The California Honeydrops take busking act onstage at the Mint

The California Honeydrops aren’t exactly the kind of busking band you can ignore in a subway tunnel. Though from Oakland, their Southern-fried jazz is so authentic that commuters may wonder whether they've somehow been transported to the Big Easy when they hear the band in BART's subway tunnels. For the last four years, the street musicians have thrived on creating a Mardi Gras-style party in BART stations.

 “When you’re playing on the street or in the subway, it’s like popping a song on the radio from out of nowhere, taking people by surprise,” said frontman and trumpeter Lech Wierzynski. “It’s the purest way to interact with the public.”

A few weeks ahead of their March European tour, the five-piece band of seasoned street players will play the Mint on Saturday, brandinshing a distinct blend of historic New Orleans culture and blue-eyed soul. Over the years, they’ve had plenty of YouTube documentation of their ability to play anywhere, anytime — especially rush hour.

Taking a look at videos of the band’s polished street performances, it's clear their Bay Area roots take a back seat to the jumping rhythms of Dixieland jazz. The sound, flush with brass, bass, melodica and tub bass, is meant to inspire your best second-line dance moves — a stylish form of strutting and dancing among New Orleans natives during block parties, parades, even funerals.

The Honeydrops' ability to get people into their act is something that directly translates into their nightclub shows, where they usually spend more time offstage than on.

“When we play, we’re always down on the dance floor and letting loose and dancing with people,” Wierzynski said. “And whatever state or country we play, everyone has their own little bit of culture they put into it, adding a little bit of what they do. When we tour, it’s all part of the endless challenge of finding out who the next crowd is gonna be.”

Check out the videos of their famous busking performances below:

Pop & Hiss premiere: Yacht's 'Shangri-La' video

Our fair town has been compared to plenty of less-than-complimentary things in pop songs, from a cake left out in the rain to a fantasy world of celluoid heroes and villains. But someone calling it an undisputed heaven on Earth might be a new one, and for that we'd like to thank the transplanted post-punk duo Yacht for the compliment.

The duo of Jona Bechtolt (a Portland, Ore., transplant) and Claire L. Evans (a veteran of L.A. noise punks Weirdo/Begeirdo) has a new video for its sylvan single "Shangri-La," the title track of Yacht's most recent album on DFA Records. Maybe their set at the Hollywood Bowl a while back gave them new inspiration to explain to skeptics why they'd want to live here. The tune's surprisingly Beatles-y chorus of "If I can't go to heaven, let me go to L.A." gets a tableau of soft-focus, SoCal-utopian imagery (backyard oranges, Elysian Park tai-chi, beach party fireworks).

The fact that we can watch this in February and think, "Oh yeah, I really should hit the beach this weekend," is reason enough that Yacht's  assessment of L.A. isn't too far off the mark.

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-- August Brown

Photo: Alin Dragulin / Girlie Action

Clifton's Cafeteria to host Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, 'Chinatown'

Clifton's Cafeteria, the iconic downtown Los Angeles restaurant that's in the early stages of a floor-to-ceiling renovation, will open its doors Saturday night to host a special screening of Roman Polanski's 1974 L.A. classic "Chinatown," along with an improvised performance from jazz composer and violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson based on the film's Jerry Goldsmith-penned score.

The cafeteria, which is being rehabbed by Edison Bar owner Andrew Meieran, recently received a face-lift when a 1960s-era aluminum grating that covered the building's original 1904 facade was removed. The full renovation of the space is expected to take at least 18 months, but in the meantime, with booking from the Los Angeles arts collective and creative agency The Masses, Clifton's will play host to a regular film and music series showcasing classic movies set in Los Angeles.

PHOTOS: Unveiling Clifton's original facade

The Masses, which has created music videos for artists including Bon Iver, Beach House, Death Cab for Cutie (co-directed by the late Masses co-owner Heath Ledger), We Are Augustines and many others, and hosts the youth-oriented film camp OMG Cameras Everywhere!, used to program a similar screening series poolside at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

The event is free, and each installment will feature DJs spinning music before and after the screening. On Saturday, in addition to Atwood-Ferguson's solo performance, Jesse Peterson and DJ Carlos Nino of the Dublab collective will provide the sounds. Seating is first come, first serve. Doors open at 7 p.m., with the movie starting at 8 p.m.

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Sunset Junction Group files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy

Quick chat: John McCrea of Cake

-- Randall Roberts

Photo: A view of the interior at the Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles. Credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

Sunset Junction Street Festival group files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy

The Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy following last year’s  last-minute cancellation of the 30-year-old Sunset Junction Street Festival in Silver Lake, leaving behind a trail of creditors owed more than $900,000, according to documents filed in Central District U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

The city of Los Angeles, which had helped underwrite the event, is the big debt holder among more than 200 creditors, with more than $250,000 owed.

Much of the rest of the debt detailed in the filing is for booking fees not paid to musicians who had been scheduled to perform, including the Butthole Surfers ($24,000), the alt-rock band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah ($22,000), pop singer k.d. lang ($20,000), the pop band Hanson ($20,000), the rock-funk collective Ozomatli ($20,000), Bobby Womack ($15,000), the dance-pop collective Gayngs ($13,000), Peaches ($12,800), soul-R&B singers Freddie Pool ($8,750), Charles Bradley ($5,500) and Brenda Holloway ($1,500), the alt-rock duo Belle Brigade ($5,000), the punk band Helmet ($5,000), the Dum Dum Girls ($5,000), the EC Twins ($3,000), the neo-soul band Butch Walker & the Black Widows ($3,000) and the Three Degrees ($2,500).

PHOTOS: A few Sunset Junction-adjacent performances (2011)

Alliance president Michael McKinley is also listed among creditors as being owed $50,000.

The alliance listed assets of only $500 in miscellaneous furnishings and equipment at its Coronado Street office.

The alliance is the nonprofit organization that put together the festival, which was denied the city permits it needed to continue in 2011 after city officials declined to extend more time to the alliance to repay money still owed from previous years.

In August, after alliance officials scrambled to assure city officials that they could meet the year’s financial obligations, the Board of Public Works denied permits that would allow the event to proceed because promoters failed to come through with a check for $141,000 to cover fees. A last minute loan of $100,000 from concert promoter Live Nation failed to change board members’ minds.

“Fail me once, shame on you,” board President Andrea Alarcon said at the time. “Fail me twice, shame on me. This organization has failed this city time and time again.”

The street festival had grown in 30 years from a free grassroots celebration among neighborhood businesses and local musicians to a ticketed  event attracting national talent. Many residents and business owners had grown disenchanted with the yearly festival because of the disruption it created in the area.

The Internal Revenue Service, listed as being owed $20,000, and California’s Employment Development Department, an additional $6,511, are the only two creditors given priority status. All others are categorized as nonpriority debts.

Among the other major creditors are CBS Radio ($61,500) and event promoter Spaceland Productions ($24,000). The Groove Tickets ticket agency is also owed $46,417, according to the liquidation filing that was entered Dec. 7. The festival group’s lawyer, Phillip Tate, is listed as being owed $30,000.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles, AIDS Walk Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center and the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles are each owed $350, according to the filing.

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--Randy Lewis

Photo: Rock group Kinky plays the Sunset Junction Street Festival in 2008. Credit: Stefano Paltera / For The Times.

Quick Chat: John McCrea of Cake

Cake's members have always considered themselves a band of pop music outsiders. Formed in the early '90s amid the backdrop of the Seattle explosion, the horns, hooks and dry wit of songs like “The Distance” and the Gloria Gaynor cover “I Will Survive” were a comically offbeat answer to the bombast of grunge. After seven years between albums, the band got another bite at the mainstream when their 2011 album “Showroom of Compassion” (recorded independently at their solar-powered studio in Sacramento) debuted at No.1 on the Billboard 200 despite selling only 44,000 copies in its first week.

At the time it was the lowest-selling No. 1 album in SoundScan history. But for a band that still operates under the pop-culture radar, they see it as a major win for the little guy. Stopping in L.A. at the Palladium for the first time in several years, frontman John McCrea talked to Pop & Hiss about Cake’s recent success.

Who is your audience these days?

It’s weird. I thought that it would just be a lot of older, Generation X people, but on the road each year we get more people that haven’t heard us before that are all ages. We get a lot of high school kids, even some seniors dig us.

Any opinion on the fact that your latest record debuted as the lowest-selling No. 1 album on the charts, ever?

In a period of precipitous decline in the record business, we’ve looked at it pretty positively. Cake’s not a band that’s supposed to be No. 1 on any charts. So it definitely stretched our imaginations to be No. 1, even fleetingly. We sold about the same amount of copies that we did for our previous album, which was seven years earlier. So it seems like we’ve built a pretty trusted relationship with our fans.

What’s been the best part of releasing your new music independently?

It’s clean, it’s a feeling of self-reliance — that we’re investing in ourselves. Between recording the album in a solar-powered studio and self-releasing our album, it’s part of the general inclination on Cake’s part to become more self-reliant and less dependent on what I think are failing infrastructures.

You’re well-known for launching participatory contests with your fans. Any new ones on the horizon?

We are doing this contest where our trumpet player Vince DiFiore scored our song “Federal Funding” for marching bands and so a lot of high school and college marching bands are entering a contest where they learn that song, play it and send in a video. We’re gonna choose one of them as a grand prize winner. I think we’ll end up putting them in a new Cake video.

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— Nate Jackson

Photo: Frontman John McCrea, far right, with Cake band mates, from left, Paulo Baldi, Vince DiFiore, Xan McCurdy and Gabe Nelson. Credit: Robert McKnight.

Lauryn Hill plays it cool

The singer takes her time warming up to the Palladium crowd, but finally lets loose.

“Aren't you tired of losing our people?” Lauryn Hill asked the sold-out crowd just before singing her last song of the night. “I am.”

“Love your artists,” she continued. “When they falter, hold them accountable. But love them. People are now showing Whitney Houston the love and respect she should have received throughout her career — through all of it.”

Given the constant drubbing she's taken over the years — from the media and from disgruntled fans — it was easy to see that Hill's words were drawn from experience and weren't simply meant to apply to the recently deceased diva.

The commentary was also notable because it marked the first and only time all Tuesday night that Hill engaged the crowd with anything like banter or conversation. The first half of her 90-minute Valentine's evening concert at the Hollywood Palladium was marked by steely professionalism. She and her tightly rehearsed band seemed to press fast-forward as they raced through tunes from her Grammy-winning 1998 solo album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” at breakneck pace.

Trim and gorgeous, wearing a long, flowing black skirt, heavy jacket (that was never removed) and shiny metallic blouse, she initially gave off the effect of being a butterfly in a glass container, wings fluttering energetically but never breeching the protective barrier she'd erected between herself and her fans. There was a cool detachment that prevented the show from really catching fire, though every song was met with thunderous applause.

Martina McBride: The thorns amid love's red roses

Martina McBride takes a skeptical look at romance in her Valentine's Day show at the Nokia Theatre.

Martina McBride is an unlikely choice for a Valentine's Day concert. In one of the country star's best-known songs, “Independence Day,” she describes a battered woman who burns down her house, while the “it” in her current single, “I'm Gonna Love You Through It,” refers to breast cancer. Disease, domestic abuse, “teenagers walking around in a culture of darkness” (as she puts it in “Love's the Only House”): Calamity always looms in a Martina McBride song, even — or especially — when the song sounds like it should be about shopping for shoes.

Nevertheless, there was McBride on Tuesday evening at the Nokia Theatre, the main attraction in a Valentine's Day benefit for the PGA Tour Charities. Red lighting bathed the venue's lobby; onstage, a DJ from radio station Go Country 105 FM wondered how many wives had dragged their husbands to the show. Date-night sexy in a pair of shiny, skin-tight trousers, McBride was cheery enough between songs, introducing “Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong” as a tune about “good friends and drinking wine” and ribbing her younger brother, who plays guitar in her touring band, for recently getting married — “again.” (“It's OK,” she added. “We like this one.”)

In the songs themselves, though, McBride assumed a series of positions, from sorrow to indifference to outright hostility, that seemed at odds with the occasion. (This was a good thing.) “Whatcha Gonna Do,” from last year's impressive album “Eleven,” warned a hot-and-cold lover to put his priorities in order, but did so in language entirely drained of passion: “You miss me, you want me, you need me / Whatever.” She was similarly aloof in “Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong,” one of the peppiest of her would-be shoe-shopping numbers; the wine, it turns out, accompanies some stern advice to a pal recently dumped. “It ain't the end of the world,” McBride sang, “'Cause now that he's gone … you got nothing to lose.”

Other songs contained more emotion but felt no less skeptical of the hollow certitude that Valentine's Day embodies. 

Christian Bale on Whitney Houston's allure in 'American Psycho'

As the world continues to absorb the news of Whitney Houston's death, clips and remembrances have been popping up all over the place. The above scene, taken from the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," has been making its way through social media due to one particular exchange featuring protagonist Patrick Bateman, played by Christian Bale, and two pretty women making out on a couch.

As the two ladies chat and squirm, Bale's character Bateman, a serial killer, seems a million miles away, lost in thought about ... Whitney Houston. "Did you know that Whitney Houston's debut LP, called simply 'Whitney Houston,' had four No. 1 singles on it? Did you know that, Christie?" asks Bateman.

She is dismissive of Houston's allure, but Bateman continues: 

"It's hard to choose a favorite among so many great tracks. But 'The Greatest Love of All' is one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation and dignity. Its universal message crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it's not too late to better ourselves."

Dave Matthews Band announces new album, Irvine date

Here's a cocktail party tidbit: No act sold more tickets than the Dave Matthews Band did for the period that stretched from 2000 to 2009. That little factoid comes courtesy of Billboard, which notes that the band sold 11.2 million in that span. Today, the band has revealed that a new album and an extensive U.S. tour are on the horizon. The group will play the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine on Sept. 8.

Pop & Hiss advises getting there early to catch soul up-and-comer Allen Stone. Tickets, according to a Live Nation statement, are slated to go on sale March 9. A pre-sale will be offered via the Dave Matthews Band's fan club. While prices for the Irivne date haven't been revealed, tickets for other dates are generally running $40 to $75, not including surcharges. 

The band recently went into the studio with veteran producer Steve Lillywhite, who the group collaborated with on its first three studio albums. A release date has not yet been set, but the tour is set to launch May 18 in the Woodlands, Texas. 

The new album will be the band's first since 2009's "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King," which lost the album of the year Grammy to Taylor Swift and her "Fearless." "Big Whiskey" received largely favorable reviews, as it presented a more rock 'n' roll side of the Dave Matthews Band.  

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Listen to Usher's Diplo-produced slow-burner 'Climax'

Adele, Whitney Houston, Fun make an impact on the charts

-- Todd Martens

Image: Dave Matthews. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

Listen to Usher's Diplo-produced slow-burner 'Climax'

Usher is offering the first taste of his upcoming studio album with a new Diplo-produced single, “Climax.”

Set for official release Feb. 28, the slow-burner was leaked Tuesday, just in time for all those Valentine’s Day nightcaps. “Climax” takes us back to the earlier work from the R&B crooner, recalling the younger singer who offered up woozy bedroom jams such as “Nice and Slow” and “Slow Jam.”

While listeners have for better or worse gotten used to this marriage of R&B-meets-electro, the single (unlike recent hits “OMG," “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” and "Without You") is rooted in pure soul, with Diplo employing sexy synths behind a dripping downbeat.

“Climax” was written by the singer, Redd Stylez, Ariel Rechtshaid and Diplo. His seventh studio album will be released later this spring on RCA Records.

Usher is currently enjoying a string of hit collaborations -- “Without You” by David Guetta, which hit the No. 1 spot on the pop charts, and “Promise” with Romeo Santos, which reached the No. 1 spot on the Latin charts.

Draw the curtains, light a candle and take a listen to “Climax” below.