Brian Wilson; Dave Alvin; Living Sisters; Harper Simon (Walt Disney Concert Hall; 2,265 seats; $35-$49.75) By PHIL GALLO

Studying California almost always requires the examination of contrasts. The songwriting careers of Brian Wilson and Dave Alvin, two youths raised in the L.A. working class suburbs of Hawthorne and Downey, respectively, begin about 15 years apart, their perspectives defined by the specifics of time and place. Wilson, in the Beach Boys, captured innocence, youth and sunshine in the early '60s; Alvin, in the late '70s and '80s in the Blasters and as a solo artist, reflected on loss, specifically the promises and culture of the Golden Gate state. Played side-by-side Sunday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Southern California sounded like two very different places.
After a week of California classical perspectives in the West Coast, Left Coast series, Disney Concert Hall played host to the pop flip side in "Songs of the Sun" with Alvin taking the theme to heart and personalizing his statement. Wilson, backed by most of his band on acoustic instruments, gave a shortened version of his standard show.

Wilson's 11-song set was filled with glorious, raise-the-roof harmonies, a celebration of girls, cars, teen angst, surfing, an a cappella cover of the Four Freshmen's "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring" and, for one pensive five-minute stretch, the Wilson-Van Dyke Parks masterpiece "Heroes and Villains."

Alvin's eight-song set, which included an impromptu "Surfer Girl," was more stark and reflective, the sounds of sighs and pain rising from Greg Leisz' slide work on an assortment of stringed instruments. In Alvin's world, the waterway is a dry river, the radio plays oldies for separated friends and lovers, and the great hangout is but a memory, having burned down years ago. And in "Downey Girl," his recent tribute to his hometown's first celebrity, Karen Carpenter, Alvin uses biography to pose personal questions about pride and character, the sort of soul-searching Wilson and Tony Asher achieved on "God Only Knows" that Wilson sang with his usual crack-in-the-mettle persona.

Memory, more than the here and now that made Wilson a champion teen chronicler, supplies the depth in Alvin's folk and blues-based tunes.

Where Wilson succeeded by taking the Hollywood dream and applying it to the local landscape and rock 'n' roll, Alvin stays inland and assumes the roots of the Southern refugees who made their way west a generation before his birth. One side of the California dream Wilson and Alvin describe is freedom in all its manifestations. On the other side, it's a steady paycheck.

The Living Sisters -- native Angelenos Inara George and Eleni Mandell with Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark -- play light folk with angelic three-part vocals, a reminder of the debut album of the Roches from 30 years ago. "You Make Me Blue," a song by George, daughter of the late Little Feat leader Lowell, shared the alchemy used by Wilson and Alvin, mixing doo-wop with folk music for glorious effect.

Opener Harper Simon shares considerable musical DNA with his father Paul, a resolutely non-California sound. His winsome personality, combined with deft finger-picking guitar style, strong wordplay and engaging melodies, made for an impressive four-song set. The reason for his inclusion on the bill, though, is a mystery.

Live: Brian Wilson and company in the 'Sun' Dave Alvin, Harper Simon and the Living Sisters help the Beach Boys legend make 'Songs of the Sun' concert

Talk about California dreaming. . . .

At the end of Sunday's "Songs of the Sun" concert, part of the L.A. Philharmonic's West Coast, Left Coast festival celebrating regional culture, headliner Brian Wilson invited the rest of the night's performers back to the stage for a multi-generational singalong on a couple of his signature hits, "Surfin' U.S.A." and "Fun, Fun, Fun."

Out trotted singer-songwriter Harper Simon, who had opened the evening, the ad hoc female harmony trio the Living Sisters -- Inara George, the daughter of Little Feat founder Lowell George; jazz-pop singer-songwriter Eleni Mandell; and Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark -- and veteran Southland roots-rock singer, songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin.

One bit of wishful thinking for aficionados of Southern California pop music went unrealized: that of a more substantive musical meeting between Wilson, the melodic and harmonic genius behind the Beach Boys, and Alvin, the heart and soul of the Blasters, one of the great L.A. bands of the '80s.

Yes, Alvin added his voice (off-mike) and hand claps to the two iconic Beach Boys hits of the '60s, songs born of this region's surf and car cultures. But it could have been an even more symbolically ideal collaboration had he strapped on a Fender electric guitar -- the locally produced embodiment of the sound and spirit not only of the Beach Boys but also of rock 'n' roll itself -- to handle parts originally played by Wilson's late brother Carl.

That nit officially picked, "Songs of the Sun" nevertheless was an illuminating night of appropriately casual and largely acoustic music-making rooted in the exquisite vocal harmonizing that is central to Wilson's music and that of the Andrews Sisters-cum-Roches-inspired Living Sisters. Those harmonies also can be found in the folk-country narrative storytelling tradition that Alvin has embraced over the last 30 years.

Simon started off with four songs delivered much as he would have done them in his appearances at the Silverlake Lounge, which he referenced early on. "Berkeley Girl" most directly connected with the night's geographical focal point, with its nods to those nexuses of indie-rock, Silver Lake and Echo Park.

Alvin came next with a 45-minute set that he opened with a short homage to another under-sung Southland singer-songwriter, John Stewart, whom he saluted with a verse from the title track from Stewart's paean to the Golden State, "California Bloodlines." That segued into Alvin's "California's Burning," a more caustic look at what's happened to the state once regarded by much of the nation as the Promised Land.

His sweet ode to Karen Carpenter, "Downey Girl," was complemented by steel guitar ace Greg Leisz, playing dobro. "Dry River," his unromanticized account of growing up near the concrete banks of the San Gabriel River, led nicely into "King of California."

He topped off his set with "Ashgrove," his celebration of the long-defunct folk-blues club, and a rare latter-day reading of "Fourth of July," reconfigured into a slower, more haunting folk-style rendition than the version he recorded after he'd left the Blasters and joined X.

George, Mandell and Stark, dressed in complementary silver, gold and blue lamé mini-dresses, warbled sweetly during their 15 minutes on stage, mostly as an interlude between the centerpiece sets by Alvin and Wilson.

Wilson stuck largely to cornerstone Beach Boys material but did it in a relatively unfamiliar way. He placed more emphasis than usual on the vocals because of reduced instrumentation, just two acoustic guitars, bass, piano and occasional keyboards, rather than his full-scale 10-piece band.

There was an exquisite a cappella nod to one of his primary influences, the Four Freshmen, and a timely version of "Little Saint Nick." That led to an audience singalong on "Help Me, Rhonda" and "Good Vibrations."

It was the perfect climax to a near-perfect evening.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

Music Menagerie Presents - Rantoul & Die a romantic comedy - June 20, 2009

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Rantoul & Die Benefit Performance Website

'Man of Somebody's Dreams: A Tribute to Chris Gaffney'

'Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm' and 'Man of Somebody's Dreams: A Tribute to Chris Gaffney'
By Randy Lewis
March 25, 2009
Various Artists

"Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm"

Vanguard

* * *


Various Artists

"Man of Somebody's Dreams: A Tribute to Chris Gaffney"

Yep Roc

* * * 1/2

Tribute albums can be flimsy excuses to string together recordings by a hodgepodge of musicians. But in the right hands, they can be genuinely illuminating efforts, especially in the case of honorees who deserve broader recognition. Fortunately, two new collections paying posthumous props to Tex-Mex singer, songwriter and bandleader Doug Sahm and his spiritual brother, Southern California roots musician Chris Gaffney, fall squarely into the second camp.

The connection between the albums runs deeper than shared appearances by Los Lobos, Dave Alvin and Alejandro Escovedo, or even the presence of Sahm on the Gaffney album by way of his Texas Tornados' recording of Gaffney's haunting "The Gardens."

They are musical soul mates, genre-defying singers and writers who were equally at home with a Tex-Mex polka, a honky-tonk two-step, a soul ballad or a rock 'n' roll barn-burner. And both dusky-voiced singers were intimately attuned to the geography from which that music sprang. Sahm died almost a decade ago at 58, of natural causes; Gaffney passed last year at 57 from liver cancer.

Sahm's brief brush with mainstream success came in the 1960s, when his Sir Douglas Quintet logged Top 40 hits with "She's About a Mover," "The Rains Came" and "Mendocino." He could be reasonably credited as the father of the Americana/roots music movement, weaving together threads of rock, R&B, blues, country and Mexican music into a vibrant and organic tapestry in his subsequent solo recordings and with his Grammy-winning Tornados.

Bob Dylan is among Sahm's legion of music cognoscenti fans, although he's not on "Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm." The 14 tracks are dominated by fellow Texans, including Jimmie Vaughan, Charlie Sexton, Delbert McClinton, Joe "King" Carrasco and Terry Allen. Likewise, the Gaffney album skews toward his compadres from the Southland roots-music community, including John Doe, Tom Russell, Peter Case, Robert "Big Sandy" Williams and Gaffney's Hacienda Brothers partner, Dave Gonzalez.

In their version of "Nuevo Laredo," the Gourds find the magic Tex-Mex groove that Sahm pretty much defined more than four decades ago. McClinton handles "Texas Me," documenting Sahm's move from the Lone Star State to San Francisco when that early success started to turn his world upside down.

Gaffney never had that problem, slugging out a living for the last three decades mostly in Southland bars. His empathy for the solitary habitués of those watering holes showed up regularly in his incisive songs such as "Six Nights a Week," which Peter Case powers through here.

Alvin assembled this tribute for Gaffney, who was a member of his Guilty Men band and his best friend, and he adds an enlightening first-person introduction to "Artesia." The song is one of Gaffney's many testaments to the unique facets of Southern California that have given way to tract homes and shopping-mall culture.

David Hidalgo handles the lead vocal on the title tune, which might be Gaffney's most moving composition, a country waltz about a man who is "living a vision of his own indecision, he's all alone with his pride." Joe Ely cranks up the wattage with a rollicking performance of "Lift Your Leg," a masterpiece of bar-bred bravado, and Calexico turns what Gaffney performed as an ebullient norteño polka, "Frank's Tavern," into a moving ballad.

Both albums end on poignant notes: the Sahm tribute closes with his son, Shawn, doing a rendition of "Mendocino," while the Gaffney album leaves the final word to Gaffney himself in a recording made shortly before he died.

Alvin recorded him singing Stanley Wykoff and Michael Berberet's "Guitars of My Dead Friends," and you can hear the toll his illness had taken on his once mighty voice. But it's a fitting homage to the legacy that music can leave behind.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

Eddie Vedder Joins John Doe & Exene Cervenka's Knitters to Party fo Obama in Seattle

1/21/09, 1:19 pm EST
The country’s best inauguration party Tuesday night turned out to be in the other Washington: At Seattle’s tiny Tractor Tavern club, the Knitters (the rootsy side band led by X’s John Doe and Exene Cervenka) played a Americana-soaked barnstormer of a show — complete with a guest appearance by Eddie Vedder. “Whenever anyone’s being a cynic and an asshole, saying it’s just gonna be the same old thing, do me a favor and tell ‘em to fuck off,” Doe told the crowd, in one of the evening’s many happy references to the day’s events. Then he invited Vedder onstage to duet with Cervenka on a gleefully frenzied version of X’s 1983 tune “The New World,” with its sardonic lyrics about another election: “It was better before they voted for what’s his name.”

Vedder, who had managed to blend in to the crowd (which also included his Pearl Jam bandmates Jeff Ament and Mike McCready) with his hair tucked into a big black knit cap, was in a mood to celebrate: He pounded out the beat on Doe’s back with his fists, slow-danced with Cervenka, and played air guitar while the Knitters’ Dave Alvin (formerly of the Blasters) finished the song with a lengthy solo that incorporated both Chuck Berry licks and what sounded like part of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Thank you, man in the black hat,” Doe said.