Dirty Glitter 2013 In Review #4: Sunset Strip Music Festival Edition

Saturday, August 3rd in West Hollywood, CA was the Sunset Strip Music Festival. Born in 2008, it takes place on and along the notorious Sunset Boulevard as well as inside it's world famous venues the Viper Room, the Roxy and the Whiskey where, once upon a time, the Doors were actually the house band. The fest is all about honoring and promoting the live music scene that the Sunset Strip was built on and every year's festival has a special honoree who has been an influence on The Strip: past honorees have been Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue, Slash and last year, the Doors. This year the Strip recognized that girls rock, too: 2013's honoree was none other than the one and only Joan Jett. Why? Because just like us, the Sunset Strip loves rock & roll.

Dirty Glitter 8/1/13: Sunset Strip Music Festival Edition

Andy Clockwise- "Everybody's In A Band"
He's charming, roguish, audacious, a bit of a wild man on stage...he's Andy Clockwise. An Aussie who came to Los Angeles for a visit and, in discovering that he felt quite at home among the madness, never left. "Schizo pop" is Clockwise's trade but what it sounds like is a swaggering maestro of wit and awesome. On Saturday at the Sunset Strip Music Fest Clockwise played the Viper Room stage where he did, indeed, pull out this song: from his 2011 release The Socialite (which was an examination of the cult of celebrity through humorous and partially vodka-iced eyes) it's appropriately titled, "Everybody's In a Band."


Sabrosa Purr- "The Lovely People"
Sabrosa Purr is an LA four-piece that sometimes defies description but often gets compared to notable bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Jane's Addiction. I simply call them "a collision of stoner fuzz and metal punched up by guitar rock, glam and as ethereal and enigmatic as any drug induced head trip". They've two EPs and one full album and listening to them takes the mind on multiple trips as Will Love’s vocals bend from pliant, boy/man coos to eye-watering, nu-metal howls that would earn Kurt Cobain’s seal of approval...and those will be happening in this song. During SSMF they occupied Viper Room stage. Sabrosa Purr is guitar driven, ethereal, haunting, bombastic, occasionally quiet and with a female rhythm section, it officially makes them one of the sexiest bands, period.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club- "Rival"
The Sunset Strip isn't the typical stomping grounds for garage rockers Black Rebel Motorcycle Club but Los Angeles is their home, LA loves them and BRMC are always ones to rock for a good cause. The good cause in question was the non-profit Music For Relief (which was founded by headliners Linkin Park). A portion of SSMF ticket sales went to MFR which is all about musicians supporting disaster relief efforts. So on Saturday BRMC did their awesome thing at the festival on the main stage and it was loud and from the heart, which there's a lot of tucked inside the leather jackets of Peter Hayes, Leah Shapiro and Robert Been. This track is from their latest release, Specter At The Feast, and it's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at what I described as possibly their 'hi-octane grungiest'. It also contains my favorite drum performance from Leah Shapiro since she joined the band in 2008.

Signed, 

Diary of a Concert Whore  aka @dharma69

Sunset Strip Music Fest 2011 Artist Profile: Jordan Cook

Jordan Cook...

...is a guy who stunned the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland during a jam session with BB King and Van Morrison. He was 15.

...at the age of 17, stepped in for an AWOL Aretha Franklin at a House of Blues show in Florida and performed an entire set with her band. It went very well.

...blew the mind of Nic Adler, owner of The Roxy Theater, so hard at SXSW 2011 that Nic made it his business to see Jordan on the 2011 Sunset Strip Music Festival lineup. No more fitting a showcase for such a pure force of talent.

To see Jordan Cook in the live is to feel as if you’re watching flesh become legend or something equally impressive and it’s not just because he’s blessed with archetypical rock star good looks (yes, he could easily pass for a Chris Cornell sibling). Touring on the release of his album Seven Deadly Sins, he had a February residency in LA at The Viper Room and on this particular night the joint wasn’t full, but that was fine: Cook played as if his soul were at stake in that Robert Johnson-way for a crowd that alternated between open-mouthed awe and straight up rocking the fuck out. His guitar talent and Hendrix-tendencies qualify as virtuosic and aren't something that he “does” so much as something that he “unleashes”.

He’s Canadian, but we won’t hold that against him (yes, how“South Park” of me) because he caters to a music lover’s most primal senses. Cook’s oeuvre is the school of rock with the sludge of backwater blues and grit in its veins and, if you’re not careful, can awaken some of your more carnal tendencies in a public arena. Women will dance, undulating to the potential of six-string sin (see the title of his album for further) and dudes will feel like air-guitar gods about to get laid. In “Black Eyes” Cook’s fierce and abrasive howl frames lyrics like, “And when she came, she said her name” and “Such a sick game; I feel no shame” so you know that rock and roll’s fundamental undercurrent of sex is present and pure and electric. Stylistically, he’s infected with the ability to make that guitar of his seem like a sixth appendage (think about it) without which he’d be incomplete, but then he closes the album Seven Deadly Sins with a piano-laced track like “The War” and he captures more than the ability to blow raging hot but also to soothe slow-dancingly, achingly cool.

A visual aid of badass proportions:

Calling Cook a stunning live performer is like calling "The Godfather" a good movie; with intense and uninhibited swagger, the man turns a stage into his playground and that may stem from the fact that he’s been playing since he was two.

Star in the making? If I had any real faith in this thing that we call the “music industry” I would resoundingly say, “Hell’s fucking yeah!”…but I don’t. Incomparable talent, which rivals that of the renowned musicians that he draws inspiration and praise from, is not the harbinger that it used to be. Still, your next order of business is to catch Jordan Cook when he takes ownership of The Roxy Theater stage on Saturday, August 20th for the Sunset Strip Music Festival.