Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988

Velma surprised me

Velma woke me up this morning before she left for work and told me to meet her at Market and 2nd at 5pm. I remember groggily protesting but she insisted she had a surprise for me.

I dutifully turned up on the corner downtown this afternoon, not knowing what I was in store for.

Turns out The Dandy Warhols, one of my all-time favorite bands, were hosting a pre-release listening party for their new album at 111 Minna Gallery. Velma had signed up for their emails a long time ago so she could pull something like this on me.

The album's called ...Earth to The Dandy Warhols... and I liked the sound of it (although it's always hard to get a good impression when there's a buzz of assorted merry socializing competing with the music). It comes out May 19 on their site, and they've offered the first track, “The World The People Together (Come On),” as a free MP3 download.

Brent and Zia were there early. Zia even came with her case of records to spin for our aural pleasure after they'd played the new album two or three times through. I'm not sure whether Courtney and Pete came down from Portland for this, as I left pretty early. Maybe I'm just old, but after Velma left (she had a prior engagement so she could only spend an hour with me) I got bored looking at people I don't know drinking and socializing. So after a beer and listening to some of Zia's picks, I headed for the hills.

Astute readers may recall that The Dandy Warhols are actually listed on my very long list of clients. I used to shoot the band every time they'd play anywhere in the Bay Area in their early years (mid- to late-1990s) and at one time their management asked if they could use some of my photos for publicity since they had just switched drummers and didn't have any new pictures yet. A bunch of my live shots had been featured on their website way back then too, but they're long gone by now.

Funny enough, I'd just recently been thinking of getting together all my Dandys photos and putting out a book. I'd even gotten the box of prints and negatives down off the shelf just last week.

To top it all off, the photo featured today on my photoblog is one of those old Dandys pictures, which I'd added to the database last week.

I think it's all a sign that I should do the photo book.

Labels: music, photo, The Dandy Warhols

Posted by espd at 10:05 PM | 
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