Above photo by Andrew Quist in 2011 courtesy of Fast Atmosphere Mother Hips website. Hips are celebrating 20 years as a rock and roll band, and extended family or brotherhood.

Off the top of my head, I can think of four places I did shows with the Hips in Palo Alto: two shows at Cubberley, one duo show at Stanford CoHo and a biggish free show at City Hall Plaza as part of the post-race festivities of the Chronicle Classic 5-mile run.

Mother Hips play tonight at Oakland at Fox Theatre — Terry and I are opting for something less interesting, burritos or Chinese take-out at some friends’ house and perhaps not sleeping thru a screening of “The Hobbit-2”.

Mother Hips also played the Edge several times, produced in-house by the club.

Dave Schwartz of Fast Atmoshphere had sent me archive tapes of the two Cubberley shows; he may have a complete set of all Mother Palo Alto Hips events.

I have some posters by Jon and I, and abstracted photoshopped nude by Ruth Bernhard.

(“Stet” to mis-identifying the web host company two graphs above)

The other Palo Altism that comes to mind is that Tim and Greg were originally in a band with Ali Weiss, Ali and the Cats — she is from here and I met her by phone for the first time about a year ago and chatted her up about all this. The four-disc retrospective the band put out recently includes a radio interview back in Chico from that period.

Not that I am that down with Gov. Jerry Brown, but I am sometimes tempted to write him a letter about some cultural protocol for honoring Mother Hips and “california soul”. I worked on his 1992 campaign for U.S. President when we both lived in SF.

Here’s a selfie back when you used a disposable camera with actual film, from that Stanford CoHo event, of Tim Bluhm and myselfie.

Another funny Earthwisism about the Hips is that I met Stanford basketball great 6’9″ Joe Kirchofer recently at a football game and he told me that he first discovered the band at that CoHo show I organized. (Seeing him at a Hips show I imagine is like seeing Bill Walton at the Dead).

Here are two posters from those days. 

Now that I am adopting the digitized protocol of music and using this fairly functional lapdance thingy, I am taking advantage of their free download offer. (but believe me, no matter how many more $10 billion dollar app deals there are, music and otherwise, you got to see Mother Hips live or you just don’t get it)

This one was for a run of shows that included Mother Hips and Train