Contributed by Tim Foster
Musician & Executive Director at CapitolWeekly.net
I am joining the chorus to mourn the passing of Charles Adrian Thomas, AKA Ground Chuck, Sunday, Sept 14, 2025.
Chuck was at the very first rock and roll show I ever went to, in January 1986. I can still picture him in the pit, wearing a spiked leather jacket with band logos painted all over it. I met him soon after – he was friends with a girl I was dating, and she spent quite a bit of time with him.
Like everyone else, I was charmed by Chuck – his enthusiasm and almost manic sincerity was hard not to like: I knew Chuck for 39 years, and I think he hugged me every single time I saw him – for nearly forty years. He loved his friends so much, and he made sure they knew it. We could all take a lesson from that.
When I started playing music, Chuck was a big supporter of the bands I was in. I was a bit surprised he liked my bands so much given that we were doing sixties kinda stuff, and he was a speed metal/hardcore punk guy. Years later I discovered that Chuck had been into ’60s garage punk loooong before I’d ever heard it – he was playing garage band covers in bands when I was still listening to shit like “Gone Troppo.”
He LOVED the Losin Streaks, and there were several times I ran into him on the street as he was listening to our first album on his cd player. We played at his birthday party a few years ago and he sat in on drums on one of the songs, a cover of The Stoics’ classic, “Hate.” I can’t count the number of times he played maracas or tambourine with us.
Chuck played in various bands over the years, but my favorite was Mental Defective League, a hardcore outfit he fronted off and on for a decade or so. The band was great and Chuck was a truly gifted front man… chasing himself all over the stage and busting out with tight kneed jumps all night long. Seeing them was always cathartic – you walked out feeling younger than you did going in.
I went to see Chuck as he was starting hospice – there wasn’t much in his apartment, and almost nothing on the walls. One of the only things he did have hanging up was a flyer for the Sacramento Trash Jubilee, a series of shows I helped coordinate a couple of summers ago. I asked Matt K Shrugg to do a cartoon of Chuck for the poster – the King of Trash, as it were. Chuck loved it.
My Facebook feed is a wall of posts about Chuck, which speaks to the impact he had on his community. That his friends stepped up to care for him 24 hours a day for months says even more. It’s hard to describe what Chuck was to Sacramento without using words like ‘fixture’ and ‘character’ but he was much more than that. He was like Sacramento’s spirit animal — and something is gone now that is gone forever.
I love you buddy. Always. 
