Pop Music in San Diego Rode a Wave of Sameness During Decade

In 1849, French writer Alphonse Karr observed, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

A century and a half later, the San Diego pop-music scene is a perfect case in point: Over the last decade, there have been plenty of changes, but for the most part, things are still very much the same.

- Despite the international success of such hometown heroes as the Beat Farmers, Ratt, and Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, local bands that play original music still have trouble finding nightclub work.

“Things have actually gotten worse,” said Buddy Blue, singer-guitarist of local blue-eyed soulsters the Jacks. “When the decade began, the Top 40 bands got all the action, and as if that wasn’t vile enough, the end of the decade sees canned music virtually eliminating live music altogether.

“It’s gotten to the point where there’s no incentive, no reason, to start a band in San Diego, original or otherwise.”

- Despite the fact that San Diego’s population has grown from 696,000 to more than 1 million, making it the sixth-largest city in the United States, the music industry continues to view the region as a suburb of Los Angeles, an unnecessary pit stop for touring superstars. Just this year, prominent no-shows included the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and the Jefferson Airplane.

“A lot of big artists who are playing a limited number of dates in the U.S. still feel they can accomplish what they want to, media-wise, in California by playing San Francisco and Los Angeles,” said local concert promoter Bill Silva.

“There’s a general feeling that by playing San Francisco, they can take care of Northern California, and by playing Los Angeles, they can take care of Southern California.”

- Despite a significant increase in concert activity and growing mainstream acceptance--concerts started popping up in all sorts of unlikely places, from shopping malls to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and, briefly, Sea World--pop music is still considered a cultural outlaw by the powers-that-be.

“This town is very prejudiced, very anti-rock ‘n’ roll,” said Country Dick Montana of the Beat Farmers. “They’ll channel millions of taxpayer dollars into the symphony and the Soviet Arts Festival, and then go out of their way to make it nearly impossible for any rock ‘n’ roll function to happen.”

Still, there were plenty of high hopes when the decade began, particularly on the home-grown front. The local pop scene was more vibrant than ever. Original-music bands like the Penetrators, DFX2, and the Rick Elias Band routinely attracted standing-room-only crowds to the half-dozen or so nightclubs where Top 40 cover tunes were taboo, including the Skeleton Club and the Zebra Club downtown, the Spirit in Bay Park, and the Rodeo in La Jolla.

There was even a monthly magazine, Kicks, that was devoted to covering this scene through band profiles, performance reviews and club reports.

Harlan Schiffman recalls being so impressed by what he saw, by what he heard, during his frequent visits to the Skeleton Club, that he promptly began promoting shows and managing local bands himself.

“It was such a phenomenon, this music scene generated by the clubs and the bands, that it just seduced me,” Schiffman said. “I’d never seen anything like it before--it was almost like all the things we had been reading about the music scenes in London and New York over the last five years were now happening right here in San Diego.”

Within a year, however, it was pretty much over. The crowds went first, then the clubs. Kicks was sold and soon folded; most of the bands broke up, switched to Top 40 covers or fled to Los Angeles.

“Everything just seemed to dry up, all at once,” recalled Blue, of the Jacks. “People stopped coming out for shows, the clubs changed over to different formats, and promising bands such as the Penetrators and DFX2 that really seemed ready to make a move broke up before anything had a chance to happen for them, while others either turned into Top 40 . . . or moved to L.A.”

Still, a few local original-music bands persevered, and as the 1980s progressed, many of them got signed by national labels: the Puppies to Stiff America, the Beat Farmers to Rhino and then to MCA/Curb, Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper to Enigma, Ratt to Enigma and then to Atlantic, Rough Cutt to Warner Brothers, the Jacks to Rounder, Robbie Vaughn and the Shadows to Island, and, most recently, the Voices to MCA.

But almost all of these bands have since been dropped by their respective labels, and of the ones that haven’t, only the Beat Farmers, Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, and Ratt have made a name for themselves outside San Diego.

Even then, the Beat Farmers have yet to amass more than a cult following, and Nixon is known more for his wacky promos on MTV than for his music.

Only Ratt has managed to score several hit albums and singles, but the heavy-metal group’s four members make a point of disavowing their San Diego roots whenever they’re interviewed in the rock press or on TV. That’s probably because they found fortune and fame only after moving to Los Angeles in 1984. They’d apparently like to forget their earlier years of struggling in San Diego.

The disintegration of the San Diego pop-music scene in the early 1980s--and its continued failure to rebuild itself--is no mystery.

If you look at cities that have long been known for their strong, vibrant music scenes--like London, New York, Detroit and Kansas City--you’ll discover a pattern: A majority of their citizens are natives, with a fierce sense of hometown pride that is conspicuously absent in San Diego, where natives are in the minority.

Furthermore, most of these cities are aging metropolises with little to offer in the way of recreation. Accordingly, leisure activities tend to revolve around night life. In San Diego, however, the beaches, the bays, the mountains and deserts offer inviting alternatives.

“San Diego is just not an original-music, rock ‘n’ roll town,” said Mojo Nixon. “There’s no history of it here as there is in, say, Detroit, where people can look back all the way to the 1960s and say, oh, these are our bands.

“There’s also no college or listener-sponsored radio station that caters to the local music scene as there is in a lot of towns--Memphis, for one. And there’s absolutely no support from City Hall.

“In Austin, Tex., the City Council is even paying their bands to go to New York and play, whereas in San Diego, the powers-that-be want everything to be nice and safe and easy.”

The only real bright spot on the local music set is the the Street Scene, which each year since 1984 has provided badly needed exposure for a handful of promising San Diego bands.

“The Street Scene is a big boon for San Diego,” Blue said. “It’s a major event, and the fact that the promoter (Rob Hagey) always includes at least one or two local bands in the lineup is a very good thing for this town.”

Concert-wise, San Diego had plenty to be grateful for in the 1980s. In 1982 came the first Concerts by the Bay series at Humphrey’s on Shelter Island, which went from just seven shows in the summer of 1982 to nearly 50 in the summer of 1989.

In January, 1983, local radio station XTRA-FM (91X) switched from a traditional album-oriented rock (AOR) format to alternative new music. The move, according to promoter Silva, “gave the San Diego concert market a whole new bent on life. It created an audience for alternative bands that never existed before.”

And by the time the decade was half over, both the Bacchanal in Kearny Mesa and the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach had changed their focus from local bands to concerts by national acts.

Understandably, then, the decade has seen a significant increase in the number of concerts, particularly by club-level and alternative-music acts.

“We’re seeing a lot of shows we never would have seen before, primarily because there was no place to see them, or no audience for them,” promoter-manager Schiffman said.

Yet the decade also saw its share of downs: police crackdowns on punk-rock shows, a lack of civic funding for the Street Scene, brawls at rap concerts, and--most notably--the closure of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium to pop shows after the 1982 Who concert, during which the grass playing field was severely damaged by dancing revelers.

The ban was finally lifted this year--ironically, in time for the Who’s return last August--but its legacy persists.

“To be able to lure the upper-end artists, you really need a major outdoor concert facility,” Silva said. “We haven’t had one for much of the decade, and it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get the word out before we even have a chance to be competitive with Los Angeles and other large markets.”