February: "Each Day is Valentine’s Day"

February: "Each Day is Valentine’s Day"

“While the slant sun of February pours into the bowers a flood of light.” 

(William Cullen Bryant)

This month, we got back on track working on the recording of our upcoming CD release, “Stone and Fire.” We laid down some sounds at Randy Rood’s studio in El Cerrito, CA, wrandyrood@gmail.com. We really enjoy Randy’s guidance when needed and his mastery of the technology.  Chappell has her art table set up in the living room. She asked me for a picture of the cycles of the moon and began working on the cover art for the album, moon goddess, hawk, an appaloosa, a mystery soon to be revealed.

On Saturday, January 19, 2013, Dave performed at the Alameda Historical Museum, a "Spark Start the Year" event put on by Artists Embassy International (Richmond) and Poets of the Vineyard (Santa Rosa). He dedicated the poem he read, “Well Water Makes Good Pie Crust,” to the “Idle No More” movement and the Generation of the Seventh Fire. Dave and Alameda poet Nanette Deetz (Tsalagi/Dakota/German) sang a Praise Song together, “teach us peace all these nations come to honor you.” The audience loved our set and sang along with us on the last verse of the song.

Our daughter, Kelsey Holt, had a show in Oakland, F3 at the Cotton Mill, featuring her own business Rose La Mer Headpieces that we attended on Friday, January 25. All kinds of crafts, food, a band, open studios, even some poets were there. Kelsey makes wonderful one-of-a-kind headpieces and hats from vintage materials. Check out her Etsy store here. 

Everything was happening that weekend. The next night, Chappell and I attended a house concert on Milvia St. in Berkeley, CA, to hear our friend Aireene Espiritu on ukulele, Saturday January 26. We met Aireene at the FAR-West Conference in Irvine CA last October and loved her music and good spirit. Co-billed with her in Berkeley was Clyde Leland. He and Aireene swapped sets, with special guests hopping on now and then. Aireene is a touring musician originally based in Oakland, CA, so this was a coming home tour of the Bay Area. The inspiration for her original songs comes from folk and gospel music and her uncles' Filipino folk guitar playing. 

 

 (Our December show at First Street Cafe)

We have a special Open Mic performance at First Street Café on Saturday Feb. 2^nd.  We will also be sitting in that night with Mark Comstock and The First Street Golden Eagles Mardis Gras Indian tribe and Social Club.  We’ll feature some New Orleans music (Fats Domino, Dr. John) as a warm up for Mardi Gras.

Dave has a poetry reading coming up on Wednesday, February 20th in San Francisco where he will be the featured poet performing with Chappell on guitar at Sacred Grounds Poets' Circle. Sacred Grounds Poets began in 1972, making it the city’s longest running poetry reading. It is located at 2095 Hayes St. at Cole, San Francisco, phone 415.387.3859. No charge. Show starts at 7 pm, goes to 9:30 pm. Open mic after Dave’s reading.

Hope to see you at our upcoming shows!

Happy Birthday to Kelsey & Chappell this month! Happy Valentines, everyone!

When Rock & Roll was Young and Hungry: Remembering the Old Clubs

 (Yorkville Village, 1960s) 

When Rock & Roll was Young and Hungry:  Remembering the Old Clubs 

In a recent post to Facebook, I wrote about the history of the Concord Coliseum and included a photo of what the building downtown looks like now that it’s a Petco store. Concord, California’s former concert hall premiered on August 4th & 5th, 1967, and stayed open for a year-and-a-half until 1969. My post sparked some reminiscences from the local “kids,” (I did not live here then). One of them remembers seeing Jimmy Page play with the Yardbirds at the Coliseum (Jimmy went on to found Led Zeppelin).  

(Yardbirds 1967)

Some of the biggest names in music at the time, Sonny & Cher, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Van Morrison, Big Brother & the Holding Company (with Janis), and Sly & The Family Stone played there. The former co-owner of the Coliseum, Bill Quarry, was also booking acts at Frenchy’s, the hot spot in Hayward in the East Bay area in the 60’s and 70′s.

This stirred up my own memories of playing in my first rock and roll bands in the early sixties. When I was in high school in my hometown of Oakville, Ontario (Canada), Rock & Roll was a cottage industry (1961 – 1966). After the British Invasion, everyone wanted to jump on the bandwagon and get into Sergeant Pepper’s Band.  In 1965, my popular high school rock band, the Delshanes, got a manager and a regular gig at the local hot spot “The Grotto” (shades of The Cavern Club in Liverpool where the Beatles started). Our graduation from high school ended the Delshanes’ career. The lead singer joined an opera company a couple of years later and began his long 17 years on the road touring with various opera companies. I went on to play R&B in Yorkville Village, Toronto, where Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Neil Young, and Gordon Lightfoot, among others, launched their careers. Living in Toronto, I also got to see Led Zeppelin on their first US tour in 1969. They played a humble venue called the Rockpile. What a treat!  But the music was too loud for such a small place. With ears ringing, I remember leaving early.

I moved to Northern California in the 1970s, where Uncle Sam’s in Sebastopol was one of the cool places to play. This hippie nightclub that held about 250 people was where I saw Mose Allison live for the first time. Along with the bands I was in at the time, Frontier and Pemmican, there was another local band called Clover. They were led by vocalist and blues harp player, Huey Lewis. Like many of us in those “cottage industry” days of rock music, Clover scraped together a living by playing gigs up and down the West Coast. They were luckier than most of us in that they’d recorded two albums on Fantasy Records. These vinyl discs were largely ignored in America but they succeeded to some degree in England where they caught the attention of Elvis Costello. Clover got another break backing Elvis Costello on his debut album in 1977.

In the 1980s, Huey went on to achieve fame and commercial success with Huey Lewis and the News, joined by a couple of the Clover guys. Clover’s pedal steel and lead guitarist John McFee was asked to join the Doobie Brothers, to replace Jeff Baxter who left the band in 1979.

Another famous member of Clover I can recall was bass player, John Ciambotti. He went on to play for Lucinda Williams before he passed away at age 67 in 2010.

John McFee is still busy and creative. He recently produced our friend Pamela Polland’s 2010 album, Hawaiinized, and played almost all the instruments. She was one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s finest singers and now lives in Hawaii, still singing as fabulous as ever. John helped make a wonderful album for her, available at http://www.pamelapolland.com/.

It was inevitable that rock music would become big business and lose its small town roots. But those of us who were there, miss the days of intimate club performances, the camaraderie of the old music club scene. It just wasn’t the same, going to see stadium bands in big sports arenas, or digging a punk band from the mosh pits of the 1980s. Of course the high-powered arena rock era swallowed up the folk music scene but it came back to life when the Unplugged era made acoustic music popular again some decades later.

(by Dave Holt)

The Joy of Fontella Bass Lives On in Her Songs

The Joy of Fontella Bass Lives On in Her Songs

Most R&B fans remember Fontella Bass as the dynamic voice delivering us from teenage pain and suffering with the song “Rescue Me.” This chart-topping record, released in the fall of 1965, was a #1 hit on the R&B charts for four weeks. Today we honor Fontella and her music in our memory since she passed away in St. Louis, Missouri, on December 26, 2012.

At five years old in 1945, Fontella was accompanying her grandmother's singing on the piano at many funeral services, and was singing in her church's choir at six years old. By the time she was nine she was touring with her mother, gospel singer Martha Bass from the Clara Ward Singers, throughout the South and Southwest.

Fontella also valued her family life and became Mrs. Lester Bowie when she married the well-known trumpeter for the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They also toured together with that band. Mr. Bowie passed on in 1999. They are survived by their four children.

My friend, Sherry Margolin, now a musician/pianist living in Paris “had the pleasure of accompanying her” around the time her Grammy-nominated Gospel Album, “No Ways Tired,” was released in 1995. Sherry was hired to play for Fontella’s band for a week-long booking at Paris’s Meridien Hotel. The regular Hammond B-3 organ player couldn’t make it so Sherry took the gig, “even though I’m under-qualified. Seeing I was in fact a pianist like herself, she let me take over the piano on some numbers,” Sherry recalled.

Sherry also remembers her as “a wonderful singer and pianist who should be known for a lot more than the one hit usually associated with her. She was a warm person who made me feel welcome on her stage. … I hoped I would see and hear her again.”

Fontella was signed by Chess/Checker Records in 1963. She had a couple of minor hits as part of a duet before her big top ten hit as a soloist, “Rescue Me.” It was the first gold record for the Chess/Checker label since Chuck Berry’s hits several years before.  The house musicians/ arrangers at Chess, Raynard Miner and Carl William Smith, got the official listing as songwriters, for both lyrics and music, of “Rescue Me.”

Sherry recalled how Fontella fought for her rightful share of the lyric royalties. “She WROTE that song … During her adult life, she fought hard for some of the royalties from that hit which were denied her like so many great artists in the 50’s and 60’s.” Fontella became disillusioned with Chess and left the label in 1967.

As she told Cheryl Andryco, the author of The Story of Fontella Bass, "I had the first million seller for Chess since Chuck Berry about 10 years before. Things were riding high for them, but when it came time to collect my first royalty check, I looked at it, saw how little it was, tore it up and threw it back across the desk.”

She eventually sued for and received a $50,000 settlement when “Rescue Me” was used in an American Express commercial in 1993. She was credited with her share of the songwriting royalties. Fontella Bass was inducted into the St. Louis Hall of Fame in 2000. The official company employed songwriters of “Rescue Me” are not remembered in the Hall of Fame by the music audience.

(Thanks to Wikipedia for some of this information!)