Photo Essay-Los Lobos at the Sacramento Music Festival

Once in while in this business, one is lucky enough to get up close to watch an all-time favorite. That was the case Sunday night at the Sacramento Music Festival, when the Beet Seeking Missile was able to hang in the photo pit for the entire two-hour plus Los Lobos set. And what a set it was!

 One of America's finest rock bands (and a Beet Seeking Missile favorite!) played a memorable show. Los Lobos are going strong in their fourth decade of touring, recording and blending cultural heritage with psychedelic rock, folk and blues. In a set list that spanned their 40 years together, they played favorites like "Dream in blue,"  "I got loaded," "Volver Volver," "Mas y Mas" and a great cover of the Grateful Dead's "West L.A. Fadeaway."
The greatest part of the show was while looking around at all the dancing, happy, singing people giving their pure , unabashed love to this band, I would look up and catch the band having fun too; joking with each other between songs, inviting a fan onstage to sing and generally being the consumate pros and great multi-instrumentalists that they are known to be all over the world.

Talib Kweli-Spanning the globe to bring you a variety of sounds

  I knew there was something unique about Talib Kweli when I first saw him in the fall of 2004. He was opening for the Beastie Boys at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Baseball season was in full swing and out comes this Brooklyn kid with a t-shirt, jeans.... and an Oakland A's cap. Not only did he get the Beet Seeking Missile's attention with his choice of head gear; his high-order vocabulary and quick-segue delivery were absolutely mind-blowing.

What topped it off during his short set, was his impromptu freestyling. During the great song "Get by," he incorporated an episode from the previous night's A's game into the song. Like the best rappers, who are reporters on the mic, Kweli improvised a short rhyme about the incident: a Texas Rangers pitcher, in a fit of rage and frustration, had thrown a chair into the stands and injured a fan. It was just a brief moment in time, but it was also a quick glimpse into this young man's lightning-quick style.

The next time i saw Kweli, it was two years later at a rock club called the Boardwalk in Orangevale, a Sacramento suburb known for it's fondness for late model Camaro's (and about a mile's walk away from the Beet Seeking Missile's home at the time). 

It was a Tuesday night,  and the turn-out was low- maybe forty people in the house. Yet the rapper performed as if we were 40,000. It was epic fun, as he stormed the place with only a turntable and two back-up singers. He even hosted a white-boy dance-off onstage(I think there was one black kid in attendance.)

 But as I looked around the sparsely attended show, all I could think was: Why don't more music lovers,  regardless of where they're from, know about this guy?

Much has developed since that night. Despite relatively low record sales, Kweli's fan base has grown steadily through word-of-mouth buzz. He is hardly what one would consider a rap star, but he prefers it that way. Kweli has built his following in a steady, hard-working fashion.

 Touring constantly, he circles the globe playing big and small venues everywhere. Kweli has the rare ability to deftly straddled the fine line between thought provoking lyrics and being an entertaining party emcee. He is atonishingly gifted at both.

That larger success has eluded him, is part of that choice.  Jay Z summed it best in his song Moment of Clarity-"If skills sold, truth be told, I'd probably be, lyrically Talib Kweli." Unlike many big box rappers, Kweli has managed to retain his creativity and keep his integrity intact throughout a 15-year career.

His latest, the long-awaited Prisoner of Conscious, may be where his perseverance finally pays off. It's his first release that combines the elements of great production and the feel of his live sound. It's also the first release that marks his complete financial independence as an artist, after disbanding his last record label and reorganizing things so that he has complete artistic and financial control of his music. In many ways, it's a new peak for the artist.

Prisoner of Conscious contains a variety of sounds. The album's biggest two production triumphs are capturing Kweli's live verbal cadence and adding a wide range of guests, who exceed expectations. Kweli keeps the listener engaged with little idiosyncratic commands that are so customary during his live performances. It's a repetitive process where Kweli squeezes these into the smallest spaces of each song and they fit like small puzzle pieces that make the picture clearer as his high-speed vocabulary washes over you in this age of distractions.

Likewise, the artist has utilized guest appearances in the past, but never to this extent. Sometimes that's a recipe for failure, but Kweli gets the best out of each performer. The list is impressive, featuring up and coming artists like Miguel and Kendrick Lamar along well-known names like Buster Rhymes.

 "I love music/I'm complete in my devotion," intones Kweli on the autobiographical "Turnt Up," the album's third track. Here, Kweli alludes to the cerebral influence of his mother, an English professor at Medgar Evans College in New York City.  His love for music oozes from each track. The next song, "Come here," which features rising star Miguel, is a lyrical sauna. It has a sensual Marvin Gaye fell to it . In a perfect world, you would hear this song drifting smoothly from car speakers all summer long,

Kweli also documents his constant travels around the world on the record. On "Favela Love," Kweli recounts some memorable thoughts on a balcony in Rio de Janeiro with the help of Brazilian singer Seu Jorge. "A feeling of panic engulfin' the whole planet/Yet my words are slow dancin', my language is romantic." Elsewhere, he drops a reference to a show at Sacramento's Ace of Spades on the whirlwind "High Life," a song that has the flavor of Ghanian style hip-life music.

He calls out phony rappers and has fun trading boasts with Busta Rhymes on "Rocket Ships." On the quirky "Upper Echelon" he says "Rap been laughable over the last year or two." However, he says it best on "High Life"-"I'm fishing with dynamite/now I got a freezer full of rappers." Part of the reason this album is so refreshing, is that Kweli doesn't mince words when being critical about the genre that he loves so much-or anything else.

Kweli returns to his biggest strengths-challenging the everyday perceptions that keep many in our country so stuck in the same place. He calls out the whiners that pollute the internet and airwaves with lyrics like "Stop it. With all the soap operas and the soap boxes" and "They're saying that we need a revolution, but their passion is reduced to all-caps on a computer."

All of this is set to a variety of uptempo beats, catchy hooks and notebooks full of thought-provoking metaphors. Chances are this will be his biggest album to date. But no matter what happens, Kweli will make out well, especially now that he has become a completely independent entity.

And don't forget that he sometimes pairs with Mos Def (now Yasmin Bey) in the legendary Black Star. Lesser known, is Idle Warship, an amazing electronica/rock/rap project with longtime collaborator Res.Some nights he just drops in and DJs at clubs to keep his feet to the ground. It's called creativity people. Keep goin' Kweli!


Here is the video of "High Life"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvTNj5--a9o

 Or a live version of "Turnt Up"
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTnxCmDXBsU

And finally, the GREAT Kweli classic "Get By"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2ou1Yh1IVY

When we were Kings

The Beet Seeking Missile was saddened to hear of the passing of the great Slayer guitarist/songwriter Jeff Hanneman earlier today. The musician had been suffering from a terrible flesh-eating disease called Necrotizing Fasciitis that he contracted from a spider bite a couple of years ago while on tour in South America. He perished from liver failure related to the condition. Hanneman was 49 years old.

Born in Oakland, California, the young Hanneman was fascinated by his father's tales of World War II as well as his older brother's experiences in the Vietnam War. Much of this influenced his songwriting, which often portrayed the starkness of war and other dark aspects of the human condition. Additionally, he was raised by these men to become a huge Raiders fan. It was no great irony, when years later, the first full-length Slayer concert video was shot by NFL Films. 

He met guitarist Kerry King in 1981 and after forming Slayer together, the two quickly became the twin demons of thrash in a band that was the epitome of speed metal with a punk attitude. The band became a favorite of both punks and metalheads with their no holds barred approach, propelling them on a similar tangent with Metallica, to become the twin kings of the thrash ranks.

 Much of their music was characterized by big, fast, memorable riffs and Hanneman's chaotic phrasing, that always contained an element or two of beautiful, twisted melody. He was a fan favorite who went all out onstage every night, sporting Dead Kennedys stickers on his guitar and a Raiders jersey on his person.
Hanneman wrote or cowrote many of the band's most recognizable songs including "Angel of Death," "Seasons in the Abyss" and "Behind the crooked cross." Although his health had kept him off the road for the last couple of years, at the time of his death, he was reportedly working on new Slayer material.

The Beet Seeking Missile first saw Slayer on the Reign in Blood tour in 1986 at the El Dorado Saloon in Sacramento. That album, still the best 29 minutes of metal ever recorded, was played in it's entirety in front of the kind of fierce crowd that came to define the band's fan base for the next 25 years. I was completely blown away by the aggressive attack coming through the Marshall stacks and once made the mistake of wandering too close to King's stack-and still have a decent amount of ear damage to show for it.

I don't recall the final count of Slayer shows I've been to over the years but it's probably about fifteen. Every one of those shows became a great place to meet up with some of my dearest music following friends over the years. Slayer continues to inspire an unparalled tribal passion amongst the lovers of their music.

As a writer, my personal highlight occurred near the beginning of the Seasons in Abyss tour at the Henry J. Kaiser in Oakland. The band had just returned from Egypt, where they had shot the video for the title track and had ridden all night by bus to get to the venue after getting off a plane in L.A.

I encountered a drowsy looking Hanneman walking toward the dressing room and introduced myself . I asked him if I could have an interview. He said he wasn't really awake yet, but to hit him up after the show and he'd be glad to talk. At that, he sat down, cracked open a St.Pauli Girl and started a video game (Super Nintendo).

After an epic set, I waited backstage as the band entertained a huge entourage of well wishers and starstruck folks. When Hanneman had signed his share of autographs, he sought me out and we sat down for an interview where he was glad to answer any and all questions that I had for him. Very polite and professional and a hell of a nice fellow. It amazed me that this writer of so many dark classics was so affable in the way of The Dude from The Big Lebowski.

The last time I saw Slayer was at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium was a few years back and the band was still bringing it with the same fierceness as their early days. The bloodlust "Slay-er! Slay-er! Slay-er!" chants of their fans were filled the air with the same passion as the early days. I recalled how fighter pilots in the Gulf War had requested Slayer's "War Ensemble" to be blared on the runways of Kuwait before they took off on missions over Iraq.
 I had recently seen a great documentary about Muhammad Ali's 1974 "Rumble in the jungle" with George Foreman in Zaire called "When we were Kings." The locals despised Foreman because he had traveled to Zaire with a German Shepard. Little did he know, when he got off the plane with that dog, that the Dutch Imperialists who controlled the country had used that breed to viciously control unruly crowds who had the audacity to rise up against them. Thus the locals would chant "Ali boma ye, Ali boma ye" which translates to "Ali, kill him" as Ali went on training runs on the rural roads of the country.

Naturally, I had to try out a little "Slayer, boma ye!" on this rabid crowd of loyalists. It seemed to click. Fitting, since like Ali, the band remain kings to many of their fans all over the world.
Jeff Hanneman, you will be sorely missed.

Long Live Slayer! And Long Live the memory of the great Jeff Hanneman! Feel free to share your Slayer and Jeff Hanneman memories with The Beet Seeking Missile.

Chemical Warfare '85

 Seasons in the Abyss-The Video