It's always amazing to be interviewed, asked to play at coffee shop, bar, or club by your friends. And I'm very great full for each opportunity!!! But when an outside source with no idea who I am, who I know, and where I came from listens to my music and offers to do an interview, well that's when I basically pee my pants:)

Thank you so much you brought tears to my eyes<3 Alonso

These College Grads in Journalism are the I.E. Weekly's Bells Toll.
Bell sisters Kady and Jessica
http://www.myspace.com/bells_toll



( ((The Whole interview right here)) )

AlonsoandFriends--thisclose to becoming a golden god

The Bells Toll on IE Rock & Roll

By: Jessica Bell , Kady Bell

“The dreams I had I still believe in . . . I got to spread my wings again and again”

–Alonso Benjamin Chan



So we’ve determined that Alonso Benjamin Chan of Moreno Valley-based group AlonsoandFriends (one word) is the male Penny Lane incarnate—just a humble servant to rock & roll, a music-campaignin’, free-bike-cyclin’ bandaid at heart, whose current project is literally a Bandaid for his aching heart. He sponges Richard Ashcroft vocally, even speaking in Keys to the World tongue, hangs his guitar John Lennon-high and stomps his feet Neil Young-style, lending rhythmic insight into a world of fandemonium. Not to mention that he’s cribbed Ben Fong-Torres’ look and catchphrase.

“Crazy,” he says, sucking a quickly-eroding, watermelon-flavored Blowpop and pulling a double-take as our William Miller-esque interview progresses minus the inevitable question: what do you love about music? (Correct answer: to begin with, everything). We Bells exchange bemused looks, attempting to figure the man beneath the black fatigue jacket. Chan may not plan on retiring from the business of elevating rock stars or parading under an alias in Morocco, but he’s more than a tad like us and the great Lady Goodman.

Hey, we’re all Ashcroft aficionados (music is power, submit to his sound) and at least two of us pit stop at nearby record stores to visit friends when “nothing’s going right, ‘cause nothing ever does.” Chan began visiting his friends at Los Angeles’ Café Bleu in a post-80s rendezvous with Brit-pop and synth, and, after actually encountering obsessions Johnny Marr, the Stone Roses and Brian Wilson, contracted the music-making bug.

Alas, after practically being told his sappy songwriting was crappy with a capital “C” (a bad breakup turned him ultra-reminiscent, costing Chan a band), he abandoned almost famous dreams—“Tiny Dancer” sing alongs and Rolling Stone covers—for a college education. These days he’s joy-songwriting while merging his patchwork influences into a personally quilted sound, perhaps taking the Beatles too seriously by asking for a little help from his comrades—it’s him and the entire universe (as read on MySpace).

“Whatever comes out is going to come out,” Chan says. “After being in a band for so long you kind of do whatever you can to keep it together, so I would write the songs they wanted me to write, but now it’s like ‘Screw you, these are the songs that I have, if you don’t want to play them that’s fine but I’m going to if I get the chance.’”

Maybe for Chan this is merely a think-piece about a guy trying to come to grips with change in the harsh face of reality. Either way, it took Riverside’s annual Saturation Festival and inherent circle of musicians—all seemingly intertwined—to rekindle Chan’s playin’-fire. His former band The Wrecking Stone—described as a combination of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and the Stones—was stubbornly set on sticking to one slot in the rock & roll smorgasbord, unwilling to stomach a shift from stiff to soft (think love is ‘ell). Thankfully his growing group of new “friends” is well versed in the mix-up, playing the outskirts of soul, folk, psychedelic and country with instruments ranging from lap-steel guitar to bongos, and, soon, strings and keys.

Chan’s breakup was one of those “now you have to divide the city” catastrophes that left him questioning his former self and the “we” he’d become. As part of the bandaid process, he joined the well-known bike-cycle gang called the Cycledelics—a group of nearly 50 creative people who come together on a weekly basis. The “gang” even gave him a new nickname—Bubbles, on account of his Blowpop propensities. In fact, they sponsored a stage-packed night at Saturation to aid in his full recovery.

“That night was so crazy, and I jumped on it,” he says. “People have been jumping onstage ever since.”

It’s hard to flee the “Bittersweet Symphony” vibes of Chan’s demo-in-progress until track eight, heard in his sweet-screeching, thickly layered vocals that border on Brit-pop bluesy. Those sappy post-break-up songs are the antonym of crappy, actually, (we’d even boldly go where many have gone before and call them super un-crappy) and, since this unreleased hodgepodge was recorded over several months, quite reflective of reformation.

Apparently all Chan needed was a piggyback ride from a few righteous buds, as he’s now playing the songs he wants to play. And the dreams he had? Well, he still believes in them.

For more information visit: http://www.myspace.com/alonsoandfriends.



If you're an IE-based band and would like the Bell Sisters to hear your music, email Kady and Jessica at kmbell311@aol.com or jnbell311@aol.com.