::: WITH ROBBERS ON HIGH STREET :::

9/14 - Bar Pink, San Diego, Ca.

9/15 - The Roxy, Los Angeles, Ca.

9/17 - Hotel Utah, San Francisco, Ca.

9/19 - Doug Fir Lounge, Portland, Or.

9/21 - The Funhouse, Seattle, Wa. 

::: ALSO :::

8/13 - Tom’s Shoes Give Event, Irvine Spectrum, Ca.

Every Tuesday in August - Allah-Las Residency at The Echo - 1822 West Sunset Boulevard

8/16 - Strangers Family Band, Crooked Cowboy & the Freshwater Indians, PEACE (Jeff Davies of the Brian Jonestown Massacre), Records by Dirk

8/23 - Cologne (San Francisco), Jeffertitti’s Nile, TBA

8/30 - Blackfeet Braves, Big Search, TRC (Members of My Pet Saddle)

presco:

You can hear the Allah-Las on YouTube, and you can see them every Tuesday in August at the Echo, where they’re headlining a free residency.

But in neither case, according to the band, will you be getting the actual Allah-Las experience: the thing itself, the work of art with the aura, the Mona Lisa–hanging-at-the-Louvre, as opposed to the Mona Lisa on a faded postcard or a computer monitor.

The Allah-Las are the 2011 version of the retro-rock tradition that goes back to a bunch of kids forming bands in garages across the country in the late ’50s and the early to mid-’60s. Said youngsters were inspired by the original rock explosion broadcast to suburban homes by Ed Sullivan and the others, at the time when those kids were at their most impressionable.

Out of the garages and small labels came a bunch of iconic singles that were anthologized in the ’70s in collections with rock-appropriate names like Nuggets and Pebbles. Nuggets — and ’70s retro-cool bands like the Flaming Groovies and labels like Bomp! — in turn begat the more psychedelic Paisley Underground movement in Los Angeles in the ’80s. The Beat went on and on in the ’90s — yes, even during grunge — with “surf-gaze” cult groups like Further.

But what all those retro bands across the decades never had to contend with is the age of instant availability, the digital cornucopia that allows anyone to find pretty much everything that was ever recorded anywhere, and then to make infinite copies.

The Allah-Las’ answer to the challenge has been to go back to the beginning, back to the carefully crafted 45 rpm single.

Read More