Some ideas are just too good to resist. An AC/DC tribute band with an all-gay lineup called GayC/DC, for instance.
It all happened eleven years ago, when a bunch of California-based rockers wrapped up their previous band — a Go-Go’s tribute called (what else?) the Gay Gay’s — and started joking about what to do for an encore. “We wanted to keep playing and just started throwing ideas around,” recalls singer Chris Freeman, who doubles as cofounder of the pioneering queercore band Pansy Division. “Then someone said ‘GayC/DC ‘ and I said ‘Hang on a minute, that’s got legs.’ I could already see the logo in my head. And we spent the next 20 minutes Googling, because we thought there was no way this band didn’t already exist.”
It didn’t exist then, but it does now — and GayC/DC come to Deep Cuts in Medford Saturday. In addition, Pansy Division will play a separate show at the Faces Brewing Co. in Malden on Sept. 19.
They’re well aware of the irony of a gay salute to the ultimate macho hard-rock band. “That’s the whole point,” says drummer Brian Welch. Though you can expect a few strategic lyric changes, the music is done straight-up. Says Freeman, “Some people might think we’re blasphemy, but I’ve always been a big AC/DC fan. As a gay person I can say that visibility is crucial, and so is making sure people have a good time.” Adds Welch. “The music is never the joke, if anything we’re pointing to ourselves and laughing. It’s more about what we would have liked to see, growing up as gay kids with Bowie and Queen.”
Welch came into GayC/DC with a unique perspective. A longtime Bostonian, he was part of the hard-rock scene at the Channel and Bunratty’s, did drum tech for a few bands and wound up on the road with Extreme. Though its frontman Gary Cherone was supportive when Welch came out, he says the whole scene wasn’t that way.
“It was a very heteronormative scene,” he now recalls. “All through touring with Extreme, I’d just say I had a girl back home. Most people on the road crew were there for the drugs or the leftover girls, because we weren’t getting paid a lot. We had everything presented to us, and it showed me what people are willing to do to get close to somebody famous — and that scared me. I only saw things start changing when the alternative scene happened, and I started working for bands like Tribe.” Welch says that one of the few bands that made him feel at home as a gay rocker was Pansy Division, who first played TT the Bear’s Place in the 90’s. “I saw them and said ‘My God, there’s someone out there like me.’ I can’t tell you how much that meant.”
When Pansy Division plays this month, they’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of their sophomore album “Deflowered” — the album that perfected their mix of broad humor and underlying seriousness. (It also led to their touring with the up-and-coming Green Day). “It was the first album we did as a statement,” Freeman says. “We started getting mail from kids, saying things like ‘I bought your album and I keep it under my bed where my parents can’t see it, so don’t write me back.’ And we figured, OK, maybe they should be getting certain types of messages — so we put safe-sex information in the album, maybe a center where they could go if they got kicked out of the house. We didn’t get that when we were 14 so we said okay, we’ll be that band.”