romana machado

Plague Days: By nature a robust, even stolid animal, I’m almost never sick, so the virus that laid me low after Valentine’s Day came with as much mental irritation as physical discomfort. Between explosions of coughing and paroxysms of sneezing, I’d become a walking murrain; a contagion feared by all who crossed my path, moodily exiled to Casa Garmon in Boyle Heights. Having to time the composition of sentences between bouts of hacking and horking is probably the reason all the great consumptives are poets, as any other kind of writing is impossible. Deprived of every other sustaining vice (well, not every vice—now and then, the Playmate did come down from San Francisco to nurse me), I surrendered completely to the narcotic of my music collection. Amassed carefully since the dawn of the digital era, this 10,000-hour haul of vintage rock and soul is but the merest fragment of the number of records and CDs that have passed through my hands down the decades. Thankfully, my mailbox was crammed with an unusually large number of reissues—among them a three-CD primer on the work of Sandy Hurvitz, a former Mother of Invention whose 1967 debut, Sandy’s Album Is Here at Last, is a sludgy abortion that could well stand for all time as a monument to how lousy production can destroy a noble set of songs. Her 1970 rebirth on Reprise as Essra Mohawk yielded something quite a bit better in Primordial Lovers, a hint at what her first LP might’ve been had not Frank Zappa passively destroyed it. The emotive peaks scaled on “I Have Been Here Before” and “It’s Been a Beautiful Day” are far beyond anything she could’ve reached hanging out with so tyrannical a trivialist as Zappa. The swooping, heartrending vocal bite and McCartneyesque knack for tricky song structure and complex melodies put this album deep into cult mythology—as dazzlingly eccentric a Personal Statement as anything John Cale or Arthur Lee ever unwound. One can spend an entire afternoon with it (as I did) and take away the impression the disc will yield as many secrets on the thousandth listen as the first. Mohawk’s eponymous third album came out in 1975 on Asylum, its mid-decade sophisto-pop evoking the hi-gloss production sheen of Linda Ronstadt or Jackson Browne without sounding anything like them at all. If it falls from the giddy psychedelic heights of Lovers, this third LP still delivers the same goods in miniature—crafty pop melodies, expressive heartshorn vocals and lots of small urbane whimsies. The mail also brought Stax Number Ones, a potent and pungent blast of much better-known material, starting with “Green Onions” off the 1962 LP of the same name by Booker T. & the MG’s and winding up with Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman,” which hit in 1974, the year before the label closed. Along the way are well-loved tunes by Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Johnnie Taylor, Rufus Thomas, and the Staples Singers, with the whole standing in for the Stax catalogue, which is only the greatest haul of soul singles ever heard of. Much love as well goes to Rykodisc for their resurrection of proto-indie feedback theorists Galaxie 500, their studio albums-plus-rarities-plus-Peel Sessions now available on three double-CD sets. That dream pop eventually spread over the earhole world like a-bubblin’ treacle is due in no small measure to the exertions of these Canadian brats back in the late 1980s. Believe it or not, kiddies, there was a time Back When it took a record like Today or On Fire to make you not regret the invention of the amplifier. In an era thickly smeared with bozos posing behind Gibsons, G5K was part of a saving remnant that advanced the rockist aesthetic, come Ratt, come Poison, come Christgau. By 1991’s This Is Our Music, the trio’s sound was already being subsumed into the shoegaze movement out of Old Blighty, with My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver piloting the Great Transatlantic Drone, but the set still has the narcotic effect of the Romilar cough syrup the late Lester Bangs glugged by the carboy.

Upright, More or Less: Candy-liquid codeine being denied me, I turned to various other chemical means for succor, with the result being I was able to get out to a few events without spraying gales of microbes everywhere. Ex-CityBeat copy editor Josh Sindell was actually glad to see me when we both met at the Troubadour for the Year Long Disaster album release party/Big Bang party. Big Bang led off and, as impressed as I was with their Norwegian records, the general kickassedness of their music has improved markedly since they took up residence in L.A. The headliners expertly cranked their latest—Black Magic: All Mysteries Revealed—in its hard-driving entirety as clips from the 2006 Russian movie version of The Master and Margarita ran behind them. The memory of everywhere I went, from the Silent Movie Theatre’s apocalyptically awesome double bill of Glen & Randa (1971 high art from Jim McBride about dumbass hippies after the end of the world) and The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (almost two decades before his superb second-unit work in Amadeus, Jan Schmidt helmed this startling ultraviolent tale of feral schoolgirls that needed but de minimus dubbing and title change to Czech Chicks Go Dingo to play every Dixie drive-in for the last two years of the LBJ administration) to the Brides of March runaround mid-month (which I attended in San Francisco with the Playmate and a hundred other freaks all swaddled in wedding formal and staggering pub-to-bar all over Union Square and environs as I kept pace while doing indica rips and choking like Doc Holliday) comes back through a haze of antihistamines and cough-suppressants, two of my most unfavorite categories of drugs. By the P.O.W. Fest (held at the Echoplex over the last weekend of March), I was feeling more-or-less cured and missed most of Sunday’s lineup celebrating my new vigor with the Playmate and putting her on a plane. I did myself an injury by missing Gestapo Khazi, but arriving in time for Pierced Arrows proved no great boon, as the latter was having troubles enough keeping a scant couple dozen attendees interested. Twice times their number clogged up the smoking area outside, including a few Lords of Altamont, a longtime favorite I’ve walked into at least one spit-blood biker hoedown to hear. At length, The Brother Wayne Kramer ascended the stage and announced the imminent sonic ass-kick all were due, courtesy of the Standells. These kings of the late 1960s Strip were titans in their long gone day, with a run of memorable singles kicked off by lowlife anthem “Dirty Water,” which got to #11 Billboard back in 1966. The possibility of ever seeing these guys perform live was right down there with seeing J. Geils Band or the risen Pol Pot in order of any probability I’d reckoned, so seeing four elderly men romp like George Foreman into “Riot on Sunset Strip” and “Dirty Water” made my night. I tottered home feeling better, reminded of what George Clinton said about music’s power not only to move, but remove.

The Continuing Adventures of Black Love: It’s my pleasure to note this act has gotten sharper and weirder since I saw them at the Smell last summer. I seldom make the long trek into deepest Silver Lake to the Hyperion Tavern—a tiny low-roofed onetime S&M club turned hipster hangout—but Black Love’s request came over my transom so prettily I legged it out anyway, only to find a gaggle of drunk Hollywood scene-limpets I usually walk two miles to avoid. These worthies were fouling the air with racist imprecations and sub-Mencia remarks as I elbowed inside and awaited the band to offload the strange. It wasn’t long before David Cotner began to howl demented and delicious Beat poetry from the flyspeck stage, accompanied by Sergio Segovia on bass and ex- Saccherine Trust drummer Anthony Cicero. Cotner’s narrow frame suggests an angular Bill Burroughsian intensity and his words deliver on the promise. The place began to fill with gawking and grinning locals, digging on his advance-man-for-the-Apocalypse act. It ended abruptly after an abbreviated set and patrons were still blinking as I loped out the door.

Ode on the Death of a Dino Cop: That the late LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates had a dung-shovel for a mouth was something Angelenos had to live with until the 1991 Rodney King riots blew his clueless ass off the city payroll into the methane madness of right-wing talk radio. Chief Gates once advocated shooting casual drug users, tried to turn the already historically racist cop-shop he adorned into the kind of paramilitary once all the rage in places like Argentina, and owed his fall from grace to “Black Power” rhetoric from Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters. That city services continue to wither and die during the worst economic times since the 1930s without any visible decrease in the number of police clogging the streets is one tribute to the impact of this from-the-ranks throwback and continued harassment of an all-but-legal marijuana trade is another. So, scoop out a shallow rectangle of L.A. dirt and make ready to plant the perfumed residuum of our city’s last indisputably saurian cop—a man better simply hurled into the tarpit on Wilshire Boulevard than given the solemn and costly dignity of a policeman’s funeral. Every public-spirited peace officer across this great land may breathe a sigh of relief now that the greatest televised libel upon their spiffy badges since Barney Fife is as dead as Bulldog Drummond.

—Ron Garmon