Live footage of The Buttertones in San Francisco performing Life Coach, an original song that appears on their 2016 self released “American Brunch” LP.
The cinematic surf noir of The Buttertones captured on multiple foggy lensed cameras in a darkly lit crowded low ceilinged basement full of hysterical sweaty shrieking females, whats not to like?
This video is a multi-cam clip from their 2017 summer tour which I captured below the Swedish American Hall on Market St at the nocturnal retreat otherwise known as DuNord.
The Buttertones, an educated and enigmatic five-piece combo that arose from the Los Angeles basin at the time consisting of Richard Araiza (vocals/guitar), Sean Redman (bass), Modesto Cobian (drums), London Guzmán (saxophone) and Dakota Böettcher (guitar). I have just read that as of July 2019, guitarist Dakota has left the group, so it should interesting as they forge ahead without his additional musical influence.
On the occasion of the band’s 40th Anniversary, the noise mongers collectively known as Flipper assembled on the stage at The Great American Music Hall shortly after 11 pm to deliver their sonic sermon last night.
Prompt , showered and shaved, frontman for the occasion, Mr David Yow greeted some people beside the stage including a bored 15 year old brought 1500 miles by her mother.
After the pleasantries, our cameras turn to capture the opening feedback salvo from Ted, a brief intro of the Flipper as the “the greatest band in the history of forever” be a young female fan in the audience, and Yow & Co take over. David soon leaps into the sold out crowd of some 500 attendees and we’re officially off!
The joyous din kept going until well after midnight. Here are the first few moments of some of the nihilistic nostalgia and friendly frenzy that ensued.
Above is the version from last night, followed below by a video from 2006 of the band featuring original vocalist Bruce Loose at Cafe DuNord in San Francisco with Kris Novoselic on bass.
Gary Floyd’s Black Kali Ma band shot live at the Fillmore in San Francisco joined onstage by the large and lovely Stinky’s Peep Show Go-Go Dancers.
Black Kali Ma was a hard rock band fronted by singer Gary Floyd and at the time of this recording consisted of drummer Bruce Ducheneaux (BOMB, Assassins Of God), bassist JT Antonopoulos (RHYTHM PIGS), and guitarists Matt Margolin (SMOKIN’ RHYTHM PRAWNS), and Danny Roman (SISTER DOUBLE HAPPINESS, THE GARY FLOYD BAND). The hard rocking San Francisco based group, which originally featured ex-Sister Double Happiness bassist Miles Montalbano was formed to build upon the bluesy punk spirit of Floyd’s previous bands and Jello Biafra released their album “You Ride the Pony, I’ll Be the Bunny” on his Alternative Tentacles label in 2000.
Big voiced and big bear-like frontman Gary Floyd first emerged with seminal Austin, TX “commie-fag” band the Dicks in 1980 who later relocated to San Francisco. After the 80’s hardcore scene grew tiresome, Gary resurfaced in Sister Double Happiness, a San Francisco band with a solid, bluesy roots rock sound built around Gary’s passionate emotive vocals and perhaps the first band to create rock music peppered by lyrics influenced by the AIDS epidemic. At the height of their post punk buzz and after their first album came out on SST Gary quit the group and pursued what he calls a “spiritual journey.” While he was studying Hindu deities and considering joining a monastery, but soon major label A&R came sniffing around, Gary reformed the group and dismissed the prospects of a monk like life. He told SF weekly in 1999 “I figured if I joined a monastery I’d probably end up being a pretty bad monk. Miserable me, you know, fucking fag sitting around a monastery pissed off at everyone.” With his group signed to a major label at the crux of the rise of “Alternative rock”, they were on the road opening shows for Nirvana and the future looked bright. Despite promising press coverage, it became clear their reputation as a live band far surpassed their album sales, and after touring the US and Europe multiple times with multiple bassists and releasing albums on a slew of labels, including the aforementioned SST, as well as Warner Brothers, Dutch East India they hung it up as a unit.
Gary continued writing and performing music, doing several solo albums as a blues singer, many of the tunes of which he still does to this day. His life story is told in his published memoir Please Bee Nice,My Life Up ‘Til Now: A Gary Floyd Memoir
now available at this link: evnt.bz/BeeNice
Click his name for links to past performances by Gary Floyd, as I’ve been documenting shows by this gentleman for decades and likely have one of the largest repositories of his live music videos to be seen anywhere. You’ll catch videos of him performing in combos such as The Dicks, Sister Double Happiness, Black Kali Ma, and his most recent group The Buddha Brothers.
The Deluxe on Haight St was a happening hurricane of activity on a January 2002 evening when our camera was there to catch the encore of seasoned San Francisco rock n roll soldier Bone Cootes and his bad azz bar room blasting band.
He starts off in this gritty unedited live clip with “Little Bird” , a tavern tested tune that would later appear on his Bone Cootes “Blow Out The Curses” CD and finishes here with a ribald ripper by the late great Andre Williams, “Bacon Fat”.
Bones band the Living Wrecks, featuring debonair dudes like Austin DeLone on the keys, six string pluckin’ birthday boy Kevin Ink in another corner and Joe Kyle Jr on the standup bass were all easily tossin’ out grooves and licks to spare. On fire with their unique amalgam of country fried blues, swanky angular urbane jazz attack and ol’ fashioned pub rock, they were inciting hip grinding drunken dancefloor mayhem. Through the magic of time travelin’ digital video…it’s like now you are there too!
Flipper’s 40th anniversary is this year and they are playing later this week in their hometown of San Francisco at Great American Music Hall. I guess I gotta shell out the big bucks if I wanna see ’em again. Should I do it? It will be sorta like a family reunion, in that not everyone will be there, and those that are, might not even be recognizable the way you remembered them, or even the members you’d want to see the most.
Here’s live video clips I made featuring songs made infamous during Flipper’s early years…
One further down below is newer from the 21st century, featuring current vocalist David Yow doing Love Canal and Ha Ha Ha which were on an early single. The other just below is about 20 years older, you hear part of their final Subterranean single “Someday” and the closing song “Way Of The World” from a daytime outdoor show in the early 90’s when the reconstituted band soldiered on after the death of original member Will Shatter. At the time a guy named John Dougherty was brought in on bass, and just like Will, Dougherty too would also die of a heroin overdose shortly after this 8mm footage was shot.
Here’s a more recent live lineup performing past glories from the band’s break-thru single originally released on Subterranean Records in 1981
Both songs are masterfully jaded methed up narcoleptic noise rock takes on the American Dream gone awry, setting the tone for the emerging ennui amidst a painful wasteland of suburban consumer conformity and corporate malfeasance that would be known as the 1980’s.
For a year or two in the late eighties, I used to answer Flipper’s fan mail, not for the money, uh, just for the glory I think… besides they were too lazy. Their singer Will Shatter would show up and sit beside me at the Subterranean record label store front on Valencia St circa 10 am with a Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler in hand. He was really just hoping to cash spare royalty checks before the rest of his bandmates, and seemed disinterested in the fan mail I showed him from geeky kids in far off Poland and Kentucky. The label guy would maybe throw him a few bucks to get rid of him lurking around the storefront, and Will might even pilfer a couple 7″s on his way out to sell somewhere else. But Will was a beatnik poet, and really just a guy from Gilroy, and he died soon after of an OD…
me on day will shatter’s death hit the news
The Flippant Men Who Make The, Uh, I Guess You’d Call It “Music”
Steve DePace is the entrepreneurial mercenary and life force trying to preserve the band’s legacy, Ted is more chill, a laconic Vietnam Vet, frazzled and still the easiest to be around to this day. I think Will was the sweetest of the bunch, while Bruce, now put out to pasture, was obviously the most mischievous, which is kinda cute when you’re young, less so as you creep into middle age.
When Flipper Kinda Lost Its Way In The World …
By the early 90’s Bruce’s drug taking manifested itself beyond pranks into petty feuds and worse, he became such a jerk, that after Will died, he was actually caught climbing through the ceiling vents of his own indie label warehouse to steal his own master tapes. It was all part of a coked up cash-in ploy and they sold the reels to Rick Rubin and Henry Rollins for chump change.
Bruce “Loose” Calderwood on stage 1994
Selling the tapes got a cash infusion, but sorta proved to be a stupid move, as not only did they burn the true foundational business bridge to their past glories, as soon they took the new money from Rubin, (an amount that barely woulda bought a decent new van), all the early Flipper tapes & LPs were soon out of print. Most of their legacy material was basically lost to the netherworlds of corporate negligence… They put out one new record on a major label in 1993 that stiffed, and I think Steve DePace had to sue to buy back their own music from Sony or whomever ended up owned and kept it dormant for well over a decade into the 21st century long after iTunes and eMusic downloads were already in decline.
Flipper mighta been a buncha drug ravaged idiots, but they were also brutally inspired artists without fear who made a definite caustic sonic mark on the rock music world. Really a band with no apologies, and a legacy of noise that still always makes me smile despite actually knowing the muther fuckers. Original singer Bruce “loose” Calderwood is a more than half crazy old mountain man misanthrope, constantly complaining online about his back, lashing out in recriminating rants while David Yow of Jesus Lizard cavorts the globe singing the songs Bruce made famous, much to Bruce’s chagrin and anger.
They were one of the great band’s of the early 80’s post-punk scene, and the only thing that held them back was everything. especially their own dysfunctionality. I consider them America’s nasty little answer to the pomp & circumspect Public Image Limited., but with much more sincerity, true grit and heart. They made dark deep wounding records that still stand the test of time, and their songs churn away in the background like psychic sewer dweller anthems. As Krist Novoselic of Nirvana has said of the band he briefly joined “Their music drew me into a universe where bleak was beautiful. I realized the work was as heavy and transcendent as anything in the rock echelon. Mainstream convention was shattered. Flipper were too weird and dangerous for the world. And if the world didn’t get it, that was just another loss for humanity. “
Apparently the world as another chance to catch on. Steve DePace mentioned to me in April when I inquired about the band’s 40th anniversary tour, and working on a documentary of their career “The time is right! I am going to get it all done over the next year or two! We will be rebuilding and relaunching the brand and the band in a big way. Lots of shows and many other things…”
Apache the band specializes in lousy good ol’ fashioned not too serious, raunchy robust beer drinkin’ goofball fun… and this song is the epitome of their misfit casual cool attitude
This was a great show at the old Elbo Room in San Francisco that I happened to be at in January 2017. Here’s Apache doing “Boyz’ Life” at the Elbo Room in San Francisco, CA, January 27, 2017.
Apache released their first album “Boomtown Gems” in 2008. Touring the world ensued and their sophomore album “Radical Sabbatical” was released in 2010.
In #SanFrancisco, Where Homeless Tent Cities & Needle Strewn Sidewalks Overflow With Human Fecal Matter, The Transit Agencies Of The Local Mono Party Political Cabal Casually Squandered Two Billion Tax Dollar$ On A Fancy Bus Shelter That Is A Total Bust !
Due To Safety Concerns About Shoddy Construction, It Was Blocked Off From Public Access A Year Ago, Only Days After Opening, And Its Closure Escalated The Already Miserable Gridlock Downtown.
The Site, Which Even Empty Still Costs Taxpayers $2.5 Million A Month To Maintain, May Host Actual #TransitPassengers In Late July 2019, But As Designed, Will Still Have No Direct Connections To Existing Subways or Rail Lines.
Here’s A Few Seconds Of Footage I Got Of The Impractical Massive Monstrosity That Looks Like It Was Dreamed Up In As A Dubai Discotheque Landing Pad During The Brief Period It Was Open Last Year
The Empty Basement “Might” Someday Have A Rail Stop In The Very Far Off Nebulous Future, But Only If A Batsh/t Bait & Switch #BulletTrain Scheme Is Ever Fully Funded.
Remember Kids! This Is The Kind Of Magic #TheDemocrats Can Accomplish If Given A Super Majority And A Checkbook With Unfettered Reins Of Power! Good Job Gang! You’ve Made Us Proud In #TheCityThatKnowsHow !
Next Time You Are Standing In A Packed Bart Train At Rush Hour Wondering Why The System Sucks, Remember The Transit Masterminds Spent 2 Billion Tax Dollars On A Bus Barn To Nowhere Only A Few Blocks Away.
Here are two songs featured on the original Osgood Slaughter cassette demo that was recorded with Jonathan Burnside at Razor’s Edge on Divisidero St in 1987, but recreated live in 2017 on stage some 30 years later.
One deals with parenting the late great Bruno Bersani way… Our hero recounts how he left the whiskey soaked bar crawls of SF’s side streets to raise a child, and how that demon had to be tamed. The second is about the “Weirdo On The Block” another concern of the young Bruno Bersani, and of which he undoubtedly feared he’d become…
These songs were recorded live at The Bottom Of The Hill October 14th 2017 at the band’s last known performance of tunes that originally surfaced on the 1987 Osgood Slaughter demo. The original studio versions are available at Bandcamp and one is embedded below for your streaming or downloading pleasure, as archived via the “ChewyMarzolo1” Bandcamp page, a treasure trove of indie music you likely ain’t heard.
Oh are you still here? … well then you get the ULTIMATE REWARD! This is a rarely seen clip of Bruno Bersani’s 1984 oddball electro pop group’s only video that aired on an Oregon cable access show… here’s a story about Bruno’s Moose Lodge cribbed from the panicon13th blog where I found it
The song comes from “a demo of amazing synth punk. Hilarious lyrics and a band that can really play. Years after this came out, John O’Neil told me he’d hung out with lead singer Bruno while he smashed copies of the tape in his garage with a hammer. Too bad, because there weren’t many to go around, my copy was #86 of 100. I only got to see them play once, it was at a high school dance where they had the plug pulled on them after 10 minutes. “It appears that we’re done for the evening…” Bruno said, barely started on his two liter bottle of wine cooler sitting prominently on his synth before a room of teenagers. “
Here is footage of the SF based heavy comic rockers Osgood Slaughter performing a rock oddity about “Fruit Bats!” in the unlikely locale of a Guam public park circa 1989.
As I post this I just got word that Osgood Slaughter’s vocalist Bruno Bersani has left this earthly realm and I send condolences to his extended family and many friends. I was never tight with the guy, but always in awe of his gruff persona, and expecting a laugh. As my pal Dave Pehing wrote after his recent passing of his larger than life stage presence “Bruno was a brilliantly weird and compelling character onstage. ”
Bruno’s most memorable lyric in my opinion was the guttural chorus “Live like an animal, die like a vegetable!” and will I try to edit a clip of him performing that song at the band’s farewell reunion show for drummer Chewy Marzolo’s 50th birthday in 2017. In the meantime enjoy this one from the wayback machine…
Osgood Slaughter was a loud, enigmatic and unavoidably omnipresent force in the dark dingy maze of hedonist hell-hole nightclubs that were San Francisco’s rock scene for a few years in the tale end of the late 80’s through early 90’s. Osgood Slaughter were a confusing comedic combo, somewhat akin to a Northern California alternative to LA band Pygmy Love Circus in some ways, with a caustic and bizarre biting sense of Zappa-esque humor mixed with thrash metal proficiency. They were too weird for the metal crowd, being more bike messenger than biker gang, and not sad or serious enough for the indie rock effete elite, so Osgood Slaughter stomped, wailed and terrorized military bases, bars & backyard bar bq’s alike in search of fame and fortune on both US coasts, and even the South Pacific before disbanding and splintering off circa 1993.
When i first moved to San Francisco, this band soon hit my radar as more persistent than popular, but always active on the underground, and had revolving lineups featuring guitar work from a couple of my earliest punk guitar god pals, such as John Cobbett (of Malefice, Gwar and later Ludicra/Hammers of Misfortune) and one of the guitarists featured in the video posted here Barry D’live (known fortouring ax man stints in Gwar and Me First & the Gimme Gimmes, several albums with RKL, and now playing with MDC).
The embedded Osgood Slaughter track “Time To Be A Transient” features the John Cobbett era lineup circa 1990 and is from their Take This All Of You, And Eat It album available on Bandcamp if you can’t find yr crusty old CD copy like me. If you delve into Chewy Marzolo’s overflowing bandcamp, you will find many more Osgood outtakes, unreleased would be albums, and side projects from the members.
In August 2001 the Dirtbombs from Detroit Michigan convened at the Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco for a memorable gig that has stood the test of time nearlt two decades later. Here’s an exclusive never before seen edited HD clip of the Dirtbombs opening number shot with two Sony digital video cameras in the back of a sweaty sold out club on a warm San Francisco night. This newly rediscovered & remastered HD edit of the opening number from the show features the closing track of their 12 song 1998 debut album “Horndog Fest”.
Then below this never before seen video is another of the band tearing through a medley of back of back tunes from the same set:
Cedar Point ’76/ I’ll Be In Trouble/Chains Of Love/Maybe Your Baby
Creem Mag inspired poster for the show by Detroit artist Dennis Loren
The Dirtbombs, fronted by the then 35-year-old Mick Collins (already a veteran of budget garage rawk groups such as Blacktop & The Gories), were out and about mainly to promote their sophomore album, Ultraglide in Black on the In The Red label. At the time, rock scribe, Jennifer Maerz interviewed Collins for an interview that was published days prior to the gig in SF Weekly where she noted Collins got the idea for the Dirtbombs back in 1992, while on tour in Europe with the Gories. At that time, he said the punk trend was to chuck the bass player and just have drums and guitars — a trend he reacted to by having two bass players. Since then, the band has gone through 10 lineups. “There’s enough ex-Dirtbombs to make five whole bands. There’s a couple people whose names I don’t even remember,” chuckles Collins. (The latest configuration includes Ghetto Records owner Jim Diamond on bass, Tom Potter on “fuzz” bass, Pat Patano and Ben Blackwell on drums, and Collins on vocals, guitar, and harmonica.)
Mick told Maerz “We’re extremely loud live because we have two drum sets and two full bass rigs — and we keep the beat going all night,” says Collins. “In addition to “loud,’ I guess “unpredictable’ is a good word. We never know what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of give-and-take with the audience — the more they’re into it, the more we are. We encourage people to dress wild, wear costumes and stuff. Don’t worry about looking cool; don’t worry about that scenester crap. We don’t fit in, why should you? Let your freak flag fly high, baby! Let it all hang out!”
