Live Shows

The searchers

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com
When there is no firm ground, the only sensible thing to do is to keep moving. Lester Bangs wrote that, but countless wandering souls have lived it since the first humans stumbled across the continents. Long after land bridges dissolved and the great cities of the world were mapped, San Francisco — the legendary land’s-end haven for dreamers, kooks, and hedonists — became a butterfly net for the world’s drifters. Prismatic crowds have come and gone through the decades, helping to grow one of the world’s great music scenes.

"There’s just a certain point where you realize that nothing is going to satisfy you all the time," muses Christopher Owens, one of two masterminds behind the SF band Girls. "The solution is to be a person who’s always looking for the next thing. Oscar Wilde said that the meaning of life is the search for meaning of life. But there is no meaning to life — it’s just never laying down and accepting your surroundings, even if they’re comfortable. It’s like the Rolling Stones song, "(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction." I think I’ve always felt like that, and always will be like that."

Girls, “Lust for Life”

Looking up from peeling the label off a kombucha bottle and blinking his big eyes, Chet "JR" White nonchalantly nods: "I’m really never content, hardly ever happy, but every once in a while I’m both. Everything’s about getting somewhere else, I think."

While most bands fade slowly or implode, ever so rarely one explodes into something transcendent because it’s hit a nerve or two and tapped into the human experience in a profound way. Girls is that kind of band. Owens and White have been around for years, playing raucous live shows while quietly perfecting their imminent debut LP, Album (True Panther/Matador). A collection of glam-pop with that genre’s flair for artifice, it also — unlike traditional glam pop — possesses an emotional authenticity absent from so much music being churned out today.

Owens and White first united as roommates in San Francisco, but their lives couldn’t have started out more differently. While White was playing in punk bands in his parents’ Santa Cruz garage and going to recording school, Owens was growing up as part of the Slovenian sect of the Children of God cult, where secular music was forbidden unless one of the cult’s adults decided to indulge the younger members’ desire to learn the occasional Beatles or 1960s folk tune.

Owens broke away from the Children of God at 16 to live with his sister in Amarillo, Texas. Everything the rest of us had heard a thousand times before we were teenagers was a revelation to him. "When I learned to play the guitar, I was still in the cult and I didn’t really know anything but their music," he says. "When I turned 16 and left the group, it was like the whole world was in front of me. I got the Cranberries, the Cure, Black Sabbath, Sinead O’Connor, Michael Jackson, and the Romeo + Juliet movie soundtrack, and I’d play them on my stereo in my room and learn them and play guitar. The next wave was pop music. When I turned 18, I had become an American teen."

Owens was quickly engulfed by the small town’s punk scene: "I threw away seven years of my life there. All I have is tattoos from Amarillo." He played in a few punk bands, the music drawing him in because it was "really angsty." But after a few years, he felt the itch to do something new. "There wasn’t really anything in particular that drew me to San Francisco," he says. "I made a commitment that I was gonna leave Amarillo on New Year’s Day in 2005. All my friends moved to Austin, which I thought was the lamest thing in the world. I wanted absolute change. I wanted to totally reinvent myself and leave all those people behind."

Shortly after he landed in the Bay Area, Owens was asked to join the L.A. band Holy Shit. "I only played in the band because I was totally obsessed with Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck," he says, referring to the band’s underground-hero founders. "I started to write these songs to impress them and to vent my feelings, but the main driving force was that I wanted to be like them so much. I kept thinking I’m gonna make something that’s gonna blow their minds. I wanted to make something really classic that everyone could say they liked."

And that’s what he did. Owens wrote dozens of songs inspired by his friends, ex-lovers, and San Francisco itself, and recorded them, guided by White’s keen ear for grandeur. After scrapping song takes recorded on a four-track, the pair spent money on a proper tape machine and used only a few microphones to keep Album crisp and clear.

"I like big, amazing sounding records," says engineering wizard and bassist White, who counts Wrecking Crew bassist Carol Kaye as an influence. "I hate lo-fi music. Early on, people would call us lo-fi and I would take it kind of hard. We were just attempting to make the best-sounding thing we could with what we had — as good as any big record that had a lot of money put into it. I always like records that are made under some sort of duress. I think those records are great, if you can hear it. When I hear ours, I can hear the moments that go along with the music."

With Album, Owens and White edge closer to timelessness than any of their San Francisco contemporaries. While much of the city’s rock scene is embroiled in a hot and noisy love affair with psychedelic garage music, the boys of Girls have come up with something different: classic melodic songs for a restless soul in search of freedom and purpose in this whirlwind world. It doesn’t hurt that behind Owens’ lyrical pearls one discovers lush and unadulterated arrangements and majestic Wall of Sound-esque moments.

Album‘s magnum opus, "Hellhole Ratrace," is a plaintive hymn about the urge to cut loose and live. It starts off with simple guitar strumming, which in turn is soon immersed in a mesmerizing swell of buried organ work, slow hand claps, and trilling guitars that elevates it into an anthem. "I don’t wanna die without shaking up a leg or two /I wanna do some dancin’ too," sings Owens. "I don’t wanna cry /my whole life through /Yeah I wanna do some laughin’ too / So come on, come on, come on, come on and dance with me."

This year has already been one hell of a ride for Girls, which now includes guitarist John Anderson ("He’s the best guitar player I’ve ever played with in my life," says Owens) and drummer Garett Godard. The group has been on tour nearly constantly for several months across America and Europe. For a pair of nomads like Owens and White, it seems like the perfect gig, at least for now. Both harbor dreams of being thrust into the canon with the rest of the greats, and that reality may not be so far off.

"I want to write a song that’s as good as "Let It Be" or "I Will Always Love You." I want to write a song that everybody in the world knows," says Owens, glancing at his bandmate.

"I just want to be one of those bands that becomes culturally ingrained, one of those bands that’s unavoidable," echoes White. "One of those bands that is larger than music itself."

Impassioned youth, existential wisdom, and stories of aching romance weave together to make Album a slice of true Californian pop that never stops hitting home. When you hear Owens’ voice, unshackled by fuzz or distortion, crooning about the fear of dying before ever accomplishing anything, you remember that you’ve felt the same way dozens of times too. And when he starts chirping, "I wish I had a suntan /I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine," on the sarcastic, ecstatic opener "Lust for Life," you want to drop everything and run through the streets to join him.

GIRLS

With Papercuts, Cass McCombs

Wed/9, 9 p.m., $14–$16

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(888) 233-0449

www.gamh.com

Daydream city

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the Bay Area’s labyrinth of low-lit warehouses, cramped house parties, and grimed-out dive bars, it’s a cacophonous tug-of-war for the three-chord crown.

This latter-day resurrection of traits from the late 1960s — the Sears Roebuck guitars; the off-key, offbeat attack; the onstage fearlessness — has brought many unpretentious all-for-one-and-one-for-all shows to the scene. Poised to snag a bit of the shiny rock ‘n’ roll royal headdress is Oakland’s Snakeflower 2, a trio whose blistering, bare-bones repertoire seems to spring newly alive from a dusty, attic-dwelling bin of decades-old abandoned vinyl.

Vocalist and bassist Matthew Melton’s lo-fi roots stretch — like the world’s longest amp cord — all the way back to his hometown in Memphis. There, he grew up playing in garage bands and jamming with prolific punk hero Jay Reatard.

Discontented with the Memphis scene’s lack of fire, Melton eventually put together a ramshackle, road-ready outfit that became Snakeflower’s first incarnation. The group played what Melton, a lover of subgenres, describes as "art punk non-songs." Moving his musical dreams and new band to California instigated a gift-and-curse scenario. "We decided almost overnight to go on tour," he says. "It was really ill-conceived. We did a full U.S. tour literally calling venues from the road, jumping on these bills and having pretty crazy shows along the way."

Snakeflower mark one had wilted by the time the group made it to San Francisco, and Melton’s bandmates stranded him in the city and left for Los Angeles. Nonetheless, he decided to stick things out and reform the band with two new members, drummer Billy Badlands and guitarist Tim Tinderholt.

"Where I grew up in Memphis, you can be guaranteed that no one’s gonna pay any attention to you," Melton says. "Here, there’s much more energy in the scene. Plus, being surrounded by so many great bands is a motivation to keep making great music."

It’s easy to hear what the California scene has done for Snakeflower 2’s live shows and recordings — the group’s aggression is undeniable. The late 2008 release Renegade Daydream (Tic Tac Totally) is steeped in the dire urgency of a fragile heart under pressure. It grooves hard, thanks to dagger-sharp hooks and vicious chord progressions, all registering at shit-hot speed to keep up with Melton’s nervy vocal swagger. "Memory Castle," the album’s single, pairs psychedelic tunnel-vision reverb with a rumination on lost dreams and the courage it takes to get them back.

Melton’s already looking in a new direction for the group’s next album. When his other brainchild, the smooth-punk outfit Bare Wires, gained popularity, Snakeflower 2’s gigs took a hiatus. But during that time, he devoted himself to writing fresh, epic material.

"I’ve actually been working in secret to write and record a 14-minute long cantata called ‘Forbidden Melody,’" he explains. "I had to set time aside to isolate myself [and] work with really pure ideas. [The new music] is something totally different, almost like a rock opera. I’m trying to go a little bit further, really trying to come up with something new."

While much of the local garage scene sticks to the ordinary and familiar. leave it to Melton and his mates to shoot the moon and score an album in the process.

SNAKEFLOWER 2

With the Vows, In the Dust

July 13, 9 p.m., $5 (day of show only)

Elbo Room

642 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com

Bicycle Music Festival

-
0

GATHERING Is it any surprise that the city responsible for Critical Mass would also have birthed the country’s largest 100 percent pedal-powered musical festival? We didn’t think so. Since 2007, a group of volunteers have been hosting this multi-location celebration of bikes, music, and sustainable culture — and we expect this year’s to be bigger than ever, with musical participants like Cello Joe, Manicato, Sean Hayes, and many more. The day starts early at 935 York St. for a Critical Mass-style bike parade (complete with a 2,000-watt pedal-powered PA system, of course) to Golden Gate Park’s Marx Meadow, where bands will play on the bike-powered, bike-hauled stage. Another cruise takes revelers to Dolores Park for a series of live shows starting at 3 p.m. The event officially concludes with another set of concerts — including the fantastically entertaining Tornado Rider (think cello metal) — at 8:45 p.m. But we’re pretty sure that after all the riding and playing, the city’s bike aficionados aren’t going to call it a night — so drivers, beware! And bikers, game on!

BICYCLE MUSIC FESTIVAL Sat/20, 8 a.m. Free. 935 York, SF. (415) 572-9625. bicyclemusicfestival.com

Bounce to this

-
0

superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Hold my hair, Bethany — things are gonna get wicked. The Bay’s set to undergo a massive new-bass invasion on Saturday, April 11, and I’m kind of freaking out about it, kind of having outfit trauma, and kind of fiending for a diet coconut juice. Is that postcolonialist?

Perhaps more pressingly: are the low-frequency freakinetics of abstract dubstep, turbo crunk, and future bass vanishing into the headphone red zones of download fanboys and nightlife intellectuals? I mean, has anyone figured out how to dance to any of this mind-blowing shit yet?

That will be one of the looming, booming nightlife questions as critical darlings Flying Lotus, Kode9, and the Bug rumble through Mighty with a gig tagged "The Future," and Ghislain "King of Bounce" Poirier storms the monthly Tormenta Tropical party at Elbo Room. No question, though: both events will melt your face, so pack yourself an extra and hop between them.

When it comes to dance floor poetics, Montreal-based producer, DJ, and mentor Poirier is the shrewdest of the bunch. The Ninja Tune artist has played it both ways from the beginning, tickling cerebellums with growling reveries and laser-chopped academic beats on some tracks, while on others pumping sharp dancehall grinds and grimy ragga as his guest vocalists strike demanding political poses. It’s this second, much more party-friendly "world riddim idiom" Poirier who’ll pop up at Tormenta Tropical, touring for his new Soca Sound System EP, a pulse-pounding glance toward the Trinidadian genre that includes the infectious "Wha-La-La-Leng" with MC Face-T.

And yet, despite Poirier’s intensely straightforward dance-driven live shows and steady stream of lean-and-mean mixtapes, like last year’s excellent Bring the Fire, he’s still mostly known in the States for his forays into glitch-and-sizzle future bass territory. That may be due to his pioneering work in tearing off the 4/4 beats straightjacket and commandeering homemade, bleeding bass lines to glue his ravenously global-eared sets together. Or it may be because people still have trouble seeing the Great White North as the glorious multicultural clusterfuck it is — they’d just rather slap an abstract label on it. Whatever. "Ideas are the best plug-ins," Poirier told Cyclic Defrost magazine last year — but he knows a free mind should be followed by a bumping ass.

In terms of real abstractitude, though, Flying Lotus, the Bug, and Kode 9 swim in the deepest of waters — and each traffics in his own delightful mental aquarium. L.A.’s FlyLo may still be drowning in positive press ink from his incredible 2008 release Los Angeles (Warp) but he hasn’t sacrificed any of his experimental chutzpah, chopping up hip-hop strains into turbulent, prismatic soundscapes. He’s also the smilingest DJ I’ve ever seen. London’s the Bug brings a throbbing, postapocalyptic edge to his dub creations, and his jazz background adds an ethereal sheen to his production style. Hyperdub Records owner Kode9, from Glasgow, is the most mischievous of the trio. His output aspires to a warped dubstep atmosphere that he likens to "drinking acid rain," but he also brings some much-needed humor to the mix — and reassuring connections to dance music’s past. The B-side of his new "Black Sun" single, "2 Far Gone," is a total rewiring of Adonis’ 1986 house classic "No Way Back" that dissolves me into a nostalgic grin.

When these three bass-purveyors passed through San Francisco last year — Lotus and Kode as part of the Brainfeeder Festival at 103 Harriet St., and the Bug at dread bass throwdown Surya Dub — they put in exquisitely thoughtful and uplifting sessions. Alas, they were mostly greeted with appreciative, hella-stoned nodding from the crowd. Only a few hardcore freaks had the gumption to truly take the floor. This time, I say make like the freaks and lose yourself to the beat in your head. The bass is only the basis. It’s up to us to fill in the bounce.

TORMENTA TROPICAL WITH GHISLAIN POIRIER

Sat/11, 10pm, $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo,com

THE FUTURE WITH FLYING LOTUS, KODE9 AND THE BUG

Sat/11, 9pm-afterhours, $20. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

Firestarters

-
0

"I’ve always been a serious musician," says drummer and multi-instrumentalist M.E. Miller, "so I hate to be thought of as some fool who just created havoc."

Miller’s old band the Toy Killers created plenty of havoc with their music, as showcased on the recent CD retrospective The Unlistenable Years (ugEXPLODE), which draws on live and studio recordings from their early 1980s peak.

Co-founded by Miller and fellow percussionist Charles K. Noyes in 1979, the Toy Killers created a squirming, clattering din that encompassed no-wave noise, free improv, and even the mutant dance music of downtown New York City peers like Material and the Golden Palominos. Their shifting lineup included such future avant-garde all-stars as John Zorn, Bill Laswell, and Elliott Sharp, as well as a post-DNA Arto Lindsay on guitar and vocals. But fairly or not, the Toy Killers were as notorious for their confrontational live performances as they were for their music. Miller was responsible for many of their live antics, which included a penchant for setting things on fire and igniting M-80s, dynamite, and other explosives.

There’s a Zen-like calm to the way Miller describes people’s reactions to his group’s brand of "anti-performance art." Asked how the outfit’s (literally) fiery performances went over with their Lower East Side audiences, Miller, speaking over the phone from his home in Alameda, flatly responds, "Not well." He recounts one gig at Soundscape in which audience members set up a barricade of chairs to separate themselves from the band.

Then there was an incident that took place at the Kitchen during an Elliot Sharp concert. "He just said, ‘At one point, Miller, I’m gonna turn to you, and you just make somethin’ happen,’<0x2009>" the drummer recalls. "So I just made an incendiary go from the drums straight up about six to eight feet. It just went ‘fa-foom,’ and I got all burned." The house lights came on, and the show was over.

"I think I probably pissed a lot of people off, but it was … purely for amusement. It was funny," he summarizes. Miraculously, no one, apart from Miller, was ever injured at the Toy Killers’ shows, and they never burned any venues down — an achievement that prospective show bookers might keep in mind.

The Unlistenable Years won’t cause your CD player to burst into flames, and there’s undoubtedly a visual element that’s lacking on some of the live recordings. But for the most part, the music holds up on its own, conveying a sense of near chaos that’s in keeping with their reputation as a live entity. In fact, ugEXPLODE label head and Oakland resident Weasel Walter didn’t know a thing about the band when he first encountered them in the late ’80s via Speed Trials (Homestead), a 1983 compilation that highlighted the band alongside Sonic Youth, Swans, Lydia Lunch, and the early Beastie Boys, who once opened for the Toy Killers.

The Toy Killers’ contribution, "Victimless Crime," caught Walter’s attention due to Noyes’ peculiar style of drumming. "I was really into free jazz drums and stuff like that," Walter said by phone. "But he seemed to approach drumming from a point of total disruption…. It’s like the Shaggs or something." (On his bandmate’s unique drumming style, Miller marvels, "It sounds like there is a rationale, but I’ve never been able to figure it out…. You either have to be incredibly bright or severely retarded to play like that.")

Walter filed away the band name in the back of his mind for nearly two decades. Miller, meanwhile, had been off the radar for years: it turns out he’d been playing in a wedding band since moving back to the Bay Area in the early ’90s — he grew up in Sunnyvale and later attended UC Santa Cruz — before finally connecting with fellow Bay Area improvisers like Henry Kaiser and ROVA’s Larry Ochs a few years ago. When Walter found out, he sought out Miller and persuaded him to hand over all the old tapes he could get his hands on so he could put together their long-overdue "debut" — some three decades after their first live shows.

Not content to stop there, the group — or at least a new incarnation of it — is working on a new album that showcases founders Miller and Noyes along with newcomers Kaiser, Walter, and others. They plan on unveiling a new live Toy Killers later this year, although the elusive Noyes, who still lives on the East Coast, probably won’t be involved. Still, Walter is excited at the chance to work with these battle-scarred veterans. "I feel like part of my job is to encourage these older guys to not be in the middle and not hold back," he says. "People who have counted these guys out for one reason or another are not gonna be able to count them out at all."

nowave.pair.com/ugexplode

3 Inches of Blood

-
0

PREVIEW Keyboard neckties. ‘Ludes. Neck beards. Meerkat racing. The 2005 Dan Alvarez would have told you that all of these things have a better chance at becoming popular with kids than the dork fest that is power metal. This is coming from a guy who spent his formative years listening to groups like Rhapsody, known for their symphonic epics about goblins and dragons and their uncanny ability to induce crippling bouts of prolonged virginity. So you could imagine the 2008 Dan’s surprise when groups like Dragonforce, Dream Evil, and Protest the Hero began headlining shows and moving units with the very same operatic (read: cheesy) vocals and bombastic (read: indulgent) qualities I hold so dear.

One of the undisputed leaders of power metal’s shocking renaissance is Vancouver sextet, 3 Inches of Blood. The armor-wearing, orc crushing — they actually have a song called "Destroy the Orcs" — miscreants craft technically impressive, melodically sophisticated captivating battle anthems. They are led by a twin-vocal attack, highlighted by the aptly named Cam Pipes, who recalls a young Rob Halford and who is seriously into larping. Pipes’ glorious, shrill falsetto is backed by the brutal, guttural barks of second vocalist Jamie Hooper. Though Hooper had to take the year off due to throat problems related to his intense screaming, guitarist Justin Hegberg makes sure the band retains its steel by effectively stepping in for Hooper. The group’s frenetic live shows seem guaranteed to go over well at the metal-friendly Slim’s. Sharpen your broad sword, tap your mana, and get ready for war!


3 INCHES OF BLOOD With Toxic Holocaust and Early Man. Tues/13, 8 p.m., $15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 255-0333, www.slims-sf.com

Holiday Guide 2008: Seasonal sounds

-
0

› culture@sfbg.com

Thanks to the continued explosion of musically-oriented Web sites and blogs, you’ll probably be even more inundated than usual this year with "best of 2008" lists come January 2009 — far too late for your tuneful shopping needs. So we’re cranking one out early, organized by affinity groups — some slightly imaginary, some more concrete — in an attempt to cut through the loud hype and scattered bombast while amping up your gift-giving options. At the end is a suggested list of delectable upcoming live shows, if you’re more ticket-oriented.

FOR THE RETRO-FUTURIST DISCO HEAD


Electronic music is a good example of how griping about the state of a scene can sometimes release unexpected creativity. Syclops, nominally a Finnish fusion trio, is the latest we’ve heard from Maurice Fulton since his quasi-breakthrough electro-spazz project Mu. I’ve Got My Eye on You is the longest in a line of pretty epic wins for the label DFA and for electronic music generally: radiating out from "Where’s Jason’s K," the 10 tracks that make up the album tear ass from pharma’d-out Detroit techno to dreamy, lush deep space jazz.

Also: Shed‘s Shedding the Past (Ostgut Tonträger) if your giftee’s the type who longs for the halcyon days of high minimal glitch; Nôze, Songs on the Rocks (Get Physical) if his or her affection for tech house precision is matched only by a love of closing-time sing-alongs and Waitsian growls.

FOR LONG-LIMBED INDIE SCRAPPERS


It would be hard to write enough about "Black Rice," the best song on Canadian indie quartet Women‘s self-titled debut on Jagjaguwar. Starting from an absurdly unambitious guitar line, the song blossoms into something wildly and fiercely beautiful. It could be the impossible falsetto of the chorus, or the way the rhythm section comes unglued from the vocals and guitar, but the song condenses what makes the rest of the album — noisy, lo-fi interludes and all — so engaging. Everything seems held together provisionally on a song like the heartrending "Shaking Hand," but the chorus snaps into place with rubber-banded eagerness.

Also: Abe Vigoda‘s Skeleton (PPM) for its irrepressible youthful longing and controlled thrash; Benoît Pioulard‘s Temper (Kranky) for twining the threads of noise and surprisingly pretty, almost adult-contemporary songwriting into a neither/nor album that’s perfect for gray days.

WEIRDOS ONLY


Although more structured than anything they’ve done before, Saint Dymphna (Social Registry), the newest long player from New York’s mystical vibe crew Gang Gang Dance, still arrives packed with the otherworldliness that characterized its excellent predecessor, God’s Money (Social Registry, 2005). Three years in the making, the album itself is nothing if not well paced: the transitions between songs and the gradual build of rhythmic energy make it less kin to trad rock albums than to DJ mixes. When the swells crest, as on "First Communion" and "House Jam," electronic gurgles and processed sounds that might otherwise sound like trying too hard are transformed into pure pith: they’re as inviting and faceted as a just-split pomegranate.

Also: Paavoharju‘s Laulu Laakson Kukista (Fonal), since these Finnish folksters cover the dance floor with silt on "Kevätrumpu," bust some desperate torch techno on "Uskallan," and spend a number of other tracks sounding stuck between pagan classical radio and deteriorating field recordings; Rings is a trio of new primitives formerly known as First Nation — on Black Habit (Paw Tracks), the outfit sounds like it’s gotten into the Slits’ basements and started making music dictated from beyond.

POST-HIP-HOP BASS SEMANTICS


A DJ mix that stands alone as an album is a rare thing, but leave it to Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ/rupture, to make one, as he has with Uproot (Agriculture). Deeply, er, rooted in the bass plate tectonics of dubstep and cut with the finest in eclectic samples, ranging from experimentalist Ekkehard Ehlers to lazer bass don Ghislain Poirier, Uproot rolls deep with dubbed-out ambience, but DJ/rupture is just as happy to turn things upside down, as when he plunks down Ehlers’ gorgeous string loop, "Plays John Cassavetes, Pt. 2," around the mix’s halfway point. And if bangers of the future don’t sound like "Gave You All My Love (Matt Shadetek’s I Gave You All My Dub Remix)," which subs out dub’s organic space for Fisher-Price primary-color contrasts that split the brain evenly in two, I’m not sure it’s a future worth living in.

Also: for the more historically minded, Ragga Twins have released Step Out! (Soul Jazz), a retrospective that collects the work of a duo widely considered to be the inventors of that dubstep ancestor, jungle; Tank Thong Mixtape (Weaponshouse) by Megasoid happens to be free, so spend some money on a nice CD-R, decorate it with glitter, and watch exasperation turn to glee when your loved one blows out his or her speakers with this beast.

HEAVY STUFF


One of the year’s most life-affirming releases comes from a band called Fucked Up; its Chemistry of Common Life (Matador) is grounded in hardcore, and has hardness to spare, but makes its biggest impact when it lets a flute solo emerge from the tempest. With his basso profundo growl, singer Pink Eyes can sound like he’s gargling hot dogs, and harnessed to a song like "Black Albino Bones," with its cooing melody — the closest thing to pop the seven-year-old band has attempted — it makes for an unexpectedly moving juxtaposition. But the group’s real skill comes from mining the void left after the tribal affiliations of high school fall away; "Twice Born"<0x2009>‘s refrain, "Hands up if you think you’re the only one," could be the year’s Miranda July–esque rallying cry.

Also: if you’re wondering what Mick Barr’s been up to post-Ocrilim, the short answer, witnessed on Krallice‘s Krallice (Profound Lore) is black metal; Peasant (Level Plane), an all-encompassing slab of darkness by Baton Rouge–based Thou, is closer to trad sludge than to the transcendent drone of Sunn 0))), but no less impressively bleak.

SHOWS


The holiday season is not always a great time for shows (other than several Nutcracker incarnations), but for folks who want to gift live music this year there are plenty of sonic distractions. On the heels of Everybody (Thrill Jockey), its latest bout of sophisticated jazz rock, the eternally springlike Sea and Cake will make an appearance at Great American Music Hall just in time to counteract your seasonal affective disorder (Dec. 2, 8 p.m., $20). Sebastien Tellier rolls with the Daft Punk posse, so it’s no surprise that his music marries spot-on genre mimicry and a native sense of melody; check out the video for "Divine," in which the Beach Boys–meet–Lio jam turns into a global karaoke marathon of Tellier doppelgängers (Mezzanine, Dec. 4, 9 p.m., $15). There’s no rest for local workhorses Tussle and Jonas Reinhardt — they’ll be bringing their peculiar hot-cold takes on krauty electronics to the Hemlock Tavern (Dec. 6, 9:30 p.m., $7). And even if her music is not your cup of tea, Aimee Mann’s 3rd Annual Christmas Show should be a nice shot of seasonality in a city that tends to avoid big displays of Christmas spirit; consider it a good sign that Patton Oswalt, the stand-up comedian most deserving of your attention, will take part (Bimbo’s, Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $40). His looks call to mind a peripheral character from The Catcher in the Rye, and his preternaturally gentle music is specially designed not to hurt babies’ ears, but the earnest beauty of Jonathan Richman‘s songs might pierce your heart (Great American Music Hall, Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $15). Bearing a post-hardcore pedigree like whoa, San Francisco’s own Crime in Choir moves gracefully beyond its members’ backgrounds — At the Drive-In, the Fucking Champs — into (surprise!) instrumental prog territory (Hemlock Tavern, Dec. 13, 9:30 p.m., $6). *

Click here for more Holiday Guide 2008.

You can’t kill them

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

They’re on the fringe, and they don’t plan to leave it. Though mostly overlooked in their home country of New Zealand during the last two decades, the free-rockers in the Dead C will be the first to tell you that they’re not terribly bothered.

"We are not seen as plausible cultural ambassadors," stated guitarist Bruce Russell by e-mail from his home Down Under, citing the failure of the "laughable New Zealand media" to cover what’s artistically adventurous as one of the reasons his three-piece rarely can make it abroad to play shows. One would hope that Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats would be more seriously considered for Kiwi government arts grants: indie rockers of yesteryear and the narcoleptic noisemongers of today repeatedly cite the Dead C as an influence on what they do. Just look who’s opening for them on their upcoming US gigs: Thurston Moore (who hosted them at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ "Nightmare Before Christmas" in England two years ago), Blues Control, Wolf Eyes, Six Organs of Admittance — all serious contenders on the experimental circuit, and all projects that garnered something, aesthetic or emotional, from the Dead C’s history of desperate clatter.

The Dead C got its start in Dunedin — members are located in Port Chalmers and Lyttelton today, about 225 miles apart — when the self-designated "AMM of Punk Rock" released its 1988 full-length debut, DR503, on Flying Nun, the infamous home to pop bands like the Clean, the Chills, Tall Dwarfs, and the Verlaines, for whom Yeats once drummed. A pop group the Dead C are not, but for an ensemble so ardently free-form and unmarketable, they’ve done nicely.

"The irony is, we’ve done very well in commercial terms by being ‘uncommercial,’" Russell explained. "I don’t know many of our contemporaries in New Zealand who are in better career positions than us. We make money. We can make any kind of record we like."

Much of their international clout was forged in their ’90s relationship with the Siltbreeze label, run and recently revived by Tom Lax of Philadelphia, with whom they released some of their most acclaimed discs, including 1992’s Harsh ’70s Reality, 1995’s White House, and 1997’s Tusk. This period saw them create what many consider to be their most vital material, flirting with darkly catchy riffs while always doggedly blazing space for noisy, alien buzz and scrape. Secret Earth is their brand new release, shortly following last year’s Future Artists (both Ba Da Bing) and recorded over two days, six months apart. Morley’s eerie exhale oversees a stupor-inducing slow grind that renders track titles a useless roadmap for proceedings: after a few minutes with the Dead C, one won’t notice such trifling details as the stops, starts, and riffs anymore. They are, after all, masters of mood. Morley and Russell’s guitars-at-odds and Yeats’ distantly mic’d drums consistently scare up an unsettling, deconstructed blues-groove that makes clear the precedent for Sebadoh’s stoned angst cassettes.

Regardless of influence, the upcoming US dates mark only their third outing to the States since getting together — damn! What do they do on the rare occasion they’re on a stage? "We approach live shows quietly, without undue fuss, so we can take ’em by surprise and wring their necks before they can fight back," Russell wrote, pointing out that there’s nothing static about a Dead C track — other than that staticky sound.

Any fan with the whoops and feedback screeches of "Driver U.F.O." committed to memory will hear something that sounds rather otherwise if that song shows up in the set. "We are ‘fully improvised,’ though every now and then we’ll attempt an item from our back catalog," Russell continued. "But we never, ever practice them."

This back catalog is becoming more available thanks to Ba Da Bing, their US label for the past few years, which will be reissuing DR503 and 1989’s Eusa Kills (Flying Nun) on vinyl. The band is, according to Russell, also hoping to reissue its pre-1990 work next year (working title: Complete ’80s Reality). Immediately available, however, is the tour-only 12-inch, which includes recent live recordings, and gives an added incentive to check ’em out this week.

Why not? It’s hard not to be charmed by their passive-aggressive, cavalier mode of operation. "We just do what we do and dare people to ignore it," Russell offered. "Which they duly do, and we could not care less."

THE DEAD C

With Six Organs of Admittance

Thurs/16, 8 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

Download festival

-
0

PREVIEW If there was an contest for the most cringe-inducing festival name ever, Download would win handily. This is the future, I guess: international corporations sponsoring Wal-Mart-style festivals that pack as many bands as possible into oversize, out-of-the-way suburban locations with deals that are hard to ignore. Aye, there’s the rub.

Scottish noise punk pioneers the Jesus and Mary Chain headline the seductively-priced one-day throwdown. Reformed last year, brothers William and Jim Reid became infamous in the early days for their too-wasted-to-play live shows, standing with their backs to the crowd during their 15-minute sets. But with newfound sobriety and a slew of recent festival dates under their belts, JAMC might have perfected their arena rock charisma by now.

Gang of Four is another UK band that originally broke up before Al Gore invented the Internet. Since re-forming in 2004, the British blowhards have released a remix album, toured hard, and plan to put out a new disc later this year, updating their rhythmic Marxism for a fresh generation of activist dance punks.

Wait — I know what you’re thinking: the members of the headlining acts probably can’t check their e-mail without assistance, let alone download. They probably still, like, tape things. But like any big-box retailer, Download has something for the kids: Yeasayer, which dominates college radio with its groovy world beats; Blitzen Trapper, the Portland-based six-piece with a flair for alt-country and lotsa buzz; and Airborne Toxic Event, who hails from Los Angeles and, just like their muse Don DeLillo, captivate audiences with their melodramatic pretension. And man, that’s just the beginning. With 26 bands slotted to play in one day, that’s only 77 cents a band!

DOWNLOAD FESTIVAL See Web site for complete lineup and set times. Sat/19, 1 p.m., $20. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000, www.downloadfestival.com

Sound in the balance

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Anger is an energy," sang John Lydon in the Public Image Ltd. tune "Rise." San Francisco electronic artist Kush Arora harnesses a similar combustible force in his live shows and on the three full-length recordings that have made him an established club fixture and touring act. "I try to do something different with music and express the frustrations of the youth in this country," says the affable 26-year-old Haight District resident, who performs with Chicago’s MC Zulu July 13 at Dub Mission.

Arora’s ragga-techno fusions have struck a chord with audiences from the Bay Area to New York, while monthly hybrid live/DJ sets at Club Six’s Surya Dub night have earned him a broad audience that includes dubstep heads, bhangra fans, experimental electronic admirers, and grime listeners. It makes sense as the former Montessori School teacher has always balanced different cultures.

Born in San Leandro and educated in Orinda’s leafy suburbs, Arora ingested death metal, punk, and experimental-industrial sounds, as well as his family’s Indian and Punjab music, learning traditional instruments like the single-stringed tumbi and algoze flute. His music experience increased after interning at his uncle Aman Batra’s Manhattan hip-hop studio Sound Illusions, and later working for sound-editing software company Arboretum Systems.

In high school he formed an experimental band called Involution, which he helmed for six years before launching his solo noise project Clairaudience in the early ’00s. But it was while attending a 14-month audio recording course at Emeryville’s Ex’Pressions that he learned a signature skill: recording live vocals. "When I was writing songs for my first album [2004’s Underwater Jihad (Record Label/Kush Arora Productions)], I wasn’t impressed with my own work or where electronic music was at the time. It wasn’t badass enough," explains Arora, who also felt there was a lack of high quality, vocal-based dance music in the Bay.

Soon Arora contacted and tracked stateside Punjabi singers and ragga MCs, including Chicago’s MC Zulu, Trinidad’s Juakali, Jamaica’s N4SA, Los Angeles’ Wiseproof, and San Jose’s Sukh and Sultan. "I wanted to work with people who were dangerous and different, especially vocalists who didn’t fall into their music’s niche or category," Arora says of the often confrontational and political artists he’s recorded on full-lengths like 2006’s Bhang Ragga and 2007’s From Brooklyn to SF, both released on his Kush Arora Productions imprint. The albums brought club bookings far and near.

Over the past several years Arora has played large Indian gatherings, small IDM shows, underground warehouse events, raves, and the monthly Non-Stop Bhangra party in San Francisco. His performance breakthrough happened in 2006 at DJ Sep’s weekly Sunday-night reggae party at the Elbo Room, Dub Mission. "That changed my whole presence in the city," he says.

Arora believes his family’s roots in the often-volatile Punjab region between India and Pakistan breathes through his music. "That’s why I like bhangra. It has an element of aggression and sadness," he reflects, acknowledging that those also are traits he looks for in his vocal collaborations. "The artists I work with have a real tug-of-war between good and evil in their lives. My music is their redemption and my redemption in a fateful balance." *

KUSH ARORA

Dub Mission on Sundays, 9 p.m., $6

(Arora and MC Zulu on July 13, $7)

Elbo Room

647 Valencia, SF

www.dubmissionsf.com

No need for earplugs at SFTV Unplugged

-
0

rdlmartystefancolora.jpg
Stefan Grant and bassist Martin Morales rock the Devil at SFTV Unplugged.

By Kat Renz

A year ago, local guitarist Stefan Grant wasn’t sure how he’d continue playing live shows. The drummer of his alternative/metal band, Kinetic Chain, moved to Chicago, and the tribe was further split after he and the lead guitarist suffered a falling out.

And then, as so often happens in those bummer times, epiphany struck: what if they took a different direction from the guitar riff-driven, crashing drum sound they were so used to and went acoustic instead? “Let’s strip it down to what it is,” Grant said, adding that he wanted to create an opportunity to play and see live music that’s easy on the ears but still rock, as opposed to jazz or pop – a sweet space he considers relatively rare in the city. Thus was born SFTV Unplugged.

It’s not a novel approach – remember how killer those episodes of MTV Unplugged were back in the ’90s? “I think there are a lot of 30-plus people who liked Unplugged a lot,” Grant said, as we proceeded to rail off a list of our favorite performances. Alice in Chains. The Cure. That legendary Nirvana performance with Kurt Cobain sarcastically commenting on everything from harp-tuning to Leadbelly’s for-sale guitar amid a stage buried in star-gazer lilies.

Ultrabananas

-
0

› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Springtime in Clubland’s looking gorgeous so far: it could totally move covers and dominate the next cycle. A special double pinkies up to all the fab promoters throwing AIDS ride-run-walk-collapse fundraisers and shining limelight on the No on Prop. 98 campaign. I’d air-kiss you to death, but it would crust my Cover Girl Hipster Neutral No. 140 Lipslicks Lipgloss. Ack.

On to biz: yep, the hardcore electro banger sound — think ELO meets Spank Rock, filtered through acid house and bare-bones punk — has set my fuchsia radar to stunned, even though it’s already glitzed up most of the city’s edgier dance floors. It certainly makes me question the meaning of “underground” in the MySpace age. And despite the scene’s sometimes perilous “Girls Gone Wild” flirtations, it’s total ferosh to see so many banger women bringing real DJ and promoter power: Emily Betty, Queen Meleksah, Parker Day, Nastique, Kelly Kate …

Stuttery vocals, ripped-needle basslines, Justice influence, and hands-in-the-air breakdowns are the genre’s sonic commonalities, but the sound’s a mutt, streamlining electroclash and iDJ kitsch into a neon ball-slap to the brainiac minimal techno boyzone. That means it’s stylistically elastic, and two of my favorite San Francisco DJs — and people — from other scenes have vaulted to the banger forefront. Richie Panic (www.myspace.com/richiepanicisagenius) got big spinning mod classics and electroclash before teaming up with DJ Jeffrey Paradise, the banger godfather, to rock the new sound. He fronts an all-out ultrabananas punk energy — Gorilla Biscuits trumps Hot Chip — and his unerring ear blows dragon smoke from my broken lightbulb. Check out Mr. Panic’s top bangers here.

Vin Sol (www.myspace.com/vinsol), on the smoother hand, is a hometown hip-hop hero who tells me he found rap crowds too resistant to experimentation; electro has freed him to splash freestyle classics like Debbie Deb’s "When I Hear Music" over the lowdown banger sheen, and startle laptop lovers with dazzling vinyl pyrotechnics.

Newbies? "Ableton’s my homeboy," 22-year-old PUBLIC (www.myspace.com/publicworld), a.k.a. Nick Marsh, recently said to me with a laugh. He’s been blowing banger minds with his live shows at parties like Blow Up (www.myspace.com/blow_up_415) and software edits of the Cardigans, ELO (yes!), even When in Rome’s melancholic 1988 dance jam "The Promise." And his hypnotic new tune "Colorful" is a hit. "I played in a hardcore band, then went through an acoustic Postal Service phase," said the longtime record collector and musician. "So harder but really melodic stuff is natural to me. I think one way to get everyone on the floor is to take softer songs and make them more aggressive, so there’s a broader energy." He’s sliced and diced Metallica too.

Also fresh is 23-year-old LXNDR (www.myspace.com/djlxndr), who used to spin at raves and dreamt of being Armand Van Helden (!) before gravitating to Felix da Housecat and Richie Hawtin. He describes his sound as POPalicious — heavy beats over classic trax, but tasteful and widely appealing — and presides over the No More Conversations (www.myspace.com/nomoreconversationssf) weekly and wild Youngbloodz monthly (First Fridays at Milk, www.milksf.com). "I like to turn heads with my mixes and really make people notice that I put a lot of thought into how I drop a track. That’s what I always liked about the older dudes when I was coming up," he told me. Aw, sweet. Look for his seven-song EP — on which he plays guitar, bass, and synths — to hit this summer and munch up the younger clubbables.

Sonic Reducer Overage: Toumani Diabate, Ingrid Michaelson, La Otracina, Poison the Well, and the art overfloweth

-
0

What to do when the gloom descends and the sky thunders? Double your pleasuuuur with art-music selections that didn’t make it into print last week and the worthy live shows that slipped betwixt the cracks this time around.

Ingrid Michaelson
The new Lisa Loeb or… the latest waif in a Nellie McKay cute suit? Something to ponder when listening to the MySpace star best known for her Grey’s Anatomy and Old Navy commercial tunes. This is so sold out I think you’ll have to contact your fave Hannah Montana/soccer mom scalper for assistance. With Greg Laswell. Wed/23, 7:30 p.m., $15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333.

Zak%20Wilson%20-%20bob sml.jpg
Amoebic art: Zak Wilson’s acrylic My Roomate Bob Ate My Last Piece of Chicken, So I Had to Shoot Him.

“Amoeba Music‘s Second Annual Art Show”
Wonder what those talents scowling in the aisles do on their off hours. More than 30 toil in the trenches of art-making, we hear. The second annual event includes more than 100 pieces by staffers at the SF, Berkeley, and LA stores. Get an eyeful at the reception Fri/25, 7 p.m.-2 a.m., when organizers raffle off prizes as a fund-raiser for Creativity Explored. Show runs through Sat/26. Daily 8 p.m.–2 a.m. Space Gallery, 1141 Polk, SF. (415) 377-3325.

ribbons.jpg

“Enter the Center”
Call ’em Ribbons. Call ’em Ship. Just don’t call ’em late to this long-awaited exhibit. The dynamic Bay Area duo whoop it up at the opening reception honoring their new book, Enter the Center, on Sat/26, 6-10 p.m. – stay for the screening of the pair’s new video album, the treeVD. And look for more special soirees at Ribbons’ month-long quasi-arts center, ala Feb. 2’s get-down with White Rainbow, Lucky Dragons and a classical Indian ensemble, and Feb. 9’s fete with Brendan Fowler of BARR, Pocahaunted, and ARP. Eleanor Harwood Gallery, 1295 Alabama, SF. (415) 867-7770.

Thou shalt have icons

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

DVD "I put John Coltrane up in my headphones." So said innovative producer Madlib’s sped-up alter ego, Quasimoto, on 2000’s breakthrough hip-hop album The Unseen (Stones Throw). Although the brave crate diggers of hip-hop are doing their best to bring forth the horns of yore, as on local duo Zeph and Azeem’s phenomenal 2007 album Rise Up (Om), these days jazz is too often relegated to the unseen background or exploited by marketing giants that find ways to slap a few select jazz masters onto dorm room posters and cheap best-of holiday gift CDs. They want to sell the idea of John Coltrane to your headphones, and that’s the end of it: there’s no incentive to get out and see some live shows, whether jazz ensembles or DJ-MC combos, or to make music yourself.

So thank the most high for seven recent releases in the ongoing Jazz Icons DVD series (Reelin’ in the Years Productions). The series’s recently released second round showcases Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Dexter Gordon, Wes Montgomery, and Charles Mingus in cleanly remastered, previously unreleased video recordings from the 1950s and ’60s. The vivid black-and-white images offer an almost palpable sense of communication among the musicians, partly because the studio and stage settings are so carefully arranged — many of these performances were for strikingly lit, modernist-looking European TV shows — and partly because those cats played with their entire bodies. The up-close shots emphasize this in beautiful, often artfully angled ways.

During the three performances included on Montgomery’s disc, Live in ’65, the guitarist’s brain seems to be solidly in his right thumb, which he uses like a huge guitar pick with eyes as he feels out new rhythms on "Here’s That Rainy Day" and kicks out some unparalleled octave soloing on "Twisted Blues," evidence of what Carlos Santana, in his brief afterword to the liner notes, labels Montgomery’s "ability to transform thought into music." During Ruud Jacobs’s bass solo on "The End of a Love Affair," you can only see his right hand plucking the strings, not his left hand creating the notes, and it’s as if the entire group he’s playing with is moving the missing left hand together. Pianist Harold Mabern’s contributions to the Montgomery disc, on "Here’s That Rainy Day" and "Jingles," both recorded in Belgium with Arthur Harper on bass and Jimmy Lovelace on drums, typify his talent for leaping back and forth between waterfall chord clusters and bluesy droplet lines that dance intimately with Montgomery’s chordal romps. When I worked at the Stanford Jazz Workshop with an almost 40 years older Mabern, he was known as a man whose stories were as entertaining as his musical tutorials. The Belgium session captures his sense of musical storytelling before the music and the storytelling separated.

The Coltrane disc, Live in ’60, ’61 and ’65, consists of recordings from Germany in 1960 and ’61 and Belgium in ’65. The Belgian water must have been terrific. The DVD includes three tunes performed during Coltrane’s last appearance in Europe (he died in 1967), with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums; they sound — and look — like a release and cleansing of demons. "Naima" presents especially transcendent musical communication. You can’t call it a comeback, but put on a Jazz Icons DVD at a holiday party and watch as the room illuminates and people start to play together.

www.jazzicons.com

Porno for pop-ettes

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

New Pornographers ringleader A.C. Newman’s life has changed a lot since his 2004 solo debut, The Slow Wonder (Matador), became the secret darling of indie aficionados round the world: he relocated from his native Vancouver to Brooklyn, married the girl of his dreams, and became a morning person.

His music has metamorphosed too. "Some people think that this record is a real departure for us," Newman explained early one recent morning from his Park Slope home. He was talking about Challengers (Matador), the controversial new album from his indie supergroup, which slows the band’s trademark pop hooks to a more cerebral pace. This evolution, rife with organic instrumentals, has elicited the industry tag grower from multiple critics and left legions of fans scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to dance to the strange new tempo.

Newman and his cohorts didn’t set out to shock and awe their fans — the new sound is part of a natural growth. Sick of synths and willing to try something new, the band turned to an old trick of sorts.

"Our records are always made with whatever’s lying around," Newman said. In the past a band member has happened on a Wurlitzer here, a pump organ there, and these influences have informed the shapes of recordings. But this time, he continued, "it just so happened that when we came to Brooklyn, ‘what was lying around’ was a lot more. There’s a great creative feeling, a bigger infrastructure of musicians here. I felt like we had access to these totally amazing A-list people."

The borough treasures gathered for the album included a Broadway cellist, part of Sufjan Stevens’s string section, an extraordinarily gifted flutist, and even a French horn. "It feels like cheating sometimes," Newman said of the last-minute flourishes. "But I’m glad we opened it up to other people’s influences."

Even the idea of New York made its way onto Challengers. Clocking in at just under seven minutes, "Unguided" is a miniepic that chronicles Newman’s flirtations with the city through a cryptic lyricism that shines bright: "You wrote yourself into a corner, safe/ Easy to defend your borders." A contribution by Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, "Myriad Harbor," serves up a Bob Dylan–esque take on urban boredom replete with Brian Wilson–caliber harmonies. Standout tracks include the Newman–Neko Case duet "Adventures in Solitude" and the title track, which discovers Case at her best. The delicate croons of "We are the challengers of the unknown" over fragile strains of banjo give us the opportunity to pretend we’re hearing the alt-country chanteuse for the first time. Porno purists will appreciate "All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth," although the title seems to drip with hubris: the saccharine-pop nod conjures up the band’s early sound, as does "Mutiny, I Promise You," a hook-laden propellant painted with the woodwinds and half bars of ’60s pop.

With both Case and Bejar on the road with the Pornographers, the cosmos has aligned to present Challengers in its true form. Newman confesses that live shows are always bittersweet for him "because of the nature of our band. Sometimes we’re playing, and I’ll think, ‘Is this the last time this lineup is ever going to play like this?’"

As for the camp that insists that any part of the new disc is disposable or disappointing, let’s face it: when it comes to our most cherished artists, we’re all needy little brats. We expect their music to inspire and describe us, infuse meaning into our daily struggles, provide the score to our love affairs, and polish the landscapes of our losses. As far as expectations go, that’s a little steep, don’t ya think? Instead of whining when a group fails to anticipate our desires and mercilessly attacking their forays into unfamiliar territory, we should take Challengers as an opportunity to move with the band.

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS

With Lavender Diamond and Fancey

Mon/17, 8 p.m., $25–$27

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 775-7722

www.ticketmaster.com

Class of 2007: J.Nash

-
0

SUPERLATIVE Most Likely to Get Nasty

QUOTE "I’m about to eat your ass like soul food."

If you’re looking for the future of hyphy, vocalist J.Nash is already there. Never mind that his versatile vocals link the two hottest Bay Area rap albums this year: Mistah FAB’s Da Baydestrian (SMC) and Turf Talk’s West Coast Vaccine (Sic Wid It). His own album, Hyphy Love (Soul Boy/Urban Life), is a genre unto itself, a fusion of hyphy and R&B that Nash calls R&Bay. Hailing from East Oakland’s Murder Dubs — otherwise known as the 20s and home to Beeda Weeda, who appears on Hyphy Love — Nash used to rap, but, he points out, "Everyone was rappin’, so I switched," employing skills learned primarily at church. Nonetheless, apart from a brief stint as a member of vocal group Rewind, he says, "I always messed with rappers, like Laroo and Keak."

Nash’s date with destiny, however, was meeting up-and-coming rapper FAB, who appeared on Nash’s 2005 out-the-trunk album, Real Man (Soul Boy), shortly before blowing up with Son of a Pimp (Thizz Ent., 2005). "I thought I was doing him a favor," Nash says with a laugh, acknowledging how much the association with FAB boosted his career.

FAB protégé Rob E also produced half of Hyphy Love, letting his hair down even more than on Baydestrian. These tracks are fleshed out with productions by heavyweights like Droop-E and Sean T, whose beat on "Hyphy Dancin’" transforms the sound with a throwback ’80s paint job, resulting in one of the disc’s most unique songs.

Lest anyone think Hyphy Love is all hyphy and no love, Nash delivers a number of excellent, more conventional slow-jam-style ballads, with a flexible tenor that moves up to alto and down to baritone. As an artist who writes his own material, Nash never suffers from the lyrical banality typical of contemporary R&B. Like R. Kelly, whose work he admires, Nash brings out the nasty. There’s something hilarious about hearing the line "I’m sucking on those big ol’ boobs" delivered with the agonized passion of a slow jam. It’s a much more realistic thought in a sexual situation than the usual "Hold you in my arms" crap.

Nash has already started to generate buzz thanks to a lo-fi video for his advance single, "Cupcakin," with J-Stalin, which has scored more than 35,000 hits on YouTube and has been cross-posted all over the Net. A second, more professional video for the more hyphy "Show You Love" has just debuted. Expect live shows in clubs around the Bay.

"Once you see me perform," Nash says with a rapper’s swagger, "it’s over. I got you. You’re going to become a fan." (Garrett Caples)

Fall Arts Preview

-
0

A cornucopia of fall arts listings and previews, at your virtual fingertips.

————-

MUSIC

Upcoming releases

Live shows

Clubs and parties

Classical events

————

ARTS

Theater

Dance

Visual Arts

Profile: Choreographer Erika Shuch

———–

FILM

Cheryl Eddy’s picks

Dennis Harvey’s picks

Rep house action

————

EVENTS

Fairs and festivals guide

Party with me, Oh My God

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Toxic Avenger pawing ferociously at his slime-dipped guitar while an army of redneck zombies feasts on a moshing drove of punk rockers — now that’s a cool visual. Maybe Giuseppe Andrews — Cabin Fever star and an independent filmmaker who’s had a number of his movies distributed through Troma Entertainment — can keep Toxie and his flesh-eating pals in mind for his next music video for Chicago prog poppers Oh My God. With one director’s credit for the quartet already under his belt, Andrews recently added a second by helming the video for the title track off the band’s fifth full-length, Fools Want Noise (Split Red). Andrews’s vision for the song might not be a gore-packed freakfest typical of the Troma catalog, but there’s no denying the oddball humor and sicko charm exhibited within his art. As the video opens, a grizzly, bronze-tanned old-timer dressed in a thong shimmies in place to vocalist Billy O’Neill’s rabid whine and snapping fingers. "Two eyes swimming in a sea of fat / A liver drowning in a vodka vat / You want more of that / Do you want more of that? / Well the TV is on and the radio is on cuz nobody can make a choice / Fools want noise," O’Neill proclaims between random shots of a lip-synching cheeseburger puppet and trailer trash conga-dancing around a swimming pool. Just as the song erupts, Andrews — clad in a bathrobe and flaunting a set of horse-size wax choppers — pops up onscreen and slams his body around a living room.

From his Chicago apartment, OMG synthesizer player Ig said he was a bit puzzled by the video’s kooky imagery on initial viewing but has since warmed up to it. Andrews’s actors, he explained, are "the mostly elderly people who live in his Ventura trailer park, where he lives along with his dad. He chooses to live in this trailer park and to use his fellow residents as actors — many of whom are ex–drug addicts, Vietnam vets, etcetera.

"Basically, he makes John Waters’s films look like Disney movies."

But enough about Andrews. Playing a mash of disco, glam, and hard rock, OMG has garnered plenty of fans of its own through its flamboyant live shows and relentless tour schedule since forming in 1999. Uniting bustling organ, bassy grooves, and Bish’s propulsive drumbeats with a heap of distortion, the group sounds like the musical spawn of Robert Fripp and Gary Richrath, that guy from REO Speedwagon. Somehow work in a jealous Bob Mould, and the result is Fools Want Noise, a guitar-laden punk onslaught ripe with devil-horned salutes and tempos jacked up by adrenalin.

The album also finds the combo joined by friend and Darediablo guitarist Jake Garcia. Though all of OMG’s previous endeavors were accomplished without the use of guitar, Ig said, the three didn’t have a "prior plan to get punky or guitary. We just jumped at the chance to record with Jake." Then again, the added guitar really shouldn’t be a shock to fans — it just adds to OMG’s ever-teetering dynamic.

"I have an organ sound that’s very distinctive, and no matter how pliable Billy’s voice is, he’s still such a Billy," Ig said. "Bish too has a drum sound style I could pick out of a lineup.

"And somehow, once Billy’s background, mine, and Bish’s get poured into a beaker, the result consistently is the unique chemical called Oh My God." *

OH MY GOD

With the Faceless Werewolves

Thurs/12, 9:30 p.m., $5

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0925

www.hemlocktavern.com

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

MCMAF: Sweetness and light

-
0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUGAR AND GOLD

With Her Grace the Duchess and the Society

May 19, 9 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Feeling the spirit

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Yeah, I was a club kid once. It’s a bit of a blur, but somehow somewhere in the ’90s I went from punk and indie to baggy pants and glow sticks in the flick of a switch. I put away my Fall records and picked up endless white-label 12-inches and compilation CDs with titles like Ultimate Techno Explosion. Or something to that effect. Like I said, it’s a blur. I remember the dancing, though — suddenly my punk ass liked to shake! It’s a shame most of my indie friends chose to stay behind, but this was the ’90s. In those days, never the twain shall meet….

It’s now a full decade later, and — finally! — the indie kids are cutting loose without fear of bruising their street cred, thanks to artists such as the Rapture, !!!, and LCD Soundsystem. Turns out rock and dance music don’t have to be mutually exclusive terms. Need further proof? Take Austin’s finest ambassadors of electropunk mania, Ghostland Observatory. The duo — composed of vocalist-guitarist Aaron Behrens and keyboardist-drummer Thomas Ross Turner — whip up a mighty frenzy of swaggering rawk bravado and delirious vocal acrobatics delivered with a come-hither fluster over sweltering beds of booty-bouncing beats. Music for getting hot and bothered, certainly — or maybe songs for unleashing demons. Take your pick.

"We’re two entirely different people," Turner says, chuckling, over the phone from the Texas capital, in explanation of how their quite dissimilar influences have coalesced into the flipped disco of 2005’s delete.delete.i.eat.meat and last year’s Paparazzi Lightning (both Trashy Moped Recordings). "Aaron’s more into the rock showman thing — people like Prince and Freddie Mercury. For me, Daft Punk pretty much are my heroes — they got me into electronic music and club culture. That’s where we’re each coming from."

They might be coming from different places, but their destination is clearly shared, as evidenced on Paparazzi Lightning. Picture an evening of unbridled debauchery — one in which a club night teeters on the brink of collapse — condensed into 35 frantic minutes, and you’re on your way to understanding the Ghostland Observatory vision. Behrens can clearly work a room into whatever mood he sees fit, whether through stomping and yowling with wanton glee on the thundering "All You Rock and Rollers" and "Ghetto Magnet," or the seething taunts of "Move with Your Lover." Meanwhile, Turner effortlessly guides us on the emotional travelogue of a never-ending night, flashing away with the urgency of red-carpet paparazzi as he peppers the album with synth shrieks, squelches, and Daft Punk–worthy rhythms.

Asked about their live shows, Turner gives fair warning: "It’s really nonstop. We just give and give until everybody’s wiped out and goes home." All right, indie rockers and club kids — you heard the man. Better start stocking up on energy drinks. *

GHOSTLAND OBSERVATORY

With Honeycut, the Gray Kid, and Landshark

March 3, 9 p.m., $15

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

>

Love rebuff

-
0

SONIC REDUCER Hey, subliminal kids, watch out for those Music and Lyrics billboards all over town — they’re as deadly as Pretty Ricky’s between-the-sheets crunk, chased by Justin Timberlake covers such as the Klaxons’ strings-laced "My Love" and Rock Plaza Central’s mead-soaked "Sexy Back." The poster pic is so mundane that it catches then holds your attention: Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore shyly demur from meeting the viewer’s, and each other’s, eyes, choosing instead to moon over — what? Music, lyrics, Craigslist casual encounter ads, old mug shots? With Valentine’s Day shuffling furtively around the corner, I’d venture that it’s best Hugh and Drew weren’t out bonding over some cozy Cattle Decapitation appearance, because as all we brave, San Francisco live-music lovers know, hot hookups and cool shows don’t necessarily mix.

Unspoken rule number 14 of San Francisco rock, according to your cruise director on the Glumboat: don’t hit on the local wildlife at shows. San Francisco’s SFMFs (single female music fans, for all you acronym haters) know, Joe. Single is an increasingly obsolete format in vinyl, CD, and skin and bones — consider it a mission impossible to meet nonattached men, women, or potted plants at shows. I don’t care which way you swing (if — caveat — you’re not in the band itself), you’re more likely to have a close, personal relationship with the bouncer who’s forcibly removing you from the club than someone you’d potentially want to date. You have a better chance meeting some fast ninetysomething at a retirement home than at a show.

If you’ve just moved to town: so sorry to bust up your illusions of glam romance, but concerts here are simply not pickup scenes — for anyone other than the guys and girls in the band. Hip-hop, folk, C&W, blues, pop, and rock lovelorns — you’re all outta luck, though indie rock is the absolute worst. You know that cute, floppy-haired, gangly boy rocker in a polo shirt and Converse by the side of the stage? He may be by himself (and likely he has a futsy partner tucked away at home), but that doesn’t mean he actually wants to talk to anyone — let alone get a phone number.

All this is what I’ve gathered during my many years of showgoing — and a quick, extremely unscientific poll of singletons in Guardian editorial bears me out. Sample responses: "Everyone’s all cliqued up at shows." "You go with your friends, find your spot, and you don’t talk to other people. Ever." "At dance clubs you meet other people because you’re actually dancing with each other. At live shows everyone’s looking at the stage." "It’s too loud to talk." "San Francisco has a reputation of being aloof." "Maybe you can talk to someone when you’re standing in line at the bar?"

"Either it’s all guys or the one girl you want to hit on will be someone in the band’s girlfriend," said calendar editor Duncan Scott Davidson, who’s also clocked time as a doorguy at Slim’s, the Endup, and 111 Minna. "The only time I ever tried to pick up someone was at a Bomb show, and she turned out to be Bomb drummer Tony Fag’s girlfriend." Irony abounds.

He’s actually seen guys trying to hit on women at shows, he added, "But what do you say? ‘This band really rocks, huh?’ "

My favorite answer is "People are just there for the music," which does say something about our fair scene’s integrity if you believe music lovers are simply there to see and hear, not to hook up. And perhaps it imparts even more about the nature of local original music, which is less about the damsels than going dumb, less about the sex than the noise sax solos — with the Lovemakers in the horny minority. Chalk it up to the Bay Area’s feminist legacy and the p.c. ’90s, but on the plus side of the non-meat-market music scene, I’ve often felt as safe and unpressured while checking out music solo as any hulking dude in a black hoodie at a Mastodon show. Perhaps our live scene is thriving on that focus and the passion we have for the music — and lyrics — itself.

Ahem. I don’t know about you, horndogs, but pure intentions certainly get me all hot and bothered, though they don’t help when we’re sulking alone in the corner at the Husbands’ Valentine hoedown. If ya got a problem with that, prove me wrong. *

SWINGING SOUNDS O’ THE STRATOSPHERE

BLOODY HOLLIES


A question for the ages: Who to Trust, Who to Love, Who to Kill — and the title of the fierce San Diego blues punks’ new Alive disc. Wed/7, 9 p.m. Annie’s Social Club, 917 Folsom, SF. $5. (415) 974-1585

KINGS AND QUEENS


Nevada City homegrownies make haunting pop prog. P.S. K&Q’s Rich Good once teamed with Joanna Newsom in the Pleased. Thurs/8, 9:30 p.m. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $6. www.hemlocktavern.com

MIRAH


Recently remixed up with Mt. Eerie and Anna Oxygen on Joyride, the K artist is too cute for her horn-rims. Little Brazil and the Affair also play. Fri/9, 10 p.m. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8–$10. (415) 621-4455

RED THREAD


The moody Oaklanders are stitching up new songs for a summer album. Fri/9, 9:30 p.m. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $7. www.hemlocktavern.com

TYVA KYZY


Riot rrroar — the all-female Tuvan throat singers wrap their power pipes around lullabies and tunes about tea. Sun/11, 8 p.m. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. $21. (415) 885-0750

ZS


The NYC chamber noise–niks sit down with Death Sentence: Panda! and Sword and Sandals. Sun/11, 9 p.m. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8. (415) 621-4455

1...678Page 7 of 8

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org