User:Wikijoewoodley/sandbox

Joe Woodard is a writer/journalist (aka Josef Woodard in writing work) and musician-songwriter-guitarist involved in various bands, including Headless Household, flapping, Flapping, Dudley, Lucinda Lane and his own solo albums, both instrumental and vocal. He is also head of the eclectic Household Ink Records label based in Santa Barbara, California, launched in 1987 and now with 40-plus titles in its catalogue.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1958, Woodard's family moved to Santa Barbara a year later and the city has remained his home base.

Beginning in the 1980s, Woodard has been a freelance journalist-critic specializing in diverse forms of music as well as film and fine art. He has contributed to a wide range of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, DownBeat, Guitar Player, Billboard and other music magazines, Entertainment Weekly, Artweek, Opera Now, and the Santa Barbara Independent, where he is currently the Senior Arts Writer. His list of published books includes biographies of jazz musicians Charles Lloyd and Charlie Haden, both for Silman-James Press, and the "satirical romance novel" Ladies Who Lunch.

The flagship band on the Household Ink Records roster is the "hopelessly eclectic" and malleable group Headless Household, with a discography running from its eponymously-titled 1987 LP to 2015's Balladismo. Featured musicians in the band include Woodard, keyboardist Richard "Dick" Dunlap, drummer and studio head Tom Lackner and bassist Chris Symer. Multiple guests have performed and recorded with the group, including saxophonists Tom Buckner and David Binney, vocalists Ellen Turner, Julie Christensen, Nicole Lvoff and Liz Barnitz, trumpeter Nate Birkey and violinists Sally Barr and Gilles Apap.

The rock band flapping, Flapping (originally called flapping, Flapping, FLAPPING) has released three albums. Its 1995 debut album TEX featured Woodard, Lackner, bassist-songwriter-singer Bruce Winter, guitarist-singer Rob Taylor. With the following album from 1996, Montgomery Street, Taylor's spot was taken by singer-guitarist-songwriter Glen Phillips, best known as the leader of the alt rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket, which was on hiatus when Phillips joined the band. After slowly working on the next album, seeyoutonite, (a title referring to a catch phrase of Winter's) in Lackner's Tompound Studio in Santa Barbara, the album was finally released in May of 2020, during the COVID lockdown. The album, with songs written by Woodard, featured cameos from Phillips (singing on "Something for Nothing," "Danger in Numbers" and "Aim of Love"), Parry Gripp on "Wonder in the Backyard," Winter on "Closet World," Jesse Rhodes on "Stinger," Todd Capps on "Another One" and Zach Madden on "Winding Way." The guest list also included backing vocalists Lois Mahalia, Nicole Lvoff and Anna Abbey and pedal steel guitarist Bill Flores.

Woodard was also part of the folk-rock band Dudley, based around the songwriting and vocals of Ellen Turner, and has appeared as guitarist on other recordings. In the late 90s, he and Lackner also performed and recorded the album Malarchitecture with the fusion band Lean-To, also with Los Angeles-based guitarist Brad Rabuchin and bassist Bob Mair.

Press for Headless Household

"Headless Household still seems to think that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Clever without being obnoxious, laid-back without snoozing, their quick-dissolve electric studiohead jazz offers an alternative--not exactly a revolution, more a wink than a nod: We haven't given up, how about you?...Awareness won't get you to heaven, but in this case it gets you pretty far." --Greg Burk, L.A. Weekly 

“No, Headless Household is not an Industrial band. They sound like Miles Davis playing with the Kronos Quartet conducted by Sun Ra with occasional vocals by George Jones and backup singers from A Man and a Woman. Wonderful and wonderfully bizarre. If and when Twin Peaks gets another stab at prime-time TV, Headless Household would be the perfect band to play at the lodge.” --Nick Dedina, Rhapsody.com

“…solid musicianship and an admirable willingness to toss in whatever strikes their fancy.” --Aaron Steinberg, Jazz Times

“Soundwise, it is an eclectic and surprisingly alluring program that covers a variety of genres that, while certainly experimental, remains accessible. The group’s interest in the fusion of electric and acoustic touches is seen from the outset… Overall, a quirky--in a good way--outing from a group that is certainly charting its own course.” --Jay Collins, Cadence

“Music this wildly diverse can never be properly marketed in this age of specialization, but that doesn’t make it any less extraordinary.” --Bill Milkowski, Tower Pulse magazine

“Headless Household achieved regional cult status by the late 1990s, thanks to their quirky and eclectic kind of new music, their relentless live shows and a string of albums….” --All-Music Guide (www.allmusic.com)

“Overall the vibe was great and the music eclectic enough to satisfy any head, household member or not.” –Charles Donelan, Santa Barbara Independent

Discography

With Headless Household


 * Headless Household (1987; vinyl)
 * Inside/Outside USA (1993)
 * ITEMS (1995)
 * Free Associations (1999)
 * mockhausen (2000)
 * post-Polka (2003)
 * Blur Joan (2005)
 * Basemento (2010)
 * Balladismo (2015)

as Joe Woodard


 * Between (2002)
 * Goleta Electric (2022)
 * Wedding Album (On this Day) (2002)

with flapping, Flapping


 * TEX (1995)
 * Montgomery Street (1996)
 * seeyoutonite (2020)

with Dudley


 * Public Nudism (1995)
 * Are Our Oars Out? (1996)
 * Doin' Jack (1998)

with Lean-To


 * Malarchitecture (1997)

Books


 * Conversations with Charlie Haden (Silman-James Press) (2017)
 * Charles Lloyd: A Wild, Blatant Truth (Silman-James Press, 2015)
 * Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM (Granta, 2007) (wrote the chapter “ECM and U.S. Jazz”)
 * The Art of Symeon Shimin (Mercury Press, 2019), wrote a biographical essay

External website

Household Ink Records website