Market Days, Chicago

We spent much of last Saturday and Sunday two weekends ago at the big end-of-summer neighborhood festival in Boys Town, Chicago's gay district along Halstead Street.

Market Days apparently is the biggest annual gay and lesbian event in the Midwest, though the mix of straight people in the crowd was far higher than at your typical gay pride event.
We took the train from Andersonville to Boys Town. Why can't other cities figure out mass transit the way Chicago has? From left to right: Tim, Pete, Steve (our host), Al, Martin and the Cajun.
There were a few people in costume, like this very prideful flight crew. But it was nothing like Mardi Gras or Southern Decadence.
One of the most surprising parts of the festival was the great music line-up. This is Candye Kane, who left behind a brief career as a porn star and magazine model (i.e. Juggs) in the mid-1980s to become a punk rocker-then-rockabilly-blues singer.

The San Diegan has an amazing voice, is a professed bi-sexual and was treated successfully for pancreatic cancer last year.
Next up was Catfight, a Chicago all-chick punk-rock-pop cover band. Click on any pic to view it larger.
The girls loved the girls.
The Village People closed the festival's final night.
The soldier and American Indian are original band members, and the cowboy and lead-singing cop have been with the band off and on since 1980. The construction worker and leather guy are newer additions. Here they are doing a stirring patriotic rendition of "The Navy."
A good time was had by all.

Jazz Fest

I headed to New Orleans last weekend with Tim for the final days of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. We stayed Uptown with my friends Pedro and Tommy. Here we are in front of the Gentily Stage on Saturday afternoon.
Sugarland delivered a great set as the closeout band on the Acura stage Friday. Tim and I were able to squeeze our way right up to the front lines. The only downer was the drunk Yat standing next to me who kept pushing me and knocking into me during the show.
Some Mardi Gras Indians in elaborately beaded costumes joined Sugerland for one of the group's closing numbers.
My favorite performance was by Cowboy Mouth, a New Orleans rock band, whose drummer and lead singer, Fred LeBlanc, is famous for his high-caffeinated performances. They did a few numbers from their new album, Fearless, along with some great post-Katrina tunes like "The Avenue" and classics like "Jenny Says."
We caught the end of a set by Doreen (center) and her jazz combo. I've know Doreen since the early 90s when I would listen to her and the group play every Saturday morning on Royal Street in the French Quarter. It was great to see her on stage at Jazz Fest. She plays that clarinet like no one else.

Of course, Jazz Fest is about food as much as it's about music. And we did our best to gobble down everything possible. I started here with one of my favorites, a duck poboy.

We also ate jambalaya, soft-shell crab poboys, crawfish bread, sweet potato chips and a few other things that I can't remember now.

We washed everything down with rose mint iced tea.

This was our final meal of the Fest, a puff pastry topped with oysters, some crawfish beignets smothered with horseradish sauce and a crawfish pouch sitting in étouffée.
After it was all over, we headed to a house six blocks away for a huge crawfish boil (500 pounds of the critters) where Tim tasted his first boiled mudbugs. The crawfish were the best I've ever had.

The cook, a guy from Lake Charles who now lives in Las Vegas, used a couple of special techniques. First, he purged the crawfish for 24 hours in fresh water rather than doing the traditional quick purge in salt water. Then, after the crawfish were cooked, he let them soak for a few minutes in butter seasoned with tons of garlic and a Cajun spice mix.

We kept telling Tim that the rest his crawfish-eating experiences probably never will match this one.

I must be a lesbian

I saw the Indigo Girls in concert for the SEVENTH TIME last Thursday. They delivered a stripped-down acoustic show at Humphrey's, an amazing outdoor concert space along San Diego's waterfront. Kayakers actually pull up alongside the venue and watch shows from the water.

The Girls played a couple of songs from their upcoming album (set for release in February) but mostly stuck to their usual mix of tracks spanning their 20-plus-year career. I finally got to see them perform one of my all-time favorites,"Wood Song," but I'm still waiting for their rarely-heard acappella version of "Finlandia."

Here's a clip of the duo singing "Finlandia" with Girlyman last year during a show in Oyster Bay, NY.


Vonda Shepard, who lives in the northern suburbs of San Diego, made a surprise appearance at the Humphrey's show to promote the upcoming release of her own new album. She performed a couple of songs including "Baby, Don't You Break My Heart Slow," a number that she recorded with Emily Saliers (the blond part of Indigo Girls).

Here's a video of that song featuring a very dolled-up Emily.


I've been going to Indigo Girls concerts since the early 1990s. I saw them for the second time at the Saenger Theater in New Orleans, where they made the video for "Joking." Several hundred of us stayed for about an hour after the show ended while they filmed stage and crowd shots. Much of the rest of the video was shot in my old Bywater neighborhood.

Those greedy bastards at Sony won't let anyone embed the clip of the video on Web sites, but you can watch "Joking" by going to this YouTubel link.

The Girls happily announced at the show on Thursday that they recently became independent artists after Sony has dropped them from their longtime contract with the label. Good news indeed.

From my bag of Christmas video goodies

Bing and Bowie sing "Little Drummer Boy"
I remember watching this live on television in 1977 and thinking that something really special had just happened.


"The 12 Yats of Christmas"
You might need subtitles for this one if you're not from N'Awlins.



"White Christmas"
No, she's not a drag queen. She's Spanish actress and singer Itziar Castro.



Santa does "Jesus Freak"



Better than acid


And finally, this mesmerizing holiday homage to Trinity Broadcasting Network diva and big hair luminary Jan Crouch. (If you think she's amazing as I do, just read this about her preacher husband Paul.)

Band geeks gather in L.A.

Rex, Stan and I were among the thousands of current and former marching band members who attended today's Drum Corps International championship at the Rose Bowl.

All three of us were high school band geeks. I played snare drum and was drum major. Rex played clarinet and saxophone. Stan, who is an accomplished pianist, played base drum and saxophone.
Drum Corps are marching bands that are formed each summer from the most talented members of high school and college marching bands across the country. I've followed drum corps for years and always dreamed of going to the championship.

The Cavaliers of Rosemont, Ill., were among my favorites (partly because of an amazing color guard), finishing in third place just behind the first-place Blue Devils of Concord, Calif. (the home state crowd favorites) and the second-place Cadets of Allentown, Pa., who put on a spectacular show but created a stir by incorporating annoying on-field narration.
My long-time favorite corps, Phantom Regiment from Rockford, Ill., finished fourth with a beautiful show titled "On Air," which featured a mix of old and new symphonic selections including Stravinsky's "Firebird."
I also liked sixth-place finisher Carolina Crown's horse racing-themed show, which was one of the most beautiful in terms of music.
All of the 12 corps in the finals gathered on the field after their performances to hear the judging results.
The drum majors gathered on the edge of the field.
Members of the Blue Devils held hands while waiting for the inevitable. There was no element of suspense as the California corps easily won its 12th championship since 1976, and first since 2003.

Erasure Live!

So I was wondering, after a grown-up Debbie Gibson and reconstructed versions of When in Rome and A Flock of Seagulls headlined San Diego Pride Festival 2006, could organizers top such a gay-friendly '80s pop-music extravaganza? Did they ever!
Erasure duo Andy Bell and Vince Clarke played a mix of their older and newer hits during a one-hour-plus set in Balboa Park early Sunday evening.
For a while, I thought I would miss the show. I had to work Sunday - unusual for me - and just 20 minutes before Erasure was set to take the stage I was still sitting in the newsroom waiting for my editor to clear my story. Somehow I managed to race from the office to the park in my car, walk the half mile or so from the zoo parking lot to the festival area and find Rex, with a few minutes to spare.

The crowd was decidedly Erasure-friendly, obviously filled with guys between 38 and 45 who, like me, came out in the late '80s and early '90s. Erasure's songs - Chains of Love, Oh L'Amour, Home, A Little Respect - were our anthems.

And don't discount Bell's role in the global gay rights movement. He was openly, unashamedly and undeniably homosexual from Erasure's earliest days in 1985, when the only other widely known gay pop musicians were drag queens.

Here's a video montage of today's show that Rex shot:

Generation V: Major Tom lives on

German singer Peter Schilling released Major Tom, the English version of the original Völlig Losgelöst, in 1983. The song continued the story of an astronaut character who was created by David Bowie in the 1969 hit Space Oddity and revived in his 1980 song Ashes to Ashes.

Here's the video trilogy in order, starting with Bowie's Space Oddity:


Ashes to Ashes, maybe my favorite Bowie song:


And Schilling's Major Tom:


And as a bonus, here's a rare live clip of Völlig Losgelöst:

Generation V: Face Paint and Mowhawks

It was 1981. I had just completed 8th grade in Catholic school in Jennings, La., and my class took a graduation trip to Houston.

The highlight of the trip was a visit to AstroWorld, the city's big amusement park.

It didn't take long for us to notice fliers promoting a big show featuring Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow later that evening at the park's vast outdoor concert space.

We couldn't believe our luck. Not only was it our first pop music concert, but also a chance to see the groups perform two of the hottest videos burning up the airwaves on MTV - "Goody Two Shoes" by the Ants and "I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow.

To say we stood out in our gelato-colored polo shirts, khaki shorts and deck shoes amid a sea of black leather, mascara and spiked do's would be a major understatement. It was country come to the city on steroids.

Here's a picture of my New Orleans buddy Michael and his mother taken in the early 1980s when he was doing the punk thing in New York.

It seemed EVERYONE at the AstroWorld concert looked like Michael, except for me and my friends.

Here's "Goody Two Shoes."


And my favorite Ants song, "Stand and Deliver."


Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" still pops up every once in a while in movies and TV commercials.


Wondering what happened to Michael, my former punk friend from New Orleans?

Here he is all grown up.

Thanks Michael for letting me use the pics.

Eurovision outgays itself

From the country that gave the world genocide and über-war criminal Slobodan Milošević comes Eurovision 2007 winner Marija Šerifović, whose strong voice and pseudolesbian/Harry Potteresque performance played well all across the continent. Even the BBC couldn't ignore the homo aura of the act, describing it as a "slow-motion lesbian porn film."

Find multiple versions of the winning song here, including the English version titled "Destiny."

We captured most of these images by photographing the live broadcast with Rex's fancy digital camera. This post by Rex includes a translation of a 2004 Serbian magazine article that claims Šerifović came out to her father.
Finishing second in the 52nd version of this huge cultural event, which is virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic, was Ukrainian glam drag queen Verka Surduchka (below), whose entry was fiercely protested by rabidly homophobic conservative nationalists in her home country.
This quite possibly was one of the gayest Eurovision finals ever, an amazing feat given the event's long history of appealing to its legions of queer fans.

And the 2007 finale could have been even gayer. Denmark's DQ, the competition's other drag performer -- yes, there were two -- was eliminated in an earlier round when her song, "Drama Queen," failed to make the cut.

I love Eurovision. We spent most of Saturday afternoon watching the three-hour-plus finale live through a high-resolution Internet Webcast.

The contest, which is a kitschy mix of American Idol, Olympic opening ceremony and political party convention, has produced some of the world's best know music performers over the years including Abba (1974), Céline Dione (1988) and Lulu (1969). Viewers in each participating country vote for their favorites after the finalists perform their songs during the live show.

Most of my favorites didn't fare so well, though Serbia and Ukraine did make my top 10 list.

My picks...................................Final results
1. France.....................................1. Serbia
2. Finland....................................2. Ukraine
3. Germany.................................3. Russia
4. Hungary..................................4. Turkey
5. Latvia......................................5. Bulgaria
6. Serbia..................................... 6. Belarus
7. FYR Macedonia......................7. Greece
8. Ukraine...................................8. Armenia
9. Sweden...................................9. Hungary
10. U.K......................................10. Moldova

Go here to see all of the final results. And here for links to videos of all of the competitors and a replay of the Webcast.
Among my disappointments was France's entry, Les Fatals Picards fronted by fem falsetto Ivan Callot, who finished at No. 22.
The story was similar for German entry Roger Cicero (No. 19), who had a nifty big-band sound.
And the U.K.'s hyper-poppy Schooch (No. 23), whose high-energy performance to "Flying the Flag (for you)" could have doubled as a slightly risqué British Airways commercial.

Not all of my favorites fared poorly.

I really liked Hayko from Armenia, but his bleeding-heart prop at the end of his song was shameful even by Eurovision's schmaltzy standards.

As in past years, politics seemed to surface in some of the voting Saturday. That's the only way to explain the high finish of so many clearly sub-par entries, particularly those from eastern European countries who received big support from neighboring nations.
Take Russia for example. That country's entry was Serebro (No. 3), a talentless sexpot girl group whose song, profoundly titled "Song #1," included these unforgettable (or unforgivable) lyrics:

Gotta tease you nasty guy
So take it don't be shy
Put your cherry on my cake
And taste my cherry pie

Then there was Turkey's pitiful boy-toy entry, Kenan Doğulu, whose fourth-place finish came courtesy of first-place votes by Belgium, France, Germany, The Netherlands and the U.K., all of which have sizable Turkish immigrant populations.

As usual the spotlight was on the host country -- the winner of the previous year's competition.

For the most part, Finland put on an entertaining and technically flawless show despite some awkward dead spots, like when the hosts struggled near the end to fill a gap while the winner made her way to the stage.
Here's a view of the huge crowd that gathered to watch the contest on giant screens in Helsinki's central square.
We plugged the computer right into the TV to watch the show through the Webcast which came in at television quality. You've gotta love technology!

Generation V

I'm a kid of the music video age, that period squeezed between the vinyl and eight tracks of the 70s and the MP3 files and iPods of the 90s. During my high school and college days, my pop culture world was most heavily influenced by Night Tracks, MTV and VH1.

In celebration of that proud musical heritage I've decided to resurrect a little of that heady time when the whole world seemed to stop for every time a music video by a major artist debuted. I'll be putting some of my favorite forgotten videos here in periodic posts under this same title.

For my first installment I've chosen The Psychedelic Furs, a pop punk band from England made famous in the States by its title song for the movie "Pretty in Pink."

I rediscovered the band a few years ago when I heard "The Ghost in You" while listening to the on board music during a flight to Germany.



As soon as I got home I bought the band's greatest hits CD. Here are a couple more of my favorites from that disc.

"Heaven"


"Love My Way"


Looks like the band is touring again and stopping on the Left Coast in July, including a date in San Diego.

I couldn't make this stuff up

Since we're on the topic of people who never should have been given a microphone, you kids should know about Wing.

Who is Wing? Well, aside from being a woman who clearly has far too much spare time on her hands, she's a Hong Kong native who immigrated to New Zealand about 10 years ago and started taking singing lessons as a hobby.

For a while, her "career" was limited to gigs at local nursing homes and hospitals. But then those crazy boys at South Park discovered her and wrote an entire episode around her covers of Abba songs.

Almost overnight, Wing became an international cult sensation.

While her tone-deaf and rhythmless deliveries of Abba standards are enough to make your ears bleed, her covers of AC/DC heavy metal hits -- including "Back in Black" and "For Those about to Rock" -- are nothing short of apocalyptic.

Don't believe me? Then check out these videos of Wing singing some of her most gut-wrenching karaoke tunes during a performance at a university in New Zealand.



"Mama Mia"


"I Want to Hold Your Hand"


"In the Ghetto"


"Over the Rainbow"


"Close to You"

Haven't suffered enough yet? Then check out Wing's webpage and these samples of some of her other recordings.

Another recent music fetish

I was overdosing on iTunes the other night and stumbled upon Joanna Newsom. She plays harp like nothing you've heard before, and her voice is unique and enchanting while slightly annoying - a combination of Bjork, Kate Bush and Cindy Lauper.

Here's her video to the song, "Sprout and the Bean."



And her she is in a recent interview.

Can't get it out of my head

I recently discovered this song, "How Can It Be," by Australian duo Forever Thursday.




JC Penny is using the tune in its latest TV commercial.



You can buy the single at iTunes, but I haven't had any luck finding any other recording by this group.

Rovics plays New Orleans

Folk singer David Rovics will play a show on Friday, May 30, at Tulane University's Lupin Theater.

His repertoire of politically charged music includes "New Orleans," a moving and powerful response to the failure of government both before and after Hurricane Katrina wrecked the city.

I saw him perform last month while I was visiting London, and his show was great (see my previous post here). He's traveled all over the world and he has spent time in the Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans. He has ties to Common Ground Collective, an activist group doing amazing post-hurricane relief work in New Orleans.

He's also a writer and political commentator (check out his Songwriter's Notebook blog).

If you're still in New Orleans or within driving distance, go see his show and say hello for me. David says the show likely will start at 8 p.m., but you should double check the time with the theater.

Click the links below to listen to some of David's songs:
"After the Revolution"
"The Battle of Blair Mountain"
"Jenin"
"St. Patrick Battalion"

Music in the hood

The San Diego Indie Music Fest happened just a few blocks from my front door this weekend.


Vendors were hawking everything from ZIP code T-shirts . . .

. . . to handmade jewelry.

This guy was from the Technomania Circus of San Diego.

They're not the Waltons and they're not from Amish Country. These people are part of some sort of fringe Christian hippie religious movement - some people call it a cult - that apparently has been the subject of numerous controversies. These particular members live in north San Diego County at the group's avocado farm/commune.

They sang sweet folksy songs about bugs and flowers and lemonade. They served tea out of their psychedelic bus parked a couple of blocks from the music festival's main stage. And they invited everyone to join their club. Go figure.


The pug enjoyed the sights.