(above) Duane Jarvis

L.A. RECORD is happy to provide a new home to writer Ron Garmon’s long-running L.A. music column, rescued now from the defunct L.A. CityBeat and retitled something more appropriately Beefheartian. We welcome Ron to the fold and look forward to running into him in the weirdest places. These are the first two installments. More to come!

Of Gamelans and Faux-Rednecks: Squinting in the dim light of REDCAT downtown last Saturday night, I saw few acidheads out for the L.A.-based Burant Wangi (“Fragrant Offering”) gamelan’s performance of two new compositions. I’d faithfully missed most of the other hallucino-treats on hand the previous week, from the Acid Mothers Temple/Kinksi overandunder at the Echo on Friday to a Westside underground trance bash with FatFinger, Mark Zambala that failed to go off due to venue problems. Yes, in my decadent search for cheap out-of-head thrills post-rock revisionism that lead me to concert-hall mutations of the Bach family and writhing before cracked speakers in dust-storms, I’ve come to be overawed by traditional Balinese court music. Two long compositions—each product of the many months of directed improvisation traditional to the form—explored shimmering vastnesses of sound, with beautiful female dancers performing elaborate narratives. The whole thing was split by an intermission and ended with a kecak or Monkey Chant, a gibbering gibbon-like call-and-response ritual I’ve cackled in far sylvan glades and remote wastelands myself. This crowd was a bit tony for self-siminianization, so I walked across Hill Street afterward to the Redwood Bar, where several-score of L.A.’s finest faux-rednecks were on genial display. Standing out from the generality were former CityBeat editrix Rebecca Schoenkopf, columnist Chris Morris and the ever-delightful Ruby Friedman, each indisputably themselves in the midst of this crowded haul of good-natured caricatures. All dug on the rockabilly slam of Dex Romweber, formerly of influential indie-hicks Flat Duo Jets and accompanied on the drums by sister Sarah of Snatches of Pink. For this hillbilly, the whole almost-back-home vibe took place over a faint and dainty hammering going off in the inner ears like M-80s tossed casually at wind chimes.

Duane Jarvis, 1957-2009: This L.A. root-rock stalwart died on April Fools Day after a long struggle with cancer. He’d discontinued curative treatment and moved to a hospice late last month. The guitarist, who’d played with Lucinda Williams and John Prine, found his condition worsening during a U.K. tour with Michelle Shocked. He was one of four beneficiaries of the Dog & Pony Show fundraiser held at the now-defunct Safari Sam’s last Labor Day weekend. Donations may be sent to Pray for Tomorrow Fund, 2554 Lincoln Blvd., No. 1010, Venice, CA 90291. He was 51.

Warehouse Rock: The night before CityBeat folded, I dropped by Silver Factory well into Thursday evening proceedings. Secreted downstairs inside a Wholesale District warehouse along a nearly-lightless Mateo Street, the place is legal, permitted and a likely next step for the determinedly rockist L.A. underground. A lope down more corridors than Maxwell Smart put me before a refined portion of retro-1980s glam from Folio. The livelier stuff is firmly in the this-minute mode of VHS or Beta or The Killers, but the ballads recall the sturdy agonies of Loverboy, Night Ranger and all those soaring, heart-tug power arias that used to howl in doleful hope over the end-credit sequences in B-movies made back in Reagan’s second term. The ladies all swooned and some of the more geezer-like males enjoyed a fine snifter of Proust, transported far from this remote and cheery vault.

Sea-green Serenades: By Sunday night, my old paper was aught but a past-tense Wikipedia entry and I was unwinding at the Echo with onetime CityBeat intern Guelda Voien at the end of an unusually weird weekend. Never let it be said the Homosexuals can’t pick their support, as newbies Shark Toys came as a blistering revelation. A synth/guitar twosome but recently bulked to standard rockband size by addition of a bass/drummer duo sporting near-identical pornstar tashes, they laid it on in the timeless staccato lunge of self-confessed influence Black Randy & the Metrosquad. A fat dose of late-1960s proto-electronica of Silver Apples was an audacious contrast, but Simeon Coxe III, surviving half of a venerable NYC duo as important to punk as the Stooges and postpunk as Can, unlimbered a spare and hypnotic set. Crusty punks and even gamier hippies, formerly warring species, now mixed amiably within a temporary horde of beard-strippled hipsters and sweet-cheeked colligates, the whole forming the ambulant Seven Ages of Freak exhibit that is what’s left of the great American counterculture. We all awaited the headliners in sweaty fortitude; rewarded at last by a calculatedly ferocious attack by a sweet-looking old codger named Bruno Wizard. The Homosexuals had to change their name from their Class of ’77 moniker The Rejects to avoid major-label interest and lay buried in the tone-art boneyard until a career resurrection similar to what the Apples underwent last decade. Like compeers The Buzzcocks and Slaughter & the Dogs, this band can still turn in a dandified and droogish set; a tumult still going on by the time I draped my crinkled velvet jacket over my companion and walked her out.

—Ron Garmon