Blast From The Phast

Seeing as how it was South Bay homeboy Phast Phreddie Patterson (a.k.a. The Boogaloo Omnibus)'s birthday yesterday, we'd like to share Phast's memories of witnessing live shows by the Imperial Dogs back in the day, as they appeared on the Perfect Sound Forever website in a story about the origins of the Long Ryders that ran in January 2005:

"But there was a band called the Imperial Dogs that was actually from Carson, California. And they played a lot in the Carson/Long Beach/Torrance area -- the South Bay, they call it, between Long Beach and the L.A. airport. That's where the Imperial Dogs were from, and they played a lot of hall parties and things down there. And I think that if they had played in Hollywood more and actually had made records, they would have been a lot more influential to what became the punk scene.

"Because the Imperial Dogs were very much influenced by the harder aspects of the glitter scene -- mostly the flash look -- as well as the Stooges, the MC5, the Blue Oyster Cult, the early Aerosmith records, and the New York Dolls. And there was nothing like them at the time. There was absolutely nothing like them.

"I saw them in three different incarnations -- they were called Sugar Boy, then White Light, and then the Imperial Dogs. They became the Imperial Dogs in 1974 and they were doing this noisy, in-your-face kind of rock 'n' roll, long before the Ramones or any of that."