Reunited Texas punks the Marked Men play two shows at Thee Stork Club
SAN FRANCISCO -- Made up of four musicians from the fruitful punk scene in Denton, TX, the players in tuneful garage-punk quartet the Marked Men have collective their hands in well over a dozen different groups. The Marked Men formed in 2002 from the ashes of popular punk crew the Reds (who recorded for Bay Area garage icon Greg Lowery's San Francisco label Rip Off Records) after bassist Chris Pulliam moved to Japan. Guitarists Jeff Burke and Mark Ryan and drummer Mike Throneberry brought on new four-stringer Joe Ayoub and started bashing out tuneful punk songs with the new quartet.
Picking up where the previous outfit left off, the Marked Men put out their eponymous debut the following year through Rip Off Records, earning rave reviews with the catchy, corrosive tracks penned by Burke and Ryan. The band would build on it's reputation with steady touring and a string of single and album releases through a variety of labels (their most recent effort Ghosts on Dirtnap Records came out in 2008).
The band has been on an extended hiatus in recent years as members focus on other projects -- Ryan plays in his main solo act the Mind Spiders as well as High Tension Wires, while Burke moved to Japan for a time and started his group Novice before relocating back to Texas and founding the American version of the band Radioactive as well as indie-rock project Lost Ballons. The group reunited for a string of dates across the U.S. in 2017 that stopped at the Chapel in San Francisco. While the Marked Men have been largely quiet since then (though they did release the greatest hits collection On the Other Side in 2018), they did reconvene for a pair of festivals the following year in Austin and New York City. In March, the quartet announced it would be playing another round of dates in different regions of the States to celebrate the band's 20th anniversary, with current run of five West Coast concerts ending at Thee Stork Club in Oakland.
After the Saturday night show sold out, a second 2 p.m. matinee was added. The Marked Men will be joined by Seattle-based power-pop outfit Supercrush for both concerts, with a pair SF groups filling out the bill. Noisy punk band Stimulation opening the early show and hardcore reprobates the Losers kick things off after dark.
The Marked Men
Saturday, Oct. 21, 2 p.m. and 9 p.m. $20-$22
Thee Stork Club