I just bought tickets to see the Noise Pop presentation of one of my favorite bands of all time, Archers of Loaf, at the Great American Music Hall.

AOL were one of about twenty Chapel Hill bands that I used to follow and occasionally work with, back in the day.

edit to add:

ok, stop the presses. Chris wrote back to say:

haha not working now but i’m with a sf-focused website, the bold italic.

edit to add: i just sent a text to Chris Appelgren, who is part of the Palo Alto Rock and Roll archvie, as part of my series of semi-pathetic push the envelope “ticket request” riffs.    Verbatim:

Dude can you please sort me w a pass to say hi to Eric Bachman 2nite at GAMH I bought 2 thx for 63 bucks. Mark Weiss earthwise palo alto you know, who intro’d you and Mollie to tory maya ar ba. Weirdly i bought a pee chee folder just yest tks

Here I am repasting something I wrote for the other AOL last fall:

Terry and I watched two hours of the Stanford versus San Jose State football game Saturday, which Stanford won 57-3 behind Heisman candidate Andrew Luck’s leadership, and some stalwart defense against their south Santa Clara County brothers-in-pads.

We had comp tickets courtesy of Terry’s employment at the Stanford Hospital. We had relatively mixed loyalties in that neither of us is a Stanford alum. Terry got her MFA, and my mother a BA in Sociology, from San Jose State (and I a Master’s from Berkeley) that she completed while I was in high school, as a returning student.

But despite these factors, and my predilection towards underdogs, I found myself quite partisan and quickly jumping on the bandwagon for David Shaw’s boys. I took a cue from the souvenir drink tumbler I bought and cheered for #3 Michael Thomas the FS to keep up the tough coverage — not that he heard me from the opposite goal-line and three fourths of the way to Sky City.

I snapped one photo, of Luck’s 2Q third-and-goal touchdown to Ryan Hewitt that made it 27-0. We left the game after a couple series of the second half. For music lovers, I recall the band playing Green Day’s “Welcome to Paradise” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” in reference to their visit to Miami and The Orange Bowl last January. I imagine there is an app or site that chronicles their entire playlist deadbase.

Meanwhile I was thinking back to 7th grade at Terman in 1978 and riding my bike to games to watch Darrin Nelson, Ken Margerum, et al. I remember sitting with throngs of my classmates and shredding the Stanford Daily into confetti. I have to admit I miss the old bowl and its simplicity — none of this two-tier complexity.

A beyond-football highlight Saturday was chatting with Ellen Fletcher the former Palo Alto Council member and bike route activist, who was volunteering her time at Silicon Valley Bike Coalition corral.

My mind for several days, and various blog posts, was also preoccupied during the game with the prospects of Archers of Loaf (AOL) doing a reunion tour and playing two nights at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. The Archers were indie darlings from Chapel Hill, North Carolina music scene who re-formed this year after a hiatus. I recall that the night in March 1995 they played Cubberley (with Plexi, and Frightwig, who included my Terman and Gunn classmate Mia Levin) there was so much rain that the Sharks game was cancelled. When the band finally showed up a couple hours late, they were like gods crossing the Atlantic to the new world.

When they returned to Cubberley in 1998, with Beulah, I made a poster with a likeness of Muhammed Ali, in reference to the AOL song “The Greatest of All Time.”

It would be great to get bands like Archers of Loaf to start playing Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto; I actually left a voice mail to their agent Jim Romeo of Ground Control Touring in North Carolina asking if the band could play a nooner in Palo Alto — I was thinking Lytton Plaza — on behalf of the Varsity Theatre Revival campaign, which I also call Last Picture Waltz initiative, but got no response yet. We ended up grilling rather than going into the City to hear music.

I’ve posted here a couple versions of AOL’s most famous song “Web in Front.” I have no idea what it is about; something about unrequited love, or not giving up, or admitting some emotions are out of proportion. The refrain says “All I ever wanted was to be your spine.”

Yeah, it’s a possibility. (Stanford national champions, AOL playing The Varsity).

Things are probably going to get weird. (that’s a bad lyric misquote — which reminds me that today is also the first practice of a new band that I am co-leading working title in the Frank Portman sense One Day Vacation (with an extra space between Day and Vacation) that does voice and piano reworkings of Tracy Chapman)

There’s a possibility. Or should I say: throw me in the river — or creek in this case:

in honor of Archers and Appelgren, I may have to stet and officially change the name of the archive to the Palo Alto Rock and Roll Archvie or Archvee — AOL cd is called “Vee Vee” get it?

also, god i wrote laos, — i must be thinking khmer, like me’s thao dao zee avi — me like when i can finally check the “chapel hill” box, to the right. “austistic” means austin, as in what i am missing this year both music conference, tom petty at basketball arena may 5 and NCAA even if mizzou goes i am still hand to mouth and out of pocket — other than the big splurge tonight for all time sake. or maybe i can dig a stack of posters from my warehouse and sell 5 of them at $20 each. Yes! look for me on O’Farrell… password, for five bucks off is “wurster means sausage-maker” — fuck if you say that you get a free poster.

Appelgren texted back instantaneously — and this is all at the very non-rock and roll like at 830 am on a Saturday — to say he is no longer with Noise Pop but declined to elaborate on what exactly he is doing in its stead. I texted him that “You are still charter member Palo Alto Rock and Roll Archvie nonetheless. Mbw

stopthepresses: appelgren did write back to say that he is working for a website called the bold italic. which immediately sent me back to reverie and my days in the late 1980s as an advertising copywriter wanna-be (truth be told) and although I generally do not talk about this stuff and generally never mention the actual firms madison avenue outlets local yokels or santa clara valley nobodies or nobody dies that i once ran with — why give the bastards the satisfaction if that does not sound like so many sour NEW AND IMPROVED EXTRA SOUR! grapes AND DANCING RAISINS ? — there was a story about Andy Berlin, the failed Duke graduate songwriter who became a multi-millionaire agency founder, along with Jeff Goodby the failed Harvard hockey player and Richie Silverstein the failed “C-print” guy — he was like Michelle Budziak, printing other people’s film — not that Michelle is not a goddess of emulsion and glass and more — they were the got milk guys, and Andy is also heard on many voice overs ala one of his mentors Hal Riney — god, I cannot believe I am being like the Holinshed of the SF Ad Scene — anyhoo, so the otry is that at an Ad Club meeting designed to lure and entice would-be Goodby’s and all that, people putting their books together, entice and inspire, of mess with our heads — I used the word “duplicitous” vis a vis City Council and Giant Search Engine Bogus Pr Contest Scam yesterday in another pub == there was a slide on the wall of a hip funny ad, by GBS, and some dweeb raised his hand and said something to the effect that the font chosen was inappropriate or too small. So allegedly Berlin, who rolled in rather cavalierly and maybe had a twelve-pack which he maybe shared with his lackeys, plants or just those “close enough to smell him” (which is a Jeremy not Lin but Postaer reference, about getting good seats at the Warriors), Berlin said:

YOU MEAN IF THE HEADLINE WAS 36 POINT BOLD ITALIC IT WOULD BE BIGGER THAN YOUR DICK? or perhaps he said

YOU MEAN IF THE HEADLINE WAS 36 POINT BOLD ITALIC IT WOULD LOOK LIKE YOUR DICK?

italic in this case meaning perhaps “bent”.

But I was not there and subsequently in either alluding to this eliptically — and you can guess that I have been elliptical since before Euclid even — directly to Andy Berlin or in discussing it with others, no one on the planet but two people, and these two people apparently went to the event together recall this as actually having happened – -which is why I call it, to Chris Appelgren — FOUNDER OF PEE CHEES THE BAND, OWNER OF LOOKOUT I almost wrote Lock Out as in NBA THE LABEL  AND I FORGET THE NAME OF YOUR MORE RECENT BAND ALTHOUGH I DID BUY THE CD AND I RECALL LIKING THE COVER, THE COOL FONT YOU CHOSE FOR BAND LOGO OR NAME

which reminds me of my pleasant chat with a KPFA phone-womaner yesterday about Naomi Klein “No Logo” and something about Shock of War Pinochet and Friedman book and movie, but I digress

ok, if i can pull this altogether I will outro with Chris Appelgren recent band at Youtube:

my KZSU show within a show was called “fits the format” but might have been “fits the pattern” — here i use “ethniceities” for the same code, for “jewish”