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.

But no matter, this night will surely keep its place in the ol’ memory banks much, much longer – from the warm, excited hug I received from the Happy Hollows’ lead singer/guitarist Sarah Negahdari before I even walked through the door, to the drunkenly enthusiastic girl in the audience who intimated she could be doing exactly what I’m doing right now (and in truth, her first impressions of the Happy Hollows matched mine almost exactly, so if she could get the essence of what she was saying translated to the screen/page, she could very well be a new voice in the ever-crowded blogosphere), and the striking contrast of the three bands on the bill, there was plenty more to associate with the venue this time than just a bunch of LP sleeves on the wall (and 45s too).

I first encountered the Happy Hollows, an energized Pixies-esque punk-ish trio from that hip section of L.A. known as Silver Lake, during San Francisco’s annual Mission Creek festival back in July. What made them stand out that Friday night in July was still very much on display more than a month later, and it was still working to their advantage. But more on that in a bit. (more…)

While a large chunk of San Francisco’s concert-going population was crowding Golden Gate Park for that big ol’ Outside Lands festival, Saturday night, August 23, 2008, at Kimo’s was a mutual reputation-building affair for the well-informed handful of folks in attendance.

The under-new-management venue, Kimo’s, has a colorful history, rife with stories of shady characters, assaults, and other blemishes typical of the nearby Tenderloin neighborhood. Put it this way – it’s the neighborhood where transvestite hookers have shouting matches in the street, and crack cocaine can be bought out in the open just as easily as organic fruit at a farmer’s market (maybe even more easily). So something fishy is bound to spill over into adjacent neighborhoods every now and then.

For the night’s headliner, the L.A.-based group of family and friends known as the Parson Red Heads, it was an historic night – their first headlining gig in San Francisco. Granted, it was at Kimo’s, but all was well. The venue’s new management claims to be more artist-friendly. And in truth, there were no oddballs to be seen in the place (none that we could visibly identify, anyway). So out-of-towners like the Parsons were spared the wrath of San Francisco’s finest. And at the end of the show, a live personal announcement was made from the stage, thanking the band and informing the audience of upcoming shows. Ah, just like the olden days, when clubs cared. None of that “show’s over, now get out!” attitude from some unseen goon in a corner booth. Now, if Kimo’s can just get their web site working and add upcoming shows to their MySpace calendar, we can really say they’re getting somewhere.

They can also get their doorman to his post earlier. Had I arrived with a dishonest group of friends, they all could have weaseled in for free. But they’re not like that, so they just kept their bills in hand and made sure they were spotted by the doorman when he returned.

By this point, the Red Heads were sound checking. Even this was worth hearing, as drummer Brette Marie Way tested her vocal mikes with a charming, off-the-cuff rendition of TLC’s “Waterfalls.” After run-throughs of the band’s already classic yet still not released set opener “Time is Running Out” and a cover of Herman’s Hermits’ British invasion mega hit “Something Tells Me I’m Into Something Good,” the opening acts took care of their sound checks with little time in between. The night was running smoothly, and would continue that way to the end. Nobody even thought about bullshitting the audience with interminable waits between sets and sound checks. Anyone who missed their train home couldn’t blame Kimo’s or the bands. (more…)

Listening to rock radio in the early ’90s — particularly the college and ‘alternative’ varieties — was an experience like no other. The ratio of tolerable to intolerable music was so high that no aspiring hipster ever needed to flip through top 40 stations again. The cream of those groups (Soundgarden, the Afghan Whigs, Dinosaur Jr., and of course Nirvana and Pearl Jam) were getting their due on MTV, too. There may not have been the kinds of explosive social and political issues, at that time, to galvanize a generation the way ’60s did, and that the last eight years have had, but much of that early ’90s music made a similarly strong connection and reflection of the awkward psyches that were and are common in high schoolers and college students.

Seeing it that way, anyone who still grooves to the grunge and college rock of yesteryear either has some serious unresolved personal issues, or simply hasn’t learned how to grow up yet. As it turns out, one of that era’s icons, Juliana Hatfield, is about to publish her first book, a memoir titled When I Grow Up. Do with that what you will.

Most of us first became familiar with Juliana in the summer of 1993, when what was to become her signature song, “My Sister,” took hold of modern rock radio and MTV, disarming us with its blunt opening line: “I hate my sister, she’s such a bitch.” Either you were enthralled with empathy, you were turned off by the girlishness of Juliana’s voice, or you were like my mother and just laughed. But no matter what the response, you likely did respond in some way to that introduction.

In reality, Juliana does not have a sister (though she does have a brother, Jason, who has collaborated with her once in a while in the studio), and by ‘93, she already had six years of record-making and live performance behind her. While attending the Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts native Juliana Hatfield was approached by drummer Freda Boner (later the less eyebrow-raising Love) and singer/guitarist John Strohm in 1986. (more…)

Few bands in the history of rock n’ roll have been simultaneously as lucky and doomed as Badfinger. Lucky because they were not only one of the wildly eclectic assortment of artists the Beatles signed to their Apple Records label in 1968, but also because they had the talent and the songs to actually make something of their good fortune. And doomed because of poor management and a fatal dose of hopelessness. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

When the band joined the Apple roster, they were operating under the name the Iveys. And, much like their similarly botanically named contemporaries the Hollies, the Iveys – who consisted of vocalist/guitarist Pete Ham, vocalist/guitarist Tom Evans, bassist/vocalist Ron Griffith and drummer Mike Gibbins – were playing a highly melodic, often jaunty and sometimes dramatic mix of British invasion rock n’ roll. They were slightly out of fashion in the late ’60s, and yet, being that they sounded an awful lot like the Beatles, it mattered very little. The Beatles could do no wrong, and as the Beatles themselves were acutely aware of this, they wisely took the band under their wing. In time, Badfinger became the most successful act on the Apple roster, apart from the Beatles themselves. Along with Big Star and the Raspberries, the band helped shape what we all would come to know as “power pop.”

The Iveys - Maybe Tomorrow (1969)
purchase this album (Amazon)

Tony Visconti was tasked with producing the debut LP by the Iveys. The album was preceded by a single that was thought to have great potential, the melancholy, Left-Banke-ish, Tom Evans-sung ballad “Maybe Tomorrow.” When it failed to dent the top 40 in the states (the single stalled at #67), the album’s release was canceled by Apple’s US distributor, Capitol. However, the album still made it to store shelves in Japan and parts of Europe. What those countries heard was a mixed bag of feisty rockers, cutesy pop ditties and a very Beatley sound.

From the lighthearted tale of a “Fisherman,” sung again by the Paul McCartney of the band, Tom Evans, to the bizarre juxtaposition of a sad eviction tale sung along to vaguely Mexican-sounding, not terribly unhappy music with a supple Pete Ham lead vocal, “They’re Knocking Down Our Home” (download), the contents of Maybe Tomorrow are all over the place. Sometimes this is a good thing; other times it falls flat, like when the band added some ridiculous call-and-response to “I’m In Love,” or the silly wah-wah and affected chorus vocals in “Think About The Good Times” (download). The most impressive song here is the closer, a Pete Ham-sung, a long-ish tune called “I’ve Been Waiting” (download) that foreshadowed Weezer’s dramatic, similarly placed “Only In Dreams” 25 years later. The band’s first effort may not have been a broadly defining moment, but the power pop template was being formed. Except that nobody really knew it yet. (more…)

I am not one to toss around the word “hero” lightly. It takes extraordinary courage to earn such a designation. I am also not one to write one of these artist overviews with too much usage of the first-person singular pronoun. I like to keep myself out of it as much as I can, trying to maintain some semblance of journalistic objectivity.

But you know what? Ornette Coleman is indeed a heroic figure, not just in jazz, but in popular culture. And for me to make such a statement reflects my own definition of what a hero is. So, to hell with omitting the first person singular pronoun. I’m telling this story the way I want to tell it – from my own personal, biased perspective.

That perspective began when I was in college. What better time to be introduced to Ornette Coleman than during the time when our minds are being pried open and expanded farther than our confining high school institutions ever could pry? And it was in a jazz history class at the University of Rhode Island, appropriately enough, that I first heard Ornette’s name. It was and still is a unique name – who else besides Coleman’s own son can claim it? Admittedly, I was drawn in and driven to find out more as soon as Coleman’s name was linked with that most attractive of adjectives to the mind of a college student with a taste for the unusual – “controversial.”

The text in our history book only briefly touched upon what made Coleman a controversial figure, from what I can remember. Most significantly, Coleman’s tendency to play outside of conventional chord changes seemed to make him a target of derision in his early career. He played by his own rules, and by the early 1970s he had given his set of rules a name – harmolodics.

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