From the archives

Beat Farmers, Frank Zappa, Lester Bangs

San Diego music in a nutshell

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Band room, SOMA, early '90s. "SOMA has the horrible system where you flyer for the shows, and when people come to the door they ask them, ‘Who are you here to see?’ and if you say ‘Powerdresser,’ they give us a dollar."

  • Birth of the Beat Farmers

  • Jerry Raney: “This guy from El Cajon High named Jack Chan knew how to play, we’d go out and get the Beatles songbooks and go through 'em and he’d teach me the chords.”
  • By Roger Anderson March 16, 1989
Jerry Raney: "The guy from Iron Butterfly, Darryl DeLoach, for instance — he had this Hollywood guy who wanted to be our manager."

  • The Hardback Lester Bangs

  • I think it’d really be groovy to give the readers an idea of what it was like growing up in El Cajon and reading Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg and listening to Mingus and Coltrane and the Stones.
  • By Roger Anderson, Nov. 26, 1987
Lester Bangs' high school classmate, Roger Anderson: "You were right, you loved music more than you loved yourself."

  • The Lost Powerdresser

  • I grew up as a teenager in an extraordinary music scene, the folk music scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s, which gave me the chance to see artists like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Richard & Mimi Fariña, and many others in a small club
  • By Paul Williams July 24, 2003
Denver Lucas at Lou’s Records, 1994. Lucas greeted me warmly the next few times I visited Lou’s used record and CD section, gave me copies of Powerdresser’s records.

  • Dirty Zappa’s Dirty Little Secret

  • In the mid-1950s a high school kid from El Cajon named Frank Zappa read an article in Look magazine that said Sam Goody was so good at selling records, he could unload a copy of Edgar Varèse’s Ionisations. This piqued the curiosity of the restless, inventive young rocker.
  • By August Kleinzahler Sept. 23, 1999
Frank Zappa. The Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead — unspeakable dreck. That’s why Zappa was such a tonic.

  • Vinyl Reckoning

  • In 1976 or ’7, to persuade Robert Christgau, my bag-o-wind editor at the Village Voice, to let me write about jazz (he considered me a “rock-identified critic”), I did a non-rock “think piece” in which I claimed, among other things, that increasing the aural input of jazz around the house will enliven (for example) your dreams and sex acts.
  • By Richard Meltzer Jan. 28, 1999
Billy Altman, Legs McNeil, John Holstrom, the author, and Rosa Hoffman, 1976. Right now I’m reading Please Kill Me, the Leggs McNeil/Gillian McCain oral punk thing.
Paul Anke moos. Neil Sedaka shouts. Lesley Gore whines. Robert Goulet merely talks. Seals and Crofts sound like drunken grigs or munchkins weeing away in high report. Olivia Newton-John alternately shrieks and then sounds like she’s on Valium.

  • The Grammar of Rock and Roll

  • No, it shouldn’t be “Love Me Tenderly” of “All Shaken Up.” The song “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” is exactly as it should be.
  • By Alexander Theroux July 20, 1995
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