First of all, for your car, your home, your iPod, whatever… go to CD Baby and purchase the CD by Tanya Plescia. She, loyal readers will recall, is the pianist from Sacramento who recently gave a performance in Manteca, attended by this space. I have been to many piano concerts in my short but exciting life. None compared to this. Ms. Plescia brings a passion and fire to the piano literature that would thrill Beethoven. She takes those little notes on the page and breathes life into them, literally teasing out the flesh and blood that has gone into each composition, peeling back the layers of heart and emotion in each work until it is revealed stark and luminescent. She is fearless and devoted to the work, whether it is her own brilliant composition (I heard three at her concert), or works of previous masters. You say you’re not a big fan of classical piano? Listen to Tanya Plescia and you will be. Go here to purchase her CD: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/tanyaplescia.

I was out and about this past weekend, and ran into some very interesting young girls at a Vacaville event, and they were also quite remarkable. I’m speaking of the Honeybee Trio, a singing group of three girls (one is 12, the other two 13) who perform amazing close harmonies, featuring songs from the 1940s and 50s. They really put on a show, in addition to just nailing the very difficult vocal parts. This is not one of those “awwww” acts, either. They really are worth a trip out of town, and appropriate for the entire family, so if you’re not doing anything else this weekend, the Honeybee Trio is going to perform at 2 p.m. this Sunday, Oct. 11, at The Wednesday Club of Suisun, 225 Sacramento Street, in Suisun. Sure it’s a drive, but what better day to take the family for a musical excursion out of town? Check out the Honeybee Trio here: http://honeybeetrio.com/HoneyBeeTrio.com/Welcome_to_our_Home_Page!.html

Oh, you just can’t get out of town this weekend? Really? Well, you’re in luck, because there is a lot going on around here as well. First of all, if you’re at the Martinez Farmer’s Market on Sunday, from around, say, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., I’ll be there with my other Very Bad Boy, Mr. Danny White, and the Sisters of Mercy. We’ll be playing acoustic tunes for ya’ll, getting sassy and sardonic, all at the same time. And that’s not easy.

If you’re in the mood for music tonight, get thee to Armando’s at 707 Marina Vista and check out K.T. and the Wicked Gents. This group of astounding musicians from around these parts features an amazing keyboardist/singer named Kathy Trejcka, the always-awesome Kennan Shaw on bass, guitarists extraordinaire Kelly Back and Nick Montes, and Jan Jackson on drums. A very good time is always guaranteed when musicians of this caliber get together.

Check out Gina Graziano and the Miracle Workers on Friday at the John Muir Amphitheater. She always brings a smile and a song to every stage. Showtime starts at 8 p.m.

On Saturday one of my favorite local bands, the Hopeful Romantics, will take the stage at Armando’s at 8 p.m. to bring their special blend of old timey, new timey and originals to massage your ears and sooth your world-weary soul. Led by the phenomenal Hope Savage and featuring the wizardry of Brian Walker and Danny White as well as others, the Hopeful Romantics are bringing a new faith back to the musical landscape. Don’t miss them. Also on the bill Saturday are Five Cent Coffee and Vagabondage.

Yeah, we’ve got it going on around here. We are the music. So go out this weekend and be the music. And if you have a hangover on Monday, treat yourself to another night at Armando’s with the Monday Night Blues Jam, beginning at 7 p.m. I’ll definitely see you there. I’ll be the one working.

This has dominated the news, and the attention of our culture, for at least a few weeks now. Regardless of how you feel about The Beatles, their importance, or their music, you have to admit they are a force of nature. Only two remain alive, and yet this one video game is expected to change the face of video gaming, simply because it is expected to sell over 100 million copies.

This brings to mind an issue I’ve been reading about on some music blogs lately – the changes in the music business, and how we really don’t have, nine years in, a sound that defines the new millennium. Certain bands, and certainly The Beatles, defined the 1960s, while others defined the 70s, and so on. So far, though, there doesn’t seem to be a particular band or sound that defines the first nine years of the 2000s. And there are some theories for that I find very interesting.

Perhaps the simplest is the one I hear most from older people – that there simply isn’t any good music out there any more. That’s silly, of course. There’s probably more good music out there now than ever. And here’s the other theory: it’s just much harder to find, because there’s so much of it, and so many ways to get it.

In the old days, there were a handful of record companies. Each would have a stable of musicians, bands, singers, etc., and those artists would record records. Those records would then be manufactured and marketed by a team of sales folks, distributors, etc., who would create ad campaigns, scour radio stations for airplay, and visit record stores to make sure the product was visible on shelves. It seemed like there was a lot of product being sold, a lot of artists out there on the market, but compared to today, it wasn’t so much.

Now, creating buzz around certain bands is much harder. There are just so many more avenues in which bands can be seen, heard and marketed. Go to iTunes and browse. It’s overwhelming. So many different artists are there, just in that one market. But if you want to check out lesser-known acts, go to CD Baby and browse. There you’ll find obscure acts alongside more well-known artists, and who has the time or patience to sift through literally thousands of acts they’ve never heard, to try and give a fair shake to a particular sound? I used to pick up albums that looked interesting, and just play them a few times to see if I liked them. These days, I don’t have the time or money to do such explorations, so I just stick with what I know. Apparently I’m not the only one – in fact, that seems to be the rule.

A new model of music distribution is clearly underway. It’s time that the old one died; it doesn’t work in this new era. But while we’re waiting for the new one to kick in, it’s interesting to see that The Beatles are still creating the most musical buzz I’ve seen in many years, so many years after their demise. Proof once and for all that it doesn’t matter how well you market, if you don’t have the music to back it up.

Themes, dreams, and schemes — that’s what the show promises, and it delivers so very much more than that. For an hour each week, Bob sits behind the mike and spins his favorite records, based on the theme that week. It could be “Hair,” or it might be “Girls’ Names,” or “Cadillac.” He has had a different theme for the 100 shows that exist. There may not be a fourth season.

You never, ever hear a Bob Dylan song on the show. Instead, you hear one of the most distinctive voices the world has ever produced, announce each tune and give insightful, funny, and smart commentary on the song, artist, times, whatever. Bob knows his music, lives for it, and has one of the greatest record collections of all time. At least that’s what he wants you to believe – I don’t personally know if the records he plays on his show actually belong to him, or if he just announces them after they are researched and purchased by his staff. I prefer to believe the myth, and God knows Bob is capable of myth. After all, he’s the one who told us at the beginning of his career that he got his start in the circus. And we believed him (or at least the media did).

On this show, you’ll hear every kind of genre. You hear old time country music, like Bob Wills and Lefty Frizzel and Bill Monroe. You’ll hear the Davis Sisters, and Skeeter Davis. You’ll hear Patsy Cline and Earnest Tubb. You’ll hear George Jones sing a duet with a woman – it’s a song about a husband and wife, each in love with their neighbors and anxious to invite them over for another evening. I’m not making this up.

You’ll hear blues, exquisite blues from the masters, like Robert Johnson, Skip James, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry. Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie.

You’ll hear REM and Elvis Costello and the White Stripes.

You just won’t hear Bob. Some people think that’s a good thing. I’m sorry for those people. Bob is masterful. But that’s another column.

The point is, Theme Time Radio Hour is worth getting XM Satellite Radio for. It’s expensive — $145 a year, plus you have to buy the radio. But there are other treats as well; a station devoted to blues, one to the music of Bruce Springsteen, another to the Grateful Dead. These are ok, they get tiresome for me. I also am a fan of Tom Petty’s Buried Treasure Show, which features Mr. Petty spinning his favorite records from the early to mid 1960s. This show is also a treat.

And if, for some reason, you can’t afford to have satellite radio in your car, and you still want to hear Theme Time Radio Hour (and you really must – here’s a sample of the kind of patter you can expect, this from the Musical Instruments show: “the harmonica is the best selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.”), then you can probably search on the Internet and find a place to hear the shows without the need for a subscription. I mean, most everything is available out there these days, and this is probably no exception.

So happy listening, and if you do run across this show and like it, drop me a line and let me know.

She auditioned a song, and I said to myself “this is no backup singer, this is a miracle of nature.” She had a quality that I had not heard before, at least live. Sure, there was a little of Janis Joplin in it, but only a hint. Barb was more like Bessie Smith; more melodic, ironic and forceful than Janis. Her voice was sweeter, but you could tell from the whiskey she poured into her songs that her life had been every bit as hard as any other blues singer’s. I was stunned, and instantly in love. It didn’t hurt that she was gorgeous, in a way that was uncommon for the end of the 1970s. She wasn’t rail thin and wispy. Rather, she had all the right curves in all the right places, and she carried herself with a confidence that radiated sexiness without the come-hither nonsense.

After she sang, I excused myself to step outside on the porch for a smoke. She followed, much to my surprise, and sat next to me. She bummed a smoke, which I lit for her, asked me my name, which I told her, then said, “wanna neck?” From that moment on, I was hers. We kissed a little on the porch, then went back inside and sang some more. Then she went home, and I didn’t so much as have her phone number. But I had an agenda.

I pretty much became a stalker from that point on. I found out where she worked (she tended bar), and I became a regular there. I found out she sang at that bar with the Dick Oxtot Golden Age Jazz Band. I became a groupie. I was around her as much as I could figure out how to be. And eventually we started going out. And she changed my life.

Before Barb, blues for me was strictly electric. No one played acoustic blues, at least no one I paid any attention to. But Barb knew all these amazing players, both living and dead, who had no band, but only their guitars. She turned me on to Ramblin’ Jack Eliot, Leon Redbone, Rosalie Sorrels, Memphis Minnie. . . many others, and she loved Leonard Cohen. So I learned to calm down, play acoustic guitar, and redirect all that crazy energy I had from jumping around and acting goofy to focusing it in emotional delivery. It happened almost overnight, and it happened because she sang with me. The two of us together just felt powerful when we sang. I don’t know how it came off – people then told us they thought we were great together, but we never really captured a show, either on tape or video. Those things were much harder to do back then. I do know that I felt a glow, a pulse, run through my veins when Barb and I sang together, and I’ve never felt anything like it since.

I took that energy and started writing serious songs, and they poured out of me. We took our show to the Gulf Coast, and played various venues there. We learned (out of necessity) lots of country classics while we were there, and added that to our blues set. It served us well.

Things didn’t last between us. Barb and I were almost too good of a couple, and we finally flamed out. But we never stopped singing together. And I never stopped cherishing her, though she doesn’t know that. She still has that amazing voice.

All this is my way of saying that this Sunday, August 23, we’re playing together again at the Hotel Mac in Point Richmond, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The address is 50 Washington Avenue in Point Richmond. They serve great food, and have a very nice bar. It’s a classy place, but you don’t have to dress up.

Come by and get some late 70s nostalgia, or at least watch us get ours on. We’d love to see you.

We were in Kodiak, Alaska, doing a six-week gig in a hotel called Beachcombers, which was an old steamship that had washed up on shore and converted to a hotel/bar/restaurant. In Kodiak, the emphasis is always on “bar.” People imbibe with fervor there. It’s really all there is to do. Well, that and hit on other people’s wives. You see, there are ten men to every woman on the island, or at least that was the ratio back then. And Jeanne, my wife, had this remarkable long blond hair that went to her ankles. It was quite beautiful, really.

We had been married for a few years by then. I was twenty in 1974, and had been the leader of my band for a couple of years. Jeanne, whom I had originally met in high school (where she had been my teacher), was the keyboard player and a singer in the band. We had a cool outfit named Colefeat, which was primarily a blues band, or at least that was our intention. Heck, in 1974 I was a kid off the hardscrabble streets of Lafayette, CA., and knew next to nothing about life experiences of the kind that launched or sustained blues lyrics. But I was playing guitar for John Lee Hooker, and learning an awful lot about that life from listening to him and his cohorts.

We played a lot of clubs in the East Bay then, including Keystone Berkeley, where we were the house band for a couple of years. We also played the Longbranch, and West Dakota, and Great American Music Hall, and Wolfgang’s, and the Point Richmond Pool Hall (about which more next week). With the exception of the Music Hall, none of those clubs remain today. But you may have heard of Eddie Money, Greg Kihn, Randy Oda, Jimmy Lyon, Tower of Power. . . those were just some of the folks getting their start back then in those same clubs.

We were not bad, given our youth and inexperience. At one point, a record company executive from ABC Records heard us, liked what he heard and invited us to spend six weeks in Kodiak, tightening up our show and preparing to record an album when we got back. That was the ticket to my dream, and I was sure from that point on that my life was going to unfold as I had always imagined it would – records, adoration, money, endless tours, interviews in Rolling Stone – you know, just the average day in a rock icon’s life.

So when we got to Kodiak, me and my band, we were pretty jazzed. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was the allure of this amazing landscape on my wife, who was eight years older than me and growing bored of being married to a kid posing as a man. She found herself a tour guide in the form of a hunky fisherman named Ed, and after the first week, I never really saw much of Jeannie. When she wasn’t singing love songs to Ed (songs I had written for her, about her, whatever), she was hanging out with him, touring the island and who knows what else.

After a couple of weeks of that, and the fact that the drummer was plotting a coup to steal my band from me after the gig was over and form his own group (which he did, by the way – google The Shakers, Yankee Reggae), I just cashed in my ticket and went home. Broke up the band, spent some very despondent weeks licking my wounds and listening to Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.” Jeanne came home after a few weeks, and we tried patching things up, putting other bands together, but all in vain. The damage had been done, and the bad blood wasn’t going away.

Around that time (by now it was 1978), a friend of mine in the newspaper business invited me to join a bluegrass band. Not having any other musical iron in the fire, I agreed, and went to his Point Richmond home to do a little jamming. He had also invited a woman who he said sang backup vocals. She was late in arriving, but when she did, she drove up in a pink 1954 Buick, wearing a bowler hat on her massive afro, a summer dress on her 5’3” frame, which she carried quite well, and a bottle of something in her hand.

She opened her mouth to sing, and out came the voice of a blues angel. This was no background singer, I thought.

And that accounts for the next three remarkable years of my life, which I will tell you about next week.

On various blues discussion boards, this topic goes on night and day. People weigh in on the subject as though each and every one of them had a PhD in the subject. It’s almost alarming how much raw emotion goes into the topic. Because, ultimately, and here comes a spoiler folks — to me the blues is a feeling that you have when you play a particular song, or hear a particular song, that just resonates to your toes. Elicits tears, chills, laughter, takes you directly to a life experience you had that was vivid and extreme, one that let you know in no uncertain terms you were alive. The blues always takes me to that place. For me,  that’s the power of the genre. The genius of it. The mojo of it, it you will.

Others, however, will tell you otherwise. Wikipedia, for example, helpfully points out that the phrase “blues” comes from the term “Blue Devils,” which means melancholy and sadness, and was commonly used at the end of the 18th century. The first copyrighted song with the term “blues” in it was 1919′s “Dallas Blues.” I’ve never heard the song, but I’ll bet it doesn’t sound anything like the blues I’ve come to know and love.

We all know (or should) that blues as a genre comes out of the cotton fields of Mississippi. I won’t say the plantation owners at the time acted stupidly in using slaves to build their fortune, because apparently it would hurt some feelings. But let’s just say that the life of a southern slave was harsh beyond any experience we can muster in today’s America. And the response to that cruelty was song. Think about that. To ease the almost unbearable pain of hardship, loss and constant backbreaking work, the response wasn’t organized resistance, which would seem the reasonable response. Slaves outnumbered masters by hundreds to one. No, it was, instead, to sing. Singing broke out in the fields of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, etc. It spread like wildfire, and it evidently helped ease the pain a little. But it did so much more than that. It spread to the churches, it spread to the juke joints and road houses. It spread to into the very cellular meat of the American bloodstream and grew into its bones, its brain, its heart. The singing continued over years and wars, in brothels, bars and bedrooms. The voices, the verses, the horrors and the sorrows, the moments of joy and delight, the music letting us see the world, like a tear in the window shade.

The blues is Bessie Smith, and Mamie Smith, sure. It’s Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell, and W.C. Handy and Pinetop Perkins and Sunnyland Slim. It’s Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. It’s Buddy Guy and Robert Cray, but. . . ah. Is it, say, Eric Clapton? Is it early Rolling Stones? Is it John Mayall, or Mike Bloomfield, or Stevie Ray Vaughn? Is it John Mayer? Can a guy like Tony Bennett sing the blues? How about Patsy Cline? Or k.d. lang? Or (here’s where it gets fun) Elvis (Presley, not Costello)? Or are these folks, who have all recorded blues songs, rendered a (pun intended) pale imitation of the form? Can, in other words, white folks really sing the blues, or is it just, at best, a tribute? An homage? Or, at worst, a savage ripping off of a cultural heritage?

Fun, huh? These are topics that bear discussion, and they certainly are being discussed in various places. When all the talking is through, let’s hope some light and love and understanding wind up the end result. If so, all this talk will have been worthwhile.

I raised him better than that, so I can’t speak to that particular opinion. But I can say that it is a Beatle legacy that any band you mention for the past 40 years is going to be compared to the Beatles one way or another. You can talk musically, or success-wise, or record sales-wise, or popularity-wise.

Let’s just take the Stones, for instance. Not only my son, but band mate Danny White, who actually owns a music store and has pretty good taste in music overall, doesn’t care for the Beatles. Beyond my initial reaction (what is WRONG with these people?), I can understand to a point where it’s coming from. If you’re looking for raw power, for unbridled sexuality and a bad boy persona, the Beatles aren’t your band. And the Stones have dined out on that image their whole lives. But it is an image, and one that was cunningly contrived because it was available in 1964; the Beatles pretty much owned the world that year and the following five years in popular music. The Stones, with all due respect, followed the Beatles musical lead until 1970, when the Beatles broke up and Brian Jones was dead — then the Stones came into their own as the self-proclaimed “greatest rock and roll band in the world.” But their output after, say, 1976 has been sparse and less than impressive. They’re a stadium spectacle, and amazing at it. But recording greats they no longer are.

And thus it has always been. When I first started wanting to be the Beatles in 1964, there were several rivals. I remember an album that featured one side of Beatle songs, and the other side featuring songs by The Four Seasons. And the title was The Beatles vs. The Four Seasons. An interesting concept, though one has to wonder who bought that record. Four Seasons fans were, in my recollection, older than the average Beatle fan back then, and not inclined to the early wave of Beatlemania.

No, the serious Beatle rivals then were The Beach Boys. I recall girls getting into really nasty scapes at school because of their loyalty to one band or the other. It was like a conversation between a Catholic and Protestant in Germany during Martin Luther’s time — there was just no middle ground to be had. Of course, I could have cared less for the Beach Boys then; surfing was the furthest thing from my mind, or wearing those silly striped shirts or driving hot rods. I wanted a guitar, a collarless suit, a cool electric guitar, and some friends to play music with so I could get swarmed by screaming girls, too. I stood alone in my room for years, practicing my stage stance, my vocal harmonies, and my moves. I’m not exaggerating. Years.

Today, I have those friends, those guitars, and those songs to play on various stages. The screaming girls? Well, once I did a gig at Martinez Jr. High, and a bunch of high school cheerleaders got caught up in the moment and screamed like that, and I felt I had fulfilled a lifelong ambition. Other than that, my wife screams at me from time to time, but I don’t think it’s a musical appreciation thing.

Meanwhile, we’re all waiting for the next musical model to come along. Remember, before the Beatles it was Elvis, a solo guy who himself was modeling Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. So the Beatles introduced the concept of self-contained band. That model remains with us, but it’s growing long in the tooth. I’m excited to see what happens when a new model emerges, one that cannot be compared to the Beatles.

Meanwhile, even if you don’t like the Beatles (and what is WRONG with you?), you have to admit they had a permanent and positive mark on our culture, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah!

One can argue about their effect on the world, on music, on life. Lord knows one can argue, and one does, stridently. There are people in my band (they know who they are) who don’t care for the Beatles. And I’m married to a woman who only mildly likes them, even though her favorite bands are those keenly influenced by the four mop tops. It’s hard, truth be told, to find a band who hasn’t been keenly influenced by the Beatles. The whole concept of bands as we know it today grew exactly out of the model created by John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Last week, I mentioned that rock and roll was only blues, bleached by the white folks in the music business and marketed to white kids as a safe alternative, and that’s what I believe. Then came the Beatles. And everything changed.

The influence was clearly there. “Twist and Shout,” “Baby It’s You,” “Roll Over, Beethoven,” “Please Mr. Postman;” these are all tunes right out of black American radio, arranged and sung by a Liverpool fella named John Lennon with reverence and awe. But John and his band had something else going on — something even Elvis didn’t have, or Buddy Holly. There was a jocularity, an irreverence, a sense of play and at the same time dead seriousness, that echoed those blues men of a decade before. The Beatles knew what they were doing, young as they were and unschooled in the ways of the world. They knew they had a sound by the tail, a dangerous and exhilarating sound, and they were going to follow it as far as it took them.

Elvis was a singer, and a remarkable one. Buddy Holly wrote tunes, but wasn’t much of  singer. The Beatles put it all together in an irresistible package — singing, playing, songwriting, fashion, attitude — and swept the world for ten years. The thing that kept them alive that long was the songs, and the sound of those songs. Think about this: “She Loves You” hit the charts in 1964. Two years later (two years!) we get Eleanor Rigby. One year after that, we get Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That’s not even human, folks. That pace of musical evolution is just unobtainable on this planet.

Still, they did it, and that remarkable growth spurt I believe helped us to grow as a generation, helped us get our minds off of pop radio topics like girls and cars and into socially more sophisticated notions, like life and the universe. Which, I think, led in turn to many of the social upheavals of the time, most of which I for one hold very dear to this day.

But no band before or since has held the kind of influence the Beatles did. These guys pretty much set the stage for how things were going to sound on the radio during their decade of dominance. Not only how things sounded, but how they looked, how we dressed, how we behaved, how we saw the world and each other.  That’s a lot of power for four musicians to wield, but they did it with class and style, and I think we’re all the better for it.

Speaking of bands, my very own band, The Very Bad Boys, will be at Armando’s Saturday night. We won’t be doing any Beatle covers, due to the aftermentioned grumpy-head fella who doesn’t like them, but we will be covering some other interesting songs, and their influence on me will be (always and forever) apparent.

Thanks, fellas. From the bottom of my heart.

First, Michael Jackson hit the jackpot in the 1980s — he had it all. He reached the very top. And it would seem that the view from there must be magnificent. After all, the world adores you. Money is no longer an object. People hang on your every word, your every action. You are suddenly important. You matter. You’re relevant to millions of lives.

Yes, that seems wonderful. Except it finally destroyed this man. Because you can’t live like that. There is no life in a sanitary bubble, and a sanitary bubble is where you need to be once you reach the point on the fame meter where every utterance is a headline. You need to  be protected from the daily intrusion of fans. From the daily intrusion of media. From the daily intrusion of a world which thinks you hold some magic key to some magic kingdom. Imagine living like that for a couple of weeks. Turns out that all the money, all the adoration — it’s just smoke and mirrors, hiding a poison of inertia and isolation. So for all those years after “Dangerous,” Michael made no music.

Now, let’s talk about another artist who had a much smaller amount of fame and fortune, and who has lived to tell the tale. Edward Mahoney, who grew up in New York but moved to the West Coast as a young man, wanted nothing in life so much as to be a rock star. Not a musician, mind you. A rock star. He lived the life long before the reality came, and Edward Mahoney first changed his name to Eddie Spaghetti, then finally to Eddie Money.

How do I know? Because I was playing the same Berkeley and Oakland dives as Eddie and the Rockets, back in the 1970s, when we were all aspiring rock stars. Greg Kihn, who later had a couple of hits himself, was there too. We were all young and hungry, certain of our genius and ready to conquer the world. Except Eddie was driven by forces a lot of us didn’t have. He dressed and acted like a star long before he was one. And that’s not meant in a complimentary way. Most of us didn’t care for Eddie back then. He was an arrogant jerk, frankly, with no particular talent that we could see.

But he went on to sign with Bill Graham, who was representing local talent back then, in addition to running the Fillmore and Winterland empires. And Eddie had a couple of monster hits — “Two Tickets to Paradise,” and “Baby Hold On.” He lost a lot of friends on his climb to fame, and seemingly burned his bridges without looking back. He spent some time living the fame and fortune he so intensely aspired to, and then, as to all, it passed him by. And that nearly killed him. A lifelong drug habit almost turned in to a life-ending drug overdose.

And now Eddie can be seen at county fairs, and at Santa Cruz beach boardwalk this month during the Free Friday concert series (Greg Kihn will be there in August). Apparently someone has written a musical about Eddie’s life, which will be performed on the East Coast, according to his Web site. But the days of Money the rock star have long since passed. He has lived to see himself become a fading memory, an obscurity in the annals of music.

Is that better than dying before you become a “who?”

I won’t ever find out, because I’ve always been a “who.” But given the price stars pay to be stars, I’m grateful to toil in obscurity. I have a lot of bridges still intact.

But here’s my question: if fans of the Grateful Dead are Deadheads, and if Jimmy Buffet fans are Parrotheads, and Rush Limbaugh fans are Dittoheads, then are fans of air guitarists Airheads? Is that fair? Personally, I think it’s kind. Here’s why it even comes up.

Tomorrow and Saturday (June 26 and 27) at the Independent in San Francisco (a great place for a live show, by the way, though seating is extremely limited and mostly you just have to stand there and watch the bands, which I hate, so get off my lawn!) it’s the regional finals for the U.S. Air Guitar Championships. People will pay money to watch other people, often donning fake beards, spandex and other silliness, take the stage and pretend to play guitar. These air guitarists will compete with each other to win spots in the national finals.

Again, these are air guitarists. They don’t play an instrument. They don’t even HAVE an instrument. They get up and pretend to play an invisible guitar, with all the goofy gyrations inherent in every 13-year-old boy’s fantasy of what kind of moves you should make when you’re playing your guitar. The kind of moves I used to make in the mirror when I was 11, and pretending to play a pretend guitar. The crowd went wild for me then. And now, through some kind of societal meltdown of reality and standards, there are actual crowds actually going wild for these guys now.

And here, dear friends, is where I fear coming off as cranky and humorless. Perhaps I’m missing the big joke, and taking this far more seriously than I should. After all, who’s getting hurt? If people want to pay to see the musical equivalent of professional wrestling, who am I to not giggle along with the crowd, or chuckle knowingly to myself and just move on?

Well, I’m me. And this kind of stuff drives me crazy. Because if you go to the Web site (www.usairguitar.com), you see what seems like an entire subculture emerging around this goofiness. I mean, even Rock Band and Guitar Hero require some kind of minimal hand to eye coordination to succeed. Air guitar requires only a willingness to shed any tiny twine of dignity and self-worth you might have once had. Even karaoke demands a vocal to be actually sung. Air guitar requires you to move your arms, maybe your legs, in some resemblance of a pre-recorded track.

Is this, then, where Joe Cocker has led us (kids: Google the name if you don’t get the reference)?

On a piece that ran about this on a local news channel, one Bay Area air guitarist, Beardo Weirdo, said this: “Air guitar is the embodiment of rock and roll. Air guitar takes away the technical ability and all of the pretense and what you are left with is the performance, which really is the essence of being on stage anyway.”

Takes away all of the pretense? Really?

See, those are fighting words for me. Air guitar, to my way of thinking, is the embodiment of the enemy of rock and roll; it represents all the vapidity, stupidity and meaninglessness of a life lived alone in a bedroom, cut off from any real danger, any real chance-taking, any real effort. Rock and roll is a threat, it’s dangerous, it’s menacing. Air heads and their contests make it seem like a cheap circus made of wet cardboard and runny mascara.

So get the heck off of my lawn with your silly air guitar.

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