Local garage-rock siren Shannon Shaw headlines sold-out 20th anniversary show at the Rickshaw Stop
The namesake for one of the most beloved garage-rock of the Bay Area underground, Shannon Shaw brings her solo band to the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco for a sold-out show Saturday night.
Mixing of '50s and '60s sounds -- elements of early rock and roll stylings (particularly Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison), doo-wop, girl groups, surf and R&B -- with more modern garage-punk grit, singer/bassist Shaw and singer/guitarist Cody Blanchard first started playing music together in 2007 while students at Oakland's California College of the Arts. They founded Shannon and the Clams and would fill out the band's line-up with drummer Ian Amberson, eventually signing with local record store-affiliated imprint 1-2-3-4 Go! Records for their retro-tinged debut I Wanna Go Home that featured Shaw's raw, emotive delivery at the center of the band's original tunes.
A number of singles and their second effort Sleep Talk followed, with the band eventually moving to Seattle-based Sub Pop subsidiary Hardly Art for the more polished Dreams in the Rat House in 2013. By the time they released Gone By Dawn two years later, drummer Nate Mahan had taken over for the departed Amberson (the later addition of singer/keyboardist Will Sprott would cement the band's current line-up). The group had by then established itself as a powerhouse live act, growing its national fan base and earning invitations to perform at Coachella and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.
The discovery that Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach was a fan would lead the quartet to being signed by his Easy Eye Sound label and him producing their next album, the stellar Onion in 2018. Shaw would also record her solo debut Shannon in Nashville with Auerbach producing and co-writing a majority of the songs on an effort that couched her brassy, powerful voice over lushly orchestrated '60s pop and country arrangements backed by a band of Nashville session legends including drummer Gene Chrisman (Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis) and keyboard player Bobby Wood (Elvis, George Jones, Tammy Wynette). The album would make numerous year-ending best-of lists.
The group would reunite with Auerbach to record their most recent effort, 2021's Year of the Spider that saw Shannon and the Clams pushing their sound ever forward. Shaw performed with her own band at the Mosswood Meltdown in July, but tragedy struck the singer in August when her fiancé and the drummer in her group Joe Haener -- a scene fixture who had played in such notable bands as the Gris Gris, Battleship, the Rock n' Roll Adventure Kids and others -- died in an Oregon car crash just months before their wedding. While Shannon and the Clams cancelled a number of scheduled appearances, in 2022 they made an emotional return to the stage at Gonerfest in Memphis as well as closing out the Halloween Meltdown in Oakland.
Shaw was also among the many local luminaries who took the stage to perform at last year's Holiday Craptacular, an annual Christmas benefit for the SF-Marin Food Bank held at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco's Mission District. For this sold-out show Saturday night that is part of the Rickshaw Stop's 20th anniversary celebration, Shaw and her band will be joined by a pair of notable San Francisco songwriters who both delivery fiery political messages with their songs: Mae Powell and Mayya Feygina, who first came to fame fronting her band the Revolutionary Hell Yeah.
Shannon Shaw
Saturday, Jan. 13, 8 p.m. $30-$35 (sold out)
The Rickshaw Stop