recent_press2

Check out Arcadia Blues Club tonight to catch what promises to be one hell of a hootin' hollerin' foot-stomper of a show, when Rick Shea and the Losin' End are joined by rootsy diva Rosie Flores.

Shea and company have become a regular fixture at Arcadia 's premier music venue. A subtle and sweet balladeer on one hand and ass-kicking Tele-slinger on the other, Shea shifts gears as smoothly as a trucker climbing Kellog Hill. As he points out in his bio “For me the story come first, the musical setting follows and an acoustic guitar seems like a good place to start, but sometimes you need to plug in the Telecaster and put a little grit on things.”

He's good at grit. His music was born out of his upbringing in the old honky-tonk haven of San Bernardino where he busted his chops playing folkie coffeehouses and country bars. He's blended the sound of country classics like Merle Haggard and the Carter Family with roots rock and Southwestern influences for a good-timin' sonic stew.

San Antonio-born, Southern California-raised singing guitarist Rosie Flores is known as the “rockabilly filly,” but that's not all that she brings to the party. She, like Shea, blends honky-tonk with a dash of jazz and a spoonful of her Tex-Mex heritage. According to her bio, “If Patsy Cline and Brian Setzer had a child who grew up litening to Ernest Tubb, Elvis, Billie Holiday and Keith Richards, perhaps they'd sound like me.” You get the idea.

Music starts at 8pm tonight at Arcadia Blues Club, 16 E. Huntington Drive , Arcadia . Call (626) 447-9349.

Rick Shea swings at ABC April 20, 2006

The Arcadia Blues Club is fast becoming the top venue for blues in the San Gabriel Valley . Owner Bob Dahms is a professional musician and brings an eye for talent and a love of the blues to a neighborhood that's emerging from an entertainment drought after years of neglect. Dahms only brings in top, professional talent to ABC and its sister club, Yesteryears in Pomona .

Friday night brings country roots favorite Rick Shea's Country Swing to the stage. Shea hails from the gritty end of Route 66 in San Bernardino . The place used to be known for its sprawling honky-tonk scene, and he soaked up the local ambiance and took it to heart.

Shea started out playing folk on the coffeehouse circuit before gravitating to the country scene as a sideman. This on-the-job education translated into a solo career that's produced five albums and countless gigs at venues and festivals all over the country.

He's received rave reviews for his songwriting and playing and is hailed as a honky-tonk storyteller.

But this is honky-tonk with attitude. In Shea's own words from his bio, “For me, the story comes first, the musical setting follows, and an acoustic guitar seems like a good place to start, but sometimes you do need to plug in the Telecaster and put a little grit on things. I've always liked the analogy that your songs are kind of like your children, and, for me, I guess that means a few of mine may need to go to reform school.”

Music starts at 9 p.m. $10 cover. Arcadia Blues Club, 16 E. Huntington Drive , Arcadia . Call (626) 447-9349 .

Fontana honky-tonk Loretta's Inn, circa 1979. Long, low, dimly lit, filled with smoke so thick that the air itself would increasingly assume a congealed, opalescent atmosphere—a world completely different from any we know today.

Slicing through the murk enveloping the dance floor, a battered, boozy constituency—the hardscrabble, blue collar Saturday night pleasure seekers, gliding unsteadily across the crowded dance floor, seeming more like shadows than citizens, a mixture of husbands and wives, lone wolf truckers, down-on-their-luck pickers, all wordlessly reveling in the long-established country music ritual, an almost ceremonial occasion where the single most important element—more so even than the steady flow of draft beer and 90-proof shooters—was the music being performed on the bandstand.

The seven-nights-a-week five-piece band ruled this particular roost, and, more often than not, one of the players was San Bernardino-based singer-guitarist Rick Shea, at the time a baby-faced aspirant barely out of his teens.

“Sure, there were fights, but none of those places were as rough as you might think,” Shea recalls. “They were an older crowd, and they'd been goin' to these places since the days when Wynn Stewart started working them. Basically, it was just hardcore working-class, a bunch of truck drivers and whores, there to do what they were doin,' and they all seemed to like us a lot. I'd work at Clyde's, The Brandin' Iron, Loretta's, the Fontana Inn--most of those places are gone now, but back then, you'd play seven nights a week, make about $60 a night, which was not bad money. The truck stops were different in that you'd play more slow songs than I ever thought possible. Every other song was a slow one, because these guys were there to dance—and none of ‘em were good dancers. They were there to hang out with these girls—well, a little more than hang out.”

The experience was punishing, yet rewarding in a variety of ways, providing a trove of musical knowledge, a sense of discipline so acute that its demands rose more to the level of duty then a mere sit-down guitar gig, and, significantly, the ability to gauge what would carry the most appeal in any given situation.

All of this has subsequently been translated into Shea's own contemporary style, an approach that's strikingly original, even as it acknowledges and upholds the traditions he learned, quick and dirty, first hand. As showcased on his current Bound For Trouble CD, Shea's songs are loaded with sharply-etched, high-resolution imagery, fraught with atmosphere and color, and wrought with a painstaking craftsmanship. Where many of his peers concentrate on swagger, audacity and grandstanding to draw listeners in, Shea's strikingly modest, reserved presence and understated delivery create the perfect mixture to present his lyrically intense originals.

Bound For Trouble isn't just about cheatin' hearts and two-step kick-starts; the album pulses with hard-edged muscle, with big guitars capable of delivering menacing riffs that uncoil like some great glistening serpent, verging into territory characterized by near apocalyptic ferocity (the demented, rocked-up blues of “Piedmont Ridge”), shifting into an achingly delicate filigree of notes to frame the cutting, stark, folk-tale-telling of “Texas Lawyer,” and all of them are served up on a sprawling scale that lends his songs the same quietly imposing grandeur as the rugged mountain ranges that hemmed the San Bernardino club circuit he followed in his youth.

The hard-earned Shea blend of arid immediacy and pluming steam-vapor emotion rates as one the most engrossing, nuanced evolutionary developments California country-rock has seen in a generation, and it's been produced through a dogged, soul-deep perseverance that reflects the singer's particular artistic heritage.

“Workin' the regular country bars meant learning a lot of songs first-hand, either onstage or from the jukebox. You'd just get a quick heads-up like, ‘key of G, train beat' or ‘D dog, shuffle.' If there were any parts like the intro guitar on ‘Ramblin Fever,' you were expected to know it, either from the jukebox or just from hearing someone else play it. It was a good education. With no rehearsal, you could play five nights a week with a different band every night—just jump in and start playin' the tunes.”

Unloading gear from his ragged old truck, Shea speaks with a quiet deliberation. He's preparing to set up for a regular every-Thursday-night job at the Arcadia Blues Club, perhaps a somewhat anomalous-sounding booking, but one that Shea has parlayed into a strong weekly attraction. At the ABC, he surrounds himself with an ever-shifting array of accompanists, drawn from a pool of like-minded talents mining the same vein of vernacular American expression. Tonight, it's down to the bare-bones core of Shea's Losin' End band, with only longtime cohorts Dave Drury on drums and bassist Dave Hall, yet the three of them conjure a sound with depth enough to transform each song into a wholly realized presentation.

The key, of course, is Shea's lyrics, which are uniformly evocative and arresting. With a strong catalog of material to draw from, from his impressive debut The Buffalo Show , and two fine, collaborative sets, Trouble and Me (with fiddler-mandolinist Brantley Kearns) and 2003's Our Shangri-La (an album of powerhouse duets with Long Beach hard country empress Patty Booker), Shea covers a great deal of experience and emotion. His originals, whether addressing romantic fealty or abject misery, play out on an almost cinematic scale, and Shea's deceptively neutral (in the best Ricky Nelson sense) onstage demeanor conveys an unassuming, thoroughly likeable persona even as its slightly withdrawn quality keeps the focus squarely on the songs themselves. For Shea, that's exactly where it's at, a course he's faithfully followed most of his life.

His childhood was that of an itinerant military brat, his Air Force officer father leading the clan from state to state until they finally settled in 1970s San Bernardino.

“I was 12 years old when I got here,” Shea says. “We came out from Maryland, and I was keen on the Beach Boys, and that was my image of California—the sunny beaches. Seeing it all so brown, with the mountains, and the Mexican girls at school with their hair piled high, and the guys looking so tough—it was a lot different than what I expected.

“I started playing guitar a little bit, had garage bands all through high school. After I graduated, I began hanging around at the Penny University—the acoustic bluegrass and folk room in San Bernardino—and Jim Ringer and Mary McCaslin were the big stars there. I started doing the open mic night, and playing the occasional weekend show. My tastes at the time were more toward Neil Young and the Grateful Dead, but I'd started listening to country radio in high school, and also got it indirectly through the Dead playing Merle Haggard songs. After a short while, I fell into it, playing on weekends in Crestline bars—I lived in a funky cabin up in those mountains for years—then I started playing the country bars in San Bernardino, Riverside and Rialto, and I started seeing it all in the right light. The guys I played with were solid country musicians. It's a certain perspective they have, one that you can't help but recognize, and that's the best way to know these songs.”

One of the most remarkable aspects of Shea's career is the fact that he's not only survived, but managed to earn a living and raise a family with neither a day job nor the traditional country artists' other economic booster—the annual European tour. Country is about as far from being a viable meal ticket as one can get in the business, and for a frontline honky-tonk man like Shea, survival translates into ceaseless toil at an often marginal pay scale. Not that he's without cachet; Shea toured for years as a sideman with Americana flag-bearer Dave Alvin, a job that's taken him to the stage of Madison Square Garden (where Alvin opened for Bob Dylan).

“Doing the thing with Dave Alvin, and all that touring, was really worthwhile.” Shea says. “Dave was very generous—I'd open all the shows, and even when I wasn't doing that, he'd always introduce and let me do a couple of songs, so the extra exposure was great.”

Shea wasn't about to squander that, and the man is nothing if not determined: Bound For Trouble , a radical creative departure from his earlier, mostly acoustic straight-ahead country, was originally released as 2000's Sawbones , but the album seemed to have been ahead of its time.

“Of course, it's all operating at a grass roots level, and the albums I did with Brantley and Patty had done pretty well,” he says. “People would ask me what else I had out and I found that not many were at all familiar with Sawbones , so this was a chance to get it out again. I think its getting attention that it missed the first time around.”

If Sawbones went frustratingly under noticed, this incarnation—remixed, remastered, and with three new tracks—carries undeniable weight, with all the impact of a painstakingly perfected work that employs Shea's offbeat aesthetic: stoic deadpan entwined with incendiary passion, compelling these fundamental opposites into a point of convergence. Not an easy task, but one that imbues his music with a strikingly effective combination of elements.

“It's only three minutes, you've got to fill and every word, every syllable counts,” he explains. “I pay attention to the sounds of the words and try to use imagery a lot, so the images will stay with me when I'm performing—border towns and back alleys, forsaken lonely roads, love crushed under religious oppression and an earthquake-destroyed mission all come floating back. I'll ask myself, ‘What would Buck Owens say here?' or ‘How would Harlan Howard or Merle Haggard put this?' And I just hope to get somewhere close.”

Shea not only represents the fabulous, wide-open California country tradition, his respect for—and mastery of—the sound has allowed him to push farther, ride harder and reach higher—with Bound For Trouble , Shea's taken the music to a wilder, freer, more radiant plateau.

His stage show covers such diverse ground—from the rich atmosphere and emotion of his “Black Eyed Girl” to the gospel soul-stirring of “Walkin' to Jerusalem”—that it's practically dizzying, and Shea performs with all the flexibility, force and quiet determination that has carried him through to another pivotal point: one where the next move has to take him to an even greater, more ambitious level.

At the end of the night, with all the glasses drained and the dance floor more than adequately punished, Shea is as eager and pragmatic as ever. “I constantly work at songwriting, but it's still difficult to find the time. I've always got four, five, half a dozen songs I'm working on. It was nice to get Bound For Trouble done, but it's time for a whole new set.”

The constant self-imposed demands Shea makes of himself are also met with his own characteristically relaxed attitude.

“I try not to take myself or the whole thing too seriously, although I am very serious about it.” he says. “You can't parade it around or act like it's too important, but this is what I do—it's what I am.”

Rick Shea appears at the Arcadia Blues Club, 16 E. Huntington Dr., Arcadia, (626) 447-9349; www.2ndstreetlive.com, every Thursday. For more info, www.rickshea.net .

Tribute: The band I see Hawks in L.A.-Rob Waller, left, Paul Lacques, Paul Marshall, Shawn Norse

along with Rick Shea-perform at a memorial for Acoustic Music Series founder Ron Stockfleth

Bittersweet coda to folk showcase

Musicians honor the concert series' founder, whose death leaves the future of the annual program uncertain .

Dave Alvin's annual January concert has become the keynote event of the Acoustic Music Series in Pasadena. But early during his 10th edition Saturday at the Neighborhood Church, the contemporary-folk stalwart voiced the concern that was on the minds of many regulars at the series, which began in 1992 and quickly became a small jewel on the local music landscape.

"This might be the last one," Alvin told the capacity crowd of about 300, and he characterized the evening as "bittersweet." The reason for the uncertainty was the death in November of series founder Ron Stockfleth, a crusty contractor, artisan and music fan who started putting on shows in the Pasadena area despite a complete lack of experience in the field. His death of kidney cancer at age 55 has imperiled something that's grown into more than just a place to hear music.

"This was a nice community gathering spot, and for this type of music, community is the word," Alvin said in his dressing room before the show. "If it stops with Ron's passing, it's a real sad thing."

Roger Sherman, the series' sound engineer and a close associate of Stockfleth, said the future of the nonprofit enterprise is up in the air.

"It was pretty much Ron's ballgame in terms of promoting and stuff," Sherman said Saturday. "He never ran after the sponsors or benefactors. If we get some interest in that area, it would make things a lot more possible.... We'd love to have it happen. It would be a shame if it went away."

A lot of musicians would agree.

"The audience that's coming out to these shows is kind of who you want to play for," said Rick Shea, a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has played the series both as a solo act and as a member of Alvin's band.

"Their musical tastes have developed. They've kind of worked at it a little bit," Shea added Saturday, just after performing at an afternoon memorial service for Stockfleth at the Unitarian church. "It's the audience that knows how to find this music."

"It's a really special show," said Rob Waller, the singer in the band I See Hawks in L.A., which also played at the memorial. "Doing this kind of music and being able to get in front of a roomful of a couple hundred people in a really nice space and having everyone listen, that's a really special thing."

That audience has been drawn by such artists as Alison Krauss, Mark O'Connor, Susana Baca, Holly Near, Iris DeMent and countless others — virtually every major figure working the U.S. folk circuit. The series' primary venue has been the Neighborhood Church, a spacious, comfortable room with an intimate feel and fine sound.

At the afternoon memorial, friends and associates of Stockfleth expressed their affection for the Pasadena native, but they made no effort to sugarcoat a man who was described variously as "difficult," "a curmudgeon," "sarcastic" and "solitary."

Those aren't qualities you tend to associate with a successful concert promoter, but over the years, the Los Angeles area has had no shortage of eccentric characters at the helms of its folk-music institutions. In the early '60s, the flamboyant Doug Weston built the Troubadour in West Hollywood into a premiere showcase, while a couple of miles away, the headstrong Ed Pearl made the Ash Grove a bastion of a more rootsy form of folk.

So it was fitting that one of the songs Alvin dedicated to Stockfleth during his show was "Ashgrove," a salute to the Melrose Avenue club and the way of life it opened up for the blues-struck kid from Downey.

"You have to have somebody with a vision, and Ron was kind of like Brendan Mullen or Ed Pearl," Alvin said before the show, citing the founder of the Hollywood punk club the Masque and the Ash Grove owner, respectively. "Like most visionaries ... they're all idiosyncratic, and they've all got their edges. ... But he was a guy who did it for love, and we don't have enough of that in this town."

Whether it was a swan song or not, Alvin's show embodied the appeal of the Acoustic Music Series. The concert always gives him a rare and welcome chance to play with steel, slide and conventional guitarist Greg Leisz, and on Saturday they were joined by singer-guitarist-accordionist Chris Gaffney and singer-violinist Amy Farris.

Alvin, who established himself as a top-rank songwriter and intense musician during his days with the Los Angeles bands the Blasters and X, went from deep-voiced blues to sultry stomps to evocative storytelling, with the audience hanging on every word and pristinely clear musical accent.

Although it was "Ashgrove" and "Somewhere in Time," another song from his latest album, that Alvin dedicated to Stockfleth's memory, it was another selection that might have made the most poetic connection with the reticent, recalcitrant loner who provided a stage for so many musical poets.

Alvin's "Everett Ruess" tells the true story of a young Los Angeles artist who also had a penchant for retreating to the Sierra Nevada and who in the 1930s disappeared without a trace in the Western wilderness. The final verse:

You give your dreams away as you get older

Oh, but I never gave up mine

And they'll never find my body, boys

Or understand my mind.

Rick Shea's new album Bound For Trouble

Rick Shea took time out from his busy schedule to give American Music a report on what he has been up to since leaving The Guilty Men, and his new CD on Tres Pescadores records:

I started thinking about remixing and re-releasing "Sawbones" in oct 04, David Orser was getting ready to scale back his operation at AIM records and I knew a lot of stuff would be going into storage so I talked to David and he very generously turned the master session files for " Sawbones" over to me to remix and remaster and Tim and Brian at Tres Pescadores agreed to put it out. "Sawbones" had done real well and gotten great reviews, locally and all over the country and in Europe, and when I was touring with Dave Alvin I was able to open a lot of the shows and get the word out pretty well. But when we were promoting "Our Shangri-La" , the album of duets I did with Patty Booker in 03 and "Trouble and Me", the collaboration I did with Brantley Kearns in 02, I talked to a lot of DJ and radio people who didn't know about "Sawbones ", this seemed like a good opportunity to get it out to some of them.

I didn't want to change the character of the album too much since it had been out awhile and a lot of people liked it, but I did want to change a few of the arrangements and make it a little less bright sounding overall. It took some time finding a compatable studio to work in, Brad Cobb finally turned up and became a huge asset in the remixing and remastering .

On most of the songs we didn't change much, we took some of the processing off of my vocal and that was it, but a few songs got a bit of reworking. On Magadalena we added John Zertzke playing Cherokee Flute; on Lonesome Cannonball we edited out some sections and made the song shorter, put in Chojo Jacques on fiddle and made Chojo and Dave Alvins instrumental breaks at the end stand out a little more. On Walkin' to Jerusalem we took out some instrumental fills and opened up the arrangement a bit; on Saginaw Michigan we put in Don Heffington playing Bongo's which we had left off on the original album and on Piedmont Ridge Jack Rudy came in and played harmonica. Wyman Reese added keyboards on the song Sawbones and on Cammellia and I added acoustic guitar on Black-Eyed Girl and that's about it for the original tracks. On the new tracks Texas Lawyer is from a live radio broadcast I did at KPIG in march of 05, Never been in Love is a Nick Lowe song we recorded for Walter Clevengers tribute to Nick Lowe, "Lowe Profile" that we recorded at Walters studio in Orange County along with the new title track "Bound for Trouble" (Christy McWilson recorded her duet vocal for Never Been in Love in Seattle). The re-release of "Sawbones" came out as "Bound for Trouble" Nov 8, 05 on Tres Pescadore Records.

I've been calling my band The Losin' End for a long time and decided to rename the album and include the band name because we were adding tracks and redoing the artwork and it just seemed like a different album in a lot of ways. We've been getting the album out to a lot of radio that didn't get it the first time around and its doing real well, it debuted at #8 on the Freeform Americana Roots Chart for Dec, its #8 again this month, it showed up as #5 on the EuroAmericana chart for Dec and its been showing up on a lot of other independent playlists.

I'll be at SXSW doing some shows and playing with James Intveld who I've been doing a lot with the last couple of years, James has me playin steel and/or guitar in his band and opening a lot of the shows, we did a short tour last summer of east coast and midwest dates. I'm doing a thursday night residency at The Arcadia Blues Club here close to home with The Losin' End, we'll start having some guests there soon, and I'm playing a few more out of town shows along with a lot of local shows. I was in Alberta Canada in Nov with Chojo Jacques playing some of the folk clubs in Calgary and Edmonton as headliner and I did a west coast tour earlier last year co/billed wit h my buddies I See Hawks in LA, so theres always a lot goin on, you can check my website.

Its also time to get started on a new album, I've got 3 or 4 new songs I'm real excited about and a lot of ideas I've built up over the last couple years. I'd like to do some more collaborating, I get to work with so many great people I'm always trying to think of ways to get them involved on my albums. I recorded a couple songs when I was in Hawaii last May with 11 Gallon Hat, some friends I've worked with a few times there who are wonderful musicians, we did a song of mine called The Day of my Return and one of theirs called Pass the Eggnog Please which they included on a Christmas album they put out last fall. Besides all that a big windstorm tore part of the roof off the back of the house the other night, that needs fixin, and my oldest son who's away at college says his car won't start, so it looks like I'll be stayin busy for awhile.