Category Archives: TVD Los Angeles

Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

Well, I ride on a mailtrain, baby / Can’t buy a thrill / Well, I’ve been up all night, baby / Leanin’ on the windowsill / Well, if I die / On top of the hill / And if I don’t make it / You know my baby will

Don’t the moon look good, mama / Shinin’ through the trees? / Don’t the brakeman look good, mama / Flagging down the “Double E?” / Don’t the sun look good / Goin’ down over the sea? / Don’t my gal look fine / When she’s comin’ after me?

Rocking through September. While I recover from my covid brain fog, I’m keeping it simple. Work, music, and watching sports on TV. The highlight of my week came in the form of a snapshot of an old fishing buddy.

In it was an old sailor named Bob who used to fish every Tuesday night on a tuna boat called The Condor. Those days at sea on The Condor with Bob, Sheriff, and the big Rondo were carefree and now precious—all of us loved being on the water in September and October.

Here’s to calm, warm waters and smiling fishermen.

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There are rock stars, there are pop stars, and then there’s “Weird Al” Yankovic—a 66-year-old accordion player who has spent more than four decades turning other people’s hits into punchlines, and who can still fill an arena on a Saturday night.

On September 19, he brought his Bigger & Weirder 2026 Tour to a packed Honda Center in Anaheim, California. If you grew up wearing out a cassette of Dare to Be Stupid or a burned CD of Running with Scissors, this was the kind of night that makes you feel about twelve years old again—in the best possible way.

Opening the night was Puddles Pity Party, the seven-foot sad clown with a voice that has no business coming out of a clown. Puddles opened things up with a fun set of covers and original music, and for three of the songs, he had fans come up and join him on stage—which, if you’ve ever seen his act, is half the fun.

He played “Let’s Give ’Em Pumpkin to Talk About,” “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island,” and a cover of “Under Pressure.” The whole set was amazing. His lounge-act style of recreating songs—part crooner, part performance art, all deadpan—makes it fun for the whole crowd, and by the time he walked off, the arena was warmed up and ready.

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Three distinct voices of modern rock assembled Thursday night, September 17, at Honda Center in Anaheim, CA: Dorothy’s blues-soaked hard rock, the unmistakable alternative-rock legacy of Stone Temple Pilots, and Godsmack’s rock-radio assault as part of the band’s 2026 Rise of Rock World Tour. The first leg of this arena assault kicked off way back in May and runs through late October, concluding in Uncasville, CT.

Honda Center has always been a spectacular place to attend a concert, but with the recent renovations and add-ons, it is now better than ever. Dorothy opened the evening with a spectacle of blues-driven hard rock, with vocal centerpiece Dorothy Martin delivering a soulful, gritty performance full of rock ‘n’ roll swagger.

Opening a show like this is never an easy assignment, but from the first verse of “Down to the Bottom,” she immediately had all captivated and without a doubt amassed many new fans as a result—definitely an artist to further explore if not familiar with Dorothy’s discography.

Stone Temple Pilots need no introduction. The band that initially rose to fame as part of the grunge explosion of the early 1990s dominated radio and MTV for that decade, and remains active and relevant in 2026.

This is no nostalgia act, as vocalist Jeff Gutt has injected a new energy into the band with his own identity while respectfully honoring the legacy of the late Scott Weiland. Along with original members Erik Kretz on drums and brothers Robert and Dean DeLeo on bass and guitar, respectively, the band continues to deliver quality performances nightly.

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Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

I’m so sick of T.V. / You know, I’m getting bored of the tube / I’m so sick of romance / And I’m gettin’ real sick of you

I wanna get on out of here / Find me somethin’ to do / Yeah, get on outta here / Just ain’t nothin’ to do

It’s crazy for me to think that we’re midway through September. Fuck me—but okay. It was a long, hot August, and Labor Day weekend was hot and seemed to go on for days. I spent that Saturday at the Rose Bowl watching Guns ‘N Roses. The band together, sounding big with Slash shredding on a mesmerizing amount of guitars!

After the show we spent hours hanging with Axel. I hadn’t hung with him in over 30 years. Funny how alot doesn’t change. Maybe, in this case, with the exception of how happy Axel has become. That’s cool.

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Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

I met a girl who sang the blues / And I asked her for some happy news / But she just smiled and turned away / I went down to the sacred store / Where I’d heard the music years before / But the man there said the music wouldn’t play

And in the streets, the children screamed / The lovers cried and the poets dreamed / But not a word was spoken / The church bells all were broken

And the three men I admire most / The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost / They caught the last train for the coast / The day the music died

I guess one could say, “Any day is a good day to release a new song.”

Honestly, I’m a bit stumped on what to report this week. I did give a nod and a wink at this week’s stack of new vinyl. This Idelic Hour set shows that even in dark times, music thrives.

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Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

You picked me up / Oh, yes you did / When nobody else would / I know you did / And you did things / For me, my baby / That nobody else could / I know you did

It’s another hot one here in LA. Actually at 90 degrees, we’re on a cooling trend. After two short weeks it’s like…I’m getting my pencils sharped and notebooks organized for a busy, busy fall. The trick is to be happily working away. Honestly those summer cucumbers and watermelon help.

Per tradition, September marks the beginning of school and triggers the time for young bands to release new songs. So, with that in mind…

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Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

On the path with my restless curiosity / Beyond life, before me / A passenger on no ordinary journey / It’s one of a kind, won’t get left behind

I’m floating on a moment, don’t know how long / No one knows, no one can stay / All going to nowhere (nowhere) / All going, make no mistake

I think this week’s Idelic Hour may have melted. Maybe it was just the DJ?

I’m a bit scared to check the garage. My crates of vinyl might resemble the wicked witch after a dip in the pool.

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Some lineups look good on a flyer, and lineups that make sense the second the first act starts, and this one was the second kind. On August 21, Little Stranger headlined the Observatory OC in Santa Ana, the Orange County stop on their Broken Hearted Boys Tour, and they brought along three acts who have been turning up on each other’s records for years. Tropidelic, Jarv, and Damn Skippy supported them—four sets, one extended crew, and a room that never really cooled off in between.

Damn Skippy kicked things off with a ton of energy, setting the mood for the night and really getting everyone moving. The Carolinas rapper does not ease into anything—he came out at full speed and had the early arrivals on his side before most of them had found a spot on the floor. Jarv was up next and kept that momentum going. The Brooklyn MC and producer works in a classic boom-bap style without ever sounding like a museum piece, and by the end of his set, he had us ready for the next two bands.

Tropidelic came next, and they are always an exciting set—this night was no different. The six-piece out of Cleveland runs reggae, hip-hop, and horn-driven funk together in a way that should not work as smoothly as it does, and frontman Matthew Roads spends the whole set making sure nobody gets to stand still.

The set included “Follow Your Nature,” “New World,” “Sunny Days,” and “Same Hat,” with collaborations “Pressure” with Nahte and Skippy, “Movie Star” with Jarv, and “Holiday” with Little Stranger. That is the thing about a bill like this one—the guests are already in the building, so the collabs actually happen instead of getting name-checked from the stage.

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Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes / Let them know you realize that life goes fast / It’s hard to make the good things last / You realize the sun doesn’t go down / It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

On Tuesday, we dropped our youngest off at college—a new chapter for the Sidel family. I don’t know if I have a soundtrack for my thoughts and feelings this week. Excited, emotional, grateful, proud, and anxious as any parent would be. File under: Mindblower.

When I started playing records last night, the song that came to mind was “Rock On,” but I believe I dropped “Thunderwing” instead.

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On August 7 Rebelution headlined the first of 3 nights at the Pacific Amphitheatre, another in a great season at the OC Fair. Skip Marley and Niko Rubio supported them. It was one of those Costa Mesa evenings that makes you glad you bought the ticket—warm but not hot, a breeze coming in off the coast, and the smell of fair food drifting over the hill behind the amphitheatre. People were in their seats early for this one, which does not always happen at the fair, and you could tell from the parking lot that it was going to be a good night.

Niko Rubio started things off. This was my second time seeing her, and she was just as amazing as I remembered her. I love her mix of different music genres. She is a Mexican and Salvadoran American artist out of Southern California, and she pulls from dreamy alt-pop, mariachi, and old-school R&B without any of it feeling forced.

It all works even better live than it does on record. She played songs “Sunday Girl,” “Savior Girl,” and “Ring Ring” from her recent EP. Her band was tight, her voice carried all the way to the back rows, and she had the early crowd on her side within about two songs. If you have not heard her yet, go find “Ring Ring” and the newer “Sunday Girl” material. She is only going to get bigger from here.

Next up was Skip Marley. He came out, and from the first note, he was making the crowd move. He played his original “Lions,” as well as Bob Marley covers “Exodus” and “Is This Love.” With every song he played, you could see and hear the feeling in it, and all the fans were singing along.

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Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

I got a baby’s brain and an old man’s heart / Took eighteen years to get this far / Don’t always know what I’m talkin’ about / Feels like I’m livin’ in the middle of doubt

‘Cause I’m eighteen / I get confused every day / Eighteen, I just don’t know what to say / Eighteen, I gotta get away

It’s Friday, late morning, and I’m sitting in the dining area of our groovy pad in the canyon, having a late breakfast with my son Jonah. Last week, the kid turned 18. On Tuesday, he went off to college for his freshman year.

I’m not saying this is the last breakfast we’ll have together, but I was up late last night alone with my turntable and crate of old records, memories of turning 18, and dropping a needle on my worn copy Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits.

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WORDS AND IMAGES: DANIEL GRAY | New wave. Art rock. Synth pop. Rock. Take your pick because it’s been hard to define the music of The Fixx. As much as they have been labeled an “’80s band,” they still make new music, and more than half their album output comes from the ’90s and 2000s. But still, they seem to be products of the Reagan era, and the multitude of videos played on MTV, shot in the style and look of the day, helped freeze them in time for the casual audience. But The Fixx fans know better.

Playing to a packed house at the Belasco in downtown Los Angeles, The Fixx took the stage and opened with “Beautiful Friction,” the title song from their 2012 album. Out of their first four songs, only “Stand or Fall” was from the 1980s. And while, without a doubt, many in the audience were there to hear the hits, which include four top-twenty tunes, The Fixx was out to play a range of songs from their vast repertoire and not pander to any era.

Truthfully, the night was all the better for it. Because the band are better musicians and Cy Curnin is a much deeper lyricist than standard definition music videos can convey. The quintet featured the “classic” lineup of Cy Curnin on lead vocals, Jamie West-Oram on guitar, Rupert Greenall on keyboards, Adam Woods on drums, and Dan K. Brown on bass.

Curnin is tall and lean, and the all-white suit he wore only enhanced a theatrical nature that has a bit of David Bowie and David Byrne to it. He doesn’t just sing songs, he performs them. Curnin is easily the most animated of the band, with Greenall and Woods naturally remaining behind their respective instruments, and the nattily dressed Brown, complete with a top hat, staying anchored in place while playing bass.

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Nobody in that room knew what they were watching. Not the couple beside me who had flown in from England. Not the guy two rows up in a faded Trapeze shirt. Not me, camera in hand, working a Saturday night in the desert.

On August 1, we all thought we were going to be seeing a killer rock and roll show courtesy of Kings of Chaos. Three days later, Glenn Hughes announced his retirement from touring and live performances, revealing that his medical team had told him he needs another open-heart surgery—and just like that, the seventeen songs I had spent the evening photographing became the last public performance of one of the most extraordinary voices rock has ever produced.

I have been sitting with that for a week. Here is what I saw.

Kings of Chaos is Matt Sorum’s idea, and it is a deceptively simple one. Take the drummer’s chair—Sorum has occupied some of the best ones in rock, from Guns N’ Roses to Velvet Revolver to The Cult—build a bulletproof house band around it, then rotate in rock’s upper tier from who is willing and available.

There is no new album to promote. There is no narrative arc. There are just great songs played by the people who actually made them, in whatever configuration the calendar allows. On paper, it reads like a casino package. In practice, on this night, it was closer to a summit.

The room was near capacity without quite selling out, and the fans I spoke with had come in from all over Southern California and from as far away as England and Australia. That tells you something about how thin the ground has gotten for shows like this one.

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Some concerts you plan your whole summer around. Others land on a random Wednesday in the middle of the OC Fair, and those are the ones you end up talking about for weeks. July 29th was the second kind. Cypress Hill rolled into the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa with 35 years of hits behind them and absolutely no interest in taking it easy, and Los Angeles’ own Ozomatli got there first and set the bar high. Two bands from the same city, two completely different sounds, one crowd that never sat down. If you skipped this one because it was a school night, you missed the best party in Orange County.

The show was part of the OC Fair’s Toyota Summer Concert Series, which is still one of the best deals in Southern California—your concert ticket gets you into the Fair, so you can spend the afternoon eating things you would never eat anywhere else and then walk straight into an 8,000-seat amphitheatre. By the 7:30 downbeat, the place was packed, loose, and ready to go.

Ozomatli opened things up with the unique blend of genres that really makes for an amazing show. Three decades in, the LA collective still throws salsa, cumbia, hip-hop, funk, reggae, and rock into the same song and makes it sound effortless. They played great songs like “Tus Ojos,” “After Party,” “Como Ves,” and “O Le Le” that had people singing and dancing throughout the venue.

The horns did most of the heavy lifting, the rhythm section never let up, and the crowd figured out pretty quickly this was not a set to spend in the beer line. They closed out their set playing out into the crowd and interacting with the fans—drums, horns, and all, straight down the aisles. It is their signature move, and it still works every time.

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Greetings from Laurel Canyon!

Well, I got up feeling so down / I got off being sold out / I’ve kept the movie rolling / But the story’s getting old now / Oh yeah

Well I just looked in the mirror / And things aren’t looking so good / I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota / Oh yeah

So now you know / Who gets mystified / So now you know / Who gets mystified

Show me the power child, I’d like to say / That I’m down on my knees today / Yeah it gives me the butterflies, gives me away / ‘Til I’m up on my feet again

Our summer heatwave is here and so are my “summer lazies.” Last week I was so knocked around I couldn’t even spit an Idelic minute, let alone an hour.

Ultimately, LA is the coolest city to spend the summer in. The humidity is low, making summer nights relatively comfortable. As I flipped through my crates of melting vinyl, I felt urges for grunge, ’70s punk, oddballs, and a few new bits.

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