Doug Evans, bass player for the seminal punk band the Didjits, died on December 28 in California. He was 53.
Evans hailed from Mattoon, Illinois, and hooked up with Sullivan natives, brothers Rick and Bradley Sims, who would become the powerful punk trio known as the Didjits. The band first kicked off in Champaign in the ’80s, after Evans’ skateboard buddy Randy Kilwag encouraged him to move to town. Champaign’s burgeoning music scene at the time included many pop-punk outfits like future Wilco members Leroy Bach’s Bowery Boys and Jay Bennett’s Titanic Love Affair, but the Didjits tore the town apart like no other band. Most of the mania can be attributed to frontman Rick Sims, who gleefully ranted his way through the band’s tight and compact punk anthems (full albums barely topped a half-hour), often dumping beer all over his besotted audience, as Evans and Brad Sims met him every step of the way on the rhythm section. The Didjits had a yen for 1950s rock legends, covering Little Richard’s “Lucille” and penning an ode to “Jerry Lee” (“We went over to Jerry’s house / Everybody did a little acid / We watched him kill one of his wives / We didn’t care because we were so high”). This made sense, as Sims’ guitar licks could occasionally sway into rockabilly, and he had the unhinged star charisma of performers like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, all the while ably backed by Evans and Brad Sims.
Unsurprisingly, the Didjits soon got snapped up by Touch And Go records, which Rick Sims called the only label they were ever really on. The 1986 debut Fizzjob (on the band’s own Bam Bam Records, eventually re-released on T&G) kicked off with “Jerry Lee” before segueing an ode to a “California Surf Queen” with guitar sounds to match, soon followed by the more somber “Pet Funeral.” The band not only had tremendous energy and inspired musicianship, the songs were frickin’ hilarious, like making fun of a hick in “Fix Some Food Bitch” (“Where’s my TV Guide?”) Their first official T&G release, Hey Judester, featured “Skull Baby” (“You’d cry too if all you had was a skull”), an homage to “Joliet,” and frequent show opener “Under The Christmas Fish.” Other T&G albums included 1990’s Hornet Pinata (which kicked off with the catchy “Killboy Powderhead” and featured odes to “Captain Ahab,” “Evel Knievel” and “Sweet Sweet Satan” himself), 1991’s Full Nelson Reilly, and 1993’s Que Sirhan Sirhan. Evans only sang lead on the band’s version of “Foxy Lady,” and gamely posed for a Prince-inspired cover of the Lovesicle single in 1989.