Steve Hochman on September 12th, 2015

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[Note: The Continental Drifters were an all-star roots-pop ensemble formed in Los Angeles in the early 1990s and then transplanted to New Orleans. Their members’ associations included the likes of the Dream Syndicate, Giant Sand, Steve Wynn, the dB’s, the Cowsills, the Bangles and Liquor Giants. The two-CD retrospective, “Drifted In: In the Beginning & Beond,” was released in July via Omnivore Recordings.]

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For the two reunion concerts by the Continental Drifters at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre next weekend, the concert’s producers at the Wild Honey Foundation have found a backdrop that resembles the curtain at the old Raji’s club, where the band held court regularly in its early-’90s beginnings.

“Just like those spangly things like at a strip club?” laughs Gary Eaton, one of the Drifters’ co-founding guitarists and songwriters, when told of this. “Made out of Mylar, or whatever.”

Something like that. If they really want to evoke the long-gone Hollywood hot-spot/dive, though, they need to pump in the scents of stale beer, cigarettes and sweat. Oh, and grease. Really stale grease.

• ||| Live: The Continental Drifters do two benefit shows, Sept. 19 and 20, for the Autism Think Tank at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre. Tickets are still available for the Sept. 20 show.

That’s one memory that comes to the mind of Peter Holsapple, a Drifter from all but the very start, remaining through the end of the band around the end of the decade.

Holsapple: “I fondly recall last-minute rehearsing of songs, especially vocals, in that nasty kitchen at Raji’s. I’m sure it had been quite a while since anything had actually been cooked in there, but the floors were always a little slippery from old grease. We would position ourselves around the space and let fly with whatever we were getting ready to play on the stage when we got back up.”

Or if they really want to recreate some of the most memorable times of the Raji’s Tuesday night residency the Drifters held down most weeks in 1991 and ’92, maybe they’ll …. Well, that’s where we’ll start our little journey back to life at Raji’s with the Drifters, specifically a night on which English singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl came down to see what the buzz was about:

Holsapple: “The late, great Kirsty MacColl came down one night when we were doing Drag Night.”

Yes. Drag Night.

Holsapple: “God knows what she must have thought. Those nights were particularly curious, to hear these great songs with lovely harmonies from these hairy men in shabby dresses and bad wigs, with their stylists Susan and Vicki.”

Those hairy men and their “stylists” at the time constituted what was at once an indie-rock supergroup of sorts and a band at the leading edge of what came to be called Americana. When the group first held forth at Raji’s, the lineup featured guitarist Gary Eaton (from L.A.’s Devil Squares and Ringling Sisters), bassist Mark Walton (the Dream Syndicate), keyboardist Danny McGough, guitarist Ray Ganucheau and drummer Carlo Nuccio (whose pre-Drifters resumé included a stint in Pat McLaughlin’s band, with later work with, among many others, Emmylou Harris, Buckwheat Zydeco, Tory Amos and Marianne Faithful).

That didn’t last long, though. Holsapple (then having left his much-lauded band the dB’s) sat in one night when Ganucheau couldn’t make it, and stayed. Soon the Psycho Sisters — Vicki Peterson of the Bangles and Susan Cowsill of the, well, Cowsills — became regular guests and then full-timers. Robert Maché, who’d played in Dream Syndicate leader Steve Wynn’s band, also filled in when Ganucheau was absent and eventually became a full-timer. And there were guests. Always guests. Wynn would sit in. Local blues belter Top Jimmy. Jackson Browne even. Not to mention the notables who came in just to enjoy the vibe and see what the buzz was about — several remember the quiet guy in the baseball cap standing by the bar one night, a fellow named Bruce Springsteen.

Most memories, the Drifters pretty much agree, are fuzzy.

“Man, specifics are dodgy when talking Raji’s,” says Maché, who was both fan and auxiliary band member in those days.

The Continental Drifters (2001 press photo)

Nuccio: “I think that was one of the first gigs we were playing with the girls officially in the band. Vicki, I remember, was in a suit and had drawn a mustache on her face. I get to the gig, get my dress and throw it on. Susan is handing me lipstick. What the hell, I put lipstick on. Hadn’t even shaved. Then I see Peter and this crazy son of a bitch shaved like Aunt Bee. Shaved his legs and chest. ‘Oh, man, you’d gonna pay for that!’ He went the long yard.

At some point Susan was playing drums, I think, and I was up front singing, and I remember one of the Ringling Sisters coming up and lifting my dress and leaving a $5 bill in my underwear. Before it was over I was tipped like 50 bucks. I thought, ‘I’m never gonna wear anything but at dress to a gig again!’”

Peterson: “Yes, there was more than one Drag Night. It apparently does not take much to get these guys into skirts. But the first one was memorable. Susan and I dressed in double-reverse drag: Since both of us had spent out time on stage at Raji’s dressed in as masculine as way as possible — overalls, flannel shirts, ripped jeans … the ’90s! — we decided to dig through my Bangles regalia and show up as WOMEN! At least looking like a man’s version of what a woman looks like. Or something. The whole transgender conversation wasn’t quite as prevalent then and we just thought it was funny. What was great was how into it the guys were. It was a party. Well, not ALL the guys. Mark Walton looked like a fashion model. But Gary looked like a Viking. He was not ready for this aspect of the Drifters, I think.”

Eaton: “I wasn’t gonna dress in drag. I made a lousy chick. I kinda dressed in drag, but didn’t do it up like Mark. Mark looked fantastic. That was the joke. ‘You look good!’”

Any night could be an adventure, regardless of the attire, often for some of those reasons behind the unclear memories. But the music was always strong.

McGough: “I would go watch Carlo play with anybody. I believe I watched him fall asleep on stage with the band mid-groove and he never dropped a beat … and woke up in time for the fancy ending.”

And there was the night on which rather than playing at Raji’s they walked across the street to play the Pantages — as the opening act for no less than Bob Dylan. Eaton doesn’t remember much about the Drifters’ performance that night, but the spirit of what he saw with the headliner seemed compatible.

Eaton: “At the Pantages there were downstairs dressing rooms for the peons, and upstairs the high-class ones for the stars. I remember walking to the stage and he had his door open and there was a coffee table and a couch and a BIG bottle of Jack Daniels almost gone. They went on, the band starts playing ‘Rainy Day Women,’ he goes on, plugs his guitar in. I’m at the monitor board. He starts playing, but he’s not playing that song. Different time signature and everything. He started singing and it was not that song.”

It was a fun year for the Drifters, but things got, as they say, complicated. The shorthand became to call them the Fleetwood Mac of Americana, though mostly for the intra-band intrigue that marked its existence: A couple of relationships developed (Peterson and Eaton, Cowsill and Holsapple), then a marriage (Cowsill/Holsapple), then a relocation to New Orleans (home of Ganucheau and Nuccio), a split (Peterson/Eaton, with the latter leaving the band), the birth of a child (Cowsill/Holsapple),  a divorce (Cowsill/Holsapple again) and another relationship and marriage (Cowsill and Russ Broussard, who had taken over the drum stool after Nuccio left).  Oh, and Cowsill and Peterson are sisters-in-law, the latter having married the former’s brother John. Add in the requisite business stumbles and you’ve got something of a soap opera.

Holsapple: “It could get volatile. The Drifters were a shouting bunch, antithetical to the quietly disdainful dB’s. Everyone in the band had family dynamics that were diametrically opposed to my own, and yelling figured into play heavily. Beer also made it louder. There’s a key line in [the song] ‘Drifters’ which is, ‘You don’t understand / no YOU don’t understand,’ which inevitably escalated louder during many a heated argument. Everyone talked over everyone else all the time. Sometimes it spilled out into the alley and parking lot behind Raji’s too.”

But through it all, perhaps because of it all, you’ve also got some wonderful music, marked by sharp songwriting, great playing, breathtaking harmonies and an ear for some choice cover songs — all captured wonderfully on the new “Drifted: In the Beginning & Beyond” compilation.

Maché: “I remember the visceral emotion of listening to this amazing band and wondering at just how much sound was produced off that tiny stage, and not really knowing who all the people are that I’d been introduced to a couple of times, and a few minutes later being asked to join them on stage, guitar thrust into my hands, playing ‘Vatican Blues’ or ‘Dallas,’ and then [country-rock singer-songwriter-dynamo] Rosie Flores shows up and within five minutes she’s laying on her back on stage ripping up a solo to ‘Wild Thing,’ and it occurs to me that there’s even more music coming off the stage than what bewildered me before. It was the perfect kind of loud.”

Most of the guest appearances were unplanned and in-the-moment. A few led to other things, though:

Eaton: “Do you remember when [L.A.-based singer-songwriter] Victoria Williams was out opening for Neil Young and couldn’t play and found out she had multiple sclerosis? We heard about that but hadn’t seen her for a while. One night we got to Raji’s, went up to the bar and she was there. We were going with half a band that night. John Convertino [of Giant Sand and later Calexico] was on drums, Dave Catching [Ringling Sisters and later Queens of the Stone Age] on guitar. She was telling us about her travails. Don’t know if we talked her into it, but she played guitar on ‘Boogie Man.’ She hadn’t played in a while, her fingers were bad. But Chris Douridas from KCRW was there and dug it and invited us down the next morning to play on the air. We had to be there at 6 or 7. We were up late, had to be there at the crack of dawn. But there’s a recording of Vic playing with us.”

Over the years the volatility subsided, but reunions were hard to arrange, not due to lingering resentments but to life. There was a 2002 revival at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival with something of a hodgepodge lineup (Ganucheau back in the fold) and a 2003reunion of the original quintet and 2009 set by the New Orleans lineup at the NOLA club Carrolton Station, where Cowsill had been putting on regular “Covered in Vinyl” concerts built around tributes to classic albums. But this set of shows — a Sept. 12 night at the famed New Orleans club Tipitina’s preceding the Santa Monica concerts — mark the first time all 10 members of the various lineups have ever shared a stage. And it’s not about what might have been, or about working out past issues. It’s about celebrating the magic of what was.

Cowsill: Raji’s was my Hogwarts! I learned more at that place about musical community, kindred spirits and music for music’s sake than in all my years and experiences up until that point. I learned how to play guitar, how to write a song, what it meant to be welcomed in as a potential peer to these most talented and truly natural artists. And me … a Cowsill for crying out loud! Yeah, Raji’s as my Hogwarts and the Drifters as my teachers.

Maché: “The lasting impression of Drifters nights at Raji’s was the sense of real community — Los Angeles is so scattered that community on a large scale is almost non-existent. So seeing people from all over Los Angeles come together in that little club was beautiful. You have to remember that this was the heyday if big hair metal bands, and the music industry was pushing that all over town. So people in that community of people who regarded real, passionate music over self-image was very refreshing. Vickie Peterson and Susan Cowsill in flannel shirts and overalls was a perfect illustration. And there were so many people smiling. That’s a big memory.”

Peterson: “This has nothing to do with the music, which was enveloping and comforting and new and familiar to me all at the same time. This is just a memory of how we felt like a gang, a team, a family. There were no formal ‘rehearsals’ — there were nights hanging out at the Batch Pad, playing acoustic guitars, learning new songs. There was no ‘marketing plan,’ or much of a plan at all. It was a band that just needed to be. And I can’t wait to play with these people again.”