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