by Gene Mahoney

August 2003 - Hey, everybody! How are you doing? Whew! I have to sit down! I've been dancing around listening to this great new local band called Echo Beach. Yessiree ... Echo Beach --- 'Guitar & Percussion Jazz from San Francisco'. It really makes you want to get down. Man, I love those vibes! This is great cocktail party music. Get their CD at echobeachband.com. Oh, and wouldn't you know -- they just happen to advertise with me. What a coincidence! Seriously, folks, I was feeling pretty down before I put this CD on just now and it cheered me up within the first few notes.... Starting in September, the second Tuesday of every month will be San Francisco Herald Night at Zebulon (83 Natoma, off 2nd Street between Mission & Howard), from 7pm to 10pm. SF Herald Night will be a salon for writers, where you'll have a chance to meet the columnists for this paper and listen to them read old and new works. If you would like to participate as a writer reading your work at SF Herald Night, contact me at sfherald@eudoramail.com. There may be live music, too. This is open to anyone who wants to come, listen, and participate....

Back to music for a moment: Steven Capozzolla (AKA Mr. Fabulous) has a new CD out. I dig it. To me he sounds like a cross between the Grateful Dead, Cracker, and Billy Bragg. If anyone wants to buy a copy go visit laststoprecords.com....

I received a call last month from Ted Mason, who was the guitarist for that '80's new wave pop band Modern English. Remember I Melt with You ('I'll stop the world and melt with you!') It turns out that even though Modern English is no more, Ted is still in the music business. He owns a record company, Mi5 Recordings. I logged on to his web site (Mi5recordings.com) and saw his roster of bands: Jesus Jones, prominent songwriter and former Ultravox lead singer Midge Ure, Murray Head (remember 'One Night in Bangkok'?), Eric McFaden & George Clinton (I used to see Eric hang out at the late, great Caffe Proust), and get this --- reggae kings Toots and the Maytals (kids, if you think reggae is just this dreadlocked Rasta-stuff, you've got to check out these early pioneers). After the bios of those artists, there were links to web sites of other musicians with no explanation. Was Ted going to sign these artists in the future? The web site links were for Suzanne Vega, Sugar Ray, The Wallflowers, and get this -- Ringo Starr! Man, I would love to interview one of The Beatles. I remember being a gigantic Beatle-maniac when I was 15 in 1980. I lived on Long Island, about a 50 minute train ride from Manhattan. One day I decided that I would take a train into the city the next weekend and wait outside the Dakota Apartments until I saw John Lennon walk in. The next day I awoke to the news that something had happened the night before that would make that impossible. I think you know what I mean.

Anyway, Ted has produced numerous acts, including Jesus and Mary Chain, Sugar Hill Gang, that idiot Queen Latifah, Peter Gabriel, African Bambata, Grandmaster Flash, Edwin Collins (remember Orange Juice?), Hugh Cornwall of The Stranglers, and jazz great Betty Carter. 'Being a producer got me my record company, not being in Modern English,' explains Ted. 'I played in and managed the band. They were so unhappy. They could never go to a psychologist. It was a very lonely experience.' Though Ted owns a record company now, his predictions for the future aren't exactly what you want to hear at stockholders' meeting: 'I think with downloads, CD's are dead. In less than ten years all the record companies will be dead as well. There are six billion people in the world and three billion of them are musicians. Two hundred A&R guys are going to decide what we should listen to. Steve Jobs of Apple is the new record company.' Mr. Mason was in town to promote John Lombardo and Mary Ramsey (playing together as John and Mary of 10,000 Maniacs).

Ah yes -- 10,000 Maniacs. I remember being a teenager growing up on Long Island (have I ever told you this before?) and being a senior in high school, chomping at the bit to graduate. Most of my friends were a year or two older than me and had gone away to college. The ones who went to the State University of New York at Buffalo used to tell me about a great band they would see perform at local bars called 10,000 Maniacs. I heard some songs they played for me and thought they were all right. Then when In My Tribe came out --- woe! A great album. Ted and John (sans Mary) showed up to chat for a brief interview at 19 Broadway in Fairfax while we watched our very own lovely and talented Kimberlye Gold perform (they both said she had 'a good voice'). John left 10,000 Maniacs in 1986 because he 'wasn't having fun.' When I asked him if that was because Natalie Merchant isn't exactly reputed to be a laid-back party girl he replied, 'I got along with Natalie fine. I was the only one in the band who did.' Mr. Lombardo says he wrote all the songs that got them a record deal (their first album was titled The Wishing Chair) and after his departure from the band, he met Mary and they put out two albums on Rykodisk, a small label out of Minneapolis, that did okay. Upon Natalie's departure in '95, John rejoined the band and Mary (who played violin on the Maniacs' Unplugged album) took over as lead singer.

Released in June 1997, their single, a cover of Roxy Music's 'More than This', hit number 18 on the U.S. charts and their album, Love Among the Ruins, sold a respectable 400,000 copies. I remember where I was when I heard that they had reformed the band. I was getting ready to go to work one day and my landlady was watching Live with Regis and Kathy Lee, as she did every morning. 'Reeg' announced that the new 10,000 Maniacs would be on the show. 'That was the week that Frank Gifford got caught sleeping with that stewardess, so Kathy Lee wasn't there,' John recalls. 'But her replacement, Paula Zahn, was even hotter. The other guests were Dennis Franz, who was nice, and Kathy Griffin, who wouldn't speak to us at all.' (I had to surf the web to find out who Kathy Griffin is. She played the 'feisty redhead' on that Brooke Shields' laugh-riot sitcom, Suddenly Susan). The band's TV appearances also included Sabrina the Teenaged Witch and RuPaul's show.

However, just before the second single got released, their record company went under, though the band managed to put out a second post-Natalie CD titled The Earth Pressed Flat on a small label called Barnone. 'I think Mary's voice sounds just as good as Natalie's,' relates John. 'Mary is a classically trained musician who plays with symphony orchestras. I think that if the band had started with Mary instead of Natalie it would have been successful, too. We became popular at a time when the world was interested in a female singer who didn't have to be an over the top sex symbol or one of the boys, like Joan Jett. We just chose a singer who was also a songwriter, not someone just strutting around.'.... 

Elsewhere on the music front, I just received a copy in the mail of Everything will never be OK, the debut CD from Fiction Plane, a new band featuring Dan Brown on bass, Seton Daunt on guitar, and Joe Sumner (Sting's eldest son) on guitar and vocals. I'm rushing to get this issue off to the printer, so I haven't had time to really savor the disc, but from what I've heard, it's really good stuff. What's that? No, they don't sound like The Police. Joe's voice occasionally sounds like his father's, yet is distinctive enough where you know it's him. I haven't had time to really listen to the lyrics, but they seem sort of dark with a lot of references about death. I guess he takes after his old man. Maybe when he was a kid Sting took him to soccer practice and Jungian therapy sessions. I look forward to listening to the CD again and maybe interviewing these guys for an upcoming issue. What's that? So if they don't sound like The Police, who do they sound like? I don't know. Themselves, I guess.

Actually if I had to make a quick comparison to some band, I'd say they sound a little like James (remember 'Born of Frustration'?) Anyway, pick it up. It's on MCA Records. (Fictionplane.com).... Oh, one last note about Fiction Plane: They used to be called Santa's Boyfriend and perform at the Backstage Cafe in Beverly Hills. Herald readers will recall that is the club owned by Stewart, Miles, and of course, Ian Copeland. Ian just left me a message on my voicemail asking me to be one of the judges at the Backstage's new Monday Night Bikini Contest. For more info on that and other happenings at the Backstage check out backstagecafe.com....

There's a new book out titled Wacky Chicks (Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulously Eccentric Women) by Simon Doonan. Mr. Doonan studies these curious real-life female characters: Isabel Garret, who navigates the U.S. solo in her motor home and frequently stops at swinger conventions and biker rallies to set up shop for her slashed and sexy fetish wear. Jessica Porter, the first person in the world to produce, write, and perform macrobiotic dinner theater and stand-up comedy. Amy Sedaris, the co-writer, co-director, and star of the now defunct, truly tasteless Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy, who has decorated her Greenwich Village apartment like a woodland glade to delight her pet bunny rabbit. Lisa Eisner, a L.A. book publisher who dresses in Sammy Davis' old clothes, topped off by an authentic Indian headdress or cowboy hat adorned with a tiara. Spider Fawke, a former designer for chi-chi fashion houses in Paris who is now a park ranger and lives with 38 reptiles in a one-bedroom apartment in the San Fernando Valley.

Also, Brigid Berlin, one of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (that's enough of an explanation for me). Suzanne Bartsch, a celebrity party promoter who organizes a bunch of transvestites and hookers to perform at Barmitzvahs. Jocelyn Meinster, who called a taxidermist when her pet Chihuahua died and now performs shadow plays on the wall with the aid of a flashlight, turning her beloved deceased dog into a fearsome dinosaur. Carrie Fisher, whose wacky Hollywood decor includes a collection of thrift shop paintings of ugly children (I thought writing Postcards from the Edge would have qualified her as wacky enough). Rona Barrett, the former gossip columnist who turned her back on celebrity culture and moved to a Santa Barbara ranch, where she grows lavender and chucks fist-fulls of it into her own food, calling it 'Aronatherapy'. Kazuko, the pixie-sized shaman who talks to animals and believes that cavemen wore fashion accessories, and once understudied for Herve Villechaize, the late midget actor from Fantasy Island. 

Mary Xmas, a radical cheerleader/neo-feminist writer of 'herstory' who once dated a transgender person and reveres Valerie Solanas (the man-hating prostitute who shot Andy Warhol). And of course, our own Pearl Harbour -- the former lead singer of Pearl Harbour and the Explosions, ex-wife of The Clash's bass player, and former San Francisco 'exotic dancer', who once lived in a Marin County storage locker and loved it. The book's from Simon & Schuster (simonsays.com).... Wayne, an old friend of mine from New York was in town on business a few days ago and took me out to the Redwood Room in the Clift Hotel (Geary & Taylor), where he was staying. I'm so busy with this paper that I never get out anymore, but hey, it was a lot of fun. If Sex and the City took place in S.F. instead of N.Y. I guess the girls would hang out here. The place has these portraits on the wall that move! I don't think they're holograms. How do they do that? Slides? I don't know.

All the women there were very beautiful (as if we were in West Los Angeles or New York's South Street Seaport) and our bartender really knew his shit! His name is Michael McLean and when Wayne asked him what a good vodka drink was, Mike passionately explained which ones were good and not so good. Then he took out two glasses and compared the densities of two brands of vodkas, as though it was a TV commercial comparing his brand versus the leading competitor. I'm sure everyone reading this has already been here and I'm telling you things you already know, but I just thought I'd mention it. Wayne told me about a new weekly paper called the Long Island Press (apparently named after a defunct daily rag I remember as a wee lad). He told me that Joey Butafucco's former teenage mistress ('The Long Island Lolita'), Amy Fisher writes a column for it. Check out LongIslandPress.com if you want to check Amy out.

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Gene can be emailed here