Happy Valentine’s Day! Earlier this week these recordings of legendary San Francisco band Hickey came my way. It included a 1997 recording of a Valentine’s Day show at Komotion, which I thought would be a cool present to you. http://remoteoutposts.blogspot.com/2013/02/hickey-ultra-heliocentric-underworld-of.html
It also reminded me of the time my band played with them in Concord. I tell this story a lot, so I thought I put it on my blog.
By Eric Louie
In the years after high school I had a band, 3 Hunglo. One of our early shows was at the Time Out Sports Bar in Concord where a guy named Tony was trying to have shows on off nights. We ended up getting a Tuesday show with Hickey. It was 1997, I think.
A local hard rock band called Toxic Love was the third band. Despite even Tony’s suggestions, they insisted on playing first, which sucked, since us and Hickey were from San Francisco. No one from the city is going to Concord, especially on a Tuesday night, even if it is free. But that’s what happened, and the bar was essentially empty when the rest of us played. I remember the Toxic Love folks, whose bassist/singer used a wireless connection for his instrument, and the friends they brought left while we played.
So when Hickey played, there really was no one but our band and a couple guys at the bar. I remember thinking Hickey talked a lot between songs. It included mentions of mullets, which the Toxic Love guy had. Too bad he wasn’t there to hear that. In a joking threat, Hickey said they would play a 20-minute song about the creation of the world, which I later learned was “In the Beginning.”
One of the guys at the bar, who really was in a cowboy hat, then got pissed and said he didn’t want to hear that in his bar. I guess noisy, loud punk doesn’t mix. He wanted to fight, but his friend calmed him down before anything real happened. He would have had to walk across an empty bar, and never got out of his chair. Not like anyone wanted to fight anyway.
That was the first I had seen Hickey, and we talked to them after. The next week or so I saw them in a packed San Francisco Mission District warehouse. I think it was Komotion, on 16th near Harrison street. I mainly knew places by location rather than name, and also only remember going there a couple times. Soon after Hickey broke up, and there were other bands the three members made that I saw.
I then moved to Stockton, so I wasn’t around a lot. Then I heard Matty Luv, Hickey’s singer/guitarist, died. I didn’t know him really well, but I was really sad to hear that. I knew a lot of my friends were close, and also that it was a big loss to to the local music scene that is still a big part of my life.
There’s a Web site with Hickey and other Matty Luv music free at http://www.mattyluv.com.
Eric Louie 