Tuxedomoon

Who Cares Anyway? Post-Punk San Francisco And The End Of The Analog Age 
By Will York (Headpress) 

Will York has done such an exemplary job here, in that it is a deeply entertaining read even if you aren't already intimately familiar with bands like Caroliner, Flipper, Tuxedomoon, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Toiling Midgets, or Pop-O-Pies.

This thoroughly researched and frequently tragic tome is sure to appeal to any music fans who still long for the pre-gentrification era, when creatives could still afford to pay the prohibitively astronomical rent for warehouses and rehearsal spaces in big cities before unscrupulous landlords with big tech money killed off urban Bohemia in this country, with Judge Dredd "stop and frisk" class patrols and a nearly universal lack of accessible egalitarian neighborhoods for working class artists.

York delves deep into the avant garde, Flipper-informed history of Faith No More and Mr Bungle - way back when metal deedler Jim Martin was still partying with high school dude-metal stoner buds Cliff Burton and all through Courtney Love's inflammatory stint as vocalist. This pre-dates the Chuck Mosely era, when "We Care A Lot" crossed over into college radio and MTV airplay, long before when Mike Patton joined the group and they went supernova mainstream in the hyper-polished commercial whiteboy funk era of the band and their defiantly unpop experimental endeavors that followed. 

I find the startlingly dangerous, death taunting, law scorning, ledge dwelling excesses of the Sleepers’ Ricky Williams and Michael Belfer of particular interest, but the heavy book is spilling over with twisted tales of debauchery, comedy, community and collaboration in the post-punk era. Recommended.

 Buy it 

When Can I Fly? The Sleepers, Tuxedomoon & Beyond
By Michael Belfer
 Foreword by Jon Savage
Hozac Books 

I'm not that into art rock or prog rock, or Devo or the Residents, or any shit like that, right? I'm a Dead Boys guy, not a Pere Ubu guy, you know what I mean? Man oh man, though, once you get about 20 pages into this book by San Francisco punk scene pioneer Michael Belfer (guitarist with The Sleepers and Tuxedomoon) it reads like a crazy fuckin' movie. What a wild freakin' life this dude had! WHOA!

If you read my columns and rants on a semi regular basis, you are probably already hip to my ongoing theory that there ain't many good bands no more in part because controlled media consolidation pummels us all day with time-waster buy shit/puppet celebrity fakes we never asked for, and partly, because there is such a shortage of affordable real estate spaces available to rehearse in, since the banking scum jacked up all the rents everywhere under Obamaand Holder who actually even went to work for 'em after failing to prosecute anybody for the mass mortgage scams, and the landlords who used to rent working class homes to working class people flipped all their rentals into Airbnb’s and act like they're doing you some big fuckin' favor for painting their front porch steps purple, adding a hot tub and a Buddha statue to the yard and charging you $300 a night. These old punk bands paid like $300 a month, ya know?