The Babies – “Wild 2”

When: 26 April 2011
Where: North Lake Avenue
Who: Assorted street gangs
Weather: Mild, clear

Even as mix-and-match pop revival bands go, The Babies were under the radar, but they didn’t sound quite like anything else. Its old west-meets-new shouted “adventure!” But not exactly the kind of adventure I was having.

I came back from New York determined to catalogue every neighborhood in Los Angeles for a new book in the vein of Broke Ass Stuart. Stuart’s TV show was soon to premiere on IFC, and having talked with him in San Francisco I was hoping to get some legitimacy for my project. So when he announced he was going to be at the Dragonfly in Hollywood, I lept onto the next train.

The Dragonfly is a bar for all the actors who work in the tiny theaters on Santa Monica Boulevard, but on this night they were hosting a Star Wars-themed disco. The place was empty and after 45 minutes Stuart hadn’t shown, so I made my way back home. First on the subway with the kind of girls that would inspire many doodles, then the Gold Line to Pasadena, and then a brisk walk through the night, at which point this song was playing on my iPod. The streets were not terribly safe. There had been a shooting on Villa, and gang members were circling the area, very poorly concealing the guns in their pockets.

But that’s why I wear a tie.

Next: Pasadena is still relevant, dammit!

The Secret Sisters – “Somethin’ Stupid” / “Tweed Heads”

When: October 2010
Where: Meredith Avenue, Pasadena
Who: Nobody
Weather: Hot, dry

It was late Thursday night, and I had class in the morning. I’d just left a screenwriting workshop where I’d been presenting, piece by piece, my first pilot script, an admittedly clunky concept called “Tweed Heads,” set in late 1950s television. I didn’t want to do a show about television, unfortunately it was all I knew and had yet to receive any genuine inspiration. I was already toying with the idea of re-setting the show in the late ’80s, but I was stubborn and the idea wasn’t totally formed, so I kept on.

What’s more, our indian summer had stretched well into October. I was sweating from the heat long after the sun had gone down, yearning for the dignity of winter to arrive. Tweed Heads was the only complete script to come out of that workshop, but it’s not like it was any good. I just wanted to go home and sleep for at least three hours.

Next: It could have been worse…

Hot Hot Heat – “21@12”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oIi_NiFZdU

When: 12 June 2010
Where: One Colorado
Who: Sam Ettinger, Hot Hot Heat, and about a thousand strangers
Weather: Warm, sunny

Months earlier in my dorm building, I was talking with an RA at the front desk. I had reached my limit and registered my disgust for my raver roommate, his ecstasy-addled friends, the whole school’s inexplicable appreciation for dubstep and a general sense of skankitude that unavoidable permeated every aspect of my experience at SF State. He replied, “perhaps dorm life is not for you.”

Earlier that term I had considered going back home but decided that would be cowardly. The truth was, San Francisco State was not for me, and as much as I had denied it, this would be my breaking point.

Sprouts’ grocery store was opening in East Pasadena, and I went to the job fair there. I was one of several hundred applicants, all looking for work. This was the situation we were in now, and maybe forever. During the interview one of the staff asked me if I was going back to SF State. I said yes, and they never called back.

When I got back on Facebook, I made a discovery: Ashlie Gudmundsen had a boyfriend. My head began spinning, not because I was head-over-heels in love with her, but because of all the vast implications. Everything was clear. I didn’t like film school. I was out of money, I hated it up there. I’m not going back. I rushed to my mothers to thrill her with the news.

Later that night, I met up with an old friend from Hebrew school, Sam Ettinger, for a free Hot Hot Heat concert at One Colorado (a public square) courtesy of KCRW. It was wild. An unfamiliar woman pinched by butt thinking I was someone else. After the concert we went for gelato and I retired at my mother’s apartment with a DVD of The Ben Stiller Show. Everything just got a lot easier.

Next: Misguidedness and market research…

MGMT – “It’s Working”

When: 1 June 2010
Where: South Lake Avenue
Who: Various crowds
Weather: June Gloom

As a group, we still didn’t know what Pop Revival was until late in the summer; the term itself would only be coined by The Fling that autumn. Vampire Weekend and even The Like were considered New Wave Revival, but this new thing– actually very old– was upon us.

The summer began confusingly. I was still recording Monty Park videos, and I was hanging around Pasadena assuming I’d return to San Francisco in the fall. All of that was about to change, but in the meantime I was hanging around my mom’s then-unfurnished apartment, eating fish tacos from a broish and totally-un-South-Lake restaurant called Wahoo’s and catching up on television’s newest phenomenon Modern Family. In my mind, Modern Family boded well for the new decade: it was good, yet popular!

But for the most part I wandered around desperate for some new music. The National’s High Violet had recently come out to ridiculous critical acclaim, to the point that I read one musician’s opinion that “Bloodbuzz Ohio” had changed songwriting forever. I didn’t find it to be that; it was the same kind of exhausting bombast from the mid-noughties that maybe I was getting too old for. Incidentally, the only person who agreed with me on High Violet was my mother, but to my knowledge we were the only people who hated WALL-E.

For some reason, I remembered that MGMT had actually released a second album at the beginning of the year. I took a look at the cover; the purple plaid put me in a state of total understanding:This is us. This is now. It wasn’t quite that, but in any case I downloaded “It’s Working.” The Beach Boys-like roll of the song was energizing. For a long time I couldn’t not listen to it. Within a few days it was my most played song on iTunes.

I never downloaded the rest of the album, but I didn’t need to. Pop Revival had come.

Welcome to the 2010s.

The Four Tops – “Bernadette”

When: 5 May 2010
Where: San Francisco State University
Who: Several people
Weather: Warm, sunny

Through some loophole in the system, I was allowed to take a graduate-level music course. Because of budget cuts, I was unable to take any classes of real value, so I settled for Dean Suzuki’s Origins of Rock class with ill-hidden excitement.

It was a great class. All you did was sit and listen to old rockabilly, 60s pop and soul music and learn about that world (essentially an academic version of the early installments of No Hard Chords). And while I may have had difficulty memorizing the names of Brill Building composers, I welcomed the opportunity to relax before lunchtime every Tuesday and Thursday.

For a brief week, I became obsessed with this song, not just because I’d heard it in Suzuki’s class, but it had also been the subject of someone else’s term paper in another class– Music Ideas in Culture, or as I called it, Exercises in the Overintellectualization of Popular Music. I could have done without that class if I hadn’t taken so much joy in doing a presentation on “Eleanor Get Your Boots On” and watching Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

And as the semester neared its end, my mood drastically improved. The promise of college had finally delivered, with a circle of friends, a venue to perform, and the fact that I actually enjoyed my classes. I hadn’t loved San Francisco so much since that fateful spring weekend two years before.

So naturally, it was time to get the hell out.

Next: Chekhov’s opening act

Vampire Weekend – “Taxi Cab”

When: 19 April 2010
Where: Fox Theater Oakland
Who: Ambiguously Jewish Ashlie
Weather: Mild, clear
Book: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Not wanting to make the mistake I did at the Arctic Monkeys concert, I made sure I had someone to go see Vampire Weekend with. Ambiguously Jewish Ashlie jumped at the opportunity. We met downtown and our differing perspectives on music became apparent– she didn’t have bad taste, you see, but rather on the BART she described to me her adoration for “girl groups.” I had only seen one girl group, The Like, who’d opened for Arctic Monkeys to thunderous jeers seven months earlier. “I didn’t mind them,” I said. Ashlie had never heard of them.

I was hoping I could turn this into a date, which I did, but I wanted to make sure Ashlie was interested, so I asked her best friend on Facebook who immediately dissuaded me from making any move. So I didn’t, and simply continued my journey at SF State.

Next: My soul phase.

Gorillaz – “Rhinestone Eyes”

When: 24 March 2010
Where: Westbound 29 Bus
Who: Strangers
Weather: Warm, sunny

When I say I miss San Francisco, I really mean I miss the food, which is odd because I never went out due to constant brokeness.

But I always made an exception for El Farolito because it was the closest and the cheapest. I loved that place so much that I went all the way to the Excelsior to get steak suizas right before I was supposed to go onstage back at SF State. This was Tyler Cornfield’s broken mic. And I barely made it. Unable to reach for my iPod as I ran, this song played all the way to the basement of the school.

Next: Monday Night Weekend

Gorillaz – “Stylo”

When: March 2010
Where: My dorm
Who: My roommate
Weather: Mild, sunny

My roommate had moved on to Plastic Beach, and so it seemed had the world. You couldn’t escape “Stylo.” So it was with little wonder that I, so desperately seeking the acceptable sound of this infant decade, latched onto it so eagerly.

One has to remember what early 2010 was like– so many of us had jettisoned the noughties into the sun, and in the posher places like San Francisco men had already begun wearing skinny ties, the young women traded in their trashy wares for sundresses hi-rise jeans. At least they had north of 24th Street. ’90’s nostalgia had crept in, everything new was neon. Electric was the look, as it were, and that misheard lyric was guaranteed to make me smile approvingly.

The new tens had a few kinks to work out. It had already a fashion sense borrowed from a previous era, but a bit more class and classicism would come from another era.

An era made relevant, as we shall see come summer, by a TV show.

Next: Falling backwards into relevance.

Television – “See No Evil”

When: 28 February 2010
Where: SF State quad
Who: Jeannie, Jordon Jo, Ambiguously Jewish Ashlie, and Shayna Rader
Weather: Cold but clear

The sun was soon to set and I was feeling low. My roommate Chris was indulging in another round of Miike Snow, and I needed a break from my marathon of Band of Brothers. I went out, hesitant to go right to the dining hall, so I decided to give Marquee Moona first listen while doing a circuit of the campus.

“I see…I see no…”

I paused as I rounded a corner, noticing my ex-girlfriend coming from the other way before she stopped to talk to a guy who looked like a Chinese Buddy Holly playing frisbee with two lovely hipster girls. There was nobody around, it was Sunday. Desperate for human contact, I threw myself into the conversation, but a strange thing happened. After Jeannie departed, I found myself intrigued by the frisbee game, and more importantly the people playing. I loved them; if I’d met them a year and a half earlier I’d certainly not be as miserable as I was now.

I followed them back to the dining hall, but not before running into their leader, for lack of a better word, Tyler Cornfield. Now there was a name I knew. Though I’d never met him, his name was all over San Francisco. He made things happen. I’d met him once before, people watching outside some embarrassing resident event set to– ugh– the Black Eyed Peas. He concurred, and I made it a point to hang out with him more. Finally I’d metmypeople at this place. And I made it a point to hang out with them as much as possible. I smiled and resumed.

“–EVIIIIIIIILLLLLL!”

Special note: Tyler and Jordon were the founding members of the communal folk band “Wes Leslie and His Deadly Medley;” their story is that of the great and ongoing SF nightlife crisis, which I’ll save for another day.

Next: Electric is the look.

Miike Snow – “Animal”

When: February 2010
Where: My dorm
Who: My roommate and Maddie Lucero-Simmons
Weather: Cold and junk

My roommate was emphatic. “This band is going to be the new Passion Pit!”

Maddie was skeptical. “What about Passion Pit now?”

He relented. “Sure, but if Passion Pit didn’t exist, these guys would be huge!” He was kind of right. I’d heard the song on two different NPR shows before he started playing it in the dorm, and the single overall made a modest splash.

I was very bored.

Next: Passing the torch at SF State.