The full Herb Caen[s] (+ mo'!)
w/: Sactown Greg’s guitar + Bam 83, Kobe 81 + my Bako ICE snapshot
Editor’s note: Welcome to the new weekly WCS format that is bound to remind you of the old one… or, maybe put you in mind of shrinkflation. The old countdown just kept growing longer and longer and with each 2025 edition I began to suspect that no one was reading to my posts’ conclusion, where the choicest goodies would sometimes lay.
Today’s iteration looks a lot like the joint you’ve been hitting for two-and-a-half years. Big diff, headline aside? This post contains only a third of the old-school sort’s news entries. It also happens to be festooned with way more bells and whistles, proportionally.
Have at it.
3 A belated farewell to CAKE’s original guitarist
Downtown Sacramento’s Channel 24 isn’t a venue I’ve yet hit, but the idea of trekking up back up to Northern Cali so that I can be a part of next weekend’s sold-out shows has hassled the back of my mind as much as anything related to my new, seemingly bottomless list of jobs that is my independent paperback publishing side hustle.
More on that last part below.
Full disclosure, for the newcomers who may still need it: I’m an old-school fan of CAKE’s economic sound stylings. (Stockton’s Pavement is—of course—the most epic Central Valley rock combo. Evah.) Back in 95, the fellas played my Golden Gate Park wedding, and bandleader John McCrea remains a comrade who will play me new music in weird Portland places. He’s the one who turned me on to three upcoming River City shows, the first hometown concerts since last month’s passing of founding member Greg Brown. He was 54.
Ain’t gonna be a whole bunch of objectivity jumpin’ off in the next clutch of paragraphs.
Since I was first catching CAKE on Kennel Club and I-Beam undercards, I stayed happily startled by Brown’s idiosyncratic playing, which McCrea aptly described as “messy, and precise, and inherently musical.”
“[H]e was really good at just really precise, detail-oriented, contrapuntal expression,” McCrea told Capitol Public Radio. (The three gigs’ proceeds go to KVMR and Sacramento Public Radio, absolutely a Comrade McCrea move.)
These artists were the very first that I successfully championed, reviewing CAKE’s demo for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Brown’s innovative guitar led the way, along with John’s insanely specific lyricism and trumpeter Vince di Fiore’s rock Hall of Fame-worthy contribution.
The widely-mourned Brown’s identifying axe was a 1965 Guild Starfire, a hollow-body electric deal that he would run through a distortion pedal and into a Silvertone amp— perfect for the aforementioned grimy, grinding, messy-yet-somehow-precise sound. Greg Brown was an avatar of late-20th-century minimalist rock guitar.
His style came across as effortless, unless you noticed his back’s slight practice hunch.
Bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse
An insanely fun fact I gleaned while learning what would be necessary to write on Brown’s passing: The band came up with the bones of their biggest hit, “The Distance” on the same day they played Al’s Bar, the legendary LA Arts District dive. They were busking near Canter’s Deli, over on Fairfax, and minutes before hitting the Al’s Bar stage that night, the band sat down with my ex and I to firm up plans for the Saturday night wedding celebration up north, in that park.
Now, rock bands are like thruples in that no one can see inside. From the outside though? It struck me that Brown’s also being a songwriter functioned as both gift and curse. McCrea may have been the principle tune scribe, but Greg Brown wrote the one that got this small Sacramento band big.
“The success of that song put such a strain on us personally,” said drummer Todd Roper would tell Billboard. “We weren’t strong enough between the five of us in a personal sense to hold it together, to survive the weight that was thrust onto us once the success began to arrive.”
Within a year, Brown and bassist Victor Damiani split. No one asked for this divorce. In shallow retrospect, even Comrade John thought the break-up hella dumb.
“Musically, there was a really great symbiosis and I really felt that it (their departures, especially Brown's) was the most stupid thing in the world,” McCrea told something called The Gazette in 1998. With Vic, Brown next formed Death Ray, which did not stand out. CAKE’s next single was the jam “Never There.”
Greg would go on to get a master’s degree in music composition, to match with his bachelor’s in business, and put out a lot solo work. Dude got a gig with the City of Sacramento and worked that until dying of a brief illness last month.
As with the recent passings of James Bernard, Todd Snider, and Sascha Jenkins, this peer death felt uncomfortably personal. I hadn’t even heard of the “drop dead 50s” until these guys started falling out. (Thanks a lot, fellas!) There’s something elegant though about quitting the game while the getting is good and exploring mid-size hometown life. (Dropping dead? Not so much, ofc.)
The sold out all-ages shows at Channel 24 ought to crackle with emotion. Fans have a way of giving back, and the guitarist who will be absent contributed to a massive thrill that Sacramento won’t produce again. A decades-in-the-making recoil is coming to town. How many emotions can a single club hold?
Lil Hit
A new study shows that Mary Jane may be a “gateway” to female orgasm. Do with that information what you must.
Marijuana Moment
Gustavo Arellano supports your love of The OC
The exceptional Los Angeles Times columnist came in hot to start his recent conversation with me and Lev Anderson. Then we went deep on the origins of “Ask a Mexican,” Arellano’s ground-breaking OC Weekly column from the aughts. Then dudely gave up the general scoop on ICE in LA, circa 2026. And, my guy showed an Orange County love that’s so full of complexity that, well… I ain’t nevah doin’ that shit, but you do you, homey.
This consistently hilarious and insightful pod ep pairs well with 72nd Assembly District candidate Chris Kluwe conversation.
The full Herb Caen
Attempting to accurately analyze a whole-ass liar in real time is the ultimate fool’s errand…
When a NYT political gatekeeper asked Rebecca Solnit if progressives hadn’t erred by loudly calling out Trump’s fascism and racism, she didn’t say, “If you don’t get the fuck out of my motherfuckin’ face with that bullshit …
I’d have said, If you don’t get the fuck out of my face with that mutha-fuck-in’ bullshit…
At minimum I’da told em this…
If Train Dreams had played out in, say, Gold Country rather than the map spot where Eastern Washington, Idaho, and the Canadian border connect, the flick might not be such a hellacious Oscars underdog…
How wrong is it wrong that an Epstein suicide betting pool has been gestating in my mind?
This. Is. The Rollout.
Through Saturday, I’ll be scribin’ out here in the Mojave Desert—miles beyond Joshua Tree—almost completely losing myself in my world of sentences. By Sunday I gotta get back to LA and jerk over to extraversion, on account of this extravagant party that I’m having to launch the paperback iteration of Ghetto Celebrity, my turn-of-the-century memoir.
With its new Introduction and photography that depicts some of the story’s main characters, my first book… I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but… my literary debut entertained the shit out of me upon fully engaging the text for the first time in 15 years. Some readers of the hardcover may not have noticed that my prose included no years, but moved the narrative along via popular culture occurrences—a risky prognostication gambit if there ever was one.
I’m sayin’ though: Diddy and DeAngelo show up on the story’s very last page, which plays out in 2001 Manhattan. And God knows I’m funny. Some sections of Ghetto Celebrity I’ve read 30 times, and that shit still had me ROFL.
Apologies for the bragging—this item is promotional and turning y’all off would be counterproductive—but as I often tell people: Putting out this memoir ruined my career, though beautifully. Getting to taste the obvious, non-ironic benefits of my labor has been a long time coming.
Here’s author and 2024 WCS podcast guest RK Byers’ brief assessment of Ghetto Celebrity:
(Look for more writer takes on GC in its March run-up to publication. The next bit may be coming from France.)
As mentioned, there’s this fantastic party happening in Northeast LA, on the local holiday called Oscar Sunday. Though civilians may struggle with the concept, the party is necessary, a building block of a dark-horse product’s publicity.
As a broke-ass writer, I’m fortunate to have woke-ass friends who appreciate what I do. (Subscribers can peruse Chef Wendy Zeng’s genius menu, which is based on the “New Spain” film script that I’m scribblin’ on in the desert, miles beyond Joshua Tree.) A couple of cannabis industry sponsors have come through as well, as Mary Jane usage in Ghetto Celebrity can only be described as pervasive. Nevertheless, this is the part where I tell you how helpful it would be for you to become a WCS paid subscriber. Or, as a few of you luckily do, show some love via Venmo.
After the party I gotta start making my way up to Seattle, for an editing gig. West Coast sojourn, fo’ sho.
Like subprime loans, but with more dunking
Are these promos the advertising industry’s version liquor-stores-in-the-hood?Podcaster and memoir endorser Touré astutely compares today’s sports gambling ads featuring famous Negroes like Jamie Foxx, Kevin Hart, and even Drake to malt liquor ads from back when a 40 was what you downed to find your drive-by shooting courage.
Anything you Caen do, I Caen do better
Among my fave music-listening hobbies is throwing on a gospel album and then using my ears to play “spot the sinner”…
Now that it’s legal to have real talk about American racism, let’s get into climate denial as the Whites-first escape-from-Earth scheme…
At the same time, it’s wild to me that the upper echelon of government is all but spraying for DEI…
And that people still label me paranoid…
America’s collective IQ drops three to five points whenever John Oliver goes on vacation, so look forward to more collective idiocy…
2 Are ya ready for the new ICE recruits?
Last month I had an overnight in Bakersfield that shined a new light on the future of ICE.
