Will York - Who Cares Anyway: Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age

Praise for WHO CARES ANYWAY

This is a really cool book that describes a San Francisco that was such a unique and creative place, and which will probably never exist in this form again. Great stuff documented with detail and respect! BILL GOULD, FAITH NO MORE

Some of the most interesting, if not always easily delightful, music and art comes from loons larking about on edges. The San Francisco-based art-terrorists, whose stories Will York captures, reveals a scene where every bizarre cranny both amuses and alarms, keenly giving the feeling of fascinated unease the musicians themselves inspire. BRIAN DOHERTY, author of THIS IS BURNING MAN & DIRTY PICTURES

If your concept of San Francisco rock starts with The Jefferson Airplane and ends with The Beau Brummels, then good for you because The Grateful Dead were terrible. On the other hand, youre missing out on some of the oddest, most oddball, and downright oddballest music ever created. Thankfully, Will York is determined to introduce you to the sights, sounds, sites and wounds of excellent but under-heralded artists like Flipper, the Residents, Toiling Midgets, Caroliner, Pop-o-Pies, The Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and even MTVs Faith No More. Great book! MARK PRINDLE, markprindle.com

An evocative deep dive into San Franciscos leftfield post-punk underground, before it was quashed by the successive waves of dotcom booms that rendered the corporatization, unaffordability, and tech orientation of a boutique city. Through crucial first-hand testimony from some of the scenes prime movers, Who Cares Anyway illuminates the creative forces that sparked it, underpinned by an unprecedented blend of situationist thought, substance misuse, and psychosis. DAVID KATZ

A fascinating tale of self-made weirdo punk visionaries plotting revenge on the fine arts. Warning: Extremely Compelling. OWEN KLINE, director of FUNNY PAGES

The late-20th Century Hate Ashbury underground of Flipper, Dead Kennedys, Pop-O-Pies, Toiling Midgets, Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, etc., might be the most riveting, radical, nihilistic, and influential rock history never told. Will Yorks Who Cares Anyway captures the time and place and attitude of the last great American subculture. STEVEN BLUSH, author/filmmaker AMERICAN HARDCORE

Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Caroliner, U.S. Saucer, Amarillo Records, Bananafish, Great Phone Calls so much of this is in our musical DNA. What made it all so fun and enticing was how the elements of darkness, sadness, anger, and humor were possibly part of an elaborate fiction, an inside joke, or maybe even yet, completely sincere. I like to think it was all that (and likely more!) at once. Reading Who Cares Anyway is like finally sitting down for a night of stories with long lost relatives. If you werent there and admired from afar, like us, youll get a sense of where you came from. And if youre someone who likes the mystery, dont worry I assure you I still believe in the singing bull. GEOLOGIST, ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

This thorough examination of a time and place in music and performance art history takes you to an astounding and beautiful realm. I admire Will York for taking on the task of explaining the unexplainable, and for putting into words an experience most could only fathom with their eyes and ears while they were in the process of living it. DAME DARCY, CAROLINER

A HEADPRESS BOOK
First published by Headpress in 2023, Oxford, United Kingdom

WHO CARES ANYWAY
Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age

Text copyright WILL YORK
This volume copyright HEADPRESS 2023
Cover design and layout: MARK CRITCHELL
Index: Edwin Canfield
The Publisher thanks Leigh Bushell

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The moral rights of the author have been asserted. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the Publisher.

Lyrics used with kind permission.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-915316-05-9 paperback
ISBN 978-1-915316-06-6 ebook
ISBN NO-ISBN hardback

HEADPRESS. POP AND UNPOP CULTURE

Exclusive NO-ISBN special edition hardbacks
and other items of interest are available at HEADPRESS.COM

Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its concatenation of causes and effects.

J.L. Borges, The Zahir

I n April of 1999, I ordered some items from the website of Amarillo Records in what must have been one of my earliest forays into the realm of e-commerceif one can even call it that. A look back at the archived website (no, not amarillorecords.com, but members.aol.com/starleigh7/cat_al.html) tells me that I must have paid with a check, as the only other forms of payment they accepted were cash or money order.

Among the items in my order was the Three Doctors Bands Back to Basics Live LP, which, at $4.50, had been priced to move. The blurb on the website called it Beyond parody, beyond integrity, beyond conceptualbeyond listenable! I may have taken that as a challenge. I remember being amused by the cover art and intrigued, if somewhat baffled, by the liner notes. Alas, when I put the record on, I discovered that it was warpedas in, physically warped, enough so that it wobbled on my turntable.

Sheepishly, I emailed the label to see about getting a replacement. To my relief, I received a prompt and courteous reply from label head Gregg Turkington, who also happened to be the lead vocalist for the Three Doctors. Sorry about that! he wrote, before parenthetically adding that it may be a blessing in disguise that yet another copy of that album was somehow destroyed.

Pressing my luck, I sent a follow-up email to inquire about my odds of ever stumbling across a couple of out-of-print records by another of Turkingtons bands, the Zip Code Rapists, at the local record store. Not too good, he replied. However, I do have a tiny quantity of The Man Cant Bust Our Music and Sing and Play the Three Doctors and Other Sounds of Today here; I would sell you the EP for $10 and the LP for $4 (as it is a shitty, shitty later pressing on truly rotten vinyl). It was a deal.

Its only a slight exaggeration to call the ensuing shipmentwhich also included an Amarillo Records sampler CD and a few back issues of Turkingtons 1980s zine Breakfast Without Meatthe inspiration for this book. I could backtrack a little furtherto the time a fellow DJ at WXYC-Chapel Hill introduced me to comedian Neil Hamburger or the time a listener called in and requested that I play something by a band called Faxed Head. But really, it was the one-two punch of Back to Basics and Sing and Play the Three Doctors that cemented my fascination with San Francisco, or at least the mythical version of it I was concocting inside my head.