In 2015, Culture Club reformed and made a tour stop at The Greek Theater in Berkeley, before the tour had to be cut short due to Boy George O’Dowd suffering some vocal polyp issues. They eventually came back with a new album called LIFE, in 2018 with this song on it, but with a somewhat different arrangement, but that still namedrops Michelle Obama.
Here is the original version of “The Truth Is A Runway Train”, which I assembled as a slideshow montage.
This original Johnny Cash country folk influenced sound of this song differs greatly from the more glossy gospel/soul style version that they ended up putting on their next album, and even did an upbeat sort of gritty Philly Soul/Stax style remix featuring Gladys Knight who also joined the band onstage at The Greek Theater in LA.
UK Boot Boy Glam Rockers Cock Sparrer Present Their Classic Song “Teenage Heart” From The Flight Deck Of The U.S.S. Hornet Aircraft Carrier In Alameda CA.
The occasion was “Rock The Ship” a festival celebrating the 15th Anniversary Of Pirates Press Records, and quite an event and logistical nightmare it was, with shows taking place over multiple venues on 4 successive nights and peaking with this headlining set aboard a massive aircraft carrier.
Amongst the many details Pirates Press and their event production staff accounted for included the building of a separate 30 foot high entrance scaffolding to accommodate getting attendees up to the flight deck of the decommissioned aircraft carrier just for the event.
I was pleasantly surprised by an opening act at a recent concert in San Francisco, a young singer out of Milwaukee named Trapper Schoepp performing with his brother. The songwriter has been on the road for months promoting his indie magnum opus album “Primetime Illusion“, one he’s put his heart soul and life on the line to get the word out about, which is what you have to do as a rapscallion road troubadour.
Liking what I heard, but still settling into the venue, I quickly jolted up, when I heard him announce his next song was to be a cover our the late great beloved San Francisco bluesy hard rock act Sister Double Happiness that was fronted by Dicks’ vocalist Gary Floyd. The 21st century hipster audience of early arrivals seemed somewhat nonplused as they’d probably never heard of this largely forgotten local group.
Sister Double Happiness original 1980’s lineup as seen clockwise from upper right guitarist Ben Cohen, singer Gary Floyd , drummer Lynn Perko, bassist Mikey Donaldson
I’ll have to interject, and hereby attest that SDH were likely the best band in town when I moved to San Francisco in 1987, a hard rocking band with pedigreed punk roots but moving quickly past that generic genre cage and into their own threnodious turf. Just before disbanding in 1988, they’d released a searing, smokin’ debut on Greg Ginn‘s SST label featuring a fierce tune called “Freight Train” that poignantly documented the fear, loss, despair and confusion of the AIDS era that stole so many lives before any sort of viable medical treatments were available.
Somewhere along the line, this maverick millennial Milwaukee songster was taught a decades old and out-of-print dirge called “Freight Train” backstage at a Jayhawks show or something, and has resurrected this beautiful abandoned beast of a song out of the blue to share with a new generation of listeners.
Trapper, who seems like a very hopeful, talented and earnest young man has included a supple studio version on his new album “Primetime Illusion” that is awash in electric guitar and piano played by Wilco‘s Pat Sansone, but this stream below is video of the raw stripped down acoustic duo arrangement delivered live in a big room full of strangers. I commend the Schoepp brothers here for their excellent taste and sincere commitment to the material.
I caught this surprising performance on a cell phone camera at The Chapel in San Francisco in October 2019. The song’s poetic stanzas were written by Gary Floyd circa 1986, who put this epic cry for understanding onto tape, and his heart and soul into every performance he gave at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, which was ravaging through our city and a whole generation at that time.
An intense hard driving live band that I saw dozens of times, Sister Double Happiness never failed to kill onstage, giving headliners like Nirvana and Soundgarden a run for their money when on tour opening for them, yet never quite fit into any music industry category or achieve any radio or solid video support from any of their numerous labels, and they just slowly lost momentum and petered out in the mid 90’s. From the looks of him, I doubt Trapper Schoepp coulda even been born when any of this happened.
Sister Double Happiness haven’t played together in probably twenty years, and their debut record with the song “Freight Train” on it is long out of print. Their incredible musical energy and legacy has been dissipating into time much like a hazy puff of faint incense smoke.
It was strange seeing a young man this in 2019, choose to deliver such a relatively obscure Reagan era song dealing with death, despair, confusion and need for support and love, who was not born at the time it was composed.
Some good news on the Sister Double Happiness front is that I heard recently from the song’s co-writer, guitarist Ben Cohen that he has secured the rights and masters, and is on the road to re-releasing the long lost album on all the formats both hard plastic and streaming. Stay Tuned!
Flyer for SDH at Mabuhay Gardens in 1987 with Faith No More and Leaving Trains (Flyer by Rob Collison)
Redd Kross have just embarked on their longest US tour in over twenty years, no longer teen babes from Monsanto, they are fully grown rock gods, that have receding hairlines, mortgages and even kids’ tuition to take care of. This makes imperative, insane and impressive the challenge of delivering punky precision blasts of gargantuan glammy guitar goo all over the place every night ever the more magnificent a mission amidst a missing “music industry”.
Steve & Jeff MacDonald, along with Jason Shapiro and Dale Crover are the latest incarnation of Redd Kross seen here on their 10 week fall 2019 US tour. When the boys hit the Cornerstone in Berkeley CA to a sold out crowd , with merch man and cartoonist Brian Walsby watching from the wings, the set list careened into this topical tune featured on their 2012 comeback album “Researching The Blues”. The band are currently promoting the followup to their last album with the 2019 release on Merge Records of a full length called “Behind The Door”
I shot just this hastily edited two camera bootleg video from high above it all in the balcony as the nightclub lackeys tried to thwart me at every step of the way, and eventually shut me down long before The Melvins took the stage. Ironically the Melvins are a band I used to have the home phone numbers of, and even help get gigs over 30 years ago.
Fun Fact : Dale Crover and I were both long haired hippie rock fans employed as extras in Oliver Stone’s Doors bio pic in the early 90’s, but I’m the only one of us that got screen time as I agreed to appear nude leaping over a bonfire…Dale hung with the Nancy Hayes extras talent agency long enough to be cast as a spit swapping young flannel flying Neil Young substitute in a convertible in Neil’s Harvest Moon comeback music video, and eventually get even more famous for turning down the drummer gig in Nirvana. I just faded rapidly into obscurity and became a barely employable blogger and bootleg video director chased by bouncer’s around craft brew bars in Berkeley… c’est la vie.
The pounding synth sounds that start up Giuda’s studio version of this track on their latest album E.V.A get buried in the crowd roar of this live version shot at the Bottom of The Hill in San Francisco. This energetic Italo rock band has become known for mixing 70’s style glam pop and skinhead moonstompin’ punk riffs into a new spacey interstellar sound.
The main two songwriting members of Giuda are singer Tenda and guitarist Lorenzo who have known each other since childhood in Rome, and used to perform in a band called Taxi before they had started Giuda. In fact the very first US performance of Taxi was a memorable gig at Thee Parkside in 2003, when a big redneck lookin’ dude in a “God Bless The U.S.A.” t-shirt walked up and raised the tension level by confrontationally approaching Tenda and stood stoic, eye to eye in front of him while he was performing on the barely raised stage platform, Tenda didn’t flinch. When asked about this evening at The Bottom Of The Hill, Tenda said eventually after the set ended up, the possible bad guy ended up buying Tenda beers by the end of the night.
Here’s a boppin’ lil’ single from some unlikely suspects who’ve resurfaced onto the rock scene after decades of plugging away, perfecting their pop and dodging the dustbins of history by derailing dormancy. The new Rubinoos release “From Home” just came out on Yep Roc Records, and I shot this video clip in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, literally just blocks away from where this underrated band cut their first single for Beserkley Records in the mid-70s.
Nearly 50 years since forming their first combo, and 42 years since appearing on American Bandstand, the Rubinoos have revitalized their classic pop sound and are making a go of it with their latest effort “From Home” on the Yep Roc label.
Taking their tried and true formula of vocal harmonizing with sweetly layered instrumental accompaniment, they teamed up with some production help at Hyde St Studios with longtime local fan Chuck Prophet and ace engineer Paul Q Kolderie (whose made some great records with everyone from The Go-Go’s and Dinosaur Jr to The Pixies, Radiohead and more). The results are finally garnering them their first serious 21st century press attention since getting embroiled in a lawsuit with Dr Luke and Avril Lavigne over their all too apparent uncredited copycatting of the 70’s era Rubinoos single “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” about a decade ago.
The new song featured here, co-written with Chuck Prophet, pays tribute to the late Honey Lantree, a UK hairdresser who went on to become an iconic female drummer for the Honeycombs, a 60’s pop band produced by eccentric UK production wunderkind Joe Meek.
Despite having begun their career during the Nixon era when bubblegum rock was not yet a retro sound, and prevailing thru a decades long run with all the tawdry travails of show biz, the Rubinoos overall are actually in great shape and spirits, and seem way healthier (and far more talented) than many bands I know half their age.
To familiarize yourself with this amazing band and their past glories, you can visit a playlist on Spotify that will fill in all the blanks
Here’s to the mighty Rubinoos who I hope can provide us much needed inspiration for kids of all ages!
November 1 – The Chapel – San Francisco, CA November 3 – Harlow’s – Sacramento, CA November 17 – Bootleg Bar – Los Angeles, CA December 9 – White Eagle – Portland, OR December 11 – Sunset Tavern – Seattle, WA
“Flinch” is the title of this song, and the video in this post features yet another Shotwell lineup recorded recently (48 hrs ago) in August 2019 at the Eagle in San Francisco, an historic gay bar that Jimmy said he was honored to perform at. The new lineup seen here features one of Shotwell’s original drummers, Steve Moriarty, who first played with the band in 1996, and a new bass player, who was introduced onstage with one name, but insisted it was something far less exotic else when asked about it later this past Thursday at the Eagle.
The song “Flinch” itself appeared originally on a cassette demo entitled “for The Devil Has Its Day” which is a lyric refrain from the song, and it first circulated in the fall of 2001 shortly after Shotwell’s Geneva Avenue Fallout split LP with Miami had sold out of its initial pressing. Eventually this tape surfaced as CD, a joint effort between two fledgling indie labels, one called S.P.A.M. who printed the discs, and later Plan-it X, who finished the job by actually getting some cardboard covers made. Here’s a live version recorded about 18 years later… I probably have a tape of Jimmy and a circa 2000 lineup doing this song, and perhaps will put that here for posterity when I find it.
The 4 track recorded demo this song came from was the sequel of sorts to that Shotwell/Miami split record, and featured at the time an all new lineup of Buzz and his friend Ken from Delaware. It was made deep in the recesses of the old Mission Records space, with the late Matty Luv twisting the knobs in the summer of 2001, right after the first wave of dot com stocks crashed but just before the twin towers fell in NYC.
The world was never the same, but somehow…despite umpteen lineup changes…Shotwell is. In fact the band has a new album very much in their quater century of mid tempo punk tradition, their first in a decade, it is entitled Dead Bats, that music is available via Revolver USA is you don’t see it at your local record store.
Jimmy in his Mission kitchen circa ’98
Jimmy Shotwell’s been living in SF since the late 80’s when he moved here from the midwest. He played guitar in a band called X-tal that released 3 albums with him involved on Alias Records. Jim grew gradually apart from the lighter college rock fare offered by X-tal and joined the punkier flavored Strawman with Tommy Strange in the early 90’s. They toured and released a few records on Allied before parting musical ways. Jim started Shotwell with Aaron Cometbus in the summer of 1994 and their very first gig was opening for Sublime at Komotion in SF.
Jim always was, and still is, a supportive presence to those helping keep D.I.Y. underground music alive. He prefers to play outside the nightclub circuit and truly emobodies the ook Yer Own Fkn Life DIY ethos. His green monster truck, maroon mini vans, RVs and other vehicles have hauled countless tons of gear and beer around the Bay Area and beyond. In the late 90s, as a favor to a friend, selflessly he drove across the country and took the unknown UK band Scarfo on their first US tour, which introduced Jamie Hince to Allison Mosshart of Discount, she was the singer of a band Shotwell had just made a split 7″ with. Eventually that indirect connection lead to the formation of The Kills. They‘ve since made millions apparently, while Jimmy is still hauling the broke and unknown around in his vehicles, barely makin‘ beer money.
He wouldn‘t have it any other way.
Never content to play by the rules, Jim has flourished and floundered but survived solely outside the mainstream day job employment and musical scenes. The boy has initiative and an ethos of personal industry that might irk a landlord, or perplex the typical wage slave, but he’s still here, unlike so many who couldn’t hack it in the mean streets of San Francisco.
A dedicated member of the volunteer run Komotion International musical collective during it’s early nineties heyday, Jim helped out with so many shows by so many bands including bringing through Pinhead Gunpowder, and majorly saving the day doing beer and gear runs for bands like Citizen Fish, Rancid, the Ex, Fifteen, Beat Happening, and many more. One night at the cajoling of your webmaster, he even helped invent Punk Rock Karaoke there between sweaty sets at a packed Bikini Kill and MDC show.
His main musical influences are punk bands from the old school such as The Clash, Circle Jerks, Stiff Little Fingers, old Misfits , Ramones, Black Flag and Johnny Thunders. All of the aforementioned also became part of the Punk-araoke repertoire at that 1991 gig.
I found mp3 and even scans of the Shotwell “Devil Has Its Day” cassette tape posted online here at a blog from punk archivist Greg Harvester called Remote Outposts and he has a bunch of Shotwell related posts here. Might as well grab it, because it’s not likely to hit Spotify anytime soon.
Death Valley Girls (Bonnie Bloomgarden, Larry Schemel, Pickle, and The Kid) found time to visit Amoeba Records in San Francisco on a Friday night in April 2019 for an in-store signing and performance between playing at Starlite Social Club in Oakland and a run up to headline an indie rock festival in Chico CA. Currently one of the most unique bands on the indie rock touring circuit, they are promoting a new single called Dream Cleaver and have albums out on both the hipster faves Burger and Suicide Squeeze labels worth checking out.
At the event in the video they signed copies of two vinyl albums, a reissued clear & green speckled version of their Burger Records “Glow In The Dark” vinyl and pressings of their newest release on Suicide Squeeze “Darkness Rains”. Amoeba’s staff were hospitable and gave the gals matching black tees that they wore with the store’s moniker done up in white death metal lettering. The “Girls” enthralled a mixed audience comprised of music industry veterans like Invisibl Skratch Piklz DJ Q-Bert, dedicated fans who’d driven in from as far as Vacaville, random aging hipsters, and even some kids apparently seeing their very first live band performance.
DVG See Their Latest Colored Vinyl LP Version For The First Time
Bonnie Bloomgarden’s White Boots
Pickle Signing The Burger Records LP
Love Is Cool – Buy A Record!
The band is continuing a tour they started in August with Brody Dalle’s revitalized band The Distillers through much of October 2019, here are some of their remaining dates:
10/11 — Minneapolis, MN @ The Varsity Theater ^
10/12 — Des Moines, IA @ Wooly’s ^
10/13 — St Louis, MO @ The Ready Room ^
10/15 — Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall ^
10/16 — Austin, TX @ Emo’s ^
10/17 — Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater ^
10/19 — Denver, CO @ Ogden Theatre ^
10/20 — Salt Lake City, UT @ The Union Event Center ^
Since the late 1980’s the band NOFX has been torturing audiences coast to coast, and eventually worldwide, and they’ve only gotten more popular for some mysterious reason.
Below I’ve embedded a rare video I shot of the band circa 1992 at a show at the Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco, and you’ll get their 2019 single and the most recent US search trends data from Google on who is looking up the band.
I think the video above was shot an early all ages Sunday show circa December 1992 at Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco. Aaron Abeyta ( aka El Hefe) was a recent addition, and I think the White Trash Two Heebs and a Bean album had just been released. It could’ve also been 1993…I can’t recall, I know NOFX toured Japan with All You Can Eat in 1994, but this is definitely before then… Does anyone else remember this gig?
Here’s google search data on where in the whirled peeps keeps looking these guys up
Pickle Signing The Burger Records LP
