Bobby Sullivan
He grew up in the Washington, DC punk scene. Forming Soulside in 1983, their first release under the name Lunch Meat was a split 7” with Dave Grohl’s first band, Mission Impossible. After the first 7”, all their work (three albums and another 7”) was produced by Ian MacKaye and released on Dischord Records. Soulside toured extensively in the US, Canada, and Mexico, and toured Europe in 1989, including Eastern Europe.
Bobby Sullivan is a musician and activist.
Soulside were the only American band to play at one of the illegal punk shows held in East Berlin in the 1980s, shows put on in tolerant Lutheran churches against the wishes of the dictatorship and its security organs such as the Stasi. The shows normally featured banned East German groups, and only rarely did international bands appear, traveling into East Berlin on tourist visas and playing in borrowed gear.
After Soulside's split, Sullivan formed 7 League Boots in Boston, a band which blended reggae and rock. After releasing two 7”s and one album on Constant Change/Cargo Records, they broke up and Sullivan joined Rain Like The Sound Of Trains in DC, before forming Sevens with his brother Mark Sullivan.[1] Both bands released albums produced by Tim Kerr.
In his later years, Sullivan became an activist. Mentored by Eric Weinberger, a civil rights activist who had been on the Freedom Rides, he worked with Food Not Bombs (soup kitchens for the homeless) for five years in DC and Boston. He also helped form the DC chapter of the Anarchist Black Cross, a political prisoner support network, giving him close relationships with Ramona Africa from the MOVE Organization and various former Black Panthers and Weather Underground members. Today Bobby still makes music as B.Subtle with Moving Temple and Spontaneous Earth, an “acoustic roots” band in Asheville, North Carolina. He also visits prisons and corresponds regularly with hundreds of inmates as Minister of Education for the Rastafarian UniverSoul Order, a prison ministry.
References
- "Review of ''Hot Bodi Gram''". Monochrom.at. Archived from the original on 2004-02-04. Retrieved 2012-01-26.
Washington Post interview about Soulside reunion - Dec. 2014
Bandwidth coverage of 2nd album's reissue on vinyl - 2014
Interview on 24 Hours blog about the Prison Ministry - 2013
- Dance of Days by Mark Andersen & Mark Jenkins pages 169, 188, 211, 217-218, 232, 284-85, 275, 357, 383, 425, Akashic Books 2009.
- Banned In DC by Cynthia Connoly, Leslie Clague & Sharron Cheslow, Sun Dog Propaganda, 1998. Lest.
- American Hardcore: A Tribal History by Steven Blush pages 52, 175, Feral House 2010.
- The Dave Grohl Story: Nirvana, Foo Fighters by Jeff Apter.
- Visual Vitriol by David Ensminger page 110, University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
- This is a Call: The Life & Times of Dave Grohl by Paul Brannigan, Da Capo Press.
- The Philosophy of Punk by Craig O'Hara page 60, AK Press 1999.