02 December 2007

The Offs

Re-uploaded 05/13/2024. Enjoy, NØ.
 


The Original line-up of The Offs was: Billy Hawk - guitar, Don Vinil - vocals, Fast Floyd - bass, & Bob Steeler - drums. They were later joined by Bob Roberts - saxophone. The Offs' singer, Don Vinil (who sadly died of a heroin overdose on Ninth St. in New York in 1983), was one of the first openly gay people in the West Coast punk scene. V.Vale of Search & Destroy & RE/Search introduced Vinil to guitarist Billy Hawk after Vinil was kicked out of his first band, Grand Mal. The Offs formed in late 1977 as just a goof between Billy Hawk, Don Vinil, & a girl named Olga. They played around, various wanna-be musicians drifted in & out of the band. Gradually everyone involved got more & more serious.

The Offs were unique among the first wave of West Coast punk bands in maintaining a home base on both coasts. In San Francisco, their manager discovered the Deaf Club as a live venue, & the Offs released records on the labels CD Presents and 415 Records. In New York City, they hung out with Basquiat (who scrawled their album cover), & released a single on Max's Kansas City Records. The greatest thing about this San Francisco sextet was their inability to be pigeon-holed. Were they punk? New wave? Avant-garde? Art rock? No New York noise? A new strain of art jazz? Some odd form of mutant ska gone wrong with bleating sax & screeching vocals? Like their U.K. contemporaries, Blurt, they were sort of all these things, & still others with names that haven't been invented. But what tied them to the punk community was the basic blazing energy to everything they did. These weren't a bunch of art school posers, they were smash-it-up party skanksters who wanted to do something fresh within an absolutely remarkably creative late-'70s Bay Area scene -- in cahoots with Crime, Nuns, Avengers, Negative Trend, Flipper, Pink Section, Tuxedomoon, Vktms, Mutants, Lewd, Dils, Zeros, & more.

Most of their earlier recordings have been nearly impossible to get but recently a live recording of The Offs has been released on Vampir Records, recorded by Terry Hammer at the infamous Mabuhay Gardens in 1980.

The OFFs from Various - Can You Hear Me? Music from the Deaf Club
Optional Music OPT LP001, 1980.

6. OFFS "Hundred Dollar Limo"
7. OFFS "Die Babylon"
8. OFFS "I've Got the Handle"

12 comments:

  1. ORIGINAL BASSIST WAS DENNY DEGORIO

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  2. Who played sax on the Offs' Max's single?

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    Replies
    1. Bob Roberts Skyline Studio New York City with Peter Crowley producing and mixing

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  3. I've been looking for hundred dollar limo forever. Any chance you could reload it?

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    Replies
    1. You're search is over. Re-uploaded. Thanks for the request & comment.

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  4. Awesome - thanks! Such a great song, wish they would have done a studio version of it. That said, this is pretty tight.

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  5. Does anyone ever mention how Billy Hawk beat women, one nearly to death in southern Ca?

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    Replies
    1. I guess you just did.

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    2. That was Floyd, not Billy Hawke.

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  6. Does anyone know Don's real last name? I knew it once (I swear he told me--we hung out together in SF, in a small circle of weirdo gay punks) but that was 45 years ago. And I've never seen it anywhere--on the single Everyones a Bigot the credits are Don Vinil and Billy Hawk.

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  7. 1: Don McFarland (Vinil) overdosed because of desperation. he was a genius surrounded by careerists accelerating a decline into mediocracy and conformity.
    2. the junkies and careerists in the band (guitarist&drummer) who slavishly followed howie clown's (clown was later Reprise Records prez) dictum. following that they destroyed their authenticity & original sound by desperately attempting to conform to the commercially popular "new wave" promulgated by the plantation system.
    3.their goal of finally losing their day jobs (loafing about/doing& selling drugs) came to naught. Billy is still smuggling souls
    4: the Wikipedia article is consumerist junkie bullshit
    BTW Denny wasn't their first bass player...

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    Replies
    1. Thanks anonymous.

      Someone wanted to know Don's last name.

      An anonymous commenter posited that Denny was the first bassist. I never said that.

      Bad drugs have killed many good people, but more have died because of assholes that influenced them.

      & wiki is wiki, what do you expect???

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