Alice Eve speaks out on Star Trek underwear scene!
Matthew Lickona 2:29 p.m., May 24
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Stories by Dave Good
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Brothers Gow
I came away from my first Brothers Gow experience with no clear idea what manner of band I was listening to. There is no defining sound here. The music seems to be the end result ...
They Do It the Hard Way: San Diegans who refuse to modernize
Deep-blue collar
The Printer “My buddy in San Francisco got his finger smashed in an old printing press. It actually turned the bone to powder. He had no phone in his warehouse to call for help, so ...
Super Water Sympathy
A busy year ahead for Super Water Sympathy: the band is hitting the road in support of their second full-length, Hydrogen Child, and then picking up a couple months of Warped Tour road work that ...
Heavy-hitters from the peace-and-love generation
Like pioneers
Slightly Stoopid enlists Bob Weir, a couple Neville Brothers, Tommy Chong, and Karl Denson for their new live CD/DVD, Slightly Stoopid & Friends: Live at Roberto’s TRI Studios.
Music critic snobbery
Local tribute Rushed is a band in demand now that Rush is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Bill Payne, last man standing
Bill Payne’s on the phone from his home in Montana — “It’s a good place to land up” — to talk about his present tour with a character named Dennis McNally (and Gabe Ford on ...
Helado Negro
Sometimes I hear music that is so far outside the realm of possibilities that I want to know who likes it and who dances to it. I want to meet the kinds of people that ...
VietNam out of Texas
Those bands worth a listen because they are so different, but not so far out there that you can’t get a grip on the music — I hate it when that happens. VietNam is from ...
The Revival Tour: white punks on folk
The sixth Revival Tour kicked off in Texas on March 15. The group rolls into San Diego April 21 propelled, as its promoters say, by “an innate need to tell a story in its naked ...
SD Music TV suspects in the crosshairs
SD Music TV’s studios were burglarized on the last weekend of March. Unreplaceable recordings were stolen.
East of Sweden
A great little indie-rock band with a strange name that had a cello-playing drummer last year. I had a chance to talk to Jeffrey O’Brien about both. The cello thing, he explained, was for their ...
Hip to shop
“What did they used to call that, the kind of music that used to be playing in supermarkets?” Well, whatever the proper term is, Ex-Dragon frontman Mario Escovedo says that’s a new direction Requiemme, his ...
Bury the past with an axe
On May 28, Finding the Sacred Heart — Live in Philly, 1986 will be released for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray. The concert was filmed at the Spectrum in Philadelphia during the second ...
Thrashed
“Every single day I get emails from people who still tune in.” Ed Duke shuttered his long-running web radio station Thrash Unlimited recently. “Technically, it’s still on the air,” he says by phone, “on [Internet ...
The plaintive croon of Angel Olsen
Not the voice of an angel, which is not to say that Angel Olsen’s singing voice is not good, it’s just that it’s not particularly angelic. Intricate is a word I’d use in its place. ...
Stacy Antonel once paralyzed by fear
Stacy Antonel of Ocean Beach won the $10,000 grand prize at the conclusion of the first season of 3 Minutes to Stardom, a local singing competition.
Bluesman Bill Magee turns 70
“You gotta have a passion for it. That’s got to be number one. Number two? You got to be willing to pay your dues by practicing day and night.” We meet up for lunch, Bill ...
How hard is it to get rid of a rabbit?
Author Dave Good writes about the rabbit he found (and now owns) and the San Diego bunny scene.
Horse sense
Stone Horse’s Dr. Rock and Roll spares a minute
‘In December, we changed the name to Stone Horse.” I tell Danielle Spade the new name rings of Linda Ronstadt. She giggles: “Yeah. Stone Ponys. But my sister said our other name was too long. ...
Jeff Mangum
In their short lifetime as a band, Neutral Milk Hotel could have been described as late bloomers. It took them almost a decade to become overnight successes, and even then, the love was delayed. In ...
Natasha Kozaily dreamt beyond the horizon
On May 14, Natasha Kozaily will release her second CD, Serenading Renegades. She intends dual release parties, both in San Diego and back home on Cayman Island. The Caymanian has lived here since 2010, lured ...
Thicker Than Thieves
Once a beach band, always a beach band? Thicker Than Thieves will kick off their spring tour in Ocean Beach, not so far from where it began for them more than a decade ago. That ...
The Hush Sound
Grace Potter in a nightgown: “I don’t want to be the one you forget,” sings Greta Morgan (née Salpeter) in “Medicine Man.” “I don’t wanna be the one you regret.” That’s regret — not forget. ...
The Muffs
Kim Shattuck started the Muffs with Melanie Vammen in Los Angeles in 1991. They were fresh out of a metal-ish act called Pandora. In the next couple of years they would generate enough buzz as ...
Horn-free high school
B Side Players trombonist/Helix High associate music director Michael Benge tries to land Poncho Sanchez to do show with his students, but parents don’t want to enter into contract.
Who wants to jam?
jammingout.net launches after a delay; Doyle Thomas wants musicians to be able to find each other for impromptu jam sessions.
Gimbel's gambit
Geezer frontman Adam Gimbel comes up with a contest that celebrates 91X’s 30th anniversary.
The Residents: A cult band minus a genre
And now for some good old deconstruction of American pop music: the Residents are taking a lap around the country in celebration of their 40th anniversary as a creative unit. Too strange for some, the ...
The cliché-bashing Mouse on Mars
Does anybody remember Sparks? The brothers Mael launched that band in Los Angeles during the early 1970s, and while I don’t think they ever had what could be described as a big following, the memory ...
The Highwayman, a quartet of one, at Belly Up
“About six years ago, I had an epiphany of sorts.” Tony Suraci, aka the Highwayman, explains how he came to front such a complicated show. “For a long time I performed Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, ...
Songwriters are culture's poets
How does songwriting fit in at the Writer’s Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University?
The Generators plug in at Shakedown
USA Today once identified the Generators as one of America’s most underrated of punk bands. In truth, a punk-revival band from late 1990s Los Angeles, the Generators owe much to the Britpunk of the 1970s. ...
No hipsters, no canines
Musician Ron Najor produces the film I Am Not a Hipster, screened at Sundance and now on cable and DVD.
Jon Goodhue plays to the masses
Golf, fishing, and rock and roll: Jon Goodhue emails that he is just leaving the course at Carmel Mountain Ranch at one point during the month that I spend interviewing him. A San Diego transplant ...
Radio quiet
Piano-and-voice teacher Deborah Cooney is convinced electric meters made her sick and destroyed her music business.
Joey Harris & the Mentals — rock stars posing as a club act
“A rock star posing as a club act.” This is how a talent buyer at a local nightclub once characterized Joey Harris. A guitarist and a singer and a songwriter, Harris was solid gold even ...
Red Wanting Blue
They can make a whole song out of two major chords. This means that something very entertaining must also be going on simultaneously. Not that it happens all the time in the Red Wanting Blue ...
The PettyBreakers go after Superstorm Sandy
“We’ve all got friends on the East Coast.” Guitarist John McAllister talks about the benefit gig to help the Red Cross effort for Hurricane Sandy victims that he and his band, the PettyBreakers, are spearheading. ...
A 2012 rock-roll rundown
The Reader asked musicians and music-industry locals to name their favorite hometown CD releases of the year. Here’s what they had to say. Diana Death (musician/Rock ’n’ Roll Preservation Society DJ): The New Kinetics, In ...
Jessica Crosby’s in her cups
Jessica Crosby’s YouTube music video of her doing a cover version of “Cups” from the film Pitch Perfect.
B-Side Players
We pause now at year’s end for a visit with some old friends: the B-Side Players. A trusty bunch of local loyalists, the Players have been a part of the hometown music scene for years. ...
San Pedro el Cortez — cooking without a recipe
They were new last year: the San Pedro el Cortez band, home-based in Tijuana, where there is currently a resurgence of rock bands that follow different camps: shoegaze, psych, British mod, American garage. SPeC fit ...
Sprucing up the Arena — that's a wrap
Photographer Rick Gould’s ’70s concert photos were made into art for the interior of Sports Arena.
Brit-punk in the Blood
Colin Smith emails from London that when the Blood plays San Diego, they plan to open with “Megalomania.” That was the band’s first single, a short little blast that ridiculed the Pope. It almost sounds ...
Dropping trou in North County
Coda Reactor frontman Miles Orff gets ejected from Boar Cross’n for dropping his trousers in protest over his band’s abbreviated set.
