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Posted by glen609 on November 11, 2009

Los Tikkilyches y Los Schwamigos

Posted by glen609 on August 12, 2009

Fox and Goose, Sacramento Aug. 7th and Marcos Cafe, Columa CA, Aug. 9th.

Los Tikkilyches are a five piece from Sayulita, Mexico that describe themselves as “latin-surf-funk-rockin’soul-reggae fusion” who played recently with a Sacramento funky trio, The Scwamigos for two beautiful nights of eclectic musical maestrosity.

Los Tikkilyches play in all the restaurants and bars in and around Puerto Vallarta and they’re bringing their significant musical chops to the Western States for a couple months of rampant touring and tearing it up.

Both bands played their lights out in two venues the weekend of Aug. 7-9 and demonstrated true musical transcendence. Schwa Monley, bassist for Schwamigos, is nearly as much fun to watch as he is to hear, with the funk happening on a grand scale. Alejandro on drums and Hunter as frontman scoop up the funky vibe and groove to unheard of heights.

In the Tikkilyches, we got Alyssa Adams on keys and vocals with the beautiful grace and style. She harmonizes with Julia Blumenthal on guitar while Jonas Brewer holds down the lows and the beautiful flute solos and works his hair and his chilled out beatific personality pretty good as well. There’s a new guy on drums, Chad Sylva who’s worked out his amazing chops in Nashville for the last ten or twenty years. His fills are so clean they bring a tear to the eye. And then forget

Los Tikkilyces

about the guitar player, Jess Edmondson, if you’re worried about crying because his tasty guitar leads and solos fill the air with enough creamy goodness to fill the tear coffers of the most industrious tear merchant. Lightning fast and graceful is an understatement and it’s enough to turn everyone’s body into “one giant ear” according to the musician himself. Plus, the beard alone is worth the price of admission.

They got the whole glorious crowd gyrating exponentially and feverishly and nobody wanted it to stop. It was so frenetic my nice digital camera flew apart into a million pieces spontaneously and luckily nobody got hurt. Russ flew himself to the floor once, but made a graceful recovery, moved to his left and kept eveyone’s groove alive. We all felt gloriously alive and swam down the rapids of love and nostalgia until the next show.

Catch their tour right here: wooooo!

Bay to Breakers - 2009

Posted by glen609 on May 17, 2009

So I slapped on my Santa hat, put Dolores in her syringe box and headed on down the hill in my Crocs. The first guy I see is this dude in a skirt, rockin it solo. Dolores starts chiping and so I stop to give her a squirt of mush (in the shade because it’s already getting pretty hot, poor bird) and off we go again.

Passing through the Haight, this dude is already passed out on the corner. Maybe it was from the night before. It’s about 9:00 AM. In the high eighties. Some of the real runners are already coming back down Haight St. from the finish line at Ocean Beach. There were some bumblebees with runners bibs. I guess they flew pretty fast.

Another great GG review: Smells Like Teen Spirit, by Nirvana, touched a generation and it’s still a powerful backdrop to drunk naked people walking towards the beach from downtown San Francisco dressed as bees or salmon (swimming the wrong way and spawning on Howard Street while the cops are trying to clear the area).

“I feel stupid and contagious” is just about the most apt sentiment to frame the annual Bay to Breakers. Also, “a denial”.

Still a great song, still a great “race”.

The cops were out in force, but they didn’t bust anybody (not yet anyway) for nudity or drinking. Yay!

They could have busted these naked guys. Do we really need to see this?

I stopped in at the Beanbag cafe for brunch and took a bunch of pictures out the window.

This guy came up to me and said, This is one of only two days a year in San Francisco that nobody asks me if I’m a real Monk. What a sweetheart. I showed him my bird. He didn’t seem that impressed.

Wooo! I need some water. It’s hot out here.

This girl had way too many pants on! After her friend pulled ‘em down she ran around half naked like an animal just set free. Cute and pleasant.

Many people asked what Santa had in the box. I showed ‘em and then we went dancing and bounced this pool around. Dolores didn’t really like all the loud music. So I fed her again and fled back up the hill.

These guys had it all goin’ on. Short shorts, wizard hats, long gray beards and a stack of empties. Right on. Magical no littering. I think they gave homeless guy a PBR. What a beautiful magical day.

May 2009

Posted by glen609 on May 4, 2009

Check out these shows…

May 7th:

The Illness, Cloakwheel, Headshear - Kimo’s

Spectrum, The Entrance Band - Great American Music Hall

April 2009

Posted by glen609 on April 17, 2009

Handpicked shows in San Francisco, constantly updated, come back often…

Parlor Mob, Sassy!!!, Satin Peaches Bottom of the Hill. 8pm, $10, Thursday April 23rd.

Floater, Dolorata, Sticks And Stones- Bottom of the Hill, Saturday 04/18/09

Black Keys, Thee Makeout Party Fox Theater. 8pm, $30, Saturday 04/18/09

Mastodon, Kylesa, Intronaut Great American Music Hall. 7:30pm, sold out, Sunday 04/19/09

Fleet Foxes, Blitzen Trapper Fox Theater. 8pm, $22.50, Tuesday 04/21/09

Hotel Utah Sat. 04/17/09

Posted by glen609 on

Headshear, Fractal, David Knight - Hotel Utah

Jackscrew Player

Posted by glen609 on April 16, 2009

Jackscrew is GT, Lørth Samuelsson ünd Joe Boojjer. They are a neo-arena rock band for San Francisco, California.

From s/t by Jackscrew.

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From Five Live Demos:

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From Bone Conduction, by jackscrew

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Jackscrew on the roof

Unintended Consequences

Posted by glen609 on April 15, 2009

My new band name is Unintended Consequences.

Listen to

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while you’re reading.

Have you ever wondered why they sell “food” at some of our local clubs like Bottom of the Hill, Cafe du Nord and Great American Music Hall? Actually, to call it food is pretty much an overstatement. After a “meal” of one of the worst pizzas I’ve ever had at “Cafe” du Nord, on a date where I was trying to impress, we were accosted by an official who wanted to take a picture of us eating.

Coast Starlight

For proof, he said.

Of what?

That they actually sell food here. That looks like food you’re eating.

Sort of. Actually I don’t know what it is, but we are eating. Why do you need proof?

It’s part of their license. They are required to sell food.

Okay. Take your pictures.

So, I didn’t quite know what to think. At first I thought the venue was trying to pull a fast one, like getting a discount on their liquor license by claiming to be one thing while actually another.

It turns out, as I learned from a SF Chronicle article this weekend, that it’s the ABC, the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control, that’s pulling a fast one. They’re putting pressure on local establishments that want to offer all ages entertainment to sell more food as a requirement of their licenses that allow alcohol. Of course all these clubs make most of their money on booze. The older, drinking crowd helps pay for the opportunity of the kids to see the live music they crave. That’s just the way it is. The bureaucracy though, charged with protecting these virginal innocents thinks the answer is more food.

It makes a little sense, though just a little. At some point a compromise was made. The government couldn’t stomach under-aged kids in nightclubs so they made a deal and now everybody pretends that selling food is the answer to under-aged drinking. Seen in this light it’s thinking that’s not necessarily evil, but it is insidious.

Take Amtrak. They have a perfectly good bus that runs from the San Francisco Ferry Building straight to San Luis Obispo, where my family lives, that takes 3 hours less time that taking the train and costs $10 less, but they won’t sell you a ticket. Apparently, there’s a state law that you can’t buy an Amtrak bus ticket without having at least one train segment on your itinerary. I called the Amtrak office to confirm and the nice man said, “We are not a bus company. We are a train company.”

Okay. So I bit my lip and bought the train Bus and Train ticket combo, and although I had to wake up this morning an extra two hours too early and I get in to see my family a extra two hours later, I am sitting in the nice lounge car conversing with this cool aging rocker whose reading and quoting from The Merchant of Venice, and I have enough room to spread out, think, and write about the state of bureaucracy. It was hard to get out of bed this morning - I don’t get enough quality time with my hot new girlfriend as it is - but at least I can be assured that the government is watching out and protecting our otherwise feeble train system. By the way, if you haven’t taken a t rain trip I highly recommend it. Despite the delays (and some other bit of bureaucracy that gives track preference to frieght cars over passenger trains that sometimes strands Amtrak trains on the sidings for literally hours) it’s a nice and easy way to go. Leave your fast paced yuppie downtown attitude at the station and enjoy the scenery and the nice people along the way.

Also in the news concerning bureaucracy is a new trade war with Mexico that was sparked by a small provision in Obama’s omnibus spending bill rescinding those polluting Mexican trucks on our Interstates. That got the Mexican government riled enough to impose stiff tariffs on some of our California grown agricultural products and the war is on unless someone cand stop it by reinstating the trucks, for example. The intention was getting the smoking trucks out of airspace. Anyone that lived in L.A. in the the 70s can appreciate the benefits that air quality managemnet has had over the decades. But there’s a delicate balance. Now the grape and tomato growers are paying the price. Is that what we want?

So too the battle between state and federal officials over marijuana dispensaries. California voters decided that they wanted a way to distribute pot to people who needed it medically, came up with a compromise and flawed system and some people capitalzie on the loopholes and make a profit. The Feds, seeing a potential threat, crack down and everybody loses. There’s no sense. Those were the days when the born again Christian’s ruled the World. Recently though, Obama’s team came up with a seemingly coherent strategy whereby arrests will only be made when someone breaks both Federal and State law. That’s the theory. In practice, the Feds will still find a way to claim that state laws are being broken. It’s all fucked up. There’s no communication, no set standards, no consistency. People are being jailed at the whims of the government.

All this is what people hate about big government and bureaucracy. I’m a bleeding hearted progressive liberal who believes that government can and should be the answer to many of the problems that individuals or corporations can’t or won’t solve and this is exactly what I detest about bureaucracy. It’s inefficient, inconsistent, unjust, unequal, paternalistic, and spooky. But it’s an attempt to protect us. It just hasn’t been thought out very well, over increasingly complex issues and the results are often oppressive and ridiculous.

Why am I on this stupid train anyways? It’s a convoluted answer intended to protect a government subsidy from the extinction that could result from pure market forces if it was left to compete with buses.

Why is there crappy food at local venues? It’s there to keep all the venues from turning into nightlcubs that sell nothing but entertainment and alcohol. The people come for the entertainment and some come for the alcohol. What’s so wrong with that? If the clubs felt it was in their economic best interests to sell food on their own initiative then they would without any interference. Would it be so horrible to have a bunch of 18 year olds mixing in with the old drunks at the Tuesday Night show at the Bottom of the Hill?

Shouldn’t I be able to go buy a little pot if my Doctor says it might help?

It’s the classic battle between rights and freedoms. Your rights end where mine begin.

Fleet Foxes at the Fillmore

Last night, at Fleet Foxes at the Fillmore, I oppressed the urge to buy an $11 garden burger. Probably would have sucked. Saved my money for beer instead. Vote with your wallet and let the government (try) to do their jobs.

T-Model Ford and Gravel Road, Ferocious Few, Ramshackle Romeos - Thee Parkside, 03/29/09

Posted by glen609 on March 31, 2009

My girlfriend dumped me today so it was a good time to listen to the Blues.

Real, authentic, deep South, Delta Blues coming to you from the luminary label Fat Possum. This was T-Model Ford. Eighty Eight years old and a reported 23 little Ford’s to his name. That’s got to be a classic.

Francisco Fernandez, from the opener Ferocious Few called out his name and pointed to the diminutive man sitting on the side with his cane waiting patiently to go on.

“I’m a legend!” he announced. Classic.

T-Model Ford

Getting dumped is a bummer. But it’s a bummer tinged with realism and that’s what the blues are about. It’s a bunch of sad chords, set with a bunch of sad and lonely and resigned lyrics, but there’s an optimism and energy to the structure and to the rhythm. We’re all fucked, it says, but we’re all in it together so we may as well dance, drink, fuck and have a good time.

So I was listening, loosening up, drinking Thee Parkside’s famous Blue Collar Special (shot of Jameson and a PBR) two fisted of course and the feeling was coming back. From an incredible sadness I went into a kind of reverie and then I hit on this girl that turned out to be my friend’s new girlfriend. Oops! Worse things have happened and now we were all good friends.

I even started flirting, by text, with my ex. Maybe we weren’t done after all. As long as there’s the blues, there’s a glimmer of hope.

T-Model has a creaky broken guitar sound that he fingerpicks and drones and he plays exclusively in the key of E. That’s apparently all he knows. He only picked up a guitar at the age of 58. And now he sounds like the back side of Heaven. “I’m a chicken head man,” or “She asked me, so I told her.” Classic.

Between every song he announced, “It’s Jack Daniels time!” and he took a slug.

Nothing sad about this man. He was having the time of his life and you could tell he had that same time of his life every night. This was not the embittered, embattled picture of the stereotyped black bluesman from the South.

He watched my friend’s girl twirling her hips to the beat right in front of the stage and licked his chops. He wasn’t afraid.

Twenty four was right around the corner.

Change your Relationship Status

Posted by glen609 on

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Choose from some of these comments or add your own…

…went from “Single” to “Married”

…went from “Married” to “Single”

…went from “It’s Complicated” to “Single”

…went from “In a Relationship” to “Single”