Great Blues Men Influenced This Blues Woman

Some people think rock ‘n’ roll is strictly a man’s game.

In their minds, rock performed by women is a completely different sport, like women’s basketball, more finessed, more lyrical, heavy on vocal harmonies, flute and piano. Female rock guitar players and drummers are especially suspect. The highest compliment a woman player can receive is “she’s not bad--for a girl.”

Blues guitarist-singer Kris Wiley, who’s playing at Smokin’ Johnnie’s on Saturday, isn’t buying into that stuff.

“A lot of people tell me, ‘You’re the first girl guitar player that can play like one of the boys,’ ” Wiley says. “It’s a lot of male ignorance. It used to irritate me, but now I just brush it off.”

Wiley, who grew up in the South Bay area, started playing guitar at 15.

“The day I bought my guitar, my friend told me to get a blues album; he didn’t tell me why,” she says. She bought a B.B. King album. And that, as they say, was that.

Although her initial interest was in jazz guitar, Wiley slowly realized that her real love was the blues.

“I love (jazz), but it doesn’t affect my soul like the blues does,” she says.

She studied music privately and in college, and she cites Albert King, Freddie King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert Collins as her major influences.

Wiley and her band have played regularly at B.B. King’s for well over a year, as well as at other clubs around the City of the Angels. She is currently working on her first, as-yet untitled, CD, which she expects to release sometime this summer. The record will feature original numbers by Wiley plus a few cover tunes, she says.

“I just love playing the blues,” Wiley says. “That’s what’s inside of me. I can listen to it all day long and never get tired of it.”

This is an especially good week at Studio City’s “Blues, Booze and Barbecues” center. In addition to Wiley, Allie & the Delta Disciples and the Rhythm Lords are also scheduled at Smokin’ Johnnie’s.

* Kris Wiley plays Saturday night at Smokin’ Johnnie’s, 11720 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. No cover. Call (818) 760-6631. For information on other upcoming Wiley gigs, call (310) 395-4835.

From the Valley: Li’l Elmo and the Cosmos, who are playing at B.B. King’s tonight, are a Valley band that has gone around the world.

“I hate to admit this, but the band started in Taft High School back in 1972,” says lead singer Jay Kessler.

“We were 10 years old at the time,” he adds jokingly.

After a first flush of success, the band broke up in 1975 and stayed broken for 10 years, until the members decided to give it one more try.

“It came back together as a fluke, and we started doing some shows,” Kessler says.

As their audiences started to grow, the band members realized they might have something.

“We dropped our day jobs and hit the road,” he says.

For the last 10 years, the band has played about 180 dates per year: mostly fairs, festivals, nightclubs, Las Vegas and Reno. The band has been around the world, playing in Europe and other lands.

Kessler says the band’s performance style and vocal harmonies are what set it apart from other oldies acts.

“We try to put it over with a legitimate rock ‘n’ roll consciousness; we don’t want to be perceived as a parody-type thing,” he says.

The band’s repertoire covers what Kessler calls “the rock ‘n’ roll years,” 1951-1969, and includes a number of obscure tunes by doo-wop groups of that era.

“We’re really good at doing the doo-wop-type stuff,” Kessler says. “We try to educate our audiences as to how cool this music is, and we also try to mix in some of our own music.”

The band is currently in the studio working on its third album.

“The major labels perceive vintage rock ‘n’ roll as yesterday’s newspapers,” Kessler says. “But there’s a huge audience out there for what we do.”

* Li’l Elmo and the Cosmos play tonight at B. B. King’s Blues Club, at Universal CityWalk, 1000 Universal Center Drive. $6 cover. Call (818) 622-5464.

Misunderstood: Singer Joel Johnson of the band Johnson, playing at Bourbon Square on Saturday, says any misunderstandings regarding the band’s name are not his fault.

His name is Johnson.

“Any [double-]entendre is just the product of a filthy mind,” he says coyly. “I’ve fronted bands for years, but I never billed them as ‘so-and-so and the so-and-sos.’ I really got tired of that.”

“I’m fronting the band; it becomes our constant, our continuity,” he says. “But we don’t play as many church gigs as we used to.”

Johnson says the band’s music is stylistically diverse, but his personality and the group’s style of play give their work a cohesiveness.

“It’s a show,” Johnson says. “It’s not depressed guys in flannel playing loud music.”

* Johnson plays Saturday night at Bourbon Square, 15324 Victory Blvd., Van Nuys. $5 cover. Call (818) 997-8562.

Mountain People: Lode, which is playing Saturday at the Cobalt Cafe, is a young, Topanga-based band that has a new CD out on Geffen Records.

Inara George, the band’s lead singer, can tell you that the CD “Legs & Arms” was produced by Gary Katz, who previously worked with Steely Dan and others. And she can also tell you the significance of the band’s name.

“It was an accident,” she says. It seems an artist friend of the band wrote the word “load” on a refrigerator, and it became the name of the band, she remembers vaguely.

“I never liked the name,” she says. “We racked our brains, but we couldn’t think of anything better, so we just changed the spelling.”

The band seems to reflect the character of the isolated mountain community from which it hails.

“What’s cool about Topanga is that everyone has an artistic charge to them,” George says. “A great bunch of people end up in Topanga.”

* Lode plays Saturday night at the Cobalt Cafe, 22047 Sherman Way, Canoga Park. $4 cover. Call (818) 348-3789.