Richmond Music Journal Blog

In the Year 2000

2012-01-02T13:16:00.002-05:00

Scott Mills wanted to do an interview in 2000 on the history of the Journal, which was 8 years old at the time, and had four more years to live. My recollection is we did the interview as a series of email exchanges. I published it in the paper and had it on the website for awhile. Now it's time to park it on the blog, minus the parts that are no longer true, like Twisters still existing and things like that.

When did the RMJ first hit the streets?

Late in October of 1993

Did you think it was going to last as long as it has?

No, I thought I'd get a real job eventually and lose interest in it, or someone would buy it. I didn't know what the future would hold. At job interviews, they would always ask, where do you see yourself in five years? And I never knew. Maybe that's why I never get the job.

The RMJ is legendary for the battles that took place in its pages. What are some of the memorable ones?

The first one was when we started to go see bands in the Bottom. That pissed off the clubs on Grace Street.

What do you think made the scene change locations?

I couldn't guess. I know what makes me change locations is a bad neighborhood vibe. No parking, running for your life to get back to your car. The second battle was giving the Richmond Music Cooperative's CD so-so reviews. So that crowd hated us. And they were the In Crowd, too. Then everyone who hated the Vapor Rhinos hated us because we liked them. Then everyone who hated girls doing a music newspaper hated us, because most of our writers were girls and we didn't always write about the music. We wrote about the scene.

Let me publicly thank Anne Soffee and Lisa Honeycutt, who both traveled the scene with me a great deal in the beginning. Anne invented the term "toe molecule" for where a musician keeps his personal sensitivity, romanticism and loyalty. They draw on that toe molecule to write music, but they don't live up to their own lyrics. Lisa, especially, took a lot of mean-spirited criticism from the guys for things she wrote. The musicians complain that the RMJ is not supportive, but nothing beat the personal attacks and personal ugliness they dished back. It's always about the music from this end, but they'd hit back at our looks.

I remember the interviews used to ask who the babe magnet in the band was. I always thought that was an unusual question.

It was a 16 Magazine type question. The whole interview was based on that magazine. The next battle was the waitresses at Marvin's, the restaurant across from the Hole in the Wall. They hated us. Marvin's was the scene hang-out. Every time someone famous died, they put up pictures of the dead person immediately. I always wondered how they did that so fast. It was actually a pretty cool place, but I was an interloper to them. Then we wrote about Dave Brockie getting naked at the end of a Gwar show at the Flood Zone. So then the Flood Zone hated us, because that became a part of their liquor license problem, although not the part that lost them their license. But Mike Hsu, who was in Animal Farm and also a deejay on The Buzz, kept badmouthing the paper on the air. So there was plenty of love lost there. And radio hated us because our readers wrote in letters about how much they hated local radio, and we printed them.

What I find really interesting is the RMJ is still a survivor and The Buzz, the Flood Zone, and a lot of those bands no longer exist. Kids today don't even know there was a Flood Zone.

Then everyone who hated Frog Legs hated us, because we liked Frog Legs. Then we didn't think much of the Floating Folk Festival's first CD, so they hated us. Everyone who gets a bad review hates us. I have an enemies list, and people move off it, but it's pretty stable over the years. There's people who write us really, really nasty letters that make personal and untrue accusations about our motivations. There's people who shafted us on money, people who stole things from us, people who tried to start competitive newspapers, people who tried to sue us. That's the spectrum of unforgivable offenses. One woman used to call me repeatedly from North Carolina in the middle of the night and said I was sexually frustrated and dressed in Garanimal outfits. Finally, I read her phone number to her off my caller ID, and she stopped after that. I guess she didn't know Caller ID existed. I still don't know who that was. I wouldn't have minded if she called the phone line I set up for late night calls, the message line. The ringer was always turned off on that phone. It just recorded messages and took faxes. But she would call my personal phone.

The Garanimals outfit is songworthy. Again, all of those start-up papers came and went. Of course, bands wanted as much press as they could get, and would do whatever they could to be in any music paper. Did you have hard feelings toward bands that did things for competitors?

Of course, especially if they bought ads everywhere but the Journal. Or they send hate mail about me to other papers. What's with that? One band bought a display ad in Punchline saying insulting things about me!

What is the most outrageous thing that happened while doing the Journal?
Getting kicked out of the Metro during a Gwar show. They actually tried to confiscate my camera. I told them I wouldn't take any photos -- photo bans were common -- even though I had the band's permission, but they wanted to take the camera anyway. So I dodged them. And the bouncers kept hunting me down in the crowd. It got scary. They were big guys. I darted in front of the stage at one point and got sprayed down with fake blood. Then I headed for the staircase, a huge bouncer on my heels. I pulled my keychain out. It had a little silver pocketknife on it, and pulled out the blade. If that bouncer had touched me, I really think I would have tried to stab him. I got out with my camera, and ran into Marvin's across the street, looking for my friend, Anne. George Reuther from the Vapor Rhinos was sitting inside and looked really startled when I walked in. I didn't realize I was covered in fake blood. He said he didn't know where Anne was, so I went home and saw myself in the mirror, all fake bloody.

That was an unnerving experience. I also got kicked out of the Flood Zone a couple of time for taking photos of bands, even local bands. That was insane. Then Metro wouldn't let me in even if I was on the guest list. Like I'm so much trouble. Writing about things that happened in the clubs attracted trouble from the ABC agents.

That's really a visual description. That's the one thing I miss about the RMJ, when you stopped writing as much as you did in the early days. Your descriptions were always so visual, it made you feel like you were right there. Did you study journalism?

My degree is in journalism, although I learned more about writing just from reading people I admire, not from professors. I've always been an observer of life rather than a participant.

What's the worst thing that happened?

Having to hire a lawyer for $500 over the Gwar/Flood Zone hearing at the ABC Board. That was a lot of money for nothing, since the Flood Zone lawyers made a deal with the ABC in the hallway moments before and I never had to testify. I had hired a lawyer to explain why I was going to refuse to testify. It's called quashing a subpoena. Brockie was there in a suit with his lawyer, too. And it all turned out to be unnecessary because the Flood Zone owners, just kids, caved. They had done more serious things we didn't know about, so it really wasn't a First Amendment issue. $500 was a huge amount of money to me.

Why did you not want to testify?
It was a violation of journalism ethics. You can't be subpoenaed to squeal on people when you are reporting a story. That was the basis of the papers we filed in reply. Brockie had taken off his costume before he left the stage, so he was nude on stage for a few minutes, and we mentioned that in the story. The ABC tossed the lewd display charge in with a bundle of other ABC violations they had against the Flood Zone. Even with the lewd charge, they would have lost their liquor license. I don't think Dave or I knew that going in. We both wanted to maintain silence to help the Flood Zone because we both lawyered up. And then the Flood Zone never gave us the courtesy of letting us know they were up the creek anyway.

Oh, in other worst things, I got mugged outside the train station in the Bottom one rainy Friday night. The guy grabbed me from behind and punched me in the head until I hit the ground, took my purse and called me a bitch. It was an older black man, neatly dressed in an Eisenhower jacket. I remember that I kept walking toward him when I spotted him in the shadows because I didn't want to insult him! Make him think I was prejudice because he was black. Like if I turned and ran the other way, it would hurt his feelings.

I was so rattled after it happen, ran around looking for a cop. Finally found one, and he didn't even call it in! It was too routine for him. I lost $25, my credit card, and a camera. The cop finally agreed to go back to the scene with me and shine a flashlight around, and I found my cosmetics purse, but nothing else. I had just come from seeing Suzy Saxon and the Anglos at Alley Katz. I had a black eye the next day. I had to get a replacement driver's license, so I put on layers of makeup to cover the black eye for the photo, and it came out great. Like Glamour Shots. Best license photo I ever took.

I also got hit by car on Cary Street and broke my wrist. I was picked up an article from a girl who worked in a shop there. She told the insurance people I was in a hurry to meet her, so my claim failed, and then she went to work for my competition, so she was not a great experience. I did the next paper by putting a pencil inside my cast and typing with the eraser end. Look how resourceful I was, and I still got fired from my job. I was working part-time for a personal injuries attorney. It wasn't a good business to have an injured person sitting in your front office, still able to work.

The RMJ is distinctly unapologetic to complainers, and that sets it apart from the music papers that come and go. Where did the your motto "Everybody Hates It, Everybody Reads It" come from?

That's why everyone tells me all the time, so it became the slogan. We don't care what people think because the newspaper has never supported me financially. If you depend on advertising revenue to pay your rent, then you're going to want to please everyone and keep the advertising dollars rolling in. You edit scared. I suspect that's why there isn't that much local coverage in Punchline. The ad revenue has to be protected. But I've never lived off the paper. It pays for itself. If it does well, it gets bigger. If it doesn't, it gets smaller. I don't make calls soliciting ads anymore. I don't have the time. They need so much attention, so many reminders, a dozen phone calls to get their ad in on time, and then two dozen to collect the money. I just build the paper around whatever advertising comes in on its own.

I was in Seattle in 1994 and the local music zines were more like the RMJ. What are some of your favorite issues and articles?

When no one knew me and I was in a period of my life when I didn't care what people thought, I wrote better articles. I lived it back then. Went out almost every night and stayed out until the bars closed. Hit five or six places a night. I can't do that now. I enjoyed publishing Killer Montone's work. Mad Dog wrote for us. Ned Scott Jr., Buzzy Lawler. I have a good group now with Robert Stutler, Walter Boelt, Kiki Nusbaumer, The Griper and the Johns. There's two or three Johns. I get them confused. Except for John Church, I've never met any of the current writers. It's all done by email.

You have had a lot of writers and reviewers of the years. At one point you did most of the writing. What made you stop doing as much?

The usual thing that stops women from doing things, a boyfriend. He didn't want to go out every night because he had a full time job, and I didn't want to go out without him. Then when we did go out, it was usually to see his friends play, and they knew me, so it was not easy to review them. If you hate them and write about it, it becomes a dilemma. It's tough to handle the advertising, too, when you're a reviewer. I had to retire.

Lots of your writers use fake names. Why?

They're in bands, so they don't want other bands to know they're reviewing. But most of them are audience members. The one rule I had was, if you must use a fake name, you have to stick with it. You build an identity and become that person.

Has a band ever pissed you off so much, you left them out of the RMJ?

Yep, either they didn't pay for an ad, or they didn't pay my boyfriend when he ran sound for them. Or they complained they only wanted good reviews. All bad reviews should not be published. Or they were insufferable assholes who fought dirty by taking personal shots at me in other papers. All those guys were banished. It's not a big deal. They probably didn't even notice.

Somehow every music person in town still manages to pick up the RMJ and scoff at why they're not in the polls. Have you ever boosted a band in the polls you really liked, or is it always based on votes?

I vote when I see someone I think is good. If a group is tied, I'll put them in the order I think is most deserving. There's a lot of ties. Second through 10th place are often just single votes.

Word association. Dave Matthews.

I bought "Under the Table and Dreaming." I like some of the songs on that CD. The lyrics are nonsense. What I really hate is bands that try to imitate him. They're always really bad. I've only see him play once at the Flood Zone and it was too crowded. I took a few photos and left. I interviewed him on the phone before "Under the Table" came out. He was modest and shy and said he really wasn't friends with his band. They barely rehearsed together.

Did you think he would be the mega-sensation he has become?

It's an amazing feat for a band with no sex appeal and not many hit songs. But it's like Phish or the Grateful Dead, I guess.

Cracker.

I bought two of the CDs. I like a lot of their songs. I've seen them twice, at the Flood Zone and at a Plan 9 in-store. They hated our Flood Zone review and sent a lot of pissy mail about it. So I guess we'll never have a Sound of Music ad. Most people who try to start a music newspaper in this town kiss up to Sound of Music hard, do a lot of interviews with their engineers and the bands they're recording. We never cared. Interviews with engineers are dull reading anyway. And interviews with bands who have a new CD out, it's always the exact same story. They worked hard on it. They think it's good. Hope you buy it. Zzzzzzz.

I remember David Lowery wrote a letter to the RMJ about someone saying he did nothing for the local scene. What was that all about?

A misinterpretation. We said no local band he championed has made it big, or has made it yet. See, even you remember just the misinterpretation from their side, and not the original review or our response. That's how rumors start.

Gwar.

I've seen them four times, and maybe that many times without costumes. I've seen X-Cops. It's always an enjoyable show because, unlike other bands in Richmond, it is a show. Scariens, Frog Legs, Vapor Rhinos, Ultra Bait, Thelma Shook, they all did shows with costumes and themes. You never knew what was going to happen next, and the music was the soundtrack. I'd rather see a show any day. I interviewed Dave Brockie once. He was very entertaining to write about. He gave me Hitler's head to present to The Ramones as a gift since I was going to that show that night.

I'd say the Gwar review that landed you in court was your biggest publicity moment. The local news and Times-Dispatch all mentioned the paper in their stories. MTV reported on it.

And then came the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I felt Brockie understood the paper. It's not like other papers. It didn't do preshow interviews. But since then, no one has mentioned us. (Style never did, even when I finally folded the paper after 11 years, when they would write stories about the end of papers like ThroTTle and Caffeine that didn't last as long.)

Frog Legs.

Their early songs were great, great musicianship. They put on a show. They were characters. They should have made it. I saw them play every week for months, and never got tired of it. They had just started getting a following locally when they went on the college circuit for East Coast Entertainment, and then dissolved. The frat houses did not get them. I asked an East Coast booker once how they were doing, and they said the after-show comments were bad. Then some producer changed their sound for their first CD, and they were blander. The songs didn't sound the same. In the beginning, they used to call my answering machine in the middle of the night and record long, long messages. They'd get on extensions and talk to each other, do skits. That definitely created interest in seeing their show the first time. They they were impossible to interview because they were always in character, always on. They never told the truth or gave a straight answer. Guitarist Tom Illmensee really was the band. People thought it was vocalist Wrenn Mangum, but musicians went to hear Tom play.

Thelma Shook.

I have both their CDs. Dean Owen wrote some of the best songs I ever heard. I still listen to those songs. He is a great vocalist and showman. He should be on the cover of Rolling Stone. Their music was better than Frog Legs, even. Damn near brilliant. He's a musical genius. When they were promoting the first demo tape, I came home one night and found the front door of my apartment building completely decorated in Thelma Shook eyeglasses. They traded me computer software for advertising space, so it was a great deal.

Cover bands.

I don't have anything against them, really. In the beginning I thought they were cheesy, but now, if I am going to be in a bar for four to six hours, I'd just as soon hear some covers. The bands writing truly entertaining originals are few.

One thing I heard about the RMJ was cover bands got treated better than bands that composed their own songs, and it was the bands' writing that got dissed because their songs were not good. But the cover bands avoided that criticism because they played known hits. They were not being judged on how well they played.

Sometimes that's all you have to do to be entertaining, play covers. But that's not true, what you said. We judged cover bands. The Fredds hated us, BS&M hated us. We didn't give all cover bands a free pass.

Original acts.

You mean bands that write all original music or have an original act? You need to be really good before you start playing out. I hate it when a show is like a rehearsal, when everyone stops between each song and has a meeting, when they wear street clothes on stage. If someone has to change a string, the others should play something. It's not smoke break time. Have a plan for technical difficulties.

Moondance.

We had a great deal there. I gave them half-price ads and I always got in free. And they always did an ad. I went there a lot, so it worked out. It was a good room. I like square rooms with tables. I couldn't offer other clubs that deal because I didn't go to the same places every week, but at Moondance, I ate a lot of food, saw a lot of bands. The bartenders, the waitresses, Chuck, everyone was like a family. Chuck always had a joke.

Other music venues.

I used to know all the doormen. When it got to the point where I didn't and had to pay covers, that was a kick in the teeth. I like places with no cover charges because I never know how long I'm staying. I stopped going to the Bottom when the parking situation got ugly. Suddenly, every spot had a man standing there trying to collect $4 in advance. Or they were towing. It became easier to go to the suburbs, club in a strip mall with plenty of free parking and lights. No homeless people trying to intercept you.

Memorable bands?

Vapor Rhinos, Frog Legs, Gwar, Dumm Dumms, Thelma Shook, Los 10 Space, Grumbledog, Ultra Bait, Scariens, Princess Tone, Barbie n' Bondage, Dog Psychology, Beex, Peter Bell and his amazing combination of ego and insecurity. My Guitar wrote the best songs and had the worst band name. It was all V.J. Jones, a real talent. He wasn't so good playing out because there was no stage charisma, but his tapes were amazing. I gave away dozens of "Radio and Coffee." People loved it, but the live show would be disappointing. He should have a songwriting deal. I liked Ira Marlowe's solo CD, too. He was before my time, but the work he left behind showed ability.

Ten Ten, The Good Guys, Single Bullet Theory were all before I came along. I've met some of them, seen some revivals and reunions. They fit the context of their time, but their music sounds dated now. The Waking Hours sounded dated before they even got started.

The best show I saw was John Fogerty was the Classic Amphitheatre. That was emotional for me. I loved Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Dean Owen - A Memoir

2011-07-22T16:08:00.005-04:00

I found in my computer this fragment of an interview with Dean Owen, which I did not conduct. I think someone named Chris Brooks might have asked the questions, but it is stream-of-Dean, which needs to be preserved for historical purposes, and I have translated it into English and attached some video to this because, as it turns out, I was in attendance for some of these highlights.

There was a time when I was playing with the Vapor Rhinos at the Metro and Dan-o was in the front row, yelling for us to play “Chinese Rocks.” Both Tommy Rodriguez and Peter Headley turn around and give me a look, but I didn’t know the song, so I just shrugged! Dan-o had a look of total disbelief, dumbfounded, like “how can you not know ‘Chinese Rocks’”? But I hadn’t listened to The Ramones. I didn’t come from that background. That’s why Tommy called me "Dirty Hippie" for years.

With me, it’s never been about genre. I can find things I like about any genre. In those days, it was weed or women for me. My high school hadn’t caught up to punk rock yet. We were still at jocks and freaks. Everyone smoked pot, but you were a freak if you wore it on your sleeve. It was all Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ted Nugent, ZZ Top, Alice Cooper, The Grateful Dead.
I was playing jam band music when I met Tommy. Charlie Brown ran a little reggae bar at the corner of Harrison and Broad called New Horizons. He calls me and says a band called Brown Experience is playing with the Prevaricators and someone else, and the regular sound guy won’t do it because they are awful! So, for 25 bucks and beer, I was mixing me some awful. That’s where I first met or saw all of those guys, Tommy, George Reuther, Dave Brockie, Keith Clarke, Crazy Jimmy.

That night, I watched Crazy Jimmy flick a cigarette into one of those retro greasy car mechanic haircuts and chuck his white ‘70s boot into the mirror ball. The guy with the cigarette in his hair didn’t notice until it was smoking pretty good. I laughed my ass off the entire night. I had already seen and fallen in love with Root Boy Slim, so this was pretty much exactly where I was headed. Loud, often obnoxious, slightly offensive, fun as shit, rock and roll that didn’t take itself seriously!

I continued to play the jam band stuff for a stint, toured with a band from Georgia, even moved to Arizona for awhile. I played with Widespread Panic a number of times and even toured with them, but I was never in the band.

New Horizons caught fire. The Jade Elephant opened. Twisters opened, and Tommy and Peter let me join the Vapor Rhinos! George was the bass player! I think Peter liked me because I was good, but not as good as him! I loved all the crazy shit, the flying penis, the smoke machine, the gutted stuffed animals everywhere, poking fun at everything and everyone, especially the cool people. Packing peanuts, general all-over goofiness, but mostly I really loved the songs! Peter is one funny guy and that is totally reflected in his lyrics, beach me a whale, chocolate mousse, if you can’t cut the mustard, you can cut the cheese. That’s some All-American potty humor at its best! I was all about it!

We played New Year’s Eve at the Red Light Inn in 1994. Aside from George chasing wild, coked up strippers around with a yard rake and a bicycle horn down his pants, the funniest thing to me was the regulars were really upset I was wearing a red, white and blue bikini top. We really didn’t get too out of hand that night because as you can guess, some pretty big bitches work at strip clubs! Not to say we didn’t do any crazy shit, we just didn’t break anything that wasn’t ours to break.

I was actually a DJ at the Red Light. I "spun the hits that shook the tits." Peter loved that one! Lots of funny shit happens at a strip club. The reason they hired me to DJ was because the girls were sick of the idiots loading the juke box with “Girls Girls Girls,” 47 times in a row.

The Pee Patrol used to crack me up, as well. Every night they would stick their heads in and make sure everything was all right. Two officers dressed up in ridiculous disguises would walk through the alleys, trying to bust drunk college students peeing. They would mill around the entrance for 20-30 minutes every night, getting a freebie! That building is now the home of my fellow bandmate and best friend, Ric Withers’ print shop!

The Vapor Rhinos eventually gave me the boot, signed my walking papers, kicked me to the curb, told me to amscray. They shit in a bag, lit it on fire, and threw it on my porch. I’m kidding, kind of. Bands come and go. People come and go. I am still great friends with those guys, and I think the world of them. Peter got me to stop using so many notes on the hi-hat and introduced me to the girls of Ultra Bait, the next band I was in. Tommy taught me how to tongue kiss! George gave me one of his gonads. I love all of them and now they kick ass with just two and don’t need nobody else.

Ultra Bait was super fun, my first chick band. We rented a practice space downtown the first summer. It was a Salvation Army storage building. The Cashmere Jungle Lords had a space there. The place was originally a school and our space was the shower and locker room area. It was hot as hell, so there was a lot of almost naked rehearsals. I loved that part! Peter introduced me to them and one night a few weeks later, in Carytown, a girl dressed as a hot nurse comes bounding across the street in the pouring rain, carrying a guitar amp, slips and falls, smashing the amp right in front of me. I got out of the car, helped her up, and it’s Carmen. She is a lot upset. So I told her I would get my amp from home and she could use it. I watched them play with this drummer they called Jiffy Pop.

He was awful, truly awful. His beats were sporadic and irregular like the sound of Jiffy Pop on the stove. I told Tammie they should let me play, and they did! That lasted a couple of years. With me, it’s not really about genre or anything other than I like you and you like me. I can’t handle playing music with someone I don’t like. No matter how much money or anything else you get! I explode eventually and destroy it all!

Thelma Shook was one of those bands. We were all teenage friends way back, with the exception of the drummer, and now we were together again to give it another try. We had just recorded an EP with Mark Miley at Glass Hand that was getting attention. We had enough money and material to put out a CD, and then…I exploded. The band was practicing at my house. The bass player was living with me, behind on his rent and not giving a shit, eating my food, not cleaning up his cat shit, drying his stinky ass fish socks on the radiator and gassing everyone out of the house. We broke up. Ric and I carried on without them. Hell, we wrote all the songs anyway.

We recorded the CD with Mark again, this time at Montana studio. Everyone from Harry Gore to Tim Harriss played on it, Sherrie Blanks, Tommy Rod, Tom Illmensee, 27 people in all. That was a lot of fun! Then we put together a new band to play out. It was pretty much straight up pop-rock. We dug it. Ric let me do whatever I wanted, so I got to be all campy and goofy again with giant, inflatable dolls, space costumes, lots of fun! The Rt. 1 South show was super fun with Mark Miley on drums and Cheez playing bass. There’s a funny as hell video on YouTube of another show, opening for Beex at Moondance and Tommy is heckling us throughout the set. You can’t mistake us, we are the guys dressed like sailors! The rhythm section was Bobby Jorgenson and Chip Farnsworth. It’s great to see how uncomfortable those guys get when I start making with the gay sailor jokes.

Bands come and go. I have been in more than 50. Bay of Pigs is a stoner metal band I am singing for. They wrote all the songs and arrangements. I just do the screaming. I really like not being in charge. It’s nice to come back to. The other guys are half my age and full of piss and douche, so they aren’t afraid to tell me what sucks and what doesn’t. I love that shit.

Brown Sabbath sprung from Ultra Bait. Mr. E.T. Snyder, El Presidente, came up with it. He put it together with Ryan Lake on guitar, Denny Cable on vocals, and me on drums. He told me he heard Bill Ward in my drumming, but I think it was more that I had a good practice space. Truth is – and this harkens back to the Ramones thing – I had never listened to Black Sabbath until I was asked to be the drummer in a Black Sabbath cover band! I had the first record on vinyl and that’s it. Skillet actually set me straight on how to play that shit.

Other musicians will give you shit about playing in a cover band, but it doesn’t bother me. Bill Ward is a kickass drummer, so if someone says I play his music, great! I take it as a big compliment. I wouldn’t say Brown Sabbath is a tribute band, though, not in the sense of Zoso or Mister Crowley. We don’t dress up or duplicate a record or performance. There is a lot of us in it, sometimes whether we want it there or not. Ryan Lake was the original guitarist and he is friggin' amazing. He left to play with Alabama Thunder Pussy. Frank Jackson took over and promptly fell off a roof and compound-fractured his arm. Ryan came back one more time to play the Frank’s Hospital Stay Benefit at the Canal Club. It has been Frank ever since. We all really enjoy it, still, every time. I doubt we will ever completely stop.

It’s always great to play on a nice stage like The National, with a great PA and someone competent to run it. Always! When you play mostly low quality stages and basements with mediocre PA systems, a nice stage stands out. But in this town, music venues are held captive by outdated and idiotic ABC regulations. Everyone knows it. You have to sell 15 slices of shitty pizza so you can drink a beer and watch a band in Richmond. I don’t understand why outside investors don’t do a little scouting before opening a big-ass, never going to pay for itself club in this town. Why were there 12 security guys at a Brown Sabbath show? How much does that cost? This town can only float a smaller venue. Why do they make them so big? For half the money, you could equip and run a great, local music venue, even with the inane regulations. I believe you could stay afloat. It takes a good deal of work, and by more than one person, but I’ve seen it done. Dreams of the lottery….

I am not a good Iggy Pop. I look like Iggy, but as Danny and Chester can tell you, my voice is awful! But the band Iggy Plop is fun and funny. The other band members don’t like the name Iggy Plop! They don’t think it’s cool! That cracks me up. I like playing music that I like with musicians I like, whether it’s my music or someone else’s. I don’t care, as long as it’s fun. I am not what you call a looker, and you wouldn’t know it from watching me on stage, but I am shy, so I do this whole music thing just to meet girls! Oh, and maybe smoke a little weed! Hang out with my friends! I am such a douche!

Footage from Onionhead.

Last Testament

2011-04-01T19:51:00.000-04:00

Page Wilson's last general email.

Took a pretty rough fall a bit over 4 months ago, when my knee went out (again), and dropped me on the "step stone" in my front yard. FYI a step stone is a roughly 2 X 3 foot kinda squared, roughly 10 inch high, flattish piece of granite, where in times past you would pull your buggy up to so the passengers could disembark without taking that long step into the mud! Or something like that. Obviously, my property was something more than a house in days gone past. What type? Haven't a clue, but have heard some juicy rumors. Only the step stone remains. I thought it was actually pretty cool, until the night of the fall. But it will remain right where it is. Never know when another buggy might show up, eh?

So, some things have changed around the home base of our radio/musical Swamp. I broke my left shoulder, sprained something in my back, and still have a left knee that threatens to drop me again if I'm not a really good boy. It hurts to walk and, for the moment, to play the guitar; but that must change as I heal. I have a couple of good doctor friends who are trying to make some things happen, and I'm going to do my best to be a good, patient, patient. Try that without health insurance or money, and you'll have an idea of where I am today. And that's why I'm sending this missive out to you.

As I've talked to some close compadres about the pending hospital/recovery/operations situation, almost every one said I should let the folks on my mailing list know what was happening, and see if some could help. I fought writing this email to you, because I don't like to ask for help. For me. Helping other folks is second nature in my very unique, blessed position as a singer-songwriter/radio producer/musical performance organizer/whatever. Now I find all that could be in jeopardy, so am going to suck up my pride, and just lay it out there. That's what they told me to do.

Brutal honesty, when you haven't been able to work for four months, things get a little slim. I'm on the verge of losing my house to foreclosure. It's not only where I feed the dog, but also where the Out O' the Blue Radio Revue is produced. Am also barely keeping lights on, and the water running.

If the dog is hurt, the $led don't run. And this dog is hurt right now. Ideally, I would be able to add a few sponsors to the radio program, and get through this. But folks are scared in this economy. And for the moment, me, too.

So. I write you tonight to just up and ask if you might be able to help. Our fine radio station doesn't pay me to do the program, but they give me the two hours to spend with you weekly, and play the wonderful music we are so blessed with. So, with this missive, I am hoping you might have a few bucks you might invest in the Swamp, and keeping Page Wilson and his brave crew of volunteers functioning in close to our usual manner, bringing you radio, and live music, and whatever else we can think of.

I don't send you this lightly. These are desperate times here, and I need your help. 'Nuf said. Thank you if you can help, but if you can't I understand. Times are rough all over. I just don't have anywhere else to turn right now. The banks won't touch me. Heh, heh. The new mailing address is below.

Thank you. Take care.
Pg

Sent November 26, 2010

Adam Lambert at The National

2010-08-29T20:49:00.004-04:00

The line outside The National at mid-morning.

Concert going is a commitment. There's serious fans who know how the game works, and then there's the clueless. Like me.

The serious fans began gathering outside The National early in the morning before Adam Lambert's concert on Aug. 27. There were at least 20 in lawn chairs out on the sidewalk when I came to work around 8:30. By mid-afternoon, there was a couple of hundred. By the time I got off work, the line was down the block.

A co-worker wanted to go with me instead of my husband, who would have been more cooperative. She didn't want to stand on line until the line. Our original plan to hang out at Gibson's and go through the get-in-early underground door was nixed because there was a line to get into Gibson's. So it was 7 p.m. before we joined the line, which was then halfway down 8th Street.

Lines really aren't ordeals, at least to me. You have a good time talking to other people, finding out what lengths they have gone to be there. The weather was great. I could have handled a three-hour line. It's like a community and everyone has a story.

A white limousine pulled up and a man got out with a gaggle of older women who looked like they had just come from sitting on a patio. Even with a limo, they had to join the line down on Marshall Street, literally around the block from The National.

After 7, National bouncers came down the line shouting that everyone should have their own ticket in their hand, and we began to move forward. I noticed the man behind me had an Internet print-out. I asked him if that was his ticket. He said he hoped so, because it was all he had. His mother had already been taken inside because she was in a wheelchair. And she was 70 years old!

"This is all she wanted for her birthday," he said. "She wanted to see Adam before she died. She thinks he is the next Elvis."

American Idol Adam -
Not Performing This Year

That's brings us to the Problem of the Two Adams. There is the openly gay, dangerous, kind-of-goth Adam who first emerged nationally at the American Music Awards. Then there is the American Idol Adam who did indeed look and act like the second coming of Elvis, a clean cut, handsome, possibly straight Adam who sang well-known cover songs in a rich, thrilling voice and wore impeccable, beautiful suits. I suspect many of the old ladies and children in the crowd were expecting to see American Idol Adam, but a smaller, more intense group of old-school, Ann Rice type goths were hip to the real Adam. They were also the ones who knew you had to get there early if you wanted to stand near the stage.

And sure enough, when the show started and hands went up in front, almost all of them were wearing fingerless black gloves.

Considering our position several hundred back in the line, my friend and I were very lucky to find two seats together at all, but there were in the next to the last row in the balcony. It was a nice enough view of the stage if you don't mind that the people on it look an inch tall. Despite buying a ticket and investing half a day in seeing this concert, my view would be 100 times better watching fan videos on YouTube the next day. That made me grumpy. I seldom go to concerts. This time I had made an effort, but not enough of an effort to actually make it an unforgettable experience. Next time I will know.

I got even grumpier as the next 90 minutes transpired. It takes a couple of hours to settle in a sold-out house when there's no assigned seats. In the balcony, people did what people do, kept leaving single seats between each group. The ushers had to urge everyone to fill in the empty seats so the latecomers could sit together. Then there was no room to seat even later comers together, and they had to be broken up. We heard their displeasure. Then the still later comers who expected to sit, not stand, got into insisting-matches with the poor ushers, who had to comb the balcony looking for volunteers to give up their seats and move to the floor. No one did.

The unremarkable Alison Iraheta finished her short opening set and the lights came up for intermission. We got a second wave of people looking for seats in the balcony. These were moms and dads with little kids moving upstairs after realizing during Alison's set that the kids were too short to see the stage. There was no way they were going to successfully push their way through the determined goths in front of the stage so that American Idol Adam could meet their cute kids, who were actually wearing matching, spangled dance recital costumes. American Idol Adam wasn't doing this show anyway.

I don't know where these super late seniors and parents with recital classes in tow ended up sitting, but kudos to the bouncers at The National for handling all the drama without going crazy. And they stopped people from standing along the mid-balcony rail and blocking my view. And thank you to my fellow old people in the balcony for not standing up through the whole show so I didn't have to.

After the audience sang along with "Don't Stop Believing," waving their arms in the air -- so cheesy -- and a snippet of "Billie Jean," the lights finally went down again and there was another extended wait as the audience sang along with Adam's "For Your Entertainment" like a rehearsed chorus. That was a unifying moment that swept away my irritation. His silhouette finally appeared, in voodoo garb, at the top of a little staircase, and I forgot all about how annoyed I was at being sardined with a thousand demanding people.

Singing "Soaked"

His show is well rehearsed and does not go off script. Even when he seems to be talking to the audience, he's actually performing a lead-in to the next song set. Like a stage play, it doesn't stop. They filled in a pause for a costume change with pulsing music and multi-colored lasers bouncing all through The National.

He does songs from his album. One was "Soak," sang alone on the stage, stunning in a long coat, with possibly just keyboards for accompaniment. He is very tall. His voice was so gorgeous. That was the highlight for me, even though it was a song I had not paid much attention to on the CD.

The rest of the time, four dancers gyrating on stage made it far more entertaining a show than just a singer at a mic with a band playing behind him. Adam sang, he danced, he changed outfits. He was tall. He kissed his guitar player. He was fab. Yes, he is the next Elvis, and the next Liberace, and the next Michael Jackson, and the next Liza Minnelli.

Concerts have changed. Fifteen years ago when I used to attend a dozen a month as a reporter, you had to beg the management to let you bring in a camera, and half the time you were refused. And if you took a camera in anyway, you got ejected. Now there's video cameras all over the room recording the show. I guess they don't even try to ban them. On YouTube, you can follow Adam's concert up and down the United States, and it looks and sounds just like the show at The National. Here's a really good video of my favorite moment from the Knoxville show, uploaded by Needacoke. All her/his videos are good.

The stage door line early in the day.

All day a cluster of 30 or so had stood guard at the stage door on 7th Street, waiting for Adam to go in, and after the show, the crowd had tripled, waiting for him to come out. I could tell from my Twitter feed --- where I followed everyone I could find who said they were going to the Richmond concert -- that he came out about 90 minutes after the show and briefly signed a few autographs before getting on the bus. There were even groupies, but they looked like woeful hookers from the '70s with their spiked heels and micro-mini skirts. Did they really think they had a shot at getting on the bus to give blow jobs? Probably not this night.

Permission to Kill Yourself

2010-03-09T17:31:00.002-05:00

In Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, there is a fascinating study about how suicides of prominent personalities set off chain reactions of suicides, as if the first gives permission for the others to do likewise.

I never met or interviewed Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and wasn't a fan of his music, which I found mumbly. News reports say he shot himself in the heart while drinking with friends after a series of text messages he exchanged with an unknown party upset him.

Going through old interviews with Linkous, I found one where he said he was deeply influenced by the Charlottesville writer Breece D'J Pancake, who shot himself in the head in 1979.

Reading Pancake's biographical notes, I find he, in turn, was a big fan of Phil Ochs, who hanged himself in 1976.

It's like each gave the next one permission. To prove you are artistic, or too deep or troubled for this world, or too romantic a figure? Does this somehow validate your art? What in the world makes you blow yourself away?

Social Media and Art

2009-12-11T10:49:00.003-05:00

I (Twitter address @MarianeMatera) went to the December Social Media Club Richmond VA (@smcrva) meeting at the Firehouse Theater (@firehouserva), which afterward dispersed to The Camel (@TheCamel) a few doors down, and then a few diehards went on to Sine. I did not.

The focus was how independent music and film can use social media. Ian Graham (@IanGraham) of RVA Magazine, which to me is a publication of style over substance, was the moderator. The panel was an imported Amy Greenlaw (@girlgamy and @FilmPop) of Film Pop! from New Hampshire to talk about independent film promotion; Joel Burleson of the band Ki:Theory (@kitheory) and Jessica Gordon of The Trigger System (@triggersystem), to represent music. Gordon used to bartend at Twisters, ran the place when it was the 929 Cafe, and still books bands for The Canal Club and some other places. She also teaches English at VCU, which made me smile because she speaks in the flowing cadence of today's young people, so she reminded me of no English prof I ever had.

So what did I learn -- other than as usual I am the least luckiest person ever? (Even with two raffle tickets, a relatively small attendance, and many poinsettias to give away, I still didn't win one.) If you've been to one seminar on social media, you've been to them all. Seldom is anything new brought to the table after the basics, but this discussion was a reflective discourse on what social media killed.

Victim: the flyer on the telephone pole as a way to promote a show, for one, although Gordon said she still makes use of flyers, but not like the old days when you'd run off several hundred at Kinko's and then hire some derelict musicians or street denizens to wander around with a staple gun and cover the telephone poles.

When I first started the Journal, the city had declared war on telephone pole flyers and occasionally stripped the poles, but that didn't stop anyone. Bands were engaged in pre-show warfare to staple their flyers over everyone else's and sometimes it got very ugly.

Still, we can list as victims of social media:
Flyers
Kinko's
Staple gun salesmen
Poor musicians with staple guns who need the job for cigarette money
Fax machines for faxing the flyers to Style Weekly

For bands, the victim of social media is the traditional press kit. They no longer need a demo cassette or stacks of 8x10 black and white glossies. Instead they can stream their latest originals on their MySpace page and park color band photos and videos of performances there as well. Despite MySpace being the ugliest, most difficult to use social media site, it's perfect for bands because it streams music in a handy audio player.

You neglect MySpace at your peril. I learned this hard lesson recently when the Tobacco Company was feeling around for some classic rock bands for long-term regular bookings. By the time my husband's band got three songs together to burn onto a CD, and realized there was no current band photo, and the press kit was years out of date, the Tobacco Company booker had made his decisions. We would have been able to move faster on that feeler if all I had to do was email him back with a link to a MySpace page, which would have everything already on it.

Clubs and bands can reward people for following them on Twitter, MySpace or Facebook with a few ticket give-aways before each show, essentially functioning as their own radio station.

(Shall we list local radio as another victim of social media as far as promoting local shows? Okay:

Local radio)

Nationally, iTunes and Walmart killed the recording industry as far as the $19.99 CD goes of two hit songs and 10 bad songs. Bands no longer make their fortunes through album sales. The dollars are in concert tickets and merchandising now, and local bands must go the same route. Burleson said he pretty much gives his music away on the Internet, but it's all about cultivating your fan base. They will come to your shows not to hear the music they can get for free, but to meet the band, to experience the show, to meet other fans with similar taste, to buy the T-shirt, to get a CD/DVD that has some added value to it, like artwork, or a video. Burleson says he makes his money by licensing his music to television shows.

Getting signed by a major label, getting radio play, making the Billboard Top 100, kissing your keyboard player as the closing act on the AMAs and then having to apologize for it to Barbara Walters -- these are all still the goals of any band, but be realistic. Making the big time is as likely as being struck by lightning. Divide the number of bands in Virginia by Dave Matthews and you still have one single lucky son of a bitch.

But you can have a degree of local notoriety through the cultivation of fans through social media. YouTube some of your past song performances, stream your best originals on MySpace, create a fan page on Facebook. Be a little star.

Greenlaw was less engaging about promoting independent film because that is a narrow niche -- film people and film fans. Essentially, though you build a website for your little film and from that mothership, launch your droids: clips and behind-the-scenes videos on YouTube and Vimeo, Facebook fan pages, Twitters to alert people to film festivals where you're showing the movie. Unlike music, you never give the film away free, even though, if you ask me, little films are just auditions for directors and screenwriters to get a bigger deal.

You realize Southpark started out as a little holiday gift Internet video shared by industry people.

So that's it. I sort of knew all this already, only I'm not doing it yet because if I was, my husband would have a three-nights a week gig now at the Tobacco Company, bringing home an extra $180 a week (okay, not that much, really, for the sacrifice of three nights a week gone), but it's $9,360 a year! That buys something.

Gary Gerloff

2009-05-27T18:56:00.002-04:00

Gary Gerloff was one of my telephone buddies back in ’93, ’94 when I first started the Richmond Music Journal. I don’t recall if we ever actually met in person and talked, and I’ve only seen him play a time or two.

He was delighted with the newspaper and would call and tell me stories about the Richmond music scene of years ago, most of which I could not use because they were racy and I didn’t know if they were even true. He knew all the wild women of the scene, the groupies, the local girls that went on to become regional and national groupies, all the stunts they used to get into the band buses parked outside the venues. He wanted me to do stories on them, but I declined since I think they had moved on and probably didn't want to be reminded.

He often told me the paper kept him connected to the music scene, the new local bands coming up that he would never have heard of otherwise. Our stories often tickled him and he would call to laugh and comment about them. And one time he took me to task quite sternly for being lovesick over a musician he did not think was worthy of my time. He called him Pie Face and that shook some reality back into me.

I had the feeling he wasn’t working because he would call me during the day and could talk for hours. Later I heard he was a Mr. Mom who kept the kids while his wife worked and then played music at night. I don't know if that was true although his obituary didn't list any job history. It seemed like a good arrangement, if true. The running joke about him was, obviously, how much he physically resembled Jerry Garcia.

He died this past weekend at age 58.

Morality in Chesterfield County

2009-05-24T08:49:00.005-04:00

Many years ago, there was a man living on the Southside who decided the Richmond Music Journal was offensive to his children, although I think he was actually divorced and not living with his children at the time. He would go into places like Plan 9 on Midlothian Turnpike and the Barnes and Noble on Huguenot (both locations are gone now), and complain that the paper was obscene and needed to be removed. They ignored him at Plan 9 since they knew him and knew he was a complainer, and at Barnes and Noble, they removed the papers from the box in the front foyer, but then put them back after he left. After all, they were a book store and not about censorship.

It all boiled down to the word "cocksucker" used as an adjective on the front page and a photograph of a band that dressed up in fat, naked people costumes.

The guy went to the Chesterfield Commonwealth Attorney's Office. I think the attorney who was assigned the case thought I was a kid and scaring me would solve the problem. He would try to convince me I had to report to his office for a tongue lashing from him and a "Chesterfield County detective" (oooh, scary!), and then, terrified, I would behave after that. I knew he couldn't actually make me visit him legally.

I was really annoyed when he called. Back then I wasn't working anywhere, living on food stamps and temp jobs, and didn't care if a dozen Keystone Kops pulled up and put me in jail. When you've got nothing to lose, even this kind of notoriety is helpful. When you have family, a mortgage, and all that stability stuff to protect, being a renegade or a rebel isn't as easy. So I was ready to go. Bring on the handcuffs, Chesterfield County! The newspaper The State, a start-up that couldn't decide if it wanted to compete against Style Weekly or the Times-Dispatch, already had the ACLU on speed dial on my behalf.

The tape recorder attached to my phone to record band interviews was on autopilot to cut on whenever I answered the phone. It recorded the whole crazy conversation.

I’m an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Chesterfield county. I was wondering if you’d be willing to sit down and talk with me and a detective from the Chesterfield County police department, and I’ll tell you what this is about. You probably already know. We have received complaints involving the Music Journal, and I have been assigned to investigate it along with the Chesterfield County police department. And I have looked into it and I wanted to discuss it with you. It is not our intent at this time to bring any charges. But I would like to sit with you and discuss with you what the complaints are about and whether or not they can be resolved.

Are you aware of Rolling Stone?

Yes, ma’m.

Are you aware of the language in that publication?

Yes, ma’m.

Are you aware that publication is available in Chesterfield County?

I’m sure it is. Yes, ma’m.

Has this parent picked up a Rolling Stone?

Well, I don’t think they’re giving them away, are they?

I don’t give them away. I don’t give them to this man’s children.

I understand that. And believe me, if you sit down and talk with me, I think we can come to an understanding.

Are you aware of Redbook magazine? Cosmopolitan?

If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. You can tell me that and then we can do this the hard way.

I am perfectly willing to take this magazine completely out of Chesterfield County. I do not want people like this reading my publication. It’s not to my advantage at all to have this man or his children reading it. I do not want his children reading it.

Right.

All I need to know is where his children saw it and I will deal with that outlet and pull it out of there.

I don’t even know the person who made the complaint.

Well, that’s what we need to find out, where this parent found this magazine so I can remove it from his sight.

He is not your concern. He himself is not going to bring any action. None that I know of. All I can tell you is I have been assigned by the Commonwealth Attorney of Chesterfield County to look into this. I have done that. I’ve talked to police officers. If I can meet with you and tell you what the concern is, then it probably can be resolved that way.

You can tell me right now. What is the concern and I will remove the paper from Chesterfield County.

All right. Well, I’m not asking you to do that. I looked through a number of back articles. I don’t see anything at all wrong with a number of articles, but the complaints were based on the December and January magazines, and that was based on both language and some pictures that were published. I know you’re familiar with the areas I’m familiar with. The cocksucking article.

That article was not about cocksucking per se. Are you aware that Redbook and Cosmopolitan magazine, which are available in Chesterfield County, instruct women on how to do that? While in my magazine it was only used as a derisive expression for toadying to people.

I read the article and I agree with you.

He has more danger from Good Housekeeping as far as his children learning some procedure he doesn’t like than he does from my magazine.

I’m not arguing with you about that.

I can walk into your office with a load of magazines I’ll purchase at a 7-11 in Chesterfield County, magazines that the cover headlines are visible to children. If you’re buying candy at the counter of the 7-11, all the headlines are right there in front of you.

The point is this...

You don’t have to buy the magazines, they’re right there in front of you.

I think it is right on the borderline as far as the type of information. The type of magazines you’re referring to are basically magazines for sale. Yours is not for sale.

Since it’s not for sale, is the problem that children are seeing it?

They can pick up your magazine and take it home for nothing. And I don’t know what your opinion is, whether or not you would want your 12 or 13-year-old child to see it.

Where is it available in the county where a kid could come on a bicycle alone, get it, and go home? They would have to be with their parents. If their parents don’t see what they’ve got, I can’t supervise every child in Chesterfield County. But if there is an outlet that children are rushing to so they can read this magazine and learn dirty words that aren’t already in any publications in their parents’ homes, I’ll be happy to remove it. Like I said, I don’t want people like this reading it, people who are going to go to all this trouble, to call detectives and commonwealth attorneys and report stuff that’s already out there. You know I’m not breaking any new ground here. I’m way behind.

I don’t think you are, either. The question is as to access for young people, whether or not certain portions of these two issues I’ve seen approach going over the line.

What’s the other complaint other than cocksucker that isn’t even used in a sexual context? What photograph are we talking about? The little band Donkey Balls who dressed up like naked fat people?

Right, that one.

They look like Cabbage Patch dolls.

That’s your opinion, but other people are going to look at it different. I agree that it’s close. My intent in calling you is saying this. We are getting a number of complaints on it. It can be toned down. I’m not telling you to change your magazine or change your style, but I think more discretion can be used as to what pictures are displayed.

My magazine, as you can see, is only about local music. It is very seldom...not every single band that plays music in this town dresses up in naked fat people costumes. So it’s not a usual thing that happens. But you find out where the outlet is, and I’ll be extraordinarily happy to withdraw this paper from that outlet. I don’t really care who reads it. It’s for musicians only. It’s not for children. I will be very happy to put on the front cover of every issue that this is not for children, that parents have a responsibility to make sure their children do not pick this up.

I think in reality we’re talking about 13 and 14-year-olds. They’re not by their mom’s and dad’s side every minute of every day.

Well, they should be! I can’t be responsible for these children. They’re going to find stuff all over the place.

But you are responsible for distributing this magazine.

And I will be very happy to pull it from wherever I’m banned.

I’m not asking you to do that.

Well, you should be. You should be banning it, because I can’t change my editorial policy for one parent in one county. So what we need to do is keep it away from these people. Understand? You realize this is a freedom of speech issue. I've already heard from the Times-Dispatch about doing a story on it.

I’ve learned a little about that in law school.

You realize if you go through with this, the press will pick it up, there’ll be stories, the parents who filed this claim will be ridiculed, just like the people trying to stop Howard Stern.

I don’t know about that. This isn’t New York City! This is Chesterfield County!

That’s right. It’s the same thing. How far are they getting with that? How about the parents who protested the XL-102 billboard?

I don’t recall that.

The XL-102 billboard that looks like a woman having an orgasm. Remember that?

Oh yeah.

Then you know how it goes. These things go nowhere. They create a lot of paperwork. It gets your name in the paper. It produces a lot of notoriety and publicity for the paper, it’s a big, ugly mess, but in the end, it goes down on First Amendment rights. You can’t keep something from publishing.

That’s not true. I can keep something I’ve seen from publishing!

So I won’t go into Chesterfield County! I don’t care about Chesterfield County! I’ll pull it out.

Well, that’s fine. If you tell me you’re going to remove it from Chesterfield County, then I don’t have any further business.

Just tell me which outlets are causing the problem. I’ll tell the owners of those businesses about people with unsupervised children coming in, and I can no longer be there because of you. And we’ll have no problem. So I need two things from you, your name, title, telephone number, and what outlets were cited. You mind if I tape this conversation?

No, ma’m.

Where was the paper found?

The complaint lists Peaches and Digits. Those are the two listed on my complaint.

Okay, I’ll talk to the managers there and tell them, and when people come in asking for it, they can tell them to come in to the city or somewhere else.

Okay. That’s fine.

So it’s settled? So you can call that parent and tell them I’m not bringing it to Peaches. His kids can come to Peaches and buy music and don’t worry about anything.

All right, ma’m. I’m sorry it worked out like this.

I have no problem with this at all because I don’t want people in Chesterfield County reading this paper. It’s not for people like that.

****end of call

This is the same Chesterfield banning dancing in clubs now, isn't it? Anyway, I don't think Peaches or Digits really cared that much about the cranky customer and I continued to leave the paper there after a month or so. Like I told the attorney, not too many bands performed in naked costumes.

Both Digits and Peaches are gone now, too. I can't take the credit. Napster and Wal-Mart had more to do with that than me. Eventually I found out who the complainer was because he started sending me threatening faxes, and I traced the telephone number back to him. He was surprised when I called him. We had a long rambling talk, almost two hours, and there was a lot more going on in his life than my newspaper, but complaining about the paper was one area where he felt like he could make a difference. After that phone call, the situation ended. Maybe he just needed to talk to someone.

And oddly enough, at the time, a Chesterfield County police detective was one of my music reviewers, writing under his real name.

Am I to blame now for all that's happened since, the sextexting in schools, the coaches and policeman who are making dates with underaged girls on the Internet and cell phone text messages? Did the Richmond Music Journal destroy the moral fabric of a generation of Chesterfield County children?

As far as bad language goes, Brick has outdone me since then and they're a free distribution paper. How come the commonwealth's attorney's office isn't summoning Media General down to sit down with a detective and work things out? This all seems so quaint now, as if from a time where I wore a hoopskirt and had the vapors.

A Few Thoughts at 9 p.m.

2008-03-03T21:27:00.001-05:00

My theory, and a good one it is, had always been that the music scene catered to one core audience -- mall and restaurant workers. There was no other theory to account for why the crowd didn't arrive until nearly midnight. Think about it. If you work in suburban retail or at a restaurant, you were closing at 10 p.m., cleaning up by 11 p.m., and ready to socialize and have a few drinks at midnight. You didn't have to report for your next shift until late the next afternoon. How else were these people closing the bars down at 2 a.m., even on week nights?

So any band scheduled to start at 9 p.m., or even 10 p.m., was playing to crickets. The after-work happy hour crowd was clearing out; the mall and restaurant people were still at work. Nobody wanted to be the opening band in that dead slot, so the opening band would delay as long as possible before taking the stage. The drummer-is-missing ploy was a popular one. I used to hate these delays when I was on a tight schedule to try to see a half dozen bands in one night and every band was ditzing around, trying to get closer to an 11 p.m. start. That, of course, inevitably pushed the headliner back to 1 a.m., which I really hated.

Anyway, I don't know where the mall and restaurant workers go to chill out until last call these days. The action has progressively moved out to the far corners of the suburbs where people seem to keep more traditional hours. Out in the 'burbs, the situation is reversed. People are working, or tired, even on weekends, so the action is most intense around 9 p.m. It's the prime of the evening for suburban bars. The place is packed, and when a band takes their first break around 10:15, they come back at 10:45 to much less than before. By midnight, it's crickets and usually it's all over by 1 a.m. No need to turn up the lights at 2 and literally grab drinks out of people's hands (ah, the good old days of Last Call...after being attractively cloaked in bar darkness most of the night, when you are the most soused and scary looking, they turn up the lights and hover over you, desperately demanding you hand over your bottles and glasses as ABC agents lurk).

I thought about this as I ate a basket of tasty pig sliders at Grandpa Eddie's and watched the Harrison Deane Band play to a full, attentive room, clapping and cheering, and it was barely 10 p.m. But after their break, most of those people were gone. Including me. I slipped out a few songs into the second set because even on a Friday night, 11:30 is teddy bear time for my ancient, weary bones. My recommendation is if you're playing in suburbia and find yourself with a very good crowd at the very beginning don't assume they're there for the duration: Play as long as you can stand it before you take that first break. The bar might do another strong 30 minutes or so of business and love you for it, and the audience will probably hang in until you give them an excuse to duck out by putting your guitars down.

Suzanne Rathburn 1962-2008

2008-01-30T20:18:00.000-05:00

When Suzanne called last August, she knew something most of us don't know, how much time she had left to live. Two months to a year. Fate compromised and gave her five months.

At the time I wanted to believe the doctors were wrong. "They're so often wrong."

"I know," she said, but I could tell she was resigned to it. This was her third encounter with cancer and she was choosing chemotherapy again to buy time, even though ultimately it would be painful, uncomfortable time. "I can't possibly get my affairs in order in two months."

I never saw Suzanne during the bad times. When she'd show up again, she always had her hair back and was in high spirits. She would come by to record a song in my husband's studio or swim in my pool. She was always happy. She laughed a lot, almost as a punctuation to every sentence. Even when she talked about her bad relationships -- some that were Lifetime movie of the week bad and some that just fizzed out quietly -- she did it in an offhand, casual way. Those bad relationships were 90 percent of what we talked about because we didn't have much else in common except a few mutual acquaintances. I hope that wasn't an all-consuming part of her life.

She considered everyone a good friend. We could and did go a year or more without seeing or talking to each other, and yet she considered me a good friend. My cell phone number was in the book of people to call at the end. How could that be? She was just that way. She embraced people. She was full of gratitude and appreciation for any little thing you did for her and she expressed it. I felt overpaid in appreciation, truly undeserving.

She was a people-person. If I sent her an email, I'd get a call back in seconds, not a return email. So when I heard the news back in August and sent her an email offering whatever I could do, I wasn't surprised when the phone rang the moment I hit "Send."

I listened, as usual. That was all I was ever able to do, listen. She was saying good-bye even though the battle was just beginning. She loved all her friends. She would miss them. She said it was hard to breathe, hard to speak, although except for one coughing spell, she sounded fine on the phone. I don't think she was religious, yet she conjured up a death where she still existed with human emotions.

"I'm going to miss you guys so much!"

As fall progressed and the holidays passed, no news was good news. Then right after the holidays, I got another call. She sounded great and was positive and upbeat. She had even gone back to work part-time. She alluded to being in crushing pain, and yet she was picking up her life again. The doctors were telling her there were fewer tumors. "I'm going to beat this, Mariane, I really think I'm going to beat this."

"Well, then, I'll see you in the summer when we open the pool."

"Oh, I can't go in the sun anymore because of the chemotherapy."

"Okay, we'll swim at night."

But it wasn't a turning point. It was the view from the top of the sliding board, because within a week, the slide began. In mid-January we heard she was in hospice care. I dutifully carried the phone number around in my purse, with all intentions to go by, but instantly a chain of minor problems consumed me for two weeks, and the moment I dispatched the last one, the cell phone rang in my pocket.

"We found your telephone number in a book Suzanne kept."

The summer she was recording her album, she paid for one session in flowers. She brought a carload of flowers over and planted them in the two giant pots on either side of my front steps. That summer the front of the house looked great, an explosion of color and beauty that multiplied throughout the season. Then winter came and they all died and didn't come back. They were flowers for a single season, a temporary burst of vibrant life, and then they were gone.

So Much Music in So Little Time

2007-12-19T21:29:00.001-05:00

By spring of 1994, I was a curious bystander to the meteoric rise of The Ernies, based on their ska appeal and following in Boy O Boy’s big footsteps. They went from gigs at Crazy Charlie’s and Buffalo Joe’s to opening for the Screaming Cheetah Wheelies at the Flood Zone in just nine months, covering everything currently popular with an overtone of ska. I was doubly curious because the lead singer, Will Hummel, had been in my Cub Scout troop when he was a sprout. Would one of my former Cubs become a rock star? Could I sell my story to the National Enquirer?

Now they were back at the Zone, opening for their mentors, Boy O Boy, packing them in, much to the dismay of the FZ bouncers who warned me alcohol-fueled fights always broke out. (Boy O Boy, if you don’t know, became Fighting Gravity. As far as I can tell, only two of the guys have hung in and for some reason, I would always get anonymous hate mail whenever we wrote about them, usually directed at the lead singer, Schiavone McGee.)

On this night McGee, without the band, started the show singing one line. “All I need is a holiday,” and then went silent. The audience sang the rest back to him. They were good at taking directions. Hands in the air! Jump! Bounce! You could tell they were in college. I almost expected McGee to sing, “Close your bluebooks and pass them to the front.”

(2007 aside: Do colleges still give exams in bluebooks?) Anyway, The Ernies just seemed destined to make it. They were signed almost immediately, yet like Boy O Boy, the style that established them was a passing fad and they didn't sound like themselves once the record company finished with them.

We went to the 1708 Social Gallery in the Bottom, a club I described as looking like a stage set from “Brideshead Revisited.” We sat on white sofas and drank Dinosaurs: Long Island Iced Teas turned green by a dose of Midori. “They were so strong, we attracted Jurassic narcs.”

(“Jurassic Park” was big then. Was that clever or was I still high on Dinosaurs when I wrote it? In any case, the Social Gallery hosted bands like Lovesake which featured civilized instruments like upright basses and violins. Then it became something like a goth disco.)

On a Sunday night, we endured an unusual opening act at the Hole in the Wall, a poet whose poem consisted almost entirely of “Daddy’s going to take out the Harley. Want to go for a ride on the Harley?” The band was Gibbon Hick, with Marty McCavitt on keyboards and baritone sax, Pippin Barnett on drums, Paul Watson on cornet and guitar, and Steve Williams on bass and vocals. I sold an old telephone to Watson once and he seemed very glad to get it. He was in a lot of bands.

“Jazz audiences are attentive. No talking, no wandering around. They really listen as if their collective concentration is another instrument in the band. After the set, they literally passed a hat. ‘Feel free to contribute to the deconstruction of music,’ and the audience willingly did. It was jazz church of the holiest kind.”

At the Sunset Grill, we saw the band that all the other bands hated because they got all the gigs, The Fredds. They were the Sunday night house band at Mulligan’s in Innsbrook and always got the big money shows, the bachelor auctions and chili cook-offs.

“They play progressive dance music! They’re a cover band, but they cover, like, the new stuff on the radio, the stuff you can dance to,” I was told, as I tried to imagine people dancing to Beck’s’ Loser’ or Counting Crow’s ‘Mr. Jones.’”

One night, I saw five bands in five hours in five different places. We caught up with No Small Feet, another big cover band, at Lightfoot’s, a hotel lounge where “bank secretaries go to meet insurance salesmen.” Lee Covington was playing behind a rack of three keyboards and the band tried to resist the pleas from women who just wanted to dance to songs they knew.

“Guess what, we’re going to play another original song and you might not be able to dance to this one either,” Andy Edmunds chided them over the microphone.

It isn’t always easy being a dance band, although don’t tell that to Bio Ritmo. Even in ’94 at the Metro, they had everyone dancing, at the same time declaring the Metro had the worst PA in town. A block down Grace Street, we watched Rocket 69, “New York-style, ‘70’s punk a la The Heartbreakers” drown out their lead singer Dan-o; then we joined the preppy people packed into the Flood Zone for NRBQ. Across the street, BS&M were playing the outside patio at the Sunset Grill, but we opted to stay warm and go inside Scarlett’s for the last three songs in The Useless Playboys set. The stage was decorated in glittered moons and stars that vocalist Mike Geir had made from cardboard he salvaged from Marvin’s basement.

We finished the night at an after-hours downtown place called Casablanca’s and had pancakes smothered in peaches and cream. How did I do it? I didn't pay covers. I had a little press pass I made and laminated at Kinko's.

(I was startled when I arrived at the BS&M website. This band has sure changed, although it still seems to belong to Dave Barton, another hated guy in '94 because he got all the good gigs.)

A private Rites-o-Spring party at Peter Headley’s house on W. Cary was better attended than most club shows, and even advertised on the Rock Line. Headley wisely nailed his bedroom door shut for the duration. White Cross, with the reunited line up of Crispy Cramner, Mike Rodriguez, Joel Benson and Rob Mosby, opened for the Vapor Rhinos. Stuffed animals bounced all over the house until the stuffing was literally beat out of them.

My writer Kami Godbey was no slouch at descriptive prose. I could picture her night at the Metro with Sliang Laos and “a crowd as diverse as a family-sized pack of General Mills cereals. Grunge kids, goth chicks, skinheads, punks and freaks were all jammin’, or maybe all that motion was just everyone trying to unstick their shoes from the tacky gook that layers Metro’s floors. I kept getting stuck to the wall.”

Kami also discovered the Trip Thugs at the Metro and she was enthralled enough to seek them out at the “Thug house” on the 2400 block of West Main. They were Patrick Corregan, John Ekermeyer, Kelly Turner, and Mark Young. They even had a staff “manager and artist” Russell A. Duerr, and soundman, Mike Brady. They had been together five months and were already clocking in seven or eight gigs a month at places like the Metro and Crazy Charlie’s.

They were from Northern Virginia except Young, who was from Salem, and Turner, from Los Angeles. Inspired by Avail, they come to Richmond to seek their fortune, although it ultimately didn't help. Kami got creative with my recommended questions and asked things like when was the last time they were naked, could they tell the difference between different brands of toilet paper, and if they ever had that “not so fresh feeling.” Maybe that’s why the serious music writer guys in town hated the Journal and still do. All they blog about is how great Punchline used to be. Still, I give the girl props, and she took photos, too. After a year or so, she disappeared on me.

For reasons I can’t remember now, we had to Photoshop the band photo Kami took of the Trip Thugs, even though we didn’t have Photoshop. Photoshop may not have been invented then. We took two different photos and pasted them together into one, and it worked perfectly. It was Scissorshop.

The 1995 Musician Quiz

2007-12-14T17:29:00.000-05:00

We ran a variation of this quiz in a 1995 issue. All the girls I met who had dated musicians had the same stories about how these guys lived, and a pattern developed.

You have seen every episode of “Ren & Stimpy.” +15
You have seen every episode of “Southpark.” +10
You can quote from memory the entire movie “Spinal Tap.” +5

You are in a committed relationship. +5
You were in a relationship, but she was committed. +10

You own a house. -5
You rent an apartment. +5
You rent a room in someone else’s apartment. +10
You never know whose sofa you’ll be sleeping on tonight. +15

You have gone to an all-night drug store to buy Kwell. +5

You are half deaf. +5

You have more than 500 records. +10
You play on half of them. +20

You have a futon mattress and you’ve been saving up for the frame for the past five years. +10

Your wardrobe is black, gray, black, and gray. +5
Your underwear is just gray. +10.
You don’t have any underwear. +15.

You play in another band. +5
You play in two other bands. +10
You’re John Leedes. +15. (The 1994 15 point answer was You’re Charlie Kilpatrick.)

You have lived in the Fan District. +5
You have lived in The Ritz. +10
You have lived in the Ellwood Sweat. +15
You have lived on the Spine. +20.

You never have a condom when you need one, but you always have a guitar pick. +5
You can make a girl come with a guitar pick. +10

The best time you ever had, you were drunk. +5
The best time you ever had, you were stoned. +5
The best time you ever had, you were drunk and stoned. +10
You don’t remember the best time you ever had, but people tell you it was great. +15

You have a full-time job that has nothing to do with music. -5
You have a part-time job that has nothing to do with music. +5
You work part-time as a bartender. +15
You work part-time as a restaurant cook. +20
You work part-time washing dishes. +25
Your girlfriend has a job. You play music. +30

You have more stereo equipment, amps and instruments than furniture +5
You have dishes, but you use them as ashtrays +10
You have an ashtray you use for a dish +15

You have never owned a car newer than 10 years old +5
You have never owned a car. +15
Your dream is to own a van. +5
You are living in a van. +20
You and your entire band are living in a van. +25

Your girlfriend has dated another guy in your band. +5
Your girlfriend has dated every guy in your band. +10
Your girlfriend is dating you only to get to another guy in your band. +15
You wouldn’t even have a girlfriend if you weren’t in a band. +20

To you, the major food groups are the Village, Joe’s, Third Street Diner, and Denny’s. +10

You can name every band you’ve played in and the set lists for each, but not the last five girls you dated. +5

Your wife/girlfriend has never been with you on New Year’s Eve because you’ve always been working. +10

Bonus points:

You have worked at more than 20 Richmond restaurants. +20
Your bar tab is more than you made playing. +15
Your girlfriend's bar tab is more than you made playing. +20

175-200 points: You are a real Richmond musician!
75-170 points: You’re a musician.
0-70 points: You’re not a musician. Why did you even take this test?

Christine Gibson

2007-12-11T10:09:00.000-05:00

Here's the obit from the Times-Dispatch website. Since it is going to disappear from the site after Dec. 13, I've moved it here so it never disappears.

Christine Ann Gibson

GIBSON, Christine Ann, 55, of Richmond, Va., died on Dec. 9, 2007 due to complications after a courageous battle with breast cancer. She is survived by her awesome daughter, Maria Christine Gibson Applegate; her loving husband, Thomas William Applegate; sister, Susan Gibson of Mont Clair, N.J.; and aunt, Hazel Tipton of Fresno, Calif. She was born Sept. 12, 1952 in Newark, N.J. to Richard and Margret Gibson. She left New Jersey and came to Richmond to attend classes at VCU. Once in Richmond, Christine became a vocalist, visionary, and the attitude for Richmond's legendary punk rock band, BEEX. Under Christine's direction, BEEX enjoyed a 30-year run from its beginning as one of Richmond's first punk bands, established in 1977. At the same time, she became vice president of operations at Vatex America. After a career span of 24 years beginning as an embroiderer, rising through the company and ending as vice president, she was proclaimed Vatexian of the Year several times over. Christine was also the creator of the BARBIE GARDEN, an ongoing art installation featured in her yard on one of the Fan's many interesting streets. Christine was more than any of this and then some. Those who knew her are better for it and they know it. Donations may be made to OAR of Richmond Inc., 1 N. 3rd Street, Richmond, Va. 23219.

Link to Times-Dispatch story

Hollywood Grill

2007-12-08T14:47:00.001-05:00

I admit it. Oregon Hill scares me. I used to have a friend who lived on S. Pine Street, known as “the spine” among the ancient, formerly cool people. I liked going to see him in his dollhouse apartment. Over the years, I met other people who lived in the Hill in various states of bohemian poverty. Then I met people who were buying houses in Oregon Hill and getting these massive, funky spaces for hardly any money.

Still, it scares me. Especially at night. I think it has something to do with the necessity of knowing how to parallel park and the claustrophobic, narrow streets.

So it took much bundling up of my courage to go to the Hollywood Grill, former site of the notorious Chuck Wagon where you never knew what was going to happen and you had a 50/50 chance of ending the night at MCV. But that was the old days, before the demographics of Oregon Hill began to shift.

Hollywood Grill is not named after Hollywood, Calif. It is named after Hollywood Cemetery, which predates Tinsel Town. I was immediately surprised. Oregon Hill is on the cusp of a massive gentrification, with rehabs and new townhouses that look architecturally like the old townhouses, popping up everywhere. No parking skills were required. China Street had plenty of open spaces on this particular Tuesday night. To further acclimate you, the Grill is about two blocks south of Mamma Zu’s.

This is a small place with a wall of booths, a six-seater bar, and one overpowering pool table. The blackboard special on Tuesdays is 50 cent tacos, (also a great name for a band.) Monday night is free pool, Wednesday is someone called Uncle Bob on his guitar, Thursday is karaoke, and Friday and Saturday is live music. On this particular night, an experiment was in progress: do 50 cent tacos need a band to bring people in? That is the question.

The band serving as the lab rats in this experiment was the Harrison Deane Band, in which my husband plays bass, explaining why I made this trip in the first place.

The spotlights on the pool table kept the band well-lit, although it must be very distracting for them when people are lining up shots literally right under their noses. And if someone’s playing pool, you can’t really dance without bumping into them.

Hollywood’s menu is strictly school cafeteria style, serviceable and inexpensive. Sodas are served in the can with a plastic cup of ice, all the better for taste and fizz since Coke shot out of a bar spray nozzle is just nasty. There are no desserts on the menu, but at a workingman’s bar, dessert is a Marlboro Red anyway. Sunday brunch starts at the late hour of noon and there’s a choice of four things! Woo woo!

I thought I was in for a slow night at 8 p.m., with only six others in the place, but as the evening progressed, the crowd grew like an amoeba, doubling in size every hour. By 10 p.m., we had a shouting woman holding her cell phone up to the band and noodle dancers fueled by PBR moving the chairs back so they could undulate to anything that sounded remotely like a Grateful Dead song.

My bill for two tacos and a can of Dr. Pepper came to $3.75 (the soda was $1.75?!). I left a $2 tip because I am just that fabulous, and so is the band. With two guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, their layered, polished sound is worthy of a crowd of 200. But that would have required 400 tacos.

A Trip to Grandpa Eddie's

2007-12-08T14:28:00.001-05:00

Anything with the name “grandpa” in it seems like it’s not going to be what’s happening now, but I kept hearing about bands getting gigs at Grandpa Eddie's , so off we went.

I thought we’d find it at the former location of the Three Chopt Sports Grill, a split room in a strip mall on Three Chopt near Cox Road that kept the band on one side and the drunks on the other. But it wasn’t there. It was on the west side of Cox in a brand new brick building. We arrived at 9 p.m. on a Friday, just in time for the band, but long after the dinner crowd had cleared out.

The restaurant, which moved to the Far West End from its original Goochland location, is positioning itself as the Tobacco Company of the West. Most of the places on the West End that host local music are not known for their food. Grandpa Eddie’s wants to be all things to all people, a place to eat as well as linger after dinner. Bands play Friday and Saturday nights from 9 to midnight. The restaurant’s great looking website has the line-up posted.

Jack Taggart, who books the music, says, “There’s nowhere in the West End to play that is totally geared around the music. We need to find those pockets of people. It’s a long way to go downtown for West Enders, so to get a place established out here would be great.”

I like clubs where you don’t have to stand, clutching your beer. At Grandpa Eddie’s, you can sit with a clear view of the band from just about every booth in the place, as well as the bar, which is behind large glass windows, and also serves to separate the smoking area from the non-smoking dining room. The room is a warm, cozy copper color and the acoustics are, in my sound tech husband’s estimation, “dry,” i.e., reverb isn’t bouncing off the walls. Grandpa Eddie’s politely turns off the wide screen TV above the band, always a nice touch. There’s no dance floor. If you get happy feet, you’ll have to dance by yourself next to your table.

Our food arrived before we could even settle into the booth or finish the baby cornbread muffins served as a free appetizer. That was fast! Everyone has their own opinion of barbecue, so we won’t argue that here. The menu is online. We had a sandwich, “Kansas City’s Famous Burnt Ends,” with slaw and fries, and a rack of ribs with collards and slaw. For dessert, we split the donut sundae, a glazed donut with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and a cherry. That was just odd. Doughnuts are not easy to negotiate with a fork or spoon, so it was a dessert that fought back. With soda and tea, our bill for two was $33.55. The house dessert is peanut butter pie.

Where does used restaurant ketchup go? Everywhere I eat, the bottle of ketchup at the table is always brand new, even at Arby’s. How can that be?

Back Alley Hoodoo was playing that evening. They also have a good website and if you Google them, you’ll find links to videos on YouTube, too. They are older, seasoned blues musicians, as are most of the bands currently on the schedule. No loud kid bands for Grandpa Eddie.

I’ve never understood how you can play the blues as a band. Something like “Red House,” which Back Alley Hoodoo covers, sounds more poignant when wailed by one solitary guy and his acoustic guitar. If you’ve got enough buddies for a band, you shouldn’t have the blues!

Tell Me Something New

2007-12-05T20:19:00.000-05:00

This makes me sad because I don’t want to come off as sounding snarky, but we really need to control our enthusiasm, at least to reasonably normal levels, when writing about bands. During the newspaper days, when I sensed the reviews were coming from friends and family, I ran them in the letters column rather than in the reviews column.

Now everything goes onto the same web page, although no doubt the readers can detect a biased review. It depends on the size of the room, but normally, less than 20 people is not a crowd. Two couples dancing is not a crowd dancing. It’s four people dancing. Watch those adjectives or you’ll give yourself away as a publicist and it dilutes your message. The very fact that my paid reviewers were so hard to please gave them credibility when they were surprised by a good band. Don’t be so easy that you’re suspect.

And remember who your readers are. The audience on the Journal’s website is mostly musicians, and they don’t really care how good a band is because they’re probably not going to see you unless you’re opening for them. They’re interested in the room, the acoustics, the stage, whether there’s regulars who come to the club all the time or if the place will be rolling in tumbleweeds unless they bring their own friends. If you have insider information about how much the club owners pay, or if the doorman gets to keep half the money, whether the house PA barely works, or the TV is going to be blaring sports right over the vocalist’s head – share that.

Otherwise, we already know that every one of you is the greatest band that ever was and deserves to pack the house with standing room crowds every night. We already know you cover songs fantastically, yet with such originality you make them truly your own. Your originals are indeed No. 1 hits that everyone will be singing next week. We all know you “will not disappoint,” a favorite cliché used in all the hundreds of reviews I’ve published. Every bar is wonderful because they booked you and you want them to book you again, so their food is fantastic, the microwaved chicken fingers are where microwaved chicken fingers were born, the beer is the coldest ever in history, the bathrooms so clean and sparkly, and the manager and waitstaff are saints. They practically give foot rubs, they’re so accommodating. Your thousands of fans are the most fun people; so much fun that all the rest of us must go to your next show and rub elbows with them so the fun will spread. We will have a great time, maybe the greatest of our lives.

Yes, we know all that. Now tell me stuff I don’t know.

Heavy and Light

2007-11-16T12:00:00.000-05:00

The Vapor Rhinos were a fun band that always put on a show, but because all their songs were comical and rudely off-color, other bands didn’t seem to appreciate them. Our lavish coverage of the Vapor Rhinos resulted in much jeering. They had elaborately painted stage sets at every show and often shredded a bunch of stuffed animals at the finale. They’d buy up all the stuffed animal stock at thrift stores for these ritual sacrifices.

The band was Tommy Rodriquez, the guy who actually builds guitars, on guitar, George Reuther on bass, Dean Owen on drums and Peter Headley on vocals. Not only did they play out a lot, they went to see other bands a lot, so you saw this gang, together or apart, everywhere all the time. They became part of stories that weren’t even about the Vapor Rhinos. George has disappeared, but the other guys are still in town.

One of the first places I went to see them was New Year’s Eve at the Red Light Inn on Grace Street, a topless bar. This bar was a loyal advertiser for many years and the easiest money I made. I’d walk in, find the guy who had the money and he’d hand me the $25 for a quarter page ad without any discussion as soon as he spotted me. Handing cash to women was just second nature in this club.

The band was never serious, so all the stories verged on crazy. I did the band interview in person at Marvin’s, with everyone around the table arguing with the waitresses about mayonnaise and complaining about morning hair, even though it was 11 p.m. It was like a scene from a Marx Brothers movie.

I used the same basic 20 questions for all my band interviews, one of which was “origin of the name.” Before this, I had never thought about the band names that were combinations of light and heavy images.

George and Tommy were sitting in the Village trying to think of a name, and Tommy wanted something heavy, and George wanted something light and airy. Like Iron and Butterfly. But it was taken.

Or Concrete and Blonde.

Or Led and Zeppelin.

Hence, Vapor and Rhinos.

Can you think of more?

Brushes with Greatness

2007-11-08T16:03:00.000-05:00

In the first year of the paper, we covered some Brushes with Greatness. When David Letterman had the good late night show on NBC, not the one he has now on CBS, he would go into the studio audience soliciting stories of commonfolk encounters with celebrities.

Seeing Fishbone was in itself a brush with greatness. I described their show at the Flood Zone as “a happy version of Dante’s Inferno.” The lead singer was wearing baggy gray pants held up by suspenders, but not held up enough. His pubic hair was visible. The drummer wore only boxer shorts and played with his back to the audience, the better to show off the fish skeleton tattoo on his back.

Our technical brush with greatness was encountering Bruce Hornsby on the top level of the Zone, autographing women’s breasts. From there, we watched a female crowd surfer in white stockings, a lacy aqua bra and a flowered dress get passed repeatedly over the heads of the crowd on the floor. Each time she broke the surface and sailed over the crowd, she was missing more of her clothes.

The highlight of the show was a song called “Swim,” which seemed to consist entirely of the lyrics, “swim, muthafuka, swim muthafuka, swim, muthafuka, swim.” The singer climbed onto the amps, reached the rail of the balcony, climbed up and dangled himself over the crowd, which beseeched him to “Swim!” A stagehand kept feeding him more mic cord as he continued to climb along the balcony and finally made a dramatic leap into the crowd. He was cleanly caught and sailed as if sliding on ice from one end of the Flood Zone to the other, still holding the mic. It was totally awesome.

Then we had the pleasure of publishing Anthony Dowd’s story of playing piano for Frank Sinatra at the Jefferson Hotel before Sinatra played the Mosque and passed out from the heat. Dowd was offered twice his usual fee to extend the hours he played at the Lemaire Restaurant until Sinatra left.

Sinatra arrived at 10 p.m. surrounded by guys with walkie-talkies (remember, this is pre-cell phone days), an advance man with a clipboard, comic Tom Dreesen (Sinatra’s opening act), two beefy bodyguards who handled the money, and a coterie of friends. They stayed in a private dining room for an hour while Dowd played, then came out and sat around his piano. Sinatra sang along to “Autumn in New York,” even though he had just performed a show. Then he stumbled through “Everything Happens to Me,” forgetting the words.

Dowd’s hands were aching by this time, but saxophonist Skip Gailes came in to help, and the bodyguards slipped him a $200 tip. Various people kept whispering for him to play “Laura,” Sinatra’s favorite song. He did twice. Sinatra and his party stayed until after 1 a.m., then left. The next night, the singer collapsed at the Mosque and was taken to MCV.

The last brush belongs to the band Animal Farm, a group that moved to Richmond from North Adams State College in Massachusetts because they heard Richmond was “nice and cheap. We didn’t know the crowds were going to be so tough. In Boston, the crowds were just more. It was a bigger, more active scene.” Like it was really going to be easier to launch a band from Richmond. Ha!

I think they really moved down here because vocalist Mike Hsu got a job as a DJ on WVGO on the 2-7 p.m. weekday shift. The other guys, Wayne Driscoll, Steve Gullotti, Aaron Tunnell, manager Gary Engel and soundman Bill Crowell, had to make do in this foreign, backward land. Driscoll worked at Sign Graphics, Tunnell was a dispatcher at Dominion Service, Gullotti was a “food service manager.” They shared a practice space in Shockoe Bottom with Zag Man Zig, All Natural Band and Mirage. But the band’s best days were behind them, back in Boston. Richmond was the beginning of the end. There were rumors about this one getting extreme religion and that one putting a hand in the collective kitty. Either can break up a band.

But here’s their brush with greatness. They met Jon Stewart, then a show host on MTV, now the mega-star of the “Daily Show” on Comedy Central. He was doing stand-up at Shotz in Farmville and dropped in on their gig. “He said we were awesome.”

When Harry Met Sally

2007-11-05T21:35:00.000-05:00

Women who aren’t married and want to be sometimes ask me how I met my husband. It was a long path through a chain of bands, which could have gone several different ways – and in that sense, it seemed like fate.

I could have met him right away if I had gone to a Stiff Richard show at the Metro. There was a blackboard above the downstairs bar that listed the bands for the week and I saw the name. The band was Guy Pettengell, guitar and songwriter, Billy Britt, drums, and Bobby Jorgenson, bass. In due time, I received their CD “Squeeze” in the mail and gave it to Peter Bell to review because he knew Pettengell from somewhere and was eager to review it. The review was okay but not glowing.

Time passed and Bell himself got into a band, October. Ironically, Jorgenson was playing guitar in that band, a holdover from the original line-up called Solid Ground. Bell urged me to see them because, he promised, Jorgenson looked like Frank Daniel, a guy from Single Bullet Theory and My Uncle’s Old Army Buddys who I had a futile crush on.

It was true. They could have been related. I saw October at Jimmy Ryan’s and Moondance. Before the Moondance show, the band Thelma Shook had decorated my front door in the dead of night with flyers and cardboard “Shook” eyeglasses, and left me a whole box of cassettes. I was passing out those cassettes to everyone at Moondance, encouraging people to submit reviews. One of the people who got a cassette was Jorgenson.

I still remind him that if he had only written a review and gotten in touch with me to submit it, we might have met a year sooner, but he didn’t. (Small World aside: He went on to play bass in Thelma Shook.)

Time passed. I had heard of the band Joe America. Frank used to go see them play, and never invited me, which made me very curious about this mysterious local music scene that hardly anyone knew about that didn’t start until 11 o’clock at night. We’d go to dinner and a movie, and then he’d leave and go on for part two of his evening without me. Where did he go? What did he do? Who did he meet? That curiosity birthed the Richmond Music Journal, so now I had a reason to see Joe America for myself, without a date. I was a reporter.

This band took me to venues I had never been to before, and never went to again, like the Bus Stop in Shockoe Slip and Cimarron Rose on Midlothian Turnpike, a steakhouse famous for its superdelicious cinnamon buns. There’s a Walgreen’s now on Buford and Midlothian where this place was. I loved their cassette, “What World?” and knew all the songs by the time I first saw them, so their originals were as familiar as covers to me.

The band was Chris Douthit, JJ Loehr, Keith MacPhee, Chip Farnsworth and Merewyn, a background vocalist. The other background vocalist, Chuck, had been promoted to “management” and their soundman, Flash, had gone on tour with Reba McEntire, so now they had Bill Murray on sound and lights. It was the first big operation outfit I encountered. (Small World aside: MacPhee had been in Single Bullet Theory, too. Loehr had traveled with Bell as an opening act when Bell was in Ten Ten and had been in a band with Frank.)

Even before 9/11, Joe America stood for patriotism. “We’re watching CNN, a lot of political debates, we’re thinking about racism, looking at both sides of things. We’ve got the best of everything in America and we should be praising that. That’s Joe America. We go after things harder. We can stand in the face of all kinds of things. America is still a place where if you try, and work hard, it’s going to come true for you.”

Their song “Bad Days” was a tribute to people who fought in Desert Storm.

They had talent, equipment, great songs, enough covers to placate the bookers, a great PA, lights, and touring truck, but there was mysterious “bad blood going around town with the clubs…if you get on the wrong side of people in this town, it really hurts, and we’ve made the mistake of trying to expose ourselves at some wrong times.”

What?

“Where we belong is having the Dave Matthews Band open for us. We have values, we’re straight with people; we’re upfront; we don’t tell lies. That’s the greatest thing about our band. We’re trying to work through the music scene in Richmond, but there’s a whole lot of schmucky people.”

Douthit was proud of the fact their songs varied. “You check the Beatles out. Every song doesn’t sound the same. But you go down to hear Fulflej, the Pleasure Astros, every song is the same, even the same lyrics. These kids have one good idea and they do it every time on every song. We do acoustic, electric, go over the edge, overdrive, but we keep it dynamic.”

The real reason their songs sounded different was they had three very distinct songwriters, MacPhee, Loehr and Douthit, bringing in material. I especially liked Loehr's "Think About a Song" and "Every Little Danger." I still have a version of the latter on my iTunes. "Guardian Angel" and "Lies" were my MacPhee favorites.

Soon enough, they dissolved. Time passed. When MacPhee formed a new band with Keith Clarke called Grumbledog, I got a call from Clarke to come out to see them at Twisters. It was MacPhee’s Joe America songs again, interspersed with Clarke’s excellent pop tunes which sounded like radio-ready ‘90s hits. It was a good show, so I was ready to go see them again next time they called. They were going to be at the Sunset Grill. But they weren't a three piece anymore. They had a new drummer, Farnsworth from Joe America. And oh….they added a second guitar, Bobby Jorgenson. By the end of their set on the Sunset Grill’s outdoor stage, I had made up my mind. It took a couple more shows to bag him.

And that’s how we met. It only took three years and four bands. No woman who has ever asked to hear this story has made it to the end. They want to know an easier way to meet a guy. Or at least a quicker one.

Letters, We Get Letters

2007-11-01T13:02:00.000-04:00

Several months into the first year of the paper, the letters to the editor section was rocking, and it stayed rocking almost until the end of the paper’s run. We’d often have two full pages of them, and not made-up letters like Punchline or Brick, either.

This was accomplished by eliminating the biggest hurdle to writing letters to the editor: the writing part. This was before email became commonplace. You actually had to put a stamp on a letter back then. I got a second phone line and put an answering machine and a fax on it just for letters, comments, complaints, whatever, day or night, and that line often rang through the night. This was also more than a decade before the Richmond Times-Dispatch thought up the “Your 2 Cents” call-in line.

The fax line did okay, but the answering machine steadily produced pages of copy for the paper every issue. People called in from the clubs to shout their approval of whatever band they were watching…and this was also before cell phones were affordable, so they were calling from pay phones. Someone regularly called from the Village pay phone to complain about the local music scene. Guys called post-coitus from bed and put their husky-voice girlfriends on the line to comment. Mostly they called to complain about the paper, complain about the music scene, complain about local radio, and promote themselves.

“It’s weird to me that you guys are trying to promote local music, yet every issue is about what you guys did every night at a club. There’s more than three or four ways of looking at the scene here in town.”

But I only had three or four writers.

“The jazz scene in Richmond is tired. Jazz is an emotional thing, and all these white guys in Richmond are trying to make it a technically academic, non-emotional thing, headwise great jazz, but heart-wise, no…All the same guys are still all the same guys. The ones who were popular 10 years ago and running the show are still doing it.”

Guess what, still all the same guys.

“We want to read more about the new bands. You could be using the ‘Lyrics and Deep Thoughts’ page for more band interviews. Just do band interviews and record reviews.”

There is nothing duller than a band interview. It is essentially the same story over and over. Guys meet. Form a band. Think they have lightning in a bottle or a different sound. Want to get discovered. Gigging for dollars in crappy bars to small crowds of indifferent beer drinkers watching sports on the TV right over the band’s heads. Van keeps breaking down. Drummers keep quitting. Get money together to finally record debut album. Recording process is so acrimonious, band breaks up when the album is finished. The two guys most serious about the music, usually the ones who wrote the songs, form a new band. Process starts over.

Then for a few lucky ones, they actually do get signed by an offshoot of a major label, or even a major label. Record producer makes them change their sound to something more like what is currently popular. The songs that got them noticed are homogenized until they sound derivative and overproduced. The band is sent out on some grueling tours with little marketing support for the tour or the album. Label doesn’t pick up their option. They come home, sometimes broke and with nothing to fall back on, sometimes with just enough money to buy a house, start their wife in a business, or open a recording studio.

I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened to Fighting Gravity, Agents of Good Roots or The Ernies, but I do know their shows and their self-produced music sounded better than their label releases. I was especially disappointed in Agents. Their little cassette they sold at shows was terrific. Their label debut CD: barely recognizable as them.

“Nobody cares about bands like My Uncle’s Old Army Buddys and Useless Playboys. You should be writing about bands like King Sour, Kepone, Used Carlotta, Spike the Dog, Bucket and The Seymores. They’re all signing record contracts.”

Then there was Frog Legs, who found a way to do theater on my answering machine. With various members on different extension lines, they could record nonsensical improv in tandem.

“Well, I was riding the mechanical bull with the fly roper and the transcendental maggot when I was surprised to see the munificent cheerleader with the rose pink memorandum stapled to her forehead. Written in lipstick across that piece of paper was: ‘Pretty girls love Frog Legs.’”

This was before digital answering machines, when there was a tape I could remove and put into a tape player to transcribe. I couldn’t do that today. There’s email, but that isn’t as purely anonymous and impulsively liberating as voice messages left in the dead of night, and that anonymity gave birth to much creativity and safely vented the frustration from the local music community.

Bands We Shall Not Name

2007-10-01T21:08:00.001-04:00

Most of the bands we interviewed the first winter of the paper in ‘94 turned out to be problematic.

There was the band that won the Yamaha TicketMaster Flood Zone contest in 1993, but I doubt that meant anything, even at the time. I can’t think of many bands that benefited greatly from winning a battle of the bands type competition, which is why I disdain contests. Song contests, too. It’s just a mechanism for collecting entry fees.

Anyway, they came from Hampton Roads to play “aggressive alternative rock,” with one band member in Newport News, one in Colonial Heights, one in Chesterfield, and the practice space an abandoned house in Church Hill where they kept three cats. Poor cats are probably long dead now.

I had a writer who was into bondage sex, and apparently a guy in this band must have been, too, and there was an incident when he caught her being tied up by someone else and people were climbing up the sides of buildings like Spiderman, and breaking windows, and I received tearful phone calls in the middle of the night (from him, not her!) asking why, why, why. Hearts were breaking along with the windows. It was all very sad.

Then there was this other band that I thought was very good and I went to many of their shows. But they turned out not to be particularly nice guys. They got to the point where they couldn’t keep the electricity on in their Fan rental, so they lived in the dark and cold. The drummer borrowed money from my too trusting boyfriend (for drugs, not electricity!) and never paid it back, so I felt robbed. I have since tossed their cassette. I still see one of their most loyal fans downtown from time to time. He must work nearby. Every time I see him I want to kick him, even though he probably didn’t have much to do with the nastiness. I don’t think he recognizes me, thank goodness.

Then there was this folksy trio, who were mediocre music makers, but a few years later, the lone female in the trio wanted to write for the paper. She did a few things, but she wasn’t a particularly good writer, so I had to fix her articles, and she took offense at that because, it turned out, she considered herself a professional writer. She wrote porn on the Internet for money. She did not look the type.

So, during the winter of 1994, we interviewed two bands I can mention by name, Blotto Diablo and Useless Playboys, neither of which caused me trouble. One of the guys in Blotto Diablo actually made crowns and other dental work for a living, and he left for a better job in another state. I wasn’t a fan of their style of music, so I didn’t see them often. Useless Playboys was the house band at Scarlett’s, now Main Street Station, and did a big swing type show in the bar, which is now the entrance foyer to the train station. They were very entertaining, but I never felt comfortable in the room because it was a scene. Their fans liked to dress up in vintage swing era styles and it was like walking through a time tunnel. I, unfortunately, tended to dress more on the goth side, so I stuck out. Jonny Cecka was in Useless Playboys. He played an upright bass and sometimes would jump on the side of it. Always made a good photo.

Pump Down the Volume - 1994

2007-09-16T11:35:00.000-04:00

“John and I were working in his office and there was a record on the turntable and it was turned up LOUD. The director of the film walked in and asked John to turn down the music. I think only people in our generation know what the phrase ‘turn down the music’ represents. I saw the look that shot across his face. He walked over and turned up the volume twice as loud. In my opinion, if God is the kind of fellow I think he is, this one act alone should grant John automatic admission into Heaven.”
— Don Novello’s obituary for John Belushi, 1982

“Every sound person in Richmond is almost deaf.”
— Scott Burger in “Throttle,” on why the music’s so loud

Dateline 1994 - John Belushi would think some of the Richmond clubs are heaven. Good, bad or indifferent, things are certainly loud, and we have to ask, if it’s so loud to the point of being indistinguishable, is this what the bands really want? Not be heard as anything but a consistent homogenized roar that all sounds alike?

Nik Turner of Hawkwind had a full-page ad in Swill magazine promoting his Space Ritual ‘94 tour “featuring an amazing light show,” and there Richmond was on the sked, squeezed in as usual between Chapel Hill and Baltimore.

Cleopatra records had sent me the CD and their repugnant catalog. We had dutifully listened and heard a lot of undescribable (as opposed to indescribable) music from guys who were pretending like they were on spaceships or something. We could a) not go and always wonder if we missed something “amazing” or b) go and see something “amazing” or c) go and know for sure we didn’t miss anything “amazing,” so we went, and it was pretty amazing, all right.

A little after 10 p.m., we’re debating whether it’s too early to go in. We want to avoid the opening bands, but Twisters shows are starting later and later. “Nobody comes until after 11 p.m.,” majordomo Steve Douglas says, but there’s a line forming at the door so in order just to secure a good standing spot for after midnight, we are being forced to set up camp on the bleachers and risk band burn-out long before the exalted Nik Turner shows up.

Whoa, band burn-out is instantaneous. They have white-guy dreadlocks, nasty devil goatees, gazillion tattoos, and they look like that Muppet band that has Animal as the drummer. They buckle down in some stance like they’re holding back hell and do something to the very bottom of the top guitar string that creates just a tremendous roar. The lead singer, who looks like an evil troll, is screaming. This goes on non-stop for an hour. Between songs, while sampled “War of the Worlds” type chatter plays on the PA, they turn their backs to the audience and light lots of cigarettes, pass them back and forth, and guzzle beer which is lined up on top of all the amps.

I don’t know who this is. They look like Sleep from San Francisco, rude, crude and multi-tattooed, but they don’t sound like the CD I have at home, so I turn to this blondie blonde guy on the bleachers next to me, and yell at him, “WHO’S THIS BAND?,” giving him a free ear blow in the process.

“THE FIRST ONE,” he says.

Aha ha ha. Wise ass.

Turns out it’s Buzzoven, or Buzzov•en as they prefer. Buzzov•en would have done a good job accompanying the Los Angeles earthquake. It sounded like the ground beneath Twisters was going to open up and suck us all down into a spiral of steaming lava. Equipment breakdowns did nothing to deter the roar. Douglas just swarmed around the rafters and over the amps like a monkey in a baseball cap, gluing, sticking, plugging, and screwing things back together. When the band finished, he swept up the broken glass.

The bill was attracting an almost exclusively male crowd, Richmond’s entire underground science fiction contingent, all these guys who spend their lives in their rooms reading comic books and look like Mr. Potato Head as rendered by Salvador Dali. It was a relief to see semi-normal Don’t Call Me Jimmeeee. We could send Don’t Call Me Jimmeeee on forays to the bar to get beer without losing our camp site on the top bleacher, although he was subsequently put on Twisters house arrest for drawing a picture of the United Nations logo on the men’s room wall.

The band Sleep came on next, and once again there is an hour’s worth of roaring from hell. Anne, who’s supposed to be covering this band for the Journal but has been rendered inoperative because she’s on a date, says, “this is better than a vibrator,” as a sonic buzz saw sound slams the air. We sit down on the bleachers to experience it properly. It is like a vibrator. Film from a moon landing plays on a screen behind them. The guitar player is wearing only red sweat pants and he has no shoulders, no chest, no hips, and the sweat pants are creeping lower and lower. There’s a tattoo on his tail bone.

“WHERE ARE THEY FROM?” Don’t Call Me Jimmeeee yells in my ear. I write on my pad, “San Francisco.” He yells back do I like them? I write back, “We’re waiting for his pants to fall down.” Kami has the camera ready to go for the moon shot but it doesn’t happen. The crowd on the floor is dense and bobbing. After Sleep comes off stage, Red Pants is standing right in front of us talking to somebody. Don’t Call me Jimmee is holding Kami’s camera looking for motor speed or F-stops or something and we go into a panic to get it back because suddenly WE HAVE CRACK! Red Pants’ drawers have now slipped to appliance repairman level right in front of our faces and we can’t get Don’t Call Me Jimmee’s attention to hand the camera back. We’re hysterical. Kami finally rips it out of his hands, but by this time Red Pants has wrapped a shirt around his mostly bare ass. No posterior is caught for posterity.

Now it’s finally time for Nik Turner and as if some walkee-talkee communication is going on, the last crew of sci-fi heads come in at exactly the right moment for the headliner, accompanied by the extraordinarily dapper looking Buzzy Lawler. We swoon. It’s 12:40 a.m. How he’d know exactly what time to come? How do you compute these things?

The “amazing light show” is floating green blobs on the wall. I’ve seen this done better in little psychedelic bars back in the Sixties where some hippie sat in a booth and dripped food coloring on glass slides and held them up in front of a projector. There’s a white strobe light flashing which is always a cool effect, and a fog machine, but where’s Nik Turner?

And who’s this guy trying to fight his way through the crowd wearing weird goggles and a bicycle racing helmet with flashing lights on it, shaking two phone-book sized maraca things? The crowd doesn’t let him through. Goofs dressed like this are so common on Grace Street, it takes awhile for people to realize this is the star of the show! Let him through!

The star is wearing black long winter underwear with electric blue lights imbedded in them. He has an old man’s body, skinny, narrow, emaciated shoulders, flaccid thighs, and a little, low hanging, poochy stomach. But his helmet and goggles and weird mechanical voice and hand movements have a certain erotic style and so we have a show.

Don’t Call Me Jimmee is howling, “They all expected Hawkwind playing with Motorhead and what they’re getting is Devo!” He thinks this is a hoot. We are fairly entertained, but it would have been better earlier without two hours of head-exploding opening acts. Kami says the lighting for a photo is hopeless and has gone; Anne has moved to another venue; Don’t Call Me Jimmee is now formally under Twister house arrest for graffiti crime; Buzzy has disappeared; I’ve had too many beers, too many Camels, and feel like my head’s been banged against the wall too many times. At 1:45 a.m., at a point I estimated was two-thirds through Turner’s set, I surrender, hoping whatever truly “amazing” thing about the light show didn’t happen after I left. (Later I hear Turner played until 3:45 a.m., another two hours! Is this possible?!)

Just as I’m pulling away, I see the delectable Dirtball drummer Peter Headley coming down the street. His timing is even better than the sci-fi heads. Come at the end of the last set, see the finale and pay no cover. Some people have got the knack of this down. Well, damn.

All the way home I hear crickets. Something has happened to my hearing. Inside my apartment I hear crickets. Even though I live in the city, crickets roar in my head all night. Fortunately crickets is not a bad noise to sleep to. Next morning I hear crickets. All day long I hear crickets. I call Anne that evening and Anne’s hearing crickets. Everyone who was at the show is hearing crickets. We now live in an invisible cricket-filled sci-fi environment. Maybe this is the amazing thing that happens on the Space Ritual ‘94 tour.

YOU WILL HEAR CRICKETS FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Epilogue 2007: This was the beginning of why you have to yell at me now if you want me to hear you.

They Hated Us

2007-08-23T19:43:00.002-04:00

From the very beginning, we were hated. Our slogan was, "Everybody hates us. Everybody reads us." In chronological order, the Hate Parade:

1. The first to hate us was the club managers in the Grace Street corridor. We started to go see bands playing in Shockoe Bottom. That pissed them off. One pulled his ad. The only real music was at Twisters, Hole in the Wall, and the Metro. The Bottom was cover bands and frat boys. I was a traitor. Right off the bat.

2. We gave the Richmond Music Cooperative CD so-so reviews, so they hated us. They were the "cool" people, too, so that was deadly. We were the only exclusively local music newspaper and didn't treat the RMC like the second coming.

3. We liked the Vapor Rhinos. So everyone who hated the Vapor Rhinos hated us. The Vapor Rhinos were bad because they weren't serious about the music. (But that's what we liked.) One guy, an acoustic folk musician, gave us fits about this. Then he had a sex change operation. Really.

4. The guys who took writing about music seriously hated us because my writers were mostly female and they wrote more about the social life of the scene and the desirability of the musicians, rather than the music -- the art of music! These serious writer guys venomously aired their hatred of us in the articles they wrote for other publications, often with very nasty and cruel comments about our physical unattractiveness. During the latter half of the RMJ’s print years, I had all male writers who strove to be serious, so the disdain subsided. I still think the paper was more amusing when it was a tongue-in-cheek Tiger Beat.

5. The waitresses at Marvin’s hated us. Marvin’s on Laurel Street across from the Hole in the Wall, was like the communal living room for Oregon Hill. The waitresses there were the lovers and mother-figures of choice for the musicians who sat in there all night every night. Marvin's waitresses brought them beer and food, and cleaned up after them. What more can you want in a woman? The waitresses didn’t like the girl reporters from the Journal invading their turf.

(The cool thing about Marvin’s was within minutes after someone famous died, photos of that person would be plastered all over the restaurant. Also, if someone well-known was in Playboy, they had a copy on the counter you could borrow so you could see the famous naked woman without having to buy the issue. Yes, I mean you, Tonya Harding.)

Anyway, I was an interloper and never received a warm welcome at Marvin’s. In fact, I suspect many of the middle-of-the-night anonymous hate calls came from Marvin’s waitresses accusing me of being sexually frustrated and desperate for a man. One of the more colorful attacks said I dressed in “Garanimals” clothes, a high-waisted style favored by toddlers. That was actually true.

6. Then the guys mismanaging the Flood Zone and whichever radio station was The Buzz hated us. I won't go into it in detail here. It was the whole GWAR nudity, ABC Board deal, which was more about the Flood Zone's ABC violations regarding signage and selling, but the publicity about GWAR was in the forefront in the media. Both GWAR and the RMJ spent big money on lawyers so we wouldn't have to testify against the Flood Zone, but the case was settled in the hallway, and the Flood Zone guys still couldn't make a financial go of it. The undeserved blame clung to us like skunk funk for years. The ABC enforcer tried to shake my hand when it was all over, after attempting to kick in my front door with her foot just weeks earlier, but I was having none of it. She cost me $500 for nothing. My lawyer didn't even get to speak.

7. Local radio hated us anyway because our readers were always writing in about how much they hated local radio. Getting an ad from a radio station was next to impossible.

8. People who hated Frog Legs hated us because we liked Frog Legs. It was another case of the men don't know, but the little girls understand. The guys did have to give props to Tom Illmensee's guitar skills, though. There was a respectful hush when he soloed.

9. Like the Richmond Music Cooperative before them, we gave so-so reviews to all the CDs of the Floating Folk Festival, so some members of that group hated us. One guy's hatred was so far-reaching and intense, I think I could have actually sued for malicious libel and won. But he also hated Wal-Mart.

10. The Metro hated us. After the Flood Zone/Gwar show incident, they didn't want to admit me to shows anymore. I was detained and sent packing every time by those Arabian brothers and their army of gigantic bald bouncers. Guest list? Your name is not on the guest list. That's your name? No, it's not. Not on guest list. No guest list for you. They thought I was a double agent for the ABC Board, or if any of my photos of Metro shows got published, they'd get shut down. Maybe so. There were holes in the floor upstairs big enough to see downstairs. You don't want to hear about the bathroom.

11. Cracker, David Lowery and Sound of Music hated us. I actually liked that band and bought two of their albums, but Lowery didn't like a review I wrote of a Flood Zone show. (I liked that show. What's better than Sweet Thistle Pie or Nothing to Believe In?) He was insulted because he thought we wrote he wasn't doing anything to help the local scene. What we actually wrote was none of the bands he championed were successful. It seemed at the time Dave Matthews' management team was doing more to launch Charlottesville musicians, but looking back now, all the ones he championed fizzled out, too. Remember those solo girl acts who were going to be the next big thing?

12. Then, surprise, Frog Legs got management and now they hated us. Frankly, I thought the CD they did was not good and the girls who worked at East Coast Entertainment told me the feedback from the frat houses was not good. They were not a frat band. They were getting bad career guidance. We said so and got hated for it. The Bone Anchor Website remembers the tours as a good time, but then the next entry has the band dissolving. (We don't even get a mention for booking that weekly gig at Moondance for them in the first place. That wasn't easy. We had to chase Chuck Wrenn through the Farmers' Market when he was loopy to get him to give us Tuesday nights and then call everyone we knew and beg them to show up the first few Tuesdays until the word of mouth got going.)

13. People who hated Peter Bell (Ten Ten) hated us. We gave him a platform to express his views. Some of his music reviews may have been tainted by his disdain for the players, but they were colorful. Our gigantic interview with him, which ran over several issues, was very well-read and talked about, even by the people who insisted it was all lies.

14. One of Peter's pet targets was a large and financially lucrative cover band Spectrum. In fact, none of our writers liked that band much, so Spectrum hated us and we got a rep for being hostile to cover bands. (They're actually good. They just didn't appeal to my pieced tongue writers.)

15. S0 cover bands hated us. The Fredds hated us. BS&M hated us. And they were the only ones who had money to buy ads! We're screwed! And the truth is, I'd actually rather hear a good cover band.

I forget who hated us towards the end. There's this one guy who sent some super vicious emails just recently (and the old, ugly and fat slams were there, and this guy isn't even a Serious Writer Guy!) because I didn't write something about him on the Website, but I just never answered back. I don't care. I used to let everyone have a say. I printed all the hate mail. Now I don't. But I recently found a 2000 interview I did with Scott Mills about the first eight years of the Journal, and we talked about everyone who hated me. It brought back these fun memories I'm retelling here. Being hated is not so bad. At least people were talking about the paper!

(Overnight, a very small, grainy photo of a topless Tonya Harding mysteriously disappeared from this entry! Apparently there are people whose job it is to search and delete those things through the night. Where do I apply for that job? Anyway, I have substituted a more clothed photo. Then a week later, I noticed our famous cover photo of a Gwar phallus being patted by many hands also disappeared. I think you can still see it and other Gwar photos if you take the link, but this is very mysterious. Even the Frog Legs photo was censored. It was just a band photo. Everyone was wearing clothes. Why would it get flagged? Are frog's legs obscene?

Still, I guess it's a good thing that blogspot is not full of porn, even though my stuff was "art.")

Scarien Nation Now Be One

2007-08-10T12:12:00.001-04:00

In 1993, I discovered The Scariens through The Weakley Whirl Knews. I was in awe of this free distribution paper because it had no real ads in it and they published more copies than I did. I had to raise at least $500 a month in advertising to print 2,000 copies and they were distributing 5,000. To quote the Sundance Kid, who are these guys?

They were guys with day jobs (i.e., some money). Two of them worked for the City of Richmond’s recreation department, and The Weakley Whirl Knews did more than just promote the Scarien philosophy, it also took satirical jabs at the City administration, especially 2Bob, their name for then City Manager Robert Bobb.
But who they really are is not important here.

This is how I found them.

Mad Dog and Chuck Wrenn operated the Rockline. You called the Rockline number and heard a recording of Mad Dog and Chuck reading a list of what band was playing where that week, along with some jokes. Mad Dog worked out of a little office in Scott’s Addition, promoting bands, writing screenplays, inventing gag gifts, doing voiceovers and commercials. He did weekend gigs as a local DJ on various stations. We both had fax machines (uncommon and expensive back then...they used thermal paper rolls!), and since I’m shy, I preferred faxing people to calling them. He was always in and always faxed back right away, so he was a valuable asset. He clued me in on the Scariens. He said it was a father and son band. Not too many like that around.

I found them at Twisters, playing a show that began at midnight with an onstage haircut. The cutter was Angie, a girl I would have more dealings with three years in the future when she was living in a rented cubicle in an art space and would come to my Carytown apartment to use my shower. She looked like the offspring of Cher and Jeff Beck and she was everywhere on the scene for many years. For someone who seemed constantly on the brink of homelessness, she always looked dramatically fabulous. (Another story for another day.)

The Scariens’ lead singer, “Huk L. Bury,” wearing a fire engine red suit, told the audience Angie’s subject was “having the evil cut out of his hair.” The Scariens had a loyal following that I described then as “people who needed to be accompanied by Big Nurse.” Later, after I became one of The Scariens’ loyal following myself, I would get to know these people, and a more adorable motley crew you couldn’t ask for. One guy, I recall, got hit by a car while bicycling across the Lee Bridge and was out for a long time. I'm still scared of the Lee Bridge.

The Scariens’ act was, in short, a hocus pocus collage of lyrics from one song sang over the music of another, new lyrics laced into familiar songs, and medleys that went everywhere. “Bury” told me all songs basically have the same chords, so all are interchangeable. (You can extend that philosophy to politics as well.) Costumes were a mix of Middle Eastern garb meets Las Vegas, with what looked like props from old magic shows spinning around the stage. (I always preferred bands with a show. There was more to write about if you knew nothing about music, which I didn’t.)

At a Bidder’s Suite (used to be in a basement on the 900 block of E. Grace St.) acoustic Scariens show, I met a Scarien relative, Anne Thomas Soffee, whose knowledge of the past and present music scene would be endlessly helpful and sometimes she could even be persuaded to write something for the Journal when you could get her away from the Useless Playboys shows. Some of our adventures in the mid-90s would find their way into her bellydancing memoir, Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love. There was even talk of a movie.

The Scariens knew how to work the media. Not only did they have their own newspaper, they got on the Internet early and there are remnants of them everywhere. They also videotaped performances and got them on public access television on constant rotation, so in future issues of the Journal, I had letter-writers complaining about the onslaught of Scarien concert footage on their TVs. And this was long before YouTube. (I’m surprised I can’t find any Scariens on YouTube now.)

Earlier this year (2007), “Kareem Awheet,” the Scarien drummer, died. Conquering yet another new wave of communication, the band lives on at MySpace.

See also Scarien bozo bucks. I have yet to get one, so I guess this movement didn't catch on.

December 1993

2007-08-09T14:42:00.000-04:00

By the second issue of the Journal in December 1993, I was hearing about more bands beyond the few I had encountered at the August 1993 Carytown Watermelon Festival and built my first issue around.

I heard from The Waking Hours – who are still struggling to make it in Los Angeles 14 years later – The Petals, Liberation, Mike Edwards and the Banned, Kyle Davis, Useless Playboys, (this video says it's from winter '94), Shadowvine, Ululating Mummies, No Small Feet (still using the publicity photo my first husband took 15 years ago), Frog Legs, Bio Ritmo, Kepone, The Seymores, Hegoat, Pleasure Astro, The Good Guys, Mick and the Moondogs, Scariens, Coral, Sketch, and the Dumm-Dumms.

The Seymores were considered the best bet for fame and fortune, despite the efforts of Twisters manager Steve Douglas to push Pleasure Astro, his girlfriend’s mostly girl band. The pair would be future major players in Plan 9’s Planetary Records label. Like the Local Music Store, it was another flawed business plan that provided employment for a variety of local music scene characters, without regard to business saavy.

I last saw Steve a few years ago, out on Grace Street where he had moved after leaving his family in Oregon Hill. He was going to Florida and before he left town, he wanted to write a shocking expose of his experiences in the Richmond music scene, but he never did. Some bridges are better left unburned, especially if you might come back.

Over the years, he had some strong opinions about what I was doing wrong with the Journal and when I didn’t comply, he’d withdraw advertising support if he was in a position to do so; hence, our relationship was terse. His vision was that the paper was supposed to be supportive to a fault of the local music scene. We tended to find fault. Douglas later put his support behind exactly that kind of newspaper, and it failed within a few months. I can’t remember the name of it but it was financed by members of Mr. Pink, a band I first enjoyed but then had to boycott because of their invasion onto my fragile advertising turf.

(Mr. Pink, not coincidentally, was signed to the Planetary label. Like so much of the Richmond scene, it was all interconnected and who-you-know, which doesn't always work out well. Sometimes you need who-knows-how instead of who-you-know.)

It’s hard to get out of my head some of the colorful and grimy stories of Steve’s exploits told to me by other guys. Even if they didn’t admire Steve’s music or business practices, they all took their hat off to his equipment, the punchline of many a Steve anecdote. There’s the "on the floor in Twisters in front of everybody" story with a well-known band groupie – who actually has a really good job now – and the "pull it out and whop it on the table" story, etc.

The Seymores, fronted by David Fera, scorned the local music press as beneath them. I knew they were a serious band because they had 8x10 glossies. They were meant for greater things, although their courtship with fame never resulted in marriage. They were signed by two labels, Vernon Yard and then David Lowery’s Pitch a Tent.

Remnants of The Seymores still float on the Internet, with the same publicity photo from 14 years ago, promoting the same three albums I remember, including the wonderfully titled “Treat Her Like a Show Cat.”

In October 2005, the Independent Weekly out of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill reported Fera was still an “almost famous musician.” His new band was the New Orleans-based Big Blue Marble, and there's plenty about that band on the Internet if you want to catch up with David. (photo)

Our First Band Interviews in Nov. 1993

2007-07-31T16:09:00.000-04:00

The first three band interviews were Big City, Dirtball, and The Trouble with Larry. Dirtball had a professional looking, 8x10 black and white photo. Big City had a snapshot. The Larry guys, who lived in a sprawling Fan apartment with cats, had a professional looking CD.

Big City was Billy Ray Hatley, Velpo Robertson, Audie Stanley, Mark Szafranski, Mike Edwards and soundman Karl Erickkson.

Hatley is with Billy Ray Hatley and the Showdogs now. Szafranski still owns Metro Sound Company, and it’s still downtown. He moved from a small store on the northside of Broad across the street to a bigger space. He was consistently the most annoying full page advertiser I had to deal with because he always had to be persuaded, and was very particular about the ad. The deal was never done; it was a constant negotiation.

Big City, which was formed in 1987, was the house band at the Bus Stop in Shockoe Slip for almost three years. They recorded a CD, “Big City Live: Kissed by the Gods” at the Flood Zone, when the club had a recording studio upstairs. Their goal was to be on “Saturday Night Live.” It didn’t happen.

“If you want to work in this town, you have to do covers. We do whatever it takes because we’re old guys,” said Hatley.

Dirtball was Wes Freed, Neal Furgurson, Jim Garthoff, Peter Headley, Kirk Henderson, Jeff Liverman, John Mosher, Mike Rodriguez, Paul Watson and soundman Curt Blankenship.

You can see Freed now on TV commercials for a car junkyard. Headley still lives in the same house on Cary Street, now surrounded by pricey renovations. I went to a party at that house once when there were no interior walls, except for around his bedroom. He nailed the door of his bedroom shut to keep partygoers out. The bathroom was lined with blankets, but you could see down inside it from the staircase. You could see the lower floor from holes in the upper floor. Outside in the backyard was the car that had brought Headley to town. It was one big planter. I hear the house is superdeluxe now, although you can't really tell from the outside.

Dirtball was a relatively new band playing “hillbilly soul.” Their biggest problem, they said, was “Peter’s toilet doesn’t flush and we practice in his house.” Freed would travel through a few more bands with relatively the same sound during the next 15 years.

The Trouble with Larry (scroll to the bottom of article at link) was Richard Sarvay, Mark Abba, and Kathy Jones --who would soon leave the band -- and a drum machine. For awhile, toward the end, they actually had a drummer. Finding local welcoming stages for their “art punk” style of music was a neverending problem, although they could and did play out of town. (The interview was written by Rebecca Edwards, who probably never wrote for me again because I don't remember her.) They were one of the few bands still advertising towards the end of the Journal's print run, although with dark and scary ads featuring two-headed calves.

Their CD had Easter Island style heads on it, and we determined it was cursed. Something bad happened to everyone who had it to review.

“Being self-taught hinders you because you don’t know the rules and you come across stuff in a torturous manner, but on the other hand, you’re not bound by the rules,” said Sarvay in ’93.

I suspect Richard is now selling music and comic memorabilia on eBay out of Bumpass under the name hillbilly_behemoth. I say that because Hillbilly's store is Good Kitty Collectibles, and Richard's music company was called Good Kitty, too.

1993 Quotes and Updates

2007-07-31T11:49:00.000-04:00

Plagiarism in music is what they call the folk process.

-- Arlo Guthrie said this during a concert at the Flood Zone

It was a great show, and my first. The audience sat in rows of chairs.

After 75 days, no one remembers.

-- Japanese saying

This is what I advise everyone who thinks their personal problem is the end of their world. Just about everything blows over.

Reasons not to be in a band: One is likely to acquire a slight ringing in one’s ears. One hears about money a great deal but rarely sees any. There are fans who can be a problem, or there are no fans, an even bigger problem.

-- Thomas Beller in The New Yorker

My design for the Journal was heavily influenced by The New Yorker, a magazine I love to subscribe to when I have money. All those shows I stood in front of the amps because that was the best place to take a picture, I'm paying for it now. I can't seem to filter out background noise anymore, so I don't hear the TV if the dishwasher or air conditioner is running. I can't hear people talking to me in restaurants.

The one time I feel confident and comfortable is when I’m playing a show. I’ve made this little world for myself and that’s the one place where I can really be strong. I’m in control and I can say things that I don’t regret because it’s all been planned out. Nobody can interrupt me because I have the stage. It’s a way to communicate with people without really having to talk to them. Just because I’m lonely and I want to communicate doesn’t necessarily mean I like people.

-- Juliana Hatfield

Remember her? Probably not. This works for writing, too. I can communicate without having to actually be with people. I have never liked talking on the phone. I feel like a hostage. When I first starting doing the paper, a lot of men called me and would talk for hours. I was like a sounding board for a couple of dozen guys, married, single, usually older than younger. It’d start out being about music, then it would be about life in general. Maybe it was because I was home during the day and many of these guys were, too, playing househusband while their wife worked and doing music at night and weekends. I heard a lot of stories about the local groupies and bad girls. After my boyfriend moved in and I started working during the day, the calls stopped.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income, half the possibilities of life are shut off. You hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.

-- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915

Songwriters write their best songs before they become rich and famous. It’s hard to relate to your audience when you’re no longer living their lifestyle. I think Maugham is wrong. My husband wrote a half-dozen songs when he was in his 20s and he hasn't written anything since. What does he have to feel passionately about these days? I'll Take the Garbage Out When I'm Ready (Back Off Woman)

There can’t be any thought process when you’re playing if you want to get close to music.

-- Charlie Haden

What makes the difference between a great musician and a mediocre one is what’s played between the notes: the feeling you give the silences as well as the sounds.

-- John Densmore, The Doors

You are the worst audience in the world. You very rarely look at me, you never applaud, and you don’t look like you’re having any fun whatsoever.

-- an acoustic performer about me

This guy, who was sort of a friend because I met him before I started writing about music, was confused. I wasn’t at his show to encourage him or be a girlie fan. I was there to write about his show, and the room he was playing. I wasn’t there to have fun. I was working.

The Bottom was better when it was just dilapidated old buildings and everybody was afraid to go there.

-- an anonymous musician quoted in a 1993 Times-Dispatch article.

The most threatening places are the white, middle-class places where a lot of athletes go. That’s where the fights are. They seem to be the most volatile of people – the highest level of testosterone and the lowest level of intellect.

-- John Fralin of the Swingaderos on bar brawling, 1993

Remember around this time, a family took their mom out for her birthday to a show at Scarlett’s, which was on the first floor of what is again Main Street Station, and they were asked to leave for being rowdy, and there was a shoot-out with security on the front steps and people died.

Historical Records

2007-07-25T15:45:00.001-04:00

Much to my amazement, the VCU library said they had all but six of the printed copies of the Richmond Music Journal. Since I did 12 a year from 1993 to early into 2005, that’s a lot of issues.

I was able to quickly supply electronic copies of three of the newer ones they were missing, and the other three I took to the Library of Virginia where they promise (I hope) not to lose them while they make microfilm copies of them for the VCU library.

While I was waiting for them to come get my precious papers, I paged through them. One of them, June 1997, claimed to be the biggest Journal ever. It was 40 pages, and so full of ads, it was unbelievable. I think I actually did bigger papers a few times after that, but then there was a long and rapid decline. Still, I was just amazed at how good and comprehensive the paper was in its heyday of 1994-1999.

In September 1999, I went to work for the Mechanicsville Local, which was a dream come true because my ambition in life since childhood was to work for a small community newspaper. I put out a weekly paper of 36 to 52 pages every Monday, and except for a sportswriter who did about 10 of the back pages, I wrote the whole thing.

I covered Mechanicsville and Hanover government with the same controversial intensity with which I covered local music in the ‘90s and managed to piss off a few readers and advertisers, just like I did on the Journal. The publisher, a woman from West Virginia with an accounting background and no journalism experience at all, wanted a shopper, an inoffensive paper that just raked in the advertising dollars and never generated any controversy, so after two years I was given the boot. Two-thirds of the rest of the staff soon followed me out the door after the paper was bought and sold repeatedly, and finally was eaten alive by Media General, the publishers of the evolving Times-Dispatch. Sigh. It was fun while it lasted, just like the Journal was.

In a fit of disillusionment, I tossed my more than 120 Locals, but I held on to the Journals. I’m glad Ray Bonis at VCU did, too. All those crazy stories and interviews and photographs of more than a decade of the local music scene will survive. I like to think that was the last good decade of local music, but old-timers always tell me it was the ‘70s, or maybe the ‘80s, or the time when the drinking age was still 18.

The other, obvious, thing I learned was it's better to own your own little paper and work for yourself. You won't make any money, but you'll have more control. And anyway, I found out after I left, the Local paid me nearly $10,000 a year less than they had the men who did the same job before me.

I'm Not There

2007-06-24T19:50:00.000-04:00

I often curse the day my husband got his PA. He claimed he was going to make money running sound for other bands and it would pay for itself. It would also provide him with band security, because he'd be the one with the PA, harder to kick out of the band.

So, for years, an entire room in the apartment became the storage room for the PA, then a room in the house. One of the cars always has to be big enough to haul the PA. And it never really pays for itself because things break, things have to be replaced, bands that make money buy their own PA, and bands that don't make money don't want to pay anything reasonable for PA. So you end up just being the guy in your own band that always brings the PA.

And if you're the girl dating the guy in the band that brings the PA, and you ride with him, then you're there two hours before the gig starts and at least an hour after it's over. It's a long night. In the last few years, there's been few paying jobs and more no pay jobs running sound for friends' parties.

Musician parties are tantamount to Woodstockian events. Musicians know other musicians, so there's usually eight to 20 bands. These things start early in the afternoon and go into the wee hours because people just don't go home. They camp out. They drum circle. They sleep on the lawn. If you're bringing the PA, you go in at 11 a.m. to set up, and when the final band gives up at 1 or 2 in the morning, then there's another hour or two of amateurs, people who can't play, people who can't sing, people who are drunk, who want to take advantage of the live mic and live out a fantasy for awhile. If you're a nice guy like my husband, you don't pull the plug on them until everyone at the party is comatose.

In the beginning, when I was working on our relationship, or felt it needed to be supported, I would go to these ordeals, but I am notoriously and famously the Least Fun Person at Any Party. Now I don't go. I'm just not there. I fantasize about going to parties in a normal way, when things are well underway and then leaving before they get stupid. I fantasize about having a date for parties who actually hangs out with me, who isn't either chained to the PA for 15 hours or on stage himself. (Probably the key was to date someone who likes music, not someone who plays music.)

So my husband comes back from these things and says, "Everyone asked about you." He thinks they missed me. But I know, being the Least Fun Person at Any Party, that's not the case. I tell him, "They ask about me because they think we've broken up. They're just checking to see if there is any way possible we could still be together when you're always at these things alone." (Well, I suppose he's alone. I wouldn't know. I'm not there.)

My Long History with the Journal

2007-06-03T11:04:00.000-04:00

The Richmond Music Journal was hatched in the summer of 1993. From 1989 until then, I had worked on Night Moves, Richmond Along the James, Livewire, Focus, Oh!, and various other free distribution entertainment tabloids that collapsed within a year or two due to various mismanagements. Inevitably, more money was spent than made; no one ever wanted to do the dirty work of selling ads; the writers were never paid; the writers were never edited; no one knew anything about basic journalism; and too many copies were printed. At one paper, no one wanted to drive around town distributing the paper. The copies sat in the office!

So when the dust settled once again in ’93, I decided I would do a paper myself. To make it easier to sell ads, I would focus on a single topic. I had been a book, movie and restaurant reviewer at various times of my career, so the unlikeliest direction was music. Besides, I had a crush on a musician who had stopped seeing me, the now deceased Frank Daniel, and I thought this paper would peak his interest again.

It didn’t, but I met another musician and lived happily ever after anyway. (Or as happy as anyone gets.)

In case anyone ever wants to try to again, here's the secret. The paper was planned for three months before the premiere issue in November 1993. I sent out an information packet to every likely advertiser and was amazed to get 12 ads for the first issue. I put up $250 as a starter fund, and I originally had a partner who was also going to put up $250, but he didn’t, and that was the end of him. I never had to use my own money again, and over the years the paper paid for computer software and occasionally even paid the rent or a utility bill.

The short-lived partner wanted to call the paper Core. I opted for the Richmond Music Journal because it made short work of explaining what the paper was about. It would be a journal, a diary, of Richmond music. We would not do “pre-shows,” which are interviews with bands before they come to town. That, I’ve always felt and still believe, is the purpose of advertising. We would only review. That hurt us, advertising-wise, although it’s also been my experience that 1) if a band can get a pre-show article, they’re even less likely to buy an ad; and 2) bands won’t buy ads anyway. They’re always too broke, too business-stupid, or too arrogant.

I had two great influences when creating the Journal. The first was ex-Rolling Stone Bill Wyman’s book Stone Alone, in which he wrote about the little music newspapers in England and their popularity polls. He kept an eye on how he was doing in the Best Bass Player rankings. I would always have some kind of popularity poll, and I would focus on local music.

The second influence was the New Yorker magazine. The Journal layout and design was very similar, columns of straight text with only the occasional photo or cartoon, simple, readable and clean. The emphasis would be, like the New Yorker, on analytical commentary and review.

The quality of writing has not been consistent over the years since I’ve gone through dozens of writers—some better than others—but I seldom flat-out rejected anyone’s submission. With some editing, anything can be shaped into a readable piece that at least vaguely resembles analytical commentary. The articles I never got around to using were inevitably about a regional or national musician or band. I put the local material first, a practice I think would save the Richmond Times-Dispatch, but they refuse to believe it.

Having been a freelance writer for 20 years before starting the Journal, I know how frustrating it is, and I decided to try to publish everyone who submitted work. And I would pay them, even if it was just $5. And I did. Some writers have waived payment, which helped our bottom line, and I thank them for that. Some wrote for advertising credit. One band paid me in Mac software and that was a tremendous deal. Doing this paper taught me how to use QuarkXPress and Photoshop, and those skills enabled me to get progressively better paying day jobs.

Not only did I improve my marketable skills, I met my husband in 1996 through the paper. I missed meeting him in 1993 because I never got around to seeing the band Stiff Richard when it played the Metro. Copies of their CD came in and the paper reviewed them unfavorably. Around then I met Peter Bell, formerly of Ten Ten, who was eager to write and be written about. And when he formed the band October, he brought to my attention that one of his guitarists looked very much like Frank Daniel, the musician who had inspired me to launch the Journal. I went to a show at Jimmy Ryan’s and saw that he did, but he was also much too young for me. Journal reviewers consistently panned October so I kept a discreet distance, although I went to every show I could just to look.

Fast forward a year. I had met Keith MacPhee when he was in Joe America, and when he moved on to Grumbledog with Keith Clarke, they invited me to a show. The band was just a three-piece when I saw it at Twisters, but in the summer of 1996 when I saw them again at the Sunset Grill, they had added a guitar player, the same guy who used to be in October. With shorter hair and a goatee, he looked older. I dated him through Grumbledog, the great Thelma Shook, Bobby and Greg, the Colossal Eds and Mozo.

For a long period, he ran sound more than he played, especially a long standing regular gig with Whistler's Mother, but I'm sure that was frustrating for him not to be playing, and on a few colorful occasions, he was royally stiffed by young, arrogant, asshole little kid bands that didn't want to pay him after contracting his services and using him and I had to declare war against them in the Journal because I'm Italian and that's what we do. Sometimes it shook the money loose and sometimes it didn't.

And this became a problem, as far as the paper was concerned. My friends became his friends and band mates, and he brought new people into my circle, and all of them were musicians, and I realized I was now fatally compromised. It would be very difficult to maintain a peaceful relationship with him and his friends and bandmates and still write honest reviews of bands. Good reviews would be suspect. I continued to serve as publisher, editor and sole ad salesman for the Journal, but I stepped down for the most part as a writer. It got to the point we only went out to see his friends play, and then to the point we only went out when he was playing. The paper got smaller.

We were married in 2001, despite the 15-year age difference, and he went on to the CBJ with Cy Taggart and John Leedes, Harrison Deane Band, Us, B2B, and various smaller units that came and went quickly.

So, I have to say the Journal was good to me personally. It never became huge, but it also never collapsed into debt-ridden ruin like Pulp Radio, Punchline, and other similar papers that have come and gone. At its height, which was around 1995, the Journal was often as big as 48 pages. Summers were especially fruitful with full-page ads for big touring shows at the Landmark and Classic Amphitheatre.

I would normally go out four or five nights a week, hitting three to five clubs each night, seeing and photographing as many as 12 bands a night, and doing more than half the writing myself. Staying out until the bars closed was routine. One night I even got beat up and robbed in front of Main Street Station, my reward for being the last person in the Bottom on a Friday night after a Suzy Saxon and the Anglos show at Alley Katz.

It was easier when the clubs were clustered. There was a time when the Grace and Laurel corridor near VCU would have at least three live music clubs within walking distance. Then the Bottom opened up, and you could literally walk around one block and catch sets in five or more different clubs. West Main was a corridor of clubs for a short time, although you couldn’t visit them all easily without moving your car. They’ve gone more to restaurants now.

Live music spread into the suburbs. Parking is convenient and free, but you have to commit to one club. You can’t go elsewhere during the break and then come back without a lot of road tripping.

The other problem is burnout. Every band interview sounds so similar to every other band interview, you feel like a hamster in a wheel when you've been writing for even just a few years. There’s seldom anything new to write about the continuing struggle of bands to capture lightning in a bottle and get a record contract. When they succeed, it’s essentially the same story, and when they fail, it’s even more the same story. That’s why the paper always needed new writers who hear this story with new ears and write it up like it’s never been written before.

As the years passed, and I actually started getting day jobs, it was hard to go out even one night a week. The Journal continued, though, due to the faithfulness of a couple of writers, Walter Boelt and Robert Stutler, and advertisers who still supported it like the Boulevard Deli, A Major Music and Oasis Duplicating. Then the Boulevard Deli was gone.

I still enjoyed doing the calendar, the polls, and compiling the always interesting and funny letters and comments, so I gradually began moving the paper's content to the Internet, bit by bit. I was printing 1,000 copies of the paper, but getting up to 2,000 hits a month on the Website, so I began to suspect more people were reading it online. That was verified each month when I brought the paper around to the record and equipment stores and found too many old copies were still around. It was time to stop the print edition in the spring of 2005 after a few final bimonthly issues. I wasn’t sure until it was over when the last issue would be, so it was never announced in print. There was very little outcry, and not even a mention in the other papers that we had ceased, when the deaths of less successful papers had been reported.

Maybe that’s because we’re not really gone yet, but we’re certainly a shadow of our former selves. But the print edition ended without debt, in fact, with a little money left over. To me, and probably only me, it was a great success.

For the past year or so, I've been watching another paper, Brick, make all the classic mistakes, and struggle, even with the backing of Media General, and it shouldn't be this hard to do a good local paper. It is hard, but that's the trick, not taking the easy way out by using too much syndicated material. Local stories and many local photos are key. If you make your readership your stories, you have faithful readers, because we like to read about ourselves and people we know. Putting a town on the map for arts and music requires a very intensive coverage of the local arts and music trying to thrive. Otherwise, what's the point of a local paper?

Thelma Shook at Moondance April 1998

2007-04-15T23:16:00.000-04:00

This was recorded April 10, 1998 at the Beex show at Moondance. Thelma Shook was the middle band and decorated the stage as the deck of the Titanic with cannibalistic penquins all around the club. Most of the tape is obscured by people standing right in front of the camera, which no one was manning so it's a static shot. I managed to find three songs that allow a view of the band most of the time, "Losing My Direction," "Dog" and "Invisible Again" which should really be called "See Me Now." Dean Owen is a genius songwriter. The two known Thelma Shook CDs are even better.

Harrison Deane Band at Irish Festival

2007-03-24T22:07:00.000-04:00

"Money"
Irish Festival, Church Hill, March 24, 2007

Bobby Jorgenson is on vocals on this particular cover.

Case Studies

2006-12-09T19:03:00.000-05:00

The most enduring local bands do not necessarily have the greatest talent, but the greatest compatibility of temperament types. You can’t have a band with four charismatic leaders. There is a leader—often the person who felt the need for the band in the first place—and the others. No matter what they call themselves, they’re Giant Ego and the Yes Men, or Spotlight on Me and the Interchangeable Sidemen.

I suppose there are some musicians who put together bands because they enjoy playing music. Rather than ending with fireworks, they quietly peter out because the players can no longer find the time to practice or do the work involved in booking and performing. Or like Hootie and the Blowfish, they make their money, buy their houses, and retire early to play golf.

But more often there is always one person in the band who is the Problem, or as I like to call him, the Giant Asshole, the Ego from Hell, the Big Baby, the one who cannot comprehend that not everything is about him because, to him, it most surely is.

That’s why he’s in a band. For the attention-starved, it is necessary to stand in a spotlight and inflict your music on an indifferent audience and thus feel superior to those whose only talent is being the audience.

In one band I liked, three of the four enjoyed playing music, but all had day jobs. Music was a hobby. A record contract was a very distant dream, like winning the lottery.

The fourth was a full-blown Lost Boy in Neverland. He considered the band his full-time job, a luxury made possible by a girlfriend with a job. He did the booking, wrote many of the songs, fronted the band, got stinking drunk every show and fought with the bartenders. He complained endlessly that he had to do everything—the others never did anything—to advance the band. He was the hub and everything to do with the band revolved around him.

Then someone else in the band actually did something that advanced the band to the next level. You would think Mr. Hub would be happy. Instead, he fired the guy. When the dust settled, the psychology became clear. Hub’s need to be the catalyst of progress in the band was his only goal—more than having the band succeed. It was his excuse for never having to get a day job. Despite his complaints, if someone actually did anything to help the band, it diminished the band’s dependence on him. Thus, the band had to be destroyed.

Another band I enjoyed had two brilliant co-songwriters who could create genius together but not apart. The different bands they continually built around themselves were incidental.

The two couldn’t have been more different. One hated playing out and wanted to let demo records be the only road to the record deal. The other wanted the band to be lifted into stardom through playing out as much as possible and becoming a word of mouth sensation, much like the Dave Matthews Band did. To divert themselves from killing each other, they turned on their sidemen instead. They agreed–because they had to in order to stay together—that the problem was always the other guys, and they invented faults and dramas to continually break the bands up without ever dealing with each other.

Then there was the Giant Asshole who played in a regional touring band, but he wasn’t the frontman who got the attention and a bigger cut of the money. So he started his own band, but he still needed a guy who could do all the things he could not—sing, talk to the audience, and yet not appear to be the frontman, even though he clearly would be.

Giant Asshole determined where everyone stood on stage, the song choices, what nights they practiced, which songs would go onto the costly CD where his guitar tracks would be layered literally in the dozens. He even determined who was allowed to collect the money at the end of the night.

The only thing he couldn’t control was the tendency of the audience and the music press to focus on the guy who was singing. This is often a problem with guitar players and vocalists, whether it’s Jagger and Richards or Axl and Slash. Who represents the band? When the photograph in the paper shows only the vocalist, when the reporters tend to quote only the vocalist—the guitar-playing Giant Asshole wants to kill him. Like Eddie Van Halen, fire enough vocalists and you don’t have a band anymore.

Still Supporting Yoko and Heather

2006-11-24T17:36:00.000-05:00

I guess I am a sucker for anything Beatles because I've bought their music many times over now. First, I bought the original LPs as they came out over the years, as well as all the 45 rpms. And don't think it was easy saving up the $3.99 or whatever the albums cost back then. I even bought the 101 Strings versions of Beatle songs. When I lost all my books and records in a move in 1969, I had to buy all the LPs over again, adding McCartney's first solo album to the group. I never bought anything by Wings or any other Beatle after that, although I would keep acquiring the same body of work over and over.

I sold all my records to buy a crib when I was a young, broke, almost homeless mom, and a couple of decades later, Frank, the beloved, shocked to learn I no longer had a single Beatles album, gave me a set of cassettes with every single song on them. Then I got a CD player and gradually bought all the albums on CD, although they were the British releases. I bought the three anthology double disc CDs, and gradually sold them off on eBay because after one or two listens, I really don't need to own old, scratchy cover tunes from when they were starting out, or the rejected versions of songs, or BBC in studio versions. Then I bought the Beatles No. 1 hits CD. At this point, I really should be done. And yes, I have the Anthology on DVD, which I've watched a time or two. And the big book. What I liked the most about the Anthology video was the Shea Stadium scenes.

Over the years, I've bought DVDs with the Ed Sullivan shows, and the George Harrison tribute, watched them, and sold them on eBay. This was before Netflix. I don't collect anything that's John and Yoko, because she ruined him. She put him on a fatal pedestal. I can't look at him with her. I am still on Team Cynthia.

Then my third husband gave me the boxed set of the American albums on CD, which I didn't even want. I doubt I've listened to these even once, but I own them. Seeing the old album covers again, covers I had studied so intently as a teen, was odd feeling. I own a couple of CDs of bluegrass versions of Beatles songs, too. I like those because I love banjo. Last Christmas I bought the remix of "Let It Be," the way it was supposed to be before it was Phil Spectored. I think I listened to that twice. I like it better than the original "Let It Be."

Today, I bought the Cirque du Soleil mix "Love," put together by George Martin and his son, a mix of various Beatle tracks, all cooked and stirred into a big stew. The reviews for this album were all raves, but besides a much more lush sound, I didn't notice anything amazingly different about many of the songs. Remember the Scariens? It's like that, you hear the music to one song, but the lyrics to another, different combinations of songs lead in and out.

And what is my favorite song? Songs that never make it onto all these re-releases. I like the lesser known songs from "Help." I like "The Night Before" and "Another Girl." And my favorite 45 rpm was "I Feel Fine" with "She's a Woman" on the B side. They make me happy. When I hear those, I can literally taste my youth in my mouth. I can smell the memories of where I was and who I used to be, with everything still in front of me, with the possibility of a good life still...possible.

Happy Again

2006-11-04T15:39:00.000-05:00

It's the myspace.com phenom. Everyone has a page and so when the young die young, there's a mental photograph left behind. It collects clues to the mystery of life, and sometimes to the mystery of death, as in the case of Taylor Behl whose page linked her to her killer through their relationship as curious strangers intertwining in some bizarre, sick way.

I didn't go to Chris Williams' funeral because my husband arranged to go with friends so I wouldn't have to take off from work. I surfed over to his myspace page instead and picked up the last two entries. A week before he died, he posted to his fans that he had opted to "rejoin the fellows for our first official tour to promote the release of our upcoming DVD."

The post before that goes back four months to June. "I have been on a journey like no other the past couple of months. I have truly had to search deep within to find out who I am and what kind of person I want to be. Well, I figured it out. I want to be a man, a great husband eventually, a great father eventually, an amazing drummer, and most of all, a person that people enjoy being around. Hopefully my dad would be proud of the man that I am and the man I want to be! Happy again."

Happy again? So perhaps there was a crisis of identity, an unjoining with the band, that had been resolved briefly before the end. It reminded me of Frank, coming out of his second failed marriage, putting together what he perceived as his perfect band, finally getting the players he wanted, and then dying alone in the house. That's why I don't trust happiness. The journey like no other is always one of discomfort, pain, indecision, striving, trying, working hard, goals just out of reach. When you hit happy, it's like end game. I don't trust it.

The Drummer Dies

2006-10-29T19:01:00.000-05:00

The phone rang kind of early this morning before we were up, and my husband kept saying, "oh man, oh man," which made me think something had happened to my son, or my son had totaled my husband's truck, which he drives.

When he got off the phone, he said the drummer of The Fifteen, a band he plays with occasionally, had passed out Friday night and whoever was there couldn't wake him up. Even though he didn't know the guy real well, he was in a spin all day, trying to find out when the funeral was. Nobody was answering their cell phones. Then he mentioned the guy also played in the Pat McGee Band, so I googled Pat McGee, which sent me to a Wikipedia entry, which has already been updated.

Drummer Chris Williams past away peacefully in his home October 28th 2006.

So I Was High on the Hog Once

2006-10-23T19:53:00.000-04:00

I mentioned to my husband the other day that I had come under fire for never having attended a High on the Hog. "Yes, we did," he said.

We went the one year it was held on Mayo Island, the year Chuck made the brown "Southpork" T-shirts when each character in South Park looked like a pig. According to the shirt, the bill that year (1998) was Page Wilson & Reckless Abandon, Jim Dudley's Chez Roue, the Janet Martin Band, Car Bomb Inc. (one of my favorites), and Bobby Parker and the Blues Night Band.

My husband literally has a hundred T-shirts or more, and this is after we took out three garbage bags full of them several years ago. His whole life story is told in souvenir T-shirts. And someone else's life as well, because his mother always brings him back a shirt from her vacations, so he has shirts from places he's never been. But he only wears about 10 of them, which reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry riffs on the theory of the favorite T-shirt, which one fateful day doesn't survive the wash and dry, and the second favorite T-shirt takes its place, and on down the line.

This is Not a Socialist Web Site

2006-10-20T10:22:00.000-04:00

One thing I've always had to contend with during 11 years of doing a print version of the Richmond Music Journal was the theory that, despite the fact I owned it, produced it, sold the ads, did all the work, etc., some people thought it was supposed to be a people's newspaper and thus be what they wanted it to be, cover local music the way they thought it should be covered, include the bands they wanted to read about in a devoted, supportive way they imagined a local newspaper should be (on what planet, I don't know...papers that did take this approach never made it a year, if you recall).

They have called me every kind of ugly, sexist, woman-bashing name, both privately and publicly, for not meeting their expectations.

The paper was never a significant money-maker for me. My success was that it never went into debt as others did. I printed every submission about local music. Sorry, but I am not going to write everything, and if nobody else writes about it, then it's not going to be written about. I have never had a staff. Never could afford one. In that sense, the paper was socialist and open to everyone. But no one else wanted to do the work.

Those who I consider essential contributors to the paper were the infamous Killer Montone, my partners in the midnight rambling years, Lisa Honeycutt and Anne Soffee, and my last two devoted writers, Robert Stutler and Walter Boelt (who I never met in person). Other writers came and went, but those were the main ones. I had some very devoted advertisers, too, like Moondance, Poe's Pub, A Major Music, Boulevard Deli, and Oasis that kept the paper alive. And if you wrote a couple of things or contributed a few photos over the 11 years, thank you very, very much, but you didn't go to the mountain top with us so it's not like I owe you until the end of time.

The Web site is even more mine, and I truly do what I want with it and what I have time to do. I pay for it, why shouldn't I? Do your own Web site.

And I have never, ever said I was an expert on music or even knew anything about it. I am good at publishing a paper that doesn't go into debt. That was my skill. I depended on other people's knowledge and tastes for content. When I wrote, it was about what I thought and where I wanted to go, without any claims that I was an expert. There are some local music events and traditions I have never attended, I admit. There's an in-crowd in the local music scene that I have never been a part of and didn't enjoy hanging out with because their heads were often very far up their butts, and sometimes I think they were a big part of the reason more things didn't happen in Richmond. And some of them, on the other hand, were nice, but in Richmond tradition, just kept hanging on to the way things once were.

I'm not going to debate this with some of you anymore, especially those who haven't even noticed the paper has been gone for more than two years. Just like you were never required to read the paper, you need not visit here either. Go do your own Web site.

Onionhead and Delilah Jones

2006-09-24T00:43:00.000-04:00

Onionhead, it turns out, is not a new REM tribute band, but a reunion show of an old REM tribute band that existed roughly sometime between Flipside and the Vapor Rhinos, if you are a student of Dean Owen Band History. I came on the scene during Vapor Rhinos, the Al-Qaeda band for stuffed animals. Every show ended with multiple beheadings and a snowstorm of stuffing. Those were great days, when bands actually put on shows. When they wore costumes and makeup and made entrances.

The occasion was Owen's 43rd birthday (how can that be?) and the 16th anniversary of Onionhead, which excellently represented the REM catalog. It's good to see a man in eyeliner and mascara again. I have so missed that. Owen combined that with a suit, while the rest of the band did nothing in particular costume-wise. I thoroughly enjoyed it and regret I couldn't stay for the second set, but as is often the case with musicians, if my husband isn't playing, my husband isn't staying.

Tonight I dropped into Bleu Bistro for one set of Delilah Jones and to check on my husband who was staying for their whole show because he was running sound. This is a great room for bands because they've got their own spacious corner in the back of the bar. I dislike bars that put the band upfront, right next to the door, so every time someone comes in, they look like a guest vocalist. Bleu Bistro also does not have televisions showing soundless sports hanging over the band's head. It's a square room, so every seat can see fairly well, and there was a cool sofa area, although most of the people there were canoodling.

Delilah Jones does all Dead, including songs the Grateful Dead covered and that's all I can say since I am only vaguely familiar with the Dead. I do know, though, that any Dead cover band will always have an audience who will be there for the music; there will always be certain songs that will make people dance, alone or in groups; and the people there for the music will put the players on a Garcia-like pedestal. All of this was true once again. A nice touch was the light show going on behind the band. Remember those? A guy was running a loop of pulsating colors and Dead logos through his laptop, into a little projector and onto the wall. Back in the '60s, the light show guys actually used to mix colored oils on slides and put them under projectors, or something. It was more holistic and less high tech, but the results were the same. Much better than a soundless TV showing sports, anyway.

Joe Camel stole my identity

2006-09-24T00:29:00.000-04:00

I was in Cary Street Cafe and two guys come in with satchels and little handheld computer-y looking things. The first thing you think is suicide bombers, right? I notice they carefully select people to talk to in the bar, and whoever they select opens their wallet for them. What are they selling? They never talk to me, but I see my husband open his wallet for them. I now notice they are approaching only people who are smoking. Then I figure it out. Then I am appalled.

"Did you just let those guys scan your license?" I asked my trusting, naive husband.
"Yes?" he says, already knowing he did something goofy.
"And you did this for....let me guess, a free pack of cigarettes?!"
"Yes," he says, now even more ashamed. And even he knows he screwed up. "And they're Camels!" my Marlboro Man adds. He sold out for not even his brand.
I'm desperately thinking what kind of information is on his license. They've got our address now, so I guess there will be plenty of mail coming. And if they want, they can reprint the license, replace his photo and now there will be hundreds of illegal aliens claiming to be my husband, living at my address.

I suppose there's some legal reason cigarette companies can't just hand out cigarettes to everyone in a bar like they used to; that they are now required to get and record ID, but it all seems sleazy and invasive. A machine that scans in your license for a pack of cigarettes. It's like Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of porridge. (Old Testament shout-out)

No Waffle for You!

2006-09-13T13:31:00.000-04:00

For many musicians, Denny's probably means good memories, somewhere to go eat after a gig, even in Richmond (although here, it was often Toddle House, then Aunt Sara's, then Waffle House). But so far I am 0 for 2 for good memories at Denny's.

The first time was after a troublesome gig at a private party on the Potomac. Someone you all know booked our band, with many promises of money and great, free food and an attentive audience, and none of that materialized. The music was played in a corner. Most people ignored it. After the music, the food was gone and there was still the long drive back to Richmond, none the richer and very hungry. In desperation, all the band cars pulled into a Denny's where the waitress was too busy to attend to us for a very long time and the most drunken person in the group bellowed, "I need FUD," to no avail.

Last night we went to Denny's because we had a $5 off coupon. There were only a few people there, including our waitress, Dave Chappelle in a wig and dress. We ordered breakfast, and since I really, really wanted a Belgian waffle with strawberries and nothing else, I predicted I would not get one.

I didn't. After awhile, Waitress returned to say they couldn't get the waffle maker to work. I reluctantly switched to pancakes with strawberries. After awhile, Waitress returned with my husband's food, but she just waved my naked pancakes around without giving them to me. "You wanted strawberries, right?"

Right. I told my husband, "I'm not going to get them." Meanwhile, my pancakes are getting cold because she's walking all over the place with them.

Sure enough, after awhile, she comes back, without my now frigid pancakes and says, "You are gonna be hot!" (Unlike the pancakes.) There's no strawberries. Just give me the pancakes then. I have already written up this meal as not counting toward my life experiences. After another while, she brings back the pancakes, which by this time have congealed into dry, rubbery flaps of tasteless flour.

So I'm finished with Denny's, although as long as I am married to a musician, I have the bad feeling it is not a definitive finished.

A Night at the Market Cafe

2006-08-11T19:17:00.000-04:00

We went out to the Market Cafe in Innsbrook on Wednesday to check out the band since my husband was playing there the following night for the first time. There is a vast difference between playing the Cafe on Wednesday and playing it on Thursday. Namely, people. Wednesday we couldn't find a place to park because there was a show at the Innsbrook Pavilion, and even the Market Cafe was packed. I don't understand that. Why go there instead of the Pavilion?

On Thursday, without a show at the Pavilion, I think we just drew a few tables of people who knew the band somehow and few if any dinner or drinking regulars. You wouldn't go to the Cafe for dinner anyway unless you like dried up hot dogs and wilted salad bars. Parking was plentiful, unfortunately, but fortunately, you don't play for the door, but unfortunately, the Market doesn't pay a lot, but why should they when they couldn't have made that much money on food or beer. We were there five and a half hours and my husband made $45, so that's $8.18 an hour. I love the music business.

When we pulled up, John said, "Well, so much for the easiest load-in ever," because you could pull up right behind the stage, but there's no gate on the back of the fence. No problem. Everything was hoisted over the fence except the new bass amp which I wheeled down the sidewalk and then pushed through the patio maze of chairs. It was like playing Frogger.

The Market sells you a literal bucket of beer, a tin bucket full of ice and whatever. I remember Moondance used to sell you a bucket of Rolling Rock, but the buckets were smaller. These were big buckets, complete with a can opener. You could get a variety pack bucket with all sorts of things in it. That's cool, but I don't drink, so no bucket for me.

We were home about 10, which is great. I hate getting home at 3 a.m., especially on a school night. It was a very pleasant night, and being on an outdoor patio is a nice place to hear music, especially with no neighbors around to call the police.

My next outing probably won't be until September. My husband just booked a gig running sound for a band playing at the Bleu Bistro. Last time I was there, it was the Jewish Mother on Quioccasin, or maybe whatever came after. I've got my fingers crossed for something that isn't bar food. The band is Delilah Jones, a Grateful Dead cover band. I'm definitely going to need something more than chicken fingers and a paper cuplet of honey mustard sauce.

Burnt Like a Strawberry

2006-05-21T18:21:00.000-04:00

Saturday morning, we drove across town so my husband could stand on the back of a flatbed trailer in the middle of a field under the blazing noon day sun and sing for no money. He's a musician, and more often than not the love of performing is more important than making money at it. Not for the drummer, though. He didn't come. And the frontman was sick. Still, they sounded very good. John and Joe (far left and far right) had already been on the back of the truck for the previous hour playing with the Squalor Hollow Boyz. I kicked myself for not bringing the video camera, because it was a beautiful, although windy, day. And my skin got fried. Should have brought sunblock, too. I'm just not thinking in terms of summer yet.

Meanwhile, the night before, my son was on assignment for Style Weekly, photographing Avail's surprise appearance with Lucero at Nanci Raygun's. The torch passes. Ten years ago, I was photographing bands at that same club (when it was Twisters), but for the Music Journal.

Elliott Yamin

2006-05-13T18:53:00.000-04:00

I went to the James Center to see Elliott Yamin. Actually I had to photograph it as part of my day job, but I probably would have gone anyway. I just wouldn't have gotten as close as I did without being credentialed. No surprises. Sometimes you think movie stars are going to be bigger than life, and then you find they're much shorter. Elliott looked exactly like I expected, like he does on TV. Very humble guy. Must be weird to be a nobody on the local Richmond music scene...even a nobody on the total Richmond scene...and then in a span of six months or so, come home to this kind of huge reception.

Susan Greenbaum's band opened for him and ended up playing a half hour more than they planned because Elliott's limo was late. She filled in with some inane chatter. I think she thought with all the kids in the crowd, she had do Romper Room style patter between songs. The time would have been better spent explaining how important it is not to fall down on the voting next week and to get everyone you know in other states to help since the phone lines go into gridlock around here.