“I love San Diego and I love Brooklyn,” explained Golden Triangle drummer Jay Hough via email from Calgary. Trapsman from 1999 to 2003 for San Diego’s defunct GoGoGo AirHeart, Hough returned to SD last Sunday …
July 14, 2010
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Stories by David Stampone
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Burn, Piano, Burn
Songs of the City
You may recall Baby Rock, the notorious Tijuana nightclub founded in the late ’80s. A 1997 U.S. News and World Report article on Mexico’s booming drug trade found it to be “an elaborate faux-cave, four-level …
June 9, 2010
The Pack Represents
Dude, your band’s from where? Ah, yes, the local music coverage angle that never quits: debate over claimed/perceived/insufficient geographic affiliation. San Diego CityBeat scribe Todd Kroviak weighed in last Wednesday (3/31) with a column entitled …
April 7, 2010
Passing Strange
The short and stocky black performer perked up in conversation at a Brooklyn bar last month. “San Diego? Heidi and I were just talking about San Diego the other day, remembering how important it was …
March 3, 2010
Who Are the Hi-Five?
Winning their fourth straight AFC West championship, the San Diego Chargers ended their regular season as a possible Super Bowl team. As their postseason commenced last Sunday, one could imagine hopeful Bolts faithful singing along …
January 20, 2010
Soundtrack DJ
For UCSD grad Devon Goldberg, it’s like doing his old free-form radio show back at the student-run campus station KSDT — but different. Schedule permitting, every Saturday night from 10 p.m. to midnight local time, …
January 13, 2010
I Bleed Spartan Blue
The Padres earned no invite to baseball’s Fall Classic this year, but San Diego already had its 2009 global champs in Chula Vista’s Park View Little League Blue Bombers, who beat Taiwan in the Little …
November 4, 2009
People Who Died
“San Diego will always have a special place in my heart as the place I began my career in rock ’n’ roll,” expressed the late author Jim Carroll 20 years ago. It was in an …
September 23, 2009
The Geography of Jazz
The East West Quintet’s name says a lot, geographically speaking. If you pick up the jazz-rock combo’s ambitious second album (this year’s Vast), you will see a shout-out to their East Coast base on closing …
September 16, 2009
Where Is "Sweet Rock and Roll"?
Somewhere in San Diego a tantalizing Holy Grail of rock performance history is awaiting discovery in a dusty corner…maybe. As documented in Richie Unterberger’s comprehensive new book White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by …
September 2, 2009
An Epitaph for East Memphis Slim
When Memphis session player and producer Jim Dickinson passed away at age 67 from heart complications on Saturday, August 15, few music fans may have realized how vast his résumé was — one that included …
August 26, 2009
No Helicopter, No Iron Butterfly
The 40th anniversary of Woodstock this weekend also marks the career-curtailing failure of San Diego’s Iron Butterfly to play the historic festival as scheduled. How did things fall apart for the Butterfly in August of …
August 12, 2009
No Bubblegum Punk
“Temecula Sunrise,” eh? Listeners to this gorgeous track on Bitte Orca, the acclaimed month-old fifth album from Brooklyn art-rock band Dirty Projectors — headlining at the Casbah tonight — may wonder what it’s all about. …
July 8, 2009
The Red Wing and the Rock Star
Which former San Diego County resident looms largest in popular music? Zappa? Waits? Jewel? A case can be made for Eddie Vedder, who went from struggling SD musician to front man of grunge monsters Pearl …
June 24, 2009
Snake Sighting
Tonight’s headliners at the Belly Up, the Night Marchers, San Diego knows well; three quarters of the band’s members were together from 1999 to 2005 as Hot Snakes. The fourth Hot Snake was singer-guitarist Rick …
December 30, 2008
Puck Rock?
Before founding Megadeth, veteran thrash-master Dave Mustaine (born September 13, 1961, in La Mesa, currently living in Fallbrook) was Metallica’s original lead guitarist before getting replaced by Kirk Hammett in 1983. These days, Mustaine has …
December 3, 2008
Not the Same Ol' Song
As far as tunes that name-check the team go, the new track "San Diego Chargers," by Mexican dance-pop-punk-funk duo Plastilina Mosh won't take over first place in the hearts of Chargers faithful anytime soon — …
November 25, 2008
Orange Alert for Dengue Fever
The future looked promising for Dengue Fever when the critically acclaimed psych-surf-worldbeat indie act fronted by Cambodian immigrant Chhom Nimol was driving home to Los Angeles after opening for Jonathan Richman at the Casbah on …
April 16, 2008
Appetite for Deconstruction
The second song on the Burning Brides’ third album Hang Love is titled “San Diego.” The Philadelphia-born/L.A.-based neo-grunge trio played it last week at the Casbah. When the record was released last June, reviewers singled …
April 9, 2008
Glossines with Benefits
" 'Well, let's have a benefit show for you!' -- that's what everybody was saying," relates Glossines singer-bassist Amber Everson. The native San Diegan needs surgery to remove a polyp from her vocal cords as …
January 2, 2008
Sax Worker
When San Diego's Creedle suspended operations a decade ago, the quirky avant-rock-jazz band had streamlined down to a quartet. In 1996, the bass/drums/guitar/sax lineup released its third and final album, When the Wind Blows -- …
January 2, 2008
Why It's Called a University
San Diego fans of international underground rock were excited for the December 5 Ché Café performance by Damo Suzuki. The Japanese singer is best known as vocalist for German prog group Can, which set the …
December 20, 2007
Beach Club Blues
"'Canes in San Diego's Mission Beach is right on the boardwalk." So begins the SD entry in a Band of Horses "Road Log" story in the last issue of Filter magazine. "It's a fairly disgusting …
December 13, 2007
All Business
L.A.-based Carla Bozulich has been a frequent visiting performer in San Diego over the years, singing in Ethyl Meatplow and later leading alt-country indie-rock outfit Geraldine Fibbers. She's been touring the world supporting her Evangelista …
November 21, 2007
Defined by What We Hated
Michael Addis performed as a drummer 20 years ago in Playground Slap, a top original San Diego band of their day (they reunited a few months ago, sans Addis). More recently, the former SDSU film …
November 8, 2007
Wild Guessing
Q: Who was asked to be Van Halen's lead singer before Sammy Hagar? If you know the answer, maybe you're already planning to do battle in Cover Me Badd's Music Trivia tonight at the Whistle …
October 25, 2007
Beautiful Mess
"San Diego to Tijuana... Arguably the most infamous border town of the Western World. The last hedonist haven. Crossing from a city that thrives on consumerism to a city that survives on debauchery, we were …
October 18, 2007
He Could Rap Forever
Local actor and musician Mark Gregg will be missed tomorrow at the San Diego Film Festival's area premiere of The Pacific and Eddy, his feature-length acting debut. Instead he will be remembered in a gathering …
September 27, 2007
East Side, West
When vocalist-guitarist Amber Coffman takes the Casbah stage this weekend as a member of Brooklyn's art-pop band Dirty Projectors, it will mark a sort of homecoming. Before relocating to New York at the beginning of …
September 13, 2007
Hymns Plummet
Which came first, lyric or melody? No need to pose that classic songwriter query to Glen Galloway about any tunes on his band Soul-Junk's new album. In the beginning were the words, to paraphrase John …
August 2, 2007
Just Insane
Gary Hustwit, a presence in the San Diego music scene through the '80s and '90s, thanked the cheering full house at Philadelphia's Drexel University last month after a screening of his directorial debut, Helvetica. The …
June 7, 2007
Those Wastrels from Hoover High...
The day after the release of Led Zeppelin's first album, the band made its S.D. debut at the Fox Theatre on January 13, 1969. Later that year, less than a week before Woodstock, the Brits …
May 3, 2007
Time Has Told
Stephen Marley, son of reggae legend Bob Marley, turned 35 last Friday (yes, 4/20); last night, Stephen headlined at San Diego's House of Blues. He first performed on a downtown SD stage almost two decades …
April 26, 2007
Loathsome Rockwrite Shuck
Veteran Portland garage-pop duo the Bugs includes S.D. native and Grossmont High School grad Michael Coumatos. On the band's new vinyl LP, Paul Haines and Coumatos alternate singer-guitarist and drummer duties on 18 stripped-down tunes …
April 19, 2007
Shocked by Bad Tacos
"I moved to New York in 1999 and immediately was in shock by the fact that I couldn't find good Mexican food," says San Diego native and Pistolera front woman Sandra Velasquez. "How hard is …
March 8, 2007
Shot Around
San Diego in the summer of 2005, The Pacific and Eddy premiered last weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Writer and director Matthew Nourse -- a SD native, 1998 alum of Torrey Pines …
February 1, 2007
Six Feet of Dirt
The North Atlantic, an explosive math-rock trio from Michigan that formed at Kalamazoo College in 1999 (and migrated to SD within a year), offered this Gerald R. Ford obit on their MySpace bulletin: "...Ford is …
January 11, 2007
Save Your Tears
After Rocket From the Crypt's final hometown gig on Halloween 2005, the Sultans became the last John Reis band left. Last Wednesday, news of the Sultans' "last show ever!" was included in a press release. …
January 4, 2007
Tijuana-on-the-Schuylkill
Confusion is nothing new concerning the hometown of Robert Lopez, a.k.a. El Vez. Before starting his Mexican-American "Elvis translator" persona in the late '80s, Lopez co-fronted West Coast punk pioneers the Zeros in the mid-'70s …
December 28, 2006
Of SoftLightes and Limelight
"Ah, NME and their hyperbole..." says a not ungrateful Kristian Dunn, bassist in the SoftLightes. The San Diego band (formerly known as the Incredible Moses Leroy) was reviewed in England's New Musical Express for their …
November 30, 2006
If Not Gravel, What About the Sand?
After four decades and 20 albums, Tom Waits, a 1968 graduate of Chula Vista's Hilltop High, is arguably the most substantial music figure to emerge from the San Diego area. Ever since the Eagles made …
November 9, 2006