The new Venues page can work together with the new Bands page for fans who find a band they don’t know playing at a place they don’t know.  Simply read their respective descriptions to get a general idea about “who” and “where,” then follow the links to learn more.  There are choices of links to follow from the Bands page (Facebook, MySpace, videos, etc.), but the one link for each entry on the Venue’s page goes directly to the venue’s calendar.  This will be handy when looking for bands whose musical styles are outside of what HWS traditionally covers.

The bands themselves have always used the Venues page to troll for gigs which will be easier now that each description contains information about the types of bands that have played a particular venue.  Plus a new gig-trolling feature has been added at the end of the Venues page.  It is a list of places that don’t book roots Americana, but probably would if somebody would get in touch.   This feature is about getting venues like Beale Street in SF and St. James Gate in Belmont on a band’s radar.

Future plans are to build a list of venues beyond of the greater Bay Area; like The Palms in Winters, the Cow Track in Oakdale or the Caspar Inn just north of Mendocino.  There really is no need to think nationally for touring.  The Venues page lists about 50 places within a 2-hour drive of SF and there are plenty more, as we hope to show, within a 2-4 hour drive.  Playing to new faces is what this upcoming feature will be about.

Li’l Anne and the Tune Wranglers emerged out of the Sweet ‘n’ Lo’s in 2009, but soon went into hibernation while waiting for a new bass player to appear.  Multi-instrumental Belle from the bluegrass band Belle Monroe and her Brewglass Boys might provide the Tune Wranglers with their bass line.

Eric Embry has confirmed that the fire has gone out of the Burning Embers.  Never the most focused of bands when it came to bookings,  Embry is likely to resurface in a band where he gets to just show up and play.  Tom Armstrong was one of the Burning Embers’ success stories when they pulled him out of retirement to play bass, but with two vocalists already in place, they never really got him into the mix as much as they could have.  Meanwhile, the Ember’s fiddler and singer, Katy Rexford, has joined the Whiskey Richards who spent a good portion of ‘09 stabilizing their line-up and now appear poised to hit it and git it in 2010.

The Lariats of Fire, who were quiet during most of ‘09, have found a replacement for their lost drummer and are back in action again.  And the new and improved five-piece B-Stars have hooked up with the new and improved 23 Club in Brisbane where every Wednesday night is now B-Stars night.  This provides an excellent mid-week opportunity to get your dancin’ shoes on or just sip a few and chill at this venerable club.

In club news, bars everywhere are changing hands as a result of the recession and among them are three Irish bars: the Abbey Tavern and Blarney Stone in SF’s Richmond district and the Blackthorn Tavern in the Sunset.  All of these venues have entertainment licenses, but none have managed to gain much traction with music.  Few, and least of all SF’s Irish community, seem interested in the trad side of Irish music and, with the possible exception of Cullan’s Hound’s, the Bay Area’s many fine alt-Irish bands haven’t been finding enough stages to play.  The real question is where the Abbey, Blarney Stone and Blackthorn are going with “Irish,” since all now have either non-Irish or second or third generation Irish-American owners with little or no connection to the Emerald Isle.  Of the three, the Blackthorn has been the farthest along in booking non-Irish music, but as the economy forces bar owners to seek new markets, we can count these as new opportunities for a wide spectrum of bands.

Annie’s was never strong in booking twang, though it has hosted Hank III and most recently John Doe and the Sadies, but the club has always been a force in rock and punk with a booking policy that welcomed new and touring bands.  Annie’s has also been a consistent supporter of counter-culture performance art including poets, story tellers, guerrilla theater, burlesque and almost anything remotely artsy that people could dream up for its back room.

The club was determined to keep its cover charges and drink prices affordable as it struggled to pay its bills, but according to club management, quoted in the SF Bay Guardian, the recession took its toll.  The future is uncertain, but this club has had different owners and names (Cherry, Covered Wagon).  It’s also been closed for extended periods yet it has re-emerged each time.

Sam’s joins a growing trend in full-service restaurants that support roots, often early on week-nights.  Others include Speisekammer in Alameda, Little Switzerland in Santa Rosa, and Iron Springs Brewery in Fairfax.

SF Dept. of Over-Regulation

The agenda was about some rule changes relating to permits for one-time events and minor strengthening of the notoriously weak, though club-friendly, Entertainment Commission.  This was not what the audience came for.   They came for a football toss between the pro-club and anti-club teams.  The meeting started benignly enough with Chairman Dufty providing some background, a statement that enhancing public safety was the goal of the committee, and then a few functionaries who weighed in with fairly benign comments.  Then came time for audience comments, the whistle blew and the gamesmanship began.

Neighborhood activists weighed in on the evils of clubs: noisy drunks, urine-soaked doorways and violence, violence, and more violence.  They showed a five-minute video purporting to be about the violence associated with clubs.  It started off with a fairly decent fight — a few roundhouse punches, but no weapons, no blood, nothing broken and the combatants were soon pulled apart.  The next cut showed a rather sorry fight, a shoving match really, then came four and a half minutes of people milling around outside a few venues.  Oh yes, and a pack of loud motorcycles roared by.

The pro-club forces weighed in with the economic benefits of nightlife, cultural and artistic diversity, and their fear of having San Francisco turn into its suburbs.  One speaker concluded her praise of SF’s nightlife saying, “That’s why I live here!”  This drew another round of applause from the pro-club side which seemed to out-number the anti-club side by about 4-1.

The three Supervisors listened politely and held their judgments in reserve as is their wont during factious meetings.  They’d seen the pro-club versus anti-club football tossed around enough to know that what the people needed to say would have little to do with the meeting’s specific agenda.

“What if club life really isn’t so violent after all?”

The bigger question is whether the public safety issue that is motivating the committee’s agenda is misguided.  What if club life really isn’t so violent after all?  Of course violence sometimes breaks out at a club, but it is actually quite rare, usually confined to two individuals and bloodless.  The over-all risk to violence upon one’s own person is quite modest when compared to the risk of violence at, say, schools, sporting events, public housing or MUNI.

The neighbors’ video reinforces this point. It was prepared to highlight club violence, but the best they could come up with was one quick-ending fist fight, one push-and-shove, and four and a half minutes of people milling around outside clubs behaving perfectly peacefully.  And what about those thuggish looking brutes pounding by on their motorcycles in the wee hours?  As creepy and annoying as they are, they had absolutely nothing to do with the clubs they were driving past.

The Supervisors and the club debate itself seem to have been hijacked by a handful of neighbors who do not want noisy drunks waking them up or urinating in their doorways.  These are fair and honest concerns.  But the neighbors also know that the forces of law and order aren’t going to react to that, so they’ve taken relatively infrequent and minor incidents of club violence and stoked them into an epic myth.

The pro-club forces need to change their tactics and deflate the hot-air balloon around club violence.  The Supervisors need to change their focus from legislation driven by public safety to real concerns, such as how to keep clubs and the arts they support thriving.  As for the few bad apples, the City Attorney already has the power to shut them down just as he’s done this week to the Pink Diamonds.

“The last thing San Francisco’s clubs need is more pointless bureaucratic initiatives emanating from City Hall.”

Clubs are regulated beyond what most types of business must endure.  The Entertainment Commission and the Supervisors need to make cutting the red tape around club management their priority, and there’s no better place to start than to send a strong message to the State Alcoholic Beverage Control.  ABC regulates things like the menus at clubs serving food, it mandates what tables need candles, and it regulates the type of dancing that can be done.  The last thing  San Francisco’s clubs need is more pointless bureaucratic initiatives such as these emanating from City Hall.

The Freight & Salvage has hit one out of the park with their new facility which provides a showcase for $13M well spent.

Upgrades over its old facility are abundant, one being location which is in downtown Berkeley instead of the San Pablo Avenue corridor.  This makes it accessible to BART which helps the transportation problem, and places scores of restaurants within walking distance which helps the dinner-and-a-show problem.

Doors open into a spacious, welcoming lobby which in turn leads to the auditorium; and an auditorium is something the old facility was never meant to be.  It had been cobbled together inside of a soulless rectangular structure that might have been a freight forwarding warehouse in it’s original life.  The new facility is built for shows as it features side walls that slope inward toward the stage and seating that rises away from it.

The photo above shows the audience sitting right up to the stage but the front rows, which are on the flat portion of the floor, can be removed for lower drawing performances or dance-friendly shows.  As for the seats themselves, the narrow back-breakers of old have been replaced by wide, well-cushioned, tush-friendly furnishings.

Lighting has improved from “maybe” to top-notch and the sound could well be the best of any room in the Bay Area.  Hicks with Sticks walked the auditorium from corner to corner and front to back, and found the volume and mix consistent in every part of the room with not an echo to be heard.  And what a relief to find that show prices have remained the same at about $15-20 per, which is a bargain in the alcohol-free Freight considering what a similar event at a club would cost once the door and bar tabs have been settled.

Access, comfort, quality and value are four solid reasons to get to the new Freight & Salvage.  Not having to walk by the side of the stage in view of the entire audience to get to the bathrooms, as it was in the old facility, runs a solid fifth.

The big ol’ western swing band Lost Weekend seemed like a perfect fit for the new Freight.  Find their “Six Pack to Go” from that night here.

The Riptide

Red Meat, East Bay Grease, Porkchop Express, Burning Embers, Joe Goldmark and the Seducers, and the now-disbanded Plain High Drifters are among the locals.  Big Smith and Rancho Deluxe are among the visitors.  Several clips are from Anna’s Monday night open mics.

Having so much to choose from begs the question of where to start.  This rousing track from one of the Shut-Ins‘ shows, which includes members of the Celtish-punkish band Culann’s Hounds and dancers from the Hot Pink Feathers, is a good jumping off point.

The upshot of it has been that honky-tonk all but evaporated, the Brisbane locals became alienated, and bars without a core of regulars are like a bank without depositors.  Yet a ray of light does shine since the newest ownership at least has a sensible booking policy.  The Fancy Dan Band is booked along with four other Americana-leaning bands on 10/10, the Road Zombies Car Club has a Halloween party coming up on 10/24 with the Royal Deuces and the Hi-Rhythm Hustlers, and Cherry Bomb Productions, which bailed out following mountains of abuse from prior managements, is returning with at least two Brisbane Bop Barndance & BBQ shows on 11/8 and 12/6.

Betty LeBlanc’s once popular Sunday Cajun/zydeco shows, which had been on hold for a few years are also coming back on 11/15.  What remains to be seen is whether the customers will come back to the storied club which was at the heart of a thriving honky-tonk scene that developed in Brisbane after WW2 and ran up to the ’60s.  Of course Brisbane will never get back to that, but it does appear that the 23 Club has at least regained its footing.   Stay tuned to HWS News for further developments.

BBC, the Other One

Rock and roll, rockabilly, and punk has a new stage on the Mid-Peninsula.  The British Banker’s Club opened three decades ago as a Menlo Park fern bar.  These days the ferns are gone and the club books live bands like Santa Cruz rockabilly from the Chop Tops, Santa Cruz surfabilly from Los High Tops and SF rockabilly from Miss Fire and the Detonations. Talk about disturbing the chardonnay!  Thanks, BBC, for letting the Pabst drinkers in and bringing life to the mid-Peninsula dead zone.

On third Thursdays The Sleeping Lady in Fairfax hosts Larry Carlin’s Bluegrass Showcase which is invitational, and Carlin, who is Marin’s main man for bluegrass, knows just whom to invite.  He produced monthly shows for many a moon at the Sweetwater Saloon in Mill Valley and at the Sweetwater Station in Larkspur.  Those venues have closed but the post office will stop delivering mail before Larry Carlin stops producing bluegrass, so off to the Sleeping Lady it is.  He also publishes a bluegrass newsletter that can be subscribed to by contacting him via his site.