HOLIDAY FUNDRAISER AT COPRO NASON ART GALLERY DEC 13, 2008!

COME GATHER WITH YOUR FRIENDS
FROM THE DOG & PONY SHOW
FOR A HOLIDAY FUNDRAISING EVENT AT
COPRO NASON ART GALLERY DEC 13, 2008!

It’s that time of year again, when we look forward to communing with our friends and loved ones and sharing the years events. And this years past events sure have given us a lot to talk about.

First of all, in the past year + we lost some of our favorite people to illness. Chris Gaffney, Steve Bartell, Jeff Cranford - you will all be dearly missed. We’ve also seen other good friends go through tough medical times. Drac Conley is seeing the better side of his surgery for prostate cancer, with 5 post surgery screenings coming up negative (that’s good). Candye Kane holds good thoughts and continues with clean tests as well after fighting off a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Duane Jarvis has just gone through another surgery, but is back in LA ready to continue the battle. Please keep sending your good thoughts as he is prepares for chemo in the coming months. All are still trying to recover financially from past and present medical bills and lost wages.

With all of your help our fundraising event over Labor Day weekend to help with these medical needs was a huge success. We raised just over $30,000.00 in ticket sales, art sales and the raffle! Unfortunately, there is a dark side to this story in that Sam has not paid us all of the money that was raised from the advance ticket sales at Safari Sam’s. He still owes us $5,680. and has been slow to respond on this. Sam – PAY UP!

Anyway, back to a brighter note on the year’s events….
WE ELECTED A NEW PRESIDENT! With the Bush years nearly behind us, we can go with hope into 2009, and know that with our help, we could see a brighter future for our children. With our help and persistence, we will hopefully see some sort of new structure to our healthcare system so that in the future our friends won’t need to think about the financial ramification of getting sick. I know - I’m idealistic. But I’ll hold onto this thought as we stand behind our new President in pushing for change.

In the meantime! Let’s have a PARTY!

Copro Nason Art Gallery at Bergamont Station in Santa Monica has offered to continue the fundraising efforts of the Dog & Pony Show by hosting our annual holiday party this year! They have invited many great artists to show in the gallery and will donate proceeds of sales to The Dog & Pony efforts! This is such a huge help for us, as with the financial setbacks of the year, our party would not have been able to happen without their help.

So come join us for food, drink, great music by Joe Wood http://www.myspace.com/joewoodandthelonelyones, Champagne Velvet http://www.myspace.com/champagnevelvet and other surprise guests. Let’s end this year with some fun and look forward to a brighter New Year!

Where: Copro/Nason Gallery
Bergamot Station Art Complex,
2525 Michigan Ave. Unit T5
Santa Monica, CA 90404

When: Saturday, December 13, 8:00-12mid

A portion of the proceeds from this show will be donated to
“The Dog and Pony Show” http://www.musicmenagerie.net/dogandponyshow/. The music and art community is filled with talented people who share the plight of having no access to adequate healthcare. There is a national problem with our healthcare system and we all need to help each other in these dark times. All of the money donated will go directly to pay the bills of those who need assistance. We will also have a silent auction on some original work prints to directly benefit
"The Dog and Pony Show". The more money we raise the more people we can help.

ARTIST LIST:
Alex Garcia, Bad Otis Link, Bethany Marchman, Brandi Milne, Brian Viveros Brooke Kent, Charles Manson, Chet Zar, Chris Peters, Christopher Pugliese, Dan May, Dan Quintana, Delphia, Eric Fortune, Femke Hiemstra Jasmine Worth, Jeff Gillette, Jimmy Pickering, Keith Weesner, Kevin Scalzo KMNDZ, Kukula, Lauren Gardiner, Lola, Luke Chueh, Makiko Sugawa, Mari Inukai, Mark Covell, Martin Wittfooth, Michael Page, Naoto Hattori, Nathan Spoor, Peter Forystek, Tin, Ver Mar, Vince Cacciotti, XNO & more

One of Us, Gobble Gobble

ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN

The good news, according to Nancy Sefton, is that all-around mensch Safari Sam Lanni has paid a thousand bux of the $6,680 he owes The Dog & Pony Show cancer benefit staged at Safari Sam’s last Labor Day weekend. I was at Burning Man when this marathon came off, but the event was so successful (and need for succoring cancer-wracked musicians so great) that D&P ramrod Dave Alvin is thinking about making this roots-rock extravaganza a yearly thang. The bad news is over five-and-a-half thousand of promised gate money is still outstanding and the worse news is that Duane Jarvis, guitarist extraordinaire and one of the four objects of D&P’s charitable intentions, is in hospital in the U.K. recovering from surgery. Jarvis has been on tour with Michelle Shocked and his friends ask you to remember him in whatever prayers you make.

- Ron Garmon / City Beat

Published: 11/19/2008

Blast from a Blaster

www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/blast_from_the_blaster/7751/

“I’m sympathetic, but you don’t stiff people with cancer”: I can think of a metric fuckton of better things to jawbone with Dave Alvin of The Blasters about than the financial peccadilloes of club owners, but Sam Lanni still owes the Dog & Pony Show benefit Dave hosted the $7,000 he collected from the gate. In the months since the Labor Day roots-music marathon, the owner of the now-closed Safari Sam’s has yielded up little but excuses for the missing money, intended to defray medical costs for four L.A. musicians, all longtime friends of the master Blaster.

Dave never played Lanni’s celebrated Huntington Beach venue back in the 1980s, but, like the rest of us, watched the new club going up near Kingsley and Sunset with curiosity. “I met Sam when they were building the club,” Dave drawled. “I went by just to look at it when it was being built. I met him the night we played and he seemed like a good guy; passionate, you know, about music and all that, and I’ve always held to the theory that to have a great club and a music scene, you have to have visionaries. Not just musicians, but owners of nightclubs. Ed Pearl, who owned and ran The Ash Grove for about 30 years, was one. Doug Weston at The Troubadour, Brendan Mullen and The Masque, even Elmer Valentine and The Whisky, so you need people like that, who’ll do anything to make that happen. Maybe sometimes it’s a little wacky with some of these guys, but you need that. Sam seemed like one of those guys to me.”

“I believe I played there the first time, in 2006, when it reopened. I don’t remember if it was the first night, but it was the first weekend. I did a New Year’s show with the Knitters and played there a couple of more times since. Then I put on the three-day benefit on Labor Day. Basically,” at this point Dave sounds as if he’s about to undergo a root canal, “I put it together with my manager Nancy Sefton, and the idea was to raise money for some friends of ours who’ve been battling cancer and don’t have health insurance. My best friend was a guy named Chris Gaffney and Chris unfortunately died from it. I have three other friends, Candye Kane, the blues singer, Duane Jarvis, a great guitar player who’s played with everybody from John Prine to Lucinda Williams, and Drak Conley, guitar-player and bon vivant. It was overwhelming! Nancy and Drak came up with the idea of an Internet site for music and people like this. Chris had fans from all over the world and that was kind of a way of raising the heart money. The benefit was not only to raise money to help somebody, but kind of also a group hug. So, Sam offered the place for free. Some places charge operating costs for benefits, whatever they say that is, but Sam was pretty cool about the door, thinking he’ll make money off the bar. I got a bunch of everybody’s friends to agree to play. It was successful and I was proud and kinda happy about it, but then there came a little problem.”

The problem was Sam’s non-payment of almost $7,000 worth of credit card sales to the objects of the benefit, three of whom still live while the fourth’s family is still paying medical bills. How the flamboyant entrepreneur got into this scrape is the subject of some lurid Clubland gossip these days, but Dave’s not particularly interested in Lanni’s troubles with his nut. “I’ve been hearing all sorts of rumors about this and some of them are pretty good,” Dave philosophized. “Every musician has been stiffed at a gig. Chris Gaffney would find it ironic he got stiffed on his last gig. It’s another thing to stiff people who are dealing with cancer. It was a frigging benefit to help these people … .” At this point, Dave’s pleasant movie-cowboy voice simply gave out and it was a long minute before he resumed. “Well, that’s a different kind of getting stiffed. He owes us $6,680. I know it’s not a million bucks or anything, and we got the bulk of the money, but this sum is off the credit card sales. If suddenly tomorrow we had the money, I’d be fine. Everybody goes through hard times and it’s hard to be a club owner, particularly in Los Angeles. The city doesn’t really want music clubs. I’m sympathetic, but you don’t stiff people with cancer. I can’t go to bat for everyone he’s stiffed, but that would make him fine with me. Sell a car or something. You owe us.”

Transitions: Like the rest of this ever-reeling world, Clubland can’t be still. While Safari Sam’s is running out the last of its string downtown, with shows slated at The Regent through January, another fixture is retiring as well. For a decade, KCRW’s music director and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic has been Nic Harcourt; he steps down as both effective Nov. 30, though he’ll continue on as deejay on the popular 6-9 p.m. Sunday slot. Finally, ex-Mother of Invention (and “Indian of the group”) Jimmy Carl Black died on Nov. 8 in Germany, where he could earn an actual living playing music, something he hadn’t been able to do in L.A. since the Clubland 1960s. He was 70.

–Ron Garmon / City Beat

Published: 11/13/2008

CITY BEAT FOLLOWS THE STORY OF SAFARI SAM'S - Padlock Blues

Padlock Blues

www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/padlock_blues/7677/

By Ron Garmon

The Fast Finish of Safari Sam’s: I was packing for another long weekend of desert debauch when the rumors began to swirl in earnest about the demise of Safari Sam’s. The Sunset Boulevard venue, named after owner Sam Lanni’s fabled, equally short-lived Huntington Beach establishment that flourished for a couple of well-remembered years back in the mid-1980s, was a noble attempt to bridge the narrow chasm between the Hollywood and Silver Lake scenes. The new Sam’s opened in mid-2006 to as close to sentimental goodwill as Hollywood gets, with crowds of scenesters overflowing into the street every night for months. The Hollywood old mob and rockers-for-life, in particular, took to the place, and pals from the Dragonfly and Garage days hailed me every time I walked past the open doors. The venue didn’t survive the hoopla’s subsiding and eventually emptied out, with sharp-eyed observers of the venue’s MySpace page reportedly getting an early view of the club’s impending fate in a recent blurb – “If your band draws less than 20 people during the week or less than 30 people on weekends here at Safari Sam’s then we will not ask you to play here again.”

Well, the per-ton price of snot in Hollywood is low enough for this to pass without (much) notice. Still, losing friends and alienating people is a bad way to operate even here and the stories flying around Clubland indicate Lanni was doing landoffice business of late at pissing people off. Rumors abound as to where all the money went, but partner Chad Forrello isn’t talking about it. “It’s difficult for me to go through the emotions on this,” he told me on Monday, his voice sounding hollow and blasted over the phone. “I stopped working there day-to-day last February and our relationship deteriorated. I’m still an investor. It was absolutely shocking and heartbreaking to hear of the Sunset closing, but the calendar has been transferred to the Regent.” What of reports in Kevin Bronson’s blog of Lanni’s “mounting debts”? “That might be a part of it but considering he’s still holding onto a large sum of my money, I can’t really say anything negative.”

Sound policy, no doubt, and Chad points to one plausible reason for Lanni’s straits – “It took us two years for the club to open and I think that’s where the trouble started,” he remembers. “That was a lot of money. I don’t think anyone was able to recover from that. It was really hard dealing with the city. To have us work as hard as we did and have the place close was really a heartbreaker. They let us in there last Friday to pick up our stuff and I just broke down, melted completely.”

Nancy Sefton is manager for Dave Alvin and one of the ramrods behind the Dog & Pony Festival benefit for music industry cancer patients thrown at Sam’s this past Labor Day. “Sam’s been important enough in our community over the years and I understand he’s having financial issues,” Nancy allowed tolerantly, “but we put on this three-day event and we haven’t been paid for all the advance ticket sales yet, so I didn’t get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I got the e-mail Sam’s was to be shut down. We’ve got four cancer victims who are counting on this money.”

“Chris Gaffney passed before the event took place, and the funds for him are for his family’s bill,” she continued, her voice sad and tired. “The three other victims have all had their surgeries and are all on a better side of it right now. We had everyone from Indie 103 to yourselves at CityBeat to Gibson Guitars and Amoeba Music helping out, plus tons of artists from the community with the art auction. Sam came forward, offered his club all three days and was gonna give us 100 percent of the door. He did finally sent a check, which I’m holding because the bank says there’s not enough funds there. He told me he’s been having a lot of problems and he’s been really up front and honest with me, or at least I think he’s been honest. The last thing he did was send us a check, which we got on October 7. It was post-dated October 10, I soon found out there wasn’t enough money in the bank, and a few hours later the club closed. There are people I’m accountable to on this and I’ve been holding off on making an announcement on how much we’ve raised. With his check, we’ve raised over $30,000. Without it, he owes us almost $7,000. This is a fine total for a benefit, but a drop in the bucket for four sets of medical bills.”

“He just has to find a way to make good on this,” Nancy finished, after paying due tribute to an optimistic nature. “Everything will be fine with us and we’ll honor him if he just pays us that money.”

To be continued ...



Published: 10/22/2008