After a Decade, Record Deal Nudges Venice Beyond the Clubs

For a decade, Venice labored as just another Los Angeles rock ‘n’ roll group with a good following but no opportunity to move beyond the local club scene.

Now they have a chance to take their music to the next level.

Last week, Venice entered the studio to record its first album for Modern/Atlantic Records. The band, a socially conscious group heavily influenced by the R&B; sound of the early 1970s, should spend about two months recording 12 songs.

Modern, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, is expected to spend $190,000 on the album due out in late autumn. A video is likely, too, according to band members.

Although the three-record deal represents an important career leap, lead singer-songwriter Kipp Lennon isn’t celebrating prematurely.

“We can’t have a big party,” Lennon said. “Now we have to make a great album, and then we have to make a great video, and then hope you are not a one-hit video.”

For the last two years, the band has sold out concerts at venues such as At My Place (213 seats), the Music Machine (425) and the Roxy (450). Two weeks ago, several hundred people attended a show at the Music Machine, which featured new material along with crowd-pleasing favorites such as “Ball and Chain,” a song about racism, and “Pushed Her Too Far,” which is about relationships.

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Lennon, who writes many of the songs, said the band received other offers for record deals but signed with Modern because “they liked us for all the right reasons. They weren’t going to take us and try to turn us into some other band that we’re not.”

He said there was no dramatic event that finally moved the band from a promising club group to the studio. “We just played as often as possible, and enough people saw us.”

Philip Littell has attracted a good following of his own. Since early June, Littell, along with his band, What is Said, has performed each Thursday night at Cafe Largo in the Fairfax District. The end of his special engagement will be July 27.

Littell, who presents a mixture of offbeat poetry, jazz and African rhythms into what he calls “cabarock,” pokes fun at himself and life around him. His show fits the cabaret atmosphere at the cafe, operated by Jean-Pierre Boccara, who still runs Lhasaland in Hollywood.

“In a world of copycats and clones, Littell stands out,” said Richard Bruland, owner of Bebop Records and Fine Art in Reseda. “It’s not rock ‘n’ roll; it’s an artist who makes you walk away feeling he revealed something very personal.”

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Littell has appeared in plays at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, LaMama Hollywood, Powerhouse Theater and Court Theater, and has done performance art pieces in smaller venues. These days, he is busy writing a musical.

Veteran singer John Raitt will be the special guest soloist with the Santa Monica College Band, Orchestra and Choir when they perform “An Evening of Pops” at 8 p.m. July 29.

The free concert, to be held in the Santa Monica College Amphitheater, is the third in the school’s outdoor series, “Grand Summer Nights.”

Raitt, father of singer Bonnie Raitt, has performed in such shows as “Oklahoma,” “Carousel” and “Annie Get Your Gun,” and appeared in MGM productions of “Flight Command” and “Ziegfeld Girl.”

At present he is touring the country with “South Pacific.”