Jonny Whiteside

Cruising through the San Fernando Valley with Swamp Dogg is something else. Clad in creamy khakis that match his Chrysler 600's paint job — as well as a “Swamp” ball cap and a Bluetooth earpiece — the 71-year-old veteran underground soul overlord has the energy of a man 30 years younger, befitting his role as leader of a fervent cult following that has deified this master of offbeat '70s-era psych-funk.

As trailer parks of Sunland slide by, the Virginia-born Dogg cranks up some freshly minted...

Folk-punk singer-guitarist Sunny War is one of Los Angeles' great renegade phenomena. A sensation as a teenage street performer in Venice Beach, she has gone on to international renown and a solid series of releases that have established her as a significant artistic force. The 26-year-old musician's prodigious, largely self-taught finger-picking style stuns all in earshot, and her songwriting is an ideally fluid, wholly self-propelled method of expression that — as her...

Singer-guitarist Kim Shattuck has navigated the cesspool of Los Angeles rock & roll with fierce, unerring grace for decades, first with cult-roiling ’80s garage pop provocateurs the Pandoras and, since 1991, as leader of gloriously adept power trio the Muffs.
Shattuck’s considerable musical capabilities and offbeat, slightly geeky stage persona have long since established her as one of this town’s top rock practitioners and news of her latest incarnation, the Coolies, alongside longtime Pando...

Billy Bones, the Hillside Strangler, and the short eventful life of the Skulls and the Masque
In 1977, Hollywood was the epicenter of punk noir, a shadowy vortex of hustlers, oblivion seekers, runaways and hookers, all out to surf the boulevard’s ceaseless lava flow of neon slime. The star-spangled sidewalk’s magnetic lure pulled in a multitude of lost souls, boogying through the PCP fumes in platform shoes while trying to outsmart their mad dog nemeses, the Los Angeles Police Department – th...

FREDDY “BOOM BOOM” Cannon, the volatile force responsible for eruptive 1959 hit “Tallahassee Lassie,” is one of America’s greatest-ever rockers. He may be pushing 80 today, but Cannon is as resolutely devoted to the big beat as ever. With a penchant for primitivo R&B-tinged ravers put over with a frantic declarative shout and stomping dance rhythms, Cannon carved a lurid swath through the teen idol detritus of the early 1960s and held his own during the British Invasion thanks to a slew of me...

The almost simultaneous deaths of legendary percussionists D.J. Fontana and Nick Knox last week was shocking, tragic and a loaded cultural moment that demands re-examination of the 20th century’s single greatest phenomenon — rock & roll. As Elvis Presley’s drummer, Fontana played a critical role in establishing a sound whose fundamentally primordial message of rebel liberation threatened to destroy Western civilization’s social order.
This is not an overstatement — by 1956, Elvis was universa...

Glendale Latina pop-punk quartet Go Betty Go’s 18-year run has been marked by enough high drama and dynamic tension for half a dozen bands. Formed by teen sisters Aixa and Nicolette Vilar, they worked a luminous brand of high-impact, bilingual punk rock lent tremendous heft by guitarist Betty Cisneros’ formidably idiosyncratic playing. Within three years, the group had a significant following whom they’d whip into a frenzy every Tuesday night at their long-running, reliably SRO residency at f...

Ventura's annual Johnny Cash tribute Roadshow Revival goes down this Saturday, June 14. It serves not only to venerate one of country's most universally revered artists but is also a chance to talk about what a maniac he was when he lived here.
Columbia offered Cash more money and artistic freedom than Sam Phillips ever provided at Sun, and this was his most intensely creative and ambitious period. His extraordinary output included his exceptional clutch of concept albums: the working man - t...

”At rehearsal we can play for hours and nobody says a word,” Charly says. “There’s no need to. We’ve all known each other since we were young kids, playing backyard shows in Highland Park, I was 14 or 15, had a band called It’s the Vermin, and [guitarist] OT had a band called Disrot. We’d play shows together but that scene died, it faded away. So we were all riding bikes, started a club called Iron Horse, and we were all hanging out and just decided to start a new band, and make it about bike...

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Dancer Lee Angel was midcentury rock & roll's premier muse, a backstage asset who exerted an irresistible force over Little Richard, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Jackie Wilson.
She was both a burlesque legend and the ultimate rock & roll insider — when John Lennon and Yoko Ono got together, Apple execs ponied up long coin and begged Angel to break 'em up — but she would have no part of the sleazy scheme, she has said.
For Angel, it all started as an out-of-nowhere fluke. "...

The mid-'60s Sunset Strip was the most fabulous playground in the Western world, a glittering wonderland where Jayne Mansfield did the frug high on acid, Arthur Lee wandered barefoot between Clark and Hilldale as Elvis rolled by in his Cadillac, and The Standells and Barney Kessel's trio alternated sets down at P.J.'s. It was an eruptive, unstable, fast-moving microcosm of cool, where music and fashion ruled the scene.
Among the Strip's colorful cast of characters at the time was Lynn Castle,...

Soul music is the most criminally underserved item on the 21st-century pop bill of fare, a fact that makes the presence of veteran singer Nolan Porter even more consequential. Although the Los Angeles native seldom performs in Southern California, he is a major attraction in the United Kingdom, where he'd the subject of popular adoration, enthusiastic BBC reportage and a critically acclaimed 2015 documentary film. Porter has exerted a powerful influence there: Paul Weller recorded Porter’s “I...