The
Workin'
Stiffs
These days, few bands are taking it upon them-
selves to bring San Francisco's punk scene out of
its garage-tinged doldrums, and leading the way
are the Workin' Stiffs. With one of the best front-
men in the business, this four man wrecking crew
packs a punch that would send Muhammad Ali
back to his corner. Carrying on in the true tradition
of Sham 69, Cockney Rejects, and GBH, the
Workin' Stiffs are bringing punk rock out of the
garage and back to the streets-where it belongs.
What are your names, and since you are the Workin'
Stiffs, what are your occupations?
My name is Mike, I play guitar, trying to graduate from college
My name is Mundo, I play the bass and I'm a gardener
My name's Eric, I play drums and I'm a truck mechanic
I'm Dave, and I do singing and carpentry.
Where are you guys from?
Mike I grew up in Santa Barbara.
Mundo: I'm from Tehachapi
Eric: I'm mostly from the East Bay, then I moved to Dublin.
Dave: I'm also from the Santa Barbara area.
How did you get together?
Mike: I was living up here to San Francisco, then
Dave came up from Santa Barbara and moved in with
me. then we wanted to get a band started, and we
knew Eric was up here from some friends who knew
him down in Santa Barbara, so we got in touch with
him. Mundo was in Alaska at the time, so we were
sending him tapes of the songs we were putting
together, and he was learning them on the acoustic
bass, then he finally came down, and we started
practicing down in Santa Clara
Dave: One of the reasons we got together is because Mike
was in a band, and Eric was in a band, and I was in a band,
different bands in Santa Barbara, and Mundo was just
always in Santa Barbara being a drunk and making a fool of
himself, and our bands fizzled out, but we kept in touch.
How long have you been together?
Mike: About a year-and-a-half
How did you develop your sound?
Mundo: I listen to a lot of older punk rock. For a while
there when there was just a lot of hardcore bands, I was
getting a little burn out on them like in the late '80s.
early '90s, there were no just straight punk bands, so
found myself not liking a lot of music until there was a
recent explosion on the East Coast: there's a lot of Oil
bands more '77 style punk
I
Dave: Three our four years ago, we didn't do anything
except buy old punk and heavy metal records for a laugh
there was nothing coming out, then all of the sudden
there's a shit load of stuff out from the East now. And it
seems like there are a lot of bands out there that are just
starting up foo, kind of going back to the basics..
Where did you guys learn how to skateboard?
Mundo: I learned to skate one summer in Tehachapi I was
just sitting there and, as you can imagine, there's not
much to do in Tehachapi
Where is Tehachapi?
Mundo: It's about 45 minutes east of Bakersfield. So,
some friends of mine from high school stole a skate-
board from some kid, and then they didn't know what to
do with it, so they gave it me and I leamed how to ride it.
Dave I used to skate the Tea Gardens in Santa Barbara,
that place was the bomb.
Mike: I grew up a block away from the Fly Away bond
in Goleta. It wasn't the craziest place, but it had good
transitions. We skated there for years. And we used to
skate at UCSB, just having the campus cops chase us
for something to do.
How about your influences?
Mike: Musically, we're influenced by older GBH and
English Oil bands, just different stuff. Whatever I write
depends on what I'm listening to the most at the time.
How would you describe your sound?
Dave. It seems like a lot of stuff we listen to might not
be what we end up sounding like. I'll listen to a lot of
old Oil and a lot of old punk and a lot of newer stuff,
and it just comes into a big mix. Don't call us an Oi!
band or straight punk, we're just a mixx
Mundo: We play rock and roll!
Mike. The kind of music we play is getting the tag of
being called street punk right now. That's kind of fair,
because I don't really think of us as like an Oi! band
or just a punk band, either, we lie somewhere in
between. We have some Oi! influences, but we're inflo
enced by older punk rock too.
What bands do you like to go see?
Dave: The US Bombs, the Stitches. One Man Army, the
Lowdowns, Strychnine
Mundo: The Reducers, the Loudmouths
Dave, who are your influences?
Dave I used to love watching Jason Sears from RKL
that guy's a fucking maniac
Mundo: I'd say that Dave's influenced by Evel Knievel
because of some of the shit he does. We played a bar
in Nevada City, and Dave was off the scale that night,
and I don't even remember playing, really.
These people with us were sitting at one of
the tables in the audience, and they had pint
glasses on the table, and Dave runs, jumps,
does a bellyflop on the table, and collapses
one of the pint glasses with his stomach and
walks away completely unscathed, and there
was a big sharp piece sticking out of the bot-
tom of it too. This was during our set
Mike: We started a fire at the Trocadero one
night and wondered if that would be our last
time there, but we ended up playing there the
next month. I thought we might've singed the
disco ball, but
What do you have out now and what's
coming out?
Mike: We've got a 7 on Chapter Eleven
Records out of Sonoma, and we
have an LP/CD out now on East
Bay Menace called Dog Tired. We
have a split 7" coming out with
the Bristles, that'll be on Beer City.
Where do you guys see the
Workin' Stiffs in two years?
Dave: Maybe touring a little bit
more. That's pretty fun.
Personally, for me, in the city.
it's a blast. I love playing in
San Francisco, playing with
the bands that we're playing
with now and the places we
get to play
Mike: I'd like to just see us
putting out the same type of
music we've been putting out
from the start. It takes a while
for band members to get
used to one another and cre-
ate a sound that you consider
your own, so we're still work
ing at that, and we're doing
pretty well. Two years from
now we'll probably have more
records out and just be more
solid, doing the same thing.
playing the same places, and
just keeping the ball going
Eric: I want to go to Europe.
Mundo: I'd like to tour
Hawaii or Brazil
You guys have come a pretty
good way in a short time. How did that happen?
Dave: Well, it definitely wasn't our doing, we
had a lot of people who helped us out along
the way from like our very first show. There's
been a lot of people in the Bay Area who've
bent over backwards to help us out, and we
definitely appreciate that. People like Fast
Mike, the Loudmouths, Bruce Robers, Tim Yo
the Swingin' Utters. George at the Trocadero,
lan and the Randumbs up in Sonoma,
Chapter Eleven Records, the guys in
Strychnine, East Bay Menace Records, and
Ken from Boston.
When people come to your show, what are they
going to see?
Dave: No frills, no faking. What you see is
what you get
Mike: We don't have any gimmicks. We
just got together, four guys playing what
we want to play in terms of sound. We did
the best we could to make that sound, and
now we're just doing the same thing-live
the best way we know how
Brandon Pollack
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