California Calling – A night of story telling with Joe Sib – at The Key Club

October 15, 2009

For a few of us here at Big Wheel we have had the opportunity to skate, have a bunch a beers and a lot of laughs with Joe Sib over the years. Yet when we were photographing and video taping many of the Complete Control Radio shows at the Indie 103.1 studios, we got to hear a lot of the many stories Joe has.. and he has a ton of them. When we were sent a note that he was thinking of doing a live story telling … we were all “hell yea”, Joe’s story’s are pretty funny with a bit of history about all kinds of stuff mixed in.

The night finally rolled around and it was Thursday October 15th and we were off to The Key Club’s Plush Room for what could be described as half spoken word meets a stand up comedic routine. The $10 dollar a head donation went directly to the charity, Wheels For Humanity which helps people that can not afford wheel chairs get them.

The show got started at 9:15pm with one of Joe’s kid’s calling him on the phone, not sure if this was a set up or a phone alarm going off to appear as a call. It was this vibe that set the stage…. just a real guy with real stuff that was part of the culmination of who he has become and the stories that were about to unfold this evening.

To go through the stories and redact them would do them all a disservice so what we will do is hit a few of the highlights. Joe’s stories start out when his parents divorced when he was 10 years old.

”When I lived with my dad our refrigerator was the Safeway across the street”

”At my mom’s house there were so many rules that there was no way to remember them all. At my dad’s house there were no rules and I loved it”

”Actually there was only one rule at a my dad’s house and that was, Don’t Fuck Up”

Joe recalled the first time his dad took him to Winchester skatepark and he was freaked out. His dad kept encouraging him to go to try it and saying, “Joe these are your people”. His dad just said, try it for 15 minutes for me and then after a few kick turns, Joe was hooked on the place.

It was at this skatepark that was his first introduction to Punk rock

During the show he would look at the large photo on the stage of Johnny Ramone and ask for advice at various points.

There were stories of all kinds of Punk rock high jinx from the backyard parties, the gigs to the drinking. One of the stand out stories was when John Mauer of Social Distortion put him and his friends on the guest list, Joe and his buddies were stoked. The chick that was driving them to the show was already pretty wasted and even driving with a drink between her legs. The chick mis-calculated the off ramp to get off the freeway not far from the show and totally crashed the car in what Joe described as doing a rock and roll on the jersey barrier with the car. In what could only be pictured as a scene out of the movie “Suburbia”, Joe and all his friends just ran from the car and off the freeway, determined to get to the show to see Social Distortion play.

These were stories of a kid growing up in a divorced home, learning about life, discovering a world of Punk rock and skateboarding, and finding his way through the madness to some how survive it all. Delivered in a style that was a cross between comedian Louie Anderson meets the Punk rock world, the program never lagged and the audience’s attention never wavered. It flowed very well, so much so that when it was over you could hardly believe that the stories went on for an hour and twenty minutes … everyone wanted to hear more.