Yolo County’s delinquent son

Woodland’s Main Street is pretty much dead tonight. Well, make that every night. The only action is outside the Stag, where a guy with a mohawk smokes a cigarette by the door, which is a pretty good indicator of where the punk venue is. It’s either that or a cigar store.

Inside, the Stag’s your average dive joint—one long corridor with a bar spanning across the place. As swanky as that sounds, don’t get any ideas—it’s not your Midtown Sacramento urban-NPR-wine-bar; it’s the kind of place you go and get wasted, maybe score with a fat chick.

Tonight, a woman in fishnet stockings twists bleached-out strands of hair around her finger while her date, a rugged dude with red, leathery skin, mad-dogs anyone who looks in her direction. For some reason, there’s a Wall Street Journal on one of the empty tables. A tweaker stands by the bathrooms picking at a face scab.

The San Francisco band Blame Betty gets ready to play to a packed house. The singer, a lanky showman, slithers around the stage, gesticulating like Madonna. Halfway through the set, a drunk local in a cowboy hat gets “the look”—no, not the Vidal Sassoon look, but the one like he either wants to fuck the shit out of something or kick its ass.

As the band plays, the crowd keeps its collective eye on the drunk, for fear that he might lash out. And, of course, he does. Mid-song, he lunges for the microphone. Surprisingly, the singer is amused. The band keeps playing. The singer stands by the amp watching as the drunk belts out a loud, angry, and surprisingly beautiful, rendition of Black Flag’s “TV Party.”

Let’s back up.

If you’ve never been, Woodland is a fucking weird town.

Like Mayberry on meth, the pace is slow but jittery. On a given day, you’re bound to see a blood riding his BMX bike to the mini-mart, an over-zealous Christian damning something to hell, a low-rent actor talking on his cell phone by the Opera House and an angry racist honking at an illegal farm worker. All right, perhaps Mayberry is a bad comparison, but somewhere in between goofy events like the Dynamite Chili Cook-off and the ease at which one can score a bag of weed, the town has developed quite a personality.

And thanks to some new business owners and promoters, the personality is becoming younger as the town experiences something of a counter-culture awakening.

Last year, despite a bit of protest, Deep Ink, a tattoo shop opened up right on Main Street. Butch’s Board Shop is thriving. In January, punk label Gearhead Records opened a retail store in a quiet neighborhood just behind Main Street. And for the past several months, the Stag has been hosting punk shows, with the help of promoter Casey Sharp.

Sharp says he found the dive bar just by looking around Woodland. He went into the Stag, convinced the owner that if she bought him a PA system from Guitar Center and guaranteed $1 Pabsts on Saturdays, he’d book the talent and bring in some extra business.

And so far, he’s done just that. Bands including the Secretions, Hot Pistol, Calendar Girl, Hookerfight, Iguanadon, Die Sister Die, the Divide, Posiden, the Thunder Boys and even I Walk the Line, from Finland, have played the rough-and-tumble bar. Sharp says the bands have one common element: They were drawn to the Stag’s intimate, slightly trashy and personality-heavy setting.

“They come back because they love the atmosphere,” Sharp says. “And I don’t screw ’em over.”

On Saturday, the town of Woodland might never be the same, as L.A. psychobilly/punk band Rezurex brings its skeleton-clad insanity to Woodland for the night. Sharp and hundreds of local psychobilly fans are beyond excited. But how are all those slick-haired leather hounds going to fit into that tiny space?

“It’s gonna’ be total chaos,” Sharp says. Yes, of course it is.