Promotions don’t come more beautifully simple than Casbeers’s “Free Freeholies” night on December 21 to celebrate the release of Augie Meyers’s CD, My Freeholies Ain’t Free Anymore. It was fitting, since few musical artists can match the Zen simplicity with which Meyers writes, sings, and stabs at his Vox Continental organ.
Meyers was in a jocular holiday mood on the crowded Casbeers stage, dishing out a string of deadpan jokes (“Someone lost $35, rolled up in a rubber band. Here’s the rubber band.”) and confidently fronting Los Texmaniacs, a band that he dubs the Rocka Baca’s, in honor of band leader Max Baca. Choice line of the night, from the title song of Meyers’s new album: “She said if I wasn’t so mean/She’d still be cooking me some beans.”
THE COUP AND MR. LIF
The Coup’s Pick a Bigger Weapon and Mr. Lif’s Mo’ Mega were easily two of the best hip-hop albums released in 2006. On the morning of December 2, the tour bus housing both acts plummeted 30 feet from a road in California and exploded.
Fortunately, everyone on the bus survived, although many sustained serious injuries and lost clothing, instruments, computers, identification, cameras, cash, and keys — basically, their livelihood.
“The bus was totally engulfed in flames,” Boots Riley recalls on author Jeff Chang’s website Cantstopwontstop.com. “For a while, no one stopped to help, supposedly because they thought we were ‘illegal aliens’ crossing the border. Eventually some great folks stopped and helped.”
The Coup and Mr. Lif are looking for some “great folks” to help them out in this time of need: a PayPal donation button is available for each act at their MySpace page.
“Most of the band touring with The Coup has kids, rent that won’t quit, bills, and holiday expenses coming,” Riley says on Chang’s brilliant Zentronix: Dubwise Hiphopcentric blog. “We need money, because the band doesn’t have the tools that they make a living with. Not only did we lose cash and material things on the bus, but we also were depending on this tour for money to make it through.”
— Gilbert Garcia and M. Solis
