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We played this promo event here right after the “Village at Squaw Valley” opened. Gorgeous day in the mountains, great brews, saucy babe in tights on stilts - too bad the attendance wasn’t tremendous, but the place is a little off the beaten path. Regardless, we took home the biggest single-show paycheck of our uber-distinguished careers. We also got a kick out of the fact that jamband A-listers ALO (aka Animal Liberation Orchestra) were also on the bill but we were the headlining act. Not that this had anything to do with them having aNOTHER gig that night in the city they had to dash back for…
Eternal thanks to Dave Walters for recording and mixing down the tracks!
This was our last of a half dozen shows at the Tongue & Groove, and probably came off as smoothly as any of them. And by “smoothly” I mean we only had one memorable instrument meltdown (Aaron’s bass lost power early in the set), most of the mics worked, and I think no one wanted to strangle anyone else on stage during the performance. Success!
We loved the scene at this place, but the logistics of the power set-up/break-down for the 45-minute set sandwiched with two other bands never suited our style. We’d be barely warmed up, Andy’s mic would finally be on, Mike would finally manage to tell the guy running the soundboard that he couldn’t hear anyone in his monitors… and then we’d be getting the boot off-stage for the next band. Ah San Francisco.
Can’t beat Johnny Lee Hooker’s personal clubhouse for style. Red velour curtains, intelligent lights, and in-house Hammond B3 organ baybee! Kickass sound system to boot, but no dice letting us record ourselves… something about protecting the boom boom brand. Little did they know we’d be selling out arenas and lifting up anyone who’d ever associated with us within two years.*
* may not have actually come true
This was technically not our first gig at Sierra Vista - just the first one where the the power stayed on longer than 20 minutes and the roads weren’t buried in 2 feet of fresh snow. After being treated to a lakeside sunset meal from the dining room, we got a tour of resident sound guru (and Humpty’s alum) Blake’s storied vintage house audio set-up, including PA, soundboard, and monitor components from Grateful Dead and String Cheese Incident tours.
The turnout wasn’t stellar and our energy never matched the mile-high elevation, but the soundboard recording of our mediocre performance was pristine. Pristine enough that Andy–unemployed at the time–decided to sink some serious time into patching together a CD’s worth of tracks for mass-distribution at High Sierra Festival one month hence. Here’s a sampler:
- Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
- Ass Ripper (aka Ripper’s Revenge)
- Where’s Walker
- Too Many Sparks
- Hindsight
This was the first (and only) time we played the Elbo Room, which at the time was another hub of the SF jam scene alongside the Tongue & Groove and Last Day Saloon (R.I.P. to both). A fun enough show, we played this as a fund-raiser for a friend of Whirr’s who’d allegedly survived a near-lethal infection slicing sushi and was way deep in medical debt. Don’t know if it was recorded… if it was, it wasn’t stimulating enough to survive the extraction-to-mp3 process.
This was our first Yankee gig, first encounter with the legendary Fritz, and the first time we worked with a promoter (Satisfied Productions). Beyond that, wouldn’t say it was a top-shelf show - being the opening act, playing a short set, never really loosening up and letting things rip. But it felt a little like we were taking our game up a notch with a badass headliner (Eric McFadden Trio) and a promoter. Nice to have someone else do the promo art for once!
mp3: Timbalito
This was the last time we played at our neighborhood haunt the Last Day Saloon. The booking folks were still grumpy with us for not drawing bigger Saturday crowds in 2001 (wtf?) so we were on Wednesday night probation with our livetronic comrades Whirr. I think some emo band was lined up for the following Friday night. Hmm.
Once a mainstay of the SF jam scene, the LDS’s identity crisis continued for another year or so till it eventually sold its soul to the Rockit Room. Blame it on the dotcom bubble burst, changing moods, or just bad taste, this venue’s metamorphosis encapsulated the trouble we were having making a dent in the SF music scene.
But enough retro-hyperbole - mp3s!
This was our first big gig weekend as a quartet after half our namesake (Jeremy Walker) high-tailed to Chicago. We had a bunch of new material to fill any gaps in the weekend–including the “Where’s Walker” tribute to Jer–but I think we were still surprised at how solidly the shows came together. This weekend definitely fueled our confidence to push onward as a 4-piece.
The buzz didn’t last too long though - within a week our studio on Natoma St in SOMA was broken into and Aaron’s classic Les Paul was ganked, along with a mixing board or something comparatively trivial. The superstitious among us (read: Andy) sensed our all-too-good Tahoe karma was coming back to bite us in SF. Aaron channeled his angst into our new tune “Complaints”, a gripe against the guitar-theft gods. Whatever it takes to crank out new material when your lead vocalist skips town!
Long-lost mp3 scraps from the weekend: