Randy Stodola and the Alley Cats Rise Again

By Garrick Rawlings, Columnist
Before punk rock was ever called punk rock, the seeds of what became the punk rock genre were sown in Detroit, Michigan ― an endeavor spearheaded by legendary bands MC5 and The Stooges (where Iggy Pop came from)  ―  along with garage rockers all over the world at the time. Lenny Kaye’s classic compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 is a good read of this history. In New York City, the Velvet Underground (where Lou Reed came from) and the New York Dolls (where David Johansen came from) were doing their arty versions of shaking up the norm.

This was largely an artistic and musical reaction to the late 1960s California psychedelic music/hippy scene which was unrelatable to Detroit’s working class kids, children of factory workers, where the sound of foundries, huge metal stamping machines, welding and assembly lines filled the air and which in turn inspired a heavier, faster and more direct sound of rock ’n’ roll that mixed in a good portion of rhythm & blues and Motown soul. Pretty much what rock ’n’ roll was and did when it was born in the early 1950s; there was a new generation that had no use for Perry Como or (How Much is) that Doggie in the Window? MC5 lead vocalist Rob Tyner’s famous battle cry (and song), Kick Out the Jams Motherfuckers was originally a response to the banal noodling hippy bands boring the hell out of the audience with endless long songs. They were more into The Who, perhaps the  first real punk band.

This pattern of pop/rock music becoming too safe, boring and stagnant ― just begging to be destroyed by youth movements identified by aggressive, loud and back to basics rock ― what we all know now as punk after the demise of The Stooges and MC5 in the early ’70s was due to the usual self-inflicted human damage and poor national record sales. Even though these bands never made it big in their era, this famous quote attributed to producer Brian Eno also applied to these other bands, “The first Velvet Undergound album sold only 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” In their wake, the short-lived glam rock/glitter rock era came to be of which T. Rex and the The Sweet were the best. 

This is where San Pedro’s Randy Stodola and The Alley Cats enter the scene. The band started in 1974, several years before the Ramones (’76), Sex Pistols (’77) and the Clash (’77) released their first albums where too many people think punk started. According to Stodola, “We were playing a lot of small clubs. We didn’t really do covers. We played our rock songs really fast and got a reaction and eventually the booking agent for The Whiskey saw us. They were doing these Rodney Bingenheimer punk rock and new wave shows with the Screamers, Germs, Weirdos — and he saw us and said, ‘You guys sound like punk,’ and he booked us but he told us we needed to dress up because we looked like we were homeless. We got all our clothes at the thrift shops. It’s all we could afford and I hated bell bottoms and that’s all you could buy then [new] and I cut my hair short to be different. We got a great response and then the Masque had just opened and they asked us to play there, it was our first actual real show where they charged cover for it and then we became a punk rock band.”

Once again, as corporations took over the music business from the music people, mainstream rock became stagnate and boring again, and so overblown with slick production that the average kid could never “make it.” So the next wave of punk rock was in. Later, in the late ’80s when the spandex Sunset Strip hair metal scene got ridiculous, punk and grunge killed that off — see the pattern? Tragically all that is now called “classic rock” and people pay to go see tribute acts of it ― a sad commentary on the willful ignorance of our dumbed down mainstream culture and art. Luckily, there’s always a pissed off new generation that comes around and gets real with it again.

This story assignment came at an opportune time. I had just watched the excellent documentary Chinatown Punk Wars, an episode of PBS SoCal KCET’s Artbound series about the fleeting but highly influential and much-loved scene in LA’s Chinatown between Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Café, Chinese restaurants by day and competing punk/new-wave clubs at night – roughly from ’78 to ’81. Opportune because the Alley Cats were deep into the scene by that time, along with punk legends, Plugz, FEAR, X, Germs, Los Lobos, Go-Go’s, The Brat, Black Flag and many more, explains Stodola. “We played the first weekend at the Hong Kong with The Bags and [before that] we were the first punk band to play at Madame Wong’s. After we played the second night, we thought it was great, tons of people, polite respectful, then we found out she was banning us from the club — Dianne [original bassist] was riling up the audience.”

At that time, the Hong Kong Café had yet to follow Wong’s into being a music venue as owner Esther Wong, “Godmother of Punk,” soured on the more hardcore (and sometimes destructive) punks. She started booking more new wave and power pop acts like The Knack and The Police. Stodola went to the premier of the documentary with Alice Bag (Alicia Velasquez) and then showed me a photo of the two of them outside the Redwood Bar & Grill post show. He liked the doc but felt it was too short (56 minutes). “It was pretty good. You only have a certain amount of time. For what they did it was pretty good.” We are both in agreement that it should have been several hours longer.

The original Alley Cats lineup, along with Randy, consisted of Dianne Chai on bass and John McCarthy on drums. They released their highly regarded debut album in 1981, Nightmare City (Time Coast Records), and the follow up, Escape From Planet Earth (MCA), in ’82. Here’s a great video from that era filmed in 1979 at the band’s rehearsal studio in Los Angeles by director Dennis Dragon, “Night of the Living Dead”. The Alley Cats were featured in the 1982 British concert film Urgh! A Music War 1982 concert film performing Nothing Means Nothing Anymore along with a slew of performances from that era’s punk, new-wave and post punk artists.

In a classic Stodola twist, the next two albums released were by the same band, except now called Zarkons (Riders in the Long Black Parade ’85 (Enigma) and Between the Idea and the Reality…Falls the Shadow ’88 (Atlantic) – Terry Cooley replaced McCarthy on drums and Freda Rente was added on vocals/keyboards.  

“I actually had this idea that every album we’re going to change our name – laughing loudly – to make sure [the fans] are truly committed!” Stodola said.

There was a 20-year period where Stodola did not play music at all. He’s suffered from depression throughout his whole life, surviving a suicide attempt at age 12. He showed me the scar on his wrist, he doesn’t even remember doing it, only remembering being knocked over by his dog, covered in blood in the bathroom, the dog grabbed the razor and ran out to his parents and they got him to the hospital. To his, and to all of our good fortune, he is a fighter and a survivor. He recently put another trio of Alley Cats together and they have been performing more and more gigs – here’s a story on a show at The Sardine earlier this year in what’s left of the LA Weekly. 

I sat down with Randy on the sidewalk in front of the Sacred Grounds coffee shop in San Pedro for a very generous chat on how he got back to his music and other life stories. In my research for this story, many times I read or heard from the many folks who know Randy, along with their great respect of his art they all made a point of saying what a truly kind man he is, and I found that to be true as well.

RLn: Tell me about today’s Alley Cats.

RS: They’ve been with me about two years, Apryl Cady on bass and Matt Lasky on drums. They both started with me in their twentysomethings and it’s been amazing. I met Matt at the Fresh & Easy over here before it closed, his father was a drummer and a big fan of the Alley Cats and had all our records, so Matt became a big fan and learned to drum to the Alley Cats, so when he auditioned for it, he already knew all the songs!

I met Apryl outside of Harold’s on Pacific and she was born in North Dakota and just moved here from Fargo — I grew up on a farm six miles north of Fargo — so we understood each other’s accent — turns out she has the same birthday as me too!  

RLn: Sounds like the whole thing was meant to happen! Going back, the old band played most if not all of the classic LA clubs, tell me about those days.

RS: We played the Whiskey, the Starwood, the Roxy, the Greek Theater, just a million places. Stiv Bators came to one of our shows and later we opened for them — the Dead Boys. And then he had Lords of the New Church and we played with them and then he died, it was sad [hit by a car on his motorcycle in Paris in 1990 at age of 40]. The Dead Boys were a great band, they were more rock ’n’ roll.

RLn: Who did you play with at the Greek?

RS: Adam Ant! I guess they heard our album and wanted to play with us and we found out two days before the show. We weren’t listed on the bill so we thought when we came out that the people there to see Adam Ant would boo us, instead we got a great reaction, it really surprised us, he was real nice, the band was real nice. We played with King Crimson in New York for 20,000 people.

RLn: (Randy sent me a mix of the new Alley Cats album which will be called We All Walk Among the Shadows – Until We Become One recorded in San Pedro at A. Fuller Sound Studio, recorded/engineered by Adam Fuller.) Listening to your new album, the first and last tracks are spoken word poetry, where does that come from?

RS: When I was a kid, my dad used to bring home poetry albums from the library, Millay, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and all these people and they’re all voices reciting poetry. I thought it was really cool, there used to be poetry albums back then, comedy albums — Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, Redd Foxx — I think Cheech & Chong was the last big comedy album then it sort of died out but it was really big at one time. 

I got really depressed and I didn’t play for 20 years, I would just walk around for miles every day writing poetry in my head and reciting it out loud, obsessing on the musicality and the rhythm and the meaning of the words. I didn’t start writing it down until I ran out of money and I’d write four or five poems at a time and make a poetry magazine and I walked around selling them, I sold about a thousand copies. I then started poetry readings and started playing again solo acoustic.

RLn: How did you get into making music?

RS: I started when I was about 6, I borrowed my sister’s guitar and got a book of 1st position chords, but I had nobody to play with. When we lived on a farm in North Dakota my older sister and me would ride on horseback to the drive-in theater north of town, we’d turn on the speaker that’s supposed to go on your car window, it was a lot of fun to me, we didn’t have a record player.

It was only when I moved to California, when I was about 13, when I got my first access to a record and cassette player and took out a Hank Williams greatest hits album at the library and recorded it on the cassette. [He does a great solo acoustic “Your Cheatin’ Heart” on the new album.]

RLn: What made you decide to cover the Avengers song We Are One on the new album along with your originals?

RS: I’ve always been a big Avengers fan, we play that song a lot live and we got such a good reaction we decided to record it, we do it a little different than them. We’ve played with them a lot back in the day here in LA and up in San Francisco where they’re from, and we recently played with them at Alex’s Bar and the Echoplex.

The new Alley Cats album is just what one would hope for, raw edgy, jacked up rock, call it punk if you’d like. A great mix of full band originals, the aforementioned spoken word pieces and Hank Williams cover, a song by his friend Malti Kennedy, We Had a Chance Tonight, and a couple of ‘resurrections — Licorice Cats, a song the old Alley Cats performed and made several attempts to capture in the studio, but didn’t get it right until this time. Another gem is You Can Be My Highway Song by his old band, the Hubcaps. A former band member found a rehearsal recording and sent it to Randy and he worked it up as a new Alley Cats song. 

Along with Alley Cats gigs, he performs solo acoustic and performs at poetry readings.  

The next Alley Cats gig is the Halloween Bash in El Segundo, Saturday, Oct. 28 at South Bay Customs with his old friend Dez Cadena (formerly of Black Flag and the Misfits) and his new band Dondo..