San Jose’s Language Arts Crew Part of Metro Rocktober Edition
Every year, Metro does a Rocktober issue, where 5-6 bands or artists are featured. I wrote one of the pieces about San Jose Hip Hop group, Language Arts Crew. They are a bit of a legacy, having been around over a decade. They’ve also splintered off into several groups. (Whiskey Avengers, Insolence, Trashkannon) But they’ve still stayed together and continued to record new material as Language Arts Crew.
Check out the song “Lazy Daze in California” before you read the article. It’s a great tune and was a minor local hit 6 years ago.
Jeff Rosenstock (Bomb the Music Industry)Will Never Miss a Shinobu Set
I interviewed Jeff Rosenstock at Nickel City in San Jose when my band, Gnarboots, opened the show.( Dan Potthast and Shinobu were also on the bill.) It was a weird night. I completely exhausted myself during our set due to the fact that I was wearing a suit, tie and a wig the entire performance.
I was nearly incapacitated during the majority of Dan Potthast’s set and knew that I had only a small window of time to get my interview with Rosenstock. He didn’t want to interview during Shinobu’s performance. Cause as he told me earlier, “I will never ever miss a Shinobu set.”
The interview went smoothly. I found him to be delightful. My favorite moment of the interview came when Jason Rodriguez, one of the San Jose kids that comes to all the Gnarboots shows, interrupted our interview with some random comments. It was brief, but it made my night.
I first realized that Jason and his friends were coming to all our shows when we’d played Homestead Lanes in Cupertino a month earlier. I was outside the venue by myself when Jason (who I didn’t know at the time) and some of his friends walked by and started doing the Gnarboots chant for me. They didn’t stop, and they didn’t look directly at me, but I could see them checking out my reaction from the corner of their eyes. Anyways, what were we talking about? Oh yeah…Bomb the music industry.
Read my interview with Jeff Rosenstock over at Amp Magazine!
le Verita Will Set You Free
I chose to write my most recent Metro article about the San Jose electronic-folk-rock duo le Verita because of what an original band they are. That goes a long way in my mind, even if they’re not yet at their full potential. When you see a band like le Verita in their early stages carving out a unique sound, something unlike all the other bands in the area, you can’t help but wonder what their music will sound like after they’ve had a few more years to develop.
One item I didn’t get into in the actual article was the story behind their name. They originally wanted to call themselves “The Truths”, but found out someone else had that name already. So, they translated it into another language (I can’t remember if it’s Italian or French.) and voilà, they were now called le Verita. The Metro editors must have been aware of this story, because they titled the article “Undeniable Truth.” In addition, they wrote a caption under their photo that said, “The truth will set you free.” I can only imagine what casual Metro readers thought when they read all these unexplained “truth” references. Maybe Metro just figured people would go to Babel Fish and see what le Verita meant, and it would all make sense somehow.
Tea and Talk with San Jose’s Hard Girls
I recently sat down with San Jose punk band Hard Girls for an article I was writing for Metro Newspaper. After the interview was over, drummer Max Feshbach told me, “This is the first time we ever gave a serious interview.”
I was surprised at how well the interview ended up going. We met up at a pseudo ultra-lounge themed diner near San Jose State called “Flames.” Since I was friends with the band members, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to conduct a serious interview and that we’d spend the entire time making jokes about our testicles. As it turned out we got pretty deep into their history, musical influences, and so forth. I got so much usable information that it became near impossible to distill our conversation down to 750 words.
Of the interesting tidbits I couldn’t squeeze in the article, my favorite was finding out how guitarist Mike Huguenor was voted best local guitarist in Metro’s best of series in 2002. The beauty of the story is that he wasn’t playing guitar in a band that year. He was lead singer for “Rage against the Robots.” How could this happen, you ask? Huguenor wasn’t sure either, but he suspected that one of his friends infiltrated the system and stuffed the ballot box. I won’t name names, but you know who you are.
