Hailing from San Jose, Stickup Kid draws inspiration from other energetic Bay Area pop-punk crews like Green Day. It’s no surprise, then, that they were signed to Oakland’s Adeline Records, founded by the Billie Joe Armstrong, before the record label folded in 2017. Stickup Kid has been gigging since the 2009 release of their debut EP, Fight Nothing. In the ensuing years, the local boys have dropped two more EPs and three full-length albums—including their self-released 2019 project, Soul Drive, which showcases the band’s maturing sound. Continue reading »
Tony-award winning playwright and composer William Finn recounts his tribulations with a brain aneurysm in his semi-autobiographical 1998 musical, A New Brain. Protagonist Gordon, a composer, grapples with anxiety and existential angst as he tries to keep his cool before a dangerous brain surgery that threatens his life, and with it, all of his unfulfilled artistic potential. Premiered at New York City’s Lincoln Center, A New Brain has been performed in theaters across the US and in the UK, and now makes its South Bay premiere at the Tabard Theatre Jan 9-26. Continue reading »
In the wake of Elon Musk’s meme-worthy cyber truck unveiling, this year’s Silicon Valley Auto Show is sure to be buzzing with both futuristic wheels and good old-fashioned, gas-guzzling muscle. All the name brands will be there—Bentley, Lamborghini, Maserati, Rolls Royce—along with the most dazzling examples of bleeding-edge technologies including electric vehicles and alternative fuels. The best news? Test drives are available. Just be prepared for the letdown when you eventually have to drive home in your bucket of bolts. Continue reading »
With a deadpan delivery and a look reminiscent of Mitch Hedberg’s, stand-up comic Dusty Slay is an expert at making light of uncomfortable situations. Raised in a trailer park in Alabama, Slay likes to poke fun at his experience of growing up poor, his many shitty restaurant jobs (he loves working them after he’s put in his two-week notice) and the complexities of his love for country music. Donning a trucker hat—which, at times, is emblazoned with his own name—and a pair of oversized ’80s glasses, the breakout comedian has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Tonight Show. Continue reading »
Pat Travers was part of a wave of late-’70s guitar heroes—artists who, in the wake of Peter Frampton’s runaway success, seemed poised to break out in a major way. But just as things got rolling for Travers, a combination of changing fashions, the corporatization of rock radio and plain bad luck blunted his momentum.
Still, he soldiered on, building a deeper and more varied body of work that continues to hold up today. He remains active outside the studio as well, playing dozens of live dates yearly, all over the US and in his native Canada.
Travers first came on the scene with his self-titled 1976 debut album. Building a straightforward, blues-influenced sound around his guitar playing and a spare bass-and-drums rhythm section, he delivered a sturdy set of rockers; half the album tracks were original tunes, and the rest, such as Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and Little Walter’s “Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights),” were well-chosen covers.
The latter would be a minor hit single for Travers when released in a rowdy live version on his fifth album, 1979’s Live! Go For What You Know. On the strength of that record’s success, he followed up with his most popular studio album, 1980’s Crash and Burn.
Unfortunately, today that record title seems more than a little prophetic. His next album fared poorly on the charts. When it’s suggested that the launch of MTV—with its favoring of visually and style-oriented groups over artists who played guitars—might have contributed to his commercial misfortune, Travers agrees, but he says there’s more to it than that.
“The kiss of death—the real bite—came before that,” Travers says.
He lays the blame for the end of creatively vital rock radio stations (like the ones that played Pat Travers records) at the feet of Lee Abrams. A pioneer of using research to build radio playlists, Abrams is credited with creating the AOR (album oriented radio) format. But Abrams’ approach usurped the role of radio station program directors, replacing their music choices with a rigid list of songs, carefully created through the use of focus groups. The result was a loss of character; a radio station in, say, San Francisco no longer sounded substantially different from one in Boston.
“Everything became homogenized across the nation,” Travers says. “There was no more something breaking out in the Northeast and something else happening in the Southwest.”
The days of regional hits were over, and the work that touring artists did to build regional audiences became less effective.
To be fair, Travers had other difficulties around that time. He split with his management and was locked for years in a legal battle with his record label. But Travers prefers to look forward.
“That was then,” he says, “and here we are now.”
Along the way, he’s never lost his creative spark. In the 40 years since Crash and Burn, Travers has released more than 30 albums. Leveraging the power of his onstage performances, nearly half of those releases are live recordings.
Despite his focus on the present and future, Pat Travers’ latest album finds him reaching into the distant past. Swing! collects big band, jump blues and swing tunes from the 1940s and updates them with a powerful rock & roll energy. He says he got the idea after his wife tuned into a ’40s classics channel on Sirius XM. (In a bit of irony, XM Radio was co-founded by Lee Abrams.) Travers found himself thinking, “Man, these are some hot players, and it just sounds like a lot of fun.”
Travers’ new versions of classics like Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” increase the wattage with electric guitar. He notes that the original arrangements didn’t need a lot of tinkering.
“All I had to do was try to figure out how to get my guitar in there,” he says with a chuckle.
Another chestnut, Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” is now a part of the Pat Travers Band’s live sets. And that aggregation remains busy, with dates booked well into the spring. The group is nearly done recording an album of all-new music, with a hoped-for release date sometime in 2020.
“Hopefully,” Travers says, “I’ll have the best album I’ve ever made.”
I understand that you love one another, but I see the both of you kissing each other like y’all are about to have sex. It has been going on for quite a while and I am tired of seeing it. The both of you catch the same train as I do, and every time you and her get on the train, y’all rush to sit down and express yourself. You tried to hide your intimate moments by having her sit on top of you and put a jacket over you and her face which is obvious that you are kissing. That’s the dumbest thing I have ever seen. Hell, I even saw you sucking on her chest like you were breastfeeding and putting your hands inside her underwear, touching her booty, which is definitely unacceptable. This is a train, not a hotel room. I tried to avoid seeing that, but both of you are really loud. There are other people on the train who don’t want to see that. The both of you need to stop doing that and act as adults. You can meet each other on the weekend and do whatever y’all hearts desire. By the way, I know your girlfriend’s name because you talk too much.
I Saw You is an anonymous “man on the street” column. Email your rants and raves about co-workers or any badly behaving citizens to [email protected], or send to 380 S. First St, San Jose, 95113. Submissions should stick to about 100 words.
Two rising women of country music come to San Jose to kick off 2020. The KRTY-hosted night begins with dance lessons from 7:30pm to 8:30pm. That’s followed by a set from Stephanie Quayle. “If I Was a Cowboy,” the most recent single from the Bozeman, Montana native, bucks back at the tired tropes of cowboy culture while giving women permission to embrace most empowering facets of rugged individualism. The evening’s headliner is Gabby Barrett, who caught her first big break after finishing third on the 16th season of American Idol. She is currently touring behind two singles: “I Hope” and “The Good Ones.” Continue reading »
Bay Area novelist Tara Sim caught the attention of young adult readers back in 2016 for her historical fantasy set in Victorian London, The Timekeeper—the first of a trilogy of groundbreaking LGBTQ fiction. Now she’s back with a new novel titled Scavenge the Stars, which borrows the general outline of The Count of Monte Cristo and pulls a gender switcheroo. The new book is the first of two parts, and the author sits down with fellow YA novelist Kat Cho (Wicked Fox) for a conversation about writing, world-building and gender in fiction. Continue reading »
Scotland-born singer and songwriter KT Tunstall might get lost in the avalanche of awesome spawn-of-Patti-Smith/PJ Harvey female rockers of the 2010s. But she’s matured and flourished since her chart emergence back in 2004, mixing her obvious ear for the pop hook with lean arrangements and a serious plunge into artistic expression. She can scorch with rockers like “The River” and soar into the quiet places with the wonderful cover of Beck’s “Golden Age.” Her most recent album, WAX, is the second in a trilogy of records delving into “soul, body and mind” which includes the moving song “The Night That Bowie Died.” Continue reading »
A bit of a throwback to the indie rock of the mid-aughts, Wayfairy blends acoustic instruments—such as banjo, fiddle, accordion and washboard—with a punk sensibility and activist message. The Oakland-based band brings its radical vision of peace, love and the abolishment of private property to San Jose’s DIY-tastic Playback Studios. Also on the bill, local noise-rock collective Eastern Westerner, who draw inspiration from San Jose indie legends Duster and other contemporary no-wave phenoms like Sonic Youth. Continue reading »
