Saturday, August 1, 2009

The Second “Leg” of the “Tour”/Mix 4

So we embarked once again on a journey to play music abroad. This time though instead of going north, we travels south to San Diego (La Jolla actually if you want to get technical) to play at Che Café on the UCSD campus.

This time we left at a relatively reasonable time compared to the intense Seattle all-nighter. Rob and I left Napa at 6am from Napa to pick up Bob in SF and load up our equipment at our practice space. Everything from then to LA was pretty smooth.  Had the pleasure of meeting my good friend Julia a few hours into the trip. She was coming up from LA and had left at the same time as us. Through the process of phone calls here and there and calculating when we would meet based off of which exits we had passed, after a bit of nay saying (I myself remained hopeful) we miraculously both hit up the same food stop at just about the same time for a glorious lunch from a Subway inside of a gas station. Ah, the simple pleasures of fast food sandwiches and Central Valley roadside conversation.

From there we moved on and all was well until we approached the greater LA area. Traffic was a bitch. People tell you this. People tell you this quite often when talking about LA. It doesn’t quite hit you though until you’re in it for 4 hours. It never stopped for long. Just more like constant milling at parking lot speeds. Not a whole lot to look at either. The ocean is nowhere in site and the beauty of the urban landscape and track housing is something that can only be enjoyed by a select few (read: not us). It did elicit a few conversations though, mostly about how lame it is. Really deep, I know. Until we got further south, close to San Diego, the height of my visual stimulation was multiple blowup gorillas on top of businesses that were different colors and each with different and completely randomly designed shorts. Of the three of us, I was probably the most fascinated by them. One day when we can afford it and are at the point where we are able to actually place importance on the visual aspects of our live show, when we have become so happy with our playing and our appetite for strange musical instruments has been quenched, we will ( if I have anything to say about it) get at least 2 of these gorillas to have with us onstage while we play. People will look on and go crazy due to a combination of aural and visual ecstasy…..Until that day I’ll just simply be resigned to acting like a gorilla myself.

Eventually we arrived in La Jolla at the Che Café. A very cool little place that is close in proximity to everything else on the UCSD campus but seems set apart in it’s own world. It’s surrounded by trees and has a very cool vibe to it.  The show went well and was pretty laid back. Nothing to extraordinary, but the show was without difficulties, so that was something to be  happy about. Claire Ku, who set up the gig for us, is a fellow Napa native who wanted to spread the butter (no pun intended) of Napa over the bread of San Diego. She was kind enough to let us stay at her place and even brought us out to a hearty breakfast the next morning and footed the bill. It was the start of a great post-show day.

From there we went to the cove in La Jolla. It was very packed for being such a small beach, (nothing like the beaches at Dillon and Bodega here in Northern California) but there were a lot of cool little cliff caves and water ways that gave the three of us a nice little swim. Bob and I, having an extreme lack of sea sense when it came to navigating around the barnacle covered rocks in the water, were each trying to pee out in the ocean current and before either of us even started we were both thrown on the rocks and cut up our legs. It was more comedic then tragic though, but the fact that it was in water made it look a lot worse then it was with blood streaming everywhere.

After we enjoyed the water and the weather we began out journey back up north. There was an overnight layover in South Pasadena at my friend Annie’s house. We watched Bruno that night and I must say it was pretty funny. It definitely followed the same format as Borat, but it still provided a lot of laughs with one of the most outrageous scenes being an interview that Bruno has with parents that are basically willing to sacrifice any sense of dignity and the well being of their children in order to make a buck off of their babies. Anyways, the next morning we woke up and got on the road and in short time were back in the bay. Good times.

Bellow is the tracklisting of a mix that I made based on the songs that we were grooving to during our trips to Seattle and San Diego:

BCG MIX 4:

1. Give It To Me Baby - Rick James

2. Mary Jane - Rick James

3. Get On The Floor - Michael Jackson

4. Mykonos - Fleet Foxes

5. Street Fighting Man - The Rolling Stones

6. Roadrunner - The Modern Lovers

7. San Ber'dino - Frank Zappa

8. Manheru Changamire - Hallelujah Chicken Run Band

9. Also Frightened - Animal Collective

10. Make Friend Sounds - Heatwarmer

11. The Long Way Home (Prins Thomas Edit) - Lindstrøm

12. Tonight's The Night - Neil Young

13. Justice Tonight/Kick It Over - The Clash

14. The Beach Party - Hot Chip

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