back to the show

Friday, April 02, 2004, at 12:35PM

By Eric Richardson

Wednesday night I finally ended my unintentional little hiatus from live music and wandered over to Hollywood to check out Indie Night 8 at the Hotel Cafe. I didn't make it there until around 9:30, so by the time I showed up Gabriel Mann was already well into his set. Though I didn't catch a ton of his stuff I did like what I heard. Saucy Monky was up next and I've written about them many times before, so I don't have that much new to say. Sally Smithwick from Paper Sun played with them on the keys, which was fun. You get the three girls up front and it's hard to even realize you've got a bass guitar and some drums back there. The Woods, whose website is one of the most barren I've ever seen, followed, and I hate describing music so I'll just point you to the music page on their site, where the one scrap of not "coming soon" is a full-length mp3.

Next up was Joe Purdy. We didn't stay for him, but I feel I need to explain that. It's not that Joe Purdy isn't good. He is. I really like his stuff. But if there's one thing he is, it's mellow. I was there with a friend from high school who had flown in from Michigan Wednesday afternoon, so at this point 11:30pm PST was feeling pretty late no matter what. Joe definitely would have put her to sleep, but in a good way. I've done this same thing before, so I felt I owed a little more than just saying we took off.

The whole night was really cool. Cynthia (from Saucy Monky and OlivoiL Records, who put on the show) had good things to say about what the night meant to her. Paraphrasing, it was a night to celebrate the fact that you can focus on one sale at a time, to one person at a time, and eventually end up with a sustainable career. The people there seemed to agree.