With Tiki Oasis happening at this very moment, there’s a lot of people and bands travelling from all over the world to San Diego. Combine that with the Surf Guitar 101 Festival that happened just last week, there’s a lot of surf/garage bands on tour right now coming through the San Diego area. King Flamingo, The Greasy Gills, and the Boss Martians are three of them. While none of these bands are playing the main stage at Oasis this year, there is a lot of overflow of bands. Some playing the room parties and/or overflow to the local clubs and even restaurants. These bands played the Til Two Club on Wednesday, July 31, which is the first night of Tiki Oasis.
We were at a party before going to this show, so we got to the Til Two Club a little late and missed King Flamingo. But I did buy some of their merch, as it was dirt cheap ($3 for a cassette, $5 for a 7″, and $10 for a full length album!). It was funny, when buying the merch, I gave the guy one of my business cards for this very blog. He glanced at the pictures on it and said “Is that the Wyld Gooms?!” Good eye! Turns out some of the members play on some of their albums or compilation releases! Anyways, King Flamingo play echoey surf garage tunes with a gothic twist. One of the 7″s I picked up has covers of the B-52s and the Misfits on it. I haven’t had time to check it out yet, but you can hear what they sound like here:
The Greasy Gills were up next. They’re from Oakland, I believe, and they actually come down to San Diego quite a bit! They got the surf rock thing down with a bouncy beat. A lot of fun and I will definitely check them out again!
Then the Boss Martians. They were boss! When we parked our car in front of the club, Evan Foster was out walking around the street with his guitar. “Warming up?”. “No, cooling down!” It was HOT inside the Til Two Club! Doing more research, I realized why he looked familiar: he’s been playing guitar with the Sonics in their latest incarnations! WOW! I love the latest version of the Sonics and have seen them a few times in the past 10 years. “This Is The Sonics” is just an incredible album, one that once it ends, I just put it back on again. Anyways, the Boss Martians took control of the stage and did it all: surf, garage, songs with vocals and a lot of instrumentals too. They’ve been around for about 25 years now and their experience showed. They got a new EP of garage surf instrumentals called “Venus & The Western Sky” which is recommended.
Here’s some pictures of them:
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