Now Chipotle's throwing a music festival.

Well, it's not a music festival, exactly; more like one an awkward mix of a music/food/drinking/corporate indoctrination event. Seriously, they're calling it a "food, ideas, and music festival." (Notice "music" in last place there.) So the primary goal of the event, coming to Golden Gate Park on June 8, is to get you to try new Chipotle dishes and feel good about this restaurant you (or, okay, us) eat at way too often. To make this proposition more attractive, the company has booked musicians like Mayer Hawthorne and the Walkmen to play live. They'll doubtless be giving impassioned, singular performances, since everyone at a Chipotle festival will care deeply about them, and will be paying extremely close attention.

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Meet Justin Loans -- known to his mother as Justin Flores, and to the Internet as one-half of smooth-rapping Oakland goofballs RnB Millionaires. The Millionaires churned out a handful of tracks from their West Oakland lab in recent years, but nothing with any serious shelf life. They've been working hard, though; Justin Loans' first solo effort, the How To Fake It In America EP, is out today.

This marks the first official release from the flock of professional roving partiers known as Trill Team 6 -- if you've "expressed yourself" in the warehouses of West Oakland or haunted some of SOMA's underground rap clubs, you might have heard of 'em. The loosely associated group of DJs and their cohorts (which includes Oakland hip-hop mainstay Willie Maze) has contentedly spent the last few years throwing parties like Sick Sad World and rallying friends and family to get fucked up together. Flores' work takes this ethos and runs in a whole new direction.

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Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 15, Google's annual I/O conference kicks off at the Moscone Center here in San Francisco. And according to tech site the Verge, the Internet giant will use the occasion to announce a new streaming music service designed to compete with Spotify and Rdio.

Why a music subscription service? Because Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, Pandora, and whatever Beats/MOG is working on apparently aren't enough. Hey, Apple is developing one, too. It's the fashion these days.

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Ava Mendoza demonstrates the all-important whammy bar.

How do electric guitars work, anyway? Why do they all look and sound so different? What do those switches and knobs even do?

If you've ever wondered about these and other mysteries regarding the electric guitar, a new video from the Exploratorium has you covered. This latest installment of the newly relocated museum's Science in the City series gets local axe-wielders Ava Mendoza, Henry Kaiser, and legendary guitar shop owner Fat Dog to investigate -- and demonstrate -- the many different factors that go into electric guitars sounding like they do. And what a fun investigation it is. Even if you understand how the instruments work (hint: it's pretty simple), there are enough killer licks in this clip to make it well worth watching. Check it out:

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Chillin' in the grass at Potrero Del Sol

Looks like 2013 will bring another day worth raving about at Potrero Del Sol park. The Bay Bridged and Tiny Telephone just announced the lineup for their annual single-day, outdoor music gathering in that southerly grassy expanse, and it looks excellent. Headlining are local garage mavens Thee Oh Sees, but the bill also includes plenty of acts we don't see in town all that often. This third edition of the annual festival takes place Saturday, July 13, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Here's the full lineup:

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SF Weekly

Deep Blue presents Derrick May
Public Works
May 11, 2013

The evening began at Terroir, a wine bar in SOMA, drinking expensive bottles of wine for a French friend's birthday (because honestly, you can't get more Gallic than wine, cheese, and "rillettes"). There was a group of about eight of his countrymen, most of whom had never before been to San Francisco, and we were trying to figure out where to go next. At first, Monroe was floated; the prospect of seeing Tornado Wallace play to a crowd of North Beachers seemed entertaining enough (but it was deemed too small). Then I tried to convince everyone to hop on the BART so we could go to Oakland for a hardboiled techno underground (too far, probably no girls). Before anyone could propose anything else, another friend tore into the bar with tickets for Public Works in hand. The night was decided: We'd check out Detroit techno elder Derrick May. It was the right decision.

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Kevin Brown

Secret Chiefs 3 at Cafe Du Nord. All photos courtesy of Kevin Brown

Secret Chiefs 3
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Cafe Du Nord

Better than: The day before mother's day has any right to be.

To say Secret Chiefs 3 have been lately absent from the musical landscape is to ascribe a regularity to their release and touring schedule that's never really existed in their 17 years as a band. Of course, this "band" moves exclusively to the watch of guitarist/composer/producer Trey Spruance, formerly of Mr. Bungle, whose conceptual ambition along with the high overhead of the band's lush records leads to sporadic output.

But while Secret Chiefs 3 haven't played locally in a while, they have been busy, alternately performing before enthusiastic festival crowds in Europe and the Middle East, and working on the long-awaited follow-up to their 2004 LP, Book of Horizons. So it came as a welcome surprise when, a little under two months ago, fans of their Facebook page were treated to news of recording progress and a US mini-tour to make up for the absence. As the Bay Area has been Spruance's lifelong locale, Saturday's homecoming gig at Cafe Du Nord promised to be a barnburner.

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Instead of watching the Black Keys onstage, you could watch them on a screen in the food court area.

The Black Keys, the Flaming Lips, Andrew Bird, Alabama Shakes, the Dirty Projectors, Vintage Trouble and more
Friday, May 10, 2013
Bottle Rock Napa Valley

Better than: Bob's Hot Rods cover band, Craig Chaquico, or other music you'd typically hear at a winery.

Ostensibly the four-day event that took over downtown Napa last weekend was a "music festival." But that doesn't seem like an accurate term for the situation at Napa Valley's fairgrounds on Friday.

Most major music festivals offer diversions from the stages presenting live music -- ferris wheels, silent discos, etc. But at Bottle Rock, the bands and their performances felt like diversions themselves. Instead a "music festival," perhaps we should think of Bottle Rock as a day-drinking conference, or consumption confab, or cash-discarding party. It was a pricey, exclusive-feeling event packed with comedy, fancy food, and plenty of drinking, one that happened to include -- as a matter of course rather than an aching passion -- live performances from big, broadly appealing rock acts like the Black Keys, the Flaming Lips, and Alabama Shakes.

See also: Bottle Rock: Napa Festival's Attempt To Combine Food, Wine, and Music Falls Short

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by Joseph Geha

Hundreds of people, mostly young Asian women, are lining the sidewalks of Market Street, forming small clusters that weave along the uneven bricks starting in front of the Warfield, and ending at infinity.

They are sitting on unfolded newspapers and chatting with friends, some sipping coffee and tea, others munching on food from boxes on the ground with plastic forks. Others are half asleep, especially those toward the front of the line -- and justifiably so, as they have been there since 7:30 this morning.

Why, you ask?

B.A.P.

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Paul Collins

Paul Collins founded the Nerves in 1975 with Jack Lee and Peter Case in San Francisco. The group struggled to gain momentum, but the track "Hangin' on the Telephone," from their sole 1976 EP, was propelled into fame by Blondie's faithful cover on the 1978 breakthrough LP Parallel Lines. Following the Nerves, Jack Lee became a solo artist; Peter Case found success in L.A with The Plimsouls, and continues to perform; and Collins founded the Beat.

The Beat's 1979 debut is a high-mark of late-'70s power pop, a softened and polished variety of guitar-centric new wave successfully introduced to a market eager for rock 'n' roll in the wake of punk. While many of the Beat's contemporaries in the power-pop proliferation that followed the wild success of The Knack's "My Sharona" are forgotten, Collins' spirited delivery and indelible harmonies endure. He steadily records and performs to this day, even issuing a career highlight in 2010 entitled King of Power Pop. His late-career triumph affirms Collins as a journeyman honing the limitless potential of melody and the propulsive tempos of the rock band format. Ahead of Collins performance at Thee Parkside tonight (Friday, May 10), we discussed his history with the city and the recent redemption of the once-negative term "power-pop."

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