IT'S A LITTLE HOLE-IN-THE-WALL just off of Ninth Avenue in downtown San Diego. The walls out
front are painted with bright and colorful murals. The waitresses that greet
you inside all seem to have piercings. It's probably the only place in San
Diego where you can order "vegan chorizo." For a Mexican restaurant
in the heart of one of California's most conservative cities, this place is about
as punk as it gets.
"You're going to love it here," says Matt Anderson. It's just past five o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon in San Diego, and Anderson and I are catching a late lunch at Pokez, one of his favorite local restaurants. It’s apparent that he has been coming here for years. When we walks in, a guy in the corner sporting a shaggy brown mop cranes his neck and says hello.
"How are you doing?" he asks.
"Okay," Anderson shrugs.
Around here, people know who Matt Anderson is. But chances are, you've never heard of him. In fact, you've probably never heard of Antioch Arrow or Clikatat Ikatowi or any of the bands that Anderson so righteously supported in the early-'90s as the driving force behind Gravity Records. For years, Anderson and his friends developed a sound here in San Diego that became legendary for the broken equipment and bruised throats left in its wake. At the time, people called this the "Gravity sound" and it was an artistic and theatrical take on hardcore punk the like that many had never seen. Lately, people have been calling it "screamo," and thanks to bands like the Blood Brothers and Thursday, it's quickly finding a place on both the radio and MTV.
Not that Anderson cares—he long ago had his day in the sun, and, to hear him tell it, there's no way what's going on now could ever touch what was happening then.
"Sometimes I will hear these new bands and think, 'God damn, this band is totally doing that sound,'" Anderson says shaking his head. "But for me there hasn't been anything as exciting as what was going on then. I haven't been blown away by anything musically the way I was by Gravity. I don't buy records that freak me out anymore—but back then, I was totally hung up on these bands."
IT COULDN'T HAVE LASTED for more than three years. Four if you're feeling generous. In all reality, Gravity's reign was unspectacularly brief. But if you were there for any of the shows or the records or the screaming, then you know that there was a time where it really did seem like anything was possible. "Gravity came at an interesting crossroads," says Dave Clifford, a longtime scene observer who now plays in the band Pleasure Forever. "It was all of these young people who were at the right age, at the right place and the right time. In San Diego there was nothing going on. A lot of really great stuff had to come out of that."
What came out of that was Gravity Records—which turned out to be as great and as exciting as people make it out to be. Founded by Anderson when he was just 19 years old, Gravity was more of a hobby than it was something that would go on to define a genre. At the time, Anderson was singing for a breakneck hardcore band called Heroin who perhaps became best known for screening the covers of their records on paper bags from the grocery store. Anderson would often create the mystique surrounding Gravity through acts like this. Everything was done by hand. Everything was created almost like a secret.
But no one involved in the Gravity scene thought that they would end up laying the groundwork for a new musical movement by doing so—truth is, they were having too much fun to care. "Around then, so many people were into it," Anderson remembers. "I was living at this house with 20 other people, silk-screening records all the time. We'd spend every weekend playing at [local DIY punk venue] the Ché Cafe. Heroin or Antioch Arrow became, like, the house band there."
By the time that Heroin played their last show in the fall of 1993, Antioch Arrow had already begun playing around San Diego. Formed by vocalist and former Heroin drummer Aaron Montaigne, Antioch Arrow would go onto epitomize all things Gravity. A mix of art school fashion, gothed-out rock and two-minute brash bursts, Antioch Arrow wasn't your typical punk band. They were almost always "too rock star-ish," as Anderson says, throwing themselves into their equipment and flaunting attitudes that matched their tight-fitting trousers. While most hardcore bands tried to tear down the barrier between audience and performer, it seemed like Antioch Arrow were reinforcing it—which is exactly what occurred.
"For as many people who liked Gravity," says Anderson, "there was just as many that didn't. People would complain that it was all about turning your back to the crowd or screaming and wearing white belts—but that was just Antioch Arrow."
Though Antioch Arrow got most of the attention, it was Clikatat Ikatowi that deservedly got the respect. Forged by former Heroin guitarist Scott Bartiloni, with a pro-skater named Mario Rubalcaba on drums and an unknown scene rat enigmatically named "C" on vocals, Clikatat Ikatowi was the most accomplished of the Gravity bands. Which is to say that, when they wanted to, they could actually play. "We weren't into falling on the floor like Antioch Arrow was," Rubalcaba says now with a laugh. "We weren't into being destructive. We were definitely trying to be more musical."
By the time that Clikatat released their debut album, 1995’s Orchestrated And Conducted By, Gravity seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough. Over the course of three years, Anderson and his bands—which had now branched out to include a spastic five-piece from Colorado called Angelhair—had fostered one of the most talked about and consistently imitated scenes in the world. For a while, it seemed like you couldn't go to a show without seeing a broken guitar or a singer in a pair of half boots. Strangely, people began moving to San Diego just to be seen there. Rolling Stone even ran an article proclaiming the City's music scene as "the next big thing."
"There was stuff like that happening all the time," says Anderson. "When things seem kind of big, they really do inflate. It would seem so much bigger than it was. We couldn't understand it. All these labels wanted Antioch Arrow and Clikatat Ikatowi. John Hughes [director of Sixteen Candles] saw Clikatat in Chicago and loved them. He freaked out and wanted to sign them to a major."
Clikatat didn't sign to a major, though. They didn't change the face of music or become the next big thing, either. Gravity never did blow up like people expected. In fact, it would take years for the world to fully embrace a sound this jarring. So it was that, in the case of the original Gravity bands, they tragically and miraculously disappeared—coming and going as fast as the songs they were playing. "The whole thing was like a miniature explosion," says Ezra Caraeff, who later took up booking bands at the Ché Cafe. "Other bands influenced by the scene started popping up right afterwards, but I don't think anyone cared. The Gravity bands had this crazed punk passion that was impossible to imitate, and when that died out, that was the end of it. When it died, it really did die."
EARLIER IN THE DAY, Anderson and I drive over to a place called Custom Printing on a dead-end street in San Diego's Mission Bay neighborhood. It's where Anderson has spent the last seven years working. When he first started there, he would often trade in his weekly payment in exchange for the printing of Gravity's more popular records. Now Anderson has got his own office in the back with his name on the door. On the ride over he'll jokingly refer to this "as the real home of Gravity Records." When we arrive a few minutes later, it's apparent that he wasn't kidding.
Crammed into a space not much bigger than a walk-in closet, Anderson has just about everything that had to do with Gravity stored here. There are stacks of old fliers. Boxes of old artwork. Tons and tons of photos. If anyone is still wondering where it all went when Gravity seemed to disappear in the mid-’90s, they should look no further than the small and cluttered workspace where Anderson currently spends his days. "I pretty much work here to pay off old debts now," he says sounding defeated. "Sometimes I'm afraid I blew it and that it was all over in three years—but I still want to do it."
Anderson can't pin down exactly when things started falling apart for Gravity. It may have been a few weeks after the release of the Clikatat record or when Antioch Arrow told him they were looking for another label. But even then things were good—so much so, that he didn't even think twice when a girl he liked offered him his first fix of heroin. "Gravity at that point was more than I ever dreamed, and I just thought I could do it,” Anderson says. “I remember thinking, 'I'll just have an addiction for a while.'" Anderson’s heroin addiction lasted nearly five years. "I guess I had a kind of a 'fuck you'-attitude about it," he adds. "When I wanted to throw things in my life away, I definitely could."
Within a year of trying heroin, Anderson would become a full blown junkie, shutting out his friends and family and falling out of touch with just about everyone. Antioch Arrow would eventually leave San Diego for Los Angeles in search of a major label record deal, while inner-band tensions would tear Clikatat apart. Rubalcaba remembers a last-gasp attempt at saving the band, which included Anderson coming in on second guitar. The arrangement only lasted a few practices. The other members of the band gave up when Anderson couldn't remember his parts. "Around then, the scene just went into the sewer," Rubalcaba says. "The heroin thing exploded in San Diego and that killed it. People were just into the drugs. Matt was a close friend of mine, but there wasn't much I could do. You can't make someone get clean."
Still, many people tried. Andy Ward, who had played bass in Antioch Arrow as well as the poignant emo band Evergreen, began running Gravity in hopes that it would allow Anderson the space to clean up. It didn't. Neither did his mother's invitation to move back in to his childhood home. For a while there, it seemed like nothing could cure him. "I knew how bad it was," he says. "I knew it was wrecking everything. But, for whatever reason, I wasn't ready to quit." At his worst, Anderson was spending $500 a week on heroin. Bands on Gravity started complaining publicly that their money was going in his arm. Even now, Anderson isn't sure. "That may have happened," he says apologetically. "But I spent more than just their money on heroin. I spent all the money on heroin."
A few years into his addiction, Anderson stopped production on Gravity's catalog and let most everything go out of print. Penniless, he moved into his girlfriend's apartment in San Francisco. "That was rock bottom," Anderson admits. "I had no money and Gravity was on the absolute rocks. I was just done." It was here that Gravity should have come to an end. Instead, it found a new beginning. After just a few months up north, Anderson kicked heroin completely.
He spent the next five years willing himself into a better place, pairing down his vices to the occasional drink or cigarette. He's back in San Diego now, where he's held onto some of his friends from the Gravity days, and is playing in a new band with Rubalcaba (who later pulled drum duty for Rocket From The Crypt). Anderson still runs Gravity, which is doing much better thanks to the sudden sales of a Rapture EP he released in 1999. Of course, like a few other people now, Anderson hears traces of Gravity when he turns on the radio. "When my little sister got into At The Drive-In," he says, "I remember telling her they liked Gravity. I was like, 'Can't you hear it?'"
In a way, it's a small reward for all that Anderson has endured. But perhaps the most rewarding aspect of this story is that he is still around to tell it. "It’s kind of hard to look back on the whole thing without it sounding depressing," he says. "But what can I do? Gravity has been my whole life."
LATER ON THAT NIGHT, Anderson and I go back to his tiny apartment to grab some photos from Gravity’s early days. He has a huge box of them crammed under his bed with some other relics that he couldn't quite file away at the print shop. He opens a battered old envelope marked HEROIN-LAST TOUR, flipping through one picture after another, placing some of his favorites to the side. First he picks out a photo of Heroin's final show at the Ché; then a picture of them playing in Berkeley.
"Look," he says, pointing to a skinny teenager singing along. "There's Justin [Pearson] from the Locust!"
You'd think it would be difficult for Anderson to look at all of these photos without dwelling on the years wasted to drugs or the friends he lost along the way. But these days, time is on Anderson's side. As another generation picks up where he and his friends left off, it seems that even if Gravity was forgotten, it would be impossible to forget. "People still respect it," Anderson says with genuine amazement. "Even though I kind of trashed it, people still want to hear Antioch Arrow and Clikatat Ikatowi. People still want to find this stuff out. It continues to be unearthed.
“As for me?” he says, letting out a smile. “I'm just happy they hung in there."
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