What's Happening at The Non-Writer

... and Winters Tavern too

September’s gone already. What happened?

Here in Pacifica California the weather gets very nice starting in September. It seems that every small town along the coast has some kind of festival going on, and our town’s fest is one of the biggest. More on that later.

In my last story, I interviewed two improvising guitarists that came to Winters Tavern in mid September. The mssv gig, featuring Mike Baggetta on guitar, Stephen Hodges on drums, and Mike Watt on bass, was definitely a highlight for me last month. Watt is the best known musician in the group, but not that well known to me. I remember seeing his early punk band The Minutemen play in LA once, but I never got any of their recordings. That band was over in 1985 and Watt’s path through music took a lot of twists and turns that I was unaware of.

I thought the heavy use of improvisation in mssv was a departure for Watt. Boy was I wrong. As soon as I looked through the recordings offered at the merch table I saw that he was doing improv back in the 1990’s with another favorite guitarist of mine, Nels Cline. I recently discovered a YouTube video of Watt and Cline playing in a band on MTV in 1995. Watt was hosting the show 120 Minutes. The video includes some pretty funny outtakes of Watt introducing other band videos.

Also in September, I started working on a story I’ve been wanting to do for a long time about the Scottish Highland Bagpipe. In preparation for this story, I attended the 157th Scottish Highland Gathering and Games in Pleasanton, one of the largest gatherings of its kind in North America. I’ve been attending this event on and off for at least 30 years. This recent one was the first since the pandemic.

The highlight of this event for me occurs at the end of the day when all the pipe bands march in front of the grandstand and perform as one “massed band”. When I first experienced this over 30 years ago, I was struck by how much it reminded me of some of my favorite avant-music. In the story I’m working on I will spell out the parallels I’ve been hearing over the years, leading up to an examination of two improvising/experimental musicians who use the Highland Bagpipe as their instrument.

Another discovery I made in September came while I was working on a chapter for the book The Gomelsky Recordings. Some of you may recall that it is my work on this book that got me to start doing The Non-Writer on substack. The research for this book is never-ending, so even while writing it I continue to uncover new revelations.

This time, it came while working on a chapter about Gary Farr and the T-Bones. Gomelsky worked with Farr at about the same time he was working with the Yardbirds. With both bands, Gomelsky produced several singles, but the T-Bones never created any hits like the Yardbirds did.

During their short life, the T-Bones had a rotating cast of musicians around Farr. One of them was a very young keyboard player that was just starting to make a name for himself playing a Hammond organ. I knew about Keith Emerson’s appearance in the band, but for some reason I thought it was just for a few brief live gigs.

As I assembled the list of Gomelsky produced singles, I noticed that Emerson did in fact record with them. I also remembered that I read Keith Emerson’s autobiography, Pictures of an Exhibitionist, about a decade ago. Did I still have it? I often pass books on to friends when I complete them.

Yes, I did still have the book, and yes Emerson wrote his own chapter on the T-Bones, even mentioning Gomelsky a few times. In the past I’ve been fond of recalling how the name Giorgio Gomelsky was all over my record collection, but I didn’t know who he was till 2017, a year after he died. Is this process repeating itself with my book collection?

And finally for my September roundup, the last weekend is when my town puts on its biggest festival of the year, The Fog Fest. A one mile stretch of the main drag is shut down and filled with vendor, food and booze booths, along with three stages for live music. The event is kicked off by a parade, and I was very happy to see a large number of school bands marching in this year’s parade. There were also “floats” representing the many themes of our coastal community, including mermaids and pirates. Once again, Winters Tavern participated in the parade, and this year they won the Best Float award.

And of course there were bands playing all day and all night at Winters Tavern during festival weekend. The tavern is only a block away from the fest, so the pirate float made a sharp turn at the end of the parade and headed for the Winters Tavern parking lot where the band on the float played as the first band of the day at the tavern.

Such a great time. I hope you enjoyed this little slice of my music community. In the meantime, let me know about yours. And for a sneak peak at what’s coming up, here’s another installment of What’s Happening at Winters Tavern. More experimental bands!!