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Another Fein Mess
A.F. Stone’s Monthly
June 2010

Rhino Days Are Here Again

Rhino Record Store reopened 0 a few doors south of its original Westwood location for two weeks in late May for a charity fundraising sale organized by original store owner Richard Foos. Donated records, books and CDs were offered at bargain basement prices, and free concerts added icing to the cake: Blasters, Peter Case, Bob Forrest, Wild Man Fisher, Ruby Friedman, Willie G, the Gears, the Last, the Loons, Maria McKee, Ruben & The Jets, Spain, Syd Straw, Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, Richard Thompson, the Urinals and Mike Watt. There was also a screening of Nirvana’s performance at the Rhino store in 1989 and a documentary about Emmit Rhodes, which included an in-store interview with him and two other Merry Go Round members. (I came late and missed it, but Rhodes’ behavior moved one fan to remark to me “I’m looking for a tall building to jump off.”)

A breathtaking swan song for a store already gone. I bought about $100 worth of low-priced treasures, though I’d be hard pressed to name three of them now. (This just in: Wild Man Fisher went AWOL from his assisted living unit and did not appear at the store.)

0 It was called a Pop-Up store, because it has popped up, and then vanished, twice now.

PHOTOS


Blasters. Phil Alvin soldiers on with ragged voice and tenacity.


Art Fein, one of the Smith Brothers (or Peter Case).


Christine Collister and Richard Thompson.


Thee Midnighters with Willie G.


East L.A. magnate Gene Aguilera, Willie G, Gary Stewart


Emmit Rhodes mugs, for the record.


The most amazing in-store appearance of the fest: Tom Servo and Krow, on loan from Mystery Science Theater 3000.


Temple City Kazoo Orchestra “for the last time.”


Bob Wayne of Big Daddy poses with Richard Foos


Ruben Guevara, sans Jets

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New (To Me) Music

When I got free albums from record companies I never listened to music, only auditioned it. It was like being in college, never having a minute to read for pleasure.

Now that I get nuthin free, I seek it. I borrow CDs from friends and dump them onto my iPod, which is great, but I also buy things blind. Of course, I am lucky that enormous Amoeba Records is within walking distance of my house (so you think I walk there? ha!). I rummage the $1 bins and always walk out with four CDs (fourth one free) for 3 bucks. (For you locals, it’s just like the dime album bin at Aron’s Records, adjusted for inflation.)

Also I’ll sometimes take a big leap and get four $2.98 CDs for nine bucks. Usually those are known commodities (one of Chuck E’s albums, an Oasis with “Visual scratches that don’t affect playing”). And then there was the big Rhino sale in May (written about extensively, forthwith) where I tried a lot of unknowns because, you know, it was for charity. Some finds:

- Elvis Sinatra, “East Village Vegas” (1999). When a comp of lounge (for lack of a better word) singers contains both new and old artists I dismiss the new ones. The style seems false in contemporary hands . But this guy (George Leonard) handles it swell. The style is timeless pop/swing, and it’s clever and right, not dissimilar to Rupert Holmes.

- Gene Watson, “22 Golden Country Hits” (2009 Tv package). In 1994 I heard a Gene Watson song on the radio that reminded me of all the best qualities of 70’s country. I knew his 1975 hit, “Love On A Hot Afternoon” but nothing more so I figured, in my ignorance, that the song was a one-off comeback and for the ensuing 16 years tried to find it. When I got this package for $1.82 (country music was not embraced at the Rhino sale) I approached it with hope that I would recognize the tune. Instead, I realized that I liked every song, and that the “mid-70s” style I liked was HIS style. As each song unfurled I shook my head saying “How can this be? This is so good!” Days later I thanked Richard, who ran the sale, for allowing me to make this discovery and he said “Oh, I discovered that seven years ago. He’s second to me after Merle Haggard.” But I am not as great a Haggard fan, so Gene Watson is number one for me.

Cat on the Prowl

Late April I saw Anne McCue from Nashville with 29 Mules at Ireland’s in Van Nuys ... May 15 went to see Chuck E. Weiss at the Piano Bar in Hollywood and the joint was rockin’, as always. Also packed, ditto ... For the May 16th early-evening Messaround at Viva Cantina in Burbank, Jonny Whiteside rounded up Del Casher, The Handsome Sexies, and Troy Walker. Walker, a longtime L.A. fixture, was, and is, a gay-playing soul singer who can really belt. He’s been around for decades (Elvis loved him!) and this coming-out, so to speak, was a joy to behold. What pipes! The guy’s 71 and still on fire. Jonny’s shows rock approximately every 3 weeks ... May 18 I went to see Ruby Friedman again at the Hotel Cafe, but that’s a given. Jake Austen, of Rocktober magazine, and Screamin’ Scott Simon came along. (Also went June 1, but I’m a Rubyist. Bob Forrest opened.) ... I’ll always go to see I See Hawks in LA., but Thursday May 20 the motivation was to see Weber’s, a venue in Reseda that calls itself ‘”The New Palomino.” The club, behind a strip of stores and facing nothing but an alley, is hard to find. It’s nice enough and the Hawks were short a man but fine ... Saturday night 5/22 I went out to Joe’s in Burbank to see the Deke Dickerson band with Nokie Edwards, one of the last remaining Ventures. The place was packed, a nice sign that our music has ‘legs’ here ... Saw Dead Rock West Sunday night May 23 at the Grand Ole Echo - and a lot of other acts through the month, some pictured below:

PHOTOS

Old Californio, Grand Ole Echo


Chuck E. Weiss workin’ it, Piano Bar, May 15


AF, Smilin’ Screamin’ Scott Simon, Chuck E show


James Intveld with the Messaround Band, Viva Cantina


Del Casher, guitar maestro, Viva Cantina. Casher, a tech inventor, adapted the wah-wah pedal for guitars when he worked at Voxx in the 1960s. Before he created that application, the wah-wah was used by , and designed solely for, trumpet-players.


Sylvia, Troy Walker, Art Fein, Viva Cantina


Three Balls of Fire at the Liquid Kitty, Santa Monica


Groovy Rednecks, Grand Ole Echo, with Kent Geib in front.


Dead Rock West - Cindy Wasserman and Frank Lee Drennen. Dave Gleason on left, D.J. Bonebrake on drums. Grand Ole Echo.


Dave Gleason, Grand Ole Echo


Some call it the best photo ever taken of Carlos Guitarlos.: Gil T, Carlos, Dave Drive (Gears), Dig the Pig on break at Carlos’s gig at Liquid Kitty, in front of an office bldg built on site of Club 88.


Girl driven to a frenzy by I See Hawks in L.A., Weber’s.

James Intveld

Ran into him at the Messaround. He lives in Nashville, but comes home to L.A. often. We talked about Elvis like we did years ago when he was a lad and I was ... getting old. (Now he’s 50, and I got there.) At 6 foot and skinny he is the same body type as Elvis at 21, so a sculptor used him as a body model for a sculpture of Elvis. (Also because he’s seen thousands of Elvis photos.) He does 200 shows a year around the world, and acting roles, singing on soundtracks, ads. Recently he has toured as John Fogerty’s guitarist, replacing Billy Burnette.

PHOTO


James Intveld, Bernie Bernstein, AF - Viva Cantina

Trip Envy

The country-rock community here is so strong it has field trips.

On some weekends, I See Hawks in L.A., Old Californio, Jim Lauderdale (once from here) and others play at Pappy & Harriet’s in Joshua Tree. It is a 2-hour drive from L.A., and people rent cabins nearby so’s not to need to drive home. It’s so communal it brings a tear to my eye. What I need to do is attend one.

Music

I was startled to see, at Amoeba, a CD by “Los Angeles Negroes.” A punk band? It was the Spanish section. The group was The Black Angels ... Listening to Teresa Brewer’s ‘Sweet Old Fashioned Girl’ I noticed a line I’d missed. She’s old fashioned girl but also a rockin’ rollin’ little Goldilocks who “hangs around the house where the lights are blue.” The House Of Blue Lights! How cool ... “Na na na nanana, late at night,” a riff in the Drifters hit “I Count The Tears,” was taken whole for the Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live For Today.” The songwriter felt correctly that by 1966 nobody remembered 1962. Is time passing like that now? Is someone saying “2006? Who can remember what it was like then?” ... I wonder what Don Henley thought of the 4-22-10 LATimes subhed that said “Glenn Frey & Co.” played the Hollywood Bowl. Good thing egotism has no place in that band ... In a restaurant scene set in 1953 in a tv drama about Werner Von Braun, “Rocket 88” blasts in the bg. It was a novelty hit, but so was “Doggy In the Window,” which would more likely’ve been playing ... McCabe’s ad: Laurie Lewis “has played with everyone from Dave Alvin to Ralph Stanley.” A nice swath, but a slim one ...

Reviews In The News

Sourpuss lounge-lizard Stephen Holden in the 4-9-10 NY Times was outraged at the “muddled, pretentious” film clips that comprise “When You’re Strange,” the Doors docu movie. (It was stock on hand. Jim couldn’t do retakes, Holdup.) New York Hold’en hated the script, a “shallow hodgepodge” containing “cliched images” (words that, ironically, often come to mind reading Holden’s reviews). The movie leaves “you” confused, he says evasively. He blithely sneers about a generation’s “widespread assumption that drugs consumed indiscriminately were a shortcut to enlightenment.”

Annie Powers, 4-14 LATimes, says the lead singer of Muse ‘careened’ around the stage. Tilting like a boat about to capsize? “Caromed’ would be good, if he bounced off stuff. She cites the drummer as “chill,” an adjective. A skyscraper prop was “meant to evoke the menacing buildings in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ “ (How she know dat? Not Lang’s “Metropolis?” Chaplin’s mechanized world?) Then after sneering with vicious stereotyping “Near the front rows, two sorority types danced as some bookish-looking indie dudes snickered” she turned on less enlightened crits: The band is “a type that Zeitgeist-obsessed tastemakers don’t notice until they become superstars.” She has many enemies (‘paranoia’ does not apply) and they’re massed. It’s this self-hoisted hipster’s cross.

From Coachella five days later Margaret Wappler and August Brown report insubstantially about “early festival gossip” and that fans “griped over Facebook” (exclusively, I deduce) and gush that spotting Jay-Z at different performances was a “widespread game” for the audience. (Not everyone has up front press-passes, kids.) Jessica Gelt provided separate coverage, perhaps of people’s choice of booze.

August Brown, in the 4-24 LATimes, takes a page from Bob Hilburn to propose what “immediate question” faced a Hole concert. The leader of the “beloved band” (no argument there!) was “known for creatively punctuating missives” (whew!) and a rep as a “one-woman gossip-maelstrom” who carries and air of “sly, been-there pugnacity.” What falderal. That she ‘decried and articulated the thousand patronizing cuts of the male imagination” (what the f--k?) is the garbled cry of a woe-man.

Instead of assigning a review in Pop Music on Sunday, 4-25, the LATimes had writer David Ulin narrate an account of taking his daughter to a Taylor Swift concert. The logic of having an early-teen evaluate the show is so sensible it’s unique.

August Brown, reviewing a book about record stores in the 4-8 LATimes, wrote that 78 rpm records were threatened by a new technology in 1924 -- vinyl records. 19-what? Neither Brown nor the perhaps-imaginary proofreader knows record history. (I’m sure author Gary Calamar did not write this.)

Review Reviews

In the 5-19-10 NY Times wisened Maureen Dowd laments the path from ‘single’ to ‘unmarried,’ prefacing a proposal with “If roughly one out of nine Americans is gay ...” She doesn’t state it, she conjectures it to contend that some nutty thing follows. Crazy sociological looseness has a name: Dowd’s syndrome.

Krista Simmons, in the always hilarious LATimes Food Section 4-15-10, opens “Coffee and Danish: You can’t help but think of a stale pot of truck stop brew sitting next to jelly-laden pastry.” Poor kid: probably raised in Bel-Air, ate only kwa-sonts. “Coffee is an integral part of the daily lives of Scandinavians” she quotes a Swedish author. If you found that remarkable, you probably read the rest of the article.

In the 4-23 LATimes Colin Stutz reports that a bar in Silver Lake has changed its style. If you read the L.A. Times you’d think the entire city revolves around Silver Lake, when in fact “the increasingly upscale neighborhood” (is Stutz in real estate?) consists of people who greet each other ”Good morning Hipster Jones.” “And how are you, Hipster Smith?” (L.A. Times: You’re supposed to be above the L.A. Weekly, not sink to its level.)

Jennifer Steinhauser’s 4-18 NYTimes piece on Demi Moore was excessively worshipful. “Did you love her” when she posed pregnant? “Or were you more impressed” when she did something else? “Or have you never forgiven her” for some other thing? That “She took a sip from her Starbucks cup, which no one in the West Hollywood restaurant where we met seemed to mind” (What? No riot?) puts Demi on a pedestal too high. Take a cold shower, Jenn.

Politics, Slightly

A long LATimes piece about Meg Whitman, the eBay billionaire running for governor, buried the lead. After eBay bought into craigslist, eBay started its own connections service and registered it as craigslist.org, leading people who wished to reach craigslist to her company. She said this was “a common business practice.” Money comes in under her watch, but business stinks.

David Leonhardt, in the 5-19 NYTimes business section, citing tobacco industry claims that regulation would curtail individual freedom, recalls that the auto industry used the same cry to fight seatbelt installation in the 1960s. Ha ha ha.

Big banks complain that state oversight of interest rates hurts them because they must obey separate rules for every state. Somewhere still inside me is the idea that banking is local, not national. When I traveled cross-country after college I knew I’d never see “my” bank. Now the mega-banks that cover the country don’t obey rules, they set them.

Steve Lopez, in the 5-3 LATimes, rode with a cop, and like the Eagles who said they felt like true desperadoes when they posed for photos dressed as outlaws, assumed a cop’s righteousness. They were tailing people who drive while using cellphones “and you know who you are.” At first the posturing seemed self-mocking, but he kept it up. The fine is $76: “I’d raise it to $500.” (Lopez MAD!) “My partner and I” is used, and Lopez himself questioned a miscreant. “Our mission to enforce and educate” he crowed. Bring Back Al Martinez.

Namby Pamby

Mikael Wood’s 5-22 LAT piece about the stage musical “Glee” says an actress who walked into the audience was flanked by guards not to protect her from bullies -- but from fans who adore her! Did your head snap like mine? Shades of Jack & Jill Magazine ... Ovation Cable’s airing of a 2007 BBC production of ‘Fanny Hill’ featured scenes graphically depicting shagging and salaciousness. (Of a man who expired during sex she says “He died inside me.”) Yet her nipples were airbrushed when her breasts showed. What a country, ours. I stand with William Dean Howells who said, or would have, “I’ve never seen a man who was ruined by a nipple” ...

Words

When “amp up” appeared in a hed in the 5-22 LAT sports section I nearly fainted. Where was the R that has has transformed ‘amping’ (amplifying) to the meaningless, and epidemic ‘ramping’? Next ‘increase’ 1 for uptick or spike 2 ?... Within ten minutes on CSPAN2 I heard “transited” instead of ‘trasitioned’ and “fix” instead of ‘fixate.’ Depretentionization is in the air ... What strange words. History Channel WWII documentary says a 1944 film about the Army “galvanized support for the American war effort.” That movie startled America into sudden support? Til 1944 people were so-so about the war? Get a dictionary ...

1 Or ‘sharp increase.’

2 Journalism school said to write plainly, not use fancy or attention-getting words 3. (When I use them in this screed, it’s for laughs.)

3 Come to think of it, what are newish unnecessarily elaborate words called? Pro-active, backstory, iconic, quintessential are not slang, they’re ... Ephemeralities?

Crazy Man

New anchors (lead weights) are goofballs, sure, but on Friday, May 7, Eric Stillman on Channel 5 here exceeded his goofball quotient.

Covering closure, or lane reduction, of Sunset Blvd over the 405 Freeway, which will disrupt traffic, Stillman opened his live coverage shaking a fist at the camera and dancing excitedly. He irrationally threw a traffic cone and walked up to cars waving his hands like an escaped mental patient.

Nobody knew what his problem was, he just approached cars and made spastic motions. At one point he went to the door of a school bus expecting, I suppose, that the driver would open the door for an interview. The sensible anchor back at the studio noted that approaching a school bus in high dudgeon was wrong.

That area, prime real estate between Westwood and Brentwood must be Eric’s turf. (Not-poor Eric!) There’s no other reason for him to be so exercised. Nobody watching felt sorry for him for anything other than his poor judgment, bad behavior and stupidity.

It Takes All Kinds

I get grief from ... everyone about “The TAMI Show.” Everyone - every person on earth - says James Brown’s dancing is the best rock & roll on film. I offer as better Ike & Tina Turner in the subsequent film, “The Big TNT Show,” in which Tina wails through 11 minutes that is, well, the best rock & roll on film.

This may sound snobby, since most people can’t access that movie, like saying the best concert ever performed was one I saw 4. But Tina Turner, omigod, her wailing makes, to borrow from Little Richard, my little finger stand straight up. Her ferocity, pushed by Ike’s rocking band, is earthshaking.

James Brown’s dancing is swell as all getout, but the song isn’t especially superior to his others, and as for dancing ... I don’t see what it has to do with rock & roll. It’s athletic. Ballet if you like. But one thing is undeniable - I don’t like it as much as everyone else does.

Also, does everyone “of a certain age” admire ‘Easy Rider’? It fell flat with me, but I wan’t a tripper. I left the movie baffled and disappointed, the only keep-awake point the brief appearance of Phil Specter, chosen maybe for his acting prowess but more likely for his funding the film. A couple of dope dopes drive around dressed up funny and then get killed by a redneck with a goiter. Have you seen the commune scene lately? - my god, the embarrassment. 5

Back in those days I had a vague idea of “L.A.” that included this film and “The Trip” and others showing people who looked too old to be doing what they were doing. I preferred my dream image of San Francisco. Most youth culture movies stunk, period.

4 Bo Diddley’s performance in The Big TNT Show is like Zeus descending from Mt. Olympus. He plays a simple riff repeatedly, but what a riff! Bo Diddle was not just a gunslinger, he was a god.

5 Maybe I’ve tapped a vein. After writing this, someone said to me, apropos of Dennis Hopper’s death, that they didn’t think much of the movie either and that they knew other people who felt this way - that the hubbub at the time was The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Danny Boy

I bought some 50s tv shows at the Rhino Pop-Up store, and that’s ridiculous. Three of the dvd players in my house are broken, leaving one that works. Nobody dropped them, they weren’t overworked, they’re just dvd’s - a fragile inscrutable technology. I am loath, even, to put a disc in the one that works because it’s ... inhuman. I got another backup VHS/TV combo, two, bec the Sharp died.

(I knew that the Sylvania line, name-revived in the late-90s, was a low-end brand, but when looking to program a remote for it I was a little surprised to see “Also Memorex, Emerson.” They were all made by Funai, which for all I know could today be rebranded to some prestige name - Kia? - just as Gold Star, the low-end Korean electronics firm, changed its name to LG.)

I peeked at the ‘Mister Peepers’ 4-disc set. Wally Cox in 1952 was dazzling in his recessiveness. The shadows time cast on the filmed-broadcast made it look dreamlike like in my memory. But after after five minutes it went on the shelf, this scant re-view enough for the rest of my life.

Then ‘Make Room For Daddy,’ the Danny Thomas 6 show about a Lebanese-American entertainer 7 with an Uncle Tonouse and Cousin Habib - his Arab heritage was accepted as easily as Irish or Italian! It was funny, but one hour was enough to sate me, so the other 12 hours will remain un-reseen.

6 On an Elvis-buddiesVHS, one recalled that Elvis disliked Danny Thomas. At a photo-op to mark Elvis giving a huge refurbished Navy ship to Thomas’s City Of Hope, Thomas, he reported, asided to Elvis “So what am I supposed to do with this big piece of shit?”

7 His wife and kids were WASPy. The boy, Rusty Hamer, didn’t adjust to post-50s obscurity 8 and committed suicide in the 1990’s.

8 Twenty years ago at Little Nashville in North Hollywood someone pointed to a guy in a flannel shirt across the room and whispered “Lee Akers.” That name resonates with little credit-readers from the 1950s as the child star of the Rin Tin Tin tv show. He carried a vending-machine cardboard card of himself with Rinny, which maybe clicked with chicks. (It was a big Rinny night; piano-rocker Rip Masters was there too.)

License

Saw the license plate DMB DNCE.

Secondly I realized it’s someone’s initials, and they dance.

My first thought was Dumb Dunce, which was redundant.

A Different Drum

On May 9, the offbeat male yoga teacher said “Happy Mothers Day to all you mothers. And you women, too.”

- 57 -

Mark On the Move

I made it to the second day of the Doheny Blues Festival in Dana Point, drawn by the presence of Bettye Lavette, Booker T. Jones and Otis Taylor. I also liked the idea of getting to see headliners Crosby, Stills & Nash included in the $55 single-day ticket price since their recent tours have adhered to the now-normal “superstar” scale of $100-$350 in the big halls. CSN didn’t exactly belong at a blues festival, but what the heck.

The beachside weather was perfect and the venue (with three stages) nicely compact. The starting times were staggered so unlike other festivals you could catch almost all the acts, only a few overlapped, and the audio feed at one of the big stages was broadcast at the other during changeovers. After a spirited set from Nathan James with The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ leader Kim Wilson blowing terrific harmonica and sharing vocals, Bettye LaVette’s introduction of fresh material from her new album Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook was everything I’d hoped it would be. (I’ve seen Bettye a couple times during her strong “comeback” after her years of relative obscurity, including a truly mind-bending show at The Knitting Factory in 2005 that left me feeling she really was the unheralded equal of Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin, so my expectations were high.)

The sexy senior citizen started with The Beatles “The Word,” strutting the stage fronting a soulful small band, and slowed down George Harrison’s “Isn’t It A Pity” into a gritty, gospel testament. She always bites down hard on lyrics and has a fiery focus. At the slower tempos she’s mesmerizing. She sat on the stage in a yoga position (she’s in great shape) and absolutely nailed Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” with minimal accompaniment, and likewise wrung ever ounce from The Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” and The Stones’ “Salt of the Earth.”

She did a few tunes from her breakthrough albums The Scene of the Crime and I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise (including Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow” and her own composition “Before the Money Came”) before a crushing a cappella “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” (a Sinead O’Connor song that Bettye now practically owns). I was disappointed she didn’t get a huge ovation. Maybe the blissed-out party crowd and sunshine overcame Bettye’s dead-serious intensity. She’s more of a nightclub, indoors act.

Otis Taylor is a folk-bluesman who was disillusioned by showbiz and dropped out to run an antiques store for a couple decades, until he re-emerged to record and perform in 1995. I heard him interviewed on NPR in 2003, talking about his album Truth is Not Fiction and his views on black music and racism in America, the lynchings of his grand-grandfather and murder of his uncle, and was really impressed. I got the album and have been following him ever since, as he’s broadened his “angry blues” and begun infusing his music with black string-band and old-timey traditions, playing the banjo as much as he plays guitar, and throwing in elements of contemporary dance and trance music as well.

His set was Jimi Hendrix-meets-John Lee Hooker. He led his band (which included fiddler Anne Harris, a striking, multi-faceted player) through long, hypnotic grooves with minimal lyrics, often stomping a single chord for minutes while the improvisations swirled. He brought out Kim Wilson to duet a “hambone” harmonica battle, and let a theramin (played by his daughter Cassie) begin a quick version of “Amazing Grace” that soon went jam-happy as well. His latest album is Clovis People Vol. 3 (typically perverse for Taylor, there are no volumes one or two). He’s turning out to be thrillingly unpredictable, on CD and live.

Booker T. played the key MG’s instrumentals “Green Onions,” “Soul Limbo,” “Hip Hug-Her,” “Hang ‘Em High,” a couple tunes from his recent Potato Hole album, and finished with “Time is Tight” (starting in a new slow arrangement and then kicking into high gear). In between he came out from behind his Hammond B-3 and sang (not something I expected) songs he wrote for others or produced, including “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Born Under a Bad Sign,” “Hold On, I’m Comin’” and (in very shaky performances where he was off-key and out of time) “Dock of the Bay” and “Take Me to the River” (which I guess he included just cuz it’s from Memphis, since he didn’t produce the Al Green hit or write it). He allowed his drummer to rap during several tunes, which was a mistake to my ears but the crowd seemed to dig it. Maybe he thinks audiences would be bored by all-instrumental sets. Not me.

CSN, cutting down their usual 3 hour extravanganzas to a manageable 90 minutes to beat sound curfew at the beach, were focused and tight, Steve Stills sounding terrific on several slashing guitar solos (maybe that was the blues edge that got them booked for the event). They found room for their own hits including “Marrakesh Express,” “Déjà vu,” “Our House” and a blistering “Almost Cut My Hair” (I know lots of folks can’t stand the song, but it still chokes me up with sixties nostalgia). They also didn’t neglect Buffalo Springfield, with solid “Rock and Roll Woman” and “Bluebird,” Graham Nash’s still-relevant “Military Madness” and two extremely well done outsiders, “Ruby Tuesday” and “Behind Blue Eyes,” which really brought out the harmonies. I liked what David Crosby said as the sun went down and the wind picked up, explaining their continuing appeal: “Our fans depend on Stephen to write rock tunes that make them want to boogie, Graham to write anthems to sing along to, and me to write the weird shit.” It all worked.


-- Mark Leviton

(Mark’s sixties-themed radio show Pet Sounds can be heard alternate Wednesdays 10pm-Midnight PST on KVMR-FM 89.5 in the Sacramento area and streaming at www.kvmr.org )

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Gene Sculatti letter to L.A. Weekly 6-3-10
re: Dennis Hopper obit

After decades of critics’ kid-gloves treatment for Hopper, F.X. Feeney’s obit came as no surprise. Surely I wasn’t the only twentysomething in 1969 who wasn’t “so captivated” by Hopper’s condescending, cooler-than-thou David Crosby impersonation in Easy Rider. The film doesn’t “now date so badly.” Dated from the day its print was struck, it was an instant anachronism of super-hippie smugness. Thirty years later, Hopper’s self-congratulatory TV spots for Ameriprise revealed him as a routine careerist, ready to leverage his heritage status within some imagined boomer community (“our generation”) for cash. What you mean “we,” kemosabe?