Mike Bookey

Dear Alfred “Weird Al” Yankovic,
You are playing at the Deschutes County Fair this weekend. I saw this on your website – you know, the one with all the bright colors and wacky photos of you confusedly looking at the camera as if to say, “Hey, what's goin' on here?” Speaking of photos, remember when you had a moustache, glasses and looked like a guy who owned a windowless van? I liked those photos more than I like the updated ones in which you look more like the inordinately tall woman who taught me piano lessons.
Anyway, thanks for making our fair one of the many fairs at which you're playing family friendly music and/or making people laugh. You've made me laugh over the years and I thought “Smells Like Nirvana” was really cool when I was in fourth grade and hadn't started listening to actual Nirvana music yet. When I heard the real song a year later, it sure sounded depressing. That Kurt Cobain was not funny at all. Also, how about UHF, that was a crazy movie, man. By the way, where can I get a VHS copy of that?

A lot of bands enter contests. This typically means a high-school battle of the bands, or perhaps engaging in a larger affair, like the recent Last Band Standing. But with the Internet, music competitions take on an entirely new style and scope. In other words, electronic-based contests are a new and different world.
This is something Adventure Galley, a band comprised mostly of Mountain View High School graduates who've relocated to Eugene, discovered when they tossed in an application to the Toyota Music Rock the Space contest this spring. They didn't know what to expect – so they really didn't expect anything, especially when the quintet discovered that some 17,000 other acts had entered the contest.

Ritchie Young is playing the Tower Theatre with his band, Loch Lomond this week, but it won't be his first time in the iconic Bend venue. In fact, he's played there a few times, but not as leader of the critically revered folk-pop band that he now helms. This was before the Tower was the Tower we know now – things were different. Really different.
“They'd just give us the key and let us do whatever we wanted,” says Young, “The seats were all torn up – there wasn't much else you could do to the place to make it more burned out, but when you're playing punk rock music in high school that's kind of the ideal situation, ya know?”

In a way, Colin Hay has lived two musical lives and most people came to know him during that first life when he was the front man for the iconic Australian band, Men at Work. Yes, the same Men at Work that informed the world in 1981 that they had come from the “land down under” and that same year asked us “Who Could it Be Now?” And this is the same Men at Work that popped up in the news in the past few weeks after the band was ordered to pay back royalties because a judge in Sydney decided that a flute melody found in “Down Under” had been copied from a children's song.
But then there's the other Colin Hay – the guy who resurfaced in the middle of the last decade with sweetly seasoned, mostly acoustic songs that appeared in television shows like Scrubs, in addition to the wildly popular Garden State soundtrack. This second career has brought Hay an entirely new group of fans, many of whom probably weren't yet born when Men at Work scored its first round of big hits or only knew the band by way of novelty '80s mix tapes. But Hay, who comes to the Athletic Club of Bend on Wednesday, July 14, just a month before the release of his new solo album American Sunshine, hasn't forgotten about Men at Work.

Every Thursday for the past 11 weeks, 400 or more people have been loading into Boondocks where upon entering they're handed a red (or sometimes yellow) raffle ticket – you know, the kind that are awarded for skee ball prowess or can be redeemed for entry into less-corporate movie theaters. It's with that ticket that those gathered will voice their opinion as to which of the five bands that have been onstage during the past four hours has earned their confidence.