Social Distortion’s new album, “Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes,” officially surfaces Tuesday, and longtime followers of the veteran O.C. punk rock band probably have noticed the group’s profile surfacing in ways they might never had expected.

For one, there’s the massive billboard along the southbound Santa Ana Freeway in La Mirada, something that would have seemed impossible to imagine when the band was starting out three decades ago.  The group’s label, Epitaph Records, has erected another atop the Amoeba Music store in Hollywood, and a third across from the Hollywood Palladium noting the band’s three sold-out shows there Jan. 27-29.

A collaboration between the band’s website and Amazon.com has offered visitors the ability to stream the album for free, and for every 100,000 streams, Amazon.com drops its sale price on the album by $1. As of Tuesday afternoon, the album had been streamed more than 400,000 times, bringing Amazon’s price to $8.99 from the $12.99 starting point.

Last month the group made its first national TV appearance ever when it performed on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and on Tuesday night, Social D returns to the late-night TV talk show arena for a performance on “Conan.”

On a recent stop at a Barnes & Noble bookstore, I even found a pile of complimentary Social Distortion bookmarks. Does the flurry of promotional and marketing efforts take away some of the band’s long-cultivated mystique?

“We always wanted to remain a little bit underground and unattainable,” singer and chief songwriter Mike Ness told me recently. “But at some point, you realize that the mystery is solved now. We’re just an O.C. rock 'n’ roll band that’s trying to get more fans, basically.”

As for the decision to stop declining requests for TV appearances, Ness said, “we’ve been asked before, and it was always one of those things where some of us wanted to do it and some of us didn’t. … Honestly, I feel now that there are thousands of people out there who just don’t know they’re Social D fans yet.  Besides, TV is cool now. Once we did it [for Kimmel], it was like, ‘Why didn’t we do this a long time ago?’ ”

-- Randy Lewis

 
I caught up with surf guitar hero Dick Dale in Anaheim over the weekend at the 2011 NAMM show, that wondrously cacophonous gathering put on by the International Music Products Assn. that brings together seemingly anyone and everyone who makes, sells or plays equipment used in all aspects of music making.

Dale was just wrapping up an autograph session just outside the exhibition area for Fender Musical Instruments Group, the company whose guitars the elder Dale has been playing since he first started pounding out those watery, reverb-soaked riffs and solos back in the 1950s.

Dale went through extensive surgery last year to try to locate and repair an intestinal leak that caused a potentially life-threatening infection. But over the weekend he displayed his old energy and enthusiasm as he sat scribbling signatures for a line of convention-goers, accompanied by his guitar-playing son, Jimmy, with whom he now tours. In addition to Friday's autograph session, the Dales also gave a demonstration on Saturday of a new line of Fender acoustic guitars they helped design.

Dick told me that he’s not entirely out of the woods health-wise yet. Following a few more previously scheduled shows, including the NAMM appearances and public performances Feb. 4 at the Brixton Club in Redondo Beach and Feb. 5 at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, the 73-year-old Stratocaster shredder will go back to the hospital for a follow-up procedure he needs to address additional complications he’s had since a malignant tumor was taken out of his intestinal tract in 2008.

He’s let fans know about his condition, often sharing details with fans who also are cancer patients and who have created something of a survivor community around him.

“I stay positive,” Dale said. “I like to show people that it’s something you can live with.”

--Randy Lewis

Photo of Dick and Jimmy Dale at Fender guitar booth at the 2011 NAMM show in Anaheim. Credit: Fender Musical Instruments Corp.

Last year, I wrote a long profile on local singer-songwriter Ariana Delawari's hemisphere-spanning path to recording her solo debut alongside the L.A. indie demimonde and traditional musicians in her troubled ancestral home of Afghanistan. But outside of an unexpectedly noisy and raucous live set at the New Los Angeles Folk Festival and a video for her song "We Came Home," few shows and little new material surfaced in 2010.

Hopefully, this new remix of her track "Be Gone Taliban" from the percussion-mad producer Butchy Fuego indicates an even more interesting second wind this year. Fuego tears the droning original to ribbons and rebuilds it with cheap snare hits, jaundiced electro groans and vocal sampling that makes Delawari sound like she's reading a dream diary through a fuzzy wiretap. M.I.A. may be hawking her "ViCKi LEEKX" mixtape, but this is an on-the-record document of another politically volatile artist thriving in a radical update of her sound.

-- August Brown

Photo: Ariana Delawari. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

The L.A. band has had trouble getting local bookings in wake of a shooting outside a show at the Echo six months ago. The police say the band has no connection to the alleged gunman.

Maybe more than any other local band, the Warlocks will be glad to see 2010 gone.

On June 20, the psychedelic outfit played a show at the Echo as part of a night booked by the Eastside DJ crew, the Part Time Punks. Around 2 in the morning, as Warlocks frontman Bobby Hecksher was packing up his gear onstage, he heard gunshots outside.

“It wasn’t one bullet, it was a full-on onslaught,” he recalled, speaking six months later in a coffee shop near his apartment in Northeast Los Angeles. “I heard people screaming and yelling, and then everyone ran inside.”

A gunman had fired about eight rounds from a semiautomatic pistol into the small crowd leaving the Echo, injuring three people, and then quickly escaped.

“One guy came and sat down to the left of the stage,” Hecksher said. “He was holding his head in his hands. And there are people around him and he says, ‘A bullet just grazed my head.’ … He had a gash there. It looked like it had just nicked him.”

About a month later, the police arrested an alleged member of the Mongols biker gang, Jose Luis Sanchez, in connection with the shooting, which the police established as targeting a member of the rival Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang who had been inside the Sunset Boulevard rock club.

All three victims have recovered, including a man who sustained the most critical injury, a gunshot to the torso. However, Hecksher says his band’s reputation is still hurting, and he has been having a hard time getting L.A. bookings in the wake of the shootings.

According to LAPD Lt. Wes Buhrmester, a watch commander with the Rampart station, “the band's involvement, or lack of same, was investigated pursuant to the overall investigation of how this incident occurred, and no link to the suspect was found.” The case will be going to jury trial in early 2011.

Among the bits of advice that Don Van Vliet, in the guise of his musical alter ego, Captain Beefheart, listed in a 1996 musical primer called “Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing,” is this, number 1: “Listen to the birds. That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.”

Van Vliet, who died on Friday at 69, followed this advice throughout his career, making guitar-based music as part of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band from the mid-1960s through the early ‘80s that was primal, transcendental, animalistic and absolutely out-of-time. Intensely bound with the natural world, the singer, composer, horn and woodwind player, bandleader -- and, after his retirement from the music business, painter – lived his life as a provocateur who ventured to the sonic and structural edges of rock to expand the music’s possibilities.

As a result, though, on first listen the best of Van Vliet and band, even 40 years later, sounds wrong – but only in the way that, say, Marcel Duchamp’s cubist painting “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” looks wrong. Many of Van Vliet’s peers both in the L.A. scene and as part of the British Invasion were transfixed with black blues and R&B music, and harnessed that love to invent their version of rock & roll, and then steadfastly stayed within the imposed blues-based template for the rest of their creative lives. But once Van Vliet mastered the style – on the fiery first two singles, Bo Diddley’s “Diddy Wah Diddy” and an original called “Frying Pan” -- he and the band started dismantling it, examining its parts, and reconstructing it to create blues/rock/free jazz as seen through shattered monocle.

This deconstruction occurred over a three-year period between 1966 and 1969 in various apartments and houses in Hollywood, Laurel Canyon and Woodland Hills. Guitarist Ry Cooder, who played guitar and helped translate Van Vliet’s vision on Captain Beefheart’s first full-length album in 1967, “Safe As Milk,” described Beefheart’s music in a BBC documentary like this: “Somehow the concept seemed to be, you take the raw blues elements, like the John Lee Hooker idea, Howlin’ Wolf, down to its purest element, which is just sound -- a grunt maybe -- and something abstract. And then you take your John Coltrane, your crazy time signature, free jazz, Ornette Coleman thing. Sort of hybridize them together, and this is what you come up with.”

The result was confusing, oblong and, at times, sonicly painful. Pulitzer Prize winning music critic Tim Page once wrote that at the pinnacle of Captain Beefheart’s notoriety, “there was no faster way to clear out a party than to put on one of his records and turn it up.” Page compared first encounters with the music as “befriending a porcupine.”

Their atmospheric guitar rock has taken a while to catch on, but now at least one music publication has labeled them 'the new queens of the underground.'

After nearly six years on the local scene, Warpaint had little to its résumé: one EP, a rotating cast of drummers and a string of dead-end day jobs.

Stella Mozgawa, however, wanted in. A session drummer who had toured her native Australia with Devo, there was little doubt Mozgawa had the chops. Yet singer-guitarist Emily Kokal was skeptical, and there were five words she needed to hear first.

Mozgawa recalled how she leveled with Kokal, essentially asking the singer for the gig last fall at Silver Lake's Stella Café: "I said, 'I'm ready to be poor.'"

And thus, Mozgawa had said the magic phrase needed to gain entry into an atmospheric rock quartet whose future even an optimist would have likely deemed perilous.

"Here was Stella, who made money and made a living," Kokal said Tuesday at dinner with her bandmates at Hollywood's Sushi Ike. "We were really broke. I didn't want her to think that she could do this on the side. She had to commit. So when she said she was ready to be poor, we were cool."

If afforded time, the songs of Warpaint, which don't build so much as materialize, are full of lurking surprises. With intricate guitars that stress patience and ambience, perhaps it's no revelation that it's taken Warpaint, whose members range in age from the mid-20s to early 30s, nearly seven years to have anything resembling a career.

The band last year inked a worldwide deal with storied British independent Rough Trade, a label associated with dream-pop act the Raincoats and '80s alt-rock forebears the Smiths, among many others. Since aligning recently with the Beggars Group, a consortium of sorts of independent labels that includes Matador Records, 4AD and XL, Rough Trade has become increasingly active, and is doing so at a time when the Beggars Group has set its sights on Los Angeles.

"We were looking at a lot of artists to sign who are based in L.A., and we still are," said Miwa Okumura, an L.A. native who relocated here one year ago from Beggars' U.S. headquarters in New York City to open an Echo Park outpost. "There's a growing music community here. It's always existed, and I get that. But there's so much going on right now."

It’s hard to believe that with everything Social Distortion has been through during the veteran O.C. punk band’s 30-plus year career, a national TV appearance never happened before Monday night’s performance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Social D singer-songwriter-guitarist Mike Ness led his bandmates through “Machine Gun Blues” (above) from the forthcoming album “Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes” that’s slated for release Jan. 18, the band’s first new collection since 2004's "Sex, Love and Rock 'n' Roll."

I spoke with Ness over the summer on a day when he was working on that track, which is something of a history lesson akin to “1945,” Social D’s look at the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Ness recalls scribbling the words to "1945" out one day in school when he felt bored out of his mind in class.

The new song takes the perspective of an old-school gangster during the Depression and Prohibition.

“I wrote ‘Machine Gun Blues’ the same way I wrote ‘1945,’ ” he said during a break in sessions at the Burbank studio where he was mixing the album. “I obviously wasn’t there in 1934. It’s a gangster’s couple-day trip, and what his life might have been like.  Instead of glorifying it, he’s not digging what’s going on, even though he’s in a nice suit. He knows it’s short-lived, it’s going to be over soon and it’s going to be ugly.”

To those concerned over what will become of 1717 Silver Lake Blvd. in its new incarnation as the Satellite, booker Jennifer Tefft would like to reassure you that nothing drastic is in store.

“The Satellite will be the exact same club as it’s always been (as Club Spaceland), just with a new name,” she said. “It’s the same staff, the same vibe, and I’m back booking.”

The venue, which hosted promoter Mitchell Frank’s Club Spaceland for 16 years, has begun transitioning into its new incarnation under the helm of Tefft and the building’s longtime owner, Jeff Wolfram. While Frank continues his plans for a new dance-centric venue on the east-ish side of L.A., the Satellite should stay much as fans remember it from 1999 until 2009, when Tefft separated from Frank’s Spaceland Productions.

For those worried that the indie rock venue might make a drastic change in its bookings as the Satellite, Tefft has no plans to deviate from the genres she established there and during her most recent position booking for the Fold (one, she says, she parted with on "entirely amicable" terms).

“I like everything good,” she said. “My tastes are eclectic and far-reaching, and that’s how it was at Spaceland, that’s how it was at the Bootleg Theater, and that’s how it’s going to be here. I like indie and pop, but we’ll also book metal and rap if there’s a market for it. People still want to play that room, and my ability to book shows is the same there as it always was.”

In March, one of the most crucial clubs on the L.A. music scene for nearly two decades, especially for indie rock, will come to an end. But in a way, it won’t.

Club Spaceland, which promoter Mitchell Frank began as a weekly night in 1993 but which soon began monopolizing the bookings at 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., will officially cut ties with the venue next spring.  Frank plans to open a new venue that caters to electronica audiences. It will join a music, dining and nightlife stable at Spaceland Productions that also includes the Echo, the Echoplex, the Echo Park bar El Prado, the nouveau-Mexican restaurant Malo and the forthcoming Mas Malo downtown.

Meanwhile, at 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., owner Jeff Wolfram is making plans for a new club at the site, to be called the Satellite, including hiring Jennifer Tefft, Spaceland’s former music booker.

For those whose 20s and 30s were defined by watching or performing in local indie bands in the more-easterly climes of L.A., the change looks less drastic than one might expect. But the split still heralds the end of one particular moment in music in one of America’s most indie-centric neighborhoods, and may hint at what the next one entails.  We talked with Frank about what led to this split, what the new venue will offer and Spaceland’s legacy of moving weirdo music into the limelight and making mainstream rock a little stranger.

How long has this untethering between Spaceland Productions and the venue been planned?

It’s been on my mind for a while. I don’t own the venue, there were creative differences, and it was just time.  We were being told what to do, and I’m not one for being told what to book. I book what I like. It came to a head --  nothing major happened , but it just hit a boiling point. I couldn’t operate it as I wanted to.

In terms of the Spaceland Productions business model, how had that venue’s role changed for you over the last few years?

We had a wall between our venues. We’d make dueling offers and let the agents pick, and it just wasn’t as artist-friendly over there. It was growing difficult for us to do shows there.

You run the building that houses the Echo and the Echoplex. Did the fact that you didn’t run the venue that housed Spaceland affect this decision?

I cut a bad deal there when I was much more of a novice, and it never changed even after I made them millions of dollars. It’s going to be tough having to compete against it -– I’m now competing against my old talent buyer and against the club that I put on the map. I love Spaceland. I loved all the years I spent there. I just never had a good deal.

 
In the mood for some new music from Aimee Mann, Sia, Bon Iver and Of Montreal? Consider heading over to Spaceland in Silver Lake on Friday.

There’s one hitch: It won’t be Mann, Sia, Bon Iver and Of Montreal on stage singing that new material, but the Silver Lake Chorus, an ensemble of 22 area musicians who share a deep affinity for vocal harmonizing.

The fledgling choral group has won fans in the indie music world, thus the new songs written for the Chorus’ forthcoming debut album by those and other notable singers and songwriters. On the set list for Friday’s show, alongside covers of material by Radiohead, Muse, Phoenix and John Gold, are Mann’s “It’s So Easy to Die,” Sia’s “Salted Wound,” Bon Iver’s “From the Snow Tipped Hills” and Of Montreal’s “Slave Translator.”

The list of Chorus fans doesn’t stop there: Beck, the Bird and the Bee, Tegan and Sara and Jenny Lewis also are contributing original songs to the group’s album, which Ben Lee is producing, says chorus director Samantha Rader.

“Each artist submitted their song to us in demo format, then our genius arranger -- Heather Ogilvy, who is also a soprano in the chorus -- creates killer choral arrangements of these sick, never-before-heard indie tracks,” Rader says. Her arrangement of “It’s So Easy To Die,” for instance, “features all gorgeous male-female duets — six pairs of duets; 12 singers -- that showcase some of the incredible individual voices in the chorus.”

The Silver Lake Chorus, which formed earlier this year, is scheduled to hit the stage Friday at 8:30 p.m. for what will be only its third public performance.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of The Silver Lake Chorus. Credit: Levi Walker

 
The blue-and-silver curtain will drop for good on the Silver Lake indie rock institution Spaceland next  March.

The club, founded as a weekly night in 1993 by promoter Mitchell Frank, hosted some of the earliest L.A. performances by Beck, Foo Fighters, Arcade Fire, Elliott Smith and Weezer, among many others. It became synonymous with both a revitalized eastside rock scene in Los Angeles and the neighborhood's changing demographics, hosting thousands of shows and serving as an essential launch pad for local and international artists even as Frank expanded to newer venues, including the Echo (2001) and the Echoplex (2007). But as of March, the venue will operate under a new club name, the Satellite, and will sever affilation with Frank's and business partner Jeff Ellermeyer's Spaceland Productions for in-house booking.

"It just reached a point where it was time for us to move on," Frank said in a written statement. "We've had some incredible musical moments here; people met, fell in love, started life-long friendships, but it's just time for a change."

The release noted that the change could be toward a more electronica-centric direction at a new venue focused on dance nights, electro bands and DJs. Frank has long alluded to courting a new downtown venue managed by Spaceland Productions, which could fit the neighborhood's recent spate of major electronica events.

Spaceland's final shows will include a monthlong Melvins residency and the L.A. debuts of U.K. bands the Vaccines and Yuck.

[UPDATE: In a written statement, former longtime Spaceland Productions booker Jennifer Tefft confirmed that she will be leaving her current position as a talent buyer at The Fold to book shows at The Satellite, the new club located at the former home of Club Spaceland in Silver Lake.]

-- August Brown (Full disclosure: In my other life as a musician, I've played several of Spaceland Productions' clubs, including Spaceland)

Photo: Arcade Fire at Spaceland in 2004. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Don't hate local newcomers Grouplove because they met and formed while spending a summer on the Greek Isle of Crete. They think it sounds silly too.

"We hate our story," says keyboardist/painter Hannah Hooper. "It sounds like we’re all just like, 'Oh, let’s just lead our amazing lives and go to Greece for the summer!' It’s quite the opposite of that."

Two years ago Hooper was offered a first-year art residency in Greece for her work as a painter. With singer/guitarist Christian Zucconi in tow, the pair left New York for Europe, and met, randomly, their future bandmates: Drummer Ryan Rabin was in the midst of traveling abroad, bassist Andrew Wessen was in Crete to surf and Londonite/guitarist Sean Gadd was visiting a friend. 

"We were just at a point where we were fed up with the monotony of our lives," Hooper says. "Christian and I sold everything to get those plane tickets, and those were the equivalent of a month’s rent."

Going through Crete withdrawal, the newfound pals regrouped in Los Angeles, and their fiddling with instruments started to feel like more than a hobby. A friend of Rabin's signed on as manager, shows started being booked and it suddenly no longer made sense for the five piece to live in three different cities on two continents. 

But enough with the formalities.

If Los Angeles music fans are heretofore ignorant of Grouplove, they're about to get a crash course in Grouplove's anthemic indie-pop oddities, as the band has the opening slot on Florence + the Machine's three-night, sold-out stay this weekend at the Wiltern. The groups share a booking agency in CAA.

"That’s all our agent," Hooper says. "I wish that was more interesting. I want to say, ‘I met Florence in the street and she was amazing and we hit it off.’ But we’ll meet her on Friday."

Come January, Grouplove will lead a residency at the Bootleg Theater, and a full-length is due in 2011 via Warner-affiliated Canvasback. For now, here's what you need to know: