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, […]
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Feel the Pulse
Bob Marley was born on February 6, 1945 at Nine Miles, Saint Ann, Jamaica. Legend that he is in the world of reggae, his birthday is still commemorated long after his death, and most years the Bob Marley celebrations stretch through the entire month. The Ragga Muffins Tour is one such Marley-esque congregation, a string […]
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The Never Ending Stack
The CDs arrive in an unending stream. The mailman sticks them in the slot in my front door; FedEx and UPS drivers block the street in front of my house to drop them off; promoters leave them on my porch or mail them to the Journal office; bandmembers slip them to me at shows. I […]
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The Wolves Return
Not long after Los Lobos’ Louie Perez called me last week, we got to talking about our kids. He has several, and spoke of his oldest son who, when he graduated from high school, announced that he was moving out of the house. His plan was to spend a couple of years "concentrating on the […]