Tuesday, March 18, 2008

I *could* blog about how Trix and I drank Guinness at our local watering hole last night JUST LIKE THE REST OF THE COUNTRY, but who'd care? Yawn. Wow, you drank Guinness on St. Patrick's Day? How remarkable and fascinating, whee!

INSTEAD I'll mention that last Friday we saw this guy in concert:



This, my friends, is the legendary Sky Sunlight Saxon, who fronted a group in the 1960s called the Seeds. You may remember them from their classic garage hit "Pushin' Too Hard," or their classic, warped psych classic "The Future." Lester Bangs loved 'em, and they burned bright and fast. Sky himself still plays shows -- but he didn't play a lick of "Pushin' Too Hard" on Friday, preferring instead to play some extremely fucked up but occasionally awesome new stuff, at least some of which sounded made up on the spot a la Jim Morrison at his most extemporaneous.

Sky's recently taken up with Father Yod's Ya Ho Wa religion, and if you don't know about Ya Ho Wa, well, here you go. Basically they're a kind of hippy music/love/god collective who also are a band and make records, most of which are pretty fucking awesomely fucked up. There were no Ya Ho Wa people in attendance on Friday, in fact:

The tragedy: There were like 20 people in attendance. Come ON, Los Angeles. Have a sense of history. This is SKY SAXON, here, he was punk before punk EXISTED, y'know? Attend shows that aren't MGMT shows (not that I don't dig MGMT, but I'm just saying), okay?

The cool thing: Their drummer is most likely gonna be our drummer soon. That rules.

This is why I love Los Angeles.

6 comments:

belsum said...

Is that where you met "Michael McDonald"?

Jon Hunt said...

Nope, I just saw him walking down the street last night. Didn't meet him. Just saw him with his girlfriend striding confidently down Melrose.

(not REAL Michael McDonald, that would be a double-plus-good sighting.)

belsum said...

Well I knew it wasn't the *real* guy! Chris just misunderstood your middle-of-the-night text about the Yacht Rock guy I guess. Hee!

Jon Hunt said...

REAL Mike McDonald was a gawker stalker sighting last week tho! He IS in LA!

belsum said...

He should be the guest mentor on American Idol. HA!

Chris deliberately sought out the Doobie Brothers episode of What's Happenin' on hulu.com the other day. *shakes head*

Josh Hoisington said...

Jon:

Isn't the whole point of LA not to have a sense of history? These are the people that want to make a condo out of the Capitol Tower and a Pizza hut out of Western Studios, after all.

Still, there's much to love, what with "drummers" in residence and such. I think I'm the only person in Grand Rapids to own a drum set.

Anyway, this is not the place to complain.

I have decided that if nobody out there will hire me for something from 2000 miles away by next fall (because I can't take another cold winter) I'll just move to LA an live on the streets. Dead serious.

So if your band still needs an auxiliary multi-instrumentalist, and doesn't mind having a street person in it, I'll be available.