It’s Gonna Blow!!! filmmaker Bill Perrine writes book on Harry Partch, Pauline Oliveros, and others in San Diego’s experimental 1970s music scene

Don’t get him wrong, San Diego native Bill Perrine has no insurmountable beef with his hometown. He’s happy to rock out at the Casbah, or to stick his head into Nate’s Garden Grill or the Black Cat. But the author of the just-released Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego emphasizes that his book isn’t all, or even mostly, about the territory part. “I didn’t write this book as a love letter to San Diego or anything of that sort,” he explains. “It just so happens that all this great art happened in my backyard, and it’s not being documented in the way I’d like. If all these people had lived in Peoria or New York, and I had access to all the research materials, I might have written the same book. Or am I just telling myself that?”

Large portions of the history of local avant-garde music involve UCSD. “I mostly remember seeing The Locust, Mats Gustafsson, David Murray, Mark Dresser, and Jeff Parker all play there, though not together. Also one of those eternal, slow Morton Feldman string quartets. However, I didn’t choose to write about UCSD for any personal reasons whatsoever. If [composer] Pauline Oliveros and friends had worked at Bob’s Bait ‘n Tackle, I would have happily written about that instead.”

UCSD is widely recognized as a hotbed of musical exploration into the unknown. “Well, they designed it that way. The whole point of the music department, when it was founded in the ‘60s, was to create a place of exploration, and the Center for Music Experiment was an outgrowth of that. The UCSD of the ‘70s wasn’t the UCSD it is today. It was a searching, conflicted adolescent, checking out the fringes, poking at the limits, rather than the sophisticated adult it is now. It’s still pretty exploratory, but you’re never as wild and unfettered as you are when you’re young and it’s the 1970s.”

Perrine boasts a lifelong interest in outskirts and fringes, but he made his name as the documentary filmmaker behind It’s Gonna Blow!!! San Diego’s Music Underground 1986-1996 and Why Are We Doing This in Front of People? featuring local band Octagrape. “Writing is filmmaking with a longer run time and far fewer cameras,” he says. “Godard, [Ross] McElwee and [Agnes] Varda all feel like writers to me. They write with their cameras, which is a really neat trick if you can pull it off.” Once he decided to become an author, “Geoff Dyer and [UCSD composer and professor] Kenneth Gaburo, taught me to embrace and assert one’s own authorial failures, struggles and contradictions as part of the narrative. When that didn’t work, I just banged my head against the wall until something popped.”

Perrine was too young to catch pioneer instrument designer Harry Partch, and he’s sad he never caught up to Pauline Oliveros. But he cherishes his assorted memories of the good stuff, and is willing to list a few. “Many years ago, I saw Derek Bailey play at the Spruce Street Forum, joined at the end by George Lewis. It felt totally alive, unpremeditated, operating on some sort of higher plane I didn’t entirely understand. Various Stay Strange shows. Oneida at the Soda Bar, deep in the zone while the guy next to me stared at his phone and Bobby Matador stared through him.”

His local connections influenced the scope of the book, but the scene he covers was part of a larger whole. “Other than for the purposes of this book, I don’t really make a distinction between San Diego’s avant-garde history and the rest of it. It’s all related, and the interest has been there as long as I’ve been into, barf, ‘the arts.’ I was on the hunt for ‘70s-era locals who were doing stuff with synths and electronics. I knew Oliveros had been here, but I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d been up to, other than teaching. Same with Partch. I came across a whole world that went far beyond the synth stuff I’d been looking for. Moreover, almost everything — microtonality, instrument building, electronics, extreme vocals, environmental art, improv — was being done by people who knew and worked closely with one another. The exception being the East County scene around Boyd Rice, Robert Turman, and Steve Hitchcock, which was kind of its own thing, though loosely aligned with the punk movement. That’s what’s really interesting: the connections and relationships. Otherwise, I’d just be making a list of cool stuff.”

If you likeg this article, you may also enjoy I Come From the Andromeda Galaxy, Sam Lopez keeps San Diego Strange, and Bill Perrine After the Blow.