Oenophiles be on alert: many great vineyards and wine distributors will be gathering in Cupertino this Thursday. Though Campbell’s limited-capacity Wine Walk sold out well in advance, Cupertino’s Food & Wine Stroll offers South Bay denizens another chance to sup on the move this week. Taking place at Main Street by the former Vallco Mall (RIP), the Stroll features vins and varietals from near and far, including celebrated locals like Vidovich Vineyards and Testarossa, as well as imported favorites from RiBevi Italian Wines and more. Wristbands available for wine and food, or just food.

Food & Wine Stroll
Thurs, 6pm, $25+
Main Street, Cupertino

Eat, drink and be spendy at the third annual Cupertino Food & Wine Stroll. In addition to bites and sips, this festival celebrates the downtown business community. There are two tiers of presale tickets: $15 buys access to food only, while $30 gets you a grub-and-drink wristband. Both levels are just a bit pricier the day of the festival. Grab a gooey slice à la Doppio Zero Pizzeria, slide some Kebab Shop cuts off the skewer or savor one of Pacific Catch’s bites from the sea. As for drinks, Rootstock Wine Bar and Steins Beer Garden have that covered.Cupertino Food & Wine Stroll
Thu, 5:30pm, $15+
Main Street Cupertino

Up and coming local singer-songwriter Zoey Campbell blends resonant vocals with spare but affecting arrangements on her self-released three-song demo—now streaming at soundcloud.com/zoeyalise. It’s a promising collection of mellow, soulful indie-folk, which belies her youth (the San Jose native is just 19) and hints at a strong debut yet to come. On standout track “What Is It, Gotta Be True,” Campbell’s smoky, sultry melody fuses effortlessly with a slow-stomping backing track and a wandering bass. She recently played the SoFA Street Fair and she will perform at the SoFA Market on April 26 before this April 27 show in Cupertino. (NV)

Zoey Campbell
Fri, 9pm, $5
The X Bar, Cupertino

On the cover of his latest album, Think Bigs, San Jose rapper Andrew Bigs wears wire-rimmed glasses and channels Steve Jobs in the iconic, if grammatically incorrect, “Think Different” Apple campaign. On the aptly titled release, Bigs distills his singular experience of growing up on the East Side, then attending private school for football at Archbishop Mitty.

“I grew up around poverty—gangbanging, people’s families getting evicted,” he says. “And then I go to highschool with the children of CEOs and sports players. In high school, I had a homie that was homeless that stayed at my house sometimes. And then on the weekends, I’d go to a party at a fucking mansion. It was like ‘how do I exist within this?’”

Bigs—a shortening of his real name Bigelow—started out as an exclusively “conscious” rapper under the moniker “Society” in his “hard-headed” late teens. But as he aged, he took a broader stance, seeking to ground his insights in personal musings that were universally relatable. 

“You don’t want to be overly preachy,” Bigs says, explaining his shifting tastes. “But if the experience is authentic, people can connect whether they’ve lived it or not. Nobody wants to be told what to do or what to think. Plus, young homies ain’t going to listen to it if it don’t bump.”

Bigs employs a coalition of producers to meld live instrumentation with the slow-stomping pace of trap. The kick-off track, “Never Let You Down” rides a tinkly piano riff into a choir-backed hook about making enough dough for his parents to retire. But even though Bigs seeks to speak to everyone, he also understands that his race has given him benefits not offered to his childhood neighbors.

“White privilege is real,” he says. “I come from experiences that are hard. Nonetheless, when I get into a car, they don’t look at me the same as they look at my brother Malcolm (one of his producers). I own that. You have to be humble, open to those conversations—recognize you just don’t know what it’s like to be a person of color.”

Outside of music, Bigs works at De-Bug, a media advocacy non-profit that gave him his first recording space. The emcee strives to highlight the stories of working-class people ignored in the tech-wealth narrative of Silicon Valley. He aids their “participatory defense” program which organizes the family members of an arrestee so that they can help lawyers beat the case of their loved one as a grassroots response to mass incarceration.

“Everything goes through the courts,” he says. “So it’s a really traditional community organizing ethic applied to the courtroom. I spend a lot of time around this shit. I’ve seen mothers break down in meetings, people getting locked away for petty things. It shapes how I look at things.”

Bigs considers his music a part of De-Bug’s storytelling efforts and he shared his novel perspective with the country when he embarked on his first major tour, opening for Reef the Lost Cause. He traveled to Philadelphia and back, performing 17 shows in 30 days and earning a newfound confidence.

“It’s a lot of hard work. A lot of people break,” he says. “It’s tiring, physically and mentally, performing in and out every night. And it can just be a lot. This was a test, but I passed that shit with flying colors. I could have done another two months.”

He just returned from SXSW last month and hopes his community-building and steady rap grind will deliver his hometown to national prominence. He is celebrating the release of Think Bigs with a show at De Anza College this Thursday.

“The dope part of San Jose hip-hop is that you can find all types of shit,” he says. “People with live bands, people doing super trap shit, turn-up shit, people on some gangsta stuff, people on some conscious stuff, boom-bap—all that co-exists. There’s no stamp, where it’s like ‘Oh that’s from San Jose,’ but that in itself creates a style. It opens a door to people creating whatever they want.”

Andrew Bigs
Apr 21
De Anza College, Cupertino

In February, unknown San Jose rapper Antwon released the video for his song “Helicopter,” which quickly became the subject of music blogs all over the internet, most notably spin.com. It’s now creeping up on 80,000 views and counting.

What made “Helicopter” an Internet sensation was how seamlessly the director mashed together scenes from the Steve McQueen 1960s car chase flick Bullitt with footage of Antwon and his crew walking around those same San Franciscan streets.

But the real gem in the video is the song itself. It’s a unique hybrid of party-rap, stoner-rap, emo-rap and nerd-rap, without actually falling into any one of these pre-existing rap genres.

“A lot of people will tell me, ‘oh you’re an Internet rapper.’ My stuff got big on the Internet because I couldn’t get it big anywhere else,” Antwon says.

In fact, the majority of music blogs that wrote about Helicopter were not rap-oriented. Antwon has yet to get much interest from the hip-hop community.
“Rap music has its own media, like The Source or XXL, but a lot of rappers don’t fit into that mold. It’s easier for me to get into Fader and stuff like that. My audience isn’t a really strong hip-hop audience. They are people that listen to a lot of different stuff,” Antwon says.

The music for “Helicopter” is actually an instrumental song called “Helicopter Does Not Exist,” which was produced by Walsh, for his own 2010 EP, Smoke Weed About It. It’s a funky, dissonant electronic track with an authentic retro vibe that could easily pass for a cool soundtrack to a ’70s action flick that never existed. Antwon contacted Walsh and asked if he could rap over it for his mixtape Fantasy Beds. Walsh told him yes.

Barbara Wahli has a talent for turning her birthday into an event. A few years ago, the South Bay “Barb Rocks” promoter had the tables turned on her when one of the bands she had booked, Point Three, figured out she knew the words to Dramarama’s “Anything Anything,” which they covered. They made her sing it when they played it on stage, and instantly a birthday tradition was born.

The next year, Death Valley High got her to sing a Joan-Jett-inspired cover of “Crimson and Clover” that went straight into “Bad Reputation.” The next, Golden Hour convinced her to sing Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”

This year, her birthday show—tonight at Britannia Arms Cupertino—will take things one step further, however. This time one of the bands, the Trash Pop Icons, have actually written a song about her, “Barb on the Rocks,” which they’ll debut at the show. As for her now-traditional performance, she had decided not to do it this year, but then Mike Duell of the Driftwood Sin (and formely of Undergone) asked her to do an acoustic number. She actually got as far as picking one out, but whether it happens or not will be a game-time decision as they have had a hard time finding a moment to practice it.

One of the things Wahli is most excited about is that this show will also double as the CD release show for local band Cadent.

“I’ve been waiting for that Tabula Rasa CD for over a year now!” says Wahli.

The band will also debut the video for their single “Like Tonight” at the show. Cadent’s bass player Nate Skelton is also in the band Manjo and the Bandolins, who will also perform, along with a reunited Far From You.

“In general, I’m just excited about celebrating my birthday with great friends, doing what I love most,” says Wahli, “which is be around good live music.”

The BARB ROCKS BIRTHDAY BASH will be held Saturday, June 30 at Britannia Arms Cupertino, 9pm; $5.

San Jose pop-punkers A Four Star Affair will be shooting a scene for their next video at their X Bar show Saturday. Considering that their first video—which came out earlier this year, for “The Group W Bench”—was a hoot, it’s probably worth getting in on. Don’t know if they’ll have mimes, Robin Hood and zombies this time, but I have a feeling it will be just as ADD and funny as the other one.

They humbly request that attendees for this all-ages show come dressed up “like this is a Hollywood premiere,” which gives you an idea of the red-carpet concept they’re going for.

These four guys can barely keep a straight face sometimes, but damn they’ve been working hard lately. They successfully raised enough money through Kickstarter to fund their second EP, A Tragedy Like Me, which is their best batch yet of soaring, sweet-as-candy pop-punk. More fun than Taking Back Sunday, but in the same vein, they haven’t changed their basic mission since 2010’s debut EP If I Can’t Have You No One Can, but they’ve matured—even though that it seems wrong to use that word in the same sentence as “A Four Star Affair”—quite a bit. Pounders, Fabulous Under Fire and Highway Music open.

A Four Star Affair performs at X Bar in Cupertino on Saturday at 8:30pm; $9.

Mixing anarchist crust-punk with rural, jug-band folk music wasn’t anything particularly planned out for the members of Santa Cruz’s Blackbird Raum. In fact, they never gave much thought to being a band, at least not in the early 2000s when they were all living like bohemians and squatting in abandoned buildings. Playing music was just something to do to pass the time. And of course, being squatters meant that electric instruments were out of the question.

“That’s why we learned to play folk instruments. They were lying around. We all started playing those instruments because you could,” says mandolin player Mars.

It turned out that there were other groups of squatters, traveling around the country, playing old timey jug band folk instruments too, but they were getting paid.

“All of us were living in the most squalid manner possible. The idea that these people played the streets and got thirty bucks, we thought they were millionaires,” says banjo player, Caspian.

While these bands (The Sourmash Hug Band, The Inkwell Rhythm Makers & The Hobo Goblins) were playing the same types of acoustic instruments (banjos, mandolins, accordions, washtub basses and washboards) and similarly pulling heavily from early Americana, jazz and traditional European music, they were mostly composing fun, light-hearted sing-along-type ditties.

Blackbird Raum decided to follow in these bands footsteps and start busking on the streets. But playing happy, superficial songs didn’t interest them, even if that’s what random tourists (with money) passing by wanted to hear. Instead Blackbird Raum wrote complex political songs, often about environmental issues and socio-economical inequities. They lacked a distinct lead vocalist and didn’t write catchy sing-along choruses, instead giving their jug-band songs a crust-punk bent.

Oddly enough, this is precisely how Blackbird Raum developed a loyal fanbase in Santa Cruz, now drawing several hundred people per show when they headline venues in their hometown. Plus they tour all over the United States and Europe, playing clubs, community centers, famer’s markets and even, still, on the streets.

Blackbird Raum plays Saturday, May 5, at Homestead Lanes in Cupertino, 8pm; $8.

At one show on their Cambodian tour last year, South Bay all-girl rock band the Like Me’s played for over 5,000 people. This was less than two years after their first show ever—at Iguanas Taqueria in San Jose. Their bass player, Helena Hong, had only just started playing the bass four days earlier.

The band, who headline the “Gals Rock” show at X Bar on Saturday, has never confined their music to any one genre. They play rock, funk, R & B, folk, reggae, or whatever else they feel like, but in the beginning all their songs were confined to English. Then they started thinking of ways they could better represent their cultures (two of them are Cambodian and two are Filipino). They made some videos in Khmer, the common language in Cambodia, and those went viral.

“We got contacted by this one woman who invited us to play in front of the Angkor Wat Temple Complex because of those videos. To us it was like, we have to make this happen. When will we ever be invited to play in front of this sacred temple again?” Hong says.

This was not a typical rock concert by any means. Angkor Wat was constructed in the 12th century and has been a place of religious significance for the Khmer people ever since. The show was a two-day event, called “a tribute to the masters.” The other performers at the event were master violinists, trombonists, cello players and even an old woman that performed an ancient dance. The Like Me’s were the only group anywhere near the realm of rock music.

“It was an honor because they were saying we were masters of our music,” Hong says.

Third-wave ska legends Dan Potthast of MU330 and Slow Gherkin thought they had put skanking behind them years ago. But it all came back to them in 2009, when Potthast joined up with four ex-Gherkin members (A.J. Marquez, Matt Porter, Brendan Thompson and Phil Boutelle) and his fellow MU330 bandmate Matt Knobbe to form Dan P and the Bricks, who play X Bar in Cupertino on Saturday.

“I’d been living in Santa Cruz for eight years, hanging out with these guys that have ska flowing through their veins,” Potthast says. “Both of our bands, Slow Gherkin and MU330, as they grew older, moved away from traditional-sounding ska. When we got together many years later, it felt like this guilty pleasure to just play ska songs.”

In reality, neither MU330 nor Slow Gherkin had ever played only ska songs. Like the other prominent bands of the third-wave movement, they were fusing ska with punk and other genres.

“Gherkin was aggressive. It was that ska-punk thing. Everyone was playing at every moment during every song, just hammering,” says founding Gherkin member Marquez.

MU330 took the ska-punk sound to a whole different level, dubbing itself a “psycho-ska” band and mixing manic punk energy with crazy circus music and hyper-ska. In later years, indie rock made it into their sound as well. It was all counterbalanced with Potthast’s penchant for writing in an Elvis Costello-esque New Wave style.

“I have more of an appreciation of the bounce of ska rather than just the really fast punky stuff, the groove where it makes you really want to dance,” Potthast says.

When Dan P and the Bricks formed, they decided that, rather than reach back to the third wave movement of their heyday, they’d return all the way to ska’s source—back to that sweet, soulful, midtempo groove like it used to be played in Jamaica in the ’60s by artists like the Skatalites and Prince Buster. <!–nextpage–>

“It is such a powerful musical genre. It’s so fun to play and watch people explode. My ears have grown a little. We’ll take some space and play less,” Marquez says of the new approach.

After a few shows, they added three more members to the mix: Liam Ryan, Eric Johnson and Kevin Zinn (horn players from the local reggae band Soul Majestic). Now a 10-piece, the Bricks are a powerhouse ska machine.

Both Gherkin and MU330 spent the ’90s relentlessly on the road, but the Bricks were never intended to be a serious, touring project. Everyone in the band is in their 30s and has other commitments, careers and/or families. So most of their shows are for the community, meaning that they stay in the Bay Area, but also that they donate a majority of the money they make to local charities.

“With the Bricks we wanted to increase the fun factor. That’s what we’re all about. If we can help some different charities along the way, even better,” Potthast says.

When the opportunity came up to record an album, they jumped on it. The hardest part was coordinating schedules. Potthast took the rhythm section down to Los Angeles to record with his friend, producer Chris Murray, famous from his days with the Canadian ska band King Apparatus, then spent the remaining part of the month recording horns and vocals. He’d then drive down to L.A. to mix the record with Murray.

The result is Watch Where You Walk, a lush, well-crafted, traditional ska record that remains authentic in its production and arrangements but still has Potthast’s early-’80s New Wave approach to songwriting. The album has already received positive reviews on several music blogs, including a “2011 album of the year” nod on Upstarter.com.

Potthast says he put more work into Watch Where You Walk than on any of his post-MU330 solo albums. It’s also the first ska album anyone in the Bricks has made in over a decade.

There’s a sweet full-circle sense to the whole project, he says.

“When MU330 really started going in 1991, we were always the odd band on the bill. There would be a metal band, a punk band, a whatever band. We were the anomaly. Then suddenly in the mid-to-late ’90s there were five ska bands in every small town in the Midwest. Now there doesn’t seem like as many bands doing what we’re doing,” he muses. “Maybe we had to get away from it, give it some time and get back to where it didn’t feel trendy.”

Dan P and the Bricks
Saturday; 8pm; $8
X Bar, Cupertino