CHEEEK-OOO – How I Came To Be Aware of the Greatest Rock and Roll Band Never Known

Magic Johnson has AIDS and I am on several hits of high powered blotter acid.

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Closing the Distance: Travel By Sea’s Unflinching New Record, Two States and the Blindness That Follows

Travel By Sea is a long distance band. Circumstantially split into two states, and divided by a thousand miles of desolation, singer-songwriter Kyle Kersten and his musical cohort, producer and multi-instrumentalist Brian Kraft bridge the gap over the high wires, using the internet to convene and collaborate on their shared artistic oeuvre – a sparse, detached form of country that wallows in the Western themes of vast, empty nature, distant dreams, and the loneliness that haunts the forsaken.

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Relish; The Moment (In The Hipnic of Time)

I caught up to Zach on the far side of a bend in the trail. He was stooped down, tracking something that was slithering on the ground. “SNAKE!” I yelled, skidding on the heels of my well-worn flip-flops. “Good lord, get away! They’ve got rabies, and fangs!” I yelled, backing away. I hate snakes. Especially little ones. They say those are the ones that will kill you the deadest. Their venom is super concentrated, like powdered Gatorade. When a pasty American hiker calf is in their sights, their jaws unhinge grotesquely, and then lock down on the nearest flesh meat like those of an iron-deficient pit bull. Once a young snake has its hooks into you, you might as well limp off and jump headlong from the nearest cliff, otherwise the end will come much more slowly and brutally, but just as surely.

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Reasonably Deranged: Grundish and Askew, by Lance Carbuncle, reviewed by Corby Anderson

It is bloody obvious that Carbuncle takes great joy in the writing process. His prose is wild, effective, and refreshing to read. When Carbuncle needs a word that the limitations of the Oxford Dictionary does not provide for, he makes it up, footnoting his rationale. The pages turn themselves. As revolting as his characters are, they are endearingly interesting. As with his brilliant first novel, the settings of Grundish and Askew are so well conceived and detailed that one feels as though they are there with the characters, sitting ringside, drinking piss-warm Hamm’s in a threadbare lawn chair as Grundish circles the trailer park, berzerkingly attacking his perverted neighbors with frozen hotdogs.

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A Legacy of Sunshine: The Mother Hips release their seventh record, Pacific Dust

The chorus of Pacific Dust comes on like a sudden, swinging, sliding, shirt-tearing, nose smashing street fight. At this point I begin to dance and yell into the otherwise quiet house here on a gloomy day in Monterey. I yell so loud that my old dog, Bear, who is about 95% deaf, bolts up from his rainy day bed and starts howling out of blind allegiance. The cat flies off the bookshelf and takes off in a desperate run for the bed, where he hides underneath, red eyed and worried. Meanwhile my wife comes running with a piping hot tuna casserole in her mitted hands, looking concerned upon entry into my cluttered office, but within seconds of her entry I’ve got her hopping around rocking out in her apron and pigtails like some Polish hippy chef with a penchant for dancing with her pile of hot fish meat in hand.

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Hipnic at The Miller: It Was the Event of the Season

He sliced the lemon in big cavemanesque curls of the blade, and when he had filleted a slice, he danced his eyebrows a few times, which I took for the universal motion meaning, “Want some?” I declined, seeing as I had no use for a lemon wedge that I could think of, and instead watched him gum the lemon slices while he told neighbor Spencer and I a tale which seemed so implausible that it nearly shocked me sober – no easy task after a sunny summer afternoon of beer and tunes.

Bedraggled and freely defiant of social stigmas such as personal reek and close-talkativeness as he was, our acidic new friend spoke low and seriously about an incident which had happened in the very spot where the bouncing van was parked just the night before.

There, he said, a man had stopped his car to talk, but instead of asking for directions, or offering a ride, the guy in the car offered the lemon man a drastically brutal choice: Jump off the cliff, or be shot in the forehead. As he told it, the man was dead serious, and held a pistol by his side. So he jumped, and somehow survived the hundred or so foot drop by clinging to ice plant vines just over the ledge, until the coast was clear. That is where he found the lemon, it seems. Out there on the cliff someone had ditched a bag of the things for no apparent reason, he said punctuating the conclusion of his story with a creepy lemon peel smile.

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A Pleasant Erosion: Lazed and Deluged at the 2009 Desert Rocks Festival

A massive spring storm bore down directly on top of the Desert Rocks Festival outside of Moab, Utah for most of two days. Yet neither rampant lightning nor a biblical flood could dampen the spirits of the hearty campers and musicians who all left the onslaught resurrected as a tight knit community which had collectively overcome the dizzying array of elemental forces to thoroughly Rock the Desert.

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Play Your Hunches – Neil Young at the Wells Fargo Clamshell

The Wells Fargo Theater is a low slung, half-clam shell venue inside the brightly lit white walls and glass of the Colorado Convention Center. Most nights the theater is filled with corporate hucksters and their magician lackeys. We walked into the reception area to find a large crowd milling about, queuing up for beer and wine. Thirsty from the long drive and parched from overcaffinatation, I found myself drawn to the beer line. The man in front of me told us that we had missed Peggy Young, the openers, set. Not to worry though, he smiled, you didn’t miss anything, he added. His pal, a bearded man in glasses and tie dye shirt nodded enthusiastically, and I sipped my beer – calming the anxiety gathered inside myself, the inevitable lovechild of traveling light and late and fast and on a line with very little information or plan to fall back upon. I bought a couple t-shirts – because you just never know.

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The Cake Eaters

In this place there exists an automotive phenomenon called the Valley Car. A valley car is defined as a once road trip worthy vehicle that is now trapped in our 40-mile valley due to the laws of diminishing returns, gravity and certain legal restraints. Any attempt to relocate a Valley Car to any other valley is usually met with a swift, fatal loss or compression and/or a good drive train nuking. I once tried to trade my Toyota Tercel valley car for a Subaru that was reputed to have the guts (and equally important to me at the time, the working door locks) to make it to Los Angeles, where I was attempting to move. I got about a half hour out of the Roaring Fork Valley on a beautiful weekday, nothing but open road, adventure and love on my mind. I soon ended up in the back of a cop car in the inbred colony of Debeque, staring at my fried engine.

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Gramble on Big Sur -Skinny Singers, Nikki Bluhm and the Gramblers, and Big Light take over the venerable Fernwood (Jambase.com)

The Fernwood is not like any “resort” that you have ever been to. It is a completely original, sweetly jagged, irreplaceable spawn of a cosmic anomaly. Cobbled together with serendipitous ramshackle utilitarianism, the twelve room hotel wings out from the redwood hewn tavern like a beckoning yellow bear hug, and sits perched atop a grove of monumental Coastal Redwoods with some of the best creek camping spots imaginable. It is an undeniably special place, a spun out vortex within the already trippy Big Sur meridian.

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