Setlist, 10 May 2008

I love the approach of the summer, as it seems a lot of great new albums come out. This week’s show had a lot of new music, but by far the clear winner is the astounding compilation of classic bossa nova by Nicola Conte, “Nicola Conte Presents Viagem.” I think we’re going to be hearing a lot of music from this album in coming weeks

Anyway, here’s the link to this week’s setlist.

And here’s the video for Little Dragon’s single “Test.”

El Camino!

Today on the excellent cars blog Jalopnik I read a post about the choice for their final entry in their “fantasy garage.” If you’ve ever read Jalopnik, you know they have a thing about the Chevrolet El Camino, a vehicle that was part car, part truck. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that they would choose an El Camino for their fantasy garage. After all, they’ve featured all sorts of cars converted into trucks, including a Porsche 924-amino.

As they put it:

Perhaps more important than the figures and the ridiculousness of this car is what it means. The 454 SS isn’t a car you give to mom to drive to the grocery store. It is the simplest way to turn rubber into smoke. Hoonage personified. This is a car you get into trouble with. It’s a leather-jacketed, chain-smoking, knife-wielding, hard-livin’, “Screw you” to proper society. No other car makes less sense, but is so perfect at doing it.

My dad had an El Camino, and looking back on it, I still admire how truly badass a vehicle it was. He had a 1973 El Camino SS, with a 454 cubic inch (7.4 liters!) engine and a racing cam. It had bucket seats that swiveled and a Hurst shifter. At the time, I knew this was a pretty badass machine, but the entirety of its badassedness escaped me as a 10-year-old.

I sent my dad the Jalopnik link today, and this was his response:

Thinking about it, the El Camino I had was the SS series. It had a factory Chevy 454 Big Block with a 3/4 lobe race cam. The owner before me had a blower on it with a different hood. It had a factory 4 speed BNN transmission with a Hurst shifter. It had factory bucket seats that rotated 90 degrees from the driving position towards the door on both sides. There was a lever on the lower left side that released the seat. It had air shock absorbers and front stabilizing suspension. It had Mickey Thompson headers.

When I was working on the California Aqueduct Project.on the Grape Vine, my co-worker Bobby and I were at the Ranch House Bar in Castaic, Bobby had a brand new 1982 El Camino that had a high performance 350 Chevy engine. It was all tricked out. The Aqueduct Haul Roads were bladed and in perfect shape. Scrapers could go full speed. We decided to race 7 miles from one end of the project to the other. The whole bar and 1/2 the town showed up that evening to watch us.

It was just about dusk on a summer evening. Prior to the start, the owner of the bar gave us each old leather football helmets to wear. Bobby kept introducing me to the ladies that showed up as a distraction to have some of the guys on the crew try to let the air out of my back tires. He did not know I had my oiler put a 6 inch blob of grease in the middle of his seat.

It was show time.

The El Camino’s were side by side in racing positions. We chugged a long neck Bud, shook hands and ran to our cars. My seat was in the perfect position to jump in and swivel into position. Bobby looked like Mr. Clean with a shaved head and dressed like a Cowboy. His huge 6 ft 8 stature was all muscle. He was a rodeo champion and an outstanding large scale heavy equipment operator. He was a legend.

Bobby jumped into his car. My El Camino was right beside his. I looked over and saw Bobby’s big face in the leather football helmet with this huge grimace, half laughter and the other half the look of someone who just had a bad accident on the first date.

I was laughing so hard he got the jump on me. It was dusty when I was trailing behind him. I could hardly see the road. He kept cutting me off. We were all over the haul road. At the 3/4 mark we were head to head entering a curve doing well over 120 miles an hour.

We were both into a brodie on the curve. We both went airborne off the superelevation. I was lucky. Bobby was not. Bobby landed into a rocky part of the dry river bed that was along side the haul road. He kept going. It looked like a Hot Wheels car on a wash board. He said the worst thing was that he was all over the road because he could not stay seated and kept sliding on the seat.

His car was totaled.

I always smile when I see those old clips of the Dukes of Hazzard. When his El Camino hit the ground it broke the headers off of the engine block and broke one of the motor mounts. We yanked it out of the river bed and took it back to the on site mechanics’ shop. We welded the headers directly to the engine. We welded the engine mount as well. His El Camino was never the same.

Bobby had the insurance company buy him a new car. He said that the gas pedal stuck and it was a work related accident.

My Dad was there and talked about that incident for years. Bobby remained a close friend.

Setlist, 26 April 2008

This week’s show was nicely laid-back in honor of the spring, and there were a few new standout tracks worth mentioning. Little Dragon’s ‘Little Dragon’ is a great new CD from the Goteborg-based group, which features Yukimi Nagano (Koop, Hird) on vocals. But for me the record of the week is “Percussion Maddness Revisited,” from Luisito Quintero with “Little” Louie Vega (of Masters at Work) producing. Excellent stuff.

Anyway, here’s the setlist:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pc20sgzhqB3NpbyXExLv7Gw

Commie Lord of the Rings: It really is a hoax

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find that I had a new comment. Not just any comment, mind you, but one that related to this post from four years ago, about a supposed review in Rudé Právo from 1977 of Lord of the Rings from a hardline Communist perspective. Blogger (and regular commenter to my blog)Jan Vaněk Jr. writes today to say that the review was a hoax. Here’s what Jan Vaněk wrote in his comment:

Better late than never: yes, it’s a hoax (or an example of memetic idiocy). It was translated from Polish (soon losing attribution to their Communist daily from 1971) in spring 2002; see the history in comments here. And in Polish, it is possible to find six spoof reviews of LOTR from various viewpoints, this being the most extreme.

While at the time I wrote that the review may or may not be a hoax, it’s good to get this cleared up. And it’s definitely good to get things moving again on this blog.

Setlist, 19 April 2008

Today was my first show after returning from an extended visit to San Francisco, and I brought back a fair amount of new stuff. The setlist is at this address:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pc20sgzhqB3MbbkaY_UNdYw

The standout tracks for me were Celia Cruz’s version of Santana’s “Oye Como Va,” Ron Blake’s tribute to his father as remixed by Osunlade, “Tom Blake,” and Senor Coconut’s warped remake of Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”

Looking forward to the next show, next Saturday, 26 April!

Setlist, 2 February 2008

This week’s show was a lot of fun to put together because it’s the Carnaval weekend, which of course meant a fair helping of samba, or at least samba that wouldn’t give people a total brain hemorrhage before 9am. The outstanding new finds this week included the ‘Brazilian Beats Brooklyn’ compilation, which includes the astounding “16 Toneladas (16 Tons)” by Noriel Vilela, a song I first heard at one of DJ Baltazar’s nights at Palac Akropolis.

I also picked up Vampire Weekend’s eponymous CD, and it’s great. They really remind me of the Talking Heads in all the right ways. Plus that “Roots of Chicha” CD is excellent; this week I played “Cariñito” by Los Hijos del Sol, which is an amazing, if woozy, groove.

Here’s the link to the setlist: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pc20sgzhqB3NnUt7SeCM0Mg.

Set list, 19 January 2008

I’ve finally figured out how to best post these setlists in a format that doesn’t take absolutely _forever_ to format. So the setlist is now up on Google Documents. Get it here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pc20sgzhqB3PdRozTMvEJUw