Two videos from the last Starfish show...

Here's a couple more videos from the last Starfish show to get you all hyped up to come out Saturday night! Since most of you are anywhere but LA. Here's my acoustic version of "Bury Me In My Jetpack", and Tucker's "Christy Montana".

Frozen Foods in the Boston Phoenix

Writer Ben Westhoff covers some Frozen Food projects old and new in the Boston Phoenix this week, including a photo by our St. Louis friend Benjamin Shepard:

All-Ages Acoustic Madness with Tucker Booth

...at the Starfish Learning Center. It's my impression that this is the kind of venue that Ian MacKaye requires for a live show with his act, The Evens. Indeed, the show Tucker's pulled me aboard for is an all-ages show at an alternative learning center. And while it's not a kids' show, I had to design the flyer as such. 'Cause if there are kids there, dancing will be compulsory, if not, indeed, irresistible. Hope to see you in Hermosa Beach on December 1st!

Tucker Booth featured on Sunday night ABC? (update)

Last night I experienced a surreal mass media double take as my roommate watched a show that nobody's watching, "Brothers and Sisters" on ABC. It's Nielsens are comparable to SNL's all-time worst ratings, in the 4's, and because I watch television based strictly on ratings, I'd never seen it before.

But last night, my roommate calls me in and says, "They just said 'Tucker Booth' on this show." Obviously the writers had struck on some hot-button formula to hike the ratings, and it involved the ever-incendiary name, Tucker Booth. For those that don't know, Tucker Booth is quite the non-fiction artist who calls the Frozen Food Section and St. Louis home. He has, however, spent some legendary times living on the beaches on of LA.

So I come in to watch, and the characters start spouting off "Tucker Booth" like it was "Paris Hilton", and in the most fitting ways ...."She lost her virginity to a guy named Tucker Booth!" and "I got high for the first time with a guy named Tucker Booth" and "What should we do now? Google Tucker Booth!"

My roommate and I are looking at each other in disbelief. It was as if the legendary underground had poked it's head up into mass media and looked around for a bit. It's not too much of a stretch for me to think that some writer in LA actually has heard about Tucker Booth and decided to throw it in just for kicks. The name is comic, and people frequently ask him if it's a stage name, which it isn't. And The Frozen Food Section does have the peeps in LA who perpetuate the myths. (We pay them to.) But to see it pop up on a middling Sunday-evening snoozer about red state-blue state family tensions was surreal.

In the final scene, the whole family of 10 or more is sitting around the table in awkward conversation, and someone says "Tucker Booth?" and everyone busts out laughing, like it's a in-joke between the whole family. Which, I guess, is what they call art mirroring life.

If the show was more of a hit, I'm sure you could find some clips on YouTube. But on the odd chance that somebody TiVoed it by accident, upload that gold! The Frozen Food Section needs a copyright cause to fight!

UDPATE:

Here's a link to a transcript with video. Somehow I missed the gay sex implications while watching it live.

And it's popped up in a number of blogs this morning too. Search Google Blogs.

Tucker Booth attacked metaphorically!

Aight then, it's after midnight and I know I'm not going to be waking up in time for some basketball tomorrow, so I'm fixing to lay into a good blog before bed. Since maestromie, my homie Tucker never blogs, I've gotta relay the sweet sweet tidings delivered at the Venice Cafe recently, just west of the brewery in St. Louis. (The brewery thing is metaphorically instrumental in here.)

Tucker's life is an ongoing escapade of one pretty caper after another, and he recently had his guitar stolen. This is more than a bummer, as he makes his money with his guitar on the streets of St. Louis. So I lent him my guitar for the show, and we planned to duet on a couple rock songs he wrote at 16 years old. This sounded good, as I hadn't played the Venice since 2000, before I emigrated from the motherland.

Understand now that conflict dogs Tucker like scandal on republican. (e.g.) Everywhere he goes, people love him or swing at him. In this way, he's a pretty good barometer for personal issues. If people have some deep-seated crap they can't resolve, they may find Tucker a pretty good conduit for grounding them. Not in a "let's discuss" kind of way, but in a "when jealousy attacks" kind of way.

The night was mellow enough to start. Right off the bat, Tucker drops his own "Having Fun with Poetry," a song that dares the bar crowd to question his hip-hop sincerity. He also panders, dropping a few covers to assuage the typical bar distaste for anything "different". And then he taunts the red-staters, assuring them that all is right with our Lord and Saviour George W. Bush. In usual fashion, one fan polarizes with Tucker, applauds endlessly after every song and buys a copy of the album. Another begs to know if his parents really named him Tucker Booth. He shows her his driver's license.

Now at the other pole;

I'm up with Tuck to sing I Love You, a pop confection he wrote with his high school band, Sweetland. As we're bantering it up before the song, dude with the backwards cap says, "How much for a cd?" Not bad; two cd sales from a crowd of 15 or so. Tucker says, "Ten or best offer." So the dude ponies up eight bucks and gets his cd.

Good feelings, record sales, party times, in front of everybody, the dude breaks the album in half and goes back to the bar.

This was a classic moment. There aren't too many interpretations of what the guy intended to communicate, but the whole place went quiet to figure it out anyway. And Tucker says, "What do you know, it took a year to create and two seconds for a douchebag to break it in half."

Backwards hat mumbles something, and Tucker says, "You didn't even pay the full ten bucks!"

"You said 'or best offer,'" the dude says.

"Well here's my best offer," Tucker says and flips him the bird. We dedicate the song, "I Love You", to him. After the song, the guy following our set tries to cut our mic. What the hell is going on here? The guy says he thought we were going to have words with the activist at the bar.

Yes, cut our mic, we're going to start a bar fight.

After one more song, our followup decides he's ready to take the stage and proceeds with some faithful renditions of Dave Matthews and Foo Fighters. Great, now we have testosterone at the bar and top 40 at the mic, and strangely enough, they're totally there for each other. Strange coalition. We later learned that the guy who booked the show had intended Tucker to be the headliner.

Oh well. The live art showcase with brothers Jim Mahfood and DJ Mahf was commencing at the Red Sea and we hit that up. It definitely saved the night.

Nietzsche once said there was "too much beer in the German intellect." The same might be said about the St. Louis economy, or the American political discourse, or whatever; I don't wanna discourse about aggression towards "different" in the Midwest. I'll leave that to you. But man, talk about a microcosm of America.