Like many Che Underground musicians, I left San Diego in the mid-’80s (February 1987 in my case). However, the Che Cafe itself continued to host music by a variety of acts, many of them related to the bands that staked out the turf in the earlier ’80s.
Generous donors including Bart Mendoza and Bruce Haemmerle have sent me flyers from late-’80s Che Cafe shows. I’m eager to start making connections between the gigs of 1983-’85 and those that happened (at the Che and elsewhere in San Diego) after many of us here had decamped to San Francisco or other ports of call.
Here’s a sampling of flyers; can you tell us the stories behind them? (Warning: The leftmost flyer of the four below is NSFW.)
Kind of a segue from the regular genre of Che bands being discussed, but I saw the Insolents at Che Cafe around 84 or 85, I believe. I don’t recall who they played with except for a college age cover band with an asian lead singer who could cop vocal styles really well, singing Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys and TSOL covers.
I remember that Art and Chui were there, and Jeanie Raven and Scott Macdonald. When a campus rentacop tried to “handle” Scott Macdonald he got punched in the face for it, and eventually the SDPD rolled in as everyone was leaving.
I think that was the only Che show I ever attended.
I thought the late 80’s was an amazing time in the San Diego music. Some of the bands I remember from that time: Daddy Long Leggs, Pitchfork, Fishwife, Crash Worship, Three Mile Pilot, The Holy Love Snakes, Night Soil Man, aMiniature, Dark Globe and WormDrive (my own band). The cool thing was all of these bands were very different, and yet we all played shows together and had a scene.
>>The cool thing was all of these bands were very different, and yet we all played shows together and had a scene.
Barney: Testify! I’m totally interested in hearing about it … Exactly how I’d describe the fun of what we were doing a few years earlier, and probably the engine driving any scene worthy of the name.
What were the venues? What were the ages of the participants? I’m thinking early- to mid-20s, based on the guys I know were in a few of those groups. Were folks spread all over the county or concentrated in a few areas?
Hook us up! I’m eager to listen, look and learn.
Who did the Hair Theater flier? That took some….balls. I’ll bet they didn’t have a pile of those by the checkout at Licorice Pizza 🙂
Paul: I’ve spent hours parsing the statement on that flyer, “Suck on this baby!” (sic)
With a comma, you’d be telling “Baby” to suck on this. Without it, you’re telling an unknown party that “this baby” is to be sucked upon.
(Kids: This is what 20 years as an editor does to you!)
In the late 80s I played in the Town Criers with Ray Brandes, but I wasnt really too involved in the music scene otherwise. One big thing right around that time was the opening of the original Casbah. I remember John Toner, who was roomates with my girlfriend at the time, was working on the interior construction… and I remember him very excited that the owners had bought a bunch of booth benches from an old Farrell’s ice cream restaurant that had gone under… the black tuck-and-roll that became the Casbah’s trademark motif. It’s covering the wall in back of the stage to this day (I assume, anyway) in the current location.
I believe the current Casbah location used to be a lesbian bar called The Club. (Noise 292 played there one odd evening.) Later, it became a bearish lair called The Bulc.
I only got to the Casbah once or twice on visits south (I think once for a Shambles gig), but it sure made me wish it had been around when we were playing San Diego.
this time was also when everything and everybody seemed to coalesce around hard drugs and playskool at the hotel san diego. familiar girls started turning up at the Roaring 20s to fund their habits, guys i knew started getting locked up, (at least people weren’t smoking meth yet, sheesh!) but shit hair theater and the morlocks were both at their most rockin! really good shows by both at the Che, Emerald Ballroom and even a last gasp at the Pallisades…but for the most part, drugs and techno had taken over.
The Che did have a useful tucked-away aspect about it, but I also remember that sometimes downtown events had a bit more powerful pull--as there were always easy nearby spots to just check in on. I never really went casually to the Che, I went there because there was specifically a band I was interested in. But when something like that was on, as in a show that drew me to drive on up there (or catch a ride with others), I remember a real sense of anticipation as you finally got onto the dark, somewhat forested (if only with Eucalyptus), possibly misty and foggy campus. You’re not that far from the ocean there, there’s a maritime atmosphere, but also a sense of being in a grove. I also recall a slight sense of trespass--you didn’t want to be challenged by some campus guards, you wanted to park and slip through the lines unseen, and get across to that shack in that shady glade from where some kind of music was already emanating. Once you got in, you felt safe, and you were among a small village or island of music people. All or any of the varied subcultural types you’d encounter felt closer (I trusted and hoped) to the sense of “us” than of “them”--them being everyone else, the people at the mall (excuse me, shopping center) or on the beach or wherever--driving down 805--whom I think I suspected had an interior monologue going on that sounded something like a drone of unquestioningness, the sound of living the unexamined life, which I wanted no part of, did not want to get shunted into. As the eighties wore on the place (Che that is) continued to be a reliable island and probably still is, but I do see that I began to get there a little more seldom--possibly just because the center of gravity for me was downtown. I know I attended some later eighties shows (I didn’t even turn twenty until the fall of ’87), but I’m hard-pressed to say at the moment what they were. Then again I was gone entirely in ’88, missing a year. Actually, that Trebels flyer interests me. Those guys were a good band with a lot of heart, started in the early ’80s, and went right on through, I guess until Jay moved to Australia. Perhaps their history has already been told elsewhere on the blog. In about 1987 I tried feebly to get a little side group together with Javier (guitar) and John Chilson (drums), I was going to play bass and sing--and we did go so far as to rehearse a few songs in my (parents’s) garage--but it didn’t amount to much because I didn’t pursue it with enough gusto or something, and probably wasn’t ready to lead. Instead, I answered the call to try New York for a year, leaving in the winter of ’87 / ’88, playing bass once again with the Nashville Ramblers, although we changed the name for awhile. Irrelevent personal biography except that this trio (Ron Silva, me, Carl Rusk) was a Che performer I believe twice, in the 1985 / ’86 era. Not quite the late-’80s. I suppose the Trebels and the Nashville Ramblers fit together in ways, in a “swinging sixties”-but-less-would-be psychedelia-way, looking more to the earlier days of the Beat Boom and the pioneering American rock & roll era, and a lot of 1965 transitional-type harmony-rock in our case. As uber-revivalists seeking our own version of individuality but in context (just following our own star) we were all hyper-conscious of subgenres within genres, probably deigning all of them cool but feeling able to represent only about three of them at one time. Mike Stax had invoked the strand(s) that would ten years later finally be given the umbrella name of freakbeat to such a degree that he was like an axis unto himself. But to bring it back to the Che, I must have seen the Tell-Tale Hearts at Che in the late-’80s. They began in ’83 but had really become a phenomenon a few years later. I saw them so many times so many different places that individual shows are hard to place. I have a series of still vignettes in my mind’s eye…. Ultimately the wave broke and that’s how we get to the Towne Criers, which Dave Ellison mentioned. I was in that briefly, but I guess my membership in that too was sacrificed to the New York thing at the end of ’87. They kept on--but did they play at Che? I did a few shows with Ray (this was Ray’s project after the Tell-Tale Hearts), but in keeping with what I was saying about the gravity of downtown, I didn’t play any with the T.C.’s north of Interstate 8.
Barney, thanks for mentioning 2581. I definitely played a few times at 2581 with the Nashville Ramblers in 1989 after our return from New York and while we were operating as “The Black Diamonds.” Saw other shows there, too. What was the official name? The 2581 Club--or was it Club 2581? Maybe it truly was just “2581.”
2581 was just the address , that was all we ever reffered to it as . I dated the owner for a while , well sort of dated . . . ” dated ” is more like it .
Who was that band that played the entire Who album Tommy one night , then the next night played Qudrophenia , note for note .
They were from back east somewhere , and nailed those albums front to back & every which way .
I was in this terrible ( but lots of fun ) band for a while in the late 80’s called the Glory Stompers and we played with the Fuzztones at Rio’s in Point Loma . Myself and Steve Medico and Rubin , Doug and Ed . Doug and Ed sadly aren’t with us anymore , OD and suicide in that order . . . I remember their road guy was impressed with my gear I had a Silvertone cabinet with 8 -- 10 inch speakers that Steve gave me I think . It had a 100 watt head and I used a Vox wah wah pedal . The guitar was a junk Ibenez strat copy , but that amp was a howling monster .
I’ve been searching for any kind of recordings or footage from any of our shows forever and come up bupkiss . I guess Rubin had the 2 inch master we made for a demo at Glass Brick and recorded over it of all things . . .
Wait, Doug of the Moto Guzzi fame? Is that who you’re speaking of, Mike?
Mike, regrets about that master tape!
Those 8 x 10″ Silvertone cabinets are super cool, Mike, as well as being totally over-the-top on a conceptual level. Way too many of those got parted out over the years for their Jensen speakers. But I’m glad to say that there are current speakers now that replicate the Jensens really well. I’m thinking Weber, but there are also good Italian-made speakers currently in production that sport facsimile Jensen labels, and they’re pretty good, too.
I hope the OD you mention is not a particular guy I’ve been thinking of all these years on a where-are-they-now level. There was a very handsome guy who drove a Moto Guzzi in the late ’80s, I’m probably thinking ’87, right before I moved to NYC for a year. I really envied the guy his good looks--and I recall him as a very nice guy, too. In my memory which is no doubt warped by the passage of time, he had serious cheekbones, like Gene Clark or something. Probably quite the ladykiller, and with the matching Moto Guzzi, one of my favorite bikes for looks. I’ll be happy if you go, “no, not that Doug!”--or if I have the name wrong….
In fact the Doug I’m thinking of maybe even looks a bit like Sir Doug of the Sir Douglas Quintet--the legendary Doug Sahm!
Tom it was NOT that doug . That was another good friend named Doug Green He graduated to that Guzzi from a really nice Lambretta he used to have . He had a friend named Hugo and they both lived in Chula Vista .
I still see Doug once in a while . He still works the Alibi I think . I bought my hot tub from him !
The Doug who overdosed was a different Doug than him .
I forgot all about 2581… that was the late 80s…how long was that place around? I was only there once to see the Lyres. Wasn’t that an actual bar and not an underage club?
And what was the name of the bar/venue on El Cajon in the early 90s (it might still be there)…on a corner, with a car lot on the other side of the cross street?
2581 was owned by the aforementioned girl Stobbe dated, Julie. She went on to run the bar Dave Ellison is talking about, the Megalopolis, next to Pearson Ford (they stand alone at Fairmont and El Cajon.) There was a little Megalopolis scene going on in the early to mid nineties--I must have played fifty shows there. It was a weird “L’ shaped place.
I remember being banned for life from that bar because , once during a Manual Scan show I decided to go outside and tear a street sign out of the ground and bring it into the bar and attack someone .
I don’t remember why or who I was attacking , but I wasn’t allowed back as long as the owner was there . . . I think I broke something on the way to the supposed victim .
I would sneak in once in a while when she wasn’t there for the night , if the band was good enough , but I would have to skee-daddle if she showed up .
The weird “L” shape of the bar was to my advantage because if she came in I would get a high-sign from some of my accomplices and run out the back door at the other end of the “L” , near the stage .
Dave E: 2581 was an all age joint with a bar…?… I went there a few times and I was not 21.
By the way, there is a photo of the interior of 2581 on my myspace page. It’s a stage shot with a rare moment where Ben Wayne of the Event is onstage playing drums with Carl Rusk, Ron Silva and I.
Kriss had a lot going on back then , I’m not sure what she’s up to now . I’ll make a few discrete inquiries and see what I can find out for you .
I haven’t seen Doug in a while either , but not nearly as long as Kriss . I do see him occasionally roaring by on his Harley but generally I’m in my truck going somewhere else and I don’t manage to catch his gaze .
I thought I had a picture of Doug and Hugo on their bikes in front of my house but I can’t find it in my treasure trove of pictures .
I’m feeling you on the curiosity welling up in me , When I found this site , I recognized most of the names but had a hard time making the faces re-appear from the fog that is my memory . I can almost smell the little rooms and hallways now and I’m starting to have a more clear vision of those lost weekends of my youth .