Should Auld Acquaintance: We Be XuXa might get my vote as best L.A. rock album of 2009 [It rips—ed.], but the crowd at the Smell on New Year’s Eve seemed just as happy to leave them there. We might’ve been losing a great band in Mika Miko (for a while, at any rate) (in the rock biz, not even the Davies brothers say never), but we were most assuredly bidding a Year From Hell a gladsome adieu. At 10 p.m. the place was already filled to near-capacity with stylishly bundled kids and blinking geezers, the latter obviously taking their first wobblefooted steps into what had been nothing more than rumor before they’d started down the alley. Outside, LAPD had already popped the Good Hard Times art party up the block, with bitterly cursing ticketholders, DJs and performers clotting the pavement and damning their luck. Inside the Smell, fans were rocking out to Charlie & the Moonhearts, an OC thrash-surf act just then crashing into a cover of Del Shannon’s “Runaway” like an overamped and understaffed Ruben & the Jets. Up next was Staring Problem, their bad lot of Jerseyite punk-lite howl ‘n’ squall something Angelenos can impassively accept and these did. This being the last night of a universally reviled year, acceptance extended to a couple of pro forma flings at moshing, but that seldom gets far anymore and this didn’t. Eventually, the band shut down and I was sitting in one of the busted theater seats scribbling notes and harfing shrooms when the P.A. struck into “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealer’s Wheel. Hearing Mr. Blonde’s Reservoir Dogs whipsong on NYE is as clear an exit cue as anyone is likely to get, so I legged to the pavement as the speakers warbled “And your family all come crawlin’, slap you on the back and say. ‘Plea-e-e-eese.’” Before long, I happened onto a fellow Burner confused at directions given for the far-underground NeXuS party, so he gave me a ride since I knew the place—a huge warehouse nestled under the Boyle Heights side of the Sixth Street Bridge; an otherwise deserted precinct already jumping with two other parties. Detonations from the massed speakers inside the buildings were enough to make sure neighborhood rats would get no sleep tonight and the gritty streets swarmed with revelers hooting and weaving as I cleared the door forty minutes before midnight. Inside were dozens of old pals with whom I’d heard many a chime at midnight, so I squeezed and hugged and danced and toked and exchanged giddy texts with the Playmate (her sexy self aloft on a scatter of champagne bubbles inside some hippie party bus up in the Bay) as the minutes ticked away and the shrooms went off like psychedelic mortar rounds in my head. All was merriment as the countdown began and the party stomped into high gear when it was over and that Decade the Locust Ate went down the chute, never to return. DJs from Ninja Skillz, Project Alma, Pocket and Blue Insomnia spread the beats over a hard-churning throng, with Wolfie, Fatfinger, Porter Tinsley and Jesse Wright turning in standout sets as the hour advanced and temperatures inside and out dropped to knee-knocking levels. One last round of jumping and embracing and kissing and I tottered out the door like a psylocibe-soaked Foster Brooks sometime after 4 AM—one more merry American sot of indeterminate poisoning rising to meet a new decade in the manner immemorial.

NYE II: The Next Day: Despite brain-blown lassitude worthy of Dude Lebowski, I managed to swing by the lovely Elaine Layabout’s party at Echo Curio the following eve. The underground impresario greeted me with an expansive “Four bands and not a douchebag in the bunch!” I caught most of most of Andy Clockwise’s set, coming away as much impressed by the fellow’s playful Aussie Iggyisms as much as the stylistic range of his songs or the bite of their satire. Bug-eyed and bearded, the man called Clockwise stalked the tiny space like mad Nero, laying down strophes of punk, pop, and wonky soul that sound like nothing you’ve ever really heard out of those or any other genre. Music as fresh and original as this is what starts the wheels of cult bandwagons turning and Clockwise tears through his own material with the righteous force of one of those Ideas Whose Time has Come you used to hear so much about. Next up was the Ignorant, four local punx who went at their tried-and-true stuff with a stylish will, with angular frontman Django razor-shredding lyrics and whipping the crowd up just like in the days when the worst we had to endure was only Jimmy Carter and The Gong Show.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Ciggie Bums: Most of the next ten days found me locked in L.A RECORD and fiction deadlines, with little time for clubsmanship left over after the Playmate’s mid-month visit and our romps at the Hotel Roosevelt. All we managed was a midnight stroll to the Frolic Room, far down Hollywood Boulevard, where I bought and watched her drink a Lemon Drop, which she declared too sour. I hadn’t been in the place since I quit boozing seven long years ago (thus balking any outstanding bets in the Hollywood Death Pool of that dreadful era) and the place had scarcely changed, right down to the impassive drunks at the bar. This is a perfect town to quit drinking and take up hallucinogens in, and that’s one reason why such a constitutional Grasshopper gets as much Ant work done as I do, but there comes a time when even the longest loudest computer playlist will feed my feedback jones no longer. You can stack up gigs of Dutch proto-prog, London art-rock, Detroit fuzz, Midwestern funk, and weird skronk out of bands known only to you, Kim Cooper, Mike Stax and some guy in Berlin with a USB port hub plugged into his skull and rig the whole wad for a Marne-like assault on your own ears for aught it will do you. Go ahead, Bucky, I’ve tried it—all you get is intensified desire to hear the Living Thing birth itself before your ears. I did get to see Ruby Friedman Orchestra doing their best-ever show at the Hotel Café on the 12th. Herself was more intense and in-command than ever, having fun with the audience and belting out the set with Bessie-like looseness and conviction, especially on “Go About Your Day”—a song containing all the sweated anomie of our curious heart-shorn town compressed into a diamond as big as, well, if not the Ritz, then Ruby’s capacious heart. And that was me slumping indica-baked on Grindhouse night at the New Beverly on the 19th, mesmerized at the vintage Italo-undead double bill of City of the Walking Dead and Night of the Zombies, both from the truly screwhead year of 1980. The first is a prime Umberto Lenzi joint starring the one-and-only Hugo Stiglitz in a downbeat Eastmancolor version of a 1950s Universal sci-fi thriller, with the right-wing Americanisms swapped out for Euro-left paranoia and the whole smeared with blood and greased entrails like an East St. Louis abattoir. The second, helmed by the dread Bruno Mattei (some rank his 1977 opus S.S. Extermination Camp among the unsung masterpieces, but then again, some still love Conway Twitty) rivals anything Ed Wood ever cobbled together in the way of Weird Personal Statements—a hilarious, foot-stomping, stock-footage-ridden welter of unartful clichés and expertly applied ultraviolence that had the sold-out crowd hooting and roaring like teenagers. That was good old-fashioned hillbilly fun, cuzzin, but still only half the scary-movie-and-rockin’-band symmetry of the sainted Elvis. Still, the short blast I got of Manhattan Murder Mystery at L’Keg on the 14th was enough to make up the deficit. My temples were throbbing with the low-grade migraine I always get after too-great a time away from amplified blare. As I approached the venue, there were K-CAL newsvans parked outside in the rain on Glendale Ave., out in the rain at Ti-George’s Chicken doing a story on a fundraiser for Haiti. Around the corner and downstairs, Triple-M was going off in the tiny space like a pocket edition of Burdon’s first Animals—great gusts of electrified blooz-blizzard with Matthew Teardrop singing with peak conviction. He has one of the L.A. rock scene’s great voices—a compound of woe and eloquence that slugs through our accumulated years of affected flat-affect like a gravedigger’s maul. Skull is the new EP and I know that because eminently squeezable fellow Virginian Elaine Layabout sidled up and pressed one into my geek-gloved mitt. The Cigarette Bums were next and here the floor must yield to full disclosure. I have a longstanding policy of not reviewing the art of people I know and break it only when the individual interests me enough to let curiosity take over. Ruby Friedman is one outstanding example of the rewards of this approach and this band is certainly another. Witty soft-spoken Steven “Slaughter” Carrera is a fellow L.A. RECORD scribe and we hang at shows and he pays me my golden-geezer due, but that’s scarcely adequate prep for the hyper-aggro blues ballistics of the Ciggie Bums. My eyebrows shot up and stayed there as they laid down their wares—being several wide-boy raveups, each a variation on the classic pattern laid down by the Yardbirds and picked up by every brat with a six-string and taste since. Eamon McGinniss thumps a melodic bass, Steve’s guitar runs are manic and tightly coiled and both swap out the snarky vocals. Ah, yes, I thought. Gimme the ole fundamentals, with their infinite and pleasing variety, every time and twice on this soggy Thursday night. The Bums’ music is rootsy-expressive, postpunk quirky and as solidly diverting as anything squalling in Silverlake at the present moment. By the time they shut down, my migraine had magically closed in on itself and I felt sated and happy as any lucky junkie.

—Ron Garmon

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

Cops and Unpaid Bills: Though his likeness still haunts everywhere you look, the King of Pop was finally laid away. Meanwhile, Los Angeles has spent the rest of the month looking for someone to slap with the bill for the king’s Nebuchadnezzarian sendoff. Though unattended by me, his funeral orgies fetched hundreds of thousands and that the LAPD was out in massive force didn’t need my eyeball confirmation since there was scarcely a cop to be seen anywhere else. All Jackson’s shove into Eternity meant to rockers and the party set downtown was that J.Q. Law was occupied in heroically overpolicing one event instead of the usual twenty. That the city attempted to hand fans and the (sore-bereaved) Jackson family a $1.4 million bill for its twitchy, long-running, and surreal policy of cop-overkill at every public gathering is bad enough. Add the fact that more police were around Staples Center for Jacko’s last appearance than for the entire 1984 Olympics and the public gets a broad hint of what underground parties and live music now face on a weekly basis. Thin blue line or no, there was little change in Angelenos’ customary sheeplike behavior after dark—even the very muggers did as told when directed to fuck off, I’m happy to report. Perhaps the city will know similar rebuffs while rattling its tin cup.

The Great Kim F.’s Lesbian Hunt and the Silver Lining on Mateo Street: Straight and Frankenstein tall stood Kim Fowley in the low-roofed Redwood Lounge last weekend. Presiding over another installment of “Hollywood Sexual Underground”, the legendary songwriter-producer-impresario was haranguing a roomful of sweating freaks and lovelies when I clambered in off the street on another boiling hot Friday night. “Are there any lesbians or drunks in the house tonight?” he intoned from somewhere near the ceiling, glowering about the narrow room like a rock ‘n’ roll Vincent Price. There were no confessed Sapphics, but that the place was packed with lushers was discernible by the naked nose, yet nary had a peep arose from the bar. Amateurs, I snorted. Just wait ‘til L.A. Decom. Impossible to rattle, Fowley breezed through the intro to Trophy Wives, who let out as deafening a caterwaul as I’ve ever heard loosed in the place. The lead singer’s mic died, but the drummer went off like a long string of M-80s and the narrow bar began to suitably rock. Grinning, I left, loping south through Little Tokyo and the Arts District as the floating parties and nuzzling lovers heralding the start of another off-the-hook weekend. I toked a buzz all the way down a dark slit of Mateo Street to Silver Factory Studios. This (literally underground) rock venue likewise surged, only this time with friendly indie rockers and the bent-neon psychedelia of 60 Watt Kid. This local trio went on at senatorial length, sculpting a too-big-for-the-room groove out of reverb and pleasantly unnerving electronic soundscapes. Their Women rez ends on the 27th, and I urge you to buy the ticket and take the inner-space ride.

Rock Around the Block: My run the following Saturday night was more of a downtown dogtrot, begun at the Smell with a fusillade of heavy noise from Christmas Island. This San Diego three-piece served up the blare with minimalist brio, as a double handful of spritzing kids capered crazily. Around the corner at the Five Star Bar, Anaheim’s Thee Makeout Party was doing the same to an older crowd, far gone in beer. TMP is power pop done the populist way, their raveups eschewing all Alex Chiltonian subtlety in favor of Cheap Trick-style detonation gratification. Out in the street, gaudy rockers mixed easily with the tranny ladies and street vendors, the whole gladsome magilla distancing themselves from the overflow crowd at the Edison just up the block. Smiling miniskirted ladies and glowering beaux greeted me at the Ed’s alleyway entrance, their attentions further warming an already sweltering night all the way back to the Smell. Bipolar Bear was just then going off inside, their horror-movie hodad rock blistering away as stylishly as ever. Anyone who can imagine mutant descendants of the Trashmen shooting the curves eleven toes over off a post-apocalyptic San Onofre already loves these guys whether they’ve heard them or not. I faded into the heat-glazed night with ears blistered by more better rockin’ than any half-block in Los Angeles.

The Glazed Daisies of Alex Chilton: The long bake of last week made grim my writerly slog through speculative fiction and reportorial fact. One of the consolations of a rock writer’s life is the vast haul of incoming schwag suited to every facet of one’s weirdo tastes. My latest audio bauble is Fantasy Records’ single-CD remaster of two longtime power-pop cult artifacts —#1 Record and Radio City by wildly influential Memphis maudits Big Star, an act blessed with far more talent than luck. Alex Chilton’s post-Box Tops comeback attempt zigged when the rest of rock zagged, despite first-rate collaborators like Chris Bell and Andy Hummel, but their sound lingers on in pretty much every four-piece Beatle-inflected rock band since. The sound is fully up to the standard set on Fantasy’s Isaac Hayes reissues earlier this year, with classics like “Don’t Lie to Me” and “September Gurls” packing an intensified wallop and lending a gorgeous Southern context to SoCal’s yearly spate of Dixie-like heat.

—Ron Garmon

Acid Wash: I caught up with some L.A. RECORD peeps at the Echo’s No Culture show last week, but not before catching up with Lucky Dragons, owners of one of my few whole-souled enthusiasms on the current SoCal scene. The rara avis duo of Luke Fischbeck and Sara Rara don’t so much give performances of their Minkowski Space postrock as collaborate with the audience and they did so tonight, passing out various tone-making apparatus to rapt ones sitting semicircle on the concrete floor. They view the craft of song the same way long-gone late-‘70s postpunk experimentalists the Swell Maps did—as a mere conventional pretext for astonishing ventures into the arrangement of pure skronk. The Luckies go even farther, since “Read About Seymour”, the Maps’ best-known joint, is at least a recognizable freehand caricature of a rock tune. Once this gorgeous directed meditation shut down, the room began to bulge with late-arriving scenesters who visibly dug on Rainbow Arabia. Their goofy little synth-dance tunes are like what might’ve happened to disco had the punk D.I.Y. ethic caught on around 1978 and the roller-boogie set began to manufacture its own thud. It was Hecuba’s night, celebrating release of Paradise, the band’s first full-length slab of minimum R&B. I hadn’t heard Isabelle Albuquerque’s winsome Ono coo since they opened for occultists Ya Ho Wah 13 back in late ’07 at the very Echoplex below our feet. Their new stuff is at once weirder and more commercial than before, putting them in the pocket for this giddy epoch.

Little Willie G. Would Be Proud: Rock ‘n’ roll was long gone from famed Whittier Boulevard by the time I decamped for Boyle Heights three years back, determined to have my Angeleno being physically close to downtown and spiritually far from Hollywood and farther still from Van Nuys. There was a time in the 1960s, legend has it, when bands like Thee Midnighters played stupendous music up and down this SoCal extension of Soul Street. That band’s underplayed swagger is still a fair match for the Yardbirds’ laid-back drooginess, with diminutive Willie Garcia giving Eric Burdon a brief run for mid-decade blues-shouter honors. What happened to shut down East L.A.’s branch office of the Life is a mystery to me, but the venues that supported it are shuttered or open now as charismatic churches, alive with a spirit vastly less playful and devilish. Hunter Thompson cowered behind locked SRO doors in this ‘hood, but I leg it up Whittier free of the monoxide-suffused air, with my only care being the occasional LAPD officer kind enough to inform me with Zagat precision exactly which part of town I’m walking my hillbilly ass around in. I’d noticed the recent uptick in amplified noise and freak traffic in and out of The Blvd., an elegant little bar loitering almost within sight of the art-boho ghetto across the Sixth Street Bridge, but didn’t actually cross its threshold until last Friday night. Onstage, UV Lights was making classic rock noise onstage in the deathless manner of Budgie and Ten Years After and an early evening crowd of neighborhood rockers and Warehouse District artisans milled as familiarly as L.A. locals ever do. I dallied a while and headed across the bridge to the Smell, where a much smaller and tenderer turnout had gathered for the woozy drone of Winifred E. Eye, Oakland cowpokes down here grazing the South Forty before driving on to Stagecoach.

Phild0g Mourned and Shooter Remembered: Burner pals were having a beach party up near Pismo last Saturday, but a noon Sunday interview with Steve Priest of the Sweet kept me no farther away than a frozen desert hillside somewhere past Victorville. This was a private event, but we columnist types have our ways. There, some twenty miles off two-lane blacktop down a twisted, rock-jagged road pitted by erosion lay the Final Roll Call Party, already in progress as Kirsten and I staggered out of her car late in the evening. There were lights, a dance floor, a sprinkling of art, all the accoutrements of the kind of old-school rave put since the late 1990s by Phild0g, a near-legendary underground DJ and promoter who died last December 16th. I didn’t know the deceased and the Stormriders rave crew is but legend to me but the Ninja Skillz DJs were like Old Home. My friend was getting her first taste of rave culture while I helped tend the fire. While Phild0g was hymned between sets, my mind turned to a fellow writer named Caleb Schaber, a reporter I knew from his Burning Man incarnation as a hard-living gonzo journalist named Shooter. Caleb’s self-engineered exit happened two Fridays before, leaving a bigger-than-usual hole in another community of desert hedonists. As the music pulsed and well-bundled sweet ones swayed, I knew a moment of perfect peace as some dozen of us gazed around the fire at faces glowing with that rare contentment of shivering with the quick while chilling with the dead.

—Ron Garmon

Eminence Front and Hula Hoops: Having no choice, I’ll own being the guy who looks like Sting standing in the back of L.A. rock venues scribbling on fragments of actual paper. I don’t mind the work and only tourists take the actual cat before their faces as the for-reals-dawg Gordon Sumner of two decades ago. Thus does my faith in human intelligence dim a little every year at Coachella, the giant music and art festival held annually in remote and dusty Indio. It was my fourth time covering the event and first for L.A. RECORD, a publication I’m happy to report needs zero introduction among the rock cognoscenti swamped inside the variegated mass of bikers, geezers, ravekids, hucksters, b-boyz, flygirls, mainstream families and, yes, tourists; with every twentieth of the latter pointing a tentative digit at my face and mouthing “Aren’t you…” under the all-obliterating sonic uproar. Such hopeful gawkerati also spotted Paris Hilton in the crowd this year, along with Jared Leto, Alicia Silverstone, David Hasselhoff, Reese Witherspoon, Keenan Ivory Wayans and more sweating with the commonality at this Great American Rockshow. Bitsy, my driver and plus-one, has a pleasant form of celebrity as the bomb-ass chick whose hula-hoop workout on the roof of her building in the Hollywood flats draws hundreds of daily spectators, with necks craning from as far as the Roosevelt Hotel. Her hips and hoop carved us a path this past weekend through a mob made agreeable, even buttery, by some of the best music likely ever played in Riverside County.

Time Waits For One Man: The weather on Friday was excellent, so Felix Da Housecat’s set at the Sahara was packed to overflow with ravers and my driver drew the first of many crowds with her hooping. At the big stage, the Airborne Toxic Event disappointed, seeming to wilt a bit in their dark clothes, but the Black Keys turned in a rousing gutbucket-rock set done in the grand manner, channeling the first-wave festival eminences like Deep Purple and the Who. Going next, Franz Ferdinand hit the mark completely, turning in a polished and ferocious performance that rocked many a skeptical veteran of the Glaswegians’ mainstage outings in previous years. The crowd at mainstage next came to grips with Morrissey, with the celebrated (if tubby) romantic opening for headliner Paul McCartney. Alas, we were far away at the Gobi (throwing down to heroic dancefloor sets by Bug and Peanut Butter Wolf) when Moz threw his celebrated bitchfit, storming offstage in the middle of his performance, his still-fetching nose sickened by the smell of frying burgers. Leaving a whirling Bitsy with our cool-as-fuck campmates, I met my friend Kirsten at the Do Lab’s rocking misting station, and we dallied at Silversun Pickups’ triumphant star turn on the Outdoor Stage. I’ve followed these local prodigies from their earliest appearences and they laid into the audience with new songs off Swoon, a long-awaited sophomore album fitting punky rhythms, sheets of decorative noise and an adroit four-fingered salute to Iron Butterfly into the band’s established sound. Guitarist Brian Auber bitched wittily about the Cute Beatle, as the rest of Friday night began shutting down and we drifted to the mainstage for the Act We’ve Known For All These Years.

Anon roared the profound nonsense of “Jet” and a spry and slender sexagenarian named Sir Paul McCartney went on a 33-song stomp though one of the premier music catalogs of the twentieth century. The set incorporated songs by John and George along with a few surprises and a long trawl through his 1970s and ‘80s Wings albums. From the square of way upfront where we stood, it looked like a big chunk of Macca’s present-day fanbase is composed of tender-looking indie-pop kids and these imps were as blown away as any of the hard-bitten journos who raved of Friday’s finale. Like the peachfuzztone young ‘uns prostrate before Roger Waters at last year’s festival, they’d come to see someone (correctly) regarded as one of the Immortals and a still-vibrant presence in their own rock ‘n’ roll lives. Sir Paul outlasted everything else on the lot, going on almost an hour past the 1 AM closing. Looking at beginnings of the second-highest take in festival history, organizers wisely decided the $1000-a-minute the city of Indio charges for after-curfew music was the merest bagatelle.

We Are the Night: The hour was well advanced by the time we made it out to the Polo Grounds on for Saturday’s bop-til-you-drop. Drive-By Truckers were shivering to a bravura conclusion with a cover of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” at the Outdoor as Michael Franti & Spearhead (who were playing late-night desert gatherings of Burners just a few years back) were vibing tribally from the big stage. Passing the Mojave stage on our way to dance to the Bloody Beetroots DJ set at the Sahara, I saw a tiny Henry Rollins deep within, belaboring a milling fringe of onlookers like the village atheist. As the sun went down, longtime Coachella vets Thievery Corporation did a rousing beat-heavy set on the mainstage, heavy with their patented thundering harmonics and bracing agitprop. I left the din with a lovely campmate named Kat to check out Booker T. & the DBTs, with members of Drive-By Truckers backing organist Booker T. Jones, venerable anchor of 1960s soul giant Stax Records, in a welter of raw Dixie funk. Our by-then swollen party skipped Turbonegro and passed on M.I.A. for the dance-dance immolation incinerating the Sahara for the rest of the night. I heard about the Killers’ less-than-adequate mainstage turn at soured secondhand and felt glad to have trusted my social instincts, as first mash-up kings Crookers then a DJ set by the Chemical Brothers then a balls-out performance by MSTRKRFT slammed beats into a writhing mob of friendlies, with Chem Bros. lifting an already bliss-dosed, e-sodden, candy-flipped-out mob into the stratosphere with a robot-chant of “Some chemicals are good/Some chemicals are bad.” True dat, but the bad were mainly rotten vibes emitted by a pushy wedge of aristos pitching random helots out of the way a few feet from my group. Online sources credit Paris Hilton and her entourage with the brief disturbance, but from what I saw, the culprits could’ve been any clutch of overdressed Hollywood Boulevard shitheels. It was just like a night in the L.A. underground, minus the sketchy nabes and a chance of being mugged.

Feedback Apocalypse: We’d raged hard the night before and the sun was well along its path before Bitsy and I struck camp Sunday afternoon and loaded out for the festival. Staying since Thursday night at a campground by the Salton Sea with a group of sexy party-hardy Burners had the great advantage of dead calm at night, broken every few hours by the symphonic Doppler roar of a Union Pacific freight train high-balling by. Jointly feeling heat exhaustion and sleep deprivation while singly spacing out from individualized drug intake, we tootled the three-dozen miles to Indio on an overheated engine, arriving just in time to miss Perry Ferrell’s now-traditional Sunday DJ slot at the Sahara. We got our groove on briefly with Plump DJs, before gliding past hundreds of exhausted attendees for whom a hooping hottie and some mutant looking like Sting held no interest. We flopped happily far up front at mainstage as lengthening shadows set the mood for My Bloody Valentine. Management was handing out earplugs at the gate and small wonder, since toward the end of “You Made Me Realise,” guitarists Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher (the latter impassive as a Xanax-bombed soccer mom) loosed a gorgeous fifteen-minute-plus feedback annihilation that was easily the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in decades of doting on amplified music. I can’t imagine how the Horrors could hear even themselves going off at the Gobi many hundreds of yards away. It was less a solo than a hideous (and hideously effective) evocation of nightmare; a compressed and aestheticized variation on the opening bombardment at the Somme, another historic din that produced few actual causalties. The crowd, thus blitzed and shit-hammered, was easy mop-up for the Cure, since even the dirgiest of their album tracks sound like 1910 Fruitgum Company by comparison. Bitsy was limp with exhaustion, but these Byronic proto-goths are her favorite-ever band and she was soon slicing circles through the audience with her hoop. I let her decide when she’d had enough and escorted her out when she did, leaving the headliners to what observers described as a power-trawl through B-sides and obscurities that went on until approximately 1:30 a.m. when organizers pulled the plug and the band did two more numbers in the dark. About 70 minutes later, I was standing in front of my crib in Boyle Heights, watching Bitsy’s taillights fade up the street. On my desk was a notice that the cheerful folks at the Lugo Station post office had my ticket to Burning Man 2009. Bon temps roulez, motherfuckos.

—Ron Garmon

Roach Coachella: Orders from the Fire Marshal sent the marathon Fauxchella festival packing from the announced Traction Ave. venue earlier in the week, but by showtime on Good Friday organizers had moved the event to gamier precincts many blocks away. Hangar 1018 is beloved of the downtown party set and I know the space well, having wandered along its sketchy and verminous stretch of S. Santa Fe many times in various states of hallucinogenic inebriation. Inside, instead of the usual haul of faux-fur and near-naked ladies, were a couple hundred gamboling on the fragments of their Eastside Cool. I was waved past the door by promoters spoke cheerily of the ultraviolence they’d already visited upon everyone else inquiring after The List. They looked entirely too jocose to be joking. The hour was advanced and most of the 11 scheduled acts had already unplugged and went, but the overdriven squeal-pop of Myonics was letting rip from the graffiti-doused back patio. It was like Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist projected inside a 1960s beach party movie—a lighthearted frolic of the seriously geeky young, complete with spastic dancing and bashful romance. In the main room, Globes on Remote held forth in like caramel-coated Depeche Mode or a Huey Lewis in receipt of really bad News. Such sugary ferocity was just what the occasion called for and the Allah Las were pouring it at 1 a.m. as I made my slow fade to the door, their psilocybin surf music howling like bonfire night at Owlsley State Beach.

Doing the Devil: The normal crowd at the Silent Movie Theatre these days is the hipper sort of cineaste; stylish singles and couples lounging before crazed dada like Myra Breckinridge or Repo: The Genetic Opera in an air of abstracted contemplation. I too can be found there on occasion, usually sitting gimlet-eyed along the back wall as some 1970s Eastmancolor atrocity is exhumed. Even so, Easter Sunday’s screening of F.W. Murnau’s Faust was the first actual silent movie I’d ever sat through at this last shrine to their memory. Scoring was the Cabeza de Vaca Arcestra, an ad-hoc assemblage featuring art-punk chanteuse Nora Keyes and members of South Bay high-artisans dios (malos) chattering, clanking and gorgeously caterwauling over this haunting and hallucinatory masterpiece. This freehanded adaptation of Goethe’s deathless wrestle between God and Devil was Murnau’s bow at Weimar film giant Ufa before being lured out here, bringing Emil Jannings—his Mephistopheles—with him. Jannings went on to win the very first Oscar given for Best Actor before heading home to Germany to make propaganda films for Hitler. So, as Kurt Vonnegut used it say, it goes. Still, no Satanic dereliction can wipe away Murnau’s visionary claptrap nor the dainty pallor of Camilla Horn as Gretchen, a face credibly worth the protagonist’s immortal ectoplasm. The Arcestra’s deepspace introspections and bone-chilling harmonics gently took the film sideways, subtly shifting the impact from morality fable to pagan fantasia. Since culture endlessly recycles itself in hybrids like these, happy is the conclusion that silent cinema is yet another idea whose time has come.

Rubaceous: The adorable Ruby Friedman majorly rocked the Viper Room on Monday, beneficiary of a hard-driving new Orchestra, a bucket of sweat and a couple of choice Iggyisms. Jumping in her maryjanes and batting babydoll eyes at a thick crowd of old and new friends, she rocketed the boys through an abbreviated set with the punky brio of Texas Terri Laird or Brody Armstrong. I know she was mercurial, but this? In the sagacious words of Barry Fitzgerald in The Quiet Man, “That red hair of hers is no lie.”

This Column Brought to You By: The kind folks at Shout Factory, knowing of my taste for antiquaria, bunged along their new career survey, Action: The Sweet Anthology and I’ve played it relentlessly my every writing moment all weekend. These two discs balance the hits and near-hits from this U.K. benzedrine-bubblegum judiciously, the hi-octane fluff turned in by outside songwriters Chinn and Chapman along with edgier band-written tunes. You’re allowed one revelation per retrospective and this collection’s surprise is Disc 2’s “Funk It Up (David’s Song),” the adenoidal glamsters’ surprisingly juicy pass at mid-1970s P-Funk. That and the album version of “Love is Like Oxygen,” truly a thing of beauty and a proggy joy at 6:52. The Sweet appears at the H.O.B. on April 30 and I may just shoehorn in.

—Ron Garmon