Away From The Numbers #1

I always felt kinda sorry for the city of San Diego during the 1980s. Despite the fact that over 1.7 million people resided in the San Diego metro area in 1980, and despite the area itself being an earthly paradise, the city’s underground music scene was duller than dishwater. Not even 90 minutes north lay Orange County and just over two hours away was Hollywood, and yet with LA and OC concurrently thriving with one of the greatest underground rock scenes of all time, the best San Diego could come up with was, what – Battalion of Saints? And in the-mid 80s, The Morlocks and Crawdaddys?

When I’d talk to music-obsessed folks from SD at the time, they’d tell me about their shitty music clubs and how biker gangs would regularly fight at X shows, as well as how their weekends were usually spent in cars driving to LA for shows by necessity. It was gratifying when the 90s rolled around and the city truly got “a scene of one’s own” and dozens of strange and oddly complementary local underground bands. Those who participated in it – such as my now-wife – say that it was truly a blast. But before that, to me it was the land of shitty hardcore and the embarrassingly juvenile (if highly complex and time-consuming) “macabre” art of “Mad Marc Rude”. So I concentrated my San Diego vibes on the fish tacos and the sunshine instead.

Mad Marc was otherwise known as Mark Hoffman, and his bizarre, nonsensical editorial in May 1980’s Away From The Numbers #1 illustrates the vapidity of adolescence and the scene he and his peers were trying to will into life. To their credit, while what’s going on in LA colors so much of what’s covered here, they’re trying very hard to make a figuratively clean cut at the border of Orange and San Diego counties, and editor Pete Verbrugge comes off admirably for trying. “The object of Away From The Numbers is to shed light on San Diego’s new wave scene by bringing to attention events, people and places that we feel haven’t received adequate coverage.” Like The Jam playing in LA? Sure! “There are obstacles, of course, like the SDPD”. Fuckin’ cops. They hate us, we hate them, right?

I do like the coverage of local thrift shops by “Jolie” – man, one thing I do remember about early 90s visits to San Diego was stuff like that: stopped-in-time thrift stores and old movie theaters and bookstores that looked like no one had walked in since 1974. Verbrugge’s “show of the month” took place on March 29th, 1980 and was a bill of The Alleycats, the Go-Gos and a local group called Mature Adults. Mature was perhaps the antithesis of our editor’s physical reaction to the Go-Gos: “It took the Gogos all of three minutes to win the crowd over, about the same time it took me to come all down my pants”. Whew; I know I’ve seen some really outtasite shows in my life but thankfully that hasn’t happened yet.

The Cramps are due to come play the North Park LIons Club in May, and I do hope that they made it, because Away From The Numbers #1, specifically reviewer Russ Toppman, is buzzing about the band, as well as should have been. Songs The Lord Taught Us has just come out and he’s floored, as I would eventually be when I’d hear it a couple of years later. I also like the back-page advertisement for a two-location local record store called Arcade Music Company, where all records and tapes are $2.49 (can you imagine?) and that there’s a “New Wave section coming in May”. A new wave section! Man, I used to love the new wave sections at my local mainstream chain record stores. At Record Factory in San Jose it was called “Modern Music”, and I’d go in there and ogle the same 17 or so unsold records every time, until I finally discovered Tower Records in Campbell, which had everything, and even domestic underground records were filed away as “Imports”. Away From The Numbers #1 is a strong time capsule of that era, and it’s a fanzine that’s highly fetching in a historical and sociological sense, while perhaps not quite as an informed curation of sub-underground SoCal circa 1980.