Everybody’s business

Drum roll, please
Local rockers, fret not. A new shop catering to drum and bass players is opening in early September.

Tony Kasper, Casey Schmidt and Bob Zammit didn’t take long to decide that, after years of working in the drum department at Sound Source, they couldn’t stand to give up the work they love just because the longtime Chico music shop was closing its storefront to go online-only.

They’ve dubbed it Epicenter Music Shop “in homage,” Zammit said, to the club that used to be located above Sound Source’s previous location on Broadway. The shop will be located at Third and Mangrove avenues.

Part of the business will involve teaching music classes, while the retail side will offer mostly smaller-ticket items such as picks, sticks, strings and drum heads. The staff is already in touch with Chico State and area churches to do on-site tuning work. They’ll also sell local CDs in the shop.

“It had reached the point where the other retailers in town had been referring any drum stuff to us anyway,” Zammit said. And musicians were asking them, “What the heck am I supposed to do now?”

All three young men (Zammit is the eldest at 26) are active in the local music scene, with Zammit and Kasper playing in the band Uncut and Schmidt a member of the experimental Jojo’s Jacket.

In true Chico-style, Zammit said the trio’s goal is, simply, “If we can just eke out a basic living with it, it would be the greatest thing ever.”

Silvery goodness
Kudos to Butte County, whose booth at the California State Fair took home a silver medal.

Nearly 40 local businesses helped put together the display, which cost $5,000 in county general fund dollars to construct (it’s by Richard Bay of Sacramento) and included images of geese and other wildlife, Bidwell Park, mining history, agricultural products and Chico’s artsy offerings. There’s an animated puppet working a yo-yo, videos, a game and trivia—all conceptualized by the Butte County Cultural Tourism project.

Cow patties galore
Speaking of fairs, I was up in Yreka for the Siskiyou Golden Fair, a festive cornucopia of fun that I’ve written of in this column in years past. This year, I experienced more farm animals than usual because I had my 10-month-old along. (Here’s me: “Lookit the cow! Lookit the cow! The cow says, ‘Moo!’”) Did you ever try to get cow patties off of stroller wheels? But I digress.

What I really want to share is that I went to the wedding of a high school friend, and though the following may sound like a Jeff Foxworthy “you might be a redneck if” story, it was really a nice, romantic event.

The wedding took place at a lake, and the bride and groom and their two respective children drove up in one of those monster truck thingies that plows through mud. They walked from the truck bed to the ground via wooden steps. Then, all in formal wedding wear, they hopped back into the truck and raced toward the water, where they spun around in the mud as the crowd cheered. After dining on a stack of Krispy Kreme donuts with a wedding-couple cake topper, the guests participated in a “mud bog reception.”

You should have been there.