Hit So Hard is the pull-no-punches portrait of the hell-and-back life of Patty Schemel, the drummer of Courtney Love’s seminal rock band Hole during its peak years. An unprecedented and unflinching look at one of the ‘90s most crucial and controversial groups, Hit So Hard (directed by P. David Ebersole) shows  Patty as a true Gen X survivor.  

Catch this one-of-a-kind documentary at San Francisco's Roxie Theater April 27th - May 3rd! Director P. David Ebersole, Patty Schemel, and Eric Erlandson (Hole) will introduce the 7:15pm and 9:30pm screenings on Friday, April 27 and Saturday, April 28! They will also hold a Q&A after the 7:15pm screening on both days!

Amoeba is proud to team up with Berkeley's Moe's Books for a reading and acoustic performance with Eric Erlandson! Eric will be performing and reading from his book Letters To Kurt on Wednesday,  April 25th at 7:30pm. 

Erlandson is best known as co-founder, songwriter, and lead guitarist of the band Hole, which he formed with Courtney Love. Their albums Pretty on the Inside, Live Through This, and Celebrity Skin achieved international recognition and success. Live Through This was named one of the top 100 albums of all time by Time magazine. Since the breakup of the band in 2002, Erlandson has been involved in a number of musical and literary projects including Letters to Kurt, an anguished, angry, and tender meditation on the octane and ether of rock and roll and its many moons: sex, drugs, suicide, fame, and rage. It's part Dream Songs, part Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and the Clash. Rants, reflections, and gunshot fill these fifty-two prose poems. They are raw, funny, sad, and searching.

I love Avi Buffalo! I love when a new band seems to come out of nowhere! They just suddenly jump into my life, changing it forever. I do tend to be a bit dramatic with my love of certain bands, but I do really love this band. I can't imagine my year without this album. I felt like I was destined to fall in love with this band months before I even heard the album. They are from Long Beach, California and on Sub Pop Records. What more did I need to know?! I grew up in the fantastic little big town of Long Beach and I have been patiently waiting for a really good band to make me proud. I got super sick of everyone talking about Sublime. I will always love Warren G and Snoop Dogg, but I needed more. Melissa Etheridge lived in Long Beach for a while. We have our share of actors coming from Long Beach, too. The great Brice Beckham from Mr. Belvedere, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen from Saved By the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, Sally Kellerman and Cameron Diaz. But I needed a Shins or Band of Horses type band to come from Long Beach. Everybody wants at least one great indie band to come from their hometown. Avi Buffalo might just be that band.

Today, April 12th 2010, is Joe Pop-O-Pie's 51st birthday. And to celebrate the occasion, the key figure behind the legendary SF punk outfit The Pop-O-Pies, who formed in 1981 and disbanded sixteen years ago, decided to reform the group and perform on a bill at the Warfield in San Francisco tonight (they play tomorrow & Wednesday also), along with another recently reformed SF group -- Faith No More. Coincidentally, Joe was an original member of Faith No More!

Besides being a unique way to celebrate his birthday, another reason Joe chose this time to reform the group was that he recently found himself with a lot of free time on his hands and needed to fill that void. "This is what recessions are good for. If you get laid off and you've got nothing to do, you gotta do something," laughed the long time San Francisco resident, speaking by phone a few days ago from his new home in Reno, Nevada.

After living in the deep and gritty heart of San Francisco for three decades, including having spent the past eighteen years in the Tenderloin, the New Jersey born and raised Joe Pop-O-Pie has embraced his recent move to Nevada. "One of the things that is so fantastic about Reno, NV is that cockroaches can't live up here. Yeah, the Tenderloin is just rife with cockroaches. It was such an amazing thing. Cockroaches can survive a nuclear war but they won't follow you up the mountains to Nevada," he said. Shortly after finishing college in NJ Joe packed up and moved west to the city by the Bay, where, in September of 1981, he formed The Pop-O-Pies. Labeled 'punk,' the Pop-O-Pies, which essentially consisted of Joe and an ever rotating list of musicians, were really a concept band. For the first two years of their existence at their live performances the band played only one song for their entire set, the Grateful Dead's "Truckin.'"