Category: Musicology
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Serendip
Made a last minute choice to swing up to Menlo Park after work to a little place called Bar Loretta, tucked inside a restaurant called Left Bank, apparently on the site Magoo’s Pizza Parlor, the site of the first proto-Grateful Dead show sixty years ago. Billed as the Warlocks still, the show featured the first…
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Wooosh
A good friend of mine talks about that feeling of creative flow in which it gets easier to make your ideas real. It comes and goes on its own but you can certainly invite and you can definitely chase it way. You can at the very least leave the door open and cultivate the habit…
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More punk than you
Reading sadly of David Thomas’s death at 71 of kidney failure it appears, the legendary founder of Pere Ubu. Remembering how my hipper than thou postpunk mentor and now-famous game pundit Jeff Green told me about first seeing him before a show and wondering something like who the fat guy in the used car salesman…
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Record store day!
Drove up to Oakland this morning to meet my pals in Rockridge to check out some new vinyl releases for this spring’s record store day at Open Mind Music (and, it turns out, Stranded up the street). After a scare with a lost phone and some very good samaritans we each headed home with our…
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New sounds of silence
I’ve recently been following this artist on Soundcloud, Sarah Walker, whose specialty is freely reinterpreting standards of the past (many of them from my own formative years) in what I might say is a more contemporary style, reminiscent of popular singer-songwriters of the moment (think Tay Tay, et al.). The premise seems to be imagine…
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A funny thing happened on the way to the charger
Last night I saw a hot damn show up in Sebastopol at a brewpub called the Hopmonk. The main act, Pokey LaFarge (and band), and the opener, Cicada Rhythm, were both a hoot. It felt like a walk through the 20th century, from hot jazz to jump blues to texas swing to jumping jive to…
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Making merry
Ending another long week in the company of friends. This afternoon I took advantage of my administrative leave to drive up to Sebastopol through several rain squalls and traffic jams to have dinner at the Goldfinch (mostly seafood — I had champagne with my oyster) and then see a show at the Hopmonk brewpub. Still…