We spent hours last night battling through our secret archive—one a storage unit, now something between a firetrap and a choking hazard—to fish out whatever relics we could from six years of publishing this crazy thing. And we actually found … a lot? But not a lot of a lot. L.A. RECORD flies by night always, and our archives have gone through several apartments, Volvo trunks, storage units, floods and spasms of unavoidable but hilarious catastrophe, so sadly they aren’t complete. But they’re more complete than we thought!

So—in honor of the amazing L.A. ZINE FEST, we’ll be bringing out some L.A. RECORD-type things that haven’t seen the light of day for years. If you ever missed an issue—or a pint glass—this may be your only chance! We’ve done 105 issues so far, and we have most of them, but there are barely any copies of some of them. And we have no plans (or fantasies) of reprinting, so much like actual records, you probably want to get them while they can still be got. And so at our little table at zine fest we will have …

ASSORTED COPIES OF VOLUME 1 ISSUES!
The giant poster that started it all! Hand-delivered up and down Sunset Blvd. by people who were very tired the next day. We have more of these than we thought, but not enough for complete runs. Some are unfolded posters, some are only the folded hand-out issues … you’ll just have to see. Some of these are disgustingly rare, too. (You’ll be seeing the last few copies of certain ones.) Included are … Lavender Diamond, Peanut Butter Wolf, Daddy Kev (naked), Daddy Kev’s dogs (naked), Josh Homme and Chris Goss, Busdriver, David Scott Stone and more!

ASSORTED COPIES OF VOLUME 2 ISSUES!
Still as the one-pager! Strangely, we have big gaps in this volume. Must be a box lost somewhere? We’ll have posters and foldouts of many but not all volume 2 issues including Big Business, the rare Texas-only Andrew W.K. and David Cross issue, Entrance Band, the amazing Mika Miko as the Dickies, Abe Vigoda, Jail Weddings, Daedelus, the Henry Clay People and more!

COMPLETE RUNS OF VOLUME 3 and VOLUME 4!
Surprisingly, we have COMPLETE runs of each 12-issue volume of our monthly—every 16-page fold-out issue (pictured above) from 2008 to 2010. (Pocahunted to Soft Pack.) The rarest are the Henry Rollins / Crystal Antlers and Happy Hollows issues, but we’ve got them! And we’ve also got Gaslamp Killer, RZA, RTX, Blu and Ta’Raach, Luis and the Wildfires, Dam-Funk, Pearl Harbor and more!

COMPLETE RUNS OF VOLUME 5 and VOLUME 6 (SO FAR!)
These are the quarterlies, starting with Flying Lotus and going through Nite Jewel, Hanni El Khatib, Daedelus, King Tuff and Ras G. We’ll have a stack of each, although Tuff and Ras are down to the last copies. And we’ll bring a VERY FEW of the Ras G’s with the flexi record inside!

WHAT ELSE?
Lot of weird stuff. Pint glasses, random posters—our detritus is your curiosity! Come visit and say hi, and then join us for the L.A. ZINE FEST afterparty with Allah Las, Cold Showers and Neverever at 7 pm—free!

L.A. RECORD AT L.A. ZINE FEST ON SUN., FEB. 19, AT THE LAST BOOKSTORE, 453 S. SPRING ST., DOWNTOWN. 11 AM / FREE / ALL AGES. AFTERPARTY WITH ALLAH LAS, COLD SHOWERS AND NEVEREVER AT 7 PM / FREE / ALL AGES. LAZINEFEST.COM.

Making their first LA appearance at The Echo, the mysterious Manchester band WU LYF  was welcomed by fans who sang along loud and proud to their album “Go Tell the Fire to The Mountain,” which was just released in June. No one could keep still as sweat and hair flew all over the place. WU LYF just announced a world tour which will end back in LA at the Troubadour in November. But will they have merch this time around?  Opening for WU was Long Beach’s Crystal Antlers who had just completed a Monday night residency. Photos from July 26, 2011 by Debi Del Grande.

WU LYF:

[View with PicLens]

[View with PicLens]

Download: Judgment Day Mixtape

Bloody Death Skull – Judgment Day
Nostalghia – Cool For Chaos
Halloween Swim Team – Science Fiction
Peter Himmelman – The Pigeons Couldn’t Sleep
Ash Reiter – 2012
Mexicans With Guns – Death And Rebirth
Jenny O – Earth Has Won
The Silent League – Here’s A Star
Yacht – Dystopia
William Strangeland – Last Breath
The Rock N Roll – November Rain
Crystal Antlers – Parting Song For The Torn Sky
Bobby Blunders – Wound Too Tight
Nihiti – Who Will Be Your Messenger
Sister Mantos – Fin Del Mundo Yankee
The Thermals – Here’s Your Future
National Park System – Sad And Fucked (Not Moving)
5-Track – A Beautiful Song About The End Of The World
DRVGDEALER – Smoke Lightning Fuck Unicorns

Download: Moon Duo “Mazes”

(from Mazes out now on Sacred Bones)

Wooden Shjips guitarist and singer Ripley Johnson assembled Moon Duo (with keyboardist Sanae Yanada and samples pried from a bunch of primitive drum machines) to channel even more powerful drones and tones from the forbidden zone of rock ‘n’ roll. Moon Duo will play the Echo on Tuesday. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is the ‘J’ in ‘Wooden Shjips’ from a typo on the back of a Crosby, Stills and Nash live record? Or is it because people should always have a ‘J’ in the middle of listening to those records?
Ripley Johnson (guitar): Absolutely not! Those are both really funny. A ‘J’ in the middle? No one ever said that before!
What is your favorite place to visit in Morocco?
My favorite place to visit there is Fez. Fez is a medieval walled city—about a million people inside the walls. Completely nuts. There is a modern part outside it, but the old part is massive. And you literally can’t drive a car into it. So everything goes in on donkey carts or people’s backs. I highly recommend it. I’ve only been once and I stayed in a—like a guest house. These old houses they restore. They’re fantastic. It’s such a closed society. You never see people’s houses. It’s just a door, and walls everywhere. But if you get beyond the door—if you can—there’s fantastic courtyards in these houses, and they’re quite beautiful.
What’s the most isolated you ever felt on planet Earth? Out in the Moroccan desert?
The most isolated I ever felt was in Joshua Tree walking around there. Until a plane flies over. You can feel like you’re the last person on earth and you see a place in the sky and brings you back.
What effect does that environment have on you?
It gives you a sense of how small you really are. I’m into that whole existential experience. I’m not a thrill-seeker. Some people jump out of airplanes to feel alive. Being in places like that makes me feel alive and causes me to think about the big picture.
Wayne McGuire wrote that the drone in the Velvet Underground’s music is an expression of a kind of existential ‘death drive.’ Is there a connection between that music and the experience of isolation?
What I find interesting about the Velvet Underground—lemme go off on a tangent! In New York, the Velvet Underground are considered this art-rock band. And I could see how you might think the songs are this kind of ritualistic thing. But if you read some of their interviews, they talk about being outside of New York and playing sock-hops. In the late ‘60s going to high school gyms and people are dancing. Even in ’67 and ’68, maybe people aren’t as hip in these smaller towns—they just wanted to dance. And they would play ‘Sister Ray’ and people would dance. That to me is the key to the repetition and drone. You hear it in dance music, you hear it in early rock ‘n’ roll—then I think rock ‘n’ roll lost some of that in the ‘70s. It got a little wanky. But to me, the Velvet Underground were a great dance band. And they’ve said that in interviews. I think that’s missed a lot. That’s how I respond to that stuff.
Kim Fowley said, ‘They shut off the heat of the beat.’ Same concept?
I did meet Kim Fowley once. He’s a funny guy. Is he writing a book? He really should be. Anyway—I don’t know why that happened. Some people blame cocaine. People got all self-centered and self-focused and you do a bunch of coke and think you can do anything, and people got really into the virtuosic kind of thing. But not everyone—there’s always stuff going on beneath the surface.
If the ‘60s were acid and pot and ‘70s and ‘80s were coke, what chemical substance controls American society today?
Meth? I don’t know? Caffeine? Sugar? People are addicted to food these days, it seems. I don’t know what the kids are doing. It’s hard to say.
You said that you thought Johnny Thunders was the best thing that ever came out of New York—what’s the best thing that ever came out of L.A.?
I really like Wallace Berman. He did an art magazine and was tied into the avant-garde scene—I’m no expert; I just have a book by him that’s amazing—and he was one of these guys in the underground art scene in L.A. in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He was a polymath. He did everything. He did photography, he did any kind of thing he could get his hands on and knew every artist. He was one of these inspiring figures. When I think of L.A., I think of him and of these people that are sort of working in the underground there. When I think of L.A., I think of the underbelly. There always seems to be like really interesting things you can discover about L.A. that don’t get exposed very often. I’ve just started getting into L.A. noir fiction. Ross McDonald, Raymond Chandler—I’ve started reading him obsessively.
Who’s the most Chandlerian character you’ve met recently?
I don’t run in interesting enough circles! I don’t know any tough guys or tough chicks.
What is the most awe-inspiring African rock reissue you own?
My favorite is the Chrissy Zeppy Tembo—My Ancestors. I think he may have been the drummer in Witch. These are things—you buy the reissue and don’t get around to reading the insert cuz you just get obsessive about listening to it. All of that stuff, it’s just so good. I love a lot of the afrobeat and afrofunk stuff—the Nigerian stuff, and even highlife stuff—but this zamrock stuff isn’t funky. It’s just rock bands from Africa. Really amazing songwriting and guitar playing.
What kind of beneficial health effects are there to playing repetitive rock ‘n’ roll music?
I’d hope there’s some stress relief.
Like a hot tub for the mind?
Something to take your mind off your troubles. I listen to a lot of music when I’m driving and it allows me to zone out for a while. There are benefits to not thinking about things—that’s the goal. Maybe not while you’re driving! But I tend to have crazy ideas when I’m driving, and get inspired by that. Sometimes things will pop into my head. I’m constantly taking notes or sometimes I dictate to someone else in the car.
Which of those crazy ideas is most exciting for you now?
We’re talking about doing a tour 12” in October and we’re gonna do this Halloween thing—this came up while I was driving! But we’ll do a variety of custom t-shirts for the tour, and we’ll each have a custom t-shirt we can wear on tour. I’m really into tour gear right now. Like I make handmade t-shirts and take them on tour and wear them every day. It’s a consistency thing. Every day I’m wearing a similar thing. Right now I’m into shapes. White t-shirts with geometric patterns. Triangles and circles.
Doesn’t that come out in the wash? Or is that not an issue on tour?
We do the wash every once in a while, but you just got to get it on thick! Just do layers! I’ve been talking about this record a lot in interviews and now we have to do it—it’ll probably be more instrumental, but maybe we’ll do a cover. ‘The Monster Mash’ or something. We wanna do something spookier. I think of it as a soundtrack to a Halloween party, or if you had kids trick-or-treating in your neighborhood, you could crank it on your porch.
A soundtrack to a guy pretending he’s a stuffed dummy but then he jumps up and freaks out a bunch of six-year-olds?
Exactly! There was a house that everyone was afraid of in my neighborhood growing up. This really dark gothic stone house overgrown with ivy.
How many people in American suburbs have been denied the gothic creepiness of childhood?
The suburbs are scary in their own way! The Stepford Wives kind of thing. I find that sort of conformity incredibly creepy. I think it’s gotten worse, actually. Some of the older suburbs are somewhat interesting. You can find certain neighborhoods—weird subdivisions that were the precursors to the suburbs. Like in Oakland, one were like Disney made it and the lampposts are all the sames—like ‘50s-style art deco. But today things have gotten cheaper and worse. I don’t these McMansions are gonna last very song. They don’t seem made very well. But I like the idea of some of these modular homes—these prefabs. Some designers are making really interesting prefab homes that you can pretty much plop down anywhere. They’re designed smart and low-impact. I have a small dream to buy some land in the desert and plop one of these boxes down.
Fort Ripley? What do you think you’d look like when you came back to town once every three months for supplies?
Probably exactly the same! I already look like that. We’ve talked about going to Detroit and doing that. It’s not a blank canvas, but it’s a place where the American city can be re-imagined. Like suburb-type communities with mass transit. In suburbs and exurbs, everything looks the same. If they let people go crazy and be individual, I think you could have really cool neighborhoods. Like gated communities—my parents live in this retirement community in Florida and there are rules. Your bushes have to be trimmed a certain way. To fulfill this idea of how a neighborhood should be. That’s scary to me.
What do the security guards at this gated community think of you?
If your family lives there, it’s fun to be the freak who comes to visit cuz it throws things off a little bit. I haven’t started golfing yet, but I kind of want to.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS MOON DUO WITH CRYSTAL ANTLERS AND XU XU FANG ON TUE., APR. 12, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $10-$12 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. MOON DUO’S MAZES IS OUT NOW ON SACRED BONES. VISIT MOON DUO AT MOONDUO.ORG.

Hanni El Khatib (say that 5 times fast) kicked things off at the Glasshouse. With only guitar and a drummer, Hanni played his own brand of stripped down 1950s influenced dirty blues rock with dashes of rockabilly and soul. “Loved One,” full of testosterone and one two many beers, feels like a car gunning its engines before a street race. “You Rascal You,” with its chunky over-modulated sound and piercing lead jabs, is slicked back and tattooed up and cruising for a bruising, and “Dead Wrong” is a dancy doo wop skirt twister. Dirty guitar, sultry sandpaper vocals—awesome.
Adler Bloom

Drug Cabin is Nathan Thelan’s (Moonrats and Pretty Girls Make Graves) solo project. I was not able to catch their entire set but what I heard was really wonderful. “Nobody’s Ghost,” with its airy chords and meditative cadence and Thelan’s beautiful vocals, wraps you up in your own daydreams. “One I love” moves along like a water running over rocks, Thelan’s guitar picking dancing while the bass happily walks along. Very cool dreamy stuff that pulled me back to Steeler’s Wheel or elements of the masterful Beach Boy’s Holland album or the earthiness of Neil Young. Cool beans indeed.
—Adler Bloom

As soon as Tijuana Panthers started warming up, a crowd began to form tightly in the Glasshouse full of many fans and many curious observers that hadn’t heard them before. They started out with “Don’t Shoot Your Guns,” which reminds me of a British-pop-punk that differs from their general surf sound. The crowd was pushing to get to the front and there was a small amount of moshers, but everyone was dancing and singing along. All three members were on point with their vocals and playing; they sounded phenomenal. When they played audience favorite “Creature,” absolutely everyone began to jump, dance, and scream out the lyrics. They played “Boardwalk” beautifully, and dedicated it to “Pee Wee Herman” making him a lucky lad because this song is sensual and sweet. They ended their set with “Prayer Needs.” After Chad played the beginning of it once before and left us wanting to hear it, we finally got our fix and it sounded as amazingly catchy as ever.
—Alyssa Holland

If Hell has a Club Punk Cabana then Death Hymn Number Nine would be the band. If music is blaring in Charlie Sheen’s head when the “poles” in his brain are playing tug of war, then Death Hymn Number Nine is that noise. With the blood red paint spatter on their t-shirts and the chalk powder faces they looked Día de los Muertos punk puppets. The music is frantic and balls out punk with the lead singer screaming so hard that it made my throat sore, but Death Hymn Number Nine’s songs also have some cool vibes that lift them above standard punk fare. Some of the tom tom beats almost sounded punk big band, some of the guitar almost sounded like a punk version of Duane Eddy twangy surf guitar. Splash some blood red paint on your t-shirt and check them out.
—Adler Bloom

Crystal Antlers seriously sounded fucking magnificent tonight. They always do, but for some reason tonight everything just came together perfectly and Jonny Bell’s voice sounded so good it was like a recording (so we recorded it of course). The crowd got denser, and moshed powerfully, as I was standing directly behind their biggest fan. He was reaching his hands out to Crystal Antlers and screaming along to each song. They began with new songs, “Fortune Telling” and “Until The Sun Dies Pt. 2,” which both sound very strong, hard-hitting, energetic, and experimental. When they played “Summer Solstice,” not one person wasn’t moving. The drumbeat forces your hips to move, and the Cora’s keys get stuck in your head for days (making my days better). This is honestly one of my favorite songs, ever. The song that captured the audience the most was “A Thousand Eyes,” which starts out heavy, fast, and loud, and drops down to a bluesy passionate slower chorus. Before they ended their perfect set, Bell said “up next is Audacity at Aladdin’s, then Growlers. Growlers…we played on your roof five years ago, don’t forget that.”
—Alyssa Holland

When you watch Audacity, that surf/garage/rock band from Fullerton, California, you feel like you’re at a backyard house party. Maybe it is because the guys are so unpretentious about what they do—which is play solidly crafted garage rock, have some beers and call each other bitches. The crowd at Aladdin’s Jr were totally on board, dancing and asking the boys to play their favorite Audacity songs. If only there had been a swimming pool to jump in—it would of totally felt like the OC.
—Adler Bloom

Growlers started their set as Brooks said over the screaming crowd, “This song is called ‘Gay Thoughts’.” I was in the middle of the crowd, with absolutely no room to even breathe anything but the smells of 3 different kinds of smoke, many different alcohols and sweat. I don’t know what the hell the crowd was doing. We were just falling back and forth together and squished up so tight that I’m pretty sure my bones are now crushed. So after this song I left this weird wave of people with many others saying, “Why can’t we just dance?”—made my way backstage and then on stage with the Growlers, and danced my heart out with all the other girls surrounding the band. The crowd went wild for “Acid Rain,” an obvious all time favorite for most of them. It’s definitely one of the most addictive songs out there right now, and it’s impossible to not enjoy. They slowed it down with “Empty Bones,” but that didn’t stop people from crowd surfing constantly and getting thrown back into the wave of people by the Glasshouse security. I died when they played “Old Cold River,” and I sang along adoringly to Brook’s fantastic vocals. A drunk person almost pushed me off the stage but I retaliated and continued to dance to all of their tropical-bluesy-surf music that holds hypnotic sway over so many die-hard fans who will never get enough of the Growlers’ genius. When they finished, we of course screamed for more, and they played “People Don’t Change Blues,” which Matt Taylor sang after he took a bra that was thrown on stage and put it on a coyote that sat next to the drums (I swear I was not tripping). We got our last hoorah, danced and sang along, until the dear Sean Carlson told us to get off stage at the end of another magical FYF night.
—Alyssa Holland