Hayley Thomas, editor
Contributors Neal Breton Dan Wityak Jon Bartel Leah St. James Reid Cain Ben Simon Joshua Chase
This issue, I really wanted to feature The Flower Girl. You know, the one who magically appears at ev-
Send writing, art & ad inquiries to Swapzineslo@gmail.com
ery bar on any given night wielding a basket of over-priced roses that just smacks of “first date awkwardness.” Maybe I’m mystified because I have never received one of these flowers, nor have I seen anyone else buy one. My friends have reminded me that yes, there are more Cover Art by than one flower girl, but the one I am entranced with really hounds the North County circuit. You know the one - she’s got dirty-blonde hair, a sheepish smile and wears panty-hose with the same “fancy” dress. ReNeal Breton (of SLO Art Supally, it’s the smile that gets me. It says “happy,” but there’s a mysteriply) has repeatedly barked, ous undertone beneath. “bios are for suckers,” and She’s also absolutely everywhere I am. So, one night, my that’s to be expected. He’s friend was locked out of her truck in downtown Paso Robles and we gruff, not a big ‘hugger’ and are just sitting on the curb trying to figure out what to do next. Well, he’s got that grizzly beard who do you think I saw carefully sauntering down the street with going on (If you ask me, he’s a basket of flowers? Yep. My Flower Girl. So I asked for her card. a bona fide softie if I ever I didn’t want to scare her off on the street, so I made my intentions saw one). Despite the fact known in an e-mail. It was hard to connect a music/culture zine with that he’s convinced himself what she does for a living, but I made it sound legit. Really, I just his career has “peaked” as wanted to know, “Who are you and how did you end up doing this for of late (February New Times a living….and doing it so damn well?” cover, show at fancy Vale A few days later, I received an email reply. Here’s what it Fine Art in Paso, cover of said: “Hello Hayley. I am the Flower Girl, but not the one in Califorthis humble publication you nia. I have a folk acoustic band in Michigan. I saw that your magazine hold in your hands), I doubt features independent musicians, we checked out your magazine and we’ve seen the last of this thought it was cool, and we were wondering if you would be interested crafty man. Stop by his new in doing a piece on us. We’re called Thirty Steps to Forward.” Now, storefront inside Coalition I am of the school of thought that it doesn’t matter if you truly love Skate and congratulate him a band or not – if they’re local and they support the scene, then you on “making it big!” just shut your mouth and grin. But this band is NOT local, so I can’t Neal also created the last page promise that. You will see what I mean. poster as well as the masthead I encourage everyone to check out their You Tube video for the Oh My Land story on pg. 6 (Thirty Steps Forward – The Bird and The Fool). Think 90s grunge WWW.NEALBRETON.COM meets art school project with Bjork influenced vocals. Oh, and there’s masks, too! Anyway, if you see MY Flower Girl out there let her know I’m ready for her close-up. - Your faithful Swap editor, Hayley T.
Neal Breton!
BOO BOO RECORDS BOO BOO RECORDS BOO BOO RECORDS
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“D
ude, this guy from school is having a party at his place for Saint Patrick’s Day. He’s getting two kegs!” Those, dear reader, are the magic words. I’m 20 in 1995, Denver Colorado, it’s cold and is most likely going to snow later. We pile thirteen punk rockers into two small hatchback cars and roll out to the party around 11p.m. I spend the car ride trying to get the stereo to play a DI tape and don’t really pay attention to where we’re going. The passengers side window won’t go all the way up and its freezing balls in the car. I keep my hood up over my head, looking down to avoid the wind form outside and work on the cassette player. Just as a I manage to get the damn cassette tape to play, we arrive. We roll into the house and proceed to scare the shit out of the kid throwing the party. He’s 21 or so and has maybe seen a punk rocker on tv. He is certainly not ready for thirteen of us drinking all his beer and scaring the shit out of his neighbors. Down in the basement is a keg of green colored Budweiser, we head down, take over the stereo and start killing cup after plastic cup of green swill. I see one of the guys not in our crew drinking a nongreen beer and ask him where it came from. He tells me there is a keg of Sam Adams upstairs. ‘Where is this upstairs you speak of kind sir?’ I ask him before he points in the general direction of the stairs. I sneak away from my friends (can’t have them drinking MY beer) as they are singing along to The Exploited blasting out of the recently commissioned stereo. Upstairs is quiet with a bunch of typical 90’s college kids hanging around the kitchen drinking Sam Adams listening to the latest stuff out of Seattle. I politely grab a cup, fill it and proceed to run my mouth about how shitty their taste in music is, how dumb their clothes are, and how lame their girlfriends are. It takes about an hour for them to decipher my sarcasm before they decide they’ve had enough. They figure that I, and by extension my friends, have worn out their welcome. Things are getting a little heated and one of the larger dudes is starting to threaten me with violence. I excuse my now drunken self to ‘hit the bathroom’ then head downstairs to recruit some back up for the impending throw down. As I reach the bottom of the stairs I am shocked to see two guys in tie-dye shirts sitting on the couch smoking a bong listening to what I assume to be The Grateful Dead or some lame ass hippie shit. My back up is nowhere to be found.
Pictured, Reid Cain pla ying a very small air gui tar circa mid 90s. He has since moved up to “man-sized” guitar s.
Upstairs, I hear them raising their voices about finding and ‘kicking that little assholes face in!’ This little asshole makes a quick decision to make a break for the door before he can be found. Escape! Outside the impending storm has arrived. The wind is blasting and the snow is flying. Both the cars I came with are gone and I have no idea where the fuck I am. I can’t see more than half a block due to the storm, but I doubt the party kids will let me use their phone now without a bit of blood being shed, most likely mine. I look up the street, then down the street, and choose to head ‘left.’ I don’t know what time it is but it must be late as there are no cars on the streets. Each block is marked by street signs with names I don’t recognize. It’s super fucking cold and I am lost on the streets of Denver. After stumbling around for an hour I am freezing. I finally find a street I know. Colfax Avenue! One of the main streets in Denver and the cross street of my buddy Barlow’s apartment, from where we started the night. Unfortunately, I don’t know which way to go and still can see anything due to the storm. If I could see the city skyline, finding my way would be simple. Fuck it, so far ‘left’ has worked so ‘left’ it is! Another 30 minutes and many blocks pass and I am starting to think that ‘right’ may have been a better choice as I still don’t recognize anything on the street. It’s late, freezing and I am officially lost and drunk. Fucked to be precise. I need to find a place to sleep. I start looking into cars and over fences. Over a brick wall I spot my salvation! A small, cute little treehouse. I jump up and work myself over the five foot brick wall falling off the other side landing in a way that causes me to vomit in the bushes.
See CAIN, Page 16
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Whiskey Piss, 8:30 pm: Pour House Axia, 8:30 p.m., $5: Pour House Death Tower, Musical Chairs, ZuhG, Orion Walsh, 9 pm: Frog & Peach Caught in Motion, Ragged Jubilee, History of Painters, 8 pm: Kreuzberg Dead Volts, I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch In The House, The Devils Own: The Z Club 3/7 - Kevin Coons, Chloe Smith & Ross Major 7 pm: Linnaea’s Café 3/9- Red River Massacre 6 pm: Frog & Peach 3/9- Lamb’s Ear, The Diatoms, 7:30 pm: Steynberg Gallery 3/10- The Mother Corn Shuckers 7pm: SLO Down Pub 3/10- Bad Jeans, Magazine Dirty, King Walrus 8pm: Kreuzberg 3/16- Kristen Opstad, March 16 8 pm: Linnaea’s Café 3/19- Battalion of Saints, Hostile Takedown, A+ in Evil, Santa Maria Bo und? - M 9 don’t arch The 1st Line, Workhorse, 8 pm $10: The Z Club forget N asty, Str Dimes & aigt 3/20- Dead Volts: Frog & Peach Bad Jea ns at O’Sulliv 3/24- Deathbear, City Mouse, $5: The Z Club an’s 3/24 - The Sons of KD Elder 8:30pm: Pour House 3/27- Teutonic Tuesdays: McCarthy’s Irish Pub 3/30- Dead Volts, Ghosts of Guadalupe, American Dirt 8:30pm: Pour House Ongoing SundaysPour House Blues Jam, 4 p.m. MondaysFrog and Peach, Toan’s Open Jam 9 p.m. (1st & 3rd) Kruezburg: Tipsy Trio 8pm TuesdaysCreekside Brewery: Open Mic Night, 9 p.m. SLO Down Pub: Blues Jam 7pm Wednesdays- (1st & 3rd Wed. ) Sanitarium Music Nights 7 p.m., $5 Thursdays- Creekside, Gypsy Jazz, 10 p.m. Bru Coffee House, Open mic, 6 p.m. Fuel Dock: Open Mic 8 p.m.
PINS THE S
with
biba pickles By Dan Wityak
seat covers and jammed em in the toilet. Now, this is a trick that I hope everyone does in the future. You flush and go before all the water rises up and goes everywhere, so you have to shit fast, like speed pooping, and as fast as possible you’ve gotta get outta there before the toilet overflows! Well, that’s an ugly thing I’ve done fairly recently. I’ve gotta a lotta funny stories about my mom but… Swap- Do you have any hobbies besides speed pooping?
T
oday I sat down with radio personality and local hero Biba Pickles. For those of you sitting around reading this who do not know Biba, it is very likely that you’ve seen her around town. Biba walks downtown San Luis Obispo wearing outlandish clothes and face paint. She is often seen turning the heads of older civilians and terrifying little children. Biba is a DJ for 91.3 KCPR and for those not familiar with her show, I highly encourage checking it out. Here’s what she had to share: Swap- Tell me everything, I want your deep dark secrets! BIBA- Well, do you want the good, the bad, or the ugly? Swap- Definitely the ugly! I want the deepest darkest secrets! BIBA- Mmm, okay, well, I’ve done some pretty messed up things. Oh, I got one, this is something I did recently! So, I was drunk at a local bar (name omitted) and on a dare, someone said, “You should take a shit in a weird place, like on an elevator or just somewhere where people will just get really grossed out.” And I of course I said ‘No, because I’m not an animal, I’m gonna shit in a bathroom,’ but the thing is I wanted to win this dare. So what I did was I took all the toilet
BIBA- I really like knitting. That’s something that’s very home-y and grandma-ish that I really like and I’ve done that since I was like fifteen. And I also like craft making. I know how to sew. I make dresses and weird things, kind of like the movie May where she sews things and has like a weird eye and talks to her doll, which actually kinda sounds like me (haha) when I was younger. I like doing things that are even kind of weird for me to do and not weird for other people to do, like cooking, but I’m usually not doing these things in a normal fashion. I can’t feel like I’m doing something too normal, I get really freaked out, a lot of anxiety. I feel like I start to become something that I hate. I also play guitar and have some other instruments. I have a violin, a ukulele, a balalaika, and a recorder and a thump piano. I draw and I write and I do all these creative things, but I don’t share them with anybody, so nobody really knows. I don’t talk about it. I mean, I used to talk about it a lot, but I stopped because I found a pattern of everyone talking about their art and their music and it’s just, I don’t wanna be that guy who’s trying to pawn his shit off on you. I also don’t wanna steal my friends thunder, so I let them talk about their own bands and whatever. Swap- So why don’t you tell me (and our readers) about the Biba Pickles Variety Show? Is it really ‘Anything goes?’ BIBA- It’s anything that is common in my life. It’s anything that’s weird that I’ve accumulated throughout the years. For example, the first show that I did I did it on the Jonestown Massacre. And I had a forty-five minute tape recording of the Jonestown Massacre and
See PICKLES, Page 16
Too modern for folk and too weird for rock, the outlandish outfit still manages to fuse both with rich, magical results. Hayley Thomas
“O
h My Land!” was a silly, antiquated expression front man Patrick Patton’s grandmother liked to exclaim, much to the giggle of nearby whippersnappers. In fact, she said it so often and with such enthusiasm that Patton’s wife and band mate, Andrea, decided it would be the perfect name for a band. “Then Patrick yoinked it from me!” Andrea laughed jokingly during a recent interview (Grandma, 73, still attends most Oh My Land shows). With seven members comprising the clan, it was hard to get everyone in the same room for a tell-all SWAP interview. However, we managed to gather a few of the colorful personalities around my trusty tape recorder to talk about their new album, “The Mayflower Twins.” Swap: Your new CD, “The Mayflower Twins” is very elaborate. I want to know more about the concept and how that came to be. ANDREA: I feel like it 6 developed organically and it
Photo by Richard Fusillo
LUSH & LOUD – The band is: Patrick Patton – Guitar, Vocals, Andrea Patton - Synth, Vocals, Rachel Coons - Keyboard, Vocals, Kevin Coons Guitar, Joshua Grant - Bass, Matt Preston - Drums and Jonathan Sorbello - Violin. Kevin Coons not pictured.
pieced together over the course of a couple of years. PATRICK: The second-to-last track on the album, Genevieve, was the first song for the album, and didn’t write it with the intention of making an album around it or anything, The song wrote itself and then it was like ‘Ok…what is the story about?’ It grew and grew and grew and became an 18-song album centered around the central character of “Genevieve.” By the end of it, I was writing songs specifically to tell one part of the story or another. It’s about two twin girls and they parallel each other, but they are opposites. They run the same kind of path in life…It’s a very long, very detailed story.
Swap: It’s a more slippery question than I thought! MATT: I never really understood what it was about… (Laughter) ANDREA: I’ve been around the story for a long time and some of these songs are a couple of years old and I feel like it’s about two sisters whose lives take two very different paths, but they parallel each other in the high and low points. One’s in Hollywood and one’s at home, a housewife. PATRICK: A big theme is being trapped in the choices you make in life. Jeanie wants to get married and have kids and gets trapped and Genevieve is trapped by being exploited and sort of
a Lindsay Lohan thing, getting wasted…eventually, she ends up in jail. Swap: Tell me about your live shows. I’ve seen you on Youtube wearing strange masks at SLO Brew! PATRICK: We try to do something different at every show and we like to make it really enthusiastic and high energy. Swap: Did you guys all grew up together? MATT: I met everyone through Nolan, our mutual friend that recorded the album and they needed a guitar player and so I started learning the songs before the show. Then their drummer dropped off the face of the earth and so then I started playing drums. PATRICK: Pretty much everyone in the band is a songwriter on their own and a multi-instrumentalist. Swap: Do you guys travel at all? PATRICK: We have all played in lots of other bands together and Kevin, our guitar player, is in Candle, and we all went cross country in that band and Matt went cross country in a different band…we went everywhere. We used to have a record label and it was very successful for a while…we made money and toured the country. I call that successful. It kind of died out… Swap: How do you handle the dynamic of having so many people in your band? RACHEL: Everyone’s really cool. We all really like each other. I feel really blessed to be in a band where everyone gets along and it’s happy. PATRICK: We’re all friends first. No one is starving for the
attention or anything. We all have our own side projects, so we can ‘let it out.’ Swap: Are you creative in your day jobs? PATRICK: I’m an EMT on an ambulance. ANDREA: I’m the manager of a fabrics website. RACHEL: I work with kids, so I have to be creative all day, every day. MATT: I’m a “brochure distribution technician!” KEVIN: Biologist. Swap: What’s the energy like with all of you guys in a room together? BAND: Loud! PATRICK: When we are writing it’s really confusing. We don’t talk about it. We just start playing… ANDREA: Everyone writes their own parts and for the most part it develops. PATRICK: We’ll play for weeks and weeks until everyone finds their own place. Swap: Do you think you have more room to be experimental? MATT: It’s the opposite. There’s so much, that you really have to make it count. You really have to pick your parts. We have two guitars, two keyboards and a violinist, so there’s a lot of melodic instruments. Swap: The first album had a lot of acoustic instruments, banjo and mandolin in there. This second album seems more rock. RACHEL: We’ve developed our sound and we know what we
A TAIL OF TWO TWINS – Download the new Oh My Land album “The Mayflower Twins” free at www.ohmylandmusic.com.
can really do. Swap: Can you put your finger on your sound? PATRICK: Sort of like Arcade Fire meets Tilly and The Wall. Swap: Some of your stuff sounds radio friendly in a good way. PATRICK: We should try to get on The Krush 92.5! MATT: They say they are the only station that plays local bands, but PK is on KZOZ… Swap: You’ve been playing a lot of shows. Where do you like to play? PATRICK: SLO Brew has been the best for us and just for having an audience. You’re up on a stage and they have good capacity, so I feel that’s the best for a live show. It’s really fun playing at small places where it’s really packed and we fill up the Z Club or Camozzis…it’s really fun, but the sound itsn’t there. Especially since we have so many instruments…We have a hard time finding venues that can handle us. We need a large stage and it takes a long time to setup and tear down. Matt: My last band was a three-piece and it was really basic. No one had any pedals, so it’s like the exact opposite of this! This is like a totally different thing but I am way more impressed with how much they can handle. Swap: Your albums are filled with weird sounds and the recording is very rich and there’s a lot going on and thought going into it. Are you self recording? MATT: We are self recording with the help of our friend. Nolan Perry is a terrific at-home recording engineer. He’s in Paso Robles and he just did Loud Spaces E.P. and it sounds really good, too. PATRICK: We’ll have some studio time soon. We’ve had some really generous people giving us money to record. We’ll record
See LAND, pg. 12
7
m e o P e c a Pe mon Ben Si
I want to live on a planet Where Martians spell out a message Besides “SCRAM” as they soar Across Cretaceous skies I want to live on a planet Where alien children Aren’t instructed to build fossils By summer camp Martians I want to live on a planet Where a T. rex can speak his mind And even temporarily escape occupation From Martian authorities I want to live on a planet Where I won’t feel endangered Where I won’t feel extinct Where a dinosaur can stand Next to an alien And fathom the child If that’s impossible, Can’t the dinosaurs just get their own planet? Ben Simon is a poet, writer, musician, cartoonist and comedian from San Luis Obispo. His poems have previously appeared in Beatdom Magazine, Another Type of Groove, and SLOHS Expressions. He is currently putting the finishing touches on his first novel, All the Wrong Dudes.
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Send your prose to Swapzineslo@gmail.com
Of Spider Bites and Bee Stings Joshua Chase Relax, ladies, please. Don’t worry. I can assure you I’m not contagious. At least, not at the moment on this particular occasion. The swelling on my inner elbow is expected to subside in a few days’ time, and I come bearing gifts: Antibiotic caplets to fight infection and lots of gauze—for aesthetics, of course. Hopefully it will help keep the smell down to a minimum. And for me—more of the same but at least Percodan rarely if ever results in an abscess. Joshua Chase is a freelance writer and poet. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and daughter. He’s not local, but he heard about SWAP! through SLO poet Ben Simon, so what the heck. We let it slide.
Jon Bartel is a sometime poet who lives in Atascadero and teaches at Cal Poly. He plays guitar in American Dirt.
Kids These Days Jon Bartel
Take one snarky starving artist, add clothed cats, warm PBR and shake vigorously
L
Matt Foote ife had been pillaging us pretty hard for a while, so we did what we always do when crisis rears its ugly little cabeza: We locked ourselves off from the world, got drunk, and painted our little hearts out; left their contents empty and smeared all over the canvas.
We had moved to the Central Coast to get away from the hustle and the hassle of LA. We’d traded the traffic and the stress and the shit-stained streets of Los Angeles for the benign pleasantries and polite disinterest of Slotown, CA - the city Oprah Winfrey herself has dubbed “the happiest place in America.” Oh, yes, so fucking happy. We both lost our barely-above-minimum-wage jobs on the same day, and now had approximately three weeks to figure out rent or get the hell out of town. So, we painted and painted our little hearts out because that’s the only way we can diffuse the stress, and we hoped for opportunity to come and snap us in the ass like a wet towel. It was the start of September and the students were flooding back into town for the start of the fall semester. We felt the brightness of their youthful optimism burning our eyes - this sweet student life, this gilded path laid out before these kids, a path that both of us had once attempted to walk in our own pasts, only to wobble drunkenly off the side of the thing and wind up passed out in the bushes. But of course, we had high hopes for this squealing new batch of fresh young things. Surely, things would work out perfectly for them. Smirk. Wink. Of all the seasons to be broke and hopeless, this was the right one. My birthday was the coming month, which usually coincides with a minor financial windfall from one of the grannies; and then the holidays to follow, when the world seems momentarily more caring and charitable. Most years, around the holidays, we both tried to give as much as we could manage. This year, we were on the other side, but we were scrapping it out. We’d been posting ads on Craigslist for “custom portraits,” pitching the service as “a great, unique gift idea,” and it was working; commissions were com10 ing through.
One lady wanted a portrait of her “award-winning” Great Dane. She brought us 17 photos to work from, as well as three pages of detailed instructions, all for one 40 dollar “pet portrait.” Another lady had us do a portrait of her five cats, but the boy cats were to be depicted wearing Lincoln-style top hats, and the lady cats were to have pink bows around their necks and flowers tucked behind their ears. Oy! But the next show at the Gallery At The End Of The World was opening at the beginning of December, so that was something to look forward to, and until then, we had plenty of projects to keep us occupied. The commissions were barely putting food on our plates and beer in our beer-holes. And then, a pair of phone calls. Amazing. How can timing be so good? First, we’d met Neal Breton (Ahem - this month’s Swap cover artist) through the Arts Editor of The New Times, Annie Swellington. And this guy just happened to be opening an art supply shop in downtown the following month. Until his supplies came in, he was just some dude sitting there in an empty storefront, so he decided to let us help him organize a grand-opening art show to fill space and kill time until his shop opened properly. The next miraculously-timed call was a woman for whom I’d done an art commission last year. That time, she had me do a portrait of the exterior of her shop on Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks. This time, she wanted us to do a set of portraits that basically depicted the entirety of her business district, which she had dubbed “The Shops At Woodman & Ventura.” The pay she was offering happened to match almost perfectly with the rent that we had looming in a few weeks. For Neal’s art shop show, I’d already been putting ads in the “artists” section of Craigslist for a few months, trying to build up a crew who would be up for doing snarky, lowbrow DIY events. So, with a few weeks out and a few more ads and e-mails, we ended up with a nice and - Ahem - very diverse group of artists picked out. On the day that artists were dropping their art off for the show, it got a whole lot more diverse. We found out that someone had forwarded our “Call To Artists” posting as an “Open Call,” and it seemed that this particular list of artists were of the elderly female variety whose every bit of essence looked like or smelled like or somehow reminded you of doilies. We planned the show to open on a Thursday to get some bounce from the crowd at Farmer’s. Annie Swellington and her colleague, New Times calendar editor Kristi Flamingo, were kind enough to give the show a few little bumps in the edition of the paper on opening day. It turned out to be a fun little show and it was worth doing. We didn’t sell much, but the tiny little space was packed for a few hours, and we met some new artists that we knew we’d be seeing a lot more of in the future. And as for me, I got to drink some Pabst Blue Ribbons on the street and pretend, just for a moment, that I was a “somebody” again and not just some random unemployed dude drinking Pabst on the street.
Matt Foote came to this town to take over the real estate desk at the local altweekly. Between the time was hired (in October 2008) and when he actually started (in January 2009), the industry and all its affiliates had sort of ceased to exist. Your classic D.O.A. scenario. Foote then attended Cuesta and received a degree in broadcast communications. Now he washes dishes at Kreuzberg.
From LAND, pg. 7 things the way we want to. People have been seeing us at shows or online and they are donating. I didn’t think anybody would, but they are! Swap: What’s with the whole marriage thing? What’s it like to be married and playing together? PATRICK: Everyone in our band is married…except for Matt! ANDREA: What we take home is more conceptual talk… like the sound we’re trying to get. It’s not like we’re sitting there writing music together. Swap: Who do you like to play with? MATT: PK is like Oh My Land’s mentoring older brothers. They have a huge draw, and every time they play SLO Brew, they ask us to support them. It’s really great for us. We sound completely different from them. PATRICK: For some reason, the kindness keeps coming. They must really like us! Swap: In turn, are you helping out other local people in the scene? PATRICK: I am really excited about hearing Cole Rodgers. I met him at our last show at SLO Brew and he’s a senior in high school and in a motorized wheelchair and he plays lap steel and sings. He just sent me a demo, I was chatting
with him on facebook, and I was super impressed with it. I can’t wait to hear his band. They don’t have a name yet, and I told them to get one and make sure it’s good. I’m sure I’m going to be hearing it a lot. I would love to play with them, but they don’t sound like us much. They’re more folk-y. MATT: We’re screwed. Too loud to play with the folk bands and too quiet to play with the loud bands! ANDREA: I feel like there’s not a lot of electronic-y bands around here…you wouldn’t know it from the album, but at our show’s we’re very electronic. PATRICK: Fierce Creatures from Fresno really fits with us. The style and the genre works. They are really fun. They really inspired us. Swap: Do you have any funny stories you want to close with? RACHEL: The one time Patrick got really drunk! MATT: Can we say this one? It’s funny because this never happens to Patrick. We were at SLO Brew and we were playing at Candle’s release show, and Pat was at the bar. We were all doing our own thing. Then it was Candle’s last song and I go in the back to get ready and he’s like, ‘Matt! I am too drunk! I don’t know if we can do this!’ And I told
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AericKana ReyEAm FTim DCelLticE ID Fegr - Old ass Blu
him, ‘We have to, Patrick. There’s no option.’ We went out there and he’s such a good frontman you couldn’t really tell. It seemed like it was part of the schtick. But then there was one song… PATRICK. I forgot to take off the capo. Or put it on. Everyone is awesome, so they played the song a half step up…it was the second song. The one slow song of the set. RACHEL: We tried to sound really pretty, but everyone was like ‘Ahhh!’ Swap: You guys aren’t the hard partying type, are you? BAND: No, no. PATRICK: We try to portray ourselves that way! MATT: At the last show at SLO Brew….PK has some of the most die-hard fans you have ever seen. They were sold out and there’s pictures…there’s one tall girl standing outside the window looking so, so sad watching from outside. PATRICK: We had friends that couldn’t get in…I think it’s great that any band from SLO can sell out a place. There’s a lot of local support, but also not really. If you go see a big local band like PK sell out a club with 300 people, then come back to see the (dance) music crowd, there’s way more people there, way over capacity. So I don’t know why
they say “sold out” at 300 people. Matt: Did you read that New Times Chase Hall article? It was sort of a complaining piece, but he made a few points. If we didn’t play bars that sold alcoholic drinks, a lot of people would see us once every few months. No one our age really dances anymore and no one wants to stand sober for two hours. PATRICK: That’s why we switch things up each show to keep it different. I spent weeks making projections for each song for one show…but the day of the show, the projector didn’t work! Swap: What does an Oh My Land groupie look like? Besides Patrick’s Grandma? PATRICK: Jordan Washburn is one of our groupies…the first five or six shows we had, he would come every time, take off his shirt and get in the very front row and just go nuts! He’s one of our favorite supporters, but of course Lilly and Taylor [of Bee Goat House] too. But We (also) have really buff, oiled down guys in leopard print thongs that carry [Andrea and Rachel] onto the stage.
-For shows and downloads: www.ohmylandmusic.com
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Alex DiGrazia’s got an acid tongue, bleeding heart and a four-track recorde
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Hayley Thomas
A
s far as 18-year-old singer/songwriter Alex DiGrazia is concerned, he may just die from being OCD. But, as he goes on to sing on the second track of his first self-produced CD, I am You Are, “nothing soothes [him] more than the smell of old books and warm tea.” Alex looks exactly how he sounds. He’s intensely poetic, lanky with long hair and a tendency to bust into song if given a guitar. He lives in Atascadero, where he records and produces his raw and tender songs. Those tunes are tortured, humorous and wordy, exploring everything from his cremated cats’ remains “You are a box,” to the universal atrocities of young love. He croons on track 5: “If loneliness could kill, I’d be a dead flower on the side of the hill under the fallen snow and I’d grow old alone and die.” Who didn’t feel that way as a teen? The songs are unabashedly autobiographical in a way that makes you blush before flipping through the handscrawled liner notes to make sure you heard right. Why should you give a hoot about Alex? Well, he’s not a fuck up, number one, and – more importantly – he’s setting a bright example for other young musicians attempting to thrive in North County – a place that I (and many of my peers) felt was a cultural wasteland growing up. DiGrazia and many of his musician pals can’t even get into bars yet, but they’ve got the creativity, drive and common camaraderie to create their own twisted, beautiful audiosphere. Stick that on a your stupid letterman jacket. He’s also got something down that many older musicians continue to fail at: He’s genuinely interested in sup-
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porting and investing in his local scene, regardless of how small or seemingly insignificant. Case in point: When I prodded Alex on his artistic influences, he talked about his favorite bands (Fleet of Foxes being a recent obsession), but he also cited his friends, like fellow musicians Morgan Enos (Sea Birds) and Ross Major (At Dusk/ Hooded Archer). DiGrazia said when Enos, then a fellow high school student, produced his first album sophomore year, everything changed. “We were in a music class together. I’d see him walking around school playing the mandolin and stuff and I thought, ‘I want to get to know that guy,’” said DiGrazia. “He was a weird kid and he didn’t really want to be friends. But we started talking to me about music and he gave me his CD. That was super inspiring.” Up until then, DiGrazia had only dabbled in song writing and didn’t take it too seriously. Better to leave that stuff to the “pros.” “Morgan was my first example of the fact that kids my age could write songs and write music and put together a CD,” said Alex. The DIY seed was sown. Since then, Alex has produced two CDs, “I Am You Are,” released in 2010, and most recently, “Prophetic Dreams,” out early this year. The new CD is still angst-ridden and darkly funny, but it’s also a bit more grown up, with impressive vocal harmonies and a finer ear to recording. DiGrazia plays all the instruments on his albums, rocking out on acoustic guitar, mandolin, bass, clarinet, piano, tambourine, harmonica and the all-purpose megaphone.
The recording is done on his fourtrack digital recorder. With an on-board mic and mastering system, he can convert the songs straight to mp3. Whole days can disappear when he gets into that “Insomnia-induced philosophical state of mind.” DiGrazia contends that he’s just figuring life out – with all of its stresses, hypocrisies, tragedies and surprises– one song at a time. “I remember times in high school when I’d be working on music instead of school work…like my song, “Welcome to Detention,” based off a poem I wrote in detention,” DiGrazia said. “Music has always been almost intrusive in my life.” After a recent stint at the University of Oregon (a mental and emotional breakdown cut the college debauchery short), DiGrazia enrolled himself in music classes at Cuesta. It may not be every parent’s dream, but DiGrazia is young, with his musical destiny ahead of him. For now, DiGrazia is content holed up in his room, creating songs that make you wince, cringe, giggle and blush. “I’m just fine, I’m just taking my time,” he assures us in his frantic selfsearching tune “The Mess in My Mind.” “[I’m] Learning not to sacrifice meaning for rhyme. And I’m just living my life the way I’ve learned how to.” The singer/songwriter invites anyone and everyone to check out his music and take a peek into his “diary.” “I’m not writing about anything that hasn’t been written before - what I’m doing is spinning my take on it,” he said. “What I have, no one else has, simply because they’re not me.” Find both of DiGrazia’s albums on bandcamp.com. Also follow the musician on facebook for updates.
Alex DiGrazia began penning the songs for his first album, “I am You Are” during his junior year, and it’s about more than your average teenage identity crisis. The album is perhaps best characterized by the intense rantings on track 4, where DiGrazia attempts to come to terms with world chaos. “The truth will
remain and the shackles will break and the mold will be
broken and cash will be burned and the trees with their axes will take their turns and the forests will build all their houses of people like here is the church and the steeply rising rate of death in wars and unprotected teen sex and abortion. And all of America’s spiraling faster and crashing to rubble and burning to ashes…” If only his teachers
had known.
PICKLES, pg. 5
you can hear them talking about why they have to die and it’s really creepy because it’s warped in the middle and all the voices are messed up. They all sound demonic and at the very end it’s gets all quiet because they’re all dead. And I think that it’s really
disturbing and that’s why it was appropriate for my show. The show is just a common theme of things that will scare people or of things that are very weird. Swap- Do you have any final words? BIBA- Is this really the end of the
interview? Swap- Yes. BIBA- Well I love animals and all the things that aren’t human. I love my bunny, RoboCop and I love doing butterfly knife tricks and doing things that are perceived as dangerous. I also like juggling and playing with my yo-yo, hula hooping, etcetera.
Dan Wityak is tired and is probably daydreaming, wishing he was sleeping right now.
Be sure to catch Biba Pickles on air every Monday from 2-4pm and the Biba Pickles Variety Hour every Saturday from 4-5pm on 91.3 KCPR fm. I highly recommend it!
CAIN pg. 3 Wiping my face with my sleeve and swearing to myself, I make my way up the cute little ladder
into the cute little treehouse. Fucking paradise! There is a cute little door that closes pretty tightly behind me, an adorable little window that looks out into the frozen street, and a grip of blankets that probably smell terrible but I’m too drunk to give a shit. I curl up and pass out quickly in the cold, dark night dreaming of hot chocolate and a warm fireplace. I wake to the sun glowing softly through the cute little treehouse’s floral lace curtains. I hear a strange squeak outside and then take a note of my surroundings. Through a boozy hangover haze I recall my adventure of last night and evaluate my current situation. Well, this worked out fine. Another ‘squeak’ followed by some odd moans. Then, more moans and strange yells, none of it is coherent. I lie quietly listening to the strange noises now surrounding me from below the treehouse. What the fuck is this place? I look out the cute little window to see a bunch of kids playing with a ball in the yard below me. The storm has passed in the night and sun is running on high reflecting off the snow and burning my bloodshot eyes. The kids are making very strange noises ¬- it’s not a language I can understand. They don’t even seem to understand each other. Okay, this is not good I’m thinking as I close the curtains and devise an escape plan. I weigh my options. Sneaky? Apologetic? Nah, fuck it, I am just going to make a break for it and hope I escape without being arrested. I figure I can be down the ladder and over the fence before the kids can call an adult out to have me arrested or shoot me. One, two, three... I’m out the door, down the ladder and into the middle of a kids’ soccer game. The game stops and them all look at me silently. None of them make a noise. I back away from the game slowly as the children stare. I step in my own frozen vomit as I reach the brick wall. Jump, scratch, fall, jump, grap, pull, up, over, fall. Once over the fence, I choose ‘left’ as my escape route and start to walk quickly and ‘innocently’ away while contemplating the bizarre events behind me. With the clear sky, I can see the skyline and get my bearings. Fuck! I am three blocks from Barlow’s. I hope he has something to eat. Later Barlow gives me a ride home and we make a point to drive by the tree house. As it turns out, a private school for deaf children is a fine place to avoid getting your ass kicked, hauled to jail and – most importantly – to sleep off a night of heavy drinking.
The Benevolent Dr. Cain, Esq is a real fake doctor/ lawyer. Born and raised in the Rocky Mountains in a small town in Colorado, he then blah, blah, blah, Oakland California, blah, blah, blah, San Luis Obispo! He operates Dr. Cain’s Comics and Games in Downtown SLO and does art for people and stuff. In addition, he plays music in Red Eye Junction, Magazine Dirty and The Tarweed Two. He surfs and his dog Mavis is ugly, but adorable.
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Rainbows, books and steam-powered pony machines! Carefully clip out this poster, by Neal Breton!
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By Neal Breton