Inside the Nob Hill Masonic Center's auditorium.

[Post updated 3:35 p.m. on 5/8/12; see below]

Over the last few years, concert promotion giant Live Nation has hosted an increasing number of concerts at San Francisco's Nob Hill Masonic Center. The seated, 3,500-capacity venue doesn't usually hold crazy rock shows (unless you think Weezer is crazy), but Al Green, Yanni, and Roxette are all scheduled to play there later this year, along with comedian Aziz Ansari and others.

At least one group of Nob Hill neighbors isn't happy about that. As the Examiner reports today, the Nob Hill Association is suing to get the city to look more closely at a recent increase in the number of concerts Live Nation is allowed to hold at the Masonic Center.

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Thrillhouse Records at 3422 Mission St.

Thrillhouse Records, a small, volunteer-run record store on Mission Street specializing in punk and hardcore, lost nearly $1,000 in cash and inventory in a burglary last week, according to its owner, Fred Schrunk.

But Schrunk, who is also an employee of Amoeba Music, was able to recover some of the stolen records when the burglar attempted to sell them to Amoeba the morning after the crime.

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Solomon Kahn, a beloved local DJ who performed at such diverse venues as Oracle Arena, AT&T Park, and every major club in San Francisco, was tragically killed Tuesday, Jan. 31, in Bangkok, Thailand, in a car accident. He was 34.

Kahn, known to clubgoers as DJ Solomon, was in Thailand as a part of a four-date tour, his first performances in the country. According to a family friend, he was with his fiancée, Nicole Cronin, in a taxi when the vehicle stalled on a highway and was rear-ended. Kahn was fatally wounded. Cronin sustained several fractures, but is not in critical condition.

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The Gold Dust, now an endangered species of San Francisco bar.

Have you heard? San Francisco's classic Gold Dust Lounge -- a 1933 watering hole that was a regular haunt of legendary local columnist Herb Caen, and hosts a regular live rock 'n' roll band -- is in trouble. Its landlord wants to boot the bar to make way for an expansion of clothing store the Limited (yes, really, the Limited). So of course local barflies, history buffs, and Defenders of All That Is Old, Cheap, and Real in San Francisco are doing what they can to save the place. If they fail, this hall of West Coast history will be only a memory after March 6.

Hence "Save The Gold Dust Lounge," a new tune from local songwriter Catherine Hill. Over a rambling blues-folk chord progression, Hill invokes the storied history of the Gold Dust in the spirit of an old protest song, offering listeners both an education and a call to action. Hey, who knew crooner Bing Crosby did the ceilings and lights? We didn't. See what else you find out about the Gold Dust (and sign a petition to save it) after the jump.

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Neil Young and the LincVolt

Only a crazy (read: legally negligent) person would convert a 1959 Lincoln Continental to run on a hybrid of gasoline and electricity.

That's the argument in a new lawsuit filed against a firm owned by Neil Young, whose custom-built hybrid is being blamed for a 2010 warehouse fire in San Carlos that caused more than $1 million in damage. The blaze burned a great deal of Young's music memorabilia -- including rare guitars and photographs -- and left the car a mere shell of burned-out steel.

The hybrid Lincoln was a project of LincVolt, a company of which Young is an officer. Unigard, which insured the warehouse Young rented to store the car, says that building it -- a project that was the subject of a four-part film series in 2008 -- was not a smart thing to do:

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Wallpaper's Ricky Reed

Wallpaper., the thumping crunk-pop outfit led by Oakland's Ricky Reed, signed a record deal late last year with Sony Music imprint Epic, making it the latest Bay Area group to jump to a major label.

Best known for last year's breakout single, "#STUPiDFACEDD" -- which was featured on MTV and watched more than 2 million times on YouTube -- Wallpaper joined the Epic roster after a late-night meeting in early December with L.A. Reid, Epic's CEO and a judge on the music TV show The X Factor.

In an interview with All Shook Down over the weekend, Wallpaper's Reed says he was called to the Sony Music building in Beverly Hills late on Dec. 2, and found himself meeting with Reid, producer Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, and the Epic artist Ciara. After several hours of playing Wallpaper's music for the assembled group, Reed was asked if he wanted a deal, and by the afternoon of Dec. 4, he had signed a contract.

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It was certainly one of the weirdest local news stories of this week: Around 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, a man was seen purloining a ring from an apartment atop Telegraph Hill. The apartment manager chased the burglar, but he hopped over a fence, only to find himself perched in thick brush atop a 200-foot cliff. What followed was hilarious and strange: An extended standoff in which the man hung out in the brush on the top of the hill for more than 24 hours. The police -- and plenty of media -- came and watched, but authorities ultimately decided it would be too risky to send an officer to bring the man down. (Instead, they shined a light on him and asked if he needed anything. He just told them to go away.)

By around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, the police were over the standoff, and left. That gave the burglar just what he needed -- a chance to take off! So take off he did, sliding on his ass down the cliff and scurrying away around 10 p.m. He's now a fugitive.

Obviously, comical stalemates like this don't happen often, even in a city as wacky as San Francisco. So the folks over at the Bay Citizen's culture desk decided to do something funny, and commission a song about it. They found local musicians Taylor Brown and Brian Bergeron, who wrote and performed "The Ballad of the Burglar of Telegraph Hill." The song harkens back to an era when folk singers regularly wrote about notable events. It's pretty funny. And the video even features costume changes. Watch them perform the song -- and check out the lyrics -- after the jump.

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Jerry Garcia

Jerry Garcia, the San Francisco-born guitarist of the Grateful Dead, will be the subject of a new feature-length documentary film released this spring, according to a report today in Deadline Hollywood.

Spearheading the project are music documentary producer Malcom Leo (This Is Elvis, The Beach Boys: An American Band), and John Hartmann, brother of the late comedian Phil Hartmann, who managed Cosby, Still, and Nash, the Eagles, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among other bands. Leo and Hartmann already produced a film clip about Garcia shown at AT&T Park last summer for the SF Giants' Jerry Garcia Day; footage from that event will be included in the new film.

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Flickr/Dennis

Patrons and staff at Mighty breathed a small sigh of relief yesterday as the San Francisco nightclub (which doubles as a venue for corporate events during the day) at least temporarily eluded the threat of losing hundreds of public parking spots on Utah and San Bruno streets -- spaces that help Mighty attract customers.

Mighty owner Sean Manchester learned last week that the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency planned to propose that the nearby spaces turn into tow-away spots after 10 p.m. This was in response to growing concerns among police officers in the Mission Station over homeless encampments and people spending the night in their cars in the area.

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R.I.P., Killa Keise

Vallejo police are saying today that a 28-year-old man found shot to death in a car on Interstate 80 last night is S.F. rapper Markeise "Killa Keise" Henry.

According to this Vallejo Times Herald story, Keise's body was found at about 11 p.m. last night inside a Pontiac that had veered off the highway and into some bushes:

Inside the crashed vehicle, responders found Henry, who had received a number of gunshot wounds to his upper body, and was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

No suspects had been arrested in the case as of Friday afternoon, police said. Mustard said police were not yet ready to reveal further details, including whether Henry was a victim of a random shooting or targeted.

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