The Festival of the Fundraisers is a lineup of musicians and DJ Miles to benefit Chapter 510, Oakland’s only youth-writing center. Rock out for a noble cause. She Mob will play at around 4:30 PM, and there will be potluck. That’s right: potluck.
Stork Club: 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA – $10 at the door
The poster by Paul Pott has so many details.
The lineup is thus:
2:00 pm . . . Doors Open, DJ Miles (DJ Miles throughout)
3:00 . . . Jeff Gutman
3:45 . . . Perple Mertis and the Moon People of Centuar
4:30 . . . She Mob (Joy, Lisa, Alan and Suki!)
5:15 . . . DJ Miles
5:30 . . . The Clarences
6:15 . . . Electraphonic (Alan is also in this band with Errol Stewart – Alan is super-busy on this day)
7:00 . . . Bunny Numpkins and the Kill Blow-Up Reaction
7:45 . . .Lida Husik
8:30 . . .The Happy Clams
9:15 . . .The Rinds
10:00 . . The Oobie Doobies
10:45 . . Secret Sauce
11:30 pm . . DJ Miles
Whee! We love literature and now we honor it by playing a show with The Rabbles and poet Julien Poirier at The Octopus Literary Salon in uptown Oakland: 2101 Webster Street (at 22nd Street), 7 pm – be there and be literary.
It
took us 20 years to book a record store appearance–pretty good for a band that never produced any vinyl (we’re working on it). Up The Creek Records in Walnut Creek, California (look it up–it’s a little city with the suburban name) will feature She Mob on Saturday, May 12, 2018, at 6 p.m. We’ll be playing a couple of sets until 7:30 or maybe 8–surrounded by beautiful, beautiful records and other fine sundries. Come rock with She Mob once more. It’s free, all ages and the store contains a David Bowie-themed sitting room, which must be experienced at least once in a lifetime.
Up The Creek Records
1840 Tice Valley Blvd., Walnut Creek
(925) 954-1261
6 P.M.
Last we played on October 5th, we were sitting on the floor of our favorite Bay Area gallery, Creativity Explored, improvising a three-hour set for the Bride of Monster art opening with lots of bells, whistles, effects-pedals and various other bangy, plinky, drone-y, electronic-y kinds of things. We had no idea Beth Spotswood from the San Francisco Chronicle was in the house, taking notes. She had fabulous things to say about the exhibit, a great interview with our friend and exhibit curator E. Francis Kohler, and even a mention about us:
“Past the small storefront gallery and reception area sat the huge art studio. The studio’s soaring walls, nearly two stories high, were covered in massive art pieces. Any flat space — every table and chair — displayed drawings on paper and intricate paintings. A shelf of pottery was near a desk that was so covered in paint splatter, it resembled a Jackson Pollock piece. Two members of the band She Mob, both sporting brightly colored wigs, played bizarrely delightful music from a blanket spread on the floor, while guests sipping white wine from plastic cups stepped over them.”
She didn’t mention Alan (maybe because he was standing up), but he was there in full force, adding ambient soundz and even some of our trademark melodies for the full three hours. He was also the most punctual of the group to perform, we might add. Bride of Monster is on view until November 18, 2017. If you’re in San Francisco, you should see it because it is mind-blowingly good. The full review of the show is here.
Our friend John Hughes took this photo of us on the floor, having a good time at Creativity Explored, as always.
October 5, 2017
She Mob will be playing at one of the great galleries of our modern age: Creativity Explored. We’ll be creating a soundscape at the Bride of Monster Show opening, October 5th, from 7 to 9 PM. Come see some amazing artwork while Joy, Lisa and Alan play play unobtrusive weird-ass noize stuff.
From the Creativity Explored site: Bride of Monster features wild and woolly new interpretations of female monsters. Bride of Monster is a small-group exhibition featuring new interpretations of female monsters from film, folklore, and mythology. Featured artists include Christina Marie Fong, Thomas Pringle, Yukari Sakura, Gerald Wiggins, and Richard Wright.
Creativity Explored: 3245 16th Street (at Guerrero), San Francisco
Thursday, October 5th
7 PM to 9 PM
S
hort notice, but better late than never. Joy, Lisa and Alan LIVE at the New School spring fundraiser in Berkeley, Californ-I-A.
Saturday, April 30th at 2 p.m.
Outdoor bands, bakesale, rummage sale, bouncy house, bunny hutch, playground, RAWK.
Hope you can make it.
New School – 1606 Bonita Street, Berkeley
Spanglish and rock will always go together like chips and guac.
From Right in the Head.
She Mob posing by Joy’s house, Oakland, CA, late ’90s.
Time passages—ephemeral memories! Lisa was snooping around our old archived site, particularly our press reviews, and lo and behold, there was a Richard Riegel write-up on our first album Cancel The Wedding that she’d completely forgotten about. It was a two-fer, combining Riegel’s thoughts on our debut effort and the 60s-era Sacramento garage band reissue from the band She.
Below is the She Mob part. The entire review is STILL online(!) Lisa’s copying-&-pasting our mention below (for posterity) just in case the Voice decides to trash or rearrange its archive. Gotta look ahead to our future Wikipedia article—those require citations and plenty of them. Here it is, from the dawn of a new century…
She’s Not There (Not Anymore, Anyway)
By Richard Riegel, February 8, 2000, The Village Voice
I’ll never doubt you again, Goddess! She Mob came to my mailbox as a promo disc earlier on, whereas I’d deliberately ordered the newly issued She set (paid own $$) from an oldies catalog, because the blurb made it sound “interesting.” Only after they’d taken over my player’s deck time with back-to-back spins did I realize that the paranormal parallels between the two don’t stop with their names. Both are all-female (save one token Y-chromo in She Mob), both hail from northern California, both play highly catchy and intelligent thwack-rock of their own composition, both could be described as “lo-fi” in sound (only if you think that’s a problem), neither works for one of the four remaining music conglomerates . . . but the punch line is that these separated-at-birth albums were recorded 30 years apart! …
Thirty years on, with ever so many consciousnesses (F & M) raised in the meantime, the womyn of San Francisco’s She Mob rock on with the kind of semiobscure purity once lived out by their forewenches in She, releasing their own material until big companies catch on. The newer band is less dominated by one focal presence, as Sue Hutchinson and Diane Wallis trade lead vocals as well as guitar and bass slots. Whoever’s singing—Hutchinson in her expressive gush, Wallis as a kind of litterbox-trained Nico, or drummer Lisa McElroy—the homemade lyrics are clever and funny slices of everyday lives carried on beneath the radar of the daily orgies atop the stock market, in humbly passionate rooms where people take Prozac and are sometimes reincarnated as puppies. Let’s just call She Mob “passive-resistance grrrls.”
The voices alternately soar and then converse in manic harmonies, while insistent skrotch from guitars and bass and drums keeps you anchored to the eternal beat. The under-a-minute “Luge” sounds like Pere Ubu going bicoastal if not binary, while “I Took the $” gets down to brassy attacks: “I know that you know/That I know that you know/He says that I’m away.” “Teacher” boldly admonishes the Newtocrite males who continually defame the profession that it’s no walk in the sandbox. The members of She Mob are already in their thirties (only if you think that’s a problem), so they may have shed some precocious illusions along the way, but their cheek and smarts are just as cheeky and smartass as those of She, who recorded during their true-blue teen-and-twenties years (but who are actually older than She Mob in real-time ages by now). Got that?
Did you miss the New School fundraiser we played in Berkeley on Halloween? Yes? Are you…crying? Well, dry your tears! We got some video of the shindig and everything’s going to be all right now. A very fun afternoon, featuring cupcakes, little kids dressed as mermaids and superheroes, The Chuckleberries (awesome!), and a lot of wood chips backstage (next to the bunny hutch). Jackson set up the camera and we proceeded, after our long hiatus, to rock. Featuring: Joy, Lisa, Suki and the return of Alan.
“I’m Lost”
“Mrs. Idey” & “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy”
“Wet Kitten” & “Queen of Doom”
That’s right — Halloween DAY, 2 p.m at the New School. Details in the flyer. Free show and all proceeds from the Fall Bazaar go to the New School scholarship fund.
There will be a haunted jump house, which is a dream come true we didn’t even know we had.
