I’d never really heard of East Nashville before reading something on songwriter Amelia White’s webpage about one of her songs showing up on a double-disc compilation called The Other Side: Music from East Nashville . Amelia is not strictly from Nashville — she moved there from Boston a few years back to make her way […]
Music
Coverage of the music scene in Humboldt County with upcoming shows from locals and out-of-town acts, reviews, interviews and more.
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Do you hear the clock ticking?
Everywhere I go lately people ask, “What’s up with Reggae?” They wonder which show they should buy tickets for, Reggae on the River or Reggae Rising, or if the whole thing is going down in flames. While I’ve been following the battle pretty closely, I honestly don’t know. I talked with Carol Bruno the other […]
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A Plastic Vodka Bottle Full of Pennies
I caught Jason Webley‘sact a few years ago in an unlikely place: a sports bar behind the now defunct Arcata Denny’s. (The Placebo put on shows there for a spell.) What I remember most is him jumping up on a table with his accordion to lead the crowd in one rollicking sing-along after another. Webley […]
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The Coco Benefit
t was one of those phone calls. The caller ID on my phone said St. Joe’s. Not a good sign. It was my good buddy Gregg calling from a hospital room where he was visiting our mutual friend Coco Hogan, a longtime Humboldt resident, someone I’ve known since I started going to Reggae many years […]
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420?
If you’re in the know you can imagine why four-twenty is such a big deal here in Humboldt – and it has nothing to do with blackbirds baked in a pie. For the uninitiated, 420 (or 4:20, or 4/20) is code for getting baked, as in the consumption of marijuana. Exactly why is lost somewhere […]
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Notes From Bob’s Mailbox
Since I’m heading out to tour Cali over Easter vay-cay, I’ve put the Hum on autopilot, basically just dumping the mailbag directly into this space (sort of anyway). First one from Carol B., via Yvonne: People Productions and KMUD proudly present "Stephen Marley: Mind Control North American Tour" Wednesday, April 18, at the Arcata Community […]
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Golden?
For some reason the band portrait from San Francisco-based jamband New Monsoon had me feeling a bit nostalgic. I was a teenager living in the Bay Area when the Summer of Love rolled around 40 years ago. I know there’s some sort of kinship between modern jambands and the bands I heard that summer, at […]
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Luminescent
The p.r. e-mail hooked me with its description of The Luminescent Orchestrii as: "a gypsy tango klezmer punk acoustic string band from New York City." There was a link to the band’s webpage; I spared no time and immediately downloaded a few luminescent MP3s – brilliant shimmering songs with complex driving rhythms, amazing East-Euro-style harmonies […]
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Too much
Considering the fact that we’re something of a rural backwater, Humboldt County certainly plays host to a lot of music in a wide range of styles. Sometimes there are just way too many choices of where to go and what to do. Check this week’s calendar section for a rundown on this weekend’s classical overload. […]
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Cosmic Roadhouse Country
In my younger days I spent many happy hours in a dive bar on the Arcata Plaza called The Boot Club, where the No. 1 favorite on the jukebox was a tune by Freddy Fender, "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights." While the leader of Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days was still in elementary school when the […]
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Whose Blues?
The blues. Who’s the audience for it in this day and age? Who are the players? At a time when plenty of young musicians are sawing on fiddles and picking up and picking on mandolins and banjos old timey style, a scant few seem interested in playing the blues, and if they do, it’s more […]
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Trouble in Sunny Fortuna
Trouble, oh we got trouble, right here in the Friendly City! With a capital "T" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool, that stands for pool. We’ve surely got trouble! Right here in the Friendly City. Gotta figger out a way to keep the young ones moral after school! Trouble, trouble, trouble, […]