After brutal tragedy, Lynn Breedlove made a luminous album of memory and men

Punk legend's new band Trust Me's 'Why I Like Dead Guys' came in the aftermath of the murder of his father and stepmother

Excerpts from interview by Marke B.

For 48hills

Trust Me. Photo by Daniel Foerste

"In May, 2020, Robert Breedlove, 87, and his wife Patricia Breedlove, 80, were murdered in their Grass Valley home by Patricia’s troubled son, Dennis Lee Wallace. The cause of death was blunt force trauma. Wallace, who had been living in a trailer on the Breedloves’ property, was charged with double homicide and sent to prison.

The name Breedlove should ring a bell: Robert was the father of SF punk legend and trans activist Lynn Breedlove, whose raucous dyke band Tribe 8 helped define the queercore movement in the 1990s, and who went on to form band The Homobiles, which just performed at the soon-to-be-closed Thee Parkside this past weekend; launch the first-ever ride share service, also called Homobiles, to help protect drag queens on the way to gigs; and publish several books, including the Lambda Award-winning Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show.

With such an expressive punk rock pedigree, it’s no surprise that Breedlove would turn to music and poetry to process his father and stepmother’s brutal deaths. When I first put on the new album he made about the tragedy with local experimental duo The Living Earth Show as Trust Me, called Why I Like Dead Guys, I expected a howl of cathartic rage, a furious screed against the abject violence of fate.

What came out of the speakers, however, was a luminously detailed, sublimely tender meditation not just on his father’s murder and his tangled relationship with his stepbrother, but on many of the men—and other strong spirits—who Breedlove had encountered throughout his life."

Read 48hills interview in full here.