BY MIKE GITTER Another time, another place, a different twist in the alternate history of punk, So-Cal’s loud, fast, hook-heavy, and probably most literate band, Channel 3, would have been The Replacements. By the time the Cerritos-born band released 1983’s After The Lights Go Out, a record that hot-wired the grit of their steady stream of releases since 1980’s self-titled CH3 EP and (barely) three-minute barbs like “I’ve Got a Gun” or “Catholic Boy”, Channel 3 weren’t content to merely live in punk’s wash of white noise and static. “We were part of that class of 1980, 1981, bands like TSOL, The Adolescents, Agent Orange and so many others that came after the first wave of bands like The Germs, The Co-Go’s, the Masque era bands,” recounts guitarist Kim Gardener, who formed CH3 with childhood pal, singer/guitarist Mike McGrann in 1979. “By 1983, 1984, it was clear that we were all learning to write songs and play our instruments better. We all wanted more than just
to play two-minute hardcore songs.” By the time Channel 3 were interviewed by xXx at Boston’s The Channel club on January 15, 1984 (on tour with New York’s Kraut, who rolled up with Sex Pistol, Steve Jones, in-tow), they were one of many bands, including the likes of Husker Du and the pre-Soul Asylum, Dave Pirner-fronted Loud Fast Rules that were about to shower the bald-brigade with a more melodic, just-as-heartfelt, riot of their own. That’s to say nothing of McGrann being one of punk’s best lyrical storytellers in his own right - one of CH3’s sharpest calling cards that continues to the band’s most recent album, 2018’s Jay Lansford-produced Put ‘Em Up. “Mike and I go back to second grade together and have been buddies since then,” Gardener says. “We went to school together, we learned to play guitar together. Mike was also a creative writing major, so when he came with the lyrics to ‘Manzanar’ and the whole concept of what