Clarke Blacker SMWRG
First published 2012
About the SMWRG song 1,000 Lives to Die, Vice wrote: “If you were to make a pie chart of all the brutal songs in human history, this song would be the big Pac Man eating the wedge that is every other brutal song combined”. You must have been very proud
It’s funny. I don’t remember ever seeing this article from Vice that you’ve quoted here. I enjoyed reading it immensely. It really all depends upon what exactly the writer was responding to. If he wants brutal, then maybe he should have listened to Christian Rat Attack
Yes, I am honored to have someone say something like that about this, or any of our songs. This is one of a number of later SMWRG songs that were going in a direction that I really wanted to explore further. I was becoming more interested in a kind of musical minimalism and I was moving toward one or two chord compositions. I was completely uninterested in the hyperactive super fast punk sound of the day, I found it very boring. For me the speed didn’t give the audience a chance to connect with either the lyrics or even the presentation except in a very superficial way. Except for Black Flag and a few others, most bands all sounded the same to me
I guess that I was looking to stretch out and to have room for the music to breathe, or rather, to breathe fire in the audiences’ faces. I wanted 1,000 Lives to be hypnotic, but really, really loud and annoyingly hypnotic, not at all soothing. The real point of interest to me was the drone and stripping the song down to almost nothing. In point of fact, I was always pushing to make the sonic environment completely saturated with a big howling, grinding noise. I wanted it to be uncomfortable for the audience to be standing in front of SMWRG when we were playing
When we put the CD together (Some People Deserve to Suffer) for Emperor Jones Records, Craig Stewart and I chose this and another track (Buttfuckers) from a live show that we played with the Butthole Surfers at the Theater Gallery in January 1987. The Soxx showed up terribly sick and his voice sounded simply awful. Later, after listening to the tapes, that hoarseness sounded perfect on 1,000 Lives and his crazed intro about his landlord, completely transformed Buttfuckers
I don’t remember which came first, the lyrics or the riff, but 1,000 Lives is essentially a two-chord song based around this vaguely eastern-sounding riff that I was playing. On 1,000 Lives I used a quick delay to give it the tinny, doubled quality against Bobby Beeman’s bass roar. I knew the lyrics at one time, but I have repeatedly listened to this track (and a few others) and I simply cannot pick up more than a few words here and there
The cover for Some People Deserve to Suffer is great
The cover of the CD is a photograph that Scott had found somewhere and we had used it on an old poster. When we were working on the CD Scott refused to go along with using his original cover idea which was a photograph that he had taken of the TV screen during a documentary that showed four starving children in a German concentration camp during World War 2. He was afraid that people would misunderstand and think we were making fun of them or their plight, which we weren’t. As a compromise, we agreed to use the other photo that you see here. I had contacted the original photographer and gotten permission to use that on the final cover. I still liked his original picture better and I may use it someday on another SMWRG project
It is unfortunately a fact that some people made assumptions regarding our views on race and other things that simply weren’t true. Years later, the wife of one of my closest friends took one look at the website and immediately thought that we were Nazis. She knew me very well and knew that it wasn’t true but she really didn’t know that much about the band either. The next day I put up the disclaimer on the home page of the website to prevent just such a misunderstanding. We weren’t against any race or had any political axe to grind. We were against everything, including ourselves
Your first band was Bag of Wire, but I have never found any recordings. What sort of sound did they have?
It isn’t exactly true that Bag of Wire was my first band. I had been playing in bands of various sorts since around 1968. I was doing a critical history of modern rock show (how pretentious does this sound) at a local radio station around 1975-76 and through the show met Mike Haskins. Mike was working in a local Peaches record store and we shared a lot of musical interests. One day he invited me over to see his band, The Nervebreakers perform in a local club. I was completely blown away by their performance. Like many people, I had become disillusioned with the general direction of rock music in the 70s and had become very interested in the European jazz/art rock of bands like Gong, Nucleus, and others. I had begun to ignore mainstream rock entirely. The Nervebreakers show made me remember just why I liked rock in the first place. They were brash, loud, and took their influences from bands like The Kinks, The Troggs, and even The Supremes
I went back the next week to record them for my radio show. Pierre, their bass player left a few weeks later and I offered to sit in on bass (not my instrument) and eventually was absorbed into the band. I played with them for about a year but despite my deep musical attraction, I never really fit in well with the band personally
After playing the Dallas Sex Pistols show in January 1978 I left the band. I would remain close to lead guitarist Mike Haskins and acted as an on again, off again manager and general confidant. I was always very enthusiastic about the band and remain so to this day. I think that the writing team of Mike Haskins and Thom Edwards was unequaled and guitarist Barry Kooda writes some of the best power pop songs I have ever heard
So what is the point of this? In the fall of 1980, during the recording of their first album with producer Phil York, there were serious tensions building in the Nervebreakers about the mix. Specifically there was the Mike Haskins mix and the Barry Kooda mix, and neither liked the other’s approach. It ended with Mike leaving the band and then he and I decided to do something different. Along with Nervebreaker bassist Bob Childress, ex-Vomit Pigs drummer Russell Fleming, Mike and I set about starting a new band that would eventually become Bag of Wire (BOW). We discussed a number of lead singers and decided that we would ask someone we thought was interesting rather than someone we already knew could sing. Mike briefly considered Bobby Soxx but he was afraid Bobby was too unstable and would be too dangerous to work with. He then suggest Curtis Hawkins who ran a local collector record shop, Stacks O’ Tracks. Curtis was perfect. He was the antithesis of a punk singer, he was a huge, burly guy with lots of interesting musical ideas. He suggested the name if I remember correctly. It is a Jamaican slang term meaning betrayer. Apparently the man who turned Marcus Garvey in to the authorities eventually went crazy and spent the remainder of his life wandering the streets of Kingston picking up bits of wire and putting them into a bag he carried. Betrayer, we thought it was appropriate
BOW was my favorite kind of band. It was as if you put everything that you had ever heard and liked into a blender and turned it up on high. We played rockabilly, ska, blues, etc. We turned country songs into ska songs and ska songs into rockabilly songs. We played Roky Erickson songs, Captain Beefheart songs and Leslie Gore songs. I loved it. I was playing second guitar to Mike, one of the best guitarists I’ve ever known. BOW created a brief big splash in Dallas, the dancers liked us, the girls liked us, the clubs liked us. We weren’t easy to categorize but everyone had a lot of fun. Unfortunately three of the five members going through divorces and Mike was burned out playing with another guitarist for so many years, I was eventually squeezed out. The band died a few months later. There are a few poor recordings of us live around but nothing official was ever released
Would you say the Pistols’ shows (at the Longhorn Ballroom) in Dallas and Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio kickstarted the Texas scene? Or is that giving Rotten and the lads too much credit?
In all fairness, I wouldn’t give them any credit at all. Their show made very little impact overall. Things were already starting to move pretty fast in the year (1977) before they got to Texas in January 1978. We (Nervebreakers) had already opened for the Ramones in Dallas and that had gone very well. Bands like the Toys and the Nervebreakers were the real drivers of the scene early on in Dallas. Their beginnings can probably be traced back as far as 1975 in various incarnations. The Toys were an odd kind of pop-rock band before there was anything like new wave. They would play different often older pop songs such as the Beatles’ Bad Boy with a kind of edge and sense of fashion that was quite unlike anything else at the time. They were very interesting at a time when not much was interesting. They shared rehearsal space with the Nervebreakers and we would often play shows together. These two bands really set the tone and laid the groundwork for what was to follow
The Nervebreakers had taken their name from a line in the Troggs song “I Can’t Control Myself” and their sound owed a lot to them. I think that when I first joined we had about five Troggs songs in our repertoire. They weren’t really punk although there was nothing else to call them. They shared qualities with the New York Dolls, especially with the dual guitars, but they weren’t Glam either. It was a different kind edgy than that. They were really a band that just liked guitar-based rock, especially that of the 1960s and had managed to give it an entirely new feel without sounding like an oldies band
At the first show I played with them, our sound man Colin measured us at 130 decibels at 80 feet from the stage. We were really loud! Nervebreakers laid the groundwork for everything in Texas. They were always the biggest dog on the block. Nervebreakers plugged along for years, just missing getting signed in the first wave of record contracts in 1978. For many years the record companies were only interested in you if you came from New York or LA, Texas was considered a backwater. When Mercury records came to see us with the Sex Pistols they were disappointed that we didn’t sound like the 13th Floor Elevators. I guess they were too lazy to actually listen to the demos, preferring to take a road trip instead. It is unfortunate that the Nervebreakers have never received the recognition that they deserved. They still play shows around Texas from time to time with the same lineup as when I left the band
Were you listening to the UK punk bands in the late 70s, like the Damned and the Clash, or the more arty bands like Wire and the Slits?
In fact, BOW had played a Damned song, called Red Lips or something like that. I was a huge fan of the Clash, maybe the last truly great band. Each of us in SMWRG had wildly varying musical interests. Scott was very much into Wire, New Order and Gang of Four. I liked PIL, the Clash, and I was starting to be interested in the US Los Angeles punk scene revolving around Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Fear. I was also listening to Dave Edmunds and Gang of Four at drummer Scott Elam’s insistence. Bobby Beeman was interested in a lot of the speed metal when he first joined and played things like Megadeath for me. I didn’t like them. The Soxx listened to everything
Some really great punk bands came out of Texas. New York, Los Angeles and DC get most of the attention but for me Texas and San Francisco were equally as good, if not better
My wife and I saw a long documentary a couple of years ago about the punk scene in Chicago, a huge music town. I was surprised that every band they talked about and showed live footage of was really nothing that you would ever remember or would want to listen to twice. It made me realize just how unusual the Texas scene really was. More different kinds of bands came out of Texas in the late 70s and early 80s than any other single place in the US that I can think of. I don’t mean they were successful, because with the exception of the Butthole Surfers they weren’t. I just mean that Texas bands had an originality that was missing in other places
Where did you first meet Bobby Soxx?
I had encountered the Soxx (as we always referred to him) a number of times in the previous couple of years but had never really spoken with him other than to say hi. He had a very, let us call it “colorful” reputation about town. As I said earlier, we had discussed him as a potential lead singer for BOW at one time
One night in early January 1981 after a BOW show at DJ’s, a local club, I was approached by the Soxx and he asked me to play in a band with him. It was one of my first few dates with my then to be future wife, Vicky Bowles, and Bobby most gallantly offered her a copy of his tract “The Flaming Gavel” and inscribed it with the words “Vicky is exempt!”. We still have that tract. After leaving BOW sometime in February 1981, I remembered talking to Bobby in DJ’s and so I put the word out on the street for the Soxx to contact me. One day a week or so later he just showed up at my back door. During the late spring 1981 we tried a couple of different bass players, including my future sister-in-law, Valerie Bowles who had played with the Soxx in the Teenage Queers, but no one seemed quite right. I really had no idea what I wanted to do with this yet unnamed band so I called my old friend Scott Elam who played drums and we started fooling around with some casual rehearsals, waiting for something to gel. It took a little while to work out a direction but the Soxx was such a distinctive singer and had such an outrageous personality that things started to come together in a month or two
We played a show or two with Mark Ridlin of Quad Pi/Lithium Christmas in the temporary bass spot. Mark is a great guy and he already knew Bobby. He was intellectually sympathetic, but he already had a steady gig. One day in the early summer of 1981, right before a Metamorphosis show I think, the Soxx introduced Bobby Beeman to me as our new bass player. I said fine, and never gave it another thought. Bobby had a noise band called Hole that had opened for us once in Fort Worth at Zero’s. Bobby Beeman was much younger than I, eighteen I think when he joined, and I was nearly 31 at the time. Bob brought a kind of brashness to the band that I liked. He had plenty of ideas that fit nicely with mine and was not one bit afraid of doing something different. He was very adventurous in his approach to the bass, if not especially accomplished. I didn’t really care all that much about how great a player anyone was, only about whether they fit in and we got along. Bobby was a great choice and is still a close friend
We took our name from a comic strip called “Stick Man With Ray Gun” that Bobby drew for “The Flaming Gavel”. I loved the crazed Stick Man character who went about blasting with his ray gun anyone he suspected of sullying his neighborhood. It was completely politically incorrect, wildly racist, and completely irrational. In other words, just perfect! It would prove to be much more than just that in the end however. The irrational Stick Man became a real character, dominating the band with his psychic presence so to speak. Together, SMWRG could be a very difficult entity to deal with. As a unit we were up for chaos and we intended to be the center of the tornado. Whenever all of us were together you just knew that we were going to be difficult. We had no respect for anyone else
What was the band dynamic like? Did the band members get along with each other? The rumours are that you didn’t always
That is a bit of a complex thing to answer honestly, but I’ll try. I think that to a great extent we did all get along but we had to manage that relationship. Bobby Beeman and I were pretty close despite the difference in our ages. I think we often saw things in similar ways. Scott and I got along very well most of the time but I admit that there were periods where I was not at all nice to him. I think I actually stopped speaking to him for about a year for some idiotic reason that I cannot remember. Worst of all, I didn’t do enough to defend Scott when the Soxx would ride him, mercilessly teasing him about anything or nothing. Bobby Soxx was a very nice and easy guy to work with most of the time despite his reputation otherwise
Unfortunately, Scott seemed to be an easy target for the Soxx and he made him the butt of his jokes more than he should have. I don’t mean to say that Bobby picked on Scott all the time, he didn’t, just more than I would have liked. No one was safe from Bobby’s jokes but Scott was apparently seen as the weakest and he got more than his share of abuse. As a result of years of taking this abuse from Bobby and frankly some from me as well, Scott has become estranged and really wants nothing to do with SMWRG or its memory. It is a real shame, Scott and I were very good friends and SMWRG would not have been the same band without him. He was very influential within the band and was often its most eloquent spokesman. He also contributed the title to eventual CD release, Some People Deserve to Suffer
It was a joke within the band that we didn’t get along and so we never hung out together, only coming together to play shows. It really wasn’t true, but it could look like that to some people. As I said before, Bobby Beeman and I got on quite well and spent a lot of social time together with mutual friends. Scott and I were both very interested in art and spent time going to museums and talking art and his great love, photography. We also always got everyone together, either before or after our shows, to eat Mexican food. What we didn’t do was travel together. Scott always went with me and Vicky (she was at every show) and Bobby Beeman always got himself to shows. What we did with the Soxx was another matter. At first he traveled with me and Scott but once after an unfortunate trip back from Austin or San Antonio one night when it was about 20 degrees outside, the Soxx was passed out in the back of my van and farted so bad and continuously, that for about five hours we had to drive with the windows open with the heater going full blast. After that episode, Vicky put her little high-heeled foot down and said no more Soxx in our van. We had to find other ways to get him to the show, even flying him to shows in Houston, Austin, and San Antonio rather than to ride in an enclosed vehicle with him
How did SMWRG write?
We usually wrote by having the three of us improvise until something felt interesting while Bobby would rummage through his briefcase, pulling out fragments of lyrics in search of something he felt like singing. We just sort of pieced things together very loosely. The Soxx wrote essentially all of the lyrics, I think Bobby Beeman contributed some to the lyrics of Grave City which is one of my very favorite songs. We would flail around until something felt right and as the song started coming together we’d put together an arrangement. It would start sometimes with the Soxx chanting lyrics that he was working on, usually while he was cooking or some other kind of work. He would often just chant snatches of lyrics no matter where he was. Often it might start with that and we would start feeling out some music to go along with it. We wrote the music as a unit. We all contributed equally to that
While in the studio in San Antonio recording a track for the compilation album Cottage Cheese from the Lips of Death, we wrote entirely new music to Christian Rat Attack, an old song of Bobby’s that we had never played. We were originally planning on doing something else, I forget just what, but I think Beeman suggested that we write something on the spot. The Soxx suggested using the lyrics to Christian Rat Attack, a song that he had performed a few years earlier with the Teenage Queers. We wrote completely new music, arranged, recorded, and mixed it all in about four hours with Butthole Surfer lead singer Gibby Haynes acting as engineer on the track. That’s him laughing in the background at the end of the song. I’m not sure that I had ever even heard the original version. Later, the track was remixed without our permission by the owner of the studio, cutting off the spoken intro and burying the vocals in echo. As far as I know, this is the only reported incident of censorship on a hard core punk compilation album. Gibby later stole the original half track tape mix and gave it to us. That is the version that appears on Some People Deserve to Suffer
It seems from the stories that are out there that Bobby didn’t always treat people nice
The first time we ever played Austin we shared the bill with the Butthhole Surfers who were opening for us. While we were setting up a guy came up and asked if his band the Stains could use our equipment to play a few songs. Of course, the Stick Man was not amused and we said fuck no. The Surfers offered them their equipment and they agreed to play three songs in between our sets. We reluctantly said ok as long as they didn’t touch our equipment. So, during the FOURTH song Bobby went up and stood in front of their singer and took a leak on his shoes while he was singing. Chaos ensued. When they managed to get things quieted down, the Butthole Surfers had to stand at the front of the stage with their arms linked together to keep the audience from storming the stage to get at us. We left town quickly after the show
A couple of years later when we played a show with the Dead Kennedys we ran into them again playing on the same bill as MDC (Millions of Dead Cops). They remembered but were cool about it. We all had a good laugh and a beer or two
As someone who knew Bobby well, do you think he was suffering from a type of disorder which led him to behave in the way he did?
We always knew that Bobby Soxx had major problems. He was, to be perfectly honest, crazy. Not drooling crazy, just nuts. He had been in the Terrell State Hospital, a mental institution in Terrell, Texas twice I believe, once for holding his grandfather hostage with a shotgun. Bobby had anger issues. In the beginning I had to personally vouch for Bobby’s behavior to let us play at the Hot Klub where he had been banned for breaking a bottle over the head of one the Stranglers when the band was playing there. He had apparently been brought up in an unstable and ignorant redneck family and there were strong undercurrents of racist, possibly KKK history in the background. Bobby was a very complicated and badly damaged individual. He was incredibly polite and gracious if he thought he should respect (not fear) someone. For example, although he was a horrible misogynist and treated women terribly, he always treated Vicky (first my girlfriend, and later my wife) like a queen. He also loved animals and cats and was rarely without a kitten if he had anything resembling a permanent home to keep it
Bobby’s personal problems were always aggravated by his drug use, which was prodigious. When we worked together he abuse methamphetamines, cocaine, and a wide variety of downers and hallucinogens, sometimes daily. These did not have much effect on him as a working member of the band however, he always seemed to be able to hold up his end of things. I could not tell that he had taken acid at all until the dosage was greater than four hits at a time. I remember him anxiously telling me that he had taken seven hits of acid just as we went on stage to record our set for the Live at the Hot Klub album. The live versions of Scavenger of Death and Kill the Innocent on our CD are taken from this show. So much for seven hits of acid affecting him, it just made him a bit nervous. I have said that he was often more professional in situations than I was, and it is true. I was much more likely to be the one to give people a hard time than the Soxx was
I read an interview with Bob Beeman in which he mentioned you coming to Dallas and bringing some of Soxx’s ashes. You kept them for a long time. If I may ask, why was that?
I can’t believe that you would ask me that. He was one of my closest friends. We worked together for the better part of eight years and we participated in some of the most artistically successful work that I have ever been involved in. The truth of the story though is that I had asked our friend Max Mabry to bring the ashes that were at the show. A few years ago I was coming to Dallas for a visit, Vicky’s dad was undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer. My trip just happened to coincide in a DJ’s Reunion show that some friends were putting together in Dallas. While SMWRG had never played DJ’s (it was closed by the time we started performing), all of us had played there in one band or another and the spiritual beginning of SMWRG began there with Bobby’s asking me to play with him. I hadn’t played in front of an audience since the last time we played, I think it was the oddly named Change Your Life Festival in Dallas in the late summer of 1988. I borrowed a Les Paul from Max, a Marshall amp from the guitarist from Quad Pi, called BOW drummer Russell Fleming, and we played, badly I must say, without a singer with different people from the audience singing or trying to sing. Max brought some of Bobby’s ashes and we displayed them on stage so he could be there with us
I want to tell the story of the ashes though, I have never told any interviewer this before, so I guess this is a scoop for you
I have lived in South Florida since 1988 and when Bobby Soxx died in 2001 I went back to Dallas for his wake. Vicky was unable to come because of conflicts with her job so I went alone. During the wake I was introduced to a woman named Sunny who was ostensibly Bobby’s wife. As the wake at Charlie Gilder’s Bar of Soap began to wind down Sunny came to me asking me for a ride home. It was now dark, pitch black, and it had been raining very hard in Dallas the entire day. I had no idea where we were going as she led me on a circuitous route through East Dallas, an area I never knew very well to begin with
Eventually we stopped at a house and she said to come in, there was something that she wanted to give me. We went inside, soaking wet to find a house that looked like your average mental picture of a crack den. There was no furniture, only a filthy mattress with three or four sad looking dogs lying in their own filth. She took me into another room, kitchen I think and proceeded to show me a partially drunk 44 oz. bottle of malt liquor that she was saving because it was “Bobby’s last 44”
At that point, three or four very shady looking guys in their early 20s came in and went into another room. I was getting seriously uncomfortable. She then took the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes and picked up a cardboard box about 8” square and opened it. She told me to put my hand in and to take some of the contents and put them in the cellophane packet. I realized as I put my hand in that I had my hand in Bobby’s ashes. I stuffed the packet into my pocket and made for the door in a hurry. By the time I got to the car I was hysterical and it was raining very hard. I wiped my hand, filthy with my friend’s ashes on the roof of the car in the rain and got into the rental car and drove away as quickly as I could manage. I drove about a block, pulled over and was hysterically crying for some time
When I could pull myself together enough, I pulled out my phone and called Vicky. She stayed on the phone with me until I could calm down a bit. She then suggested that I drive over to Max’s house and that he would take care of me since she couldn’t be there. I did, and he did, just as she had said he would. While there I gave him some of Bobby’s ashes since he was also a good friend of Bobby’s and was actually creating a small shrine in his house with the ashes of a few other friends who had died over the past few years. Those were the ashes that appeared at the DJ’s Reunion. My container of Bobby’s ashes is here in my home, along with some ashes from another close friend, Paul Cornet, who died of a brain tumor in the nineties
Were there any of your Texas punk contemporaries you rated highly? These days many of those bands, and the clubs you played in, have taken on a near mythic status
We played a lot of places in primarily Dallas, Austin, Houston and San Antonio. I really like playing the Ritz Theater in Austin, and also the Island in Houston. I loved DJs where I had played often with BOW and always the Hot Klub, which seemed like my second home sometimes. In the early days we played the Metamorphosis Concert Hall, a very small place where they let us do anything that we wanted no matter how weird it got. My fondest memories are of early SMWRG shows where we had done a variety of abstract things with the lighting and play especially unusual tapes through the PA as intro. I still can see fans standing up and screaming for us to shut it off!
Honestly, I was never a big fan of many of the bands that were our contemporaries except for the Butthole Surfers and, of course, the Nervebreakers. I also liked the Hugh Beaumont Experience and the Skuds, an early Dallas punk band that brought new meaning to the DIY ethic. I never saw the Big Boys play but Bob Beeman was tight with them and I understand that they were very good. I think we were scheduled to play with them once but I don’t remember why we didn’t. Your average punk band was just that, at best average. Neither of those two that I just mentioned sounded like any other bands. Nervebreakers didn’t fit anyone’s mental picture of a punk band either
Frankly most bands on the scene weren’t really all that interesting either. Don’t get me wrong, I actually liked everyone as individuals, I just didn’t like much of the music. I thought most of it was too derivative to be very interesting. Not many bands took much in the way of chances artistically. SMWRG was just so much my world and vision that simply it pushed everything else to the side. Other bands were often more of an annoyance, something we had to sit through to get on stage. I was a very harsh critic, especially if I was suffering through some third-rate band’s set and waiting to go on stage. Even worse, I was prone to taking out that irritation on the audience when I did finally get on stage, which I often did. I would sometimes deliberately sabotage my sound to make it incomprehensible just to piss people off if I was bothered about something. The Stick Man rears his ugly little baseball-capped head again
Other people, Bobby Beeman for example, would be a better, more charitable and certainly less biased source for you to ask this question. The Surfers were very good friends, we started around the same time, we would trade off opening for each other, things like that. The biggest difference was that they had larger ambitions and we didn’t. The Butthole Surfers would eventually absorb by osmosis some of SMWRG’s chaotic noise and go on to use it for their own purposes. It was painfully obvious that to make it in the music business is very hard work and you would need to rely on each other to make it, and then to survive any success you might have. No one was stupid enough to rely on the Soxx for anything. No one was going to go around the country in a single van with the Soxx
Did you have a favorite place to play in Texas?
Like I said, some of my fondest memories were of playing Metamorphosis. I also loved playing the Hot Klub, Studio D, Studio 29 and the Twilite Room. These were great places to play. The Ritz Theater in Austin, I think we played there twice. That was a very good place to play although during the last show we played there they were having serious power problems and we had to stop multiple times during the set. It was still a great place to play. I also liked The Island in Houston quite a lot. It was very large as I remember and had a large stage. The famous picture of Bobby showing just why you didn’t really want to follow us was taken there. I think that was the only time he ever did that stunt. I don’t remember who played after, but they were really pissed. In general, most bands didn’t like following us just because it was often anticlimactic for them
SMWRG, Deprogrammer, Vomit Pigs, Sharon Tates Baby, Big Boys… Young kids today that are discovering these bands seem to be hankering for music that they believe comes from somewhere authentic. Music seems to have lost much of its “humanity”/soul; or maybe it’s an age thing?
One thing that I will say is unlike today’s kids, that virtually everyone that I met in the punk scene from the mid to late 70s through the middle and late 80s was a serious fan and were very knowledgeable regarding the history of rock music in general. Whether I liked their bands or not, all the young people were infinitely better educated about music than today’s kids are. I assume that it is partly the fault of the radio and made worse by the download culture but almost everything that I ever hear is vapid and superficial. Everyone wants to be superstars. I have been feeling for some time that rap killed rock and that rock is basically dead. I’m just not sure everyone knows it yet
I’ve told more people this story than want to hear it, but when I was first starting to listen to the radio seriously, somewhere around 1960 or early 1961, AM radio was the only thing and the Dallas-Fort Worth area was a major center for top 40 radio. Texas businessman Gordon McLendon is generally credited with inventing the top 40 format and he had major stations in Houston and Dallas. Dallas, New York, and LA were the three big radio cities where new material was being broken. Every weekend the major stations alternated new material with old songs. As a result, I never actually recognized the difference so when the Beatles and the Stones started up in late 1962-1963 they were played right alongside something recorded in 1951. Because of listening to music like this for years, I don’t recognize era and genre differences as making any difference. I can easily move back and forth between My Bloody Valentine, the Clash, Fats Domino, PIL, Chuck Berry, and on, and on, and on. This is the radio station in my head
Unfortunately young people in their ignorance have largely lost touch with their musical heritage. This heritage needs to be repeatedly plowed under and reborn by seeding its influence. Without people like B.B. King, Freddy King, Howlin’ Wolf and others like them we never would have had the Yardbirds, Cream, Jeff Beck, and Led Zeppelin. Where would the rockabilly movement of the early 80s been without people like Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent? If you go back and listen to the originals, they are still way better than the Stray Cats and any other Brian Setzer bands. If you are a jazz fan people don’t think you are an old fogey for listening to John Coltrane or Miles Davis. Jazz fans have respect for the past. Few rock fans today, have anything like that kind of respect for the past
Are you still painting? A lot of the musicians I’ve interviewed for this site paint now. The creative urge, I suppose
I paint fitfully, as I always have. My degree was in painting and I have painted off and on since college. Painting is a very stressful and emotionally draining activity for me. I was very involved with digital painting in the early to middle 90s but I became disillusioned with it. It was too easy and there was too much reliance on photography as the image source. I have some of my digital work on my website (clarkeblacker.com) but I never put up any of my later work. I haven’t done anything to the site in years, just as I have neglected SMWRG (stickmenwithrayguns.com). I have a friend, Lawrence Gartel, who is a reasonably well known digital artist and has been exhibiting worldwide since the 1970s. Lawrence and I would sometimes have public debates regarding digital art, with me acting what you might call the loyal opposition
I started painting again in oil around 2000 and was actively working on a series of large landscapes of the everglades here in Florida. I was showing a lot and had one very good commission but I lost some good work when the Globe tabloid building where Vicky worked was attacked with Anthrax. Her good friend Bob Stevens sat about 30 feet from her office and was killed. I had a couple of large paintings in their legal offices when it happened and I never got them back since the building was quarantined and all of the contents were eventually destroyed. This so bothered me that it took the wind out of my sails and I eventually quit painting, although I intend to take it up again. I am not finished with it
I’m going to New York in a month or two and plan to sit for a long time in front of my favorite painting, Monet’s huge (roughly 48’ long) blue Water Lily painting in the Museum of Modern Art. I need to spend some time looking at it again
Thanks Clarke