The Underrated and the Forgotten: Seven L.A. Bands Way More People Should Know About
The tender years in Tucson, Arizona, stealing money from my big brother’s busboy tip jar and buying Circle K money orders with the coins to send to Zed Records in Long Beach for all the Dangerhouse sides, The Eyes, The Bags, the mighty Weirdos, Black Randy and the Metro Squad, The Alley Cats, The Deadbeats, etc. Bands I’d hardly heard but knew were godhead. I was an outcast kid, beat up sometimes, mocked, laughed at. Later, at 15, I’d be living mostly at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, a young bike racer recently named to the junior national team. Was in SoCal for a bike race. Somehow, I wound up in a car with Axxel G. Reese from The Gears and some punk-rock college dude from Tucson. My fake ID, ordered from the back pages of Creem, worked. Bike racing makes you look older....