Cosmic Cowboys

The Flatlanders are on the road again

By Greg Cahill

If we’d grown up near an ocean,” Texas singer-songwriter Butch Hancock recently told the Dallas Star Telegram, “we might have written sea chanteys.” Fortunately for fans, Hancock and his compadres Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore instead grew up on the sprawling plains of Lubbock, Texas, which gave the world Buddy Holly, the spooky phenomenon known as the Lubbock Lights, and the posse known as the Flatlanders, the kings of Zen-tinted country rock.

Nearly 35 years ago, the legendary Flatlanders helped pave the way for today’s trendy retro- and alt-country sound with an innovative blend of old-timey country, Tex-Mex, folk, blues, and rock. Shunned by the Nashville establishment, this talented trio of Texas troubadours has long enjoyed the dubious status of critics’ darlings. Unlike many of today’s cafe cowboys, however, these hombres have credentials: Gilmore, born and raised in Lubbock, had his first demos in 1965 financed by Buddy Holly’s father; Ely, a high school dropout, rambled around the globe as a rock minstrel and eventually settled back in Lubbock, where he worked as a fruit picker, circus hand, dishwasher, and itinerant musician; and Hancock, also a Lubbock native, spent hours listening to music on border radio stations when he wasn’t driving the tractor on his father’s farm.

In 1971, the Flatlanders–a band that combined modern lyrics and traditional instrumentation, including a musical saw–were, well, big in Lubbock. Their 1972 eponymous debut recording (released only on eight-track tape at the time) quickly vanished but became an instant cult classic.

And that was that. Or so it seemed. The three amigos went their own ways but never fell out of friendship. Then in 1990, Rounder Records reissued the Flatlanders’ album as More a Legend Than a Band. Gilmore, Ely, and Hancock quickly became cult heroes, getting the spotlight on Austin City Limits, sometimes making guest appearances on each other’s albums, and, to the delight of Americana fans, occasionally getting back together for a Flatlanders reunion.

Two years ago, fate gave the Flatlanders a second chance. Film director Robert Redford enlisted the band to contribute the track “South Wind of Summer” to the Horse Whisperer soundtrack, the first time the trio had collaborated on songwriting. A series of reunion gigs followed, and this spring the Flatlanders did something fans had dreamed about for years: they released their sophomore effort, Now Again (New West). A thousand honky-tonks later, the Flatlanders reunite for a pair of shows that bring them to Rancho Nicasio on July 4 and the Marin County Fair on July 7.

Of the three, Gilmore probably has enjoyed the widest critical success. He resurfaced in the mid ’80s on the Oakland-based Hightone label. In 1991, Rolling Stone selected Gilmore as country artist of the year in its prestigious annual rock critics’ poll. And USA Today (along with another hundred or so newspapers) named Gilmore’s 1991 major-label debut, After Awhile (Elektra), country album of the year.

Ely–who bolstered his career after opening a 1981 British tour for the Clash–found himself locked out of the Nashville mainstream long before alt-country became a commercial option. Yet he’s consistently recorded albums spiced with tastefully dueling guitar and pedal steel leads, as well as images of dusty drifters and sweaty roadhouses.

Meanwhile, Hancock has languished on the pages of obscure Americana music magazines such as No Depression and Dirty Linen. He has released a string of notable small-label CDs (including The Wind’s Dominion and Eats Away the Night) and such hard-to-find self-produced cassettes as No Two Alike, a 14-tape series recorded during one glorious week at the Cactus Cafe in Austin. He also has penned hit songs for Emmylou Harris and the Texas Tornadoes, but his solo albums–including acoustic-based material that would do Bob Dylan proud, like 1991’s Own & Own–are well worth searching out.

In a recent interview, Hancock told the Star Telegram that the new Flatlanders album was “inevitable” because the trio had worked with singer-songwriter, playwright, and artist (and fellow Lubbockite) Terry Allen on music for a play called Chippy. “It was like destiny or something,” Hancock says.

“We just didn’t know when,” Ely added in true cosmic cowboy fashion. “It’s amazing, but we always thought the [second] record was there all along. It was like a painting in the sand–all we had to do was dust off parts of it and watch it appear.”

The Flatlanders perform July 4, at 3pm, at Rancho Nicasio, Town Square, Nicasio. Tickets are $20 advance; $25 door. 415.662.2219. They perform again July 7, at 6:30pm, as part of the Blues and Roots Festival at the Marin County Fair, Marin Center, Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael. Tickets are $11 adults; $9 kids and seniors; free for ages under four. 415.499.6400.

From the June 27-July 3, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Obstacle Course: Ruth Brown manages to overcome just about anything.

Photograph by Barbara Roberds

Soul Survivor

R&B great Ruth Brown beats the odds

By Greg Cahill

She’s a fighter. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, a 20-year-old singer named Ruth Brown, known as “Miss Rhythm,” skyrocketed to the top of the R&B charts with “Teardrops in My Eyes” and other hits. She earned millions for her bosses at Atlantic Records with the label’s first 45 rpm single, leading industry insiders to dub the New York-based offices “the house that Ruth built.”

Atlantic Records went on to record Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and other top acts. Brown, denied royalties, slipped into near poverty, working for a while as domestic help. In 1986 she sued the giant label, eventually winning the royalty dispute in a landmark decision that created the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, a charitable organization that provides hospitalization and other benefits to pioneers of the genre.

Yet Brown’s biggest fight still lay ahead. Two years ago, she was stricken with a debilitating stroke that left the singer voiceless. Concerts were canceled, and many predicted that the Grammy-winning performer was silenced for good.

Brown fought back. After a lengthy round of speech therapy (and no small amount of prayer), she’s back onstage and singing limited engagements. Brown travels this weekend to the Russian River Blues Festival, where she will host an all-star lineup of W. C. Handy Blues Award winners. It is perhaps the greatest comeback from a performer who has racked up an impressive list of accomplishments.

“In my mind, I didn’t know what in the world I had done to deserve that stroke,” she says, during a phone interview from her Las Vegas home. “I mean, my voice is my livelihood.”

During the interview, Brown struggles occasionally to find the right word, but her speech is remarkably lucid, her mind sharp, and her humor still intact.

As always, Brown’s spirit is unflagging. “All I can say is thank God for this recovery, because I want to start somewhere again,” she adds. “This is all I’ve known.”

Brown, 74, is a soul survivor. Born Ruth Alston Weston, she styled her singing after her idols Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan. She was discovered by Duke Ellington in a small Washington, D.C., nightclub in 1948. A friend of Ellington’s set up an audition with Ahmet Ertegun, the chief at then-fledgling Atlantic Records. En route to the audition at the Apollo Theater in New York, Brown was seriously injured in a car crash and hospitalized for nine months.

Eighteen months later, she stood on crutches to record “So Long,” an old Russ Morgan ballad, backed by an Atlantic Records all-star jazz band assembled by guitarist Eddie Condron. The song was a sensation and it made Brown a star. She became one of the premiere recording artists of the ’50s, with five No. 1 hits, including “(Mama) He treats Your Daughter Mean” and “5-10-15 Hours.”

Since then Brown has recorded more than 80 albums. Her credits include several million-selling hits, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Grammy Award, two W. C. Handy Awards (last month Brown was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame), a Tony Award (for best actress in the 1987 musical Black and Blue), the Ralph Gleason Award for Music Journalism (for her 1996 autobiography A Good Day to Sing the Blues), and a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.

These days, Brown–who now lives in a Las Vegas retirement community nicknamed “God’s waiting room”–is unfazed by her brushes with mortality. “I’ve been to the gate a whole lotta times and they turned me around and said, ‘Go back, you’re not ready yet.’ Sometimes I wonder how long my luck will hold out,” she adds with a laugh.

“My philosophy is, live for today because we don’t know about tomorrow. The older I get, the more I realize how true that statement is. Life is precious, no doubt about it.”

The Russian River Blues Festival runs Saturday-Sunday, June 29-30 at Johnson’s Beach in Guerneville. Saturday’s lineup is a state of the blues guitar summit with the Robert Cray Band, Tommy Castro, Coco Montoya, Deborah Coleman, and Kenny Neal. Sunday’s lineup features Bobby “Blue” Bland, the W. C. Handy Blues All-Stars (with Ruth Brown, Maria Muldaur, Billy Boy Arnold, and Duke Robillard), Booker T. Jones, the Elvin Bishop Band, Mighty Sam McClain, and “Sweetharp” Santana. Tickets at the gate are $45 a day or $85 for a two-day pass. Call 510.655.9471.

From the June 20-26, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Keen on You: Robert Earl Keen honed his skills with schoolmates like Lyle Lovett.

A Life in Song

Robert Earl Keen sings close to home

By Scott Cooper

You’re sitting around a campfire somewhere in the West as an old cowboy with a dusty hat and a missing thumb tells you a high tale of surly characters he’s encountered throughout his rugged life. He leans into each word while you sit on the edge of your log glued to his every motion and utterance.

That’s kind of what it’s like to listen to a Robert Earl Keen song.

Keen, who performs Friday, June 21, at the Mystic Theatre, is arguably the top Texas singer-songwriter on the road today. His songs conjure up vivid images of characters that would fit right into that cowboy’s tall tale, but he also sings about people we all know.

“There’s a lot of rural settings, but I don’t always consider them rural,” Keen says. “I just consider them down and out. Sometimes, it’s actually the loser who makes out and does well in the end. That’s one of my favorite themes. People relate to that theme. Also, people relate to the fact that life is a mess, and I particularly strive to describe what kind of mess it is.”

On his latest release, Gravitational Forces (Lost Highway), Keen paints a familiar canvas of such messes. “It’s a perfect mirror of my personal life,” he admits.

It’s easy to see Keen in some of these characters but not all. On the disc’s catchy opening track, “My Home Ain’t in the Hall of Fame,” he claims to be a “highway bum” with a “sunburned thumb.” It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize this as Keen, whose most famous song is “The Road Goes on Forever” with its catch phrase “and the party never ends.” On the other hand, few fans want to think of Keen as one of the adulterous faux lovebirds in “High Plains Jamboree,” who seem to disregard the good life at home while they dance together in the motel lounge.

As good as any songwriting technician on the scene today, Keen perfected his craft at the University of Texas A&M. His songsmithing skills were honed not necessarily in any class, but on his porch with friends and fellow Aggies like Lyle Lovett. Keen maintains a deep admiration for Lovett, but not all of his college songwriting buddies draw such praise.

“I had a few friends who thought because they knew you so well or the fact that they were privy to your life, that gave them access to write about your life or use you as the subject matter or use some activity that you had done as the subject matter to their song,” Keen says. “I had been the butt of that a few times, and I don’t like it. In the first place it’s lazy. In the second place, it’s chicken shit. It’s cowardly. So I really try to stay away from that. You can’t always help it, sometimes there’s that personal joke or maybe you want to make a jab at somebody just to tease ’em a little bit. Number one, I don’t use it very much. And number two, I try not to be cruel about it.”

As an example, Keen has a song called “I’m Comin’ Home” in which he sings about a character named Sleepy John, who in real life is Santa Cruz music promoter John Sandidge. “He loves being in that tune,” Keen says about Sandidge. “The greatest thing about that is Todd Snider’s ‘Beer Run’ song. The characters that Todd has in his song say that they’ve met this old hippie named Sleepy John that claimed to be the guy from the Robert Earl song.

“That’s like Steven Spielberg putting his own references to his own movies. I love that kind of inside humor. But then again, that particular description is a very nice description. There’s nothing but flattery there. Everybody’s happy with that.”

By contrast, Keen says his reference to his sister in “Merry Christmas from the Family” (which was covered by the Dixie Chicks) was possibly a step over the line. “She never said so, but I’m almost positive she was offended,” Keen admits. “And the fact was, it was actually another family member in another place, but it worked better for my sister to be there. She didn’t like the fact that it was implied that she was that character because that really wasn’t her. But it worked better for the song.

“Fiction is very forgiving,” he points out. “That’s the magic of it.”

Keen may have picked up this penchant for fiction from his college days, but none of his college professors explained the concept quite as clearly or eloquently as writer Charles Bukowski.

“There’s a great passage,” he says, “in the first couple of chapters in what I think is Charles Bukowski’s best book, Ham on Rye. It’s a great little story about when he was a child, the president was coming through town, and they were instructed as a class to go to the parade and then on Monday morning to write about it and turn it in for a grade. Of course, Bukowski, being who he is, didn’t go. He was drinking lemonade and wine probably. He was 10 or 11 years old.

“So he didn’t go to the parade, but he sat down and wrote this story about the parade and it was the best one, and they had him come to the front of the class and read the story. Everyone who listened believed that he had been there. And he says at the end of this particular chapter, ‘That’s when I found out all they want are beautiful lies.’

“That, I think, is really the goal: the beautiful lie. If you stick too closely to real characters, sometimes their flaws or lack of flaws will interrupt your momentum as far as your narrative and you’ll be a little guarded about what you say.”

Keen says he has one place in particular where he tends to find more inspiration than others, and it’s not where you might think. “I find a lot more topics at home [than on the road],” he says. “The road is very, very tunnel-like. It has very few new experiences waiting for you. You get in the bus or plane or train or whatever vehicle, and you go to the gig and you do the sound check and the sound checks are very similar and the rooms are very similar. The people and the attitudes are very similar.”

Though a regular on the tour circuit throughout the United States, Keen rarely goes on the lengthy megatours preferred by others.

“I have some rules about it,” he explains. “I don’t go out for more than three weeks. I always allow band members to take off for any kind of family obligation or crisis. I’m not a dictator. I’m a bandleader. I try to keep the band real happy. For the most part, we try to do it in moderation. I have overdone it in the past. It will affect you. You just get short-tempered and tired and your judgment goes out the window. All of a sudden you have a few bad experiences in a row, and it can come unglued. It’s a lot better to have some rules about it and stick to ’em. People are always trying to make you break ’em anyway.

“If you do your tours right and you’re working like we work, which is really trying to get out there and play to as many people as possible and get back home, you don’t leave much time for experimentation and just wandering around and learning about the town. I used to do a lot more hanging out. It was a lot more fun and you saw a lot more things, and you certainly got a lot more of the picture. This touring the way most people tour with bands is too tight.”

Now married with two girls waiting at home, it’s understandable that Keen may not revel in the luxuries of the road as he once did. As his most famous song says, “The road goes on forever”–but has the party actually ended?

“The party slows down sometimes,” the 45-year-old Keen says. “It never really ends, but it has fallen down on one knee and had to catch its breath.”

Robert Earl Keen plays at the Mystic on June 21 at 8pm. Rodney Hayden opens. Tickets are $20. Mystic Theatre, 21 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. 707.765.6665.

From the June 20-26, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Read All About It: The Librarians want you to dance.

Photograph by Bill Powell

Storming the Stacks

When was the last time you saw a Librarian shake his ass?

By Sara Bir

Sometimes it’s tough to tell if the Librarians are joking. When you see a man dressed all in black down to the leather gloves, flailing around the stage with a tambourine, belting out backing vocals while the guitarist is dressed in a bad suit and applying an exaggerated Elvis Costello tremolo to the lyric “Ce-ramic lawn orn-a-ments,” it takes just a wee bit of adjustment to figure out what’s going on–particularly if you’re acclimated to stoic bands that take themselves too seriously. This is, after all, only rock and roll, and that is exactly what the Librarians play.

The Librarians began inauspiciously enough with Damon Larson and Ryan Gan screwing around as a two-piece at parties and co-ops around Berkeley in 1999. By 2001 they were a full band, adding Lucas White on bass and Ben Adrian on drums, with Larson tackling guitar and lead vocal duties and Gan becoming part hype man, part “dancing monkey,” as Adrian puts it. Gan plays the solid gold Rock Star, strutting all over the stage striking Mick Jagger poses, rubbing his ass, and pointing at the audience provokingly with his tambo stick. “The tambo stick is my scepter of power, so to say. I point at people with it, I shake it, it’s really an extension of . . . yeah,” theorizes Ryan.

It is refreshing to see a band provoking the audience, especially because the Librarians’ approach is more tongue-in-cheek than, say, Madonna’s when she’s grabbing her boobies. They just want you to enjoy yourself, even if it means–God forbid–dancing! “You see these kids standing around, thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I should go ahead and move,'” Gan says of an audience’s typical initial reaction.

Not that they haven’t been doing well for themselves. The Librarians placed first in UC Berkeley’s 2001 Battle of the Bands and have since been winning themselves a growing following of fans by playing a blue streak of shows up and down the Bay Area, as well as getting radio play on Berkeley’s KALX and Live 105’s Local Lounge.

Recently they released their debut full-length CD, The Pathetic Aesthetic, on Petaluma-based Pandacide Records, which was recorded over the past year at Adrian’s own studio, Feedback Loop Industries. “Do we want to say we recorded it in your studio, or do we want to say we recorded it in your bedroom?” Larson asks Adrian. “Both of which are true.”

If that technicality qualifies the songs on The Pathetic Aesthetic as high-energy bedroom music, fine. Tracks like “Too Fat to Frug” and “Pissing on Your Party” are rife with a savvy teenage innocence that both mocks and celebrates sloppy parties where horny guys talk shit to pick up drunk art-school girls (and no, the Librarians are not teenagers). Last time I checked, that’s what rock and roll was all about–having fun, trying to getting laid, and not caring that you’re a dork.

In the meantime, North Bay crowds have been receptive, happy to have the chance to get in on a spirited show. “When we’ve played the Phoenix, kids know what to do,” Larson says.

“It’s become North Bay Dance Party,” says Adrian.

“There’s Nü Metal and hippy dance-jam crap, but kids just want to shake their ass,” adds White.

And where do ass-shaking power-pop bands fit in the scheme of things? “We’re very versatile. We’ve played raves–it’s funny to see a bunch of rave kids moshing in front. We’ve played with the emo kids, we’ve played with the Velvet Teen,” says Gan. “I like to call that the speedball show–we’re the cocaine, Velvet Teen’s like the heroin.” You can try a speedball yourself at the Librarian’s North Bay CD release on Saturday at the Phoenix, and you won’t even get arrested for it.

Friday, June 21, 7pm. The Ghost, the KGB, and the Exit open. The Velvet Teen headline with Sin in Space playing the lobby. The Phoenix Theatre, 201 Washington St., Petaluma. 707.762.3565.

From the June 20-26, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Moved By Mali: Markus James brings world blues to the fore on ‘Nightbird.’

Out of Africa

Two excellent–and opposite–examples of albums inspired by Mali

By Sara Bir

In the summer of 2000, two Western musicians traveled to Mali, bore the searing West African heat, submerged themselves in the country’s thriving music community, and left for home with a bundle of recordings in tow. One was Damon Albarn, Blur frontman and golden boy of Britpop, whose next musical undertaking would see him rendered as a blue-haired cartoon in the animated hip-hop creation Gorillaz; the other was lesser-known Northern Californian singer- songwriter Markus James, whose lifelong exploration of West African music led him to coproduce several installments of Public Radio International’s Afropop Worldwide.

Now, two years later, James and Albarn have both released albums documenting their Mali experiences, and while the results are very different, both stand as fine proof of what Western musicians are inspired to create when they displace themselves from their traditional settings.

Albarn’s week-long excursion to Mali was part of the international humanitarian group Oxfam’s On the Line project, which connects the lives of people living in countries on the Greenwich meridian line. With a DAT recorder and modest melodica in tow, Albarn recorded over 40 hours with countless Malian musicians. After returning to England, he recruited respected Malian singer Afel Bocoum to record additional vocals. Albarn then fed the bits and pieces he had floating about into his computer, mixed them up, inserted electronic bleeps here and there, and out came Mali Music (Honest Jon’s Records).

Blur have always been the most versatile of the Britpop bands, convincingly hopscotching between punk, shoegaze, and Tin Pan Alley sounds, so it can’t be too shocking to see Albarn adding Mali to his repertoire. Mali Music isn’t Mali’s Mali but Damon Albarn’s Mali. Luckily, it’s a fascinating place to be. The songs are, for the most part, a thick but slick groove-heavy mélange, with echoes of Gorillaz-style funky darkness and Albarn’s scattered vocals, which seem to climb out of some weird sunstroke-induced daze. Albarn’s simple melodica patterns cross all over Mali Music, producing a playful trance that blends with the West African instruments well.

Like a chef embracing fusion cuisine, Albarn wields exotic spices to flavor a predominantly Western main dish. It’s a vivid collage, a collection of glossy souvenir postcards that Albarn gathered and mounted for us. A few of the best tracks, like the appealingly honest and unassuming “Nabintou Diakite,” are straight-up live recordings, while the opener, “Spoons,” has a dusty, epic swell that shows how Mali Music houses both grand facades and humble, largely untouched audio snapshots.

For all of Mali Music‘s cinematic lavishness, North Bay blues musician Markus James’ Nightbird (Firenze Records) is equally effective in its sparseness. Unlike Albarn, James went to Mali to record an album, not just stuff, and the result is much more involved and unified. James eschews Albarn’s breezy day-tripping through the country’s musical culture and heritage; here, the Malian instruments are subtle, melding with James’ softly growling voice and no-frills instrumentation.

On Nightbird, James delivers what he calls “world blues,” and his mournful vocals, bare-bones guitar, and straightforward, unaffected lyrical narrative do evoke the otherworldly spookiness of Delta Blues. The “world” part of the equation comes into play with James’ gang of Malian performers (including Mamadou Sidibe, whom James was recently touring with), who add an even deeper level. The Malian element here is not just interesting surface decoration but integral and vital. Elegant and raw all at once, Nightbird is amazingly evocative, as sweltering and haunting as an expanse of sand dunes baking under the desert sun. (This is James’ second album recorded in Mali, and not his last; he returned there in 2001 and has another album due out next year).

Either of these albums will expose listeners to Mali’s rich musical world, which is a great thing. But Albarn’s whirlwind musical tour and James’ slow, lyrical creep are each strong enough albums to stand on their own merits. Call Mali Music digitized afropop, call Nightbird world blues, call them whatever. I’ll call them good and well worth a listen for those who are happy to strike out into territory that strays from the path.

From the June 13-19, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photograph by Michael Amsler

Success Story: Tom Gaffey, manager of the Phoenix, has successfully run an all-ages club–but not without problems. An earthquake retrofit is his next challenge.

Rock Unsteady

North Bay bands–and music fans–find themselves all dressed up with nowhere to go

By Sara Bir

On a recent Saturday at the Phoenix Theatre in Petaluma, a larger crowd than usual is gathered outside. The gothic-punk band AFI is playing, and the kids have come out in their full glory: eyeliner, greasy, dyed black hair, and torn fishnet stockings are in abundance. AFI recently signed with the major record label DreamWorks, and this two-night gig at the Phoenix is a wonderfully circular event: the band, who are originally from Ukiah, basically cut their musical teeth playing this place nearly 10 years ago. They even wrote a song about it, “The Days of the Phoenix.”

So, in an overly dramatic sense, it could be said that without the Phoenix, DreamWorks would not have a hot, new band on their hands, MTV2 would be missing a video, and–most important–the kids waiting to hear AFI play would be stuck with no big reason to get excited tonight. When you are 16 and music matters more than almost anything in the world, there’s no better place to be than with your friends watching a band play their hearts out for you.

The Phoenix fought long and hard to stay open. Four telecom engineers acted the angel two years ago, swooping in and saving the venerable all-ages venue from a certain demise. Others have not had such divine intervention. Fallen Sonoma County venues line the past five years like a row of headstones in a cemetery: Santa Rosa lost the Moonlight, Rumors, and Mudds. Last year it was the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati. The latest casualty is Jessie Jean’s Coffee Beans, an all-ages live music emporium and coffee shop in Santa Rosa. They have announced that they will be closing their doors at the end of the month.

Anyone would expect a large city like San Francisco, Seattle, or Chicago to have an active music community, but when presented with evidence of thriving scenes in places like Lawrence, Kan. or Omaha, Neb., people are often surprised. Sonoma County, with half a million residents, many of them forward-thinking and creative, sort of falls between the two extremes.

Jon Fee, who plays bass in the Rum Diary out of Cotati and runs Don Lee records (which has put out two compilations featuring Bay Area indie bands, translation: music and translation: music 2) says, “Sonoma County measures up pretty well with similar areas across America. It has most of the key elements to produce a thriving music scene: it’s of a good size, it’s close to a cosmopolitan city, it’s affordable, there are good record stores, great music equipment shops, and a couple of colleges. What we are lacking is an established venue.” True, with Sonoma State University and Santa Rosa Junior College, there’s certainly potential for an audience to support a more stable roster of venues, especially ones geared toward a younger demographic.

“There’s definitely a huge void to be filled here, considering the amount of homegrown talent and the obvious demand for it,” says 23-year-old Dylan Abbott, who lives in Petaluma and plays in the indie-rock band Superficial Hero. “There are hundreds of musicians playing original music locally, and with only a handful of venues available to the younger audience that is the most passionate about that music, 90 percent of those bands are doomed to either go unheard or forced to play away from home.”

Perhaps that’s why we need a larger spectrum of all-ages venues–because it’s almost as if the Sonoma County music scene, which has so much talent and diversity and potential, is all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Between Rock and a Hard Place

Keith Givens is in a tight spot, the one club owners are all too often squeezed into: he’s not making enough money running his coffee shop, Jessie Jean’s Coffee Beans in Santa Rosa on Mendocino Avenue, right across the street from the Junior College and Santa Rosa High School, to keep it open. “The music’s been the only thing keeping the money coming in,” he says. “The coffee and all that’s died off, and schools are out.”

Givens opened Jessie Jean’s in October 2000. Prior to that, he had an espresso cart in front of G&G Market in Santa Rosa. From the get-go, Jessie Jean’s was intended as a live music venue. “I started out with blues and jazz, folk dancing and square dancing,” he says. “Now we have every show imaginable . . . all the punk shows, metal shows. It’s about 130 bands a month.”

Jessie Jean’s stepped up when Sonoma County lost its primary midsize all-ages venue last year, the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati. “When the Inn closed down, we lost a great venue that was able to bring in smaller, independent touring bands and was willing to give young local musicians a stage to play on for all-ages crowds,” says Abbott. “Jessie Jean’s had sort of filled that void, catering to a similar audience with an equally diverse range of styles.”

And it did not go unnoticed. “We get calls from everywhere in the United States to play shows here,” Givens says. “Someone called from Pennsylvania yesterday . . . Arizona, South Carolina, Kansas.”

What Jessie Jean’s doesn’t have are hip-hop and techno shows, mostly because of a small handful of incidents involving fighting and underage drinking–all happening outside the club. “The kids don’t know how to behave themselves–there’s 100 that do, and 20 that don’t,” says Givens, who does not believe that the police zero in on rock venues specifically. “They don’t target anything unless you draw their attention to it. The police department’s been pretty cool. They want you to do exactly what you’re asked of, and that’s to have ample security to make sure the kids are safe. If you do all that, they leave you alone.”

In some cases, just keeping on top of what’s going on inside and outside has been enough to curb trouble. “We opened this place, there was graffiti for four months,” recalls Givens. “We busted some guy doing it, the cops busted two other people doing it. We painted the walls, and the kids started showing up–the ones that have been here doing the shows–and there hasn’t been any graffiti on our building since . . . actually, on this whole block.

“I get parents, every week they come by and give us their telephone number if their kid’s gonna be here past 11. And if you’ve got 150 kids running around here and you got 10 of them outside and you need to call, then that’s what we do. It’s about keeping the kids safe, and they know it’s like a big babysitter.”

The kids look out for Jessie Jean’s, too. “They come up to me and say, ‘Keith, that guy’s out there starting shit again who got kicked out of here two months ago.’ Or ‘Keith, someone’s drinking out there in front of the shop.”

“The kids in the evening are beautiful,” says Penny Caswell, who also runs Jessie Jean’s and is Givens’ fiancée. “They’re all here to have fun and try to keep the place open. Those kids put 210 percent into their music.”

“I enjoy all of them. We aren’t just here for the bands; we’re here for the kids. Everything we’ve done with the shows and the kids . . . there isn’t anywhere else for them to go. There really isn’t–unless there’s alcohol there,” Givens says.

Possibly Jessie Jean’s didn’t make it because it’s a more teen-oriented venue. “Say you have 200 people in here, [only] 25 people will buy stuff,” Givens explains. “A dollar soda or a dollar water–which is $30 on our $200 show, and you’re paying the bands half. . . . This place needed $460 a day all the way through, and when the schools are out, it drops to $120 a day, and we’re here for 18 hours. It’s hard to keep a venue like that open.”

Jessie Jean’s had been putting on benefit shows for six months to keep the place open. “All the money goes towards us, $500 or $700,” Givens says. “Some kids went out and made their own flyers, went out and collected money to try to keep the place open. But there’s not much you can do when you have three days to pay or get served and move out. If someone walks through here with $4,700, we’d still be open.”

Even if the end is looming, Givens and Caswell would like to continue doing events as long as possible–“to the end of June, we hope,” Givens says. “I definitely want to thank all of the kids for supporting us.”

End of the Beginning

“God, I loved the Inn,” sighs Michael Houghton, editor of the bimonthly music magazine Section M, which was initially devoted to North Bay underground music but has since moved on to focus on the entire Bay Area. Section M has been coproducing shows in venues such as the Phoenix, Jessie Jean’s, and the Old Vic for nearly three years but mainly used the Inn of the Beginning as its base for shows.

“It had become such a home as far as putting on shows and going just to feel that community,” Houghton says. “It was pretty much the perfect combination of factors: geographically in the middle of Sonoma County so everyone could go, and it was all-ages as well as serving beer for the older folk, and with a great sound guy and system. It’s just so much harder to get people to come out to shows without the Inn. It was a pretty big blow to the scene at the time.”

So if the Inn of the Beginning had so much going for it, why did it close? First off, the Inn took a severe financial hit when Sparks, the fine-dining vegan restaurant that opened in the space to supplement the club, didn’t work out in that location. Sparks later moved to Guerneville. But another reason was perhaps longer in the making, a slow burn that built up with a series of kids getting busted for drugs and drinking in the parking lot outside of the club.

“The amount of pressure that the police put on that club was just totally unreasonable,” Houghton says. “Instead of trying to help with whatever problems they perceived, especially underage drinking, they just went out of their way to make the club suffer however they could.” That included fines and periods of suspending the Inn’s liquor license.

Abbott agrees. “The Inn and Jessie Jean’s are two prime examples of high-profile, all-ages venues that faced a large amount of resistance and outright hostility from local law enforcement and government. I understand the need to go after things like underage drinking and drug use, but it seems like these two clubs faced a disproportionate amount of scrutiny and regulation based on a handful of isolated incidents.”

“Clubs give kids music, community, and creativity as something they should aspire to,” Houghton points out. “You shut that down and you shut down dreams, and you leave them with the choice between boredom and self-medicated boredom. I just don’t understand the twisted politics of situations like that,” says Houghton.

But isn’t it the same story in any town that has young adults heading out to shows? “The man is always going to crack down,” says Fee. “That is what he’s there for. The man is like a big grizzly bear. No grizzly is just going to sit back and let you pull on his tail or leave beer bottles and cans in his cave.”

“I’d like to see more support from the city councils and police for something that is helping the kids and should be making their job easier,” Houghton says. “They ought to be working with the promoters to help provide a safe place for kids, instead of against them. These kids are good kids.”

There’s a There There

Is there even a scene here to begin with? It depends on which people you talk to, how old they are, and what kind of music they like. The past five years have proved that the musical soil in Sonoma County is pretty damn fertile: new bands spring up all the time, and a lot of them–such as punkers Tsunami Bomb, indie-rockers Benton Falls, and local faves the Velvet Teen–tour regularly.

“I think a lot of kids from Sonoma County go to shows up here and end up getting tuned in to what’s happening in the Bay Area as sort of an outgrowth of that. It’s rare that I go to a show in San Francisco or Berkeley and don’t see anyone who I recognize from shows around here,” Abbott says. “On the flip side of that, it’s been rare for me to meet people from out of town at local shows, unless there’s a touring band with a larger draw playing locally. So it seems like kids around here are tuned in to things enough that they’ll go to shows locally and in the rest of the area, but there’s not really any people making Sonoma County a destination for underground music.”

Which, to a point, it could be–at least for lesser-known touring bands, who often look to play in satellite locations close to larger cities so they can book as many dates as possible when in one region. If a band plays a town and picks up that the audience is into the music and having a good time, they’ll remember that club and want to go back there.

“When smaller touring bands or bands from San Francisco come to play shows in Sonoma County, they generally think it’s going to be awesome because they’ve read a copy of Section M and they think we have a really devoted music scene,” says Fee. “What we have is a solid amount of support for local bands but not so much for smaller touring bands.”

What about Marin County? Plenty of clubs are going strong there–Sweetwater in Mill Valley, 19 Broadway in Fairfax, and New George’s in San Rafael. But even though the space for live music exists, the focus is mostly on retro and folk acts, which aren’t big with all-ages crowds. As Abbott says, “I don’t know . . . I’ve never been to a show in Marin. That would just be . . . wrong.”

“If you live in Marin, you are close enough to go to shows in San Francisco,” says Fee. “It’s only 20 minutes away, and it’s well worth the drive.”

The aptly named Phoenix, though risen, still faces adversity. The building is in need of an earthquake retrofit, which was slated for this summer, an eventuality that would have put a kink in more than a few music fans’ summers. But if you’ve heard a collective sigh of relief, that’s because the retrofit has been postponed yet again. “We’re still here,” says Tom Gaffey, manager of the Phoenix since 1983 and a familiar face to many. “We’ll have to eventually get it done, but we’ll still be around for a little while. They’re looking to start their construction project maybe the beginning of next year. We’re booked through the summer.”

In the meantime, the Phoenix–and Gaffey–will continue marching on. He certainly seems to be enthusiastic. “I finally got my prescription for Prilosec [heartburn medicine], so it’s going to be a great summer!” he chimes. “And you can quote me on that.”

“Things are slowly growing back,” says Houghton. “We have a lot of amazing new bands coming up in the scene, and the shows just keep getting bigger. So something is going right.”

It’s up to us to keep it that way.

From the June 13-19, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.