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Your favorite spunktronic rock-n-roll band is back at SF’s legendary Connecticut Yankee Friday May 8th. Been a while since we’ve rocked this iconic Red Sawx chowdahead hideout in Potrero Hill - or any bah in SF. Come get your boogie on, soak up the down home vibe, chill on the back patio - whatevah yah plehjah, you’d be wicked retahded to miss this pahty.
Friday May 8th @ 9 pm
Connecticut Yankee
100 Connecticut St @ 17th (Potrero Hill - EZ parking, and the 22-Fillmore stops out front)
http://www.theyankee.com/
opener: Jeremy’s new band Animal Farm
Here’s a nugget from the arsenal to spice things up -
Lookout redwood trees! RJX is gearing up to shred some axe at the first annual Baconwood Festival, someplace in the mystical wilderness of Mendocino.
Backstory:
The Ron Jeremy Explosion kicked off their heroic 4-year rocket ride through San Francisco and northern California as a straight-up rock-n-roll band in 2000. By the time they meteored back to earth in 2004 they’d grown increasingly prone to fits of pocket funk, groove electronica, knob-tweaking psychedelia, and the occasional detour into dissonant children’s music or an 80’s TV anthem. Upon impact, they wandered around dazed for a while, hopscotched a couple members across the country and back, then finally decided to dust off the chops for a reunion show in 2006.
A dozen “reunion” shows later the RJX is still officially not a band, but retains the right to blast the roof off an unsuspecting northern California club, ski resort, festival or foot-race without warning at any time.
Retrobloggin’ rock-n-roll
As the Hollywood studios enter their 5th year of battling for our prized audience mic/pocketcam content, we figured there’s no sense letting these classic pix, ads, and clips collect dust. Relive the good times in the same authentically amateur, low-fidelity, vintage resolution & sampling rate you remember back when RJX was just another garage band.
SF is still coming to grips with the mournful death of Castro-centric Halloween. To help the community thru this bewildering void, this year we put on capes and saved Halloween by playing a house party at Shirey’s place in the Mission. Unfortunately we never set up the mic to record, and seems that hardly anyone took any pictures or video.
This video of a random stroll from the front driveway into the belly of the bash is about all we’ve seen for media from that night. Where are your secret video stockpiles people?
San Francisco gets high marks for its execution of citywide day-partying: Carnaval traverses the Mission, North Beach Jazz Fest invades 20+ bars, Love Parade takes over Market St and Civic Center, Blue Angels prompt bbqs on every rooftop, KFOG Kaboom is visible and audible from every vantage point and car stereo, Haight St Fair overflows into the panhandle and GG Park, Burning Man Decompression makes Dogpatch visible from the moon, etc. But Bay2Breakers is the one debaucherous day to rule them all, cutting literally and figuratively across the entire city’s topography and demography, creating the biggest, most-inclusive, and most definitive annual day-party in the city. If not the country.
Naturally, the RJX has tried to do its part to contribute…
RJX loves Tahoe. Tahoe loves RJX. We played at Bar of America in Truckee close to 20 times between 2001-2004, but it’d been three years since we’d been there (on account of us not being a band anymore). Mike–visiting from NYC–provided the video camera, and thanks to our friend Peter for lending his impromptu professional photography sensibilities.
For some reason these remind me of a mid-career “back to the studio” type video that some bands make (Steely Dan comes to mind), but it’s just a live performance with really low lighting. And we seem unusually well-dressed and well-behaved. Okay maybe “old” is the word I’m looking for.
Skip ahead for complete mp3s of all 3 sets both nights. But first, seems appropriate the kick things off with the tune we wrote for the gig we’re playing, Truckee:
One last trip to the bridge. I think we knew the end/hiatus was nigh for this one, but the jams were kicked out nonetheless. mp3s:
I’m not sure that we even emailed anyone about this one - figured we’d pummeled our three Tahoe fans into submission enough and it was time to let local word-of-mouth work for itself. It, umm… didn’t… but we apparently had fierce competition from a nearby Reggae festival (where our three Tahoe fans went that night, along with a few thousand other folks). Nonetheless, Blake’s epic soundsystem helped capture our show, mellow though it may have been. Here are some mp3s:
Ron Jeremy Explosion one night stand with mamaSutra - saucy… Fun show, though we never really settled into our groove, as was often the case with shorter pre-midnight SF gigs where folks were just beginning to get their drink on as we’d head off stage. No audio from the night emerged from the multi-step digital encoding/trimming/compressing process.
Who can resist smitten/splooged forefathers? Actually, funny thing about this weekend was that the Friday night show was the first and only time in RJX @ BofA history that Bill Kenny (the BofA bar manager and patron saint of Truckee nightlife) gave us the thumbs down on the performance. Wasn’t harsh about it, just gave us a “eh, you can’t nail it every time” line as he was drowning us in tequila shots at the end of the night.
Needless to say, Saturday’s performance was about earning our keep at the one place that’d consistently brought out our best chops and creativity. These are a few of Saturday’s tracks, variously sliced up per Shirey’s media management whimsy-of-the-week:
- Sly and Robbie ad libbing - with DJ Mike Park on the loopy mic
- Too Many Sparks
- Where’s Walker jam > Funk Bomb
- Truckee jam
- In 3s jam
- 5/4
- Degobaah - no idea what tune this little nugget sprouted out of
It’s not that Bar of America was the only place we ever played, it’s just one of the few places we’d consistently get recordings we wanted to listen to later. The audio quality on this one is a little shaky since we left the audience mic dangling from a pole instead of propping it up to point toward the stage, but the show was solid enough to sink a little time into cranking out another CD. Plus, you get to hear some pretty hilarious audience banter as a result of the unfortunate mic placement…
mp3s:
- Killer Wife > In 3s (lyrics support from the crowd)
- Margaritaville
- Money Maker > Peace Frog
- Timbalito