Scapegoat Wax, KutMasta Kurt, Slow Car Crash, DJ Badrok & cootdog

In James’ hometown, his popularity is in-your-face obvious. Every contemporary music radio station in town — from hard rockin’ Z-Rock to alternative-adult The Point — is bumping the single; the stickers, posters and flyers are up everywhere; and with so many of James’ old acquaintances either still living in Chico or around for the summer, The Brick Works was packed to capacity on Saturday (June 16^th) with old friends, genuine well-wishers, proud locals, jockers, would-be coattail-riders and other random party goers. The show was a smashing success before the supporting act even hit the stage.

True validation of just how popular and feverish the hype around Scapegoat Wax is on a local level comes from a local weekly magazine publisher and his wife, who tell the tale of arriving at The Brick to find the bouncers explaining to two sobbing, mewling young girls that the show was sold out and there was no way they were going to get in. (The publisher and his wife stepped around the scene and entered the club to join the party.) The girls simply arrived too late, and while they stood outside with their over-applied mascara running down tear-soaked cheeks and staring doe-eyed and emotionally wounded at the front door, the evening’s guest DJ, hip-hop heavy-weight KutMasta Kurt, had taken his first break, and Omarr Escoffie’s Slow Car Crash occupied the stage inside.

Slow Car Crash seems to have a slightly different stage scene nearly every time they play, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It adds an element of surprise and variation to the music, and keeps vibe fresh and in a state of evolution. This time around, Escoffie, keyboard player / sound manipulator Joe Gauthier, vocalist Christina Brown and cellist Mehdi Belahbib laid down a half-hour set of their signature soul sounds, and though the sound wasn’t all that great, the set was pretty tight, and warmed up the crowd from a conversational rumble to a level of appreciative exaltation. After Slow Car Crash, Kurt provided the background music until the always amazing turntable master DJ Badrok, perhaps Chico’s second most famous musical personality, took to the one’s and two’s in front of the capacity crowd, who went completely nuts.

The thing about putting Badrok on a bill, is that he’ll always rock the house. In fact, I can’t remember being witness to a single room that Badrok hasn’t turned out, so it wasn’t surprising that, as has he dropped a cornucopia of funk, old school and battle breaks, the audience was at a constant level of cheering, and really exploded at the end of each routine. Unfortunately, Badrok doesn’t have too much audio product on the market (and the world suffers greatly because of that), but you can check his scratches all over Scapegoat’s Okeeblow, including "Aisle 10." A quick set by local Mystic Roots and solo MC cootdog bookended Badrok’s set, and the West Marin native rapper, who was briefly joined by female recording partner Nikki Sierra, kicked a couple of medleys consisting of several of his classic tunes.

By the time Scapegoat hit the stage, The Brick Works was in full swing and the group kicked "Revenge of the Dope Fiend Beat" as their entrance music, but wasted no time getting straight to it. The band and the crowd began to rock together, and it took virtually nothing to set people off in fits of screaming, the thunderous roar of which compounded sound problems the band was already having, and though it didn’t slow things up at all, it caused a little confusion on stage from time to time. A posse of rappers known as The Suspects took up space on the side stage as out-of-the-way hype men, and as various posse members filmed the performance, the band — keyboard player Joel Stites, guitarist Keir Gotcher, bass player Kerry James, DJ Mr. Dope America (a.k.a. Tyrone Coyote) and James, armed with a sequencer / drum machine mounted in a Fender Telecaster guitar body — played straight to the crowd. The set was short, but featured such gems as the anthemic "Star 6," the fresh and funky "Freeway," the old-school ballad "Light of the Moon," and, of course, the money shot, "Aisle 10 (Hello Allison)," all from Okeeblow.

At the end of the set, the band broke down as James sent copies of the single flying over the audience, and stood in complete aghast of the adoration he was receiving in return. The kids in front were pining for autographs, and nearly everyone he passed on his way back to The Brick’s green room wanted a piece of his time (or a piece of his ass). The evening was a hit, despite the sound problems and the few glitches in the live set (this was the band’s first performance together in front of a real crowd), which will be worked out with more live exposure. The real golden aspect of this evening was the love that the crowd showed for the hometown hero, and the smart money says that James’ home territory is just the beginning.

– Max Sidman
– Photos by Myles Stenger

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