Courtney Jaye sang in sweet tones,
To the people with abs on their bones.
As they lounged round the pool,
All decidedly cool,
It was if she had sung all alone.

No drinks out, I get.

But no water bottles in?

How does that make sense?

In theory, the Yolks’ nothing-new-under-the-sun approach to loud three-chord rock should have been merely good. Yet I couldn’t stop pointing my eyes and ears at the stage. If they’re taking drugs, I want to know what.

She’s like the character you’d add to a TV show to spruce things up–not like that bastard Poochie from Itchy and Scratchy, but legit, like Flim Flam from The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo.

Spindrift played Hotel Vegas with a bad-ass boogie rock sound, like something the Hell’s Angels would have been listening to in the 60s if they’d been less right-wing and instead joined forces with John Sinclair and the White Panthers to legalize pot and make love in the streets.

Have you ever noticed there are no black Coldplays or Arcade Fires or Sunny Day Real Estates, only black Crystal Antlers-es and TVs on the Radio? BLACK MEN IN INDIE ROCK ARE NOT ALLOWED TO GENTLY PINE!

… with an entire Mac software set at his disposal, not to mention a real drum kit, he could have had any drum sound he pleased, but he preferred to pair many of his songs with the kind of analog binks and thocks that could have accompanied a game of Pong in 1973.

The cool, the dorky, the unsmiling, the spastic, the silent, the pimpled and the suave all rocked out with as much self-consciousness as preschoolers. No one took their pants off, yet the rafters knocked.

The Cigarette Bums were up next. Already among the first rank of Eastside bands, they bid as fair to be Silverlake’s champion road dogs, playing this last local stand before departing for yet another tour. They swaggered to the stage and laced into their customary biff-bang-pow like nothing else mattered. Midway through, Steve broke a string, leaped from the stage, faceplanted beautifully, and bombed out the door to return with a replacement guitar twenty seconds later. The set concluded when a short-circuit briefly snapped off every light in the building. Cheering was little short of maniacal as the Bums took bows in the dark.

Ellis can turn phrase with the best around, like a mangier Mark Twain bewitching some shoddy Christmas decorations into a holiday pavilion on the Champs Elysee.