Boisterous blues from a good time gal

Bony, liposuctioned, designer-wearing divas don’t sing the blues. It’s the big, boisterous broads with something to get off their chests.

San Diego singer/performer Candye Kane has got what those old time babes had to give, and when she takes to the floor of the GLC next week with her brassy brand of jump-blues and swing, you’re gonna feel it!

Stripper, adult film star, teenaged mom from East L.A., Kane doesn’t have to look very hard into her past for blues-worthy material. She’s not afraid to let it all hang out either, literally and figuratively. Undaunted by her Rubenesque figure and generous assets, expect the expected from someone who called her latest CD whole lotta love and posted on her Web site (www.candyekane.com) news that she is selling pillows made from her used brassieres.

While Kane may cut a flamboyant figure, she’s serious about performing and has racked up an impressive list of collaborations/supporting roles over the past 15 years: B.B. King, Cyndi Lauper, Mavis Staples, the Reverend Horton Heat, to name a scant few. A recent addition is her 23-year-old son Evan Caleb, who plays drums in her touring band.

She’s got an arsenal of Hollywood Babylon stories, ("close encounters of the celebrity kind") that could create volumes of trashy memoirs, but, she says her best show biz story involves meeting Tony Bennett. Displaying none of the inherent backstage snobbery, he humoured her star-struck request for album-cover autographs and essentially treated her like someone who counted.

She likes that story she says, because that’s who she aims to be.

"I’m singing for the guy who works all day and comes out and spends his money on drinks for his girlfriend," says Kane.

She’s a working class hero, a lover and a fighter, and you ain’t gonna forget her.

Candye Kane performs with opening act the Big Burlesque Fat Bottom Revue at the Garibaldi Lift Co. next Friday, Sept. 12. Tickets $15 available in advance from the GLC, Bestsellers and through Whistler Entertainment.