Portland based all-male trio Clorox Girls power through catchy punk tunes that echo their late 70s punk-originator-influences on their new 7”. They open with “Genocide,” a rollicking, danceable track with a pop sensibility that belies the pessimistic verse “we can’t win, that’s the truth of it.” B-side track “Bad Girls” kicks off with a rumbling drum beat, alternating a simple catchy repeated chorus of the song’s title with howls that veer toward being sweet and engaging rather than animalistic or threatening. Playing in various incarnations for nearly a decade, Clorox Girls refuse to slow down or grow up, keeping simple memorable punk tunes coming through in a playful, unassuming fashion. After their 2 ½ year hiatus, it’s nice to see them back in action, with a return to the more stripped down punk that appeared on their early releases. Perhaps this has something to do with the group’s return to their California roots, or perhaps it’s a return to the sort of frenetic performances that put them on the map to begin with. Either way, this 7” gives us a hopeful preview of the sort of high energy archetypal punk we can expect on an upcoming full length.

-Walt! Gorecki

Middle Class is Mike Atta, Jeff Atta, Matt Simon and Mike Patton (no, not that Mike Patton). Depending on who you ask, you might be told they are the first ever hardcore band, or you might get kicked in the gut with a pre-scuffed Urban Outfitters combat boot. After a very long spell, the band reunited last year to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Frontier Records—the label that put out Middle Class’ 1979 EP, “Out of Vogue.” Now they’re returning to the Echoplex to play a badass L.A. RECORD show with Kid Congo, the Urinals and Grant Hart. This interview by Jonny Bell.

Do you get confused with the other Mike Patton?
Mike Patton (bass): Yeah, when I was living in Santa Monica one time I got a phone call and it was a girl and she asked, ‘Is this Mike Patton?’ I go, ‘Yeah,’ and she just screamed. ‘Aahhhhhh!!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you must be thinking of that other guy …’
Mike Atta (guitar): Nobody’s ever screamed for me. People have screamed at me …
Do you ever get super fans coming into your vintage shop Out Of Vogue?
MA: I wouldn’t say super fans—they don’t scream or anything—but I get kids in here who will be standing over here by the records or by the guitars and they’ll be nudging each other and whispering, ‘That’s him.’ And I’m just like the slob behind the counter, and finally I’ll ask ’em, ‘Can I help you?’ And they’ll say, ‘Are you the guy?’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, that depends. What guy?’ ‘The Middle Class?’ ‘Yeah I’m the guy.’
So tell me about The Sound of Music club in San Francisco …
MA: The club I remember best of all was the Deaf Club.
Matt Simon (drums): I remember very distinctly playing there, like an afternoon show with the Toiling Midgets where we were going to leave right after and come home. And I started coming on to the acid and I remember seeing all these people—rolling drunks and stuff—this is my Sound of Music story—and I see this old black guy who comes walking up and I was like, ‘Hey, you should be careful. You’re all drunk and I just saw these people rob this guy.’ So I sat and talked to him for like five or ten minutes. Then he said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and he opened his jacket and he had a badge and gun and everything, and I thought, Oh, Jesus Christ. I was just coming on to the acid.
MP: The Deaf Club was really cool, it was a club for deaf people and we played a show and the deaf people that were around were behind the amplifiers and a bunch of them were touching the bass amp and putting their heads against the walls to get into the vibrations. We played with the Bags and Patricia [Morrison] lost her bass after the show and I remember going into a room looking for it and asking if anyone had seen a bass. When no one turned around I yelled, ‘Hey! What are you all deaf?’
MA: I remember it being next door to a hotel where punk rockers lived and it was like one of those places where you walk in past the guy in the glass case and he hands you a towel. One of those kinds of places with heroin addicts and everything.
You guys were pretty interested in the San Francisco scene?
MA: I think we were more accepted up there by the scene and the kids and everything than we were in Los Angeles. I think at that time, when were playing with the Wounds and the Toiling Midgets—what would that have been 1980, 81?—I don’t think their scene was like the scene down here. The scene down here had become more hardcore with like the beach scene and everything, and they may have had hardcore elements up there but it wasn’t the same kind of thing. It seemed like they were open to more kinds of music.
Why do you think that the bands in San Francisco didn’t end up being quite so ‘legendary’ as a lot of the Southern California bands?
MA: Well, the Avengers and the Nuns and all those bands—they were all pretty big San Francisco bands and they could do pretty well in L.A., but I don’t think they did well with the crowd that was the crowd that liked TSOL and the Adolescents and all that kind of stuff.
MS: I think the L.A. punk scene was bigger too—there was more music industry stuff down here, more records put out.
MP: What was the Sound of Music’s or whatever’s fanzine? Oh, Search & Destroy. It was too intellectual —it was intellectual and party and L.A. was not.
MA: I would say San Francisco was more like the earlier parts of the L.A. scene, where you had a lot of people that were art school, you know like the Weirdos and X and all those bands that went to CalArts or whatever—poetry readings and all that.
What were some of your favorite bands growing up?
Jeff Atta (vocals): Leading up to the band, like before ’74-’75, me and Mike would go to Licorice Pizza in Santa Ana and they’d have all these weird imports and stuff like that, and we got into Eno and Roxy Music and stuff like that.
MP: When I was growing up, I didn’t listen to music. And when I met Jeff in high school he introduced me to Mott the Hoople and New York Dolls, and I kind of got introduced to rock ‘n’ roll when Jeff and I were hanging around. I remember Jeff had the English music magazines, and Creem magazine we used to read. Creem had this little article about this new thing in England called ‘punk rock,’ and they listed the Sex Pistols, the Damned and the Buzzcocks—those three bands. And in high school people would ask you what bands you liked and I would say the Damned, and I didn’t even know what they sounded like.
MA: I think for me, at that time—I was about 14 when you guys were discovering all that other stuff—I was listening to stuff like Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, anything that would go along with my pot-smoking at the time. And then I remember when I was 15 and a half, almost 16, I started playing guitar and everybody else that was playing guitar was trying to learn Aerosmith and stuff like that, and you guys had gotten like the Dictators and the Ramones in like ’76, and you said, ‘You should try playing this.’
MS: You guys covered a lot of Ramones songs when you first started right?
MA: Yeah, when we first started and it was me and Mike and a couple other people. We were doing Stones songs, Ramones songs …
MP: ‘Cause it was easy.
You started off playing a lot of cover songs?
MA: Yeah, just in our studio. We had a storage unit that was converted into a place for us to rehearse and that’s where we started playing that, and then writing some of our own stuff. But we were into writing songs like Wire and the Ramones. We just didn’t know how fast it was going to end up.
I know it’s a simple question, but why did you start playing so fast?
MA: It wasn’t premeditated—that’s for sure.
JA: I think we thought, ‘OK, punk is loud and it’s fast,’ so we just played as loud and fast as we could. We weren’t intentionally trying to play any faster than anyone else …
MP: And it wasn’t something we really noticed until people started saying, ‘Wow, you guys are really fast!’
MA: We didn’t know anything about the ‘rules’ of music. You know, all those bands like X and everybody, they were all based in blues—they all still had that ‘thing.’ We didn’t know anything about that. We didn’t know about relative minors. I’ve had people say, ‘You know that song “Introductory Rights”? Did you know that song is only one chord?’ [Laughs] Rob Ritter from 45 Grave, Gun Club and all that—he always recorded bands early on. He had a cassette recorder with him all the time, and he goes, ‘I was trying to figure out how to play your songs. What kind of alternative tuning do you use?’ And I go, ‘Alternative? I just tune to Mike.’ … On the speed thing, we recorded on the record that Frontier put out there a version of a song ‘You Belong’ that’s a half a minute longer than the 45 version—and it was just a six-month period till we got to the speed of the ‘Out of Vogue’ single. And like I said, it wasn’t intentional. I don’t know how we got there; it was just a lot of Dr. Pepper and Suzy Q’s. … I remember consciously drinking Dr. Pepper and being kind of like straight-edge after reading in Trouser Press magazine where they were first talking about ‘the punks’ and that they’re against all rock ‘n’ roll conventions, all what’s supposed to be rock ‘n’ roll—the drugs and all that. So we took that to mean that we weren’t supposed to get high, we were just supposed to play this music. It didn’t take long to find out that wasn’t true.
MP: Well, that was one of the reasons I think the L.A. people liked us—we were cute. We were from Orange County, we were straight, we were VERY straight.
MA: I smoked pot before Middle Class, and I quit once we started because I thought you weren’t supposed to do dope or anything like that. It wasn’t until later that I really started smoking a lot of pot. [Laughs]
JA: At that time we were living in Santa Ana, and later in Fullerton. That’s why we got so big up in L.A., because as far as we knew we were the only people in Orange County playing punk rock. Later we found out there were people in Fullerton, Huntington Beach, recording around the same time, but were totally isolated.
MA: At that time there really wasn’t a lot of bands coming out of Orange County at all. When we got interviewed for the Masque when Brendan Mullen was writing his book, he asked, ‘Was it hard? People always said that people in the L.A. scene wouldn’t allow bands from the South Bay and Orange County to come up and play?’ Well for us, it’s because that didn’t exist yet. Everybody that was in those early bands—those first waver bands—they were all from someplace else anyways. How many people were really from Hollywood? They were all glitter kids from the Valley or the Dils and the Zeros were from Carlsbad or San Diego. … Our first show, I just met the guys from the Zeros and asked if we could play; told ’em we had a band and they said, ‘Yeah, you can play next week.’ It was that simple. It was with the Bags, the Controllers and Skulls or something like that. Kind of a different time—that’s for sure.
Do you think there’ll ever be a scene as vibrant as the scene back then?
MA: I talk to a lot of the kids coming in here today. I talk to Audacity, and I ask them how they keep up and everybody’s in a band now—it’s easy for everyone to get their content out there. Before it was like you had no choice—if you wanted to be part of punk rock you had to be part of a little scene. I mean there are little scenes still. Burger Records has their little thing—
MS: —but it’s not underground. You can’t keep anything underground anymore; it’s very difficult in the computer age.
MA: It gets co-opted or whatever, and I don’t know, it’s just like fashion today—it’s just all taking parts of other things. … We never dressed like punk rockers; we dressed pretty much like what you see now, but in high school everybody had long hair and it was still an outcast kind of thing. … Now, you can go to any high school in the United States and you can’t tell what people are into because everybody looks hip or indie or whatever. Before, you could identify a person and be like, ‘That guy’s a loadie, that guys a surfer, that guy’s a punk rocker.’ Now it’s like the guys that are in bands like Mumford & Sons or whatever, look the same as the guys in Audacity! They’re all wearing flannel cowboy shirts, and these guys are playing songs about squirrels?
MS: When I got into punk, I just cut my hair and started wearing ties, and older people would say, ‘You’re a very nice young man. You’re thinking of joining the military?’ And people my age were like, ‘You’re just an idiot.’
MA: I just saw this posting from a friend of my wife’s son’s band and it’s called ‘post-hardcore,’ but they all have haircuts like Disney channel kids. But I guess that it’s ‘post-hardcore metal’, not ‘post-hardcore punk’ or something. I don’t know! … You know it’s interesting because in the original punk rock scene from L.A.—and I think S.F was the same—when you look at bands that were involved like Weirdos, Screamers, Middle Class … when you listen to these bands individually, they kind of sound like they shouldn’t be playing together. You got the Middle Class playing with the Screamers and when you listen to the Screamers now you hear them doing like bloop-beep—all that kind of stuff. I think they all fit together because it was all outcast things. Later on, when you had your hardcore punk scene, you could put four hardcore bands together and it was kind of a blur of music.
MP: And the problem with the hardcore scene was that it became very regimented, and there was a certain way you were supposed to look and a certain way you were supposed to be and it was completely the opposite of what punk started as.
MS: It was not a friendly scene! If you weren’t connected or dressed right you were in danger of getting hurt bad.
MA: I just remember when you played shows up to 1980 or so, you could look out into the crowd and there would be a bunch of girls in the audience. By 1981 you looked down there and everyone had a shaved head and no shirt on! I saw this amazing picture on this Mabuhay thing: Black Flag playing at Mabuhay Gardens and it was Henry Rollins and he was just like all tense and flexed and tight and everything, and there’s like four guys in the front and they all looked exactly the same.
It became like a church …
MA: Yeah exactly. I read this thing about our band and our relationship with hardcore and they wrote that if we would have just done our first single and kept with that music, that we would’ve been as popular as Black Flag. But we changed the formula.
MP: I remember when we played the Fleetwood, some guy came in with long hair while we were playing and got pummeled by the crowd because he wasn’t supposed to be there, and there was a real visceral reaction. I remember Jeff refused to play the first singles. We wouldn’t play them and we broke from that.
MA: I just remember you would start playing and everybody’s back was turned and they’d be all ready to start throwing down and stuff.
MS: I think the ratio of being hit to throwing punches must’ve been 50 to 1. We’ve been beaten up a lot more than we’ve beaten. [Laughs] It’s not a TSOL kind of thing where there are these four big guys who were like ass-kickers.
MP: The original punks were not jocks, you know—they were all losers. But then the jocks got into it and saw about an inch deep of what punk rock was. Didn’t get the whole concept of it. Put on the uniform, and there were jocks and assholes coming in, and now that was hardcore.
MA: We’re going to get beat up again, aren’t we?
Do you think ‘Out of Vogue’ was the first hardcore single?
MA: Some people that were in the original scene, Alice Bag or something, they’ll say it was proto-punk or the beginning of thrash punk or whatever, and I’ll take it, because it’s what gets us known and stuff. And people say this led to that, or Black Flag was a heavy metal band till they heard the ‘Out of Vogue’ single. People will argue that thing with the Bad Brains: ‘Look at the two records—Middle Class was ’78, Bad Brains was ’79.’ You know, I think that the arguments are pretty funny. A blog I was just reading yesterday was saying Black Flag was the first hardcore band. ‘Their single came out in ’76.’ I’m like, ‘What? Where did you get that from?’
JA: All that stuff is just a record collector thing. You have to pick something, somebody always had to be the first one. It’s just like the argument about who was the first ‘punk’ band, and somebody will say, ‘Oh, Iggy was.’
MA: No—Sonics!
MS: It was Charlie Parker!
MA: Next thing you know people are saying it was the Carter Family or something. I think [‘Out of Vogue’] was influential to a lot of people, and I’ll take that.
What do you think about all the old punk bands re-uniting?
MA: I find the whole thing kind of interesting that bands like ours, or bands like TSOL or whatever the bands are can actually play these shows, and they’ll be a mixture of young people and old people. I just remember being 19-20 years old and having absolutely no desire to see bands that had existed 30 years prior, you know what I mean?
MS: Yeah—like going to see the Coasters!
MA: I remember one time when we were about 23-24, and we went to go see Eric Burdon. We were fed up with punk rock so we were looking back at some of the old stuff like the Animals, doing something different. So we went to Eric Burdon at the Roxy and he looked all Vegas! Had his shirt open and all these gold chains on. And he did a medley of the Animals’ hits and we were all like, ‘Uhhhh …’
MS: I remember that and we were—I hate to say this—a little bit famous at the time and the guy was like, ‘Here, we’ve got seats for you right up front.’ After like the third song we were like, ‘Let’s get outta here!’ It was terrible. It was unbearable!
MA: I think it’s interesting that kids and people find inspiration in going to see these old bands and everything. I mean, I’m completely thrilled by it. I’m flattered that a 15-year-old kid would come in here and actually value my opinion on music and stuff, cuz I could tell you that when I was their age I could give a fuck about what somebody that was 30 or 40 years old thought about music. People will bring CDs in for me and ask, ‘Can you listen to this?’ and I’ll say, ‘You know, there’s nothing I can really do for you.’ [Laughs] It’s kind of cool that they care. With the Audacity kids I was like, ‘You guys wanna play behind my store?’ Haha!
MP: The fact that anybody cares is fucking awesome.
Watching you guys play was great, as opposed to maybe the Germs or something. You heard about what they’re doing now?
MA: Yeah, of course. We were going to try and get a guy from ER to take Jeff’s place if he wasn’t going to do the show. .. An actor! But anyways … they tried to get us to do the Germs return show a couple years ago. They said, ‘We got the Minutemen, we got the Germs.’ And I was like, ‘D. Boon’s dead, Darby’s dead. How are you guys doing that?’ Didn’t make any sense to me. … Maybe the actor is good, but to me it’s like going to see Wild Child as the Doors or Atomic Punks doing Van Halen. But, believe me, more people go to see that than the Middle Class!
MS: You know, like I watched the Adolescents and TSOL and they’ve obviously practiced all the way through and they’re tight and perfect, but to me that’s not really the most important thing. They’ve been playing the same set over and over again like for 20 years, but for us it’s a lot different, you know, cuz we’ve just started playing this stuff again this year.
MA: It’s kind of like Middle Class was before … The way we play and the way it is, all it takes is just one little thing to go wrong to throw it into a complete mess. You never know when the wheels are going to fly off and that’s what makes it kind of exciting. And you know with some of these other bands you can tell that it can be done in their sleep.
What’d you guys do in the thirty or so years since the band broke up?
MA: I was in a band with Alice from the Bags called Cambridge Apostles; I did that for a little bit. For a very short time I had a band with Ward Dotson from Gun Club, and for a while I didn’t do anything except for play with Matt’s band—he was in a band called the Pontiac Brothers. They discovered the Doll Hut here in Anaheim and started that thing.
MP: I played in Trotsky Icepick with Jack Grisham [of TSOL], then I was going to college and was in a couple bands—Breathe and Young Caucasians.
MA: Wait, you were in Breathe?
MP: Yeah, when I was going to Fullerton college. A different Breathe.
MA: Oh, there was a band Breath—
MS: —Bad Breath! They were the first hardcore uhhh …
MA: —Gingivitis band! Then you took over the Eddie empire—Eddie and the Subtitles.
MP: Yeah, when Eddie bailed, I presided over the crumbling empire—produced China White, Adolescents, Christian Death …
MA: Oh, I thought that was the other Mike Patton!

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS THE MIDDLE CLASS WITH KID CONGO AND THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS, GRANT HART AND THE URINALS ON FRI., JUNE 24, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $16-$18 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE! VISIT THE MIDDLE CLASS AT FACEBOOK.COM/THEMIDDLECLASSOFFICIAL.

Looking back, you might say that brothers Bobby, Dannis and David Hackney started as a ‘proto-punk’ band, but really this is pure punk rock made years before anyone else even touched the genre. Within the context of the time and place—east side Detroit in the early 1970s—Death seem absolutely sagelike in their prescience. A documentary and a book are in the works, and tons more reissues to follow their rediscovered, barely released … For All The World to See on Drag City. Bobby and Dannis speak now from a snowed-in recording studio in Vermont about Death’s upcoming visit to L.A., David Bowie, and the day disco came to town. This interview by Kristina Benson.

I was looking at the Death site, and it said that what really intrigued you were bass players that could sing while playing, like Jermaine Jackson and Paul McCartney.
Bobby Hackney (bass, vocals): Paul McCartney, always from early—when we first saw the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” that struck me. The fact that he played—I was so young at the time! It was just an amazing four-stringed instrument. I didn’t even know what the instrument was. I just knew they were guitars! … And Jermaine Jackson was another one. I think that the reason why that connection was, is because I grew up in the black community, the Jackson 5 was a huge thing at the end of ’68 to ’69, and it was the big Afro era. And I was just kind of starting on the path of being a serious musician at the time. We were just kind playing around with every type of music, and it was just kind of cool if you could play the bass and have a big Afro! It did a lot for my teenaged social life!
What’s the best thing having an Afro did for your social life?
BH: In the ’70s, man, it just made you cool! Sly Stone had an Afro, he had the signature Afro, Linc from ‘The Mod Squad’ had a signature Afro, Jimi Hendrix had a signature Afro, so, I mean there was a lot of signature Afros. And of course, with the Jackson 5, they kind of—after that, Afros just exploded. But it just made you look cool, like wearing cool clothes of today! The guy who signed us to Groovesville, Brian Spears, he was a real executive type—Brian had a really big Afro! So I mean, everyone had big Afros back then. It was cool!
I kept reading that there was a lot of resistance to the idea of black guys playing punk, or proto-punk, or whatever you’d call what you guys were doing.
BH: We never called it proto-punk back then. See, Kristina, what you have to understand, is during that time we just called it rock ‘n’ roll. And if you said punk, well, that term hadn’t taken on in music until the late 1970s—and this was between 1973-76—if you called a musician a punk back then, those were fighting words! So I mean, we just called it straight ahead, hard-drivin’, rock ‘n’ roll. And I think the fact that we were getting such resistance— ‘Why don’t you guys stop playing that rock ‘n’ roll, that loud noise, man, and play some Earth Wind and Fire, play some James Brown.’ And so this is what we were surrounded by unless we went out maybe to Ann Arbor or Gross Pointe, where there were other rock bands who were doing our thing and we kind of hung out with them a little bit. In our neighborhood, I mean, yeah. We was kind of weird, you know? But it was music that we chose because we loved it! We loved the whole movement. I think that 1968 had a real big effect on me and my two brothers, you know. Musically. And I think the fact that in 1968, three big events happened in our household, and that was Martin Luther King, Jr. being assassinated, and then after that a month later, we lost our dad, you know? To a car accident. And then a couple months after that, Bobby Kennedy. I just remember 1968 being this surreal year where like, the country was like on fire but the music was just incredible, just this incredible music and all these incredible happenings, and a lot of it had to do with rock ’n’ roll music. … It was like this whole wave of the young people just trying to be one voice and it was almost as though the rock musicians were the carriers of the message.
What were some of the other bands you’d hang out with?
BH: David saw the MC5 right before the riots broke out and that sort of thing. He hung out with old blues musicians, and you never know who he’d have with him. That’s where most of our exposure came. When we went out to Ann Arbor, we’d go to a club called Uncle Sam, other clubs, take in the scene. Even then, it was kind of weird! We were the only three black guys in the place! This was back in the early ’70s, and you know, it was like white club, black club, that type of thing. But everyone treated us really nice, and when people would ask us, because when we were together some people would ask us if we were a musical group or band—of course, David used to love the shock value of telling people our name. ‘What’s the name of your band?’ and David would look at them and go ‘Death!’ just to get the reaction.
Why didn’t you play very many shows?
BH: We had signed up to Groovesville in 1974, and our manifesto was to concentrate on developing the music, songwriting, making sure we had as many songs as we could. Hindsight, maybe he had intuition or a feeling within that he knew he wouldn’t be here so he spent a lot of time just recording, recording, writing, recording, recording, writing. And I wrote all of the lyrics, and I’d be writing a lot but David was just like a marathon! I’d go to school, he’d be in the corner with his guitar. I’d come home, he’d be in the corner with his
guitar. Late at night, in the corner with his guitar. Always constantly writing music. … The fact of the matter is that we did play a few shows out, but the problem was like those shows were booked in front of entirely rhythm & blues and black audiences. These people looked at us like, ‘What the heck just happened?’
Were there clubs that wouldn’t let you play?
BH: There were clubs that didn’t understand us, didn’t know us. And on top of that, we didn’t have a hit record out. That also—that was the main thing that was our main goal. Back then, we were kind of—I think we almost kind of fell into this ‘Us Against the World’ kind of thing and we were just used to that. And David almost had this attitude, we all did, like, ‘We know something you don’t know.’ And it gave us an edge, and we kind of liked that edge. But we would have loved to have performed, been involved with a lot of shows. Here we were, stuck on the east side in the black community and we just loved rock ‘n’ roll music!
You, or maybe your brother, spoke of disco as an effort to glaze over all of these political issues and be just like, ‘Don’t worry, just party!’
BH: It’s weird, it turns out that 1976 would be our worst year, and almost 34 years later we find out that it could have been our best year for the decisions we made. Because had we not done some of the things we did in 1976 there’s a possibility that the world wouldn’t know about this music. But at the time, 1976 was the most dismal year for us as musicians. Simply because a lot of things had happened, and we were no longer with our production company, who was shopping us to a major label and we decided to put out these records but, see, the thing about it is, when you grew up in Detroit, we saw a lot of our friends and associates that made this kind of happen and got local hits. And you’d give it to the disc jockey and he would play it! … So when we released ‘Politicians in My Eyes’ and ‘Keep on Knocking’ in 1976, we was trying to get airplay but we were getting really sparse airplay, like way in the night, 3 in the morning, one or two times in the day, and that’s all you’d hear it. Of course, David would go to the DJs and hound ’em, like, ‘What’s going on, man, you guys are not playing our music. You say you like it, why won’t you play it?’ And finally one DJ told us what was going on, cuz we didn’t really understand that that was the beginning of the corporate wave that was about to take over radio. He said, ‘We’re no longer picking our music and we don’t have as much control even over the local music,’ and then that’s one thing—they’d just block out local music. … This disco thing was really growing strong and no one could get any airplay. … My brother Dannis just came in!
We were just talking about the disco tsunami and corporate control over the media.
BH: 1976 was definitely a serious recession year in Detroit, and that happened to be the year that we were trying to get our little single played on the radio! And it was also the year that Bowie came to town! This was the biggest announcement to us that disco was moving in, and taking over rock ‘n’ roll. Cuz that’s what everyone was saying in Detroit: ‘Disco’s gonna take over rock ‘n’ roll, disco’s gonna take over rock ‘n’ roll.’ And you’d hear that, you know? And it happened in 1976. David Bowie was coming to town, and we were kind of down and out so we figured it would be a great concert, let’s check it out. And we thought it would be Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and all that great stuff, you know. … And he comes out in his little jacket, his little disco suit, and he’s singing in his little disco suit—and you know that album Young Americans? What had happened, Kristina, David Bowie, of course, not the radio stations—no one played this—none of the radio stations played this. That was the whole promotion. He rented the Michigan Palace as if to say, ‘This is the new me, check it out.’ And it was the weirdest thing, walking out of that theater that evening. We had been to a lot of Detroit concerts. We’ve seen ’em rowdy, appreciative, elated, disappointed. But that was the weirdest vibe cuz you can tell everyone was like, ‘What the hell?’ Cuz at first, they were like, ‘OK, that’s it, David you got us!’ … and after the fifth song we were looking at each other like, ‘He’s for real about this.’ I’ve seen crowds in Detroit throw things, but I mean, it’s David Bowie. There are some people you just don’t throw at. I remember the reaction and that was the announcement to us that disco was going to eat at the fabric of rock ‘n’ roll, which it did. That was the night, in Detroit, that disco truly came to town.
Is that what ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Victim’ is about?
Dannis Hackney (drums): That was actually a song, I think, about us! Because we were the rock ‘n’ roll victims, trapped in our room—listening to rock ‘n’ roll, looking for an outlet!
Your sons are playing music, are they facing similar challenges to the ones that you faced?
BH: Well, my sons are in a band called Rough Francis and they’ve kind of, you know, introduced our music to the public locally. They played it and they heard it and it’s a long story but they were as excited as everyone else when they heard the music.
Do you all ever play together?
DH: Yup! BH: The very first Death show that we did in Detroit we all played on stage together and it was a pretty good show. We did Chicago and Cleveland as well.
You went to an Alice Cooper show with your mom. What was it about that show that made you so excited?
DH: My mom knew a lot of the people that worked at Motown and they used to invite her to the parties they’d hold. And one night, me and my mom was going to one of these parties but we had to go through the arena where Alice Cooper was playing in order to get to where we were going. We were in the middle of the crowd and my mom looks at the stage and says, ‘Who’s that fella?’ I said, ‘Mom, that’s Alice Cooper. He’s one of the biggest rock stars in the world!’ And you know, Alice was up there on the stage and he had his boa constrictor and he was laying all over the stage and my mom said she thought he had a couple of problems. She went to the Motown party but I stayed and watched Alice Cooper, and it was just—the way the drummer was going, and the guitar, and the bass, that music—I was just standing there mesmerized and it just changed me. I went home to tell my brothers about this exciting Alice Cooper concert that I saw, and Bobby—he went out and bought a bunch of Alice Cooper records and we sat up in the room and we grooved on it. I told the guys, ’This is the direction I think we should go.’ And initially I got kinda laughed off until the Who came to town, and when David saw the Who show he came back and since he was the leader of the band, he said, ‘This is the way we’re going; this is the direction the music is going.’ We all agreed, and we started playing rock ‘n’ roll.
And your kids discovered your band at some party in California?
BH: It was my son, Julian, in San Francisco and he was—I dunno what kind of party it was, and he calls me up and said, ‘Dad, do you realize they’re playing your music out here at underground parties and people are going crazy over it?’ I thought he was talking about our reggae stuff, that we were doing with Lambsbread. But he says, ‘No, Dad, you were in a band in Detroit, in the 1970s called Death.’ And boy, did the phone get quiet. Cuz keep in mind this is the first time, in about 30 years, that I’ve heard anyone playing our music and it’s the very first time I’m talking to my son about being in a band in Detroit called Death.
Why hadn’t you ever talked to him about Death?
BH: Those were all recorded on reel to reel … so even with the tapes I had, I didn’t even have a reel to reel machine to play it on! So it wasn’t like, ‘Hey kids, let’s sit around tonight and listen to some Death!’ It wasn’t like a family heirloom. And my kids were into punk and hardcore, a lot of that music. And I used to tell them, ‘This kinda sounds like some of the stuff we used to do back in Detroit.’ And I’d get, ‘Yeah, Dad’—you know. … We never really talked to them about Death, and I think it had to do with all the bitter rejection and all the stuff we tried to do. When we do finally tell the whole story in a book, I think people will understand the gist of the whole story. There’s a lot of good things to come—the documentary and everything—that’s going to tell the 100 percent story.
One of you said that many kids missed the Motown era because their parents didn’t want the devil’s music in the house and all these kids missed the musical movement of the ’60s because they were oppressed by their parents.
BH: Well, that was the way it was back then. All that stuff you see about Elvis, and the devil’s music, and burning the records—that was true. There were a lot of households that, you know, kids were not allowed to listen to popular music. The only place they got it was high school. High school was the place. Your parents could do what they want, but they can’t keep you from going to school! There were a lot of uptight kids who didn’t know, and some of our friends learned about Motown from coming to our house and listening to records after school.
Who did you turn on to soul?
BH: It was really [eldest Hackney brother] Earl who was socializing as a pre-teen and teenager during that time. I used to hear stories from him—one kid’s dad threatened to kick him out of the house cuz he discovered he had some Marvin Gaye records or Motown records. … That’s the way life was back then! This is the same era where Brian Wilson’s father beat him with 2x4s. So see what I’m saying? That’s just the way kids were raised. Back in those days you could get beat by anybody! Your parents, the teacher, the neighbor—and they all thought they were doing your parents a favor! I mean, if you were bad in front of the class, I remember the teacher called us up and you’d hold out your hand, and sometimes you’d get one whack, sometimes five!
Little did they know they were whacking the hands of the future bass player for Death.
BH: You know, it’s funny—we used to think it was only in the black community, but later I realized it was in every community.
When you started the band did you think you’d be huge? In spite of all the obstacles?
BH: I think when we left Detroit as a trio we did. I think that we held on to our dream throughout the time we were here, that me, Dannis and David were here. But I think that there was just so much rejection—we moved here, and we did change the name to the Fourth Movement and put out kind of a gospel rock ‘n’ roll album and there was an article that came out in the biggest campus paper in Vermont, the University of Vermont. It was a split article—it said really good things about our music, but really bad things about our message. And David engineered—well, we all were in. We all kind of directed the ship, but I think that was a really special project for David. Me and Dannis, we can take rejection and it kind of rolls off our backs. David is kind of one of these artistic Beethoven types that— something like that would just drive him over the edge. I think that after so much rejection, David just wanted to go back to Detroit and re-solidify things in Detroit but the problem was that we had begun to raise families here, and for almost three years it was kind of like a stand-off between us. We were here just making music, bass and drums, and we’d always say, ‘We don’t have our guitar player,’ and David would say, ‘Hey man, I don’t have my brothers.’ But time settled things in and we knew he wasn’t coming back, and he knew we wasn’t coming back to Detroit.
Is it true you wouldn’t change the name of the band and it cost you a record deal?
BH: It’s true, in a sense. Don Davis, who owned Groovesville Productions, who also owned our contract, he had pending business with Clive Davis and the Grammy award-winning song ‘You Don’t Have to Be a Star (To Be in My Show)’—Don Davis wrote and produced that, and it was on Arista. Later on, Don produced Johnnie Taylor’s mega-smash hit ‘Disco Lady,’ and that was released on Columbia. So he had this whole thing. And we were summoned into the office because Don was carrying our tapes, and someone in Clive Davis’ camp had heard our music and really liked it but didn’t like the name. So we got summoned into Brian Spears’ office in Detroit and Brian said, ‘Don is still in Detroit. Someone in Clive Davis’ camp heard your music, and it’s possible that you may have a deal if you’d be willing to play the game.’ So David, after pausing for a minute, said, ‘Tell Clive Davis to go to hell.’ So that’s the truth of the story. Brian was our real advocate and fan at Groovesville, and he was trying to piggyback on the success of these real big bands and real big albums that Don Davis was working for.
Any regrets about that, at all?
BH: You know, it was funny. At the time we were so enthralled with recording the music, and our expectations were so great, and we were so cocky and so young, and we thought our music was so great—David just knew we’d get another deal. We talked about it a little but never let that define the rest of our career, or our relationship with each other. Out of all those records recorded at United Sound that year, we truly were the forgotten ones. Johnnie Taylor’s record went on to go platinum, and helped to usher in the disco age. Parliament released ‘Mothership,’ and that went platinum. Everyone got released that year but us. We were like the forgotten guys.
How did you feel about all those people having all that success around you?
BH: We were a black rock band on a black rhythm & blues company, so we don’t blame Don Davis for the fact that he decided not to exercise the option on our contract. I mean, he had big business pending with Clive Davis. And he wasn’t really sure about the name anyway, and our concept, so I gotta kind of look at it from his perspective. ‘I got potential million sellers right here, why should I haggle with my serious contacts with a band where I’m not really sure about their name myself?’ So I can see that from his perspective in 1975. We wasn’t never really bitter with Don Davis, or especially with Brian. Right when this discovery came—Brian had faxed us a sheet that he did in 1976 cuz he was trying to get a deal for us in the U.K.; he still believed in us. And he got this letter back from this guy in the U.K. and on the letter it lists all the people that heard the music—Polygram, CBS, Warner Brothers, Elektra, all the labels from London and you know what it said at the bottom? It said, ‘Well Brian, none of these people seem to show much interest in the band, and less interest in the name. If I were you I’d just stop shoppin’ it.’ And we have that! We’re talking about doing a book, and should we do one, there will be a picture of that in there.
There’s a Mary Jane Hooper record, and the back of the record sleeve is a collage of all of her rejection letters from a bunch of record companies.
BH: Sometimes that’s just the way it goes, but the one thing I’m thankful about is that the music got lifted. David was right, he said Death’s music would outlive all the rejection and anything we regretted. The only thing I’m regretting now is that he’s not around to see his prophecy come true.
Are there more Death releases to come, besides the demos?
BH: A lot more. There’s just so much, so much that we did between ’73 and ’76—it’s just incredible. And we can’t wait to come to L.A. It’s going to be awesome.

DEATH WITH RTX AND SIC ALPS ON SAT., FEB. 26, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $12-$14 / 18+. ATTHEECHO. COM. DEATH’S SPIRITUAL. MENTAL. PHYSICAL. RELEASES TUE., JAN. 25, ON DRAG CITY. VISIT DEATH AT DEATHFROMDETROIT.COM.

Bombón plays ’60s surf-inspired garage punk, and recorded their debut LP, Las Chicas del Bombón, on 1/2-inch tape at Cali Mucho in San Pedro. They just returned from their first tour of the South with Pine Hill Haints and Rise Up Howling Werewolf. They speak now from the Liquid Kitty in homemade matching sailor dresses. They are patiently waiting for their phone call from Quentin Tarantino. This interview by Lainna Fader.

What are we watching?
Paloma Bañuelos (bass): Liquid Kitty let us do our own projections for the show, and we brought this ’60s go-go girl DVD but we hadn’t seen all of it and turns out it’s full of naked ladies!
Yeah, I think your crowd might have been a little distracted—what would’ve been your second choice?
Jerico Campbell (drums): Definitely horror films! I’m really excited—on Saturday I’m going to the Hollywood Forever cemetery to see Night of the Living Dead. I love horror movies.
Angela Ramos (guitar): I wanted to see Rosemary’s Baby there.
Why did you choose the South for your first tour?
PB: We wanted to go to Alabama.
Why?
AR: That’s where our music family is! And it’s a big family. We stayed at this big house where all the bands that Kevin [Carle, Cali Mucho Studios] records hang out when they’re in town. Every time any of the bands tour they stay there, and we’ve all become close really fast. We have music families in other places though. We have one in Fullerton—the Burger Records family.
PB: Burger put out our tape before we even were really a band. We had only been playing for like a month at that point.
How’d you get a record label to take you seriously before you even really considered yourselves a band?
PB: Angela’s from Orange County and she’s friends with them.
AR: It’s funny because it was only once I moved to San Pedro that I started hanging out with those guys. We actually talked about taking a food truck on tour while we were on this tour. We’d see bands sponsored by like Dickies, and we thought, ‘Who needs Dickies? We should be sponsored by a food truck!’
Which food truck do you want to tour with?
PB: I think we’d take the one down the street.
PB: San Pedro has a lot of Mexican taco trucks, but we grew up with them. Everyone’s used to them because they’ve been here forever. They’re all popular in L.A. now. Maybe we should take one of them from home.
Are you the tip of the surf iceberg? Are there a dozen more surf bands in San Pedro?
PB: No! Not at all, actually. There’s like no surf bands.
AR: There’s a lot of amazing bands in San Pedro but there’s no surf bands. I think there’s some in Lawndale. We’d probably be playing punk music if we weren’t playing surf music.
PB: I like Black Flag, and of course the Minutemen.
JC: We like whatever’s fast and got a good beat.
You definitely got a few people dancing tonight.
PB: Yeah! We get one random really old guy dancing at every show.
It’s always the same character?
AR: Or a tranny.
PB: Yeah, an eccentric old man or a tranny. It’s always one or the other.
AR: Our best show was when everyone danced. We had a couple of those where I guess everyone was just in the mood, and it made us play better. I wish people knew that—bands play better when people dance.
PB: At Awesomefest everyone was dancing.
AR: I think it really makes a difference. When I was singing ‘La Playa,’ I couldn’t hear myself singing because the entire crowd was singing over me, and everyone was dancing.
How do you decide whether to sing or not in a song?
AR: There’s only three songs with lyrics, and they were written to have lyrics. People always tell us to sing on our songs, but we play surf music—it’s the other way around.
PB: I think we just concentrate on playing good, on the music quality and making something crazy—not so much vocals.
Some of the best surf bands, like the Astronauts and Trashmen, played their best music without the actual experience of going surfing first. Does surfing spoil the inspiration to create surf music?
AR: It’s irrelevant. I’ve always been athletically challenged.
JC: I think we’re all athletically challenged.
PB: I don’t run very well.
JC: We ride bikes sometimes.
AR: The most athletic I get is riding a bike. I don’t like to run around at all.
PB: Angela’s blind. Well she’s not blind, she just can’t see very well. So surfing’s kind of out of the question anyway.
Is surf music nerd rock? Do you get geeks coming up and asking you to play obscure Fender Four songs or album cuts off Surfaris albums and getting pissed if you don’t know what they’re talking about?
PB: Oh my god, definitely! Lots of nerds.
AR: All of the surf bands, all of them are nerds. One of the guys in Man or Astroman? is actually a scientist, and I’m a chemist, so I think that’s awesome. I think guitar in surf music gets pretty technical and mathematical so that leads to a lot of surf music being nerdy.
Do you have to be good at math then to be good at making surf music?
PB: I’m the worst at math!
JC: I think surf music’s more about the rhythm so I think we’re OK.
In our last issue, we interviewed Roky Erickson and he said ‘exploding stars’ is his favorite sound. What’s your favorite?
PB: That’s a good one—I love Roky! That’s a hard question.
JC: This is going to sound corny, but I work with kids, and I love the sound of kids laughing. That’s the most awesome noise in the world. I work in a kindergarten.
PB: I love the sound of Pop Rocks.
How would you even describe the sound of Pop Rocks?
PB: (Laughs) You hear it in your head!
AR: I haven’t really ever thought about that.
PB: Wait. I have a question for Roky. Has he ever heard a star explode? Really? How would he know what an exploding star sounds like? I think Roky’s a little crazy now. Doesn’t he have to listen to five radios and ten TV shows all at once to fall asleep at night?
Besides Roky, who’s making music that you’re inspired by?
PB: We’re all big Holly Golightly fans. All three of us. I really like Billy Childish.
AR: We have very different taste for the most part, though.
JC: I like Rilo Kiley, Weezer, the Soft Pack. Angela’s the one who showed me surf music.
PB: Yeah—Angela had the idea of doing a surf band. Me and Jerico knew the Ventures and the Trashwomen but that’s pretty much it. I had a couple surf comps but I’m much more into ’60s psychedelic. Angela inspired us to get into surf music.
What do you bring to the table that the Trashwomen haven’t already done in the ’90s?
PB: We play our own songs!
JC: We’re 100 percent original.
What’s next for Bombón?
PB: We want Quentin to call us back!
AR: We want Quentin Tarantino to call us back! I was going to stalk him, but I’m too lazy.
I think he’d be kind of easy to stalk. He’s around.
PB: Great! I hope he listens to our record.
AR: I think he’d really like our record. I like Pulp Fiction a lot.
PB: We always thought our songs would be so good for his movies. We just found out today that Angela sent him a copy of our record last week.
PB: People always tell us we’re like a combination of the 5.6.7.8.’s and the Ventures, so we’d be great!
AR: I think our goal for next year is to just make more songs. I don’t know if we’re ever going to be in a Tarantino movie, but we can hope.
PB: But I really hope Quentin calls us back!
JC: Yeah, even if it’s just to say, ‘Hey, I like your record!’ That would make us so happy. Call us back, Quentin!

BOMBÓN’S LAS CHICAS DEL BOMBÓN LP IS OUT NOW ON 45 RPM. VISIT BOMBÓN AT MYSPACE.COM/BOMBONHOORAH.

Download: David Serby “Don’t Even Try”

(from Honky Tonk and Vine out now on Harbor Grove)

David Serby was a punk kid in Orange County and then an insurance adjuster in L.A. and took a long time and a lot of lumps to become the country singer he is now. He performs monthly at dark bars with old photos on the walls and he has just released his third album Honky Tonk And Vine. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

If you wrote a song called ‘Blues For An Insurance Adjuster,’ what would it be like?
Oh good Lord. That would pretty much be if I wrote a musical for the movie Office Space. When I was doing insurance I had the back of my cubicle backed up to a big window and I went to my boss and said, ‘Can I take this back thing off because its got this big beautiful window here?’ He said no, so a friend of mine who was next to me brought his little Leatherman tool kit in and hung around ‘til everybody was gone and we took it off and put the back of the cubicle in the storage facility bin back behind a big crate and nobody ever said anything. I don’t think they ever noticed.
What was the most productive creative work you ever got out of those experiences?
I think that you figure out who you are by figuring out who you’re not. You put these clothes on and go, ‘This doesn’t feel right on me.’ When I started working there, my life was completely upside down and that job was really the only thing I had to hold on to. I was probably about six months into that job and my friend who I met there was quitting to go to graduate school back in New York—he said, ‘You hate this job—why don’t you just quit right now and we’ll take three months off and we’ll drive around the country? You can bring a guitar.’ I said, ‘I can’t do it—my life has been a mess for so long. I can’t.’ I was still hanging on to that cliff—I hung on to that cliff for another six years before I actually let go.
Are you more of a risk taker now?
Definitely. It’s a completely different world. I let go of that cliff and I just said, ‘You know what? The game is rigged.’ I don’t want to turn into an anarchist or anything but this whole capitalist system is not really set up to encourage freedom of thought and art. And if that’s what you want to do, as soon as you realize that the system is not set up to really help you or encourage you and that you’re going to have to figure out your own path and make your own rules—as soon as you accept those things, life becomes a hell of a lot easier.
Are these the same sentiments you were talking about in your old punk band?
Kind of. The things I was railing against then—being a cog in a machine and all those teenage things you’re pissed about, like having a number on a social security card and all that bullshit. But you do come full circle. You rail against it and then you graduate from high school—I remember feeling instantly ancient. Just old. And thinking, ‘How did this happen?’ And then it was another 10 or 15 years of realizing that just because I was older doesn’t mean I had to be older. I went to high school in Orange County so that was like in ‘78 and in ‘82 I graduated—there was a lot of great punk rock going on in Orange County at that time. I used to see Mike Ness hanging around. I saw Agent Orange more times than I can count! And the Adolescents and TSOL and all those bands—I saw them in high school gyms, I saw them in Elks Clubs, I saw them at the Lodge in Fullerton—I saw them everywhere. There was a lot of great art happening down there and all of that stuff was cool. But my family had country records and I remember I would play the Johnny Cash Live From San Quentin record all the time and I would listen to a band like X—I remember getting that first X record. I got the first X record and the first Blasters record on the same day and I went to my friend’s house and I put it on her record player and listened to it and just stared at the artwork and was completely blown away by that stuff. That stuff is completely folk music. It’s folk music like it’s people talking about what’s going on in their life and on the street. They’re talking about people who are making it day to day. They’re kind of like historians—especially a band like X, they were just brilliant historians. I love that band.
Guy Clark says you have to leave a space in the song for the guy who’s listening to be like, ‘Hey that’s me…’ Is that something you try to do?
One of the things that I love most about country music is that people identify with it. It’s very common language—a very conversational art form and I think people connect with it because they do see themselves in those songs. If you’ve done that and somebody can listen to a song and recognize themselves in it, then I think you’ve really managed to do something special. That is kind of what I try to do. The thing with country music is that people make fun of it because country music talks about ‘my girlfriend left me, my wife left me, my dog died, my pick-up truck’s broken down…’ But you know what? That shit happens to people! It sounds simple, but it’s not simple—it’s not easy to do that. I remember reading an interview with either Jakob Dylan or Tom Petty—a reviewer wrote about how the songs were all three chords and they were all conversational and how the songs were too simple and he said, ‘Look, if being simple were easy everyone would do it.’ Except for the ones about being in prison—although I’ve been in plenty of metaphorical prisons—I don’t think I’ve ever heard a country song that I haven’t identified with. That’s the brilliance about it.
What’s hard about writing a simple song for you?
You have to pick out the little things. My friend said, ‘My husband is always on the street—he’s always working on his car and he should be in the house working on other stuff, if you know what I mean.’ And I thought, ‘That’s like a universal man-woman experience.’ And I came home and wrote this song ‘Better With My Hands’ about a couple that is falling apart—which I know something about—and a guy who doesn’t know how to talk about what he’s feeling—which I know something about. The fact that I was talking to this woman and she was saying the same thing was happening to her—well, you know, there’s something that I haven’t written about and if it’s happening to me and it’s happening to her then it’s happening to millions of people all over the world. The key is to try and tell it in a fresh original way—it’s tough to be simple when you’re trying to be different.
Harlan Howard would do the same thing—just listen to people talking in a bar.
There’s a song on the record called ‘I Only Smoke When I’m Drinking’ and twice in a week somebody tried to bum a cigarette off of me and both times I said I only smoke when I’m drinking. And the song ‘Permanent Position’—I was talking to my friend at the Cinema Bar about how great it would be if Rod—the guy who owns the Cinema Bar—would pay us to drink beer because that’s pretty much one of our favorite things to do. I’m not the only one who wants to sit in a bar and get paid to drink beer, I’m sure.
What’s the big story you want to tell? What’s on your mind that you want in a song?
That’s a good question. I’m in a good place in my own personal life so I’m kind of looking outward more. The first record had its own story, but for the last two records I kind of moved away from that—what I really want to do is look at other people and their lives. The world needs good art right now—it needs good stories.
What makes you say that?
Well, I don’t know—this place is a wreck. The middle class is disappearing and people are so hypnotized by pop culture that they don’t see it. I look at my sister and her husband who have gone through tough times. I watch people struggle and it seems that it’s people who shouldn’t be struggling. It’s people whose families that for generations, their lot in life has improved—and now this generation, everything has gone backwards for them. There’s a movie called The Interpreter with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman and there’s a line in that movie—‘There are no more countries, only corporations.’ And it’s that. The corporations don’t give a rat’s ass about the people in this country. It’s the death of the middle class, the Wal-Mart economic model—it’s all that stuff and it’s the effect that stuff is having in people’s lives. That’s what’s interesting to me.
What do you think about that strange kind of split in country? That part of it is so stand-up-for-the-little-guy and yet it’s used to market Wal-Mart and expensive trucks?
I know—I agree with that and I don’t think that it even registers with people. I really don’t and I think it’s the hypnotic effect of pop culture. I went off to Stagecoach a couple weeks ago and there was the Palomino stage and it had some big acts that drew some people over from the main area—the bands had a more independent aesthetic and were more country-based like Dale Watson and Jim Lauderdale. And there were sadly not big crowds for them. I spent almost the whole weekend in front of that stage. Late on Sunday night, the wind kicked up and it was kind of cool and I walked back through the main stage area in the middle of Kid Rock’s set and he was playing a Queen song—I think it was either ‘We Are the Champions’ or ‘We Will Rock You’ and there was supposed to have been 50,000 people in attendance but there wasn’t more than 250 people over at the Palomino stage. At that time I think it was Jim Lauderdale and Dale Watson headlining, who I think are just brilliant contemporary country song writers and the other 49,999 people were over in front of that main stage and it was like a drunken spring break over there. I’m not making a value judgement but it’s completely different from old school country and how that art form was historically approached. It’s more like arena rock and pop music and those two fan bases don’t really cross-pollinate.
Is ‘Get It In Gear’ really about helping a girl get naked photos of herself back from a drug dealer? What happened?
I have no idea what happened to that girl. I knew her many years ago and kinda had a thing for her—kind of like the moth to the flame thing. I met her in junior college. You see those things happening and the signs are not good, but there’s a fascination there and you get to a certain point where you either jump off the cliff or walk back to your car right away.
What’s something you walked away from that you’re glad you left behind?
There was a whole bunch like ten years ago. I chose to go a different way professionally—I chose to go a different way in my relationships and I chose not to wallow in self-pity and depression and to try and use that. There is a tendency to kind of wallow in your bad luck—I think as an artist you probably should do a little of that because that’s how you connect with things, but the key is not getting so destroyed that you can’t do anything. I read an interview with Oliver Stone and he talks about going through a period in his life when he was having substance abuse problems—he said even when he was his drunkest or his most drugged-out or whatever, he got up every day and he wrote. There is a real saving grace in creating art. If you can force yourself to do it when you’re down, it will lead you to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Whenever Harlan Howard went into a bar, he’d always take the barstool closest to the front door—what is your preferred barstool and why?
I would take the farthest barstool from the door—but the one that had the view. I like my bars as dark as possible but I also like to be able to see people come and go. I like to watch people when they don’t know they’re being watched—you get an honest read on what people are doing and how they’re reacting to folks. I love to do that. I told somebody recently that I love to sit in airports when the flight is delayed. I just like to watch people. I might sit by the door but then you gotta turn around—if you’re over there in the back of the bar where you can see the whole deal, that would be my place.

DAVID SERBY ON THUR., JUN. 18, AT THE PIKE, 1836 E. 4TH ST., LONG BEACH. 9 PM / FREE / 21+. PIKELONGBEACH.COM.DAVID SERBY’S HONKY TONK AND VINE IS OUT NOW ON HARBOR GROVE. VISIT DAVID SERBY AT DAVIDSERBY.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/DAVIDSERBY.

L.A. RECORD is proud to partner with Cinefamily to present this unprecedented opening of the vaults of San Francisco’s Target Video, who filmed a giant chunk of the West Coast’s original punk bands (including the still-infamous Cramps at Napa State Hospital and Crime at San Quentin!) and whose archives still have yet to be fully explored. On Thursday, Target founder Joe Rees will present a special screening—Cinefamily explains:

In 1977, San Francisco-based artist Joe Rees founded Target Video. Target taped bands in its studio space, in clubs, at parties and on the streets of the world when music television was nonexistent. With a vision and love for underground music and art, Target documented a truly explosive era, and in the process created a massive archive of punk rock performance footage that captured the scene in all its raw clumsiness and exuberance. Joe Rees and Target co-conspirator Jackie Sharp will be in-person at the Cinefamily to present an epic, two-part program drawing from the seemingly bottomless Target library. The first half is a Los Angeles and California-centric program featuring classic footage of local heroes (The Screamers, Black Flag, TSOL) alongside lesser-known-but-equally awesome acts (Nervous Gender, BPeople, The Plugz). The second half mines the Target library for its rarest nuggets, and features footage of bands that will make music nerds squeal with glee. Ever heard of the Tuff Darts? Silence Hospital? Nash The Slash? This may be your one and only chance to ever see these clips, so this night is not to be missed.

We have two pairs of tickets to give away! All you have to do is send us the address of your favorite clip of some wild old live punk from Youtube and we’ll give the tickets to whoever comes up with the best one! Email us at fortherecord [at] larecord.com and note that anyone finding Black Randy footage will get tons of bonus points… and you can also buy tickets here!