and friends (who collectively are billing themselves as California's only
"all French night"--but hey, what about Bardot a Go Go?). Downstairs you've got a battle of the '60s with pretty much all the great oldies vinyl slingers in town (Rooky Ricardo's Dick Vivian among them). Seven bucks will get you in and dance lessons will get you coordinated.
On a related note: one new old CD that's been blowing my mind is Light in the Attic's reissue of the Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire De Melody Nelson, a musical retelling of Lolita featuring the perverted old crooner and his young lover Jane Birkin first released in 1971. Get your clammy hands on it March 24. Creepy taboos never sounded so sexy.
The Gutter Twins (Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan)
February 11, 2009
The Independent
Better Than: Joaquin Phoenix' new rap career
The audience: Reg'lar folks, mostly dressed in shades of the bruise palette. Two parkas, one with a fur-lined hood. Three trilbies. Smatterings of plaid. One army coat tricked out like Coldplay's Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Wankers Club Band uniforms.
The show: I bought earplugs from the coat check girl just as a skinny guy in a knit cap walked onstage and began playing acoustic guitar. Wimp, her eye-roll said. Then he began beatboxing and making weird didgeridoo-like noises at top volume. Harold "Happy" Chichester played keyboards and provided impeccable falsetto for the Afghan Whigs and Twilight Singers. He's an all-round nice guy from Columbus, Ohio, and won over the crowd with "I Live in a Glamorous Town," which dealt with women dressed as hookers, "if hookers were pirates."
As the Gutter Twins loped onstage and took their seats, I noticed that there were actually three of them. (The extra Twin is guitarist Dave Rosser.) I was also slightly alarmed at the acoustic song-circle theme the evening was taking. Can Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan's songs of lust and menace survive such a tranquil setting?
I'm still convinced that Lanegan is another of Will
Ferrell's side projects. They've never been seen together in the same room, and
they share a comic-stern expression. Meanwhile, Dulli wasn't smoking onstage, which was surprising, given that he's been
quite happy to break city laws at past shows in S.F.
| Calibree Photography |
| Sign of the Times: Fat City |
So why is yet another club in a prime location apparently biting the dust? Possible clues can be gleaned from the user reviews at Yelp.com. Out of 34 total ratings, Fat City received an unusually high number of poor assessments: 11, or almost one-third of the reviews, gave it one star, the lowest possible rating. Not only that, but a Yelp graph depicting ratings over time showed a precipitous decline in the past two months, suggesting the venue was getting worse, not better.
| Voltage Music |
| Dub Selector: DJ Tomas aka Dub I.D. |
