Looking for something to get you past the hump of Hump Day? Well put down that “which Disney princess is your dog” quiz right this second, for a straight-up ridiculous amount of good new music was unleashed upon the world this week, with a disproportionate amount of it coming from our very own home turf.
Listen up, burst with pride, and let us know what else you’re listening to.
The debut Rich Girls EP we’ve been waiting for all year, Fiver, is finally out on Breakup Records (full record here) and the Luisa Black-led trio has a release show tonight (Wed/8) at the Rickshaw Stop. Here’s album-opener “Worse.”
The Bay Area punk forefathers in Rancid, to whom we must admit a highly specific regional allegiance, will put out Honor Is All We Know, their first record in five years, at the end of this month. Here’s the first studio track they’ve released, “Face Up.”
The chilled-out Afro-electro-future-soul-tastic sounds of The Seshen, a Guardian GOLDIE winner from earlier this year, are lush and plentiful on their EP Unravel — stream the whole thing right here — with UK label Tru Thoughts. Release show this Sat/11 at Leo’s in Oakland. Here’s the first video, for “Unravel.”
We’ve listened to this bit of jangly lo-fi sweetness from SF’s The Mantles at least a half-dozen times since they premiered it yesterday; they’ll have it out on a 7-inch next month via Slumberland Records.
And The Tropics, fresh off a win at the Music Video Race (with a rather different sort of aesthetic), released this video for “Fireproof” — a shot-by-shot remake of Marky Mark’s “Good Vibrations.” More, please. The Tropics’ Wind House is out Oct. 28 on Breakup.
And, lastly: Do you need convincing to watch a new tUnE-yArDs video? Didn’t think so. Ms. Garbus just announced she’ll be home for a show at the Fox Theater Dec. 11, with opener Cibo Matto (!).
LEFT OF THE DIAL Christopher Owens, San Francisco resident, has a problem.
It’s one of those problems that maybe doesn’t sound like a problem to people who didn’t achieve critical darling status in the artistic industry of their choice by age 30, but it is a problem nonetheless. The problem is that Girls, his old band, was a very, very good band that wrote complex but catchy, rocking but intimate songs, drawing from ’80s power-pop and ’60s doo-wop and orchestral rock to talk about breakups and his escape from a deeply complicated childhood ensconced in the cult-like Children of God sect of Christianity. Girls was instantly, recognizably, good — in a way that seemed, on first listen, to stem from very little effort, though the depth of Owens’ confessional songwriting forced you to understand otherwise if you spent 30 seconds thinking about it.
The Christopher Owens problem is that after two albums of very good music by his very good band, the band broke up and he decided to go it alone, and not everyone was impressed with the result. Lysandre, Owens’ debut solo work, released in January of last year, was a concept album, full of proggy theatrical flair and flute solos. It had moments where it shined, but it was not the seamless work we’d come to expect from the songwriter; Owens himself later admitted he just sort of had to get it out of his system.
Fast-forward about 18 months, and the music press seems almost breathlessly relieved by his second go. A New Testament (Turnstile), released last week, is indeed easier on the ears. It’s a straight-up countrified Owens, an identity he’s hinted at previously but never fully embraced, with clear gospel influences and a renewed appreciation for pop structure and aesthetics; it allows Owens’ first-person lyrics to take center stage again. (He’ll play songs from the new record at Great American Music Hall Sat/11).
Is it a safer record than his previous effort? Sure. Does it follow more conventional Americana-pop rules? Yep. Does he sound like he’s having more fun actually making the music? Hell yes.
It’s that sense, actually, that seems to be confusing and alarming critics left and right (to an amusing degree, if you were to read, say, a dozen reviews in a row.) Christopher Owens seems happy. The Christopher Owens? He of the loaded religious upbringing, who made a name writing incredibly well-crafted songs about doomed relationships? How could he?
“That reaction has definitely surprised me,” the 35-year-old says with a laugh. He’s a little weary from doing press interviews all day from his home in SF when I catch up with him by phone about a week before the record comes out, but otherwise seems like he’s in good spirits.
“For one, the writing spans about four years, so it doesn’t make sense to paint it as a ‘Oh, he’s happy now,’ type of thing. Yes, I’m grateful for a lot in my life right now.” (One can’t help but think his stable, long-term relationship and relatively recent sobriety have played a part, though he doesn’t really want to discuss either topic.)
“I would never set out to make a ‘positive record,’ but I’m glad it’s having that effect on people.” He thinks a moment. “I also think that’s maybe just the sound of a lot of people working together who like each other very much, having fun.”
Those people include producer Doug Boehm, who produced Lysandre, as well as Girls’ acclaimed second record, Father, Son, Holy Ghost; the band also includes a keyboardist, drummer, and guitarist who played on that Girls album. Other people — like gospel singers Skyler Jordan, Traci Nelson, and Makeda Francisco, who provide backup on “Stephen,” a weighty, cathartic elegy of a song for Owens’ brother who died at age two — were instrumental in how Owens selected tracks once he decided this was going to be his country record. (He has hundreds of songs and half-songs to choose from, written and stored away on his computer at home.)
The overwhelming influence of gospel — not to mention the biblical record title — will likely come off as something of a wink to longtime Owens fans; his struggle to reconcile his ultra-religious upbringing and the tumultuous period of his life that followed his leaving the church at age 16 are both well-documented.
But the reference isn’t quite so straightforwardly tongue-in-cheek, says Owens. Gospel, in particular, has come full circle for him.
“I’ve had a long history with spiritual and religious music,” he says. “We weren’t Pentecostal, but it was still about asking God to take away your burdens. There’s a desperation to it, a genuineness and earnestness.
“If you talked to me about gospel music in my teens I would probably have been very disparaging, but as I got older and calmed down more in my 20s, I started appreciating it as music,” he says. “The fact of, we’re going to sit around and sing together, and what that does to the energy in the room.”
It was in his early 20s that someone gave him a record by the singer Mahalia Jackson, known as “the Queen of Gospel,” also known for her contributions to the Civil Rights movement. The gift was almost as a joke, says Owens.
“Knowing my history [with religion], it was ‘Here, Chris, you’ll like this,'” says the singer. “But I remember realizing, this woman is fantastic. So it’s been about coming to a place where I can see the value in the music itself, which I think is part of the point. ‘Let us make a joyful noise unto the Lord.’ And as I started to write and play music myself, it’s been about figuring out a way to do that with a non-religious quality, how to strip the music of its religious associations. I’ve listened to a lot of Elvis’ gospel albums…
“If you’re from the Ukraine and you walk into a gospel church, even if you don’t understand the language, you’re still going to get goosebumps,” he continues. “There’s still power in the sound.”
As for the Christopher Owens problem: Judging by early reviews, he’s appeased some Girls fans who were left cold by his first solo effort. Not that he puts too much stock in other peoples’ opinions of him. He’s happy with the record. And yeah, he admits, he is happy, in general, at the moment. And yet:
“It’s kind of funny that people are thinking of the record like that. Because even when you have these blessings, life always goes both ways. I think life is an uphill climb,” he says. “If you’re climbing the right way.”
Thing is, October — that’s San Francisco’s summer, if you’re a newbie — is just getting started. Next up is Treasure Island Music Festival (Oct. 18-19), now in its eighth year, aka your annual opportunity to look out at the bay and the twinkling city in the distance, pull your hoodie tighter around yourself, and say “I should come out here more often.”
Even if it’s the only time of year you find yourself on the isle, it’s a damn good one. TIMF is a beauty of festival, design-wise: Two stages within shouting distance of each other plus staggered performances throughout the day mean you don’t get caught up in festival FOMO. And the visual art and DJs it attracts thanks to the Silent Frisco stage pump it up with a distinctly San Franciscan flair (in case, for example, you ingest so much of something that the temperature and skyline aren’t enough to help you remember where you are).
Here are our picks for the best of the fest.
TV on the Radio Very few bands can accurately claim to sound like the future and the past at once, but these Brooklyn rockers — who have been teasing singles from their new release Seeds, out this November — zoom pretty effortlessly back and forth, with bass, synths, keys, and horns that come together for a damn good dance party.
Ana Tijoux We first fell for the French-Chilean artist’s textured, colorful blend of Spanish language hip-hop with jazz and traditional South American instruments in 2006 — when her collaboration with Julieta Venegas was everywhere, and we didn’t even get sick of it. Since then she’s only grown more intriguing, and less like pretty much anything else happening in Latin music. Check out this year’s Vengo if you need convincing.
The Growlers Psych-y surf-punk from Costa Mesa that can help you visualize beach weather, regardless of that middle-of-the-bay breeze cutting through your clothes.
Ãsgeir This Icelandic folk-tronica phenom is only 22, but he’s already been buzzy (especially abroad) for a good chunk of his adult life. We’re curious to hear how the lush songs off his debut album translate live.
Chuck Prophet’s been around the San Francisco music scene long enough to make a name for himself in a few regards: He can be counted on for rock ‘n’ roll story-songs, for startlingly visual writing. The influence of Lou Reed shines plainly through his somewhat disaffected drawl. And more often than not his adopted hometown of San Francisco (he’s lived here for nearly 35 years) is the central subject of his musical mash notes, as in 2012’s elegy for the city, Temple Beautiful, with its lamentations about long-dead rock clubs and Halloweens in the Castro.
Night Surfer (Yep Roc), out last week, is a different kind of a beast. Where Temple looked to the city’s past, Night Surfer takes on what the future may hold, with song titles like “Countrified Inner City Technological Man.” Where Temple was sparse, emotive, even delicate in places, the new record is a Prophet-rocking-the-fuck-out record, in which even the most weary-sounding songs of the road come with a “damn I’ve had good time” kind of wink. There are shades of Tom Petty at his most fun, an aura of what Roxy Music might’ve sounded like if they were from California, and swells of strings lending weight to choruses — not to mention huge guitar hooks courtesy of REM’s Peter Buck anchoring many a track. This is a record to blast in a car, or to see performed live in a very big room.
Luckily, Prophet’s playing the very big room known as Golden Gate Park this weekend at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (at 2:45pm on Sun/5, at the Rooster Stage) before heading out on the road. If that weren’t enough — or for those of you a slightly more intimate Chuck Prophet experience, he and his band the Mission Express (which includes his wife, Stephanie) will be holding court at the Make Out Room the previous two nights for early shows (Fri/3 and Sat/4, both at 7:30pm). Ahead of his busy weekend, we checked in by phone to talk about the album, the city, and that excellent Scott Wiener takedown via Facebook about a month ago.
SF Bay GuardianI read somewhere that you set out for this to be your kind of post-apocalyptic, future-themed record. What pointed you in that direction?
Chuck Prophet Yeah, at one point there was a dystopian thread that was running through it, though I don’t really consider it a dystopian record now. But that was enough of a thread to get me into writing, going ‘Oh, that’d be fun.’ I’m not totally cranky about the future or technology, if that’s what it comes off as — the record cover itself was taken on an iPhone, I recorded the demos on a laptop.
But in another way I think if certain things happening now were in a Cormac McCarthy novel, people would be asking him “How could you have written this, how could you write things so violently?” I mean a year ago when I was writing htis record I didn’t know, I couldn’t have imagined that there would be beheadings on TV. I was touring Mexico, which in places has its own kind of horror show going on…and then there’s my own neighborhood, how the Castro is slowly turning into the strip mall. Wondering, do we need another Jamba Juice or Chipotle here? So that was the theme to get excited about, just to get into it.
SFBG On the record, though, you don’t sound overly critical or angry at the future you’re seeing. The music alone is mostly very upbeat.
CP It’s not an angry record; I think it’s an anxious record. At this point in time it’s 2014, and I don’t want to just be another asshole with a TV, commenting, you know. I like pulling the camera back and taking things in on a little more on social level, picking apart how things work. I’m much less cynical than I was when I was younger. I feel lucky in many ways.
SFBG How did the sound come together? You made this record partially in SF and partially in Nashville, yeah?
CP When the record started, one of the touchstones was a lot of glam rock, and also sort of garage rock nuggets from a certain era in Holland and England…Gary Glitter, Thin Lizzy, and all that kind of grandiose 70s guitar music. All of it is kind of a reaction to what I did befoe: Temple Beautiful was really stripped down, with one electric guitar in one speaker; even the cover was in black and white. And the focus was on the words. This was a chance to have a little more fun musically, to get a little arena rock, especially on tour.
We made the record here in SF, and then decided to go a little more grandiose with those beautiful string arrangements, so we did that in Nashville with Nashville players. And then we mixed it in upstate New York, at this barn where they worked on the first couple Radiohead records, actually. So that was great, mixing in a barn, peeing outside and whatnot.
SFBG What led to Peter Buck’s participation?
CP I’ve known Peter for years, thoguh he’s someone I may not see very often. He has a festival every year in January in Baja, and last time I was there he said, “Hey man, I’m just waitng for an invitation to come play on a record.” So he came down from Portland for it, and that was great — honestly, we had three guitar players playing at the same time, and I think he just put everybody on their best behavior. And he’s also just a hook machine. So that was a thrill.
SFBG So many songs on this one seem really cinematic, with these full characters. How do they take place in your head?
CP With songs like “Truth Will Out (The Ballad of Melissa and Remy),” that’s probably a result of reading way too much true crime than would be good for anybody. It’s funny because I got my mom a Kindle a couple years ago, and one point I realized, ‘I can look at this and see what kind of books my mom reads.’ But then maybe I don’t want to know — Fifty Shades of Grey, or whatnot. So I started scrolling through there, and it was all theology and true crime. Which makes sense for me in a lot of ways.
Melissa and Remy, in particular, came out of the Amanda Knox trials. I wrote it with my friend Kurt Lipschutz, and at some point after I got into the song I realized it doesn’t really go anywhere, nothing gets tied up in the end at all. But then I thought, neither does The Maltese Falcon, neither does The Big Lebowski. Was she kidnapped? Did the nihilist do it? It doesn’t matter.
SFBG How are you feeling about the music scene here as of late? We know how you feel about development, and Sup. Scott Weiner, to a certain extent.
CP In terms of the music scene, to me, it still seems like a vibrant town. I feel like there’s a lot going on — there are always shows at the Hemlock and Bottom of the Hill with bands that are getting started, doing interesting things. I think there are people making records in their closet, and they’ve got five roommates, and they’re doing it for excitement of doing it.
When it comes to how the city’s changing, I’m more concerned about honoring the diversity and open-mindedness that this city is supposed to represent. I’ve seen my neighborhood change, and a lot of it is for the better. But I don’t want to see people rounded up and chased down the street with pitchforks because they’re “marginal characters.” Every time they change condo status on a building, it means they can’t enforce rent control, and I just want to slow down the tsunami, have us think it through a little bit before we drive people out of here.
There are always going to be competing points of view about how the city is, and I just don’t share Scott Wiener’s. He loves condos, he’s crazy for condos. [The efforts to shut down the needle exchange in Duboce Triangle and the Chronicle column about the neighborhood] made me think, there are probably people here who don’t even remember AIDS. I mean, that needle exchange saves lives, and I think there are people who don’t understand that, people who really do think that it’s all about owning property and making money, and I just don’t really share that vision.
I was thinking about asking him to debate me — where I’d let him talk first and then I say “I don’t really agree with you” — but I’m one of those guys where, even if I’m right, I’d probably lose the debate. We’ve been thinking about other things, like a dunking booth, a pie throwing thing, maybe at the Make Out Room. If we could raise money for the needle exchange by doing it, I’d let him throw a pie at my face. Absolutely.
SFBG You’re not feeling entirely negative about the future of San Francisco, though.
CP Not at all. The thing I’ve been thinking lately is, you know, the future might save us. But we have to get there first.
LEFT OF THE DIAL When Slim’s booker Dawn Holliday first met with Warren Hellman in 2001, she had no way of knowing that the quaint little music festival the investor wanted to organize would grow to be one of San Francisco’s most fiercely cherished traditions.
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which runs this Friday, Oct. 3 through Sunday, Oct. 5 (featuring this rather impressive lineup of bands, whose music you’ll find in the YouTube playlist below) is special for a number of reasons. It’s free, thanks to an endowment from the late sir Hellman. You can’t buy alcohol. You won’t find huge video screens projecting tweets about the festival in real time. To get distinctly San Francisco on you and use a word I generally avoid, its vibe — yes — is about a solar system away from certain other huge music festivals in Golden Gate Park that shall remain nameless. And it just couldn’t take place anywhere else.
Little story for ya: Four years ago this week, I moved back to the Bay Area from New York. I was unemployed and aimless and temporarily living with my parents again at 26, and the future was terrifying. I was regrouping, but I didn’t know if I was back here for good. The day after I landed — hungover, disoriented by the smells and sounds and lack of sensory overload of not-New York City — I headed to Hardly Strictly with a few old friends. I remember foraging our way into the park, just pushing toward the music, and literally stumbling out of a wall of shrubbery to find Patti Smith just starting her set.
The crowd was insane: people tightly packed in, drinking, passing joints, hollering, bundled in seven layers each, sitting on each other’s shoulders, stepping on each other’s army blankets full of microbrews and organic rice chips and apologizing as they tried to push up closer to the stage.
My eyes darted from the older woman with flowing batik-print pants, eyes closed, swaying joyously by herself, to the young couple with matching dreads who were tripping on god knows what, to the balding-but-ponytailed and potbellied man who seemed to be trying to get a hacky sack game going to the beat of “Because the Night.”
I don’t want to speak for all Bay Area kids, but I’ve always been pretty ambivalent about large groups of hippies — there’s just a saturation point when you grow up here. Unlike so many of my transplant friends, I have never found the remnants of the Summer of Love overly enchanting; this is what happens when you are forced to watch the documentary Berkeley In the Sixties in high school history classes. I am also, for what it’s worth, not the biggest fan of crowds.
I knew I’d been gone a while because I was in love. I’d never been so happy to see ridiculous, stoned, absolutely beside themselves weirdos all doing their own weird things next to each other and nobody caring. Little kids dancing with grandparents; teenagers making out. I felt like I’d stumbled onto some sort of magical island, one where nobody talked about the stock exchange and everyone was incredibly, almost purposefully unfashionable and the thought of waiting in line to get into a club was ludicrous. I wanted to live in this smelly pile of humanity forever, and that was a new one for me. I knew I’d been gone a while because I was seeing SF the way transplants see SF. And I also knew I was home.
That atmosphere, I learned while talking to Holliday last week, is absolutely by design.
“I think of it more as a gathering of music lovers than a festival, really,” says Holliday, who’s booked Hardly Strictly every year since its inception. “I think having no fences — you can walk away at any time — and not selling alcohol makes a huge difference in people’s attitudes.”
As for the task of putting together a lineup each year that appeals to everyone from teenagers to folks in their 70s and 80s — the announcement of Sun Kil Moon, Deltron 3030, the Apache Relay, Sharon Van Etten, and others had many pronouncing this the hippest (read: appealing to folks under 40) lineup in years — Holliday says she actually keeps it relatively simple.
“When it started, and I kind of still do this, it was just with Warren in mind,” she says. “I was thinking about what he hadn’t heard yet. I knew he didn’t start listening to music until later in life, so I wanted to book music that I thought he should be turned on to. As long as there was some kind of roots in it. The Blind Boys of Alabama, Gogol Bordello, all stuff that he would really love to hear, but he’d never go out and see because he went to bed at 9:30. That was my goal for 12 years. ‘What would blow Warren’s mind?'” She laughs, noting that Hellman’s early bedtime is also the reason for the festival ending not long after dark.
“I don’t think [my booking] has changed that much with his passing,” she says. “It’s still music that I feel doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. Nothing’s bigger than the Fillmore. A lot of the bands don’t fill our rooms [Great American Music Hall and Slim’s], so a lot of people get to hear music they’re not normally exposed to. The age range is all over the place. And with bands that usually are a higher ticket, it’s a an opportunity for fans to go see $60, $70 shows for free.”
The park itself also has a lot to do with how she books: “I walk through it and see what I hear,” she says. “The contours of the meadows at different times of the year speak differently to you. Sometimes when I walk down JFK, I still hear Alejandro Escovedo singing, and that was eight years ago now.”
She also has a long-running wish list of artists; Lucinda Williams and Yo La Tengo, both playing this year’s fest, have been on it for some time. And she’s especially looking forward to the annual tribute to those who’ve passed away, which happens Saturday afternoon at the banjo stage — Lou Reed, Pete Seeger, and the Ramones will all be honored this year.
“It’s the best gift,” she says. “I mean if someone were able to give us world peace, I’d say that was the best gift. But since no one’s going to — yep, this is the best.”
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is all day Fri/3 through Sun/5, for free, of course, in Golden Gate Park. Check www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com for set times, and visit our Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/noise for more coverage of the fest. Until then — we’ll see ya in the park.
Because nothing showcases the breadth of music being made in the Bay Area better than some chilled-out electro R&B followed by a driving blues-rock sprint of a song: Here are the latest music videos from local faves Cathedrals and the Stone Foxes.
The Cathedrals‘ first music video, for their song “Unbound,” marks one year since the duo began releasing music online — beginning with that tune, with Brodie Jenkins’ seductive singalong of a chorus over a layered symphony of Johnny Hwin’s guitar and synths. For the video, released today, the pair recruited Maria Kochetkova, a dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, to perform in front of a light sculpture called Sugar Cubes, by SF artist Alex Green. Cathedrals’ debut EP came out this month on Neon Gold, and they’ll play Treasure Island Music Festival Oct. 19.
And in an entirely different vein, The Stone Foxes, who are home this week after a whirlwind tour of the West Coast, gave us this brand-new video for “Locomotion,” in which our heroes — showcasing a good sense of humor alongside their lack of physical prowess — challenge a bunch of guys who actually know how to play basketball to an ill-fated game. “We thought, what kind of video could encapsulate the song’s story of the [band members] Koehler Brothers’ great grandfather running away from the authorities in newly communist Russia? A sports movie of course!” wrote the band by way of explanation. Gonna call that one a slam dunk.
The band promises to release new music the first Friday of every month for the next year, building up to an album in late 2015. For now, the Stone Foxes will kick off a residency at The Chapel Nov. 1 with Strange Vine.
John Darnielle’s brain seems like it runs at just a slightly higher RPM than other people’s.
One could get this impression from listening to the tightly crafted mini-universe he creates inside each track on a Mountain Goats record — take your pick, he’s penned some 14 full-length studio LPs inside the last 18 years, not counting a slew of singles and B-sides and other assorted treats — or from his Twitter feed, which zooms from his enthusiasm for black metal to witty commentary about televised wrestling to on-point, eloquent opining about Ferguson, vegetarianism, or abortion rights.
He also wet his feet in the world of publishing in 2008 by penning an unconventional book for the 33 ⅓ series about Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, in the form of a collection of fictional journal entries written by a teenager from a mental hospital.
But his first novel, Wolf in White Van (published this month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is another animal altogether, one running at an even more impressive speed. Though its motifs won’t be unfamiliar to Darnielle fans — despair, metal, the difficulty of connecting to other human beings, the isolation and unsung miseries of suburban adolescence — the narrative is far more vast and complex than anything he’s ever written. Told backward, the story unfolds like a labyrinthian treasure map, one in which the treasure chest keeps moving but you’re careening toward it regardless, and also you’re a little scared of what you’ll find when you get there.
For the first half of the book, all we know is our protagonist, Sean, is a man whose face is horribly disfigured because of something mysterious that happened when he was 17, and who lives a highly secluded life as a result. He makes a living running an analog role-playing game called “Trace Italian,” set in a post-apocalyptic Midwest, in which players snail-mail him their choices and he mails back where those choices have led. Sean finds himself on trial when two teens take the game a little too seriously, and the rest of his life story — including the the incident that caused his disfigurement — is delivered to readers in surreal, highly visual flashes. It’s a survivor’s story, however dark. (Which is, of course, the very feeling that draws listeners to Darnielle’s music, record after record after record.)
Within weeks of its publication, the book’s garnered rave reviews, including a nomination for a National Book Award. Also, I’m not going to lie; I felt mildly fucked up for about three days after reading it. Which I think is generally a sign of good art?
Darnielle’s currently in the middle of a national book tour, reading and speaking at bookstores throughout the U.S. — including the new Green Apple Books on the Park this Mon/29. We caught up with the impossibly fast-talking Darnielle on the phone a couple weeks ago from his home in North Carolina, where he’d just returned home from grocery shopping and was inspecting the little fishpond in his backyard, worried that the herons had attacked and eaten the last of his fish. [Note: I erred on the side of vagaries rather than spoilers in this interview, which has also been lightly edited for the sake of cohesiveness.]
San Francisco Bay Guardian So I love the book. I read it in one sitting and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. Are you getting good feedback? How does it feel different from having a new album come out?
John Darnielle Thank you. I’m so glad, I really didn’t know how it was going to be received. The wait for a book to be out in the world is so long, and you read it 15 times, and the first time you’re thinking “This seems so fresh and so good” …and then by the end you lose sight of the big picture, going “I hope this reads as well as it was reading five years ago.”
With music, I always try to write and record and get it out there into the world. Because there’s a freshness for me, and also because I want people to hear them when they’re new. Before the Internet came around I used to just play new stuff all the time. With a book, there’s so much to it, by the final process, it’s like you’ve built a house.
Also, this is all me, by myself. People always treat my albums like they’re just me, but there are other musicians — Jon Wurster and Peter Hughes — who are a big part of it.
SFBG Speaking of which, you’ve also put out four albums in the last six years. Can you walk me through the timeline of how this book came about amidst all that?
JD The day after I turned in Masters of Reality in 2007, I wrote what ended up being the last chapter of [Wolf in the White Van]. And that was going to be the one chapter that Sean got — I wrote all these other chapters from the perspectives of different narrators. Some of them made it back into the book in a different form. But the day that I got the idea to tell it backwards, I decided, okay, let’s stay with the one guy.
The scene that opens the book [in which Sean’s father is carrying him down a hallway after coming home from the hospital] was originally told from his father’s point of view. It was very hard to let go of those chapters, how I’d already been through that process.
SFBG The father-son relationship still feels very central, and I know your relationship with your own stepfather shows up a lot in your songwriting. Do you think becoming a father yourself affected that aspect of the story?
JD I actually wrote that before [my wife] was even pregnant. But yeah, there’s a lot of grief for father-son relationships [in my work], and I think if I wrote the book now, being a son and a father certainly inform those things. I’m old enough now to think about parents, you know, that they’re parents. [Sean’s] parents were once parents to a baby.
I was at one point suicidal when I was a teenager, and that’s a thing, as a parent, how do you deal with it when your kid says that?…you have to have respect for that situation, and this is his account about living with the aftermath. And part of that is not ever being close to his parents again. That’s where you have to respect people’s descriptions of the worlds they live in, and not force them to live in a world that just makes sense to you.
SFBG When you decided it was just going to be Sean as a narrator, were you wanting people to realize they were working with an unreliable narrator? As the book goes on and we understand more about his situation, I think empathize with him more but also maybe trust his point of view less.
JD I think people rely on narrators to give them what they want to hear, and he’s actually really reliable in that he describes the reality of the situation — right down to not being certain of his motives. I think that’s where you realize that narrative is kind of an imposition. When people break up with each other, we always ask ‘Oh, what happened?’ or ‘They grew apart’ to put some kind of story together and it’s really, they just sort of did. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and someone pulled the chain.
I think Sean’s reliable in that he’s telling the truth about himself, and the way that looks from the outside is something we have to infer from the way people look at him, treat him. It’s kind of a basic existential problem with subjectivity, right?
SFBGThe last time I talked to you, you mentioned that some of your song names came from notebooks you keep, with simple phrases you see and like — “Outer Scorpion Squadron” [from All Eternals Deck] and the like. I noticed some similar phrases in the game, on the cards Sean sends back to players.
JD Yeah, I was able to weasel one or two of those in there. The rock throne. In a big book, especially with his game, you can do that — you’re really just making a giant tapestry with all these obsessions, occupations, old interests, small things that inspire you; you can get all of those sewn together in your quilt.
SFBG How did the game come about? It’s such a detailed world within the world of the book.
JD It wasn’t part of the initial idea. When I was brainstorming I had bits of a story to tell, and I was going “Okay, if I have this person [who’s so isolated], how would he make a living?” And in the present day, it would be a lot of IT jobs, home office type of stuff. But back then [pre-Internet] I think it would’ve been much harder. I think I got the idea on an airplane and just started to swell up from the idea of it, having this whole other universe to populate.
SFBG Which is, of course, how a lot of people spend their time now, but they’re universes that exist on the Internet.
JD And the Internet is great for a lot of things, but it is a more solitary activity. There’s something about the mail — speaking of old interests — I used to submit my old short stories to magazines when I was 12 or 13 years old, and there was the whole world of getting something in the mail from far off, a feeling that was really intense, that I don’t think happens when you get something back in seconds. I also used to send away for stuff from [Belgian hardcore band] Agathocles, and they’d send you stuff directly from Holland — 7-inch white vinyl, flyers for local shows and things like that. It was a very arcane and awesome world to be part of.
I mean, the mail is kind of rad. I always like when you see little ads that are just, send in $5, and you have no idea what this service is, but you’ll probably learn something you don’t know anything about. I like thinking about, you know, someone took out that ad, and what the story is behind that.
SFBG Before I let you go — tell me about this fish you’re so concerned with.
JD Well, we live in a pretty wild area in North Carolina, so we have this pond, nothing fancy, just a little fishpond, and there are also hawks around and sometimes herons, so I guess these goldfish were destined to be eaten, so that happened recently. And I was up here the other day, actually doing an interview, and I saw this flash of orange and it was this one fish that used to bully the others that had survived the massacre. This one survivor fish. But I’m not seeing him now.
SFBGWell, that’s upsetting.
JD It was a big one; that would be a mouthful. He could turn up, though.
[Update, two days later: “One fish is still among the living.”]
John Darnielle will read from Wolf in White Van, in conversation with Robin Sloan, at 7pm on Sept. 29, at Green Apple Books on the Park (1231 9th Ave, SF). More deets: www.greenapplebooks.com.
Ever get so overwhelmed by all the awesome events in the Bay Area on a given weekend that you give up on trying to decide between any of them and find yourself just hanging with whomever you can get to come to your house to drink with you and your cats? Or, if you’re feeling really adventurous, venturing 50 yards down the street to watch baseball at the closest bar with a TV?
Haha, me neither! Just kidding; that person sounds like a loser who is definitely not me. ANYWAY, this is one of those weekends where you’re going to have to make some tough calls. It’s called being a grownup. Here we go.
FRI/26
San Franciscans may think they have the market cornered on psychedelia, but things sound a little different in the desert — dusty, moody, lonely, and super atmospheric. All of these are apt words for decker., a Sedona-based “desert folk” act led by singer-songwriter Brandon Decker that won hearts with its soulful live act at SXSW, among other stages. This show at Bottom of the Hill (1233 17th St, SF), which serves as a record release party for the band’s fifth album, Patsy, will actually be a double-helping of soul: Oakland favorites Whiskerman, with multi-instrumentalist Graham Patzner’s vocal chops at the helm, will help open the evening.
Bob Mould, Castro resident and extremely well-spoken guy in addition to being an exceedingly talented guitarist and legendary all-around frontman, is coming home — and his welcome party’s at the Fillmore (1805 Geary, SF) tonight with Cymbals Eat Guitars. Mould’s new record, Beauty and Ruin, has been on repeat in certain headphones; check our interview with him in this week’s paper for more.
SAT/27
The Bay Area Record Fair, aka the best new acronym to come out of the local music scene since possibly ever, is throwing the second edition of its schmooze-fest/record sale/party this Saturday at Thee Parkside (1600 17th St, SF) and the surrounding blocks. This free shindig, thrown by local label Father/Daughter Records alongside promoters Professional Fans, will feature live sets from Happy Diving (whose excellent debut LP is out next month), Hot Flash Heat Wave, Wild Moth, and Flim Flam and The Jet Stars of Three O’Clock Rock. All of that while you swing by tables from more than 30 Bay Area record labels, who’ll be hawking CDs, LPs, t-shirts, stickers, that one weird rare flexi-disk you’ve been looking for forever, etc. The party goes down from noon to 5pm, but $5 gets you early entry (first access to the crates, you fiends) at 11am. RSVP here. Oh, and here’s our review of the last one.
Over on the other side of the Bay, the second annual Oakland Music Festival highlights the best in local-ish hip-hop, funk, R&B, dance and electronic music, with a few folky singer-songwriters in there for good measure. The daylong fest has four stages throughout downtown (21st, 22nd, and Grand Streets between Broadway and Webster) with headliners like rapper Dom Kennedy, beatmaker Esta, soulful singer SZA as headliners, while the legendary Chuy Gomez and hometown heroes Trackademicks and 1-O.A.K hold down the DJ stage. Plus, you know, food, beer, a beautiful day in the East Bay sunshine. Tickets (for $28 or $35, unless you go VIP) right here.
SUN/28
How do you get away with throwing a bonkers dance party on public Ocean Beach in broad daylight? Pipe the music directly into the crowd’s headphones, that’s how. The Silent Frisco crew has found the ultimate underground vibe, above ground, with HushFest. Here’s how it works: Gather at the party spot (imbibe your libations beforehand, please, no drugs or alcohol on the beach), pay $20 for special wireless headphones, and dance in the sand with a huge gaggle of other wildly, silently gesticulating aficianados — all for $20, kicking off at 11am. DJs at this annual event around include genius duo Psychmagik, who rejigger deepest funk-rock memories of the 1970s, Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation, and Fort Knox Five. Yes, you can still yell “woo!” (Marke B.)
The Aislers Set, Cold Beat, and the Mantles at The Chapel (777 Valencia, SF). This here’s an SF triple-threat, with the Brit-influenced, late ’90s/early aughts indie-pop veterans The Aislers Set making their much-awaited return tonight. Hannah Lew’s (ex-Grass Widow) Cold Beat will lend a harder edge to the evening, sandwiched alongside the Mantles’ 60s-tinged dream-pop. Also for $20, we can think of worse ways to stave off the Sunday night blues.
LEFT OF THE DIALBob Mould seems like a good multi-tasker. The legendary singer-guitarist is just signing out of a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session as he answers the phone in New York for our interview Sept. 9; he’ll play at the Bowery Ballroom the following night.
“Sorry, we went a little over because there were technical difficulties at the beginning,” he says, when I explain that I’ve been watching for the last hour in real time as his superfans — as well as guitar nerds of all stripes, from all over the world — ask him questions.
These queries range in topic from pleas for his explosively influential punk band Hüsker Dü to get back together (“Some things can’t be replicated, and those eight years are best left untarnished”) to interest in his diet and exercise regimens (little to no starches, lots of running staircases when he’s home in SF), wrestling opinions (Mould at one point wrote music for the professional wrestling industry) to “what positions were your guitar pedal knobs at when I saw you play this one particular show?” (generally, 3pm for both).
If the fans seem all over the place, it’s for good reason: Mould’s career is as varied as the people who count him among their heroes. After fronting Hüsker Dü in the early ’80s; he ushered in a higher standard for hard-hitting alt-rock in the ’90s with a new band, Sugar. His solo career has taken him into melancholy singer-songwriter territory, then back to all-consuming wall-of-deafening-sound guitar rock, with forays into the aforementioned wrestling business. In 2011, after decades of being known for his intense love of privacy, he penned an acclaimed memoir about his life thus far, including his tortured early years spent closeted, at times using meth and cocaine to cope.
After that 180, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Mould’s most recent work, Beauty and Ruin (which came out June 3 on Merge), grapples with highly personal territory.
In the first half of 2012, Mould was riding high off the book’s success. He’d just been honored by dozens of younger rock titans who consider him a god — Dave Grohl, Spoon, Ryan Adams — at a tribute performance in LA. He had a new record out, the critically acclaimed, harder-than-he’d-rocked-in-a-while Silver Age, and was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Sugar’s much-loved Copper Blue. And then, in October, Mould’s father died.
“It was not unexpected, but it was still tough nonetheless,” says Mould, who has written candidly about his complicated relationship with his father — an alcoholic who was physically abusive at times, but also introduced him to rock ‘n’ roll, and acted as one of Hüsker Dü’s biggest supporters in the band’s early years.
“[Losing a parent] is something most of us go through, but I don’t think I’d realize how a loss of the size really shifts your perspective…it was an emotional time. And that became the marker for the next 12 months of touring, dealing with my relationship with my family and my work.”
The record takes on four key themes or acts, says Mould: “There’s the loss, and the reflection, and then acceptance. And then there’s moving on to the future, which is how the album closes out. It’s a work about a really confusing experience.”
Backed by Jason Narducy on bass and the tireless Jon Wurster on drums (Mould shares Wurster’s time with Superchunk and the Mountain Goats), Mould channels that confusion into a something like a condensed, theatrical rock ‘n’ roll epic. (His tour for the record brings him to The Fillmore this Fri/26.)
Considering its subject matter, it’s hardly a downer of a record. “I’m sure it confuses some of the longtime fellow miserablists [to hear the bright, upbeat tunes],” says Mould with a laugh. “It’s a heavy record; it’s got its own darkness, but it has an equal amount of light to keep it balanced out.”
Beauty and Ruin also demands to be heard as an album: As a listener, even if you were to shut off the part of your brain that comprehends lyrics, it’s the cathartic, hook-driven guitar thrum throughout these missives — which builds to unrelentingly passionate levels on “The War,” marking the end of side 1 on the record, if it were an LP, before sliding into the naked clarity of “Forgiveness” — that engages your full body, that makes you question whether or not aging affects Bob Mould the way it affects regular humans, because the man honestly sounds like he could sing and play electric guitar and run a marathon at the same time.
Not so, Mould says. On days off when he’s on tour, he tries to talk as little as possible to protect his voice. “I sing really hard, probably too hard for my own good, and naturally it gets a little tougher to recover from that each night.”
When he’s not on tour, of course, he’s home in San Francisco — he’s lived in the Castro for the past five years. And yes, as a guy who made $12 playing Mabuhay Gardens in 1981 with Hüsker Dü, he’s noticed that the scene here has changed in the last few years. But it’s not all doom and gloom.
“I’ll still go to the Independent, Bottom of the Hill, Great American to see shows. I like the Chapel. There are still great clubs. But yeah, historically, when there’s been development — especially these big condo developments — when that’s on the rise in the city, at first, the neighbors are going ‘Oh, we love living next to the nightclub!'” says Mould. “Then they have their first kid, and the nightclub keeps them up at night. And they start fighting the nightclub, and if they get it closed down the neighborhood turns into a really boring place, and they don’t know it until it’s too late. I’ve seen it happen in so many cities around the world.”
“…I’m not certain how anybody can live in San Francisco, with the cost of living and the rents. It’s just such a massive change,” he continues. “Cities change. And we can fight City Hall, fight the developers…but cities evolve. And people who make art for their living are leaving for other places, which is tough because San Francisco has such an amazing history with music and how it’s affected world cultures. I’ve honestly just learned to deal with it.
“Because you never know what’s going to happen. Things change. Maybe it’ll change back.”
It’s not often that you get to see a new venue on opening night — so yeah, even if Beck hadn’t been part of the deal, we would’ve been stoked to spend Friday evening at the newly refurbished and rebranded Masonic.
While it’s not technically a new venue, it might as well be: After months of construction (and literally years of fighting with Nob Hill neighbors) the historic Masonic temple reopened this weekend with a new sound system, completely revamped stage and seating areas, new bars and concessions, a shmancy new VIP section, you name it.
The renovations also upped the venue’s capacity to 3,300 — compare that to, say, the Warfield’s 2,300 — which makes it all the more impressive that the jam-packed amphitheater-shaped, with seats on the upper level and standing-room only on the floor — actually felt pretty intimate. Of course, several hundred strangers sweating on you will also do that.
“There’s no opener tonight, so we’re kind of gonna open for ourselves,” Beck told the crowd, to cheers of approval. “And we’ve been playing a lot of festivals. We thought we’d play some of the new album for you first, which we haven’t really gotten to do — this’ll be nice to stretch out a little.”
Accordingly, the first 30 minutes or so were made up of harmony-heavy, melancholy numbers off February’s Morning Phase, which Beck has said was intended as a companion to 2002’s Sea Change, his other (truly masterful) collection of heartbreakingly beautiful songs to take along on a solo post-breakup road trip. “Blue Moon” was as triumphant and warm as it was, well, blue; accompanied by an image of a werewolf-howl-worthy moon on the giant video screen behind him, the song lulled the crowd into a reflective state. The always-welcome “Golden Age” sealed the mood, with our ringleader at the guitar and harmonica.
And then, very abruptly, it was time to dance.
One almost forgets exactly how many hits Beck Hansen has written over the course of his 20-year career, until one sees them performed back-to-back. “Devil’s Haircut,” “Loser,” “Where It’s At” — if you were a young person in the 90s, there’s a good chance these lyrics are wedged permanently into some corner of your brain. A super-heavy “E-Pro” devolved into band members physically crashing into each other and falling down in a pile of guitar reverb, after which Beck, straight-faced, turned it into a crime scene, stretching a piece of yellow caution tape across the stage.
The highlight, though? Devotees of Beck’s live show will know to expect “Debra” — quite likely the best tongue-in-cheek sexytime jam ever written, and certainly the best one about wanting to romance both an intended paramour and her sister — but it doesn’t matter how much you’re anticipating it, or, say, if you saw him do it last year at Treasure Island Music Festival. When he catapults his voice into that falsetto, then busts out the regional specifics (“I’m gonna head to the East Bay, maybe to Emeryville, to the shopping center where you work at the fashion outlet…”), and actually looks like he’s still having fun with it, no matter how long he’s been doing this — well, that shit’s contagious.
If we have any complaints, it’s that the show was encore-less. But when you open for yourself and play a solid, nearly two-hour set that spans 13 studio albums, with roughly half of the songs involving running around the stage like a madman in a little sport jacket and Amish-looking hat, and don’t seem to have broken a sweat by the end of all of it — we’ll forgive you. Billboard recently called Beck “the coolest weirdo in the room,” which, seeing as this room was in San Francisco, at the start of Folsom Street Fair weekend, that might have been a stretch.
On the other hand, we’ve had this stuck in our heads for the past three days. Keep doing what you do, sir. We’ll probably be in the crowd next time, too.
Never fear! You just need a dose of Double Duchess, the Bay’s favorite queer electro duo, who invited Kelly Osbourne to do a Jem and the Holograms-style bit in this video for “Good Girl Freak Out,” which also features LA’s Future People.
Check it out below, and catch the fabulousness that is DD — made up of emcee-producer davO and charismatic vocalist Krylon Superstar — when the duo performs live at the Elbo Room Oct. 3.
The first time I saw Dave Chappelle perform live was 10 years and three months ago, in a large, echo-y gymnasium at UC San Diego. It was my 20th birthday and I was soexcited.
This was June of 2004, and the comedian was at the absolute peak of his Chappelle’s Show fame, which meant he suddenly found himself performing for sports arenas full of college kids who had neither the patience nor the decorum (nor the sobriety) to actually sit and listen to a standup comic performing material, choosing instead to holler “I’M RICK JAMES, BITCH!” or “WHAT!” and “YEAH!” in Lil Jon voices at random — in reference, of course, to their favorite Chappelle’s Show impressions. They did this without provocation or logic. They interrupted him constantly. They did not care. He was pissed. Every audience member who wasn’t doing it was super pissed.
Two weeks later, encountering a similar audience in Sacramento, he left the stage for two minutes, then came back and said: “This show is ruining my life. This is the most important thing I do, and because I’m on TV, you make it hard for me to do it. People can’t distinguish between what’s real and fake. This ain’t a TV show. You’re not watching Comedy Central…You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you’re not smart enough to get what I’m doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid.”
Less than a year later, mid-production, he took off for South Africa and the show came to an abrupt end.
I have always felt a strangely personal guilt about this. I’m sorry about the idiots at UCSD, Dave, I have wanted to tell him. To this day, I can’t think of another instance in which such an intelligent brand of comedy has amassed such an astoundingly high percentage of morons as its fan base.
This being the case, I went into Dave Chappelle’s midnight performance at the Punch Line in SF last night (the fourth of four gigs in two nights announced Tuesday morning; he’ll do another one tonight at 10:30pm) with, well — I don’t want to say great expectations. But it’s a small club; I’ve heard great things about his smaller shows in SF over the past year or so, and I was ready for something like a redemptive Dave Chappelle experience.
“All of those 20-year-old idiots have grown up,” some part of my brain believed. “These shows sold out so quickly. These are super-fans. This will be great.”
You know what happens to drunk 20-year-old idiot college kids who get an ego boost from yelling stupid shit at standup comedians? They do grow up. They get jobs. They move to SF. They buy expensive collared shirts. And they become drunk 30-year-old idiot startup bros who get an ego boost from yelling stupid shit at standup comedians.
“DAVE who’s the hottest celebrity you’ve slept with!” (“That question assumes I’ve slept with a celebrity.”)
“DAVE you lift, bra? You lift!” (“No, this is actually just a really small shirt.”)
“Hey Dave! HEY DAVE! Are you gonna get the iPhone 6?” (Blank stare of disbelief. “Uh, probably.”)
Have you ever cringed so hard in a public place that it takes all your strength not to actually pull your shirt up over your head and crawl under your chair? Imagine a club full of people sharing this feeling. Now sit with it. For four hours. Now add a two-drink minimum and stressed-out waiters serving mandatory drinks that mandatorily must be downed within the next 10 minutes because it’s 1:45 in the morning.
To be fair: Chappelle was asking for it, quite literally. He opened with some SF-centric bits — a story about how he got mugged for the first time ever in San Francisco, and it was by a gay man. There was a quick, sweet anecdote about hanging out with the “startlingly funny” Robin Williams at the Punch Line, followed by a thought about Joan Rivers (“Joan Rivers was a great comedian, the problem is, she died a couple days after Robin Williams. Great comedian, but that’s bad timing.”) And then the evening became a neverending Q&A session, with very loose interpretations of both Qs and As.
“What do you guys wanna talk about?” he repeated at least a half-dozen times, leaning forward on his barstool in a short-sleeve black button-up shirt (looking, yes, noticeably buff), chainsmoking an entire pack of yellow American Spirits that he stubbed out in succession on his sneaker, drinking tequila and Coronas, and, at one point, ordering shots for a couple in the front row.
Fresh from appearances the past couple months at the traveling Oddball Comedy Festival, Chappelle — who, most of the year, lives in a farmhouse in Ohio with his wife and three kids — acknowledged that he was using this handful of last-minute SF performances as “practice” before heading to Chicago this weekend, where he’ll host Common’s Aahh! Fest, with Lupe Fiasco, De La Soul, MC Lyte (!), and others. And either he was plain sick of repeating material he’d performed three times in the last 48 hours, or he doesn’t have any new material, because most of what he did last night — sorry, what he did this morning, from 12:30am until just shy of 5am — is not what most people would refer to as “material.” This is also likely one reason the most sober he appeared all night was in the couple instances he caught people holding their cell phones, which were strictly and clearly prohibited from the moment he walked on stage. (“YouTube ruins comedy.”)
Also to be fair, Dave Chappelle is one of the few comedians alive who could get away with straight-up, absolutely non-planned riffing for that long — on current events, on domestic abuse and football, on race relations, on Ferguson, on run-ins with OJ, on sex, on marriage, on fame and its perils — and actually, for the most part, hold an audience’s attention.
For all his sloppiness (the last half-hour or so was largely Chappelle realizing and vocalizing how badly he needed to pee), the man possesses a spark of something undeniably genius, and it’s most visible in his social commentary, when he lets himself get dark — like the running gag of him being a “quinoa-eating” black person, the kind that makes white people feel safe. Or like when he unleashed a lucid torrent of facts about the shooting of unarmed young black men in the US over the past three years, including the grossly under-publicized killing of 22-year-old John Crawford III by white cops in a Walmart in Chappelle’s home state of Ohio last week. Crawford had picked up a BB gun inside the store — a gun that was for sale, naturally, at Walmart.
“The store never closed! They haven’t even shown the tapes!” Chappelle said incredulously. “And the worst part is that you’re allowed to carry a gun in Ohio. I’ve gone to Denny’s packing a gun! (Pause.) I’ve had a lot of cash on me at certain points in my life.”
At times you could almost see the sharpest version of him shining through the beer and weed haze, gauging the audience’s temperature, seeing how much more serious and guilt-inducing shit a mostly white audience would tolerate, before bringing everybody back in with his (still excellent) white suburban neighbor voice or a dick joke punchline.
Around 4am, after maybe half the audience had left (“What if I just wait all of you out? I’m going to be the last one standing”) and Chappelle became less and less articulate, the pauses in his riffing got longer, as he (and we) sat listening to the sound of cars driving through freshly rain-washed streets outside. Everybody had gotten their dumb questions out, or else had gotten too drunk and indiscriminately yelled for a while and then had their embarrassed friends drag them home. It was awkward the way any straggler-at-the-party-at-4am interaction is awkward. A little bit like a hostage situation, but with an incredibly funny and intelligent albeit unfocused kidnapper.
“It will take you years to understand what happened here tonight,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh, as someone asked about his show tomorrow (tonight). “Oh yeah, it’ll be great,” he said. “You should come. Based on how it went tonight, you won’t hear this shit again.”
—
Q: “Bring back the show!”
A: “Problem with that is, when you quit a show the way I did, networks don’t exactly trust you ever again. You realize I didn’t tell anyone I wasn’t coming in, I just left. So it’s like ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll see you Monday…'”
Q: “What’s the funniest insult you’ve ever heard?”
A: “My 5-year-old kid told me that I had a vagina on my back, with a butt for a mouth, with a hot dog in it. Five years old! I was like, the force is strong with this one. My wife got mad at me for laughing, but come on…I wasn’t even gonna laugh until the hot dog bit. He got me with the hot dog.”
LEFT OF THE DIAL Amid all the geeky hyperventilating last week about the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch, U2 — the Irish rock giants by whom the announcement of new music inspires roughly the same level of excitement as a new flavor of seasonal, sugar-free Starbucks latte, and among the same demographic — tried to pull a Beyoncé by dropping a new album out of nowhere. For free!
Problem is, they dropped it into everyone’s iTunes (Bono’s a good friend of Jony Ive, the senior VP of design and smarmy videos at Apple) without asking. And not everyone likes U2. Tyler the Creator, in a burst of creative Twitter activity, compared finding it on his phone to waking up with a pimple “or herpe,” concluding “FUCK BONO.”
As of this writing, Apple has launched an entire site to help annoyed people get the record off their phones.In that spirit: Here are three albums that would have been a welcome surprise instead.
Oh, Karen O — we’ve had a crush on you forever, and now you go and do this? The Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman’s first solo record, out Sept. 9 on Julian Casablancas’ Cult Records, is full of raw, melancholy, lo-fi songs she wrote in 2006 and 2007, and is honestly almost too easy on the ears. Anyone who fell for O’s plaintive vocals and stripped-bare songwriting on the Her soundtrack will be entranced by this album, which O describes thusly: “When I was 27 I crushed a lot. I wasn’t sure I’d ever fall in love again. These songs were written and recorded in private around this time. They are the soundtrack to what was an ever continuing love crusade. I hope they keep you company on yours.”
Brace yourselves: Christopher Owens — the pen and voice behind two albums of sweetly tortured, confessional Girls songs (RIP), in addition to last year’s first solo effort, the prog-rock folk moodiness that was Lysandre — sounds happy. This sophomore solo effort, culled from songs Owens says he’s written over the past four years, shows a songwriter fully embracing his country and gospel influences, the latter of which lend an especially theatrical element to songs like the one for his late brother, “Stephen.” The majority of these songs are rollicking, dance-around-your-kitchen-while-making-dinner upbeat, which we could get used to.
A bright, hard-rocking new opus from one of the hardest-working 53-year-olds in the business — and one who still thankfully calls the Bay Area home. Check next week’s Bay Guardian for our in-depth interview with Mould about his life in SF and the making of the new album.
There’s something overwhelmingly dreamlike about Jessie Cafiero’s songwriting, to the point that it makes a listener feel like they’re sleepwalking: The ebbs and flows of cinematic, orchestral pop conjure a surreal sense of nearly floating around one’s city. It’s not surprising, then, to hear that the singer-guitarist often draws inspiration from walking around these foggy hills of ours.
Though Cafiero released a debut EP as Split Screens two years ago, Before The Storm, out Sept. 9, showcases a fuller band, a more confident, brighter sound, and a more lush dreamscape in which Cafiero’s words create an airtight, contemplative mood; this is the perfect sonic accompaniment for a Sunday afternoon, cruising around the city in the early fall air, seeing where the day takes you.
Cafiero released an accordingly pretty, otherworldly video for the LP’s first horn-punctuated single, “Stand Alone.” Check it below, and catch the band’s record release show at Bottom of the Hill Sat/20.
San Francisco Bay Guardian How and when did the band form? I understand it was mostly a solo project to begin with — how is this new record different, and what made you decide to bring in more members of the live band?
Jesse Cafiero The band formed a little over two years ago. I had already written and recorded my self-titled EP under the name Split Screens, but when I got my first show it was time to move the studio solo project into a live setting. With the new record, Before The Storm, I had already started playing a few shows in the area so I could bring members of the band into the studio, which was great!
SFBG What’s your songwriting process like?
JC It depends, I play guitar and piano so I like to write on both to have a little more variety. Since I started writing Split Screens material I’ve always had my phone around to record ideas on the fly, that’s definitely helped. I also love writing in the studio, usually I’ll have the main form of the song together by that point but writing particular parts in that setting is an amazing feeling.
SFBGYou’re from the East Coast originally, yeah? How did you wind up in the Bay Area? How do you think it shapes/affects your music?
JC Yeah, I’m from a small town in upstate NY called Pine Plains and I moved to the Bay Area five years ago. It was just a good time to move, I was just out of a long term relationship at that point and had fell in love with California the year before when I visited for the first time. If anything, the natural beauty of the city is inspiring and I’ve found myself coming up with some of my best lyrical ideas just taking walks up in the hills around Sutro Tower.
SFBG I love the “Stand Alone” video. What made you decide to go with stop-motion for this song?
JC I’ve always been a huge fan of animation and for “Stand Alone” the song has this lifting quality that seemed to be a great fit with the kind of movement stop-motion creates. Also the idea that I could create a piece of visual art on my own time on an incredibly small budget was really appealing to me. This was my first time attempting stop-motion so there was a freshness of creativity that I haven’t felt in a while!
SFBG Other Bay Area bands/artists you love?
JC Waterstrider, St. Tropez, Black Cobra Vipers, Doncat, Debbie Neigher, Guy Fox, Bells Atlas, Quinn Deveaux, Lee Gallagher & The Hallelujah…I know I’m leaving some people out. The list goes on.
SFBG Plans for the coming year after the record is released?
JC I’m gonna take a well-needed breather and start writing some new material. After that I’d love to do another little West Coast tour in 2015 and begin working on another music video!
SFBG Where in the Bay do you live? What’s the Bay Area food/meal you think you couldn’t live without?
JC I recently moved to the Castro. I had never had a Vietnamese sandwich until I moved to the West Coast, and the first one I ever had on Clement Street kind of changed my life. Thankfully I live around the corner from Dinosaurs so I’m pretty set on that front!
Split Screens LP Release With Yassou Benedict and New Spell Sat/20, 9:30pm, $12 Bottom of the Hill 1233 17th St, SF www.bottomofthehill.com
As you may have heard by now, Viracocha — everyone’s favorite Never-Never Land of a music venue/spoken word performance space/speakeasy/antiques store/beautiful place to stop and use the bathroom should you find yourself having to pee on Valencia — has gone legit.
After nearly a year of fundraising, inspections, and meetings with the city’s Entertainment Commission, the dreamily lit basement stage that has played host to so many awesome events will now be operating with an official venue permit.
No longer working under the veil of semi-secrecy, the folks who run the space (the tireless founder Jonathan Siegel, with help from new business partner Norah Hoover and a slew of local artists and musician employees) have spent the last six months renovating the space to meet city standards, and will now be free to actually publicize the venue’s shows. They’ll celebrate tonight with a free little gathering/party at Viracocha from 8pm to midnight — open to the public, legally, for the first time. [See a note Siegel sent to supporters early this morning at the end of this post.]
The booking process is also on the up-and-up, so bands, bookers — if you’ve always wanted to play that room but were unsure about the logistics of setting up a show you weren’t allowed to promote? Drop ’em a line.
Now, full disclosure: Roughly half the people I love in the SF arts scene have at one time or another played there, worked there, or lived there. I’ve watched Siegel give jobs to kids who arrived in San Francisco with very little, and then watched those kids make it a home. If employees or event attendees are there late and anyone seems drunk, he’ll order five pizzas. It’s been problematic, it’s seemed improbable, it has at times appeared to almost be a parody of itself and/or San Francisco. There’s a goddamn lending library in the back room that looks like it was built by whimsical 19th century fairies and chipmunks. But I adore Viracocha, and have wanted it to thrive the way you fall for the runt of any litter, the way you root for any underdog.
What this has meant, practically, as a music journalist, is that while the place is very close to my heart, it’s also been exceedingly frustrating to watch awesome shit happen there and not be able to write about it. Especially since the illegality meant that all things were basically equal and welcome — if that tame poetry reading you want to host is illegal, and so is the free workshop on tenants’ rights? Well, there’s nothing really more illegal about an aerial dance performance/dinner party/burlesque show. It was anything goes, and truly, anything went.
In closing: Congrats, Viracocha. And here are five-plus things that may or not have happened there that I really wish I could’ve written about.
1. The week after Amy Winehouse died, a bunch of local cats (many of whom normally command a pretty penny for live shows) got together to throw a last-minute tribute night revue of sorts. Folks dressed up. There was much sad drinking.
2. Jolie Holland played a week-long residency there, living in the tiny attic apartment attached to the store, and playing shows every night, lulling the packed room into a breathless trance.
3. That there video above (which is not great in visual quality I realize…but oh man, that voice) is also from a regular poetry/music/anything-goes revue called You’re Going to Die, started by writer Ned Buskirk, which continues to bring out some of the city’s finest writers and spoken word artists in addition to musicians. See SF writer and Rumpus film editor Anisse Gross reading at another one here:
4. A staged reading of an early, weird, rarely performed play by Louis CK, starring The Coup‘s Boots Riley as a dumb cop.
5. Hella music video shoots, with both local and big-name folks. Below: Wolf Larsen, and Atmosphere.
6. Porn. (Supposedly.) (Did not see with own eyes.) (Unfortunately do not have video.)
Viracocha is now open to the public, as a live venue in San Francisco!
Through many a trial — months of obstacles, pitfalls, setbacks, missteps, and hard choices — and by the unwavering energy, dedication and resolve of our staff & crew…we finally made it!
Five years ago, Viracocha began as space where creative people and their work could find advocacy. Our contributors arrived from many walks of life and varied circles within the local arts and performing community. That is, until December 2013, when we closed our doors, temporarily, to begin the process of legalizing our venue with the city. We created this underground space, despite the risk, because we felt that San Francisco needed a cultural anchor for its diverse artistic community a place to gather and express who we are. There is a voice within each of us that yearns to be heard. In a city like ours, it’s easy to feel reduced to a face in a crowd, a point on a graph, a nameless number. We built our venue to become an intimate, welcoming place, where people can feel understood, connect, and feel less alone.
At times, Viracocha seemed to exist beyond the parameters of logic and pragmatism. We’ve had to be discreet when we talk about our space, and at times we’ve been misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misquoted. When people asked “What is Viracocha, exactly? Who, actually, is behind it?” — the answers were as varied as the items in our shop. Does secrecy create it’s own allure? Perhaps so…but now’s the time to put secrets to rest, and open our doors to you! Come and meet the people who call Viracocha home — the poets, artists, and musicians who have worked and played here, laughed and cried, performed and shared. This place was built for you (yes you!) and for all of us — come on by!!
Do you enjoy ranting about these issues and more, both in person and in long, exceedingly negative Facebook posts?
Boy, do we have an event for you. The Fillmore will play host tonight [Wed/10] to a debate between Supervisors David Chiu and David Campos, who will be discussing issues that affect the city’s nightlife — transportation, building restrictions, the rent explosion meaning no one cool can afford to live here anymore, etc. The conversation will be “refereed” by the great Chronicle and Rolling Stone reporter Ben Fong-Torres, while DJ Timoteo Gigante starts things off with some music.
The mission statement, from organizers (the event is being presented by the California Music and Culture Association, SF Weekly, and The Bay Bridged): “To achieve lasting legislative reform at the state level, it is imperative that we have pro-entertainment and culture office holders in Sacramento. This is an important opportunity to hear the candidate’s positions on our issues and to make our concerns known.”
So show some civic pride, get off Facebook, and take to the streets. Er, to The Fillmore. If you don’t make your voice known when you have the chance — well, you know how this works. You lose complaining rights later. And no one wants that.
SUPERVISORS CHIU & CAMPOS DEBATE: Nightlife Issues 7pm, free The Fillmore 1805 Geary, SF Event info
LEFT OF THE DIAL The first rule of interviewing former Pixies bassist Kim Deal is that you do not say the word “Pixies” while speaking to Kim Deal.
After it has been made clear to you, multiple times and in no uncertain terms, that you are forbidden from asking her about the iconic rock band she co-founded in 1986, quit, re-joined, and then quit again in 2013, it would be understandable if you were slightly apprehensive about said phone interview — worried, perhaps, that Deal might be cranky or unpleasant regardless of your following the rules, or else that you might suddenly develop a very specific and unfortunate case of Tourette’s that leads to you uncontrollably shouting Frank Black’s name or Pixies album titles into the phone as epithets.
All of this anxiety would be for naught. Kim Deal, 53, is in great spirits when she picks up the phone at home in her native Dayton, Ohio. She’s hilarious, actually. “Hellooo, how are you?” she drawls in an overly perky telemarketer accent of sorts. Then, laughing, before switching into her unmistakable real voice: “Sorry, I don’t know why I’m talking like that.”
If anything, she’s in a bit of a silly mood because she’s been cooped up in rehearsals. It’s about two weeks before she heads out on tour with The Breeders, the band she co-leads with her twin sister Kelley, whose nearly identical voice blends with Kim’s sultry, sharp-edged alto in a way that creates addictively salty-sweet harmonies — and a band whose chart-topping contributions to the Steve Albini era of early ’90s alt-rock are so significant that only co-founding a band like the Pixies, as Kim did, could relegate it to “secondary reason for fame” status.
Anyway: The Breeders have been rehearsing in Deal’s basement, like old times. Getting on each other’s nerves, like old times. Bassist Josephine Wiggs was convinced there was a weird sound coming out of her amp last night when they were practicing. “I swear I can’t hear what she’s hearing,” says Deal, like a stand-up comedian launching into a routine about his wife’s cooking. “It’s an 810 SVT bass amp, so it sounds like a big fucking bass amp. It’s distracting you? Scoot over and you won’t hear it anymore.”
“She’s British, though,” concludes Deal with a sigh.
And how about working with her twin sister day in, day out?
“I love her more than anything in the world, but she was bothering me so much at practice the other day that I took a lamp and put it between us so I didn’t have to look at her while we were playing,” Deal says cheerfully. “Once somebody starts doing something that annoys me I kind of get a red light around them. The lamp has moved around each day as we all [get annoyed at each other]. It’s subtle.”
They might piss each other off from time to time, but if there were any doubts about the place the Breeders still occupy in their fans’ hearts, last year’s wholly sold-out 60-date tour, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the band’s biggest commercial success, Last Splash, should have laid them to rest. (Two nights at The Fillmore last August saw the band playing the entirety of that album – which was recorded in San Francisco, then rode the same angsty wave to national fame Nirvana saw that year, propelled by its most catchy and most delightfully inane song, “Cannonball.” Then they left the stage for 10 minutes before coming back to play the entirety of Pod, the band’s 1990 Kurt Cobain-influencing debut, as an encore. Deal, who had just quit the power play of the Pixies for the second time, was noticeably exuberant as a frontwoman, and seemingly could not stop smiling.)
Still, not counting last year’s 20th anniversary reissue of Last Splash (LSXX), it’s been five years since the Breeders put out new material (though it’s been a much less dramatic break than the seven-year hiatus between Last Splash and Title TK, during which time the band famously imploded in part due to Kelley Deal’s heroin use).
In lieu of new Breeders records, however — and in lieu of, er, bringing up her most recent few years with the Pixies, which, it could be noted, some of us were excited about mostly because of the chance to hear “Gigantic,” which she wrote, which is arguably the best song in the entire decades-spanning Pixies catalog — Deal has quietly issued eight 7-inch singles of solo material since January 2013. It’s something she began doing when she “couldn’t find anybody who could be in a band” with her, she says, especially living in Ohio.
“The industry dropped out of the music,” she says simply. “Musicians need jobs now. There used to be enough money in music that people who played in bands could actually make their rent. Maybe they’d sling weed on the side or do some pizza delivery, but they could hit their rent. Now that’s just not possible. Even bands that people know pretty well, they need real jobs — they design websites, then they go home to their band. Unless you’re [at the star status] where you’re, like, making perfume.”
So she started making music by herself. Though she’s brought in old friends and bandmates to play along (Slint drummer Britt Walford, whom Deal ran into at Steve Albini’s 50th birthday party, makes an appearance), the songs are unmistakably hers. Their moods shift from volatile bass-driven fuzz (“Walking With a Killer”) to cooing sing-song with an almost creepy Velvet Underground edge (“Are You Mine?”).
In an age when we’re used to artists simply throwing up a SoundCloud link and announcing “I have a new single,” she’s done something increasingly rare, as well: She released each song as an old-school single with an A and a B side, a physical product, each with its own album art. Long known for her perfectionism and attention to detail when it comes to gear and a studio’s technical specs, 2013 and 2014 were the years when Deal became entranced by the physical process of distributing music.
“It makes it more real to me,” she explains. “If I just put it out as a download, I feel like I just emailed my sister the song. Nothing even happens, it doesn’t make sense to me — I’m like, ‘Where do I put the title, the song name?'” Plus, since she self-issued Fate to Fatal in 2009, she realized she enjoyed the process of calling around to research manufacturers, assigning ISRC codes (kind of like serial numbers for songs), getting physical mail back when she sent something out.
She has no current plans to compile the tracks into an album, however — for one, each has “really different levels of production.” She feels a little like she’d be ripping people off, since the songs are all out already. And somehow she doesn’t expect “normal people” to be interested in buying these tracks, anyway, though a large portion of the Internet (and the majority of music critics) might disagree with that.
At the moment, though, Deal is in full-band mode. This current Breeders tour came about when Neutral Milk Hotel asked them to join a bill at the Hollywood Bowl; the Breeders structured the rest of the three-week tour around the gig. (In San Francisco, the band will play The Fillmore this Saturday, Sept. 13.) The tour will be a chance to try out new material, though Deal seems a little nervous about that.
“We have about four new songs right now that we can really play, and I’m working on the words for this other song Josephine wrote,” she explains. “She seems so smart, and she’s English, so I can’t just go, like, ‘ooga chooga,'” you know? I want to really say something with it.” Deal’s been reading The Power of Myth, the anthology of conversations between scholar Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, and thinking a lot on the hero’s journey. Specifically, what would happen if the hero completely ignored the advice of the gatekeeper/mentor character at the beginning of the arc.
“We’ve been working on this stuff all year, so when [Neutral Milk Hotel] asked us, even though it’s way out there, we thought ‘Hey, let’s give it a shot. And hope to hell nobody records on cell phones,'” she says.
And then there’s the act of traveling together at this stage in the game, with bandmates she’s known for 20-plus years. (After a decade or so of other members, the current lineup is the original Last Splash crew: Wiggs on bass, Jim McPherson on drums, and the inimitable sisters Deal in the center ring on vocals and guitars.)
People can get snippy on tour, says Kim — especially in Florida, “things get weird…but we get along for the most part, no one’s an asshole, that’s important. There’s just really not a rude person in this bunch.”
In the van, especially, you can always put on headphones. And if all else fails, “You get lamped,” she says. “There’s always the lamp.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PghwbxtcJo8
—
THE BREEDERS
With Kelley Stoltz 9pm, $28.50 The Fillmore 1805 Geary, SF (415) 346-3000 www.thefillmore.com
Van Pierszalowski, the songwriter and primary ringleader of SF’s WATERS, has always seemed like a guy on the brink of wide(r)spread stardom. The band’s music is an ear-pleasing mix of guitar-driven rock riffs and power pop hooks the size of Buicks; it’s radio-ready without feeling squeaky-clean, in no small part thanks to Pierszalowski’s plaintive vocals.
This may be the year it happens for WATERS. The band announced yesterday that it signed to the LA-based Vagrant Records, which will release its forthcoming EP, It All Might Be OK, on Oct. 14. And today we have this album-opening anthem, “I Feel Everything,” which has the deliciously raw feel of Pinkerton-era Weezer but with a fuzz-laden, wall-of-guitar chorus that seems ready for a stadium stage. Give it a listen below.
You know that feeling where, if you see one more headline about how all the artists and musicians have fled San Francisco and the city’s dead and we should all just throw in the towel and pack the car for LA right now, you might throw your computer through a window?
Yeah, same here. Luckily, we also have the antidote: an email inbox that fills up every day with new music from an insane number of Bay Area bands and artists, many of whom would probably be offended if you were to suggest that they do not, in fact, exist.
Here’s a handful of our favorite new jams from the local kids.
The Tropics debuted this video for “Sons & Daughters,” which would be impressively cool to look at even if the indie pop five-piece hadn’t created it in 48 hours (with a litlte help from filmmakers Bangers + Mash).
Meanwhile, SF power duo Cathedrals continued their reign of Internet domination by dropping the otherworldly new single, “In the Dark,” and simultaneously advance-streaming their entire debut EP (out Sept. 8) on Spotify.
The 7-person electro-afro-indie-funk-soul-R&B casserole that is The Seshen released the super chilled-out groove “Unravel,” also the title track off their upcoming (Oct. 6) EP with Tru Thoughts.
The city’s favorite crowd-pleasing scuzz-rock trio Terry Malts dropped “Don’t” to tease their new EP Insides, out Sept. 23 on Slumberland.
And longtime Americana duo New American Farmers recruited Chuck Prophet on guitar for this vaguely Donovan-ish/Three Dog Night-esque tune “Aiming for the Daylight,” off their upcoming LP The Farmacology Sessions, which they’ll release with a show at the Great American Music Hall this Fri/5.
What other local folks are restoring your faith in the SF music scene this week? Drop me a line or a link or a video or an interpretive dance at esilvers@sfbg.com, or @emmaruthless on the Twitter machine.
LEFT OF THE DIAL Musician Bart Davenport, Oakland native, LA resident, has one caveat for discussing his move two years ago. He might’ve broken a few hearts, but he wants to make it clear that he did not head for the southlands for the same reasons many fed-up, underfed Bay Area musicians are making the same trek these days.
“My story doesn’t have anything to do with the changes that have been happening in the Bay Area the past few years. And it really wasn’t a career move. It has to do with changes I needed to make happen within myself,” says the singer-songwriter-guitarist. “Besides, I don’t even stay away long enough to miss it — I’m up there at least once a month.”
Lucky for us, one of those trips will take place next weekend, when he helps kick off the Mission Creek Oakland Music & Arts Festival with a daylong block party Sept. 6. Davenport headlines an eclectic lineup of acts that also includes the psych-rock-folky sounds of The Blank Tapes, B. Hamilton, Foxtails Brigade, and more at this opener to the fifth incarnation of Oakland’s 10-day, 14-venue music fest, which began as an offshoot to San Francisco’s in 2009. (If there are any lingering questions about the East Bay’s music scene holding its own at this point, this is the kind of lineup that answers ’em.)
Davenport has had a pretty hectic touring schedule since his most recent LP, Physical World, dropped on Burger Records in March of this year. There were the adventures in Madrid, the opening slots for Echo & the Bunnymen at LA’s Orpheum Theatre. Last week, playing guitar in Marc & the Casuals, he co-hosted a special one-off soul music-comedy-storytelling night at The Chapel. The day after he plays the MCO Festival, he’ll be driving “like a madman” back to LA to catch a Burt Bacharach show (as an audience member). He’s gotten used to life on the road.
As a kid, though, he mostly moved back and forth between Berkeley and Oakland, where he grew up near Lake Merritt — across the street from the humble, Disneyland-inspiring wonder that is Children’s Fairyland, with its old-school talk boxes that have been narrating fairytales at the turn of a key since 1950. (He’s still enchanted by it, but — as this reporter has also discovered during some routine research — adults wanting to visit the park are required to bring a kid along.)
Nostalgia might seem to be an easy catch-all theme for someone prone to memories of kids’ amusement parks, especially someone whose most recent record conjures the synthy New Wave anthems of ’80s with almost eerie authenticity one moment, then veers backward toward Buddy Holly the next — with each song seemingly narrated by a different character named Bart Davenport, and all of it so shiny that you can never quite tell when he’s being tongue-in-cheek. Davenport’s known for clear changes in genre and sound from record to record, but the shift from 2008’s Palaces (a Harry Nilsson-esque affair with Kelley Stoltz’s fingerprints all over it) to the distinctly palm tree- and pink pollution sunset-scented Physical World (which is full of soul and jazz chord progressions, and where Davenport seems to be channeling, by turn, Hall & Oates, The Cars, New Order, and Morrisey) is probably his biggest departure yet.
The singer takes issue with critics who would simply call him “retro,” however — though it’s not because he finds the term offensive.
“I actually think it’s insulting to purist retroists, people like Nick Waterhouse, maybe, who’ve gone to great lengths to recreate certain sounds really exactingly,” says Davenport, who credits longtime collaborator Sam Flax with sending him in a New Wavey direction after producing his power-poppy 2012 single Someone2Dance.
“And I don’t even think of myself as a very nostalgic person. I think of [my influences] more like shopping at the thrift store, and finding gems that you want to repurpose to say something new,” he adds. “It’s also that I guess many people try to avoid arrangements that sound like the way things were being done 20 or 30 years ago, and I tend to not really think about anything but what I like, what I think sounds good. It’s not about taking you to 1984 or taking you to right now, it’s about taking you into your own little world. The little world of that particular song, for just three minutes.”
Reticence to talk up LA in the Bay Area press aside, Davenport will allow that one of his major influences was his newly adopted city.
“It’s definitely an LA album,” he says, noting that about two-thirds of the record was written there, and it was recorded in Alhambra, near East LA. “I think the constant sunlight breeds a kind of optimism in people. Then there’s the scenery, the palm trees, the long crazy streets. The taco trucks. Where I live, the majority of people are Latino. It’s just a different mix.” Angeleno bassist Jessica Espeleto telling him she’d play in his band if he moved down south was one thing he had in mind, as well, before making the leap.
And yet: There’s no place like home? “The entire Bay Area has great venues,” says Davenport, as we discuss the new crop of venues that have sprung up in the East Bay over the last few years. “And yeah, especially with the musicians getting priced out of San Francisco, I think it’s great that there’s the whole East Bay for them to go to. Really, thank God for Oakland.”
Amen.
BART DAVENPORT
With The Blank Tapes, B. Hamilton, many others
Mission Creek Oakland Music & Arts Festival Block Party
Sat/6, noon-8pm, free (fest runs through Sept. 13)
Musician and historically outspoken SF resident Chuck Prophet, who’ll be gracing us with his brand of ramblin’ rock and roll at this year’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fest, got a little fired up today after reading this Chron piece from the ever-insightful C.W. Nevius.
Complete with a slideshow of Duboce Triangle debauchery, the column details how the area has descended into a festering pit of shady characters bearing hypodermic needles, dismisses those who would bring up homelessness as the overarching problem as “cynics,” and features a few choice quotes from Sup. Scott Wiener about this being the worst he’s ever seen the neighborhood.
From Prophet’s Facebook page:
“This is a load of BS. Hey, Scott “condo condo condo” Wiener. Why don’t you shut the fuck up? #ThisIsNotTheMarina#Andwedontwantittobe The needle exchange behind Safeway saves lives, assholes. What do you do, other than throw up more condos? And please define “marginal types” for me. I include myself in that. The Duboce Triangle has never been safer. Go back to the Marina, why-don’t-ya?”
The last time I talked to Prophet he also veered quite eagerly away from talking about his own music toward his feelings on the proliferation of condos in SF, expressing dismay at the prospect of the city losing its “freak factor.” He has a new album coming out this September; fingers crossed it contains more (musical?) nuggets like this.
What’s going on in Bay Area music these next three months? Glad you asked.
Like a daily multivitamin wards off the sniffles, getting the SFBG’s official recommended dose of live shows is crucial to maintaining optimal mental health, fun levels, and skin tone, especially as the days get shorter and the weather turns ever-so-slightly cooler.
Here’s your musical agenda from Labor Day through Thanksgiving, with highlights from our favorite fall festivals (see this week’s issue for lots more).
Aug. 28 Black Cobra Vipers with French Cassettes The Chapel, SF. www.thechapelsf.com
Aug. 31 LIVE 105’s Punk Rock Picnic with The Offspring, Bad Religion, Pennywise, and more. Are you a late-thirties/early-forties punk rock guy or gal who can’t agree on much of anything with your 13-year-old these days? Doesn’t get much better than this lineup. Bonus points for screaming along to all the swearing on The Offspring’s “Bad Habit.” Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.theshorelineamphitheatre.com
Sept. 1 Hiero Day. Souls of Mischief, Del, and the rest of the guys have promised some pretty big guest stars at this week’s fest, but even without ’em — a free block party with beer from Linden Street Brewery and music from some of the Bay Area’s best underground rappers? Guests, schmests. Downtown Oakland, www.hieroday.com
Sept. 4-13 Mission Creek Oakland Music & Arts Festival. With a range of heavy hitters — from B. Hamilton and Bill Baird to Whiskerman — this is a showcase of the fertile ground that is Oakland’s indie rock scene right now, most with door prices you’re not likely to see from these bands again. Venues throughout Oakland,www.mcofest.org.
Sept. 11-14 Downtown Berkeley MusicFest. A range of bluesy, folky, dancey bands from all over the Bay — especially recommended: the First Person Singular presentation of Beck’s Song Reader Sept. 11 and The Parmesans at Jupiter Sept. 14. Venues all over Berkeley,www.downtownberkeleymusicfest.org
Sept. 12-14, 15th Annual Electronic Music Festival Brava Theater Center, SF. www.sfemf.org
Sept. 24 Skeletonwitch, Black Anvil DNA Lounge, SF. www.dnalounge.com
Sept. 25-28 Philip Glass’ Days and Nights Festival Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur; Sunset Cultural Center, Carmel-by-the-Sea, www.daysandnightsfestival.com
Oct 3-5 TBD Festival. Emerging Bay Area acts like 8th Grader mingle with the big kids (Blondie, Moby, Danny Brown, Kurt Vile) at this seventh annual celebration of “music, art, design, and food.” A low-key vibe and great chance to see some huge acts in a seemingly unlikely location. Riverfront, West Sacramento.www.tbdfest.com.
Oct. 14-15 Culture Collide. This new-to-the-Bay-Area party has been rocking LA for the past few years, but it seems to have taken on an appropriately Mission-esque flavor for its first Mission takeover: Local kids like Grmln alongside national acts like Cloud Nothings and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah alongside a whole host of buzzy Korean, Australian, and UK bands? Yeah, we’re there. Up and down Valencia in the Mission, with multiple stages including the Elbo Room. www.culturecollide.com
Aug. 31 LIVE 105’s Punk Rock Picnic with The Offspring, Bad Religion, Pennywise, and more. Are you a late-thirties/early-forties punk rock guy or gal who can’t agree on much of anything with your 13-year-old these days? Doesn’t get much better than this lineup. Bonus points for screaming along to all the swearing on The Offspring’s “Bad Habit.” Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.theshorelineamphitheatre.com
Sept. 1 Hiero Day. Souls of Mischief, Del, and the rest of the guys have promised some pretty big guest stars at this week’s fest, but even without ’em — a free block party with beer from Linden Street Brewery and music from some of the Bay Area’s best underground rappers? Guests, schmests. Downtown Oakland, www.hieroday.com
Sept. 4-13 Mission Creek Oakland Music & Arts Festival. With a range of heavy hitters — from B. Hamilton and Bill Baird to Whiskerman — this is a showcase of the fertile ground that is Oakland’s indie rock scene right now, most with door prices you’re not likely to see from these bands again. Venues throughout Oakland, www.mcofest.org.
Sept. 11-14 Downtown Berkeley MusicFest. A range of bluesy, folky, dancey bands from all over the Bay — especially recommended: the First Person Singular presentation of Beck’s Song Reader Sept. 11 and The Parmesans at Jupiter Sept. 14. Venues all over Berkeley,www.downtownberkeleymusicfest.org
Sept. 12-14, 15th Annual Electronic Music Festival Brava Theater Center, SF. www.sfemf.org
Sept. 24 Skeletonwitch, Black Anvil DNA Lounge, SF. www.dnalounge.com
Sept. 25-28 Philip Glass’ Days and Nights Festival Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur; Sunset Cultural Center, Carmel-by-the-Sea, www.daysandnightsfestival.com
Oct 3-5 TBD Festival, Riverfront, West Sacramento. Emerging Bay Area acts like 8th Grader mingle with the big kids (Blondie, Moby, Danny Brown, Kurt Vile) at this seventh annual celebration of “music, art, design, and food.” A low-key vibe and great chance to see some huge acts in a seemingly unlikely location. www.tbdfest.com.
Oct. 14-15 Culture Collide. This new-to-the-Bay-Area party has been rocking LA for the past few years, but it seems to have taken on an appropriately Mission-esque flavor for its first Mission takeover: Local kids like Grmln alongside national acts like Cloud Nothings and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah alongside a whole host of buzzy Korean, Australian, and UK bands? Yeah, we’re there. Up and down Valencia in the Mission, with multiple stages including the Elbo Room. www.culturecollide.com
FALL ARTS If you are a fan of hip-hop, you likely already know that 1993 was a very special year.
Call it coincidence, call it fate, call it a combination of social, economic, and political factors projected through the kaleidoscopic lens of American pop culture and write your thesis about it (you wouldn’t be the first). But something in the air in 1993 coalesced into a weather system of seminal albums from the best of the best: Tupac, Queen Latifah, Snoop Dogg, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang, De La Soul.
In Oakland, E-40 made his solo debut. Too $hort’s new album hit the top of the R&B/hip-hop charts. The Coup was selling records by rapping about the Communist Manifesto. And then there was Souls of Mischief.
Fresh out of Skyline High School, the sound of the four-piece’s debut was something else altogether: Over obscure jazz and funk samples, Souls of Mischief traded flows about weed, street violence, girls, teenage boredom — so no, not entirely unique in subject matter. But there was a sweet subtlety to the delivery, a charismatic, self-aware almost-wink to their bravado. These were Bay Area kids talking about how it felt to be Bay Area kids at that time, with a mission statement that charted a modest path for the future: This is how we chill/ from 93 ’til…
As of this writing, it’s been 20 years and 11 months since 93 ‘Til Infinity helped put the Bay on the hip-hop map. A lot’s changed, to put it lightly. The Internet happened, and the Internet’s effect on the music industry. The consolidation of thousands of smaller, regionally-influenced media channels into a few giant, similar-sounding ones.
And then there are things that haven’t changed. Twenty years and 11 months since that record first propelled them into the national spotlight, the four high school buddies who make up Souls of Mischief — that’s A-Plus, Opio, Phesto, and Tajai — are slouched on couches in their clubhouse in East Oakland on a warm Wednesday evening, ribbing each other about joint-rolling technique.
The Hiero compound, as the converted two-story warehouse is known, serves as the physical center of Hieroglyphics, the close-knit hip-hop collective/umbrella record label that’s home to rappers Del the Funkee Homosapien, Casual, and Pep Love, DJ Toure and producer Domino, in addition to Souls of Mischief. The exterior walls are covered with a mural done by teenagers in the neighborhood (it’d be tagged up by now, but everyone knows it’s Hiero so they leave it alone). Inside, the ground floor contains recording studios — Pep Love is working in one right now — and a big room that can be set up for video shoots. Upstairs, more recording space, a room with wall-to-wall shelves of vinyl, a mini-kitchen, an office.
A-Plus’s teenage son is here at the moment, recording something of his own. Stickers bearing the three-eyed Hiero logo adorn nearly every surface. An incoming mail pile is marked with a Post-it. Items on a nearby bookshelf: a stuffed alligator toy, Swisher blunt wraps. In one corner, a whiteboard reads “HIEROGLYPHICS CREW NEXT PROJECTS,” with members’ names down the left-hand side and updates about their records; as an afterthought: “THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOARD IS COORDINATED MARKETING STRATEGY.” In another corner, a chart titled “Capitalism Is a Pyramid Scheme.”
In the two-plus decades since that momentous year, the members of Souls of Mischief have had kids. Hieroglyphics went from young upstart crew to real business venture to respected veterans of the hip-hop world who can still easily sell out amphitheaters (as they learned on their 20th anniversary tour last year). There are special edition box-sets of their 20th anniversary reissue waiting for autographs downstairs before being shipped. On Monday, Sept. 1 (Labor Day), Souls of Mischief will be the centerpiece of the third annual Hiero Day, a free, all-ages music festival/block party in downtown Oakland that gets bigger every year — and it’s not just about the music. But more on that later.
What the guys have been consumed by for a year makes its debut a few days earlier. On Aug. 26, Souls of Mischief will drop their sixth studio album, There Is Only Now, the group’s first full-length since 2009.
A richly orchestrated concept album set in 1994, based loosely on real events from the year following their breakout album (when they were dealing with newfound fame, as Oakland dealt with an increase in gun violence), the record serves as both a bookend to 93 ‘Til Infinity and as completely fresh territory. For one, it’s Souls of Mischief’s first collaboration with the LA-based producer of the moment, Adrian Younge (Jay Z, Delfonics, Ghostface Killah), who’s using the album to launch his new vinyl-centric label, Linear Labs.
“The name There Is Only Now comes in part from Buddhism, the idea of focusing on the moment and being present. But it’s also a period piece with a twist — it touches on issues that are still going on now: Street violence, love, drugs, the music business. It’s a universal story,” says Tajai, after ambling in the last of the four, asking who has rolling papers. (He’s just come from a panel at UC Berkeley’s architecture school, where he was judging undergraduates’ projects, he says, by way of explanation about his preppy sweater. He’s enrolled in the Master’s program there.)
Fittingly, the record is a study in contrasts and surprises. Its guest stars are folks you might have heard of — Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes — but in roles we’re not really used to. The story, which follows the crew on an adventure through Oakland after Tajai is kidnapped, is punctuated by interludes from A Tribe Called Quest‘s DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad as an animated radio DJ, narrating and addressing Oakland from a fictional radio station, K-NOW.
Even more appropriately: The record, which clocks in at a packed 40 minutes long, sounds slick as anything — and was created without the use of a single sample or computer. At 35, Younge is known for using only live instrumentation (most of it performed himself), and the resulting beats and backing tracks draw heavily from classic ’60s and ’70s soul; his affinity for the Blaxploitation era of cinema and experience scoring films lends an extra layer of cinematic feeling to the record’s narrative.
Maybe most importantly, Souls of Mischief sound like they’re having a damn good time.
“The fact that it was all analog took it back to the beginning for us,” adds Phesto, noting that in the high school days of Souls of Mischief, they wrote songs using three-way calling. “We’ve been messing with live instrumentation from the beginning. But with the storyline, [Younge] writing it like a score, and us being lyricists for that score — I think he brought out something in us that no other producer has.”
There’s a base level of social consciousness that Hiero fans will know to expect. During one radio interlude that prefaces the song “Ghetto Superhero,” callers into K-NOW voice concerns about violence in Oakland in a way that, unfortunately, is still highly relevant. (Ali Shaheed Muhammad, with an audible smile: “It’s almost like we need some kind of superhero…”).
But it’s never been the goal to hit listeners over the head with social commentary, says A-plus. If they were going to tackle something like gentrification in Oakland, they’d do it for real, “and it’d be an 18-hour song.”
Besides, adds Tajai, “We’re older rappers. When we preach, it comes off preachy.”
Which is not to say that they’re reluctant to get political. Ask, for example, what they make of current trends in mainstream, commercial rap (and what seems like the chasm between that and the independent hip-hop that’s always bubbling just underground), and you will hear some opinions about materialism. Particularly, hypothetically, if A-Plus and Phesto had to leave an hour ago, and the light outside is waning from the pink East Oakland sky, and Tajai and Opio have smoked a good amount over the last 90 minutes.
“Music is always a reflection of society, and rap is like a 40-year-old man. That motherfucker has kids and a 401k. That’s how it’s acting,” says Tajai. “It doesn’t have the idealism it used to. It’s about ‘get paper.’ And you’re hearing kids saying that.”
“I think you can talk about money and still be a real person and have some style and finesse — I always liked Run-D.M.C. with the big chain and whatever, that’s part of hip-hop,” offers Opio. “I don’t think standing in front of the car is horrible in and of itself. But when every single thing is that…”
“The problem is not the subject matter, it’s that access to shit that isn’t that isn’t equal. It’s always the lowest common denominator, scraping the bottom of the barrel,” says Tajai. “I’ll hear something these days that’s like — is this a parody? I can’t even tell if it’s a joke. And then it takes off!”
Opio: “That’s just advertising dollars. People are investing in that because it makes money.”
Tajai: “I’m not mad at that. I’m mad that the dollars that do come in don’t go toward building new power structures. Look, the materialism is across the board. ‘In God we trust’ is on the dollar. We’re a materialist, capitalist society that’s driven by consuming. We are the mall. We’re not even the manufacturer or the farm, America is just the mall, and we’re being fed these images that make us wanna go to the mall all the time. My thing is I just want there to be some kind of reinvestment. Like cool, make a million dollars, but then have 40 percent of it go to literacy programs. Because then at the very least, people will understand that you’re a human who thinks, and not just this caricature of a rapper you’re selling to everybody.”
The thing about Hieroglyphics, most fans will tell you, is that Hieroglyphics has never quite gotten their due. Souls of Mischief were notoriously underpromoted by Jive following their debut; as violence in Oakland increased in the ’90s, the city put an actual moratorium on hip-hop shows for a while. Ask hip-hop historian Davey D about it. There was literally no place in Oakland for rappers to get on a stage.
When Hieroglyphics threw the first Hiero Day in 2012 — prompted by a Facebook fan who wrote online that, in honor of ’93 Til Infinity, he wanted to introduce as many people as possible to Hieroglyphics on 9/3, Sept. 3 — something shifted. A roster of the Bay Area’s hip-hop stars came out and played a free show in the streets that weekend, and roughly 10,000 people showed up. In 2013, it grew bigger, gaining sponsors, with Mayor Jean Quan naming it an official city holiday and referring to Hieroglyphics as a “bright spot” for Oakland.
This was a big change in tone from a city that hadn’t formally done much to support hip-hop for 20 years.
But Souls of Mischief aren’t looking for a medal. They’re looking at fundraising models like Farm Aid. They want to be able to give away houses after Hiero Day. They talk all the time, they say, about buying a farm and building a commercial kitchen where Oakland kids can learn about agriculture and cooking, learn farm-to-table techniques.
“As far as hip-hop moving forward, my thing is that hip-hop used to give us what we needed intellectually. And if we can’t feed people with it that way anymore, let’s feed them physically,” says Tajai. “You throw a weekend festival with 200,000 people, it should be an imperative to then go ‘Where is this money going?’ or ‘We’re gonna create this farm or this school.’
“That’s the whole point of Hiero Day,” he continues. “Use music to bring people together, bring people to local businesses, and then pool our resources and invest in the community so there’s lasting effects beyond just a party.”
“That’s one of the most powerful tools for young people,” says Opio. “It’s ‘OK, we’re partying, this is fun,’ and then you realize you can come together and do more than just party. You’ve seen the effects of that in the ’60s. That leads to revolutions.”
There are 15-year-olds becoming adults knowing only this version of Souls of Mischief. There’s a whole subset of fans who were born in ’93, in particular, who take Souls of Mischief lyrics straight to the chest. What will “old school” mean to their kids? Think for a second on the difference between infinity and there is only now.
“We’re talking about how to turn hip-hop into a generator of what it used to generate for us,” says Tajai. “I mean, we’re here today because of rap music. Not dead, not strung out, because of rap music. As much as because of our parents, our homies, whatever. So we gotta give something back.”
“Oh, right, and buy the record,” he adds. A half-hearted laugh. “We are the worst fucking promoters.”
Souls of Mischief play Hiero Day (alongside Zion I and some 28 other artists) Monday, Sept. 1 at the Linden Street Brewery Stage, 95 Linden, Oakl. More info: www.hieroday.com
