The Random Revelations Night Train To Nowhere Is Waiting For You To Hop Aboard!
A Podblast Powered By Curiously Curated Ska, Soul, Reggae, Dub, Punk, Funk, Easy Listening Music & Hard Liquor.
Hear my 2 hrs of painstakingly picked records and some rare soundboard concert clips. Most of my shared recordings are ripped right off vinyl rarities for your listening pleasure by artists such as Gregory Isaacs, Darondo, Dead Moon, Sister Double Happiness, Andre Williams, X, Rare Essence, Van Morrison, Larry Graham, Lou Rawls and The True Believers featuring brothers Javier & Alejandro Escovedo.
This episode is new for November and is a nuanced nocturnal tour you’ll want to revisit all over again.
Regale In Retro Rock Blasts from The Pretenders, Billy Squier, Dave Clark Five, Chilliwack, A Flock Of Seagulls as well as new music from contemporary #IndieRock artists like Jesse Dayton & Kelley Stoltz.
For the careful listener you’ll also hear a couple previously unreleased live recordings of a couple of my old late 80’s era bands Mom & The Rolling Scabs.
Gotta lil’ bored and needed to share some quarantunes with my peeps online… If yer around me in the house, you’d know I spend hours everyday regurgitatin’ through thousands of albums . For those that don’t have the pleasure of me drunkenly thumbing through the shelves and pulling out obscurities I created a digital simulation. This is an official 2 Hour Guided Missile Of a Mixtape, literaly pounds upon pounds of platters painstakingly plopped under yr Spin Doctor’s new needle. (NOTE: long before a hippie jam band in NYC used the name Spin Doctors, I was using the Spin Doctor moniker on flyers for my DJ gigs around San Francisco. I eventually gave up because you know, Little Miss Can’t Be Blecch was getting way too much MTV time, and killed my buzz).
We Begin With Members Of The Dils Cowboy Nation Covering Dave Alvin of The Blasters And End With Wanda Jackson Imitating Charlie Rich. In The Middle We Get Tales Of The Big Boys Playing With Trouble Funk & Gwar Being Banned From The Club For Life At Their Very First Show. There’s Cosmic Sounds Of The Zodiac, BT Express, Flo & Eddie, Kendra Smith, Tom T. Hall, Chuck Prophet, Nick Lowe, The Mexican Hat Dance, Stax Soul Icons & Successful Major Label Heavies Revisiting Their Punk Roots. A Rarely Heard Hip-Hop Collab Between Lil’ Jon, Jay Z & Too Short, Indie Rock Rarities From The Incredible Casuals, And Beatnik Beatch, Plus Hawaiian Islander Protest Music From Israel Kamakawiwo’ole & Michael Kahikina. Dusty Springfield vs Tony Joe White, Hank Ballard vs Kris Kristofferson, Roberta Flack vs Les McCann …So, Uh, Yeah It’s A Thing & It’s All Happening Deep Inside The Random Revelations Rotober 2020 Mix.
Anyhow the the turntablist spins sonic stories for the masses in my latest Illegal , Immoral & Fattening mix…
Wolves is the 9th of the 10 songs featured on the Dead Bats CD , the most recent release from Shotwell whose first 7″ EP appeared in 1995.
Twenty-five years and as many band members later Jimmy Jazz of Shotwell brought back percussionist STEVE MORIARTY (THE GITS, PINKOS, ST. BUSHMILLS CHOIR) to record & release Dead Bats. Joined on bass by JOE FUCKO (NAKED AGGRESSION, STRYCHNINE) they stuck to the tried and true, passionate political lyrics set to pissed drunk punk pacing that has defined their output over the decades.
Said Steve of the brief but feisty Shotwell Dead Bats Protest video he put together : “I made this on my I-phone, mostly using Black Lives Matter protest footage from Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Brazil and Paris France. It’s what I did for my summer vacation.”
Sad news came down the punk rock pipe yet again lasterday when I got word that Walter Lure, the affable sartorial sidekick to Johnny Thunders onstage antics for many years had succumbed to liver & lung cancer at age 71.
Walter Lure aka Waldo R.I.P. Walter Lure aka Waldo
Numerous musicians & fans took to social media to pay tribute to a guy who remained far from a household name to most casual rock music fans, played key roles in some seminal punk rock records, was there when it all went down, often in flames and had recently toured and performed with a long list of rebel rock heroes and mutual admirers.
I got a few chances to shoot video of Walter playing over the past few years, and he was a true old school rock n roll showman, and the ramshackle style made for gigs that were always a blast. I’ve included a few clips from some of Walter Lure’s last gigs in San Francisco on this page as a he salute to his bravado and role in providing us all with such great rock n roll memories over the decades.
Walter Lure was in NYC in the mid 70’s when he left his gig as guitarist for largely unheralded rock band The Demons, whose lead singer was a drug dealer to local musicians including the New York Dolls, to join up with Johnny Thunder’s post Dolls disastour outfit The Heartbreakers. Lure was already a fan of Thunders, who’d he watched at the Mercer Arts Center as they threw away the rock rule book, and eschewed the currently in vogue prog & hippie folk ditherings for a more animalistic vital 50’s influenced street rock sound. The charismatic & chaotic Thunders “could get a round of applause simply from messing with his own hair,” Lure writes in his recently published memoir “To Hell And Back”, and Walter, a banker’s son, who’d attended Fordham U and enjoyed classic literature, was eventually asked to join the rough housing unit known as The Heartbreakers in 1975 and quickly tried to fit in. ” I played my last show with The Demons on a Friday night at CBGB during a 1975 July 4th festival to about 20 people at 2 am and my first Heartbreakers show the next night to a jam packed house of probably 500 people with lines around the block. ” He let Dee Dee Ramone cut his fashionably long 70’s locks off, and then had to get on the same drug wavelength as his bandmates , writes Lure “like an idiot I said: yeah, I’ll try it. Within six months or a year became as fucked up as they were.” In addition to a dope habit, he established a role in the band as a sidekick and musical foil to the notoriously unreliable and drug addled singer/guitarist.
#WalterLure
The sole survivor of the classic #JohnnyThundersAndTheHeartbreakers era has left the building #RIPWalterLure Got to see Waldo a few times, and it was always a blast… Here he is performing an old #Contours classic #DoYouLoveMe with his 2017 #LAMF touring band featuring #GlenMatlock (@glenmatlock1) , #DannyRay (@explodingsax) , #MikeNess (@mikeness) and the mighty Clem Burke on drums ( @cbdproject )
In 1976, at the invitation of former NY Dolls manager Malcolm Mclaren, The Heartbreakers traveled to England for the potentially promising, but very soon to be The ill fated, Anarchy in the UK tour, with the infamous Sex Pistols headlining, as well as The Damned & The Clash as support. The New Yorkers had barely cleared customs at Heathrow when it became apparent the tour was going to be sabotaged by mountains of bad press, public out cry, boycotts and bans by local gov’t councils . This tumult arose as a result of the aftermath of the Pistols appearing on the live BBC Bill Grundy TV talk show and mischievously uttering some four letter expletives in the direction of the lovably lecherous lout of a host and all heck broke loose. Recounted Walter to interviewer Joe Whyte in 2017 “Malcolm picked us up at the airport in a limo and he was really nervous and muttering to himself. He mentioned something about the band cursing on a TV show, but we had no idea. The next day we woke up and every newspaper had nothing else on the front pages but the hideous outrage that some punks cursed on national TV. We couldn’t understand it at all. “
The Heartbreakers played what UK shows they could, and as they’d a bit of a reputation in the UK, unlike NYC where they just had debts and detractors, they stayed in London with their raging queen of a manager Leee Black Childers, hoping to score a lucrative or at least livable UK record deal.
“Leee Black Childers had kept some cash in reserve for a few spare meals and transport needs. Luckily the Clash’s roadie, Sebastian Conran offered to put us up for “a few days” at his parents flat in Belgravia. They were out of town – they being the founders of Conran’s department stores. The flat had around 5 floors and about 8 bedrooms and was beautiful. I knew Sebastian was nervous that we’d destroy the place but we were actually fairly well behaved didn’t wreck anything. I guess we didn’t have enough cash to get lots of drugs and booze and start vomiting over everything. The Clash members would stop by with friends during this time sometimes bringing food and booze. I know Johnny sold his Gretsch White Falcon guitar to Joe Strummer while we were there. “
Remaining in London throughout most of 1977 working on their debut album, they went from place to place, even crashing at a famous punk dominatrix residence, where they’d hang out getting high, while she tortured her clients in the back. Said Walter to Louder Than War in 2017 “Someone said they saw David Frost coming out one afternoon looking all red faced after having gone through a session with her. Quite the scene at the time. . . “
Upon getting a record deal offer Walter said he “finally quit my day job as a chemist with the Food and Drug Administration in New York and embarked on my new career as a drug addled punk rocker! It doesn’t get much stranger than that.”
While his bandmates used their spare time pursuing pints in the London pubs, or nodded out waiting for the man and calls from management, Lure took in musicals on the West End, and read Sartre. He came across a used English school girl tie, and incorporated it into his look, and adopted the Bowler as his headwear. They played many gigs with Siouxsie & The Banshees, and after the Heartbreakers one & only album was released and quickly bombed commercially they “officially” broke up, but soon began doing “reunion” gigs as early as 1978.
Living in New York in the early 1980’s, Lure was openly bisexual, had his drug habit, occasional “reunion” gigs with the ever impossible Johnny Thunders, and own band affairs to tend to with groups like The Heroes, The Blessed, The Hurricanes, The Waldos, but he still needed a job to pay bills. His father stepped in to get him work on Wall St. and Lure would suit up daily, and often cop dope on his lunch break at a brokerage firm, doing millions of dollars in trades while managing a debilitating drug regimen, and by night head to gigs and change out of his day job outfit backstage, in his book says he finally managed to clean up by the late 1980’s. Lure told interviewer Jeffrey Wengrofsky that after finally putting the needle down after Memorial Day 1988 “I was in charge of a settlement operation of 125 people, making four hundred grand a year. I had thought that music was complex, but this was like a world unto its own. It gets so complex with private equity. All through the ‘90s, I would work during the day in suits and change into my rock clothes at night – beat up pieces of shit from the other side of my closet. Sometimes, people from my job would come down to the gig, and there I’d be, on stage, singing “Too Much Junkie Business.” It would blow their minds. I lived a double life. I’d play once a month at The Continental with The Waldos.”
His former Heartbreakers bandmates attempted one last reunion in the early 1990’s, and Lure was achingly aghast at his old bandmates chronic condition, and could see the grim future for Jerry Nolan & Johnny Thunders barreling down hard. Writes Lure in his autobiography “Musically, they belonged together, and when they passed away, both in the span of nine months, they were buried within fifty yards of one another. Together again.”
Lure eventually was reunited with his long lost son Damien in the early 2000’s, and while the kid quietly told friends he didn’t really appreciate Walter’s simplistic “Nursery Rhyme” style songs, at least the two had a chance to bond and reacquaint after years of separation. Just a few weeks months before he died, Walter’s autobiography emerged in both hardback and paperback editions from Backbeat Press.
Entitled “To Hell And Back: My Life in Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers, in the Words of the Last Man Standing” the tale mostly delves into the sordid stories, tawdry shenanigans, that make up the trials and tribulations of being an on/off again bandmate to the legendary Johnny Thunders for umpteen years. Walter spends much of the story detailing the “Too Much Junkie Business” they were known for until the men parted. An Epilogue and Discography are provided for those that care to follow the tale past the Heartbreakers saga. Said reviewer Jim Spaeth on Amazon of the self penned tome “I couldn’t put this book down. Non-stop excitement, craziness, drama as the weirdest cast of characters rampage through the pages. I love inside stories of the music biz; this book recounts the birth and death of punk from the inside out. Walter also tells the very human and personal stories of his bandmates as they struggle with the music industry, the music press, the fans, each other, but mostly with themselves. You root for them to make it, then you root for them to just stay alive. Most didn’t; Walter lived to tell the tale. Don’t miss it!”
Invoking heady mid-seventies days with late associates Leon Russell and Phil Seymour, then 65 year old Power Pop songsmith Dwight Twilley tells of the struggle getting signed by Shelter Records and making “Sincerley” his debut LP featuring the hit “On Fire” over 40 years ago.
Eventually after regaling the audience at the Starline Social Club in Oakland California with musical memories and a rare peek at his poetic process, Dwight sucks down a beer, and plays his song “Three Persons” about a thorny love triangle, in a style much like the demo was made for his Shelter Records debut.
Down here below, we have a video towards the end of the set where Dwight invited Sarah Bethe Nelson and here band to join him on a version of “on Fire” a track he originally recorded with Phil Seymour back in 1974
Thanx For Watching, And If Feasible For You, Please Consider Tossing A Buck In The Virtual Hat To Help Support The Costs Of Acquiring, Editing And Uploading The Hundreds Of Videos Found On My Channel http://paypal.me/lilmikesf
“Hello you beautiful people! …so began an email plea from my friends that run the SF Make-Out Room, amidst all the worrisome news related to the covid-19 panic was the news that a few dozen fine people I know, and the businesses they work for are desperately struggling during to the efforts to stem the spread of some “novel” virus…
It continued “I hope everybody is holding up OK and staying safe during these unprecedented times. As many of you know, once we are free to go back to our day to day lives, the city of San Francisco, and many of our favorite bars and venues, wont be the same, if they are even there at all.”
Then came the call to action…
“That’s why the Make Out Room and the Latin American Club need your help. And why I am begging you to donate anything you can. ”
Scenes from the Make-Out Room
-click to read more at link below from my friends on the Make-Out Room Staff hard hit by the Corona Virus lockdown and if you can, help support them while their jobs are in limbo…
Or as my pal Pat Thomas (a multipurpose culture vulture whom you can see talks with here) put it more succinctly: “In 1997, my band Mushroom played their first ever gig at the Make Out Room in San Francisco. Our most recent gig (August 2019) was there too. Over the past decades for many of us – the Make Out Room has been a home away from home. Not only a place to play, but a place that has had weddings and funerals for members of the Bay Area music scene. I encourage every San Francisco musician who has ever graced the stage, every fan who attended a show, every drinker who got wasted there to donate even just $10-20 dollars – if we all do it, we can save Marty’s sweet succulent ass. click on the link here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-make-out-room-and-latin… “
Here below are some linked videos I shot to give ya an idea of the type of recent music related events the Make-Out Room has hosted over just the past 5 years… the club also hosts numerous gigs, “Writers With Drinks” & “Litquake” spoken word events, comedy, burlesque, DJ music and many other types of community gatherings ranging from birthday parties and political benefits to cumbia dance nights.
I donated instantly because music seems about main thing that makes my life worth living, and there is no where else left in SF that would serve as a clubhouse people like this… it is a creative concentration camp of affable alcoholics, cantankerous cranks, dapocaginous DJ’s, hirsute hipsters harboring bad bourgeois beards, musical misfits & morose mopers amidst the last of the loquacious & lovely ladies that all should know better. This injustice will not stand…this too shall pass. Vive La MakeOut! There’s links below to two dozen some videos of various live music I’ve edited from the Make-Out over the past few years fer yer perusal
Matthew Stoller : Literally The Guy Who Wrote The Book On The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy Alerts “Sheltered In Place” Americans To Be On Vigilant Lookout As The #CoronaVirus Corporate Coup #ShockDoctrine Goes Down In The Beltway
Congressional leaders are likely to put a very ugly deal in front of the American people, and if it passes, America may be unrecognizable after this pandemic. But there is a way to stop it, if people on the populist left and people on the populist right work together.
Here’s the situation. Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and the Trump administration is negotiating a bailout package to address the coronavirus crisis. There’s been a lot of chatter about the need to support workers as the economy goes into a freeze. This is happening around the world; the British government, for instance, is willing to pay 80% of worker wages during this downturn for those affected by the crisis.
But in the U.S., our leaders seem to be falling prey to what can only be called a corporate frenzy of favor-seeking. “Any time there is a crisis and Washington is in the middle of it is an opportunity for guys like me,” said one lobbyist.
Now first I should say that I don’t know exactly what is going to be in the final bill, because the whole process is opaque and being negotiated right now by some untrustworthy political leaders. We will only find out the details at the last minute. So all I have to go off is rumor and reporting. But if we wait until we know the full contours, it will likely be too late to act. I hope I’m wrong, but the list of what lobbyists are asking for is long, and ugly, and often the requests for money or legislative favors are done to cover up mistakes made before the coronavirus hit.
Take Boeing. The aerospace giant of course wants a $60 billion bailout. Financial problems for this corporation predated the crisis, with the mismanagement that led to the 737 Max as well as defense and space products that don’t work (I noted last July a bailout was coming). The corporation paid out $65 billion in stock buybacks and dividends over the last ten years, and it was drawing down credit lines before this crisis hit. It is highly politically connected; the board of the corporation includes Caroline Kennedy, Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, three Fortune 100 CEOs, a former US Trade Representative, and two Admirals, one of whom is the board’s only engineer. Using the excuse of the coronavirus, Boeing is trying to get the taxpayer to foot the bill for its errors, so it can go back to making more of them.
But that’s not all. Defense contractors want their payments sped up, and I’ve heard they want to widen a giant loophole called ‘other transaction authority’ to get around restrictions on profiteering. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezo want “$5 billion in grants or loans to keep commercial space company employees on the job and launch facilities open.” They also want the IRS to give them cash for R&D tax credits.
CNBC reported that hotels want $150 billion, restaurants want $145 billion, and manufacturers wants $1.4 trillion. And the International Council of Shopping Centers wants a guarantee of up to $1 trillion. The beer industry wants $5B. Candy industry wants $500M. The New York Times reported that “Adidas is seeking support for a long-sought provision allowing people to use pretax money to pay for gym memberships and fitness equipment.” Gyms are of course closed. Meatpackers want special visas so they can undercut wages of their workers, and importers want to stop paying duties they incurred for harming domestic industries for illegally dumping products into the U.S.
Now, I’m not opposed to supporting industries. This is a crisis, and we do not want a lot of the productive capacity of the United States to fall apart because of a pandemic. But the key to supporting enterprises is to make sure that there are strict conditions, so that power doesn’t consolidate into the hands of monopolists and financiers cherry-picking distressed assets. Otherwise, America will simply be unrecognizable after this pandemic. CNBC personality Jim Cramer, for instance, is worried that after this pandemic America will have just three retailers. And he’s right to be worried about that.
Here’s how we can stop it. There are enough members of Congress to act and prevent what really looks less like a relief package and more a corporate coup. However, the problem is that this group is split into different political parties, and Congressional leadership is taking advantage of that dynamic to jam this through. Mitch McConnell wants big business to rule, so he’s playing a trick. He is refusing aid to workers. Democrats are negotiating with him to try to get unemployment assistance and social welfare. McConnell knows Dems won’t pay attention to corporate bailouts if he takes the public hostage, and Democrats know that they can hand out favors to big business if they just talk about how they got larger checks for workers.
So McConnell will put a bill down in front of Nancy Pelosi, with some good stuff like unemployment insurance, but also the really ugly stuff to hand over America to big business. The corporatists in the Democratic Party will tell her “Pass the corporate coup bill, after all we have to do something right now!” And because she doesn’t have the votes from within her own caucus because of these corporatists, and because she doesn’t particularly care if America is sold off to big business, she will do that. The only hope is to get together a bipartisan group from the right and the left to oppose this charade.
And there’s a precedent.
In 2008, when Congress was on the brink of passing a $700 billion bailout to Wall Street, something astonishing happened. A motley bipartisan group of roughly a hundred members, as well as outside experts, formed what was called the “Skeptic’s Caucus,” and organized enough votes to take down the package. Congressional leaders then attached some minor tweaks, and forced the package through after the stock market crashed. Ultimately, the skeptics failed, and the bailouts ended up shifting power and wealth to an unaccountable elite class.
But for that brief moment, it became clear that opposition to Congressional leadership on corporate subsidies is possible. We will need another Skeptic’s caucus, and quickly. And this time, it can succeed. Because this time, no one is fooled by what is happening. We can see it plainly.
So whether you are a Republican or Democrat, join a new Skeptic’s caucus. And demand your member of Congress represent YOU, and not just big business. Help the people by dealing with unemployment, rent, mortgages, not big business executives trying to save their cushy positions.
That’s the situation. I need you to take this information and repost it, forward it, and contact anyone you know in politics, including your representative. Tell them they have to help the people directly and not send out aid to big business without *strict conditions.* Otherwise after this pandemic, we will wake up living in a society with a lot less freedom.
Thanks for reading. And if you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues of BIG, my newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. If you want to a book to hunker down with while sheltering in place, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
cheers,
Matt Stoller
P.S. I am releasing all copyright claims on this essay. Take it! It’s yours!
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Tune In Soon For #TheInvestigation
A one-night-only theatrical event starring John Lithgow as DJT streamed live from NYC’s Riverside Church beginning at 6 p.m. Pacific / 9 p.m Easterm
The #MuellerReport reimagined by heirs to the Disney dynasty
In the clip below shot in San Francisco at The Rickshaw Stop, Khaela Maricich and her partner Melissa Dyne deliver a track from “Brand New Abyss“, their 2017 album release from their performing entity known as “The Blow“.
Khaela first released music under the moniker The Blow in Olympia Washington 20 years ago. Since then her music, art and performances done under the name The Blow have produced albums and performance works, traversing the fields of popular music, social critique and contemporary art.
THE WOMAN YOU WANT HER TO BE
She will be the woman you want her to be woo woo woooowooooo the woman you want her to be the woman you want her to be
She’ll be smart enough to know if you want her to not be smart or just not to show it her face is a surface it seems like there’s something below it
And she’ll be the woman you want her to be woo woo woooowooooo the woman you want her to be the woman you want her to be
She’ll be your privatest property yours to posses to dress up and undress she’s an infinite yes yes yes yes there will always be more of her unless of course you’d prefer less she can do that too, just let her know what you want her to fix she can take care of it
And she knows what you want she knows what you want she knows what you want she knows what you want (it’s like she can just feel you)
Think of her as a mass not one ass but a mass of asses plastic, magic, passive, perfectible limitless: a living receptacle
And the bigger the better the tighter the sweater the bigger the better the tighter the sweater Or wait- is it not big is better? we need to compress her shrink up her sweater and make her be lesser When you fire in your cannonballs you want them to really hit something not just go floating off into endless mysterious space
She is accessible you can walk right inside through the welcoming holes in her mouth and her eyes “Hi!” There’s a comfortable area there you can chill in. Around back is the VIP entrance it’s invite only and many resent this they swear their name must be on the list They wanna get in get in get in get in…
Ask yourself what you need her for never mind, tell yourself that she needs you more.
If she is a game and you’re wanting to win her maybe make a club and just don’t let her enter keep her on the side of wherever’s the center like you’re in a sunny locale with a beer and a smile and havana cigars and the subs pumped up and your cells all charged and everything’s yes there’s a gleam on your car and she’s off in some permanent winter. Then after ten thousand years of getting your coffee freezing conditions killing her softly her hula girl uniform rigid and icicle frosty, yeah she might kinda wanna get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in get in (etc) What wouldn’t she do to get in?
She’d be the woman you want her to be. woo woo woooowooooo the woman you want her to be the woman you want her to be
You want to conquer the unknown: she can hold your hand while you do it and if you can’t find the unknown she can be your unknown she’ll lay down and let you voyage through it.
She just seems so haveable, at the very least halve-able. Split up the middle and grab what is palpable, an unlimited free material, give-able, take-able, breakable, think what all you could make with this resource a pile of woman a landmass of layered up woman a suburban mega mall of woman a stairway to heaven of woman
And she’ll be the woman you want her to be woo woo woooowooooo the woman you want her to be the woman you want her to be
Khaela Maricich
Khaela Maricich, if she didn’t exist, is sorta like a character you might see created for the “alt rock” influenced show “Portlandia”, who not only has emerged like an enigmatic lithe elfen critter from the evergreen Pacific NorthWest, but carries with her its living balsam fringed rebellious artistic spirit.
She once wrote about the process of creating ” The thing about making things is that you don’t always know what you are making while you are making it. In the best-case scenario, the thing that you are making is bigger than you or your ability to perceive it or conceptualize around it, so you sort of have to open yourself up and watch as the new life forms come out, and trust that the process won’t kill you. “
Always exhibiting a challenging confident persona, yet with just the right mix of unraveling unease on stage or record, Khaela has been the chief creative officer and sole consistent member of her “group” The Blow since its early 2000’s inception. Her creative work somehow exists stretched out & pivots and pirouettes at the intersection of “spoken word”, “performance art”, “indie rock” and “dance music”. Khaela, performing either solo, or as “The Blow” has challenged audiences and been well received critically while being heard via radio, or seen live in performance in venues all over the world, including The Kitchen, The Warhol Museum, Henry Fonda Theater, Sarah Lawrence College, The Manchester Deaf Institute, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts.
Yasuto Muraki, who has spent 3 years playing with the Japanese Doom Metal purveyors Church Of Misery is leaving the fold next month, and this was one of his final US appearances. Church Of Misery, who specialize in dark doom metal inspired by various infamous serial killers brought their 25th Anniversary North American Tour through San Francisco and ended their set with Murderfreak Blues (Tommy Lynn Sells) a dirge from their 2016 album “And Then There Were None” .
multi-cam clip shot with Insta360, and Zoom Q2n cameras imported and edited on my LG Android & iPhone phone using KineMaster, YouCut and audio mixed and sequence prepped with Adobe Premiere
CHURCH OF MISERY live at Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco on 25th Anniversary Tour
I spent some time with a remarkable set of jazz musicians this past month, who stay busy traversing the region gigging and providing beautiful grooves wherever they go. They are all so busy, its hard to keep up with all the music and combos they are involved with, with the musicians casually splintering off into new aggregations and amalgamations at varied venues, ever regrouping into duos, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets and large scale ensembles and the like as needed. The folks I’ve met and shot video of to share here are all on the forefront of a 21st century Left Coast Bay Area jazz renaissance, one that just weeks ago I barely knew existed.
One of the many talented souls I met was Anthony Thomas Martinez, a saxophonist who was visiting from San Antonio, but won scholarships as a youth to study at Berklee College Of Music, and as of late had recently been playing steady gigs not only around his hometown, but as far south as in Baja Mexico last month. He rolled through to sit in at shows around the Bay Area and as far south as Santa Cruz, for a week or two, which is all part of his itinerant musician lifestyle he calls The Hustle. His final gig here was a sold out secret session as the band leader for the night at the rustic Stow Lake Boat House in Golden Gate Park, whose weekly concert series reservations occur online, but fill up every week, even on chilly fog laden February nights.
In the embedded video seen below, he tries out his recently bartered for 1953 Ohio made King Saxophone, that he’s now dubbed “The Silver Swan”. The tune is called “Rollin’ Right” and is some of that “pain jazz”, a longer version is featured on his most recent Black Note album “Live at the Palladium”.
Performing with him in the video was fellow San Antonian raised percussionist Vince DeJesus, recent Cuban emigre Yadier Noa Chamble on bass, and Dave Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet alum Javier Santiago, originally from Minneapolis on the keys.
Wrote Anthony after the show :
“Playing at The #LakeHouse Jazz show was mad fun and is always a privilege to play with such intense and inspiring musicians. It was a packed house, 70+ people in attendance, an intimate setting with attentive ears and super grateful for the special guests who came to hang. This is my 3rd year coming out to the Bay and 4th time playing this concert series. Whenever I come, the band name I go under is “The Hustle”. I chose that name because that is very much what the gigging , working musician life is, a Hustle everyday to manifest the life you want as a reality. Most us have our own projects, play in several bands(all genres of music), do studio work, compose or arrange, produce, teach and do everything else under the music umbrella. We all strive to be the best version of ourselves and play from the heart, one day at a time, one note at a time. I believe “The Hustle” is something we all can relate to, whatever dream you may be after and that’s the place we as musicians come from when we play. To try and invoke your emotions and take you out of the Hustle for a moment, to another place while relating to it at the same time. Our release is your escape for that brief period and the greatest joy for us is for you to receive it, and hopefully touch you in some way. Until we meet again my Bay Area friends & brothers.
