Poster by Potter

Our next TIRC live rock’n'roll event is scheduled for THIS Wednesday night at Off Broadway. Yeah, sorry, I’ve been busy and kinda forgot to post about this show ’til just now. So sue me. But c’mon, it’s not like most of you reading this have that much going on on a Wednesday night in the middle of summer, anyway, right? So it shouldn’t be too difficult to rearrange your schedule to squeeze this one in… I mean, really, when was the last time you got to see a great rock’n'roll band from Puerto Rico… or ANY kind of band from Puerto Rico? So, now’s your chance. And these guys are good, too. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t be messing with getting ‘em a show here and promoting them on my website. Life’s too short to promote crap, that’s my motto… or something. So anyway, you’ve got this great band from Puerto Rico, they’re called Davila 666. My guess is that has something to do with the devil or Satan or whatever. Kind of a goofy name, but whatever. Go easy on ‘em, it’s not easy these days to come up with a band name that’s never been used before. So these guys play the kind of music that Kopper (that’s me, duh) really digs… soulful, trashy garage punk. Sorta like a Latin American version of the Black Lips, for those of you that need me to pigeonhole ‘em for ya. If that sounds like it might be up your alley, then I hope to see you at the show. For more info on these guys, visit their Myspace page. Oh, and if what I’m telling you ain’t good enough to convince you to go, then rest assured that ANY band on In The Red Records is one that you should do everything in your power to see perform live at least once before you buy the farm. That, my friends, you can take to the bank. Old Larry Hardy, my friends, that man knows how to run a record label.

Opening the show will be Left Arm and the Nevermores, so get there early to get adequately LUBED for these rockin’ Puerto Ricans.

By the way, RSVP and help promote this event on Facebook… CLICK HERE. Gracias!

This is a great T-shirt (I love that logo on the back and have often admired it when I’m driving behind a STLFD vehicle). Just got mine in the mail yesterday, so you might see me sporting it around town soon. Get one!

Since I couldn’t find any reference to this on the Web, I thought I’d go ahead and do a short blog post about the Redbird Rookies T-ball program at the Marquette Recreation Center at 4025 Minnesota in South St. Louis (the same center where Cory Spinks likes to train). In case you’re not aware, Redbird Rookies is a FREE baseball league for kids who otherwise might not have the opportunity to play. This special league, sponsored by the St. Louis Cardinals’ Cardinals Care, provides kids with uniforms, gloves, bats, balls, and other equipment, as well as extensive off-field support in the areas of health, education, mentoring, and cultural arts. From what I’ve been able to find out, it appears there are a couple of these programs on the south side, the first at Marquette (as I mentioned above), and the other at the Cherokee Recreational Center located at Jefferson & Arsenal. The number for the Marquette Center is (314) 353-1250 and the number for the Cherokee Center is (314) 664-0582 (call both after 3:00 p.m.). My son started this past Thursday and there were only a few other kids there, so there’s definitely still room on the team if you (or your child) would like to come out and play. Practices are at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I haven’t played corkball since I was a kid, and even then it was only at a couple of family reunions (on the DuParri side of the family at that, too, if I remember correctly), and usually the game was spearheaded by my dad or one of his countless cousins. I remember having an old, weathered corkball and a beatup old corkball bat around the house growing up. That bat was really thin and long, and part of the nob had broken off at some point. Once in a blue moon my dad would toss the tiny, miniature baseball to me in the backyard and I’d try my best to whack at it, usually missing the damned thing miserably. Back then I actually liked playing bottle caps more, and saved a whole shoebox full of them (90% of the caps featuring Falstaff, Ballantine or 905 beer logos) that I’d haul out of storage and use at family gatherings or whenever I could convince some kids from the neighborhood to play. My favorite part about throwing the bottle caps was the way they would zing and curve around before almost hitting the batter right in the face. No, there wasn’t much control in throwing bottle caps, or at least, if there was, I sure as hell didn’t know how to do it. But it was fun as hell, nevertheless.

If you’re like a lot of people these days, you’re probably wondering what the hell it is I’m writing about. Corkball? Bottle caps? WTF? And, I guess it’s because my dad was older—he had served in World War II and played stickball on the streets of Manchester and old North St. Louis when he was a kid—that I knew anything about it. Most of the other kids in my neighborhood had nary a clue what any of it was. To them, there was only one sport and that was baseball. So that’s what we played most of the time, including my junior-high years when we would play baseball every freakin’ day for two or three summers in a row (even if it rained). But that all came later, and once I’d started playing baseball, I never even really thought about corkball or bottle caps ever again. That is, until recently.

Corkball is a St. Louis thing, but unfortunately it doesn’t quite have the attention of other “St. Louis things” like toasted ravioli, St. Louis-style pizza, rolling stops, or our quirky habit of asking other locals where they went to high school. No one is quite sure when the game first started being played, but most local historians point to the turn of the twentieth century, and it’s been played ever since (in fact, the Gateway Corkball League has been around since 1929, believe it or not!). I could go into some great detail about the history of the game, but I couldn’t say it better than it was said in this Esquire Magazine article published on June 1, 2000. Do yourselves a favor and read it! Truly a unique story. And while you’re poking around on the Web for more info about this great old sport, be sure to visit the Corkball page on Markwort Sporting Goods’ website for detailed rules so you can really differentiate it from baseball and, indeed, other forms of stickball. Further reading can be found on the South Saint Louis Corkball Club, the Lemay Corkball Club, the Sportsman’s Corkball Club as well as the aforementioned Gateway Corkball Club sites. In fact, if you’re looking for some more competitive leagues, I would highly recommend any of those over what I’m planning on starting, but more on that in a minute.

So I basically went my entire adult life (so far) without having played even one inning of corkball, much less even watching a game. That is, until this year. I never forgot about nor lost my love of the game, and always had it in the back of my head that someday I would get off my ass and play it again. Well, a few weeks ago I realized that I’m not getting any younger and if I want to start playing, I should do it now. Why wait any longer? And since the four corkball fields at Tower Grove Park (within walking distance of my house) are going virtually unused in the 21st century (thanks to the Sportsman’s Corkball Club hightailing it for the “safer” Jefferson Barracks Park some nine years ago), there’s really no reason why I shouldn’t be playing.

So, I’ve started recruiting players to form a new, relaxed, non-competitive league, named the River City Corkball Club. The emphasis will be on having fun and we won’t be keeping track of stats or wins/losses. In fact, each game will be pickup-game style, just like how some of used to play pickup softball games at Tower Grove Park a decade ago. I figure we’ll start playing on Wednesday nights the third week of April (April 15). We’ll need to purchase some equipment (mainly a couple of masks, a batting helmet, some balls, etc.), and the best way to do that is to have everyone chip in some money. Maybe we’ll even have some shirts made, who knows. But this is definitely not the type of league that will be highly competitive or have bylaws, like those other local corkball clubs (no disrespect intended, naturally).

If you’re interested in checking it out, by all means, let me know. Post a comment below and/or join the Facebook group, and we’ll see you at the park!

Corkball Court

The Geargrinders – Weather (MP3)
The Geargrinders – Fuzz Grinder (MP3)
The Geargrinders – My Nerves Are Exploding (MP3)
The Geargrinders – Why Now (MP3)
The Geargrinders – Maggots on My Brain (MP3)
The Geargrinders – She’s a Bully (MP3)
The Geargrinders – What Do You Know? (MP3)

At the same time, I’d been following what is probably the most popular independent community radio station in the nation, WFMU from the New York City metro area. I’d been really impressed with the way in which they updated Twitter with all kinds of cool stuff going on at their station. WFMU’s Twitter account had over 2,000 followers and was getting updated several times each day, helping to promote the station to its fans all around the world at a time when Twitter appears to be growing by leaps and bounds. Genius!

“Damn,” I thought to myself, “it’d be nice if KDHX had something like that.” That was when the proverbial light bulb sputtered on over my head and I suddenly realized I could quite easily set something up for the station my own damn self that would do even more than what WFMU was doing for its fans, and that was to create an account that automatically updated everyone (sorry, “tweeted”) every time a new show was about to come on the air, plus include tweets from the KDHX blog. Any additional information could always be tweeted manually by myself or someone at the station (who I’ve yet to really talk to in great detail about this) anytime they had an announcement they’d like to make.

The way I went about doing this was to go and gather up all of the pertinent information about KDHX’s daily program schedule and create a new program calendar using Google Calendar. The reason I wanted to use Google Calendar was because it has a way of sending out reminder e-mails for every event, or, in this case, program. I would have these e-mails sent directly to my e-mail address in Gmail, and I would use a filter to have those e-mails automatically forwarded to a special “e-mail to Twitter” address that I got after signing up with a free service called TwitterMail. TwitterMail would then, in turn, automatically update the station’s new Twitter account a couple of minutes before the start of every program. After a bit of tweaking with the input fields and whatnot, I finally got it to work the way I wanted it. I discovered, for example, that the outgoing Google Calender reminders were limited to about 60 characters for the Subject field, which was the one that I wanted to contain the name of the show, the name of the host or DJ, and a quick link for people to tune in online. Some shows simply had too long of a show/host name combo to make that work, so a shortened direct link to KDHX’s website was used instead of the slightly longer direct link to the streaming audio (live.ram) file. The longer link file got truncated if it, along with the show/host names, extended beyond 60 characters, and that truncated link didn’t work at all, so I had to ensure that each show’s reminder didn’t have too many characters in the subject field, lest someone not be able to get a good link they could click on from the tweet. Make sense? Well, if not, don’t sweat it. The bottom line is I got it working pretty well and even those shows that are tweeted with the shortened “www.kdhx.org” link will still take people to the station’s website where there is a “Listen Live” link right there on the front page. Pretty easy to figure out. And so far I have to admit that it’s been working great and I’m even seeing people retweeting their favorite shows when they come on. It’s also great for me, personally, because now I am also reminded of when my favorite shows are about to come on, so I can quickly turn the station on to hear ‘em, something I wasn’t doing much of lately because most of the time I’d completely forget about them. So that was the main point of doing this, to help others such as myself get reminders via Twitter about KDHX’s programs. I think it’ll work great for the station and may even help expose it to some new listeners, not only locally but all over the world as well. So if you’re on Twitter, by all means, please follow KDHX! And while you’re at it, feel free to go ahead and follow me as well. Thanks.

The 75s - Stereo EP

The newest TIRC Records release is out now and ready for you to download. It’s a 3-song EP by local St. Louis girlie garage-pop sensations The 75s! Please head over to the TIRC Store for more info. And, if you’re looking for the live music hookup this coming weekend, be sure to make plans to attend the 75s’ EP Release Party for Stereo this Saturday night (Feb. 28) at Lemmons. Also appearing will be the Helium Tapes and That’s My Daughter. Plenty of girl-on-girl rock’n'roll action… don’t miss it!

Enjoy this hot rockin’ set from the Flat Duo Jets from Chapel Hill, NC, featuring Dex Romweber and Crow, presented by Kopper of the Savage Kick podcast. Thanks again to Jim Utz for providing this one!

DOWNLOAD | SUBSCRIBE TO THIS SHOW

As you can probably tell from the video above, the band was great, despite this being their first show in over 12 years! But I’m really looking forward to hearing some originals in the future, as an entire set of covers wore a bit thin on me after a while (despite the fact that they were all pretty choice ’60s garage nuggets that they were covering, I still like to hear what a band can do on their own). Looking forward to their next gig.

The Argonauts are a 60’s style garage punk band in St. Louis, Missouri. Although all members are from St. Louis, the band originally formed in Columbia, Missouri back in the mid 90’s. The Argonauts consist of Jason Kohner (lead vocals, guitar), Nate Reeves (lead guitar), Tim Hopmeier (bass, vocals), and Dave Devine (drums). Kohner and Reeves, fresh out of The Fabulous Hustlers (a garage combo including Steve Mace and Steve Rager of The Untamed Youth), were old friends with Hopmeier (then with The Neanderthals) and hooked up with Devine (formerly with Erector Set). The rest is history. Opening for acts such as Southern Culture On The Skids and Rocket From The Crypt, The Argonauts quickly became one of Columbia’s most popular garage bands of the 1990s. For a brief stint Dave Devine left the group and was replaced by Chris Raymond on drums before they finally disbanded. Devine and Hopmeier would go on to form The Cripplers, which Raymond would later join on guitar. However, all the members eventually moved back to St. Louis and are now back together playing some ferocious garage rock and love songs for bastards. Maximum Garage R&R!!!

Jason & The Argonauts in the early days.

Listen to the blistering covers of some of your garage-rock favorites on their Myspace page. Trust me, you won’t want to miss this show.

Oh yeah, and John Ebert made a flyer, too. Pass it on…

Flyer by John Ebert.

New snow art at Ballpark Village

Photo comes courtesy of PunchingKitty.com. More images here!

I Wanna Be Your Dog – Live (MP3)

Thanks to Tim Jamison for this one!