At 53, Lydia Lunch shows no signs of smoothing out the edginess that made her one of the powerful forces in late-’70s New York and the No Wave scene. To talk to her is to jump into a fiery whirlwind of creativity, one that whips up everybody else. It makes sense, then, that her upcoming workshop in Ojai — dubbed the Post-Catastrophe Collaborative Ojai Artists’ Workshop by and for Women — is designed to do just that for all the attendees, creating an environment for women, whether veterans of the arts or new recruits, to express their artistic sides. But what is this catastrophe in the title?
“Did you wake up today? Did you watch the news?” Ms. Lunch laughs. “Do I have to itemize things here? It’s easy in California to forget the amount of catastrophe that’s out there. … The weather is terrifying. The 800 military bases that the U.S. has is terrifying. Wars continuing all over the world is terrifying. Man-made economic crisis is terrifying. … I don’t have fear, myself, but maybe that’s because I have so many vehicles to express my concern.”
Lester Sterling can still wail a mean sax at age 77, and as the last surviving original member of the Skatalites, he has a right to. It’s a slinky, almost African sound, reminiscent of not just the history of ska, but of the Ethiopian jazz scene developing a continent away. Mr. Sterling’s band, which reunited in the ’80s and has continued playing ever since, comes to SOhO this Thursday, and should not be taken for granted.
As much as the original Skatalites have contributed to the history of ska and beyond, their ’60s incarnation was as chaotic personally as their storming and sweaty first gigs. Trombonist Don Drummond, who wrote a majority of their material, suffered from bouts of mental illness, checked in and out of sanitariums, and murdered his girlfriend in 1965. When he died four years later, most of Jamaica came out in the streets for the funeral.
Traditionally you’d take a year or two to write and record an album, then you’d go on tour,” says New Order’s lead singer Bernard Sumner with his soft Mancunian accent. “But things are working differently in the music business these days. The new idea is that we’re going to play concerts in small bursts, like nine dates, then go back and write a bit, and then play another nine concerts. Just so we don’t disappear off the face of the earth for long.”
New Order (along with opening act Johnny Marr) come to the Santa Barbara Bowl on Thursday, but the announcement of this date was indeed a surprise. Following a rancorous split with founding bass player Peter Hook, the band really hasn’t released an album since 2005’s “Waiting for the Siren’s Call” and the 2011 mop-up B-sides release “Lost Sirens.” But no, here they are again.
These days, Jamie James wears a suit and tie and a crumpled pork pie hat, with a face somewhere between Rob Corddry and John Peel. He has slung a guitar over his shoulder through blues rock, rockabilly, hard rock, and can replicate a mean Delta Blues slide. And he’ll be one of the reasons movie star Dennis Quaid plays SOhO this Saturday, along with his rock band the Sharks, which Mr. James fronts. To get to this point, it’s been a long strange trip.
It starts halfway through Mr. James’ career. During the late ’70s and early ’80s, Mr. James fronted a pre-Stray Cats, pre-MTV rockabilly revival group called the Kingbees. They put out two albums, and a strong single, “My Mistake” on RSO records. One of their fans from those days was actor Harry Dean Stanton, and the two hit it off. Mr. Stanton sings, by the way, in a sweet, untrained voice, and at the time was looking for a backup band.
“I got Harry,” Mr. James says. “I didn’t want the pressure of being the lead singer anymore. So it was nice to take a back seat with Harry Dean. I grew musically.”
They played the Mint on Pico Boulevard every Saturday night in the ’90s, and there they ran into Dennis Quaid, who at first was reluctant, but then joined the group on stage for a guitar jam. Mr. Quaid and Mr. James had both started learning guitar, and liked the same music. By 2000, Mr. Quaid invited Mr. James up to his Montana ranch to write songs, and soon the Sharks band was born.
“This is simple, first-, second-, and third-gear rock and roll,” Mr. James says. “Because of working with Harry Dean, I learned to separate the music from the ‘star’ with Dennis. We’re not here to sell Dennis Quaid T-shirts, you know?”
The band plays a mix of classic rock covers and originals by Mr. Quaid and Mr. James, and it’s really just about having a great time.
Mr. James picked up guitar at age 15, after early years playing hockey and sports in his hometown of Toronto. But Deep Purple, his first concert, blew his mind, as he stood right at the front of the stage in a tiny club directly in front of Richie Blackmore.
“I’d never seen five guys create that kind of energy on stage before. It was electrifying!” he says. “And I didn’t want to be anything else.”
He immediately bought a guitar and joined a band. He made his way to London, then back to Detroit, where he became friends with Bob Seger, then made his way to Los Angeles in 1975, where he nearly joined a reformed Steppenwolf.
When he’s not touring with the Sharks, Mr. James has been focusing on playing Delta Blues, singing old classics the way they were first performed, and playing once a week at Santa Monica’s Harvelle’s. He’s still friends with Harry Dean Stanton, and the two of them do the L.A. Times crossword by phone every morning. (Mr. James plays the music in an upcoming documentary on Mr. Stanton, also.)
For the Sharks, Mr. James has teamed up with Tom Walsh on drums, Ken Stange on keyboards and harmonica, and Tom Slik on bass, while Mr. Quaid plays guitar and keyboard on top of singing. And they just want to rock out.
“The thing I love about the Sharks is that we’re five guys who all just love playing music,” he says. Simple as that.
DENNIS QUAID AND THE SHARKS
When 9 p.m. Sat.
Where: SOhO Restaurant & Club, 1221 State St.
Cost: $20-$25
Information: sohosb.com or 962-7776
JT Nero and Allison Russell are the couple at the heart of the Birds of Chicago collective. Courtesy photo
Birds of Chicago delve into that ever-widening genre called Americana, and bring out something both soulful and sweet, smooth and raw. Just like the big city of Chicago turned traveling bluesmen into electric nightclub entertainers in the ’50s, the Birds of Chicago are set to change what can be done in the genre that has tended to the too-folksy side in recent years. They’re a smokin’ hot live band, to be proved Sunday, when they play as part of Sings Like Hell’s current series.
The band came together when Chicago-based JT Nero, of JT and the Clouds, and Montreal-based Allison Russell of Po’Girl joined forces romantically and artistically. After touring on and off with each other, and hiding their relationship from the rest of the touring musicians, they finally combined their songwriting, their arranging and their voices. Their self-titled debut came out in 2012, followed by a live album in 2013, bolstered by constant touring.
The Ayahuasca plant, when brewed with several other plants of the psychotria genus, produces a psychedelic trip that rivals the synthetic death’s-door effects of DMT. It’s known as the “vine of death.” In Peruvian ceremonies the act of ingesting it is known as “la purga” because of the all-sluices open purgatorial nature of the experience, sometimes even curing diseases. And for one woman, it has been all these things — it has cured her and expanded her consciousness in equal parts. She brings her tale to Center Stage Theater tonight and Saturday.
In the one-woman show “Wind in a Mirror: Ayahuasca Visions,” Josie Hyde uses storytelling, poetry, music and bizarre, Peter Max-ish animations to bring this story to life. A child of the ’60s and no stranger to LSD and expanding her mind, Ms. Hyde claims the late monologist Spalding Gray as a friend and muse. (“He gave me a lot of encouragement … he called me his female opposite,” she says. “We argued.”)
Johnny Boyd croons in a high voice not unlike Georgie Fame, has left his heart in San Francisco (or at least his cell phone number), and wants to put some romance back in your life. And he does it with a small combo, a new album of originals, “Never Been Blue,” and a Sunday evening performance at Goleta Valley Community Center. The stop is part of a tour he’s been waiting several years to undertake.
“Never Been Blue” came out in August and is his first in an 11-year stretch. “When that amount of time goes by, you don’t know what’s gonna happen,” he says. “Every time you turn around something has dropped out and shifted. Used to be the record company would help with the shift. But seeing as record companies don’t do that anymore . . . it makes it challenging to get to your audience.”
Gregg Luskin graduated this last quarter with a degree in computer science from UCSB, but he’s been bringing his dance technology to the masses since 2006 under the guise of his DJ alter-ego, Milkman. In his albums and his live gigs, Luskin mashes together layer upon layer of popular music, mixing a bass line from Beck, a rap from Snoop Dogg, a vocal from Shania Twain and bits and pieces from all over the charts, making them work together as very danceable songs.
Mashups have been with us for about 10 years now, starting off with very simple but smile-inducing tracks from Freelance Hellraiser and 2 Many DJs. Their hit featured Christina Aguilera’s vocals matched to the backing track of a song from The Strokes. Just when critics were calling mashups dead, younger artists like Girl Talk and Milkman have resuscitated the genre with very dense tracks that mash as much as possible. Ideas only last for a few bars before moving on to something else. This is music for an ADHD generation.
The proving ground for jazz musicians over the decades has been the nightclub stage, the chance to sit in with a group of pros and solo. It’s a high-wire act for the up-and-coming musician, proving themselves in front of a crowd as well as a group that’s heard it all. In Santa Barbara, the tradition is held by one man, Jeff Elliott and his Monday night Jazz Jams.
His name has appeared regularly on SOhO’s monthly schedule, and always on that Monday. So much so that it’s easy to take for granted what Elliot does, which is keep jazz alive in Santa Barbara at the grassroots level.
For those of us in the entertainment print trade, we know at lot of these people by name, if not face. They keep the wheels greased and the machines running; they send out the press releases and they make the artists accessible; they keep the books balanced and the funds raising; they make sure that everything feels effortless. For the general public, that means they’re invisible for the most part; and they don’t want you to know how much effort goes into being effortless. But they are always on top of the list of the “without whom” section.
So now it’s time to bring a few of these people out in to the light and give them the recognition they deserve, for photographers to backstage crews. They are our Behind the Scenes Superstars.
