litterbox

Mr. Clean's blues

by John O'Neill

OF ALL THE lunkheaded moves, giving up the drugs has to rank right up there. Maybe it was simply bad timing or, more likely, the shocking amount of free minutes a day contains to contemplate, when you aren't spending your awake time obsessing over how the hell to get to sleep. Either way, this new era that seems to be accompanying the new me is one that sends the mind reeling, as if everything went to shit all at once. Wall Street has become sell low, buy high; commercialism is the new patriotism; and chief executive officers rank a few notches below accounting departments when it comes to running the show. There are two Ramones down and two to go, and the sky may or may not be full of mysterious, noiseless, triangle-shaped crafts. Forests are burning, fish cross the street to kill other fish, and mosquitoes are the new terrorists. Little girls sleep under concrete slabs, an unmitigated half-wit who can't even pronounce "nuclear" is compared to Churchill, and computers build robots that create other, more perfect robots. Free speech, cheap oil, post-Sept. 11, 2001, pre-Sept. 11, 2002, beached whales, dirty bombs, Botox, Red Sox, Vin Diesel, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, surveillance laws, reverse engineering, stem cells, profiling, Armageddon, assorted Republican maniacs, useless sandbagging Democrats, a drooling pope. I mean, holy shit! What's it all about, Alfie? Not to suggest that these worries are solely my cross to bear – we're fucked in this together – but I can say they overwhelm the ol' gray matter twice as hard when you've recently decided to live life on a wing and a prayer. Which, in this case, happens to be Celebrex. And while that briefly magic pill created some golden low-grade-acid-like moments, it's now about as beneficial as a Flintstones chewable. I'd like to sing the blues, but that shouldn't be my turf under any circumstance. White people shouldn't sing the blues unless they're Johnny Walker.

The frontal figure for the Soledad Brothers, Walker is a savior, the one guy who can actually make up for all the Stevie Ray and Johnny Lang damage that litters the white blues landscape. Inconceivably, both he and drummer Ben Smith (the band is currently rounded out by ex-Greenhorne Brian Olive) have managed to lock on to the rawest and purest traditional form of the music and give it the sharp stick in the ass it's lacked for 40 years. Idiosyncratic, imperfect, soulful, and fierce, the Soledads' music is punk-rock attitude melded with Southern country fish fry, all-day sidewalk jamming, and White Panther power. It sounds like John Lee Hooker on an amphetamine jag, and it's knocking me silly and keeping me sane. With Walker, you get as close to a field holler as you're likely to get from a big-city med student, but then again, anyone who considers their adopted home of Detroit (a place that could conceivably not be front-page news if it were nuked) a step up from their real home, has probably earned the right to sing the blues. Soledad Brothers are not some cornball Chicago revival band – they roll in the rural delta mud and deliver acid-fried boogie-woogie with such purity that I can only shake the shack floorboards till the sweat washes me clean. And clean is what I'm all about these days.

Soledad Brothers and Sermon both waste the Makers, Fri/6, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. $10. (415) 621-4455.

E-mail John O'Neill at litterbox@sfbg.com.