Don't Knock the Boogie

Last night we saw Mike Campbell and The Dirty Knobs play at the Independent, San Francisco, and it was noteworthy (or blog-worthy) for a number of reasons.

First off, it marked a long-awaited to return to live music for Leslie and me. Our tickets for this show were originally dated April of 2020. Then, when the world shut down three weeks ahead of the show, it was changed to October 2020. Then changed again. And again. For two long years, we've been waiting to see if it would ever happen before buying any more concert tickets that would just be sitting and waiting. And now, the wait is over.

The entire night was magic, beginning with getting into the City and parking. 

Okay, maybe some folks don't get why that's worth mentioning, but those of you who have driven (and parked) around SF know what I'm talking about. We sailed right in and found a free, legal, street parking space just two blocks from the venue without even circling the block. Amazing.

We checked out the theater, and there were only a dozen or so people in line, so we had time for a great dinner at Nopa, snagging one of the last available sidewalk tables without a reservation. Then back to the Independent, where we were now about 30 people back in line. Kudos to the Independent for going through the line to check vaccination cards, IDs, and tickets, and stamping our hands efficiently while out front to get us through the doors quickly when they eventually did open.

The doors opened, and we encamped about the front right corner of the stage (the venue is standing only, with limited ADA seating on the sides). Opening act was Sammy Brue, a brilliant, young singer-songwriter who put in a short, but vibrant set.

And then the moment we'd been waiting for for two long years. Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs. Was it worth the wait? I wish it hadn't have been so long, but yeah. If any band was worth the wait, and if any show could break the pandemic frame of mind, this was it.

From the opening bars of Lightning Boogie through the final crashing cords of You Wreck Me (the final encore two hours and ten minutes later) the show was pure rock and roll perfection. Even if there had been seats, we wouldn't have used them once Mike and the guys came out on stage.

This is the first time we've seen Mike as the lead-man for a whole show. He's certainly stepped out front and shown his stuff as a member of the Heartbreakers or Mudcrutch, but he was always supporting his friend, Tom, in those roles. 

Now it's up to Mike to carry the whole show, and he does it with ease. He's as generous a front-man as TP was, letting Jason "Ape" Sinay trade off guitar solos, and letting the rhythm section shine too. The band was tight and rehearsed and having as much fun as the audience was.

Mike leads with grace as well, with the soft-spoken and self-deprecating southern charm we've come to know so well from his home-bound videos shared to Facebook over the two long years of pandemic-related tour delays. 

Mike is generous with the audience with audience too. During one song Mike asked somebody up front if she was shooting video (yes) and was she going to post it to Instagram (yes). Mike then got down on his knees in front of her and sang directly into her iPhone giving her a shot for the ages. He then asked for his guitar tech to grab his own iPhone and get behind the drums to get some video of the band with the audience for Mike's Instragram account. All this without missing a note of the song they were in.

The set (2+ hours) mostly consisted of material off the two Dirty Knobs albums (Wreckless Abandon and External Combustion), plus six Heartbreakers' songs, a cover of Route 66, and an un-recorded Dirty Knobs song called Shake These Blues.

While some of this might be the same each night of the tour, there was definitely a lot that's left to chance and Mike's mood. At one point he referenced making a set list, "but that's no use to us now," and a couple of times he thanked his band members for keeping up with him because, "they never know what I'm gonna want to play next."

I loved all the Knobs material (Sugar and Southern Boy stand out), but have to admit that the highlights were a few of the Heartbreakers songs.

Southern Accents was especially moving with the subtle change of two words, "mother" to "brother" and "she" to "he," transforming the song from a memory of Tom's childhood, to Mike's elegy for Tom.

Before that could bring down the mood of the evening, however, the band immediately launched into a rocking rendition of Fooled Again (I Don't Like It), a gem from the first Heartbreakers' album.

You Got Lucky was never my favorite Heartbreakers song, but last night's extended nine minute jam on it was an amazing tour of Mike's mind and his influences as he inserted solos and licks in tribute to Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, and others.

Altogether, an excellent show with no off moments or songs that didn't belong. The Dirty Knobs started as a side project for Mike between Heartbreakers LPs/tours more than ten years ago, so the band is tight and professional and doesn't miss a note. This is not a Heartbreakers show, but it's probably the best rock show you'll see this year, and maybe this decade.

Was it worth waiting two years for? Oh, hell yeah. But I'm so glad the wait is over.

Don't knock the boogie. It will set you free. It'll work for you. Last night it worked for me.

Set-List:

1. Lightning Boogie
   
2. External Combustion
   
3. Pistol Packin' Momma 
4. Route 66
5. Between Two Worlds
   
6. Anna Lee
   
7. Loaded Gun
   
8. Fuck that Guy
   
9. Refugee 
10. Rat City
    
11. In This Lifetime
    
12. Sugar
13. Southern Accents
    
14. Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)
    
15. Don't Knock the Boogie
16. Southern Boy
    

Encores:

1. Shake These Blues
2. You Got Lucky (extended jam)
3. You Wreck Me 

Gear Notes:

Mike relied on just three guitars from his massive collection: two different but nearly identical white Gibson Firebirds (one with Johnny Winter's autograph prominently on it) and a white Duesenberg Starplayer.  

"Ape" mostly relied on a standard Stratocaster, with a few switch-outs to a Les Paul, another white Firebird, and what looked like a Clapton "Blackie" model Stratocaster with a Telecaster neck.

 

Oops, I Did it Again!

Yesterday, I posted offensive material to Facebook, and lost a few friends over it. Again.

What was my offense? A photo (included below) and a short video of my participation in an anti-Fascist protest in San Francisco.

Following the events in Charlottesville, VA, where one woman was killed and 30 more injured while counter-protesting a rally filled with Klansmen and Nazis shouting their hate-filled rhetoric, similar "alt-Right" events were planned for the Bay Area.

Rather than attend their hate rally and confront them head-on (potentially leading to more violence), counter-rallies were scheduled for various places away from the epicenter of hate.

We were invited by friends to take part in the Ukulele Resistance Brigade, and attend the rally planned for the Castro district, then a march up Mission Street to Civic Center. We would sing satiric anti-Nazi songs and be accompanied by two electric magical unicorns. Harmless stuff.

The Ukulele Resistance Brigade, riding Mission Pony Unicorns, singing anti-Nazi songs at the intersection of Mission and Castro, San Francisco, CA, August 26, 2017

Harmless, perhaps, and yet, "friends" were so offended that I chose to say that I'm against Fascism by singing sarcastic songs while walking along Mission Street in San Francisco that they un-freinded me today.

Silly as our protest may seem, the cumulative effect of all these counter-protests worked: the leaders of the pro-Nazi rally kept changing the location and size of their event, until all that anybody saw were a few lost and lonely individuals with alt-Right slogans on their shirts stopping off at Starbucks.

I believe that those who un-friended me have two general misconceptions:
1 - That I'm using the word "Nazi" too loosely to describe those I merely disagree with, and
2 - That this protest means we leftists/progressives/whatever are against free speech.

First, no, I do not throw around "Nazi" as an all-purpose putdown for anybody with views even slightly more conservative than my own. I reserve that word for people who literally espouse the views and symbols of Hitler's Germany.

The "Unite the Right" protesters were not simply calling for conservative policies, like "tax cuts for job creators" or the right of people to die from easily preventable diseases if they're not clever enough to get a job that includes health care benefits.

They went to Charlottesville carrying semi-automatic weapons (their right), flags of the (defeated) confederacy, flags of the (defeated) Nazi Germany, raising their hand in imitation of the Nazi solute, and chanting such Nazi slogans as "blood and soil" while carrying signs reading "Jews will not replace us."

This is not rhetoric or hyperbole. I'm not saying that they're "like Nazis." They are literal Nazis.

And this is what they said they had in store for us in San Francisco. Nazi propaganda that includes calls for my erasure from America. Making clear that however much we assimilate, Jews will never be white enough for them.

That we chose ukuleles, unicorns, and satire (on the other side of town) as our weapons, rather than baseball bats, large rocks, and direct confrontation, is pretty much a testament to our tolerance for "opposing viewpoints."

But what about Free Speech!?

Yes, the Ukulele Resistance Brigade's big hit (captured in the short video post) was this:

If you're a Nazi and you're fired, it's your fault (clap, clap)
If you're a Nazi and you're fired, it's your fault (clap, clap)
Your were spotted in a mob, now you lost your fucking job
If you're a Nazi and you're fired, it's your fault (clap, clap)

What that refers to, of course, is that following Charlottesville, several of the people who figured prominently in the photos, carrying torches and screaming hateful rhetoric, were recognized by their employers and fired. No company wants to be represented by Nazis. That's a good thing. That's their right.

Yes, you have the right to say hateful things. But that doesn't mean there are no consequences.

There have always been limits to free speech. You cannot shout "Fire" in a crowded theater. You may not incite a riot. Threatening peoples lives or suggesting that someone else "needs to die" are bad things to say.

The propaganda shouted in Charlottesville went beyond hateful. Whether or not it fell within the legal of definition of inciteful, I'll leave up to the courts.

I know that when I saw those signs, I felt threatened. And when the organizers said they were coming to my region, that I'd be complicit in normalizing that speech if I did not go out and protest it. I have a right to be heard too.

No, I do not support firing someone for basic political differences that have nothing to do with the employer-employee relationship. But I know full well that if I make a public statement that goes against my employer's mission or damages my employer's image (such as suggesting a group of citizens is somehow less human than I am), I will be fired.

Check the fine print of your employee agreement or handbook: you probably already agreed to the same. I'll bet that each of the individuals who've been fired since publicly exposing themselves as Nazis agreed to such a policy. No way their employers would have fired them if their legal council hadn't made sure it would hold up in court.

Again: free speech doesn't mean no consequences.

If standing up and declaring I'm against Fascism is "too political" for you, then you're a collaborator.

And if you're thinking that their saying I have no right to exist is somehow equal to my saying I do, I do not mourn the loss of your friendship.

Let Them Ride Ferries!

As the legend goes, at a time when France was in the midst of a famine, Queen Marie Antoinette continued to spend lavishly on her extravagant lifestyle. When somebody pointed out that she was doing this while the peasants had no bread, she deadpanned, "No bread? Let them eat cake!" ("Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!")

While Old Marie A likely never really said those words, the phrase has come to represent pompous, pampered, out-of-touch aristocracy, who have no concern for the poor, not so much out of evil, but out of willful ignorance. An aristocracy that is so isolated from the problems of the average person that they imagine what they'd do if they ran out of plain bread; simply switch to brioche.

Let's jump forward a couple hundred years and change the location to the San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically, Highway 101 between San Francisco and Mountain View, where a little kingdom called "Google" has its headquarters.

For years now, Google, along with other tech giants like Apple, etc., have provided their employees (or "Googlers," yes, really) with luxury coach buses that pick them up from various locations and bring them to work without having to deal with traffic, etc.

Quite a nice perk, and one that could be said to be an environmentally sound policy of getting private cars off the road (without making their employees use, iiiiccck!, public transportation). I'm fine with that. Personally, I prefer to be cut off by one or two massive gray buses than have to deal with fifty separate Tesla's darting in and out of traffic.

The problem that many of us have had is not with the buses themselves, but what they have come to represent.

That the Valley of Heart's Delight has been re-christened Silicon Valley brought many advantages and great wealth to this region. But it has not been all-inclusive, and those left-behind have fallen further below the economic divide. We have a greater division of wealth here than in most other regions, and are divided into the privileged tech few, and the invisible poor who serve them.

And it's the invisibility of the poor that the buses represent.

The tech crew moves from their home enclaves to private buses where their commute is protected from sharing a seat with "ordinary" people. The buses deposit them at massive campuses where their meals are provided in wonderfully equipped and staffed cafes. Then they are brought home again in the private buses.

Meanwhile, poverty in Silicon Valley is very real, and very hidden.

It's not all Google's fault! Really. I like Google. I use gmail. I use YouTube. This blog is hosted by Google's Blogspot But over-all, the major tech companies have been unable to successfully address whether or not they have any responsibility as corporate citizens to do anything about the poverty their employees get to ignore.

In the last few weeks, however, the media has finally taken notice of this. Not because the media finally cares about the homeless sleeping along the banks of the Guadalupe River in San Jose. No. Because middle-class, non-tech yuppies in San Francisco got tired of rising rents and decided to protest.

The SF group noticed that the tech buses were picking up their passengers at public bus stops, where if anybody else were to stop, they'd get a ticket. This became the focus of the protests. Long-story-short, the city reached a deal with the companies to pay for their use of public bus stops.

This "solution" is supposed to result in a truce. It doesn't do anything about gentrification in San Francisco, or homelessness all along the Peninsula, or income disparity, or anything else really, but it brings in some civic revenue, so everybody's happy. Right? ... Right?

And now, Google has done one better. Completely missing the original point of the recent SF protests, or the years of resentment building around their Mountain View Googleplex, Google has announced they will provide free ferry service to their employees, saying in a statement to the press, "We certainly don't want to cause any inconvenience to SF residents and we're trying alternative ways to get Googlers to work."

For years advocates for the poor have talked about the buses being a symbol for the isolation and divide between the tech community and the rest of the Valley around them. So now, they are further removing and isolating their "Googlers" by letting them commute on the Bay, where they don't even have to notice an older model Chevrolet breaking down by the side of the road.

In Silicon Valley, Google was told that the peasants have no bread. And Google's answer was to move the brioche onto a ferry.

YouTuBeIn - The Viral Video Gathering

Last Saturday, February 17, 2007, several hundred members of the YouTube vloggerhood gathered at Pier 39 in San Francisco to meet each other, have some fun, get free stuff, and shoot some video.

During the course of the day I bribed a politician, made up with Renetto (another user who I'd previously called "Satan"), and even got a chance to ask YouTube founder Chad Hurley what he thinks of the competition from LiveVideo.com... really!

This video is my record of the event. Ever wonder what type of people are on YouTube, besides myself? Are they all computer nerds who don't know how to interact with real people or can they hold their own in a mixer situation? How far do people come to attend an event like this? Watch the video and find out...



Many thanks to angelgallardo1, spricket24, pzottolo, groovytimes, latexglovefilms, renetto, uslawyer, johnnycreepy, bryanbarton, zennie62, jesse1701, thehill88, onboardvideo, mysteryguitarman, and, of course, to Mr. Safety (smpfilms) for organizing the whole event. Also introducing Leslie S (Mrs. Kenrg).

"On YouTube" song by PeriUrban

YouTuBeIn title logo by 30andout

NOTE: Yes, I know about the lens flare. I shot this on a digital still camera that does not give me much control over the video settings and it pretty much sucks in direct light. Sorry about the image quality.

The stuff that dreams are made of

Yes, I'm a horrible blogger who's been neglecting his blogging duties for far too long. I've been busy, I tell ya, BUSY! But you don't want to hear about that, do you? You want to know what's happening out in the world, not just with my clients.

Well, I'll tell you what's happening, a robbery, that's what's happening, a robbery. They took the bird, and not just any bird, but the black bird, the one from that Bogart film, The Maltese Falcon - You know - the stuff that dreams are made of.

It had been on display at John's Grill in San Francisco for many years. I know it was there, 'cause I'd seen it there. I was staring at it across a Caesar salad and big slab or rare meet one night. It was there in the glass case, in the second floor dining room.

Now the case is smashed and the bird is gone.

Yeah, the bird's missing and there are no clues as to where it could have gone. But now there's a reward, and where there's cash, there's clues. $25 grand worth of clues should be coming John's way shortly.

And if he can't find his black bird, I've got one I might be willing to let go for twenty-five large...

Introducing the Goldstein Gate Bridge!

Yesterday's story about O.J. Simpson publishing a book in which he fictionalizes his murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman was pretty darn offensive. Well, here's something that's offensive in an entirely different way: The district board of directors for San Francisco's famous Golden Gate Bridge are expected to start taking bids from potential corporate sponsors.

I am willing to reluctantly accept the re-naming of privately owned sports and concert venues in honor of their corporate benefactors, but publicly owned landmarks are quite another thing. This is commercialism and corporatism at its worst.

Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie is very careful to point out that there will be no new name signs attached directly to the bridge (or toll booths) itself:

"This is not a naming rights deal. It's more of a behind-the-scenes, low-key, corporate partnership, much like the Proud Partners Program in the national parks."

If you're not familiar with the "Proud Partners Program", they're the ones responsible for signs saying "This trail brought to you by Ford" in our historic national parks. My personal opinion? Hiking trails with ads for Ford are offensive in nature preserves supposedly paid for by my tax dollars.

Back when the U.S. manned space program was started, it was based in Cape Canaveral, Florida. After the death of President Kennedy, it was re-named Cape Kennedy to honor his support of the space program. Local residents rebelled. They successfully argued that the Cape Canaveral name had historical significance. The areas is now the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. A reasonable compromise.

This was the precedent I remembered years ago when Candlestick Park was re-named for a corporate sponsor. Candlestick was named because the piece of land it was built on had been referred to as the Candlestick for well over a century. But corporate interests won out over historical memory.

The Golden Gate Bridge is also named after a geographic feature, and not the color of the paint as is usually assumed. Settlers had always referred to that section of land and bay, from the top of the SF Peninsula across to the Marin Headlands, where the Pacific flows into the great inland sea of the SF Bay, as the "Golden Gate."

So, here's my plan to fight back. I want to sponsor the bridge. I figure most people will hardly even notice the change in name from "Golden Gate" to "Goldstein Gate." I'll need to go in with a bid of at least $5 million. Now, obviously, I don't have $5 million available.

If you'd like to help out, you can use PayPal to send me your donations. Just send whatever you can and mark the donation "Buy a Bridge for Freedom!" Thanks for your help.