During the 80's punk was alive and well in SoCal and lucky for me I was here and not the mid-west or worse; the bands around at that time could fill pages here so I wont go into great detail on all but a couple bands. While I was at Downey High Jimmy Hetfield and Don Doty were there and after I transfered to Ramona High in Riverside I found myself in a time warp, wearing a Motorhead shirt then would get you threats and stares from the locals but I did it anyways, chicks dig rebels...
In those days I was playing drums and looking for people to jam with and not having much luck I stumbled upon a guy named Kurt and he was into heavy metal and I would show him stuff like The Anti-Nowhere League and UK Subs along with Motorhead and Tank and we would start a band called the Saints of Demise, or S.O.D. for short. We practiced as much as possible and at this time I was a Junior in H.S. and I was able to turn a horse tack room into a rehearsal studio so we were up a little on some of the other bands at our level. We played a couple backyard parties but our sloppy garage metal was truly almost punk, we thought of ourselves as a young west coast Dictators and we liked it. By this time I had moved on to bass and was learning the ropes there and things were coming together, kind of. At some point during the bands rise to school fame I was approached by a fellow classmate who said he knew of a band that needed a drummer and a bass player, and we started having drummer issues as our guy went into the Army and finding a replacement was proving difficult, so Kurt and I decided to help out Uncontrolled Society until they could find permanent members, yeah right. Now Kurt was a good drummer himself and he would morph from singer/guitarist to drummer and I would stay on at bass.
We found outright punk gigs had more people in attendance than backyard metal gigs and our form of metal wasnt going over well with Van Halen fans so playing with this band was ok and we were getting sucked in. Not long after our first gig as Uncontrolled Society we changed the name to Toxic Noise, very punk, very silly, but it worked. We started writing stuff and doing a Ramones cover and I think we tried Faster & Louder but never did it live, but we were in the thick of the Riverside punk scene then; White Flag, Cease Fire and Toxic Noise were the bands at that time and a couple other pop up bands that would come and go, sorry I can't remember them. We started heckling the local radio station lady, Billy Dobler, and forcing her to play our punk on her show that mostly showcased goth stuff from the time, her fans hated us, gaining that tag that would haunt us, people had an opinion about us, and it was always bad.
Trying to get gigs at that time at the DeAnza Theatre was impossible because our reputation was starting to hurt our punk abilities, lots of head scratching here but we said fuck it and charged on, never playing the home of punk in the mid 80's in Riverside, fuck you Stan Warwick, LOL.
To be continued...
In those days I was playing drums and looking for people to jam with and not having much luck I stumbled upon a guy named Kurt and he was into heavy metal and I would show him stuff like The Anti-Nowhere League and UK Subs along with Motorhead and Tank and we would start a band called the Saints of Demise, or S.O.D. for short. We practiced as much as possible and at this time I was a Junior in H.S. and I was able to turn a horse tack room into a rehearsal studio so we were up a little on some of the other bands at our level. We played a couple backyard parties but our sloppy garage metal was truly almost punk, we thought of ourselves as a young west coast Dictators and we liked it. By this time I had moved on to bass and was learning the ropes there and things were coming together, kind of. At some point during the bands rise to school fame I was approached by a fellow classmate who said he knew of a band that needed a drummer and a bass player, and we started having drummer issues as our guy went into the Army and finding a replacement was proving difficult, so Kurt and I decided to help out Uncontrolled Society until they could find permanent members, yeah right. Now Kurt was a good drummer himself and he would morph from singer/guitarist to drummer and I would stay on at bass.
We found outright punk gigs had more people in attendance than backyard metal gigs and our form of metal wasnt going over well with Van Halen fans so playing with this band was ok and we were getting sucked in. Not long after our first gig as Uncontrolled Society we changed the name to Toxic Noise, very punk, very silly, but it worked. We started writing stuff and doing a Ramones cover and I think we tried Faster & Louder but never did it live, but we were in the thick of the Riverside punk scene then; White Flag, Cease Fire and Toxic Noise were the bands at that time and a couple other pop up bands that would come and go, sorry I can't remember them. We started heckling the local radio station lady, Billy Dobler, and forcing her to play our punk on her show that mostly showcased goth stuff from the time, her fans hated us, gaining that tag that would haunt us, people had an opinion about us, and it was always bad.
Trying to get gigs at that time at the DeAnza Theatre was impossible because our reputation was starting to hurt our punk abilities, lots of head scratching here but we said fuck it and charged on, never playing the home of punk in the mid 80's in Riverside, fuck you Stan Warwick, LOL.
To be continued...
