To say that Sunday, February 15, 2009, was a busy day for me is an understatement. I had decided to devote the entire day to Parlour to Parlour shoots, after discovering that I couldn’t spread them across two days. Basically, nobody was willing to give up any of their precious Valentine’s Day hours for an interview. In hindsight, I should have known better than to propose V-day for anything other than a date. But all was well that ended well: I did have a date of my own on the 14th, and I made the rounds on the 15th to visit three different artists I had discovered through my time at Performer Magazine. Daniel James from Leopold and his Fiction was the first I met that day.
Standing next to the Happy Hollows‘ Sarah Negahdari at the Knockout in San Francisco’s Mission District, on the night I first saw Leopold and his Fiction perform live (the Hollows had just finished their opening set), I remarked to her that the band’s fierce grooves reminded me a lot of the blues rock & boogie of early the ’70s band Cactus. Her reaction to that statement was pretty much the same as that of Daniel James, Leopold’s chief songwriter, singer and guitarist, when I dropped in on his San Francisco apartment about six months later — “I’ve never heard them before.”
I get that a lot. (more…)
Standing inside the Knockout in San Francisco’s Mission district late on a Wednesday night, August 27, 2008, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. I know I’ve been in some club in the city before that had its walls decorated with vintage album covers… but was it this one? And had I been there that time for live music or just to hang? The sad part of the story is, if I had been in the place before, it would not have been longer than four years ago. Score one for aging.