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David Nigel Lloyd & His Mojave Desert Ceilidh Band
Black and white photos of live performances are by James Culnan
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| at Bebop Records: May 4, 1988 |
| DNL & His MDCB Mark I |
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| at The Basement Coffee House, 1986 |
DNL & His MDCB (Mark I)
As I say, Dave Beltane was the only LA bassist who could play like Ashley Hutchings. I was already working with Brandon Curtis,
AKA Straitjacket on a trad/DNL album and Dave had already put down a bass track for it. The name Mojave Desert Ceilidh Band
was a joke that Jeff Klein and I thought up. We didn't think anybody in LA knew what a ceilidh was. We thought it would be
funny to let people get into the band's shows for free if they could pronounce 'ceilidh' correctly. Not only that, we guffawed,
when we performed in Britain, audiences would be challenged to pronounce 'Mojave' correctly [scroll to bottom of page]. So,
needing a band to give substance to the joke, we brought Dave and Straitjacket in.
Jeff was completely eccentric. His cottage was filled with LPs of about every kind of music: Indian film music, Mississippi
fife and drum music, the Police, Steve Reich, Sibelius. He had tapes of Ethiopian radio he had made in the 1960s when as a
boy he had lived there: haunting broadcasts of a DJ who had no discs to jockey but had an old organ with preset settings for
waltz, beguine, tango etc. The tapes were simply of the DJ improvising to these percolating rhythms through the Saharan night.
Jeff played keyboards also and sometimes a chordal sequence would so intrigue him that he would tape down the keys of his
synthesizer so that that sequence could play all night while he slept. He had as many books as LPs and tapes. The books were
on music of course but he also read Sufi poetry and was starting to collect and use cook books from the same parts of the
world as was the music to which he was listening.
In Jeff's tiny front room there was usually a small drum kit set up between his bed and the doorway into his kitchen. You
would have to squeeze yourself round a crash cymbal to get into the kitchen . There was a set of tablas by a stack of records
(or was it books?) by the front door also.
And now here were Dave and Straitjacket squeezed into this cramped space rehearsing with Jeff and me. Jeff was the only drummer
I knew with whom you could play an acoustic instrument unamplified. And to me, My Mojave Desert Ceilidh Band sounded lovely.
Mostly we played a basement in Silverlake called THE BASEMENT and BEBOP RECORDS, a fantastically eclectic record store and
venue in Reseda. At our first BASEMENT gig I introduced the band with mock (or should I say 'mac?') Scottish names: Jeff McKlein,
David Nigel McLloyd. Strait MacJacket and —Dave was so excited about the prospect of his new Scottish name: would it
be Dave McBeltane? But I was feeling mean.— Dave Beltanovich. Strangely it stuck.
Jeff inherited a substantial sum of money when his mother died suddenly. He rented a house out in the desert to recoup and
began composing computer-based music. Quite fine stuff sharing a certain commonality with the music of Erik Satie, I felt.
Jeff, however, got less and less intrigued with the drive back to LA for Ceilidh Band rehearsals and gigs.
The album that came out of this, AN AGE OF FABLE, was very favorably reviewed. However it chronicled the band's formation
only. There is no recording of what we actually sounded like as a band.
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| AN AGE OF FABLE (cover art by gita) |
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| (drawings from gita's sketch book) |
DNL & His MDCB (Mark II)
I asked John MacAdams with whom I'd played in De De Troit's band to replace Jeff on drums. Our first gig with John was at
BEBOP and there is some marvelous video of that evening.
The second lineup of DNL & his MDCB were quite a bit louder. I even got out my old Stratocaster on some tunes. John played
drums and, on occasion, blues harmonica which was quite confusing as (a) it wasn't expected in a Celtic band and (b) it took
a while to realize that that great sound was coming from the drummer. He played both at the same time.
Except for Dave, we all had small children back then. So, the MDCB II was very much a family band. We had opened for the Oyster
Band at the Palomino in 1990. For some reason our children choose our clothes for this gig. Naturally, we hit the stage looking
like a cross between a ship-load of very friendly pirates and a slumber party. The Oyster Band dressed in their black leather
jackets, jackboots and sun-glasses of course felt we were atavistic hippies, typically vapid and unengaged Californians.
We got around, playing up in Tulare County and then touring (our infamous Pub Crawl '91) up the coast, opening up the Lord
Buckley Memorial Festival that year; playing Big Sur; Cindy Odum's Continental Drift show and Tam Paterson's Eagle's Whistle
in Santa Cruz and Monterey respectively. Returning to Lisa Ekstrom's Victorian House in Santa Cruz after a late gig where
a young woman had gifted me with a volume of her very revealing poetry, I read to the road-weary lads as we retired. Our comments
and witticisms did not go unheard, however. A closet door —we had thought it was a closet door— swung open and
out walked another young woman, this one wearing nothing more than bra and panties. We had never seen her before. "I want
you to know I can hear every word you are saying and I think you are all disgusting!" she said and disappeared back into the
depths of what we had thought was the closet. Come to think of it, there was a whole raft of nice folks we alienated on that
trip.
The trip to LA from our home in the Sierra's grew less and less entertaining in the early 90s. With friends Jerry Strull on
electric guitar, and Nancy Johnston on bodhran and vocals, and with Spike Stewart, Frank Doubleday, and gita armed with Hi-8
cameras, The Mojave Desert Ceilidh Band played its last gig at the 1992 Lord Buckley Memorial Celebration.
If not LA's only Celtic folk rock band of the time, we were certainly one of only a small handful. Such bands are legion today,
of course. MDCB mark II recorded four songs only. A pity, indeed.
| DNL & His MDCB mark II |
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| pic by Chris Mierlescu |
| Our Motto |
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ceilidh (KAY-lee): Scottish gaelic meaning a get-together for singing and dancing.
Mojave (moe-HAH-vay): a desert not found in Scotland
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