It’s not until I really started thinking about it that I realized how much I love Sweden. My best friend Karin is part Swedish. The American Girl Doll I had when I was little was the Swedish immigrant girl Kristen, decked out in her Saint Lucia holiday outfit. I used to work at a cafe in Seattle that served the best Swedish pancakes, ever, topped with lingonberry sauce. And the gorgeous singer Robyn is from Sweden, too.
She took the stage at the Warfield Theater last night as part of her US tour for her new three part album entitled Body Talk. Everyone and their hot boyfriends were at the show, some waving Swedish flags of robin egg blue and lemon yellow. Robyn has incredible energy on stage and authentic dance moves that make it obvious that she’s really having too much fun.
Her music appeals to everyone and on that note I’d like to mention the adorable 12 year old and her mom who I was standing next to during the show. 12-year-old-cutie was so excited to be there, along with the hordes of 20 to 30 somethings, who were serious about throwing back those cocktails. I dig all of Robyn’s new tracks, including the super hot “Dancing on My Own,” but then I remembered being thirteen again and listening to “Show Me Love” just really brings it all back.
Rob Tannenbaum is a man with opinions on holidays. Thanksgiving, transcendent: “if it were up to me, I would be drinking turkey gravy.” Christmas, yawn: “it’s the most boring time of year. There’s not too much to do past stay at home and watch It’s a Wonderful Life on TV.
And Hanukkah, time to go see his comedy-music duo Good for the Jews (Cafe Du Nord, Dec. 1): “There’s a long and storied tradition of Jews in San Francisco. I hope that we will see evidence of that.” Tickets would make a great present for the first of those eight crazy nights…
Tannenbaum and partner David Fagin (who respectively moonlight as music editor of Blender and frontman for nice guy-pop band The Rosenbergs) sing well placed mockeries of Jewaphrenalia, my favorite of which being “Rueben the Hook-Nosed Reindeer,” though I’m also partial to the lounge stylings of “Going Down to Boca.” Their work comes as a follow up to Tannenbaum’s previous comedy project: What I Like About Jew, an act performed at New York’s The Knitting Factory that sold out shows six years running.
Tannenbaum is aware of what his audience wants, mainly because it’s what he himself wants out of Judaic entertainment. “When I was kid and they played Jewish music in our synagogue, it was always so horrible. It was earnest and boring, like a cross between the Indigo girls and the Old Testament.” In Good for the Jews’ creation, he was looking to capitalize on the legacy of mischief and humor inherent in Jewish consciousness, the same legacy from whence he says come Sarah Silverman and Jon Stewart’s riffs. “I wanted to start a show that was traditionally Jewish but didn’t make being Jewish seem like the most boring thing in the world,” he says.
His tongue-in-cheek celebration of his faith – well hold up, because maybe “faith” is a bad word for how Tannebaum experiences being a Jew. He told me in our recent phone interview that he only darkens temple’s door a few times a year on the high holidays, but that he likes the idea of people getting into a room to celebrate shared heritage. “The same thing is true at our show, but at our show you can drink, which I don’t think you can do at temple,” he quips. His Jewishness, he says, lies in “the things I eat, the things I laugh at, the books I read, the TV shows I watch – they’re not Jewish themed, but my gestalt is Jewish. As is my circumsized penis.”
Okay, so his tongue-in-cheek celebration of his gestalt-penis, then, delights the crowds that go to see it, most of whom have been urban, many secular Jews like himself – but diverse in ways he didn’t expect they would be when the duo launched a tour that included dates in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico earlier this year. He says at a few gigs Fagin and himself outnumbered the amount of Jews in the audience. “But sometimes those shows are more rewarding,” he says.
But the duo’s frank irreverence has been known to attract negative attention as well. Which brings us to our next topic: San Franciscan Nazis.
The last time the Good for the Jews duo played SF, they were greeted by a chap goose-stepping to some inner notion of bigot matyrdom: an Aryan Pride guy who’d come to protest their show. Tannenbaum recalls the situation in his standard one liner manner (“He felt that we were representative of the Jewish-owned media. If we’re representing Zionist power, then why am I staying at a Holiday Inn?”)
But somewhere in his memory of the event lurks the indignation it triggered: the experience of being a musician about to play a show at a respectable venue who runs into the very prejudice that his ironic music implicitly calls passé. Tannenbaum tells me he actually went outside to have a conversation with the fellow, but had to retreat when he felt himself approaching the thought of violence. “When you hear someone insulting your ancestors it tends to rile up the blood a little bit.”
The incident, in a strange way, speaks to why he’s looking forward to next week’s comedy show. “This sounds like malarky, but I really do love San Francisco. It’s the only city where I think, yeah I could live here.” Nazis and all. “It’s the end result of so much tolerance: if you’re going to tolerate people you have to tolerate Nazis, too.”
Before our car ride home discussion of some of our favorite parts of the show, my friend and I had already agreed on something; holy shit that was loud. Playing to a sold-out crowd in its first of two back-to-back San Francisco shows (10/29), Deerhunter put on a raw, visceral, sometimes loose but often amazing set that pierced through the relatively small confines of the Great American Music Hall.
Walking onstage, front man Bradford Cox grabbed the mic and gazed into the crowd. “You guys look like you wanna have fun. I like that in an audience,” he said. After someone screamed out his love for him, Cox quickly replied, “Don’t forget about Lockett Pundt (guitar),” just as the band launched into the Pundt-penned and -sung “Desire Lines.” While Cox usually and deservedly gets a lot of Deerhunter’s press attention, it should be noted that Pundt is a spectacular guitarist and songwriter in his own right, and seems to be a huge part of the band’s sound.
The opener set the tone for what naturally would be a set heavy on tunes from the band’s excellent new album, Halcyon Digest (4AD). What I hadn’t expected was the blistering distortion and pounding drums that a couple of that album’s mellower, poppier songs would take on. The twisted, bubblegum pop of “Don’t Cry” transformed into a grungy monster with a life of its own, while “Memory Boy” sped up a tad to add to the urgency of Cox singing “It’s not a house anymore” in the chorus.
A couple opportunities to show off the band’s more precise, ambient style arose throughout the set. The deceptively dreamy “Helicopter” translated perfectly and drummer Moses Archuleta included what sounded like sampled drum hits coupled with his live kit. Halcyon Digest’s closer, the seemingly African-influenced “He Would Have Laughed” floated along on a repeating, looped guitar line while waves of controlled noise and feedback ebbed in and out.
After a few minutes offstage, Cox came back solo for an encore that started with him covering Scott Walker’s “30 Century Man” with just an acoustic guitar. He played it straight, which was nice and almost surreal to see after the wall of noise throughout the night. Next, the rest of the band rejoined him and launched into a ten-minute jam that had Cox aggressively attacking his guitar to pull out short bursts of dissonant squeals and screeching solos. The song built up tension slowly (maybe a little too slowly) and then eventually released with a closing minute or so of loud thrashing. A little more paring down would have added to the overall effect, but it was still a solid way to end the evening.
Deerhunter’s widening appeal became glaringly obvious as I walked out amongst groups of grungy teenagers, appreciative old-timers, stoic hipsters, and the annoying drunk guy who had been stepping on everyone’s feet and obnoxiously trying to start out-of-rhythm, mid-song clap-along sessions all night (Hey man, you’ve successfully pulled everyone’s attention away from the band and onto you. You win!). But ultimately, even the kid holding his head throughout the show with a look of “I didn’t realize I’d signed up for this eardrum fucking” walked out with a big smile on his face.
“I brought my costume, it’s in this bag. Well except for the pants.” The song and dance man of the Bay’s vaudevillian acid bordello, Broadway Freddie (aka Miguel Strong, or Michael if you’re trying to get technical about it) is already seated at a corner table at the Right Spot Cafe when I arrive to chat about Yard Dog Road Show‘s first headlining show in San Francisco in years (The Independent, Sat/20).
Broadway-Miguel is wearing a striped tie, suit jacket, and dapper fedora, which by Yard Dogs Road Show standards seems vaguely pedestrian. But then he stands up. Electric blue, leopard print, so-skinny-they’re-emaciated jeans. “Miley Cyrus,” he confides, tossing his shoulder length blonde locks.
It is fitting that Broadway be a theater of the absurd. He is one of the original three progenitors (in addition to founder-manager-hype man Eddy Joe Cotton, who also wrote the heart-stoppingly wanderlustful memoir Hobo, and filmmaker Fletcher Fledujon) of the theatrically absurd touring troupe with which he makes his livelihood. He is artfully decorative in speech — as befits a man who has spent the last eight years of his life in pursuit of a vision received en route to one of Ken Kesey’s acid tests.
I can’t say he gives me too many tangibles to work with during the course of our conversation, which is fine, because he has given me some lovely images to share in the article. The Yard Dogs Road Show milieu he finds “beyond English or current events, a landscape of dreams.” Also, it is “a sequined and glittered ceremony, a joyous one.” Fledujon, Cotton, and Strong met “organically destined to be in the same constellation of stars.” Broadway himself is “an electron,” a good show is when “the wind goes through you – you’re not doing it, it’s doing you.”
“Would you like a drink?” I ask him. “Oh, well I’m supposed to be” were finger quotes involved here? “On the wagon. But yes, I’ll have one. What are you drinking – a beer? Yes, I’ll have one of those.”
Things that we do manage to establish: the members of Yard Dogs Road Show – all “fifteen or sixteen” of them, travel together in a vintage Greyhound bus, in which none of them have their own beds save Kid Casbah, this because he is “the golden leopard, untouchable.” They are good house guests. One of their pinnacle moments as a troupe was a performance in an old opera house in Braga, Portugal — a performance that took place under an omnibus of a chandelier on a tour that took them to quite a few grand opera houses, the one in Braga being the grandest.
The gang’s all here, in the Sonoma Hills. Photo by Hilary Hulteen
Its upcoming shows – the first time the group has had its own night in the Bay in two years — is for friends and family, in the looser sense of those words. New material will be debuted, this new material involving a carousel of prancing, bejeweled pony girls that Broadway and I conclude will resemble “peeking inside a Faberge egg,” a rocket man, and the Queen of Pineapple Island. We would be remiss if we did not mention that the talents of Scotty the Blue Bunny, aerialist Abigail Munn, DJ Shawna, and belly dance impresario Zoey Jakes, will be making their appearances over the two-night run.
At this point, beers have been had. We are touching on the art of the interview. Broadway says the back and forth is a skill he cherishes, and that his last two talks with a journalist were conducted from his bathtub and shower, respectively. “Do you know what would make this a truly great interview?” Broadway leans across our table, holding my gaze. “If we got absolutely wasted! The bartender can finish asking us the questions.”
I mention I enjoy Bulleit bourbon and it is liberally applied to our conversation. At this point we must rely on my trusty notebook for the gems that were imparted.
(This in the hand of the friendly bartender, who had been reading an Us Weekly upon our interruption)
Q: How do you feel about J. Simpson’s engagement?
B- Holy f…
C- Nick f??? friend Courtney or danced w/ her at club.
Q: What celebs met recently
B- Garry Busey on tour bus in Malibu. Friendly, liked bus. Wrote # on cigarette pack.
C- Paul Mooney – belligerent interview. Stressed out. Kathy Griffin was a total bitch.
B- Oscar Grant? Don’t want to go there. What art school CC of A & Crafts
(Drawing of a cell phone with a line drawn over it)
C- 3 beers: surprisingly drunk
S- what kind of whiskey would you like?
(In my handwriting)
happy excess
(sketch by Broadway of suspended circles and stars)
I think Broadway then banged out a few impromptu tunes on The Right Spot’s piano, we drank more whiskey, shenanigans, and we called it a night.
More concrete information is to be had from the Yard Dogs Road Show website itself. For instance, after a bit of digging one can turn up a rider that states that the group requires eight vegetarian and seven omnivorous meals from show venues that do catering, tortilla chips and spicy salsa “of the health food store variety” if not. Three bottles of red wine and 24 bottles of “Stella beer or comparable” either way. To me, this says a conscious approach to health in solid foods, followed by a healthy disregard for matters of the liver.
Here’s how the “great” (it really was) interview ended: Broadway and I mutually supporting each other outside the cafe, a freak November monsoon raging around us. “So. Did we cover everything?” he wonders. “I think we did a good job,” I slur at him before giving my final regards to Broadway and tripping away in the rain. I still believe it to be the case.
(Sorry about leaving you the tab, Miguel!)
Yard Dogs Road Show
With El Radio Fantastique, Zoe Jakes, DJ Shawna, and more
Apparently, even the massive, all-powerful aliens and scumdogs of the universe known as GWAR have trouble with reception on their iPhones.
While conducting a phone interview before a show in Hollywood, band leader Oderus Urungus’ connection cut out twice, leaving him grumbling, “Maybe I’m clutching my iPhone too tightly!”
Perhaps it was his giant claws proving to be too much for our puny human technology to handle — either way, once the connection was re-established, the intergalactic beast that has led GWAR for more than a quarter century had no shortage of hilarious and outrageous things to say.
Having just finished taping a segment for the Fuel TV show Daily Habit, Oderus was being informed that he had revealed a bit more of himself to the television audience than he had thought. “I just did the show apparently with my balls hanging out the entire time and nobody told me! That’s not like a big thing for Oderus, my balls usually are hanging out — but to try to get on national TV, I’m willing to do the ball tuck, but apparently the ball tuck didn’t work, it was horrible, it looked like a duck-billed platypus coming out of a burrow or something!”
Although someone out there in TV land was undoubtedly offended by this show of alien masculinity, they can just add themselves to the scores of non-believers and critics who have unsuccessfully assailed the musical and cultural force that is GWAR over the past couple of decades. Currently celebrating their 25th anniversary, the heavy metal space gang that brought our planet recorded gems such as Scumdogs of the Universe and This Toilet Earth are back in all their unholy glory with a new album, The Bloody Pit of Horror (Metal Blade).
Propelled by the first sleazy single, “Zombies, March!,” Oderus Urungus and his cohorts have returned in fine beastly form, ready to again spread their love to fans around the globe — which of course means spraying audiences with all manner of fake blood, bodily fluids, and god knows what else.
At a time when many bands their age would be mellowing out and producing so-called “mature” material, GWAR has shown that they are only getting dirtier and heavier with time, as any fan should expect from a group with their background and history.
“With any of the records we’ve made, we didn’t really go into it with a preconceived notion of what it was going to sound like. We just went at it and tried to make the record that was appropriate to what we felt like at the time, and I guess we were feeling particularly ferocious [with this one],” says Oderus. “We just wanted to emphasize how fucking awesome we are, and recall a day not so long ago when bands actually put out an album about once a year — nowadays that just doesn’t happen, bands take forever in between albums, and half the time they’re full of re-mixes, or tracks from other albums that got cut.
We just wanted to have a whole bunch of great music for our fans, and just celebrate the idea of GWAR. One of the things about this album that’s a little different that gives it that ferocious sound is that we tuned down I believe to F#, which is basically the loosest that guitar strings can be and still stay on the neck — it sounds like the guitars are vomiting — in a good way! I think it makes for a very powerful record.”
When asked if his band of rubber aliens, mutants, deviants and demons ever looks back on their history and thinks about the fact that they’ve been doing what they do successfully for so long, the answer is a firm “No.”
“If we took the time to go back and actually examine what we were doing, we’d be so shocked and appalled that we’d stop doing it. It’s better to just keep mindlessly plugging onward,” laughs Oderus. “[With that being said] we are very well aware of just how awesome it is what we’ve managed to do, and we intend to keep doing it as long as possible — or until we escape the planet Earth, whichever comes first.”
With the release of The Bloody Pit of Horror, GWAR have been hitting the road in support, crossing the United States and making an appearance on national late night television, with a performance last month on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
“We did Springer and Joan Rivers like 20 years ago, and it took them 20 years to let us back on television!”
Oderus himself has been making several more recent appearances on TV, however — in the last year or so he’s been a regular guest on, of all places, a Fox News program, Red Eye. Although it does sound like an awfully strange pairing, the intergalactic barbarian thinks that Fox sees in him a potential for higher ratings, thus justifying having a giant space beast running around their studios.
“It is an odd match that they would put GWAR in a position where I can not only comment on society but do it over and over again, but obviously they’re having a little fun with it. It’s pretty funny to be walking around the Fox studios in New York City and run into Glenn Beck…yeah, Oderus and him are hanging out, backstage buddies!”
Having toured all over the world in the past 25-plus years, Oderus and his bandmates have seen all manner of crazy and twisted things, but the singer says that no place can hold a candle to what’s he’s seen and experienced right here in San Francisco.
“Pretty much every time we’ve been to San Francisco, it’s been insane, since the very first GWAR tour where we showed up in an old school bus, and ended up parked in the Tenderloin for a week straight, that neighborhood was really bad. And then our show at the Warfield where the bums were dropping dead right outside of the venue; the line was going around the block, they were three dead homeless people laying on the sidewalk, and out fans were just very politely stepping over their corpses, that was pretty weird!”
He also mentions a doorman selling crack by the side of the stage within just a few feet of a nearby cop — one that at first the band didn’t even believe was a real officer. “I thought he was a guy that dressed up in a joke cop outfit, because his uniform was so fucked up and dirty, and he was driving this cop car that was all beat to shit, the fenders were even hanging off it!”
With that said, Oderus is eagerly looking forward to playing here in the city on Sunday, and has some words of praise for his local fans.
“San Franciscans — you still have a complete, stone cold lock on the sickest, weirdest, most fucked up town in the United States. New Orleans has nothing on you people!”
With the Casualties, Infernaeon, and Mobile Death Camp Sun/21, 7:30 p.m., $22-$25 Regency Ballroom 1290 Sutter St., SF (800) 745-3000 www.theregencyballroom.com
Bay Area hip-hop heads are grateful that Zion I walks these mean streets. Emcee Zumbi and DJ Amp Live have been expanding the boundaries of what dope beats and lifted lyrics can be ever since they fled the industry culture of Atlanta and hit the Oakland scene with 1997’s underground hit Enter the Woods. Their vibe’s stayed positivewhile resisting major label affliation and a lot of the turf warring that plagues hip-hop in a weird, stereotype-enhancing way around some of the Bay’s venues.
We spoke with Morehouse College grad Zumbi over the phone on the cusp of the duo’s weekend-long Slim’s celebration (Sat/20 and Sun/21) in honor of new album Atomic Clock, and the gig will be the duo’s last before hitting the road on tour. Clock is a bangin’, lifted affair studded with gems like “Always” and “Girlz” featuring Martin Luther’s sweet hook — but all the same, we still found ourselves talking politics. Sheesh.
San Francisco Bay Guardian:What’s your definition of a conscious emcee? I hear a lot of people call themselves “backpack rappers” and then come out with a song telling girls to shake faster, make that money. How can you tell who the conscious rappers are?
Zumbi: For one, I don’t think consciousness is dictated by sexuality. For instance Common is a cat who’s a pretty consistently conscious person. But then he comes out talking about getting head — I think in most of his music there’s an awareness. For me, Jacka has conscious music because he reflects on spirituality and Allah. Even though he’s got the gangster stuff he’s analyzing society and spirituality, mixing it together. It’s about the dominant sense you get from the music. I feel you though, there are people that say they’re a conscious rapper and then their album just doesn’t feel that way. For me, consciousness doesn’t make you dope necessarily, even though most of the people I respect have it.
SFBG:I’ve read in past interviews that your parents attended the March on Washington and that you were at the Million Man March yourself. Can you tell me what your political beliefs are?
Z: I don’t really think of myself as a political person. I don’t totally believe in Democrats and Republicans and voting. I’m not sold on those things. I think there’s manipulation involved in all of that, and I don’t consider myself political, because I don’t think the political system is just. I just think people should be able to get what they need, that they should be able to have a full life. That’s why I’ve chosen music: it’s a little more direct. People have to jump through hoops with politics, I see it as kind of fraternity.
Zion I’s latest, Atomic Clock, tells the time
SFBG:But you have musical talent you can use as a forum to express your beliefs – how do people make a difference who don’t have that platform?
Z: By being present and really standing for what you believe – just show up. I don’t call myself political, but take something like Oscar Grant, I was down there at the BART station, I was at City Hall the second time, I was taking pictures and trying to get footage. I think it’s more about that: standing up and making your voice known. Your clothes, your fashion sense, riding a bike instead of driving cars. There’s a disconnect between what people want and how people live their lives. You don’t want to be a slave to the system, so why do you put on clothes you don’t want to wear and go do something that someone tells you that you don’t want to do every day of your life? That’s what life is about, what you choose to do. Living in the United States, we can pretty much say what we want to say. It’s not a country that’s overly oppressive on the intellectual level. Physically it is, but you can pretty much say what you want. Just get out there and be it instead of complaining about everything, be the change you want to see in the world.
SFBG:Tell me your take on Obama’s presidency so far.
Z: It’s very interesting. You couldn’t write this stuff, this is a movie in action. When he got elected there was this passion, everyone was so over George Bush. It was like we were ushering in this whole level of politics in the US. And then, because things didn’t change… for me, I voted for Obama, but I don’t think the president makes all the decisions. He’s just the face man for the government. It’s not like this guy was going to change all evils in the world! But now reality is setting in. And because he is Black, it’s encouraged this other thing, the Tea Party? That’s just ridiculous, it’s engendered this backlash, there’s this ideal that there is no racism but in reality there’s more racism than before. Michael Vick — whose dog killed a man on his property — he served two years. Obama to me is a symbol of something – I’m not sure what it is yet, some kind of transformation hopefully, but people are pushing back against what change could be because they’re frustrated, there’s no jobs – they’re looking for a way out. It’s a strange story, it’s like a movie I’m watching.
SFBG:I’ve heard that in Zion I, one of you studied to be a doctor and another, a psychologist. Which is which? How’d you chose that course of study?
Z: (laughs) I might again, you never know, I was just looking at grad schools online. The fact that it had to do with the mind in general. In college I was undeclared for the first two years and then I was getting to that point, so I was like psychology. I like the power of the mind, what the new age thing-movement is all about now, meditation, clearing your mind, intuition,
SFBG: Atomic Clock has been described as “moody and emotional.” Are you guys getting moody these days?
Z: Yeah a bit. The record, we did it really quickly in two and a half, three weeks. We proposed it to the label, hoping that they’d pass on it initially but they optioned it. It was a quick sprint all of a sudden, it went from this cool idea to something we had to rush to finish it. Because of that we had a moody attitude to it, the timing added this urgent feeling. Also, like the thing about Obama, it’s where things are, everything is in this transitional period, everyone’s stressed.
SFBG:What do you think of the influx of dance beats in hip hop these days?
Z: I think its cool. I n the beginning, hip hop was always dance music. Sugar Hill Gang was the first quote-unquote rap record. For cats to be doing [dance beats], it’s a natural thing. That’s a part of hip hop. In the late ’90s, early ’00s hip hop kind of left the club, and then the South brought us back into the club. This music is about celebrating, having a good time.
Zion I Atomic Clock CD release parties
Sat/20: featuring Locksmith, Hold Up, Bayliens, DJ Kevvy Kev
8:30 p.m., $20-23
Sun/21: featuring Eligh w/ Scarub, Bang Data, Hold Up, Oakland Faders
Donning a huge red rose on his breast, Rufus Wainwright looked quite regal standing with the San Francisco Symphony this past weekend, performing musical renditions of five Shakespeare sonnets.
Wainwright was commissioned by the Symphony to create the pieces. Always ambitious, he wrote an entire orchestral score to accompany his magical voice. Singing in iambic pentameter is no simple feat, but to also make it sound incredibly beautiful, with hints of melancholy and pure joy, made the performance a total coup. It was also great to see such a mix of people in the audience, from classy bourgeois peeps in elegant silk dresses, to young hipsters in mix-matched plaids — but all of them giddy to see Rufus with orchestra.
I guess it’s time to move past the Bay Area party blowout that was last week and into, well hell, more parties – San Fran’s no one-binge pony, after all.
And holler, they’re bringing their newest handsintheairlikeyoudon’tcare banger with them, “Indian Summer.” We got the video (recorded last week using Red Bull and a dash-mounted flip camera somewhere in a desert that materialized between the group’s tour gigs) for your viewing pleasure. Sound quality is middling, but the sentiment we like.
Wallpaper’s “Indian Summer Desert Session”
The song is like, made for these November days of milk, honey, and short-wearing jags for the optimistic among us, right lead singer Eric Federic? “I was born and raised in the Bay Area. I have memories of being confused about why it was July and it was so cold — my birthday’s in July,” said Federic, an Oakland native, who took his eyes off the road between his shows in Boise and Seattle’s Showbox at the Market to talk to SFBG on the phone about that perma-fave topic of discussion among Bay Area-ites: meterological variances.
“I’d remember we’d be so hot and sweaty and restless, we’d all get Astro Pops or whatever. I have all these great memories of growing up in this Bay Area weather system – it being warm up until the wee hours of the morning,” Federic said.
Cause for celebration, or at least for another single. Wallpaper’s well-known for its ability to mock up hot videos in a timely manner, which may explain the group’s success over the last year or so. And regardless of the temperature outside, you can achieve maximum condensation levels at its live show. Jump around with Ricky Reed, Federic’s self-hyping flashbanger character of “I’ve Got Soul, I’m So Wasted” and feel good about heading into the championship rounds of holiday party season.
(For a review of Slough Feg’s latest, The Animal Spirits, go here. Read on for an interview with the band’s guitarist-singer, Mike Scalzi.)
San Francisco Bay Guardian: I noticed a clear theological theme running through the album. Was that – the Reformation – an area of historical interest to you? I’m interested in that choice, of a less exciting historical topic than maybe a more violent event…
Mike Scalzi: It’s not as metal, certainly. But in another way, Martin Luther was very metal, in that he was dedicated. Though he was Christian, in his dedication and his rebellion, he was metal. I was reading about all that stuff in an anthology of Western cultures. It was very general – I had to teach it. I’m a teacher. I started teaching Philosophy of Religion a year ago for the first time, and I’m not really that into teaching it, because its not my area of expertise, but I kinda had to.
[Writing music] helps me, actually. If I can write a song about it, it becomes more ingrained in my everyday thought. It becomes more second nature to say “oh, the 95 Theses!” It’s not just as a teaching aid, though. When it comes to Renaissance Christian theologians, he’s the most metal one. He’s out in the world. He’s out doing stuff, being a revolutionary. And a lot of his views are funny, a lot of the things he said were really funny and really extreme.
SFBG: Less metal for being ultimately successful, though. A lot of those so-called heretics were metal in the sense that they died for their principles, or were burnt at the stake or what have you.
MS: But he was the most badass one! Obviously, I don’t agree with him – he was a fundamentalist and all that, and he brought on fundamentalism in a way, I guess. But at least he said that trying to believe that the Bible is literal fact by reason alone is preposterous. That’s why he thought you had to exercise faith – because it’s preposterous. Everything in the Old Testament is preposterous, but you have to believe in it, purely to test your faith.
After seven records, you have to think of new things. I don’t want to repeat myself.
SFBG: What was the rubric for the lyrics that were included in the liner notes?
MS: Oh, those are the lyrics to “Trick the Vicar”
SFBG: Oh, so it’s just the one song?
MS: That was my decision. I’m sick of like…I’ve done that on every record and…
SFBG: People parse your lyrics?
MS: Oh, I don’t care about that. They come up with all sorts of weird interpretations, as if I really care that much. “Oh this means this and that means that. This is the deep meaning in this.” There’s no deep meaning in this shit! At least not that I know about! But at this point, trying to find things to say is a challenge.
With “Trick the Vicar,” I thought the lyrics to that would be important because it’s all one big pun. There’s obviously no deeper meaning, other than just being entertaining. It’s like something from a Benny Hill skit or something. So on the inside of the CD, I had all the puns – I came up with all those puns in the same month. They’re really silly, obviously.
SFBG: Well I did mean to confirm whether or not “boister” was a word.
MS: Good, good! No, its not. But when I say “There’s a boister that goes on in the cloister”…
SFBG: …from context it’s pretty clear.
MS: Yeah. It’s just a bunch of silliness, but it works for the song. I like silliness, and that’s one of the things that’s missing from a lot of metal: a good sense of humor. Metal used to have a sense of humor, in the 70s and 80s.
SFBG: That’s something that I was meaning to ask you about, if there’s a way to account for that sudden lack of humor. You have this form of music that has this potential to be taken seriously, but also the potential to be looked at with a sense of humor, or with an understanding of its many tongue-in-cheek aspects. It seems like a lot of its biggest fans, a lot of the people with the kind of familiarity with it that would enable them to see the humor, are the people least able to see it.
MS: Well, there are a lot of stupid people. You go to a metal show and you run into a lot of morons. Around here, you don’t have as many.
SFBG: I think it’s sort of like a dumbbell shaped-graph. On the one end, it attracts a lot of stupid people, but on the other end, it attracts a lot of people who are discerning and smart.
MS: I think, basically, they’re going to laugh at you one way or another. Being a metal guy, especially when you’re old, or older, or from the last generation of metal, they’re going to laugh at you. You make the choice of whether they’re going to laugh at you or with you. And I choose to laugh with them!
Also, metal, or indeed all rock and roll, is inherently funny. It is! People used to know that!
SFBG: Or inherently fun. That’s what a lot of people seem to lose sight of.
MS: Metal is inherently funny. No matter what! It’s funny. That’s one of the best things about it! It’s ridiculous, and it’s great because it’s ridiculous. People realized that way back. Black Sabbath, maybe not Led Zeppelin — they never had much of a sense of humor – Deep Purple, Judas Priest. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Early glam metal – Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot – they all had a sense of humor. Van Halen! Give me a break…that band was all humor until Sammy Hagar came, and it lost its sense of humor, and it started to suck.
The way that these things incorporated humor resembled vaudeville. That was David Lee Roth’s whole thing. Humor is part of entertainment. The most serious, heavy band, Black Sabbath, was also the most funny, because they realized – they were a British band with a British sense of humor.
SFBG: It’s interesting that you mention that. Do you think the trans-Atlantic shift had anything to do with that loss of humor?
MS: No, because Van Halen is the funniest. Maybe they’re not metal. Manowar! I don’t know if you want to open that can of worms. There’s a lot of evidence that they started out as a joke. They started out tongue-in-cheek and got serious as they went along. They know they’re funny; they may not want to acknowledge it, but they are.
SFBG: And the humor is bound up in the fact that everyone knows there is a joke, but no one will actually admit it. You can listen to it and pretend that you’re taking it seriously.
MS: It’s true of hardcore too. It used to be funny, now its all [imitates hardcore singing]. It’s lost its humor – some of it hasn’t, but most of it has. That’s one of my problems with a lot of the metal in this country, or in Germany too – people take it too seriously.
It’s the same thing with entertainment. I’m accused of being too traditionalist and narrow, but I’m bored by anything else. The way that entertainment used to be, in my opinion, was better. Period. It just used to be better. And now, it lacks.
I guess the question you’re asking is “why?” I don’t know why. I think it’s something about the world and the way people see entertainment. It has a much wider scope than it used to. People are much more involved in it as fans, and take it seriously as a statement, which is great, but maybe some of the actual enjoyment of it – from the performance standpoint and the artists’ standpoint – has been diminished by the fact that people hold it too close to their heart. The fragility of their egos and their identity are wrapped up in it in a way that causes problems.
SFBG: Like many discussions about the evolution and history of metal, I blame Nirvana. They taught people, or people took away from them this idea that if a band was trying to entertain you, that was somehow false.
MS: Well, that happened way before Nirvana, but that’s when it hit mainstream.
SFBG: There’s that line in Smells Like Teen Spirit: “Here we are now/Entertain us.”
MS: I don’t know if I have much to say about that. At the time, I didn’t like it. I heard their first album, before they were really popular, and I didn’t like it then. I was playing shows in San Francisco at the time, and I knew that I was not down with what was happening as a result of them. “Don’t try.” “Don’t give a shit.” “Nevermind.” “Be a loser.” I mean, sure, I thought that when I was a teenager. That’s the 14-year-old mentality: “everything sucks, so fuck it, man.” By the time you’re in your twenties you’ve grown out of that, you try to do something, unless you end up like Kurt Cobain, and you just fade off into negative, negative, everything sucks, and then die. [Sarcastically.] That’s great! That’s my hero! [Chuckles ruefully.] What the fuck is that?
SFBG: So, part and parcel of the conversation we’ve been having is the fact that you’re a very opinionated guy…
MS: So you’ve read my blog posts. There’s a new one today! I was just reading the comments.
SFBG: I did read them. I can only imagine what kind of comments you’re going to get on the most recent one. I was wondering if there’s something you can identify about metal that helps it attract opinionated people. Or, to reverse the chicken and the egg, if there’s something about being into metal that makes people opinionated?
MS: Well, I don’t think people get into metal for some other reason, and then get opinionated once they’re into metal. Unless you want to get into the fact that most metal is so bad now that you can get into it and say “oh god I’m so opinionated because there’s so much garbage out there. That’s true of a lot of kinds of music though.
It attracts opinionated people because it is extreme music. It attracts people who are into a certain kind of mentality. It happens from such an early age! I can’t analyze it. I got into metal, like a lot of people, when I was pretty young, and that was a long time ago! I don’t remember exactly. I don’t have immediate access to that feeling first being attracted to it. To me, its something that happened so far back that its like…
SFBG: …it’s like asking “why do you like mac ‘n’ cheese?”
MS: Exactly. And I have more access to what’s happened since then. But I don’t feel like I’m actively opinionated. People take things in, and they call them like they hear them. To me, things assault my sense, not the other way around. Nobody remembers being born into the world of music or food or anything and going “Hmm, I’m going to investigate this thing!” It’s more you hear something and you’re passed into this impression that you have. And some things, you get an impression and you go “Argh, that sucks! That really bothers me!” So my opinions, like those of most people who are opinionated, come from being stimulated by something in a positive or negative way. I would say I call it like I hear it.
I never thought of myself as opinionated until I moved here. People said that if I moved to San Francisco there would be all this great music. They said, “People out there are very enlightened.” And then I got here – 20 years ago – and I thought, “Everybody here’s not really that enlightened. There’s a lot of stupid bullshit going on out here.”
SFBG: Switching tacks completely, I’m curious about your master’s degree in philosophy. I read a little bit in another interview about what you teach, but I’m curious about what you focused on in your studies.
MS: I ended up studying Descartes for my thesis. I was interested in Descartes as a graduate student because his method was very simple and intuitive, and the whole point of it was a do-it-yourself type thing, rather than getting involved in this long academic tradition. Obviously, like anyone else, he comes from an academic tradition, but his point in Meditations [on First Philosophy] was to say “let’s erase everything that happened beforehand in philosophy and science and start on your own, with what you can know by yourself.”
I just found Descartes pretty easy to understand. I was able to maneuver in that ontology. I started taking seminars on Descartes, and I subsequently got interested in German idealism, like Kant and Schopenhauer, and like every metalhead, I was interested in Nietzsche.
In a master’s degree, you end up focusing on major guys because they have these comprehensive exams that test your knowledge of Plato, Descartes, Hume, etc. I stuck to a lot of that, because I knew I would have to take an exam on it.
SFBG: That Kantian or Cartesian originalist thinking – wiping the slate clean, starting with the Categorical Imperative, or something like that…
MS: …well, Kant is much more in the tradition, he’s not trying to wipe the slate clean. He’s just trying to be revolutionary.
SFBG: I’ll admit I’m only tenuously familiar with Kant, but I remember his ethics being founded on a sort “first principle” that ignores cultural baggage and so forth.
MS: Well, that’s what people say, but his point is to come up with something that is not dependent on circumstance in any way at all. Something that’s not empirical, that’s totally dependent on reason. Just like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” in a way.
It’s something that you try to universalize by saying “what if everybody did this?” [Motions toward cookie on the table.] What if I were to steal this cookie? What if everybody did that? If it produces a contradiction – if its unreasonable for everybody to do something – you have to decide if it would be possible. Not if it would be right or wrong.
In order to establish a standard of right and wrong, you have to decide if it’s reasonable – could everyone do it. Suppose I don’t keep a promise – I say I’m going to show up here at 11, and I don’t. If I don’t do that, and I don’t keep my promise, what happens? It undermines the principle of the promise in the first place. If I don’t keep a promise, whatever, no big deal. What if nobody keeps promises. Could everybody do what I did? If no one keeps promises, there wouldn’t be promises in the first place.
SFBG: There’d be no point.
MS: You couldn’t make promises, because there’d be no such thing.
SFBG: Like if everyone stole, there would be no point in having property.
MS: If there were no property, you couldn’t steal. If there were no taking anybody’s word for anything, you couldn’t make a promise. It undermines its own possibility. It’s a contradiction that makes the act itself impossible. If its irrational to that extent, to the point where it makes the act itself a contradiction, then, according to Kant, its not morally permissible. That’s a little bit of a long answer.
SFBG: I’m going to attempt a sort of interviewer Triple Lutz here. Is Descartes’ idea of discarding what has come before, or Kant’s idea of ignoring circumstance to come up with principle…
MS: …Rational principle…
SFBG: …purely rational principle. Can that be applied to your creative process? In the sense that…
MS: No. [Laughs.] I wish I could say that it could. That’d be a brilliant piece of journalism. But as much as I’d love to be able to say that there’s some heavy metal calculus that I use in order to write by sheer principles of reason…no. At least, not for me. It’d be cool if there was some guy, some alchemist songwriter guy who was trying to find the principle of guitar or whatever.
SFBG: You could sort of take a stab at the categorical imperative of metal though, being like Maiden, Priest, and Sabbath, and not being affected by sort of the whims of circumstance.
MS: That’s the problem I’m encountering though. I don’t want to say that everything’s all based on the past. I don’t want to be a heavy metal anachronism. That’s what I’m getting in a lot of these responses to my Invisible Oranges articles. Again, to be philosophical about it, I get this confusion of cause and consequence. A lot of people say to me: “you don’t like death metal because you haven’t explored it.”
I try to keep the analysis somewhat objective, about why I don’t like the cookie monster vocals, the guitar sounds that are very brittle, and the drums that are triggered – clickety, clackety, clickety doesn’t sound “brutal.” It sounds like some bullshit to me.
People say, “You haven’t explored it enough. You haven’t heard the good stuff. You haven’t gone to the lengths that it takes to appreciate it.”
SFBG: If it’s good, it shouldn’t take any “lengths.”
MS: It’s confusing the cause with the consequence. It’s not that I don’t like extreme metal because I haven’t listened to enough of it. I haven’t listened to enough of it because I don’t like it. People think that I’ve come up with some sort of rigid heavy metal calculus and say “I like Priest, I like Maiden, I like Sabbath, Saint Vitus, whatever, some underground stuff too. These are the criteria of what I will listen to.”
It’s not like that! I grew up with the evolution of the whole thing, listening to it happen, and I heard things, and I said “I don’t like that! That’s crap! That sounds like someone who doesn’t care about what they’re doing.” It just sounds like shit to me, for whatever reason. And I heard more and more of it, and I chose not to investigate it.
SFBG: Getting back to philosophy just briefly, I saw in another interview that you described your music as having a Machiavellian aspect. I understand a Nietzschian aspect, but how does Machiavelli come into it?
MS: I was probably joking! I’m not sure. I was just being macho, talking about taking over the world. It’s a very vague characterization of Machiavelli, who I don’t really know shit about anyway.
SFBG: I was struck by the William Blake references in one of your old songs, “Tiger! Tiger!” Blake has always struck me as very metal.
MS: The reason that I put that stuff in there is not because of William Blake. It’s because of Alfred Bester, who quoted him.
SFBG: I noticed that you mentioned that author a lot in other interviews.
MS: A lot of sci-fi fans haven’t read him! This is insane to me. When people read The Stars My Destination – the original title of which was Tiger! Tiger! – they say “that’s the greatest fiction book I’ve ever read.” I was not a sci-fi or fantasy reader until I was 26, and someone got me that book. It was completely a fluke. I got it and I was like, “Ehh, I don’t really like science fiction books,” and then I finished it and said, “This is the best book I’ve ever read in my life.” Only on the basis of that did I get into science fiction.
SFBG: It’s tempting to ask you questions about Slough Feg’s distinctive sound, but seeing where my fellow interviewers have gone before, I was wary. It seems like we journalists want to get you to say “Oh, I choose to write songs with major chords because of this reason which is easy to print,” and your response is to say, “Look, this just my creative process; it’s how it sounds good to me.”
MS: Well, something that sounds good to me vocally sounds good because it’s catchy. If I remember it. I don’t always tape everything that I do. So, why do I remember it? That’s a whole question. Maybe I remember it because it sounds a little bit unique, maybe for some other reason.
SFBG: I think the music stands out to people, whether on record or live, because it makes melodic choices that almost seem like a deliberate subversion of the conventions of metal, like all those major chords. But I’m assuming that wasn’t a choice to subvert. That there wasn’t a point at which you were like, “Heavy metal is in minor keys – I’m going to do it a different way.”
MS: Well maybe there was! Again, it wasn’t a conscious choice. I don’t write Slough Feg songs according to music theory. I don’t say, “Now we’re going to do a song like this; now we’re going to do a song with these chords, or with this type of vocals.” If you do that, it ends up sounding overly stiff and deliberate.
But having said that, that’s not to say that there isn’t some kind of overall approach. When I do write stuff, what do I edit out? What do I keep? Stuff that reaches a certain criteria after the fact. Not when I come up with riffs, or vocals – that just happens. But what do I choose to keep? I don’t think about it consciously – it’s second nature to me now, so its hard to say – but basically, at one point, I wanted to write things that imitated Maiden, Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Alice Cooper, Saint Vitus, Black Flag, and all that.
It became second nature to say “I want to pick up where Maiden left off,” but not to use major chords. The first “Irish-sounding” song I ever did was called “The Red Branch,” and I was sitting around in my living room, in a place I lived in years and years ago, I was sitting in my living room with an acoustic guitar, just joking around, singing to somebody as a joke, and I thought, “That’s a cool chord change!”
I keep a lot of things that other people would throw away, that they’d be scared to put on a record because it’s too silly-sounding. I say to myself “this is actually something that someone else wouldn’t do, and have the nerve to take seriously.” I think a lot of people are embarrassed to play Slough Feg-type songs. They were 20 years ago, at least. And now we’ve developed the sound to the point that it’s sort of obnoxious. People are like “what the hell man! This guy is willing to do this?!”
That’s what happened in San Francisco in the mid-nineties, playing this music. People would be like “God, you’re willing to get up onstage and play that? That sounds like nursery-rhyme music with metal instruments. It’s major. You’re singing like you’re in a 50s musical!”
Those are the kind of influences that I incorporate, maybe because it was something people weren’t willing to do, and so it sounded fresh to people.
SFBG: That sort of discomfort you describe is interesting, because you have this whole other offshoot of metal that’s built on discomfort. Black metal is based around saying “which chords can I play that will make people uncomfortable, that are the most dissonant.” You’ve come up with an incredibly unique way to do the same thing. You challenge people’s expectations, you make them uncomfortable, you take them out of their comfort zone, but instead of being really really heavy, or really fast, or really dissonant, or really down-tuned, you just have your own personal approach: to write chord changes that are, you know, silly.
MS: Or just really, really, traditional. Not that I intended that. But this is good, I think we hit the nail on the head in sense. When I started developing the sound, in the early nineties, a lot of it was a reaction. I didn’t write these looney tunes in 1989. I wrote them when I got here, and I started playing some shows, and I noticed that all the bands were drab, and all the bands played sort of one-dimensional speed metal. And I was totally nonplussed by it.
What I was writing was a reaction. I was saying “what can be done at this point?” Punk rock and speed metal and grindcore are just an extension of the same dirge – being obnoxious by being a dirge.
SFBG: And it’s an arms race, right? You can only go so fast. And then the next band that comes along has to go faster than that.
MS: And also it’s the attitude that’s so passe after a while. Spitting blood and whatever. I wanted touch on what people inevitably heard – kid’s music, or what your parents were playing – and pose the question: “are you willing to admit that this is enjoyable to you?” Slough Feg songs that do sound like they’re from a 50’s musical. Are you able to admit that this is catchy to you? That’s the punk rock maneuver, that I was able to think of it in those terms. And that’s what set us apart. But in a totally different way, in a way that goes back to like, “This is inherently enjoyable. Are you willing to partake in it, or are you too cool for it?”
SFBG: And it’s diametrically opposed to black metal. Black metal is “I will alienate you by doing something that is not enjoyable.” Your approach is “I will alienate you by doing something that is too enjoyable.”
MS: After the fact, that’s how we can analyze it. I think that’s a proper way to look at it. My songs do assault the listener, and people say “I can’t get it out of my head!” Because it’s written in very simple way – they’re really not that hard to write, but it’s a kind of songwriting that people aren’t willing to do.
Someone said to me in the 80’s, when I liked Venom a lot – they’re a very silly, vaudevillian form of Satanic metal – “Why do you like this? Anybody can do that. Anybody can play Venom songs.” And I said “yeah, that’s true. But nobody is willing to. That’s what makes it special.”
It was Halloween on Plastic Beach on Saturday night at Oracle Arena, as Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s high concept musical variety hour, Gorillaz, took to the stage in all of its virtual Demon Day glory.
Guest stars and collaborators were in abundance — nearly 40 different musicians made appearances over the course of the evening, ranging from full horn and string sections to De La Soul’s rambunctious lyricism and Bobby Womack’s smooth soulfulness. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon stalked the stage as the genre-bending legacy of the Clash manifested beneath Hewlett’s animated offspring, the musically-inclined primate half-cousins of Tank Girl.
The surreal brilliance of all of this was evident as Albarn, in un-dead makeup, asked – “Are we the last…living souls?” The band answered with a 20-plus song audio avalanche from the Gorillaz arsenal: “Stylo,” “DARE,” “White Flag,” “19/2000,” and a show-stopping rendition of “Dirty Harry.”
“Can you tell me why they call you the Jimi Hendrix of the violin?” I’m chatting with Eileen Ivers, Bronx-born one-time house blue electric violinist for Riverdance. One must admit, it seems like a curious moniker. Over the phone, Ivers dissolves in laughter.
“I wish I could,” she finally continues. “One wonderful gentleman from some paper put that. I’d love to think that in some way — he had such a love of blues and roots — I don’t know, I won’t even go there, but I feel so connected to the instrument.” Oh, plus she integrates into her concerts (one of which will be rocking Freight and Salvage Thu/4) liberal doses of jams, electric violin, wah-wah pedal, and, dare we say, soul? “I love to put that to an audience to open their minds — this instrument can rock out as well.” The pieces are beginning to come together…
Perhaps I’m fixating on the comparison because at first glance, there is very little to tie together the lives of Hendrix and Ivers, who was born to immigrant parents used to the hardship and poverty in their birthland of County Mayo, Ireland. “There’s no Gaelic word for immigration — just for exit,” Ivers tells me. “It shows culturally they never wanted to leave, but they had to in the mass exodus.” She talks like an Irish person, falling into discussions of my Gaelic name as those of her (our) ethnic persuasion are wont to do and converses with a hint of that sing-song lilt that is the mark of the Emerald Isle.
Eileen Ivers and Immigrant Soul, sans Photoshop butchering. Photo by Luke Ratray
Ivers learned her craft through a man in the New York neighborhood she grew up who delighted in teaching the young people in the area how to play the tunes of their cultural legacy. Love of the instrument buoyed her through years at Iona College spent studying mathematics and into a career that’s seen her play with Celtic legends The Chieftains, the international touring company of Riverdance, over 40 symphonic orchestras, and on soundtracks for films like Gangs of New York (2002).
It was through the multitudinous nature of the city’s music scene that the influences audible in her new tracks like “Paddy in Zululand” came to the fore. That tune in particular features an Irish melody plucked out by Iver’s violin which emerges from a background of upbeat African percussion – testament to the connections that Ivers sees between the divergent cultures’ musical forms.
Which isn’t a particularly unique thing in and of itself – the Bay Area’s Markus James performs similar transmutations with African string music and Americana blues (vocalist Tommy McDonnell of Ivers’ touring band, Immigrant Soul, was a member of the original Blues Brothers band with Dan Akroyd and John Goodman). What may be unique is the bubbling sense of happiness that is exuded from Ivers when she imparts her art upon a listening crowd – or jaded local journalist, who she gracefully includes in her comments regarding the musical resonance she finds in these cross-continent musical similarities. “It’s in our heart — you hear these grooves and it feels right,” she says.
Lost in the music, you might say. Just like Jimi, right?
All good heavy metal strives to challenge the listener, pushing buttons and boundaries. Some of its most successful incarnations make people downright uncomfortable, achieving escalating extremes of tempo, tuning, and tone.
Slough Feg is one of San Francisco’s most unique underground bands, an honorific that stems directly from its unique approach to the challenge of challenging. Eschewing thrash’s BPM arms race, death metal’s knuckle-dragging celebration of “brutality,” and black metal’s dissonant, low-fi navel-gazing, the quartet (now two decades or, if you prefer, five drummers old) manages to discomfit with an unlikely tool: melody. New album The Animal Spiritswas released Tues/26 on Profound Lore Records.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SJCdqguiyk
Bursting with major-scale chord changes, Celtic-folk influences, and vocal lines that make the tautological adjective “sing-song” suddenly useful, the band’s music is resolutely unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. Some of the heavy metal staples are present – the acrobatic drumming and soaring, dual-guitar harmonies, for example – but that’s where the easy descriptions end.
The Animal Spirits‘ song titles evince an ecclesiastical theme, which is made immediately apparent in the music – album-opener “Trick the Vicar” rampages through two minutes of triplet-driven NWOBHM wordplay, all of it pertaining to clergy. “Out of the frying pan/into the Friar” is but one of many examples.
Though the lyrics are a bewildering mix of the high- and lowbrow, a strand of gleeful silliness is apparent throughout, even when Slough Feg tackles weighty historical subjects like Martin Luther (“The 95 Theses”), alchemy (“Materia Prima”), or trans-pacific feats of seamanship (“Kon-Tiki”). The Alan Parsons Project cover (“The Tell-Tale Heart”), conversely, is defiantly straight-faced. Closer “Tactical Air War” features a guest appearance by Bob Wright, vocalist in cult local metal band Brocas Helm.
No matter how frenzied the music around him becomes, drummer Harry Cantwell never seems to tire, and his versatility is a crucial complement to the band’s idiosyncratic arrangements. Bassist Adrian Maestas excels at the genre’s distinctive low-end gallop, though his forays up the fretboard are also a valuable addition to the sound. Guitarist Angelo Tringali is laden with responsibility, forming one half of the harmonic partnership that lies at the heart of the band’s music.
The complementary half is provided by guitarist-singer Mike Scalzi, who founded the band in his native Pennsylvania. Scalzi’s vaudevillian vocal delivery and incomparable songwriting approach are the defining elements of Slough Feg, and it is his desire to alienate people through melody that makes the band sound the way it does. A charismatic iconoclast, Scalzi has lately begun contributing to metal blog Invisible Oranges, promulgating his strong opinions with the help of a prose style he honed at his day job: teaching community college philosophy courses.
Check back in this space soon for an extensive interview with Scalzi, one of the few people in the world who can discuss Saint Vitus B-sides and use the word “ontology” correctly in a sentence, though, it must be said, not simultaneously.
Eff Arizona’s SB 1070! Maybe what this country needs is a little more immigrant punk to infuse some surly into the debate over who can hang with us in the land of the free and home of the brave. Gogol Bordello would be a good option: the gypsy rockers mainly hail from Eastern Europe, but their carnival of sound doesn’t break for badges. SFBG shutterbug Charles Russo was on hand last week to capture their nomadic fanfare.
In an age of endless crossover between most conceivable forms of music, it’s but small surprise that a Caucasian man from Virginia is making blues with West African witch doctors. What rarely gets discussed in these cross-ocean collaborations is the social aspect of the fusion. What did the artists eat for lunch the day they recorded that track? In what language was the “and-a-one” that started off the first take?
We had the opportunity to chat over the phone with Bay Area artist Markus James, who has parlayed his time with Malian string musicians into elemental blues tracks. You can hear them on both his new album, Snakeskin Violin, and at his live show (at the Ashkenaz, Fri/22) with The Wassonrai, who are West African musicians that rep for jam band track longevity – strains of which James says is indigenous everywhere from Mali to Jackson, Mississippi — into their already formidable blend of blues past and present. James said (and we’re paraphrasing here) that the secret to fusion collaborations all lies in your location-resonation, but that’s just his perspective.
San Francisco Bay Guardian:When did you first hear African music? Did you know right at the start the depths you would dive into it?
Markus James: I don’t know if anyone really knows what is going to take them. The lights really went on for me when I heard Ali Farka Toure. He played traditional West African music on the electric guitar and it came out sounding like John Lee Hooker. That was where I really felt the powerful connection between all the music I grew up loving: rock, and soul music, and of course blues music, and the connection between that and its ancient roots in West Africa.
SFBG: What did African music pick up in the United States to become blues?
MJ: The roots of blues music go way back, specifically to pentatonic [five note as opposed to our eight note system] music traditions there. Pentatonic music really resonates with what we think of as blues music. There is a direct correlation between what I call country blues, or old school blues music, and some of these music traditions that I’m talking about in West Africa. Not just the notes and the musical scale, but the groove, the rhythm. For example, in West Africa women are often pounding the millet for that evening’s food. The have this six-foot tall piece of wood – it’s like a mortar and pestle. Another woman, or a girl, is scooping it back underneath so that the wood hits the grain. They get these rhythms going that are like goom-chack-goom-chack. Then people start playing on calabashes with this rhythm, and the rhythm is virtually identical to what we call the shuffle rhythm that you hear in a lot of old blues music, Chicago blues music, and rock music. If you go over to West Africa and you start playing what we call country blues, people will just start playing along with it and they’ll say oh, that’s our music.
SFBG:On “I Won’t Let It” you perform spoken word over the music. Is there a legacy in African music of that spoken word tradition?
MJ: Absolutely. There’s a whole caste of artists called griots. Their specialty is preserving history through story-songs, but also singing praise songs to whoever’s in power at the time. They will break into long passages of rhythmically chanted tone-poem language. That’s all there.
SFBG: You do a lot of cross-culture collaboration. Does the dynamic get tricky when you come from one of the wealthiest nations in the world?
MJ: Not really. I’ll give you an example. I was introduced to a 75-year old man who is the spiritual leader of the Holehoire religion in Timbuktu, Mali. He is what we would call a healer, or in older parlance, a witch doctor. He is like a medium, and his whole role in the community is to communicate with the jinn, their spirits. His instrument is a gourd with the skin of a river snake stretched across it, the string is horse hair. He has a whole repertoire of melodies and rhythms that he plays, the purpose of which are to call certain spirits for certain purposes, to ask for rain, or to ask for good luck, a million things.
He came over to our adobe-walled house where I had my little set-up going and we started playing music together. I was playing guitar and he was shifting back and forth between his two instruments, and he would sing a little line and I would sing something. I told him, I’m making a recording in blues, which is an African-American tradition, if this thing turns out pretty good I might put it on a CD – and I’m paying him, which he’s happy about. And I said before I do anything I want to bring it back to you because I know this is really – I don’t know how I said it to him but I’d say it to you, this is really deep waters. This is considered the pre-voodoo religion. He said sure, fine, great, I hope somebody enjoys it.
The next year I came back and I played him what I had made out of it, it’s this song on Snakeskin Violin, it’s called “Sundown Pearl” I played it for him and he started beaming and smiling and saying this is very good, this is going to be very successful. When I see him I give him something which anticipates the day when I might get some royalties from it. My friends that I’ve made there, it’s hard for them to understand that I’m not really selling a lot of CDs here but they’re very happy that there’s a revenue stream.
SFBG:You’re a vegetarian. I’m curious — I’m a vegetarian too – how is it to travel in Africa without eating meat?
MJ: They assumed at first that I must be deranged. It was absolutely inconceivable that someone could live without eating meat. Even the West African artists I perform with here in the US, it’s taken them awhile to accept it, even though they know other people here. I’m trying to think what it would be like to tell someone here. It’d be like saying I went down to the Bay and I just skipped across it to Berkeley.
SFBG: You can’t even do it with food — our society has such an individualized view of eating.
MJ: You know, I’m eating rice down there without the meat sauce, but I’m still in this communal meal zone. My friends will explain, he’s a vegetarian, and that means he doesn’t believe in eating meat, and he appears to be healthy. Something that I could not have foreseen was that I’d become a emissary for vegetarianism in West Africa.
People say, you come from a rich country, and they come from a poor country, so what is politically correct? I think when some people go to West Africa they resonate with it, they connect with it. You come to realize that what we think of as wealth and poverty is very relative to our perspective. Here you might say that we’re wealthy because we have a car, or a house, or roads that allow you to go 60 miles per hour. What we have may not necessarily translate into what they would consider to be joy, happiness, abundance, peacefulness. They’re certainly not stuck in traffic jams and trying to make mortgage payments. We might be looking at a little of a joy deficit and over there they have a happiness surplus. I know that’s simplistic, but that’s my perception.
Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard has had one helluva year. He and his bandmates released their highly-anticipated LP One Life Stand in February and took a massive risk by going for a more streamlined, cohesive sound.The gamble payed off: the disc has received generally positive reviews and the group has spent the latter part of 2010 criss-crossing the globe, including a Sun/17 stop at the Warfield. Just a few months removed from a triumphant American headlining tour that was supported by critical darlings the XX, the Londoners are back opening up for their longtime friends LCD Soundsystem and playing some of the American biggest gigs of their career. Throw in the birth of his first child and a hectic DJ schedule, the Guardian was lucky to grab a quick word with the Hot Chip main man at his home in London.
San Francisco Bay Guardian: Considering how high expectations for One Life Stand were, how are you feeling about it now that it’s been out for a while?
Joe Goddard: It feels good. It was a stressful process, but it seems to have gone down quite well. Honestly, when I get done making an album, I always get a little bit tired of it and want to move on to the next one, so I really haven’t listened to it much myself. That said, the shows have been going well, and people seem to really enjoy the new tracks in the live setting. I don’t exactly know what people’s opinions are, but I guess people have been enjoying it, which makes me happy [laughs].
SFBG: As it should! As far as the album goes, it definitely seems like the new record is different stylistically to the older material. The tracks seem a little more accessible and light than some of older tracks. Was that a conscious decision, or did it come about naturally?
Goddard: I think all of us wanted to make the tracks on this record a little more streamlined and coherent, you know, a little bit more polished. On some of the previous things we’ve done, there have been layers-upon-layers of synthesizers and really intricate rhythms and percussion, and those sorts of elements. I kind of wanted to do something that didn’t rely on hundreds of layers and strip back the songs so they sound more focused and simple. We also really focused on making the songwriting as strong as possible and for the production to stand up to the songwriting. That was really our aim. I guess I just felt like doing something that sounded more direct, a bit more easy to understand, just something a little bit more straightforward.
In my mind, we were kind of refrencing the great kind of pop stances that you would get in the 80s where you’d get these big kind of epic, emotional songs — like Womack and Womack or Fleetwood Mac — these big polished pop songs that are making a big emotional statements. I feel like those songs are coming back round again, and I guess we were just hoping that people wouldn’t get too pissed off for doing something like that [laughs]. Having done that, I’d really like to do something completely different and more unrestrained for our next project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaCZN2N6Q_I
SFBG: As far as the songwriting goes, how do you and [co-vocalist] Alexis Taylor break it up? Do you write the tracks together or by yourselves?
Goddard: There isn’t really a formula to it. Basically, either myself or Alexis will come up with something and just send it to the other one. From there, we’ll work on it together. Sometimes its almost a complete song, but sometimes it’s just a fragment of a song. It used to be that we would just sit in each other’s houses, but now its mostly just over email. As far as the lyrics go, generally whoever is singing a particular part tends to have written it. Sometimes I’ll write all the lyrics for a track, sometimes [Alexis] will write all the lyrics for the track, and sometimes we’ll collaborate. We never sit down and have a lyric writing session together where we come up with couplets or anything like that. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever even asked Alexis what the lyrics to a track of his mean. I can make informed guesses about it, but they’re very personal and sometimes actually quite secret.
SFBG: Speaking of lyrics, it seems much more emotionally direct than your previous work. Did that go along with your musical direction?
Goddard: Yeah. I think that most of the record is more emotionally direct. That is partly due to the fact that we were trying to do something that was direct, and we really tried to follow that through in terms of lyrical content as well. We just wanted to let the songs say what they wanted to say, instead of being obtuse or hiding the meaning. Also, it was how we were feeling as people at the time we were making the record. We very kind of focused on our relationships, our home lives, and families, so there’s a lot of love on this record.
SFBG: How are those new, more direct, emotional tracks going over live?
Goddard: Well, I’ve got to preface this by saying that I’ve had six weeks off from playing live, because I recently had my first child. When I come back to play this October, it’ll be my first gigs in two months. From the touring I did before, I really enjoyed playing things like “Brothers” and “Alley Cats” — not only because I wrote most of those tracks — but they’re more emotionally open than most of the stuff I’ve done in the past. Although I guess you could go back to a few of the tracks from the older records and say that, but these are the ones that are fairly explicitly about my relationships and personal life.
For example, “Brothers” is clearly about my relationship and love for my brother, but I also wanted that song to also mean the brotherhood of being in the band and the brotherhood of a group of friends. The song “Alley Cats” is incredibly personal, it mentions the death of my mother. It feels great to be expressing myself with the guys that I’ve been friends with for over 20 years, and I often get quite emotional performing those songs. Of course, it is fun to do the bigger tracks like “One Life Stand” and “I Feel Better”, but I’ve really been enjoying the gentler moments in the set.
SFBG: Obviously, yourselves and LCD Soundsystem have a long history with [Hot Chip multi-instrumentalist] Al [Doyle] touring with them. Are you looking forward to getting back out on the road with them?
Goddard: It feels fantastic. It’s just a really great way to end the year. They are really just great, old friends of ours, and it’ll be great to have a drink with them, you know, and it’ll just be really comfortable. Most of us are about the same age — well, I guess James [Murphy] and Pat [Mahoney] are a just a bit older. We toured with them in the UK about five or six years ago and really learned a lot about touring with as a live, electronic rock band. They taught us a lot on that tour. I’m very much looking forward to doing it again.
I feel like both bands are established enough now that we can both just have fun and do our thing. Whereas a couple of years ago, I was trying more to get people into the music, now I’m really quite happy with what we’re doing and where we are. This tour is going to be a celebration of what we’ve achieved. They should be fun shows where people are just going to want to dance and have a good time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wif8DAyXkVc
SFBG: A couple of years ago, you guys closed out some California shows with a cover of the classic “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Can we expect a new cover to sneak its way into your set?
Goddard: Actually, we have been talking about it and trying to figure out something to do. We haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I think they’ll definitely be a little surprise. Alexis has made a few suggestions and we’re trying to work something out at the moment.
SFBG: Real quick, can you just give us some background of your recently-released remix EP, We Have Remixes? How did you end up choosing the four tracks that you did?
Goddard: We really just tried to choose remixes that we’re really excited about by people that are either personally friends of ours in terms of Hot City, Osborne, and Caribou or people that we really admire. I think Todd Edwards is just a fantastic producer, who creates really musical, intelligent, danceable tracks and we love what he did. There’s obviously been some great other remixes, but this was just a collection of four that have come about over ht last few months that were so good it just made sense to put them out on vinyl.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylldl_jsMMI
SFBG: Speaking of vinyl, you also spend lots of your time DJing. What’s better an awesome gig or a great club night?
Goddard: Hmmm, it’s hard to pick one, because I really love doing both. I think an incredible live gig kind of beats anything, but the nice thing about DJing is, since its just you, if you have a good night and the crowd has a good time you feel like its a real personal achievement. I mean, it’s hard to pick between the two. I just love doing both of them.
SFBG: No worries. Lastly, since you are a DJ, what have you been listening to and spinning recently? Got any recommendations?
Goddard: The most recent things I’ve been listening to are just lots of new 12-inches. Really, just a lot of new UK dance music, like a lot of garage that’s been influenced by techno. There’s this new UK producer called DJ Naughty, who has a wonky garage record called “Goosebumps” that’s really funky and fun. Another DJ called Red Rack’em just released this 12 inch called “How I Program” which is really good. I’ve also been listening to a ton of Hot City. I’ve been DJing quite a lot, and that’s really what I’ve been focusing on.
SFBG: Great! I really appreciate your time, and we’ll look forward to seeing you at the Warfield.
Walking up to Bimbo’s and seeing “Jon Spencer Blues Explosion” sprawled across the marquee in big, bold font, I kept thinking how crazy it was that the group hadn’t performed in SF in over eight years. Though just coming off a five-year hiatus, JSBX has been spewing their sweaty mix of punk, blues, and good old-fashioned rock and roll for nearly two decades. With all three members of the New York trio well on their way into middle age, last Wednesday (9/29/10) was a reminder that these guys were doing their thing long before groups like the White Stripes or the Black Keys were even blips on the radar. And beyond that, it proved they haven’t lost a single step.
San Francisco’s Thee Oh Sees opened the evening with a solid set of psych-rock tunes. Sounding like a Nuggets compilation jam-packed along side-squeals of distortion and reverb-drenched vocals, the band set the table nicely for the evening’s headliners. Frontman John Dwyer led the charge, despite dealing with some mic and guitar technical issues. When the band allowed themselves to stretch their legs, like on a tension-building groove late in the set, their attention to dynamics and song structure really came to the foreground. I kept thinking how much better they’d probably sound while bursting eardrums at a dank basement party, but the more posh confines of the Bimbo’s stage still allowed them to get their point across.
Throughout a nearly two-hour set, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion struck a perfect balance between the fragmented, lo-fi blues-rock deconstruction of its early material and the more accessibly polished version found on later albums. As Spencer and Judah Bauer traded off beefy guitar riffs, it became clear why these guys have never needed a bassist. Spencer’s voice sounded just as awesome as on record, and came complete with his trademark rockabilly-style slapback effect on the mic. Drummer Russell Simins was an animal behind the kit, keeping clockwork-perfect time while maintaining patterns as hard-hitting as they were tactful and funky.
My favorite aspect of the show, however, was the way the set was structured. The band went from song to song with a sense of reckless abandon, one song starting immediately after — or segueing into — another. Only Spencer’s pauses to yell “Blues Explosion!!!” (I swear he must’ve uttered those words 75 times) into the mic broke up the flow now and then. At times, a whole song wasn’t even played to completion before the band would suddenly change gears and start playing something different altogether. It all hung together wonderfully — especially during a particularly memorable transition from “Wail” into 2002’s Plastic Fang highlight “She Said” — and brought across a sense of JSBX’s early reputation for wild spontaneity. Other highlights included early hit “Afro” and Bauer taking over vocal duties for “Fuck Shit Up.”
After blowing through close to around two-dozen songs, the set unfortunately lost some momentum during a 30-minute encore. But with eight years between San Francisco sets, it’s tough to blame JSBX for wanting to get their kicks in as long as they could.
Nine hundred thousand people and over 70 bands braved the drifting fog banks for this weekend’s 10th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. With a crowd that size, you have to think logistics. So at my interview with HSB bankroller-birthday boy Warren Hellman well before the madness, I asked who were the up and comers to look out for. I chicken-danced our way through Speedway Meadows accordingly.
“The Ebony Hillbillies,” Hellman told me, chuckling over lead singer – and as the band’s press kit explains, “bones” of the group — Gloria Gassaway’s penchant for abrupt audience interaction. The HSB performance would be its first in the Bay Area, and Hellman was happy to have been its means of infiltration, particularly for Gassaway’s no-nonsense stage presence. “She’s quite a woman,” he said.
Quite a woman indeed. the Hillbillies, hailing from Jamaica, Queens, are helping to sustain the tradition of African-American string bands that started with the genre’s inception in the Appalachians in the 1920s. Black pioneers in the music can seem ironic now, particularly at events like Hardly Strictly where the audience is majority white.
But so it goes — and some of the weekend’s most exciting shows flew from the fiddles, banjos, and diddly bows of black groups like the Hillbillies and Carolina Chocolate Drops, firmly establishing that bluegrass (and neo-bluegrass, and string bands, and jazz, blues, rockabilly, country, rock ‘n’ roll, everything else that falls under “hardly) doesn’t have to be just for the honkies.
“I love making the audience have a good time. You come to see the show, you want to be entertained, but you also want to enjoy yourself,” Gassaway tells me when we catch up with her after the group’s set on Friday.
Sporting matching moccasins with fiddle player Henrique Prince, and with purple feathers threaded into her hair, the ebullient Gassaway exchanged my compliment on her flair with an insight into her cultural heritage. Although they were born with blood from the Catawba tribe of the South and North Carolina borderland, Gassaway’s father instructed Gassaway and her siblings never to reveal the secret of their Native-American-ness to teachers at school so that they could avoid possible discrimination.
“He told us, tell them you’re from Mexico, or African-American, or something – just not Native,” she says. She says she held onto that learned denial until a trip to Europe, during which she realized the beauty of her background. Now Gassaway sports turquoise jewelry onstage while playing the string music that her Black and Native ancestors must have heard almost a hundred years ago. “I’m Native, and I wear my heritage proudly,” she tells me.
Although the Hillbillies’ current configuration experienced its debut in San Francisco this weekend, it was by no means the first time individual band members had played in the City by the Bay. Bass player William Saltner recalled his last time here in the early ’60s. Saltner, a two-time Grammy winner for songwriting – he wrote “Where is the Love?” and co-wrote “Just the Two of Us” – was working with Miriam Makeba, who at the time was exiled from her home in apartheid South Africa.
“We don’t play bluegrass, we play old tyme music,” Saltner clarifies backstage. “But we claim bluegrass in this crowd,” he continues with a sly smile.
That kind of genre-bending, always evident at HSB, continued throughout the three days of 2010’s festival. MC Hammer kicked off the weekend at his yearly performance at the middle-schooler’s show on Friday morning. Randy Newman, a newly bluegrass-friendly Elvis Costello, Robert Earl Keen, the Avett Brothers, Joan Baez, and Patti Smith all turned in stellar sets that could hardly fall into the “strictly” category. The diversity was reflected in the varying age demographics of the crowd, who for the most part eschewed the sanctity of the blanket that had reigned in years past – those faithful early risers that spread their tarps in front of stages in the small hours of the morning saw their space quickly infiltrated by standing room-only, stage-switching attendees.
Temperatures in the high 60s did nothing to stem the tide of music fans that flooded the peaks and valleys of Golden Gate Park for the free festival, but they did threaten the Hillbillies’ chances of starting up a dance party with their stomp-ready old tyme strings with their opening act at the Banjo Stage on Friday. “Are you cold?” Gassaway inquired from her seat on stage. “Because I sure am!”
The cold weather seemed to make it difficult to keep strings in shape – the action stopped a few times so that a stoic Norris Bennett could tune his diddley bow, and then later his banjo to perfection. But the challenge seemed to energize the group’s firestarter. Of course, it doesn’t hurt when you can pull Hellman onstage for a little unscheduled entertainment, which Gassaway managed to accomplish in a moment when she spotted the man enjoying the show from the stage’s sidelines.
Perhaps he had it coming for hyping Gassaway’s sass. Hellman did his best to represent the honkies though, bowing out his legs and wagging his elbows in a “broke-legged chicken” dance on her command. But for all his obedience, he’s got a ways to go as far as Gassaway is concerned. A fact which she let him (and us now) know in the intro of a song entitled “Big Fat Men,” an ode to the joys of obese lovers.
Which the wiry Hellman could hardly be described as. Yet. But he’s got a good coach. “I’ve been feeding him cheesecake,” Gassaway tells me. Blow out the candle first, Warren – number ten was a good year for Hardly Strictly.
Lovevolution’s daytime portion may be cancelled this weekend, but that’s no reason to sit this one out — as I wrote this week in Super Ego, there’s tons of great Love Weekend events, plus a bunch more happenings. Funz! Read about all the official Lovevolution parties still going on here, and check out the below for even more.
But first, I promised a look at the Silent Disco movement, which is finally hosting an official, non-underground event this weekend — so I can write about it without getting it busted, heh. Silent Frisco is taking place on Saturday afternoon at the brand new Jones bar, which has been pumping the fact that it’s a mainly outdoor venue in the heart of the city. (Sat/2, noon–10 p.m., $15, Jones, 620 Jones, SF. www.sunsetpromotions.com). You get special wireless headphones that pick up a signal broadcast from the DJ booth (with two DJ channels to choose from for maximum hubbub.) Although the idea’s been around a while, the actual movement originated at the Bonnaroo festival in 2007 and has toured the world since. SF’s DJ Motion Potion has been there from the beginning and he told me it’s quite bonkers. Wildly diverse-styled DJs for this installment are Jeffrey Paradise, Disco Shawn, Centipede, MoPo himself, and a special secret guest. Get into it.
WE & THE MUSIC: FELABRATION
Afrobeat and soulful house luminary DJ Said of Fatsouls Records is back with his awesomely deep monthly We & the Music party, this time featuring local decks master David Harness for a celebration of Nigerian legend Fela Kuti, as Nigeria celebrates its 50th anniversary. It looks so young! 222 Hyde is gonna have a major dance attack on its hands …
Surely this means that the neverending monthly retroland of New Wave City is the longest-operating club in the city? Join DJs Skip, Shindog, Low Life, Melting Girl, and more to sing along to all your favorites from the ’80s at a club that started looking back right when that decade ended.
Soooo too cool for school, but not so cool it freezes you out. This great indie club is back at a new location, bringing with it “the best in classic Britpop, Madchester, 90s Indie, Mod, dancey shoegaze, power pop, and 60s soul on the first Saturday of every month!” It’s an Oasis, everybody, with free champagne until they run out. DJs Aaron Axelson and Omar preside.
Hot fun — or at least tacky tchotchke shoppingand muscle man cruising — at this huge affair that streatches all up and down Castro from Market to your future trick’s house. Also music and dancing, with several stages (the line-dancing stage behind Castro Theater is my personal fave) and performances by Pepperspray, Adonisaurus, DJ Jim Hopkins, and many more. PLUS: You could win an Atlantis cruise from GayCities.com. O.M.G.!
Another long runner! This funky house and chill techno joint has moved around a bunch, but never lost its good-footin’. Celebrate a dozen with DJs Justin V. of !!!, UK’s Simbad, and residents Solar, Nikola Baytala, Conor, and Kwai LeCheif.
“This is the gayest thing I’ve ever done in my life!” laughed my friend Ricky Strawberry as he twirled around and around, unfurling lengths of tie-dyed cloth to Hi-NRG dance tracks from a live DJ in the sunshine. If you know Ricky Strawberry, that’s pretty damn sparkly pink unicorn in a rainbow thong bathing under a Splenda waterfall gay. In fact, it was the gayest thing anyone in my pinko posse had ever done, as well, and we had a ball. It was gay, it was amazing, it was gaymazing, and you should do it too.
It? Flagging in the Park, the summertime monthly gathering of fluttering human butterflies in the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park. I wrote about it in this week’s Super Ego nightlife column — and it happens for the final time this year on Sat/2, 1 p.m.- 4p.m.
Flagging — or flag dancing, wherein the dancer whirls around waving psychedelic-patterned, weighted pieces of fabric — has been around for several decades. I remember the first time I saw it was in the ’80s at a giant outdoor picnic in Detroit organized by Metra magazine, but it really took hold inside gay clubs during the ’90s, when circuit parties were on the rise. (Flag dancing of a non-gay-specific kind, using actual flags with poles, is an ancient art still practiced especially in Italy and New Orleans — and in Midwestern marching bands.) The exact gay origins are fuzzy — men dancing with giant fans at disco clubs were a common sight, and you will see lots of flaggers at the disco-celebrating Remember the Party event next weekend, for instance, which acts as a reunion for patrons of the classic Trocadero Transfer venue in the ’70s and ’80s.
Like many alternaqueers of my generation, flagging was a turnoff in the ’90s — it was too associated with annoyingly relentless circuit music, mainstream gym culture, and bad drugs in my mind. But that was a long time ago, and like a lot of things from that time, a rediscovery after old conflicts have died out puts things into a totally different perspective. (You don’t see much flagging in mainstream gay clubs these days, and the music at Flagging in the Park is a bit more fun and interesting than I thought it would be. For the October installment, the DJ is Steve Sherwood.) I was able to appreciate the art in a different context, and without prejudice. Flagging in the Park is a beautiful event, full of rich historical meaning. It welcomes everyone — there are also large contingents of hula-hoopers, poi-twirlers, and other talents — and has taken on a more spiritual aspect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me3rZ99ArbU
When I went in August (I had heard about it for months, and was encouraged to finally attend by my friend Steven Satyricon’s lovely writeup over at The Juice Box site) I was lucky enough to see the organizer, Xavier Caylor, be sainted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for his community work. And Flagging in the Park (FITP) really does bring in a bunch of donations for community organizations, as well as provide community healing. “Without grief, you can’t have joy,” said Xavier, referencing the spirits around us in the AIDS Grove. Xavier took over FITP 10 years ago, and he teaches a flagging class at Gold’s Gym in the Castro every Wednesday, 6 p.m.-8 p.m. He’s also several thousand degrees of hotness, yowza. I wanted to know more about how he got involved, and some of the spiritual aspects of the art. His story is below — and you should drift on by this Saturday afternoon to see for yourself. Xavier provides plenty of free flags to borrow, and flagging really is a bit of good exercise, I discovered.
XAVIER CAYLOR: “I picked up my first set of flags from a friend of a friend at a party on Will Rogers Beach in 1997. I was hooked and we proceeded to flag everywhere we could: at home, in clubs and circuit parties. I heard about FITP from a fellow that I met at a circuit party in Palm Springs; he told me of a community of good friends that met during the summer months at a park in SF. I managed to contact someone and planned a weekend getaway from So. Cal. to attend in July of 1998.
“In 1998 the recently dedicated National AIDS Memorial Grove was young, the flaggers met in the then newly planted fern grove and gravel circle on the far West side. Twenty people gathered on what was a truly magical day for me; I was amazed with the variety of people, flags, and energy there – like a kid in a candy store. I not only left my heart in San Francisco but gave it freely to a tie-dye artist that became the catalyst for me moving here in just three short months. For the next few years he and I co-produced the event, popularity soon crowded us out of the circle and into the meadow. I have been producing the event since 2001 less two years that a friend took it and moved it to Dolores Park. Originally the events were planned a few days in advance around a sunny weather forecast. In 2002 this changed, acquiring permits and making these outreach events for charity brought a whole new dimension to our gatherings.
“What does the event mean to me? It was and is a magical space where love was born and flourishes, where flaggers can come out of the clubs and into nature. Held in a place that was built out of grief, mourning, and reflection by something that devastated our community and for a few hours we pour color, love, celebration, and heritage carefully back while raising consciousness by giving back. It is the place that our tribes come together to socialize, bond, and strengthen community. It is also a place that people walking through the park can happen upon a surreal event, take it in for a minute, and leave having had the opportunity to try something new or just stop and take in the music and visuals before moving along to where ever it is they are going. I usually plan 3 or 4 FITPs per year between May and October — the last one was supposed to be the final one this year, but we had such a great crowd and great vibe that we decided to have one more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd3pX-Ys1wI
“If you’ve picked up flags you’ve most likely been asked by someone to show them how to do “it.” I’ve been showing friends since day one, taught at workshops in SF, NY, SD, and Dallas. I’ve been involved with group and solo performances, led people in tie-dye, and given away hundreds of flags while traveling to parties in Brazil, Australia, Thailand, Spain and the UK ,not to mention many cities around the US.
“About my class at Gold’s Gym: When I moved to San Francisco Club Universe, 177 Townsend, on Sundays was known as Pleasuredome and was a venue with a huge stage that flaggers flocked to weekly to play and share their art. It was a beacon to flag dancers on the West coast and beyond, introducing a steady stream of club goers weekly to the glowing fabric twirling in the U.V. flooded stage. It’s close in 2002 was a blow to the dance and flag communities. In 2007 I approached the management at Gold’s and asked if I could hold a weekly space for flaggers to come and practice – I was envisioning a free space that I would hold for a year with the purpose of re-energizing my tribe and reviving that weekly space. Troy at Gold’s Gym enthusiastically offered me a position and added the class to their Group X fitness program – I’ve been teaching Wednesday nights since. It is a place that people that have never flagged can come and learn – I have flags for use and set up black lights to make them come to life. The community comes to practice, play and socialize. I support new and old flaggers at the gym and outside of the gym by leading tie-dye classes/open studios so people can make their own flags. Weekly pre class discussions are opportunities to share history, personal stories and current events. Other flow toys (like poi and fans) show up from time to time and I support them if and when I can.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC4qFjeSTvg
“The group of guys that started FITP in 1996 shared a common experience, they had all gone to a week long experience in consciousness building in San Diego called the Miracle of Love which used active meditation techniques developed by Osho Rajneesh. Those flaggers came together in 1998 to bring those techniques to the gay community through a weekend seminar that is still going strong called the ‘Men’s Inner Journey.’ It was through delving deep into the techniques of active meditation that I realized what a spiritual event flagging is. Though people don’t usually make the connection between flagging and meditation, there is a point when the body and mind are so engaged that in the exuberance of the dance the mind is set free to a place of stillness. I believe that meditation something lacking in our lives and something we need to recharge our spirit and connect with our soul.
“Flagging is a visually appealing dance that has lived primarily in the gay community for the past 40 years. It touches on spirituality by being an alternative form of meditation palatable for people on the go. I am proud to be one of the many that keeps this art form flourishing by holding the space to pass it to the next generation of artists. www.flaggercentral.com is a great resource for our community.”
Purposely constructed anonymity as a reaction to this supposed Internet Age of Information is by now pretty passe in music circles (cf. Silver Columns, jj, Burial). So some may have rolled their eyes when future dubber Clubroot went that route with his first releases, even though the music was intellectually sensuous and the first full-length release received raves from Dubstepforum to Pitchfork.
Indeed, it seemed that Clubroot was following a little too closely in Burial’s footstep — no photos, no live sets, no given name — yet the music was tweeked slightly from that brainy dubstep god’s blueprint and showed a unique promise. But by now we’re all trained for the big, and in most cases anticlimactic, reveal. Since Clubroot’s been promoting a second album on Portland’s LoDubs label, he’s come out as 25-year-old Dan Richmond of St. Alban’s, UK, and is hitting the road for some live shows — ditching the reclusiveness (even though only obscured pics of him exist, and I wonder if he’ll be disguised for his upcoming show at Triple Crown). All signs, however, point not to anticlimax but to dance floor swoon.
II MMX is a 2 CD set that contains much of first album Clubroot, but the newer stuff advances beyond earlier hyper-cerebral and sometimes too-gloomy intentions for a trip into the deep forest. Yes, tracks like “Orbiting,” “Waterways,” “Dust Storm,” and the unfortunately titled “Cherubs Cry” channel some good ol’ pan flute sounds, tablas, and disembodied choruses that may call to mind New Age label Wyndham Hill or groups like Deep Forest, Enigma, even Enya. This is not a kiss of death — there’s a Balearic-derived trend blowing through right now that’s excavating those once-tacky sounds and making something fresh with them. It’s a neat trick, quite pleasant, and Clubroot is pulling it off. Call it dubstep’s version of chillwave.
While he can still show some spooked-out dubstep teeth on tracks like “Whistles & Horns” and “Physically” (and in his live mixes, like the one above for the inimitable Mary Anne Hobbs), Clubroot’s forging ahead in the pursuit of the thing every critic is calling post-dubstep, but which none can properly define. Good for him. Pack up that warped urban sitar loop and lead us into the trees, Clubroot — whoever you may be.
(Reports from Seattle’s Decibel festival last week indicate that the live show’s a keeper, a LoDubs showcase that really stokes the diverse crowd. It’s not all ethereal — check out LoDubs head Jon AD’s killer lazer house-y set from the fest here. )
CLUBROOT With DJG, Djunya, and Jon A.D. Thurs/30, 10 p.m., $10. Triple Crown, 1760 Market, SF. www.triplecrownsf.com.
It is not everyday that a San Francisco Bay Guardian culture writer finds herself going for an interview in the Financial District. Something about the fumes of avarice making poor atmosphere for the creative process. But high above the Starbucks and town cars is the banjo-packed office of a rich man who puts on the best free bluegrass festival of the year. And so, for Warren Hellman and his Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (Fri/1-Sun/3), I braved the world of name tags and extravagant corner offices.
Much has been written on the avuncular nature of Hellman. He is an ex-president of Lehmann Brothers, and as chairman of Hellman and Friedman and founding partner of his own venture capital firm, falls just shy of Forbes’ 400 Richest Americans list. He’s a born and bred adherent to a downtown-centric vision of the city, but counts among his buddies union activists and some of the city’s well-known liberal muckrakers.
But I guess Hellman just likes what he likes. And after I’ve breached the security check-in that takes place in his megalithic office building’s lobby, traveled up to Hellman and Friedman’s well-appointed offices, chit-chatted with his amiable receptionist, and been installed in his office to wait for the man’s arrival from a meeting next door, I realize that central to this category is bluegrass music. His corner office is comfortably packed with stacks of banjos and guitars, a signed CD from Emmylou Harris that wishes him a happy birthday, a metal sculpture that wears aviator sunglasses and a white cowboy hat, thank you plaques from the Berkeley music venue Freight and Salvage, where Hellman is a keystone donor and acted as chairman for the club’s fundraising campaign in years past. It’s impossible to avoid the music in the room, indeed the music is the room
Hellman arrives shortly, limping slightly, but enthused at the prospect of our interview. I tell him it’s great to meet you, Mr. Hellman, an honorific he doesn’t cotton to – Warren it is. He’s wearing a long sleeve denim button down – a look he favors, judging from photos of him taken at different shows and events.
It comes as a shock to the system in this day and age, to meet a billionaire with progressive friends (or, in my case, a billionaire at all), an older man with tattoos who likes to talk glowingly of his trips to Burning Man ensconced in his skyscraper office above the downtown grid. “There’s no fights there!” he tells me of the desert art festival. “Sure, there’s lots of pot, but there’s no violence.” Warren perhaps falls into the eccentric rich guy archetype, but the philosophy inherent in his personal pastimes at times seep here and thre into his politics, at least sporadically. He’s the kind of guy that will endorse the installation of a massive underground parking lot in Golden Gate Park, yet still support closing down the streets that access said lot so that Sundays amongst the trees and museums can be car-free affairs.
So first for the obvious question: why bluegrass, Warren? “People like to ask these ethereal questions,” the man muses in response. I realize quickly that Hellman pulls few punches, answering questions quickly before detouring into favorite stories that more or less illustrate his point. He’s a good talker. “Why do you like bluegrass – why do you like smoked salmon?”
Fair enough, but why choose to spend your birthday putting on three days of music for the riff-raff (besides the obvious PR bonanza it affords the businessman)? With this query, the billionaire’s eyes alight with a thoroughly unmonetized joy. “It’s the single most fulfilling thing – this is as close to heaven as I’m gonna get,” Hellman says. “To be able to give something that’s really fun to a lot a people that seem to have the same love it as I do… it’s just really fulfilling. And if I could hang out with anyone in my life, it would not be the president of Lehmann Brothers and Goldman Sachs.”
Hardly Strictly seems to be at its a place that allows Hellman to mingle with people outside the financial business. He’s endowed the festival to continue at least 15 years after he dies. “I’d like it to go on more or less forever,” he says. His desire for meetings of minds across ideological, professional, and personal differences is evident even in the way he conducts our interview — which he treats as though he is meeting a friend for the first time.
Hellman’s typical routine for this weekend? “You could say what are the peaks of ecstasy,” he chuckles. He worries all week leading up to the event about the weather – this weekend’s sweaty days have perhaps precluded this part — attends the Friday morning MC Hammer (yes, Hammer’s a regular performer at the event) concert for middle schoolers, and then zips around from stage to stage in his golf cart throughout Saturday and Sunday, reaping praise by the untold hundreds of thousands that come to the park to check out the six stages of tunes provided by Hellman each year.
Oh, and there’s the matter of his band’s performance as well. Hellman plays banjo and sings for the Wronglers, who will be taking the stage at Hardly Strictly at 11 a.m. on Sun/3. They debuted at the festival, and now play gigs all over the country. His travels with the band bring him to bluegrass events year round – when he’s not racing horses, another hobby – and into contact with some great potential acts for Hardly Strictly.
One such group, Hardly Strictly newcomers the Ebony Hillbillies, an all African-American outfit from Jamaica Queens, are Hellman’s personal don’t-miss pick for this weekend. He’s also looking forward to perennial favorites Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Emmylou Harris.
Our time is up, and Hellman’s assistant enters the room to tell him that his next appointment is waiting in the lobby, which doesn’t seem to enthuse him in quite the same fashion that our interview did. Or maybe he’s just good at pretending.
“Oh crap. Well, that was the most fun I’m going to have all day,” he says. Hellman exhorts me to set up another appointment with assistant to talk (“I barely got to find out anything about you!”) and insists on playing me a song about Hardly Strictly that was sent to him by a woman impelled to compose it by her therapist but finally it is time for me to vamoose. We sit convivially, tapping our feet to the beat, Warren every so often blurting out “You have to listen to this part!” Soon, he escorts me to my journey back away from the skyscrapers of the Financial District and returns to his tightly regimented meeting schedule. Moments after our parting, I catch a flat on my bike and am forced to hail a cab to bring me to a neighborhood endowed with such pedestrian things as a bike store. It’s less infuriating than it would have been sans Hellman meet up — I’m still satisfied by our morning time brush between two worlds.
OK there are like a million parties going one this week — and I’m just getting started. (Hurray first hangover of Folsom Street Fair weekend! That means I’m over the hump now, right?) Here are a few more good ones I couldn’t squeeze in to this week’s issue ….Whip it up!
EOTO AND MIMOSA
Decompression isn’t for a little while yet, but Fridays at 103 Harriet have been easing people back down from Burning Man in a proper wonky-dubstep style. 22-year-old beatsmaker MiMOSA, who just released intriguing “space age psychedelic bass” EP Silver Lining, joins live band Eoto, whose style I think of as electronic fusion, using jazz techniques (and live drummer) to bring laptop generated jams to life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW-rCbix41g
Fri/24, 10 p.m.-4 a.m., $20. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com
CHASER
She didn’t make the cut of our Hot Sluts, but my favorite drag queen whore Monistat (“hate to love her, love to hate her”) is having a grand birthday party on Saturday evening at the EndUp, with a slew of local drag luminaries — Ambrosia Salad, Faux King Awesome, Downey — performing songs by her favorite band Goldfrapp. With DJ duo Stereogamous in from Australia.
Sat/25, 5 p.m.-10 p.m., $5. The EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF. www.theendup.com
COCKBLOCK FOLSOM PARTY
The fashion-forward queer girl (and friends!) club that brought us the actual, hilarious Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber party hits you oh so good with some progressive pop and fun mashup dancing. Guardina Bestof the Bay “Best DJ” Nuxx and awesomely talented DJ Party Ben do it up. Spanin’ photobooth! Dress kinky!
Longtime readers of my column — and people who just plain see me freaking on the streets — know I’ve been bananas for the cumbia nueva movement, most prominently represented by Buenos Aires club Zizek and its label, ZZK. One of the best acts on that label, nutty duo Frikstailers, is gonna be at the Red Devil Lounge on Monday, and it’s gonna be an air-horn blast — the club will be turned into a West Coast version of Zizek, so expect some serious Buenos.
Kele (formerly Kele Okereke) played an invigorating, dance-oriented, and quite tipsy set at Mezzanine, mixing songs from new album The Boxer with hits from his other act, Bloc Party. Best of all, he stripped down quite early in the set, leaving the mixed crowd panting for more.
You & Me, the Walkmen’s excellent 2008 album, showcased how strong the band could be while working within a mellower, more plaintive framework. Not that they’d ever been entirely void of it before, but that album’s wistful horns and lyrics dripped with melancholy that hardly let up. Early publicity about its follow-up, Lisbon, hinted at the group’s desire to revisit some of the more raucous material they toyed with on earlier albums and then fully succumbed to on 2006’s track-by-track cover of the Harry Nilsson/John Lennon album, Pussycats.
Inspired by the Memphis Sun Studio sound of the ’50s, Lisbon was written off-and-on during various trips to the Portuguese title city and then recorded in Philadelphia and New York City. The final product is an album of 11 songs (whittled down from a whopping 28 they recorded) that confirm the Walkmen’s status as one of the most consistent rock bands working today. To think these guys were initially lumped in with the wave of awful one-off bands ripping the Strokes in the early part of last decade is laughable now.
But is Lisbon the overhaul in style that advance word suggested? Well, yes and no. Standout “Angela Surf City” alone rocks harder than pretty much the entirety of You & Me. It also gives drummer Matt Barrick—the band’s secret weapon, in my opinion—a chance to attack his kit with a ferocity not heard since “The Rat” from 2004’s Bows + Arrows. Elsewhere, “Woe Is Me” is the Walkmen at their breezy up-tempo best, while “Follow the Leader” makes a lot of racket but unfortunately doesn’t really serve much of a purpose.
Ultimately, however, the sweeping, dreamy tracks again carry the majority of Lisbon. The appropriately titled “Torch Song” is a beautiful vessel for Hamilton Leithauser’s voice—a bourbon-soaked lovechild of Spoon’s Britt Daniel and early Rod Stewart. With its lullaby-like verses and old-fashioned backup harmonies, it’s also the most glaring example of the inspiration pulled out of those early Sun albums from the likes of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison.
Lisbon probably won’t be remembered as many fans’ favorite Walkmen album—it’s not as flashy as earlier recordings and it’s not quite as unified as You & Me. But when a band has created a catalog as front-to-back strong as theirs has become, picking favorites starts to feel a little ridiculous anyway.
