La Botz’s music is not all minor-key sadness. “The music is sweet and tender and lyrics are going a different direction,” he says, “a nice cocktail. If we look directly into our experience of sadness, there’s so much there, so many different shades and flavors, it’s never the same thing and never the same thing twice. There’s always some beauty and sweetness there. That was kind of the point. We live in a society so afraid to feel and have a full experience. This is, in a way, a reaction to that. We’re all totally alone with our feelings. With the music, it’s an opportunity to open up to your own situation.”

 Some folks may have already heard La Botz’s music without even knowing it. An actor as well as a musician, the 39-year-old La Botz played the multiply-tattooed “Reese” in Syvester Stallone’s latest “Rambo.” Reese is part of a group of mercenaries hired to retrieve kidnapped social workers in Burma and fight ruthless warlords. We meet him on the boat floating up-river, playing guitar and singing. Stallone cast him for the film, before even knowing about his music. When he heard La Botz’s last CD, he decided to have La Botz sing two of those tunes. So, one must ask, what’s making an extremely loud, bloody, violent movie with Sly like?

“I’ve done a couple movies, but to do an action movie is a different bag.” Says La Botz, who’s appeared with Steve Buscemi in “Animal Factory” and “Lonesome Jim” and Thora Buurch and Scarlett Johansson in “Ghost World.” When he was cast, he thought, “When are they gonna figure out they hired the wrong guy? But I think it worked out great. You have to learn how to move like you know what you;re doing. Stallone was a great teacher, Me, having no experience with action I had no idea what goes into the choreography. A lot done with real stuff, they brought in hundreds of people with missing limbs and had prosthetic limbs and they’d blow ‘em off, and it looks really gross. The guy who did the special effects also did it for ‘Saving Private Ryan.’”

How pleased was he with the result? “Being an actor, you film all this stuff, don’t know what’s cut out, you’re hopeful stuff you like will show up. The movie’s really, really fast; Stallone does an interesting job of it, things get boiled down to archetypal elements - not a lot of character development. I thought it was good. There are so many things going on. You’re in Thailand, with language barriers, cultural barriers, these Burmese people, tribal people. There were a lot of bad feelings. There was always so much interesting drama on the set.” For the battle scenes, “when you’re out there n the middle and the guns are going off and the blood is flying, you feel like you’re in the middle of the war.”

We saw the movie and really don’t know the answer to this. There’s so much death and destruction – and it does move so quickly – we weren’t sure if Reese made it out alive. “It’s pretty hard to tell,” says La Botz. “A guy who looks a little like me is covered in blood and muck, a missionary who has my build is lying dead. But you see for a split second I’m standing over a dead Asian mercenary.” Which means, he says, with a laugh if there’s yet another “Rambo” down the road, his character could return.

But music is where La Botz is at now. He’son a five-week American tour, his third annual tour where he performs, mostly, at tattoo parlors or tattoo-related bars. “Originally,” says La Botz, “the idea was a combination of things. If you’re a relatively unknown musician, it’s really hard to make any money, to make cold calls to clubs, not to mention you feel like a Budweiser salesman.” And, of course, La Botz is not peddling feel-good music. Of Skip James,  he notes, “his music was so sad he couldn’t get a job as a bluesman.”
    As to the tattoo parlor gigs, he says, “It’s definitely like you build a fan base in a particular area and make some good friends that way. Anybody can come, it’s all-ages, anything goes. Tattoo artists are very interesting mind process. It can by kooky. It’s a scene that’s developed in past five years, people who are into a mixture of music that’s like punk rock, old hillbilly, and delta blues.”
     “I listen to a lot ‘20s and ‘30s era blues stuff, gospel quartets, old hillbilly music, early jazz. I don’t buy new records too much.”
     The new album starts with “Hungry Again (Put Me in a Hole)” and that hole theme is one La Botz returns to later on. A graveyard fixation? “Put me in the hole says it so plainly, it’s the plainest simplest way,” says La Botz. “On the last album, things were a little mythological and abstract. Here I wanted to say it more directly. What says it more directly than being put in a hole? Claustrophobia, in the ground, not much light… “ The show free and should get underway 9-9:30 p.m.

378 Centre St., Jamaica Plain, 617-522-5386 www.myspace.com/thebehan