Your band sucks.
Wouldn’t that be great on a t-shirt? I’d wear that to shows all the time. 
It’s been an interesting few weeks, and I am overdue for some quiet time. TCB played a sold out show at The Blank and then turned around to play to 350+ at Rickshaw. There were a ton of friends at both, to the point where at Rickshaw it almost seemed like I knew everyone in the room. Good times. A new Smiths night also started up in the Haight called “The Queen Is Dead,” and it seems to be taking the place of the former “Louder Than Bombs” club night. I went to this last one, and it was tremendous. You’ll be hearing more about it soon. Viva Haight!
Somewhere in all that mess, I snuck away for a short L.A. vacation to see Wanda Jackson and Jack White play the El Rey. It’s a tiny place (explaining why tickets were so hard to come by). Once we staked out a killer spot, we didn’t move around until it was time to leave. We stood next to a nice couple of locals who took brought their teens to the show. Total rock and roll parents. We chatted with them for a bit until the show started. Wanda sounded great, the band was top notch, and Jack was appropriately featured without taking anything away from Wanda. The two of them had a fun chemistry on stage that seemed genuine. And as expected, the high profile show in such a small venue attracted some celebs. In the crowd, we saw Patricia Heaton and Alan Tudyk, and it sounds like Nick recognized Beck, Josh Homme, Clem Burke, Pamela Des Barres, and James Intveld. Looks like someone posted a few songs from that show:
Other highlights of the trip included my first visit to Medieval Times, which was a total hoot and highly recommended if you’ve never been. Basically, it’s a decent prix fixe menu that you eat while jammed together in a small indoor stadium. You wear a paper crown and root for one of the pretend knights that battle it out in the arena. Obviously a kids / family vacation type attraction, but whatevs. At some point, I got in some Claim Jumper too. A waitress there came by our table to compliment our “look” and ask us about rockabilly. Turns out she was from Chicago and also happened to be black, so I took the opportunity to in turn ask about the fashion I noticed on a lot of young black girls in Chicago (see #4 here). She confirmed that it’s generally referred to as the “Motown” look, and it’s quite popular there. I wish that would catch on around here!
Incidentally, I’m typing this on my new computer, which I spent the better part of this last weekend getting up and running. See, I’d been hobbling along on the same machine that crashed on me not once, but twice for the last seven or so years. Just the same, the idea of moving to a new one… learning a new operating system, reinstalling all my old software (if it even still works), moving over all my stuff, getting everything reconfigured and set up just so… well, it’s a headache I was all too happy to postpone. But rather than wait for a third crash, I figured I’d take the bull by the horns and at least do it on my own terms. After hours of frustration and exploration, the pain is mostly behind me, and I can rest easy, secure in the knowledge that this screaming fast new PC should last me another several years. Despite the once-a-decade hassle of reconfiguring and relearning where everything is in a new OS, I gotta admit that Windows 7 has some pretty slick UI features. (Any idea what to do with my old machine running XP?) And then I also finished a brand new pedal board for my new rockabilly band. Which involved drilling actual metal! And like, wiring stuff. ‘Cos that’s what men do (I’m told). We’ve got a couple of gigs in the next month or so, and I promise to share the info on us as soon as we officially “launch.”
So yeah, that was supposed to be my relaxing weekend to recuperate. I’ll be trying again this weekend.
Oh, and by the way, your scene sucks.
Listening to: Eddie Cochran – “The Eddie Cochran Story”
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Did you ever pick a name for your new band yet?
We did! But you’ll have to wait and see. 😉