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My San Diego 1984 - 1986 Hi, This site is nothing fancy, it was just a way to put up some photos I scanned in from my album. I lived in San Diego from early 1984 till November 1986. I was from Canberra in Australia and I moved back to Australia in 1986. I was reasonably young at the time (I had turned 15 the week before I left Australia). My new stepfather was American and in the US Navy (he was a Navy Seal). When I first moved to SD we lived in Imperial Beach, then Chula Vista, and then we finally moved to military housing on "The Strand" in Coronado, although I left home at 16 and ended up living with a school mates family in Coronado. I went to Coronado High School. When I arrived I was an innocent fresh faced Duran Duran fan, and quickly made friends with other "nice" kids at the school. My parents sent me to summer school the year that I arrived because of the difference in the school year coming from Australia. At the time I thought that really sucked, but in hindsight it was the best thing that could have happened. I didn't really feel that I fit in with my friends, my new family and the world around me. I was young, idealistic and getting pissed off about things. I met some kids at summer school that I hadn't noticed before. They opened the door to a whole new world for me - punk (or hardcore as it ended up being called, I just remember it as punk). I loved the music - the sound, the speed, the aggression. I loved the lyrics - it was stuff I could sing (yell) along with, and the words were saying what I felt. It was telling the hypocritical world to fuck off, which was exactly what I wanted to tell it as well. But you don't analyse any of that at the time, I just knew that I really liked it. I was young and having fun. It was me. We were just kids/young adults being ourselves and getting through life. We did a heap of stuff, some of which was awesome, and some of which was not so good.... :-) We came from a variety of backgrounds. I had grown up in a verbally abusive household, initally raised by a psycho grandmother who seriously fucked with my head, and I had just been landed with a very strict military stepfather. I had another good friend whose parents were serious religious nuts. We were sick of people telling us what we could and couldn't do. My memories of this time are a bit blurry. This is due to a combination of it being over 20 years ago (oh my God!), and also because.... well, I don't think I need to explain that one any further. Let's just say that at the time I think I lasted a grand total of about 2 weeks trying to be straight edge :-) I went to as many shows as I could. I remember some of the main ones - saw the Ramones, the Damned, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag. There were heaps of other bands that I saw, but most of them are in the "blur" so I won't try to list them, but to get a general idea, 7 Seconds, Circle Jerks, DOA, Bad Religion, etc. Basically most of the bands that were around then, especially the Southern California ones. Quite a few bands came over from England during that time as well. I definitely remember a couple I didn't see - Subhumans (in LA, wasn't allowed to go...), and to this day I am very pissed off that I missed Suicidal Tendencies when they came to SD in 1985 because I was grounded at the time (and if you think that's funny and that a "real punk" would have just gone anyway you can fuck off... as you can probably tell, it's still a touchy subject :-). I remember going to the Toy Dolls/Circle Jerks show, but my blurry memory tells me that the Toy Dolls had a whammy and didn't end up playing that night, which I was pissed off about because I really liked them. In hindsight I wish that I had taken photos from the shows that I went to, but you just didn't think about that at the time, and carrying a camera would have been a real pain (not to mention that it probably wouldn't have survived very long :-). I didn't really hang out a lot with the main SD crowd who mainly lived further up north, as I was younger and living on Coronado (and couldn't drive), but it was still an incredibly big and important part of my life, and helped shape me into the person I am today. I didn't hang out at Cliff Cunninghams house, although I did go there a few times, he was always very nice to me (did he only have one leg, or is that another blurry memory?). My friends would drive over to Coronado and pick me up on the way to shows. The main driver had a pick up truck, I have (not very fond!) memories of lying down in the open back (to stop my mohawk from blowing all over the place) and driving over the bridge to the various shows/parties we went to. We would hang out in the carpark at the shows drinking beer (etc) until the bands started playing. The number of people there was not always huge, my blurry memory tells me there were often less than 50, but some shows were pretty big, obviously it depended on who was playing. I do vividly remember the raw energy and power however. The slam dancing (which I did a little bit of, but being female and not very big this was something that I wisely usually stayed out of, however this wasn't always possible since the whirlpool of bodies often crashed into you. It was awesome to watch though.) The stage diving was certainly "interesting", considering that the numbers in the crowd were not always large and the mass of bodies wasn't always there for people to land on. I certainly saw quite a few people dive into the air and crash straight onto the floor. Could never figure out the sense in that one. I usually hung out in the front, right near the stage. You would be caught up in a group of sweaty and pushing bodies, singing/yelling as loudly as you could to the songs, really expressing and meaning every fucking word you said. That's what I loved the most. I think the most important thing that I got out of that time was realising that you should think for yourself, question things that are happening around you and don't automatically believe everything you hear or read. It also never crossed our minds back then that we couldn't/shouldn't do something, you just went ahead and did it. I suppose I've carried this way of thinking with me through my entire life. Anyone could play in a band, and you didn't think about how bad you were. You wrote your own (very meaningful :-) lyrics. You drew some really strange artwork which you thought was incredibly cool. You saw the world in a different way to how nearly everyone else viewed it, and by some crazy quirk of nature, there happened to be a whole bunch of other people out there at the same time who saw it in a similar way to you as well. And some of them were able to transform this view into some seriously awesome music. I moved back to Canberra at the end of 1986, got involved in the scene here (getting even more intense about life) until into my early twenties, and then slowly drifted away from it. Funnily enough I grew older (I'm now 37), I grew out my mohawk , got a feathercut, grew that out too, listened to other music, got a career, got married, had a child, got a mortgage and got divorced (shit, I'm starting to feel like I"m ½ way through "from the cradle to the grave".... :-). But some things never leave you, and I have now found that I have come back to listening to the music that I loved so much back then. The sound and message is blowing me away all over again. After not hearing it for so long I can't believe how relevant it still is, and how much I still relate to it 20 years later. It might sound like I'm getting my mid life crisis a bit early, but I'm actually feeling like I'm regaining my "true" self again, and getting myself back to the person I used to be, before I got sidetracked by another life. I have to admit though that one of the good things about being "grown up" is that I now have the money to buy the CD's to re-stock my music collection, and that I can buy whatever I want, and how many I want without anybody trying to stop me :-) I am still trying to recover from the shock discovery that the stuff that was such a big part of my early life is now considered "old school hardcore" by a whole new generation of people who listen to bands that I have never heard of. I'm also still trying to stop laughing after stumbling across some "punk" forums on the internet with a whole lot of "serious" discussion going on about what/who is "real punk" and what isn't, and reading someone "dismiss" a well known punk band because they were too "stereotype punk" for him. Um, hate to tell you mate but twenty something years ago they were actually quite original.... (sorry guys! :-). Oh well, welcome to the generation gap (and to a whole bunch of new bands to discover!). Out of all of this, I only have one regret. Why the fuck could my parents not have moved to the US a year earlier so that I could have seen Minor Threat before they broke up????????????? God I love that band........ Cheers
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