Free Republic

...The San Francisco natives, who barely rate a second glance on the streets of their hometown, can't walk down the sidewalks of Paris without being stopped. At the House of Blues after midnight Wednesday, the band was greeted by an audience that cheered with recognition at the start of every song, sang along on the choruses and clearly knew the whole Groovies story. But the Ponderosa Stomp is a special stage, a two-night festival-within-a-festival that has become something of a growing tradition between the two weekends of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fair, which closes its 40th annual...

“You’ll be back again,” sang Barry & the Remains, starting their headlining set on Tuesday night at the eighth annual Ponderosa Stomp. It’s a song about a straying girlfriend, but the Remains could have been singing about themselves and many of the four dozen acts — rockabillies, bluesmen, R&B shouters, swamp-rockers, honky-tonkers, psychedelic bands — playing the House of Blues here in the Stomp’s two nights of nine-hour shows. In the mid-1960s Barry & the Remains toured the United States with the Beatles and made an album of crafty, surly garage-rock. Then they broke up, becoming one more rock-history footnote....