124 LA RECORD MAGAZINE SUMMER ISSUE

DEATH VALLEY GIRLS • WYATT BLAIR EGYPTIAN LOVER by XL MIDDLETON THE LOVE WITCH • DJ JOHNNY BASIL JOYCE WRICE • GIUDA • SWARVY BRIT MANOR • TERRY ALLEN ALBUMS COMICS AND MORE

ISSUE 124 • FREE SUMMER 2016

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DEATH VALLEY GIRLS Jaquelinne Cingolani with Kristina Benson

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TERRY ALLEN Chris Ziegler

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SWARVY Chris Kissel

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SHARK TOYS D.M. Collins

EGYPTIAN LOVER XL Middleton

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GIUDA Chris Ziegler

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BRIT MANOR Daiana Feuer

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WYATT BLAIR Chris Ziegler

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JOYCE WRICE Christina Gubala

EGYPTIAN LOVER by Theo Jemison

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DEATH VALLEY GIRLS Interview by Jacquelinne Cingolani with Kristina Benson Photography by AMMO

(Before you read this interview, listen to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot—I’m not kidding! Do it!) I have known Death Valley Girls for about a few years now. When I was playing music, our bands played together a few times and I always loved that they were the resilient few who believed in rock ‘n’ roll in a way reminiscent of New York’s 70s punk scene and Patti Smith, Television, Dead Boys and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. (Who were all and still are my music heroes.)

Their new full-length Glow In The Dark is available now from Burger and they’ll be doing a record release at the end of the month. We talked for hours about spirituality, rock ‘n’ roll—maybe the same thing—and what kind of fans you find on other planes or planets. Oh yeah, and course ... Iggy!

Some people say that rock ‘n roll started with the blues, but go back past that— what’s the oldest thing in history you can look at and think, ‘Yes, that’s where we came from’?

Bonnie Bloomgarden (vocals/guitar): Didn’t they just find out that King Tut’s knife was a meteorite? I think they just found that out, and I think that’s very in line with what we’re trying to do—definitely find weapons from space. That’s the oldest thing I can think of.

I think I just read that. I can’t verify the facts on that, but I’m pretty sure it’s a fact because I read it, and I like to believe everything I read. [laughs] That’s definitely our oldest reference.

Except for maybe Satan? [laughs] Larry Schemel (guitar): Well, yeah. And cavemen. Definitely cavemen come into play, because as far as the music that I would assume— BB: You love bones.

LS: Yeah, banging on stuff. A caveman is kind of about as primitive and old as you can get.

BB: As long as there’s been sticks and bones, there’s been what we’re into. You know? And meteorites.

LS: [laughs] Rock ‘n roll!

BB: Obviously we read once that the cavemen 6

invented rock ‘n roll—obviously—so now we believe that wholeheartedly.

LS: I mean, we’re roughly putting cavemen under … I think we’re putting the CroMagnons and the Neanderthals under the whole umbrella. I mean, not to offend them, but…

BB: [laughs] Yeah, we don’t want them coming up and like, belittling us. [laughs] We’ve talked before about the band’s psychic and telepathic communion and how this ability allows you to read the energetic field of strangers and know whether or not they were kindred spirits.

You guys named your record Glow In The Dark, because of this phenomena—the ability to see certain people with this glow in the dark aura or energy field. Is ‘Pink Radiation’ a type of energy in this spectrum?

LS: It definitely ties into the whole theme of the record. I’m not sure what Laura meant exactly by those lyrics.

BB: Laura [‘The Kid’ Kelsey, drums] had an intense summer. She saw things we don’t even understand. She had a possession and she had these visions where she could see this energy field of people who glow in the dark. This is

a concept I’ve had since I was a kid. I went to the loony bin for the same idea—that there was something in people you could see, like they wanted to spiritually evolve. We are all having some kind of a spiritual awakening.

I think when I was a kid I wasn’t mentally prepared, but I am now and so is the rest of the band. And then of course there are dogs— I’m obsessed with dogs.

Did you record this at the Station House?

Did you bond with their dog Darkness?

BB: That’s our favorite studio dog for sure.

We were gonna name this record Darkness Reigns, you know, like [engineer and Darkness’ dog-dad] Mark Raines. I think we’re going to put out a Halloween single or something called ‘Darkness Reigns now.

That’s our dedication.

I could go down a dog obsession k-hole.

Mark Twain once said, ‘The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.’ See where I’m going? Does this mean people aren’t ready to tap into the unconscious collective? There is such a stigma on words like astrology, spirituality, Tarot— BB: When I was a kid I was obsessed with Freud and psychology and the reason why people are the way they are. And then more recently, psychic abilities and paranormal activities came into my awareness. It dawned on me that there are just as many people concerned about spirituality as there are concerned about the medical reasons why people are the way they are. It’s just a whole new way of thinking. We can focus on the people that don’t believe in the fun things and point our fingers at them, or we can try and learn from them and make better art. We are

all just bouncing around trying to find things we are attracted to.

How did you find each other?

LS: Both of our sisters were friends and had babies that were friends and they knew we both liked music.

BB: Then we met and played everyday for like six months. It was psychic from the beginning.

I mean—you never talked, Larry! I had to read your mind! I was worried he didn’t like me. Was he judging me? Was he judging my songs?

Bonnie, didn’t you go to school for jazz?

What did you study?

BB: The history of jazz and vocal jazz. I went in high school to jazz school, and then I went to college for like a year and half or two years, and then I started a band and decided school was stupid, you know? I mean, I love the blues, and I thought that that would be something they would teach you a lot about in jazz school, and I learned a lot of theory and stuff like that. But mainly I was always like pushing the blues and I was too scared to perform, so I got kicked out because I wouldn’t do any of the things we were supposed to do. I was just way too scared. And then the last performance I had to do like, a final or something. That was a day where I just invited everyone that I knew because I couldn’t fuck it up, and then everyone came and … that day is what I bring with me every show. It’s a different space. It’s like dreaming, you know? You can’t be scared, you can’t be you, it’s just ... it’s what it is or whatever.

Why aren’t you scared with Death Valley Girls? Or are you?

BB: [laughs] No. I think jazz school ... like,

being with insane musicians—they have a whole other language, you know? On their instruments. Studying that made me realize I want to be proficient in another language.

I don’t want it to be jazz per se, but I’m not scared anymore. I just want to get better and try and do it every day.

What sci-fi novel or movie has had the greatest influence on Death Valley Girls?

LS: Oh, man. That’s a tough one. Wow. That’s a good question. I mean, there’s so many…

Nikki Pickle (bass): I always loved The Tommyknockers, which is a book about aliens that mind control everyone.

LS: I’d say The Omega Man. The book was The Last Man On Earth, and then they made the movie The Omega Man, and it was pretty much the dystopian post-apocalypse where pretty much no one’s left alive. There’s underground mutants, but there’s few people alive. In the film, Charlton Heston pretty much has a high-rise condo to himself. [laughs] BB: Just like we do!

Do you? Really?

BB: Yes! [laughs] In our minds!

LS: In Death Valley.

BB: That’s what we’re trying to get in Death Valley. We’re trying to build a high-rise for just us. But also other people, too.

NP: An arcology. You know arcology? An arcology. An architect named Paolo Soleri came up with arcologies, which are selfcontained space cities in their own building that have their own, like, architecture and ecology.

BB: Like Poltergeist III! We don’t like Vegas, but we’re into the idea of a casino where you have all your entertainment or restaurant

options, living quarters, everything in just one building, and you never have to leave it. I don’t like leaving buildings much.

I think people assume that you’re Death Valley Girls as in like, girls from the Death Valley, but are you really, like, Valley Girls, but DEATH Valley Girls?

BB: Yeah, we’re DEATH Valley Girls! Or— yeah, we’re a gang! We’re a gang! Wherever gangs come from, that’s where we’re from!

Death Valley or the Valley, it doesn’t matter, you know?

We sometimes ask if people have seen UFOs or supernatural creatures, but I feel like it’s better to ask: has a UFO or supernatural creature ever seen YOU? BB: Oh my goodness! Thank you so much for asking that! That’s really exciting. We can study as much as we want, but it’s not been verified whether or not we’ve … that’s what this record is for: to make a difference in the supernatural realm. We’ve not yet confirmed that the supernatural realm has indeed heard of us, you know? But I feel like that’s kind of our mission. We know ghosts have and things like that, but as far as other planetary creatures … no one’s emailed us yet about that.

LS: We haven’t had the close encounter of the third kind yet.

BB: It’s gonna come for sure.

Are there any psychic prophecies you received earlier in life that you are still waiting to see if they come true?

NP: I had a palm reader once tell me that I was going to save someone’s life. I feel like it may have already happened.

BB: Really? Recently I went to a convention for all paranormal things, and I went to a

psychic who’s actually one of the foremost pet psychics in all of America! She’s also a regular psychic, and she said that we have lots of traveling to do. And I’d like to see that come to fruition this year.

What kind of traveling?

BB: Well, I didn’t want to nitpick. I just imagined like, you know…

LS: Astral projection AND touring?

BB: Yeah, yeah. Astral projection’s kind of scary, though. I don’t really like flying and finding myself outside of my body. That’s something I haven’t delved into yet. I mean, I’m kind of excited for the end times just because we really want to have a compound where we can be with our friends. So maybe that’s a proxy of just the end times. I imagine we’ll all be together, kind of doing the exact same thing, except there’ll be less humans on Earth to mess up stuff for us. [laughs] To ruin our fun!

It’s interesting you say that because the whole album seems like it’s about—or at least against—loneliness; it’s about people and aliens finding each other, and about overcoming isolation.

BB: Yeah, it is. The idea of Glow In The Dark— the song and the record—is this concept that each of us has had in our own way since we were kids. That there’s something you can see in people, whether it’s psychic or whether you can actually visually see it, like an aura or something that connects and also defines a person. You can see it instantly, and that’s who we are—like, we glow in the dark, and we connect with each other instantly, or on a stream together of awareness or whatever. You know, just … we’re friends. [laughs] We’re friends!

What’s the story on ‘Summertime’? So much of this record seems like it’s happening at night or in the dark. Why does the sun come out at the end of the record?

BB: That’s interesting that you would say that.

I think ‘Summertime’ is the scariest song on the record. Because it’s about like a Stockholm syndrome kind of thing. You know you have a love and you know you’re going to see it, but you don’t know when and you’re scared and you don’t want to confront it. It’s just kind of like … you can’t avoid anyone that’s on Earth. Unless they DIE, but then it’s still in your mind—and who really knows what happens after people die? You like, confront them even more. That song is a scary song, about like, ‘I’ll see you … or not,’ you know? I don’t know when I will, but I know I will and I’m really scared. I’m petrified.

Do you think somewhere deep in rock ‘n’ roll there is a fear of death? Or is it more like a motto of ‘life is short, fuck it.’ Do you guys fear death?

LS: I don’t fear it at all. I welcome the next phase.

BB: I wish people could see what happens after people die as a cool thing. I wish people could feel differently about death—that it’s not the end, it’s cool afterwards. There is nothing worse than seeing other people so sad about the death of a loved one. That’s another thing I’d want people to leave our shows with—not to worry about their loved ones dying. I have a hard time believing I survived the time I lived in New York—before I moved to L.A. and the circumstances that brought me to Larry.

INTERVIEW

I have known people who have had neardeath experiences and one thing that fascinates me is their electromagnetic field changes: they can’t wear watches, they blow out street bulbs, they blow out car batteries, they are changed forever on a cellular level. They all report these visions where death is welcoming and they accept that this occurrence could be the final straw, and they all say it is wildly peaceful.

LS: I’ve had a couple moments where I thought I was dying. I remember feeling quite peaceful with the idea that I was going to die—it was almost like, ‘Oh shit—well, this is it.’ I never passed a threshold where I went into complete darkness, but I’ve experienced moments of thinking it was going to happen.

If you guys had one chance to inspire a tremendous act of love, an act of sex, or an act of selfless sacrifice, which one would you pick?

BB: Larry says sex. [laughs] I say ... handholding with aliens. [laughs] A selfless sacrificial sex sacrifice where Bernie is president and we get to hold aliens’ hands. Because aliens ... there’s this alien … I don’t want to talk about this too much—and also, the word alien is so passe, but I’m just going to use it to make it easier.

This is a really important story; it doesn’t have to be in this, but just so you know, one of the surviving ETs that they found at Roswell lived on Earth for an extra sixteen years, and he had his own like … an apartment and a caretaker, and they learned a lot about him, and he learned a lot about us. One of his main things was he saw that humans held hands, and he really liked that. He wanted to hold hands with his caretaker. Now I really want to hold hands with an alien.

Have you been to Roswell?

BB: No. It’s really weird; I’ll tell you that. Not in a bad way, but it’s weird.

BB: Yeah, we have friends in the community that are like, ‘Oh, come do these things.’

We’re trying to get into that community. Or not TRYING to get into it, but trying to do more things where we are active with other people that are active in exciting things, rather than sitting around and watching YouTube or whatever. But it’s slow. There’s free meetings we’ve been going to for MUFON or whatever but it’s ... you know, it’s few and far between.

But that’s a community we’d really like to reach out to a little bit more.

On ‘Love Spell’, you talk about how action is all you need, and the cosmic collectives and the underground; is this a song about being in a band and casting a love spell on people who listen?

BB: I mean—kind of! In some ways. It started off as just, ‘Oh, I put a love spell on someone … and like, wait do they really like me, or is it just the love spell?’ Then as you get closer, I was like, ‘Fuck that! What if we could put a love spell on everyone, and it’d make them love in 3-D?’ And then we were like, ‘If we make a song about it, and we sing it, then that’s the ritual. And why wouldn’t we want everyone to love everything?’ So that’s what that’s about.

Why do you think of it as a spell? Because a spell is like, taking control, you know?

BB: I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I didn’t know!

I didn’t know what would happen! Everyone says, ‘Don’t do that,’ and then you realize why, but it’s not your fault. [laughs] LARRY’S FAULT! [laughs] LS: Maybe it’s a temporary spell. So maybe in the moment you give people that feeling so that they know what it feels like.

Do you think the practice of psychic abilities and spirituality brings you closer to a kind of creative energy that is untapped by those who don’t use that part of their senses?

BB: Totally. I use those powers of perception way more than anything else. I like looking into a human’s eyes and reacting to their psychic energy. I try not to interact with that many people cuz I like it to be a really intense interaction with like eyeballs and psychic energy, instead of having a million pointless conversations.

LS: Playing rock ‘n’ roll in front of a room full of people is a way to connect without having a one on one thing. We are all trying to be in the moment and get sucked into this wild experience. For me, some of the most life affirming moments have been walking out of a rock ‘n’ roll show and you’re like ‘fuck yeah!’

That is due to the energy people are sharing.

BB: That’s our religion—that’s how rock ‘n’ roll makes us feel. It’s a spiritual fucking experience and you need it to have something to live for. Some people every Sunday sing to their best friend or their family and that’s how they fill their souls. But for us it’s our religion—we praise his name all around the country living in shitty conditions.

LS: It’s also cool to have people that you look to—like Iggy Pop. He’s the real deal and a believer of rock ‘n’ roll. He’s never not doing it because he’s like too old or something.

So then do you believe that there is something greater than you that exists?

BB: Iggy! Iggy fucking exists, not God. I haven’t firmly come to like one idea of what I think that means but fuck yeah, something greater than us exists—it’s fucking Iggy. That’s all we need to know.

What is it about Iggy that gives you that feeling? What is that ‘thing’?

BB: It’s a completely wild experience. The songs rule and the way he delivers it—to me—is what making love is. It’s the hottest thing ever. You know … we are here as disciples of that thing. I saw him at Irving Plaza awhile ago. The room was filled and by the end of the show I realized I had been smiling for thirty-five minutes from ear to ear, and so was everyone else. I realized my pants were soaking wet from everyone’s beers being spilt—just dancing, these warm bodies, these disciples of rock n roll.

LS: Yeah—and I think like Iggy, Bowie and Lou Reed would bring freaks like us together. I mean Bowie and Lou Reed dying was a big thing. Like, ‘Oh, man—they are mortal.’

BB: And what they did for sex—at the time they did it—is so cool. It is otherwordly. The Stones had it and then those dudes took it from there. Your sexuality is your sexuality and whether the world is ready to hear it or not, they did it.

LS: Yeah, making people feel empowered and comfortable with who they are— BB: They were the ones that led it and to me,

aside from girls, that’s the sexiest thing in the world—the dudes that made it cool to be like a girl. That’s the coolest thing you can do in the world. Is that bad?

No way—being a good storyteller and sexually empowering people are the two things I think an artist must possess in order to transcend. Is that what you want people to leave your shows feeling? Sexually empowered?

BB: Hell yeah. Rock ‘n’ roll to me is about being wild and breaking down other people’s ideas of what they think your sexuality should be.

I fucked up before when I asked why there weren’t women with the force and attitude of a guy like Iggy Pop in the forefront of rock ‘n’ roll right now—it was borderline insulting.

BB: No, it’s not. I mean—it’s the same answer for that as everything else. People are trying to take sexuality out of it. In the name of feminism, they are forgetting about sexuality. It’s fine to be a feminist, but it’s also fine to be sexual. Feminism at some point allowed us to be sexual, so it’d be like taking a step back to be like these girly pre-teen … nothing exciting at all. We are in the middle of a sexual revolution right now and we get to be what we want to be with no explanation, no gender—just complete freedom.

There’s a song that you guys do called ‘I’m a Man, Too.’ What happens when you’re singing that, and there’s a little timid sixteen-year-old boy in the front row and you look into his eyes and you sing, ‘You’re a man, I’m a man, too!’

BB: So far we’ve just been performing it and people are singing along. And it’s cool—no one feels weird about it yet, but I think that’s a cool question for the future because that song came out to the universe today, you know?

We’ve only played it for a handful of people, but I’m excited to answer tha tin the future for sure because it’s meant to be uniting, you know? It’s meant to unite.

Who are you trying to unite with it?

BB: Humankind. We’re always trying to unite humankind. If we could unite dogkind, we would, but I only have one dog, you know? A puffy white one. [laughs]Tommy. We’re a dog band, if that matters. I don’t know if anyone’s asking.

Cats have their moments, but I don’t like that they poop in a box and then walk all over it and then trail the poop throughout the house. Dogs can be disgusting, too, but they’re also more endearing, so you put up with it, you know?

BB: I like endearing and excited and energetic for love, rather than playing slightly sometimes.

Like, that’s not my stuff, you know? [laughs] DEATH VALLEY GIRLS’ RECORD RELEASE PARTY WITH FRANKIE AND THE WITCH FINGERS AND PEACH KELLI POP ON THURS., JUNE 30, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 / $8-$9.50 / 18+. DEATH VALLEY GIRLS’ GLOW IN THE DARK FULL-LENGTH IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM BURGER RECORDS. VISIT DEATH VALLEY GIRLS AT DEATHVALLEYGIRLS. BANDCAMP.COM. 9

TERRY ALLEN Interview by Chris Ziegler Illustration by Bijou Karman

The first few questions in this interview are about Man Ray, Captain Beefheart and Nancy Reagan because that’s how it works with Terry Allen—that’s art, music and America at its most bizarre and true, and that’s what you’ll find in Juarez and Lubbock (On Everything), two of his best albums and actually two of the best albums ever, really. His instrument of choice is the piano, but he’s really more of what they used to call a seer, in that he sees the things he sings about so perfectly and precisely, and if you don’t recognize someone (maybe yourself?) in a Terry Allen song, you might only need to clear the smear off your mirror. These are folk songs, in the sense that there are folks in them, and country songs, in the sense that they seem to take place mostly outside the big city, but really the murder-ballad-epic Juarez and the home-and-gone-again story Lubbock are albums made about and in and for the American west, where wide and lonely spaces exist within and without and where there’s always a chance to make a run for it. One day they’ll be considered literature, but for now, they’ve received welcome and lavish reissue on the Paradise of Bachelors label.

There’s a photo of you talking to Nancy Reagan here in the luxurious liner notes— how did you end up in the same room with Nancy Reagan?

The Nancy Reagan photo was taken at the first AVA—American Visual Arts—awards Exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. There were ten artists in the show and she spoke approximately three minutes with each one. Her presence was supposed to lend the exhibit credibility. The piece I showed was an hour and a half video I made called The Embrace Advanced to Fury, about the destruction of a marriage staged in a wrestling ring. I was trying to explain the one-and-a-half hour video in the three minutes allotted. When I finished, she said ‘I’m sorry I can’t see the whole thing.’ To which I replied, ‘Well, the show is up for three months—why don’t you come back when you have more time?’ She smiled with a look that said of all the things she would never do in her entire life, that was definitely one of them.

What about Captain Beefheart? Where did you get that bumper sticker for Captain Beefheart’s Safe As Milk that you used to have on your piano? Did you know him?

In L.A. I worked for about a year writing and producing one-minute radio spots for different record companies. One of the spots was for Beefheart’s album Safe As Milk for Blue Thumb Records. I sat on my wife Jo Harvey’s stomach and tickled her. I recorded her laughing and gasping hysterically for one minute. At the end, in a phony announcer voice, I said, ‘Get this record, it’ll tickle you to death.’ Blue Thumb gave me a hundred dollars and the sticker you see on my piano.

And when you were at art school here in L.A., Marcel Duchamp did a Q&A with your class—do you remember what you asked him?

I had an art teacher who was one of the first art teachers I had, and she had been a nun. She’d been in France in a cloister. And André Breton, who was part of the surrealist movement at that time…

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And art pried her away from religion?

Well, she actually met—through him—a bunch of those guys and dropped the cloth and moved back to L.A. and became a writer for the L.A. Examiner, which is defunct now, but it was a Times competitor at that time. She picked up extra money teaching art where I went to school. One of the first classes I remember, she said, ‘Today we’re going to talk about this French artist named Marcel Duchamp, and we’re fortunate enough to have Mr. Duchamp here with us to talk about his work.’ He showed slides of his stuff, he talked about it. None of us knew who the old fart was, you know. We just thought ‘this is an old French guy that’s real nice.’ And he was having a show at Pasadena Museum, which was his first museum show.

He invited us as a class because we had been so courteous to him to come to the museum and see the show. And he was having a TV interview with I think one of those slicks—I think Jerry Dunphy was the name of the TV guy. They had a chess table set up for the interview, this simulated bullshit chess game they played while Dunphy interviewed him.

After the interview, he came and shook each of our hands. Then that night … I don’t know if you’re familiar with this photograph, but there’s this famous photograph of Duchamp sitting at a chess table with a naked woman. And the woman was a writer named Eve Babitz. Eve was always hanging around school, but she posed for that with Duchamp that night after the Dunphy interview. Every time any of those guys came to L.A., she would invite them to come to the class. So there was a whole kind of stream of surrealists. And Man Ray at the time lived close by—Man Ray came to the school all of the time cuz he liked to shoot the shit with students at lunch, you know.

So Man Ray bellying up to the cafeteria table?

No cafeteria—everybody was kicking the vending machines.

So you and Man Ray sharing a warm can of Coke.

Sharing a Baby Ruth. [laughs] Now that’s art.

He was pretty amazing because he was very funny, and would say things like, ‘All of you must remember, it’s okay to be a bad artist because they don’t hurt anybody. It’s not like a bad lawyer, or a bad doctor, or a bad politician.’ But he also pushed that idea that all things were available. To an artist, you could do anything you wanted to. If you wanted to draw your dog, draw your dog.

If you wanted to write a song, write a song.

That’s kind of what was happening in the whole climate of L.A. at that time, too. The whole climate of the 60s where all of those structures and rules and other stuff prior to that was falling apart. Everybody was looking for new ways to function.

That makes me think of Lubbock’s ‘Beautiful Waitress,’ where she gives you the speech about how she loves drawing horses, even though they look like sausages. ‘No. They were horses.’ I think about that all the time.

Now that conversation was almost verbatim with a waitress I had in Fresno. Pretty much straight ahead like that.

One of the great things about these albums is that they describe the people in them so completely. I know they aren’t always reporting—you didn’t always sit down to base them on certain people. But do you ever recognize the kind of people they are out in the world now? Like: ‘That’s my Lubbock woman.’

I think it’s Joe Bob. I’ve got a drawer full of clippings people have sent me over the years of this high school hero football player gone bad. It’s almost an icon. I think that’s true with Lubbock woman. I think there’s certain iconic characteristics that these people have that aren’t restricted just to Lubbock or anywhere. I mean, those people are there.

You fill in those blanks, you know. That’s what music does—it opens a door into yourself where you can make your own connections with what these things are, and who these people are and how things

happen. And it’s not the same with all of us, you know? It’s okay. There isn’t one way to feel about something. When music is good, to me, it takes you on a new journey into yourself. It takes you out of the cliché zone.

But sometimes it takes you into it. [laughs] I’m from a small town, and growing up, the idea people could make music or make art wasn’t alien, but it seemed like something some people were born into and others weren’t. And we had a punk band in our town, and when I found out about them, it was like, ‘Oh, this IS possible.’

I think that’s what happened to me. I was fortunate enough to be that generation with rock ‘n’ roll … you know, it was like the hydrogen bomb. Everybody started picking up guitars and wanting to play and instrument, wanting to make music. But it was also the first time where all these doors started opening up to the world—that you could actually do that. And people in your town did that—which in our case, it was Buddy Holly, even though not too many people at that time paid much attention to him until he was killed. Which is an old story. But, I do think that what rock ‘n’ roll did is that it was a double-sided coin. It was very expansive in being able to think in terms of other people in the world—that there was another world out there. But also that your world is fertile, and you could make music, or you could make something from your world. That’s what people took from that. It was a very personal and very impersonal at the same time.

So not only is there a world out there, but it’s something you can be part of. You don’t have to be a spectator— Yeah. And it was real acute where I grew up, which is on flat land, which has always made people think about a horizon. And we’re always conscious of what was happening on the other side of that thing. I’ve always thought artists have three basic ‘relatives’: children because they are innocent, criminals because they break rules, and the insane because they inhabit new worlds.

INTERVIEW

You’ve talked about one of the reasons that you really got into rock ‘n’ roll when you were younger is cuz you felt it was one of the first things that addressed you as a human and not like an institution. Is that what you try and do with these records?

Just speak as a human?

I think it’s just a need, you know? Some people just have a need stronger than others.

Other people have their curiosity go in a different direction. For me, it was a need to do something outside myself. Whether it was a song, whether it was a drawing, whether it was just a mark on the ground—something to get away into the outside of myself. And that need grew into a necessity. That’s what happens to me. I get these urges and this necessity to make something. Maybe make a drawing or write something or whatever.

It’s that kind of restlessness that happens in a person, you know?

I know you spent time in actual Cortez, Colorado, where Juarez climaxes. Didn’t your grandfather live out there?

He was a shoemaker, a cobbler, in Cortez for a couple of years. I visited him as a child. That’s how I remember Cortez. I also remember being mystified kind of by that word: ‘Cortez,’ you know? It was a word that I had never heard before as a little kid, and then later of course, it’s reinforced, when you read the history of Mexico. Spaniards and all that. That was a devil kind of thing, too. The idea of a Cortez being a place, but also being a person. All those connections came up in Juarez, in the record, in the piece.

What about the first time you went to Juarez itself? Do you have the same physical connection with that place?

My folks would go to El Paso. I have an uncle that when I was very young lived in El Paso, and my folks would drive down to El Paso and would spend a few days. And always I would go over to Juarez and it always had some tequila and I’d sit in a booth. But just walking through the streets … I think the thing as far as the whole Mexican feel for me is when I was a kid walking through … they used to have these migrant workers that would come in to pick cotton every year. They would park out at the fairgrounds and it was like a huge gypsy camp, you know? There’d be people living in trailers and camps. It was like a city. It was the first time I remember walking through groups of people who were cooking and eating and playing music and singing or whatever. It was that first kind of communion like that I remember. I’ve always associated that with Mexico.

Mexico has such a pull in Juarez. It’s always on someone’s mind.

There’s actually very little that take place actually in Mexico. Most of it is in California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico.

But the idea of it looms large—it’s just over the horizon.

Everybody’s trying to get somewhere else.

Sometimes people who’ve been in cities all their life don’t understand that the deserts are all different: Chihuahua’s different than Mojave, different from the Texas Panhandle … Do the different deserts feel different to you?

‘Deserts’ … those words are like climates that are inside of you. You can be in one kind 12

of desert and thinking about the ocean, you know? It can be that kind of feeling. At least for me, it’s never been totally literal what’s out your windshield. The windshield always opens up to all these possibilities, kind of like a movie in that sense.

Like a movie screen?

Yeah. Even these characters in Juarez, I never thought of as particularly as people as much as I thought of them as these climates moving through space. And I always thought of that music as… music is always coming in from somewhere and going somewhere else. It’s like a band on the road, you know? Just the idea of music is always about motion.

All music? Or just rock ‘n’ roll?

All music. I’ve written a lot of songs while driving cars. Listened to even more.

You’ve said before you thought the three greatest American inventions were duct tape, hot glue, and putting radios in cars.

Are two of those things used to fix things that are broken? Or are three?

I think that they serve multiple purposes.

They serve to fix things that are broken, but they also serve to break things that are fixed.

Is there a particular car you used to have that you miss now?

I don’t think I think that way. I do miss dogs, you know. Cars are kind of like songs. They’re fit for what time that you had them, and they live in that particular time. A lot of times, their demise for you was as important for you as having the thing, you know? I’ve abandoned a couple of cars—that always makes a good story. I took the licence plates and kicked the hell out of the side of the doors of an old VW. bus and scratched all the ID stuff off of it— left it and walked home. Cuz I’d blown about the fourth engine in it.

That’s real commitment to abandonment.

Actually, my kid wanted it. And I would have probably given it to him, except what he wanted to do was knock a hole in the wall of his room and open the sliding door and make a little studio out of his bus. Which I thought was a really good idea, but it went down before he had a chance to do that. I’ll tell you: my first car was a 1953 Chevy, and I’m doing a piece in Austin at the museum Laguna Gloria. It’s a 1953 Chevy that I’m casting in bronze and putting a sound system inside of it and inviting different people to do songs, stories, memories, things that they would like people to hear coming out of an old ghost car. It’s going be kind of abandoned in a swamp. It’s called Road Angel.

As you say in ‘Wolfman of Del Rio’: does this 1953 Chevrolet have that vinyl tuck ‘n’ roll?

You’re not going to see it if it does, you know? But it did.

What about 1953 means something to you? That shows up in ‘Pink and Black Song.’ ‘Come with me back to 1953.’

That’s probably because I had that first car, even though I didn’t get it until a couple of years later. I guess that was 16… It’s also in ‘Wolfman of Del Rio.’ ‘1953 green Chevrolet.’

What’s happening in the second half of Lubbock? To me, side A is Lubbock itself, and then on side B we go to Los Angeles.

But then after the beautiful waitress in the diner, I get a little lost.

They’re not maps, you know? If they are maps, they’re open for interpretation. So you’re talking about ‘Blue Asian Reds,’ you’re talking about ‘New Delhi Freight Train.’

Which are both—both of those songs very much had to do with Vietnam. ‘New Delhi’ came out of it, and ‘Blue Asian Reds’ was a direct response to the killing of a friend of mine who was blown up over there.

Is he the one who’s thanked at the beginning? Where it says ‘fuck Vietnam’?

Yeah. That’s Stanley. I wrote the song to him, or through an old girlfriend of his I remember. The idea of it from that point of view. Those are the two war songs, really.

A lot of those songs took place and were written during that period of time. That’s where they laid on the record. The other side they say it starts sliding back to personal, you know? Very personal. Part of that country, but personal as well.

We’ve been talking a lot about people getting out of where they are or trying to get to somewhere else. Where did you ever feel like you fit in?

I don’t think that way. It doesn’t cross my mind where I fit in. I have been called all kinds of artists, I’ve been called all kinds of a musician. I don’t pay much attention to any of it. When I get an idea, I start working on things. Sometimes it’s music, sometimes it’s a picture, sometimes it’s a sculpture.

Sometimes it’s all three and I don’t think about what it should be in terms of a label. I just don’t think that way.

What about just as a person? A time when you walked in a room and thought, ‘Yes, this is home.’

It’s people that do that to me more than a location. I always feel at home with my wife, that and my kids. Wherever I am, when I’m with them, I’m at home. And I feel that way about… I’m fortunate that I feel that way about quite a few friends. But it’s not specific to a place on a map.

Are you the kind of person who doesn’t need maps very often?

Well, only when I’m lost.

On the song ‘Oui’ on Lubbock, the singer quits art for a while to go work in the factory. Did you do that?

No. No. [laughs] I never did.

I know the impulse. ‘It weren’t art, but it weren’t bad.’

Well, the impulse to go work in the factory is usually forced upon you by the fact that you’re starving.

That’s true. ‘Impulse’ was not the right term.

I think what happens … what certainly happens to people in art school, that first year is pretty critical. Once you get out, you don’t have mama anymore. You don’t have your peers, you don’t have a studio, you don’t have tools. You have to figure out how to do it yourself. So in that sense, it is a factory that you’re headed to and you have to figure it out. How to make a living and continue making work, you know?

It’s all a factory.

That’s a big killer a lot of times.

That happens in music all the time. They make the record, and then they realize that was step zero, and now they have to walk into the factory.

Yeah. That’s amazing now that anybody can make a record now. It certainly wasn’t that way thirty years ago. Everybody has the access to making one, but no access to anybody to hear it, hardly. But I also think time spent is a huge issue. Used to be you’d get a record, you’d sit down, you’d listen to it over and over, and you’d listen to it as this one thing.

You’d listen to it as an album. Now, you can buy half a song.

Like just getting fries at the drive-thru.

Yeah, right. It’s a whole different way…

That’s why I’m very happy about Paradise of Bachelors because they’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. I’m very happy with what they’ve done, and I love seeing it as an LP—that size again where you can hold it and look at it.

How close do these records feel to you now? Part of the story of the frontier and the outlaw and the Western is that it always ends—one day the railroad shows up and the old days are over. Do Juarez and Lubbock still feel alive to you? Or will they one day be ‘over’ somehow?

They had so many different lives.

Especially Juarez. There’s so many different manifestations. It’s come up in so many different ways. I’ve used it and kind of investigated it from all these different angles, and still it’s a mystery to me. Where it came from and what it might be. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that. So both of the records are still living things to me. I’ve got quite a few records, and I feel this close to my other records and I do those two. But they’re the first, so there is something that I always go back to when I’m … you know.

Something I feel good about with those records. But I don’t think—I guess I’ve never thought of music as ending. ‘Oldies but goodies’…

‘Oldies but goldies.’

Yeah. [laughs] Something either lives or changes through time, or it doesn’t, you know? That’s just for the world to deal with.

In some ways, these characters feel really mythic to me—like Stagger Lee or John Henry. They were real people at one time, but they’re also something else. They’re alive in songs, and they move around between them.

I think that they not only live in songs, they live in the air, you know? They’re a part of the atmosphere of the planet. Sometimes you tap into it as music, sometimes you tap into it as an image, you know. But they’re all out there.

Sometimes I talk to people about their work and they feel less like a creator than a transmitter—like they just tuned in to something in the air or in the night. Does that make sense to you?

It does. Because Juarez came in a lot of mysterious ways and came very fast, and it came in different directions. I don’t really know where it came from. That’s part of the reason that it keeps showing up. Somewhere or another, I’m always … I didn’t have much money when I recorded it. I always wondered what it would sound like with other musicians playing. I’ve redone a lot of the songs on other records just to get an idea of how it might work with a band. We did one acoustic band show of the whole INTERVIEW

record in Chicago about six or seven years ago. It was in conjunction with a friend of mine who was an artist that died, but had a big retrospective exhibition played in conjunction with that. His favourite record was Juarez, and so we did the whole record.

I don’t know. I think that the music … if it’s alive, then it’s alive, you know?

Didn’t the entire Juarez concept start with an image of a slaughter house? A hogkilling machine?

It was the hog-killing machine, yeah. It was basically people crawling in, but then when they turned upside-down—where hogs would normally have their throats cut, these people turned inside out into part of nature.

They were part of the earth. So in a sense, it was the opposite of a killing machine. It was kind of a rebirth machine.

The last song on Lubbock is ‘I Just Left Myself ’: ‘I just left myself today, I couldn’t wait to get away.’ Some people read that as a death song or a suicide song.

For me, that’s kind of a moronic interpretation. No, I think it’s getting away from yourself. Sometimes it’s like getting away from your home town. In order to get away from it, sometimes it’s the absolute only way you’ll ever see it.

That’s the story of you and Lubbock, right? You couldn’t wait to get away, and when you got away, you found it was still with you.

That’s a classic thing with people. I think a lot of people—young people especially—rebel against where they’re from and think that everything’s better somewhere else. In some cases, that’s true. In some cases, it’s damn sure better than where you were. But for me, going back and recording and realising that all of my feelings inside were really very much … I had great affection for the place and for the people and that world. Even though it was all tinged with definite sarcasm, you know? It made me realise how usually—and I think it’s pretty much true for everybody—how fertile wherever it is that you’re from can actually be. You can draw it, you can pull something out of it that’s a real revelation about life and yourself and whatever.

Is that what you’re talking about when you say you want to get out of yourself? Like in Juarez: ‘Go north to get south’?

Yeah. I remember once, somebody asked me in some interview what I thought the definition of ‘art’ was, and I said, ‘to get out of town’. It just popped in my head—to get out of town. I think it’s to get out of town in a lot of different levels. That’s what that song is saying too, I think. But I’m not very interested really in dissecting songs. To me, one of the things about making anything that kind of needs… it’s about mystery.

Things that you feel are valuable that really happened … they happened in some area that’s mysterious. You really don’t know where it comes from, you really don’t know why it comes. And to kind of beat it to death—to kill the mystery of it—is not something I’m interested in spending time doing.

Do you have a favorite mystery of the desert? Like the Ship of the Desert? It’s a California story that somewhere there’s a Spanish galleon in the sand dunes. The idea is they sailed up the Gulf of California INTERVIEW

in the 1500s when it was a lot wetter and got all the way up to Salton Sea. When they went to go back, the water had gone down. So they were trapped. And the ship is legendarily still out there. I always liked that idea—the journey home interrupted.

I never heard that, but I love that story.

I bring it up cuz I know you’ve said the only picture in your house growing up was a ship. A ship in the Texas desert.

That’s a good parallel because actually that ship, I’ve got it. It’s called The Cape Horner.

I’m looking at it right now—up on my wall in my studio. It’s got a little Frederick Owen poem: ‘I must go down to the sea again, and the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer by.’

That could almost fit on one of your albums—another lonesome traveler trying to get somewhere.

Yeah, it’s all happening in some kind of space. Space you’re trying to get out of, or space you’re trying to get into. While you’re in one the whole time.

To me, a big part of the idea of the frontier wasn’t just travel and motion, it was being on the run—people trying to get away.

From the law, their circumstances, their family, themselves. The other side of that is always knowing what you left behind.

You’re right on the money. Being … dispossessed in a sense, I suppose. Everybody is, like in Juarez especially. The sailor is never on the sea. Alice is always wanting to get to the U.S.A.,Jabo is trying to get back home.

Everybody is trying to get somewhere else.

Chic’s kind of a crapshoot because she’s a basic witch who drives the whole thing. I think you’re totally right. Going somewhere and coming from somewhere.

And both these albums start and end the same way. They start with someone in motion—Jabo on Juarez trying to get home, and driving down the ‘Amarillo Highway’ in Lubbock. And they end with someone not just at rest but all alone. On Lubbock, they’re by themselves looking at the ‘smear on the mirror’ and on Juarez, Jabo’s listening to the jukebox thinking ‘it’s all gonna leave you.’

Well, that’s how it all ends up.

So that’s the only story there really is: you start out life in motion and eventually you’re all alone when you finally stop?

Yeah. [laughs] It’s what happens.

So ‘today’s rainbow, tomorrow’s tamale.’ I don’t want to spoil the mystery of that— That’s a hopeful little remark, isn’t it? That just came right out of my head, you know?

And where it got into my head, I don’t have a clue. Probably some failed T.V. dinner, you know? [laughs] We talked about life starting in motion and ending alone at rest. Maybe it’s better to start with the rainbow and end with the tamale.

Start with a T.V. dinner, man.

TERRY ALLEN’S JUAREZ IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM PARADISE OF BACHELORS. LUBBOCK (ON EVERYTHING) WILL BE AVAILABLE FROM PARADISE OF BACHELORS THIS FALL. VISIT TERRY ALLEN AT TERRYALLENARTMUSIC.COM.

EGYPTIAN LOVER Interview by XL Middleton Photography by Theo Jemison

The year was nineteen-ninety-something and I was somewhere in northwest Pasadena in the backyard of a friend’s uncle’s house, eating carne asada tacos and sipping Tecates—nervously, since I was well under 21 at the time. The Dogg Food tape I had slipped into the boombox had come to an end, and my friend’s uncle slipped in a tape of his own. Upon first listen, it didn’t sound anything like the mellow midtempo g-funk I was steadily consuming at the time. Still, the frenetic ticks and booms of 808 drums that came pouring out of the speakers felt comfortable—they felt like home. It wasn’t the first time I had ever heard the Egyptian Lover’s “Egypt, Egypt,” but it was the first time I had ever put my ears on it in a way that was more than passive. As a budding music producer at the time, I began to dissect its minimalist rhythm-centric construction, while simultaneously, my friend’s uncle and his homies began to lean and sway, finally culminating in full-on popping and locking as the meat on the grill sizzled. The father of west coast electro hip hop had just made an indelible mark on my musical evolution. At the time, nobody could’ve convinced me that if I were to fast forward to 2016, I would be able to list The Egyptian Lover among my collaborators, and now consider him something of a friend, thanks to an introduction from my modern funk cohort Brian Ellis. Just in time for the release of his anthology Egyptian Lover 1983-1988 on Stones Throw Records, I sat down with Egypt to talk about everything from the enduring appeal of the 808 drum to a few freaky tales from the Uncle Jamm’s Army days.

Did the Egyptian Lover have all the ladies, even before joining Uncle Jamm’s Army?

There’s a story I remember about you keeping Dom Perignon in the trunk of the car at all times. Is that true?

That is definitely true. [laughs] Dom Perignon in the trunk of the Mercedes Benz. I mean, every boy loves girls. So when I was in high school I was always trying to get the girls.

Going to Uncle Jamm’s Army parties before our DJ formed, trying to talk to the ladies. I was always Egyptian Lover even before I made the record Egyptian Lover.

Tell us the story of how you became a part of Uncle Jamm’s Army.

I started DJing at my high school and doing house parties. I was very good at DJing, but I didn’t know how good I was at DJing cuz I’d never had anybody to compare me to—my style was different than everybody’s style. I did a party the same night as Uncle Jamm’s Army, and I think my venue held like 400 people and it only got like 75 to 100 people. So I said, ‘Dang, I can’t beat Uncle Jamm’s Army.’ I almost gave up on the whole being-a-DJ thing. Then I was at the mall with my friend Snake Puppy who later on joined L.A. Dream Team—we was making mixtapes together—and Rodger from Uncle Jamm’s Army came to pass out some fliers for his next party. Snake Puppy said, ‘Yo, Rodg, you got the best dance promotion team out there, but you don’t have the best DJ. If you got the best DJ, then you guys would be the best everything.’ ‘Who’s the best DJ—you?’

‘No, my man right here: Egyptian Lover.’

Rodg knew me from being, a dancer. He said, ‘You can DJ?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Come with me.’

We went together to go make a commercial for the next party, and I was cueing up the record—Zapp—from the beginning, so it was like tikatikatikatikabow bobobomp bomp bomp bomp bomp. He said, ‘What is that?’

‘They call it scratching in New York but, you know—it’s just cueing the record out loud.’

He said, ‘Do it on the commercial.’ So I went bikibikibikibikibowwww bobobomp bomp. We put it on the commercial and it was like the INTERVIEW

first time L.A. ever heard anything scratched other than what was on a Grandmaster Flash record or something like that. So we went to the dance that weekend, and all of a sudden it became a DJ contest and they had five DJs up there. Nobody wanted to go first, and I’m like … I ain’t care, cuz I was the youngest dude in there. I’ll go first. So I went first, and they tried to sabotage me—they gave me Aretha Franklin’s ‘Jump to It’ at a Uncle Jamm’s Army party. Okay—so you know that was failed already. Wasn’t gonna happen. But I put my headphones on, and she sung a cappella in the beginning: ‘Jump, jump, jump to it.’

Then the beat came in. And the beat was just like a drum beat for two bars, maybe four bars, and then the bass came in and it kinda went another four bars and then she started singing. I said … well, I can keep that beat going. And maybe I can scratch in ‘jump.’ So I started doing that. I went [singing] ‘Jump, jump, jump to it,’ and then the beat came in and I was going, jump, jump, chicka jump, jump, jump, chicka jump, then throw the beat back in. [laughs] And I just kept scratching, chickachickachicka jump, boom, ka. And everybody stopped dancing. Everybody started watching what I was doing. So now I didn’t know if that was good or bad. Like, okay—I’m a DJ and I’m supposed to make them dance, but they’re all watching me.

People are standing on tables and chairs and screaming and pointing, and I’m like, ‘Okay, I think they like it but they’re not dancing.’

So Rodger ran to the DJ booth and I’m like, ‘Aw shit, I’m in trouble.’ My first time and I’m fired already. He said, ‘That’s you?’ ‘Yeah.’

‘What record you want?’ ‘Oh I get to pick my record now? Give me Tom Tom Club.

Give me ‘It’s Nasty’ by Grandmaster Flash.

Give me Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. All that Tom Tom Club stuff.’ They gave me all those records and I really just started cuttin’ ‘em up and mixin’ ‘em and scratchin’ ‘em, you know, just making parts of a record happen. Like, Grandmaster Flash said, ‘two turntables,’ and I kept scratching that part, ‘and two turntables, two two two turntables.’ All the other four

DJs just turned around and walked away like, ‘I’m not going after him.’ [laughs] They just quit. ‘You win, homie. Can’t nobody do what you just did.’ So I’m like, to this one guy, ‘Was it good?’ He said, ‘Man we ain’t never seen nothing like that before. Hell yeah, that was good—it was great.’ So then I knew that what I was doing was okay.

Is it true that you never actually owned your own DJ set-up?

Nah—I never had a pair of turntables. I had one turntable that I was doing mixtapes with, and that’s how I learned how to scratch cuz I was cueing one turntable up. I had one belt drive turntable, and I made my own scratch pad so I could rewind the record and cue it up and take the pause button off at the same time throwing the record forward. That’s how I learned how to scratch and backspin the record.

So you learned to DJ at home but just with one table.

Yeah, just one. But I actually wasn’t DJing.

I was actually just making mixtapes. That’s how I learned how to DJ. I made mixtapes with the cueing the record in, and one time I accidentally flipped the pause button early and you hear biki boom. So instead of going, boom, dat dum dat dum dat dum, edit, dat dum dat dum dat dum, edit, it was going ... edit, dat dum dat dum dat dum, eki edit. It was like, wiki edit. I accidentally put the wiki cue point in there. So I left it in there. Then Grandmaster Flash’s records was doing that— I’m like, ‘Well, he’s cueing the record out loud, so I can do it, too.’ So it didn’t matter. They called it a scratch, and so they created a new thing of cueing the record out loud and call it a scratch. It was easy for me cuz I did it all the time that I was making mixtapes. I made a lot of mixtapes, like I said, and I was selling them all over my high school in the San Fernando Valley at Monroe. I actually curse on the record and do raps on the instrumentals and just do all kind of pause-button mixes—which was pretty, pretty, pretty good back at that time. This man walked up to me at the end of the school day one day. He didn’t go to our

school—wasn’t a teacher or anything, it was just a grown man. I’m like, ‘Oh shit—maybe his daughter has my tape and I’m cursing on it. I’m in trouble. I think I’m in trouble now.’ He said, ‘Hey, are you Egyptian Lover?

You made this tape? Think you can do what you did on this tape at my club? I’ll give you $500.’ I’m like hell yeah! He gave me all this stuff: ‘I’ll pay you cash money when you get there.’ I called my uncle up and said, ‘Hey, can you take me to this club?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’

Then I said, ‘I need to figure out how to learn how to DJ the stuff that I did with the tapes.’

So I called my other friend and he brought his turntable over, and we had a Realistic mixer and I was learning how to do the pause-button mixes. But I couldn’t get them to repeat that fast, so one of my friends and my brother said, ‘Well, while one record is playing, then you put a second record on and you can have them going back and forth like that. While the second record is playing, rewind the first record and bring it back over there and hit it so it can go three times. It’s easy.’ I tried it and it worked. We said, ‘Call that the triple threat.’ We repeated one piece of the record three times and it sounded like the tape addins—which is good. ‘They’ll think I did this on the tape like this.’ I practiced with a whole bunch of different records and I actually learned that one day how to DJ: how to find the breakdown on the record, how to do the beginning, and all that, probably in two or three days. [laughs] So now I’m happy. I got my records, I got doubled-up records, I went and bought a whole bunch of records. Went to the club with my crate of records ready to rock it, and he said, ‘Oh, I don’t want you to DJ—I want you to do that rap you did on the cassette.’ I’m like … oh man. I learned how to DJ for nothing. So I did my rap, got my money. My uncle and them was going crazy like, ‘You’re pretty good! This is incredible, da da da da, everybody was going crazy!’ ‘Man, I didn’t even practice. Half of it was ad-libbed.

I don’t even remember the first half of the rap I put on the cassette. The second half was all ad-libbed.’ He said, ‘Well—you ad-lib good!’

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[laughs] So then when I went to a house party I had all these DJ skills, so I started doing all these DJ skills. That’s when Snake Puppy saw me and was like, ‘Man, you are bad-ass. You need to get with Uncle Jamm’s Army, and da da da da.’ That’s when he told Rodg I was a good DJ and it all came to a head.

I wanted to also talk about the 808 as an instrument. The 808 has found uses in so many different styles of music from electro, Miami bass, trap—why is it that this particular drum machine is the one that resonates for people?

It’s the sound. The sound with nothing on it—no EQ or anything. The sound of the 808 is just a monster. When they made it, I think they wanted it to sound like a real drum, and then it didn’t sound like a real drum so they really didn’t like it that much. But man, the sound that it did have, and they way it sounds when it’s loud—a loud volume in the club— is very, very nice. It’s easy on the ears, it doesn’t hurt, and it’s not too much bass, it’s not too much highs, it’s there in the middle. And when you turn that bass up it’s like … okay, there it is. Boom. I mean, you just can’t get over it—it’s just like, ‘Okay, that’s the 808.’

I think that’s what it is about the 80s analog synthesizer sound in general. Those sounds were honest, in a way, because you knew it wasn’t a real drum. The same thing with all the synthesizer sounds—you knew it wasn’t a real bass or it wasn’t a real piano, but what it was still resonated.

Right. It was the sound of the 80s. It was brand new to everybody and it just carried and carried and carried. I loved the 808 from the very beginning—that’s why I always used it. I tried other drum machines and I always went back to the 808. There was one song that I didn’t use the 808 on that I wish I would have, so on the anthology I actually took the 707 off the record—’Kinky Nation (Kingdom Kum)’—and put the 808 on it and put it on the Greatest Hits on Stones Throw.

Do you think your sound and your style of production influenced Miami bass as well?

I know for sure it influenced Miami bass as well. [laughs] I was in Miami doing shows and on the breakdown of ‘Egypt, Egypt’ we would always turn the record off and play the 808 live, and turn the bass up and just have the bass just humming. We’d do the breakdown like that, and everybody was just going berserk at this club. So the next day we had another show and it was sold out again, and that bass was just booming. It was probably about 20 people in there that ended up being producers who all made bass tracks.

One of them was Luke Skyywalker who was the promoter of that show, and when he heard that, [he was like] ‘Okay, this is it. This is the sound right here.’ He saw me program the 808 live, he saw me perform with it, and he’s like, ‘I know where to go get one—I know everything about this thing now.’ So he joined up with 2 Live Crew right after that, and slowly but surely the Miami bass started coming alive. And a couple of other guys was just starting to do it—so the 808 sound itself, like with ‘Planet Rock’ and with Cybotron and with ‘Clear,’ and Hashim with ‘It’s Time,’ Pretty Tony, and Freestyle and all them … the 808 was already starting to get into the hands of producers who liked to do dance music. I 16

think ‘Planet Rock’ was the very first one to start it out, cuz when they took the Kraftwerk beat that didn’t have any bottom to it and put the 808 on it and gave it more of a soulful sound ... that was it. That took it to the next level. I didn’t know what that drum machine was. I met this guy named Afrika Islam, and I said, ‘Dang, your name Afrika Islam—it’s like Afrika Bambaataa.’ ‘Yeah, that’s my dad—I call him my dad. He is the one who did “Planet Rock.”’ ‘Yeah, what kind of drum was that?’

‘It wasn’t a drum—it was a drum machine.’ ‘A drum machine? Can I get one of those?’ ‘Yeah, they have them at Guitar Center.’ So the next day we went to Guitar Center and one of the employees helped me program ‘Planet Rock’ in the 808 and it sounded just like ‘Planet Rock.’ And I start adding drum beats to it and changing it up like, ‘This sounds like a record right here. This could be my record.’ It was on sale for $800—I think the regular price was $1,200. So I took it back home, programmed it full of beats, and that weekend I had a dance with Uncle Jamm’s Army at the L.A. Sports Arena in front of 10,000 people. I brought the 808 out, full of beats—nobody knew that I had it. I was playing ‘Planet Rock’ and on the breakdown I put on the 808 and nobody stopped dancing, everybody kept on going. I was checking out the crowd, checking on the people on stage who didn’t know what was going on. And then I broke it down—broke the hi-hats down, made it my own breakdown for ‘Planet Rock’ and everybody was still partying. Then I changed the beat on they butts and I put some of my different beats, so instead of the beat going boom, boom boom, boom boom it’s like going boboomboom ka, boboomboboom ka, boom ka boboomboboom ka, boboboboboomboom ka, boboomboboom ka.

I started doing the cowbells and start putting in the rimshot, put in the open hats, the closed hats … and then I changed it again and broke it down and the main guy from Uncle Jamm’s Army ran up to me and said, ‘Man, what record is that?’ ‘It’s my drum machine.’

‘A what?’ He looked down and I said, ‘This.’

I knew right then and there that we had to make a record with this drum machine. And then I think it was two guys from The Deele, and one of them said it was the best drum program he had ever heard in his life, even better than a real drummer. That made me feel good cuz they were in a group that was already established. And the drum program was just going crazy, it was like bobobobo ka, boboomboboom ka, bobo ka boboboom … It was just too many bass beats with this. I mean … I didn’t know how to play drums. I just made a beat that could make people dance and freak to it. I looked at Rodg and I think about the twentieth time somebody said, ‘What record is that?’—I looked at him and he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, we gotta go to the studio.’

So we went to the studio and we made ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’ and then we made ‘Dial-a-Freak’ and we put it out.

You were one of the first artists to really put out all of your own records, and you even got it distributed without a middleman. What made you savvy enough to do that when most of your contemporaries weren’t? Was it something that anybody could have done if they had the know-how? Or were you in a special position to do it independently?

I just wanted to do it on my own. When I was in high school I sold mixtapes, and they sold out every time I went to school. So I made twice as many, and they sold out. I made three times as many, and they sold out. I made four times as many and they almost sold out. I always had the idea of selling music. When I started my label, I didn’t want to sell a million copies—I just wanted to sell some vinyl. I wanted to start my own record label and get them to local record stores—at that time there was a lot of record stores around L.A. and in California. So we sold ... a lot of records. We had probably hit like 12 or 15,000 on ‘Dial-aFreak,’ so I pressed up 15,000 ‘Egypt, Egypt’s and those things sold so fast. By the end of the month we were probably at almost 100,000.

By the end of three months we were probably at 500,000. It just started spreading all across America. Every record store—every radio station—was playing it. It took me by surprise, but I had already started my own label and I already had my own distribution company, so I couldn’t go back on it. When the major labels got a whiff of what I was doing, they tried to sign me, but I had so much money on the books that their deals didn’t compare to what I was already owed from distributors and other companies.

Those numbers that you’re talking about— those are numbers major labels would have no doubt been impressed with back then.

Oh yeah—they were definitely impressed.

And the money was already coming in quickly cuz the distributors had to pay for the records they had already in order to order some more, and everybody was asking for this record. The record had legs on its own, with no promotion or whatsoever. It just took off. Then I had to make an album to collect the money for the 12-inch. If you have a company and you only have one record, they can buy as many as they want and they don’t have to pay. But if I had an album coming out after that, and they want the album, they’ll pay for the 12-inch to get the album. Then I’ll put out another 12inch and they’ll pay for the album to the get the next 12-inch. Then I’ll put out another 12-inch, and it goes on and on. That’s how you get paid from the distributors.

That’s crazy. That’s game that is still completely useful in this day and age.

Today I think it’s a lot easier cuz it’s less distributors and record stores to work with, so it’s easier to get paid. You don’t have to chase a thousand people—you probably just chase fifty to a hundred people. It’s easier to keep control and count your numbers and all that. I mean, it’s sad that records are not being pressed up in hundreds of thousands like they were. People get excited pressing 100 records, 500 records, 1,000 records. I remember when I was going and ordering 100,000 records or 50,000 records, and I didn’t get not one returned. Nowadays the the last single I think I did 5,000 to 7,500, and I told some people in Europe and they’re like, ‘What? That many?’ It’s like … wow, okay. But I think vinyl has picked up a little bit more. And I’m not just one kind of music—my music, they got it in rap, they got it in hip-hop, they got it in electro, they got it in dance, they got it in … all sorts of different kind of DJs and people love my music. A lot of different people are buying it.

How did you adapt to the shrinking of the music industry?

I’m figuring it out right now, putting out 1984 and putting out the anthology. It seems like the iTunes thing is pretty good—people can actually go online and buy your record and it’s never sold out. That was one of the main problems I had by having my own record company. If the record store sold out, they was not going to call me and put in another order. They just sold out and that was it. I had to actually call the record stores and see if they still had it in stock, and if they didn’t have it in stock have them reorder it and they would reorder it. I only had one or two artists on my label and it’s like … we gotta keep calling them to make sure they keep stock. Every time they checked they was always sold out, and they would order some more and then I would call them again in a week and they’d sold out.

We kept calling them every week and made sure they kept reordering and reordering and doing bigger orders. Nowadays, they only order that many to begin with and they just sit in the shop for weeks to months. [laughs] And it’s crazy, it’s not like it was back in the day when people just loved vinyl. They have other avenues to buy music. They’re buying them online, they’re buying vinyl, they’re buying CDs, they’re buying ... I mean, even tapes today. I pressed up some tapes and I sold out—had to reorder them and make some more. I can’t believe people are buying tapes again. It’s amazing.

So I don’t know what you would call it … your very iconic rhythmic breathing.

I understand that came from Ebonee Webb, who, for those who don’t know, is a relatively obscure 80s band that was produced by the Bar-Kays. What song was it that had inspired you to come with your own take on it?

It was ‘Something About You.’ But I was inspired already from Prince, from ‘Soft and Wet’ and ‘Sexy Dancer,’ and even before Prince … I was at this school when I was a little bitty kid. I mean elementary school. And the girls was all singing this nasty song: ‘Put your foot on a rock, ah, ah.’ And when they did that, ‘ah, ah,’ I was hooked. ‘I love that sound.’ It sounds so nasty. I love that. I used to do that to girls all the time—the ‘ah, ah,’ They’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Just being a freak, whatever.’ I’m growing up with this in my mind that this breathing is a freak. Then I heard Prince on ‘Sexy Dancer’ doing ‘ooh ha ooh ha ooh ha’—I’m like, ‘That’s that kind of sexy breathing thing!’ Then I start putting it in my high school mixtapes, a little breathing here and there. Then I heard Ebonee Webb, ‘Something About You’ and they was trying to sound like Prince—they did the breathing as well. I’m like, ‘That’s it right there. I love this.’ When I made my record I had to do it—it was just so cool.

It’s always cool that you’ve been upfront about which songs inspired you to make your own songs. It’s like what a lot of hiphop producers were doing with sampling, but you weren’t sampling—you were taking ideas and reformatting them your way.

Like if I hear a horn going dink dink dink dinkdink dink dink dink, I was like, ‘Oh, I like that melody.’ So I’ll just use a cowbell and go dink dink dink dinkdink dink dink dink, and INTERVIEW

just use the cowbell as that melody. But to me, it’s not stealing what they got—it’s hearing that rhythm and making it my own.

I wanted to ask about ‘Freak-A-Holic’ in particular. People say that it was based on ‘Modernaire’ from Purple Rain. I don’t hear that.

Nah, it’s actually from ‘Free World.’ Jesse Johnson. Sounds just like ‘Free World’ from Jesse Johnson. [laughs] And then there was a certain record that we’ve talked about—Julian Flenoy, right?

Yeah—when I heard Julian Flenoy, I heard parts of his record with the LinnDrum and I’m like, ‘Man, if he only would have did this part throughout the song, this song would have been a hit.’ So when I did ‘Alezby Inn’ I kinda tried to take that from ‘Free World,’ and it didn’t come out exactly how I wanted it so I went back in the studio and I made ‘Freak-a-Holic.’ I kind of took that Julian Fenoy break that he only had on one half of a bar and put that throughout my whole song, and programmed the LinnDrum like that. His influence was definitely part of that.

Him and mostly Jesse Johnson when he did ‘Free World.’ I don’t know why he never put that on the album—it was probably one of the best songs for Uncle Jamm’s Army and the clubs that we had. I made ‘Freak-a-Holic’ from that and it just took off.

On the subject of ‘Freak-a-Holic,’ that was the LinnDrum that you used, right?

What inspired you to step away from your signature drum machine for a track?

Only cuz Jesse used the LinnDrum and Prince was using the Linn, so I tried to use the Linn for different songs. I tried to get a different sound than the 808. ‘Freak-a-Holic’ was definitely different than ‘Egypt, Egypt’— didn’t have the breathing. I just tried to show that I could do other things. I might not want to do other things, but I could show that I can. That’s why I used the LinnDrum and made ‘Freak-a-Holic.’

What does Prince’s legacy mean to you as an artist and producer? What are some of your earliest memories listening to and playing some of his music?

Prince was a genius. I mean, I heard songs that he took and made his own, and it gave me the idea to take songs and make them my own. I heard a song where I know for a fact that he got ‘Do Me Baby’ from. I heard the whole first two bars and I’m like, ‘That’s ‘Do Me Baby,’ back in the day. Then I heard other songs that inspired him: ‘Okay, so it’s not stealing if you take it and make it your own.’ So if you hear, let’s say, Heatwave’s ‘Always and Forever,’ and you change it up, and instead of going doom doom doom doom, you go, doom dodoom do doom and just the same kind of groove … just change up the bass … now it’s your own even though you got the same kind of melody.

You’re changing the keys, you’re changing the rhythm, and now it’s your own song. And you need to actually base the whole song on that.

My brother taught me how to take a song apart by listening to the record over and over and over again—listening to every instrument throughout the whole record every time you listen to it. Then you build it back a different way. I learned how to take a song apart and redo it and make it my own. That’s what I heard Prince do, and a lot of other famous INTERVIEW

people did back in the day.

I gotta say, even from my own Tap Water album … I had a song called ‘I’m Ready,’ and that song really happened because of you. You recommended that I get the L.A. Connection album. For those that don’t know, it’s a side project produced by Larry Blackmon from Cameo, and one of my favorite joints on there was ‘Jealousy.’

That’s what I deconstructed to turn into ‘I’m Ready.’ That’s cool that that came from your recommendation, basically. So back to the anthology—there’s never-beforereleased material on it. What’s up with this material? How come we haven’t heard it?

‘Electric Encounter’ almost came out. It was really close to coming out and it just didn’t make it. As the years went on, it just got forgot about and left behind, but it’s probably one of my favorite songs so we had to put it on the anthology. And then we did some dubs, and like I said, ‘Kinky Nation (Kingdom Kum)’ I redid with a 808. We got some stuff from the Breakin’ ‘n’ Enterin’ album—‘The Egyptian Lover’s Theme’ and ‘Spray it Super AJ’ on there. We got Uncle Jamm’s Army songs ‘Diala-Freak’ and ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’ on there. We got ‘What Is A DJ If He Can’t Scratch’ which is not on pretty much any other CD except for the first album, so it’s the original version on here. And it’s just crazy. We got ‘I Cry (Night After Night)’ and it’s remixed cuz it’s a heavier drum kick. We actually did a video for that and it’s cool just to put this out again and let the younger people—the new generation— hear it. And they’re loving it as well. One guy, he’s probably about 21, said, ‘Man, this is the greatest album of all time.’ [laughs] I was like, ‘Thank you.’ He’d never heard any of these songs but ‘Egypt, Egypt.’ And coming from him it was like … wow, this is cool. This is the new generation and they’re digging it so I’m happy that they are.

There’s a story that at one of the Uncle Jamm parties, George Clinton brought a test press of ‘Atomic Dog’ and asked you to play it, and it cleared the dance floor out.

Yes—he brought ‘Atomic Dog,’ but we were already deep into our set so we was playing some Prince and we was getting ready to play some ‘Planet Rock.’ The crowd was already super hyped-up and he brought ‘Atomic Dog,’ but it was George Clinton and we had to play it. We listened to it in the headphones and said, ‘Man, it’s funky, but it’s really slow.’ We kind of sped it up a little bit but it didn’t help.

We looked at the dance floor and only like four people was there just dancing. George was there with all of his people, and we told him, ‘Man, you gotta make it faster and pump that bass up a little bit, the bass drum, and this, that, and the other.’ They watched the whole DJ set that I was doing—playing ‘Planet Rock’ backwards and scratching and doing f tricks on the turntables. And they brought us back the next test pressing of ‘Atomic Dog,’ and this time the record was going backwards. [laughs] It was sped up a little and the beat was boosted a little. I said, ‘Ah, they did their homework with the DJs and saw what the crowd was reacting to.’ And it came out really well.

You’ve done nearly all of your projects through Egyptian Empire Records—what made you want to release this anthology

through Stones Throw?

I always wanted to put it out for my 30th anniversary, but I got caught right in the middle of doing my 1984 album, which took way longer than I thought it was gonna take.

And me and Peanut Butter Wolf, was talking, and Wolf said, ‘I’d put it out—we’ll do a nice box set and make it look nice.’ ‘Nah, I’ma put it on Egyptian Empire.’ Then a year went by—I’m not even started on it yet. We just got the masters and had them transferred, and it’s like … wow, I’m nowhere close to even starting this project. I’m still working on 1984. So I had a meeting with Stones Throw and said, ‘You know what? It’d probably be a better idea if you guys did it. That way, I can concentrate on my 1984 album and you guys can concentrate on the anthology album. Both of them can come out at the same time and it’ll be a good boost for me—turning 50 years old.’ I wanted to do it for my 30th anniversary.

It was going to be put out in 2014, and 2014 came and went so fast. So Stones Throw did it for me and it was a great pleasure to work with them and do it.

1984 took a long time to complete as well. Why? I know that you use all analog equipment—you went back to that, right?

We first started working on the album about eight years ago. We got like sixteen songs done and probably another ten songs that weren’t completely finished. Then the hard drive crashed. All the songs were gone. [laughs] And I didn’t have a backup. We did it all analog and everything, but we saved it onto a hard drive.

And the hard drive crashed. I was working with Brian Ellis at the time and that was our first album together. We have it on CDs and emails and stuff like that, but it wasn’t the topquality analog that I wanted. When we went back to the studio to recreate those songs, I said, ‘Well, let’s work on a new song first.’ We worked on a new song and it came out better than all the songs that we did. We worked on another one and then worked on another one and kept on working. So we just did another brand-new album. The first album we have CDs of—maybe that’ll come out in the future. But the new one with the songs that ended up on 1984 is just incredible.

How much more unreleased material is in the Egyptian vault?

A lot of it without vocals, but a lot of music, lot of beats. A lot of ideas. It’s like any artist—they start something and put it in the can, maybe finish it later. I don’t call it ‘the vault’—I call it ‘the tomb.’

I was looking at the credits on the album Filthy and I noticed you were managed by Jerry Heller?

For like one deal. [laughs] I did a deal with Priority Records, with Jerry Heller. It was a album I was working on, and I wasn’t too happy about it, but he was like, ‘Aww, don’t throw it away. I can get you signed to Priority, da da da.’ I said, ‘Who’s Priority?’ I went to meet them, and all they had was the California Raisins. I’m like, ‘You’re not really a record label.’ ‘Well we got a lot of money, we’re gonna put it behind you and da da da da.’ So we did the Filthy album with Priority Records and they put it on a new label called NuBeat, which is a new beat other than the California Raisins. I was like … okay, this’ll be different. I did the deal for 10% for them to

get the deal for managing. It was Jerry Heller and Morey Alexander. And when we did the deal, they wanted 10% each. I said, ‘No, that wasn’t the deal. The deal was 10%, not 10% each for getting the deal. Since you’re trying to fuck me, so you’re fired.’ That was it for our relationship. That’s when they went and got Eazy-E. So when you saw in the movie that they were the first rap group signed, they skipped that Egyptian Lover was first.

Then there’s a story about you meeting Donna Summer—how there may have been a missed opportunity for a collaboration.

Oh man, that was sad. [laughs] I was in the studio, and I was getting ready to record this song called ‘Girls.’ I was working with an emulator that we had just bought that day, and there was one line I did that just came out so well. I said, ‘We gotta put that part in the record.’ So we was listening to the tape, trying to find that part. At that same time, the owner of the studio Elton brought this girl into the studio. I’m like, ‘Damn, I ain’t got time right now cuz I’m trying to find this part.’ And I’m paying by the hour, so I don’t know if he’s trying to stall time to make me, you know, pay more hours. He says, ‘Hey, Egypt, I want you to meet Donna.’ When I looked at her, she had no make-up on, I think her hair was back in a bun—it did not look like anybody I would recognize or even want to recognize. Just a regular plain-Jane girl. I looked at her and said, ‘Hello, nice to meet you.’ And right when I said, ‘Nice to meet you,’ the part came on that we was looking for the past 30 minutes. I turned around and said, ‘That’s it right there! That’s it right there!’

So he was like, ‘Okay, we see you’re busy,’ and they walked away. [laughs] 30 years later, I’m doing the 1984 album and Elton walks in the studio again and says, ‘Yeah, I remember when I brought Donna Summer in here.’

‘That was Donna Summer?’ ‘Yeah, I brought her in here and you kinda igged both of us cuz you were busy.’ ‘I didn’t know that was Donna Summer. You introduced her as Donna. You didn’t introduce her as Donna Summer.’ I was so mad that it happened like that. It was crazy.

Maybe it’s best you didn’t carry that with you over the course of 30 years? [laughs] It was sad. I wish I woulda known that was her.

What’s coming next from Egyptian Empire as a label? Are there other artists on the label besides you?

It’s gonna be just me. I try to inspire other artists to start their own record label, just like I started mine, so they can get all their money that’s due to them. And in today’s day and age it’s even better for them to do that. You can go to bandcamp and do your whole record label there, and sell t-shirts, and do whatever you gotta do and make your money, concerts and everything. I suggest everybody get their own Bandcamp started and just be your own label. Be the owner of your own music, be the producer, be the director, be the writer, be the artist, be everything—do it all, baby, just like that.

EGYPTIAN LOVER’S ANTHOLOGY: 1983-1988 IS OUT NOW ON STONES THROW. VISIT EGYPTIAN LOVER AT FACEBOOK/THEGYPTIANLOVER. 17

BRIT MANOR Interview by Daiana Feuer Photography by Debi Del Grande Brit Manor comes from the future and her soul has traveled to this time to inhabit this body and make these songs with a voice so pretty that it does seem otherworldly—especially when it quivers or hits those low notes. She’s lent her voice to Nick Waterhouse, Ty Segall, Yellow Alex & The Feelings, and Kilo Kish, but it’s a whole other thing to hear it applied to her own thoughts, which are mostly concerned with no less than the meaning of life as we know it and what exactly is beyond the beyond. Her recent Only Child mini-album is for the most part an electronic soul record she’s created with frequent collaborator and Bastard Jazz label-mate Captain Planet. The album starts with a disco song about reincarnation, “Wheels Of Eternity,” and traverses many moods and moments in her life—her family, her coming of age, sexual escapades, and introspective observations—before culminating in a stirring acoustic homage to Hurricane Katrina (“Under Water”) and the final beat-driven track “Call4U,” where her voice opens up and swallows your head.

You used to throw parties?

I did that for 6 or 7 years both in New York and L.A. and I had a good run throwing parties. It just got a little bit crazy. I started an art and literary magazine, which kind of took over my party-throwing energy. The magazine ran for about two years. We took submissions from artists, photographers, short story writers and poets. It was a quarterly. Then all of a sudden publishing took a turn for the worst so we ran out of money. It was really sad but it was a cool thing and I have a tattoo on my body dedicated to that.

You’ve already run through a lot of artistic and creative avenues of expression.

Growing up, music was a second language.

It’s certifiably in my DNA. My mother was a jazz singer, vocal coach and writer​, and my father and step-fathers were all musicians.

Even though I danced competitively until I was 14 and primarily studied acting through college, I was always singing in churches, talent shows and show choirs. As a kid, I did lots of musicals—the only place I could activate all my powers! I played piano and saxophone, ​harmonized incessantly to the radio​, and watched MTV and musicals on VHS with my mother. As a dancer I learned to listen to music not only with my ears but with my body. That’s always been one of my strengths and greatest joys—interpreting music physically. I love performing. When I first started playing music in New York I was really into the nightlife. I started going to a lot of shows and wanted to get involved in putting on underground performances and parties. I was really into helping other people shine and promote their stuff. When I moved back to Los Angeles I started doing it here and it started to blow up. Promoting, though, after you reach a certain age … I couldn’t make a living off of it unless I wanted to do it full force. I was really into marketing and promoting and did web design. I guess I had a knack for it. Side-hustle, girl, you know?

Sometimes creative people can’t help themselves from doing everything.

I know. Walking renaissance woman. But it’s cool—doing other things you get to meet all different kinds of people.

It’s true. When you focus your attention on just one niche, you realize suddenly that all your friends are drummers.

INTERVIEW

I’ve been going to physical therapy and my physical therapist is so cute and we talk about music and art in L.A., but he’s totally a freaking doctor. And it’s really refreshing.

He knows a lot about anatomy and art! I had foot surgery in December from an old dance injury. But it’s healing well.

At least you get to hang out with a handsome doctor.

I know! I’m looking for my husband— someone who can traipse the globe with me.

It’s not an official mission but I have a side-eye out for the love of my life.

Seems like a good time to segway into your song, ‘StopDropRoll.’ That’s about: Sex. It’s kind of an amalgamation of probably three lovers that I’ve had and all the places I’ve done it. Ha! That was really fun to write.

Sometimes you just got to get it out.

Also if you put it in a song you’ll never forget that one time...

I wonder—if any of them hear it, will they know it was them? There are a couple very specific references in there. I think I was listening to a lot of downtempo Drake-y stuff when I wrote it, and that’s what came out.

When did you write these songs?

They were written over a period of six months, with the exception of ‘Under Water,’ which was written over five years ago. I was inspired

by Hurricane Katrina. That whole experience colored the landscape of the time. I wrote the others over the summer and fall, mostly with my buddy Chuck Wild, Captain Planet. We’ve collaborated for a long time. He’s a global DJ and producer. We met at NYU and both live here, and we’re on the same label, Bastard Jazz.

We’re really good friends and we’ve written a handful of singles together and decided to do something more meaty together—a full electronic-based album. It’s just effortless between us. The timing was right for us to work together. I’m so comfortable with him so it was easy for me to be honest and talk about things I wanted to say, rather than write pop songs for whatever the fuck else I was doing before, to be real. Even though I’ve released smaller projects, Only Child is the first body of work that feels like I’m meeting myself on the proverbial yellow brick road, as an artist in my own right and storyteller. The songs all have a different seed. Sometimes they enter through a story I want to tell and then I find

out what the colors of the music will sound like around that story. Other times we’ll start with a rhythm or feel. ‘Wheels Of Eternity’ was inspired by Talking Heads. I just wanted to have that driving dance feeling married with all the reincarnation stuff I was exploring at the time.

Tell me about the reincarnation phase.

I experienced a lot of death in my family and friends in the last two or three years so I became interested in the idea of death and what it means, and I started investigating reincarnation and the afterlife—reading different schools of thought. I am always wondering what the purpose of life is and why we’re here. There’s no answer but it’s fun to explore the possibilities. I’ve also had some really interesting life readings and energy work where people tell me about my past lives, which always freaks me out but it’s fun more than anything. ‘Wheels Of Eternity’ is about this rotating conveyor belt of people coming in and out of life on earth. Where do they go?

Destiny isn’t a scary thing to me, but I have a lot of questions about it and I will probably write more songs about it.

What’s your most interesting past life?

Egyptian princess. Can’t you see it?

It’s that crown you’re always wearing that gives it away.

I was a fire breather then and I died young and I was sitting on a pot of gold and I owned some pyramids. That was a cool one. My last life apparently I was an Eskimo man. A lot of my past lives involve service and solitude, specialty jobs like nurses and nuns and teachers. The list goes on and on.

Why do past lives seem more interesting than the current one?

Because it’s fantasy. Like you’re in a play and you get to put on someone else’s clothes and pretend you’re them, which probably you were. I had this interesting vision where I was walking down a grassy lawn and all my past lives were standing along an aisle. I looked so different from anyone else and I knew this life would be different from all the others.

I was meant to do something new. Just to have that picture in my head of all the souls I’ve inhabited and meeting myself now and knowing what I am meant to do. It’s weird, man—maybe I’ve done too many shrooms.

Or just enough.

There’s a part of me that feels pretty futuristic.

Like I’m either always in the future or traveling to the past. I’m trying to figure out how to be more grounded but I’m always thinking about why we’re here and the meaning of life and what does the future hold for my next generation.

Do you believe there is a ‘soul?’

I think so. I do. It’s hard to put things into words because everyone has a different definition of what a soul could be but I feel it’s essentially energy that gets bottled up into someone or something and gets transferred.

I don’t think anything gets destroyed. There’s a line of thought that souls move up the spiritual chain. We come into the world with basic needs like survival or making ends meet all the way up to a Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad where you’re this enlightened being that transferred back into an altered source—‘the source,’ whatever that is. And all humans are on this road towards that enlightenment. It’s called the Akashic records.

Each life your soul evolves into something else and you’re here to learn something new and if you don’t learn it this life, you have to learn it in the next. There’s this interesting book called ‘Many Mansions’ by Edgar Cayce. He posits that if you gouge someone’s eyes out in the age of Atlantis, there’s a good chance that in one of your lives you will be blind because karma’s a bitch. This evolution of the soul happens.

There’s another theory that we come down in soul groups. Your family and friends are people you’ve had lives with before and you’re working out what you need to do karmically in this life. So your mom could have been your son in a past life. Another idea is that you choose your parents. Who knows what’s real? But it’s fun.

That’s the question. What the hell? And why?

What are we all doing here? And there’s no way we could be the only creatures. Maybe in our galaxy, but there has to be other worlds and being in the universe. It’s too massive.

Even if humans occurred as a biological accident of bacteria touching a plant, how could that not happen anywhere else?

Exactly. There has to be other creatures on another planet. They may not look like anything we’ve ever seen but they’re alive and thriving on some weird-ass planet.

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If someone offered you a ticket to leave earth and explore this other world but you can’t come back, would you go? [gasps] Yeah, I’d go. As long as I don’t have children. But if I’m just doing me and someone asks me to go today, I’ll go. The song ‘Only Child’ was inspired by meddling with my parents and why they are the way they are and why I have had to deal with this revolving door of fathers. That song is a meditation on that and set the tone for the record. It was the most honest that I’ve felt writing a song and just real. I wanted to evoke a feeling of what it means to be an only child and be parentless.

Has your mother heard it?

Yeah. She hasn’t really told me how she feels about it. I played it for my two stepdads and I was sweating when I did. If they’re really listening, I don’t speak of them in a positive way. They didn’t have anything to say other than ‘that’s your story and you should tell it.’

As you gently search for your future husband—you know they say you end up marrying someone like your father—what does that mean to you?

I don’t think that will make or break my decision. I’ve liked so many types of people and I’ve ben there, done that with pretty much every shape and size. I have an interesting vision in mind for what he looks like and how I feel around him and I’m waiting for that to happen. He is not like any of my fathers.

Does he have angel wings?

He has a halo and levitates.

Moving on through the album, ‘Diamond In The Rough’ comes next. That’s the gogirl song.

I wrote that song when I was coming out of my late twenties and trying to unearth my power diva. I was excited to make the video for that. In songs you get images and you want to live out whatever picture you get in association with the music. The dancing and the metallic body paint, these women who are finally letting themselves be uncovered and revealed and they’re cosmic. I kept thinking about crystals and rocks and anything you find deep under the sea.

There seems to be a coming of age moment in the transition from 20s to 30s, where you inhabit a new level of yourself.

There’s a big shedding that happens, a big reveal of who you are and what you want to do. And a lot of your demons finally leave you, once you decide to work through that inner violence of your 20s in finding who you are. And being beautiful, what that means. Living in L.A. is really fucking difficult, especially in entertainment, always being concerned about how you look as a woman and ideas of beauty. That song was a deep sea dive into finding the ‘diamond in the rough.’ Everyone is magical. Everyone is powerful and it’s more about finding and uncovering it in yourself rather than getting it from somewhere else.

There are a few other collaborations on the album. You did ‘W8N4U’ at Red Bull Music Academy?

Yup, I wrote that with Aaron Miller, aka ‘Noveiux’ from the band Basecamp and producer Mike Gao. What’s RBMA all about? Is it like summer camp?

Kind of yeah! It’s fucking weird, man. But 22

it was an honor to be invited. You’re secretly chosen by some invisible team to be part of it.

This one was at Bonnaroo. We ‘glamped’ on our own campground off to the edge of the forest in our own zone and met with a lot of cool artists and saw shows and made music all night. We wrote that song in 24 hours. I was terrified because I’m not used to writing in groups of people on the spot but I ended up collaborating on like six songs while there and I surprised myself. I was thankful for the opportunity to be scared. Writing music can be this coveted, spiritual private experience but it doesn’t have to be that way and I’m better for the experience for sure. It was really cool. Red Bull has so much money they don’t know what to do with. I’m just lucky to be in that world because they’re a great sponsor.

There’s another collaboration, ‘Tide.’

‘Tide’ was a chill, hip-hop backpack track. I met Kilo Kish at Redbull as well and wanted her to be on it. It was a song that needed a rapper, so we brought in Def Sound. I had a lot of different ideas and it all came together as a hodge podge.

It’s cool that you didn’t restrict yourself to doing one kind of thing on this album.

There’s certainly a through-line, that being you, but there are a lot of surprises.

I definitely feel like a versatile artist, for better or for worse. I’m excited to make music that catches people off guard. This album reflects different moments of my recent life. It’s an inner landscape of my mind. And the artwork for each song really reflects what I see at night in my dreams— it’s those pictures. Those are the feelings I want to evoke. Essentially self-exploration and a chance to look beyond yourself. That’s the underlying theme. The main theme is really loneliness. There’s always something bigger than us that is beyond us that we’re trying to reach. This record was a chance to explore myself, my relationships with other people, and ask questions about things that are greater than me that I don’t understand, that which is ‘life.’ I hope it was successful in some way.

Do you think loneliness is an essential part of the human condition?

Loneliness and solitude are essential. It’s extremely important. It’s mandatory. People who don’t feel comfortable being alone, that’s a big red flag. It’s important for us to be ok without anything. I personally thrive on my own. I love it. A lot of people don’t work that way. But I think it’s a magical time, to spend time with yourself without anyone breathing down your neck or any responsibility to anyone else. That’s why it’s fun to be a kid.

You can do whatever the fuck you want.

You’re not worried about what people think or responsibilities or taking care of anything.

You have time to know yourself. That’s the point of life, to give yourself that space and honor who you are. I don’t know how anyone does that without having alone time.

BRIT MANOR ON FRI., JULY 22, AT RESIDENT, 428 S. HEWITT ST., DOWNTOWN. VISIT RESIDENTDTLA. COM FOR DETAILS. BRIT MANOR’S ONLY CHILD IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM BASTARD JAZZ. VISIT BRIT MANOR AT BRITMANOR.COM.

JOYCE WRICE Interview by Christina Gubala Photography by dana washington

Although relatively new to the scene, self-taught singer Joyce Wrice’s honey-sweet voice feels timeless. After friends encouraged her to post a few playful yet vocally impressive Missy Elliott and Aaliyah covers to YouTube, the raw power of her talent was on full display. Her debut EP, a self-released digital endeavor featuring production from MNDSGN and SiR, eschews the auto-tune and heavy vocal manipulation that characterizes pop music in 2016 in favor of her natural voice texture, and the results as intimate as they are sultry. The San Diego-born Angeleno is a bubbly conversationalist whose passions include poring over liner notes and re-examining every aspect of the dream of the 1990s R&B scene. Her roots tie her to Japan and Detroit, but her future is being shaped by a blossoming fan base in Australia and New Zealand and some exciting collaborations on the horizon. Fresh off her first tour, Joyce took the time to discuss Tamia, YouTube notoriety, and what lies ahead for her promising career.

I wanted to ask about the songs that you choose to cover. You ranged from Missy Elliott to Mya. How do you pick the ones that you’re gonna throw up there? Do you do any of your covers live, and which ones go off the best?

I’m stuck in the 90s, so I’m listening to old music. I’ll just be singing along and some days I’m like, ‘I should sing this, people might like it.’

What’s so special about the 90s to you?

It was just the time. It seems more genuine and fun. From what I hear from certain artists these days on the radio, or who are popular on social media and stuff ... some of the R&B is a little corny to me. I sometimes feel like it’s about making a hit song that’s catchy, or something that you can ‘get,’ something that people just want to go viral.

A lot of it sounds like music for advertisements a lot of the time.

Exactly. And to me, that’s just not fun. I felt like in the 90s, it was more genuine, and people really put in a lot of time.

It was certainly a different process of getting it out there, too. The pre-viral era definitely didn’t have that weird, earworm-y pressure on it.

They didn’t have social media back then, so they weren’t maybe distracted. I don’t know.

But a lot of the music just feels much better.

I just think at that time they really developed artists, and there’s not really much artist development these days. I think a label ... they just want the artist to pretty much build INTERVIEW

their own fanbase and kind of do all the work, and then once they have built the fanbase and booked enough shows, or shows that they are capable of doing a lot of things on their own, that’s when the label wants to put money behind you. Maybe back then there was more money, so they had the money and time to develop artists. That probably helped with the making of the music, too, because they were able to pick certain songwriters and producers and see who could fit with what artists very well. I feel like you kind of can see some of that information on the liner notes, too, but you’ll see ... like with Janet Jackson, she’s always been working with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and clearly it’s because they know what compliments her voice, they’re maybe at a good comfort level with her, things like that. That’s why they create the magic that they create.

So talk to me about SiR. I know y’all collaborated on both the production and the writing on your EP—what’s SiR’s deal?

So I’m always on Wikipedia. I might not be the most dependable source, but when I come across a song I really like, I’ll go on Wikipedia and look up who wrote the song. I really loved the song “All That Matters” by Justin Bieber. And I really wanted to know who produced and wrote that song. So I looked it up and saw this guy was the writer—D. K. the Punisher.

Who has like, crazy followers, so I knew I couldn’t really get in contact with him. But 25

D.K. the Punisher produced it and I went to his Twitter, and we had a lot of mutual friends. I figured I would just add him, and he added me back. Then I messaged him and told him I really love that song that he did with Justin Bieber, ‘I’d love to work with you’. He responded that he’d love to work with me too. So he invited me to the studio that he was working out of, and SiR happened to be there. He was just like, ‘Hey, I’m a songwriter. I enjoy writing for other artists. If you ever want to work on anything, let me know.’ So I told him I really want to work on an EP—I want to work on my first project. That really started everything.

So total serendipity?

Yeah, it was a little mystic. I’m not mystic but—I practice Buddhism, and one of the things I wrote down was that I want to meet a songwriter to work with who can help to develop my voice and writing. I met SiR and it just happened so organically. We would meet a few times a week and work on the songs. He works very fast. He mixes a little bit, and so that’s how my voice sounds the way it sounds. He did a great job of playing around with the vocal production.

It sounds organic, though. It’s got a lovely texture that feels really honest to what your actual voice sounds like.

When I first went to a recording studio, I was a little uncomfortable because it’s just a whole different vibe as opposed to thinking in front of a computer screen, you know? So for me, I always emphasize clean—no effects as possible. I don’t want it to sound like a robot. I always thought I was going to sound like a robot or something.

Why are the tracks on your EP in the order that they are? Like, why is ‘You Used To Love Me’ after ‘Do You Love Me’? Are you telling a story? And is it a sad one?

Yeah, I did that on purpose. It went from... like questioning someone and being in denial of the fact that something was pretty much already over. And then ‘You Used To Love Me’ reflecting on the relationship. But it’s also a made-up story, too—for storytelling purposes.

Things have been moving pretty rapidly for you in the last couple of years. You started out on YouTube and things accelerated from there.

I also recently made a music Facebook page—initially I didn’t think it was necessary because I don’t use Facebook very much, but I guess it doesn’t matter about me. The people that I work with were like, ‘Just get a Facebook.’ I realized in different countries, some people don’t care about Instagram or Twitter. So I made a Facebook page, and the first thing I uploaded was a video of me covering a Brandy song—it’s like a thirty second snippet, or I think fifteen. Then all of a sudden, I got four thousand likes on my Facebook page. The video just went viral and it was a lot of people from New Zealand and Australia. So to this day they’re still passing that video around.

I noticed on your YouTube page, you have these incredibly supportive comment sections. Almost one hundred percent positive all the time. Have you ever experienced any kind the weirdness that 26

sometimes comes with being a YouTube personality? Has anybody ever been a little bit too … comment-y?

Oh my God. I have seen the weirdest comments on there. It’s kind of gross. ‘You make my woody stand up.’ A few people have said really strange sexual comments. When I would do YouTube covers with my friend Ariel and those covers were on his page, there were people who were commenting some weird stuff. Again, sexual comments, and … I think a lot of people are fascinated by me being half black, half Japanese. So some of their questions or statements were kind of … … kind of vaguely racist?

A little bit. ‘I didn’t know Japanese women married black men’ and shit like that. I think people also have fun being able to say whatever they want behind the computer.

But yeah—overall, they have been very positive. I love being able to connect with the listener. I think it’s really important for me to make people—not necessarily happy, but I want them to feel something listening to my music and my voice. When I grew up listening to music, I liked a lot of heartbreak songs, but I also loved a lot of rap music. I loved the way it would make me feel—all these great ways that people would use their voice, how they would have fun with it, or try to relay these certain emotions. I want to have that impact on other people. I love reading comments and I like replying back.

It’s not all about me putting out stuff and there not being any type of—I don’t want to say ‘connection,’ but… I enjoy being engaged with listeners.

I know what you mean about making people emote. It seems like a lot of the songs on the EP are about different romantic situations—the twists and turns of love. Are these coming from a personal place? Or are you tapping into that universal R&B feeling of just … the way that love never ever changes?

Some of it is from personal experience, and some of it is from things I’ve seen my friends go through. And then it’s mixed with a little bit of… making shit up. I really enjoyed ‘Ain’t No Need’ for example. I hung out with this guy, and he told me that he was ‘jaded,’ and I kept that in my mind. I wanted to use that for a song. MNDSGN sent me that beat and I was just playing around with things I heard that day like, ‘Oh, let’s play off of this statement he’d said.’ Then I realized after writing half the song that even though he said that he was jaded, it was really a reflection of my own life, too.

How is ‘Ain’t No Need’ both a reflection of you and that guy who told you that he was jaded? In what way are you telling both of those perspectives at once?

When I was writing that song, I was freestyling based off what I heard from this person. After listening through it, I realized that I’m also very shy and I’m also very jaded, and I just realized that I could relate to that person. I’m also talking about myself a little bit—how it’s easier to give other people advice, but hard to take your own advice.

You said that you’re both shy and jaded— do you feel like those two things are related?

I’ve always been very shy, but after going through certain experiences, I became a little jaded, and then that’s kind of made me closed off. There’s a difference between being closed off and shy, too, because I’m also just kind of a present person. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with my shyness. I’m still very private about certain things. My best friend tells me I’m a very, very private person, even though she’s like my close friend. There’s just certain things I guess I don’t naturally share with people?

Everybody has their own way of operating, and I feel like artists tend to route a lot of things through their creations, too. That’s kind of the reason that you do create—so you have a place to put the things you can’t really discuss in ‘normal reality’.

Yes, that’s true.

There are virtually no effects on your voice on the EP, and when you’re singing on YouTube, there are absolutely no effects at all. Did you come from a musical upbringing? Were you singing as a child?

It’s something I got into when I was little. I didn’t watch Disney movies—like, I liked Barney and I watched a few Disney movies, but overall, I didn’t watch movies. I didn’t care too much about anything but music. I was just listening to music and watched music videos all day. I wanted to sing on the instrumental parts of the album. I wanted to sing just as good as the other artists. I didn’t really grow up like ‘I want to be a singer.’ It was mostly ‘I love the way this makes me feel. I love the way the vocals work.’ I was so fascinated by it.

I didn’t grow up with a musical background.

My mom liked a lot of soul and jazz music, but we never sang together or anything.

My dad, he’s the one who played Tamia and Brandy and he loved Biggie and certain jazz artists. He would play it in the car, and I would love it. That’s what introduced me to music was him playing Tamia—the first singer that I came across. That totally changed my life. But I didn’t sing at all in a choir, or I didn’t join any music classes or anything. I mostly just danced starting in junior high to high school. I was really shy about singing, too. The YouTube covers didn’t start until the end of my high school when my friend Ariel was playing the ukulele during lunch outside.

He knew I was really into music, but he didn’t know I could sing. But I would hum a little bit, and he’d be like, ‘Whoa!’ We got together and we covered a Ryan Leslie song called ‘Valentine’ and we posted it on YouTube for fun and got really great feedback. And we just continued doing it.

I watched those videos. It’s really infectious watching you two have fun together, and I feel like that’s something that’s really beautiful about your project.

Everything seems like it comes from a place of playfulness. It doesn’t feel like a job to you, does it?

No, it doesn’t. Yeah, it’s fun.

Where do you want to take your project?

What’s the top of the world for you as a singer?

I would love to work with a lot of songwriters like Bryan-Michael Cox, Johntá Austin … I love Rodney Jerkins, I’m not sure what he’s doing now [laughs] but Rodney Jerkins. I’m gonna be honest. For example, Brandy … for

her, I think it was Afrodisiac. She was really disappointed in the album because Rodney Jerkins didn’t really help her the way she wanted supposedly. So who knows? I guess for a while some people have it all together, but sometimes after a while, they just don’t work out anymore. They’re not as strong or creative as they were before.

They don’t have that hunger they did when they first got rolling.

Maybe. Or whatever was cool in the 90s just doesn’t work anymore, you know? I would really love to be able to be on a label that could really introduce me to a lot of great songwriters. I have some friends who produce who I really enjoy—MNDSGN from Stones Throw is one of my favourite. My ideal label situation would be a label who really sees me as a priority and allows me to have freedom and be able to have a say in what I would want. I don’t want to get shelved. [laughs] Or packaged. You say that you really appreciated liner notes. Looking at the album art for your EP, it really reminded me of old school Mariah Carey. Like, Emotion-era-y Mariah Carey. The photography—it’s really sensual, but it’s also really respectful towards you as a human being. And it felt really refreshing.

That’s good, I’m glad, yeah.

Is there going to be a physical copy?

I would like to, but I can’t afford it. So who knows? Maybe after putting it out, I could collaborate. There is someone in Japan who I’ve been communicating with about possibly distributing the EP in Japan and then they would make physical copies. If that would happen, that would be great. My favorite is the way we created that album liner notes page with all the song titles. That was something I told everyone: ‘I need to do this.’ My friend Joseph Anthony helped create that for me because I told him I want to have a little collage going on, and I want it to really mesh very well.

Why are you so interested and well-versed in album liner notes and credits? What makes you want to get in touch with the people that are behind the scenes?

I’m just a very curious person, and I am fascinated by the way other people do things and just the way their minds work. I’m just so passionate about music that I want to know everything. I geek out about it. Yesterday, I met this one songwriter that I absolutely love, and I couldn’t help but ask her, ‘Hey, so when you wrote this song, how did you make it? Who were you thinking about?

What was the process like?’ Naturally I just want to know. It’s fun for me!

You’re an interviewer!

I want to be a part of where ... you’re seeing right through their experience, I guess.

JOYCE WRICE WITH KARI FAUX, ARIMA EDERRA AND CLARK + THE COMMUNITY ON THURS., JUNE 16, AT THE HI HAT, 5043 YORK BLVD., HIGHLAND PARK. 9 PM / FREE / 18+. HIHAT.LA. JOYCE WRICE’S STAY AROUND EP IS AVAILABLE NOW. LOOK FOR FUTURE RELEASES BY JOYCE WRICE THIS SUMMER ON AKASHIK RECORDS. VISIT JOYCE WRICE AT JOYCEWRICE.COM. INTERVIEW

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SWARVY Interview by Chris Kissel Photography by Theo Jemison

L.A. is proving to be a comfortable home for Swarvy, a newly-arrived beatsmith and musical polymath. The Philly-area native spent years traversing prog-metal, psychedelic rock, and jazz; most recently he’s made his name with the warm and funky style of hip-hop beats most closely associated with Dilla and Madlib. But even there, he makes the style his own—while many of the labrynthine pieces on his latest tape Elderberry sound as if they were chopped out of old jazz records, they were actually jammed out live by Swarvy and a couple of collaborators. It wasn’t long ago that he gigged in a Philly-New York circuit where audience members frequently gave him the cold shoulder or worse. Now, six months into life in L.A., his curiosity hasn’t calmed down—his interests swerve from Quincy Jones to Kendrick Lamar to obscure 60s garage rock and luxurious 80s mullet-jazz—but he’s found a sense of community and an audience eager to vibe with his advanced sensibility. The producer, bandleader, and beatmaker sat down with us in his apartment in Leimert Park.

‘Headgames’ is one of my favorite tracks on Elderberry, and it’s driven by a great guitar lick. Is that something you found?

No—on that one I consciously thought it would be funny if I tried to make it sound like it was a sample. To flip myself playing that line so that people would be confused. People said they couldn’t tell the difference, and I was trying to do that. I could have done more shit, too—I could have added vinyl crackle or something to really confuse people. I was jamming with my homie Matt [Houston], who was playing drums on that, like a swing rhythm. I wrote the guitar lick on piano and then recorded it on guitar.

That’s not at all what I was expecting. It sounds like a Wes Montgomery sample.

That’s what I was thinking! I love Wes Montgomery.

How much did you jam until you came up with that snippet?

We didn’t do more than that loop.

You wrote that on its own? Like a melody?

Yeah—I wrote the chords and then I wrote that part over it.

It sounds like the middle of a solo.

Exactly. I wanted it to sound like we chopped it out of a solo.

I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.

I’ve never heard of anyone doing it specifically as a joke. I thought it was really funny. Have you ever heard of DJ Harrison? He’s amazing.

He’s a crazy multi-instrumentalist from Richmond, Virginia. He flips himself playing a lot. He’s a crazy player—he’s a master of keys, drums, guitar, bass. He’ll record himself playing like a quartet, just doing the whole thing. Then he’ll chop it up. But he’s the only person I can actively think of who flips himself playing stuff.

It’s interesting to think that a beat is typically the result of going through old records and reconfiguring those sounds via technology, which results in this technology-driven meta-format. And INTERVIEW

now you’re using the instruments and the language of the original format to recreate that meta-format.

Totally. There’s always that hip-hop spirit in the way I make everything. The way I end up wanting it to sound is the way hip-hop records sound. Even if I’m making a jazz song, I’ll try to tone it back. But a lot of the time the drums are hard because I want them to be like that, even if it’s a softer song. Listening to records all the time to flip them, you find a lot of great music. You’ll find a song and you don’t even want to chop it up, you just want to listen to the full song. You learn those songs and study them a little bit, and they become part of the same vocabulary. It’s a neverending cycle—the more I dig for records, the more fuel I have for everything else.

Are you a big collector?

Not a huge collector. I know people who know a lot about certain artists and go digging for that stuff. I just go through dollar bins.

I’m a dollar bin digger. I go in there looking for samples. I mean, if there’s a bigger artist I know I want, I’ll go looking for it, too. But usually I just go in there without knowing what I’m going to get. Even if it’s just a snare, it’s a dollar snare. It’s worth it. Every time I go into a record store I don’t know what they’re going to have. Sometimes I’ll know what I want to listen to at the time—jazz records or soul or whatever. But generally I’ll just go find anything that looks interesting.

What jumps out to you?

Which musicians played on it, what record label released it. The year. If there’s a listening station I’ll check it out, or look it up on my phone and listen to it. Sometimes I’ll just grab a bunch. I just got these at Amoeba where my homegirl was playing. [Motions to a stack of records leaning against the wall.] I know Ronnie Laws, I know Patrice Rushen, I know Michael Franks. I just grabbed them. The more you dig the more you understand. There are records you see at every record store. You’ll

see it and say, ‘This is always here.’ Shit like Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass or however many Barbra Streisand records you can find. But I didn’t know what this was. [picks up one of the records] It looks like a crazy psychedelic rock thing, but it’s not. It’s the L.A. Jazz Choir.

It was made in Glendale. And I was like … whatever. I’ll try it out.

Is it an actual choir?

Yeah, it sounds like a bunch of white people singing. With maybe a Black band. Because the band sounds really good. They’re crazy.

Not that the singers sound bad. They just sound really white. [laughs] I knew a lot of the songs on here, so I thought it would be cool. And it’s actually pretty dope. One record I found that I didn’t know much about was from the Brothers Johnson. Do you know about them? They made a record called Light Up the Night. The cover is a picture of a guy holding a flashlight up to his dick. It’s hilarious. But Quincy Jones produced it, and that record is amazing. A lot of the sounds there I was really getting into. I’ve been getting into 80s records. I was sampling 60s and 70s records for a long time, and I wasn’t really down with a lot of the textures of 80s records. When I was younger, I didn’t fuck with the way those drums sounded. I hated that sound. But I love it now. My brother is older, and he was really into that shit. He loved the way 80s songs sounded. I liked the songs, but I never liked the production. But in the last year or two, I’ve been realizing the power of those textures, and the way they can be used. I’ve been hearing a lot of early 80s, like 81 and 82. So many good records from that time. Funk records, good pop songs with really wild textures and arrangements.

I assume we can chalk up our distaste for some of that stuff to our cultural moment.

We were born into a generation that valued crisp ‘authentic’ sounds.

I was born in ’90, and I grew up out of that. I wanted to hear a rawer dirty sound.

It seems like more synthetic sounds are having a renaissance with our generation.

And I’m finding so many records from that era, too. Artists that just created really dope shit. There aren’t a lot of textures I don’t see an application for. I fuck with any kinds of sounds, at this point. Have you heard of SOLAR? Sound of L.A. Records? They put out so many great records—a lot of stuff in the 70s and 80s. Records by acts like the Whispers. I see a lot of those now that I’m in L.A. Wherever you go, you see localized records. There are a ton of soul records.

It’s crazy how many private press soul records were made in the 70s and 80s.

Yeah, and shit like this. [points at the L.A. Jazz Choir record] They probably only made 300, 500 copies of this.

We’re back to that economy now. We’re making 300, 500-run tapes.

It’s like little snacks. [laughs] How much of Elderberry was recorded live, and how much is made up of samples?

It’s half and half. I can’t get away from either one. I put out a record called twothousandnine with Pink Siifu [in February] and it goes sample track, live track, sample track, live track. A lot of people told me they can’t tell where each begins or ends. I want that. It challenges people to wonder what’s what.

The Rhodes [organ] you play yourself is probably the exact instrument you’d be sampling from an old soul record.

I play the same instruments, so it ends up being the same textures. All I have right now is a Rhodes, a bass, a guitar, and a drum set.

Sometimes synths, but mostly just that.

How did you get hooked up with Leaving Records, the label that put out the Elderberry tape?

Matthewdavid asked me to play a Leaving Records showcase at Los Globos, about a half a year ago. But the first time I met Matthew, he slept over at my parents’ house. He was playing a show in Philly. Ringgo [Ancheta, 31

a.k.a L.A. producer MNDSGN] introduced us and told me Matthew needed a place to stay. I played him a bunch of music, and then he asked me to play the showcase. And he just wanted to do more stuff with me after that.

Is there a moment on Elderberry you’re particularly excited about? Something that drew you out of your depth?

I really liked working with Kiefer [Shackelford, L.A. producer/keyboardist]. He’s in my band now. I put a little quartet together. The way we vibe together is great. He’s a special, amazing keyboard player. The way we play together reminds me of when I used to play in bands a lot, when one of us would be on one instrument and the other would be on another and we would just write together at the same time. It’s super comfortable making music with him and having proper solos on the record and shit like that. He’s on Ringgo’s new record, and he’s all over Jonwayne’s record, too.

I wanted to ask you about ‘By the Pool,’ which is my favorite track off your record Stunts Vol. 1-3 from last year. Is that you playing that main organ melody?

I played all the instruments on that song. I wrote it in a pool. I was standing in a pool with my friend and I just thought of it. Then I went to the studio and I remembered it, and then wrote it out.

Is that how pieces come to you? You hear the melody in your head and then go turn it into something concrete?

No—that’s my favorite way, though. It’s the most satisfying, mostly because I’m just happy I remembered it. It used to be I would hear something in my head, and then when I would go to figure it out, it was such a jumble. I hear a note and it would make me forget what I’d heard. Now my musical memory is stronger. I started teaching myself the piano as well, and it’s a lot easier to figure out what’s in your head that way. So that’s my favorite way to write.

But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes I have to sit myself down and force myself to make something, even when I’m tired or pissed off or I don’t feel like making anything.

And sometimes it comes out dope.

Does beat making in particular lend itself to that sort of creative process?

I feel like beat makers and producers are the only type of musicians who are as prolific as they are. Can you think of anyone else who makes music like that?

It’s different. That’s part of what makes it so interesting as a form—each piece is brief and episodic.

Like little scenes in a comic book or a movie or something. The way they get strung together feels like a story. I guess beatmakers go from the beginning of the track to the end. They have an idea, they put the parts down, they record it, and then they’re done. And then they can put it out. Whereas a singer or an instrumentalist might be able to do only that one element of the song, and they need other people to help them finish. A lot of the time they’ll get stuck and things don’t get finished.

Or someone working within a different genre will think of a melody, and they’ll think, ‘That’s going to be the verse, or that’s going to be the chorus.’ They’re locking moments together in the framework of a song, rather than stringing them into 32

something like a beat tape. Elderberry is a collection of melodies and moments. Do you think about an album like that in terms of each track being related, like a suite? Or is it more a spectrum?

When I put something together, I’m all about the way it comes together as a whole.

It’s so much more powerful to me as a whole piece than each individual track. It’s all about the context it creates once they are all next to each other. I made Elderberry really fast, and it was kind of stripped down. I didn’t really add anything. I purposely left the tracks as they were. I didn’t try to do too much to connect them. But they do all fit into a certain mood, or a story. Every record is kind of like that.

With beats, there’s the added dimension that if someone wants to use it to rap over it, they’ll rip it out of that context, and it’ll become a piece of someone else’s puzzle.

Which happens all the time. There are certain records that feel like they don’t work well to me as single tracks, and they work way better hearing it all the way through. Other times it’s the other way around. I want to be somewhere in the middle, where it can work both ways.

There are certain records to me where I don’t want to hear the tracks outside the album.

To Pimp a Butterfly sounded way better as a record than the singles. It’s just the way that record moves. Everything makes sense when it comes in at that moment.

That’s obviously by design, too. The version of ‘i’ on the record was made to exist within the album—it’s a recontextualized version of that single.

That was dope. I love how he has different versions of his tracks. And when he does a live version, he’ll take verses from other songs and make new parts. I love the arrangements he does. I thought To Pimp a Butterfly worked like that. When I would try to take tracks out, it didn’t feel the same to me as if I had heard it all the way through.

Who are your guiding lights as far as musicians who inspire you?

The biggest influences are the ones I’ve really gotten to connect with. Like Ringgo. He’s from the east coast too, he’s from New Jersey, and he’s always been a huge inspiration.

We’ve always been super supportive of each other. And that whole crew—like Devonwho as well. We have a kinship. But in terms of people that I don’t actually know … Quincy Jones. Dave Grusin is another great producer.

Sun Ra. I like Jeff Lorber a lot. I respect how they put things together, and arrange things.

And they’re very musical.

They’re people who shape sounds. Even Sun Ra—people with an idea of the sounds they want to achieve, and who bring people together to chase that.

They direct the energy. And they make all different kinds of music. I like that, too. I don’t like following an artist and then getting disappointed by some of the shit they end up doing. You’re rooting for somebody, and then you’re let down, and you can’t even listen to the old shit anymore.

It’s hard to put musicians on a pedestal, because they will very rarely live up to your expectations. Kendrick is a perfect example.

It would be very upsetting if he put out a mediocre record.

Even a mediocre record. And there’s no reason he would, with his circle and the type of talent he has. It’s like when people get into sports and they get emotionally devastated when a team loses. They take it personally. But I like the versatility, and I like the growth. I like subscribing to something where you’re going to see growth all the time.

What kind of artistic challenges are you putting in front of yourself now?

I’m trying to get better at the instruments I’m playing. I’m probably not trying has hard as I should be, because there are so many different things I’m doing.. But I want to keep getting better. Especially on keys. I’m relatively new to that. I took piano lessons when I was four or five, and then stopped and started to play other instruments. It was only like two years ago that I came back to piano. I have a book called The Jazz Piano Book, and there are parts where one page will take me a month or two—just to really understand it.

That’s naturally going to change the way the music you make sounds.

The more songs I learn—it’s like a big monster, really. It’s going to keep growing, and get crazier and crazier as these pieces get added to it. But that’s the main challenge. The rest of it is keeping it going and staying organized.

There’s so much shit going on. I’ve been producing shit for a lot of people. I’ve been developing some really close relationships with these people, too. Do you know Versis?

He’s dope, and I’m producing his whole next record. Since we started working together in November, we’ve made a whole lot of joints.

He’s like my brother now. I try to keep people around where we can learn from each other.

We push each other, and just get better faster.

What does all of that work actually entail on your end?

I’ll get together with that artist and we will make music together. Singers, rappers— any kind of musician. I’m doing a whole record with Kiefer, and that’s going to be an instrumental record, but I’m working with a few singers. Vida Jafari is one. I did some stuff with Arima Ederra, too. They’re both great singers. And Versis is a rapper, but he’s singing a lot now, too. And same thing with this dude lojii. I’m doing a whole rap record with him, but he’s singing on it also.

You work with them on creating the music, and you work on the mixing and engineering as well?

All of that. But we’re really making music together. A lot of times it’ll be my idea and they’ll write something on it, or it’ll be their idea and they’ll hum it to me, and I’ll figure it out, I’ll play it. I’ll make whatever idea we’re singing into a track. With Versis, he’ll make voice memos and send them to me, and we’ll make them together.

How deep does your experience with production go?

I just started working with a lot more singers in the past two years—especially the last year.

But I went to school for audio engineering in Pennsylvania, at a place called Lebanon Valley. It used to be a music conservatory.

So I went there for audio recording, and studied bass and jazz performance. I grew up in Philly, and as I got older, my family slowly moved farther outside of Philly. My

dad used to play in bands—used to play a lot of guitar. He still fucks around with music, actually. I never got to hear the old bands he was playing in. It was mostly stuff like the Yardbirds. They just did covers. I don’t think they wrote too many songs or anything.

He has a really dope record collection. And my brother is really dope at classical piano.

And my sister used to play, too. So growing up, there was a lot of music. [My family] wanted me to take piano lessons, it was my idea originally because I saw my brother and sister taking it. I was always super interested in playing music. I was always fascinated with the guitar, and my dad was really supportive. I stopped playing piano and got a bass, and that became my thing for awhile.

I was obsessed with low frequencies. I taught myself guitar, and then I taught myself drums, and then I learned piano.

Did you play in bands in high school?

Battle of the bands type stuff?

I was never into the battle of the bands thing.

I thought it was weird. A lot of times you had to, like, pay to get in. I was like, ‘Why am I going to pay you to play my shit?’ Or you have to sell a certain amount of tickets to the show. That’s still a format that people use. I can’t do it. My brother was in college when I started playing bass a lot, and when I was 13 we started playing in bands together. I was playing so much, and learning a lot of shit.

I was playing with these college kids, and it was heavier stuff. Always instrumental. And it was really technical, wildly-arranged rock shit. I was making heavy-ass … basically fight music. Do you ever listen to Fantômas, or Mr. Bungle? Fantômas was another one of Mike Patton’s bands, that had the drummer from Slayer [Dave Lombardo], the guitarist from Melvins [Buzz Osborne], and the bassist from Mr. Bungle [Trevor Dunn]. That was my shit for a minute. But I don’t want anyone to fight. I didn’t like how people were acting a fool at the shows. Beating each other up. I hated making people get angry, and then they were acting like an asshole to me, and I’m playing for them. So I stopped. I was playing jazz the whole time because I was in the big band and the orchestra at school, and I was also playing in little jazz combos. I also loved reggae, and I was listening to jazz and hip hop, and I was making little beats on my own. I was always into making stuff on my computer, for years. Ever since we got a desktop computer—just making mixes and edits of stuff. After the first band I was in with my brother broke up when I was 15 or 16, I took all the members and started writing music myself. That’s when I realized I could lead a band. And once I started leading that band, MegaMega, I started realizing that I could direct everyone’s energy in different ways. If the musicians were fluid, if they were good, they would follow me, even if I didn’t say anything. I also started making my own psychedelic music. McKenzie was just a twopiece, drums and guitar, and we did a bunch of tours. People would be smiling more, and I was happier. I was happier with people vibing out and dancing than punching each other in the face. It made sense when I was in high school because I was more angsty and shit, but it just got so old, and I was too tired to do it.

INTERVIEW

Do you still get to work with your interest in being a bandleader?

I wasn’t playing in bands for a minute. I kind of missed it, even though it’s hard to keep everybody together. But now that I’m doing my own music, I can just put together groups for shows. So I had to find people who could learn music really fast. Kiefer is one of those dudes, and I found this other dude Efa [Etoroma, Jr.], who is an amazing drummer, and this other dude Mike McTaggart, who is an amazing guitarist. The last show we played, I couldn’t get them to rehearse with me until the day of the show, and we rehearsed for like a hour, and they nailed it. They fuckin’ killed it. So I needed cats who could do that. I had wanted to get a band together for awhile, just to play my own stuff. I was making music in a quartet format, and I wanted a band to play it with me. To play tracks like ‘By the Pool,’ and a bunch of other songs that I have. Songs that I don’t really want to play unless I have a band with bigger arrangements, stuff that feels bigger than a DJ set. I originally put them together because [L.A. producer] House Shoes wanted me to play a Dilla Day show on Valentine’s Day for J. Dilla’s birthday, and learn a bunch of Dilla songs and play them. I found these dudes and we did that, and I’ve been having them play my original shit, too. We’ve been playing shit from Stunts, playing shit from Elderberry, and it’s been dope.

What other directions do you want to go with your music?

I want to put out a different type of record. I don’t want to put out the same record twice.

Elderberry is a beat tape. Stunts was like a huge beat tape. But I also put out a jazz record called Scotch. I want to do a proper jazz record, and I want to delve into other weird shit after that.

I have a bunch of ambient shit.

You should make a new age tape.

That would be dope. Just make a new age record with Matthewdavid? He might be down. I want to get back into rock music, too.

I’m really into the integration of rock music into other things. I’ve been finding a lot more rock records that I like. For awhile, I wasn’t fucking with rock records, but now I’m liking it again. I found this thing called Ultimate Spinach that’s dope.

Ultimate Spinach are amazing.

This one is great, too. [holds up a vinyl copy of The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles, and Fripp] It’s so dope.

Are you supporting yourself the same way you were in Philly?

Yeah—the best thing is that after a few months the same school hired me to work with kids out here. We just did a little recital out here for the kids. I started offering my own private lessons, and I have a lot of kids doing that now, too. I do Skype lessons with people all over the world. I just tweeted it and posted it on my website! Between that and making music and doing shows, it’s all music. When I was on the east coast, I was teaching five days a week. Now, I teach two days a week and work for myself the rest of the time.

Does production work feel similar to teaching work?

Yeah. A lot of the time I’m helping people finish their ideas, and in some cases making INTERVIEW

them more confident. It’s a lot of love. It feels like a big community.

Where were you living right before you moved to L.A.?

I was living at my parents’ after I graduated, which is in Media, Pennsylvania. I was going into Philly and New York to play. It’s tough trying to stay motivated out there.

Because there aren’t as many like-minded people, and there aren’t as many events that stick to it. There aren’t any long running events like Low End Theory there. The Roots are an exception because they really came up and played dope shit, and killed it for everybody. But they don’t have the events out there. [Producer/former Digable Planets DJ] King Britt did Saturn Never Sleeps but he doesn’t do that anymore.

The only person there who I thought was trying to push people was King Britt, and that’s just one person. It was crazy. All these events would just die. It wasn’t pushing me forward. The second time I visited L.A., I loved it. Ringgo said his roommate was moving out and asked me to move in. And my brother was pushing me: ‘You should quit your job and move out there.’

Where were you working in Philly?

I was teaching. I quit and moved out here in December. I just packed up the car with everything and drove. Just my clothes and my instruments and that was it.

Is L.A. holding up to your expectations?

Yeah. I totally knew it would, ever since I visited that second time. There is just so much support and love for this type of shit. People out here want to hear different stuff. They want new shit. I felt like in New York when I would do that, people would get angry. They’d ask me to play Future or Gucci Mane or some shit. I don’t know what they want to hear. The best thing is when people try to request songs when I’m on an SP [sampler]. ‘I can’t pull up songs on this thing.’ [laughs] I remember getting backlash against the stuff I was playing in New York and Philly, and it took forever for people to not be like that. I was playing weirder beats at the time. It wasn’t as jazz and R&B oriented then as it is now. It was a bit more dissonant. Noiser. Kinda hardcore.

I switched around styles a lot. I probably did make some people upset. [laughs] What kind of backlash?

They would actually freak out. Frat boy type shit. People would come up after a set and say, ‘That was awful.’ Or they would be mad.

Crazy shit like that. I’ve had people tell me my shit was awful. People happened to wander into the venue during my set and told me my music was awful.

That stuff helped drive you to L.A.?

It wasn’t always like that. People started to catch on. I started to get a little more support.

But it wasn’t enough support that I felt like I could go anywhere. When I’m here, I feel like there are more forward thinking people who are into hearing different things. And I get more of a sense of community out here, compared to Philly or New York. At least one that sticks and grows.

SWARVY’S ELDERBERRY IS OUT NOW ON LEAVING. VISIT SWARVY AT SWARVY.BANDCAMP.COM.

SUMMER 2016

SHARK TOYS Interview by D.M. Collins Photography by Daiana Feuer There is nothing “objective” you can say about Shark Toys, L.A.’s most wound-up, frenetic and heartfelt band. Its four members have a cult-like devotion to punk-infused rock history, slavishly disassembling and rebuilding it on every spazzed-out tune they’ve played since forming in 2008. So I might as well confess: I LOVE this band, beyond the reach of nagging journalistic integrity. I even roomed with founders Daniel and Rina Clodfelter a few years back.

He and I were both “Daniel C.,” which looked rather brotherly (and confusing) in the credits when we’d interview bands together for L.A. RECORD. Yet while half of me wants to tell readers “Love this band and BUY THEIR NEW ALBUM,” the other half of me is scared shitless of interviewing my old pal. Mr. Clodfelter, normally a bright, cheery fellow, is so distrustful of music journalists that he stopped being one himself years ago—and it’s only because of our friendship that he’s consenting to this interview at all. Will our interview be a candid discussion about the band’s songs and shows? Or will I get in trouble for steering topics towards chapters of Danny’s past he’d rather not reveal? Pensive, I go to meet Danny after one of Shark Toys’ marathon practices, making a mental note NOT to mention the scandalous “Las Vegas Pistachio Incident” in the final edit.

I know it was a couple years between these recordings and your last ones, but I feel your music has become harder—a little more ‘serious’—than the off-the-cuff home recordings you used to self-release at the dawn of the band.

Daniel Clodfelter (guitar/vocals): Well, yeah—as you get older, dark, depressing shit happens.

I don’t think I was accusing you of having depressing, darker songs …

But it is! I agree. I’m a genuinely positive guy, and a happy guy. But I’ve had a few friends die, and commit suicide, and die of drug overdoses, and shit gets dark sometimes. And some things you don’t want to talk about in a personal context. Within the last two years I’ve lost four pretty close friends. It’s really fucking terrible! And if you think about it really hard, it can really bring you down. A few of them were some of my best friends since I was a teenager and family members. And the only way to vent about it is by writing songs about it, to relieve that pressure.

You must really trust your bandmates to open up to them about things like this.

I agree with that. Our current lineup of [drummer] Emanuel [Farias] and [bassist] Bill [Gray] and Rina … their musicianship comes second to being a buddy and meshing on a musical and intellectual level … and listening to records and talking about books. But it has a connection because once we start making music together, our music is already on the same page because we come from the same place.

Wassily Kandinski thought that emotions could be expressed as colors or shapes. If each band member were a color and a shape, what would they be?

Rina loves Kandinski! He is one of her favorite artists! I like him a lot too! What is the condition where people see music as colors?

Oliver Sachs talks about it in his Musicophilia book, which you recommended to me.

‘Synesthesia.’ My ex-girlfriend, the professional submissive who ate all your cheese out of the fridge once, had it.

Speaking of Oliver Sachs, in his book Hallucinations, he talks about all kinds of disorders and syndromes and substances that cause hallucinations, and that’s where I got inspiration for the subject matter for our recent single, ‘Delirium Tremens.’ Though since it’s a first-person account of the depths of alcoholism and withdrawal, it’s one of those ones where I’m hesitant to play it anymore—I don’t know if people can differentiate the line between me and the narrator of the song, or if they know that there is a line at all. I will admit, I have never experienced delirium tremens. But I do think it’s a pretty good song. Very fun to play!

Jonathan Richman famously made the Modern Lovers focus as much on what to leave OUT of the music as what to put in it: like there’s nothing wrong with the blues, but they didn’t play blues licks. Are there musical ideas your band mates might come up with that would make you say, ‘No. That’s not a Shark Toys sound.’?

I don’t feel like there’s a template for what we do, but I also feel like the people who I choose to play music with are on the same wavelength as me. I feel like whatever direction we go in… could do a blues thing and make it fucked up and weird, as long as it’s deconstructed enough. We just try to make weird, shitty, deconstructed rock music.

I know lots of bands have deconstructed rock INTERVIEW

music before, like no wave and punk, but I feel like we do it in our own way. I can’t honestly classify my own music because I feel like I’m just deconstructing rock ‘n’ roll music. People who listen to it place it in whatever context they hear it. I just play music I want to play.

But if you like all these kinds of music, why choose to sound so … punk?

Part of it comes from being a permanent nonmusician. I play guitar, but I don’t care about really ‘learning to play guitar.’ After the 90s, punk doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

Sure, I grew up listening to Rancid and Bouncing Souls, but I was fucking ten. That is terrible, embarrassing music! But it’s a part of me, and Bill is my same age, so in the van, we’ll geek out about that shit.

‘Punk’ means nothing to you in 2016? What do you think it means to most people?

Things like that are why I stopped writing about music. I love reading about theories and styles and whatever, pertaining to music.

I don’t like spending too much time worrying what things mean.

Punk was supposed to be the music of rebellion, and throwing off the past—yet it has had such staying power! I don’t see that as hypocrisy, I see it as defying ALL conventions, even the convention about how one defies convention.

I don’t have a problem with rebellion. I get annoyed when the punk clichés get a bit over the top. Punk music was the first kind of music I really dug into and explored on my own, and I think that’s why it has such staying power with me. I see punk as fucked-up pop songs, or at least that is the type I like to listen to and the type I like to make. I always found hardcore or street punk or thrash kind of boring. I need a good song, even if it’s a skewed and deconstructed one.

There’s a Woody Allen documentary where he talks about meeting Steven Spielberg, and both directors told each other that they just wanted to make movies like the ones they’d loved as kids. Can’t you say that Shark Toys’ style is in some ways an homage to music you loved as a kid?

It’s becoming that way now. Before I just wanted to make everything super fucked up. I still do, but now I accept the arc of everything: all music, even super-cheesy shit I liked at age 15 or age 19 or age 22. I have no boundaries anymore. I still fuck shit up, but I’m less constricted in which way it goes.

Have you thought about doing songs in a poppier vein? With serious harmonies or orchestrated flourishes or modern production values?

I would love to. I love old 60s pop records like the Zombies and early Bee Gees. Or like early John Cale, Vintage Violence and Paris 1919, though it isn’t exactly pop—it’s definitely orchestral! I love Nick Lowe and the Bay City Rollers. I really love pop music. When I first INTERVIEW

started jamming with Bill, since he had done stuff with Devon Williams and Catwalk and a bunch of rad modern pop people, I thought he would bring the pop out of me. Instead I brought the punk out of him! It’s not what I expected, but it’s great.

It’s rather pop that you had a music video come out a few months back.

For ‘Something Something Else.’ When we played with Protomartyr at the Echo in March, I was approached at the merch booth by a dude, Dave Paige, who said he worked for Tim & Eric’s production company Abso Lutely. He said he was wanting to get into making music videos. I met him and his partner Janel Krankling, who also works for Abso Lutely, for beers at the Black Boar a night or two later. He had a really crazy script mapped out: weirdo people peeling potatoes and a crazy dancer and strange blonde twins.

It was all really bizarre! But I could tell he knew where it was going, so we ran with it and started shooting. It happened really quick.

But the whole thing came out really cool.

It sounds like you’re on a creative streak.

I definitely have had dry spells—years where it didn’t flow or click. Right now, I’ve been able to write a lot. And writing with Bill and Emanuel has been really good and easy. We just go out there and start crackin’ stuff out.

We’ve had two records come out [in 2016].

We hadn’t had any records come out for three years: we recorded this full length two years ago, and with the weird, slow process of getting a record on vinyl these days, it takes forever. The album was on Mt.St.Mtn. Of the two records this year, they were both recorded

by Dave Fox from Traditional Fools. The 7” came out on Emotional Response, which is a label run by Stew Anderson from Boyracer, a 90s indie rock band from England. He lives in Flagstaff now with his wife Jen Turrell, who is the daughter of James Turrell, the artist who has the exhibit at LACMA right now. They’re both really good musicians and cool people.

I saw they re-released a Sleaford Mods 7’, which is like a British drum machine band that sounds like the Fall! I got in touch with them based on that, and [Stew] already owned our EP and I was a big Boyracer fan, and we just took it from there.

What shirt are you wearing right now?

Royal Trux. I’ve always been a huge Royal Trux fan and a Pussy Galore fan, and we played with Neil Michael Hagerty in Sacramento at a free show. A night or two before that, we played a really big L.A. show where we made a decent amount of money—enough to justify driving up to Sacramento and not make any money, but to play with a band I’ve been obsessed with since I was a teenager. When me and Rina were teenagers, we were both huge Royal Trux fans. There’s probably no connection in our music, but they’ve always been a huge part of me.

There’s a dynamic that he and Jennifer Herrema had as a couple in Royal Trux.

Shark Toys is a band with a couple in it— do you get inspiration from other bands that have relationships within them?

I love being in a band with Rina and being married to Rina, but I don’t think our relationship defines our music or has much to do with it. We started the band maybe in part because we’re a couple, but really more because we both like the same music and wanted to mess around. A few ‘couple’ bands like the Vaselines are semi-inspirational, but I feel our music is a different thing and it doesn’t have any connection to relationship things.

I came to appreciate Rina the one time I had to fill in for her on keyboards. Rina knows how to adjust for the chaos. But on some recent songs, her keyboards seem to have been replaced by saxophone. Why? Because of her schedule, we had to record a record without Rina on keys, so I wanted something to fill the void. I didn’t want to have ‘Rina-sounding’ keys without her playing them. I’m a huge fan of early punk records with sax, like Contortions and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and even the Stooges. I always wanted sax on one of my records. Once I decided to take my hunch more seriously, I hit up Mikal Cronin, who I’ve known for years from his playing with Epsilons—I met him while we were in the Red Hearts—and Okie Dokie and Moonhearts in the early days of Shark Toys. I knew he had an ear for weird punk stuff. He was in between tours when we had our recording session for the forthcoming LP, and he stopped by the studio for a few hours with a couple of saxophones to record and hang. He came in to the studio and belted out a few takes of weirdo shit on four or five songs exactly as I heard them—or wanted to hear them—in my head. I don’t think anyone believed he would actually stop by, but he did.

The end result sounds amazing. I can’t wait to share it with people.

I love sax when it’s used unconventionally, but in a brash way. Like Mika Miko or Strange Boys.

Yeah, same! When we hit up Mikal, since there was a possibility that he might still be on tour, we also hit up Jenna who was the sax player in both bands you just mentioned. But she wasn’t available and Mikal was. A few weeks ago we had our LP release party at Permanent, and we played with a new band from Oakland called the World—they have two sax players, and it’s amazing. It’s Andy from the Cuts/Time Flys/ Reptoids/et cetera on guitar, and a bunch of other Bay Area buddies from Life Stinks and that scene. Real Raincoats, post-punk vibe. It was a blast. We played a bunch of our new songs with Bill, and then Mike [Naeimollah] our original bassist, came up and played with us for the first time in over a year to play deep cuts from the LP. It was super weird and fun.

When you started the band, it was super DUPER weird: just you and Rina, without a rhythm section at all.

The band we’ve been playing with for the last year or so has been myself on guitar and vocals, Emanuel on drums, Bill on bass, and Rina on keyboard. Everyone in the band is pretty similar. All of us are music and literature obsessed. Emanuel always has a sketch book on him. He is a great artist and it is really inspiring to see him always coming up with new things to draw and great ideas.

Mike did play bass for four or five years and on most of our records. He’s still an honorary member. His school stuff may be easing up soon, which was why he initially quit, and we have talked about maybe bringing him back if he has the time.

I know you’re all music and literature obsessed. But which member of Shark Toys is the most obsessive?

We’re all pretty music geeky! Band practices often turn into conversations about records and bands and such. We all have similar tastes in music, so we’re all always showing each other different bands. Emanuel was the one who first showed me the Mekons and recommended we cover ‘Where Were You.’ Inversely, on our last tour, Bill and I introduced Emanuel to Big Star and Chris Bell—I think he was already familiar with Alex Chilton?

He told me the other day that it’s all he’s been listening to since we’ve been back.

How does being a scholar inform what, and how, you play? Compared to a person who may know chords and how to play, but doesn’t have your level of knowledge and sheer fandom?

It gives me pleasure in my elitist snobbery!

Just kidding. But I’ve always been really into music. My whole life, ever since I started working, my money always went to going to shows, buying CDs, buying records. Initially it was intimidating knowing that there was so much music—so much good music—out there. It made me think, ‘Why should I even play music? What do I have to contribute to this already giant mass of noise floating around the world?’ It was frustrating as a young songwriter to think I had came up with a song structure or something and then have someone show me that it had been done very similarly 20 or 30 years earlier. Or six months earlier! That used to really get to me. But once I started writing more music, I started getting pleasure in comparisons to bands I had never listened to but got compared to, such as the Clean or the Urinals. And [now I] embrace and enjoy the similarities, and both of those bands are now some of my favorites.

SHARK TOYS’ OUTSIDER SECT IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM MT.ST.MTN. VISIT SHARK TOYS AT FACEBOOK. COM/SHARKTOYS. 37

GIUDA Interview by Chris Ziegler Illustration by Felipe Flores Giuda are probably the premiere junkshop glam-slash-rock ‘n’ roll band—with emphasis on the “slash” part, cuz these guys are just merciless live—on the planet. They’ve got plenty of inspiration from the post-“Baby Come Back” Equals—the era when Eddy Grant was the king of crushing but catchy riffs—and the heaviest of Sweet-style pre-punk glam guitar rockers, as well as a world-class depth of knowledge about the very many unjustly unknown bands that slipped through the cracks between Bowie/Bolan and the first infamous TV appearance of the Sex Pistols. They know their history for sure, but they don’t play like a bunch of professors—at their recent packed Long Beach show, they were positively relentless, delivering a spot-on Move cover (“California Man,” a gift to the locals?) and making Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” sound like Cock Sparrer. Their newest Speaks Evil album is one of their best and the lead single “Roll The Balls” is all set to punch a permanent hole in your head. Rhythm, riffs and rock ‘n’ roll—does there need to be anything else?

How would you explain Giuda to Americans? Our 70s glam and protopunk was a lot different than the European version. We have plenty of bands ripping off the Stooges now but hardly anybody trying to follow in the footsteps of the Equals or Slade or something.

We’re a modern band: we learned from the past, shaped our sound and brought it all into the present day. We had our influences, going deep into the 60s and early 70s: bands like the Equals, Slade, Third World War and the so called ‘Junk Shop Glam Rock’ with bands like Rats and Hector. Then all the Aussie bands such as Marcus Hook Roll Band, the punk rock of Slaughter & The Dogs and so on. TI guess most people coming to our concerts are aware of what we play, the way we sound like. We’ve been lucky enough to have a solid fan-base—they did catch really soon what we were trying to do. Do we really have to explain American people something about rock ‘n’ roll? It seems some people really enjoyed our concerts, so, come to see us, don’t miss the chance, we aren’t often around the US! There are a couple different types of glam/ rock/proto-punk bands from the original junkshop glam era. There are the ones with the crazy costumes and fancy hair—Iron Virgin—and the tough black-t-shirtand-denim ones—Crushed Butler—and then the ones that were just studio guys that barely ever played out and probably dressed in button-up shirts and ties (Nicky Bulldog?) … where does Giuda fit in? If you were around in 1975, who would you have wanted to hang out with and why?

We had fun wearing platform boots for ‘Roll the Balls’ video, but we perfectly know it’s not 1974, and we think of ourselves as a modern band with our own dressing and music style.

Of course we’d hang out with Suzi Quatro!

How much of a role did the Internet play in bringing this style of music back to the light? I feel like it started with the Velvet Tinmine comp, but without Purepop and Crazeekid and your own Proudfoot Sound … maybe it would’ve faded. What keeps glam and protopunk so alive online? What keeps it alive for you?

Everything has started with those compilations and blogs. They played a fundamental role on 38

putting again the light on a certain kind of sound that the most had left behind. I think that also Giuda gave their contribution.

Nowadays it’s pretty funny to listen to Alvin Stardust’s ‘My Coo Ca Choo’ in many DJs set. If it was all just about doing homework we would not spending all this time and years touring and playing and sharing our passion for this music. Rock ’n’ roll fascination has nothing to do with the past and to think how wonderful were the good old times—it’s all about the future, to listen those great albums, let them change your life and think you have to do something based on those insights.

That’s why anybody in the entire world could just dig it in a question of seconds—you can’t catch most of other music styles in a matter of seconds. And that’s why we listen to these records the same way when we started to make music—it’s still exciting. And to discover new obscure bands and to bring this sound into modern times and make it fresh and new it’s even better.

Why did this sound fade away? Even now, it’s still more underground than 70s punk or 60s garage or 80s hardcore. How did something that was so internationally popular in the 70s become so obscure by the 2010s, and is it coming back?

For many critics and people buying albums, from the late 60s to punk there was nothing significant in the music scene. In Italy for example they privileged a more ‘intellectual’ and ‘sophisticated’ music, especially prog rock bands, and bands like Slade and T. Rex have always been considered junk. The truth is that after those super bands of the 60s, these glam rock acts have been precisely those bands bringing rock ’n’ roll back to its basics. The fact is that their influence has been fundamental to the punk movement, both in the UK and in the U.S.A. I do not know why there has not been a glam revival and it is something that we do not care. As I said we have treasured that musical baggage, but we do not feel at all a revival band. Weren’t the Stones into rhythm ’n’ blues but trying to make something different and new with it? That is all true. And we like to make people discover some history of this sound, but it’s not our priority. What we really want to do is to push it into the future and play some awesome rock ’n’ roll,

and those connections—being fans of those bands—really come easy to make for us.

Who would win in a no-holds-barred riff rock ‘n’ roll battle and why: Eddy Grant, Vanda/Young or Mike Chapman/Nicky Chinn?

They were all great and different between them. Eddy Grant was a great song writer and his guitar riffs sound perfect in their uniqueness, Chinn and Chapman … in addition to writing lots of hits they were also great producers. Vanda and Young wrote tons of songs for different artists, and also for their own studio projects. They were great producers—AC/DC—and also successful musicians with the Easybeats. To choose just one of them is too difficult since each one of them are so important for us.

If you could pry apart any of your favorite bands of the 70s and pick out members to make the best possible band ever, who would you get? There were so many musicians in this era who never got their due. Who would you want to have made famous?

To build up the best band ever we’d choose these guys: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. For sure the Jook deserved much more success. They were one of the most underrated band of all time.

Saturday nights are very important in this style of music. So many bands have ‘Saturday night’ songs—even Giuda on the first album! What do you all do on Saturday nights? Is it like ‘Roll The Balls’ says: ‘They ask in interviews, if I like drugs or I like booze / but I don’t dig that scene / I’m in love with aspirin!’

The lyrics is ‘but I’m not deep in sin / cuz I’m in love with aspirin !’ We almost spend every Saturday playing. We are constantly on tour since 2013, more or less. Sometimes we need some aspirin, even if it’s Saturday night ...

What was the first Giuda tour of the U.S. like? What did you do to win people over when they’d never seen or heard you before?

How long did it take them to sing along with your songs? What disgusting food or drink did Americans give you that you had to pretend to enjoy out of politeness? I assume … Taco Bell?

First Giuda tour was in 2012 and 2013, East Coast and Midwest. Since the first gig we had great feeling with the US audience! Many people already knew our songs and it was really exciting to hear them sing along with us—we were really surprised. Everyone is so friendly everywhere here in the States and really make us feel like we are at home. And it’s not a way to be complacent and not to displease anyone, but we feel very comfortable everywhere here.

It’s hard to eat something good and healthy when you are constantly on tour, especially if you want to eat something simple, with no dressing and sauces! We never tried Taco Bell, and I think we won’t.

How many times have you come to California? What records do you hope to find while you’re over here? Maybe a Berlin Brats test press in some neglected bargain bin somewhere?

We’ve been in the West Coast back in the days with our first band, Taxi. We made few gigs around California, Arizona and Nevada.

There’s tons of stuff we would like to buy, and we’ve been already lucky to find something like Canyon’s ‘Top Of The World’, Brat’s ‘Not Quite Right’ and the bubblegum gem ‘Patty Cake’ by the Yummies. For sure we will spend some of our day off for more records shopping.

What new things did you try on the Speaks Evil album? And why did you call it Speaks Evil? Is that the logical progression for a third album: sees evil, hears evil … speaks evil?

Before entering the studio we make a lot of preproduction work with our producer Danilo Silvestri. That helps us to make the songs sound exactly how we wanted. ‘Speaks Evil’ is much more ‘no frills’ than our past releases.

It’s basically ‘just two guitars playing,’ just like when we play live. You can’t find in the album a massive use of overdubs and I think it’s evident that there’s much more awareness in the songwriting, which has resulted in songs that are more flowing and compact. It’s a raw record, even if we didn’t lost the melodic vein of the past albums. I think the title really fits!

GIUDA’S SPEAKS EVIL IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM BURNING HEART. VISIT GIUDA AT GIUDA.NET. INTERVIEW

If you don’t know Lolipop Records’ Wyatt Blair, here’s a simple introduction: if you like things like rock, pop, fun, guitars or being alive, you already have (or you need!) a copy of Blair’s Banana Cream Dream, which finally came out on vinyl last year after original issue on (of course) cassette. And if you liked Banana Cream Dream, you better strap on your fingerless gloves and tighten up your headband because Blair’s coming album Point Of No Return is gonna take you somewhere you’ve never been before. In this interview, we call it ‘montage rock’ because that’s what it is: in every scene of dramatic character evolution in every VHS B-movie from the late 80s, there’s a song that plays that makes you think everything is possible, and that’s the sound and feel that Blair zeroed in on for this album.

This isn’t yacht rock or even yacht punk—as he says, it’s not a joke, even if sounds funny. (Although from a production standpoint, it’s downright fascinating: jaguar growling sample? Absolutely.

Cracking whip sample? Let’s use two! Bleaked-out Zevon style song about soul-sucking L.A. life? Yes, with steel drums!) Instead, it’s a pop album pushed to the limit: Thin Lizzy chasing the Top Gun soundtrack through high-G aerobatics, lightning-struck by hook after harmonic hook. Some albums seem like they should be movies; Point Of No Return will make your own actual life feel like a movie ... if you’ve got the guts to let it.

Why does this record sound the way it does?

Because this is not a style a lot of people are messing with right now.

I didn’t have a real game plan. I really like pop music; I’ve always liked pop music. It’s almost like when I did Banana Cream Dream, my whole goal was like, ‘I’m not gonna use one effect. I’m not gonna use a fucking guitar pedal, I’m not gonna use shit. I’m just gonna plug my guitar into my tape machine.’ At the time, all these bands—there were just too many effects and pedals and like … trippiness.

I want to make the most basic-sounding rock record—see if I can do it. It was more of a test to myself—how far in that direction I could go? And then for this, it was like … I don’t feel much heart in music anymore sometimes. I mean, there’s bands out there that have heart, obviously. But at the time I was writing these songs, I got really into anthem rock—like, arena rock. I just really like what it fucking embodies. It makes me wanna put a fist up in the air, like, ‘Fuck yeah!’ Like I feel something.

I was like, ‘Man, I want to make a real, honest record.’

That’s interesting because this sound is supposedly the opposite of honest—it’s so produced and over-the-top. I feel like when people think about music that sounds honest to them, they’ll think of like really spare folk or raw punk or something. Not this rocked-out phasered-out sound. What about this sound to you felt like it had heart?

All of it starts with like … if something makes me smile or laugh, I’m attracted to that.

I’ve always been attracted to funny things.

I just like funny shit. I was listening to a lot of Kenny Loggins, and I was like, ‘This is fucking hilarious!’ Like, ‘This is fucking awesome.’ I couldn’t stop listening to it. The Top Gun soundtrack was a huge inspiration to me. That was the biggest inspiration to me for that record, really. My friend Louis [Filliger] actually showed me the ‘Playing With The Boys’ song years ago, and it put the biggest smile on my face. I was crying laughing: ‘This 40

is the best song I’ve ever heard.’ And from there, I just started listening to so much of that—Kenny Loggins and like Whitesnake and all this shit. I was like ... something about this music makes me wanna go fuckin’ do shit.

Like jump on your dirtbike and go rescue the Karate Kid just when he’s about to be defeated?

Exactly. I wanna break some bricks and fucking run. I feel like the music runs through my body so quickly.

You know what this is? It’s montage rock.

This whole album is designed to soundtrack a montage of you rapidly improving your life. [laughs] I guess, yeah. I really didn’t have any specific influence. Even at the time, I wasn’t listening to Thin Lizzy or any of that shit. It was just Kenny Loggins, Top Gun, Whitesnake … I bought a Metal Zone pedal kind of as a joke that I found for like twenty bucks. And this drum machine that I had, I was just using that and I made some demos, and I was just, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna go out to Arizona for two weeks, and knock out as much as I can.’ I did some vocals here, and then I mixed at Lolipop. I had some friends play on it. It’s the only record I’ve ever written where I co-wrote a song [with Louis Filliger.] We randomly wrote that song together: ‘I’ll just throw it on the record. Why not?’ This record was very, very spur of the moment. When I write songs, I’ll try and write a verse and a chorus. And when I have a verse and a chorus, I’m like, ‘I have a song!’ But I don’t actually sit down and construct that song and add bridges … like this record, I tried my hardest to have the best pre-choruses I could. I want all the prechoruses to be better than the choruses, you know? I’d never done that before, so it was like, ‘Alright, how am I going to do this?’ I sat down and figured it out, literally the moment that the song was being recorded—I just figured it out. ‘I have a verse and a chorus, and I’ll figure out how to smash ‘em together once the mic is in front of me.’ And I just do that. It

WYATT BL Interview by Chris Ziegler Photography by Ben Rice

INTERVIEW

LAIR INTERVIEW

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was supposed to be done a long time ago. The only reason it took me so long is like, I got back to L.A. from recording in Arizona, and I just got so bogged down with, you know, work. I seriously didn’t touch it for a year. It was just sitting on my computer.

So Lolipop Records prevented this from coming out on Lolipop Records?

Totally, man!

Did you found Lolipop? Or co-found it?

I started it. I really wanted to put out comedy on cassette. I was getting really into standup comedy, and that’s why the misspelling is LOL—like ‘laugh out loud.’ No one got it.

What a revelation!

But it was way harder for me to figure out how to put out comedy, so I ended up putting out my friends’ bands for fun. And then it just has been bands. But the intention was … it was really a joke. It wasn’t supposed to be a serious record label. I don’t know how to run a business, I don’t know how to use Photoshop—I still don’t use Photoshop, I use Pages. Every cassette we do I make on Pages.

When you were first doing Lolipop, how much were you personally doing?

I was doing it all myself. It was so fucking spur of the moment. This all started in my parents’ garage when I was like, nineteen. I had a desk in there. My parents kind of let me have the garage—that was my spot, and I had all my posters everywhere and my drum set.

It was like my man cave. I remember being so fucking bored. I didn’t go out, really. I just recorded all day and night, and my friends would come over and we’d record more shit, and I was like, ‘There needs to be an outlet for all of this.’ I just drew a lollipop on a piece of paper and I took a picture of it and I made a Facebook page. ‘Oh. Alright. It’s done.’ It’s always been an open door, and there’s been people that have come in and helped.

An open garage door.

Exactly. I’ve always had a yes mentality.

Like in improv—‘Yes, and … ?’

Honestly … I feel weird saying it, but it’s like a joke that hasn’t reached the punchline yet or something?

Better a joke that hasn’t reached the punchline than to be a joke that doesn’t have a punchline.

I’m searching for that. I think the confusion is what makes it so real. We only care about the music. I don’t like anyone even knowing that I run it. I’ve booked Lolipop tours and did merch with bands and I played, and people were like, ‘Oh, you’re a Lolipop band!’ ‘Yeah.

A Lolipop band.’ They had no idea, and I love it. I don’t tell them, and I don’t want to tell them. Who gives a shit? Like, the heart—the logo is who we are. I’m just helping do all the shit. [laughs] So how do you deal with the split personality aspect of doing all the label things for all the other bands and sort of melting into the crowd, and then all of a sudden releasing a solo album that is very extremely ‘you.’

This isn’t like …. a shy record.

That’s the hardest thing. It’s like business and pleasure, or business and creativity—I still haven’t found the right balance, you know?

I’ll go months where it’s Lolipop all day and night, 24/7. I don’t even get to think about picking up a guitar. Then I’ll feel like, ‘Oh, what am I doing? I write songs, too! What the 42

fuck! I need to get all these songs out of me.’

And then I’ll go a few weeks where I’m always on a guitar trying to record. I don’t have the mentality like ‘I’ll do a little bit of that and a little bit of this.’ It’s always been, ‘I’m gonna fucking put my whole fucking self into this, or I’m not going to do it at all.’ This record that I’m coming out with has taken me two years to make just for that reason. I recorded it in Arizona at my family’s house. My dad plays drums, so he has a drum room and he let me set up my shit in there. It was a process. I know that I’m done with the record when I already hate it, so … I’m done with it. I could rant on about bands that are all self-confident in their music. It’s like, you’re not doing something right, then—you need to hate your music.

That’s how it works.

You say that when you first heard albums with this sound, you were laughing, and I can see that happening here, too: ‘Wyatt’s so funny! This is so 80s and stuff!’ But listening to the actual songs, this seems like a pretty serious record. Maybe your most serious?

That’s the problem. That’s my biggest fear. I’m really self-conscious about this record, to be honest, but I felt the same way when I put out Banana Cream Dream—but less because I didn’t care as much about shit back then.

Banana Cream Dream was supposed to be a joke—really purposefully a joke, so I didn’t feel weird putting it out because I thought it would just be pretty obvious. But obviously, songwriting is a really big passion of mine.

I’m really serious about songwriting. To me, those songs were the first songs I ever wrote, and I’m serious about them, but the concept was supposed to be comedy. This record was a similar deal, but the songs are serious to me. They’re not funny songs. The sound is funny, and I kind of wanted to do this as kind of a giant ‘fuck you’ to everyone—not outwardly, but you know ... I’m trying to write songs here, and if you can’t see that because it sounds funny to you, then it won’t make sense. I’m not a super crazy meticulous musician. I’m not some crazy-talented guy. I just really like writing songs, and I really tried to push myself with this record. Musically and writing-wise. I’m scared people aren’t going to go that deep because they’re just going to be like, ‘That sounds funny!’ And they’re going to move on: ‘Oh, it’s a joke.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, it is a joke, but…’

This record has heart, like you said. You can tell you’re singing about things you care about.

That was the whole goal. I don’t like super ethereal lyrics. I’ve never been into that. I’m not gonna fucking fly in the clouds and pick pearls in fucking trees and shit. I just wanna talk.

No hobbit rock?

I wanna hear about a song where someone got their heart broken, or like, shit’s going on and they’re really upset about something. That’s where I’m like, ‘Yeah! Fuck yeah! Yes, you get it, we get it ... this record makes sense to me, it speaks to me.’ I’ve always been more attracted to that kind of shit. I wanted to harp on that big time on this one. I don’t think it came across as much with Banana Cream Dream because it was songs about girls and hanging out and shit. But this, I was like, ‘I’m gonna

dig a little deeper.’

I mean, just the way it starts: ‘In this world, win or lose, day or night, only the strong survive.’ It’s definitely montage rock. I can see Wyatt tightening his headband and cracking his knuckles in his fingerless gloves.

But it’s also kind of what you want from a pop song—it’s the underdog becoming strong and going out to overcome.

Exactly. That’s the whole point.

People want a little heroism in their songs, because they want to feel that heroic things can happen, you know? Or that they can be heroic too?

Yeah—I just want to make people smile, you know? I’m not trying to sell out shows and do all this crazy shit. If someone just fucking smiles and they sing back those lyrics and they feel something: ‘Yeah, fucking only the strong survive!’ I’ve been struggling a lot on a personal level with depression and anxiety and all this shit, and this was my way get past that.

I don’t know how to describe it. I’m shitty at articulating myself.

Wanna put on a guitar and sing it to me? [laughs] It’s supposed to be a pick-me-up.

Honestly, it’s totally a self-indulgent record.

All my records are self-indulgent, and I’m totally just like, ‘Yo, I’m fucking depressed, this shit makes me laugh—I hope it makes you laugh, too.’ Hopefully I can help other people out.

Is there a difference between the Wyatt Blair on this record and the Wyatt Blair who’s walking around Echo Park every day?

Absolutely. On the record, I try to embody this person that speaks for the people.

The pop hero.

I kind of want people to not like the record when it comes out because it doesn’t sound relevant—it doesn’t sound cool to what’s going on right now. That’s always been my goal.

To make records people don’t like?

I want to make records you can’t put your finger on: ‘Oh yeah, it sounds like fucking Beach Fossils.’ There’s not enough of this shit going on, and it makes me laugh—maybe I should try that. And I just try that, you know?

I’d be myself but I’m not like that in real life, and I thought it’d be funny to write anthem-y songs. And I don’t know—it helped me, man! It was fun making it, I had a good time recording it, and I hope people have a good time listening to it.

What does pop music mean to you? I get the sense it’s not just hooks and harmony.

It’s more of an escape. I think it’s funny because the things I enjoy in life the most are things that I shove into the holes of my body.

Music is like fucking my head constantly, and I don’t want to get fucked by some giant black fucking dark death metal-y shit.

You want a little romance.

It’s like as you get older, women get pickier with men, men get pickier with women … people get pickier with music and food and diet and shit like that, and for me, the real world depresses me too much. I just need something that makes me smile—something that’s real, that I can feel. To me, that’s pop music, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. I feel like that’s how pop music is pop music, and I think that’s why it’s so successful—a lot of people are just fucking unhappy, you know? I really feel like the general public is just fucking

upset. Why listen to upsetting music when you’re upset? Like that’s why people drink and people, when they celebrate, they go eat. It’s an escape. It’s a way to comfort yourself and feel good and get away from all the real world shit. So that’s why I’ve always been attracted to it. When I was younger I thought pop music was lame. I was like, ‘Oh, fuck pop music, I’m never going to make a pop record.’

‘Pop music is popular music!’

Exactly. That’s why punk exists so heavily in teenage kids, you know? It’s anti-parents, antieverything. But when you get older, you’re like, ‘Man, I can make more of a statement of “fuck everything going on!” by making a pop record.’ It’s more punk to me, making the most badass pop record than making the most badass punk record.

You mentioned ‘arena rock’ before—what’s the fundamental definition of arena rock?

It can bring thousands of people together.

It’s like singing that shit where it’s like, ‘Fuck, this feels good. We’re fucking doing shit.’ I don’t know how to describe that feeling. I’ve never really had it in real life, it’s just ... I feel it with records, you know? When I listen to a Thin Lizzy record, I’m like, ‘FUCK! That motherfucker ... he gets it. He’s talking directly to me.’

Are records the only reason you know this is a real feeling?

Totally. That’s it for me, man. That’s it. All I do is listen to records. I don’t go to fucking live shows ... it doesn’t really matter to me. The band could suck. I don’t judge a band on their live shows. Okay, you just wasted thirty minutes of my time, but that’s okay—I’m going to buy your record, and that I’ll listen to the rest of my life. What you want people to hear is the record, you know? It’s like … if you’re going to buy a fucking kitchen table, would you want to buy it at some woodworking festival where ten thousand people are watching this guy quickly make a kitchen table, going, ‘Here you go, you can have this!’ Or would you be like, ‘Dude, why don’t you take your time and make it the way you want it to look and feel and then I’ll be interested in buying it because then I can actually use this kitchen table for years with my family and I can pass it down to my grandkids.’ To me, that’s what a record is. Why go watch a band, you know?

Underneath all these lights, it’s uncomfortable, the band’s on tour and has been traveling and hasn’t slept … I mean, fuck, you can’t expect it to sound the way the band wants it to sound, really. I want the record. Just give me the record, you know? I want to listen to it with my eyes closed, when I go to sleep, when I’m making breakfast, when I’m drinking coffee or chillin’...

This sounds like records to you are more like literature or film. It’s about the finished project, not the process. Not like a play, where it can change every time, but about the complete and unchanging final work.

Exactly. That’s a perfect way of describing that, you know? I like plays, I like Broadway—that’s cool, you know? And I like seeing bands live.

But it’s not the same to me. It doesn’t get me that same fucking high as having that record.

What makes you collect records? How does it connect to the music you make?

I don’t view my collection as a whole collection.

I go band to band. For instance, my latest INTERVIEW

obsession has been Thin Lizzy for the past year, and all I’ve been buying are Thin Lizzy records. I don’t buy anything else right now.

Now I have every fucking Thin Lizzy record.

I don’t give a fuck about any other band. Like … it’s Thin Lizzy. That’s it. But I know that’ll die because this has been the same with me for ten years, and then it’ll be some other band.

I’ll try and get their whole discography and really get into ‘em. I like hearing the progress from the first record to the second record to the third record. To me, that’s the story of someone’s life. It’s harder with bands that don’t have a huge discography, which is cooler to me because it’s even more mysterious: ‘Whoa, they have one record? That’s the one record that they have and it’s amazing! Holy shit!’

They came from nowhere and went back to nowhere. Who were they? No one knows.

Exactly! There are so many bands that only put out 45s: ‘What? These are the only songs?’

How have those kind of records affected your personality? It’s encouraging that so much great music has been made, but it’s discouraging so little of it got any recognition at the time.

That’s the thing, though. It’s sad to me that when it comes to a record, especially back in the 80s and the 70s and the 90s, even, it was more luck or you had to know the right person at the right time. You had to play that show for that one guy to be there.

The coked up A&R guy: ‘You got it, man!

You got it!’

Exactly! It was so old school back then, but it was that was how it was. And if you didn’t get a deal or you were from some podunk town and didn’t move to the city, no one gave a shit. And it’s still like that now; the bands that don’t have a PR agent or a booking agent,

like some bands just putting things out on Bandcamp … people don’t care. People want to be spoon-fed this shit, you know? I feel like for most musicians, you shouldn’t expect anything. I don’t think people should expect anything in general in life; I think that’s just a poor way of living, always expecting shit.

If you’re just making music and you don’t expect anything, then if anything comes from it, it’s good. That’s always been my mentality.

I feel like it’s a lot of bands’ mentalities. A lot of those undiscovered bands are just dudes writing songs. They didn’t care about a record deal. And then some dudes like you and me found out and were like, ‘This is the fucking coolest shit ever, and we gotta reissue this somehow.’ They’re like, ‘That’s cool, thanks guys! Those are some songs I wrote back when I was a teenager or whatever!’

You collect, make music, run a label, book the tours—do you ever feel like you know too much? There must be a lot less mystery left in how music actually gets made.

Well that’s the thing. That’s what inspired this record to be what it is. I wanted it to be the anti-everything. Music’s selfish, man. That’s the dark part. I’ll spend all this money on records and I’ll listen to all this music like, ‘Fuck, this is just some dude pissed off.’ It’s all ego, you know? And it’s fine—that’s just how it is. I mean, the art is there. And there’s good that comes out of it. And for me, selfishly— honestly—I was just like, ‘I want to make a record that doesn’t make sense to anyone. I want it to just be funny and real.’ I almost wanted to shock people. Instead of shocking like, ‘I’m going to take these pictures of myself with fucking G-strings on and blood and fucking all this …’ Shock people with the most basic four-chord songs, you know? But

it might not even be shocking.

It’s definitely unexpected.

I purposely wanted to do that, but at the same time, it’s been a long time since I have put out a record, so a lot’s happened. Banana Cream Dream came out in 2012, so it’s been four years. A lot happens in four years. It’s a long time for me, at least. I want every single one of my records to be totally different. I have a whole other record that’s all acoustic guitar and folk, and I have a dance record I really want to do—like club music, you know? I don’t really try to genre-specify myself. I really like every kind of music, like, genuinely. For me it’s more like building a character, if that makes sense. I don’t know if this is because I’m a record collector, and each band to me seems like this cool character. I want every one of my records to be different. Almost like what David Bowie did. You can tell he’s not trying to put himself in a box and do the same shit over and over and over. I just want to push myself. I love early nineties dance music. Can I make an early nineties dance record, and can I make the best one ever? That keeps running in my mind. I don’t give a fuck if my fans don’t ... I don’t even have any fans, so it doesn’t matter anyways. [laughs] I don’t care. I’m just going to keep doing myself. I like artists that do that, and I like bands that change.

Is there an upside to the point of no return?

If no one cares what you do, that means you can do anything you want at all.

That’s what I’m trying to do. It just sucks, because I feel like a lot of people don’t take me seriously.

You look so cheerful on the record covers.

I don’t know. Every artist wants their record to be heard, and I hope this record does something. I hope people can hear it. Maybe

it’ll bring some smiles to people’s faces, maybe I’ll get a fan base. I’d rather have fans that get what I’m doing, even if that takes longer to do, rather than having this really big fan base and being like, ‘Fuck, I wish I could do this kind of record, but I know it would never fly.’

Is this why it’s called Point Of No Return?

Cuz you don’t wanna go backwards?

Louis came up with the name. The past two years have kind of been shitty for me, and I’ve been just dealing with growing up and … you know, life, however you want to put it. I felt like in the process of making this record I was losing my fucking mind being in the city. Like … I fucking hate L.A. And really L.A. has a big undercurrent with this record. The song ‘Cruel World’ is about L.A. It’s about the entertainment business.

Moving to the city and you don’t look good enough, you don’t sound good enough—it’s a cruel world, and we all live in it. And you know … only the strong survive. I’ve reached the point of no return here, and this record came out of it. It’s just me spinning in my head in my apartment. How can I make a record and live in the city and pay an arm and a leg to live here? I don’t have a PR lady, so no one’s gonna hear this record if I come out with it. I’m at the fucking point of no return, so I’m just gonna title the record Point Of No Return. [laughs] So not just a point of no return, but a point of no financial return too?

Point of no everything return!

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ALBUM REVIEWS

57

COMICS

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DISTRIBUTION MAP

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FILM THE LOVE WITCH

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Curated by Tom Child

by Tiffany Anders

THE INTERPRETER

ANARCHY!: THE McLAREN WESTWOOD GANG

DJ JOHN BASIL a.k.a. HERU AVENGER

by Kristina Benson

by Gabriel Hart

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WAYBACK MACHINE

by Ron Garmon

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LIVE PHOTOS Edited by Debi Del Grande HEALTH at COACHELLA

by DEBI DEL GRANDE

ALBUM REVIEWS complexity that makes ‘Double Ecstasy’ stand out. This EP could easily be one of the top, if not, the top underground hip-hop releases of the summer.

—Desi Ambrozak

ANTWON Double Ecstasy EP Anticon A true pioneer of the genre, Antwon somehow never fails to innovate and his latest EP Double Ecstasy is no exception. The beats are on point and the production is at a level beyond his previous recordings thanks to Lars Stalfors who is known for his work with Mars Volta and Health but who interestingly enough has not done a hip-hop album up to this point.

You don’t see much of the softer more introspective lyrics that he explored in ‘Heavy Hearted in Doldrums’ in this one outside of the opening track ‘Luv’ which delves into the more depressing aspects of the strip club experience.

Instead the lyricism is more in line with the ‘Dying in the Pussy’ vibe and the instrumentation ranges from the airy, washed-out feel that Antwon fans will already be familiar with to a heavier and more aggressive intensity to match the raw style of rhyming. The songs have a distinctly club-oriented feel but with very prominent dramatic changes in tempo and stark contrasting musical elements that have the effect of adding a layer of

ADULT BOOKS

cheerfully down-tempo with soulful harmonies. ‘Evil Cowboy’ is one of the more upbeat tracks featuring a guest appearance by Brandon Cordoba of the jazz-fusion group, Katalyst. Check out the CD and digital download out this July with a vinyl version—their first ever record release—coming later this year on El Relleno Records.

—Desi Ambrozak

CARLOS NINO & Friends Flutes, Echoes, It’s All Happening Leaving Records

Running From the Blows Lolipop When Adult Books debuted their self-titled EP—one of the first releases on the upstart Echo Park indie label, Lolipop Records—the sound seemed to have more in common with lo-fi, laid back, party punk contemporaries like FIDLAR and Together Pangea than with some of their more psychedelic label mates. However, four years later on their full-length debut, the band that took their name from X’s first single shows off an evolved style which sees them striking into post-punk and heavy garage/psych territory with confidence. Channeling darker influences than many of their peers, the Lincoln Heights trio incorporates ‘80s-tinged synth lines, dusky guitar tones, and a more somber vocal approach to great effect into many of these new songs. All the while, they keep their

ALBUM REVIEW SUBMISSIONS

L.A. RECORD invites all local musicians to send music for review­—anything from unreleased MP3s and demos to finished full albums. Send digital to fortherecord@ larecord.com and physical to:

P.O. Box 21729 Long Beach, CA 90801 If you are in a band and would like to advertise your release in L.A. RECORD, email advertise@larecord.com

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strong propulsive rhythms intact, and pepper the album with hints of the fuzzy, reverb drenched psychedelia that has been so successful for many of their friends. Perhaps Running From The Blows’ only weakness as a record is the stark difference between the band’s more psychedelic songs and their post-punk songs.

It’s interesting to hear the band cover so much ground across one album, but the contrast makes the album feel unfocused at times. Regardless, Running From The Blows is a fantastic debut. It’s an exciting release for a band that seems uninterested in remaining static and instead seems curious to challenge themselves and push their sound wherever it might go.

—Simon Weedn

BRIGHTENER “When the Lights Come Up” New Professor

Brainstory self-titled EP El Relleno Records All five tracks on the latest EP from Brainstory have the laid back, easygoing vibes for which the threepiece has come to be known for, but with a heavier jazz influence than in previous recordings. The music is a mellow mix of folk rock, and psych pop, but with a distinctly late 60’s early 70’s vibe thanks in part to the minimalist style of their producer Eduardo Arenas of Chicano Batman. Despite the obvious influence of Chicano Batman, Brainstory still manages to distinguish themselves with several variations in structure and themes. The songs are all very chill but melodic with wah-wah guitar, loungy vocals, plus a distinctly Latin touch and minimal effects.

It’s like a very lo-fi combination of Santana, Jack Johnson, Shuggie Otis, and Jonathan Richman but with dreamy overtones in the instrumentation and lyrics. ‘Fruitless Tree’ really stands out with catchy riffs and upbeat rhythms but most of the tracks are more folky and

We live a world of contrasts. You could be sitting in a beautiful place and yet long for something that is out of reach. Brightener channels this feeling with songs that fill up a well with lightness, freeing feelings that overflow—not overtake—everything that they comes in contact with. This lightness is juxtaposed against a melancholic hopefulness that makes the music charming and easy to sink into, and the two-song single “When the Lights Come Up” effectively pulls on your heartstrings. The title track starts with a sunny wah-wah guitar riff, setting the stage for Sturgeon to sing about meeting someone you love that you know you can never be with.

Once the first round of the chorus comes in the song breaks into full gear. It’s reminiscent of early work by Ben Gibbard and groups like Coconut Records. The B-side “Haven’t You Noticed” takes a different approach: it’s a little slower, and more delicate, with electronic drum machine beats and simple guitar strumming. The songs on this release have just the contrast and cohesion to show the breadth and talent this group has. Required listening.

—Zachary Jensen

Many people know Carlos Niño from his work as a radio DJ and tastemaker, hosting various KPFK shows over the years, as well as being one of the founders of Dublab; but some may not be familiar with the fact that he is also quite the prolific music producer as well as a musician himself with quite the resume under his belt.

The music under his own moniker takes reference from his love of traditional music around the globe, jazz, electronic, and a touch of hip-hop and classical elements to create something wholly unique and experiential. His latest release Flutes, Echoes, It’s All Happening! is an expansion on the previous elements of music, yet furthers the exploration. The album functions like a spiritual journey similar to what Alice Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, and many other jazz greats did in the past, but expounds on that with the trajectories that contemporary artists like Kamasi Washington and Flying Lotus are doing for music today. More than that, it also feels like the soundtrack to a mythical tale that is unfolding in the mind of Niño. While so many musical elements are being explored all at once, you would think that the album would have issues with cohesion, however this is far from the case; tracks like “Metamaravilla” with it’s wind chimes, nature sounds, flutes, and classical string arrangements flow perfecting into songs like “It’s All Happening” that is more hip hop influenced with guest beats by Madlib and strings

by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.

ALBUM REVIEWS

Speaking of guest appearances the “friends” that make up this project read like an all-star cast of who’s who in today’s music scene across many genres. Niño has definitely put his curating skills to great use in assembling a group a talented musicians in order to create a solid album once again.

—Zachary Jensen

COLLEEN GREEN

Loud and aggressive haunting tracks like “Seis Seis Seis” and downright thumping songs like “Death Valley Boogie” remind us quickly of what it was we loved about this band when they first came out a few years back; the new and gorgeously exciting execution is what makes you excited about what this band is doing and could do in the future. On songs like “Pink Radiation” we hear the Death Valley Girls whisper in the dark while “I’m a Man Too” is an an opus to feminist thoughts screamed in the light of the day. “If you’re a man I’m a man too!” is the message here and it works, delivered through fuzz guitars and vintage drums. Death Valley Girls’ new album is a killer display of how loud and brutal rock ‘n’ roll should be but also how sweet it can sound.

—Daniel Sweetland

DEATH VALLEY GIRLS Glow In The Dark Burger Records ALBUM REVIEWS

5 Heavy Psych Sounds

EGYPTIAN LOVER Anthology 1983-1988 Stones Throw This anthology celebration of legendary electro-freak Egyptian Lover wastes no time starting the party and doesn’t let it stop though its four-disc expanse. A throbbing libido and deft scratch hand channeled through five years of electronic manipulation characterize the majority of this collection but there’s a fearless experimentation on each track. His funk heft pumps through as Kraftwerkian beats nimbly skip along, conjuring nearly involuntary movement from the listener’s body.

Robotic voices chant about Egypt on his more famous bangers like “Egypt, Egypt” rooted more in the caricature than the culture, while he pants into syncopated pockets. EL’s sexual joy de vivre licks at the listeners’ ears as he sings to his favorite little freak in the second person — he’s guiding, commanding, demanding, and always directly engaging.

There’s an intoxicating braggadocio that he has maintained throughout his career, and as the relatively chronological collection plays on, it makes the unexpected moments of comparative vulnerability like “I Cry (Night After Night)” refresh-

HAR MAR SUPERSTAR Best Summer Ever Cult Records

GLOBELAMP The Orange Glow Psychedelic Thriftstore/ Wichita

FARFLUNG

self-titled EP Infinity Cat With oohs and ahs and a popinfluenced new production approach, Colleen Green is taking things even further into sing-along territory. The first song kicks in like you want any good indie pop album to start, with simple, fun lyrics like “you could have been the one.”

You know what you’re getting and it’s good. The high point of the album comes on the second song of the album, “Cold Shoulder,” a great rocker with “second chances in the summer sun” imagery and some mean guitars, like if the Ramones and Beach House were jamming in a techno lab somewhere in SD. This album is possibly the strongest 20 minutes of consistent music Colleen Green has put out to date and much like the Ramones and Beach House, it just works so well simplified and stripped back.

—Daniel Sweetland

ing. Flourishes of electric guitars intertwine with synthetic filigree, and while the electro-genre is by nature repetitive, there are enough surprises born of his playfulness as he rides a groove to keep it feeling fresh. This slice of early hip-hop and electro comes from the most fertile era and features the foundational work of a living legend; needless to say, it does not disappoint. ­—Christina Gubala

The pool of psych-rock bands is deep and wide these days. Poke around the sweetly smoky corners of Bandcamp and you’ll find yourself knee-deep in album covers spilling over with skulls, moons, snakes and, of course, voluptuous naked women. It’s all becoming a bit overdone, which makes it that much easier to appreciate underground mainstays like Farflung, an underappreciated L.A. band that’s been plugging in and plugging away for two decades, gathering fans like Henry Rollins and Voivod along the way. The band’s new album 5 is its first full-length album in eight years, and it’s a bracing reminder of why Farflung deserves a higher profile. At once both thunderous and agile, 5 proves this quintet is perfectly capable of seriously subterranean rumbling (“Being Bolled”), shimmering space-rock (“27th Sun”) and everything in between.

That includes deeply krunchy kraut grooves (“Proterozoic”), fuzzed-out alt-rock (“Lupine”) and swirling, primal freakouts (“The Retreat”).

Hell, the alien New Wave of “We Are” sounds like it could soundtrack a Target commercial ... if they have Targets in the smoldering shadowlands of planet Mercury. Farflung also has appearances by members of Queens of the Stone Age, Hawkwind and Eagles of Death Metal on 5, and that’s all fine and good.

But the real story here is the return of Farflung. All hail our new highflyin’ heavy boogie overlords!

—Ben Salmon

The Orange Glow, the first album release on Joel Jerome’s Psychedelic Thriftstore Recordings label, is a consistently engaging genre trip, now getting a worldwide release courtesy Wichita Recordings.

Ranging from gentle coffeehouse vibes (“Artist/Traveler”) to grungy indie rock (“Piece of the Pie”) to stomping psychedelic folk (“Controversial/Confrontational”), the album is unified by Elizabeth Le Fey’s evocative vocals and straightforward poetic lyricism about loss, regret, betrayal, hope and longing, dropping small gems like, “Answers are just questions killing time” or “They same that time heals the wounds but I still feel the same/Sitting on pyramids in my mind, ruins surround us” delivered in Le Fey’s haunting voice, which is smartly allowed to be the star of the show here, frequently multi-tracked and reverbed until she feels like she’s occupying your brain for a bit, occasionally affecting a charmingly mysterious Bert the chimney sweep by way of Pittsburgh accent. In interviews, Le Fey has name checked Elliott Smith, Joanna Newsom, Donovan and Jefferson Airplane as formative inspirations and she wears these influences on her sleeve on The Orange Glow but her use of these sounds has resulted in a deeply personal creative vision. This album is an evolution in her sound from her also impressive but comparatively lo-fi debut, Star Dust, and it will be interesting to see where Globelamp goes from here. ­—Tom Child

Since Bye Bye 17, Har Mar Superstar (a.k.a. Sean Tillman) has been a busy guy: tricking everyone into believing that he was going to be the new touring guitarist for The Replacements, making a cameo in Broad City, and releasing his new album, Best Summer Ever. A twist on the concept album, Best, is meant to be an imagined collection of greatest hits spanning 1950-1985. Given Tillman’s penchant for 60s soul and 80s keyboards, this would seem to ensure a successful realization of said concept. While the album is enjoyable, it’s not a complete bullseye. It starts out promising, with an 80s synth take on Bobby Charles’ “I Hope,” then heads south with the Julian Casablanca-penned “Youth Without Love,” which sounds like a Dexy’s Midnight Runners reject.

The mediocre 80s theme continues with the disco-y “Anybody’s Game” and “It was Only Dancing (Sex).”

The 60s soul throwback “How Did I Get Through The Day” is one of the better tracks, but sees Tillman rehashing 17 with overworked lyrics like “I’m all alone/watching the phone/but you ain’t coming home.” But it’s not all bad. On Best, Tillman has his usual ear for melody and offers more variety than 17, though this “Greatest Hits” album is a little heavy on the 80s. “Haircut,” co-written with Karen O, is a slinky trip back to 70s New York, while “Radiator” is a stripped-down love letter to domesticity in the tradition of “Our House” or “Fixing a Hole.” “Famous Last Words” is a clever, punky tune made up of the deathbed words of Truman Capote and Eugene O’Neill among others, and doo-wop closer “Confidence” is some of Tillman’s most honest songwriting—and his best falsetto yet. ­—Madison Desler

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29. CONTINENTAL ROOM 115 W. Santa Fe Ave. Fullerton 30. ECHO / ECHOPLEX 1822 Sunset Blvd Echo Park 31. DEL MONTE SPEAKEASY 52 Windward Ave Venice Beach 68. MRS. FISH 448 S. Hill St, DTLA 32. THE PROSPECTOR 2400 E. 7th St Long Beach

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS 69. BEDROCK 1623 Allesandro St. Echo Park 45. CAVEMAN VINTAGE 650 N Spring St Chinatown 46. FUTURE MUSIC 5112 York Blvd Highland Park 47. GILMORE MUSIC LONG BEACH 1935 E 7th St Long Beach

33. THE REGENT 448 S Main St, DTLA

48. MCCABE’S 3101 Pico Blvd Santa Monica

17. RECORD JUNGLE 2459 Whittier Blvd Montebello

70. RESIDENT ★ 428 S. Hewitt St. DTLA

CAFES & RESTAURANTS

18. RECORD RECYCLER 17312 Crenshaw Blvd Torrance

34. ROYCE HALL 340 Royce Dr. Westwood

49. CAFE DE LECHE 5000 York Blvd Highland Park

51. LORD WINDSOR COFFEE 1101 E. 3rd St. Long Beach 52. TWO BOOTS PIZZERIA 1818 West Sunset Blvd Echo Park

RETAIL 53. AARDVARK’S 7575 Melrose Ave Melrose 54. BOOK SOUP 8818 Sunset Blvd Hollywood 55. BOOKMAN 840 N Tustin St Orange County 57. FILTH MART 1038 N. Fairfax Ave Melrose 58. FLASHBACKS 465 N Tustin St Orange County 59. THE LAST BOOKSTORE 453 S Spring St, DTLA 60. MADE 236 Pine Ave Long Beach 61. OUT OF VOGUE 109 E. Commonwealth Fullerton 62. PROGRAMME SKATE 2495 E. Chapman Ave Fullerton 63. STICKY RICKS 4539 E. Cesar Chavez Ave. East L.A. 64. STORIES BOOKS & MUSIC 1716 Sunset Blvd Echo Park 71. VIDEOTHEQUE ★ 1020 Mission St. South Pasadena

MOVIE THEATERS 65. CINEFAMILY 611 N Fairfax Ave Los Angeles 66. THE FRIDA CINEMA 305 E 4th St Santa Ana

★ NEW THIS ISSUE!

THE INTERPRETER

DJ JOHNNY BASIL a.k.a. HERU AVENGER

pYramiD plUs “cOmin’ at Ya” (lifewOrlD, 1983) “This is just that straight electro funk. It’s catchy. I’ve been spinning a lot lately so I’ve been into spinning like good time stuff. It might be a little sought-after, I haven’t really checked. I don’t know—it’s just a fun 7”. I might have gotten it at a thrift store.”

“BabY cOme On” seX o’clocK Usa (lOnDOn, 1976)

Curated by Kristina Benson Photography by Stefano Galli DJ Johnny Basil a.k.a. Heru Avenger is one half of Basil & Rogers, a sleazy disco outfit that could (and should! and WILL!) provide the soundtrack for your wildest and most decadent fantasies via their soon to be released 12” on the Forest Jams label. He is also the mastermind behind the Miles Davis-meets-Can free jazz ensemble Baast (full disclosure: I’ve contributed theremin and vocals) and the delirously sleazy proto-punk ‘street rock’ band Kandi Jones. And of course you may know him as the Growlers’ touring DJ or as a part of Rendezvous, and of course he has an impeccable record collection. He joined us to talk about some of the books and records that have influenced him.

DISCO: THE BILL BERNSTEIN PHOTOGRAPHS (BILL BERNSTEIN, REEL ART PRESS, 2015)

“Bill Bernstein was a very on-the-scene nightlife guy, went to all the clubs. Fashion-wise, these pictures are definitely worth more than a thousand words. My favorite picture? Well, there’s so many good ones.

Because it’s all the clubs. It’s not just narrowing in on Studio 54. That’s what makes it cool. There’s so many good photos. Maybe the photo of the couple making out on a net suspended above whatever disco? That one’s up there. Right now I’m sure there is versions of this kind of thing going on but the details are missing—and the characters are missing too. On a whole. There are characters out there, but as a whole? Like this? I don’t know. It’s really interesting, the fashion. I like the mid to late 70s. It’s such a no man’s land with fashion. It’s preppy, too, but you have to understand preppy as like a West Village gay look. You see Halston decadence—that’s the whole thing with disco, it’s a very artificial created environment. Very flamboyant, obviously. For the scene, this is a very good book.”

disco (ALBERT GOLDMAN, HAWTHORN BOOKS, 1978) “I really like Albert Goldman, I love his John Lennon book, which is amazing, because it really breaks down the character in Yoko Ono as well. I highly recommend everyone read that book, and this one as well, because there are great photos, and it treats disco as part of a whole new world. It’s a critical analysis of disco, as well as a breakdown of places that you could have gone. This book came out at the apex. He goes into the background of what the discotheque could be and was. Lots of great photos, of course. It’s an interesting book, the way it’s written. There’s a lot of psychoanalysis in terms of the herding techniques as well—cuz you know, you’re getting people into all kinds of different groups to listen to someone spin records. It analyzes disco almost like a cult, as a religion, and the origins and the way it’s fabricated and put together.”

antonio lopeZ: Fashion, art, seX, and disco (ROger anD MaUriciO PaDilHa, RiZZOli, 2012) “This book is signed by the author! ‘Jamie, I hope you love the book and I hope I get to see you again when we get to L.A. xoxo, Mauricio.’ This was another Amazon score. How I got a signed one, I’ll never know. This guy is very iconic—he launched Jerry Hall, did fashion drawings, definitely Warhol-connected. An illustrator, took photos, did just amazing sketches. On the scene, really highend, and really unbelievable. He had amazing style. I mean, how bitchin is this book? To me his whole body of work just captures every angle perfectly.”

INTERPRETER

“This is from a movie called Sex O’Clock USA. It’s very quintessential deep, soulful disco. Female vocals. I just really love this song, I’m really happy I found this. I think I got it at Rockaway Records a long time ago. What really grabs me are the string arrangements, the vocal arrangement, and the feel. This is super sexy. The lyrics are ‘Baby come on / Give it to your lovin’ daddy.’ And that’s it. That’s what really influences me—the repetition.”

AlVin CasH “TribUte TO MUHammeD Ali (‘GQ’ ROck)” (MIDWAY, 197X) “This is later Alvin Cash. It’s amazing—really Bohannon-like cuz it’s straight on the beat, just hard and amazing. It’s late 70s. There’s some good disco that even goes into the early 80s a tiny bit. It kind of cuts off at about 83, then the good disco gets few and far between. I like disco before it goes full-on sample-based. I’ve been really exploring the late 70s-early 80s disco-dance records, with almost like rap and rhymes but there’s still a band playing on it. I’m really mining that era. I’m also into late 70s go-go, Trouble Funk, all that stuff, especially since I listen to a lot of the Sugar Hill 12”s. It’s still band-oriented. Once again, this one just has repetition, which I like. Simple lyrics: ‘Don’t stop / just rock.’ I don’t need it to tell a story—it’s not supposed to. That’s not its purpose.”

JR FUnk anD tHe lOVe macHine “Feel GOOD, PartY Time” (brass, 1980) “It’s got almost like James Brown-type vocals, but it’s getting into more of the modern sound with the production. Still like real straight, with synths. Very James Brown! It’s all James Brown contests at the end of the day, though. I dig it: ‘Feel good, party time.’ This is 1980, so it’s really telling you what the next direction was going to be. And that’s why I like the early 80s stuff because there’s a lot of this style still happening. But once the new wave came in, it turned more into dance music. And it’s got a sassy little synth line. I like it—it’s kind of modern.”

REVELATION “FEEL IT” (HANDSHAKE, 1980) “This was a thrift store find. The production is amazing. I like the words: ‘Feel it / good vibrations.’ It deals with what I’m dealing with right now with the energy work. And it’s sexy! It’s sophisticated— on a sophisticated tip. Different, too—like classic. It’s got almost like a Philly sound. It’s also catchy. It’s an anthem.”

MICHAEL WILSON “GROOVE IT TO YOUR BODY” (PRELUDE, 1982)

“This one is really great—tough male soul and disco. It’s really stripped down and minimal, with tough guitar lines. It’s got blues changes so it’s really down home, but it’s got a future sound, especially with the drum production and claps. There are horns, a little percussion. Catchy, catchy chorus—I love this! I’m in love with this track for sure. It’s just wicked. It’s a wicked track, but it’s on Prelude so it’s got sophisticated production but it’s deep soul disco-funk. It drives. Big breakdown, badass clav! Pure wicked! In ’82! Surprised my ass.”

IKE STRONG “BOOGIE LAND” (WILLKERR, 1981) “It’s strange, minimalist, menacing—almost sound-tracky. Hard disco, very funky. I love it! This I think I got at the swap meet.

Classic soulful deep soul vocals. It’s all about repetition. It’s got the blues change. The flip is the instrumental, which is good about these 12s. I always like to get the instrumental if you can. It’s hypnotic!”

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Kevin Morby’s music is steeped in American tradition: He sings with a Dylan-like wear and wisdom, and, as we hear throughout Singing Saw, he uses country-politan choruses, gospel-influenced backing vocals, and layers of fuzz guitars to bring his songs alive. He’s had a prolific career, from his two albums with the Babies to his own two solo albums, and Singing Saw finds him with a seasoned artist’s sense of stylistic balance. “I Have Been to the Mountain” tempers an apocalyptic journeyman lyric with mariachi horns; “Water” has the structure of a pre-war ballad but makes room for a choir. Morby’s voice anchors the disparate sounds, but the ideas are also cohered by Morby’s overarching preoccupations with violence and death. These are death-inflected forms: folk and its hangings, poisonings, and shipwrecks, gospel’s litany of the earthly miseries from which faith frees us. They’re brought together here in service of Morby’s self-mythologizing lyrics, often deeply personal. “Cut Me Down” opens the album with a swell of hand saws playing a major chord, then turns to confronts the path of the dead—literal or figurative—he’s left behind. He implores the saw to cut him down, perhaps as penance. “Destroyer” reveals what is actually Morby’s most Dylan-like trait: fastidious exploration of the oddities of modern life, be they ugly or beautiful. Morby contemplates first the vanishing of his mother, then his father, his sister, and finally himself, and when he comes into focus, he’s walking alone, carrying the saw—a saw that, as we’ve heard, will cut him down, but one that also sings very sweetly. It contains within it a potential both for beauty and destruction. Nothing was revealed, as Dylan himself once sang—only the sense that life is a puzzle with infinite clues and no answers. But Morby keeps looking, through the peculiar lens of American music.

—Chris Kissel

KIM AND THE CREATED “Get What I Want” 7” Lolipop 52

Echo Park punk queen Kim House has released a new single, “Get What I Want,” backed with “Can’t Be.” The A-side, a midtempo rocker combining punk, golden oldies, and some 50’s bmovie weirdness, is reminiscent of bands like Shannon and the Clams or The King Khan & BBQ Show.

However, where those bands often go for sweet, House goes for sour, sucker-punching visceral energy into reverb-soaked surf guitars. Her vocals, a mixture of acid-dunked baby talk and Wanda Jackson growl, are something to behold. When she screams, “I’m gonna get what I want little baby/I’m gonna get what I need,” you absolutely believe her. “Can’t Be” drops the candy, sha-la-la brattiness of the A-side for junglecat growls, tom-toms, and a 10ton riff, which make the barely 2-minute run-time seem way too short. As fearless as House has ever been, “Can’t Be” is a riot-starter.

You can practically see House stalking across the stage in her signature catsuit, snarling “I won’t be who you want me to be,” a testament to producer Randy Randall (No Age), who captures most of House’s live energy on record.

—Madison Desler

JOHN DOE The Westerner Cool Rock Records John Doe’s love affair with the American West, from his early days as frontman of X to his solo endeavors singing odes to the Golden State, frames an album that works with the process of grief. While Doe refers to it as his “psychedelic, soul record from the Arizona desert,” he roots the statement spiritually, rather than in the context of music. It’s tinged with his signature dusty alt-country hues, chugging 12-bar bluesiness and chorus harmonies. Green grass, little patches of sunlight, blue skies — Doe’s ruminations on the loss of his dear friend author Michael Blake integrate imagery of the natural world as one approaches the Pacific Coast. Ro-

mantic heartbreak is articulated on “Alone in Arizona” at first pass, but in the context of grief, the listener is exposed to a more nuanced portrait of heartbreak—the kind that we familiarize with as we age and experience loss with increasing frequency. The Westerner is steeped in earnestness, another side-effect of loss, and Doe’s voice is in the mix is as though he’s singing from a plateau under a desert sky. The closing track, “Rising Sun,” is Doe’s send off, an ode to a ride off into the sunset on the wind rather than horseback, and a farewell to a 30-year friendship that rings with understanding. ­—Christina Gubala

L.A. DRONES The Name of This Band Is...

This Starcraft There are L.A. buzzbands you can catch at any of the city’s dwindling number of legit rock venues and patrons of same typically deserve what you don’t necessarily want to get. Then there are the bands playing warehouses, art galleries, backyards, museums, one-off unlicensed premises, and other halfburied venues and L.A. Drones bestrides this loud semi-world like, if not some sonic colossus then at least the time Rosemary Clooney dropped acid and briefly fronted for Ruben & the Jets. Despite their bi-lingual punning moniker, the duo of Vulcanito and Tormentas Gonzales never give less than full value, never perform this glittery, hyper-cinematic music (part of a long composition titled “The Dreamlike World of the Midnight Walker”) quite the same twice.

“Horrible Dreams,” the opener, sets the nervously nocturnal tone for what follows, which may be summed as an attempt to elide a candyflip haze spent in some moving multiverse contained just east of Western and due west from Eastern. Alternately bouncy, doomy, shimmering, and seductive, this is the sound of nighttime L.A., a place that is easy to find only on a map.

—Ron Garmon

lyrics would be less of a butter knife, more a machete! But if these are the rejects, the final album promises to be no half-steppin’.

—D.M. Collins

MICHAEL NHAT Severed Members EP Gorefest Michael Nhat got over-zealous while completing his upcoming Death Doesn’t Care About Love album; the result was eight extra songs so unruly, he decided to release them early, a small salad of leftovers before the thematic puree to come. The biggest, oddest-tasting morsel is definitely “Mongrel, Pt. 1,” a tenminute rap suite that begins with an almost Mardi Gras beat, passes through rhymes about ecological holocausts and alien stingrays, and ends with electro sunshine bloops and bleeps, like early Kraftwerk, juxtaposed against Nhat chanting “She can play the piano … while it’s on fire.” Nhat’s beats are more mature and fascinating than ever, evoking 90’s Tom Waits, the Screamers, and “Workin’ in the Coalmine”era DEVO. But the sample-based tracks hit even harder. “Trample,” with its Tijuana Brass-esque horn loops, and “Panty Line,” which lays skull-crushing beats over symphonic horns, frame Nhat’s lyrical litanies with the perfect backdrop of pathos and the macabre. And I do mean “litanies”: some tracks list actual names of three-year-olds suffocated in trash bags by sociopaths: others detail very real neglect and murder.

“Choke on your own vomit. You no longer have a pulse,” guest rapper LinaCarol chants over and over again on one track, like a witch’s spell, until her dark magic is abruptly interrupted by a comical (and, I assume, real) phone message left by a stingy producer, balking about throwing more production onto a track. I would have enjoyed more such humor, especially on the less gruesome, more “Conscious Rap” songs—tracks like “I’m Nhat” and the pro-vegetarian “Eat,” evoke the social consciousness of mid-80s rappers with none of their smirk, though lines like “What, are you in high school? Open your books!” on “I’m Nhat” do sound like something Run DMC would say. I wish if Nhat would evoke Big Daddy Kane with titles like “I Get the Job Done,” his

NITE JEWEL Liquid Cool Gloriette Liquid Cool is Ramona Gonzalez’s most immediately singular undertaking since the earliest days of Nite Jewel. Bypassing the constrictive expectations placed upon her by labels and producers, this nine-track album is self-produced, self-released and a noticeably intimate affair. While“Kiss the Screen” and “Boo Hoo” exhibit undeniably poppy sensibilities, the overall effect is more like pop as performance art—an artist’s interpretation of the genre. Her vocal scoops remain untouched by the ubiquitous hyper-production that characterizes modern pop music, yet read as familiar as singing into a hairbrush as a sleepover. The album is a one-onone dialog between creator and listener, the only intermediary being the means via which the music is consumed, and while the creation of the record may have been born from Gonzalez’s own alienation in a crowd (physically or digitally, a sentiment most of us can relate to), the result vibes like a note passed to you from your best friend circa 1997.

The album’s strongest track, “All My Life”, glides in earnestly at the end, ripe with longing and genius in the way most pop music tends to be—it rattles around in your head on an infinite loop and still leaves you craving it.

—Christina Gubala

ALBUM REVIEWS

OPEN MIKE EAGLE Hella Personal Film Festival Mello Music Group Has Open Mike Eagle, rap’s eternal nerdy teenager, finally grown up? Oh sure, technically Mr. Eagle has been a thoughtful, professional, lightning-fast MC for many years, not to mention a doting father to an elementary-school aged son. And sure, if there is a newfound “mellowness” to this album that we haven’t seen before, that might be as much due to Paul White’s production choices as to Mr. Eagle’s lyrical content: with an all-over-themap sample based approach that pulls primarily from accessible, Madlib-esque 70’s soul, interspersed with the occasional Sesame-Street loop or singer/songwriter ditty, White makes this album sound as diverse with one producer as the last album, Dark Comedy, did with 12. In some ways, it’s also more comedic than Dark Comedy, interspersed with clips from Doug Stanhope and Lenny Bruce, rhymes about awkward third-wheel dates and weird dreams and the joys of waking up with a smaller hangover than normal. Plus, there’s intentionally left-in vocal mistakes, like on “I Went Outside Today,” where Open Mike almost gets to seamlessly hand the mike over to guest Aesop Rock, but then stumbles and ends his lines with an unintentional “Fuck!” I almost want to call Eagle rap’s Alex Chilton, for intentionally punking up what could be a gorgeous, serious album. But then Mr. Eagle goes into Zappa territory, turning upon the genre of rap itself: not since Run DMC insisted they “rap cuz I do not sing” has a hip hop album pointed out its own limitations this much, with lyrics like: “Rap music has ruined me: I always want to loop my favorite part.” My favorite pomo sabotage is when he intentionally rhymes the word “person” with itself in “Smiling (Quirky Race Doc),” like Dante does with “Jesus” in the Divine Comedy”: seeing each other as people and not as representatives of a race is so crucial, Mr. Eagle breaks with the album’s format as well as its theme to highlight it, in the process making one of this decade’s best rap songs. It’s rare to hear a hip hop album this mature and yet so anarchic, that speaks to your deepest

ALBUM REVIEWS

soul while still including a goofy joke rap with the singer of Future Islands. But it works, gloriously.

Here’s hoping that Open Mike Eagle continues to grow deeper, without growing older.

—D.M. Collins

and “Hollywood Symphony” is as dramatic and intricate as an Isaac Hayes soundtrack.

Released close to the moment when interest in progressive rock began to wane, this masterpiece of 35mm kosmische is now the kind of snob item regularly included on listicles like “500 Albums You’d Have Heard Already If You Didn’t Suck” and other such canon fodder.

ROBERT BENSICK BAND james chance and the contortions Buy Futurismo

PEACH KELLI POP “Halloween Mask” 7” Burger Records Allie Hanlon is good at writing catchy punk songs, but the title track of Peach Kelli Pop’s “Halloween Mask” single definitely has sharper teeth than what’s come before. As with the Ramones, a band Hanlon has the rare gift for honoring without outright imitating, an untrained ear might hear a lot of sameness in Peach Kelli Pop’s discography. But despite her youthful exuberance, and songs about teen dreams and egg rolls, there’s been a growth and maturation, especially now that Peach Kelli Pop has started recording as a full band with its current touring lineup. This song is exhibit A of how much they’ve changed—not only have they gone from a fouron-the-floor punk band to now exhibiting a Mudhoney/Nirvana grunge shuffle, but they’ve taken on a feminist topic that previously, they merely lived: how women are forced to wear masks to get by in our world (kudos to drummer Mindee Jorgensen for giving it that extra oomph). “Hundred Dollar Bill” has all the urgency and gorgeous high-pitched vocals of a Fastbacks song, and though this reviewer still hasn’t been able to unpack the lyrics after repeated listening, the song supposedly continues the exploration of feminist themes, inspired by Allie’s visit to a strip club, and her ruminations on how strippers might just be using sexuality as a positive, power-rich mechanism for making money and holding men’s attention, and their money, captive. But perhaps these songs are better when not over-explained, as aphorisms that we can drape our

Idol of the shortlived No Wave movement of 1978-79, James Chance is often grouped these days among the founders of American punk, but this debut is more in line with postIggy ideas of showmanship in Manhattan and environs. This rotten and cynically funny pop entertainment holds up better than most such artifacts today because the ranty bitterness of the lyrics is perfectly matched by Chance’s bent virtuosity of sax and violins. “Designed to Kill” is a cutthroat song got up as nervous dancefloor anthem (yes, there were such things in the late 70s) and bent-stupid masterpiece “Contort Yourself” is about as close to disco fluff as proceedings get, with Chance yelping and howling like Papa’s just got a brand new nitrous canister. “Bedroom Athlete” is the standout: a bizarre cockerel boast that makes Kanye’s latest sound like some accountant’s Friday night Uber confession. “Incorrigible” burns it all down in a stylish blitz of showbiz contempt more thoroughgoing than “Memo from Turner” or even “My Way.” With his retro-adman’s suits and Bob’s Big Boy hair, Chance was a premature return of a species of scabrous early 60s hipster Andy Kaufman was then lampooning as Tony Clifton. One of the era’s essential listens. No Wave itself hung on for a few more years (The Stick Men convulsed early Reagan Age Philly with a similar, funkier shtick) before returning lightly disguised as first noise rock and later experimental.

HOLGER CZUKAY Movie!

Grönland

The Can bassist’s 1979 solo LP Movies (here renamed with a different track order) was practically a Can reunion, what with Michel Karoli, Jaki Leibezeit, and Irwin Schmidt turning up as sidemen and Rebop Kwaku Baah contributing an organ track on “Cool With The Pool.” The band’s catalog having been extensively used as film score cues (sometimes without permission), it only made sense to record four tracks of readymade cinema music. The first track, “Oh Lord Give Us More Money,” is enough for an entire slate of the giddy and brutal poliziesco Italian film companies were then still turning out, “Persian Love” could have been the main title theme for Argo’s fake SF extravaganza,

French Pictures in London Smog Veil

Advanced fossicking in the mid-1970s Cleveland art-rock scene yields this 1975 slab of avant-pop chaos just in time to re-write rock history. Bensick, drummer in at least one local bubblegum act and visual artist who’d figured out how to wire fuzztones into oscillators and synchronized light, inveigled future members of Pere Ubu and other Cuyahoga luminaries into a short-lived sonic karass he hoped would score a deal with A&M Records, that tomb of the human earhole. Even the patronage of Eric Carmen (of the Raspberries) couldn’t get the thing into shops and that’s a pity, since there is more than enough room in the labyrinthine legend of Ohio rock for an acidhead version of Steely Dan’s Countdown to Ecstasy. This exhumed artifact puts a lot of early Ubu into deep shade, largely because Bensick’s musical vision is closer to David Bowie’s cosmic cosmopolitanism than Dave Thomas’s mannered context-free hectoring.

Indeed, Bensick varies up the program stylishly, veering from the John Cale-like smooth weirdness of “8:30 Victoria Haze” to the oddly familiar Ubu-esque whooping, gargling propulsion on “Doll,” a finale that cuts the absolute fuck out of “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” released that same year. Liner notes are comprehensive and magnificent

Various artists Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music The Numero Group

Here comes the Nuggets of 1970s roots rock. These nineteen ultra-obscuro tracks represent the commercial box canyons and dud rounds of country rock’s long 1968-80 heyday. Failed bands and fallen aspirants like Mistress Mary and Jeff Cowell fill in the far background of outlaw and alt country for us and regional outfits like Jimmy Carter and the Dallas County Green leave one wondering how the hell they missed the Big Gravy Train.

Kathy Heidiman’s “Sleep a Million Years” is a pop gem, “Me Lovin’ You” by Deerfield radiofriendly Gram Parsons-lite, The Black Canyon Gang’s “Lonesome City” a mini-fantasia of countrified psychedelia, and the spare and eerie “Buffalo Skinners” reveals Bill Madison to 21st century ears as a lost Townes Van Zandt. The finale belongs to a Virginia guitarpicker named Doug Firebaugh, whose “Alabama Railroad Town” clocks in at eighty-one creepy-as-fuck seconds. Anyone even mildly into American roots music will come away with an enlarged sense of its heritage and possibilities.

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own meanings on. I don’t know what the closing track, “Stuck in a Dream” is supposed to mean, but for me, it evokes the hardship of having a relative in a coma, or on life support, conscious but not conscious, as just happened to my niece’s mother—this super creep has found it a very cathartic monstrosity, a dream-like peon to a pain you cannot feel. Who knows what is actually behind these masks? But they are mesmerizing to hear.

—D.M. Collins

moods. Autodrama finds them slinking out of the shadows and shedding some of the soft focus.

—Ben Salmon

Indy Rock Royalty Comb Burger Records

RUBY FRIEDMAN ORCHESTRA Gem Pulcrum

PURO INSTINCT Autodrama Manifesto In 2011, the L.A. duo Puro Instinct seemed to emerge, fully formed, from a dense, candycolored haze of 1980s electro-pop nostalgia and 21st century blogbuzz dreams. With effortless cool, the sisters behind the group - Piper and Skylar Kaplan - dropped their perfectly titled debut album Headbangers In Ecstasy, a narcotic blend of smeared synths, chilled beats, Skylar’s sparkling guitar and Piper’s dead-eyed hymns to ennui.

Since, Puro Instinct has been largely quiet, delivering a remix here or an Ariel Pink collab there.

Now, the Kaplans are back with their sophomore effort Autodrama, an homage to their upbringing in Hollywood, where they started Puro Instinct as teens. The album is sharper than Headbangers, and it feels more grown-up - no surprise there - without sacrificing the sisters’ preternatural penchant for plush, forward-thinking grooves.

“Tell Me” takes an elegant vocal melody and tethers it to a burbling, deeply rooted bass line. “Six of Swords” is a modern dancefloor jam with a roller-coaster chorus and a funky post-disco soul. And the title track moves at a sinister pace, giving Skylar ample space to add some much-needed psychedelic six-stringed texture to the album.

As was the case five years ago, Puro Instinct makes music for late-night 54

TOMORROW’S TULIPS

A star attraction at places like the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood, RFO is a kind of High Forties nightclub act that somehow materialized out of the blue ozone crackle over Tinseltown. Rootsy by inclination and rockist by temperament, this sonic platform for La Friedman’s soaring, glossolalic vocals did hairraising pass at Darrell Scott’s “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” that wound up on FX’s Justified and highlights proceedings here. There’s also the slow-burning, Stones-y “Ten Minutes,” the Badfingeresque “I Don’t” and the cosmic cowgirl weirdness of “Red Light Lullaby,” the latter something Jeannie C. Riley recorded might have recorded in a far better 1960s than any embalmed in bad history and worse memory. Indeed, Ruby seems to occupy a better present than the rest of us too, as the colorfully shaded misdemeanors in her lyrics suggest. She drops almost as many references to God and sex as Prince usually did but these, along with the unearthly purity of her singing, sound like they come from vastly different experiences of the same happily ecumenical cosmos. Here is the kind of music you think they don’t make anymore.

-Ron Garmon

Tomorrow’s Tulips sounds like a long forgotten band from the 90’s west coast rock take over — think slludgy guitars and faded vocals over some amazing vibes and funky beats. With indie rock royalty comb they’ve released a compact collection of eight vibed out songs with a real modern Southern California feel.

The songs float in and out from one another and in the spirit of the best of the new era of lo-f indie pop there are more than hints here from the past—the Velvet Underground, Nirvana, and the Brian Jonestown massacre all come to mind. And like those bands Tomorrow’s Tulips seem to be doing it the only way they know organic and original.

“Quiet Riot Girl” is a slow and mournful sounding song that tiptoes around the outskirts of shoe gaze while songs like “Check Me Out” have a more 60’s tremolo garage rock vibe while still not really being loud rock. And it’s these quiet places that Tomorrow’s Tulips show their tender beauty. It’s these moments we see the line they are trying to walk and doing so admirably.

—Daniel Sweetland

VARIOUS ARTISTS Tribute to Pet Sounds Reverberation Appreciation Society God only knows HOW many various artist comps we’ve seen come along in the past decade on which modern lo-fi garage punkers, beach goth-ers, and bedroom bloop-bloop-bleepers let their hair down EVEN MORE than normal, going against type to cover some fun favorites. But

covering the Nerves or even the Velvet Underground is a sight different than trying to cover the Beach Boys, rock and roll’s tightest (white, male) vocal group, and especially the Pet Sounds album, written, arranged, and recorded

by Brian Wilson during some of the the best years of his life, when he’d surpassed even Phil Spector’s skills in the studio and had the full might of Capitol Records’ money behind him, not to mention Carole Kaye and Hal Blaine as a rhythm section. Surprisingly, these bands mostly pull it off. A lot of the bands wisely decided to hide their highest Brian and Carl Wilson notes under a wash of echo, but there are moment when, say, the Boogarins crew’s vocals stick out so poorly out of tune that no amount of ironic detachment should have permitted it; even Shannon Shaw of Shannon and the Clams, hands down the best vocalist in garage/ trash rock today, falters on even pronouncing words such as “inspuuuu-ration” on “I Wasn’t Made for These Times.” Yet the best tracks shine not of trying to best the Beach Boys at their own game, but in meeting them halfway. Chris Catalena captures the childlike innocence if “God Only Knows” with violin and toy piano sounds, much like if Chris Stamey, or the Muppets, had recorded it.

Night Beats nail “Sloop John B” to a fucking surf board with a super fun, aw-shucks, warts-and-all reverb approach, more akin to the early Beach Boys surf recordings, if they had been born on the bayou and not in Hawthorne.

And Indian Jewelry turn in one of the most accessible songs of their career with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” evoking Kim Gordon or Lush with ethereal vocals over a punchy fuzz bass. If your favorite band is on this comp, their Beach Boys cover might become your favorite song.

And if you love the Beach Boys, you’ll be glad that their legacy is no longer solely in the hands of the Wondermints, John Stamos, or ... you know, the former Beach Boys.

—D.M. Collins

VARIOUS ARTISTS Brown Acid: The Second Trip RidingEasy Think of the compilation Brown Acid: the Second Trip as the privilege to sit in Lance Barresi’s living room and check out his massive record collection. For years, Barresi has, via his L.A. and Chicago-based Permanent Records store, stockpiled private press and otherwise rare protometal records, engaging in a long, patient process of identifying some of the best undiscovered albums of the genre. By way of Brown Acid, Barresi and the RidingEasy label share curated cuts from that collection with the record-shopping public.

The Second Trip is the second installment in the series, and a special reissue effort in the sense it focuses on the largely overlooked school of late ‘60s and early ‘70s rock that its major stylistic cues from the likes of Black Sabbath, Vanilla Fudge, and Funkadelic (Numero’s Darkscorch Canticles is also essential, though its preoccupations are more on the side of Dungeons and Dragons than acid and ass shaking). It was music that pushed the overdrive of 60s psych til it was pure sludge: guitarists who could squeal like Jimmy Page and arpeggiate like Niccolò Paganini, and rhythm sections that churned funk and garage rock into a sinister stew.

The highlights on this collection are largely the songs that best pull off the key elements of the style, from the sporadic time changes and rumbling rhythms to the walls of hallucinogenic organ. Sweet Crystal’s “Warlords,” for instance, is a deeply gnarly forest of riffage; Sonny Hugg’s “Daybreak,” packs in deceptively complex rhythms and a slippery, soulful guitar solo.

Other tunes, however, delight in their slight variations on the form: Iron Knowledge’s “Show Stopper” is Bar-Kays meets Blue Cheer, featuring the wartiest, chunkiest bass line never sampled; Spiny Normen’s “Bell Park Loon” (which Barresi claims he found on a reel to reel, never before released) is a Jethro Tull-like flute freakout.

Nothing here is as good as Black Sabbath at their best, but it’s still a thrilling ride throughout—a testament to the time Barresi has poured into the collection and to his discerning ears.

—Chris Kissel ALBUM REVIEWS

COMICS Curated by Tom Child

SPENCER HICKS

LILA ASH | INSTAGRAM: SECRET_HOTGIRL

DAVE VAN PATTEN COMICS

JOHN TOTTENHAM 57

THE LOVE WITCH AND DIRECTOR ANNA BILLER Interview by Tiffany Anders Photography by Alex the Brown

One of the biggest compliments I’ve ever received was when Poison Ivy of the Cramps asked me if I was a witch. I wasn’t quite sure how to answer, but I knew this was a very powerful and positive thing, and it made me wonder if I was somehow neglecting an inner power within me that she was able to see. Certainly, I trusted that if there was anyone out there who was going to truly be able to recognize it, it would be her. She’s a magical person to me: sexy, smart, fearless, a guitar hero and a person of obvious integrity. She has captivated both men and women alike. She is the ultimate witch. I’m still trying to figure out what my witchy power is, but one thing is for sure—if you’re a witch, you are different, for good or for bad. In Anna Biller’s second feature film The Love Witch, we follow Elaine, a witch who is determined to use her powers to find love. She’s casting spells, making potions and seducing the men who fall victim to her witchy ways. She takes an apartment in a Victorian house with a married woman named Trish, who is content in her relationship and doesn’t understand Elaine’s single-minded need for love. It’s a visual feast, too: Biller’s fabulous production design, costumes and lighting create a world that pays homage to the thrillers and melodramas of the 60s, making for a fun ride while (hilariously) tackling gender issues from a female point of view. Watch for local screenings soon and warning—spoilers may follow!

What was the inspiration behind Love Witch? And what was the inspiration behind the genre and style and look of the film?

I always wanna make movies that are about female pleasure, especially female pleasure in the cinema—like what makes women excited to be watching a movie? So female fantasy was important. The lead character with her beautiful 60s make up and the wig and the costumes … I consider that a female fantasy.

Whereas a male fantasy might be women naked or in bikinis, this is a female fantasy of dress-up and glamour and just fun. Same thing with the visual style. I’ve watched so many classic movies and I really enjoyed the lighting in those movies—and the décor, the costumes, the soundtracks—and it’s just what is in my eye to capture when I’m making a film. The style is how I think a movie should look. The reason I made a witch movie is also because the witch is very loaded historically.

She’s evil, she’s sexy, she’s all the stereotypes about women—and also all the kinda great things about women—all fused together.

That seemed like an exciting character to put on the screen to talk about gender issues, and what it’s like to be a woman. And I also always feel like being a woman is about being persecuted on a certain level. Like as if you’re a witch: if you speak out of turn or if you have opinions that are too strong, people have this fury against you, like they wanna burn you.

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And also men will sometimes get a little too excited, as if you’re casting a spell on them— and you’re not even trying to. There’s just this weird thing that can be different in a way that is either good or bad. But you’re not a regular person. Being a woman is like being a witch.

I really loved this film—there were so many moments where I felt like, ‘Oh my God, this is my life!’

That’s great! That’s exactly what I wanted for the movie. I wanted to make a movie for girls.

There’s so much male fantasy out there, and there’s so little female fantasy movies. And some of the female fantasy movies are actually kinda dumb, and they’re actually in some weird way patriarchal—like the romantic comedies that are out there. It’s all the same story: a bitchy girl and some guy taming her, and then she’s all happy to just be a slave. Like … do I want to watch movies like that?

Have you seen Belladonna of Sadness, the 60s Japanese anime witch story that’s playing at Cinefamily right now? It’s interesting—it’s absolutely beautiful to look at, but it’s very much a male fantasy witch tale.

Everything we have is pretty much male fantasy and that’s fine—I mean, that’s neat, too.

My friend and I were sitting there watching it, and it is this beautiful fairytale to look at with all these beautiful water colors that are mesmerizing, but there’s all this rape that

just gets really …. we both had the same confused icky feeling after.

That really depends on how it’s done. In those pre-Code movies, there are so many women getting raped and abused, but it’s all from the woman’s point of view. It’s weird because they were kinda exploitation movies, but you really feel for the woman. You’re rooting for the woman and it’s about her struggle. Rape is one of those things where it for sure depends on how its shot and whose point of view it’s from.

If it’s supposed to be erotic, that’s a problem.

I always put rape in my movies because to me that is the ultimate male aggressive power move that is about hatred against women.

It’s something that men do as a last resort to control women—silence women—and it’s always the fear women have. It’s something that is a part of every woman’s life who actually tries to dare to be transgressive.

Women online who are opinionated get rape threats, and a rape threat is the same as death threat—it’s a threat of harm to you because you’re a woman. So I feel that rape is so loaded and it can be used in many different ways.

I watched it right before I watched your film, and the difference in point of view is so clear. In Belladonna of Sadness, to me she never really gets her power back, or at least not in the way I wanted to see it. She gives into the devil, which is suppose to be the turning point in which she gets power but—

That’s actually in the new movie. She gives into the devil. She gets accused of being a witch when she’s not, and she gives into the devil. I think giving into the devil is actually succumbing to the patriarchy—to male power and male desire. Male demonic desire.

It’s being possessed utterly by the patriarchy and now you’re losing yourself. It’s about her defeat.

This is exactly the way I felt. Watching that film before watching yours brought to light so much that is in these kinda tales. I really loved that your witch’s tale is from a female perspective. And I like that with Elaine and Trish, both of their desires are different but you really feel where both are coming from. What you hear a lot as a woman is represented in both characters.

They’re almost like the two sides that every woman has. Each one of them is kinda incomplete, so they’re basically like one. It’s like the split everyone has within themselves: the woman who just wants to be herself and not deal with gender, and the woman who wants to play the gender role and get all the benefits and the bad things that come with that. Women usually go back and forth in their lives between one and the other.

Very true—like that scene in the pink tea room. Which, by the way, the design in that is crazy amazing—it’s like feminine fantasy to the limit.

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“It’s all the same story: a bitchy girl and some guy taming her, and then she’s all happy to just be a slave. Like … do I want to watch movies like that?”

Yeah! I wanted to make that really clear that was the feminine world.

I felt it! But their conversation in that scene—I’ve heard both things so often.

Like Elaine saying you just need to be pretty and give a man the freedom to be whoever they want to be, and then the other side with Trish saying you can’t base all your self worth on the love of a man. How did you come up with those two characters?

I started with Elaine, the main character who’s the witch, because I’m interested in the idea of … playing a feminine role. If you do it too much, it can drive you kinda nuts and she’s kinda nuts. She’s kinda crazy and mentally imbalanced, and then she loses it later because nobody can sustain that. It’s like wearing a mask—you’re not being yourself.

You’re trying to please other people and losing yourself in the process, and that is like selling your soul to the devil and it’s not healthy. But the other side of it is the character who is like the rational woman, like, ‘I’m strong, I’m my own person, I know who I am, I don’t have to cater to a man.’ But look what happens—her man leaves her for the other type of woman.

That’s every woman’s dilemma. And then what happens is that Elaine—who is playing the game—ends up losing her man in the end for the opposite reason—because she was wearing the mask. He tells her, ‘I don’t like your mask—it’s phony.’ And so the men become these judges and you get these men who say, ‘Well, I love a woman who’s like a burlesque dancer’ and then you get another man who says, ‘I like a woman that wears no make-up.’ They’re all controlling and they’re all judges and they’re all telling women what they should be, what they should do, how they should look, how they should behave … and so you can’t really win. So women are all fragmented, and Elaine … she’s all about that.

She’s completely fragmented from being told all her life that to get love, she has to please a man and it’s impossible to do it—because they’re never gonna be pleased.

In the burlesque strip club scene, there are so many great lines that the coven priest and high priestess bring up. The high priestess starts talking about how controlled women have been in being called whores or being shackled by marriage, and the priest says that female sexuality is the ultimate power, and you should embrace it. You kinda have a moment where you feel like, ‘Right on! I wanna get behind this, here is our moment of empowerment!’

Yeah—but that’s actually the mentality that ends up destroying Elaine. And what’s interesting about that dialogue is when the high priestess is speaking the lines, they seem feminist and empowering, but when the high priest is speaking the lines, they seem demonic. Those lines were written as a monologue not assigned to any particular 60

character and they were assigned later, but it’s because of the way he’s saying them that they seem demonic and the way she’s saying them that they seem empowering. That goes back to the satanic Bible— Yes—I was going to bring that up. By Anton LaVey—which I have read, actually.

He advises women to do all those things: you have to wear make-up, wear high heels … so that’s Anton LaVey, but it’s also all these feminist wiccan women who feel that way, but in their feminist way. It’s this weird thing—witchcraft is really obsessed or has been historically obsessed with defining gender. They talk about ‘polarity.’ ‘Polarity’ means that there’s a man and there’s a woman.

Obviously there are lesbian and gay covens now, but originally in the 50s and 60s they were very into the magic of sexual polarity and gender polarity.

How long did you spend researching witchcraft and covens?

I spent a couple of years researching witchcraft before and during writing the script, reading everything I could about it. I knew a lot about it and I didn’t put a lot of it in the script, but it informs how the characters are, how they behave and the things that interest them.

What’s your background? How did you get involved in filmmaking?

I always wanted to make movies, but I started off in college in the art department and they don’t allow you to be in the film department until your 3rd year, so then I just stayed in the art dept because I liked it. I also didn’t really like the UCLA film department because it was very narrative and I was more into experimental film. I was making videos in art school and then I graduated and picked up a super-8 camera at a garage sale and started shooting super-8 films and then I went to graduate school at Cal Arts. I sent them my drawings and my paintings and my super-8 movies and I got accepted, and I found nobody was interested in my artwork. They were only interested in my films. They started encouraging me to just do movies and so then I got in to the film department and got access to the equipment. I think it was because it’s what I wanted to do. People were more interested in my films because it was where my passion really was. My dad is an artist and I grew up with artists and art galleries, so that was really natural for me to go into art … but it really wasn’t so much my thing, I realized.

But it was great to have an art background because it was great training critically. Like some filmmakers will think about story, but I’m coming more from an art place.

I’m a big fan of all that 1960s inspired stuff.

This made me want to go back and watch Beyond The Valley of The Dolls, which is one of my favorite movies. When I saw it in high school, it was empowering for me, mostly because all the girls were in a band, and anytime I got to see girls in a band I

was ecstatic and inspired, even if it was camp and far from feminism. Are you a fan of those films, or is it statement in some sort of way on those films?

I actually watched a lot of classic movies, and that’s like movies from the 20s. Mainly the 20s to the 60s. It’s not like I was watching Russ Meyer. I’m watching Douglas Sirk movies, Hitchcock … I was also watching witchcraft movies. I watched The Wicker Man, Rosemary’s Baby, Horror Hotel and those classic horror films. I was really watching thrillers and melodramas from the 50s and 60s. I was looking at Marnie and The Birds. I wasn’t imitating any particular style. I just thought since she’s a witch, her apartment needs to be really wild—lots of colors. And I did take the colors from the Thoth tarot deck, like the character says.

There’s lots of blue and purple, there are parts that are red and yellow and orange … I made the rooms based on those colors with tarot imagery. Everything is more symbolic than just the scene itself. Like you said, the tea room is all lace and pink and white because it’s all feminine, and the burlesque club is all red—red velvet, red light—cuz that’s burlesque. But the lighting and the décor are what make it look like old movies. I worked extremely hard to find the right DP to light the film the way I wanted, because it’s a very outdated style of lighting and most DPs either can’t or won’t do it. It’s very difficult, it’s time-consuming, it takes a lot of skill. I needed to find the right DP who knew how to do it. That’s the main thing: hard lighting. Now everything is soft lighting. Because I watched so many of those classic movies … if the lighting wasn’t like that, no matter how great the sets were and the costumes were, it would still look modern.

How did you figure that out?

The very first time I was shooting on 16 mm, I had a DP who I just let light it however he wanted. I got it back and I couldn’t use it because I hated the way it looked. Then I realized it was because of the lighting and I had to reshoot it—had to direct the lighting a little bit—and it still wasn’t quite what I wanted. So I studied lighting a bit and cinematography to be able to explain to DPs what I’m looking for. The more talented the DP is, the more they can do it—but I realized that I have this intolerance for modern lighting. Unless it’s lit this way, I’m not gonna like it. I have had such a problem with DPs because sometimes really skilled talented DPs don’t get what I’m going for.

I work with a lot of film directors, and there’s so much tightening of narrative and story. I like that The Love Witch has a bit of both: there’s story, but more from an art perspective. The message is still very clear.

I worked really hard on story on this one, which I had not done before. It is very clear—

sometimes I wonder if it’s too clear? My style has not been to be this linear and clear, but I think it’s good. You know what it is you saw.

You know what it’s about. … and it was also so fun for me too!

Because you’re getting all those messages while you’re being entertained by story.

One of my favorite scenes is that renaissance fair fairy tale marriage. It’s so over the top.

Because that’s really going into female fantasy there And the dichotomy of voices in their heads!

That’s actually where the whole movie started from—the voices. This is the man, this is the woman, this is how they think and they’re never gonna see eye to eye ever. Also that guy that I got to play Gryff is pretty amazing. I found out after we shot the film that he’s a romance novel cover model!

That scene is beyond genius to me. It just nails everything.

And it’s really sad, isn’t it? She’s found her ideal true love and her fantasy, but because he’s got this monologue in his head you realize it’s not coming true—it’s not coming true for him. Like he’s not really there. He’s there, but he’s not really there, like so many men are—they just check out when they get married or they get a girlfriend. They just emotionally check out.

I like that line as they’re riding horses, where she says ‘Am I your girl?’ and he says ‘For today’ That was pretty funny—I laughed, while also feeling the pain. What’s your feeling on Elaine? Do you think she will eventually become empowered or do you think she will just continue hopelessly looking for love?

At the end of the film she becomes psychotic and people rarely emerge from that intact, so I would say she probably doesn’t. She goes too far with psychosis. I’ve known women like that, to tell you the truth. Like women who were sex workers, and they get lost in that—they think they’re being empowered but they end up just dead, really. They spiral down. And other women I’ve known have become schizophrenic or bipolar, being raised with those values. It’s a fun movie but it’s a sad movie, too, because it’s about a woman who has had so little love in her life and has tried everything to get it. And because she’s so beautiful and young, that’s the only way she’s going to be able to get it.

And it’s not good enough for her—she’s just being used. And how many women have that story? A lot of women have that story. A lot of people take these kind of stories as a joke or something, as if it’s about other movies.

But it’s not about other movie—it’s about that experience of being a woman.

VISIT ANNA BILLER AT LIFEOFASTAR. COM FOR MORE INFO ON THE LOVE WITCH. FILM

LIVE PHOTOS SPRING 2016 Clara Nova March 2016 The Fonda

ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR DEBI DEL GRANDE

Adult Books April 2016 The Echoplex

SCOTT SHEFF

SHEVA KAFAI

Mind Meld May 2016 The Teragram

The Generators April 2016 The Roxy

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

CHAD ELDER

L.A. Witch April 2015 The Mayan

The Melvins May 2016 The Troubadour

MAXIMILIAN HO

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DEBI DEL GRANDE

LIVE PHOTOS

Christine and the Queens April 2016 The Echo

White Fang April 2016 The Troubadour

CALEB DONATO

CHAD ELDER

Deap Valley March 2016 The Fonda

Joanna Newsom March 2016 Orpheum Theatre

MAXIMILIAN HO

Mystic Braves May 2016 Teragram Ballroom DEBI DEL GRANDE

Silversun Pickups May 2016 Fox Pomona

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

DEBI DEL GRANDE

SHEVA KAFAI

LIVE PHOTOS

LESLIE KALOHI

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ANARCHY!:

THE MCLAREN WESTWOOD GANG Interview by Gabriel Hart Illustration by Joe McGarry At first It may be easy to believe that the well of information on the Sex Pistols (and everyone who was part of their erratic orbit) would have long since run dry. After yielding one lone lightning rod record before the final filmic prank of The Great Rock N’ Roll Swindle, what more would we have besides countless tales that don’t quite explain how one of the most important (though stumbling) musical phenomena of our time was no accident? So meet Phil Strongman, a man who was not just on the frontlines of punk, but who was also the main employee at Malcolm McLaren’s Glitterbest management office. With his new documentary ANARCHY!: The McLaren Westwood Gang—currently moving toward completion and release—the focus finally shifts to McLaren, who until now has been the most misrepresented of the group. That’s a downright crime, considering he possessed the necessary visionary pre-tense for the first youth movement that would never actually die. Strongman puts it all in historical perspective that goes far beyond punk, locating McLaren in the same revolutionary class as Stuart Christie, the Angry Brigade, the Situationists and the Paris Riots of ’68, in which McLaren was an actual participant, and argues that McLaren’s influence in pop culture was the next evolutionary step. No stone is left un-thrown as the film goes beyond well-traveled Sex Pistols roads and into McLaren’s rarely talked about time with the New York Dolls, Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant, as well as his later years as a solo artist and overall NYC trendsetter. At a satisfying two-and-a-half hours, one will feel that this story is almost complete—save for the new parts we have to yet to write ourselves.

The film starts out with that great quote from Lindsay Anderson: ‘All art worth its salt starts out wanting to change the world.’ Do you think Malcolm and the boys actually set out to change the world?

Or was it more to end the boredom of their own little microcosm?

Phil Strongman (director): It was both. There was definitely a revolutionary thing cuz they came out of that time—the mid-late 60s when suddenly all these ideas started to come through. It was touched on in the film. You know … the Vietnam War was going on.

People might think that that’s audacious, but I think it makes perfect sense.

Thanks. The thing is, people believe that Malcolm and Vivienne and that whole thing came out of the mid-late 70s out of nowhere, and there was no connection to the stuff that went before. And there was—it was continuing that fight with a different name.

It puts the advent of punk and McLaren and the Pistols in the same kind of revolutionary lineages—the French riots in 1968 and the Situationists. I think a person might say that there were no casualties in this punk rock thing, but there actually were. It was dangerous, and just as much was at stake.

I mean—it was nothing compared with the real war, but as a kind of cultural war, which is partly what it was … Johnny Rotten had his throat slashed, Paul Cook had fourteen stitches in his head, one of the Clash roadies was killed, an Irish punk was killed … I was attacked, Boy George was attacked, my brother was attacked. Loads of people were. It was a big affront at the time to the establishment.

It was a big deal, and those clothes from Sex or Acme Attractions—they’re expensive.

They’re rare. They’re like stuff from the war, you know? If you want to buy a G.I. outfit from the battle of Iwo Jima or if you want to buy some Nazi uniform from the Battle of the Bulge, these things cost a fortune as well. It wasn’t a war, but it was a cultural war.

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That’s beyond the fan’s perspective. Those things have an aura and an essence.

Yeah—there’s a young art student who said to me months ago because she’d seen a rough cut, ‘I don’t see the point of the film, because we have all these freedoms now.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got them because we won them.

Society’s more tolerant racially amd sexually ... and because of the clothes, anyone can wear almost anything in most places in the West, and it came from that.’

What would you attribute that modern complacency to, considering things have gotten so much worse on a global scale?

I don’t know. There is that tolerance because society had to give a bit. People over seventeen or eighteen can kind of wear what they want in most places in the West. They have to give that ground. You know, people who were gay or bisexual are generally tolerated in most places in the West. They had to give that ground. That bit of freedom was won, but there are obviously bigger issues. I think part of the thing is the internet. It’s great in a lot of ways, but in other ways, it just gets kids sitting at home playing on a laptop or an iPhone just day and night, and they don’t meet as much.

When I was a kid, it was like hanging out on street corners, you know? And to get music, you’d have to go to a record shop and buy vinyl and meet other people who were into that music, and a band might form in that record store. Now there aren’t any. It’s that thing with technology—it’s helped but hindered. It’s pacified things a little. In England, especially, the last really big guitar scene was like the Brit pop scene, which is kind of okay, and that was like twenty years ago before the internet got big. Since then, there hasn’t been a band scene like the Mersey scene, where the Beatles came out of it … there was other things and there was punk, but since the last twenty years, there hasn’t been a scene like that. Maybe [the internet has] damaged that—made it more difficult for people.

You could actually Frankenstein your own tastes now that the Internet is there. There’s no grand explosion of something, at least on my radar.

It’s all spread too much to ever build up into anything worldwide. I reckon something will happen again, but it’s definitely damaged that.

It’s delayed that scene. It’s a problem.

You brought up the fashion thing—could there be shocking fashion in the world now?

The punk thing doesn’t offend anyone.

[Laughs] I don’t know—maybe mildly, like young kids turn up to gigs in suits and ties. It’s strange, because that freedom’s been kind of won. Obviously not everywhere. If you were in Russia wearing a T-shirt saying ‘HANG PUTIN’, or if you were in somewhere in Alabama that was all Trump territory wearing a T-shirt saying ‘HANG TRUMP’, those slogans on a T-shirt combined with something else would be … but generally the vibe is not necessarily just to be outrageous, but to be good. It was enough once to be outrageous in the 60s, 70s and 80s, but now it’s not enough anymore.

One thing that still has an aura of shock is still the transgender thing. Even though people aren’t trying to shock—it’s just the way they are.

It’s like the drag queen scene as well. And again, it’s not what they’re wearing—it’s the fact that a guy’s saying he’s a woman or a woman saying she’s a guy. It’s not the clothing anymore. I’m sure there’s some look somewhere that will somewhere offend, or make people at least think, but it’s not one that’s going to be easily thought of.

When Stuart Edwards was talking about Malcolm and the ‘genius’ term getting thrown around, he made it seem like the seed of Malcom’s genius was his uncanny ability to see all men and women as transparent, in a way. As a small child he had a knack to size you up and describe you in one sentence.

It was an unusual situation. He was right in a family that was sort of Jewish lower middle class but they got richer … but he was just neglected. The mother just really didn’t care.

When Malcolm learned to walk, Mother was sitting on the sofa smoking: ‘So what? You’re walking.’ Some people get bad parentage, but they’ll get some kind of attention. From his mother, he didn’t [get anything]. In a way, he was making his own way in the world. His grandmother, who was quite an outrageous person herself—a would-be actress who was never allowed to act—encouraged that. You have a real charisma about him. You felt this guy could do a lot of things. When I met him, I was seventeen, and that time—‘76, you know—I was impressed that he was someone.

I think everyone was. The same for people like Johnny Rotten, and Joe Strummer and in a way Glen Matlock, though he was much quieter. You felt these people had more than the average musician, designer, whatever— they had something going on. They were going somewhere. It was encouraging.

Do you remember when you met Malcolm?

I went into the shop he had with Vivienne— Sex. I’d started seeing the Pistols, and I’d been working in Acme Attractions with Don Letts and people who were hanging out with the Clash. The Clash didn’t exist at that point, but I was hanging around with those guys. And we had pretty sharp stuff, sort of zoot suits and things people hadn’t worn before that I thought were new. I didn’t realize for a few months that this is stuff from the 1940s, this is stuff from the 1930s—teen rebellion stuff.

We’d gone to see the Pistols, me and my friend Jay. There was a guy called Don Hughes who’d been a Mod in the sixties in West London, and he had written something in NME about the whole Mod thing, which was intriguing to us. There had been Mods, rockers, and then kind of the hippie thing and bikers, and it kind of faded. There were still bikers around, but there was nothing else … it’d just ... gone, 65

you know? So it was intriguing to us. After seeing the Pistols in May ‘76, I said, ‘Where do I get that T-shirt? That’s amazing!’ and they said, ‘Oh, at that shop.’ And Don Hughes knew the shop. Being older, he’d been there before. So I went in, and there was Malcolm that I’d seen at the gig. There’d been this sort of repartee between Malcolm and Rotten on the stage, you know? ‘Get me a drink now!’—friendly-unfriendly banter. So I knew the name. And he tried to sell me a T-shirt, which I didn’t buy, but I just got talking to him and saying that I thought the shop was great and the band was great and ... as you do, when you’re seventeen just babbling away.

But he was great—he’d take you seriously, and most people didn’t then. People forget there was that age discrimination thing. If you were under twenty-five—certainly under twentyone—no one took you that seriously.

That’s a good point. Now there’s a whole backlash against the millennials. All my friends, when I was growing up, they were six or seven years older than me. It seems like there’s a real disconnect between the youth coming up and the more seasoned veterans.

Again—it’s an internet thing. I remember the Beatles had hits when they were twenty.

People were younger then in bands. Later on in the nineties, you get … you know, one of the guys is twenty-nine when they first have a hit. Before, it was very young. The Pistols were literally teenagers at their first gig. That was part of it—the youth thing. I don’t think that goes on as much now. There’s a lot of people who resent the millennials, people who resent the baby boomers ... maybe from the perspective of the big corporate society that’s good cuz people aren’t questioning things.

They’re squabbling amongst each other.

I forget myself sometimes that for a second there were punks but there was no punk music. All of the punks would go to the discos, and there’d just be a great sound system playing reggae. Is that correct?

Before punk hit, reggae had been big briefly—like ‘69, ‘70, ‘71, skinheads and then suedeheads. You’d hear it in most dance halls.

By the mid-70s it was a bit underground. I mean, that’s the thing about punk—it was so fucking small. The first time I saw the Pistols, May ‘76, there was—apart from me and my brother and Don Hughes—there was absolutely no other people. Then their next gig there was thirty-five, and then fifty, but it was a slow burn when you think, like, they’d had a few lines in NME, they’d had half a page in Sounds. They had music press coverage by the standards of the day that was quite big, but it was slow. It was also because of their reputation cuz they’d been trouble. That hadn’t happened in rock ‘n’ roll cuz a lot of young people hadn’t been going to these gigs anymore. I think that changed it. With the punk scene, it was people of your generation saying stuff about what’s happening now in a really raw way. In hindsight, it’s a massive thing cuz it did go around the world. Many people, you know, from Poland and Hungary and Sweden and Germany. I think McLaren’s genius, in a way, was making it happen. There was that New York scene that was great, but it didn’t break out. CBGB’s did a punk festival in 1979; nothing happened. The Ramones 66

had to come here to England have it happen in ’77. It had to take off in another country, and it took off here because of the Pistols.

So what would’ve been a lively day at Glitterbest? You were kind of on the frontlines.

Getting chased by like twenty teddy boys waving broken bottles and losing them on the street and then getting up to the office and telling Malcolm— That was a real menace? The teddy boys? I was wondering how much of that has been exaggerated. I grew up in Orange County, and we had to run from skinheads.

There was a lot of that. People got noses broken and got chased. I never got a bad kicking, but stuff went on.

What did the teddy boys not like about the punks? In theory, it seems like both groups would have a lot to agree on.

But they were like the rockers, the teddy boys: ‘Oh, you guys think you’re tough?

Well, we’re like 25 and we’re tough, and we’ve got loads of friends.’ By that point, the teddy boys had become established. A few of them were original that were like 40 years old. They’d been doing this since 1965.

Greaser guys—lots of tattoos, MOM and DAD and HATE and WAR on the knuckles, and carrying razors and stuff. Some of them were heavy guys. A few of the younger ones got it. I remember seeing younger teddy boys jumping into a Clash gig and thinking, ‘Fuck, they’re great!’ and wearing spiky hair the next week. They would change. But people in the older lot—25, 30, 35—they’d never change. They just saw these cheesy kids. And with England, the ‘God Save the Queen’ thing was the final straw. It became this minor war, and people were hurt.

Thousands weren’t killed, but people were hurt. Two of the Pistols were.

So rock ‘n’ roll is obviously this feral creature born in the sticks from southern white trash and Black juke joints, and Malcolm mentions Elvis as the end to these kind of feral origins. He said, ‘Pop culture is still something people felt like they had to control—’ —sorry to interrupt, but I know what you mean. I know that thought: the wild sound, which it kind of is, good or bad. Especially in those days. That was, I suppose, the anarchy spirit of rock ‘n’ roll—that it wasn’t sort of a showbiz-y small scene, even though some of the people were very slick professionals.

It wasn’t about professionalism. I mean—it was wild. That got lost after the 60s. By the mid 70s it was all acceptable. Pink Floyd was acceptable. They’d get on kids’ TV programs.

[Rock ‘n’ roll] no longer had anything to say.

I think it was about getting back to the spirit of the 50s, because that was the real thing. We saw that everything after ‘69—the prog rock thing, the psychedelia—you’re decorating the house but you’re not extending it. You’re just giving more curlicues and flowers on top of it. And this whole guitar sound with indie bands now …

It’s horrible. Indie rock to me sounds like a car commercial. It’s completely cannibalized itself. It’s like the new format for a single is a car commercial, and it sounds like a car commercial. It all could be the same band in my opinion.

I don’t hear much that’s original. It’s lost a lot of drive. Maybe it’s this thing that we’ve been saying now—the internet has divided people though it’s meant for communication. It’s kept people apart from real life. Maybe swapping emails doesn’t do it. I don’t know.

It’s strange. But yeah, they say rock ‘n’ roll, they’ve brought it back to life. That whole rock ‘n’ roll culture was, I think, always political, even though it wasn’t said. Especially in the 50s, it wasn’t articulated. But John Lennon always said, ‘We weren’t saying anything in the 60s and 70s they weren’t saying in the 50s. They just said it more subtly without thinking about it.’ It’s about freedom—their songs are about freedom, even the 50s ones.

That doesn’t go with going to fight a war in Vietnam. Freedom doesn’t sit with that. I think we got that spirit back. And all those things that happened in the 80s … Adam Ant, Sting, Boy George and everything since … Nirvana, Green Day and whoever … some of those bands were great, some of them weren’t so great, but they all came from that, you know? People like Nirvana were honest about that. One of their albums was called Nevermind after the Pistols album.

They know that was a key influence.

Malcolm McLaren was obviously very ambitious, and there’s another interesting quote in the movie from him: ‘Life’s a journey, and once you reach the destination, you’re dead. You need to fail magnificently, because it’s better to be a brilliant failure than any kind of benign success.’ How do you reconcile that attitude with how ambitious and daring and stop-at-nothing he’d be to get the Sex Pistols a gig, for example?

His thing was to cause excitement. To cause an adventure. He was an anarchist in terms of, ‘Let’s just shake it up,’ because, you know … communism has failed. There’s a whole legacy of Stalinism, of oppression, and Eastern Europe was still mildly oppressed then, and fascism and corporate capitalism … everyone knows, unless it’s tempered with something, it’s a drag. What’s another way? That was his thing—picking up on anarchy. Without being a hardcore committed activist anarchist, he just saw it as an adventure. I think he thought this is the way to get a band through, and it doesn’t matter if we do this or do that—we’ll use the money to make a bigger excitement.

‘We’ll do this to get that, we’ll do this to get that. We’ll move it on.’ His whole trip was like, ‘This is an adventure,’ like a buccaneer.

I love that spirit—that logic. Or illogic, I guess.

People worry about making it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t make it. Just do something that’s great.

Do something that you know is going to age well.

I’ve known great musicians and great bands who’ve never made it, and I’m sure you’ve seen a few in your time as well. So to actually get a band to make it is a big deal—to get something out there, and to actually…

And there’s usually a lot of compromise in that, too, you know? I’m always naturally suspicious when it happens. [Laughs] That was the great thing about that. There was no kind of sellout. [Now] you’ve got members of the band doing adverts for this and that

and it’s not what it was, but hey, that happens.

At the time, the whole point was they weren’t going to sell out cuz everyone had before. And in those years, they didn’t. They got arrested.

They got beaten up for it. Malcolm got beaten up for it. When people say, ‘They weren’t that hardcore,’ it’s like, you know … you get arrested for it! You get beaten up for it, then you tell me what’s hardcore.

Malcolm said this in the movie—that the age of interactive culture began with Sid Vicious, the fan that became the star.

It’s a key point. When he said it, I’d never thought of that. Because Sid was the fan. We in the early audience arrogantly thought we were almost equal to the band, cuz we had our own way of dressing and we didn’t just copy them like some fans did. We had our own things, and we’d been doing this before them. But they did have a certain look and they sounded great in their own way, and it was fantastic. With the Beatles, especially after ‘63, their gigs were ninety percent teenage girls screaming. They were idols. The Pistols weren’t our idols. We knew they were great, but we didn’t look up to them as being rock gods. They were people you could see in the bar. But they did have something, and I think we were part of that. It was a unique thing cuz when Sid joined the band, they were seasoned musicians that had been playing for months or years or decades, sometimes going between different bands. That never happened before—it was interactive. Like Malcolm says in the movie: the audience will become the band, and it will be an endless rampage.

With the English media, there was a term coined around the time Amy Winehouse passed away: ‘death by media.’ The same can be said for Princess Diana and countless others, where someone’s life is so possessed and defined by media coverage— would you have put Sid in that same kind of category? Was he the first person to have his life changed in a negative way by press coverage like that?

There is some truth in that. The whole antiPistols thing that happened after the TV swearing. There was a lot of media hate against them. And after the ‘God Save the Queen’ thing there was even more. It undoubtedly put pressure on them, and they were hounded for a time. Reporters were literally waiting outside trying to find drugs … or trying to plant drugs. They were all about pressure, and for someone like Sid, who came from a very fucked-up background, very vulnerable—his mother was sort of a junkie that hadn’t really helped him—I think that pushed him more into heroin and into Nancy. The pressure was unbelievable, really. People spend years in therapy for what the band went through, and in a way, what a lot of us went through—quite a few months of never knowing if you were going to get attacked every time you stepped out on the street. [Now] there are a few more kinds of freedoms in certain ways in Western society, but they were fought for—without sounding melodramatic. Like the Beatles and the Stones before, [the Sex Pistols] changed society in a more tolerant way. It’s still in place now. Certain young people still get it—they understand that was important, and they can see why it was important. That’s why we’re talking about it now, you know?

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