1. ABRUZZI 780 Seventh St. Live music. 2. ARCATA ARTISANS COOPERATIVE 883 H St. Featuring silk screens by John Wesa, paintings by Mimi LaPlant and ceramics by Natalie DiConstanzo. Wine served to benefit the Humboldt Community Breast Health Project. 3. ARCATA CITY HALL 736 F St. “Who You Gonna Call?” Portraits of city of Arcata employees […]
Bob Doran
Freelance photographer and writer, Arts and Entertainment editor from 1997 to 2013.
Posted inMusic
The Return
Bob Weir was a teenager hanging around at the local music store in Palo Alto when he met Jerry Garcia. The two guitar players ended up forming a folk/blues combo with Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and they called it Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. That band would eventually add new players and change its name […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Downtown Fortuna’s First Friday
Downtown Fortuna’s First Friday starts at 5 p.m. and runs until 8 p.m. during winter months featuring North Coast artists and local musicians. December’s edition is in conjunction with Redwood Village Al Gray Electric Lighted Parade and Fortuna Downtown Holiday Open House with businesses open late offering specials and discounts. BARTOW’S JEWELERS, 651 […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Poet
The poet Jane Hirshfield is what you’d called “esteemed.” A graduate of Princeton, she studied at the San Francisco Zen Center and received lay ordination in Soto Zen following years of monastic practice at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. She’s the author of seven award-winning poetry collections, most recently Come, Thief, published by Knopf […]
Posted inMusic
His Guitar Sings
Charlie Hunter is a guitar player and a composer of songs, but you’d never call him a singer/songwriter: His guitar sings, but he doesn’t. Instead he paints lyric pictures with improvised melodic lines, playing a custom seven-string guitar designed so he can play his own bass lines. Last time he came to town it […]
Posted inNews
A Guide to Crowd Funding
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of crowd funding websites help people drum up financial support for everything from creative projects and social causes to medical bills and disaster relief. Based on volume of web traffic, Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the top two, followed by GoFundMe, according to the Internet ranking site Alexa. All are online payment […]
Posted inNews
Passing the Virtual Hat
Singer/guitar-plucker Sam Whitlach ended a set at the Jambalaya earlier this year in classic songwriter fashion, with a little pitch. If you like his songs, take some home on his CD. The album he recorded as A Man Named Samuel is full of good songs, but it has little to do with the music he’s […]
Posted inMusic
On the Wild Frontier
Back in the mid-1980s, a couple of Georgia boys, Chris Robinson and his younger brother Rich, started a high school rock band called Mr. Crowe’s Garden. By the end of the decade they’d changed that name to The Black Crowes and hit the big time playing solid southern-tinged blues rock and winning fans in the […]
Posted inNews
A Song for Bill
Every once in a while someone reads a story in the Journal and is inspired. We like it when that happens. An example is this song by former Humboldter Melody Walker, an “Americali” singer/songwriter who now lives in Richmond. (Walker was among those profiled in Herb Childress‘ cover story from 2011, “Leaving.”) She explained, “My […]
Posted inMusic
Visionaries
He’s known as the “King of the Surf Guitar” and he certainly earned the title. Dick Dale is a surfer from Orange County who created a big reverb-drenched guitar sound to recreate the way he felt riding waves. After filling smaller venues, he started renting the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa for what he called surfer […]
Posted inNews
The Logger Reborn
We’ve been hearing rumblings about what’s going on at the historic Logger Bar out in Blue Lake. The venerable establishment kitty-corner from Dell’Arte changed hands and new owner Kate Martin (below) has been hard at work refurbishing with a crew of volunteers including Bad Bob Ornelas. Official announcement of a ribbon-cutting and re-opening scheduled for […]
Posted inMusic
Beauty
It’s a 20 year tradition: Each fall, eco-conscious hippie rockers Clan Dyken head out from their homes in the Sierras on something they call the “Revive the Beauty Way Tour.” The family band journeys through California and Oregon in a biodiesel bus gathering donations of cash and food along the way, then heads over to […]