{"id":246,"date":"2003-12-10T14:33:20","date_gmt":"2003-12-10T22:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karney.org\/music\/?p=246"},"modified":"2012-05-04T14:35:01","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T21:35:01","slug":"san-francisco-chronicle-datebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/san-francisco-chronicle-datebook\/","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco Chronicle Datebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"karney<\/a><\/p>\n

San Francisco Chronicle Datebook<\/p>\n

December 10, 2003<\/p>\n

Between her heavy-metal past and her eclectic\/punkish present, local musician Karney is hitting all the right notes.<\/p>\n

Joel Selvin, Senior Pop Music Critic<\/p>\n

Rock musician Karney sat in a Potrero Hill coffee house two mornings after throwing a party for her friends to see her band. \u201cI\u2019m still burned out, \u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not just the playing. It\u2019s all the shopping at Costco and getting the party ready.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Lennon Rehearsal and Music Services in South of Market on Friday, she was swamped by friends when she came offstage after a blistering set, with her three-piece band, of material from her forthcoming CD release, \u201cAll Connected. \u201d She accepted their congratulations while she sipped a drink. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to get all your friends to go out to a nightclub to see you play,\u201d she said. \u201cBut you can get them to come to a party.\u201d<\/p>\n

The accomplished native San Franciscan rocker may only now be emerging on the local scene as bandleader, songwriter and performer, but she has been playing music in town since she blew clarinet for the all-city all-star band in junior high school. \u201cI first saw her when I was in the pit band at Lowell, \u201d said trombonist Marty Wehner at her party, \u201cand she was up there playing \u2018Gypsy.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

She toured with the post-punk modern rocker Angel Corpus Christi and worked briefly with Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes. \u201cThat didn\u2019t last too long, \u201d she said. \u201cShe freaked out when I started bringing my tape recorder to rehearsals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karney experimented with blending heavy metal and hip-hop in her late \u201980s band, Stepchildren, whose college radio single, \u201cJericho,\u201d was remixed by Parliament-Funkadelic\u2019s George Clinton. She composed a number of pieces in the minimalist avant-garde school of Steve Reich and John Cage that have been performed. But she never managed to make her name on the local rock scene.<\/p>\n

After years of providing piano accompaniment for modern dance troupes or backing drag queens at local cabarets, Karney, who admits to being somewhere around 40, decided to return to college. She studied electronic music at San Francisco State with an eye toward working in the potentially lucrative field of composing music for video games. She has worked on a number \u2014 including \u201cSim City\u201d and \u201cStar Wars Galaxy\u201d \u2014 and did music for many boxing matches and football games. She made MIDI versions of every NCAA college fight song.<\/p>\n

She financed her new album with earnings from her first full musical score for a game, for LucasArts\u2019 Armed and Dangerous, an Xbox game released last week. She recorded everything from string orchestras to Celtic folk groups in her home studio.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would go from recording French horns at my little studio during the day to Fantasy Studios at night to wail on the mike.\u201d She is taking baby steps toward establishing a following outside the small San Francisco clubs such as the Red Devil Lounge (where she will give a CD release party Jan. 16), touring an acoustic version of her act in the Pacific Northwest for the first time earlier this year. Her previous, self-released CD, \u201cShellshock Girl,\u201d picked up some independent radio play and made a few converts, setting the stage for her new CD.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d say it did well considering it was a one-nag operation, meaning me, \u201d said the president of Tangent Records, the label she runs out of the Potrero Hill apartment she shares with her husband, trumpeter Bill Ortiz, who plays with the swing outfit Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, when he isn\u2019t on the road with Santana.<\/p>\n

Soft auburn curls falling to her shoulders frame her apple-shaped face. Her singing and songwriting can evoke \u201970s rock queens such as Ann Wilson of Heart, Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac or Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, although the intense drive for self-expression that fuels her writing and singing reeks of punk poet Patti Smith.<\/p>\n

In front of a couple of dozen friends nibbling food and drinking wine at the rehearsal hall party, her guitar playing is eloquent, complex, lyrical and carefully harmonized with the band\u2019s other guitarist, John Wedemeyer (the supple rhythm section of bassist Victor Little and drummer Thomas Pridgen, an extraordinary 20-year-old talent, completes the lineup). Their part-time tour manager, occasional rapper Steffen Franz \u2014 who performs under the name DJ Standout Selector \u2014 lends some vocal harmony and takes over for the anti- war toasting on a dub reggae number. The band mixes an arena-rock flavor with the insurgent spirit of alternative rock and some of punk\u2019s raw energy.<\/p>\n

Some of her songs have overt political content, and some of her songs deal frankly with sex. \u201cThat\u2019s really because I can\u2019t write a love song,\u201d she said. \u201cI can be honest about a sex song.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title track of her first album, \u201cShellshock Girl,\u201d comes from her German mother\u2019s experience during the Second World War, she said, \u201cwalking through fields of dead 17-year-old soldiers.\u201d Her first album also contains her song \u201cSlap,\u201d based on a gruesome story of a domestic violence episode she heard a police officer tell from his first day on the job, a recording she decorated with a double-reed Middle Eastern instrument called the karna played by SFSU jazz Professor Hafez Modirzadeh.<\/p>\n

\u201cI decided to lighten up a little on the next record,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u2013 San Francisco Chronicle<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

San Francisco Chronicle Datebook December 10, 2003 Between her heavy-metal past and her eclectic\/punkish present, local musician Karney is hitting all the right notes. Joel Selvin, Senior Pop Music Critic Rock musician Karney sat in a Potrero Hill coffee house … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6,5],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press","tag-press-2","tag-san-francisco-chronicle"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247,"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karney.org\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}