The FOBs started its career with a benefit for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) at the historic, recently reopened Fillmore in S.F. (thanks to brother Giles McNamee and friends such as John Gilmore). We played with special guest Merl Saunders. Steve Jobs' daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, joined us to sing the opening song.

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Before that, we played the amazon.com family picnic near Seattle. This is truly a GenX town, evidenced by the attitude of our waiter at a family restaurant who suggested to the eight of us to order "a buttload" of food to share. Despite a few cries for songs from The Cure and other bands we'd never heard of, the songs went over quite well with the amazon crowd, who were playing stickball (so hard that the CEO had a large cut on his head).

Before that we played the famous Troubadour club in London (actually South Kensington). This club was a folk club in the 1950s and early 60s (when Bob Dylan played there), and a jazz club for a while (when Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts was in the house band), then became a Swinging London club for the scene-makers and rock royalty of London. Now it is still as small as it ever was, holding about 100 people, with a stage even smaller than the cave at the Cavern where the Beatles started. Aided by drummer Chris of the Rockhoppers, we played four hours! Three encores! The Brits were enthusiastic about the songs, especially the San Francisco sound ("White Rabbit" and "The Music Never Stopped" were particularly popular).

We had played only a few gigs before this one, including a 4th of July party in Gualala (TBone Tony Bove's hometown at the time) and several other private parties.