The smell emanating from the back of the van, the bitching and moaning about how your stash of expired Slim Jims has mysteriously disappeared, playing the license-plate game for the nth fucking time, passing the last rest stop for 150 miles just before that last beer hits your bladder… It’s like Vacation all over again. [...]

Everyone knows that senior prom is basically a bunch of horny build up followed by dashed hopes, drunken disappointment and, if you’re one of the lucky ones, bad sex and a not-too-exorbitant dry cleaning bill. We’d been trying to get Social Studies to the prom — um, into the back seat — for months. It [...]

Everyone knows what happens at the end of Revenge of the Nerds. The Tri-Lambs mop the floor with the Alpha Betas during the Greek Games, using their big brains and a Vader mask to demolish the meatheads in competition and score with the hot Pi Delts. The lesson of the movie is plain — the [...]

It’s a damn shame my public high school didn’t have an orchestra. No orchestra means those kids contentedly playing D&D in a corner while everyone else was busy pretending to get laid before their 17th birthday were denied achieving their full nerd potential. In addition to reaching Level 10 wizarding status, they could have been [...]

Maybe you happened to catch Magic Bullets on our last episode of Backseat Beat, in which these charming men chatted us up about vibrators, Spam burritos (not a euphemism) and cock with wine (we’ll let you decide if that’s a euphemism). Their interview left us with some steamy windows and way more naughty bits than [...]

Backseat Beat Episode 7: Magic Bullets from Brad Robertson on Vimeo. When it sometimes feels like every other band in our fair foggy town is doing their best to mine obscure 60s garage nuggets in a bald attempt to please the PBR-toting scenester crowds, it’s more than a little refreshing to find a band that [...]

Backseat Beat Episode 6: Ash Reiter from Brad Robertson on Vimeo. At this point, we pretty much assume that a given Backseat Beat shoot is going to involve some kind of risk to person or property. Since our shoot with indie pop outfit Ash Reiter dawned sunny and clear as a bell, we settled on [...]

Backseat Beat Episode 5 – Still Flyin’ from Brad Robertson on Vimeo. It was supposed to be a joke—a fake reggae band backed by a stage full of nonmusicians drinking beer on couches. But somehow, along the way, the joke band became a living breathing organism, which itself became an unholy cross between a party [...]

You get to the end of a crappy week and what do you know? Someone calls you up and says they’re going to screen all four episodes of Backseat Beat at their film festival on Monday! Yep, all four episodes will screen as part of the GEARS festival at Zeitgeist Bar in San Francisco on [...]

If it’s Friday night and you’re facing a quiet evening at home, perhaps playing Farmville while finishing off the cold second half of the burrito you bought for lunch, then the Downer Party would be the perfect soundtrack. The perfect soundtrack, that is, to burn your ears off with hook-laden tales of whiskey-soaked debauchery, and [...]