Do you remember where you were when seminal San Francisco jitterpop-punks Translator released their 1982 debut, Heartbeats and Triggers? You were probably “Everywhere That I’m Not,” the title of Translator’s hair-trigger single then making the rounds on the poppin’-fresh phenom known as MTV. Or did you forget?
“I remember sitting on a stoop in San Francisco in 1981,” recalls Translator frontman Steve Barton, speaking from L.A. on the eve of the band’s SXSW reunion. “I was talking to one of the members of Flipper, and he said, ‘I’ve always thought of [Flipper] as the Grateful Dead and you guys as Cream.'”
Nice pigeon holes if you can get ’em, but after their 415 Records debut and a trio of subsequent LPs (No Time Like Now, Translator, and Evening of the Harvest) that kept Barton, co-guitar-slinger Robert Darlington, bassist Larry Dekker, and drummer Dave Scheff in sticks ‘n’ strings through 1986, Translator gave way in 1989 when the singer returned to his native L.A. Despite a pair of retrospectives in the mid-Nineties, Translator was, to all appearances, a dead language. Until …
“We’ve all been keeping busy with our own music since the breakup, but when Bob came out to L.A. last November, I thought, well, hey, maybe we could do a Translator show,” Barton says. “The next thing I knew, we had a gig booked at Café de Norde in San Francisco that went so great that at one point I almost felt as though I were going to faint. It was that emotional.”
Thus the rebirth of Translator. “We’re just having a ball,” beams the newly Translated Barton, his grin visible straight through the phone line. “In Austin we’re all going to be staying in the same place together, very much like the Beatles’ Help! So who knows? We’ll have guitars and we might just come up with something!”
This article appears in March 17 • 2006.