This wild little guy has been out for a second but we were so busy with shows, shows and shows that we didn’t get a chance to make a huge deal about it! So behold—L.A. RECORD 104! First issue of our sixth year of printing with busting-through-the-mold L.A. transplant KING TUFF on the cover and a very provocative MIA DOI TODD on the poster! Must it be seen to be believed? Or must one first believe to see? Order a copy and all will be revealed … including characteristically reality-rending interviews with Hall & Oates, the Middle Class, Animals & Men, Don Juan Y Los Blancos, Paul Collins, James Pants, Shabazz Palaces and more!

And of course there’s side B with interviews with Tim Burton (!?), Guy Maddin and Sparks on their new collaborative musical, Interpreters by Bleached, Computer Jay and Ria Ama and more, as well as 50 hand-made hand-illustrated album reviews, mind-debriding comics — now expanded! — and a new L.A. WISDOM, in which DJ Nobody and Laena Geronimo discover the exact moment when living with your parents becomes sad.

Order your own copy here! Or subscribe here! Or just grab one for free across the greater Los Angeles metro zone!

L.A. RECORD 104:

CHELSEA WOLFE — KRISTINA BENSON
MIA DOI TODD — DAIANA FEUER
PAUL COLLINS — DAN COLLINS AND KRISTINA BENSON
HALL AND OATES — DAN COLLINS
PAPERCRANES — DAIANA FEUER
ANIMALS & MEN — CHRIS ZIEGLER
THE MIDDLE CLASS — JONNY BELL
KING TUFF — CHRIS ZIEGLER
SPINDRIFT — DAIANA FEUER
MICHAEL CHAPMAN — KEVIN FERGUSON
FEEDING PEOPLE — DAN COLLINS AND LAINNA FADER
DON JUAN Y LOS BLANCOS — LAINNA FADER
JAMES PANTS — CHRIS ZIEGLER
SHABAZZ PALACES — LAINNA FADER

ALBUM REVIEWS EDITED BY DAN COLLINS
THE INTERPRETER: COMPUTER JAY — KRISTINA BENSON
THE INTERPRETER: BLEACHED — KRISTINA BENSON

COMICS EDITED BY TOM CHILD

L.A. WISDOM EDITED BY DAIANA FEUER

ART EDITED BY DREW DENNY
TIM BURTON — DREW DENNY

FILM EDITED BY LAINNA FADER
THE INTERPRETER: RIA AMA — LAINNA FADER
SPARKS/GUY MADDIN — LAINNA FADER

BOOKS EDITED BY NIKKI BAZAR
EXCERPT FROM KASMIR BY JON LEON
FROM DALI TO LAMA … KARMA OR COINCIDENCE BY PATRICK LYONS
BOOK AND ZINE REVIEWS

—Sarah Bennett

DISTRO HAS BEGUN!

SIDE A

LACO$TE by Daiana Feuer
HANNI EL KHATIB by Lainna Fader
DEATH by Kristina Benson
GANG OF FOUR by Lainna Fader
TEEBS by Kristina Benson
OFF! by Chris Ziegler
TOM TOM CLUB by Daiana Feuer
FORT KING by Dan Collins
LUIS & THE WILDFIRES by Lainna Fader
MY DRY WET MESS by Lainna Fader
BEST COAST by Dan Collins
WANDA JACKSON by Daiana Feuer
WHITE FENCE by Daniel Clodfelter
THE MELVINS by Chris Ziegler
WINO by Chris Ziegler
NOBUNNY by Drew Denny
HANDSOME FAMILY by Daiana Feuer
THE TRASHMEN by Dan Collins

SIDE B

ALBUM REVIEWS  edited by Dan Collins
THE INTERPRETER: CHAD BROWN by Lainna Fader
THE INTERPRETER: JULIA HOLTER by Drew Denny

COMICS edited by Tom Child

ART edited by Drew Denny
ALL THIS AND NOTHING by Drew Denny

BOOKS edited by Nikki Bazar
JON SAVAGE by Ron Garmon
BOOK AND ZINE REVIEWS

FILM edited by Lainna Fader
THE INTERPRETER: STRANGELOOP by Lainna Fader
ALLISON ANDERS + KURT VOSS by Lainna Fader

L.A. WISDOM w/ Kim Fowley and Ruthann Friedman edited by Daiana Feuer

POSTER:
Photography by Ramon Felix
Design by Jun Ohnuki
Letting by Champoyhate

SPECIAL THANKS to Annette Badalian and Shane Carpenter for helping us so much!

—Sarah Bennett

Download: Scott H. Biram “Time Flies”

(from Something’s Wrong/Lost Forever out now on Bloodshot)

Scott H. Biram is an American hollerer with a bunch of room to himself between David Allan Coe and Jack Oblivian. He likes Black Flag but sometimes he gets weird and reedy like Dock Boggs, and he decides here that he is probably not going to take shrooms again for a little bit. This interview by Sarah Bennett.

Do you still have your ’65 Ranchero?
Scott H. Biram: I’m sitting in it now. It was pretty beat up when I got it but I had it redone and they kinda ripped me off and didn’t do as good a job as they should have. But my cousin builds hot rods and works at this badass shop and he had it for three weeks and fixed it all up and it’s badass.
Do you collect old cars?
Scott H. Biram: No, this was actually my uncle’s—he died in ’99 and I bought it from my aunt. It was just sitting in the carport for five or six years. He was only the second owner and the old man, Mr. McCoy, who owned it before—my grandfather says he remembers when that old man bought the car brand new and drove it into town and no one had ever seen anything like it before.
What town was that?
Scott H. Biram: Until I was 10, I lived in a small town called Prairie Lee—population 100 people. There was a schoolhouse with grades kindergarten through twelfth grade all in one big building. There were fourteen kids in my class. I moved to San Marcos, Texas, when I was 10—a college town—and I grew up there. Plus I did a lot of traveling with the folks too, so I didn’t get the whole hick thing.
You’ve openly attacked the ‘hick’ stereotype. You have an art degree, right?
Scott H. Biram: Some people just automatically think I’m some kind of dumb redneck because of my moustache, but no—I went to college at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. It’s a state university now. David Yow—the singer for Jesus Lizard—is also from there. He was quite a bit older than me, but we still had the same art teacher who did a couple of Jesus Lizard album covers and he just did my most recent one, too.
Do you still do any visual art?
Scott H. Biram: No, I got burned out in college and didn’t want to do any more art after that. I still do T-shirt designs, but that’s about as far as that goes. I was a painting major and I did collage—weird collage. I made some little tiny roasted turkeys one time.
Where did music come in? I read that you got into Stevie Wonder first and demanded a Casio keyboard for Christmas.
Scott H. Biram: I don’t know where I would have said that, but yeah. When I was a little kid I heard ‘Superstitious’ and I was like, ‘What is that?’ It didn’t sound like a keyboard and my mom told me it was a synthesizer and I said, ‘I want one of those.’ So, yeah—I started playing keyboards first.
You’ve been in a lot of physical accidents—including the Great French Gas Station Leg Break of ’09. Does your pain tolerance ever improve?
Scott H. Biram: Nah, I don’t like pain. Most of the stuff happened to me back in 2003 with my big wreck when I broke every limb in my body except for my left arm. It was pretty wild. And so in February, I broke my other leg and they put rods in that one. Now I’m like the bionic redneck or something.
How much metal is in your body? How much does it weigh?
Scott H. Biram: It’s titanium so it’s not really heavy, but I have a rod through the center of the bone of my right lower leg and a plate in my left knee with about eight screws. I have a titanium rod through my right leg through the center of my right femur and another plate on my forearm with more screws in it. But as far as pain goes, my tolerance for Vicodin is way high now. I took one the other night and it didn’t do anything to me.
What about morphine?
Scott H. Biram: They didn’t give me any this last time, but when I was in the first time, they had me on so much morphine for the first week that I thought I was locked in a feed store behind enemy lines. I was in a military hospital, too, so everyone had their fatigues on.
You recovered alone this time, right?
Scott H. Biram: I’m always alone. I’m like stir-crazy in my own head. My dog thinks I’m crazy because I’ve been whispering to myself. I’ll be thinking something then I’ll whisper it and my dog will look at me like, ‘What are you doing?’
Is it hard to adjust to the inherent social aspects of going on tour?
Scott H. Biram: When I go out by myself in regular situations not playing music, I can get nervous. I don’t like to be around people—meeting their families and stuff like that—it just makes me nervous. But when I’m on the road, it’s like having a birthday party for you every night. You’re the guest of honor and they’re giving you food and beer and showing me their titties and stuff.
Do you believe that bad things happen to you because you were a bad person in a past life?
Scott H. Biram: No. I just feel like I have shit luck. I’m not a clumsy person. When I slipped in France, it was because the gas company makes their pumps with tile flooring on it so they’re slippery as fuck.
If you did have a past life who do you think you’d be?
Scott H. Biram: Not a truck driver; probably a carpenter. I’m good at building things. If I was somebody else before, I would be just an anybody that didn’t stand out too much—a person living a humble life. I just don’t feel any extraordinary background coming to me from any past life. But I’ve been told I have an old soul.
Do you agree with the statement that ‘America in 2009 is a place and time when it isn’t hard to have the blues’?
Scott H. Biram: I’ve been having a little bit of trouble writing lately, but I started recording a new record just a couple of weeks ago. It was three years between my last two records, so if I can finish this one in the next seven or eight months, I’ll be doing good. I’m feeling a little punk rock again. I’ve been trying to write some minute punk songs—just straight-up punk rock hollerin’. It goes with my lack of inspiration somehow. If I just yell some words out and play some really Black Flag-sounding shit, I could write a shitload of those songs. I know there are a few people who miss the wild and crazy me because the last record had a lot of ballad songs on there. They say, ‘We miss the rowdy, grind-y style,’ so I don’t mind showing them it’s still there—and then throwing a couple of lonely ones in there too. The one I already recorded for the new album is kind of like a lonely, driving-across-the-desert-at-night song.
Do the ballads come from recording alone in your home studio?
Scott H. Biram: No. It’s because I’m depressed. I’m depressed as fuck. I’ve been depressed forever. I’m jaded too. I have no love interests at all and that’s a little depressing too, that I’ve given up on that shit.
You could try not spending so much time alone? Your dog can’t help you meet people.
Scott H. Biram: That’s why I’m taking acting classes. I’ve been filming a demo for a horror movie that’s coming out where I’m a serial killer truck driver.
Joyride?
Scott H. Biram: It’ll be more like Texas Chainsaw Massacre but where I’m a truck driver. I went to Nashville to film this scene and in 16-degree weather I hung a girl by some hooks in a barn. I’ve been thinking I really want to get into this acting thing—get my mind off of music for a little bit—so I’ve been looking into these classes at the city college here in town. And I think I can meet people in a setting that’s not at a bar.
But then you’re meeting actresses who are really good at faking things.
Scott H. Biram: Yeah, well, I’m good at faking shit too. But, really, I like girls who are actresses because they have a career idea and they want to do something with their lives.
They also tend to take care of their bodies more because it might end up on camera.
Scott H. Biram: That’s awesome.
You could go to the titty bar to meet women.
Scott H. Biram: It’s not that you can’t pick up chicks at a titty bar—unless you got coke—but it’s just a waste of money. We hit one once every tour because we’re bored.
You’re in Austin now, but are there any other cities you would consider living in?
Scott H. Biram: I love San Francisco. I like the way it looks. I like coming over one of those hills and seeing the bay down below. It’s one place I feel like I can breathe; when I’m home or in other cities, I feel like I’m not taking as deep of breaths as I should. I drove through Louisiana once where all the refineries are and my nose started bleeding.
How does L.A. stack up?
Scott H. Biram: I like going to L.A. I don’t want to live in L.A. I don’t like the traffic. Every friend I know who moves there within two months is wearing a spiked belt.
What’s one way someone from L.A. could not look so out-of-place in the South?
Scott H. Biram: Well, I can’t speak for the South because Texas is not the South.
The United States of Texas?
Scott H. Biram: It’s just such a big place and there’s so many different places and different kinds of people in Texas. I’m not all about that ‘seceding from the Union’ bullshit, but it is its own entity. To me, there’s the South, Texas, the Southwest and the West. If you want to blend in in Austin, you just have to have a bunch of tattoos.
What job did you have to quit to do music full-time?
Scott H. Biram: I was a cook at the Town Square Deli in Wimberley, Texas. My last job was Christmas Eve, 2001. I was supposed to get off two hours early and I got off two hours late and I looked into the restaurant and everyone was gone except the owners and their friends drinking mimosas and having a good old time and I was back there washing dishes and late for my Christmas Eve at my parent’s house. So I said I quit without my two weeks. Told them that they wouldn’t like the way I’m going to act the next two weeks if I stay here.
Was that the worst job you ever had?
Scott H. Biram: The worst job I had would either be the pawn shop or the Goodwill. At Goodwill, I sorted through all the shit that gets donated. It’s all dirty from people’s garages and I have this thing when my hands get dust on them, I feel weird—like this claustrophobic feeling. I don’t mind oil or gasoline on them, but if they get some kind of dry stuff, it makes me freak out. They told me I needed to clean the men’s restroom and I just walked out.
What about the pawn shop?
Scott H. Biram: That was just depressing. There was this crazy guy in my art class and he got crazier and crazier and one time he came into the pawn shop and he pawned a bunch of guns and I was like, ‘This guy does not need to have guns.’
Do you still get inspiration from the CB radio?
Scott H. Biram: Well, I haven’t had my CB in a while, but five minutes of listening to it, there’s something that’s worth it. That’s where I got the title of the last record. ‘Lost Forever’ came from this trucker saying, ‘We’re gonna be lost forever!’ and the ‘Something’s Wrong’ comes from when me and my friends were on mushrooms in high school and my friend’s curled up in a ball screaming, ‘Something’s wrong!’
Which is better—LSD or shrooms?
Scott H. Biram: Well, after last Halloween, I don’t know if I’ll take shrooms again. The mushrooms freaked me out. I played this festival. There were a thousand people there and I came by myself and I didn’t know anybody. Somebody gave me some shrooms and we went to this campfire—it was a campout festival. There were all these hippies and there were people playing drums and shit. I had just played but I didn’t know anybody and I kept hearing my name being called. When I tried to find my van I got lost in the woods. I should have seen it coming—me coming alone and getting lost in the woods on mushrooms. I also locked myself in a porta-potty for half an hour to try and get my shit together.
No more psychedelics?
Scott H. Biram: I’ll drop some acid again, but I smoke pot and drink and that’s about it. Except for New Year’s Eve—that’s another story. Last year we were in New Orleans. A quarter-hit of acid, a party in a mansion and I got really drunk and started walking through the Garden District and wandered into some bars where I stayed until the sun came up.
You seem to end up on a lot of solo adventures.
Scott H. Biram: Sometimes I put myself in these places to make myself do things so that I’ll have stories to tell. I’m a really good storyteller. I remember little details and things from when I was 3 all the way up through high school and college. And I like to tell stories and I can’t shut up.
Good thing you can write songs about them.
Scott H. Biram: Yeah, but then I tell more stories between songs and people yell at me to shut up and play. It’s funnier in France where they have no idea what I’m saying.

SCOTT H. BIRAM WITH THE DIRT DAUBERS ON SAT., FEB. 6, AT SPACELAND, 1717 SILVERLAKE BLVD., SILVER LAKE. 8:30 PM / $8-$10 / 21+. CLUBSPACELAND.COM. SCOTT H. BIRAM’S SOMETHING’S WRONG/LOST FOREVER IS OUT NOW ON BLOODSHOT. VISIT SCOTT H. BIRAM AT SCOTTBIRAM.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/SCOTTHBIRAM.

The mass email from Andrew W.K. came into my best friend’s inbox and even though I only knew the simplistic, punch-along lyrics to “Party Hard,” we were one of the first 100 people to reply, earning us tickets to watch the man in dirty-white pound a few out on Liberace’s mirrored piano. How the famed, reflective Baldwin grand got to the Gibson Guitar showroom (two blocks off Rodeo Drive) from its permanent perch at Kitsch HQ in Vegas, I’ll never know, but there it was, missing its see-through Lucite top and some mirrored squares on the legs, but it was THERE with 100 lucky emailers surrounding it.

Andrew W.K. emerged from a black velvet box and stumbled over a nonsensical speech (about how we should make sure to bring extra quarters to the store when we’re buying water to tip the cashier. WTF?) before sitting at the mirrored beast and improvising simplistic songs about food, being a boy and dog ownership. Clearly hanging out in another dimension where he wasn’t expected to play the instrument in front of fans, Andrew (despite being classically trained since age 4) banged out staccato couplets until they bled into a garbled Nordstrom piano-player audition over which he sang, “You gotta eat food/You gotta eat to live.” His voice was not of Andrew W.K. but instead wandered lost between Bob Dylan’s hiccupping and Randy Newman’s laziness. And even though Andrew’s just-released album is comprised entirely of made-up-on-the-spot piano songs, this was just weird. Not party-‘til-you-puke, force-your-nose-to-bleed-because-it-looks-badass weird (which I was half-expecting), but more upside-own-sunglasses-at-night, I’m-mad-at-my-label-so-I’m-going-to-dick-around-on-Liberace’s-piano weird.

Eventually, he pulled it together enough to play keg-worthy anthems like “Party Hard” and “Get Wet,” which, surprisingly, translated well to the piano. And with his signature tunes coming out of Liberace’s piano, Andrew finally flourished. The pre-written lyrics allowed him to focus on unique re-harmonizations and the audience screamed the songs’ namesake choruses, stoked to be only arms-distance away from the headbanging man dressed like a Heartland mechanic.

I might have been puzzled when he got the crowd to alternately chant “Mrs. Washington” and “asshole Tuesdays” for a whole minute (and again when I realized that his improv songs are only as dry as his humor), but Andrew W.K.’s numerous erratic moments were overshadowed by the epic Beethoven-ness of his rare coherent ones. Oh, yeah. The glittery piano helped, too.

—Sarah Bennett

Exene Cervenka by Sarah Bennett

Between a Lil Wayne documentary screening and an Exene Cervenka show at Alex’s Bar, I experienced the full spectrum of the art/artist-reality/celebrity conundrum in under 6 hours.

First, Quincy Jones III’s renegade documentary, The Carter, was screened in a subterranean auditorium on USC’s campus (with Ice Cube’s student son and Tupac’s first manager in attendance). Filmed with no scripts, plans or interviews (in accordance to Lil Wayne’s wishes), the film eschews traditional rock-doc babble for intimate reality show-worthy footage of the 27 year-old rapper (then at the tipping point of mainstream success) smoking joints, drinking cough syrup and recording impromptu songs out of a bag of studio equipment in his hotel room.

Although the hourly drug use and jetset lifestyle could easily get him lumped in with a hip hop hoodlum stereotype, Lil Wayne’s spontaneous creativity, unabated output and raw, uncensored lyrics (he once compared himself to Russel Crowe from A Beautiful Mind, but it’s probably more like Bob Dylan circa 1965) set him apart from the rest of a genre that is increasingly overrun with prefab “rappers.” While The Carter gives a more personal look at what it’s like to live in the unorthodox realm of “Wayne’s World,” it fails to give new insight to the rapper’s hinted-at deeper emotions and instead demonstrates the ease with which popular musicians avoid internal conflicts by slipping under the cover of celebrity bravado.

Because he would not sit down for direct questions from the producers (and gave vague responses to journalists featured in the film), lyrics splayed over artful live footage served as the closest thing to self-reflective commentary from Lil Wayne. But the rapper’s words are a jumble of pussy-eating semi-rhymes and crack-day reminisces that (like the late MJ) mask sadness with a public persona and prove Wayne is not ready to take off his diamond-crusted teeth and confront some damning truths.

Hours after the documentary’s credits rolled, Alien Lord (and veteran artistic onion) Exene Cervenka (in a move more Tupac than Weezy F. Baby) stripped away another emotional layer by roaring through a batch of subdued folk songs to a surprisingly thin crowd at Alex’s Bar. Flanked by musician-friends Wolfmaiden, Conquering Lion and Black Scorpion 35, the 53 year-old multi-medium artist set aside the last of her angry-punk bombast and presented a set of raw electric-acoustic tunes, many from her latest solo album, Somewhere Gone. Inspired by the last four years of living in Missouri, Cervenka’s new lyrics tackle subjects such as loneliness and isolation with such poetic honesty that there is no need for her signature snarling vocals.

Instead of keeping convention by writing songs in line with her other, louder music projects, Cervenka’s Midwest epiphany helped her do what Lil Wayne could not in The Carter, fearlessly emerge from behind the mask of public expectations and expose your soul to a bunch of drunk Long Beach fans. Somewhere in a pot-and-sizzurp stupor, Young Money is jealous.

—Sarah Bennett

—Sarah Bennett