Going to concerts at Royce Hall always feels like going to a football game: you park in a random UCLA lot, then walk half a mile across campus in the hopes of seeing a winner. But Valentine’s Day night, as my best gal and I hoofed it past deserted science labs in the direction of a gathering throng of lanky people in their woolen best, most paired up and holding hands, I felt like we were approaching something less collegiate and more magical, almost like a quiddich match.
Tuesday night’s first filmic performance by the band ADULT. (for there were two back-to-back performances) was full of familiar faces as well as just plain full. Local electronic intelligentsia, from theremin players (Kevin Li of Seksu Roba) to three-year-old impressers (DJ Lance Rock from Yo! Gabba! Gabba!) sat captivated as the Brian Eno prelude faded away, the Silent Movie Theater went dark, and images of a woman’s legs and pant suit skirt stood starkly on the screen, motionless, even as ricocheted sounds of electronic knocks and phlangers bubbled up from either side of the stage. Nicola Kuperus’s horror film “DECAMPMENT” had begun.
Forty years ago, Jack Nicholson and a bunch of dudes who would go on to do Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces co-wrote their first avant-garde, marijuana-laced cinematic masterpiece. It’s purpose: to bring a pre-fab boy band called the Monkees out of the teenie bopper magazines and into the hearts of hippies. It succeeded at the former, but not so much at the latter–no amount of fourth-wall breaking could shatter their image as an artificial construct to the crowd of rockers now keepin’ it real with fourteen minute guitar solos at the Monterey Pop Festival.
In hindsight, however, the Monkees’ movie Head (the idea was that the next film’s ad could say “From the People Who Gave You Head!“) is a lot less goofy than it seemed at the time. Appearances by Dennis Hopper, Sonny Liston, Frank Zappa, and Toni Basil, shocking visual references to violence both real and cartoonish, and satires of the sappy pop cultural milieu of the time, themselves included, make this feel like a movie that’s saying something, even if nobody quite knows what that something is. »continue reading Head: Monkees Movie Comes Home Again
An Invitation, by Inara George and Van Dyke Parks, is a truly welcoming and rewarding album. Since she’s performing songs from the album at Largo this weekend, today we quiz Inara on some of the subtleties of its lyrics, and ask her to share the joy of collaborating with one of modern music’s greats.
The arrangement of the songs definitely has the feel of a musical. The album even has an overture. Was musical theatre a big inspiration for the songs?
I wouldn’t say musical theatre…but definitely musicals… as a kid I loved watching film musicals with Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Jane Powell etc… as well as some of the Disney cartoons. Sleepy Beauty was a favorite of mine. »continue reading Interview: Inara George on An Invitation
The Inara George/Van Dyke Parks partnership on An Invitation is a wonderful symbiosis, an amphibian that treads through two almost opposing elements, one stark and timid, the other well-crafted and delicate, though I’m not always sure which is which. The latter is usually the musical arrangement by Van Dyke Parks, so after listening to the opening number, “Overture,” with its instrumental loveliness pouring out all over the place, I nearly wrote something stupid like “this album is better than Smile!” Well, it’s not: but with its lush yet spare strings and woodwinds, it definitely bests Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd, slash your throat out!).
It’s to Van Dyke Parks’ credit that he can arrange such sonorous and American music without sounding like an incidental tune from Oklahoma. But he’s obviously been helped by the fortified framework Inara’s given him to build from. Van Dyke Parks is an orchestrator of the most lovingly dogged kind, sticking his notes daintily but steadfastly to the tunes as Inara wrote them. And while they are not precious, the songs definitely are charming, the accents and crescendos cleverly woven around her meandering, slightly jazzy vocals, which bring to mind Julie London’s phrasing and Regina Spektor’s throaty beauty. »continue reading Review: Inara George with Van Dyke Parks, An Invitation
PHOTO: The Mae Shi by Sung. Full F Yeah gallery here.
This year’s F Yeah Fest almost ended in tragedy before it began: Sean Carlson, the festival organizer, was chased down the street and savagely beaten by some security guards at the Hollywood Bowl (while some cops watched) just days before the event. But L.A.’s indomitable spirit being what it is, he lathered up his bruises and managed to get things up and running nonetheless. Come August 30th, kids of all ages still managed to drag their no-speed bikes on down to the Echoplex to see four fantastic stages of muscular music and courageous comedy for hour upon hour, hoping to catch something amazing they’d never heard before.
It was in that spirit that I showed up at the Echo around 4:30 to see the Underground Railroad to Candyland, a highly enthusiastic punk band with two singers who sang all the same lines in tandem, one guy with a headband and beard strumming a guitar while singing, the other guy wearing a Spongebob shirt, shorts and sunglasses indoors, leaping into the air and belting out his words as if they were prophecy. He literally looked and sounded like one of the Kipper Kids, and I mean that as a compliment. With sing-a-long songs about cocaine and “going downtown to see the body of a bird,” they sounded like Hickey meets Sham 69 meets Toni Basil’s “Micky.” And it was pretty awesome. Later, comedian Kyle Kinane on the Rec Center stage would make a joke about Spongebob dude: “Musicians get laid. I saw some guy on stage at the Echo with a Spongebob shirt on, jumping up and down. ‘You got two years of fucking anybody you want. Use it wisely.’”
But back to the crowds—this year saw a new crop of kids who probably just turned fourteen, and it’s refreshing to see new fashions replace the tired hoodies and Mao hats that were festival staples just a few years back. I saw tasteful pompadours, a couple pairs of boat shoes, and some kids so young and fresh, their angelic eyelashes made them look like they were wearing eyeliner when they probably weren’t. There seemed to be some confusion about the proper way to wear jeans—clearly flares were out, but the battles of wrinkly ankles versus cuffs, cut-offs versus full length, and tight asses versus saggy britches raged. And nearly everybody seemed confused about where to lock up their bicycles. »continue reading F Yeah Fest V, Echo Park, August 30, 2008
Beachwood Sparks never exactly broke up, but they haven’t played much since about 2002. Once dancey groups like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Peaches started stealing all the magazine covers, Beachwood Sparks packed their dusty ol’ spurs away and moseyed off in a bunch of different directions, bringing life to groups as diverse as Indian Jewelry and Xu Xu Fang. But their brand of lysergic country rock has been sorely missed as of late, so it was a hoot and a holler to see them up on the Bates Stage at Sunset Junction playing a set that included most (if not all) of the songs from their self-titled debut. »continue reading Beachwood Sparks, Sunset Junction, August 24, 2008
The thirty year cycle has come full “circle,” as it were, and ground-breaking annoyance-punkers The Germs finally have their own bio-drama, replete with some serious drama about the making of the movie itself. The film, What We Do Is Secret, which spans the tail-end of the seventies to singer Darby Crash’s suicide in 1980, took roughly fifteen years for first-time director Rodger Grossman to complete. This M*A*S*H* of a movie dwarfed the reign of the Germs themselves in terms of longevity, money and celebrity (not counting Pat Smear’s stint in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters years later). And in many ways, Grossman’s struggle to put the Germs on the big screen was fought harder than the Germs’ own struggles to find stages to play on during their legendary heyday.
Grossman’s labor of love was nearly stillborn many times, his money repeatedly running out, and distribution deals constantly eluding him. Eventually, in lieu of an official film release, actor Shane West, who played Crash in the biopic after David Arquette dropped out, started touring with original Germs guitarist Pat Smear, drummer Don Bolles, and bassist Lorna Doom at various Warped Tour type activities. There were annoying appearances by co-star Bijou Phillips in dreary Nylon TV interviews, and articles about the unfinished film in various alternative press publications, and a couple film festival screenings, but no official release for the Film That Wouldn’t Die. »continue reading What We Do Is Secret–Germs Biopic Officially Released
PHOTO: Last year’s 77BOADRUM in NYC. No photo available for 88BOADRUM, which will feature 14% more drummers, as it has not yet happened. (Credit: Vice)
This Friday’s 88BOADRUM event at the La Brea Tar Pits is “sold out”—but don’t worry if you forgot to pick up your free tickets. With this many drummers playing at once, you’ll be able to hear it for blocks around. Let’s only hope that the curators at nearby LACMA haven’t taken the Ming vases out of storage after last week’s earthquake.
Looking down the line-up, in amongst the drummer from the obvious bands for this type of thing (Mika Miko, the Fucking Champs, Samhain), you might notice some odd men and women out: Tennessee Thomas from the Like, Patty Schemel from Hole, the drummer from Jawbreaker, and even some session dude from Link Wray’s recordings! I guess Hisham Bharoocha (ex-Lightning Bolt), the “artistic director” for the LA event alongside the Boredoms themselves, just found every eligible drummer with skills that he could, then slapped them together in time to have eighty-eight drummers all playing tomorrow, on 8/8/08, at 8:08 p.m. And if the list is strained, well, they have another 88 drummers in Brooklyn doing the same thing.
Given the flakiness of musicians in general, I would not be at all surprised to find that someone from the list flakes out at the last minute, leaving the event with a very bad numerological stamp that some lucky drummer in the audience might have to fill!
This Thursday night, the Don’t Knock The Rock ‘08 film festival continues with a double feature at the Silent Movie Theater, this time featuring punk rock from the Windy City. When we think of early punk rock, we tend to think of New York, London, and Los Angeles, and even the more obsessive among us probably then tend to follow our fandom in cities such as San Francisco, D.C., even Akron and Detroit.
But Chicago also had a scene that included some pioneers in punk, both in the form of arguably the first punk-only club, La Mere Vipere, as well as “the producer who made grunge,” Steve Albini, whose pivotal industrial punk band Big Black appears here in early archival footage in tomorrow night’s feature documentary, You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-84.
Following the film will be a DJ set by Terry “Dadbag” Graham (Gun Club, The Bags), and then the second half of the night’s entertainment will be brought by DFW Punk, a film all about, you guessed it, punk rock in Dallas and Ft. Worth (title says it all, really). There’ll be director Q & A stuff, and probably giveaways, and likely you’ll see Hadrian Belove floating around with drinks and keys and stuff. For the obscurantist who wants to be able to brag about early scenes in every city, this is your night.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen the disintegration of unions, the peak of oil, and the death of Bob Hope. But I never thought I’d see a return to the 1929 banking scares, with people running to withdraw funds from a cash-strapped bank–especially not at the IndyMac building in Pasadena near my work.
One poor lady even fainted right there on the curb! I’d probably do the same thing if I lost my money due to a collapsed banking institution. Though, then again, in this economy, who can afford the ambulance or the emergency room visit?
These poor suckers must have really wanted some fast cash–unless they had over $100,000 tucked away in their savings, they’ll be covered by the bank’s insurance, and even after that they’ll get a large portion of it back. Still, it makes ya think… about investing in gold! That woman who got $600 for her scrap gold in that TV commercial is probably feeling pretty foolish right now.
The King Khan show last Thursday night at the Echo was the most packed and sweaty I’ve seen there in a long time. The last time was probably when the MC5 reunited not so long ago on this very same Echo stage, with a gospel soul review that included Mark Arm, Evan Dando, Don Was, and some of Motown’s finest. But King Khan and the Shrines had perhaps an even bigger crowd, and actually played better, evoking the spirit of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and making all the mods and rockers and Joe Cockers writhe around like crazed go-go hyenas.
The opening band, the Jacuzzi Boys, had the right idea, playing some good garage noises mixed with a little Americana, kinda like the Georgia Satellites meets Back from the Grave. And the DJ was spinning some good stuff: classic rhythm and blues, the 13th Floor Elevators, Them.
But the ferocious soul velocity of the Shrines was not to be bested. A nine piece band dressed in black, wearing voodoo necklaces, they leapt into gear with spooky keyboards, a tenor and baritone sax blaring, a buncha guitar and percussion, and a beardo drummer who looked like Dr. John the Night Tripper. »continue reading King Khan & The Shrines at The Echo, July 11, 2008
A little over a week ago, at the Silent Movie Theater in the Fairfax District, I and a bunch of local artsy musician types were glued to the screen, watching the most recent Dublab short film festival, “Labrat Matinee V: Daytime Goes Dark.” After seeing thirty or so pretty good shorts and music videos (featuring, among others, Michael Cera, Flight of the Conchords, Charlyne Yi, Daedelus, Laura Palmer’s mom, Ariel Pink, and John Malkovich being interviewed and simultaneously bathed by Craig Bierko), I somehow corralled Cinefamily honcho and cinematic curator Hadrian Belove away from his buddy Billy Zane (loved you in Orlando!) and into my journalistic clutches.
Saturday night, I carpooled on down to the Summer Camp event at the Art & Mayhem gallery in Atwater Village (not to be confused with the Little Radio Summer Camp–can you say “theme conflict?”). The “camp” theme this night was universally interpreted as Indian feathers and headbands for the girls (totally hot) and shorts and knee-socks for the guys (kind of gross). And there was some kind of Friday the 13th theme going on too. And kids were doing arts and crafts, and playing games with water balloons and three legged races and shit like that–but I was more into the aural tug-of-war going on between the different acts of the night. »continue reading Summer Camp at Art & Mayhem Gallery, 6/14/08
Last last Saturday, while most people were still recovering from their hangovers, my crew was travelin’ to the Manimal Festival in the low desert. I was a little worried, because when we neared Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, the horizon was burning like Mordor—big black plumes of smoke were flying out of Joshua Tree National Park, threatening to engulf us all in a fire like the one that ravaged this area two years ago.
But it was worth a little danger to be there. The Manimal Festival promised to have everything Coachella has—multiple stages, wildly different acts, desert heat, the faint smell of sage and horse poo wafting through the air—but no seven dollar Heinekens or need to buy a cheap plastic spray-mist bottle to avoid heat stroke. And while we expected a large crowd sprinkled liberally with familiar faces, we wouldn’t have to stand behind 50,000 people to see a band or wait in a three hour traffic jam just to get to the venue.
Actually, when we got to Pappy & Harriet’s, the crowd wasn’t all that big yet. I felt bad for the first band, Corridor, really just one guy who had a cello, guitar, and all these effects pedals and equipment up on stage. He sounded great, playing more intricate music with one member than most bands do with four, but the heat was his enemy: the two-dozen people who showed up early were all scrunched into the shady bar area on the right, trying to ward off instant melanoma from the blistering sun, so he kind of had to play with his neck craned to see the audience. Too bad, because the noise-drone experimentation he was doing perfectly matched the dusty haze of the hot sun beating down on those of us who sat up front. He started packing before we could snap a photo, but my photographer Amy Jo got one later of him, hanging out in a Chinook.
Remember how the Blues Brothers parodied soul music, yet strived to be actually kinda good at at the same time? It was making fun of soul music while still aspiring to be soul?
Dethklok is like that for death metal, but far more perfectly. Whereas Dan Akroyd and John Belushi could never really sing to beat the bands they parodied/idolized (or, in more recent times, Tenacious D never attempted to forge their concept rock prog metal into the true eight-album song cycle it deserved), the touring version of Dethklok plays metal more brutal than lots of “real” head-banging bands, who would never be able to match Dethklok’s deep grizzly growl while simultaneously keeping their serpent tongues cemented into their cheeks.
There had been rumors that the touring version of Dethklok looked more or less like the cartoon version, with a raven-haired stocky lead singer, two skinny Swedish-looking guitarists, a balding red-haired drummer and a bassist with a murdery-face. That sounded unlikely to me—I expected a multi-media animated concoction similar to a Gorillaz concert, perhaps five guys playing behind five screens with a corresponding Dethklok character projected on each.
Instead, the stage show itself was neither a costume party nor a clever stage play, but something perhaps a tad too simple: a group of four average-looking, short-haired guys playing in front of one big screen, upon which they projected cartoon sequences recycled directly from the TV show. »continue reading Dethklok at the Wiltern, June 6, 2008
Friday night, I slipped on down to the oasis of Pappy and Harriet’s, in Pioneertown, near Joshua Tree, the spiritual hometown of Gram Parsons. Spindrift was scheduled to play a show with a bunch of their psyche-holic bandito friends and promised a premiere of their film, The Legend of God’s Gun, at 1 a.m., in the back parking lot. I’m not sure why they called it a “premiere”—it seems to me there’ve been lots of screenings of this movie in various forms at various L.A. parties during the past couple years—but no matter. My friends and I needed a cheap and musically challenging diversion during the holiday weekend, and drinks cost less in the Old West.
Due to the wet weather and recent tornadoes in the Californian deserts, it took nearly three hours to drive out to Joshua Tree. But it was a treat to walk in late and have Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days band greet us with honest, sawdust-on-the-floor saloon tunes. Gleason, a perennial favorite of Pappy and Harriet’s, played tight, authentic Americana country, with just a teeny tiny touch of seventies Laurel Canyon hippie. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but sometimes formalism when it’s tightly arranged and well performed is better than your band’s “experimental” half-baked concoctions. And I’ll bet Dave Gleason’s boys really complemented the chicken fried steak most of the local families were eating, on what looked like folding tables.
After a brutal half-hour of take down and set up, an acoustic duo called “The Dutch Masters” took the stage. At first I thought maybe they were members of Spindrift, since they had the God’s Gun look down pat: one guy with a vest, hat, and Doc Watson moustache, and the other dude with lanky hair, a top hat, and a cravat, like a 19th century prairie undertaker. Oh, and both with fake guns and holsters. I was eyein’ them up when somebody told me that the undertaker dude was Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols. That explained the wall of paparazzi in the front row, blocking everyone else’s view (and I guess I was one of them–I apologize to all the folks behind me). »continue reading Spindrift, Quarter After, Asteroid #4 & Dutch Masters at Pappy and Harriet’s, High Desert, May 23, 2008
I got to the Echoplex around nine, and it was shockingly easy to get into the venue: no line, and no bouncer searching my groin area for switchblades, though he did act like I was a total moron for trying to give him my ticket before showing him my ID. Guess I had the order wrong.
Light FM (god, I wish they’d change their name to “Hat FM”) were on stage when I came in. Their radio promo moniker was actually quite fitting—their songs all had the same tired indie rock arrangements we’ve heard on the radio for the last four years, not exactly bedazzling the two-dozen early birds sipping their vodka and Red Bulls. The keyboardist distinguished herself with a couple interesting melody lines, but otherwise I felt Light FM were trying desperately to appeal to my demographic by riffing on just the right two chords, and it was not to be. »continue reading Earlimart/Siggy/Voxhaul Broadcast/Light FM at the Echoplex, 5/17/08
Forty years ago, Jack Nicholson and a bunch of dudes who would go on to do Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces co-wrote their first avant-garde, marijuana-laced cinematic masterpiece. It’s purpose: to bring a pre-fab boy band called the Monkees out of the teenie bopper magazines and into the hearts of hippies. It succeeded at the former, but not so much at the latter–no amount of fourth-wall breaking could shatter their image as an artificial construct to the crowd of rockers now keepin’ it real with fourteen minute guitar solos at the Monterey Pop Festival.
The Inara George/Van Dyke Parks partnership on An Invitation is a wonderful symbiosis, an amphibian that treads through two almost opposing elements, one stark and timid, the other well-crafted and delicate, though I’m not always sure which is which. The latter is usually the musical arrangement by Van Dyke Parks, so after listening to the opening number, “Overture,” with its instrumental loveliness pouring out all over the place, I nearly wrote something stupid like “this album is better than Smile!” Well, it’s not: but with its lush yet spare strings and woodwinds, it definitely bests Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd, slash your throat out!).
The thirty year cycle has come full “circle,” as it were, and ground-breaking annoyance-punkers The Germs finally have their own bio-drama, replete with some serious drama about the making of the movie itself. The film, What We Do Is Secret, which spans the tail-end of the seventies to singer Darby Crash’s suicide in 1980, took roughly fifteen years for first-time director Rodger Grossman to complete. This M*A*S*H* of a movie dwarfed the reign of the Germs themselves in terms of longevity, money and celebrity (not counting Pat Smear’s stint in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters years later). And in many ways, Grossman’s struggle to put the Germs on the big screen was fought harder than the Germs’ own struggles to find stages to play on during their legendary heyday.
This Thursday night, the 
A little over a week ago, at the Silent Movie Theater in the Fairfax District, I and a bunch of local artsy musician types were glued to the screen, watching the most recent 
