SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
The San Diego Union-Tribune is an American metropolitan daily newspaper, published in San Diego, California. Its name derives from a 1992 merger between the two major daily newspapers at the time, The San Diego Union and the San Diego Evening Tribune. The name changed to U-T San Diego in 2012 but was changed again to The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2015. In 2015, it was acquired by Tribune Publishing, later renamed Tronc. (More from Wikipedia)
Mike Stax also does not have an article in Wikipedia, though there is a short article on the fanzine Ugly Things that he founded in 1983 (the Tell-Tale Hearts were also formed that year). To my mind, there can be little doubt of his “notability”. An article in the San Diego Union Tribune on May 23, 2013 about an upcoming concert over three days celebrating the 30th anniversary of Ugly Things quotes another San Diego musician and rock critic Bart Mendoza (who is in the Shambles): “To me, Ugly Things is the top music magazine in the world. It’s even better than (top English music publication) Mojo, because it has more pages and covers more ground with more depth. Mike’s coverage of music is the template everybody has to match, not only for content but for research. No one else does such comprehensive articles.”
Mike Stax’s exhaustively researched article over four issues in Ugly Things on the Misunderstood led to the publication of a book on the band called Like, Misunderstood that was co-written with the band’s lead singer Rick Brown; as quoted in the Union Tribune article, Stax says: “They came pretty close to making it in London, they got a deal with Fontana Records, had a single out and had media (coverage). Then, the [U.S. military] draft claimed the lead singer, and they were finished overnight, just as they were on the verge of success. They would have been the first psychedelic band, with an album out before before [Jimi] Hendrix and Pink Floyd. They were cheated. Their music was world-class.”
* * *
In April 1986, Eric Bacher left the Tell-Tale Hearts and was replaced by another ex-Crawdaddy, Peter Miesner. After 3½ years, the band was having difficulty keeping it going: “Musically, the band had stuck in a rut for some time. The new songs that were being written did not sound like ‘Tell-Tale Hearts songs’, and we each had difficulty adjusting to and accommodating the changes that were taking place as our individual tastes expanded. . . . And Mike [Stax] put it best to a San Diego Union reporter: ‘We had painted ourselves into a corner musically.’”
(September 2017)
