It’s 2am and this is what I’m feeling after getting home from Bottlerock’s biggest and best day: tired, deaf, a little hungry, tired, thirsty as hell, musically fulfilled, nostalgic, sore, tired, and, most of all, happy.
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Live Review: Bottlerock Day 2 with Outkast, Weezer & Smash Mouth
Local Bands Play Big Part of Bottlerock Lineup
The three-day extravaganza known as Bottlerock began today in Napa, the city known more for restaurants and winetasting than music. To wit, the festival, now in its second year and under new ownership, has focused more on music this year—in addition to bringing internationally famous acts like the Cure and Outkast to Napa, there will also be over two dozen local bands playing at the festival, meaning that over one-third of the bands playing will be from the Bay Area.
This isn’t a new idea—local acts were featured at last year’s festival—but there are more of them this year, and it’s more than just an afterthought. Latitude 38, the company behind this year’s Bottlerock festival, says including local bands was the plan from the start.
“A lot of people didn’t know there were a lot of bands in Napa,” says Latitude 38 CEO Dave Graham. He says they’ve made a new tradition of kicking off the festival with a local band on the main stage. This year, it’s the Napa–based group Grass Child.
On Saturday, the first band to strum a chord, pluck a note, or bang a drum will be local favorites Trebuchet, the indie-folk quartet known for its original songs with glorious harmonies and wide-ranging instrumentation. They’ll be playing on the City Winery Lounge stage at Noon, greeting attendees just inside the main entrance with their explosive tunes and catchy melodies.
The opening slot at a festival is a blessing and a curse. “We don’t have any headliners to contend with,” says Eliott Whitehurst, the band’s mandolinist, guitarist and lyricist. “But at the same time, it’ll be a challenge because we’ve never been in that situation where it’s like, ‘Oh, look there’s all these people,’ and they continue to walk by.”
Whitehurst, who lives in Napa, says he is excited for this year’s festival—not in the least because he’ll be playing in it, but also because the concerns of last year are being mitigated. “Last year, we actually got out of town,” he says. “People in Napa were of one of two minds: either this is going to be awesome… or oh my god, we do not have the infrastructure to handle what is going to be thrown at this city.” With a festival expecting 30,000 people per day for an entire weekend, in a city of 78,340, that’s to be expected. Though he’s sure there will still be challenges, Whitehurst says, “I’m not as afraid of it this year as I was last year.”
Local acts playing in the festival come from as far away as San Francisco, and Whitehurst says about 150 bands sent entries to Thea Whitsil, who also organizes the annual Napa Porchfest, to fill 32 spots. Instead of having an “in” or being owed a favor, as is the case when so many bands are booked for a festival like this, Trebuchet and the other local acts were picked on merit. “That’s why we’re so stoked on it,” says Whitehurst, who knows the industry well, coming from a musical family.
The group made a one-shot montage video as an homage to the big names at Bottlerock, rearranging pieces of about a dozen songs into their own style. It was a hit—garnering over 1,200 Youtube views in just over two weeks. “It didn’t take us too long,” says Whitehurst. “We practiced for a day and maybe did 10 shots of us doing it live.” The festival is filled with nostalgia for those who grew up with the soundtrack of the ‘90s. Whitehurst is no exception. “I can’t deny how fun it will be,” he says. Outkast and Weezer will be great, and, because they’re a sure-fire way to heat things up, he’s also stoked to see Blues Traveler.
Throwback Thursday: Satchel Paige and San Rafael’s Albert Park
In 1948, Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige was the oldest rookie to play in Major League baseball when he signed with the Cleveland Indians at 42, one year after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier to become the league’s first black player. Paige had been a wildly successful pitcher in the Negro Leagues before that, and went 6-1 in his rookie year as a starter and reliever. When the Indians’ owner sold the team in 1949, Paige lost his roster spot despite posting a 3.04 ERA that season. He returned to “barnstorming,” playing on independent league teams traveling by bus to small towns before returning to Major League Baseball in 1951. In that brief time, he may have played at San Rafael’s Albert Park.
“At Albert Park, they would bring in All-Star teams from the major leagues,” says Mike Shapiro, co-owner and general manager of the San Rafael Pacifics independent baseball team. “We found an old program… for the Indianapolis Clowns, featuring their pitcher Satchel Paige.”
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The Clowns featured other stars, like Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, All-Star relief pitcher John Wyatt and All-Star catcher Paul Casanova. The games were a combination of skill and laughs, similar to the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, priding itself on the fan experience. The Clowns and other teams were typical of barnstorming teams taking the field on weekends at Albert Park, which was built in 1950, and other Bay Area fields.
Paige was named to the MLB All-Star Team in 1952 before returning to barnstorming two years later. He continued to pitch into his 60s, including pitching three shutout innings in a game against the Boston Red Sox at age 59 for the Kansas City Athletics in 1965. Paige continued playing until 1967, ending his career with the Clowns, baseball’s last black team. In Paige’s own estimation, he pitched 55 no-hitters and won over 2,000 of the 2,500 games in his semi-pro baseball career. His major league career numbers, which included a significantly smaller sample size, are also impressive: a record of 28-31 with a 3.29 ERA in 476 innings pitched.
While it can’t be said for certain if Paige played at Albert Park, even if he did while playing with the Clowns at age 61, he wouldn’t be the oldest player to take the field in a professional game. Major league pitcher Bill Lee, who played in the 1973 All-Star game as a member of the Boston Red Sox, has a one-up on Paige—sort of. The Bay Area native pitched a complete game win for the Pacifics as a 65-year-old on a one-day contract two years ago, becoming the oldest player in professional baseball to do so. His hat and the game’s lineup card were sent to the Hall of Fame.
Lee will play in one more game for the Pacifics this year, batting in the DH spot on the night his No. 31 jersey is retired by the team, Friday, Aug. 22.
May 29: MoeTar at the Fenix
Oakland alternative rock group MoeTar thrives on contradiction. Vocalist Moorea Dickason and songwriter Tarik Ragab founded the group in 2008 intent on mashing up paradoxical elements with experimental flair. Their debut album, From These Small Seeds, proved that disparate sounding music could also be cohesive, even catchy. MoeTar’s eclectic sound, which mixes progressive rock with electronica and pop, is at once complex and subtle, a unique combination in a world of easily-classifiable sound. MoeTar plays Thursday, May 29, at Fenix, 919 Fourth St, San Rafael. 8pm. $10. 415.813.5600.
May 30: Reverend Horton Heat at Mystic Theatre
In the country-fed world of rockabilly, there’s no one more enduring than Reverend Horton Heat. Hailing from Dallas, Texas, the Reverend, aka singer and guitarist Jim Heath, is known as the godfather of psychobilly, a genre that’s as loud as it is energetic. Since the mid-eighties, Revered Horton Heat, the man and the trio, have found wide spanning success with their mixture of country, surf, punk and rock and roll. This week, the Rev appears again in the North Bay when they roll in on Friday, May 30, at Mystic Theatre, 23 Petaluma Blvd N, Petaluma. 8pm. $26-$29. 707.765.2121.
May 31: Events Beyond Bottlerock
All of Napa is getting into the swing of the area’s biggest music festival of the year. Bottlerock is going to dominate the Napa Valley for the weekend, and local venues and restaurants know that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Oxbow Public Market (610 First St) offers Bottlerock breakfast specials all three days with live music from festival acts. After-parties can be found all over town, with music and food trucks at City Winery (1030 Main St), local bands live at Silo’s (530 Main St), and late night lounge fun at Uva Trattoria (1040 Clinton St). If you’ve had all the music you can handle, there’s always Giggle Rock, a standup show with local stand-out comedians on Saturday, May 31 at Slack Collective Studios and Gallery, 964 Pearl St, Napa. 10pm. $5.
June 1: Sonoma County Pride Parade
Sonoma County Pride returns to the Russian River this year for a weekend-long celebration of the LGBTIQ community, friends and families (“IQ” stand for intersexed, questioning). The event boasts dozens of local merchants and businesses offering special events and extended hours for the “Free to Be” themed festival. Highlights include dance parties and appearances by Pandora Boxx of “Ru Paul’s Drag Race.” Family activities abound, and Sunday offers the ultimate Pride Parade down Main St. Sonoma Pride takes place from Friday, May 30th to Sunday, June 1st, around downtown, with a parade on June 1st, Main St, Guerneville. 11am. Free. 415.218.9835.
Bottlerock Preview: Camper Van Beethoven
Could there be a better act to play the uniquely Northern California festival BottleRock than Santa Cruz’s own Camper Van Beethoven, with their conjoined twin band Cracker in tow?
After all, Camper is the group that on their 2013 album La Costa Perdida delivered “Northern California Girls,” perhaps the ultimate NorCal anthem—meaning an anthem that’s way too laid back to actually be an anthem.
“Right, it takes seven minutes to get where it’s going,” admits David Lowery, the frontman for both Camper and Cracker. “The drums come in a little bit like three times before they finally kick in about three-and-a-half minutes into the song.”
Lowery had already written his share of great California songs for both Camper and Cracker over the years—most recently, “Where Have Those Days Gone”—in which he mistakes Good Times’ astrologer Rob Brezsny for Thomas Pynchon in a bar in Mendocino County—but also “Big Dipper,” “Miss Santa Cruz County,” “Come On Darkness” and more.
But with his latest cycle, he’s outdone himself. While La Costa Perdida was a NorCal-influenced album, the songs on Camper’s latest, El Camino Real (which comes out June 3), are all set in, or otherwise related to, SoCal.
“We wrote these songs at the same time, then thematically we broke off most of the Northern California ones for the last album, and then kind of took these songs that were Southern California, and built another album around them, by adding another five songs or something like that,” says Lowery. “There’s kind of this opus going now, this theme going. There’s also a Cracker album, which comes out next year. It’s a double disc—one is Berkeley, one is Bakersfield. One is the punk side of the band, one is the country side.”
So, basically, four albums worth of California songs. And it all started because of…Joan Didion?
“I think it started with me and Victor [Krummenacher] and Jonathan [Segel] reading a bunch of Joan Didion,” confirms Lowery. He can’t remember which collection of essays specifically sparked it, but it would almost have to be the first section of Slouching Toward Bethlehem, in which Didion rips to shreds the “golden dream” of the Inland Empire—where Lowery, his Camper bandmates Krummenacher and Segel, and Cracker co-founder Johnny Hickman all grew up.
“Those essays really captured the feel of it. It’s not really that flattering about the area, but that’s sort of what people from the Inland Empire are proud of,” says Lowery. “There was actually some sort of referendum on a theme for the Inland Empire, like ‘Virginia is for Lovers’ or how California is the Golden State. And we all wrote in: ‘We will kick your ass.’”
The most noticeable difference between the two Camper albums is the overall feel—La Costa Perdida is more easygoing and gentle, while El Camino Real is darker and more intense, with a deep streak of paranoia that runs through songs like “The Ultimate Solution,” “It Was Like That When We Got Here” and “I Live In L.A.” Clearly, Lowery has very different views on the two halves of the state.
“Yeah, but I like ’em both,” says Lowey.
At the BottleRock festival in Napa May 30-June 1, Lowery’s bands will join an eclectic mix of five dozen other acts across four stages, including the Cure, OutKast, Weezer, LL Cool J, Robert Earl Keen, TV on the Radio and Smash Mouth. Some of those musicians have been around longer than Camper, while others benefited from the college-radio-to-gold-records trail that CVB and Cracker blazed in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s very likely, however, that Camper is the only band on the schedule that has been reunited longer than they were originally together. After recording their first album in Santa Cruz in 1985, the band imploded on a European tour in 1990. But after reforming in the early 2000s, they’ve been back together now for over a decade. Part of the reason, Lowery says, is that they all agreed to do the band on a more part-time basis, or at least do fewer tours, which puts less pressure on them as a group. But maybe it’s even simpler than that.
“Jonathan says it’s just because we’re not in our twenties,” says Lowery. “And it’s kind of true.”
Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker play BottleRock Napa, which runs May 30-June 1 at the Napa Calley Expo, 575 Third St., Napa. Tickets are $149 for single-day passes, $279 for a three-day pass, at bottlerocknapavalley.com. 877-435-9849.
—Steve Palopoli
Pleasures of the Flesh
I was going to start this by saying you should visit Petaluma’s Thistle Meats because the three-month-old butcher shop serves a lineup of beef, pork, goat, rabbit, and lamb sourced from a who’s-who of local, sustainable, and humanely minded producers and that the shop makes the most of that meat with nose-to-tail, use-every-part-of-the-animal butchery right down to freshly made stock from leftover bones.
And I was going to say that the meat cost more, yes, but compared to what—factory-farmed, antibiotic-jabbed industrial meat wrapped in cellophane on a Styrofoam tray?
I was going to say all that because those things are true, and important. Even in a slow-food wonderland like the North Bay, Thistle is a rarity. But that all sounds too prescriptive, like you should recycle and call your mother more often.
Instead, I think Thistle Meats is worth your time and money because it’s such a pleasurable experience. And pleasure is a great motivator.
Thistle Meats takes the old school ideal of the butcher shop— wisecracking men in white aprons cutting meat to order—and does it one better. Actually, two better. There are three talented male butchers on hand who each has his specialty (sausage, butchery, charcuterie), but the store is owned and operated by two smiling, exuberant women, friends-turned-business partners, Lisa Modica and Molly Best. The shop is their vision come to life.
Best grew up in Petaluma and realized one day that her ag-friendly town was missing something.
“It’s Petaluma,” she says. “Why isn’t there a butcher shop?”
Modica came from Colorado to help her friend remedy that situation. Backed by a team of architects and builders, they gutted a North Petaluma Ave. storefront and turned it into a place of beauty. Exposed-brick walls, white subway tiles and a big butcher table give the light-filled shop a classic feel. The gleaming meat display showcases various cuts in an artful tableau that could serve as a subject for a latter-day Norman Rockwell. Bouquets of fresh flowers hang next to house-made sausages and local cheeses.
But this is a butcher shop, not a precious art gallery. The store breaks down whole animals from local producers like Stemple Creek Ranch, Green Star Farms and Monkey Ranch. The beef is dry-aged in-house. They make a variety of sausages. Salumi is coming. Look for the patties of harrisa-spiked goat sliders.
“That is the gateway to goat,” Best confides.
The small kitchen in back also turns out a head cheese to make you forget that speckled meat jelly from the supermarket. There’s a “sandwich of the day” served on a crusty ciabatta from nearby Della Fattoria bakery. In short, the shop is loaded with good food that checks just about every box: sustainable, local, humane. But what makes the place such a winner is that it is a work of passion and a celebration of the pleasures of good food.
It’s a delicious truth that the most hedonistic pleasures, like a sun-warmed tomato plucked from your backyard garden or a grass-fed ribeye raised by a conscientious local rancher, tend to be the best thing for the planet. We eat them not because we should—but because they taste so good.
Now go call your mother.
Live Review: Bottlerock Day 2 with Outkast, Weezer & Smash Mouth
It’s 2am and this is what I’m feeling after getting home from Bottlerock’s biggest and best day: tired, deaf, a little hungry, tired, thirsty as hell, musically fulfilled, nostalgic, sore, tired, and, most of all, happy.
We arrived just in time to see Trebuchet kick off the day on the local stage, representing well with power-packed singalongs and sky-blue, skin-tight...
Local Bands Play Big Part of Bottlerock Lineup
The three-day extravaganza known as Bottlerock began today in Napa, the city known more for restaurants and winetasting than music. To wit, the festival, now in its second year and under new ownership, has focused more on music this year—in addition to bringing internationally famous acts like the Cure and Outkast to Napa, there will also be over two...
Throwback Thursday: Satchel Paige and San Rafael’s Albert Park
Hall of Famer still played, between MLB teams, because he was just too good not to
May 29: MoeTar at the Fenix
Oakland alternative rock group MoeTar thrives on contradiction. Vocalist Moorea Dickason and songwriter Tarik Ragab founded the group in 2008 intent on mashing up paradoxical elements with experimental flair. Their debut album, From These Small Seeds, proved that disparate sounding music could also be cohesive, even catchy. MoeTar’s eclectic sound, which mixes progressive rock with electronica and pop, is...
May 30: Reverend Horton Heat at Mystic Theatre
In the country-fed world of rockabilly, there’s no one more enduring than Reverend Horton Heat. Hailing from Dallas, Texas, the Reverend, aka singer and guitarist Jim Heath, is known as the godfather of psychobilly, a genre that’s as loud as it is energetic. Since the mid-eighties, Revered Horton Heat, the man and the trio, have found wide spanning success...
May 31: Events Beyond Bottlerock
All of Napa is getting into the swing of the area’s biggest music festival of the year. Bottlerock is going to dominate the Napa Valley for the weekend, and local venues and restaurants know that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Oxbow Public Market (610 First St) offers Bottlerock breakfast specials all three days with live music from...
June 1: Sonoma County Pride Parade
Sonoma County Pride returns to the Russian River this year for a weekend-long celebration of the LGBTIQ community, friends and families (“IQ” stand for intersexed, questioning). The event boasts dozens of local merchants and businesses offering special events and extended hours for the “Free to Be” themed festival. Highlights include dance parties and appearances by Pandora Boxx of “Ru...
Bottlerock Preview: Camper Van Beethoven
Could there be a better act to play the uniquely Northern California festival BottleRock than Santa Cruz’s own Camper Van Beethoven, with their conjoined twin band Cracker in tow?
After all, Camper is the group that on their 2013 album La Costa Perdida delivered “Northern California Girls,” perhaps the ultimate NorCal anthem—meaning an anthem that’s way too laid back to...
Pleasures of the Flesh
I was going to start this by saying you should visit Petaluma's Thistle Meats because the three-month-old butcher shop serves a lineup of beef, pork, goat, rabbit, and lamb sourced from a who's-who of local, sustainable, and humanely minded producers and that the shop makes the most of that meat with nose-to-tail, use-every-part-of-the-animal butchery right down to freshly made...
