Gestapo Khazi “Escalators”
(from “Escalators” 7″ out now on Eradicator)

Gestapo Khazi play adrenalized surf-punk served straight up. I like this a lot. If Dick Dale and the Wipers formed a band and put a three-minute limit on songs, it’d sound like this. “Escala-tors” is poppier. It’s reverb-drenched and sounds more Ventures than Dale, and it flows like I’m lying on my back in the sun bobbing between waves. I prefer the B-side. If “Escalators” is floating on a raft, “The Atomic Kind” is swimming in a choppy ocean with a hard current at your back, leaping waves like an amberjack on a feeding frenzy, ears echoing with water and a feeling of hyperventilation as you gasp for a gulp of air before planting your face back into the cold salty sea. I would have loved this song when I was triathlon training. The song races to completion after a concise two-and-a-half minutes, but this is the type of song that could be stretched to an hour, and I’d be cool with it. I have no idea what the lyrics are about (surf conditions? Master Race? Cars? ObamaCare?) but who cares: it’s surf punk, so just stop thinking and go with it.

—Scott Schultz

The Henry Clay People “Your Famous Friends”
(From Somewhere on the Golden Coast out now on TBD Records)

Somewhere on the Golden Coast starts out with a one-minute Pavement-y lo-fi intro, then the big-deal production kicks in with a beefed-up version of “Working Part Time.” That and “This Ain’t a Scene” previously appeared on the band’s 2009 album, but both are strong enough to break nationally, and the new songs on the disc are just as good. Two-thirds of the way into the 34-minute album, the band leaves their comfort zone—Replacements/Tom Petty/ last-call rock ‘n’ roll—with a light psychedelic ballad called “A Temporary Fix,” and then they throw down two piano-led boogie stompers, “Saturday Night” and “Your Famous Friends,” showing off keyboardist Jordan Hudock and suggesting a promising new development in their sound. My favorite song is “End of an Empire,” which is classic Henry Clay People with catchy choruses and the brothers Siara trading hooks. Joey doesn’t have the strongest voice, but there’s strength in his delivery. This is supposed to be the record that bounces the Henry Clay into something big and it could really do it—it’s a worthy follow-up to last year’s local classic For Cheap or for Free and just the step they needed to take next.

—Scott Schultz

The three Chinese bands all share an affinity for first-generation post-punk like Joy Division and Bauhaus. It’s most apparent in the basslines, but all three bands take their sounds in unique directions. AV Okubo plays industrial punk with keyboards that sound distinctly Asian. Carsick Cars are China’s answer to Sonic Youth, and that’s not hyperbole. P.K.14 sounds like Joy Division with the urgency of the Clash. Chinese students were jumping around in a frenzy, and hipster jaws dropped before bands who are local heroes 5,000 miles away from Spaceland and the Echo.

I missed most of M31′s set but returned in time to grab a couple two-for-one beers (one Chinese/one American) and hit the main floor for the first of the Beijing bands, AV Okubo. It wasn’t really unusual seeing Chinese musicians onstage in L.A., and the music was so loud that the language difference had a minimal effect. In fact, I was standing next to a friend from L.A. RECORD, and two songs into the set he turned to me and said, “Oh, wait—these are the guys from China?” Lu Yan (vox/keyboard) is a fierce front man with a vocal delivery that rates up with the rest of the genre’s screamers. They kind of reminded me a bit of Infected Mushroom. AV Okubo’s debut CD is produced by Martin Atkins, and it’s easy to see why he’d be interested in working with a band like this.

L.A.’s Monolators were the next band up. Perhaps it was because they were onstage a little early compared to their preferred midnight slot, or maybe it was because they wanted to impress the Beijing bands, but they hit the stage with even more ferocity than usual. The band sounded great—blazing through their set, breaking mic stands, cords and strings and flailing all over the place. The Chinese students were even caught in the frenzy—a tornado of energy lifting everything not fastened to the floor. They closed with local classic “We Fell Dead” and raised the bar for P.K.14.

(I think this was around the time I walked across the street with friends to smoke the mystical bloggerweed. For some reason, the bloggers in this town get the best weed in L.A.—I think if you show the collectives your URL link, they take you to a secret humidor for the strongest marijuana in the universe.)

P.K.14 are legends in China, and lead singer Yang Haisong made the most of his stage space, shouting in Chinese over classic Factory Records-style music with an intensity that makes Bruce Springsteen look bored by comparison. Yang leaped through the air and danced like crazy, unlike his Wednesday night Viper Room appearance where he spent the set writhing on the stage and screaming directly into the floor. Clearly, he’d been watching the Monolators and was conscious enough to want to avoid repetition—a mark of a true headliner. The band’s songs are also in Chinese, so I don’t know what the lyrics are about, but they sound important. The band was tight and they play heavy and hard. The band absolutely killed, and by the time they left the stage the American Legion Hall was as humid as Nanching with vaporized rock ‘n’ roll sweat.

I was excited to see Signals, since I was a fan of the Mae Shi and I’d never seen the band that rose from their ashes. But I never really got into this band. I think the double wallop of the Monolators and P.K.14 really siphoned away a good part of their energy. I was psyched to hear their cover of one of my most favorite bands ever—Sparks’ “Angst in My Pants”—but ultimately they never quite won me over. I’d definitely catch them again though, because I really liked the Mae Shi and sometimes a band’s slot on a lineup affects how they connect with the audience.

By the time Carsick Cars hit the stage, it was close to 1:30 AM—if not past it. The crowd by this point was mostly Chinese, with some hardy hipsters sticking around to see a band which had developed some local buzz after a midnight set at the Echo earlier in the week at Walking Sleep’s Monday residency. (They’ve also been building an international reputation after opening for Sonic Youth on their European tour.) Carsick Cars are into pedals, loops and long waves of distortion, and they do it better than most American bands that I’ve seen. They also have a keen sense of pop hooks and riffs that really separates them from most of the shoegaze-ampstare bands. They even have a few songs in basic English, which really helped me get into them. The title track from their new CD, You Can Listen, You Can Talk, sounds like a mix of Sonic Youth and classic bubblegum. Their jams were really good, and they had a nice ebb and flow linking the riffs, jams and choruses—and their new songs shred!

The event had a real special feel to it. It was really interesting and inspiring to see the two scenes merge. Members of the different bands were hanging out together and talking music. The Chinese fans loved the Monolators and the L.A. hipsters ate up P.K.14. All three Chinese bands are headliner quality, and the Carsick Cars—with their English lyrics and distortion fuzz bubble yum sound—are catchy enough to catch on with American radio. (Especially those stations that don’t suck.) I think the middle acts—the Monolators and P.K.14—were the stars of this night. Beijing’s music may be mostly unrecognized on these shores, but the best bands from China can definitely hold their own with L.A.’s finest. Los Angeles is awesome for recognizing this and welcoming them with open arms.

—Scott Schultz

Stream: VOICEsVOICEs “Tidal”

(from the VOICEsVOICEs/Gold Ether “Tidal”/”In Armies” 7″ out now on How To Fight)

VOICEsVOICEs (also appearing as Gold Ether) are the first band presented in How to Fight’s new 7” Animal Battle Series, featuring bands playing as themselves and then their alter-egos on the B-side. When I first heard VOICEsVOICEs were recording as Gold Ether, I figured it would sound something like Jadakiss—indecipherably masked vocals swirling through a psychedelic soundscape. While Gold Ether doesn’t go that far, they do rev up the BPM considerably. It’s like what VOICEsVOICEs probably listen to when they’re spinning at the gym, but it still sounds unmistakably like a VOICEsVOICEs song and will probably become a fan favorite if they play it live. The actual VOICEsVOICEs song, “Tidal,” sounds more like another band, with familiar beats and vocals around a reverbing guitar riff that wouldn’t be out of place on a Warpaint song, and it meanders through three-and-a-half minutes, which is about 2/3 the length of most VOICEsVOICEs songs. This is also the first VOICEsVOICEs song where you can actually hear their two separate voices harmonizing. I wore out their debut EP months ago, and these songs were good enough for me to play double-time until their Manimal EP released. This duo clearly has not even come close to hitting the wall artistically.

—Scott Schultz

Download: VOICEsVOICEs “Flulyk Visions” (Radio Edit)

(from the Origins EP out Feb. 2 on Manimal)

VOICEsVOICEs might be like the middle of every great Led Zeppelin song, or maybe like Yoko Ono played backwards while in a warm cave. Their new EP—produced by Prefuse 73—is out now on Manimal Vinyl. Nico Turner and Jenean Farris met with L.A. RECORD‘s Scott Schultz at the Farmers Market to discuss how Prefuse brought out the voices of VOICEsVOICEs, which of them is the better wrestler, and how drummers are more than the musicians at the back of the stage.

I was listening to an advance track of one of the songs on your new EP, and I could actually make out a couple of the lyrics clearly: ‘Human kindness.’
Jenean Farris (drums/vocals/effects): That was from ‘Flulyk Visions,’ from our EP coming out in January. It’s pronounced ‘flu-like,’ like ‘flu-like symptoms.’ When we make soundscapes, it’s all about how it feels. And we’re obsessed with the English language—the way words sound together. We try to be spontaneous about how we name our songs—it’s how we’re feeling. Whatever name pops in our head right away that just fits, we’ll run with it. And for whatever reason, that popped into my head for that song.
You were both new to your instruments when you started VOICEsVOICEs, right?
Nico Turner (guitar/vocals/effects): We were both drummers in other bands. We played around, but we didn’t actually know what we were doing. Pedals, amps, guitars—we didn’t really know how it worked.
Jenean Farris: We could strum a guitar, but until you plug it in and hook it up, you really don’t know what you’re doing.
Nico Turner: We had guitars, but we didn’t want them to sound like guitars because that was boring to us. So we started experimenting and really didn’t know what we were doing.
Jenean Farris: In the beginning, it was more about the sounds we could capture. And then we had the one loop pedal, so we would loop stuff—a lot of it was vocals going through the guitar mix and distorting the vocals to make sounds as well.
How did Nico end up the guitarist? Did you flip a coin?
Nico Turner: When we would jam and play together to come up with stuff, it just happened that I enjoyed a lot of the stuff that I was coming up with—these sounds on guitar—and Jenean is such an amazing drummer and it just happened that she was into that so much. She’s just so good at it, so it happened.
Which one of you is the better singer?
Jenean Farris: We have the same singing individual ability. We have different styles so it works out to be equal. Our name, VOICEsVOICEs, is a lot of masking. We wanted to get more harmonies out there and actually really get our voices out there—it’s like we got the drumming and the sounds were fine, but our own natural voices were frightening—and then to write lyrics and stuff … We’re the hardest critics on ourselves. So when we went to record with Prefuse 73, the first thing he did was stick us in front of a microphone and was like, ‘OK, sing this part!’ Put us on the spot and it forced us to do it. And it was cool because we wouldn’t have been able to do it unless he was the way he was—which was very, ‘DAMN! That’s dope!’ He was really supportive and telling Nico things that she never even knew about her voice before—with me too. That’s really interesting and I wouldn’t have ever thought of it that way until he mentioned it to me. It was really encouraging. That helped us get to that place where we’re not afraid now to really actually sing—even without effects and stuff.
Were you nervous about working with Prefuse?
Nico Turner: Like Jenean said, he actually yanked me in front of the microphone to sing my first day. It literally took me all day to get my voice out of my body. He was so nice and patient and willing to work with us and really defused the whole ‘Oh my god, it’s Prefuse 73!’ thing. It was great and he was one of the best people to work with.
On that first day when Nico was on the mic, were you behind the glass with Prefuse? What was running through your head?
Jenean Farris: I was excited. I know I don’t have the most immaculate voice, but I’m not afraid to go out there and try. I was excited because he was forcing her to do it, but he was able to be more encouraging than I am able to be. His way is way more gentle and supportive in ways I can’t be.
What kind of fingerprints did Prefuse leave on you?
Jenean Farris: He took us in a direction that we wanted to go but we didn’t have the capabilities. We went in there with live technology.
Nico Turner: He was somebody who knew how to mix well and was a great producer who let us draw the line without any big ego about it, and he only worked with us because he wanted to work with us. We were spoiled working with him. He pushed us vocally and with electronics and stuff that we wanted to lean toward—experiments that we weren’t previously capable of.
Jenean Farris: He also has all this really fun equipment that we don’t have. Like he let me put some lap steel in there just to add a little texture! Not a solo, but to make different sounds.
When you first started writing together, did you intentionally avoid making traditional songs?
Jenean Farris: It wasn’t a deliberate counter-approach. We weren’t like, ‘Oh, we’re going to be different!’ We wanted to embrace the sounds. Whatever we did, if it was something we liked, we were going to try to be free and run with it.
Nico Turner: It was an experiment about embracing the creation of sound. Whatever we liked was what we ran with.
Jenean Farris: We have a library of small loops that we’ve come up with. We recycle a lot of things. We’ll go back to a loop that we liked and build off of it. Some rock bands would say that we just use riffs. It’s kind of like that. We find noises that we like and build off of it.
Was the Sounds Outside EP recorded live?
Jenean Farris: It wasn’t recorded live. It was recorded at a gallery, but it was kind of live.
Nico Turner: It wasn’t one take. It was recorded in three takes. We did the whole CD in one day. The track ‘Sounds Outside’ was recorded with one take.
Jenean Farris: We sat on the floor and recorded it live—no retake.
Nico Turner: At the Show Cave in Echo Park.
Jenean Farris: That was where I first heard the Rainbow Arabia CD. I borrowed it and never gave it back.
I always say Manimal bands travel in packs. The first time I saw you at the Echo, it was after being highly recommended by Devon from Exit Music and Eddie from Polyamorous Affair. Eddie said, ‘VOICEsVOICEs sounds like the middle of every great Zeppelin song.’ How do you describe it?
Jenean Farris: People always ask us and I just say, ‘I don’t know, man!’
Nico Turner: I just say ‘experimental,’ even though that is totally vague. But that’s what we are. It’s a big experiment for us.
Jenean Farris: People want you to classify yourself, but the second you do that, there is so many things they can write off about you. We’re really worried because some people say electronic, some people say ambient, psychedelic, rock … We’re really parts of all of them. We just try to stay away from a band sound. We’ll let other people make those statements.
You two have been together less than a year and a half. Are you surprised how much progress you’ve made?
Nico Turner: We never had a plan—we wanted to create something different without being stuck behind a drum kit.
Jenean Farris: We don’t want to be a drum machine for someone else’s band—like a robot. We wanted to get the respect as artists and songwriters.
Nico Turner: We wanted to break that mold of our only being drummers—
Jenean Farris: —and not being credited as songwriters or having any creative input.
Nico Turner: Just because we liked what were doing and it was so special to us—that was the drive for us to go out and play as many shows as we could in the first year. Then we met Chuck P [from Indie 103.1]. We were so proud of our EP—we said, ‘Chuck, you love music, check this out!’ We just gave it to him and he loved it, and he knew Paul from Manimal. It was really just being proud of what we were doing and wanting to share it, and everything just came from there.
Jenean Farris: In terms of things happening to us as a baby band, it’s really serendipitous. Everything is falling into place. I mean, we do have to give ourselves some credit, too—after all, we have been working really hard. Right from the beginning, we were out promoting and putting ourselves out there as much as possible, even when we weren’t even ready. We would play shows before we even had our set down, and it was actually a very vulnerable place to be in. People could see us learning how to play right in front of them—a very, raw vulnerable place to be. But that was part of the excitement. And of course we would do that in places where that was OK. We wouldn’t go play at the Viper Room. People go there expecting performances and they expect them to be tight. The art galleries, the Smell—places like that—we could put ourselves out there and it was fine, and then it just happened that Paul saw one of our notices out there online—it may have even been L.A. RECORD. Serendipity and the total effort of working hard.
Was there a ‘Eureka!’ moment when you realized that you two had something? That it wasn’t just a personal project?
Nico Turner: I remember my ‘Eureka!’ moment. We were practicing at the Smell—it was just us there. It was hot, and we felt like we were wasting time and were ready to give up. Jenean went outside to smoke a cigarette and I stayed inside and to get out my aggression I started playing the second part of ‘Tape Moon’ and yelling that part, and Jenean came running in and said, ‘Keep doing that!’ And we wrote the song. It was June 2008 when we were first practicing. It was one of our first practices. We were trying to write songs for our show we had with Mick Turner.
From Hawkwind?
Jenean Farris: No. From the Dirty Three. If it was Nik Turner from Hawkwind, my mom would have shit bricks. She loves them. One of the first records I ever had was Fripp and Eno where it was one long song. My parents were punk rock musicians, though. Nico’s dad was a jazz player.
And you two met at a Xu Xu Fang show?
Jenean Farris: We did meet at a Xu Xu Fang show. We had talked about meeting up at a show at some point. I had just discovered Xu Xu Fang, and I loved them and I saw that they were playing at Silverlake Lounge. So I called her and said, ‘You have to check out this band.’ So she went and she loved it and it was awesome—so that was cool. And it was really weird that night because there were thunderstorms. It started to leak in and the power went out, but they still managed to do some sort of a drum-off with minimal light in the background and funky pictures. It was all very moody because they had to play without power. From there, we started talking about having a project together.
If you were to ever cover a song with clear vocals, what would it be?
Nico Turner: We want to cover Laurie Anderson really bad. We would do a cover medley and make one big song out of it.
Jenean Farris: We just got this new sampler that will make it awesome. When we get back from our tour we are going to learn that thing. No work—just play music.
Nico Turner: We want to figure out how to imitate Laurie’s vocoder sound but without a vocoder. We’ll borrow howardAmb’s—howardAmb is this band who loves Laurie Anderson also. They’re a two-person band and they use a vocoder.
Jenean Farris: We saw a band the other night—Jogger—at Mr. T’s Bowl, and they did a Laurie Anderson cover, and I was like, ‘YEAH!’ They did ‘O, Superman.’ It was genius because you have to be creative with the electric violin, and he was singing through his violin and it gave a vocoder effect.
Jenean Farris: I think we’ll meet Laurie Anderson soon because I believe in the power of positive thinking. Read The Secret!
Who wins when you two wrestle?
Nico Turner: Jenean is pretty aggressive when she drinks, so she usually starts it, and she’s pretty good so she usually wins. I’m getting better though, unless she catches me off guard.
Jenean Farris: I tried to wrestle Quinn [from Corridor] when he was playing drums with us on the road. We were in Seattle. I think that’s why he decided he didn’t want to join our band.
Nico Turner: Quinn is in great shape. He must have wrestled in high school or something. He took her out in nothing flat. He’s also an amazing drummer.
What are your spirit animals?
Jenean Farris: I am a tiger and Nico is a crow. It’s funny that you asked that, because the cover of our new 7” is a merging of our two spiritual animals. It’s a tiger with a crow flying through it.
Nico Turner: I think I’m actually more of a house cat.
Jenean Farris: No, you are definitely a crow!

VOICEsVOICEs WITH PREFUSE 73 AND GASLAMP KILLER ON WED., FEB. 3, AT THE TROUBADOUR, 9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $15-$17 / ALL AGES.
TROUBADOUR.COM. VOICEsVOICEs’ ORIGINS EP IS OUT NOW ON MANIMAL VINYL AND VOICEsVOICEs “ANIMAL BATTLE VOL. 1″ 7″ IS OUT NOW ON HOW TO FIGHT RECORDS. VISIT VOICEsVOICEs AT WEAREVOICESVOICES.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/WEAREVOICESVOICES.

Stream: Melt-Banana – “Dog Song”

(from the album Melt-Banana Lite LIVE ver. 0.0 on A-Zap Records)

Melt-Banana is a really loud band from Tokyo, known almost as much for its distorted guitar as for its Animaniac, video-game-effects-at-hyperspeed tethered to equally rapido drum beats.  And singer Yako’s screaming cadences are so loud and often distorted that it doesn’t matter what language she sings in; it still sounds awesome. Don’t be mistaken by the band’s “Lite” side project, which is Melt-Banana substituting Agata’s guitar for synth programs and samplers and the revolving door drummers replaced by beats. Everything else is pure Banana. The end result is the kind of music teenage Terminators would mosh to. There’s one song, “Cat and the Blood,” that uses ambient spacey samples zig-zagged by shrieks that sound like weapons over Yako’s kitty Armageddon chorus “Ca’s singing like Meow, more blood, no trap, while dogs sleep tight.” The lyrics are in English, and they even provide the lyrics, and they’re actually pretty good for a second language. “Dog Song,” Yako’s ode to the faithful canine, is my personal favorite: “He likes some bones, He likes to bite hard, He Likes some toys, He likes to run fast, I hear some dog barks…”  And then she lets out the most awesome electronic distorted barking freakout in the history of recorded music (maybe they could sell it as a ringtone?).  This music makes me feel so hyper. If I was back in Echo Park, I would take this CD to the tunnel adjacent to the Echoplex, and I would get really high and play this CD on a boom box full blast, so the echoes would ricochet in every direction. If any of you try it, and I highly recommend you do, let me know how it sounds.

-Scott Schultz

Download: Melt Banana “Blank Page Of The Blind”

(from Bambi’s Dilemma out now on A-ZAP)

Melt-Banana is the ultimate adrenaline band. This band from Tokyo sounds like what the aliens will be playing on the warship stereos when they come to eat us measly humans. They are currently touring with a show that splits Melt-Banana with their new incarnation, Melt-Banana Lite, which is still pretty fucking heavy even though they ditch their guitars. Lead singer Yasuko Onuki (Yako) sat down with Scott Schultz after a sound check in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss how to say ‘cat brains’ in Japanese, fans who make homemade Melt-Banana anime videos, the secret of Agata’s mask, and more.

Are you the loudest band in Japan?
Yasuko Onuki (vocals): Unfortunately, no. I wish we were. There are many loud bands in Japan. Many bands that are both loud and good. We are friends with a lot of them.
This can be where you give your shout-outs, so our readers in L.A. can discover cool Japanese bands.
Yasuko Onuki: Slight Slappers, Senseless Apocalypse, Fluid, Worst Taste, Corrupted are all very good bands. HG Fact is a very good Japanese label that your readers should check out.
Have any of you blown out your ears yet?
Yasuko Onuki: None of us have blown out our ears. We wear plugs.
This tour and your new live CD are being promoted as ‘Melt-Banana Lite.’ Are you guys going soft?
Yasuko Onuki: No, we aren’t going soft. Melt-Banana regular has a lot of loud guitars and is closer to hardcore. For us, coming from Japan, it is very difficult to tour with guitars and drums because we have to bring them on flights and the drums take a lot of room in the van. We wanted to originally record and tour this time without guitars and try something different. Rather than guitars and drums, we wanted to use more samplers, synthesizers, synth drum machines and vocals. It would be easier—more convenient. We thought at first we would even go without drums. In the end, we like drums and cabinets. The music itself on Melt-Banana Lite isn’t very soft at all. It’s still very loud and hard. For this tour our shows will be a little different with half of our show being Melt-Banana Lite. I’m not sure if people will like it, but it will be loud.
What do people think?
Yasuko Onuki: We have been splitting the sets in two—twenty minutes of Melt-Banana Lite and twenty minutes of Melt-Banana Regular. People seem to like it, although some people prefer old Banana. We always want to try something new—something different. On November 3, we released Melt-Banana Lite Version 0.0. It is a live CD. Now we’re thinking of going into the studio and releasing a studio Lite CD.
I read that it’s more expensive for you to tour Japan than it is for you to tour America. How is that possible?
Yasuko Onuki: In Japan, highway tolls and gas are really expensive. For example, from Tokyo to Osaka—which is only about 500 kilometers—it is at least $100 each way. So if we can’t get enough people we can’t tour small towns in Japan. We play the big cities there. We have more fans in U.S.A.
Have you learned to like American fast food?
Yasuko Onuki: When we first started touring, we had a hard time eating. In Japan, I eat more Japanese-style: rice, miso and fish. When on tour, it’s hard to eat burgers every day, but we find good Asian food. Like we’ve been eating Vietnamese food lately. Now we find the good fast food—In-N-Out, we learned. Five Guys burgers are the best on the East Coast. At first I didn’t like Mexican food, but now I do.
I remember the first time I saw you live in 2005, I saw [guitarist] Agata with his trademark mask on, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, he takes the bird flu seriously!’ What is the origin of the surgeon’s mask?
Yasuko Onuki: A while ago, when we were on tour, he had a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. He put Kleenex in his nostrils to stop it, so he hid it behind a mask. Then he got comfortable with it. Back when he started wearing it, people could still smoke in clubs, and the mask filtered it. On tour now, people say swine flu.
The crowds in your shows are so wild. What is the craziest thing you’ve ever seen from the stage?
Yasuko Onuki: I remember one time, there was a kid and he kept doing back flips. He did them for the entire show. He found some steps, maybe six feet in the air. He would run up them and do a back flip and people would catch him and he kept doing it. I just watched it while I sang. It was funny.
You wrote a song specifically for the Adult Swim cartoon ‘Perfect Hair Forever’ a few years back. Can you spot the fans who found you through Adult Swim?
Yasuko Onuki: I’m sure there are people who come to the shows who first heard of us through the cartoon. I can’t tell from the stage which people discovered us through the cartoon. I was happy with the way the song was used though because the sound and animation fit very well. Many people make videos and cartoons to our songs now and send links to us. I think it’s neat.
My friend showed a Melt-Banana video on YouTube to his 7-year-old son that he liked a lot. It is set to your song ‘Green Eyed Devil.’ It is an anime cartoon in which you are a video game character being chased by an alien. You climb a volcano and grab a space guitar. When you play it, it destroys the alien, and you win the game. Was that one of your actual videos, or was that made by a fan?
Yasuko Onuki: Really? I’m not familiar with that one. It must have been made by a fan. It sounds cool. I’d like to see that one.
Which did you discover first—Western punk rock or Japanese punk rock?
Yasuko Onuki: When I was young, I wasn’t familiar with Japanese punk. It was there, but I wasn’t familiar with it. I knew Sex Pistols, the Damned. When I started playing in clubs in Japan, I became aware of Japanese punk bands.
You had Jello Biafra join you guys on stage in San Francisco. How did that happen?
Yasuko Onuki: We had been playing the Dead Kennedy’s song ‘Government Flu.’ Our tour manager knows Jello Biafra. He told him to come by and he just showed up. I was surprised. We asked him to sing with us and he did. Afterward we invited him to other shows, and he also joined us in Florida.
You’re actually not the only Japanese artist that I’m interviewing this month. I just sent an interview to Yoko Ono.
Yasuko Onuki: I met Yoko Ono once! I was in the studio with her son, Sean Lennon. After we were finished playing, Sean and I went to dinner, and his mother joined us at the restaurant. I remember thinking at the time that she reminded me a lot of my own mother. They both look and act the same, and of course they’re both Japanese, and they are also close to the same age. So I was thinking of her more as my friend’s mother than a rock ‘n’ roll icon.
I saw on your MySpace page that it says ‘Neko Brains.’ What does that mean?
Yasuko Onuki: Neko means ‘cat.’ It means ‘cat brains.’ Cats have small brains compared to humans, so when we’re on tour and somebody does something stupid, we call them ‘neko brain.’

MELT-BANANA WITH TERA MELOS ON WED., DEC. 16, AT THE TROUBADOUR, 9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $13-$15 / ALL AGES. TROUBADOUR.COM. MELT-BANANA’S MELT-BANANA LITE LIVE: VER.0.0 IS OUT NOW ON A-ZAP. VISIT MELT-BANANA AT MYSPACE.COM/AZAP.

(from the And Now The Screaming Starts EP available now from Shiloe)

Shiloe is the scariest shoegaze band in Los Angeles and also one of the noisiest. They recently released a single, ‘Daggers In Your Eyes’ that suddenly got them airplay in a dozen cities. When they’re not playing gigs around town, they’re seeking out the paranormal. Guitarist/vocalist Ken Ramos and bassist Melissa Pleckham met with L.A. RECORD to discuss ghost hunting, the Beatles, and how to a handle a zombie invasion. This interview by Scott Schultz.

How long have you two been ghost-hunting?
Ken Ramos (guitar/lead vocals): Maybe six months.
Melissa Pleckham (bass): But we’ve been watching Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures for years now.
Ken Ramos: It was something that we had always wanted to do, but didn’t have any clue as to how to join a group or do anything with it.
Melissa Pleckham: We figured out how to Google it on that Internet machine.
What will you do if you actually catch a ghost?
Ken Ramos: I don’t know. We’re not really trying to catch them. I’d be happy to let them go on their merry way. I’d just like to see stuff.
What if they wanted to hang out with you for a couple days? Where would you take them to show them living Los Angeles?
Melissa Pleckham: We can’t take them to Nova Express anymore because it’s gone. We always used to like the Nova Express but it’s gone.
Ken Ramos: Her mom has a good ghost story, which is what ‘Lady In The Attic’ is about. That’s probably our favorite ghost—since I wrote about it.
Melissa Pleckham: She lived in a haunted house when she was seven or eight and she and her sister used to share a room and at night, they used to hear a lady calling the name William. The next morning, she asked her mom, ‘Who’s William?’ Her mom would go ‘Uh….’ and wouldn’t tell her. One day, her mother told her they weren’t allowed to play in the attic anymore. ‘Don’t go in the attic.’ No explanation. They thought that was weird. After they moved out of the house, her mom told her there had been a little boy who had died in the house and that his name was William. One day my grandma had been in the attic and there was an old lady in there wearing old-fashioned clothes and she said something to my grandmother which made her tell everybody to not go up in the attic. But my grandmother wouldn’t say what it was.
‘Daggers in Your Eyes’ is a radical shift in direction for you guys in terms of raised vocals, melodies and accessibility—is this a new direction for the band or are you still exploring the boundaries of your style?
Ken Ramos: I don’t really think of it as a direction. I don’t think I have a direction when it comes to that stuff—which I like. I always try to think of the Beatles and their whole catalogue of stuff. They have pretty much everything from ‘Rocky Raccoon’ to ‘Helter Skelter.’ Listening to that stuff, I never get the feeling that they are knowingly experimenting with a sound. With ‘Daggers,’ I just wrote the lyrics and the vocal melody one day, and that was the first time that I had written a song that way. It sat around for a while and one day I just started strumming guitar and trying to find chords that fit it. I never really started thinking about where it was going until it was done.
Were you guys surprised that your song was being played in multiple radio markets? how did you find out?
Melissa Pleckham: I wasn’t suprised. It sounds like a radio song to me. It sounds like a prom song—like what they would play at a really good prom. If John Hughes had made a modern prom movie.
Ken Ramos: The old Google device yields all kinds of results. Look up your song, and you could find it. A couple of times we were driving around and heard ‘Daggers’ on KCRW, which is pretty amazing.
If you could be in a movie playing yourselves, which movie would it be?
Melissa Pleckham: We could be in Almost Famous. We could be playing when he dropped acid and said he was a golden god. It would be jarring and not really in line with the movie, but I would really like that.
Ken Ramos: I would want to be in any eighties movie featuring Oingo Boingo. What’s the one with Rodney Dangerfield? Back to School? I love that one.
Ken, you had a college roommate who was a prince in his native land. Where was he a prince? And what kind of music was he into?
Ken Ramos: I do not know what kind of music he listened to? I think he was from Thailand.
Melissa Pleckham: Did you have to bow when he came in the room?
Ken Ramos: No.
Did other people bow to him in front of you?
Ken Ramos: No. He didn’t really tell anybody. It would sometimes come out in conversation sometimes. It was friends who knew them. He was really casual about it. He was a really weird guy. He was studying computer science, and he was just sitting in front of a computer all day and all night. I never heard any music.
Did he have a manservant?
Ken Ramos: No, but at home he did.
Melissa Pleckham: When I was at Berkeley, I had a roommate who would look at porn on the computer while I was in the room, and she would always listen to MIDI versions of Celine Dion songs. ‘My Heart Will Go On.’
At your Halloween show last year, Melissa’s father dressed as a pimp and joined the band onstage playing guitar.
Melissa Pleckham: I kind of expect such theatricality from him at this point. (laughs) My dad’s pretty wild, so it’s not like if your dad’s an accountant and he shows up dressed as a pimp to play guitar with you. Then it would be awkward.
Your parents are the only ones I always walk up to and say ‘hi’ to at shows. What’s your favorite band to play full blast in your apartment?
Melissa Pleckham: Black Sabbath. Paranoid.
Ken Ramos: We have the vinyl Paranoid.
Melissa Pleckham: One time, I was listening to it alone while in the apartment getting dressed. ‘Iron Man’ came on, and I was kind of afraid to leave the room. It was kind of a creepy moment. What if ‘Iron Man’ is out there?
What’s the best music to play while speeding on the highway?
Melissa Pleckham: I like Dig Me Out by Sleater Kinney. There are several really fast songs that make me feel frantic.
You played Mexico City early on. How did you get that gig?
Ken Ramos: It was the craziest most magnificent weekend. It was an Internet radio station from Mexico City. One of the DJs contacted us. We did an interview and he kept in contact with us. One day my phone rang, and it was this guy asking us if we wanted to play Mexico City. Of course I said yes. Not even asking anyone if they can do it—just, ‘Yes, we’ll do it!’ We got down there and they took us to the pyramids and everything.
Melissa Pleckham: We sent to Xochimilco, canals and a haunted island called Doll Island.
Ken Ramos: This guy hung dolls all over it to ward the island of the spirit of this little girl who had drowned on the island. You’re supposed to bring a doll and hang it up.
Melissa Pleckham: We didn’t know that, so we’re probably cursed. They were really scary. We would love to go back.
Ken Ramos: We just spoke to that guy again. He’s not a DJ anymore. He’s writing for a magazine, but I hope to go back there again.
Are you going to ever record anything in Spanish?
Melissa Pleckham: Ken knows an embarrassing amount of Spanish for a person whose last name is Ramos and whose father is a native Spanish speaker.
Ken Ramos: My Swedish mom speaks fluent Spanish, and my sister who lived in Argentina for a year can speak it, and I don’t really speak it.
Melissa Pleckham: I think I speak more Spanish than you, and that isn’t saying much.
You played the Troubadour in November for the first time. What were your expectations?
Melissa Pleckham: I expected to find out what’s in the room upstairs to the left of the stage, with the curtain. Because we’ve been up in the loft, and I’ve heard from other people that it’s similar. It’s a lounge with a bathroom. But I want to see it with my eyes. Because that where you see the bands come down from, and I always wonder—‘What’s up there?’ I remember we saw Sonic Youth when they played a secret show in like 2004 and we got backstage passes, but we only got in the loft—not the secret artists room. So we were all psyched for backstage passes, but the only person we saw was Steve Shelley—which was still cool, but I wouldn’t know what to do with Thurston Moore if I ever encountered him. Which I have done several times. I love Kim Gordon.
Did you contact them to let them know you were playing at their vinyl release at Origami Records?
Melissa Pleckham: They posted bulletins about it on Myspace and Facebook, and they mentioned us.
Ken Ramos: I think their manager or someone like that was at our show.
Melissa Pleckham: They mentioned the Origami release party and it said ‘With our friends Pocahaunted and Shiloe,’ and we were like, ‘Now we’re friends with Sonic Youth. It’s officially official. They said it, so that means we’re friends. So that means the next time we’re in Northampton we can look them up and crash at their place and we can put the quote “Our Friends” — Sonic Youth in all of our promotional materials.’ [laughs]
You guys have two great drummers, but you’ve continued advertising for drummers since forever. Is there a chance that someday Shiloe will perform live with three drummers?
Melissa Pleckham: We would switch them out.
Ken Ramos: Hopefully we could bring all of them out at one time. That would be good.
Do you ever have Dan and Daniel fight each other just for your personal amusement?
Ken Ramos: No, but we should make a little chicken-wire ring.
You guys play a lot of warehouse shows along with the clubs and gallery gigs. What’s the most endearing feature of each?
Ken Ramos: Some places have less of a PA and less of a stage than other places. I like the art gallery shows because it’s real cool to be part of the mix between the visual arts and the music. I like that a lot. Clubs are always cool because they have a nice, loud P.A. system where the sound carries. Warehouses are cool because you never know what to expect. We played in one that was a metal shop, and there were these crazy machines everywhere that looked like they could kill you.
Melissa Pleckham: Sometimes I fear that we’re too loud for galleries, but I guess it depends on the bill. We’ve played at L’Keg with Nocturnes but that was a really good bill and people liked it. I think that in bars it can be hard because in bars people favor bands that are conducive to drinking beers and talking and I don’t think we are sometimes because we’re loud. So depending on the crowd, we can put people off. The good thing about a warehouse like Silver Factory is that there isn’t always a big crowd, but when there is they’re almost always there to listen to music and the bar is incidental. I just don’t think that people go to Silver Factory to drink.
Are you going to make a video for ‘Daggers?’
Ken Ramos: We were talking to Alexis from Kissing Cousins who made their video.
Melissa Pleckham: She works in television professionally. We’re talking to her, but it’s hard—she’s busy, but hopefully soon. We had a video in the works for ‘Gone.’ A friend was doing it for us. But it’s been like a year in the making, so I don’t know if it’s still happening.
Are you noticing the ‘radio song’ effect in the crowd yet?
Ken Ramos: I guess at our last Spaceland show, we heard people tell us it’s the song they like. It’s too new though, and it’s not like it’s in heavy rotation anywhere.
Melissa Pleckham: Over the last month or two, we’ve noticed the people have been actually gathering closer to the stage than they used to, but I think it may be because we’re actually making an effort to engage the audience more. Before we were never quite sure what to do because we were focusing on our roles. Now we are focusing on the reasons why we want to be a band. I think a lot of bands will look at the local successful bands and model themselves after that. I think it’s better to model yourself after a band you admire and not worry about getting a Spaceland residency.
Who would be your blueprint bands?
Melissa Pleckham: Well, songwriting-wise Ken’s would be the Beatles, which can sound pretentious—but why wouldn’t you want to model yourself after the best?
Ken Ramos: Why would you choose any other band but the best-ever to model songwriting after? As far as songwriting band, they’re my favorite band. I like to pick apart their songs and try to figure out what they were doing.
Melissa Pleckham: When the Beatles started, they were modeling themselves after Elvis and Little Richard. They weren’t comparing themselves to Herman’s Hermits and trying to figure out how to top that.
Ken Ramos: I would say I’d like to be AC/DC meets Led Zeppelin live with a giant bell and a flaming gong!
What is the best scary song ever?
Melissa Pleckham: I would say the best scary song ever was ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead.’ It was in a vampire B-flick, so that gives it extra credibility.
What is your favorite story by Stephen King?
Ken Ramos: Movie is definitely The Shining. The original. The song from that is pretty creepy It plays when the blood comes out of the elevator. I read more Dean Koontz. I guess he’s the Southern California Stephen King. He’s pretty good.
Melissa Pleckham: My favorite scary stories are Scary Stories Told In The Dark. They are regional stories—simplified for children—and the art work is really disturbing. I found all three books on a bargain table for like five dollars a few years ago, and the pictures really hold up. It’s really scary!
What is your favorite horror movie?
Melissa Pleckham: Halloween. I just like the way they constructed the movie. It seems like every shot moves the movie forward, and nothing is wasted. It’s really evocative of the fall, but I only recently found out it was actually shot in Pasadena. I always thought it was filmed in the mid-west. Then when you know it’s in Pasadena, you notice palm trees in the background that you never noticed before. It’s not a slasher flick, but it really started it all. That and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is also one of my favorites. What I also like about Halloween is nobody actually makes stupid choices—Michael Myers finds them. There’s a whole school of thought with horror movies and the final girl theory. Women learning to fend for themselves.
Would you like to write or play a part in a horror movie?
Melissa Pleckham: Yes I would, and I have quite the horror movie scream.
Ken Ramos: We recorded two Halloween songs, and one of them she screams at the end. The first time she did it the distortion was so loud.
Melissa Pleckham: If I could just do one movie where I could be covered in blood, I would be so proud. A zombie movie would be awesome.
Do you prefer the old school zombies where they were rigor-mortised and stiff or the new school zombies where they’re super fast with super strength?
Melissa Pleckham: I prefer the old ones. I like the new Dawn of the Dead as well. It makes sense that in the original, they had been dead a while, so they would be slow and stiff, but in the new one they were freshly dead, so it makes sense that they would still be able to run. But I really like both versions, I just happen to prefer the original zombies.
Ken Ramos: I like when they mix the two, because that seems more real. Like in the new one, they had some zombies who were dead a while and they are slow, but the new zombies are off and running.
Melissa Pleckham: My favorite zombies are the ones who are still in their funeral clothing like the ones in Thriller or the original Night of the Living Dead zombie.
I met the original zombie once at a horror convention in Florida. He looks the same, but he spoke with a Shakespearean voice. If you safely made it to the mall during the zombie attacks, how long would you stay before making a run for freedom?
Ken Ramos: I would hang forever.
Melissa Pleckham: When the Hot Dog On a Stick ran out, we’d run.

SHILOE WITH CAT PARTY, MELLOWDRONE AND THE START ON SAT., DEC. 12, AT THE TROUBADOUR, 9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $12 / ALL AGES. TROUBADOUR.COM. SHILOE’S AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS EP IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM SHILOE. VISIT SHILOE AT SHILOE.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/SHILOEMUSIC.

The Last Shout of Yet Another Rock Band: The surrounding mallspace changes with the commercial fortunes of Hollywood Blvd., but the Knitting Factory continues to take on a fine patina of rockist grunge. The Tinseltown Knit is the last great Boulevard rock joint and if Hollywood itself faded into a John Carpenter movie hellhole, this place would be its Al’s Bar. Subdivided by genre, the main room boomed with club kids while about a dozen bits of hipster jetsam crammed the tiny AlterKnit Lounge for the reputed last-ever show by the Horse Thieves. Lead guitarist Alex Maslansky confirmed the terminal status by mumbling something about “the last temptation of the Horse Thieves” before his band twinkletoed off into a twee-country that might be called “cowpop.” Their MySpace page shows them fairly deft hands at Cali country vaudeville in the ironic-distance mode. At this transit lounge for distracted hipsters, the trio sped through despite complaints about the sound and an audience standing around in the usual flat affect. Even at the clipped length of sets at the AlterKnit, the end couldn’t come soon enough, so I left as the last song came loading into the chute, with Maslansky’s elegant hawgleg grunt receding as I zigzagged down the corridor.

Castellari vs. Tarantino: From there, I felt like a bit of regenerative ultraviolence, so I legged toking over to one of the last screenings of Inglourious Basterds during its long stay at the Arclight. I was way behind seeing this partially because I wanted to screen the 1978 Enzo Castellari original first, a full-tilt basher that never played the Southern drive-in circuit or much of anywhere else in North America. Basterd kin to The Dirty Dozen, Cross of Iron and Kelly’s Heroes and chock with affectionate shoutouts to all three, Inglorious Bastards treats American participation in WW II like a big-budget proto-Burning Man party, complete with hippies, guns, designer explosions, naked Nazi chicks, rockin’ individualized uniforms and more fuck-you attitude than a fistful of middle fingers. This is very likely the only punk-sensible WW II movie, as almost all the characters are in cheerful rebellion against everything but dismantling the Third Reich, itself a kind of ultimate in bummer Authority. This sensibility resurfaces in Quentin Tarantino’s epic in Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, a Tennessee hillbilly whose unstated-but-sufficient reason for hating Nazis is they’re such obvious and insufferable pricks. Basterds rebukes an entire substratum of WW II cinema of the 1950s-1970s that tended for Cold War reasons to “humanize” servants of the Third Reich; even Patton managed to make the Red Army look a lot less savory than the generic-looking Good Germans George C. Scott spent most of its runtime jawboning to death. The takeaway serves Q’s trademark sense of justice well—history too often fails to mark survivors with anywhere near the right degree of thoroughness.

Brief Dream of Decom: My experience of this 6th installment of Burning Man’s annual L.A. afterparty was short and full of wonder. A lady named Gypsy Goddess was visiting me that weekend and we took up where we left off when parting at Burning Man 2009. Consequently, we didn’t get out to the Cornfield (what the rest of the world calls Los Angeles State Historic Park in otherwise nondescript Naud Junction) on Saturday, until the hour was already well advanced. Decom has gone from a big outdoor art-party in the Warehouse District to a mini-BRC, with exhibits Patrick Shearn’s and Cynthia Washburn’s Holding Flame seeming to have the dust still on them. All the pals we saw looked to be recuperating, minds still blown and reeling from what everyone swears was a miraculous uber-Burn—seven days of bliss difficult to absorb even by the breakneck hedonics of the L.A. underground party set. I was informed my presence was required back in bed so we headed there, walking all the way back to Union Station as hippies and party folk streamed past us, their great glad Fellini smiles smearing the night like glowsticks. We were high by the time we passed through Olvera Street.

All Night Horrorthon: When the all-night horror marathon became part of U.S. culture, I don’t know, but the practice was already venerable and going full-blast in the South and Midwest of my youth. The surplus gross tonnage of horror/SF/giant-bug cinema produced from the sound-era on had already taken over Friday and Saturday night TV in most regions, with vintage flicker featuring Boris, Bela and Vincent buttressing the surreal slasher/cannibal/lesbian-vampire fests then unspooling at drive-ins. One of the best things about L.A. is that it hosts several such dead man’s parties every October, with the bill at the Aero on Halloween Night looking like prime slime for fans of Reagan/Bush I-era High Cheese. The New Beverly’s seven-feature hoedown on Oct. 10 showed the finicky hands of true gutbucket connoisseurs. Dog Soldiers (2002) is a nice U.K. howler about how well an out-on-maneuvers platoon of Her Majesty’s Own serve up as werewolf-feed. About a reel into The Burning (1981) came realization I’d seen this Friday the 13th knockoff back when it came out, but I stayed for every hack and gouge anyway. Future master-thespians Jason Alexander (sporting a riot of hair on his skull) and a pre-mummification Holly Hunter keep things moving, treating the between-slaughter bits as Catskills cabaret. This superior genre entry represents the first nickel Miramax’s Bob & Harvey Weinstein made in the biz and well-earned it was. After such slick popcult, nothing less than the high art of Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery (1981) would do. Among the most delirious of the late maestro’s films, the only difference between this and any academically recognized surrealist “transgressive” or avant-art masterpiece is the near-incidental horror claptrap of what passes for the plot. Few Ken Russell movies ever made the grindhouse/arthouse jump, but the ones that did (The Devils, Tommy, Altered States) all recall the balls-out gonzo Fulci applies here to the art of the body count. It ended with a flash of maggoty poetics well past the midnight hour and house lights went up on an almost-full room. The “surprise” movie turned out to be rare episodes of Tales from the Crypt, so I took a long, quiet walk around Hancock Park, toked up a monsteroso indica buzz and settled back in time for opening credits of Superstition (1982). A little-screened modern-witchcraft wheeze with many longueurs, a few interesting arty pretensions and scads of stylish murders, end credits flapped at about 4:30 a.m. and Fight for Your Life (1977) cranked up moments after. I’d read of this storied shock-morality fable and theatre management warned us of it in vague but emphatic terms many hours before. Nearly everyone around me was gently snoring when this worn print of the event’s oldest, cheapest movie started clattering. Its plot details an interval of rape and brutalization inflicted in the far suburbs on a peace-loving African American family by three maniacs—all gross racial stereotypes including an indolent Latin, a rape-crazy Asian and a windy, psychotic Southern redneck. The latter is a tour-de-force acting job by none other than William Sanderson, the backwoods idiot on Newhart with the two brothers Darryl. Nearly everyone in the movie is a voluble bigot and all own their hatreds lovingly at top volume, spacing bouts of low-budget Salo-like sadism with a kind of verbal violence that tends to make Angelenos of all ethnicities exceedingly nervous. The adenoidal sawing in the seats abruptly choked off and tight uneasy laughter welled up as one over-the-top offense to human decency chased another in a movie perhaps best described as a Last House on the Left for racists. Worse, as very likely the only authentic hillbilly in the house, I got a sudden, immersive sense-memory (total props to the brilliant Sanderson) of what old-school rednecks were like back in that long-gone day. The recollections thus let loose sent several nightmares back-projecting in my own mind, pulling me home to Gothic Dixie as the film clattered on in front of me. The abused family was about to take revenge and, from the far back, I could see heads beginning to sink and disappear below seat level when my (muted) cell throbbed and I bolted outside. At the other end was a tiny, tender voice calling from Caracas, where it was already mid-morning and all she wanted was for me to be careful going home tonight in crazy L.A. Thanks, baby. I incinerated the last shavings in my weed pipe before finally resorting to shrooms, the preliminary buzz of which hit sometime in the second reel of Galaxy of Terror (1981), last in the marathon. As pretty much your basic early-1980s Roger Corman B-movie, this welter of space-opera clichés sports nothing worse than a woman being raped to death by a giant slug. Sick. Featuring astoundingly weird acting (from Sid Haig, Ray Walston, Robert “Freddy Kreuger” Englund, Joanie from Happy Days and the stickwood son of Oliver from Green Acres) and dialogue even H. Beam Piper would reject as too unlike human speech, it was the kind of flick a roomful of semi-strangers could bond over and did. There was a Tom & Jerry cartoon afterwards, followed by an old TV sign-off message as a Soviet-looking ordnance parade rolled by to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner.” As I slipped out the lobby for home, there was still a swarm of dazed and happy folks on the pavement outside, all of them wisely unwilling to leave this 12-hour temporary community for the slate-grey of another midtown Sunday morning.

Cali Countryfolk and Woes of a Cub Rockcrit: Outgoing L.A. RECORD photog and writer Scott Schultz says I’m “an L.A. institution” and I hope that’s not one of the reasons he’s off to photograph rock bands in China for a year. He cites the rotten economy and that’s certainly plainly visible in the local scene, as veterans like Scott are vanishing in favor of kids who’d be making bones elsewhere in the literary underground had not 1) the L.A. music scene blown up as it has in the past half-decade and 2) the economy hadn’t (symmetrically) imploded, making the reaches of urban deep-innerspace suddenly attractive as a Subject. Most of the local music writers around when I got my first rockcrit job a decade ago couldn’t be bothered with live music and almost all are now gone, replaced by striplings doing something remarkably close to what I did when starting out. A scheduling bump with the RECORD struck my name from the list at the “secret” Flaming Lips-o-palooza at the Montalban last Thursday, Oct. 15th, so Scott got to cover that and 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. The Lemon Sun songcraft is certainly there, with harmonies and filigree from Rachel Kolar, Lauren Brown, Robby Delosier, Molly Collins and more making the crowd-lonely poetics of the genre sound fresh, even sociable. I snagged one of their 3-song EPs outside as fellow RECORD scribe Steve Slaughter from Cigarette Bums unloaded upon my geezer’s shoulders a doleful and familiar blues—bumped off guest lists, girlfriend logistics, erratic hours; the usual sleepless days and wasted nights. Steve, who made notes of everything and had even brought a tape recorder (something I’d quit doing years ago), longed for an exclusive on Devil Makes Three, and got one by my simple expedient of slowly walking out the door into the Echo Park night. He was happily interviewing one of the members of Brother/Sister as I went back inside for a linger before Old Man Markley. This passel of root-tooters were fresh from a gig at Brick by Brick, an oldtime San Diego dive I’m overjoyed to hear is still open. This unsigned gang of owlhoots packs a heavy reliance on trad instrumentation (banjo, kazoo, washboard) along with trainwhistle harmonies and a hellcat’s freight of regret. The place was full of tattooed girls and urbane cowboys already, like some peyote dream of Hoot Gibson, who used to shoot movies about four miles from here in some other America altogether.

—Ron Garmon

Steve Fox is the Director of State Campaigns for Marijuana Policy Project—also known as the MPP, the nation’s largest marijuana reform organization—and is co-author of a new book called Marijuana is Safer, which argues that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol. He speaks now via phone to L.A. RECORD‘s Scott Schultz.

Of the politicians in Washington D.C. who are opposed to marijuana legalization, what do you feel is the breakdown between those who are benefiting from the anti-drug campaigns, those who are privately in favor but politically opposed, and those who are just legitimately opposed?
Steve Fox: Fear is probably the biggest reason of all. When you think of the American public and how they’ve been convinced that marijuana is a dangerous drug, elected officials are at a whole other level. Many of them have been convinced that marijuana is a dangerous subject for them. They just know from their little playbook that’s given to them when they’re running for office: ‘Here’s what we’re going to say when anything about illegal drugs comes up.’ I think it’s really going to take public pressure for many of them to change, and that is what our book is all about. The book is about giving people the confidence to be more outspoken. There are so many people out there that are supportive of changing marijuana laws or maybe even using marijuana themselves. In the past—though they believed that marijuana was safer than alcohol—they weren’t prepared to talk about it at length. Instead they would get caught up in talking about, ‘Well, this is a waste of government resources!’ We want to make the simple point that all you need to talk about is, ‘I should just be able to choose.’ Marijuana is less harmful than alcohol. I should not be punished if I want to use the less harmful substance. We should be asking our elected officials why they want to force people to drink instead of using the less-harmful option, and make it about alcohol and not about marijuana.
When Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams got suspended for smoking pot and retired early, I thought the sports media really played up the pothead stereotype rather than discussing the fact that NFL athletes use toxic pills as pain relievers instead of the safer alternative.
Steve Fox: We’ve certainly been waiting for a situation like that, and while I was working on the SAFER campaign, we tried to push that as hard as we could. We even put up a billboard in Denver encouraging Ricky to come to Denver with the people who support his safer choice. This was based on the fact that we put an initiative on the ballot in Denver to make marijuana legal, and it passed. So we were glad, and we did get some national coverage from that effort. But discussion of the deeper issues just doesn’t happen. The same thing with Michael Phelps when the picture of him smoking from a bong was released. The ignored part of the story was that he was drinking heavily and hitting on women and being obnoxious, but nobody really cared about that. That part is ignored. But he takes one hit, and that becomes international news. People have to think about the fact that we are steering people toward alcohol for no reason.
When you first hit D.C., did they ever send pages over to you to try to hit you up for some pot? Or just treat you differently?
Steve Fox: Nothing along those lines, but I went to one meeting early on in my lobbying—it may have been my third meeting that I had with an actual member of Congress, as opposed to a staff member. The chief of staff who was sitting in on the meeting with us opened the door the member of Congress’ door and said, ‘Hey, the potheads are here.’ We were both dressed up in our suits and looked nothing like potheads whatsoever, if you have a stereotypical image of potheads in your head. But that’s how we were introduced. It’s challenging work—trying to get members of Congress to change the image in their minds and the minds of their staff members.
How much do we pay in taxes when the DEA sweeps collectives? And what is the cost of other aggressive domestic tactics in the War On Drugs?
Steve Fox: I don’t have that figure. I’ve heard people say figures in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it could always be a higher figure. What you see in California right now is a huge effort called the CAMP—Campaign Against Marijuana Planting—program to go out to public lands wherever they see marijuana growing and cut it down. They published a figure recently about how much marijuana they had eliminated, and it was definitely in the billions of dollars worth. It’s just a massive amount of money doing this, and it’s really just not changing anything. They’re not diminishing supply in a way that the prices are going up.
I think the prices are going down, especially with competition between the collectives. At my neighborhood collective, I can buy an eighth of good sense for ten dollars. I can even buy a gram for three. It’s cheaper to buy pot now than it is to buy cigarettes in Los Angeles these days.
Steve Fox: I would imagine. Especially without even having taxes on it. This is the whole point. They’re spending millions and millions of dollars trying to eliminate this product. In some cases they’re actually chopping down hemp. It’s insane what’s going on, and all they need to do is shift this to a legitimate market and they won’t have to spend this money trying to eradicate it and arrest people. The nation is spending tens of billions of dollars every year trying to clamp down on the marijuana market, and it’s just crazy.
Our paper and other papers in Southern California have found a lot of new advertisers among medical marijuana collectives. It’s verifiable proof of the residual business that grows from the legalization of marijuana.
Steve Fox: That’s one of the reasons that I think the legalization of marijuana and setting up a system for taxation and regulation is basically inevitable at this point. With the collectives currently open for patients, they’re showing that this is a big business—like the pharmaceutical industry and the alcohol industry. They can’t kill it at this point.
I have a prescription and I have a lot of friends with prescriptions so we can purchase marijuana at collectives, and I would wager that over half the people are using marijuana as an alternative intoxicant to alcohol. Does that compromise the battle for legalization because it’s forcing casual users to be lumped together with actual medical users?
Steve Fox: You made an important point there that a lot of people use marijuana as an alternative recreational intoxicant to alcohol. We’re opening the whole debate about the medical use of marijuana and whether it’s being over recommended or not. It’s up to each doctor to decide whether they’re giving appropriate care. I think part of what contributes to there being so many recommendations is that for doctors, there’s always been a balance. You hear what someone’s problem is. You decide whether it makes sense to prescribe a certain medicine based on the potential health and the potential risk. As you know when we were growing up, what doctors used to say, ‘Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.’ Marijuana is less harmful than aspirin, so people claim they have some pain, and it’s possible that marijuana might help because it’s a balance between risk and benefit. And there’s potential benefit and little risk. There’s something to be said for changing the laws and making marijuana legal in the same way that alcohol is legal—there’s something to be said for many of us and officials who feel skeptical about the medical use. But now some of those people are more willing to talk about marijuana legalization overall because to them that is a more legitimate issue.
What is your ideal realistic timeline for marijuana legalization?
Steve Fox: I definitely believe that the states are going to have to lead the way. There are certainly signs of California leading the way. Just in terms of all the other business that’s going on already, with medical marijuana and the fact that the legislation has been introduced by representative Ammanio to get the conversation going. The field poll that shows that support is 56 percent. It just feels that way. I don’t think 2010 is going to be the year, but there is a serious chance that an initiative passes in 2012. MPP will also have an initiative on the ballot in Nevada in 2012. So we’ll see. If the trends keep going in the direction that they’re going now, I would think it would happen. The communications director of MPP has likened this battle against marijuana to communism and the fact that it’s sort of a system that doesn’t necessarily have a sustained intellectual foundation below it. We could be reaching the point where it just crumbles under it’s own weight, and we’ll just have to try to come up with a system to replace it.
Do you think that we’ll come to the point where marijuana becomes legal in 25 states before it becomes legal federally? At what point do you think the pressures of the recession and the federal and state defecits will provoke people to demand legalization to generate tax revenue and pay the bills? Especially if the platform takes hold in California?
Steve Fox: I’m one who doesn’t believe that the need to pay the bills is what will be making a state develop a system of taxation and regulation for marijuana. I think it will be more along the lines of the revenue being a benefit on top of a realization that it just doesn’t make sense to spend our law enforcement resources maintaining a system of prohibition over a substance that is just so benign. The way I like to describe it now is to ask people to imagine if tomorrow, the alcohol industry had a press conference and announced they had developed a new product that is similar to alcohol, but that it is less addictive, less toxic, with fewer health problems, can’t kill you and has no carbs. Would we celebrate that? Of course there would be celebration, and people would say, ‘This is great! We have a recreational alternative that is so less harmful than alcohol. So let’s let people use that instead.’
What do you think would be a fair marijuana tax in California?
Steve Fox: I can’t say there is a proper tax. It’s going to be a moving target at the point where it becomes legal. The price is likely to shift. You need to factor that in so that you don’t have such a huge tax that it becomes almost more expensive to purchase through legitimate means than through the criminal market. Some people have floated $50 an ounce. It could be that the price for marijuana would drop. It could be more like tobacco taxes are right now, where in some states it could be two- and three-hundred-percent tax. It will be enough of a revenue generator that it will be worthwhile, and the important point here is that it’s a relatively benign substance, especially compared to alcohol.
In your book you said that one third of Americans believe marijuana is more harmful than alcohol and consider it a ‘gateway’ drug. How do you plan to change that? Or are you going to focus more on the moderate third in the middle who believe marijuana and alcohol have similar health risks?
Steve Fox: Clearly, going after the moderate third in the middle is the easier task. Those who believe alcohol and marijuana are equally harmful—getting them to appreciate that marijuana is much safer than alcohol. If you think of it as some sort of trend line as how people see marijuana from safe to dangerous, everyone should shift to the marijuana is safer side. I was once talking to a woman who had just smoked marijuana, and she was explaining to me that she was sort of embarrassed about it. She was telling me the ways that marijuana was harmful and basically echoing what the government has said, and this was someone who was completely supportive and believes that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol. But even she thought the harms were much greater than they were. So really everyone has got to shift toward understanding that marijuana is not as harmful as they believe. There has just been so much propaganda over the past 30 or 40 years that it is just ingrained in people’s heads. All we want is to shift everyone to the idea that marijuana is less harmful. The statistics will follow.
How much do you feel Hollywood’s portrayal of the stereotypical pothead being an exagerated variation of the town drunk without addressing the fact that it a safer alternative to drinking affects people’s mindsets?
Steve Fox: It’s a stereotype, and when you get to the gut of why many people are opposed to marijuana, they have a picture of Woodstock or Harold and Kumar. They don’t want these people walking around and they don’t realize that there are so many people smoking already. They really don’t see that. Maybe if they live in San Francisco or Los Angeles perhaps, but there aren’t a ton if you talk to Middle America. They don’t realize that there are NASCAR fans who also smoke marijuana. It’s just happening and it’s out there, but on television it’s all a stereotype. But hopefully there will be other shows and there are other movies where they are slowly changing the image of pot smoking. Entourage, for example, shows all of the character smoking in a way that doesn’t make them look unlikable. They’re just smoking and having a good time.
Your new book Marijuana is Safer, So Why Are They Driving Us To Drink? was co-written by Paul Armentano of NORML and Mason Tvert of Safer Choice. Was that for the purpose of offering a united front among the three largest marijuana activist groups? Or simply a means to combine your research?
Steve Fox: We’re certainly happy that there is a united campaign around the book. MPP is the nation’s largest organization dedicated to reforming marijuana laws. They have about 35 full time staffers and a budget of 5 to 6 million dollars a year to work on state ballot initiatives that often have a budget of their own. The mission of the organization is to reduce the harm associated with the use of marijuana—which certainly includes arrest and imprisonment. At present we have a medical marijuana ballot initiative in Arizona in 2010 that we’re working on. We are working long term at taxation and regulation in Nevada and there are other things going on in a few other states where we’re advising or involved. It keeps us pretty busy. We certainly have an eye on California, where a lot of action is taking place. The truth is the ‘Safer…’ campaign has been going on since 2005 in Colorado. That’s something that I helped get off the ground and Mason Tvert has been heading up since then. He and I have combined insight into the book and Paul is just a real expert on the biology of marijuana. He’s spent years and years responding to the myths that are out there. It was good to bring him in. He was integral to the parts of the book that describe what marijuana is and its harms compared to the harms from alcohol and the evolution of the marijuana prohibition. Mason and I did more work on the latter half of the book, which is about the SAFER campaign. That opens the debate on the absurdity of enforcing a marijuana prohibition while we’re driving people to drink, and discusses what we can do to change the atmosphere in the country.
Who is a greater adversary for MPP? Liquor lobbyists or War On Drugs fearmongers?
Steve Fox: I would say it’s definitely been what the government has done to spread myths about marijuana—that’s where it all comes from. You could say the Partnership For a Drug Free America maybe played some role. The real anti-marijuana campaign was launched by the government and has been going on since the 1930s, more specifically since Richard Nixon and his anti-marijuana campaign. It really convinced most Americans that it’s a dangerous drug. The alcohol industry isn’t really out there fighting legalization, although we’ll see what happens in the future. It’s more that people sense from the government that marijuana is a scary and dangerous drug.
Do you think as the alcohol lobby becomes aware of the SAFER campaign—which clearly shows marijuana as a safer alternative to alcohol—they might set their sights on you?
Steve Fox: We’ll see. One would think that any industry is defensive of their own product, and if they feel they are being attacked—and they are feeling the effects at the till—that’s certainly a fight that we would welcome. We’re not such a big-budget effort that we would worry about losing funding or being crushed by the alcohol industry. It would be a great public debate to have. And it is the debate that we want to have. So if they engage, it would just raise our awareness to a higher level. The media would pay a lot of attention and that would give us a megaphone.
Why didn’t you guys publish your book on hemp paper?
Steve Fox: Good question. I suppose we could have tried to negotiate a deal with our publisher to publish on hemp paper, but we were just happy to get a publisher who was willing to put out the book. And we’re grateful they took a leap with it.
Are you going to be touring for the book or doing readings to get the message of the book out?
Steve Fox: Mason is going to be doing the touring part of the campaign. As part of the SAFER campaign—www.saferchoice.org—there’s been a new campaign launched called safercampuses.org. To give you a little background, there was a campaign called the Amethyst Initiative that has now about 135 university presidents all endorsing a call for a national debate for lowering the drinking age to address the myriad of alcohol-related problems on college campuses. We had been pushing for more of a debate about reducing alcohol-related problems on campuses by allowing people to use marijuana instead, or at the very least not having penalties for having marijuana that are far greater than the penalties for underage alcohol abuse. We run all kinds of referendum on many many big campuses around the country. We’ve gotten those approved by students and gotten all kinds of media attention for that. We haven’t had any campus come out and say, ‘Alright, yeah—that sounds reasonable. We’re going to lessen our marijuana penalties.’ What we’re doing now is pushing all of the university presidents who are tied down to the Amethyst Initiative to sign up for what we have: the Emerald Initiative, which is calling for a national debate about making the use of marijuana legal in order to reduce alcohol-related problems on campuses.
Any final words of advice?
Steve Fox: I would recommend they check out the book. It’s a balanced book that isn’t preaching to the choir. It’s a handbook for how they can make change and how they should talk to friends and family to get the ‘marijuana is safer than alcohol’ message out there, which is the prerequisite to changing the law. So they can buy the book, read the book, get themselves familiar with the talking points we put in there, and when they feel they have enough information, they can pass it on to a friend who needs to be educated.

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT THE MPP AT MPP.ORG. MARIJUANA IS SAFER IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM CHELSEA GREEN.