Top San Francisco Bluegrass Band, Three Times Bad, Tahoe Debut at the Divided Sky

Top San Francisco bluegrass band, Three Times Bad, brings their distinctive brand of dirty American roots music to the Divided Sky on Saturday, April 27.

Hood River News has called Three Times Bad “a hot new San Francisco string trio born from the soundtrack to the critically acclaimed, transmedia novel 'badbadbad'” by band leader Jesus Angel Garcia. The Source Weekly says their music evokes “epic moustaches and bent bluegrass.” There’s also rural blues and old-school country in their sound, hillbilly swing and Appalachian rags, Gypsy jazz, freak preachery, murder ballads, folk punk, story songs, and hot singalongs.

Many of the lyrics come directly from scenes in the novel, which trains its high beams on 21st century Americana, where sex, God and rock ‘n’ roll meet the social web. In his five-star review of the book, James Greer (Guided by Voices) said, “Garcia aims to unsettle your assumptions about class, about gender, about sex, about religion, about identity: in short, about yourself, and what it means to be human in an inhuman world.”

Three Times Bad -- featuring Garcia on acoustic guitar, banjo, and lead vocals; Claire Grinton on fiddle and vocals; and Curtis Aikens on upright bass and vocals -- carries on this artistic exploration with a Southern Gothic approach to songwriting and dynamic live performances in the family of the Devil Makes Three and Old Crow Medicine Show. We're talking urban hillbilly music at its finest: ear-opening, toe-tapping tales of love-making on cornbread crumbs, illicit obsession with the reverend's wife and possum stew, and gospel hoedowns the likes of which you haven't seen since Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening.

For a glimpse of Three Times Bad's stylistic range and live energy, check out this sampler of concert clips: http://www.reverbnation.com/threetimesbad/song/15292937-epk-sampler-13-three-times-bad

Here's a video mashup from their first performance of 2013 at Berkeley's Starry Plough:

For more information, music, videos, photos, and media coverage, please go to http://threetimesbad.com.

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