Bob Reed is seen here singing a soulful rendition of a classic composition by Stax songwriters William Bell & Booker T Jones with special guest backing vocalists Meryl Theo Press and Karina Denike. Bob has sung in numerous bands over the years in the Bay Area, notably grunge flannel flyin’ power pop band Overwhelming Colorfast whom he was with I first came across him in the early 1990’s.
Every year for at least the last eleventy or so, there is a SF-Marin Food Bank benefit in late December put on by my friend Parker T Gibbs featuring lotsa local acts such as the talented Marc Capelle & the Casuals, seen here as the backing band. This video was recorded on multiple cameras I manned around the room at The 2018 Gibbsmo Holiday Craptacular in San Francisco at the Make-Out Room.
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are led by incomparable show biz aficionado Spike Slawson, backed by an all-star punk cred band, in this instance featuring CJ Ramone on bass, Scott Shiflett on lead guitar, Fat Wreck special teams superhero Dave Raun on the drums, joined by fellow Lagwagon member and solo singer/songwriter Joey Cape on rhythm guitar.
This excerpt of them mauling a Paul Simon fave was shot live at Slim’s amidst three sold out 2019 San Francisco Christmas shows. See what you missed as Spike cajoles the horde and leads the band through a tightly wound, heroic 90 minute set of rock classics. Be sure to click to expand the video, and kick up the video volume if it’s muted in the streaming embed below!
Here is the first clip I’ve had time to edit from the annual Xmess Craptacular at the Make Out Room in San Francisco.
These two songs below are sung by Mark Eitzel, (formerly of American Music Club) with the band consisting of Tom Ayres and Bart Davenport on guitars, Pete Strauss on bass, Michael Urbano on drums with that mini Capelle on percussion holding down the rhythm section. These surprise numbers were definitely among the evening’s roller coaster of highs and lows and highlights for low lifes who get back on and ride again.
more videos from this annual event that benefits the San Francisco food bank and livens up a dreary holiday season will be forthcoming as time permits…stay tuned
In 2015, Culture Club reformed and made a tour stop at The Greek Theater in Berkeley, before the tour had to be cut short due to Boy George O’Dowd suffering some vocal polyp issues. They eventually came back with a new album called LIFE, in 2018 with this song on it, but with a somewhat different arrangement, but that still namedrops Michelle Obama.
Here is the original version of “The Truth Is A Runway Train”, which I assembled as a slideshow montage.
This original Johnny Cash country folk influenced sound of this song differs greatly from the more glossy gospel/soul style version that they ended up putting on their next album, and even did an upbeat sort of gritty Philly Soul/Stax style remix featuring Gladys Knight who also joined the band onstage at The Greek Theater in LA.
UK Boot Boy Glam Rockers Cock Sparrer Present Their Classic Song “Teenage Heart” From The Flight Deck Of The U.S.S. Hornet Aircraft Carrier In Alameda CA.
The occasion was “Rock The Ship” a festival celebrating the 15th Anniversary Of Pirates Press Records, and quite an event and logistical nightmare it was, with shows taking place over multiple venues on 4 successive nights and peaking with this headlining set aboard a massive aircraft carrier.
Amongst the many details Pirates Press and their event production staff accounted for included the building of a separate 30 foot high entrance scaffolding to accommodate getting attendees up to the flight deck of the decommissioned aircraft carrier just for the event.
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.
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)
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 Live At The Make-Out Room
Redd Kross have just embarked on their longest US tour in over twenty years, no longer teen babes from Monsanto, they are fully grown rock gods, that have receding hairlines, mortgages and even kids’ tuition to take care of. This makes imperative, insane and impressive the challenge of delivering punky precision blasts of gargantuan glammy guitar goo all over the place every night ever the more magnificent a mission amidst a missing “music industry”.
Steve & Jeff MacDonald, along with Jason Shapiro and Dale Crover are the latest incarnation of Redd Kross seen here on their 10 week fall 2019 US tour. When the boys hit the Cornerstone in Berkeley CA to a sold out crowd , with merch man and cartoonist Brian Walsby watching from the wings, the set list careened into this topical tune featured on their 2012 comeback album “Researching The Blues”. The band are currently promoting the followup to their last album with the 2019 release on Merge Records of a full length called “Behind The Door”
I shot just this hastily edited two camera bootleg video from high above it all in the balcony as the nightclub lackeys tried to thwart me at every step of the way, and eventually shut me down long before The Melvins took the stage. Ironically the Melvins are a band I used to have the home phone numbers of, and even help get gigs over 30 years ago.
Fun Fact : Dale Crover and I were both long haired hippie rock fans employed as extras in Oliver Stone’s Doors bio pic in the early 90’s, but I’m the only one of us that got screen time as I agreed to appear nude leaping over a bonfire…Dale hung with the Nancy Hayes extras talent agency long enough to be cast as a spit swapping young flannel flying Neil Young substitute in a convertible in Neil’s Harvest Moon comeback music video, and eventually get even more famous for turning down the drummer gig in Nirvana. I just faded rapidly into obscurity and became a barely employable blogger and bootleg video director chased by bouncer’s around craft brew bars in Berkeley… c’est la vie.
The pounding synth sounds that start up Giuda’s studio version of this track on their latest album E.V.A get buried in the crowd roar of this live version shot at the Bottom of The Hill in San Francisco. This energetic Italo rock band has become known for mixing 70’s style glam pop and skinhead moonstompin’ punk riffs into a new spacey interstellar sound.
The main two songwriting members of Giuda are singer Tenda and guitarist Lorenzo who have known each other since childhood in Rome, and used to perform in a band called Taxi before they had started Giuda. In fact the very first US performance of Taxi was a memorable gig at Thee Parkside in 2003, when a big redneck lookin’ dude in a “God Bless The U.S.A.” t-shirt walked up and raised the tension level by confrontationally approaching Tenda and stood stoic, eye to eye in front of him while he was performing on the barely raised stage platform, Tenda didn’t flinch. When asked about this evening at The Bottom Of The Hill, Tenda said eventually after the set ended up, the possible bad guy ended up buying Tenda beers by the end of the night.
Here’s a boppin’ lil’ single from some unlikely suspects who’ve resurfaced onto the rock scene after decades of plugging away, perfecting their pop and dodging the dustbins of history by derailing dormancy. The new Rubinoos release “From Home” just came out on Yep Roc Records, and I shot this video clip in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, literally just blocks away from where this underrated band cut their first single for Beserkley Records in the mid-70s.
Nearly 50 years since forming their first combo, and 42 years since appearing on American Bandstand, the Rubinoos have revitalized their classic pop sound and are making a go of it with their latest effort “From Home” on the Yep Roc label.
Taking their tried and true formula of vocal harmonizing with sweetly layered instrumental accompaniment, they teamed up with some production help at Hyde St Studios with longtime local fan Chuck Prophet and ace engineer Paul Q Kolderie (whose made some great records with everyone from The Go-Go’s and Dinosaur Jr to The Pixies, Radiohead and more). The results are finally garnering them their first serious 21st century press attention since getting embroiled in a lawsuit with Dr Luke and Avril Lavigne over their all too apparent uncredited copycatting of the 70’s era Rubinoos single “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” about a decade ago.
The new song featured here, co-written with Chuck Prophet, pays tribute to the late Honey Lantree, a UK hairdresser who went on to become an iconic female drummer for the Honeycombs, a 60’s pop band produced by eccentric UK production wunderkind Joe Meek.
Despite having begun their career during the Nixon era when bubblegum rock was not yet a retro sound, and prevailing thru a decades long run with all the tawdry travails of show biz, the Rubinoos overall are actually in great shape and spirits, and seem way healthier (and far more talented) than many bands I know half their age.
To familiarize yourself with this amazing band and their past glories, you can visit a playlist on Spotify that will fill in all the blanks
Here’s to the mighty Rubinoos who I hope can provide us much needed inspiration for kids of all ages!
November 1 – The Chapel – San Francisco, CA November 3 – Harlow’s – Sacramento, CA November 17 – Bootleg Bar – Los Angeles, CA December 9 – White Eagle – Portland, OR December 11 – Sunset Tavern – Seattle, WA
