Live From the Living Room

The husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Grossman and Laurie Gunning--a.k.a. Dogwood Moon--will feature their brand of high-energy folk music Saturday night as they host a CD release party at the Ban-Dar in Ventura.

It will be another strange double bill that could only happen at this eclectic venue, as boogie-woogie piano virtuoso Carl Sonny Leyland takes over the stage at 10 p.m. after Dogwood Moon has finished blowing minds with several of their 100 or so original songs.

The new CD is “Dogwood Moon Live @ Fox Run,” a recording that is not much more than a month old. This is the Moon’s fourth album in a career that is not quite 5 years old.

Gunning and Grossman met while taking voice lessons from the same teacher, and although recently electrified, began as a pair of acoustic folkies. Based in Los Angeles, the pair toured frequently around California, across the country and in Europe. Locally, their soaring vocals and hook-filled songs and enthusiastic performances made them favorites at the old Cafe Voltaire in Ventura. Gunning has a powerful voice that is part Grace Slick, part Carly Simon and part Stevie Nicks and harmonizes perfectly with her husband.

Now living in Santa Monica, the couple still play 15 to 20 gigs a month and are at work on another album. They’re about to enter the soundtrack business, as well. Grossman discussed the latest news concerning his favorite duo during a recent phone interview.

How’s the Dogwood Moon biz these days?

It’s been fantastic, man, really good. The best thing about what we’ve been doing is that we’ve been off the road.

How long have you two been gone?

We were gone for two years, living in our car, staying on friends’ couches. We never had our own bed to sleep on, that kind of situation, and always having to entertain. You haven’t seen your college buddy in three years and he happens to be working the night we’re playing in his town, and when we get back from the show, it’s like “Hey, sing me a song.” You know, it’s like one in the morning and we’ve driven 800 miles that day. And that was kind of the downside of the whole thing. The good side was we got to spend so much time with all of our friends and I was able to meet all of Laurie’s family, and she met all my family.

Four CDs is quite a body of work. You’re definitely not on the Boston timetable of an album every 10 years.

Exactly. Four years, four CDs and about a thousand shows. My big thing is writing. I love to write. The greatest thing about loving to write is that it’s a talent to have when you don’t want to be on the road. It’s not all about performing and being in front of a crowd, but about the craft of writing. And, as it turns out, I’m starting a company with a friend of mine I met in college at Cornell, [called] Dogwood Moon Music. We’ll be writing soundtrack music and we’ll be able to stay here in L.A. and just write music, and I won’t have to sing for my meals at one in the morning anymore.

So how many Dogwood Moon songs are there?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe one hundred. But we play so often that songs don’t stay new for very long. A song that was new two months ago has been played 100 times, so that’s the impetus for writing new songs.

What’s the story on the new album?

We met some people in Sudbury, Mass., who are really big folk people, folk angels really. They have a rather large house with a recording studio, and they house a lot of traveling performers--people come through and do a house concert at their home, then stay at their home. We were staying at their home often when we were in that area, and they said “Hey, let’s do a live album.” They had all this tricked-out studio gear, so we invited all our fans in the area and recorded it in the living room. I mixed it over the course of the next week and we released it within a month after it was done.

Where does it fit in with what came before?

A little bit edgier, less folky, more like singer-songwriter rock, or alternative folk. I think we’re coming into our own sound. We’re able to do the vocal harmony thing, and I think there’s a little more drive to it. Whereas the lyrics on the first couple of albums were centered around nature, these lyrics seem to be more centered around questioning our purpose here and questioning our relationship with the people we come in contact with.

Why did you go from acoustic to electric?

We had been playing the same set for the first couple of years. I was playing guitar and Laurie was playing shaker, but what happened was we’d have these four-hour shows and we’d want to do something improvisational and all she had was a shaker, so she decided she wanted to learn an instrument. Then one day on our tour in Europe, she picked up a bass and within three days she was playing at our shows. It really freed me up from being just the acoustic strummer guy, so then I started adding a more acoustic-electric sound.

So what are the advantages and disadvantages of being a duo?

The advantages are that we are so damn portable, and the disadvantages are there isn’t a whole lot of room to explore the musical frontier because it’s just two instruments.

So what’s the next step for Dogwood Moon?

As a duo, Laurie and I have really defined our craft as far as the singing goes. And that’s really been our calling card, but the thing I’m really looking forward to doing next is making the musicianship and the music be more identifiable. Right now, when you hear Laurie and I singing, you know it’s Dogwood Moon, but when we’re not singing and it’s just instrumentation, it’s not identifiable enough. So what we want to do in the studio is create our sound both musically and vocally. That’s the next creative step for us.

The band is named for a tree that doesn’t grow here and that big bright thing in the night sky. So what does a dogwood tree look like?

They have pink and white flowers, and they’re gorgeous. Laurie has a tattoo of one.

DETAILS

Dogwood Moon at the Ban-Dar, 3005 E. Main St., Ventura, 8 p.m. Saturday; $5 or $15 with CD; 643-4420.

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When Cafe Voltaire went away last year, it pretty much took the acoustic music scene with it, at least temporarily. Then Mary Wilson of the Tatters initiated Acoustic Wednesdays at 66 California, an event that has now been running smoothly for about a year.

Enter Brian Parra, local rock-star-to-be with his off-the-wall group the American Cheese Band. Parra is also a part-time promoter trying to make music meaningful more often.

To that end, Wilson has graciously allowed Parra to take the last Wednesday of each month and transform it into Young Acoustic Songwriters Night.

It’s an all-ages show beginning at 7 p.m. with three artists playing a pair of 30-minute sets each, all for the princely sum of three bucks. Parra explains:

“I noticed it was the same people--sort of the old Voltaire crew--the Tatters, Jon Wilcox, Left of Memphis, playing pretty much every month. So I approached Mary Wilson about taking one night a month, sent her an e-mail and laid the whole thing out. It’s all about kids that don’t have the resources to make a decent demo or don’t have enough material to go three hours.”

Next week’s gig will feature Paul Courselle, who usually plays Mondays at Latte 101 in Ventura, and Cindy Sullivan, a teenager who Parra saw at Open Mike Night at the Garden Village Cafe in Ventura. The third young songwriter will be Chris Larson.

Like they say--it takes one to know one. Parra is 23.

“My criteria is under 30--that’s what I call young,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem like there’s an accessible all-ages venue that happens every week, so this is pretty serious and this is a classy joint. It’s been pretty successful so far with 30 to 40 people each week, and the thing I like about it most is I can actually pay the musicians at least something--30 or 40 bucks at the end of the night. For most of them, this is their first paying gig ever, so they’re pretty thrilled.”

DETAILS

Young Songwriters Showcase with Paul Courselle, Cindy Sullivan and Chris Larson at 66 California, 66 California St., Ventura, 7 p.m. Wednesday; $3; 648-2266.

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The Grateful Dead, that legendary groove rock band, trucked right into the past tense with the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995. Yet that long strange trip will be revived by tribute band Stunt Road, which will play a lot of Deadhead-friendly music Saturday night at Season Ticket in Simi Valley.

Stunt Road has been around for more than 15 years--or about as long as the Dead’s live version of “Sugar Magnolia”-- and were named for a party spot up on Mulholland Drive.

Although the parking lot probably won’t be packed with the world’s slowest land vehicle (the VW bus), this sports bar becomes the Deadhead center of the universe a couple of times each month when Stunt Road convinces the surviving Jerry’s Kids to come dancing.

The band knows over 100 songs, including all the usual classic rock dance-inducing numbers, plus more than 70 Dead songs.

DETAILS

Stunt Road at Season Ticket, 5835 Los Angeles Ave., Simi Valley, 9 p.m. Saturday; free; 520-1166.

Bill Locey can be reached by e-mail at blocey@pacbell.net.