Todd Severson (our Master of Ceremonies for the evening, announces songwriter George Rotalo
Andrew Bunnell joins Poplord on stage
Blake Jones & the Trike Shop
Joy Mohler, Robert Paul and Kate McKnight join in on the GroupSing for Brian and Lisa Kao
Ron "Doc" Morse leads the Trike Shop through "Cruel to Be Kind"
Big thanks to Pam Severson our photographer for the evening! (more great pix to come….)
underground garden artist picture
I’m going to have to ask Marcel how he does those thumbnail pic displays so I can post a whole bunch more of these fun pictures at once…..
but for now, here’s a small taste of the fun that was had last Saturday night at Audie’s Olympic at the Underground Garden CD Release Party! It’s a shot taken by….(I’m not sure who!) that I took off of Aileen Imperatrice’s facebook page. It’s a picture of a number of the artists who contributed to the Underground Garden Art Piece in front of the actual thing itself!
Over the weekend, I’ll be trying to figure the thumbnail thing AND the ‘ohmanthefileistoobig forthisblogtoaccept’ thing out. Big thanks to Pam Severson for taking pictures for us all evening! I look forward to getting them posted up here soon!
Saturday night’s event was a success on many levels. That success was due to the contributions of many many people (appropriate to the “underground garden” theme, I think). I find that I’m still tired; perhaps it’s the accumulated tiredness of many months of almost constant activity.
There are still a few things to take care of:
1) get the pictures from Saturday night and start posting/sharing them.
2) get the tiles from the Underground Garden art piece and store them safely.
3) figure out when/where we’ll show the Underground Garden art piece again and make those arrangements.
4) get ready for a fun gig next Thursday night…another one of those post-Arthop gigs set up by Mike from Rademacher.
5) start organizing a mailing blitz of the new CD —trying to gather reviews/press/airplay, etc.
6) I have a pile o’ important birthdays coming up in my life..some mine, some not. I’ve gotta bake a cake!
George Rotalo's CD cover
For Saturday night’s show, we’re hoping to present the music from our new CD, but we’re also looking to offer up the fun of hearing lots of different voices/ lots of different sounds of the local music world.
George Rotalo is an excellent songwriter who just doesn’t play out often enough. He’ll open the show right at 9pm, so don’t be late!
Somewhere in the show’s mid-section, we’ll hear from Dylan Tidyman-Jones [pictured with a small animal above] who’s not only a terrific songwriter, but a great guitar player . We hear him most often these days with Wheels of Fortune, but Saturday, we get to hear some of his solo material.
Two more reasons to enjoy Saturday’s show at Audie’s!
Big thanks are in order for our pal Todd Severson who is helping us with the promotions of the CD release party!
(He made the very very cool flyer for the event—[above]!)
and thanks to Mike Osegueda, music writer for the Fresno Bee and fresnobeehive.com, for
posting a song from the new album on the beehive!
Here’s the link. (click here).
tile from The Underground Garden by Ross and Kim Garcia
Click here for the posting I did over at Fresno Famous.
Click here for a post that contributing artist Ed Stewart did about his part in the piece.
Click here for a post from Heather McClane of the Fresno Beehive. She’s doing a regular featured called “Junk in the Trunk”, and Underground Garden art project contributor (and builder! thanks Adam!) is featured, and some of the junk in his trunk are the bits of wood for the art piece.
And I *think* Adam did a post on this project when he was first building the tiles….but I’ll check back and link it. Either way. He writes an excellent blog that you may wish to check out. (click)
The above picture is one of the actual tiles for the project. This one by Ross and Kim Garcia. Ross is the designer/artist that put together the cover for our CD: The Underground Garden. (and of course, the art piece AND the cd make their public debut at Audie’s Olympic (aka Club Fred) on Saturday, April 24!)
Over a dozen (actually, the count is now at 15!) local artists are contributing to this piece. The only guide lines are that they do their thing on a 12″x12″ piece of wood that we provided, and that they use the idea of “Underground Garden” as their leaping off point. Adam wall (awesome blogger and woodworker) is going to assemble it all together. This wonder-to-behold will be unveiled at our CD release party at Audie’s Olympic/Club Fred on Saturday, April 24th.
And what a party it will be!
Don’t miss this chance to see this unique work from this group of local area artists.
(pictured are works from Teresa Flores and Aileen Imperatrice.)
Here’s the complete list of artists: Teresa Flores, Shannon Johnson, Aileen Imperatrice, Ross Garcia, MyCow, Monica Geigle, David Gomez, Grayson Soenke, Abolino Bautista, Donnalee Dunn, Jamie Meadows. Ole Scovill, Ramiro Martinez, Ed Stewart and Adam Wall.
The Rogue Festival has been over for about four days. I feel like I’m pretty much recovered from the wonderful but long days (and nights). This afternoon and evening I plan on doing as little as possible and enjoying the beautiful Spring day. [Nothing like relaxing on a back patio in the Central Valley in the Springtime with a cold drink of one's choice in hand.]
I count the talk-show Rogue Festival presentation: “The Underground Garden: scene-makers, tall-tales and Fresno rock ‘n roll” as a success.
Sure there were some rough edges, and the 45 minute limitations of the show made us wish we had more time to visit with these folks, but as a teaser of things to come and a pointer towards what such a show could develop into, I think it worked.
I also think it showed that there’s still a ways to go in meeting two main goals that I had for the show:
1) getting people excited about the decades-long musical heritage Central California has
and
2) to continue to explore and appreciate this metaphor of our local arts/music scene as an Underground Garden: a place where things can thrive, a place that is inter-connected, a place where new things can develop, a place that understands it’s history yet moves toward the future—even if it is still, for the moment under-explored and under-appreciated.
Underground Garden events still coming up:
*the completion of the Underground Garden cooperative art piece
(which now has MORE than a dozen local artists working on it)
*and the release party of our band’s album The Underground Garden at Audie’s Olympic Tavern (formerly Club Fred) on Saturday, April 24th.
—THIS show has more than a dozen *musical* guests slated to perform, as well as dancers, food, AND the debut of the above-mentioned art piece.
Stay tuned!
In keeping with this “underground garden” metaphor, I’d say this is the one time of the year where the local underground garden burbles up almost to the surface. (Maybe if I’d started with the metaphor “underground thermal mud pot” or “gyser”, that sentence would have worked better.)
But, in spite of my bad writing, it’s true. In these 10 days of the Rogue Fest, it seems that the extreme concentration of performers and their creativity and the audience that’s interested in such things just about breaks through to the general conciousness of our beloved sprawled-out town. For just a moment, we might skip our chain restaraunts and Hollywood blockbuster movies and see what kind of crazy thangs our neighbors and fellow Fresnans can dream up.
There’s some posts below (yours for a scroll-down) about what’s brewing in my own show. We launch the first episode tonight at Veni Vidi Vici at 7:30. This one concentrates on the local music scene of the 60′s and 70′s.
Come on out to the Rogue Festival! Bring a friend or two, and see what a deliriously delightful underground garden is blooming just under the surface of Central California.
Was it Ben Franklin, or was it Randolph Hearst or was it Johannes Genzfliesch zum Guttenburg that said “A newspaper unites a community”?
Music scenes are communities. Many small newspapers, zines and websites dedicated to Fresno music have risen up and disappeared over the years. In this episode, we talk to the people behind two of them: Gary Edwards (The Valley Music News [late 70's/early 80's]) and Josh Tehee (current editor at www.fresnofamous.com).
Bands need a place to play.
On this same bill is Freddie Martinez who took The Olympic Tavern in the 80′s and re-christened it:
Club Fred.
All three of these people are multi-faceted. Between them, they’ve written books, played in bands, ran record stores, ran rock clubs, organized music festivals, promoted gigs and fought fires.
Come to episode 2 of “The Underground Garden: scene-makers, tall-tales and Fresno rock n’ roll” at 3:30 on Sunday, March 7th to hear their stories.
Spinners Records (Gary's former business)
The 1,000 Faces of Tehee: writer,editor, punk rock singer, indie songwriter...