I generally approach any manifestation of the so-called supergroup with a raised eyebrow. The formula usually boils down to a group of has-been rock stars who pool what’s left of their collective fame and make a last-ditch run at the charts for the sake of a paycheck, and/or in some pathetic bid for resuscitated rock cred. And it usually turns out to be more of a novelty than anything worth actually listening to (e.g. Tinted Windows).

Not so in the case of Them Crooked Vultures. Guitarist / singer Josh Homme (Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age), drummer Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters), and guitarist Alain Johannes (session ace, producer) are anything but has-beens — in fact, it could be argued that they’re all at the top of the respective games right now — and bassist John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) is a straight up legend who would have to put in some serious downgrading work to sully his reputation as a consummate musician. From the sound of the music and the demeanor of the players on stage, this feels more like fun than anything else, like they might very well be doing it even if no was paying attention…which, of course, is certainly not the case, as evidenced by the hype around the record and the fact that their stop at the Fox in Oakland was a sold out show.

It’s always great to see Grohl playing drums; in fact, I think there should be a law that he can only play drums from now on, enough with the Foo already. Dude is a beast on the kit. His attack is like Animal from the Muppets, but there’s nothing funny about the dynamics of his power and style, it’s serious business. Homme is a great guitarist and songwriter, and backed by Johannes, has managed to pull off really interesting, extremely well executed guitar parts rich with inventive depth.

Jones is easily one of the most well rounded musicians I’ve ever witnessed. Not only did he play myriad basses throughout the show, but he played an electric organ — handling those songs’ bass parts on foot pedals — a guitar, and even a keytar. Plus, you know, he’s fucking John Paul Jones, the quiet yet unwavering foundation of Led Zeppelin. To see him play live, especially these days, is to see one of the greatest rock musicians of all time — a serious treat.

I snapped off about 100 photos from my vantage point on the second-tier of the floor area, and about 20 of them made the cut; as usual, you can click over the set on Flickr to see them in all their largeness:

Many thanks due to my ace homie Lydia for the hookup on tickets to this show.

Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitcher Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter on acid.

I’ve heard this story a million times, but always as MLB lore, never from an official of the league, never from a television sports historian, and never from another professional player. So I always thought that, despite the plausibility of the tale, there was a chance it was an urban legend.

But sure enough, it’s true, proven beyond doubt by No-Mas, which posted the animated version of the story, narrated by Ellis himself. Priceless…

I ventured out and across the newly reopened Bay Bridge on Monday night to catch Big Business at the Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco. It was my fourth time seeing the bass-and-drums metal duo (who are now a trio, with guitarist Toshi Kasai from Altamont), and by far one of the best performances I’ve seen from them.

Local heroes Triclops opened (those guys get all the good gigs) and while I like their music a lot, I find the lead singer’s approach a bit annoying — too many vocal effects, and a weird affected stage presence that bothers me, though I can’t really explain why. Maybe it’s just me. But the band kicks out the fucking weird noisy jams with reckless abandon, and I can definitely get down with that.

I always enjoy seeing Big Business — I’ve been a fan of bass payer Jared Warren since he was in Karp and the mighty yet short-lived The Whip, and a fan of drummer Coady Willis since Murder City Devils — but this show reminded me that I prefer to catch them when they’re not opening for The Melvins. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Melvins, but when Big Business tours with them, I feel like their duo metal thing is too easily overshadowed by the fact that they’re half of The Melvins, like they don’t get their full due as their own band. For the record, Big Business wields more than enough rock power to anchor the headline position at a show, and they’ve proven that beyond question.

I was blown away (almost literally) by the sheer size of Jared’s bass rig (two 15″ speaker cabinets driven by a GK 800RB, topped by a Crate 2×12 and a Marshall 4×10 powered by a Sunn Beta Bass head, all stacked up in a giant square of air-pushing monstrosity), and by the unrepentant yet finessed fury that Coady unleashes on his drum kit. They played for over an hour, ran through a bunch of songs from all three albums, and didn’t disappoint.

The show was pretty amazing. Here are a buncha photos (you can click over to the set on Flickr to see the photos in all their glorious bigness)…

It’s been roughly a decade since The Jesus Lizard was a full time, regularly touring band, and despite all that time off, their reunion tour stop at the Fillmore in San Francisco on Saturday night served as a blunt reminder: The Jesus Lizard is the single greatest live rock band of all time.

There are a million thoughts and observations banging around in my head from last night’s show, and I am still high from the experience. So rather than try to lace it all together into one well-crafted, cohesive piece, I figure the end here is better served by a good old fashioned brain dump. And there’s a photo gallery, too (click over to the set on Flickr to see the photos all big and stuff)…

Not only do I feel fortunate to have been in the building for this show, but bass player David Sims — who is one of my greatest influences as a bass player — left a couple of after-show passes for me at the door, so I was able to meet the man face to face very briefly and thank him for the show, the after-show passes, and just for being an inspiration. At least, that’s what I meant when I shook his hand and stammered out “thank you.” I’ve met plenty of rock stars over the years, and I never really miss a step ’cause most of ‘em really aren’t that special. But Sims is a bit of a hero to me. And he’s a super nice guy.

At 49 years old, David Yow is as explosive and charismatic of a frontman as ever. He spent a good third of the show floating on top of the crowd.

Killdozer, who were scheduled to play second in the evening’s line up, cancelled, so the only opener was Black Elk. As soon as I walked in I recognized the frontman. Black Elk’s lead singer, Tom Glose, is also the bass player in Portland, OR band Cougar, who we (Ovipositor) played with two weeks ago at Kelly’s Olympian in Downtown Portland. Colin and I caught up with him at the after-show meet-and-greet, and we talked for a bit about Portland and playing in too many bands. Nice guy. Small world.

(Bass nerd alert.) I immediately noticed that the bass rig David Sims had on stage was not his traditional Gallien-Krueger 800RB head and two 1×15 cabinets. Sims is touring this time around with an Ampeg SVT 8×10 cabinet powered by an SVT VR head, a tube-powered, tone rich beast. Not only is the specter of it on stage way more imposing (the thick VR compared to the relatively svelte profile of the 800RB, and the refrigerator sized 8×10 compared to two 15″ speaker boxes), but in my opinion, the sound really benefitted from it as well.

Duane Dennison was playing a really nice custom guitar from the Electrical Guitar Company. And, no surprise, he was playing it really well.

I pretty much lost my shit when the band played “Nub,” “Monkey Trick,” “Glamorous,” “Blue Shot,” “Boilermaker,” “Puss,” “Mouth Breather,” and “Seasick.” That short list is just scratching the surface of great songs on the set list, but those are the ones that really got me hyped.

Mac McNeilly is a truly one of the most amazingly drummers I’ve ever witnessed. The band wrapped up their initial set by dropping out one at a time — first Yow, then Duane, then Sims — leaving Mac on stage playing drums solo, pounding out almost lyrical patterns between the crack of the snare, the rumbling punch of his kick, and two monstrous sounding toms (one rack-mounted and a big fat one on the floor).

After the show, as I waited in the balcony area for the bands to come out and do the after-show meet-and-greet thing, I looked over the edge of the balcony just in time to see my friend Eugene, who was still down on the venue’s main floor, get pelted from above with a sopping wet shirt. I looked over to see David Yow leaning over an adjacent balcony, cackling like a mad man and giving Eugene the finger. (They are, apparently, well acquainted with each other; must be a freaky frontman camaraderie thing.)

They get tagged with the “noise rock” handle pretty frequently, and while they can certainly do that, I generally see The Jesus Lizard as a pretty straightforward rock band… A really inventive and skilled band that makes aggressive, interesting and unique music, but a pretty straightforward rock band nonetheless. Admittedly, though, there’s something about them, especially in the live setting, that borders on complete chaos. Maybe it’s Yow’s general presence, maybe it’s the fact that most of their songs get faster when they play them live, maybe it’s that the studio recordings are merely caging the beast. Whatever it is, there is certainly the sense that, at any second, shit could careen out of the control into mass hysteria, total bedlam, riots in the streets, the end of the fucking universe. Yeah, that sounds a bit extreme. But that’s real rock ‘n’ roll as far as I’m concerned.

I’m still mulling it all over, and I reserve the right to add to this list of random thoughts as more come to mind, but it all comes back to this: The Jesus Lizard is the single greatest live rock band of all time.

I don’t get out much these days (though this month certainly seems like an exception to that rule) but that doesn’t mean I don’t maintain a couple of innocuous vices. I like to take a drink in the evenings, and since I live so far away from my favorite darkned bar, and because I’m trying to avoid the empty calories of beer (admittedly, with mixed results; getting older is a bitch like that), I find myself gravitating more and more to whiskey. I’ve been a whiskey drinker for years, and in that time I’ve pretty much always stuck with Jameson because it tastes good and it’s affordable. In the last five years or so, however, I’ve started to really dig into the various types of hooch that represent the whiskey (or “whisky” without the “e” if you’re Scottish, Canadian or Japanese) family.

In my whiskey travels I’ve found that I don’t care for Rye in general, nor do I like whiskeys that deliver a big, overly powerful hit of peat flavor. I like clean, smooth blends, single malts and single casks, mostly older Scotch and Irish whiskies, and refined Southern American bourbons. But those are just generalities. I’m always experimenting, and I’m often surprised by whiskey that I didn’t expected to like. Despite my interest in whiskey, however, I’m still very much a novice, and obviously still learning about the variety, depth and breadth of the product and the culture that surrounds it.

Which is why I enjoy attending WhiskyFest in San Francisco. This three-year-old event is one of two annual whiskey-themed events in the city, and it is by far the superior of the two (I attended the other, the Whiskies Of the World Expo, the first time it was held, and was not impressed with the setup, the distilleries on hand, or the clientele…though I will say that they killed it on the food element). I was at the first annual Whisky Fest and had a blast; I skipped the second one and really regretted it; and last Friday, October 16, I attended the third Whisky Fest with a couple of friends, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Here’s a little photo recap of the action (you can see the whole set in all its full-sized glory over at Flickr)…

I recently ordered the 13th Floor Elevators box set, Sign Of The 3 Eyed Men, directly from the UK label that put it out, International Artists. It showed up in the mail today, so I grabbed a coworker and had him handle the camera as I opened it up. Voila — box opening video.

A really nicely constructed set, it features a great coffee table quality book by Paul Drummond (the guy who wrote the official band biography) full of album info, amazing images of the band, their releases, show posters and handbills, etc. All 10 discs are inside the book, which is accompanied by an envelope full of stickers and reproductions of handbills and posters from the Austin, TX group’s heyday.

As I opened the set I noticed — but failed to mention in the video — the reference to “phonographic records” on the back of the box, and it set me to thinking that the only thing that could have made this set cooler would have been the inclusion of some vinyl. I understand that pressing all 10 discs on to 180 gram vinyl would have been cost-prohibitive, but reproductions of a few of the old 45s would have been nice, and I definitely would have paid a few extra bucks for that kind of thing.

All nitpicking and vinyl fetishism aside, I’m still extremely stoked on this…

These days you can pretty much do anything on a mobile phone. From internet browsing to social networking, direct text communication and photo sharing to making travel plans and restaurant reservations, watching movies and listening to (and even making) music, and a whole lot more. In some countries, like Japan, people can even watch broadcast television on their mobiles.

We’ve reached a point in technical evolution where the mobile device is a handheld computer first and a telephone second. And as far as technology goes, nothing else has reached the same level of global saturation, with well over 50 percent of the world’s population now wired with a mobile phone.

The guy from IBM who told Apple’s Steves back in the day that no one would ever want a computer in their homes must really feel like a visionless asshole at this point. And if he doesn’t, he sure fucking should. Not only do people have multiple computers in their homes, they carry computers in their pockets.

Mobile phone have not only replaced land lines in many homes and helped techno-hipsters find each other while they’re out on the town, but they’ve been used to break news, fuel revolutions and keep an eye on public processes. The evolution of the mobile handheld is one of the most impressive advents of technology of all time, though it seems largely taken for granted by the generation who uses it most, probably because the technology has come of age along side the kids who adopt it the quickest. Even my generation, the oldest ages of X, has adapted pretty quickly to this marvel of modern science; we think nothing of taking out our iPhones, Blackberrys, Palms, etc. and tracking down our friends via GPS, making a restaurant, hotel or flight reservation, checking real time traffic and weather, or downloading some music.

Or, in this case, throwing a quick post up to a blog. There are mobile apps and SMS/MMS options for Tumbler, Blogger, in this case Wordpress, and more, and because I’ve been dying to try it out ever since I installed the WP app on my BB Storm, I figured I’d wax philosophic on the impressive nature of mobile capabilities. But then again, you’re probably aware of all this anyway, so I’ll shut up about it.

Oh, and these photos? The Art Blakey record is what I was listening to when I wrote this, and I just thought the chrome 9 was some gangster ass shit to post for no reason in particular, except that I wanted to test the image posting capabilities of the WP Blackberry app from the phone’s camera and SD card gallery, respectively…

Ovipositor played The Hemlock Tavern in SF on Saturday night with our friends Generalissimo and Cartographer (both great bands who kicked out the fucking jams). Not only was it the unofficial kick off of our Fall ‘09 tour (with Generalissimo), but it was also the public unveiling of the CD we had a release party for — also at The Hemlock — back in December.

It’s about time we had some product to sling, but I still say it was worth the wait. The custom screen printing and die-cutting on the package looks and works great, and aside from the absence of the album info on the spine on the package, it’ll sit nicely on the shelf along side your other favorite CDs. (People still buy CDs everyone once in a while, right? Right.)

Here are a few photos of the newly released physical version of Oakland Minor (holler at us over at the Ovipositor site for some mail order action):

(Front)

(Back)

(Open)

(Interior)

Saturday night’s show was a bit of a trial run of a tour setlist for us, though we have a pretty good repertoire of tunes at this point, so we plan on switching up every night. Of course, we also played last, which, to quote Colin, meant that we were either headlining the show or cleaning up the mess, depending on how you look at it. Turns out it was a little bit of both.

Generalissimo and Cartographer killed it, and of course I forgot both my camera and my digital recorder so I failed to document their greatness (stay tuned, however, for plenty of Generalissimo tour photo action in the coming week). They played to a good crowd that trickled in as steadily as they trickled out as the evening went on. By the time our set ended, the audience had thinned out. Luckily the homie EJ showed up right before we played and managed to get some photos of us in action. So here you go, just like you were there:

I recently started following Ted Bawno on Twitter. Aside from being a prolific Twitterer (so much so, in fact, that I briefly consider unfollowing him daily), Bawno — who may or may not be the alter ego of NYC journalist, former Vibe music editor, and Ego Trip founder Sacha Jenkins — was the publisher of the now defunct Ego Trip magazine, “The Arrogant Voice of Musical Truth,” which launched in 1994 and folded after the publication of its fourth anniversary / farewell issue in 1998. Since the magazine’s closure, the Ego Trip crew has released two books, Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists and Ego Trip’s Big Book of Racism, and produced the VH1 programs, Ego Trip’s The (White) Raper Show and Ego Trips Miss Rap Supreme.

Anyway, Bawno mentioned on Twitter not long ago that he was planning to bring back the print edition of Ego Trip, which would be dope. In addition to a unique and intelligently irreverent editorial voice, the magazine always boasted really interesting and artistic yet functional design, right down to the house ads. And they were damn good house ads — simple, eye catching, culturally relevant, whip smart.

Unlike most magazines’ house ads, which are basically just boring subscription pitches featuring a couple of past magazine covers, a rate discount and (maybe) some slick or catchy marketing copy, Ego Trip’s were brand defining without actually making a sales pitch, and were more impactful than just about any house ad campaign I’ve seen since. What these house ads lacked in directly measurable ROI potential (no call-to-action message tied to user revenue), they more than made up for in memorable brand recognition. I’m not going to remember a subscription pitch I get from, say, Maxim — just another generic sweaty hot chick in a biki, offering me 70% off the regular newsstand rate of a magazine I couldn’t care less about — but I sure as hell remember most of Ego Trip’s house ads, 11 years after the magazine folded (the one featuring the image of Reggie Jackson walking off the field for the last time, tipping his cap to the crowd, under the caption “Bow down to a player that’s greater than you.” has always been my favorite).

The last issue of Ego Trip (cover above) was full of house ads, and reading of Bawno’s intention to reanimate the magazine got me thinking about them, so I dug that issue out of my own little magazine archive and did some scanning. The ads themselves are a bit grainy (note the difference in resolution quality of the copy over the images) and my scanner is a few years old, and not of the highest quality, so…it is what it is. With the exception of the “The ghetto’s trying to kill us.” and “We get lifted.” ads, these are all full-page or two-page ads. They’re all pretty brilliant…

(Note the prophetic statement under the space walking monkey: “Publishing is Dead.” This was ‘98, these guys were way ahead of the game.)

*The Ego Trip cover and all the house ads from that issue that appear here are the property of Ego Trip. I scanned and posted them simply to illustrate the blog entry, and because I really like them, and I’ll happily remove these images if Ted Bawno and/or Sacha Jenkins asks me to.

I had started writing this piece as a longer post about the uncanny lyrical prowess and MC skills of deceased Harlem, NY rapper Big L, but fuck it, I think this movie preview speaks for itself. If you’re a fan of rap music, or even remotely interested, you should damn well know about Big L already, and you should be as stoked as I am to check out this long-overdue documentary about one of the greatest MCs who never blew up…