› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Starved for ideas? Dirt cheap, down to your last slice of cheese pizza and Harley beer, and still deeply smitten with fuzz-swathed guitars, ruttin’ rhythms, and a complete dearth of chops?
Desperate times call for rotten but still somewhat respectful measures, according to Chris Owen, former Guardian music ad maestro, ex–Killer’s Kiss kingpin, Hook or Crook label head cootie, and everlasting primordial rock fan. When the time came to name Budget Rock Showcase, the garage-punk onslaught of a music fest that Owen birthed five years ago with ex–Guardian columnist and onetime Parkside booker John O’Neill, they turned to the best: ye olde SF garage rock upenders the Mummies.
“We took the name from the back of a Mummies record, a picture of the Mummies that says ‘Budget Rock Showcase’ on their hearse or station wagon. We thought it was the perfect name for a festival of these bands,” recalled Owen from Gris Gris leader Greg Ashley’s digs, where they’re working on a 7-inch of Ashley’s pre-Mirrors high school combo, the Strate Coats. In response, the Mummies have been, um, fairly mum. “They’re pretty nonplussed that we decided to appropriate that. I get the feeling that doing some kind of organized, highfalutin thing is not necessarily what they’re into.”
Well, their tacit agreement was all Owen needed to pick up the fest he abandoned after the first year with a bit of booking help from friends such as O’Neill, ex–Parkside booker John Pool, and Stork Club bar manager-booker Lance Hill. Known for giving Comets on Fire one of their first Bay Area shows and drawing the underage Black Lips from across the country and later lauded for bringing in Beantown’s highly combustible Lyres, Budget Rock leaves Thee Parkside for the first time and celebrates its fifth year at the Stork. “It probably wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t do it this year,” Owen said while scarfing pizza with Ashley (“the food that fuels Budget Rock!”). “No one got off their ass to do it.”
So what is this crazy, impecunious thing called Budget Rock? “All the bands fall under a couple different rubrics,” Owen said. “Real traditional garage bands like Omens and Original Sins. I tend to like noisier In the Red stuff, but Budget Rock is supposed to be about Bay Area bands that are descended from great bands like Supercharger, the Mummies, Rip Offs, and Bobbyteens.” Of snarly note — besides the magnifico, malignant Original Sins (Brother JT’s original garage unit, which hasn’t played the Bay in more than a decade) — are fest first-timer Ray Loney, the Sneaky Pinks, the Mothballs, the Traditional Fools, Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and the Okmoniks (one of several acts to have played every fest).
With the mainstream pop scene’s own appropriation of garage rock now petering to a close and disappearing from car commercials and the demise of such fests as Garage Shock, Owen can safely say that Budget Rock is one of the few of its die-hard kind, along with Goner fest in Memphis and Horizontal Action’s Chicago Blackout. Original garage lovers can all breathe a sigh of relief now — and enjoy the grease in peace. “You can spot a band that’s trying to make it a mile away,” Owen said.
“It’s like when you hear the Strokes, and they promote themselves as the Velvet Underground,” Ashley interjected. “They kind of do sound like them but like the worst songs on the last album rather than the best songs off the first album.”
This will likely be the first and last time Budget Rock will pick pockets at the Stork because Hill is moving on after failing to buy the joint — word has it he has looked into the old Golden Bull space too. But then, that’s the way this breed of untamed raw-k shakes down.
JOAN OF OURS A passing that came and went relatively unheralded Oct. 21: Runaways drummer Sandy West died after a lengthy tussle with lung cancer.
Yet it’s not too late to lay down your respect to Joan Jett, who plays San Francisco on Nov. 4 and has said after West’s passing, “I started the Runaways with Sandy West. We shared the dream of girls playing rock ’n’ roll. Sandy was an exuberant and powerful drummer. So underrated, she was the caliber of John Bonham. I am overcome from the loss of my friend. I always told her we changed the world.”
Jett is still out to change the world, it seems, when I spoke to her recently from her tour bus shortly before West’s death. Her new album, Sinner, on her own Blackheart Records, had just come out, and she was psyched about its politically and spiritually oriented material. After chatting about the Warped Tour (“I had my BMX bike and rode around from stage to stage checking out as much music as I could”) and producing the first Germs LP for her friend Darby Crash (“We got serious for about four days and probably as un-fucked-up as we could be and went in there and made a great record”), Jett got in one last push for rocking women like herself and West.
“I think the environment for women is just as bad now [as when I started Blackheart Records],” she said. “In fact, I think it’s even more dangerous because there’s this illusion of equality, when in fact, that’s not the case at all. Girl bands can’t seem to get above that successful club level, then they run into that glass ceiling thing.” SFBG
JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS
Sat/4, 9 p.m.
Fillmore
805 Geary, SF
$30
www.ticketmaster.com
ORIGINAL SINS
Nov. 10
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
www.hemlocktavern.com
BUDGET ROCK SHOWCASE
Nov. 10–12
Stork Club
2330 Telegraph, Oakl.
www.myspace.com/budgetrock
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Cheap greats
The sound of evil
› duncan@sfbg.com
Metal people scare me.
Not in an “ooh, I’m scared” kind of way, but in an “oh, that’s sad,” arrested development kind of way.
This is especially true of the black metal cabal. Black metal is supposedly the be-all and end-all of evil, and it’s just so camp that it’s silly. Everyone’s got a fake metal name (Necronomicon or Umlaut), panda bear Kiss tribute makeup (I mean, corpsepaint), and homemade nail-spike armbands. Don’t forget the unreadable band logo that looks like cleverly arranged twigs. Clearly, these are people who spend as much time rehearsing their look in front of a mirror as they do rehearsing their music in the studio, if not more.
Which is why Ludicra is one of the few bands generally classified as black metal that I’ll bother with. For one thing, the group includes vocalist Laurie Sue Shanaman and guitarist–backing vocalist Christy Cather — they’re not in the same old heavy metal boys club.
More importantly, when I want to hear heavy music, I want it to intersect with my life. I haven’t been burning churches or worshipping Thor lately. If I want to hear some fairy-tale shit, I’ll cut out the middleman and listen to Ride of the Valkyries. Alienation, loneliness, the death of relationships, and the sense of anonymity in being yet another face in a big city — this is stuff I can relate to. “Something big and bright/ Looms outside my window/ Choked with promise/ Smothered in hope/ Days plod on like machines of ceaseless ruin/ Lost in a forest of haunted buildings.” These are the opening lines of “Dead City” from Ludicra’s new album, Fex Urbis Lex Orbis (Alternative Tentacles), which quotes Saint Jerome, via Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, meaning “dregs of the city, law of the earth.” Jerome was referring to Christ’s apostles and how they were the lowliest scumbags teaching the highest truth. This is echoed in the album’s verminous cover art: restrained line drawings of roaches, ants, rats, flies, and a club-footed pigeon. The meek shall inherit the earth — or at least the urban parts — but they probably won’t be walking on two legs.
Although it’s not necessarily meant to be a concept album, Fex Urbis feels like one to me: five epic tracks, the longest almost a dozen minutes, about the entropy of modern city living. From that hopeful light outside the window, just out of reach, to “the sign that modern times is finally crashing down” in the final track, “Collapse,” the full-length reminds me of the Red Sparowes’ At the Soundless Dawn (Neurot, 2005), which, in turn, reminds me of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. For all its double-bass drum bombast, dark screams, and perfectly timed twin-guitar riffing, Fex Urbis Lex Orbis has more in common with Philip Glass’s score to that film than with anything released by Mayhem.
Putting in the CD for the first time, I was kind of spooked out by Shanaman’s voice. It’s an otherworldly death rattle. But when juxtaposed with both the lyrics and the relatively clean backing vocals, also sung by Shanaman, the result isn’t evil — a tone that has held so much sway over the metal community for so many years after the first, eponymous Black Sabbath album — but heavy. The music is epic without being cheesy fantasy, which makes it resonate.
I think it’d be fair to say at this point that I don’t believe in evil. I believe ignorance and delusion exist at the base of willful choices. Evil is supernatural. Ignorance is human and therefore that much scarier. Even on Halloween, nothing is going to reach out from the land beyond and get you.
Sure, Shanaman’s voice sounds evil, but when I talked to her in person, the first word that came to mind was sweet. She laughs easily, sometimes because she thinks something is funny but mostly out of nervousness, it seems. She’s a self-admitted “total choir geek.”
Drummer Aesop Hantman knew he wanted to be in a band with her since the mid-’90s, when he was in Hickey and she was in the local noise-grind act Tallow. “Here was this totally demure, nice girl that would fucking explode,” he says in a phone interview. “It was really unnerving.”
Ludicra, which includes guitarist John Cobbett and bassist Ross Sewage, are likewise unnerving. They remind you that just because there’s no bogeyman under your bed and Satan is real only to country bumpkins like the Louvin Brothers and unrepentant metal geeks, it doesn’t mean you won’t be swallowed up by forces greater than yourself: “Gone are the days of reckless vanity,” Shanaman howls as the album winds down. “Gone are the old songs from the shore…. Here’s the end of what we have dreamt of. Here’s the face of the collapse.” SFBG
LUDICRA
Tues/31, 9 p.m.
Elbo Room
647 Valencia, SF
$7
(415) 552-7788
Solomon’s, mine
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Boo! And hiss, while you’re at it. Isn’t it scary how the music retail biz has changed? As a onetime music store flunky, I was hard-pressed to decide whether it was a trick or treat when I heard a few weeks back about the liquidation of Tower Records — this after filing for bankruptcy twice in the last two years. After all, I wasted a good, penniless year and a half of the late ’80s behind a register in the “tape” room and then behind a clipboard at one of the Sacto chain’s flagship stores at Columbus and Bay in San Francisco.
Those were the days — the horror, the horror of trying to subsist on megamuffins and minimum wage. The fun of stacking and alphabetizing cassettes under the benevolent leadership of the azure-Mohawked experimental musician Pamela Z. The joy of talking psychedelia and envisioning earth-shattering cultural epiphanies (one fave: imagining Sonic Youth teamed with Public Enemy years before “Kool Thing”) with Winter Flowers’ Christof Certik. The insanity of controlling the red-eyed, camped-out crowd from behind the Bass ticket booth when the final Who tour went on sale — and getting a Tower sweatshirt when my $50,000-in-two-sellout-hours register totaled to the penny.
The shock of realizing, as a budding world music buyer, that my assistant was thieving bags of Van Morrison and Chieftains CDs from my section. The starstruck bedazzlement of glimpsing the musicians and celebs pour through the glass doors on a regular basis (following a testy Todd Rundgren around with a drooling coworker, catching a lady-killing grin from Chris Isaak, and listening to Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys praise the version of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem pouring out of the speakers). The weirdness of instructing shut-in customers on what to do when the cassette ends (you press “rewind” or you find Scotch tape and record over it in disgust). The surprise of ordering vinyl and CD versions of the same release and finding certain humongous labels unwilling or unable to ship records, making available only the higher-priced so-called alternative. The pleasures of the lurching, lumbering 1 a.m. Muni ride home after completing the midnight closing shift, back to my digs in the Lower Haight. The switch-flipping surrealness of realizing I was the only one actually bothering to work during most of my shifts — while everyone else was down the street on three-hour lunches or fielding drinks with label reps.
Sure, the party was great while it lasted, and in pop cultural backwaters like Honolulu, Tower became the only, life-changing game in town — jetting in imports, hard-to-find discs, zines, and books at below list prices — and likewise you could get your hand-stapled xeroxed zine into Towers from Tokyo to Paris. And while the sprawling stores flourished, they drove out of business the local mom-and-pop music stores that didn’t recalibrate and start to sell used music and books, collector’s cards, comics, and games.
So now it’s being boiled down to end racks and wire fixtures — after a 30-hour bankruptcy auction ended in favor of the Great American Group’s $134.3 million bid rather than that of Trans World Entertainment, which said it would have kept most of the stores open. And frankly, I feel only somewhat sentimental — despite the initial quality of in-house magazine Pulse and the quasi-democratic, carry-everything supermarket atmosphere — because Russ Solomon’s retail model was far from carefree. The reason the prices were so low was that the workers there were barely scraping together a living (therefore often resorting to unrepentant graft — one staffer funded his trip to Italy on returned, unmarked promo music). At the time it felt like the glamorous equivalent of a record store sweatshop, with its overeducated, obsessive employees bitterly muttering to themselves about the amount of money that would pass through their hands — and straight into Solomon’s coffers.
Why stay? Pre–Amoeba Music, Tower was the biggest and best music store in San Francisco. And did such rampant thieving make a dent in profits, leading to the chain’s demise? Maybe it only started to show when downloads began their rule and the market shattered into a grillion niches, when even a megalith like Tower didn’t seem able to keep up.
As Tower crumbles, I may not be able to find the music I passionately want or need at 11:55 p.m., but I might shed a tear for my last shred of connection with the store — those times I’d trot up Market, between sets at Cafe du Nord, when most shops are darkened and early birds are tucked in bed, and duck into the Castro Tower to browse the magazine racks, those fluorescent lights beating down and the words dancing beneath my ringed eyes.
NO PAIN, NO DOCTORS If you think this election season is painful, tell it to the Bay Area–by–way–of–Chicago art-rock transplants No Doctors. Their whistle-stop tour of sorts stops this week at Club Six in San Francisco and ends at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland — and takes the formidable loudness of the foursome to some scenic points such as Joshua Tree and Lompoc. A working vacation with a message?
The tour has been dubbed “US out of CA,” guitarist Elvis DeMorrow told me. “I think everyone can get behind secession at this point.” After spending most of the past year working on their new LP, Origins and Tectonics, due spring 2007 on Yik Yak, the band “somehow arrived on an all-California thing, playing all the places no one even tries to play,” he continued.
Luckily for the No Doctors, DeMorrow is keeping his administrative job at the Stanford medical school’s pain research division. “To me, it’s totally relevant to playing music with a band and the effects it might have in your life,” he declares. Playing music as pain control? Don’t tell that to the bright bulbs at the CIA who came up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers as an instrument of torture. SFBG
NO DOCTORS
Tues/31, 8 p.m.
Club Six
60 Sixth St., SF
$5–$7
(415) 863-1221
Online Exclusive: Method Man at the crossroads
a&eletters@sfbg.com
When a bumped phone interview with hip-hop legend and putf8um artist Method Man mushroomed into a proposed
backstage post-show encounter, I naturally jumped at the chance.
Being a devotee of the ultimately more funk-based grooves of Bay Area hip-hop, I tend not to pay
attention to the doings of NYC, and I can’t claim to have ever followed the Wu-Tang Clan in general or Meth
in particular, though I have always admired both from afar. Yet one needn’t follow the Big Apple’s scene in
great detail to appreciate its impact, and with Meth’s successful film and TV career, most recently as a recurring character in this season of HBO’s cop drama The Wire, one needn’t even listen to hip-hop anymore
to appreciate his.
This situation is exactly what’s troubling Method Man. His very success in the cultural mainstream, he
feels, has been held against him by the hip hop-industry, a curious situation considering
mainstream success is the perceived goal and direct subject matter of most raps these days. Unlike the
recent fashion among rappers like Andre3000 to pooh-pooh their interest in music in favor of their
“acting career,” Meth wants to be known primarily as an MC. But Hollywood success has proved to be a
slippery slope, paved by Ice-T and Ice Cube — each in his turn the most terrifying, authentic street rapper
imaginable — to the end of your hit-making potential in hip-hop.
Couple this perception with Meth’s vocal challenges of the effect of corporate media consolidation, and it’s
not difficult to imagine why Def Jam released his fourth solo album, 4:21: The Day After, without a peep
at the end of August, as if the label had written him off despite his track record of one gold and two
putf8um plaques.
Still, no one who’s heard the angry, defiantly shitkicking 4:21 (executive produced by the RZA, Erick
Sermon, and Meth himself) or saw the show Meth put on that evening (leaping from the stage to the bar and
running across it by way of introduction, later executing a backwards handspring from the stage into the crowd by way of ending) could possibly doubt his vitality as an MC. He put on a long, exhausting show,
heavy with new material, that utterly rocked the packed house.
Shortly after the show ended, I was brought backstage by Meth’s road manager, 7, to a tiny corridor of a
dressing room crammed with various hangers on. A man in a warm-up suit with a towel over his head was
sitting alone on a short flight of steps in the center of the room.
“That’s him,” 7 said, before disappearing to take care of other business.
It was like being sent to introduce yourself to a boxer who’d just finished a successful but punishing
brawl. The face that looked up at my inquiry was that of a man who’d retreated somewhere far away into
himself, requiring a momentary effort to swim to the surface. Quite suddenly I found myself face to face
with Method Man, whose presence immediately turned all heads in the room our way as he invited me to sit down
for a brief discussion of his new album and his dissatisfaction with his treatment by the music
industry.
SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN: I read the statement on your Web site [www.method-man.com] in which you
discuss your problems with the industry. Could you describe the problems you’ve been having?
METHOD MAN: My big problem with the industry is the way they treat hip-hop artists as opposed to artists
in other genres. Hip-hop music, they treat it like it’s fast food. You get about two weeks of promotion
before your album. Then you get the week of your album, then you get the week after, then they just
leave you to the dogs.
Whereas back in the day, you had artists in development, a month ahead of time before you even
started your campaign, to make sure that you got off on the right foot.
Nowadays it’s like there’s nobody in your corner anymore. Everybody’s trying to go into their own
little club, for lack of a better word. Everybody has their own little cliques now. Ain’t no money being
generated so the labels are taking on a lot of artists because of this at once that they don’t even have
enough staff members to take care of every artist, as an individual. Their attention is elsewhere, or only
with certain people.
SFBG: Your new single [“Say,” featuring Lauryn Hill] suggests you’ve had problems with the way critics have
received your recent work and even with the radio playing your records. How can someone of your status
be having trouble getting spins?
MM: You know what it is, man? A lot of people have come around acting like I’m the worst thing that ever
happened to hip-hop, as good as I am.
Hating is hating. I’ve been hated on, but just by the industry, not in the streets. They never liked my crew
[the Wu-Tang Clan] anyway. They think we ain’t together anymore and they try to pick at each and
every individual. Some motherfuckers they pick up. Other people they just shit on. I guess I’m just the
shittee right now, you know what I mean?
SFBG: Do you think it has to do with the age bias in hip-hop? The idea an MC is supposed to be 18 or 20?
MM: You know what I think it is? As our contracts go on, we have stipulations where, if we sell a certain
amount of albums, [the labels] have to raise our stock. A lot of times dudes just want to get out their
contracts so they can go independent and make more money by themselves. There’s a lot of factors that
play into it.
SFBG: Are you not getting enough label support?
MM: A label only does so much anyway. It’s your team inside your team that makes sure that you got a video.
Or that you got that single out there, or that your tour dates are put together correctly. The labels,
they basically just do product placement. They make sure that all your stuff is in the proper place where
it’s supposed to be at. They’re gonna make sure your posters are up. They’re going to make sure that
they’re giving out samples of other artists that are coming out also. [But i]t’s really up to us [the
artists] to make sure our music is going where it’s supposed to.
Right now there’s so many artists people can pick and choose from, don’t nobody like shit no more.
SFBG: Do you think you’re getting squeezed out of radio play as a result of corporate media
conslidation?
MM: Absolutely; this shit ain’t nothing new. It isn’t just happening to me. It’s been going on since dudes
have been doing this hip-hop music. They bleed you dry and then they push you the fuck out.
That’s why I always stress to the fans to take your power back. I always hear people talking about things
like, “Damn, what happened to these dudes? What happened to these guys? I always liked their shit.”
But the fans, not just the industry, tend to turn their backs on dudes. They get fed so much bullshit,
they be like, “Fuck it; I’m not dealing with that shit. I’m going to listen to this.”
SFBG: So what about your acting career? Do you feel like you’ve been overexposed as an actor or that
you’ve been spread too thin and are readjusting your focus?
MM: Fuck Hollywood, B.
SFBG: But I heard you say on the radio today you wanted to play a crackhead and get an Oscar….
MM: I do want to play a crackhead in a movie. I’m going to be a crackhead who dies of an overdose at the
end of the movie, and people cry, and I’m going to get me an Oscar. But fuck Hollywood; tell ‘em to come see
me. Tell ‘em to come to my door.
SFBG: Obviously, from what you said during the show and the lyrics on 4:21: The Day After you haven’t
renounced smoking marijuana, so could you discuss the concept behind “4:21”? Is it about the difficulties
of living the hard-partying lifestyle of the rap artist?
MM: It was just symbolic of a moment of clarity for me. I made a symbol for myself of a moment of
clarity. You know I’ve always been an avid 4:20 person. I like to get out there and smoke with the
best of them. But I picked “4:21” as like, the day after. I got tired of people running up on me and
being like, “You was funny in that movie,” because I was an MC first and foremost. It used to be like, “Yo,
that fuckin’ verse you did on that song, that was hot.” Now it’s like, “My kids love you; they love that
movie, How High.”
It gets to the point when even when I’m having a serious moment, or a serious conversation, people
laugh at the shit like it’s funny. But they laugh cause they thinking of the movie; they thinking of
some sitcom shit.
SFBG: Besides yourself and RZA, Erick Sermon executive produced the album. Can you talka bout your
connection with him?
MM: I’ve been fuckin’ with E ever since I’ve been fuckin’ with Redman. E knows what I like, you know
what I’m saying? The same way he knows what Redman likes. And RZA, that’s a given right there. I’ve been
down with RZA’s shit A1 since day one.
SFBG: 4:21 also features a collaboration with Ol’ Dirty Bastard. When did you guys record this track?
MM: “Dirty Meth” — that’s a posthumous joint with O.D.B. It was after he was gone already. I tell everyone
that so they know.
SFBG: But he seems to permeate the new album.
MM: He does. Good word, too. He permeates it.
Economy class
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO “Please pass the grilled Moroccan spice-rubbed lamb loin,” I dewily asked the cute investment banker from Philadelphia on my left.
Me and Hunky Beau were seated under the Saturday stars at Escondida, a “hidden kitchen” — a.k.a. renegade restaurant in someone’s home or backyard — deep in the Outer Mission, at a table that also included four hip lady lawyers and a postgrad neurobiologist from UCSF who makes headphones for birds. (Don’t ask. Well, OK — first you implant screws in the skulls of small finches, and then you jury-rig a sort of “fly-pod” out of two Q-tips and an old transistor in order to test their hearing skills. Someday, I swear, those poor, deaf birds will have revenge on us all.)
Hidden kitchens are big these days, especially since the permit processes for restaurants and clubs seem to be getting more complex by the minute, and most of the time the underground menus are cheaper than the real thing: you get multicourse gourmet eats plus drinks in a lively underground setting for the price of appetizers at Andalu. And there’s a naughty inspectors-be-damned thrill to boot. (It’s all very hush-hush, but you can usually find hints about upcoming covert cucina events on chowhound.com or Craigslist — just don’t sue me if you get botulism. I got nothin’ for ya.)
The food and company were delish. But me? I was more interested in shoving as much entrée as I could into my faux-leopard baguette handbag — the Hunkster and I were due on a plane to Honolulu in a few hours to attend the biggest gay wedding of the year in Waikiki. And a girl can’t survive a five-hour ride on $4 minicans of Pringles alone. It was bad enough I had to pack my in-flight Stoli in three-ounce saline solution bottles just to get past the damn check-in.
Waikiki? Why not, I say. But first, a real drink to get the whole aloha ball rolling. So we hit up Jet, the new Greg Bronstein joint in the Castro where the Detour used to be, and ordered us up some primo alco-Dramamine. Although I partially miss the hurricane-fence decor and tragic queen atmosphere of the Detour, Jet’s awfully cute, with black padded leather walls, Broadway marquee lighting, and a fuzzy pink double bed in an alcove in the back. There’s also a small dance floor, rare these days in the Castro without a giant video screen playing Kylie Minogue. The club, in all its luxuriant gay sleaziness, is either a pint-size Studio 54 or Liza Minnelli’s future mausoleum. Probably both. Right now, the music is all hip-hop lite — pretensions to be the next Pendulum? — and there’s a velvet rope on weekends — as if! — but something could definitely be done with the place.
Lemme tell you though, Honolulu in October is fabu. The mangoes are huge, the agua is aqua, the gay scene is horrid — new club coming in November: Circuit Hawaii! — and the 14-year-old tranny hookers in six-inch clear plastic heels are gorgeous. Plus there’s, like, five military bases nearby, for those into raping drunk Marines. And who isn’t? Me and Hunky were hopping around like we had humuhumunukunukuapuaas in our Volcoms.
My dearest amigos from the old EndUp days, ChrisP and Armando, got betrothed right on the water in a tear-jerking all-hula celebration bursting with orchids and sunlight. There weren’t any conch shell blasts or caged white doves (or earthquakes), but the grooms were rowed into the friends-and-family ceremony on an outrigger by four hot muscle dykes in sports bras — an ancient tradition, I’m told. It was the second amazing gay wedding I’d been to this year, and although I used to rail against such things politically — why be normal? — I cried like Tonya Harding at the 1994 Winter Olympics. Love is real. And so was the open bar, which me and my sadly, gloriously bare ring finger quickly sidled up to for a post–gay marriage mai tai, studiously avoiding the moony-eyed intimations Hunky Beau was sending my way. I’m not quite done playing hard to get yet. Or am I? Aloha! SFBG
JET
2348 Market, SF
8 p.m.–2 a.m.
www.jetsf.com
Surfing new turf
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Listening to the warm analogs, e-bowed guitar, and post-jazz swing that manifest on “Medium Blue” off Surf Boundaries (Ghostly International) — one of two new albums by Christopher Willits — you might assume that the instrumentation was performed by an ensemble of helping hands rather than simply the Bay Area electronic musician. And you’d be half right. The 28-year-old Kansas City, Mo., native executes many of the album’s compelling melodies and fizzling, ambient textures on guitar, laptop, and synths — aided at times by compañeros including Adam Theis, Brad Laner, and notably, R&B-pop vocalist Latrice Barnett on the calming orchestrations of stringed instruments and horns.
“My name’s on the record, but tons of collective energy came into making it happen,” explains Willits at a Mission District bar. “I outsourced some things to the brilliant friends around me.”
Their impact is evident: the CD shifts dynamically from the usual guitar-run-through-a-laptop drone and fuzz of Willits’s live sets. He says that he hopes to someday put together a band to perform a release like Surf Boundaries on tour. That plan isn’t a surprise, considering Willits’s determination to always have a full plate.
The Mills College graduate’s musical career has quickly taken flight since his move to the Bay in 2000. It’s amazing that Willits even has time for solo endeavors between playing with Flössin — his side project with Hella’s Zach Hill featuring guest noisemaking from Kid606, the Advantage’s Carson McWhirter, and Matmos — and ongoing collaborations with avant-garde musicians such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, and former Tool bassist Paul d’Amour. When not on tour, Willits spends his time at the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco, where he began teaching digital audio workshops five years ago. With John Phillips, he also founded Overlap.org, an online community that aims to give exposure to electronic and experimental artists through blog feeds, podcasts, and live music events.
Much of Willits’s work as a solo artist and a collaborator is documented on labels such as Taylor Deupree’s 12K and Sub Rosa, but his recent alliance with the Midwestern electronic imprint Ghostly International may prove the most promising. “I really like Ghostly, because they’re more into artist development rather than boxing in artists’ sounds and constraining them from branching off,” Willits says.
Likewise, his latest offerings are all over the sonic map. The art alone for Surf Boundaries illustrates its ethereal mood: soft hues delicately wash images of animals scattered around a portrait of Willits. The music within strikes a wonderful symphonic balance between electronic composition and live instrumentation as Willits and his collaborators frolic with a blend of jubilant French pop, glitchy guitar, and shimmering psychedelia.
Along with Surf Boundaries’ cozy, sleepy appeal comes Willits’s shrill wake-up call with guitarist Brad Laner (Medicine, Electric Company) — the North Valley Subconscious Orchestra. The space pop–oriented unit gives the Creation Records class of ’91 competition with white-noise guitar treatments and alt-rock rhythms.
The duo met through mutual friend Kid606, and for Willits the collaboration was a dream come true.
“Laner is one of my guitar heroes,” he says, adding that when he first listened to his old Medicine cassette in high school, he mistook Laner’s nails-on-chalkboard approach to guitar playing for a stereo malfunction.
“I realized that the way he’s making that sound is that he’s running all his guitar effects into a shitty four-track and then cranking the preamps up on it, so it’s getting this full …” — Willits makes a fast, circular motion with his arms — “whish!”
Released in August as Ghostly’s first full-length available exclusively via download, NVSO’s The Right Kind of Nothing highlights Laner’s signature guitar bluster and Willits’s ability to dabble subtly in an aggregation of soundscapes. What results is a continuous squall of beaming shoegaze discord that feels like sunshine bursting into a dark room — only to be broken by heavy kraut rock tempos and Swervedriver guitars.
Though Surf Boundaries and The Right Kind of Nothing radically differ in sound and structure, both discs showcase Willits’s ambition to crack the electronic mold and move toward a contemporary vein of experimental rock.
“All I’m trying to do is feel out my own energy and relationship to my creative process,” Willits explains. “I could have never envisioned the albums sounding the way they do. I love being surprised by my own creativity.” SFBG
CHRISTOPHER WILLITS
With Daedelus, Caural, and Thavius Beck
Fri/20, 9 p.m.
Bar of Contemporary Art
414 Jessie, SF
$10
(415) 777-4278
www.sfboca.com
www.overlap.org
Hailing a Japanoise guitar maestro
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FULL CIRCLE For more than three decades Masayuki Takayanagi (1932–1991) has served as a cult figure to a small but rabid coterie of listeners searching for the roots of extremity in improvised music and free jazz. The Japanese guitarist has received kudos from renowned experimentalists like John Zorn and Otomo Yoshihide yet has remained obscure because his recorded output has been generally unavailable. During the last decade a slew of his reissued recordings have been available only as hard-to-find, pricey imports, while the original vinyl pressings have changed hands for ridiculous amounts of money.
So what’s the big deal? Beginning in the late ’60s, Takayanagi blazed kamikaze musical assaults of a previously unheard violence and abstraction in the jazz idiom. Long before the pure Japanoise of artists like Merzbow, Masayuki Takayanagi threw down a gauntlet. “I always feel that beauty of form and tone are lies. Playing music that’s muddy and violently splattered is an essential way of getting at the truth,” he once wrote. This approach manifested itself in a concept he called “mass projection” — a gushing, sweaty arc of maximum density and energy that was savagely defiant of melody, interplay, and structure.
Unfortunately, a good portion of Takayanagi’s early free-music output is marred by lousy recording quality: early ’70s performances on the DIW and PSF labels suffice as archival documents but barely hint at the true strength and articulation of the music. The newly issued CD versions of the mythically scarce 1975 diptych Axis: Another Revolvable Thing Volume 1 and 2 (Doubt Music, Japan) should rectify this situation, presenting almost 100 focused minutes of Takayanagi and his classic New Directions Unit in full fury.
Recorded live in Tokyo on Sept. 5, 1975, the quartet revealed their manifesto in six movements, roughly building from agitated, spacious quietude to climactic, sustained catharsis. Although the volumes mix up the sequence, the release’s freshly translated liner notes suggest that the music can also be pondered in the order it was executed. The first part — a display of Takayanagi’s more minimal “gradual projection” style — evokes the low-volume scuttling of English guitar pioneer Derek Bailey’s early Company groups. Spotlighting acoustic guitar, flute, slide whistle, rubbery acoustic bass, and skittering percussion, the music is pervaded with a deceptively delicate sense of restraint. A second gradual projection concerns isolated, dynamic sounds that burst through silence in their own mysterious tempos. After a few minutes, Kenji Mori’s lumpy bass clarinet croaks while Takayanagi surprisingly sneaks in a few brief melodic shards that allude to his straight-ahead roots. Part three — a dull drum solo — fills space before the final half of the concert: three mass projections. The first builds very slowly, with sustained cymbal wash and sinister tremolo bass bowing before revealing the perverted grunts from Takayanagi’s now-electrified strings. The second pushes the intensity up but still feels like a tease, threatening to explode before receding into sustained tones penetrated by pricking soprano saxophone curlicues and tumbling percussion.
In the final segment the floodgates open, and we are assaulted by a lengthy tirade that appears to start at maximum intensity but manages to blow straight through the roof, ascending into unknown levels of forceful cruelty. Hiroshi Yamazaki’s superhumanly dense drum attack violently propels the onslaught. Bassist Nobuyoshi Ino ditches his main ax, creating an acidic wall of fierce noise on cello while Takayanagi goads his guitar into shrieks of feedback and crusty slabs of distorted density, bashing it with a metal slide. Intermittently cutting through the din on his alto saxophone, the unflappable Mori is eerily eloquent. Throughout this hypnotic overload of information, one might concentrate on the detail of parts, the texture of the whole, or nothing at all. After 16 minutes the saxophone lapses into outright screaming. Takayanagi’s guitar coasts arrogantly over the damage in thick sheets of atonality before rising into dog-whistle range, calling an end to a harrowing 22 minutes of sustained devastation. If only the first and last sequences of this concert were paired alone on one release, Axis might have been Takayanagi’s single finest recording. With these discs, at least, the secret is out, and the tortured innovations of an obscure musical pioneer are finally revealed to a wider audience seeking buckets of blood in their music. SFBG
Straight outta Mill Valley
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Some time has passed since people routinely looked in 924 Gilman Street’s direction to familiarize themselves with what’s new and interesting in Bay Area rock. However, this doesn’t mean that nothing worthwhile passes through its doors. Topping the bill of the annual Punk Prom earlier this year were the Abi Yoyos, whose cavalier, recklessly hooky normal-dude brand of punk is totally outlook brightening.
Over beer and burritos at a San Francisco taquería, guitarist-vocalist-songwriter Matt Bleyle and lead vocalist Shawn Mehrens, both 21, recently strolled down a nearly five-year-long footpath of memories, including problematic tour vans and onstage pleas for Albuterol inhalers. Unlike a lot of local groups, the Abi Yoyos openly rep the North Bay: namely, Mill Valley. Its members’ paths crossed when Bleyle, Mehrens, and bassist Jeff Mitchell attended Tamalpais High.
“The band was sort of an offshoot of the conversations that Matt and I would have while taking all-night walks in Mill Valley,” Mehrens said. “Nothing is open past 10 p.m., and nobody really presents any options as to how to change things aside from maybe starting a band.” Originally, they played straight hardcore; since then, they’ve adopted a more complex, melodic approach. They cite Charles Darwin — or as Mehrens calls him, “Chuck D” — and Phil Ochs as inspiration for their evolution, along with bands like los Rabbis and the Fleshies.
“Originally we were called Gutter Snatch, as we tried to just come up with the most offensive name possible,” Bleyle said. The moniker Abi Yoyos came to pass courtesy of a Pete Seeger song and an African tale that prophesied “if we turn our back on music and religion, Abi Yoyo [a bogeyman who symbolizes Western civilization] will come and get us.”
The musicianship of the band — which includes drummer Blaine Patrick and saxophonist Kyle Chu — is remarkably solid. “Blaine has won ‘Outstanding Soloist’ awards at Stanford Jazz Camp,” Bleyle explained. “Jeff was in a band called Turbulence that sounded like a cross between Weezer and Hendrix.” Chu joined the band after the Abi Yoyos’ first 7-inch, “The World Is Not My Home” (Riisk), and the lineup solidified to what it appears as on their new debut, Mill Valley (Big Raccoon).
To put out that record, Mehrens worked 80-hour weeks between three jobs, including one at ellusionist.com, a magicians’ supply Web site. “We’re really hard to pigeonhole,” said Mehrens, who now runs Big Raccoon. His friend Corbett Redford, who ran S.P.A.M. Records, along with other industry-seasoned pals, gave the Abi Yoyos the guidance needed to release Mill Valley, an altogether inspired, infectious set of songs.
“I think we can all agree on our hometown heroes,” Bleyle said with a smirk. Sammy Hagar was one of the first names to be mentioned, along with “the guy who invented the toilet-seat guitar,” Huey Lewis, Clover, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. “Cruisin’ and boozin’, my ass!” exclaimed Mehrens to much laughter. “I hate Sammy Hagar.”
Instead the band takes after punkier forefathers. John from the Fleshies introduced the Abi Yoyos to the Punk Prom audience as what Flipper would sound like “if Flipper were good.” After a few minutes of searching for the drummer, that description gained credibility as the band, donning dresses and sparkly makeup, ripped into their cover of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.”
They routinely jam “Helter Skelter” in their practice space — a large metal storage box with electrical outlets by San Quentin State Prison — skirting lunacy in their proximity to inmates and in their unusual reverence for both the sticky melodies of ’60s pop and the fast, snotty punk that emerged from LA in the ’80s. In a scene where, in Mehrens’s words, “image means a lot,” the Abi Yoyos tend to defy punker conventions, adopting an unusually eclectic aesthetic. “Quagmire” moves from medium-paced hardcore to a full-blown anthem about halfway through — a nod to Bleyle’s recent “openness to prog” and odd song structures — and they pop hooks in a forcefully shameless manner; Mehrens was, after all, “raised on R&B and Motown.”
“We have friends in a lot of different scenes,” Mehrens said. “Bands that play hardcore, dancy punk, crusty punk, and some that don’t do anything at all. At every show, there are different types of kids rockin’ out.”
Their first nationwide tour began in late July and has included such transcendent experiences as Dumpster diving, playing a farm in Las Cruces, and shooting Roman candles out the passenger-side window of their van on the Williamsburg Bridge. “We’re a little too weird for the South,” said Mehrens by phone from Ohio. “And one show flyer described us as ‘strange punk,’ which we all think is pretty awesome.”
With any luck, their sharp wit and taut songwriting will take them much further than would the gas tank of Sammy Hagar’s convertible. SFBG
ABI YOYOS
With This Is My Fist, Onion Flavored Rings, Giant Haystacks, and Robocop 3
Sat/21, 7 p.m.
Balazo 18 Art Gallery
2183 Mission, SF
$5
(415) 255-7227
Joy sticks
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Skip the cherries — life at times seems like a big fat bowl of Froot Loops — the type that figure-eight, undulate, and connect in the most unpredictable ways. For instance, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, né Will Oldham, and his ungainly, increasingly ecstatic shadow folk-country — that association’s only right and natural. Oldham and Gen X cinematic hot-spring stoner sagas — it’s altogether plausible. But Oldham and Diddy, the Bad Boy impresario identified in his own PR literature as a “mogul” before proffering the job title “artist” — huh?
What could these two possibly have in common apart from their age, 36? It’s a logical leap if you study Diddy — arriving about two hours late for his recent roundtable interview at the Ritz-Carlton with absolutely zero Burger King Whoppers for yours truly and the other journos who were ready to gnaw their own typing arms off in hunger and antsiness. Instead the mogul packs a makeup artist and hair man (who brandishes a far-from-puffy comb — sorry) and plays us no tracks from his new, still-scarce album, Press Play (Bad Boy/Universal), yet carries it in his bejeweled hand like a salesman. (Perhaps in answer to the inevitable query: with fashion design, artist development, reality TV, label jockeying in his past, and DiddyTV on YouTube currently serving up alleged shots of Sean in the john, why does he even bother making an album? Diddy’s comeback: “It’s a gift and curse, because I do so many things. I’m making sure people know how serious I am about music.”)
Well, Diddy and Oldham name games are the most obvious thread. Like Diddy, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, a.k.a. P. Diddy, a.k.a. Puffy, a.k.a. Sean Combs — Oldham is a man of many hats, personae, songs: a humble troubadour, a rambling tangent-exploring interview, a perpetual touring player, a before-his-time out-folker, a Hollywood-shunning onetime teen star of Matewan. At one point it seemed like he had a recording name for his every sound, if not every album — Bonnie “Prince” Billy was just the latest handle in a line that included Palace Brothers, Palace, Will Oldham, and at least one disc that sported no name at all. It was disorienting, delirious, and hard to track, and at times it just made you want to throw your hamburger mitts up, shave the nearest beard, and beat yourself around the face and neck.
Oldham probably feels much the same after fielding the same question repeatedly, explaining that he once thought of his albums much like films or plays and wanted to label each uniquely. “I thought it would be a way of focusing things on each record,” he says from his native Louisville, Ky. “People would say, ‘I like this record,’ rather than ‘I like the music of …’ I didn’t realize that it was sort of a definitely pointless battle — to see about maybe trying to make people focus on records as independent entities rather than representations of an individual’s or group’s work, and it became sooo energy-expending to always explain this name thing. I was finally just, like, ‘This is just bullshit.’”
And if Diddy and his whirlwind junket offered little apart from the lingering impression that for some reason it was critical for him to leave the scent of power and money (he’s reportedly worth $315 million) on local media — then Oldham is his opposite. On time and generously unearthing the contents of his mind, he’s disarmingly candid and eager to dive into the depths of his past, untangling his feelings and thoughts about acting, recording, and mentoring (he famously championed a solo Joanna Newsom and played her music for their label, Drag City). Yet unlike Diddy, who appears to be jetting around the country in search of the artistic credibility he first found in music as a producer, Oldham has never been more on top of his so-called game.
His new album, The Letting Go (Drag City), is the worthy, relatively full-blown, and outright beauteous studio follow-up to his 2005 stunner Superwolf with Matt Sweeney. This time Dawn McCarthy of the Bay Area’s Faun Fables leaves her imprint — her vocals echoing somewhere in the vicinity of Sandy Denny and Joan Baez. Under the gaze of Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurosson (Björk’s sometime engineer whom Oldham met while touring with the swan queen), The Letting Go is awash with melancholic melodic Southern rock and blues-folk, tunes that revolve around cursed love, child ghosts, and frosty wakes. Captured in Reykjavík and decorated with an image of Makapu’u beach on Oahu, The Letting Go doesn’t sound on the surface like the product of volcanic island ramblings and rumblings — but its lyrics do hint at the tragedy of believing that each man or woman is an island.
That’s why Oldham has gone out of his way to introduce performers like Newsom and McCarthy to his audiences. “Part of it is to reveal how interconnected things could be if you want them to be,” he explains with a soft Southern drawl. “Part of it is also, if the world isn’t going your way and there’s a certain amount always of loneliness to do battle with, sometimes you realize it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to be this solitary figure in the world.” The yearning to connect, this time with an old friend, surfaces in Old Joy, a film by Kelly Reichardt (River of Grass), which has caught praise on the festival circuit for its rapturously, deliberately paced meditation on two men’s slow-growth rambles through old-growth Oregon wilderness. Oldham’s first substantial starring role since Matewan (he most recently appeared in Junebug), his character, Kurt, is a slacker gone to seed, soon to be homeless, and still in search of his next high, his next life lesson, his next brush with grace. After helping Reichardt brainstorm hot-spring locales in Kentucky, the man who could have ended up like Macaulay Culkin or so many Coreys — and instead laid down the blueprint for, one imagines, Jenny Lewis — accepted the part. “I knew Kelly was going to be working in a way I like to work, which is just like a full immersion process,” he says, making the connection much as he pulls together Old Joy, his 1997 album, Joya (Drag City), Madonna, Emily Dickinson, and The Letting Go. “Everybody goes there. Everybody’s basically on call…. The line between tasks is a semipermeable membrane. That’s how I like making records too.” SFBG
BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY
With Dark Hand and Lamplight and Sir Richard Bishop
Oct. 30–31, 8 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$18
(415) 885-0750
For more on Will Oldham and Diddy, go to www.sfbayguardian.com/blogs/music.
In bed with the Long Winters
It’s become popular to characterize the Long Winters’ John Roderick as an intellectual ronin of sorts: a librarian without master who travels the countryside lending his songs and wisdom to brainy 826 benefits. Others reject this stuffy veneer outright, preferring to embrace him as a lovable vaudevillian rogue of the “song, dance, seltzer down the pants” variety.
Still, Roderick is well aware of his reputation as a mysterious dude, explaining, “It’s never been clear, even to the people close to me, whether or not I might actually be an emotionally abusive, exploitative, drunken rapist posing as a sensitive singer-songwriter, and that’s an ambiguity that I cultivate.”
His band, the Long Winters, are back with their third album, Putting the Days to Bed (Barsuk), a sonic patchwork of lust, architecture, rock ’n’ roll love children, and memories of lovers past that defy destruction. Maybe. Roderick writes to ensure that his lyrics don’t bind the listener with logistical detail, preferring to provide softly focused emotional Polaroid photos. “What I’m shooting for is that the listener be able to recall their own stories — when they felt the same way,” he says. With mentions of everything from teaspoons to retired Air Force pilots, however, come fans usually seeking interpretational guidance. Why not indulge listeners with answers? “No one really wants me out in the parking lot after a show explaining my lyrics” he deadpans. “Even if a few people might think they do.”
The crazy thing is, it actually works. On “Teaspoon,” rituals of courtship, “the way that she smiles me down,” careen past as a horn section trumpets the start of a new relationship. Even if the lady in question “claims to be clowning,” the mood is clear, the butterflies in the stomach already swirling. Putting the Days to Bed’s best moment is the wistfully gorgeous “Seven,” a song that lies on its back in tall grass, staring at the sky and hoping against hope to see a lost lover’s face in the clouds. “Would you say that I/ Was the last thing you want to remember me by?” Roderick wonders aloud.
It’s this kind of masterfully eloquent longing that has built the Long Winters no small amount of indie fame. Yet while appreciative of the kudos, Roderick quickly reduces them to a digestible perspective: “I think the Long Winters fall somewhere between it being OK for us to sample some crackers from the deli tray of the Wrens without getting our hands slapped but not so far as to get drunk and spill guacamole on Sufjan Stevens’s pants.” (Kate Izquierdo)
More of Kate Izquierdo’s interview with Long Winters’ John Roderick.
LONG WINTERS
With What Made Milwaukee Famous and the Vasco Era
Fri/13, 9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
Sweet dreams
› kimberly@sfbg.com
“It definitely contributes to this kind of cavelike, sort of womblike environment up here.”
Tom Carter is surveying his kingdom, a.k.a. the Oakland apartment he shares with his partner, Natacha Robinson, and we both try to make the connection between Charalambides, his 15-year-old duo with ex Christina Carter, and the hundreds of Playmobil figurines that populate damn near every surface around him. The only Playmobil-free space seems to be Carter’s cranny-cum-closet-cum-studio housing a computer equipped with Pro Tools and sundry plug-ins that simulate analog effects. Otherwise the Lego-like pieces cover his mantles, bookshelves, lintels, and alcoves, reenacting the Crusades, banquets, pirate ship scenes, you name it. In front of Carter on the table is Robinson’s latest tableau in progress: a petite pair of anthropomorphized mice in wedding garb, fashioned from Sculpey, next to a pile of teensy clay food.
It’s a distracting collection, yet the multitudes also seem to mirror Carter’s prodigious creative output: in addition to Charalambides — which most recently released one of the more straight-laced recordings of its lifespan, A Vintage Burden (Kranky), an almost slow-fi folk album that manages to be both haunting and achingly beautiful — Carter is in Badgerlore (the Bay Area supergroup of sorts with Seven Rabbit Cycle’s Rob Fisk, Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny, Yellow Swans’ Pete Swanson, Grouper’s Liz Harris, and Skygreen Leopards’ Glenn Donaldson); Zaika with Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards; Kyrgyz with Loren Chasse and Christine Boepple of the Jewelled Antler Collective and Robert Horton; and various stirring CD-R projects with solely Horton (the latest, Lunar Eclipse [Important], collects 73 minutes of terrifying drone, conjured with the aid of e-bow, boot, vibrator, and field recordings). All of which led Carter, who also records other musicians regularly and continuously toils on live CD-Rs, to quit his job as a manager at Berkeley’s Half Price Books in order to concentrate on performing live with Charalambides, which plays its first show in the Bay Area this week since Carter moved to town in 2004. The duo has also lined up fall dates at Arthur Nights in LA and All Tomorrow’s Parties in the UK.
There’s obviously a lot on Carter’s plate — we’re not even going to start with the dusting. But Carter is no one’s toy, despite his laid-back style and acid-washed drawl and the fact that Charalambides is now catching a second wind of attention from publications like Wire after putting out vinyl-only recordings throughout the last decade on respected underground imprint Siltbreeze.
Carter began Charalambides in 1991 with fellow Houston record store employee Christina after playing in “pretty goofy” bands like Schlong Weasel. (They named the band after a Greek surname noticed on a shopper’s check; “it was supposed to be evocative but doesn’t mean anything,” he explains.)
“I probably would have met her anyway,” Carter says now of their fateful encounter. “I knew all her boyfriends.” Nonetheless the two were wed, becoming creative partners.
Houston at that time was a hotbed of “superweird experimental stuff,” Carter says. “It was sort of grunge-influenced in a way, but it was sort of psychedelic and bizarre. People just making odd decisions based on drug use and volume.”
Third Charalambides members would come and go, like guitarist Jason Bill and pedal steel player Heather Leigh Murray, but the Carters were constants, even after they broke up in 2003. The 2004 album Joy Shapes (Kranky) documents the split. “It was kind of an intense record to make and kind of intense to listen to,” remembers Carter. “Exhausting to listen to and just exhausting all around.”
Developing their songs through improvisation and then overdubbing parts over the sounds, Charalambides dropped in and out of dormancy until 2000, mostly, Carter says, because “we were never really comfortable as a live band.” The group started to make music with an eye to performance. “We always wanted things to be somewhat formless when we approached a song, but at the same time, we wanted to kind of know what we were doing so it would actually exist as a song. What was the minimum thing you could have in a song and it still be a song?” Vintage Burden turned out to be their first “duo record” in ages, a return to the way the pair had once worked, producing sprawling psychedelic numbers, with one notable difference. Christina, who now lives in Northampton, Mass., wrote all the songs before Carter flew to her home to record on her eight-track Tascam digital recorder. Working on music was easy, he says. “Neither one of us is a particularly grudge-bearing person.”
Keep the grudges for movie-house sequels. Currently listening to ’60s West Coast rock groups like the Byrds and the Grateful Dead in addition to peers and pals like the Yellow Swans and Skaters, Carter might be considered the kick-back link between hippie experimentation of the past and the transcendent aggression of the present. “I do consider myself part of the tradition of Texas–West Coast transplants,” he says mildly. Why do so many Texans turn up on these shores? “I dunno. It’s a place to smoke weed in peace. Ha-ha-ha.” SFBG
CHARALAMBIDES
With Shawn McMillen, Hans Keller,
and Feast
Mon/16, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$7
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
Also Tom Carter–Shawn McMillen duo, Sean Smith, and Christina Carter
Tues/17, 8 p.m.
21 Grand
416 25th St., Oakl.
$6
(510) 44-GRAND
21grand.org
Subtle and sincere
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Honestly, is sincerity back? And if not sincerity, then can we expect at least Bruce Springsteen, Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, and that word-drunk, narrative-schwinging, Dylan–damaged breed of songwriter that you associate with a kind of East Coasty, epic rust belt, bar-band earnestness that freedom-rocked our worlds in the early ’80s? I know Bob Seger is back — please don’t make me listen to the new album.
You can be forgiven for assuming a J. Geils Band revival is schlumping right around the corner once you cock your vulnerable hearing aid to the Killers’ new album, Sam’s Town (Island). Am I the only one who thinks that someone at the label misread the memo and got the sponsor, whoops, the title wrong? “Sam’s Club” rolls off the tongue much more naturally. I mean, it’s pretty easy to read these songs — more Freddie Mercury and Bono than Bruce and John Cougar Mellencamp — as dispatches from some sorry rocker stuck deep in the aisles at a big-box discount retailer. “My List” — that’s gotta be about forgetting what you went in there for. “Why Do I Keep Counting?” doubtless involves bulk purchases of those butter horn megapacks. “For Reasons Unknown”: yeah, I also buy too much bargain toilet paper and then give half away to relatives — does anyone actually save money this way? “Bling (Confessions of a King)” — Sam’s Club isn’t just about pepperoni-pizza-flavored Combos, and hulking bottles of Motrin.
I don’t care what the Killers kids think — as ambitious and against type as it plays, Sam’s Town simply sucks. So I urge you, if you are truly in need of barfed-up visions of Dylan (and his more rocking imitators), to check out this year’s underacknowledged Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice opus, Second Attention (Kill Rock Stars). There is such a thing as being too prolific. Mr. Wand makes so much music that this one was easy to skip.
Another band of would-be rock gods from the all-boy school of Les Paul essentialism is the Hold Steady. Call me a girl, but I never got their shtick and just assumed they were snarky, annoyingly sarcastic smart-asses with prep-school blazers who were made to listen to too much anthem rock at an impressionable age. That is, until I actually saw them at CBGB’s during last year’s CMJ Music Marathon, playing their hearts out, looking like insurance adjusters taking their favorite Cheap Trick fast songs out for a spin.
Yup, it was one of those moments that make you punch the air with your fist, yell like a middle schooler, and pour beer over the guitarist’s Converse. Instantly, you reverted to the brain-dead, raving, ravaged die-hard rock ’n’ roll fan in full ear-bleed death roll — all you needed was a stingray to whip around and pierce you in the aorta so you could die happily, destroyed by the wilderness you’d always deep-down loved. Like an extremely famous TV crocodile hunter.
That performance — and maybe even the Hold Steady’s new Boys and Girls in America (Vagrant) — may be all that it takes to fluff your flaccid affection for stale Bruce Hornsby–style piano lines. Thus it was heartening to hear HS vocalist Craig Finn sounding so, er, out of it in the touring vehicle last week, stuck in traffic outside Atlanta. “Hopefully, I write about the highs and the hangovers,” he drawled. One KISS anecdote later and he was gone. Next up: Tad Kubler, who writes the band’s music.
Kubler assured me that HS have suffered — suffered Guided by Voices comparisons, thanks to the amount of spilled beer that drenches their stages. “Getting hurt onstage is definitely kind of a drag,” he offered. “I almost knocked myself out in Bowling Green, Ohio. Jumping over a railing, I caught my head on monitors that I didn’t see over the stage. Personal injury onstage is something we avoid, but if it’s for the art …”
SUBTLE TRANSITION The Bay Area geniuses of Subtle know all about personal injury — and they know it’s not worthwhile — despite the blatant excellence of their new full-length, For Hero: For Fool (Astralwerks). It’s “a distinctive blend of television, Monty Python, Galway Kinnell, and comic books,” as vocalist Adam “doseone” Drucker described it, also in Atlanta. The band manages to impress despite the fact that one of its core members, Dax Pierson, was seriously injured and paralyzed when Subtle’s van hit black ice while on tour last year.
Drucker began the band with Pierson and recalls starting the new album when Pierson got out of rehab: “The accident struck like lightning. It was the heaviest of times, so we turned around and worked on the record. One of the major motifs of the record is diving into whatever it is,” although, he adds, “we refrained from putting it on our sleeve and wearing it around all day.”
Pierson contributed some demos to the album but has been unable to tour — in fact, Drucker said last week Pierson returned to the hospital for a major operation to reinstall his medication pump. “It’s the main thing on his plate, to put it frankly,” explained Drucker, who added that Pierson has been making phenomenal music since the accident. As for performance, Pierson wants to be prepared when he returns to the stage, Drucker said, because he was “probably the greatest performer. He was a gangsta at it. When he wants to return to performance, he wants to kill it in the capacity he is in.” SFBG
SUBTLE
Sat/14, 10 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$12
(415) 621-4455
WOODEN WAND AND THE SKY HIGH BAND
Sun/15, 9 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$7
(415) 923-0923
HOLD STEADY
Tues/17, 8 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$13–$16
(415) 885-0750
Escape pods
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space. Moonlight kisses the city’s knockoff gold metallic Fendi slingbacks, the ones with the sparkly diamantine heels, and slides up the back of its dime-store disco-ball dress — a little slap here, a little tickle there — until it reaches the ragged sunburst of hair at the nape of its neck and launches into daylight, where the real party is these days. And here we all are in our hot-pink neon escape pods, canoodling with the oceanic music, zipping past the anguished twists and turns, the endless downs and downers of the real world, with all the trashy grace and alien style we can muster. Because really, what else can we do? The real world’s moving on without us, easing its oily fingers into annihilation’s tight black hole, ringing torture’s doorbell, its xanthochroous eyes frothing like a million zillion bubbles of electronic beer shampoo. Kure kure takora! Gimme, gimme octopus!
Whoa. What was in that magic truffle? Oh, that’s right. Drugs. Never trust a tranny dressed as Little Bo Creep bearing gifts at a street fair.
Thing is, I’m pretty sure I never ate it — too many empty calories. But in the past month I really wouldn’t have had to. With LoveFest, the Folsom Street Fair, the new Summer Music Conference, and umpteen outdoor parties, we’ve finally found a way to stretch the wondrous, hallucinatory panties of Burning Man across an entire month.
Suits me just fine. Hey, some of us ain’t rich enough to spend a whole week toodling around the high desert in a crotch-scented sarong. Better we get the Man delivered right to our back door. (Oh, and to all you fabulous burners: I’m still waiting for my thank-you gifts. While you were out spiritually saving the universe, I was covering for your sandy, goddess-loving cracks at work.)
So with all the amazing things going on — the herd of giraffes raving outside City Hall, the leather corsets winking in the sunshine like semaphore come-ons, the perverts and the children joining hands — it was easy to let one’s mind wander, to drift like a sea monkey up to the top of the tank and climb out for a better look.
Was there any meaning to it all? Thousands and thousands of shiny, happy lovers taking to the streets again and again, completely unencumbered, it seemed, by any overt political message. Totally stripped of any frustrated protest. After a while it got kinda weird. I admit, I’m a little old-school. When people used to tell me it was foolish to think parties could change the world in a practical way, I’d hand my two good earrings to the sister standing next to me and tear into their skinny, cynical asses like a wet gremlin. But the whole “change the world” pie in the sky no longer seems on the menu.
I raised a brow this year when one of the LoveFest organizers told me the party’s big ambition was to be a “shining star of love in the current night.” I howled with laughter at the folks who paid $90-plus to go to one of the giant Folsom-oriented leather parties. (Guess we’re not all in this together.) And hardly a single call to any real-world revolution did my Cuervo-crossed eyes see, not even an artistic one. (What a horrible drag all that political stuff is. Embarrassing.)
Was it too much to ask for even just one giant Bush puppet? There was a time not long ago when you couldn’t climb out of the Dumpster without the papier-mache fingers of one of those goddamn things getting caught in your brand-new used wig.
Of course things happened behind the scenes. Folsom donates thousands of dollars to organizations for people in need. Burning Man and LoveFest and all the rest “keep the creativity flowing.” And who would argue that no greater good can come from a monthlong blast of mind-blowing music or a tattooed musclebear from Paris trying to pick you up? (Too bad I’d seen his pornos. I just couldn’t deal with his “sex face.”)
But I had some classic grumpy-hippie flashbacks: Where was all the anger!? What the heck are we fighting for!? Fuck the man! Have we become so disillusioned with our own outspokenness after six long years of virtual political ineffectiveness that we now channel all our practical energy into the personal realm? Or did we just need, for once, to escape the endless fighting and get it on? Are parties now just cosmic battery rechargers? I wondered: what exactly is “the love”?
Then I threw on my banana yellow poncho and break-danced with a blue gorilla, sparkling like a Texan’s sequined chaps. Truffle, anyone? SFBG
Writing wrongs
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
If there’s one person you would expect to condemn the present state of America’s political affairs, it would be Billy Bragg, right? Surely Britain’s punk poet laureate should be grabbing every microphone within reaching distance to decry the evils of our current administration. But surprisingly, his reaction is quite the opposite. “I’m encouraged by the results of the last two elections, because I believe that America has not yet decided what kind of country it’s going to be in the 21st century,” he says on the phone from Winnepeg.
Bragg is currently on a bit of a multitasking tour to showcase his two latest works: Volume II (YepRoc), a box set, and The Progressive Patriot, a book. While Volume II is an expected retrospective that covers the second half of Bragg’s career from 1988 onward, The Progressive Patriot is uncharted territory for the singer-songwriter, a treatise that addresses Britain’s national identity, the emergence of organized racism, and the political road that weaves between the two.
Much as in Britain, Bragg sees battles of ideology as a key proving ground in the future of our country and agrees with the concept of “two Americas” as it pertains to the states’ political climate. “On one hand you’ve got the neoconservative Christian right, who are getting everybody to vote and still can’t get a majority,” he says, “and on the other side you’ve got the more compassionate idea of America as a multicultural society, which just can’t get everybody to vote.” Yet as bleak and insurmountable a problem as this may seem, Bragg takes the long view. “I’m in a fortunate position. I have the opportunity to travel around and meet people trying to manifest that ‘other’ America. Reading local newspapers in America, you see all sorts of things that are going completely against the neoconservative agenda in some states.” Volume II picks up at a crucial period of Bragg’s career, kicking off with his 1988 release, Workers Playtime (Go! Discs/Elektra). The album marked Bragg’s transition from punk iconoclast to, as he would later affectionately come to be known, the “Bard from Barking.” Instead of using just his guitar and a portable amp as on his earlier recordings, Bragg included bits of orchestration on Workers, plus a band to accompany his songs of law, love, and everything in between. “The album of lost love. It’s my great lost soul album!” he says with a wistful chuckle.
At the heart of that bittersweet collection is the amazing “Valentine’s Day Is Over,” a woman’s lament over her lover, rough economic times, and the beatings that result. “That economy and brutality are related / Now I understand,” the protagonist explains wearily. Bragg feels a particular satisfaction with that song and the topics it tackles. “I often cite that as the ideal Billy Bragg song because politics and ‘the love song’ overlap in that song. It’s a really hard thing to do, rather than being a ‘love song writer’ or a ‘political song writer.’ I hate it when people divide those two. Life isn’t divided like that.”
The ever-encircled worlds of life and politics also led Bragg to write the new book, with the ideas spurred by everything from recent elections in his hometown to raising his young son. “A far-right political party called the BNP earned a seat on the council in my hometown of Barking, East London,” the songwriter says. “That was a real shock to me because these were the people that I came into politics fighting. I realized that it needed something more than just writing a song.” Being a father further drives his desire for intelligent debate around the future of his country. His concerns about nationalism are expressed in the interest of cohesion, not the racist ideal of exclusion. He explains, “I’m interested to hear your background, but what is important to me is how my children and your children are going to get on with each other. Everything else is secondary to that.”
As you might expect, Bragg’s MySpace page also bears the mark of his beliefs and ideas. It also contains his songs: items that were conspicuously absent during his recent showdown with the networking Web site. Having successfully lobbied MySpace to retool their artist agreement so that the site doesn’t “own” any artist’s uploaded content, Bragg is now taking on MTV Flux, another networking site that features an upload ability similar to YouTube. A video featuring his challenge to Flux dots the page, along with archival footage of him at various events, such as a concert in Washington, DC, in 2002. That day he addressed the crowd and warned them of a greater looming evil — not of conservatives or imperialism but of cynicism.
He still stands behind that message. “I know from personal experience that cynicism eats away your soul,” Bragg says. “God knows Tony Blair’s been spreading cynicism around for the last few years. I’ve had to fight my own.” SFBG
BILLY BRAGG
Thurs/5, 8 and 10:30 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$30–$35
(415) 885-0750
HARDLY STRICTLY
BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL
Sat/7, 4:40 p.m.
Speedway Meadow
Golden Gate Park, SF
Free
www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com
Restoration Hardcore
Davis might not have those frog signs along the westbound side of Highway 80 anymore — “Live in Davis because it’s green, safe, and nuclear free…. It’s academic!” — but there’s certainly no shortage of wondrous music happening there.
Exhibit A: KDVS — the UC Davis radio station, a longtime champion of alternative music and the only entirely student-run station in the UC system — is about to put on the fourth edition of “Operation: Restore Maximum Freedom,” a twice-a-year one-day music festival, the likes of which have seldom been undertaken by Northern California college radio stations.
Unlike other music festivals hawking themselves as “alternative,” O:RMF is the real thing, presenting strictly music of the compellingly weird variety without sponsored stages and pricey merch tables — by sheer dint of student-volunteer willpower. “It’s a good time out in the sunshine,” said Erik Magnuson, who DJs at KDVS in addition to holding down the station’s assistant programming directorship. “We’re able to get great acts without having to worry about advertising to offset costs.”
The festival isn’t a station fundraiser — all profits go toward future incarnations of the event — but is instead an earnest offering of experimental sounds chosen democratically in committee by station volunteers. Those volunteers run O:RMF at Woodland watering hole Plainfield Station, which KDVS events coordinator and O:RMF organizer Brendan Boyle described as a “biker bar with a quasi-Libertarian vibe.” O:RMF itself fully “represents the radio station,” Boyle continued. “We’re free-form, which is a real anomaly, and it’s a reaction to our current political climate.” Hence the military-operation-inspired name.
The first, all-ages O:RMF in May 2005 was headlined by elastic noise psychos Sightings and Elephant 6 pop oddities a Hawk and a Hacksaw, and the subsequent fests have featured bands like the increasingly relevant, drift-ambience peddlers Growing and the splendidly hard-angled post-punkers Erase Errata. In each case, KDVS has looped in some of the most keenly unconventional artists around, and the upcoming festival looks the best yet.
This time it’s drawn 17 artists of various marginal modes, all of great repute in their respective scenes: longtime glitch-head Kid606 started the Tigerbeat6 label, and quirk-folk guitarist Michael Hurley was a luminary in Greenwich Village’s 1960s folk scene. Hop around to the dance punk of Numbers and the disorienting, psychedelic hip-hop of Third Sight. The garage-punk component is damned impressive by itself: the Lamps, one of Los Angeles’s finest and an In the Red mainstay, will crack their bass-heavy fuzz whip along with Th’ Losin Streaks, whose famously fun live show begets a cleaner, more Nuggets-like, ’60s garage vibe.
Suffice to say that few stations have the guts and the cavalier student base to put on an event like this, especially one that’s plainly not out to make money. As Boyle puts it, “it’s a very real event with no bullshit attached,” and with any luck, attendees will get as stoked on smashing music industry conventions as KDVS is. (Michael Harkin)
OPERATION: RESTORE MAXIMUM FREEDOM IV
Sat/7, noon–midnight
Plainfield Station
23944 County Road 98, Woodland
$15, $10 advance; all ages
For tickets and the complete lineup, go to www.myspace.com/maximumfreedom
Rock till you drop
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“They’re the ones that pushed E-40 into hyphy,” says Hamburger Eyes photographer Dave Potes, in reference to his friends the Mall, a San Francisco art punk trio, and the hype that surrounds them.
“Yeah, we’re part of the hyphy movement,” adds Mall guitarist-keyboardist Daniel Tierney, 27, and his bandmates erupt into cacophonous chuckling.
I’ve heard the “h” word dropped incessantly for weeks now and have pretended to be hip to the Bay Area hip-hop phenomenon. As the band continues chatting about the genre and its influence on the new DJ Shadow album, bewilderment washes over me, and I hang my head and admit to having no idea what anyone’s talking about.
“You’ve got to get on the bus then,” bassist-guitarist-vocalist Ellery Samson, 29, demands when someone mentions the “yellow bus.” In unison everyone chants a couple of “da, do, do, do”s as if the composition should strike a chord, like my sister’s favorite New Kids on the Block track. I grin and nod even though I’m still puzzled.
Whether or not the Mall seriously acknowledge an affiliation to the hip-hop movement is questionable. However, while chilling over beers on a bar patio in the Mission District, I get a sense of buoyancy and selflessness from the mild-mannered band members.
“Up until last month, we all lived within three blocks of this bar,” says drummer Adam Cimino, 28, adding that this particular area definitely inspired their recent songs.
Given the languid quiet of this cool, fogless night — punctuated by the occasional crack of a cue ball or the faint sounds from the bar jukebox — it’s hard to imagine this neighborhood spawning a band whose music brims with pissed-off aggression and agitated velocity. But then, the Mall aren’t exactly from this hood. The band’s beginnings trace back to Montgomery High in Santa Rosa, where Samson and Tierney met and became friends. The pair worked on another musical project, called Downers, but soon found themselves seeking an additional element: Cimino.
Samson gave him a call. “I want to do this screamy, art fag, punk rock thing,” jokes Cimino in a mock-Samson accent, re-creating the talk. “I was, like, ‘I get it. That sounds awesome.’”
The three obtained a practice space without ever playing a note of music together and began work on the first few songs that would end up on their EP, First, Before, and Never Again (Mt. St. Mtn., 2006). From there on, the band gelled into what has become an enterprising experience for all involved.
The group’s new debut, Emergency at the Everyday (Secretariat), is an exercise in emphatic pugnacity and loud-as-shit tumult. The 13 songs — clocking in at less than 20 minutes — are punishing in scope yet danceable. Casio-pop melodies ebb and flow along a thunderous foundation of crunching guitars, plodding bass lines, and dynamite-fueled drum pops.
“We get our sound from fucking up the amps, and we don’t use distortion pedals,” Cimino explains. “It’s just little Casio keyboards and an amp turned to 10. That’s what makes it so gritty-sounding.”
Samson’s vocals add to the mélange of fuzzed-out commotion. Imagine the throaty screech of a young Black Francis shattering through an aggro mixture of angular guitar bluster and punk avidity. During the recording of the album, Samson sang through an old rotary telephone hooked up to a PA to match the distortion of the other instruments and capture the intensity of live performance.
“The music was so blown-out it was too awkward to have clean vocals,” adds a smiling Cimino. “It’s a neat trick.”
But even without the aid from the telephone, you can’t deny the hostility of Samson’s vocals. It’s surprising considering his placid demeanor.
“Everybody’s really angry right now, and we’re just as angry as anybody else,” he says.
The band backs up Samson’s statement by discussing the unending Iraq war and their disapproval of the president, and though the Mall’s songs don’t exactly cover those topics, they certainly fuel the fire. “There’s a lot of violence and frustration and boredom going on,” Cimino adds.
“Fuck, I thought it was party music, man,” Tierney chimes in, and the band bursts into another fit of laughter.
After three years together and a national tour on the horizon, including dates opening for the Slits, the Mall’s sound continues to evolve. And who knows? Maybe their direction will cross the border into genuine hyphy. Already back in the studio recording songs for another EP, the Mall aren’t holding back anything: to them, it’s all about having fun and making great music for their friends.
“It’s totally replaced skateboarding for me,” Cimino says. “I’m off work. I don’t want to watch TV. I don’t want to eat dinner. I get to hang out and play music with these guys.” SFBG
THE MALL
With the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower and Boyskout
Thurs/5, 9:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
Roughin’ Justin
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Don’t be tripping, sit your sexy back down slowly, and I’ll try to break the news to you gently: Justin Timberlake and I have a history.
OK, it’s not like we sat around in Pampers and OshKosh B’Gosh, playing gastroenterologist with Barbie and GI Joe and gurgling along to “White Lines.” Though I am getting a dose of feverish white-line nostalgia listening to coke-daddy ode “Losing My Way” off dusty Justy’s new Jive album, Speakerboxxx … whoops, I mean FutureSex/LoveSounds. And it’s not as if we met on The Mickey Mouse Club, brawling over mouse ears and bawling about diaper rash and paltry camera time. We don’t go that way back.
But Kimberly discovered Timberly long before a certain sheepish someone made contact with that Jackson scion’s nipple ornament. I first saw el Cueball, as I so lovingly dubbed my mousy darling’s shaved pate, fronting *NSYNC at the Santa Clara County Fair around ’98. You know, back when the strings were still apparent. I was there with a few other geezer peers, measuring the hype on the opening local Filipino American vocal group, when the budding boy banders entered prancing and the 14-year-old girls went positively cuckoo, clutching photos and near weeping with longing as Timberlake and company worked the whistled theme to Welcome Back, Kotter into the encore.
Then I met up with Timby again at the Oakland Arena when the “Justified and Stripped” tour broke away from the rest of the bubblegum boys and strapped on Christina Aguilera. Whatever you think of Aguilera’s dirty-girl front, she certainly displayed pipes and pride live, strutting around like Femlin in a black corset and short pants and belting out “Beautiful.” But that was forgotten when Timberhunk emerged — thin voice or no, the little girls were still going utterly nutzoid. They screamed, freaked, and gaped like ravenous baby birds beneath the catwalk he beatboxed upon. That’s the power of cute, man.
But Just-oh doesn’t want to be just cute anymore, as the cover of FutureSex attests: suited up in a skinny black suit like a baby Reservoir Dog, little buckeroo looks outright pissed, crushing a disco ball beneath his heel. If Justified hasn’t made it perfectly clear, Timberlake wants to be considered a force — artistic, tough-guy, whatev — to be reckoned with. Pity the poor pop-pets — Madonna, Britney, Justy — they all have such an ambivalent relationship with le fickle dance floor. FutureSex reeks of such ambition — as the swinging singles prince offers up a kind of archaic devotion to the album format and a familiar if downbeat trajectory tracing a loverboy’s woozy weave from lust to lovesickness. Witness the first half of the full-length: “FutureSex/LoveSound,” “Sexyback,” “Sexy Ladies.” Either someone’s out of synonyms for doing the doity or someone’s ob-sexed.
Musically kitted out by Timbaland in the Neptunes’ absence, FutureSex is clearly intended to be a kind of Prince-ly, sensual opus, and for having the good taste to imitate the most original funk rock stylists of the ’80s, Timba-lake should be commended. But all the CD images of Timbo smashing disco balls seem out of character, overwrought. To wax crassly, Justin tries to show us he has the balls to both musically embrace Grandmaster Flash, Queen, Lil Jon, and yes, the alpha and omega, libertine and spendthrift couple of ’80s soul, Prince and Michael Jackson, and strike out on his own. Just ignore the slimness of Timberlake’s vanilla soul. It’s barely flavored, not quite iced, with techno, barebacked beats, and retro soul, and despite the disc’s initially fluid, almost mirror-ball-like reflective programming, it opens into a dull middle section that’s broken up only by the frisky groove of “Damn Girl.” It makes you wish Timberlake had the courage of his initial fantasy-fueled single’s conviction. If only this disco baller had left it at FutureSex and Timberlake stuck to his, er, cheesy pistols and the Prince of schwing’s original program.
CALIFONE DREAMING Califone’s Tim Rutili can probably understand the urge to try out new personae. While talking about his new, gorgeous album, Roots and Crowns (Thrill Jockey), the frontperson and soundtrack composer fessed up to believing in past lives — and indeed relying on that knowledge when it came to penning tunes about kittens that see ghosts, lost eyes, and black metal fornication. “The writing process is all about that — just letting things bubble up,” he says from Chicago, where the band is rehearsing. And what does he imagine the members of Califone were in a past life? “Circus clowns.”
The ex–Red Red Meat member doesn’t seem to spook easily. Case in point: the last time Califone played San Francisco, their van was broken into. Treasured gear such as Rutili’s grandfather’s 1917 violin and a custom-made acoustic guitar, which he says was “nicer than my house,” were stolen. “They were nice enough to leave stuff that looked shitty,” he waxes positively. “It was heartbreaking, but in the end it forced us to learn a lot of new tricks, open up our ideas, and gather new things. It really did inform the recording to not have to lean on any of the old stuff.”
The scattered Califone seems to be working out the kinks in its evolution, with Rutili in Los Angeles writing music for film and the rest of the band in Chicago and Valparaiso, Ind. “I see us getting older and becoming more creative,” Rutili muses. And most people just get older and watch more TV. “That doesn’t seem to be happening with us, but it makes it more difficult too. TV is easy — keeping your eyes open and your ear to the ground and trying to remain connected and in touch with creativity is difficult.” SFBG
CALIFONE
With Oakley Hall and D.W. Holiday
Tues/10, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
Grizzly man
New York City band Grizzly Bear’s gently ambient Yellow House (Warp) manages to delicately conjure bittersweet associations of musty, memory-cluttered childhood homes and reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist-modernist novel The Yellow Wall-Paper — but the real household dirt on this band has to remain in one’s imagination.
Vocalist-keyboardist-guitarist-autoharpist Edward Droste is up-front about his own sexuality — saying he’s been in a relationship with one man for most of the band’s existence — but when it comes to the love lives of his straight mates, the sometime journalist and Pro Tools bedroom recordist is the soul of discretion. Grizzly Bear’s tales of random hookups are just “too dirty” to pass along, he explains on the phone from the East Coast college campus where the group is playing before joining the TV on the Radio tour in October. “I usually bond with the girls,” says Droste, 27, miming his role as the band’s father confessor. “It’s cool — we’re leaving town. But it’s totally cool.”
And a certain ethereal cool marks the foursome’s gorgeous soundscapes, now lifted above the tape-hiss fray of their fake-fur-embellished 2004 debut, Horn of Plenty (Kanine; later reissued in 2005 with a CD of remixes by Dntel, the Soft Pink Truth, Final Fantasy, and Solex). Yellow House sounds warm and welcoming, thanks to the production prowess of the band’s brass and woodwinds player Chris Taylor and the recording site: Droste’s mother’s Boston-area home, the yellow house of the disc’s title. The seductive tug of nostalgia takes over as Beach Boys–style harmonies skate over fingerpicked acoustic guitar and strings, bird chirps, and wah-wah pedal flit together on “Little Brother.” Horns lumber alongside busy insectlike electronics and Droste’s and guitarist Daniel Rossen’s cooing vocals during “Plans.” By the time the album breaks into “Marla” — a slowed-down, strings-swathed dusky dirge based on a 1930s-era tune penned by Droste’s great-aunt of the same name, a failed singer who eventually drank herself to death — resistance becomes futile. This is seriously lovely music, a reflection of the group’s recent communal music-making — and far removed from groupie dish.
“Initially, we wanted to record an album before we had a label and didn’t have any money,” recalls Droste, who shares the name of the Hooters cofounder, a distant relation. “My mom was going to be away, it was my old childhood home, and I was, like, ‘Well, we can all have our own bedrooms, record in the living room, and there’s a backyard, and every night we’d have chips and salsa and beer.’”
The laid-back atmosphere and ensuing musical productivity led to a bidding frenzy among indie labels when the recordings emerged, and now Droste is relaxing into a tour schedule that brings him back to San Francisco for the first time since February 2005, when Grizzly Bear — jokingly named after a Droste boyfriend who was anything but — played the Eagle Tavern. How did Droste’s hetero bandmates handle the attentions of SF’s finest bears — and those of the bandleader himself?
“They’re total cock teases. They love attention from boys, but they never do anything,” Droste offers laconically. “Never say never, but I kind of feel like if you’re hanging with me in New York City and there are a million fags everywhere and dozens of opportunities … I’m just gonna drop it and accept the fact.” (Kimberly Chun)
GRIZZLY BEAR
Fri/29, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$12
(415) 771-1421
www.grizzly-bear.net
Boys? What boys?
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
I meet bandleader, videographer, and Mission District indie icon Leslie Satterfield at Ritual café on a summer evening as she walks up Valencia Street looking weather-beaten and weary from her recent travels. Is she just back from a cross-country tour, I wonder? No, she was precisely where you’d expect the guitarist from Boyskout to have been: camping. She survived days of deer watching and near–bear sightings in the Sierras, and despite her desire for a hot shower and warm bed, Satterfield settles in with a cappuccino and some good stories.
Satterfield may be best known for her post-punk quartet Boyskout, a band that’s risen the ranks since its inception in 2001 to tour around the United States and Germany and headline major local venues including Mezzanine and Bimbo’s 365 Club. But the sandy-blond, late-20s songwriter has been also turning heads of late with her filmmaking.
Her video for Film School’s song “11:11” — a minimalist travelogue set in San Francisco streets and tunnels — is the latest work for her own Sharkbone Productions, which has also produced Boyskout videos shown internationally at major gay and lesbian film festivals. Her latest projects include a video for Rough Trade UK–signed act Scissors for Lefty and a self-produced experimental film that she describes as “being about love and creating what you believe.”
“Most of my films have been about how we create our own realities with our mind and how powerful the mind itself is — how your thoughts create everything that happens to you,” Satterfield says.
With her Mission artist garb — black boots and worn dark denim — I figure Satterfield had a youth spent in mosh pits and zine-collective punk hangouts. On the contrary, she grew up listening to the Beatles, Olivia Newton-John, and Simon and Garfunkel, while spending a lot of time drawing. She earned a BA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and resided in Amsterdam for a year before moving west. Now in addition to classics from Elton John and Heart, her iPod holds songs by Coco Rosie, the Libertines, and Tapes ’n Tapes. It’s an eclectic collection of music, similar to the local bands she holds dear and performs with regularly. The list includes up-and-coming acts like the Fucking Ocean, Tartufi, Full Moon Partisans, Death of a Party, and the Mall, as well as Shande — the group fronted by her sometime–guest guitarist Jennifer Chochinov.
Admittedly a shy, coy romantic who’s just completed an all-acoustic album, Mixing Memory with Desire (Dial), as J-Mod, Satterfield was initially a reluctant lead vocalist. You wouldn’t know it from Boyskout’s recent rock-out performances: Satterfield’s steely, saucerwide blue eyes zap the audience playfully while she mixes it up with her bandmates onstage. Along with bassist Piper Lewine, keys and violin player Christina Stanley, and drummer Ping (and occasionally adding guest guitarists like Chochinov or Daniel Dietrick to the lineup), Satterfield slayed audiences at South By Southwest this year in Austin and returned immediately to begin recording Boyskout’s now completed second album, Another Life (Three Ring). At the time we speak, eight of the planned 11 songs are done but won’t be out, well, until they’re done. “I’m a huge perfectionist,” Satterfield confesses. “The biggest in the world. I really like to take my time and do things to a tee.”
The songs I’ve heard from the project, including the Nocturne-era-Siouxsie-sounding “Spotlight” and the jittery dance-rock slab of “Lobby Boys,” are as refreshing as local underground music can get (word to Live 105). Meanwhile, Satterfield’s singing on the J-Mod disc (fantastically recorded at Hyde Street Studios) resembles Nico or Hope Sandoval in their darkest, most mysterious moments. Each album serves as an introduction to Satterfield’s thoughtful and dissonant guitar playing, a style that compliments her alabaster-smooth voice. Based on her range of projects and contacts, I get the impression that Satterfield has some big opportunities on the horizon.
Other recent adventures include a trip to Portland to teach at the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls. “I taught last year in New York, and it was really fun. I worked with a group of 8-year-olds who formed their own band called Pink Slip.” Which reminds me, I never did get to ask Satterfield what her day job is. For now I’ll just assume it’s the professional term for “brilliant multidisciplinary artist.” SFBG
BOYSKOUT
With the Mall and the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower
Oct. 5, 9:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
www.boyskout.com
Lennon’s boom
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Which John Lennon did you know? Initially, I was too young to know him as anything more than the moptop behind the chipped bobble-headed garage-sale find — and as one of the songwriters behind my parental units’ token soft-rock gatefold, the Beatles’ Love Songs (Capitol, 1977) (the “White Album”’s “acid rock,” as Moms described it, went way beyond the pale). That’s all the Lennon I could grasp until the Rolling Stone cover pic that accompanied news of his 1980 murder — that coverlineless image picturing a nude Lennon fetally curled around a clothed Yoko Ono. If you dug the raw romanticism of that Annie Leibovitz image and Lennon’s 10-point program to success, excess, then bread-baking, Sean-rearing semiretired rock-star redemption, then you were with us. If you didn’t and you were disgusted, you weren’t — go hang with the Yoko-booing minions at, say, the recent Elvis Costello–Alan Toussaint Paramount show. It was that simple when you were an already media-saturated brat ready to draw battle lines and take pop music dead seriously.
Nowadays, the very undead but still much-pondered Bob Dylan may inspire a higher page count than Lennon when it comes to critical essays, encyclopedias, and that ilk. But I’d venture that Lennon’s influence continues to echo subtly through the culture, starting with the recommended banishing of “Imagine” from Clear Channel airwaves shortly after 9/11 and continuing through to some recent docs, DVDs, and dispatches from his estate.
Ignore the critically mauled 2005 musical Lennon and don’t wait for a Martin Scorsese PBS-approved documentary treatment — though, oh, to glimpse Abel Ferrera’s charred take on Lennon’s Bad Lieutenant–style “lost weekend” with Harry Nilsson. For somewhat unvarnished, intimate footage of Lennon with Ono in their Ascot, England, estate studio and shooting hoops with Miles Davis, check Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s “Imagine” (2000) — the material of Lennon warbling “Jealous Guy” and trianguutf8g in the studio with a very active Ono and a stoic Phil Spector is eye-cleansing.
After sampling Lennon and Ono’s frank BBC interview there, you’ll want even more truth — so turn to last year’s The Dick Cavett Show: John and Yoko Collection DVD, which collects three 1971–72 episodes featuring the gabby couple. It encompasses some of Lennon’s most in-depth US TV interviews, as the relaxed, wise-cracking musician sparred and jabbed with the clearly nervous and very deeply tanned Cavett in between sizable excerpts of Ono’s great Fly and Lennon’s Erection, a cinematic “construct” if there ever was one. Even more astounding than Cavett’s half-baked monologues are the lengthy stretches of airtime devoted to Lennon and Ono explaining their 1972 deportation case — one suspects even Jon Stewart would yelp, “TMI!” — and the pair’s impassioned, controversial performance of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” (worth it alone to Bay Area–philes when Lennon pulls out a Ron Dellums quote to back up the lyrics) and Ono’s still-nervy, saxed-up “We’re All Water.” The versions of Lennon visible here are familiar and complementary — John as the willful dreamer and the provocative righter of wrongs, be it the plight of American Indians or the lack of consideration given Ono’s art. And one wonders, will network TV ever be quite this maddening — and challenging — again?
Scenes from both The Dick Cavett Show: John and Yoko Collection and Gimme Some Truth surface in The US vs. John Lennon, a new feature film revealing the latest Lennon iteration: the musician as a political animal hounded by the Nixon administration and threatened with deportation. Lennon considered a peace-promoting concert tour following Nixon’s reelection jaunt around the country — and posed a serious enough threat to Tricky Dicky, in the very year millions of 18-year-old Beatles fans were given the vote for the first time, that the US government moved to stop him. Focusing on Lennon’s significance as an activist who devoted his personal life (transforming the Lennon-Ono honeymoon into the peacenik, media-lovin’ bed-in) and considerable platform to antiwar efforts, filmmakers David Leaf and John Scheinfeld (Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of “Smile”) worked with documents released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act suit (aided and abetted by Jon Weiner, who consulted and wrote Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files) to make their film. Supported by commentators ranging from Ono and Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis and G. Gordon Liddy, the two have fashioned a sleek, informative primer on the importance of being Lennon and the historical context he emerged from. The only images they wish they had included but didn’t, Leaf told me, were World War II pictures of a bomb-besieged Liverpool and war-torn Japan.
“What’s important to note is that being for peace meant more than being nonviolent for John and Yoko,” he explained from an office in Century City. “This was in their bones, if you will. John saw firsthand what war caused.”
Leaf and his partner have had the film in mind since the mid-’90s, when Lennon’s FBI file was opened. After the disappointments of 2004, it’s intoxicating to imagine an artist and his listeners changing history, and at the very least The US vs. John Lennon allows one to dream, even briefly. Why was Lennon such a menace? “I think what terrifies power the most is truth,” Leaf says. “When truth is spoken without fear of consequence, it is threatening, and when John and Yoko embarked on their campaign for peace, they weren’t promoting themselves or a record but peace or nonviolence.” SFBG
THE US VS. JOHN LENNON
Opens Fri/29 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
The Shadow knows
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Why do we want DJ Shadow, né Josh Davis, to suffer for his art? Why are we so enamored of the romantic image of Davis, pate and gaze humbly hidden by a hoodie, bowed like a monk before a crate of precious vinyl like a mendicant curled in prayer at the dusty cathedral of flat black plastic? It doesn’t help that Davis seems to resemble in part that now-iconic pop image when he meets me at Universal Records’ SoMa offices. Polite and erudite, rigorous and righteous, he obviously takes a subtle, scientific delight in the details and precision of language and in meeting commitments, making dates, finishing interviews, taking care of business. He’s not some goofed playa tripping on hyphy’s train.
But being a smart dude aware of all the angles, Davis, 34, is well aware of the disjunction between his image and his current sound — his past and present — too. “I feel like it was getting to the point where a lot of people were trying to tell me who I am and what I represent,” he explains in the, yes, shadows of a Bat Cave–ish conference room hung with midcentury horror-cheese movie posters. “This image where it’s just sort of like me in the dungeon of records, with the hood pulled over my head, and I only like old music, and y’know, hip-hop was so much better way back when.
“Yeah, that’s a little piece of who I am, but it seems like some people kind of fetishize that culture or that aspect of my personality, where it has sort of devoured everything else. And, um, I just feel like it was important for me to make this record and articulate who I am, rather than let people compartmentalize me in that little box of, ‘OK, this is DJ Shadow. He’s the sample guy. He’s the guy who made Endtroducing, and he’ll never make a better record, and that’s … DJ Shadow. Next artist.’”
Hence The Outsider (Island). It’s a bold, deep rejoinder to scoffers that somewhat ditches the dreamy grooves in Shadow’s past for ever-infectious hyphy-lickin’ good times (radio hit “3 Freaks” with Turf Talk and Keak da Sneak and “Turf Dancin’” with the Federation and Animaniaks), a little bow to crunk (“Seein’ Things” with David Banner, made in the interim between Davis’s 2002 album, Private Press [MCA], and the rise of Bay sounds), funk and funny jams (“Backstage Girl” with Phonte Coleman), and even a completely outta-left-field dissonant pastoral (“What Have I Done” with Christina Carter of Charlambrides). Even E-40 takes part (“Dats My Part”), in what might seem to some like Davis’s bow to the Bay and its players. However you read the title of his latest album, this outsider has probably made his most geographically specific, here-and-now recording to date. It’s rooted in a genuine — though scattershot and even schizo — sense of place rather than an imaginative pomo zone where old 45s can be recycled and reused ad infinitum and a talented and introverted head like Shadow can study beats, the art of sampling, and music making inside out in bedroom-community privacy. Perhaps that’s why the San Jose–born, Davis-raised Davis has been so often connected, mistakenly, to Hayward — therein lies the romance of burby anonymity, the decentered, very nonurban reality of so many hoodie-bedecked kids who fall for hip-hop and spring for decks.
So Davis leans forward intently and tells me about listening to hyphy for the first time on KMEL while driving over the Golden Gate to his Mission studio and getting an instant hit off its raw kick. How he tried to break down the “strange, almost Eastern chords and keys” underlying Rick Rock’s, Droop-E’s, Trax-a-Million’s, and Mac Dre’s tracks. These are tales he has told many times before, to Billboard and URB (which lapsed by sticking the currently capped, clean-cut Davis in a white suit, like a datedly slick star DJ). But you have to appreciate the sincere passion of his mission. The need for this father of identical twin toddler daughters to fly right, get the record straight, come correct, and make good art, even if it means happily stepping aside, letting the current Bay stars set up on two-thirds of his sonic dreamscape’s turf, and disappearing into the heat of, say, Summer Jam 2005.
“I just feel like my job is to make a good song,” he says mildly. “And if making a good song means that I play the back and not get real freaky with the programming and not load it up with 10 trillion samples or something, whatever the song requires is what I’m willing to do.”SFBG
DJ SHADOW
Thurs/21, 4 p.m.
Amoeba Music
2455 Telegraph, Berk.
Free
(510) 549-1125
Thurs/21, 8 p.m.
Amoeba Music
1855 Haight, SF
Free
(415) 831-1200
WITH MASSIVE ATTACK
Fri/22, 8 p.m.
Greek Theatre
UC Berkeley, Gayley Road, Berk.
$45.50
www.ticketmaster.com
Bringing Knives out
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Emily Haines is not known for keeping her thoughts to herself.
As part of Toronto’s Metric, the notoriously outspoken singer-keyboardist incorporates her political beliefs into wildly infectious synth-rock songs. On 2003’s Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (Everloving) and last fall’s Live It Out (Last Gang), Haines tackled such unlikely pop-song subject matters as war, Big Brother, and the emptiness of consumer culture with thrilling, often thought-provoking results. “Buy this car to drive to work/ Drive to work to pay for this car” — from “Handshakes” — is a typical sentiment. She’s even more articulate in Metric interviews, discussing everything from voter disenfranchisement to the futility of trying to create real change through music.
It’s strange, then, that Haines is tight-lipped when it comes to her solo debut, Knives Don’t Have Your Back, out Sept. 26 on Last Gang. During a phone conversation from England, where Metric performed at Reading Festival two days prior, she sounds annoyed by the mere idea of talking about her album’s lyrics. “Do you think you can put it in words?” she icily counters when asked to elaborate on the central theme. “If I have to name the narrative, then there’s no point in having had one there at all.” Clearly, she prefers to keep her own songs open to interpretation.
Thing is, Knives is such a huge artistic departure both musically and lyrically for Haines that some insight might prove helpful. Rather than rely on the propulsive energy and shout-it-out choruses that define Metric’s sound, Haines (who also moonlights in Broken Social Scene) has recorded an album of soft, piano-based hymns more intent on capturing a mood — and a seriously somber one at that — than whipping audiences into raucous, dance-floor frenzies. Recorded with help from members of Sparklehorse, Stars, and Broken Social Scene, the album is hardly recognizable as the work of the same feisty woman who fronts Metric.
Haines, however, insists she didn’t approach Knives’s songs any differently than those of her band. “I spend all my time at the piano,” she explains. “For Metric, we’ve always just adapted my piano songs into a rock ’n’ roll format. So it was interesting [for Knives] to keep some of them for myself and leave them as is. Because I’ve always written more music than anyone could be asked to digest, I just chose the songs that I realized it’d be kind of sad if I never, ever put them out. It’s taken me a while to get up the nerve to release them though.”
The product of a rather lengthy incubation period, Knives was written over four years and recorded in as many cities — namely, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, and New York. So it’s a bit surprising that the album comes off as such a cohesive collection of, as Haines puts it, photographs from her past. “It ended up feeling like snapshots over that period of time,” she says. “When I look back and listen to these songs, I feel like the last four years have been some of the most intense.”
As song titles such as “Our Hell” and “Nothing and Nowhere” suggest, the result is almost abysmally bleak. Turning her focus from political anger to personal turmoil, Haines ruminates extensively on pain, loss, loneliness, and despair. “Are we breathing? Are we wasting our breath?” she sings in “Crowd Surf off a Cliff.” Even more unnerving, “The Last Page” finds her cryptically singing, “Death is absolutely safe.” But while the entire album could pass as a heartrending document of one woman’s extremely troubled times, all Haines will say (and only after much prodding) is that Knives is “essentially about being grateful for what you have, even when your life is shit.”
When she comes to San Francisco this week — a sequel to her July 2004 Cafe du Nord appearance, where she offered a rare sneak preview of an in-progress Knives — Haines will be accompanied by bassist Paul Dillon and Sparklehorse drummer Scott Minor, whom she’s enlisted to help her “nail that Plastic Ono Band vibe.” She’ll then head back to England for another Metric tour and to start recording the band’s third album. Later, if time allows, she hopes to play more solo gigs and eventually perform again with Broken Social Scene.
In other words, while fans may find it odd that Haines is suddenly mum about her solo music, they can take comfort that she’s fast becoming one of the busiest artists in indie rock.
“It’s weird,” she says. “When people say to me how busy my life is, I suppose that I really am ridiculously busy. But to me, it just feels like being a musician. That’s what I wanted to do and that’s what I’m doing. I’m making music. It’s not a job. It’s my life. It’s my friends and my family. So the more the better.” SFBG
EMILY HAINES AND THE SOFT SKELETON
Fri/22, 9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com