Tall, flamboyant of dress, profane as James Joyce and possessed of a legend that rolls out before him like the fog at Dracula’s feet, Fowley is a man for whom literally everybody in the L.A. scene has a pre-set opinion. This interview by Ron Garmon.

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Tall and courtly like some 1950s Nashville idol, Earle’s brand of C&W insurgency is highlighted by a knack for raising the ghosts of traditional America inside a context colored by our 21st-century blues. Our chat finds him dealing well with being a Southern boy in the East Village. This interview by Ron Garmon.

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I wound up at the Echoplex instead, getting the joy of seeing one of L.A.’s wondrous little surprises, He’s My Brother, She’s My Sister. Cali country is something I love with the fervor of a late convert, since even Buck Owens was little more than some jackass on TV until I moved my Dixie-fried ears out here for an accidental steeping in the Bakersfield Sound and its many variants. Robert Kolar and Felipe Ceballos from tough indie wide-boys Lemon Sun contribute heavily to Brother/Sister, with the whole, shifting, multi-piece concatenation in the great line of Gram Rabbit and the Parson Red Heads in the insistence on coupling the High with the Lonesome.

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I savored every slow-passing second in the heat—music from the likes of the Submarines, Mika Miko and Tiny Masters of Today, the latter pack of striplings enough to restore any lost faith in the rock verities, as well as the giddy confabs with pals from the RECORD, accidental meetings with ex-girlfriends; even the hi-skool snubs from industry barnacles and no-talents felt good, for such too is life under the municipal big top in rock ‘n’ roll’s Greatest Show on Earth.

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This is darkly sensual stuff made by and for nighttime people rampant midnight-to-six in ill-lit warehouses as spiritually far from Hollywood as Podunk or Parnassus; a hassle-diminished urban paradise best approached with GPS and pepper spray. These five bleak and sexy tracks compress L.A.’s node of this international milieu into a tidy 90-megabyte romp, good for your next spasm of non-dancefloor action-adventure and as fine an occasion for civic pride as Ripley’s Museum, the next Randy Newman album or the grave of Sam Yorty.

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A strikingly elegant pop-blues singer of Amazonian build, Chris Clark bade fair to be Motown’s premature answer to Dusty Springfield with release of Soul Sounds in 1967, showcasing Ms. Clark’s limber and dazzling voice. Ms. Clark will be performing at Sunset Junction on Sunday. This interview by Ron Garmon.

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Named after the Alabama cemetery where the band used to practice, the Haints’ uncanny specialty is a punk rock retrofit of the “dead” traditional music of the South and West. Guitarist-vocalist-fiddler Jaime Barrier muses on a vanishing America, punky get-up-and-go and the difficulties involved in mic-ing a musical saw. This interview by Ron Garmon.

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Indie rock doesn’t produce much in the way of anthems, but, then again, Glasvegas is ‘indie’ only by D.I.Y. courtesy, started as it was by four Glaswegians with more confessed ambition than self-admitted skill. Crowd and feedback noise from Oasis’ rattletrap set punctuated a conversation already fraught with slippage. This interview by Ron Garmon.

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Straight and Frankenstein tall stood Kim Fowley in the low-roofed Redwood Lounge last weekend. Presiding over another installment of “Hollywood Sexual Underground”, the legendary songwriter-producer-impresario was haranguing a roomful of sweating freaks and lovelies when I clambered in off the street on another boiling hot Friday night. “Are there any lesbians or drunks in the house tonight?” he intoned from somewhere near the ceiling, glowering about the narrow room like a rock ‘n’ roll Vincent Price.

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Stewards of the rare and miraculously bad in movies—as well as TV, how-to, instructional and homemade video—the merry footage fetishists of Everything is Terrible! make live what critics would rather let die. The weekend after EIT’s ‘Found Footage Freakout’ at the Silent Movie Theatre late last month found these sore-eyed custodians of the Temple of Dumb waxing philosophic. This interview by Ron Garmon.

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