Church Police Posters

I've recently been in touch with people (on-line) who are fans either of the Church Police, or Flipper, or both, and that has inspired me to get more active in fulfilling the potential of this blog to serve as a repository of information on the Church Police and my recollections of the early-80s SF musical underground scene that I played a bit part in. I have bunches of old journals and other artifacts that deserve some kind of public airing. Not much in the way of photos though - the Church Police are woefully under-preserved in the audio and visual realms, but that only adds to the allure and mystery doesn't it...

Here are some scans I made a few years ago of posters from our shows. They may still be on-line somewhere, if Comcast chose to preserve the pages I posted when the domain was attbi.com but here's a fresh look at them. 

This isn't the full collection though. I gotta save a few things for the 
deluxe edition box set that I hope to release some day.


Bruce made this one. These scans are such high quality that you can see the text from the other side of the newspaper bleeding through.


This one was made by Tim. He was the biggest sports fan in our band, but I follow major league baseball and the NFL pretty closely these days.



I made this one. It's based on the popular Hong Kong comic book
series Old Master Q. You have to read it starting in the upper 
right, then go down, then upper left, then go down. 

I used to work at Coit Liquors in North Beach, right there on Washington Square, across from the big Catholic Church and right around the corner from Chinatown. I would stroll around the neighborhood on my lunch hours and picked up a few issues of these comics. None of them were in English but many of the strips had no dialog so the jokes were easy to understand. I actually combined two different strips to make this poster so it is a truly original work of art.



I made this poster for a show we put on in Pleasant Hill. Maybe Contra Costa was our response to a compilation album called No New York and it's follow-up rebuttal comp Yes L.A. Too bad we never released the album. As it turned out, Flipper canceled on us. I think they were scared to go through the Caldecott Tunnel or something (wimps.)

This is the show where our exceedingly rare single "Killing Myself To Live" (OOP on Stomach Ache Records, released in 1996) was recorded. We played the song two times in a row (even though I didn't realize it until we were about halfway into the performance which is why my guitar playing is even more screwed up and dischordant than usual but it's better that way.) It's the second take that made it to the single, though I think they work better listened to back-to-back. But I had nothing to do with putting that single out anyway so what does it matter...



You've seen this image already, of course. It's the basis for the cover of the Gilligan's Wings single. This historic document notes the first public performance of the Church Police and the last performance by the Maroons, the band that Bruce, Tim and I were in before forming the Church Police, though Tim had already quit by the time of this show.

He and Eric sat in the mostly empty bar harrassing Bruce and me and Ba, our bass player, though she was nice and a good musician and had some difficult personal issues due to the death of both her parents in a tragic car accident several years earlier so no one was ever really that mean to her.

Then, after the Maroons sunk into oblivion after that set, I put my guitar back on after watching Gaga Din and played a bunch of different songs and the Church Police began their too-brief and ill-managed career.