Singer/Songwriter/Storyteller Michael Gaither

I’ve always been a huge fan of Queen. Way back in the stone age of 1980 before stadiums had corporate sponsorship, I saw Queen at The Oakland Colliseum. (No “McAfee”. No “Oracle”. It was just called “The Oakland Arena”.) It’s still the greatest rock concert I’ve ever seen. And probably ever will. Along the same lines, I love a good Queen cover. My rule on cover tunes: Don’t play it like the original, or what’s the point, really? Make it your own. For example, listen to L.A. songwriter Grey Delisle’s take on “Bohemian Rhapsody”. It’s stark. Just her and an autoharp. And it’s quite brilliant.

That said, I’m continually overwhelmed (in a good way) by the amount of music and the number of musicians that I stumble upon. On Monday afternoon, I finished an interview with Antsy McClain of The Trailer Park Troubadors. Antsy was travelling and doing a quick California run with fingerstyle guitarist Edgar Cruz, so I interviewed Edgar, too.

When Edgar told me he did a note for note version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, I asked him to play it, and he did. Turns out it’s on his instructional video, which has been authorized by Queen guitarist Brian May and features a few other Queen classics as well.

Pretty inspiring (well, humbling more likely) stuff. Both Antsy and Edgar will be featured interviews in upcoming episodes of my “Songs and Stories” podcast. Check back here in a few weeks or sign up on my mailing list to find out when these interviews are posted.

They only get played one month out of the year, so Christmas CDs seem like a boxful of new presents when I unpack them with the rest of the holiday paraphernalia every end-of-November. There are obvious favorites like Bruce Cockburn’s “Christmas” and the Vince Giraldi trio’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, neither of which leave our player until mid-January. But this year “A Very Slambovian Christmas” has been added to the frequent-play mix.

This is the new Christmas release from “Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus”, a band which even the casual visitor to this web site probably knows that I’m quite fond of. And as any fan of the band can tell you, “every day is Christmas in Slambovia”. Seriously. What other band could mash up “Angels We Have Heard on High (Gloria)” with Them’s “G-L-O-R-I-A” and play it at festivals in the middle of summer? (That’s the closing track on this record, by the way.)

“A Very Slambovian Christmas” is a collection of live performances, featuring serious takes on classics like “Silver Bells” and “The Christmas Song”, a straight telling of “The Night Before Christmas”, and originals like “Suddenly It’s Christmas”, which has some of the best lyrics I’ve heard in a contemporary Christmas song:

“Take us back to when wishes came true if you were good / And we tried to stay awake all night to see him if we could” / Take us back to places that could set our hearts on fire / Where the inner world was glowing with the purest of desires.”

You can learn more about the band by digging into a couple of previous “Songs and Stories” podcasts. (I interviewed Joziah Longo, their lead singer and songwriter, in episode eight and episode forty-six.) In the meantime, even though the big holiday is just a day or two away, you can order “A Very Slambovian Christmas” on either a limited CD pressing or as an MP3 download (so you can have it in time to play over and over on Christmas morning.)

Have a very Slambovian Christmas, everyone.

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As a lifelong Santa Cruz native who’s paid the bills with a high-tech day job for more years than I care to acknowledge, I couldn’t help but LOVE “Surf.com”, the latest novel from local author Fred Reiss.

The story is set way back in 1999, when the dot com boom hit Silicon Valley and spilled over onto “our side of the hill”, leaving “instant locals”, SUVs, and million dollar plus homes in its wake. The story is told through the eyes of local hero, “Vic”, who’s dealing with local surf spots invaded by dot com-ers buying their way into Santa Cruz. He’s also deciding where he fits in when he’s offered wads of money to be an icon for the “Surf.com” startup, a gig which includes fringe benefits with an “Execu-Diva” named Andrea.

Click to order “Surf.com”
The clever mix of local color with dot com era makes a great read. It’s also very funny. Here’s how Vic processes his early reaction to a group of techies:

“Just about all of them had that soft-white bulb office tan. Laminated company badges were clipped like hunting permits on their belts or pockets. They yammered on cell phones, headsets, and only took a break from clicking their keyboards to check beepers and palm pilots for incoming calls or e-mails. Their hand-held devices might have been communicating online, but for people who took pride in their networking skills, none of the dot-comers looked like they were connecting with one another or the world around them. I couldn’t tell if they were talking to themselves, speaking on a telephone headset, having a conversation with the person across from them, or babbling incoherently to an imaginary playmate.”

Reiss himself is a real Jack of All Trades. (“Surf.com” is his third book – he’s previously published “Gidget Must Die” and the non-fiction self-help book “Insult and Live”.) Back in the late comedy scare of the 1980s, he was my favorite insult comedian (click here for a nostalgic trip back in time). These days you can hear his KFOX Weekly World Update on Sunday mornings. And on most weekends, you’re likely to find Fred running the tasting room room at Roudon-Smith Winery in Scotts Valley.

Not completely uncoincidentally, I’ll be playing up at Roudon-Smith the weekend of 5/31 and 6/1, along with Sherry Austin, Chuck McCabe, Jay Howlet, and Bev Barnett and Greg Newlon during Vintner’s Festival Weekend. Check out the complete schedule on the right-hand side of my main page to see who’s playing and when. And if you do make it out to the festival, pick up a copy of “Surf.com”. You’ll find them next to Fred in the tasting room.

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Tom Petty went back to his roots last night. So did I. I’ve been attending shows at the Civic since 1978, but somehow always missed Petty and the Heartbreakers when they played there. (While chatting in line with a younger Petty fan before the show, I tried to recap all the folks I’ve seen in that building. I managed to recollect evenings with everyone from ACDC, The Ramones, Motorhead, and Devo…to Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Lovett, and Nanci Griffith.)

And so now I’ve *finally* seen Petty at the Civic: On Monday evening, Petty and his pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch, played the second stop of a short, two-week tour. I think we both had a good night.

After opening with an electrified cover of “Shady Grove”, Petty confirmed that, “If you’re looking for some old hippie music, you came to the right place” and went into a great new country ballad called “Orphan of the Storm”. This reunion features Petty’s current bandmates Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell (who merged into the Heartbreakers with Petty), along with the other original Mudcrutch members Randall Marsh and Tom Leadon, who last night frequently played twin lead guitar with Campbell.

They spent two hours playing their new “LP” (as Petty called it) and filled the rest with an eclectic collection of covers, running through Dylan, Bill Monroe, Jerry Lee Lewis, and old country standards like “Six Days on the Road” and “Love Please Come Home”. Though chatty and obviously having as much fun as the audience was, Petty took a sidestage approach, frequently turning over the show to the twin lead guitars of Campbell and Leadon, sharing lead vocals with Leadon and Tench, and forgoing guitar to work as the bass player in this resurrected band.

Mudcrutch at the Santa Cruz Civic

Let’s hope this turns into more than a two-week stint.

I’ve been a Petty fan since I was old enough to buy records. (Yes, I intentionally linked “records” to a wiki so you younger folks can catch up). I even recorded a cover of “Running Down a Dream on my first CD, gladly paying the $15.16 royalties to both Petty and Campbell.

For me, being able to see Petty and company in a venue small enough where I wasn’t just watching a TV screen was pretty darned exciting.

The crowd was great last night – which doesn’t always happen – and it was a great mix of younger and older folk. (As my wife said, “someone from our era is still popular”.) And while some things have changed – cell phones have replaced waving lighters during the night – not everything has. When Mudcrutch closed with a rockin’ version of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35″ (better known as “Everybody Must Get Stoned”), and the spotlights cut through the smoke in the Santa Cruz Civic, it definitely smelled like 1978.