Jared Mees and The Grown Children: This Is How We Do It In Fresno (Merced, CA)-- Local Cut

Jared Mees and The Grown Children: This Is How We Do It In Fresno (Merced, CA)

July 31st, 2008 [11:26AM] Posted by: Jared Mees | 1 COMMENT

“This Is How We Do It In Fresno” – BKF

Jordan Dykstra reports:

We played in Merced, CA at the venue called The Partisan. The vibe was wooden on the outside and very mellow on the in. We got burritos across the street and then Sean and I walked for about half an hour to find some delicious blue Spirits cigs, but no one had ‘em. Defeated, we settled on a dirty-ass six-dollar pack of camel lights.

The show started around showtime. Portlander Allison Milham opened up for Brian Kenny Fresno! and played some acoustic guitar, accordion, old school beat machine, and vox through a loop pedal. She reminded me of a warmer Wolev and has a smooth, controlled voice and played with her strapping chap Le Pettit Protest. It’s nice to meet kind, rad people from PDX outside of PDX! Mrs. DASH!

Stealing the show for good reasons, Brian Kenny Fresno (!) then opened up for Jared Mees and the Grown Children. BKF is a man named Brian Kenny and is from Fresno. He draped his cutoff overalls with a cape. On the cape was a gigantic weed leaf, chillin’, with sunglasses. I am not too afraid to say that BKF is one of the best entertainers I’ve ever seen. He encouraged audience involvement throughout the show by giving out organic raisins, having Sean (a grown child) leaf through his songbook of, oh around original 200 songs, and put up the coordinating transparency on his overhead projector so we could sing along with the lyrics or look at the picture/menu/story behind the song. He sang quite a few songs about weed (his label is in fact called BONG HIT RECORDS—with the slogan “It takes a lot of bong hits to make a record”), Fresno, having sex, science and physics, smut/pornography, animals, superheroes, favorite restaurants, etc. His setup involved around 40-45 pedals, lights, generators, drums, accessories, and such. He easily played a six string bass and a six-string guitar at the same time using hammer-ons. Please understand this confusion by viewing below video:

He also looked a hecka lot like the dude from Best in Show, what’s his name? Oh yeah:

Megan Spear (also a child, grown) played an Old Money tune called “Baby Blue.” Old Money is a kickass Portland band that is looking for a new drummer, female preferred I’m going to go ahead and guess. Megan is from Atwater, which is pretty damn close to Merced where we played the evening in question for this blogpost.

Moving on, Jared Mees and the Grown Children then closed out the evening with some pretty kickass JMATGC tunes…check out “Cockleburs and Hay.”

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Thanks for all the fish and reading this.

Links:
Jared Mees and the Grown ChildrenSpace
Allison MilhamSpace
Brian Kenny FresnoSpace

Photos courtesy of Jared Mees and the Grown Children

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