Amanda Jo Williams at the Unknown Theater

“Country girl from outer space” Amanda Jo Williams has been winning over Angelinos with her uncanny ability to project an unfiltered open heart through her cartoonishly vulnerable voice and her spare elemental compositions. She also comes across as disarmingly endearing in many of the bizarre videos on her myspace page. You can see her for free tonight, Thursday Aug 26th at the Mountain Bar. Live shows feature her freaky tribal hilbilly folk band careening through her simple rollicking  country grooves with wild unfettered abandon while Amanda sits centerstage with her tiny guitar and big drum unselfconciously doing her thing. Paper Magazine describes a show saying,”Williams strummed A-minor for fifteen minutes straight while her band stomped rhythmically around her backwoods muppet ballideering.”

It’s the emotional whallop her music delivers that makes her more than just another freak in the freak kingdom.”Listening to Amanda Jo Williams’ rough-shod country-folk is like eating a squirrel stew supper before falling into bed,  her primal music is an open maw to the mysteries and fears of the world. With a twang-heavy voice that sometimes breaks into manic gibberish, she sounds like an unruly, sometimes lonely little girl left to her own devices.”says the L.A. Times

“My music is basic and simple”, Williams says in her interview with  Daiana Feuer on Tumblr, “I do stuff that’s more from space, channeling how aliens would tell us to be when we’re more evolved. Anything is possible. You can see what you want to see when you want to see it, when you are ready to see. When your will is aligned with the universe and what you are born to do, when those things are aligned, you can find the place where you belong.”

"People need music where the artist is honest and themselves."- Amanda Jo Williams

Jeffertitti’s Nile will also bring their “hypnotic river of sound” to Chinatown on the same bill, providing some riffy Beatlesque melodicism and heavily effected sonic extrapolations.

also a live set by Latin Meds (josh charney of le switch is in latin meds)

and DJ  Hey Okay!

The Mountain Bar

it’s a DRAMATURGY production

Jeffertitti's Nile

The LA FOLDAWAYS are finally entering intense rehearsals in May. A side project from the Mister Nervous band, Wes and a dedicated crew of misfits will be pulling together a repertoire of “classic” rockNroll including numbers from The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, The Kinks, Van Morrison, Shocking Blue (!), The Who… and more stuff including some interesting takes on old blues and RnB songs. A core trio is working as the lynchpin – and a large pool of  singers and players will rotate as the “front” or songleaders in many performances.

Not quite a tribute, “Classic Rock” or jam band – more a combination of all three. Shows will often feature completely different band line-ups, as available players will work in different combinations making each show completely unique. The LA Foldaways mission: to treat many of our favorite vintage songs as vibrant living things to be joyously jammed (as opposed to reverently copied).

We’ll let you know more soon.

Every Tuesday at the Airliner is a different theme, like the 60s night here

This Tuesday’s event at the Airliner is GO FOLK YOURSELF and features Pierre de Reeder (of Rilo Kiley), Pete Covington (from New South Wales, Australia), Homesick Elephant and Mister Nervous (hey that’s us, we’re opening up this weeks show at 8pm with a bang… well we can get kinda loud…) and 6 other musical artists. With 2 (or more) stages running at the same time wandering through the large funky building allows you to check out many different artists in a single evening.

I had a chance to interview Vince Munoz, he’s the guy who puts these Tuesday things together, so instead of me raving away let’s see what the man who makes it all happen has to say.

“Every Tuesday I do is a different monthly event”, says Munoz,” For example the first Tuesday of every month I do an indie-electronic event (Tektonik LA). Every 4th Tuesday we’ve just started doing a ’60s night. We normally have DJs spinning ’60s soul, mod, motown, etc. downstairs, while upstairs we’ve been getting some really good local acts covering different bands from the ’60s.”

“The fact that my job is getting to listen to good bands is very cool.  With Go Folk Yourself what we want to do is turn the venue into more of an experience. We want the event to be a place where artists, musicians and vendors can network and get their name out. The goal is to get really good acts that not only make the show strong and fun but also we want to give them an opportunity to come back every month and build their fans. We’ve been  getting vendors and artists to setup their products, paintings, sculptures etc. in our back patio.”

“The plan for all of our events is to branch out to a bigger community”, Vince stresses,” we want to do more than just be another show with a bunch of bands.”

GO FOLK YOURSELF

APRIL 13th 2010 – 8pm

THE AIRLINER

2419 N. Broadway

Los Angeles CA 90031

- WES D

(hit the  link below and read my complete interview with Vince!)

HERE’S THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW

Mister Nervous played Blue Day with Ben Fordham on violin at the DRAMA cd release party last week

We had a great time jamming with our friends last week at the Unknown Theater where we released our new CD Drama. Almost everyone who sang or played on the record was able to come out and make that big sound come alive. Lydee from the Sundowners sent along some pix that we’ll put up in the images area, Thanx Lydee! We’ll be playing more shows with the Sundowners this year, Dennis has already set one up for June at The Old Towne Pub in Pasadena, and we’re grateful for that because we love playing with those guys! In fact: I want to thank everyone who made it out to the show last Thursday for their support.

Now just in case you were one of those unfortunates who managed to miss out on that show here’s your next opportunity to rectify that terrible error (AH-HA-hahaha) ’cause we’re playing at the Silver Factory Studios this SUNDAY 3/28. We’ll have our friends Rocking Horse People and Megasapien with us so if you didn’t catch their recent performances at Echo Curio and the Unknown … well then you gotta complete win/win/win situation on hand here!

SUNDAY MARCH 28th

Silver Factory Studios 3/28/2010

SILVER FACTORY STUDIOS
10pm: ROCKING HORSE PEOPLE
11pm: MISTER NERVOUS
12:00 : MEGASAPIEN

The Sundowners do what they please

There’s nothing quite like a SUNDOWNERS show. The songs this band plays are completely their own and influenced (as lead singer and guitarist Dennis Stahl says) by,”…all the good shit from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. This is not a contrived sound for the masses, it’s a heavy psychedelic, spiritual blues sound:100% organic and designed to open the mind. There are a lot of acts out there, yes, but only a few bands. What this means is three guys and a lady who play together and off of each other. We don’t cater to any particular audience, just those interested in good rock and roll from every era.”

From the hills of Alta Dena where the air is justa little clearer and the altitude justa little higher their music will probably remind you of a lot of things but it’ll never sound even slightly derivative. And live the band projects an atmosphere of affection and whimsy that makes it feel like you’ve been invited into a happy house-party with your new favorite slightly bent friends.

Michael Harpel and Dennis Stahl

On  SKELETONIZE , their second album,  the songs pull from an even wider landscape of sounds and moods than on their sprawling two disc debut cd. Just when you think you know where the journey is headed the band’ll switch it up and take you to some new unexpectedly wonderful place…as Dennis recently remarked “we’ll do uptempo and downtempo in the same song”. This flies in the face of the current trend of easily pigeonholed cookie-cutter compositions many groups use to try to zero-in on their currently chosen demographic target, which naturally makes this unaffected take-us-as-we-are crew very near and dear to Mister Nervous’ heart.

And so we are pleased beyond words to say the Sundowners are opening up our Mister Nervous record release party this Thursday!

The Sundowners love you and they're your new best friends!

THURSDAY MARCH 18th

THE UNKNOWN THEATER
1110 Seward St.
Los Angeles CA 90038

(with MY IMAGINARY FRIENDS and MISTER NERVOUS)

Doors open at 10pm
$10 at the door (however: drinks are very reasonable!)

OLIN & the MOON (photo by Ninelle Efremova)

One of the hardest working bands in LA OLIN and the MOON are either performing, recording, rehearsing, partying or unconscious. I’m not even sure why I’m writing about them because if you hang anywhere near the east side of Los Angeles you probably already know them. Well just in case ya don’t:

Possibly the best most honest heartfelt authentic band you’ll find playing folk flavored rock music right now began in Sun Valley Idaho with Singer/Songwriter David LaBrel, his brother and lead guitarist Travis and drummer Marshall Vore. In Los Angeles they met up with Brian McGinnis (pedal steel, banjo, guitar) and Kyle Vicioso (bass) and started drinkin’, starvin’ and workin’ their butts off. You can see that  the effort paid off in every show. They make a sound that’s  intimate and gigantic all at once. David’s voice delivers the goods communicating quiet strength and intimacy and the boys play with a precision that somehow always looks like reckless abandon. The group’s  camaraderie is  obvious and infectious: wherever Olin and the Moon goes the party’s fine.

I was blown away the first time I saw the GYPSY RIVER HAUNTS play at Cranes Tavern, the brutal blast of rockabilly raunch these boys churn out at-the-drop-of-a-hat damn near knocked me on my ass.

Gypsy River Haunts (photo by Danielle Levitt)

Even more impressive is the fact that they just get more awesome every time I see ‘em, improving the quality and tightness of their performances without taking  the energy level down a single notch. If you like your rockNroll honest, raw and raucous these are the men for you to watch. Andrew Sheppard stands frontNcenter roaring out the words to their tunes with a power  that belies his somewhat diminutive frame while Dustin Hollenbeck attacks that cool maroon tele like a shredder whose discovered that well executed  hot country fused rockabilly licks can blow most metal players into the next county. Johnny and Salvatore man the engine room and keep this monster slammin’.

Are you gettin’ my meaning here (?) … these guys are hot.

OK: here’s the deal-

You can catch both these must see bands this week at the weekly HOMEWORK MONDAYS event ongoing over at CRANES TAVERN ( as well as the Downtown Train – a band exuberantly tackling classic roots, r&b and blues tunes – and Ned Casual’s spot-on DJ sets of authentic the-real-shit rockin roots music). Admission is free – Attendance is mandatory (or it oughta be)

OLIN & THE MOON – GYPSY RIVER HAUNTS – DOWNTOWN TRAIN
MONDAY MARCH 1st
CRANES TAVERN
1611 North El Centro Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90028