Newest articles and comments on The Sacramento Press written by Tracy Saville

Tracy Saville on "T2 Performance Solutions Launch Celebration"

2011-05-02T17:13:07Z

David - what a wonderful gift this article was! I love that you were there, enjoyed yourself, and appreciated our event. We so appreciate your support and that you wrote this piece unsolicited - free, good press is a really wonderful thing! As a leadership development and human workforce consulting company, we are in the business of helping people achieve their goals and perform at the highest levels possible. You just helped enable that - I hope you will stay connected and let us know if there is anything we can ever do for you! All our highest regards - Tim and Tracy Saville

Tracy Saville on "For Arts' Sake receives, seeks grants"

2011-03-08T23:45:39Z

Terrific focus on priorities here...so pleased to see action moving forward commensurate with demand and needs! Also City leadership seems to be working toward real steps to create a stronger bridge between arts education and real opportunity for artists and creatives. This can only translate into a more robust economic climate which translates into increased tax base, which is what we're after...a cultural engine that works! (Tracy Saville, Adjunct Professor, IADT Creative Design College)

I Was a Teenage Train Wreck: Why Reunions are Required Reading

2009-07-20T15:19:06Z

If the quintessential reunion experience could be captured metaphorically by a famous (or infamous) novel, I’d have to point to War and Peace, by Tolstoy; our personal history—mighty and insignificant-all in one sweeping evening of epic romance, drama, conflict and survival. If we’re talking the 80’s, of course it must be film, and would therefore be, Pretty in Pink meets The Breakfast Club. Bad hair, bad boys, bad acne, bad grades, and bad teachers, all tied together in a pretty pink bow of good memories. I wonder what F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said about reunions, being that he loathed status and above all else believed the underdog should always win the day. I know what Nick Carraway might say, Fittzgerald’s famous low-brow, high-reaching bad boy from The Great Gatsby would say: He’d say reunions are an open book to our past, and if we read between the lines, we can pretty much see ourselves in a kind of interrogation-quality light that just goes to show you, “you were worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Fresh off my own twenty-five, I’m still not entirely sure what part of our brains becomes enamored with the idea of hooking up with our old high school chums, revisiting our past. Is it our fascination with who we once were? Or is it our fixation on who we wish we would have been? Do we go for vindication, if we’re honest, or do we go seeking redemption?-forgiveness?-new kinds of self-flagellation?

In any case, reunions are all about that first real dance you went to where you got a butt squeeze from your dream guy, an invitation to hang out in the quad with the cool chicks you always admired, and losing your virginity in the back seat of a 1967 Volkswagen, listening to Sammy Hagar, feeling pretty sure your mom was going to kick your ass for coming home at four in the morning. Reunions can also be a straight shot of “what the hell have I done with my life”, and “can someone please explain how come I let that goofy looking guy steal my virginity in the backseat of a 1968 Vega, listening to Duran Duran, feeling confident that rash on his penis was probably normal?” I speak anecdotally, of course. (I never once listened to Duran Duran on purpose, believed in Vegas or anything with less than a growling 350 in it. Nor did I, for the record, lose my virginity to anyone connected with my high school class, or my high school. I did, however, drive a Volkswagen beetle; an orange one, and loved Sammy Hagar. I met him once in a café in Carmel, eating fried green tomatoes and drinking some of the best Pinot I’ve ever had. He was shortish, if I recall. I’m pretty sure I acted like a total fangirl.)

And speaking of feeling sorry for the stupid choices of our youth, run-ins with Sammy Hagar excluded, I think about that feeling you get at a reunion, just before you walk in the door, and you wonder if the cheerleaders who once talked behind your back years ago might actually be forgiven for their teenage skulduggery, and whether or not the hours-long sensation of being a broiling slab of post-post-pubescent joy with a mortgage and three careers, on display for all to snicker at, will be as gloriously intoxicating as you imagined it would be when you decided to come in a rational moment four months earlier. And then I bite down on my lower lip until I draw blood, slam my right hand in a car door, and stick a large pasta fork in my forehead until reality sinks back in and I remember; I hated high school, but I loved (almost) everyone there.

I was awkward, silly, afraid to be loved, afraid to be rejected, took fashion risks that paid off and failed, did all the things I taught my own son not to do, and generally got out of high school with more than I hoped for, but not as much as I could have—just like everybody else. I wasn’t special, but I was especially me, and generally speaking; if I had to do it all over again, I don’t think I’d change a molecule of the experience. Well that’s not entirely true. I might not wear that ridiculous hat and suspender get-up that I did my first day of school, my sophomore year. And I think I might have avoided the platinum mullet in my graduation photo, if only my mother had loved me enough to save me from myself.

Then again, who we were in our glorious teenage angst may have been our mother’s fault, but who we are in our spectacular adult magnificence is entirely our own. Reunions are good for dosing out that particular reminder. That may be why some go back every five years and some wait twenty-five. Some of us like the feeling of hitting our heads against the wall; if always feels so good when we stop.

Tracy Saville on "LA Band Red Cortez: Iconic Magic"

2009-06-19T19:54:54Z

Meant to post a pic of them. Check them out at www.redcortez.com. Or MySpace.

LA Band Red Cortez: Iconic Magic

2009-06-19T19:52:40Z

A week ago, I fell in love with new music for the first time since I stole my brother’s worn copy of Led Zeppelin’s Song Remains the Same album. I was fourteen and was smitten. Recently, a friend who road manages (I love his life), texted me, said he’d be in town with a new project at Marilyn’s on K Street, said he’d put me on the list—Tracy plus one. Normally, I avoid club bands I’ve never heard of, because they’re a dime a dozen and the best you can hope for is good in a sea of mediocre. But my LA pal is cool and has good taste, so I said why not. I wasn’t there five minutes, settling into a cush-backed chair, sipping refreshing water with bubbles, when they began to wail, and I felt that in-your-gut recognition of being in the presence of iconic brilliance. I know this makes me sound like a Fangirl, but I don’t care.

Red Cortez, formally The Weather Underground, not to be confused with the radical group from the 1970’s who started street riots, escalating to bombing federal targets as a means of confronting their failing U.S. government—although one can’t help but wonder at the intellectual, aesthetic choice of the former band name—stole my rock and roll heart. They opened my eyes to the fact: there is indeed life beyond big hair and lighter ballads. You just have to be willing to let go.

They blew my mind with their wholly inventive and totally unique, urban, melodic folk-like lyrics and generation-marking mix of beats and composition infused with Latin, alt rock, punk, blues, country, Mariachi, jazz, and R&B sounds. At once, Red Cortez is hard to define, impossible to peg them into any particular musical corner. But they’re also achingly familiar. I was poignantly attracted to their, melodic storytelling lyrics and their cosmically spiritual, sometimes whimsical arrangements. It’s something when you can forget you’re in space and time and music lifts you into its power and flow, the way history-making bands always do. This is Red Cortez.

I could go on about Diego Guerrero’s percussion, a skin hitter who seems to understand rhythm as if it were in his DNA, or Harley Prechtel – Cortez, whose voice, keyboard fingers, and lips around the harmonica are pure sex and every girl’s night in shining armor without alienating his male fans because he sings like his testicles are titanium. I could wax forever about Ryan Kirkpatrick’ bass lines, that seem betrothed to the cores of his brother’s souls, and I could ramble ions over Calvin J. Love’s guitar, which reminded me of The Edge in U2 who has a unique guitar delay which Love seems to channel, but whose virtuoso, commanding control of tempo and emotion oozes from his strings in a way that he can call his own. I could go on, but I won’t.

I’ll just predict these guys will become a Grammy-winning, iconic cornerstone of this generation’s musical lore, if they don’t screw it up. Mark my words: Red Cortez will make their nut in the emotional angst of this generation’s raw truth, and they will continue to ingratiate young and oldish alike to their stylings every time they grace us with their presence. You watch. They will.

It’s good to be in love again.