Blogging in the Soggy Northern Boggy
Mews and musings
I was gonna visit the ol’ stomping grounds today but atmospheric rivers of sky-icebergs make it impractical.
I just edited and published a blog post which I wrote recently, Musing of Days of Yore on the ol’ Wordpress.
Poppin’ the Ska goes LIVE in all the streaming contraptionoids TOMORROW! Why? Cos Valentines and Ska goes happily ever after, Columbia.
Inside the All Night Ska Disco at Area 51 is off to a beaaaauuuutiful start out there in the wilds, THANKS for your feedback and shares, means this (and other!) worlds to me.
Our intrepid artist of note Shannon Wheeler has started publishing his comic novel, My Father - A Commune Manifesto and I am thrilled to see this. Lands very close to home as it, well, all happened close to home, in fact literally and figuratively.
Here’s my aforementioned bloggy post, cos why not reshare here? A bit more about my me, and some more folks I’m very fond of indeed.
In the Before Time (2018!), the UpTones played what would turn out to be our second-to-last show. ‘Twas at Ashkenaz in Berkeley, a place with a great wooden dance floor, wonderful folks, and infinite memories. I have the show poster on my wall, as I love this unusual one.
Paul Albert Jackson created the artwork specifically for this Earth Day event, and I love the community vibe of it, and the little mini green UpTones band in the middle.
The group reassembled once more after this, for an outdoor show in Albany, CA, adjacent to Berkeley, and I don’t think there was a poster for that. There was a great crowd and it was one of the few times when the front rows were mostly very (very!) young kids. It was a family affair in the park, hence the youthful youths, dancing and playing or watching in rapt fascination. It reminded me, while we played, of how live music struck me when I was very young. A revelation, then, a great world opening, which I wanted to be in.
Three key events –
Pete Seeger when I must have been 3 years old maybe. Not sure where that was, but it had to be somewhere in the East Bay. Moms’s and pops’s brought their kids’s to see the already legendary folk singer, and I got seated cross-legged on the floor right up in front. Memories loose, but I remember thinking he was unusually tall, gazing up at the dude, with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, leading the audience in a singalong of This Land Is Your Land – now that I remember. This would be about 1968.
The Cadillac Kids when I was in 5th grade, outdoors at the Cragmont School playground of all places. I didn’t attend that school, but someone had the great idea to drive me and a few other students to this concert in the Berkeley Hills, from Longfellow School in West Berkeley. That was the first time I heard Johnny B. Goode. They played Rock Around The Clock and other ’50s rock n’ roll and I was over the moon. Soon after, I was learning to play those songs on guitar, with help from my first teacher, Lee Waterman.
Finally, in about 1978, at a roadhouse in Elk, California, near Mendocino, right on the coast, this rock band I will never remember the name of, changed my life forever. I was with my dad, visiting some family friends up there, and we went to the only event in that very small town that night. Rock. And. Roll happened. Crowd-pleasing hard rock of the mid-’70s long-hair variety. I don’t remember the songs, so maybe they were originals, I just remember the vibe in that packed room, and the band’s powerful presence onstage. I wanted their gig. In my mind, being in a band went from being a fun little idea to an absolutely compelling ambition.
The following years saw me recruiting friends to form a band, bonding with some now lifelong friends like Tom Pope and others, naming our groups and playing parties when we could, and then when I was 15 I met Charles Stella and Erik Rader aaaand, the rest of the original UpTones including my childhood friend Greg Blanche, and it was, as they say, on.