I went down a YouTube rabbit hole last night. Here's how it started.
Working on cover tunes for Sunset Grooves, playing along to Thunder Island by Jay Ferguson. That reminded me of a band that covered that song on YouTube, so I looked them up. The Pet Rock Band is what they are called and they did a great version of Thunder Island.
After watching that, I remembered that at one of our previous SG rehearsals, since we are doing Somebody's Baby by Jackson Browne, we should also do Boulevard, which led to a search that found a house band in Hollywood called Soundcheck doing that song.
It took me a minute to realize that this was actually Jackson Browne playing it, but, whatever. And it made me jealous that they have 3 guitar players covering all the bases. I did a deeper dive on the Soundcheck page, where they have a ton of videos, and looked up some songs we also do (Easy Lover, Maggie May, some others).
On Maggie May, a bassist named Julia Lage played and at first, I didn't think she was all that great, but the more I watched, the more I realized that she could really play. A search on her stuff led me to her and a singer named Gabbie Rae playing Heart's Barracuda on a cruise ship, and dang, they were great!
I then watched a few of Gabbie's videos, learning that she's now all of 24 and really great frontwoman. She did some videos with Soundcheck at 18 and was killing it then. Seems like she's doing hard rock and metal these days, but wow, what a voice!
From there, YouTube suggested (or I searched, I can't remember) Noelle Leblanc, who was the singer for a band I loved years ago, Damone, from Boston. I wrote about them a few times in the blog, but I dove into their videos from the 2006-2012 era. Sadly, there's not much, and what there is was shot with potato cameras, but they have a few documentary shorts of their recording of "Out Here All Night," which I found to be cool.
This video and the part 2 video kept me up way too late (12:30am), as well as some great live footage from when Damone reunited in 2019. They were so tight and Noelle is pretty great at guitar, check it out.
Loving that the bassist, Mike Vasquez, is playing a white Gibby Thunderbird, just like Butterfly!
This morning, I did more searching and found that Noelle has been putting out songs ever since Damone disbanded. I know she did the Organ Beats and some solo stuff, but she has stuff as recent as April of this year. It is less rock and more pop/singer-songwriter, but I love her voice so I'll check it out.
I also did a search with Damone, the Crocodile Cafe and a date of 5/15/2006, when I saw them play. That led to an article about Jim Anderson, the sound guy from the Croc back then. When he left the Croc and/or retired, he donated all the shows he recorded there to the University of Washington, where they archived it all!
Of course, having played there back then, I looked for Lund Bros., of which there are 2 shows. There's a Scheme show, but I don't think I played it with them. There is an Ethyl show from 2003, which I'll have to check out. There's a Shake Some Action! show, but I don't think I was with them either. Lots of stuff by Robb with Cass. There's Juliana Hatfield (I was there), Damone (I was there), the Hold Steady (I was not there) and so much more. Trouble is, it is only accessible in person and not online, due to intellectual property mumbo jumbo.
Looks like I'm gonna have to take a field trip one of these days, back to Suzzalo Library to take a listen.
