Five years ago today, I posted the first entry to Che Underground: The Blog. I’d been talking to some old friends about a place where we could share sounds and images from our musical youth in San Diego, and this turned out to be the handiest solution.

Soon Rockin’ Dog Dave Ellison created our striking design, and contributors including Ray Brandes, Kristen Tobiason, Paul Kaufman, David Fleminger and so many others enriched the site beyond anything I could have hoped. 

And my, how we grew! Hundreds of stories … Tens of thousands of comments and visitors. This little corner of the Web let so many revisit so much and introduced a whole new audience to the things we created back at the dawn of the ’80s.

The earth has made five solar revolutions since then, and most of us are still here on it. Looking back, I think we’ve moved in good directions, and I’m proud of any part this place played in bringing us back together.

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Last week’s photographic contribution from Tell-Tale Hearts guitarist Eric Bacher of the band and audience at Greenwich Village West, ca. 1984 — salvaged from a vintage contact sheet — omitted some great shots of the band, including a grainy image of keyboardist/harmonica player Bill Calhoun.

Like the rest of the set, these shots of the Hearts include Eric as well as vocalist Ray Brandes, drummer David Klowden and bassist Mike Stax.

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More photography courtesy of Tell-Tale Hearts guitarist Eric Bacher: images of the band and audience at Greenwich Village West, ca. 1984.

According to Eric, the Hearts played this underground lair only twice. The photos, lifted from an old contact sheet, of course include Eric as well as Tell-Tale Hearts vocalist Ray Brandes, drummer David Klowden and bassist Mike Stax. (Keyboardist Bill Calhoun was not captured by the lens that night.)

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(A double-header: Che Underground: The Blog talks to two of our scene’s pre-eminent tattoo artists. If you’d like your story told, e-mail cheunderground@gmail.com!)

How did you learn your technique and find a career in tattooing?

Mike Stobbe: I’ve been at Avalon Tattoo for almost 23 years now. I started tattooing in 1987, a few years after I graduated high school. My technique is just sort of a mix of my personal style, lots of comic/cinema influence, punk-rock childhood images, lots of different mish-mashed stuff. I like to think that I don’t have a particular style even though people have told me they could tell I did a tattoo. I guess that’s an evident style, but I like to be good at any kind of tattoo anyone might want me to do. It keeps my options open as far as what kind of work I get to do, as opposed to being “this guy” or “that guy.” It makes my job different all day long. That keeps me interested, I guess.

Bobby Lane: I learned little by little, I picked up what little information I could gather and started by experimenting on myself, basically. Not the best way, but many of us have taken this route. I don’t suggest it, but then again, I don’t suggest anyone become a tattoo artist. I got good enough to get a job, which is where the learning process really began.

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Befitting their short, colorful career from the summers of 1983 to 1984, souvenirs of the Gravedigger V have been in short supply on Che Underground: The Blog. Now, Tell-Tale Hearts guitarist Eric Bacher steps up with two new additions to the set.

“We just did some ‘fall’ cleaning, and I found a few old pictures,” Eric writes. “The one of Leighton and Chris Gast was given to Denise by Leighton some time in the 80′s, I’m not sure of the provenance of the other.”

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(In this installment, Che Underground: The Blog catches up with Rockin’ Dogs drummer Cole Smithey about his career at the movies in New York. If you’d like your story told, e-mail cheunderground@gmail.com!)

You recently celebrated your 15th year in New York and 15 years as a film critic. What was your path from drummer with the Rockin’ Dogs to your current role as “the smartest film critic in the world”?

It was a long and bumpy one, I can assure you. I moved up to San Francisco with the idea of finding a new band to play with, but that just didn’t happen. Having studied acting at SDSU, I got an acting scholarship to Hartnell College in Salinas. So, I spent a year in Salinas living out of my van. I played tympani in a 38-piece symphony orchestra there — doing classical music. I also played drums with the pep band at football games. The drama-department politics at Hartnell were horrendous, but I somehow managed to come out of it with a 4.0 GPA. There’s something to be said for living in your van: You just study all the time.

I moved back to SF and was working for my talent agent — sending myself out on auditions for industrials and commercials — when I picked up an issue of Sight and Soundmagazine. I realized instantly that I wanted to be a film critic.

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(In this installment, Che Underground: The Blog talks to San Diego scene documentarian Cynthia Jaynes Omololu about her career in young-adult fiction. If you’d like your story told, e-mail cheunderground@gmail.com!)

With the publication of Dirty Little Secrets and the recent release of the first installment of your new Transcendence series, C.J. Omololu is developing a growing reputation as an author of fiction for young adults. How did you get from the San Diego scene of our youth to a writing career in San Francisco?

Aw, thanks, Matthew. I’ll take that kind of reputation. It actually makes a lot of sense – I have to write from the perspective of a 16 or 17 year old and a lot of people say I’m emotionally stunted at around that age. Okay, not totally true, but I started hanging around the San Diego scene at about that age, and it was a pretty influential time for me. We’d moved to Del Mar from Poway in the summer between 9th and 10th grade and I felt like I never fit in there – we were renting an apartment in the land of multimillion dollar beach houses and honestly, I couldn’t compete.

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(In this installment, Che Underground: The Blog talks to the original drummer of Manual Scan and co-founder of Lemons Are Yellow about his memories of the San Diego scene and his far-ranging career in biochemistry. If you’d like your story told, e-mail cheunderground@gmail.com!)

We actually met right after you’d left San Diego to study at UC Berkeley, then for your doctorate at MIT. But you stayed in close touch with all of us who were still in America’s Finest City. What was it like coming back for short visits and seeing the scene change?

I have very vivid memories coming back during quarter breaks and other holidays during my first year away, 1982-3. The most shocking thing was that every time I came back, the Answers song list was totally different, even within a couple of months! At the same time, the Mod scene became incredibly huge, and the punk scene seemed to go from an artistic, underground scene to a place laced with way too much testosterone. So I did feel like I was missing a lot, a lot was indeed happening, and not being there day-to-day probably accentuated that feeling. I stayed in San Diego during that amazing summer of ’83, so I did get to see some of the best parts first hand. (cue “Nowhere”).

And then when I came back summer of ’84, so much more had changed. No more Answers. No more Noise 292. I think that summer, the Morlocks emerged (pun intended) at a party at Paul Allen’s house. I remember I had to stand back, they were so loud, and I was accustomed to some pretty loud stuff back then! They played “Voices Green and Purple,” it was intense. And before long, everyone was up in San Francisco, just across from me in Berkeley, so I got to see a bit of that era before I left for Boston in late ‘86.

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San Diego music legend and former Penetrators front man Gary Heffern has met with misadventure, and he needs our financial help to set things straight.

Heffern, now living in Finland, in May suffered a burst appendix that forced him to cancel a July Penetrators reunion in San Diego and postponed his work on a new CD, not to mention his day job. With bills coming due, Gary is reaching out to his network for support.

Here are a couple of opportunities to help this San Diego legend in his hour of need:

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(In this installment, Che Underground: The Blog examines a Wallflower’s journey to hair theater. If you’d like your story told, e-mail cheunderground@gmail.com!)

The last time I saw you was around 1985, when you were playing guitar with San Diego’s original Wallflowers. How did you get from rock-‘n’-roll in Poway, Calif., to ownership of one of LA’s best-known barber shops, Sweeney Todd’s?

Hmmmm … I’m not sure I can draw any correlation between my experience in the Wallflowers and my career in the tonsorial arts except to say that I probably cut hair a lot better than I played guitar! But seriously, I guess if there was anything to compare, it would have to be that like the guitar you’re constantly honing your chops (pun intended!) There’s always some new technique or some new flourish to add to your bag of tricks if you keep your eyes and ears open.

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