PUNK COMEDY?

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

It was maybe not that far-fetched. For the bulk of 1977, people kept predicting Punk Rock to be the Wave of the Future, but settled for evolving into New Wave, and lots of people made money instead of just a few lucky souls. But what the heck were WE doing playing in that scene? Don’t really know, but the one club in San Francisco that catered to the fad was the late Mabuhay Gardens (aka The Fab Mab) on Broadway. A Filipino restaurant by day, it became the haven for Punk groups by 1977, and many who later had international fame played there, including REM, The Go-Gos, Patti Smith, and Motorhead. Somehow, Dirk Dirksen (a nephew of the Republican Senator Everett Dirksen), who booked the room and rudely emceed the shows, thought we were the perfect act to open the shows.

I think we must have played the room a good ten times between January and September of that year, and we enjoyed maybe two of them. Dirk didn’t help much, giving us a rather fey intro, and doing little to quell the audience chaos, in fact doing more to incite them. We often came out to a chorus of boos, and the only respite was the club removing all the ash trays before the show started, instead putting popcorn on each table so the punks would have something to toss at  the stage that wouldn’t physically hurt anyone. Once someone came directly on to the stage and emptied his basket of popcorn over Ruby’s head. I think our only consolation was knowing Dirk was paying us more than he was paying the bands. Maybe we should have demanded more.

The worst hell gig there from my standpoint was one where a guy just incessantly kept booing us and telling us how much we suck. We soldiered on, getting tepid applause amidst the stupidity of the situation. As we were backstage licking our wounds, the first band was preparing to go up. One of that band’s members came up to me to tell me how much he enjoyed it, but defeated his own purpose by asking, “And what’d ja think of what I was doing out there?” I said, “You mean you were the one who was shouting out all that shit?” He said, “Yeah, pretty cool, huh,” and I said “No it wasn’t the least bit cool, why would you do that to a fellow performer?” He was taken aback by my reaction, but said the common phrase that many hecklers have said over the years, “I was only trying to help!” I did explain to him nicely that we are all in this struggle together, and we really need to support each other, not put each other down. He seemed to get it, the conversation ended with an apology and handshake from him, so not a total loss.

The one positive that came out of those gigs was on a night where Seymour Stein, the founder and president of Sire Records, was there. Sire was a label that was having occasional successes, and had just signed Talking Heads, but would hit their jackpot when they signed Madonna in the early 80’s. Stein was at the Mabuhay to catch whatever bands were on the bill, but wound up talking to us, and later calling me from New York to say he was interested. Who knew that two years later we would be in New York opening for Robin Williams, but that was mostly under the auspices of another record label, Casablanca. I was so swept up in the Robin-mania, I didn’t even think to contact Stein and let him know we were there. Add that to our list of missed opportunities.

We may have played the Mabuhay once more after the heckler incident, because by the autumn of 77 we started to get upscale gigs and didn’t have to court that element anymore. Or so we thought. We had gotten in with the 500-seat indoor venue The Old Waldorf as a designated opening act for several groups on their way up, most without incident, but the one that stands out in my memory was opening for punk godfather Iggy Pop. I had barely heard of him and my partner had not heard of him at all. We should have been better prepared for the onslaught having worked all those gigs at Mabuhay, but I guess we needed that occasional jolt of reality.

It started out good at sound check, where we met Iggy. It was sort of surprising to meet the man when he was just Jimmy Osterberg (his real name), and see what a lovely kind man he was! Of course, he wouldn’t want his fans to know he was the shy, self-effacing person we met, but his demeanour threw us for a loop. Would his fans be as kind? Well, in a (70’s) word, negatory!

The boos were incessant and stupid, and again this audience, most barely 21, seemed to have a lame idea of how to be punks for a day. The guy that was most vocal merely had two pieces of masking tape covering his face in the shape of an X, as though he was X-ing himself out of something, god knows what. We had hired a roadie by then, who we only knew as BJ, never knew anything more about him, but he always showed up on time for the gigs. Big, burly, and not the sharpest tool in the shed, but devoted to making our gigs run as well as they could. We saw him walk over to X Man and say something, then the guy remained silent for the rest of the time we were on. I was told later he said to X Man, in his Texas accent, “Boss says you gotta die!”

Thankfully, after the Iggy gig, we never had to play to that type of audience again. The offshoot of the experience was I added The Punk Comic Johnny Bugger to our act, with a prop safety pin stuck through my entire head. I told jokes like “Take my wife… asshole!” or “This guy comes up to me, says he hasn’t had a bite in three days… so I ATE him!” Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or something like it.

October 16th, 2021



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