It's one in the afternoon, and the women of Killian's Angels are having breakfast. We're at the Sherwood Forest Café inside the Excalibur, where lead singer and guitarist Beth Mullaney, bassist Ginger Bruner and drummer Nan Fortier are working their way through coffee, eggs, hash browns and a pancake. Yes, one pancake between the three of them.
The trio, along with Satomi Hofmann, Dolly Coulter and Lisa Viscuglia, constitute the aforementioned all-female, Celtic bar band. But their music is more than just Celtic, they've got aspirations outside the bar scene, and they may even welcome a male into their ranks in the near future (only temporarily, of course).
The Angels have played everywhere from your standard-issue Irish pubs to a lumberjack convention at the Rio ("That was a weird gig, man," Bruner says), and they're booked Mondays for the rest of the year at the Excalibur's Minstrel's Lounge, bringing their mix of Irish folk, rock, pop and country to unsuspecting tourists from around the globe. Just don't call them a lounge act.
"We're bringing Killian's Angels to the lounge, instead of bringing the lounge to Killian's Angels," Mullaney says. They're still playing various other shows around town, and they'll be busy on St. Patrick's Day, with sets heavy in traditional Irish music at the Fremont Street Experience.
Just as they're not a typical lounge act, the Angels aren't your typical bar band, either. Although an average set includes covers of everything from Alanis Morissette and The Proclaimers to Van Morrison and The Waterboys, the band also has a whole repertoire of originals, represented on their recent 12-track, self-titled CD.
"We don't want to not do any of the original stuff," Mullaney says, so they throw in quite a few of their own tunes even at the lounge gigs. "People respond well to it, they really do. It gets to be that fun thing where they're singing along."
There's even an Angels fan by the name of Robert Valentine who's been to every single show save one—when his mother died. "We've had people just be walking by, stop in their tracks, come in, sit down, and then tell us afterwards that we saved them a lot of money at the tables," Bruner says.
It's that kind of appeal that sets the Angels apart, and puts them just as much at home playing for the culturati at First Friday as for vacationing families from Nebraska. While most band members have day jobs (not, however, ones that prevent them from eating breakfast at 1 p.m.), they see the Angels as their top priority. Bruner recently quit KNPR after 17 years because the station wanted to switch her to a time slot that would conflict with the band's gigs. Fortier, who drums for the Blue Man Group, is taking 10 months off to help launch the new Blue Man show in Berlin, but she'll be back. "Nan's our drummer," Mullaney says simply, though a replacement (the aforementioned potential male) will of course be necessary in the interim. Mullaney jokes that they will make the new drummer wear a dress, regardless of gender.
A few days later, I catch the band in their native habitat, the ubiquitous Vegas Irish pub ("It's the sports bar of the aughts," Bruner says). At Brendan's inside the Orleans, even short a member, the Angels fill the bar with their eclectic music. You could add "multi-instrumentalist" to each member's job description, since they all play several instruments, sometimes during the same song. Although the place is full of chatter, when a song ends, everyone cheers. A friend of mine keeps requesting "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)," and to the band's great credit, they refuse to play it. There seems to be more camaraderie between the band and patrons than with the average bar band. Valentine sits front and center.
If anyone can bridge local culture and tourist culture, it's Killian's Angels. They may not be there yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some hipsters start filtering into the Excalibur to catch the band's set. "I would love to get more people to come there on Mondays and have it be this weird thing that can kind of start," Mullaney says, "where people are going to a Vegas lounge on the Strip, and seeing something very unusual."