Photo Jack Gould LowBallAssChatter is very proud and happy that Dave Alvin's Public Domain album won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Recording. OC Weekly used a track from the album, “Don't Let Your Deal Go Down,” on Roots Canal, our latest compilation CD, so we can now claim to be Grammy Award winners by proxy. From now on, we plan to introduce ourselves to total strangers as “close personal friends of Grammy-winning recording artist Dave Alvin.” Perhaps this will get us laid more frequently, and with greater enthusiasm. “It feels great to win,” says Alvin. “It's a validation. I didn't really focus on it until the day before, but then it was like, 'Oh, fuck! The Grammys!' I let it get to me. I was thinking that if I lose, everything I've ever done from the Blasters onward has been for nothing. When I won, I dedicated the award to 'all the musicians driving in vans right now, pulling into a gig in a beer joint.' That's what it was all about: people who are broke or almost broke, and they keep doing this anyway.” Before his sudden mainstream acceptance had a chance to go to his head, though, Alvin was brought right back down to earth: after receiving his trophy, Alvin took a powder down a flight of stairs to catch a breather but soon found himself lost, wandering and face-to-face with a power-mad, Staples rent-a-cop. “I went up to this security guard and asked him how to get back onto the floor,” Alvin laughs. “He was standing there with nothing to do, and now he had something to do—I gave him a crisis to work on.
“'Where's your pass?' the guard asked.
“'I don't have a pass,' I told him.
“'You can't be here without a pass.'
“'I just won a Grammy!' I said.
“'I don't care, pal. You need a pass.'
“'Don't be a fuckin' idiot. I just won an award!'
“'You're going to have to leave right now!'
“He was actually getting ready to throw me the fuck out. We went at it for a while, but I wouldn't back down, and finally he just said, 'Go through that door.' So I won twice that night.” (Buddy Seigal)
EARTH DAY UPROOTED
It looks as if there won't be an Earth Day festival at the Hub in Fullerton this year. “I'm almost sure we're not going to do it,” says Hub owner Carlo Terranova, who lost money on last year's huge, rocking, free, all-day festival in the Hub parking lot. With more time, Terranova says, he might have found the sponsorship money to pull off the concert again. But he has been otherwise occupied: the Continental, a jet-set lounge-themed bar he's been building for the past two years, is tentatively scheduled to open in June. Terranova says the Continental, located near the Hub on the other side of Harbor Boulevard, will feature “a classic lounge environment with one-man piano shows, stylish bands and acid jazz.” The bar itself is hand-crafted. “Everything in the place has an artistic element, from the wrought-iron work to the rounded stage in the corner to the booths, which are from Little Joe's, the famous Italian restaurant in LA.” Which means you'll be sharing butt space with famous people—or at least planting yours where famous people once planted theirs. Famous people “like Tommy Lasorda,” says Terranova. Wait—huh? That's not exciting! Who gives a flying crap about Tommy Lasorda? Still, “the place really looks and feels like you're walking into 1964.” (Alison M. Rosen)
CONFIDENTIAL TO . . .
. . . the irked bassist of the really, really wretched local kiddie-punk band: I don't mind being called a “fascist Nazi,” but to accuse me of liking Blink-182? That's just going too far! As most right-thinking people are aware, Blink-182 are to punk what Jonny Lang is to blues—slick, soulless, watered-down, ultracommercial barfola as far removed from the roots of the music they claim to carry a torch for as Dubya's intellect is from Noam Chomsky's. So, no, I do not like Blink. They're hapless, annoying mook-rockers who happen to be quite adept at doing what their marketers tell them to do. Witness this story we stumbled upon on www.sonicnet.com (penned by Corey Moss, which reads uncannily like a press release instead of a news story, but that's a whole other argument for another time): “BLINK-182 TO KICK OFF CIVIC TOUR 2001—POP PUNKS WILL PLAY FIRST LEG OF OUTING, AND THEY'LL BRING A HONDA THEY DESIGNED ALONG WITH THEM. San Diego pop punks Blink-182 will show off their new ride on the first leg of the Civic Tour 2001, kicking off April 30 in Seattle. Blink . . . have been commissioned by Honda to design a car and promote the company with the outing, which will hit nine U.S. cities in 11 days. And if the 'Blink-182 Civic,' which will travel with the band on the tour, looks anything like the band's CD covers, it will be vibrantly colorful and famously tasteless. Honda plans to give away the car at the end of the tour to the winner of a drawing fans can enter beginning in March on the Civic Tour website. . . . A second leg of Civic Tour 2001 is in the works for early summer. Honda said it would announce the band for that leg later this month.” (Rich Kane)
