Hicks with Sticks
San Francisco Bay Area Twang Calendar Highlights
Bands / Clubs |
Sat, Sept 13:
The Burning Embers @ Smiley's Schooner Saloon, 41 Wharf Rd., Bolinas |
Sun, Sept 14:
CalAmericana Presents: Gayle Lynn & the Hired Hands/Sheila Groves & Flatt Lonesome @ Ireland's 32, 3920 Geary Blvd., SF 8pm free |
Fri, Sept 19:
19th Annual Hank Williams Birthday Tribute & Sing-a-Long w/The Rounders @ The Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF |
Fri, Oct 3:
Royal Deuces, Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit, Big Mistake @ Starry Plough, Berk, 9:30, $9 |
Full Calendar |
THE SLAUGHTER CONTINUES ON THE NEW PINE BOX BOYS CD
Whenever the Pine Box Boys play, Hicks with Sticks polls select audience members for estimates of how many people they expect to die during the set. The audience usually escapes, but the
people in PBB songs rarely do.
Their third CD, Child of Calamity, features 14 tracks and somebody, if we can count a scarecrow with a brain as
a "somebody," dies in 12 of them. Two or three drown, another is smothered, another gets munched by a cotton gin, three bite the dust in a feud, the slacker
scarecrow gets torched by the farmer for letting the crows eat the corn. The two songs without deaths are at least reaper-friendly. "The Undertaker's
Prayer" is about an undertaker who delights in skinning the last dollars out of the dead's estate, and "The Gravedigger" is proud to be the last one to let you down.
Those looking for the song about the cute puppy with the waggley tail might have bought the wrong CD.
Now all this killing is going to get a little boring if that's all it's about, but there's
method in their mayhem in the form of character studies and human emotions. They may be humanity's worst character traits and emotions, but what else
should we expect from of a band that's named after a cheap coffin. "The Undertaker's Prayer," for instance, is a social protest song about greed in one of
the greediest of industries. The scarecrow in "An Unkindness" becomes a metaphor for taking responsibility for bad decisions. "Pardon Me, Ginger," with
the industrial fatality at the cotton gin, turns into a tale of lust, betrayal and weakness when the newly widowed Ginger doesn't shoot the flattering bearer
of the bad news, and this is a sign for him to stay the night.
Beyond the corpses, something not to be overlooked is how strong the PBBs are musically. There can be some serious guitar pickin' by
Lester T. Raww, "Possum" Carvidi plays a mean banjo that isn't the least bit annoying, and Col. Timothy Leather on bass and Steven "Your Uncle" Dodds on drums form
one of the tightest rhythm sections around. It's a mystery how sometimes Pine Box girl, demure fiddler Yoon-Ki Chai, fell in with this lot but she holds down her
end, perhaps blanking out on the lyrics, but in sync with the music.
It's all good, clean fun, sort of. Hey, back in Arkansas, the home of band leader
Raww, the official state song is a murder ballad. Better still, in his other life, Mr. Raww, whose likeness graces the CD's cover, is over 6', big framed, mutton
chopped, favors black, has a menacing salt and pepper goatee, and is a school teacher. You can bet that those kids, unlike a PBB audience returning the chorus of "Stab," sit still and pay attention. www.pineboxboys.com
PARENTS TELEVISION COUNCIL: THE FCC'S PRUDE PATROL
 Parents Television Council is a name to remember because it is the driving force behind every Federal Communications Commission frenzy over
"indecency" on the airwaves. It's been three and a half eternal years since Janet Jackson's wardrobe failure at the Super Bowl. The Federal prude patrol is
still going on and on about it, and still losing. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that CBS will not have to pay a $550,000 fine for J-Jack's microsecond pastie flash.
This comes on the heels of a December ruling that Fox could not be fined for incidental swearing when U2's Bono let an f-word slip as
he enthusiastically accepted an award. In both cases the courts have told the FCC to cut the nonsense.
Nonsense is what these two big nothing cases are about. They are naked Oval
Office grandstanding for the Christian right. This political publicity stunt is costing taxpayers millions, as government-sponsored prudishness makes its
way to the Supreme Court which, as a matter of public record, is where the FCC is going on Dubya's orders to keep the pandering fires burning.
The FCC claims that it was flooded with 540,000 complaints over Boobiegate. The part they're leaving out is that 539,999 of those complaints were generated
the Parents Television Council with help from the FCC itself as both organizations strove to equate JJ's bosom with the fall of Western Civilization.
  The Parents Television Council is much like the anti-evolution
Creation Research Institute and the cavalcade of think tanks, advocacy groups and "research" fronts that exist to frighten money out of religious conservatives through exaggerations about broadcast indecency,
Teri Schiavo, Charles Darwin or any other bogeyman who can help them separate dollars from dupes. PTC was founded by PR man L. Brent Bozell as a subsidiary of his Media Research Center,
which itself is a spinoff from his PR organization the Conservative Communications Center.
Media Transparency, which keeps tabs on the far right's media agenda, has PTC's story
and information about the entire network of media propagandists who are workin' the rubles out of the rubes, and now running the FCC. "According to an early December 2004
report in Mediaweek, the PTC has
become a master at generating indecency complaints with the FCC." 'Nuff said? |
77 EL DEORA WAILS, CROONS AND THINKS
 77 el Deora's first CD, Sirens, contained a flock of rockers spaced out with a few ballads; their new one, Hammer and Tongs, has a few rockers between the
ballads. Tempo isn't much of an issue when Jen Courtney's voice combines with Maurice Tani's lyrics to establish the grand plan. "Poison" would need to be as
slow-acting as the topic itself while "High on Life (Short on Cash)" would need to romp with the spirit of a carefree spendthrift.
As for lyrics, "My bio's been retracted/My resume's redacted/As a matter of fact it's/All one big lie" leaves little doubt about the points being made in
"(Everybody's Got) Something to Hide." Even well-travelled C/W themes, like getting too drunk to hold onto your woman ("Evidently") and love lost ("Out with
the Old"), get lyrical treatments that are off the tried and true. "I press against the window/So my skin can feel the view/Out with the old – In with the new."
The band's reach for lyrical horsepower extends to the late poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," a quiet rage about the many wrong
ends of the stick pressed into the skin of the hand of the little guy. "Bring It On" exposes the emptiness of one of the more well-known Bushisms. "We lose the
war on our own shore when we let freedom fall, 'cause freedom for security gets neither one at all." Amen, brother.
Hammer and Tongs includes an impressive guest list. David Phillips'
pedal steel is all over it; Belle Monroe and her Brewglass Boys power "New Car Smell;" and Catherine Foreman from Starlene and Mike Wolf, who plays with Tani in the Country Squires,
are on "Javalina." In all, a dozen local luminaries dot the CD's landscape. It all works because Tani's computer substitutes for a studio. He's got it to where people can just email their parts
and he can put the songs together through the miracle of modern software.
Even the packaging wants to go deep. The details disappear at the scale
reproduced here, but that is an angel lifting a fainting maiden and a telecaster out of a rusting '60 Chevy convertible. It's whatcha call another one of them thar mettyfores. www.western-independent.com/77eldeora
ONE NAKED COWBOY TOO MANY
The Naked Cowboy,
who has made a name for himself as a boots, hat and undies-clad Times Square busker, was arrested in SF as he played Union Square. A rookie cop arrested him, but the police couldn't charge him because
the citation had been filled out with the wrong infraction number.
 The Naked Cowboy's appearance in SF -- he was here because his girlfriend was taking a belly dancing class in the East Bay -- was an eyebrow raiser for those who remember
the late San Franciscan, Buck Naked, who the Naked Cowboy copped his act from. Buck met his untimely end in front of a crazed pigeon lover's gun in Golden Gate Park's Panhandle.
The Naked Cowboy's undershorts are no match for the Buckster's toilet plunger, but it looks like Buck Naked fans and their disdain for the Naked Cowboy are a dying breed. The Examiner reported that the
Not-so-bare-assed Cowboy was their number three story during the last week of July.
The flame shall not perish! Buck lives on MySpace.
ALL THE NEWS THAT PRINTS IN FITS
New bands have been springing up faster than HWS can get out to see them, but we have caught up with The Fancy Dan Band, Heartache Valley Girls, ShitKickers, Big Mistake, Lonestar Retrobates, Midnight Trio and
Rancho Deluxe, all of which have been added to the Bands page. There are more in the pipeline including Sheila Groves and Flatt Lonesome, The Mighty Lynch Pins, Sacred Profanities and
Country Casanovas... There's also a split location thing happening where part of the band is in the Bay Area and part isn't. Rancho Deluxe, reviewed in the previous issue, features
long-time collaborators Mark Adams from Paso Robles, Jesse Jay Harris from SF, plus players to be named later. Kate Howser and Jennifer Daunt, who front Axton Kinkaid,
have recently moved to Oregon yet they play all their shows with the other three band members who live in the Bay Area. Dave Gleason's Wasted Days may return to the HWS Bands page. Gleason moved
to Ventura with plans to start a band there, but so far he's still playing with his SF-area crew... Hicks with Sticks dropped into the 23 Club on a Brisbane
Saturday night to find out how its new incarnation as a Latin club was working out. The crowd was thin and the only band playing, or booked from now to eternity, was Cesar Ascarrunz's Latin All-Stars.
It was Ascarrunz who bought an interest in the club and led it into Latin music. It doesn't look like this incarnation can last, but how many more false restarts can the venerable club
have left?... Perhaps the 7 Mile House can pick up the 23 Club's slack. It is a relaxed little dive officially in northernmost Brisbane but really in the
southernmost reaches of San Francisco, near Third and Geneva, just east of the Cow Palace. They've got late night food, cheap drinks, no cover and twangin' bands like the Dave Crimmen Band
and the Country Casanovas who play there August 23rd... Epic Arts, former home of Twang Cafe, which hosted a strong line-up of acoustic twang on first Sundays at the Berkeley
multi-culti art space, closed on July 15th... Finbar Devine's, a Petaluma brew pub that was booking bluegrass and some alt-twang, has also closed...
Anticipation runs high near the end of summer for the free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park. Find yet another unbelievable line-up at http://hardlystrictlybluegrass.com... Finally, in the spirit of always leaving them laughing, catch this jaw-dropping, five-star, forward it to all your friends
music video link submitted to Hicks with Sticks by roving correspondent Silver String Teddy Silverman. Anybody who can get music out of a violin while
wearing two-foot-long shoes, let alone from a bicycle pump while getting a chair broken over his head, has earned our utmost respect. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XA16CzV_Y0 |
