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Music

Stand in the place where you live

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› duncan@sfbg.com

I guess I’m a snob. It’s not easy to admit, since I like to fancy myself a salt of the earth type, but there it is. I’d just assumed that after making two albums for Fat Possum, 2005’s Stairs and Elevators and last year’s amazing All This Time; opening shows for the Drive-By Truckers and Lucinda Williams; and touring clubs relentlessly in the headlining spot, the next logical step for Cincinnati’s Heartless Bastards would be a change of geography.

I’ve never been to Cincinnati. My only experience with Ohio — besides the Neil Young song — was driving through the opposite end of the state on the I-80. What’s "hi" in the middle and round on both ends? Not Ohio — seemed to me it was flat all the way across. And humid. But what do I know? The only time I stopped was to gas up and indulge in an ill-advised all-you-can-eat steak (i.e., sinew and cartilage) special at a Truckstops of America. What I am familiar with is the great rock ‘n’ roll migration tale, featuring groups such as the Dead Boys moving from Cleveland to New York, which probably had more to do with the ready availability of smack than it did with making it. The West Coast version plays itself out as a southerly flight to the home of clapped-out hair bands and cheap tacos: Los Angeles. Even our beloved Melvins, who wended their way down from Aberdeen, Wash., and lodged in San Francisco for a magic period, ended up there, chasing the dragon of rock success.

So it’s ironic that after years of thinking it was lame when bands left the Bay for a chance at the big time I’d ask Erika Wennerstrom — the vocalist, guitarist, and principle songwriter for the Heartless Bastards — if the trio were thinking of moving away from their place in the heartland. I’ve bought into the stereotype that the edges are where it happens and that the center — with the exception of Chi-town — is a cultural vacuum.

"No, not really," Wennerstrom says over the phone. "I like Ohio." If I didn’t know where she was from — Dayton, originally — I’d be baffled by her accent. There’s a lilt, a slight twang, and a flatness to it, all at once — high in the middle and round on both ends, a hominess that’s entirely absent in her soulful, from-the-gut singing voice. Isn’t it just like a snobby SF bastard to find it quaint?

"I just think if we tour enough," she continues, "we’re eventually going through enough cities anyway. Plus, sometimes you end up being part of the whole rat race. I hate to use that word," she adds hastily. "There’s lots of big cities I enjoy, but I don’t know if it’s worth having to juggle three jobs."

They may not be juggling, but the HB’s are no strangers to work: drummer Kevin Vaughn works at an incense factory in nearby Oxford, while bassist Mike Lamping works for his family business, Superior Janitor Supply, which receives a shout-out in the "Very Special Thanks" section of the new album. After the last trip around the country in a van, Wennerstrom finally felt that she’d made enough to cut back on bartending and focus on songwriting.

And maybe that’s where my whole "why don’t you move" thing comes from. Listen to Wennerstrom’s dreamy ooh-wooh-hoos over the violin and viola on "I Swallowed a Dragonfly" — "in hopes that it would help me fly" — and you’ll hear a magic that transcends punching clocks and pulling beers. All This Time is so good, it gives me this "go tell it on the mountain" feeling, which, in turn, leads to a mild bitterness: Why aren’t the Heartless Bastards famous yet? Why are they opening for Lucinda Williams, great as she is, at the Fillmore and not headlining the Fillmore? How can they win Best Rock Group and Best Album of the Year two years in a row at the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards and still be featured in Tom Moon’s "The ‘Overlooked 11’ of 2006" on NPR? Moon has the right idea, and I know I put them on my top 10 list, so who dropped the fucking ball here? And so, somewhat subliminally, my mind starts thinking that maybe it’s Ohio that’s holding them back.

But would they be as good, would the songs sound as sweetly powerful, if there was nothing quotidian to transcend? If they were ensconced in a Hollywood bubble of yes-men attesting to the brilliance of every note? I mean, Jesus, someone in Los Angeles convinced A Simple Plan that they don’t suck. Band members could get lazy if they didn’t have to make an honest living, though I’d have to add that’s what’s so damned appealing about the Heartless Bastards: there’s something honest and unassuming, something unpremeditated about their songs. Despite their name, their music clearly comes from the heart. More precisely, it comes from the hearts of working-class Ohio musicians who haven’t been feted by the same painfully out-of-touch A&R assholes who learned nothing from Nirvana’s momentary pimp-slap of the artistically bankrupt LA record industry: you can’t fabricate honesty.

"I really don’t need a lot," Wennerstrom sings on "Blue Day." "Just trying to hold on to what I got." *

HEARTLESS BASTARDS

With Beaten Awake and Ride the Blinds

Fri/26, 9 p.m., $10

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 970-9777

>

Follow that bird

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By Max Goldberg


› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With so many duos still adhering to the muddied-guitar-and-drums style years after the White Stripes broke, it’s refreshing to see local twosome the Finches reaching back to an earlier, folksier model wherein melody and songwriting win out over bombast and swagger.

"We actually tried to have our friend Justin play drums at the practice space with us once, and none of us really knew what we wanted at that point," guitarist-vocalist Aaron Morgan muses over tea at a noisy café a few blocks west of the UC Berkeley campus. "And it was Justin himself who told us, ‘You know, you guys don’t really need a drummer.’ "

When the boy-girl duo of Morgan and vocalist-guitarist Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs perform, their plain-harmony vocals and soft-spoken stage patter make it a little difficult not to think of A Mighty Wind, but the earnestness is clearly paying off. I’ve seen the group play several times over the last year, and it’s hard to miss all the kids drifting by the merch table to pick up the group’s self-released EP, Six Songs, an endearing batch of tunes topped with a tender Pennypacker Riggs print showing a girl with a finch, riding off into a dreamscape of mountains and night.

That merch table will be a little busier soon with the release of the Finches’ debut, Human Like a House. The full-length feels very much like a natural growth from Six Songs, and while fans will certainly be pleased to hear more of a good thing, there are subtle surprises here too. For starters, the Pennypacker Riggs album art that so catches the eye has expanded to an accompanying book, How I Was Carried Away.

"I like to conflate the visual and the aural," she explains. "They’re kind of the same stories."

For now the duo seem grateful for the support they’ve received on their own merits and are thrilled that they’ve been added to the Revolver Distribution and the Dulc-I-Tone label rosters. "I think the word will spread about them to people who really get it," Matt Lammikins at Revolver says, "and that’s how they have gotten a weird following all over the country [the world, really] that has no rhyme or reason, and my friends still don’t know who they are…. It’s just good honest songwriting." The confidence all this has inspired shows on Human Like a House, especially in Pennypacker Riggs’s increasingly varied singing range. There are several songs here — "Last Favor" and the title track — that elaborate on the Six Songs formula: song-pirouettes in which melodies circle one another, matching up with Pennypacker Riggs’s forlorn lyrics. This balancing tends to work best when the tunes are kept short. In "June Carter Cash," for example, we get a clear-eyed snapshot of love and loss in a few rounds of the stately chord progression. The song is about the way we express our own feelings and experiences in other people’s voices and music. Hence the heartbreaking lyric "June Carter and John have flown / Now I’m ready to let you let me go."

"My favorite songs were the last we wrote," Pennypacker Riggs confesses. It shows: "Step Outside" is ebullient, the sound of the Finches falling in love, singing, "When we stop / It feels as though / We’re rolling backwards" over descending chords. Elsewhere the band leavens its duets with drums, pedal steel, and cello. The last is provided by Vetiver’s Alissa Anderson on the shimmering "Two Ghosts," a song in which Anderson’s drones seem to reel in Pennypacker Riggs’s and Morgan’s conversing guitar lines like something caught at sea.

Guest shots aside, Human Like a House is a homespun affair. The pedal steel is provided by Morgan’s father, David, who also engineered much of the recording in the family’s San Diego garage. "My dad’s just beginning to learn how to engineer recordings," Morgan explains. "This was his learning experience, which, I have to say, I think he did a nice job on." Indeed, the guitars sound a little brighter than on Six Songs, the harmonies delivered with a newfound warmth and clarity. Finishing touches were added in Pennypacker Riggs’s family garage in El Cerrito, with the vocalist’s mother contributing a recorder overdub before the duo closed the book on Human Like a House.

These production choices seem appropriate given the ground the duo treads on this album. "Owning a home [in the Bay Area] is pretty much a fantasy, a domestic fantasy," Pennypacker Riggs says when I ask her about recurrent images of homemaking. "I love this area, but I won’t be able to afford to stay here forever, which bums me out."

It’s a rootlessness all too familiar to many of us and one that Pennypacker Riggs rubs up against on Human Like a House. The album’s centerpiece, "The House under the Hill," crescendos with a chorus fleshed out with vocals by Morgan’s parents in a swelling show of support. But then, moments later, it’s just the guitars and Pennypacker Riggs’s voice again: "Alone I am nameless / And fearless and faceless." Bob Dylan might ask her, "How does it feel?" but by the end of Human Like a House, we have a pretty good idea. *

FINCHES

Sat/27, 2 p.m., free

Amoeba Music

1855 Haight, SF

(415) 831-1200

Also Wed/31, 9 p.m., $8

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

>

Idol musings

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Is there any escape from the tractor beam–pull influence of American Idol? Can someone do me a favor and put a plug in Paula Abdul’s histrionics, leash the dawgs of Randy Jackson, douse the frat-boy smirk on Ryan Seacrest’s mug, or, reluctantly, hold back the refreshing wave of honest harshitude rolling off Simon Cowell? And while you’re up, get me a High Life, hand me the channel changer, and take a socket wrench to that persistent leak of CDs by Idol alums. Winners and also-rans are far too prevalent on the charts — they’re essentially ruining my poppy good times, apart from the odd Kelly Clarkson guilty pleasure. The past few months saw the release of a second album of almost too stolidly respectful R&B by Ruben Studdard, The Return (J); an already gold-certified, lustily voiced and eclectic but undistinguished pop-rock self-titled debut by Taylor Hicks (Arista); and my star-studded fave, Fantasia, by Fantasia Barrino, who put together a contempo, Kelis-like, pop Afro-futurist collection with input from OutKast’s Big Boi, Gnarls Barkley’s Cee-Lo, Missy Elliott, and Swizz Beats. If I hadda listen idol-ly to someone, I guess I’d pop the baby mama on — you’ll be thinking you’re dreaming, girl, when you realize Fantasia actually sounds better than B’Day.

Adore it or abhor it, the phenom starts all over again Jan. 16, playing to our fondness for rags-to-riches stories and let’s-put-on-a-show moxie, our identification with those kids belting their hearts out in gladiatorial thumbs-up-thumbs-down cutthroat competition, our cynical identification with the judges’ stringent assessments, and our resurgent belief in a seemingly democratic process (know anyone who has ever voted?). Despite the scrappy likability and self-conscious modernity of Barrino’s second disc, it’s not to Idol fans’ tastes, methinks, judging from the supposed 230,000 or so CDs sold, in contrast with the 5-mil-plus number Clarkson is bringing down. Yippee, it’s the return of the blockbuster-minded music industry! So, barring catfights and embarrassing "hee-haw at Hung" moments, I think I’ll pass on season six, despite the benediction of approval bestowed by artists such as Prince and Mary J. Blige in season five.

Why? Maybe I like my idols weaned on something more original and less cliché than the Motown and Beatles songbooks. Maybe idols shouldn’t be quite so predigested and programmatic — so that contestants like Tamyra Gray won’t be dropped from their labels when they demand to write their albums.

There’s a place for pop, perhaps — this is a popularity contest, after all — and the fact that the show includes a songwriting competition this season should throw a new wrinkle into the mix of predictable boomer standards. Well, hell, why not ask aspirants to write their own songs? At the risk of turning this into a teary-eyed singer-songwriter showdown, I’d venture that approach would weed out a slew of vacuous, empty-vessel warblers.

Anyway, singing for your supper or at least your next career change seems pro forma. The game-ification of the pop cult draws amateur hopefuls and sporting observers alike, and the Recording Academy’s entry into the ring with its "My Grammy Moment" campaign, in which a dozen finalists vie to play beta pup to Justin Timberlake’s alpha dog at the 49th annual Grammy Awards, seems to bear me out. Watchers can log on to Yahoo! Music and view the audition videos of prospective sexy backups and vote online or via text message for the top five finalists, who will be announced Jan. 17. Voting continues, sports fans, till the lot are winnowed down to the top three on Super Bowl weekend, with the winner announced live at the Grammys on Feb. 11 before his or her live moment with Timby (who seems to be surfing the trend of recent celeb breakups right into In-N-Out).

Among the oodles of original video submissions are entries from Bay Area–esque finalists Jayne Rio of Vallejo, Mandy Ventrice of Pittsburg, and Philip Ray, formerly of Oakland. I asked the 28-year-old Ray, a graphic designer now living in Los Angeles, last week about his simultaneously unusual and mundane clip, in which he fluidly multitasks behind the wheel, driving through a medley of Whitney Houston and other Grammy-winning songs (the branding never sleeps). "It was a time thing," he ‘fessed. "I knew a deadline was approaching, and I have a tiny camera. I was on the way to El Pollo Loco, and I thought it would be a different way to approach it. That was my effort to make me stand out — most people sing in cars, so I thought … people would relate to it."

The son of Rev. Dr. CJ Anderson, who Ray says staged numerous musical events to raise money for the needy in the Bay Area, the contestant recalled catching benefit concerts at Pete Escovedo’s club until he moved south in 1996. Nowadays he writes songs and dreams of developing community centers that will cultivate unsigned vocalists and musicians. Praising Timberlake for the "way he navigated his career" and citing "Losing My Way" as his favorite JT song, the earnest Ray isn’t petrified by the possibility of working his wiles on a Grammy mob of pros. "It’s my ultimate dream. Aside from just being hungry for the opportunity, I think I’m going to try to use any opportunity to carve out a career as successful as Justin Timberlake’s."

Maybe I listened to too much punk as a tot, but as amiable as Ray is, that sort of bald careerism — as much a part of American Idol as actual performance — gives my perhaps rockist-tinged heart pause. I know pop has other uses beyond validating my romantic notion of self-sabotaging, autodestructing, doo-doo-dappling antistars, and American Idol and "My Grammy Moment" may be opening the playing field to new voices, but how fresh can it all be, given the validating arena they’re competing in? When I see, for instance, Big Boi, Elliott, Devendra Banhart, Prince, Thurston Moore, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Radiohead fill the judges’ shoes full-time, I’ll climb back on the couch. *

music.yahoo.com

Open mind music

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Not to misinterpret the question asked by a sneering Johnny Lydon of a San Francisco crowd as his band was self-destructing onstage at the now-defunct Winterland Ballroom almost 30 years ago, but seriously, folks, life seems unfair sometimes. In other words, here’s a sensible afterthought for your musical mind: there are simply too many damn bands at our fingertips, and sometimes we’re only lucky enough to encounter a handful of the really good ones. You might find yourself uttering regrets like "Fuck! I missed them play at that dingy hole-in-the-wall last year," and unfortunately you now have to settle for the mega-rock-star treatment as the same group works its charms on an enraptured crowd arena-style. So the story goes — rock ‘n’ roll can be a bitch.

The Curtains’ Chris Cohen is more optimistic, however.

"I try to let chance determine what I get to hear now because there’s so much music to choose from," the vocalist and guitarist of the Oakland trio confesses over coffee at Atlas Cafe in the Mission District. And though Cohen is reluctant to put his finger on any particular band that might get his musical juices pumping, he does divulge that most of the combos he encounters nowadays are his friends’ groups or supporting ensembles on tour.

"I really like when you don’t have any prior knowledge of the band, because then you can go at it with an open mind," he adds.

Such was my experience with Cohen’s project. My first exposure to the Curtains was on a chilly November night last year when I roamed over to Oakland to catch Mount Eerie’s performance at a packed 21 Grand. With no particular expectations, I leaned against a wall and watched the threesome set up their instruments. But as the band greeted the crowd with chiming keyboards and palm-muted guitar strums, my semi-inebriated attention was held and then kicked into deep interest.

Onstage, Cohen — along with guitarist-percussionist-vocalist Nedelle Torrisi and keyboardist-percussionist-vocalist Annie Lewandowski — exchanged smiles and jammed on quiet, twee pop–imbued ditties. The band’s lighthearted enthusiasm mirrored Beat Happening, while their cheerful harmonies and bubblegum-savvy melodies channeled the Softies and the Vaselines. The mood was buoyant and comfortable as the members sat in place and toyed with electric guitars, a single drum, and a wood block on one song after another.

CALAMITY TAMED


The aural beauty that floats from stereo speakers on the Curtains’ fourth album, Calamity (Asthmatic Kitty), tells a different story. Performed and recorded almost entirely by Cohen during December 2005, the album is drenched with sunny, ’60s-style psych pop and art rock experimentalism. Calamity at times evokes Smile-era Brian Wilson and early T. Rex with songs such as "Green Water" and "Invisible String," while treading into cozier-sounding territory on the opener, "Go Lucky." As intimate piano strides and acoustic guitar glide forth, Cohen’s Neil Young–ish chirp complements the melody: "Go, go, go you lucky one / You, you, you stop anywhere that someone sets you down / No, no, no spots anywhere / You, you, you will just spin me around."

But to Cohen, the Curtains aren’t trapped in a musical time warp. It’s all about what’s accessible to him at the moment.

"For that album I made a conscious decision to make something that wasn’t too fancy as far as the sound goes," he explains. "I wanted to use the sounds that were most easily available to me, which are guitar, bass, and my dad’s piano."

"I wanted it to sound very warm and personal," Cohen continues. "However, the sound of it wasn’t something so much that I had in mind but the effect that I wanted it to have on people, which was to be uplifting and make the listener feel happy. The music I value the most is the kind that takes me out of my life and makes me feel hopeful."

NEW STAGES


Since 2000, Cohen has had the Curtains in his crosshairs. Cofounded by Cohen and Trevor Shimizu, the group went through a couple of incarnations, occasionally including Andrew Maxwell, Satomi Matsuzaki, and Greg Saunier. After releasing three full-lengths, Cohen put the Curtains on hiatus in 2003 so he could join Matsuzaki and Saunier in Deerhoof. After several albums with that band, Cohen left last year to focus on his own projects.

"The Curtains before was something we would do in really brief spurts," Cohen says. "We would have a show, do a tour, and then rehearse for two weeks. I didn’t want to do it like that anymore. I wanted to make it a regular thing."

According to Deerhoof drummer and ex-Curtains member Saunier, Cohen had recorded 99 percent of Calamity before he revealed that he wanted to leave Deerhoof. "We listened to it in the car on tour, and I was stunned. It was like a garden of ideas and melodies — no two alike — everything asymmetrical and ravishingly beautiful," Saunier writes in an e-mail. "Every night I’d go to sleep fantasizing about how great the next Deerhoof record was going to be with all these hits on there. Then Chris shattered my dreams. But it’s OK, the Curtains deserve an album this beautiful in their catalog…. The Curtains are like the Jean-Luc Godard of the SF music scene, everything is so human and exposed, which, of course, takes way more nerve than any hipster’s posturing. The Curtains know no rule book for how you write songs — they write their own rule book from the spasms of the imagination. They have my undying admiration."

Cohen admits that while recording the album, he wasn’t sure whether to stamp the Curtains’ name on it, because his approach to the recording was so different from his past endeavors.

"Everything with the Curtains has always been done out of necessity," he says, going on to explain that he only had a limited amount of time to work on the music, so he played all the instruments himself.

Though Calamity includes guest vocals by Torrisi and Yasi Perera as well as musical contributions from Half-Handed Cloud leader and Sufjan Stevens chum John Ringhofer, Cohen had to rethink the album in terms of its live re-creation. "When I was making it, I wasn’t thinking of anybody else performing the music, which has made it difficult to now perform it as a band," he says. "I didn’t think anyone else would be interested, and then Nedelle was, like, ‘I want to play in a band again. Can I play in your band?’ "

After Torrisi and Lewandowski joined the Curtains, Cohen says he became "excited about playing new music again in a band with new people."

"Something that’s been really fun now is that everybody has been singing and working on harmonies," Cohen says, "and that’s something no other version of the band has done." The band doesn’t have a big repertoire, he adds, so the trio keep throwing out the songs that don’t work.

Cohen also admits that the idea of even having vocals in his band is relatively new. "I really wasn’t interested in vocals for a long time. I felt like I just wanted to make music that was really abstract, and I just didn’t have anything I wanted to sing about."

But Cohen’s vision seems to have changed with the addition of Torrisi and Lewandowski. In essence, the Curtains are starting over from scratch and fashioning Calamity‘s catchy pop into their own.

"To me, the Curtains has always been a pop band," Cohen explains. "I want it to be music that anyone can understand and enjoy. It fits into the limited amount of time that pop music seems to inhabit people’s lives." *

CURTAINS

With Sic Alps and Okay

Fri/19, 10 p.m., $7

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

(415) 550-6994

www.theknockoutsf.com

>

Posi posse

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What’s the expiration date on cute? Is it just limited to the length of time you can tag a cat a kitten, pull off head-to-toe pink, tolerate unironic smiley faces, or maintain a Britney Spears fan site? Does anyone older than 21 still strive to be cute — or anyone not in a boy band, not a showgirl, not wearing mouse ears? Maybe cool stole cute’s thunder around the time kindercore and twee pop faded from view, got into Stanford, and sold their Belle and Sebastian albums, because except for the brief bandying about of the posicore label, as embodied by inspirational party starters like Hawnay Troof and Barr, cute has been, alas, the wallflower at the hoodies’ and headbangers’ balls. Even indie kids have generally distanced themselves from the terrifyingly twinkly adjective — cute and all its shiny, blank surfaces just doesn’t fit the grim, grimy tenor of the times.

Perhaps that’s why it’s the moment for Matt and Kim, the Brooklyn drum-and-keyboard successors to Mates of State and the latest, freshest, most upbeat iteration of the rock duo approach to come along since all those bands with "-s" tacked to their names. They’re supercute; get the kids to dance, stage-dive, and generally act up at their live shows; dream up funny, lovable, and yes, cute videos of food fights; and make lots of energetic pop punk (not to be confused with punk pop and Hilary Duff dumpees). The c word has been a hassle, though. "We get cornered into ‘cute’ a lot as a category," says Matt (né Johnson, 24) from Brooklyn, where he and Kim (last name: Schifino, 25) have settled down briefly amid their nonstop traversing of the country, spreading the gospel of fun. "If someone told me a band was a really cute band, I wouldn’t want to see that band. But a lot of people enjoy it — we smile, we have fun, Kim’s cute. I mean, a lot of people say that we’re cute in a really positive way, and that’s fine, but I wouldn’t want a video or photo shoot where we’re swinging on swings. I don’t want to brand ourselves as cutecore."

The "core" suffix is the kiss of death, isn’t it? Worse than the "-s" because it sounds like it might be cool — there might be a community of sorts there, but instead there’s just the distinct whiff of curdling dismissiveness. Similarly, all the bands that got tagged "screamo" should have just fallen on the neck of their guitars the instant they heard that insult applied to their music.

"Kim doesn’t like cute," Johnson says.

Thus the band decided to drench its new video for "5k," from its self-titled debut on IHEARTCOMIX, with fake blood, mock dismemberment, and pseudo gore. The pair aren’t afraid to mix a little jeopardy into their joy — so they’re not too scared of the warm winter that’s throwing down in their Brooklyn neighborhood at the moment we talk. "Over in New York City it’s ridiculous!" Johnson raves. "People are wearin’ T-shirts. It’s 70 degrees. It’s like the end of the world. It’s definitely colder in San Francisco in the summer than New York City in January."

Yet the unseasonable heat fits the sunny dispositions of the two-and-a-half-year-old combo, who haven’t had any time to write new songs since they bought their touring van in October 2005 ("We used to travel in an ’89 Honda Civic sedan and cram in all the stuff to the roof and drive with the back on the ground and the front in the air"). "We’re totally a summertime band," says Johnson, a onetime political punk fan who worked in film production.

"We like fun songs and fun things related to summer. I guess people get a little grumpier in winter, so as far as writing fast and up-spirited songs goes, it’s much better for it."

Never ones to shun the fun times, Matt and Kim still agree it’s the worst of times that stand out. In fact, one of their most memorable tour tales from the last year had to be their first performance in the Bay Area, at Rock Paper Scissors in Oakland.

"We got the show the day before we were playing there, and somehow the word was that we were an acoustic band and we’re a really loud band," Johnson recalls. "And it’s their knitting night, and a bunch of people are sitting around at tables knitting. I think we made it through three songs…." *

MATT AND KIM

With Girl Talk and USA Crypt

Fri/12, 9 p.m.

$13, sold out

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1422

www.independentsf.com

ASK MATT AND KIM

TOURING TIPS


• Choose whom you go with wisely. "If they’re your friend, be ready for them not be your friend anymore," Matt Johnson says. "Kim is the first person it’s really worked out with. We went with another person on one of our tours, and Kim now seems to disdain him."

• Pancakes can be a costly proposition. "I definitely realized that once we went to IHOP," Johnson says. "We just got pancakes, and it cost $20. That was a real realization."

• Check the weather before it wrecks it. "I feel like the hottest place I’d ever been in my life is Colorado — I thought I was gonna die," he bemoans. "And the coldest place was in Arizona. I thought that was the desert and it was gonna be hot. Be careful about thinking the south is always warm, when it really is not. Cleveland, Miss., in February — boy, that was cold."

FAVORITE TUNES


"I often describe what we listen to as a lot of people’s guilty pleasures," Johnson says. "I grew up listening to political punk, and I went from being close-minded in general, and then my mind blew wide open."

• T.I., King (Grand Hustle/Atlantic)

• Beyoncé, B’Day (Sony)

• Best Fwends, next year’s album

• Girl Talk, Night Ripper (Illegal Art)

• Flosstradamus

High tide

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Let’s face it: half the kick of discovering a little-known noodler or late-night four-tracker lies in the shock of the unknown. Jaded ears perk up at the sound of some never-was untouched by time, history, or, hell, pop itself — after all, musical obscuros like High Speed and the Afflicted Man, one of Wooden Shjips guitarist Ripley Johnson’s favorites, were far from popular.

Wooden Shjips itself — give or take that copycat culture–jamming "j" — might have easily slipped past notice. I first heard their 2005 three-song 10-inch, Shrinking Moon for You, by chance when Holy Mountain honcho John Whitson spun the disc at Hemlock Tavern — the ears pricked up to a dusty, droning cluster of fuzz, the hips jiggled along with those sleigh bells until the second guitar shrieked to the foreground. Hark, the groovy in extremis, raw ’60s-style teenage-riot drama of the Velvets or Spaceman 3. I was told it was a single by a local band that was giving away its searing psych stomp to anyone who e-mailed for a copy. I seem to remember dutifully firing off a message later. No response.

No wonder — Johnson ran through the original 300-copy pressing of Shrinking Moon after raves from music sites and blogs such as Dusted and Siltblog and the random high-five by Byron Coley in Wire. The next Wooden Shjips recording, the 2006 7-inch "Dance, California"/"Clouds over Earthquake," garnered further positivity, completely spoiling Johnson’s original plan of a worldwide free musical giveaway — a goodwill crusade of vinyl shareware, if you will, that embraced its own mystery.

"It became a little tricky once people started writing about it, like on blogs and stuff," Johnson said last week, chilling on a chilly SF evening with bassist Dusty Jermier in Eagle Tavern’s beer garden. "Then record stores wanted to carry it, but if it’s free, you can’t really sell it to them, and they wouldn’t take it for free."

Most artists should be so unlucky. But Johnson explained, "It was important to be consistent. Since no one knew the band, there was no way to sell them, so the initial idea was to just give them away, and if I couldn’t give them away, I actually had a plan to leave them on bus seats and in libraries. It didn’t work out that I had to do that.

"I mean, the one thing I didn’t want to end up with was a box of records that just sat in my closet, because I’ve been there before."

But it is fun for the treasure-trawling music collector geeking out on the thrill of discovery, which Johnson can relate to. "I think the other big inspiration was from private press records from the ’60s and ’70s — people who’d make their own record, maybe 100 copies, and it would be forgotten, and then 30 years later people would discover it and decide it was the greatest record they’d ever heard," he said, citing High Speed and George Brigman on San Francisco’s Anopheles Records as inspirations. "Just press the record, make music — why wait? Why do you need a label? Why do you need people to like you to make a record? You can just make it, and if people don’t like it, maybe they’ll like it in 20 years."

Instead, "there was a lot of going down to the post office every day and mailing out records, which is really fun to a certain degree," he continued. "It’s cool to be contacted by people all over the world." They’d PayPal him shipping and extra money to coax him to send his single as far afield as New Zealand, Japan, and Lebanon. All of which has led to a forthcoming full-length for Holy Mountain, singles for Sub Pop and France’s Pollymaggoo imprint, and shows at South by Southwest — after Wooden Shjips play their first show at Cafe du Nord on Jan. 15.

"We’re actually having goals thrust upon us," said Johnson, a Wallingford, Conn., native who works as a systems administrator at CNET. "We’re sort of drowning in goals at this point — a lot of offers to put out records, show offers."

It’s a radical change from Johnson’s last, late ’90s band, Botulism. "We would pretty much clear rooms," he recalled. The first "iteration" of Wooden Shjips, which began a few years ago, consisted of nonmusicians. Johnson wanted bandmates who would bring the willingness to learn but leave the ego at home. "Musicians are a pain in the ass," said the grinning guitarist, who confesses he did want to "dictate a little bit." Unfortunately, nonmusicians also didn’t often come with the dedication. "In fact, in the first version our drummer quit because we started talking about playing shows," Johnson added, chuckling.

Making music — white label or no — continues to be the focus: Johnson, Jermier, "nonmusician" keyboardist Nash Whalen, and drummer Omar Ahsanuddin have already begun recording on a creaky eight-track reel-to-reel in the SoMa practice space they share with the Fucking Champs. And perhaps Johnson will find use for the box of Botulism singles he has in his closet, selling them as Wooden Shjips juvenilia. "I’d rather just revert to the old plan and put them on bus seats or in the library," he said with a smile, "and see if people discover them on their own." *

WOODEN SHJIPS

Mon/15, 9 p.m.

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

Free

(415) 861-5016

>

Kirby Dominant

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KIRBY DOMINANT

Starr: The Contemplations of a Dominator

(Rapitalism)

In a moment when Bay Area hip-hop is synonymous with hyphy in most people’s minds, it’s radio-shock savvy of Kirby Dominant to throw down a solo effort that follows no trends while his Niggaz and White Girlz project with Chris Sinister continues to generate word of mouth. Though its cover art features the same fuchsia hues of Niggaz and White Girlz — according to the man himself, fuchsia is the current signature color of the Rapitalism label — there is no denying that Starr: The Contemplations of a Dominator finds its creator on what he’s described as "some Jack Pollock shit," throwing different ideas and sounds at your head and seeing what sticks.

The first thing that does is the leadoff track, "Shenanigans," on which Dominator taps into an Irish atmosphere derived from time spent in Saskatchewan — but make no mistake, the guitar riff–driven result is no Leprechaun in the Hood pure silliness, and he steps far outside any record collection you’d find in a house of pain. Tapping into various space scientist and chemist cadences (much like Kool Keith in Dr. Octagon mode) to formulate what he deems musical style number 1,576,384,979, Dominant mocks faux producers with no range and knowledge, informing them that "Gil Evans would stab your ass with a toothbrush."

From there he journeys through the warm soul of the title track, lowering a voice that can be as mischievous as early Q-Tip in order to target MCs with no vocabulary whose rhymes are "fermentin’ like orange juice in prison." Going "solo like a nigga at the rodeo," he moves through "Come Outside" to a rock jam coda and then pays tribute to homegirl Joni Mitchell during "The Power of Stephen Padmore’s Shirt." On "So Right" he even gets so loose mentally that he turns instrumental, collaborating with Roy Hargrove to create a trumpet-inflected epic. In the near future Dominant plans to spread the new wave thuggin’ gospel further with Bloody Tuxedos, and he’s even venturing into classical music with Ensemble Mik Nawooj. Starr proves his wild wordplay can comfortably occupy and redesign any space between those wildly different zones.

New wave on the tracks

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Hip-hop’s maze is infinite in size, shape, and perspective, but sometimes MCs get trapped at an impasse and start repeating each other like a gaggle of parrots. During times like that — times like now — it takes imaginative minds to break through and open new verbal doors. That’s what the two-brained Bay Area rhyme machine known as Kirb and Chris does on Niggaz and White Girlz (Rapitalism), a mixtape-turned-CD that launches the sound of new wave thuggin’: loops of ’80s hits and obscurities coupled with hard and hilarious truths about sex and race in America.

"We liked to go to the new wave clubs and do our thing," Kirby Dominant says when asked about the inspiration behind the concept. "We’d go out during the week and then on Sunday just compose what we went through, whether it was little chicks fuckin’ with us, kissin’ on us or dudes tryin’ to downplay us. We wanted to come through and fuck with taboos and myths and stereotypes. It’s not necessarily something we take to heart — I’ll fuck anything that moves, first of all, I don’t care what color it is."

Before they began recording, Kirb and Chris tried out the title Niggaz and White Girlz in social situations to see what kind of reactions it provoked. "A lot of people in our crew were, like, ‘Dude, that’s fucking ignorant,’ " Dominant remembers. "I’d say, ‘But if I called it Niggaz and Mexicans, you wouldn’t say anything, huh?’ "

"Or Niggaz with Niggaz," Chris Sinister adds.

Dominant claims some black-on-both-sides (or in clear jewel boxes and on the outs?) big names were up for cameos — until they heard about the subject matter. "I’m not going for these rappers saying they aren’t fucking white girls," he says. "I’ve been on tour, and there ain’t no fuckin’ black girls in Canada. I’m not believin’ it. I’ve been to those towns!"

The truth is calling the shots on Niggaz and White Girlz, and it’s open season on any gender or color that just can’t get enough. Dominant and Sinister sprinkle a ton of pop culture references on top of what one of the album’s characters calls a "Rick James and Teena Marie love" theme that could have been just a gimmick: Hill Street Blues, the Cosby kids, New Kids on the Block, Vampire’s Kiss, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Malcolm Little are all recruited for dissing or boasting purposes.

But dig beneath, and you’ll find track after track that takes post–P.M. Dawn new wave rap in unexpected directions. The keyboard stabs of Gary Numan’s "Down in the Park," for example, are an ideal sonic setting for Sinister to live up to his last name with a realist tale of the hustling that takes over city rec areas at night. Inspirational and even kind of spine-chilling, "In You" keeps Bono’s histrionics on "With or Without You" to a minimum, allowing Sinister and Dominant to spin candidly detailed morality tales with different endings about a greedy promoter and a woman turning tricks to support a habit. "Human" gives Dominant an opportunity to provide the frankly hilarious sequel that LL Cool J never made for "I Need Love." On "Money" the duo get hot but not counterfeit, and DJ Ice Water is at his coldest in revealing what the B-52’s "Legal Tender" has been all along — a prototypical money-stacking rap track, complete with synths and hand claps.

Some of the more obscure musical sources on Niggaz and White Girlz give Kirb and Chris the chance to lay down tracks on which the new wave sound is wholly submerged. "Change Your Mind" might be the album’s hottest cut, with Dominant mocking the "foul quotations and little heart murmurs" of MCs who have a fear of the kind of music made by, say, the Talking Heads. But the most mind-blowing moment is "Doorstep, Girl." There the duo flow over Morrissey — specifically, the Smiths’ single-mom scenario "This Night Has Opened My Eyes." Sinister, whose mother, Diane, gave him a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis when he was young, taps into his own version of Moz’s melancholic and literary approach to lyric writing, addressing a girl who "turned my open heart into an abyss."

"Before the album I really got my heart broke," Sinister says when asked about his words. "I think the best thing is that Kirb really told me, ‘Man, just talk about what’s goin’ on.’ "

"A lot of times, people in hip-hop, they try to tell their whole life in one song," Dominant says. "I study songs, and I’m, like, ‘How come you can’t write a song about just waking up in the morning and how the sun looks while your girl’s still asleep?’ "

Misery and comedy live next door to each other on Niggaz and White Girlz. The many skits that Kirb and Chris create don’t just shame all the wack between-song scripts that have stunk up too many recordings since gangsta crashed Prince Paul’s party — they’re better and more perceptive than most sketches by comedians. On "Don’t You (Take All My Money)," Ice Water scratches and scribbles over the voice of a woman who says, among other things, "Y’all wasn’t playing when you said ’80s dance music shit!" According to Dominant, the woman’s cameo came from club hopping on the block during a typical 16-hour recording session. "We were at Hyde Street [Studios], and I was, like, ‘I need chicks.’ "

"Literally, we pulled those girls out of the club and got them in the studio," Sinister adds.

Dominant: "All we did was play the song and put them in the studio and let them talk over it. Whatever we liked, we took."

Sinister: "We could do outtakes of the shit they were sayin’. And that was a beautiful woman too."

A top contender for funniest skit has to be "Fuck You and White Bitches," in which a Goapele-loving young woman gets heated with Dominant because he took a girl named Becky to see Revenge of the Sith. "It got really strange, because I swear to God, when Kirb was doing that skit with her, she really started feelin’ it," Sinister says, referring to the skit’s actress, the cousin of one of Dominant’s ex-girlfriends.

"You know the part when she says, ‘I bet she can’t ride a dick like I can,’ and the white girl goes, ‘You wanna bet?,’ " Dominant asks. "That was my uncle’s idea."

"At first it just ended, but my uncle was, like, ‘You should add "You wanna bet?" on that shit,’ " he says to general laughter.

Creativity is a family affair in the world of Kirb and Chris. "No one could have made this album but us," Dominant says. "How many hood-ass niggas are you going to find listening to the B-52’s and knowing about them who can rap?" *

KIRB AND CHRIS

With C.L.A.W.S., Matthew Africa, Ryan Poulsen, and Special Fun Ambassador Cims

Sat/13, 9 p.m.

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

$8

www.kirbandchris.com

www.rapitalism.com

>

P&J jam

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Icons come and go, with all the fanfare, dressers, and folderol that legends demand, you know — with a wiggle of a ruddy nose, the flash of a cape, a blast of TNT, the slam of the estate gates. Goodbye, James Brown (RIP Godfather of Soul, Dec. 25, 2006), may you work a little less in heaven than

you did on earth. Fare thee well, Village Music (music geeks’ vinyl treasure trove), readying to close Sept. 30, due to the high rent demanded in Mill Valley. Next?

I was ready to say hasta luego to that mammoth warhorse of all critics’ polls, the Village Voice‘s Pazz and Jop. The massive compendium of top 10 album and song lists and legitimizer of toiling, stinking music crit midgets the nation over, the creature seemed to be next on the list of endangered species when creator-caretaker Robert Christgau (dean of American rock critics) and Voice music editor Chuck Eddy were fired last year after the New Times’ purchase of Village Voice Media.

Still, the yearly e-mail appeared again early last month — "Hello. You are one of the 1,500-odd critics we’d like to include …" — this time signed by the Voice‘s new music editor, Rob Harvilla, who got the NT corporate relocation orders from the East Bay Express.

Is it the same poll without Christgau keeping tempo? Honestly, few envy Harvilla, who has had a tough shoe to polish in pleasing Voice readers and filling his well-established predecessors’ boots while boasting little of sheer record-reviewing chops and logging a fraction of the critical thought that has gone into the careers of Eddy and Christgau. The latter for good reason dubbed his graded music review column Consumer’s Guide. Ever the idealistic, outraged, yet overthinking lot, music writers were conflicted — torn between their loyalty to the old Voice editors and the scent of a continuing or future paycheck. The notion of alternate polls was batted around on the blogosphere.

Still, when Gawker Media actually began one, who suspected the brouhaha that would ensue? Gawker’s music blog, Idolator, announced its startlingly similar Jackin’ Pop Critics Poll with the cheeky, gauntlet-tossing headline "Time to Raze the Village," called out Christgau’s and Eddy’s cannings, and issued the salvo "For those who had long turned to the Voice to help guide them through the realm of pop, rock, and hip-hop, the 51-year-old alt-weekly now had about as much musical credibility as, say, a three-month-old blog." Shortly after that, Idolator poll editor and ex–Seattle Weekly music editor Michaelangelo Matos was informed, through a multiple-source grapevine at the NT-VV Media–owned Minneapolis–St. Paul City Pages (the alt-weekly at which he began his career) that he has been banned from that paper.

Gawker-Idolator later reported that word quickly went out to NT-VV music staffers that they’re not allowed to vote in the Idolator poll. "When we announced the poll, that day, I saw an e-mail from John Lomax, who is the Houston Press music editor — he’s head of New Times music editors — instructing all music editors and staff writers that hourly and salaried staffers of New Times were not allowed to vote in the Idolator poll," Matos told me from Seattle.

Matos added that despite NT-VV being "obviously hardball kind of guys," he took umbrage at the fact that "they didn’t tell me I was banned. I heard it from somebody else. I think the way they handled it was chickenshit, but from the way I can tell, that’s one way they operate, through fear and imprecation." At press time, Lomax and City Pages music editor Sarah Askari had not responded to inquiries.

Is this just a matter of new media versus New Times? Corporate print media fending off the pricks of a million busy blogging digits? To make matters even more complicated, Christgau himself, whose Consumer Guide was recently picked up by MSN, has voted in both polls. "I have told people who’ve asked to do what they wish," he e-mailed me, adding that Eddy, now at Billboard, is not voting in P&J.

Yet other aboveboard and down-low boycotts of P&J abound, Matos said. Ex–Voice staffer and current Pop Conference organizer Eric Weisbard is skipping the poll because, the former P&J pooh-bah e-mailed, "participating in Pazz & Jop validates the New Times neanderthals who now run Village Voice Media. They may want to keep alive a poll that generates more Web hits than anything else they do, but in all other ways, they hate and are trying to eradicate everything that the Village Voice music section stood for: intellectual discussion of popular music and popular culture."

"A number of people who aren’t voting in the Voice poll are older and better established," added Matos, describing an argument he recently had with a friend. "I heatedly called it a labor issue, and my friend said, ‘If I vote in the Voice poll, am I a scab?’ It’s probably not that cut-and-dried…. Everyone in New York knows how bad the Voice has gotten, but for a lot of people, the Voice still represents a decent paycheck. It’s a hard thing to argue with. People who don’t want to piss off the Village Voice, and frankly, till this poll came along, I was one of them."

Vote in both, don’t vote in P&J, or vote in P&J and pen protest too? I’ve always internally chafed against the voice of critical authority, inclusive yet contentious, implied with P&J. Perhaps that sense of center is a bastion of the past, along with traditional music industry models. Yet even the first P&J Matos ever read — from 1990, with De La Soul on the cover — included an essay by a writer who refused to participate in the group grope. The gathering was that quirky and open to dissent.

An alien concert in the new order of NT-VV? "Good going, champions of the free press!" Idolator crowed after announcing the NT-VV response, excerpting a supposed example e-mail from a NT-VV music editor to writer. "To get revenge, we plan to not patronize the porn ads in the back of your magazines for the next week. You have no idea how much that’s gonna cost you."

One long-tenured P&J pooh-bah continues to watch over the proceedings, if from afar. "I look forward with considerable curiosity to both polls," Christgau wrote to me. "I very much doubt either will be as good as the last PJ, but we shall see." Nonetheless, it seems unlikely the boycotted and participation-by-dictate P&J will, as Matos put it, "open things up for you," as good critics and past polls have. *

Get in the Vans

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Not surprisingly, a sneaker store was the meeting place for two young members of the popular East Bay hip-hop quartet the Pack, whose slow and smoldering bass-heavy runaway rap hit "Vans," about the "punk rock shoe," has the infectious hook "Got my Vans on, but they look like sneakers."

"Me and Stunna went to the same school. So we knew each other," Lil Uno said. "But one day we just both happened to be in the same shoe store … and it was sort of by accident how it all happened." That fateful day in 2005 set the stage for the formation of the four-member Wolf Pack, as they were originally called. On Dec. 19, Jive/Zomba, via the Too $hort imprint Up All Nite, released their national debut, Skateboards 2 Scrapers, an EP with seven songs that features two versions of their "My Adidas"–style sneaker hit for the hyphy age, including the "Vans Remix," featuring the godfather of Bay Area rap himself, Too $hort, plus an appearance by the "Tony Hawk of the ghetto," as the Pack call him, Mistah FAB. The disc should tide fans over until the release of the group’s full-length in April.

Speaking recently by cell phone from Berkeley, on a break from his School for the Performing Arts–tutored lessons, the now-17-year-old Lil Uno continued his sneaker-seeking tale. Stunna "had actually just bought a pair of shoes that I wanted, and I had just bought a pair of shoes that he wanted…. They ran out of his size, and they ran out of my size. So we actually ended up trading a pair of shoes for a pair of shoes." He laughed. "And then later on we end up making a song about shoes. Funny how things happen."

Indeed! But what happened immediately was Lil Uno invited Stunna to a party in San Francisco. It was at that party that he met producer-rapper Young L and rapper Lil B, who had already started recording music together. "The next day they asked me to go to the studio…. It was all four of us. And since then it’s been the Pack," Lil Uno said of the very young group (the oldest member is 19). So confident is Jive in their success that it has designed a limited edition Vans skateboard. Vans, the lucky shoe company getting all the free promotion, is planning a Pack shoe.

Meanwhile, the Pack have been busy. Since forming in 2005, the tireless group has recorded more than 150 songs; put out several regional rap full-lengths, including their Wolf Pack Musik series; been taken under Too $hort’s wing; and used MySpace to full advantage in getting heard.

"They’re inspiring because despite their young age, they are really creative and also really eager about learning about music and the music business," said Taj Mahal Pilghman, general manager, project coordinator, and engineer-producer. "And $hort has really taken the time to let them go in and do their thing and then school them afterwards."

"Vans" was just one of many songs the Pack posted on MySpace. "[‘Vans’] took off. It ran, and there wasn’t really any stopping it," Lil Uno said. His fellow band member Young L, who produced the track, added that "MySpace gets about 25 to 30 percent credit for us getting signed…. But without it, we would have had a much harder time being heard."

Regardless, Young L, now 19, is as surprised as his fellow Packers about the unbridled success of "Vans," which is currently heard in numerous amateur videotaped dance numbers posted on YouTube. "We didn’t think it would be such a hit. With that song we were just having fun, really," the skilled young producer explained. He laced up the track for the minimal hypnotic beat in no time, using Reason and ReCycle software. And the voice that recurs throughout the song saying "Young L" but sounding like "You’re new" (the phase that has become the Pack’s trademark) is a vocal he cranked out on the FruityLoops program.

For the upcoming album, however, he wants to "incorporate more real instrumentation," and at press time, he was meeting with Lil Jon, who will reportedly coproduce it.

Young L, who grew up soaking up the sounds of "Too $hort, 2Pac, the Cash Money crew, as well as Jay Z and Rock-a-fella," doesn’t think the Pack should be stuck to any one sound, as is threatening to happen. "We have hyphy songs," he said from Berkeley. "But I don’t think we are a hyphy group, because hyphy is based on high-energy, hyperactive lyrics and beats, and our sound is more varied than that." One example is the Miami bass–styled track "Candy" on Skateboards 2 Scrapers, which at times echoes 2 Live Crew’s "Get It Girl" and other Luke tunes. "We’ve always been into Miami bass, especially Lil B, who has always been into Uncle Luke," Young L added. "We just love good music!" *

Hanging on the ‘Phone

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s hard to take Elephone seriously — not just because of their whimsical name, but because with this San Francisco quintet, what you see definitely isn’t what you get.

Witness vocalist Ryan Lambert and guitarist Terry Ashkinos out of what you might assume was their natural habitat. The duo looked strangely at home in the lobby bar at the Fairmont Hotel, where the soft tinkle of piano keys polluted the air and floor-length fur coats were as ubiquitous as they are politically incorrect. Instead of looking awkward, the two seemed relaxed as they sipped on cocktails and joked among themselves last month — not what you expect from your typical Bay Area indie rockers.

And like many musicians who create contemplative and darkly melodic material, you might expect the demeanor of Elephone’s members to be as brooding as their elegantly macabre sound, which has drawn frequent comparisons to those august melancholic revelers the Cure. But with Elephone this isn’t the case, and it’s easy to separate the art from the artists after spending a rather rollicking evening with Lambert and Ashkinos.

Thorough Internet research would have you believe the name Elephone is derived from a quirky, Dr. Seuss–esque nonsense poem, an obscure literary nod which would support the already established notion of Elephone as a thinking music fan’s band. In reality, the moniker wasn’t inspired by absurdist poetry, and instead the group discovered its name serendipitously after a night of drinking and cavorting with an animatronic elephant.

"We have told people in the past that it is a combination of our favorite meat and our favorite thing to throw," the dry-witted Ashkinos said. "The truth is we were watching this animatronic elephant at this bar. As we became drunker and drunker, we started riffing on the word ‘elephant’ and came up with Elephone. We don’t really know what it means, but it meant something to us at the time."

The impossibility of pinning down the many faces of Elephone appears to be a pattern for the musical mythological beast created by longtime friends Lambert and Ashkinos. That creature continues to metamorphose: the current lineup includes bassist Dan Settle in addition to keyboardist Sierra Frost and drummer Lily Fadden from the band Two Seconds.

When asked to define their sound, Lambert and Ashkinos make it very clear they abhor any kind of musical comparison that might confine them to a certain genre and instead opt for literary references such as Tom Robbins, Ernest Hemingway, and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

"A love and respect of literature is like the brotherhood of the band," Ashkinos explained. "We all have a literary outlook of the world, viewing it as an ongoing story or as a drama unfolding. That’s how we like to write songs."

Not to be outdone, Lambert drolly chimed in about his aversion to being influenced by other bands: "I can’t play music like any other musician. Like, if someone were to ask, ‘Play this like so-and-so from that influential band,’ I wouldn’t be able to. I can only play how I play. Now, I could understand if I was asked to make a song feel like Charlie Chaplin. That I could understand."

On Elephone’s sophomore full-length, The Camera behind the Camera behind the Camera (Three Ring), haunting guitars, swirling keyboards, and Lambert’s austere vocals give their overall sound an enveloping cinematic quality comparable to the refined bombast of Radiohead and the eccentric capriciousness of the Arcade Fire. Lyrically, they wear bleeding hearts on their tattered blazer sleeves, with songs about extreme isolation and the difficult task of putting the pieces back together after an emotional fallout. The result is a collection of poetic pastiches and romantic character narratives that exclude self-indulgent emo tendencies and trite sentimentality.

Lambert makes a conscious effort to leave precious flowery details and love-song clichés out of his writing. "When this album was being written, those themes of love and relationships were not attractive to me," he recalled. "What was attractive to me were the things that happen after you’ve gotten over something or before you begin something. Like that profound loneliness when you have nothing and no one to bounce things off of."

One thing is certain about Elephone: they are serious about their sound. "That’s the good thing about the band," Ashkinos added. "We don’t need a movie playing behind us when we play, a fancy light show, or strippers dancing onstage, because our songs are good and we love what we do." And although Lambert has been known to don a pair of fuzzy bunny ears on occasion, Elephone make music like they mean it. With a devilish smirk and a glint in his eye, Ashkinos concluded with conviction, "We are making honest music for dishonest times." *

I heart your dark side

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› duncan@sfbg.com

I’ve got to admit — I was intimidated. I’ve done enough interviews that I don’t usually get the jitters beforehand, but San Francisco songwriter Rykarda Parasol’s sheer self-possession on last year’s full-length Our Hearts First Meet (Three Ring) had me a little spooked. Yeah, I’ve sat through enough interminable creative-writing workshops to know not to confuse the author with the story, the narrator with the narrative, the singer with the song. Nonetheless, on such numbers as "Night on Red River," there’s a glow of eternal bad-ass that outlasts the spinning of the CD. "So my steps were slow and my swagger [pause] deliberate," Parasol sings at her throatiest — almost on the edge of phlegmy, really. "And if ever my heart grieved, now my body must not confess it." And she walks and wails, more in triumph than lament, into the Texas dark, leaving the jeering crowd back in the bar, "walking through everyone out on Red River tonight."

The situation plays itself out more than once. On "Arrival, a Rival," Parasol sings, "So this is Texas, so this is ache / So this is Texas on your knees now don’t you break." With "En Route," she tells the story of a lone motorcyclist, an ex-lover, who died on the way to New Orleans. At his funeral, she mourns, "Not a dry eye was to be seen / Unless you looked into mine." The record — set largely in Texas but also in New York — has a novelistic, dare I say, cinematic feel to it. There’s crashing thunder, and there’s light. There are lonesome plains and evil deeds, with only the sound of "Texas Midnight Radio" to hold off the darkness. But what in lesser hands (and with lesser voices) could come across as ham-handed and weepy, another alterna–heartbreak opus, rises above. Parasol’s background — yeah, that’s her real name — as a University of San Francisco literature grad shines through, and the songs come across as the tales of a woman, an outsider, in crisis situations. Parasol’s character digs deep and summons an inner strength just strong enough to edge out self-doubt and to stand up and walk on.

WHEN WE FIRST MEET


So yeah, I was intimidated a bit. Our Hearts First Meet feels like literature to me: it makes me think of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and — I’m a little reticent to say it because I think she gets this a lot — Nick Cave.

Of course, when I met Parasol for coffee in the Mission District, she wasn’t swaggering deliberately. She didn’t put her cigarette out in my drink, like the famous story of Cave dousing his smoke in Richard Butler’s cocktail at a London party. Really, what the fuck did I expect? While careful, which is to say trained with an almost Pavlovian rigor, not to confuse the writer with the writing, I could see the path she’d taken from being "extremely shy my whole life" to the "I shall overcome" — or, to take another quote from "Red River," "To myself I will be true" — attitude of the disc.

"I was told not to sing in the school chorus," Parasol told me. "I used to lip-synch. I was … I wouldn’t say ‘tone deaf,’ because that’s a real clinical term. They call it a ‘lack of relative pitch.’ " She went on to say she had "no natural aptitude" for music, rather "such a strong desire. I just wanted to push myself further."

This desire led to opera lessons. Although Parasol wanted to sing rock, she also knew her parents wouldn’t bite, so she pitched opera to appeal to her mother’s sense of elegance. "I was kind of a ratty kid," she added, laughing. From opera lessons she went on to a few bands, none of which she wanted to name. Finally, toward the tail end of a venture with ex-Jawbreaker drummer Adam Pfahler, wherein she didn’t write any of the music, he asked her if she had any songs. "It was, like, ‘Somebody actually wants to hear what I’ve written. Oh, my god.’ I never felt I had any business being a musician."

PERPETUAL OUTSIDER


Beyond feeling musically unworthy, Parasol felt like a cultural outsider. Her father is a Holocaust survivor. Born in Poland, he spent his early years hiding from Nazis before immigrating to the newly formed State of Israel and later, through the beneficence of a distant relative, to California. He met his future wife, a Swedish woman, in a San Francisco bar. "He probably saw a big, tall blond lady and thought, ‘I’m going to have kids that will be Hitler’s worst nightmare,’ " Parasol said. "Aryan Jews!" Holidays saw "Hanukkah wrapping paper underneath the Christmas tree that we referred to as ‘the bush.’ You know, like the burning bush. We were very confused."

Despite wacky Decembers, Parasol’s upbringing was largely secular. Nonetheless, she grew up feeling outside the main current of American culture. Having recently seen the PBS documentary on Andy Warhol, she related to the artist as an outsider who came to the States as a child and never really fit in. "Although I was born in the US, everybody around me was a foreigner," Parasol explained. "My parents didn’t have any American friends. Everything in their house was sort of European." What she calls her "funny accent" as a child was drilled out of her in school as a "speech impediment." When she studied American literature in college, "it was a brand-new world."

Maybe it was the relative unfamiliarity of the surrounding culture that led her to move from Northern California to Hollywood and later to Austin and New York, where she seems to have continued in her role as a perennial outsider. Looking back on the interview, I think we had a bit of a misunderstanding about the setting of the album and its overarching Southern Gothic tone. Texas has a mythos to it, one that’s certainly embraced by Texans, right down to their "Don’t Mess with Texas" anti-littering campaign. It’s the Lone Star State, and everything’s bigger there. I don’t know, but when I brought Texas up, I think Parasol thought I was somehow challenging her right to use the state as a backdrop. Which, of course, I would have — had it felt unearned or tacked on. She even went so far as to send me an e-mail addendum stating, "Art is frequently artificial. These songs are not grand statements about Texas or the South. They’re about hurt, loss, and isolation."

They’re outsider songs, I’d add. Which isn’t to say they don’t conjure up a set of imagery and the aforementioned mythos — they just know when to transcend it. They’re powerful enough to transcend it. Parasol mentioned a well-meaning fan with a video idea. "He was talking about sticking me in period costume with 1930s hair, and I was, like, ‘This isn’t 1930,’ " she said. "I wasn’t keen on the concept. I want it to be timeless." This is where I think we weren’t seeing eye to eye. Just because something has a setting in time and space, that doesn’t mean it’s not timeless.

I’ve got to admit that I see a woman on a barren plain when I listen to Our Hearts First Meet, in the middle of a thunderstorm, and damn it all if she isn’t often wearing a worn gingham dress, reminiscent of Dorothea Lange’s famously destitute Okies. This woman doesn’t have fancy hair, because it’s pouring rain, and besides, she can’t afford an expensive hairdo. But it’s not a helpless, waifish image, even though the woman may very well be weeping in the rain. The feeling I get from it is that of the final scene in King Lear. Lear is half naked and half mad, rid of everything he once held dear. And he’s shouting, taking a stand against the very universe. He’s been sunk to the depths in terms of worldly stature, but his humanity has been raised to its zenith.

It was funny to hear Parasol talk about "Night on Red River." Never mind separating the singer from the song: the scenario is that she’s in a bar with her boyfriend and "a young girl who passed judgment on people she didn’t know. A clique person." When the protagonist’s boyfriend does nothing to stand up for her, she takes that burning walk down Red River. But whereas the song’s narrator comes across as pure bad-ass, Parasol herself frames the real-life situation differently: "I have no power in this situation," she said of that night. "Nothing I can do can make it better or worse. I’m going to have to stick this out. But I don’t have to stay here."

And I guess that’s it: finding the sense of power in powerlessness. Parasol seems to have done this in her life as well as in her music: she’s found her bad-ass gland and tapped it. *

RYKARDA PARASOL AND THE TOWER RAVENS

With Elephone, French Disco, and Dora Flood

Fri/5, 9 p.m., $10

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

>

Rutting madly

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Oh! Yes! It hurts! Oh yes! It hurts!

My virtual buttocks are on fire.

After my last little column about stuff I’d enjoyed in Clubland over the past year, I got spanked online for downplaying some of the Bay’s ongoing nightlife trends. Namely: breakbeats and house revivals, dubstep and kiddie rave, Burning Man, Burning Man, Burning Man. (Isn’t he burnt yet? Sheesh. It’s like a spiritual tire fire already.) That’s fine, baby: hit me one more time. Getting spanked online was my former profession. If my drag name weren’t already Pantaysia, I’d be known as Rudolpha the Red-Assed Tranny for sure. And luckily, it’s the new year — I can simply wad up my 2006 wall calendar and stuff it down my cut-off liquor store panty hose for some rough-year-behind-me relief. I’m just. That. Crafty. See?

My, but how the sting lingers, the echoing smack of keen reprimands. Whether or not the genres of clubalalia mentioned above — and I’m pretty sure one or more of my personalities has dished them all here in the past — are curvaceous and bearded enough to attract my one good eye is one thing. Whether or not my mouth is so big it can swallow all the wonders of what happens after dark and spit them whole back in your face is another. I’m just one slightly skinny leather hip-hop disco Muppet queer after all. My day job’s at a Wendy’s! I leave being everywhere to other gay peeps.

Yet the familiar finds its way into one’s regular carousing, no? What if I’m in a hot, wet rut? All those back room encounters, bathhouse sounds, bhangra parties, electro flashes, wet jockstraps, mad drag queens, hip-hop karaoke nights, bedroom DJs, shots of Cuervo … could they be of a party piece? Didn’t I once declare krumping the future? Where’s the damn risk?

Yes, I have my broad themes: 2005 was all about the democratization of Clubland via technology — and trying to get laid by a woman for the first time; 2006 was about how clubs reflected our culture’s apocalyptic visions and the return of the outlaw gay underground. Lord knows what the predawn rubble of 2007 will shape itself into. But here are some nifty things I’d like to stick my nosy pumps in.

NEOMINIMAL TECHNO


DJ Jason Kendig, Claude VonStroke, and a giant swath of relocated Detroiters are injecting tiny bleeps and beats in the strangest of places: dive bars and back rooms. What’s the deal?

GEAR CULTURE


Bars like Gestalt in the Mission District are serving brewskis to Critical Massers. Clubs like LoGear at the Transfer are making frantic pedalers dance. Will the fixed-gear explosion spawn a raucous rocker renaissance?

TABLE GODDESSES


Where are the ladies? The fierce rulers of the US club scene at the moment are women from New York City and Los Angeles. For years my money’s been on SF femmes like Jenny Fake, Forest Green, and Claire-Ahl to join them. Why are we still ruled by men?

BEAT FREAKS


Fine. For the 13th time I’m calling a house revival. House club mainstays like Fag and Taboo are still going strong. Legendary DJ Ruben Mancias is coming back from New York City for a while to restart his influential club Devotion, and DJ TeeJay Walton is launching a new club called Freak the Beat (www.freakthebeat.com), specifically aimed at attracting younger househeds. Fingers crossed.

POST-POST-IRONY


Last year all the quotes were dropped from retro. People took the sounds and styles of the past seriously, no joke. It paid off in a lot of ways (notably, people stopped laughing and erroneously screaming, "Oh my god, I used to love this song!" when a record had claps or a guitar solo in it). But post-irony was, well, not much fun. Are people on the dance floor smiling yet? That’s better. *

It’s happening, and it’s happening now. Sign up at www.sfbg.com and you can flame my frickin’ column at will (I know you’ve got scandalous New Year’s Eve tales … better share ’em it before I do). Also: hit up the Pixel Vision blog (www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision) for more club news, reviews, and how-do-you-dos. It’s all about raving in the cubicles, baby.

New Year’s Eve ill

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER You gotta love the Bay Area, which so often sweeps in the new year with the wet, wild kiss of stormy weather. Blecch — too much tongue. Still, I succumb to the call of fun: I can’t count how many times I’ve vaulted over gushing gutters, minced down streets that have morphed into streams, danced between the raindrops, hopped between soggy cardboard sheets in backyards that have turned into miasmas of mud, and jabbed firework gawkers with the bad end of an umbrella. Outta-hand winter waterworks seem somewhat fitting for our kooky, multitentacled, many-flavored assortment of New Year’s Eve entertainment offerings. So here’s a selected guide to live sounds for all persuasions, preferences, sizes, and sicknesses (we’re not even going to go into the sans pants warehouse show) — let’s see what’s out there on the blessed night all those in the so-called biz dub "amateur night," the evening when most everyone feels compelled to get out and brave the puddles pooling around their doorsteps.

ROCKING LIKE A HURRICANE


Don’t bother knockin’, because the yacht-rockin’ good times are sure to be had when Portland, Ore., one-man party machine Yacht meets Oakland one-man party machine Hawnay Troof at 21 Grand; Blevin Blectum, High Places, and Bronze tan it up too. Kid606 will be swinging from there to Rx Gallery, where he performs with French beat blurters DAT Politics, delay-pedal ditherers Lemonade, and Kontrol with Dirtybird. It’s not plus tard, ‘tards! After catching the LA band eves ago at the Make-Out Room and dancing our Khmers off, we’ve got a Dengue Fever for the flava of Cambodian garage rock — this year it’s at Rickshaw Stop (www.rickshawstop.com). The Lovemakers get busy with Honeycut at Great American Music Hall. At the Fillmore (www.ticketmaster.com), My Morning Jacket stoke the flames of Southern rock. Breakout ska punk critters the Aggrolites open for Hepcat at Slim’s (www.slims-sf.com). Harold Ray Live in Concert do unspeakable — and delightful — things to an organ at Annie’s Social Club (www.anniessocialclub.com). Balazo Gallery (www.balazogallery.com) finds Goldie faves Trainwreck Riders living it up with La Plebe. Birdmonster scare up the good times along with art-punk Boyskout at Bottom of the Hill (www.bottomofthehill.com). Crane your necks at the Stork Club (www.storkcluboakland.com) as bits of the Bobby Teens and Gravy Train!!!! come together and costume-ize for the customized Dinky Bits and the Lil Guys. Rube Waddell revamp their "Live at Leeds" — or shall we say "Sexy at Sketchers" — show at a wanton belly dancing, cabaret, and brass happening going down at Amnesia (www.amnesiathebar.com). And for those with hair that needs a band, there are LA Guns (playing with the curiosity-piquing Infamous Choke Chain) at Roosters Roadhouse, Alameda (groups.msn.com/roostersroadhouse). And why Y and T at Avalon, Santa Clara (www.nightclubavalon.com)? Y not?

TICK-TOCK, HIP-HOP


Zion I, Lyrics Born, and Crown City Rockers put together the rap show to beat at the Independent (www.theindependentsf.com), striking trepidation in the hearts of bouncers with no-holds-barred rhymes and an all-night open bar (line up the Henny, honey). But don’t count the Coup out: so soon after the group’s recent bus crash, in which they lost all their belongings and several members and tourmates were injured, the Bay Area band gets back onstage alongside Les Claypool and the New Orleans Social Club at Claypool’s New Year’s Eve Hatter’s Ball at Grace Pavilion, Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa (www.harmonyfestival.com/nye/nye.html). Also, booty, bass, and all the b’s will be bumpin’ back when Spank Rock boomerangs to 280 Seventh Street (upcoming.org/event/134159).

GROOVES AND ALL JAZZ HANDS ON DECK


Piano legend McCoy Tyner is the monster headliner at Yoshi’s (www.yoshis.com). Washing up on Anna’s Jazz Island, Berkeley (www.annasjazzisland.com), Yoruban priestess and Afro-Cuban soul stirrer Bobi Cespedes and her trio work their magic. Soul and funk trumpeter Oscar Myers blows out 2006 with Steppin’ at the Boom Boom Room (www.boomboomblues.com). Bimbo’s 365 Club (www.bimbos365club.com) wink-winks, nudge-nudges with the New Morty Show and Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums. Vocalist Kim McNalley urges you to party like it’s 1929 at her Jazz at Pearl’s (www.jazzatpearls.com); Jesus Diaz and his Bay Area Cuban All Stars light a fire under La Peña Cultural Center (www.lapena.org). And OK, everyone dug Eddie Murphy more in Dreamgirls — don’t x out Jamie Foxx; he attempts to fill Oracle Arena, Oakland, accompanied by Fantasia Barrino (www.ticketmaster.com).

A YEN FOR YUCKS


Our favorite unfunny funnyman, Neil Hamburger (and former SF storage container dweller, or so he says), throws pop culture on the grill, sweats profusely, and jubilantly rolls around in a trough of bad taste for two shows at the Hemlock Tavern (www.hemlocktavern.com); astrology nut Harvey Sid Fisher ushers in the ‘Burger meister. Patton Oswalt blew that whiny David Cross off the stage when he opened for him at Cobb’s way back when — now the prince of King of Queens headlines two rounds on New Year’s Eve (www.cobbscomedyclub.com).

Just remember, ya can’t stop the rain. Don’t fear the reaper. Stay metal, and be sure to strap yourself in for 2007 — because judging from the way we roll, it could be a bumpy ride. *

Making their lists

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PAUL COSTUROS
Total Shutdown, Death Sentence: Panda!, Murder Murder
(10) Bay Area representing and dominating at the End Times Fest in St. Paul, Minn., June 22–<\d>24.
(9) T.I.T.S., Throughout the Ages split double 12-inch with Leopard Leg (Upset the Rhythm) and live. Forest-witch psych never sounded so good.
(8) Fuckwolf CD on Kimosciotic and live. Dub done via destruction by way of swallowing glass and delay …
(7) Burmese, White (Planaria) and live. Every time I see them I feel like I’ve been transported to a Beijing opera in 1790 and forced to watch it while strapped to a chair at gunpoint.
(6) Devin the Dude, live at the Red Devil Lounge, Nov. 6. Songs about fucking, drinking, and smoking weed sung so beautifully, like an angel.
(5) “Black Panther Rank and File” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, March 18–<\d>July 2, and getting snubbed by Bobby Seale when I asked him about when he did stand-up comedy.
(4) Tracy Morgan doing stand-up live at Cobb’s, March 3.
(3) Sergio Iglesias and the Latin Love Machine at Thee Parkside, Nov. 18, and the soccer circle that followed.
(2) 16 Bitch Pile-Up, Doomsday 1999, Ettrick with Weasel Walter live, March 15.
(1) (tie) Nate Denver’s Neck at the Elbo Room, Oct. 14. I laughed, I cried, and I wanted to destroy someone for the first time since sixth grade; Skip Donahue’s new wave extravo-bonanza at Casanova, April 20; Kurtis Blow at Mighty, Aug. 12; DJ Funk at the Rickshaw Stop, July 21; and ESG at Mezzanine, Oct. 27.

ARI MESSER
Contributor
• Mountain Goats, Get Lonely (4AD).
• Beth Orton, Comfort of Strangers (Astralwerks). Shimmers with a modern kind of grace.
• Nic Jones, Game Set Match (Topic). My favorite wild-as-the-firth Brit-folk revivalist, live in the ’70s, resurrecting ballads and slapping the guitar like a preacher on a healing mission.
• Crooked Jades, World’s on Fire (Jade Note Music). Old-timey troubadours sing with fire, then stomp it out so that there’s nothing left to repent for.
• Various artists, Chrome Children (Stones Throw).
• Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s, The Dust of Retreat (Standard Recording Co.).
• Sara Tavares, Balance (Times Square).
• Meneguar, I Was Born at Night (Magic Bullet).
• Mirah, Joyride: Remixes (K). The double album explores the songwriter’s expansive journal-like stories.
• Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City). Surpasses Cat Power in my book of 2006 for the year’s most sweetly sacrificial feline croon.

CLIPD BEAKS
Tigerbeat6 band
(1) E-40, “Tell Me When To Go” (Sick Wid It/Jive). Duh.
(2) Indian Jewelry and Celebration at South by Southwest.
(3) Lil Wayne, everything but especially “Shooter,” Tha Carter Vol. 2 (Cash Money).
(4) No Doctors — just in general.
(5) Mute Era and In Corridors. The mystic protégés of the Minnesota-Japan rock ’n’ roll exchange program.
(6) Gentleman’s Techno at the Cave — especially OonceOonce DJ sets and Black William and the Gondolier live.
(7) White Williams, “Headlines,” Let’s Lazertag Sometime (Tigerbeat6).
(8) Watching Dusty Sparkles from Glass Candy and Danava do anything.
(9) Shawn Porter, a.k.a. Bloody Snowman.
(10) Erase Errata, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars).

SAKE ONE
Levende Lounge resident DJ
(1) A lotta ancestors: from the great J-Dilla to LA DJ and community organizer DJ Dusk to SF native and NYC staple Adam Goldstone to rebel radio pioneer Michael “Mixxin” Moore to SF DJ and youth activist DJ Domino, the sky gained a lotta bring-ass stars.
(2) The Trackademics phenomenon. Comin’ straight outta Alameda High, young Trackademics took the underground dance music world by storm, using broken beat, dance punk, and new soul sounds and smashing them into a hyphy hybrid that had kids going stewey from SF to NYC.
(3) Pacific Standard Time anniversary party. When Kool Herc stepped to the DJ booth at Levende Lounge in March, time sorta stood still for a few hours. He gave Frisco a taste of the magic that sparked a global prairie fire.
(4) Bilal, Something to Hold Onto. Probably the best major-label release of 2006 that never came out. His label blamed online leaks but probably just lacked the creative vision to market such a strange product — namely, inventive modern soul music.
(5) Tiombe Lockhart, “O Bloody Day, O Starry Night on the Bowery” (Bling47). Evil genius Waajeed and the brilliant Ms. Lockhart released the first of what should be many classic joints.
(6) GQ, “Better Must Come” (Calibud). Something about an eight-year-old having a number one hit with a conscious anthem just kinda makes me feel good about the future.
(7) Alice Smith, For Lovers, Dreamers and Me (BBE Music). Though the incredible Maurice Fulton remix of “Love Endeavor” isn’t here, this album reflected a new direction for urban music.
(8) The hyphy movement. Kinda obvious, but its impact is hard to overstate. Bay Area club music took the world by storm in 2006, leading taste-making rags and bloggers from here to Denmark scouring the Web for the latest Bay Area slang, style, and sounds.
(9) Journey into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story (Rhino). After a couple attempts, 2006 saw a definitive two-disc collection of some of the songs that trademarked perhaps the most influential DJ of all time, besides Herc.
(10) TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope). I prefer the leaked version because “Wolf Like Me” is the shit, but it’s still pretty damn good for a major-label debut, nyuk, nyuk.

GENE “BEAN” BAE
Battleship
(1) Punk section at Amoeba, SF and Berkeley. I know I work there, and this comes dangerously close to an advertisement, but isn’t it about time?
(2) Domino Records’ Sound of Young Scotland series. Lovely reissues of Orange Juice, Fire Engines, and my current fave, Josef K. Courtesy of Franz Ferdinand’s severance check.
(3) Boy, I sure picked a bad year to swear off box sets: This Heat’s Out of Cold Storage (ReR) finally makes available all the in- and out-of-print recordings.
(4) Boy, I sure picked a bad year to swear off metal: Boris, Pink and live, and collaborating with Sunn O))) on Altar (both Southern Lord).
(5) The Bay Area represents: running into fellow local bands such as the Fucking Ocean in NYC and T.I.T.S. in Leeds, England, while on a too-long tour was the salve for the weary, homesick, itinerant musician. And by the way, the Fucking Ocean’s new CD, Le Main Rouge, harks back to the heady times at the turn of the century when it seemed like every day a new band that didn’t suck crawled out of a new crack in the sidewalk.
(6) It would be irresponsible of me to not mention the midterm elections.
(7) Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man was the best music-related film of the year. And it gave me more reasons to hate U2.
(8) Coming to a curbside near you: the Bay Area’s best new venue, John Benson’s decommissioned AC Transit bus converted into a biodiesel RV and mobile venue.
(9) Billy Childish’s unplugged show, Mama Buzz Café, May.
(10) And one thing that sucked this year: Lance Hill quit booking and working the Stork Club. The man who brought you the club’s happy hour and free admission during the Oakland Art Murmur — and who let Battleship record an album at his venue — has left the building. May the East Bay rise to the occasion and continue nurturing good local music.

MATT BAUER
Singer-songwriter
(1) Mariee Sioux, A Bundled Bundle Of Bundles (self-released). So. Ridiculously. Good.
(2) Death Vessel, Stay Close (North East Indie). I’ve listened to this five billion times since I got it in October.
(3) Laura Gibson, If You Come to Greet Me (Hush).
(4) CMJ Music Marathon, accompanying Alela Diane and Tom Brosseau on banjo. When Brosseau breaks into the highest part of his range, it makes me almost believe in ghosts.
(5) El Capitan live at the Rite Spot, Oct 15. They did a medley covering and reworking other Bay Area artists’ music — one of the most creative and heartfelt things I heard all year.
(6) Last of the Blacksmiths, “And Then Some”/”You Think I’m. O.K.” 7-inch.
(7) Deerhoof, McCarren Park Pool, Brooklyn, NY.
(8) Standing onstage at Carnegie Hall. OK, I was only delivering a bass amp for Smokey Robinson. But it gave me chills!
(9) Jolie Holland’s “Mexican Blue.” Maybe my favorite song of 2006.
(10) Jeffrey Luck Lucas, Bottom of the Hill, Feb. 8.

DAVE BROEKEMA
Numbers
• T.I.T.S. and Leopard Leg, Throughout the Ages/Leopard Leg split double 12-inch (Upset the Rhythm)
• Mon Cousin Belge, the Knockout, a couple weeks ago
• Bootleg of Black Sabbath Live in Paris 20 Dec. 1970
• Trin Tran (a.k.a. Trinng Tranng)
• Erase Errata, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars)
Weasel Walter performing with Sergio Iglesias, Thee Parkside, Nov. 18
• Gay Beast, El Rio, Dec. 7
• Fuckwolf, anywhere, anytime
• K.I.T. dressed as mummies (or the Mummies)
• Halloween at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn
• Seeing The Sweet Smell of Success with Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster on PBS twice (I don’t have cable). Totally awesome creepy nastiness.

BROLIN WINNING
422 Records and MP3.com; Top 10 Hip-Hop
• Mekalek, Live and Learn (Glow-in-the-Dark). Time Machine’s DJ-producer connects with various rappers for a supremely banging compilation-style album. Rhode Island, stand up!
• Motion Man, Pablito’s Way (Threshold). Bay Area superlyricist knocks it out of the park on his second solo effort, produced by KutMasta Kurt, featuring Too $hort, Mistah FAB, and Q*bert.
• Snoop Dogg, Tha Blue Carpet Treatment (Geffen). Though a bit bloated, Snoop’s eighth album is still great, featuring bass-heavy beats and collabos with Nate Dogg, Dre, Cube, E-40, and others.
• Melina Jones, Swearing Off Busters (sampler). An immensely talented MC-vocalist from the SFC, Jones is the future. Check her out on MySpace and cop the album in early ’07.
• Dudley Perkins, Expressions (Stones Throw). Charmingly blunted soul-funk meanderings from underground icon Madlib and the artist formerly known as Declaime.
•<\!s><\i>Ghostface, Fishscale (Def Jam). The Wu’s most consistent swordsman continues to impress, with help from Dilla, Doom, and Pete Rock.
• Rakim, Slims, Sept. 10. The R may be pushing 40, but he still knows how to move the crowd, running through timeless jams with Kid Capri backing him up.
• A Tribe Called Quest, Berkeley Community Theatre, Sept. 9. Rhymefest and the Procussions were cool too, but the reunited Tribe killed it.
• Ice Cube, Fillmore, April 25. Despite cred-killing family films and uneven recent material, Cube ripped it live, drawing from a thick catalog of Westside classics.
• Kool Keith, Mezzanine, June 17. At his first local appearance in years, notorious rap weirdo Kool Keith did an amazing set with lots of Ultramag and Octagon material, plus a random topless chick.

WILL SCHWARTZ
Hey Willpower
(10) Amy Winehouse, “Rehab” (Universal/Island).
(9) Cassie, “Me and U” (Bad Boy).
(8) Brick Lane, London, on a Sunday.
(7) Hot Chip, “Over and Over” (Astralwerks).
(6) Fingered Club at Little Pedro’s in downtown LA.
(5) Final Fantasy, Bottom of the Hill, Aug. 11.
(4) Planning to Rock at Club Motherfucker, Bardens Boudoir, London, Dec. 9.
(3) Grizzly Bear, Yellow House (Warp).
(2) Lena Wolff, Needles and Pens, March 11–<\d>April 9.
(1) Field Mob with Ciara, “So What” (Universal).

LEE HILDEBRAND
Contributor
• Brett Dennen, So Much More (Dualtone). The Central Valley singer-songwriter addresses political and romantic concerns in a craggy, tear-stained tenor.
• Kelis, Kelis Was Here (Jive). Although in-your-face sexuality is the Manhattan siren’s calling card, it’s hard not to also adore the way she blurs the lines between R&B, rock, hip-hop, and pop.
• Charles Lloyd, Sangam (ECM).
• Ann Nesby, In the Spirit (Shanachie). Nesby’s glorious alto pipes often leap octaves in breathtaking bounds on this masterpiece of traditional African American gospel music.
• Joan Osborne, Pretty Little Stranger (Vanguard).
• Catherine Russell, Cat (World Village). Veteran background vocalist Russell steps to the forefront with a wonderfully eclectic set of tunes including “Back o’ Town Blues,” which her dad, Luis Russell, wrote with Louis Armstrong back in 1945.
• Candi Staton, His Hands (Honest Jons/Astralwerks).
• Irma Thomas, After the Rain (Rounder).
• Hank Williams III, Straight to Hell (Bruc). This intense honky-tonk country music is filled with visions so demented that the label’s owner, former California lieutenant governor Mike Curb, spells his own name backward.
• Mitch Woods, Big Easy Boogie (Club 88). Marin County vocalist-pianist Woods creates the hottest set of 1950s-style New Orleans R&B since, well, the ’50s.

TOM CARTER
Charalambides; Top 10 Things That Didn’t Happen in San Francisco
(1) Getting dosed at Terrastock, Providence, RI, and watching Lightning Bolt from high in the light rigging, April 23.
(2) On tour with Marcia, watching thousands of chimney swifts flocking into a smokestack during a light rainstorm in Portland, Ore., with a double rainbow to the east and a sunset to the west.
(3) Me and Natacha witnessing Comets on Fire’s chalet get destroyed at All Tomorrow’s Parties with a BBC film crew documenting the whole scene. Minehead, Devonshire, UK.
(4) Ben Chasny destroying with solo electric guitar at Arthur Nights, LA, Oct. 21.
(5) Jamming Buffy St. Marie’s “Cod’Ine” for over an hour at 4 a.m. with Matt Valentine and Erika Elder in Guilford, Vt.; also Mvee and the Bummer Road’s form-destroying set at ATP, Minehead, Devonshire, UK.
(6) Hearing the most killer noise CD-R ever in Nashville, recorded by Chris Cherry Blossoms’ Boston Terrier.
(7) Gigging with Badgerlore at the Wire festival, Chicago, and eating pizza slices the size of surfboards with Glen Donaldson, Sept. 21.
(8) Laying down thick sounds with Shawn McMillen and the Starving Weirdos in Eureka and later watching McMillen toss tennis balls to a terrier on the beach in Samoa while hearing Steve Weirdo’s roommate’s tales of Sasquatch hunting and dodging bullets in the Yuroc reservation.
(9) Ashtray Navigation’s Syd Barrett tribute at the beginning of their set, biker bar downstairs playing “Astronomy Domine” the same night in Leeds, UK.
(10) Gray-orange dust storm over the gash of the Rio Grande. Later that night, me and my girlfriend, Natacha, listen to Of’s wedding CD-R and watch dozens of shooting stars and a distant thunderstorm over the mountains, Taos, NM.
RIP Syd Barrett, Arthur Lee, and whoever else I’m forgetting.

Hallelujah, more lists!

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MATTHEW EDWARDS
MUSIC LOVERS
(1) <\i>The Fall live at the Independent, May. Mark E. Smith, wife, and a band he put together the day before — classic Fall. Peerless.
(2) <\i>John Legend, Get Lifted (Sony). More ideas per song than most indie bands have in a lifetime. Stellar soul.
(3) <\i>Margaret Cho singing “Old Man’s Cock and Balls” to the tune of “Old Time Rock and Roll,” Provincetown, July
(4) <\i>D’autres nouvelles des etoiles — Serge Gainsbourg DVD. 4 hours of sin and sauce, wit and wiles.
(5) <\i>Poppy and the Jezebels, “Nazi Girls”/”Painting New York on my Shoes* (Kiss of Death/Reveal). Best young group out of UK in an age — four 14-year-old girls from Birmingham. Massive in 2007.
(6) <\i>Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, directed by Michel Gondry.
(7.) <\i>Drive-By Truckers at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. The American Smiths with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s shirts and guitars.
(8) <\i>Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City). So far ahead of the “new folk” pack it’s not true. A goldrush-town Kate Bush.
(9) <\i>One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found (Rhino)
(10) <\i>Borts Minorts opening for us at Amnesia.
Music Lovers play Slim’s Dec. 23.

KELLEY STOLTZ
SUB POP SONGWRITER
(1) <\i>Detroit producer-musician-good fellow Matthew Smith’s Outrageous Cherry released their umpteenth album Stay Happy (Rainbow Quartz), and it’s a fab collection of big beat Jesus and Mary Chain meets the Chills type of pet sounds.
(2) <\i>I got to play a show with Dan Sartain in Amsterdam this fall. He describes himself to the common man as Chris Isaak on acid — or was that quaaludes ? No weepy romantic, the 24-year-old hails from Birmingham, Ala., and does surf-rockabilly besame-mucho murder ballads really well. He’s a real character, too. After staying up all night he was spotted eating falafel wearing his hotel towels for socks. His new album, Join … Dan Sartain, is on Bjork’s One Little Indian label.
(3) <\i>The Muldoons are a family band composed of Hunter and Shane, about age 9 and 12, respectively, and their dad, drummer Brian, who play high energy Stoogey rock. Their first single was recorded by Jack White, no less. There were a lot of kids playing rock songs this year, but these guys are future and now, for real. Listen to their live session on www.wfmu.org for proof.
(4) <\i>As 2006 comes to a close, it is getting closer to April 2007, when Sonny Smith’s new album will finally appear. After some rewrites and a touch of hemming and hawing, my favorite SF Pro Tools hobo will release Fruitvale on a new label run by local vocalist Chuck Prophet.
(5) <\i>The Oh Sees recorded a fine new album, Sucks Blood, and that too will be coming along early next year, but since I heard it this year I can safely say it was one of the sonic highlights of the recent past.
(6) <\i>Vetiver, To Find Me Gone (Dicristina Stair). A great collection of ’70s AM radio pop magic and smart lyrical turns.
(7) <\i>Black Fiction were a force of rumbling floor toms, Casio blips, and cool tunes. The most interesting SF band playing in 4/4 time.
(8) <\i>Australia’s Eddy Current Suppression Ring channeled AC/DC, the Buzzcocks, and early Joy Division/Warsaw on their fantastic “Get Up Morning” single.
(9) <\i>How could Arthur Lee and Syd Barrett pass away within a couple weeks of each other? Similar souls departed.
(10) <\i>Sub Pop goes green and offsets their offices’ electricity usage with clean windpower churned up in the Pacific Northwest. I hope more corporate structures within and outside of the music world will take note and do a simple thing that helps a lot.

DEVIN HOFF
DEVIN HOFF PLATFORM
(1) <\i>Marisa Monte, Palace of Fine Arts, Nov. 5
(2) <\i>Deerhoof, Great American Music Hall, Sept. 5
(3) <\i>Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu, solo at Prison Literature Project benefit, AK Press Warehouse, April 11
(4) <\i>Ornette Coleman, Sound Grammar (Sound Grammar)
(5) <\i>Marisa Monte, Universo au Meu Redor (Blue Note)
(6) <\i>Marisa Monte, Infinito Particular (Blue Note)
(7) <\i>Caetano Veloso, Ce (Umvd)
(8) <\i>Ches Smith, Congs for Brums (Free Porcupine Society)
(9) <\i>Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone duo
(10) <\i>Iron Maiden, A Matter of Life and Death (Sanctuary)

JORDAN KURLAND
NOISE POP
(1) <\i>The Who, Endless Wire (Republic)
(2) <\i>Jose Gonzalez, Veneer (Mute)
(3) <\i>Thom Yorke, The Eraser (XL)
(4) <\i>Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love)
(5) <\i>Cat Power, The Greatest (Matador)
(6) <\i>Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid, The Exchange Session, Volume 1 (Domino)
(7) <\i>Cursive, Happy Hollow (Saddle Creek)
(8) <\i>Long Winters, Putting the Days to Bed (Barsuk)
(9) <\i>Boards of Canada, Trans Canada Highway (Warp)
(10) <\i>Beirut, The Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing)

CHRISTOPHER APPELGREN
NOISE POP, LOOKOUT RECORDS
•<\!s><\i>Colossal Yes, Acapulco Roughs (Ba Da Bing)
•<\!s><\i>Voxtrot’s cover of Comet Gain’s “You Can Hide Your Love Forever” from the band’s Web site
•<\!s><\i>Still Flyin’, Time Wrinkle (Antenna Farm)
•<\!s><\i>Peter Bjorn and John, Young Folks (Wichita)
•<\!s><\i>Primal Scream, Riot City Blues (Sony)
•<\!s><\i>Trainwreck Riders, Lonely Road Revival (Alive)
•<\!s><\i>The Tyde, Three’s Co. (Rough Trade)
•<\!s><\i>French Kicks, Two Thousand (Vagrant)
•<\!s><\i>Chow Nasty live
•<\!s><\i>Love Is All, Nine Times That Same Song (What’s Your Rupture)

VICE COOLER
XBXRX, HAWNAY TROOF, K.I.T.
•<\!s><\i>Matt And Kim, Cafe Du Nord, Aug. 19. They have been described as the “happy Japanther.” It’s true that both bands are duos and use minimal drums for their sing-along anthems. But Matt throws his hands in the air while he plays.
•<\!s><\i>My own birthday party, 21 Grand, July 15. Performances by Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Mirror Dash, Harry Marry, Dinky Bits, Always, Sharon Cheslow and Elise from Magic Markers. I felt like I had my own MTV Sweet Sixteen episode.
•<\!s><\i>Sonic Youth, Bill Graham Civic Center. Not only was I tripped beyond because they even played “Mote,” but I also got to drone on it! Thurston looked over when their never- ending outro started, smiled, and threw his guitar to me. They even gave me all of their leftover catering.
•<\!s><\i>7 Year Rabbit Cycle, Ache Horns (Free Porcupine). This is one of the best records that I have ever heard. It’s a shame that they never get to play live because it is one of the most powerful things that you will ever see.
•<\!s><\i>Xiu Xiu, The Air Force (5 Rue Christine). Does anyone else think the cover looks like Jamie Stewart as Jesus Christ?
•<\!s><\i>Macromantix at 12 Galaxies, November
This MC came straight from the Oz and killed the small crowd.
•<\!s><\i>Deerhoof live. Their free, download-only EP of covers and live tracks made it to the top of my iTunes for 2006. But seeing them go completely nuts under a public microscope has been so rad. Next time you see them look for the John Dieterich strut during “Flower.”
•<\!s><\i>Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast (Matador). One of the best electronic -based records to come out in years.
•<\!s><\i>High Places. It’s like the Beach Boys on more drugs. But High Places don’t do drugs. Mindfuck, right?
•<\!s><\i>Quintron and Miss Pussycat at 12 Galaxies, July 14
•<\!s><\i>Barr, “The Song Is the Single” 7-inch (PPM).
Brendan Fowler plows through an enormous amount of subjects like touring, loneliness, breaking up, pop music, and his song sucking — in a mere four minutes! The crowd left with their jaws on the floor when he premiered this at the Hemlock in July.
•<\!s><\i>Peaches live and Impeach My Bush (XL)
Peaches’ live show is on fire. She is now backed by JD (Le Tigre), Sam Mahoney (Hole) and Radio Sloan (The Need), who make up the Herms, the best backing band in rock history.

SONNY SMITH
SINGER-SONGWRITER
•<\!s><\i>Edith Frost. A Chicago transplant to the Bay Area — her solo opening set for Bert Jansch was casual, personal, and real. Great American Music Hall, Oct. 25.
•<\!s><\i>Jesse Hawthorne Ficks. The guy that puts all the midnight triple-bills together at the Castro. He’ll make you realize that seeing Who Made Who when you were 12 is more important than seeing Citizen Kane in college or Cassavetes in film school.
•<\!s><\i>Alice Shaw. Few artists turn the camera on themselves so consistently and keep it lighthearted and meaningful at the same time.
•<\!s><\i>Omer. The guy that plays on Valencia. Year after year he remains this city’s most dedicated, unique, sincere, bizarre, angry, chipper, crazy, and prolific performer. If you’re intertwined with music so much that you play in the rain on the street every night then you’re operating on a whole other level.
•<\!s><\i>Bert Jansch. One nice thing about the neo-folk trend is that he’s out touring and making records. At the Music Hall, he dressed like a regular old, unassuming guy and launched immediately into a song about a friend murdered by Pinochet. True folk music.
•<\!s><\i>24th Street Mini Park. The most beautiful, selfless, and innocent piece of art this city has created that I know of.
•<\!s><\i>Packard Jennings. He exposes greed, reveals hypocrisy, uncovers lies. A rebellious social commentator, this artist is totally anti-authoritarian, so we like him.
•<\!s><\i>AM Radio. Neverending home of complete insanity. Fascists, paranoid conspiracy theorists, hate mongers, xenophobes, racists, psych-babble freaks, radical religious zealots, and right-wing patriot sociopaths. Truly the theater of the absurd.
•<\!s><\i> Dark Hand Lamp Light. One of the first times I’ve seen music and visual art melting so perfectly together to tell good old-fashioned stories.
•<\!s><\i>Sister Madalene. There is no problem she cannot solve. One visit will convince you and lift you out of sorrow and darkness.

MISSION CREEK MUSIC AND ARTS FESTIVAL STAFF
TOP NINE PLUS FAVORITE MISSION CREEK SHOW
(1) <\i>Jeff Ray (founder/producer): Best show — The Knife at the Mezzanine. Best record — Dwayne Sodahberk, Cut Open (Tigerbeat 6).
(2) <\i>Jon Fellman (co-producer): Best show — Slits, T.I.T.S., and Tussle at Uptown. Best CD — Kelley Stoltz, Below the Branches (Sub Pop).
(3) <\i>Lianne Mueller (graphic designer): Best show — Beirut at Great American Music Hall. Best CD — Lambchop, Damaged (Merge).
(4) <\i>Moira Bartel (sponsorship): Best show — Cat Power at the Palace of Fine Arts.
(5) <\i>Ashley Sarver (programmer): Favorite show — Sprite Macon at Amnesia. Favorite album — Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City).
(6) <\i>Molly Merson (sponsorship): Best show — Alejandro Escovedo and Jeffrey Luck Lucas at 12 Galaxies. Favorite album — Bob Frank and John Murry, World Without End (Bowstring).
(7) <\i>Brianna Toth (publicity, programmer): Favorite show — Dead Science with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and Sholi. Favorite album — Paris Hilton, Paris (WEA).
(8) <\i>Katie Vida (arts curator): Best show — Anselm Kiefer at SFMOMA. Best album: Beirut, Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing). Best man: Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), Poet Laureate of the United States in 2000.
(9) <\i>Neil Martinson (programmer): Show — Os Mutantes at the Fillmore. Record — Winter Flowers, Winter Flowers (Attack Nine). Musical trend — Master Moth.
(10) <\i>Favorite Mission Creek show of 2006 — Silver Sunshine, Citay, Willow Willow, and Persephone’s Bees at Rickshaw Stop, May 20.
The Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival will be happening from May 10–<\d>20; go to www.mcmf.org for more information.

Unholy spirit

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› cheryl@sfbg.com
It was dark and stormy the night I journeyed to Oakland to meet the Saviours — a perfect weather match for their music, which I’ve had on constant ear blast since picking up their Tim Green–<\d>produced debut, Crucifire (Level Plane, 2006). These guys are fucking serious. They proffer fierce, hard-driving metal so metal you could pronounce it me-tal, spreading their gospel with lyrics such as “All crosses burn into the sky, and their ashes fall to serve as hell’s floor.” Live — forget it: heads involuntarily bang when the Saviours unleash their thunder.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I knocked on the door of the Saviours’ lair (the Telegraph Avenue digs of singer-guitarist Austin Barber, guitarist Dean Tyler Morris, and drummer Scott Batiste). A giant, fiery pentagram? A life-size diorama of Slayer’s Reign in Blood album cover?
Actually, it was a pretty normal apartment, all things considered. Barber, Batiste, and Morris were chilling around a coffee table that displayed evidence of a post-Thanksgiving weekend winding to a boozy end. (Bassist Cyrus Comiskey, the only member who doesn’t live there and who also plays with Drunk Horse, was stuck at work.) We settled in to chat about the band and expand on the latest update posted on their Web site, www.killforsaviours.com: “We’re writing new songs and partying.”
The members all have pre-Saviours history: Barber and Batiste played in screamo outfit Yaphet Kotto, while Batiste and Morris have known each other since junior high.
“Me and Scott had the idea to start the band a couple of years ago. We got together, started jamming, and we were on tour a month later,” said Barber, who at 24 is the youngest Saviour and the only one who isn’t from Santa Cruz. (He hails from Fort Smith, Ark.) “We just wanted to start a killer heavy band. Now we’re trying to chill out and write a new record — and not play very many shows until spring.”
Their music may visit dark places, but the guys share an easygoing chemistry that extends to their songwriting technique.
“Pretty much everything starts with something that Scott writes, and then everybody adds to it until we decide it’s done,” Morris said. “A lot of times he’ll do stuff musically that I would never do, so of course it makes me think about something new and forces me to figure out a way to work myself into it. Everybody does that — Austin does that with his parts, and Cyrus does that with all his bass parts, and Scott does that with the drums too. It’s very collaborative.”
Batiste added, “This band’s pretty amicable. Like, at the end of 42 days of tour, we were all hanging out and drinking and not sick of each other.”
The Saviours have also found support in the Bay Area metal scene, where peers include High on Fire and Green’s band, the Fucking Champs. Of course, they’re also fans of the genre gods: Slayer, Black Sabbath, and Metallica. The anti-Christian imagery that appears in their lyrics and album artwork is owed to Barber, who grew up surrounded by conservative types. In other words, he’s not a Satan worshipper.
Christianity, he explained, “has always been such a bummer in my life. I just always identified with the dark — partying, do whatever the fuck you want, just living your life. And they’re trying to not live life. All that shit’s representative of doing your own thing, and fuck everybody else.”
Doing their own thing is important for the Saviours, who said they’ll never hook into Ozzfest-style bullshit. They’ve just settled into a new practice space and have plans for a live album (possibly to be recorded at their upcoming Hemlock Tavern show) as well as their next studio full-length, which will be “an extension of the first album,” Barber said.
“It’s gonna sound different, though, ’cause we only have two guitar players now and we used to have three,” Morris noted. (Fifth member Mag Delana, a Yaphet Kotto vet, left the band after Crucifire was recorded.) “I think the songs are getting more intricate.”
“They’ll also stay kinda raw, though,” Batiste added. “Consciously, we try to stay simple.”
Though they joke that they only do “extreme tours,” owing to past jaunts that saw them navigating icy highways in the Midwest and sweltering in East Coast summer heat, the Saviours are eager to hit the road next year. This year they traveled across America playing songs from Crucifire and their 2005 EP, Warship (Level Plane), recorded soon after the band formed, and they’ve picked up fans everywhere.
In New Orleans, Barber recalled, “We were partying all night after the show. I’m out front eating some food, and I hear our band blasting out of some car. And it’s the sheriff — literally the sheriff of New Orleans. He’s all, ‘Fuckin’ Saviours! Aaaah!’ Just screaming at me. He was blasting our CD from the cop car. It was fucking awesome.”<\!s>SFBG
SAVIOURS
With California Love
Dec. 29, 9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$6
www.hemlocktavern.com

Purple tamed?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Ho, ho, hum. I may have to take it up with a certain chunky fellah in the red clown suit, because just between you and me, I can’t take the pressure. I’m sure you understand — the stress to plonk down the bones for the most lavish holiday booty. To have the raddest New Year’s Eve. To return or regift those less-than-apt presents in the weeks to follow. To end the year with a big bang, sinking your teeth deeply into the ass of life and emerging with stories to tell and most limbs intact.
Right up there with all of the above is the pressure to have fun in Las Vegas. I mean, you have to be a complete loser to not enjoy yourself, not eke out some happening in Vegas that had to stay in Vegas, right? After all, America’s sin city is busy recasting itself as the country’s entertainment capital, building casinos and ripping up the strip late into the night — surely they have some poison that tempts a princely palette?
Alas, Vegas can be such a tease. Exhibit one: Prince, supposedly deep into an indefinite residency at his new club, 3121 (the branding of this year’s album continues), at the Rio hotel but instead taking every weekend off till New Year’s from his Friday and Saturday gig. Caveat: don’t jingle-jangle into town expecting to see his purple highness shake it dutifully, night in and out, à la Frankie, Elvis, Wayne Newton, Barry Manilow, all the big cheeses. Admittedly, even at $125–<\d>$312 a pop, it would have been worth it — to see the larger-than-life mercurial Minneapolis mini at his relatively intimate 900-seat venue, which is said to be under the Purple 1’s sole artistic control, while the adjoining 3121 Jazz Cuisine is overseen by his personal chef. It’s the latest sign of the times: the 48-year-old was following his inclusion in an obligatory animated feature, Happy Feet, and his now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t Net presence (this year he shut down his longtime site shortly after fielding a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for being the first major artist to release an entire album online exclusively) with a distinct signifier of a rapidly settling-down showbiz icon: a stint in Vegas. Isn’t this American entertainment’s Valhalla, where major stars come to die? “Now if he gets fat like Elvis …,” opined alexnevermind319 on fan site www.prince.org. I pictured the man socking back in a beige McMansion, crusting elegantly in a La-Z-Boy, heavily partaking of TiVo, inhaling fistfuls of Corn Nuts, and wondering if he’s in danger of becoming a corn nut himself, burned out on the bright lights that mask the sun-baked void after only a mere month.
I was clearly conflicted, so I sought solace in a kicky, clean-fun but self-aggrandizing Pussycat Dolls revue at Cesar’s Pure nightclub (drinking game: take a swig every time the half-nekkid hotties urge “Sing along, ladies”) and a geriatrically inclined ’n’ reclined show by Neil Diamond impersonator Jay White, a genuine sing-alike (Diamond himself is quoted in White’s ad: “Jay, keep singing so I can stay home and relax”) who too often shatters the illusion (“Everyone got their Christmas shopping done?” the would-be solitary man queried amid his re-creation of Diamond’s July 4, 1976, Vegas show).
But what am I complaining about? History, musical or otherwise, is often reworked here, toward new, profitable, and vanity-fluffing ends. I dug the Liberace Museum — including its cranky caretakers, who forbade us from cruising through its two buildings in a mere half hour — but you don’t have to look far beyond Liberace’s chinchilla-trimmed capes and mirror-tiled roadster to glimpse the sadness beneath the flash: my partner in Vegas grime read the fine print in the trophy room and noted that many are for simply giving talks and such. Did even the highest-paid entertainer in Vegas history (Liberace took home $50,000 a week in 1955 for turning it out regularly at the Riviera) and the man who enlightened Elvis himself about the power of glitter really need to pad his brag board?
Perhaps size does matter — Las Vegas is as much about industrial-scale entertainment as it is about taking your money in a wholesale sorta way. Judging from the recent low-key array of musical offerings — Toni Braxton was Prince’s only real rival last week — the Purple Pachyderm looms large here, the one truly musically innovative performer currently ensconced in Vegas. But can we say any Vegas-level dues are getting paid at all when Prince keeps the length of his engagement foggily indefinite, the time he goes onstage set vaguely after 10 p.m. — can’t he take the heat, sweat, and slog like a regularly gigging musician? It made you respect those crack, hard-working players behind small fries like White even more. In announcing Prince’s Vegas lounge act, a rep claimed Prince “wants to bring raw, live music back to Las Vegas.” So bring it already.<\!s>SFBG
PRINCE
Fri. and Sat. (after Dec. 28, but don’t count on it), 10 p.m.
3121 at the Rio
3700 W. Flamingo, Las Vegas, Nev.
www.ticketmaster.com

Ringing it backwards

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SUPER EGO Hustlers are like trees — you can usually tell how long they’ve been around by the number of rings around their eyes. Or how many teeth they have left, if trees had teeth, which they don’t, but hey, I’m never one to not stretch a simile to Andromeda and back. They pay me to do it! It’s my elastic destiny.
I was counting the rings on a hot tattooed man-product at the bar closest to my heart, Mr. Lee-ona’s in the Tenderloin, when a thought attacked me: maybe, Miss Marke B., you should do one of those year-in-clubs retrospectives and try to relive, in a Swiss-cheese-brain way, 12 hard months’ worth of gadabouting. The highs, hangovers, hilarity, hurling, what have you.
Suddenly, I was attracted both ways. Retrospectives can be lame, but no one really does them about clubs here. So there’s originality. Plus: I had a coherent thought! I should run with it. Maybe I’ll even earn another ring.

BREAKOUTS
There were oh-so-very many success stories in 2006, not all of them pretty. Here are some. Bootie (www.bootiesf.com), the horrendously wonderful mashup monthly, moved to DNA Lounge and became a secret guilty favorite. Tipsy zombie Santas dancing to Kanye West and Beethoven — ’nuff said. Also: Hard Eight at Crash (www.crashnightclub.com) with DJ Tommy Lee blew the roof off retro and introduced a whole new generation of Marina chicks to porn and torn rock T’s. A sight to ponder heartily. The Transfer (415-861-7499) attempted to transform a beloved biker-dyke bar into the most forward-thinking semiunderground party stop on every cool clubber’s night train and ended up being a little of both, which — who knew? — proved to be an addictive combination.

FLAMEOUTS
Megaclubs, no doubt. San Francisco had already moved away from cavernous supastar showcase spots by the start of ’06. Even that infamous security-wracked techno black hole, 1015 (www.1015.com), was making good on its intentions to remodel itself into a more intimate, lounge-type joint. Mezzanine (www.mezzaninesf.com) found it drew more crowds as an edgy concert space than as a circuit host. And while the ever-delayed opening of “super club” Temple (www.templesf.com) teased me with inklings of controlled experiments (would the ability to plug your own headphones into a DJ booth be enough to tempt folks to pay $20 door fees and find their way through 10 rooms?), the nightspot’s had too many permit problems to get off the ground. We’re edging toward a time when a “DJ” walks into a bar and plugs a cell phone into the speakers — we’re obviously in need of some intimacy.

TRENDS
In a weird reversal of the ’70s, mushrooms have tied cocaine as the bad-girl head party, but neither of them can beat prescription drugs yet. The bathroom stalls are like freakin’ Canadian pharmacies. The whole ’70s rare-groove gay bathhouse trend is still our most exportable original trend — breakbeats, who? — thanks to Bus Station John and a host of new gay musicologists. Circuit is dead, house keeps taking a beating, and no one’s too snobby about music anymore (too much of a good thing? I’m so puke over the easy ’80s). Club Neon (www.neonsf.com) and Brigitte Bardot (www.myspace.com/brigittesf) are doing wonders with bringing back the ’90s, with original remixes and a glam-grunge aesthetic. Trash drag and its backlash, trashier drag, are merging at an alarming pace. And seedy dives — complete with the occasional hustler — are back for their trademark naughty luxury. No more lava lamps and pod chairs, people! SFBG

MR. LEE-ONA’S
301 Turk, SF
7 a.m.–2 a.m.
(415) 292-9803

Dreamboys

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Never mind whether or not this is the year of Dreamgirls. I mean, forget the musical if you can — it’s not possible here in Los Angeles, where it’s taken over the town — although dreams never go out of style. What I want to know is what category does it fit in? New music? Reissued with a twist? Covers? And, for old folks who remember 1982, was the original sort of a reissue? (It is the story of Motown, after all.) Or just a memory — fond or otherwise? (See the movie if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
In any case, my year-end begins and ends with “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” — Jennifer Holliday’s 1982 original kicks off my Top 10 chart, and Jennifer Hudson’s take on the tune, from the just-released movie, closes it. It’s a great song: Holliday’s version is simply out of this world, but that’s only a small part of why I love it so much. The real reason is the killer, utterly surreal ending, when both women are pouring it out, singing, “And you, you, you, you’re gonna love me, yeah!”
Ask yourself, what’s wrong here? For instance, in Dreamgirls, do you think she succeeds in making her man love her? Of course she doesn’t. Do the Iraqi people love the US Armed Forces just because George Bush wants them to? Life doesn’t work that way.
So while my wife apparently loves me, for reasons I do not understand, what I spent the entire year doing was trying to get my daily parade of hits to do the same — to find new music that reached out and grabbed me, knocked me on my ass, obsessed me to the point where I drove down Sunset Boulevard with my iPod blowing out my eardrums, feeling like I was 16 again. It didn’t happen. I gave Snow Patrol more than the time of day. I fell in (and out) of love with Gnarls Barkley. I dove headlong into Jay-Z. I downloaded more singles from iTunes than you can possibly imagine, and I’ll say this for all of them: not bad.
Still, the most important aspect of a year in music is finding the center of gravity — one’s personal ground zero — and proceeding from there. And in years past that’s meant locating a scene, a band, or an album that somehow says it all. Not this year, not for me. As far as I’m concerned, music 2006 was anchored by a parade of fabulous reissues and by one live performance — in Bangkok, Thailand, no less. It was so stunning that I need only think of it to feel good all over.
On Aug. 1, many thousands of miles from home, former Guardian music critic, boho baseball commissar, and one-time coolest guy in San Francisco Mike McGuirk cut loose with a karaoke version of Procol Harem’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Not only did he stun the house, he finished by pouring a pitcher of beer over a noisy limey sitting at the bar. And he lived to tell the tale.
I know that to be true, because a week later I had a two-hour visit with McGuirk, whom I picked up at LAX and drove to a strip mall in nearby Ladera Heights. We traded stories until I ran out and he had the floor all to himself. He spoke of life in Southeast Asia, about being mistaken for Superman — black frames being what they are in a land where all white guys look alike — and about the pain and glory of leaving it all behind. McGuirk, when all was said and done, radiated a glow that I could only dream about. If that ain’t rock ’n’ roll, I don’t know what is.
See you next year — and hang on to your hat; things look like they could get rough. SFBG
TOMMY TOMPKINS’S TOP 10
(1) Jennifer Holiday, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Dreamgirls (1982 Original Broadcast Cast) (Decca US)
(2) Byrds, There Is a Season (Legacy)
(3) Various artists, What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967–<\d>1977) (Rhino)
(4) Clash, The Singles (Legacy)
(5) Various artists, American Music: The Hightone Records Story (Hightone)
(6) Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, This Is a Journey … into Time (Liaison/Raw Venture)
(7) Pretenders, Pirate Radio (Rhino)
(8) Waylon Jennings, Nashville Rebel (RCA)
(9) Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Legends of Country Music: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (Legacy)
(10) Jennifer Hudson, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Dreamgirls (Music from the Motion Picture) (Sony)

Rock in a hard place

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Who cares what I have to say? I just review video games and write lies about music for pay. You don’t want to read about what kind of “meaning” I gleaned from my experience with music that “really mattered” in 2006, do you?
It’s 4 a.m. I ran out of money one week ago. I ran out of cigarettes at exactly 2:10 this morning, and until I get paid again — in approximately eight days if I’m lucky — I will be eating only things you can prepare by adding hot water. I don’t care about music. I hate music. I hate everything.
Well, I guess I don’t hate AC/DC, especially “Down Payment Blues,” which I think I listen to every day. I used to care about music — a lot, I suppose. I don’t anymore. The only new stuff I listened to this year with any real loyalty — and enjoyment — was a pair of singles from a band I have always hated: “Photograph” and “Rockstar” by Nickelback.
First of all, “Photograph” struck me because I thought it would make an excellent song for a new country dude to cover and have a huge hit with. I elect Tim McGraw to do it, as it sounds enough like “Where the Green Grass Grows,” which is probably what gave me the idea in the first place. This kind of unknown guy Dwayne Wade could do it too. Wade is cool — he’s like the return of John Stewart, who sang “Wild and Blue.” Wait, did I write Dwayne Wade and John Stewart? Ugh. I mean Dallas Wayne and John Anderson. Dwayne Wade is a basketball player. He’s on the Jets. Stewart — I have no idea where that name came from. Sorry, this is what happens when I don’t have cigarettes. I am actually crying right now.
Anyway, I also like the sentimental quality of the lyrics in “Photograph.” I guess I am supposed to quote something here, but I don’t feel like it. Just go listen to the song. You’ll see what I mean. You will also undoubtedly disagree with me. I liked “Rockstar” because it’s funny and also has a big chorus you can sing along with after listening for approximately one second.
One thing that hit me this past week about music in general is that indie rock won’t fucking go away. I don’t understand this. How can people still care about Cat Power or Jacket or Envelope or whatever those lame-ass bands are called? I don’t think there is anything more irrelevant, except maybe college football.
And after hearing this Chromatics EP, Nite, tonight, I also realized the neo–no wave thing is alive and well and suckier than ever. Man, that shit needs to die. What are they putting in the water in Seattle anyway? Anus? I read something about Nite in which the guy said the band was playing a sort of Italo-Euro pop. Is this the new thing, ripping off Italian pop or esoteric European styles that no one likes or cares about? Jesus Christ. I hate America.
With my limited knowledge, I think the only truly interesting and innovative things happening in music are in metal, but writing that is pointless because no one really actually cares about metal — besides those 50 metal fans. So 90 percent of the people who read this will just go back to listening to Arctic Monkeys. Even if they checked out Lamb of God, they wouldn’t like it. I don’t like Lamb of God that much myself — it’s just that they are a mainstream death metal band on a major label and they don’t wholly suck. Also they are not Christian, like seemingly every other “death” metal band right now, which is another disturbing trend today. This is happening because the Christians actually want us all dead. They are trying to bring about the end of the world. The government is helping them. Holy Jesus Lord, I want a cigarette. SFBG
MIKE MCGUIRK’S TOP 10 AC/DC SONGS HEARD WHILE WATCHING STRIPPERS IN THAILAND
(10) “You Shook Me All Night Long”
(9) “Whole Lotta Rosie”
(8) “Let Me Put My Love into You”
(7) “Back in Black”
(6) “Money Talks”
(5) “Stiff Upper Lip”
(4) “Fire Your Guns”
(3) “Safe in New York City”
(2) “Thunderstruck”
(1) “Hells Bells”

The best show I never saw

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› duncan@sfbg.com
My daughter, Dolores — otherwise known as Dolly, though only to family, as she’s getting a little too sophisticated for nicknames — is a born rocker. The first music she heard, pipin’ hot out of the womb, was London Calling by the Clash. Now that she’s five, she wants more of the same when her father, mellowing in his old age, tries to catch the news on NPR on the way to kindergarten: “Dad, what is this? I don’t want talk…. I want rock.” When I inevitably cave to the pressure of the younger and cooler, the air guitar and air drums start right up.
Beyond rocking out in the car, Dolly fronts a semi-imaginary band called the Rock Girls, featuring a rotating lineup of her cousins Chloe and Abby on bass and drums, respectively, and Katie Rockgirl, Lisa McCartney, or Veronica Lee Mills (Dolly’s stage names) on — what else? — vocals and lead guitar. Now, I realize every parent in the world thinks their kid is somehow more gifted and magnificent than the common rabble of paste-eating snot noses, but I’m serious here: she’s got some intense, Tenacious D–style talent at coming up with extemporaneous rock lyrics, from her early punk hit “Step on a Pigeon, Yeah!,” made up on an evening stroll through the streets of Prague a few years ago, to her current repertoire, which is leaning lyrically toward the inspirational power ballad (“I can do anything in the world, yeah!”), and exhibits an intuitive grasp of song structure and phrasing. Beyond this, the kid’s got serious moves. She takes ballet and tap classes, both of which influence her Rock Girls routines, but lately she’s been working in flamenco-type flourishes and bounce-off-furniture, Martha Graham–meets–the Solid Gold Dancers modern dance maneuvers.
And while she’s seen the Sippy Cups during a matinee at Cafe du Nord and her namesake, Dolly Parton, at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, she hasn’t really seen any show-shows. You know, shows that happen after dark, with mosh pits and people in leather jackets drinking bourbon and acting cooler than they actually are. So I decided to take her to see Radio Birdman at the Great American Music Hall on Aug. 31. Why not? It was an all-ages show, I had an extra set of headphone-style ear protection left over from my days of shooting guns, and besides — she was born to rock.
As we walked down O’Farrell on the way to the show, we came to one of those sparkly sidewalks. Dolly has a rule: when there’s a sparkly sidewalk, you’ve got to dance. Doesn’t matter where you’re going or what you’re doing, sparkles equal boogie. This stretch of sparkle motion lasted half a city block and included a new move, the likes of which Britney Spears can only dream about.
“Did you see that, Dad? Did you see the DJ thing?”
She showed me again, cocking her head to the side as though holding headphones in the crook of her neck and doing an exaggerated Jam Master Jay–style zip-zip-whir scratch. I don’t know where she got it, but she’s got it.
We arrived at the hall around 9, and openers the Sermon had already played. I ran into my friend Brett from back in the day — he’d ridden his motorcycle from Denver to see Radio Birdman. It was a good night for Dolly’s first real show. Radio Birdman, who’d formed in 1974 in Sydney, Australia, broke up in 1979 and, despite occasional reformations, had never toured in the United States until now. They were in their 50s; Dolly was midway through five. The torch was about to be passed, rock ’n’ roll–style. The Black Furies came on with, “Fuckin’ fuck yeah! We’re the fuckin’ Black fuckin’ Furies from San Fran-fuckin’-cisco, motherfuckers!” I’m not sure how much Dolly caught from the balcony next to the lighting booth, where former Guardian intern K. Tighe hooked us up with the primo seats and free Cokes. Dolly’s had a few more cherries than mine, but I’m not one to hold a grudge.
Dolly had been talkin’ about rockin’ all day, from when I dropped her off at kindergarten at 10 to 8, to when her mom picked her up. We made sure she caught a nap after dinner, but it was a little shorter than planned, as she was superexcited to see the show. Halfway through the Black Furies, however, her eyelids started drooping, and she leaned into Pops, sleeping right through the Furies’ continuing flurry of fucks. I asked her if she wanted to go home, but she didn’t want to leave without accomplishing the mission.
She had a slight rally between sets. We did a little call-and-response in the bathroom:
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“Yeah!” she shouted.
“Ready to what?”
“Ready to rock!”
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. We walked around the floor for a bit, which kind of freaked her out because it was dark and there were a bunch of punker types dressed in black. Plus, when you’re five, your eyes are level with most people’s butts, which has to be a drag. Then we went outside, where we spotted another kid with shotgun earmuffs. Went back upstairs to the lighting loft. My friend Heather stopped by and tried to chat with Dolly, who looked at me and said, “I want to go home now.”
I’m not going to lie to you: I was disappointed. But not all that much, strangely enough. I mean, if it’d been a date and my date was, like, “I’m not feeling this,” I’d have said, “Here’s a 20. Catch a cab.” But I’ve seen a lot of rock bands, and none of them are as cool as my kid. I’m sure Radio Birdman will come around again in the next 30 years. We’ll see them then — and I’ll be the one to fall asleep.
It’s not about me anymore, and I find that comforting. During the first six months of Dolly’s life, I found it terrifying, depressing, and just plain weird. I no longer played the lead role in my own life. I went through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of death over that fact: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And that’s where I am now: acceptance. Not a grudging but a welcoming acceptance. Hertz may have you believe that “when you’re number two, you try harder,” but the fact of the matter is, when you’re number two, you can finally relax. SFBG
DUNCAN SCOTT DAVIDSON’S NOT QUITE TOP 10
• Radio Birdman (sort of) with Dolly, Great American Music Hall, Aug. 31
• The Melvins and Big Business, Great American Music Hall, Nov. 29. The Melvins killed rock. Rock is now dead, and all the other bands can unplug, go home, and stop pretending.
• Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and Rykarda Parasol, 12 Galaxies, Oct. 20
• Hot Mute, Hot Mute (Hot Mute)
• Easy Action, Triclops!, and Red Fang, Parkside, Nov. 10
• Viva Voce, Get Yr Blood Sucked Out (Barsuk)
• Bronx, Priestess, and Riverboat Gamblers, Independent, Jun. 24
• Bronx, The Bronx (Island)
• Silver Jews, Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City)
• Rykarda Parasol, Our Hearts First Meet (Three Ring)
• Rocky Votolato, Makers (Barsuk)
• Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti-)
• Islands, Return to the Sea (Equator)
• Favourite Sons, Down Beside Your Beauty (Vice)
• Heartless Bastards, All This Time (Fat Possum)

Sing out

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The stage floods red, and the guitars churn. This rock is southern grit — a real heartland affair. Onstage, a man with straggly black hair steadies his guitar and returns to the microphone stand: “They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need/ Their shit don’t stink, and their kids won’t bleed/ Their kids won’t bleed in their damn little war/ And we can’t make it here anymore.” The crowd goes off, the band keeps up, and then James McMurtry puts down his guitar.
This is pretty much what preaching to the converted looks like. I should know — I’m up here every night, and I see it all the time. By day I’m a writer, but nights still find me on my balcony perch behind the lighting board at the Great American Music Hall. My voyeur point offers nightly opportunities to study the mechanics of crowds. From here, I’ve learned that hippies twirl, hipsters stand with arms folded, punk rockers still mosh — well, they try — and any alt-country audience worth its salt drains all the Maker’s Mark early in the night.
Still, there are two things that happen during every show. The first, somewhat annoying thing is that at some point someone in the band will say something like “Hey, this place used to be a brothel, you know.” This false statement is typically followed by a joke, statement, or inflammatory song about the Bush administration. The San Francisco crowd — regardless of what kind of night it is — will always go crazy.
McMurtry is at that point in the evening — only he’s played here enough times to forgo the cathouse comment, and he skips right to the hard stuff. “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” is nothing short of an anthem, a wartime confession that things these days are pretty fucked up. This marks the third time I’ve witnessed a crowd encountering this song. From above, I can see the now-familiar shudders — I see the guitar chords grabbing at the guts, the lyrics pulling at the guilt, and the eyes glazing over with the most dutifully civic of queries: how the hell did we get to this point?
Music has long been a vehicle for dissent. In fact, the protest genre’s history is so strong that some of its most revolutionary battle cries (“The times they are a-changin’,” “God save the queen,” and “Fuck the police”) have become pop culture clichés. Sticks and stones and all of that, but it turns out the right words can pack one hell of a punch.
A few months ago during the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park, a known dissenter rewrote an old song, Leadbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues,” in front of more than 50,000 listeners. It was Fleet Week in the city, and fighter jets roared overhead as Billy Bragg led his crowd through the chorus of “Bush War Blues,” a sea of middle fingers fiercely stabbing at the air.
It seems that we are all tangled up in the newest wave of protest music — and it’s quite a stretch from the “Kumbaya,” peacenik days of yore. Today’s troubadours are mobile. Bragg, McMurtry, and countless other hard-touring artists are playing festivals, midlevel clubs, and bars from coast to coast — resulting in a revolution being waged on stages throughout the land, a series of battles fought one song at a time.
I can’t help but think, as I watch the crowd down below, that at this very moment somewhere in this country, a 13-year-old kid is being shoved into a dark and sweaty all-ages venue. The band onstage is yelling about blood and oil, telling him he’s going to die for his government. The vocalist gives a “fuck you” to our commander-in-chief before launching into another indecipherable, out-of-tune 45-second song. The room goes wild. And the kid, for perhaps the first time, realizes that there is a movement afoot. SFBG
K. TIGHE’S WORKING-STIFF TOP 10
(1) Steve Earle and Billy Bragg on the same stage Oct. 7 at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, flipping off passing aircraft alongside their enormous crowds.
(2) Radio Birdman at the Great American Music Hall on Aug. 31. One of the greatest — and certainly most unexpected — shows of the year.
(3) Black Heart Procession with Calexico at the Fillmore on June 16.
(4) Leaving the Lucero and William Elliot Whitmore show at Slim’s on Oct. 12 with a broken heart, a gut full of whiskey, and a rekindled love for all things banjo.
(5) Seeing so many talented local bands do well this year was definitely a highlight. The barbarasteele and Black Fiction show at Cafe du Nord on Feb. 12 was proof positive that we are sitting on a gold mine.
(6) Nurse with Wound at the Great American, June 16–<\d>17, making naked ladies swim around the stage.
(7) Syd Barrett and Arthur Lee — you bastards. Rest in peace.
(8) Sleater-Kinney’s final SF shows at the Great American on May 2–<\d>3 reminded me why I loved them in the first place — just in time for them to break up, goddamn it.
(9) Dinosaur Jr. and the irreparable hearing damage they caused at the Great American on April 19–<\d>20 made me understand that always wearing earplugs, hiding in doorways, and not standing in front of three Marshall stacks might be good for my overall health.
(10) Someone having the good sense to pull the plug on Lauryn Hill, Great American on July 29.

A sound proposition

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There are huge, expensive, city-sponsored monuments to the arts lined up on Van Ness Avenue, opposite City Hall, and I’ve seen some of the best music in the world performed there.
The formidable San Francisco Symphony took a run at Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at Davies Symphony Hall years back — a feat not dissimilar to juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle along a plank over a pit of alligators — and pulled it off with both precision and gusto. And more recently, the San Francisco Opera made me, a lifelong doubter of wobbly-voiced wailing, an instant convert. The occasion was a spectacular staging of Billy Budd, Herman Melville’s great tragedy of miscarried justice as hauntingly rendered by Benjamin Britten.
The opera and the symphony — though deriving much of their revenue from foundations, corporate sponsorships, and ticket sales — also enjoy considerable subsidization from government. According to the SF Symphony’s IRS Form 990, it received almost $800,000 in government grants in 2005 alone.
These subsidies are good, but there needs to be a lot more of them — and they need to serve all citizens of San Francisco much more effectively. It could not be said, for example, that a typical Friday night at the SF Opera is either affordable or appealing to a significant portion of the city’s residents.
And it’s certainly not true that there isn’t enough music and art in San Francisco for all its citizens. This place is bursting at the seams with creativity. You could put on a live performance by a local band or DJ crew in Justin Herman Plaza each week for a solid year and not run out of talent.
In fact, that’s not a bad idea! Why not, as a matter of city policy, support the staging of one free, live, outdoor musical performance per week year-round? We can keep it cheap. Once you bring things inside, it gets a bit expensive, stops being DIY, and starts meaning forms, insurance, and union-scale wages — all substantial barriers to entry for your local experimental jazz combo. The space would, in fact, have to be donated — not impossible, but not always likely.
So outdoors it is. Rain or shine. Bring your own PA. Do your own flyering. According to Sandy Lee of the Parks and Recreation Department, the nonprofit rate for using any outdoor musical facility is $500 for as many as 1,000 people. If you want to do one show weekly for a year, that’s $26,000 total. I’ll wager that San Francisco’s major arts funders could easily cover that annual fee through a matching grant program paid directly to Rec and Parks.
That’s a bump on a log in the world of arts funding, and such an arrangement isn’t unprecedented. San Francisco’s Hotel Tax Fund picks up the user fee for the Golden Gate Park Band, which has a regular Sunday gig April through October in the unremodeled band shell in the newly remodeled Music Concourse.
So we’re certain just about everyone will agree that more free live music outdoors would also be pretty much awesome. Now we get to program 52 weeks of free live music in San Francisco. Booking, or perhaps curating is a better term, would be done democratically, ethically, and, of course, pro bono by volunteers called up from the performance and presentation community. Local venue and club bookers, noncommercial and — ulp! — pirate radio DJs, festival programmers, musicologists, and the like. Remember, we have 52 weeks to fill, so there’s room for everyone.
At this point it’s clear that there would be hang-ups to unhang. There would be the danger of favoritism and payola in the booking — underpaid musicians and bookers are often hungry and desperate. There would definitely be aesthetic disagreements. Where, for example, will the punk and metal bands play? The thumping DJ crews? Lee noted that the department is “very sensitive” to NIMBYs opposed to amplified music.
Nevertheless, she said, the city is full of outdoor venues for amplified music, all available for the $500 nonprofit use fee. These include McLaren Park, the Civic Center, Mission Dolores Park, Union Square, Justin Herman Plaza, the Marina Green, and Washington Square. In Golden Gate Park the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival has sprawled magnificently across the Speedway, Marx, and Lindley meadows; both Reggae and Opera in the Park regularly occupy Sharon Meadow; and the band shell, a.k.a. Spreckel’s Temple of Music, is also back in action after being closed for three years during the de Young reconstruction.
“The band shell is open to any group that wants to perform there,” Lee said, and that’s a great place to start.
Get city backing for a pilot program and set up a spring-to-fall season similar to that of the Golden Gate Park Band, whose musicians are volunteers. Shoot for radical diversity in the booking to get a true cross section of the city’s ethnic, cultural, contemporary, and historic musical palette. Schedule performances opportunistically: during lunch hours downtown, at 2 p.m. on a sunny Saturday in the park. Stage local music showcases on weekends or holidays for full afternoons of free music. Pick the lively bands for fog season so folks have a reason to jump around. Switch venues each week to keep the NIMBYs off balance. And remember that commercial radio stations would have to pay the commercial user fee of $5,000 if they want to get in on the game. This will keep things focused on the grassroots.
We must create an expectation for this kind of low-cost local arts subsidy. It’s true that music and culture thrive like weeds in the cracked cement of oppression. But keep in mind that $26,000 for a year of venue-user fees for local music is 3.25 percent of the symphony’s government subsidy. The city can take an unprecedented step in support of genuinely accessible, relevant arts programming. At a time of gutted arts funding around California and the nation, San Francisco could set an example for pragmatic, affordable, nonelitist, human-scale public arts for the entire community.
The only thing stopping us is cultural elitism, NIMBYs, and acres of bureaucracy. Piece o’ cake! SFBG
JOSH WILSON’S TOP 10
•Project Soundwave’s experimental, participatory music showcase
•Godwaffle Noise Pancakes at ArtSF and beyond
•Resipiscent Records release party, Hotel Utah, Oct. 20
•Sumatran Folk Cinema and Ghosts of Isan, presented by Sublime Frequencies at Artists’ Television Access, July 14
•William Parker Quartet, Yoshi’s, May 24. Jazz wants to be free!
•Experimental music showcases staged weekly at 21Grand
•Deerhoof! Castro Theatre, April 27
•Gong Family Unconvention, the Melkweg, Amsterdam, Nov. 3–<\d>5, featuring Steve Hillage playing his first rock guitar solo since 1979, Acid Mothers Temple with the Ruins guesting on drum ’n’ bass, and local guitar superstar Josh Pollock invoking the spirit of Sonny Sharrock with Daevid Allen’s University of Errors (a truly explosive combo including ex-local DJ Michael Clare)
•Hawkwind, the same weekend as the Gong Uncon, in nearby Haarlem, full on with alien dancers, lasers in the stage fog, and Dave Brock announcing the encore: “If fuckin’ Lemmy kin play ‘Silver Machine,’ we kin fuckin’ play ‘Motörhead’!”
•Noncorporate radio in San Francisco: KUSF, KPOO, Western Addition Radio, Pirate Cat

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