Re-uploaded 05/13/2024. Enjoy, NØ.
The Original line-up of The Offs was: Billy Hawk - guitar, Don Vinil - vocals, Fast Floyd - bass, & Bob Steeler - drums. They were later joined by Bob Roberts - saxophone. The Offs' singer, Don Vinil (who sadly died of a heroin overdose on Ninth St. in New York in 1983), was one of the first openly gay people in the West Coast punk scene. V.Vale of Search & Destroy & RE/Search introduced Vinil to guitarist Billy Hawk after Vinil was kicked out of his first band, Grand Mal. The Offs formed in late 1977 as just a goof between Billy Hawk, Don Vinil, & a girl named Olga. They played around, various wanna-be musicians drifted in & out of the band. Gradually everyone involved got more & more serious.
The Offs were unique among the first wave of West Coast punk bands in maintaining a home base on both coasts. In San Francisco, their manager discovered the Deaf Club as a live venue, & the Offs released records on the labels CD Presents and 415 Records. In New York City, they hung out with Basquiat (who scrawled their album cover), & released a single on Max's Kansas City Records. The greatest thing about this San Francisco sextet was their inability to be pigeon-holed. Were they punk? New wave? Avant-garde? Art rock? No New York noise? A new strain of art jazz? Some odd form of mutant ska gone wrong with bleating sax & screeching vocals? Like their U.K. contemporaries, Blurt, they were sort of all these things, & still others with names that haven't been invented. But what tied them to the punk community was the basic blazing energy to everything they did. These weren't a bunch of art school posers, they were smash-it-up party skanksters who wanted to do something fresh within an absolutely remarkably creative late-'70s Bay Area scene -- in cahoots with Crime, Nuns, Avengers, Negative Trend, Flipper, Pink Section, Tuxedomoon, Vktms, Mutants, Lewd, Dils, Zeros, & more.
Most of their earlier recordings have been nearly impossible to get but recently a live recording of The Offs has been released on Vampir Records, recorded by Terry Hammer at the infamous Mabuhay Gardens in 1980.
The OFFs from
Various - Can You Hear Me? Music from the Deaf Club,
Optional Music OPT LP001, 1980.
6. OFFS "Hundred Dollar Limo"
7. OFFS "Die Babylon"
8. OFFS "I've Got the Handle"