Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
July Fourth, 2016! Wooooo! Yeah! Our country is still here! Let’s celebrate!
If you’d like to add to your celebrations this week in The Bay Area with a concert, I’ll tell you what we’ve got coming up: caricatures, drugs, dogs, and culture that you don’t have to pay for.
So, let’s preview. Time to preview. It’s time to preview now and now here are the previews.
Continue reading “Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts: 2016-07-04 – 2016-07-10”
Do you know what today is? It is Leif Erickson Day here in the USA. Let us celebrate explorers as well as arbitrarily-horned helmets.
Also, the Litquake festival begins in San Francisco! A solid day for a book about explorers.
After that’s done with, let’s look at the concerts coming up this week in the Bay Area. Skol, let’s preview! Continue reading “Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts: 10/9/15-10/14/15”
Photos and review by: Alan Ralph @ARPhotoSF
As it has every summer for the past 6 years, the Rockstar Energy Drink MAYHEM Festival rocked Shoreline Amphitheater on July 6, 2014.
While it was nearly impossible to photograph all 18 bands that performed on 4 stages, and due to not yet being able to be in two places at one time, I missed King 810, Texas Hippie Coalition, Miss May I, Veil of Maya, and all of the bands on the Victory Records stage (Wretched, Islander, Erimha; Emmure started the tour on the next show).
Below are photo galleries from Avenged Sevenfold, KoRn, Asking Alexandria, Trivium, Cannibal Corpse, Body Count w/Ice-T, Suicide Silence, Mushroomhead, Darkest Hour, and Upon a Burning Body.
Continue reading “Photo Gallery: Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival — July 6, 2014”
October is nearly here. Match pre-Halloween candy sales with some concert-going and that’s a recipe for general happiness.
Here’s what’s coming up this week.
Continue reading “Spinning Platters Weekly Guide to Bay Area Concerts, 9/26/13-10/2/13”
Photos and review by: Alan Ralph @ARPhotoSF
Mountain View. California. Sunny. 82°.
With every meteorologist proclaiming the apocalypse across the West Coast, it was not as miserably hot as was expected. Yet with the arrival of the first band of the annual Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival, the heat (and volume) was definitely turning up, and for the duration of the day, more than a baker’s dozen worth of bands played across four stages, culminating with the sun setting just in time for Rob Zombie to heat it up again with plenty of fire and pyro!
Continue reading “Show Review: Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem, Shoreline Amphitheater, June 30, 2013”
Subtitle: Still Crazy After All These Years
That subtitle is a reference to a song from 1975. Bands will yell out things like “How many of you have seen us before?” and a few fans will yell “Whoo hoo!” If a band yelled out, “How many of you were born in 1975?” there’d be only crickets. Still, as I said in my preview post, if you are a true music nerd, Warped Tour is something you should still be going to. But, if you’re not going to go, and your idea of experiencing Warped Tour is to let someone else do it and then read about their experiences, you’re in the right place. Come with me as I wade through the masses at the 2010 Warped Tour. Continue reading “Warped Tour 2010 Diary: Shoreline Amphitheater, 6/26/2010”
There’s a rumor going around that I’m too old for concerts. Well it’s not true, the concerts are fine, it’s the driving there and back that I’m too old for. Well today I ventured out to that rare event, for me anyway, a stadium show featuring The Killers and, what tipped the scales for my attendance, The New York Dolls. Continue reading “Show Review: The Killers, The New York Dolls and The Nervous Wreckords at Shoreline Amphitheater, 9/12/09”
It starts at the gate on a wooden table, security searching bags, removing water bottle caps. It’s not a line, but a mass of people, compressed into a singlularity, squeezed through metal detectors like orange juice through a strainer–the pulp left behind: water bottle caps, drugs, Diet Dr. Pepper cans piled in neat towers around the parking lot (each layer an epoch) and something else…something less tangible. Metal detectors root out invisible men with sirens: a novel assimilation process to remove their weapons and expose their water. An invasive beep accompanies me through the plastic archway, where a woman– African American, in a yellow staff polo– asks me if I’m wearing a belt. I pull up my sweater and t-shirt, the small metal belt buckle is proof enough of my identity; a gentle pat down proves that I am indeed visible and physical. No, I am not an invisible man, merely an inappropriately dressed white male with a balding pattern and an open bottle of water, covering a culture I know only through books, Boondocks episodes and BET. Continue reading “Rock the Bells: A Journey Through Time and Memory”
