Hi Everyone - 

This Tuesday Kneebody will be playing at The Temple Bar.  It’s going
to be our last concert there and it will probably the last time I’ll
ever play at The Temple Bar because they’ve announced that they’ll be
closing at the end of this month.  

It’s been really strange thinking about that over the past week.  The
Temple Bar has always been here while I’ve been living in Los Angeles.
They opened the year I moved here.  Before it was the Temple Bar, the
bar at 1026 Wilshire was called At My Place.  I never knew it as that
but I heard that in the seventies, while he was here in LA living his
“lost weekend”, John Lennon played there. 

My friends and I were some of first bunch of musicians playing at The
Temple Bar when they opened.  For the first few years I think that I
was there almost every night of the week; sometimes playing in three
bands in a night.  At least it felt that way.  I was there when we
put together a 20 growing to 30 eventually making it to a 70 piece
orchestra filling the bar.  I played with some of my childhood heros
there.  I was also there on many nights playing duets or trios with
singer songwriters.  I also heard some of the most world class
inspiring live music I’ve ever heard there.
  
Early on, the owners Louie and Nettie Ryan and  their booking agent
Megan Jacobs created an atmosphere that embraced the music scene and
the musicians that helped create it.  There were many times when
Louie and Nettie would tell me and everyone else that we were all
family.  That was their way to nurture and reassure all of us. And it
really did make me feel special to know that in this giant sprawling
city at the edge of this big continent, there was a place where we
could all play, anytime we wanted.  We all felt how special it was.
And with music communities being as close as they are, word spread
quickly. Soon, the Temple Bar became a great destination for touring
bands from other parts of the country and the world. 

Kneebody, in it’s earliest stage played there every Monday.  It was
during the time of those Mondays that we were able to write and learn
a lot of our songs.  It was a weekly composition deadline for us to
write new music and try it in front of an audience.   If we didn’t
have that comfortable workshop environment, I’m not sure what the
band would sound like today or if the band would still exist.

  Over the years, everyone started getting busier and busier.  
Between spending time on the road, in the studio or just being
somewhere else that life has taken me, there have been bigger
intervals between my gigs there. The Temple Bar has always been a
place that I’ve kept coming back to.  It definitely has been that way
for Kneebody.  It’s always been the best Los Angeles venue for us. 
And because of how easy it’s been to play there, it’s been a palce
that we’ve kind of taken for granted.  We’ve been able to create some
great nights of double and triple bills there inviting our friends
from out of town to play with us.  It’s going to be tough to find a
new place to play.

I want to say that for the record, I’m very happy to have played
there and am grateful to Louie, Nettie, Dexter, Swan and everyone
else of the The Temple Bar cast over the years.  Thank you all so
much.  It will be hard to picture anything else there at 11th and
Wilshire.




Here’s the info…

@ THE TEMPLE BAR
Nels Cline w/Norton Wisdom 
Todd Sickafoose’s Blood Orange (featuring Jenny Scheinman)
Kneebody (Minus Shane)

Tuesday, September 9th
$10
ALL AGES
Doors open at 8pm
1026 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles
Info/Tickets: 310.393.6611 or www.templebarlive.com


www.kneebody.com
www.myspace.com/kneebody

There is an election coming up. Tonight I was trying to have a conversation about the Republican Convention and I realized that everything I was saying was something someone else said on the radio I was listening to that day but in a more watered down-less fully understood Kaveh sort of way. If you were to ask me to really defend or elaborate on what I was saying, I would most likely repeat what I had said and eventually start muttering hoping that you were satisfied with my answer. I am out of touch with politics. I am really left with knee jerk reactions to the candidates and I’m feeling like I really couldn’t say why I’d vote for one candidate over the other let alone argue with someone who really knew what they were talking about.Does anyone else feel this way? Why would you vote for Barack Obama? Why would you vote for John McCain?Anyhow, just now I found a website that could help me form some more opinions or could also give me more stats to draw from if I needed them. It’s called Project Vote Smart (http://www.votesmart.org). It has the biographies and voting records of all of our elected officials.  Why didn’t I know about this sooner?If anyone else has informed opinions on these guys or places where I could make some, let me know!Thanks

OK, I’m on a Paul Simonon binge right now. I think he’s my favorite bass player. I can’t stop listening to The Good The Bad and The Queen. It’s a really great artist collaboration record. DangerMouse is the producer. He never over does it. The songs are all there, bare elements and bits of sound and beats that sit perfectly. The guys playing are really showcased. You can hear where they put beats how they phrase and what notes they choose… It’s a total Paul album. His bass lines are right there in the front of every song and they are stark and beautiful. Also his illustrations are very very cool. I just read an interview with him in bass player (www.bassplayer.com/article/paul-simonon/Aug-03/784). In it he reveals a lot about his relationship to music through the Clash and the reggae he was always drawn towards. Listening to this reminds me of talking to my buddy Lonnie Marshall who played bass with Joe Strummer on the album “Earthquake Weather” after the Clash officially dissolved. He said that when they played in London on that tour, people would yell at him on stage and yell “Where’s Paul??!!!”. He said that later when they were playing in Japan, he finally ran into him at a show and that Paul was a really nice sweet guy.

Here’s the first song, my favorite song from Joe Strummer and the Mescalaros first album:

And here’s “Kingdom Of Doom” a really cool song by The Good the Bad and The Queen with Damon Albarn, Paul Simonon, Simon Tong and Tony Allen. I can’t stop listening to this album:

This is a great clip from my step dad’s band Thinking Plague at a recent concert last spring.