Country, BlueGrass, Blues... That's what CBGB's acronym name stood for. When you create something new, like opening a small club for music acts, things take on a life of their own. This great little video just popped up on my YouTube feed, and begged for a blog post. And let's face it, if CBGB's is legendary in your mind, you still wonder what OMFUG means. This video will tell you. 12 epic shows at the legendary tiny NYC club, CBGB's, that changed music forever, analyzed in this great little video. And what's a Gormandizer?
Everyone who found their way into punk rock and alternative music came by a different path. Those bands who played epic shows at CBGB's and other tiny clubs in the mid 1970's, in New York City, started something that is still rippling through society nearly 50 years later. Most of you probably had one or two friends that initially turned you on to the punk scene, and probably quite a few bands of that era. For me, it was a long journey to get into punk rock, and I bounced around a lot, and had a wide range of people, and even some jobs, where I was turned on to different aspects of punk rock music and culture. BMX freestyler and walking punk rock encyclopedia, Mike Sarrail, is the guy who dragged me slowly into punk, and got me hooked, in 1987-1988. A huge thanks to Mike for that. But that was a decade after I first heard of this weird thing called punk rock.
I remember seeing a TV show, 60 minutes, I think, or one like it, with a segment on the punk rock scene in New York City, in about 1977 or 1978. The old reporter was talking to punk kids outside some club, and they showed a little footage of a show. At the time, I was a super dorky Ohio kid, around 11 or 12, and listened mostly to Canadian soft rock station CKLW, from Windsor. I remember that interview with the punk kids, because while they were shooting it, some kid suddenly yelped, and everyon turned. While he was standing there, someone had cut his forearm with a knife. Not a bad cut, but you could see it bleeding on camera. I just thought, "Those kids are CRAZY!" That was my first taste of this thing called punk rock.
A guy named Phil in high school would read me Dead Kennedys lyrics in American government class in 1983-84. Phil was a really cool guy, super smart, and the "head punker," of the 7 or 8 punkers, in Boise High School. He let me listen to the DK's on his Walkman a couple of times, and it just sounded so thrashy, I couldn't understand it. But then he read me some lyrics, and let me read a lyric sheet of Jello Biafra's writing, and that floored me. "This guy's really smart," I said, totally surprised. Phil, most likely wearing his Holiday Inn Cambodia T-shirt, agreed. So we talked about punk a little now and then. And we'd draw weird doodles in class, and show them to each other.
One day I drew a sort of desert landscape, kind of like monument valley, with rock spires, with a black sun in the sky, and all the shadows were on the wrong side, falling towards the sun. The idea was sparked by something Phil had said, or some DK lyrics, I can't remember. He thought that one was really cool. Phil also had the single coolest piercing, long before the piercing trend began. He came to school one day with about a three inch long, rusty, bent nail through his ear. And he wore it for a month or so. It never got infected. He was the first person who helped me understand that there was intelligence, and really something being said in punk rock, or at least some of it. But I still didn't like the music at all. And the punkers didn't stand for anything, it was just "do your own thing." I was way to uptight and conflicted for that message in high school.
My senior year of high school, 1983-1984, was when I was getting really serious about BMX. I was racing regularly that summer, and then indoor winter races over in Caldwell. But I also ran cross country, and actually got a varsity letter. So technically I was a jock, though a cross country letter makes it an iffy case. I was a back of the pack runner. But at the same time, I was getting serious about BMX trick riding, it wasn't really called "freestyle" yet. So I was just beginning to swerve off of the mainstream track, and into the alternative subculture world, but not in music. When my trick teammate Jay Bickel and I practiced, in late spring and on in 1984, we usually had The Cars self-titled album blasting.
But it was BMX freestyle that took over my life in 1984 in Boise, and I spent my high school graduation money, about $400, on my first serious bike, a Skyway T/A. My parents weren't happy about that. But I didn't have near enough money to go to college anyway, so it wasn't that big of a deal. I joined the only BMX trick team in Idaho, and we did a few shows, and rode in parades, which Jay's mom promoted for us. We also had the first two freestyle contests in Idaho. So I was careening away from mainstream, though my main group of friends were typical Idaho outdoorsy guys. I'd hang out with them most nights, and then I'd go practice tricks at Jay's house a couple days a week, and on my own in the afternoons.
Life took my family to San Jose, California in 1985, where I started my first BMX freestyle zine, and got to know the Golden Gate Park freestyle guys, particularly the already legendary Curb Dogs, led by the character Dave Vanderspek. I heard a bit more punk, but other than riding two or three times a month with those guys, I didn't hang out enough to hear much of the music they were into. But Vander was the pioneer, leading the punk rock and skater influence into the small, fledgling, BMX freestyle world. He was totally ahead of his time in many ways, including music and wild clothes, as well as riding progression. That was another way the punk rock world seeped a bit more into my consciousness, but that was still before I got into the music itself.
My zine, as I've written about many times in my blogs, landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in August of 1986. Suddenly one of my bosses, Andy Jenkins, and my co-worker/roommate, Mark "Lew" Lewman, were totally into punk music. My other boss/roommate, Craig, "Gork" Barrette was a hardcore metalhead, turning me onto to other bands I'd never heard of, like Metallica, Saxon, and then new band, Guns n' Roses. My first night sleeping on their couch, they scanned my two little crates of cassette tapes, shook their heads, and said something like, "We need to get you listening to some good music."
Andy and Lew tried to baptise me into punk rock and industrial music in 1986, and, along with Gork, took me to my first punk gig, Tex and the Horseheads, opening for Andy's indsutrial band, Factory, in the fall of 1986. This gig was on the roof of an art colony in the L.A. arts district, back when artists actually lived there. The police and police helicopter shut down the show before Factory played, which added to the underground hype of the band. I did see Factory actually play a few weeks later. While I got exposed to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Black Flag, Skinny Puppy, Joy Division, Bauhaus, D.R.I., and Marginal Man, from them, and The Cure and Gene Loves Jezebel from Redondo Beach freestyler, Craig Grasso, who we sessioned with at The Spot, every night. I heard a lot more music from the punk world, but it still didn't seem to be for me. The joke at FREESTYLIN' magazine was that they laid me off because I didn't like Skinny Puppy, Andy's favorite industrial band. I just didn't get industrial music, and it was a running joke, every time I screwed up. "You didn't do this right... and you don't like Skinny Puppy," and we'd all laugh. My musical horizons were widening, but I still listened to my Bruce Springsteen and Night Ranger cassettes all the time, much to their dismay. Meanwhile, the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill came out, and Lew played that about 17 times a day, every day from then on. My musical tastes probably doomed my job at Wizard Publications as much as my exceptional dorkiness. It's a tough call. But it's cool, they hired this guy a couple of months later, after I got laid off, and he worked out well there.
Then I moved to Huntington Beach to work Bob Morales at the American Freestyle Association (AFA), editing their newsletter, in late January of 1987. I went from hearing Gork's KNAC (hard rock/metal station) and Lew's nono-stop Beastie Boys, at work, to having KROQ, SoCal's widely known new wave/alternative rock station, on at work all day. They played the Dead Kennedys once in a while, Oingo Boingo, the Violent Femmes, a bunch of other New Wave, and lots of non-top 40 music, with songs like this and this, and this. I think it was Bob Morales who turned me on to 7 Seconds, as well. Or maybe it was one of the skinheads we used as ramp roadies occasionally. Hey, just put on some good music, and take the skinheads bowling. I can't remember. Sometime around then is when I remember hearing of a guy named Mike who just wanted a Pepsi, but his mom wouldn't give him one. Jeeez... it was just one Pepsi.
Within a couple of weeks, I became a local BMX freestyler at the Huntington Beach Pier, where I met Mike Sarrail. He was a tall skinny guy who was great at doing Miami hop-hops and undertakers, and other solid freestyle tricks of the day. We started riding every weekend, and hanging out. When driving around to go get a burger or get a new tube at a bike shop, Mike started playing all kinds of music I'd never heard of.
Analyzing my musical taste, or lack thereof, Mike asked one day, "You like acoustic guitar stuff, right?" I replied, "Yeah." Mike put on Jane's Addiction's "Jane Says." I liked it. Then he played "Mountain Song," and that was pretty cool, too. I didn't have a car then, so whenever we went somewhere to ride, Mike introduced me to some new music, slowly leading me into the underground world of punk and indie music in general. Mike also had a great leather jacket, and on the back he had hand painted a bunch fo the lyrics from Crass' "Big A Little A." Not only was it a cool jacket, it was a conversation starter at every club. People would walk up behind Mike, and start reading the back of his jacket, often grabbing his arm when he started to walk away, so they could finish reading it.
He didn't shove music at me, saying "How can you NOT like this!" He'd say, "Check this out." He also made me a great bootleg mix tape of Guns n' Roses, in 1987, from other bootlegs. He called it "Boot by Boot." I told him he should have called it "Second hand boots." Either way, it had, "Mama Kin," "Patience," "Used to Love Her," songs that later came out on the Lies EP. There was also an interview with the band talking about when they all lived in a one room apartment together.
Mike's favorite band was The Ramones, which he introduced me to after breaking me in on mellower bands. Ramones Mania soon became a go to cassette for me when out riding my freestyle bike, night after night. When I think of 1989, I think of sessioning the Huntington Pier Bank almost every night, with whatever skaters showed up, and Ramones Mania in my Walkman. Night after night after night, that whole spring and summer, after someone cut down the chain blocking the bank, that was my thing. Learning new bank tricks to The Ramones. Mike also introduced me to a bunch of punk classics like The Misfits, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Sham 69, FEAR, The Zeros, and this uplifting little ditty.
Mike also started taking me to his favorite punk venue, Scream, in L.A. The funny thing is that it's the building that's in this Journey video. I totally recognized the big staircase from this video, the first time I went there. This happened in late 1987 or early 1988. Jane's Addiciton was basically the house band, playing regularly, and the deal on Saturday nights was "10 bands for $10." Hard to beat that. My first time there, I remember a band called Pygmy Love Circus played, the singer was wearing a kilt, and holding a stuffed boar's head on stage, with a big knife, I think. I just went, "What the fuck is going on here?" I won't lie, I went home with a headache. The second trip was a little better, but I still left with a headache.
The third trip up to Scream, one of the bands played the Johnny Cash song "Ring of Fire" at the end of their set. I grew up with my mom's country music radio stations playing in the background my whole childhood, and while I didn't like much country music, I was a big fan of Johnny Cash. That punk band, of course, was Social Distortion, and they played several of the songs that later came out on the Social Distortion album in those shows at Scream. I think Mike made me a tape of some of their songs, and I bought Social Distortion, the album, on cassette when it came out. I was hooked, and went to a bunch more shows with Mike over the next 3-4 years, a few at Scream , and several other places. At Scream I discovered bands like The Dickies, Human Drama, and Junkyard, as well as seeing Jane's Addiction and Social Distortion a few times each.
In late 1987, I went to work for Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboard's video company. Part of my job was tape librarian, and I soon found a video of JFA (Jodie Foster's Army) that some skater had taped, and they dubbed to betacam. That was one of the first skate punk bands. The main part of my job was making dubs of videos for everyone in the Vision empire, which consisted of several companies. When I made copies of the 1987 Vision video Skatevisions, I discovered Agent Orange, whose music is the entire soundtrack. In this interview with Moby, street artist Shephard Fairey says Skatevisions is what first turned him on to punk rock. I liked the Agent Orange music immediately. So I would put on that tape in the background, and just listen to it at work, in my little dub room.
Another favorite song I found at Unreel was this one song in Sims snowboard video, Snow Shredders, which turned out to be "Coolidge" by The Descendents. That's probably the first punk song I really connected to. I still play it all the time in the mornings, all these years later, to get me going. "I looked up one day and saw, it was up to me, you can only be a victim if you admit defeat." That line has helped keep me going through a lot of tough times (as has Social Distortion's "Don't Drag Me Down"). I would just play Skatevisions or Snow Shredders videos over and over, just for the music. I eventually made VHS dubs of those tapes, realizing I shouldn't be playing the master tapes just to listen to the music in my little dub room.
Between the Vision skaters bringing in music, and a knockout of a woman who was our "freelance music finder chick" at Unreel, I heard of a lot of up-and coming bands working at Unreel. I first heard The Offspring, Yello, Uniform Choice, JFA, TSOL, Big Drill Car, All, guitarist Joe Satriani, and The Vandals, and several other bands, because of working at Unreel Productions. That's when my music taste really began to change, between Mike Sarrail introducing me to new music on the weekends, and finding bands at work, at Unreel, during the week, I slipped into the punk rock world between 1987 and 1990.
One day street skating pioneer Mark Gonzales, yes, "The Gonz" himself, walked into Unreel with a weird vinyl album that he gave to Unreel head producer Don Hoffman. Mark was a Vision skater in the mid-late 1980's, before defecting and starting Blind under Steve Rocco's World Industries fledgling empire. Mark found the album at Vinyl Solution record shop in Huntington Beach, I think, and bought it just because he liked the cover. There was a song Mark wanted to use for his next video part, I think. That album was The Stain, a punk band from Toledo, Ohio. Don contacted the main guy, Jon Stainbrook, and Jon turned out to be a great source of music for Vision and Unreel, for the next couple of years. We used a several of The Stain's songs, and other music from the talented trio, who all did their own individual music as well.
For any of you that watched or bought my 1990 BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, on the front of the box it said, "Killer soundtrack by The Stain." When making my video, I called up Jon, and bought a bunch of music for the video. I still owe him for 4 songs, I think. I did pay him for the other 8. The check's in the mail Jon... I was particularly proud of the little music video I made using his skate song "Pool Party," for the Nude Bowl section in the video (26:54 in the link above). While I still listened to several other types of music, mostly classic rock then (can't knock some Boston now and then), punk became my main day to day music by that time. Also in 1990, I worked for a surf and skate video distributor in Gardena. At a trade show that winter, we went to the premiere of Snowboarders in Exile. I scored a free copy of Snowboarder's in Exile, which has one of the greatest soundtracks ever, and watched it dozens of times over the next couple of years. This video turned me on to Husker Du, and Firehose, among other bands.
In the early 1990's, I started hanging out more with the Huntington Beach BMX racer/jumper scene. Editing this video in 1991 led to sleeping on the floor of Chris Moeller's tiny "Winnebago" apartment, when S&M Bikes was being run out of a single car garage. A big part of that Huntington Beach area BMX crew was the P.O.W.'s, (Pros Of Westminster). I later lived in that house, and was also roommates with Chris Moeller, and Jason "Timmy" Ball in another apartment later on. Timmy was always finding new music, and introduced us to bands like Propaghandi and Nashville Pussy. By then I was a fan of The Descendents and All, as was Chris. Chris turned me on to a bunch of new music, late 80's and early 90's power punk or pop punk, and some 80's hardcore, as well. I first heard of Green Day, Pegboy, and NoFX from Chris, and first heard Nirvana on a mix tape that Will Smyth, from the U.K., made for Chris. He also had a great compilation cassette from Flipside Records, called The Big One, that he played all the time. It had Green Day, The Offspring, Big Drill Car, and several other bands on it, which were all pretty unknown at the time. Chris also introduced me to Operation Ivy, the epic ska band that was only around a couple of years, but had enormous influence in the punk world. Green Day covered their song, "Knowledge" in live shows for years.
In 1992, and again in 1993, I lived for several months in the P.O.W. House in Westminster, with BMXers like Dave Clymer, Alan Foster, Todd Lyons, John Paul Rogers, Lawan Cunningham, Chris Sales, Jason Lonergan, and later Brian Foster, among others. Every night the House members, and former house guys, and a few others, congregated in the living room, and looked for cheap punk shows to go see, if possible. I saw a lot of good shows in those days. Bands like Pegboy and photographer O's band Olivelawn are two that stand out in my mind. That was also the era where several female punk bands came onto my radar. L7 was a favorite for us at the house, we went to several of their shows. But there was also Hole, The Muffs, Babes in Toyland, Japanese band Shonen Knife, and local Orange County female punkers The Red Aunts. In addition to seeing some of those, I remember multiple shows of All, Big Drill Car, and Chemical People, together, and going to see Jawbreaker, along with a bunch of other bands I saw and forgot.
As the early 90's progressed, Nirvana broke big, much to their dismay. The Grunge explosion helped launch several other underground bands into the mainstream, ready or not. Orange County ska band, No Doubt, blasted to the stratosphere, with Gewn Stefani lamenting the troubles of girlhood. That coincided with another SoCal ska band, Save Ferris, breaking, and then South Bay's bad boys, Pennywise. Rage Against the Machine played their first gig in a Huntington Beach living room, the city where slam dancing was born (really). And straight out of action sports hub, Huntington Beach, came The Offspring, blowing up huge and surprising everyone, themselves included. Somewhere in that time period I first heard Face to Face, probably "Disconnected" on KROQ. I think "Disconnected" is the single greatest song of the 1990's. For real. Also in the early 90's, New Jersey BMX street riding powerhouse, and star of my 1990 video, Keith Treanor, was the guy who said, "You're smart Sluggy, you'd totally like Bad Religion, they talk about smart shit." Keith was right, and showed me that truth is stranger than fiction. A bit later on came the Props BMX videos which turned the BMX world onto an up coming band named Blink-182, and others.
In the P.O.W. House, with 8 to 12 BMX guys living in the four bedroom house in Westminster, California, rent was only $90 to $120 month. That was a good thing during the early 1990's long recession. Often we would get to the middle of the month with no job, and then look through the want ads in the newspaper, to find a job to work for two weeks, to come up with rent money by the first of the next month. Seriously, a few of us did that at times, getting a shitty telemarketing job, or something, just to pay rent, by some ramen and beer, and then we'd quit, ride our bikes hard for two weeks, then find another one.
In this period, I ran into two jobs that I wound up working over and over for several years. One of those jobs was in the box office for the first Cirque du Soleil show to come to Orange County, Saltimbanco. Working there was so cool, I worked in the box office the next four times they came to Orange County, until 2003. Cirque was the coolest and best run company I ever worked for. The other job I applied to on a dare from one of the guys in the House. There was always a want ad for an "adult book store" in the newspaper. We'd joke about it with each other. One day, one of the guys dared me to go apply. There was another construction job close to it, so I headed out to apply for both. I went and applied at the porn store first, and I got hired on the spot. I never even made it to the other job site. Suddenly I was a real life smut peddler, selling magazines, vibrators, lubes, and leather goods to the bondage folks. It was actually much more boring than people imagine, but the pay was pretty good since I got an hourly wage, plus a commission on everything but magazines.
The guys I worked with at the porn store were cool, and after about six months of working there, I went in one day and a co-worker, Bryan, asked if I had done anything interesting lately. I said I went to a punk show the night before, Social Distortion, I think. Bryan was this really small, skinny guy, and he got a weird smirk on his face. "I used to be in a punk band, you know," he told me. "Really?" I had no idea, we had never really talked about music at work. "Which band?" I asked, expecting him to say some obscure Orange County punk band I'd never heard of. And here's where I bring this crazy long post about punk rock full circle, to the crazy 1970's music and art scenes that sparked punk rock in New York City, in clubs like CBGB's and others.
Bryan's smile grew, "I was the original rhythmn guitarist in The Cramps." I didn't believe him at first. Alan, the manager said, "Yep, he was." The Cramps, one of those handful bands that nearly every punker had a patch or pin of on their jacket or backpack then, and even now. How legendary are The Cramps? Here's Henry Rollins talking about The Cramps. A couple of days later, my porn store co-worker, Bryan Gregory, brought in an album with him on the cover. "I invented the 'halfhead' look," Bryan said proudly. The Bryan I worked with in the 90's had jet black hair, usually pulled straight back in a ponytail. On the Gravest Hits album cover his hair in front was died blonde, and it hung over one side of his face. He said he started that look, in 1975or 1976, something like that. Then people started copying it. He'd tell them, "Don't copy me, come up with your own style." But some of them kept copying him. Bryan's half head look morphed into the New Wave flop (guitarist) made famous a decade later, by guys like vert skater Tony Hawk, and many others in the 1980's.
Bryan, in general, hated new guys at work. Before that day talking about punk, we got along, but didn't talk all that much. After that day, we started talking about punk, music in general, creativity, art, and a lot more. Not long after, he turned me on to a great, but little known movie, called Mindwalk. He was in a band called Pollen then (1994-95?) which changed their name to The Dials, because of another, more established band, called Pollen in Europe. I wound up being a roadie for Bryan and The Dials at a couple of club gigs. Bryan and I were talking about some music video ideas, after I told him I made low budget BMX videos, but never ended up making any of them happen.
Bryan, the store manager Alan, and I, talked about what it would be like to open a cool porn store, since we worked in a sketchy old school one, with no style, that was pretty hospitable to women. We knew it wasn't going to happen, but we all had cool ideas for it. Not long after Condom Revolution opened up in Orange County, which was pretty much what we all had imagined, a fun, cool adult store that was welcoming to women and couples, not like the traditional, creepy, old porn shops. Good idea, because that was a new trend a few years later, before the internet took over most of the adult business.
Starting in 1992, I worked on TV show crews, like American Gladiators, in the summer, and then came back to Orange County in late summer. Some times I worked as a furniture mover the rest of the year, but if couldn't find another job, they'd hire me back at the ol' porn shop, since I was a good worker and an honest guy. I worked at the porn store (Hip Pocket Books in Garden Grove) about 4 times over the next several years.
By the late 1990's, Bryan had become the area supervisor of a few porn stores in the area. Something about porn stores attracted musicians, we had four serious musicians work at that one store while I was there. You could work in those shops with tattoos, which was unusual at the time, and we could easily switch shifts, like in restaurants, so they could get nights off to play gigs. The money was decent, the work was easy, and you could get your girlfriends 15% off on toys, as well as condoms, and lubes, and videos. Maybe that was it.
In about 1998, I think, I interviewed Bryan for a zine I was doing called Huevos. The zine was a combination of action sports (still called Extreme Sports by most people, thanks to ESPN, which we hated), and art and some music. Bryan and I sat in the back office of the porn store, I turned on my old school cassette recorder, and I asked him about the earliest days of punk rock, the time leading up to the rise of CBGB's as a legendary club for the New York punk scene. Bryan was totally open, and it was immediately apparent he had done a lot of interviews before. As a zine, newsletter, and magazine guy at times, I had interviewed maybe two or three dozen people, and written long, solid interviews. Interviewing Bryan was like interviewing a major rock star on one hand, but we were co-workers and friends, and both sarastic as could be, so it was a fun chat. The interview filled up both sides of a 90 minute cassette, talking about his life, from a "sissy boy in Detroit" (his term), as a bisexual kid in that rough city in the 1960's, to the present time (the late 1990's). He was totally open, and the converation wandered through a whole bunch of topics, and stories from his life as a musician and artist, and anything else that came up.
On Detroit he said, "Even the girls would kick your ass there when I was a kid.". He told me about the early days in New York City, sleeping in hollows under the sidewalks in the winter with Cramps members Lux Interior and Poison Ivy. He talked about moving to New York, about meeting Lux and Ivy and forming The Cramps. He went through his time with them, leaving The Cramps, working other jobs, and playing in other bands.
We talked all the way into the late 1990's, where he wanted to play accordion in his current band, The Dials, and bring some Zydeco influence into it some day. Yep, Bryan Gregory, the guy that scared the crap out of young Henry Rollins (in the funny story linked above) played accordion as a kid, and had a really wide range of musical influences. His life stories surprised me several times. And the accordion bit threw me, I totally didn't expect that. The Dials had homemade cassette tape out, which he gave me a copy of. I don't know if they ever made an album /CD. But I was clueless to Zydeco music, and he explained where he first heard it, and why he wanted to blend it into the band's music.
Was there a common theme to this crazy character, Bryan Gregory, who was one of those early msucians and characters that helped spawn what we now call punk rock? Yes. Bryan said he always wanted to try something new. He loved to break new ground, try things no one had ever done before, and liked shocking people with the unexpected. He was still doing that with his music and art, in his late 40's, at the time of the interview. Once something had been done, and the newness had faded, he liked to move on to other ideas. Like so many creative people, he had more ideas than he knew what to do with, and he liked to keep trying them, see where they went, and then try something else.
As a guy who didn't know much about punk history, despite Mike Sarrail's expert tutelage years earlier, I got to ask the one question I'd always had about the early days of punk in New York City. I asked Bryan Gregory, original member of The Cramps, sitting in the back office of the porn store, "OK, who would you say really started punk rock?" I expected him to say The Ramones, or one of those known early bands, maybe a short-lived band I had never heard of. His answer surprised me, "I'd have to say that street urchin, Patti Smith, with her poetry." He thought she had the attitude in her poetry readings and music that really lit the fire of what became eventually became punk rock. So for every punker out there who has ever wondered where punk really started, that's the answer from one of the people that was there when it all got going.
One more thing about that interview, which was probably the last in-depth interview anyone ever did with Bryan. He was largely forgotten by the media at that point. He died in early 2001, about a month short of his 51st birthday. Bryan brought a custom guitar to the interview to show me. By custom, I mean he had hand carved the body of what I believe was a Fender Telecaster. He carved a penis each in the top and bottom horns, by the neck, and two penises, touching heads, in the rounded part of the body, so there was a hole in the body inside of them. Bryan called it the Fender Phallicaster. He said his bandmates in The Dials wouldn't let him play it on stage, but he wanted to at some point, again, just to fuck with people.
I don't think I had a camera that day, I used photos of him from albums, and from a recent art show of his I went to, when I made the zine. So I don't think I actually took a photo of the one and only Bryan Gregory, hand-carved Fender Phallicaster. I honestly don't remember. Bummer. I've looked it up online, now, 25 years after the interview, with all the good years of the internet since, and I can find no mention of that guitar. I have no idea what happened to it. It's probably in a closet or storage unit in Orange County, packed away and forgotten, that'd be my guess. But who knows?
The funny thing about Bryan was that he was this crazy character and musician on stage, particularly in The Cramps. But I knew him as a funny, sarcastic co-worker, who was pretty low key. I asked him one day at work what he did the night before, I think we were talking about some new TV show or something. Bryan said, "I watched a couple of TV shows and darned socks." I just started laughing, "Nobody has darned socks in like fifty years! Are you kidding me?" Bryan snapped back, "Hey, I have good socks, those fuckers are expensive." Then I went to an art show of these 3D collage things he made, which he called "dream boxes." They were something I'd never seen before, and really freaking cool. If I wasn't so broke then, I would have bought one. Or two. His day to day life then was pretty normal, but he was still playing music and breaking new ground with his artwork. In fact, my title in my zine interview with him was, "If it hasn't been done yet, Bryan Gregory might just be the guy to do it first."
So that's my story of transition from a teenage dork who listened to Night Ranger and Billy Squier, to a middle aged, Has Been, Old School BMX freestyle dork, turned Sharpie artist and blogger, who likes punk rock. I have never been to CBGB's, and I have never even owned an album by The Cramps. But with my odd life path, I brought this epic blog post full circle in my own weird way. I hope this was interesting to a few of you out there, and reminded you of some music you've forgotten about.
In the course of writing blog posts, I often run into things I don't expect. Bryan Gregory seems to have gained a small cult following after he died. That's really cool. I last talked to him about a year before he died, in 2000, I think, when KROQ had him as the answer to a trivia question one night. I called him up and told him, and he found that amusing. I went on with my life, lost track of Bryan, and didn't hear about his death until a couple of years later.
That story about The Cramps, told by Henry Rollins (link above) is epic. I also really dig this song I just found. "The Day Bryan Gregory Died." There's even a book about about Bryan and The Cramps, as well. His legacy as a pioneering musician lives on, 50 years after punk rock began, and 22 years after Bryan's death. That's cool. For anyone wondering, the 90 minute audio cassette with my interview of Bryan was in the storage unit I lost in my move to North Carolina in 2008. It, and all my stuff, got sold in a storage unit auction. Yeah, that's a bummer. Any last words Bryan? Heh, heh, heh... Sarcastic 'til the end...
Oh yeah, I googled it. Turns out I'm a Gormandizer. You learn something every day. And yes, this post makes me seem cooler than I really am. Most of these bands were being played somewhere in my periphery. and a small number are the ones I listened to a lot, and the ones I saw live at some point. The harcdcore punk fans have been to far more gigs than I have. I'm still a dork, I'm just a dork who listens to better music than I did 37-38 years ago, that's all. If you want to hate on me for all the bands I didn't mention, write your own damn post.
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