PUNK ROCK changed Joe Sib’s life, but San Jose changed his name. Before his parents divorced, Sib was growing up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, among redwoods, horses and acres of undisturbed natural beauty that he quickly came to despise. Fed up with talking to trees and staring longingly at skateboarding magazines, his hunger for excitement was only temporarily sated by relocating with his mother to Santa Cruz. In 1982, at age 15, he moved in with his father in San Jose, which for him at the time was like moving to New York City. Things would never be the same again.
“The first day in the smoking section at Westmont High, I’m sitting there, and this girl says to me, ‘Hey, do you like punk rock?'” Sib remembers. “I say, ‘Yeah.’ And she says, ‘Do you want to meet other people who like punk rock?’ I go ‘OK.’
“So I walk over there, and on the steps in the middle of the smoking section in the quad, you’ve got all the guys with the little mustaches and the Zeppelin T-shirts, and then all these punk rockers. Skinheads, Mohawks, bleached hair, everything. And I remember this guy comes over to me and goes, ‘What’s your name, man?’
I say, ‘I’m Joe Subbiondo.’
“He’s like, ‘Joe who?’ ‘Joe Subbiondo.’ He’s like ‘Aw, no way, dude, you’re Joe Sib, man! You’re Joe Sib!’
“I wasn’t even on that campus 30 minutes, and I was changed for the rest of my life.”
Not that everybody believed it at the time.
“Someone called me and asked, ‘Is Joe Sib there?’ My dad’s like, ‘Excuse me? Joe Sib?’ I told him, ‘They gave me, I guess, a nickname.’ He said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it; those never stick.’
“Here I am, I’m a 43-year-old man, and there’s a beautiful Italian name gone forever, at the wave of a hand of a guy with a skinhead.”
Sib, who’s telling this story by phone on the way to his office in Los Angeles, pauses—which, by the way, he almost never does.
“That right there,” he says, “is what California Calling is about.”
Hot Wax
California Calling, which comes to the Improv in San Jose on Oct. 7, is Sib’s one-man, spoken-word show about growing up in the South Bay’s now-legendary ’80s skate-punk scene. Sib is a Hollywood success story, now best known as the founder of Sideonedummy Records, to which he has signed popular bands like the Gaslight Anthem, Gogol Bordello, 7 Seconds, Anti Flag and Flogging Molly.
Before that, Sib was the lead singer of Wax, a post-Pixies alt-band that found cult fame with the video for its single “California.” Directed by an up-and-coming Spike Jonze—and later banned from daytime airplay by MTV—it featured a man on fire running through the streets in slow-motion, in one continuous cut, for the length of the song.
The band had met Jonze skateboarding, and another video he did for them, for the song “Hush,” featured the kind of ludicrous stunts he would later direct for MTV’s Jackass. Wax drummer Loomis Fall later gained more mainstream fame (or at least a higher level of cult fame) as part of the Jackass crew, as well.
But before that, Sib was just one more alienated 1980s suburban child of divorce who found salvation through punk rock. He grew up in a South Bay melting pot of skating and punk rock that remains one of the great undocumented undergrounds. Although it has long been recognized within the skating world, it’s only barely begun to get attention in the mainstream in the last few years. While the punk scenes in Los Angeles, Orange County, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have all had books and movies dedicated to them, Sib’s touring show has been the first that most of his audience has ever heard of San Jose’s counterculture.
“The thing that was unique about San Jose was you had two influences in California culture hitting each other at the same time,” Sib explains. “You had one of the best skateboarders in the world, Steve Caballero—he’s living in your backyard. He has a ramp. Every pro skateboarder from here to New York City is coming to visit him. You see Lance Mountain there. You see Stacy Peralta. When you’re living in it, you don’t think about it. But when I talk to other people about ‘Yeah, I grew up skating with Steve Caballero, saw Lance Mountain, saw Neil Blender, saw Chris Miller, Corey O’Brien,’ people don’t believe it. Cause that’s not happening in their hometown.”
Then there was the punk scene, mostly driven by the skaters themselves. The “supergroup” at the time was the Faction, featuring Caballero on guitar, with Gavin O’Brien handling lead vocals and Ray Stevens II on bass. The Faction was featured on the first skate-punk compilation, compiled by Thrasher magazine, along with another of Stevens’ bands, Los Olvidados. At the time that Sib arrived in San Jose, the Faction had just formed, but Los Olvidados had already been part of the South Bay’s first official punk riot, opening for Black Flag at De Anza College in 1981.
Local skaters had access to the most famous punk bands from around the country, too.
“Every band at least played San Francisco, so we were able to see all of those bands. And guys like Corey O’Brien and Gavin O’Brien were also talking to those bands and bringing them to town. So it really was a unique situation,” Sib says.
Stage Dive
In a way, Sib had been working up to California Calling for most of the decade as the host of the punk-rock show Complete Control on L.A.’s KYSR-FM, mixing his own stories in with the music. But the idea began to come together last year.
“I was in the parking lot at SideOneDummy, I was with a band, we were just hanging out, and one of the guys said to me, ‘Man, I love your stories. I wish you could come on the road with us.’ They were driving to Portland and they had like 12 hours to kill,” Sib recalls. “He said, ‘You should put your stories on a CD for us.'”
Most people would laugh off the suggestion as a joke, but not Sib. Instead, he wrote down 10 to 15 of what he considered his best stories and actually did put four of those on a CD. After a while, the CD got passed around, and he started getting questions about it: Did he have more stories? Was he ever going to tell them live?
Once he got the idea for the show—mixing in projected photographs of skaters and punk rockers with the stories he wanted to tell about them, blending his love of punk music with his personal story—Sib knew his new project would be met with some very specific preconceived notions.
“When you think of spoken word and punk rock, there’s two guys who come to mind: Henry Rollins and Jello [Biafra],” he says. “My show is nothing like theirs, nor would I ever try to do anything like that. Because both of those guys are (a) way smarter than I am, and (b) they’re icons. They’re legends! Jello and Henry, they’ve made an impact on my life with their music, and with their spoken word on top of it. I’m coming from the point of view of a kid who just happened to be at the right place at the right time when punk rock hit the suburbs of California.”
As Sib started to consider what stories to include in the show, he went back further and further, until he landed on one specific date—and Sib does have an incredible mind for dates.
“That one day was Dec. 27, 1981, when my father took me to Winchester Skate Park in Campbell,” he says. “At that point, my parents were separated I was living with my mom during the week and visiting my dad on the weekends. As a lot of people remember in the ’80s, everyone was divorced. Like, if you weren’t a part of the divorced scene, then you weren’t happening. I remember fewer parents that were together than parents that weren’t together.” If Westmont High was where Sib got his new name, Winchester Skate Park, two years earlier, was where he got his new identity.
“My dad walked me in. I was scared shitless. I had a bowl haircut. A turtleneck sweater on. I was as far from being cool as you possibly can be, even farther.” Finding a spot to hide out by himself, Sib saw for the first time the kind of skateboarding he’d only seen in magazines up to that point. And he heard the first punk song of his life, the Buzzcocks’ “Hollow Inside.” At that moment, he went from being a 13-year-old into FM radio and magic to something entirely different.
“That really began everything,” he says, “because from that moment on, all I wanted to do was skateboard and find out more about punk rock. Whether it was the Sex Pistols, or the Clash, or the Ramones. All the bigger bands. Then when I found out as I continued in that scene that there were bands in San Jose, like Executioner and Los Olvidados and Ribsy, it was like, ‘Wow, these guys, the Faction, this is their band? How do they do it?'”
Sib’s obsession with starting a band only got deeper. When the SoCal-punk documentary Another State of Mind came out in 1984, he and his friends went to the Camera 3 in San Jose to see it. As far as punk films go, it’s even more depressing than Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization—at least the end, where the Social Distortion/Youth Brigade tour that the crew has been following for the whole film spirals into disaster. They leave their bus on the East Coast, Youth Brigade hitching a ride with the filmmakers, and Social D frontman Mike Ness flying back to California, his band broken up.
“When I walked out of that theater, all my friends were like, ‘Man, I never want to do that, what a nightmare.’ When I walked out, I was like, ‘I can’t wait to fucking do that. I cannot wait to push the broken-down van. I cannot wait to dye my hair in a bathroom in Omaha. I cannot wait not to get paid when we play Milwaukee. I can’t wait to go on the road. I can’t wait to get kicked out of my first band.”
Sib would have to wait until 1990, when he got the boot from Front-Line, a San Jose band that in its time played with the Faction, Ribsy and Frontier Wives. Ironically, even though his next band, Wax, got together after he had moved to L.A., he got kicked out of it in San Jose, too, on Aug. 9, 1995 (again, Sib’s eerie memory for details and dates). Wax reunited last year and even returned to play San Jose.
SJ All the Way
Though Sib has already performed the show in Los Angeles (including a five-month residency at Largo where he developed it), New York City, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere, this is his first time bringing it to the South Bay, and he admits he has no clue what the reaction will be.
Blank Club co-owner Corey O’Brien is one of the skaters Sib looked up to back in the day. There’s even a photograph of him in the show. O’Brien caught California Calling at the Punchline in San Francisco earlier this year and describes it as a mix of standup and spoken word.
“It was cool, ’cause it was one of my friends up onstage, telling stories from when we were kids,” O’Brien says. “He’s kind of a bigwig in Hollywood now, but he hasn’t forgotten his roots, which a lot of people do. He’s San Jose all the way.”
O’Brien says he had absolutely no idea what to expect. “He’d been telling me about it for a while,” he says. “I thought he was crazy.”
Another of the skate-punk legends from Sib’s day, Ray Stevens II, hasn’t seen the show yet but plans to go. Stevens remembers Sib’s energy. “Even then he was a superfan,” says Stevens. “I used to call him the punk rock cheerleader. He has a way of getting people excited.”
That may be exactly the quality that the San Jose skatepunk story needs.
“What Joe’s doing is cool,” says Stevens. “No one else is going to do it.”
Nailing It
What gives Sib such a mind for dates and details? Two words, he says: obsessive compulsive.
“Before I fly, I have to touch the outside of the plane,” he says. “About a year ago, I was on a plane, and I forgot to touch the outside. They were getting ready to shut the door, and I looked at the stewardess, and I said the wrong thing. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to freak you out—but check this out. I’m not a weirdo, I just need to step outside for one second and touch the outside of the plane. I’ve been doing it my whole life. She looked at me, then she looked at the guy I was flying with and she said, ‘Not a problem.’ Later on, we were halfway to New York, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve had crazier requests than that.'”
California Calling allows Sib to channel that obsessiveness into art, much like his music has over the years. There’s a lot of music in the show, too, although not always what you would expect.
“It runs the gamut from ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ to ‘Nervous Breakdown’ by Black Flag. If there’s one thing I try to get across, it’s not so much about punk rock, it’s really about growing up. It’s about that moment that you stop being influenced musically, politically, religiously by your parents, and you start stepping out on your own. The soundtrack just happens to be punk rock.”
His sense that this is something bigger than just a story about skateboarders and punk rock has grown as he gets feedback from people in different cities.
“You get a lot of people who go, ‘You gotta tell that Ramones story, that’s insane’ or ‘Tell me the Social Distortion story again,'” he says. “I love those stories, but the thing that’s been exciting and more than I could have expected is to have people come up and tell me their story. Like, ‘When you talk about moving in with your dad, I went through the same thing.’ Or one was ‘I told my sister to come to your show because we both moved in with my dad when we were 15, and everything you said about what it was like going from mom’s house to dad’s house, you nailed it.'”
He’s also inspired some bizarre audience interactivity, like in Portland where a woman in the audience, in the middle of one of his stories, started talking about one time she saw Bad Religion.
“When you’re talking about music—whether it’s metal, rock & roll, classical—people will get passionate about it. I’ve seen it firsthand,” Sib says. “This woman just started talking over me, and I’m on a PA! I just said, hey, why don’t you come up here right now and tell that story. I want to hear that story.”
And even in a sea of stories about the Clash, the Ramones, the Faction and Social Unrest, isn’t that the most punk rock thing of all?
JOE SIB performs CALIFORNIA CALLING on Thursday, Oct. 7, at the Improv in San Jose. The show is presented by Channel 92.3.
