The Entroporium

To celebrate the return of Elvis Costello and his Spinning Songbook, we’ll take a deep dive into Elvis’s back pages. I trawl through Elvis’s more recent, less widely known albums as well as take a walk through the tons of ‘bonus material’ from the many reissues of his classic LPs. When you get called on stage and the wheel hits on ‘REQUEST!’, you don’t want to be the lame-o who asks for Pump It Up, right?

As a taster for this weekend’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, I hosted local stars of honky-tonk country and western swing Emily Bonn & The Vivants live in studio. A full set by Emily and her band, plus a sampling of some of the great artists that will be featured out in Golden Gate Park, October 1-3 2010.

Last Friday, my friend Dennis took me down to the parking lot of the HP Pavilion to check out The Roots. Actually, that’s not quite right. It was the Dew Action Sports Tour, featuring The Roots playing out back after all the BMX jumping was over. I’d never been to one of these action sports [...]

Yes, I really am still writing about the World Cup. And, no, that does not mean that all four of you Entroporium fans are going to need to wait another four years before I start posting regularly again. Sunday, June 18th was a glorious San Francisco summer day with nary a wisp of fog in [...]

While Pitchfork thinks Art Brut’s live show is like “Hives crossed with Monty Python,” I’m going to dissent and go with Steve Coogan fronting The Damned, because they were funnier and had better songs than that (or perhaps more succinctly, had songs).

Something was deeply, weirdly wrong with Meg. She was completely off time, playing the wrong parts at the wrong times, and was generally blowing it. It was so bad, this could have been a first rehearsal with her never having heard the songs before. My friends and I all looked at each other dumbstruck. Could this be for real? Meg will never win any drumming awards, and any fan will tell you that that’s not really her M.O. as part of the band, but this was preposterously sloppy.

…and indeed MC5 did kick out the jams (is there really any other way to say it?). The reconstituted DKT/MC5 slammed through the whole album, from the iconic title track (though without the spoken introduction) all the way through the cover of Sun Ra’s “Starship.” It was a storming rendition of one of the all-time great rock and roll albums, and it was treated with reverence and authority by the original performers. What more can you ask for?

With the crowd standing in riveted silence all night — which in itself was pretty amazing given the number of underage folks in the room — I may have been the only person in the room who was faintly disappointed (and only faintly, I should emphasize, before I go into my big semi-diatribe). The band struggled with some of the intricate songs – “Come On Feel The Illinoise!” was introduced by Sufjan as “the hard one” – and the mix was terrible, the bass and drums way too high and the ornamental percussion too low.

Got any room on the bandwagon for me? Up until four days ago, today was to be the official release date for Sufjan Stevens’ new opus, Come On Feel The Illinoise! It’s been moved off again for another month because of issues related to copyright – a touch ironic for an artist whose success will [...]