dan monick

Warhol Girls & Masked Piggies: This past month has had me either closeted like a monk writing for deadlines or having the kind of adventures unsuitable for reading in a family rock ‘n’ roll journal. Well, man can’t live by noise alone, or so I told myself when I missed a jampacked evening of rockist delights (including Silversun Pickups at the Echo and the Pity Party downstairs at the Echoplex) on Nov. 8 in favor of a rare screening of The Telephone Book at the Egyptian. This 1971 ultra-black sex comedy is just about the last great undiscovered U.S. film of the Nixon era and one of the few that doesn’t feel more than minimally dated. Detailing the adventures of a blonde nymphet (Sarah Kennedy) who falls in love with an obscene caller (the elusive Norman Rose, veteran TV announcer resplendent in a plastic mask he never takes off) she spends the movie traipsing through Manhattan in an overheated scamper trying to find. Part Alice in Wonderland and part de Sade’s Justine (both also filmed at about this time by people with far less talent), this movie is one of those artifacts, along with Pink Flamingos, the original Last House on the Left, Skywald horror comics and the inexorable rise of Alice Cooper, documenting the point the Swinging Sixties cankered into the Sick Seventies. Director Nelson Lyons (in attendance and feisty) went on to write for the original Saturday Night Live which helps explain the weird and unsettling ending, in which Death is revealed as nothing more than just another uptight pig. Featuring Jill Clayburgh (Tish Darling on Dirty Sexy Money), Barry Morse (the cop that won’t stop in the original of The Fugitive, here buried in naked women) Roger C. Carmel (Harry Mudd on Star Trek) Dolph Sweet (the dad on Give Me a Break) and no less than three Warhol Superstars (Ultra Violet, Nadine and Jeri Miller), plus a mind-croggling stretch of proto-Freudian animation that likely got the movie its X rating, this was claws-down weirder than the brain-battering Coffin Joe festival that ran all last month at the Silent Movie. Kindly see the print edition of the RECORD for the perils of attending that while twisted on kush. Selah, hippie.

Happiness & the Hollows: Anyone thinking L.A. is suffering a drought of great music (just out of conjecture, mind, since I know of no one so dumbass) need only hie themselves over to fusty Spaceland for the final show of their Monday night rez next week. The new album is Spells, a slick and strobe-lit improvement on such delightful early artifacts as last year’s Bunnies and Bombs EP—this album differs from their old sound the same way a park carousel compares to the car George Jetson drove to work. Propulsive and uplifting, the set charts an eccentric stratospheric course courtesy of Sarah Negahdari and her sardonically innocent voice, an instrument I’ve seen induce trancelike reveries on faces packed cheek-by-flushed-jowl in the least private of spaces. There’s a few gleeful lefthand turns into satire (“Delorean”, an album highlight) and weird ambition (“A Man, a Plan, A Canal”) before the lilting fadeout, at which the whole thing winks out like a bottle rocket. Impressive—and best of all they can replicate this delicate arrangement of moods onstage and without all the soundcheck fuss indie artistes like to inflict upon the hiposcienti. On the Nov. 11 installment, the Hollows got some first-rate support in Dirt Dress (a trio of noise-brats I last saw at the Smell and a slice of the old raucous for which the joint is justly famous) and Julian Casablancas of The Strokes making an unannounced appearance, hawking his new Fall line in artful cowpunk for out-West delectation. I’d be lying my ass off it I said it came anywhere near the sonic standard of Dirt Dress, so I won’t. It was, as always, the Hollows’ night as they calmly and modestly took full possession of yet another bill. See ‘em one last time on Monday the 30th.

60 Watt Tower of Power: Next Tuesday at the Echo was pretty much the same blown-away deal, as I watched 60 Watt Kid put formidable support into deep shade. Gowns was holding forth at a dozen-odd locals in the main room while many more were puffing away in the smoker’s lounge out back, adding frightful abuse of lung tissue to blatant earhole neglect, as this duo went at their swooping postpunk with a will exciting to behold. One listen to “Butterfly Knife” on their MySpace page ought to be enough to convince any punter bright enough to use a Q-tip that they’re onto something of likely permanent value to the skronk aesthetic—something wild and gorgeous stuck in the noise-pop refinement process between Sonic Youth and Fifty Foot Rope. Yes, they’re that good (even spine-chilling at times) and Best Coast was dead-game too, even with sound issues that blurred the vocals into an indistinct bawl. The crowd (drawn off the back porch by DJ Dannyboy Collins’ assortment of awesomely weird vintage surf rock from the likes of Zorba & the Greeks) warmed to them at once, despite heckling from a couple of overlubed drunks up front. Their warm, mildly punkish trad-pop went over well, all the way up to a sweet cover of “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” which is already the Ramones at their awshux tenderest. Still, there’s no messin’ with the Kid and this was their album release after all. We Come From The Bright Side is a steroid jackrabbit bound that makes their debut For the Love EP sound like the eerie quasi-folkie artifact it actually is. Vocalist Kevin Litrow whoops and caws like a spastic David Byrne and the melodies are just as pleasing but now expanded into the deep innerspace sense of cozmik joy implied by the title. Tracks like “Take the Pain Out of Your Chest” recall the solemn majesties found in proto–prog like Ash Ra Tempel and Syd-era Pink Floyd, but only as a point of interstellar departure. This trio is great precisely because of their unironic caress of the heart, reaching for something like classic rock’s enduring grip on primary human feeling. As with the Hollows, the Kid makes doing the same honking thang live a genial blur of ease and competence, down through winding raga-rock vistas of Harrisonoid intensity, past bobbing fragments of melody that collapse like antimatter into a single pedaled beep. After a decade-plus haunting L.A. rock venues as rockcrit, I take my oath it just doesn’t get any better than this bright sweet noise gliding over our city’s ongoing bop-til-you-drop cultural renaissance. Out of a place caught every which way in an accelerating social meltdown, may only 60 watts of pure pop love prove just enough.

The Raven, the Desert & Ruby: Part of what’s been keeping me out of too many of L.A.’s fine rockist institutions this month was increasing heavy commitment to a couple of literary magazines of local origin and broad reputation. One is called Paraphilia Magazine, which is turning into a kind of Maximum R&D proving ground of lovers of extreme lit and old-skool Dangerous Vision-aries like Norman Spinrad and Charles Platt. It pleases them to run a confabulation of mine of one kind (King Kong’s sad postmortem fate) or another (what would Zombie Lenin do?) every issue and it’s only a bizarre Bradburyian coincidence editrix Dire McCain looks like my little sister or a female Roy Baty, depending upon the light. Another was a massive, tricky and experimentally-annotated chunk of Poe scholarship set to run in Antique Children: A Mischievous Literary Arts Journal, edited by Jim Lopez. Needless to say, the Poe study required many hours pondering lore by flickering laptop night and toking away at the stuff I review for the print edition. A fellow adopted Virginian also of querulous temperament, Edgar A. was also, I realized, a man so given to ferocity he became a kind of literary Terminator—the kind of mad-dog critic as would soon savage a poet’s leg as look at it. On the afternoon of Nov. 17, I hauled myself away from the absinthe pleasures of another man’s bile, told my ever-lurking inner goth to take a hike, packed the backpack myself and followed it out to Burbank, where my friend Troi gave me a ride to a still-undisclosed location somewhere past the same stretch of high desert road that killed Blonday’s car on the way to Burning Man 2009. That intrepid lady simply ordered up another ride, but neither curb service nor cop could reach the spot where we offloaded a DJ stand, amplifiers, firewood and suchlike for Spirit’s Fire all-night New Moon Meteor Shower dance party. About70 people clustered around the fire I tended down nearly the last stick of wood, spinning fire and dancing to DJs Heavenly Father, Bass Mechanic, Anton Tumas and others, until far into the morning, when everyone hugged and went home, where Eddie Poe’s gloomy bugbird was nowhere to be found.

A Roof Bow-Off Advisory Warning is Being Issued For: The Viper Room this Wednesday, Nov. 25, courtesy of the emotional, whimsical, unforgettable Ruby Freidman and Orchestra. Come see it happen at 8:00 p.m.

—Ron Garmon