Photo by Jim Herrington via Los Straightjackets - Faceboook
Los Straightjackets
Los Straightjackets
Nashville’s much-loved surf instrumental masked masters Los Straitjackets bring their 30th anniversary tour to Milwaukee this Friday at Shank Hall with a special guest, co-founder Danny Amis, aka Daddy-O Grande, back in action for the night.
Guitarist Eddie Angel shared his memories of forming the band in 1994 with Amis, along with drummer Jimmy Lester and bassist Scott Esbeck.
Amis and Angel’s friendship was sparked years earlier after Amis heard Angel covering a Link Wray song with another band. Angel, who has also played with the Planet Rockets, Neanderthals and others, would go on to record a tribute to Wray, Eddie Angel Plays Link Wray, on his own Spinout Records in 2006.
“When he saw my band, he said, ‘Man, I never thought I would hear anyone play Link Wray in Nashville,’” Angel says.
If at first …
The band had begun life in the late ‘80s as a trio, The Straitjackets, featuring Angel, Amis and Lester. But that band kind of petered out, and Angel moved to Chicago. When he came back to Nashville in 1994, he moved in briefly with Amis, and suggested they invite Lester over to play the old songs. Little did Angel know how much his life would change after that idea.
“Really at this point, I thought we were going to do it for fun,” he says. “I had no intention of doing an instrumental band. We had tried it once. I thought we’ll just play for our friends once a month maybe in town and that would be it, you know. But Danny – unbeknownst to me – he was going through a midlife crisis, I guess. He had a good job. He was working for Nashville Now, which was like a TV show in Nashville, but he was ready to quit and wanted to get into a band again.”
They kept rehearsing, and meanwhile, Amis had developed an interest in Mexican culture and went on several trips to Mexico City and began bringing back Lucha Libre wrestling masks, which would soon provide them their signature look.
“I remember our first gig in Nashville was opening for Man or Astroman?” he says. “We were backstage getting ready to go on (with the masks) and we almost chickened out. We thought, ‘We’re going to wear these, really? Our friends are going to laugh at us.’ But we decided to put them on and knew the first gig we had a winner and stayed with it.”
Things would move quickly after that night. They ended up recording their debut album, The Utterly Fantastic and Totally Unbelievable Sound Of Los Straitjackets with Ben Vaughn in 1995 for Upstart Records. Soon after, they got a booking agent and hit the road.
“We got into a van and toured non-stop, and, no pun intended, but we caught a wave because Pulp Fiction had just come out, and all of a sudden there were surf instrumental bands everywhere, every city we went to, including Milwaukee and like Dayton, Ohio, you know,” he says. “We just kept doing it: touring in the van, writing songs and putting out records. After three years of doing that, we were making a living.”
The improbability of the instrumental band’s long journey is not lost on Angel, who says after being in several other bands that “crashed and burned,” he knows he found something special in Los Straitjackets.
“Whenever there was a time when I would think about quitting,” he says. “I would say to myself, ‘Man, it took me so long. I worked so hard to do this. It was so improbable to get here. I just can quit.’ And I would just keep doing it.”
New releases and the return of Daddy-O Grande
The band has two new releases on the horizon, one with Nick Lowe, who they had been touring and recording with since 2014, and a new Los Straitjackets album in 2025.
Amis, who left the band in 2010 after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, is returning to play four shows with the band, including their Shank Hall show.
“He’s healthier than he has been in years,” says Angel.
Angel’s son, Simon, aka Senor Taco, will be playing second guitar with Los Straitjackets on the tour and will be opening with his own band Wasted Major.
