Whats playing on your system today?

@reubent, I don’t know much about The Tubes, even though I grew up in San Jose, just 45 minutes south of their base in San Francisco. But in L.A. I was a member of the band for a singer who got her start as a dancer for The Tubes live shows, Pearl Harbour. In the early 80’s she got a record deal with Stiff Records (distributed in the U.S.A. by CBS), and moved to England to live and work. She was a member of the Stiff Records Revue package tour (with Costello, Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, etc.) and toured as well with The Clash and the rest of the Punk/New Wave crowd. She was married to Clash bassist Paul Simonon for awhile, but by the time I met her in L.A. they had divorced, and her contract with Stiff expired and not renewed. But she had made enough dough to buy a Craftsman-style house in the Silverlake district (hipster-ville) in L.A.

She’s quite a sweet lady (with a vintage clothes collection you wouldn’t believe; the second bedroom in her house is a walk-in closet), and had a lot of stories to tell. I was most interested in the pianist in her UK band, the great Geraint Watkins. He later became a member of The Dave Edmunds Band, whose live album you just picked up. Great one! Geraint has a couple of solo albums of his own.