Jay Reatard @ Amoeba Records in Hollywood 08.18.09

Tuesday the family and I made a trip to Amoeba records in Hollywood. I roped the whole family into the adventure instead of just my son because it was my wife's birthday and we planned on going to one of our favorite restaurants after seeing Jay Reatard play.

I actually took half the day off from work so that we could go plenty early and avoid the late afternoon traffic. It also gave me plenty of time to look for records and such. I hadn't been to Amoeba since last summer. Unbelievable, I know. I had a whole list of cd's and records I have been waiting to buy and plus I love looking through all the latest 7 inch records to see if I can find something to perk my interest. I got some new 7 inch records, but I also found a really cool bin of fifty cent records. I picked up 3 of them and I can say that one of them that I listened to this morning is great. I'm sure it will make an appearance here some day.

So I finished all my browsing and shopping by 5PM and Jay didn't go on until 6. I did pick up "Watch Me Fall" Jay's latest record. I was fully planning on buying the CD, but for only 2 dollars more I could get the record and that had a code for a digital download of the record as well. For me that seemed like a deal and so I got the vinyl. After putting the purchases in the car, we just started hanging out by the stage as Jay and Stephen Pope (bassist) set up. I'm glad we did, because after a few other people gathered with us near the stage the security roped the area off. We got roped in and no one else was allowed up that close. Sweet!

Jay had some problems with the guy on the mixing board. His frustration came out in a lot of F-bombs over the mic. Needless to say, my wife didn't think this was the best atmosphere for my 9 year old daughter. I have to say I agree, so they left. I was kind of bummed about that, because I think they would have liked the show, but what can you do. Jay has a mouth like a sailor and he has no qualms about cursing in front of the kiddies.

Finally 6 Pm came and Jay rocked the house. Before he started I took a picture of the set list and I was very excited by what I saw. I was really excited about the prospect of some acoustic numbers. Sadly, though, Jay didn't play the set list. I don't know the reason for diverting away from the setlist. He ended up only playing 30 minutes. I don't know if that was the plan all the time and before hand they agreed to do a cut down playlist or if for some reason he was pissed about the whole situation and decided to cut it short. Whatever the reason, he didn't open with Blood Visions which he has done the last two times I saw him and he didn't do any acoustic numbers. Still he did play Nightmares (my favorite) and everything and everything on the second half of the setlist.

One of the cool highlights of the show was during "Death Is Forming" jay pulled the guy with a sailor's captain hat next to me up on stage and gave him his guitar. That guy strummed mad noise out of the guitar while jay sang. He grabbed one of his own records off the shelf and smashed it by repeatedly punching it. Not exactly original, but it was effective and dramatic.

After that we went out for a lovely dinner to celebrate my wife's birthday. Happy birthday honey and thanks for indulging me on your birthday.

Enjoy the photos. Here is a link to the entire album of photos I took that evening.

Battleflask, Hollow Points, Bad Reaction and Angry Samoans at Blue Sky in Los Angeles - 08.14.09

It's been a long time since I've been to a show, hence it has been a long time since I posted some rock photos. Last night I went to an Angry Samoans show in a very sketchy part of LA. Angry Samoans were great as per usual, but Bad Reaction simply blazed. They played stuff off their latest release and they sounded very tight. Battleflask who played with the Samoans last time I saw them opened the show. They play some good old school punk. I highly recommend them and if you hav a chance to pick up their disc, you should do it. It was a shame that more people weren't there when they played. They have some catchy danceable songs. Hollow Points were next. They were from Seattle. They were pretty good, but to be honest they did kind of sound like a lot of other mainstream punk bands on Warped tour. Not exactly my cup of tea. They started out great and they played well, but after a while things started to sound formulaic and too similar. I know that is a weird comment, while at the same time praising Angry Samoans and other more hard core bands. I guess I don't mind the conventions an similarity in some hard core bands because I just like hard core more. I can say they were photogenic and I got some great pics of them playing. Anyway, this was the first show I had been too since buying a bigger memory card for my camera. So I shot and shot and shot and shot. I spend hours this morning going through the photos adjusting things here and there and weeding about about 200 photos that just didn't make the cut. I got a lot of good band photos, but I must say the crowd was particularly great at this show. It wasn't too crowded and it didn't get too violent. I could move around and get lots of angles. For the most part people didn't mind my flash going of in their face. There was one girl that had a problem, but she quicly got over it. You'll notice I kept in the photo of her trying to cover my lense. I think it actually makes for a better shot. I'm including here a few major highlight photos and a link to the whole album on Flickr.

Enjoy!

Half Way To Crazy Mix 2001

This past week I was doing some cleaning and organizing and I found a box full of old mix CD's. Part of me was like "ugh more cd's to file away" another part of me was like "cool I haven't seen these CD's forever, I think there are some songs on them I have I don't have on my computer". The CD's were made in that beautiful window of time between blank CD's becoming really cheap and affordable and me getting an Ipod. It appears from the dates on the CD's that this was pretty much between 2001 and 2003.

Many of these mixes are filled with well known favorites. Some have radio hits of the day. Some are just compilations of random songs that I got from here or there and I wanted to have them on a CD somewhere. Some stuff is just from CD singles and such and I wanted them on a longer format CD because I didn't want to have a CD in my car or at work with just a couple songs. The CD's are really fun to go back to because they are a sort of time capsule of where my mind was at in those few years. You can see the same artists and songs popping up over and over again. I was obviously obsessed with The White Stripes because there are everywhere. Radiohead was also big on my hit list in those days. It was also during this time that I first started ripping vinyl and so you can see some what some of my early vinyl rip favorites were.

So I thought I'd rip these CD's and share them over the coming months. Even back then I liked coming up with goofy names for the compilations. There were however some with very boring names like Hip Hop mix 1 or the even more clever hip hop mix 2. you could probably guess what my collection of 80's metal tunes was. So part of the fun in prepping these for the blog was renaming some of the boring titles. Also to perk them up a big I grabbed some images from the internet and threw them on the files so there is some visual representation of the collection. I did cut corners and didn't do any titles or text over the images. I'll save that extra labor of love for any knew comps that I release.

So today I thought I'd start with one entitled "Halfway To Crazy Mix". That is the actual original title. I didn't rename that. The tracks go like this:

01 Fish (Reprise) - King
02 Six Blade Knife - Dire Straights
03 Let Down - Radiohead
04 Cakewalk Into Town - Taj Mahal
05 Ballad Of A Thin Man - Bob Dylan
06 Half Way To Crazy - Jesus And The Marychain
07 Heaven Help - Lenny Kravitz
08 Hallelujah, I Love Him So - Peggy Lee
09 Stairway To Heaven - Led Zeppelin
10 Happy Phantom - Tori Amos
11 Ingrid Bergman - Billy Bragg and Wilco
12 Fat Babies - Lyle Lovett
13 In My Room - The Beach Boys
14 The Emperor's New Clothes - Elton John
15 Fools - King
16 The Lost Children - Michael Jackson
17 Sweet Child O' Mine - Guns and Roses
18 California Stars - Billy Bragg and Wilco
19 Signal To Noise - The Cure
20 Stuck On You - Elvis Presley
21 Anyway - Dynamite Hack

You'll notice even from this first selection that I broke one of the basic rules of a mix tape. I had more than one song by the same artist. I did that a lot on these mixes. I think that was because I didn't have my whole CD collection ripped to hard drives and I what I could rip was limited to the amount of disc space I had. I think I also wasn't even working with MP3's in many cases. I was ripping uncompressed AIFF files to my computer which took up a lot of space and so I could only fit a certain amount of songs. I think my methodology was to take a disc and rip the highlights and after having ripped a bunch of highlights from different CD's I then mixed and matched. So what you get is a lot of the same artists showing up on the various mixes and even on the same mix. Oh well, that's just the way it was.

Before closing out I thought I'd comment a little on the music. Part of the joy of these CD's has been listening to songs I hadn't heard forever. Just yesterday I was listening to one of the mixes and my son was commenting that he hadn't heard this song or that song forever and he had forgotten about it. These discs were the soundtrack to his younger years. On this disc the Billy Bragg songs were really nice to hear again. It was also nice listening to Taj Mahal. That falls into the category of one of the first records I ripped from vinyl. Many of the songs off that Taj Mahal record were played to death 7-9 years ago. Favorite lines in "Cakewalk" is "I spend my whole day stealing chickens, mama from the rich folks' yard" and "I woke up this morning feeling so good I laid back down again. Throw your big leg over me mama, I might not feel this good again." Good stuff.

So that is the first installment. If you have any questions about where the tracks came from or any comments please post them.

Enjoy!