Entry 7- My first blogspot band review- Black Hondo Kicks Ass

Yesterday, I was hired by the Democratic National Committee to canvas door to door spreading the word about the upcoming Presidential election, and, more importantly, raising funds for the DNC, which is money either the Obama or Clinton campaigns will need to fall back on in a race against a very wealthy Republican fundraising machine.

I had done this once before with a consumer group named C.A.L.P.I.R.G. Canvassing and collecting money door to door for whatever cause does not pay very well. But it was Friday and I had shit to do. Plus, I was guaranteed to be paid a certain amount just for my first day of training, whether or not I collected any money. (8 bucks an hour for four hours. If I kept doing this week by week, I would eventually have to start mugging homeless people in order to turn in enough cash at the end of the day to meet my weekly quota of collections.)

My trainer and I left her office and took the bus to Kensington. I had offered to drive numerous times, but she said because of insurance reasons, she would need to check my driving record, and verify that I did have auto insurance, which we did not have time to do in one day before heading out for canvassing. I barely had the canvassing rap down when we got to our target neighborhood. But I was mostly just there to observe my trainer and learn the ropes of canvassing.

(My trainer shall remain anonymous and so will the location of her office. The reasons for that should become clear in the paragraphs below.)

My only plan for Friday, before this suddenly landed on my plate, had been to see a local band named Black Hondo at the San Diego Sports Club. My trainer promised me the canvassing would be done by 8:30 or 9pm, and after the bus ride back to the undisclosed office location, I figured I could still make it to Sports Club before 10:30. Black Hondo was scheduled to play at 9, but as we all know, concerts never start on time, so I figured I had a good chance of still making at least part of their set.

My trainers only reason for being in San Diego is to do her canvassing work. So, when we arrived in the Kensington area, she began giving me a lecture about the neighborhood being extremely wealthy and also extremely liberal. I laughed, thinking she was joking, but she was not. She told me she had canvassed the day before a few blocks away from where I was being trained and everyone was very nice. Even Republicans she encountered, who were obviously not going to donate to the DNC, had been polite and cordial to her.

I bit my lip a little bit. I have known many people over the years who have lived in that area, and all of them absolutely were very nice, but in today's political climate, and economic shortfalls, I could imagine people who were normally nice maybe not being overly friendly to liberal beggars knocking on their front doors unannounced.

"I think the Mayor of San Diego lives in this neighborhood." I told her.

"Is he a Democrat?" She asked.

"I'm pretty sure he's not."

We decided to skip his house if we came across it, and there was any way to tell it belonged to him, because asking an acting candidate to donate money to the opposing party's national campaign seemed like a real waste of time. I know he lives there because I had read it in the paper. Whichever house is his, I had no idea. I did kind of hope we would maybe see him walking around and I would get a chance to speak with him. I don't get agree with most of his policies, but there is one very important policy that sets him apart from candidate Steve Francis in a very important way. Can anyone guess which one it is? (Hint: It has something to do with marriage, and equal rights.)

I shadowed my trainer, or mentor, or whatever her official title is, and was impressed with her canvassing skills. She did not back down. She was right; even people who we could immediately tell were not going to donate were still nice and did not seem to mind chatting with us. When we got deep into the Ken neighborhood, we rounded a corner that was covered with hedges and bushes, and there was this magnificent castle of a house. There were red, white, and blue streamers trailing from the rooftop down into an elegant garden. Re-Elect Sanders signs were plastered on the walls of the house, and stuck with wooden stakes into the lawn. I looked down at the front lawn, which was about twenty yards across, and thirty yards long running from the street up to the front of the house. A humongous caricature of Jerry's face had somehow been mowed into the blades of grass. I noticed as we walked by, his eyes in the lawn portrait seemed to follow us; like some kind of trippy M.C. Escher illusion.

"I think this might be the Mayor's house." I told my trainer.

When we were past Jerry's mansion, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of the curtains from the fourth or fifth story window fluttering closed. THEY have seen us, I thought.

The very next house we went to looked promising. It was a little more humble than Jerry's, but had a couple nice cars out front, which you always suppose means that people who live there have some money.

My trainer knocked on the front door and there was an audible rattle and bang from inside the house. Was that a shotgun? I thought.

Before either I, or my trainer could rationalize what was happening; a huge, balding man came storming out of the house waving his arms in the air as if he was going to attack us. My trainer is the one officially hired as a campaigner, and I do not even have health insurance, so I figured if he really did start swinging, I could trip her up and be able to run back to Adams Avenue and hop into a cab before he could even touch me.

Fortunately, the man was only a bit drunk, and was just joking around. After that, each house we went to was boarded up and people refused to even come to their doors. The word had gone out- Peaceniks had infiltrated the neighborhood.

Even before we had been spotted by Jerry's watchdogs, many people would not donate because they had already donated to individual candidates campaigns. A few also, said they preferred to donate online. Although, when you think about it, in an age of rampant identity theft, it might be a little smarter to write a check made out to exactly who you want the money to go to, and receive a receipt, than it is to put your CC info haphazardly onto the Internet.

(I've had trouble myself selling my published ebook for this reason. People are leery of putting their CC info onto a website they are not familiar with. As if, those same credit card numbers are not already looped into an excessive amount of databases, and this is THE site that is going to rip them off. Go figure.)

Shortly before 10:30, I arrived in Hillcrest and meandered my way to the Sports Club. I could hear Black Hondo, and their singer Lucy's voice echoing outside, so I was glad I was right on time. I caught maybe four or five songs before they wrapped things up. I have seen them play a couple of times before, and last night was no different. They are very good when they drive it hard and fast, and a little out of time when they try to slow it down. They are a newly formed band, though, and I give them a lot of props for sounding that good after only writing music together for a few months. Their guitarist, Jason, has only played in front of a live audience the two or three times the band has, and gets more consistent each time they play.

The true spectacle is their singer Lucy, who has a very commanding stage presence without hardly interacting with the audience at all. The Sabath based riffs are supported by the pounding rhythm section, with just a little keyboard underneath, to make it seem surreal.

Once again, they have a few kinks with their metre in the slower songs they have written. But the harder driving songs, and the way the band is very comfortable playing with each other, remind me of other bands I have seen, in a way that it does not matter if the audience shows up or not. In or out of the garage, it sounds the same- They are here to jam and have a good time. I like that. No frills. No fancy shit. It's a hard core, blue-collar vibe that can scare people who have their brains wrapped in protective, plastic, Mickey Mouse Itunes shit.

You can check them out on Myspace here: http://www.myspace.com/blackhondo

(I recommend the live show to really hear their sound. Hopefully soon, they can get into a real studio and blast it the way they want.)

[A side note to my second, and probably last, attempt at door to door canvassing, that has nothing at all to do with my band review in any way, is that my trainer spoke on the phone with another canvasser that is working in Nashville, Tennessee. Canvassers like this are soldiers for political parties. They do not always get to choose where they are sent to do their work, or who else they get to work with. The campaigner working for the DNC in Nashville had to choose six or seven people out of twenty to train and take door to door on his first day of canvassing. His team raised almost four hundred dollars in one day in a state that is just plain realistically a Red one. My trainer raised only a portion of that here in San Diego after two full days of canvassing. Which is pretty amazing considering that San Diego is not really the Republican stronghold of California like it used to be. And who did my trainer get to work with? That's right! Me! A guy who hardly has a pot to piss in, and really would like to get involved in some way to help out his affiliated party, but is going to keep appointments he has made in order to get a real, steady paying job. Maybe there are just more people in Nashville, and other cities across the country, who are not afraid to get out the vote, and less quick to slam their doors on people's faces.)