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Nerves of Chrome

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Whatever happened to all the cyberpunks? Once upon a Blade Runner, it looked like neo-noirists and novelists from the early 1980s were finally getting turned on to George Orwell’s vision, predicting a dystopian, nightmarish future in which humans were subject to conditioning and control. Even musicians were getting it: perhaps inspired by Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (Buddah, 1975), such artists as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Pere Ubu were dabbling in a postapocalyptic music world by the close of the ’70s. But if there was one band that dared to define the genre back then, Chrome was it.

Lauded by critics and fans as one of the pioneers of industrial rock, the San Francisco outfit coupled psych-punk and electrodub with lyrical themes of alienation, paranoia, and ’50s sci-fi cinema, though its sound mirrored bands like the Sonics and Wipers when drummer Damon Edge and bassist Gary Spain came together in 1976. Following the release of its debut, The Visitation (Siren), later that year, the group folded once its members realized the album was a sales flop. Everything changed, however, once Spain and Edge hooked up with Helios Creed, a guitarist whom Spain had jammed with during the early ’70s. As Creed explained over the phone, "Chrome was the only band that was doing something I was interested in … space rock, punk rock, and the sci-fi kind of thing."

"It was really psychedelic, and it wasn’t in to be psychedelic back then. It was just punk and Budweiser," he continued. "Psychedelia would remind punks of the hippies, so they wouldn’t want anything to do with that. And I said, ‘Well, that’s great, ’cause acid punk doesn’t exist.’"

Creed also revealed that a falling-out during the recording sessions for Chrome’s sophomore effort, Alien Soundtracks (Siren, 1978), resulted in Spain’s exit in 1977 and subsequently ushered in a radical shift away from the band’s protopunk beginnings.

"Damon started playing some tapes that they had made a year or two before that were outtakes from The Visitation, and I said, ‘God! This stuff is fucking great!’" Creed said, laughing. "I liked it better than The Visitation, and I suggested that we make stuff like that and integrate it into our punk set."

Alien Soundtracks‘ 1979 follow-up, Half Machine Lip Moves (Siren), adhered to this formula as well. Joining scratchy, three-chord guitars and trash can–like drums with Creed’s growled vocals and an excess of waterlogged-sounding effects, the result mirrored some otherworldly murky realm. By the time Creed and Edge’s final collaboration, 3rd from the Sun (Siren), was released in 1982, the combo was heading in a more gothic direction, similar to that of contemporaries Killing Joke and Swans.

Chrome remained a duo until its ’83 demise, though the bandmates adopted a taped drum machine nicknamed Johnny L. Cyborg as their third member and briefly enlisted John and Hilary Stench from Pearl Harbour and the Explosions. During this period the group was primarily a recording project and only played live twice, to sold-out crowds in San Francisco and at a Bologna, Italy, festival. Edge moved to Europe to start another version of Chrome, while Creed remained stateside to work on his solo career, angry that he was left behind.

After Edge died in 1995, Creed carried on with the band because he felt he was just as entitled as his ex-bandmate to put out Chrome records. Since 1996, Creed has recorded a handful of full-lengths under the Chrome moniker but tends to focus more on his solo material. His current West Coast tour will include Chrome and Helios Creed songs, and he revealed he hasn’t ruled out a future full-on Chrome tour. Creed also wanted to set the record straight about his strained partnership with Edge.

"Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate Damon. We just went through some shit," he clarified. "I forgive and love everybody." *

CHROME

With Battleship

Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $12

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

The personal history, adventures, experience, and observation of David Copperfuck

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What’s up with all these "fuck"-ing bands of late? I’m referencing the band name phenomenon: it used to be about being "pink" this or "black" that or "wolf" or "bear" something, but it looks like our favorite four-letter word is now reaping the benefits of name-gaming fun. "Fuck" names might be nothing new — we all recall the Matador Records’ Bay Area outfit that sported the word in its singular form during the ’90s — but it looks like being a "mountain" nowadays just isn’t as cool as it used to be.

To David Copperfuck — vocalist Molly Samuel, drummer Dean Bein, guitarist Chris Baker, and bassist Avi Klein — the so-called trend is a joke. The mere mention that their moniker snagged top billing in the Onion for an end-of-the-year poll titled "Worst Band Names of 2006" generates a round of laughter from the San Francisco punkers. Baker jokingly reveals while hanging out in Samuel’s bike-littered Mission District apartment that "it was really challenging to shoot ourselves in the foot" and that the quartet were "just fucking themselves over ahead of time" by selecting the alias.

"We weren’t trying to be clever or anything," Bein adds while lounging on a recliner. "We were just trying to capture the essence or magic of a couple of words."

But then nothing serious seems to resonate with this bunch. During our two-hour powwow, the group resembles four giddy college kids stretched out lazily on Samuel’s couches, sipping cans of beer and bullshitting about their day jobs, their obsession with the apocalypse, and various extracurricular activities.

"I’m in a play," Bein says when asked whether any of David Copperfuck’s members currently play in any other bands. "It’s called Jurassic Park 4."

"But you have a show, right?" Samuel inquires.

"Yeah, we’re opening for Japanther," Bein replies before cracking a wry smile.

David Copperfuck formed in San Francisco in the fall of 2005, but their friendship harks back to 2002, when they first met at Oberlin College. The four were actively involved in the school’s indie scene and played in two groups, Red Tape Apocalypse and Zohar.

"This band is sort of an amalgamation of those prior bands," Baker says. "RTA was like straight-up, Blatz-style punk with two singers going full throttle, while Zohar was more about going big-time, playing the long songs, and trying to do something that was beyond our technical skills."

The band members acknowledge that they found it hard to continue after graduation with the two projects, which broke up as everyone began to relocate. By August 2005, the members of David Copperfuck had all migrated to San Francisco and, according to Samuel, knew they were going to start a new group once they got here. And it looks like the Oberlin gang’s West Coast venture was a smart choice after all: in its year-and-a-half existence, David Copperfuck has immersed itself in the Bay Area’s thriving punk community and currently plays out as much as possible.

"I don’t think we’ve ever asked for a show," Klein says. "We never really campaign. That can sound really immodest, but we just have friends, and we are supportive of those people and their bands, and they return the favor, I guess."

And regardless of whether they’re sharing the spotlight with floor crouchers, basement dwellers, or bus rats, the quartet is definitely hip to the unconventional venue. So the title of David Copperfuck’s debut 7-inch, "Chalet Chalet" (Party Turtle), seems fitting. It’s a crunchy mix of three-chord guitars, bass distortion, and frantic drum noise that recalls bands such as the Germs, the Bags, and Crass. Samuel’s distraught bark adds to the fray.

"I feel like our shows are always really fun, because there’s not really any posturing," Samuel offers. "We’re pretty unassuming with the people. We set up, and then it just kind of explodes, and it’s like ‘Here we are.’"

The four hope to soon release dual split singles with Oakland’s KIT and Orinda’s ParasitesGo! and will also embark on their first West Coast tour with Connie Fucking Francis in June. They also run True Panther Sounds, a record label they started in college, which has released albums by Lemonade, Broken Strings, and Standing Nudes. So what took David Copperfuck so long when it came to documenting themselves? Bein confesses that their debut single took a while to make because of their "inexperience with the whole record recording and releasing prospect of being in a band."

"I think we are about as unprofessional as it goes," Klein says with a laugh. "Live is like the only thing we can do."

DAVID COPPERFUCK

With Didi Mau and Manhater

Thurs/31, 9:30 p.m., $5

Eagle Tavern

398 12th St., SF

(415) 626-0880

www.sfeagle.com

Negative creep

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› duncan@sfbg.com

"Do you always have to offend everyone?" So ran a comment — anonymous, of course — on a piece I’d written for an undergrad creative writing class, a piss take on the Our Father titled "Our Father II." This was in the early ’90s, when I was still planning my escape from junior college and the burbs. Another classmate suggested that I "try going on a fishing trip or getting laid or something" so I could "write something positive for a change."

During this time in my life, Unsane (Matador, 1991), the eponymous debut by the East Village meat grinders, was in heavy rotation on my turntable, the cover displayed upright on the stereo cabinet: a man on the subway tracks, his head neatly severed by the downtown train. In an era rife with rawboned noise rock, the record was the ne plus ultra of anger and aggression: as violent and uncompromising as golden-age Slayer, but more immediate and less mythical. Whereas Slayer sang about historical creeps Ed Gein and Josef Mengele, Unsane’s Chris Spencer screamed his throat raw about that guy, right there, sitting across the aisle from you with an ice pick in his pocket, staring. Musically, he somehow managed to take the country staple Fender Telecaster and wring the twang out of it, giving it a metal-on-metal screech like that subway train with its brakes locked.

Years later, after logging a decent amount of coitus and fishing trips, I had lost neither my predilection for the aggro or for Unsane. I’d wander around the SF State campus stressed, thinking deep collegiate thoughts, scowling, and muttering to myself, borderline Trenchcoat Mafia and pre–selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I got into a philosophical argument with a poet visiting one of my classes. She was heavily into Zen and read a few poems about sweaty horses and wild roses. They were well crafted and praiseworthy but raised hackles when their author, all blissed out on Mill Valley and whole grain, contended that the purpose of poetry is to convey beauty. That’s an option, sure, but what about ugly? If the only purpose of art is to strive for beauty, what separates it from a Cover Girl commercial, from the consistent mainstream message that things, such as they are, are not as they should be? "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," John Keats wrote in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." I prefer the adage "Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugly goes to the bone." Sure, the Lorax speaks for the trees, but who will speak for the twisted, ugly, and bitter?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Three albums — not counting singles and greatest-hits comps — and four labels later, Unsane are back with Visqueen on Ipecac, with its cover of a body wrapped in plastic sheeting and dumped in a meadow. Over the course of its career, the band has toured relentlessly, including an opening stint with Slayer; lost a drummer to a heroin overdose; and inspired dozens of noise bands, some the real deal, others merely aping it. In February 1998, Spencer was attacked by four people in Amsterdam and needed emergency surgery for internal bleeding. So while you can look at the photos on Unsane’s site and see the band members smiling and horsing around, their recordings are decidedly missing that "good day, sunshine" vibe. They’ve been there, and they’ve seen it. "This city is packed full of lowlifes," Spencer sings over a forlorn harmonica on the ominously titled "This Stops at the River," "and all I can see in your eyes is fear."

It can be argued that there’s a certain homogeneity in Unsane’s fixation on the shady side of the street. "I know it’s only pain / I know it’s all the same," Spencer reveals in a moment of self-awareness. Both Keats and my classroom visitor had it right — and they both had it wrong. Zen isn’t a hippie chill pill; it’s about seeing clearly what’s there. This is the picture, Pollyanna. This is the whole thing. You live in the city; there are no more truffula trees. There are no more barbaloots in their barbaloot suits. There’s a boot on your car, rent’s due, the phone’s been disconnected, and there’s a junkie sitting on the curb, shooting up in his foot.

There are things you can count on in this world, and that same, punishing Unsane sound, with minor variations, will be there when you need release. Keats died of tuberculosis at 25, coughing up blood. If "beauty is truth, truth beauty," then either his death was a lie or all the death and blood and bodies wrapped in Visqueen have some kind of underlying beauty. There is an aesthetic in violence and fear that forms a more satisfying whole than roses and Grecian urns alone. What does an urn hold, after all, but ashes? *

UNSANE

With 400 Blows and Mouth of the Architect

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

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Gui, your music looks terrific

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The first clue that Gui Boratto’s Chromophobia is an extraordinary Kompakt disc — a song collection that places the German label back at the forefront of the best electronic music — can be found on its cover art. Since its inception, Kompakt has had a signature clean design style for its releases. Developed by one of the label’s three co-owners, Wolfgang Voigt, it’s made great use of simple circles and basic color combinations. For Chromophobia, the São Paulo, Brazil, musician called on his friend Felipe Caetano to create a cover. Caetano came up with a beautiful piece of color theory that layers a series of primary-color Kompakt circles over the edges of one another to form a variety of new-hued combinations.

"Our first idea was to do a black-and-white cover, but we decided that was cliché," Boratto says from São Paulo, referring to the title word, a term for the fear of color. "The decision to make the cover colorful was ironic. But for me, chromophobia is like simplicity — the same type of meaning as monochromatism within an architectural point of view."

Got that? The affable Boratto is no club drone whose scope of experience remains as narrow as a programmed and endlessly looped 4/4 beat. He’s a married father of one who has studied architecture in addition to music. "I think architecture and music are almost the same thing," he says, his accent bringing an alternately questioning and singsong quality to English words. "They’re different means of expression, but they treat spaces in the same way."

In Chromophobia, Boratto builds and creates a variety of attractive spaces, without pretension but with a sensibility perhaps informed by a love of modernist architectural pioneers such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. "Within the modernism movement, you can find the same ramp used in the garage and in the dining room," he observes. Such functionality could be ascribed to many tracks on Chromophobia, which entwine rhythmic and melodic complexity and simplicity in a manner that can add vivid atmosphere to private interior settings, natural panoramas, and — though not in all cases — the dance floor.

COLOR ME GLAD


A major part of Chromophobia‘s appeal — apparent from the crystalline descending melody of the opening track, "Scene 1" — is that Boratto knows how to construct a strong simple motif or riff. "My first instrument was guitar, and when I was 10 or 11, I was really into Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin," he says, breaking down his musical background into shorthand. "But in the mid- to late ’80s, my older brother lived for a while in the south of France and then in London, and when he came back he brainwashed me."

The glorious results of that brainwashing are apparent in Chromophobia‘s most-discussed track, "Beautiful Life," on which Boratto’s wife, Luciana Villanova, plays the role of a female Bernard Sumner, quietly singing some affirmative words alongside a mammoth guitar line that invokes the unmistakable bass lines of New Order’s Peter Hook. "It was really a joke," Boratto says with bashful enthusiasm when asked about the track, which Web sites such as Resident Advisor have singled out for special praise. "There’s no complex textures [to "Beautiful Life"], as there are on some of the other songs [on Chromophobia]." True, but the song is no mere retro exercise: as much as New Order, the sunny feminine grace of "Beautiful Life" also calls to mind Ricardo Villalobos’s epic 2006 update of his own "La Belle Epoque," probably the only time Boratto and the Chilean Villalobos have crafted a similar definition of techno.

Still, Chromophobia‘s truest pleasures might be subtler ones, such as the alternately shuddering and sinuous propulsive energy of "Terminal" and "Gate 7" (the latter of which takes its title from the number of the TAM Airlines boarding gate for all of Boratto’s flights to Europe). On "Acróstico," Boratto provides a reprieve from this momentum, fashioning the electronic equivalent — via an array of low-key chirps and whirring sounds — of a nature scene at dawn or dusk.

"The title of ‘Acróstico’ stems from the fact that the high bass notes complete the lower notes — if you see a drawing of the notes, it looks like an acrostic," Boratto explains. For a musician who specializes in instrumental tracks, Boratto has a flair for linguistic matters. After bringing up Franz Kafka in response to a question about Chromophobia‘s final track, "The Verdict" — which takes its name from a Kafka tale often published in volumes of The Metamorphosis — he comments on a certain similarity: "One thing I noticed is that with Metamorphosis‘s Mr. [Gregor] Samsa, if the two s‘s in his name turn into k‘s, and the m‘s turn into f‘s, you have Kafka. It’s fiction, but it’s his story."

THE AMERICAN FRIENDS


By no means is Chromophobia Kafkaesque. But a dynamic between colorful optimism and an undercurrent of gloom gradually courses through the album, growing deeper as it progresses. On the penultimate track, "Hera," Boratto crafts a coda so poignant that it easily eclipses the best recent tracks put forth by Booka Shade and other instrumental acts on Get Physical, perhaps the one German label to overshadow Kompakt in recent years. Kompakt is definitely on a roll as of late, thanks to the long-awaited — and underrated — second volume of label cohead Michael Mayer’s Immer (2006) and the ambient — in comparison to Boratto — allure of the Field’s acclaimed From Here We Go Sublime. The Field’s Axel Willner is inventive enough to tap into the so-ghostly-it’s-frightening essence of the Flamingos’ "I Only Have Eyes for You" (also a touchstone on the soundtrack of Kenneth Anger’s 1950 film Rabbit’s Moon), yet Boratto’s palette is broader, connecting techno’s chillier reaches with the warmth of Antonio Carlos "Tom" Jobim.

Jobim may be "the master," in Boratto’s words, but the man behind Chromophobia also loves US brands of soul — especially Al Green and Stevie Wonder. Likewise, while the "little Paris" known as Prague might be Boratto’s favorite city in architectural terms, he’s looking forward to his SF visit. "I really love San Francisco," he says, remembering the "mainstream" charms of a club like Spundae, where he once saw Boy George. "I actually lived near Berkeley, in Pinole, for six months in 2001. I studied in Berkeley, and I had two American friends. This one friend had a big house in a nice neighborhood in Berkeley, where we had barbecues and never-ending parties. We used to party in San Francisco too, at some clubs and friends’ apartments."

This week, as Boratto returns to the Bay Area, he’s going to find a lot more than just two American friends — or at least American fans — at his party. And deservedly so — he’s made one of the best records of this year. *

KOMPAKT TOUR

With Gui Boratto and Michael Mayer

Thurs/24, 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Holdin’ the weight of the Bay

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Still looks like slavery

But it’s the black legacy

Mistah FAB, "100 Bars"

One night last September, I hitch a ride with G-Stack of the Delinquents and Dotrix of Tha Mekanix to Dem Hoodstarz’s album release party in San Francisco. As we park outside the club, Mistah FAB rolls up with a modest posse. In contrast to his usual iced-out Technicolor clubwear, the man also known as Fabby Davis Jr. is low-key, dressed all in black, a pair of designer stunna shades supplying the main clue to his identity. He hops in Stack’s car to hear a newly laid track for the latter’s upcoming Purple Hood, then we set out for the club, a less than half block journey whose distance is lengthened interminably by a series of well-wishers and business consultations. It’s like following two CEOs across the floor of the stock exchange: Stack is on two cell phones, trying to shake hands with someone. FAB, meanwhile, handles minor transactions, poses for a photo, and takes a call, all while briefing me on the deal he had just signed with Atlantic Records for Da Yellow Bus Rydah, the much-anticipated follow-up to his 2005 disc, Son of a Pimp (Thizz Ent.).

Near the door, a man takes FAB aside. "FAB, you gotta do something about the violence," he says, meaning specifically the 141 homicides in Oakland in 2006 under former mayor and present attorney general Jerry Brown. FAB nods at what is clearly an unreasonable request, albeit one that reflects the disproportionate political burden borne by black entertainers in America. No one would turn to, say, Justin Timberlake to stop violence. Then again, I imagine no one asks Keak Da Sneak either. FAB’s position, in other words, is unique.

Though he made his early reputation as a freestyle battle rhymer and owes his success to hyphy hits like "Super Sic Wit It," FAB’s lyrics seldom stray into gangsta or pimp terrain — the title of his last album is simply literal. Yet he can get down on a track with the most thugged-out MCs. Aside from the giants Too $hort and E-40 and on par with the perpetually hot Keak, FAB is the rapper all Bay Area rappers want on their albums, because he has the biggest buzz on the radio and in the streets. His popularity gives him influence, but FAB commands respect in the hood because he’s from the hood: his compass-based hit "N.E.W. Oakland" was the first major rap recognition of his native North Oakland as a hood. This rapport with the alienated and isolated ghetto youth who constitute hyphy’s core audience separates him from the vast majority of MCs to whom the label "conscious" may be applied.

"You go up to someone in the hood and be, like, ‘Dick Cheney had a heart attack,’ they be, like, ‘Who the fuck is Dick Cheney?’" FAB says later. "But you tell him, ‘Jay-Z donated a million dollars to improve water in Africa,’ they be, like, ‘For real?’ That’s something of their world. Being a Bay Area artist, I’m of their world. So you have the opportunity to teach without them knowing."

"People who have influence," FAB continues, "have an obligation to tell people, ‘Preserve life. Save lives. Help lives.’ But it’s hard to reach people if you’re not giving them something they relate to. The hyphy movement is something they relate to. Hyphy gets you in the door, to open their ears to what I’m saying. It’s up to them to digest it."

That night at the club, FAB exerts his influence. When things get salty between security and Dem Hoodstarz’s East Palo Alto associates, the group calls FAB to the stage to perform their collaboration "Ugh." Things chill out. FAB issues an impromptu plea against violence and murders. These are problems no single person can solve, but FAB is doing his part. Yet by the show’s finale — the "Getz Ya Grown Man On" remix, on which he has a verse — Fabby Davis has left the building. Being Mistah FAB, I realize, can be exhausting.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BUS ROAD


Mistah FAB’s deal with Atlantic is a landmark in a scene long neglected by the majors. Along with Clyde Carson’s signing with Capitol, FAB’s arrangement — including distribution for his Faeva Afta Entertainment — is the first serious acknowledgment of the renaissance Bay Area rap has undergone in the past three years. Unlike E-40, a regional star who’d already achieved putf8um sales on Jive before his push last year by Warner Bros., FAB’s an unknown quantity outside the Bay. And in contrast to Frontline or the Federation — whose deals came through the respective backing of nationally known producers E-A-Ski and Rick Rock — FAB is the first evidence for a new generation of local rappers that enough talent and dedication can get you signed. It’s another weight on the shoulders of the man born Stanley Cox Jr.

"Lots of people are putting their hopes into the album," he acknowledges. "They’re, like, ‘I hope FAB do it, because it’ll kick in the door for all of us.’ I realized when I was creating this album it’s not just something I want to do. It’s something my whole region depends on."

Da Yellow Bus Rydah‘s journey has been anything but smooth, however. Bottom line: Atlantic has postponed the album’s tentatively scheduled spring release, due to controversy surrounding the Ghostbusters-themed advance single, "Ghost Ride It." A tribute to the hood-invented practice of throwing your car in neutral as you walk alongside and steer, "Ghost Ride It" was generating a buzz through its a video on YouTube and the minor-league MTVs when a Dec. 29, 2006, Associated Press story ("Hip-Hop Car Stunt Leaves 2 Dead") linked the song with a pair of unrelated deaths: Davender Gulley, 18, of Stockton, who "died after his head slammed into a parked car while he was hanging out the window of an SUV," and an unnamed "36-year-old man dancing on top of a moving car [who] fell off, hit his head and died in what authorities said was Canada’s first ghost riding fatality." While the scant details obscure whether these incidents stemmed from ghost riding or more traditional automotive horseplay, Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes found the trend alarming enough to call FAB on the carpet in January.

"You understand that a lot of kids look up to you?" Sean Hannity accused rather than asked FAB. "They sing your songs. They dress like you. They talk like you — they wanna be you!" Aside from displaying an oversimplified sense of the relationship between artist and audience, Hannity’s remark reveals a comic lack of familiarity with hip-hop and their guest in particular: what part of "Super Sic Wit It" do you sing? Moreover, while rap fans undoubtedly draw from the same well of slang, the idea that they all talk the same — or even like FAB, for that matter — is a stereotype.

"I don’t think they expected me to be so articulate," FAB recalls with a laugh. Yet among MCs, FAB is singular interview subject. While he has a clear sense of his talent and importance, he’s more apt to discuss his personal relationship with God or how his lonely childhood as a latchkey kid inspired him to create rather than brag about how real he is. His power to articulate the struggle of urban youth — to explain the rage that motivates, say, ghost riding — is the very reason he’s often labeled the spokesperson for a hyphy movement otherwise devoted to "going dumb."

Hannity treated FAB like he’s dumb, but FAB turned the tables. Hannity’s denunciation of his effect on the "kids" prompted the rapper to question whether his influence rightly extends to a Canadian 11 years his senior, which Hannity countered by accusing FAB of wanting as much "money and controversy" as he can get. When FAB speculated on the influence of turning on the TV and seeing 3,000 soldiers die in Iraq, Alan Colmes was sent in as a balm, ending the segment.

"Both those people were adults," FAB says later of the ghost-riding deaths. "I feel bad for the families, but at the end of the day, an adult has to take responsibility for his actions."

GHOSTBUSTED


The next pothole for Yellow Bus was a late March cease and desist letter from Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement in the "Ghost Ride It" video — just as it was about to debut on MTV’s 106 and Park. "We had permission [to use the Ghostbusters van] from the man who built it and owns it," FAB explains. "But Columbia owns the logo." The video was immediately pulled from all media outlets, impairing Atlantic’s ability to market the single nationally. As a result, the Yellow Bus has been parked. The official explanation, from Atlantic VP Mike Carin, is that the label is focusing on FAB’s "artistic development." Despite the inevitable rumor that the rapper was dropped, Carin confirms that "the deal is still in place."

Still, such delays have silenced many MCs’ buzz: witness how the delay of Raekwon’s album on Aftermath has converted excitement into skepticism, or how the Team’s World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch, 2006) dropped too long after its singles had peaked, leading to lower-than-expected sales. Fortunately, the structure of FAB’s distribution deal allows him an unusual degree of freedom.

"They were willing to sacrifice certain things," he says of his initial decision to sign with Atlantic among competing offers. "They allowed me to do what I want to do — if I want to drop an independent album, I can."

ENTER DA BAYDESTRIAN


This flexibility has allowed the prolific FAB to immediately walk out another new album, Da Baydestrian, on May 15, through SMC/Fontana. Although, according to SMC cofounder Will Bronson, Atlantic has options to include as many as five of its songs on Yellow Bus, Baydestrian is an otherwise distinct project intended to satisfy the demand for a follow-up to Son of a Pimp. FAB’s also preparing a series of summer releases, including a second installment of the all-freestyle Tonite Show with DJ Fresh. (Fresh, incidentally, edited FAB’s 2005 DVD, The Freestyle King, now packaged with Baydestrian as a bonus.) With Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin, representing the East and West respectively, FAB’s formed the multihood group N.E.W. Oakland, whose mixtape is nearing completion. Prince of Da Bay (In Yo Face/Hooker Boy Filmz), a documentary on FAB by local hip-hop director Dame Hooker, should be out by press time, while FAB’s next DVD, Shoobalaboobie TV, is in the works.

"You do what you have to do to keep the buzz going," FAB says. "Also sales — on the independent level, your numbers are what’s important [to major labels]." Da Baydestrian thus has Atlantic’s blessing, but its commercial success will determine the fate of his deal.

Yet the need to appeal to the marketplace hasn’t inhibited FAB’s creativity, and Da Baydestrian refuses to play it safe. Rather than exploit the hyphy sound he helped establish, FAB only sprinkles it in, most obviously on the remix of the Traxamillion-produced "Sideshow" and the opening title track, one of six bangers produced by FAB protégé Rob-E. The young Martinez-born producer proves his versatility on tracks like the triumphant "Get This Together" and the melancholy "Life on Track," featuring Faeva Afta vocalist J-Nash, whose Hyphy Love drops in August. Another four productions by Son of a Pimp collaborator Genessee contribute to Baydestrian‘s in-house feel even as the family breaks new ground: "Can’t Wait," say, evokes Andre 3000’s explorations of go-go, filtered through FAB’s hyphy sensibility, while "Shorty Tryin’ 2 Get By" is a contemporary "Keep Ya Head Up" spiced with Bay Area R&B. The album is refreshingly free of skits, and guest stars are kept to a minimum, but Too $hort blesses the disc three times, an unambiguous stamp of approval from Bay rap’s founder.

What makes Da Baydestrian one of the most extraordinary albums since hyphy’s inception, however, is its social consciousness. "Deepest Thoughts," for example, hits out at President George W. Bush, but even more pointedly at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for expanding the prison system instead of aiding the poor. The Sean T–produced "Crack Baby Anthem" addresses teen dope dealers, seeking to uplift without castigating or glorifying their activities — for the nonghetto audience, the song connects the dots between poverty, crime, and the present political climate. FAB describes his approach as "hip-hyphy," presenting an alternative to hip-hop fans who consider hyphy juvenile or incomprehensible. Granted, the disc’s school bus and helmet imagery — referring to the hyphy concept of acting "retarded" — is hardly p.c. Nonetheless, FAB’s lunchbox-wielding Baydestrian is a welcome change from the exaltation of guns and dope adorning your average rap album.

"In no way am I trying to say I’m like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X," FAB explains. "But I realized I could create nonsense and seem to support ignorance, or I can get people to start looking at the reality of it, and the reality of it is that young blacks are dying, not only in the Bay; they’re dying everywhere. We’ve been raised in a warlike civilization. We’ve been brainwashed to accept war as the proper thing to do when things don’t go right."

"Tupac [Shakur] said it himself," FAB concludes. "He said, ‘I’m not going to be the one to change the world. But I guarantee I’ll plant a seed in the mind of someone who does.’ We’re all the Tupac generation. Pac was hyphy."

While I don’t think it’s my place to declare FAB the next Tupac, I can’t fail to be struck by his invocation of the Bay Area icon. On a superficial level, of course, with all his non-thugged-out, cartoonish imagery, FAB is nothing like Pac, just as the hyphy movement differs from the Bay’s mid-’90s sound. Yet locally, if not nationally, the two rappers occupy the same position on the map of hip-hop: like Pac, FAB has cred with nearly everyone, he has a positive message within an utterly street aesthetic, and he makes tunes everyone wants to hear. No rapper has embodied all three attributes since Pac, and that combination makes FAB extraordinary. *

Going to town

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Would you consider remixing Thelonious Monk? Pianist Jason Moran would, and he has.

He’s not playing those remixes, though, when he comes to town this week to re-create the famed pianist-composer’s Town Hall concert of 1959. This time through, Moran, along with Monk’s son, drummer T.S. Monk, will play the large-band concert relatively straight. But the performance is a primer for Moran’s newest musical exploration: a Monk-based multimedia performance titled In My Mind.

Moran says the idea stems from an SFJAZZ request that he replicate the Town Hall show. The notion wasn’t tremendously exciting to Moran until he thought about bringing in some nonjazz elements.

"I wondered what would happen if I didn’t think about this musically and only thought about it conceptually," Moran says from New York City.

That’s how young pianists think when they are influenced by visual artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Rauschenberg. Moran’s interests recently led him into collaboration with video artist Joan Jonas on The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, a multimedia performance inspired by the writing of the German art historian Aby Warburg.

So conceptual Monk? Why not? "What I’m seeing is a way to look at Monk and this concert as an artifact. Not as music," Moran says.

Moran likes the way artist Fred Wilson recontextualizes images and objects, giving them a new meaning. "Once you start to experience objects like that, you have a different sensibility about what it means to you, its relationship to you," he explains. "That’s how I wanted to think about Monk and this concert — what is its relationship to me?"

Monk is the reason Moran started playing piano, and the young player has a deep understanding of the often misunderstood and misrepresented sphinx of the keyboard.

"The hard part is actually trying to unlearn what learned me," Moran explains with a laugh. "I want to reconnect with Monk, not with people talking about his ‘quirky rhythms’ or ‘off-centered humor.’ I wanted to get past all that and say this was a real human being who shaped the world of jazz and the world of music, partially because of what he did at the instrument but mostly because of the way he thought."

This first show May 19 won’t encompass the multimedia audio-mix aspects Moran will bring to another San Francisco performance this fall, but he thinks people should see both shows, saying, "I want them to understand how jazz performance can change." (Marcus Crowder)

JASON MORAN AND ORCHESTRA FEATURING T.S. MONK

Sat/19, 8 p.m., $25–$64

Palace of Fine Arts Theatre

3301 Lyon, SF

1-800-850-SFJF

www.sfjazz.org

Family values

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Forty years ago Rufus Wanta sent lyrics to one of the song-poem studios that were popular at the time. The record he eventually received from the company was, with its tacky torch-song treatment, a big disappointment. Call it poetic justice, then, that keyboardist Nathan Wanta uses words penned by his grandfather in a song written by his band, Last of the Blacksmiths. "And Then Some" is the A-side to the band’s recently minted 7-inch, which also features another intergenerational collaboration — the cover artwork was drawn by vocalist-guitarist Nigel Pavao’s father.

A sense of history — the past as pretext — figures heavily in the musical vision of Last of the Blacksmiths, a group whose extraordinary camaraderie is immediately clear. "There’s family involved," drummer Bert Garibay explained as the band gathered for rehearsal in their modest studio, near the end of the J Church line. "We played Rufus Wanta’s 80th birthday party. It’s more important than playing big shows — it’s real."

Bassist Jake Bunch, whose father played bass professionally in the 1960s, added, "There are no egos in this band. It’s one of the reasons we have been able to stay together as long as we have."

Indeed, after four years Last of the Blacksmiths may be hitting their creative stride. The new single and an as-yet-unreleased LP were put to tape by Desmond Shea, whose talent for crafting Americana gothic is evidenced in records he has made with Jeffrey Luck Lucas and the Court and Spark. "We trusted Desmond because of his body of work," Garibay said. "It was the beginning of a new understanding as a band." Pavao, who recorded the band’s self-titled debut along with Garibay, further explained, "It didn’t take Desmond long to get what we wanted to do. He pushed us and showed us where we needed to focus."

The result, recorded live in the Studio That Time Forgot, is a wide canvas on which patience and space are valued over punctuation and bombast. Each instrument — whether Wanta’s loping Rhodes piano or the cherubic mandolin of Pavao’s confessional B-side, "You Think I’m OK" — is allowed to settle into a graceful groove and assert itself without force. Wanta channels his elder over a loamy soundscape decidedly more appropriate than the old song-poem cut: "I gave until the hurt was real / I suffered today for tomorrow’s meal."

Last of the Blacksmiths haven’t yet set a release date for their full-length, which is being mixed, but the disc, like the 7-inch, will bear the mark of their new label home, the Vanguard Squad, which also offers "logical disputation and investigation of truth, art, musings, manifestos, and general fuckery" through its Proletariat Press. "It wasn’t a big stretch," Wanta confessed. "[Label owner] Bambouche is a dear friend who likes our music." But the compelling question for Last of the Blacksmiths is not "who do we know?" but "where have we been?" And in the end, one of their greatest strengths is the ability to embrace their craft as they have their heritage — as an unbroken line forward and back. *

LAST OF THE BLACKSMITHS

With Or, the Whale and the Finches

Sun/20, 8 p.m., $10

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Gimme my Prince

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Iggy Pop spit in my face at one of the Stooges’ sold-out shows at the Warfield last month. And I loved it. The crowning moment, however, came just before that, when he stared me down and mouthed the lyrics of "1970": "Beautiful baby, feed my love … all night … till I blow … away," then slithered away from the seesawing mass in the pit. In the wake of our brief encounter, everything — the amplifiers’ deafening roar, Pop’s leathery frame, the tug-of-war crowd ripple — seemed to run in slow motion, amalgamating into a nauseating blob of wah noise. My mind and body felt geutf8ous after Pop’s rock ‘n’ roll kiss of death. Sure, it was a disgusting moment, but it was my Iggy moment, and you can’t take that away from me.

Rock star moments are quite a rarity nowadays, and I’m not referring to your recent brush with that sweaty tail wagger crawling around onstage at your favorite hole-in-the-wall dive in Hipstertown, USA. True rock stars are getting older, and there aren’t too many of the nimble bodied left who are willing to give you your full money’s worth like Pop. That is, unless you’re talking about the artist formerly and currently known as Prince. My devoted glorification of — or obsession with — the Purple One stems from the early ’80s, when Michael Jackson ruled the world and MTV still played videos. Nursed on albums such as Dirty Mind and Controversy (both Warner Bros.; 1980, 1981), I’ve come to celebrate his entire recorded output — except for For You (Warner Bros., 1978), which is a little too disco-y for my taste — and have eBayed his concert T-shirts just so I could get a piece of the action. At one point I even owned three VHS copies of his 1984 movie Purple Rain, for crying out loud. But what’s most unsettling is the fact that I’ve never seen Prince live. I’ve only heard the stories from concertgoers, and like Pop’s, his ticking clock isn’t slowing down.

Aside from his 96-date Musicology jaunt in 2004, the Minnesota native’s touring schedule has boiled down to a couple dozen sporadic dates in recent years. He’s also limited his public performances to awards ceremonies, and as of March his weekly concerts at his 3121 club in Las Vegas have ground to a halt. With hip-replacement gossip still lingering in the tabloids, we all might be SOL in terms of a Prince fix soon.

Yet the artist’s rain-soaked halftime performance at this year’s Super Bowl leaves a thread of hope that he’s not ready to wave the white flag just yet. The funky Rick James dance moves might have been absent, but it’s obvious he’s still able to rip on an electrifying guitar solo or belt out that soul-drenched wail. There have also been rumors that he’s slated to headline this summer’s Al Gore–curated Live Earth Festival and that he’s working on songs for a new album, to be released later this year.

I’m not expecting Prince to roll out a tour on the scale of those of his Purple Rain days, but considering it’s been two decades since the release of Sign ‘O’ the Times (Paisley Park), a live rendition of the entire album would be quite nice. Still, as with his one-off San Francisco performance May 19, Prince can pop up whenever he feels like it and entice a crowd with the mere snap of a finger — just because he’s fucking Prince. And as my Iggy experience gradually fades in my memory, I’m in desperate need of my Prince moment. At this point, I’ll take it any way I can get it. *

PRINCE

Sat/19, 8 p.m., $90–$225

Orpheum Theatre

1192 Market, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

Rhymes with work

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johnny@sfbg.com

I have some Björk memories stowed on shelves and in crates. There’s the signed copy of the Sugarcubes’ "Birthday" 12-inch from the days of the group’s English-language interview with Melody Maker, when Björk showed up late and apologized with the immortal first words "I was shitting" (a moment that all who mistook her for a cute elf should have noted). And I’ve got a great teenage Kodak shot of a friend who helped start riot grrrl long before she picked up a guitar, sitting on Björk’s lap.

But whither Björk? Has she indeed withered to nothing but old soulless art zombie bones because Matthew Barney took a flensing knife to her whale of a voice and cut away her personality? Those were the questions a semilapsed Björk maniac and I leaped to the minute her new album, Volta (Atlantic), blasted from his car speakers with its brash yet mannered call to arms, "Earth Intruders." Here it was, a track that united Björk and Timbaland! Ten years ago, swept up by my love for Post and Homogenic (both Elektra; 1995 and 1997) and the late Aaliyah’s even greater One in a Million (Blackground, 1996), I’d have been rapt. Now we both shrugged and wished we could wish ourselves into truly enjoying what we were hearing.

The good news about Volta is that it gets much better as it goes along. The bad news is that it takes a while to get someplace vital or unconventional by Björk’s standards. The arrival occurs when the heavily processed guitar riff and seesawing volume levels of "Declare Independence" kick in and Björk begins issuing commands like a less moldy and more melodic Peaches, a Chick on Speed with pagan fire in her blood, or a Cobra Killer without a sense of the ridiculous. Here, at least and at last, her flag-raising and megaphone-crackling shouts are matched by musical momentum, so that by the end of the track you’d have to be dead not to want to join her cheerleading squad.

She’s spelling out F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M, but in a manner much different from that of the riot grrrl schools with whom she once swam upstream, against dull dude rock currents, though sporting savvier raver gear. Volta‘s glossy color cover art and some of Björk’s comments about the album suggest she’s made a collection of wise party anthems for girls of the next generation. Her dedication to the feminine is there, no doubt, yet her mood and the music surrounding it are — until "Declare Independence" hits — often morose. The Henryk Górecki–influenced horn symphonics of a track such as "The Dull Flame of Desire" were mined a decade ago by Björk’s lesser contemporaries of the time, Lamb, and her duet partner on it, Antony (Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons), engages her in a maddening war of affectations. She has more range and emotion; he should be fined for grievous vibrato abuse. In the end, they’re both stampeded by the drumroll cameo of Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale. It’s epic, all right.

Elsewhere, Björk occasionally dips into the orientalist waters near where her husband’s recent ship of a movie, Drawing Restraint 9, sank much too slowly. Built around Min Xiao-Fen’s skittering pipa sounds, "I See Who You Are" gives that film’s anatomy lessons a less violent and possibly lesbian twist, staying chilly, while "Hope," another underwhelming collabo with Timbaland, further proves his ego is bigger than his imagination these days. So what’s to love? Before the anarchic blast of "Declare Independence," Volta‘s highlight is "Vertebrae by Vertebrae"; the sinister symphonic dissonance that was Björk’s métier during parts of Homogenic and most of her Dancer in the Dark numbers comes back, and she’s more than ready for it, unleashing her wildest howls. Instead of Górecki, the deathly cloud formations of Alban Berg come to mind during the song’s interludes. But Björk is no naive Lulu — she uses such a scene to try out some primal vocal and back-stretching calisthenics.

Such signs of life are a step in the right direction, away from the nadir of 2004’s Medúlla (Elektra), which was doomed from its conception as an all-vocal album. Björk has a tendency to overestimate her singing range, as any Ella Fitzgerald fan who has heard the Icelandic one try to get through "Like Someone in Love" on sheer winking cuteness can attest to. Fortunately, this same belief in her power has made for some thrilling songs. Volta only has a couple, but a couple are better than none. *

BJÖRK

With Joanna Newsom and Ghost Digital

Sat/19, 7:30 p.m., $26.50–$70.50

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Pkwy., Mountain View

(415) 421-TIXS

www.tickets.com

Fresh fruit from old punks

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FULL CIRCLE Once upon a time, at Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco, the Dead Kennedys blew the Clash off the stage. I think it was early spring 1980. I didn’t pay much attention to dates in those days, but I remember this much — I was there.

On that night the DKs delivered their fat, funny broadsides with a joyous abandon that few bands of the era could match. Vocalist Jello Biafra — who finished his set drenched in sweat and wearing only his underwear’s elastic waistband — was simply inspired. The group was tight as a drum, and their material — most of which appeared on Fresh Fruits for Rotting Vegetables (Alternative Tentacles, 1980) — was first-rate. Songs such as "Holiday in Cambodia" and "California Über Alles" were politically sharp and lifted by the group’s sarcastic humor — which is to say the band delivered a hilarious, politically pointed good time.

The Clash never got cozy with their American audience. That evening they were self-conscious and too obviously under control — burdened by political points rather than delivering them. The band’s hard-edged working class–oriented politics, which evolved into complex internationalism, was hard for many to access. For comparison, try finding music by the Bay Area’s Dils, whose somewhat dry, hunt-and-peck rhetoric was as close to a domestic analogue as the Clash spawned.

That was nearly 30 years ago. Today Joe Strummer’s dead, Topper Headon looks dead, the DKs — minus Biafra — are an oldies act, and Biafra is an outspoken spoken word artist who, on his latest three-CD opus, In the Grip of Official Treason, compares DK guitarist East Bay Ray to deposed California governor Gray Davis.

Still, the Clash’s music holds up — as does Biafra’s delight with the absurdities of America’s hypocrisies. Our safe American homes don’t feel quite so secure, and bad news keeps leaking through cracks in the wall, which makes checking in with the Clash and Biafra relevant. The former’s somewhat vestigial but still cool Singles Box (Sony) was released late last year (there are so many discs that you could drop a few behind, say, a CD case and not miss ’em for a month or three). The compilation is simply superb, especially because it revives much of the band’s pre–London Calling material.

Nearly 30 years down the road, the Clash’s material has aged little. Perhaps the band just wanted fame, and the principals were as ignorant as the rest of us. Julien Temple’s recent documentary about Strummer, The Future Is Unwritten, undercuts that premise. But even the most cynical punks tended to clam up when it came to the Clash. To say the band wasn’t about albums before and after 1979’s fabulous London Calling (Sony) is a cop-out. Combat Rock (Sony, 1982) was a fully realized and wildly popular triumph, as much as three-disc Sandinista (Sony, 1981) was kind of a soporific mess. Nevertheless, punk rock — for aesthetic and financial reasons — wasn’t primarily about making albums.

Which means that hearing the Clash’s singles, along with the B-sides, as streamlined things unto themselves places a person right in step with what mattered from the only band that mattered. Just give a listen to "White Riot" or their simply brilliant cover of the Bobby Fuller Four’s "I Fought the Law."

Do you have to own this collection? Well, if you’ve got most of the band’s material, you can pass. This one might be best appreciated by fiends, collectors, and the idle rich. Yet it’s amazing how satisfying this music is, and not as a nostalgic exercise in golden protest. The Clash, born in defiant reaction against the musical mainstream, never made peace with it, their major-label contract and midcareer success notwithstanding. Their music delivers.

After all these years — and at this awfully nervous moment in history — it’s also a good time to consider Biafra’s new spoken word collection, a seriously timely 210-plus minutes of sardonic, smart, and occasionally funny political commentary. When he exited the DKs, Biafra drifted away from music as the principal vehicle for his wit and insight. Although he never moved far from punk, his work today seems to follow in the footsteps of social critics such as Paul Krassner.

On Grip (Alternative Tentacles), which consists of live material from various performances, Biafra offers uncommon observations about common household pests such as George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the wars on Iraq and on terror, and other familiar American vulgarities. Careening through a club while the Dead Kennedys were playing doesn’t, in most respects, share much with sitting down and listening to Biafra tear into the fabric of imperial America. What hasn’t changed, however, are the drive and acerbic wit that Biafra brings to the stage — then and now. *

DIRKFEST

Jello Biafra MCs the celebration of Dirk Dirksen’s life, with SF Mutant All Stars, the Contractions, White Trash Debutantes, No Alternative, and others

June 8, 8 p.m., $25

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

Digital Venuses

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Call them the new British bitch pack: barefoot soul shouter Joss Stone and her ascendant sistren, skankin’ Lily Allen and torchy Amy Winehouse (Corinne Bailey Rae’s exempted due to being a queen of nice and hazy sentiment and, well, yes, color). The Pipettes also deliver Ronettes-Supremes paeans but have yet to splash large beyond the UK. It’s Stone and Winehouse who have made recent history on the US pop charts: the latter’s Back to Black (Republic) scored the highest ever debut for a British woman (number seven), and Stone’s Introducing Joss Stone (Virgin) followed a week later, debuting at number two.

The third release in this triumvirate, Allen’s Alright, Still (Capitol), is the least compelling, though it possesses the most diverse sonic palette: ska, Britpop jangle, punk, rocksteady, N’Awlinz funk, and English dancehall, courtesy of her fellow celebutot music maker, DJ and producer Mark Ronson. While "Friend of Mine" will doubtless prove a decent summer jam, the scattershot production speaks more to Ronson’s patented retro-soul ambition than to individuality on Allen’s part. I’m already over the stunt sampling of Professor Longhair and find Allen’s spin on jaded indie affect and lyrics powered by class snobbery grating.

The aforementioned artists are part of yet another wave of British acts working in black American musical idioms: James Hunter, James Morrison, Lady Sovereign, and Alice Russell. Call them the spawn of Dusty Springfield. Blue-eyed British soul diva Springfield’s 1969 classic Dusty in Memphis (Rhino/WEA) is the obvious grail for most of these new acolytes. They’ve also benefited from the successive layers of space opened by Blighty’s trends in Northern soul, acid jazz, trip-hop, and the Yankee stand taken for retro soul by the now-defunct Desco label (which split into Soul Fire and Daptone) with black vocalists such as Lee Fields. One wants to big up Allen, Winehouse, and Stone on the sisterhood empowerment tip for their brassy attitude and scathing kiss-offs to trifling men on these recordings. And it’s interesting that they’ve emerged at a time when their male counterparts, such as Morrison — and David Gray and Chris Martin — seem to have "bitched up." Yet this gender power–reversal is sadly trumped by glaring issues of race and authenticity.

REAL ME, REAL MIMICRY


Nowhere are these issues more clearly embodied than in Joss Stone, who’s about to hit the Yay Area. She’s been around for a minute, leading the cited alien invasion with her Miami Sound–assisted debut, The Soul Sessions (Virgin), in 2003. Missed in all the hype and scandal over Stone’s breakup with Motown scion Beau Dozier, her recent adoption of a faux-Yank accent, and the sacking of her handlers is the fact that her much-vaunted revamp has a precedent: Stone described her second CD — Mind, Body, and Soul (Virgin) — as her "real debut," and it contained a mix of Southern soul, urban swing, and hip-hop similar to the template codified by Lauryn Hill in the late 1990s.

The 19-year-old blond Venus actually coaxed Hill out of her fog to guest on "Music," but overall Introducing merely treads water instead of shifting any postmillennial soul paradigm. Stone remains trapped by the novelty factor of having been a 15-year-old girl from Devon who could mimic a middle-aged black American singer and has not figured out how to reconcile her West Country roots, accent, and affluence with the grit and honesty her ambitions require. She’s content to let producer Raphael Saadiq locate her brand-new thang somewhere between Aretha Franklin circa Sparkle and the early ’80s Isleys, with a soupçon of hip-hop flourishes — an approach that only really sparks on opener "Girl They Won’t Believe It" — when underage Stone really ought to be ashamed at her affair with 41-year-old Saadiq. The specter of Dallas Austin’s banging for beats screed rears its ugly head.

Stone may be styled in psychedelic body paint, flowers, and baubles as some lost wild child of Janis Joplin, but unlike that late bad-Jewish-girl-with-a-yen-for-the-blues icon, she lacks the ovaries and independence to instigate any sonic revolt, nor does she transcend her black influences. Although she too failed to flip the rock biz’s race politics, Joplin was an original. She was also perfecting a worthy form of hybridity, whereas Stone would still do best to apprentice behind a seasoned soul singer and grow into her voice. Meanwhile, she’s an immature artist trapped within the middle-class mythos and mass fantasies of the pop star system.

RUNNING THE RACE?


White artists’ love and theft of black expression, as ratified by the Elvis phenomenon, remains the primary cultural battleground in the aughties — don’t get it twisted. The phenomenon of white singers who sound black is as old as minstrelsy, of course. Vaginas trouble this aesthetic guerrilla warfare — with Stone and company entrenched in the valley of sound between Joplin, Springfield, Lydia Pense, and Teena Marie on the one side and Madonna, Taylor Dayne, Britney Spears, and Fergie on the other. Yet Stone and her sister purveyors of femme funk are not truly innocents with songs in their hearts and stars in their eyes. These daughters of Al Jolson, removing their Jewish foreignness by sonically and visually blacking up as he did in The Jazz Singer, are reaping the rewards this season from the West’s most vital industry: the consumption and export of essential blackness.

Whether fucking or channeling the likes of Dinah Washington and Ronnie Spector in the studio, Allen, Stone, and Winehouse are enjoying everything but the burden of blackness. These vocalists face the dilemma of the privileges of whiteness versus the comforts of being soulful, and this will continue to dog their careers if longevity’s next. Doubtless Stone, Allen, and Winehouse don’t want to be "nappy-headed hos" — thanks, Don Imus — but desire the erotic, exotic power of sistagirls without being the mules of the world. Yet why is the old "black joy, not black pain" truism surfacing now in the UK?

Look to recent cinema from across the pond: in The Queen, Elizabeth II, the paragon of English womanhood, is asked by Tony Blair to be feely and emotional to help heal the nation in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, to restore the heart Diana represented. But Elizabeth chafes, bound by old royal models of honor and duty. The crisis of Britannia is coded even more explicitly in Children of Men. In its dystopic vision, black women are despised yet also figures of salvation. As in the film, in which only a regenerative black female can save England, these new wave British soulsters labor to recuperate the distant and unreal of classic soul, despite its distinctly American set of societal preconditions. A post–Margaret Thatcher, post-Blair return to authenticity is what these singers represent, a late moment after Rod Stewart delivered fair Albion’s best-ever approximation of soul and empire has faded, leaving postcolonial turmoil and identity flux. Black female soul brings rebirth to this turbulent world via the vocalizing of Stone et al., placing them back at center of the world — at least aesthetically.

FLIPPING BACK TO BLACK


This activity meets its zenith in the petite, pinup-tatted, beehive-burdened, anorexic form of Winehouse. Unlike Stone, who’s at pains to elide her Englishness, Winehouse’s distinctly North London Jewish accent surfaces on her critically acclaimed Back to Black, but her extreme jazz-soul mummery remains paramount, even as white critics and listeners continue to adopt a white version of black culture at the expense of young black artists of the retro-nuevo soul or urban alternative persuasion. Winehouse has yet to be anointed with a universal ghetto pass and, like Stone and Allen, has bypassed the hood and proper apprenticeship for lucrative prime time at the nation’s premier venues this spring.

Throughout Back to Black, Winehouse gets away with borderline minstrelsy, carelessly mashing up a vocal cocktail of Washington, Billie Holiday, Carla Thomas, and Phil Spector’s girl-group surrogates while not being excoriated because her Pete Doherty–rivaling tabloid exploits with drunkenness, raunchy sexuality, and public belligerence fit her admirers’ view of authentic blackness. Behind Spanish Harlem drag, Motown cocktail dresses, and Cleopatra’s black eyeliner, Winehouse is the cunning poster girl of her mid-Atlantic milieu, permitted to get away with potentially offensive lyrics such as "side from Sammy you’re my best black Jew" ("Me and Mr. Jones"), showcasing a pair of cooning black backing vocalists and hipster-comforting insincerity.

"What kind of fuckery is this?" I’m sure to Winehouse’s equivalents across the color line — from fiftysomething Sharon Jones to 36-year-old failing freaky-deak diva Macy Gray and badass bitches in the wings such as Alice Smith — it seems like the demoralizing same old. These are black artists who, to varying degrees, can sang but whose efforts render them invisible in a field overwhelmed by white soul saviors. Why invest in these sistas’ development or even spotlight the neo–chitlin circuit movement afoot in the Southeast when the only blackness that really counts bears a stench of formaldehyde? *

JOSS STONE

Tues/15, 8 p.m., $35

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 775-7722

MCMAF: Renewable source

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Van Halen may have made it into the music record books for Most Ridiculous Tour Rider for their demand for M&Ms picked free of the turdlike brown numbers. But musician-director Vincent Gallo might make the rock hitmakers jump with his own Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival must-have. "I’m not going to show you his rider," festival founder Jeff Ray says wryly. "It’s a little crazy."

"Oh, c’mon," I say, perched on a couch in the red and yellow office in Ray’s Mission flat. Stringed instruments, an organ, books, artwork, and the other tools and artifacts of an active musician and artist compete with the stuff of the festival – a paper schedule that winds around one wall, MCMAF posters with artwork by Jo Jackson, Andrew Schoultz, and Cliff Hengst (Leslie Shows offered a collage for this year’s), and beer bottles and empties marking many busy, late nights – that has threatened to swallow Ray’s creative energies since it began 11 years ago. Ray’s cat Panther, which he describes as bipolar, dozes drooling on my jacket – if that feline can give it up, surely he can.

"You can say I’m trying to track down a coin-operated arcade horse," he admits.

Attempting to please and showcase the many, radically varied, wild, and woolly musicians and artists who participate in the festival is part of the MCMAF mission – along with presenting a lineup that’s made of 80 percent local emerging creators. And the creek runs uphill: this year’s event includes Nevada City artists such as Mariee Sioux and Cafe Beautierre, as well as a "folky-centric" slant focusing on solo artists such as Gary Higgins, who was initially discovered by Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance and Comets on Fire and is coming to California for the first time. Energized by volunteer and guest curators such as the Plug Research label, Ray and John Fellman, the festival’s main programmers, continue to compel ex-San Francisco music scenesters such as, say, Devendra Banhart, who will judge the music video awards, and introduce new streams: a dance mavericks program and a brass band parade through the Mission that will end with a festival celebrating sustainable energy and installation art in Dolores Park.

The faces of the volunteers may change, the groups may wander off or move on, but a few things remain. "It’s the same every year," Ray says. "Chaos, spontaneity, intuition, inspiration, mixed with pragmatic people who have stronger organizing skills than I do." And after more than a decade, he knows how he might define a successful event at this most grassroots of local music gatherings – with bands as varied as Comets on Fire and Kid 606, Lemonade and Petracovich, Acid Mothers Temple and Bran Pos, David Copperfuck and Subtle: a solid show has to have "mostly good vibes. And no one gets killed. No club catches on fire. And if we don’t go too much in debt, that’s a good thing." (Kimberly Chun)

For a complete schedule of the 11th annual Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival (May 10-20), go to www.mcmf.org. Check www.sfbg.com/blogs/music for more Mission Creek festival coverage.

The Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival 2007

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MCMAF founder Jeff Ray surveys the dream and the damage

A jolly good Vincent Gallo taps into his musical wellspring


After years of homelessness and substance addiction, the Chamber Strings’ Kevin Junior returns

The Dilettantes take love to the streets

YACHT’s Jona Bechtolt believes in you, dancing

With Buy Hidden Persuaders, I Am Spoonbender continue to remove our veils

Gary Higgins: Redheaded stranger

Ich bin Kevin Blechdom

Gowns connect this world and the next

All that glitters just may be Sugar and Gold

Finding refuge in the Harbours

Our selected picks at the Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival

MCMAF: Renaissance man

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> johnny@sfbg.com

If Vincent Gallo turned himself into pure music, what would it sound like? For now, I know how the Gallo I’m talking with sounds: enthusiastic, upbeat – occasionally letting loose an endearing rascally cackle – and extremely alive. Over the course of a great couple hours, he’s raved rather than ranted, giving himself over to rapture while rapping about everyone from Joe Spinell (star of 1980’s gory Maniac and bit-part actor extraordinaire) to Michael Jackson. Vibe, connection, beautiful, and phenomenal are key words in the current Gallo lexicon, and his passion reaches its peak when he discusses RRIICCEE, his new group with Corey Lee Granet and Eric Erlandson, which will be premiering at this year’s Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival.

"I’m in love," Gallo says. "I’m so proud when we’re playing together. Not proud because I think we’re better, but proud I was able to make myself open in this way."

Openness has been key to Gallo’s music to date, as the snaky, at times Moondog-like press-record-and-play charms of his 2002 collection, Recordings of Music for Film (Warp), prove. While Gallo refers to those songs as "documents of creation," he’s still in the discovery process with his new band. To prioritize recording is to "be part of the problem of music," he says, paraphrasing what Erlandson told him during an encounter at a health food store that led to the group’s formation.

"Someone said today, ‘It sounds like a jam band,’ and that was the most gross comment I’ve ever heard in my life," Gallo goes on to clarify, lest anyone mistake his current activities for hoary hippy shtick. "A jam is a disorganized version of the most ordinary cliche habits – that’s the furthest thing from what we’re doing." While he’s quick to distinguish his current project from what he calls the "cabaret" mentality of big-name acts, the man also known as a cinematic lightning rod is out to divine something, perhaps something kindred to the current free-jazz renaissance: "Improv is not a good word [for what we’re doing]. It’s more a gesture of composing and performing at the same time."

The main difference between the Gallo I’m talking with and the one I briefly met during his 2004 road tour for The Brown Bunny is that this guy isn’t as road weary and battle scarred. Understandably so – it’s hard to think of a little movie that sparked such a big furor, not to mention so many misunderstandings. "To hear people say, ‘Oh brilliant, you made a film just so you could get blown,’ in a world where it’s so hard not to get blown," he says, with some exasperation.

I mention that long before he made The Brown Bunny, Gallo once compared its portrait of an unredeemable man to the one within Michael Powell’s 1960 Peeping Tom. "I guess it had a similar effect on that filmmaker’s career," he agrees. "People have a hard time swallowing a person like me. I evoke, I irritate in general. I wish that people liked me. I’m just not willing to become anything different to get that [approval]."

A little later, while discussing the way the media can directly distort some talented people’s sense of their own gifts, he utters a telling aside. "Maybe secretly I’m smart enough to know that even in what appear to be self-destructive gestures I have to solve the problem again."

The name Vincent Gallo might not fly to mind when the term likable is invoked, but in fact he’s a charming interview subject, as quip-flaired as Morrissey was once upon a time and genuinely humane in an old-school manner that differs from today’s era of abbreviated cell phone chats. Most of all, he’s in love, and not just with his new group. Tuxedo Moon, the collage artist Jess, the "high" beauty of Taj Mahal guitarist Jesse Ed Davis III, the 1970 movie The Only Game in Town, and the encyclopedic movie knowledge of Sage Stallone (Sly’s son) receive verbal bouquets over the course of our conversation. At one point he plays Jackson’s "I Can’t Help It" (from 1978’s Off the Wall) for me over the phone and says that he often cries when he listens to it.

"My creativity is always motivated by what’s missing, the same way it comes from what’s broken, what needs to be cleaned, what needs to be prepared because I don’t have it," he says, falling into an incantation. "It always comes from loss or from the seed of something that needs to be protected and grown."

Though still lodged in California, the man who made a point of emphasizing his total solo control over The Brown Bunny has moved on in spirit from that East Coast-to-West Coast journey. "If what I do is 50 billion times better than me, then it’s pure crap, because I’m just a jerk," he says. "When you get together with people and transcend yourself, it’s really an exciting moment, and that happened right away with this band." *

RRIICCEE

May 19, call for time and price

Q&A WITH VINCENT GALLO

May 20, call for time and price

Swedish American Music Hall

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

www.mcmf.com

MCMAF: Months of somedays

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> kimberly@sfbg.com

When Month of Sundays (Bobsled), the second Chamber Strings album, was released in 2001, singer-songwriter Kevin Junior was hailed as a new pop savant of sorts – a ragged, rainy-day Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson’s lost brother, last sighted wandering gray shores amid dingy drizzle and deep dissolution. So where has he been the past six years?

"I got kidnapped by aliens, basically," Johnny Thunders-look-alike Junior deadpans from his Chicago flat. "Yeah, I went through, well, a five-year Behind the Music sort of life."

But what music. The refined rejoinder to the Chamber Strings’ sprawling, alternately rocking and contemplative, Exile on Main Street-like two-disc debut, Gospel Morning (Idiot Savant, 1997), Month of Sundays opens with an eerie, elegant piano refrain before plunging the listener into a gloriously wistful string of songs, imbued with beautifully blown-out, classic ’60s orchestral-pop arrangements. They’re harpsichord-driven, brass-laced, and jangling and touched by the glamorous, "Last Train to Georgia" sorrow and pity of civil rights-era soul-stirrers.

And what a life. After spending $200,000 to make Month of Sundays and doggedly touring, Junior discovered that his depression and grief following the death of close friends and collaborators such as Epic Soundtracks had morphed into an all-consuming drug habit. The band and Junior’s 15-year marriage bit the dust, and the Akron, Ohio, musician was on the streets: homeless and struggling with his heroin addiction for five years, Junior was, at his lowest point, living in a cardboard box on the streets of LA’s skid row. "Oddly enough, out of the few possessions I had, I kept a Japanese music magazine that I was on the cover of," he recalls. "Every once in a while I’d pull this thing out of my bag, lying on the street next to some guy, and say, ‘Hey, look – it’s me!’ And he’d say, ‘Nah, that ain’t you.’ ‘No, it is me.’ "

During that time, Junior’s routine consisted of staying up for five days consecutively, shooting crack and heroin. He ended up in jail three times and tried to kill himself a dozen times. "It never seemed to work," the songwriter says. "I guess I was blessed with a really strong constitution, because I think of it now and I can’t even believe that I’m sitting here talking to you." The end seemed near when Junior contracted endocarditis and was dragged into the hospital by another homeless man just in time.

Remarkably, he kept writing songs, he says, "whenever I hit a hotel lobby or found a guitar. I just kept them in my head." He returned to Akron and was invited by Soundtracks’ brother Nikki Sudden to live in Berlin and tour and open for him. "But Berlin was the worst place for me," Junior explains ruefully. "It’s the heroin capital of the world. You can’t walk two blocks without that coming around, and I wasn’t strong enough to quit. Nikki and I were really bad for each other that way." He finally moved to England and with the help of friends found a good doctor to help him clean up.

Upon returning to the States, Junior persuaded the rest of the Chamber Strings to get back together after at least one false start. (At first, Junior says, "we didn’t even make it to the rehearsal room. I moved in with Anthony Illarde, the drummer, and within two months we ended up in a fistfight.") One successful, sold-out Chicago reunion show and one documentary (John Boston’s For a Happy Ending) later, Junior is back in the rehearsal studio making demos to reintroduce labels to the Chamber Strings, and he sounds dazed and genuinely humbled when he confesses, "I feel like I got dropped back off on planet Earth again." *

To see For a Happy Ending, go to www.gloriousnoise.com.

MCMAF: The Dilettantes

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Meeting up for an interview anywhere in the Haight in the middle of a Sunday afternoon is a bit of a dodgy prospect. With every easily distracted tourist and bumbling acid casualty in the city making random zigzags through the neighborhood, finding a clear path on the sidewalk is enough of a challenge, never mind finding a quiet place to talk. But there I am, in a booth at Magnolia’s, with the three songwriters of the Dilettantes, chatting away over beers without so much as a glance in the direction of all the scattershot energy reigning outside. Lesson? Miracles do happen, even in the Haight.

I’m mentioning the neighborhood because the Dilettantes identify so closely with it. Not only do most of the band members work and spend time here, but they also draw deeply from the Haight’s ’60s musical legacy. Sure, their music is filtered through four decades’ worth of post-psychedelic comedown, but the songs of Joel Gion, Jefferson Parker, and Brock Galland – accompanied by drummer KC Kozak and bassist Nick Marcantonio – follow the arcs and whirls of artists from that era, particularly their constant reference point: love.

Still, this is 2007, and San Francisco has changed. When I ask how the Haight inspires the group’s songwriting, Galland immediately says, "Well, the fumes that come off the sidewalk, definitely." Listening to the advance copy of their forthcoming album, 101 Tambourines (Stranger Touch), I see what he means – those flower power daisies have been glazed with curious oozing substances, as evidenced in their gritty garage pop. There’s a welcome sheen of grease to Galland’s clamorous "Kiss and Run," while Parker’s "Don’t You Ever Fall" parades with a slightly woozy majesty worthy of these streets. Gion’s "The Whole World" might jangle in Byrds-y formations, but it’s his unruffled Go Betweens-meet-Lou Reed delivery that attests that the times indeed have changed since the Summer of Love.

Perhaps these descriptions remind you of another band with whom Gion was associated: the tumultuous Brian Jonestown Massacre, led by the notoriously headstrong Anton Newcombe. Certainly both groups share sonic similarities, but Gion enthusiastically points out a major difference: "Jonestown was the singular vision of just one guy, while the Dilettantes are a completely collaborative, cooperative effort. Really, it’s a mutual appreciation society we have here. It’s great!"

Of course, that’s already obvious to me – I can see it in the brotherly ease with which they finish each other’s sentences. Parker sums it up: "One of the best things about being in the Dilettantes is that we’ve all helped each other grow as songwriters. We keep joking about re-creating one of those famous Brian Jonestown Massacre fights at the end of our shows, but really we just like and respect each other too much to ever do that." (Todd Lavoie)

CHAMBER STRINGS

With the Dilettantes and Persephone’s Bees

May 18, 9 p.m., $15

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

MCMAF: This magic moment

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

YACHT has cancelled his May 11 appearance with Kid606, Trackademicks, Lazer Sword and Luke’s Anger.

Enthusiastic and optimistic – Jona Bechtolt would have to be both to schedule back-to-back shows in Bloomington, Ind., and Big Sur, as he did on his most recent tour.

"I’m pretty much into playing wherever there is a desire for me to do so," Bechtolt e-mails en route to Seattle. "Once I played in a bathroom in the basement/rec-room of some kid’s grandparents’ house in St. Louis because he really wanted me to."

Infectious enough to rock the wood paneling of any suburban pad, conceptual enough to win over the crowd at New York’s premier performance-art space, the Kitchen, Bechtolt’s YACHT is a one-man dance-party extravaganza. Tourmate and fellow genre-masher Dave Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors describes Bechtolt’s jams as "positive energy rainbowe dome musick from a next-generation West Coast healer," while pal Devendra Banhart terms it "megaphysical" music: the kind of thing that makes you want to slam and shimmy, which is just what Bechtolt does in his workout-pace performances.

A couple months ago I interviewed BARR’s Brendan Fowler and was wowed by his hyperproductivity as a performer, an artist, and a magazine maker. Bechtolt, against all odds, seems to up the ante. Drawing from Portland, Ore.’s collaborative creative spirit ("Everyone I know that’s making music or videos or whatever is fully supportive in a way I haven’t really seen anywhere else"), Bechtolt is the resident connector, beat maker, blogger, and shaker. In between programming the Blow’s electronica, maintaining a killer video-text blog (www.teamyacht.com), and spitting out remixes (States Rights recently released a collection of these sides called Our Friends in Hell), Bechtolt’s found time to help create the Portland-centric Urban Honking blog collective, play drums with Banhart and Little Wings, and embark on several tours in recent years (he spent this past New Year’s Eve at Oakland’s 21 Grand). Oh, and he’s produced a new full-length YACHT album, I Believe in You. Your Magic Is Real (Marriage), to send the dance party home with you.

"It’s definitely important to me for YACHT to be all mine," Bechtolt muses. "I love collaborating, and it totally keeps me on my toes." Still, he explains, "I love making stuff on my own even more because I don’t have to worry about making anyone happy other than myself." The sense of liberation shows: I Believe in You is a freewheeling record replete with cameos (Bobby Birdman, Eats Tapes), shout-outs, and hooks galore. "See a Penny (Pick It Up)" sets the tone with a simple, sunny vocal line layered over crushing synths, snuffed-out beats, and nervous guitar notes. And Bechtolt brings a remixing sensibility to his work: each song piles up tracks before a deconstructive juncture – call it a break or a bridge – reasserts the crucial elements of rhythm and melody. The album gets increasingly eclectic – and identifiably Northwestern – as it moves past its early run of hardcore dance anthems. "I Believe in You" in particular sounds like tricked-out K Records pop, and "Women of the World" is unabashed Nirvana-love (Bechtolt publishes his songs under the motto "I learned it from watching grunge").

The ultimate magic act would be for YACHT to actually score a crossover with any one of these pop romances. Bechtolt’s clearly got the production chops to do some commercial damage, but his sound is probably a little too goofy to have Timbaland worried. No matter: the stage is where YACHT comes into full bloom. (Fittingly, the actual recording seems like almost an afterthought to the gonzo release party Bechtolt has planned for Portland: YACHT on a yacht, rocking the Willamette River.)

"Performance is totally something I think about a lot," the artist confesses. "Sometimes I write songs with big speakers, call-and-responses, and specific dance moves in mind, and other times songs just happen, and I hope that the same energy that comes out at shows comes out on the document of the song." It only takes a quick spin through YouTube – one especially compelling clip pictures Bechtolt in silhouette, pulling off pop-and-lock dance moves to the beat of album opener "So Post All ‘Em" – to know that with YACHT, seeing is believing. *

YACHT

With Kid606, Trackademicks, Lazer Sword, and Luke’s Anger

May 11, 9 p.m., call for price

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

MCMAF: Runoff to run after

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MAY 10

SO SO MANY WHITE WHITE TIGERS


Guitarist Ned flies back from New York City for the return of the art-punk trio that roared. (Kimberly Chun)

With Triangle, Bookworms, and the Tufffetttes. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 970-9777

MAY 13

FREDDY MCGUIRE


I’m not sure about this here Freddy McGuire, other than that he might have some Wobbly accompaniment and he is related to a certain Anne McGuire who can sing a song that’ll pierce you straight through the heart – not to mention warble you into a zone of glorious discomfort, as evidenced by her performances in self-directed movies such as Joe DiMaggio 1,2,3 (in which she stalk-serenades the actual slugger as he takes a senior citizen stroll along the Marina piers) and the classic black-and-white Judy Garland reincarnation I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong. (Johnny Ray Huston)

With Connie Fucking Francis and Fierce Antler. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 970-9777

SONNY SMITH


Mr. Smith has gone to more than Washington – well, I’m not sure if he’s gone there, but he says he’s been everywhere from Europe to Colorado to Central America since he was born in San Francisco in 1972. His songs, well, they travel from Ireland to Idaho, to name just a couple of places. But lately, the handsome guy with "the heartache of the sea" (and a sense of humor about as big) draws inspiration from home – as well as the motel rooms with massage beds down the road. It’s all there in the title of his latest song collection, Fruitvale, issued by Belle Sound. Even a troubadour can stay fixed in one neighborhood for a while. I haven’t been to Fruitvale lately, but I know Smith’s "Mario" all too well. (Huston)

With Virgil Shaw and Kelley Stoltz. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. Call for time and price. (415) 647-2888

MAY 15

EDITH FROST


Maybe Leslie Feist is our new chanteuse, our true post-lounge swooner. But every chanteuse needs a secret twin, and at this year’s fest – while the warm, dusty, music-fests-picnic-mats-and-straw-hats winds of Northern California’s summer blow in from the future – I’d like to nominate Edith Frost to play that other-half role, and not only because her recent work with the Zincs for their killer new disc, Black Pompadour (Thrill Jockey), makes that project even better. Frost is a thoroughly original songmaker in her own right. The crooning Texan has become a core part of the hip and humbling Drag City scene, and her most recent effort, 2005’s It’s a Game, thrives with ripe twang and raw elegance. She has a talent for writing melodies that sound improvised until they get into your head and take up residence. (Ari Messer)

With Spider and Cafe Beautierre, and Willard Grant Conspiracy. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 861-5016

MAY 16

HALLFLOWERS


Cole Porter’s "You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To" has never sounded quite so alluringly sinister as when sung by the Halls – namely, sisters Jennifer and Laurie (the latter from the noisy SF duo Ovarian Trolley) and mom Phyllis. Along with guitarist Doug Hilsinger, they make up the Hallflowers, an SF treat that has just released a second full-length, Hide and Seek (self-issued), which includes a version of "Autumn Leaves" that’ll have you thinking it’s late August in early May. They’re a perfect match for Alela Diane. (Huston)

With King City, the Dodos, Alela Diane, and Two Sheds. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 552-7788

MAY 19

EBB AND FLOW


Many rock bands adopt hep lingo when attempting to describe themselves, as if clever nomenclature could replace substance. Not so with the Ebb and Flow, whose absurdist rhetoric is no jive pitch. A stroll through their Web site could cause one to believe this trio bunks down in Captain Beefheart’s in-law apartment, but when it comes to kicking out the jams, there is much more at stake. Their rock collage is at once poised and disheveled, like a Crazy Horse-Stereolab tea party or a Stevie Nicks-Augustus Pablo blind date. (Nathan Baker)

With Music for Animals, Elephone, Scrabbel, DW Holiday, Solar Powered People, Form and Fate, Tom Thumb, and the Parties. Rockit Room, 406 Clement, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 387-6343

KING KONG


Ex-Slint bassist Ethan Buck utters a comeback bellow. (Chun)

With Andy Tisdall. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 923-0923

LAVENDER DIAMOND


The epic quirk-pop combo slayed at ArthurFest a few years back – and its lovely EP is finally out on Matador. (Chun)

Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 771-1421

MAY 20

MIA DOI TODD


A persimmon tree isn’t such a strange thing. Thick, dry branches twisting like untold stories, orange fruit hanging off its tips like ornamental paper lanterns, it’s certainly eerie, changing form every day while other plants rest dormant in the dead of winter – but its eeriness is light-giving and never unordinary. Well, literary folk haunter Mia Doi Todd is as complicated, and her musical fruits are as alternately sweet and astringent. I’ve heard more than one misguided listener comment dishearteningly on the LA native’s faux-British accent, and listening to some of her early voice-and-guitar work requires an even better mood than cocking an ear to Marissa Nadler’s music. But, like Nadler, when she’s really on – with Manzanita and the latest reinvention of that album, La Ninja: Amor and Other Dreams of Manzanita (both Plug Research), for example – she pulses somewhere between Roald Dahl and PJ Harvey, and her lattice of lyrical branches and darkly lilting guitar patterns yields a sweet, rare fruit. (Messer)

With Daedelus, Roommate, Flying Lotus, and Ola Podrina. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 625-8880

For more, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

MCMAF: Collective hip noises

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Should you take this life seriously enough to listen to it, I would suggest you head to local electro-organic thinkers I Am Spoonbender’s Web site right now, before you read this story, and download the trailer for their latest self-released album, Buy Hidden Persuaders (IAS, 2006), another three-sided disc (their gorgeous Teletwin 12-inch had concurrent grooves on one side, allowing for a randomly asserted listening experience) from the wizards of esoteric musical realism. Sure, the aesthetically thorough trailer’s bricolage of images and texts deals with everything from hypnosis to Illuminati-style dollar-bill machinations and just happens to act as a manifesto, art show, music preview, and persuasive cinematic display all at once.

But don’t fret. Dutifully check the "I Agree" button when the site lets you know that "IASBHP [I Am Spoonbender’s Buy Hidden Persuaders] is a subliminal advertisement for itself … produced by control, and is an album of ‘engineered outcomes.’ " Grin and download, watch and get ready to strangely rock, because you will surely make use of the free album download in WAV format and proceed to share these pulsing soundscapes with everyone you encounter, whether you intend to or not. William S. Burroughs’s notion that language is a virus was tied to his ideas about time as a sort of viral petri dish, and that makes sense here, in reverse. Persuaders is a soundtrack to its own propagation.

"I firmly believe that after spending three and a half years working on this album, there’s no way to hear it all in less than that time," Dustin Donaldson said recently on the phone from his San Francisco home. The mastermind behind IAS’s infectious, rhythmic stylings knows sound inside and out. "It’s designed to be encountered repeatedly and to reveal itself over time," he continued. "The longer you listen to it, the more you’re going to hear recurring musical themes, say, in different registers on different sounds, lyrical themes reflecting on themselves."

The entire Persuaders project – which includes the album, their first performance in three years, the succulent Web site, the Shown Actual Size EP (Gold Standard Laboratories), the book that will soon accompany the new album, and even the band’s dreams as they go to bed at dawn in San Francisco after nights of channeling and creating – is aimed at balancing out and exposing as a fraud the harm done by advertising and the like to our very beings. If we envision corruption and mind control as diseases, then Persuaders is an equally potent and uniquely celebratory vaccine – a careful dosage bordering the illuminating and the lethal. It’s celebratory because it co-opts subliminal and similar techniques in order to start a conversation, rather than to sell or speak about any one thing in particular. It’s potent because it refuses to double back on itself without adding more meaning. The three sides, or collages – "You Have Been Suggested," "Penetrate to Deeper Levels," and "Slowly Replaced in Mirrors" – seldom ring the same bells twice. And yes, there are hidden messages: don’t be afraid to slow things down, speed them up, listen from afar …

The thing is, you’ve already heard Persuaders, sizzling through your mind just before or after media stimulation. When Cup, the other core half of IAS, sings, "We all need mirrors to know / Who we are now," over surprisingly guttural organ sounds, her expressive vocals and multi-instrumental prowess, here as throughout, lend a sense of flight to Donaldson’s Middle Earthy rhythms and organic mechanics. Imagine Laurie Anderson playing tag with Robert Ashley.

The material for Persuaders came from everywhere and nowhere. After years watching "thousands of films" but no television, Donaldson was shocked when a friend moved in and they got cable. "I just was absolutely unprepared for … the aggression in marketing tactics," he said. "Drug company television ads became a big source of, well, I guess it’s inspiration in some sense, something to create a mirror-state protest record around. We attempt, through this record, to send the same amount of energy back toward these sources. For every action there’s a reaction, and at some level there’s a neutralization, hopefully – in audio terms, phase cancellation.

"For me, specifically, there was about a year of experiments in sensory deprivation," Donaldson continued. "Sleep deprivation … also, going into the studio often late at night and turning off all the lights and turning on huge, 750-watt strobes … setting them at different tempos and playing drums to that and just getting out – open to receive." There was even a resulting side project, yet to be released, where nothing could be recorded until the entire group had been up for 30 hours. Of course, the results were carefully edited for clarity.

Excited, you should now flock to the Mezzanine prepared to buy whatever IAS chooses to sell. If you print your own money, make sure the paper sparkles, and don’t forget to record the sounds the bills make when they leap, calmly, into flames. *

I AM SPOONBENDER

With Steven Stapleton, Ariel Pink, and Phase Chancellor

May 11, 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

MCMAF: Gary Higgins

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A couple years after Drag City reissued Gary Higgins’s 1973 album Red Hash, the recording stands tall as one of the prime excavations of the ongoing psych-folk gold rush. As with Vashti Bunyan, Higgins’s resurgence comes with a mythic narrative: where Bunyan left behind Just Another Diamond Day for a bucolic family life in England’s north country, Higgins floated upriver in a different way after Red Hash, serving time for a marijuana bust in rural Connecticut. The disc was recorded while he was out on bail, in the few days between his arrest and sentencing. If Red Hash‘s spectral, overcast tone is any indication, Higgins spent the time in a reflective, worried mind: the full-length’s opening lines – "What do you intend to do young man? / Where do you intend to go? / Will you take a trip to the deep dark South / down into Mexico?" – sound like those of a poet rather than of an outlaw.

Higgins only served 13 months of his 5- to 10-year sentence, but the seeds of Red Hash‘s legend had been sown. The album finally got its due thanks to Drag City’s Zach Cowie, who, after being indoctrinated by Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny, spent a couple of years tracking Higgins down. He found the redheaded stranger back in his Connecticut home, with master tapes ready for the remastering. To hear Red Hash now is to know you’re coming across one of those great, lost records. There is, of course, a strong patchouli vibe throughout, but it’s the sad-eyed, searching beauty of Higgins’s voice and melodies that consecrate the album as an American beauty. The songs are fractured, but gently so: "My brothers and I were born of the sky," Higgins wistfully sings on "Unable to Fly." "The curse lay on me unable to fly / But in the first few months of our lives / Carefree in the sun we all would lie." (Max Goldberg)

GARY HIGGINS

With PG Six and Sean Smith

May 12, 7:30 p.m., $17

Swedish American Hall

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.swedishamericanhall.com

MCMAF: Ich bin Kevin Blechdom

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It’s customary to crave road travel when your summer bummer declines into a case of cubicle claustrophobia at the ol’ air-conditioned nightmare. Some of us just need to go on hiatus for a while. But take it from electronic-experimental musician Kevin Blechdom: her 2002 move from San Francisco to Berlin has been a fruitful experience.

"For the last four years, I was able to support myself through playing music," she writes via e-mail. "That’s nearly impossible to do in America with the style of music I’m making, but totally possible in Europe. I remember someone asking me what I did for a living, and I shyly said that I was a musician. They consider it a ‘real’ career, and I remember being surprised by that. In America you say, ‘I’m a musician,’ and then the other person asks, ‘But what’s your real job?’ "

Born Kristin Erickson, the 28-year-old artist was first drawn to music as a child growing up in Stuart, Fla. Initially trained as a classical pianist, Blechdom was also influenced by musical theater and pop music, and she started writing songs with her brother during high school. She went on to study piano at Florida State University but became disenchanted with its "conservative and eventually depressing" program and transferred in 1997 to Mills College in Oakland to study electronic music composition.

"I spent a lot of hours in the music library listening to avant-garde electronic music from the ’60s and ’70s, and I kept seeing ‘recorded at Mills College’ on the back of my favorite recordings," she writes. "When I got to Mills, it was the perfect environment for a young musician wanting to find her own way to compose and listen and think about music."

While at Mills, Blechdom struck up a friendship with Bevin Kelley, a.k.a. Blevin Blectum. The pair soon started performing as an electronic duo and releasing albums under the moniker Blectum from Blechdom. But after an intense four-year partnership, the twosome’s relations soured, and Blechdom shortly afterward fled to Berlin.

"I think a lot of the trouble was dealing with a public growth spurt and having to grow up a bit," she notes of her spilt with Blectum. "We have an amazing collaborative intuition that I treasure. In the last year we have started to work together again, and it’s gratifying to start where we left off."

As a solo artist, Blechdom has gravitated toward musical theater and performance art, while retaining Blectum from Blechdom’s noise ethic. Her Chicks on Speed-released full-lengths – Bitches Without Britches (2003) and Eat My Heart Out (2005) – channel artists such as Kate Bush and Magnetic Fields with dizzying synth pop allure and barnyard banjos. Upon the latter album’s release, Blechdom began performing topless and draping herself in dripping, raw meat during her live sets.

"It was a very basic symbolism mixed with a salute to female performance art. The symbolism was about turning inside out or trying to find those ‘inside’ feelings to express," she writes, adding that it was fun until she got nauseated and had to stop.

Blechdom is in the process of relocating to the Bay Area so she can attend school this fall. In addition to her solo work and Blectum from Blechdom, she’s also collaborating with Evans Hankey in the Reality Club and with Christopher Fleeger in an Evanescence and Rammstein cover band called Barn Wave. Her third solo album – a collection of "acoustic theater songs" – is in the can, but she has yet to find a label to release it.

"I think," she ventures, "this might be the first record I’ve made that my grandparents will be able to appreciate." (Chris Sabbath)

BLECTUM FROM BLECHDOM

With Kevin Blechdom, Christopher Fleeger and Charles Engstrom, Ching Chong Song, Kevanescence, and Reality Club

May 15, 8 p.m., $7-$15, sliding scale

With Blevin Blectum, Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet, and James Goode

May 16, 8 p.m., $7-$15, sliding scale

Lab

2948 16th St., SF

(415) 864-8855

www.thelab.org

MCMAF: Lost and Gowns

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> kimberly@sfbg.com

You can’t put your arms around a memory, as one hopeless rock ‘n’ roll soul once sang, but you can ponder a memory’s origins, observe its manifestations, and perhaps even embrace its spectral aftereffects. So it goes with Gowns’ Ezra Buchla, who currently lives with bandmate Erika Anderson in the North Berkeley "towering, crumbling Grey Gardens-style Victorian manse" where he was born. "I’ve lived in this house my whole life," he says quietly. I’ve interrupted his late afternoon soldering on a modular synthesizer – another day’s work with his father, synthesizer inventor Don Buchla. "I’ve had a lot of strange experiences, real or imaginary."

He says he’s had dreams about a woman who was buried next to his house, beckoning him over to her final resting place or hanging off the roof by her fingertips in front of a window. Another time he discovered himself in the grip of a hallucination about an agoraphobic woman who locked herself in the attic till she starved to death. He then heard laughing echoing from that floor. Footsteps have also been heard on the floor above. And one night as a child, he woke up and saw that the trapdoor to the attic, above his bed, had disappeared. "My dad ignores it, but it’s hard to," Buchla says. "For example, when the trapdoor disappeared, he said it was moved by rats, which seems impossible to me. It’s too big and too firmly attached to the ceiling."

The stories sound like the stuff of Realtors’ nightmares. Yet not surprisingly, Buchla doesn’t mind the mysterious appearances – and disappearances – at all. "I like it here. It’s pretty special."

Gowns’ music, likewise, dares to venture into alien haunts, the eerie intersections between past and present, the strange spaces where AOR rock meets the avant-garde, places where the trio, which includes percussionist Corey Fogel, finds quiet beauty and moments of bristling cacophony. That much is evident on Red State (Cardboard), on which former Amps for Christ guitarist and oscillator manipulator Anderson and ex-Mae Shi vocalist Buchla, who studied composition at Oberlin College and the California Institute of the Arts, speak in spooked whispers over fragile bits of noise and through folk-song filters.

When the pair started the band, Anderson says, "we didn’t really have grand ideas. We were just kind of hanging out a lot, and we thought, let’s record really simple things in our bedrooms. But we did want to use technology to play with sound forms and make things textural and use digital editing as a composition tool."

"The funny thing is that our knowledge base for music is almost completely opposite," Anderson says, going on to describe their recent 15-minute live "noise valentine" version of Bruce Springsteen’s "I’m on Fire" with Carla Bozulich. "I can sing almost any song on classic rock or AOR stations. I have all that oldies history or dumb classic rock history. Whereas Ezra’s got a knowledge of all the new music composers and history. When we met, there was barely anything that was similar. Now they overlap more and more." May those meetings be happier – and as dramatic – as that visitor dangling from the roof. *

GOWNS

With Bran … Pos, Kristin Miltner and Cliff Caruthers, Anti-Ear, and Core Ogg the Cool Man and Paul Baker

May 19, call for time and price

Lab

2948 16th St., SF

(415) 864-8855

www.thelab.org

MCMAF: Sweetness and light

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

"The ghosts come quickly, and they leave quickly," remarks Philipp Minnig about his effective yet unorthodox approach to songwriting for San Francisco electro-disco group Sugar and Gold.

"I always call songwriting ‘ghostbusting,’ " he says over tapas at Picaro in the Mission District, in a German accent softened by years spent in Northern California. "There will be an idea floating around, and you zap it, throw out your trap, and there it goes. For us, our traps are chords, or a rhythm. Someone brings in the ghost, and we all work on it."

Sugar and Gold is the brainchild of the rosy-cheeked lead vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter and his longtime friend and collaborator, vocalist and keyboardist Nicolas Dobbratz. They met in middle school in Pacific Grove and decided after a particularly memorable acid trip to start a band. The duo – whose previous combos Dura Delinquent and Connexion were rooted in visceral proto-punk – were always set on making dance-oriented music that was inclusive, countering the snobbish in-crowd ethos of Bay Area hipster groups. It is this generosity of spirit and their infectious, unduutf8g rhythms that led to a friendship and working relationship with Oakland’s dance-punk foursome Gravy Train, who recently enlisted Minnig and Dobbratz to produce their next album.

The two bands met when Gravy Train sought advice from Sugar and Gold about a hard-to-achieve keyboard effect in one of their songs. Minnig was happy to help them out, explaining that he believes in an altruistic approach to making music: "If everyone keeps their musical techniques to themselves, the scene and the music will never expand to get bigger and better."

A beautiful relationship was born. "Sugar and Gold don’t have a too-cool-for-school vibe," Gravy Train’s brazen redheaded vocalist Chunx writes via e-mail. "At their live shows, they are all about letting go, getting wild, and just feeling the music. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are, or what you look like, which is the same philosophy as Gravy Train." On Sugar and Gold’s debut, Creme (Antenna Farm), the sextet – including Jerome Steegmans on bass, drummer Robin Macmillan, and backing vocalists Susana Cortes and Fatima Fleming – take inspiration from the voluptuous soul of Funkadelic and Sly Stone, the subversive rock ‘n’ roll of the Cramps, and the cerebral electronic mastery of Kraftwerk, creating the seemingly antithetical hybrid of thoughtful yet sexy dance music.

Ghostbusting aside, this musical intellectualism sets Sugar and Gold apart from dance music makers who view music not as a way of life or an extension of themselves but as part of a hedonistic event experienced by a superficial persona. Minnig believes in the music he makes, and he views the process as a fundamental and spiritual necessity. "When we recorded the album, the music was giving us a feeling that was real, authentic," he says. "Music is the only spirituality we have. It’s the only way to believe in something greater than ourselves."

He has a similarly insightful answer to the question of why dance music is important. Between sips of peppermint tea, he says, "Dancing is one of those few things that, when done right, you do without an end in mind. You are free from an objective, which is rare in our society."

SUGAR AND GOLD

With Her Grace the Duchess and the Society

May 19, 9 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

MCMAF: Finding refuge in the Harbours

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"Basically I’m just trying to get everything out so I can sleep at night," vocalist Miguel Zelaya said in explanation of the steady stream of bubbling and bursting indie pop springing forth from his rather busy cerebellum. As the songwriter and creative mastermind of local darlings the Harbours, Zelaya is diligence personified. Having released a deadly infectious debut, Second Story Maker (Stab City), a mere six months ago, he and his bandmates are already back in the studio, recording material for the follow-up intended for release later this year.

"I already have a whole new set of songs I’m excited about. I’m always writing, really," he said, beaming from our sidewalk table at a Mission cafe, and I didn’t doubt him for a second. Spotting him among the evening’s bustle was easy: Zelaya was the one scrawling away intently in his journal. Another song closer to a good night’s sleep, I reckoned.

Zelaya has been writing and performing in the Bay Area for ages, but the Harbours are a relatively new addition to a thrillingly revitalized local music scene: their genesis was only two years ago, when the organizers of the 2005 Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival requested that he play at the event. A band was assembled, and within a year they’d finished recording their debut. Numerous lineup changes have since occurred, as members moved away or found other commitments – including Elephone and the Mother Hips – but Zelaya has remained the constant, fervently crafting fetching melodies with one ear pointed to the Band and Neil Young records of his childhood and the other pricked in the direction of the indie rock artists he holds in equally high regard. Second Story Maker is a fitting testament to these twin passions. The pulse-spurring immediacy of "Girl" and "Sick of the Electric" – "my big production number," Zelaya joked about the latter, describing the irrepressible vibrations of the album’s highlight – certainly reflect the finest moments of ’60s and ’70s radio, but in no way could they ever be confined to mere homage territory. These are songs on par with the finest work by Sloan, the Pernice Brothers, and Teenage Fanclub, fellow kindred spirits in reappropriating the sounds of their parents’ record collections in thoughtful, energizing new fashions. And more are on the way. "I have so many ideas right now, it’s crazy," Zelaya said. "I have plenty of stories to tell." (Todd Lavoie)

HARBOURS

With Rykarda Parasol, Michael Zapruder and Rain of Frogs, and Golden Messenger String Band

May 10, 8 p.m., call for price

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

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