Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.

Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.

For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.

Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.

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David Duchovny’s sex-addled auteur drives away in his beat-up Porsche to end an episode of Californication. Show’s over.

But wait… what’s that kick-ass song playing?

Over on Grey’s Anatomy, McDreamy is lovesick over Meredith but paralyzed by his emotions. Voice-over does a play-by-play but you’re tuning out because, in the background, there’s a song you gotta have playing.

Great pop songs have long been TV show mainstays, but mostly it’s been for the opening credits. Sometimes there were annoying but you knew them: think of ”I’ll Be There For You” by The Rembrandts, kicking off Friends for a decade. Or, before that, Gary Portnoy’s charming “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” at the beginning of Cheers. I’ve always been a fan of Malcom in the Middle’s explosive opener “Boss of Me” by They Might Be Giants.

More and more today’s series are stocked full of good (and sometimes really obscure) tunes. Cable TV, in particular, seems to push the creative envelope sonically, even if it is a 15-second sample. On Showtime a recent Weeds episode ended with a cool little cucumber called “Thank You For Making Me Feel Better” by the otherwise unknown Linus of Hollywood.

How did I know that? Because you can look it up.

So, you like your shows, whether it’d be some House or reruns of Six Feet Under (some of the best music in there) or another endless plot twist in Lost. And music that makes you go, “Hey, that’s cool” plays on them. Then, you should probably be aware that a quick little visit to the networks sites for those shows will give you full listings of those cool songs.

For example, on ABC (home of Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and Desperate Housewives) you can even download right then and there any song screened on any episode. Same thing with Showtime (Californication, Nurse Jackie, Dexter). Ditto for Fox (House, Glee, Hell’s Kitchen).

That’s all. I just wanted to let you in on that.

Surf’s up, you got shows to watch and music to discover.

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We’ve seen the kind of hubub American Idol can create so it’s no surprise that the fame-by-committee format would pop up elsewhere. Even in the world of punk rock and skateboarders. The annual Ernie Ball Battle of the Bands on the Vans Warped Tour has become an internet voting behemoth. As of this writing there were more than 16,000 bands fighting for votes to play at one of the tour stops.

And if you’re a local unsigned band, what’s not to like? It’s free to enter, there’s a site Toolkit any lunkhead can use to make a very decent band page and, if you got the fan-vote power, you got at least a fighting chance to get reviewed by some Old White Guys (read: industry professionals) who decide if you’re going to play when the tour goes by your home town.

It works just like a regular Battle of the Band, only bigger. Of course, hundreds of bands try to get a spot and four for each tour stop make it. The contest is open to all genres from Ska to Hip-Hop and Blues but the Punk/Rock/Metal bands dominate the scene, by far. I guess there’s always Freestyle Rap Battles and summer Bar-B-Qs for the rest.

MuseZu caught up with Matthew “Zippy” Zipkin, guitarist for the Metal/Prog-Rock San Francisco outfit The Illness. The band is vying for a slot on the Vans Warped Tour Ernie Ball Battle of The Band’s stop at The Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View in June. Zippy talks to us about the sudden exposure, the ethical weirdnesses of internet voting and what makes them a band bound for the big stage.

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The great rock documentary It Might Get Loud showed up as streamable content on my Netflix account–and that’s the sort of news that really gets an impecunious bastard like me salivating.

The film manages to bring in one room three generations of electric guitar masters–Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and The White Stripes’ Jack White–to talk about and riff on their craft. But it builds up to it. You see the three in their cars on their way to the sound stage, the helpers setting up their gears, White, ever the sparkplug, suggesting “there might be a fistfight.”

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Ever feel “behind the times”? Ever browse through your iPod only to find the same old titles, each classic like a French lover but not-so-fresh like, well, a French lover?

Now, thanks to MuseZu, you too can be one of those unfailingly hip jerks quick with the great new band out there. Just browse through these next few titles, embrace the new newness of these still-underground players and pull them out on your next date or hang-out. Name-dropping these bands will make you sound cool. Guaranteed. Now, go for it, Indie Newbie.

St Vincent

Why: It’s hard to dismiss an act that does such beautiful, yet simple videos: check out the weeping-on-command in “Actors Out Of Work” or the stilted, jarring camera work in “Marrow”. Well, it helps that she’s unbelievably pretty, in a porcelain doll way. Sound-wise, you remember that superb balancing act on Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, between the purity of Thom Yorke’s voice, the steady beats and distorted walls of guitar? It’s all in here, in sonic bloom.  Only her voice sounds more like Billie Holiday’s. It’s pristine yet surprising like Bjork’s music can be but more approachable.

Key Tracks: Actor Out of Work, The Strangers, Marrow & The Party from her 2009 album “Actor.”

Cool Thing To Say: “It’s actually just one person, Annie Clark, and, I’m not trying to name drop here but: she’s toured as part of Sufjan Stevens’ band and she was a guitarist and background singer in the 27-member group Polyphonic Spree which is headed by Tim DeLaughter, the guy from that awesome 90’s alternative rock band Tripping Daisy.”

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The rock world has made demi-gods out of bands for decades but it’s also swallowed up a good number of these. Musezu,com pays homage to bygone stars with a series that focuses on the Seventies, the Eighties and the Nineties and the top acts of their time. It’s probably too early for the Aughts, sorry. We’ll remind you of their glory years and check in on where they’re at now.

First up on PULSE OF THE DECADE: Rock Bands of The Seventies…

Aerosmith

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For every minute in the day, three minutes worth of new music comes out to listen to.  For this reason it is no wonder that we have a new sub-genre what seems like every two weeks.  Groups of creative individuals are constantly borrowing and reshaping their favorite elements from various sources in the great music spectrum, giving birth to new sounds.  Trying to discern a group’s influences is one of my favorite parts of listening to new music, and that is why I had such a fun time experiencing the new EP from a band who’s name seems to sum up in one word the constant flux of musical textures we are experiencing today.

A Sacramento band two years in the making, Evolutia is certainly nothing utterly groundbreaking, but this is more often than not a good thing.  Nobody wants to hear somebody playing the saw to the a-rhythmic background of guinea pigs, for instance.  Evolutia’s new EP, “Fears Fall”, borrows unapologetically from several relatively unrelated genres (though of course you cannot completely separate any genre from any other.)  Drawing from such varied influences as classical music, ragtime piano, Muse, The Julianna Theory, Bloc Party, Led Zeppelin, 36 Crazyfists, Mars Volta, Radiohead, mewithoutyou, and say anything, their sound lends itself to a varied and aurally pleasing listening experience.

The Fears Fall EP kicks off it’s first track, My Element, with a slightly faster, slightly edgier Death Cab For Cutie-like melodic sensibility.  It’s pop worth is enormous, with simple chord progressions made more elaborate by classically oriented piano arrangements.  This band’s further depth of influence comes from the romantic desperation found almost ubiquitously in pop punk bands from earlier last decade.  This theme continues through the EP, and although I have to admit I wanted to vomit every time I heard this in the pop punk context, in this neo-piano prog rock setting it’s comes through as being very creative.  The singer moans “I fall apart without you”, and frankly, I believe him.

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Synchronicity is best defined by way of example.  You know how whenever you learn a new word you tend to hear it several times over the course of the next few days, having never been aware of hearing it before?  That’s what synchronicity is.

I was recently tuned into a pair of new internet sites that claim to measure the activity around a band in all markets, including myspace/facebook streams, internet and FM radio play, and blog activity.  I think we can all see what a handy tool this would be to bands, but that’s not the point.

As a musician I usually trend towards talk radio, preferring the blah blah blah of mostly uninteresting verbal fodder to a tune that might interrupt whatever musical thought I was in the middle of.  More recently than event described in the last paragraph to the tune of two days I was listening to NPR and happened to catch a story about those two sites, one is called bandmetrics.com, and the other bigchampagne.com.

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If you walk past San Francisco’s Civic Center today at 1:30 p.m., March 4th 2010, you may notice a crowd gathered there, demonstrating and visibly upset. Too often things like these happen but passerbys never know what they’re about. The shout-outs through loudspeakers just recycle labor chants from the 70’s, when these things had more weight. So I’m here to inform you on a few of the issues this crowd is upset about, because it’s nice to find these things out in polite, printed paragraphs.

The March 4th Strike & Day of Action was called in defense of public services and public education. “We’re being asked to share the pain, but Wall Street and the Banksters are making record profits,” read a pamphlet entitled “NO CUTS: Join The Movement.” These broad strokes of outrage point to a disturbing trend: as cities, counties and states struggle with budget deficits in a poor economy, public schools, public transportation and parks are the first to get cut.

The sad part is that it’s the most common people (the majority of us) that rely on these public services the most. We can’t afford private schools with room and board. We can’t afford BMWs and parking garages and we need parks because apartment buildings don’t have any.

So let us peruse through just a few of the issues at hand. This way, if you see the crowd in Civic Center today, you’ll know what they’re shouting about.

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Are you with us?

Do you have a taste for delectable qualities of beer? Does your SF Bay Area heart covertly beat faster at the thought of New York City? And if we threw a freak show in there, wouldn’t it be the coolest?

Heather Holiday, the Sword Swallower, and her very own Coney Island Brewing Co. steel hop lager

Then come see–direct from Brooklyn’s legendary Coney Island Sideshow–a real human blockhead and a sword swallower in San Francisco at select bars, pubs and cafes on Tuesday March 2. They are here for the 2nd ANNUAL CONEY ISLAND PUB CRAWL, brought out by Shmaltz Brewing Company to celebrate their new line of Coney Island Lagers. Whew that’s a lot of capitalized names thrown at you. Sorry.

Simply put, the two freaks will be performing their classic bag of tricks for free while you enjoy beers with their likeness on them. And this is pure American classic sort of entertainment that’s been all but abandoned for those obnoxious IMAX films you love so much. There will be Human Blockhead Donny Vomit (a YouTube sensation who redefines the idea of a “used” condom by sticking one in his nose and pulling it out from his mouth; tres awesome, we think) and the lovely Sword Swallower Heather Holiday to behold.

And if you try their beers you can rest assured it will be for a good cause. We’re told the Coney Island Sideshow is a registered non-profit organization and a portion of the dough you plunk down for a Coney Island Lager goes right to making sure those freaks go on stick God-knows-what into their heads.

This is where Donny Vomit and Heather Holiday will be appearing on Tuesday March 2:

7 pm – 7:30 pm
Cafe Royale @ 800 Post Street 415-441-4099
-Beer Special: Half off bottles of Messiah Bold.

7:45 pm – 8:30 pm
Church Key @ 1402 Grant Avenue 415-986-3511
-Beer Special: $1 off Human Blockhead® on draft.

8:45 – 9:15 pm
Monk’s Kettle @ 3141 16th Street 415-865-9523
-Beer Special: $1 off Human Blockhead® on draft.

9:30 pm – 12 am
Bender’s @ 806 S. Van Ness Avenue 415-824-1800
-Beer Special: $5 for 22 oz. bottle of Coney Island Sword Swallower®.

To find out more about Shmaltz Brewing Company, go here.

To find out more about the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, go here.

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