Fresno : Grub (Or "How to avoid Taco Bell at 2am.")

Ok. So here is what I tried to accomplish with these first few posts – to cover the basics of the Fresno scene from a musician’s perspective. I know I left a ton of stuff out – like more info about the other venues in town besides Tokyo Garden ( Starline, Club Fred, anything else left these days? ) and the other bands in town besides the three defunct ones I mentioned and Brian Kenney Fresno (there are lots ). So if there is something really important that I forgot to mention and you feel like telling me, or leaving a comment about it, you should.

Hopefully I will come back and spend some more time writing about Fresno later this year.

The last thing I want to cover before I move on is a brief list of some of my favorite spots to take my musician friends to eat while they are in Fresno. There are a few prerequisites for a place to be considered...

1) Relatively close to the 99 or 180 freeways. There is no point in recommending someplace up on Champlain and Perrin, or even Fig Garden Village, as the drive from the freeway for most visitors is too long and confusing.

2) It should be affordable. Not necessarily cheap, but affordable. Under $10 for sure.

3) It should have regular, if not late night, hours and it can’t be a super corporate fast food chain like KFC or Taco Bell. Regional chains are cool.

4) It has to be pretty good.

So, for Fresno I’ll throw 3 of my favorite options. They will probably seem like old hat for most of the Fresno kids who seem to be the ones reading the blog regularly so far, but for people not from our little town, and wandering Fresno late at night, our advice could prove helpful. If you have any other recommendations, please add them in the comments.

Million Elephant – Thai

The thing about Million Elephant that makes it so attractive for a band is that the menu has a ton of options. There are a number of vegetarian options, savory meat dishes and little appetizers that can fit into the budget of almost everyone. It is open late. It is family run. And it is a civilized restaurant on a main drag where you can sit back and enjoy a meal and not feel like someone may attack you or steal your van at any moment.

I noticed that they recently changed their hours, but on weekends I think they are still open until 3am. So a touring band can get off after even a late show and still get a table and dinner at a place that isn’t Denny’s. I would recommend the Phad Si Ew. It is a tasty, spicy and filling noodle dish. Most entrees cost just under $10 and they have a number of seafood and specialty options that are pricier. This is NOT my favorite Thai place in Fresno ( B & K on First reserves that dubious honor ), but their late night hours and consistent service make it an easy recommendation.

The Million Elephant Cafe and Bar
1153 N Fulton St
Fresno, CA 93728
(559) 237-3832
Get Directions

Robertito’s – Mexican

This is not the first place I’d recommend to people with sensitive stomachs or vegetarian members in their band. I would hazard a guess that absolutely nothing you purchase here is strictly vegetarian. But it is one of the better late night taco shops that are located downtown ( that you probably won’t get shot at ). There are two restaurants within a block of each other just off the downtown grid : the Abby location and the Tuolumne location. The above pic is from somebody’s midnight adventure to a Robertito’s in Oceanside – but you get the idea of what the place looks like.

In Fresno, I prefer the Tuolumne location, because it is a walk up sort of thing. You park your van, walk up to the window and order. It affords you that last, “…Let’s get of the van and walk around a little…” break before you hit the road or the hotel. Plus you don’t have to hassle for ordering for the other passengers via a drive-thru window. My favorite item to order, and a Fresno classic, is the California Burrito, which is a combination of steak, potatoes, salsa and cheese wrapped up in a tortilla. So good. Sometimes painful. Well worth it. This place is open late. Maybe 24 hours? I have never seen it closed.

Robertito's Taco Shop
2623 Tuolumne St
Fresno, CA 93721
(559) 237-1034
Get Directions

Al’s Café – Diner

Al’s Café is not open late for dinner unfortunately, but its location makes it the ideal place to grab a breakfast or brunch on the way out of town. It is located just off the 99 freeway on Olive and is home to some of the best hamburger steak, enchiladas and biscuits in the world. You heard me right. This little culinary gem, located in the remains of a Wendy’s, serves a crossover menu of some of the best Mexican food as well as some of those Caucasian favorites like biscuits and gravy.

You can eat veggie here, though vegan would be tough. But if you’re one of those veggies who likes to splurge every once in awhile, this would be the place to cut loose at. Fresno is blessed with a wealth of good Mexican food, and while Al’s isn’t my favorite, everything they prepare has such a down-hone style to it, that it is always delicious and comforting even if it doesn’t taste exactly the same way “mom made it”.

They don’t take cards here and their little ATM machine is a total rip-off. So bring cash.

This would be the perfect band brunch spot if they served alcohol. But they don’t. But even considering that flaw, they’re still a 99 out of 100.

Al's Cafe
1823 W Olive Ave
Fresno, CA 93728
(559) 233-9226
Get directions

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Fresno : Tokyo Garden (Or "Best place to waste your youth, ever!!!")

This post should start with a long disclaimer.

I have seen over 300 shows at Tokyo Garden. I have been going there since I was 19 years old. I have drank there, ate there, shat there, puked there and fought there. I have known the family that currently owns the restaurant for a long time (though I have never been able to recall their last name) and I have been booking shows there for 4 years now.

Ok. Now for the boring part.

For the uninitiated, Tokyo Garden is a 125 person capacity restaurant and venue in Fresno,California. It has been serving authentic Japanese food for over 50 years and, according to the owners, is the first Japanese restaurant in the United States. The décor is super kitschy, a mixture of somewhat beat-up 50’s era tables, an almost tiki-like bar, wood paneling and giant Godzilla dolls.

There really is no cooler place on earth. You couldn’t find a more delightful dive on Delancey or on South Congress. The bartenders are a super reserved, gruff Japanese duo name Tommy and Toshi. They are brothers and the owners of the joint. You can trust them to pour you a great drink, and give you the evilest eye while the pour it. They are notoriously mean.



On Friday nights they host a karaoke night and the first and third Sundays are reserved for the local Jazz heroes to come out and have a jam. The first and third Jazz Sundays are either the coolest or lamest nights to come to Tokyo Garden. The music is great. Everyone seems into it. The downside is that you’ll never find a place to sit and you will have to wait an hour to get a drink or have a meal. Tokyo Garden is chronically short staffed.

It is the only bar I know of, besides Cheers, that has its own theme song.

My favorite nights are when we manage to pull in some unsuspecting touring musician who is wayyyy to big for the room. The first show I booked there was with Aaron Espinoza (of Earlimart) and Jason Lytle (of Grandaddy). We had convinced them to come up and play a benefit show. The local elementary school’s music programs had been cut and we had decided that the proceeds from the show would go to help a local school’s music budget.

The show was the night before the Earlimart CD Release party in LA for Treble and Tremble. At that time, Earlimart was in every music magazine, and Grandaddy was already a household name for us kids form the Central Valley. The show was packed and everyone sat in a hippie circle on the floor in front of the stage for Lytle’s set. They sang along to all the old Grandaddy anthems and I remember he also played a lot of new songs that ended up being on “Just Like the Fambly Cat”. I remember “Rear View Mirror” really well. That is such a pretty song.

Aaron followed up with some great tunes. He had all these little crickets going off around the stage and he had brought a Space Echo all the way from his studio in LA that he used on a great cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “State Trooper”. Which is a bad ass song that Aaron does a bad ass version of.

That was one of my favorite shows ever.

Last fall we convinced John Vanderslice to hold the first show of his national tour here at Tokyo Garden. It was really stressful. He had lots of big sound requirements in his rider and Tokyo Garden doesn’t really have anything powerful on its roster of sound equipment. We have two mics, a 4 channel Yamaha PA, some crusty old power amps, two monitors and two 15” house speakers. That is all.

Luckily, Vanderslice was being tour managed by Dave Willingham, who, besides being a really responsible, kick-ass dude, is also a fantastic engineer. He owns a studio in Denton, TX called the Echo Lab and has an amazing ear and years of experience. He basically kicked me off the mixing board and started fiddling with things and brought out giant rolls of gaffer’s tapes, effects processors, microphones, sharpie markers, you name it.

He ended up making JV sound pretty marvelous and for the encore, JV marched out into the street in front of Tokyo Garden and sang his last song surrounded by a gaggle of drunk people and honking cars (that is what the that blurry cellphone pic is of). I had a feeling he pulled that “walk outside for the encore” move a couple times on his tour. But rest assured. It was never better than that night he did it at Tokyo.

And if there is anything magic about Tokyo Garden, it is exactly that : the potential for greatness lingers in the air there. I have seen a TON of shitty shows there, but I have never seen a better show anywhere else in the entire world.

If you are interested in booking a show at Tokyo Garden, I recommend you go through their myspace initially. It can be pretty tricky to get a show as they only have live music once or twice a week. The best way to do it, if you aren’t a national touring act, is to approach a local band about helping put together a bill.

Like I said, I have seen a lot of shitty shows here to. Hey Fresno people! What was your favorite, or least favorite Tokyo Garden show?

DOWNLOAD : Brad Basmajian - Tokyo Garden Theme Song
LINK : Official Tokyo Garden Website
LINK : Tokyo Garden Myspace
LINK : Kurtz’s Collection of Tokyo Garden pics on Flickr

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Fresno : Brian Kenney Fresno (Or "The slippery special spot of Fresno.")

Brian Kenney Fresno is one of the guys that I knew absolutely had to mention when I started this thing. He is a truly bizarre anti-folk / folkster / prog-rocking monster whose last name is Fresno. For reals. His regimen of steady touring since the 90’s, his record label and his not-to-suprising lack of commercial success has inspired and educated me. At the closing of yesterday’s post I referred to Brian Kenney Fresno as one of Fresno’s most underrated musicians – In hindsight, it would have been more appropriate to describe Brian as one of the WORLD’S most underrated musicians.

BKF is a master of the Warr Guitar. As I understand it, the Warr Guitar is a customized revamp of another instrument called the Chapman Stick. It is a stringed and fretted instrument like a guitar, but instead of picking, strumming or bowing, as on a conventional stringed instrument, each of Brian’s hands are tapping on the instrument independently. It is a monster and Brian has his set up with 12 strings – 5 bass strings and 7 guitar strings. This wicked instrument combined with loop pedals, effects processors and vocals means that BKF can pump out an orchestra level amount of counterpoint and noise. Talk about an arsenal.

Beyond his technical proficiency and hi-tech gadgetry, there is something about his music and his performance that is so ridiculous and awesome and life changing. No matter how hard I try and get down what this guy does musically with his guitar and with his music and his face and his whole thing .. the schtick … no matter what, my writing won’t be nearly as impressive as seeing him live just once. Soooo, if you have the chance, I highly recommend you see him.

Last year he played my birthday party and I had several friends from LA visiting. They loved him. Which leads me to believe that his appeal isn’t simply based on Fresno kitsch.

One of the guests at the party was Randy from the band One Trick Pony. I don’t remember everything about the party in exact detail, but I remember we were pretty trashed, sweaty and giggly by the end of the night, which is about when Brian Kenney took the stage (or backyard rather). Once Brian began his set, everyone, no matter how tired or sun-stroked or drunk got up and stood in the middle of the backyard to get a good view of this caped, marijuana-smelling, weird-guitar-wielding, flannel clad freakshow.

At one point I remember I was standing next to Randy, and at some point BKF said or played something so completely ridiculous that Randy (the guy from One Trick Pony) fell to his knees laughing and crying and completely spazzing out. And drunk.

I remember Brian stopped in the middle of the song, pointed at Randy and yelled, “That’s right! That’s right! Get down on your knees!”

I think that’s how I’ll always remember Brian Kenney Fresno : telling my friends to get down on their knees and worship him.

He is performing every Sunday evening at Club Fred in Fresno, CA. From 5 to 8. Afterwards you get to watch the Simpsons! Below is a great video and some audio. Watch the video. Please.

DOWNLOAD : Brian Kenney Fresno - That's Who
DOWNLOAD : Brian Kenney Fresno - Bobby Salazar!

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Nickel Nickel Nine

When other musicians find out I am from Fresno, one of the first questions I’m asked is, “How is the music scene in Fresno?” When this inevitably happens, I take a deep breath, shake my head, and answer in a very honest way, “It sucks.”

Which, no matter how easy I try to take it on my hometown, no matter how many excuses I try to make for my friends, no matter what anyone says; I am sure is the correct answer. The Fresno music scene is super shitty.

How do I come to this conclusion? Well, I think that the ultimate measurement by which to gauge a “music scene” would be by measuring the number of bands or songs or music from that “scene” that are interesting and worth spending your time enjoying, listening to, or blogging about.

The volume of Fresno music that I can even stand listening to is incredibly small, and makes up a very small percentage of the music that I listen to on a regular basis. There are a handful of bands whose performances or records I can even endure, and of those few, there are a handful of songs that I would actually consider memorable.

And even those bands from Fresno that I like – they usually don’t do anything. It seems the pattern of Fresno bands is fixed on playing the local dive bars, getting a small local buzz going, playing the local “big place” (in this case the 200 capacity, all-ages club, called The Starline), putting together a poor-to-mediocre record, and then imploding. Or, if they are lucky, they’ll just keep repeating steps one through three indefinitely until they get burned out or someone gets pregnant or dies.

There are no Fresno band success stories.

Ok. Now that I’ve panned the shit out my hometown music scene, I would like to mention that there a few Fresno bands that qualify as notable “near misses” or “glimmers of hope”. So, instead of continuing to document the uber-lameness of Fresno, (which should be obvious to anyone) I figure I’ll write about a few of the bands and a few of the songs from the past that I think are worth spending some time on.

No Cello (2004-2006, estimated)

I remember these guys started playing out at about the same time I moved back to Fresno and they always had these huge crowds of 16 year old girls surrounding the stage at every show. So of course I went to the shows as well. No Cello started as a guitar and drums duo, where drummer James Brittain-Gore would sing and sling drumsticks around crazily and Jordan Beyelia would nail down awesomely psychedelic riffs on guitar. They were everyone’s favorite. Girls swooned over them and guys were jealous. They were so fucking cool and all of 16 years old.

They recorded one EP for a local failed record label called Greytank (we’ll talk about them some other time). It doesn’t reflect the intensity and rawness of their live show, but is still pretty representative of what they were capable of.

DOWNLOAD : No Cello - Revolution (mp3)

Cause of band break-up : added a Tambourine player and keyboardist/bassist, Death

Pinkeye (2003-2006, estimated)

How do you write about these guys? To the uninitiated, I would describe the Pinkeye Cocktail as 2/3 sugary and weezer-y pop songwriting, 1/3 blistering drum licks (courtesy of Daren Taylor, who went on to become the drummer for Los Angeles’s Airborne Toxic Event) and a generous dash of drunkenness.

There is no one in Fresno I have seen who could transform a bar in Fresno into as big a party as these guys could. There was something infectiously retarded about the joy that infused a room when their guitars began clanging out the opening chords of a number. It was like being let out of class in grade school. Liberating and exciting and regular. Like clockwork.

I also must add that this is one of the few bands that had an un-official chorus of dancers that would show up at every single show. A large percentage of the band hailed from the neighboring town of Reedley, and the assorted girlfriends and girlfriends of their girlfriends (almost all exclusively from Reedley) would dance their weird Reedley dance (it looked kinda like a ska-skank sort of thing and involved lots of bangs in the eyes) at every show and further spread the weird joy that this band was known for.

They started one record and almost put it out. They never mixed it, so it sounds like ass. But to Pinkeye’s credit, they are the only one of the three bands listed here with all the original members still alive. So they could, in theory, reunite.

DOWNLOAD : Pinkeye - Ravishing (mp3)

Cause of band break-up : awesome drummer moved to Los Angeles, chaos, and unknown

Milk for the Morning Cake (1998 -2000, estimated)

This was a classic shoegaze band from the late 90’s fronted by my friend Ryan Tallman. Ryan was a bit of a boy genius. He graduated from high school early (or dropped out, I forget) and hauled ass at guitar way before I even learned to play a chord. I think I payed him $100 in 10th grade to record, on four track, my first attempt at a record.

The early MFTMC stuff had an awesome blend of open ended guitar sounds and atmospheric trumpet parts and rocking fucking backbeats. When I went away to the East Coast for school I would play an EP they did for all my new NYC friends. I don’t know if anybody in the northeast was as into to it as I was, but I know there a lot of Fresno folks who still have fond memories of this band. My fave tune was “Fuck Your Friends” which has all the emo of emo without any of the shitty aftertaste. Unfortunately, I couldn't find that track, but I convinced my friend Jefferson to post an MP3 from their last, unreleased record.

They were in and around the local scene for years, and went through a number of lineup changes, but the first incarnation and their first EP, in my opinion, was their best. If you have a link to something from that record, please post it in the comments! It has been years since I've heard it!

DOWNLOAD : Milk For The Morning Cake - Dead Summer (mp3)

Cause of band break-up : Ego, Death

Feel free to post your own list of Fave fresno bands in the comments. I'd be really curious about what folks dig up.

Tomorrow

My plan for tomorrow is to spotlight Brian Kenney Fresno, one of Fresno's most underrated and awesome musicians. Stay tuned.

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