The Burning Nerve Ending Magic Podcast :: A Sun City Girls Story

The year was 1978 at CMU in Mount Pleasant, MI, the U.S. was in a period of "Deep Standby" after the end of the horredndous Vietnam War in 1975, there was the Jonestown Massacre, the beginning of the Iranian revolution, and a historic blizzard that took place in January, which caused over 20 deaths, 100,000 cars to be abandoned on highways, prompting President Carter to declare a disaster area, forcing CMU to close for the first time in 140 years. It was also the same year that Cheech and Chong's subliminal stoner classic Up in Smoke took over drive-ins all across America, as well as Halloween, Bob Dylan's Street Legal, and the same year Charlie Chaplin's remains were stolen from Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland.
But within those school walls, a couple of teenagers shared a dorm room, a hall, and became fast friends theough the prophetic power of music. Roommates Scott Mansfield, Bob Thomas, Alan Bishop, and their neighbor Jim Genette quickly connected and began jamming in the cosmic confines of their sonic space, where time seemed like an illusion and the future burned brighter than a UFO parallel-parking on 1200 S. Franklin St. On this episode, we chat with Mansfield, who had the pleasure and honor of witnessing a young Alan Bishop learn how to play the guitar, Thomas, and his son, Joe, who interviewed Bishop some forty years later for a college project, about their critical connection to a preexisting world that had not yet been influenced by the Sun City Girls, and their metaphysical magic. As we near the end of season two, join us on for this epic expedition into the Salad Days, where the Dire Straits, Bob Dylan, Farrah Fawcett, and anti-draft rallies helped pave the way for our spiritual story to begin.

Ian Folke Svenonius is a multi-instrumentalist, author, filmmaker, and host of the acclaimed web video series Soft Focus in the late 2000s. A legend in the Washington, DC, punk/hardcore movement that shaped the radiating subconscious of the American youth during Regan's destructive reign in the 1980s, Svenonius has lead groups like the mighty Dischord Records' band The Nation of Ulysses, Weird War, XYZ, and his most recent outfit, Escape-ism, whose album "Charge of the Love Brigade," was released last year with radical reception.
Where Svenonius comes into the fractalated fold of the Sun City Girls' legendary lore is the mighty interview he conducted with the Bishops in November 2008, not long after Charlie had passed the previous winter. Taped before a live audience at Cobb's Comedy Club in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, the three, along with a mysteriously masked Mark Gergis, whose piercing presence remained frozen like a statue, set off on a dystopian dialogue through the tonal trenches and spiritual side streets of two of the most celebrated artists of their time.

Campisano has an incredibly interesting relationship and a cosmic connection to the Sun City Girls and its members, in particular, the late, great Charles Gocher. While attending Arizona State University (ASU) in the 1980s, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, but not without its creative challenges. Many may not know this, but Gocher worked in the school cafeteria through Marriott Hotles, and would often pull "pranks" on the more deserving students, but not Campisano! Often seen in the library or lounge area, hidden behind a spiritual smoke screen from his esoteric exhales, reading various books on jazz, art, etc.
Gocher gave alchemical advise to the young student, and it had nothing to do with going to school to be an artist. All the tools we need to achieve the essence of expression are available all around us, and that's exactly what Campisano has done with her career. Having captured some of the most subliminal shots of the band over the years, Campisano's photography and participation in the scene are critical to the culture and the electrifying energy that birthed the Girls, and several others. While music holds the merciless magic of the human spirit, it's the photos that freeze everything in time, safe from sickness and death, and the reaper that patirently waits.

On this episode, we speak to local legend, engineer, musician, and founder of Tempest Recording, Clarke Rigsby, who knew the band before their prolific output of metaphysical material in the 1980s with the Cloaven Tape series. With the release of the legendary compilation "Ominous Clouds - Produced For Citizens For A Non-Nuclear Future", which featured the Sun City Girls' first vinyl appearance, at the time, when the group was a quartet with LInda Cushma, as well as local groups like Hans Olson, who founded the influential Sun Club in Tempe, Jamaican-based blues singer Big Pete Pearson, Pete Cannon, who played in Poet's Corner, and Rigsby himself, we virtually travel 1,708 miles across country to better understand the genesis of the band, and their heroic history.

Before the highly influential and groundbreaking "Riot Grrrl" movement began taking shape in the 1990s, with bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, empowering women in music and the arts, there was the Phoenix, Arizona-based trio Burning Bush out in the desert, laying the groundwork for perhaps one of the most important periods in the American underground scene at the time. Featuring members Audrey Creed (drums), Denise Tanguay (bass, vocals), and our most recent guest, Thomascyne Buckley (guitar, vocals), the band's music symbolized a giant fist made of creative concrete that punched through the fake shiny veneers of the system that led with a crooked smile during the pungent politics that riddled the 1980s. Like most of the groups coming out of the Tempe/Phoenix scene at the time, Burning Bush were one of the many that coexisted alongside the Sun City Girls, as each of their electrifying ethos cut through the existentialism of life, and exposed the beauty of community connection, and creative freedom.