My favorite season (festival) has officially begun! BottleRock Napa Valley 2022 kicked off this past Friday (May 27) with a flurry of great artists. I look forward to this event every year since it brings such great bands right to my hometown, but this year, it’s different. I say that because I can’t believe it’s been three years since I was last here! 2020’s BottleRock was canceled due to COVID, and 2021 was pushed to September. Unfortunately, I had to miss last year due to concerns over the Delta variant, so suffice to say I had been anxiously awaiting a three-day music festival with gorgeous weather for days, at least. Continue reading “BottleRock Napa Valley 2022 Festival Journal, Day 1”
Category: Show Reviews
With 5000 phones in Phoenix: An Olivia Rodrigo Diary
This is the text conversation I had on the morning the Sour Tour went on sale. Emerging superstar Olivia Rodrigo had announced her first ever tour and put the entire thing on sale on the same day. And rather than play venues fit for her popularity, the tour was booked as 100% underplays, and was bound to sell out immediately, creating a lifeline (gold rush?) for professional ticket sellers they have desperately needed since COVID hit the concert industry hard.
No, my sister-in-law did not get tickets that day for my niece and her best friend. The tickets would come much later. Continue reading “With 5000 phones in Phoenix: An Olivia Rodrigo Diary”
Show Review: Fozzy (Chris Jericho), Great American Music Hall, 05/08/2022
Photos and review by: Alan Ralph @ARPhotoSF
The floor and stage of Great American Music Hall is not really large enough to turn into a wrestling ring and arena, so lucky for those in attendance this Mother’s Day, former WWF and current AEW professional wrestler Chris Jericho was fronting his metal band Fozzy here tonight and not jumping off the top rope!
Without a Phone in Las Vegas: A Silk Sonic Diary
When I left the Silk Sonic show at the Dolby Theater at Park MGM on Tuesday night, I made my way over to the official afterparty. There was a very short line to get in which they immediately steered us away from. All of us concertgoers were “guest list” which was a slow-moving, Disneyland-style mess of velvet ropes that I immediately noped out on. Why did I care about an official afterparty anyway? So I headed to the exit, only to run into the same Bay Area friend I had seen before the show. He introduced me to a friend of his who had come down from Portland for the event. He asked me what I was going to write about the show and I explained that I wasn’t going to write about it all, but then I spent the night not at the afterparty but thinking about what I should write about it. Continue reading “Without a Phone in Las Vegas: A Silk Sonic Diary”
Show Review: Thao with Black Belt Eagle Scout and Quinn Christopherson at The Fillmore, 5/7/22
QUINN CHRISTOPHERSON
“Welcome to the Fillmore,” the top-hatted greeter with gentle eyes said as their generous gloved hand-stretched an apple towards me. “Thank You.” Continue reading “Show Review: Thao with Black Belt Eagle Scout and Quinn Christopherson at The Fillmore, 5/7/22”
Show Review: Parquet Courts, Automatic at The Fox Theater – Oakland, 4/27/22
Well, that was refreshing, and thank the gods of mix-boards and acoustics the sound was on point…
Continue reading “Show Review: Parquet Courts, Automatic at The Fox Theater — Oakland, 4/27/22”
Show Review: Interpol, Tycho, and Matthew Dear at The Greek Theatre – UC Berkeley, 4/30/22
Show Review: John 5 & The Creatures, DNA Lounge, 04/20/2022
Photos and review by: Alan Ralph @ARPhotoSF
It’s interesting when successful musicians branch out on their own solo projects. Maybe they have too much creative energy that doesn’t flow with their band and need to expand on it, or maybe they just have free time between recording and tour cycles to do their own thing. Whatever the case may be, the best moment to see these performers live is not with their marquee name bands, one hundred yards away in some stadium… no, the best time is when they are on their solo tours! Paul Stanley of KISS once performed at The Fillmore to 800 people. Joe Perry of Aerosmith also performed at The Fillmore in front of only 400 people. When John 5 is not performing to thousands of people with Rob Zombie, he very often makes solo records, tours with his own solo project called John 5 & The Creatures, and when in San Francisco, always comes back to the intimate DNA Lounge.
Show Review: Boy Harsher and Troller at The Belasco Theatre (Los Angeles) 04/19/2022
“Take me down to LA, I wanna go down”
It’s wild to think that the last time I wrote a show review was in 2019. Here we are in the waxing and waning throes of a two-year-long global pandemic and while still testing regularly and waiting for information on the next COVID variant it seems like we’re beginning to move toward a new normal. There’s something surreal and strangely dystopian about going to a concert, let alone to a MinSynth one, but that didn’t stop the many, if any, from attending Boy Harsher’s return to Los Angeles.
Show Review: Spiritualized at The Fillmore, 4.12.22
Spiritualized, enters its third decade doing the one thing it has done and doing it well: building manifold soundscapes over rock and pop fundamentals, repetition unto transcendence.
Each track is reducible to some early Rock Rhythm and Blues motif. Continue reading “Show Review: Spiritualized at The Fillmore, 4.12.22”