Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Blame me then, but download, quick! Here, courtesy of Salon, is a link to a great slice of rare early '70s soul, "You Can't Blame Me," by Johnson, Hawkins, Tatum & Durr, from Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label" If you like that, I'd pay close attention to The Pop Life, online mission control for writer-scholar-DJ-Oaktown hipster Oliver Wang, aka DJ O-Dub, a multi-hyphen guy whose personality is so split even Humpty-Hump himself couldn't put it back together again. Oliver is also the source of fabulous mp3 files at what he judiciously calls his "record appreciation" blog, otherwise know as Soul Sides. Go forth; you will come back a better person. Unless, like me, you are beyond hope. posted by TommyT @ 11:36 am | Permanent link

Monday, July 26, 2004

I don't fuck around when it comes to Prince Is it against the law or anything to use four-letter words in a blog headline? I mean I'm not David Mamet or anything, although I am a serious Mamet fan (I saw American Buffalo last year at A.C.T. in San Francisco and couldn't sleep for a week it was so good - of course as anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm excitable). But years ago I took a Huey-Bobby-David-Eldridge correspondance course in effective use of the mother tongue, and I still remember when Seale wrote this in his 1970 history of the Panthers, Seize the Time. He wrote, "Motherfucker is a very common expression nowadays. Eldridge [Cleaver] ran it down to me once when a number of people got upset over this vernacular of the ghetto. Eldridge said: 'I've seen and heard brothers use this word four and five times in one sentence and each time the word had a different meaning and expression.... But today, check the following sentence: 'Man, Let me tell you. This motherfucker here went down there with his motherfucking gun, knocked down the motherfucking door and blew this motherfucker's brains out. This shit is getting to be a motherfucker." The reason why I've shared this - other than because writing things like the aforementioned is what happens on blogs, as near as I can figure out, anyway - is to give you an idea of where I'm coming from when it comes to using the word fuck in a sentence designed to communicate how much the music of Prince means to me. And the reason why I'm doing that is because I stumbled across this Prince Megamix, played it, and then played it again so loud that my deaf cat ran into the other room. And realized I needed to tell the world about it. Happy trails, y'all. posted by TommyT @ 10:52 pm | Permanent link

Eggers replaces cocaine as pick-up payoff The story I'm going to tell is true, so help me god, why would i lie? Dave Eggers lives in town; at first I thought he was just a writer, but he's so much more than that - call him the Pearl Mesta of Valencia Street and you'll get no objection from me. He is a one-man juice bar the likes of which haven't been seen around the written word in San Francisco or maybe around anything this side of Bill Graham since I don't know when. How important is this cat? Well, if you're a writer and you live in Bernal Heights - I don't okay, I live in Oakland and not only because I can't afford to live in Bernal Heights - but if you live there, when your alarm goes off you get up and you switch on whatever you can to find out what cafe he's gonna be at so that you can not only get there first in time to be casual but also to guard the entrances and your flank, as does Jackie the Abysssinian, top man in a quartet of lap surfers who crash at my place. Cats know a thing or two about power and how to serve it, and while I'm not saying you have to be a cat to parlay with Mr. E, I am saying that you might get closer to him if you watched your cat more and your tv less. You don't believe me and I don't care. But if I did, I'd tell you to check out this post and then check yourself. I was at a reading a while back that was held in that Coppola building near North Beach; the place was full of the kind of writers whose spouses make lots of money. Afterward, people were milling about trying to see if anyone important like Dave Eggers was there. Sit down, and believe this: what I am about to tell you really happened, I swear. On two different occasions in the course of 10 minutes, I heard young late-20s-looking guys try to hustle up some action using nothing more but the powerful cache of you-know-who. The first guy approached an highly available, slightly pulverized brunette carrying one of those laptop bags with an Apple logo on the sides that indicated she was a writer with money or perhaps not even a writer yet. With no prelim whatsoever, he said: "Hey, want to go over to the Oxygen bar later on? I heard Dave Eggers has been hanging out there the past two nights." She said "maybe." No kidding. I was considering this, when a young man and woman strolled by. From a distance I mistook them as an item - he was trying his best, but up close the body language was off; they were a fair distance from coupling. "Yeah, I was out," he said casually, as if he didn't care whether or not she was listening, except he was bent over toward her like a tree in a hurricane. It spoiled the effect. "Jean-Paul and I were at a party, it was cool, you know, all good; we copped some of the Northern Alliance's finest and chased down every dragon between here and the Valencia St. Projects. His brother's in the Special Forces, they all sell the shit when they get back. Homeland Security's too scared to check their luggage. But yeah, I was hazy f'sheezy. Dave Eggers was there." I think I'm moving to Culver City. My brother isn't in the Special Forces by a long shot. I don't even have a brother. posted by TommyT @ 12:17 am | Permanent link

Saturday, July 24, 2004

No religion like Bad Religion "Let Them Eat War," a song from Bad Religion's new album, The Empire Strikes First, is stuck in my skull, and I mean it - like it's racing in circles at high speed, and as soon as it's done, the damn thing starts all over again. Still, it could be worse, all things considered (for the crew that shares my apartment with me, my tendency to sing along out loud is one of those things): the song may be on the modest side, but the band is tight as a drum and "Eat War" has more hooks than a boat full of fishermen. The verse is built around a G-F-C-D chord pattern, over which the singer delivers this (and trust me, Greg Graffin does NOT sound angry - he sounds concerned and earnest: "There's a prophet on a mountain and he's makin' up dinner/ with long division and a riding crop, anybody can feel like a winner/ when it's served up piping hot/but the people are not looking for a handout/ they're America's working corps/ can this be what they voted for/ Let them eat war/ Let them eat war/ That's how to ration the poor..." The question I have is this: each time I hear the song I start to sing along and play (nearly invisible) air drums. In addition to that, I have to battle the impulse to dance (frequently losing the fight), and when the background harmonies slide into the chorus with their aaahhh-aaahhh three-part arrangement, I sing along no matter where I am. Which is a long way of saying that "Let Them Eat War" makes me happy as hell each time I hear it, and if it makes me happy, what about the plight of those poor motherfuckers stuck slaving away for some rich slob, or worse, not even able to find a gig that'll let them sell their labor? Has the song raised my level of empathy? My understanding of what's going on? Am I ready to storm the Winter Palace or even the Winter Junior-Senior School Clean-up Dance (like Travolta did in Carrie? )Should politically inspired art entertain? And if so, where should it stop entertaining and start teaching or start doing something? I have been considering this matter all evening. posted by TommyT @ 2:34 am | Permanent link

Thursday, July 22, 2004

What about my baby mama? We could really percolate when things got bad - I'm talking about me and my baby mama. I won't bore you with tha drama; besides, ain't nothin' compared to what Holla Point and his baby mama got going, for real. Stop by iTunes, open your fist and drop $.99 on the counter for "Baby Mama," Holla Point's new single: listen up and you see that it's been some winding, spellbinding, testifying, arrestifying, hella long, the hatas was wrong journey from "My Adidas" to her child support check. I wouldn't lie to you. posted by TommyT @ 2:08 pm | Permanent link

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Clubbo Records returns from the crates You can’t really say that Clubbo Records rocked your world or anything – but sometimes, when you surf over to Clubbo.com and you hear something by, say, Bleep (when Martin Jarrow was behind the wheel), it almost seems that way. Clubbo is back from the dead, or back from somewhere, or just here, or, well, whatever. Unless it never went anywhere to begin with. If you're interested in what’s going on, go to Hit or Myth, and read about the strange and fantastic story of Clubbo Records. posted by TommyT @ 9:05 pm | Permanent link

Spinning Out Of Control 6 am, Tuesday, July 20 - Downtown Oakland YMCA "Have A Good Time," Trouble Man "Come Get Some," Lil' Jon, Sean Paul, & TLC "Microphone Fiend," Eric B. & Rakim "Reasons," Earth Wind & Fire "Funky Hilife," C.K. Mann & Carousel "Give It Up," Public Enemy "Love's Train," Con Funk Shun "N.E.P.A. Dance Dub," Tony Allen w/Afrobeat 2000 "This Is How We Do  It," Montell Jordan "If You Don't Know Me By Now," Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes posted by TommyT @ 2:25 pm | Permanent link

Monday, July 19, 2004

Blues Busters - Reggae Does Dylan Years ago I picked an LP called Tribute To Sam Cooke by a Jamaican duo called The Blues Busters. They covered Cooke songs like "Chain Gang" and "Bring It On Home To Me," and they killed, which is to say it was one great great album. At work today I opened about 50 packages bearing new releases (I know, it's a tough job), and the most interesting was Is It Rolling Bob?: A Reggae Tribute To Bob Dylan. It features artists like Toots Hibbert (from Toots and the Maytals),The Mighty Diamonds (not my favorite group, but definitely my favorite group name), Sizzla, Luciano, and Gregory Issacs, to name a few. Is it as good as the Cooke tribute? No. But it's still damn good, and worth the purchase. posted by TommyT @ 2:03 pm | Permanent link

Sunday, July 18, 2004

when the city dropped into the night Started the weekend staring into a purple haze but when the sun finally rose i was floating blissfully through the liquid sky with Brian Jonestown Massacre, and I hardly even knew that my in-laws had come and gone. posted by TommyT @ 5:32 pm | Permanent link

Friday, July 16, 2004

Local heroes There were hundreds of young black men and women in the Bay Area during the '60s who threw in with the Black Panther Party. You had to live here to really understand how influential the group was in these parts. The legend of Huey P. Newton and his sidekicks Bobby Seale and David Hilliard still lives - when I walked into a Vietnamese restaurant on 15th St. the other night with Hilliard and Pat Thomas, people stared at the one-time Panther leader as if Denzel Washington had just entered the room. We talked about the organization's vast, incredibly rich archives and the many possibilities lurking within, including the two-CD Shout! Factory's Black Power: Music of a Revolution, which piggy backs on the Panthers' legacy, to deliver a slice of life during wartime. It serves up Huey, Marvin Gaye, Gil Scot-Heron, the Soul Children, the Chi-lites, Last Poets, and Curtis Mayfield like parts of one magnificent, totally rockin' house party that sounded like it just wasn't gonna quit. At least it seemed like that to me. These days - well, I'll tell you what - in the East Bay, a lot of people learned something back then, and a lot of them haven't forgotten. It would have been nice to hear a track by The Lumpen, the Panthers' singing group - their single "Bobby Must Be Set Free" would've satisfied me (I've got it lying around somewhere). On the other hand, it's just as well that Amiri Baraka's singing group, the Advanced Workers, backed by the Anti-Imperialist singers, weren't asked to donate their song, "Gotta Stop Dancin' and Start Fightin' So We Can Do More Dancing Later On." (I'm not sure if I've got the title right, I read it in Rolling Stone years ago.) Amiri had recently changed his name - not from LeRoi Jones, but from Imamu, which I think means High Priest (not the image a Maoist leader wanted to cultivate back in the day). Whatever name he goes by, Baraka is sometimes as provocative and interesting today as he was back in the day. Hilliard is, too - both of them know there are no easy answers, and that if it's change you're after, you've got to be ready to sacrifice. On that note, I will return to the story I'm working on - peace. posted by TommyT @ 12:03 am | Permanent link

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Nervous breakbeat It may be better to go down in flames than to play the oldies circuit, but there's a third way, even if most musicians are unable or choose not to explore it. Occasionally, an artist or band is able to grow up, and create music that brings to bear the lessons of a life lived. Check out Oakland's venerable Neurosis - born in the fires of second generation punk, and grown up in the metal section of your local record store (but call it "heavy music," please). As the genre splits, splinters, and splinters again into a million micro-niches, Neurosis preaches the gospel of unity, character, and open ears - not that anyone is listening. There's plenty to hear - check out Neurosis & Jarboe, the recent tape-swapping collaboration with the one-time Swan, and The Eye Of Every Storm, the band's latest. And surf your ass over to  "Storm Warning," freshly minted in the pages of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. posted by TommyT @ 12:50 pm | Permanent link

Prison dental brawl When you figure out what that means, drop me a line and we'll both know. Guitarist Tommy Lamb - once of Rockfinger and once alive - knows, but then again he ought to, he was killed in one back in the '70s. Unless you've got a hotline to great beyond, you aren't going to learn much from him. Don't ask his twin and collaborator, Rockfinger vocalist Jack, because as has been long chronicled, Jack hated Tommy and Tommy hated Jack back. You - all of you - are bored with the story; the lawsuit over credits to "Feel It" that led to a feud, to a series of fight, to the breakup, to court, to arson, to jail, and eventually, well, there was the prison dental brawl. Come to think of it, the dental brawl thing sounds like Chris Rocks' "Tossed Salad Man," which makes me think about keeping my distance, because well, you know...But if you want the remastered, remixed, and reissued "Feel It," hold on because Clubbo Records has been bought, the back catalogue - long in the deep freeze - is about to become available, and you're going get the chance to feel whatever it is that motivated 10 gazillion fans to buy the record back in the day. Crate diggers looking for super-rare Clubbo discs have dug a hole from the fire department parking lot in Deer Park, Long Island straight through to the other side of the world, coming out empty-handed on E. 85th and York in Manhattan. Put down that pail and shovel and let your kid brother play in the sandbox, your prayers have been answered. Rockfinger isn't exactly alive and well (in fact, the cleaned up "Feel It," played backwards proves that Tommy did say "I wanted to fry Jack to a crisp," which is to say even if Tommy was still alive, one of the brothers would probably be dead. Right?) But at least you'll be able to buy the song once again. How you feelin' now? posted by TommyT @ 3:29 am | Permanent link

Monday, July 12, 2004

To make offense a skill Talk about making Shakespeare come alive. In the case of Henry IV, part 1 and Henry IV, part 2 - now Henry IV, a three-plus hour combined Prince Hal two-fer - I’ll give California Shakespeare Theater this much: they took to heart the last lines of Hal’s Act I, Scene 2 monologue – where, after a night of hard-partying, the Prince swears that he’s going to leave his low-down ways and redeem himself. Because, the truth is that it’s difficult to fathom how the normally excellent company could have mounted such a surprisingly offensive production. I probably should have known when the aforementioned passage – written into scene 2 of the original – had been dispensed with before the audience settled into their seats. Adapter Dakin Matthews admits to slicing over half of the two plays' 7000 lines, but proudly claims historical and textual accuracy in his program notes. So he’s got that going for him; but if he can’t be accused of losing the audience by losing necessary plot information, he makes up for it by omitting anything that smacks of motivation - which demands more from director Mladen Kiselov than he's able to produce. The upside of this strategy is a stageful of really erratic, unpredictable characters – unlike anything Shakespeare intended, but familiar like the SSI cases who argue with ghosts on city buses. Devoid of even the meager padding Shakespeare originally offered, the infamously hot-headed Harry Hotspur went from hello to an over-the-top rage like an undersized redneck nursing a ten-beer brood while spoiling for foreigners at the local pub. Pre-Matthews, Hal could logically elevate into royal orbit; in the new, improved, shorter version - ideal for today's tired commuter and those with plans later on in the evening - Henry IV, the A.D.D.-version, only reckless naivete would explain his princely rebirth. Fine performances by reliable local stalwarts like Stacy Ross and Catherine Castellanos, were lost as Sean Dugan – familiar to Oz fans as the wickedly flirtatious Timmy Kirk, the favor-seeking Christian solidier who turned into Satan (that could happen) on death row – struggled with nerves and lines and lurched across the stage like Homer Simpson in a tutu during the fight scenes. Oh, and then there was reliable, ever-stoic James Carpenter, whose performance as King Henry brought to mind the fabulous Prince Hal he created for Berkeley Shakespeare during the late ‘80s; but not in a good way (what was with the Woolworth’s-issue crown and the chain mail headgear that made him look like he was ready for Halloween on Castro Street?). posted by TommyT @ 2:53 am | Permanent link

Sunday, July 11, 2004

El Presidente's one-digit salute Sunday was rolling along slowly when I found this at Dr. Menlo's trustworthy American Samizadt Home For The Discontented. The dispatch perked me up, and I hope it does the same for you. It comes from a blogger who goes by the name of Jive Turkey - it seems that he had a close encounter with the leader of the free world recently. Mr. Turkey calls it The Single Greatest Event Of My Life, and who I am to disagree? You go Jive Turkey, may a thousand trees bloom (and may one Bush wither and, well, you finish the sentence). posted by TommyT @ 3:18 pm | Permanent link

Friday, July 9, 2004

Got it covered The worst thing that happened to club bands back in the day was when it was no longer okay for a band's set to be primarily cover tunes (they weren't even referred to as cover tunes; it was just what club bands played). Suddenly it was all about original material, and in my neighborhood that meant instead of the Countdowns, the Stingrays, the First Grade, or the Hassles (with Billy Joel singing lead) doing - in the case of the last two bands- Sam and Dave, the Rascals, and the Brooklyn Bridge, we had the Wilkinson Tricycle playing horrible original blues-rock, and the only slightly less horrible Banshee doing their version of early prog-rock. Even then, the best way to judge a band was by what songs it covered in between the bad originals. Springsteen's '70s concerts included the much-recorded Mitch Ryder medley, as well as a long, fat list of tunes by artists like Buddy Holly, Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Isleys, Marvin Gaye, and Sam and Dave. All of this is leading to my five favorite covers, an exercise that was inspired by a raggedy poster from a Petaluma nightclub that dates back to the early '80s and a bill that featured the band I was in opening for X (my favorite all-time rock band) - who played, if not the best cover ever, certainly the best cover of a '60s tune by a punk band, which is where today's top five begins: 1. X, playing the Door's "Soul Kitchen" 2. Aretha Franklin singing Sam Cooke's "Change Is Gonna Come" 3. Al Green singing the Temptations' "Don't Look Back" 4. The Clash playing Bobby Fuller's "I Fought The Law (and the law won)" 5. Boys II Men singing G.C. Cameron's "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday" posted by TommyT @ 6:03 pm | Permanent link

Thursday, July 8, 2004

Darkness of Heart I have no doubt that some PHD candidate has written a dissertation on Heart's Wilson sisters - something like "Lizzie Borden, Aileen Wuormos, and the reappropriation of violent imagary in Heart's "Barracuda." That is no consolation as far as I'm concerned: I'm neck deep in the group's 1977 album Little Queen, and my sights are set much lower - another weekly installment of Second Time Around, my weekly reissue slot in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. What to make of "Barracuda" lyrics like "Back over Time we were all Trying for free/ You met the porpoise and me, uh huh/ No right no wrong….selling a Song-/ A name whisper game"? Well, I've been listening for the last 30 minutes or so and i'll offer up this opinion: not much except the moral of the story, which is - "You’re gonna burn, burn, burn, burn, burn into the wick/ Ohhh, Barra…barracuda! Yeah." I'm really taken by the "Barra...barracuda!" bit - not bad for a couple of chicks. posted by TommyT @ 3:56 pm | Permanent link

Spin Class, Tues.&Thurs at 6 am, Oakland YMCA It is true that I often arrive to teach the aforementioned class after having been up all night. But it is also true that the music is as good as any you'll find in any class of any sort anywhere (anytime, or did I mention that already). Which is what keeps me going and what keep people coming. Don't believe me? Check out this morning's playlist: I Knew You Were Waiting, Aretha Franklin Nightshift, Commodores Dark End Of The Street, Aretha Franklin You're The First, The Last, My Everything, Barry White The Boogie That B, Black Eyed Peas Date With Baby, Brooklyn Funk Essentials Big Apple Boogaloo, Brooklyn Funk Essentials Ain't Nobody, Chaka Khan Pusherman, Curtis Mayfield Lowrider, Cypress Hill Devil's Pie, D'Angelo Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time), Delphonics Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get, Dramatics posted by TommyT @ 1:38 am | Permanent link

Monday, July 5, 2004

(July) Four ain’t nothin’ but a number If you’ve been paying attention, you know that phrase printed above is the title of my second album, and that it made the label go all Ashcroft on my ass. The bad blood goes back a couple of years. Apparently a quartet of Southern Baptists suffered coronaries in a Mississippi Walmart the day my debut - Burn It - dropped; the chain forgot to remove what a lawyer called “offensive material” from the display racks in aisle seven. They’re eating pie in the sky, and the album is tough to find - if you see it in your neighborhood Mom and Pop, pick it up – the shit is so tight Ray-Dog at the Source made sure it got four mics, or so I heard anyway. Am I worried about the heat? Well, to quote Jim Carroll’s song “People Who Died” from the fabulous Catholic Boy, “I know it’s dangerous, but it sure beats Rikers.” The analogy breaks down quickly, so if you want to wander out on the front lines - where a writer can really get herself in trouble - check out the L.A. Weekly’s ultra-cool Erin Aubry Kaplan. In her column Red, White, and Blues, she exposes her one-woman boycott of the Pledge of Allegiance, a brilliant little piece in which she references Jim Crow, Louis Farrakhan, Huey Newton, and Pinky Lee, among others. My school - private and understated in a Waspy, upperclass sort of way -- didn’t do the Pledge. I compensated by refusing to stand for the "Star Spangled Banner" at sporting events, a commitment that I've never turned my back on. That's saying something - in fact my allegiance proved stronger than my first marriage. My father-in-law - whose beliefs made Genghis Kahn look like Graham Nash - took me to a Yankees-Boston game. Frankie Valli sang the anthem, I sat, and when the old man realized what was up, he spit at me and split. When I got home, G.I. Jane – my wife - had her things packed, and she left, too. posted by TommyT @ 3:48 pm | Permanent link