On a Western Swing Bender with Lost Weekend

May 17, 4:51 PMSF Music ExaminerDerk Richardson

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Is there a better name for a country band than Lost Weekend?

Ignore the unavoidable TV tangent in the "Lost" part of the moniker but consider Hank Williams' "Lost Highway" (if not David Lynch's). More than this, cast your mind back to 1945 (or some more recent date when it screened on the tube) to the Billy Wilder classic starring Ray Milland, who descends into a four-day alcoholic binge that's more painful to watch than any Britney Spears "gotcha" tape or legit song video.

Milland played Don Birnam, and it's Don Burnham - guitarist and singer - who fronts Lost Weekend. Ah, ha!

Truth be told, the band doesn't play country as we know it today. The San Francisco band, born in Cow Hollow (really) in the 1980s, plays the kind of western swing swung into American musical iconography in the 1930s and '40s by Bob Wills and the Western Playboys with such songs as "San Antonio Rose" and "Lone Star Rag."

I'd say Wills' music was inimitable, but Lost Weekend would prove me wrong. During the 2002 San Francisco Jazz Festival, for instance, this little big band opened for Merle Haggard in a Bob Wills tribute show and actually did the Hag one better in terms of honoring the father of western swing. Of course it's hard to do wrong with multiple-reed player Jim Rothermel, pedal steel player Bobby Black and lead guitarist Mark Holzinger in the fold.

You can check them out below performing the Bob Wills/Tommy Duncan classic "Time Changes Everything," or live in San Francisco, hopefully not after a lost weekend à la John Lennon, Monday, May 19, at 8 and 10 p.m., at the Union Square roots-music club, Biscuits & Blues.