Maybe I will still a little high from the Hold Steady show last night at Mezzanine in San Francisco. My experience, at least at first, wasn't as strong and immediate as I though it would be, but by the end of their set and before their first encore I was getting really into it. The band was fucking tight and I loved the choice of songs they played. The most surprising aspect, at least to me, was that the kids up front were fucking *into* it. I mean, hands in the air, singing along during the singalongs, jumping up and down, and both feeding Craig Finn and being fed by his energy. By the second encore, perhaps the first time I've ever seen a second encore happen well *after* the house music came on and a good amount of the crowd had left, I was right there up front, hands up, singing along, having a blast. Here I was, a 31 year old man jumping up and down at a rock show like I did when I would see Avail at Gilman Street at age 19. Maybe with all the things that have changed in my life, I'm still basically the same after all.

Here's the setlist in case you're a superfan and you're curious:

The Hold Steady @ The Mezzanine, San Francisco, CA July 29, 2008
Constructive Summer
Chips Ahoy
Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night
Sequestered In Memphis
Girls Like Status
Massive Nights
Southtown Girls
Lord, I'm Discouraged
Yeah Sapphire
Knuckles
Hot Fries
One For The Cutters
You Can Make Him Like You
Your Little Hoodrat Friend
Crucifiction Cruise
How A Resurrection Really Feels
Slapped Acress

Encore #1:
Positive Jam
Stuck Between Stations
Most People Are DJs

Encore #2:
Banging Camp
Killer Parties

Labels: live music, mezzanine, san francisco, setlists, the hold steady

It's been about a month and I've been really flakey on the MP3 of the week. I still want to keep doing it, but I did throw down with a 13 songs post on pizza.saur.us that includes a lot of stuff I've been into recently. Check it out, there are a lot of great pop songs in there and I'm still really into the new CSS record and am patiently awaiting for the new Annie to come out.

However, this is a project that is a decade in the making and something I've always wanted to do.

From 1994 until about 1998 I recorded every live show I went to. I didn't want to make money, but as a historian I wanted to document what I did and the music that happened all around me. I went to so many shows, mostly around the SF Bay Area and I feel like I got a lot of good stuff from venues around the bay area including a lot of good indie stuff from The Bottom Of The Hill's heyday. A lot of these recordings I traded for other tapes through the pages of Maximum Rock N' Roll magazine and the internet in its infancy, but some of the tapes I've recorded I know don't exist anywhere else.

I've decided to digitize a lot of these tapes and release them into the world. I assume I'll get better at breaking up the tracks and whatnot, but for now these are entire live shows available as an MP3. I was really good at dating all my tapes and I am entirely certain about their date and location. I used a small, good quality tape recorder initially and always wore a blue work jacket that I had altered to be able to wear a stereo condenser microphone in the center. I used good Maxell tapes and kept a great list to keep track of all my recordings (although over the years I've actually lost my list and hope to remake it someday).

I'm going to start with the first Modest Mouse show I ever went to. It was April, 1997 and they played at Mod Lang records in Berkeley (an institution that now finds a home in El Cerrito, a few miles north from Berkeley) the same night they opened for Built To Spill at Slim's in San Francisco (I have that show too). I was an avid, almost obsessive Modest Mouse fan ever since I heard This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About and probably recorded upwards of 20 shows from San Francisco to Washington State before they hit the big time with "Float On." I still like the band, but I have new favorites and new groups to listen to and go see live.

I listened to these tapes a lot back in the day. I used to work as a medical courier and would spend my entire day in the car, before iPods, avoiding the radio and listening to music as I cruised Northern California. These tapes and the others I traded for provided most of what I heard in those days.

I am so happy to share these, and if you have any tips regarding recording these digitally please let me know. Until then, enjoy.

"You get creative when ordering your drinks, and your stinks. Mine stinks."

Modest Mouse
Mod Lang Records
Berkeley, CA
April 27, 1997

1. Neverending Math Equation
2. Cowboy Dan
3. Whenever I Breathe Out You Breathe In (Positive Negative)
4. Tundra/Desert

Labels: bootlegs, live music, modest mouse, tape trading

Looking through all the crap I keep in the drawer that sits underneath by super old, old school monitor I found an old notebook with streetsandavenues songs and keyboard settings listed in it. Some songs I wish I could hear again and never made it to a proper recording (well, any recording really).

1. a fateful heaven
2. rohyphnol
3. the period in tamarack between
4. ellipsis (i love that this is the only word written on the page)
5. a modern version of rita hayworth
6. finalcy
7. you're twenty minutes late i don't love you anymore (I must have been bored writing this, I decorated all around the title with tiny astericks)
8. the people under the stars
9. song without a name (I honestly have no idea if this was a song without a name, or "song without a name.")
10. guided by voices song (I'm pretty sure this was a song that, you know, sounded like GBV. a working title for sure.)
11. ...when you're going to die.
12. (can machines be heroic?)
13. four hands to hold you under the water.

My favorite page is titled "Songs We Will Play In Vacaville On June 25, 1999." This includes, among other songs we recorded and other songs listed above, "brian lilly in the US air force." Yes, it is struck through.

Anyways, good times down memory lane. MP3 of the week is new, sorry it took three weeks. I'm old(er).

Some songs for the weekend. Duh.
01. Swervedriver - Rave On
02. Film School - He's A Deep Deep Lake
03. Ride - Seagull
04. The Stills - Rooios / Palm Wine Drinkard
05. My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow
06. The Hold Steady - Slapped Actress

One of these things don't belong...but oh well.

Actually, I'm listening to sassylime's muxtape, that's more appropriate.

As promised, there is a new MP3 of the week. I'm going to see Swervedriver tonight in San Francisco and am pretty pumped for the show. I did a more thorough post over at pizza.saur.us but thought ya'll might enjoy the opening track from Mezcal Head. I peeked at the setlist from Monday's show in Seattle(?) and it looks good.

Click on the cover of Mezcal Head on the left to enjoy.

Last chance to get the MP3s from Friday. I also flaked on posting an MP3 of the week on Sunday, but that will all change this evening sometime. I had also forgotten that I used to use an image of the album cover for the MP3 of the week, so I'll bring that back too.

Went to an unexpected A's game last night and had a blast in the cold night as the A's beat the Blue Jays to extend their winning streak to 5 games. At one point some sullen teens snuck down to our section, but I couldn't figure out why since all they did was text message each other and pay absolutely no attention to the game. Go figure.

Down there on the left column I've added a feed from Twitter. I'm going to use it as a mobile blogging, but will do my very best to not use it as a way to drunk text everyone I know. Have to be careful!

Just got this piece of spam:

This will be my first real three-day weekend in a long, long time. You see, I used to work Tuesday - Saturday so these Monday holidays were nice because everyone else I knew was off work too, but it still wasn't the same because I always still had to work Saturdays.

F that now. No more Saturdays at work watching everyone enjoy the sunshine.

The new Hold Steady album Stay Positive leaked last night. I listened to it well after midnight while sitting on the couch downstairs because I couldn't find my good headphones in the dark and MRA was sound asleep. Eh. I don't really know what to think at this point. It's different. Some of the instrumentation is wacky and crappy (the harpsichord on "On For The Cutters" and especially the crappy synth line on "Navy Sheets." That one in particular sounds so stupid and is so high in the mix.) However, I definitely like the first track "Constructive Summer." It has that high energy that I had hoped for from this record. In fact, I wanted Stay Positive to *BE* my record for the Summer Of Awesomeness which will be Summer 2008. Now I'm not so sure.

I talked to Mitch last night about how right around now there seems to be a ton of decent (if not good) new music flooding the market. New Ratatat is out soon, there's a new Annie record on the way (this one has a nice megamix featuring songs from the album). I also noticed today that there's a new Joan Of Arc (???) record coming out? The hey?

Enough hoo-ha. Here's some songs for the weekend:

Anyways. We're off to SF for a nice dinner at Rohan Lounge. Pork lettuce wraps & pancakes await!

"In bar light, she looked alright. In daylight, she looked desperate."

New Hold Steady track for the MP3 of the week. The Hold Steady continue to kick out the jams, and I'm hoping their new album Stay Positive becomes my car ride, party in the park, getting drunk in the daylight kind of soundtrack. This song is a great start with the handclap/singalong outro, blasting horns, E Street piano, and howling organs. Good stuff.

MP3 of the week is back. Click on the link over there yonder on the left and enjoy a bassline grooving, silly and addicting song off the new Islands record. I really can't stop grinning when I hear the lines "Creeper in my home, crawled in through the window. I grabbed the kitchen knife, couldn't stick it in though" and I really love the background vocals that echo the word "didn't." One of the best songs of the first part of 2008. For sure.

Eating delicious tacos at work is awesome.

Played a good game of softball yesterday, but unfortunately a friend got smacked right in the face with a ball and bled a lot out of her nose. Had a great BBQ on Sunday afternoon in North Oakland and ate some sausages and drank some beers outdoors. Saturday we went on a nice long walk around San Francisco and soaked up the sun and avoided tourists. Had a BBQ ourselves Saturday night. Can't really ask for a better weekend.

Yelle - Ce Jeu (Moods Remix)

I just ate about a pound of Hawaiian BBQ for lunch. This Yelle song is what I usually throw down in the afternoon to wake up in stead of hitting the espresso machine. Too much slappy dancey fun.

This is the 855's post on Blackyellowblack. I still like to think of it as (!)BLCKYLLWBLCK better though since I like the typewriter look.

I had a good night last week of reading back through some of the archives here, especially those of 2001 when I kept a good log of Amscray's US tour and did a (surprisingly) good top-ten records countdown. I was so glad I wrote so much stuff down and posted it here, and it's soothing to know that it will be accessible forever.

I kept wondering why I stopped doing this log as much as I used to but I really know that it's because of all the time I spend on other sites (oaklog, flickr, pizza.saur.us, myspace, etc), well, really not how much time *I* spend on those sites but how those sites came to represent what I wanted to do with (!)BYB. What I wanted back then was a media outlet, a place to post pictures and MP3's and scans of the recent records I bought at Amoeba and a record of travels and day-to-day activities. What makes it so special to me now is just the written record of what I was doing then up until what I'm doing now.

What surprised me the most was how little extra content went with each post. Now I feel like I should add a photo or a MP3 or something from Youtube because that's a lot easier than actually sitting down and writing something. Blogs now are fancy and strive for readership because it's so much easier to make a Myspace page and then ramble on that instead of designing an actual website and putting an effort into creating something people want to read.

That's kind of what I miss. Going through the archives most of the websites & blogs are gone, even the bigger ones (at the time). There are a few holdouts leftover and it makes me happy to know they're still there.

So, yeah. I'm still here. I'm happy to be here as a holdout from when the web began to be something that everyone could use and before it was something that everyone *had* to use.

Come visit our new MP3 blog, PIZZA.SAUR.US.

We've got a new MP3 blog over at PIZZA.SAUR.US and ever since then I've had this commercial stuck in my head.

Back from Vietnam.

Going to see The Boss tomorrow for the first time. Totally pumped.

The first of many videos from Vietnam. Enjoy:

Bus Ride From Hanoi to Ha Long City

Labels: travel vietnam scooters busride hanoi halongcity

Greetings from Hanoi. It's hot, muggy, and totally awesome. Photos here:

Going to Vietnam on Thursday night. Going to post some photos on Flickr. Hells yes.

Three Weeks From Today...

I'll be in Hanoi.

Things are...

...finally starting to get better.

Bah. Crazy people.

Drive me crazy.

I rode my bike to work two days in a row because BART is free. It feels pretty good.

After I've spent $206 on anti-malarial drugs, it feels like my October trip to Vietnam is now a super reality. Also, my arm hurts from the Hep A and Tetanus shots. Ouch.

Earthquake! A 4.2 quake in my neighborhood interrupted me mid-pee this morning a bit after 4 AM. I stopped halfway through after what felt like a truck hit our building and opened the bathroom door and said "Alice? Are you OK?" She said "Yes."

So I finished peeing and went back to sleep. When I got to work in the morning there were hair products all over the floor.

It was actually kinda cool.

Fourth of July was fun. Went to Creektown and swam and BBQed and played bones all day long. Life can be good.

I woke up on December 1st and while I was in the shower I decided to start updating blackyellowblack again. Of course, I told myself I'd post at least once a day in December even if it was to grumble about not thinking of anything to post about, but alas, it's December 6th and I'm just getting things started.

The Minolta Dimage EX - Like a tank!

Ah, the Minolta Dimage EX. This was my first digital camera, the one that took all the pictures featured in The Daily Photo a few years back and the one that has been collecting dust on my bookshelf ever since it started eating batteries at an alarming rate (and my "alarming rate" I mean will kill the batteries the first time the flash goes off). Yesterday I finally got the gumption to upgrade to a new camera and I picked up the Canon A540 last night after work. I like it so far but really didn't have much to take pictures of besides the cat, or my feet, or my records, or our tiny Christmas tree*, but it was fun nonetheless.

Look for more photos on the Flickr, and now that I've got this first post out of the way check back tomorrow...maybe I'll post some music or something. What a novel idea!

* = photo by MRA