Punk pisses off

Pub date August 26, 2008
SectionMusicSectionMusic Features

PREVIEW I don’t know how you can call yourself punk rock and not love the Urinals. OK, I know, you bought your punk credentials at Hot Topic and had them validated at last year’s Warped Tour ’cause you managed to sit through the baby-faced oldsters of Sum 41. But, hey, you haven’t lived — nor have you ever truly visited a urinal — till you’ve heard the now-30-year-old influential unit’s muy-primitivo "Salmonella" or "You Piss Me Off." This is punk before it got shoved into a uniform.

It’s apt then that the 100 Flowers alter ego project headlines the first annual Your Flesh Invitational. Never you mind that the mag — resurrected three years ago as an online pub — was birthed in 1981 in Minnesota, of all places, by Californians Peter Davis and Ron Clark, Ferret Comix’s Dave Roth, and Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould, no less. Silly Mouldie decided to dü the music dü instead of the musical journalism dü, and the bristly, bustling, cantankerous rock rag subsequently moved to Chicago in 1999 and ceased regular print production in ’04. Yet why produce a show there when this city is ripe for plundering and rich with like-minded souls. Remember, it’s YOUR Flesh — not the man’s — and hence the presence of stellar local fleshpots like Nothing People and the Traditional Fools, capering and cavorting beside the Northwestern angular-rock scions of Intelligence and the Chicago snot-rockers of Mannequin Men.

YOUR FLESH INVITATIONAL With Urinals, Intelligence, Mannequin Men, Nothing People, and the Traditional Fools. Sun/31, 8 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com