MY BACK STORY

Like most people my I age, I got interested in music in the late 1950s, but it became an obsession with me by 1961 or so. It was the height of popularity for the Girl Groups and the Phil Spector (the murdering bastard) Wall of Sound. I was primed and ready by the time the Beatles showed up a year or two later. I was hooked in a big way.

By the early 1970s though, I had become tired of the mainstream rock and was more and more fascinated by the peculiar jazz and rock experiments that were coming out of England, France and Germany. Then I simply drifted away from mainstream rock.

I became interested again in rock music when while working for a local public access radio station KCHU in Dallas when I met Mike Haskins who invited me to come see his band The Nervebreakers one weekend sometime around late 1976 or so. I did and was blown away. I remembered why I like rock and roll. It was an epiphany. I later joined on bass and played with them until leaving the band in January 1978 after opening for the Sex Pistols in Dallas.

I continued working on and off with the Nervebreakers as sometime manager, sometime confidant, before starting Bag of Wire in the fall of 1980 with Nervebreakers Mike Haskins and Bob Childress when the band began to splinter. I left the band a few months later and Bag of Wire fell apart fairly quickly despite their popularity at the time.

Soon after leaving Bag of Wire I started the infamous Stick Men With Ray Guns (SMWRG) with singer Bobby Soxx in the spring of 1981. The rest is history I guess. Along with the Soxx, drummer Scott Elam and bassist Bobby Beeman, SMWRG began to terrorize Texas punk audiences, building a crazy reputation over the years. SMWRG was nothing but pure Id (look it up). We were the manifestation of an unrestrained and uncensored frustrations of everyone involved. As the live recordings released in the past few years well show, we let it all out on stage. Nothing was held back.

CLARKE BLACKER

 

PHOTO

Performing Creating to Destroy the Universe II Live at Howl, Fort Myers, Florida August 16, 2018