Feel-Good Blues

Duo Tom Ball & Kenny Sultan will bring their “good-time blues” to the well-kept secret that is the Zalk Theatre on the campus of Happy Valley School this weekend.

The place, on Highway 150 between Ojai and Santa Paula, is lacking in signage and is difficult to find in the dark, but the venue itself is a small, intimate setting with great sound.

Ball and Sultan have been together for a long time; in fact their latest release is “20th Anniversary Live.”

Ball has the perfect gruff blues voice, plus he plays a mean harmonica; Sultan is a guitar virtuoso. Their repertoire includes hilarious blues tunes by forgotten singers, plus a number of originals.

This is no crying-in-your-beer blues, but happy and funny songs about bad women, worse liquor, jail, fishing, Dolly Parton and the Dodgers.

These guys could make Klingons smile.

Ball discussed the latest during a recent phone conversation.

Twenty years is a long time. How do you account for that?

I don’t know. Part of it, I suppose, is that we’re a duo, so you can’t be outnumbered like you can be in a trio or anything bigger, and this way we both have veto power over any songs we do. Plus we’re good friends and we travel well together. One thing led to another and we just continued to play music together and it’s just worked out all right.

How many albums so far?

About seven if you want to count LPs. We’re going to work this last one for a while because we’re too lazy to learn new material. That one was easier because it was a live one, so we could redo some songs. There were seven or eight new ones, and the rest was stuff that we’d already done on other records, some of which were out of print, so we figured we could get away with doing them again.

So the blues biz is working out, then?

Yeah, it’s working out pretty well. No complaints. There are a lot more festivals, and it seems because we play acoustic we can manage to fool both blues festivals as well as folk and bluegrass festivals into hiring us.

And it’s still that “good-time blues”?

Everything’s good. Santa Barbara is a hard town to live in in some ways because it’s not the cheapest town on the planet. But we like it here. We hang out and eat tofu, play squash and go jogging and stuff. Actually, we’re not into working out. Our philosophy is no pain, no pain.

So how do you get the blues in Santa Barbara? No parking at Nordstrom’s?

Well, I grew up in Santa Monica and Kenny grew up in the Valley. We were both exposed to this kind of music when we were down in L.A., which is enough to give anyone the blues. Then we met up here and it’s been all downhill ever since.

Why the blues, not polka or something else?

It just kind of spoke to us, I think we’re probably both victims of that folk and blues music revival thing that went on in the ‘60s. Then again, it is kind of hypocritical to see two white boys from California singing about working in coal mines or being sharecroppers, so we try to write our own material so we don’t look like too big of idiots.

Have you run out of those old blues songs?

Every now and then we stumble across an old 78 and find something that hasn’t been redone and is close enough to what we like so we can redo it without looking like fools. We tend to write more now because we’re almost running out of stuff to steal.

Are you going to Europe again this year?

Yeah, we’ve been doing this since ‘91, and we’re going in April and May this year to Ireland and England. They just party every night. It’s kind of hard on us because we have to get up and drive, but it’s really a good time with wonderful people. We played in one town in Ireland that only had 1,500 people in it, but 36 pubs. That’s our kind of town.

Why do Europeans appreciate American roots music perhaps more than we do?

I don’t know, but they do. They take American music real seriously, not only blues, but jazz, bluegrass, country and rockabilly--they really thrive on U.S. roots music. It’s presented in a lot of cases in concert halls, and there are people taking notes. There are programs printed up and they want to know in advance what your program’s going to be, which is weird. That’s hard for us because we like to wing it, so we try to avoid those kinds of scenarios, but sometimes they’re unavoidable.

So many musicians get frustrated and give up, talented or not. How did you guys manage to make a living doing music?

I think you have to diversify a little bit. If you depend completely on live gigs, then it gets really hard. All you have to do is break your finger and you’re off for six months. Kenny and I have three or four instructional books out there. I do a lot of studio work where the phone will ring and they want a harmonica part on somebody else’s disc or a TV show or something like it. It fills in the gaps. Kenny does quite a bit of teaching. Also, I have a solo album out and he has one he just finished recording. So the more you can get out there, be it records or books or anything else, the better off you are. That way, you still have a little money coming in, even if you don’t gig seven nights a week. I’m sure we could do a lot more studio work if we lived in Nashville or something, but who wants to live there?

What’s the best and worst thing about all this?

The best thing is not having a real job. You can sleep in in the morning. It’s one thing when you’re in your 20s and you don’t mind gigging six nights a week, but as you get older, it just gets harder and harder to spend that much time in bars. The worst thing, I guess, is not having any benefits--no unemployment [insurance] or any of that stuff. Got to stay healthy.

*

DETAILS

Tom Ball & Kenny Sultan at the Zalk Theatre, 8585 Highway 150, Ojai; Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; $15; 677-5450.

*

The Old Mill Antique Store, a Santa Paula landmark, will host a rare concert Saturday night featuring country-flavored singer-songwriter Tom Russell, with Ojai songstress Rain Perry opening. Russell will doubtlessly play a few tunes off his latest, “The Man From God Knows Where,” which is a musical history of the Russell family from its beginnings in Norway and Ireland.

The majority of Russell’s songs have cowboy-oriented themes--the artist grew up on a Topanga ranch in the early ‘50s listening to a lot of the local hillbilly and country and western artists such as Merle Travis, Joe Maphis and Tex Williams.

He’s been playing for nearly 30 years, having paid his dues (and gotten a lot of song ideas) backing strippers, female impersonators, dog acts and sword swallowers in Vancouver and elsewhere. His “Tulare Dust: A Songwriter’s Tribute to Merle Haggard” was voted Americana Album of the Year in 1995.

Perry’s latest is “Balance,” released on her own Precipitous Records label.

She’s working on songs for her next album and planning for next summer’s Agility Festival, to be held again at Libbey Park in Ojai at the end of June. Her networking skills are responsible for this gig.

“I befriended Tom Russell’s booking agent when I went to Seattle for a show,” Perry said. “Originally Perla Batalla was going to open, but it was her anniversary, so they called me. I’m thinking this place holds 100 or 150 at the very most. They don’t normally do concerts there. It used to be a feed and grain store. It’s really cool. It has a lot of local history stuff up on the wall.”

*

DETAILS

Tom Russell and Rain Perry at the Old Mill Antique Store, 926 Railroad Ave., Santa Paula; Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; $15; 646-4706.

*

That disturbing duo, Insane Clown Posse, will be doing its thing Tuesday night at the Ventura Theatre. Opening the festivities will be Insolence and Marz.

It’s a posse of two--Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. They’ve been at it 11 years now, inspired by their Detroit homies, rapper Esham and Bob Ritchie, now known as Kid Rock.

Their fans, dubbed the Juggalos, will be the ones with the painted faces not on the stage.

In a recent interview, J discussed the obvious: “Our music is vulgar, violent, sexist--whatever, but you have to look for it. You don’t have to sit through us while you’re waiting for Santana to come on.”

Originally signed to Hollywood Records--at least until Disney officials actually listened to the group in 1997--their “inappropriate lyrics” have since found a home with Island Records. The band released five albums before the latest two--that’s right two--”Bizaar” and “Bizzar.”

The critics, MTV, radio and most parents hate them, but J seemed to totter on the verge of indifference. “And I have no question we will once again reign supreme by making all the critics’ worst album lists of 2000. But you know what . . . this isn’t for them.”

*

DETAILS

Insane Clown Posse, Insolence and Marz at the Ventura Theatre, 26 Chestnut St., Ventura; Tuesday, 9 p.m.; $25; 653-0721.

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

DROPHEAD for pop

Ball has the perfect gruff blues voice, plus he plays a mean harmonica; Sultan is a guitar virtuoso.