Some volume issues during a performance on screen render the crowd restless. Murmurs ripple through, speculating and questioning.

“Can’t hear a fucking thing!” cuts through the darkness, crass and unconstructive.

“Well, you should’ve been there!” retorts another faceless voice, more lighthearted. By the end of the film, he couldn’t have been more right.

The Smell first opened its doors in 1998 and to this day is the only Los Angeles venue heavily DIY in nearly every aspect. Dedicated to the purveyors and connoisseurs of music and art, the Smell is run by the artists whose work decorates the walls, by bands who schedule their own shows and volunteers who love art. It’s a community spot welcoming creative minds.

Michael Fierstein, of Static Aktion, has been working with club owner Jim Smith for over five years now, setting up shows and loving every minute. He’s brought some great acts to the Smell, a magic he used to make their documentary film about the legendary venue, Live at The Smell.

“I love The Smell, it’s my home,” said Fierstein, who produced the film. “I have nothing but the utmost respect for Jim Smith and it really was an honor that he would trust me to oversee a movie about the Smell, using The Smell’s name.”

Working with friend and filmmaker Bob Bellerue, the documentary became the sort of thing only the marriage of like-minds could make happen. Bellerue brought his technical prowess to plate and Fierstein picked bands and booked shows for filming.
“I thought it was important for us to document some of the bands that were around and also document our space and what a show is like at the Smell,” said Fierstein.

From the in-your-face shots of sweaty kids in sonic ecstasy hovering over the Foot Village drum circle to Captain Ahab’s enthusiastic, Speedo (only) clad side show mouthing lyrics and bouncing off every surface he can get to, the shots capture The Smell in true form.

The camera stock, editing, and overall cinematography were very DIY, an appropriate aesthetic for the feature. Reminiscent of Urgh! A Music War, the film showcased live acts in uninterrupted succession. Segments of performances by The Mae Shi, Foot Village, Ponytail, Abe Vigoda, High Places, Gowns, BARR, No Age, HEALTH and Captain Ahab were shown with crisp, flawless audio.

“It’s DIY cinema vérité,” explains Bellerue, “a fancy way of saying we were just working with the equipment available to us.  Amongst the core crew and our friends we had a couple of miniDV cameras, Hi-8, and mini-DVDr.  With good audio any video can work.”

Mirroring the values of the Smell in content and quality, Live at The Smell immortalizes the venue on film. In the press release, Bellerue says, “Venues come and go, but Jim Smith and the Smell are going nowhere fast and taking us all along,”  This film spearheads the ride and from the looks of things, it’s going to be the time of our lives.

—Christina Nersesian

All I’ve got to show from Coachella is a sunburn, a pimple, and a busted bottom lip. While there, I enjoyed: half-assed ass shaking to Crystal Castles, Ting Tings, and Girl Talk; Morrissey looking bloated but still croonin’ like a pro; Paul McCartney singing me to sleep as I lay in my tent; worrying that Ariel Pink was either going to melt or collapse into a pile of dust when exposed to daylight; watching Liars (featuring Alex Myrvold of Pizza!) squirm through my favorite songs while I wondered whether their presence signified a new direction for Coachella (towards an aesthetic I find much more attractive and interesting than that of, say, the stupid Killers) or simply reaffirmed my aforementioned belief that some music is best kept in dark places where sweat is produced via dancing hard as fuck rather than by standing in the fucking sun thinking, “I would be dancing right now if I weren’t sweating my balls off!”

And: I guess I do like that one TV on the Radio song; how gross but totally radical it is that M.I.A. can hop and squat and shimmy and slam like that so soon after popping a baby human out of her vagina? I mean, I hate it when people talk about their babies and how their babies are waiting for them so they can only sing seven songs but I’ll take seven songs and some dumb-ass baby banter if it means I also get amazing glow in the dark costumes and hammer-dancing in front of footage of impoverished Sri Lankan militia men while M.I.A performs effortlessly, barely breaking a sweat—unlike Gwen Stefani who looked like a sweaty bag of shit for several performances after birthing Kingston.

And: the Vivian Girls looking too shampooed to have all that hair in their face and doing absolutely nothing new but making me like them anyway—also a case of No One Dancing until my buddy Jack and I started a water-spitting war and got at least 12 too-skinny kids in short shorts to move, although they were mostly just scurrying away from us but really where’s the line between that and the way hipsters dance, anyway? Plus the Vivian Girls really know how to harmonize and they swapped instruments during a coda without any awkwardness at all, a well-choreographed gimmick that reminded me of how cool I felt the first time I switched drivers going 80 on the freeway but then also how I wondered immediately after, “Why did we just do that?” But then I thought immediately after that: “Sometimes it’s good to do something just for fun, even if it could kill you.” Not that the Vivian Girls switching instruments during a song could kill anyone—the analogy really lies in the doing something just for fun part, because you are young so maybe it’s enough that you are new even if what you’re doing is not.

Also—how No Age has really gotten their shit together. They are now a professional act complete with Scott their very own sound guy (ex-drummer for the Soft Boiled Eggies) and Jim Smith who coolly orchestrated the tech guys to get it all just right so that this show actually did get people bouncing up and down and shoving each other a bit. Plus Chloe Sevigny, one of my first female crushes, was there looking like a fancy rancher’s daughter wearing a white dress that was sort of see through if you stared at it long enough and with her golden locks in a tidy French twist. And: how I can’t help but hum along to that goddamned whistly song by Peter, Bjorn and John.

Finally: how watching X and My Bloody Valentine put into perspective all these kids making noisy pop music by recalling the rich and fabled genealogy of this newfangled uprising and putting a sincere (albeit wrinkled) face on sounds that were once something controversial and that today’s babies take for granted… it must be oddly pleasant to play a show you never would’ve been asked to play in your own heyday, knowing that tropes you helped invent are propelling smooth-skinned foals into stardom from what middle-aged critics are carelessly referring to as the “outside” or the “fringes” while you wonder where the hell that leaves you? But I guess that’s how culture propagates itself and blah-blah-blah babies are gross, even when they are not babies but musical movements.

I didn’t get to see Public Enemy because I was busy almost getting arrested. Then I was not allowed back in so I didn’t get to see the Cure either. Lame.

—Drew Denny

By Chris Ziegler
Photograph by Dan Monick
Moral Support by Charlie Rose

Downtown L.A. was post-nuclear when The Smell first moved in a decade ago, but now it’s all neon. There’s a dog groomer, a gourmet pizzeria and a velvet-rope nightclub just around the corner from The Smell’s alley entrance, and there’s even a boutique cinema that opened in December: “On their artist’s rendition of their facade,” says Smell founder Jim Smith, “our spot is completely blank.” But except for a modestly painted sign of their own — and a much-improved sound system, installed in 2002 — The Smell remains the same, a durable and dedicated successor to vital all-ages D.I.Y. venues like the PCH Club, the Jabberjaw and even the original ’77 punker cave The Masque.

When they started in January of 1998, Smith and founders emeriti Jarrett Silberman and Ara Shirinyan weren’t thinking much beyond month to month; the always-volunteer-run Smell recently planned ten days of anniversary celebrations to mark ten years of undaunted persistence and a rejuvenating new wave of L.A. music affectionately collected as “Smell bands.” Read More…