The Kickstand

The Kickstand is a community oriented bike shop, venue and thrift store. If you have not heard about it — it’s about time.

The quirky warehouse mainly functions as a charitable means for bike repair and bike repair education, but also houses a thrift shop and stage area, which help raise funds for The Kickstand’s main project. The place was started late last year by Ani Previc.

As a venue, The Kickstand has a great deal of charm. The lack of air conditioning and disheveled pieces of bicycles add to the charm. On the walls hang local artwork for sale. Painted bicycles and Christmas lights also decorate the red interior. The people are nice and everything is in the name of DIY bike repair. The only downside is its distance from campus.

It is a gigantic building, but can be difficult to find. The most helpful directions come from Glypher, creator of Gainesvillebands.com, who backs The Kickstand as a committee member. He has a picture of the area on his news forum.

The Alligator has done two pieces on The Kickstand. The first is a multimedia article that has pictures of the interior under construction and is narrated by Vyki Englert. In the piece, Chelsea Carnes is quoted as stressing the importance of the venue aspect of The Kickstand.

The other Alligator article can be read by clicking here.

Back in May, my own band opened for a show at the Kickstand. It was a great time. My girlfriend came down from Tallahassee to witness. My newspaper editor and her friends also came. A modest slew of others too (including a roommate). The atmosphere was relaxed (despite my own anxiety before any live performance) and we were told to start whenever we felt comfortable.

Jon Crocker played after us. His set was very intimate, full of personal anecdotes and jokes that interrupted his songs. Everyone sat around him in a style reminiscent of elementary story time. A dog hopped around the crowd and interrupted many musical moments.

The seemingly awkward highschool band, Max’s Birthday played after Crocker. Their piano driven indie music was amusing. Here is a picture of what the stage looked like with them on it.

The last band to play was the Muse/Radiohead-esque Dead Songwriters. A very talented group of musicians who originated from Ocala.

The night was blisteringy hot. The night was authentic.

A list of upcoming Kickstand shows can be found here. I strongly urge you to support the shows.

I earnestly hope the place becomes big — it deserves to. The many volunteers backing the project have big hearts and great ambitions for the place.

The Kickstand has both a MySpace and a website. Check them out and go to their shows. Learn how to get your bike fixed if necissary. If you do not have a bike, let them help you build one.

Futuristic Bad Girl Goes On Bad Boy Records

She is like the best parts of “The Love Below” by Andre 3000. The drum beat, the clapping, the horns, everything on the song “VSHH CyberHop Remix” screams “Hey Ya” part two. She reminds me of what David Bowie would have been if he had never left his Ziggy Stardust phase and then got a sex change instead of settling for androgyny.

As an entertainer, she is like James Brown, but more jerky and futuristic. She even cites him as a major influence. Okay, enough with the comparisons.

“I’m an alien from outer space.”

The way her voice crows at the end of “VSHH CyberHop Remix” fills your body with soul.The way she stutters some words leaves your foot tapping and your head jerking. Other songs, she tones down the quirky futuristic vibe and breaks out like a gospel girl.

I think Janelle Monae is going to blow up on the scene this year. In fact, Nouveau Magazine predicted her as one of five artists who people would know by 2008. I hope this rings true.

She has been steadily gaining a following ever since 2005 when she was featured on the “Purple Ribbon All-Star’s Compilation: Volume 2″ with her song, “Lettin’ Go.” The song became a cult hit. Later, in 2006, she was appropriately featured on The Idlewild soundtrack.

The movie clip below was ripped from MySpace. It explains how Big Boi and P. Diddy jointly discovered Monae. I find it amusing that she did not respond to P. Diddy’s initial message inquiry.

Okay, I will be honest — I cannot figure out how to embed MySpace videos into WordPress. So, here is the link:

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=34522441

Spouting About Local Bands That Come To Mind

No inspiration has reared its head lately; at least no music topic worthy of this blog.

Of course there has been music. It floats around me constantly from grocery store aisles and from under my fingers.

Maybe “plenty of inspiration but no aspiration” is a more accurate description.

All focus has been inward and locally.

So, on that vein, here is a synopsis of some local Gainesville musicians that command some attention.

On a side note: I do not count bands like Against Me and Tom Petty. They have roots here, but they left this sunken swamp long ago for brighter stars.

The bands listed here are still here — doing their best in this hick, college town to belong. They are the ones you find placing giddy, nervous faith at open mic nights and hustling friends to watch them at the Atlantic. They are the ones who gave up long ago on making it big (only to the public, there is still a sliver of hope in the most down-trodden souls) and continue rocking in Gainesville just as they did in 1999.

Tonight, I plan to make an appearance at Lillians Music Store for an open mic night. A new, fresh and seemingly disjointed band called Bandits will be playing there. One member of the band lives in St. Petersburg and the other two are a couple, made official on Facebook, who attend UF.

Their vocal-harmonies are smooth and guitars, repeating traps of chilling melodies. Their influences include Iron and Wine and Sufjan Stevens; the outcome of this being folk lullabies of the college variety. With a little more production and some extra textures, they could easily overthrow other minimalistic-indie bands and crown themselves kings of the genre. This is fairly presumptuous, considering the band just made their MySpace page February 29 and are making one of their first live debuts tonight.

An update: After watching them live, I am not disappointed. The folk part of their self-labeled “folk-indie” band, is more pronounced with the addition of a banjo and less recording equipment between receivers. Covers were chosen well and complemented their style. The three distinct voices in the band blended beautifully and made for lush harmonies.

It was a relaxing evening. I could not get a roommate to tag along and so I went alone. I decided to bike rather than find parking. I arrived earlier than expected and wandered around downtown Gainesville waiting for them to play. Saw many sights and overheard many conversations.

While Bandits played their folk music, a club next door poured out animated party people; predominately blacks who commented on the Bandit’s music with phrases like “now that is country right there.”

Before they played, I caught some of the house band. It was a trip down memory lane … here were the same people playing the same songs from one of my first shows over a year ago. It was partly the reason I went to see Bandits.

I have fond memories of playing at Lillians. Rocking out in front of a small group of 40-something-year-olds and about 3 friends who stuck around on a Monday night. There is nothing to make you more humble.

I did my awkward thing after the set. Mumbled incorrect pronunciations of “good job” to the members and then biked back home, humming one of their covers that was stuck in my head.

A band I have been reminiscing about a lot recently is The Most. They broke up sometime early this year, but their quirky, rock-opera performances left a lasting impression on me. Perhaps, listing the Most goes against my earlier assertions about what makes a Gainesville band, but they just split up less than a month ago and it seems like even less than that since the band was furtively making the rounds at music venues.

One of the last blogs on their MySpace sums it up eloquently:

“As far as The Most is concerned, I thought we could go all the way, and in a way, we did. If ‘all the way’ means playing with Just A Scientist at the Rion Ballroom at a show no one knows about, while random people jump onstage and make us feel awkward. In that case we made it big time.”

I was at that show. It was indeed awkward. A small man with orangutan arms and a larger man with hair down to his back jumped onstage and danced ‘the robot’ for a good 15 minutes. They proceeded to bum-rush the microphone after the show and confess their love and admiration for The Most. The band tended to attract a strange cult. During the same show, a smelly, weasel man high-kicked around the audience, holding out a clipboard for a mailing list. The Weasel was a regular at the shows. You could often find him dancing to The Most as if it were an aerobics class, sweat dripping, pumping his arms to the beat. All he was missing was a step-stool and mat.

They were a band that made you feel like you were at a bigger venue than you were. They turned that small bar into a stadium. They oozed bloated egos. The singer belted like a Broadway singer and reached out toward the sky at the faraway dreams of stardom that he never got. They had it all, but they never got their just reward: validation.

One last band to mention before retiring is: Oh Sanders. I am not a rabid fan of their indie-pop sound, but “The State of Disorder” is one of the catchiest songs I have ever heard. Most particularly, the guitar/glockenspiel hook is infectious.

More than good musicians, they are excellent networkers. It is an incestuous, mother-son, gooey mess in the Gainesville music scene and they are the forefront in this melting pot.

“The singer is also in another band as a keyboardist…They are big fans of another band who always come to their shows… who are on the same small label as this other band… They play often with this funky Artic Monkey-esque band. They have an ambitious singer who is also the drummer in another band who employs a guitarist who is in two or three bands…”

Oh Sanders is pop without embarrassment. It is only natural for them to throw in funny keyboard sounds and danceable swooping high-hats. Stella Leung’s voice borders on good and bad, tolerable and interesting. Her subject matter is indie-poppish (if ever a terrible word existed) and funny at times.

I have quite a few more Gainesville bands to go through, but this post is running over 1,000 words and therefore should taper off. I will finish this list some other time in a “local bands: part two” or something.