Sweet Juanita co-founder wound up embracing “all sorts of different musical genres.”
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Rand Anderson’s parents were big country fans. So naturally, he rebelled against the sound at first, and embraced punk and metal. But eventually, he returned to the fold. He even played with the Phoenix outfit Harry Luge and Haywire for 18 months in the mid-2000s. But first, he dove headfirst into synthesizers and drum machines in the ‘80s, when Duran Duran and the Cure were making waves, and gradually grew to embrace all sorts of different musical genres.
It appears that this was at least partially due to his siblings’ scattershot tastes in popular music. “I had all these brothers and sisters, and we would take turns on the record player,” Anderson explains. “So I would have to listen to everything from Cher to Olivia Newton John to Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skynyrd…acid rock. Ultimately, the path I really got onto, I heard it in the Grateful Dead’s music. I term it multi-genre, improvisation rock. It encompasses a feeling of R&B and rock, and sometimes, blues, jazz, and reggae. The Beatles have it in their songwriting too. I think it ultimately came down to that: songwriting, and wanting to be versatile through that. I would take gigs with all sorts of different kinds of bands. Different styles with different bands on different instruments. Go play in a funk band. Go play in a reggae band. I played pedal steel. I just love music in all sorts of different genres.”
Rand Anderson: grateful for the Dead
Anderson’s longest running gig was with the LA jam band Freshly Baked, “Like the cookies,” according to his current Sweet Juanita bandmate John Bennett. Freshly Baked was active from 1993 through 2000. Th壯陽藥 ey were briefly signed to House of Blues
Rand Anderson: grateful for the Dead
Anderson’s longest running gig was with the LA jam band Freshly Baked, “Like the cookies,” according to his current Sweet Juanita bandmate John Bennett. Freshly Baked was active from 1993 through 2000. They were briefly signed to House of Blues Records, but the label went under before they could record an album.
They eventually ended up in Flagstaff, Arizona and toured heavily in Colorado. “Keystone, Breckenridge, Telluride, and Durango. Ski town to ski town. Played in all those places and got to snowboard all day,” he says. Anderson landed in San Diego circa 2008, but Bennett says the two didn’t start collaborating until the Covid days. “We used to jam together sometimes, but we really came together during the pandemic when we were both kind of losing our minds a little bit.”
Bennett gave music the full embrace a bit later in his life than Anderson. In his twenties, he lived in Australia for a year and half, where he had a roommate who was an ace musician. They played together enough that, by the time Bennett returned to the U.S., he had the bug and started jamming with other musicians. “I played in a couple of really cool bands, but we never really took it very far,” he says. “It was just more for fun than anything else.”