It's a little blurry but that guy in the pink is The King Teen when he still had some moves. It's VHS footage from a Smokejumpers show at an all-ages venue in Sonora, California, in Gold Country, in April 1997. Someone from that venue used to put a camcorder in the back of the hall and just run it until the tape ran out, about two hours.
The tapes were only recently digitized and put online. You can watch a couple dozen late-'90s punk shows here.
The video is 3:33 long and it contains two full songs, plus the start of a third, just to give you an idea of the pacing of a Smokejumpers set. I included the start of the third song so you can see how we kept going from one song right to the next. The video starts with us just having finished the previous song. You can also see me throwing a
baseball cap into the crowd. That was a Sonora cap, as in the Mexican state, which I'd bought in the Mission that day for that purpose.
If you're a longtime newsletter reader you might remember Us Ugly Guys being a Song of the Newsletter before. Click here if you want to see a video of me playing it solo in Raleigh last year and read about how it's the only song I ever got paid to make up. I mean,
the bosses didn't know that's what they were paying me to do.
This video shows the song in its native habitat, a lot louder and faster, with some blistering guitar playing by Tom "Double D" Thumb, drumming by Big Stick Mick, and bass playing by Rusty Strings, who's unfortunately out of frame to the left, even in the landscape version of the video.
Plus me showing off my three (3) stage moves:
- The leg waggling thing
- The modified duckwalk skipping around thing
- Well, there's probably a third one
This was pretty early in our history (1996-2000) and we hadn't developed some of our act yet, like Mick picking up his snare drum and wandering around in the audience during an extended breakdown where I introduced the other band members. I switched to electric guitar and Rusty, and later enough other bass players to fill a good-sized passenger van, only played standup bass. But you get the idea.
The other song, the one whose lyrics are displayed in the thumbnail above, is You What?!
This one was based on a true story! Papa Ed, the bass player for my previous band, The Wankin' Teens, who also was one of the many bass players for The Smokejumpers, told a story at practice about how his wife told him she'd been walking in San Francisco when she got hit by a cable car. I don't know how you get hit by a huge thing that tops out at 9 mph, but she did.
And just as in the song, she was descended upon by onlookers, including several lawyers trying to give her their cards. And she dusted herself off and said "I'm OK."
Papa Ed, who's a tall, raw-boned country boy from the Central Valley, said that he said, "You WHAAAAAAATTT???!!!" You kind of have to hear him say it but I decided in that moment, after
about 20 minutes of laughing, that that had to be a song. I changed cable car to limo to make it relatable outside the bay and also get some class resentment in there and not slander our beloved moving landmarks, and then I added some fiction about the lingerie and not paying the rent.
Both songs were on our album Flat Tear It Up, which as far as I know can't be heard online, though we're hoping to remedy that shortly. They should play for you at these Dropbox links
though:
Us Ugly guys | You What?!
Double D
played the part of "my baby" onstage, saying her lines in a falsetto voice, but on the recorded version we had an actual woman, not my baby but Andy Peregrine, the singer for a band called Beltfight, who were every bit as badass as you might think given that name, and so was she. She gave it a real Betty Boop vibe that was the best thing about that record.
You What?! is not part of
my set these days, but I'm thinking I might add it in. I just need to work on my boop-boop-be-doop
falsetto.
And maybe that duckwalk thing.
