Head East - Rollin' toward All Good

report filed 5/2/00 - 8:10 am - Funny how things work out sometimes. Last week it looked like this update was gonna be a double-double rock whopper with images from four different shows. Sure looked good on paper. Didn't happen that way though.

The musical menu appeared quite promising indeed on Friday night with Government Grown playing Winstons. Earlier in the week, we learned that GG recently parted ways with their former keyboard player, but have still been performing as a quartet, adding a soprano sax. So it was with a greater than typical degree of anticipation that we made our way into the venerable music club. The hardworking staff here weren't the only ones looking forward to checking out the new configuration. Alot of the folks there were GG faithful, and there was a good buzz in the room by the time GG started shortly after 11pm.

GG's core unit, Harley Orion on bass, guitarist Tyler Hardwick, and drummer Jeremy Moss, is a solid nucleus, and very capable of rocking the house as a trio. The additional melodic lines, tones and textures of a sax or keyboard, gives GG a more sophisticated, dynamic sound... but either way, they have good chemistry and lots of energy.

The crowd was certainly into it. Although the place wasn't jammed to capacity (thankfully), Friday's show appeared to be the best turnout for GG so far at Winstons. Definitely a good show from a promising, young band. Not to mention a great way to start to the weekend...

And then things went downhill. At least musically. Plans to check out our neon city amigos, King Cartel on Saturday night fell through. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal, because the Cartel was scheduled to play both Saturday and Sunday, so it seemed easy enough to catch up with them the following day.

That brings us to Sunday. While chatting with an OB scenester I learned that the Cartel had canceled both Winston's shows. The reason - the band broke up. Wow... It's true. Confirmed the news with Chris King yesterday. He has plans to form a new group - look for more news on this in the coming weeks...

The other two shows were supposed to be performances from WMO and Psydecar, each playing at separate house parties on Sunday. We started the Sunday afternoon festivities at the WMO shindig and wound up hanging out until the end of the night. It was alot of fun, but as it turns out, no live music. It was a blast though. Unfortunately, we never made it over to the Psydecar party...

So there you have it. Just one of those weekends...

Getting set here for the upcoming trek East, enroute to the All Good Festival in West Virginia on 5/19-5/21. After that we're setting up the Anytime/Anywhere Studio at HGMN HQ in North Carolina, and will base operations from there for the summer. When we update the website next site we'll already be on the road.

In the mean time though there's lots of work to be done.

Very excited about an interview with Roger Waters scheduled for later today. That interview will result in an article for the Las Vegas Weekly, previewing the Pink Floyd founder's upcoming US tour. We're also scheduled to speak with Bill Laymon, bass player for the David Nelson Band for an upcoming feature article on the band, as well as one of our longtime favorites, Jorma Kaukonen, for our continuing research on the Relix book.

Couple of good shows at Winstons on the docket as well: the David Nelson Band on the 4th and Wise Monkey on the 5th. As we know, there's no guarantee that we'll have images from those performances, but if we can, we will.

check back next week and see how it turns out...
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