When Juliette Lewis played the Casbah

When actress Juliette Lewis played the Casbah a year ago, the show sold out. It only lasted 20 minutes, but there was a fight in the crowd, and cops showed up, so that made it seem longer.

Her show on November 4, again at the Casbah, also sold out (tickets were $12), and it was twice as long: 40 minutes. Unlike other actors-turned-singers, Lewis really rocked. She reminded me of a female Iggy Pop. She was thrashing around onstage and at one point jumped onto the fans for some crowd surfing. Some lyrics were hard to understand with her screams, but I could hear the line, "You got to warm me up before you rub me raw."

After the show, Lewis sat on the steps of her tour bus talking to fans. I heard one gal ask, "How is Brad Pitt?" Pitt was her boyfriend of two years. Lewis never answered.

I asked, "How is your dad?"

Lewis's dad is actor Geoffrey Lewis, who was born in San Diego in 1935 and starred in lots of movies with Clint Eastwood in the 1970s.

Lewis said, "Oh, my dad is doing great. I just talked to him last night."

One of the girls standing there said, "Is her dad famous?" Since this gal probably wouldn't know all the older movies he did, I mentioned his being in Maverick with Mel Gibson. She hadn't seen it.

There was a handful of girls asking for drummer Patty Schemel to come off the bus. She finally did. The former Hole drummer was asked by one fan, "How is Courtney Love doing?" Patty responded, "I talked to her the other day, and she sounded all right."

I asked this girl if she knew Courtney Love played in town ten days ago. She said, "Yeah, I was there. And when Courtney forgot the words to a song, she brought me onstage to sing it."

Juliette was autographing everything people put in front of her: the video boxes from Natural Born Killers, Strange Days, and Old School. Someone else had a current Esquire magazine which features Lewis on the cover.

I bought her new CD Like a Bolt of Lightning, and I saw that Linda Perry had composed a song on it. Perry said in an interview once that she grew up playing in a lot of bands in San Diego, but it wasn't until she moved to San Francisco in the late 1980s and joined 4 Non Blondes that she succeeded. Their biggest hit was "What's Up." Perry also wrote the hits "Get the Party Started" for Pink and "Beautiful" for Christina Aguilera.

As I left the Casbah around 11:45, a guy was showing Lewis the tattoo he had of her on his chest. She said, "I'm going to have to get a picture of that."