German Shepherds: San Francisco’s eeriest band
In the 1980s, San Francisco’s underground found itself gestating eerie synthpunks German Shepherds, one of the strangest pairings attached to the city’s musical history.
Quite a feat considering the Bay Area included mutoid avant-punks and synth mavericks from The Residents, Chrome, Tuxedomoon, and Minimal Man. Yet German Shepherds seriously pushed DIY minimal squalor to a whole depth of disquieting edge, spiking in both their hissing electronic conjurings and fabricated biographies an unsettling blur between reality and US suburbia’s subterranean nightmares.
Little is known about German Shepherds. What can be pieced together is that the project was founded in 1981 by Stephen Scheatzle and Mark Hutchinson, the latter operating under the moniker Sandy Stark, originally from Ohio but burnished in San Francisco’s febrile, leftfield petri dish. Soaking up the anxieties of the era, the duo dropped their debut EP, The Legendary German Shepherds, the following year, featuring Jim Osbourne’s ominous artwork of either an Alsatian with blood dripping from its maw, or a hyper gory version of the said dog having mauled its owner, disembowelled intestines on display, depending on which version you nabbed.
Including the chilling ‘Message From JJ’, an audio excerpt of Reverend Jim Jones’ many taped sermons to his People’s Temple cult, and its comic horror artwork, German Shepherds were already crafting a reputation among the punk fringes as a head-spinningly provocative entity. Further cuts would find selection on 1983’s The “You’ll Hate This Record” Record compilation, plus the ‘THC / Quit It’ 7”, before unleashing their debut and sole album. Eager to drum up publicity, German Shepherds fabricated the sordid rumour that Stark was arrested on child molestation charges and hung himself in jail, a questionable act of jest that no doubt spurred morbid punks to seek their records among the scant indie retailers that stocked them.
Dropped in 1985 via their own M&S Music, the aptly titled Music For Sick Queers stood as the churning culmination of their warped lyrical reportage and soiled imagination. Caked in lo-fi crust and droning buzz, German Shepherds craft a uniquely festering slice of Americana, a synthpunk collage curdled with small-town terror scoring white picket violence and conservative psychosis. Such dissections of the US psyche flash with knotty viscerality the moment album opener ‘Communist Control’ emits its hypnotic trance, a hive of backward vocals and insectoid fuzz spiking the cut with alien radiations that truly feel like the KGB is reaching your mind amid its subliminal frequencies. A perfect riposte to the Red Scare paranoia that flared up under President Ronald Reagan’s cartoon patriotism.
Further Cold War escalations provide potent thematic fuel for Music For Sick Queers. Slathered in leaden, dead noise and askance sirens, ‘Complacent American’ depicts the grim terror of not making the fallout shelter in time before an impending nuclear missile, and ‘Armageddon Man’ observes an evangelical leader pushing the ‘little red button’ and inviting the end times as an eager servant of the Lord, peppered with aural scratches and mosquito debris amid its fanatical mulch.
German Shepherds rarely display much in the way of aggression, which is the key to Music For Sick Queers’ ugly sting. The album’s most skin-crawlingly creepy moments are the ostensible love songs, sung in a listless and numbed paralysis, prickling with gut-twisting threat throughout. ‘Love Me’ layers thin and artificial synth wines atop a B-movie organ, the repeated “I Love You” refrains engulfed by demonic breathing, glaring ever more menacing behind the suspected vignette of unrequited romance, and ‘I Adore You’ infests itself even deeper into your fever dreams, trance-inducing sequencers and brittle rhythm boxes scab and coagulate to a lascivious communique with God as evil plans are underway: “Oh, Lord… I submit to you. I offer a sacrifice. Permit me to offer this sacrifice… I want your blood. Share your blood… oh, God.”
What ties Music For Sick Queers together is German Shepherds’ childish lens. Where Dead Kennedys would spit ‘I Kill Children’ with rotten sadism through the eyes of the murderer, Hutchinson and Stark present their tales of suburban squalor and private alienation from the perspective of those who have lost control, know not what they do, or commit sin cushioned with the twisted and warped justifications that eschew wrongdoing. Such a thematic vantage is illustrated on its most uncomfortable cut, ‘Booty Jones’, allegedly exploring the crimes of paedophile Kenneth Parnell via an invented monologue peering into the mind of such a predator’s disturbed thought processes: “What do you say, Timmy? / Let’s you and me go for a little ride”.
Despite such rancid material, at Music For Sick Queers’ shrivelled heart is a cold, gallows humour. German Shepherds never veer into draining self-seriousness or pompous excoriations of political ills; each track, no matter how dark, is charged with the sense that Hutchinson and Stark are two blokes with a very sick sense of humour, enjoying dropping a nasty little record out in the musical wilderness, stifling grim giggles as they weave yarns about their sullying mythos, and eagerly pushing the buttons of America’s hobgoblins and sacred cows for the sheer provocative thrill. It’s not big or clever, but it creates a pulpy, EC Comics aura that pulls the record from ever detouring into earnest pretensions.
That said, Music For Sick Queers is indeed an eerie, claustrophobic listen, lifting the nation’s rotten bark and exposing the putrid writhe and teeming dank underneath the Stars and Stripes, a Boiled Angel satire of ‘Morning in America’ Republican cloy. 40 years on from its debut, German Shepherds exorcised a grubby synthpunk gem from the eeriest pits of Americana, an enduring ode to suburban horror both dripping with serrated dread and nasty, acidic smirk.
