What’s your favorite nation? Sammies nomination!

SN&R’s Sound Advice music column goes prime time to champion the 2010 Sacramento Area Music Award nominees

This article was published on 08.26.10

Jake Desrochers, who moonlights as DJ Blackheart, tears into the Les Paul. His two kids, Jaden and Hunter,are what motivate him to do what he does.
Photo By David Jayne

Find out more online at www.sammies.com.

Dear music scene: Please quit MySpace immediately and move on with your social-networking lives.

I’m serious. I was shocked to discover that MySpace even still exists. And that nearly every Sacramento band or musician’s MySpace page looks so wack it apparently was designed by the same colorblind deejay who learned his Web skills from Highlights magazine.

Please, it’s so much easier to share music on Facebook, or sites such as Bandcamp and SoundCloud. So unless Tom really is your uncle, it’s time to hit delete.

Here’s why: This year, we decided to let SN&R’s readers bear the burden of selecting the 2010 Sacramento Area Music Award nominees. All SN&R had to do was tally up the votes, plug bands into appropriate genres and call it a day. It should have been so dang easy.

But every rosy idea has a thorny hiccup. And who knew voters would end up nominating thousands of musicians for this year’s Sammies, which meant verifying artists’ names and viability on your awful MySpace pages. For hours. Even days.

I tried to pawn this off on interns, but they’d conveniently all disappeared to get someone coffee. What a thankless task, this Sammies 2010 ordeal.

All right, so I’m just fishing for sympathy.

It was 100 percent worth it.

Yeah, award shows such as the Grammys tend to celebrate all that’s rotten in the world of arts and entertainment. And sure, undoubtedly people will not agree with this year’s Sammies nominees. I can already sense the nasty e-mails coming my way and hear the gang outside my apartment brandishing pitchforks and torches (note to haters: I’ve moved).

So this year, I propose a different attitude: Use this list of Sammies nominees as a starter kit. Visit the artists’ websites and listen to the tunes. Then, go a bit deeper. Buy an album or even hit up a gig.

The Sacto music scene is pretty divided as it is. So let’s make the Sammies—and MySpace—the two banners under which local musicians can unite and move forward.

This year’s Sammies nominees include gnarly thrash-playing kids, indie rockers, jazz fiends and blues hounds from Midtown. As you travel outward to the suburbs, screamo and electro-prog rockers with pointed haircuts who play a new noise at venues such as The Boardwalk or Club Retro join the mix. Even metal types who jam at off-the-grid spots such as On the Y and punk and hardcore regulars at places like Fire Escape Bar and Grill in Citrus Heights are represented.

The Sacto scene is as all over the map, as is this year’s Sammies nominees.

Consider the 10 artists up for Outstanding Album/Release: two indie darlings, two local-scene veteran rockers, a pack of suburban screamo kids, a folk crooner, a chamber-pop troupe and three very different local rappers.

Even bands in the same genre have little in common. Of the seven Outstanding Country/Americana nominees, I’m sure half have never worn cowboy boots.

The differences continue. The Outstanding Deejay nominees are as likely to spin house as they are hip-hop. And don’t even begin to explore the minutiae of a new category such as Outstanding Indie/Electro/Progressive, an increasingly popular yet obscure genre of bands who a play a fresh mix of glam-inspired alternative dance rock.

Hell, even the teenagers are Balkanized: This year’s Outstanding Teen Band nominees includes a girl pop duo, four Davis kids who sound like Pavement, bluesy rockers, a pre-high-school punk trio and a foursome thrash outfit who writes songs with titles like “I Bitchslap Zombies.”

They say Sacto is one of the most diverse cities in the nation, and this too holds true with its music scene. In the end, some 215 artists or bands are nominated in 31 different categories. This means that potentially 1,000 individual musicians are up for a 2010 award.

It could have been easy, but it never is.

Sarah Volkov began drumming over a year ago and now sits at the kit for locals Fight Inside.
Photo By David Jayne

How Sammies democracy works: Instead of staying home this past Friday night and finishing this explanation of how and why SN&R ended up with these 2010 Sammies nominees, I went out to a bunch of shows, lost my bike and ended the night trying to break into an underground music venue to get it back.

I’ll get to the details, but for now let’s just say I blame Random Abiladeze for everything.

Abiladeze is a great local rapper—he’s nominated for Outstanding Emcee this year and won the award in 2009—but if he didn’t send a text reminding me of last Friday night’s show with Zuhg (also Sammies nominated) at Harlow’s, I would have never gone out and gotten into so much trouble.

That’s the problem: I usually receive a bunch of text messages from local musicians or promoters pimping gigs, and try to at least make an appearance. I want to see people perform. And support the scene. There’s no TiVo or reruns. It’s a one-time deal, and you don’t want to miss out on something great—such as that Sufjan Stevens gig at Old Ironsides a few years back. (I’ll never forgive myself.)

Anyway, since we’re being honest, let’s also be 100 percent transparent about this year’s Sammies nomination process.

SN&R’s call for nominees began on July 15 and ended August 12. People were allowed to nominate whomever they wanted, which resulted in thousands of bands and artists’ names in the hat.

My job was to take the top vote getters and place them in genre categories. I do not specialize in pigeonholing, and in many cases I had no clue what bands belonged where. This lead to consulting local music-scene stakeholders: musicians, promoters, venue owners, audio engineers, photographers, groupies, guitar techs, bartenders, coke dealers, waiters, etc.

In the end, some great local artists didn’t make the cut. But the resulting list is still the largest, most inclusive set of Sammies nominees in SN&R’s 19 years of handing out music awards.

And there are some new categories, the most obvious and popular being Outstanding Cover Band. Ten groups have been recognized—among them, zombies who play Black Sabbath tunes, suburbanites who bow at the throne of Steely Dan, and four cover bands that call the Bay Area home but rep Sacto so hard we felt they deserved to be acknowledged.

This year’s two biggest awards are SN&R’s Hall of Fame and the Readers’ Choice nominees. The HOF recognizes local artists who’ve stood the test of time, put out lasting tunes and also gigged aplenty, both locally and abroad. Hip-hop troupe the CUF and punk rockers the Secretions fit this bill, for sure, but I was shocked to discover that local legends 7Seconds—who still tour, including a jaunt to Europe this summer and a forthcoming appearance at Los Angeles’ FYF Fest this September—was not already a HOF member. Consider their inclusion past due and about damn time.

Of course, all the Sammies nominees are equally deserving. The coveted Sammie award doth not discriminate.

Even that text messager Random Abiladeze is worthy. And last Friday’s jam with Zuhg bore unexpected fruit: It was the first time I’d seen a rapper perform a rendition of “Lonely Blues.”

As for my brush with trespassing: After the Harlow’s gig, I lost track of time at a local dive bar listening to a punk-rock dude describe how he ended up being held at gunpoint by New York City cops with members of Agnostic Front. By this time, I’d forgotten my bike at a nearby math-rock show, which is how I ended up with barbed-wire cuts on my arm trying to get it back.

But all ends well in the local music scene: The venue’s promoter drove the bike to my front door early Saturday morning in the back of his Volvo station wagon.

Next year, SN&R will add a “Badass Local Underground Music Promoter” category, for sure, and this dude is going to take the cake.

The fine print: This year, unlike some in the past, SN&R readers will vote on the nominees and determine the eventual Sacramento Area Music Award winners. Voting begins September 2 at www.sammies.com.

Winners will be announced at the 19th annual Sammies Awards and Festival on Saturday, October 9, from 6 to 10 p.m., which will be a block-party celebration on R Street between 14th and 15th streets, including afterparties at the Shady Lady Saloon and R15. Visit www.sammies.com for more information. Direct hate mail (or praise) to <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">{ document.write(String.fromCharCode(60,97,32,104,114,101,102,61,34,109,97,105,108,116,111,58,109,117,115,105,99,64,110,101,119,115,114,101,118,105,101,119,46,99,111,109,34,62,109,117,115,105,99,64,110,101,119,115,114,101,118,105,101,119,46,99,111,109,60,47,97,62)) } </script>. Please don’t try to MySpace me, because I don’t have an account.

Nick Miller

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2010 nominees