Full photo gallery below.

December 8, 2008 would have been Jim Morrison’s 65th birthday, had he lived. To celebrate, KLOS threw a massive party at Barney’s Beanery, one of Jim’s favorite bars in West Hollywood. Prior to this party I found myself sitting at the dining table of the Doors’ suite in the Pali House hotel down the block. Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek – aka THE DOORS – were sitting on the other side of said table. So what do they make of this birthday party? What might they have given Jim for his birthday? What would they be doing on this night, were he still alive? What do they think of Barney’s Beanery: The Franchise? And who’ll be the first to bring up Obama? Read on.

Ok, guys. What can you tell me about the Beanery between 1967 and 1970?

Robby: It didn’t change much between those years, you know, it was kind of a sawdust-on-the-floor type of place. They had pool tables, right?

Ray: Yeah.

Robby: Pool tables, you go in there and shoot pool, hang out, and generally waste time.

Ray: “A place where a man can go to waste time.”

I don’t think that’s changed.

Ray: I mean that place has been the same since the ’30s. It was a writer’s bar, kind of a writer’s intellectual bar, great assortment of whiskey behind the bar, great assortment of beer, beer on tap, lots of beer. Ed Kienholz, in the early ’60s, did a construction of Barney’s Beanery; it was fabulous. It was just a great place to hang out and very conducive to talk! It was a place where a man could go and have a drink and talk to another guy. And then the girls started coming too, which was kinda cool. Women started to come in. But before that, I don’t know.

Robby: Did they have a jukebox?

Ray: I don’t know if music entered the equation over there.

Robby: I think they did, but it wasn’t like Fred C. Dobbs or something like that. (Fred C. Dobbs = long-gone Sunset Strip coffeehouse)

Ray: It was a great place, man, it’s always been a great place, and they have a great bowl of chili. Really good bar food.

Any favorite memories of the place or favorite conversations?

Ray: Favorite conversations. Well, I discussed Freidrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil with Jim, you know, we talked about the philosophy behind Nietzsche’s existentialism and transcendence. And American politics were always discussed. How to get out of Vietnam alive, “No one here gets out alive” – how do you get out of there and maintain your sanity, how to shut it down. Interestingly it wasn’t a lot different back then than three months ago, four months ago, before Obama becomes president and we know we’re getting out of Iraq. It was, you know, “Are we ever getting out of Iraq?” “Are we ever getting out of Vietnam?” Wait a minute! I’ve been through this, man. It was 40 years ago, and we’re still doing the same stuff, so that’s the irony of it.

Did you ever think you might not get out of the Beanery alive?

(Robby laughs.) Ray: (Laughs) No no, it was always cool at the Beanery. Something might happen out on the street but if you just kept walking or didn’t pay attention to it, it was fine.

Have you been to any of the Franchised Beaneries?

Both: No!?

There’s one on the Third Street Promenade, there’s one up in Pasadena…

Robby: How many are there?

Almost half a dozen by now. The plan is to take it nationwide.

Ray: I wouldn’t be surprised. Why not? The Fillmores are nationwide now too, Fillmore all over the place. Played in the Fillmore in New York.

Robby: Hard Rock Cafe…

Ray: Fillmores everywhere, Hard Rocks everywhere. And now Barney’s Beanery! And that’s good. It’s a good place to quaff a few and to really discuss philosophy. And I think that’s important, I think we need more philosophical discussions by contemporary American young people. Us guys, we did it already. I’m just waiting for the young people to catch up to us so that we can all sit around and talk on the same level. And I know you guys can! I know you can, just waiting for it to happen. For God’s sake, stop texting.

We’ll try. Gotta get people away from their devices! (puts blackberry in pocket)

Ray: Open the doors of perception! That’s what we tried to do, we’d sit around and talk with the doors of perception open. When you open those doors of perception, all kinds of things come in! All kinds of things go in and out.

Myself, I’m online a lot. I find it’s important to just…unplug.

Ray: Exactly. Do they take LSD today?

Oh yeah. Well…the kids these days, it’s more “E” in the clubs.

Ray: Yeah, well, it’s been that for the last decade-and-a-half. Any acid? Acid heads?

(Are these guys looking to score?) I don’t know if it’s any more or less en vogue than it was in the 60s…maybe a little less?

Ray: Boy, you don’t hear about it. You certainly don’t hear about it as much as you did back in the 60s. It doesn’t enter the public equation in any way, shape or form.

Robby: Probably people are embarrassed to admit that they have taken it, maybe it’s too old-fashioned…

Well, I certainly still have my copy of Be Here Now by Ram Dass next to the couch.

Ray: There you go! (both laugh heartily – yes! I made the Doors laugh)

Jim’s 65th birthday would have been today. If he were with us, what would you get him for his birthday?

Robby: Probably a bottle of Wild Turkey.

Ray: I would get him…There was an art exhibit up in Oakland called Birth of the Cool. It was about Southern California, and the ’40s and the ’50s, the architectural style, and the furniture style and the cool jazz. And I think that’s what I would get him, a book called Birth of the Cool. Because we came out…I came out in ‘60, he came out in ‘62, ‘63 and we came out into that kind of cool California…jazz, bikini girls, hot rods, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Mann and that whole…Robby grew up with this stuff for God’s sake, he was always here. And it was just like, the jazz was cool, man. It was not New York City hard bop, it was California contrapuntal…it was Bach…it was like Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan going, “da-doo ba do do do, ba do do do” and weaving around each other – and Robby and I have always tried to do that on stage, tried to incorporate some of that – and then Densmore would add that whole Latino, that Southern California Latino feel, so it’s really Southern Californian. I grew up in Chicago, and Jim came out of Florida, so I would get him Birth of the Cool.

So he’s got Wild Turkey and Birth of the Cool.

Ray: He’d be fine, man.

Did Jim ever give either of you a birthday present that you remember?

Ray: Never gave me nothin’! (laughs)

Robby: (laughs) Not that I remember. He wasn’t a present kind of a guy…

Ray: Well you know we were all in our 20s, I don’t think anybody was…

Presence was the present maybe.

Ray: It wasn’t the phase of present giving…those aren’t milestones, just another day has gone by. You’re high, and music…

Robby: I remember we gave YOU a present on your birthday!

Ray: Yeah?

Robby: It was the organ. Remember? The-

RM: Oh, the big B3! No, the C3! The C3! Yes! How could I forget that damn thing!

Robby: It was beautiful. And it was huge, it was like this giant…You know what a B3 looks like?

Yeah.

This was a C3, it was, like, even bigger and it had a big case to it, a wooden thing…’cause we always wanted Ray to get a Hammond sound on some stuff, you know. And he says, “What the hell am I going to do with this? It’s too big to go in my house!” So we stuck it in the studio. And we used it on…

Ray: Oh, “Changeling”…

Robby: Yeah, and we used it on “The Soft Parade”.

Ray: Yeah! Great sound.

So that’s the birthday organ on “Soft Parade”?

Ray: Yes. They did, they got me a C3 Church. C3 for “church”. Other than that, you know, birthdays didn’t mean anything, but they were cool, man.

Good excuse to have a drink if nothing else.

Ray: But now it does [mean something]! You know, birthdays now are a time of looking back. You go, “Oh, wow. Jim would be 65. What might have happened? What was his life? What did he do? How many books of poetry did he write, how many films was he involved with, how many more Doors records would have happened?” When you’re looking ahead, birthdays are not important. When you’re looking back, birthdays are important, because you’re evaluating what you’ve done to bring you to this point of 65 years on planet earth.

Looking at it with that perspective: If he were here, what do you think might have happened, and what do you think would have been going on tonight?

Robby: Well…we might just be all going over to Barney’s. (All laugh.) “Jim! It’s your birthday, let’s go to Barney’s man!”

Ray: (Laughing) Right! “Hey, man! Come on down!” You know, he’s up in Laurel Canyon or something on Love street, the house that he had with Pam… “Come on man, let’s have a couple of drinks! Wax philosophical…” I think he would have obviously written a lot more poetry and we would have made records and made Doors music. I think he was looking forward to…he talked to John on the telephone some time in…I don’t know what, May or June [1971] and he said, “How’s LA Woman doing?” And John said, “LA Woman is doing great man, critics love it and it’s selling great.” And Jim said, “Boy, we gotta take it on the road, let’s go play it live!” And John said, “Yeah, that’s what Ray and Robby and I were talking about – doing what we did in the studio, but doing it live.” ‘Cause its virtually a live recording, we had Jerry Scheff on bass and Marc Benno on rhythm guitar, leaving Robby to play lead guitar…[plus] keyboards, and drums, and we were going to take that whole thing on the road. And Morrison said, “Oh that’d be great man, let’s do that. Soon as I get back let’s go on the road.” John said, “When you coming back?” He said, “Welllll… I don’t know exactly when I’m coming yet, but I’ll be back and we’ll take it out.”

And you know we would have made records – not nearly as furiously as we did in our 20s, we’d be entering our 30s – and you know there would be poetry, and records, and God knows what else.

Robby: Film…

Ray: And politics. Politics. Psychedelic stoners go into politics. Cosmically conscious leaders of America. Can you imagine? Enlightened cosmically conscious people leading America. God! It could have…it could have been amazing, we would have avoided Vietnam, we would have avoided obviously Iraq, we’d have avoided all kinds of things. And it would have been The New Age, it would have been a new age, a new consciousness to save the planet, save the ecology…kids in school, give them all a good education…

Robby: They got Kennedy. They got the Kennedys, and Jim died, so whatta you gonna do?

Ray: Destiny of the ’60s.

Tumultuous, but more than once I wish that I had been around to experience all of that. I’m jealous of you guys.

Ray: It was expansive! You can’t imagine how expansive you felt, how grand you felt, how big, how big the coming together of a bunch of people who all had long hair and were all outcasts, and it was like, “Outcasts? We know what’s going on! We’ve got the truth behind us! Nobody is lying: We have seen the man behind the curtain, ‘Wizard of Oz’, we know what that man looks like and by God that man looks just like us, and he doesn’t know what we know about taking care of Mother Earth, the Garden. The Garden of Eden! This is the Garden of Eden, we just have to get back to it. Take care of the planet, that’s our job. Take care of the planet, take care of the people. THEN let everybody dance and sing and go mad and wild and just get stoned and have the grandest time you can possibly have for your three score and ten.

Does the Obama victory feel to you like a smaller version of that ideal, in some form? Grass roots, “Yes We Can”, “Yes We Did”…

Ray: Absolutely.

Robby: (Laughing) We hope so…

(Laughing) Exactly. We’ll see how it goes, right?

Ray: I was in tears, man, I was watching that speech from Chicago…

I shed a tear, absolutely.

Ray: And you know, I was like, “Hey, hey, I don’t tear up here…”

Were you at the actual victory speech?

Ray: No no no, I was just tearing up watching it on TV, and I said, “I’m a manly man, I don’t do that sort of thing, tear up just because some guy is saying that we can all come together as brothers and sisters”… It was marvelous, and again, an expansive moment in time, and hopefully, we can keep that going.

I personally celebrated for at least a week after the election.(Yes! I made the Doors laugh again)

Ray: Isn’t it great?

Let’s talk about Live At The Matrix 1967 briefly (November 18; Rhino). This is a double album you’ve just released, showcasing two small club gigs in San Francisco – weeks before you became a household name. To start, there are a lot of covers on this album. Who was the Allen Toussaint fan in the camp? I’m a big fan of New Orleans music.

Robby: Which was the Allen Toussaint cover?

“Get out of my life, woman”…

Ray: (singing) I don’t want you no more!

Robby: Oh, I didn’t know he wrote that.

Ray: Robby! Robby brought it.

Robby: Well, we all liked it.

Ray: We all liked it, but who was the one who said, “Let’s do that” ? Probably you.
(Singing again) Get out of my life, woman, din-din-din-da-din

Robby: Yeah, I loved all that stuff. Wilson Pickett…What else is on there?

“King Bee” is on there.

Robby: Yeah, “The King Bee”…well, the Stones did that first…

Ray: Slim Harpo. Slim Harpo, the Stones got it from Slim Harpo. I heard that in Chicago in…sheez, I dunno, late ’50s, on the radio in Chicago growing up with that blues. (sings) Well I’m a King Bee, buzzin’ round your hive… Woo! Smooth. Dark and bluesy. Yeah, we loved the blues, I mean Morrison came out of the swamps of Florida for God’s sake; I came out of Chicago, Robby came out of a whole jug band and Koerner, Ray & Glover, and Paul Butterfield, Robert Johnson with his slide guitar…So we had the slide guitar master, and the swamp dog out of Florida, the blues keyboard player, and the hard rockin’ marching band snare drummer. That was the Doors.

You’re up at the Matrix in San Francisco, 41 years ago. Tell me a little bit about the other dates you were playing up there compared to this venue, maybe, and the overall feel right before things took off. (Shortly following these gigs the Doors would become very, very famous.)

Robby: Well, we went up there basically to play the Fillmore and the Avalon, and that was really an experience because…well, we had been up there once, but for us the Fillmore was like the end of the world, and San Francisco was the place to go when you were in LA. You always would hear about it. So we got to go up there, and man: The Fillmore is amazing; the audience loved us. We were an LA band, so we were afraid they were going to put us down like they did most LA bands.

That’s a thing about Northern California…

Robby: Exactly. But they didn’t; they really loved us, and so in between playing weekends up there we played at the Matrix. And it was kind of almost like a paid rehearsal, because it was during the week, and there weren’t that many people around, so we were just having fun. And we knew they were going to record, because that was what they did there. So we tried not to let the microphone, the tape recorders get in the way. We just kinda played what we were gonna play and tried to not be aware of the taping going on.

What’s it like listening to the recordings now?

Robby: Well, I’m amazed at how good we were (laughs) because…we were, you know, we had only done one album at that point, and I had only been playing electric guitar for maybe a year and a half…and I think we sounded great.

Ray: I loved the band. I’m one of the biggest Doors fans on the planet, I think they play great. And he has great lyrics…The song structure is great, and the execution of the song structure is great: great guitar player, keyboard player, drummer, those guys … Only three guys making all that music and Jim’s floating over the top of it…excellent, excellent band. Totally biased.

No surprises there. Let’s go party!

Following this interview nine or so people all cram into the elevator: security guard, manager, publicist, wife, photographer, some people I didn’t meet, Doors, me – elevator is at capacity and acting goofy like it’s too heavy. It’s doing that scary jiggly-bungee thing! Jeff (manager) cracks wise that his ego is putting us over the edge. We take our chances and shut the door. As if on cue, the elevator stops at the second floor and we have to squeeze somebody else into the death vessel. It’s getting tight in here! Soon we hit the ground floor and the Doors, replete with entourage, make their way up the block to Barney’s Beanery where spotlights, red carpets, drinks, a gigantic steam tray of signature chili, 95.5 KLOS’ Jim Ladd, and a cake larger than my bed await all of us. Be sure to come back later for more photos and Victor’s recap of the evening’s Beanery festivities…

The Doors: Live At The Matrix 1967:
AVAILABLE NOW at Rhino and The Doors’ website

» The Doors (Official Site)

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.

Siggy were up next, and though they wear their age on their sleeves (but hey, they all have Ph.D.’s and just do this as a hobby), they were probably my favorites of the night. Galen, their singer, has a heart-wrenching voice reminiscent of Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Alan Vega, or just about any of your Max’s Kansas City types. Yet there’s a vibrato there and power and a pain that really seemed to touch even the most jaded sweater-vest collector in the audience. Just when I thought their thudding bass and percolating guitar sounds veered a little too far into U2 territory, the groove shifted into almost a Raw Power direction, and finally they even did a splendid cover of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Galen’s cat-growls mewing to a halt mid-word almost like Darby Crash. Good stuff.

Voxhaul Broadcast played next. Thin, tattered Live Aid T-shirt, big hair, good looking guys. But they kept serving up tunes like indie iceberg lettuce, with no flavor to distinguish one from the next. Guys, if I can’t remember any of your songs, I can’t review you.

Finally Earlimart played, and all the partygoers in the smoke hole outside came in to join the throng and watch, including Adam Goldberg and his breathtakingly gorgeous arm candy. The watchwords of the evening were “vocal harmonies”—either the PA or the sound man at the Echoplex has gotten a lot better, so you could really hear Aaron and Ariana’s voices blending together as smooth as butter. Sometimes, when men and women harmonize, the two different timbres of vocal chord sound disparate, but not here. Each song allowed Ariana’s melancholy to accentuate Aaron’s yearning, and when it was good, it was great.

The instrumentation was pretty impressive, too. I guess they’ve gotten over their flirtation with backup orchestras, because last night they played their complex arrangements with just four people, Ariana sometimes abandoning her bass (No bass! The Doors had no bass! You see, the gypsies had no homes!) to become a dueling keyboardist. Whoever the other keyboardist was, he was pretty awesome as well, and either he or Aaron kept triggering weird interstitial music between songs, sometimes full samples of classical-sounding ditties, and other times just the emanating repetition of whooshing echoey machine noises in a metallic loop. And Aaron let himself stretch out on the guitar, ending three or four songs with a blistering guitar crescendo quite a bit more rockin’ than the meat of most of their songs.

Aaron practically apologized for playing primarily new stuff—the show was kind of a test-run for touring behind their upcoming album, Hymn and Her, which meant I didn’t recognize most of the songs. In fact, at one point, Aaron started singing “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and I thought “oh no, please tell me they don’t do a U2 cover on the new album!” But it was all a joke, and they instead jumped into another beautiful love song.

For an encore, they let Ariana sing “Happy Alone,” an older track on which she sings lead and pretty much plays the whole song herself, just piano with a bit of guitar and Aaron’s background vocals in the mix. It made me wish they’d give her more of a spotlight—she has a dark and lovely voice, not Joan Baez’s by any means, but evocative of the same kind of hope and sadness ol’ Joanie had. In fact, the whole show, I was pretty much concentrating on her. She seemed to be having the most fun, yet her voice conveyed the most pain. Here’s hoping the band gets even sparser so that she can shine a little more in the mix.

After the last note rang out, I virtually dashed out the door and followed the pied piper pilgrimage under the bridge, across Glendale Blvd, and up the piss-soaked cement staircase to Sunset to go to the Echo proper. I have no idea why the Echoplex makes you do that, when they have a perfectly good staircase connecting the two clubs indoors that they instead rope off and put eight security guards around. But whatever, I needed the exercise after my three Jamesons on the rocks.

Hang the DJ’s at the Echo was theoretically spinning all nineties music, which was fun to dance to. But I noticed that as they started edging deeper and deeper into the eighties stuff, a lot more people hit the dance floor, which I think says something about the nineties as a decade. I wish they’d played some early nineties techno (how perfect would Alpha Team’s “Speed Racer” be at a time like this?), but I think that’s just me showing that I’m an old geezer who shouldn’t be dancing at all-ages clubs anyhow.

Joe Jackson performed the aesthetic masterpiece of architecture with seating to match, one with gilded archways, ornate lounges and a total freakin’ mezzanine, The Orpheum Theater, Tuesday night. I was there and Sung was there, too, and he took pictures. For those who could not attend, I am not proud to tell you that you missed a gigantic opportunity to raise your standards. JJ opened with “Steppin’ Out” just to get it out of the way. That’s what kind of show I’m about to review.

After driving a bit into scary downtown near the Fashion District, I dropped $10 to park, went halfway up Broadway and entered a voluminous space. Euclid would just shit himself to behold the interior of the Orpheum, so rigorous in its geometry that you feel like making love to someone just hunting for the right row.

I was seated in one of those little balcony snob zones where rich ladies peer at “Cosi fan tutti” through bejeweled binoculars. Had it all to myself for the opening act, a duo named after the lead singer, first name: MUTLU. Not an Elder God of Chaos Mutlu but a bearded, friendly and bone-sincere Philadelphian white male who brought along his friend, Chris. Two acoustic guitars, two vox, and R&B folk songs for about forty minutes. I couldn’t leave. He sings like a soulful angel. Mutlu’s sound and style have a Saturn return that keeps bringing up the Blues Traveler and late Grateful Dead and Traffic. Or maybe this. Dig if you will, this. MUTLU is the magical earthy tell-it-like-it-is Pennsylvanian whose working class dramas are existential codeine, who we shell-shocked rock and roll veterans nominate as our personal savior when the world runs us down. No cynicism about him, nothing pretentious, just brotherly love radiating though a layer mask of Thin Lizzy’s “Romeo and the Lonely Girl”. Do I turn his rolling papers in my hand or his words in my mind?

Round of applause, thanks everyone, and leaves. During the wait, I exchange inanities with Sung on many topics including losanjealous, the general lack of eighties band coverage on the site, and more!

Let me tell you now what kind of a show it turned into. When JJ came out, the fan’s deafening cheer startled this fifty-three year old rock dignitary, an aging Malcolm McDowell in profile, into taking a gigantic wayward step backward. If he feels worthy of the outpouring, he’s not letting us know. If he feels we’re worthy of his outpouring, well, you could argue that one, too. For an opener, as mentioned, he trashes and simultaneously reinvents “Steppin’ Out” at twice its original speed as if to firmly demonstrate his unconventional powers first-hand. I wasn’t sure I liked it. He went from here to playing a short set from his new album of this January, Rain, a collector’s item by now loaded with wry Brit humor and a loneliness magnified from his protracted stay in Berlin.

To wit, Joe Jackson looks like Malcolm McLaren as well as Malcolm McDowell. But because we don’t want him cancelling any tours in a fit of pique, something this so-called ugliest man in rock and roll can and would do in a New York minute, we’ll just say it’s not the age, it’s the mileage.

The new material has a mature and cerebral element, a restlessness that JJ tried to share with the shouting lummoxes. He was very well behaved with all the whoops and ridiculousness. But the poor gentleman, who mentioned up front and beforehand that he wanted to fill the opulent Orpheum with the streetwise tenderness of “Solo (So Low)”, was denied by some idiot who wanted to treat him like a jukebox. JJ has come to terms with this sort of thing, but he still doesn’t quite get it and doesn’t like it. Well… “Dirty Martini” came with a history lesson on the origin of the cocktail, a show highlight in performance. At this point, a lay critic recognizes that age and miles has not ossified the man’s impeccable piano chops. He is a screaming, no messing around, perfectly performing Mozart who can play anything under the sun perfectly at any speed and with his own brand of elegant, hard alcohol élan at an afterthought. Probably, at this point, the only one of the class of ‘77 who still can. Elvis Costello can carry a tune. But not like that.

Feel like you missed something special? You did. What am I supposed to do now, go through the whole set? Tell you about “Scary Monsters” out of nowhere, burying “Caravan” in the middle of “Chinatown”? Tell you about what it was like to see the members of his three man band walk off the stage as he wrapped up “Slow Song”?

Here’s the blueprint:

1. Steppin’ Out
2. Invisible Man
3. Not Here, Not Now
4. Rush Across The Road
5. Dirty Martini
6. Stranger Than Fiction
7. On Your Radio
8. Solo (So Low)
9. The Uptown Train
10. Chinatown/Caravan (Duke Ellington cover)
11. Scary Monsters (David Bowie cover)
12. It’s Different For Girls
13. Good Bad Boy
14. You Can’t Get What You Want
15. One More Time
16. A Place In The Rain

Encore:
17. Is She Really Going Out With Him?
18. A Slow Song

Mutlu.

MAY 2 – FRIDAY 930am
Arrive Baton Rouge. Am inexplicably (albeit pleasingly) upgraded to “premier” status at the rental car stand. As such, immediately begin cruising soul food joints adjacent to the airport in a leather-clad SUV with Infinity sound and XM radio, looking for that first food fix before Brett arrives…

NOON
Check into uptown guest house. Two-story joint with balcony entrance off the courtyard. Sweet locale. Ridiculous cheap

205pm
Fairgrounds. We’ve got a full day ahead of us, culminating with Stevie Wonder

512pm
Just before Stevie takes the stage, torrential downpour turns the racetrack into a serious mudfest

730pm
Seahorse Saloon

EVENING
General New Orleans goofiness centered on and around Magazine – we’ve an early day tomorrow. Though delicious, the gourmet burgers at Storyville take exactly one hour to arrive at the table. Final N/B: There are exactly two cds in the Brothers III jukebox that are not of the country & western varietal. Both are Louis Prima…

MAY 3 – SATURDAY 630am
Jesus – am I awake? Coffee

745am
Ninth ward, bag lunches in hand, waiting to work for Habitat. The sky is dark. The wind blows deep. The sky breaks: fast, heavy. Today’s scheduled work is unfortunately of the exterior varietal. We watch the thunderstorm and wait some 2.5 hours, sipping coffee in a dark, half-built house at the end of Spain, eventually dismissed without hammering so much as a single nail

1045am
While purchasing my first gravy-drizzled hot sausage of the day, I manage to unintentionally short-change the proprietor of a soul food breakfast-and-donut stand just off Franklin. The “Please respect your family and do not ask for free food” sign on the wall behind him has me suspecting I’m not the first

11am
Driving tour of Historic Algiers Point, west bank

1pm
Meet complete strangers outside Magazine coffee shop in order to return sand-crusted cell phone found yesterday at fairgrounds

145pm
Fairgrounds. Long day of you-know-what. Predictably it’s a mud-fest today, but the sky having cleared around noon the day becomes a scorcher

335pm
Aaron Neville’s gospel-tinged take on “Bridge Over Troubled Water” makes a couple of those back-of-neck hairs stand on end

730pm
Liuzza’s block party. Why are 700 people ordering bloody maries at 730pm? Let’s find out

Midnight-ish
Following the walk of the dead we are now drinking in Rendevouz, a lounge on Magazine recommended by Habitat volunteer

2-ish AM
Caught third wind. Joined a group going to see Mike Dillon’s Go Go Jungle and The Hairy Apes BMX, back up the street near the house at Le Bon Temps. I’m told some of the guys on stage are in Galactic, but then, I’m told a lot of things at this hour

4am
Heating and eating uneaten panini from the morning’s volunteer attempt – and anything else found in fridge

MAY 4 – SUNDAY 915am
I can’t believe we agreed to turn in this fantastic gas-guzzling SUV after only two days

10am
Down in the quarter the line for coffee and beignets is way too long at Cafe du Monde. We try two more coffee shops before surrendering to a considerably more appropriate bloody mary

1230pm
Sonny Landreth is slated to perform on the Gentilly stage quite early today, interfering with everybody’s hangover. We arrive at the festival somewhat earlier than usual, contraband half-pints of Jim Beam for which to spike the mint tea neatly tucked into cargo pockets

230pm
Snooks Eaglin is such a badass

335pm
Raconteours taking the stage. Jack’s sporting a chrome guitar and a seriously Vegas-looking outfit. Immediately after taking the stage he loses the jacket. It’s apparently impossible for me to mention Jack White without bragging to Ron that I saw the Stripes in 2000 with some 25 people at Al’s Bar in downtown LA for $5 – one of my first shows after moving out here – so I will now do that

730pm
Rendevouz with full posse at yon Seahorse Saloon

815pm
Sharing a cocktail with “taxi” driver at Mrs Mae’s, possibly the cheapest bar in town now that Joe’s Cozy Corner has gone belly-up (RIP). Why are these drinks so damned cheap? Is it because they use corn whiskey, as inferred by a rival bartender last night? (Am I presently going blind?)

9pm
Courtyard BBQ party at the house. Who says you’ll stop eating Boudin sausage once you leave the fairgrounds?

SUNDAY NIGHT/MONDAY MORNING
Redacted – Frenchmen Street

MONDAY
Let’s get back to California

Thanks, New Orleans! See you next year. _R

The next morning, Charlie is in the kitchen and Alan is just arriving home, hinting not so subtlety to Charlie that he engaged in sexual congress with his Hollywood Bowl date the previous night. He is gloating this conquest over Charlie, who apparently did not engage in sexual congress the previous night. Alan, however, true to his good nature, sets aside celebration of his conquest and makes an offering to Charlie: It seems Alan’s female friend has a female friend, whom might date Charlie. The catch: she’s 40. Charlie rejects the offer and again evokes his bizarre fear of older women’s extended earlobes.

We advance in time to that evening. Cut to the interior of Charlie’s bedroom. He dismounts from atop beautiful blonde Dee Dee. with a FCC-friendly suggestion of just-completed sexual congress. As he tries to engage Dee Dee in some light conversation, it becomes quite apparent that she has a functioning mental age of about 7 years old. Charlie is understandably frustrated at yet another failure to connect with another on a level besides the carnal, and our pathos for his plight arises in us. Upon this stark realization, Charlie sprints from his bedroom, down to Alan’s room, and, against his early protestations, asks him to set up the blind date with the “old chick.”

The next scene finds Alan and Charlie arriving at a restaurant to meet their two dates. Alan advises him, “Just be yourself. By yourself, I mean someone else entirely.” The studio audience finds this mildly amusing. Linda, Charlie’s blind date, is an attractive older Asian female, in stark contrast to his Caucasian blonde female conquest of the previous evening, her “exotic” ethnicity serving to underscore the sense of “other” as this blind date with a woman his own age is new territory for Charlie. Furthermore, she’s a judge and teaches law at UCLA. Charlie is visibly intimidated and immediately blows it: “I wasn’t expecting someone so… yummy!” He continues, “I was expecting you to be more… dry. But you’re not. You’re actually kind of… moist.” The studio audience finds this line particularly humorous, no doubt supplying for themselves a secondary meaning to the usage of “moist,” the suggestion that a transudation of fluid within (Linda’s) vaginal walls is presently occurring, suggesting sexual attraction to Charlie. Notably, this is Charlie’s observation, not Linda’s, and while seemingly a throwaway double entendre, also underscores his faulty perceptive faculties that err towards narcissism when engaging with women. Regardless, this would be hardly an appropriate topic for dinner conversation. A combination of overdubbed laughter and applause is audible.

Charlie realizes his Freudian slip and asks to start over with Linda. The scene continues following some commercial sponsor messages. Upon returning, further exposition reveals that Linda has kids, a fact of adulthood that further distances her from the man-child Charlie.

A waitress, another young blonde, passes and knows Charlie of course. “How come you never called me?” She seems genuinely upset. Apparently, Charlie has had an encounter with this woman but never phoned her following it. This brief exchange is not wasted on Linda; all indications are that Charlie is not winning her over. The scene ends on this discordant note.

We are now in the car as Charlie and Alan drive home after the date. They are reviewing over how the date went. They discuss a scene that we did not see on camera, a common sitcom tactic: Apparently, Charlie, having not progressed from his “moist” slip apparently proceeded to bring up the topic of pornography at the table and the strangely specific detail that he finds the bloopers on pornography DVDs to be a turn off. Clearly, Charlie is an active onanist and constantly seeks sexual release. While in the car, Alan gets a cell phone call; it’s his date; news comes that Linda didn’t like Charlie. His rejection is appropriate, given his behavior. He is dejected and yet we empathize with him, despite the fact he behaved like a cad. This conundrum is the essential contradiction of Charlie, the depraved, yet likeable figure.

It is now dark, both in Charlie’s mood and time of night. Charlie wakes up in the middle of the night; he is troubled that Linda didn’t like him. He begs Alan to set up another meeting. He cries out in genuine anguish, “I’m tired of having meaningless sex with hot pin heads!”
In the morning, Charlie is calling Linda; he gets her voice mail. This call takes place in the kitchen, alluding that perhaps Charlie is taking on the spurned female role in this couple, in an ironic reversal. His rotund wise cracking housekeeper is wiping down the kitchen and she pipes with humorous asides while Charlie is leaving his message, much to the studio audience’s delight. One notable line: “I never thought I’d see Charlie Harper on his knees. You know, figuratively.” The suggestion being that Charlie literally spends time on his knees, in sexual activity. Significantly, the conjured visual of Charlie “on his knees” more likely casts him in a submissive, homosexual fellacio scenario, rather than a heterosexual intercourse encounter, this fitting in with the emasculation that is taking place within his character as he pursues Linda. Lest the mood grow too somber, the housekeeper chimes in with, “Just because she’s smart and successful doesn’t mean she’s not damaged enough to go out with you.” Brilliant.

Not obtaining satisfaction, and in keeping with is compulsive, addictive behavior, Charlie leaves the house with the pure intent to get drunk. Time advances and in the very next scene, we find Charlie—in a remarkable display of the administrative efficiency of our court system and some plain good luck—in court—Linda’s courtroom—on a charge for public drunkenness.

Linda, despite being an educated judge, leaps to the unlikely conclusion that Charlie has orchestrated this trouble with the law by design, with an aim to be brought into her court. She is touched by this apparent gesture, while he plays that this was his plan all along. She calls him to the bench and finally yields to him, “Alright, one dinner” and the sex obsessed man-child Charlie is rewarded for his ill manners throughout the episode. Finally, on the way out of the courtroom, another young blonde female (the third of the episode), apparently being brought in on a charge for solicitation recognizes Charlie, presumably from a paid-for sexual encounter. Hence, while Linda has already been brought down in agreeing to the date, we are invited to laugh at her one final time on the way out.

The show ends not on the date with the female Asian judge, but regresses to recount Charlie’s stay in jail, centered around the anecdote–again bizarrely specific–regarding “giving your cellmate a baloney sandwich when he asks for it,” the implication being that if you withhold (food) from your presumably physically stronger cellmate, there will be negative repercussions, with a subtext, as with all prison-set jokes, of course the latent threat of homosexual anal rape. Crucially, the implication from the context of the anectdote is that Charlie did in fact learn this lesson “the hard way,” so to speak, being forced to copulate homosexually (presumably submissively) and thus ends this episode-long exploration sexual frustrations on a note that not only does not reinforce his (hetero)sexual prowess and ability to attract female mates, but in fact directly negates it . This conclusion, while seemingly downbeat, in fact underscores an alternate reading of the very title of this situational comedy, “Two and a Half Men.” For the titualar “Half Man” is not merely referring to Alan’s son, Jake, but in fact does references the very nature of Alan and Charlie themselves, both “Half Men,” both, incomplete, unresolved beings. We are left to wonder will they ever be fully formed men? We dutifully tune in next Monday at 9 pm to CBS to find out just that.

Interview and photos by Brian Romero – February 7, 2008

Hollywood is filled with rock bands who look the part but fail to deliver the goods. The Vacation is not one of them. They continue to craft primal, sleaze-tinged songs that consistently bring the audience to a writhing frenzy. Brothers Ben and Steve Tegel talk about the band’s upcoming album and shows at the Viper Room.

Ben, you gave me a CD with rough mixes of the new album late last year. Is it all done?

Steve: It’s all done on the recording side of it. We just have to figure out how we’re going to release it. We’re talking to some small labels now and if it doesn’t work out we’ll release it ourselves.

Ben: We actually have way more songs that I haven’t given to you yet. There’s at least twice as many. Maybe even more than that.

Are those songs going to be released down the road?

Ben: Well, I dunno. I don’t know… There’s a lot of ‘em. Not all of them are great, but some are really good. I just listened to them recently and I was like ‘Hey, this is not bad.’

Steve: I think maybe we could just keep putting out songs…

Ben: Yeah, you never know nowadays. Things are different with the internet and all. You can keep putting out as many songs as you want.

Steve: I mean, we can sell individual songs on our site or on MySpace.

Ben: Yeah.

Steve: We can just do that.

It seems like the album format doesn’t mean much as it used to.

Ben: That’s kinda how the record industry started. Back in the day of The Beatles and The Stones there weren’t any albums. It wasn’t until the the sixties that it became an art form. So maybe that’s what’s happening again, I dunno.

Steve: Maybe we can do a thing where can buy a song for a dollar, but for ten dollars you can get twelve songs. Somethin’ like that… do a package deal.

Ben: There’s lots of ways to do it now.

Did you guys write when you were touring for the first album or did you start once you got back to LA?

Ben: We don’t write anything on the road. For some reason we’re not really capable of that. Some of the songs are older and were written a while ago, but most of them were written when we got back.

Steve: We wrote them while we were in the process of recording them.

Did the songs come from the band jamming or from you and Ben sitting down and hashing them out?

Steve: We did it all different ways. That song “I Can’t Dance With You” is something Ben and I came up with on our own. I came up with that riff on the acoustic guitar.

Ben: With these new songs I’d say most were from the whole band…well, maybe more like half were written together. All four of us…

Steve: The original idea usually came when we were all jamming together.

Ben: Some of them were songs that Steve and I would write and then take to the other guys. Then Denny or Dutch would add a bridge or something. It was pretty collaborative.

Steve: Yeah.

Ben: Sometimes I’d have an idea for a song and sing it into Steve’s answering machine. Then he’d figure out a guitar part and we’d come in and it’d be different than how I thought it was going to be, but that was cool. Like I said, Denny would come up with a bridge or great turn around or something.

Steve: That’s how “Do What You Want” came about. And that song “Shit Talker” which will be up on our MySpace page soon… it came from a 45 minute jam session. Us jamming and Ben improvising lyrics. We recorded it and I kinda edited it together how I thought the song should go. You know, in terms of intro, verse, chorus, stuff like that. But that is actually the recording we use on the album. Ben recorded lyrics over that live jam.

Ben: Some of my original vocals got captured on the drum mics.

Steve: I actually think you were standing next to the drums and they bled into your vocal mic. But that song is an example of one way we came up with things. We weren’t intending that to be the final version of the song. I thought we’d go in and play it again, but it just didn’t work that way.

I think this album has expanded the sound of the band. Was this a natural artistic progression or did you guys set out to break some new ground?

Ben: It’s all different classic rock, funk, and soul. James Brown and Funkadelic were just as important to us as The Doors, Rolling Stones and Stooges.

Steve: Yeah. I mean, even the Stones could be funky too.

Ben: Really, whatever came out as a song was just what we felt was working at the time. I think it’s cool to have a little variety, maybe something has a honky tonk feel… to me there isn’t much difference. People like to differentiate genres strictly, but I don’t think they’re all that different. You know, The Rolling Stones did a disco song. Funkadelic was basically a rock band. James Brown was basically a rock singer, I think. To me it’s all the same thing, just different rhythmic feel and expression of different human emotions.

Steve: It doesn’t matter if it’s rock or if it’s funky… if it’s got drums, bass and guitars, it’s a rock band. I don’t think it was a conscious thing for us to try and do anything different. Oh, we did have a piano player on some songs, that was different. Maybe that affected the spirit of it. To me it was a natural continuation of what we were doing.

Steve, did you play the slide guitar on “Whiskey Drinking Man”?

No, Dutch actually played that.

I thought it was a good addition to the song.

Ben: Dutch is very good at that kinda traditional American guitar playing. Besides bass he plays the banjo, mandolin and the slide guitar.

Steve: I don’t think he plays the mandolin, but he does play the banjo. He’s a good guitar player. There’s a lot of piano on that song too, which gives it that kinda honky tonk feel.

Last year I saw you guys play a show with a keyboard player. Are you looking to fill that spot or are you going to keep the stripped down approach?

Ben: We had a guy for a while, John Nieman. He’d play keyboards and sometimes play guitar, and he’s a really good musician but it just didn’t feel the same live like when it was just the four of us. So we decided for live purposes that we’ll stick with that for now, but who knows what’s gonna happen a year from now, maybe… but I doubt it. I guess it just wasn’t gelling.

Steve: It’s been the four of us for so long. So anything that comes into that just feels strange. It’s more of an edge when it’s the four of us. We play off of each other more.

It’s not like you even notice anything is missing when you play those songs live anyway.

Steve: It had nothing to do with… I mean, the guy is a really great player. And there were times when it was really cool, and took some pressure off of me… but It just changes the energy of what our band is about live. Part of that is me banging away furiously on the guitar, you know. I think I was playing too tasteful or subtle with the keyboards or other guitar being around. I get to play more obnoxiously when it’s just the four of us.

Not too many bands can pull off the two guitar thing and keep that almost unhinged energy.

Steve: Yeah, you kinda have to listen to the other guy and not just bash away.

A big exception is Guns N’ Roses, but Izzy and Slash just did their own thing and didn’t work out too many parts together.

Steve: Ha! I think Slash was just going off the whole time.

Ben: Certain bands just work with two guitars. Some only need one.

Steve: A lot of classic punk bands only had one guitar player, like the Sex Pistols.

Then you have the Dead Boys who had two.

Steve: The Clash did, too.

Ben: The Stooges had just one, but sometimes they had a keyboard or sax player.

Steve: We may have John play keys at one of the upcoming Viper Room gigs.

Ben: It’s getting bright in here!

Ben puts on sunglasses.

“I Can’t Dance With You” is a really infectious song. I had to listen to it again immediately after it ended the first time. What’s the story behind that one?

Ben: You know what it was… we were writing songs over at Steve’s place and it wasn’t going too good. Then he played something that sounded like “Tequila” by The Champs. I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds good!’ So he started playing “Tequila” and then changed it around a bit.

Steve: So the rhythm is based on that.

Ben: It’s basically “Tequila.”

Steve hums the tune of “Tequila” while playing air guitar.

Steve: I guess that won’t really come across in the interview!

Everyone laughs.

Ben: That was one of the best periods in music. The early sixties rock. They had these quasi-novelty songs like “Tequila”, “Papa Oom Mow Mow…”

Steve: “Zig Zag Wanderer!”

Ben: Even that was a little more sophisticated. Captain Beefheart, I think I sent you that track and some other stuff from the first album. But The Stooges came out of that original garage rock and psychedelic sound. But if you go back even earlier to songs like “Louie Louie” or “Wooly Bully,” it’s basically nonsense. It was the idea of a sort of catharsis. Everyone was all pent up and buttoned down in the 40’s and 50’s and then all of a sudden it comes out in this screaming gibberish. To me, that’s really what The Vacation is about – to achieve, through the music, some sort of liberation.

What about the lyrics to that song?

Ben: Um, I just made them up right there…

Steve: Yeah, the “I can’t dance, I can’t dance” was just kind of a natural rhythm.

Ben: But then I had to go back figure out what I was talking about.

Steve: You know, it’s about when you hear some Snoop Dogg at the party and you’re all grooving by yourself and the girl steps in and…

Ben: Well… Well, it’s kind of a joke, but it’s still serious…

Steve: What’s the serious part of that song?

Ben: I really do feel that way, but at the same time it’s an exaggeration. I’m making fun of that whole attitude, people who think they’re the shit but really they’re not…

Steve: So you think you can dance?!

Ben: Yeah, whether it’s dancing or whatever. You know, people who just think they’ve got it going on. And that’s good enough to just think that…

Steve: Maybe you are that good, if you just project that. If you think you’re the best, maybe you are the best.

Ben: Actually, these days I’ve realized it’s not whether you’re good or bad… they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, as long as you’re noticed. It doesn’t matter if you’re noticed for being atrociously bad because that’s the equivalent of being stupendously great. In terms of the effect it has on people, it’s how much you’re remembered or whatever.

That kind of leads into my next question… “Shit Talker” blasts tabloids, celebrity blogs and the backstabbing nature of our society. How do you think that Americas obsession has fueled celeb meltdowns like the one Britney Spears is having now?

Ben: Everything is getting more extreme now. But that song is really more about how girls are just really, really mean to other girls. You know, woman is woman’s own worst enemy. They’re forced to be competitive, it’s like economics. They’re all competing for the most valuable dude or whatever. The way we approach our personal relationships is influenced by finances now. Sex is a commodity now. And celebrities are commodities. These people become overwhelmed by their own image. They forget who they are as a person. It’s the same thing that happened to Elvis or Marilyn Monroe. Those are the archetypes. And with Britney Spears, they’re melding together at an unprecedented speed towards a complete tragic collapse.

Steve: It’s totally encouraged by the people behind them. There’s nobody telling them, “Don’t get this much attention!”

Ben: Part of me thinks she’s doing this cynically, as some sort of a public performance. It’s a performance that exists for the public eye on the internet, on Access Hollywood, in magazines… it’s a piece of multimedia performance art. Maybe she’s a genius who’s created this sort of “crazy Britney” persona for everyone’s amusement!

I wish that was true!

Steve: I think she’s lashing out at the way Kevin used her. K-Fed is the most masterful pimp, manipulator… of all time! He just broke that girl.

Ben: Really? You’re kidding.

Steve: I think that’s what’s going on with her. I think she was really crushed by K-Fed.

Ben: There’s a whole industry surrounding Britney Spears right now. She’s in every fucking magazine that comes out.

Steve: Then there’s celebrity blogging. Like, remember the days when you’d come home drunk and you might call somebody and leave a dumb message. But now you just post it on your blog it’s up there for everyone to see.

Ben: Now you can’t even leave anyone messages if you’re famous, or even if you’re not. It’ll end up on YouTube or something. There’s so much surveillance now. There’s nothing that’s private any more. When we were kids, we didn’t even have answering machines. We didn’t have one until the mid-eighties. Back then, if you weren’t home, you didn’t get the call. You didn’t even know someone tried to call.

Steve: I wish we could go back to those times. I really do…

Ben: I guess it’s a double edged sword. Parents can use it to keep track of their kids. You never have to get lost, you have MapQuest…

Steve: I could find places before we had MapQuest!

Ben: It’s true, man.

Steve: I used to be able to meet up with my friends without a cel phone…

Ben: Now it seems impossible. ‘Oh my god, how am I going to find this place? How am I going to find you at the Six Flags or know to meet up by the fucking water fountain?’

Steve: We used to do it though, all the time!

Ben: Hell yeah, we did it for thousands of years. The thing is, once you cross that line, there’s no going back. We become media beings, like cyborgs. It’s not an exaggeration to think that it literally changes the way your brain functions. Different neural pathways become opened up. The technology changes the way you think and operate. There’s no going back. It’s like that diagram of human evolution… you have the neanderthal, caveman, and everything up to us. Now it’s a different being. A media being. Someone staring at a computer while on their cel phone. The brain is different.

We’re approaching a Terminator type of level.

Ben: It’s so funny… If you look back at some of that sci-fi, a lot of it has come true! It’s really happening. Remember “Running Man?”

Yeah, now American Gladiator is back on TV which only seems one step away from that.

Steve: Or now you have that show where they have lie detectors and ask you all these personal questions. I haven’t seen that yet and I’m not sure I want to go there.

Ben: But we’ve gone there as a culture. That’s what I’m saying, there’s no going back. I’m telling you, “Running Man” is only ten years away!

Ben, you illustrated a gig poster that had Lindsay Lohan smoking crack in an alley. Did you get any shit for that?

Ben: I got attention for it on the web. Places like digg.com, which I’d never heard of before. But they posted it and there’s a lot of comments on it up there. Some guy from the LA Times said that it was, uh, tasteless or something like that.

Steve: Tasteless!

Ben: I dunno, I thought it was funny. It just came to me. That’s when her mugshot was posted after she was busted with coke, so…

Steve: And Amy Winehouse really was smoking crack, on video!

Ben: It didn’t seem that bad. It was funny, at least that’s what I thought.

Steve: I think a lot of people like that poster. Maybe just for the illustration. It’s funny that someone would comment that it’s tasteless, just look at any magazine cover…

Ben: No, look at the LA Times! Talk about tasteless… Selling murder, death and mayhem every day for fucking years.

Steve: It’s just weird that someone would pick that as being tasteless. Who’s got taste anymore? What does that mean?

We live in a totally tasteless society.

Ben: Exactly. America’s supposed to be this classless society right? But that just means it’s a tasteless society.

Steve: You mean we have no class.

Ben: No class and no taste. It’s like what people initially said about rock n’ roll, it’s crass and vulgar.

Ben and Steve (simultaneously): But that’s what’s good about it!

Ben: It’s supposed to be that way, in a sense, so why shouldn’t a rock n’ roll poster be that way? If the music is supposed to be that way…

Steve: Right. It goes back to us trying to return to that more simple style.

Ben: Yeah, we’re supposed to be very primal. It’s supposed to get people’s brains back to a more primitive state. I think that’s why we work best live. That’s the true experience of rock n’ roll – it’s a primal, primitive, communal spirit. You’re supposed to have this cathartic release through the loud volume, repetitive rhythms, and sexual, frenzied kind of dancing and performance. That, to me, is what rock… well, not all rock n’ roll is like that, there’s stuff that’s more reflective that’s supposed to describe human emotions in a more sophisticated way. But I like the early stuff, like we were talking about before – “Louie Louie”, “Wooly Bully”, early garage rock all the way up to The Stooges. Then there’s the best of punk rock, which is supposed to be this visceral, kinda primordial experience. That’s where I see The Vacation sort of fitting in.

What inspired you to cover the Shangri-Las “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”?

Ben: I just really like that song, it’s classic and it’s not really one of those songs that’s overplayed on the radio like some oldies are. I heard it a few years ago and thought it was an awesome song. So I came up with the idea and brought it to the guys. I never wanted to do a cover unless we could really make it our own. I hate it when I hear a cover and it’s basically played the same way as the original. I wanted to do the opposite. On the original song in the verse she’s singing it really high and it’s more of a full band sound… then it breaks down and gets really quiet on the chorus. You know, the ‘walking in the sand’ part. So I wanted to do the opposite of that – make the verses really low, kinda Marilyn Manson-y and sparse sounding. Then it’d get really heavy for the chorus. We tried it and it worked.

Steve: Just a little twist.

People really loved it at that last show at Swinghouse.

Steve: That’s a hard rockin’ number live.

Ben: It’s a good Vacation song, ’cause it’s got those background vocals…

Steve (singing): Remember!

Ben: Basically we’re similar to a 1960’s girl group.

Steve: Yeah, in a lot of ways that’s true.

I noticed “Marshmallow Girl” isn’t on the new album. Why did it get cut? That song always goes over so well live.

Ben: I know, I know. We tried recording that song…

Steve: I don’t know what happened. I thought it was a good recording.

Ben: It was decent, but when I listened to it… it just wasn’t as good as some of the times we’ve played it live.

Steve: I don’t know what it is about that song…

Ben: It really needs the audience to work, for some reason.

Steve: Maybe it should just be a live thing.

Ben: Yeah, maybe that isn’t the kind of song you need to listen to at home. Honestly man, even bad or mediocre music sounds better live or on a jukebox at a bar. I can’t even concentrate on listening to music at home, there are so many other things… I end up trying to do ten things at once and can’t really focus on it. You go out to a bar and music makes sense there, that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Steve: You’re forced to be involved in it.

Ben: It’s loud, first of all. When you’re at home you can never really turn the music up loud enough. People will start complaining. But there you have people just doing the things that humans do… it’s tribal.

Steve: I always say with a recording of music it’s only one aspect of the experience.

Ben: Yeah, that’s true.

Steve: When you’re at a show, you’re not just listening… you hear what I’m saying? You see the band. There’s people all around you, there’s this vibe happening in the room…

Ben: You’re checking out this girl, you’re drinking and flirting, you can feel the speakers pushing air.

Steve: It’s really physical. It’s funny because people have said to us in the past “You know, you guys are so great live, but your record doesn’t capture that”. And I kinda agree. Our first album doesn’t capture the power of our live show, but how can you really capture that on a recording when you’re isolating that one thing? It’s just the audio, how could it feel the same? Is that even possible?

You guys have this reputation for being wild on stage and giving really intense performances. Do you ever feel like it overshadows the music itself?

Steve: I don’t know. I don’t think we always go crazy. We’re just having fun, man. It’s so fun just to get up there and play…

Ben: We just try to put on a good show. That, to me, is an important part of rock n’ roll.

Steve: That’s an important part of it.

Ben: It’s a genuine thing…

Steve: It’s what we were just talking about before. It’s not just the music, it’s the whole experience. It’s an assault on your senses and your spirit.

Ben: To me, the crowd is just as important as the band. That’s what’s cool about that last show we did. I don’t think there should be a stage. Also, people are naturally guarded, it takes a little coaxing to get them to come around… maybe a little alcohol. But if they see this guy on stage going wild and making a fool of himself, that might encourage them to think, ‘This is not ordinary, there are no rules, this isn’t ordinary life.’ That’s what’s special about rock shows. It shouldn’t be about just consuming, standing there consuming with your ears the music being manufactured for you.

Steve: I never really get just sitting there passively listening to live music. It’s weird.

Ben: Sometimes it’s cool to sit there and listen to someone’s song that makes you think or feel something. I can appreciate that and like it sometimes. It’s cool, but it’s just not what we’re about as a band.

Steve: Yeah, you’re right.

Ben: So, if that’s what we have to deal with…

Steve: To answer the question, I don’t worry about that because I don’t think the music suffers. There are some bands, that are mostly about a show. I don’t know why, but I can’t think of any right now…

Kiss?

Steve: Yeah Kiss! It’s mostly a show, the music is almost irrelevant. I don’t think our antics on stage impair our music. I think it’s part of it. We’re like that because we’re so excited to be playing.

That last show the guy who announced the band was like “who knows what these guys are going to do!”

Ben: That’s hard, because you can never meet the expectations. Some people maybe be disappointed, but you can’t force it. It has to be spontaneous. And I don’t like bands that are considered theatrical, we’re not a theatrical band. I’m responding to the volume and rhythm of the music along with the energy of the crowd. So that’s something that exists organically for that specific moment and place in time. We don’t plan anything out. Sometimes we change our set list on the fly to respond to the energy of the room.

Steve: It takes a lot out of you. Playing shows makes me tired. Like this interview.

Everyone laughs.

You just updated your MySpace page. “I Can’t Dance With You” is available as a free download.

Ben: This is our way of releasing an EP. Every Thursday after our shows at the Viper Room this month we’ll post a new one. People can get familiar with the tracks and, I don’t know… this is basically us saying, ‘We’re back and we have new music.’ We’re trying to figure out a strategy or label situation. With all that shit, nobody knows what to do any more. It’s all different now and everybody has their own ideas about how to make it as a band now. So we’re trying to figure that out along with everybody else.

Steve: One way or another we’ll get the music out to the people.

The Vacation play tonight and every Thursday this month at The Viper Room. You can hear and download their new songs on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/thevacation.

FURTHER READING
» The Vacation @ Swinghouse, 1/25/08
» The Binges, The Vacation, Yearlong Disaster, Tokyo Smog @ The Roxy, 7/3/07
» Kibitz Komune @ Canter’s, April 5: The Losanjealous Timeline
» The Vacation @ Concert of the Beast: The Losanjealous “Interview”

We’ve been talking about doing something like this for well over a year and it is now time to get it out the door. Please bookmark this page. May it serve you when planning how much money to bring (or not to bring) the next time you hit the live music circuit. With any luck we’ll eventually be able to tell who’s doing things right, who’s doing things so-so, and who’s shafting everybody in the ass indiscriminately across the board.

The next time you go to a show you need to remember:

1. Where were you
2. What was the date
3. Who was playing
4. What drink did you order
5. Which bar did you order from
6. How much did it cost
7. Any other pertinent information (How was the drink? etc)

The ‘which bar’ category has been added based on the fact that within venues themselves, some bars offer drinks not available at the other bars. Example, beers are available in super big gulp sizes at the downstairs bars at Spaceland and Roxy but not at the upstairs bars. You get the idea.

Every time you see a show and order at least one drink, come back to this page and add your info to the comment section. Every week or so, we’ll update the master list with your input, sorting by venue then by date within venue. If this takes off we may eventually have a serious resource on our hands here, and we will database it. If it doesn’t take off, we’ll then know you are all (a) lazy or (b) non-boozers. Either way we win; demo data is prettymuch invaluable these days. I’ll start the chart with last night’s show and a recent foray at the Troubadour. Let’s do this, people! Price guide after the jump.

*** THIS CHART LAST UPDATED 26 OCT 2007 ***

*unverified

Photo of South Bay bartender taken by losanjealous ryan for www.losanjealous.com – an independent music, events and original content site based in Los Angeles. Used with permission.

Las Vegas may have Wayne Newton, but Los Angeles has Morrissey. Sure he’s performing extended residencies in San Fran and NYC as well, but we got an incredible 10 consecutive nights–er, make that actually 8, but more on that later. After all, this is the city where he revived his career in 2004 with the amazing You Are The Quarry. Tonight was the series finale and the last LA will probably see of the The Ringleader of the Tormentors tour. It was also the last show before the closing of the Hollywood Palladium for a much deserved makeover.

After an anxious build up, Morrissey started off the night with “How Soon Is Now?”–a promising sign that he would mix things up a bit, make the last night special and leave the fans with something memorable. But the rest of the setlist was standard Morrissey fare. No real surprises, but still a fantastic twenty three songs and the crowd was raucous from start to end. So instead of moping and waiting for my favorite songs to come around I just joined in the celebration. No band has ever accepted my offer to write out their setlist, so why imagine that Morrissey would be the first?

Of course, at one point in the show, my mind did drift off and stop at the speculation of a Smiths comeback. Looking at how happy (by Morrissey standards) he looked on stage and the rapport he shares with his band, however, I can definitely understand if The Smiths never reunited. There is nothing I can fault with Morrissey’s musicians. Loud when they need to be and always crystal clear. Oh, and heaven forbid if one had to split all those gazillion dollars with Johnny Marr and a session rhythm section.

Back to the performance. Morrissey was energetic throughout and shook more front row hands than I ever recall during a performance. One special occurance in the night was when the band collectively took off their shirts and chucked them into the crowd. I couldn’t tell if the crowd fought over these as fervently as one of Morrissey’s but it was quite amusing. I remember being in the pit one time when a five person tug of war started for a Morrissey shirt. After each party agreed to a stalemate, one of the girls pulled out a small pair of scissors from her bag and cut the shirt into equal pieces. The encore was shortened to one song presumably because of all the attempted stage invasions.

So after the opener Kristeen Young, I went to visit the infamous bathroom (assuming it was the men’s room where the ‘plumbing problem’ occurred). This explanation reminded me all too much of those last minute mechanical problems that airlines announce as they bump you onto the next flight. Even Morrissey wryly remarked about the mysterious plumbing problem but came short of letting the cat completely out of the bag. Thank you anyway, Moz Angeles loves you.

Setlist:

How Soon Is Now?
In the Future When All’s Well
The Loop
Jack the Ripper
Sister, I’m a Poet
London
Tomorrow
Human Being
Why Don’t You Find Out for Yourself?
The World Is Full of Crashing Bores
I Like You
Death of a Disco Dancer
Billy Budd
Shoplifters of the World Unite
All You Need Is Me
One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell
Irish Blood, English Heart
Stretch Out and Wait
I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris
I Will See You in Far off Places

Encore:

First of the Gang to Die

TIME TO VOTE

(a) Cafe Tropical (Either) (Silverlake pictured)
(b) King’s Road (Beverly)
(c) Groundworks (Any)
(d) Peet’s For Life, Brah (Any)
(e) Lost Souls (Downtown)
(f) Insomnia (Beverly)
(g) Urth (Any)
(h) Stella (Silverlake)
(i) Buzz (Beverly)
(j) Koffea (Ktown)
(k) Newsroom (Either)
(l) Nandarang (Ktown)
(m) Mr Coffee (Ktown)
(n) The Cow’s End (Venice Pier)
(o) The Griddle (Sunset/Fairfax)
(p) Stir Crazy (Melrose)
(q) One O’Them South Pasadena Joints (South Pasadena)
(r) Fucking Denny’s, Man
(s) Fucking Starbucks, Stop Hating
(t) Psychobabble (Los Feliz)
(u) Sabor Y Cultura (Armeniawood)
(v) Casa de Sousa (Olvera) (Downtown)
(w) The Coffee Table (Either)
(x) Cofftea (SG Valley)
(y) Casbah (Silverlake)
(z) The Pantry Goddammit (Downtown)
(aa) Whats-its-name, Studio City (Studio City)
(bb) MaGee’s Donuts, Duh! (Tranny Central)
(cc) Bob’s Donuts (farmer’s market, 3rd/fairfax)
(dd) My buddy Bjorn’s kitchen (redacted)
(ee) Silverlake Coffee Co (Where the fuck might you suppose)
(ff) Casa Blue (Highland Park)
(gg) Chango (Echo Park)
(hh) Intelligentsia (Silverlake)
(ii) That one joint on Fountain (Fountain)
(jj) The Scientology Celebrity Centre (Celeb Centre/BeHo)
(kk) UnUrban (Stallone’s Fave) (Santa Monica)
(ll) Portfolio (Long Beach)
(mm) Write-in:
(nn) Write-in #2:
(oo) Write-in #3:

This list is by no means exhaustive. Vote for no more than five. Criteria to consider: available coffees, crowd, waitstaff, clientele, comfort, wifi, couches, ambience, entertainment, readability, parking, # dogs, # writers, # bums, restrooms (free/25cents/fuckoff none here). Criteria will add weight to to your tally if provided. No login required to comment. No real name required to comment. Generally speaking you will not be humiliated or ostracized for whatever the fuck you decide to comment. Get out the vote.

saw scott booker checking in @ the front desk and knew I was in the right place. Hit the pool and saw a small stage. Fast forward to the gig: they changed it up a bit: they BEGAN the set with “do you realize”, said they were used to always leaving the stage after that song, left the stage at which time captain america came out, did the ear-cupping thing and made us all scream for an encore for ten seconds at which time they came back out and played another hour-and-a-half or more, finally closing with “race for the prize” …

otherwise your textbook lips show but small, by a beautiful pool, of course loud as hell. loved it. i hadn’t heard any of the at war material live other than at the bowl, so really enjoyed that. and they pulled out an oldie – “mountain side” from priest driven ambulance which was spontaneously dubbed, in wayne’s words, “mountain wind because this is the fuggin’ windiest day I’ve ever seen in Las Vegas.” wayne did the thing with the bugle again. no hamster ball but there was really no room for it with all of the wade pools. might have been the most intimate full-band show I’ve seen in years – possibly since Zona Rosa 1999 which, incidentally, is a venue on the current tour.

they were playing fantastically awesome T.Rex as people entered. they also dedicated “vein of stars” to the one and only Marc Bolen who’d died 30 years ago to the day. loved the stravinsky firebird suite closing cadenza by which they walked onto the stage, and I heard steven work the same chord progression into some incidental music mid-set (likely a bed for one of the anti-war sentiments).

at one point, some guy (marine?) had enough of the anti-war bugle action and managed to walk right the hell onto the stage – which basically anybody could’ve done – and started screaming amidst all the confusion @ coyne, no bullshit, who listened patiently until the dude was escorted off by THE FLASH. Wayne proffered that it was apparently too loud in the guy’s hotel room, but take heart: the show was nearly over. we were told to decide amongst ourselves if we wanted to collectively lie and say everybody jumped into the pool and went apeshit, which nearly came to fruition more than once. best of all, it was incredibly easy to get right up to the front of the stage while they were rocking out and shooting confetti over my head (confetti was billowing straight the hell out onto flamingo road and very likely all over the gold coast across the street). Big wind and a perfect night.