Mission District’s El Rio celebrates beloved SF punk promoter Scott Rogers

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — The music scene in San Francisco lost one of its hardest working and most beloved champions last year when punk promoter Scott Rogers (aka Scott Alcoholocaust) passed away in June after an 18-month battle with metastatic prostate cancer.

Rogers had been an intrinsic cornerstone of the Bay Area live music scene for a quarter of a century, tirelessly promoting punk and metal concerts at venues on both sides of the Bay — frequently organizing multiple events on the same night — under both his pseudonym (Alcoholocaust Presents) and his Depth Charge Presents banner.

Relocating to San Francisco from Nevada City in 1988, Rogers threw  himself into booking concerts full time in 1995, squirreling away enough money to support himself during the first few months of a passion project that would not bring him great financial rewards, but made the promoter a wealthy man in terms of friends, admirers and good times over the decades that followed.

Rogers was diagnosed with cancer in February of 2020, only a month before the COVID-19 pandemic would shutter all of the venues he would host shows at, effectively cutting off his livelihood. A GoFundMe campaign quickly raised tens of thousands of dollars, eventually collectiing over $140,000 from friends, fans and supporters who wanted desperately to hold benefit concerts for Rogers but couldn’t.

While he promoted shows at dozens of venues in San Francisco and the East Bay over the years, during the past decade Rogers probably spent more time at the Knockout in San Francisco’s Mission District than any place outside of his own home. A planned string of tribute concerts at the Knockout in memory of Rogers and the great service he provided for punk and metal fans in the Bay Area a month after his passing in 2021 was largely scrapped due to spiking COVID cases, but this birthday party at the El Rio Saturday will provide his friends and supporters a much-needed afternoon of redemption and celebration.

The late legendary guitar great, composer and satirist Frank Zappa in the mid-1980s released a live album with the title Does Humor Belong In Music? That question gets answered with an unequivocal “Yes!” from headlining local geriatric punk-rock reprobates the Grannies.  

Punk bands built around a gimmick usually focus far more attention on concept than they do songs and execution, but for going on two decades, the cross-dressing rabble rousers behind Bay Area quintet the Grannies has been mixing their love for ridiculous shenanigans with some solid and serious rock and roll. Formed in 1999 when the group first clambered upon a San Francisco stage dressed in thrift-store old lady dresses, masks and wigs, The Grannies deliver a trashy, furious assault that echoes the likes of the New York Dolls, the Dictators and the Dwarves.

Lead guitarist Lois ‘Carmen’ DeNominator (aka Sluggo Cawley), exhibitionist lead singer Deanamite (aka Dean Scheben) and company have been entertaining the masses with their onstage antics and infectious anthems drawn from such fittingly titled efforts as Taste the Walker, the outtakes/demos collection Incontinence and the band’s most recent full-length effort — 2015’s Ballsier — for Texas-based imprint Saustex Records while playing regular local shows and touring abroad. The following year, the crew released Lords & Ladies, a split live album with the Upper Crust, the notable powdered-wig sporting Boston hard rockers who the Grannies have shared stages with in the U.S. and Europe.

The group went on an extended hiatus in 2018 so Cawley could pursue his more roots-oriented songwriting with the noir-ish country-rock band REQ’D that has released three albums since being founded, including Dressing Wounds By Candlelight a few months ago. However, the Grannies reunited to play their first show in four years at an August benefit to honor the memory of Daniel Blair (a longtime employee at Cawley’s San Francisco framing shop) at the SF Eagle.

The balance of the whopping six-band line-up features a number of local luminaries, some of which are playing their first show after an extended period of inactivity. Veteran SF punk trio the Bar Feeders have been playing their roots-informed brand of spastic hardcore for going on three decades and were a longtime staple of Rogers’ gigs. Pins of Light  features a talented quartet of musicians including members of such noted SF bands as Dead and Gone, Triclops!, Hightower, Peace Creep and Psychic Hit. 

Showcasing bassist Shane Baker’s growling vocal delivery and a sound that splits the difference between two bands anchored by late bass legend Lemmy Kilmister — the pulsing, space rock of Hawkwind and the raucous, locomotive riffs of Motörhead — the band is rounded out by the twin guitar attack of Jake Palladino and Ravi Durbeej and powerhouse drummer Phil Becker. The band’s self-released sophomore album Home featured “Adoration,” arguably the best Killing Joke song not written by Killing Joke in the last decade. Also appearing at the El Rio birthday celebration will be unrepentantly weird Bay Area punk favorites Fleshies, Oakland band Fracas and Kicker, the all-star old-school outfit fronted by UK transplant Pete the Roadie backed by current and former members of Neurosis, Dystopia and Operation Ivy.

Scott Rogers Birthday Bash with the Grannies and more
Saturday, Oct. 15, 2 p.m. $10
El Rio