How many times have you found yourself playing in a very weird venue? From my very first gig at a chili cook-off through an assortment of busking misadventures, I’ve demonstrated a knack for performing in strange places for unwary/unwilling spectators.
Between the scrap metal and the cross-dressing and the affinity for the Velvet Underground’s second album, Noise 292 was nobody’s idea of a crossover band. One of our oddest gigs was a Jesse Jackson presidential benefit at Pea Soup Andersen’s in Carlsbad, Calif., which we were asked to play by a friend of Wendell’s parents.
The event took place in the very green conference hall upstairs, and (aside from the organizer and a team of high-school break dancers he’d also recruited to entertain) I believe we were the only white people in attendance. The bulk of our large audience seemed to be affluent, middle-aged to elderly pillars of San Diego’s African-American community, and it was hard to imagine our interpretation of “Sister Ray” going over particularly well. (I learned the term “ofay” that afternoon from one of the spectators watching the break dancers.)
We turned the volume down and decided to play our three least industrial numbers; I can still remember hitting that first bass note and watching an elderly church lady in the front row clap her hands over her ears and double up in agony. People fled that room like they had to catch the last helicopter out of Saigon! By the middle of the second song, we were all alone in the conference room — except for the organizer, who congratulated us warmly and suggested we should open for Santana at another rally in LA.
Where was the strangest place you ever played?
Ive never heard that term before.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ofay
Funny, though, that they’d book white break dancers to entertain a black audience.
I dont think Ive ever played anywhere as strange as that. As close as we ever came was playing on a weekend afternoon in a park in Escondido to picknicking families. It was set up by the band we shared a rehearsal space with…the were kind of a new wave cover band called Distraction. I think they had some original material as well. The played songs like Pretty In Pink and I Was a Puppet by Echo and the Bunnymen. They came to hate us becasue we were messy, and because one of our friends drew a smiley face (in pencil) on the circle they’d painted on the restroom door.
I cant remember what the “audience’s” reaction was. I do remember that Neil Smith and Kirby were both there. Does anyone remember Neil or Kirby? More Poway people who were involved in the music scene.
I quickly realized that electric gear (let alone a 40-gallon oil drum!) is way too bulky for such guerilla methods … Hence my ongoing fascination with lightweight, self-amplifying musical weapons. I now do most of my thrashing on a ukulele (“Ziggy Stardust,” “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”), and by 50 I’ll probably be rockin’ a pair of spoons.
We had a really big practice space in San Marcos that we shared with these guys. It was too big, really. A smaller space where everyone can look at one another is much better for learning to play together. With this space, we had everything set up along one wall…the way we’d stand on stage. The other bands’ equipment was on the other wall facing us. Our side was littered with broken guitar strings and string wrappers and cigarette butts…their side was spotlessly clean and orderly…they even had a drum riser. There was an area off to one side with a couch and a restroom. They must have been really proud of the way they painted the restroom door, because they were REALLY angry about the smiley face, and our relationship with them just went downhill from there. Actually I think it was Jason who drew it.
Matthew, that wasn’t us that played with you there…sounds like a fun time though!
LOL … Dave, I’m suddenly humming the theme to the “Patty Duke Show”!
Bizarre practice spaces are a whole other fertile topic, aren’t they? All the weird-ass places we managed to practice!
Hey — speaking of weird gigs, was it the Crawdaddys who played a wedding down around Ensenada where somebody (I think a caterer) was murdered, and all the band’s gear was impounded by the Mexican police? (It’s a scenario worthy of Gabriel García Márquez, but I can’t vouch for its accuracy.)
It was indeed the Crawdaddys. It was 4th of July, 1981, I believe, because Mark Z was in the band still. There was a weird, violent, drunk mix of people. According to Pete Miesner, someone in the crowd was throwing firecrackers at the band (of the cherry bomb variety.) A huge fight broke out, and someone in the crowd was stabbed with a table leg. No instrument confiscation, but playing the soundtrack to a murder is a good enough story in and of itself.
in the scan, we played some weird gigs. We did a frat party, and we charged em money for every encore or extra song. How many times can you soundtrack the beer bong appearance with “do wah diddy”? I remember playing the elks lodge on 4th or 5th, close to Laurel. Is that still there? We did the marian HS prom. Those PVTV03 gigs in LA were unusual, in that they were in what I remember to be a club where a tv studio used to be? Rich Coffee from the unclaimed was quite the heckler. Ray you were there a few times.
When Noise 292 played the lesbian bar that’s now the Casbah,* Kristin had a scheduling conflict, and the mistress of ceremonies was freaked that our whole front line was male. She made me turn down my bass, explaining that “the womyn don’t like loud bass.” (I could hear that “y” in there.) She also kept calling out the fact that Joanne was on drums, repeatedly announcing things like (swear to God), “Joanne on drums … Yes, she’s a woman drummer … Let’s hear a drum solo, Joanne!” (Ms. Norris was mortified, needless to say.)
And the gender-Angst was absurd anyway, since (as Jonathan Richman would say) the crowd was outta sight — very enthusiastic and having fun.
One Joanne-brokered gig that we didn’t get to play was something billed as an “S&M Christmas party.” I’ve always regretted missing the opportunity to play “Venus in Furs” underneath the mistletoe!
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*The lesbian bar was called “The Club.” Then it switched over to a leather-daddy bar and changed its name to “The Bulc.”
My last band in San Francisco — the Amazons — had a cool, weird little gig going for a few weeks as part of a project called Popcorn Theater, in which the audience was driven in the famous Mexican bus to strange urban wastelands around the industrial periphery of SF and treated at each stop to a little performance piece, some of them rather haunting. The Amazons were the main performers on the bus, leading sing-alongs and rockin’ out as it swerved around town.
Have you ever tried to work the crowd by pacing around a moving bus while playing guitar and singing over a diesel engine? It takes strong lungs, arms and thigh muscles.
I think the only wierd gigs we played were already in the other gig thread- Uncle Sam’s BBQ in Chula Vista, The Distillery East (only weird because it was at such a weak venue) and the one on the boat with the Injections.
I’m putting some real effort into getting my site moved to another server- there are some GREAT manifest destiny stories about doing exactly what Matt was talking about above- Guerilla tactics to play on the Palomar and (What was the other campus in or around San Marcos-Vista-Esco? I should actually know- I attended some night classes there at one time.)
Oh well practice spaces? We used to use Jimmy Buffet’s space in Olivenhain in a pinch- that was very weird. Gold records and twelve-packs of Schaeffer Beer. Odd.
Also Men of Clay had a garage in IB that was actually pretty great, though as I remember it- warm. One time we got use of it spur of the moment and Dan, Lloyd and I had just partook of the magic Boxtops and Joel shows up unawares. He’s at a complete loss when I can’t get through the first two lines of my song without doubling up with laughter. Dan was playing the drums with a total Cheshire cat grin, which was messing with my giggles.
We mostly practised at parties, real time- because whenever we even practiced the cops would come, so we figured better make the most of it.
Of course it undoubtedly showed in our performance, but we were all about the chaos anyhow. The music was a little bit elective.
I’ve definitely played my share of gigs that qualify for a rock ‘n’ roll Twilight Zone. We played a gig at San Diego County Mental Health for the patients and staff. We had to wear name badges and the whole thing, go through gates etc. Anyway David Anderson refused to wear his, just because, I guess:-) The gig was fine, we pack up and prepare to head out. as we’re getting ready to leave. David is nowhere to be found. Turns out, he got detained and held because he didn’t have a badge. As for rehearsal spaces, Kevin’s garage on Taft Street in Bird Rock was definitely a cool place to hang out. I remember scavenging egg cartons and carpet scraps around 1978 for “the studio” to try and annoy the neighbors a little less:-) And Tony- those frat parties were pretty wild! If I recall correctly, Mel from the Phantom Surfers told me years later that he was part of one that used to have us play thier parties at SDSU. My most random “gig” ever was sometime in (I think) 1981. A bunch of us were at a punk show in Tijuana, where San Diego bands were playing somewhere on the south side of Revolucion. The drummer for one of the bands didn’t show, and someone asked if anybody there played drums. One of my friends pointed at me and although I tried to confirm that I didn’t, next thing I know I’m playing a short set, horribly. Not that anyone cared, -- did I mention the amount of alcohol consumed by all that night? 🙂 Also The Elks Lodge is still there. The Shambles played a party there about a decade ago and there have been a few shows there since. And I completely agree with Ray about Al’s Bar 🙂
Tijuana was the all-time best location for weird musical scenes! Viz. our earlier thread about Emilio’s Cafeteria Musical, which deserves a book all by itself. (Although to my knowledge, nobody was ever impaled with a table leg at Emilio’s.)
The culinary arts loom large in my list of odd venues: In addition to our freak show at Pea Soup Andersen’s, my first San Diego gig was at the aforementioned chili cook-off, and my last was Jan. 30, 1987, at a Chinese restaurant called Wok Express that served as the evening’s venue for Club Cult.
Your recollection is spot on, Matthew. We arrived a couple of hours before show time, and “Spaceman,” as we had by then taken to calling them, had still not arrived. When they finally did show up, they did indeed spent two hours putting up the spider webs, dolls and other props to make the North Park Lions Club appear as portentously gloomy as possible. In fact, it looked rather like a failed attempt at a haunted house, constructed in the elementary school library for the “harvest carnival”. I remember marveling at how incredibly amateurish they seemed, particularly for a band the British press had been fawning over. There is a little bit of the band’s soundcheck and set up on the video I have. When you guys finished, we essentially repeated the amps through the crowd scene you described. One of the worst aspects of being an opening band, and many of us know this from loads of experience, is soundchecking so close to the start of the show that people have entered the room and think you are actually performing!
LOL! I’m picturing Specimen driving all over the country with cartons and cartons of that frickin’ tinsel. I spent that whole damn gig scared I was going to step on my glasses buried underneath that stuff. I think I had an effects box tangled up in there, too — but I was afraid to step on it, dreading the crunch of broken glass.
I can’t stop laughing … Ray sent me this video clip of Specimen’s sound check that fateful May night. The bassist’s shorts alone are worth the price of admission!
Sacred Lies , Leucadias first true punk band , Live at the Zebra Club on Broadway down town late 1980 , it was a black soul bar in a terrible nieghbor hood at that time , now shiney malls
Speaking of Sacred Lies … Oh, and check it out — here’s Toby!
(This whole photo set is fantastic — Toby Gibson is the Herodotus of SD punk.)
Sacred Lies at the Zebra Club.
Max Brown behind Fairmont Hall.
Those photos of the anarchy day picnic belong to some girl who lives in Australia now. But since I looked at her site and found she was just another dipshit bigot, I took them without asking.
The rest of those photo credits belong to Alan Clark, John Murray, Max Brown, Kevin Kress, Kevin Castillo, Dawn Damage, Sacred Jimmy, and Randy Underwood.
I looked up the Aussie dipshit, Toby, and that set me off on another subculture tangent:
When did the whole white-supremacist skinhead thing reach Southern California? I didn’t encounter the White Aryan Resistance until I moved to SF in 1987; they were pals of Fallbrook’s own Tom Metzger, but I don’t remember him having a skinhead entourage at that time in San Diego itself.
This woman said she was hanging out with skins back in San Diego, but I don’t remember any super-special racist philosophy from them. (Maybe they were just trying to spare my feelings! LOL)
When Arturo and Chui (and Wendell and company) were present, there was no organized racist element at punk shows. I recall hearing stories a couple times where Tom Metzger Junior’s lads tried to hand out fliers for his “White Aryan Resistance” group outside of fairmount hall and some of the old SDSH crew roughed them up and told them to beat it. There were racists in the punk scene- don’t get me wrong- but those were one person’s beliefs and they generally kept them to themselves or if they stated them, it was not because they wanted to “recruit” someone into their “movement”.
I think that changed about the time that the majority of the Skeleton Club and NPLC/Fairmont Hall punks began to fade out of the scene. I don’t know though- that’s just my guess, knowing how cool most of those people were and how little tolerance they had for complete rubbish like organized bigotry.
I do remember seeing a piece on the news after I had left for Wyoming about some skinheads who vandalized a Jewish Cemetery in San Diego, and then were found shot to death in an alley a week later. Everyone talks about the Nazi extremism and all of their inflammatory public displays flexing their muscles and blaming anyone not white for their shortcomings, but the news rarely takes a good hard look at just what organizations exact that kind of vengeance. I know it might seem hypocritical but I see a bit of justice in physically abusing nazi skins- it feels right to me. I suppose my intolerance is no different from theirs, but whatever- I grew up with a lot of people from different walks of life. It pisses me off when someone tries to bully them.
I see stuff on the web occasionally about violence on the boardwalk and see these dumb-ass meat-heads throwing nazi salutes after blindsiding some black guy, and it just makes me sick. Those types would have lasted about three minutes back in 1982.
I also recall a kid from back East referred to as “Skinhead Ed” who took knocks constantly (essentially for being young and new to the locale and spouting off racist, nationalist rhetoric.)
Quoted from mister M’burg: “(Maybe they were just trying to spare my feelings! LOL)”
I always knew people were treating me special because I was 100% Scottish, Irish and Swedish. That sort of hybrid always seems to threaten the master race.
I’m thinking of doing a short film along the lines of William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic ” where a guy is trying to smuggle political sewage which has been downloaded into his head to Los Angeles from Orange County. It’ll be calle Johnny Teutonic. (Cymbal shot here!) Or maybe Johnny Moronic. I haven’t decided.
Johnny Moronic , great name for a New Wave band Toby ! Salud !