by Cole Coonce
OUTER CIRCLE was an art-damaged post-punk band from Long Beach, California, circa the early to mid-1980s. The singer (“Spit” Spingola) wore a foosball man as a necklace and sang about middle-class ennui and dysfunction.
I joined the group after they had released an eponymous EP on Bemisbrain Records. Their debut featured five songs of mesmerizing sound textures featuring mellifluous synthesizers, analog rhythm machines, and Hawaiian steel guitar coupled with singer Spit’s deep baritone vocals.
When I joined as guitarist in 1983, Outer Circle‘s sonic focus shifted from the ethereal to a harder-edged sound.
We shared a rehearsal space with the esteemed minimalist art-punkers the Minutemen, and South Bay punk-rock superheroes Black Flag rehearsed at an adjoining studio around the corner from our lockout.
Normally we would gig with more avant-garde post-punk acts like the Shadow Minstrels, Mnemonic Devices, and Red Wedding, but the one time we opened for Black Flag in East LA their mob of militant mohawked-moshers wanted to kill us.
After surviving that encounter, in 1984 we released a 12″ new wave dance single on XLNT Brand Records. The A-side’s leadoff is “My Mona Lisa,” followed by “Building Dreams” and “Warm Gun.”
Despite “My Mona Lisa” achieving some success with airplay on KNAC and KROQ, the band began to collapse as some members began to resent the direction necessary to get on commercial radio and quit.
After Outer Circle’s complete implosion, Spit and I started the Fontanelles, an outfit best remembered for its appearance as the band performing at “Club Scum” in the schlock horror movie “Hobgoblins,” a no-budget film which enjoys cult status.
Now, a million years later, there has been a resurgence of interest in the Los Angeles post-punk scene of the 1980s. Inspired by music writers poking aorund the band’s history, I endeavored to take footage from the band performing “plausibly live” at a Dimension Cable television show and cut-in thematic elements relevant to Spit’s lyrics in a series of “official lyrics videos.” -30-
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