Category Archives: Folk Rock

Rotober Random Revelations Mixcloud

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…






Tulsa Storyteller Dwight Twilley

Dwight Twilley performing on Oakland

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

 

 

 

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Flat Five Find Love Live

A groovy Free Design cover performed by super talented Bloodshot Records recording artists The Flat Five from Chicago Illinois. This cover song was recorded Jan 18th 2017 on the final show of the band’s first ever Pacific Coast Tour in San Francisco.

The Chicago based quintet of Kelly Hogan, Nora O’Connor, Scott Ligon, Casey McDonough, and drummer Alex Hall were surreptitiously recorded for posterity (but Nora kept spotting the lil’ cameras everywhere, cuz she’s still pretty observant for a road weary mamacita). For more info on the Flat Five and to obtain their debut album visit their website http://www.theflatfivechicago.com

If ya dig it, please consider donating a $1 to keep my channel alive & kicking http://paypal.me/lilmikesf …

😀 𝙏𝙝𝙖𝙣x 𝙁𝙤𝙧 𝙒𝙖𝙩𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜! 🚩

Video graciously hosted for free by LBRY.TV where unfettered free speech & courageous uncensored and non-corporate content can still circulate on the internet

Tom Heyman & Deirdre White – “You Scumbags, You Maggots”

The annual Gibbsmo Xmess Craptacular wouldn’t be complete without the classic “Fairytale Of New York” as delivered by our husband & wife team of Tom & Deidre singing Shane MacGowan’s holiday classic, recently voted the all time fave Christmas song in the UK.

Tom dedicates this version to his friend, the late great Bay Area rock musician Roy Loney, who passed away, just a week prior to this concert.

The UK Guardian has compiled several perspectives including Pogue’s lyricist Shane MacGowan, and multi instrumentalist band member and musical composer James Fearnley’s accounts as to how the song came arduously together and was piecemeal edited through trial and error into an eventual musical masterpiece, well over the course of a year or two, at this link here

My band got to open for the Pogues at The Fillmore in December 1987 when the ramshackle folk/punk troubadours released this storied tune, and have been amazed to watch from the sidelines, as it slowly grew in acclaim, and into far wider public acceptance. It is hard to imagine that it would eventually beat out established family friendly platinum offerings associated with Irving Berlin, Gene Autry & even Paul McCartney. Ironically, the year that The Pogues released their brilliant LP “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” and it’s Christmas single “Fairytale Of New York“, the Pet Shop Boys actually topped the December single charts in the UK, with their sappy 70’s disco cover of Elvis Presley tested MOR fave “You Were Always On My Mind“.

Video shot by @LilMikeSF via 4 cameras at the Make Out Room in San Francisco with some bonus mid song audience angle footage added from Gary Hobish’s iPhone footage borrowed from a Craptacular synopsis post to his Facebook page …all the more the merrier Xmas y’all!

Trapper Schoepp – Freight Train (Sister Double Happiness cover at The Chapel)

I was pleasantly surprised by an opening act at a recent concert in San Francisco, a young singer out of Milwaukee named Trapper Schoepp performing with his brother.  The songwriter has been on the road for months promoting his indie magnum opus album “Primetime Illusion“, one he’s put his heart soul and life on the line to get the word out about, which is what you have to do as a rapscallion road troubadour.

Trapper Schoepp onstage

Liking what I heard, but still settling into the venue, I quickly jolted up, when I heard him announce his next song was to be a cover our the late great beloved San Francisco bluesy hard rock act Sister Double Happiness that was fronted by Dicks’ vocalist Gary Floyd. The 21st century hipster audience of early arrivals seemed somewhat nonplused as they’d probably never heard of this largely forgotten local group.

Sister Double Happiness original 1980’s lineup as seen clockwise from upper right guitarist Ben Cohen, singer Gary Floyd , drummer Lynn Perko, bassist Mikey Donaldson

I’ll have to interject, and hereby attest that SDH were likely the best band in town when I moved to San Francisco in 1987, a hard rocking band with pedigreed punk roots but moving quickly past that generic genre cage and into their own threnodious turf. Just before disbanding in 1988, they’d released a searing, smokin’ debut on Greg Ginn‘s SST label featuring a fierce tune called “Freight Train” that poignantly documented the fear, loss, despair and confusion of the AIDS era that stole so many lives before any sort of viable medical treatments were available.

 

Somewhere along the line, this maverick millennial Milwaukee songster was taught a decades old and out-of-print dirge called “Freight Train” backstage at a Jayhawks show or something, and has resurrected this beautiful abandoned beast of a song out of the blue to share with a new generation of listeners.

Trapper, who seems like a very hopeful, talented and earnest young man has included a supple studio version on his new album “Primetime Illusion” that is awash in electric guitar and piano played by Wilco‘s Pat Sansone, but this stream below is video of the raw stripped down acoustic duo arrangement delivered live in a big room full of strangers. I commend the Schoepp brothers here for their excellent taste and sincere commitment to the material.

I caught this surprising performance on a cell phone camera at The Chapel in San Francisco in October 2019. The song’s poetic stanzas were written by Gary Floyd circa 1986, who put this epic cry for understanding onto tape, and his heart and soul into every performance he gave at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, which was ravaging through our city and a whole generation at that time.

An intense hard driving live band that I saw dozens of times, Sister Double Happiness never failed to kill onstage, giving headliners like Nirvana and Soundgarden a run for their money when on tour opening for them, yet never quite fit into any music industry category or achieve any radio or solid video support from any of their numerous labels, and they just slowly lost momentum and petered out in the mid 90’s. From the looks of him, I doubt Trapper Schoepp coulda even been born when any of this happened.

Sister Double Happiness haven’t played together in probably twenty years, and their debut record with the song “Freight Train” on it is long out of print. Their incredible musical energy and legacy has been dissipating into time much like a hazy puff of faint incense smoke.

It was strange seeing a young man this in 2019, choose to deliver such a relatively obscure Reagan era song dealing with death, despair, confusion and need for support and love, who was not born at the time it was composed.

Some good news on the Sister Double Happiness front is that I heard recently from the song’s co-writer, guitarist Ben Cohen that he has secured the rights and masters, and is on the road to re-releasing the long lost album on all the formats both hard plastic and streaming.  Stay Tuned!

Flyer for SDH at Mabuhay Gardens in 1987 with Faith No More and Leaving Trains
(Flyer by Rob Collison)

Highlights Of Chuck Prophet’s Hardly Strictly Weekend 2019

Here’s a two song video clip from the opening salvo of the Chuck Prophet Official annual two night stand at The Make-Out Room this weekend as his post Hardly Strictly after party tradition. The two tunes I edited up here are the set opener “Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins” from the Yep Roc album of the same name and the song “Balinese Dancer” which appeared first in the early 90’s on one of his earliest solo albums. The sound for these San Francisco shows this first weekend of October 2019 was pretty darn good, especially with dedicated knob twiddler Damien Rasmussen handling duties at the board.

Here is a capture of the live feed provided by the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fest website of Chuck’s full set Friday from the Swan stage at the outdoor festival in Golden Gate Park, as reposted by Craig Love

Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express
Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express Live At The Make-Out Room

Trigger Warning Content Advisory : Lil’ Mike Tracked Down By “Jams For Man”

So a funny thing happened one evening after work, I get this phone call…it’s a guy from L.A., that I’ve never met…but he wants to ask me some questions…

He says he’s “not a cop”, so I agree to talk… boy, was that his mistake for asking. Apparently, he’s a “podcast host” who delves into suburban garage band lore from Reston VA with his 50 something episode audio archive of interviews called “Jams For Man“.

Next thing you know, I’ve spun off in a tongue waggin’ wagontrain of thought on a 35 year easily derailed hell ride down memory lane…

Much of it concerns a few years I spent living in the beastly banal ‘burbs of the bourgeois beltway outside Washington DC in the mid 1980’s. I was an awkward angry teenage sh/t disturber defiantly runnin’ with an overall pretty polite posse of pubescent punkers, seein’ all the all ages shows I could of seminal early 80’s DC hardcore & out there visiting indie acts of the age like Death Piggy, Eugene Chadbourne, Crippled Pilgrims, 9353, Void, Husker Du, Big Black, Sun City Girls, Trouble Funk, Psychodrama, 45 Grave, Marginal Man, Reagan Youth, Meatmen and even Frankie Valli.

This host feller amazingly does the detective work and even pulls up a few audio clips of some of my loopy long forgotten and banned early NoVA high school bands. If only I had been Dave Grohl, who played the same suburban Battle of the Bands circuit, turns out that these tapes would actually be of historical note or even worth something!

Then at some point, after getting expelled from Fairfax County schools, we take a Greyhound and head over the Rockies to the wily west coast where I recant too many “It All Seems So Silly In The Long Run” stories of California rock n roll abandon. There are possibly true tales from the road and serendipitous sidetracks about setting up oft illegal gigs in the early 90’s for then relatively unknown bands like NOFX, Sublime, Rancid, Green Day, Fred Armisen’s Trenchmouth etc…

Anyhow, I ranted, I raved, I regaled and rambled and never shut up for a full hour, which is far more than I, or anyone I know sober, can even put up with me.

This poor fella, the saintly Andy Keiler, originally from Reston VA, now a musician, school teacher and father in Los Angeles, is a patient soul and held the phone away from his aching ear while I blithely blared. He warily winced, even politely laughed at a couple jokes I thought were way funnier, but he got it all down on what we used to call “tape”. He adroitly edited, spliced, tried to make nice, and compressed and squeezed in snippets of vintage music.

1990 CD/LP/Cassette Compilation benefit for Food Not Bombs that had music by Bedlam Rovers feat Lil’ Mike

Somehow he tracked down a Reagan era cassette recording I had made with my first teen band, the long forgotten Toolin’ For Bovines. He also found an early 4 track demo from the late 80’s from my 100 something gig run with The Bedlam Rovers, an excerpt from a 924 Gilman St recording I played guitar on with pre-tween screamo sensations The Rolling Scabs, a 1994 16 track live recording I helped produce by Sublime at Komotion in SF, as well as just for fun of it, some influential early 80’s jams from a band with Reston roots called the Alter-Natives who were on SST. Andy even threw in some of my more recent playlist faves from El Vez and new material by The Rubinoos, two bands I just happened to be editing videos for the week he called. There are also some rarely, if ever seen too young to shave photos of me from deep in the dregs of the wistful wayback machine…

I know you can find more Jams For Man podcast interviews with people from the Northern Virginia music scene via Podomatic, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, iTunes or perhaps where ever you prefer to do your Podcast listening. Some of the other characters interviewed you can hear in depth conversations with include multi media popsmith Spookey Ruben, Ron Winters of Branch Manager, bassist Jerry Barrett who played in HR from Bad Brains’ solo band amongst many others. There’s recent episode uploads featuring my talented ol’ pal Davis White of groups like Lorelei, and Media Disease, and talks with some of the past members of Avail, as well as prolific NYC based opera & orchestral composer James Barry, and the Zelig like Mike Davis who recorded with plenty of his own bands like The Blood Bats and Foundation and also served as a staff engineer at Don Zientara’s seminal Inner Ear Studios facility. Andy also posts excerpts of music from some of the artists & bands he interviews that participated but aren’t particularly well documented such as Transilience , early Avail etc at a Jams For Man Music Sound Cloud page found here

Matt Baldwin – Passing Through

Event host & organizer as well as author of a Leonard Cohen biography, Sylvie Simmons, introduces solo guitarist Matt Baldwin who performs a classic progressive folk tune from the late 40’s. apparently “PASSING THROUGH” is the only published tune by a Chicago folk musician named Richard (Dick) Cleveland Blakeslee. Inspired to send it to the People’s Songs organization in New York, his home-cut acetate disc arrived at the offices of the loose knit non-profit predecessor to “Sing-Out’ whose members included Mo Asch, Anges “Sis” Cunningham, Tom Glazer, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays. They regularly published a newsletter to share new folk songs for the progressive labor movement to shareand in turn, the tune was soon introduced via the newsletter to sympathetic subscribers around the same time as We Shall Overcome. Blakeslee’s song was recorded and popularized by Pete Seeger, and sung by him regularly throughout the  1948 Presidential election campaign when Seeger was backing Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace. Other renditions of the song have been recorded by The HighwaymenCisco HoustonEarl Scruggs, & on a 1970 live album by Leonard Cohen.

I saw jesus on the cross on a hill called calvary
“do you hate mankind for what they done to you? “
He said, “talk of love not hate, things to do – it’s getting late.
I’ve so little time and I’m only passing through.”Passing through, passing through.


Sometimes happy, sometimes blue,
Glad that I ran into you.
Tell the people that you saw me passing through.

I saw adam leave the garden with an apple in his hand,
I said “now you’re out, what are you going to do? “
“plant some crops and pray for rain, maybe raise a little cane.
I’m an orphan now, and I’m only passing through.”Passing through, passing through

…I was with Washington at valley ford, shivering in the snow.

I said, “how come the men here suffer like they do? “
“men will suffer, men will fight, even die for what is right
Even though they know they’re only passing through”Passing through, passing through

…I was with Franklin Roosevelt’s side on the night before he died.
He said, “one world must come out of world war two” (ah, the fool)
“yankee, russian, white or tan, ” he said, “a man is still a man.


We’re all on one road, and we’re only passing through.”Passing through, passing through …Passing through, passing through …

-Dick Blakeslee

This was recorded at a post-humous Cohen tribute and benefit for the San Francisco Community Music Center held at The Chapel at 777 Valencia St in San Francisco. The San Francisco Community Music Center ( http://SFCMC.org) is a non-profit school founded in 1921 with the mission of making music accessible to all people, regardless of their financial means. They offer classes for people of all ages, abilities and interests and financial aid to all who need it.

Gary Floyd’s Buddha Brothers …it was the happiest day of their lives

Live at The SF Eagle

“Franklyn & Susie got married…it was the happiest day of their lives”

…and then some sh/t went down…

Just another folk fable as sung by the mighty Gary Floyd. A true San Francisco via Texas music icon, since arriving in the city by the bay with his band The Dicks in the early 80’s, Gary Floyd has painted with many musical colors, from the red , hot & fierce roars of bands like Black Kali Ma, to the more subtle swamp tones he tends to hit here with The Buddha Brothers. Whipping up wistful folk with some sweet & occasionally nasty down home blues elements, imagine Gary and the boys on some shaded country front porch obliviously jamming as the day passes by. Gary’s mournful howls rise above the sound of squealin’ baby pigs in the nearby sty, and his Buddha Brothers keep happily hammering home harmonies, and rapturous riffs a-plenty long after the sweltering sun goes down.

Shot at their seeming home away from home, the SF Eagle, in this video Gary’s Buddha Brothers are Gary Floyd, Greg Dale, Chewy Marzolo, Edgar San Gabriel, Mark Smotroff and Pokechoppums

Check out these links below to Bandcamp and search for Buddha Brothers music, you can find at two separate releases from this informal amalgamation of San Francisco Bay Area musicians.

The most recent release basically features the lineup in this video, and was recorded by Donny Newenhouse at El Studio in San Francisco in 2018 on fat two inch analog tape and includes a striking cover of Karen Dalton’s “Something On Your Mind” https://chewymarzolo1.bandcamp.com/album/buddha-brothers-2018

The  first Buddha Brothers digital collection was recorded a couple years earlier by Doug Hilsinger who played some pedal steel along with a lineup that included

  • Gary Floyd: vocals, harmonica
  • Edgar San Gabriel: bass
  • Jeff Hashfield: piano, organ
  • Danny Roman: guitar
  • Elliott Shannonhouse: guitar
  • Josh Walker: drums
    and Ms Caroleen Beatty on backing vocals

    https://garyfloydandthebuddhabrothers.bandcamp.com/album/buddha-light

  • Jon Langford’s Four Lost Souls – I Thought He Was Dead

    Long Jon Fanglord joined by musical compatriots John Szymanski, Tawny Newsome, and Bethany Thomas, onstage at The Make-Out Room in San Francisco CA.

    They perform a track from their debut Bloodshot Records label album that was recorded literally in “the Nuthouse” with Elvis Presley’s former bassist, Norbert Putnam down in Muscle Shoals Alabama

    the Four Lost Souls layin the langorous Langford lyrical harmonies on thick at the Make-Out Room

    @LilMikeSF Media Maker Myriorama