Hotfoot finally put out our album in January but I’d swear we had this show booked before it was even written. Nathan’s 50th birthday is in a couple weeks which means the end of his 12 Records Towards 50 project is nearly upon us. I should have gotten him a cake, but I guess a yerba mate from a Mexican supermarket in Pasadena is about the next best thing.
(or maybe the next best thing would be these giant fried pork skins they were selling, piled high and layered with buttercream… no? ok)
Anyway, I had been dogsitting in Bird Rock for the last week which gave me plenty of time to work on the feedback I received on two major pieces of writing. More details to come, but suffice it to say shutting myself in for the week to hack away on my literary pursuits had me feeling more than a little like Jack Torrance. Thankfully, the soothing palliative of free jazz loomed on the horizon.
Open Gate recently changed venues and is now hosted by Neighborhood Universalist Unitarian Church in Pasadena (home of the Rev. Dr. Omega Burckhardt, a name straight out of Pynchon or Cronenberg), whose Ross Chapel sounds wonderful. At first I was worried our sound would get too washed out in such a reverberant space but it proved not to be an issue.
Every time this band plays we sound better, our communication more natural, the compositions tighter and the improvisations more expressive. This show was no exception. If we saw each other more than once every four months we’d be unstoppable, to say nothing of what might have happened if we had rehearsed before recording our album.
A number of LA improvising titans (hi, Vinny! hi, Mike!) came to this show including the legendary G.E. Stinson, one of my gateway artists into experimental music as a kid, who very kindly approached me twice after the set to compliment my playing and the tunes.
(Conversely, I was talking to Garrett — who I hadn’t seen since we played the Battery in… 2018? 2019? — after we finished playing and another old head cut in to ask if we had gone to CalArts together. I’ve never been so insulted in all my life.)
Last year after Hotfoot’s first recording session in San Marcos, Nathan introduced me to an unassuming 24-hour taco shop in a Cardiff gas station with the best carnitas north of La Fachada. We stopped back in just long enough to eat and listen to the locals’ drunken racial tirades and I was in bed by midnight. That’s putting the business in showbiz, folks.
I was too busy eating to take a picture of dinner, but I had run down to Bahia Don Bravo for a breakfast burrito that morning. I’d say “God bless Southern California” if it weren’t already so obvious he had.
Driving to the show playlist:
- Nathan tried getting me into Skinny Puppy through Last Rites. Still no effect, but…
- …the discussion of production choices on that record brought us to Boldy’s Manger on McNichols, an album I adore and which has been in heavy rotation lately.
- From there we moved on to The Price of Tea in China and a debate on the merits of the Alchemist’s production. Nathan said “Run-Ins” sounded like one of my beats, and even if it’s my least favorite track on the album, who am I to argue with that kind of comparison?
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