2000

Snocore 2000: System Of A Down, Incubus, Mr. Bungle, Puya, War., SF, Sat., January 22

SETLISTS : 

(MR. BUNGLE) : The Thing Strikes, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Ars Moriendi, None Of Them Knew They Were Robots, Retrovertigo, Travolta, My Ass Is On Fire, Vanity Fair, Goodbye Sober Day

(INCUBUS) : New Skin, Privilege, Favorite Things, Pardon Me, Vitamin, The Warmth, Make Yourself, Calgone, When It Comes, Redefine

(SYSTEM OF A DOWN) :  Suite-Pee, X, Suggestions, Know, Snowblind, DAM, Spiders, DDevil, Marmalade, Darts, Chic N’ Stu, Soil, Peephole, War?, Sugar

It’s not every day one begins a new millennium. Indeed, the entire planet was going through a transitional period of sorts and like my personal experience, not all of it was pleasant. I was just relieved that we made it through that New Year’s without all the computers bugging out. It had been three weeks into this new era with little hiccups apart from Bill Gates stepping down from Microsoft the week before this. I was still reeling from the unceremonious departure of Pete and myself from the Maritime Hall and frankly I was depressed and remained that way for quite some time. My love life was practically nonexistent and I was drinking too much to be sure. The election, or rather selection, of George W. Bush at the end of the year and the following disasters of 9/11 and the wars spurned thereafter, kept me in this melancholy limbo until I found my way out of it around 2005. But in the meantime, I had ushering to distract me from my malaise and was able to refocus my time and energy towards my work with Local 16. If I couldn’t be happy, at least I was making more money. Speaking of which, I was finding that I was being recruited more and more to be a full time usher at The Warfield that year, being paid, but having to work through the entire show. That was the case for this first show of the millennium, the SnoCore Tour. The extra money always helped, but I always preferred to volunteer. You get cut for the main act and you get a free drink. 

This cavalcade of stars was on its 5th year, but this would be the final year of the tour before it would be cleft into two separate tours afterwards. One would be the SnoCore Icicle Tour, devoted primarily to funk and jam bands, and the other would be known as the SnoCore Rock Tour, featuring (naturally) rock and metal bands. It was a pity that they did this since the tour had brought eclectic groups together allowing their varied fans to absorb and appreciate each other’s styles as the Lollapalooza tour once had. Call it human nature I guess for birds of a feather to flock together. This year’s tour had just begun exactly a week before in San Diego, headlined this time by System Of A Down. It had only been two months since I’d last seen the first act of the night, Puya, opening for Type O Negative at the Maritime and I was impressed by their sound. Type O didn’t let us record that night, but Puya did. They had been touring with Ozzfest the summer before, playing on the second stage which was headlined by Slipknot. Being the first of a four band line up that night, Puya’s set was brief, but they got the crowd warmed up a bit. They were heavy, though mixed in funk and Latin percussion into their bombastic jams. I’m sorry to say that this was the last time I’d get to see them play live. 

The next act, Mr. Bungle, was the main reason I was at that show. It had been five long years since they played The Fillmore and I was eager to hear their demented tunes once again. Mike Patton was quickly back on his creativity horse after the dissolution of Faith No More in 1998, but he was still embroiled in his feud with Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers which I had written about previously. Though their back and forth began with Kiedis originally accusing Patton of copying his vocal style, anyone hearing Bungle’s set that night would swiftly dismiss that notion. To me, it’s pointless to compare Bungle with the Chilis, but clearly Mike’s vocal abilities, not to mention prolific musical repertoire, are on a higher level than Anthony’s. But with the “Californication” album just released the year before, Kiedis was laughing all the way to the bank, but I digress.

I suppose Mr. Patton was in a strange place emotionally as well around this time and in a way was taking it out on the SnoCore crowds this tour. Fed up with the nu-metal Sport-O’s populating his audiences, Mike and the band seemed utterly determined to bring these jocks to the edge of gay panic with their antics. They would dress up like the Village People, wear wigs and dresses, and in one famous instance in Myrtle Beach, Patton simulated oral sex with his microphone, until the enraged machismo crowd started pelting him and the band with coins and stuff. Even at this show, they kept up their homoerotic assault, though it fell a little flat, being San Francisco. A few songs in, he shouted, “Welcome to the Sno-Queer Tour!” and asked, “Are there any raging hot dicks out there? I’m trembling just thinking about them. Any tight shirts out there?” Later, he introduced his percussionist as “RuPaul” and asked the crowd, “Have you heard the rumors about Pantera? About Phil? He came out of the closet! Keep up the fight, Phil!” If that wasn’t enough, at the end of the set he thanked the “Boys & Girls”, claiming the set was “the best fucking blowjob I ever had!”

Gay baiting notwithstanding, it was an exceptional set, beginning with a cover of Henry Mancini’s “The Thing Strikes”. I was working one of the main aisles but on another aisle was my friend Bruce and I could hear him on the bootleg I found of this show on YouTube, attempting to help a girl who had passed out. He and the girl’s companions were having trouble helping her up, she being “too heavy”, so Bruce advised her to stay put while he went to fetch her some orange juice from one of the bars hoping that it would “get her blood sugar back up”. Upon his return, apparently the passed out girl came to and took off to whereabouts unknown. It still was nice of Bruce to try to help. He even sweetly reassured the girl’s friends that they wouldn’t call their parents about this or anything. Haven’t seen Bruce in years. I hope he’s OK and quit smoking for the love of God. I can still smell the pungent reek of tobacco from his clothes in my mind.

Anyway, this would be the last tour Bungle would play for almost twenty years and I regret not seeing their reunion in 2019, especially since it was one of the last good shows to come through town before the pandemic hit. But in the interim, Mr. Patton was his usual busy bee self, playing in other numerous bands like the Fantomas, Mondo Cane, and Tomahawk and founding Ipacac Records with Greg Werckman, who I interned for at Alternative Tentacles. Patton was even asked to join Velvet Revolver but declined, joking, “I think everyone else knows why I was not interested, except them, which is the funny part.” Just as well. Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots was a much better fit, though I can’t help but wonder what any Guns N’ Roses song would sound like from Mike’s unique throat.

Next up was Incubus, who I had recorded at the Maritime back in 1998. Their star was quickly rising with the release of their third studio album, “Make Yourself”, which had just come out the previous October and would ultimately get certified double platinum. Their lead singer, Brandon Boyd, had just shaved off his then trademark dreadlocks and they played four songs off the new album, “Privilege”, “The Warmth”, “Make Yourself”, and “When It Comes”. It would be only five months until I saw them again on the main stage of the B.F.D. Festival at Shoreline and they would return the following year to headline back to back shows at the Warfield. 

Like Incubus, System Of A Down was also on the up and up, clearly since they went from opening for Slayer at The Warfield just a year and a half before this to headlining themselves. Their singer, Serj Tankian, mentioned that Slayer show after “Suite-Pee”, the first song of their set. They were such fans of Slayer that they had changed their name from “Victims Of A Down”, just so they’d be closer to them alphabetically in record stores. The band had come a long way, particularly since they still only had their debut album out and their next album, “Toxicity”, wouldn’t come out for nearly another two years. They came on stage that night to the sounds of the “March Of The Empire” from “The Empire Strikes Back”. Between songs, Serj would spout lines of his intense poetry, like screaming, “Where are the gods we were promised!?!” after playing “Know” and asking, “Where is the devil? Where is the hopping, little bunny rabbit?” and declared a “people feeding frenzy” before launching into “DDevil”. Before they played “Soil”, he dedicated the song to “all those motherfuckers talking to themselves outside.” 

Though like I said, their next album would be out for a while, they still treated the crowd to a couple new songs, “X” and “Chic N’ Stu”. The latter song actually wouldn’t be released until 2002, being the first song on “Steal This Album” . They also did a cover of “Snowblind” by Black Sabbath. Incidentally, their guitarist, Daron Malakian, had been in a band with that song’s name previously, so one can assume he was a Sabbath fan and it was his idea to cover it. I can see what Serj and Patton were friends since both System and Bungle weren’t your run of the mill metal bands. They and their bandmates obviously had musical chops comparable to any prog or jam bands out there and I appreciated that they were elevating heavy music beyond the nu metal meatheads who had been dominating the music scene up till then. There was once again no shortage of T-shirts and swag on sale on this SnoCore tour, as well as displays for snowboarding and stuff around, but sadly there was no poster for the show. 

On a personal note, I’d like to apologize to all my loyal readers out there since it had been some time since I had added to this blog. After completing writing about that exhausting year of 1999, I understandably wanted to take a little breather, especially since I had just moved to Alameda as well. I took it upon myself before beginning to write again to finally put in chronological order and inventory my entire poster collection during this period also, a task a very long time coming. I’m truly regretful that I hadn’t done this sooner, since it was a herculean task to say the least, taking weeks to complete in my spare time between working jobs. I’m happy to say that I got it done finally, unleashing me to write once again. Furthermore, it unearthed a lot of shows that I’d forgotten about and refreshed my memory of the shows that I will eventually get around to chronicle. So, I thank you for your patience. Onward into the 21st century…

Snocore 2000: System Of A Down, Incubus, Mr. Bungle, Puya, War., SF, Sat., January 22

https://archive.org/details/system-of-a-down-warfield-12200

https://archive.org/details/incubus-warfield-12200

https://archive.org/details/mr.-bungle-warfield-12200

https://archive.org/details/puya-warfield-12200

https://archive.org/details/mr.-bungle-bootleg-warfield-12200

https://archive.org/details/system-of-a-down-bootleg-warfield-12200

Anthrax, Systematic, Fu Manchu, Unband, War., SF, Sat., February 5

SETLIST : Crush, Fueled, I Am The Law, Antisocial, Inside Out, Room For One More, Among The Living – I’m The Man – Time – Efilnikufesin (N.F.L.) – Be All End All, Hy Pro Glo, 604, Metal Thrashing Mad, A.I.R., Only, (encore), Phantom Lord, Got The Time, Caught In The Mosh, Bring The Noise, Cupajoe

Though it had been four years since I saw Anthrax for the first time opening for The Misfits at The Fillmore, I had just recorded three of their members at the Maritime in their other band, Stormtroopers Of Death. There, guitarist Scott Ian, bassist Dan Lilker, and drummer Charlie Benante, would ultimately steal the footage from that show and release it in their “Kill Yourself : The Movie” DVD, giving neither me or Tory, who cut the video that night, credit or one thin dime for our efforts. I wouldn’t find this out until just a couple months ago and I’m still a little bitter. Can you tell? Despite this underhanded backstabbery, I was blissfully unaware of it at the time Anthrax took the stage at The Warfield that night. To me, it was just another show in my long road to getting my live show groove back after my unceremonious departure from the Maritime as their full time recording engineer. I would however return there on a part time basis, filling in for Wade, my replacement, when he was unavailable, starting with the Zen Tricksters a month after this show, but I’ll get to that later. My return to live music was a slow one, partially since live shows traditionally are more plentiful in the springtime, but soon my diet of concerts would return, especially by the fall of this year.

It was an impressive line up of thrash metal acts that night, starting with Unband, who were pretty heavy, though I haven’t heard of or seen them since. I thought it was funny that they ended one song chanting the lyric, “I like to feel like a piece of shit” which they got the crowd to chant along in a sort of sing-songy kid’s voice. Systematic was next, a band who had been just signed as one of the first acts on Lars Ulrich’s The Music Company label. They would release their first album, “Somewhere In Between” the following year. I’d only see them one more time, opening for Metallica at The Fillmore in 2004, which would be their final show in the bay area before they split up that year. But it was the penultimate band, Fu Manchu, that I was mostly interested that night. They, along with Puya who I’d just seen opening for System Of A Down at the very same venue for the SnoCore tour only two weeks prior to this, were both openers for Type O Negative at the Maritime. Though Type O wouldn’t let us tape that night, Puya and Fu Manchu did and I was very impressed with both their chops. Fu Manchu was just on the cusp of releasing their “King Of The Road” album only nine days after this show. 

It was sort of a transitional period for Anthrax as it if for many bands who release a greatest hits album. They had to leave Ignition Records shortly after I saw them at The Fillmore in ’96 after the label went bankrupt and were then signed to Beyond Records. The “Return Of The Killer A’s” hits compilation had just been released a month and a half before this night through that label and though Dan wasn’t playing bass with them like he had with S.O.D, Frank Bello was. They had employed their former singer Joey Belladonna to do, strangely enough, a cover of The Temptations “Ball Of Confusion”, the only recording that would have he and their current vocalist, John Bush, singing together. John would go on to do a short tour with his former band, Armored Saint, later that year as well. There had been some talk of Anthrax touring with both singers, but Belladonna dropped out at the last minute. Unfortunately, Beyond would also go bankrupt, but Anthrax would sign to Sanctuary Records three years later.

It was a strange yet obscure coincidence that Anthrax would introduce their set with a bit from “South Park”, Terrance & Philip’s infamous song, “Uncle Fucka”. I would see The Cure play The Fillmore only 12 days after this show and Robert Smith had recently just lent his voice to their “Mecha-Streisand” episode. Just goes to show you that bands as divergent as Anthrax and The Cure can still find commonality in something. I’m sad to say I only got the first five songs of Anthrax’s set that night, having run out of tape early. There’s a bootleg CD of their set floating around out there somewhere, though I’ve been unable to locate it online, but I’m glad it’s out there all the same. Still, there’s some quality footage from their show in Salt Lake City on YouTube from this tour. John praised their new compilation before they played “I Am The Law” and encouraged their fans to sing along. Though this would be the largest venue I’d get to see Anthrax headline in and they packed the house, sadly there was no poster that night.

Anthrax, Systematic, Fu Manchu, Unband, War., SF, Sat., February 5

https://archive.org/details/anthrax-fillmore-2500

https://archive.org/details/fu-manchu-fillmore-2500

https://archive.org/details/systematic-fillmore-2500

https://archive.org/details/unband-fillmore-2500

The Cure, Fill., SF, Thur., February 17

SETLIST : Out Of This World, Watching Me Fall, Fascination Street, The Last Day Of Summer, Maybe Someday, From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea, If Only Tonight We Could Sleep, 39, Prayers For Rain, Bloodflowers, (encore), A Strange Day, A Forest, (encore), The Figurehead, Disintegration

This was one of those nights where we ushers were spoiled. The last time I saw these venerable Goth rock virtuosos four years before this, they had packed the Shark Tank arena in San Jose and here I’d be seeing them up close and personal with only about 1000 other people. Suffice to say, this would be the smallest venue I’d likely ever see The Cure perform. To add to the privilege I and my fellow ushers were being awarded that night, this would be the very first of only six small club dates The Cure would be playing, one of only two on the west coast. They were promoting their latest album, “Bloodflowers” which had just been released two weeks before this night. This was one of those charmed occasions when a big band like them would do a short run of club shows to debut, and frankly rehearse, their new material before taking it to the big venues in a full blown worldwide tour. The band had actually been in town signing autographs at Virgin Megastore downtown the day before, but I didn’t hear about it.

This long awaited new album had been delayed for over two years, being touted as the third album in a trilogy along with “Pornography” and “Disintegration”. They would record a live DVD in Berlin called “Trilogy” two years later playing each album in their entirety. Many agreed that the new material wasn’t as good or memorable as the stuff from those other seminal works. Melody Maker even titled their review of the new album, “Goth-Awful!”, giving it a paltry 1.5 out of 5 stars. Still, it was nominated for a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album and Robert Smith, their famous frightwigged frontman, insists that it was his favorite. Naturally, you didn’t hear so much as a peep of complaint from me or anyone else there that night. Like I said, we were being spoiled. There actually had been rumors that “Bloodflowers” would be The Cure’s last album of original material. Though it would be their final album on the Fiction record label, they would eventually sign to Geffen in 2004 and put out the self-titled “The Cure” album that year and then the “4:13 Dream” album four years afterwards. They have since wrote some new songs, but haven’t released any new albums. 

Making it an even more rare and exclusive privilege for me, I was one of only a handful of people in the house to hear their soundcheck which included their big hits “Just Like Heaven” and “In Between Days” which weren’t played in their set that evening. We lucky few were amongst the first to hear some of their new songs including “Out Of This World” and “Watching Me Fall” performed live, the first two tracks off the new album which they started their set with. The latter song would be used in the end credits of the horror film “American Psycho” which had just been screened at Sundance a month before this. Other new tunes also played were “The Last Days Of Summer”, “Maybe Someday”, “39”, and the title track “Bloodflowers”. In fact, The Cure having also played “Out Of This World” and “Bloodflowers” during their soundcheck, I am one of those even fewer people to hear those tunes first performed in public… period. Lucky me, I guess. Coincidentally, it was a good time to brood to these mopey songs in the bay area since Santa Rosa native Charles Schultz, the cartoonist of “Peanuts”, had just passed away five days before this. Good grief indeed.

Speaking of cartoons and strange coincidences, as I mentioned in my previous entry, there was a strange though utterly obscure coincidence between this night and the show I saw 12 days prior. Thrash metal veterans Anthrax had just played The Warfield, taking the stage to a recording of “Uncle Fucka”, the infamous song by the Canadian cartoon duo of Terrance & Phillip from “South Park”. It turns out that Robert Smith had just recently leant his voice to that conspicuously vulgar animated show for their “Mecha-Streisand” episode. “South Park” creator Trey Parker, who had up till recently emulated Smith’s hairstyle for years, sought Smith out to do battle in the episode with ol Babs herself, who had turned into a gargantuan robotic dinosaur and was terrorizing the titular town. Trey was obviously a big fan and Smith was gracious enough to have his lines recorded over the phone for him. In the episode, Smith transformed into “Smithra”, a gigantic Mothra creature with Smith’s signature hairdo and he grabbed Mecha-Striesand by her tail and flung her into outer space where she exploded. The show ended with Smith walking off into the sunset and Kyle declared, “Disintegration is the best album ever!” and Cartman yelled, “Robert Smith kicks ass!” To this day, Smith is the only celebrity portrayed on that show in a universally positive manner. So, it was timely that The Cure would perform the epic “Disintegration” for their final song of their last encore.

Anyway, if any members of The Cure and Anthrax ever have an opportunity to hang out together, at least they’ll have “South Park” to help break the ice. In a related story, Smith, along with Cure drummer Jason Cooper and guitarist Reeves Gabriel, David Bowie’s guitarist who would join The Cure in 2012, had recently collaborated with Trey to form the one-off band COGASM, derived from the first two letters of each member’s last names. They composed a song called “A Sign From God” that was used in the soundtrack to Trey’s film comedy “Orgasmo”. They had also recorded a B-Side for that song called “Wrong Number” which was listed as being recorded by The Cure, but it was only released officially as one of their songs on the “Galore” greatest hits album.

But back to the show. Big Rick Stuart from Live 105 was there and apologized for the show’s 40 minute late start saying that there was a voucher system to get the fans in which had been taking a little while to process everyone and encouraged folks inside to check out the poster room. Despite the voucher system, I heard people were paying as high as $1000 bucks a ticket from scalpers. The line to get in had snaked around the block and there was no shortage of weepy eyed Cure fans hoping against hope of getting a miracle ticket. All and all it was definitely worth the wait for which Smith sheepishly apologized for at the beginning of the show. God knows most of those fans would have waited for all eternity to see this one. Good heavens, the screams these people let out during the encore breaks were deafening. 

It’s reassuring to revisit this night again since I had just missed The Cure at Shoreline last month, a long 23 years later, being stuck at work ironically at a Psychiatrist’s convention. Certainly, many a Cure fan and presumably some if not all of the band’s members could use some relief from depression. I’m just grateful that this show got a poster and it’s a good thing too. Those fans might have torn the place apart if there wasn’t one and I’d have probably joined them. That gig was a true rarity amongst the long list of shows under my belt. Incidentally, 2000 was a special year as well, being the first year of a new century which was a leap year since 1600. We won’t see another one until the year 2400 and I have a feeling The Cure won’t be touring anymore by then.

The Cure, Fill., SF, Thur., February 17

https://archive.org/details/the-cure-fillmore-21700

Peter Murphy, War., SF, Thur., March 2

SETLIST : Final Solution, The Scarlet Thing In You, Wild Birds Flock To Me, Mirror To My Woman’s Mind, Deep Ocean Vast Sea, Disappearing, I’ll Fall With Your Knife, Crystal Wrists, Subway, The Sweetest Drop, Hit Song, Indigo Eyes, Surrendered, Roll Call, Huuvola, Cuts You Up

It had been over two years since Mr. Murphy graced the Warfield stage with his old band Bauhaus for back to back sold out shows, but this time the dark prince of Goth was doing his own stuff. He had brought along good company to join him on stage and for this performance, including Kevin Haskins, the drummer for Bauhaus as well as Love & Rockets. To his left and right that show would be Eric Avery, the original bassist of Jane’s Addiction, and another Perry Farrell co-worker and fellow Peter, Peter DiStefano, who had been Perry’s guitarist in Porno For Pyros. It was “An evening with…” show with Mr. Murphy, so it was an easy one to usher as well as an early one, just having to wait out the DJ and a couple songs into the set before I’d be cut loose to have a drink and enjoy myself. This was just the second date of Peter’s new solo tour, his first in 5 years, which had just began in Anaheim the night before this. I witnessed the show he did at The Fillmore the previous tour as well as both nights Bauhaus did at The Warfield in ’98, so I felt fairly versed in his work. Feel free to revisit my reviews of those shows at your leisure, gentle reader.

They started the show with a cover of “Final Solution” by Pere Ubu, a band I always felt I should know more about. They were one of the few acts in my favorite rock documentary, “Urgh! A Music War!”, that I’ve still never seen. Having Peter do one of their songs is endorsement enough. Afterwards, Peter greeted his fans saying, “Salaam… Hi!… Shalom”, and then promptly continued with “That Scarlet Thing In You”. He hadn’t put out a new album since 1995’s “Cascade”, but he did cover material from all five of the solo albums he had put out by then. After they finished “I’ll Fall With Your Knife”, he joked, “Thank you! That was good, wasn’t it?” and introduced the band before continuing with “Crystal Wrists”. 

I wouldn’t have to wait nearly as long as before to be in the presence of this vampirish baritone once again, since he’d return to town only eight months later to play the Great American and I was there front and center. On that, the “Just For Love” tour, he’d bring along only two other musicians, the aforementioned guitarist Mr. DiStefano and Hugh Marsh on violin. Six days after that Great American show, he’d perform at the El Ray Theater in Los Angeles, recording his “aLive Just For Love” live album. Naturally, I’ll expand on all that when I get to November. Although this night’s appearance would be the largest of the various venues I’d see Mr. Murphy do a solo show in, unlike Bauhaus, The Warfield didn’t provide a poster for this one.

Peter Murphy, War., SF, Thur., March 2

https://archive.org/details/peter-murphy-warfield-3200

Zen Tricksters, David Gans, Taos Hum, Viscous Rumors. Maritime Hall, SF, Sat., March 4

SETLIST : Leave Me Out Of This, Shakedown Street, Down The Road, Rubin & Cherise, Scarlet Begonias, Light Of Life Jam, Truckin’, Elenor Rigby Jam, Comes A Time, Say That I Am, Travelin’ Light, Unbroken Chain, Dark Star, Hard To Handle

Oh boy… This is a tough one to write about. And no, it’s not just that it was another godforsaken hippie show. This was my first time back working at the Maritime as recording engineer since the previous November. To first time readers, let me briefly rehash the depressing circumstances which pre-dates my return and to all my loyal readers, feel free to skip ahead. My former recording partner and mentor, Pete Slauson, had a long delayed final falling out with Boots, the Maritime’s tyrannical boss over our unpaid royalties, and Boots abruptly fired him. In solidarity, I followed Pete and quit. My lifelong friend and video engineer at the Hall, Tory, shortly followed suit. Boots had found a replacement willing to do the job, paying a paltry $50 on a show by show basis. The fellow who replaced me was named Wade Furgeson and in a strange small world coincidence, my brother Alex was actually friends with his sister Piper where they both lived in Los Angeles.

In another strange coincidence, Wade’s main moneymaking gig at the time was working as a security guard at the O’Farrell Theater, the birthplace of the modern adult film industry, which was just a block away from where I was living at the time in the Tenderloin. Clearly, $50 a show wasn’t going to cut it as a means of full time employment for Mr. Furgeson. Since there was only one set of keys for the recording room and Wade knew I lived close by to his main gig, I would pop by the lobby of the O’Farrell to either pick up or drop off these keys. I can still feel my bashfulness from every time I’d skulk in and sheepishly ask, “Is Wade here?” and one of the doorman would say something like, “He’s in the Jungle Room” and then they’d go fetch him for me. Anyway, strangely enough, I can’t entirely recall how Boots was able to conscript me into the lion’s den of the Maritime once again, but clearly I jumped at the chance since my decision occurred so impulsively. Yes, I knew I was coming in just to fill in for Wade when he couldn’t do it, but I still consider this one of the most rash choices I had ever made in my life.

I will never forget the look of quiet disappointment in Pete when I told him that I had gone back to work there. I know he forgave me for doing it, but I know it took me down a peg in his eyes. It was even harder to break the news to Tory, to one of my oldest friends. He took it better than I thought he would. Still, what I did hurt our friendship and amongst other boorish behavior on my part during that period and afterwards, ultimately led to Tory distancing himself from me to the point where he severed our friendship entirely. Even though my return to the Hall was brief, only filling in for Wade for a grand total of 10 shows before the Maritime finally tanked, this betrayal continues to haunt me to this day. I cannot entirely excuse my cowardice and greed, but understand, I was addicted. The recording gig at the Maritime was and will always be my proudest accomplishment professionally. It was my dream job and I loved it intensely. This was the behavior of an addict and in that moment, I succumbed to my weakness. Whew… This is a confession after all. I’m glad to get this off my chest and though I’d spent years apologizing for and deeply regret this decision I made, I hope still that Tory may some day read this, understand, and forgive me. Likewise, I hope Pete, who passed away in 2020, is on high in soundman’s heaven and feels the same.

OK, with that unpleasant business aside, I’ll press on with the show at hand. This betrayal is punctuated that my return to the Hall would begin with the Zen Tricksters. Not only did I have no interest in recording this band, having already recorded them once there in 1998, but it was a hippie show. Yes, this band who primarily covered the Dead, who were practically a cover band themselves, had returned and once again, they had David Gans opening for them. Rob Barraco, the ever-present keyboardist for all Dead side projects was with these guys then, between tours with Phil Lesh, The Other Ones, and The Dead. Rob also has the unfortunate distinction of being the keyboardist who played on the theme song for “The Cosby Show”. However, The Trickers was Jeff Mattson’s band, another one of those who I like to call the “Dead Ringers”, who would also go on to be the lead guitarist for the Dark Star Orchestra, and like Rob, contribute to other Dead related side projects. It helped that Jeff had an uncanny resemblance to Jerry Garcia, especially when he grew out his lambchops, making him look like Jerry in the 70’s before he grew out his beard. As luck would have it, I had already just seen both Rob & Jeff playing with Lesh at the Warfield the previous April. 

The Tricksters came up early that night to back up David Gans during his set for “Bird Song” and “Crazy, Crazy, Crazy”. Jeff backed him up again for “The Return Of Grevious Angel” and both Jeff & Rob played with Gans for an acoustic version of “Attics In My Life”. Don’t get me wrong, the Tricksters weren’t a bad band, far from it. I always joke whenever the Dark Star Orchestra or the Tricksters come to mind or in conversation, that the Dead never sounded that tight. Covers aside, the Tricksters had a couple albums of their own out by then of mostly original material including the “A Love Surreal” album which they had just put out the year before this. They played both “Down The Road” and “Say That I Am”, both original tunes from that one at this gig.

The good news out of this godawful mess I made for myself was that one of the openers that night, Taos Hum, used my recording from that night to put out a live album. Granted, I wasn’t a fan of their music, but it was another credit to my resume and though I didn’t get any money for it apart from the $50 blood money I took for the night’s work, at least the CD got made at all. I suppose I have Josh Porter to thank for that, since he had been working in the production office of the Hall at that time and was promoting Taos Hum. I think he might have been their manager back then as well. I’m also happy to say that though this first of the these post-Pete Maritime shows would be one that I was less than thrilled about, some of the others I would do afterwards would be exceptional. These included the Flaming Lips, a longtime favorite of mine who had just released their seminal album, “The Soft Bulletin”, the Dance Hall Crashers, my brother’s old ska band, and the legendary Todd Rundgren, who would release a live DVD from the show I recorded there. 

Finally, on a less serious note, I had come up with an appropriate name for this disgraceful point in my life and the Maritime’s history, calling it the “Blue Period”. This reference I lifted from Picasso, was accurate for a couple of reasons, but mainly for the mood of the Hall and myself at the time. Anyone who has worked at a venue during the last year or two of its decline before closing knows of this feeling of malaise in the face of the venue’s inevitable doom. I would also refer to this period with the gallows humor moniker of “The Last Days In The Bunker”, a name whose origin I think you all can guess. Indeed, this ennui is felt I imagine in any business or even relationship coming to its whimpering end. But the title of “Blue Period” actually came initially from a completely organic, unrelated, and obvious origin. 

When Pete had left the Hall, he had taken his lava lamps from the recording room which had flanked our video monitor since the beginning of our work together. Their absence had made the recording room a touch on the dark side, so one of the lighting guys upstairs, probably Steve, kindly set up one of their spare PAR can lights on the floor of the room in the back with a dark blue gel in its frame. I aimed the light to reflect its cool blue glow off of the rounded, white plaster wall in the back and there it stayed until Hall’s final show over a year and half later. In a microscopic way, this new appearance of the recording room helped me emotionally continue this work since I think it made my subconscious feel like it was a different job from beforehand which it really was. Whatever shreds of joy that remained in my employment at the Hall would quickly fade and when the venue finally sank the following year, it came as some relief to all those involved, even I imagine in some way for Boots.

Ice Cube, War., SF, Fri., March 24

SETLIST: Natural Born Killaz, Hello, (unknown), (unknown), Chin Check, The Nigga You Love To Hate, Check Yo Self, (unknown), Steady Mobbin’, Bow Down, Supreme Hustle, Cheddar, Foe Life, Gangstas Make The World Go Around, 3 Time Felons, We Be Clubbin’, You Can Do It

Anyone who wishes to continue keeping their heads in the vicinity of their shoulders would be wise never to even suggest that Ice Cube has sold out, but it was a foregone conclusion that by this show he was at least rich and famous. Still, he admirably made a point to give some of his riches back to the community from where he emerged and made a point to encourage others in the hip hop community to follow suit. Between his work with N.W.A. and having just released his sixth solo album, Cube had little left to prove musically. Likewise, he had just produced, wrote, and starred in “Next Friday”, the sequel to his breakthrough comedy “Friday”, which had hit theaters two months before this show, his 13th movie acting, 4th as a producer. He had also made a very impressive acting performance in “Three Kings”, arguably his best, just the year before this. His new movie, though commercially successful, making twice as much money as the original, clearly wasn’t as funny as “Friday”, partially because Chris Tucker didn’t return to reprise his role of Smokey. But likewise, Cube’s new album, “War & Peace : Vol. 2”, his final album on Priority Records and coincidentally also a sequel, didn’t fare so well either with critics and to make matters worse, it would be the first solo album Cube would release that didn’t go platinum.

It was not and still isn’t my place to even hint at a dis at one of the greatest Playas to ever walk the Earth, but there was no denying that the age of Gangsta Rap was coming to a close. It was only natural and in fact inevitable. Whenever any new music genre rises from the streets and finds mainstream success, the corrupting power of money will rob the genre of its urgency and DIY street cred. Now, this isn’t all bad news. With the rise and eventual overtaking of rap as the most popular and lucrative forms of popular music, a new crop of rap superstars like Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Kanye West, and Puff Daddy just to name a few would elevate the genre to stadium level crowds. Just as well. Ice Cube had just turned 30 years old the previous June and maybe the time was right for him to move on from his wilder days of youth.

It would be later that summer that Cube would help lead that big crowd vanguard joining the “Up In Smoke” tour with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, briefly reforming N.W.A., though without MC Ren and the recently deceased Eazy-E. That tour would also include Eminem, Nate Dogg, Kurupt, and D12 amongst others, but would take place way down at the Shark Tank in San Jose, so I unfortunately missed that one. But I would get treated to a few special guests touring with Cube for this spring solo tour of his. He brought out Mack 10, WC, and DJ Crazy Toones, AKA the Westside Connection with him. I’m sad to say that I just learned that DJ Crazy Toones died of a heart attack in 2017 at the all too young age of 45. They got Chuy Gomez from KMEL to introduce the show and he wrapped up at end of the night as well.

Cube made the interesting choice of using Wendy Carlos’ opening theme to “The Shining” to play when he took the stage, a perfect introduction before starting his set with “Natural Born Killaz”. From there, he wasted no time getting into the new material, playing “Hello”, the first song off the new album. We were treated to two more new ones during his set, “Supreme Hustle” and “You Can Do It”, the last song of the set. But to be sure, he packed in a few crowd pleasers like “The Nigga You Love To Hate”, which he got the crowd to put up their middle fingers and chant “Fuck you, Ice Cube!” This also gave him the opportunity to do the old standby of splitting up the crowd and having them shout, “Party over here, fuck you over there!” 

They did the smash hit, “Check Yo Self”, but omitted “It Was A Good Day” surprisingly. After “Steady Mobbin’”, Cube asked the crowd, “Y’all like that one? Can we go back when I first started doin’ this shit?” and then he repeated “Westside Connection kept the west coast on the map” three times and said, “I’m gonna show you how” before he and the Westside Connection did their hit, “Bow Down”. He also had WC and Mack 10 each do a solo song of theirs, “Cheddar” and “Foe Life” respectively. Cube pumped up the audience between songs declaring that he’d been “waiting to do Frisco for about four months” and he had the lighting guy turn up the lights in the house so he could see “how many gangstas we got in here.”

He also gave props between songs, shouting, “Give it up for KMEL! Dopest radio station in the bay! KMEL’s been playing Ice Cube forever!” and he went on about how when “niggas start being peaceful, that’s when they start fighting. Got to keep it gangsta”. Cube encouraged the crowd to “go crazy, Frisco! It’s Friday! Ain’t got nothing to do, ain’t got no job, already budded the fuck out. Don’t worry about that” before they did “We Be Clubbin’”.  At the end, he had everybody “put a Dub in the air, Westside!”, having the crowd form a “W” with their hands and then declared, “Thanks for the support! I’m outta this bitch!” And then he sauntered casually off stage. It was over. 

I’m ashamed to say this was the last time I saw Cube performing live, though I am equally as proud to say that I got to see him six times in only eight years, three times at The Warfield alone. He wouldn’t put out another solo album until six years later. Upon listening to the new material and Westside Connection stuff from this show, I realize that it was good stuff and shouldn’t have moved on so nonchalantly from Cube. Still, it’s hard to reconcile my love of his music with his inexplicable behavior recently, refusing to get vaccinated for COVID despite promoting the wearing of face masks at first. 

There was also a bit of a dust up after Cube, promoting a 13-point plan called the “Contract With Black America”, had contact with Donald Trump’s campaign through Jared Kushner just two months before the 2020 election. The idea that Donald would seriously entertain any of the plan’s points, particularly infusing a half a trillion dollars into the Black community and exempting black Americans from paying income taxes, would appear to be wishful thinking at its worst. But Cube was clearly too smart not to know this and was perhaps making this overture to try to put the screws on to Biden to keep up support with the black community or at the very least, hedge his bets if Donald was re-elected. Regardless, people freaked out a little bit when Cube did this, particularly since in 2016 he not only said he’d never endorse Trump, but made a song two years later called “Arrest The President” where he called Donald, “Russian intelligence”. It didn’t help that Kanye got pilled around the same time too.

In the long run, what I think about Mr. O’Shea Jackson is of little concern. Cube’s indelible mark on rap music and popular culture is undeniably a significant one. I’ve said before that very few artists can command a stage quite the same way he can. And that voice… It’s funny, when his very own flesh and blood son, O’Shea Jackson, Jr., played the role of his own father in the biopic “Straight Out Of Compton” in 2015, I couldn’t escape that he just didn’t quite have his father’s signature voice. On one final note, and I’m sorry I have to blurt this one out, but having been married to a hair stylist for the past eight years, I’ve developed the eye of knowing when a man’s coloring his hair and I’m uneasy to say Cube is obviously doing it. I mean, it’s OK. It’s his hair and his choice. It’s a free country, but personally I think he’d be better off going grey or just shaving it all off like Dr. Dre does. 

Ice Cube, War., SF, Fri., March 24

https://archive.org/details/ice-cube-warfield-32400

The Flaming Lips, Looper, Maritime Hall, SF, Tues., March 28

SETLIST : What A Wonderful World Intro, Race For The Prize, Riding To Work In Year 2025 (You’re Invisible Now), Thirty-Five Thousand Feet Of Despair, Feeling Yourself Disintegrate, She Don’t Use Jelly, Slow Nerve Action, Over The Rainbow, Lightning Strikes The Postman, Waitin’ For A Superman, What Is The Light?, When You Smile, The Spark That Bled

This would be the second show I’d do during the “Blue Period” at the Maritime, the short stretch of shows I’d do after my partner Pete was fired. If anything would explain, though not excuse, my betrayal in returning to work at the Hall after the owner’s brutal purge of my friend and mentor, it would be the opportunity to record the Flaming Lips. If you’ve read this blog for a while and God knows I hope you have, you’d know that I had been a big fan of these Oklahoma weirdos for years. But even with my adoration for the Lips, I drastically underestimated the quantum leap they were making then artistically and commercially.

The Lips had released their seminal album, “The Soft Bulletin” the previous May and I had seen them once since then playing the E.A.R. tour at the Fillmore that July. At that infamous show, there was a blackout that lasted for a couple hours, truncating their set and having members of that tour to come out on stage in the darkness to perform acoustically through a bullhorn. This was not exactly the ideal circumstance for the Lips to debut their new material to the bay area, but here at the Maritime, they would find a second chance and I’d be there to record it. Considering the complex nature of the new songs, the Lips had decided to tour this time as a three piece, being their singer Wayne Conye, Steven Drozd playing keys and guitars, and Michael Ivins mostly on bass. Steven, who had been their drummer, would let pre-recorded tracks of his drumming substitute for the real thing this time. They had erected a screen behind them that had stuff projected onto it during their set and Wayne had a lipstick camera mounted on a mic stand in front of him that relayed his image onto that screen as well.

They had brought along the band Looper from Glasgow, Scotland to open for them that night, an electronic music outfit fronted by Stuart David, who had just departed as the bassist from Belle & Sebastian that year. Looper were still only a couple years old as a band and were just about to release their second album, “The Geometrid” on the SubPop label two weeks after this show. Wayne joked at the end of his set after thanking them for coming on tour with them all the way from Glasgow that they were “kind of hard to understand”. He said, “So if you see them, say hello” and if you had trouble deciphering their thick accent to “just smile and nod along… They’re nice people.”

After Looper’s set, the Lips came on stage introduced at first a recording of Louis Armstrong singing his timeless classic “What A Wonderful World” and then by a disembodied electronic voice saying, “Ladies & Gentlemen, please welcome on stage, one of the most unique, sound generating vessels in the known universe, The Flaming Lips” and then Wayne kicked off the the first song off the new album, “Race For The Prize”, smashing a mallet into a gong throughout the tune. During that song, the screen behind him displayed images of Leonard Bernstein conducting spliced in between footage of atomic explosion tests. The footage on the screen morphed into heart surgery and plane crashes for “Thirty-Five Thousand Feet Of Despair” afterwards. Incidentally, speaking of film footage, “American Beauty” swept the Oscars just two days before this show. Anyway, Wayne put on a funny, lizard head hand puppet and had it mouth along into the lipstick camera to the words of “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” next, accompanied by a person on the screen mouthing a beat box riff. They had a little quiet piece at the end of that song, both Steven and Michael playing gently on separate keyboards while Wayne played around with his theramin. 

When they finished, the band started throwing T-shirts, pieces of candy, and confetti into the crowd, though Wayne tried to calm them down saying, “I know it’s free stuff, so don’t go crazy too quick” and then they did their old hit, “She Don’t Use Jelly”. Steven played a lap steel guitar for that one and I caught sight of a fan dressed head to toe in a white bunny outfit up front. In the next song, “Slow Nerve Action”, Wayne replaced his lizard puppet with a talking nun hand doll and would use it as well to simultaneously mouth along the lyrics of that tune too. It’s strange. The Lips had always been colorful, having decorated their stage with Christmas lights before and with various bouquets of flowers this time, but after this tour, their stage shows started turning more and more into some sort of fever dream, psychedelic children’s party. Seriously, after this, you’d see more and more of these “Furries” showing up in the crowd and on stage, balloons, naked people, and stuff, ultimately leading to Wayne getting into a giant inflatable, clear plastic ball and being rolled out to be carried around overhead by his audiences. God help the clean up crew for any of those mopping up one of their gigs. Confetti gets everywhere.

They took it down a bit after that and Wayne addressed his audience saying, “This song is probably one of the greatest songs of all time. It’s up there with ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘Merry Christmas’”. Now that latter song, I can’t say which he’s referring to but somebody yelled out the traditional song to yell out at a rock show which he responded, “No, not ‘Freebird’… It’s one of those songs that if you want to sing along to, we encourage that, OK? But the thing about this song is that it’s so familiar to you , that you’ll begin to sing the song and you realize you don’t know the words. So sometimes, people will say, gee, I don’t know the words and not sing. We don’t want this to happen. If you begin to sing and don’t knot the words, just mumble.” Wayne covered his mouth and did a little mumbling before he continued, “Just as loud as you would be singing. No one will really know the difference between whether you’re singing words or if you’re just mumbling along and then no one will be embarrassed if they don’t know the words, OK?… You’ll see.”

Wayne then crooned the immortal, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”, being led off by a snippet of Judy Garland from “The Wizard Of Oz” repeating “Why?” over and over again. It was a touching and respectful cover of the old standard and indeed, those who didn’t know the lyrics mumbled along convincingly beside the others who did. From there, they shifted gears and did, “Lightning Strikes The Postman” with images of marching bands on the screen behind them cut between bits of Evil from the film “Time Bandits” blowing up a dog with lightning strikes from his fingertips with Wayne shouting the song’s lyrics through his megaphone. They then followed it with the sublime “Waitin’ For A Superman” and during the song, Wayne held a little mechanical toy bird in his free hand that flapped its wings throughout the performance of the song. Even then, that song gives me a little lump in my throat, it is so beautiful and sentimental. It became even more so after 9/11 and to me became that morose period’s de facto theme song. Finally, for “What Is The Light?”, they projected bits from the space teleportation finale of “2001 : A Space Odyssey”. It was funny at the end, after Wayne thanked Looper again he wanted to also thank the venue which he called the “Maritime Ballroom”, joking it had “something to do with the sea and shipwrecks and that all seemed appropriate to us, I suppose.”

All and all, it was an uplifting experience, probably the one I did during the Maritime’s “Blue Period” of which I’m proudest. None of us knew just how important that album the Lips put out was then and few of us appreciated how lucky we were to see them during that period. I’ll never forget talking to Boots, the Maritime’s tyrannical owner, how proud I was that I got to record them, though he cynically dismissed their work as “whiney, college music”. Boots’ remarks aside, the Lips would laugh all the way to the bank, having that album top many a top ten list that year, including being awarded NME’s album of the year. We got to hear five of the new songs live that night too. This album would gain the Lips fame and fortune and the next time I’d see them, they’d be headlining a sold out night at The Warfield three years later, the very place I recorded them in my first bootleg there in 1993 when they opened for Porno For Pyros almost ten years previously to the day.

https://archive.org/details/the-flaming-lips-maritime-hall-32800

Mix Master Mike, Rahzel, Choclair, Cali Agents, Super Dudes, Maritime Hall, SF, Thurs., March 30

It had been exactly a year and five days since I had last recorded Mix Master Mike at the Hall and here he was there once again to dazzle the kids with his incomparable skills on the ones and twos. Mike had just began a 37 city tour two weeks before this starting in Detroit. After touring extensively with the Beastie Boys, replacing Hurricane as their DJ in 1998, he had also put out his solo album “Anti-Theft Device” the same year. This time, he was touring in support of his new one, “Eye Of The Cyclops” which had just hit the stores nine days before this show. It would go on to receive critical acclaim, including winning Best Electronic Album at the California Music Awards. I really appreciated that he sampled a ton of bits from my favorite film parody “Hardware Wars” in it.

Mike had brought along human beatbox extraordinaire Rahzel from The Roots to open for him and he was most welcome on the bill, returning to the Maritime after using some of my recordings from the last show he did there with Pfife Dawg the previous July on his debut album. Rahzel had put out “The Fifth Element : Make The Music 2000” the previous July and seven of the seventeen tracks on that one were “interludes” from the show I recorded. The interludes included his signature hit, “If Your Mother Only Knew”, showcasing his uncanny ability to spit beats and sing at the same time. Naturally, he performed it at this show. I don’t recall getting any money and certainly didn’t get any credit from that album, but I’m just glad it’s out there with all the others just the same. They at least acknowledged that the interludes were recorded at the Maritime.

That year, Rahzel also leant his voice to the snowboarding video game “SSX” and its sequel “SSX Tricky” the following year as the game’s announcer. Mike contributed to a lot of the music for those games as well. I would become highly addicted to both games, spending countless hours running those courses, doing insane tricks and such, to the point where I frankly couldn’t get much better. I can still Rahzel’s voice in my head shouting, “Tricky, Tricky, Tricky!”, when a character pulls off a dope move in the “SSX Tricky”. They even made it possible to unlock Mix Master Mike as a secret character in that one. Those games would be huge hits and would spawn further sequels in which I would waste even more hours of my precious youth. Rahzel had been also keeping busy in 2000 apart from the touring and voice work to do guest appearances on albums for artists such as Lyden David Hall, Roni Size Reprezent, Everlast, and Common.

There were other talented openers that night including Choclair, a Canadian rapper from Toronto. Starting his rap career at the tender age of 11, by the time he played the Hall, Choclair already had over a dozen albums under his belt. He had just signed to Priority Records the year before, putting out his “Ice Cold” album which would certify gold and win him a Juno award for Best Rap Recording.  Maritime vets Cali Agents were there once again too, the dream team hip hop duo of Rasco and Planet Asia. As many times as I recorded them, it would still be another couple months before they would finally drop their debut album, How The West Was One”. 

This show had been brought in as a replacement for an unlikely musical collaboration called Subset. Believe it or not, Mir Mix-A-Lot teamed up with The Presidents Of The United States Of America, (Yes, THAT band, the one that did “Lump” and “Peaches”). God only knows why they thought their respective talents of booty rap and quirky college rock would mesh, but they were all from Seattle, so it at least we know that they knew each other from around the hood. It was a short lived project and though they had recorded some songs together, this supergroup yielded no official releases and the whole project dissolved that year, probably explaining why the show was cancelled in the first place. Mix-A-Lot wanted to take the band into a harder, electronic direction and those nerds in The Presidents weren’t having it I guess. The Subset show was still listed on the monthly poster, so it had been cancelled fairly abruptly, late enough to still be on the poster and not have Mike’s show listed instead. I wouldn’t have to wait long to see Mix Master Mike do his magic again, since I would see him play at The Fillmore the following February in 2001 and another two more times there in less that two years.

Luna, Mark Eitzel, Fill., SF, Sat., April 1

SETLIST : Bewitched, Tracy I Love You, 4000 Days, Hello Little One, Pup Tent, Superfreaky Memories, Lost In Space, 23 Minutes In Brussels, Tiger Lily, Bonnie & Clyde, Friendly Advice, (encore), Fuzzy Wuzzy, Moon Palace, (encore), 4th Of July

I was familiar with Luna by then having already seen them twice as an opener at The Warfield and headlining once before at The Fillmore about two and a half years before this. I had mentioned previously that The Fillmore’s booking agent, Michael Bailey, was a fan of theirs, even introducing them on stage a couple times, which I never witnessed him do for any other band. Luna had just put out “The Days Of Our Nights” album out on Elektra the previous October, but would be promptly dropped by that label for being “not commercially viable” and has since gone out of print. Still, they would be quickly snatched up again by Jericho Records which, strangely enough like Elektra, was also a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, sort of. Anyway, Luna did a cover of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” on that album and their new song “The Old Fashioned Way” would be used in the opening scene of the crime drama “Kill Me Later” with Selma Blair a year later, though the band didn’t play either song in their set that night.

Anyway, Luna’s bassist Justin Hardwood had just left the band to return home to his native New Zealand and had been replaced by Britta Phillips. She and frontman Dean Wareham would become romantically involved and would ultimately marry seven years later. Britta had the distinction of being the singing voice for Jem in the “Jem & The Holograms” animated show in the late 80’s. The couple would later form the musical duo of Dean & Britta as well. Luna would also release a a live album with the elegant but unimaginative title of “Luna Live” in 2001, recorded from gigs they did at the 9:30 Club in D.C. the previous December and at the Knitting Factory in New York City two months after this show on my birthday coincidentally, July 15th. That album would wrap up with a cover of “Bonnie & Clyde” by Serge Gainsbourg and Luna indeed played that one at this gig, Britta singing the Brigette Bardot parts. 

Mark Eitzel from American Music Club was there, opening as a solo act. The bay area native began his set with a respectful cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night”, an old lullabye made famous by many country and rock balladeers like Elvis and Willie Nelson. Mark had disbanded American Music Club over six years before this gig, but was busy putting out seven albums of solo material since and was just about to put out his eighth, “The Invisible Man” a year after this. A departure from his previous work, the new one would lean more towards electronic music. He did treat us to two new songs, “Without You” and finishing his set with “Proclaim Your Joy”. Later that October, bands like Calexico, Lambchop, and others would put together a tribute record of Mark’s songs called, “Come On Beautiful”. I don’t remember who was making the announcements at this show, but he thanked Mr. Eitzel after his set and said, “We don’t get enough of Mark. He’s living in New York City now.”

As before with Luna fans, it was very subdued, making it an easy show to usher. After the third song “4000 Days”, Dean got a little peeved when he discovered that someone had drank his beer on stage. He muttered, “Who drank my beer when I was up in the dressing room? I didn’t drink this. It was full!” He paused for a moment to tune his guitar and shrugged, “I forgive you, whoever you were.” Dean thanked the crowd after “Superfreaky Memories” for “bearing with” them. Like I said, they did “Bonnie & Clyde”, the second to last song in their set and Dean introduced Britta to the crowd, saying that this night was the first time they were playing the song live. They would come back for two encores, finishing the second one with “4th Of July” a song from Galaxie 500, Dean’s old band. It was appropriate to perform it in a way, because it was April Fool’s Day. Though this show didn’t get a poster, Luna would return less than a year later to The Fillmore and that show would get one.

Luna, Mark Eitzel, Fill., SF, Sat., April 1

https://archive.org/details/luna-fillmore-4100

https://archive.org/details/mark-eitzel-fillmore-4100

Dance Hall Crashers, The Muffs, Tilt, Buck, Maritime Hall, SF Sat., April 8

SETLIST : Shelley, Make Her Purr, Mr. Blue, Next To You, My Problem, The Real You, Triple Track, Just Like That, Truly Comfortable, Othello, Remember To Breathe, Go, Beverly Kills, Cat Fight, Good For Nothin’, American Girl, Don’t Wanna Behave, Lost Again, (encore), Skinhead BBQ, The Truth About Me, DHC

This was a show I couldn’t pass up, even specifically asking Wade who was then the head recording engineer at the Maritime if I could have it. When I explained to him that this was my brother’s former band and my long history with them, he obliged me and I am forever grateful. However, I was disappointed to find out two months later that the Crashers would release “The Live Album : Witless Banter & 25 Mildly Antagonistic Songs Of Love”, dashing my hopes that they would use my recording that night. Likewise, when they put out their live DVD in 2005, “The Show Must Go Off! : DHC – Live”, any prospects of the video recorded that show were lost as well. I don’t blame them really since the House Of Blues was a much better run and more renowned recording operation than the Maritime’s, especially during the Hall’s depressing “Blue Period”. Still, I was glad the gang was there as well as the supremely talented opening acts they brought along with them. It was gratifying to greet my old friends at the Hall and give them the nickel tour, showing them the recording room and catching up with them at dinner and before the doors opened.

This was being billed as the “Girl-O-Rama” tour, perhaps a play on words for the “Punk-O-Rama” compilation albums that were regularly being released from Epitaph Records at the time. It might have been a subtle barb against them as well, noting the conspicuous absence of female artists on their roster. The tour had brought along The Muffs, fronted by the late great Kim Shattuck, who actually would have just turned 60 years old last week, but sadly succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s Disease two years ago. I had seen them open for Veruca Salt at The Fillmore in 1995 and they had their cover of Kim Wylde’s “Kids In America” featured in the film comedy “Clueless” that year. That cover would also show up in the video game “Rock Band 2”. The year of this show, The Muffs put out their “Hamburger” greatest hits album as well as the “Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow” album the previous June. Like the Crashers, The Muffs contributed a 30-second song, “Pimmel”, to the “Short Music For Short People” compilation album and though the Crashers played their song “Triple Track” that night, I can’t recall if The Muffs played theirs. Kim would briefly replace Kim Deal in The Pixies in 2013, but I didn’t see them when they played the Fox. Those jerks fired her at the end of that tour, so sadly this would be the last time I’d see Kim alive.

Before The Muffs, Tilt played as well, and like The Muffs, I had also seen them a few years before this at The Fillmore, then opening for Sausage. Fronted by a talented woman called Cinder Block, she had been the only female artist on the Fat Wreck Chords roster until they picked up The Muffs in 1998. Both bands played on the Van’s Warped Tour later that summer. Tilt had just released their fourth and final album, “Viewers Like You”, the previous August, but Cinder was already beginning to move on from performing, having formed the merchandising company Cinder Block Inc. two years before this. She had been printing swag for other bands like AFI and for the Warped tour, but later expanded to bigger acts like The Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, REM, and Phil Collins. Tilt would ultimately disband a year after this show making it also the last time I’d see them perform live. 

The Crashers were still hornless and would remain so until they disbanded, just doing a three piece with the brothers Hammon, Jason on guitar, Gavin on drums, and Mikey Weiss on bass. This “third stage” version of the Crashers was still promoting their most recent and final album of original material, “Purr”. I’d had heard some of the new songs when they headlined The Fillmore the year before and I must say, though the album was only 33 minutes long, they were some of the best songs they had ever written in my opinion. Seriously, some DHC songs are so catchy, they become ear worms. Jason said in an interview that “Purr” was his favorite album of theirs, being the closest recreation of their live sound, other than their live album obviously. 

Jason was wearing a cowboy hat and tan, khaki shorts that night as they took the stage and opened their set with “Shelley”. I was sad that my friend Tory was no longer working the video switcher since he too grew up with Jason and Gavin and whoever was manning the switcher that night wasn’t nearly as skillful or dexterous as Tory was. The crowd was pumped up as they always were for them in their home neighborhood. Elyse asked them “Are you ready to jump on this one? Don’t spill your beer!” before they did “Next To You”. I was glad that they treated their old school local fans to a couple golden oldies like “Truly Comfortable” and then “Othello”. I’m understandably biased towards the latter since my brother Alex wrote it, though I still think it’s one of their best songs. 

Later, Karina addressed the crowd saying, “We wrote this next song for all the ladies out there because we figure there are a lot of men who like to watch girls fight and we think it’s pretty lame. It’s called ‘Cat Fight’. So this one goes out to all the girls.” Afterwards, Elyse joked, “There’s a lot of lovely ladies in the house. Guys might want to take advantage…” then she laughed and corrected herself, “Well, not take advantage, but it’s true, there’s lots of lovely ladies” and then they did “Good For Nothin’” She also reminded them, “We did a live record in L.A. It was the longest fuckin’ show we’ve ever played in our lives, like 25 songs” and then she laughed, “We tried… just FYI.”

Karina talked a little more asking, “You guys feel like singing at all?” and looked up and down at a few people up front playfully accusing them of being tired. While coaching them through through singing “Who-oh-oh” for the chorus of “Don’t Wanna Behave” the boys teased her a bit, playing a slow, labored, riff that kind of sounded like that “batter-up” bit at baseball games. She leered a little and said it they would stop playing, she could finish explaining it to them and joked that Jason was drunk and couldn’t remember the song. Elyse mentioned that “I think it smells like pot up here” and pointed to a few folks up front reassuring them, “No, it’s not you.” At the end of the set, Karina thanked everyone and the opening acts, joking that if anyone “had missed them, you fucked up.” She also pointed out, “I know Oasis was playing in Berkeley, so thank you for coming out to this, & the Bammies too!”. The crowd booed Oasis, who were playing at Berkeley Community Theater that night. Good for them.

They came back on stage to start their encore with another chestnut from days of yore, “Skinhead BBQ”, then “The Truth About Me”, and finished the night as was tradition with their anthem, “DHC”. As always, part of me hoped that they would dust off “Street Sweeper”, but they never indulged me with that one. I handed off the tapes to the gang and that was it. I was sad that my brother wasn’t there to enjoy the show, but he had just moved to L.A. I wouldn’t see The Crashers again until over three years later where they’d play their final bay area show at Slim’s. I like to think that someday the Crashers would do a reunion show, especially since my brother Alex is back living in the bay area again, though Slim’s has since closed its doors. The gang are still all alive and well and God knows they have a multitude of former members to choose from to join in such an endeavor.

https://archive.org/details/dance-hall-crashers-maritime-hall-41400

Redman & Method Man, Outsidaz, ZZYZX, Capitol Eye, Big Chaly, Maritime Hall, SF, Mon., April 17

I had been introduced to the hip hop dream team of Redman and Method Man in 1998 when they headlined at the Maritime and had also caught Redman on his own as one of the opening acts for the SnoCore tour at The Warfield the previous year. By this time, their debut album together, “Blackout!” had finally dropped and had been in stores for over seven months. Digital downloads of music were starting to get popular to the point where the guys from Metallica had literally just filed their infamous lawsuit against Napster that very day. Anyway, the new album was a hit, being certified platinum the following January and would be sort of a precursor to their stoner comedy movie, “How High”, which would come out that shortly afterwards. The duo had also been on the ridiculously successful Hard Knock Life tour with Jay-Z the previous summer. Joining fellow openers Ja Rule and DMX, Method Man would notoriously stage dive a lot on that tour. 

Method Man had also been busy on his own around then, joining his Wu Tang Clan crew in the recording of “The W Album” that November. Redman would be featured on the “Redbull” song for that one. Method Man also contributed the song “Know Your Role” for the “WWF Aggression” soundtrack album, his song being the theme song for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson at the time. WWF would be renamed WWE two years later, resolving a legal battle over the name with the World Wildlife Foundation. With all the recent success, Redman & Method Man were also picked up by St. Ides to market their disgusting beer. There might be no accounting for taste, but for the truckload of money they were likely paid for that campaign, I’d be all over it too.

There were a few talented openers that night, including the Outsidaz, who I had just recorded there at the Hall the previous November on the Lyricist Lounge tour. By then, their debut album “Night Life” had been out four months, dedicated to the rapper Slangton, a member who had been recently murdered. Also there was ZZYZX, named after the small town in unincorporated San Bernadino county formerly known as Soda Springs. That town took the moniker in an effort to be the last word in the english language and I suppose the rapper took it too in order to be the last artist one would find alphabetically in a record store. Before him was Capitol Eye, a group out of Long Beach which incorporated an actual band of drums, bass, and guitar with them, mixing in a healthy dose of jazz and punk into their hip hop stylings. Named presumably for their lead rapper, I-Man, they would release their debut album “Mood Swingz” that August. Which leaves Big Chaly as the first act that show, though I can’t recall anything about him or his brief set. Though Redman & Method Man would enjoy the height of their critical and commercial success during this period, they would only release one more album, “Blackout! 2” almost ten years after its precursor.

Rick Springfield,Brian Copeland, Fill., SF, Fri., April 21

SETLIST : Affair Of The Heart, I’ve Done Everything For You, Love Somebody, Don’t Talk To Strangers, I Get Excited, Inside Sylvia, Free, State Of The Heart, Medley : What Kind Of Fool Am I – Carry Me Away – Everybody’s Girl – Calling All Girls – Bruce – Stand Up – Human Touch, Jessie’s Girl, (encore), Medley : Love Is Alright Tonight – Living In Oz – All Day & All Of The Night

Now, I know what you’re thinking and you would be absolutely correct that this was one of the guiltiest of guilty pleasure shows. But Rick Springfield was correct in his assumption that the 1980’s were at the cusp of a new revival, having that had 20 years officially past by already. Hair metal, new wave, and old school hip hop people were beginning to get a second look. Mr. Springfield himself had been in a self-imposed hibernation, having just released his first album in over ten years, “Karma”. Understandably, he had taken the time off to raise his two sons born in ’85 and ’89, but to also treat his chronic depression. By 2000, with his sons having grown a bit, he was out and about again in force, doing this extensive tour that year to various venues, country fairs, and whatnot. The tour actually had been postponed for a year, but better late than never I guess.

I have to admit, the moment I heard this show was coming to The Fillmore, the very first thing that popped in my head and remains there to this day was Alfred Molina’s deranged scene near the end of “Boogie Nights”. That movie had only been out less than three years and cemented itself firmly into pop culture, due in no small part to its unforgettable soundtrack. It was one of those soundtracks that was so brilliantly executed, that the scenes in that iconic film are inexorably linked to the songs in them. Very few movies have achieved this level of distinction, such films like “Pulp Fiction” and “Repo Man” come to mind. Which leads me back to Mr. Molina and if you are familiar with the movie and probably are, bear with me. I’ll try to make it short. For those unfamiliar, Rick’s big hit, “Jessie’s Girl”, was used while Molina’s character, high as a kite freebasing cocaine, rambles on while the main characters nervously proceed with a botched robbery. Anyway, when the song came on, Alfred shouted, “Ricky Springfield! Buddy of mine!” and proceeded to dance about in his underwear and open silk robe singing along badly to its lyrics. Let’s just say events in the scene went downhill from there and leave it at that. No spoilers. If you haven’t seen it, see it. I even labeled the tape that night “Rick[y] Springfield” in that scene’s honor.

Anyway, back to “Ricky”. Apart from that hit song and his various acting roles in the early 80’s, notably playing Dr. Noah Drake on “General Hospital” and in the pilot episode of “Battlestar Galactica”, I had no other knowledge of this Australian born pop star. His return to making music that year coincided with the release of a couple greatest hits albums, “Greatest Hits Alive” and “VH1 Behind The Music : The Rick Springfield Collection”. Though his return to touring was a long time coming, the crowd was sparse that night, populated almost exclusively by women around their late 30s early 40s. Naturally, this would track being of the age twentyish years older from when the fans were teens and tweens when Rick hit it big around ’81. There was no poster at the end of the night, which was obviously disappointing to myself, but even more to his devotees.

The Fillmore made an interesting and welcome choice of having comedian Brian Copeland open the show. This was a supremely rare occasion mixing the two genres of comedy and music. It reminded me of the time my folks saw Julio Iglacias at Shoreline with Rosanne Barr opening back in the 80s. Talk about an odd couple. But Brian was no stranger of opening for famous musicians, having also supported Ray Charles, Natalie Cole, Aretha Franklin, and Ringo Starr. Brian was very funny and sort of a local hero, having been a fixture on KGO Channel 7, the bay area’s ABC affiliate as well as its radio station. Brian grew up in lily white San Leandro and went to school at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward just across the street from my friend John’s old flophouse. Telling the story of that experience would gain Brian critical success a few years later with his one man show, “Not A Genuine Black Man”. It initially had a six week run at The Marsh Theater, but due to overwhelming demand, had its run extended to a whopping 25 months. It remains the longest running one man play in San Francisco history. He eventually took it on the road to 30 cities, doing over 700 performances in a 7 year span.

He covered a multitude of subjects that night, joking that La Mas training had to have been a cheap, lazy man’s idea, lampooning the notion that the pain of childbirth could be mitigated with simply breathing hard and saying, “You know how much an anesthesiologist costs!?!” He went on to talk about Mark Fuhrman from the O.J. trial and how he said the N-word 41 times. “That’s not racism, that’s Tourette’s!” Brian mused about how old movies wouldn’t be as acceptable in our socially evolving society claiming that “Snow White” had only two female characters, one being an evil backstabber and the other being a “dipshit” who was “happy to clean up for seven guys”, even singing as she did so. He also defended porn on the internet asking “what would you rather have a 15 year old boy have in his hand, his dick or an Uzi? You can’t shoot people while you’re masturbating… I speak from experience.” 

We all cracked up when he wondered, “If Dr, Kevorkian had a patient that lived, would that be considered malpractice?” He also criticized Clinton’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy in the military wondering if recruiters would resort to using indirect questions to determine if new recruits were gay like “What do you think of Bette Midler?”, “Should a wicker basket go on a table or a wall?”, and “Are the color of these socks green or teal?” He mocked the recent adoption of a stretch of highway by the Ku Klux Klan wondering, “Wouldn’t we be tempted to just litter more?” Brian also taunted deniers of evolution in Kansas posing the head scratcher of how come there were flying monkeys in “The Wizard Of Oz”. Anyway, he was hilarious, covering a lot of ground and getting a ton of yucks during his brief twenty minute set.

But the star of the show soon bounded on stage to the ear splitting shrieks of those fans, screaming like they were kids again. I had to hand it to Rick, even though the house was less than half full, he acted all night like he was playing to a fucking stadium. Rick definitely got an A for effort at that show. I thought it was funny and frankly a little scary how he’d toss his guitars to his guitar tech off stage between songs. I guess the guy had practice since he caught every one, making it look easy. He opened with “Affairs Of The Heart” before doing a cover of Sammy Hagar’s “I’ve Done Everything For You”. Then he asked if anybody had seen his movie “Hard To Hold” and asked, “Who got to see my naked butt!?!” before playing “Love Somebody” from that movie’s soundtrack. Afterwards, he offered some chocolate to the people up front and wondered since he had just blew his nose into one of the white towels on stage, if he could keep it. 

Rick did some extensive, but fairly impressive guitar noodling before playing “Don’t Talk To Strangers”, getting all the women to sing along loudly to the chorus. He even went to individual women up front asking “Who really sucks up here? Who can’t sing at all?” and offered his mic to them to sing the title line in the chorus. The first one did it and he shook his head saying, “That was in tune”, and then offered the mic to the woman next to her. After her off key reciting, Rick nodded and smiled, “That was horrible!”. Finally, he brought up an adorable little girl, presumably the daughter of one of his fans, on stage and her reciting was genuinely heartwarming, getting a rousing round of applause. Funny to think that the little girl there has to be around her mother’s age now and undoubtably will remember her little solo at The Fillmore for the rest of her days.

Before he did “I Get Excited”, he recounted about “when I was about 20 years old, I had a mad crush on Greta Grabo… who was about 80 at the time.” There was a melancholy bit after tell us the origin story of his new song “Free”, recalling recently how his neighbors had lost their 4 year old boy, who drowned in Lake Tahoe. Rick said that he’d wake up around 3 am and look across the street to see his neighbors house with all its lights on and he then got the crowd to sing along with that song’s chorus. But he managed to bring the mood back up with a cover of “State Of The Heart” by Mondo Rock, an Australian band who were big there in the 70s, before finishing his set with a medley of seven songs and then finishing with “Jessie’s Girl”. Rick did another three song medley for his encore ending the show with a spirited cover of “All Day & All Of The Night” by The Kinks. Before finishing, Rick thanked his band, pointing out his drummer was brand new being “a virgin until two hours ago!”

Rick Springfield, Brian Copeland, Fill., SF, Fri., April 21

https://archive.org/details/rick-springfield-fillmore-42100

https://archive.org/details/brian-copeland-fillmore-42100

BR5-49, The Road Kings, Wilson Gil & The Willful Sinners, Maritime Hall, SF, Sat. April 22

It was quite the juxtaposition going from Rick Springfield’s overly enthusiastic 80’s rock stylings at The Fillmore the night before to this, an old timey revue of country and rockabilly acts. The nation had also been rattled that morning by the terrible optics on the news of the seizing of Elain Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who had been brought illegally into Florida by his father. The taking of that infamous photo of the guy all dressed up in black tactical gear snatching up the crying kid was one of several unfortunate incidents which would ultimately cost Al Gore the White House eight months later. But for that night, on the other side of the country, we would be magically transported to the land of Pre-World War II Honky Tonk.

I’d seen BR5-49 the year before opening for the Brian Setzer Orchestra at The Warfield and I was impressed by their class and musical chops. Named after the phone number of Junior Sample’s car salesman skit on “Hee Haw”, they had toured all the previous year with Brian and accumulated enough live recordings to put together their “Coast To Coast” live compilation album. So, it having been released that year, my recording that night at the Maritime was already highly unlikely to ever be used for anything. That band was in a sort of transitional period having just been dropped by Arista Records when they merged with Sony, but would soon be picked up by Lucky Dog Records a year later. It was hard not to like these guys with their cheerful, upbeat demeanor, dressed to the nines in snazzy vintage suits, bolo ties, and cowboy hats.

Texas rockabilly band The Road Kings were opening that night. They were still pretty new having just put out their debut self titled album the year before this gig. Local hillbilly Wilson Gil was also there, but like Rick Springfield from the night before, this show too was sparsely populated. Still, I was glad to do it, especially since shows featuring country and related genres like rockabilly were few and far between for me. I appreciated that the Maritime, despite all its faults, was committed to bringing these acts into its roster of shows, a welcome distraction from all the metal and hip hop. BR5-49 has been on hiatus for over ten years now, their members moving on to other bands and solo  projects. Their original bass player retired completely joking, “I’m not doing anything now, and I’m getting damn good at it!”

Slipknot, One Minute Silence, Mudvayne, War., SF, Sun., April 30

SETLISTS :

(MUDVAYNE) : Dig, -1, Death Blooms, Under My Skin, Internal Primates Forever, Cradle

(ONE MINUTE SILENCE) : Rise & Shine, 1845, Holy Man

(SLIPKNOT) : Get Behind Me Satan & Push Intro, [sic], Eyeless, Wait & Bleed, No Life, Liberate, Purity, Prosthetics, Spit It Out, Get This, Surfacing, Scissors

No band would follow Slipknot after this. Their days as an opening act would be forever behind them well over a year before their second album would even make the shelves. In fact, the debut self-titled album was certified platinum just two days after this show and would ultimately go double platinum. I’ve always said there is no better endorsement for a band other than the “Jesus Saves From Hell” crowd picketing your show. And there they were, signs and megaphones in hand to fruitlessly berate the amused heshers waiting to get inside before the doors opened. One of the picketers literally had a banner reading “Listen To Slipknot You Will Burn In Hell”. Nobody was more flattered than Slipknot’s drummer Joey Jordison who joked later, “That ruled! It shows we’re making a difference. We tried to con the banner out of the guy, so we could put it on stage!” Sadly, Joey passed away two years ago suffering from an acute case of transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder that causes the spinal cord to become inflamed, though his official cause of death is still unknown. Despite what the picketers think, there is still no reliable accounts of the current whereabouts of Joey’s soul.

I’d actually had recorded two of these three bands at the Maritime before this, One Minute Silence opening for Sepultura back in February of ’98 and Slipknot just five months before this opening for (sigh) Coal Chamber. Though I’m grateful Coal Chamber used the footage I recorded for a live DVD for that show, I’m still pissed off that they didn’t put my name in the credits or pay me one red cent for my efforts. The insult stung deeper since Slipknot, a clearly superior band was the opener for such a mediocre band, and they didn’t use what recorded there at all. But whatever, read the review of that show if you want to hear more bellyaching. Let’s move on.

Like I alluded to before, Slipknot were officially big, a headlining act, so much so that they outgrew the Maritime and were playing to a sell out show at The Warfield, holding around 800 more people than the Hall. I believe that the Warfield had actually snatched up Slipknot from them for this tour since I’d seen them listed in ads for the Maritime, though it was moved to the Warfield before the listing made it to the Maritime’s monthly poster. The band was going though a little dust up with Korn around that time complaining about their drummer, David Silveria, posing recently for a Calvin Klein ad. On one leg of this tour, Slipknot’s singer, Corey Taylor, held up a copy of “Teen People” magazine opened to the page with the ad and shouted, “People like that are destroying music!” before lighting it on fire. Korn and Slipknot eventually reconciled, both agreeing that it was a bad move by David. Korn even parodied his “modeling career” in the video for their song “Twisted Transistor” which my brother acted in. Check it out when you get a chance, it’s a very funny video.

First on stage that night was Mudvayne from Peoria, Illinois who were on the cusp of releasing their first album, “L.D. 50” four months after this night, named after a term in toxicology which means the “lethal dose to kill 50% of a population”. You can guess the music was as dark as the title, partially also due to it also being executive produced by Slipknot percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan. Like Slipknot, Mudvayne too had creepy stage names and had a penchant for theatrical and gruesome masks and face paint. Incidentally, their guitarist Greg Tribbett’s brother Derrick plays bass with the band Dope who I also recorded opening alongside Slipknot at that Maritime show the previous November. Small world. Mudvayne’s first album would go gold after a year and then they’d get big with their second one, so much so I’d see them headline their own show at The Warfield five years later.

Mudvayne were as loud as they were intense, their singer, Chad Gray, introducing their new hit “Dig” loudly demanded, “I want to see the ceiling dripping with blood!!!” A couple songs in, he thanked “from across the sea”, One Minute Silence, and a “traveling band of fucking crazy people from Des Moines, Iowa… Slipknot!!!” and then Chad said,”Let’s see the floor go up and down for this one! It’s calisthenics, people!” The Slipknot crowd is a tough one to please, even for a band as heavy as Mudvayne, so there were a few wise ass detractors up front. Chad joked before they played “Cradle”, the last song of their set, “We got one more song and we’re outta’ here…that some of you seem happy about”, but he still thanked the folks up front. Next up was the aforementioned One Minute Silence, a nu metal band from Ireland, a rare bird being not a country a person would immediately associate with the genre. Their second album, “Buy Now… Saved Later” had just hit the shelves a day shy of three weeks before this night. Since I’d recorded them at the Maritime, they had replaced their original guitarist Chris Ignatiou with Mossimo Fiocco.

Slipknot took the stage as they had done before with a long intro starting with the sounds of “Get Behind Me Satan And Push”, a twangy country tune recorded by Billie Jo Spears in ’68. Once again, they left the chorus skipping on the line, “Get Behind Me Satan”, before taking the stage to their noisy sampling track, “742617000027” and then ripping into “[sic]”. Corey announced, “Welcome to the year of Slipknot, motherfuckers!!!” As you could guess, the pit went totally berserk and pretty much stayed that way for the remainder of their set. They took a pause finally after “Eyeless” and Corey yelled, “What the fuck is up, San Francisco!?!” and demanded that the lighting guy “light this up so I can see all my friends” After the lighting guy obliged him, he gazed upwards saying, “I can see we got all the crazy motherfuckers in San Francisco in one place!” After “Wait & Bleed”, he wanted to “ask a real fuckin’ crazy question. How many of you sick motherfuckers have the Slipknot album!?! Wanna hear a song we haven’t played in San Francisco ever!?!” and then they did “No Life”. Corey had everybody give it up for the openers and thanked the crowd too before making the rather unsettling demand, “I wanna see this place explode like Oklahoma City!!!” before playing “Liberate”. I think you know the reference he’s making. 

A sore spot was brought up with the band, Corey saying they were “getting a lot of fuckin’ questions about the next song, why we took it off the album” about the “greedy cocksucker who made us take it off” and then insisted, “Fuck them, we’re going to play it”. He was referring to the song “Purity” which indeed had been taken off the debut album at the last minute. Its lyrics had been based on the story of Purity Knight, a young girl who had been tortured and buried alive, a narrative right up Slipknot’s alley. Well, there had been some back and forth whether the story was true or not and if it wasn’t, whether or not it would be under copyright. Ultimately, they dodged the legal headache by leaving it off the album and replacing it with “Me Inside”. Slipknot has since re-released the song for their “Disasterpieces” DVD as well as the “9.0 Live” album. There had been a video crew that night and Corey mentioned them before “Spit It Out” saying we were “being videotaped for their next home video”, so he challenged the audience, “You ready to prove who’s the craziest crowd in North America!?!” The thought that they’d use the video from that night and not the night at the Maritime irked me, but it turns out neither footage was ever used. 

Corey got the everybody in the crowd to stick their middle fingers in the air after “Get This” and declared “Surfacing” our country’s new national anthem. Finishing their set, he dedicated “Scissors” to “the sickness”, whatever that means to you I guess, ending in a sprawling, drawn out, ear splitting finale. Funny, though stylistically apart as bands could be, Beck also would do a sort of apocalyptic finale at the end of his show only two nights later at the Civic Center. Thankfully, you can find good bootleg recordings of both Mudvayne’s and Slipknot’s sets on YouTube. I was however disappointed at the end of this show to see that there was no poster. Still, I would only have to wait a mere six weeks before I would hear Slipknot’s psychotic joyful noise once more when they would headline the second stage at Live 105’s B.F.D. Festival, a welcome addition to that shows relatively inoffensive line up. Incidentally, “Gladiator” just opened that week in theaters, but the opening battle did remind me a little of Slipknot’s pit that night.

Slipknot, One Minute Silence, Mudvayne, War., SF, Sun., April 30

https://archive.org/details/slipknot-warfield-43000

https://archive.org/details/mudvayne-warfield-43000

https://archive.org/det…/one-minute-silence-warfield-43000

https://archive.org/details/mudvayne-bootleg-warfield-43000

https://archive.org/details/slipknot-bootleg-warfield-43000

Beck, Café Tacuba, BG Civic, SF, Tues., May 2

SETLIST : Beercan, Novacane, Mixed Bizness, Loser, Hollywood Freaks, Milk & Honey, Minus, Sexx Laws, Debra, Tropicalia, Lampshade, Pay No Mind (Snoozer), Dead Melodies, One Foot In The Grave, Nobody’s Fault But My Own, Rowboat, Jackass, Bra, New Pollution, (encore), DJ Swamp solo, Where It’s At, Devil’s Haircut

It had been three and a half since I’d seen Beck, especially since by this time had put out not one but two albums. “Mutations”, though not as commercially successful as his previous one, “Odelay”, still won him a Grammy for Best Alternative Album and his latest “Midnight Vultures” would quickly be certified gold. “Mutations” had been so anticipated by my family that my sister, brother, and I actually got copies of it for Christmas. Understandably, all these years later, who gave which copy to who escapes me now. Beck had a hit with this latest one and was riding higher than ever having recently headlined Coachella the previous October debuting four of the new songs live just a month before the new album dropped and performing on “Saturday Night Live” later that December. After this American tour, Beck would go on to also headline huge festivals overseas such as the ones in Reading and Leeds. And if that wasn’t enough, “Midnight Vultures” would also be nominated for a Grammy for Best Album. Beck’s updated band reflected the big sound of the new endeavor with a three piece horn section and two new female back up singers. 

Cafe Tacuba originally from Juarez, Mexico was opening that night at this sold out show. From their humble beginnings playing a coffee shop in Mexico City back in ’89, they had worked their way up to be quite famous in their home country. They had also just contributed a song to the soundtrack of the critically acclaimed film, “Amores Perros” the year of this show. Their latest release, a double album called “Reves / Yo Soy” would be nominated for a Grammy for Best Latin Rock / Alternative Performance and would win them a Latin Grammy for Best Rock Album. Their music was brilliant and infectious, one of the best openers I’d ever see open for Beck. After their set was clear, Beck’s one was quickly put together.

It was quite a sight on stage, hard to describe really. There were a few pairs of towering, orange pylons surrounded by foot wide, ribbed tubing which hung from above. The risers for Beck’s musicians were covered in some sort of rubber padding. Beck eased into his set warming up the crowd with a jam that included the chorus from Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See” which flowed right into “Beercan”. During that tune, he did a little breakdown, doing the chorus from “Electric Avenue” by Eddie Grant. A couple songs later during “Mixed Bizness”, Beck did a little bit of “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie too, before allowing the drummer to end it with a solo of his own. They did “Loser” next and it was actually reassuring by this time to hear it again, knowing that Beck, having 7 albums under his belt and bigger than ever, would never have this song imprison him with the moniker of “one hit wonder”. 

Afterwards, he played four new ones, “Hollywood Freaks”, where he got the crowd to repeatedly sing “Sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-Aw yeah!” and then said ,”I wanna take you on a little bit of an odyssey right now”, before doing “Milk & Honey”. The band did a strange noise piece they called “Minus” before launching into the rambunctious “Sexx Laws”. Afterwards, Beck went into a sort of love preacher stream of consciousness saying, “As I was pulling into San Francisco this time, I always forget what a beautiful place this is… beautiful streets, beautiful houses… This is a beautiful place to fall in love. This is a beautiful place to meet somebody special. This is a beautiful place to make love!” He then sang soulfully, “To make loooooove! Feel like making loooove! There’s nothing wrong with a little…” And then the band hit a beat. He asked the band, “Give me another bump!” and then they hit another beat and he sang, “Ain’t nothin’ wrong… Ain’t nothin’ wrong… Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little Nicotine & Gravy!”

For the final new song in this four song stretch, Beck took it way down, seducing the crowd with “Debra”. Anybody who saw this tour will never forget the point during the song where a bed draped in red satin sheets and a huge mirror ball were lowered onto the stage from the rafters. Beck undulated in the bed as a galaxy of reflected beams of light filled the Civic Center. That was about as close as one could approach getting it on with music just shy of Sade or Prince. Beck kept it relaxed, changing into a jumpsuit with pink sequins during a percussion solo which then flowed into “Tropicalia”, the first of three songs off of the “Mutations” album which I would be hearing live for the first time. He then had the rest of the band take a breather to do some acoustic solo bits as he was accustomed to do at all his headlining shows.

We were actually fortunate that night, for it would be the last time to date that he played “Lampshade”. He had only played it twice that year, in New York City the previous February and this show, and it would be one of only seven times he’s EVER played it live. He then did four more solo tunes, including “Dead Melodies” and “Nobody’s Fault But My Own”, also off the “Mutations” album. I’m glad he asked for requests then because he squeezed in a bit of “Rowboat”, a song which had the distinction of being covered by Johnny Cash. I heard Johnny sing it himself at The Fillmore in 1996, the last time I saw Cash alive. Beck brought the band and the pace gradually back up with “Jackass”. 

They got funky again, doing what Beck called a “boogaloo” jam which they called “Bra”, calling out his bandmates one at a time, allowing them little solos before ending the set with “New Pollution”. When they came back on stage, DJ Swamp did a long introduction, scratching electronic samples to the beats of “Louie Louie”, “Eye Of The Tiger”, and “Smoke On The Water” to much applause. They wrapped up the encore with the hits “Where It’s At” and “Devil’s Haircut” which flowed into a thunderous finale. The band all put on crossing guard vests, hockey shin and shoulder pads, and wandered about the stage bumping into and rolling around with each other. Beck did some robot dance moves, put on some 3D glasses someone up front in the crowd gave him, and placed an orange traffic cone on his own head. One guy even rode a bicycle from the wings across the stage all the while the stage lights flashed as the band dismantled the set. Some reviewers attributed this avant garde performance art as well as the bizarre set as a homage to Al Hansen, who was Beck’s grandfather and a famous “Fluxus absurdist” artist. This spectacle went on for a good ten minutes or so before it was all over. 

As I mentioned in the previous show I wrote about, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that Slipknot had a similar sonic apocalypse ending to their show two days before this at The Warfield, though most would agree that the two acts are significantly different stylistically. BGP had made a poster for this night, but it wasn’t one of the ones the public could buy, but you still can check it out online. It was a big poster too. This would also be the last tour with DJ Swamp in the band. I’d see lucky to see Beck two more times that year, once headlining Alice’s Now & Zen Festival in Golden Gate Park that September and only a month after that playing without his band at the Bridge School Benefit, acoustically as always there. On a personal note, Beck’s upbeat year would be tempered by the depression he’d be burdened with after ending his nine year relationship with Leigh Lemon. At the risk of being self-indulgent, he would write 12 of the 14 songs in a single week after his break up for his next album, “Sea Change” which would come out in 2002. That certified gold album was also a hit with critics, so at least his misery didn’t harm his career none.

Beck, Café Tacuba, BG Civic, SF, Tues., May 2

https://archive.org/details/beck-bg-civic-5200

https://archive.org/details/cafe-tacuba-bg-civic-5200

Bernie Worrell & The Woo Warriors, Taos Hum, Food, Maritime Hall, SF, Sat., May 13

Though I had quite a few encounters with George Clinton before this, I don’t believe I ever had the pleasure of seeing his original Parliament Funkadelic keyboardist much less record him. Yes, one Mr. George Bernard Worrell, Jr. just turned 55 years old the month before this show and he had been bringing the funk on the keys already for decades, having also played alongside such venerable musicians such as Adrian Belew, Sly & Robbie, The Talking Heads, and Bill Laswell just to name a handful. I imagine few people know, myself included prior to doing my customary research, that Bernie had also attended Juilliard and holds a degree from the New England Conservatory Of Music. Real funk music demands quality musicianship and Bernie was definitely in the top of his class. Bernie was also a founding member of David Letterman’s band on the Late Show, the CBS Orchestra, though he only played with them for Dave’s first year there in 1993. Bernie got replaced by a horn section, their loss in my opinion. I have a soft spot in my heart for people who shred on keys since my mom used to teach piano.

The first act that night was a band called Food, a name so obvious and brilliant for a band yet baffling that no one had used it up till then. They were a jazz group started by woodwind player Iain Ballamy from the U.K. and percussionist Thomas Stroenen from Norway. They roped in a few other guys from Norway and had just put out their first self titled album that year. Great name aside, I haven’t seen them since. This would be the second time in two months that I would record Taos Hum at the Hall, the first being with the Zen Tricksters. To this day, I still don’t know which of the two shows or what songs from both that they used for their live album. Though I’m eternally grateful that the album came out, part of me really doesn’t care since I’m not a big fan of their music. Off the subject, the country of India reported the just exceeded a billion people that day and I can say with confidence that there has to be at least one band from there better than Taos Hum. 

Bernie, however, I am a fan of and it was an honor to have this Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Inductee in my resume of recordings. He and his Woo Warriors band had just performed the night before at Palookaville in Santa Cruz and the set from that gig is available on Internet.archive though the set from the Maritime isn’t. Pity, I would have enjoyed hearing that again, yet Bernie has no shortage of live material out on the market, especially from that year. I assume the sets from both nights were similar and most certainly included a couple P-Funk tunes. Thankfully, I’d see Bernie a couple of years later with Colonel Claypool’s Bucket Of Bernie Brains band, an ingenious supergroup of Bernie, Les Claypool on bass, Buckethead on guitar, and Brain Mantia on drums. It was brilliant, though short lived collaboration, but I still got to see them play three times between 2002 and 2003. Buckethead was at the Palookaville gig, but I don’t think he was at the Maritime one. I think I would have remembered that, having recorded that mysterious guitar hero at the Hall before. He makes quite an impression.

On a final note about this show, I wasn’t entirely sure that this gig was going to happen for me in the first place or if I was in fact able to come back to the Maritime Hall at all. Exactly one month and a day before this, I was fill in for Wade at the Hall to record reggae star Lucky Dube. I had just gotten through his soundcheck when I was approached by his young, friendly, American tour manager and I explained who I was and took him down to the recording room to show him around. Now, Lucky Dube had performed at the Maritime before, so I had assumed that they knew all about the recordings there, but the guy was unaware. I guess they didn’t get the tapes before for whatever reason, but this tour manager was not only amenable to the idea of us recording, he was also genuinely interested in putting out a live album and/or DVD. It seemed like a win-win, right?

So, naturally I took him to talk to Boots about it and returned to the recording room to do the soundcheck for Zulu Spear, who were the opening act that night. Well, I don’t know exactly what went down between Boots and the stage manager, but I heard the volume of their argument predictably rise from upstairs. Boots just couldn’t keep that gaping, fat trap of his shut yet again and he stormed down into the recording room, chewed me out, and told me to take a hike. By then, I knew recording Lucky Dube was out of the question, but I was holding on to thin sliver of hope that we still could do Zulu Spear. I liked that band, but alas, Boots pulled the plug on the whole evening and I skulked out of there. 

I wasn’t planning on returning to the Hall ever again and was frankly done with it, but Wade called me up anyway for Bernie’s show and I didn’t hear another word about the whole Lucky Dube fiasco. By this time, Boots had bigger problems than little ol’ me. The Hall was quickly falling apart and even the monthly poster for May was just a collage of previous monthly posters. The Glenda, The Good Witch Of The North from “The Wizard Of Oz” from the May 1998 poster even says a defiant, “They Shall Never Conquer”. But by the following May, the Maritime would be no more. I’d record only four more shows there after Bernie. Still, It’s a pity we didn’t get to record Lucky Dube because he would be gunned down eight years later in his native South Africa during a hold up. He was mistaken for a rich Nigerian, a very unlucky turn of events if you pardon the expression, but his killers were caught and are currently spending the rest of their lives in prison. They better hope not to run into any of his fans on the inside.

Stereolab, Chicago Underground Duo, War., SF, Wed., May 17

SETLIST : Blips Drips & Strips, Infinity Girl, The Free Design, Barock-Plastik, Op Hop Detonation, Metronomic Underground, Des Etoiles Electroniques, Household Names, (unknown), Analogue Rock, (unknown), French Disco, (unknown), (encore), (unknown), (unknown), John Cage Bubblegum

This would be the largest venue I’d ever see Stereolab perform in as a headliner, returning to the bay area after just playing at The Fillmore the previous November. And if you have been following my humble little writing endeavor here for a while, you’d know how much this band means to me. A friend asked recently who my favorite bands were of all time and though I named a bunch, Stereolab impulsively blurted out of my lips first. So, you could imagine my conflicting feelings as all fans of a band who witness one of their favorites get sold out Warfield big, the simultaneous pride for their success and the loss of the (a-hem) intimacy you had with them perviously. But after this night, Stereolab would play all their following San Francisco shows back at the cozy ol’ Fillmore from then on out. So, conversely, I feel then a since of betrayal from the music consuming public, though a sense of relief that they didn’t go on to get stadium big.  Naturally, I think they deserve it and then some, but that’s show biz. Not to say playing The Fillmore is small potatoes, far from it. Stereolab sells out every show there without fail. I once had to pony up $125 back in 2019 to get a resale ticket and that says something. I wouldn’t do that for just any band.

I was working all night as an usher, so I got the sticker and for some reason it was labeled “Cricket” that gig. I distinctly remember it being the house right aisle, or Aisle 3, I was keeping clear. Though I was pissed I had to work all night, the Stereolab crowd has always been a civilized bunch and easy to corral. The hypnotic nature of their sound tends to paralyze most listeners in their tracks, so they don’t move around much anyway. Apparently, there was a DJ opener named the Chicago Underground Duo, but I don’t remember them. This was the first date of Stereolab’s North American tour, still promoting their latest album, “Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night”, which had come out the previous September. I’m glad it was plenty loud enough, so the recording came out good. We got to hear at least four songs off the new album too. Now I say “at least” because despite my obsession with this band there actually were (gasp!) a handful of songs in this set which I didn’t know and for the life of me still can’t decipher. The one at the end of the set after “French Disco” was a long instrumental. Hopefully, some gentle reader out there knows or maybe I’ll find out some other way in the future and will update this. Anyway, even though I was working through the set, I had the time of my life and Stereolab was at the top of their game. 

I remember Laetitia wore her hair the shortest I have have ever seen it, a really close cropped sort of “Joan Of Arc” look. It might have been because the Luc Besson film “The Messenger : The Story Of Joan Of Arc” with Milla Jovovich in the starring role, had just come out the previous October. Laetitia is French after all, but who knows. Maybe she was just keeping it short for low maintenance since her son Alex had just entered the terrible twos. She said “Merci” to the crowd when their set ended and for the encore she told us, “We are going to play another new song… You can say you heard it first. It’s got many parts to it.” She then thanked everyone and “Also, the hospitality of this venue. Rock & roll is very sweet here.” Awww… I remember distinctly singing along loudly to the chorus of their last song of the night, “John Cage Bubblegum”, even getting the attention of some of the nearby patrons as I belted, “Aye-yaye-aye-yaye-yaye-yaye!” and so forth. Sweet as it was, it was bittersweet when it had to end and there wasn’t a poster, though Stereolab got one when they played The Fillmore the last time around. I would have to wait another year and half until they would return to play The Fillmore once again, but I’m proud to say that I would continue to see them at that venue at least 11 more times. Frankly, since I haven’t been keeping track of my shows after I stopped bootlegging in 2010, I’ve lost count.

Stereolab, War., SF, Wed., May 17

https://archive.org/details/stereolab-warfield-51700

The Original P, Clyde’s Ride, Broun Fellinis, Maritime Hall, SF, Fri., May 19

The old school crew from Parliament Funkadelic had returned to play the Hall just eight months after I recorded them there last. This time they had officially adopted the moniker of “The Original P”. Feel free to visit the previous entry from that show in September of ’99 if you want to read more about their history. And though I didn’t save either recording for myself, nor have I been able to find it on the web, rest assured they covered a lot of material and many golden oldies as they had done previously. I am sad to say that this would be the last time I’d see three of the four original P-Funk members together alive, leaving Grady Thomas the last man standing. We lost Raymond Davis five years after this show, Calvin Simon last year in January of 2022, and “Fuzzy” Haskins just last March. And yet despite his notorious partying for decades, their old leader George Clinton has somehow managed to clean himself up, shave off his trademark harlequin locks, and still tours to this day at the age of 82. Mind boggling.

I am happy to report however that the video of the set of Clyde’s Ride was on YouTube. You can see on stage that Pinky was doing monitors that night. They were a nine piece funk band from San Diego and they were quite good for a bunch of white kids. They had a solid horn section and had a man and woman named Lani and Derek singing together. Clyde’s Ride put out their debut, self titled album in 1997, but that was it for them. They weren’t together long. I didn’t get their setlist, but I know they opened their set with “Aisles Of Smiles” and played “Silver Dollar” two songs later.

The Broun Fellinis were first on that night and though I had taped them personally a zillion times at The Elbo Room and elsewhere, this would be the one and only occasion I’d get to tape them at the Maritime. I was overjoyed and honored. Maybe Keith, their sound guy who also worked at the Hall still has a copy of that night, but I haven’t seen that fellow in years. Unlike Clyde’s Ride, the Fellinis are still around and playing in the bay area regularly, over thirty years for them now. They’ve aged well, I might add. They would go on to release their “Out Through The N’ Door” album four months after this gig. This would be one of the final shows I’d record at the Hall, leaving only three more to go for me before that doomed venue finally sunk.

https://archive.org/details/clydes-ride-maritime-hall-51900

Primal Scream, Fill., SF, Sat., June 10

SETLIST : Swastika Eyes, Shoot Speed / Kill Light, Pills, Burning Wheel, MBV Arkestra (If They Move, Kill ‘Em), Insect Royalty, Kill All Hippies, Keep Your Dreams, Kill All Hippies, Exterminator, Blood Money, Rocks, Kowalski, Accelerator, Don’t Call Me Nigger Whitey, (encore), Higher Than The Sun, Medication, City, Movin’ On Up, (encore), Kick Out The Jams, No Fun

I can say that this show has the unique distinction of being the only time I worked at The Fillmore as a stagehand. I had been ushering as usual at my station by the front of house soundboard when I was approached by the venerable master of all things audio, the late great Chris Charuki, who, knowing I was a stagehand with Local 16, implored me to join the crew at the end of the night to load out their gear. I have to admit I was hesitant. Part of me was clinging to my status as a passive observer at that esteemed venue, but when I looked into Charuki’s puppy dog eyes, I couldn’t say no. He passed away in 2018 and I miss him dearly. Thankfully, it was a quick load out, being just Primal Scream performing that night and I was even given a tour shirt, though I’ve since misplaced it. Besides, I owed it to my dear brother Alex who was a huge fan. He had just moved to L.A. earlier that year and though he didn’t catch Primal Scream when this tour swung through his neighborhood, he’s caught them several times before and since then.

Primal Scream had been a sort of anomaly in the so-called Britpop world, flirting with various genres over the years. Hailing from Scotland, their singer Bobby Gillespie had been the original drummer for The Jesus & Mary Chain. Bobby wasn’t very talented with the drums, playing only a snare and a floor tom whilst standing during the Chain’s earliest days, since he lacked the skill to play a full kit. He blossomed as Primal Scream’s frontman though. I was sort of coming late to the party seeing the band, though I’d been familiar with their work through my brother and liked what I heard. I remember their song “Rocks” was on “Beavis & Butthead” and they mistook the lyric “Get your rocks off” to be “get your rock salt”. 

Anyhow, I hadn’t had much chance to see them before since this would be their first headlining tour in 8 years. Primal Scream had just released their 6th studio album that January called “XTRMNTR”, obviously “exterminator” with all the vowels removed. Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine helped produce and played guitar on it, though he wasn’t touring with them. Primal Scream had taken a departure from their previous acid house psychedelia to produce a more industrial electronica sound for that album. In fact, they played mostly new songs in their main set, taking up all but three songs that were older. During their first encore, they even played a new song called, “City”, that wouldn’t be released until their following album, “Evil Heat”, in 2002.

Bobby Gillespie had a reputation for being quite the party animal even by Britpop standards and it was a safe bet that he was high as kite that night on stage. Primal Scream was practically proud of their reputation of superhuman drug intake but they still delivered, though I noticed Bobby sweats a lot. It took him a bit, but Bobby straightened himself out over the next few years, fathering a couple kids, getting married, and ultimately becoming sober in 2008. The band then had recently picked up Darrin Mooney as their new drummer as well as Mani Mounfield on bass from The Stone Roses who had recently disbanded. 

The new album’s single had the provocative title “Swastika Eyes” which they opened their set with and I also caught them rehearsing it during soundcheck. It didn’t help that the first song on the new album was called “Kill All Hippies” at a place like The Fillmore. Some of the old timers might have taken offense if they were paying attention when they played it that night. But they further raised eyebrows that show when near the end of “Higher Than The Sun”, Bobby sang the chorus of Sly & The Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey”, a song that most wouldn’t even dare utter its title much less sing it these days, despite its strong anti-racist message. For their second encore, they did a couple other covers, “Kick Out The Jams” by the MC5 and also “No Fun”, from another renowned Detroit proto-punk band, The Stooges. I was grateful they had a nice poster that night, a welcome addition to getting a free shirt. Afterwards, I was proud that I helped load out the band, quickly dispelling any hesitancy I had earlier. It went fast, but I was a little jittery riding on The Fillmore’s notoriously rickety freight elevator. This wouldn’t be the last time I’d see Primal Scream at The Fillmore. They would return three years later as the unlikely opener for Underworld. That was a unique pairing.

But I have to confess, this being a confession after all, that I fibbed a bit at the beginning of this. I actually had worked one other show at The Fillmore in the capacity of a union stagehand, but I’m resolutely not proud of it. To my defense, there were notable differences between the Primal Scream and this other show, one, it being a private benefit, not open to the general public. Secondly, I was just a camera page, a job I enjoy but rarely get from the union, not a sound guy. I was happy to get the work, but when I found out later who was playing, I was beyond mortified. Of all the bands, it was… Train. And to any of the gentle readers out there who’ve read anything involving that godforsaken band I’ve written, you’d know I hate them passionately. I seriously considered calling the union back and have myself replaced. 

At least Matt Nathanson was the opener, a local singer songwriter who had been managed by Jordan Kurland, the fellow I used to intern for at Primus’ management and current honcho of the Noise Pop Festival. Matt’s music is inoffensive, but infinitely more tolerable than Train’s. Women love Train and there were plenty of them there fawning over them that night, which makes me hate them even more. Anyway, I was reassured slightly since it was for charity and my alma matter, The San Francisco Boys Chorus, joined them on stage for a few numbers. It was near Christmas then and I think they sang a few carols together. I don’t want to be a Grinch but still, it was overall a painful memory, especially since I accidentally made eye contact with their singer, Pat Monahan, a couple times that night. I feel unclean even writing about it all these years later.

Primal Scream, Fill., SF, Sat., June 10

https://archive.org/details/primal-scream-fillmore-61000

Todd Rundgren, Keno, Maritime Hall, SF, Sun., June 11

SETLIST : I Hate My Frickin I.S.P., Play This Game, Love Of The Common Man, Yer Fast (And I Like It), Black & White, Trapped, There Goes My Inspiration, Number 1 Lowest Common Denominator, Open My Eyes, Love In Action, Hit Me Like A Train, You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, Bang On The Ukulele Daily, Temporary Sanity, Couldn’t I Just Tell You, Mystified – Broke Down & Busted, Buffalo Grass, One World, The Ikon, Hammer In My Heart, Worldwide Epiphany

Todd Rundgren is one of those artists that people should know about but don’t and I’m afraid that was the case for me before this night. Most people like myself only knew him from his song “Bang On The Drum All Day” that was ubiquitous from commercials from things like Carnival Cruises to serving as the theme song for the Green Bay Packers. However, I did know the “Open My Eyes” song from my brother who was a fan of Todd’s first band, Nazz. But going over merely his music producing credentials, from Hall & Oates to Bad Religion, I feel even less worthy to have recorded him. If that wasn’t humbling enough, Todd used the tapes from that night to make his “Live In San Francisco” DVD. Just the thought of this master of the studio using my tapes for an official release of his makes me very proud. Not that that Todd and I ever even met or was aware of my contribution. As it is all too often, I wasn’t mentioned in the credits. But like so many others that got released without so much as a bloody thank you, I will always retain a shred of solemn pride for my microscopic contribution to the arts.

Todd had already been a music legend and technical wizard well before the dawn of the internet. After the end of Nazz in 1969, he briefly became a computer programmer, actually designing the first color graphics tablet. From there he would be the first artist to have an interactive TV concert, produced “No World Order” in 1994, the first interactive album, and was one of the earliest users of the internet to distribute music. I had found out one piece of tragic trivia while researching this. There had been unfounded rumors of there being a feud between Todd and John Lennon in the 70’s and Mark David Chapman, John’s assassin, was wearing a Todd Rundgren “Hermit Of Mink Hollow” TV shirt when he shot him. Police even found a copy of his album “Runt: The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren” in Mark’s hotel room. Of course, none of it is remotely Todd’s fault and he in fact toured extensively with another Beatle, Ringo Starr, for many years.

One final tidbit, which I heard a little about back in 1991, was the paternity of actor Liv Tyler. I’d knew about Aerosmith, though wasn’t a big fan, when I heard the story going around that she was singer Steven Tyler’s daughter, but I didn’t know that she had been raised by Todd Rundgren and her mom. She was even going by the name Liv Rundgren up till then. Her mother, former Playboy centerfold Bebe Buell, had an affair with Steven, but believed, quite wisely, that in his then deranged, drug addled state, that Steven would be an unfit father, putting it mildly. But Steven eventually got clean and the truth came out in the end publicly, but Todd and Liv remain close and the rest is history. Todd actually had just gotten remarried a couple years before this show. By this time, he was just about to release “One Long Year”, his 17th studio album, just nine days after this show in fact.

When I first came to this gig, I thought it was, like most, unlikely to produce a live CD or DVD. So, you can imagine my shock when I came up the staircases of the Maritime to discover a jib camera rig set up on the dance floor. To those who don’t know, this rig is a boom device used to mount a camera on one end, and a counterweight with camera controls on the other. You’ve probably seen one once in your life. You get the picture. But there had never been one at the Hall before, so I knew they meant business that night. I took a deep breath, went downstairs, and did the soundcheck as focused as possible. The good news is mixing the bands was pretty simple. The first band, Keno, was just a four piece rock act and Todd’s band was just a power trio. When you’re as tight as Todd and his guys were, it was easy to do my job. But I’m sure there was no goof I could pull that night that Mr. Rundgren couldn’t fix in the studio afterwards.

It was a very civilized crowd there at the Hall that night. Todd’s music isn’t really the kind of stuff you dance to, so they pretty much stood there transfixed, bobbing their heads a little. He opened with the first two songs off the new album, “I Hate My Frickin ISP” and “Yer Fast (And I Like It)”. A couple songs later, he described “Number 1 Lowest Common Denominator” as “the first song I wrote about sex.” I thought it was cute that Todd played “Bang On The Drum All Day” solo on the ukulele, introducing it as a “old Hawaiian war chant.” His fellow trio partners, Kasim Sulton on bass and Trey Sabatelli on drums were excellent and they both got to do impressive solos at the encore during “The Ikon”. I enjoyed watching it again here while writing. It’d been a while. I have to admit that the jib camera looked good, making me wish the Maritime had one all along really. It just occurred to me that this recording would be the LAST one, chronologically speaking, I recorded at the Hall that eventually produced a CD or DVD. Whoa… It’s a good one to end with I suppose.

https://archive.org/details/todd-rundgren-maritime-hall-61100

Live 105’s BFD 2000: Limp Bizkit, Stone Temple Pilots, Moby, Slipknot, The Offspring, Cypress Hill, Third Eye Blind, Incubus, Godsmack, Snake River Conspiracy, Shoreline, Mountain View, Fri., June 16

SETLISTS :

(CYPRESS HILL) : Hand On The Pump, Real Estate, How I Could Just Kill A Man, Insane In The Brain, Cock The Hammer, Checkmate, Can’t Get The Best Of Me, Lick A Shot, A To The K, Rock Star

(THE OFFSPRING) : Bad Habit, All I Want, Walla Walla, Gone Away, Come Out & Play, Staring At The Sun, The Kid’s Aren’t Alright, Gotta Get Away, Smash, Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)

(SLIPKNOT) : [sic], Eyeless, Wait & Bleed, No Life, Liberate, Purity, Prosthetics, Spit It Out, Eeyore, Surfacing

(STONE TEMPLE PILOTS) : Crackerman, Vasoline, Tumble In The Rough, Wicked Garden, Sin, Big Empty, Interstate Love Song, Plush, Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart, Down, Dead & Bloated, Sex Type Thing

(LIMP BIZKIT) : Show Me What You Got, Break Stuff, Just Like This, Faith, Re-Arranged, Counterfeit, Take A Look Around, Nookie

It actually had been four years since I caught the B.F.D. at Shoreline and it always provided a dependable fun time out, at least something for everybody even if it’s a little, shall we say, radio friendly. Some years were better than others, but they were always good. For some reason, I was late to the show, something I abhor, so I ended up missing Everclear open on the main stage. I like them and had seen them plenty by then, but I’m not a huge fan. I just want my money’s worth, damn it. I did make it there in time for the act that followed, Godsmack. They were still pretty new back then having just toured with Limp Bizkit, that night’s headliner, through Europe and were just a few months shy of releasing their second album, “Awake”. Between songs, the lead singer praised the “hot chicks” who were there, but predictably scolded the people up front for sitting while the kids up on the lawn were “working their asses off”. He taunted the people in the seats asking whether they were “too drunk to stand up or way too old to be in this fuckin’ place?” Being in the seats myself, I felt a little self conscious. I couldn’t decipher their setlist, but I do know they played “Going Down” and “Voodoo”.

I had to move fast that day because on top of the second “Dysfunctional” stage, there was also a smaller “Local-Lounge” stage. There, I was able to catch a song from Snake River Conspiracy before I had to bolt over to the Dysfunctional stage in time for Incubus. It had been only a few months since I saw them on the SnoCore tour at The Warfield with Puya, Mr. Bungle, and System Of A Down. I had taped them once at the Maritime as well, but it was nice to get a little closer to them this time. I truly regretted going back to the main stage to catch Third Eye Blind instead of catching AFI on the Local-Lounge stage hat day. Those pompous bastards had the nerve to do an utterly cringe inducing cover of “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones. Frontman and uber-douchebag Stephen Jenkins tried and was unsuccessful in getting the crowd to sing along. If that gut wrenching rendition wasn’t blasphemous enough, Third Eye Blind also did “Baba O’Reilly” by The Who at the end of their set. That one really got me. That band needs a serious ass kicking. It was gratifying to hear people on my tape in the background screaming, “You suck!” at them. At least I’d be seeing The Who on that very same stage a month later where they’d perform that song correctly. Jenkins did mention something about being up on the lawn four years ago “high as a kite”. I wish he had stayed there.

The good news is those obnoxious cream puffs were followed by Cypress Fucking Hill. It was like giving water to a man dying of thirst. Cypress Hill was touring with a full band this time, drums, bass, and guitar in tow. I’m just glad that the predominantly lily white lineup for B.F.D. had at least one act of color. If that wasn’t bad enough, there wasn’t a single woman on either the main or the Dysfunctional stage that year. Cypress Hill’s fifth album, “Skull & Bones”, just dropped in April and they had another hit on their hands with “Rock Superstar”. They would play again at The Fillmore in August, but I’d be overseas in Europe and miss it which is a pity, since they used the recording of their show that night to make the “Live At The Fillmore” album. Geez… The one time I miss them back then. 

The “DJ With No Name” introduced them asking the crowd if anybody snuck in any weed because “now’s the time to use it!” At the end of their set, rapper B-Real reminded them that their “3rd annual Smokeout Festival” was happening in San Bernardino that October, apologizing then for doing a “shameless plug”.

I thought it a strange but enjoyable combination of having The Offspring follow Cypress Hill, but I would be pleasantly surprised to see them touring together again and play The Warfield five months later. Apart from being Californians of the southern variety, on the surface they seem to have little in common, musically or otherwise, but it worked. The Offspring would release their “Conspiracy Of One” album that November which though not as successful as earlier stuff, would still go platinum. 

I made sure to bounce back to the Dysfunctional stage in time to get a good spot for Slipknot. I knew that one would be popular. There had been rumors that Slipknot and Limp Bizkit, who were headlining that night, had been feuding, but whatever came between them, they ultimately resolved. Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst even joked later that night during his set that “besides all the shit talk, those motherfuckers are bad as fuck!” Years later, Fred would pay tribute to Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison at his service in Des Moines when he died in 2021. I found some footage of this bonkers set Slipknot did at B.F.D. on YouTube, but it’s pretty jittery. I literally had just seen Slipknot headline at The Warfield six weeks before this and their set was basically the same one. They only had one album by then after all. But they kicked ass once again and the mosh pit was beyond belief. I’d see them one more time the following year also at Shoreline, but they’d be on the main stage for Ozzfest with Black Sabbath. 

They opened their set with the recording of the old country ditty “Get Behind Me Satan & Push” by Billie Jo Spears as they’d done the other times I saw them. I managed to fend off the swirling throngs of shirtless tough guys and god knows it was loud enough, so the recording came out better than expected. Singer Corey Taylor said before “Wait & Bleed” that they’d just gotten back from Germany and asked if we missed them. “Germany can fuck off compared to you crazy motherfuckers!!!”, he growled. Afterwards, he asked if “any of you crazy motherfuckers” were at their recent Warfield show and I raised my hand to be counted. 

Corey went on to tell the crowd “a little story” saying, “I don’t know if you guys noticed this or paid any attention, but I was walkin’ in here and there was this no life motherfucker holding up a ‘Be True To Jesus” and ‘Burn In Hell’ sign. I don’t give a shit what religion you are. So, I was just going to fuckin’ walk by. But as I was walking by, that dickless fuckin’ Christian cocksucker had the fuckin’ balls to turn to me and my boys and say, ‘You know what? Slipknot sucks!’” The crowd booed loudly and then Corey continued, “And you know I can’t keep my mouth shut. So I stopped, I fuckin’ looked at him and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s nice. But you know what? Jesus is fuckin’ old news! You have to get the fuck over it!’ I don’t give a shit about a god who can tell me what the fuck I can fuckin’ listen to, god damn it!!! If Satan lets me listen to my own music, so fuckin’ be it! I wanna see your fuckin’ fists in the fuckin’ air right now! ‘Cus this song goes out to any motherfucker out there who thinks they’re better than you or me or anybody on this fuckin’ stage, or anybody outside this fence! I wanna see how high you can jump!!!”

Corey got everybody to do that crouch on the ground bit during “Spit It Out”again, repeating, “Get down on the fuckin’ ground…” and then getting them to bounce up “like somebody just fucked you in the asshole!” and go totally nuts when the drums dropped in again. I remember that mosh pit kicked up a lot of dust making breathing a little challenging. I took off after that song to go back to the main stage for Moby. Getting almost the entire set of Slipknot prevented me from getting most of Moby’s on the main stage, but I already had recorded him once the year before at the Maritime and I would go on to see him perform twice in a row headlining at The Warfield just two months later. I was seeing a lot of Moby back then but when choosing between them, Slipknot wins easily. Sorry Moby. I did catch Moby doing a minute or two of guitar solo on stage before doing “Body Rock”, saying he felt the urge to “jerk off”.

I actually was excited to see Stone Temple Pilots the most that night. I hadn’t seen them since my first time, catching them at The Fillmore back in 1994. They were too big for that place then already. They had recently put out their platinum selling “No. 4” album. The video for their new single “Sour Girl” had Sarah Michelle Gellar from “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” in it, though they didn’t play it that night. And the Pilots were tight that show, really the highlight of the festival. Frontman Scott Weiland had developed a reputation for his conspicuous consumption of substances and had been in and out of rehab in the intervening years, but he seemed together that evening. He was his old shirtless boogaloo machine again. Scott joked, “Pleasant to be in the merry land of sex & acid!” before doing “Wicked Garden”. He also got a little cheeky before they performed down saying, “Well,  you’re all so polite. We’ve got to break out one written by Stone Cold Steve Austin. So here you have it…”

They would do a little jazzy introduction before finishing their set with “Sex Type Thing”, walking off stage to the sound of police sirens. This would be the final time I’d see Stone Temple Pilots though. The band would break up in 2002 and Scott would go on to join Velvet Revolver with the members of Guns N’ Roses (minus Axl Rose obviously). I was lucky enough to see Velvet Revolver a couple times at The Warfield, once in ’04 and then again in ’07. The Pilots would get together briefly in 2013, but Scott and the rest of the band would end up embroiled in lawsuits over rights to the band’s name. Scott would then sadly die of an overdose overdose in 2015.

It was a little weird seeing Limp Bizkit again after the debacle of Woodstock ’99 where they seemed to bear the most blame for, at least amongst the artists that performed there. I mean, Moby, The Offspring, Everclear, and Godsmack, who were on this bill earlier that night, all performed at that doomed festival, but everyone was looking in Limp Bizkit’s direction when that festival took a steep nose dive into oblivion during their set and afterwards. Still, that disastrous performance didn’t harm their career in the short term. Their 3rd album, “Chocolate Starfish & The Hot Dog Flavored Water” would come out four months later and would be so successful, it would sell a million copies in its first week alone before ultimately going six times platinum. So, whatever criticism I would have for Mr. Durst and company is tempered by the fact they’re rich and I’m not. Scott Weiland actually co wrote and sang on a song on that album. But this would be the peak of Limp Bizkit’s career and indeed for nu-metal in general. Guitarist Wes Borland would leave the Limp Bizkit the following year and I’d see them just one more time opening for Korn at The Warfield in 2003.

But no band in their right mind would want to follow Stone Temple Pilots and sure enough, more than half the crowd had emptied out of Shoreline by the time Limp Bizkit stormed on stage. I remember it was freezing cold by then too and the seats up front were so deserted, Fred encouraged the “people in the front to scream for all the people in the back to get up here!” By then, the ushers stopped bothering and people from up on the lawn were pouring down front in droves freely. I was able to slither my way closer getting down to about the fifth row. Fred rightly praised other bands that night including Cypress Hill and Stone Temple Pilots, asking the crowd, “How many killer songs Stone Temple Pilots have!?!” 

Despite it having been a long day and evening, whenever I do a festival, I always make a point to stick it out to the bitter end. Every time I leave before the last song is finished, I always feel a lack of closure. So, I did the courtesy of sticking around for Limp Bizkit, braving the cold. Fred did however drop one dis that evening, dedicating “Counterfeit” to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Trent as well as Marilyn Manson were feuding with him around then as well. Limp Bizkit, Stone Temple Pilots, and Godsmack from this festival would also go on to also play the WXRK Dysfunctional Family Picnic in New Jersey the following week. I’d return to Shoreline to attend the B.F.D.’s the following two years in a row, but those would be the last one’s I’d do. Live 105 stopped doing the B.F.D. after 2017, changing formats and management in recent years. I hope they do it again some day. The bay area needs more festivals.

Live 105’s BFD 2000: Limp Bizkit, Stone Temple Pilots, Moby, Slipknot, The Offspring, Cypress Hill, Third Eye Blind, Incubus, Godsmack, Snake River Conspiracy, Shoreline, Mountain View, Fri., June 16

https://archive.org/details/limp-bizkit-shoreline-61600

https://archive.org/…/stone-temple-pilots-shoreline-61600

https://archive.org/details/moby-shoreline-61600

https://archive.org/details/slipknot-shoreline-61600

https://archive.org/details/the-offspring-shoreline-61600

https://archive.org/details/cypress-hill-shoreline-61600

https://archive.org/details/third-eye-blind-shoreline-61600

https://archive.org/details/incubus-shoreline-61600

https://archive.org/…/snake-river-conspiracy-shoreline…

https://archive.org/details/godsmack-shoreline-61600

The Ventures, Casino Royale, Tiki Tones, Electric Peach, Maritime Hall, SF, Sat., June 17

This would be the second and final time The Ventures would perform at the Maritime and the last time I’d see any of the original members alive sadly. Pete had recorded them the first time around the previous year and though I was jealous then, I totally understood, primarily because they spawned from his generation and were one of the few bands that played at the Hall he actually knew. That was an epic show and we had hoped that a live album and/or DVD would come from it, but it never materialized. The Ventures instead went on to record one in Japan a year later. Still, I was honored to have this one under my belt this time around. Anyone on Earth who counts themselves a fan of surf guitar rock knows and owes a debt of gratitude to this venerable instrumental band.

There were also an interesting variety of openers that night, starting with the local synth pop duo, Electric Peach. Following them were the Tiki Tones, who graced the stage in bright, colorful Hawaiian shirts. As their name suggests, they were the very definition of mellow lounge rock and the band members had given themselves tiki inspired stage names like Koro on drums, Lono and Shag on guitars, Ku on bass, and of coarse Lord Wahini on organ. They had just released their third album “The Leisure Experiment” that year. Finally, there was Casino Royale, a go-go dance band that had just formed the year before this, comprised of members of several local bands including Idiot Flesh, the Clubfoot Orchestra, Charming Hostess, and Eskimo. There are actually a few bands that claim this name, including one from Croatia, but this one had just completed a tribute album to Burt Bacharach. All and all, the three set the informal mood of the night and I’m sure many a tropical cocktail was consumed by the audience.

This night was actually a welcome change of pace from the testosterone heavy B.F.D. festival I had attended the night before, headlined by Limp Bizkit, the obnoxious kings of the frat rock nu metal of the time. Song after song, The Ventures soothed my jangled nerves with their syrupy sweet guitar licks, covering all their surf rock classics like “Pipeline”, “Walk Don’t Run”, and “Hawaii 5-0” as well as covers of “Runaway”, House Of The Rising Sun”, and “Wipeout”. I knew I was blessed to get this one, but like I mentioned before, it would be the last time. Bob Bogle passed away in 2009, Nokie Edwards in 2018, Gerry McGee in 2019 and finally Don Wilson just last year. But their contribution to their genre will never be forgotten particularly since they were rightly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2008 by none other than John Fogerty from Credence Clearwater Revival.

Dave Vanian & His Phantom Chords, The Amazing Crowns, Slim’s, SF, Wed., July 5

SETLISTS :

THE AMAZING CROWNS : Still Royal, Shivering In The Corner, Baby’s Out On Bail, Halos & Horns, Perfect Sin, Hat Size, Harem Caravan, 1965 GTO, Chop Shop, Sin City, Do The Devil

DAVE VANIAN & HIS PHANTOM CHORDS : Haunted Garage, Voodoo Doll, Piece Of My Heart, This House Is Haunted, Pretty Girl, Born To Be Wicked, (unknown), You & I, Jezebel, Chase The Wild Wind, Town Without Pity, After The Lights Go Out, Whiskey & Me, (unknown), Big Town, Frenzy, (unknown)

It had been about two and a half weeks since my last show, a bit of a stretch for me back then, but a welcome one considering how busy I was. Ironically, it has been a spell since I had written since I had been mired knee deep in the Dreamforce convention in town, a show I just wrapped up after twelve long days. I had been seeing the discs of Dave Vanian & His Phantom Chords sitting patiently on the corner of my writing desk that whole stretch collecting dust and it’s a relief to finally get to it. I had taken the time to listen to them before my work commenced and was able to transcribe all but three of the songs they performed in their set. Those other three I presume are ancient covers whose titles have escaped me. The music world had a shock the week before this show at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark where during that rain soaked day, the crowd surged, trampling 9 people to death and injuring 26 during Pearl Jam’s set. Distraught from the tragedy, PJ nearly called it quits, but after a sojourn to collect themselves emotionally, returned to the stage the following month and I’m happy to say they are still together to this day 23 years later.

Though Mr. Vanian has never left the stage and was in fine form. I was actually lucky to catch this band of his, a side project from his usual endless touring as lead singer of The Damned. Dave had put this so-called “gothabilly” act together after The Damned’s (short lived) break up in 1989 and they had put out their first and only self titled album six years later. This project of Dave’s would be brief and he would soon return to The Damned and hasn’t toured with The Phantom Chords since, at least as far as I know. Their style as the name suggested was a bit of a mash up between goth rock and rockabilly. In the beginning, Dave had enlisted former Damned guitarist Roman Jugg and bassist Bryn Merrick, though neither of them were present in this touring band. The show was a steal, costing only $12 to get in, a bargain even way back then.

Seriously, I could have sworn I’d seen this opening act, the Amazing Crowns before either at the Maritime or elsewhere, but I found nothing else in my records. Suffice to say, I caught them at least this time. Anyway, this swing band from Providence, Rhode Island had just released their “Royal” studio album that June as well as their “Playback Live” album, recorded at a three night stint in their hometown and released the previous March. They had actually at first been called the Amazing Royal Crowns, but had to change their name in 1997 over a dispute with the Royal Crown Revue, another swing band of note around that time. I was glad to catch them too since they disbanded two years later, although they did a reunion in 2015 in Boston opening for the Bosstones and one more time in Chicago for a tribute to friend and touring partner Eric “HiFi” Kish of Hi-Fi & The Roadrunners who had died in a motorcycle accident.

They got the crowd warmed up and rowdy, introduced to the stage as “born to be bad and bad since birth! It’s the heart achin’, it’s the bone breakin’ sounds of the Amazing Crowns!” Though it was mostly their original material, they did one cover which they called a “song by a roots rockabilly band. It’s very obscure. They’re kinda Australian, Scottish. They’re a very obscure rockabilly band that went by the initials AC/DC!” They then went on to do a swinging version of “Sin City”. Their singer, Jason “King” Kendall later introduced a couple members of the band saying one “got the best place by Fenway Park! He knows more about Grand Funk Railroad than anybody!… Judd Williams on drums!” The he asked, “You thinking ‘How do I find a guy like that on stand up bass?’ Guys ask ‘How can I be a guy like that?… You can’t… On the big doghouse bass, Jack ‘The Swinger’ Hanlon!” King went on finally asking, “What can I say about him that hasn’t already been said? J.D. Burgess on guitar!”

Warmed up by the Amazing Crowns swinging antics, everybody got their dancing shoes on when Dave began his vampirish baritone crooning, opening with “Haunted Garage”. He followed it with “Voodoo Doll” saying he was going to “take y’all down to the Louisiana swamp.” He joked that he later got through “Pretty Girl” by “the skin of my teeth” and that “some of us know the songs” before they continued with “Born To Be Wicked”. Though I didn’t know those aforementioned covers, one cover I and everybody in the house knew for certain was his passionate rendition of “Town Without Pity” by Gene Pitney. Near the end of the set, Dave introduced “Big Town” saying “this is where we get out in the car and drive across the Nevada desert and we go to Las Vegas.” I wish I had known that Dave and the band were going to play at the Covered Wagon the following night. I would have enjoyed seeing him again, particularly since like I said this would be the only time I’d see him with the Phantom Chords. Still, I would only have to wait a year for him to return singing for The Damned at the Great American Music Hall and I have seen Dave with them countless times since.

Dave Vanian & His Phantom Chords, The Amazing Crowns, Slim’s, SF, Wed., July 5

https://archive.org/…/dave-vanian-his-phantom-chords…

https://archive.org/details/the-amazing-crowns-slims-7500

Travis, Leona Naess, Fill., SF, Mon., July 17

SETLIST : All I Want To Do Is Rock, Good Feeling, Writing To Reach You, As You Are, Driftwood, The Fear, Good Day To Die, Why Does It Always Rain On Me?, Turn, Safe, Coming Around, Slide Show, Blue Flashing Light, (encore), Just The Faces Change, …Baby One More Time, The Weight, Happy

Though Travis had been playing in Scotland since 1990, they were still relatively new to us Yanks. Their first album “Good Feeling” had come out in 1997 and their latest one, “The Man Who” had just dropped in stores in 1999 and would go on to go triple platinum. One of the hidden tracks on the American version of that album, “Blue Flashing Light”, was played at this show. Travis had been touring a lot, stopping a few times in the bay area then, though I had missed them up till this night. They opened for Oasis at the Berkeley Community Theater that April as well as an in store set at Virgin Megastore earlier that day, but I was busy recording the Dance Hall Crashers at the Maritime. Before that they had did a gig at Bottom Of Hill that January. So, they were making up for lost time with us folks in the states, playing for a fourth time in just seven months. Incidentally, they’re named after Harry Dean Stanton’s character in the Wim Wenders film, “Paris, TX”, a very solemn movie for such an upbeat band.

They got singer-songwriter Leona Naess to open that night. She was English by birth, but had been in New York City for some time, having originally studied anthropology at New York University before switching her major to music. Her father was briefly married to Diana Ross, but they divorced in 1982 when she was a kid. Her debut album, “Comatised”, had just come out that March and two of her songs, “Charm Attack” and “Lazy Days”, were used in the soundtrack for the teen comedy “Whatever It Takes” with James Franco. I have never seen it, but apparently it was a box office bomb and the critics thought it sucked. Too bad for Leona. I only recorded a couple of her songs during her set, so I don’t know if she played either of those, but I do know she did “Chase” and “Panic-Stricken”.

Travis got on stage to the organ intro of “Your Time Is Gonna Come” by Led Zeppelin, a respectful nod to the Fillmore’s hippie legacy. I was immediately impressed with the powerful voice of their frontman, Fran Healy. Seriously, there are only a few people in rock who can belt it out with that kind of force such as Maynard James Keenan, Ann Wilson, Ronnie James Dio, or Chris Cornell. Whenever I hear such a powerful voice, I do grow concerned that the singer will ultimately ruin their voice doing that, especially when Fran does the chorus to “Turn”. Travis is still around today, but I haven’t seen them since 2001, so I can’t say if Fran’s voice still has a punch. Anyway, one thing that did bug me about Fran was the way he smiled when he sang.  He doesn’t mean any harm by it obviously. That’s just one of my pet peeves when singers do that. But I have to hand it to Fran, the girls just melted for that accent of his.

They played a couple songs that wouldn’t be released until their next album “Afterglow” in 2001, “Coming Around” and “Safe”, though the latter actually had been written in 1992. During “Driftwood”, they had the mirror ball light up for the crowd. Always cheerful, after their syrupy sweet “Why Does It Always Rain On Me” which had all the girls singing along to the chorus, Fran suggested the audience go out the next day and “do something nice for someone… If a lot of people do that, we can have a revolution.” Later, he mused that “songs are like fireworks. When they explode for everyone to see, it’s the most beautiful thing, and the record companies, the radio stations fade away… We use these stars to navigate this crazy thing called life.” Corny as it might be, I appreciate the sentiment. Seriously, listening to Travis makes me fell like a cold hearted cynic and reminds me I gotta lighten up a little… maybe smile more. Fran did make a point to praise the photo in the Fillmore lobby of The Who performing the last note of the last song of one of their shows at Winterland. And as luck would have it, the next show I would see would be… you guessed it… The Who at Shoreline.

One thing I liked about Travis’ gig was their eclectic choices for a couple of songs they did during their encore. I don’t think anybody was quite prepared for when they did a rather straight forward, acoustic version of “…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears. Granted, Britney was at the height of her popularity, but it was like none of us knew how to feel just then. In another nod to our Fillmore’s hippie forefathers, Travis made the wise decision to make their next tune “The Weight” by The Band. Fran took some time to tell the crowd that The Band performed their last show at Winterland and that Martin Scorsese filmed it to make the concert movie “The Last Waltz”.  They nailed the harmonies on that one too. Travis ended the night with a rousing version of “Happy”, Fran doing a duck walk and guitarist Andrew Dunlop doing karate kicks and rolling around on his back. They also had a good poster that night thankfully. Though I had missed them all those times before, it would only be two short months until I’d see Travis again as one of the opening acts for the Alice Now & Zen Festival in the park with Beck and The Go-Go’s.

Travis, Leona Naess, Fill., SF, Mon., July 17

https://archive.org/details/travis-fillmore-71700

https://archive.org/details/leona-naess-fillmore-71700

The Who, Unamerican, Shoreline, Mon., August 21

SETLIST : I Can’t Explain, Substitute, Anyway Anyhow Anywhere, I Don’t Even Know Myself, My Wife, Bargain, Baba O’Riley, Drowned, The Kids Are Alright, Relay, Pinball Wizard, The Real Me, Who Are You, Magic Bus, Behind Blue Eyes, You Better You Bet, 5:15, Won’t Get Fooled Again, (encore) Naked Eye, Let’s See Action, My Generation

After seeing The Who for the first time at the Bridge School Benefit the previous October, I was determined to see them again at one of their own shows. Bridge School’s always acoustic and let’s just say The Who definitely needs to be heard electric. And like at Bridge School before, I had brought along my dear ol’ mom in tow.  The Bridge School show had gone on so late before, going all the way until midnight, though actually it was 1 AM because of the daylight savings time switch that night. So, I thought it was only fair to her and myself that we also see The Who at a more appropriate hour. The Who had been busy touring for the first time as a five piece since 1982. They had Zak Starkey, the son of Ringo Starr, on drums and I have to say seeing him play for the first time, that he was impressive. His father taught him well. I mean, no one could replace Keith Moon, but Zak effectively channeled his manic monkey-like energy. The Who requires a heavy hitter. They also had veteran keyboardist John “Rabbit” Bundrick who worked with Pete Townshend and The Who on and off since 1977. Apart from a laundry list of world class musicians he’s played for including Roger Waters, Free, and Bob Marley, Rabbit has the distinction for being the principal musician for the cult film masterpiece “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”.

But there was one crowning achievement, the highest such in my opinion that any persons could aspire to, The Who had the honor of receiving in that fine year of our Lord 2000. Yes, The Who got to play themselves on an episode of “The Simpsons”. And it wasn’t just any episode. “A Tale Of Two Springfields” was “The Simpsons” 250th episode. Apparently though, Pete thought others would be doing their voices like in “Yellow Submarine”, so he blew it off. Personally, I think he was lying and either didn’t want to do it or was bitching about not being paid enough for it. In a strange twist, the show actually got Pete’s brother Paul to do his voice for him. The public was none the wiser. Roger Daltrey on the other hand was ecstatic about doing his part, having been a fan of the show for years. In fact, when he met Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer and many others, they debated about which one of them was more in awe of the other. Anyway, it was a very funny episode, one of “The Simpsons” finest, ending with the band playing “Won’t Get Fooled Again” which they also played at this show.

The circumstances of this Shoreline show were actually unique in all the history of my concerts. To this day, it remains the only concert I’ve seen after stepping off an international flight earlier that day. I had just finished a visit to my dear old dad in Amsterdam as well as stretches checking out Paris and Luxembourg. On a sad note, when I had just arrived in the old country, the Concorde had just crashed in Paris, so everybody was bummed, especially in Paris understandably. To make matters worse, while I was there, the Russian submarine called the Kursk sank, killing all 118 of its crew. Still, I enjoyed myself all the same. It’s hard not to have a good time in Amsterdam. So, when I flew back, I made sure there was enough wiggle room for mom to pick me up at the airport and for us to grab a quick bite to eat before the show began. Thankfully, all the stars were aligned, my flight was on time, and I didn’t even feel jet lagged.

There was an opening act also from England called Unamerican, fronted by former World Party guitarist Steve McEwan. I only recorded one of their songs and don’t really remember much about them. The only had one album, and though they worked on a second one, it was never released. We were up on the lawn and couldn’t hear them that well anyway. The Who got on soon after and we were treated to a wide array of their songs for nearly three hours starting with “I Can’t Explain”. Clearly winning the fashion contest for the night, bassist John Entwistle was donning a lime green leather jacket over a rainbow colored shirt and bolo tie. His guitar strap had a print of a skeleton’s arm and hand along it, draping over John’s lanky shoulder. Pete was his usual chatty, smart aleck self, joking to the purple lit crowd as he came out, “You’re all purple. Purple people like last time!”

They quickly followed with the golden oldies “Substitute” and “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”. By the latter, Pete had already busted out some of his trademark windmill arm spins and some impressive guitar solos in that lengthy new arrangement. People often associate The Who with their studio work and stuff like the “Tommy” movie and stage musical, but they forget just how hard Pete shreds on the guitar live. Afterwards, Pete worked a bit tuning his guitar, complaining that it sounded “too clangy.” He then went on to talk about projects that were never completed before they released the “Who’s Next” album, including one called “Lifehouse”, an unfinished, multi-media rock opera follow up to “Tommy” which they had around 30 songs written on and off over the years. They then performed one of them called “I Don’t Even Know Myself”. 

Afterwards, Pete said that it was “nice to be back in this place of good works, to be bringing Who brutalism to this lovely place”. He then puckish praised John calling him their “resident bass player”. He responded, “I’m always here.” Pete joked, “He’s very green tonight” and John introduced the next song saying that “I wrote this while I was walking my dogs” and did “My Wife”. Pete got a little peeved at the usual bunch of lazy rich people sitting up front before they did “Bargain”. He playfully chided them, “You guys really wanna be here or you want to be somewhere else? Because if you want to be somewhere else, you can go wherever you want to. If you’ve had too much prozac, or too much to drink, or too many gins, or paid too much money for your seats, I’ll give you your money back! You can go and watch Kenny G. You know, why buy a front seat if you’re going to sit in it? I’m sure I owe you something.” Then the offending patrons started to stand and he went on, “No, I’m not making you stand up. I’m just finding somebody to hurt.” They followed that with the thunderous rock anthem “Baba O’Reilly” which Roger finished with a harmonica solo. They cooled things off a little having Pete do a solo acoustic version of “Drowned” and then Roger put on an acoustic guitar of his own, joining the rest of the band for an extended version of “The Kids Are Alright”.

Pete did one more of his little rants before doing “Relay” introducing it as “this is another one of those ‘Lifehouse’ songs. This one was definitely from the second batch of writing. I got more of a grip. I’d done some work on the script which Roger helped with. This was in 1974 or 1975. We were coming back to it again and by that time, I’d really formulated this idea in the future…” Then Pete paused hearing someone yelling at him in the crowd and grinned, “We don’t take requests. We don’t. You know, we get a lot of requests for ‘I Can See For Miles.” And then he rolled his eyes. “You know, there’s five of us up here … and only two of us are really skilled in the art of singing.” Roger quipped back, “Only one of us here tonight.” Pete went on, “Anyway, I started to form this idea of what would be necessary for rock & roll to reach China. And it wasn’t the internet. It wasn’t telephone lines but it was some kind of cable linked experience that we’ll share. We’’l jack into it and we would be here rocking and they would be there rocking and we would be rocking and we’d all rock together. But it would be like Ozzy Osbourne on acid!”

Pete laughed, “And thank god we never got to make the movie, ‘cus it was as tacky as that in some places. And a lot of thoughts behind it were about, you know, the fact that we’re trying to recognize the fact back in the 1970’s, rock was trying to be a new church. It wasn’t worthy to be a new church but we did know how to congregate. That’s what we do. We congregate, don’t we? And sometimes we congregate and feel something very special and sometimes we congregate and the guy on stage tells you to stand up or sit down. We pay him too much or too little. And sometimes we get really, really high without smoking any drugs. And the next song is very specifically about that network and it’s called ‘Relay’!”

After the obligatory “Pinball Wizard”, they went into a blistering long version of “The Real Me” and though I thought Roger’s voice was a little shaky in the beginning, he was on point big time by then and nailed it. Roger even made a wisecrack later that “Mark Twain was right”, (presumably about the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco), and he was “fuckin’ freezing” saying that he was just getting warmed up well over an hour into their set. They did a long and dynamic version of “Magic Bus” and John gave a jaw dropping bass solo during “5:15”. I noticed that there were roman numerals inlaid on his bass frets. They finished their set with a climactic “Won’t Get Fooled Again” The Who soon returned and began their encore with two obscure ones, “Naked Eye” and “Let’s See Action”, before wrapping up the night with a sprawling, 16 minute, epic version of “My Generation”. Seriously, that one went all kinds of places stylistically, from eerily quiet to thunderous, ending with a bombastic, feedback soaked climax. 

I’m sad to say this was the last time I’d see The Who, at least The Who with John Entwistle. John would pass away only two years later just before they were starting a new tour. So this would be the last full tour with him. They said it was a heart attack, but he had cocaine in his system. People always were distracted by Keith Moon’s relentless partying and Pete’s guitar smashing antics, but John could tie one off as well the rest of them. He just did it more quietly. At least I can say that I got to see him three times live, those two times with The Who and that one time he did a solo show at The Fillmore. I was also relieved that I was through this show, I was finally able to cajole my brother Alex to see The Who. He worshiped them for God’s sake and frankly he’s the one, like with so many other great bands, who introduced them to me in the first place. The final straw that broke his proverbial camel’s back was that I pointed out the fact that his own MOTHER had seen The Who twice and he hadn’t seen them once, not to mention the time we saw Pete at Bridge School playing solo in 1996. But unfortunately Alex had tickets to see The Who that fateful tour when John died. His show at the Hollywood Bowl was to be the first of that tour, but to The Who’s credit, just a mere four days after John’s passing, they soldiered on. The band enlisted session pro Pino Palladino to fill in for him and he remained as their bassist for fifteen more years. Zak’s still playing drums for them too. Incidentally, I always thought Alex’s bass style was similar to Entwistle’s, an excellent one to emulate to be sure.

I’m happy to say that the video of The Who’s set from that evening at Shoreline is on YouTube in almost its entirety, missing only “My Generation” at the very end. The Who finished that tour in 2000 and Pete managed to get through it all smashing his guitar live on stage only once at Jonas Beach near New York City. They wrapped it all up with shows at Royal Albert Hall back home in London which had such notable guests performing alongside them as Paul Weller, Eddie Vedder, Noel Gallagher, Nigel Kennedy, and Bryan Adams. The recordings from that night were later used to make a live CD and DVD. The Who started supporting the Teenage Cancer Trust in 2000 as well and the following year, Pete would get a Lifetime Achievement award from the Grammys. Anyway, I did see Roger one more time in 2009 on his own. He was performing solo at a giant party for Oracle at their big convention. I was working it at the Moscone Center, but the party was on Treasure Island. Yet I managed to stowaway on one of the fleet of buses going out there and though I was dead tired from work and had to be up in the morning again for it, I pressed on. That’s what The Who would do, right? I would have gone just for Roger, but Aerosmith was also there and I’d never seen them before and haven’t since. It was worth it. 

The Who, Shoreline, Mon., August 21

https://archive.org/details/the-who-shoreline-82100

https://archive.org/details/the-who-bootleg-shoreline-82100

A Perfect Circle, Sunna, War., SF, Tues., September 6

SETLIST : Magdalena, The Hollow, Sleeping Beauty, Orestes, Brena, Thomas, Thinking Of You, Rose, Renholder, 3 Libras, Diary Of A Lovesong, Over, Judith

Please forgive me, gentle readers, if I don’t have a whole lot to say about this show, but it’s for a few reasons. First and foremost, it seems the recording of this show has gone AWOL which isn’t unto itself entirely too surprising. Considering the piles of tapes and CDs I’ve rummaged through all this time, one or two shows are bound to get lost in the shuffle. Hopefully, it will turn up someday and I can amend this entry. Secondly, this show comes right on the heels of their first show at The Warfield the previous October. And considering the setlists were probably all but identical, you can understand how I could easily get the two shows confused for each other. Lastly, it was 23 fucking years ago, be kind. For more info on the band and its history, check out the review of the previous show. Thank you again for your patience.

That being said, I was at least able to fish out their setlist online and there was a poster that night which also shared the date for the show at The Fillmore in Denver they did the week before this. That at least is unique about this show since despite having other posters with show dates of other gigs in the city, area, and/or around the state, this is the only one I can think of which also included one from out of state. Incidentally, The Fillmore in Denver had just opened the year before, one of many to bear that famous name to open around the country, including venues in Philadelphia and Charlotte, NC. By then, A Perfect Circle’s debut album, “Mer De Noms” had been out almost four months and would go platinum by (appropriately) that Halloween as well as win “Best Debut Album” at the California Music Awards that year. This was around the time that singer Maynard James Keenen was starting to wear more and more elaborate costumes for his performances with A Perfect Circle as well as his other band, Tool, partially in an effort to no longer be recognized on the street. I think he was wearing a long blonde wig at this one. 

A Perfect Circle had been on the road briefly that spring opening for Nine Inch Nails for their “Fragility v2.0” tour. But on this headlining tour, they had brought along Sunna, an industrial rock band from Bristol who had just released their debut album, “One Minute Silence”, exactly a month before this show. I was happy that Maynard and the gang once again did their mash-up, “Diary Of A Lovesong”, comprised of “Diary Of A Madman” by Black Sabbath and “Lovesong” by The Cure, an inspired pairing. After eight grueling months, A Perfect Circle’s tour ended and Maynard would rejoin Tool to record what would be their “Lateralus” album. A Perfect Circle would soon tour the following year, though I would not see them again until 2003 at Shoreline for the last Lollapalooza tour.

Alice Cooper, The Donnas, War., SF, Fri., September 15

SETLISTS :

(THE DONNAS) : Are You Going To Move It For Me, Hyperactive, Check It Out, Skin Tight, Do You Want To Hit It, Hook It Up, Well Done, Hey I’m Going To Be Your Girl, Get You Alone, Get Out Of My Room, Living After Midnight, Doin’ Donuts, Zero

(ALICE COOPER) : Brutal Planet, Gimme, Go To Hell, Blow Me A Kiss, I’m Eighteen, Feed My Frankenstein, Wicked Young Man, Dead Babies, Ballad Of Dwight Fry, I Love The Dead, Black Widow Jam, No More Mr. Nice Guy, It’s Hot Tonight, Caught In A Dream, It’s The little Things, Poison, Take It Like A Woman, Only Women Bleed, You Drive Me Nervous, Under My Wheels, School’s Out, (encore), Billion Dollar Baby, My Generation, Elected

Part of me was actually happy that it had been so long in the career of one Mr.  Vincent Damon Furnier AKA Alice Cooper that I would finally see him perform. Sometimes it takes a while for me to appreciate the impact of such a rock and roll pioneer as he. Alice had always been around when I was growing up though, his hits “School’s Out” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy” ubiquitous on the radio. His gruesome, unmistakable visage would appear on the TV from time time, from his alliance with legendary wrestler and fellow serpent enthusiast Jake “The Snake” Roberts on WWF to his hilarious cameo in the film “Wayne’s World”. Alice had hit a rough patch in the early 80’s with alcohol and drugs, and not only cleaned himself up, but helped Dave Mustaine of Megadeth clean up too when he was on tour opening for him. It wasn’t until much later in the 90’s that I learned that it was Alice’s song “I’m Eighteen” that Johnny Rotten used for his impromptu audition for the Sex Pistols that fateful day at Viviane Westwood’s boutique. Johnny’s mom was a big fan. I also learned that, like the Grateful Dead, because of the increasing size of his live audience in the early 70’s, that it demanded that his live stage system upscale to meet the firepower arenas required. Necessity was truly the mother of invention and partially through his efforts, line arrays and advanced monitor systems were soon commonplace.

But influence and technical stuff aside, Alice was a cultural phenomenon. He was part of the proto-punk movement emerging from Detroit in the late 60’s along such contemporaries as The Stooges and the MC5. Originally, he wanted to call his band Nazz, but Todd Rundgren had already laid claim to that name. Ironically, I had just recorded Todd’s live DVD at the Maritime just weeks before this show. In need of a new name, he chose Alice Cooper, being seemingly innocuous and a funny contrast to his macabre stage persona which he cobbled together from Betty Davis in “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?” and the character of The Great Tyrant in “Barbarella”. It didn’t take long for the American public and then the world to clutch their pearls in terror at this diminutive midwesterner which catapulted him into the limelight. 

Fast forward about thirty years, and there I was on the dance floor of the Warfield awaiting his arrival to the stage. Alice had turned 52 years old that year, just a year older than I am now, incidentally being born the day after my wife who had also grew up in Michigan near Detroit. He and the band had just played in Russia for the first time that and had also recorded a live DVD at the Hammersmith Apollo that July.  Earlier that year in February, he had taken part in a cavalcade of stars in Melbourne, Australia including Roger Daltrey (who I had just seen with The Who three and a half weeks before this show), Peter Frampton, Paul Rogers, flanked by a 30 piece rock symphony and 10 person choir, doing a variety of rock standards by The Beatles, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and Queen. As a nod to Roger, Alice played “My Generation” for his encore that night and imagine most if not all the tour. Mr. Cooper was promoting his (gulp!) 14th studio album then, “Brutal Planet”, which had taken a more industrial sound than his previous work, and we were treated to six of the new songs that show. 

But as luck would have it, what thunderstruck me the most that night was the opening act, The Donnas. There had been talk of this band of very young ladies from down the peninsula in Palo Alto, but I hadn’t heard of seen them at all until this show. They had all grown up together down there, meeting in the 8th grade, and forming other bands calling themselves “Ragady Ann” and “The Electrocutes”, (God, I love that name), before morphing into The Donnas. They adopted the stage names, corresponding to the initials of their real last names as Donna A. (Brett Anderson) on vocals, Donna R. (Allison Robertson) on guitar, Donna F. (Maya Ford) on bass, and Donna C. (Torry Castellano) on drums. Perhaps it was a nod to punk rock pioneers The Ramones who used their band name for their last names. Fellow usher Jeff Gitlow went to school with Maya and said she was nice, but quiet and brooding. He said she used to wear an army helmet everywhere. 

Word was out about them and by the time of this show, they already had three albums on Lookout! Records under their belts, the latest one being “Get Skintight”. Soon, they would move up in the world, signing to Atlantic and their next album, “The Donnas Turn 21” would have a bonus track on the Japanese version of Mr. Cooper’s “School’s Out”. The next album also would have a cover of “Living After Midnight” by Judas Priest which they played at this show as well as their new song, “Do You Wanna Hit It?” Further honoring their rock & roll mentors, they would do a brilliant cover of Kiss’ “Strutter” for the film comedy “Detroit Rock City” the year before as well as play the prom band in the film “Jawbreaker”. Incidentally, the former drummer of Kiss, Eric Singer, taking over the “Catman” character made famous by Peter Criss, was playing with Alice on this tour. And speaking of “Cats”, the stage musical of that name had just closed in New York City five days before this show, ending a mind boggling, 18 year, 7,485 show run. But we were seeing an entirely different, though equally horrifying stage experience, that evening.

Yes, I admit, being an embarrassingly horny young man at the time, I was distracted by the downright hotness of The Donnas when they first took the stage, but by the time Brett had introduced their second song “Hyperactive” as one “about partying all night long”, I found myself enraptured by them. Their bare bones siren song had hooked me and I found myself once again in that rare state where I was asking myself what the hell was I actually hearing. They were indeed “skintight” as band technically and though their sound was fairly uncomplicated as rock bands go, their songs were utterly brilliant and their stage presence was beyond charismatic. I dare say I fell in love that night, but on so many levels. 

They kept up the chatter between songs, asking “Any guys here wearing skin tight pants tonight? I thought there would be!”, before doing “Skin Tight” and “This song is about picking up guys. It’s called ‘Get You Alone”. Later, Allison joked, “How many of you there suffer from seasonal allergies?” and Brett continued, “Alright, this song is for all our parents who are here tonight. It’s called ‘Get Out Of My Room’!” Near the end, Brett said that the audience was “looking hotter than last night” and went on, “We’re not going to give in to the guys who want us to take off our shirts. That sucks! But for the rest of you, we got some stuff to give away, to the loudest girl in the audience!” Everybody screamed their lungs out as she tossed out a few shirt to the folks up front. The Donna’s set was the usual 45 minutes for a single opening act but all too short for me, so I was determined to see them again and would as often as I could afterwards. I would have to wait two years to see them once again at The Warfield, then opening for Jimmy Eat World. I had to miss their Fillmore show in 2001 since I was too late to get on the ushers list and worked the Carlos Mencia show at The Warfield that night instead, quite a different show indeed. But I’m happy to report that I got to see The Donnas perform six more times after this night until they played their last bay area show at Slim’s in 2009.

Alice began his set as you might imagine theatrically with an intro by “The Controller”, a narrator of sorts from “Brutal Planet” album, claiming to be “the only piece of technology left in the city of the dead… run by the sadistic metal maniac Alice Cooper!” The crowd cheered as the disembodied voice warned us “Go now while you still have a chance, before it’s too late!” and then the band opened with the title track of the new album. Later, they did an extended jam session to the tune of “Black Widow” where Eric got to do an impressive drum solo which transitioned into a creepy toy piano intro before they did “No More Mr. Nice Guy”. Later, I overheard myself talking to another usher and I mentioned that I had eaten at Taqueria Cancun across the street and I was “regretting it”. Speaking of ailments, Alice did a bit before performing the new song, “It’s The Little Things”. He said, “You know, I’m not one to complain but I will. I woke up this morning with… a headache, and I had a backache, and I had a toothache. That’s alright. I can deal with that. But I came all the way to San Francisco and some guy in the front row has a Marilyn Manson T-Shirt on! Now that really pisses me off! It’s the little things that drive me wild!”

Granted, many a punk and metal act owes a debt of gratitude to this original “shock rocker”, but it’s fair to say that Manson probably stole more from him than all of them. Still, though middle aged, Alice’s stage show made Manson’s stage show seem tiresome in comparison. They did a bit where he collected body parts and assembled a monster, flipping a switch, electrocuting it and bringing it to life. The green giant lumbered about the stage as he sang, “Feed My Frankenstein”. He took a beat to introduce the band later pointing out that his bass player Greg Smith was wearing a see-through shirt and had purple hair and he declared that the keyboard player Teddy Andreadis was “ripped from the pages of ‘Hollywood Confidential’!” And then Alice saved himself for the end simply announcing, “And of coarse… Me!” The crowd roared and they did “Under My Wheels”.

They followed that with “School’s Out”, an appropriate song to finish their set and then returned shortly, starting their encore with “Billion Dollar Baby”. Alice did the aforementioned cover of “My Generation” which morphed into “Elected”, a song reminiscent of “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones. This was also an appropriate song to end on, it being an election year and Election Day was about six weeks away. I remember they had people storm the stage with masks of George W. Bush, Al Gore, both Hillary and Bill Clinton, and I think Nixon too and they bounced around throwing monopoly money everywhere. It was quite a spectacle. I and the rest of the audience would be disappointed later to discover that there was no poster printed for the evening, but after witnessing it all, I was glad I came big time. 

Alice Cooper, The Donnas, War., SF, Fri., September 15

https://archive.org/details/alice-cooper-warfield-91500

https://archive.org/details/the-donnas-warfield-91500

Moby, Hybrid, War., SF, Sun., September 17

Moby, Hybrid, War., SF, Mon., September 18

SETLISTS :

(SUNDAY) : Honey, Porcelain (acoustic), Ring Of Fire, Feeling So Real, Thousand, Porcelain, Find My Baby, James Bond, Go, (unknown), Everloving, Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?, Me & Bobby McGee, The End, If Things Were Perfect, Ah Ah, Bring Back The Happiness, Move (You Make Me Feel So Good), Everytime You Touch Me, Natural Blues, The Sky Is Broken, Body Rock

(MONDAY) : My Weakness, Find My Baby, Machete, Porcelain, That’s When I Reached For My Revolver, Go, (unknown), Everloving, Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?, White Rabbit – Me & Bobby McGee, (unknown), Ah Ah, Bring Back My Happiness, Move (You Make Me Feel So Good), Everytime You Touch Me, Natural Blues, The Sky Is Broken, Body Rock, Honey, Porcelain (acoustic), Feeling So Real, Run On

It had only been less than a year since I recorded Moby at the Maritime and just a mere three months since I’d seen him on the main stage at Live 105’s B.F.D. festival. So between those shows and these last two of Moby’s three run stint at The Warfield, (the third show added by popular demand), I got to know that hyperactive bald shrimp pretty well around then, not to mention seeing him headline his Area One and Area Two festivals the following two years and then once again at The Warfield in 2005. Moby was still riding high on the success of his “Play” album and had just released “Mobysongs : 1993-88” that July, a compilation of his greatest hits with Elektra and had just launched this new American tour beginning at Red Rocks in Colorado the week before this. The single “Flower” had also just been used in the action film “Gone In 60 Seconds” released earlier that summer.

There was an opening act that night called Hybrid, a British electronic music dup, but I didn’t record them. I just thought they were local DJs and didn’t think much of them at the time, though I did find out that Julee Cruise, the oft employed siren singer from various David Lynch projects, contributed vocals on their debut album “Wide Angle” that came out the year before this. They went on to re-release it as a double album later, calling it “Wider Angle”, the second disc being a live set from this tour which they called “Live Angle”. I believe they used the songs “Burnin’” and “Kill City” from their recordings of these San Francisco gigs. 

Moby mostly played the same stuff both days I saw him, though he juggled around the order. On Sunday, he did the “James Bond” song, “If Things Were Perfect”, “Thousand” and “Honey” and on the second day, he did “My Weakness”, “Machete”, “That’s When I Reached For My Revolver”, and “Run On”, a variation of the old spiritual hymn “Run On For A Long Time” by Bill Landford & The Landfordaires. He also took time as he always had before to show off how god damned eclectic he is and regaled the crowd with some random acoustic covers, doing “Ring Of Fire” by Johnny Cash and “The End” by The Doors on Sunday, and “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane and a little riff from “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix on Monday. He unfortunately did “Me & Bobby McGee” by Kris Kristofferson and made famous by Janis Joplin both days, a song which I despise. A long time ago I worked in a novelty family restaurant in San Ramon named Bobby McGee’s as a bus boy and let’s just say it was an unpleasant experience and leave it at that. 

Both nights, Moby did an acoustic solo version of his hit song “Porcelain” as well as the full band electric version. On Sunday, they introduced “Feeling So Real” with one of his back up singers doing a slow soulful intro with the song’s title, it’s only lyric actually apart from Moby madly hopping about jabbering, “Love make you feel it now!” Later, I overheard myself ordering a pint of Anchor Steam from the bar. Moby mentioned something on that Sunday show he said the night before he’d “like to reiterate. One of the things I’ve always loved about San Francisco… One of the only places or at least 10 or 11 years ago where you had a thriving dance culture. I remember I first started making records in 1990-91 and at that point you’d go over to Europe… come back to the US and the only places that had anything going on were New York, L.A., and San Francisco.” He mentioned one of the “best events I’ve played was a rave called Toontown” at the Fashion Center around ’92-’93. His DJ did an entertaining solo between songs later, scratching “Aw yeah!” along with the drummer. Moby, a conspicuously vocal vegan and skinny as a rail as always, joked with the crowd asking, “Do you think I’m getting fat?” He then did a bluesy intro to “Body Rock” that had a little guitar noodling from “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin.

During the Monday show, he did an impressive percussion solo during “Bring Back My Happiness” and did a little of “California Love” by Tupac during that version of “Body Rock”. His buxom black back up singers played a little gag on him that night between songs, saying they wanted to make an “Oreo cookie” with him and they hugged him simultaneously from the front and from behind wiggling and laughing hysterically. You could tell Moby was pleasantly surprised, laughing loudly as well. Like I said before, he’d return to the bay area with his Area One festival the following year at Shoreline with an all-star line up including the Outkast, New Order with Billy Corgan, The Roots, and Paul Oakenfold. Also in 2001, Moby would release his “Moby : Play – The DVD” with live footage of him performing on Jools Holland and that DVD would be nominated for a Grammy for Best Long Form Music Video. I’m also happy to report that these string of shows got a poster and it was a pretty good one too.

Moby, War., SF, Sun., September 17

https://archive.org/details/moby-warfield-91700

Moby, War., SF, Mon., September 18

https://archive.org/details/moby-warfield-91800

Elastica, Meat Puppets, Fill., SF, Wed., September 20

SETLISTS :

(MEAT PUPPETS) : Armed & Stupid, Take Off Your Clothes, Hercules, Push The Button, I Quit, Sam, Oh Me, Pieces Of Me, When I Stop Dreaming, Up On The Sun, Fatboy/Fat/Requiem

(ELASTICA) : How He Wrote Elastica Man, Line Up, KB, Mad Dog God Damn, Vaseline, Da Da Da Ich Leib Dich Nicht Du Leibst Mich Nicht Aha Aha Aha, Annie, Moody, Stutter, Human, Car Song, You Arse My Place, Connection, (encore), My Sex, The Bitch Don’t Work, Waking Up

I had seen Elastica a few times when they were just taking off in 1995, once also at The Fillmore and then on two dates on the main stage at Lollapalooza that year. But five years later, the band was on its last legs. The only other original member of the band by this time apart from its painfully sexy front woman, Justine Frischman, was the bassist Annie Holland. Her guitarist Donna Matthews had left the band having picked up a nasty heroin habit. If that wasn’t bad enough, she had a torrid backstage romance with drummer Justin Welch that ended in a catastrophic break up. Thankfully, Donna eventually got clean and now teaches music at Dartington College in the UK. They were touring with the second and final album, “The Menace”, and we got to hear seven of the new songs that night. Justine had broken up with her boyfriend, Damon Albarn from Blur, recently as well. I and I imagine most people at the concert were unware of their parting then, otherwise she would have gotten a litany of marriage proposals from most of the single men and a few single women in the crowd that night, myself included. I’m sure some couples would have been amenable to swing as well. It was San Francisco after all. 

Anyway, Elastica had just finished playing at the Reading Festival that August, Pulp headlining that second day of the festival, and there they were, playing a sold out show at The Fillmore for what would be their last tour. There had been a bit of a dust up during the years since I’d seen them last between Elastica and the band Wire who had sued them over similarities between their song “Three Girl Rhumba” and Elastica’s big hit single “Connection”. In a strange twist of legal fate, Elastica’s music publishing company, EMI, had hired a musicologist who testified that the songs were indeed similar and said that a percentage of royalties should go to Wire, but for some inexplicable reason Wire’s publishing company, Carlin, actually negotiated a LOWER settlement than what was recommended. Wire ended up just getting a few thousand dollars. But in the end, there were no hard feelings and Wire even allowed Elastica to steal a little more from them for another song they did called “Lowdown”. Yes, the music industry indeed makes for some strange bedfellows. Coincidentally, Wire just played The Fillmore earlier that May, though I missed it. Pity though. It was one of only eight shows they did on that tour. 

Speaking of strange bedfellows, one thing that made this show even more intriguing was the opening act, the Meat Puppets from Seattle, quite a departure from Elastica’s sound stylistically. I had seen them once before headlining The Fillmore back in ’94 when they were riding high from their collaboration with Nirvana for their “Unplugged” album. There, Kurt Cobain and the band covered a couple of their songs, “Plateau” and “Lake Of Fire”, but for some reason the Meat Puppets played neither of those songs at this show.  While Elastica was falling apart, the Meat Puppets were just getting back on their feet. Bass player Chris Kirkwood had been strung out, even going missing for a spell, before cleaning up and helped to reincarnate the band with his brother Curt on guitar. Their new album, “Golden Lies”, would come out just a week after this gig and their set was mostly new material, seven songs out of their set of eleven. They also did a cover of “When I Stop Dreaming” by the country duo The Louvin Brothers, Curt introducing it saying, “let’s do a little bit of the down home”. Their drummer, Shandon Sahm, would pop up from behind his drum kit periodically between songs shirtless, sticking up his devil’s horns, and sticking out his tongue. One time that night, somebody was screaming something at the band between songs and Curt joked, “I’ll meet you later… I’ll meet you in Salinas and we’ll exchange information.” 

The audience went nuts when Elastica took the stage, Justine sporting a tight tank top and low rise jeans. Someone (predictably) yelled out “I love you, Justine!” and she didn’t look up, muttering, “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.” Ouch. Like I said, she just broke up with Damon. A couple of their new songs were covers including and English version of “Da Da Da Ich Leib Dich Nicht Du Leibst Mich Nicht Aha Aha Aha” by the obscure German 80’s band Trio as well as “Moody” by ESG. The former roughly translates to “I love you not, you love me not”, perhaps another not so subtle jab at her ex-boyfriend. Though Elastica got a poster when they played The Fillmore in 1995, there wasn’t one that evening. And yes, there won’t be any future ones either.

Still, Justine went on to put the music industry behind her and actually lives nearby in the north bay with her husband, Ian Faloona. As luck would have it, after Elastica disbanded shortly after this show, she went to Boulder, Colorado and got a masters degree in visual arts from the Nuropa Institute, a Buddhist liberal arts college where my sister Erica attended at the time. Erica had no memory of Justine being there, though it’s understandable since she was unfamiliar with her music and had no idea what she looked like. That’s where Justine met her husband who was a professor of meteorology and has since gone on to have a modestly successful career as an oil painter. Though Justine had given up performing, she did help produce British rapper M.I.A. and co-wrote some of her music for her debut album “Arular” in 2005. Yes, Elastica had come and gone and so did the so-called Britpop movement shortly afterwards, but they would remain one of the revered notable artists from that brief musical movement. 

Elastica, Meat Puppets, Fill., SF, Wed., September 20

https://archive.org/details/elastica-fillmore-92000

https://archive.org/details/meat-puppets-fillmore-92000

Alice’s Now & Zen Festival: Beck, The Go-Go’s, Travis, Tonic, Dogstar, Golden Gate Park Sharon Meadows, SF, Sun., September 24

SETLISTS :

(TRAVIS) : Writing To Reach You, Driftwood, Why Does It Always Rain On Me?, Turn, The Humpty Dumpty Love Song, Slide Show, Blue Flashing Light

(TONIC) : Open Up Your Eyes, Future Says Run, Sugar, Soldier’s Daughter, Casual Affair, Dancing Days, If You Could Only See, You Wanted More

(THE GO-GO’S) : Vacation, Tonight, How Much More, Apology, Head Over Heels, Sonic Superslide, Has The Whole World Lost Its Head?, Kissing Asphalt, Beatnik Beach, Our Lips Are Sealed, Skidmarks, We Got The Beat

(BECK) : New Pollution, Loser, Mixed Bizness, Salt In The Wound, Debra, Tropicalia, One Foot In The Grave, Nobody’s Fault But My Own, Jackass, Where It’s At, Devil’s Haircut, Sexx Laws

This was quite the long day musically speaking. It’s not often that I would see a daytime festival and then go to another concert the very same evening, but I did do that a handful of times in my concert going career and may still do it again someday. I remember well seeing the 420 Festival in the park in 1994 with Fishbone and then hauling ass over to the Greek in Berkeley to catch Soundgarden. Ten years later, I would do the unlikely combination of seeing Willie Nelson in the park at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and then seeing none other than Olivia Newton-John at Davies Symphony Hall with the SF symphony backing her up. That was a weird one. Anyway, I would have just enough time to catch the line up at this, the 3rd annual Alice’s Now & Zen Festival, and make it to The Fillmore later to see Saint Etienne for the first time. And at $20, it was a steal even for back then.

I was disappointed that I was late and unable to see the set of Dogstar, Keanu Reeves’ band. I did catch the tail end of their last song, so at least I have the experience of seeing Neo himself with my own eyes. I appreciated that he had the good taste to not sing and just play bass. There are so many celebrity vanity bands where their singing voices are downright cringeworthy. What I heard was pretty good actually, though I haven’t seen them since. He still tours with them from time to time between films. Honestly, considering the amount of work he does in this town, you’d think I would have bumped into him at least once since then. He was spending a good deal of time in the bay area around then filming “Matrix Reloaded” and “Matrix Revolutions” simultaneously. Though I didn’t see him then, twenty years later, just before the pandemic, he was filming the helicopter finale at the building across the street from the Hyatt Embarcadero where I was doing AV work for a writer’s conference. But as you can imagine, I was busy and he was way too high up from us for me to really see anything. In a minor coincidence, Saint Etienne had a song, “Like A Motorway” in the soundtrack album for the action film “Speed” which Keanu starred in, though the song wasn’t actually played in the movie.

Anyway, the next band, Travis, I had just seen a mere two months before this, headlining their own show also at The Fillmore. They were their pleasant Scottish selves once again, though their set was truncated compared to last time, doing only seven songs. My old classmate from college and resident Alice DJ Sterling James introduced them saying, “The band that’s coming up now… (big cheer from the audience)… I see you’re familiar with” and let the crowd know that they could meet them after their set at the merch booth. They opened with “Writing To Reach You” and between songs, the singer Fran Healy gave another one of his chipper pep talks, smiling as always, “What a lovely day! The next song is about letting go, taking your hands off the steering wheel. Don’t do it when you’re driving. Just do it with your life” and then they did “Driftwood”. Afterwards, he looked up in the sky and joked that it was “definitely not going to be any rain today” before they did “Why Does It Always Rain On Me?”

He followed that talking about how when you make a wish like you “take an eyelash off of someone’s cheek and blow it to the wind and make a wish. The next song is kinda like a song that has all these cool wishes in it. Not like, oh, I wish I had a Lamborghini, oh, I wish I had a million dollars, but kinda like human wishes. This is called ‘Turn’”. They did a cute tune called “The Humpty Dumpty Love Song” which Fran admitted afterwards that it was the first time the band had played it live. He gave a little speech similar to something he said at the Fillmore show saying, “This is a song about songs. I think songs say lots of things… the lights that we navigate our lives by, the use of art, films. Songs are like the bookmarks in your life… If you hear that again, it takes you back in time.” They finished their set with “Blue Flashing Light”, which was a bonus track in the American release of their hit album, “The Man Who”. 

They were followed by Tonic from Los Angeles introduced by Gretchen, another Alice DJ. She reminded the crowd that the station’s new CD “Alice Music : Volume 4” was on sale at the merch booth and the proceeds went to help breast cancer charities. That year, Tonic’s song “Mean To Me” had recently been in the soundtrack for the film “Gossip”, though they didn’t play it that day, and their singer, Emerson Hart, had just gotten married. Like Travis, their music was pleasant but unoffensive, a typical band one would hear on Alice. They did do a rather impressive and respectful cover of “Dancing Days” by Led Zeppelin near the end of their set and Emerson got the crowd to scream pretty loud at the count of three. 

Sure, Beck was a big deal to me back then, but I had seen him plenty over the years, even catching him just that May headlining at Bill Graham Civic and I would see him yet again playing with the Foo Fighters at the MGD Blind Date show at The Warfield only a month after this. So the real draw for me that day at the festival was The Go-Go’s. I had recorded them the year before at the Maritime after having not seen them in five years, so I was eager to check them out again. I felt spoiled frankly. Those women are rock & roll royalty in my opinion. To punctuate that point, they were endorsed that day by Billy Joe Armstrong from Green Day who came out to sing the Jane Wiedlin bridge in the middle of “Our Lips Are Sealed”. He is a big fan obviously and the crowd went nuts for it.

Sterling had come back out before their set began and introduced David Thompson, the vice president of marketing of WebEx, one of the festival’s sponsors before The Go-Go’s came on. For a stuffed shirt, David was pretty pumped up, joking about how everybody hates commuting and that the next time you’re stuck in traffic on the way to a meeting or something, get hooked up with his company, which actually was one of the pioneers in web conferencing back then. The technology wouldn’t really take off until Zoom came along and the pandemic hit. Anyway, they allowed some young lady named Melissa on stage and said they were having her “share the high point” in her life as she would introduce her favorite band, shouting, “I’m not worthy!… The Go-Go’s!” They played a good handful of their hits, but also did a few brand new ones like “Apology”, “Sonic Superslide”, and “Kissing Asphalt” which wouldn’t be released until their next album, “God Bless The Go-Go’s”, came out eight months later. It would be their first album of original material in 17 years, but their last one too. Incidentally, Billy Joe co-wrote, played guitar, and sang back up vocals on the song “Unforgiven” on it, though they didn’t perform it at that gig. They wrapped up their set with a rousing version of “We Got The Beat” which had a little breakdown near the end of it where Belinda sang the chorus of “All The Small Things” by Blink 182.

Beck did a funky intro doing a little “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See” by Busta Rhymes before breaking into “New Pollution”. He did a spectacular set as always, doing most of the songs I had heard from his Civic Center show. He did treat us to a rare B-side from his most recent album, “Midnight Vultures”, called “Salt In The Wound”. Beck put it out on an EP that was only available through his website and only 10,000 copies were made. Afterwards, he gave a shout out and a little solo for each of his band members, calling his horn section “The Brass Menagerie” and himself “The Artist Currently Known As Beck” (a little joke at Prince’s expense I guess), before they ripped into “Mixed Bizness”. He did a little bit in that song, playing a couple bars of “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie. 

They brought the mood down for his gettin’ busy anthem “Debra” and Beck really hit the super high, “Star Search” notes on that one. He joked “obviously being a diva, it takes a while to get the 17 octave vocal range”, claiming it went back to the “castrados of the 15th century”. During “Tropicalia”, Beck gave a shout out to his tenor sax player, David Arthur Brown, whose wife just had a baby four days before this show. They wrapped up their set busting out some “serious equipment”, being a banjo expertly handled by Smokey Hormel, and played “Sexx Laws”. I know I said earlier that The Go-Go’s was the big draw for me that day, but upon hearing Beck’s set again, I must say he was in fine form that day. They were tight. They left the stage in a din of feedback and Beck howling incoherently for nearly a minute into his mic. 

Now & Zen Festival: Beck, The Go-Go’s, Travis, Tonic, Golden Gate Park Sharon Meadows, SF, Sun., September 24

https://archive.org/details/beck-gg-park-92400

https://archive.org/details/the-go-gos-gg-park-92400

https://archive.org/details/tonic-gg-park-92400

https://archive.org/details/travis-gg-park-92400

Saint Etienne, DJ Bob, Fill., SF, Sun., September 24

SETLIST : Filthy, Lose That Girl, Don’t Back Down, Heart Failed (In The Back Of A Taxi), Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Sycamore, Boy Is Crying, Nothing Can Stop Us Now, Erica America, Downey CA, Shoot Out The Lights, Like A Motorway, Sylvie, Sail Away, (encore), Ready Or Not, People Get Real, (encore), He’s On The Phone

As I had mentioned in the previous entry, this was one of those rare occasions where I attended a festival in the park and high tailed it over to another show that very same evening. In this case it was the Alice Now & Zen Festival with Beck, The Go-Go’s, Tonic, Travis, and Dogstar. I didn’t know anything about Saint Etienne before this show, but afterwards I would become a die hard fan. So much so, that I would put up the poster from this show in my kitchen later when I was living in the Outer Sunset and it would remain there for many years. But on this night in question, it was indeed one of those “sight unseen” shows. They had only a DJ opening for them that night, so it was an easy one to usher for which I was grateful, since I was bushed from the festival earlier that day. He was named DJ Bob and he mostly played obscure 60’s go go dancing music, appropriate enough since I just finished watching The Go-Go’s earlier that afternoon.

Saint Etienne, though named after a French football team, were actually English and had been around for about a decade. This however would be only the third time they had toured the US, performing just 13 shows in 12 cities this time around. Saint Etienne’s singer, Sarah Cracknell was actually the fourth singer in that band’s history, becoming its permanent one after the first three rotated in and out quite rapidly, her first single being “Nothing Can Stop Us”. I’m happy to say she is still with them to this day. My god, that woman is so sexy it hurts. The microsecond she opened her mouth to sing, I was instantly smitten by her irresistible siren song. The band had just put out their “Sound Of Water” album that June, a more atmospheric electronica one than some of their previous work. Sarah had also just put out her first solo record “Lipside”, which had been delayed for three years, as well as a collection of B-sides and new tracks called “Kelly’s Locker”.  She sang “Ready Or Not”, the first song of the former at the beginning of their first encore that night.

She looked fine as May wine at that show dressed in a skin tight, red sequin, one piece mini skirt, twirling and dancing with her sexy white feather boa. I overheard myself ordering a pale ale after I was cut from ushering in the middle of “Don’t Back Down”. Though I was brand new to Saint Etienne, I was pleasantly surprised to hear their acid house dance cover of Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”. It was such a stylistically divergent version from the original that on the surface, one wouldn’t think it would work, but it did. Even a Neil Young purist like my friend Jeff Pollard approved. Later in the set, they played “Like A Motorway” which had been in the soundtrack album for the action film “Speed”, though it wasn’t actually used in the movie. Coincidentally, Keanu Reeves, the star of that film, had performed with his band Dogstar earlier that day at the Now & Zen Festival. Who knows, maybe Keanu was there.

Saint Etienne, DJ Bob, Fill., SF, Sun., September 24

https://archive.org/details/saint-etienne-fillmore-92400

https://archive.org/details/dj-bob-fillmore-92400

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Flogging Molly, The Gadjits, Fill., SF, Mon., September 25

SETLISTS : 

(THE GADJITS) : Bad Gadjit, We Were Right, Outsider, (unknown), All The Way, B.C., Seat 6, (unknown), Beautiful Girl

(FLOGGING MOLLY) : Swagger, Selfish Man, The Likes Of You Again, Black Friday Rule, Worst Day Since Yesterday, Devil’s Dance Floor, Salty Dog, Delilah, Sentimental Johnny

(MIGHTY MIGHTY BOSSTONES) : Dr. D, Allow Them, Hope I Never Lose My Wallet, 1-2-8, Last Dead Mouse, All Things Considered, He’s Back, Someday I Suppose, Temporary Trip, Where’d You Go?, Cowboy Coffee, Wrong Thing Right Then, The Rascal King, The Skeleton Song, Howwhywuz Howwhyam, Hell Of A Hat, The Impression I Get, Tin Soldiers

It had been a minute since I’d last seen the Bosstones in ’95 at The Fillmore and then twice as the opening act on the main stage at Lollapalooza, first at Cal Expo then at Shoreline the following day. And though I got a healthy sampling of their work then, sadly, this show would be the final time I’d see them perform live. Turns out, they disbanded only last year. Apparently, their singer, Dickey Barrett, got a little pilled. He bought into the whole anti-vax movement, performing at a rally for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called “Defeat The Mandates”. It’s a pity. The guitarist of the Bosstones, Nate Albert, went on to get a degree in political theory from Brown University and became Executive Vice President of A & R for Warner Brothers, as well as being Executive VPs for both Capitol and Republic. Big money there. 

But by this time, the so-called Third Wave of ska music was beginning its steady decline in popularity. The Bosstones’ new album, “Pay Attention”, hadn’t sold nearly as well as their last one. It would be the last album on Mercury Records and the last time Nate as well as trombonist Dennis Brokenborough would record with the band, but the first with their new sax player, Roman Fleysher. The first act performing that night was The Gadjits from Kansas City, who were very young at the time, having just been signed to Tim Armstrong from Rancid’s record label, Hellcat, in ’97. Their lead singer dedicated “We Were Right” to the Bosstones and later praised the next act, shouting “Flogging Molly kicks ass!”. They also played a brand new song that night called “All The Way” that wouldn’t be released for over another year on their next album, “Today Is My Day”. 

As the singer of The Gadjits said, Flogging Molly indeed kicked ass. I knew what to expect from the Bosstones by then, but it being my first time seeing them and I was floored by Flogging Molly’s breakneck energy and catchy melodies. Founded in ’95, Dublin native Dave King, the former lead singer of Fastway with Fast Eddie Clarke from Motorhead, and his new group had been the resident Monday night band at an Irish pub in L.A. called Molly’s, hence their name. They felt they were flogging the place to death every time they played there. Flogging Molly had just released their first studio album, “Swagger” mixed by Steve Albini, that March and also had a live one called, “Alive Behind The Green Door” put out in three years before that. They certainly whipped up the mosh pit, bringing out the rowdy Irish in everybody. Incidentally and speaking of rowdiness in general, Dave has the logo of Manchester United tattooed on his chest. He also dedicated “Likes Of You Again” to his recently deceased father that night. I especially loved the hilarious song “Worst Day Since Yesterday”, a song Dave said was about hangovers and joked that was why he needed glow in the dark guitar picks. Near the end of the set, Dave introduced a song saying it was about an “old Irish pirate” who “many many moons ago during the 15th century” was  “one of Cortez’ killers and you and me know, San Francisco, since he was Irish, he was well hung. This song’s called ‘Salty Dog’”. Afterwards, they did a frantically paced version of “Delilah” by Tom Jones. 

One thing about this show I remember distinctly was the unmistakable presence of several members of the Hell’s Angels. I’d been accustomed to seeing a handful of them at a gig before, but there had to be at least a dozen there that night. And I must say, one of the most potent images from all my rock & roll experiences burned into my brain was the sight on one of the Angels literally standing on the railing of the balcony directly overlooking the stage right side during the first half of the Bosstones’ set. He was casually leaning his back on the wall behind him, sipping a bottle of beer. Equally as memorable, was the sight of the befuddled Fillmore security guards nearby, uneasily looking at each other with a sort of, “Screw that. You tell him to get down from there” look on their faces. The perched Angel eventually came down on his own volition much to their relief, but I thought that striking sight was fascinating. I wish I had a photo of it. 

Though the crowd had worked out a lot of rowdiness for Flogging Molly, the Bosstones got the troops to rally and kept up the pit through their set. The band was introduced by one of the DJs from Live 105 who asked the crowd if “everybody got a buzz?” and then the band took the stage to the sound of “War” by Edwin Starr coming over the speakers. About a half hour into their set, a weird argument broke out in the pit after “1-2-8” and Dickey confronted a guy in the crowd asking him “What’s your beef?” and he coaxed this skinny, angry dude on stage who was accusing them of selling out or something. Dickey rebutted “I got a microphone. I can say what the fuck I want. If you don’t like the Bosstones, I understand that. But what the fuck are you doing here? You’re holding up some prime real estate for folks who want to see the Bosstones.” He went on, “All I want you to do is have fun. That’s the only reason I’m in San Francisco.” But the guy kept on arguing yelling at everybody to calm down and back off and insisting rather unconvincingly that he was just fucking around. Dickey countered, “If he’s just fuckin’ around, that’s cool. That’s all I ever do is fuck around” and he told the crowd to give him his hat back and that the bar give him a “beer on the Bosstones”. He later rebuked “the dudes that flipped us off” earlier and mocked their “Maroon 5 mentality” which got a big laugh and then they did “He’s Back”. 

Later, he took a more cheerful posture, saying that the Bosstones “do some things well. But one thing we do exceptionally well” is get good opening acts and got a round of applause for The Gadjits who had been touring with them “all over Canada”.  And as for Flogging Molly, Dickey said they “played the kind of music I grew up with” and when he played one of their Irish songs for his father, “he cried”. And when he played one of the punk songs for his brother, “he beat the shit out me”. Before “Cowboy Coffee” he gave a bunch of random stuff to a guy named Ryan up front who was yelling along lyrics including a pair of drumsticks and a pint of Guinness from Flogging Molly. Near the end of the set, he dedicated “The Skeleton Song” to his friends in H20, NOFX, the Dance Hall Crashers, and the Swingin’ Utters. It was a pleasant surprise to hear him include the Crashers, my brother’s old band. I was pissed there was no poster for this one at the end of the night, though the Bosstones had gotten one after other shows that they played there that I missed. Ska bands were rare to headline The Fillmore back then and now they are even rarer.

Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Flogging Molly, The Gadjits, Fill., SF, Mon., September 25

https://archive.org/…/the-mighty-mighty-bosstones…

https://archive.org/details/flogging-molly-fillmore-92500

https://archive.org/details/the-gadjits-fillmore-92500

Billy Bragg & The Blokes Kevin So, Fill., SF, Tues., October 3

SETLIST : Milkman Of Human Kindness, She Came Along To Me, England Half English, Christ For President, Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key, Jane Allen, All You Fascists Are Bound To Lose, St. Monday, There Is Power In A Union, Against The Law, Dreadbelly, Greetings To The New Brunette, California Stars, A New England, (encore), Upfield, The Space Race Is Over, The Saturday Boy, Tears Of My Tracks, Sexuality

Billy had been touring for over two years now, singing tunes from the “Mermaid Avenue” albums, his collaboration with Wilco performing unreleased Woody Guthrie songs. He had just put out the second volume from that project that May. I had recorded him at the Maritime in ’98 and he had played The Fillmore the following year, though thankfully, this time around, Billy got a poster and it was a good one. Opening that night, was Boston songwriter Kevin So. He described himself modestly as the “Asian Stevie Wonder” or “Chinese-American Bruce Springsteen”. Before becoming a singer, he had studied jazz at USC and had put out his first album “Individual” in ’97. I saw on his website that he makes artsy bracelets on the side as well, a man of many talents, though this would be the only time I’d ever see him. 

Billy was his usual talkative self that night. Though he covered most of the same stuff as he had the previous year, he did break out a new one, “England, Half English” which would be the title track of his next studio album that would be released the following year. It was difficult to hear his customary diatribes between songs on my tape, but rest assured he covered a lot of ground covering subjects ranging from labor unions, the Olympics, and globalism to goatee beards. He asked the crowd what the state song of California was and got quite a few shouts of suggestions from them before they did “California Stars”. Before he wrapped up the set with “A New England”, Billy introduced the band including once again Ian McLagan from The Small Faces on keyboards. Near the end of the encore, he joked about what keeps him inspired in these times, you know, what keeps him going and he said “two words… boy bands.”

Billy Bragg & The Blokes Kevin So, Fill., SF, Tues., October 3

https://archive.org/…/billy-bragg-the-blokes-fillmore…

https://archive.org/details/kevin-so-fillmore-10300

Bad Religion, The Promise Ring, Ignite, War., SF, Fri., October 6

SETLISTS :

(IGNITE) : Taken Away, Ash Return, (unknown), Banned In D.C., A Place Called Home, Aggression, Embrace, In Defense

(BAD RELIGION) : Don’t Sell Me Short, (unknown), Stranger Than Fiction, New America, (unknown), Suffer, Henchmen, You’ve Got A Chance, (unknown), Atomic Garden, (unknown), We Can Take Them On, (unknown), (unknown), Yesterday, No Control, (unknown), A Walk, Watch You Die, The Fast Life, Mona Lisa, Do What You Want, Along The Way, Change Of Ideas, (unknown), Generator

It’s a little challenging to write about this Bad Religion show due to a recent bout of FOMO. I had just finished a long stretch at work, seeing once again the discs of this next show lonely and collecting dust on the corner of my writing desk. On the last day of my work, I swung by the Fox Theater in Oakland to pick up tickets for Les Claypool’s Flying Frog Brigade the following Wednesday and a couple for P-Funk for me and my friend Jeff Pollard for November. And lo and behold, Bad Religion was playing there that night when I got those tickets. I was utterly exhausted and knew that I had to meet my parents the following morning and to make matters worse, my wife had a catastrophic day at work and was in dire need of comforting. So, I made the call and decided not to stick around. Bad Religion had also played the Masonic the previous December which I also had to miss which makes this sting a little more. And as of next year, I haven’t seen them in two decades, so hopefully the next time they roll through town, I’ll make it up to them.

That being said, I am proud to say that as of today, I have seen them perform seven glorious times and would see them grace the stage of The Warfield twice more after this show in both 2002 and 2004. The year after this show, Bad Religion would be dropped from Atlantic and would return to making records at Epitaph headed by their guitarist Brett Gurewitz, who had just rejoined the band after recovering in rehab. They had just put out their 11th studio album, “The New America” that May produced by none other than the legendary Todd Rundgren, whose DVD I had just recorded at the Maritime earlier that year coincidentally. Turns out that though Todd was one of Brett’s heroes, they and the rest of the band butted heads right away creatively and the recording process was pretty unpleasant for all those involved. It would be the last album with Bobby Schayer on drums and singer Greg Graffin had just gotten divorced that year as well. Bad Religion had finished touring with Blink 182 that summer and on their own shortly afterwards through Europe, but this was the tenth show on their autumn tour back home in the States.

The DJ they had play between sets was a strange choice to open the show, a combo of monotonous synth samples, backed up by jazzy drums and a trumpet belting out bebop improvisations. The punks in the crowd weren’t particularly offended by this, just a touch confused. They continued to patiently hear him out, applaud politely, and drink their beers. The first band, Ignite, picked up the energy soon enough, especially since they did a rowdy cover of “Banned In D.C.” by Bad Brains. They dedicated their song “Embrace” to all “the east bay hardcore kids”. 

The next act, The Promise Ring, had clearly worn out their patience by the end of their set. The rock band from Milwaukee didn’t win any friends with their mediocre playing to the point that they were being actively booed by the last couple songs. It’s a rare occasion when a band gets booed off stage and I have to confess that I joined in on that chorus of disapproval. What I didn’t know was that their singer guitarist, Davey Von Bohlen, had been suffering from a brain tumor and had to drop out of the tour to get surgery for which he thankfully made a full recovery. The chorus of booing was funny at the time, but finding this out in my research made me feel a little guilty, though I still think they sucked that night. Poor guy got a post operative infection and which nearly killed him too.

People don’t boo bands for absolutely no reason, but it didn’t help that Davey came out telling the crowd that the A’s lost that day. He asked them to not to “kill the messenger” but he made it worse when he reminded everyone that the Giants originally were from New York and pointed out his Mets hat. They were already booing them but said he was only wearing it to cover up his scar from brain surgery. He joked “Isn’t baseball for fat guys anyway?” before they sang “Living Around” which he also dedicated to the Giants. That also didn’t endear him to the punks there. Brett tried to smooth things over when Bad Religion took the stage later, shrugging between songs, “I liked The Promise Ring!” The crowd remained unconvinced. 

Before Bad Religion started, they played a recording of some mechanical sounds, kind of like when Arthur and his knights were building the Trojan Rabbit in “Monty Python & The Holy Grail”. A few songs in, Greg dedicated their new song, “New America”, as a “homage to the 2000 presidential campaign” and mentioned that he was on the lookout for a pair of shoes he lost at the Warfield show they played there six years before this. I was at that show incidentally. Later on, he dedicated “Henchmen” to the “Republican National Committee”. Near the end of their set, they performed “The Fast Life”, a B-side only released on the Japanese and European versions of the new album. Greg split backstage for a moment, presumably to freshen up and the other band members teased him for being incontinent and played a little jazzy jam session while he was away. 

They finished their set with “Generator”, Greg describing it as it “begins like a commercial”. I was pretty beat from working earlier that day by the end of that show, so when my tape ran out during that song, I decided not to stick around for the encore. There was no poster given out later and I had yet another day of work ahead of me and AFI at The Fillmore the following night. As you can see, I was able to decipher most of Bad Religion’s set that gig, but a handful of songs escaped me. I’m still happy with the ones I was able to figure out considering the impressive number of short punk songs they plow through in a set. 

Bad Religion, The Promise Ring, Ignite, War., SF, Fri., October 6

https://archive.org/details/bad-religion-warfield-10600

https://archive.org/details/the-promise-ring-warfield-10600

https://archive.org/details/ignite-warfield-10600

AFI, The Nerve Agents, Tiger Army, Fill., SF, Sat., October 7

SETLISTS :

(TIGER ARMY) : Nocturnal, True Romance, Moonlite Dreams, Fog Surrounds, Fuck The World, Outlaw Heart, Horror Hotel, Never Die

(AFI) : Fall Children, Let It Be Broke, The Prayer Position, Sacrifice Theory, Malleus Maleficarum, A Single Second, I Wanna Get A Mohawk (But Mom Won’t Let Me Get One), File 13, A Story Of Three, Third Season, 3 1/2, Cruise Control, The Days Of The Phoenix, Morningstar, The Last Kiss, Totalimmortal

I have discovered recently that AFI has become one of those watershed bands that tends to split music lovers’ opinions on them. The first time I saw these kids from Ukiah, they were opening for my brothers’ old band, the Dance Hall Crashers, at this very same venue and they were brand spanking new. Back then, they were very young, played mostly punkish ska music, and dressed in unassuming T-shirts and jeans. But soon, AFI would don the black and become part of the vanguard of the emerging emo or “screamo” scene. Lead singer Davey Havok had been reborn as this straight edge vegan ghoul with thick black eye makeup. He had even been asked to become the new singer of The Misfits after AFI toured with their side project Samhain earlier that year. The Misfits’ then singer Michale Graves had left the band shortly after I recorded them at the Maritime the year before, but Davey declined their offer. He had contributed vocals to the “Son Of Sam” tribute album to Samhain as well as to the song “Jeckyl & Hyde” by The Nerve Agents who were the first band to play that evening. AFI had also picked up Jade Puget and Hunter Burgan a couple years before this to be their guitarist and bassist respectively, completing their current line up.

I’m not sure if I had mentioned this before, but in case I forgot when I wrote about them opening for the Crashers, there are a few theories for what AFI is an abbreviation of. The most popular answer is “A Fire Inside”, since it is the only one the band acknowledges, but other theories include “Asking For It”, “Anthems For Insubordinates”, “Abuncha Fucking Idiots”, “Another Fucking Idiot”, and “Ants Farming Indonesia”. Whatever one thinks it stands for, by this show there was no denying that they had hit it big time with their new album, “The Art Of Drowning” which had just dropped the month before this night. Davey was even touting the show as their record release party. They would soon leave Dexter Holland from The Offspring’s label Nitro to be picked up by Dreamworks in 2002.

I was pretty beat from work and checking out Bad Religion at The Warfield the night before, but I soldiered on. The first opener that night was Tiger Army and like AFI had ties to Samhain, having their drummer London May as a member since their founding in 1996, though he would leave the band the year after this show. Their bassist Geoff Kresge was also the former bassist for AFI, but had traded in his electric for an upright for this new psychobilly band. They had released their debut album the previous October and were freshly relocated to the LA area. AFI’s drummer Adam Carson had also drummed for Tiger Army, playing drums on their new album in fact, so they were a tight knit group.

The Nerve Agents were loud and rowdy as hell. I think their set might have actually been cut short by the Fillmore folks because it was so nuts out there. They joked that they hadn’t played the Fillmore since ’69 with Jefferson Airplane. In fact, this hardcore punk band was only together for a very short time, just three years. They had just released their first of only two albums, “Days Of The White Owl” that Independence Day. The Nerve Agents would go on to play their last shows at The Pound the following year. Their songs were so ridiculously fast and the singer’s lyrics hopelessly buried in the din of it all, I was only able to make less than half of their songs, “Unblossomed”, “Out On The Farm”,“Fall Of The All American”,“Next In Line”, and “Dead Man Walking”. Their singer, Sheric D, thanked AFI near the end and said they usually don’t play in front of this many people. When somebody in the audience said it was because they sucked, he joked, “maybe it’s because we suck. Yeah, we suck ass. But we’re playing The Fillmore and you’re not. Ha ha. We’ll probably not play here again.” I’m afraid he was correct, but at least he got a chance to have everybody to say hi to his mom who was there in the audience and also “Ryan’s dad”, whoever that was.

The crowd went nuts when AFI got on stage to the sound of the climax of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” blasting over the speakers. I’ve got to hand it to AFI, their fans knew all the lyrics and didn’t just sing along to them, they screamed. I suppose when one sings like Davey, one would have to scream along. He thanked the crowd for coming out, coming from “fucking everywhere” to see them, but joked, “I think someone’s throwing liver pate at us. It’s kind of gross”. I would go on to see Tiger Army open for bands at The Warfield, Rancid in 2003 and then twice with Social Distortion the following year. I would only have to wait a couple months to see AFI again, also opening for Rancid at The Warfield with The Distillers. Davey made sure to thank Rancid at this show, telling the crowd how they helped them get big after they heard their first 7” vinyl EP. 

My tape ran out during “Third Season”, so I took off a little early. I heard myself talking to a young lady saying I would walk her home, but I can’t peg who it was, probably my friend Liz. Before I took off, I caught Davey mentioning that “one of the great punk bands of all time”, T.S.O.L., were playing at Slim’s that night and if we hurried we could catch their set, coincidentally another band with an abbreviated name. He also dissed on the crowd barricade in front of him saying he thought everybody felt too far away. I’m happy to report they gave out an excellent poster for the show that night inked by Chris Shaw, one of my favorite poster artists.

AFI, The Nerve Agents, Tiger Army, Fill., SF, Sat., October 7

https://archive.org/details/afi-fillmore-10700

https://archive.org/details/the-nerve-agents-fillmore-10700

https://archive.org/details/tiger-army-fillmore-10700

Col. Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, GAMH, SF, Sun., October 8

SETLIST : Thela Hun Ginjeet, Shattering Song, Hendershot, Girls For Single Men, Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts 1-4), (set break), Pigs On The Wing Pt. 1, Dogs, Pigs (Three Different Ones), Sheep, Pigs On The Wing Pt. 2, (encore), The Awakening, Harold Of The Rocks

Col. Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, GAMH, SF, Mon., October 9

SETLIST : Taxman, Here’s To The Man, Running The Gauntlet, Riddles Are Abound Tonight, Thela Hun Ginjeet, (set break), Pigs On The Wing Pt. 1, Dogs, Pigs (Three Different Ones), Sheep, Pigs On The Wing Pt. 2, (encore), Tomorrow Never Knows

It is a strange, yet happy coincidence that I begin writing this today of all days. Last night I saw Mr. Claypool at the Fox Theater in Oakland reunited with his beloved Frog Brigade to do a bay area show for the first time in 20 years. Except this time I’m paying three times as much for a venue that’s ten times larger. Sigh…Technically, the Frog Brigade did a show up in Napa a few months ago, but that’s a little far north to still be considered bay area in my opinion, but I digress. Yes, once upon a time, early in the summer of 2000, Les decided to put Primus on hiatus after their “Antipop” album. In that meantime, he formed his “midlife crisis band”, though he was only 36 years old at the time, and debut this new band at the Mountain Aire festival up in Angel Camp in Calaveras County. Originally, Les thought up the name “Les Claypool’s Thunder Brigade”, but Michael Bailey, the honcho at BGP and longtime friend and supporter of Les, suggested it “sounded too heavy” for the sensitive hippies during that weekend of jam bands and their ilk doing their thing up in the forest. 

Instead, Les considered the history of that area and Mark Twain’s immortal short story of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County” and changed the name accordingly. Les had recruited an impressive motley crew of ringers for his team, including Todd Huth on guitar and Jay Lane on drums, reuniting the original Primus AKA Primate AKA Sausage. Jack Irons, the original drummer of the Chili Peppers and later Pearl Jam, as well as Primus drummer Herb Alexander were once employed, but just for that single Mountain Aire gig though. He also got Jeff Chimenti on keys who had cemented his hippie cred for years playing alongside Phil Lesh and other Dead projects, but strangely enough, he also used to play keys for En Vogue. Go figure. 

On sax, there was the inimitable Skerik, the bubble eyed joker from Critter’s Buggin’ and Garage A Trois, a perfect goofball jester juxtaposed to Les’ dry sense of humor. Finally, they threw a wild card in there with a tall tree of a man with long blond dreadlocks going by the name of Eenor Wildeboar. He would go between playing guitar and a thing called a cumbus, sort of a Turkish version of a 12 string, fretless banjo. Les had plucked Eenor out of the ether literally, having him audition through a mail order competition Les advertised for in the newspaper of all things. Lucky Eenor, but I thought he was a good fit. Les recognizes talent when he hears it. Les actually thanked “Dave Lefkowitz Management”, who I used to intern for, for organizing the audition and finding him before giving Eenor a solo at the beginning of the first night.

I couldn’t believe my luck when I was able to score tickets for both days of these shows at the Great American no less, just a block from my studio in the Loin and only for $20 each. Even more fortuitous was the fact they were recording a live double album those nights! Predictably, I was over the moon and a complete spaz at both shows. Primus’ first album, “Suck On This”, was a live album and had an indelible, transforming effect on me and my friends. I mean, that one was important to us. Knowing fully these nights were being taped, I was up front and made sure my voice was heard between songs, trying to do a sort of high pitched coyote-like yelp and the occasional Middle Eastern trilling to differentiate me from the others in the crowd. I admit, it was obnoxious, so much so that I got a couple dirty looks from the guy in front of me, but I swear, I didn’t do it during the music or when Les was talking. Either way, you can’t really hear me on the albums anyway, so it was a futile gesture in the end. Regardless, I still had the time of my life and am intensely proud that I was able to witness that important milestone in Mr. Claypool’s musical career.

The other big deal about this show was the second set on both nights was to be the entire album of “Animals” by Pink Floyd from start to finish. I was intrigued and frankly didn’t know the album that well, so it was a much needed refresher course for me of that piece of work. Though brilliant, it tends to be overlooked, a bit sandwiched between the twin powerhouse monoliths of “Dark Side Of The Moon” and “The Wall”. It wasn’t much of a stretch for Les considering Primus had already released a cover of “Have A Cigar” years ago on their “Miscellaneous Debris” EP of cover songs. Folks playing albums in their entirety for sets was sort of a new thing back then, but now everybody does it. 21 years after these shows, Les and Primus would tour playing Rush’s album “Farewell To Kings” for their second set which was brilliant.

Les came out both nights wearing a striking, shiny American flag helmet and black naval captain’s jacket with bright red lapels, an outfit made for a Colonel. Jay Lane was sporting an impressive rhino horn helmet as well. They opened with a cover of King Crimson’s “Thela Hun Ginjeet”, a sprawling 15 minute plus prog epic on the first night and ended their first set with it on the second night. As luck would have it, I would see THE King Crimson play The Fillmore just ten days later and yes, they played it too. I got to know that tune well. Les did a little breakdown of “Riders On The Storm” by The Doors during “Shattering Song”, perhaps a nod with his singing the “killer on the road, his brain is squirming like a toad” line to the amphibian motif. Before they played “Hendershot”, Les admitted that “he wasn’t really a Colonel”, for which I yelled out that he should be a general! Modestly, Les insisted that he should immediately be demoted to Captain and that all further merch they sell reflect that. Soon after, Les did eventually drop his rank entirely from the band title and abbreviate it simply to his “Frog Brigade”.

Afterwards, Les rambled a bit with the crowd before “Hendershot”. Someone up front offered his hat to him for which he said he was “glad you’re offering your hat… It’s a fine hat. I’m just not sure if it’s for me”. He then said he’d ask around the other band members and offered it to Skerik. At the end of the first set on that first night, the band offered up another Pink Floyd cover, a sprawling version of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. They wrapped up the song and Les said they’d be “back in 20 minutes with more Pink Floyd than anyone can stand.” I was impressed how faithful Les and the band were to the original arrangement of “Animals”. They definitely had it down pat and upon listening to the shows again, it did occur to me that’s Les’ voice and Roger Waters’ are kind of similar. For the encore on the first night, Les introduced “The Awakening”, saying that he found a copy of an album by an obscure band called The Reddings when he was a kid and that song was on it. He got together with some guys and played it at a rally at his high school and it would be one of the first songs he’d ever record. 

Before they wrapped up, Les told a story about when he was young, he was going to start a band and he was “going to call it Primate because I like Primate, being a fan of the monkey, chimp, and whatnot. So I was looking around for a guitar player. Guitar players are hard to find, especially the kind of guitar player I wanted. I didn’t want one of those shiny hairball son of a bitches that were chomping around backstage back in those days, wearing their spandex and their little bullet belts. And I looked and I looked and I looked and I looked and along came a fellah named Todd Huth. Now I knew Todd Huth from high school days. He was the guy in junior high who could play guitar and went out with Denise McGerry. Now, Denise McGerry had the biggest tits in junior high” He went on to say they’d play venues around the area, they’d play Berkeley Square, and added that he’d never played the Great American before then. With Todd Huth, they put together the first of their songs being “Too Many Puppies”, “Prelude To Fear”, “Here’s To The Man”, and of coarse… “Harold Of The Rocks” and they finished with that one.  Les, bellowed out singing “God Bless America” as they hit the last note and he laughed, “That’s it. Go away.” Night one was over.

On the second night, they surprised us with not one, but two Beatles covers, opening with “Taxman” and ending the show’s encore with “Tomorrow Never Knows” with Herb joining in on a second drum kit. I would also hear the Frog Brigade also cover “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” followed by “A Little Help From My Friends” a couple times in future shows including the New Year’s Eve shows they’d do at The Fillmore just a few months later. Now that I think about it, it’s a pity that they didn’t do any Beatles’ covers with Sean Lennon last night. I wonder if they’ve done any in other shows or with The Claypool-Lennon Delirium. Neither cover made it to the albums, sadly. Anyway, during “Taxman” that night, they opened with a long psychedelic intro and Les teased a little of “No Quarter” by Led Zeppelin in there too. Like their opening with “Thela Hun Ginjeet” the night before, this was a long first offering, over fifteen minutes. They even broke down the song near its end and played a verse and chorus of Primus’ “Wynnona’s Big Brown Beaver”.

Les addressed the crowd after the song, “So we were here last night, made a lot of racket, recorded that racket. Was anybody here last night? Well, for those of you who were here, I listened to the tapes on the ride home and you sounded fuckin’ great!” The audience and I erupted in applause and he went on, pointing to guy up front, “Especially this guy right here. Yep, that’s it. I recognize that one there. So anyway, you’re going to hear some good shit, some semi-good shit… Umm… Here we go” and they continued with “Here’s To The Man”. Les took a moment in the middle of the song to say, “I know you’re wondering. You’ve been thinking it since you walked in the door. You’re saying ‘Who’s that hot sexy man in the corner holding on to the saxophone?’ I can say from this point on that I can’t say anything that can make you enjoy this man any more… Ladies & gentlemen… Skerik” and he let had him do a solo. He playfully scolded him for going longer than his allowed “time allotment” but forgave him because he was so sexy.

I refrained a little from my coyote yipping from the night before, except during “Dogs” where everybody was doing it, but you can hear me laughing maniacally between songs. Les apologized after “Riddle Are Abound Tonight” saying “I kinda fucked that last one up”, but Jay reassured him, “That’s OK. He’s got Pro Tools!” Les went on, “So… We’re going to do another tune. It’s going to be a long son of a bitch” and invited folks to “go in the back, take about 20 minutes… and we’re going to come back out and play a shitload of Pink Floyd for you folks.” and they ended the set with the aforementioned “Thela Hun Ginjeet”. It was good to revisit the “Animals” songs and by the end of the night, I felt I had redeemed myself a little for my previous ignorance. Like on “Dogs”, everybody likewise let out a bunch of bleats for “Sheep”. 

We all screamed our heads off for the encore which was handsomely rewarded with that stellar “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Les introduced the song thanking everybody and believing that the night’s tapes would sound as good as the previous ones. He also pointed out that night would have been John Lennon’s 60th birthday, though he said they were going to play it anyway. He still thought it was appropriate. It was intense to hear Les play with two drum kits backing him up for the first time. The only other occasion I would see that was when Primus played New Year’s Eve in 2014 at The Fox and Danny Carey of Tool came out on a second kit for their encore of “Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin. Exhilarated but exhausted, I had endured a long stretch having done Bad Religion at The Warfield and AFI at The Fillmore as well working during the day right before these two nights. It was more than worth it.

The “Live Frogs” records wouldn’t be released until April of the next year for Volume 1 and July for Volume 2. Those live albums were a hit and Les would reissue them just shy of the twentieth anniversary of the shows in 2019, printing on special edition “green splatter” vinyl. The first volume would go on to win the Best Live Album at the second annual Jammie Awards. (Woo hoo!) Les would continue touring and making new music with his Frog Brigade for a few more years as well as putting together another side project, Oysterhead, with Stuart Copeland from The Police on drums and Trey Anastasio from Phish on guitar. I’m eternally ashamed that I wasn’t able to see when Oysterhead played at the Greek in Berkeley in 2001. I had been indentured to record BT, the electronic dance music DJ, at the Maritime Hall that night and it being the last official show of the Hall, I couldn’t pass that up. Still, I think it was a mistake. Chalk that one up to Stockholm Syndrome. I also missed Jane’s Addiction playing at Shoreline that night with Prodigy. Anyway, eventually, Les would reform Primus in 2003 once again with Herb on drums. 

Later in 2000, Les got together with Bob Weir opening for his band Ratdog with a one off project he called the “Rat Brigade” along with Weir and sax player Kenny Brooks, he borrowed once again Jay and Jeff on drums and keys, who had become permanent members of Ratdog. I’m sorry I too couldn’t see that incarnation, but I would witness many incarnations of the Frog Brigade with various members coming and going. If that wasn’t enough, Les would also form the Duo De Twang band with Brian Kehoe from M.I.R.V. as well as the Fancy Band a few years later. But as I said before, it would only be a couple months until I would see the Frog Brigade perform at The Fillmore on New Year’s Eve and the night before it. They would only perform the “Animals” album on the first night though. And it would only be three more short months after that I would see the Frog Brigade AGAIN, this time at The Warfield. Rest assured, there were many more times in the next few years I’d see them, including three more separate New Year’s Eve shows at The Fillmore. 

And yes, last night at The Fox was incredible as always. I was especially glad I got to see Les play with Sean Lennon on guitar and vocals since I had missed their collaboration in The Claypool-Lennon Delirium a few years ago. I’d seen Sean before with his mom, Yoko Ono, skrieking away as only she can do (thankfully), in the IMA band at the Tibetan Freedom Concert and another time with his band, Ghost Of A Sabre Tooth Tiger, at The Independent, but I’d never seen him play with Les. I’m sure last night wasn’t the last time I’d ever see the Frog Brigade, but if it is, I can confidently say that I’d seen them plenty and I know that there will always be a fan out there who’s seen them more. And considering Les just turned 60 years old last week, I think it’s safe for him to finally call the Frog Brigade his midlife crisis band.

Col. Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, GAMH, SF, Sun., October 8

https://archive.org/…/col.-les-claypools-fearless…

Col. Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, GAMH, SF, Mon., October 9

https://archive.org/…/col.-les-claypools-fearless…

King Crimson, Fill., SF, Thur., October 19

SETLIST : Introductory Soundscape, The ConstruKction Of Light, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic (Part IV), Coda : I Have A Dream, Into The Frying Pan, FraKctured, Thela Hun Ginjeet, Dinosaur, Improv, ProzaKc Blues, Improv, One Time, Frame By Frame, Red, (encore), Three Of A Perfect Pair, Elephant Talk, (encore), The Power To Believe III : Deception Of The Thrush, “Heroes”

I wasn’t sure what to make of King Crimson the first time I saw them at The Warfield five years before this. I knew the name and knew they were one of those many bands that I should know more about but didn’t. But this time, I’d be seeing them closer at the much smaller Fillmore. Yes, it had been 31 fucking years since they were beneath the roof of the Fillmore West, a different Fillmore but a Fillmore nonetheless, where they performed alongside the Chambers Brothers and Nice with Keith Emerson in December of 1969, the height of hippiedom. They made a live album from those shows. This time they were stripped down, playing as a quartet or “double duo” as they and their fans called them then. They had been a “double trio” before, but had been recently downsized as their bassist Tony Levin took a hiatus to do some session work and drummer Bill Bruford split too. This time, it would only be their venerable guitarist Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew on guitars and vocals, Trey Gunn on his various weird, custom stringed instruments, and Pat Mastelotto on drums.

They had just put out “The ConstrucKtion Of Light”, their 12th studio album, which sadly didn’t do as well as their previous ventures critically or commercially. Fripp wasn’t happy with it either and said so in public. But as I was still (relatively) ignorant to their work, I was blissfully unaware of most of the songs and whether they were new ones or old. I was however very much aware of their song “Thela Hun Ginjeet” which Les Claypool had performed just ten days prior to this show both days of his back to back shows at the Great American Music Hall with his new band the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade. He played it more or less faithfully to the style of King Crimson, but Les’ version went on about three times longer than they played it at this show. I, and everyone else on planet Earth, also knew their final song of the night, “Heroes” by David Bowie, that Fripp had contributed his signature guitar wailings for the original recording. They would also release a live album in 2000, “Heavy ConstucKtion”, with songs recorded from their European tour earlier that summer.

Robert once again sat discretely on his little stool and the band was rather dimly lit as was their thing, I guess. Like before, the fans pretty much stood there transfixed by their multilayered musical mazes, not music for any kind of normal dancing to say the least. Yes, this is the kind of music you have to be a music student to even begin to understand what they’re doing, music for smart people, booksmart anyway. The dexterity of the guitar playing that night was beyond belief, further solidifying their reputation as virtuosos at least in my opinion. I have to admit, seeing one of their shows does kind of make you feel a little smarter at the end of the night. At least when I run into prog rock fans in the future, I can boast of seeing King Crimson, even if I still know just a thimbleful about them. They covered a lot of material from their decades of work, including “The Power To Believe III : The Deception Of The Thrush” from the ProjeKct Two side band Fripp and Adrian whipped up a couple years before this. 

It had been sort of a rough week in the news. The U.S.S. Cole had just been attacked the previous Thursday by Bin Laden’s suicidal goons and to a galactic sized lesser degree of tragedy but still unfortunate, Rage Against The Machine announced they broke up (for their first time), the day before this show. On the lighter side of the news, that year astronomer Marc Buie discovered an asteroid and named it “81947 Fripp” after their esteemed guitarist. He’d also discover a second one the same night and named it after Brian Eno, who had produced and composed alongside Fripp for years. This would be the first of the three sold out King Crimson shows at The Fillmore and at least I knew with some certainty that there would be a poster at the end of the night and there was. As luck would have it the next time I’d see King Crimson was opening for none other than Tool at Berkeley Community Theater the following year. I actually took my dear ol’ mom to that show, partially because I thought she’d be intrigued by their musical complexity, but she was in fact more impressed with Tool. Go figure. I would see King Crimson one more time at The Fillmore in 2003, but that would be the last time for me, though I’d see Adrian and Trevor in other things in the future. 

King Crimson, Fill., SF, Thur., October 19

https://archive.org/details/king-crimson-fillmore-101900

The Tragically Hip, Chris Brown & Kate Fenner, Fill., SF, Tues., October 24

SETLIST : Grace Too, My Music At Work, Membership, Twist My Arm, Fully Completely, Putting Down, Gift Shop, The Last Of The Unplucked Gems, Ahead By A Century, Greasy Jungle, Freak Turbulence, Nautical Disaster, Tiger The Lion, Wheat Kings, Train Overnight, Boots Or Hearts, 700 Ft. Ceiling, Courage (For Hugh MacLennan), Lake Fever, At The Hundredth Meridian, Sharks, Poets, Flamenco, Fireworks, Stay, New Orleans Is Sinking, Fire In The Hole, (encore), Bobcaygeon, Little Bones

This was one of those rare shows at the modestly sized Fillmore where it hosted an arena sized band, albeit a band that fills arenas in its home country. Often is the case for visiting J-Pop bands and such was the case for The Tragically Hip from the Great White North. Yes, these Canadians from Kingston, Ontario were so renown amongst their ex-pat communities in America, whenever they would visit, their countrymen would snatch up the tickets to their shows instantly, leaving none for us Yanks.  Consequently, The Hip never really caught on in America commercially, but were respected by music fans and other musicians worldwide in the long run. Rest assured, they are considered a national treasure in Canada where they would be the best selling band in their home country for twenty years, the 4th overall. There were plenty of Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys in the house that night, a handful of them lined up in front of the stage. This was one of those rare occasions where the Fillmore gave out a horizontal poster at the end of the night too. Coincidentally, The Hip’s guitarist has the same name as my dad, Robert Baker, a fair common name, I admit.

The Hip had just put out their “Music @ Work” album that June, releasing it early on the web, a new marketing move for bands back then, but became more common as time rolled on, and they performed 7 of the new songs that night. Their singer Gord Downie would also release his first solo record, “Coke Machine Glow”, the following year. This was the first of two sold out gigs at The Fillmore. I would be seeing The Dirty Three at the Great American Music Hall on the second night. I’ve only been able to locate a single disc with just the first six songs of their set that show, about a half hours worth. But I’m happy to report that they recorded a video of their show that night and I found it on YouTube, a good quality one too. It was a long night since I had to work through the opening act, the singer songwriter duo of Chris Brown & Kate Fenner from New York City, and The Hip were doing two sets, so I had to work through the first set and until they started their second.

But it was time well spent. I was immediately impressed by Gord’s voice. I know he probably heard it all the time and it’s frankly kind of obvious, but it bore a striking resemblance to Michael Stipe’s from R.E.M. Though both bands started around the same time, R.E.M. a few years earlier and their music is similar, geographically there was some considerable distance between them. But who knows? They probably secretly stole from each other all time. Michael shaved his head first. That’s official. Gord was different however in that he’d do these weird sort of mumbling spoken word cutaways during his songs from time to time. He was quite the poet, brilliant really. Adding some additional tragedy to The Tragically Hip, Gord would pass away in 2017 from a brain tumor at the all too young age of 53 years old. But his revered memory lives on to all those hosers who appreciate his work.

Very much alive and intense that night, Gord was dressed in a white, long sleeved collared shirt with a grey vest, though he ended up losing the vest after they played “Gift Shop”. Sweating though that first shirt, he changed into a collarless, long sleeved, black shirt for the second set, also with a different vest he’d eventually take off. I noticed he was wearing inner ear monitors which were starting to become more and more common at shows. Gord didn’t talk much between songs, but he did mention that “Fully & Completely” is a song that is “still reverberating down the hall.” The band was touring with a young, attractive blond woman named Julie Dorion singing background vocals and slapping the tambourine all night. She had a moment to shine, singing a couple verses of “Flamenco” on her own earning her some well deserved applause. 

I was looking forward to revisiting this one after doing the research and for one other special, yet bittersweet reason. The Tragically Hip would actually be the last band that I would ever usher for and record at The Warfield. Yep, when they played there in 2007, I got the word from Ian Berzon, the head usher at the time, that they were discontinuing my traditional position at the Left Bar Aisle and something just clicked and I knew it was over. Naturally, I will write more about that when I get to it, but I will never forget The Hip because of it. I always had a feeling the last one would be of a band I didn’t know or didn’t know very well.

The Tragically Hip, Fill., SF, Tues., October 24

https://archive.org/…/the-tragically-hip-fillmore-102400

https://archive.org/details/the-tragically-hip-bootleg-fillmore-102400

The Dirty Three, Shannon Wright, Orso, GAMH, SF, Wed., October 25

SETLIST : Deep Waters, (unknown), (unknown), Some Summers They Drop Like Flys, Some Things I Just Don’t Want To Know, I Really Should Have Gone Out Last Night, Sue’s Last Ride, (encore), Everything Is Fucked, (unknown)

First off the bat, I should confess, this being a confession and all, that I was quite drunk at this show. So, listening to the tapes again helped fill in some much need blanks. I had been a fan of The Dirty Three ever since I heard them open for Morphine at The Fillmore five years before this show and had made every effort to see them when they would come to town thereafter as well as pick up any album of theirs I could lay my hands on. Coming off of the critical success of their last album, “Ocean Songs”, they had just put out “Whatever You Love, You Are” that March. This new brilliant musical offering won them an ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) award for Best Adult Alternative Album. 

It had been two years since I’d seen this instrumental trio from Down Under and they once again made the classy choice to call the Great American their home away from home when in town, the second of a two night stint there. I would go on to see them perform at that venue three more times in the future in 2003, 2005, and 2009. Opening that night, Orso, also members of a band called Rex, entertained the crowd with their duo of harpsichord sounding keys and guitar. Following them was Shannon Wright, a singer songwriter from Chapel Hill, North Carolina by way of Jacksonville, Florida. She had signed to Touch & Go alongside The Dirty Three and was quite a screamer that one. Definitely got an A for effort, physically and emotionally. I can hear myself drunkenly blurting out the Beastie Boys sample line,”It’s got a funky beat and I can bug out to it!” between songs.

The members of The Dirty Three were busy that year. Guitarist Mick Turner had released a couple solo records as well as a couple for a band he was also in called Bonnevill. On top of that, Mick had partnered up again with drummer Jim White to become the instrumental duo of The Tren Brothers. They backed up Cat Power for her debut breakthrough album, “Moon Pix” two years before this. Cat Power would open for The Dirty Three when they returned to the Great American in 2003, but I’m afraid I was drunk at that one too and made a bit of an ass of myself at that one again. It’s nobody’s fault but my own, but something about the The Dirty Three really lends itself to heavy drinking. Jim White and violinist Warren Ellis also backed up Nick Cave on his tour of Australia earlier that January. Warren had already become a member of The Bad Seeds by then and would go on to collaborate with Mr. Cave on many projects including some brilliant movie soundtracks like “The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford”.

Between songs during The Dirty Three’s set at this one, Warren was going off on one of his long strange talks and mentioned something about a dangerous neighborhood and I yelled out something about East Palo Alto. That town used to have a reputation for being dangerous back then, but now of coarse you have to be filthy rich to live there. He stopped and asked me to repeat it which I did, but he still didn’t hear me, and asked again which at that point I was too embarrassed to go on and there was an uncomfortable pause where a few of the people around me were glaring at me disapprovingly. Warren shrugged and said that whoever said it can write it down on a note and give it to him later. I kept cheering and such between songs, but at least had enough self awareness to not chime in anything else for the rest of the show.

It was hard to make out the stuff Warren was rambling about between songs that night on tape and it usually is even when you can hear him clearly. However, I was able to make out one of the things he said introducing “Everything Is Fucked” the first song of their encore, saying it was “a song about drinking poison and waiting around for the other person to die.” Likewise, being an instrumental band, even one I knew pretty well, I still had a hard time figuring out the setlist, but I managed to make out all but three of the tunes they played at that gig. He asked the audience for requests at the end and I was pleading for “The Dirty Equation”, but they didn’t play it. They had a couple interesting posters on sale that night for the show, a large red one with an illustration of a lion on it and another black one with an orange cat for the previous night. I believe the merch guy said that the lion image came from some a Polish fairy tale of something. I think Orso had made them because their name was above the other two acts suggesting they were the headliner that night. Though I was beat from seeing The Tragically Hip at The Fillmore the night before and this show going past midnight, I was glad a came, especially since the ticket only set me back $12. 

The Dirty Three, Orso, Shannon Wright, GAMH, SF, Wed., October 25

https://archive.org/…/the-dirty-three-great-american…

https://archive.org/…/orso-great-american-music-hall…

https://archive.org/…/shannon-wright-great-american…

Beck, Foo Fighters, War., SF, Thur., October 26

SETLISTS :

(FOO FIGHTERS) : Breakout, My Hero, Learn To Fly, This Is A Call, Aurora, Stacked Actors, Ain’t It The Life, Next Year, I’ll Stick Around, Monkey Wrench, Everlong

(BECK) : Loser, New Pollution, Novacane, Nicotine & Gravy, Debra, Mixed Bizness, Milk & Honey, Hotwax, Jackass, Devil’s Haircut, Sexx Laws, Where It’s At

This was an unusual show for a few notable reasons. First and foremost, it was a secret show, a show where the acts were not revealed to the fans until the curtain opened for them. It was someone big to be sure since this gig was sponsored by the cheap yet ubiquitous beer giant Miller Genuine Draft. They had been putting together these so-called “Blind Date” shows around the country doing the same scenario with such A-List acts of the day as David Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, Hole, and The Chemical Brothers. They had just put on Metallica on a few days before this in L.A. and this one was to be the last Blind Date of the year. 

The second reason this show was a horse of a different color was that there was free beer all night! The bad news is that (obviously) it was Miller Genuine Draft. However, the good news was that it was paired with unlimited slices of Round Table Pizza! I’m just glad they went with Round Table and not with something more stomach churning like Domino’s or Little Caesar’s. They had set up folding tables in the lobby and there were literally stacks upon stacks of extra large boxes filled with pepperoni and cheese pizzas. As an usher, I wasn’t allowed to touch either beer or pizza until I was cut for the night, but I made up for lost time once I was released.

Now the secret of who was playing was no secret at all to the folks working the show that night, it being the combination of the Foo Fighters followed by Beck. We were given explicit instructions not to spill the beans to the patrons that evening and I kept my lips sealed. A great double bill it might have been, but I had already seen Beck that May at the Civic and again in Golden Gate Park just a month before this. Furthermore, I’d see both Beck and the Foo Fighters just two days later performing at the first day of the Bridge School Benefit. My cup did overfloweth that year for those guys. The Foo Fighters had actually headlined one of these Blind Date shows at The Fillmore back in 1997, but I missed that one. Still, I was glad to see the Fighters again, this being the first time I’d catch them since the Tibetan Freedom Concert four years prior to this.

A DJ named Jared from a “certain radio station” that he declined to name came out to introduce the show shouting, “Let’s hear it for Miller Genuine Draft! God bless ‘em… You guys have a little MGD tonight? Where’d you guys come from?… The East Coast?” There were a smattering of cheers and boos. He went on, “The midwest?… The south?” Strangely, everybody booed the south, but they predictably cheered when he finally asked about the West Coast. He teased the crowd asking if anybody knew who the first act was and people shouted out their random guesses. One guy yelled out, “Brittany Spears!”

So, people were pleasantly surprised when the curtain finally rose for the first time revealing the Foo Fighters and they started right away with “Breakout”. Dave Grohl was his usual goofy, talkative self joking after the song, “If you haven’t figured it out, we’re the Foo Fighters. We like free beer as much as the next guy. We get free beer every night which leaves me to believe that you people might appreciate it a little bit more.” Dave then (appropriately) belched loudly and they played “My Hero” which went straight into “Learn To Fly”. During that song, Dave stopped in the middle and pointed to the crowd in the pit, “I need to share a message of peace and love and joy for a second. There’s a woman who’s getting kind of upset that she’s getting thrown around up front. I’m cool with that, so I’m going to invite her to sit by the side of the stage. I don’t want to see anybody upset now. I’m just trying to make everybody fuckin’ happy ‘cus that’s the kind of guy I am. I don’t even care if I have an orgasm as long as my friends do.”

After “Aurora”, Dave smiled and said, “That is so progressive rock shit!”, took a sip of beer, and joked, “This MGD shit is fuckin’ gross! I’m just fuckin’ with ya. I’m just fuckin’ with ya. I don’t want to lose my paycheck” and then they did “Stacked Actors”. It got kind of rowdy up front, people trying to stage dive and such, one of them grabbing at Dave. He laughed after the song, “You motherfuckers tried to take my pants off!… I kind of liked it actually”, then he belched again and continued, “Now I know you guys are at the point where you’ll pretty much make out with anybody. I’ll get there sometime. I’ve been there. It’s a nice place. Works for me. I’ll let you know once I get there.” He started pointing around to the folks in the pit, “I’ll be making out with him and you and you and him…” 

Later, he revealed before playing “Next Year”, “So, you know what… We gave our song to a TV show. Now it’s the theme to this TV show. Whatever. We were all freaked out about doing it and we weren’t sure if we should do it or not. But, uh, we did it as a favor to our good friend David Letterman. Joke!” Dave got a rimshot from the drums for that one. He mentioned that they also played the song earlier that day on “The Jay Leno show”. Turns out, he was telling the truth and that song had become the theme to the sitcom “Ed’ on NBC that year. Show creators Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman were actually from “the Late Show With David Letterman” and “Ed” ran for four seasons from 2000 to 2004. Not being much of a fan of network TV stuff, I never watched it. Apparently, there was some brew ha-ha over the rights to the song from Viacom, so they tried to replace it during the second season with “Moment In The Sun” by Clem Snides, but there was so much public outcry that they returned it to the “Next Year” song for seasons 3 and 4. It had some interesting supporting actors like Michael Ian Black, Justin Long, and John Slattery though.

Anyway. after the song, Dave said, “This is how much we wanted to come up here and play to a bunch of people drinking free beer. We played last night in Los Angeles. We woke up this morning as early as shit, totally fuckin’ hungover, and we went straight to the Jay Leno show, played it there, hopped on a fuckin’ plane, and came up here. We got here a half an hour ago!” The crowd erupted in applause and then they did “I’ll Stick Around”. Afterwards, Dave wanted “to dedicate these next two songs, fuckin’ shit hot set, to Taylor ‘cus he’s a fuckin’ trooper right there. That’s Taylor Hawkins playing the drums!” They gave Taylor a round of applause too and the band did “ Monkey Wrench” followed by the last song, “Everlong”. Before they finished, Dave shouted, “Be responsible drinkers! Tip your waitresses! Breathilize before you analyze!… They finished, took a bow, and the curtain went down again. 

The curtains rose once more after the break to the unmistakable opening acoustic guitar licks of “Loser” by Beck. I read a while ago that Beck found the whole Blind Date thing a little jarring, having to go on after the Fighters. A lot of those folks in the mosh pit were a bunch of sweaty, fraternity mooks and by that time, they were all sauced up on MGD. He did his best and did great as always as far as I could tell though. After a few songs in, I was at last cut from ushering and began to pound MGD and pizza as fast and as much as my poor, much abused digestive system could endure. Why, oh why did it have to be MGD? (Groan) But still, the price was right and after drinking four or five, the taste fatigue would give way to the drunkenness at last. All I had to do was keep from vomiting and piss like a firehose all night. 

Beck pretty much covered all the hits he had done at the shows I saw earlier in the year, though he left out his usual solo acoustic stuff to save time since he only had an hour. He introduced the band at the beginning of “Mixed Bizness” including his horn section, The Brass Menagerie, and did that little breakdown of “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie again in the middle of the song. Beck broke it down as well for the epic “Debra” wooing the subject of the song, “I’ll pick you up late after work. I know you had a hard day at your job. The boss is working you too hard. You got a run in your stockings. Your high heels are hurting your feet. I got a little sympathy for you, girl! That’s when I say… (singing)… Lady, step inside my Hyundai… (speaking again)… I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Where you wanna go? You wanna go to Thailand? You wanna go to Jamaica? You wanna go to Long Island? You wanna go to Arizona? I’ll take you for a trip around the world! Or if you want to go around the block, that’s cool with me too.”

He did that schtick again during the song boasting of his “17 octave vocal range”, saying that there were “many kinds of athletics, but none is more vigorous” than vocal athletics. Beck said you “have to start below sea level” and starting singing way low gradually wailing his way up to a high pitched crescendo and naturally, the crowd went wild. After “Milk & Honey”, Beck said, “This is a little something for the west coast. There’s a lot of people here tonight from many places from across the land. And while you’re visiting here, I’d like to bring you some west coast flavor… It’s called ‘Hotwax’”. At the end of his set, he added “I’d like to thank you for being an exceptional audience tonight. I know you didn’t know what you were going to get… Maybe you didn’t want it, but maybe you needed it. So we’d like to leave you right now with a little extra flavor” and they ended the show with “Where It’s At”. 

The tapes from that night came out well enough, but I was glad to find a good copy of the Foo Fighters set on the foofighterslive.com website. They also had a decent poster at the end of the show as well and if that wasn’t enough, let’s just say I took a little or rather a lot of the show home with me when it was over. There were still an impressive few stacks of pizzas left over, so I helped myself to a couple extra large pepperonis and carried the boxes home with me and my freshly bloated abdomen. My modestly sized refrigerator back at my even more modest studio apartment was filled to the brim with the leftovers and it kept me happily fed for the next few days. 

Beck, Foo Fighters, War., SF, Thur., October 27

https://archive.org/details/beck-warfield-102700

https://archive.org/details/foo-fighters-warfield-102700

Bridge School Benefit 2000: Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Neil Young With Friends & Relatives, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beck, Foo Fighters, Shoreline, Mountain View, Sun., October 29

SETLISTS :

(NEIL YOUNG) : Flying On The Ground Is Wrong, Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing, Mr. Soul

(FOO FIGHTERS) : Big Me, Up In Arms, Breakout, My Hero, Learn To Fly, Everlong

(BECK) : Tropicalia, Bottle Of Blues, Sing It Again, Go Easy, O Maria, Static 2, Burro (Jackass – Spanish Version)

(RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS) : Road Trippin’, Californication, What Is Soul?, Beverly Hills (Century City), Scar Tissue, Parallel Universe, Otherside, I Could Have Lied, Trouble

(TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS) : Baby Please Don’t Go, A Face In The Crowd, Mary Jane’s Last Dance, Little Red Rooster, To Find A Friend, I Won’t Back Down, Breakdown

(DAVE MATTHEWS BAND) : One Sweet World, What Would You Say, Crash Into Me, Tripping Billies, All Along The Watchtower, Cortez The Killer

(NEIL YOUNG WITH FRIENDS & RELATIVES) : Words (Between The Lines Of Age), Old Man, Red Sun, Heart Of Gold, Daddy Went Walkin’, Razor Love, Tonight’s The Night

(CROSBY, STILLS, NASH, & YOUNG) : Cinnamon Girl, Marrakesh Express, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Helplessly Hoping, Dream For Him, Suite : Judy Blue Eyes, Teach The Children, Love The One You’re With

Another glorious year had come and gone and it was time once again for the Bridge School Benefit. I was able to get a ticket, though I heard that scalpers were asking as much as $2000 a pop for this one. Jerry Pompili from BGP mentioned between acts that night that “if you want to pay that much, call the Bridge School and make a donation. They’ll take care of you.” This was my eighth Bridge School in nine years and this acoustic cavalcade of stars was always one I’d look forward to. It was also the first year they were webcasting the shows, doing it through Intel and accepting donations over the internet.

This year’s line up was especially tempting because it would be the first time I’d see the freshly reformed Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young. This would be their first tour together in 25 long years. Neil had taken interest in the idea after collaborating with Crosby and Stills on three new songs, “Looking Forward”, “Slowpoke”, and “Out Of Control” for a new Buffalo Springfield box set. I remember hearing from my friend and expert in all things Neil, Jeff Pollard who was with me at this show, that Mr. Young allegedly said he’d steadfastly refused to work with those guys again until they had put out three new albums of original material since the time he split with them, but I guess Neil relented in the end. They would all kiss and make up, pow wow in the studio once more, and put out “Looking Forward” in 1999, CSNY’s fifth and final studio album. It might not have been their best work, but if anything, it was worth it for the money. Theirs would be the 8th highest grossing tour in the world that year. 

David Crosby had been in the news that January after it was revealed, unexpectedly to say the least, that he had been sperm donor for two of Melissa Etheridge’s kids. Sadly, one of the kids, Beckett died from an opioid overdose a couple years ago. The disastrous 2000 election night was only days away from this show and David had served as a member of the Democratic Party Credentials Committee during their convention down in Los Angeles. That February, Mr. Crosby had a book published called “Stand And Be Counted”, an examination of his and other artists’ involvement in political activism over the decades. I actually read it and found it quite interesting and well written. One bit that always stuck with me was his warning to other artists to be very, VERY careful on whose horse you back politically since politicians are human after all and fall from grace from time to time. One needs to look no further for an example than John Edwards, the Democratic candidate for Vice President that election getting caught years later having an affair while his wife was dying of cancer. A random fun fact to lighten things up again, the late great comedian Phil Hartman designed the logo for Crosby, Stills, & Nash back in the day when he was a graphic designer before he made it big in comedy.

I couldn’t find the tapes of Neil Young’s traditional opening of the show, where he’d play two or three tunes just him by his lonesome as well as Canadian duo Tegan & Sara who followed him, but I do remember them. Tegan & Sara were brand new back then having released their debut album “Under Feet Like Ours” only the year before under the then moniker of Sara & Tegan and had just dropped their second album, “The Business Of Art” three months before this. Their song “My Number” would be used in the soundtrack of romantic drama film “Sweet November” with Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, a movie filmed in San Francisco earlier that year. Neil threw a bit of a curveball, opening the gig with three Buffalo Springfield songs in a row, “Flying On The Ground Is Wrong”, “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing”, and “Mr. Soul”. It had rained mercilessly the night before so obviously I was glad I chose this show instead of that one. Still, Robin Williams had been there for that day and he was cracking jokes like, “They’re gonna have the Ark built in just an hour. I know Noah!”, to try to raise the spirits of those poor, soaked concertgoers. His hair was dyed blond, so he probably was working on the film “One Hour Photo” around then.

It was a stellar line up as always at Bridge School that year, but as luck would have it, I had already seen the next two acts after Neil just two days before this. Yes, both the Foo Fighters and Beck had played a show at The Warfield that Thursday, a special secret “MGD Blind Date” where the patrons were brought to the venue by limo, practically force fed gallons of free MGD and Round Table pizza, unaware of who was playing until the curtains rose. Before that show, I hadn’t seen the Fighters since the Tibetan Freedom Concert in ’96 and they had picked up Taylor Hawkins on drums and Chris Shiflett on guitar since then. Guitarist Pat Smear had left the band a couple years before this, but would eventually rejoin them in 2011. The MGD gig was a fun show and you heard no complaints whatsoever from me for seeing two such class acts so soon again. And it was different anyway since both acts were playing acoustic this time. 

First on of the two, like before, was the Foo Fighters. I had neglected to mention a few bits about them in my writings of that Warfield show, so I’m going to go over them now. Sorry, a couple days late but better late than never. Dave Grohl and the band had hit it big with their latest album, “There’s Nothing Left To Lose”, especially with their new single, “Learn To Fly” and its brilliant music video, which won the Grammy for Best Short Form Video the following year. They would play that song as well as two other new ones, “Stacked Actors” and “Breakout” that night as they also did at The Warfield. There had been a bit of a brew ha-ha earlier that year when their guitarist, Nate Mandel, led a benefit concert that January for “Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives”, an AIDS denialist group. That organization had been condemned by the Office Of National AIDS Policy and thankfully all links that the Fighters had to them on their website were eventually removed. I remember it being bit of a big deal that year, somewhat tainting their latest good fortune and it was just awkward to say the least, especially for their fans in San Francisco.

But you wouldn’t have guessed it phased Dave in the slightest at that show or at The Warfield one. He and the band were tight as usual and he was once again his usual, jolly self. Dave joked at the end of their set that they “thought about doing ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ (by Arlo Guthrie) in its entirety” but they thought it would be “too much”. This would be the last time I’d see Dave without facial hair not to mention it would be a whopping 21 years until I would see him and the band again playing at the Dreamforce convention. That show would be the last appearance of Taylor Hawkins with the Fighters in the bay area before his untimely and tragic death a few months later from an overdose while they were on tour in Columbia. Incidentally, Tom Petty who would play later that night had asked Dave, who had sat in on a number of shows with the Heartbreakers including on an episode of “Saturday Night Live”, if he wanted to play drums for the Heartbreakers back in 1994 after Stan Lynch left the band. Dave had back then recently though tragically, freed up from Nirvana, but he declined and instead opted to continue on his own, forming this band he has to this day. It just occurred to me that the Fighters have the song “Learn To Fly” and Tom’s got “Learning To Fly”. Maybe somebody will do a mash up someday.

Though the Fighters didn’t play anything that I hadn’t heard from the Warfield show, Beck mixed up a little. In fact, the only song he did that show that he’d played at the other one was “Jackass” and this time he did it in Spanish! Appropriately, he had titled the song “Burro” on the setlist this time and arranged it with his Brass Menagerie horn section full on mariachi style. Beck did some obscure ones too like “Go Easy” and the ragtime jazzy “O Maria” off of the “Mutations” album. I’d seen Beck play the Bridge School once before in 1995, but this would be the only time I’d see him play at this benefit with other band members backing him up, where it wasn’t just him.

Next up was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I had just seen them the previous December headlining the Cow Palace, hot off the release of their smash hit “Californication” album. I was especially intrigued to hear their set for this would be the first time I’d hear them perform acoustically. Their singer, Anthony Kiedis, still had the same short haircut, but had dyed it dark brown this time. We were extremely fortunate at this show to hear the Peppers open with “Road Trippin” which was one of only four times they performed that song live and they haven’t played it at all since 2004. The Chilis made good choices for their acoustic sound that night, not playing anything too bombastic. “Scar Tissue” sounds better acoustic in my opinion. This was probably the only show you could get Flea to sit on a stool for the entire set, everyone being so used to seeing him bounce around like hyperactive kangaroo all night. Speaking of kangaroos, I learned doing research on this show that Flea was actually born in Australia. Crickey! Anyway, they did a few eclectic yet tasteful covers, “What Is Soul?” by Funkadelic, “Beverly Hills” by the Circle Jerks, and finished their set with a rather somber version of Cat Stevens’ “Trouble”. 

I’d seen Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers play the Bridge School once before in 1994 and they were an always welcome addition to the bill. Tom had been doing well recently, having new success with his latest album “Echo” which had come out the previous year, going gold in just the first three months. He had recently received a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame as well. The band had tried to release the new single “Free Girl Now” for free on the web, but Warner Brothers pulled the plug on that after two days. That album would however be the last one with bassist Howie Epstein who had succumbed to heroin addiction that would ultimately take his life three years later. Howie played on the album, but wasn’t on the cover because he flaked on the photo shoot. Tom himself had just gotten out of rehab for heroin the year before this and sadly, Mr. Petty too would ultimately succumb to an accidental overdose in 2017. 

But Mr. Petty was alive and well as were his Heartbreakers who were in good form. It must be noted that Tom was sporting a sort of awkward mod-bowl haircut that night, not his best look. They opened with the old blues standard “Baby Please Don’t Go” and went on to do a stellar set, including a sweet cover of Willie Dixon’s “ Little Red Rooster”, where he got us all literally howling and barking during the bit where he sings, “The dogs begin to bark now, hounds begin to howl.” At the end of his set, Tom got the audience to sing along to a bunch of call and response “hey hey hey”’s during a sublime and subdued “Breakdown”. Jerry Pompili came out afterwards calling it a “magical set” and then did the annual raffle.

Dave Matthews would be the third act there that night who I’d be seeing at the Bridge School Benefit for the second time, having seen him on the bill there before in 1997. Dave mentioned it was a little chilly when he came out, though it was a lot less wetter than the night before and politely thanked the audience and the Bridge School for inviting them there. The Dave Matthews Band were their talented yet inoffensive selves again, but I did appreciate when Neil came out near the end of their set to play “All Along The Watchtower” and “Cortez The Killer” with them. Dave is often the butt of jokes for allegedly being bland, but the sheer intensity of his “Watchtower” would have impressed any skeptic. Mr. Matthews had been working on new material at the time, having just built his recording studio at his country home just outside Charlottesville, North Carolina, but he didn’t play anything new that show. 

Neil was up next, his second of three appearances that night, this time with his own band, being billed as “With Friends & Relatives”. One had to give him credit for playing so many songs both days, a challenge for any musician, especially one his age even back then. Neil had his lovely wife and benefit co-founder Pegi and his sister Astrid on background vocals as well as the legendary Donald “Duck” Dunn from Booker T & The MGs and The Blues Brothers on bass. Neil had just put out the “Silver & Gold” album and played three new songs off it that night, “Razor Love”, “Red Sun”, and “Daddy Went Walkin’”. Neil would switch between guitar and the organ, occasionally playing harmonica too and they ended that set with a cool, serene, and sort of spooky version of “Tonight’s The Night”.

It didn’t take long for them to change the set and Neil was back with his old quartet and I have to say it was good to see those geezers together again, opening with “Cinnamon Girl”, one of my favorites. After “Marrakesh Express”, CSNY did “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” which I had coincidentally heard Saint Etienne do their infectious, electronic dance cover of just a month before this at The Fillmore. They also played “Dream For Him”, the only song they’d perform from their new album in their set that evening. The show ended with the finale of “Love The One You’re With” accompanied, as was by tradition, by some of the folks that had performed earlier. I saw Beck, Dave Matthews, Pegi and Astrid from Neil’s band singing along up there. Strangely enough, actor Woody Harrelson had been in the house on the first night and sang along to the finale too. It would be four long years before I’d see another Bridge School and as luck would have it, the Chilis would be at that one once again, though Anthony Kiedis’s hair would be a little longer that time. This was an enjoyable start for my Halloween weekend and I would follow this with B.B. King at The Warfield on Devil’s Night and then The Cramps at The Fillmore for Halloween itself.

Bridge School Benefit 2000: Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Neil Young, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beck, Foo Fighters, Shoreline, Mountain View, Sun., October 29

https://archive.org/…/crosby-stills-nash-young…

https://archive.org/details/neil-young-shoreline-102900

https://archive.org/…/dave-matthews-band-shoreline-102900

https://archive.org/…/tom-petty-the-heartbreakers…

https://archive.org/…/red-hot-chili-peppers-shoreline…

https://archive.org/details/beck-shoreline-102900

https://archive.org/details/foo-fighters-shoreline-102900

B.B. King, War., SF, Mon., October 30

SETLIST : Overture, Let The Good Times Roll, I’ll Survive, Bad Case Of Love, Peace Of Mind, Caledonia, All Over Again (instrumental), Early In The Morning, Ain’t That Just Like A Woman (They’ll Do It Every Time), You Are My Sunshine, I’m Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town, Three O’Clock Blues, The Thrill Is Gone, I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More), Don’t Go No Further, Please Accept My Love, Rock Me Baby, Makin’ Love Is Good For You

I was ecstatic to see for the first time the one and only B.B. King, the master of all things blues, inspiration and mentor to rock & roll pioneers from Elvis to The Beatles, but I was annoyed to death that it had to be a BGSE show. Yes, the venerable master of his beloved guitar Lucille was slumming it playing a “Bill Graham Special Event”, not to say that he and his esteemed band weren’t payed handsomely. Rest assured they were, for this was a big money conference party for J.P. Morgan. There was less than 300 people there at The Warfield, a venue that can (legally) 2000 hold more than that, so they closed off the entire balcony in an effort to make the floor seem fuller. Even then, there was little for the ushers to do, especially having little point clearing aisles for such a sparse audience. It was a welcome respite from the stretch I had the night before at the Bridge School Benefit.

Mr. King had been held in high esteem amongst the elder BGP community, being one of those blues masters who had served on many of those early eclectic bills at The Fillmore, The Fillmore West, and Winterland, sharing the stage with hippie acts like Moby Grape, The Mothers Of Invention, and The Byrds. He had gotten recent commercial and critical attention with his collaborations with Eric Clapton. Together, they put out the “Riding With The King” album that June which would go double platinum and win them the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. Jimmy Vaughn and Wendy Melvoin and her twin sister Susannah from The Revolution were also featured on the new album as well and they would perform the new song “Three O’Clock Blues” later that night. B.B. had known Eric since he was a wee 22 year old guitar protege back at the Cafe Au Go Go in 1967. Mr. King had also leant his talent to Eric’s, “Duets” album three years before this, joining him on the song, “Rock Me Baby”.

Earlier that year, Mr. King opened the third of his BBK’s Blues Clubs in Times Square, but it closed its doors in 2018. Also in 2000, there was an animated children’s TV show out called “Between The Lions” and the main character was called “B.B., The King Of Beasts” and he was modeled after you-know-who. And if that wasn’t enough, he had been the spokesman for One Touch Ultra, the blood glucose monitoring device, ever since he was diagnosed with diabetes in 1990. Those commercials with him played all the time back then. So, all things considered, Mr. King had a lot on his plate for a man who had just turned 75 years old. The usual blues purist detractors gave him a little shade for his newest works sounding too clean, but fuck ‘em. He sounded great that night.

Like I said, I didn’t have a lot to do but scowl resentfully at the rich bankers who got to see this genius for their own private little wing ding and I would say only about 50 of them were playing attention at all. When I got cut from ushering, it was open bar, so I REALLY made an effort to make up for lost time. I was pounding beer as fast as I could stomach it, so much that one of the bartenders eventually cut me off. I can still see that look of bitter distain in his eyes as he simply shook his head no, but I was able to continue my relentless beer intake from bartenders elsewhere in the house. Not to blame him in the slightest. He was just doing his job, but I knew that as an usher I was an annoyance to him to begin with. I gave him a sort of sly, “Oh, it’s like that, eh?” and went on my way. I knew I’d suffer for chugging all that fizzy liquid, because about halfway into B.B’s set, I had to pee most urgently. This is one of the principal reasons I don’t drink at shows anymore. When it became too much to bear, I bolted, did my business with the force of a firehose, and scrambled back.

Because there were so few paying attention to the show, the front of the dance floor was practically deserted. Those god damned, philistine suit people were all mingling about and talking shop in the back amongst the small, round cocktail tables and hors d’oeuvres. The band, all dressed in suits, came out and did a bit of an overture before Mr. King joined them, one of the band declaring him, “The King Of The Blues!”. And sitting at on his stool front and center, there was I, dead center right in front of him, less than 10 feet away. He opened with “Let The Good Times Roll” by Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five and they’d also cover “Early In The Morning” by them too later in the set. I was being spoiled that night and I knew it. He covered a lot of crowd pleasers including a nice sing-a-long version of “You Are My Sunshine” and his big hit, “The Thrill Is Gone”. He gave long introductions to his band members near the end and mentioned that they had backed him up in 80 different countries.

Though this would be the only B.B. King performance that I’d officially attend, there was one notable exception a few years later. I was up in Arcata visiting some friends and smoking a lot of weed as it is the custom in Humboldt County when my friends and I discovered that Mr. King was in town playing a small club that night. We went down there in a futile effort to get tickets, but it was predictably sold out and we were meandering around the club considering our next move when we spotted Mr. King, clear as day, through a window in his trailer parked beside the club. Not sure what to do, my friend Dave impulsively decided to approach the trailer, knock on the door, and see if B.B. wanted to smoke some weed. A little worried at first that we were causing a scene, Dave returned saying that he had politely declined. Pity he didn’t try to get us on the guest list. We actually did stick around for a while and heard most of B.B.’s set that night through an open window at the front of the club. We could actually hear him quite clearly and could even see a bit of the stage too. I guess I was lucky that night as well. 

Coincidentally, Mr. King would play his last bay area show at The Warfield in 2014, passing away the following year at the age of 89. He left behind not only his remarkable musical legacy, but a mind boggling 15 illegitimate children, 3 who would come forward admitting he was their father after his death. He wasn’t a the worst dad in the world though, not disputing any of their claims of parentage, even paying for college and trust funds for all of them. Still, that’s nothing compared to fellow blues contemporary Screamin’ Jay Hawkins who had officially sired 33 kids, 12 of which met for the first time at a 2001 reunion, and he may have sired up to 75. Still, as one could imagine, dividing up King’s estate after he passed was a bit complex.

B.B. King, War., SF, Mon., October 30

https://archive.org/details/b.b.-king-warfield-103000

The Cramps, Kung Fu USA, Fill., SF, Tues., October 31

SETLIST : Everybody’s Movin’, You’re Gonna Miss Me, Cramp Stomp, Let’s Get Fucked Up, Oo-wee Baby, Domino, Garbageman, Creature From The Black Leather Lagoon, If Thing Hard On, Elvis Fucking Christ, Papa Satan Sang Louie, Human Fly, New Kind Of Kick, Cornfed Dames, Drug Train, You’ve Got Good Taste, TV Set, Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?, (encore), Dinner With Drac, Mad Daddy

I may have said it before, but it bears repeating that there isn’t a band alive or dead who is better suited to play on Halloween than The Cramps. The Damned come in a respectable second, but even their goth powers are no match for the sheer psychobilly lunacy that they unleash on this very special holiday. Indeed, the last time I witnessed their insane antics was on a Halloween four years before this at The Warfield. Since then, their bass player, Slim Chance, had left the band, replaced by Sugarpie Jones. Speaking of horrifying nights, the catastrophe that was Election Night 2000 was just one week away from this gig.

It had been a memorable three day stretch starting with the Bridge School Benefit, then B.B. King at The Warfield, and then this. Opening that night was a local trio named Kung Fu USA, just a year old in fact. I only taped one song from them and never saw them again. Lux was dressed in one of usual head to toe shiny, black bondage outfits with matching high heeled pumps. But it was hard to take my eyes off of Poison Ivy that night, dressed in a (gulp!) see through black body stocking, matching witches hat, and I would say nothing else but a smile, but Ivy’s not known for smiling much.

They got warmed up after a couple of songs and then Lux barked, “Two songs in  and I’ve already spilled my wine, god damn it! Every time that happens, it makes me want to say ‘Cramp Stomp!’” As usual, there were many imaginative costumes worn that evening, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what I was dressed as at that one. After “New Kind Of Kick”, Lux thanked everybody for their “tumultuous round of applause”. A couple songs later, he announced, “Tonight, PBS and Showtime present, Roy Scheider, Charlotte Margenswamp (or something garbled like that) in ‘Jane Ayre Meets Jaws Revenge’, a 19th century classic about a governess who falls for the police chief of a small resort town who is searching for the Great White shark who ate her charge” and then they did “TV Set”. They usually end with an epic version of “Surfin’ Bird” ending in an apocalyptic climax with Lux rolling around on stage with his microphone down his throat, but this time they ended with an equally long and maniacal “Mad Daddy”.

I’m always happy when they hand out a poster at the end of the night, but I was especially impressed with this one. It was a black poster with the show’s text forming a red skull, a striking an instantly recognizable image. In fact, ever since the folks at The Fillmore put it up with the other posters in the balcony, it remains without a doubt the one your eyes are irresistibly drawn to first. From the floor, one needs only glance up for an instant and bam, there it is standing out like a sore thumb in the middle of all the others. Sadly, this would be the last time I’d see The Cramps on Halloween and though there have been many others since on that spooky holiday, none could quite come close to the high bar they set.

I would see The Cramps one more time at The Fillmore three years later, but until then, they were taking a bit of a break from touring. Just three months after this show, their old guitarist Bryan Gregory who had left the band in 1980, would pass away from heart failure, though some suspected it was AIDS. Lux would go on to voice a character on an episode of “Spongebob Squarepants” in 2002 titled “Party Pooper Pants”, playing the lead singer of an all bird rock band called The Bird Brains. Perhaps it was a take on Bad Brains. You never actually see Lux or even hear him sing. They were a puppet band in a live action scene in the show and Lux just introduces them. Anyway, Tom Kenny who had voiced Spongebob attended Lux’s memorial in 2009, God rest Mr. Interior’s  very, very strange soul.

The Cramps, Kung Fu USA, Fill., SF, Tues., October 31

https://archive.org/details/the-cramps-fillmore-103100

https://archive.org/details/kung-fu-usa-fillmore-103100

The Dandy Warhols, TV Eye, Fill., SF, Sun., November 5

SETLISTS :

(TV EYE) : Idiot Wind, A Lot Like Me, Geographical Cure, My Love, Rerun, Masonic Rite, Throw The Line, Survival Of The Fittest

(THE DANDY WARHOLS) : Be-In, Mohammed (From Balcony), Bohemian Like You, Shakin’, Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth, I Love You, Hells Bells, Green, Minnersoter, Hard On For Jesus, Horse Pills, P.D.X., Get Off, Boys Better, Genius, Solid, Country Leaver, (encore), (unknown), Mercedes Benz

Things were looking up for the Dandy’s around this period. It had been over two years since I had seen them open for Curve at the Maritime and now they were headlining The Fillmore for their first time. Prior to that, I had seen them steadily graduating to larger venues, starting with me seeing them twice at Bottom Of The Hill, then onto Slim’s. The Fillmore was a natural fit for them as it is with some bands that play there. They thought so too since they would continue to play that beloved venue practically every single time they’d return to town from then on. It was a pivotal time in history as well, the catastrophic election night of 2000 being only two days after this. Earlier that week, the first crew of the International Space Station would also start their work.

The recent elevation of status of the Dandy’s could be attributed in no small part to their latest album, “13 Tales Of New Bohemia” which had just dropped that June. With their new smash hit single, “Bohemian Like You”, they would rake in the cash from licensing it to everyone from Vodaphone and Ford ads to soundtracks for several films and TV shows like “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”. It was a very catchy song to say the least. Singer guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor said he wrote it after witnessing a pretty girl pull up in her car to the corner traffic light while he was looking out the window of his apartment and he had an instant fantasy about what it would be like to be in a relationship with her. With the success of that song and the new album, Courtney took out a loan and bought a warehouse in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, dubbing it “The Odditorium”. There, he and the band would rehearse, mix, and record new music as well as host an art space and continue their customary endless nights of drug and alcohol fueled revelry.

The band went through a change recently then as their original drummer, Eric Hedford would leave the band being replaced by Courtney’s cousin, Brent DeBoer. Eric was pissed predictably over royalties. And it being The Fillmore, I’m afraid Zia on keys had to keep her shirt on this time. In fact, her (much appreciated) usual toplessness would sadly become a thing of the past after this show. All good things much come to an end I suppose, after all, she would be officially off the market the following October, marrying the band’s manager, Travis Hendricks. The Dandy’s had been on tour in Australia that summer, releasing a version of the new album out there with a bonus disc that had seven extra tracks. They had also performed on “The Late Late Show” with Craig Kilborn two days before this show in L.A. and they would return to that city immediately afterwards to do back to back gigs at the El Rey Theater.

Opening that night was a band called TV Eye, presumably named after the 1970 Stooges’ song. There are actually a few bands that claim that name, but I believe the one I saw that night was a rock band from Linkoping, Sweden and were ex-members of the bands the Raped Teenagers (eww) and Second Sight. The members had colorful stage names like Johnny Rocket on vocals, Mat Detective on guitar, Psycho Patrick on drums, and Mr. Everglade on bass. The Dandy’s did a sort of etherial instrumental intro before morphing into “Be-In”. After I was cut from ushering and ordered an Anchor Steam, Courtney got the crowd to sing “Happy Birthday” to their guitarist Peter Holmstrum, though his birthday was actually two days before this. A few songs later, he introduced “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth” as “one from the where are they now file”, claiming that the song “dates back to 1966”.

Mentioning their recent tour, Courtney claimed they “learned this Australian folk song… it’s really old” and they played their cover over AC/DC’s “Hells Bells”, one of those bonus tracks from the Australian release of the new album. After they finished their set with “Boys Better”, he joked “So, instead of, uh, going off stage and changing our costumes and you guys scream and freak out for an encore” that they were just going to hang out to let everybody “smoke a cigarette… Zia has to pee, so anybody else has to pee, pee now, or hold your pee… OK, so let’s all take five and reconvene.” I actually did take his advice and took a much needed pee. Zia came back on stage and said the show from the previous tour they did at the Great American, (which I missed three months before this while I was traveling in Europe), was their favorite and the one they did there at The Fillmore that night was the favorite of the current tour, which received an impressive round of applause. 

Halfway through the first “encore”, Courtney mentioned “sometime in your life” everybody had to check out the picture by the stairwell of “Pete Townshend at The Fillmore” though he actually was at Winterland in that picture. After saying the next song would be their last, the crowd booed and he smirked and said “Let’s all be friends now. Besides, it seems like we play here every fuckin’ two months”. He pretended to start walking off saying, “See you guys later” but quickly stepped back and continued, “When we first started like six years ago, we would drive 12 hours to come here and play garage parties rather than 2 hours to Seattle. Have you guys ever been to Seattle?” Zia then asked, “Any you guys ever see us at The Purple Onion?” Courtney made fun of i’s former owner, Tom Guido, who had just lost that venue the year before, “Go figure. It’s like Crispin Glover driving the Exxon Valdez”, though he thanked Tom for “being part of our fucked up lives.”

At the end of the second encore, Zia did a cover of “Mercedes Benz” by Janis Joplin, introducing it saying, “I’ve only ever done this song twice, but there’s not a more suited city for this song, so I hope you guys like it.” Perhaps Zia was inspired to perform it by the famous photo of Janis by the Fillmore’s downstairs main bar, snapped by my old colleague from the Maritime Hall, Grant Jacobs. Janis, like Zia had been at all the previous Dandy’s shows I’d seen, was topless in that pic too. They played the traditional instrumental “Greensleeves” once again over the speakers once it was over, a tradition BGP had done for ages before but hadn’t dusted off in a while. It was a pity that there was no poster that show, but the Dandy’s would get several of them from future Fillmore shows in 2003, 2005, 2012 (which I attended), 2016, and just this year in 2023. I would have to wait three years to see them, or rather just Courtney and Peter, do an acoustic duo version of the Dandy’s at a special Popscene show at 330 Ritch Street, another story for another time.

The Dandy Warhols, TV Eye, Fill., SF, Sun., November 5

https://archive.org/details/the-dandy-warhols-fillmore-11500

https://archive.org/details/tv-eye-fillmore-11500

The Original Meters, War., SF, Sat., November 11

I know I often say that I underestimated the significance of many of the shows I saw in the day, but I believe this one fits the bill more than the others. I had been familiar with The Meters’ songs from the shows of The Funky Meters as well as keyboardist Art Neville’s work with The Neville Brothers, but I was woefully ignorant to their history and influence. This was a rare show to say the least. The Meters hadn’t performed a set together since 1977, a full 23 years before this and technically it had been since 1970 since they had played as a quartet since they had Cyril Neville in the band during those in between years. This was a ONE NIGHT ONLY reunion, capitalized there obviously to reinforce its importance. Yes, there might have been some bad blood between the members, but there’s nothing like a truckload of cold, hard cash to mend fences. Apparently, a couple of wealthy businessmen had some extra piles of money laying about, so they offered it to them for this one-off gig and they accepted.

The festivities of the evening were however unavoidably colored by the crippling anxiety each and every one of us were feeling after Election Day the previous Tuesday. Yes, that election. There we were trying to forget that our nation was without a President-Elect and the gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothes was well upon its way down in Florida. The power of the funk was however enough to distract us all from that horrible debacle for an evening, a testament to the skills of The Meters. As luck would have it, a month and I day after this night, it would be none other than Aimee Mann in the middle of her show at The Fillmore, that would break the news that the Supreme Court had sided with George W. Bush, beginning his age of darkness. But enough about that, back to the show at hand.

I had taken for granted, as many had, The Meters’ work over the years. Even the Rolling Stones had to defend them from racist assholes when they took them on tour between ’75 and ’76. I didn’t know before doing research for this show that they had also been the band in the original recordings of “Right Place, Wrong Time” by Dr. John and “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle. The Meters were nominated four times to be accepted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame but never admitted, though they did received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Hall in 2018. During their time apart, The Meters had been busy doing their aforementioned projects. Drummer Zigaboo Modeliste had just released his first solo album that year as well as starting his new website, Zigaboo.com. Art, bassist George Porter Jr., and guitarist Leo Nocentelli, had toured with The Funky Meters with Russell Batiste Jr. on drums, the cousin of Jon Batiste, the former bandleader for Stephen Colbert. Leo would leave the band, but remain living and performing around the bay area, being replaced by Brian Stolz. Later, Brian would be replaced by Art’s son, Ian. Russell sadly just passed away unexpectedly just a few weeks ago from a heart attack at the young age of 57. I blame the Louisiana diet.

I saw Huey Lewis stroll by me that night while I was ushering downstairs. Naturally, it was sold out big time and I did my best to wrangle the crowd as they opened the night with “Fire On The Bayou”. George got the crowd to sing the title to the beat of his cowbell for that one. Art made a joke later saying that “we’re all family now” and “we can’t get out”. There was no shortage of folks dressed in New Orleans regalia, beads, masks, and all, including one woman with little white lights woven in her hair and a fellow with a tall, red silk fez hat. Tickets were expensive that night, $50 just for the balcony, which was a lot back then, though I shudder to think how much the scalped tickets were going for at that one. Whatever anybody paid, they certainly got their money’s worth and then some. The Meters played for nearly three hours that night, covering all their hits like “Africa”, “Cissy Strut”, and “People Say”, jamming out some songs for over fifteen minutes. They dusted off a rare one called “Chug Chug Chug A-Lug” as well. So-called jam bands are a dime a dozen these days, but they and so many others owe an Everest sized mountain of debt to these pioneers. They practically invented the genre.

There was a brilliant poster that night by legendary poster artist Jim Phillips and it was one of those rare horizontal ones to boot. Being one night only, I would never see the Original Meters together again, but it would be only four months later when I would see the Funky Meters play The Fillmore again. The Meters, this original line up, would reconvene only a handful of times elsewhere including the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2005, partially in an effort to help boost morale to the city after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. They also played at Bonnaroo with Dr. John and Allen Toussant in 2011 and a couple one off gigs back home in New Orleans at Voodoo Experience and the Howlin’ Wolf. The following year in 2012, everybody but Art collaborated with Page McConnell the keyboardist from Phish to form The Metermen, an intriguing though unlikely combination. I didn’t get a chance to see them and I’m afraid there will never be another reunion of The Original Meters since we lost Art in 2019. Still, looking back, I’m proud I was able to catch this once in a lifetime night, truly musical history. 

The Original Meters, War., SF, Sat., November 11

https://archive.org/…/the-original-meters-warfield-111100

Youssou N’Dour, War., SF, Tues., November 14

It was a welcome sight to have Youssou N’Dour and his crew back at The Fillmore after six long years. In fact, he was the third show I saw at that esteemed venue after it reopened in 1994, following its prolonged earthquake repair and retrofit. The master vocalist from Senegal had returned once again to regale us with his special brand of “mbalax” afro-pop, a genre he is so associated with him back in his native Senegal, that he’s often credited for having invented it. Youssou had a busy year in 2000, having signed to Spike Lee’s 40 Acres music label and releasing two volumes of his “Joko” project, starting with “From Village To Town” that March, his first new material in six years. It would go on to be nominated for a Grammy for Best World Music Album and this tour he was on here was likewise his first American tour in six years.

The second volume released six months later would be called “The Link”, which is the English translation of the word “Joko”from Mr. N’Dour’s native tongue, Wolof. Youssou would create a foundation called The Joko Project, seeking to end the digital divide in Africa, literally linking the continent to the rest of the world electronically. He partnered with Hewlett Packard and they helped build internet access centers, online communities, and such. In addition to all that, he had just been nominated the month before this to be a Good Will Ambassador of the Food & Agriculture Organization (or FAO) of the United Nations. Earlier that year, Youssou also helped organize and headlined “The Great African Ball” in New York City, a festival of talent from all over the African diaspora. On a sad note, he had also been on the bill that year at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, the ill fated one where a stampede during Pearl Jam’s set killed nine people just three months before this night.

We all were in desperate need of Youssou’s uplifting music since by this show, it having been exactly one week since Election Night. The country as well as the rest of this poor planet were waiting anxiously to see where the chips were going to fall, so this night was a welcome distraction from all the talk of “hanging chads” and the rest. Seriously, the extraordinary range and sheer power Mr. N’Dour has with his voice is something to behold. His vocal dexterity once again was only matched by the skills of his band, especially his percussionist. My God, that man was fast. There were plenty of folks on stage as well as in the audience dressed and dancing in their immaculate and colorful African attire. I didn’t know the names of any of the songs in his set other than “Shaking The Tree” near the end, the one he collaborated on with Peter Gabriel. It was rewarding to see a man of Mr. N’Dour’s talent at a venue the size of The Warfield, though I would see him perform one more time back at The Fillmore again only eight months after this show.

Dio, Yngwie Malmsteen, Doro Pesch, Fill., SF, Thur., November 16

SETLISTS : 

(DORO PESCH) : I Rule The Ruins, White Wedding, Burning The Witches, Terrorvision, East Meets West, Metal Tango, Burn It Up, All Are We

(YNGWIE MALMSTEEN) : Far Beyond The Sun, Evil Eye, Trilogy Suite Op : 5, Red House, Badinerie, Blue, Molto Arpeggiosa (Arpegios From Hell), (acoustic guitar solo), Black Star

(DIO) : Sunset Superman, Invisible, Stand Up & Shout, Don’t Talk To Strangers, All The Fools Sailed Away, Magica Theme, Lord Of The Last Day, Fever Dreams, Feed My Head, Eriel, Annica, Challis, As Long As It’s Not About Love, Losing My Insanity, Otherworld, Magica (Reprise), Holy Diver, Heaven & Hell, Long Live Rock & Roll, Man On The Silver Mountain, (encore), Rainbow In The Dark, The Last In Line

This would be the first time I’d see the one and only Mr. Ronald James Padavona and afterwards I’d be ashamed that I hadn’t seen him sooner. Indeed, he had performed at the Maritime Hall when I was working there during the spring of 1998, but upon hearing that he had brought his own monitor board and we couldn’t get the hook up to record, I passed on sticking around for his show. Truth be told, I knew very little about this metal legend, knowing only the song “The Mob Rules” from the soundtrack to the animated film “Heavy Metal”, which unfortunately he didn’t play that night. I also remember seeing Henry Rollins doing one of his spoken word shows and going on about Dio, praising his songs for them being like “Hey Devil Woman… Beware!!!” or something like that. Hank was obviously a fan. Thankfully, I got to see Dio twice more before he passed away in 2010 and upon doing research for this show, I learned some more about him.

It is common knowledge that the world has Ronnie James Dio to thank for the so-called “devil’s horns” hand gesture ubiquitous with heavy metal shows. But in case you didn’t know, the story goes that it was Dio’s old Italian grandmother who would use the gesture towards someone giving you the “evil eye” as protective magic against it. Does it work? Maybe, but it couldn’t hurt. There’s a lot of evil eyes out there. Anyway, as a young man, though Dio hadn’t had any formal vocal training, he learned at a young age to play the trumpet, which he credited for his breath control techniques. He had made a name for himself in the music world fronting bands like Elf and Rainbow, before replacing the freshly fired Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath in 1979. Despite making some incredible music together, soon Dio would butt heads creatively with the other Sabbath guys and part company with them along with their then drummer Vinny Appice to form his own band, simply called Dio. From there, he would compose hit after glorious metal hit starting immediately with “Holy Diver” and “Rainbow In The Dark”.

So, I would clearly be showing late to the party as a Dio fan, but I made it all the same. He had just put out his 8th studio album, “Magica”, that March, a concept piece told from the viewpoint of his villainous character, Shadowcast. Being the leader of the dark forces from the netherworld, this character had invaded our planet, vaporizing people into pure, evil energy and the album’s heroes, a master and apprentice names Eriel and Challis, must recite a spell from the sacred book of Magica to defeat him. You get the idea, real D & D stuff going on here. I heard someone coin his music style once as “wizard metal” which is not entirely an inaccurate nor unflattering way of describing it, I suppose. 

We got to hear 7 of the new songs at this gig, the first of this tour that would take him and the band all over America and then shortly after the holidays, on the road again here and then to Europe with Alice Cooper and Ratt the following spring. Dio had plans to record sequels to this new album afterwards, but those plans were tragically cut short by his diagnosis of stomach cancer. He had written a new song called “Electra” for the project which would be released in the 2007 reissue of the album. Three years after Dio died, “Magica” had a special re-release with a 2-disc version containing bonus and live tracks from his earlier tour in the spring of 2000 and his tour in 2002. Sadly, most of those live tracks came from their show that March at The House Of Blues in Hollywood and not from this Fillmore one. 

It was quite an impressive line up that night, beginning with Doro Pesch or simply Doro, the “Metal Queen” from Dusseldorf, Germany. In a genre overrun with icky boys, her powerful voice cut through the mediocre acts and sexist detractors to cement her reputation as the singer of the band Warlock in the 80’s. She had struggled at first establishing her career as a solo artist in between leaving Warlock and this show, but she was back in full force, having put out the “Calling The Wild” album just two months before this and joining Dio’s tour, her first tour of America in ten years. Incidentally, a couple years ago, Doro gained the distinction of being the first heavy metal artist to perform a drive-in concert during the COVID epidemic.

She would dust off a few Warlock tunes that night, opening with “I Rule The Ruins” and also finishing up the set with “Metal Tango” and “All We Are”. For their second song, she sang a brilliant cover of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” and later did “Burn It Up”, both songs from the new album. Sadly, Doro’s father passed away earlier that year and to make matters worse, Doro had some more awful news when Mario Parillo, who played guitar and keys for her, fell ill and had to leave the tour, ultimately finding out that he had cancer and succumbing to it shortly afterwards. Mario had been replaced by this time with Oliver Palotai, a German-Hungarian classically trained musician who performed admirably. Though this would be the only time I’d see Doro, she’d go on with other members of Dio’s old band to form the Dio Disciples the year after his death, singing tribute to the master and keeping his music alive. 

Following Doro was the inimitable Yngwie Malmsteen, the Swedish guitar virtuoso. Though I had heard that he had a reputation for being kind of a pill, he had an equally popular reputation for shredding beyond belief on the guitar. After hearing his chops that night, I can safely say that the stories of his abilities were well founded. Seriously, I have heard some noodling in my time, but the speed at which this guy did his thing was mind boggling. In the middle of his set, he blew us all away with a blistering version of “Badinerie” by Johann Sebastian Bach and an equally mind blowing rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House”. Yngwie had just released his new “War To End All Wars” album just nine days before this show and he played the new track “Molto Arpeggiosa” from it near the end of his set. Yngwie had Mark Boals back on lead vocals that night, who had briefly left the tour and was replaced by Jorn Lande. Mark would also go on to sing for the Dio Disciples.

Dio also had a couple wandering members of his band return to play with him on this tour, Craig Goldy on guitar and Jimmy Bain on bass. About halfway through their set, Dio had Craig do an impressive guitar solo, a brave move after following Yngwie. I was instantly struck by Dio’s charisma and the frankly seductive power of his voice. This diminutive, 58-year old rock gremlin in a deep-V black sequin shirt was living proof that star power isn’t something you get from your looks. His is such a rare talent, the type that instantly gets his audiences right in the palm of his hand from song one. It next to impossible not to like Dio. He’s the kind of performer like say Prince, Bob Marley, Dolly Parton, or David Bowie, that if you don’t like them, you’ve probably got something wrong with you. Being amongst particularly Dio’s fans at one of his own shows was such a joyful feeling, they loved him so much. He really got the crowd to sing along to “Heaven & Hell” and “Long Live Rock & Roll” near the end of the set.

This night, like Youssou N’Dour at The Warfield two nights prior, was also a welcome distraction from the ongoing recount effort that was going on in Florida following Election Day which was just nine days before this. That stressful limbo would go on for almost four more miserable weeks. On the lighter side of the news, that day the soon to be ex-president, Bill Clinton, became the first of his office to visit Vietnam since the war. And it had been a rewarding gig, finally hearing Dio’s irresistible siren song. Pity there wasn’t a poster, nor would there be one when Dio returned to The Fillmore two years later. Obviously, he deserved one. I must confess though, whenever I think of Dio, I inescapably think of one of the times I saw The Supersuckers and their singer Eddie Spaghetti did a breakdown near the end of one of his songs singing to the chorus of Duran Duran’s “Rio”, “His name is Dio and he dances in the sand!” and so on. Curse Eddie for getting that stuck in my head and sorry if I just got it stuck in yours. Use your devil’s horns to break the curse!

Finally, I should acknowledge that this show marks the first Fillmore show my friend Alan Ralph would witness. He had just moved to town and though we wouldn’t be formally introduced until years later, this show would be the first of literally countless ones he’d attend in his illustrious career out here in the bay area. I used to think I saw a remarkable amount of concerts until I met Alan, who not only saw a multitude as a civilian, but would work through every practical rank in show biz at these gigs, from ushering, to security, to merchandise, to stagehand work, you name it. He, to this very day, goes on the road handling merch for bands like Rival Sons and Death Angel for weeks and months on end and has an ever expanding collection of guitar pics from practically every musical act in existence past or present. And if that wasn’t enough, he’d go on to take excellent photos and write reviews of current shows for spinningplatters.com. His exceptional writing skills have inspired me to up my game here on my end. Keep an eye out for Alan at your next show. He’s often the tallest guy in the room.

Dio, Yngwie Malmsteen, Doro Pesch, Fill., SF, Thur., November 16

https://archive.org/details/dio-fillmore-111600

https://archive.org/details/yngwie-malmsteen-fillmore-111600

https://archive.org/details/doro-pesch-fillmore-111600

Shane McGowan & The Popes, Sarah Franklyn, Fill., SF, Fri., November 17

SETLIST : If I Should Fall From Grace With God, Donegal Express, Paddy Rolling Stone, Paddy Public Enemy No. 1, Lonesome Highway, The Broad Majestic Shannon, Popes Instrumental, Dirty Old Town, Mother Mo Chroi, The Body Of An American, (unknown), Skipping Rhymes, Sally Mac Lennane, A Pair Of Brown Eyes, Poor Paddy, The Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn, The Irish Rover, (encore), Streams Of Whiskey, Bottle Of Smoke, The Angel Of Death

It had been exactly one week shy of five years since I’d seen Shane play The Fillmore with The Popes. He had been busy touring with them in the interim and had recently sang guest vocals for the Dropkick Murphy’s songs “The Wild Rover” and “Good Rats”. I had also seen some grainy, old, black and white footage of Shane with some friends in the Sex Pistols documentary “The Filth & The Fury” which had been released earlier that year, singing the opening lines to “Anarchy In The U.K.” His teeth were crooked, but mostly still intact back then. Actor Johnny Depp had also become friends with Shane and had directed and appeared in his music video for “That Woman’s Got Me Drinking”, playing a little guitar for that one too. The Popes had just put out their “Hollywood Boulevard” album that March, of which Shane wrote three of the songs, but they didn’t play any of the new songs that show.

I had just celebrated Thanksgiving the night before with my family and I was eager to dance off a few of the pounds I gained at that meal. Opening the gig was singer songwriter Sarah Franklyn. It was just her and another young woman playing acoustically, but the drunks in the crowd listened politely. She had a sweet, feminine voice, the kind that almost sounds like sunshine, and her music was rather soothing, a nice departure from the bombastic “wizard metal” of Ronnie James Dio, which I witnessed at The Fillmore the week before. But the calm soon gave way to the crowd going nuts when Shane opened up with the old Pogues classic, “If I Should Fall From Grace With God”, one of eight Pogues songs they’d perform at that show. Mr. MacGowan once again took his mark on stage, drunkenly leaning on his mic stand like a crutch, muttering and snarling out his slurred lyrics, letting out the occasional shrill, yet somehow joyful shriek. All the while, Shane would nurse a smoldering cigarette, indoor smoking bans be damned.

Like before, it was a rowdy good time, the kind of music that makes you feel like you’re a stumbling, foul mouthed Irish drunk even if you hadn’t touched a drop and was without a single cell of Celtic blood in you. But when you hear the staccato of Tommy “The Beast” McManamon’s tenor banjo, it just triggers something in all of our collective genetic memory young and old, especially when they dust off ancient, traditional drinking classics like “Dirty Old Town” or “Poor Paddy”. Rest assured, there was the expected amount of bone fide, full-blooded, Emerald Isle ex-pats in the audience along with their friends and kin. Before they did “The Sick Bed Of Chuchulain”, Shane made the joke, “How do you know E.T.’s a Protestant?… He looks like one!”, but then dismissed racism in general, mumbling something about being a “Jewish Catholic”. He cackled a little before teasing us by crooning playfully a few lines from “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)”, the hippie anthem by Scott McKenzie. 

They finished their set with a rip roaring version of “The Irish Rover”, but cooled us off finishing their encore with a somber, yet beautiful cover of “The Angel Of Death” by Hank Williams. Shane introduced it saying that it was the last song Hank wrote and encouraged the audience to toss on stage some acid or “Purple Haze”. Frankly, I doubt he needed any more of either than he was likely on already. I wouldn’t have to wait long to see Shane do his thing again, for he and The Popes would return to that esteemed venue a mere five months later for back to back shows, once again with Sarah Franklyn opening up for them. And though this gig didn’t get a poster at the end of the night, the next visit would, the only poster I’d get from of the three times I’d see Shane and The Popes play The Fillmore.

Shane McGowan & The Popes, Sarah Franklin, Fill., SF, Fri., November 17

https://archive.org/…/shane-macgowan-the-popes-fillmore…

https://archive.org/details/sarah-franklin-fillmore-111700

Peter Murphy, GAMH, SF, Fri., November 24

SETLIST : Cool Cool Breeze, All Night Long, Keep Me From Harm, Indigo Eyes, Subway, I’ll Fall With Your Knife, Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem, A Strange Kind Of Love, My Last Two Weeks, Big Love Tiny Fool, Gliding Like A Whale, Cuts You Up, Time Has Got Nothing To Do With It, Just For Love

Peter was giving his bay area fans an intimate treat that night playing in the cozy confines of the Great American. He’d just been to town the previous March, where I’d seen him perform at The Warfield, a venue that could hold at least eight times as many people (legally). This time the once and future frontman of Bauhaus was only touring with two other musicians in tow, Hugh Marsh, a Canadian electric violinist, and Peter DiStephano, the former guitarist of Porno For Pyros. Together, the three of them would kick off this, the first night of a two night stint at the Great American. I would be spending the following evening at the aforementioned Warfield seeing The Offspring and Cypress Hill, an entirely different musical experience altogether. Six days after this show, Peter and the guys would record their set at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles and use it to make the “aLive Just For Love” album. 

It was an evening with the dark lord of Goth, but they opened both nights with a screening of a short film called “The Grid”. This dark, blurry art piece follows Mr. Murphy himself as a time traveller in search of the first cell of his existence. With pointed elf ears, black mascara, and donning skintight, black clothes and boots from head to toe, Peter crawls, prances, and generally moves mysteriously, wandering around a barren concrete wasteland to the sound of atonal whistles, electronic beeps, and white noise. It was filmed in 1980 by his then girlfriend and avante garde performance artist Joanne Woodward, AKA JoWonder, (no, not the wife of Paul Newman, though that too would have been an intriguing collaboration). Anyway, it helped set the mood for the evening. They had originally screened the movie during Bauhaus’ U.K. tour in 1980 and I imagine the audience was as equally as confused and mesmerized as I was by it that night. JoWonder definitely took a page from some of David Lynch’s early works.

I enjoyed Peter’s stripped down sound this time around, a more gentle, introspective departure from his playing with a full band. After seeing him perform a couple times solo already as well as the back to back shows at The Warfield with Bauhaus two years before this, I was starting to become familiar with his vast repertoire, but it seems like every time I see him play, it feels brand new. His setlist that night, with the exceptions of the final song of the set and the encore was identical to the one on the live album. The song “Just For Love” was brand new then and wouldn’t be released until the “Dust” album which would come out a year and a half later. It would be only six months later when I would catch Mr. Murphy returning to once again play The Fillmore and that time he performed every single song from that next album. 

Peter Murphy, GAMH, SF, Fri., November 24

https://archive.org/…/peter-murphy-great-american-music…

The Offspring, Cypress Hill, MXPX, War., SF, Sat., November 25

SETLISTS :

(CYPRESS HILL) : We Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That, Lick A Shot, Get Out Of My Head, Can’t Get The Best Of Me, Hand On The Pump, How I Could Just Kill A Man, Insane In The Brain, Bring It On, A To The K, War Pigs, Cock The Hammer, I Wanna Get High, Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk, Hits From The Bong, Riot Starter, Rock Superstar

(THE OFFSPRING) : Bad Habit, All I Want, Come Out & Play, Million Miles Away, Gone Away, Have You Ever, Americana, Gotta Get Away, Staring At The Sun, Damnit, Original Prankster, Get A Job, Session, Smash, Kid’s Aren’t Alright, Self Esteem, Pay “The Man”, Pretty Fly (For A White Guy), Want You Bad

It had been only five months since I’d witnessed Cypress Hill and The Offspring on the main stage at B.F.D. and though they performed admirably as usual, I never thought I’d see them tour together on their own. Granted, they were both from the beautiful south of this glorious state, but apart from that, the two acts had little in common stylistically or otherwise. Regardless, somebody thought it was a good idea and/or maybe the bands just hit it off and this unlikely double bill had an enthusiastic crowd of both their fans there to welcome them. Despite their popularity, the show had been moved to The Warfield from the Bill Graham Civic Center, a venue over three times larger, probably due to low ticket sales. I must confess, this being a confession, that I had neglected to go into much detail about The Offspring when I wrote about B.F.D. because frankly I spent most of their set checking out Slipknot headlining the second stage that night, so I’m glad at least I get this entry to catch up a little. 

The Offspring had just released their “Conspiracy Of One” album just eleven days before this show, their last one with Ron Welty on drums, replaced briefly by the ever present drum master for hire Josh Freese before Atom Willard from Rocket From The Crypt took over. Ron would be fired two years after this show and lead an unsuccessful effort in 2020 to squeeze some unpaid royalties from the band. The new album, though not as commercially successful as the previous one, nonetheless went platinum. Perhaps as a not so veiled stab at the notorious greed of the music industry, The Offspring titled their new DVD “Huck It”, just released that year, filled with stunt and skate videos interspersed with footage of their live performances and interviews.

This was also during the time when America was coming to grips with the undeniable overtaking of streaming and file sharing of music, led by Napster. The Offspring and Cypress Hill both saw the writing on the wall and had firmly taken sides with Team Napster. The Offspring not only sold T-Shirts on their website fused with the Napster logo, but the band had donated money to its notorious founder, Shawn Fanning. The band even attempted to make their new album free for downloading, but the bosses at Sony weren’t having it. They eventually compromised and allowed the single “Original Prankster” go out for free. Incidentally, their brand new single, “Defy You”, recorded just that month, would be featured in the soundtrack of the upcoming Jack Black comedy film, “Orange County”. 

Opening the evening was MxPx from Washington who I’d seen open for Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros at The Fillmore the year before this. I liked these guys. They had talent, opening their set with the intro to “Baba O’Riley” by The Who, a band I had just seen earlier that summer. MxPx had just put out their fifth studio album, “The Ever Passing Moment” that May and though I didn’t get their setlist, I know they played “My Life’s Story” and “Responsibility” from that new one, as well as “Middlename”. Cypress Hill were still touring with Sen Dog’s rock band, SX-10, who had spent that summer touring with Limp Bizkit (groan), that tour also sponsored by Napster. 

Those lovable stoners got the venue nice and cloudy, covering all the usual hits as well as treating us to five songs from their new “Skull & Bones” album. B-Real gave a shout out to Tre, a DJ from KMEL, before they did “Hand On The Pump”. We all got a bit of a surprise when they did a cover of “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath, played pretty close to the original actually. Cypress Hill also did a thrash metal sort of end to “Cock The Hammer”, but then quickly got stony again following it with “I Wanna Get High” which melded right into “Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk” and “Hits From The Bong”. B Real got the crowd to chant, “Hell yeah! I get high!” before taking a break, allowing their percussionist Eric Bobo to regale us with an impressive solo. Having the rock band with them, they opted for doing “(Rock) Superstar”, instead of the “(Rap) Superstar” version of their new hit single to finish their set. 

The Offspring had another fun filled, energetic performance, dusting off all their hits up till then and treating us to five fresh ones from the new album. Strange, I just noticed that three songs in a five song stretch had titles ending with the word “Away” that night. I guess they like that word. The singer Dexter and guitarist Noodles praised the crowd for being so “handsome” and pointed out all the folks with AFI T-Shirts moshing up front, a band on The Offsprings’ own Nitro record label that I’d just seen at The Fillmore a month before this. As luck would have it, I would also see AFI play on that very stage two weeks later, opening for Rancid. The Offspring took a little breather, doing a funny “intermission” bit halfway through their set playing some vintage, recorded instrumental bossanova music before performing “Get A Job”. The band got the crowd to sing along to the “Whoa Oh”’s during “Kids Aren’t Alright” as well as the “Ow Ow Ow Ow”’s of “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”. Giving a subtle dig on having their show moved from the Civic, Dexter mentioned how glad he was playing at The Warfield instead of “one of those big places” before finishing the night with the new song, “Want You Bad”. 

I was being spoiled back then with both bands playing as often as they did, this being the sixth time I’d see Cypress Hill in less than five years. B Real, Sen Dog, and the gang would soon return to San Francisco the following July, doing one of those secret $5 shows at Slim’s that Miller Genuine Draft was sponsoring back then. I’d have to wait a little longer to see The Offspring play Live 105’s Not-So-Silent-Night in 2003 at the Civic with Jane’s Addiction, Iggy Pop, and other musical acts of note. Though sadly there wasn’t an official poster given away at the end of this Warfield show, I found a homemade one for that show being sold on Etsy which wasn’t half bad.

The Offspring, Cypress Hill, MXPX, War., SF, Sat., November 25

https://archive.org/details/the-offspring-warfield-112500

https://archive.org/details/cypress-hill-warfield-112500

https://archive.org/details/mxpx-warfield-112500

Common, Planet Asia, Fill., SF, Sun., December 3

By this time, Common Sense had committed to changing his stage name permanently to simply Common. His fourth album, “Water For Chocolate”, his first on a major label, had been out a little over eight months and was a critical and commercial juggernaut, quickly becoming his first gold record. To make it, he had assembled a super team of respected hip hop professionals called the Soulquarians at Electric Lady Studios in New York. Comprised of Questlove from The Roots, who I had recorded together with Common at the Maritime Hall the year before, J. Dilla from Slum Village, James Poyser, D’Angelo’s keyboardist, and Pino Palladino, who would soon take over as bass player for the Who after John Entwistle died, they would collectively write, produce, and record this album named after the novel by Laura Esquivel. Its unique mixture of hip hop, R & B, and Fela Kutiesque afro-pop would earn Common a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Solo Performance and his album landing on many Albums Of The Year lists. Incidentally, rumor had it back then Common was dating Erykah Badu, who had famously broken up with Andre 3000 from Outkast three years before this. 

I’d always felt that there isn’t enough hip hop shows at The Fillmore, though the Maritime was hoarding most of the best acts of the genre at the time.  Along with the aforementioned Common show with The Roots, I had recorded Common another time at the Maritime in 1998 and Planet Asia three times the previous year alone.  I’d hoped after the Maritime’s sinking in 2001, The Fillmore would pick up the slack, but hip hop shows remain there few and far between in my opinion. That being said, Common was certainly a class act and a welcome one. It was clear that he was breaking through to the mainstream as a musician then, but he would elevate himself only further as the years passed, adding the titles of actor, author, model, producer, and activist. And it’s always a point of pride for me as I’m sure it is for others when they witness a future A-Lister on the cusp of hitting the big time.

Planet Asia was, is, and will always be a reliable opening act, one that I’ve written plenty about before, so I’ll skip the biography stuff. I will say that they had a new album out that year called “How The West Was One”, and being local, they started the show saying how grateful they were to be there and even pointed out a couple of their cousins in the audience. I didn’t get their setlist, but I do know they played “Callin’ The Shots”. They also did plenty of freestyle that night. I couldn’t decipher all of Common’s setlist, but I do know that he performed five songs off the new album, starting to its first two songs, “Time Travelin’ (A Tribute To Fela), and “Heat”, followed by “A Song For Assata” , “Cold Blooded”, and “Funky For You”. Just before Common played that last one, he did an intro of P-Funk songs of both “Not Just Knee Deep”, which he got the crowd to sing a long to the Whoa-whoa-whoa’s, and “P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)”. After that song, he did “I Used To Love H.E.R.”. As luck would have it, 23 years later, I had just seen George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic last night at the Fox in Oakland. It’s not entirely coincidental since most hip hop artists sample George’s stuff anyway I suppose. 

I’m afraid I ran out of tape after the following DJ solo finished, but I got most of Common’s songs, though I’m sorry now I didn’t bring more cassettes. This was an important show. I appreciated that Common was touring with a real drummer which always brings a hip hop sound up a notch. That drummer was good too, so was his trumpet player. You don’t get a lot of trumpets at rap shows. Common spoke to the crowd a lot between songs, talking about a variety of things ranging from being “down for unity”,the history of the Black Panthers, or how “love is freedom”. I’d see Common again three years later at The Fillmore, part of the KMEL House Of Soul show with Talib Kweli, Gang Starr, and others, but I’m afraid neither show got a poster at the end of the night.

Common, Planet Asia, Fill., SF, Sun., December 3

https://archive.org/details/common-fillmore-12300

https://archive.org/details/planet-asia-fillmore-12300

Wash Me, Kennedy’s, SF, Wed., December 6

SETLIST : Playground – Johnny Ohio, Two Sides Of Midnight, Tava, Stalker, Dig Dug, Surfin’ Messiah, Monkey Armaggedon, Clock Song, Ice Cream Headache, Sugarfree, Ain’t No Fun (If The Homies Can’t Have None) – Rebecca, Run For Your Life, Warsaw, Sarin Daydream

It warmed my heart on this cool autumn day to revisit this show. Wash Me was the brainchild of my dear friends Dan Rubin on guitar, Mike Chen on bass, Jamie Lewandowski on drums, and Quan Hill on vocals. They had jammed together long enough to make a respectable set worth of songs and though I saw them perform together a number of times, this would be the one and only time I would record them myself. Wash Me had landed a gig playing at Kennedy’s, an (obviously) Irish bar across the street from Bimbo’s 365 Club in North Beach. Strangely enough, they also served Indian food there that wasn’t half bad. Their show was early enough in the day that the sun was still out, but they had gathered a modest crowd of friends like myself to watch them do their thing.

Though I am naturally biased for my compadres, I can speak objectively to say that Wash Me was a great band. Though they weren’t together long, to this day, I can still remember their songs clearly. There are so many bands out there that I have seen over and over again like Phish or Modest Mouse where to this day I couldn’t hum two bars of any of their songs, much less identify a single title of one. Granted, Wash Me was pretty no frills, stripped down, poppy punk music, but those brilliant melodies and lyrics they composed will stick with you, some for life, no kidding. I think with the right promotion and opportunities, Wash Me could have and certainly deserved to move on to bigger and better things, but it was painfully clear that the folks at Kennedy’s weren’t supportive to say the least. I don’t think they even turned off the background music at the bar while they were playing, very disrespectful. But my boys played loud enough to drown it out and then some.

I believe Quan’s then girlfriend and future wife, Amy, was in the back handling the merch and mailing list. Quan pointed out that she was wearing a Tootsie Roll baseball hat and between songs, Mike encouraged the audience to buy their stuff on the internet and mentioned a show they were going to do soon at The Stork Club in Oakland. Dan told everyone that the drummer wanted them to buy him a beer before they played “Tava” and I’m pretty sure at least one person obliged him. He then introduced “Surfin’ Messiah” as “their religious number” and got us all to grunt and holler like apes during “Monkey Armageddon”. Quan described the next two numbers, “Clock Song” as “a song about somebody who wakes up too early in the morning” and “Ice Cream Headache” as “also about a guy who doesn’t like his job”. 

They delighted us with a couple clever cover songs including a bit of “Ain’t No Fun (If The Homies Can’t Have None)” by Snoop Dogg before they played “Rebecca”. Afterwards, they did “Run For Your Life” by an obscure band called The Beatles, it being the last song on their “Rubber Soul” album. Finally, Dan introduced “Warsaw” as a song “by a depressing English band called Joy Division” and they began it at first playing the post-punk standard really jazzy, before reverting back to more like its original version. Mike mentioned again about their stickers and mailing list in the back before they wrapped it all up. To this day, it remains the only live performance I ever saw at Kennedy’s, but thankfully I was able to see Wash Me a few times back then, as well as several other musical incarnations of those wonderful, wonderful people.

Wash Me, Kennedy’s, SF, Wed., December 6

https://archive.org/details/wash-me-kennedys-12600

The David Grisman Quintet, Blue Blades Of Grass, War., SF, Fri., December 8

It had been a few years since I recorded Grisman at the Maritime, but I was happy to join once again with his enthusiastic crowd there to cheer for him and his quintet. There had been some renewed interest in his music around then after the “Grateful Dawg” documentary had been released earlier that year, the soundtrack released the year after. Directed by David’s daughter Gillian and cinematography done by Justin Kreutzmann, the son of Grateful Dead drummer, Bill Kreutzmann, the film chronicles the friendship and collaborations Grisman had with Jerry Garcia starting way back in the 60’s. Also that year in April, “The Pizza Tapes” were released. Legend had it that these recordings of Garcia and him were given to a pizza delivery guy as a tip, but copies had later surfaced around New York City and were getting popular, so they wisely decided to put it out and made it nice and official. They re-released it again ten years later with 16 additional tracks and alternate takes, playfully titling it, “The Pizza Tapes : Extra Large Edition”. Turns out, it contained the only known recording of Jerry playing “Amazing Grace”. Longtime friend and former quintet member, guitarist Tony Rice helped them record these tapes, but I’m sad to say Tony just passed away a couple years ago, apparently while making coffee.

It’s always a pleasure to hear Grisman play, a true master of the mandolin and the genre of bluegrass. My only real complaint about the show, as is always my bone to pick with bluegrass shows, is that the volume of the music was painfully low and to make matters worse, since such music is often just instrumental as Grisman’s was, the drunks in the crowd selfishly use that music as just the background score to their own conversations. The Warfield is a rather big place for such intimate music anyway. It was a long night too, since I had to usher through the opening act, the first of David’s two sets, the set break, and the beginning of the second set. Like hippies, the bluegrass crowd is a tough one to wrangle as well. Still, once I was let go from ushering and got a beer in my hand, I was able to unwind and lighten up. It also was a welcome distraction from the stressful recount and legal efforts to settle the election that was still boiling over. This would be the last weekend of that strange phantom period, the presidency spinelessly being handed over to George W. Bush later that Tuesday. David even made a little wisecrack between songs, first saying that he was for Bush, then quickly adding, “Let’s face it, he’s greatest mandolin player… Sam Bush!” 

The Blue Blades Of Grass band got the crowd warmed up, being pretty straightforward bluegrass music, though they sang well. They performed the traditional bluegrass classic, “Pig In A Pen”, a song Garcia and Grisman did together for years, including way back when they were in the Old & In The Way band. As usual, Grisman had brought along a talented roster of musicians to comprise his quartet including Matt Eakle on flute and bass flute. It’s not often one hears flute in bluegrass music, so Matt’s contribution made the songs a little different than you would typically hear at such shows, gave it sort of a jazzy Canned Heat sound. Come to think of it, you don’t see flute players live with any bands of any genre very often really.

David introduced the others about halfway through the show, starting with Joe Craven on “percussion, violin…, and just about anything he lays his hand or any other body part on, a virtuoso on nearly everything” and also mentioned that he was “about to become a papa again.” Next, he praised the “Latin touch” that his guitarist, Enrique Coria from Argentina, a man they called “El Magnifico”, and lastly, he introduced Sam Bevan, “the newest and youngest member of the group”, on upright bass. James Kerwin also took a turn playing bass with them that night. Enrique had quite an impressive solo in the second set and he got the crowd to clap, whoop, and stomp their feet to his flamenco stylings. Matt had one hell of a flute solo as well. I didn’t get a setlist that night, but I do know that they played “Pupville” near the end of the show which David dedicated “for all the kids here”, mentioning a few including ones called Chelsea and Patrick. 

I would return to The Warfield the following night to see Rancid, a very different genre and audience to be certain. Technically, this was the last time I’d see David play a full set with his quintet, but I did see Grisman many years later briefly performing at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park. Unfortunately, he was on the Banjo Stage and it was so hopelessly crowded and we were so far away, that and we were stuck right next to some filthy, deranged homeless guy, dancing wildly without a shirt who absolutely stunk to high heaven, the kind of odor that’ll make your eyes sting. My friends and I didn’t stick around to listen to David for very long and we moved on to other acts at stages elsewhere. 

The David Grisman Quintet, Blue Blades Of Grass, War., SF, Fri., December 8

https://archive.org/…/david-grisman-quintet-warfield-12800

https://archive.org/…/blue-blades-of-grass-warfield-12800

Rancid, AFI, The Distillers, War., SF, Sat., December 9

Rancid were about at the peak of their popularity back then, having just released their fifth album that August, simply titled “Rancid”, their first on Hellcat Records, Tim Armstrong’s own label. Produced by Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion, it managed to squeeze 22 tracks in just under 40 minutes, very punk, and though it got good reviews, it didn’t make as much money as their previous releases. Around that time, Tim had also formed a musical side project called The Transplants with Travis Barker, the drummer of Blink 182, and released a self titled album two years later. Rancid were home in the bay area after six weeks on the road, ending the tour amongst many friends and family at this packed, sold out Warfield show. And it must be said that it was an impressive line up, some heavy hitters here, but I was a little miffed that I had to work all night. Still, the crowd was a damn sight easier compared to wrangling the finicky hippies at the David Grisman show there the night before that. 

Opening the show were The Distillers, a still very new band fronted by Brody Dalle from Australia. Brody, a former professional swimmer and two time Catholic school dropout, had met Tim while she was playing at the Summersault Festival with her old band, Sourpuss. And though Tim was 32 and she had just turned 18, they were quickly engaged and her new band, The Distillers, got picked up by Hellcat Records, and then presto! Their first self titled debut album came out that April and there they were on stage that night. I have to admit, they were pretty fucking heavy and had impressive chops for people that young. In fact, they made the others that night seem downright poppy. Brody’s singing was so indecipherable, that I didn’t have a prayer in hell transcribing her setlist. The mosh pit went bonkers for them and suffice to say, they were a tough act to follow.

I was more than familiar with AFI by then, having seen them headline The Fillmore just two months before this show. That night, though it was Christmas season, AFI had decorated their set with about a half dozen glowing jack-o-lanterns, presumably leftover from Halloween. To add to their spookiness, they came on stage to the recording of the creepy theme song from the horror movie “Poltergeist”. Their singer, Davey Havok, also came out later near the end of Rancid’s set to help sing along to “Rejected” and “Ruby Soho”. I didn’t get their setlist that night either, but I do know that they opened with “Strength Through Wounding” and they ended their set with “The Days Of The Phoenix” and “Totalimmortal”. Davey mentioned between songs how much the  enjoyed being on the road with these bands and since this was their last night of the tour, they wanted to especially give a shout out to their “big brothers in Rancid”. 

Between sets, Rancid unfurled a giant black and white jolly roger flag, the cover of the new album, behind their set and soon they took the stage, Tim wearing a black leather, chrome studded biker jacket, aviator shades, and a bandanna. Lars Fredriksen had dyed his mohawk bright purple and wore a black Motorhead shirt with the sleeves torn off. I had the bad habit of not bringing enough tapes to shows back then, so I was only able to get about the first half hour of Rancid’s set. As you might expect, they covered all their big hits up till then, but I do know for certain that the first three songs of the night were “Maxwell Murder”, “Journey To The End Of The East Bay”, and “Name”. At the end of their set, Tim acted like he was going to throw his guitar into the audience, but relented at the last moment.  

It would be a few years until I would see The Distillers and Rancid again, but there was some serious drama happening during those in between years. Three months after this show Lars’ brother, Rob, tragically died of a brain aneurysm. Then, Tim and Brody’s marriage fell apart after Tim saw pictures of her kissing Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme in Rolling Stone magazine. In fact, the next time I would see The Distillers, they would be opening for the Queens Of The Stone Age at the scene of the crime right there at The Warfield, on that very same stage. Brody and Josh would marry two years later after that show in 2005 and have three kids together, a daughter and two sons. Unfortunately, that marriage also crumbled acrimoniously, custody battles, restraining orders, and all. This would also be the last time I’d see AFI perform live, but they’re still together and touring to this day. Finally, this night with Rancid would hold the dubious distinction of being the last show I would see before George W. Bush was so spinelessly handed the presidency just three days later, ending that historic, embarrassing six week struggle to decide the election of 2000 on a catastrophic note. 

Rancid, The Distillers, AFI, War., SF, Sat., December 9

https://archive.org/details/rancid-warfield-12900

https://archive.org/details/afi-warfield-12900

https://archive.org/details/the-distillers-warfield-12900

Aimee Mann, Grant Lee Philips, Fill., SF, Tues., December 12

SETLIST : One, Choice, That’s Just What, How Am I Different, Save Me, It’s Not Safe, 4th Of July, Red Vines, Susan, Ghost World, Long Shot, Sugar Coated, Quits, (encore), Wise Up, Deathly, Stupid Thing

This was one of those dreaded nights in history where most people who lived through it remember where they were when they heard the bad news. As luck would have it, it was none other than Aimee Mann herself who announced to the crowd at The Fillmore that George W. Bush had just been handed the presidency. Ironically, Aimee had just finished performing “Save Me” when she casually dropped that bomb on us. I was disappointed though not entirely surprised, but there were a few gasps and at least a couple people shouting, “No!” But what was done was done and I suppose if anyone is going to break such bleak news to you, at least it came from her syrupy sweet voice. 

Yes, the recounts and the legal wrangling had been going on since election day, but the Supreme Court finally lowered the boom and spinelessly handed over the keys to George, a metaphorical and literal drunk driver. Of coarse, none of us could have entirely predicted the death and suffering that would follow during W’s reign of terror. Even Aimee blew it off a bit trying to console us saying that we had “4 years of comedy” to look forward to, but it was still a hard pill to swallow. Still, listening to and writing about this now, I find it cathartic to take a deep breath, square my shoulders, and dive in on the beginning of this age of darkness. Indeed, considering that everything I’ve written about up till now happened almost entirely during the Clinton years and I pretty much stopped bootlegging at the end of the Bush ones, I take comfort in the thought that I’m basically at the halfway point of this absurdly  long confession. 

Which leads me back to the show at hand. I was pretty unfamiliar with the works of Aimee Mann before this night, though I have learned a lot since I started doing my research as usual. I was aware of her songs in the soundtrack of the P.T. Anderson movie “Magnolia” which had come out the previous winter, the long awaited follow up to his seminal masterpiece “Boogie Nights”. I thought the bit in that movie with everyone singing her song “Wise Up” was actually pretty stupid, but I enjoyed the rest of the film nonetheless. The aforementioned song “Save Me” which was also on that soundtrack went on to receive a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. Her husband, Michael Penn, the brother of actor Sean Penn, had done the music for “Boogie Nights” and even played a small role in it, the sound engineer named Nick (Yay!) who records Dirk Diggler’s cringeworthy songs in the middle act. 

Before that, Aimee had a wildly eclectic and prolonged rise to stardom. She had been enrolled in the famed Berklee College Of Music until she dropped out after 18 months and from there, believe it or not, she once was a part of Ministry in early 80’s, briefly having as she phrased it “a dysfunctional romance” with that band’s deranged frontman, Al Jourgensen. One can speculate that any romance with Al would probably be characterized so, but I digress. From there, she formed the band Till Tuesday, a damn sight less dark and bombastic than Ministry by any measure, and had some moderate success on that front. I never made the connection that she was also the etherial female voice singing the chorus of “Time Stand Still” by Rush. 

She began her solo career in the 90’s, briefly playing with the Squeeze, as well as forming the Acoustic Vaudeville project with her husband, a stage show of music and comedy which employed such now notable talents as Janeane Garofalo, Patton Oswalt, and David Cross. P.T. Anderson had become familiar with her work seeing her as a regular performer at the Largo, a nightclub in L.A. which featured other moody songwriters such as Elliot Smith, Fiona Apple, and Rufus Wainwright. Finally, she even played a bit part in the Cohen Brothers cult classic, “The Big Lebowski”, as one of the German Nihilists. So, suffice to say, Aimee had quite the impressive resume coming into The Fillmore that night. 

Though she had been a successful and respected musician for years, her then record company, Geffen, had refused to release her latest album, “Bachelor No. 2 Or The Last Remains Of The Dodo”. For whatever reason, maybe they just thought the title was too long, Aimee took that album and released it on her own new label, Super Ego Records that May. Her persistence paid off, inspiring other disgruntled artists to follow suit and do it themselves, and she made a lot of money in the process with that album and the seven others that would follow it.  Michael Penn played guitar and back up vocals for five of the new songs as well. 

Opening that night was a respected local songwriter named Grant Lee Phillips, who I had just disbanded his old group, Grant Lee Buffalo, the year before to also pursue a solo career. He had just put out his “Ladies’ Love Oracle” album online that January and was there just playing solo with his acoustic guitar, save for his second to last song. He busted out a drum machine for “It’s The Life”, even jokingly singing a bit of “In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins at the beginning of it. He praised The Fillmore, saying, “This is a nice room to sing in, not echoey at all” and pumped up the crowd reassuring them that they were “ever so close to Mann-time… the Mann-hour is approaching!” Though I never watched it personally, Grant had also just began acting in the show “Gilmore Girls” that year, playing the local town troubadour. 

I thought Aimee’s choice of beginning her set with the Three Dog Night classic, “One”, was an appropriate one considering the history of that hippie venue. Though Three Dog Night as far as I know never played the Fillmore or The Fillmore West back in the day, they did perform at The Fillmore East in New York City. Later Aimee introduced “Ghost World” as “a song about graduating from high school and having no idea what the fuck to do with your life”. Afterwards, she joked that the song “almost rocked” and asked the crowd, “Remember that show when Aimee almost rocked? It was pretty good”. Then some folks  up front hooted, “Wooo!”, and she pointed to them and laughed, “They thought we rocked.”

One of the guys on stage in her band mentioned that she had been looking at Styx records in a store today, (most likely Amoeba on Haight Street), and she went on telling us that she had “developed a really unhealthy fixation with Styx”. She told the story about how recently a friend of her watched a video tape, a long form concert movie with vignettes with actors between songs and a “crazy Mr. Roboto-like theater” and watched their “Behind The Music” episode on VH1 too. She even threatened to “do a version of ‘Lady’ right now” which was met with a round of applause, though we weren’t that lucky and she went on to finish her set with the appropriately titled “Quits” instead. She came back for an encore and wrapped up the night with the aforementioned “Wise Up”, “Deathly” and “Stupid Thing”.

I’m happy to report that they gave us a cool poster at the end of the show, the entire background of it being a box of Red Vines licorice. Clearly, that was a reference to her song “Red Vines” which she performed in the middle of her set that night. Yes, Aimee dropped a bomb on us with the news about W., but we still had a few more carefree weeks before he would be inaugurated. Nine months later, we would all witness the horrors of 9/11 and as luck would have it, the first show I’d see after that terrible day would also be at The Fillmore, but it would be Megadeth. Quite a different mood to say the least at that show, but not entirely the wrong kind of music to assuage the anxiety we were all feeling then. But I will get to that show in due time. Though Aimee did return to The Fillmore the following year, I missed it and this would to this day be the only time I would see her perform live. On one final, silly, and totally unrelated note, every time I think of Aimee, the song “Amy Grant” by the Young Fresh Fellows gets stuck in my head with Mann’s name substituted for Grant’s. If you haven’t heard that song, I strongly advise you against it now. It’ll get stuck there for life… with Mann’s name instead too. 

Aimee Mann, Grant Lee Philips, Fill., SF, Tues., December 12

https://archive.org/details/aimee-mann-fillmore-121200

https://archive.org/…/grant-lee-phillips-fillmore-121200

Alice In Winterland: Everclear, Fastball, Nelly Furtado, War., SF, Fri., December 15

SETLISTS :

(FASTBALL) : This Is Not My Life, Morning Star, Nowhere Road, Dream, The Way, On The Road Again

(EVERCLEAR) : El Distorto De Melodica, When It All Goes Wrong Again, Heroin Girl, Like A California King, Fire Maple Song, Strawberry, Wonderful, AM Radio, Everything To Everyone, I Will Buy You A New Life, Santa Monica, Father Of Mine, (encore), Local God, Sin City

This would be the fourth and final time I’d see Everclear and the only time I’d see either Fastball or Nelly Furtado. Nelly was brand spanking new back then, having just celebrated her 22nd birthday less than two weeks before this show. The Canadian singer songwriter had just released her debut album, “Whoa Nelly!” that October and it just exploded. It would go on to sell over five million copies and would reap in four Grammy Nominations including Best Pop Vocal Album, Best New Artist, and for her hit single “I’m Like A Bird”, nominations for Song Of The Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Yes, that earworm of a song of hers was all over the radio, especially Alice who was sponsoring this show as their “Alice In Winterland” concert. Even Nelly herself described it as a “hairbrush song” and I’m confidant that women out there understand that reference.

So, you can imagine how mortified I was to discover I accidentally taped over her extremely brief set opening that night. In fact, I can’t even tell you what band it was that I recorded over her, but they were some rowdy punk band and the show was in San Francisco. I’m actually surprised I did it because I thought Nelly had the voice of an angel and she certainly won over the audience as well as me that show, so I have to conclude that I did it accidentally. Anyway, Nelly is still a young woman, younger than I am at least, so I might get a chance to redeem myself and catch her performing again some day.

Like I said, this was another Alice show and once again, my former school chum from S.F. State, Sterling James, was there to emcee between acts. This was arguably the height of Everclear’s popularity and they were quite productive that year, releasing not one but twin albums, “Songs From An American Movie: Volume One : Learning  How To Smile” in July and “Volume Two : Good Time For A Bad Attitude” just a month before this show. The first volume, inspired by frontman Art Alexasis’ recent second divorce had already been certified platinum by then and though there was some confusion with their record company after the release of the second volume, that one still certified gold. 

On a somber note, their new song from Volume One, “Wonderful” had been used as the graduation song for Columbine High School that summer, that community still recovering from the tragic massacre that had taken place there. Naturally, they played it that night along with all their other hits. Art had been personally busy as well that year, making a brief appearance in the Heather Graham comedy, “Committed” and testifying before Congress on behalf of the bill HR 1488, the Compassion For Children & Child Support Enforcement Act or ACES. With a little help from his star power, the bill passed. 

The second opener, Fastball, had a huge hit with another Alice earworm, “The Way”, which two years before had raked in Grammy Nominations for Best Long Form Video as well as Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals. However, their latest album, the ironically titled “The Harsh Light Of Day”, would sell less than 85,000 copies. But the fans that night loved them all the same and it was hard not to like these guys since their songs were so catchy and though their set was only six songs long, they still treated us to a couple of whimsical covers, “Dream” by the Everly Brothers and “On The Road Again” by Willie Nelson.

Art and the band were on top of the world that night, clearly in a good mood. Coincidentally, the last time I had seen them was on that very same Warfield stage the previous winter headlining the SnoCore tour with Soul Coughing, Redman, and DJ Spooky. The band was introduced by Alice’s morning hosts, one of them being Gretchen Lancour. Being only nine days after this night, Art shouted out “Merry fuckin’ Christmas!!!” to the crowd before they played “Heroin Girl”. Art pointed out the people up in the front of the dance floor being “really fucking cool” and goaded the crowd to scream louder to match them. Pumped up, he had no problem then getting them to sing along to the chorus of “Strawberry”. Afterwards, he took a moment to wish a young woman named Danielle a happy birthday. Everclear made a curious, but interesting choice singing the lyrics of “AM Radio” to the tune of “Mr. Big Stuff”, the R & B classic by Jean Knight, afterward declaring that this was the “best fucking time they’ve ever had at The Warfield”. They came back for their encore and Art joked, “You guys by now should know you’re not getting rid of us that easy” and they finished the night with another cover, “Sin City” by AC/DC.

Alice In Winterland: Everclear, Fastball, Nelly Furtado, War., SF, Fri., December 15

https://archive.org/details/everclear-warfield-121500

https://archive.org/details/nelly-furtado-warfield-121500

https://archive.org/details/fastball-warfield-121500

Col. Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, Fill., SF, Sat., December 30

SETLIST : Thela Hun Ginjeet, Col. Claypool’s Fearless Frog Brigade, With A Little Help From My Friends, Riddles Are Abound Tonight, Calling Kyle, Hendershot, Recreating, Prelude To Fear, (set break), Pings On The Wing Pt. 1, Dogs, Pigs (Three Different Ones), Sheep, Pings On The Wing Pt. 2, (encore), Taxman

Col. Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, Fill., SF, Sun., December 31

SETLIST : Prelude To Fear, Col. Claypool’s Flying Frog Brigade, With A Little Help From My Friends, Highball With The Devil, Thela Hun Ginjeet, 16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six, Hendershot, The Ol’ Diamondback Sturgeon (Fisherman’s Chronicles, Pt. 3), Shattering Song, Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. 1-4), Here Come The Bastards, (encore), Moby Dick, Tomorrow Never Knows, (encore), Harold Of The Rocks

Galactic, War., SF, Sun., December 31

Well, this is it, last call for the 20th century. There were those who pointlessly argued that the year before was the real end of the millennium, but whatever. I’m just glad I no longer have to try to spell millennium anymore. I always get it wrong the first couple of tries. Yes, we had firmly planted our flag into the 21st century at the end of that weekend and there was no going back. Included along with these back to back New Year’s shows, I’m also going to regale you with my witnessing of the tail end of Galactic’s set at The Warfield. How I was able to gain entry to that show to catch its final hour, I will explain later, but suffice to say that was one long stretch of music and memorable one at that. This would be the first of many times the Frog Brigade would perform on New Year’s at The Fillmore and I would be privileged to attend this one along with the following New Year’s shows there for the next two years. 

But for that fateful year of our Lord 2000 A.D., I had quite the quadruple dose of Mr. Leslie Edward Claypool’s latest musical experiment, the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, who as Colonel of this rag tag assembly of oddball geniuses, is their leader. I had the honor of attended both nights of the recording of his “Live Frogs” albums at the Great American Music Hall only two months prior to these shows and they played mostly the same songs this time around as well. The first of these two nights was being billed as the final time that the band would perform Pink Floyd’s “Animals” in its entirety. And that was indeed the case for the past 23 years, but Les relented and started performing it once again this year along with several other covers, mostly of The Beatles. As luck would have it, his latest incarnation of the Frog Brigade includes Sean Lennon, who he calls “Shiner”, the youngest son of the late Beatle, John Lennon. But on these nights, 23 years ago, it was the original lineup, including Primus drummer Herb Alexander, who had been their second drummer in the Frog Brigade’s maiden line up at their debut at the Mountain Aire Festival. Herb would sit in on a second drum kit for the New Year’s show, but not the night before. As I had written previously, Les was taking a hiatus from Primus then, being quoted of saying, “I’m not here to air any dirty laundry, but after working with someone for so many years in close quarters, there is bound to be a skid mark or two on the big Primus underwear” and that Primus was “taking a little snooze, a siesta.”

There were however a few principal differences between these Claypool shows, so I’ll elaborate starting at the top with the first of the two. This show on the 30th was one of those “an evening with…” gigs, two sets and no opening act. As I mentioned before, the second set was all “Animals” as it had been at the Great American shows. Galactic had also been playing the Warfield that night, but with Robert Walter’s 20th Congress opening up instead of Ozomatli. The Frog Brigade came on stage to the recording of “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, a not so subtle, but appropriate nod to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 : A Space Odyssey”. After opening their set with the epic prog rock classic, “Thela Hun Ginjeet”, they had a false start playing a version of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” with Les substituting its lyrics with “Col. Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade”, so I listed the title in the setlists accordingly. They followed that one naturally with its companion piece from that seminal album, “With A Little Help From My Friends” and they had their drummer, Jay Lane, singing lead as The Beatles had done with their drummer, Ringo Starr. To this day, I think this is the only time I ever heard Jay sing lead on any song he performed. 

After the second set, they came back for the encore and had a surprise guest, Jerry Cantrell, the guitarist of Alice In Chains, to join them on yet another Beatles cover, “Taxman”. They had opened that song on the second night of the Great American shows, but it didn’t make it to either of the albums. Les introduced him and said, “I hope you enjoyed yourself” and encouraged the crowd to “come tomorrow night.” It shredded as all the songs did that evening and Les even did a little breakdown in the middle of it singing that bit from “The Wondrous Boat Ride” from “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory”, Les groaning, “There’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going” and so forth. It would be a precursor to Primus actually putting out a complete album covering the songs of that movie 14 years later. Incidentally, the show was a steal being only a $20 ticket, though the following night was $45, which was still a bargain considering the amount of music we got. They left the stage to the sound of Jay doing a little human beatbox which he did the following night as well. I went home and got some sleep, conserving my strength for what was next to come. 

The second and final night was being billed on the flyers as the “NYE Frogout!” which included “Surprise Performances”, “Party Goods”, and strangely enough, a “Midnight Audio Orgy”. One big difference this show had over the previous night was that there was an opening band, Banyan, the instrumental supergroup founded by Stephen Perkins, the drummer of Jane’s Addiction and Porno For Pyros, who assembled an impressive collection of virtuosos including Nels Cline on guitar, Willie Waldman on trumpet, and Mike Watt on bass. Stephen had many various other artists come and go from this band such as Rob Wasserman and Steve McKay, the saxophonist from The Stooges. Banyan had just released their second album, “Anytime At All” the previous year, the first two albums both dedicated to Mark Perkins’, Stephen’s deceased brother. You might recall Mark had died during the time Porno For Pyros performed at The Warfield back in 1993, the first show I ever bootlegged. Banyan were an excellent opening act, sounding a little like a marching band on acid, giving Nels, Willy, and Mike plenty of time to do mind blowing solos. But since all their songs were instrumental, I still have no idea what their setlist was and I believe this was the only time I’d ever get to see them perform. At the end of their set, Stephen wished a “Happy New Year’s to Les Claypool and the guys.”

Unlike the night before, the Frog Brigade just played one long set instead of breaking it up into two. But what a long set it was indeed, clocking in at just under three hours from start to finish. They came on stage once again, this time to recorded sounds of thunder and forest creatures. Some of the meatheads in the audience were chanting “You suck!” as well. Hell, the first tune, “Prelude To Fear” alone was over 20 minutes long. Les took a moment and told the crowd, “We’re going to have a fuckin’ good time tonight. It already started awesome with Banyan. We are cruisin’! We are cruisin’!… Cus’ I just took some mushrooms! Woo!” I have every reason to believe that Les was on mushrooms that night, it being such a special occasion, he having no reason to lie really, and the fact that each song went on and on for so long. Not that he was playing bad, far from it, and to my memory never has. I’m just amazed that he could still perform as well as he did under the influence. I would go so far to say that this night was easily one of if not the best Frog Brigade show I’d ever witness, top three for sure. But I suppose Les couldn’t do mushrooms for every show he did. That would eventually start taking its toll pretty fast.

Anyway, they once again did those “Sgt. Pepper’s” covers and Jay improvised a bit this time, singing “I can’t tell you but that green bud is mine” and “I just want somebody to smoke”. Afterwards, they did “Highball With The Devil” in which Les introduced it saying that this was a “song about when the booze gets ya” and that it required “a little clapping”. So, Les led us to clap along to the beat, the first and only time to my memory Les every asked one of his crowds to do so. In the middle of the tune, he bantered with guitarist Todd Huth, “You know there’s a fellah, a fine fellah sporting the motorcycle pants of doom. Todd? You’ve had a bout or two with the Highball devil, am I correct?” He then invited Todd to either exorcise this experience or express how it feels musically through his instrument and Todd did one of his incredible noodle sessions. When he finished Les praised him saying, “Todd, hat was rather extraordinary. I feel the emotion. It didn’t make me teary eyed or anything, but I could feel it.” They followed that song with “Thela Hun Ginjeet”, epically long as usual. Les took a moment to ask, “Was anybody here last night?”, and claimed though he had a good time, that the crowd that night were “some dead son of a bitches” and he thought they were “too stoned.” But he reassured the crowd that night that he could “feel the energy tonight”, despite it being a “scary thing doing something new” and he introduced Herb on the second drum kit.

This would be the first time I’d hear Les cover “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought Six” by Tom Waits. Clearly being a fan of his work, Les along with Primus guitarist Larry LeLonde had played bass and guitar respectively on “Big In Japan”, the first song off Tom’s album “Mule Variations” released just the year before this show and Tom, as most of you probably remember, was the guest vocalist on Primus’ album version of “Tommy The Cat”. Incidentally, Les played a few bass licks and chants of “say baby, you wanna lay down with me” from “Tommy The Cat” in the middle of “Shattering Song” that night. Les gave a shout out saying, “People ask me all the time who are your influences? Who you like to listen to?… I say Tom Waits of coarse.” In the middle of it, Les did a little breakdown and also sang a few lines of “Hello Skinny” by The Residents, another clear influence on Les and a song he had recorded with himself with Primus on the “Miscellaneous Debris” EP. Yep, that Tom Waits cover went on so long, Les joked when they were finished, “Never thought we’d get out of that one!”

They followed that with “Hendershot” and Les broke it down again saying that they had already heard “the good, the angelic forces”, but now was ready to introduce the “beast, the dark forces, Beelzebub… His name is Skerik and he’s a lovely man” and Skerik proceed to do some ranting through thick layers of effects before doing a mind bending saxophone solo. Les also monkeyed around with the lyrics of the chorus singing, “His momma called him Hendershot… His greasy old granny called him Hendershot… Old man down by the river called him Hendershot…” Eenor did an excellent guitar solo which Les praised, “Boy’s on fire tonight!” Next, I was pleasantly surprised to hear, after a lengthy drum solo introduction, the Frog Brigade do a unexpected Primus song, “The Ol’ Diamondback Sturgeon (Fisherman’s Chronicles Part 3)”. Claypool thanked the crowd in the middle of it saying, “This means everything to me. It’s a wonderful thing and for the next five minutes or so, I want it to mean everything to you… Fly little birdy, be free!” and he continued jamming with the band for a damn sight longer than five minutes. He even busted out a violin bow on his bass for a bit during that one.

Just when I thought the songs that nights couldn’t get any more exhausting, they went on a full 21 and a half minutes on “Shattering Song”. Les pointed out that his “wife’s standing on the corner of the stage” and that she “looks very lovely this evening”. Jay made a wisecrack later on how all the band member’s wives were hot, especially Herb’s. I could tell Les was mildly annoyed by Jay and countered, “Jay is one of those fellows who tells it how it is. Anything else until we leap into this new year?” Jay then started moaning strangely and Les pressed him to get to “get to the point”. Les then asked the audience, “How’s it going so far? I’m having a marvelous time myself” and then had the band “bring it down for your ol’ grandad, fellas”. He then did a bass solo followed by a few lines of “Riders On The Storm” by The Doors. They then finished the last song of the millennium doing their cover of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” by Pink Floyd which included a stellar solo by their keyboardist Jeff Chimenti.

Near midnight, Les pointed out “You know it’s getting extremely close to that time. It’s unbelievably close to that time” and mentioned that he would remain the Colonel of the band stating that it had been fairly decided and there would be “none of that dimpled chad bullshit for me”, a clear reference to the election fiasco we all had just finished enduring. He then asked, “Are any of you folks high this evening?” and that due to the fact that “a small man who’s about to take the seat in the Oval Office” that we perhaps should “stay high for  four years.” But he then recanted that maybe that was “not such a good idea”, condemning the “old cronies”, how it was a “dangerous time”, and suggesting that the countdown that night maybe not so much a countdown, but for the country “leaping back 10 years”.

Then at long last the hour was upon us, Les bellowed the numbers of the countdown, and shouted, “Happy New Year!”. The balloons bundled above the lighting truss were released and everybody went bonkers and Les sang a few lines of “Auld Lang Syne”, mushing up the lyrics eventually, singing “may old…whatever the words might be.” He then praised the crowd saying they were truly attractive and encouraged them to “do something fun next year… Don’t fuck around. Have a good time. “ Les pointed out, “So now, you may have noticed people distributing devices” and he was going to “show you how to work this thing.” The devices were kazoos and he instructed us to put the “square end, not the pointy end” in our mouths and “don’t blow, just sing… Don’t stuff your weed into it”, then glancing over to his drummer and in a mockingly accusing tone, “… Jay Lane… Let’s hear some fuckin’ kazoos!”

From there, he had us singing through our kazoos the riff of “Here Come The Bastards”. Clearly pissed off as we all were at that current political situation, Les chanted during the chorus, “Georgy Bush! Georgy Bush! Come for your ass! Georgy Bush!” That would be the last song of the main set, but rest assured, Les never wavered in his criticism of W throughout the following eight years. It was a foregone conclusion that they would return to the stage for an encore which they most certainly did and as expected, it was a long one. They started once again with a cover of “Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin and like in the original, Jay and Herb each went off on the mother of all drum solos. When they finally finished, Les declared, “That was a party! Best New Year’s I’ve ever been to!” 

They then went into another 20 minute plus long epic, this time being “Tomorrow Never Knows” by (once again) The Beatles. During the song, they invited Mike Watt with his bass back on stage and Les introduced him saying, “Mr. Mike Watt is an extraordinary man” and that he had “an interesting perspective on the world… So, Mr. Mike Watt, can you give us some fat ass licks?” Then, Mike did what he did best and treated us to an impressive solo which Les praised as “such a fine display of clusterfucking, I think you’d agree” and went on, “I think it’s time to move on, move into 2001 and to prosper and to multiply and to do the thing you do.” Before he began the last song of the show, Les referenced the ticket price saying that they were “almost at the $45 mark, so we had to come back out” and they began playing “Harold Of The Rocks”.

During that song, Les reminded the folks up front, “You fellas play nice in that mosh pit” and paused after the song’s second verse to say, “So, thanks again for coming out tonight. I also want to take this opportunity to apologize for the ugliness of our New Year’s Eve shirt.” He admitted, “I designed it” and reassured us that “nobody’s feelings got hurt” that it “looks like shit” since it was all on him. It didn’t matter to me since I didn’t get one anyway. So, they at long last wrapped things up with a big finale and once again Jay did his inexplicable human beatbox ending. Les had the house bring the lights up so he could get “a good look at ya!” 

Like most New Year’s shows, I stumbled out of the venue elated and totally wasted, but unlike any of these shows, I had been tasked on a mission to complete afterwards by our head usher, Tina. After I was cut from ushering, she asked me if I wanted to check out the remains of Galactic’s set at The Warfield of which I gladly said I did. She then handed me off a manilla envelope stuffed with some paperwork and told me I could get into the show with it, being on official business to deliver it to the office there in the balcony. So, I hoofed it over Cathedral Hill, marched down there and did just that. Before I knew it, I was watching a completely different New Year’s show. Believe it or not, they had just begun their THIRD set starting at the wee hour of 2 AM. I’d already seen Galactic twice before at The Fillmore and a bit of their after hours set at Mountain Aire in 1998, so I knew they’d be on for a while and I got over an hour’s worth before they finished their performance.

I was once again pleasantly surprised that shortly after I got there, Galactic revealed a special guest, one of them joking,”and behind curtain number 1!…”, as none other than Skerik strolled onto the stage. Yep, that irrepressible funky gremlin still had some gas in the tank, hauled ass like me over to The Warfield, and wailed on his sax yet again that night. Like Banyan earlier, Galactic was primarily an instrumental band, so I didn’t know the titles of their songs, but I certainly knew their cover of “We Want The Funk” because none other than that song’s creator, Mr. George Clinton, was on stage with them singing it! He was introduced by one of the Galactic guys declaring, “The master is in the house!” and George did his thing throughout the song getting the audience to “put your hands together”, chanting “party people pumpin’ their fists like this!”, him yelling “P!” and the crowd yelling “Funk!”, and so on. That was a welcome and pleasant way to usher in the new millennium, that song like so many others that evening clocking in well over a half an hour long. 

Near the end of their set, one of the Galactic guys addressed the crowd saying, “Galactic would like to personally thank everybody for coming out tonight. For it is a new year, a new year, let’s do it right… Don’t drive if you’re fucked up.” They left the stage, but quickly returned to finish the evening with a cover of “Gloria” by Them, getting everybody to chant out the letters of that name along with them. As luck would have it, the very next show I would see would be Van Morrison, the author of that song, on the very same stage just three days later and coincidentally, Van finished his encore with “Gloria” as well. Perhaps Galactic saw that Van was coming and covered that song as an homage. There was an added bonus that on top of the posters I received from both of Mr. Claypool’s shows, I also got one from Galactic as well and it was a Jimbo Phillips one to boot, one of my favorite poster artists. Yes, the millennium was officially over, but I’d only have to wait three short months and, you guessed it, I’d see the Frog Brigade yet again, this time at The Warfield where I had ended this epic New Year’s. And if that wasn’t enough, I’d see them yet again that May opening for Phil Lesh at the Greek. That’s, count em’, six Frog Brigade shows in only seven months. 

I’m also happy to report that on top of those fine posters, I was able to find a quality bootleg of the Frog Brigade’s set from the New Year’s show on YouTube. I of coarse have seen Claypool many times since then, including just a couple months ago at the Fox in Oakland, not to mention the ticket I got to see Primus at the Greek this coming April. Yes, Les might be the ripe old age of 60 now, but he’s still going strong and probably will remain performing for many years to come. In fact, just this year he released a five CD box set, “Adverse Yaw : The Prawn Song Years” which included the “Live Frogs” albums, “Purple Onion”, “The Big Eyeball In The Sky” from his Bucket Of Bernie Brains band, and his two solo albums, “Of Whales & Woe” and “Of Fungi & Foe”. And yes, on top of the following two years seeing the Frog Brigade at New Year’s, I would see Les again do New Year’s shows with his “Hatter’s Ball” in 2005 also at The Fillmore and again with Primus in 2010 at The Fox as well as that unique New Year’s Day show at the Great American on the first day of 2012. If I hadn’t seen him last October and will be again seeing him in April, I might have been tempted to see him this New Year’s at the Great American with his Les Claypool’s Bastard Jazz band. Clearly, I love the guy, but even I have to set some boundaries here.

Col. Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, Fill., SF, Sat., December 30

https://archive.org/…/col.-les-claypools-fearless…

Col. Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, Fill., SF, Sun., December 31

https://archive.org/…/col.-les-claypools-fearless…

https://archive.org/details/col.-les-claypools-fearless-flying-frog-brigade-bootleg-fillmore-123100

Galactic, War., SF, Sun., December 31

https://archive.org/details/galactic-warfield-123100