“Live at the Belly Up”: Common Sense, Sara Petite

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Friday night at 11 p.m. I put on KPBS again for a Live from the Belly Up episode from 2014 – the Belly Up Tavern being the legendary venue for live music in Solana Beach that’s been open since 1974, though because of my transportation issues I’ve never actually been there. (I wonder how they’ve weathered the storm of COVID-19.) This show consisted of a rather loose reggae/ska/rap band from Santa Barbara called Common Sense – the owner of the Belly Up, Chris Goldstein, was featured on the program saying they’ve probably played there more than any other band, and they recorded their first album live there in 1994. The front man is Nick Hernandez, who was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt with some slogans printed on the lower right side that were hard to read except at least some of them seemed to have to do with autism, and according to their Wikipedia page their current members are Hernandez, Phil Gough and Billy Sherman on electric guitars (according to Wikipedia, Sherman also plays keyboards, but no keyboards were evident on this Belly Up performance), Mikey Cruz on bass guitar and Tracy Sledge on drums.

They performed eight songs on their 25-minute TV set (as I’ve written about previous Live at the Belly Up shows, you can tell whether a group is a pop band or a jam band and how much improvising they do by the number of songs they perform – the fewer the number of songs, the more jamming they’re doing) and they were all in a sort of jumpy rhythm I associate more with ska than reggae (in a brief interview segment Hernandez said the band’s original name was Ska Pigs) and a lot of their songs had nonsense titles like “Poundy Pound” and “Switchy Switch” which at least gave Hernandez cool-sounding cadences over which he could talk-sing his lyrics. I’m presuming that Phil Gough was the taller, stockier guitarist who played conventional leads (and turned in two scorching solos on “Switchy Switch” and “Let It Roll”) and Billy Sherman the one who mostly played rhythm but did some interesting licks on slide guitar. My one problem with Common Sense is my problem with a lot of the bands on shows like this: their songs sound too similar to each other. Virtually all were in either medium or fast tempi, all featured the same jumpy rhythmic patterns, and while one by one they sounded infectious I started to feel a bit worn down at their sameness.

I was expecting to like local country singer Sara Petite, who calls her band Sara Petite and the Sugar Daddies and who at first seemed to be trying to take over the mantle from the late and sorely missed Candye Kane as San Diego’s mistress of roots music – even though she’s country instead of blues and she both looks and sounds like Bonnie Raitt would have if she had gone into country instead of blues. She was dressed in a blouse that mixed colored patterns and white tassels and showed off a decent level of cleavage – essentially a country-trash outfit but “tweaked” to more urban tastes – and her basic sound is close to Lauren Alaina, Lorrie Morgan and other modern women who do country with a lot of emotion and soul. I was a bit disappointed when her first two songs, “Perfume” and “Movin’ On” (which sounded less like Hank Snow’s original “I’m Movin’ On” than Ray Charles’ heavily remodeled cover; Snow’s was a typically self-pitying country dirge of the day, 1954, while Brother Ray gave it a buzz of anger and a good-riddance attitude; Petite’s was an original song but clearly inspired by the template of what Charles did to Snow), were in the same bouncy tempo as the Common Sense material.

Then things got better: her third song, “Barbwire” (thank you once again to the producers of Live at the Belly Up for including chyrons giving the song titles instead of leaving us to guess at them!), was a great piece about a woman who’s been harmed so much by relationship partners that she’s surrounded her heart with barbed wire and won’t ever let anybody in again. In general Petite sang more powerfully and movingly at slow tempi, and her most powerful songs on the set, “Down the Road I Go,” “You Don’t Care at All,” and “Caged Bird” (her last, and obviously inspired by Maya Angelou’s famous book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), were essentially country ballads. My husband Charles didn’t care for what he heard as the country affectations in her voice (they don’t bother me – over the years I’ve come to acknowledge my love for country music; yes, some of it sucks, but that’s also true of my long-time favorite musical genres, classical and jazz) but he was really impressed by her songwriting, especially on “You Don’t Care at All,” a wrenching breakup ballad which – uncommonly for breakup songs – blames the relationship’s collapse on both parties, not just one.

She also did a couple of uptempo numbers towards the end, including “If Mama Ain’t Happy” – in which she tried to get the audience to sing along, with mixed results – and “Love the Parade,” but it’s the slow songs that were the most moving. Incidentally Petite released this same Belly Up performance as an album, though amazon.com seems to have it available only as a download (drat!). But it’s the slow songs she does that really tear at the heart. Sara also had a great band behind her, including lead guitarist Rick Wilkins (who like his counterpart in Common Sense was the sexiest guy in the band and played some spectacular solos), Wade Maurer on bass and John Kuhlken on drums – Kuhlken also gave his name to the “John Kuhlken Memorial Choir” that backed Sara on “Caged Bird” and also on “Scarlet Letter,” an extra song on her album of the show which is, alas, so far available only as a download instead of a physical CD. (If it were available as a physical CD I’d buy it!)