San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Spring Valley springboard
The Beat Farmers, whose debut album is being reissued, will also celebrate their days playing in an East County dive bar
The Spring Valley Inn has never been mentioned in the same breath as The Troubadour in Los Angeles or The Marquee in London as a key musical incubator for young bands that went on to earn recording contracts and tour the world.
But in 1983, the Spring Valley Inn was the launching pad for the Beat Farmers, one of the finest and most rollicking rock bands to come out of San Diego in any decade, before or since. The beloved dive bar’s official capacity back then was all of 49, although the Beat Farmers’ weekly weekend gigs there drew wall-to-wall, triple-digit crowds.
One of those gigs was recorded for an album that, in 2003, was released as “Live at the Spring Valley Inn, 1983.” It is soon to be reissued in a two-cd set with the Beat Farmers’ 1985 debut album, “Tales of the New West.” In this case, the “New West” began in an intimate bar nestled between El Cajon and Jamul.
“The Spring Valley Inn didn’t have a stage, and it was so small we had to move the pool table out of the way to set up our equipment,” said guitarist-singer Jerry Raney. “It got so crowded they were afraid the fire marshal would shut them down.”
Raney chuckled when asked how this unlikely residency in this unlikely nightspot came about. He gives full credit to drummer and improbably deep-voiced singer Dan Mclain, who before co-founding the Beat Farmers had been a key member of the pioneering San Diego punk band The Penetrators.
Mclain, who used the stage name Country Dick Montana, died in 1995. One of his specialties during the Beat Farmers’ typically uproarious performances was to jump from table to table, knocking drinks on cheering concertgoers in the process. For good measure, he would lie on his back on a table or on a bar counter, place a beer bottle between his cowboy-booted feet, and — with wildly differing degrees of success — pour the beer into his mouth.
“Dick went to the people who ran the Spring Valley Inn,” Raney recalled, “and said: ‘Can we practice and experiment on your customers? We just want free drinks (in return).’ It started going from there.
“Before that, we had practiced for two months at a place we called ‘The Hippie Pad’ on Fairmount Avenue, overlooking the stadium in Mission Valley. That’s when Dick thought it would be good to find a dive bar for us to play in.”
“The Spring Valley Inn didn’t have a stage, and it was so small we had to move the pool table out of the way to set up our equipment. It got so crowded they were afraid the fire marshal would shut them down.” Jerry Raney • guitarist-singer of the Beat Farmers
Larger than life
Along with bassist Rolle Love, Raney is one of the two surviving members of the four-man band’s original lineup. He has led the latest iteration of the group, now known as The Farmers, for the past 15 years.
Larger than life, onstage and off, Mclain died onstage, midsong, during a 1995 Beat Farmers gig in Whistler, British Columbia. He was only 40.
Buddy Blue, who left the band after just three years to forge his own artistic path, died at his La Mesa home in 2006. He was 48. Like, Mclain, Blue (real name: Bernard Seigal) died of a heart attack.
The original edition of the Beat Farmers lasted until just 1986, when Joey Harris ably took over for Blue. Harris remained in the group until Mclain’s death nine years later and was featured on the band’s third through seventh albums.
The first edition of the Beat Farmers earned an instant fan in then-san Diego State University student Dan Perloff, who was working here at the time as the local marketing rep for the Los Angeles indie label Rhino Records. His enthusiasm for the Beat Farmers was so palpable that he almost single-handedly got the band signed to Rhino in 1984.
“All these different people came to hear us at the Spring Valley Inn — the punk-rockers, the New Wavers, bikers and old country music guys — and everybody liked what we were doing and got along. Then Dan Perloff came in and he said, ‘I love this band!’ That led to us recording ‘Live at the Spring Valley Inn,’ which originally was just a local release on Buddy’s label, as a kind of demo tape for Rhino. When we were getting ready to rerelease ‘Tales of the New West,’ Dan said we should throw the live album in and make it a two-disc set.”
Before he moved here to attend SDSU, Perloff had become an avid follower of various roots-rock bands in Los Angeles. His favorites included Los Lobos, The Blasters and Rank and File, which was co-founded by Carlsbad brothers Chip and Tony Kinman (the latter of whom died in 2018).
“I discovered George Jones and country music on a grander scale through hearing groups like Rank and File,” Perloff said. “When I heard the Beat Farmers at the Spring Valley Inn, I thought they were the best of everything — Jerry and Buddy, especially, with Dan providing a unique comic touch. And I could go hear them twice every weekend in Spring Valley. I started lobbying for Rhino to sign the band.”
Hubba, hubba, hubba!
The Beat Farmers’ landmark debut album, “Tales of the New West,” was released by Rhino in 1985. A gem of no-nonsense rock, country and cow-punk — its 12 songs clock in at a remarkably compact 31 minutes and 39 seconds — “Tales of the New West” will be reissued May 7 on vinyl by Beverly Hills-based Blixa Sounds, which counts Perloff among its staff.
On April 2, the digitally remastered album will be released in a deluxe, two-cd version set that pairs it with the 21-song “Live at the Spring Valley Inn, 1983.” Originally released in 2003 on Blue’s label, Clarence Records, the live album was recorded on a twotrack Teac tape recorder. It was released on vinyl in a limited edition, two-album set for Record Store Day last fall.
“That sold out almost instantly. Now, you can only find it on ebay,” Perloff said proudly.
The rough and ready live album captures its time and place as the original Beat Farmers flex their musical muscles with spunk, efficiency and a sense of purpose rare in such a young band.
Those qualities are even more in evidence on “Tales of the New West,” which was produced by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin and recorded on a shoestring budget of just $4,000. Guests on the album include Harris, San Diego music mainstay Paul Kamanski, the Kinman Brothers, The Bangles’ Vicki Peterson, The Plimsouls’ Peter Case and — playing the sax solo on “Showbiz” — “Tales of the New West” producer Berlin.
The album mixes such Beat Farmers classics as Raney’s “Selfish Heart,” the resplendent “Bigger Stones” and “The California Kid” (both written by Kamanski) with hard-driving versions of Bruce Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe,” Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” and Kingston Trio alum John Stewart’s “Never Goin’ Back.” Another San Diegan, Dane Conover, wrote “Happy Boy,” which Montana made into an audience singalong with such lines as: I was walkin’ down the street on a sunny day /
Hubba, hubba, hubba, hubba, hubba ... Well, I’m a happy boy / Happy boy!
“We were little bit rockabilly and a lot rock ’n’ roll, and we also had roots in punk rock,” said Raney, who grew up in El Cajon and befriended soon-to-be-legendary music critic Lester Bangs when both were in the eighth grade.
“We fit in a lot of musical areas, and that enabled us to open for a lot of different bands in L.A., from The Blasters and Los Lobos to The Bangles and T.S.O.L. Later, when we started touring nationally, we opened concerts for everyone from Joe Walsh and Johnny Winter to Jefferson Starship and, at River Fest in Minneapolis, Stevie Wonder. And we did very well on our own tours, headlining clubs the size of the (600-capacity) Belly Up.”
The Beat Farmers so impressed David Letterman when they appeared on his TV show in 1991 that he said he’d like to become a member of the band. Ironically, the song the band performed that night, Harris’ haunting “Hideway,” found a goggle-clad, atypically subdued Mclain playing an accordion. That move may have been made to protect the members of Letterman’s band, who accompanied the Beat Farmers for their network TV debut.
Or, as Raney once noted of Mclain in a Union-tribune interview: “He’s the only person I’ve ever seen knock himself out with his own guitar!”
Hometown heroes who toured the nation and Europe multiple times, the Beat Farmers performed here at the Street Scene festival more than any other San Diego band in the event’s 25-year history. Mclain’s 1995 death led his bandmates to wisely announce that the Beat Farmers were history, although they performed together in different configurations under different band names.
“We always gave it our all,” said Raney, who rose to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s in such top San Diego bands as Glory and Jerry Raney & The Shames.
“If the Beat Farmers were opening a concert, the headlining band had to bring its A-game, or we would steal the show. And if we were headlining on an off night in Wichita, in between major cities, and it wasn’t a large crowd, we’d work harder and do even more. We built a nice audience, and I was proud of the fact that we could go out and do successful tours, even when we didn’t have a new album out to promote.”
george.varga@sduiontribune.com