PHOTO BY KYLE HERRERA
54 San Diego Reader February 9, 2017
band name.” Caskitt calls his band “punk
continued from page 52
why not come out to a show?” Caskitt admits he caused
some grief when he balked just before one band left for a tour. “They had a two-month
rock,” but I note that the band seems to straddle both punk and rock. “When I tell people we do
Drummer/singer Caskitt (center) says he’s sick of watching vain lead singers.
tour booked, but it didn’t look like it would make any money. For them it was a vacation. But for someone like me who doesn’t have a family in San Diego, I need to work. I need to pay rent. I can’t go out on tour and come back broke as shit,” says Caskitt. After he left those local
bands, he moved to a differ- ent music scene (“L.A. put a bad taste in my mouth”) and then decided to move back to start a new local band on his own terms. I already had ‘Caskitt’ painted on my drum cases, so I stuck with that for a
punk rock, I can tell their brain goes either to the Ramones- type bands of the ’70s or the Blink-182 boy bands of the ’90s. Stephen [Long, Caskitt guitarist] has an extensive knowl- edge of metal, but our music transcends a lot of that guitar-obsessed metal. When we play, it’s with punk bands; rarely do we play with a metal band, even though we sound heavier and more technical than most punk bands. We get compared a lot Propa- gandhi, who do a more progressive and techni- cal strain of punk.”
Oceanside-based Caskitt,
which includes bassist Jesse Hernandez, appears February 9 at the Tower Bar with the
Bombpops and Squarecrow. — Ken Leighton
Music before poetry for Pinsky. It turns out that Robert Pinsky is also a sax player. We spend minutes talking about the beloved Buescher 400 series tenor sax he once owned but that got stolen. “Tenor sax,” he tells me by phone from San Francisco, “it’s the most ironic instru- ment. It has swagger.” He says
he still plays, occasionally. “Mostly keyboards. But I still go through phases where I find myself getting out the horn.” National Endowment for
the Humanities recipient and former three-term United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will kick off the Point Loma Nazarene University Writers Symposium by the Sea on Tuesday, February 21, with what he calls “poemjazz”: him reading some of his poems while backed by, on this date, the Point Loma Nazarene jazz combo. Pinsky recently recorded the material with jazz pianist Laurence Hobgood, titled Poemjazz, and released it on Circumstantial Records. As a child, he says, it was
music that came first, not poetry. “I had a lot of academic problems in grade school. One thing that held me together, that I could feel good about, was music. I played dances, bar mitzvahs. I had a vision
right up to college that I would become a great jazz musician.” When that failed to material- ize, there was poetics. “All along,” says Pinsky, “I was thinking about the sounds of words, and of rhythms.”
music — Hobgood composed his parts on the fly with only a printout of Pinsky’s poems in front of him. In contrast to the measured, friendly tones of the 76-year-old Pinsky over the phone, Pinsky’s voice on the
whenever possible, performing “poemjazz” at venues across the country. Some of the poetry is dark and pensive; some ironic, and not without humor: Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual/ Bisexual, or heterosexual, the sonnets/ Provide no evidence on the matter. Mr. Pinsky laughs aloud when I read this line of his back to him. “We can make the music
funny sometimes, too.” As for the future of
Three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Pinsky put his words to music on Poemjazz, which he will perform at Point Loma Nazarene on February 21.
This background is told in
explanation of the process of recording with Hobgood, of reading the words live against a web of piano improvisa- tions. Pinsky says the two of them recorded together in the studio, like a band, but with no
recording sounds ageless. “The chops haven’t deteriorated. I just can’t go as long. An hour gig, that’s about it.” Born in New Jersey,
Pinsky lives and teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and Hobgood are on the road
Poemjazz, will there be a volume two? Yes, with more musicians, Pinsky says. “Our goal is to do this with Laurence and maybe a bass player. That
would be the next step.” — Dave Good
Find Blurt online at
SDReader.com/blurt
CONTRIBUTORS Chad Deal, Dave Good, Dorian Hargrove, Mary Leary, Ken Leighton, Bart Mendoza, Jay Allen Sanford, David Stampone
Friday February 10
Brazillian Full Moon Party: Raggabond Jambless
Universalize
Saturday February 11 Split Finger
Something Like Seduction
The Simpson trial wasajoke. It became agame,
Dr.Seuss-ish and, chess-wise, oversimplifiedly moronic. Adouble murder was committed on June 12, 1994, about 10:10 p.m., aheinous
O.J.’s Post Mortem
crime, and an $8 million trial has ensued that, while ruinously complex in terms of DNA tests and blood samples, has been reduced simply to the matter of race. Who murdered Nicole
Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman seems to be irrelevant. Apractical joke, the black and white issue, has replaced it, and we’ve fallen for it. By Alexander Theroux, Oct. 5, 1995
Finally — the 1,500 best stories from 44 years of the Reader — fully transcribed. An ongoing project through the end of 2016.
sdreader.com/news/from-archives
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