WACO BROTHERS with Jake La Botz and Jon Langford & Alice Spencer of the Bright Shiners at The Cedar

Shaking off the plague days like a snake sheds its skin, the WACO BROTHERS stumble out of the empty, burning desert with a fierce thirst and an epic new album: The Men That God Forgot, their first collection of original tunes since 2016.

Jake La Botz’s rough and tumble Chicago upbringing took him from juvenile delinquency and punk rock to learning blues from the last of the Delta bluesmen. From there, with guitar in tow, he made his way across the U.S.A. until he hit the end of the line in Hollywood where an improbable acting career began to unfold.After getting clean from heroin at thirty years old, La Botz became a Buddhist meditation practitioner and teacher. He also took his bluesy guitar licks to the Greater Mt. Zion Church in South Central L.A. where he steeped himself in gospel music. Ever since then La Botz has been putting out his own brand of Gospel-noir Americana. The eccentric stories, characters, and underlying spiritual messages often heard in his songs come to a head on his latest album Hair on Fire.Among more than twenty film and TV credits, La Botz has acted in True Detective, Rambo, and On the Road. His most recent film, D.O.A., stars fellow musician John Doe from the punk band X.Beyond music and acting, La Botz is also a writer. A collection of short fiction is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press and a graphic memoir is also in the works.

Jon Langford's been in more bands than you have digits- and that's true even if you were born with a few extras! From his early days in Mekons, Delta 5,Three Johns and even Sisters Of Mercy to a veritable explosion of one-off recordings and performances with more names than we could ever hope to list in full. A Wikipedia description for this group,The Bright Shiners (described therein as 'circa 2022 through at least 2023,in Northern California') provides some sense of the complex taxonomy needed just to keep track of Jon's massive oeuvre. Happily, that's an understated description of a serious new outlet for his endless creativity, and The Bright Shiners' recording activities have produced a full album, Where It Really Starts, the first recording in a collaboration with Tamineh Gueramy, Alice Spencer,and Jon's frequent musical partner, John Szymanski.