Rogues of Chaos: no arresting this former Cardiac Kid.

Jerry Flack’s lifelong devotion to music was sealed at an early age. “I was three or four and my father’s band was practicing in the living room, and they were playing ‘Day Tripper’ by The Beatles,” he recalls. “I knew then that this was it. I wanted to play in a band, and I wanted to play guitar.” He would go on to embrace artists such as The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, and David Bowie. By the mid-’70s, he started getting into rockier rock, and he made sure the neighborhood knew it. “I used to deliver papers on my bike. I had this 8-track player that was made for bikes. I would take two 8-tracks with me, Bad Company and Lynyrd Skynyrd. It was ‘Shooting Star’ and the Lynyrd Skynyrd album. As I was delivering and throwing papers on the front porches, that was going full blast.”

Shortly thereafter, he started getting into the roots of what would become punk rock via The New York Dolls and The Ramones. He ended up in a band with Robert Lopez and Baba Chenelle called The Aqua Velvets. After that project, he played the first couple of rehearsals with his bandmates’ new endeavor, The Zeros. Flack would then form his own punk outfit, The Cardiac Kidz. “We were rehearsing in my living room, and I sat down with an anatomy and physiology book and I closed my eyes and opened a couple pages and put my finger down, and it was in the heart section of the book. I saw ‘cardiac,’ and I was like, ‘Here we go. Let’s do that!’”

The Kidz were active in the late-’70s and early ‘80s, but by the mid-’80s Flack had embarked on what would become a long career with the Navy. Still, he managed to keep gigging. “Every platform that I was on, we had a band. We would always play. I was on a carrier, and we had a band and we did this huge thing that they would call ‘Steel Beach Picnics’ — a big barbecue on the deck of the ship. I played in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Europe, and Japan, all kinds of different places. We always played on the ship.”

Starting in 2010, the Cardiac Kidz reunited and played sporadically for over a decade. Shortly after playing a Kidz show at the Casbah in September 2022, Spike Mike Muellenberg (Spice Pistols) and two of his musician pals joined Flack in a new band for an annual Halloween party thrown by Lisa Monday-Gomez from the online radio station Whatever68. The setlist included Cardiac Kidz tunes as well as songs by The Monkees and The Runaways, and wound up being the first gig for Rogues of Chaos, and also the final appearance for everyone in that initial lineup except for Flack. Muellenberg’s Spice Pistols commitments were too much for him to juggle another band, so Flack started looking for a different crew. The new keyboardist turned out to be one of his oldest pals, Cristina Smith. The two had known one another since the first grade. “I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for Cristina and her support, I don’t know if Rogues of Chaos would exist. She really was into this, and she really thought that I should continue writing and getting my material out there. She has been so supportive through this whole thing.”

Smith chimes in that Flack “has held onto his dream of being a musician through all the other instances of his life. He’s living it now and he’s breathing it, and he is doing it. You just gotta know that’s it’s so important to pursue your dreams.”

The now seven-piece band has been gigging out around San Diego, and they have dipped their toes into studio waters as well. Matt Starr (formerly of Ace Frehley, Mr. Big, and Kix) served as the drummer and producer on tracks recorded at local Singing Serpent Studio with Ben Moore. Flack handles almost all of the songwriting duties and is aided by singer Caylyn Gamboa, who assists with vocal melodies. “I will give her my idea of what I want the melody to be like, but if I were to try to sing, every dog in a five-mile radius would howl,” Flack says with a laugh. The band currently has two singles out (“Crazy for You” and “I Believe”) and is shooting to release a full-length LP, with a planned vinyl version as well.