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 …
March 20, 2013
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Stories by Dave Good
Natasha Kozaily dreamt beyond the horizon
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 …
March 13, 2013
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. …
March 6, 2013
Perfect storm for Stones
The Ultimate Stones gets a slot on AXS TV’s program about tribute bands.
March 6, 2013
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.
February 27, 2013
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.
February 27, 2013
Gimbel's gambit
Geezer frontman Adam Gimbel comes up with a contest that celebrates 91X’s 30th anniversary.
February 20, 2013
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 …
February 20, 2013
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 …
February 13, 2013
Jam for Jesus
Eastlake Church currently occupies Junior Seau’s former restaurant in Mission Valley.
February 6, 2013
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, …
February 6, 2013
Songwriters are culture's poets
How does songwriting fit in at the Writer’s Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University?
January 30, 2013
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. …
January 30, 2013
No hipsters, no canines
Musician Ron Najor produces the film I Am Not a Hipster, screened at Sundance and now on cable and DVD.
January 30, 2013
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 …
January 23, 2013
Radio quiet
Piano-and-voice teacher Deborah Cooney is convinced electric meters made her sick and destroyed her music business.
January 23, 2013
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 …
January 16, 2013
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 …
January 9, 2013
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. …
January 2, 2013
Rinse and repeat for SDMTV
Joseph Stevens to launch San Diego Music TV on January 30.
January 2, 2013
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 …
January 2, 2013
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.
December 26, 2012
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. …
December 26, 2012
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 …
December 19, 2012
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.
December 19, 2012
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 …
December 12, 2012
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.
December 5, 2012
Chris Robinson Brotherhood: where Southern twang meets rock and roll decadence
My favorite Chris Robinson story takes place in a beach bar, back when the Black Crowes was playing small venues. Someone in the audience had bounced a lime wedge off his brother’s dome. He stopped …
December 5, 2012
Low Volts' iron man Tim Lowman
The way Tim Lowman tells the story, it is not surprising to learn that his one-man act Low Volts may have been shaped in part by his great grandfather Doc Lowman (he was a gospel …
November 28, 2012
Yellowcard — still popular in soccer towns
Sean Mackin checks in by phone from Albuquerque to talk about the Yellowcard tour. “We’re killing time right now,” he says. “We’ll probably do some go-carting before sound check. Team-building activities. Stuff like that.” How …
November 28, 2012
Cow chip bingo?
Helix High School band directors get creative in the absence of funding, including mattress sales and cow-chip bingo.
November 20, 2012
Nena Anderson's full of surprises
We talk by phone, Nena Anderson and I, about her winter vegetable garden. She’s been working in her yard, getting ready for the coming cold front. A single mother, Anderson works as a designer, a …
November 20, 2012
Boz Scaggs
The song that transformed Boz Scaggs’s career is simple to the point of monotony. Except for the guitar break, there are two chords: an Em9 that resolves into a jazzy A13 over and over and …
November 14, 2012
Blood money
Thom Beebe, owner of Guitar and Bass Land/Skin City Drums in El Cajon won’t deal in used musical equipment anymore due to an increase in secondhand/pawnshop permit fees.
November 14, 2012
The Sea and Cake
Sam Prekop checks in by phone from his home in Chicago. I gather he is rocking in the proverbial sense, meaning in an old-fashioned chair. Every so often, I hear the tell-tale creak of wood …
November 7, 2012
Radio-free Southeast
DJ Tayari Howard launches web-based jazz-radio stations KKSD and KBLK.
October 31, 2012
Two Cow Garage
Two Cow Garage is exactly the sort of pun-ish band name that one might expect to emanate from the farm country of Ohio, which is where they are from. Other pop-culture writers bag them as …
October 31, 2012
Calexico, in tune with rocks and cactus
Members of Calexico, who called themselves Spoke at first and put out an album of the same name in 1996, are, in truth, from Tucson. “To live here,” Arizona-based singer and Calexico collaborator Marianne Dissard …
October 24, 2012
Busted Drums
Drummer Bill Ray complains about the house electronic drum kit that Viejas’ V Lounge mandates all drummers use. It’s busted, Ray says. No, it’s not, says Viejas.
October 17, 2012
The Toadies' Dark Secret
“I was reading Stephen King and a lot of that kind of stuff at the time, and I wrote a bunch of fiction songs,” Vaden Todd Lewis once told me about a song he wrote …
October 17, 2012
Lord Howler
Lord Howler: the name fits the band. Consider a four-piece hard-rock outfit, two of which are guitars along with drums and bass and all of it performed at a volume setting for those kinds of …
October 10, 2012
Was Ike Turner Murdered?
Jeanette Bazzell Turner believes there was a conspiracy to kill her former husband Ike Turner.
October 3, 2012
The Melodic Scheme of the Queers
Maybe we all hold a certain fascination for bands with offensive names. That, and there always has been, at least on my part, a compulsion to hear the inner voice of a class of people …
October 3, 2012
Blood Red Shoes
Aimee Mann, meet Cold War Kids. Blood Red Shoes, yet another drum-and-guitar rock duo sound as if tutored by both L.A. artists. They were not. They are, in fact, a British band. Laura-Mary Carter and …
September 26, 2012
Fur Peace
Fur Peace Ranch guitar camp, established in 1989 by Jorma Kaukonen and his wife Vanessa, comes to San Diego.
September 26, 2012
Crate envy
Diana Death, Heather Hardcore, and DJ Miss K play records at Til-Two club.
September 19, 2012
Anti-rock stars Blame Sally
“I’ve always been a little unorthodox about my drumming.” It’s Pam Delgado, Blame Sally’s singer-percussionist on the phone from San Francisco. “I played the drums so I could sing. I’m a singing drummer.” She mainly …
September 19, 2012