We first heard the Richards — who spell it “whisky” or “whiskey” depending on their mood — back in their 2008 start-up days when it was a challenge just to get through some songs.  We waited as they tried different material and players until they found more traction in 2009.  In 2010 we’re part of the buzz because they were rockin’ the house at Cafe Du Nord during the SF Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival.   Chase Christie is up front on vocals and rhythm guitar, Katy Rexford (Misisipi Rider) sings and fiddles, Adam Roszkiewicz (A.J. Roach) plays lead guitar, Logan Barrier pounds the skins here and in our favorite Austrian-heavy punk band Arnocorps, and multi-instrumentalist Joe Kenny plays Fender bass.  Catch them early on Friday, March 5th, 7PM with Axton Kincaid at the Makeout Room, 3225 22nd SF.

Lady A and her Heel Draggers – and dontcha like the name(?) — turned out to be quite a surprise at the Parkside on the last Sunday in February, even without their fiddle player. They’ve got a few bugs to work out like those long what-do-we-play-next song transitions, but they are a mighty seven-piece with Ayelet Arbuckle who can do the big voice thing without over-playing it, Will Fourt who isn’t shy about sneaking in some jazz licks on guitar, Mitiya Matsuda who is the new secret weapon in the B-Stars on steel, Eric Chaves who got beat up more than anyone in high school for playing both accordion and clarinet, Danny Chaves on stand-up bass, Leif Karlstrom on fiddle and Mike Brilliot from the late, great Joe Buck on traps.  They’ll open for Deke Dickerson with the Modern Sounds at the Hedley Club – Hotel De Anza, 233 W. Santa Clara, San Jose on 3/4.

Charlie Roman and the Teenage Werewolves are looking for a new guitar player.  The Big Paisano wants someone who can play drivin’ rockabilly with a vintage guitar and amp and wants to be a teenage werewolf first and foremost.  That narrows down the field, but there’s got to be one locked in his parents’ basement somewhere.  Charlie’s bassist Jack Spade, also started a new band called the something-or-others.  We might get around to learning its name, but don’t count on it.  Happy Jack starts bands often and kills ‘em fast.

March 4th update: Happy Jack checked in to say his new band Sick Wolf now has members that do the little things like rehearsing and is destined for infinity and beyond.  They’ve got the bookings to prove it.  Follow the link and believe.

Freight Train Boogie

This CD had to have been assembled by DJs.  It rolls like a big train over tracks that vary in tempo and style yet hang together as a compilation because it’s programmed like a radio show rather than just a bunch of tracks.

Dave Alvin, formerly of The Blasters; local bluegrass gal Laurie Lewis; former Marin songstress (now in Nashville) Audrey Auld; Texas songwriter Wayne “The Train” Hancock; and former Wayback now on his own Stevie Coyle are among the contributors.  FTB2 is noteworthy for bringing us talent that we might have missed like Hayes Carll’s “She Left Me for Jesus”.

“She says I should find him/and find peace at last
but if I ever find Jesus/I’m kickin’ his ass.”

Dave Alvin’s “It Don’t Make Sense (If You Can’t Make Peace)” adds social consciousness in the mix as does Peter Cooper’s “For Hank Aaron” which chronicles the prejudice Hammerin’ Hank dealt with while breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record (without steroids).

Some songs like Bill Kelly’s “20 Years in the Big City” and Slaid Cleaves‘ “Tumbleweed Stew” are for fun.  Others like Sam Baker’s haunting “Who’s Gonna Be Your Man” and Sharon Allen’s “Do-Si-Do” aim for the heart.  Other’s like Bruce Robinson’s “Born to Roll” just rock out.  It all adds up to a compilation built for Americana fans by Americana fans, and ain’t that a good thing?  Roll on, big freight train, roll on.

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.

Shovelman

A marriage between folk and electronica was destined, so if Shovelman hadn’t come along someone would have had to invent him.

Why “Shovelman?”  Well, because he plays a snow shovel rigged to be a combination fret-less guitar and percussion instrument.  Said shovel feeds its sounds into an array of samplers, compressors and other foot-operated gizmos to put the tronic in folktronica.

Every song is mixed from scratch, starting with a simple beat which Shovelman will sample and build upon while layer after layer becomes less folk and more tronic.  The result is an interesting melange of bluesman Robert Johnson, beatnik poetry, no wavers Pere Ubu, Nick Cave and off-beat rapper MC 900′ Jesus.

Hicks with Sticks saw Shovelman at a recent Amnesia show and it was clear that there would be difficulty translating his playing into a sound file because a good part of the entertainment is watching him craft the songs on the spot.  The Dirty West CD would have been helped by a video track.  Come to think of it, this review will make more sense with a video track like “Excavating the Future.”  Come for the folk, stay for the tronic.

Click to watch a grown man play a snow shovel.

The CD opens with a few mid-tempo chords that power into a pedal down rocker called “Kitten” — a take no prisoners tribute to the long clawed, human variety.   Nettie loves her some cat songs, including “Cougar.”  “She’s older than your mother and all of her friends.”

And, to make sure that she’s not just a one cat lady, there are plenty of mean woman without cat songs to go around: “Rodeo Show”, “I’m the little filly with all the brawn”; “Knockout Punch”,  “You done me wrong got what you deserved”; “Wrecking Ball”, “Your happy home, I’ll take it all” and “Boss Lady”, “I’ll pull your strings/I’ll make you crawl/You can’t say ‘no, please, stop.’”

There are other themes near to the hearts of greasers and betties like love (“Electrified), hypocrisy (“Preacher Man”), lying (“Word to the Wise”), heartbreak (“100 Miles of Heartbreak”), and of course drinking (“Getting Wild”).

The CD’s 12 original songs seem to push against the boundaries of rockabilly whether its with harmonics here, a drum solo there, backup singers elsewhere or Ms. Hammar sounding at times like Rosie Flores, JoAnn Campbell or Marti Brom.  Whatever the production issues, Motels, Gas and Beer was worth the wait.

See a Quarter Mile Combo video at \”Mean Man Blues\” – Quarter Mile Combo.

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.