The Baked Potato http://www.thebakedpotato.com/ (called "The Spud") is a tiny, legendary jazz bar in Studio City, just a short drive from Joe's home in LA. It gets its name from the menu, 100% baked potatos of maybe 15 varieties. He has played there twice while on break from the tour this year. The band he plays with, Rock Candy Funk Party, is led by keyboard maestro Arlan Oscar (Schierbaum) and includes Ron DeJesus on guitar, Mike Merritt on bass, and Tal Bergman (Joe's drummer) on drums. Sit in artists are likely to show up and jam at any time and include some of the best musicians and funk/jazz singers in the LA area. It's a band of superb musicians. They are all buddies of Joe's and he just loves to jam with them and play guitars from his collection he never gets to play normally. So far at the two gigs, he has played a '53 Telecaster, a '53 Gibson Archtop, and his repaired #52 JBLP at the first gig. A '56 Gibson ES-5 with triple P90's, an extremely rare 56 Gibson Trini Lopez Custom Deluxe and his (I think) prototype JBLP with the Bigsby at the second gig. As you can see on the vids on my channel from the two gigs, they play a mix of funk, groove, jazz and a little blues. Getting to see these guys jam from 5 feet away is a treat beyond price for us SoCal fans. The stage is floor level and maybe 8 X 10 feet, a quarter of the space in the bar. The owner crams maybe 50 folks in like sardines. The crowd is mostly his friends and us fans.
Rick
edit: I just noticed that Arlan was the studio keyboard man on Joe and Beth Hart's new release. He is one of the best B3 players I've ever heard, and has a real Mini Moog and stacked Leslies on his rig. Killer sound!
