Tampa Calling

Screeching guitars over a rapid backbeat pierce 50 ears trying to hear 25 stilted conversations. A foot-long needle shoots directly through the beckoning orifices, winds around the ear canals and connects directly with the center of each half of the brain. A throbbing begins at the base of the skull as imaginary brain fluid leaks out of each ear. Each face contorts into wrinkled disgust and the faces move closer together.

“Music is my life!” screams one bearded-with-glasses 20-something into the ear of a young girl with hair framing her face, brown tank top, cut-off jean shorts and several colored tattoos spattered across each arm. Clouds of cigarette smoke linger between them and slowly rise to the tar-stained ceiling. From the other end of the bar, the shapes and cartoons on her arms aren’t distinguishable, but I’m convinced they’re more than just blobs of ink. ”Have you ever heard the first Bad Brains album?” he continues to yell, ”It’s so raw, I can’t get enough of it!”

The band falls into a repetitive pattern of chunky chords, fast, pounding, tribal drums and hollering vocals. A few words sneak out of the mix, “MAKE…APPOINTMENT…TIME…MIND…EXCUSE!” Fuzzed mumbling fills the spaces between the recognizable words.

“I’m so glad you like them, too! Did you go see them at State a few months ago? They were great. I was there for Propaghandi, though!” the girl hollers back.

“What!? I can’t hear a fucking thing with this shit music!” Read the rest of this entry »

Uh oh, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is about a month and a half away. Did you remember? If not, it’s probably due to the distinct lack of buzz, seeing as there is no official concert scheduled, although boosters keep adding “as yet” in hopes that original co-producer Michael Lang will manage to put together a show in New York’s Prospect Park.

A handful of mostly lame events are planned for different parts of the country, and a tour called Heroes of Woodstock — featuring Mountain, Jefferson Starship, Tom Constanten (repping Grateful Dead) and others — has 16 dates on the books (none in the Southeast). In all, though, it would seem as if folks have other things on their mind than memorializing the watershed cultural event.

That doesn’t mean it’s a complete wasteland. Sony Music has released a well-thought-out group of reissues called The Woodstock Experience, five two-CD packages pairing a classic 1969 album and a complete Woodstock performance. Sony catalog artists Santana, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Jefferson Airplane and Sly and the Family Stone got the treatment.

Thirty-three acts performed at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair from Aug. 15-18, 1969, including such long-forgotten names as Quill, Sweetwater, Keef Hartley Band and Bert Sommer. (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, The Byrds and a handful of lesser-knowns declined invitations. Jeff Beck, Iron Butterfly and Joni Mitchell canceled.)

Only a handful of the performances have been immortalized, mostly via the 1970 film Woodstock and its soundtrack. And Sony can legitimately boast three of them in this collection: Sly, Santana and Joplin. Winter did not make it into the movie and while Jefferson Airplane were represented with two songs in celluloid, their set has not earned the same historical cachet as the top three.

Let’s have us a closer look at these twofers. I’ve ranked them on their merit as live performances. Read the rest of this entry »

New World Brewery on a Saturday night boasts a healthy built in-crowd of conversationalists and music lovers.  Even with the threatening cold snap on the horizon and very little local media coverage, quite a few people made it out to support the local post-punk rock band Dumbwaiters and show promoter New Granada Presents.

With the audience drinking cold beer while huddling, humping or gyrating near conveniently located space heaters on the New World patio, I wondered how many people got drawn away from this local show to see the moldy blues rock of Johnny “I played at Woodstock” Winter at Jannus Landing or Guns N’ Roses’ heroes Nazareth crust rocking at the Largo Cultural Center.  Probably none, but our continued cultural emphasis on these old bohemoths roaming the lands and garnering top dollar for performances of contrived, dated music marketed for the sake of nostalgia gets under my skin…

Read the rest of this entry »