Phoenix's Jared & the Mill play Hollywood Bowl with Gibb

Had you asked Jared Kolesar a year ago what he thought Phoenix rockers Jared & the Mill would be doing tonight, there's not much chance his answer would have been, "Probably playing the Hollywood Bowl with the last surviving member of the Bee Gees."

But that's the kind of year these Phoenix indie-folk sensations have been having.

After grabbing the national spotlight in April by staging a bedside concert at St. David's Healthcare in Austin, Texas, for Mason Endres, a fan who'd been hurt when a drunk driver drove through a crowd of pedestrians at the South by Southwest music festival, they hit the road with Barry Gibb in May. And while you'd be hard-pressed to name a single sonic similarity between their sound and Gibb's, the former Bee Gee selected them to open his entire tour.

We spoke to Kolesar as the tour was wrapping up with one final stop -- at the Hollywood Bowl -- to get the inside scoop on this unlikely twist of fate.

Question: So how's the tour been going?

Answer: The tour has been amazing. All of our shows with Barry Gibb have garnered us a pretty good fan base in these newer markets. It's been really awesome to see the kind of response we've been getting from so many people who came to see a different style of music.

Q: Right. Yeah. It doesn't seem like the most compatible bill in the world.

A: Yeah. But you know what? It works out. And all of our headlining shows we've done have been amazing. Last night, we played Santa Barbara. That was fun. We've played in some of the older theaters.

Q: OK, the obvious question would be, "How did you hook up with Barry Gibb?"

A: He was given a stack of CDs to review to find an opener and he didn't like any of the ones his agent gave him. And his agent is actually married to our agent. So our agent, overhearing the conversation, had the other agent hand off our CD to Barry and after the first song, Barry said we were the act that he wanted to play with. It's pretty wild. He'd gone through something like 70 acts before he came upon us.

Q: Have you spent much time with him?

A: He's a really busy dude, but we've probably spent between, like, 10 and 20 minutes with him, chatting. He's a really nice guy.

Q: Did he give you any good advice?

A: He didn't directly give us advice, but watching the way that he handles the media backstage and the fans, you learn a lot just watching somebody operate on his level.

Q: So were you a fan of his music before this?

A: You know, I think of the Bee Gees as the kind of music where if you don't like them, shame on you. It's really easy to groove to. I wouldn't say he was totally always on my radar, but I enjoy listening to him and his band. And on this tour, he's playing a lot of songs he wrote for other people as well, and I had no idea that he wrote the theme song for "Grease." So that's pretty tight. I've gotten to listen to that every show.

Q: Do you have a favorite Bee Gees song?

A: Me and the guys in the van, we groove to "Nights on Broadway." It's a really good tune.

Q: So what's been the best part of doing this tour for you?

A: It was a really cool way to enter the East Coast market. It was our first time playing in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, and we played to thousands of people each of those nights. So it was really cool. However, we can't wait to get home.

Q: Do you have any local shows on the horizon?

A: Yeah, our homecoming show is the Crescent Ballroom on the 14th. That should be a lot of fun.

Details: 8 p.m. Saturday, June 14. Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix. $10; $9 in advance. 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.