This past Monday night in Los Angeles, a collection of funk players from the local scene headed to the 120-capacity Gold-Diggers Bar for Very Good Mondays, the long-running weekly live funk series created by Dumpstaphunk trombonist Alex Wasily. As always, the two-set show featured no covers—the golden rule of Very Good Mondays—but this one did feature something that had never happened during the 158 previous editions of Very Good Mondays that preceded it: a surprise performance by Stevie Wonder.
But this isn’t just a story about a sit-in. It’s a story about how a local music scene long derided for its closed-door stigma has rallied around a small but mighty residency and turned it into a weekly summit of community and musicianship that’s open to all.
As Wasily explained to Live For Live Music by phone in the days after the Stevie Wonder Very Good Mondays sit-in, the earliest seeds of the series were planted in August 2020 when Dumpstaphunk was recruited by Netflix to record the soundtrack for an as yet unreleased animated movie. “We recorded in L.A. and we lived at the Gold-Diggers Hotel across the street from the studio for six weeks in this NBA bubble-style recording session. Gold-Diggers has an incredible hotel and studio, as well. The whole idea of Gold-Diggers is that you record in the studio [Gold-Diggers Sound], you live in the hotel [Gold-Diggers Hotel], and then you party or see music downstairs in the bar [Gold-Diggers Bar]—’Drink. Sleep. Record.’ It’s their literal motto. So we did this pandemic bubble and recorded and lived in the hotel and were not allowed to go anywhere, so I was in Gold-Diggers every day for 55 straight days. It was kind of like prison, it was crazy.”
With Dumpstaphunk, like most bands, still sidelined from touring due to the pandemic, Wasily continued to hang around Gold-Diggers. “At the end of 55 days,” he continued, “you get to know the staff really well, and I have bartending experience, so I started helping with the bar since the band wasn’t on the road.” He was eventually hired as a bartender at Gold-Diggers on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights. “It was a very chill job,” he recalled, “Getting a bartending job in L.A. is pretty difficult, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I like bartending. Something fun to do on the side.’”
When clubs in L.A. reopened in full force in June 2021, Wasily volunteered to help fill Gold-Diggers on a typically slow Monday night by booking a funk show. “They gave me that [first] Monday,” he explained, “and I was like, ‘Dude, I’ll fill the club,’ so I called four musicians and we just made s— up on a Monday. … It completely sold out, and the club was like, ‘Yo, I guess we could do it next week if you want.’”
With Wasily at the helm curating new groups of musicians each week, Very Good Mondays continued to blossom from there. “Back then it was called Lo-Fi Mondays. We didn’t even know what we were doing. We didn’t know what it was called, but we knew it was fun. It was like a musician hang, ’cause Monday is kind of like our Saturday. So the next week I got a similar but different lineup and put ’em up there and the same thing happened. It was super packed. … I just told them, ‘Make s— up. Don’t play songs, just make up some funky s—.
“Then, a couple weeks in, we decided the official rule is, ‘no covers.’ You cannot play anything anyone recognizes. You’re welcome to play your own original music. If you wrote the song, if you produced the song, you own it, then you can sing it.”
Despite his own bonafides as a performer, when it comes to Very Good Mondays, Wasily’s role as the series’ curator comes first. “99% of the time I’m organizing and bartending. I’m not playing. So I’ll sit in and bring my horn week after week, sometimes play in the second set or whatever, but I’ve only booked myself four times, I think.”
“When I lived in Chicago, I threw parties all the time,” he went on. “They were just called ‘funk parties,’ and we’d sell 600 tickets and play a warehouse on the South Side of Chicago somewhere deep, so I have experience in throwing a party. I guess you could say that was my early foray into show promotions [laughs]. But I understand that being a performing musician and being a promoter that runs successful, week-after-week sellouts is rare. I know that is rare and I am proud of it.”
That task is particularly tricky in Los Angeles, he added, a city whose music scene is notoriously exclusive. “There is no excuse for this town to not have some live music stuff going on every night of the week, not just Monday. It’s like, 15 million people live here, and the fact that our little 100-person club is the hang right now for our scene is a bummer, man. I wish there was more. I would be happy if people started Very Good Tuesday, Very Good Wednesday. This town can feel really lonely, honestly, but everyone from the door guy to the bartenders to the bar backs to the staff at Gold-Diggers on Monday make sure the number one thing is that people feel welcome and encouraged to be part of a community. That makes a big impact.”
“There’s just a lot of closed doors out here,” he added. “There’s a lot of ‘you got to know someone,’ and on Mondays you don’t got to know anyone. Just come, and you’re part of the family. We say it literally every week: I’ll get on stage at the end of the show I’ll be like, to everyone who’s here for the first time, ‘Welcome to the newcomers. You’re part of the family now. You got a place to come hang out on Mondays.’ We do that every week. It’s important.”
“Fast forward three years,” Wasily continued, “and [Gold-Diggers is] borderline at capacity every single Monday. Everyone is welcome, of course, but our scene especially, the funk/soul/hip-hop/R&B scene, really shows up there week after week. I just get a quartet [or a quintet], call some friends and say, ‘Yo, you want to go play two sets of just making s— up?’ Gold-Diggers gave us a super friendly artist deal, especially because it’s on Mondays. They really do care about the artist community. And it’s only 10 bucks, and it’s on Mondays, and it’s at Gold-Diggers in East Hollywood. And it works.”
Wasily credits the inclusive, musician-focused environment cultivated by Very Good Mondays with contributing to the series’ success. “I think that’s another reason why the cats that I call will say yes, because I call people that are way out of my league.”
Ahead of the 159th edition of Very Good Mondays, Wasily did just that: “I called [keyboardist] Wayne Linsey to play last Monday. He’s played with everyone on the face of the Earth. He just MD’d a portion of the Democratic National Convention.” Linsey was game, so he assembled a lineup of his fellow local heavyweights for the gig including bassist Brandon Brown (a.k.a. Pastor Funk), guitarist Nate Foley, drummer Gorden Campbell, and saxophonist DeVaughn Durham.
When Wasily was walking to Gold-Diggers for work on Monday, he recalled, he received a call from Pastor Funk asking if the band for the evening could add a sixth player: “He’s like, ‘Hey, is it cool if we have a special guest tonight?’” Wasily recounted. “I was like, ‘Yeah, of course. What’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘Bro… it’s Stevie Wonder.’”
Much like Very Good Mondays as a whole, the idea for the Stevie sit-in had come about via word of mouth within the L.A. music community. “Brandon Brown, also known as Pastor Funk, has played with Stevie before. The drummer, Gorden Campbell, has played with Stevie. And then Wayne Linsey is friends with him. So Stevie got word that they were playing, and it was one of his sons’ birthday on Monday, so he wanted a place to come and hang out with his son and throw a party, and he chose Gold-Diggers.”
“When you get those calls,” Wasily continued, “you never really know if it’s going to happen or not, but you prepare. You tell security, you tell the whole team, like, ‘Yo, there’s going to be like a 20-person party rolling through, headed by Stevie Wonder and his wife and his kids and his whole family.’ You just get ready. The hardest part is not wanting to freak out and just call everyone and be like, ‘Yeah, Stevie’s coming’ [laughs]. You don’t know if he’s coming. And even then if he comes, you just don’t want to tell everyone because then it becomes a whole thing.”
“So, I’m sitting there behind the bar just in my head like, ‘Oh my God, dude, this might actually happen.’ We set up a second keyboard for him and a microphone and everything, and sure enough, during the first set, in come, Stevie and 20 people, and they take over the back little area of the bar that we roped off from them.”
“I didn’t think Stevie wanted to play, you know?” Wasily said. “We didn’t expect anything. But sure enough, at the second set, when I heard a groove I wanted to go play on, I went and got my horn out, and as I’m walking up to the stage, I saw Stevie walking his way to the stage with his assistant, as well. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, dude, Stevie Wonder’s about to play, or something, and the crowd is going [wild]. I mean, dude, we had a capacity crowd Labor Day and everyone’s phones are out and everyone’s tripping. And he got up and, over the groove the band was already playing, pulled out a harmonica, and took a wicked solo over the groove that them dudes made up. He seamlessly joined into the band, which is something that we try to say all the time. We’re like, ‘If you’re going to sit in, play with the band, don’t just do your own thing.’ And of course, the master of masters does that, and then over that groove he starts singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to his son—his ‘Happy Birthday’.”
Related: A Day In Your Celebration: How Stevie Wonder Helped Establish MLK Day As A National Holiday
“He slipped into another tune. I can’t remember what it was—I kind of blacked out in that moment, dude, I won’t lie. And then he sat down at the keyboard and said, ‘I want to play a song that I wrote a long time ago,’ and then did (1974 Rufus/Chaka Khan hit) “Tell Me Something Good” in its entirety with everyone in the crowd absolutely going off singing. It was mayhem. And the band of course played [along with] that.” Alex Wasily even got a solo in on his trombone during the rendition.
“He was super kind and super friendly and so cool to me,” Wasily reflected on the experience. “He let people come up to him in the back [of the room]. He wasn’t really roped off, he was just sitting at a table, but everyone got to come up on their own and pay their respects and say, ‘You changed my life.’ And I think he wanted to hang out, which is… it’s really cool. He sat in and then hung out pretty much until the bar closed.”
That Stevie Wonder-led “Tell Me Something Good” was a full-circle moment for Very Good Mondays. If you’ve ever seen or heard a funk superjam before, you know that all roads tend to lead to a handful of classic funk tracks. Thanks to Very Good Mondays‘ hard “no covers” rule, however, those autopilot favorites have never figured in on Mondays at Gold-Diggers. As Wasily mused, “When Stevie Wonder comes in, everyone’s like, ‘Oh dude, but he played ‘Tell Me Something Good’. That’s a cover. And we’re all like, ‘He wrote that song, bro.’”
After 158 weeks of spontaneous creativity, active community-building, and devout golden rule-following, this weekly funk residency got its first-ever rendition of one of the most famous funk songs of all time while maintaining its long-running commitment to individual creativity: You can play recognizable songs at Very Good Mondays, but only if they’re your songs. You can play “Tell Me Something Good”, but only if you’re Stevie Wonder.
“People clown on L.A. all the time, but I swear, man, the community here is thriving. There are really awesome, cool musicians everywhere willing to do that kind of stuff, and it’s inspiring. I can only hope to be 1/100 of that level of cool at Stevie’s age. My God, even 1/1000 of how cool that dude is. That was a life-changing moment for me and for a majority of the people in the club, I think, to have a private Stevie Wonder concert for half an hour. … It just goes to show you that community is above all, man. The music is great, but if there’s people hanging and having a good time and everyone’s being cool, people are just drawn to that.”
Alex Wasily has plenty of ideas about how to continue to grow Very Good Mondays. He records every show, he explained, and is preparing a strategic release of what he calls “the music of the Mondays” from his 159-show cache of three-hour recordings. But for now, as always, he’s just looking toward next week, when a new group of musicians will take up the Monday mantle at Gold-Diggers. While no one knows what exactly it will sound like, a few things are certain: 1). It will contain no covers; 2). It will continue its mission of uniting the L.A. music scene as an inclusive community; and 3). It will be Very Good.
Below, check out photos and videos of the Stevie Wonder sit-in during the 9/2/24 edition of Very Good Mondays at Gold-Diggers in East Hollywood. Follow along on Instagram to keep up with this growing tradition—and head down to East Hollywood one Monday to check it out yourself. After all, it only costs $10.
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The post Stevie Wonder Sits In At 120-Cap Los Angeles Bar During ‘Very Good Mondays’ [Photos/Videos/Interview] appeared first on L4LM.
