Description

The Surrogate Brains hailed from the city of Stockton, California and had emerged after the young band members had began hanging together on the North side of the city. Singer Kendon-Walker Smith had grown up with guitarist Dennis Talley, feeding on a steady diet of Van Halen and Black Sabbath. When Talley had moved to the North side he had recruited Steve Rogers and ‘Duby War’ into his ranks for a new band that would become Surrogate Brains. Kendon Walker Smith (Surrogate Brains) : “I wasn’t really supposed to be in the band, except Dennis was working up songs that I had written. Duby was essentially slated to be their solitary lead singer, but I just hung around and was more prolific of a songwriter. The first show we played was at 924 Gilman and it was nothing I took seriously at the time. I was just having fun. Steve was the most ambitious of us and he was responsible for getting us out of Stockton and offering us out to any venue that would have us, especially Gilman Street. We played with just about every band that was making the scene at the time. While we were fans of many of the bands in that time, the only Lookout band that we connected with on a social level was Sewer Trout.” David Hayes of Lookout! Records approached the band with the offer of releasing an EP for the label. The only stipulated condition was the inclusion of the track “If The Things They Say Are True”. Recorded with Pavements Gary Young at the helm, the band would proceed to rip through six tracks of off the wall, albeit politically minded upbeat punk on the “Surrogate Serenades” 7” EP. The band benefited with the dual vocals, adding an interesting dimension on top of the various tempo’s rattled out by Johnny Cruz (later of Samiam). The Kendon hand drawn cover was influenced, or directly copied from a Marvel Comics cover of the X Men offshoot ‘Excalibur’. Being one of the early bands not directly from the local Bay Area scene, a sense of being outsiders was prevalent. Kendon Walker Smith (Surrogate Brains) : “We were always set apart being from Stockton and plus having our provincial idiosyncrasies that I’m certain were points of amusement for the tastemakers of the Bay Area scene. I was fond of LSD and under the influence more often than not. I remember the occasional off the cuff remark here and there and thinking that maybe these kids were hip enough to forsake the druggie subculture that I was obviously buying into at the time. Years later, I would move to San Francisco and hang out with the Bay kids and hear their back stories and find out that a lot of them were just as bad if not worse. The scene was very distinct and independent of the mainstream rock thing, which was a strong thing back then. The beginning of possibilities that we could rewrite the story of rock with a culture of kids who were connected to the audience rather than being 40 year olds covering subject matter that targeted adolescents. Gilman was a sanctuary and Lookout was in respects the documentation of said culture.. If not for Lookout , we’d be even more obscure and forgotten. As with any generation, it’s important to feel like whatever creative expression was valid and even though I can barely stand to listen to any if that stuff now, somewhere there is some kid who is turning on to it despite our never getting signed to Warner Brothers or Columbia”

Track list:
1. Super Spectacular Day
2. You
3. Tide On My Soiled Genes
4. If The Things They Say Are True
5. Down Town
6. America, The Machine