Could there be a better act to play the uniquely Northern California festival BottleRock than Santa Cruz’s own Camper Van Beethoven, with their conjoined twin band Cracker in tow?

After all, Camper is the group that on their 2013 album La Costa Perdida delivered “Northern California Girls,” perhaps the ultimate NorCal anthem—meaning an anthem that’s way too laid back to actually be an anthem.

“Right, it takes seven minutes to get where it’s going,” admits David Lowery, the frontman for both Camper and Cracker. “The drums come in a little bit like three times before they finally kick in about three-and-a-half minutes into the song.”

Lowery had already written his share of great California songs for both Camper and Cracker over the years—most recently, “Where Have Those Days Gone”—in which he mistakes Good Times’ astrologer Rob Brezsny for Thomas Pynchon in a bar in Mendocino County—but also “Big Dipper,” “Miss Santa Cruz County,” “Come On Darkness” and more.

But with his latest cycle, he’s outdone himself. While La Costa Perdida was a NorCal-influenced album, the songs on Camper’s latest, El Camino Real (which comes out June 3), are all set in, or otherwise related to, SoCal.

“We wrote these songs at the same time, then thematically we broke off most of the Northern California ones for the last album, and then kind of took these songs that were Southern California, and built another album around them, by adding another five songs or something like that,” says Lowery. “There’s kind of this opus going now, this theme going. There’s also a Cracker album, which comes out next year. It’s a double disc—one is Berkeley, one is Bakersfield. One is the punk side of the band, one is the country side.”

So, basically, four albums worth of California songs. And it all started because of … Joan Didion?

“I think it started with me and Victor [Krummenacher] and Jonathan [Segel] reading a bunch of Joan Didion,” confirms Lowery. He can’t remember which collection of essays specifically sparked it, but it would almost have to be the first section of Slouching Toward Bethlehem, in which Didion rips to shreds the “golden dream” of the Inland Empire—where Lowery, his Camper bandmates Krummenacher and Segel, and Cracker co-founder Johnny Hickman all grew up.

“Those essays really captured the feel of it. It’s not really that flattering about the area, but that’s sort of what people from the Inland Empire are proud of,” says Lowery. “There was actually some sort of referendum on a theme for the Inland Empire, like ‘Virginia is for Lovers’ or how California is the Golden State. And we all wrote in: ‘We will kick your ass.’”

The most noticeable difference between the two Camper albums is the overall feel—La Costa Perdida is more easygoing and gentle, while El Camino Real is darker and more intense, with a deep streak of paranoia that runs through songs like “The Ultimate Solution,” “It Was Like That When We Got Here” and “I Live In L.A.” Clearly, Lowery has very different views on the two halves of the state.
“Yeah, but I like ’em both,” says Lowey.

At the BottleRock festival in Napa May 30-June 1, Lowery’s bands will join an eclectic mix of five dozen other acts across four stages, including the Cure, OutKast, Weezer, LL Cool J, Robert Earl Keen, TV on the Radio and Smash Mouth.

Some of those musicians have been around longer than Camper, while others benefited from the college-radio-to-gold-records trail that CVB and Cracker blazed in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s very likely, however, that Camper is the only band on the schedule that has been reunited longer than they were originally together.

After recording their first album in Santa Cruz in 1985, the band imploded on a European tour in 1990. But after reforming in the early 2000s, they’ve been back together now for over a decade. Part of the reason, Lowery says, is that they all agreed to do the band on a more part-time basis, or at least do fewer tours, which puts less pressure on them as a group. But maybe it’s even simpler than that.

“Jonathan says it’s just because we’re not in our twenties,” says Lowery. “And it’s kind of true.”

INFO:
Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker
BottleRock Napa
May 30-June 1 at the Napa Valley Expo, Napa.
$149 for single-day pass; $279 for a three-day pass
bottlerocknapavalley.com

Did they just kill Morrissey? That’s what I’m thinking as I watch the craziest end to a concert I’ve ever seen in my life unfold.
Moz, opening his 2014 tour at the San Jose Civic on Wednesday night, has just come back for the encore, playing his third Smiths song of the night, “Asleep.”

I am pondering whether the selection of this song, with its lyrics “Deep in the cell of my heart, I will be so glad to go,” is some kind of clue about whether retiring from music is still on his mind. A couple of years ago, most fans know, Morrissey announced he planned to retire in 2014, but since then he’s done things like sign a two-record deal (the first of which comes out in July) and launch a tour, so clearly that isn’t happening yet. But still, with his recent assertion that he’s found more success as a writer than he ever did with music, you gotta wonder if he’s dropping hints about heading to the exit.

After “Asleep,” Morrissey launches into what could be considered an even more loaded choice for the set list: “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell,” my favorite song from his 2009 album, Years of Refusal. Fans are now jumping on stage wanting to touch him, which starts out cute but quickly gets annoying. Who are these creepy people always demanding hugs, anyway? Don’t give me that crap about the unique understanding they have with their rock idol. If I was Moz, I’d be petrified that one of these crazies was going to slip me the loveknife. I wouldn’t show up for my own concerts, either!

SEE MORE: Photos from Marrissey at City National Civic

Sure enough, eventually a bunch of these jackass fans bumrush the poor guy all at once. Stage security is just completely overwhelmed. Think about that for a minute. Have you ever seen those big dudes on stage at shows get overwhelmed? No, their whole existence is about being whelmed exactly the right amount. But this group gets by them, in a chaotic scene that recalls one of those shakycam fights from the Bourne Identity movies where you have no clue what’s going on. Morrissey just disappears, swallowed up midway through the line “And before you know, goodbye will be farewell.” It’s not clear if they dragged him into the wings, pulled him off the stage, or what.

The lights immediately go up, the PA music goes on, and a thousand Morrissey fans are now just staring blankly at each other, completely confused. Is the show really over? Did that just happen?

Again, I’m left fearing for Morrissey’s safety, but as the roadies milling on stage don’t seem too worked up, I figure he’s got to be all right. But it does make the opening lines of “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell” seem bitterly ironic: “Always be careful when you abuse the one you love/The hour or the day no one can tell/But one day goodbye will be farewell/And you will never see the one you love again.”

If that was indeed the last song he was planning to sing at this show, it bookended well with the opening “Hand in Glove,” with its repeated lyric “I’ll probably never see you again.” Was that a message? And was it significant that he opened with the Smiths’ very first single, and ended (we have to assume) with a farewell song from his last record?

Maybe. But otherwise, this set didn’t feel like Morrissey had one foot out the door. It wasn’t a greatest-hits show in any way, with a slowed-down “Everyday Is Like Sunday” and a Latin-tinged “First of the Gang to Die” (the highlights of the night) the only solo hits he played. Perhaps you could count “That’s How People Grow Up” or “I Have Forgiven Jesus, or the closer “The National Front Disco” among the favorites, but that’s only because Morrissey’s fans love all his songs.

This was in fact a very unsentimental show, which is another way to view the use of “Hand in Glove,” which is one of the most unsentimental love songs ever written. “Meat is Murder” was a particularly vivid example of this raw approach, accompanied as it was by brutal slaughterhouse footage that was Moz at his most militant. (PETA also had a booth inside the Civic for the show).

Most tellingly, he played several songs from his upcoming album, World Peace is None of Your Business, including the title track, the flamenco-tinged “Earth is the Loneliest Planet,” and “The Bullfighter Dies.” The songs are more varied sonically than on his last couple of rock records, although the band was ready to rip all night. The rest of the set was made up of some interesting offbeat choices, like the B-side “Ganglord,” Vauxhall and I’s “Speedway” and Maladjusted’s “Trouble Loves Me.”

This was not a set designed by a guy who thinks he’s going away for good. Morrissey is definitely looking ahead on this tour, and if he can dodge the hugs, he should be fine.

“I NEVER liked Morrissey,” sang John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats once, “and I don’t like you.”

That was on “Anti-Music Song,” one of Darnielle’s early four-track songs from the ’90s, but by 2002, on the compilation Ghana, the leader of one of the most respected indie bands around had written in the liner notes about it: “I’ve actually become a belated convert to the Church of the Mozzer, and regret going public with my ignorance of his excellence.” By 2008, Darnielle was covering “Suedehead” at live shows.

For longtime Morrissey fans, it might have been easy to judge, but isn’t this how it went for so many of us? I remember driving past Santa Cruz’s Morrissey Boulevard with friends in my first year of college, and making jokes about how it must be the whiniest street on the planet. That was about a year before I discovered the Smiths via The Queen is Dead, and I certainly never made another Morrissey joke again. I now have the words “Hang the DJ” (from the Smiths’ “Panic”) tattooed on my leg. So John Darnielle, I feel you.

The thing is, no one makes better Morrissey jokes than Morrissey, and his upcoming 10th solo album World Peace is None of Your Business, to be released this summer, appears to have some good ones, if titles like “I’m Not a Man” are any indication.

Moz’s self-deprecating wit and lyrical genius have seduced legions of unbelievers over his more than 30 years in music, a phenomenon that his 1994 solo hit “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get” seems to address head on in a sly sex-music double entendre: “When you sleep, I will creep into your thoughts, like a bad debt that you can’t pay, take the easy way and give in—and let me in.”

His autobiography was a huge hit last year, and while it had a lot of the expected incisive humor (and way too much about the Smiths trial), it didn’t give any insight at all into how he does what he does as a songwriter and singer. The only way to understand what inspires such a fierce allegiance in his fans is to see him live, which San Jose will get the rare chance to do as he opens his tour here.

Morrissey performs at a sold out show May 7 at City National Civic in San Jose. More info.

Despite releasing his autobiography last year, Morrissey is more of mystery than ever. After climbing to rock icon status after only five years with the Smiths, he’s risen and fallen in the pop-culture consciousness over and over, but to paraphrase one of his own songs: the more they ignore him, the closer he gets.

He’ll be closer than ever May 7, when Morrissey opens his U.S. tour at the City National Civic in San Jose. Tickets go on sale Thursday, Feb. 20, at 10am. A May 10 Los Angeles date is the two-month tour’s only other stop on the West Coast.

No end of questions have swirled around Morrissey for the last couple years: will he really retire, as he once proposed, in 2014? (The two-record deal he signed with Capital last month definitely points to no.) How serious are the health problems to which he’s alluded? What kind of novel is he writing? When will he release a long-overdue follow-up to his excellent 2009 album Years of Refusal? Does he have something against the Bay Area, where he’s cancelled two of his last three scheduled shows? (Although, to be fair, the Paramount concert in Oakland was great.)

The singer’s autobiography didn’t provide much insight into Morrissey as a person, (and none at all into his songwriting); it was more a series of remembrances about his career, and observations about the world. Not surprisingly, he seemed to be taking his cues from Oscar Wilde, and quite effectively. But one thing it revealed is that he’s never more in touch with his fans than when he’s on stage, and that is likely to be true once again when the South Bay contingent of his devoted following gets the chance to see him kick off this tour.

Morrissey opens his U.S. tour at the City National Civic in San Jose on May 7. Tickets and more info.

Probably the only person who would think that Lou Reed dying is funny would be Lou Reed himself. Best known for fairly humorless songs about mainlining heroin and shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather, the guy had a wicked wit.

I interviewed him only once, but it was just as strange and hilarious as his appearance in Blue in the Face would make you think. He had one of the biggest personalities rock music has ever seen, and while he usually took a more writerly approach to his songs, the one place he could always be counted on to let loose was in his live shows.

This is why I always made a point of seeking out Lou Reed bootlegs in college, because his live records were priceless—you never knew what he might do. Thankfully, there are several legit live albums that showcase how he brought his weirdness straight to the people—often pulling off versions of his songs that were far better than the studio recordings. Here are my personal favorites, in order of preference:

Take No Prisoners (1978): This double album is hands-down the most entertaining live record you will ever hear. It’s actually more of a stand-up album than anything else—he can barely get through three chords at a time without going off on some ridiculously awesome tangent. He tells Village Voice critic Robert Christgau to fuck off, responds to people who ask him if his music is political (“gimme an issue and I’ll give you a tissue”) and in general gives his take on everything. He once suggested that he should have called the album Lou Reed Talks Ð and Talks and Talks and Talks. Totally.

Animal Serenade (2004): You can argue with some of the set selections, but you have to agree that this last, heavily orchestrated Reed live album features some of his most gorgeous live versions. Even classics like “Street Hassle” and “Dirty Blvd” are better here than on his studio releases.

1969: The Velvet Underground LIve (1974): Absolutely essential for VU fans, this long-after-the-fact live release features the slow version of “Sweet Jane” that most people only know from the Cowboy Junkies cover, and a totally different “New Age,” too.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal (1974): This was Reed’s Guitar Hero record, and while that may annoy some fans, anyone who dug Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan (or hell, Ted Nugent’s Double Live Gonzo!) will appreciate Lou in epic arena mode. Also captures possibly the best live version of “Sweet Jane” he ever performed.

Cafe Stritch celebrates Lou Reed with a special HaLOUween Tribute on Oct. 31. More Info.

“HEL-LLLLO?” says Evan Dando, his unmistakable husky voice filling my receiver. Then he calls to someone in the same room: “Am I talking into the right side of this thing?” On the other side of the line, I cannot for the life of me figure out what he’s talking about. The phone? Does a phone have sides that can be considered debatable? Or maybe a different Apple product of some type that he’s using as a phone? Seems more plausible. Whatever it is, the longtime leader of the Lemonheads, performing Sept. 27 at C2SV Music Festival in San Jose, is struggling with technology today. An earlier number I called didn’t even ring, it just went dead after I dialed it. Turns out it broke on him, and he hadn’t realized it.

But now he’s on the line, and just a couple of minutes into our conversation, I’m reminded why Dando is the most fun interview in rock ’n’ roll, besides maybe Lou Reed. At one point, the noise in the background suggests he is definitely playing ping-pong while he talks to me. The first time I interviewed him, back in the ’90s, he asked if we could stop the interview for a couple of minutes because the new Beck video had just come on, and since I hadn’t seen it, he gave me a play-by-play call throughout.

It’s more than that, though. Dando manages to seem both scattered and thoughtful at the same time. He often responds to questions with a warm, drawn-out “yeah,” the kind that makes you feel like you just said the most insightful thing ever about his music. Since I’ve listened to his music for a long time, I have a lot of ideas to bounce off him, and sometimes it seems like he’s flipped it around and is interviewing me.

For instance, I’ve long felt that his records after 1990’s Lovey—1992’s It’s A Shame About Ray, 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads and 1996’s Car Button Cloth—form a trilogy of work that in retrospect is remarkably cohesive both in its sonic landscape and its themes.

“Yeah. They definitely are,” Dando says. “They’re the three Atlantic records after we sort of broke a little bit. Lovey is not really a part of it. It’s definitely a trilogy.”

For one thing, those are the records that defined his ability to write epically melodic pop songs that hide a dark lyrical core. It’s perhaps best exemplified in “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You” from Car Button Cloth, which matched a nursery-rhyme melody with lyrics like “Khmer Rouge, genocide quoi/Your place or Mein Kampf, now I’m giving the dog a bone.” Not necessarily what the world was expecting from the man who had broken out with covers of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” and Robyn St. Clare’s “Into Your Arms.”

“It’s deceptively bright sounding,” Dando admits of “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You.” But really that dark/light contrast shouldn’t have been a surprise. It grew out of the band’s early, punkier years, and as Dando’s songwriting matured, it found its way into fan favorites from “It’s A Shame About Ray” to “Rudderless” to “Hospital”—the latter a recollection of his own time in rehab, recovering from crack cocaine addiction in the mid-’90s, that nonetheless glows with the repeated lines “Green, green leaves/Falling from the trees.”

“I always liked that sour-sweet, the combination of the happy, jaunty sounding stuff with some messed-up lyrics. It comes naturally,” says Dando, making it clear why the band’s name is so apt.

Dando is full of the same contradictions himself; he’s proud of records like Come On Feel, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, but he also regrets falling for the music industry’s desire to market his looks more than his music.

“They managed to screw up the record cover. They changed it,” he says. “We had this nice cover, but they wanted to see my eyes and stuff. I totally knuckled under on it, too. I did. I did a lot of stuff like that back then, because I was sort of naïve and young, and I just wanted to be in a band, and it was working out well. But that record’s really good, I like it.”

Rumors have been flying about the record he’s working on now, but most of them are either false or yet to be decided. Ryan Adams is not involved, though Dando says they do want to work together at some point, and original Lemonhead Ben Deily—who co-founded the band with Dando in 1989, while they were in high school together in Boston—may or may not be, either. (He and Deily would like to do something to commemorate the British re-release of their first albums Hate Your Friends, Creator and Lick.) But the album is coming, regardless, Dando says.

“I know my next record’s gonna be really great, so I want to spend some extra time on it,” he says. “It really, really has to come out by spring, so I’ve gotta finish it this winter.”

Iggy And The Stooges could be playing oldies shows in Vegas or at the Mountain Winery like their contemporaries. Instead of reliving their glory days, the four-decade-old group is enjoying the peak of their success now. In 2013, the band released a searing LP, Ready To Die and played to slam-dancing audiences at outdoor festivals from Australia to Belgium. They take a victory lap with their last scheduled show of 2013 on Sept. 28 at C2SV Music Festival, but it wasn’t always this way.

For decades, the Stooges were more a legend than a band. In seven years of demented existence, from 1967 to 1974, their records sold so poorly that they were kicked to the curb by their label, despite the fact that Danny Fields—the wunderkind of the music industry at the time, who built the careers of Jim Morrison and Lou Reed, and discovered the MC5 and Ramones—was so convinced of Iggy Pop’s genius that he personally took over management of the band.

Pop himself didn’t seem to take offense, didn’t even seem to care. In Legs McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s punk history Please Kill Me, Pop admits he can see it from the record industry’s point of view. “I mean, they must have thought ‘These guys are maniacs, you know, the singer attacks the audience, they’re all loaded, they don’t communicate nicely with us, their songs won’t go on the radio … So I could see their point. But hey, I didn’t know we were that way. I saw it differently. I thought we were great. I thought we were the best band in the world. We knew what we were doing was better than anybody.”

And yet, by the time Raw Power came out—in 1973, a full year after it was recorded—the man who would eventually be hailed as the Godfather of Punk was literally lying in the gutter on Sunset Boulevard. At the same time that he was doing his most famous shows at Max’s Kansas City in New York—where his antics rolling around in broken glass and walking across tables and generally bleeding all over the place got him sent to the hospital for stitches one night by order of Alice Cooper, who was in the crowd—Pop was a music industry pariah. Kicked out of his house, hooked on heroin and couch-surfing between gigs, he was hurtling toward either certain death or rehab.

Luckily, it was the latter. It wouldn’t be until 1976 that Bowie would help Pop reinvent himself as a successful solo artist, with iconic songs like “Lust For Life” and “The Passenger” paving the way for his first and only mainstream Top 40 hit, 1990’s “Candy.”

Over the course of those years, the legend of the Stooges grew exponentially. Their three albums, 1969’s The Stooges, 1970’s Fun House, and Raw Power, lacerated the indie-rock generation with a jagged, heavy sound that was unlike anything else. Forensic evidence of those three records is all over almost every significant rock movement since, from punk to stoner metal. Stooges classics like “Search and Destroy” were enshrined in the holy canon of rock, and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” had become one of the most covered songs of all time.

The problem was not just that no one could see the Stooges, but that barely anyone had seen them, ever—by the turn of the century, almost everyone who had seemed to be in some book talking about it. The rest of us knew their indescribable live shows only via the stories handed down, and through famous bootlegs like Metallic KO, Jesus Loves the Stooges and tons more (a legit box set of Iggy bootleg material, Roadkill Rising, was released in 2011). The world wanted a Stooges reunion.

In 2003, it got it. The whole thing was actually set in motion by Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis and SoCal punk legend Mike Watt, who made original Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton a sort of ad hoc member of their band J Mascis and the Fog. Whenever they could, they’d get him to play with them when they toured in the early 2000s, and they’d always break out a handful of Stooges classics. Eventually, they roped in Scott Asheton, Ron’s brother and the original drummer for the Stooges.

By this time, Pop had taken notice, and he invited the Ashetons to play on his 2003 solo album Skull Ring. Of the three songs they collaborated on, only one—the title track—really recaptured the sludgy, almost psychedelic proto-punk of their original sound. Still, that was more than enough to give everyone a taste of how good a Stooges reunion could be. That same year, it came together, with the band showing their appreciation for Watt’s role by inviting him to replace original bassist Dave Alexander. Alexander had been fired from the Stooges for drinking too much—a seemingly impossible feat, to be sure—and died in 1975, a mere 27 years old, of complications related to exactly that. Watt joined the band for the first Stooges performance in three decades at Coachella in 2003, and played with the reunited band for five and a half years.

The reunion also brought Steve Mackay, the saxophonist who had crafted the Stooges’ unique horn sound, back into the fold. It produced a 2007 reunion album, The Weirdness, that was appropriately titled. It certainly couldn’t have been called The Greatness, although a couple of tracks got close to that classic Stooges mix of nihilism and shake appeal.

It all seemed to come crashing down though, with the death of Ron Asheton in 2009. Just as the band had begun adding classics from the Raw Power years back into their set, Asheton’s reported heart attack put a stop, once again, to the Stooges.

But it led to what was almost a whole new reunion of Iggy and the Stooges. That was the moniker the band used in the Raw Power era, when James Williamson played guitar. After his warm-up at the Blank Club with local favorites the Careless Hearts—a now-legendary show at which the Hearts’ Paul Kimball filled in for Iggy with eerie accuracy—Williamson rejoined the band in Brazil, and the new era of Iggy and the Stooges began.

The Stooges have played more than 100 dates, but stage diving seems to be taking its toll on the 66-year-old frontman. Pop had to be carried off stage after the Aug. 25 Riotfest show in Toronto, during which he leapt into the crowd and dropped his microphone.

The Sept. 28 San Jose show is The Stooges’ only West Coast performance and the last show of the year. The band will take a needed rest and no dates have been booked for 2014.
“We’re ready for a break,” Williamson says without saying when the legendary band will play again. With a touch of exaggeration, he adds, “We’re so old, you never know if there’s going to be another show or not.”

Silicon Valley hosts a strong lineup of fall concerts with some of the biggest names in pop, indie rock and electronic music and the debut of SVSX.

Wobbleland
Aug. 31, 7pm; San Jose Civic; $50-$70. Some fans of Wobbleland have expressed disappointment that this year’s lineup isn’t loaded with the same dubstep star power as one that took San Francisco by storm in 2011. But they’re missing the point—nobody on that bill was famous yet outside of the electronic underground. Wobbleland is an underground party designed to let thousands of scantily clad fans get their spines rocked by these artists before they become phenoms. This year’s rave will pump untold decibels of bass into the San Jose Civic courtesy of headliner Flux Pavilion. Flux is best known for his Bassnectar-type dubstep anthem “Bass Cannon,” but fans of Kanye and Jay-Z are more likely to recognize his track “I Can’t Stop,” which was sampled on their “Who Gon Stop Me” album last year. The rest of the Wobbleland roster, aside from maybe Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs, comes straight from the underground: Zomboy, Barenoize, Bare, Grizzly, NastyNasty, Megalodon and more.

VivaFest!
Sept. 8-16; downtown San Jose; Sept. 16 HP Pavilion show, 7pm, $30 and up. Creative director of VivaFest!, Dan Guerrero, has brought an epic vision and a flair for spectacle to what started out a couple of decades ago as a folksy tribute to the well-known but poorly understood Mexican mariachi tradition. Guerrero is the kind of producer who believes that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing bigger, so it’s no surprise that the centerpiece of his show this year has Gigante in the title. I mean, the organizers of any festival celebrating Mexican culture would be beside themselves to have Latin music star Lila Downs; Chicano Cali favorites Ozomatli; Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, which was responsible for popularizing mariachi internationally in the 1980s; and legendary cantina chanteuse Paquita la del Barrio. But Guerrero has wrapped all four of them into one show at HP Pavilion on Sept. 16, “Domingo Gigante: A Night of Stars.” The festival will also feature their yearly free Outdoor Feria del Mariachi the same day on HP’s arena green. Besides the Super Sunday extravaganza, there will be a film series, historical walks, mariachi and dance workshops, and more.

SVSX
Sept. 22; downtown San Jose
The South Bay music scene thrives off the intersection of underground culture and high-tech empire. It’s no surprise that in the land of start-ups, the music revolution of the last few years has been born in the garages and on the laptops of a new generation of talent. The Silicon Valley Sound eXperience—SVSX—is a showcase for that revolution, supporting the local music scene with stages on which to make the next advance. This debut year will feature the first SVSX music awards and a club crawl brimming with the best and brightest on the South Bay scene. Artists like Will Sprott, whose unique songwriting and arrangements with the Mumlers opened the floodgates to the wave of eclectic and sometimes unclassifiable bands that have risen up here in the last few years. Like Anya and the Get Down, whose mash-up of rock, reggae and dubstep threatens to break big at any moment. Like Careless Hearts, the Shitkickers and the other bands scheduled to perform. They are all the sound of the Silicon Valley experience.

Harmony by the Bay
Sept. 29, 2pm; Shoreline, Mountain View; $49.50-$79. The Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa was known for a weird mix of performers; last year’s bill featured the Flaming Lips, Primus and breakbeat master Chango B, along with bluegrass and Afrobeat. In March, organizers announced that, after 33 years, money woes had done in the three-day festival, at least for the time being—and then surprised everyone with the debut of this South Bay spin-off festival, a joint venture among Harmony’s organizers, KFOG and Live Nation. Pared down to a one-day, two-stage setup, HBTB attempts to carry over the eclecticism of its namesake, with alt headliners Kimbra, the Shins, Tegan and Sara, plus reggae-rockers the Dirty Heads, bluegrass fixture Alison Krauss, electro-tribal strangesters Beats Antique and reggae legend Jimmy Cliff.

People listen to stoner rock for a lot of reasons, but not usually for the lyrics. But Big Business is no ordinary stoner band, as one might suspect with any band whose core members are also in the Melvins.

In fact, drummer Coady Willis is in both Seattle punk band Murder City Devils and the Melvins right now, in addition to Big Business. Vocalist and bassist Jared Warren was in the Melvinsesque Northwest band Karp before graduating to the actual Melvins.

In the last few years, Willis and Warren have added guitarists Toshi Kasai and Scott Martin, expanding their sound somewhat (though they’ve always had collaborators to back them up). Unlike the super serious sludge from most stony metal bands, Big Business’ lyrics have an indie-rock wit to them, and some actually sound like they could be pop songs, if they weren’t being hammered away at by a metal quartet. So yeah, in a lot of ways it’s like the Melvins franchised and Big Business were the first takers—their specific strangeness is different, but the way they subvert every genre they touch in their approach is very much the same.

Last week we wrote about the fact that several homegrown Bay Area rappers, including E-40 and Too Short, were oddly absent from the Rock the Bells lineup at Shoreline over the weekend, despite the fact that they performed at the festival’s San Bernadino show a week earlier. It appeared to be a simple scheduling issue, but E-40 thinks it’s more of a conspiracy—as in, an attempt by the City of Mountain View to keep him out of the Rock the Bells lineup—and presumably any show at Shoreline—for the last few years.

“For some reason, the city of Mountain View won’t let E-40 and Too Short perform. They can’t even give us an excuse or nothin’, they can’t say nothin’,” E-40 told Fuse TV in an interview. “They don’t even know why they won’t let us perform…They don’t want us performing on our own soil, man.”

Mountain View city officials said in a statement they have no control over who plays Rock the Bells, and that scheduling decisions are made entirely by festival organizers. Organizers from Guerilla Union and Live Nation, who jointly produced last weekend’s event, confirmed in an email that all scheduling for the show was done on the basis of availability.

The question then, of course, is why E-40 thought he was available when everyone else thought that he wasn’t—and where his notion that Mountain View had deep-sixed him from the Shoreline show came from in the first place. E-40’s publicist initially said he would look into the matter, but did not return a request for comment.

The Vallejo rapper and Mountain View may still make nice in the near future—RTB organizers have left open the possibility that he’ll perform at Shoreline next year.

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