It’s a weird phenomenon: We keep playing, and kids are having a great time every summer.

We’ve picked up a comparable following, I guess. We wanted to make sure we tour every summer, regardless of our records, because we’re here to play live music. We don’t want to spend a summer getting away from the people.

And soon the people will be blessed with another full-length, this one helmed by Bob “Some Kind Of Mixer” Rock!

So far, [the record is] sounding like 311, just with Bob Rock helping us get the roadmaps and the energy of the songs down, in how he’s recording it. We’ve experimented a lot in recent years and shifted this way and that way, and with the current climate out there, with record sales, it could be a coincidence that [our sales] just went down, down, down because of the Internet, or maybe we’ve been too experimental. Maybe we should get back to the basics — the 311 basics.

Judging by their drum sound on songs like 2004’s “First Straw,” Dr. Rock sounds like the perfect fit.

In high school, I wrote a two-out-of-ten review of 311’s Transistor for the teen page of my local paper, which ran the same day as their headlining show. Mark McGrath, of opening act Sugar Ray, actually called out the piece on stage, finding fault in claims like “bevy of crap,” “tuneless drivel,” and “Vanilla Ice performing at Disney’s Tiki Tiki Room.” Over ten years later, they’re still playing godawful reggae-metal, and I’m still being paid to say they suck. Some things never change.

311 Are The New Grateful Dead, Drummer Chad Sexton Says Before Tour With Snoop Dogg [MTV]
311 – First Straw [YouTube]

Planned concerts at the PNC Bank Arts Center that will presumably allow tailgating include James Taylor, The Ringo Starr All-Starr Band, Chicago/Doobie Brothers, John Mellencamp, Rush, Donna Summer, Joe Cocker/Steve Miller, Kenny Chesney, Yes, James Blunt, The Police/Elvis Costello, Maroon 5/Counting Crows, Judas Priest, Boston and the Jonas Brothers. Aside from the Jonas Brothers (whose prepubescent fans love to get hiiiiiigh don’t you know), all these acts are aimed at audiences well above drinking age, unless accompanied by a parent. But what about Warped? Ozzfest? Well, those shows won’t be happening at the venue at all.

“We need to teach kids that getting out of control in the parking lot is not cool,” Live Nation New York president Kevin Morrow told a small audience at Holmdel High School last month. “We have tried to get some of the more sober musicians to do public service announcements, but they don’t want to be the poster child for it.”

“I have never had someone die at one of my shows,” Morrow also said. “So, we decided to remove shows like Ozzfest, the Mayhem Tour and Warped Tour.”

Seeing as how teenage revelry isn’t solely a Jersey thing, can we assume other LiveNation-booked ampitheatres (there are about 40) will soon enact similar plans, or will this be forgotten in a year? Could this signal the end of youth-oriented festivals that stoners can be stoned at?

Tailgating Banned at John Mayer, 311 Shows [Spinner]

My least favorite year of the ’90s–while it was happening and in retrospect alike–was 1996. Here are ten reasons why:

Billboard’s Top 10 Modern Rock Hits of 1996
1. Bush, “Swallowed” (Trauma/Interscope)
2. Primitive Radio Gods, “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” (Columbia)
3. Oasis, “Champagne Supernova” (Epic)
4. 311, “Down” (Capricorn)
5. The Cranberries, “Salvation” (Island)
6. Sublime, “What I Got” (Gasoline Alley/MCA)
7. Butthole Surfers, “Pepper” (Capitol)
8. Alanis Morissette, “Ironic” (Maverick)
9. Tracy Bonham, “Mother Mother” (Polygram)
10. Eels, “Novocaine For the Soul” (DreamWorks)

I began the year unemployed. New Year’s Eve I’d walked out of my job as a line cook at Figlio, an Italian place in uptown Minneapolis that was open late. I left in the middle of a midnight rush two hours after I’d been scheduled out. That set the tone. In 1996 I had ten jobs in two cities, usually two at a time, the longest for four-and-a-half months. That August I moved away from Minneapolis for the first time, to Seattle. That Christmas, a foot of snow fell on Seattle, the most the city had seen in decades. I will never forget walking through the streets of Lower Queen Anne, near the Pagliacci Pizza where I worked, as all that show turned into slush, because it never snows in Seattle, and the city doesn’t own snow plows.

In Seattle, I lived first in a hostel-turned-flophouse, six to a room, populated by bad-tempered alcoholics with money they’d earned fishing in Alaska. Then I moved to Aurora, home of by-the-hour motels, with a short, squat dominatrix who had a five-year-old son; she withheld rent and got us kicked out in mid-January 1997, whereupon I moved back to Minneapolis. Cue Primitive Radio Gods: “I’ve been downhearted, baby, I’ve been down, I’ve been downhearted, baby, eeever since the day we met.”

In Minneapolis, my first job of ‘96 was at a place called Murray’s, where I worked the pantry for two months before quitting in bullshit solidarity when a coworker was fired, a metalhead named Dano whom I barely knew. It was simply the intoxication of being newly 21 and knowing I could, like, just leave. The music didn’t help. At my previous job I brought tapes; here, we listened to commercial-and-announcement-free radio, programmed for in-store/restaurant listening. This being Minneapolis in the mid-’90s, the station we heard every day was the alt-rock one. It was always an up to catch Spacehog’s “In the Meantime,” still one of my favorite one-shots from the period, but that high was always offset by Oasis. You could set your watch by when “Champagne Supernova,” all 875 godforsaken minutes of it, would appear: “Someday you will find me/Caught beneath the laaaandsliiiiide.”

My other big radio job in Minneapolis that year was at Keys Café, next to Let It Be Records on 10th and Nicollet; both are gone now, replaced by condos. Keys was a great breakfast place in the grand Midwestern tradition of cheese piled on starch and set to bake; they made excellent soup and burgers, too, though at the time I was a pseudo-vegetarian and only ate those every few days. The cooks listened to Rev 105, a short-lived, well-loved modern-rock station whose format (alt-rock peppered with oldies and yuppie-friendly mainstream stuff) would prove influential. (Its programming director, Kevin Cole, now helms Seattle’s KEXP.) This is where I learned to hate “Salvation” and not-quite-recognize either the Tracy Bonham or Eels songs unless I was looking at the titles; it’s where I learned to find Sublime vaguely repellent; it’s where I realized “Ironic” had the effect of metal tweezer-ends coming apart between teeth rows. Oh, the memories.

In June, my friend Jeremy, several of his friends and roommates, and I were to set out for the open road, armed with frayed paperback copies of the basic counterculture library and the clothes on our backs. Destination: San Francisco. (Where else?) Soon everyone bailed except Jeremy, myself, and his annoying new girlfriend, who vaguely resembled Agent 99 from Get Smart as a pothead. The three of us set out in a rickety van in August; within two weeks I would be en route to Seattle in a Greyhound. Instead of going the direct route, after a couple days in rural Minnesota with 99’s family we went through Sioux Falls, S.D., to see Jeremy’s uncle, who would put us up for a couple days in his house.

That stopover was the beginning of the end for me: Jeremy and 99 were essentially breaking up on the road, and I, fifth wheel, was growing agitated. Their insistence on listening to Rusted Root–a band worse than any in the Modern Rock Top 10, even–didn’t help. Soon after arriving at the house, I called my mother collect from the basement and vented, loudly. Everyone in the house heard it, which I didn’t know for a couple of days; nor was I aware that Jeremy and 99 were planning to dump me on the side of the road. (They didn’t; we went another week before parting ways.) I deserved it at least as much as anyone else in the van.

Jeremy’s uncle, though, was wonderful, your classic hospitable Midwestern straight shooter. He worked for the Nabisco manufacturing plant, and when we left, he loaded us up with boxes of product. (Jeremy and I had wolfed down the Strawberry Newtons by the time we reached city limits; Chicken in a Biskit went next.) He was married with three sons, aged from about 10 to 15. Their basement had a computer, on which he let me write; I’d been struggling for a few weeks with something about some recent James Brown reissues for a zine, and I wrote some 8,000 words in pretty much one sitting, which was therapeutic. (This was back when I didn’t read what I’d written while I was writing it. You get a lot done that way.) Also in the basement was a rock-band setup: guitars, bass, drums, amps. It was soundproofed down there, and the boys, all polite and sweet-tempered, played well, took it seriously. They loved music a lot.

There was one band they loved more than anyone else. “You have to hear this,” one of them told me. “It’s the most radical thing I’ve ever heard.” They explained that this group was doing things no one had ever done before, combining things in unexpected new ways that blew apart what had previously, to them, been immobile divisions. That’s not how they put it, of course, but that was the effect.

I braced myself. I didn’t expect John Zorn or Plunderphonics, but maybe I’d hear Beck’s Odelay. I’d read about it in Spin and Rolling Stone before it came out and figured it had to be the most mind-bending record of the age; then I bought it the day of release and it sounded seamless and tepid. I remember thinking, “Well, someone thought this thing was groundbreaking. Maybe it’s these kids.” Then they put the tape in and hit play. Out came 311’s “Down.”

My first instinct, as a 21-year-old big-city music-geek jerk, was to laugh. I didn’t, though–I couldn’t. I was dumbfounded. I didn’t make a sound. I just listened. I knew the song already; it was on the radio, in the air. It was ludicrous, Rage Against the Machine retrofitted for the Ernie and Bert Super Bubblebath-Time Cassette Deck. I looked at the kids while they listened to it. Their eyes went wide, mouths partly open. A month earlier I’d had the same expression listening for the first time to Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly,” on Get Up with It, which I’d bought on vinyl at Let It Be Records, next door to my job at Keys, an album I’d wanted to hear for years, a song that surpassed my expectations for it. The kids’ expressions said what I remember thinking: I can’t believe someone actually made this. I can’t believe this really exists. Someone just opened a door to a place I always wanted to exist but never dreamed could. Everything changes now.

For years I thought small towns were fiction. My logic went something like this: People think Minneapolis is a small town, but it’s not. It’s a big city. Therefore, small towns must be more like big cities than not. This works wonderfully well if you’ve only lived in one city your whole life, but the illusion generally breaks apart once you’ve traveled somewhere larger, more cosmopolitan. I’d already done that, though, when I’d gone to Chicago for a rave the summer before. Sure, I spent a couple days in Evanston, but that was a college town. Sioux Falls wasn’t, not the same way. Culture wasn’t an industry here; it was something you either were handed or found, and if you were lucky it opened a door you didn’t know about.

The song ended. The boys looked at me. “What do you think?” they asked. “That’s cool,” I said. I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t lying, either.