The Entroporium

OK, I know I’m supposed to be going on about what it was like to be around punkers and record stores as a 13-year old in 1980, but something really unexpected happened last night. I went with a group of folks to see Bob Dylan at the Paramount in Oakland. I wasn’t so into Bob. [...]

I think the folks at The Music Faucet were trying to get rid of me, their personal 13-year old hanger-on groupie. Or maybe this was a “Punk Rock Record Store Guy” test of sorts. One day Gary Nervo issued a challenge to me. He reached into his own stash behind the counter — a rare [...]

The siren song of Telegraph Avenue led me to hanging out at The Music Faucet, a quintessentially divey record store at the unhip end of the street away from Sproul Plaza and all its attendant early-80s student madness. Luckily the guys who ran the place took a shine to me and started feeding me records [...]

After posting on Flipper, it seems like an opportune time to take a stroll through the post-punk life of a kid growing up in Berkeley in the 70s and 80s. My first brush with punk came from my godmother, of all people. She’s not exactly straight-laced, but what baby boomer was in San Francisco in [...]

The gang from Flipper is still hangin’ in there. And it’s still not pretty. San Francisco Bay Guardian profiles Flipper’s Bruce Lose After I sold all my vinyl, there were a very very few that I regretted banishing. My original Flipper 7″s were near the top of the list. There was a fabulous legend around [...]

Yeah, I’ll guess I’ll be trolling Soulseek for the next few days to hunt this down. And you should, too. 1981 Track listing and discussion Thanks to The Tofu Hut for pointing out the location after Pitchfork previewed it last week.

Sometimes you fall for a band against what you know should be every reasonable instinct. The Bees are one such band for me. They genre-jump like crazy, everything from inventing new 60s dances (the “Chicken Payback”) to Bacharach-style fluff. It’s almost more of a party trick than a cogent strategy for developing new material. “Hey, [...]