The Crucifucks, Steve Shelley, the Dead Kennedys and Me: Bev Davies Does It Again

...Or bev davies, as she may prefer. She found photos of Steve Shelley in Vancouver in 1984, on his first trip to Vancouver, drumming for the Crucifucks. Note: this article has been expanded to include some Steve Shelley stuff that didn't make the Straight piece(s)... which is NOW ONLINE. A part two is pending! 

But this is all apropos of the upcoming Orcutt/ Shelley / Miller gig at the Rickshaw. But it starts, as we see, with the Crucifucks. The best of B/bev's photos doesn't even have Steve Shelley in it (a second one follows): 

The Crucifucks, New York Theatre, Oct. 21, 1984, by bev davies, not to be reused without permission. I suspect that's Marc Hauser on bass... Gus Varner is on guitar... I wonder who the little kid is in the bottom right? (These were all-ages shows).

Steve Shelley and I talked a bit about the kit you see in these photos: “That’s a Pearl drum kit; it’s in the Sonic Youth studio now. I moved to New York with that drumkit! That’s kind of a funky drumkit. It was sold to me by an older musician in my hometown that had bought two of everything to make a double kit, so he had two kick drums and four tom toms; it was a monster kit, like a Rush-style kit, y’know? And he decided he was going to play country  music, so he sold me half of his double kit. With Urban Cowboy, country music was where the bucks were!”

He acquired it just before moving to New York -- it wasn't the kit he grew up with, he tells me. "But in that band Faith and Morals and in Strange Fruit, I would have had that Pearl kit."

He'd been in a school band--an orchestra band and a marching band--in his hometown of Michigan, but his real education, it seems, came from the drumkit he had in his parents basement. “I would go down and bash it out after dinner!” 

The rest of this is as previously ran; the Straight piece -- maybe a two-parter? -- will have more. But it turns out Steve Shelley and I have something in common, sort of. See, I was two years into being a punk rocker in 1984. I had only found out about the genre in 1982. Punk rock was not otherwise visible to me in elementary school, on television, on the radio, and then a friend played me Never Mind the Bollocks when I was 14. 

It was life-changing. By the time the Dead Kennedys played the New York Theatre (now just known as the York Theatre, but still open, on Commercial), back in October of 1984, I had all their records and even a bootleg (A Skateboard Party, whereupon you hear Jello sternly admonish the crowd, "These are the only shoes I have. Leave them alone"). 

But I also still had a fairly conservative upbringing with Catholic parents. I remember seeing the posters and flinching in horror from a band name the second night: the Crucifucks. How terrible! How offensive! How scary! I resolved to go only on the first night. Which I did. It was my first ever "real" Vancouver punk show (I was living in Maple Ridge at the time, and didn't drive, so it was a big deal to even get there and get home). Joey Shithead was a roadie, helping out onstage, but didn't perform (the crowd briefly chanted "Shit-head, Shit-head" until he looked out at them, irritated). I could have gone the second night, to see the Crucifucks, too (and Death Sentence, playing September 5th at LanaLou's with the Scammers!). I elected not to.

I didn't realize that I would become a Crucifucks fan. Enough of a fan that I would bug Steve Shelley about it at the merch table at the Biltmore, when he played here with Lee Ranaldo a few years back. "I want to interview you about your time in the Crucifucks!"

In case you didn't know, the Crucifucks' first album features Steve Shelley on drums, pre-Sonic Youth.  Compare the drums on "Go Bankrupt and Die" with "Stereo Sanctity." Sound like the same guy? It is. 

Shelley clearly wasn't as enthusiastic about the topic as I was. All he would say that night was that the Doc Dart in the Vice article, the guy who now refused to say his own former band's name and referred to them as the Christmas Folks, was completely different from the guy he'd known. I bugged him twice about it, in between pestering the band to sign stuff, but that seemed like all he was prepared to give me. So I told him I would write him, and that maybe we could talk Crucifucks if it served his interests, sometime. 

That was in 2013. I wrote him like I said I would. I never heard back. Then this happened (bandcamp here; Rickshaw gig info here): the time finally arrived where I could interview Steve about this very early band he was in, and it would actually (maybe) benefit him! 

But only if he wanted to. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, you know? Sometimes things happen in bands that kinda sour people's desire to talk about them, where you're left wondering, hmm, how bad did it get? Who amongst us has not tried to get Jim Imagawa to talk about his time in the Subhumans? (Neither Scott Beadle nor myself had much luck; we don't know why, but he really truly doesn't want to talk about it and at some point you just have to stop bugging the guy). 

...And sometimes when you find out, it's not fun, it's not entertaining, it's not "a good story," but something you wish you could go back to not knowing. People are only human, and sometimes humans can fuck up in spectacular, ugly, heartbreaking ways. I have made discreet inquiries about one local band we all know, who were destined to fall apart spectacularly, and whose name I will not now mention, to spare the innocent and guilty alike: finally hearing the sordid details of the end of that band a) saddened me, b) filled me with resolve never to repeat the story; and c) stopped me asking questions about it for all time. Some of you may not know the band I mean, but those of you who do are probably, like, "Yeah, Al, let's not go there." And those of you who don't, I assure you: it will just make you sad. You are better off. 

I do not know how much any of that applies to Steve Shelley's time in the Crucifucks, because there was only so far into it that Shelley would get. When I asked about the subject of Doc's animal rights activism, and if the band was expected to keep vegan, Shelley said "let's move on." So I would be unsurprised to learn that the Crucifucks were one such band. Doc Corbin Dart, the leader, was quite the unique character. You hear him on that first Crucifucks album prank calling the police to complain about his own band, so he could record their answers and put them between tracks; this is bordering on something a character in a Philip K. Dick novel would do, and yes, I'm thinking of A Scanner Darkly. Dart has had well-documented mental health struggles (with borderline personality disorder, apparently). He has a solo album, out of print, named for a counselor or therapist that he was seeing and apparently obsessed enough with to write songs about (an interesting review with links, here). Make sure you listen to "Out My Window." It's actually brilliant popcraft, a truly great song. 

But great songs can come from difficult people. I mentioned the Crucifucks in a conversation with another esteemed American punk recently, one who feels, like I do, that the Crucifucks were an amazing band (he'd actually seen them). But he also remarked, when I suggested that I thought from my conversation with Shelley that Doc might have been difficult to work with, that that was "because Doc was fucking insane!"

He said it with love, of course. Jello Biafra, too, when I spoke to him about Dart some years ago, was laughing in fondness and awe that Dart had changed his name to 26 and released an album called The Messiah, with images on the cover of one of his raccoon friends. I seem to recall reading, maybe in that Vice thing, that, along with "mystical practices," Dart had developed relationships with and given names to his backyard raccoons. 

I can dig that, actually -- I get real happy when I see neighbourhood rats, lately, and stop to say  hello to them, but the fact remains: when Jello Biafra regards you as an eccentric,  it means something.

In fact, The Messiah is a terrific album. Try "Animals," for instance. Doc -- excuse me, 26 -- is an animal rights advocate and rhymes "peace and love and pacifism" with "shallow sentimentalism," urging us to "get right with the animals." There's a lot of incredible musicianship and songwriting in Doc Dart's body of work, pre-and-post- Christmas Folks, and I wish him nothing but the best; I would interview him if I could. I think about him from time to time and wonder if he'll ever come back to making music. I've heard stories about him selling baseball cards and driving an SUV and if they're true I feel happy for him, I guess (as long as he's happy, y'know? I hope he isn't miserable).

But that's all the preamble you need. Who is this Doc Dart, who are these Crucifucks, and how much is Steve Shelley, when pressed, willing to share with me? (We did talk Crucifucks a bit!). You will see the answers to these questions and much more (including some great Neil Young stories, and lots about Sonic Youth, but no Moe Tucker: I forgot to ask) in maybe two weeks' time, before the Shelley-Orcutt-Miller show. 

In the meantime -- before I disappear from the blogosphere for awhile -- here are two photographs by Bev that I want to show you. These will suffice until my Steve Shelley interview finds its way online (if I am killed in a tragic blimp accident before September 9th, someone please transcribe the Zoom recording with Steve Shelley and get it to Mike, okay?). Because the Straight usually only has one article image, I wanted to show you these separately from that piece. If you've come here from the Straight website, hello. Welcome to my blog. 

Here's a Crucifucks photo from the same show with Steve Shelley plainly visible behind the drum kit:

Also by bev, not to be reused without permission"That's Gus, our guitar player," Steve Shelley notes...

And here is a photo Bev took the night before, of the Bill of Rights onstage. 

The Bill of Rights, October 20, 1984, by bev davies, not to be reused without permission

And the thing Steve Shelley and I have in common is that October 21st was his first real punk gig in Vancouver, while October 20th, the night before, was mine. He'd never played here before; I'd never gone to a show there before -- only stadium rock shows, never a real underground punk gig. 

And Bev took my photo, too. If you look in the audience, two people from the left of Rick, I think it is, and one row back, you will see this guy: 

That is 16 year old me, complete with hair (Steve still has his). It is also the first time Bev Davies took my photo -- though it was the second time she and I were at the same concert, since she and I both saw the Clash in May of that  year (I am not counting the Clash as a "real punk show," I guess, since it was at the Coliseum; it was an arena rock show, not a gig). Hey, maybe Steve was in the audience that night, too?

More to come! (And if you missed it, I put some of my photos of Bev on my PigsX7 review, here. And you can buy tickets for Orcutt-Shelley-Miller here. The bandcamp stuff is actually really cool. I'll have more to come with Ethan Miller, as well; and I wrote about Bill Orcutt here).  

Next stop Steve Shelley (as soon as I finish this other thing I'm working on).