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
“Flinch” is the title of this song, and the video in this post features yet another Shotwell lineup recorded recently (48 hrs ago) in August 2019 at the Eagle in San Francisco, an historic gay bar that Jimmy said he was honored to perform at. The new lineup seen here features one of Shotwell’s original drummers, Steve Moriarty, who first played with the band in 1996, and a new bass player, who was introduced onstage with one name, but insisted it was something far less exotic else when asked about it later this past Thursday at the Eagle.
The song “Flinch” itself appeared originally on a cassette demo entitled “for The Devil Has Its Day” which is a lyric refrain from the song, and it first circulated in the fall of 2001 shortly after Shotwell’s Geneva Avenue Fallout split LP with Miami had sold out of its initial pressing. Eventually this tape surfaced as CD, a joint effort between two fledgling indie labels, one called S.P.A.M. who printed the discs, and later Plan-it X, who finished the job by actually getting some cardboard covers made. Here’s a live version recorded about 18 years later… I probably have a tape of Jimmy and a circa 2000 lineup doing this song, and perhaps will put that here for posterity when I find it.
The 4 track recorded demo this song came from was the sequel of sorts to that Shotwell/Miami split record, and featured at the time an all new lineup of Buzz and his friend Ken from Delaware. It was made deep in the recesses of the old Mission Records space, with the late Matty Luv twisting the knobs in the summer of 2001, right after the first wave of dot com stocks crashed but just before the twin towers fell in NYC.
The world was never the same, but somehow…despite umpteen lineup changes…Shotwell is. In fact the band has a new album very much in their quater century of mid tempo punk tradition, their first in a decade, it is entitled Dead Bats, that music is available via Revolver USA is you don’t see it at your local record store.
Jimmy in his Mission kitchen circa ’98
Jimmy Shotwell’s been living in SF since the late 80’s when he moved here from the midwest. He played guitar in a band called X-tal that released 3 albums with him involved on Alias Records. Jim grew gradually apart from the lighter college rock fare offered by X-tal and joined the punkier flavored Strawman with Tommy Strange in the early 90’s. They toured and released a few records on Allied before parting musical ways. Jim started Shotwell with Aaron Cometbus in the summer of 1994 and their very first gig was opening for Sublime at Komotion in SF.
Jim always was, and still is, a supportive presence to those helping keep D.I.Y. underground music alive. He prefers to play outside the nightclub circuit and truly emobodies the ook Yer Own Fkn Life DIY ethos. His green monster truck, maroon mini vans, RVs and other vehicles have hauled countless tons of gear and beer around the Bay Area and beyond. In the late 90s, as a favor to a friend, selflessly he drove across the country and took the unknown UK band Scarfo on their first US tour, which introduced Jamie Hince to Allison Mosshart of Discount, she was the singer of a band Shotwell had just made a split 7″ with. Eventually that indirect connection lead to the formation of The Kills. They‘ve since made millions apparently, while Jimmy is still hauling the broke and unknown around in his vehicles, barely makin‘ beer money.
He wouldn‘t have it any other way.
Never content to play by the rules, Jim has flourished and floundered but survived solely outside the mainstream day job employment and musical scenes. The boy has initiative and an ethos of personal industry that might irk a landlord, or perplex the typical wage slave, but he’s still here, unlike so many who couldn’t hack it in the mean streets of San Francisco.
A dedicated member of the volunteer run Komotion International musical collective during it’s early nineties heyday, Jim helped out with so many shows by so many bands including bringing through Pinhead Gunpowder, and majorly saving the day doing beer and gear runs for bands like Citizen Fish, Rancid, the Ex, Fifteen, Beat Happening, and many more. One night at the cajoling of your webmaster, he even helped invent Punk Rock Karaoke there between sweaty sets at a packed Bikini Kill and MDC show.
His main musical influences are punk bands from the old school such as The Clash, Circle Jerks, Stiff Little Fingers, old Misfits , Ramones, Black Flag and Johnny Thunders. All of the aforementioned also became part of the Punk-araoke repertoire at that 1991 gig.
I found mp3 and even scans of the Shotwell “Devil Has Its Day” cassette tape posted online here at a blog from punk archivist Greg Harvester called Remote Outposts and he has a bunch of Shotwell related posts here. Might as well grab it, because it’s not likely to hit Spotify anytime soon.
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 composerJames 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
