Clorox Girls are a three-piece who charge through their set like somebody is chasing them. They are a 1980s, Bay Area, punk-flavored earthquake.
Justin Maurer, Clay Silva and Colin Sanders have had an on-again-off-again-on-again affair as Clorox Girls, but recently the classic 2005 lineup blasted off on a nine-date tour. They stopped by Sessions From The Box to play us nine songs clocking in at just over 15 minutes. As Clif Hanger from the Boston band The Freeze once told me more years ago than I am prepared to admit, "If you can't say it in under two minutes, you're talking too much."
Originally forming in Oakland, they moved to Portland early in the game. Maurer explains: "Clay and I got evicted from our place where we were living, I think our rent was $80 a month. It was this place called Punks With Presses and it was like 200 crust punks and their friends and dogs in Oakland. We decided to keep our jobs and live in Clay's van so we parked behind the Oaks Club, which was a 24-hour card gambling casino, and we would pee in the bushes in the morning..." "in front of all the Asian laundry people," adds Silva as he laughs.
They have been around the world and back and returned with no shortage of crack-smoking fans in Mexico City, or stories of being roofied by Turkish carpet salesmen while narrowly avoiding organ theft and Marines threatening the band for not actually having any girls in the band. For all the close calls with danger, they are very keen on playing in former dictatorships. Maurer says: "One thing that was interesting to me was that in the countries where the '60s never happened, like Spain for example, they had Franco—he was a fascist dictator until the '70s; Brazil had the dictator where music from foreign countries was forbidden, it was banned—when you play places like that, the kids go crazy."
Let's listen to some of that forbidden punk rock now.
Track listing:
1. "I'm The One"
2. "Walks The Streets"
3. "Not My Hometown"
4. "Novacaine"
5. "Eva Braun"
6. "Don't Take Your Life" (watch the zombified video double feature below with "This Dimension")
7. "Stuck In A Hole"
8. "End Of A Fantasy"
9. "Vietnam"
