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Bakersfield Bukowski With The Get Up Get Down
Topics: Bakersfield, Bakotopia, Bakotopia.com, music, Belardes, Events, entertainment, Bakotunes, Podcast, downtown, Riley's Tavern
Posted by thenovelist Thu Sep 14, 2006 09:55:55 PDT
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0 responses 0 comments All roads lead to somewhere, right? Sometimes through dark streets—the Mirkwood of Bakersfield—the tangle of urban decadence that screams at you from shadows of fog, or where the creeping corners of lots hide metal trash bins and yellow-eyed transients. It was near such dark holes that Bakersfield band Broken Record Gospel had shattered. There were allegations of drugs. There was a conflict of interest in how to approach music. Colin Cooke and Ben Gomez tried to bring the band back together. But then it all fell apart again. The Gospel fell on deaf ears. A broken record is what it is after all—and the gospel was the failure of a fresh new Bakersfield sound in rock that wasted away into bar band obscurity.

My path took me back to the fury of Indie sounds and echoing funk-Edge strums in Colin Cooke’s new band, the Get Up Get Down. The journey began weeks before. He told me about band practices and an upcoming show at Jerry’s Pizza that he later said was kind of weird. It was their first show, “The kids didn’t really clap. But they didn’t go away either.” Colin also said the band played at the Velvet Rose in Santa Barbara. “We had about 75 people. That’s pretty good for an opening act. They were into it.”

Two weeks before their show at Riley’s Tavern I had just thought about the Get Up Get Down. I wondered if their music would capture the counterculture movement of Indie rock out of the land of Korn. While such thoughts were on my mind I decided I wanted to see the darker side of Bakersfield. I wanted to see the streets where bands fall apart. I wanted to stumble through the dives, write about the very demon shadows that could haunt a dying bar band like Broken Record Gospel. I wanted to see how darkness could spawn the new life of the Get Up Get Down. You know the shadows that lurk right beneath the angelic neon Budweiser signs inside of bar windows? I was going to see the ravenous streets of Bakersfield, the hot asphalt of our city—remember The Lonely? And I wanted to see Bakersfield for the shiny penny that it isn’t.
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(nlbelardes.com)

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