Jeff Evans knows the South Bay music scene as well as anyone. At his day job as co-owner of the vinyl-fetishizing indie record shop On the Corner Music in Campbell, Evans is a huge supporter of the scene, and over the last few years he’s had an uncanny knack for forecasting its fate, from the darkest days of the live music drought to its slow revival to the recent crop of offbeat, interesting bands. His own history with the scene, as a drummer and DJ (sometimes under the moniker Jagged Jeff) stretches back to 1996, with the pop-punk band Betty’s Love Child. After a few years, he joined Jimmy Sweet and the Love, which became the popular Bodies in the Basement. That heavy-blues rock outfit worshipped T-Rex, the Stooges and even more primary rock legends.
“They listened to ’60s garage stuff, the Sonics and those types of bands,” Evans remembers. “I got the best musical lesson from those guys, and that’s what I loved playing.”
After Bodies broke up, he was in a poppier Franz Ferdinand–type outfit called the Entertainment Committee that, while it did very little as a group, did feature several musicians who would go on to do great things in the South Bay scene—Will Sprott, leader of the Mumlers, that group’s bassist Paolo Gomez and Ryan Summers of Doctor Nurse. (Of Sprott, Evans recalls: “It was always too loud for him. He would wrap his head in a towel.”
The point of reviewing Evans’ long and varied history in local bands is what he says now about his current project: “What I’m playing now with Dirty Pillows is in a weird way the end result of all those bands.
In other words, he’s found his dream gig. Formed in 2008 with guitarist-vocalist Alejandro Villaneva (who goes by his longtime nickname “Millhawse”), Dirty Pillows’ music celebrates the pair’s shared influences—Modern Lovers, the Damned, Talking Heads—but captures the raw, rushing sound of the earliest days of punk and post-punk.
“There’s a certain aesthetic we like to adhere to,” admits Villaneva, “sort of late-’70s and early-’80s punk in its various forms.”
Villaneva also found Dirty Pillows a refuge, after stifling what he really wanted to play in his previous band.
“Between songs at rehearsals, I would play these jagged, angular riffs, but I knew it would never work in that band,” he says.
The most startling element of Dirty Pillows is how much sound one duo can produce.
“It sounds really full,” agrees Evans. “And Alex really sings, you know? He’s a crooner. The first time I heard him sing, I thought of that first Strokes record.”
All that experience in other bands has convinced both members that it’s smart to stay a duo, allowing the group to remain their ideal vehicle.
“When you’re a two-piece, you’re limited in some ways,” admits Evans. “But at the same time, you don’t have to worry about, ‘Is everybody on board for this?'”
