Responding to Comments
Over night, I received the following two comments:
From the ever-popular "Anonymous:"
what gives..no Black Randy, no Tomato Du Plenty and where are The "I hate the rich" commie rockers, DILS??
Well sir or madam, where have you been? We got Black Randy here!
Black Randy has appeared on these pages a couple times. You have to peruse the archives. Blogger only shows a week's worth of entries at once.
Tomata du Plenty is still in negative form, I'm sorry to say, in a nice, safe, acid-free folder. Don't know where you live, Anonymous, but we've had one hot as hell summer here in NYC where I live. I haven't been able to get into the darkroom in several weeks. The combination of no AC and those chemicals...I just can't do it. Yeah, I'm a wimp. But let me take this as a "Fried Green Tomatoes" moment - I'm probably older than you and have more complaints about weather and rightfully so! That's the benefit of aging... you are allowed more cranky moments than in your youth! When the weather cools off... I'll be back in the darkroom. The Dils are also in the negative form too. And I got plenty of live Dils. I love the Kinman brothers and everything they've done since back in the 70s.
I saw so many great shows in San Francisco with the Dils and the Avengers, that I want to showcase a few days of San Francisco punk. You can be sure I will not forget to bring you The Nuns and Mutants while I'm at it.
I don't know how other people felt about it - and please check in and tell me your experience - but I did feel a bit of competition between LA and San Francisco. Not from the bands so much, but from the audience. Seems like a lot of people around the world don't like LA. LA takes a lot of hits. Being the biggest West Coast City, in terms of both population and square footage, it is an attraction to people who want to get out of their small towns, or whatever their current scenes are. San Francisco is an attractive destination as well but it doesn't draw nearly as many people in terms of volume as LA does. So, as a result, LA gets all kinds of people living there, many of them trying to "make it" in whatever business they are in.
It seemed like the kids in San Francisco just couldn't wait to tell the kids from LA just how much they disliked our city. A few years ago, when I was producing for VH1, I had the opportunity to interview former Mamas and Papas singer Michelle Phillips about her memories of the Monterey Pop Festival and she made note of the same tension. She observed that back in her hippie days, San Franciso hippies were the original, real hippies many of whom were what we now call homeless and lived in parks and squats and in their cars if they had them, and LA hippies were rich and lived in Bel Air (as she and the Mamas and Papas did, thanks to their success)and wore designer hippie clothes while the San Franciscans wore whatever they could get their hands on, fashion being the least important of their worries. As a California native, I can tell you from my own memories that the hippie movement did start up in San Francisco, and the college sit-ins and protests all pretty much started at UC Berkeley (as well as on the East Coast), BUT the first act of youthful/hippie resistance and violence against "The Man" and the Establishment did take place in the college community right outside my hometown, in Isla Vista, home of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
But that whole hippie thing was a zeitgeist in the 60s, just as punk was in the 70s. The more things change the more they stay the same, right?
Anyway, regarding San Francisco, whenever I'd take that 40-minute-$17 flight (ah... 70s prices) up to the city by the Bay, I'd always see LA bands there! Funny...but it seems like every time I went to the Mabuhay Gardens, LA's Alley Cats were playing.
Comment number two was from the informative Fred, who told me who the mystery guys were behind Belinda in the photo below. Today, Fred told me that Germs drummer, Donna Rhia was also from Newbury Park High School, just like Belinda and Lorna Doom. Fred - I wanted to write you back! But you post sorta anonymously too. Are you from Newbury Park/Thousand Oaks just like those Germs gals? As you may have read if you have delved deeply here, I'm from Santa Barbara. Neighbors!
Thanks to everyone who writes in. If you are looking for any photos in particular, you can search this blog using the Blogger search bar above - or if you have time, simply click on each month of the archives.
From the ever-popular "Anonymous:"
what gives..no Black Randy, no Tomato Du Plenty and where are The "I hate the rich" commie rockers, DILS??
Well sir or madam, where have you been? We got Black Randy here!
Black Randy has appeared on these pages a couple times. You have to peruse the archives. Blogger only shows a week's worth of entries at once.
Tomata du Plenty is still in negative form, I'm sorry to say, in a nice, safe, acid-free folder. Don't know where you live, Anonymous, but we've had one hot as hell summer here in NYC where I live. I haven't been able to get into the darkroom in several weeks. The combination of no AC and those chemicals...I just can't do it. Yeah, I'm a wimp. But let me take this as a "Fried Green Tomatoes" moment - I'm probably older than you and have more complaints about weather and rightfully so! That's the benefit of aging... you are allowed more cranky moments than in your youth! When the weather cools off... I'll be back in the darkroom. The Dils are also in the negative form too. And I got plenty of live Dils. I love the Kinman brothers and everything they've done since back in the 70s.
I saw so many great shows in San Francisco with the Dils and the Avengers, that I want to showcase a few days of San Francisco punk. You can be sure I will not forget to bring you The Nuns and Mutants while I'm at it.
I don't know how other people felt about it - and please check in and tell me your experience - but I did feel a bit of competition between LA and San Francisco. Not from the bands so much, but from the audience. Seems like a lot of people around the world don't like LA. LA takes a lot of hits. Being the biggest West Coast City, in terms of both population and square footage, it is an attraction to people who want to get out of their small towns, or whatever their current scenes are. San Francisco is an attractive destination as well but it doesn't draw nearly as many people in terms of volume as LA does. So, as a result, LA gets all kinds of people living there, many of them trying to "make it" in whatever business they are in.
It seemed like the kids in San Francisco just couldn't wait to tell the kids from LA just how much they disliked our city. A few years ago, when I was producing for VH1, I had the opportunity to interview former Mamas and Papas singer Michelle Phillips about her memories of the Monterey Pop Festival and she made note of the same tension. She observed that back in her hippie days, San Franciso hippies were the original, real hippies many of whom were what we now call homeless and lived in parks and squats and in their cars if they had them, and LA hippies were rich and lived in Bel Air (as she and the Mamas and Papas did, thanks to their success)and wore designer hippie clothes while the San Franciscans wore whatever they could get their hands on, fashion being the least important of their worries. As a California native, I can tell you from my own memories that the hippie movement did start up in San Francisco, and the college sit-ins and protests all pretty much started at UC Berkeley (as well as on the East Coast), BUT the first act of youthful/hippie resistance and violence against "The Man" and the Establishment did take place in the college community right outside my hometown, in Isla Vista, home of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
But that whole hippie thing was a zeitgeist in the 60s, just as punk was in the 70s. The more things change the more they stay the same, right?
Anyway, regarding San Francisco, whenever I'd take that 40-minute-$17 flight (ah... 70s prices) up to the city by the Bay, I'd always see LA bands there! Funny...but it seems like every time I went to the Mabuhay Gardens, LA's Alley Cats were playing.
Comment number two was from the informative Fred, who told me who the mystery guys were behind Belinda in the photo below. Today, Fred told me that Germs drummer, Donna Rhia was also from Newbury Park High School, just like Belinda and Lorna Doom. Fred - I wanted to write you back! But you post sorta anonymously too. Are you from Newbury Park/Thousand Oaks just like those Germs gals? As you may have read if you have delved deeply here, I'm from Santa Barbara. Neighbors!
Thanks to everyone who writes in. If you are looking for any photos in particular, you can search this blog using the Blogger search bar above - or if you have time, simply click on each month of the archives.
Comments