| Stick Men with Ray Guns | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Dallas, Texas, United States |
| Genres | Punk rock |
| Years active | 1981-1988 |
| Website | www |
| Past members |
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Stick Men with Ray Guns was an American punk rock group from Dallas, Texas. The group's name comes from a comic that Bobby Soxx (Bobby Glenn Calverley) had created called "Stick Man with Ray Gun". The Stick Man was a crazed, racist character who walked the streets of his neighborhood blasting anyone with his raygun that he thought was defiling his race or just bugged him.
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed in the mid-1970s in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in 1960s garage rock and other forms of what is now known as "proto-punk" music, punk rock bands rejected perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. Punk bands typically produced short or fast-paced songs, with hard-edged melodies and singing styles, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY ethic; many bands self-produce recordings and distribute them through independent record labels and other informal channels.
Dallas is a city in the U.S. state of Texas. With an estimated 2017 population of 1,341,075, it is the ninth most-populous city in the U.S. and third in Texas after Houston and San Antonio. Dallas is the main core of the largest metropolitan area in the Southern United States and the largest inland metropolitan area in the U.S. that lacks any navigable link to the sea. It is the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country at 7.3 million people as of 2017. Dallas is the seat of Dallas County. Sections of the city extend into Collin, Denton, Kaufman, and Rockwall counties.
Texas is the second largest state in the United States by both area and population. Geographically located in the South Central region of the country, Texas shares borders with the U.S. states of Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the west, and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the southwest, while the Gulf of Mexico is to the southeast.
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They formed in 1981 after lead singer Bobby Soxx (formerly of the Teenage Queers) attended a show by guitarist Clarke Backer's previous group, Bag of Wire. [1] Their first show was a date at the Fort Worth club Zeros in spring 1981. [1] Because of Bobby's reputation, Clarke often had to vouch for Bobby's behavior with club managers in the early days of the band. Close friends with members of the Butthole Surfers, they often shared the stage, each opening for the other until the Surfers began to tour nationally and gain popularity. They also opened on Texas dates for punk groups such as X, Dead Kennedys, T.S.O.L., The Misfits, Bad Brains, and UK Subs. They went on hiatus in 1987 and reconvened in 1988 to write new material; their last show was in June 1988.
Butthole Surfers are an American rock band formed by singer Gibby Haynes and guitarist Paul Leary in San Antonio, Texas, in 1981. The band has had numerous personnel changes, but its core lineup of Haynes, Leary, and drummer King Coffey has been consistent since 1983. Teresa Nervosa served as second drummer from 1983 to 1985, 1986 to 1989, and 2009. The band has also employed a variety of bass players, most notably Jeff Pinkus.
Dead Kennedys are an American punk rock band that formed in San Francisco, California, in 1978. The band was one of the first American hardcore bands to make a significant impact in the United Kingdom.
T.S.O.L. is an American punk rock band formed in 1978 in Long Beach, California. Although most commonly associated with hardcore punk, T.S.O.L.'s music has varied on each release, including such styles as deathrock, art punk, horror punk and other varieties of punk music.
The group was distinguished by their raucous and aggressive musical style which featured an incredibly loud, howling guitar and a thundering distorted bass, backed up with confrontational and offensive lyrics, and correspondingly Bobby's decadent lifestyle. Stick Men With Ray Guns was in many ways performance art, gleefully exploring violence and irrationality. Their sets were openly hostile or combative with the audience. They were completely unconcerned about what people thought of them. They often played unusual or intentionally irritating audio tapes prior to going on stage and sometimes experimented with annoying lighting effects if they had access to the lighting in a club. This seemingly self-destructive behavior was exaggerated whenever they played off their home turf of Dallas, often choosing to open sets out of town with songs they had never practiced.
Before the band started in 1981, Bobby Soxx was notorious for starting fights frequently, [2] urinating on other groups during their shows, and inserting microphones into his anus before leaving the set. [3] In fact, many of these aforementioned stage antics and others only happened once but their fame grew exponentially among the fans as time went on.
A microphone, colloquially nicknamed mic or mike, is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal.
The anus is an opening at the opposite end of an animal's digestive tract from the mouth. Its function is to control the expulsion of feces, unwanted semi-solid matter produced during digestion, which, depending on the type of animal, may include: matter which the animal cannot digest, such as bones; food material after all the nutrients have been extracted, for example cellulose or lignin; ingested matter which would be toxic if it remained in the digestive tract; and dead or excess gut bacteria and other endosymbionts.
In its heyday, the group recorded little in the studio, Clarke once intentionally destroyed the master tapes from a particularly weak recording session, though a few rough mixes survived and have been reluctantly included on various releases. They never toured outside of Texas and were not well known beyond the regional punk scene. However, as interest in the early Texas punk scene increased over time, groups like Stick Men with Ray Guns and The Hugh Beaumont Experience acquired a cult status among punk fans. Stick Men became better known when the Richard Hell/Thurston Moore project, Dim Stars, covered their song "Christian Rat Attack". [3] In 2000, guitarist Clarke Backer released 16 of their recordings on an album entitled Some People Deserve to Suffer. In 2002, the album was picked up, enlarged to 23 tracks, and re-released under the duel label of Emperor Jones/Drag City; the reissue received highly positive reviews from several major press agencies [3] [4] [5] and was named the No. 6 in Mojo's Best Underground Albums of 2002 list. [6]
The Hugh Beaumont Experience was a punk rock band from Fort Worth, Texas. The band's original lineup was Brad Stiles on vocals, Tommie Duncan on guitar, Clay Carlisle on bass, and Carter Kolba on drums. Formed in 1980 by members of the private school, Fort Worth Country Day School, in Fort Worth, they toured throughout Texas in 1981-82, including dates with MDC and The Dead Kennedys. Their nascent success was short-lived, however; the band had broken up by 1983, having released just one 7-inch called Cone Johnson EP and a cassette called Virgin Killers.
In modern English, the term cult has come to usually refer to a social group defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal. This sense of the term is controversial and it has divergent definitions in both popular culture and academia and it also has been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study. It is usually considered pejorative.
Richard Lester Meyers, better known by his stage name Richard Hell, is an American singer, songwriter, bass guitarist and writer.
After spending time in prison and a mental hospital, Bobby Soxx died of liver failure due to acute alcoholism on October 23, 2000. [2]
As their notoriety has increased, both Clarke Blacker and Bob Beeman have participated in a number of in-depth interviews that have appeared online. Their Some People Deserve to Suffer album has now been re-released on the band's label, We Don't Have the Time Music, and is currently available for digital download worldwide. A second album, Rock Against Reagan - Live in Houston April 6, 1984, was released on May 15, 2014 and is now available for digital download as well.
On Thanksgiving weekend 2014, the well known Austin, Texas record store End of an Ear released the vinyl lp "Grave City" as their new End of an Ear label's debut record. The first pressing quickly sold out, and a second pressing was ordered in January, 2017. The second pressing has the record label reversed (white text on a black background) to differentiate the two pressings.
In September 2016 12XU held a simultaneous release of two live vinyl lp albums; "Property of Jesus Christ" and "1,000 Lives to Die", which featured newly restored live performances recorded at two shows in 1984 and 1987. These two records give the listener rather different, but intense performances by this controversial Texas band.
