the fuxedos

Holy Fux: Elaine’s Hella Hipster Hoedown has become a welcome quarterly distraction—I’d be happy if she staged one every weekend. An indie-rock barn dance held the first Saturday this month at Pehrspace in hella non-bucolic South Echo Park, this happening was packed to the paint with veal-eyed darlings of the Eastside rock scene. I could scarce wedge my lean geezer’s carcass into the room, much less commandeer one of the authentic hay bales strewn about the room as bovine bric-a-brac, so I tarried outside and talked to the hostess. Being a Dixie lady herself, she was pretty impressed to meet a (half) authentic Tazewell Co., VA, hillbilly and I found myself unaccustomedly bashful. (About in the only other social advantage my heritage is usually good for is informing the occasional obnoxious fuck he owns a real purdy mouf’ with just the right inflection, so this kind of approval is unusual.) Some kiddies departed, leaving me room to squeeze in for a nice blast of Slang Chickens, a clutch of squalling hellions it did my heart good to contemplate. Their nitro-fueled countrified squawk acquitted a claimed decent from the likes of Hank Williams, the Flying Burrito Bros. and the Gun Club very credibly. The Chickens shut down, I gave hurried regrets and was soon padding swiftly around Echo Park Lake wondering where all the cops were going. A solid phalanx of shrieking black & whites were converging on the corner of Sunset and Park Avenue, a police car had smashed rather messily into another vehicle in what officers at the scene described as a “high-speed chase situation.” Sunset Boulevard looked to be gearing up for a lengthy closure when my phone rang and none other than my old partner, ace photographer Curious Josh, plucked me away from the scene, with both of us rematerializing at Spaceland’s door just in time for the Fuxedos. I first saw these zanies the afternoon of L.A. Decom 2007, when they flabbergasted a crowd of hallucination-hardened surrealists, with front-freak Danny Shorago leading the revels under the Sixth Street Bridge got up as a sort of Zippy the Pinhead with the cone filed down. He was just same madcap this time, right to the hospital gown that looked suspiciously like the same one from Decom. Their self-titled debut is the audio half of the band’s rollicking punky charm, with songs like “Cow/Boy” (about a neuroses of a man-bovine superhero) and “Night of the Cephalopod” (A Firesign Theatre-style B-movie takeoff) there for repeat delectation. Shorago was his usual dynamic eccentric human whirligig, turning the near-capacity house sizzling over to Killsonic, as the latter did their entrance from the lobby, Louis Prima style. If any one live act in this town kicks as hard as the Fux, it’s Killsonic, so, as I left, this fat knot of boho elite was being jerked around like some of the giddier characters at the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre not far away.* I had the usual miles-to-go-before-I thang going on elsewhere that night.

The Last Virgin on Hollywood Boulevard: In Tinseltown on an unrelated errand last Tuesday, I stopped in at fast-closing Virgin Mega for a mob scene out of Nathaniel West. One of the last remaining music shops in L.A. and an anchor for the Babylonian monstrosity that is Highland Plaza, this wedge of split-level mallspace was a reliably overpriced dump for merch you’d find cheaper a few blocks away on Sunset at Amoeba (as you listened to better music over the store speakers, too). The crowd was huge and far worse behaved than most music venues. At the 70-90% knockdown range, one winds up snatching up things like the 2006 Sony Legacy edition of Journey’s Greatest Hits, so I duly snatched it, a Sam Peckinpah movie and a CD of Edwin Fischer playing Mozart before beginning a long, slow hegira to the boulevard that took place over a lot of other people’s toes. Journey is a band of my youth not terribly well loved by the cultists and smartasses (like me) of their 1980s heyday. Well, what before our aging punky faces should appear but the club-and-rocker kids of the proverbial next gen adopting these San Francisco prog-romantic hambones, Steve Perry’s adenoids and all. They sold out the Greek twice the last time here and it’s not hard, after digesting all sixteen tracks, to know why. Whatever we of the rock snobosisie had to say about Journey (and we said plenty), I can’t remember anyone ever gobbing their way the punk era’s pet epithet—phony. Like the sweetness of Laurel & Hardy, Journey’s jejune romanticism is both silly and completely unaffected. Anyone who’s ever had “Who’s Crying Now” accidentally illume a broken heart knows what I mean, along with the passing parabolic hearing of “Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’” just as one is sunk irretrievably deep in something illicit and tasty. Even without carnal accompaniment, the fuckers have you at the first “nah-nah-nah-nah-nah” as the hips begin to Elvis themselves wantonly. Regarded as romanticism, this-minute iconography of “Don’t Stop Believin’” not only makes sense, it actually points to the magnificent durability of the whole rock experience. This is not nothing as this Thing We Do passes the half-century mark and threatens to outlive the record shops whence it came.

—Ron Garmon

* Yes, I know about the Mutaytor, but just try cramming all that into Spaceland!