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)
Here’s a two song video clip from the opening salvo of the Chuck Prophet Official annual two night stand at The Make-Out Room this weekend as his post Hardly Strictly after party tradition. The two tunes I edited up here are the set opener “Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins” from the Yep Roc album of the same name and the song “Balinese Dancer” which appeared first in the early 90’s on one of his earliest solo albums. The sound for these San Francisco shows this first weekend of October 2019 was pretty darn good, especially with dedicated knob twiddler Damien Rasmussen handling duties at the board.
Here is a capture of the live feed provided by the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fest website of Chuck’s full set Friday from the Swan stage at the outdoor festival in Golden Gate Park, as reposted by Craig Love
Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express Live At The Make-Out Room
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.
“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.
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
Arrow de Wilde of Starcrawler (live shot by @LilMikeSF)
A wild throwback to shades of the seedy 70’s Sunset Strip nights at Rodney’s English Disco, or teetering down the steep stairs to find whatever awaited in CBGB ’s toilets, Starcrawler are actually a vehicle for frenetic millennial LA wunderkinds seemingly born decades too late to make those scenes.
The band, comprised of Henri Cash gtr, bassist Tim Franco, and Austin Smith on drums started out as raw amateurs just practicing Runaways’ covers, and have evolved into their own show biz phenomenon, fronted by the fearless gangly nymphette Arrow de Wilde on vox. Their sound and stage presence has built a solid following on the road supporting bands such as the MC5 and Spoon.
I caught one of the opening nights of their fall 2019 tour in San Francisco and Starcrawler’s musicians presented an impressive sonic spectacle, caustically cool, crunchy, captivating and a perfect foil for the caterwauling of frontperson Arrow deWilde. While deWilde’s antics at the mic stand, and mostly on the floor between songs are what draw eyeballs, do not discount the pulsating precision rhythm section that drives the throbbing sound, or the slashing guitar and vocal support of Monsieur Cash in his green satin suit looking reminiscent of something Gram Parsons might’ve left behind
Starcrawler have released their Nick Launay produced sophomore album “Devour You” on Rough Trade and are hitting the clubs across the USA to earn more cash and converts as they establish themselves as a vibrant exponent of 21st century hypnotic rock n roll abandon. The first single to the new album has a video directed bythe enigmatic Jellyclaw called “Bet My Brains” inspired by subterranean urban dwellers both real and imagined.
Says singer Arrow de Wilde “that song came from thinking about the tunnel people in New York and Vegas and the Catacombs in France, and the underground village of people who live in the sewers of the L.A. River. I was fascinated with the fact that there is a whole other world happening right under our feet.” Guitarist and vocalist Henri Cash adds: “Arrow and I hadn’t even talked about it yet, but I’d already written something about the same thing—about how these people’s eyes adapt to pitch-blackness, and they end up going crazy from never seeing the sunlight.”
Arrow promises “We want to put on a real show and give people some kind of escape from all the shit going on in the world,” she says.
The band make several west coast stops in the wake of their Bottom Of The Hill performance in San Francisco on October 5th, and will play two Third Man Records Halloween shows in different cities, and make it as far north as Montreal. See the complete show date list below to find a fall 2019 show near you, and click the link get your tix before they’re all gone HERE.
Starcrawler – official band photo by Arrow’s mother Autumn de Wilde
Starcrawler tour dates 10/4/19 – San Diego, CA – The Irenic 10/5/19 – San Francisco, CA – Bottom of the Hill 10/7/19 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios 10/8/19 – Vancouver, BC – Fortune Sound Club 10/9/19 – Seattle, WA – The Crocodile 10/11/19 – Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge 10/12/19 – Denver, CO – Lost Lake Lounge 10/14/19 – Kansas City, MO – The Riot Room 10/15/19 – Omaha, NE – Reverb Lounge 10/16/19 – Saint Paul, MN – Turf Club 10/17/19 – Chicago IL – Lincoln Hall 10/19/19 – Toronto, ON – Horseshoe Tavern 10/22/19 – Montreal – Bar Le Rtiz PDB 10/23/19 – Somerville, MA – ONCE Ballroom 10/25/19 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg 10/26/19 – Philadelphia, PA – Boot & Saddle 10/27/19 – Washington, DC – Pie Shop 10/28/19 – Pittsburgh, PA – Club Café 10/30/19 – Detroit, MI – Hell Night @Third Man Records 10/31/19 – Nashville, TN – Halloween @Third Man Records 11/1/19 – Atlanta, GA – Aisle 5 11/2/19 – New Orleans, LA – Gasa Gasa 11/5/19 – Austin, TX – Barracuda 11/8/19 – Phoenix, AZ – Valley Bar 11/9/19 – Los Angeles, CA – The Fonda Theatre
Jennifer Joseph, Publisher of Manic D Press introduces Dave Dictor at his first ever book store appearance to promote MDC: Memoir from a Damaged Civilization: Stories of Punk, Fear, and Redemption, co-presented by 924 Gilman St Project. The punk singer and now author candidly talks about finding Raul’s club in Austin Tx in the late 1970’s and how it lead him to release the “John Wayne Was A Nazi” single, and begin a multi decade global odyssey of politically charged punk rock.
More excerpts from this talk forthcoming, subscribe for more. To learn more about Dave Dictor see his new website http://DaveDictor.com
To get Dave Dictor’s autobiography, request at your local bookseller or try this online link : http://amzn.to/29grKPh
Overall Dave’s book would be interesting to anyone interested in the behind the scenes history of D.I.Y. punk, with Dave’s personal path also being a parallel tale of a subculture, where punk music is not merely a fashion, or memorialized like a long gone artifact, but is treated as a living breathing movement.
Dictor’s book holds anecdotes and adventures as told through the eyes of a world weary Woody Guthrie-esque citizen soldier who has taken his lumps, learned lessons, and is still inspired to travel the road less traveled, and make a glorious din whenever and wherever he still can.
The die hard punk rock world MDC traverses is not that of the corporate sponsored festivals and action sports soundtracks, but one of more idealistic people powered shows, grass roots political benefits and the loosely connected friends and fellow travelers motivated not merely by money, but by a need to help each other network and navigate from town to town, nightclub to VFW Hall.
Dave Dictor’s view from the stage has included thousands at large sports halls and theaters, but more often than not was maybe a gig put on in a basement, squat or a community center, much like it was back when he first started touring in the early 1980’s.
Conveniently I scored my copy of Dave Dictor’s book at a reading he was doing at a local bookstore in Berkeley CA, and the audience there was rapt with attention as Dave regaled us with numerous stories of his 3 decades plus journey through American Hardcore Punk’s early days. Dave’s tales start even before that era, back in the late 60’s, when he was already becoming an iconoclastic teenager, dealing pot with the aide of a friend’s mom, bending gender & norms, and seeking out a vegetarian diet in an age when the only two people he’d heard of who’d existed like that were Hitler & Gandhi. Fortunately for us, Dave abandons his wannabe teen hippie persona behind on Long Island, and eventually hits Austin Texas just as Raul’s was starting to put on punk shows, where bands like The Big Boys and The Dicks were also forming, creating a feisty brand of Texan hardcore unlike the somewhat more macho & commercial flavors available in the more urbane coastal cities.
Dave Dictor released the “John Wayne Was a Nazi” single in 1979, his band The Stains later changed their name to MDC
In the book you’ll read of Dave leaving his seventies singer songwriter stylings behind to and eventually hit the West Coast full throttle as a punk rock pioneer living to the pulsebeat of politically aware subculture, subsisting through squatting and D.I.Y. touring, living out of vans, eating at soup kitchens and deftly dodging police and skinhead violence whenever possible. The book has tales of many shows including an early 90’s run behind the Iron Curtain, where border guards and paper work pose problems, and Russian promoters threaten to pull the plug on the tour if the band doesn’t come up with $5000 dollars overnight. You’ll learn about his friends and family, like his long time drummer Al who Dave met as a fellow Monkees fan in the 60’s, to both of ’em doing separate stints of prison time in the 1990’s.
As a memoir, and much like a friend telling a meandering adventure that no one is sure where it ends, the storyline occasionally drifts back and forth through time. Dave has met many thousands of people and magnanimously, many names are dropped briefly, while exact event details might get glossed over. Over 30 years of touring means some great stories got left out, while some chronological anachronisms occasionally appear, such as when he mentions a gig with Husker Du, where Dave relates feeling “like Prince was gonna show up, mount the stage” at First Avenue in Minneapolis “and do a few bars of Purple Rain” even though the MDC show referenced was back in 1982, and Prince was still several years away from creating that iconic cinematic moment.
Enjoy the vicarious rambling ride through these pages, Dave sure has, and one gets the feeling if some medical setbacks hadn’t sidelined him momentarily a few years ago so he’d have time to share these tales in print, most of these stories would’ve gone untold. Dictor had a serious health crisis and spiritual awakening just before penning the manuscript and feels lucky to be alive to still share his happiness and life story.
One criticism I heard of the book is that, despite conflicts and complications in a long career, this MDC book itself is not full of “dirt” and that Dave doesn’t talk hella sh/t about anyone. That is just the type of person he he is, and the author courageously, if not naively, still strives to find the positive side to everyone and everything. While allusions are made to occasional nefarious conduct by bit players in the book, Dave moves on rather than dwell on the painful parts. It is perhaps good advice for all of us. As he mentions near the end of the book on page 180, freshly leaving the hospital he almost died in, he tells a cab driver “From now on, only love will come from my mouth and be on my breath”.
Video was made at Dave Dictor’s first ever bookstore reading , the Mosh Lit release celebration for MDC: Memoir from a Damaged Civilization: Stories of Punk, Fear, and Redemption held at Pegasus Books in Berkeley CA May 25th 2016.
For over an hour, the author gave us all an informal, humorous, but deeply reflective overview of his multi decade journey through punk, as well as familial anecdotes, and life lessons. The tales dated as far back as his first cross dressing session with a 4 year old playmate to opinions on the 2016 Presidential campaign and the origins of his recently revived 40 year old slogan “No War , No KKK, No Fascist USA“.
Got to see the mighty Mekons the other night at the The Chapel in San Francisco. w/ Skokie Girls..
The two sequential songs from the sold out show in this first black & white edited video below date back to the 1988 “So Good It Hurts” album which was a sorta joint release twixt Twin/Tone and A & M labels and the second tune is from 1985’s “Fear & Whiskey” LP originally released on Sophie Bourbon’s SIN RECORDS label.
I believe the Mekons were the very first band I ever snuck in with a fake ID as an underage teenage runaway and saw at the I-Beam in San Francisco circa May 1987… In some ways, not much as changed, which is awesome and terrifying, most of the original band members I know and love are still onstage and accounted for, and sadly the world is still a greedy, stupid, venal, hostile, politically painful place in need of a good poetically poignant Mekons musical vivisecting.
However, instead of vile Tory Maggie Thatcher to rant about, there is this Boris Johnson dude…whatever. It is all the same… and most of us are aging, and if not gracefully, at least some of us had the good graces to show up for the show, at least far more paying customers than were there in 1987.
This video has slightly improved sound dynamics over a version I placed on Instagram, so rejoice in the additional camera angles and sonics here from two Mekons faves. Rumor has it Mr Langford will be back this fall as part of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass thang and, uh, he is bringing an entire two dozen member Welsh Boys Choir… you have been warned.
Here is a 360 degree video clip for the song “Thee Olde Trip To Jerusalem” (available on The Mekons album “Out Of Our Heads” and also featured in the Cd included in the 200 page book “United” that was released in 1996 via the Touch & Go affiliate label Quarterstick)
The last video I’ve pasted in below is the last song from their set, a Mekons song from their latest album, recorded some 30 years fater the earlier tunes were released, and Rolling Stone scribe Will Hermes said of the song ““How Many Stars” takes the classic form of an English folk song about a man lost at sea, and woman who dies of a broken heart, the band wondering at the sheltering sky in raggedly sympathetic harmony. “
