Reports from the scene

Locals Only

Jackson Milgaten (The Vision of a Dying World), Pall Jenkins (Three Mile Pilot), Jimmy LaValle (The Album Leaf), John Reis (Rocket from the Crypt) and Doug Ingle (Iron Butterfly) have started a new band called The Mentira. Although no music has been posted to their MySpace site yet (www.myspace.com/thementira), Ingle says the band will play a blend of folk music and what he calls “electronic music from the Garden of Eden, baby. Don’t you know that we love each other?”

Two local hippies were injured last week during a set from local Grateful Dead cover band The Electric Waste Band at Winston’s on Friday, March 27. James “Trucky” Smitts and Emily “Irey Sky” Tarmil simultaneously sustained massive head injuries after falling to the ground from what experts say was “too much spinning, not enough flailing.” In an interview from his hospital bed, Smitts was circumspect. “Man, their version of ‘Dark Star’ was wicked,” he said. “But I should have known better than to keep spinning after the seventh guitar solo.”

View from a Stool

Indie-rock fans can appear awfully jaded when it comes to watching live music—their cynical-looking posture gets so bad that sometimes it makes me cry right into my tall can of PBR. But last Friday night, a new band played at Soda Bar with such toothsome originality that the room seemed half-lit with cell-phone texting just trying to spread the word about this group, called It’s What’s for Dinner.

The band’s guitarist was perfectly competent, and the bassist laid a steady line, but the percussionist—6-foot-8, brawny through the shoulders and wearing a white butcher’s smock covered in beef juice—dominated the stage.

Before him, arranged on racks like a drum set, lay his steaks: filet mignon, ground-beef patty, an enormous T-bone cut, a rack of ribs. Later, “Joe the Butcher,” as he likes to be called, would tell me that each cut has its own special tone.  

And that sound was sublimely unique. An oddly appetizing blend of meat-beating and guitar work set my feet tapping and my stomach rumbling. In the midst of Dinner’s second song, “Grindin’ on Them Beefbones,” The Butcher played a solo, in which he slapped his meat with a speed and rhythm that would make the best conga player jealous.  
And let me tell you, it was transcendent, like listening to the very best band you can imagine playing the inside the Cowboy Star steak house. Sounds so good you can taste it. Mmmmm.

The Enrique Experience

A stronger than usual smell of Vaseline and Depends undergarments was in the air last Saturday at the San Diego Eagle bar in North Park as a white minivan carrying a slew of unassuming seniors came into dock at the BDSM / leather watering hole.

“I was tired of their constant whining about being cooped up and decided to give them a taste of their own medicine,” Sunnyville Retirement Home’s recreation director Dick Gazinga told CityBeat. The result is San Diego A-Z, 26 fun-filled activities spread over five days that range from collecting scorpion venom samples at the Anza-Borrego State Park to unloading a furniture shipment at Z Gallerie.

“I regret ever complaining,” said Charlie Gubberson, wearing a Shriners hat and looking exhausted. “I just don’t see how can collecting, dreadlock braiding or house re-stuccoing are any fun at all.”

“We had a vacancy on the ‘E’ activity after an uproar concerning a paid study for a new Ebola virus treatment,” Gazinga said as the gray-haired crowd nursed their drinks and soaked up the scene. “I told them it’s no worse than diabetes, but it still got canceled, so I picked this place out of the yellow pages.”

“That has got to be the strangest cooking show I’ve ever seen,” retiree Eileen Uhlik said, looking up at a TV screen showing a movie titled I Can’t Believe it’s Not Man Butter, while her friends admired the Eagle’s sex instruments, which included a pony bench, a St. Andrews cross used for severe slave humiliation and a full-size cage, which Gazinga used to threaten the seniors on repeated occasions.

A loud shriek was overheard coming from the men’s room as a dreadlocked retired Corporal Mort Danielson came storming out. Visibly shaken, he gave this account: “I’m wearing a brown neckerchief to match my trousers. Well, a fella in there asked me if I was into scat, and me being a jazz lover I said yes. Boy, oh boy, nothing could have prepared me for what followed. I’ve survived the Great Depression and two world wars, but I’m not sure if I’ll make it through this.”