In 2002, one of my old bands coasted, gig-less, into San Diego on one of our numerous little tours. We’d had no success in actually solidifying a show to play anywhere, our roadie had broken his hand a couple nights before while skateboarding, and we didn’t have enough money in the fund to get a hotel. Only a week into the journey and things were already as dodgy as always!
With nothing better to do and hoping to somehow get a last minute performance put together, our drummer went into a gas station and picked up a copy of The San Diego Reader, a free weekly periodical. A perfunctory perusal yielded an ad for an 80’s dance night at some club called “Shooters”, so we headed to North Park to investigate. I sat outside with the stated purpose of looking for more stuff in The Reader, but actually I was pouting in solitude because I had very little money and felt very pessimistic about the plan thus far. Spending money to get into some goth-y dance club in hopes of making some kind of connection seemed like a tremendous long shot to me.
Inside Shooters, my considerably more optimistic companions met a young man by the name of Andy Panda. Upon learning they were from Tulsa he asked if they knew a girl named Greta Smith, to which they answered in the affirmative. As though a secret handshake had been performed, we were in! A friend of Greta’s was a friend of Andy’s, and he took us home to his apartment, made sure we had couches to sleep on instead of the bed of the camper shell pickup we were traveling in, AND sweet talked us onto a bill the following night at the finest dive in town, Scolari’s Office, just a few hundred feet from Shooters. We ended up staying there for 3 days and, while I’m certain we wore out our welcome a bit with some of the roommates, if we were bugging Andy he never let on. We would listen to records in the living room and drink beer, and he told tales of his old band, Hide and Go Freak. Two of the members had sadly ended up dying from drug overdoses- a tale with morbid parallels to experiences I would have soon enough. He told us that his musical ambitions were far from over though, and that he had the name picked out already for his new project, “Mr. & Mrs. Tribute to Ugliness”.
A couple years later I ended up moving to San Diego and, being the small world that it is, I ran into Andy again with a week of my arrival. We got right to the business of being friends, and eventually I got some footage of his new, noisy art-punk band, of course called Mr. & Mrs. Tribute to Ugliness.
The show happened at Gelato Vero, a coffee and gelato place at the corner of Washington and India whose enterprising employees would put on shows for their bands in the upstairs dining area. At this particular event, Mr. & Mrs. opened up for Coachwhips, a rowdy San Francisco group whose singer managed to head-butt a sizeable hole in the drywall during their rambunctious, noisy set.
Eventually, Mr. & Mrs. broke up. Coachwhips broke up too. Gelato is still around but they don’t have shows there anymore, and the aforementioned Shooters (where the goth folks of San Diego would shake it to synth-driven 80s music) is now a sports bar that reeks with the stench of too much cologne and the men that are slathered in it.
Please try to enjoy what you have while you have it. And if possible, don’t grump out in solitude at the expense of getting out there and meeting your rad new future friends!
Fairly Loud Noises 