David Gasten & the City Kids

"The Deacon Don't Like It"

Photo by Bryce Boyer.	Previously Unreleased. Recorded 2010 [USA].
	David Gasten & the City Kids "The Deacon Don't Like It" (lo bitrate)

 

David Gasten & the City Kids are a Los Angeles-based group that play an intensified Jump Blues sound that they call “Heavy Jump Blues.” David Gasten, the band’s entertainer frontman, is also the producer of the This is Vintage Now compilation. David Gasten & the City Kids make their recording debut here with an intensified rendition of an old gospel blues song called “The Deacon Don’t Like It”. The version of “The Deacon Don’t Like It” on This is Vintage Now is a rough mix from The Deacon Don’t Like It EP, a currently unfinished four-song recording that will hopefully be completed and released to the public sometime in 2012.

David Gasten was mentored as a post-vaudeville entertainer for two years by a “Blatalian” (“Black” Italian) entertainer named Little Anthony. Little Anthony was managed by a friend of Jack Ruby’s (Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin) in the 1960’s, and is best known for being the first white performer to headline the previously all-black, Harlem-based road show Charles Taylor’s Cotton Club Revue.  Gasten also worked as a swing DJ for Dr. Miles Jones, a language and memory specialist by day and swing dance instructor by night, who taught a hard-jumping swing dance style he learned and mastered in Paris, France. It was the combination of these two experiences that began Gasten’s development of the Heavy Jump Blues sound.

Currently, David Gasten & the City Kids embraces a transitional Vintage style that is something of an intensified fusion of Jump Blues, Booker T and the MG’s-style blues/soul, and rock and roll. But according to this interview with David Gasten, when the transition into the full Heavy Jump Blues sound is complete, “[B]e prepared for a shock! Imagine an entertainer that’s a three-way mix of Bryan Ferry, Iggy Pop, and Freddie Mercury that fronts a show like Gary Glitter and the Glitter Band except even more intense, with a ‘dirty’-sounding, saxophone-based horn section with no annoying trumpets, and a rhythm sound that’s so danceable it shakes most all the wallflowers off the wall and onto the dance floor.”  And despite the 1970’s references mentioned here, it will be completely and unmistakably Vintage. More as we go...