The
Void
Prey
for us
AFTER THE SHOWGIRLS
-Bound years, I was sure Gina Gershon was headed straight to the top on a Concorde supersonic jet plane. I thought she would be a household name. She sure got mentioned a lot in my apartment. Seven years later, though, the camera never pans to her face during Oscar reaction shots, and I had to go to Internet Movie Database to learn she was dating one of the Wilson brothers. None of that seems right.
Time out of the hot Hollywood spotlight has given her the opportunity to take a few roles I can't imagine Julia, Meg, or Cameron handling without the protection of a hazmat suit (such as 1997's brother-on-sister action thriller This World, Then the Fireworks, adapted from the supremely fucked-up book by supremely fucked-up pulp writer Jim Thompson). Still, while watching Gina die horribly in a botched back-alley abortion in This World, or get dragged across a bloody hotel bathroom floor with shards of glass sticking out of her throat in Olivier Assayas's new Demonlover, is preferable to not seeing Gina at all, I feel a lot better knowing she got up off the bathroom floor to rock another day, as demonstrated by her upcoming tour in support of the movie Prey for Rock and Roll (opening in San Francisco Oct. 3).
That's right, rock 'n' roll kids. Owing to a sudden burst of dual-genre Gina saturation, fans can preface their screen viewing of Gina – playing an L.A. rocker with 20 scene years under her spiked belt and no clue why she's still strapping her guitar on each weekend – with a live show Sept. 28 at the Great American Music Hall, where Gina will be performing songs from the movie soundtrack (for which she did all the vocals and cowrote one number with Linda Perry).
Said songs could be served with some nice crackers, but you know what?
It will no doubt be worth it, because Gina knows what to do with center
stage – like, for example, when she flashed the crowd in an extremely
see-through blouse at the closing-night screening of the Gay and Lesbian
Film Festival, where Prey for Rock and Roll had its S.F. debut.
I only hope the boys of Girls Against Boys, who will be backing her
up (why?) at the Great American as well as playing a set of their own,
know enough to stay out of her way. Gina Gershon performs Sun/28,
8 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $15. (415) 885-0750.
(Lynn Rapoport)
Conan Neutron's life
cycle of a band
'Local band'
So you've passed the 10-show boundary. "Wow, dude, who'd have thought? Remember that time at the Stork when ..." Yeah, yeah, whatever. Congratulations. You've gone through the embryonic phase and are now a "local band." This doesn't need to be a derogatory term. It does make you a tiny little fish in a huge pond, though. So now it's time to finely hone what makes the band interesting or unique and build off of that. What are the band's strengths? Weaknesses? What works? What doesn't? What makes your band different from other bands? Do people leave wanting more? Always, always, leave them wanting more. Ask the questions – improve the band; it's a simple thing. It's also time for some Darwinian song culling; just like Old Yeller, it's time for the "OK" songs to go away and for newer, better songs to replace them. When the set is strong and the band is well practiced and thoroughly rested, then it's ... time to record!
