Jimmy Broustis of Shotwell
As Moniker Records' free-range A+R guy, occasional publicist, drinking buddy and down-the-hall neighbor, I'm pleased to add to my resume the title of Moniker's official music blogger. I've written sporadically about music for my blog Secret Beach, but I'm pleased as punch to have an actual music blog, affiliated with an actual record label.
For my virgin flight, I thought we'd hop in the wayback machine and visit San Francisco circa early-2003. The war in Iraq, if you'll recall, was just gearing up, the city was seething with protest and dot-com gentrification was ravaging the Mission District, spiritual home of the then-thriving punk scene. With so much at stake, passions ran incredibly high, and out of this subcultural pressure-cooker emerged a whole slew of killer bands, playing like their very lives depended on it. I was around for just a few short months at the tail-end of this era, but the Mission punk scene left an indelible mark on my consciousness, and I thought I'd share a few musical highlights.
Early 2003 was an especially weird, wooly time for me. I'd been drifting around the country, down to New Mexico and then all the way up the west coast, living out some sort of ill-conceived hobo fantasy that involved copious slurping of Steel Reserve, probably the most aptly-named alcohol this side of Night Train. By the time I landed in San Francisco, I was already a bit of a wild-eyed mess.
I ended up "living" in my friend Joey's "room" in the back of the legendary punkhole Mission Records. Said room was just a 6X12 wooden box plopped unceremoniously between the zine room and the concert space. There were about a dozen other people tenuously living in the back of the record store, occupying various nooks and perches, and piles of people cycling through day and night. The place was relentlessly punk. There was a lot of breakfast beer-drinking, and, this being San Francisco, lots of gnarlier shit too, going down back there.
The whole scene, in fact, was reeling from the recent heroin overdose of this guy Matty Luv, who'd played in a revered Mission punk band called Hickey, started a needle-exchange program in the Haight and ran the door at many Mission Recs shows. "Hickey Is About Long Hair and Getting High," Luv winked, but they were about much more than that. It seemed like everyone who came through Mission Records had Hickey tattoos, and Hickey records were in constant rotation on the turntable--the band had cultivated a following intense enough to earn a name, the "Naked Cult of Hickey"; not so much a fan club as a worldview, a way of living.
For my money, the band's finest recorded moment is Last Nite on the Planet, off their Various States of Disrepair collection (listen here), and for a 1:40 punk song it traverses some really far-out terrain. A swaggering, street-punk intro implausibly jumpcuts into what sounds like a surf-movie soundclip, then dives just as abruptly back into the fray; It's myyyyy last nite on this planet!, Luv sings exuberantly (and there's so much to do!); and then out of nowhere comes this shimmering, blissed-out, Television-style guitar workout. And then the song is suddenly over, and Matty Luv is onstage, exhorting a live audience: White Zombie will ride in here, into this little sleepy town, on their DEATH-MACHINES, and take all your freakin' heads off with one swift swoop of their git-tars, MOTHERFUCKER! (Which, as apocalyptic scenarios go, is pretty righteous).
After Hickey broke up in the late 90s, Matty went on to play in bands like Yogurt and Miami, but it was Hickey who had the greatest influence, inspiring basically a whole generation of Bay Area bands--they were punk in sound but prankster in spirit. Matty's death had brought down some seriously heavy vibes. Everybody around Mission Records just seemed shellshocked. People were trying to mourn while coping with their own problems and addictions.
In many ways, Hickey, and Matty Luv, symbolized a way of life in the City that was starting to disappear by the time I came around; the years just before rent, already extortionate, became astronomical and priced all the vigor right off the peninsula. In 2003, Mission Street could still be genuinely seedy and unpredictable, strewn with teenage speedfreaks, plastered mariachi musicians, screeching children, a whole panorama of humanity. Next to Mission Records, the preferred lair for the punks was Hunt's Donuts, some three blocks up the street. Stirringly eulogized by Erick Lyle in his epic "The Epicenter of Crime: The Hunt's Donut Story," Hunt's (open 25 hours a day!) was indeed a locus of nefarious activity. It was a major hotspot for fencing stolen shit, and not just car stereos or jewelry but power tools, fur coats, you name it. It was also where a group calling itself Punks Against War started holding meetings in early 2003. It's hard to imagine from our present vantage, deep into the jaded post-Bush/Obama years, but the pre- Iraq War days were incredibly high-tension, especially in a place as intrinsically tense as the Mission, and the talk in the donut shop was of shutting down the city when the bombs started falling. It wasn't just the impending war; it was the daily struggle, the constant crisis, of being young, poor and angry in an increasingly repressive time+place. As a massive Punks Against War banner read--It's Not the War, It's the Way We Live.
Longtime friends and contemporaries of Hickey, Shotwell (basically just flea-market philosopher Jimmy Broustis and whatever rhythm sections he was able to scare up) had persisted into the 00s and were practicing with yet another new lineup in the back of Mission Records. On bass was Buzz, who lived in a little hovel above the shop and was sort of the disgruntled parent figure about the place. You could tell he probably had a heart of gold, but he oozed crankiness. And of course Broustis on guitar, vox and junkshop attitude. I was privately tickled to learn that gruff old Broustis was from Libertyville, IL, the posh suburb where my old man used to teach high school English. But he'd become a San Franciscan to his marrow. Sonically, Shotwell were pure Bay Area punk, almost distilled to its very essence--clattering drums, overblown guitar and a slightly slacker take on Clash-style righteousness. Clocking in at a mere 25 seconds, San Francisco's Witherin' (listen here) is a left-field anthem for a city on the verge of cultural decline, short enough that I can quote its lyrics in full: San Francisco's Witherin', the dust tickles my throat/Laughing at absurdity for a decade/I swear it's gonna blow/I swear--some days it blows!
Shotwell's sister-band, Miami, featuring the aforementioned Erick Lyle (then known as Iggy Scam, and a driving force behind Punks Against War), whose diving-guitar style evoked Black Flag's Greg Ginn, and the heroic singing of Ivy Jeanne Mclelland (check out the Shotwell/Miami split LP here), had broken up shortly before I got to town. Miami and Shotwell (as well as Hickey) had been at the center of a generator-show scene that flourished in the Mission at the dawn of the decade. Bands set up shows in doorways and plazas all down Mission Street; fifty punks would suddenly arrive, there would be free burritos and flowing malt liquor, and bands would play until the cops lost their tempers and fuzzed everybody out. The shows had a serious political resonance, a full-on reclaiming of public space, but they were also just great fun; punk rock, but totally recontextualized by the street. By 2003 Shotwell and Miami weren't playing as much in the street, but new bands were borrowing generators and playing shows, often outside the 16th Street and 24th Street BART stations.
Prominent among these was a band called Full Moon Partisans. Unlike most of the punk bands around, they lived in the relatively upscale Haight; they'd met as students at SFU, and didn't pretend to be as gutter as their Mission contemporaries. They weren't covered in tattoos, they weren't especially political, and they certainly didn't have any punk puritanism about them. In contrast to the 1-2 stomp of bands like Shotwell, the Partisans' sound had a wide range of influences, from the illicit, tape-traded Soviet rock of Sergey's youth (he'd left the Ukraine with his family in the early 90s) to free jazz to the Talking Heads and Iggy + the Stooges.
Sergey, Matt and Lauren, three-quarters of the Full Moon Partisans, had a little place on the Golden Gate panhandle, and when living at the record store starting becoming untenable I'd often crash at their house--they were generous with their couch-space. Their place was a lot more fun than Mission Records, the atmosphere not nearly as strained. There were always little parties in the kitchen, everybody bopping around with the lights off, like a bunch of 15 year-olds, to Iggy Pop's Lust for Life. The Full Moon Partisans quickly became my favorite band in town. Sergey was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic who wandered the Haight with a boombox in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, a one-man advert for youthful vigor. This exuberance extended to his songwriting; Sergey sang of dancing on roofs and running through the streets, because that's what he did.
Lazy reviewers christened them "gypsy-punk", ala Gogol Bordello--because the singer was, y'know, Slavic, and they played a lot of weird minor chords. But their palette was much broader than that. Their second album, my favorite, encompasses everything from LA-style noir-punk to Soviet campfire-pop to the slithering, paranoid funk of Dictator Dance, probably the album's choicest cut. What I love about the song, beyond it's menacing groove--kinda like the Cramps doing disco--is that it brilliantly addresses an issue I've often pondered: the sheer bossiness of dance music. Put your hands in the air... jump up and get down... now slide to the left... and shake that thing... like a drill sergeant, the singer is always telling us what to do and when to do it. Dictator Dance (listen) makes this totally (and hilariously) explicit. You're gonna have to jump and shout/You're gonna do the runaround, Sergey commands. But as with any dictator, there is a core of vulnerability beneath all the despotic bluster. Just love me now and you will see/That all of you belong to me, he sings, sounding like Josef Stalin in a needy mood. It was a fitting song for a moment when the US was on the brink of war and the Bush administration was starting to look pretty totalitarian.
As the war approached--200,000 people, 500,000 people marching down Market Street in protest--there was a general feeling of panic in the City that I didn't feel equipped to deal with, and I bailed, back to Chicago, in late March. I've remained friends with many of these people, and a huge fan of their music over the years (Sergey and Matt of FMP now play in a noisier, scarier band called Didi Mau; Erick and Ivy of Miami play together intermittently in Black Rainbow), though I've spent little time in San Francisco since 2003. I gather that the scene there, despite some really brilliant bands, has lost some the urgency it had in those pre-Gavin Newsome years--there's a decent take on that decline here, which I'll quote at length: "The Mission punk scene isn’t the first San Francisco party to end tragically. Decades before the Haight Ashbury high came crashing down as paranoid and hallucinatory as any bad comedown, the African-American cultural heart of the city, the “Harlem of the West,” was literally bulldozed through under the guise of “urban renewal”; 50 years later, blacks are only 6.5% of the population. As a child I bore witness to another SF party ending, as I watched my pretty young uncle grow thin, sarcoma-spotted, snatched by the dark hand that swept through the city’s bathhouses and bars, stealing so many lives. The death of the SF punk scene, and the larger gentrification that encompassed it, was just another dying in a long series of cultural deaths. It feels more personal because I was there to witness its asthmatic last gasps, convulsive as a fish out of water."
-LIAM WARFIELD
For my virgin flight, I thought we'd hop in the wayback machine and visit San Francisco circa early-2003. The war in Iraq, if you'll recall, was just gearing up, the city was seething with protest and dot-com gentrification was ravaging the Mission District, spiritual home of the then-thriving punk scene. With so much at stake, passions ran incredibly high, and out of this subcultural pressure-cooker emerged a whole slew of killer bands, playing like their very lives depended on it. I was around for just a few short months at the tail-end of this era, but the Mission punk scene left an indelible mark on my consciousness, and I thought I'd share a few musical highlights.
Early 2003 was an especially weird, wooly time for me. I'd been drifting around the country, down to New Mexico and then all the way up the west coast, living out some sort of ill-conceived hobo fantasy that involved copious slurping of Steel Reserve, probably the most aptly-named alcohol this side of Night Train. By the time I landed in San Francisco, I was already a bit of a wild-eyed mess.
I ended up "living" in my friend Joey's "room" in the back of the legendary punkhole Mission Records. Said room was just a 6X12 wooden box plopped unceremoniously between the zine room and the concert space. There were about a dozen other people tenuously living in the back of the record store, occupying various nooks and perches, and piles of people cycling through day and night. The place was relentlessly punk. There was a lot of breakfast beer-drinking, and, this being San Francisco, lots of gnarlier shit too, going down back there.
The whole scene, in fact, was reeling from the recent heroin overdose of this guy Matty Luv, who'd played in a revered Mission punk band called Hickey, started a needle-exchange program in the Haight and ran the door at many Mission Recs shows. "Hickey Is About Long Hair and Getting High," Luv winked, but they were about much more than that. It seemed like everyone who came through Mission Records had Hickey tattoos, and Hickey records were in constant rotation on the turntable--the band had cultivated a following intense enough to earn a name, the "Naked Cult of Hickey"; not so much a fan club as a worldview, a way of living.
For my money, the band's finest recorded moment is Last Nite on the Planet, off their Various States of Disrepair collection (listen here), and for a 1:40 punk song it traverses some really far-out terrain. A swaggering, street-punk intro implausibly jumpcuts into what sounds like a surf-movie soundclip, then dives just as abruptly back into the fray; It's myyyyy last nite on this planet!, Luv sings exuberantly (and there's so much to do!); and then out of nowhere comes this shimmering, blissed-out, Television-style guitar workout. And then the song is suddenly over, and Matty Luv is onstage, exhorting a live audience: White Zombie will ride in here, into this little sleepy town, on their DEATH-MACHINES, and take all your freakin' heads off with one swift swoop of their git-tars, MOTHERFUCKER! (Which, as apocalyptic scenarios go, is pretty righteous).
After Hickey broke up in the late 90s, Matty went on to play in bands like Yogurt and Miami, but it was Hickey who had the greatest influence, inspiring basically a whole generation of Bay Area bands--they were punk in sound but prankster in spirit. Matty's death had brought down some seriously heavy vibes. Everybody around Mission Records just seemed shellshocked. People were trying to mourn while coping with their own problems and addictions.
In many ways, Hickey, and Matty Luv, symbolized a way of life in the City that was starting to disappear by the time I came around; the years just before rent, already extortionate, became astronomical and priced all the vigor right off the peninsula. In 2003, Mission Street could still be genuinely seedy and unpredictable, strewn with teenage speedfreaks, plastered mariachi musicians, screeching children, a whole panorama of humanity. Next to Mission Records, the preferred lair for the punks was Hunt's Donuts, some three blocks up the street. Stirringly eulogized by Erick Lyle in his epic "The Epicenter of Crime: The Hunt's Donut Story," Hunt's (open 25 hours a day!) was indeed a locus of nefarious activity. It was a major hotspot for fencing stolen shit, and not just car stereos or jewelry but power tools, fur coats, you name it. It was also where a group calling itself Punks Against War started holding meetings in early 2003. It's hard to imagine from our present vantage, deep into the jaded post-Bush/Obama years, but the pre- Iraq War days were incredibly high-tension, especially in a place as intrinsically tense as the Mission, and the talk in the donut shop was of shutting down the city when the bombs started falling. It wasn't just the impending war; it was the daily struggle, the constant crisis, of being young, poor and angry in an increasingly repressive time+place. As a massive Punks Against War banner read--It's Not the War, It's the Way We Live.
Longtime friends and contemporaries of Hickey, Shotwell (basically just flea-market philosopher Jimmy Broustis and whatever rhythm sections he was able to scare up) had persisted into the 00s and were practicing with yet another new lineup in the back of Mission Records. On bass was Buzz, who lived in a little hovel above the shop and was sort of the disgruntled parent figure about the place. You could tell he probably had a heart of gold, but he oozed crankiness. And of course Broustis on guitar, vox and junkshop attitude. I was privately tickled to learn that gruff old Broustis was from Libertyville, IL, the posh suburb where my old man used to teach high school English. But he'd become a San Franciscan to his marrow. Sonically, Shotwell were pure Bay Area punk, almost distilled to its very essence--clattering drums, overblown guitar and a slightly slacker take on Clash-style righteousness. Clocking in at a mere 25 seconds, San Francisco's Witherin' (listen here) is a left-field anthem for a city on the verge of cultural decline, short enough that I can quote its lyrics in full: San Francisco's Witherin', the dust tickles my throat/Laughing at absurdity for a decade/I swear it's gonna blow/I swear--some days it blows!
Shotwell's sister-band, Miami, featuring the aforementioned Erick Lyle (then known as Iggy Scam, and a driving force behind Punks Against War), whose diving-guitar style evoked Black Flag's Greg Ginn, and the heroic singing of Ivy Jeanne Mclelland (check out the Shotwell/Miami split LP here), had broken up shortly before I got to town. Miami and Shotwell (as well as Hickey) had been at the center of a generator-show scene that flourished in the Mission at the dawn of the decade. Bands set up shows in doorways and plazas all down Mission Street; fifty punks would suddenly arrive, there would be free burritos and flowing malt liquor, and bands would play until the cops lost their tempers and fuzzed everybody out. The shows had a serious political resonance, a full-on reclaiming of public space, but they were also just great fun; punk rock, but totally recontextualized by the street. By 2003 Shotwell and Miami weren't playing as much in the street, but new bands were borrowing generators and playing shows, often outside the 16th Street and 24th Street BART stations.
Prominent among these was a band called Full Moon Partisans. Unlike most of the punk bands around, they lived in the relatively upscale Haight; they'd met as students at SFU, and didn't pretend to be as gutter as their Mission contemporaries. They weren't covered in tattoos, they weren't especially political, and they certainly didn't have any punk puritanism about them. In contrast to the 1-2 stomp of bands like Shotwell, the Partisans' sound had a wide range of influences, from the illicit, tape-traded Soviet rock of Sergey's youth (he'd left the Ukraine with his family in the early 90s) to free jazz to the Talking Heads and Iggy + the Stooges.
Sergey, Matt and Lauren, three-quarters of the Full Moon Partisans, had a little place on the Golden Gate panhandle, and when living at the record store starting becoming untenable I'd often crash at their house--they were generous with their couch-space. Their place was a lot more fun than Mission Records, the atmosphere not nearly as strained. There were always little parties in the kitchen, everybody bopping around with the lights off, like a bunch of 15 year-olds, to Iggy Pop's Lust for Life. The Full Moon Partisans quickly became my favorite band in town. Sergey was a dyed-in-the-wool romantic who wandered the Haight with a boombox in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, a one-man advert for youthful vigor. This exuberance extended to his songwriting; Sergey sang of dancing on roofs and running through the streets, because that's what he did.
Lazy reviewers christened them "gypsy-punk", ala Gogol Bordello--because the singer was, y'know, Slavic, and they played a lot of weird minor chords. But their palette was much broader than that. Their second album, my favorite, encompasses everything from LA-style noir-punk to Soviet campfire-pop to the slithering, paranoid funk of Dictator Dance, probably the album's choicest cut. What I love about the song, beyond it's menacing groove--kinda like the Cramps doing disco--is that it brilliantly addresses an issue I've often pondered: the sheer bossiness of dance music. Put your hands in the air... jump up and get down... now slide to the left... and shake that thing... like a drill sergeant, the singer is always telling us what to do and when to do it. Dictator Dance (listen) makes this totally (and hilariously) explicit. You're gonna have to jump and shout/You're gonna do the runaround, Sergey commands. But as with any dictator, there is a core of vulnerability beneath all the despotic bluster. Just love me now and you will see/That all of you belong to me, he sings, sounding like Josef Stalin in a needy mood. It was a fitting song for a moment when the US was on the brink of war and the Bush administration was starting to look pretty totalitarian.
As the war approached--200,000 people, 500,000 people marching down Market Street in protest--there was a general feeling of panic in the City that I didn't feel equipped to deal with, and I bailed, back to Chicago, in late March. I've remained friends with many of these people, and a huge fan of their music over the years (Sergey and Matt of FMP now play in a noisier, scarier band called Didi Mau; Erick and Ivy of Miami play together intermittently in Black Rainbow), though I've spent little time in San Francisco since 2003. I gather that the scene there, despite some really brilliant bands, has lost some the urgency it had in those pre-Gavin Newsome years--there's a decent take on that decline here, which I'll quote at length: "The Mission punk scene isn’t the first San Francisco party to end tragically. Decades before the Haight Ashbury high came crashing down as paranoid and hallucinatory as any bad comedown, the African-American cultural heart of the city, the “Harlem of the West,” was literally bulldozed through under the guise of “urban renewal”; 50 years later, blacks are only 6.5% of the population. As a child I bore witness to another SF party ending, as I watched my pretty young uncle grow thin, sarcoma-spotted, snatched by the dark hand that swept through the city’s bathhouses and bars, stealing so many lives. The death of the SF punk scene, and the larger gentrification that encompassed it, was just another dying in a long series of cultural deaths. It feels more personal because I was there to witness its asthmatic last gasps, convulsive as a fish out of water."
-LIAM WARFIELD
Hickey's Matty Luv
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