First of all… WHOA! It’s weird to write “2020” on something. Even crazier is to think that this is the 19th SF Sketchfest! That means babies born in the year of the first Sketchfest are now able to go on their mission for The Latter-Day Saints. (Or vote. Definitely, please — everyone born in 2001 MAKE SURE YOU REGISTER TO VOTE AND DO IT!) I’vebeenwritingtheNerd’sGuideforelevenyearsnow. Which means for the twentieth year of Sketchfest, you can read the eleven th anniversary of my Nerd’s Guide. I plan to go all out for that one. This year’s guide — I’m not gonna lie — I’m totally phoning it in. Which is fine, it’s like ten minutes of reading. Don’t worry, the good people of SF Sketchfest did NOT phone in the bookings this year.
Tickets and a full schedule for everything can be found here.
Dorcas Leung is our mouse hero. Photo courtesy of Kevin Berne, 2019.
A cute little singing mouse that fancies itself a knight? Based on the novel by Kate DiCamillo, PigPen Theatre’s musical adaptation tells the tale of an ambitious mouse who rises the ranks to save the day. Like all heroes, Despereaux doesn’t let limitations (being a mouse, for one) keep him from his lofty dreams. A slightly offbeat fairy tale of sorts with a 2007 indie music vibe, this tale feels at home on the Berkeley stage as it would if redone by Wes Anderson. Continue reading “Theater Review: PigPen Theatre Co. Presents Cute Family Friendly Show: The Tale of Despereaux at Berkeley Rep”
I expect not many people in the Bay Area have heard of Merthyr Tydfil, a small post-industrial coal town in South Wales in the United Kingdom (pronounced Merther Tidvil).
Merthyr has had a bad rap since the mines closed down in the early 1980’s. It was inevitably seen by the media as an unemployment blackspot, a metaphor or even metonym for decades of economic privation, recession and post-industrial abandonment. Of course, proud local communities are complex and rich, and often subvert the media representations.
The point being that Merthyr and towns like it have a thriving music and arts scene. It’s produced a new generation of talented semi-pro and pro musicians, who I’ve had the pleasure to get to know a little through their various bands and musical projects, like the wonderfully named The Algal Bloom.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to see this informal collective’s latest offering, a tribute to The Band’s farewell concert The Last Waltz, released on vinyl in 1978. Called The Band and All the Fellas, the members are in their twenties, so weren’t even a twinkle in their parent’s eyes in ‘78. I was intrigued to see what they’d make of an album that’s firmly located and lauded in the rock and roll firmament.
Owain Hughes is the band’s leader and had the idea of getting 12 or so musicians together to reinterpret some of the songs. Owain is what you’d call a prodigy, a Merthyr Mozart if you will (though he comes from Aberfan, nearby). I first saw him at a local gig in Cardiff, to mark David Bowie’s death. He plays guitar and keyboards with a level of skill, energy and maturity that belie his youthful looks. His influences range from Frank Zappa to Rory Gallagher.
The show (selected highlights)
Up On Cripple Creek: one of The Band’s most famous foot-stompers, and a great opener. I was a tad worried about how anyone could do justice to the Arkansas drawl that was unique to Levon Helm’s lead vocals. I needn’t have been. Vocalist Mitchell Minney took the song by the scruff of the neck and made it his own, using a half-Merthyr, half-Blues Delta style, complete with yodelling, and supplemented by the invisible vibes of a cowboy hat. The band were solid, loud with two keyboard players adding depth, and some nice nods to Garth Hudson’s organ sound. Good start, boys.
Who Do You Love?: how does anyone try to reproduce Ronnie Hawkins’ rumbling, screaming performance of this Bo Diddley-beat classic? You get a slightly bonkers Phil Harrington to do his own barnstorming, lung-bursting and very funny version. Lovely tight back-up from the band, too. That warmed up the audience nicely.
Such a Night: this is where things began to get really interesting. It would have been easier and safer to give Dr John’s classic song and vocal role to a bear-like geezer from downtown Barry Island. Instead, it was offered to be-hatted Bella Collins, a great local blues chanteuse. It was an enchanting performance, subverting the somewhat unreconstructed gender politics of the lyrics. The introduction of a horn section, complete with tootling clarinet, trombone wah-wahs and Voodoo piano playing making it a moment to remember.
Bella Collins singing Such A Night
Caravan: Van Morrison’s intricate and vocally complex musical gem is one hell of a challenge for any singer to emulate. It was handed to Leila Dee to take on, and she won it in spades. Aretha Franklin is her hero, and it shows. A tremendous, gutsy performance that thrilled, and again put some beautiful vocals centre stage.
Baby Don’t You Do It: a glorious horn section, stabbing; a rock solid rhythm section, in the pocket with the bass growling; backing vocalists, singing and laughing; the lead singer, gesticulating and conducting; a sax player, blowing. A tight ending. Robbie and Levon would have been proud.
You probably won’t ever get to see this band, or hear them, although they are set to tour The First Waltz in Wales. But for me, that doesn’t really matter. I wanted to review this show to put on record a tiny but joyfully significant moment in the musical cosmos. It’s why live music matters, and why old music can jump generations and still thrill and be meaningful. A moment worth marking, and I can’t wait to see them again.
These two shows at The Fox Theater in Oakland marked what was basically the last night on the road for what may have been the most challenging tour in Sleater-Kinney’s 25 years on this Earth. Not only were they out to support the single most-divisive record in their catalog, but their long-time drummer, Janet Weiss, abruptly quit the band in the middle of rehearsals.
A lot of hardcore fans felt betrayed. People were demanding refunds because they bought tickets under the impression that they were getting the core trio of Corin Tucker and Janet Weiss and Carrie Brownstein. All of this meant that, instead of hitting the road in celebration of their career, Sleater-Kinney have to prove themselves all over again. They couldn’t rest on their reputation of being the fiercest live band around.
Metal. Metal. Metal. I spent 8 hours refabricating metal at work, so why not end the day at The Hollywood Palladium for a night of epic metal, fantasy metal, and melodic death metal? Thank you Sweden. We don’t deserve you.
I have a death wish. A metal death wish. So it was clear that I had to work 9 hours and high tail it straight to Downtown Los Angeles for a night of total fucking metal at The Belasco Theater. The occasion? GWAR. Need I say more?
Sometimes, you need to get the hell out of the house and go to a punk show. Especially in times as trying as these, perhaps because of times as trying as these, it just feels good to go somewhere where you can yell and get all that pent up anger at a seemingly unstoppable corrupt world with a bunch of like minded people. So, I hopped on the scooter and puttered off to Echo Park to the surprisingly dark-lit Echoplex for a night of punk rock fury.
Since 2007, when their song “Through the Fire and Flames” appeared on Guitar Hero III, DragonForce has appealed to the video game masses, and it showed at August Hall tonight. They had two giant video game consoles on stage that were playing a loop of late 80’s / early 90’s era video games. They also have their own channel on Twitch.tv, a live streaming video website primarily focused on video gaming, and guitarist Herman Li was wearing a backpack with a mini video camera attached to it, to live stream the entire show.
I do not get out to enough concerts. I work in live theatre which means when I’m on a “show run” I’m locked in with only Monday nights off for the next two months of my life at a time, so I have to fit in whatever I can between plays. Therefore, it’s almost serendipitous that the first show I’ve been to since May happens to also be an IDLES show, this time at The Wiltern in Korea Town.
I’ve always wondered why the Waterboys are not regularly mentioned in the same breath as U2, their more successful cohorts in Big Music. Mystic Celtic themes, wide genre experimentation, reckless ambition, and earnestness occasionally lapsing into bathos — it’s all there. Perhaps it’s because founder Mike Scott has been a bit too wide and reckless in ambition and scope. Perhaps it’s because the Waterboys as a cohesive band, has pretty much been just Mike Scott.
I suspect that a less raggle taggle band might have made Scott’s musical forays more cohesive over time. If so, the current lineup, no larger than needs be, tight and effortless enough to riff and be fun, would be a solid contender for posterity. Veteran fiddleman in a low top hat, Steve Wickham, took the stage as Scott’s equal, the latter in Canadian tuxedo and cowboy hat. The complimentary front men were supported by steadfast Zach Ernst on rhythm guitar, and Ralph Salmins on drums, who showed his chops during the second set in a solo tribute to the recently late drum god Ginger Baker. The big sound was rounded out by blistering keysman ‘Brother’ Paul Brown.
We can be grateful the Waterboys are not a bigger act and are still free to fill relatively intimate venues like the Fillmore with waves of sound up close and personal, starting appropriately with the rolling title track from the current release, Where the Action Is. The album is less a return to form, as a welcome integration of the new wave proto-pagan soul of the first three albums, with the rampant experimentation of the previous album Out of All This Blue, and their more unfortunate recent forays into rock, rhythm & blues by way of Austin. They then settled into some familiar territory with a couple solid Celtic folk tracks off 1988’s Fisherman’s Blues, and the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” The next two tracks were homage to primary influences. Scott was clearly excited about new single ‘London Mick’, a Replacements style tribute to Clash’s Mick Jones. It was a nicely complimented by ‘A Girl Called Johnny’ the very first song recorded by the Waterboys, and a tribute to Patti Smith that brilliantly held promise of what was to come.
They followed this unblemished block with ‘Still a Freak’ from Modern Blues, which is a song that fully qualifies as Dad rock, with watery blues riffs and embarrassing lyrics assuring us that, though 60 years old, yes Mike is still cool. ‘Nashville Tennessee’ is better but more of the same.
And that pretty much sets the pattern for the night: Solid new material, vibrant first iteration tracks, then unfortunate dad rock, with ‘Rosalind (You Married the Wrong Guy)’ as the standout offender. Miraculously, each and every clunker ascended to a brilliant room-filling jam thanks to that virtuoso fiddle player, and a madman on keys who at varied points stripped off his shirt, and came to center stage looking like RiffRaff wailing on a keytar!
Standouts of the evening were ‘We Will Not Be Lovers’, ‘Morning Came Too Soon’, and ‘Ladbroke Grove Symphony’, a jazzy piece closing the first set with the running rhythm of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’. The band survived a significant soundboard disruption with grace and humor, and closed the show with cheesy but endearing ‘In My Time On Earth’
The single encore was the Waterboys’ only stateside hit, ‘The Whole of the Moon’ which epitomizes their early sound. Derailed a bit perhaps by the sound malfunction, it wasn’t the strongest rendition. Yet, singing along loud and off-key as can only be done to those recognizable singles, a clump of burly middle-aged Irishmen swayed and danced and bumped into each other and hugged and took embarrassed offense and patted each others backs with forgiveness in big over earnest rapture.
