The Setlist

A week or so ago I sat down with a new friend I recently met through playing music. He wanted to get together and chat about music, the Beatles, and more music. I happily obliged. He’s a musician himself, a producer and attorney by day. One of the first questions he asked me was, “How […]

I wrote in a previous column about the rather common financial situation in which local bands and music venues find themselves. Not only do bands and venues have a lot in common, they also exist in a type of symbiotic relationship. That is, they need each other. Now, it’s easy to complain about the $14 […]

Similar to many of the changes that have come along with an evolving music industry, show promotion has morphed and permutated throughout the years. At a local level, the days of wheat pasting yielded to staple guns and telephone poles, to hoofing it around town throwing up 11-by-17-inch posters in supportive local businesses, to emailing […]

There’s the old saying that goes, “You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.” I think Jesus said that. There’s also a slightly less older saying that goes, “Well, we know where we’re goin’, but we don’t know where we’ve been.” That was David Byrne of the Talking Heads. I’m […]

In Humboldt County we rarely experience a joy greater than that of the outside world noticing how awesome we are. Whether it is the Washington Post naming Humboldt the second most beautiful county in the country (somehow behind Mugu-Rock-having Ventura County) or some other national rag documenting Eureka as having the most artists per capita, […]

To everything there is a season, a purpose, and a time. It may be short, or it may be long, but undoubtedly time continually hurries on. I don’t really know what that means, but I’m sure whomever I plagiarized understood. Let’s just say it’s about seasons and cycles and changes. A couple of changes present […]

Like a lot of you, I’m a sucker for a good story and enjoy being filled in on topical issues by smart people, which means listening to podcasts on long drives is my usual go-to. But last week, while traveling home from San Francisco, I instead put on a (very extensive) playlist of familiar songs […]

If you’re not familiar with the self-coined “Beach Goth” of the Growlers, imagine a “distinctive melding of reverb-heavy surf guitar and Bakersfield-style honky tonk with ’80s post-punk” — which is maybe not the easiest thing to create in your mind, so maybe think the Clash meets Gogol Bordello. At the beach. Look — the band […]

Many musicians will tell you that summer in Humboldt County can be a rough time of year for working bands. Nothing stops completely on the coast, but it sure slows down a lot. With the mythical Humboldt State University student back home in San Diego showing off his or her new Bernie Sanders shirt and […]