After taking a two-year break while they worked getting their swanky hipster lounge the Continental up and running, Hub Caf co-owners Carlo Terranova and Sean Francis are bringing back their big, boffo, all-afternoon-long Earth Day festival April 19, with a music lineup that'll include sets from Lit, the Supersuckers, Handsome Devil, the Color Red, Lefty, Mind Driver, those fabulous Moseleys and more (rumors about Alien Ant Farm, Phantom Planet and Unwritten Law are floating around, but so far they're just rumors, kids). With that bill, Terranova and Francis just might be able to top the 12,000 or so who turned out in the Hub parking lot (also known as the Fullerton Amtrak station lot) for the Earth Day bonanza in 2000, a year headlined by Reel Big Fish, Save Ferris and Zebrahead. And like the previous six fests, this one will also be free-ass-free. Free for the public, anyway. Terranova says it'll cost him about $50,000 to put it on, but a lot of those expenses should be offset by sponsorships, including Fender, KROQ, Paul Frank Industries, the Fullerton Police Officers Association, Wahoo's Fish Taco and possibly a couple of car companies that might use the occasion to show off their line of enviro-friendly vehicles (a wise idea, we say, since the bodies of American soldiers who've died just so we can have cheap gas should be arriving back home about then, but hey, that's just our opinion!). Taking over the C-grade, washed-up-celebrity MC slot, meanwhile (occupied previously by Gary Coleman at the 1998 Earth Day shindig) will be the positively hemorrhoidal Puck, the nose-picking grossout king from The Real World: San Francisco, which ran waaaaay back in 1994, nine years ago. Way to milk it, Puck! For schedule updates, check www.ocearthday.com often. (Rich Kane)
AWARD SHOW MANIA
Just a month to go till the March 29 Orange County Music Awards, which in its sophomore year has moved up to the decidedly larger confines of the Grove Theater of Anaheim. Here's an update, delivered in a bland, somewhat exhausted monotone, since this writer is on the Board of Directors and he's starting to get pretty tired of going to meetings and listening to award show founder/Live Magazine publisher Martin Brown yammer on all the time about what an asshole Bush is. Where were we? Yes! The OCMAs! So . . . Dick Dale is getting the lifetime-achievement award, and he's playing the show, too. Also performing will be Wonderlove, Scarlet Crush, Walter Trout, the Reventlos, the Rare Form Band, Ashley Bee, Tim Moyer, Flood U.K. and whoever winds up winning the Best High School Band or Artist category (to be decided in an afternoon showcase at the Galaxy Concert Theatre on March 16). Semifinals for the acoustic categories (Best Male, Best Female, Best Acoustic Band) will be held March 8 at the Canyon Amphitheater in Yorba Linda, and the semis for Best Live Electric Band go down over three nights, March 7 through 9, at the Gypsy Lounge in Lake Forest, all of which the public are more than welcome to attend—and not just the friends and families of bands, either. More than 200 artists have submitted entries so far, which is a shit lot of music for the judges to listen to. (Did I mention I'm one of the judges, too? “Scores, Kane, where are your scores?!?” Ahhhh, piss off, Martin!) What else? Lessee . . . OCMA tickets are on sale now at the Grove box office, yes. And this: though the official deadline for bands and musicians to turn in entries (the forms for which can be had by skipping over to www.orangecountymusicawards.com) is Friday, Martin is a nice guy sometimes, so he's letting the slackers come by the Live Magazine office at 12534 Valley View St., Garden Grove, on Saturday—between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. only!—to drop off their submissions in person. Nominations should be announced over the OCMA website on or around March 10. Actually we really like Martin, so we won't even run the photo of him he hates so much this time. (RK) SMOKEY REGGAE PARTY
You could've easily smelled the biggest open secret at this year's Bob Marley Day festival, which went down Feb. 15 and 16 at the Long Beach Arena. Capacity crowds came for the reggae, naturally, but they also came to smoke a little—um, no, make that a factory farm's worth—of weed. No surprise—Marley and almost every other reggae star have dedicated a good bit of vinyl to tunes calling for the legalization of pot. Hell, on Feb. 16, singer Chrisinti even lit a spliff onstage. But perhaps the shocker this weekend were the ingenious methods the crowd employed to sneak in their stash. Not a totally easy operation, either, since a phalanx of security guards patted everybody down at the entry gates. One woman we met inside told us she hid her stash in an Altoids tin. A guy from Riverside said he secrets his stuff in places where the fuzz would never look—like tampon wrappers. A Long Beach man told us he assigned his girlfriend the ganja-carrying duties and guaranteed he wasn't putting her in danger. “They really don't check the girls,” our friend said. Of course, the police and security guards weren't fooled. And why were they not making good on their constant threat to bust every pot smoker they saw? “We can't keep up with it,” smirked one Long Beach cop we spoke to who had this inexplicable, easygoing twinkle in his eye. Y'know, that contact high was pretty impossible to escape. . . . (Andrew Asch) PROTEST SONGS
A bunch of hippies with acoustic guitars might not stop the war on Iraq, but they could certainly slow it down, even if it's only by getting tangled up in the tank treads. Failing that, of course, there's the artistic alternative: local promoter/DJ/musician/scenemaker extraordinaire Chase Frank dedicates this Monday's installment of her Songwriters' Supper Club at DiPiazza (8 p.m. at 5205 E. Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach) to the noble art of the protest song, showcasing 10 local singer/songwriters and a bevy of peacenik-y covers and originals. Granted, there's not much of a practical effect on foreign policy at stake here: if the American government hasn't been swayed by millions-strong opposition both domestic and French, a tasteful little evening at DiPiazza probably isn't going to coax any fingers off the button. But that's not the point: through art blooms political solidarity, and through political solidarity blooms camaraderie and friendship. And it's nice to have someone special to suffocate with when the 'thrax hits the fan, isn't it? (Chris Ziegler)
