L.A. RECORD ISSUE 122

ANDERSON .PAAK FEELS NIGHT BEATS L.A. TAKEDOWN AT THE GATES YOKO ONO HOLY GRAIL VERSIS PAUL BERGMANN JABBERJAW MALCOLM MOONEY PEEP SHOW AND MUCH MORE

ISSUE 122 • FREE SPRING 2016

Goldenvoice

Cล ur de Pirate

2/27

EL REY

3/3

FONDA THEATRE

3/4

EL REY

Papadosio

3/9

THE MAYAN

Shinedown

3/12

FONDA THEATRE

Silverstein

3/25

FONDA THEATRE

Poliรงa

3/26

FONDA THEATRE

Goldenvoice & KROQ present

4/22

FONDA THEATRE

Parachute

4/29

GREEK THEATRE

Goldenvoice, KCSN & The Bluegrass Situation present

5/13

GREEK THEATRE

KCSN, Goldenvoice and Emporium Present

5/18

ORPHEUM THEATRE

Goldenvoice & KCSN present

5/19

GREEK THEATRE

Goldenvoice & FYF present

5/26

CLUB NOKIA

6/5

EL REY

Best Coast + Wavves

with Cherry Glazerr

with saQi with The Virginmarys with Being as an Ocean, Emarosa, Coldrain, and Rarity

with CLARA-NOVA

Wolfmother

with Deap Vally

with Jon McLaughlin

The Avett Brothers

with The Milk Carton Kids

John Prine and Jason Isbell with Amanda Shires Ben Folds & yMusic Mac DeMarco Jim Norton Blue October

with Dotan

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FEELS Kristina Benson

30

MALCOLM MOONEY of CAN Ron Garmon

10

ANDERSON .PAAK Chris Ziegler and sweeney kovar

34

PAUL BERGMANN Chris Ziegler

14

L.A. TAKEDOWN Chris Kissel

40

KATH BLOOM Christina Gubala

17

TOMMY KEENE Ben Salmon

42

NIGHT BEATS Chris Ziegler and Kristina Benson

20

YOKO ONO Kristina Benson

45

ROBERT LEVON BEEN of BRMC Chris Ziegler

22

HOLY GRAIL Chris Kissel

46

AT THE GATES D.M. Collins

26

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS Christina Gubala

48

VERSIS sweeney kovar

L.A. TAKEDOWN by aaron giesel

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EDITOR — Chris Ziegler — chris@larecord.com PUBLISHER — Kristina Benson — kristina@larecord.com EXECUTIVE EDITOR — Daiana Feuer — daiana@larecord.com CRAFT/WORK EDITOR — Ward Robinson — ward@larecord.com COMICS EDITOR — Tom Child — tom@larecord.com FILM EDITOR — Rin Kelly — rin@larecord.com ASST. ARTS EDITOR — Walt! Gorecki — walt@larecord.com DESIGNER — Sarah Bennett — sarah@larecord.com ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR — Debi Del Grande — debi@larecord.com WRITER AT LARGE — D.M. Collins — danc@larecord.com ACCOUNTS Kristina Benson CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Madison Desler, Ron Garmon, Christina Gubala, Audra Heinrichs, Zachary Jensen, Eyad Karkoutly, Chris Kissel, sweeney kovar, Ben Salmon, Kegan Pierce Simons, Daniel Sweetland, Ashley Jex Wagner, Simon Weedn and Layne Weiss CONTRIBUTING DESIGNERS Kristina Benson, Jun Ohnuki CONTRIBUTING COPY EDITOR Amanda Glassman CONTACT fortherecord@larecord.com

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ALBUMS, FILMS, BOOKS, AND OTHER THINGS FOR REVIEW

L.A. RECORD strongly encourages vinyl submissions for review and accepts all physical and digital formats! We also invite submissions by local authors and filmmakers. We review any genre and kind of music and especially try to support local L.A.-area musicians.

Send download links to digital music to fortherecord@larecord.com. For film—Rin Kelly at rin@larecord.com. For books—Kristina at kristina@larecord.com.

Send physical copies to:

L.A. RECORD P.O.BOX 21729 LONG BEACH, CA 90801 SUBMISSIONS L.A. RECORD strongly encourages submissions of all kinds! If you would like to interview, review, illustrate or photograph for us, please get in touch! Email fortherecord@larecord.com with “submissions” in the subject line.

PAUL BERGMANN POSTER — Ward Robinson and Jun Ohnuki ANDERSON .PAAK COVER PHOTO — Theo Jemison FEELS COVER PHOTO — Alex The Brown All content © 2016 L.A. RECORD and YBX Media, Inc.

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FEELS Interview by Kristina Benson Photography by Alex the Brown

Feels is the band that grew out of—or grew up from—Raw Geronimo, which was born directly from the mind of its polyinstrumental founder Laena Geronimo, who spent plenty of hectic years playing in other people’s bands before she finally assembled one of her own. But Feels has a new name for a reason: it feels different than Raw Geronimo. Well, actually it feels like a dream come true—a rejuvenated foursome of best friends that matches the art punk (and punk punk!) of the 80s to the overfuzzed grunge of the 90s, like if Kim Gordon took over Sonic Youth and led them on a tour of wild house shows.

Their Ty Segall-produced LP is out next month on Castle Face, and it’s pretty much unstoppable. Feels speak now about sheep, Sleep and Lisa Simpson.

Is it true you did this record in one day?

Laena Geronimo (guitar/vocals): We did record the entire album in one day. And then we mixed all of it in one day—on a separate day—and it’s all live mixed. Straight from the board to, like, one track in ProTools. It’s definitely Ty, you know? He’s a maniac, in the best way possible! We actually had planned for three days. But we got in there and the ball was rolling and then it was just done. We’d been playing those songs live for about a year, so we’ve had ‘em very down and we’d worked out all the kinks. It was just like playing a show, you know? And really, that’s what we wanted, too. Especially for our first record.

I know Laena planned out almost everything for Raw Geronimo, but Feels is a group effort—and this album feels somehow even more focused than Raw Geronimo, even with more people working and writing.

Shannon Lay (guitar/vocals): Laena and I have a lot of cohesiveness—we’re both Virgos. I’ll never forget the first time we hung out. I got in the car and we both at the same time said, ‘Hey, how are you?’ We said the same phrase right as we sat down! We’re very similar in our poetic minds. One song that’s always resonated with me is ‘Running’s Fun’—I think cuz we sing the entire thing together.

I’ve always thought about the lyrics, and know them really well and I love that line It’s a good origin story—a retrospective thing where you’re analyzing the good and the bad and how they need each other in a way. Laena writes the coolest lyrics!

A lot of songs on here seem to be about communication, and frustration with communication—or just frustration, like maybe ‘Running’s Fun.’ LG: I wrote all the lyrics on those songs, and … it’s just something that I just needed to get off my chest. I guess communication is something I think is really important, and

that lack thereof causes a lot of problems in the modern world. Especially with technology and everything. The barrier of the internet. It’s this infinite expansive world of information, but at the same time, there’s an equal loss in this human interaction and empathy. ‘Small Talk’ definitely is my own personal … I’m not sure if it’s a good quality or not, but I’m just very impatient with … gossip magazines exist, you know? I feel like it’s really easy for people to focus on things that ultimately don’t matter and to disregard things that are incredibly important but maybe not as fun to think about. Like McDonald’s versus eating a real meal or something. [laughs] How literally can I take the line, ‘the world is coming to an end, and you don’t even care, you’re talking about nothing.’

LG: We’re literally destroying our environment, you know? It blows my mind. Not that everyone should just sit around talking about how everything’s fucked or anything— We love doing that here at L.A. RECORD. All the time. Everything’s fucked!

LG: [laughs] Unless everyone starts talking about that, it’s definitely fucked, you know?

I really hope it doesn’t come to some horrible cataclysmic—I’m sorry—catastrophic event for everyone to just kind of wake up and realize that we really need to take this seriously. There’s so many different issues that people can focus on like ‘Save the Whales’ or the drought, et cetera, but it all boils down ultimately to this concept of this is our world and we’re all on it together, and it’s dying because of us. Industrialization and technology and all of these great advancements we’ve created were very shortsighted. We really need to consider the repercussions of our actions. Maybe there’s a chance for us to turn it around if we actually, like, really try right now. But people don’t want to think about that, and it’s a shame.

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That’s what I thought. I mean—thought it was probably about social media and people sharing pictures of baby otters and cute animals, not that I don’t do that. But part of the reason I do that is because I used to share really depressing stuff and I’d get so much shit about it.

LG: I don’t even share depressing stuff, and I definitely enjoy pictures of cute animals.

Sometimes it can pull me out of being in a terrible mood and, you know what I mean?

If looking at a picture of a cute animal makes you feel like you’re in a better mood, then you’re probably more willing to do something positive. I’m not good at explaining my music, really. It’s like when you just run into someone and they’re talking about things that have nothing to do with you, and that you’ll never care about. I’m not a very social person, I suppose. [laughs] What about that little speech at the end of ‘Unicorn’? It sounds really important but I can’t understand it all.

LG: ‘I don’t know anything about that, but if you wait ‘til the clock strikes the hour, you’ll be just involved as I am. Why complicate a simple creature? You walked around the clock, now gimme.’ I wrote that song in about fifteen minutes. I’ve been working on these really heavy songs that have a lot of parts and dynamics. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself with song writing. The working title of the song was ‘Fuck It.’ I walked into my roommate’s room and plugged into a little amp she had and hit record, and just played guitar for two minutes or however long the song is. Then I grabbed a book off of her table, and it happened to be The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. And I read random passages and mixed it with random things that just came out of my mouth. That’s probably the most nonsensical song I’ve ever written—and to be entirely honest—I should credit Peter S. Beagle for some of those lyrics. They’re all taken out of context and none of them are from the same paragraph. I was opening pages and landing on something. Just chance.

What iconic cartoon character would do the best job at delivering that speech?

Michael Perry Rudes (drums): I’ve been thinking about Adventure Time all day but …

I’m racking my brain. Speedy Gonzalez?

LG: I feel like some kind of small Peter Pan. Like Peter Pan but … small?

SL: Lisa Simpson! She would totally quote that—she’s a badass! You gotta watch the first episode of the first season—the Christmas episode. She gives the most amazing speech to Patty and Selma when they start badmouthing Homer cuz he’s not home.

‘Slippin’: is that a party that’s gone really well, or a party that’s gone really bad?

LG: I guess I’m political without realizing it.

That’s another sort of critique on the state of the world right now. It’s probably a party gone bad, you know? It’s not like it’s gone bad, it’s just more of a concern.

So it’s a party that’s gone in a concerning direction?

LG: [laughs] ‘We’re slippin’, everyone’s slippin’ / We’re trippin’, everyone’s trippin’ / ‘It’s broken, everything’s broken.’ It’s looking around like, ‘Damn, we’re fucked.’ The bridge in that song is an escapism-thing, I guess. And then reality hits again. [laughs] INTERVIEW

MPR: To me, it’s about a journey. We’re all going together somewhere. It’s not a drug reference as much as it’s all of us together on our little adventures. And we gotta do it together, and we unite to have our experiences, and keep chugging along.

But then it says ‘it’s broken, everything’s broken.’

MPR: Yeah—cuz bad shit happens, but you just gotta maintain. Keep going.

Laena, you’re a classically trained violinist with serious training—is there something about Feels that all of this training didn’t help with? Something that even with all your knowledge, you had to start at zero?

LG: Coming from a classical background at first hindered me with writing pop music. I could see all of the options laid out in front of me and it was really overwhelming. It’s been a real process turning off that part of my brain and letting something be simple.

But at the same time, I come up with weird guitar parts … I was playing bass in a band, and this old amazing musician guy came up to me afterward like, ‘You’re a violinist, aren’t you?’ He could tell by the way that I was playing. So I approach every instrument from that background without thinking about it.

I don’t really think about much when I’m writing songs—it’s kind of about getting lost in a tunnel and coming out the other side like, ‘What happened?’ [laughs] MPR: Laena’s really good—she has ideas of drum things here and there and she’s not a drummer so I have to learn how to speak a different language with her to learn what she wants to do and still make it my own. I do write my own shit, and I always want to do something a little bit different. Sometimes the girls will have ideas but I’ll translate it into my specific [part]. And it takes time. A lot of times I walk in too complicated cause my brain works in a drum way, and I have to pull it back and simplify and cut the fat away.

That’s kind of the way we’ve been going for the past four or five years.

Amy Allen (bass): It takes time until you’re like ‘Song, I own you!’

Laena, why did you pick up the violin? Of all the instruments you could have played …

LG: The short answer is that when I started fifth grade, there was an option of playing in an orchestra for half an hour every day or having free time for half an hour every day and I chose orchestra. The long answer is probably that my childhood was very—what’s the word I’m looking for—not normal? Like, I’m sure everyone would say that— Unconventional?

LG: Unconventional, thank you. My childhood was very unconventional. My parents were bohemian punks for the most part, and I craved normalcy and structure because there wasn’t really any of that. So I studied classical violin and ballet and got straight As. My parents never pushed me to do any of those things. I dreamed of white picket fences and I wanted to be a lawyer that either protected battered women or the environment when I was little. Obviously that didn’t happen, and I ended up falling closer to the tree that I thought I would. But I just craved structure, and I manifested it in every way that I could as a kid.

INTERVIEW

MPR: My dad was a jazz drummer, like a big band guy. He was the hired gun type who like, whoever paid him the most he would play with. He played with a band called Eddie and the Cadillacs for a long time, and was a lounge guy—played at clubs and stuff. I learned from him pretty early, and got super obsessed with the drums. In middle school I played the snare drum and I didn’t get really obsessed until I was like sixteen or seventeen, and I started studying jazz and blues. I took a lot of lessons, and I was in a jazz band in junior college but I was always like a punk rocker—but I went from being in a super punk rocker in a lot of punk bands to getting into psychedelic shit. And my favorite drummers were always jazz drummers that played rock ’n’ roll—the Ginger Bakers and the John Bonhams and the Mitch Mitchells. I was a music major in college for a year at Cal State Northridge but it started to really piss me off because it was in the box—like the theory—and I was really obsessed with being experimental. So I was like, ‘My foundations are strong, I have the tools physically and mentally …’ I quit and ended up getting a history degree. But I still study. I can read, I’m really into rudiments, and I’m really obsessed with the drums still.

Shannon, do you have a musical theory background?

SL: Not at all. A man named Dan taught me how to play guitar when I was thirteen.

Who was this man named Dan? SL: I grew up in Redondo Beach and there was this musical instrument store on PCH, and it had a little music school in the back and I signed up for lessons. I would bring in songs that I wanted to learn and he’d teach them to me. I started on an old acoustic and then I got an electric. It wasn’t til a few years ago that I was like, ‘Man I’ve been playing guitar for like ten years now, and I suck!’ For the last few years I’ve been really playing guitar every day and been really trying to understand it. I’ve never been good at reading music but I have a pretty good ear. I’ve been trying to learn how to shred harder!

Laena, you’ve played in so many bands— Swahili Blonde, the Like, Dante vs Zombies—and so many different kinds of bands. What’s different now about Feels?

LG: All the bands that you mentioned before were other people’s projects that I was playing an instrument in. This band comes from the opposite perspective. This is the evolution from Raw Geronimo—I controlled every aspect of that band, essentially. Even with Raw Geronimo, I wanted to find the right people for it to become a real band cuz that’s always been what I’ve wanted. Otherwise, I would just tour alone, but that sounds miserable to me. I’d rather be in a band with my best friends and travel around the world that way. And this band is becoming that, actually. Me and Amy have been best friends since high school. Mike and Amy and I played in a band together when we were teenagers, and I’ve known Mike peripherally over the years, and he was in Raw Geronimo, too. And Shannon was in Raw Geronimo from the very beginning. At this point, we all just love and respect and care for each other so much—and also play together.

I started Raw Geronimo having been in other people’s bands—so many others bands for a very, very long time, and never really being INTERVIEW

in a band that was very collaborative. ‘This is the part that you play. If you want to add a little bit of your personality to it, maybe that’s cool.’ Very much filling a role. When the the Like came to an end, the levels in me had been slowly rising for years where I wanted my own project. ‘Alright! Now’s the time!’ It took me a while to get to that point.

I’m naturally very, very shy and I really didn’t feel confident enough with my own music to even ask other people if they wanted to play it. But when I got back from touring with the Like, we’d been gone so much that I didn’t really have that many super close friends that were musicians. I wasn’t really part of the L.A. scene anymore. So it was me making a list of different people I knew who played different instruments really well that I could ask if they would be interested? I made a CD with all these songs that were fully fleshed out and I handed it to them like, ‘Listen to it! Let me know if you want to play it! Thanks!’ It took a while where we had different people kind of coming and going—it ended up I had to kind of do everything. But once we boiled it down to just the four-piece and Amy started playing bass, it really solidified—it became this real band where we all really respected and cared for each other, and really wanted to spend twenty-four hours stuck in a metal box together. ‘Alright! We did it! Let’s change the name now because this is the new thing!’

I don’t know the short answer to how it’s different, but it’s very different. And it’s my dream come true, to be honest.

AA: When we first started playing shows we were playing a lot of Raw Geronimo songs.

It got to the point where Shannon and I were both like ‘We need to retire these songs because they’re just not what the band is anymore.’

SL: Oh my God—everything changed! There was the six of us and we went through three or four bass players, two guitarists, and it became … we were always teaching the songs to somebody. This last guitar player we had, Vug—he quit to pursue his solo thing and he’s kicking ass and taking names, and our bass player Lance who we loved moved to New York, and our percussionist ended up leaving.

We were like … what do we do? We asked Amy if she’d play bass and Laena decided she’d play guitar and sing, and it became this perfect thing. Feels is so much more down to earth than Raw Geronimo was. It could go anywhere. There’s no corner untouched.

LG: Like I said, I’m not great with describing things—or with words, really. But we called it ‘Feels’ because we kept talking about how the songs felt. ‘This feels right’ or ‘this doesn’t.’ It became clear to all of us that the most important thing was how the songs felt and not who was playing the coolest shreddy guitar solo. ‘No egos allowed’ vibe. Let’s serve the song. Let’s play in a way where we’re all connecting energetically. It was a real process.

Me and Shannon and Mike were all in Raw Geronimo for three years together along with a bunch of other people too, and then our bass player moved to New York. My best friend Amy plays bass, but she didn’t want to be in a band. I tricked her into it. ‘We just have these shows booked and maybe you wanted to fill in until we find someone who can commit?

It’ll be really fun!’‘Yeah!’ And then she was just like, ‘Alright, this is too fun.’

AA: She had asked me to play bass for her band Raw Geronimo a couple of times because I come from a more heavy metal background.

I used to have a band called Indian Giver and we were a doom metal band, so for me to move into an indie pop vibe wasn’t necessarily where my heart was but finally she was like, ‘Amy I know you’re going to say no but I need to ask you anyway. We need a bass player—do you want to play?’ It was great because that’s when it completely changed from being Raw Geronimo to being Feels.

You guys seem almost like different pieces of the same person.

LG: It’s funny, I honestly do feel like we’re different parts of the same organism and that’s what I’ve always wanted a band to be.

And it should be! I think, if it’s going to be a real band, not just ‘Me and the Somethings.’

That’s why we decided to change the name — to recognize that it had evolved into a creature that was all of its own. Cause there are so many aspects of being in a band and everyone pulls together and makes it possible.

But Laena just said that she kind of had to trick you into being in the band, Amy? AA: Yeah but I’m not no fuckin sheep! I knew what was going on. But subconsciously you know what’s good for you and you’re like ‘This is going to be great!’ and it has been great!

SL: My only real want from any kind of music—or things I’m experiencing—is that it makes me feel something, whether it’s good or bad. That it evokes some kind of emotion in me. I think feelings are so important and the amount of variation that one can go through during a set is really cool and if you steer it in this way … it’s like a movie. The same thing isn’t happening the whole time—there are all these different things that happen. That’s how life is too. I love the idea of approaching a song and focusing on an emotion and taking it to its maximum capacity, and that’s why I love in a fast song to stop it all of a sudden—it creates that friction that you need!

That’s what you do all over ‘Play It Cool.’

And you even do the reverse—you start it with that super-heavy riff … for a second.

SL: We all really love a lot of different kinds of music—especially me and Amy, we really love stoner metal, like Sleep and stuff like that. We wanted to nod to that facet of our musical imagination, but then turn it into this super aggressive punk song.

What about the lyrics? ‘I swim like a fish in the ocean, enjoying my life until— ’ SL: ‘Enjoying my life until everything’s dead.’

It’s when you first fall in love, everything is so beautiful and you enjoy that fuzzy feeling until you’re back on the ground again.

No hidden meaning? About how the oceans are acidifying and dying?

SL: I honestly didn’t think about that! The progression of that song is that I used to sing it pretty and we’d like harmonize the whole time and it was nice and sweet … and then as that moment I wrote that song about ended and my feelings changed about it, I started screaming the lyrics. You get to a point where you stop caring about what other people think and now I sing it like … so sarcastic. It’s about a specific situation that was like one of those love affairs that overhauled my being and made me think about how I feel about things and react to things. It was an eye-opening

experience. I wouldn’t change it for the world cuz it allowed me to zoom out and get ahold of my emotions and how I react to stuff.

AA: That song changed a lot—it used to be a sweet song about like liking a guy and not knowing what to do and having butterflies but then it became mutilated into this other song: ‘Fuck that feeling! I don’t want to have that feeling anymore.’

I’ve had experiences like that. Part of me looks back and wonders what I was thinking but the other part is like well, if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be where I am now. So I really see it as anything other than a blessing.

SL: Yes! The biggest thing is to learn from it and not repeat the same pattern. You get so wrapped up in the idea that love is so painful and horrifying but so good—but it doesn’t have to be that way! You just have to change your perspective on things.

That line ‘What have I run from ? Only what’s good for me / What have I run towards? Only what’s bad for me.’ What prompted those lyrics?

LG: Everything has negative and positive attributes no matter what. It’s about life. You can look back on the choices you made and see them as negative or positive and there’s a peace that comes with that. You’re not questioning your choices. You’re recognizing that there’s a good and a bad side to everything and you follow your heart and move forward.

What’s something you know now that you wish someone had told you the first day you ever were in a band?

LG: I’ve poured years into getting the experience to feel like I could start my own band and there are so many things! But I honestly don’t think I could have gotten to the place I am now without going through hell.

All the experiences I’ve had have culminated into how I operate now and it’s all invaluable.

It’s all invaluable! I believe in earning shit the hard way. Maybe just like ‘Try not to be so incredibly socially shut off.’ As much as you may want to think that it’s not, nepotism is a strong force. I tried to just operate out of a hermit’s cave. But probably around SXSW— last year, I think—we met a lot of other bands and Lolipop played a big part in us meeting a lot of people. I had been so shut off for awhile that I wasn’t really going to shows unless I was playing them and I was jaded. And for some reason in Austin at SXSW, I saw all these bands that happen to be from L.A. and were really awesome and it was the first time I really felt like I was a part of something. I don’t know if it’s just me or if it’s just the social climate in the music world, but I feel like people were really competitive and not supportive of each other before—but now it’s like the opposite.

People are so supportive of each other and down to play shows together and wear each other’s tee-shirts and support each other. I feel like Burger spearheaded that but they’re all the way down in Fullerton. Lolipop’s just up the street and I can go there and see a bunch of other bands that are not even joking around, and like really good. It’s really awesome to not feel like you’re alone.

FEELS’ SELF-TITLED ALBUM WILL BE AVAILABLE ON FRI., FEB. 26, ON CASTLE FACE. VISIT FEELS AT FACEBOOK.COM/FEELSTHEBAND. 9

ANDERSON .PAAK Interview by Chris Ziegler and sweeney kovar Photography by Theo Jemison

Malibu is by no means Anderson .Paak’s debut, but to the wider world, it’s probably something of a revelation—a full-length followup by the surprise stand-out on Dre’s Compton. But .Paak has been a fixture in L.A. for years, with deep and real connections all across the city and a powerful capability (drummer, singer, rapper …) to fit in any place he can make the space. Raised in Oxnard with his father and then his mother in prison—a childhood he explores on Malibu’s very first song—he turned out to be a merciless drummer, but as he grew up, he says, he found out that talent itself wouldn’t be enough. From there—from periods of homelessness and couch-surfing, at one point—he changed his name from Breezy Lovejoy, climbed a famously diverse series of collaborations that dominated 2015 and culminated with Compton and carefully put together what’s basically his third true solo album. Malibu’s release this month caps off a blow-out year that fast-forwarded .Paak from local notable to worldwide up-and-comer, and as usual for .Paak, he’s made the absolute most of the timing and the opportunity—it’s a pocket epic of an album, positively bristling with detail and personality and presenting .Paak as an artist ready and able to go anywhere.

Is it true that the only people who talk shit on Ringo Starr are people who never played drums?

Man—maybe! I fuck with Ringo. I love Ringo.

Although I heard a rumor it was Bernard Purdie on some of those records, but I don’t know how true that is! I heard he was ghostdrumming. Ringo’s one of the only artists where the way he drums was just like how people write lyrics and talk. His drumming parts were just as important as the vocal parts.

You remember them just like lyrics.

I know you’re learning to surf—are you the kind of person who doesn’t mind practicing in public? Or do you like to practice in secret, so you can appear fully formed?

I don’t mind a crowd but it’d be better if there’s not. Take your board out and hit the waves—that goes hand in hand the way you deal with life, the way you deal with those waves on the board. How you adapt to catching a wave. It’s all part of life. Surf culture is huge in Southern California, and that mindstate is with the people—a lot of the people I’m around, too.

You already have that mindstate—your whole career has been making yourself ready to catch the wave when it comes.

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It’s about preparation. You are what you prepare for. When you’re out there trying to figure out how to surf and nobody’s paying attention to you, that’s the most important times. When nobody’s looking and the spotlight’s not on you, what are you doing? That’s what you’re really going to be good at when it’s time to execute. So if you’re just fucking around in the water, fucking with girls, watching TV, whatever … then that’s what you’re gonna excel at. When people weren’t paying attention—for the most part—and I was just couch-surfing and taking the bus and doing things like that, I was very adamant about wanting to be the best at my craft. And really being someone people talked highly about—a consistent reputation. That was my goal for a while. Years before it got to this point. When it was time to execute, I felt like … I just did what I had been preparing for. That time in the studio with Dre or Premier or any of these people, I’d just been in a mode where this is what I do. Fortunately for me, the pendulum came around to where people are ready for what I was doing. It wasn’t always like that.

I had to develop my sound and everything— I’ve done different things kind of like to no avail. So when it came around where people were ready to receive what I was doing, all

I had to do was just commit—put it down when I had the chance. I love being in that position. The challenge of trying to figure out a tune or being on the spot, it’s … interesting to me. That’s how I handled that—preparing when people weren’t watching.

You take my favorite risk: you don’t do things the way you’re supposed to. You’re a generalist, not a specialist who can only do one thing. But hings work out more easily for specialists. If you can do a lot of things, it takes longer for people to figure out what to do with you.

Any time you have an artist like myself where the thing they do is not so concrete and not so straight-ahead, you can’t put them in a clearcut box. And it’s gonna take a little time for people to adjust and be ready. I can’t be too concerned about that. At this point I wanna continue to get better and put the best art I know that I wanna put out. I don’t have any interest in following trends or doing what the next person is doing, even if that means I might not be selling out stadiums. There’s a bigger picture, for me. I know it pays off eventually. And I’m looking for that fanbase where they’re not just into one thing. That’s me and that’s my team. I grew up with so many different influences. You listen to Michael

Jackson, Stevie, Bowie, the Beatles, Snoop … all across the board. That’s what comes out in my music naturally. What I wanna continue to do is get that across the best as possible, so I can essentially like create my own lane.

And open up something new for other artists that kinda feel the same—other generalists who don’t just specialize in one thing, and that becomes a theme. We wanna blaze a trail for that. It might concern people, but it’s more concerning for the labels and businesses and the corporate situations that wanna box you in. Fans are ready for it—for artists like myself who aren’t just boxed into one thing.

It’s growing to a point where people are ready.

Marvin [Gaye], Stevie [Wonder]—that’s it.

That’s the goal. Hendrix. Setting their own standards and doing what they want to do.

People would call them crazy at one point.

Did you get called crazy?

Yeah—that was a part of the whole shift from Breezy Lovejoy to Anderson .Paak. I had a mentor at the time. I was doing a lot of different things. Running around, playing drums for different artists, doing my thing, rapping, singing—kind of all over the place.

He sat me down like, ‘I realize you’re super talented but we gotta work on the rest of it.’

That’s when it occurred to me that I wasn’t INTERVIEW

“When nobody’s looking and That’s what you’re really go gonna just get everything I wanted just from being talented. I needed to buckle down and figure things out—at least get a clear vision for what I wanted. That’s when I sat down and recorded a bunch of tunes, all different kinds. And a handful of the tunes that were really good I kept holding on to them til Malibu—songs like ‘The Birds,’ ‘Celebrate,’ ‘Put Me Thru,’ these are songs that I recorded years ago. And ‘Parking Lot.’ In the midst of hundreds of tunes that I recorded.

So the actual instant of the birth of Anderson .Paak is in those four songs on the brand-new Malibu?

For sure. I was finding myself and what I wanted to do. But I couldn’t do that with being afraid to just go in and explore.

People sometimes, they get caught up.

Some people get signed early and they don’t get that opportunity to get an artistdevelopment phase where they get to put music out, see what works, see what doesn’t work, try different producers … I’ve been doing that for years, man. They say this is my sophomore album but this is probably my sixth project I’ve done. I’ve recorded and put out music—this whole process—a lot of different times. Each time I’m trying to do something different. And at one point people were definitely calling us crazy. I had these same songs years ago and nobody was biting. I remember the last project I put out, I didn’t want it to get slept on so I was like, ‘Well, I’m just gonna keep making music and I believe in the music and I’ll keep making music until the people are ready and I put it out.’ I had those core songs and things started transpiring—the Dre thing and everything—and I added songs to it and built the album around those songs.

And that’s what ended up happening. Now it’s like people are so wide-open for it—a lot of people are doing the same shit! Whether it’s hip-hop or R&B, a lot of people all sound the same. There’s no greater time.

The most important thing is being original and standing out—how you gonna stand out? That’s it.

You’ve been very close to having nothing in your life, and now you’re in a position to really make some moves. What part of you did you have to leave behind to go from one to the other?

There was a part of me that lacked work ethic. And drive. At one point I thought I was entitled to get what I wanted because I could do all these different things. And I didn’t have to work as hard as the next man because I could do more. That wasn’t the case. There was a part of me that thought I deserved to smoke and drink and party without having any music done. That part of me that didn’t know how to prioritize and did not know how to … really focus on day-to-day, and making sure I’m 100% in fulfilling the steps that I need to take to get to the next level.

There was a part of me that didn’t work with

the simple goals that I wanted to meet for the year. Especially when I started having a family—started seeing everything I do affects my family. So what am I gonna do? They deserve a better life. Just because I’m lazy doesn’t mean they have to suffer. So I’m either gonna strap up my bootstraps or slip. I could go get a 9-to-5, but they can live better than that. I just got sick of it. That was the part that I had to leave behind.

This makes me think of that moment in ‘The Season / Carry Me,’ where you open the fortune cookie and it says ‘Keep dreaming.’

Is that supposed to be encouraging or sarcastic? Like when things are bad, and you get some a fortune like that: ‘Fuck you, “Keep Dreaming!”’

That’s the whole thing about fortune cookies.

It is what you make it. When you open a fortune cookie and you’re having a shitty day and the cookie gives you something like that, it’s like … man, gimme something to work with! Like, ‘What the fuck is this? “Keep Dreaming!”? Yeah, alright, thanks a lot.’

It’s in the midst of all these different things.

I’m seeing people in my family falling apart, seeing disastrous things … and in the back of my mind I know that I’ve been blessed to know … it’s a weird duality when you know what you were meant to do on this earth, but you are having a lot of distractions that are put in front of you that are making it hard for you to commit and take that stand. And believe in yourself. That’s torture. In the back of my head, I know I need to keep dreaming and doing these things, but it’s like … fuck.

How do I even stay afloat out here? And now I got a family to take care of? How do I keep my composure? That’s what I was getting at on that part.

Why is the album called Malibu? I know you grew up in Oxnard and now you’re here in L.A., and Malibu is geographically right between those two places. Is this album about what you went through to get from one place to the other?

Essentially, yeah—for sure. The first step was [previous album] Venice. I knew when I did Venice … we did ‘Drugs’ and I’d seen the momentum of that song. I had all these songs, like ‘The Birds’ and ‘Celebrate’ and ‘Parking Lot,’ and I wanted to put those out at the time, and then I saw how much traction ‘Drugs’ and other stuff was getting and I was like, ‘You got to be kidding me—I literally have to sing about drugs to get some kind of attention?’

So I was like … ‘OK, this is what we’ll do if this is what they want. We’ll start in Venice and we’ll start with the bass frequency and the lowest of the gutter, and we’re gonna bring the people out of that. For all the fans that already know what’s up, they’re gonna be cool with me trying different things. And for the fans that don’t know any better, we’re gonna teach ‘em.’ So when I started Venice, we were gonna different things—hip-hop, trap, R&B, more modern sounds. Then we’re gonna work INTERVIEW

d the spotlight’s not on you, what are you doing? oing to be good at when it’s time to execute.” our way up to Malibu in this journey. We’re going to upgrade our palettes. And heighten our senses. I wanted to take everybody on a journey and show the growth—not abandon the fanbase like that but gradually show how much range and dynamic I have and that I can actually make really good songs, with real musicianship. My fans are patient. They’re trusting—they trust me to go through the different levels I go through. I have a lot of respect for them. I’m very into like, ‘OK— where should we go now?’ Where’s natural for us to go? What feels right for me and what makes sense for them, too? I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was paying attention to what the people are saying. It’s in your face now! You can see what works now and what doesn’t.

They’ll let you know! It’s just about the balance of taking it where you wanna go, and not being afraid to take it where you wanna go—but also understanding what the people want. I don’t think you should be a slave to it—but it’s important to be aware.

This album feels like it’s got a lot of love, but also a lot of sadness—‘Celebrate’ ends with ‘Let’s celebrate … while we still can.’

That’s the heart of the record for me.

That’s a huge part of it. At the beginning of the record, I talk about my pops passing away, my mom being sent to prison … it’s pretty heavy.

I was torn when I was sequencing the album and the best way to go about it. Do I wanna start so dark at the begnning and brighten it up as it goes? Or start light and go from there?

I decided to start dark and brighten it up, just like how the day is. When I first started this, my mom was locked up for seven and a half years, and I got to see her come out. She had a new appreciation for life and so did I, after seeing that whole process of what she went through. I put the song ‘The Dreamer’ at the end, with all my nieces, to come full circle.

People are afraid to have that positivity in their music now—and love. There’s a void for these things. I want to go toward those voids that people aren’t hitting, and it’s natural to me too. It’s just the place where I’m at. When she got out, that’s how I felt. I really like the last half of the album.

You say there’s no positivity in music now, but I see a lot of positivity out there—except it’s really naïve positivity, like school-spirit ‘Hooray, isn’t stuff great!’ positivity. The moments of joy on Malibu are there in contrast with these darker moments, and that makes them feel more real. So is that what you don’t think is out there? That realistic positivity?

You still have to make a good song. Some people are putting out a message but it’s preachy, and they forget the song aspect and the song isn’t good. You’re like, ‘OK, I can’t knock it—it’s got a great message. But I’m not gonna listen to it.’ The songs in the 60s and 70s were political, they were talking about stuff AND they were funky and half the time INTERVIEW

you were like, ‘Damn, I didn’t even know he was really spitting some real shit. I just loved the tune!’ That’s what I was going for on. It might have a positive message but we’re not even thinking about that. I’m always focused on the groove, making sure the song is all the way written—that’s what’s important to me first. I’ve never been a super political dude or aimed to preach that much of a message. I just wanna make music with substance and range and dynamic and that feels good. The lyrical content is the natural situation that comes out. If you don’t stress so much about the message, it’ll come. If you focus on making good songs first, that comes with it.

What about ‘Animals’ from Compton?

That’s a political song. With a song like that, do you feel you need to be a mirror for what people are experiencing? Or a lens?

For me, I see what I see. I grew up with Tupac—that was the whole Tupac thing.

He was a real human. He had ‘Brenda’s Got A Baby,’ then he had ‘Hit ‘Em Up,’ then he had ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ and then he had ‘Toss It Up’—we’re dealing with these things as human beings, and this is who we are.

I’m affected by the world and what it goes through. And I’m seeing with my eyes what is happening. I’m experiencing these things.

I’m talking about them. Everything. I can’t just sit up here and preach like 100% like some Buddhist or Gandhi. I do dirt! And I’m gonna talk about it. And when I see dirt being done, I’m gonna talk about it. It might not always be like that, but this is how it is for me. As opposed to someone … people try and market themselves as someone and it doesn’t work, because they’ve been one way for so long and that’s not working so they try and go the positive route or whatever for the sake of image or some shit like that, and that’s bullshit, you know! The flipside is this is it—this is who you were from the jump. You were talking about this and you were talking about that. I’m trying to get all these people in the same room partying.

2016 could be a huge year for you, but you’ve already got that lyric about fame killing off your favorite entertainers. Have you thought about how you might have to keep things balanced?

I just try to stay prayed up, and I got my family—fortunately. I feel blessed. It’s been a slow bubble for me. I feel like a lot of people fell into stardom too soon. I’ll be 30 years old in February, I got a big family, a wife and son and a bunch of sisters and nieces. Those are the people that keep you grounded and keep you away from the fame monster, and thinking that you’re bigger and better than the people that helped you! You’re nothing without your team. That’s what happens. People get lost and start believing in so-and-so they just met—people who they don’t know who don’t know them and that’s the beginning of the end. I pray I never see that day.

Someone told me that if you come from nothing and make it, one of two things happens—you either wanna bring everyone else with you, or you’re like, ‘Fuck you, where were you when I needed help?’

Exactly. There are people who had problems making it and nobody believed in them and their whole life they had people saying they weren’t gonna be big … but my story’s different. Around me, people had a lot of faith in me. And I wouldn’t have anything if people didn’t believe in me, and I was always being taken care of and who brought me in and were like, ‘You know what, I know you don’t have money but I’m gonna help you out—I know you don’t have food but I’m gonna help feed you. I’ll bring your family, everything, because I believe you’re gonna be something one day.’ That’s the people I always had around me, and that’s the only reason I was able to keep doing music. I have a chip on my shoulder for corporate institutions and people when I had my music and I was going at them and they didn’t believe until the cosign, but that’s expected. Those are the people that are last to know. The people that were first to know and believe are the people I’m around still. And yeah, I do wanna take them with me. And I need them.

On ‘The Waters’ you say, ‘I don’t forget / I spent years living under my greatness.’ Can that go both ways? Don’t forget who wasn’t there, but don’t forget who was, too?

Absolutely—that’s it. That’s huge. Don’t forget, dude—you’re worth more than that.

Don’t be out here doing stuff that you don’t need to do. Don’t be out here living UNDER your greatness. That’s not you. There’s stuff that other people are gonna be able to do because they’re not made to be great. They’ll be able to do stuff that lacks class and be able to shit around, but that’s not where you need to be. I gotta remind myself of that.

You’re in a position where you’re connected to everyone—from underground to legends. Do you think you’ll have to leave the underground behind as you keep moving?

There’s a season for everything. A season for collaboration and getting my name out there and working with the people I wanted to work with and the songs that I like to do—people I was into. Sometimes, man, I would collaborate with people just because they were cool people. I might not have been the biggest fan of their music but we would collab and kick it—‘You’re cool and I wanna help you make something dope.’

Now it’s time to tighten things up—take that mindstate and elevate it a little more, but still keep it. I’ve always wanted to be the cat that can work any room. So now it’s like who else is out there … but on a different level. Who else have you not done it with that we can take it there with? We showed that we can rock with some of the best and

brightest in the underground and even in the top tier. Now it’s time to continue develop it.

I don’t think too far out. I try to maximize the moment. What ends up happening is I get a surplus, and when I look at it I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I finished three albums!’ One is NxWORRIES, and that comes out whenever they wanna drop that. Then I got my album, and this with TOKiMONSTA, and that with so-and-so, and it’s all because I’m in the habit of making music. Will I be able to keep that up? At some point, no, I’m not gonna be making great music all the time. I hope that I’m always inspired and everything I put out is gold and all that shit, but there’s gonna be a time where I might not be putting out the most cutting-edge stuff, or I might not like what I’m putting out, and at that point I don’t wanna just continue to spew out music. I wanna be able to have stuff that I’m sitting on that I had because I continued to create. It’s like a credit line. Not everything has to come out right away. When you have enough tunes, you can do stuff like that.

I’m not really thinking crazy far ahead. I’ve already started working on the next project, but I have projects that are yet to come out that are still going to come out, too—that are gonna need to be toured and all that. So I kinda have a lot of the year planned out already.

How do you balance the artistic need to be so clear and personal with the practical need to make the right business and career decisions? They seem like they’d start to conflict with each other eventually.

It’s part of the mechanics. I’m a drummer by trade. That’s where I started, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever done that came really natural to me. Everything else I had to work and figure out—how to sing, all this stuff. The way my brain works, it can do a lot of things at once. There’s a real practical side for sure.

And definitely a real undomesticated wild side, and a lot of that comes to full fruition with my studio aspect and my live situation.

Those are the times I really try and shoot from the hip and let it come out. But there’s a part of the brain as well that wants to write really good lyrics, or have dense topics to talk about—something that holds weight. I can’t help but to marry the two.

What’s something you’ll never get tired of writing about?

Women. Sexual relations. Figuring out cool ways to make women blush …

You tweeted ‘language was only made to seduce women.’

That never gets old to me—just figuring that out. They’re the most beautiful creatures.

ANDERSON .PAAK’S MALIBU IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM STEEL WOOL / OBE / ART CLUB / EMPIRE. VISIT ANDERSON .PAAK AT ANDERSONPAAK.COM 13

L.A. Takedown Interview by Chris Kissel Photography by Aaron Giesel L.A. Takedown had already completed a residency at Pehrspace, performed a very appropriate sunset gig on the rooftop of the Ace Hotel, and knocked out a November record release at Permanent Records in Highland Park, but even so, L.A. Takedown, their 42-minute cinephile voyage, seemed to just appear. L.A. Takedown announced itself as a serious and deceptively complex work: grandiose in structure but silent about its intentions; sprawling in its ambitions but decisive in every detail; a fully realized symphony written in the language of ‘80s thriller soundtracks. One minute you’re chilling on the back of a speedboat with Crockett and Tubbs, the next you’re a lonely traveler, guided by a delicate, precise guitar melody. At LATakedown.com, you can listen to the piece against one of many videos of the sun setting in real time (and download the entire work for free). It turns out L.A. Takedown is the project of Aaron Olson, an art preparator who composes by night, meticulously writing and recording for his own projects and working on commission for local museums and aspiring filmmakers. He’s a soundtrack obsessive who’s dreamed since college of scoring films, and for the last five years, L.A. Takedown—which now as a live outfit also includes Ryan Adlaf, Jessica Espeleta, Stephen Heath, Jonah Olson, Miles Wintner and Mose Wintner, has been a project for soundtracks without movies. He’s made three full-lengths as L.A. Takedown, including Greatest Hits, Volume One in 2011 and Top Down, Heater On in 2013—his love of absurd humor balances his wholly un-ironic love for 80s motorik aesthetics, kitsch or not—but L.A. Takedown is his proper debut. He’s working on a follow-up now, featuring the all-new band, for Ribbon Music.

What was the proper beginning of L.A. Takedown?

Aaron Olson: Well, the first recordings I made as L.A. Takedown were in 2010 for a friend’s really goofy short movie that no one ever saw.

It’s out there on the internet, though.

Was it an 80s themed movie?

No, it was actually my friend who made this shirt. [Shows me his sweatshirt which depicts two dogs, a chalice of poop, and the phrase ‘Hounds of the Golden Turd Video Club.’] We met freshman year of college, so like 12 years ago, and we bonded over movies—shitty movies—and we’ve been making movies together since then. The movie was like … one part of a series about these meth dealer guys. It was really cartoony and stupid, but it knows it’s cartoony and stupid. It’s a specific kind of humor I don’t think the whole world would get. So [the first L.A. Takedown music] was for that. He [had asked me], ‘Hey, wanna make some Tangerine Dream/Michael Mann-style music?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been waiting for you to ask me to do that.’ In college we were obsessed with Thief and Manhunter, the early Michael Mann movies. I did a couple songs, and I liked the results, and he did, too. He kept making the movies, so it kept being an excuse to make more songs. Basically, 80 percent of the first L.A. Takedown album that I made corresponds to my friend Matt’s movies. At the same time and a little bit before that, I started my own band—that no one else was in—called the Rests. All the music I make is an attempt to make music I’d want to listen to, but the Rests was my attempt to make instrumental 3 to 4 minute pop songs. I was really into the Tornadoes. It wasn’t surf rock, but it was instrumental guitar-lead rock. It was me trying to do something like that— just a melody. The Rests is a lot of clean guitar and my shitty Casio harpsichord sound. That stuff is still on the internet, [though] no one has ever heard it.

What was your process like for the L.A. Takedown piece? Where does the initial spark for a piece like that come from?

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I started working on it in the summer of 2014.

Part of me just wanted to make a really long piece. I like Tangerine Dream so much. I like all these longform things. There’s this Anthony Phillips album called 1984—Anthony Phillips was a guy in Genesis early on, and he went solo and recorded 1984, and I was really into that. In C by Terry Riley. I wanted to make something where there’s a record break for the flip, and then it keeps going.

Did you imagine a film or a narrative beneath it?

No, but in each section I had ideas—like the second part of the piece I refer to as the ‘getting on the freeway’ part. I’m a big fan of listening to music while I’m driving, especially long drives. I love being able to hit play, and it’s going to be 40 minutes of something and I’m not going to get bored or want to change it. But I wasn’t thinking totally visually. I was thinking more like structurally, compositionally. From a listener’s perspective: get intense, get less intense, build, don’t build, things like that. The way I write music is usually I start with one element and build.

Actually, it was surprising to me but the way I composed that whole thing was entirely linear.

I just composed as I went, basically. The first section I started working on when a friend mentioned they were working on a horror movie and [asked me], ‘Hey, can you whip something up?’ When I finished I thought it would be a great start to the thing I’ve been wanting to do. I just kept adding onto it.

The first part reminds me of a Giorgio Moroder score—I’ve heard him talk about how he uses these plodding rhythms to build a sense of unease.

I’m a big fan of Giorgio Moroder, specifically his score stuff. But I’m also just a fan of plodding movement—I just really like that.

I mean, have you seen Cat People? I highly recommend it. It’s Paul Schrader. It’s silly, but it’s really good. I feel like that soundtrack influences anything I do that’s horror-related, even though it’s not a horror movie. It’s my ideal horror soundtrack somehow, and it’s very plodding, and just so moody. That’s

what I was trying to do. This has nothing to do with Giorgio Moroder, but the first part started as this kind of clash-y polyrhythmic thing, between the beeping and the beat. I think it was five beats against four beats, but they start at the same point and meet at the same point. That to me is really just disorienting in a way. It keeps the motion interesting.

But then it’s almost like a krautrock kind of vibe, like Kluster or Harmonia.

Yeah—I wasn’t thinking that, but I love Harmonia. I love anything Michael Rotherrelated, among all the other things. But that part … that more comes from me growing up in San Diego and being really into Tortoise.

I was so into 90s instrumental post-rock, or math rock, whatever you wanna call it. I loved Don Caballero. But I also loved Steve Reich and Philip Glass and all that minimalist stuff. That’s more where that comes from in my life. And then all the krautrock—which seems like a derogatory term. I’m gonna call it ‘German 70s minimalist rock,’ which doesn’t roll off the tongue either. But I love that stuff.

The next section in the piece was me trying to be Michael Rother for a minute.

One of the early sites that wrote about ‘L.A. Takedown’ described it as tongue-in-cheek and facetious. I don’t think that’s what you were aiming for though, is it?

No. That’s something I do fear, that people think I’m being tongue-in-cheek. But I’m not. It’s very earnest music. I feel like with everything I do in my life, I do have a sense of humor about it, and about myself. Good art can be made when you’re able to laugh at it, too. But this isn’t a joke. It’s very earnest music that I can have a sense of humor about.

I guess to labor over something like this the way you must have had to labor over it—it’s hard to imagine it being tongue in cheek.

Right. I’m not spoofing. If anything, I’m homage-ing things I love and trying to make something new from it. There’s humor, or at least an awareness of humor, but I would not call it ironic or facetious.

When I watched the main video for ‘L.A. Takedown,’ which edits together all these sunset videos with the entire piece, the primary thing I was thinking about was the juxtaposition between the noir-ish stylized L.A. of Michael Mann and those folks and the actual real-life L.A. of 2015.

I wasn’t thinking about that, but if that’s something you take away from it, I’m all for it.

The idea behind that was that I love albums, and I love listening through an album, and I love sunsets. [laughs] I like things that require patience. I want people to try out some patience when they’re listening to something.

You don’t have to watch the sunset, but even if you’re working on something, you can look up and say, ‘Oh, there’s the sun now.’ The edited-together version just fit aesthetically in my mind. If it brings to mind a deeper thought, that’s fantastic.

The L.A. Times called ’L.A. Takedown’ a ‘new Los Angeles classic.’ [laughs] If that’s true, I’m stoked. I do really like that in the L.A. Times thing, they just used a picture of downtown L.A. I want it to have the image of a place rather than the image of a person.

Like it exists without the band mechanism.

I want it to be on its own—part of the scenery, I guess. Like Music for Airports, but Music for L.A. Like as you’re driving around, that’s what’s going on in the background.

It definitely gets back to the idea of the piece as a film score, even though it isn’t one literally. Like, you buy the film score for Scarface, and it doesn’t have a picture of Giorgio Moroder on the cover.

Right. It’s ‘Scarface.’ And then, on the back, it’s ‘music by Giorgio Moroder.’ For me because I’m such a score/soundtrack fan, I’m looking on the back to see who scored it. But yeah, for the public, it’s ‘I like this movie, and the music will evoke that movie.’

In your bio on your record label’s site, there’s a line that says something like ‘What if a musician was more interested in movies than they were in music?’

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Yeah—I mean, I started college hoping to be a filmmaker. I took two film classes and they said, ‘You’re not going to touch a camera for your first three years,’ because the program was so impacted. So I switched to music, like, ‘Maybe I’ll major in scoring films.’ That kind of fell apart and I just did music. But that’s just how much film really is a part of everything musical to me. Going back to the piece, was I thinking of scenes when I made it? I wasn’t, but on the whole I was thinking of the landscape or a sunset—something like that. A scene. But nothing specific—more in the sense that this will make a soundtrack to fill-in-the-blank.

Though no matter what it soundtracks, it will lend it this ‘80s aesthetic,’ for lack of a better word.

I know that the Michael Mann aesthetic I’m referencing is very 80s, and I’m a huge fan of that. His aesthetic is very different now. And there aren’t a lot of movies being made like that anymore.

In what way?

Stylized but still having substance and thought.

Manhunter, for example, doesn’t take place in L.A. at all, but it’s super-stylized and it has a ton of poppy songs in it. But to me, it’s more than just a music-video movie. Maybe that’s the connection I’m trying to make—trying to bring that aesthetic into the present with the hope of ‘let’s view this as a real thing and not as some tongue-in-cheek joke about how funny Don Johnson is or whatever.’

When you watch an old Michael Mann movie, your gut reaction is that it’s a movie version of Miami Vice, but then you realize it’s going somewhere else. For a lot of people, though, the— —the splash font.

Yeah, the splash font and the neon—maybe it signals vapidity.

I guess I’ve just been so into that. I’ve gone to theaters and seen these movies in big crowds, and people laugh and I get it—I’m not like, ‘Don’t laugh!’—but maybe next time the fact that the guy is wearing big shoulder pads won’t be funny, it’ll just be cool. I think they nailed something at that time with their aesthetics and music. [The films] are shot beautifully. I find it hard to believe that someone can make a movie like that now where the actors aren’t ‘in on it,’ or something. Thief, in particular— James Caan plays that role so well, and he’s a shitty guy, too. I’d say if you watch Thief, and any scene of them driving at night …

Tangerine Dream is playing, light is reflecting off this shiny hood, and it’s a beautiful thing.

It’s a great aesthetic.

And no film has really captured that since?

Well, Drive was an homage to all of that, and I really liked Drive. You know, [Nicolas Winding] Refn’s follow up, Only God Forgives, I didn’t like it very much. I thought it looked good, great actually, but it was a little too cold, and didn’t bring me in. Thief is pretty cold—Drive is almost a remake of Thief in my opinion—and James Caan is this really detached thief. He doesn’t fall in love with anyone, but he tries to make this really domestic relationship, tries to go straight.

He’s like Ryan Gosling in that movie but it makes more sense in Thief somehow. Drive is literally an homage, updating it a bit but stylistically doing the same thing.

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So we’re talking about the balance between the style and the purpose.

It’s that they can make something so stylized, innovative—for the time, especially—and generally badass. [laughs] I buy into the badassness of when he cracks the case in Manhunter. It’s a really triumphant moment.

Other people might think it’s cheesy but I’m totally in. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen The Keep, but it’s like a Golem monster story set in Nazi times or something—in a giant cave, basically. Tangerine Dream does the music, and that movie just totally doesn’t work. The style can’t carry it. There’s more to Thief and Manhunter and I’d even say Heat that pull me in and that I appreciate about it.

Do you have any interest in being in a more conventional kind of band?

I’ve played in other bands I guess are conventional. I don’t know what that means.

Not 44-minute instrumental pieces.

We just recorded an album and it’s ten tracks that are three to six minutes each. It’s still mostly instrumental. But that’s maybe not conventional to have an instrumental band these days.

No. And doing an homage to a style from 30 years ago is not conventional either.

But I do want to point out that it’s not just an homage. That’s a part of it, but I am trying to make current music, honestly. Although the band is called L.A. Takedown, which references a Michael Mann made for TV movie, there’s as much German 70s in it as there is 90s post rock as there is anything.

And I’m trying to make it current. I am trying to homage certain things, but I’m not trying to pastiche something. I’m trying to use homage as a starting point. Maybe the next album might break through that a little bit better, because there’s a producer. Live, we don’t sound quite as 80s or something. But I’m limited. I’m not a professional engineer or anything, so I’m just recording at home and that’s a little limiting.

Have you ever solicited film students to do scores for their movies?

No, I let it come to me. I’m not in any position to be picky about what I’m taking on as a composer. My dream would be for Michael Mann to make a return-to-form film and I could score it. But for the time being, I’m doing independent films, and I like the majority of them, and I’m doing things for museums, which is rad because I love supporting museums, and telling the story of the Civil War or whatever. I should also point out that I’m not obsessed with 80s scores in particular. I love other music just as much if not more. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of my favorite scores.

What’s your favorite recent score?

Recent is interesting. Did you see The Guest?

It’s kind of a thriller—it came out a year or two ago. It’s on Netflix. And the score to that was by the dude from the band Zombi.

[Steve Moore.] I liked that score. And the soundtrack also played into that. It was a lot of 80s stuff, John Carpenter style. But it also sounded very current to me. I think he did a great job of homage-ing and making current.

But, like, my all-time favorite scores are Jack Nitzsche scores from 60s and 70s, and 80s even—Cutter’s Way is a film that has maybe the most beautiful score in my opinion.

For some reason that score have never been released, but it’s amazing.

Do you like the Johnny Greenwood scores for Paul Thomas Anderson at all?

I saw There Will Be Blood when it came out, and I remember liking it, but I never pursued it or anything. But I did like it. And like when Amelie came out I loved that score.

I mention Johnny Greenwood I guess because his scores are the only ones I notice. Which I think is what some people don’t like about them—people feel they’re distracting I guess.

There’s a fine line in scoring where you want the music to be noticed but you don’t want to dominate.

As a viewer you can’t give it your full attention—not to an extent that it pulls you out of the movie. Unless you’re Morricone and it’s playing over a landscape.

And it works, and it’s so ingrained in the style. But something like Jack Nitzsche’s scores for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Cutter’s Way totally stand on their own.

They’re great albums of music. But in the movies, you notice them, but they really elevate everything.

They become a part of the aesthetic.

Exactly. Nitzsche had such a good ear for that, that in-between, and it’s really cool. I didn’t see Birdman, but I know the whole score is just drums, but I think that’s really cool. Have you seen Dead Man? The Jim Jarmusch film? Neil Young does the same thing—just plays electric guitar through the whole thing. And it’s awesome. And the guy who did Birdman [Alejandro González Iñárritu] has a new movie called The Revenant that I really want to see, and I know Ryuichi Sakamoto did some of the score for that. He was in Yellow Magic Orchestra, and I’m a big fan of him. Recently I became aware of a score he did for a film called Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence from the 80s, and it’s such a good score. It’s quickly moving up in my list of favorite scores.

You should make a film score mixtape.

I’d love to. I do DJ sometimes. And I DJ scores sometimes. It would be cool to do an all-scores DJ set. Everyone would just stand around and be really moody and quiet. I really do want to have a DJ night where it’s like … listening night, where people are mellow and listening to music, versus just kind of partying.

I was just talking with someone who is putting out an album and is asking people specifically not to multitask when they listen to it—don’t do the dishes, don’t go for a run. Just listen to it and don’t anything else.

That’s cool. I don’t ever want to tell anyone how to experience anything, especially if it’s my thing, but it’s cool if you [listen like] that. I would recommend putting on some headphones and sparking up a doobie if that’s what you’re into and just zoning out to it. Just get into it. But you could be doing the dishes, too. It’s probably good dishes-doing music.

Are you excited that you have a band now and can get out of the realm of doing everything yourself?

Yeah. The album is the whole band playing on it. I will say I am quite a bit of a control freak though. I like things played a certain

exact way. I have trouble giving up control, especially in this project, because it started as me in my bedroom. But I’ve played in collaborative bands where I have no control, and it’s fine. But in this band, yeah—I am excited to have other people involved. But I’m always wary, too. [laughs] Like I said, I want to make music I want to hear, and I don’t want to just be rehashing something that already exists. So I’m hoping the L.A. Takedown album does something more than make you think of a film in the 80s. Maybe it’s something you put on when you’re driving and it can create a new memory for you.

Does it bug you to think that people hear it and assume it’s tongue in cheek?

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t understand why people think it’s tongue in cheek—I understand. I also understand why people snicker when they see Manhunter for the first time. But maybe once you get that out of your system, you can view or listen to it with a new perspective where you can think of it as new and earnest. The one thing I’ve heard in the write ups that almost bugs me … nothing really has bugged me yet, but everything seems to focus on how the band is a vintage synth band. I really think of it as like a guitar, bass, and drums band with some synths in it. I’m not like a synth head. I think people assume I’m some kind of gear dude.

Maybe it’s the Giorgio Moroder thing—it recalls a synthetic mood.

I get why people latch onto that. But if I have the chance to assert my voice, then I would just say that’s not the core of the band, vintage synths or something. I’d like to think the core of the band is songwriting, and if it’s anything instrumentally it’s having a melody carried by harmonized guitars, or something like that.

It’s interesting how music like Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder sounded so futuristic and synthetic at the time, but now to us just sounds like rock. It’s not ‘electronic’ in the way that Aphex Twin or whatever sound fully electronic now.

Right. It’s not dubstep. Not that Aphex Twin is dubstep. But yeah, there are much more current sounds nowadays. But that’s not the only way to make current music. People are still using the Beatles’ format of a band in current bands, and that sounds as current as it did in 1965.

So much stuff has been made, it’s hard to make something and not walk in someone else’s footsteps.

We’re just getting out of—or maybe we’re in the heart of—recycling ‘90s trends, both in music and in fashion. There are a lot of bands that sound like Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr. Or I’ve seen haircuts and shit—everyone somehow has the Vanilla Ice haircut. Or the older brother from Home Improvement. My brother had that haircut at that time. He did that then. I’m curious to see if next decade we’re going to be referencing 2010, because was there anything to reference? Anyway—I think it’s all fair game. And if you can make something new out of it, that’s cool.

L.A. TAKEDOWN’S SELF-TITLED EP IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM RIBBON MUSIC. VISIT L.A. TAKEDOWN AT LATAKEDOWN.COM. INTERVIEW

TOMMY KEENE Interview by Ben Salmon Illustration by Luke McGarry For three decades, Tommy Keene has cranked out some of the planet’s finest power-pop without ever quite bubbling up from the underground. His 1984 EP Places That Are Gone made enough critical waves to land Keene not only atop the Village Voice’s poll of the year’s best EPs, but also on Geffen Records, the major-label home (at the time) to likeminded acts XTC and Lloyd Cole. Keene made two well-received albums for Geffen, but left the label and took a seven-year break from releasing records. Since then, he has bounced from indie to indie, building a seemingly bottomless catalog of solid songs built around bittersweet stories, the crisp jangle of an electric guitar and Keene’s preternatural knack for memorable melody. In 2015, Tommy Keene is not a household name—unless your household includes a pop geek—but he is a highly respected craftsman with a new album out that proves he hasn’t lost a single step. Laugh In The Dark, released last fall by Second Motion Records, is Keene-sian power-pop of the highest order. The 57-yearold L.A. resident will play a hometown show at the Satellite Feb. 3, with Portland psych pop band Eyelids opening.

I’ve been spinning Laugh In The Dark and my takeaway from it is just how consistent you have been. It sounds like it could absolutely be the follow up to records you made twenty years ago.

I make records for myself. And this is what I want to hear. I’m my biggest fan and I’m my worst fan. I’m the most critical person of what I do. But it’s got to be a record that makes me wanna put it on on a Saturday night and jump around the room. And it’ll have some thoughtful and some melancholy songs. But that’s what I wanna hear. I’ve never ventured off into any other genres or experimentations because I thought … well, that’s what people do what they’ve made it at what they do. ‘Let me try this because I’ve already proven myself with that.’ But I’ve never proven myself. I’m still struggling to make that perfect record. I can certainly see why people say, ‘Oh it’s another power-pop record, and they all sound the same with Tommy Keene. Yup, sounds pretty good.’

There it goes across the desk. And that’s a problem. But at this point I’m not making a lot of money. I’m trying to amuse myself.

I’m making the records for me. If people like it, that’s great. That’s the bottom line.

What is it about power-pop that seems to foster artists who write and record amazing songs, but never quite treach a level of success that you might expect?

I do think this particular genre is almost too highbrow for a lot of people. There’s nothing really gimmicky about it. It’s not dumbed down. A lot of popular music, there’s always some element of it that’s dumbed down.

Look at Bruce Springsteen. He sits there and sings a really hokey song like ‘Sherry Darling’—‘hey, hey, hey!’—and the average guy at a bar can go, ‘I like that guy.’ But he also has some really thought-provoking Dylan-esque songs. I just think there’s this lowest common denominator that makes people sell so many records. And [powerINTERVIEW

pop] tends to be a little more—probably to its own detriment—just a little purer.

It’s respecting the roots of modern 60sinfluenced rock ‘n’ roll. I think that’s why it attracts a lot of geeky fans. People that have worn out their copy of Pet Sounds. But Elvis Costello is power-pop. Cheap Trick is power-pop. Once you get beyond a certain level and sell a certain amount of records, you’ve escaped that world.

When I think power-pop, my brain automatically goes to the Raspberries and the dB’s rather than Elvis Costello and Cheap Trick.

The thing about the Raspberries—they had amazing songs but they looked like Beatles knockoffs. And that didn’t help them with people. If you saw them back then—and I did as a teenager—they had Marshall stacks and they wanted to sound like Humble Pie. Yet the records were a little bit toned down and they had kind of stupid outfits. I’ll say it! White polyester 70s suits. So each act has this thing that kind of prevented them from reaching a mass audience and will forever cement them in geek land.

I understand Laugh in the Dark came together a little differently than your previous records. How so?

I had taken some time off writing and I did a covers record [Excitement At Your Feet] in 2013. I felt rejuvenated by that and I wrote a batch of songs rather quickly for me. From ‘I’m gonna write some songs’ to ‘we’re ready to record’ to ‘we’re mastered’ to ‘here’s the release date’ it was a relatively painless and quick process compared to other records that I’ve been involved with over the years.

Why do you think it happened so much more quickly than usua;?

I think the creativity was sort of simmering and ready to burst at that point. It became rather obvious really quickly that there was a record happening.

You mentioned not writing for a couple of years— It was about a year and a half of … I don’t know, I just didn’t want to pick up a guitar and try to write. Either you don’t know what you’re gonna do, or you just don’t feel like it because you’re not inspired or not happy. If you pick up a guitar and sit there all day, nothing good’s going to come out. That’s an exercise in frustration. So I did the covers record because I was in a kind of writer’s funk, and that brought me around.

Has that happened to you before?

I’ve gone through periods like that. I’d go nine months without even picking up a guitar. That’s not strange for me. There’s just periods where I’m not touring or I’m not playing with anyone or I’m not writing or I’m not recording. That’s unheard of when you’re 22 or 16 or whatever, but as you get older other things come into your life. But yeah, I’ve gone through periods where the well was kind of dry. I remember there was an early 90s post-Geffen period where I was not happy with what I was coming up with. There was a period for a year or two where I was at sea stylistically.

The grunge thing was going on and I was trying to see how I fit in. It reminded me of when I was 13 and everyone wore plaid shirts and was listening to Black Sabbath.

Who I liked! But grunge to me was basically Black Sabbath with a little melody. I didn’t get a lot of those bands. Well—Nirvana, of course, I got.

They were the most melodic of those bands.

And Black Sabbath were very melodic. I mean, Ozzy’s favorite act is the Beatles.

So they had their dirge-y stuff, but there’s melody in Black Sabbath. But I didn’t find any in some of those Northwest bands. All these grunge bands were getting signed for millions and millions of dollars and people didn’t want any melody and that was sort of killing me. Just hurting my feelings.

What’d you do between 89’s Based On Happy Times [released by Geffen] and 96’s Ten Years After [released by Matador]?

I started playing with other people. I played with Velvet Crush. I played with Adam Schmitt. That led to Paul Westerberg. I had a little side thing going. Which I wish I could do more of. I enjoy not being the frontman.

I started as a drummer when I was a kid.

Then [I moved from] rhythm guitar to lead.

Then I became a singer-songwriter. I slowly worked my way up to the front. But I have no problem being a side guy.

You said your feelings were hurt when labels started chasing grunge. Do you still get your hurt by the music business?

That was sort of a joke. There was just this period where I couldn’t get arrested. There were these major label auditions. I had a deal with Gerard Cosloy at Matador. He was gonna do a deal with Island Records.

He brought three acts: American Music Club, Yo La Tengo and me. The guy said [he’d take me] and passed on the other two. We go through this whole 100-page contract and near the end of it the guy gets fired for sexual harassment. So there goes that deal. Then we were going back and forth with CBS in like 91 and things were going great … and a week and a half later he gets fired. That added to the misery. I think now there’s a lot more support for smaller, independent singer-songwriters, especially on social media. You get a lot of ‘You’re the greatest ever!’

TOMMY KEENE WITH EYELIDS ON WED., FEB. 3, AT THE SATELLITE, 1717 SILVER LAKE BLVD., SILVERLAKE. 9 PM / $8-$10 / 21+.

THESATELLITELA.COM. TOMMY KEENE’S LAUGH IN THE DARK IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM SECOND MOTION. VISIT TOMMY KEENE AT TOMMYKEENE.COM. 17

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YOKO ONO Interview by Kristina Benson Illustration by Bijou Karman

If Yoko Ono is a witch—like the title of her new collection of remixed classics and deep cuts tells us—then it’s really because she’s free, and she shows us how and why in this interview the same way she’s done with decades of music, art and activism. These new versions of these Ono songs prove just how ahead of her time she was—or just how timeless she’s always been—and in her answers here she talks about peace, magic, love and inspiration like they’re already here ... which they are, aren’t they?

You and your art and your music has always had a sense of optimism to it. Like how the world can be changed if you want it, or how your broken cups don’t need to stay broken forever. How do you maintain that optimism? What made you think that you could change things in the first place?

The world kept changing whether we had anything to do with it or not. In fact when you look at it closely, some changes were made by a person or people. Change is the characteristic of Human world, and I assume it will always be that way.

How did that realization connect to the idea that we must work together to make change?

That realization, as you call it, is also part of our nature. Making change together is a pragmatic way of doing it. It works faster.

You have experienced a lot of loss and a lot of tragedy in your life. What advice would you give to someone who is experiencing loss? Should we try to heal from it? I think of your lyric ‘Bury the past / move on fast’—is that something that can help in these situations?

It is unnatural to try to stick to the past. The past will change itself even if you do nothing about it. You will move on whether you like it or not.

The title of this series of albums is Yes I’m A Witch, after your song from 1974. What kind of witch are you? There are women who are strong and even dangerous who experience the word as an insult, there are women who are wise and powerful but not part of the established church, there are women who might even have magic powers. How were you wearing this word then? How do you wear it now?

I am secular. Free of all established religion.

But in that freedom, I have powerful memory of what I have learnt and accumulated wisdom from my experience with all religion. I have not dispensed any wisdom and power I have learnt from them.

For the first record, you gave each artist your catalog to listen to as well as whatever other instrumental elements attracted them from that cut. Is this how you approached INTERVIEW

this record too? How did you choose the artists you wanted to collaborate with?

The individual/group I chose were all today’s coolest musicians/band. So I wasn’t surprised much. Every time I was told the name of the song they chose, it made me nod, and smile.

When you participate in a remix project like this, how does it feel to hear your own words sent back to you in this transformed way? Do they help you continue to build as a person? Do they change the way you remember or think of yourself in the past?

I just listen to it as music—not necessarily mine. Just music. And enjoy its energy and power.

You’ve described yourself in interviews as both a ‘control freak’ and being very relaxed toward your art. How do these two opposite ideas work together at the same time? Is there a difference in the work you do when you are feeling relaxed than when you are in control?

All sounds are beautiful. I just listen, relax and enjoy.

Something this project seems to say to me is that music changes, but your voice and your words don’t—is this an idea you recognize and encourage?

Yes. Thank you, thank you, thank you! What a blessing!

Back in 2007, you said that you were really into indie music and thought that indie would help put back the spirit in music.

Do you still feel that way?

Learning through making music and art to become independent is the most cool way to learn.

One day I would love to hear a remix of the song ‘I Felt Like Smashing My Face In A Clear Glass Window.’ Did writing that song save you from smashing your face in a window?

Precisely. I was feeling like I wanted to smash my face into the glass, and instead, I was able to save myself by singing about it.

Is it healthy to live a life without ever breaking glass?

Writing a song is one of the ways I have been saved … and voila!

You have always seemed to be both fearless but also prepared to deal with that fear in your art—like in ‘Cut Piece’ or ‘Bag Piece,’ people could have hurt you if they wanted and you knew that was a possibility. I find these things inspiring when I have to face something I fear. Are there fears we have no choice but to face? Is making art a way through that? Is simply seeing or hearing or being exposed to art a way through that too?

Yes, Yes, Yes! Experiencing art is a good way to learn what is out there for you and deal with it positively.

Has the meaning of ‘Cut Piece’ has changed for you as you’ve gotten older? You spoke of people wanting to know the stone that was you – how did that stone change in the time since?

I’ve learnt a lot from actually sitting on stage with the scissors in front of me asking the audience to come up and cut my clothes. You can’t die twice in real life. But game of Art gives you how to deal positively in the game of life.

What’s the difference between female energy and male energy and how does it manifest in music? In art? How do they combine and what do they do when they are isolated from each other?

We are all male and female in various degrees.

Enacting that reallity in different ways gives us the learning of what we are. We are never isolated from each other. That’s a myth.

With your instructional artwork—is the fact that a woman is telling people what to do part of the concept behind the art?

Would it be different, do you think, if the instructions were perceived to be coming from a man?

There is no difference, except how you perceive and enact your sexual identity.

What does the word ‘peace’ mean to you?

When you’re striving for world peace, what are you striving for? What does world peace look like and how has that definition changed for you as you’ve gotten older?

You keep saying ‘as I’ve got older?’ Nothing changed with my age. Only the amount of experience and how I react to it have

changed in time, not by age, but by number of experiences. In the totally peaceful world, we will attain life without wasteful conduct.

We will be loving and loved because we will not have anger, sorrow, and illnesses and unwanted death. We will only die or go elsewhere because we want to. We will also have the freedom to go away and come back if we wished.

In another interview, you said that you felt that the downfall of patriarchy is ‘imminent’. Can we expect the realization of peace with the downfall of patriarchy?

How is patriarchy tied to peace, or the absence of peace?

Patriarchy creates a world of imbalance in which we create anger, sorrow, and various illnesses to combat the unbalanced situation.

It is not good for anybody. You should be glad and proud of what you are. But that is not insisting on an unbalanced life.

Do you think you will see peace in your lifetime? If someone asked you what they could do to bring the world closer to peace, what would you tell them?

We have such a world already. Our world is very close to Peace. It takes only for us to believe in it and see it with our mind’s eye.

Our world is incredible wise and beautiful.

What is something about you that people would find really surprising? What is the second biggest misconception about you?

In a subconscious world, I think everybody knows me and all people. We are together already in the most beautiful, ideal way. Some people prefer to not believe it. So they keep playing the game they got use to. Eventually those people will be sick and tired from that game, and will stop it. The life of joy and laughter will lead us to life of Health. The life of poverty of mind leads us to pain illnesses and unwanted death. Let’s have joy and laughter instead of giving fear and sorrow to ourselves and others. All of us deserve Eternal joy and happiness, which is ours to take.

YOKO ONO’S YES I’M A WITCH TOO IS OUT FRI., JAN. 22, ON MANIMAL. VISIT YOKO ONO AT IMAGINEPEACE. COM. 21

HOLY GRAIL Interview by Chris Kissel Photography by AMMO

Pasadena’s Holy Grail wear their influences like a raggedy old back patch, deploying vocals as sharp and bright as polished steel and solos that sound like miniature symphonies in support of an uber-metal spectacle that owes its deepest debt to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. But these dudes care at least as much about preserving metal’s hallowed past and they do about pushing their music forward: their long-anticipated new album Times of Pride and Peril, which sees the light of day Feb. 12, shows a band balancing the sheer tonnage of their riffs with a focus on songcraft, and casting off a lot of baggage in the process. Because being in a metal band comes with a lot of baggage—about 35 years worth, including dozens of subgenres, decades of accrued fan expectations, and the band’s own assumptions about what success is supposed to look like. We met up with vocalist James Paul Luna and guitarist Eli Santana on a soggy evening in Pasadena and talked about the failed promise of metal stardom, the weight of expectations, and why their new record is as much Cloud Atlas as it is Iron Maiden.

What was the biggest risk you took making this record?

Eli Santana (guitar): That it wasn’t over-thetop metal, trying to prove how fast we are and all that stuff. We were just trying to write songs.

For me, it felt almost vulnerable—like, ‘Oh no, what happens next?’

James Paul Luna (vocals): Yeah. Making music that we like, and not really taking into consideration what the metal community or our fans are going to think. That was the risk.

Metal fans will actually come up to you and say, ‘Your next record better sound like this, or I’m gonna be pissed.’

ES: Yeah—we’ve gotten that. Because I’ll do the screaming stuff here and there, people will come up and say, ‘You better stop that screaming. The old schoolers are gonna hate you, man. You better stop it.’ It’s like, what are you, 19? Why are you talking about old schoolers? The thing we always wanted to do is wear our influences on our sleeves but not act like we’ve never heard Pantera, or that we’ve never heard the 30 years of music since the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. We try to add something new to it, as opposed to basically being ... I don’t want to say parody, but the whole ‘you can’t write that riff because they didn’t have that then’ thing. That whole … ‘There were no utensils in medieval times, therefore there are no utensils at Medieval Times.’

JPL: We kind of ostracize ourselves—oh well.

It’s such a common thing for bands it’s almost cliche to even talk about—this idea of having to trade in cred with your fans for growth.

ES: I think there will always be those people no matter what. We’re never going to be able to top our first EP for those people.

What would you say is your proudest moment on the record?

ES: The last song, ‘Black Lotus.’ Because it’s really an epic song, where we really just swung for the fences. The fact that we didn’t do any screaming until the end of that song, and the note it ends on—the fact that the song even got made and is on the record is a win.

JPL: My first thought was ‘Black Lotus,’ too.

We didn’t force it, it just happened, and it was INTERVIEW

an epic song. We knew the whole time that at the end we were just going to go all out. And it just worked out.

ES: It’s funny, because it goes super long, all this music, and then out of nowhere, Luna comes in singing. This part was always meant to have a guest vocalist, but things just didn’t work out, we ran out of time, so we said, ‘oh, we’ll just come up with something.’ It’s funny, because it ended up being my favorite vocal on the record—this island of singing on this mass of music. There’s a bunch of stuff on there I’ve listened to over and over, and I had to set it aside because I didn’t want to burn myself out on it. Which is a good thing, because some of my favorite records, like the new Baroness, I have to pace myself. I [burned myself out] with Yellow & Green, where as soon as I got my hands on it we just drove around listening to it nonstop.

‘Black Lotus’ works, too, because the album has this whole concept and it’s building toward the climax the whole time. Can we talk about the concept? A supreme ruler who gains all this power and then loses it, right?

JPL: It was loosely based on our experiences with business, and how music is a business and people can get their hands into it. Where would you say it came from, Eli? It really came from your writings.

ES: It’s funny—now that I’m not in school, I’ve been reading all this history. Every time, whether it’s the Mongols or Alexander the Great, everything is going awesome, and it doesn’t last. It also gave us a focus. When we went into making the record, we had like fifty arrangements, and it was, like, ‘What’s this song going to be about?’ Well ... one time I watched this show about aliens, or one time I caught the end of Murder, She Wrote. It could be anything. The best way to spark creativity is to give yourself boundaries, so we wrote a brief short story. We picked out the arrangements and put them where we wanted them to be, and forced ourselves to write to that—to be creative within those confines. It was also kind of fun, because it was like, ‘Now I have to read up on Alexander the Great.’ But we didn’t want

it to be like the song ‘Alexander the Great’ by Iron Maiden. We wanted it to be more loose.

Almost like Cloud Atlas, where it’s the same story throughout time, but less specific. It’s more about an emotional rise and fall.

Did you actually write a song about Murder, She Wrote?

ES: It wasn’t Murder, She Wrote—a long time ago in another band, I watched Cold Case Files or something, and we took some pretty messedup story and turned it into a song.

Who’s the most metal TV detective?

ES: I think probably Columbo. People always underestimate him, but there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface. You were left thinking, ‘Oh, it is more than meets the eye!’ Initially, I would have said Fox Mulder, but I think Scully might be even more metal than him. Because there is an episode where they’re [chasing] a Satanist, and Mulder tells Scully to hide her Megadeth posters.

I didn’t know X-Files dropped a Megadeth reference!

ES: Yeah—12-year-old me lost it.

Setting these creative boundaries—is that a new thing for you?

ES: The content I was aiming at lyrically on Ride the Void I wanted to be like hardcore I was listening to—this ‘triumph of the human spirit’ thing. I didn’t want to do the Dungeons and Dragons stuff. That was something I put on my own material I was bringing in. But on this one we laid out a strict story arc, and for the most part each song musically was based on which part of the story it was going to fit into. We needed to write based on specific plot points.

And then it became about some of the business things you were going through?

JPL: Yeah, that was the fantasy story part of it … but for me, I had gotten into this dark funk for awhile, and I was just kind of burnt out on music in general. Through that, I could see that I was running the ship into the ground. So it paralleled with that story. I just realized that it was time to suck it up and get back into rockin’. [laughs] Just the album in itself is something I’m proud of—that we did it. I’m happy to be back playing music again.

What has your experience been like working within the business in general? Where are you as far as being a band in 2016?

JPL: It’s hard because in some ways we still have, like, the 90s mindset. I remember growing up playing in bands like, ‘If you get signed, you’re huge.’ That dream is still out there, even though it’s not reality. I still have to remind myself that’s not how it is. Because in reality, there’s not that much money to be made, unless you’re really, really riding it out—touring a lot, blasting social media, doing a lot of it yourself. That’s really the key to it—keeping the overhead low and doing as much of it yourself as possible.

Labels are scraping by, and trying to get their hands on any source of revenue they can. So we get these people waving golden tickets at us that aren’t really there. We’ve experienced that over these last—what, seven years? And now we’re at the point where we’ve come to terms with it, we’re aware of it, we accept it for what it is, and we make the best of what we have.

ES: It’s like storming the castle, getting in there, and being like, ‘There’s no gold in here!’ [laughs] I know it’s a downer, but I feel like there’s got to be opportunity in that, too, And hopefully we’re a part of it. But seven years ago when we got signed, it always felt like money was right around the corner.

JPL: I feel very fortunate because we’re not losing money. We’re not in the red. We’re profiting the more we tour. It is building slowly.

But in our genre especially, you have to build from a grassroots level. You can’t just expect to be superstars, unless you’re a supergroup of people in other bands. Or a fluke.

Or a 30-year juggernaut.

JPL: Totally.

Speaking of juggernauts, did you guys ever hang with Lemmy in Hollywood?

JPL: I never met him, did you?

ES: No, but I was fortunate enough to see Motorhead, and it’s still the loudest show of my life. I saw them with Iron Maiden and Dio at Long Beach Arena.

JPL: I was at that show!

ES: I had earplugs in, and my ears were still hurting from how loud Motörhead was. It was 23

awesome. I got to go on the Motörboat cruise, so I got to see one of his last shows. Everybody kind of got in line to see him. I wish I had, but looking at the pictures, he looked like he was over it.

He looked like he might have had the finish line in sight.

ES: Yeah. He just ... he never stopped partying.

Was he a big influence on you guys at all?

JPL: Really just the who-gives-a-fuck punk attitude. It went beyond any genre. I think Motörhead didn’t really try to be a metal band. It’s like rock and blues, with really heavy distortion and really gritty vocals.

ES: I don’t think he had a choice on the vocals.

JPL: [Laughs.] Totally. He was just, like, going for it. That’s really inspiring, to go for it and do it with what you got. Be as gnarly as you can.

JPL: They were proto-punk, proto-speed metal, proto-thrash. All of that.

ES: It was just Lemmy trying to be in a rock and roll band. He was just Lemmy.

Are you worried at all about the state of metal? It sounds like a silly question, I guess, but I feel like it’s something people talk about constantly. People probably say that to you all the time, right? ‘Keep fighting the good fight, guys! Make sure metal doesn’t die!’

ES: The best thing we could do is not be stale and try to turn in the same album just to ‘keep metal alive.’ You have to push it somewhere.

Honestly, that’s when a scene dies. When everyone starts doing the same thing and doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers. But metal is such a weird thing. Especially now, it’s been through so many changes. Other genres have tried to kill it so many times, and it’s still there.

Even looking back on the 90s, some of my favorite albums came from that time. I think we need to be more concerned about the state of music, rather than the state of metal. Metal will always be there.

What about the state of music?

ES: In the last year, if you heard about anyone who sold more than a million records ... it’s past the point of going, ‘Oh, man, why couldn’t a metal band sell that much?’ and more like, ‘Wow, somebody actually did that.’ I think the entire art form is going to end up somewhere that no one is sure of.

Is the situation as bad from a listener’s perspective as it is from a band’s?

ES: No. I’m a musician, and I use Spotify. I know how much we don’t get paid from that.

But I can see where the listener is coming from. Kids are growing up—even adults at this point—and saying, ‘Wait, why should I pay for music?’ Especially when it’s so easy to get it elsewhere. People just listen to music on YouTube, and don’t even care how bad the quality is. We’re definitely at a point of no return with that. There’s got to be opportunity in there, too, though. There have been a couple albums I found on Spotify, loved them so much I went and saw the bands, and just thought, ‘Please tell me there’s vinyl.’ It definitely came from a place of wanting to help out the band, but it was also about wanting to get deeper into this album that I already loved. Vinyl is helping.

I’m definitely not the only one who thinks that way. We have a lot of people who come up and ask for vinyl on tour, more so than CDs. It’s not going to be a game changer, but it helps.

So you’re putting out Times of Pride and Peril on vinyl?

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ES: Yes. That’s kind of another way we mapped out the album, with the rise and fall concept— knowing which sides the vinyl was going to be on was cool. We were almost writing for vinyl—that pacing of five or six songs at a time.

Does the label do that for you automatically or do you push for it?

ES: When we signed with Prosthetic, we started doing vinyl right away. We got lucky there. We actually had Ride the Void on cassette, and I think we’re going to do that again. My ex-girlfriend was like, ‘Who’s going to buy a cassette?’ And we sold out of them. When I was little, I always wanted to see my band on cassette—with the sleeve and everything.

When CDs came out, I was bummed to think I would never see my band on a cassette. It’s funny how things come back around.

It seems like fans rely on you to fulfill that kind of nostalgic experience for them.

ES: I think that’s why people come up and say, ‘You can’t be screaming!’ ‘You’re ruining my retro experience! I thought you were a new band doing old school stuff, and now you’re doing a new thing. You’re ruining it!’ It’s like going to Medieval Times and seeing a guy with a baseball cap.

The Medieval Times thing is such a good metaphor, beyond just the swords and beer.

ES: Yeah—because when it actually was medieval times, those were the best weapons they could get. That was the best way of combat and entertainment. Early Iron Maiden, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal—those were the best recordings they could do. If they had ProTools back then, they would have used it.

Were you giving guitar lessons while you were out on tour last time?

ES: I was. I might go back to it, but it was hard to arrange. A lot of times we’d show up to a venue and it would be a bar. I’d have a kid show up with his guitar, and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, OK, let’s go in the back of my ... van?’

The kid’s mom is like, ‘ ... who is this guy?’

JPL: [laughs] You’d open the side door and pee jugs and bottles would fall out.

Or someone is sleeping in there.

ES: Or I’d be giving a guitar lesson and random people would come up like, ‘Hey, let me buy you a beer!’ I’ve even had the thing where I’m giving a guitar lesson and the headlining band will start sound checking. If I had more of a controlled environment I might do it again.

The goal in the summer tours was to get a tent and make it like a summer camp.

I think it’s really cool. You’re going around the country meeting all these kids who are super stoked to play guitar like you.

ES: Yeah, it’s cool. I knew better than to construct a lesson plan, because it never happened. Sometimes, people just wanted to show you their licks, which Alex [Lee, guitar] wasn’t pumped about. You’re like, ‘Why did you…? You know what, you paid—you can do whatever you want.’ One guy just wanted to jam Black Sabbath with me. I was like, ‘Wait, we need to get back... you know what? We don’t need to get back to the lesson. I’ll teach you this Black Sabbath song. Let’s do this.’

I was imagining lots of 12-year-old kids.

ES: We even had some younger guys. Little dudes who were way ahead of the game. I really enjoyed that. Then sometimes, like I said, we’d just have a guy who was like, ‘I just want to show you how good I am.’ And that’s OK, too.

Do the lessons seep into your creative process?

ES: It gets in there. When I sit down to write, especially after teaching, I find myself trying to do less. Sometimes I overthink—add a bunch of show-off stuff. Now more often than not, I go for something that sounds harder and is easier to play. I’ve done it the other way around and it’s kind of a nightmare. If a kid asks me how to play a Holy Grail song, sometimes I’ll be like, ‘God, why did I make that so hard?’

It might be something I haven’t even messed with for months, maybe years. So it has sort of retroactively affected the way I play.

Do you teach lessons when you’re home?

ES: I do, but I don’t do it in person. I do the Skype thing, and I have yet to run into a problem with that. It’s weird—I’ve kind of gotten back into the novelty of it, where we’re just sort of hanging out. I’m fine with that. I even gave a lesson to someone in person down at San Diego State because the guy was going to school there. I showed up and he was like, ‘Do you want a beer?’ I was like, ‘OK.’ Then we sit down, and he goes, ‘So ... what was it like touring with Exodus?’ ‘Oh, it was cool.’ I showed him one thing, and I’m trying to write it out, and be very … like, a teacher, you know?

And he goes, ‘Well, thank you, man. This has been great,’ and gave me another beer. Then some of his other friends showed up, and we just kind of drank for a little while. Then I left.

And I was like, ‘What did I just get paid for?’ I felt a little guilty. I get kind of weird with that— if we’re going to learn, I want to do it for real.

Right. The reason you’re doing it is because you want to teach people guitar.

ES: Yeah. One of my favorite things is when they ask how to play a Holy Grail song. The true gem is, ‘OK, I’ll show you how to play it, but let me show you what I was thinking when I wrote it.’ Like, if I had [Megadeth’s] Marty Friedman teaching me when I was 14? Man. I actually met him when I was in middle school.

Megadeth were playing the classic lineup, with Nick Menza. They had a thing where if you brought enough canned goods to this homeless shelter, they’d give you a voucher where you could meet Megadeth after the show. Me and my friend went to the store like, ‘OK, for our money, what’s the heaviest thing we can get?’ We brought in these giant vats of beans. I guess we should have gotten chunky soup or something.

It was more bang for your buck. We just wanted to meet Megadeth. Maybe we should leave that out. It makes me sound like a dick.

No, man. You were in middle school. It’s OK. ES: Anyway, I met Marty, and I said something stupid. I was like, ‘You’re rad!’ ‘OK, now move it along.’ I was like, ‘No!’ I had this thing lined up! It was basically Christmas Story, where I just said I wanted my football and got pushed down the slide.

You wanted to have the moment with him that all your fans want to have with you.

ES: Yeah—I guess it’s hard for me to see that.

We did a meet-and-greet with Marty Friedman at [Holy Grail’s label] Prosthetic, and he said he’d heard the record. He said we were shredders. Whether he liked it or not remains to be seen.

Who else do you admire as musicians?

JPL: For me, it’s Ronnie James Dio and Rob Halford. Those are two of my biggest idols.

And Ian Gillan. Those are probably the big three. I really love Paul Rodgers when he was

in Free. I even like Bad Company stuff. I love old ‘70s proto-metal and heavy blues rock. It has a big influence on my style. And then just anything New Wave of British Heavy Metal. A lot of Diamond Head. There’s this band called Parallax that we both really like. Witchfinder General. There’s just so much good music out of that era. And the funny thing is that New Wave of British Heavy Metal—they weren’t really trying to be metal. It was like Lemmy and Motorhead. Just trying to make really heavy rock. It just had extra edge. They were writing good songs with mean tough-guy lyrics.

Some of that stuff is so raw—you wonder if it weren’t for bands like Metallica, if anyone would even listen to it now. It’s crazy how they are sort of the reason a lot of that stuff got preserved.

JPL: It kind of got around in the Bay Area scene, though—you could tell. Because even like the Exodus guys—everyone in the Bay Area just kind of knew about it. There’s just this network that I’m really fascinated by—how Rainbow and Deep Purple and Black Sabbath all kind of shared the same family. How there’s Dio, and Ritchie Blackmore, and how Ian Gillan sang with Black Sabbath.

ES: I was listening to the Marc Maron interview with Lemmy. [Maron] was like, ‘Are you into Deep Purple?’ And Lemmy was like, ‘Yeah, they were all my friends and we just hung out, so I figured I better check out their music.’

Like, ‘Oh yeah, my buddy’s band Deep Purple?

I should probably check out their music.’ It was exactly like that, that scene. He would go to these clubs and see Maiden, and Rainbow. It’s fascinating.

I find those moments totally disorienting.

You grow up watching Behind the Music and idolizing these bands, and realizing later they were friends and musicians trying to scrape it together like anyone else. Like Sabbath—just a bunch of stoners trying to rock out.

ES: Yeah. They were a blues band.

JPL: Just really pissed off, living in a really cold, dark town, being poor, making evil music.

ES: ISpeaking of scenes, the early 90s Brooklyn hardcore scene definitely changed the way I wrote songs, with, like, Life of Agony and Biohazard, Type O Negative, Sick of It All— that whole scene. It was the same thing, where they all knew each other, thanking each other in the liner notes and singing on each other’s records. I’ve run into a couple of those dudes, and I was like, ‘What was that like?! That was so rad!’

Does going on long tours change the way you approach the music when you get back?

JPL: It kind of does. Even playing a song live after not playing it since we were in the studio—playing it live in front of people can be like, ‘Whoa, this song is way radder than we remembered!’ Or, ‘Wow, this song is kind of awkward live.’ Some of our old material, we’ll start to get tired of it, but it’s the stuff people want to hear and have to hear at every show. I think that’s kind of natural.

ES: I think, too, whether we want to or not, at least for myself, we get influenced by the bands we’re touring with. We came home from touring with Amon Amarth and it was time to write. That stuff was creeping in. It was getting pretty Viking.

Were there bands you played with where you were just totally blown away?

INTERVIEW

ES: Blind Guardian, just the way they sounded live, the production—we were like, ‘That’s a professional-ass band.’

JPL: Even Amon Amarth. Holy shit. They were on the next level. We get a lot out of every band.

Our first tour was with Three Inches of Blood and Saviours, and that really set a lot of things in stone that we still carry on with us today.

ES: It was one of those hockey stick-shaped learning curves. The first thing we learned was ‘Don’t bring all your merch to the venue.’ Bring some to sell, leave the rest in the van. We were like, ‘Oh!’ JPL: Subconsciously, just being around the band’s music every night, it sinks in and comes out in your playing. Coming back from the Orange Goblin tour, I was like, ‘Yeah, I need to get back into heavier, sludgier playing again.’

You remind yourself that you like stuff.

JPL: Even touring with Toxic Holocaust and Krum Bums influenced a more punk attitude—a punky, thrashy thing. Each band, whether we know it or not, has an influence on us.

You’re also playing for their fans, so on every tour they’re expecting something different.

JPL: And then you’ll have those shows where you think nothing’s coming across, and after the show everyone’s rushing to the merch table and saying, ‘That was great! That was awesome!’

‘What? You were just standing there with your arms crossed.’

ES: We did this tour with Wednesday 13, and there were a lot of Hot Topic goth girls. And I swear, they hated us, and they were making fun of us, and then they ended up buying merch and taking pictures with us and stuff. I was like, ‘I don’t get anything.’

Would you go on tour again with a band that was that different from what you play? Was that a good challenge, or is it better to stick with the core audience?

ES: I would love to do that again. I like changing it up. Like you were saying, the metal scene can be formulaic. You go out with this band because you sound exactly alike—kind of dipping into the same pot. You never know. Sometimes fans of different bands will be like, ‘I never even knew this kind of music existed. I’m in.’

It’s good to mess with people’s expectations.

ES: The funny thing is that people will come up to you and be like, ‘You know, I only came to see you, I don’t like any of these other bands.’

And I’m like, ‘Those are my friends, man!’

JPL: The worse thing is when I’m selling merch next to the guys in the other band. The fans don’t realize they’re the guys from the other band, and they’re like, ‘We only came to see you, man. Those other bands, they fucking suck.’

And the singer from the other band is standing right next to me. Like, ‘Dude, not at all.’

Fandom is weird.

ES: It’s like if you saw Ultimate Warrior and the Hulkster hanging out. [Laughs.] You’d be like, ‘What?! This is fake?!’

Have you guys always thought of yourselves as an L.A. band? Your appeal and your popularity obviously go far beyond the city.

JPL: Yeah—when we started, we were all living in L.A., and we worked the L.A. circuit pretty hard. We say we’re from Pasadena because it’s not Hollywood, and it’s not L.A. And we love Van Halen.

ES: I still say we are [from L.A.]. I don’t think things would have gone the same if we were living somewhere else. Not that you INTERVIEW

have to move to L.A., but it was a good time for what we were doing. L.A. is a weird place to be a musician. There’s nothing like it in the world. Every night, there are a hundred bands playing. I felt like we made it when we didn’t have to pay to play. Which I don’t think we ever did with this band, but basically every band I’ve ever been in, I’ve paid to play.

Suddenly it was like, ‘Oh, we’re playing the Whisky? How much do we owe them? Oh, nothing? We made it!’

Did you feel like you were part of an L.A. metal scene? Does that even matter anymore?

JPL: People ask me that on tour. Like, ‘Dude, we gotta come out to L.A., how’s the scene out there?’ There are pockets here and there, but the city is so spread out that the sense of community is hard to have. There are friends of ours—for a minute there was Huntress and Gypsyhawk, and even Night Demon. And there is a scene with Blade Killer—a little bit of a scene of old school traditional classic metal. But in terms of one area or one part of town, there isn’t really that because it’s so spread out.

ES: I always felt like there wasn’t a scene, but then, looking back, I’m like, ‘Oh, there was a scene!’ We just saw it as our friends’ bands. I didn’t realize it until three years later, and all those bands had gone on to tour on their own, and we never really played together again.

Is the city good at supporting the metal scene?

Or is it just because there are a lot of people here that it happens that way?

JPL: It’s hard to say. It’s kind of like Lakers fans. They’re fair-weather fans. Because we’ve played L.A. so much, I think people think, ‘Oh, we’ll just see ‘em next time they play, in a month.’ I get that, because I do the same thing. So if we’re playing with someone who doesn’t play L.A. often—we usually get pretty good offers for stuff like that—then yeah, people crawl out of the woodwork. We get a lot of these 45- or 50-year-old men who crawl out of their grandma’s basement to come out to our show because we’re playing with Armored Saint.

ES: And then they yell at me for screaming.

JPL: But it just really depends. It’s not the kind of thing where everyone’s there at every show.

ES: There isn’t really a rock club where, like, no matter who’s playing, everybody’s going to be there. Basically I wish there was a Gasworks like in Wayne’s World. Where all the metal and rock dudes just hung out. And you could just go check out the Shitty Beatles.

According to your Spotify page, Mexico City and Stockholm are both in your top 5 cities. Have you played in Mexico? I bet if you showed up down there it would be nuts.

JPL: [laughs] I think it would be. Night Demon just went down there, and they said there’s this alley in Mexico City where they have a ton of bootlegs. He said they have these rad Holy Grail bootleg patches and shirts with silver thread and stuff, I was like, ‘Man, that sounds better than our merch.’

ES: We should go down there and clean ‘em out. Give ‘em a wholesale deal.

HOLY GRAIL’S TIMES OF PRIDE AND PERIL IS OUT FRI., FEB. 12, ON PROSTHETIC RECORDS. VISIT HOLY GRAIL AT HOLYGRAILOFFICIAL. COM.

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS Interview by Christina Gubala Illustration by Rachel Merrill

School of Seven Bells was less a band than a shared musical world, built from angelic harmonies and krautrock futurism—but it all ended abruptly following the untimely passing of co-founder Benjamin Curtis. But now Alejandra Deheza, the L.A.-by-way-of-New York artist behind the band’s lyrics and otherworldly vocals, has finished their final collaboration: SVIIB, an album full of songs she’d written about the arc of her relationship with Curtis, which endured artistically even after it was ended romantically.

Most likely, no one expected to ever hear another School of Seven Bells song, but with help from producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Deheza took the last unfinished recordings from 2012 and made them whole for 2016. Deheza sat down to speak with me frankly about her grief, a life-igniting Joshua Tree visit, a cross-country relocation, and the finality of School of Seven Bells, all with the kind of bravery that comes from confronting the extreme reality of the death of someone you love.

I imagine it’s been an interesting relationship with the press for this album—I can’t imagine what it’s been like to go through public grieving where people ask you a million questions. How has your relationship with the press changed because of this experience?

Alejandra Deheza (vocals): It immediately goes into the really deeply personal things right off the bat, which is … I knew it was going to happen. There were a lot of reasons I waited so long [to do this album]. First, I just couldn’t listen to the music. At all. But it was also because I knew when I actually made the decision, it was going to be a commitment to actually also talking about it, which was something I had to prepare myself for. And being able to be in the right place to do that … where I could get through an interview and not lose my shit? Or just feel comfortable and open enough to be able to talk—that’s some heavy shit to talk about! It’s really personal, you know?

Yeah—you expose yourself as a person.

It’s the rawest part of your heart, I’m sure.

I read this album is about the relationship arc you had with Benjamin—that you didn’t realize how songs alluded to things until you were looking at it in retrospect.

What was it like when you were first writing these songs?

I just remember when we first started … he’d start with the production, and then give me something to work with. I’ve never been the kind of person who goes, ‘I’m going to make this record about THIS.’ I admire people that can do that. I’ve never been able to. For me, it’s always something needs to come out. For some reason I felt I needed to talk about this story.

Like a signal from the universe?

I’m telling you! We were working so hard on this and Benjamin was working so hard every day. He was churning this stuff out! I felt the need to keep up. It was probably one of the best most cathartic things I’ve ever done. I never wanted to go back there in my head because … you know, relationships are hard INTERVIEW

and break-ups are really painful and my breakup with him was probably one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through in my life.

Especially since you stayed so close to each other during the entire process.

Oh yeah—there was so much love there. One of those things that had to happen, but it was so difficult. I’d never gone back there and I never wanted to go back there cuz we had been in such a great spot as friends. But that was all that was coming out. I had no choice.

That’s really beautiful.

It was crazy. And a crazy process to bring in songs to the studio and praying that he was so focused on the music and so in a songwriting mindset that he wouldn’t be like, ‘Wait … what? What is this?’

And recognize himself reflected back?

Right. We’d be on planes and I’d be writing lyrics next to him, like, ‘I know he’s gonna hear these but …’ [covering them up!] ‘I’m gonna sing them eventually,’ but there’s still this sense of … nooooooooo!

At least when you’re singing, you get to put a cloak around your poetry.

You can put your own theatrical persona into it. When you’re singing you can turn into someone else. When you’re just writing it, it’s like somebody reading your journal.

How did your own creative process change after meeting Benjamin? And how were you making music when you first started making music?

I was always kind of making up little songs, since I was a really little kid with my sister. And writing a lot of poetry. I was really obsessed with just writing. We started in New York just by accident, playing in a band together. We were learning how to be in a band in front of everyone. Our first show, we had a month to throw songs together and learn how to play instruments. I had never written a real song before. I’d written … I dunno. Never was I like, ‘I’m gonna write out these LYRICS.’ When you write poetry, you don’t have to picture it in the context of anything. It can stand alone. When you’re writing lyrics, it comes with a family, almost.

Yeah—it was just a learning process in front of everyone.

But I bet that made you brave.

I didn’t feel brave! But I guess it was. I look back like, ‘I don’t know how I did that!’

I was a huge fan of your early work—I was always really impressed and inspired by it.

That’s what got me into Michael Rother and some of the krautrock stuff.

He’s so great! We did a song with him for a comp he did. He put a band together [with Ben] for All Tomorrow’s Parties in England and I got to tag along. It was so good! One of those whirlwind things where we flew out Friday night and I think he played Saturday night. They didn’t rehearse. It was a pure jam session. It was crazy cuz they had a long discussion about the song, so Ben had some notes before they went on stage. When we got to the stage, he realized he’d left the notes in our room! He went into another zone like, ‘I’m not gonna panic—I got this!’ But I knew how terrified he was. He was gonna play with one of his heroes! It turned out to be one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anyone come up with shit on the fly like that. He was like … no sweat. Not one bead of sweat. And it didn’t come from any sense of cockiness. If anyone could ever tune in so hard to a music zone … he was here playing with other musicians but he was so immersed in it that it was almost like the cues were already there. He could read the room musically—so well. It was a focus thing. Afterward, I think he almost collapsed. He was so relieved! Like ‘Oh my God, I DID that!’ But while he was up there, you couldn’t even tell! He was in that zone. And just grooving.

You met on tour with Interpol with Secret Machines and On!Air!Library!—what changed about making music for you after you started collaborating with Benjamin?

It’s tricky to explain cuz it happened so naturally. Honestly … automatically things became a lot more serious to me. I really got into it. Before it was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re in a band playing out and I don’t know how the fuck we did this cuz we weren’t musicians 27

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FULL SEASON CALENDAR AT cap.ucla.edu

before!’ And shows were free-for-all! First, I had the idea for School of Seven Bells before I met him. I was like, ‘This time, I’m gonna pick my musicians. It’s not gonna be a bunch of people thrown together.’ I remember being like, ‘This is my chance to really really write my music.’ I got so much more immersed in it. It was a 24-hour-a-day thing, whereas before for me it wasn’t. I was winging it. But this time it was, ‘No, I wanna make my songs.’

Soulmate inspiration of that nature can really turn you into a real version of yourself very fast. People who get to experience that in their life are so lucky, even though it inevitably comes with an extreme amount of pain, no matter what happens.

100%. There’s a trade off.

Also—what is the story on the South American pickpocketing ring the band was named after?

It’s funny because when I first heard the name, I Googled® it and there were only two hits. There’s not much information, or there wasn’t, aside from what I heard in this little documentary. No one knows if it was real or not. It’s one of those things.

So you got to carry that identity with you, wondering if it really happened or not? Do you think you’re ready to retire that name after completing this project?

I have to because it’s … Benjamin and Alley, is what that name means to me. That’s what the band is. If it was just him, it wouldn’t be School of Seven Bells, and if it was just me, it wouldn’t be School of Seven Bells.

I know you’ve been through a long doldrum period—a time when it was very difficult to make anything creative. What changed to allow you to start moving forward again?

When I was in New York after everything happened, I was in such a dead zone. My only goal was to keep myself as numb as possible.

Fucked up. I didn’t wanna deal with it. And being in New York, everywhere was a memory I did not wanna have. It scared the shit out of me. I’d try to sit down and write and I felt like I lost my identity. I just didn’t know who I was anymore without being able to sit down and write, and nothing would come out. It was painful! I remember being like, ‘Is it over? Is this over now? I can’t do this anymore. Is that what happened?’ I had so many questions, not understanding why I couldn’t write music—I couldn’t write lyrics! Words were my thing, you know. That’s how I expressed myself. And I was like, ‘If this dies … ‘ It was so scary. There was one moment that clicked where I was like, ‘I need to move to California. I need to move to L.A. I need to be close to [producer] Justin [Meldal-Johnsen]. I need to finish this record.’ When I made that decision, things started loosening up. It’s almost like my mind was like … ‘Don’t get distracted! You got shit to do! Don’t lose this! It has to be finished!’

Had you spent much time in Los Angeles before you moved here?

Always brief trips. Either in and out on tour, or I was filming the video for the song [‘I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up)’] that I did with Ben while he was in the hospital.

I know Joshua Tree played a major part in that video. But there are some redwood forests, there was definitely a beach … how did you choose your locations? Why were they significant to you?

INTERVIEW

My friends Alan Del Rio and Toby Halbrooks picked the locations. Toby had been friends with Benjamin since they were 12, and he knew him. They were really close friends.

It’s a stunning video. I watched it like three times this morning. I was just out in Joshua Tree myself.

It’s so healing. And the birds—there’s something magical about the birds out there.

I couldn’t agree more. When you go back to New York, will you be working on any new projects?

I wanna work on a record with my sister Claudia.

You have beautiful harmonies together.

I have to work with her. We had such good chemistry musically. It’d just be a shame … we had to end it, and she had to start with her family and family life, which is very important.

So you’re an auntie?

Yeah, I am!

Have you felt any ease of the pain in spending time with the children?

When I see Claudia’s kid—Lalo, she calls him—Lalo and Benjamin were very close when he was a little boy. And I always … I do see a lot of Benjamin in him. That little kid’s a shredder, you know? A shredder on guitar. I remember Benj being with him in mornings—cuz we all lived together at one point—playing him music videos and setting up little keyboards for him to play. He’s like two or three and shredding! I remember one time I was in my bedroom and I heard all this commotion in the kitchen, and nobody was home except for me and my sister in the other room. I walk out of the kitchen and this little three-year-old had set up multiple keyboards like he saw in the videos, I guess, and he had a beat going on one and some noise going on the other and he was banging on the other one getting multiple tracks done, and that was 100% Benjamin. That’s 100% his influence. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is genius.’

Just fertilizing a young mind. That’s incredible. All any of us can ask to do— plant the seed and hope it grows. Did you and your sister grow up singing together?

Always. On road trips or anything, we probably drove everyone crazy. We couldn’t be in a car without harmonizing. The Beatles were huge when we were growing up. Fleetwood Mac was also a big one. Big harmonies. It was always around in my house. My dad always a had a ton of vinyl around.

How do you consume music these days?

Most of the stuff I listen to is older. Whenever people ask me I feel so stumped. I have my gotos that when I’m writing … not necessarily that I wanna write like, but it’s a vibe I’m looking for. A certain spot in my brain. A location in my head.

Do you ever listen to your older music? Let yourself feel all of that?

Lately I’ve been doing it a lot more. But it’s more like being able to be cool with it again.

It’s almost an exercise. I make myself do it every day.

A heart exercise—stretching the heart.

Yeah. It’s necessary. There are points in the day where I can’t go there. But when I can and I’m having a good moment, I put it on so I can … be cool with it again.

You have a complicated relationship with music. Are there other forms of media that give you catharsis?

That I make? Or watch? That’s difficult.

I love watching … shows. Who doesn’t?

I’m definitely one of those people who gets consumed. Like on one for a few days, getting it all, every episode.

I binge-watched Six Feet Under this July.

The entire series!

I love that show!

I cried for like five hours a night. When you see depictions of death and art in television or things of that nature, do you feel your relationship to those depictions have changed?

I can’t watch it. I can’t watch it at all. Like anything with somebody dying … hospital beds … anything like that, I have a physical reaction. I can’t be around it, I can’t look at it, I shut it off. I just don’t want to. I’ve seen the real thing. I don’t need this. That’s changed.

My stomach for stuff like that, I just don’t have it anymore. I’m not saying this as ‘poor me, boo hoo’ but I can’t even watch sad movies anymore. Before I used to love it. Maybe it was this weird fascination with, ‘What is that like? That death of sadness?’ And now I’m not curious anymore. I don’t wanna go there. I don’t need to. I know it enough in my head, you know?

Once you’re touched by that pain, you’ll never be untouched. You’ll know it the rest of your life. Have you discovered anything new since he’s been gone and your artistic consumption and your artistic process has been changing … has there been anything that’s new to you that’s inspiring? Even a musical instrument or book? That’s struck you differently?

The only thing that’s completely different is lyrics. The way that I write is now is completely different. I don’t know how it happened. I used to be … it’d be a big effort to branch out and write to different rhythms and stuff like that. Even the imagery in the head when I am writing is completely different. I feel I’m writing more stories now, where I wasn’t before. That’s been shocking to me. That was also a big thing that I had with learning how to find my voice again. I remember being like, ‘Oh shit—wait—I can’t do this anymore.’ But it wasn’t that. I was just doing it differently.

‘No, that’s not how I write.’ But yeah, that’s how I write now.

Metamorphosis as an artist.

That’s why I’m like oh my God—when I put out my own stuff, people … maybe other people won’t notice as much as me, but when I read it, I’m like … who is this person? I don’t even know.

It makes you curious what comes next. I’m really excited for you! I think it’ll be a really beautiful thing. Something I’ve noticed about our culture after having endured some grief last year is people are expected to act OK. To always act OK and sweep it under the rug. And you’re allowing to not do that—to feel, right?

I remember I felt this major pressure after he died and I … I just immediately … I was going out all the time but I felt this huge pressure to not be the sad girl. I don’t know why. It was a misguided train of thought where I was like, ‘I don’t wanna bring anyone

else down’ and I did not pay attention to myself at all. Which is part of the problem why that’s so incredibly fucked-up—I was like, ‘No, I don’t want anyone else to ever feel that ever ever ever.’ It wasn’t very … smart to think that way! But I didn’t want to bring what I was feeling in my heart to anybody. So I felt the need to just always be up. ‘No, I’m OK! I’m OK!’ It’s not like there’s a handbook for dealing with this kind of thing. Especially with such a unique relationship as you two had.

And I had really good people around me. My sister, my mom, my manager was amazing … my friend Brianna … they were always telling me ‘you have to let yourself feel that,’ and I heard the words but I didn’t understand. ‘I’m not gonna sit here and cry in front of you. I wouldn’t do that to you!’

The heaviness of what’s within is so intense that you can’t imagine exacting that on someone else. It’s almost cruel!

I didn’t want to! I felt like it was selfish, almost.

It’s terrible! Who wants this? I don’t want it.

I’m so sorry you went through that!

You kind of have to. You gotta figure it out on your own. Like you said, there is no handbook. People would give me advice that had gone through the same thing, cuz I by no means think this is a pain that’s exclusive to me—I know that people have even greater pain out there.

But there are hardly words to describe it.We rely so heavily on verbal communication, but certain things are universally human yet impossible to communicate because they just kind of transcend these measly vessels that we’ve got. I really respect that you’re going through this process, and allowing strangers like myself to pick your brain about it. It’s almost a public service—we’re all gonna go through horrifying losses.

Every one of us. No one is immune. That’s the one thing we all share—death. You know?

We’re simultaneously scared and completely ignoring the fact that it exists and exists in all of our lives every single day. So this is a really beautiful process you’re going through, and I’m grateful for you taking the time to be real and do this. That is what defines art to me—communicating things words are insufficient for.

Allowing yourself to be exposed … I don’t know. I always thought when people talk about, ‘Oh, this person loved to write, so that’s her gift’ or ‘This person loves to sing, so that’s her gift’ … I always felt it was the other way around. Like it’s actually your gift to give somebody else. You’re not supposed to keep it to yourself. It’s hard to do that. You know writers and musicians are extra sensitive raw people cuz we had to learn be like … [roars triumphantly] … and just take it!

You have to look the insides in the eye—it’s the hardest thing! But if you’re gonna make something worth making, to confront what’s within you …

You do, and you’ve gotta let people see it. And that’s difficult.

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS’ SVIIB IS OUT FRI., FEB. 26, ON VAGRANT. VISIT SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS AT SVIIB.COM. 29

MALCOLM MOONEY Interview by Ron Garmon Illustration by themegoman

If the present era sometimes feels like a random Kurt Vonnegut bricolage rerun of the last third of the twentieth century, you haven’t been paying attention because it’s not all that random. We’re seemingly unstuck in time, but the permanent attachment our culture has for Star Wars, spaghetti westerns and the undead is as unsurprising as news a hologram Jackie Wilson is set to tour America next year.

Considered this way, sight of Monster Movie and Delay ‘68 t-shirts on so many Millennial torsos is just rock music’s way of marking the many bizarre and rhomboid turns the world’s taken since itinerant American artist Malcolm Mooney decided to hitchhike to Germany and wound up fronting the most avant of its many progressive rock bands. Since Can was cited in the New York Times obituary for David Bowie as a decisive influence, its time for rock journalists and critics to retire (along with the word “krautrock”) the long-held belief in the worldwide obscurity of an act that lasted almost two decades. The quicksilver Mister Mooney fronted the first Can LPs as well as the first reunion album. His Delay ‘68 song “The Thief” has been been covered live by Radiohead and not entirely to the author’s satisfaction.

Since Mooney will be appearing at the Echo on January 24, it is well to get this advanced primer on Can’s original front man.

Hello, Mister Mooney.

Izzit two o’clock? I saw the 323 number and thought you were Marc Weinstein. He’s the only person I know out there. Hold on one second while I grind this coffee up. [Heavy whirring noise] Ah! That kinda sounds musical! [begins to improvise beat and starts scat-singing] Aieee-yaaa! That might work.

Is that thing in tune?

Probably not. Send me this conversation because I want to see it before it runs. I want to see what was said that I didn’t say. I’ve been quoted in interviews saying things I have no recollection of saying.

Well, we won’t be having any of that. This is an interview and not a hallucination.

One time, there was a band in Boston called the Hallucinations. I had to stand up and introduce them.

That must’ve been fun. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Hallucinations.’

Most of the people there were hallucinating so it was all right.

When did you begin your career as a vocalist?

Church. I began in a choir. This is old news—I sang in a youth choir in the 50s and 60s. I sang with a doo-wop group in Yonkers but don’t consider that professional. I played some saxophone with a band in Boston in the 60s but as far as vocalist goes, I think Can was my professional debut.

You also did some sculpting before deciding to hitchhike around the world.

That was another thing I didn’t say. I was known as a visual artist and I did some when I returned from Europe. I assisted Ulrich Rückriem for a few pieces ...

The story goes you met Irmin Schmidt in Cologne in 1968 and were invited to join 30

his embryonic cohort that really wasn’t a band until you went to the mic and forced the first rhythm out of the other guys.

You can consider it that but Irwin was a professional pianist and kapellmeister. Jaki [Liebezeit]’s a fantastic drummer and Holger [Czukay] was more electronic than I thought at the time but yes, I suppose I drove them to that madness. Yes. You supposedly walked up and down a staircase singing ‘upstairs and downstairs’ for an hour or so. Or so Holger has it.

That was one of our first performances at what was the name of that October festival in Cologne? Kunstmarkt! This is all dated stuff.

Fans love it and it clarifies a garbled record.

The only thing it clarifies to them that the vocalist was nuts and had no rhyme or reason to what he was doing.

Nonsense! Where did you draw inspiration from your lyrics? Some sound ad-libbed on the spot.

I would say a lot of them were ad-libbed on the spot.

‘Father Cannot Yell’ for example...

Do you want the truth or the lie?

Oh, first tell me one, then tell me the other and don’t tell me which is which and leave me to figure it out.

Well, they’re both the same. The lie is that they’re written and the truth is they’re written.

I used to write in collage and never went anywhere with it. I wrote this poem and some of it came from my experience and some came from something I invented.

It seems arguably in the Beat tradition.

Not so much Allen Ginsburg. I was more of a fan of e.e.cummings. More of Shakespeare, Yeats and Donne. Probably the

same—also both Dylans were influences.

This is all historical. What have you heard if Can or my work with Tenth Planet?

I’m a longtime fan of Can. I first became aware of them while tripping out on the cover of Ege Bamyasi in a record shop years before I even heard it, which wasn’t until sometime in the early Nineties.

Have you heard the Rite Time album?

Heard it this morning and was once again floored.

I like to think that in my progression, if not progressive rock, things do not stay still and I think that the Hysterica album I did with Tenth Planet is more representative of my writing. The Can stuff is—as I said at the beginning—just an attempt to make sound.

I don’t know if I followed Jaki’s lead or Jaki mine. It was like we connected. He was like an engine.

A lot of serious rock fans rank him among the genre’s all-time great drummers.

He was amazing and knowing him much less playing with him is inspirational and causes things to happen.

So Holger Czukay nominates you as the sparkplug on that first LP and you nominate Jaki the drummer.

I like what they said but I think the unit itself...

It’s like this: I’d love to take the credit but the five members caused whatever happened to happen. If it had been otherwise, it wouldn’t have been Can. I really don’t like the idea that people think there was a leader. With Can, I think the five made it happen. When I was younger and egotistical, I might’ve said ‘Yeah!

Yeah! That was me.’ The new group I’m gonna play with in Los Angeles is the same way. I really enjoy the rhythm and instrumental side of it.

Monster Movie took a short time to record and a long time to edit.

True, but you’d have to ask Holger about the editing. I wasn’t involved with that part of the process. Another part of the process I wasn’t involved in was the arguing among the four members as my German still isn’t good enough to get by. Thing is, I didn’t know about the release of the album at all. I found out about it when I saw it in a record store in Greenwich Village.

The story goes you named the group.

I named it Can because I can do it! I’m in Cologne and the band is starting to play every day. I can stand at this mic and I can make up lyrics—I can do this.

I imagined more Warholian reasons ...

There were also other influences about how the name was established. Later on, it was supposed to be about communism, anarchic and nihilism.

Was the woman in ‘Mary, Mary, So Contrary’ based on a specific person?

It’s based on the nursery rhyme.

Right, but you take certain liberties that sound pretty specific ...

Could be. You’ll have to wait for the book! I don’t know if you know Michael Sheppard who lives in L.A. but he asked me to start writing about Can from my perspective, how the whole thing grew and matured. I started about it three or four years ago. A lot of the information you’re asking I’m kind of holding close to the vest. There will be a collection of stories including the one about Mary. If I tell it, I’ll never write it!

It’s good to throw the press some red meat as a teaser.

Okay—have you ever heard of a poet named W.S. Graham? Some years ago I was searching INTERVIEW

“Do you want the truth or the lie?” out Malcolm Mooney and found he’d written a book called Malcolm Mooney’s Land. It was published I think by Faber & Faber. I want to know who is Malcolm Mooney and how he got the title, so if you please find the book, let me know.

When was it published?

1970.

Curious.

That’s why I’m interested. Ask me another question.

You had the rare-for-an-American experience of fronting a German rock band in Germany.

Maybe David Hasselhoff also knew such honor, I don’t know. How many times did you perform live with the band?

We did shows in the area of Cologne and Dusseldorf and Munich. My schedule with Can was not anything like what they went through later after the record came out. We did music for a live performance of Prometheus Unchained. It was summer of 69 and I think we were there two and a half months. One newspaper critic said we were sitting in wooden chairs playing electrical instruments when we should’ve been sitting in electric chairs playing wooden instruments.

Harsh.

The rest of the shows were filled! After the show ended, we played a free concert. Eventually I decided to come back to the States because it got to be more than I could handle.

That was my next question. Why did you leave the band the first time?

That’s something I don’t like to go into. They used to put out that I had a nervous breakdown and had to go back to the States. I asked the publisher, ‘Did that sell records?’ Still, I want to eliminate that from all discussion and prefer to say that I couldn’t find a bottle of hot sauce I liked in Germany so decided to come back to the Sates.

I understand. One goes to uncomfortable lengths to obtain salt for a boiled egg.

Another motive was when we were doing the theater piece I was late for rehearsal and I was in the back of the theater and remember listening to them and deciding they could do this without me. That became the point for me. Forget the hot sauce. They sent me plane tickets to come back but I was unable to turn my course and come back.

If you’re going to go all the way there on an impulse, then following another impulse to turn around makes sense.

I think so. Several years later, we did the reunion record.

Quite a record, that one.

There was another record, ‘Last Night’s Sleep’ for the Until the End of the World movie. The green onions in the lyric came from a friend in Arizona and I wrote the lyric on the plane and we did the track in about an hour and a half. At one point I watched the engineer push a button and change a note and once again wondered why they need singers and musicians!

32

You had another hot sauce epiphany and decided they not only didn’t need you, but the business could do without musicians period.

I won’t continue in this direction. I might offend someone. I like good singers. Take the Coasters, for example—I like lyrics and I don’t like them mumbled. There’s a place for scat-singing which is wonderful. Sometimes Damo [Suzuki] ... Well, I better not say that.

Let’s not outrun discretion here.

Well, he sings stuff that’s just pure sound. I better back off. I just like lyrics I can hear and understand.

Thanks for confirming the ghostly echoes of Jackie Wilson and the Drifters I hear on Rite Time especially.

I’m sure that’s part of my appropriated voice.

People like Smokey Robinson too. And Lou Reed. Certainly, I don’t mind people doing Can songs but I do want them all to be credited. When Radiohead performed the song ‘The Thief’ most people think that’s Radiohead’s song but they didn’t give any credit to the band and they made a mistake in the lyric. I heard it on a live bootleg and called up Can management and told them about it and I heard they gave us credit.

What happened after you left the band?

I went to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and took a Bachelor’s at Boston University. I did a couple of art shows at that time. I became a substitute teacher and worked for the school board in Manhattan evaluating school programs. I received my Master’s in Visual Arts at Cal State, L.A. And also decided to start singing again in a church choir.

Did you keep up with Can’s other records?

Yes. I kept up with that and Irmin’s solo stuff, a lot of Jaki’s stuff. I keep busy. What’s your claim to fame?

Look me up in the Internet. Some of it is even true. I like doing these L.A. RECORD interviews because I get an immerse in an artist’s work for a few days. Any thoughts on belated cult rock stardom?

I have one?

I’ve seen ample evidence.

I don’t know much about that. I do appreciate the people who come out to hear us play. It’s hard to think about cults but I appreciate people who come out to hear me play with a band. I don’t know about cults.

A cult pertains to culture, which is a thing that grows in a petri dish—so you can see what happens to it.

THE ECHO AND PART TIME PUNKS PRESENT MALCOLM MOONEY PERFORMING CAN SONGS PLUS DAHGA BLOOM ON SUN., JAN. 24, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 9 PM / $10-$13 / 18+.

THEECHO.COM. VISIT MALCOLM MOONEY AT MALCOLMMOONEY. COM.

PAUL BERGMANN Interview by Chris Ziegler Photography by Ward Robinson

Paul Bergmann is a singer-songwriter who splits the difference between Leonard Cohen and Jonathan Richman, though not in the way you’d expect. Richman hid a lot of sadness in his songs about summer, and of course Cohen sometimes hit the hardest with his razor-sharp sense of humor, and Bergmann is the kind of guy who likes to mix that all together for songs that slip from tragedy to comedy to observation and revelation and even simple self-portrait in the space of just a few lines. His recent Romantic Thoughts EP (Fairfax, produced with Nick Waterhouse) transplants Richman’s summer feeling to Nilsson’s sun-bleached surface-street L.A., and he’s got a lot more romance—and a lot more thinking—already saved up for his next album. He explains now how love and work (don’t) fit together, and why he relates so much to the poor misunderstood Tyrannosaurus Rex. In your lyrics, you’re very precise and thoughtful. What are the most worst curse words you’ve ever used at once? Did you ever drop a fish tank on your foot and just freak out?

I have kind of a sailor mouth. The reason I don’t do it in my lyrics is cuz I think there’s more weight to the really mundane clean words. But yeah—fuck—even just driving earlier ... I say awful, awful things in the car.

What is the ‘new’ in the song ‘Drunk (Alone and New)’? Is that because you can wake up the next morning after a big drunk and feel like part of you had the dirt washed away?

That’s definitely a part of it. You get drunk and you’re out on the town … maybe you’re with friends and somehow you’ve lost everyone and maybe you’re sitting by the Echo Park Lake alone, but suddenly you have this weird childish feeling of newness. You’re drunk but you’re alone and you feel very new.

It’s funny you’d say that about waking up the next morning. I was recently at home and my dad—who hopefully won’t mind this in the interview—had a few drinks. I’ve never seen him get drunk, but the next morning he’s like, ‘Ah, man, I was really getting that buzz on.

It really clears up the cobwebs every once in awhile.’ I thought that was pretty apt.

So … is it only while drunk and alone that you allow yourself to have hope?

Totally. Well—it’s funny because you are alone, but you don’t feel lonely. It’s one of the more uplifting songs I’ve written. The original version was acoustic and a little slower and it’s probably my personal favorite song that I’ve written. It’s more lighthearted—it pretty much touches on everything that I’ve ever felt or experienced.

That’s ambitious. Most people would be like, ‘This song is about one time I wanted to ask someone out on a date.’

I think I’m just trying to make a really ambitious statement there!

The title Romantic Thoughts title alludes to a lot, too. ‘Romance’ can be very ambiguous.

It can have nothing to do with love.

That was a playful title, but it’s also meant to be very to the point. I consider myself a romantic in the traditional way … and romantic in the more academic sense.

Romance as you would find in a library card catalog.

INTERVIEW

Exactly. The difference between romance and love? It depends on the type of love. I’ve fallen in love before and I don’t think I’m a very good artist when I’m in love. I think you get tunnel vision. You feel a small range of emotions but they’re all very polar and intense. Sure, a breakup can bring back some good stuff, but I think I’ve written my best material when it’s been awhile since I’ve been in love—when I’ve spent a lot of time with myself. Love is just the feeling and romance is a state of mind, maybe?

I think most of my career has been based on not being able to reconcile love and how other people can handle it. To me it does sort of get in the way. It’s not like I’m actively trying to avoid it in order to make my work better … but the other thing about songwriting for me is that I never really write about one thing.

People ask, ‘What’s that song about?’ ‘It’s about a multitude of feelings and emotions and based on a few different experiences and a lot of made-up things.’ I’ve written so many songs that are not based on any real women or experiences.

I like that you don’t let life experience be the limit for you. You can just write, instead of forcing yourself to be in a situation you might write about.

That’s totally accurate. When I was younger and writing songs that were a bit darker and more depressing and maybe leading a bit more of a self-destructive lifestyle … you know, you really mystify the whole artist life. Once you demystify it and realize the art is just hard work and finding patterns and formulas and practicing and putting in the hours ...

That’s when you really turn to drinking?

Exactly! I feel like a lot of art just comes from hangovers, whatever those might be. Being at the lowest of the low—that’s when you reevaluate things. I wrote a recent song called ‘Bored by the Changes of Living.’ You’re bored by how things change so much—it’s the monotony of change and growing up and getting mature.

In ‘Ocean Song,’ you have the lyric, ‘I’m growing older, maybe wiser / see the blues inside the fire.’ Does that mean the price of wisdom is a kind of sadness? But then the blues are on fire—maybe being wise is realizing you can just symbolically let that feeling go? Or burn it for fuel or warmth or amusement?

Very few lyrics that I have sort of fit one definition or meaning but that one in particular ... seeing the blues inside the fire, it’s very plainly being sort of the fire is the excitement and the love and the youth and being really happy and joyous. The blues is like a propane thing—the fire gets blue!—and it’s seeing the blues inside the fire and reconciling that melancholic nature. It’s a part of who I am and it’s reconciling that you don’t have to be eternally optimistic. Negativity is all really important to a well-rounded understanding of yourself. That’s how I felt. Maybe the loss of a little bit of idealism. I feel like I’m constantly being a little too idealistic.

I’m so glad you had a blue propane flame in mind. Are your metaphors generally accurate to such a basic chemical level?

I think that’s just happenstance. I am not the type of artist where you can look and dissect all of their songs and every metaphor makes sense. Sometimes we don’t make sense. I really don’t want to do tight, perfectly understandable lyrics. You never want to be too intellectual. I want to keep it a little childish and immature. That’s what I really like about music and it keeps me from being a little too self-important and self-referential.

You said you’re too idealistic. What are you idealistic about now? And why are you idealistic about it? Are these the strongest feelings that survived while other feelings collapsed as you grew up? Or were they the things that survived because they were the least examined?

In evolution there are vestigial parts—that’s what’s left over and might not be useful.

So like the idealism version of a platypus.

Or Tyrannosaurus Rex—with these useless arms that are still there. They define that creature. That’s all people think about. I don’t know if it’s really that. Despite saying all these things about love being a distraction and this and that, the truth about me is that I might be a real gaga puppy love kind of guy when it does happen. Maybe a part of me writing this music and being alone is trying to maintain some sort of integrity. I think I am idealistic about love and even marriage. I have these hidden traditional cultural norms [about love] that I inherently believe … and that I’m maybe trying to bypass for a little bit to try and be an ‘artist.’

Do you think this interview will make it easier or harder for you to get dates?

I don’t know. God, it’s hard dating in L.A. and being a musician.

Those guest lists only go so far. Only so many drink tickets. Hard decisions.

Yeah—I’ll be frank in this interview. I feel like maybe potential dates expect me to be a little more like a rock star … or they find that I’m not. I’m kind of a loser. Or maybe they just typecast me from the beginning and think, ‘Oh, God—an airhead musician who’s totally self inflated.’ I don’t know. I’ve got my own hang-ups but it’s just some things I’ve noticed.

I had someone tell me, ‘Man, I thought just from the look of you and who you were friends with … I’m not going to give this guy the time of day.’

That’s a great pick-up line. Nowhere to go but up.

Well, after we got to know each other, we became good friends and she thought of me differently—but it sort of opened my eyes to how certain people perceive me or typecast me. Everyone does that, though. I’ve always wanted to not have to really change or have much of an image, but I kind of just sucked it up and thought, ‘Alright, I need to have a little bit of a look.’ It’s almost cocky of me to be like, ‘Well, of course people should like me for who I am!’ without me trying to get them interested. That’s why I made that Paul Bergmann jacket.

Is this jacket the one from the video? With your name on it? Where did that come from?

My mom sent me that blue velour jacket. She’s my number one fan. It’s wonderful. She sent me that and I was like … ‘I don’t want to wear this thing.’ But then I thought, ‘OK, I’ll wear this thing.’ Then I saw Dwight Yoakam when he played with X this summer. I just dug his fucking outfit and his band and they were so glam but in a really classy way. I thought, ‘OK, I don’t want to go full THAT but I should just make a Paul Bergmann jacket.’ My friend Katie sewed on the letters.

What do you think is the biggest difference between the Paul Bergmann who starts the next album and the Paul Bergmann who was starting the Romantic Thoughts EP? How have you changed between beginning both of these projects?

35

I pretty much have the next LP written already.

Romantic Thoughts is really a culmination of years—a couple turbulent years. Not for any particular reason, but I feel like I just came out of a bit of a storm, fighting through my twenties, which were mentally and emotionally draining. I feel a lot more at ease and at peace. Talking about having more of a work ethic when it comes to song writing … I spent a month at home every morning writing a song. I have like 30 songs written already—some might be good, some might be terrible. I’m just a little more disciplined.

I know what I want. I hope it’s not a boring record but I think it might be a little more realized … maybe a little more artsy? I really like Romantic Thoughts but as soon as it came out I was like, ‘OK—those songs were very much just a certain time in my life.’ It’s funny cuz in rap music they’re always putting out mix tapes and singles on Soundcloud and I wish indie rock was a little more like that, I would be doing that all the fucking time. ‘I don’t need to put this on an album or like even an EP—I just want to put this out and see how it sticks.’

How do you feel discipline relates to inspiration?

What I’ve figured out is that you can sort of just create inspiration for yourself.

What ingredients do I need in my kitchen to do this?

Honestly … just some sort of stimulant. I stick to caffeine for that. I write in the morning.

You don’t need any inspiration and you can write at any time of day. You’re trying to access the inspirational mind and you see if it works.

And if it works it works, and if it doesn’t, I might try it again in a few days—sometimes I’ll totally rework it and it’s amazing, sometimes it’s not worth it. That’s the other thing—with songs, I don’t ever think of one instance. Very few songs are based on one instance.

What is your favorite … size for a song?

Like a song about a moment, a song about a day, a song about a year or a song about a lifetime? How big or small do you prefer to write?

That’s a real interesting question. Maybe like in that song ‘Los Angeles,’ the first stanza is thinking about one night at a bar that feels like a million different nights. Many different experiences. Like, ‘OK—I’ve found like a feeling.’

What kind of feelings are you more comfortable writing about? Your own feelings or feelings you notice happening around you?

What I’ve learned after a while is what pulls the heart strings. It sounds a little devious … like you’re trying to manipulate people’s emotions. You notice what you talk about and what really affects people. I can tell when I’m writing a song that this is just a little bit too much of my own shit. But that’s the other thing—I don’t want to be too much like ‘this is about and for the people.’ It’s a delicate balance. When I was writing ‘Ocean Song,’ that was the first one where I was more thinking of the people—thinking of my friends. I started using the pronoun ‘we’ and ‘us’ and was like, ‘Oh, that’s really powerful.’

What’s your favorite unreleased lyric right now? A line from a song no one has ever heard?

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I’ll give you a stanza: ‘And life like the cockroach is fine without you / It’s brevity, vain as it ducks out of view / This chummy old silence has found its way in / The scratch in the ceiling is going again and again.’

Do you think your songs will sound happier and happier as your lyrics get sadder? I could see that kind of thing happening with you.

I think with this particular song, yes. And I do love that. One of my favorite records is If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle and Sebastian and that is like Exhibit A for that, for me, ‘Get Me Away From Here, I’m dying’ is the most upbeat energetic fun song. I definitely can see that some of these songs are going to be like that. That quote I gave you is one of the most pushed-in-that-direction songs—but I think that’s a pretty fair prediction.

Do you ever discover things about yourself you didn’t know when you look back at your discography? Find out you were a certain kind of person that you didn’t realize at the time? It seem like it’d be revisiting a diary.

This is the big thing—it’s really helped me accept that I am an emotional, sensitive guy and that I shouldn’t be ashamed of that.

And that’s just a part of my personality and not a weakness. People used to be like, ‘Oh, you’re so sensitive, this and that.’ I remember working this cooking job when I was 22 and the guy was like, ‘You’re what we call soft.’

‘You don’t fit in with these knives and boiling liquids.’

I really took offense to it and now I’m just like, ‘Yeah, I am soft.’ I am emotional and sensitive and this and that. It was sort of a self-fulfilling thing. But I also at one point really wanted to be in a rock band and be really badass, and there’s just different ways to do that. I’m really doing what’s the most me right now.

When was the last time you actually felt like a tough guy?

God—it was probably in a dream. I remember screaming at someone in a dream but it was totally justified. Actually, this is kind of real talk, but maybe five years ago, it was a tough time for our family. Me and my mom and my aunt are staying at my aunt’s apartment and my aunt had this guy who was sort of a stalker. He was ultimately harmless but I was sleeping on the couch next to the window … It was the second story and we’re going to sleep and there’s a curtain over the window and we hear the window getting opened and our nerves were so shot because of what we were going through that I stood up and I had never heard myself scream like such a man—I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ I roared. I knew I needed to defend myself—like this is the tool I need to use and I didn’t give a fuck. Usually I’m such a scaredy-cat.

That’s personally inspiring. Maybe I could roar one day.

You could. If it comes down to it you can do anything, if it’s really that high stakes.

PAUL BERGMANN’S ROMANTIC THOUGHTS EP IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM FAIRFAX RECORDINGS. VISIT PAUL BERGMANN AT PAULBERGMANN.COM. INTERVIEW

KATH BLOOM Interview by Christina Gubala Illustration by Dave Van Patten

Perhaps it was Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, as Ethan Hawke licked his lips nervously, where she entered your cultural consciousness.

Perhaps it was the goosebump-conjuring cover of “The Breeze/My Baby Cries” that Bill Callahan delivered on tour while making the rounds a few years back. It is through myriad channels that Kath Bloom has remained quietly present for decades, and for good reason.

Bloom’s folk songs, crafted simply and delivered with immediacy, are imbued with a special kind of honest soulfulness. Her appreciation of Skip James, her love of wild horses and her adoration of her “California friends” were all discussed as we chatted on a shaky phone line, just a few hours after finding out that David Bowie had died. It was consequently a tender conversation, full of Kath’s wisdom about the passage of time, the importance of artistic expression, and creating as catharsis for pain.

I’ve seen it mentioned often that you’ve been rediscovered multiple times.

Rediscovered by one person at a time! That’s my shit—that’s my motto. I tend to be a little bit of an ironic person, so take that in consideration during the interview, OK? I never toured at all until 2009 or something.

I never had a performing career. That’s kind of the difference between me and ... I mean, it’s not like I had something, and now I don’t? I just was writing all the time—always going. Fiddle on the guitar. All through my babies. It was sort of my mode of survival— dealing with life. I mean, I recommend it to everybody to find something to work on. The work is important because even though it might even seem selfish at the time toward other people, it is the way that you connect your most ultimate ‘you-ness’ with the universe. I just play music with the people around me and record it. I always record it because Loren Mazzacane [Connors], my first partner—people always acquaint me with him, even though I haven’t talked to him since 1987—he helped the urgency to record because he came from visual arts, and he wanted something that you could touch about the music. I just got into like a habit of recording. I use ... I don’t want to say it—it out-dates me. I used a tape player until about a year ago, but I had to change my ways.

Oh, I love a tape player—no judgments there.

I love tape players because you can stop them right where you want.

It’s a very mechanical endeavor, which I appreciate. It’s easier for me to use, as well.

Me, too. And I’m older. It’s hard to keep faith in technology, but I won’t get into that. But anyway, I’ve recorded a lot. I probably have a hundred recorded songs that haven’t been released. I’m talking to a couple labels right now, trying to maybe put some stuff out.

Your 2014 release on Vow Records, the Big Sur label, was called Somewhere in California—what about this record label and Big Sur and California led to the creation of that record?

Here I get a chance to plug my California buddies a little bit. I made that album with the help of Jim Reynolds. I love to put their names in. Even my tiny little career, I just have so many people that have been so good 40

to me, and I just like to give back. At least get their names out there. Levi Strom—he drove the van on my first California tour, and I ended up singing on his sets because I also like to do harmony and play harmonica. I’m very happy to do that. And then there’s Jim Reynolds, who is more of an L.A. boy. And together they formed that record label, and so through the years when I come out there, we do some recording. I guess I have a number of things that just aren’t on anything yet, so if you know anyone who wants any of them ...

I know you started making classical music playing the cello, and that you were brought up in a classical household. But I also noticed interest in the blues in your work. How did you make the jump?

My dad was a famous classical oboist who taught at Yale and eventually was a master teacher at all the big schools, and performed all over the world. Robert Bloom. I took cello, but it wasn’t a lasting thing. I was just like any other kid. I liked musicals. Then in high school I liked Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Tim Buckley, all those people. Bob Dylan. I was kind of a dumb hippie. So I was into a lot of people, but actually it was through my relationship with Loren, where he sat me down and we listened a lot to all the greats—Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Leadbelly.

Everybody. And, yes, they deeply, deeply affected me because the really great ones are like a symphony unto themselves, and yet it was so direct and so intense and just really touched a nerve. I always played a little on the guitar. I would kind of make up these songs.

I worked in the graveyard as a groundskeeper, and after I was done I would sit down and just … you know, with guitar. Then I finished a song and we would just play. That’s how I work. I play, I write songs on my own, and I find people to play them with me. I’m drawn to lead guitarists. I learned to channel that energy into the music, though. That stuff is like white lightning. An artist has to learn to channel it because it’s all intense energy.

Manifesting in different ways. I wanted to compliment you on your cover of ‘Nobody’s Fault but Mine’; I like it better than the Led Zeppelin version.

Oh, wow—you’re going back a long time.

I wish I had that voice, but I think I have a greater knowledge a little bit now—more of

composition, and rhythmically I think I’ve gotten a lot stronger. But, hey, you don’t have the same tone in your voice as you get older. A few people—Emmylou Harris has held onto her tone pretty damn well, don’t you think?

She’s magic.

She is. She’s magic.

You mentioned the words ‘intense’ and ‘direct’ about the blues, and I feel like those are two optimal adjectives to use about your voice, regardless of the year. I think it’s lovely to watch an artist evolve, and to hear years in the voice. I really appreciate that you’ve been making music for so many decades now.

Oh, and in relative obscurity, too. You can make music without thousands of people listening to you. In the old days, that was how music got around—from household to household. That was the great music that Alan Lomax went in and discovered it all—we owe him so much.

He was the reason I got into Skip James, actually.

Oh, that’s who I love! You like Skip James? I love him, too. That’s who I was trying to think of! [singing] ‘I’m going to ramble from town to town.’ I love him.

You had a lot of your songs covered on the tribute compilation that was completed in 2009. Did it feel weird to hear something you had created being routed through other people’s voices?

Well … weird. I think if you’re a songwriter, you’re very thrilled to have someone sing a song—to think it was worth it. Of course, I’d rather leave things alone. But the way Bill Callahan sang ‘The Breeze,’ I just pretty much stopped … People would ask me for it—of course since this came out—and, really, if I had really been briefed correctly I would have just done it, but, you know, whatever. I was being a little bitch or whatever: ‘Oh, no, that’s Bill’s song.’ But, you know, in a way, it sort of became his song because he just did it so well and just made it into something. I love to perform now. I didn’t before. That’s something I try to make very clear to people. It probably was the missing link. As good as my voice was, it was hard for me. But now I love it. I’m hoping I can convey my songs, and somebody uses them. Unless you’re really big, it’s hard to make money on it and sell your songs.

It’s different from when you were licensed

by Linklater, which was a while ago now.

That was so serendipity. I had little children, way out in the middle of nowhere in the orange groves of Florida. It was so weird when it happened; I really couldn’t get any mileage out of it, so to speak. I was literally living off the grid. I’ve got globs of other new songs now to do now, so I’m going to keep going.

Not globs of them, but you know. Puddles.

Percolating puddles of music coming our way soon. I read somewhere that you work with horses.

I actually work with many, many horses. I like to work with unbroken horses—more damaged horses. And I like large ponies the best. I’m very little—I’m only five feet. And looking back now, I see how crazy I’ve been.

But I miss it a lot. I just love horses. And so do a lot of girls, but I got to do it.

I always wonder if there’s something in the subconscious feminine energy that draws us to them. I love them, too.

I would say they were medicine. They certainly were for me. They made me strong. I always was a person that did have a lot of doubt and insecurities ... deep-running stuff that kept me from doing things that maybe I could have or should have done. But horses made me strong without making me mean or overpowering. I had to meet up with them.

Aggression without brutality.

Yeah, you have to be firm, but there’s a way you can meet up with a horse that’s very rewarding. And primal, like singing. You don’t have to herd a horse, you know, to ride it.

And you don’t have to speak to it to communicate, too.

Yeah. I’m not sad. I’m always so insecure about things when I’m doing them, but when I got around horses I felt very grounded.

That’s so beautiful. [mock crying] And I want to do it! I want to do it right now!

Me, too!

KATH BLOOM WITH AVI BUFFALO AND KEVIN LITROW ON SUN., JAN. 17, AT THE BOOTLEG THEATRE, 2220 BEVERLY BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 9 PM / $5-$7 / 21+. BOOTLEGTHEATER. ORG. VISIT KATH BLOOM AT KATHBLOOM.COM. INTERVIEW

NIGHT BEATS Interview by Kristina Benson and Chris Ziegler Illustrations by Felipe Flores

Night Beats first exploded into the wider world with a 2010 song called “H-Bomb,” so it makes sense that their newest album Who Sold My Generation (Heavenly) feels more than a little post-apocalyptic. Like the title—which is not a question, you’ll note— indicates, whatever happened has already happened, and now we’re all dealing with the aftermath. Night Beats had a private catastrophe of their own just as they began making this album—they lost their bass player, which is especially bad news for a threepiece—but luck and friendship combined to recruit Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Robert Levon Been, who stepped into play bass, keep spirits up and make sure Who Sold got finished. (Chris Ziegler interviews him about his work on the album on page 45.) The result is an record that sounds more together and focused than ever, even if it’s a last-stand kind of together—the same us-againstthe-world feel that haunted the 13th Floor Elevators’ last ghostly full-length. Desperate times call for desperate rock ‘n’ roll—and analog recordings—same as it always has been. Band founder Danny Lee Blackwell speaks now about the soul, the sold and what happens if you miss the last train to Jordan.

The album is Who Sold My Generation— why do you feel like you were sold?

Danny Lee Blackwell (vocals/guitar): It’s a conscious decision to not put a question mark. It’s a question and a statement, and if you listen to the record, I feel it speaks for itself. Listeners can create their own version of what that means. That’s partly why I don’t add a question mark. Who Sold Our Generation, I feel like … it’s as common as turning on the news or the radio. Is this really the best we can do? Is this how we’re treating our lives and the people around us? Not to be a curmudgeon like ‘back in the day, we had good ol’ boys singing …’ It’s not like that—it’s selling a culture. There’s so much more to our experience as a group of human beings.

‘Celebration No. 1’ is like a talking blues that starts the album, and you’re immediately talking about the ‘sons of the sold generation’—how they’ll come to your town and plunder everything, like a Viking thing. So besides the sold generation—who are the sons of the sold generation?

The sons of the sold generation, that’s like kind of the Cronos in mythology—you know, the father of Zeus. He eats his children, and Zeus escapes from his belly. I’m a big classics fan—The Odyssey and Homer and Apollo … the Golden Fleece. You know those old sixties claymation movies?

Ray Harryhausen—he rules.

Clash of the Titans. Those are my jams. The sons of the sold generation comes from, like … the bearer of bad news. The bad figure that leads to a dirty path, you know?

This album does feel like a narrator observing a tragedy unfold. And you know, Homer was a poet. If they’d have had records then, he could’ve done a triple-LP. The blind bard, yeah. That would be so fucking cool.

What about the single ‘No Cops’? That could be about any number of tragedies.

Ferguson shooting, Trayvon Martin … the abuse of power, the police state this country’s become is alarming and scary and I don’t feel INTERVIEW

enough people are willing to talk about it and bring it to light and actually do something.

You can make the same argument to me, like I’m just playing a rock ‘n’ roll show, but no—that’s how a lot of shit gets changed. I know I started really caring about stuff when I heard ‘Masters of War,’ the Bob Dylan song.

When I started to read certain things or listen to certain things, that had a huge impact on me. Be aware that you can sell yourself so easily and uncautiously. You can sell yourself by laughing at a bad joke or trying to fit in with the cool kids or something. It’s not just my generation. It’s a lot of generations. But I can only speak for my generation cuz it’s my people.

And the song ‘Last Train to Jordan’—that means the last chance to get out and get to the truth or the promised land, right? The last chance to escape to something better.

What is this the last chance for? And did you catch that train? Or are you watching those lights go over the horizon?

Jordan is referenced a lot in gospel music. It’s seen as the promised land, as you said. The song never answers the question. ‘I’ll take the last train to Jordan,’ but it doesn’t say I got on the train—doesn’t say I got my ticket stamped.

Overarchingly, it’s about … who sold my generation? Is this the last time to make a change? The last time to say something or stand up or do something? The whole kind of overarching question-slash-statement is that it is not a question; it’s not a statement. It’s inbetween, and it gives the opportunity to do something about it. When I’m talking about going to Jordan and finding the answer, that’s always up in the air, so to speak.

Why do you feel that this is some kind of crucial moment for choice? People say every generation thinks it’s the one that will see the apocalypse, and I’m a child of the Cold War, anyway. But sometimes I feel like people use that saying to dismiss the idea that there are important things happening now that need to be addressed while they still can be addressed.

I’m not a child of the Cold War but I’m a child of 9/11, you know? I’m a child of this weird pseudoapocalyptic kind of vibe that is just shoved down everyone’s throats, young and old.

The dream-state police state?

Exactly. No joke there—it’s real. When it comes down to chances and, like, ultimate times—ultimatum moments—there’s a lot to be said about the time that we live in. We’re one of the first generations—not the—one of the first generations to live in a world where there’s a kill-all switch. Literally a button that someone can push somewhere that ends human civilization. That’s a larger theme that’s not super relevant to what I’m talking about— —but it’s a nice device.

There’s also the corroding of society within popular culture. There’s some sort of weird complacency that people developed to where they’re OK with the shit that’s on the radio.

They’re OK with people saying the most horrendous … even like a decent candidate as Hillary Clinton, she’ll get away with saying some fucked-up stuff. I think it was the last Democratic debate when she was asked the question like, ‘Who are your biggest enemies?’ Which, to start off, is like kind of a fucked-up question. Her answer, though, was like, ‘Blah-blah-blah Iran.’ You’re talking about a whole country. You’re not saying the regime. You’re not talking about the politics of maybe Ahmadinejad. You’re talking about a country that’s full of people. That’s the same rhetoric that, you know—extremist views on America, they’re like, ‘Fuck America.’ Does that mean fuck me? I guess so. All I’m saying is there’s a rhetoric that happens within popular culture, within politics, within every single thing that’s just not conducive to love and peace. Not to be a hippie or anything, but let’s be real here, you know. Nothing gets done if you’re trying to blow up the world or destroy the radio. We live in an age of a dead radio. It’s really a weird time to try to make sense of it all.

That’s interesting you link those two. I know people sometimes dismiss music that tries to be political—like Billy Bragg, ‘mixing pop and politics / they ask me what the use is.’ But at the same time, I learned about a lot of ideas I never would’ve know existed because music—like you said when you talk about hearing ‘Masters of War.’ So how much of what you believe is morally right do you think you got from music?

Another good question. I would say probably ninety percent. I was raised by my brother, so my brother taught me a lot. But all those like really pivotal real messages that came from through came from … the voices of someone I wanted to talk to, you know? Wanted to listen to. So if I hear a song by Marvin Gaye, or if I hear Bob Dylan or somebody tell me that, ‘Hey, make sure to look over your shoulder sometimes, you know? Make sure that you treat people with love.’ That I learned from music. I’d say a whole large portion, man.

Like honestly. Maybe definitely the majority.

That’s like the guiding voice to anybody, you know? You know, if you believe in God or religion or anything—all that stuff is rooted in the foundations of a good song, whether it be a pop song or folk song or soul or R&B, whatever. Those things are thankfully there within good music. And it’s cool to, like, lay it down to a twelve-bar blues. That’s a big plus.

What is your favorite era of American psychedelia? Not just the 60s but like—the 50s bohemian CIA experiment era, or the 70s trash-acid era, or like weird fringe 80s psych … when do you find the most inspiration?

When you put it in a question, it loses the meaning of the word ‘psychedelia.’ I don’t think the word psychedelic or psychedelia has much meaning—I think it was pretty far out how Son House played guitar! I think it was amazing how Buddy Holly sang the way he sang, coming out of Lubbock, Texas. I don’t think he had too much reference. A band like Los Saicos—’YA YA YA YA YA!’—I think they might’ve just heard the Beatles once and 43

started a band, but what they were doing was so far out compared to even the Velvet Underground, which would be considered a psychedelic band. Or the Grateful Dead or something. It’s a totally different ballpark.

To rephrase the question, what’s my favorite era of rock ‘n’ roll? And I’d have to say what Arthur Alexander was doing—he had ‘Anna’ and ‘Soldier of Love,’ before Motown but right around that sweet spot between pure rock ‘n’ roll and R&B. That’s really what I have the most love for. You got your early Little Richard, the incorporation of old dusty blues guys, Sun Records … that’s my favorite kind of stuff.

So forgetting the actual term ‘psychedelic’ then—what’s an actual quality within any music that inspires you? Maybe a philosophy, an aspect of personality— Soul.

Tell me more.

It could take any shape—it could take any form. It could be the level of the guitar; it could be the drumbeat. I’m pretty based in beat—a good song to me needs a good rhythm. That’s really what it boils down to.

But, you know—you can play a great beat bad. You can play a bad beat great. You can sing with a melody or some sort of quality that’s undefined that comes out of nowhere and knocks you on your ass. Billie Holiday is a beautiful example of someone who was just only soul. She had so much technical ability with the way she moved with her voice. You know, something in there sticks out. And that’s the crazy part. Like, Aaliyah is one of my favorite favorite musicians of all time, and she wasn’t technically ... She’s no Mariah Carey, you know. She’s no trapeze-artist vocalist, but what she was able to say in so little is soul.

That’s soul to me. You even have examples like Nate Dogg. You know—the Beatles fan maybe might not be a Nate Dogg fan— They should be!

They should be—exactly. He was able to do some stuff that was really just quintessentially soulful. It takes any form, any shape, any sort of beautiful, raw, soulful quality. I’m trying to define the word by using the word. You know—Arthur Alexander, man. Lee Moses.

As a wise man once asked me, Lee Moses: ‘Bad Girl’ or ‘Bad Girl (Part 1 and Part 2)’?

‘Part 1 and Part 2.’ Why not take dessert with dinner, you know? It’s beautiful. It’s definitely the root for us. You know, Lee Moses was Mighty Hannibal’s guitar player. Kind of a Buddy Miles-Hendrix kind of thing. Time and Place is one of the best records ever.

You’ve heard a lot of music in your day— heard a lot of records, I’m sure. What makes you come back to records like Lee Moses?

Why is this home for you?

Just the way that he sang, the way that he played guitar, the way that he measured beats, the way that he had rhythm perfectly placed where the guitar could act as a drum, you know? Or the drum could act like a guitar.

He’s stuck with me for years, so now that’s what I come back to. Donny Hathaway is a huge one for me, too. I’m always the lame guy at the party that will put on like the saddest song. ‘A Song for You’ or ‘You’ll Never Know How Much I Love You’ by Donny Hathaway.

But those are just the songs that I want to hear, and I want people to hear.

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That’s a big part of music—that signaling function. Using it to find people who relate to it because maybe you could relate to them.

It’s definitely like a flare: ‘Hey, anybody down with this?’

What songs do you listen to when you’re feeling sad at a level beyond just like personally sad? Like too sad for a song just about breaking up with someone.

Maybe Neil Young might be a good pick.

Even like Harry Nilsson. Something in that vein. Overarching songs that just sum up everything, not just a personal relationship or something. Maybe some B.B. King.

A planetary sadness.

Planetary sadness—that’s the name of the new record!

You have that sample that starts this album, that says like, ‘Yes, you have a tape recorder, and these things are OK to amuse a friend at a party, but then they’ll be neglected in some dark corner.’ Is that a cruel inside joke about the difficulty of analog recording?

You nailed it. It’s basically that—being the guy that shows up late to the party or something?

And the guy doesn’t really quite fit in or something. I was really lucky to find that one.

I need to double-check on the guy’s name, but he’s a really prolific field recorder. Right when they started to develop the technology to bring the recorder with you—like a backpack, you know? He was filming so much cool stuff, but he’d always have these really cool interludes or epilogues that explain the topic—a quick speech. He’s really witty. That one quote was really serendipitous.

So you acknowledge being one of the last guys to the analog-recording party: ‘Hey, you still up? Hey, I got a the cheapest sixpack I could find. Guys?’

‘I got a six-pack of Natty Ice and leftover Smirnoff!’

Where did you actually record this album?

This was done in a house in Echo Park, right?

My friend Nic’s house—he had a bunch of great equipment. It’s right by a really great taco truck. He’s now relocated to Valentine Recording.

The one that was like a closed studio that hadn’t been touched for fifty years?

A straight-up time capsule! Originally Jimmy Valentine ran the studio back in the late 60s and mid 70s and had everyone from Bing Crosby to Hal Blaine to the Beach Boys for 20/20 there—a bunch of awesome history.

My friend Nic basically got a tip and checked it out like … ‘Holy shit, this is amazing! Let me run this place!’ He resuscitated this place.

It’s incredible. We’ve done a couple recordings there since, but the majority of this album we recorded at Nic’s home studio, which is literally just a house in Echo Park with a really good control board, two-inch tape, I think a 16-channel mixer … pretty basic stuff. He’s worked with Coathangers a lot, I think even Spindrift back in the day … he’s been around and he’s really talented. I love working with him. He’s kind of our main dude.

How did you make space for Robert to play bass on this album? Having someone step into the band at such short notice— and when you’re recording—seems like a delicate situation.

Robert … Robert was an amazing force of nature. I had all these demos totally laid out with bass, drums, guitar. When we were about to go up there, I was talking to Nic and said we were getting rid of our bass player, and he said, ‘Well, if you want a live track, how are we gonna do that?’ ‘I could do some of the overdubs with bass.’ But I met Robert a few years ago—when I met Nic. They came to a show of ours at the El Rey. We were on tour with Ty Segall. But Nic said he could talk to Robert about it, and Robert was like, ‘Yeah, I could give it a shot if you just need some help laying down tracks.’ ‘That’s really cool of you, thank you—let’s try it out.’ And he got in there and didn’t take over but made original parts and made certain songs where they are now.

He stood in a place of respect and vibed off what I was saying and how I was feeling—it was incredible. An honor, to be honest. I can’t thank him enough.

This album doesn’t sound like other albums in maybe the same genre now—it’s very dark, not bright. It’s not like ‘shimmering guitars’ or something. Why? Just trying to stick with the basics. I’m not a person who’d swear to the bible of analog recording or swear to the bible of digital recording—whatever sounds best sounds best. I just lean more toward that type of environment when we record, which basically means doing things live and on tape. There’s some references to put out there that we were kind of going for—the Elevators kind of sound just happens to be my favorite sound, so there’s tendency to lean toward that production. I’m not trying to make the record that’s everyone’s favorites. I’m trying to make me and my friends’ favorite. It’s really nice you’re interviewing us but … it’s not about that. That’s a nice plus!

I know you love the 13th Floor Elevators.

We do, too. But their story is like … a horror story for bands. Everything goes wrong, and then goes even wronger. It’s not the same path as being into like U2 or Bruce Springsteen. Do you ever worry about what happens if you keep going in their direction?

You get inspired by what you relate to, and I was never a popular kid or anything.

As much as I love some popular music, I don’t feel inspired by it. It might make me shake my leg or something, but what I love about the Elevators is what they were saying and how they did it. And the fact that this random Texas kid wanted to sound like James Brown and he did it in his own way, and the guitar worked the way it did and the drums did the thing they did … you could say the same thing about the Velvet Underground, but Velvet Underground were kind of cool kids. I was never invited into that circle. I was on the borderline.

With Elevators, the detriment of all their stuff … they didn’t achieve what they probably should have. But it didn’t matter cuz they made four amazing albums. That’s all you ever really wanna do—make good music. And that’s where it comes from.

Why do you think so many people identify with historic psychedelic movements now? Do they just like drugs, or is there something more?

There’s two schools of thought. There’s definitely a climate for that—basically the psychedelic movement came out of Vietnam. We were entering the 60s, acid became a thing around that time, and we had people who were really pissed at the government and the way things are working, and they tried to act upon that in their own way, whether through song or writing or anything. And you also have people who just wanna play dress-up. People who are really into wearing Nehru shirts and Beatle boots— —and don’t forget the turquoise jewelry and floppy hats, right?

The witchy thing! Basically playing dress-up and being into something is pretty natural.

I don’t think it has to do with any social climate. So I think there’s two. Yes, there’s a lot going on this country that can elicit that type of behavior. But psychedelic ‘expand your mind’ ‘fuck the system, tear it down’ … at the core, that’s what it’s really about, but things get bastardized and caricatured and there’s all these differing opinions and movements that corrode certain things.

There’s a couple bands in L.A. that kinda piss me off cuz … OK, there’s a band in Seattle that’s a country band that are really good dudes, but they’re wearing their bolo ties and Stetsons and all that just to play the show. And the rest of the day, they’re wearing Seahawks hats and listening to Lil Wayne—that’s fine, but why are you playing dress up? I come from the place where that’s from. I actually own a real Stetson my dad gave me, and my dad used to pick cotton.

You playing dress-up is a little fucked-up!

It’s not active hate or anything. But these bands—or people or writers—that try to live in the past, I don’t know see … what I’m trying to say with this record and Who Sold My Generation is I’m owning my generation. You know what I mean? I fess up to it. What the fuck happened? And what are we gonna do about it? Are we cool with the fact of a police state? Of following the order? Standing in line and assuming the position?

So far a lot of people seem cool with it. Are you optimistic?

Absolutely. I’m not a pessimistic person. I’ll vocalize how I feel. Pessimism doesn’t factor in, or at least I tell myself that. There’s a lot of things that could be remedied by people standing up and saying something. People are very complacent a lot of times. That doesn’t mean that’s to stay, I think. I’m not trying to preach. I think people have the opportunity to change and speak out against things and if we have another school shooting in a week are we gonna actually do something about it? Or just feel sad and then turn the page?

NIGHT BEATS WITH THE RELATIONSHIP AND WARBLY JETS PLUS DJ CHRIS ZIEGLER (L.A. RECORD) ON TUE., JAN. 19, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $5 / 18+.

THEECHO.COM. NIGHT BEATS’ WHO SOLD MY GENERATION IS AVAILABLE ON FRI., JAN. 29, FROM HEAVENLY. VISIT THE NIGHT BEATS AT THENIGHTBEATS.US. INTERVIEW

ROBERT LEVON BEEN FELIPE FLORES

OF BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB AND WHO SOLD MY GENERATION

How did you become a part of Who Sold My Generation? What happened to have you walk in?

I didn’t plan or expect to. We had a very unexpected shock when our drummer Leah [Shapiro] had to go through brain surgery.

That was six months of recovery for her. So I had six months off. Danny, I’d met a long time ago at a concert at the El Rey, when I think they were opening for Thee Oh Sees.

I really loved the song ‘H-Bomb.’ Like … fuck, I wish I’d written that one! We’re kind of similar. Not the loudmouth people at the party. Introverts. It was cool to be in a crowd of people and recognize someone weird like you that’s not all about that. So we finished Spectre with [producer] Nic [Jodoin] and he said [Night Beats] were just passing through town, and it made sense.

I thought I’d maybe play on a song, and it became a lot more.

What do you do in your own head in a situation like this? Set limits for how you participate, so you respect an existing band? Just go full-force?

My rule for myself was not to play the same bass in BRMC. I brought a different instrument and didn’t use any of the same pedals to force myself to go a different way. I had a lot of compassion for them, just having lost their bassist. We’d had a falling out with our drummer Nick [Jago] years ago, so I know the feeling. In one way, how scary it is, and in another way, how liberating it is, and those two feelings are happening at the same time. You know you’ve got something more to give, but you also feel you just lost a limb, and especially when a three-piece turns into a two-piece, you don’t feel like a band anymore. There’s a lot of insecurity when you’re recording … we recorded our whole Howl album like that. Most of it is wasted energy doubting yourselves. I stopped that—I recognized the feeling and it was really nice to be the person who could help for once, rather than the person who needed that help. Just making it feel like a band, for the time we were together. And making it be fun and bring back that confidence that everyone loses when you lose your main dude. It’s psychological. Everything was there for the taking, but you just don’t trust it. It’s like any break-up. It was lucky timing that the whole thing happened.

How do you fit into this record? What songs are you on, and what other work did you do?

INTERVIEW

I played bass on just about all of them. It was cool cuz we got to trade instruments whenever there was an idea and that’s always fun. The best way to make anything is everyone to get on board and start grabbing anything you can—start rowing. Not think about strict positions. Things blurred back and forth and it wasn’t official title stuff.

Nic was the mad scientist engineer and we both did mixing but he definitely did the majority. Everyone just threw in ideas. A big blur. That was the nature of it. I’m happy it didn’t feel like a concept studio record where you’re not a band anymore, and you start experimenting like, ‘We acknowledge we’re not this, so we’re not gonna try to be a cohesive rock record from start to finish.’

What’s really fucking cool is we kept it true to a band. Danny and I talked about writing together and we did one song—the b-side to the ‘No Cops’ single. Real fucking crazy song called ‘Vulture.’ One of my favorites. It felt right leaving the record as the full piece. It should focus on the core of the Night Beats, the spirit of it. But it was really fun to mess around.

What’s ‘Vulture’ like?

I got the weirdest I ever got with writing. I sing about like … Chinese food … it’s just insane. It sounds like I took a lot of drugs.

It’s like if you took a lot of drugs and were eating Chinese food at the same time. Food poisoning and the weird fever dreams you get? But it was completely drug free. If I got to that place with drugs, it would’ve felt like cheating.

Why does this album sound the way it does? It’s raw, it’s dark …

First, Nic had a bunch of great old gear and it was an experiment to see how long we could get away with it before something broke down. It’s really fucking frustrating cuz you get in there and everyone wants to play, and most of your time goes to fixing the reel-to-reel and figuring out where the hum is coming from. There’s a lot more of those things that make you go, ‘Fuck it, let’s just do it the simple way we know will work.’ Nic was good with patiently troubleshooting that stuff and pretty much lying to us at a really good pace—’It’s gonna be alright! Just gimme one minute … I just need to wait for this one thing …’ Which was never true, but it kept us working. And then Danny as well. He’s really brave. Unlike most musicians, he’s cool with committing early and letting what happens happens.

You know a lot of work went into this song he wrote and it’s great and it means a lot, and you never see someone who can just go like, ‘Fuck it, roll with it.’ Commit to the vocal or commit to the take after one or two. I need to learn how to do that more.

With my band BRMC, we do the opposite.

Everything’s pretty meticulous. No one wants to commit to early cuz you can paint yourself into a corner. Like fuck—it was a good lesson. Yeah, fuck it!

What’s a good example of that happy kind of fuck-it! song?

I wanna say all of them. That was the spirit of the record—momentum. [When you decide not to] nitpick a song … the only thing you’re ever gonna gain to balance that out is pure momentum and fire and energy.

This record seems like it could deliver some larger life lessons.

That’s the age we live in—limitless possibilities, limitless information, limitless different ways to go about something. It’s unfamiliar and scary to go back to a time when you were stuck on one little 8-track recorder and one amp and a couple pedals and it was like … that’s it. You had to make the most of the shit in your kitchen—just a pot and a pan. But bang it together! If you’re forced to use that pot and a pan, you’re like, ‘I can probably make that sound cool, actually.’ The limitations are your friends.

We’re so used to having 300 friends on Facebook that we forget the good ones!

The power of doing it the hard way?

I’m not a purist at all. It’s important to know what you’re losing when you try a different process. And being aware of like … ‘OK, we can do a full modern digital record,’ and you could make it sound nearly identical, honestly, and maybe even get there quicker.

But there’s something you’ll never know: what you might’ve had if you’d gone through the process of cutting tape. Things where you have to commit. It’s all about choices.

You’re not gonna get to know what those things were when you do the shortcut.

Once you get past technique, the next thing is the philosophy. ‘Why you do it,’ on top of ‘how you do it.’

Nic, me and him worked on the last BRMC record together—Spectre At The Feast—and that was such a different process. It was really fun to do this quick throw-n-go record—throw it against the wall, see what happens. Nic’s the old mad scientist with all the old gear. Credit to him. The spirit’s gotta be right and you gotta have everyone willing to go with you on that ride, but that can’t lessen what it takes to know the mechanics of that stuff. I’m really impressed by him, in a day and age when not many guys are going that way. With a record like this … even playing bass before we even tracked, like playing bass with them in the room together … musicianship-wise, James is one of the last true wildman drummers.

Like the Jedi thing—there’s not many left, and if you find one who hasn’t been killed in battle yet, you’re pretty fuckin’ lucky! And Danny, he understands the power of those old records and the writing. Cuz that’s the other side—you can record something, but it’s a particular way of writing, and playing bass is all about leaving room for that spirit to come alive and staying true to the real psychedelic garage records. There’s a less is more thing to it, but it’s not that simple.

Danny had a lot of the songs walking in the room. Arrangements were loose, and not many ideas for bass at all, so there was a lot of room in there for me to do whatever came to mind. But the playing that lends the most to their thing is staying out of the way a lot—versus that lead ‘here I am!’ or whatever. He kept trying to egg me out to play more and go for it. No matter what it is, the unspoken thing is you have to obey the song. And you have to listen, which sounds really obnoxious to say something as simple as that, but a lot of people don’t listen to what the other person’s doing or the drums are doing. And when the words come in, how much room do you leave to get the closest to the feeling? I dunno. Not just bassists but anybody—guitarists are guilty. It’s egos. All that stuff. Drummers too. Fucking everybody’s guilty of it!

Would they have made this record if you couldn’t have helped? Would it have ended up being post-poned otherwise?

No—part of their way with dealing with losing was to keep moving forward no matter what. That was the spirit with or without me. That was great to see. I didn’t feel like I was saving the day at all. I was there to hopefully make it fun! Not like, ‘We can do this but it’s gonna be misery!’

Like fuck—you can do it! And you can get away with having a little fun. It’s still rock ‘n’ roll!

The album is called Who Sold My Generation—what do you think about the ‘generation’ part? Do Night Beats seem like the next generation of the kind of music you make?

Good music to me, I don’t ever look at it with a shelflife or age. The records that feel weighted in time or a fad or a trend are the ones you can spot coming. I don’t wanna say what the title means to me cuz when you hear it, it should be what it means for you. Danny’s really educated with real true psychedelic rock records and the history, not just like of guys who dig the sound. There’s a lot of psych bands, but he lives and breathes the history. One of the things I loved that he did was the UFO Club—that record with Christian from Black Angels. It’s different but it’s interesting to put himself in this time. It’s like he’s acknowledging it when he kind of lives in another time. But it should all be timeless within the spirit that they’re trying to resurrect. It’s sad that it has to be resurrected. That’s maybe what’s being acknowledged, I guess. It could’ve been a vague obtuse title, but it’s bold. @hen he told me in the studio, I was like, ‘You’re gonna have to fight for that one. It’s a statement.’

VISIT ROBERT LEVON BEEN AND BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB AT BLACKREBELMOTORCYCLECLUB. COM. 45

At the Gates Interview by D.M. Collins Illustration by Elza Burkart Throughout the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, metal was a zero sum game where the most extreme—and loud, violent, cacophonous and satanic—music was always deemed the coolest, and dangerous-sounding bands and styles were supplanted when the next flavor of even more extreme brutality emerged. True metalheads cycled through power metal, then thrash, then grindcore, then death and on into eight-second songs with vocals that sounded like Cookie Monster imitating Idi Amin. At the Gates somehow changed all that.

A Swedish death metal band from the early 90s, these very young men—along with other metal bands in their native land—changed the face of metal, allowing songs to be absolutely brutal yet still have dueling guitars, lightning melodies and nods to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and bands like Diamond Head and Iron Maiden. Ever since, we’ve lightened up and learned to love metal from all eras, and the genre was saved—but not so At the Gates, who broke up in 1996 just in time to NOT reap the rewards that were nearly theirs to grasp! Yet in 2015, At the Gates are not has-beens, but enduring favorites who reformed back in 2008 and have been touring ever since! In fact, they’re touring back to Los Angeles in February in support of last year’s At War With Reality, their first album since Slaughter of the Soul in 1995, and a harbinger of the metal yet to come.

Huge expectations were set for you guys in 1995 after Slaughter of the Soul, your highly critically-acclaimed third album. You were at a creative and commercial peak, yet you broke up almost immediately afterwards.

Why? And why did it take nearly two decades to get back together?

Tomas Lindberg (vocals): We broke up in ‘96.

That’s a long time ago. We were in our really early 20s when we broke up, all of us. I think it was just us being young and immature, not really coping with the success of that last record, Slaughter of the Soul. We didn’t really know how the industry worked. We didn’t have a manager, we never had. We still don’t!

We were too young to be able to say no to certain things, and knowing our boundaries and all that. And we were not ready for it.

Many people think of your band and immediately think of Slaughter of the Soul, the way people might talk about Coltrane and Love Supreme, or Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. So I was very surprised to read that last year’s At War With Reality, your ‘comeback’ album, hearkens back to an older, bleaker album: 1993’s With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness.

When we started the new album, we didn’t want it to be Slaughter of the Soul Part II. That would be too easy in one way, but too hard in another way. When we played the old songs—the really old songs—live, we felt they had something that we could build upon. We never really took that dark melancholic side into Slaughter of the Soul. Slaughter of the Soul is one of those records that’s like 35 minutes of pure aggression. We wanted to bring the whole palette—all the darker elements—into the new record, but still have the songwriting skills that came with Slaughter of the Soul. We wanted to write the ultimate At the Gates records when we did this one! You can expand on your sound, but only a certain amount each record—ha—so people still get really what they expect. That’s how you move it forward, and it’s a delicate thing. For our comeback album, people should understand that it was us, here—that it was At the Gates.

And we touched some new ground, but just enough new ground to keep it interesting.

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We wanted to do the ultimate At the Gates record, yes, but we didn’t want to make an At the Gates greatest hits album! We still want to push a few buttons more.

Your vocals are always recorded well—able to be understood in a way that, say, Napalm Death never was.

For me, and for the songwriters as well, it’s always been about the song. To carry the song is the riffs, the melody, and also the lyrics. I mean, I’m a big fan of extreme death metal vocalists, and you could argue you can’t hear a lot of their words, but a trained ear probably can. For me the lyrics were so important, and I want to get the words out there.

And your lyrics are relatable, too, more like punk or thrash lyrics. They’re about human emotions and politics and stories—very different from the demon-summoning, corpse-eating fantasies of many death metal bands. Do your songs always have to be about ‘real’ things?

It’s important that they’re real to me. The last album we did was a lot of metaphors and abstract in one way, but it was grounded in theory. It was about real stuff, but maybe not written as directly as I would have done before on Slaughter of the Soul and stuff like that.

But to just sing about, you know, trolls and goblins… you know, I like some of those bands, and it works for them. But to be able to sing with such emotional impact, they had to be about something I cared about.

I’ve seen a lot of old bands reform, such as the New York Dolls and Brian Wilson and Devo, and inevitably they’d record a new album, and it was never as good as their classic stuff. But At War … , which came out after a 19-year gap in recordings, was one of the best albums of your career. How do you make the best album of your life two decades later?

Especially after you told us you’d never record an album again?

It was the toughest thing we have done as musicians. We were so fired up from playing live together, and we wanted more. And the only way to go there is to write music together.

We kind of waited for Anders [Björler], our main guitar player and songwriter, to take that

step and show us that he was ready. And when he was, we got inspired by each other’s ideas.

We knew that people were going to be a little bit interested, and that we would be judged by the album that was done almost two decades ago. But we felt WE were going to be happy with it—that was the main thing.

When At the Gates was getting started, metal was undergoing some seriously bad PR—at least in the United States. It was the early 90s and we’d had years of poodle-hair glam metal on MTV, and now suddenly Kurt Cobain and grunge came along to make every form of metal—be it Poison or Pantera—seem passé. Were things as bad for metal in Sweden as they were here in the States? Was it tough for you, to sell your brand of metal to the world, when the world was skeptical of any metal?

There was a strong underground scene, but it probably wasn’t big. In Sweden, you knew EVERYONE into death metal. There was about 20 or 30 people that were the whole scene in Sweden. But that’s what made it important for us! We didn’t really think about conquering the world, or convincing other people that what we wanted to do was important. What we wanted to do as teenagers was to be part of that strong underground scene, and to be different, and to be hated by the community! That was part of the charm: to be outsiders. So it’s hard for me to really answer the question, because the important part about it was that it was ours! It’s very important for teenagers to have your own thing, and not be part of the popular thing. Flying under the radar was perfect for us!

When you started, what bands inspired you?

We were inspired by so many different styles!

I think that was the whole idea of the band, that we search for the heart and the honesty of more avant-garde bands, like the Swans, or Killing Joke—bands like that, that were doing something real and honest. Combine that with some of the classic death or thrash metal or classic metal stuff that really inspired us.

And these are the classic bands—your Morbid Angels, your Dark Angels, your Slayer, your

Judas Priests, all that stuff is very important to us! We didn’t really know exactly what we wanted to do! Just steal from a lot of different stuff and put it in the mix.

Have you ever made any creative decisions in At the Gates that you regret?

If you look back at what we did in the early days, ‘pretentious’ may be one word you can use. Trying to be avant-garde instead of just BEING avant-garde because that’s what you like. But without that, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Without those overly indulgent avant-garde pretentious songs that we did in the early days, we wouldn’t even be the people we are today. I can love the naïveté of the pretentiousness, in a way. It’s very over the top in some parts—very 17- or 18-year-olds trying to be the King Crimson of death metal!

I can see the charm in that now: playing above your abilities, being too difficult for your own good. It’s how we got where we are now.

You’re not the only classic extreme metal band coming to town in early 2016….

VENOM is coming! Do you have any questions for the godfathers of black metal?

The first three or four Venom records, I still listen to quite regularly—perhaps TOO regularly for a person forty plus! The thing is about Venom, the old records, the imagery, and the mystery… I really DON’T want to know! They’re a part of my teenage years, the way they are, with the mystery and everything.

And the way they answered interviews back in those days was just statements about how evil they were and how much liquor they drank, and all that. That’s all I know, and all I want to know! Maybe they’re all nice, normal people, or whatever… I don’t want to know that!

How evil are you? How much liquor do you drink?

Not much—ha ha! I just have a glass of wine!

AT THE GATES WITH DECAPTITATED, THE HAUNTED AND HARM’S WAY ON SAT., FEB. 20, AT THE GLASS HOUSE, 200 W. 2ND ST., POMONA. 8 PM / $30-$35 / ALL AGES. THEGLASSHOUSE.US. VISIT AT THE GATES AT ATTHEGATES.SE. INTERVIEW

VERSIS Interview by sweeney kovar Photography by dana washington When Colin Brennan was a music-loving high school student, his Mac crashed and his aspirations of being a producer were channelled into the written word, and so Colin became Versis. The teen MC found a lane early. Before he was 21, he clocked credits with a wide array of collaborators like Dibia$e, fLako and Mar. Wherever it was going down in Los Angeles, Versis was in the audience, or if he couldn’t get in the club, he was outside soaking up vibes. After his respectable debut album Illcandescent, the ubiquitous young man slipped under the radar. Versis went quiet for several years before re-emerging, transformed, in 2015 with copeæsthetic, a project much meatier, moodier and introspective than anything previous. Versis wasn’t rapping about rapping as much as he was rapping to himself, questioning himself, demanding more out of a human being who was coming into his own. I FaceTimed with the 24-year-old to speak about the life processes that led to copeæsthetic, surviving the sea of scenes in L.A., and mental health. copeæsthetic is one of my favorite pieces of music from 2015. It’s very personal without feeling like a diary. What personal elements inspired the album?

Part of what inspired copeæsthetic was witnessing [my brother’s] battle with bipolar disorder. This project, seriously—when you mentioned mental health in your email to do this interview, you reminded me that [mental health] was one of the main things I wanted to touch on with this project. I didn’t want to do it directly but I just wanted to talk about really important things that matter to me and that turned out to be mental health. Throughout the album I talk about my own struggle to keep a level head as well. It’s sometimes cryptic, but it’s there—I’m talking to myself most of the time on it.

What did you discover about yourself making the album? Do you feel you’ve had the necessary catharsis?

I proved to myself that I could really put my heart and mind into something and it could manifest the way I envisioned. I learned to trust my ear, to trust the ideas that come to me. The week the album came out, I was at work and I had a release moment at my desk. I shed some tears and I think that was symbolic of letting go of that pain that made me create the project in the first place. The whole project doesn’t stem from just the situation with my brother and I—it’s all connected through the fact that I learned how to write music through his influence. He took me to the guys that recorded me for the first time.

He connected me to the people who recorded all my first music all the way up until my first album, Illcandescent. Hearing people being able to understand what I’m saying feels good.

It’s good to know the way I’m communicating is translating .

How did the dynamic between you and your brother specifically influence the album? ‘rain on a Sunday’ or ‘calidelphia’ wouldn’t exist without my brother. I can take it back to how I learned to rap from listening to the stuff he would play. He used to play The Lox and D-Block. He’d always rewind the CDs to have me understand what they were saying. He influenced my writing towards being detailed. Our dynamic made me talk about being conflicted with loving myself and loving someone else close to me when there INTERVIEW

are reasons to be disappointed in myself or in that someone else. Our relationship leading up to the album made me have to start to learn about unconditional love and self-love.

I also want to clarify that even though we’ve had our situations, I’m putting it in the music to show how I’m dealing with it. It’s not to be putting him on blast. We talk at least every couple of weeks. We’re growing through it.

How critical to the formation of the album was that situation between you and your brother that you added on ‘rain on a Sunday’?

It was a key happening in the sense that I wouldn’t have had the time and space to process the recent happenings, let alone to record the other songs if things didn’t go down like that. When all that was happening, something told me to record audio. I wasn’t immediately thinking ‘I’m going to record this and do an album!’ In short, that moment recorded on the song was a precursor to the darkest times I’ve ever faced. At one point, I’d come home after work and just sit in the dark in silence. That was another part of the break: dealing with family stuff that led to me looking at myself more closely.

Where do you want to go musically now that you’ve processed that a bit more?

I want to make feel-good music, pretty much.

I feel like since I’ve started I’ve just been talking about rising above situations and shining light, so I want to continue on the path. I want to evolve. I left behind a lot of doubt, a lot of fear, a lot of insecurity. Now, whenever a thought about doubting myself creeps up, I try to counter it by doing the opposite of what it’s saying.

You’re 24 now. How do you look back at those years in your late teens when you were finding your voice?

I was on this wide-eyed autopilot trip. A lot of cool shit was happening for me fast. I had to go through the whole influence thing. Black Moon was one of the first groups that I really got stuck on. Obviously [A] Tribe [Called Quest]. At that time in my life, Blu was the first rapper I really connected with where just through the music I felt we would understand each other, like we were on similar planes.

The whole scene in L.A. in the late 2000s was exciting. It was getting crazy over here again.

It’s still warming up, honestly. I feel like

history is being written right now and it’s not even annoyingly crazy yet. Look at FlyLo on the intro to Kendrick’s album. I remember being raised by Adult Swim and hearing FlyLo beats and trying to figure out what the fuck that was. Watching all of it bubble was crazy.

Making music was my alternative to joining a gang. I felt like I could find a home through it, and I did. I understood what I needed to do. For Illcandescent, I printed that up myself.

I used to hold a box of CDs wherever I’d go.

I was watching what everyone else did and tried not to do that. You know the dudes on Venice and Hollywood that try to throw CDs at you? Nope. I just had nice-looking CDs in the box and if you’re curious enough, you’ll ask. I felt that would weed out attention that wasn’t genuine. I would just show up. I’m still trying to understand what’s happening here—I feel like something’s happening still, something like a jazz renaissance.

For someone who was out in public doing your thing so early, you took a significant break from putting out music after your first album, Illcandescent.

I just wasn’t sure what I was doing anymore.

Ok, put out a good album. What else is there? Then life started to get crazy.

I started feeling more down than ever.

Maybe because I felt music was my only hope. I remember recording one of the last songs for Illcandescent, ‘Life After You’ and wondering if I was good enough. I didn’t take into account the fact that maybe I had something or understood something that other folks didn’t. I was doing too much thinking. Iman Omari told me in 2011, ‘You gotta get over yourself.’ It didn’t even register until this year when he reminded me he said that. That’s always been something I’ve dealt with—being my own worst enemy.

Sometimes I think that’s what my name has represented since Versis is spelled with an ‘i’ and not a ‘u.’ I started putting shit out when I was 17. When I was 19, I put out my first album, Illcandescent. That’s only a few years of me even trying to write songs. To get love for that was dope, but I didn’t want to take credit since I didn’t feel I knew what I was doing. I had to take time and get a better understanding. I’m glad I did because listening to Illcandescent and older projects … it’s consistent. It’s always been a good

message. I just need to chill out and not get lost. At one point I didn’t want to have a bad song even written. I was paralyzed trying not to make any mistakes—which is a mistake in itself. AlI that led to me trusting my ear even more. I couldn’t verbalize the sound I was reaching for, but I knew what I wanted.

I’m just now realizing I can do whatever I want and don’t have to limit myself.

When did you start making copeæsthetic?

2011. Two songs from that year were ‘Wayside’ and ‘Love is.’ I wrote ‘Love Is.’ to this beat by Lone called ‘To Be With A Person You Really Dig’ and for a while I couldn’t get past the first verse for ‘Wayside.’ It was a crazy long process. One of my big hang-ups was that I did not want the focus to be the fact that I’m rapping. At all. I wanted it to be about the message. I was tired of hearing dope rap music. How many times can you be clever just for clever’s sake? You don’t even feel anything after a while. That’s part of why it sounds like I’m just talking on most of the project. I was trying to do the most lazy way of rapping without rapping—just barely hinting at it. At first I thought I had to live up to Illcandescent and sound ‘bigger.’ Pretty quickly it started to not feel fun. I had to see and admit I was going through shit and the music was going to reflect that. That’s when I finally realized I had a place to start. Even though the whole project isn’t just dark, I had to start from that place to be able to begin.

When you’re making something personal instead of just ‘dope raps,’ what’s it like to have the outside world consume it?

It showed me that I did what I set out to do—connect with people. At the beginning there’s an audio clip that goes ‘musicians never talk to you. I just wanted to talk to you.’ People have been talking back and that feels good.

What’s next for you?

Still doing the work to get better at living.

That’s always next. I’ve also been working a lot with Swarvy. The songs him and I have are on similar themes. Loving and forgiving yourself, letting go of resentment … life shit.

It’s all drawn from situations.

VERSIS’ copeæsthetic IS AVAILABLE NOW. VISIT VERSIS AT VERSIS. BANDCAMP.COM 49

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65 COMICS Curated by Tom Child 52

ALBUM REVIEWS

58

LIVE PHOTOS

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THE INTERPRETER Lee Set

Edited by Debi Del Grande

60

ADRIAN YOUNGE

60

WAYBACK MACHINE

Layne Weiss

Ron Garmon

66 BOOKS It All Dies Anyway:

L.A., Jabberjaw, and the end of an era Chris Ziegler and Kristina Benson

70 FILM

Peep Show Kristina Benson

RECORD 2015 74 L.A. POLL RESULTS

ALBUM REVIEWS “Psalms” with its staccato percussion and religious allusions, and on “Sandrine,” he delivers a sentimental but not sickly sweet love song. Welcome back, Younge.

—Audra Heinrichs

ADRIAN YOUNGE

There’s Something About April II Linear Labs It’s been nearly five years since the release of Adrian Younge’s There’s Something About April, but the psych-soul producerslash-composer has not lost his touch. Between then and now, he’s lent his expert touch to Jay Z’s 2013 epic Magna Carta and worked alongside Souls of Mischief in 2014, and then returned with another collaboration with Ghostface Killah earlier this year.

In 2016 however, Younge presents a work he can really call his own: There’s Something About April II. Jazz and soul enthusiasts will delight in the entirety of the work, but especially in tracks like “Hear My Love,” which features pleading vocals and lyrics for lovers that will no doubt summon to mind a modern take on Motown.

“Winter is Here” is another delectable ditty that provides listeners with a surefire way to drive the inevitable doldrums of the seasons out of sight. As bluesy as it is brazen, Younge takes careful risks on

ANDREW RINEHART

Nothing/Everything Buddyhead/Rinehart Media Nothing/Everything is the earthy and earnest effort from Andrew Rinehart, a pseudonym adopted

by Louisville, Kentucky’s Andrew Sellers. This sprawling meditation on young people’s problems—the kind of problems that leave the scars that form a personality— is bookended by tracks called “((Nothing))” and “((Everything))”, and there’s a swooning, heart-on-his-sleeve-and-flutteringin-the-breeze way in which he whips his voice through these firstperson stories of trying to situate himself in reality. His voice echoes John Darnielle, Dan Bejar and Thom Yorke for something of an uncanny homage to the indie residue of 2007, but the record boasts a remarkably American sound, with aspects of the south and the

ALBUM REVIEW SUBMISSIONS

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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

52

midwest brushed up against reverby peels of Southern California coastal guitar. Its overall lack of irony, even in its more romantically cynical moments like on “God Made You and the Devil Made Me”, is also evident in the covers. Pitch-shifted vocals turn Yoko Ono’s breezy “Growing Pain” to more of a mournful dirge—a song that has aged and feels the weight of its message. Rinehart also covers Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” expanding it into a crashing waterfall and proving that the elasticity of a well-written song is limitless.

It’s an appropriate choice for Seller’s Los Angeles record, what with references to “going clear” and all.

The entire album basks in the awe of life’s enormity while trying to break the habits of the miniscule, and musically, there are some truly beautiful moments. Sellers’ production work is downright buttery, and the mixing is easy on the ears.

The 12.5-minute “Nothing Means Anything” buries the sound of two hearts screaming at one another, as channeled by a dueling violin and cello, in the background of a cyclical lullaby. Moon-eyed and tender, this one’s for those who are looking to emote overtly.

—Christina Gubala

loneliness that the manufactured plastic cheer of the holidays seems to exacerbate. A key change to the fluffy McCartney classic “Wonderful Christmastime” gives it a lessthan-merry edge, while “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” is almost unrecognizable with new dissonance and garage production. Other songs like “Little Saint Nick” and “Run Run Rudolph” are presented more straight-up. They are charming with their surfy, airy guitars, and homey ease—a soundtrack for looking at lights or baking with grandma, you know, if you’re into that kind of thing. Ramone’s take on “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” is the best example of the duality the album represents. Her vacant delivery is such an inversion of the sappy lyrics that it becomes humorous, poking fun at the lunacy of Christmas. You can laugh along with her or just enjoy the waves of jangly guitar and reverb that permeate nostalgic tunes like “Blue Christmas” and “Run Run Rudolph.” Christmas In Reno is just the slightest bit off, much like the holidays themselves: all waxy cheer, forced merriment, and comforting commercialization on the surface, with a darker, melancholy and disillusioned layer brooding underneath. It’s the perfect album for anyone wanting some familiar Christmas music that doesn’t have Coca-Cola Santas and tinsel shooting out its ass.

—Madison Desler

an imaginary city called Detroit, Florida. Eagle’s swells of production ebb and flow around the myriad characters that he and Serengeti inhabit, sometimes sauntering, sometimes pulsing with anxious urgency.

While the album opener “Zorak” strolls in, laconically ruminating over one of the quintessential millennial existential questions—the relationship between entertainment and technology—it gives way to the seductively pensive “Screen Play.”

Like a lyrical Rubik’s cube, Eagle and Serengeti twist their poetry, tweaking meaning from micro-manipulations and blink-and-you-missed-it character shifts. The comical pain of “Pinky” and resigned fraternity (with one’s own anxiety, as I hear it) on “Church” give way to the complicated romance of “Wonder Girl,” a whiff of the feminine world from a distance. “Lemons,” arguably the most aggressive track on the album—as well as its closer—levels intersectional frustrations with steady aim and rapid delivery. Time & Materials is a Pynchon-esque book with subtleties easily underappreciated upon cursory listens, but it’s a good, fast read.

—Christina Gubala

CRESCENDO Unless WNNBB

CASSIE RAMONE

Christmas In Reno Burger For her new holiday album Christmas In Reno, Cassie Ramone (of The Vivian Girls and the Babies) plays with the conflicting feelings we often feel during the Christmas season. She’s tweaking holiday standards like “Sleigh Ride” and “The Christmas Song” with her unpolished deadpan and plenty of lo-fi grime, and the album is the sonic equivalent to the melancholy and

CAVANAUGH Time & Materials Mello Music Group

Cavanaugh, the collaborative project between Open Mike Eagle and the chameleonic Serengeti, is contemplative, playful concept record whose narrators duck and weave through the lives of the inhabitants of a fictional apartment complex in

One way of looking at history is that we don’t so much move forward as we do exist concurrently with every moment that’s come before.

Crescendo, on their sophomore LP Unless, tap into shoegaze’s parallel plane (that would be Glasgow, 1991), a style in its idealized form.

It’s as comfortable as you’d expect here, folded between timelines —thoughts, emotions, influences, and instruments smoothed into a thick blanket made to smother you into semiconsciousness. The band (Gregory Cole, Olive Kimoto, and Jess Krichelle) don’t have any ALBUM REVIEWS

trouble nailing shoegaze’s trademark moves, which also double as sleep states: every new moment overwhelms, then abandons the one before it; moments of lucidity flash, then fade away; time, like the boundaries between instruments and songs, blurs into a continuous fuzz. The record is impeccably recorded — every sound designed just right to noise-cancel the outside world. Mostly, melodies don’t matter much (and the lyrics, like the sounds, are rounded off and dulled to a point where feeling subsumes rhetoric), but on songs like “Tell Me” and “Pressure,” they bounce around like playground rhymes, ear-buggy in their simplicity. These elements combine best on “Repulsor,” with the added pleasure of guitar that sears oh-so-softly through a wall of synths like a hot knife through butter. Bands that have combined this much control over their sound with a bit more adventurousness have been able to reach outside the shoegaze timeline and into more groundbreaking territory. If Crescendo keeps pushing, they could do the same.

—Chris Kissel

textures become the centerpiece: “Down,” for instance, which samples an acoustic guitar cocooned in reverb, accompanied by a clipped, mournful male vocal. His ear for tonal depth manifests on the unexpectedly polished “Pebble,” too, with a surprise sample of a Phish guitar melody. The few pieces that revolve around vocal samples involve Parks in meditative sparring matches. On “Our Shadows,” a terse clip of a female vocal taunting “wha? wha? wha?” is paired with sharp snaps of the snare drum; they’re answered by the “hmmm”s of a man who seems like he’s just about to say something. “Bombay” is the high point of what Parks does best on this record, with his drums and a chopped-up vocal snippet going hand-to-hand, brutally and arrhythmically. With the sounds of a small crowd dubbed in, it’s got the feel of a street corner scuffle.

(Of course, it’s Parks on both sides of these battles.) These moments are rarer than the grainier, earthen moments that dominate the rest of the album, but they reinforce its themes of self and work. Ultimately, Technoself is a kind of sonic Rocky montage—a picture of Parks as an artist whipping himself into shape.

—Chris Kissel

DEANTONI PARKS Technoself Leaving

Deantoni Parks is known primarily as the most recent drummer for the Mars Volta, as well as founder and drummer of the hyper-rhythmic genre-antagonizing New York band Kudu. So it makes sense that Technoself, Parks’ debut under his own name, shows off a percussionist’s approach to composition. His biggest strengths are his attention to the timbre of the instruments and voices he samples and how he pairs them with his aggressive rhythms, which he plays himself on the drums. Combined with a generally minimalist approach, the result is an album that—while consisting largely of samples and electronic sounds—never feels synthetic. Instead, it’s a collage both colorful and tactile, like a hard-lined landscape made out of construction paper. The melodies Parks assembles are strong enough, but he’s at his best when he backs off and lets the ALBUM REVIEWS

EMITT RHODES Rainbow Ends Omnivore

This is the elusive Mr. Rhodes’ first album in several decades, but it isn’t like anyone known as “The One Man Beatles” was ever going to sink into obscurity. Rhodes started as a drummer, switched to guitar and founded a shortlived light-psych quartet called the Merry-Go-Round whose sole LP pre-capitulated much of the partly-cloudy pop of L.A.’s Paisley Underground of the early 1980s.

Two singles grazed the upper half of Billboard’s Top 100 in 1967 and the band’s songs were later covered

by Fairport Convention and the Bangles. Released in 1970, Rhodes’ self-titled debut LP did much better. His contract called for an album every six months, and the fa-

mously finicky composer—playing all the instruments, singing every note and taking endless pains out of a garage studio in Hawthorne— managed but three more before hanging it up. People still went right on playing “Live” and “You’re a Very Lovely Woman” and “She Laughed Loud” like that never happened, “Lullaby” wound up on The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack, an Emitt Rhodes documentary materialized and finally, after a suitably protracted gestation, comes this follow-up to 1973’s Farewell to Paradise. So what has this unstuck-in-time studio wizard have to say after such a span? Oh, a pretty trifle or six. Time’s reshaped that once-angelic voice into something slightly more Warren Zevonian, but that doesn’t matter, since the wonder boy now sings of divorce (“Dog on a Chain”), amends (“If I Knew Then”) and a dorkiness that’s downright Millennial (“Put Some Rhythm to It”). Rhodes, no longer content with being a one-man band, brings in Roger Manning, Jr. and Jason Falkner of Jellyfish, along with Susanna Hoffs plus Nels Cline and Pat Sansone of Wilco. The pure pop emotion like “I Can’t Tell My Heart” belies everything ever said about the banked romantic fires of winter and “Is There Someone Else” is equally raw, painful stuff that will probably get covered by country musicians until the last swinging door falls off. “It’s All Behind Us Now” is wry and lightly psychedelic and the title song, held for the finale, plays us out with the kind of wistful optimism last heard from this corner back when there were such things in the world as hippies, Zap Comix and career-suicide pacts with ABC/Dunhill. Bowie is gone, alas, but some obscure compensation mechanism restored to us Emitt Rhodes; lucky us.

—Ron Garmon

FUMIGADOS self-titled 7” Verdugo Discos

At the moment, all across Southern California, there is a new wave of punk rock rising out of some of the

oldest most storied neighborhoods our counties have to offer. Nurtured by a passionate community of music lovers and rooted in a network of backyard house parties, warehouse spaces, and sympathetic small businesses, this particular brand of hardcore is marked by its explosiveness, distinct Latin influences, and strong DIY ethos. Los Angeles’s own Fumigados do a fantastic job representing this scene and its style with their debut self-titled 7” out on Verdugos Discos. The four song EP clocks in at just under nine minutes and, from song one it wastes no time and pulls no punches. With their opening tune, “Bobo,” the band absolutely erupts off of the wax with so much force that hallucinatory visions of cyclonic circle pits and imaginary wafts of cigarette smoke, malt liquor, sweat, and leather may be inevitable. The band charges through their material with a style distinguished by fiercely thumped traditional hardcore rhythms, buzzsaw guitar tones, and the shouted (yet emotive) vocals of Erika L. The power of the tunes is captivating, and the urgency of them is very clear. Showing an amazing amount of growth from their last demo tape, Fumigados are definitely ones to keep an eye out for, especially for you fans of good hardcore.

—Simon Weedn

There are some missteps here: “he fresh” never achieves lift off; the druggy wistfulness of “blind” and “boom boom” sound like cast offs from the Breeders; and album closer “real life” seems out of place and provides an unsettling and unsatisfactory end to the album. When the record returns to dark wave motifs on “offerings,” it refreshingly shakes off the dirge and hits the dancefloor as if all that was needed was a little uptick in tempo or a little sweat on the brow. It might be L.A., but it’s winter: the days are shorter and the sky is heavier, and much of right on! sags with heavier skies. For a purported dance floorready record, you’re more suited for a Friday evening at home, Netflix® and chill.

—Kegan Pierce Simons

KNEEBODY AND DAEDELUS Kneedelus Brainfeeder

JENNYLEE Right On! Rough Trade

Jenny Lee Lindberg, bass player for Warpaint, takes the nom de plume jennylee for her debut solo album, right on!—a timely, circadian weather report for a Los Angeles El Niño winter. Suitably bass heavy and musically atmospheric, right on! finds equal ground between the foggy dizziness of early Cure and the lysergic swoon of My Bloody Valentine. Lead off single “never” anchors itself to a repeating Joy Division-esque bassline, with a lilting vocal that hovers in and around the song, but never settles. The record paints with similar colors until the Afro-rhythms of “riot” increases the pulse, providing a welcome ray of light and the most interesting and listenable track on the album.

Kneedelus is a project that has likely been in the works for years, either consciously or not. I once watched Daedelus as he watched chamber jazz quintet Kneebody perform a barroom set at Seven Grand in Downtown L.A., perhaps six or seven years ago. With a monk’s sense of solemn observation, he consumed their thrilling performance. Bassist Kaveh Rastegar and drummer Nate Wood steered their agile instrumental vehicles around sharp corners while horns and keyboards conversed, swirling interlocutors racing through the tape. They swept the room off their collective feet, but to watch Daedelus there ruminating was like seeing this project in its gestation. Kneedelus, recently released by Brainfeeder, is steeped in the fermented chemistry of a long-standing mutual appreciation. It’s a genre-evading, thoughtful, and precisely-executed album. The deeply rooted artistic relationship between the parties has fostered a mutual understanding, enabling them to weave a scintillating aural tapestry with the kind of balance rarely achieved between the disparate worlds of EDM and improvisational jazz. Woods’ 53

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32. THE PROSPECTOR 2400 E. 7th St Long Beach

48. MCCABE’S 3101 Pico Blvd Santa Monica

16. POOBAH 2636 E Colorado Blvd Pasadena

33. THE REGENT 448 S Main St, DTLA

CAFES & RESTAURANTS

17. RECORD JUNGLE 2459 Whittier Blvd Montebello

34. ROYCE HALL 340 Royce Dr. Westwood

49. CAFE DE LECHE 5000 York Blvd Highland Park

18. RECORD RECYCLER 17312 Crenshaw Blvd Torrance

35. THE SMELL 247 S Main St DTLA

50. GREENHOUSE 149 Linden Ave. Long Beach

15. PERMANENT RECORDS 5116 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 56. BOUFFANT HAIR PARLOR 1101 E Wardlow Rd Long Beach 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

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

LEE SET Curated by Kristina Benson Photography by FUNAKI

DJ Lee Set spins records from a very special moment in the history of rock’n’roll history: the time between about 1958 and 1962 when rockabilly, doo-wop, and soul all crossed paths and when—for just a moment—it seemed like all bets were off and anything was possible. She presents us with a set of songs all guaranteed to hook you in the first five seconds. (And all on 45, of course.) If you want to hear her play them for you, just come to Chills N Fever ever first Friday at the Echo in Echo Park or to the Beat Bait every third Friday at the OffBeat in Highland Park.

JOHNNY (GUITAR) WATSON “ONE MORE KISS” (CLASS, 1959)

“I found this eight years ago in Long Beach—I was like ‘Johnny Guitar Watson, I know who he is!” I just got it cuz maybe it would be good and it’s one of the best records ever. I’m gonna say that a lot! This song wasn’t a hit or anything. He’s trying to seduce you. He wants that one kiss … and honestly, at the end of the record you want to give him that one kiss!”

HONEY AND THE BEES “ALMOST EIGHTEEN” (PENTAGON, 1959)

“They’re a well known girl group and this is their first introduction record. It just lets you know—her vocals are very playful, like a ‘Hey, I’m ready!’ deal. We have our explicit music now, but back then it was more on the hush-hush. It’s got a very jazz, very R&B intro, which you don’t really get a lot from girl groups. It’s also multi-tempo. It speeds up as the song goes and at the end it’s a great one to dance to.”

THE IDOLS “JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE” (REVEILLE, 1961)

“Not your typical girl group sound or song! The girl’s just frustrated—she wants more. It’s a rough-around-the-edges kind of sound, not like bubblegum pop. And she belts it out! It was composed by Richard Berry. Very cool! Reveille was also owned

by Morey Bernstein, a New York producer but this was an L.A. band—this group was local. I like to collect L.A. records, and it’s just an R&B stomper. And it makes me happy cuz girls are doing it back then!”

RUBY JOHNSON “CALLING ALL BOYS” (V-TONE, 1961) “It’s my intro—this is one of the first ones I always play. And if I have to guest DJ for someone, this is how I like to introduce myself. It’s the perfect anthem. She’s singing ‘I don’t look like the movie stars,’ and she’s saying like, ‘I’m not like girls on the TV shows, I’m a woman.’ Like come at me: ‘I’m not what everyone expects a woman to be.’ Also it has a killer sax break. And it’s sexy!

It’s like making-baby music.”

jackie shane “comin Down” (sue, 1963) “Whenever I DJ this is the climax. You throw in the heavy hitters and then you throw in this one cuz it’s just a heavy intro and it explodes! And the best thing about it was that Jackie Shane was a drag queen. He was a ‘female impersonator,’ as they called it back then. Why isn’t there a Jackie Shane movie? this song was composed by Bobby Darin. Bobby Darin couldn’t use it and Jackie Shane took it! He ended up being a lounge singer in Canada.”

INTERPRETER

Johnny love “Chills and Fever” (star time, 1960) “I have a night called Chills and Fever after this song. This is one of the first songs that introduced me to rhythm and blues popcorn, and actually the cool thing is that there’s two versions of this song. Same song, same singer, but Johnny Love is the original one, and then it was reissued as ‘Ronny Love,’ not ‘Johnny Love.’ I like letting people know that I have the Johnny Love version cuz it’s really rare—maybe like only a hundred, if that, were pressed under Johnny Love. ‘Johnny’ was just so common that they wanted a name that would stand out.

It’s the same singer. I found this one at the Long Beach flea market like eight years ago, and it had a college radio sticker on it. That never happens! But the few times I have found something, it’s been in Long Beach—I guess that’s because Long Beach is so close to South Central and Compton, and like where the old college radio stations were, so I’m thinking it might have been from Long Beach City back in the day.

And that it makes it extra special! It starts sounding like it’s going to be ragtime but it moves into this two-chord mid-tempo dancer and it’s just a classic rhythm and blues staple.”

slim harpo “shake your hips” (eXcello, 1966) “It’s just known—that harmonica intro. Many people think it’s a Rolling Stones song but it’s Slim! And Slim Harpo is my favorite blues singer and it’s just a one-chord groove the whole time. And it’s telling you it’s the easiest dance—just shake your hips! Don’t move your mouth, don’t move your hands, just stand there and shake those hips. And it just gets everybody jumping cuz you can’t tell people what to do! It’s an awesome blues monster.”

THE CONTOURS “WHOLE LOTTA WOMAN” (MOTOWN, 1961)

“It’s this piano intro with sax and they’re like making love and it’s like ‘Alright! You got me!’ It’s early Motown and produced by Berry Gordy and there’s two versions: the raw version and then the second version, which is for the masses. Of course the first version is best because it’s raw and just the Contours’ style that they’re known for. Their songs are meant to make you dance. They never wanted to be lovey-dovey or serious—they just wanted to make good dance music. It’s good, poppy, R&B dance floor music. Rowdy rhythm and soul!”

REX GARVIN AND THE MIGHTY CRAVERS “EMULSIFIED” (EPIC, 1961) “This is everyone’s known R&B intro song and that’s just a known fact. I think if you hear it, you’d be like ‘Oh, it’s that song!’ If there was a church of R&B, this would be the gospel but with no religion— it’s just that kind of song! It’s just about being emulsified—all stirred up by love. This girl is driving him crazy! It’s so great. I’ve had this one for a few years. I think I got this off of a friend in New York.

Being record nerds, you have a community of people in the R&B scene and you sell to each other, and that’s how I found this one.

You can find selling groups on Facebook, and before all this social media thing we’d use emails.”

THE MIRACLES “i need a change” (chess, 1960) “This one is my all-time personal fave. It’s pre-Motown—a slower song, slow tempo. And this song wasn’t even going to be recorded, but Berry Gordy’s sister influenced them to make the song—and this song is also what got them to get noticed before making the big hit, which is ‘Bad Girl.’ It’s this romantic guitar intro, and then hearing Smokey Robinson plea … it makes your heart melt! It’s like doo-wop crossing over to soul, like when doo-wop was kind of coming to an end and what went on to be Motown. I always end all my nights with this song.”

57

LIVE PHOTOS WINTER 2015

ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR DEBI DEL GRANDE Deap Vally November 2015 Basic Flowers

Ty Segall and the Muggers January 2016 Teragram Ballroom

MAXIMILIAN HO

DEBI DEL GRANDE

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

ELOHIM November 2015 The Echo

Steel Panther January 2016 The Fonda

MAXIMILIAN HO

Daniel Bambaata Marley December 2015 The Roxy

SCOTT SHEFF

58

MAXIMILIAN HO

Nick Lowe with Los Straitjackets December 2015 El Rey

LESLIE KALOHI

LIVE PHOTOS

Morgan Delt January 2016 Teragram Ballroom

Fishbone December 2015 The Roxy

SCOTT SHEFF

DEBI DEL GRANDE

Mini Mansions October 2015 Hollywood Forever

Kim and the Created December 2015 Bootleg Theater

CHAD ELDER

CHAD ELDER

Very Be Careful December 2015 Teragram Ballroom

Max and the Moon November 2015 Teragram Ballroom

SCOTT SHEFF

LIVE PHOTOS

LESLIE KALOHI

59

EUGENIA VITI

ADRIAN YOUNGE When people listen to one of his records, Adrian Younge wants it to sound like a mixtape from all the best music in his carefully curated collection. Recorded with an arsenal of rare instruments, Something About April II synthesizes psychedelic rock, funk, jazz, and the timeless soundtrack work of Ennio Morricone to create a truly special experience. April II features singers Loren Oden, Stereloab’s Laetitia Sadier, Bilal, Raphael Saadiq, and Israeli singer Karolina, among others, and is a true reflection of Younge’s spirit. This interview by Layne Weiss.

How has Ennio Morricone influenced the music you make?

I started producing music in 96. I was sampling records, and I started to realize that the music I was moved by the most was by the composers and musicians on the records I was sampling. I discovered French composers like Francis Lai and other European composers like Nico Fidenco and Ennio Morricone. I was like, ‘Yo, this music is so cinematic, but there’s serious hip-hop flavor in here somewhere.’ I dived in and became very captivated by the composition. These were white guys in their late 60s or early 70s creating soul music that was inspired by Black America. But these were classically trained individuals. I was enthralled by their synthesis of American soul, psychedelic soul, and classical music.

And the amalgamation of these genres created cemented in this old cinematic music between like 68 and 73. Morricone was one of the luminaries of that era, and I would study his music to try to learn how to compose music.

It was something I never got sick of. I would find other rare records and it would open my mind to something else. It still goes on to this day. I still love hearing his music.

How does European cinema itself fit into this album?

First of all, I love classic photography. So the cinematography—just to see what they were doing is beautiful. It’s in Europe. It’s gonna be beautiful. But one of the main reasons I watch those movies is literally for the music—a lot of that music is lost. A lot of those records are lost. A lot of that music never really came out 60

on vinyl. This is your only way to hear some of this music. It’s funny with these soundtracks: two songs are amazing, two or three other ones are really good just to listen to, and the rest I don’t even need to hear. A great soundtrack I can listen to all the way through is Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly or Isaac Hayes’ Shaft. But it’s hard to find an album you can listen to all the way through.

Definitely. Like from 2015, I really like Days With Dr. Yen Lo by Ka and Preservation. I can listen to that all the way through.

That’s very good to hear. My thing with a lot of modern music is it’s not like there’s not a lot of great music out there—it’s just that it’s not recorded that well. I’m so much into sound.

Everything I do is analog, and the reason why is because I love what they did with that before. Right now, a lot of people try to get that sound, but they cut a lot of corners. When I listen to music, my ears are so sensitive I hear all those corners being cut.

If Something About April II was a film, who would you want to direct?

I’m good friends with Rose McGowan, and she’s getting into directing now. I’d probably have her direct it. I love her mind, and I love her perspective. She’s a real artist. She’s dope.

What does ‘April’ represent?

Something about April is an album I came out with in 2011. And it’s about the relationship between an interracial couple in the 60s, and you’re listening to their trials and tribulations.

April represents spring, when things are new again. When you listen to the lyrics on the album, it’s always dealing with winter turning into spring. The last song on the first album is called ‘Something About April.’ The male vocalist, Loren Oden, represents winter, and the relationship is over. And Brooke deRosa represents spring and she’s saying it doesn’t have to be over. We can reclaim what we had. Part two is a continuation of that, but on another level. A lot of times when people are preparing for a sequel, they try and make a safer album so it can ‘cross over’ a little more. But I wanted to make a darker, more heavy album. Because humbly speaking, I hoped Something About April part 1 would have been a classic and it has been defined as a classic. I mean—just off the number of people that have sampled it, from Jay-Z to Common. I wanted part 2 to be just next level. I want it to be sampled and I want people to listen to it and be like, ‘Yo. This killed part 1.’ Every time I do a sequel, I want it to be better than the first. When people listen to Something About April albums, I want them to enter that world, and that world is my crate. It’ll have Ennio Morricone, but it will also have Curtis Mayfield, Wu-Tang, and the Delfonics. People think when they’re creating an album that it should have a unilateral feel, pertaining to one particular style. But my style is synthesizing multiple genres to make an album that is parallel to a lifestyle. My lifestyle is that I love old records, and there’s a lot of people like me. So when they hear one of my records, I want them to feel all that.

ADRIAN YOUNGE’S SOMETHING ABOUT APRIL II IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM LINEAR LABS. VISIT ADRIAN YOUNGE AT LINEARLABSMUSIC. COM.

Bobby Rush

Chicken Heads: A 50 Year History of Bobby Rush Omnivore That a comprehensive survey of this candidate for Last Chicago Bluesman had to wait this long is a matter best referred to the relevant committee at the Hague charged with indicting sonic criminals. This four-disc set is a study in the ease with which one artist strutted and blew and boogalooed through genres and with the times, staying relevant all the while without much audible effort. Besides the easy mastery of the idioms of Junior Wells and Little Milton, Rush’s 1960s soul 45s like “Sock Boo Ga Loo” and “Camel Walk” are almost Platonic in their pre-funkiness and “Done Got Good to Me, Pt. 1” sees him submerged in the swampy new genre. A masterpiece of gastroporn,“Chicken Heads” was one of the earliest funk hits, peaking at # 37 R&B, but the underbelly “Mary Jane” is even funkier and prefigures a lot of better-known records by the likes of Joe Tex and Johnny “Guitar” Watson. “Bowlegged Woman, Knock-kneed Man, Pt. 1” is some fine and loping smut, “I’m Still Waiting” an adroit quick change to Philly soul and “She Put the Whammy on Me” signaled a long slide across the nation’s dance floors. 1979’s “Hey Western Union Man” is a smokeengorged retro-soulful pass at Jerry Butler’s 1968 smash adorned with just enough guitar licks for radio tastes not calcified by funk. At this point, Rush moved out of Chicago to Jackson, MI, settled down on LeJam Records and became the prolific bedroom funketeer of Southern popular memory. He recycled familiar material again and again, quoting his own disco-era tropes into the Reagan Age and beyond much in the manner of James Brown, vamping himself as a Dolemite-like character coincidentally named “Bobby Rush,” cocksman extraordinary and grizzled sexual philosopher. Singles like “Let’s Do It Together,” “Bertha Jean” and “What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander” established Rush’s rep as king of the type of records one put on to cover passionate sounds after cutting the lights. Synth-based “Dr. Funk” is genius, “A Man Can Give It (But He Can’t Take It)” sees Rush

drifting almost back to the blues and 1991’s “I Ain’t Studdin’ You” a classic of what to tell so-called friends.

Adjust the mix slightly for evolving audience tastes and keep piling on the raunch, and you have the balance of both a venerable career and most of the second half of this set.

The bluesman in him finally took over completely with a Disc Four highlight being the stripped-down 2004 cover of Al Green’s deathless “Take Me to the River,” ample qualification for the eighty-year-old Rush’s post-B.B. elevation to King of the Blues. No pretender, this.

buck owens

Buck ‘Em Volume 2: The Music of Buck Owens (1967-1975) Omnivore Volume 1 covered Owens’ origins as early rocker, godfather of California country music and emerging national star prior to Buck and the Buckeroos stint on Hee-Haw, a longrunning, long-extinct C&W variety show described not without justice as an “outhouse Laugh-In.” You’d think getting the show would turn our boy into another Nashville conformist but once the pressure to write hits was off, the stuff recorded at his new studio in Bakersfield got more interesting and experimental, with Owens adding soundtrack pop, Mexican polka, bluegrass and even psychedelic rock influences to the patented lazy-eyed cheer.

Highlights include a famously shimmering and spooky take on Cousin Emmy’s “Ruby (Are You Mad),” the rowdy stomper “Corn Likker,” and the mournfully funny, Nixon-inspired “You Ain’t Gonna Have Ol’ Buck to Kick Around No More.” You still hear country aficionados talk smack about these records but the level of skill exhibited here is startling even by rockist standards and a superior acidhead fuzztone waltz the likes of “Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass” is country music only by accident anyway. “Streets of Bakersfield” is a revered California anthem and “(It’s a) Monster’s Holiday” another in the noble line of spook-show novelty records predating Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s rise from the slab. There’s a creditable live pass at “Johnny B. Goode” and the Buckaroos easily rise to the dignity of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” He parted with Capitol not long after losing Buckeroos guitarist and close friend Don Rich in a motorcycle wipeout, scarcely the first country boy to work his way out of a job. Like contemporaries Doug Sahm and Ray Charles, he maintained a characteristic sound only indifferently contained by genre limits.

The farther away we get from HeeHaw, the better ol’ Buck sounds.

breakneck drumming explorations on album opener “Loops” cushion a wandering melodica and highflying trumpet while Daedelus’s net of electronic magic is cast over the piece. Saxophone player and composer Ben Wendel’s academic interest in the idea of technological singularity—the melding of humans and technology into a single symbiotic entity—is poignantly articulated throughout the album, from the quiet corners of “Thought Not” and sincere melancholy of “Not Love” to the competitive ascent of “Drum Battle”. The two halves flourish as a whole, creating a refreshingly optimistic vision of humans and their increasingly ever-present technology.

—Christina Gubala

lip-smacking, succulent fruit that never seems to have a bottom.

“Standing In The Rain” announces that this a band that knows its way around a goddamn great pop tune. With a shimmering guitar lead reminiscent of Aztec Camera and Sonic Flower Groove-era Primal Scream, the song—despite its refrain of “standing in the rain where the sun don’t shine”—delivers a parting of the clouds. The record’s penultimate tune, “Til You Reach Your Last Breath” is the best of the batch: a sultry brunette of a song with just the right amount of psychedelic menace, but more importantly it’s uilt around the strongest lyric on the album. “Well my daddy once said to me / embrace this life with humility / don’t be conditioned by society.” I would urge Levitation Room to do just that: be less concerned with the burden of credibility, and embrace the much more romantic and rewarding act of emotional appeal.

—Kegan Pierce Simons

these songs deserve. The opening track “Janus” is beautifully composed, starting out quite gently with soft acoustic guitars as Kivel hits his signature delicate pitch; then slowly and quietly a violin and soft brush drumming build to a crescendo around the four minute mark, letting the song crack open before closing back up again.

Another great track immediately follows with the dream pop song “Violets,” the closest to some of Kivel’s earlier work but with a hint of Real Estate or Duck Tails. The bridge—with its soaring guitar riff—sells the song by itself. The rest of the album follows suit, with every song just as beautiful as the last. Some will introduce 70s folk elements; others get a little jazzy with improvised horns and piano key smashes—but it’s always a cohesive whole. Matt Kivel is really coming into his own here—this is an album that will please past fans and hopefully win new ones.

—Zachary Jensen

world of self-doubt and fragility. A theme of finding strength in turmoil interlaces all 6 tracks on the EP. This is none so apparent than on the EP’s title track “Strange Darling”—arguably the strongest on the album. Miya is still finding her sea legs in music but you could already put her comfortably along side contemporaries Sharon Van Etten and Jenn Grant. I very much look forward to seeing what 2016 holds for her.

—Ashley Jex Wagner

Scary Aquarius Daughter self-released

MOONCHILD Please Rewind Tru-Thoughts

LEVITATION ROOM Ethos Burger

When one is woozy, you look for an anchor in the sand or a leg to stand on. And when you’re trying to solve a puzzle, you look for patterns. Hieroglyphics emerging from the deep sea felt like a series of faint blips on the sonar.

Such is this writer’s experience with Highland Park outfit Levitation Room’s full length debut out on Burger Records. The record wobbles from surf instrumental interludes to acid test blowouts to shoegaze-y pop gems. When the band digs its Chelsea boots deep into the soft loam of influences like Brian Jonestown Massacre on swirling, mercury-heavy tracks like “Cosmic Flower” and “Loved,” they enact a ritual that appeals to every garage rock lovin’ dude out there but ultimately feels hollow.

VU-style leads and rhythmic but meaningless lyrics snarled from an upturned lip sound satisfying on first pass, but like a bag of Halloween candy, merely leave the listener with a stomach ache of covetous regret. But by the time side two rolls around, the band loses the shackles of trying to prove themselves and just gets down to the good stuff—the stuff that keeps the listener satiated, the bowl of ALBUM REVIEWS

MATT KIVEL

Janus Driftless Recordings Matt Kivel has been an unsung heroes of L.A.’s independent music scene for me for quite some time now. His ability to turn such delicate and simple sounds into heartwrenching songs is quite simply remarkable. His first two albums played with different variations of style, starting first with a soft and subtle acoustic collection on Double Exposure, working with minimalist sounds and highlighted his soaring voice. His follow up Days of Being Wild added in a lo-fi dream pop element and dronedout loops and effects to the mix, which gave his music much greater depth. His latest release Janus takes the best of what made his first two albums work so well and expands on it. First and foremost, the lo-fi elements have been dropped for a much cleaner and well-produced sound. While the crackle and hiss of lo-fi recordings may enhance the sound of some groups, having this crisper sound allows every note to come through in a way

MIYA FOLICK Strange Darling EP self-released

“Today I talked to so many strangers,” Miya Folick’s crystal clear voice echoes above a single melancholy guitar on the opening track of her debut EP Strange Darling. Within the first stanza you are enveloped by her infectious sense of frail confidence and by the end of the album the cathartic release is palpable. It is hard to believe the chanteuse only recently picked up a guitar and began writing songs. Born into a Buddhist household in Santa Ana; Miya tried her hand at theater and dance in New York before returning to Southern California and settling in Los Angeles. During a period of isolation and loneliness the words and music that would become her debut offering poured out. Her dark and brooding lyrics on “What I Have To” show a wise and complex young women yearning for self-discovery. On “I Got Drunk” a hopeful refrain breathes confidence into the piece while her words pull you deeper into a

SEND MEDICINE

You don’t have to look far to see that there are some amazing things going on with jazz and jazz-inspired music right now in Los Angeles, from the heavy hitters splashing onto the world stage and getting the recognition they deserve to cameos in some of the mainstream’s biggest albums. Needless to say, it’s an exciting time for jazz and Tru Thoughts is a label that’s right in the thick of it. Moonchild is a recent signing to the label and a great addition to the L.A. jazz scene. Combining elements of R&B, hip-hop and jazz, Moonchild makes chilled-out sounds that can easily blend with any of the aforementioned genres. The three-piece used horns, wind instruments and keyboards in their sound, switching up during songs to provide a breadth of variety. Opener “All the Joy” is an R&B-influenced track with a clean and simple beat and atmospheric sound that highlights Amber Navran’s silky smooth vocals. The first single “The Truth” highlights the group’s strengths, matching hip-hop-influenced rhythms and wailing trumpet solos to smooth vocals and spacey harmonies. Many of the other tracks are just as beautifully composed, with a personal favorite being “Nobody,” which has a Erykah Badu-meets-Norah Jones vibe that is really enjoyable.

—Zachary Jensen

Filled with acid-dream lyrics and melty guitars, the newest effort from Canadian transplants Send Medicine has something for everyone. Scary Aquarius Daughter is a heady mix of psych, blues, folk, and surf—a winning combination that’s an eight-track album in the truest sense of the word. Ranging from the bluesy “July Eyes” (which sounds like The Black Keys and Allah-Las had a Mellow Yellow baby) to the Cosmic American Music of “Baby’s Coast” (with its serious “No Expectations” slide guitar action) the album remains united

by Julian Hacquebard’s breathy, detached, go-with-the-flow vocal style. With his lackadaisical delivery of lyrics like “I take all my pills with a spoon / I leave on a boat too soon / away from all this gloom (“Once Twice”), it’s clear that Send Medicine is indeed medicinal, a feel-good hit of druggy nostalgia with a beach goth twist. One of the stand-outs, “Tall Flowers” is about as 60s as it gets without Nixon campaigning for office. It starts out sounding like Zeppelin’s “Bron-Yr-Aur” in reverse before becoming a psych-folk stunner complete with backwards Hendrix riffs and woozy harmonies. While the influences may be obvious and familiar, the songs still feel fresh, a testament to the group’s songwriting abilities. Paying homage to their new home in Southern California, “Way To The Sea” comes off as sage surfer-dude advice delivered over a very Dick Dale mix of surfy guitars and “Miserlou” trumpets, while “Fourth of July,” a nice little sidewinder of a song with a pretty great riff, sounds so much like a Growlers ditty that you half expect to hear Brooks Nielsen’s scratchy voice seeping in. For a laid-back listen filled with ear-worm guitar and poetically beguiling lines like “Walkin’ through the night in a Patsy Cline way,” give Send Medicine a try. It goes down easy.

—Madison Desler

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THE SHRINE Rare Breed Century Media

Whether playing in God’s band in heaven or reigning over a vat of boiling sinners from his throne in Hell, Lemmy Kilmister will be pleased to hear this third-ish new album by the Shrine, which proves his legacy of no-nonsense heavy metal is secure!

But in art, you have to kill your father. Here, the Shrine have not changed the formula: 70s style blistering guitar assault on songs you can’t wait to hear live, head-banging riffs that will make you want to carve a pentagram into our desk, and hooks as addictive as the drugs Josh Landau sings about his protagonists using. But they take things further than even Motorhead ever dreamed of—or even Shrine fans of a few years ago might have expected.

You can tell time was put into nailing every little lead lick and echo-y ending. This is no small feat—listen to studio albums by some of the great bands from the Invaders comp, ground zero for the old-school metal renaissance we’re still enjoying, and you won’t find the Shrine’s knack for capturing bigger without getting muddier. That may because the Shrine know their post-Black Flag punk as well as their metal, and hey lookie: one-upping their Chuck Dukowski association, they’ve now officially recorded a song with former Black Flag/Circle Jerk-er and OFF! frontman Keith Morris, who does his best Dead Moon impression on the track “Never More Than Now.” You need this album even more than you need a stint in rehab.

—D.M. Collins

Making great music isn’t easy. And they say playing slow is harder than playing fast. Given all that, is it possible that Sunn O)))’s sound has the highest degree of difficulty on the planet? Well...no. Of course not. But on Kannon, the revered downtempo drone-metal group­­—built around the core duo of Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley—showcase once again both their penchant for deep, dark doomsday noise and their unparalleled patience. Split into three numbered tracks, Kannon begins with a 13-minute riff-march that undulates like a slo-mo rollercoaster as longtime Sunn associate Attila Csihar colors in the space between with his quiet, blackened croak. In the middle passage, Anderson and O’Malley sound like metal scraping against metal at an excruciatingly slow pace as male voices chant in the ether. “Kannon 3” is prettier than its predecessors, but only for a few seconds before giving way to 10 minutes of ragged buzz and howls. Perhaps the album’s most impressive quality is the immaculate production of Randall Dunn, who captures Sunn O))) so perfectly, it’s almost as if you can hear the band’s colossal tones separate from one another as they pass through the speaker grille, then fade, one by one, into the dark. When all is said and done, you’re left with two ominous robed figures silhouetted against a monument of amplifier worship. This is Sunn O))). This is what they do, better than just about anyone.

—Ben Salmon

TOZCOS

“Existencia Aturdida” 7” Verdugo Discos

SUNN O))) Kannon Southern Lord 62

While Santa Ana’s Tozcos might easily draw comparison to L.A.’s Fumigados for several reasons, the simplest of which being both bands’ charismatic female lead vocalists, Tozcos easily sets themselves apart from their peers with an even darker, grittier hardcore punk sound. On Tozcos debut self-titled 7”, the band follows up a stellar demo tape with a sound that is tighter, heavier, and finally

captured fully with superior recording equipment and good mixing. In a little under seven minutes, the band takes listeners on a five song white-knuckle ride through the dimly lit back alleys and glass littered streets of Southern California. In such a short amount of time, the band manages to cover a range of topics, from the challenge of struggling with day-to-day anxieties to the disillusionment with a future that feels more and more filled with digital entertainment and plastic fraudulence rather than organic, human experiences. There is desperation in this material, but not hopelessness. Rather, the ferocity and intensity with which Tozcos attacks these songs conveys a sense of solidarity with people with similar feelings and conflicts as opposed to folks on the verge of giving up. Tozcos’ vinyl debut not only bears many earmarks of distinctively great Southern California hardcore, but establishes them as one of the best of the growing new wave of the genre.

—Simon Weedn

(“Clean It Glen”), burbling hiphop beats (“The Lurk”) and swirling synth-psych exercises (“Dancing Lips,” “Brazilian Worm Band”).

Occasionally—“Steer Clear,” for example—Presley lifts his veil and shows off the fuzzy pop chops that has made him one of this city’s vital artists over the past decade. But those are palate cleansers in this set. Ultimately, W-X is like a tour through Presley’s sketchbook; some of its doodles stand on their own, while others show promise and a few just wander. And that’s OK. A wander through Presley’s restless mind is a trip worth taking.

—Ben Salmon

Form Early Razorcake/Recess/Ruin Discos

self-titled Castle Face One of Tim Presley’s great qualities is his constant restlessness.

Even when the longtime L.A. singer-songwriter stops and focuses his attention on one project for a while—the smeared pop-rock of Darker My Love, the frazzled psych of White Fence—you get the feeling he’s constantly glancing around, looking for a trap door.

Over the past few years, his work as White Fence has evolved from warped experimentalism to more conventional forms, so it’s no surprise that Presley spent 2015 exploring new sounds, first with Cate Le Bon under the name Drinks, and more recently as W-X, a solo side project and/or alter-ego. Here, Presley invites us behind the curtain, and the reveal is delightful, if a bit disorienting. Across 20 tracks, Presley dabbles in rubbery, tightlipped funk (“Running from the Dogs”), cut-and-paste sound collage (“Copping in the Afternoon,” “Restless Leg”), noisy reverb-rock

Various Life is...

Mono Records

WHITE MURDER

W-X

way, and “Roosevelt” is pure ballsto-the-wall head-banging fun. Give this album a try if you need a kick in the ass or ten. It’ll do the trick in under 30 mins.

—Madison Desler

If you’re looking for some combative kick-ass punk to add a jolt to your daily grind, check out White Murder. Their new album Form Early is filled with explosive Roman candle tracks clocking in at less than two minutes. Self-described salt-piss-and-vinegar songs like “Ursula” and “Middle Class” have all the grit of the dirtiest postpunk while the raging “Feminist Rag” is the perfect riot hrrl track for a female-led band. The bratty chanting of the lyrics “We don’t forgive you!” becomes a rallying cry that Bikini Kill would be proud of. “Backbone” is a doozy of a breakup song—a kiss-off complete with cops being called, in true Sid and Nancy fashion—and there’s definitely no love lost on “Place Your Bets,” where vocalists Hannah Blumenfeld and Mary Animal deliver the fantastically pessimistic lines “Jenny says she could never be alone again / and it makes me sick / She thinks that her love is like an island / but it’s a bottomless pit.”

Form Early is heavy without getting bogged down in the drudge.

The excellent “Intoxicating Effects of Resentment” skids in at barely one minute, leaving you wanting so much more in the best possible

Echo Park’s Mono Records was an early supporter of the Echo Park bands who don’t fit so easily into that kind of garage/psych/ fuzz-and-fun punk-as-pop sound; instead, Mono’s select releases tend to celebrate the esoteric, and here’s the definitive statement so far: a compilation of L.A. bands heavily inspired by U.K. sounds during that bottomlessly special postpunk moment where the spirit of ‘anything goes’ met the ability to make everything sound good.

Shoegaze, C86, labels like Glass and Fire and Rough Trade—this is what Life Is … or at least where it starts.

Some tracks here are previously released—two from Froth’s excellent Bleak LP, a-side of Tracy Bryant’s “Little Things” single also on Mono—but necessary anyway, especially if you didn’t get a limited original. But some apparently exist nowhere else, like the churning “Fear” by Jeff Fribourg (ex-Froth, now in Mind Meld) and his band Numb.er and also his Omnichord, or the Nikki Sudden-Go-Betweens stand-out bum-outs from Beat Hotel, or Billy Changer’s pixilated John Carpenter-style mostly instrumental “Ride,” a close cousin to his recent LP track “Chiller.”

Noah Kwid (once of Dirt Dress) also makes solo vinyl debut here as Kwid, an understated Fast Product-style drum-machine postpunk song called (naturally) “I Find Myself,” and Mother Merry Go Round delivers two striking songs that split the difference between Orange Juice and Joy Division. Altogether, it’s not just a powerfully consistent vision but a nice counterpoint to what the outside world thinks it is people do here: seven bands a little out of step and a little out of time, except for with each other.

—Chris Ziegler ALBUM REVIEWS

DAVE VAN PATTEN

SPENCER HICKS

COMICS

Curated by Tom Child BRIAN BROOKS

JOHN TOTTENHAM

COMICS

CHAMPOYHATE @champoychampoy

LILA ASH

65

IT ALL DIES ANYWAY

L.A., JABBERJAW, AND THE END OF AN ERA Bryan Ray Turcotte and Michelle Carr interviews by Chris Ziegler Gary Dent interview by Kristina Benson Artwork courtesy Bryan Ray Turcotte

Way back in the 90s, there was an a coffeehouse-turned-all-ages-venue in a storefront off Pico Boulevard where you could pay five bucks and see bands like Nirvana and Hole and Green Day and Helmet and hang out with freaks from L.A. and Orange County ... and maybe once in awhile someone like Sofia Coppola or Iggy Pop or Drew Barrymore might pop in, too. Jabberjaw was part of a pre-Internet tour circuit that looped through places like Koo’s Cafe, the Huntington Beach Library, the then-just-about-to-open Smell, Wilmington’s PCH Club and more, but it was a special kind of institution on its own, too—a high-water mark for L.A. weirdo culture in what was largely supposed by the outside world to be a cultural wasteland. It closed (after a very dramatic final night) twenty years ago, but it’s never been forgotten. Bryan Ray Turcotte, well-known punk documentarian, set about chronicling the world of Jabberjaw in It All Dies Anyway, currently available from Rizzoli Press. We interviewed Turcotte and Jabberjaw co-founders Gary Dent and Michelle Carr about how it all died anyway and what lives on nonetheless.

BRYAN RAY TURCOTTE

GARY DENT

MICHELLE CARR

How would you explain Jabberjaw to an all-ages showgoer now? Someone who’s used to the Smell, Non Plus Ultra …

When I got to L.A., it was the Scream Club, English Acid, the Pik-Me-Up coffee shop … that was all late 80s. I remember feeling like, ‘Man, the Sunset Strip is so bogus.’ But then I discovered that other stuff, and it definitely changed my trajectory in life. That definitely was the building blocks Jabberjaw was based on. It was true DIY—run by kids, attended by kids, a culmination of all that was going on at the time into one place. And it laid the groundwork for what was to come. I can’t really compare it to anything right now. I think it’s been assimilated into the culture that it’s OK to do these things. ‘Oh, we’re having a show.’ When we were kids, having a punk show at the Scottish Rite was 100% dangerous. You had to lie to get in to book it, hope the venue guy had a few drinks and didn’t care or wouldn’t show—and if he did show and see Mohawks, you’d immediately be shut down. Jabberjaw was a half-step evolved from that. You weren’t afraid your parents were gonna come shut the party down. You felt anything could happen—the cops could storm the place, a riot, get mugged outsude … It felt dangerous in that you felt like you were doing something you had to do but didn’t have permission.

What was a show you saw that could only have happened at Jabberjaw? Something that characterizes the place and time for you?

Low—there were a few more than four people, but it wasn’t full. They played extra quiet. It felt like sitting around a campfire. You couldn’t talk or you’d feel like a jerk. That one I was like, ‘My friends who missed this are dummies.’ And Walt Mink—they were on fire and did everything right, like they were playing in an arena, and there were like 40 people there. Nirvana was definitely attended and people were there cuz they had hype, but it felt like an average well-attended show. I’d seen that many people at Helmet or Rocket From The Crypt. I went outside and smoked under the tree cuz it was too hot inside. I didn’t feel like I was missing anything—‘I know this band, I love this band, I’ll see ‘em again.’ Low and Walt Mink, I never saw again.

What’s the value of those low-attendance shows? What part do they play?

Jabberjaw had a pretty sweet decor. Are you the one who found all those Margaret Keanes?

That is my collection! They’re all reproduction prints, but they’re definitely Keanes. The funny thing is that at the time, when it was still supposedly Walter [Keane]’s [original artwork], he contacted me and said that I had the biggest Keane collection on the West Coast, and he actually came to Jabberjaw to see them all and then signed a bunch of them for me. It was pretty great to get a phone call saying, ‘This is Walter Keane.’ They were always a scavenger hunt to find. There was no eBay. It was all thrift stores and digging, so it made it a little more exciting when you found one.

What was it about L.A. that was missing that allowed Jabberjaw to exist?

Community. It wasn’t just about the music. It had all these pieces that had to go together: somewhere great, somewhere for the kids, somewhere non-pretentious.

It was definitely a bunch of elements put together that made it happen.

Is it true that you wouldn’t let people in if they weren’t cool? When I was a kid, I wanted to go but someone told me I wouldn’t be cool enough and they’d never let me in.

And so I never went. Was she right?

Absolutely not! You were cool if you were the nerdy kid, you were cool if you were the hipster kid, you were cool— everyone there was cool because they were individuals and doing their own thing and there was no judging. It was such an eclectic group that people became friends who in reality maybe shouldn’t have become friends because it had that kind of vibe to it. So they were absolutely dead wrong—it was the land of mismatched people.

Looking back on it, I’m like, ‘Why the fuck did I listen to her? I should have just gone.’ But I was like sixteen and the people saying that to me were like twenty.

It’s a very intimidating thing to hear. But we wanted the allages thing because the sixteen year olds become twenty-one year olds and you want them to become fans early.

From the perspective of a business owner, this sounds like a nightmare—a bunch of underaged kids seeing shows in a dangeroys neighborhood. I’m picturing a target that says SUE ME. Did that cross your minds at all back then?

There’s that adorable story of a young Jimi Hey smoking crack for the first time and losing his crack virginities.

What other virginities were lost at Jabberjaw?

It was a real coming-of-age place. [laughs] Lots of new experiences were made there—virginities were lost via drugs and sex and rock and roll—all of the above.

Like initiation rites?

And it was! People did get hazed too—it was a brutal crowd, you know what I mean? There was a real battle of the wits.

It was all in good fun, but it was definitely punk rock. Like I said, Gary and I were 20 when we opened it, and then once the bands started playing, we were 22 or 23. And then kids that were still in high school started coming. So when you’re in your early 20s, you still kind of have a high school kid mentality—it was this schoolyard sizing everyone up.

It was all innocent. Again—coming-of-age. You had to be smart and funny and kind of sharp-tongued and just take it, you know? I’ve heard lots of stories about when people were very intimidated by the door people, which was any one of us, you know? [laughs] But once you became a regular, it became very inclusive. There was just this healthy balance.

It definitely wasn’t a hippie ‘sunshine and rainbows’ kind of thing. It was a bunch of weird, twisted art freaks. You know how that goes.

What made you start Jabberjaw in the first place? Instead of just hanging out at some existing coffee shop?

I was always inspired by those artists that came before us, you know, twenty or thirty years previously. Nothing super obscure or ultra-cool—pretty much the usual suspects, like the whole Andy Warhol scene. The Factory. And John Waters—he had his people and everyone was being creative and weird. There was no class distinction. It was just exciting and fun, and that was that. Through some introspection, I’ve learned I’m somewhat of an introvert—one of those introverts that seems really extroverted. Having my own place—having people kind of come in to my home—I felt comfortable. Going to another venue and trying to put myself out there felt scary and impossible. ‘It’s just so much easier if I just make a clubhouse, and people come to my clubhouse.’ [laughs] Like you throw the parties so then you have a reason to be there, instead of going to other parties and feeling like you should leave.

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BRYAN RAY TURCOTTE FROM P. 67

What made the place special for me—I can’t say the same for anybody—was the core group that liked off-center stuff. The real specialness of some of those bands … they’d only play for those people and it’d never translate anywhere else, and for that reason it felt like a private little scene that catered to a handful of people—but so loyally that it worked. Part of the reason I give so much real estate to the Imperial Butt Wizards … in my opinion, you can’t talk about Jabberjaw without talking about them. Those kind of bands are what made the place have the integrity to have a scene. Like CBGB’s is to the Ramones and Television as this place was to the Butt Wizards and Pedro, Muriel and Esther. Some bands never grew beyond that and shouldn’t have grown beyond that. It wasn’t money that was success. It was supporting friends and creating something on their own that was made for them.

There were times I felt like not part of that—like ‘This is the Jabberjaw family, and it’s a small family.’ There were nights I probably wouldn’t have got in cuz it was packed and there was not enough room. That was what made it special.

The best thing I hope for with a book like this is that it doesn’t inspire nostalgia—it inspires progression.

Something like ‘This was done before, and can be done again, and maybe you can even build on it instead of having to make the same mistakes!’

That’s always my hope. You read history and realize things happen in 60 and 80 year cycles where everyone forgets the mistakes. Now everyone is forgetting the mistakes of World War 2. The goal in an art way or music way or design way is to try and represent a scene as good as is possible to influence people to say, ‘I can do something like that!’ The same way I read books on dada like, ‘Wow, they did this with scissors and glue!’ Is this book all the little nuances? Does it explain everything like an encyclopedia? Hell no—that’d be lame. No one needs to be told. They just need to experience what it felt like. Seeing flyers with the bands, and some bands turn out to be Beck—or not even a flyer with Beck, that’s what’s important. To say, ‘This did come from somewhere.’ This little nightclub in the middle of nowhere that cost $5 to get in and if you were friends, it was free. No magic. I get frustrated when I come across bands just trying to get signed. I don’t think anyone in that club ever imagined that goal! They were stoked to get on stage and perform and their friends would say ‘Good job!’ even if they sucked. That’s what I try and pass on.

‘This can be done, so don’t dare ask for permission.’ Just go!

The majority of Jabberjaw was a calling more than a purpose.

People who went there felt like it was home.

A few people in the book say Jabberjaw was part of one of the last great pre-Internet subcultures. What do you think?

And what does that mean to you?

If you grew up then and experienced the birth of the net, you have a certain sense of loss in regards to like … the net provides you answers more quickly. Versus listening to a record you like and trying to emulate it and realizing you can’t, and discovering you can become something else. In that period in the 90s, no one had computers or cell phones. You had to get in the car, go to the thrift, get the clothes and either look like a spazz or look cool and somehow influence people … that all fed each other. There was a contest of who could find the coolest shit—of not being afraid to just try stuff out. I know parties there where everyone was dressed in ballgowns. I look at everyone now and everyone’s in ‘the business’—everyone’s creative, everyone’s in entertainment. In the 90s it was a very small population. Everyone congregated on Melrose—five stores where every single freak worked. If the biggest weirdo band played Scream Club, there’d be a hundred people— every single freak in town.

Now there’s a ton of freaks. Peak freak.

And the barometer is toned down a bit: ‘I’m a nerd who works at Facebook, and I’m also into King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.’ The weird was weirder. Now it’s a lesser divide.

There’s a certain thing I love when I see a skater with long hair 68

and a Pushead shirt listening to Odd Future—that’s awesome.

No compartmentalization. I look at pictures of myself at 14 and think, ‘I used to get beat up for looking like that?’ Vans and pegged jeans and a punk bracelet and short hair. But if everyone has feathered hair you look different. In the 90s if you were pierced or tattooed or wore hand-altered clothes or combat boots, it was like, ‘What are you? Some kind of hobo?’

Now I see businesswomen fully tatted. We never expected the complete dissolution of the suit, the uniform. Now it doesn’t matter.

This book felt very ‘90s’ to me—but I’m not sure specifically why. What about Jabberjaw was attached to that time?

I really toiled over this—it took a while to come up with what this book needed. But once I sat down and spread the artwork all over, I realized … you had old-school cut-and-paste Kinko’s Xerox flyers. You had the very begnning of computergenerated really pixilated flyers, which was interesting. Punk in a way—fucked-up pixel images that looked terrible but I thought they were important. The big thing for me was that this was the generation—which was only in the 90s—of these color silkscreen posters for one gig. That whole business!

Created to make flyers to help promote the show but also as merch to be sold and art to be sold to young kids who weren’t buying art—a framed Kozik poster to put on their wall to rep their scene. If you were a DIY band or club owner, to have those things was a badge of honor. So once I started to look at the medium of the way everything was promoted, it made sense. It was more colorful, dirtier and more crude but at the same time big and beautiful … then the icing was to wrap the whole book in a Coop poster. I wanted people to see the edges of the book on the shelf and feel the neon color and the black inks and texture and know this doesn’t exist anymore.

Artists today won’t do it. It’s too expensive to even make.

But at the time, hundreds of them were being made. It was commonplace and as cool as it gets. If you were lucky enough to get your band on a poster, you knew on some level you’d made it. The art encapsulates the scene itself and represents some weird hieroglyphic insight into what happened.

Jabberjaw was definitely a punk aesthetic and classic Xerox, but also a slightly more intellectual aesthetic ... and as high as it gets in terms of art in these big Coop poster flyers. That to me was the pinnacle of DIY—from punk into what we see now today. This bridge connected everything. I couldn’t do a book of this caliber if I had to rely on Internet source material. There is no net material in this book—all print, nothing digital. And I don’t know if I could do anything after that—after 1999, it doesn’t exist.

What worked best about Jabberjaw? What’s something captured in this book that you want to live on?

Even with Fucked Up And Photocopied, the music is too big—it’s so ever-changing. But the scene—and I say it loosely, whatever your scene is—is what I hope to preserve. I hope this book will influence a wide variety of people. When I was in high school picking up guitar to play in a punk band, there was no difference between punks in the scene—whether in the band, making flyers, taking photos, promoting shows.

Look how this scene was built. People started clubs, ran sound, painted buildings … if no one takes pictures, you will have no pictures. If no one does posters, you will have no posters. And if there’s no one like me, there will be no book at the end. There are many levels of additional input into the scene. You don’t have to be a fucking rock star. Just be a part. People who took snapshots, people wrote stories, people did little magazines and wrote reviews, indie labels put out singles, indie promoters were willing to put bands in those venues … thousands of different personalities made it thrive.

It’s not always about the band. Often the art and the artifacts left behind feel more like the scene than the music—it feels like it felt—the illustrations and photos and design and blood and sweat, more than the music could. Music is just one part.

That’s why Jabberjaw was special. It represented a scene more than any band at all. That’s what I get from punk and 90s rock and that’s what I hope to pass on. Don’t forget what brought use here. And don’t just listen to the records.

GARY DENT FROM P. 67

I hate to say that it never did … cuz we were just young and dumb too! At this point of course, would it? Yes. Back then, the neighborhood was a part of it. Was it a terrible idea, putting little kids in danger every night? Absolutely.

Probably not the greatest business plan and stuff but we never set out to be a ‘business.’ We also got away with—and this is such a ridiculous thing, and I don’t know how we got away with it as long as we did—but we got away with the thing where if you’re holding a private party and you weren’t open to the public, they couldn’t do anything to you cause you weren’t a public event. We came up with an invitation every night, and we’d stamp it with that night’s date, and the money at the door was for donation. So if the police ever came we’d just say, ‘We’re a private party—we don’t come under all of those laws.’ It worked for a very long time.

What made it not work? Did something happen?

It just got to that point: ‘You’re not going to get away with that anymore!’ I don’t think anyone can anymore. When we closed Jabberjaw, we were going to move to a different venue but when we started to find venues, you’d have to get checked out with the fire marshall and the police and the permits … and every time we would go, it would always be the same permit people and the same fire marshals. As soon as they saw us, they’d be like, ‘Absolutely not—we will never give you a permit.’

This reminds me of what Koo’s Cafe went through.

They’d be like, ‘Someone was nodding their head to the music. That’s basically the same as dancing and you don’t have the correct license for that.’ And he’d get shut down.

That’s absolutely what it got to be like. There was a councilman in the area who was trying to shut us down cuz of kids getting robbed, and his plan to shut Jabberjaw down would stop 200 kids a night from going to a bad neighborhood—so then on paper, the robbery and the muggings would stop, and he’d look like he cleaned up the area when all he did was shut down a good business.

And basically, he won. Towards the end of Jabberjaw every night, when we would get there, there’d be four parking enforcement cars and two fire trucks waiting for me before I opened the door. They really put the hammer on us.

They’d stand there with a clicker at the door, and stop us long before I would have ever stopped us, people-wise. They really made sure that we were going to be done.

Did undercover cops ever show up?

There were a few nights when we would be in full swing and then all of a sudden … they’d have been there all night and then they’d pull out badges.

So after they got to see the show, they’d pull out the badge?

Yeah! It would be pretty intimidating. There were a few times they’d say, ‘Everybody leave!’ and I’d leave with the masses. I’d just walk out: ‘I’m just a patron.’ But the paper trail would come later and I’d get fined.

You originally made friends with the local cops and the local drug dealers and gang members, right?

I had a door guy and he was a Blood—his name was Eric.

I’d pay him off to keep us away from messing with us. He was a big part of keeping a lot of problems for us down to a minimum. We had talked about it, and we paid off people in the neighborhood, and I paid other people to clean up at night. There was a homeless guy called Spider, and he’d come clean up the place at night. And he knew all the gangsters in the neighborhood and he would tell them to lay off and some would and some wouldn’t. But it helped us a lot.

How did you know if someone was legit connected to one of these gangs and helping to keep you safe?

You know what? They could have been the ones telling the next guy to rob us—absolutely nothing to prove that they weren’t part of the whole thing. It was something we just BOOKS

took a chance on, and it was good to have [Eric] out front to stand guard. People seemed to see him and be cool with him and keep on walking. The cop that became a friend of ours, he’d come and do his report in front at the end of the night, which was fantastic. He’d come to the club and park out front and do his paperwork and be a presence for a couple hours every night, and that helped out a lot. He was the one who told us never to call 911—he said, ‘If you have a problem call me.’ Once someone had gotten mugged and they called 911, and they had the guy booked and handcuffed and up against the fence. And he came up to the other cops and said, ‘Let me take this.’ And the other cops were like ‘We’re cool, we got this—it’s already all finished.’

‘I’m going to take this over.’ And he took him in his car and I swear to God we never saw that guy again—it was really weird. Not paying him, not on the take! I think he was one of the Rampart cops. I don’t know why he took us under his wing—he kind of looked out for us. I think more than he should have.

Something Sean Carlson of FYF Fest talked about with me was how smartphones really changed the dynamics of shows. People used to take all their clothes off at shows, for example, and now they don’t because they know a photo could end up on Facebook or Snapchat or whatever.

Compared to now, Jabberjaw is very underdocumented.

Do you think something was lost there, historically? Or would something more important be lost if it had been overexposed?

I think we did a good job of documenting as we did. It’s pretty well documented. But I wouldn’t want everything to be captured. Some of that stuff should be left to living it and experiencing it and not capturing it. Sometimes memories are better than pictures. You can own that yourself—you can have that in your head how that experience went down and remember it how you want to remember it. I guess I’m not such a big fan of all of that technology. I would like to think Jabberjaw could happen again and I’d like to think that there are other small venues out there, but—and I feel so old and out of the loop—I can’t imagine it happening that way again. There are too many restrictions on everything.

Hopefully I’m wrong, but with so many restrictions it would steal some of the magic of what that stuff was. It was so new and exciting then. But maybe I’m dating myself—I hope there are kids out there touring around on vans and sleeping on floors and playing to six people a night. There’s something so special about seeing a band that no one knows and there’s a show and six people come, and then the next year they come again and there’s thirty people, and then two years later it’s sold out, and then the next year they’re going to the Whisky and the Roxy size … then the Palace size. It’s really special to watch that grow from nothing. Jabberjaw did a lot with those bands. They got to go from nothing to semi-stardom—or super stardom—and I think that for me, that’s the old school way to do it. You gotta get four guys in a van with a box of t-shirts and sleep on floors and pay your dues and I hope that’s still happening.

Sofia Coppola, Drew Barrymore, Crispin Glover, Nirvana, Hole … Some of the coolest people and biggest celebrities of the day came to Jabberjaw to watch or to perform. Were there any times when you were personally star struck?

Iggy Pop was the biggest for me. He came to see Nirvana and I was working the door and we were sold out and it was absolutely ridiculous and all of a sudden this guy leans up to me and says, ‘Hey, my name is Iggy Pop—think I could get in?’ And I looked up and I was like ‘Oh, my God—it really is him!’ Someone said later that he’d brought an entourage with him but it turns out that none of them were with him and he just said they were so he could get them all in. I’m a fan of a scam like that—Iggy Pop smuggling in kids! I think it’s fantastic. He ended up watching the show from behind the counter and over by the phone he wrote, ‘I’m here and I’m stoned—Iggy Pop.’ I regret that when we closed down I didn’t cut that piece of wall out. I wish I did!

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MICHELLE CARR FROM P. 67

Exactly! I have a purpose, you know?

How legal was Jabberjaw at its most legal?

We really did our due-diligence for a couple of, you know, 20-year-olds. [laughs] We went and visited the Small Business Administration, where these old retired businessmen would give you advice. We knew all the rules and regulations. However, we just couldn’t afford to comply, and we knew it would have been a lot of really expensive build out. So what we did was … we half-assed it. We were like, ‘We can afford EXIT signs!’ We did everything possible so if the health department or the fire marshal did a quick spot check, we would pass! Or they would just move along. Once bands started playing, we were like, ‘Hmm, I think two hundred people fit—once we clear the furniture out, that looks about right.’ We also had a business license. We took it as far as we possibly could, and we were able to get away with that for eight years. The thing is we had to know what the rules were to fudge it and skirt around them. If we just completely ignored it, we’d have been shut down so fast, even back then.

So many of the line-ups at Jabberjaw seemed based on just whatever you and Gary liked—not like ‘Well, we’ve run the numbers and this is what’s profitable right now among 18-25 year olds.’

It was sometimes it was the weirdest combos. On paper at first, you’d look at it and be like, ‘Doo-Rag and Helmet?’

Somehow it just worked. No matter what the genre, it was all like-minded folks. As far as money, we were just concerned with staying open. I had to work a full-time job while I was doing Jabberjaw to support myself. The entire time. We did not make any personal money off of it—it all went back into the club. We tried to keep the club afloat with, you know, our concession stand. And whatever money was made at the door for the band, the bulk of it—a seventy-thirty split, I don’t remember exactly—would be split among the bands and we would keep thirty.

Bryan and I talked about how Jabberjaw was part of one of the last big pre-Internet subcultures. What do you think? And what does that mean to you?

For sure. Everything was word of mouth. You’d have to go visit your local record store and check out the flyer rack, you’d have to actually talk to people in the record stores or vintage shops or wherever else kooks congregate. It was very more face-to-face and it felt good. It makes me think of the raves of the 90s when you’d have to get some weird cryptic flyer that would say to go to a gas station where you’d get another flyer and it would send you to another place. It was like a scavenger hunt before you actually found out where the secret venue was. So it was all very hands-on—you had to be present. You got to meet people that way. Now when you go to shows, people are on their phones—there’s so many ways that it brings people together, but I feel at the same time there’s this strange isolation. That’s kind of a shame because you have to immerse yourself in it before you can really decide. A lot of people went to Jabberjaw not even knowing who the bands are. They would just go to hang out and see what’s going on and like, ‘Wow! If I hadn’t showed up, I never would have known about this band!’

What happened when Jabberjaw shut down? Was that planned? Forced?

It really was unplanned. The atmosphere got very dangerous, and that area and the socioeconomic climate is pretty desperate around in the 90s. I felt like something really horrible was going to happen: ‘You know what, we’ve got to shut this ship down and we’ve got to open up legally.’ At that time, I felt confident because I’d been in a couple of car wreck— unfortunately—and I got some insurance money. But once we got into the real legal aspect of being above board, it was so expensive. We couldn’t do it.

The last two shows were the Make-Up—did you know it was going to be the last show?

Kind of right before those two shows. ‘If we’re going to go out, we’re going to go out with a bang.’ [laughs] They were fucking amazing shows, except at the end of the last show … that’s when word started spreading around in the club that it was our last night. People were like, ‘No!’ There were, like, near-riots. This one kind of neighborhood guy that we hired to watch the street for us—almost kind of like a quasisecurity guard, except he was just this dude that’d been in and out of jail, but he really liked us and he was on our side— someone came by and started shooting at him! So there was this big shoot-out, we had to lock the doors, people outside were running to their cars, a bunch of us were locked inside … I had to call the cops, helicopters came … I was like, ‘See? We’ve gotta get the fuck out of here!’ [laughs] I forgot to mention, earlier that night, three fire trucks showed up and they tried to shut the show down, and I went out there and begged them: ‘Please, we just have a half an hour more to go—just let them play. We’re closing, we’re done!’ The fire truck stayed out there until the end of the show. It wasn’t until after the fire trucks left and everything was over, and I was like, ‘Oh, boo hoo, last night!’ and getting souvenirs and stuff … then it was ‘BANG BANG BANG BANG!’ All hell broke loose. It’s like, in a movie. Even describing it to you, I feel like I’m making it up, but it’s the absolute truth.

If you were doing a Jabberjaw-type venue now, what would be different?

In terms of the legality, it is next to impossible to run an illegal underground club in Los Angeles today. The political climate is different. Los Angeles is very hardcore about ‘the safety.’

A lot of people are worried about getting sued. We didn’t think about getting sued—liability didn’t enter our minds.

We were concerned for people’s safety, but we never thought that, ‘Oh my God, our lives are going to be ruined!’ There were some scary moments, but I think everyone went in at their own risk and knew what they were getting themselves into. The thought never enterted their minds to sue us or cause problems because no one wanted it to end. There was no place like it. In L.A., rents are a lot more expensive now. Back then I lived in Silver Lake, and I felt like I could move around from apartment to apartment for whatever reason, and I didn’t really have to worry about my credit being checked or the rent. The rent was affordable for my dumb job that I had and Jabberjaw, and it just seemed like financially, it was a lot more of a free kind of place. Whereas now—especially after 2008—it made things very scary and feel seemingly impossible, you know? So anyone that’s pulling it off now, kudos to you cuz it is a way different place.

Everything is much more expensive and much harder to do.

And especially now more and more people are flooding Los Angeles. In the 90s, we had the terrible—the incorrect and terrible—reputation that this was a cultural wasteland when it was not. It was like our secret little Nirvana or Shangri-La: ‘How come people think L.A. sucks? It’s really fucking great!’

And now I’m like, ‘Get the fuck out! You’re crushing me!’

There’s surgical gentrification now. There’s foreign developers coming in, and it’s just a big land-grab, and they will get us the fuck out cuz we’re in the way. I’m not leaving—I’m just going to white-knuckle it here trying to continue doing what I’m doing cuz this is my hometown! I have nowhere to go.

There’s a lot about the celebrity visits to Jabberjaw. But what were the empty nights like? Without any bands at all?

We’d be there when bands weren’t playing, too, so there were plenty of those nights where it was just people hanging out.

Then it became the place that I really originally intended, where people would go and meet their friends and then go to a show and then come back, or see who’s hanging around. It was a little community hub. That’s kind of how it was. There were so many special nights like that where we’d finally get to have a chat with this kid that we would see come to the shows all the time, but he’d be all by himself and quiet, and then we’d finally get a chance to get to know them. And that was really magical, and they became our friend. Those moments were some of my favorites, you know?

69

PEEP SHOW Interview by Kristina Benson Illustration by Luke McGarry

Peep Show was the show that went where no other show dared, and that’s not just to the very limits of human decency, of course, as proven in some of the most profoundly unsettling sex scenes ever filmed. Instead, Peep Show crawled deep inside the human mind, with a love-it-or-leave-it point-of-view filming style that had the audience quite literally looking out of the eyes of oddcouple protagonists Mark Corrigan and Jeremy Usborne—and more importantly, hearing their every unfiltered thought loud and clear. The result was Seinfeld via Sartre courtesy two characters ever more embroiled in a shared hell of their own making, but delivered with such painfully fastidious detail that it somehow makes awful perfect sense that a casual pick-up attempt on a stranger could climax with cooking and eating a pet dog. After nine seasons, Peep Show has just ended—exactly as it should have—and Mark (David Mitchell) and Jez (Robert Webb) can now be safely enshrined in sitcom Valhalla, where most likely they’ll pick up just where they left off. We joined co-creator Sam Bain as he was in the middle of writing what would be the final series to discuss how far is too far, which of the two main characters have committed the most felonies, and why all good things—or all things, really—have to come to an end.

Peep Show is probably my favorite show ever. It’s consistent. I love Seinfeld, for example, but there were definitely peaks and valleys.

But Peep Show is consistently hilarious.

Sam Bain (co-creator): Wow. That’s extremely high praise which I’m going to take at face value and pretend you’re not bullshitting.

When you guys were setting out to create this show, was it like ... a planned attack?

‘TV these days is garbage. We’re going to do something totally different in hopes of making something totally amazing.’

In a way that the show is a mixture of very old-fashioned stuff and new stuff. The old-fashioned part is that it’s like an Odd Couple sitcom. There are lots of examples of shows like that in Britain and in the U.S., where two friends are sharing a flat.

And we feel very comfortable writing a traditional sitcom [like that], but at the same time the point of view and voiceover makes it quite different. We had a few scripts that Peep Show came from—flatshare scripts that we’d written previously, and it was hard to sell that because it wasn’t very fresh. The POV technique gives it an element of freshness. And we’d learned from a couple of British shows that were on at the 70

time—and before we wrote it—like Spaced, and the Raw family which are both sort of different, and it inspired us to think differently about how you would shoot the show. So that helped.

We started brainstorming about all the crimes these guys have committed and in less than five minutes we’d come up with a really long list. Like ... [Mark’s love interest] Sophie’s cousin was underage, which would make [their charismatically criminal pal] Super Hans guilty of paedophilia, and that time he put the snake in the salad spinner is probably animal abuse. Then Jez would have a jury tampering charge and probably some charges surrounding his visa marriage.

When he tried to sell [girlfriend] Big Suze to Mark’s boss Johnson for 500 quid, that could be considered sex trafficking. Then there’s the time he locked Mark in his room and almost forced him to shit in a bag. And Mark would be guilty of child endangerment, maybe, for leaving his baby on the floor during that New Year’s Eve party, and then there’s driving without a license and some kind of hacking charge for guessing Sophie’s passwords and reading her email. It goes on and on.

“They’re both terrible people! They do terrible things!

But because you know why they’re doing them, hopefully you never really hate them.”

That’s a good list. I’d like to get a copy of that. I’d love to know if they are felonies or misdemeanors in America.

In the U.S., some of them are felonies.

Good. I’d love to frame that above my desk. I think probably Jeremy has done more crimes.

I think jury tampering is a good one. They’re both terrible people! They do terrible things!

But because you know why they’re doing them, hopefully you never really hate them.

We try to make them pathetic even when they’re eating dogs and abusing teenage boys and taking drugs, and I think that’s the fun of it. You see why they’re doing it—why they feel they have to do it. That makes it more fun and less grim.

The voice-over allows the outward presentation of the characters to feel very real—very normal—while crazy or unrealistic thoughts are spinning around in their heads. The outrageousness comes not from their actions but instead from their inner monologue. I mean ... I would hope no one would ever eat a dog to hide the fact that they had accidentally run it over.

But because we understand the characters’ rationale for their actions, that moment still felt like something that could really happen. Was that the plan with the POV angle? Or was that a happy accident?

The design of the show was two ordinary guys who seem very normal, but inside is this broiling mass of emotions and unspeakable things that you’d never say. But in terms of eating dog and stuff like that ... we do go to outrageous lengths on the show, but because of the way it’s shot—because it’s shot in this relatively realistic style—you can get away with stuff that would seem broad and unrealistic on a different show. But the POV happily— by accident and not by design—makes it feel more real.

If we were really there, would we be seeing the same thing depicted on the show?

Or is this story told from their warped perspectives and objective reality is totally different?

When you write comedy you always have to caricature, to a degree. You always have to push characters beyond the bounds ... otherwise it would be boring. I don’t think normal people would do what they do, really, but hopefully you can enjoy what they get up to.

Part of the reason why you don’t hate them is that you know their motivations.

You know why Mark feels he has to read Sophie’s emails, you understand why Jez shits in the pool at the gym ... If we heard Geoff’s inner monologue, do you think we’d find him likable as well?

Probably! When we did the pilot—before it was broadcast—we actually had a monologue for Sophie, which we recorded, but we never really stuck with it because it felt like two FILM

characters was enough. These were our two main guys, and you want to see their point of view. One was too few, and three was too many—two felt like the right number.

We experimented with that and felt like you don’t need to know what other people are feeling and thinking. Actually, it makes it stronger that you have one point of view in most scenes, or two if Jez and Mark are together.We shot and edited it Sophie’s voice over, but we never broadcast that part. It was great to experiment with that stuff. On the first day, no one had a clue how we were going to shoot it on a very technical level.

The camera team would go, ‘Well, what do we do?’ We started out putting a camera on a bicycle helmet on the actors, which we don’t do anymore—we shoot it over the shoulder and trick it because it’s easier to get good footage. But it’s that thing of almost starting at ground zero: ‘How do we do this? How does it work?’ Also in the editing room— which is a very crucial part of the process— there was a lot of head-scratching about how do we make this show watchable? Because we get this footage back which seems kind of incomprehensible at times: shots of people making tea and faces and no people. It took a really long time to figure out the visual grammar of the show.

Has there ever been a moment where you’re like, ‘You know what ... peeing on a church, putting a snake in a salad spinner, barbecuing a dog—that’s all fine. But this?

This is just too horrible.’

Because of the way it was shot, I was never that happy with when Mark and Dobby have sex in the office stationary cupboard. [With the view in] the mirror ... it always felt too much like a conventional sex scene. We wrote it thinking, ‘There won’t be a mirror, or you won’t see anything,’ but it was almost too sexual for my taste personally.

You think the scene where Dobby coaxes Mark to climax in a closet was too erotic?

Yes—a little too rich for my blood.

Even though he has this horrified look on his face and is all pale and clammy? Really?

I like it when it’s a bit more at a distance.

And the scene with the underaged boy and Super Hans—originally that character was written to be Sophie’s brother, who was a lot older, but he couldn’t actually shoot the series in the end. He had to pull out at the last minute. So we ended up going a bit younger [when we recast it]. I think that was one of those unfortunate, last-minute decisions that made the whole thing a bit too queasy for my pathetic middle-class tastes.

But you were talked into it?

We talked ourselves into it.

That was one of the episodes where I thought, ‘They would never let you do this on American TV.’

That’s one good thing about working in the U.K. It’s a bit like working in cable, really. In cable, in America, you can sort of do anything, but not so much on network shows.

When you did the episode where they try to burn the body of the dead dog so Jez can hide the fact that he ran it over, what was actually set on fire? What did you say to the prop guy? ‘We need a dog-like dummy but it can’t be too flammable.’

I don’t know what they set on fire. I know what they ate, which was a turkey leg. I think the thing on fire was a rubber model. It looks pretty realistic, right?

Oh yes. That’s one of the episodes I don’t watch very often because it upsets me.

Too much for you?

Then I’m like, ‘Well, I was OK with Hans and Sophie’s underaged groupie cousin.

Why am I not OK with this?’

You’ve got to ask yourself some questions about that. You should.

When Mark is angry and screaming at Jez that he’s a ‘total shitting bastard,’ he seems closest to David Mitchell—and I believe that in interviews, David Mitchell has said that he feels the most like Mark at those moments. With Jez, when is he most like Robert Webb?

Obviously Jeremy is a gold-plated dickhead and obviously Robert is a lovely, sophisticated gentleman, so I wouldn’t want to compare them too much. But what is similar about Robert and Jeremy? Look, it’s based not on them, but probably on ourselves. The way we think about Jeremy is as the archetypal extrovert who does exactly what he wants, whatever the consequences, and hopefully everybody’s got a bit of Jeremy’s inside him.

I’m trying to think of an answer that doesn’t make Rob look bad and I can’t! I’m going to take the Fifth Amendment on that one.

When you look at television now, do you see any British comedies influenced

by Peep Show?

I don’t know that shows in the UK have been influenced by Peep Show very much. I feel like we were kind of riding The Office’s coattails— doing a comedy about awkwardness and embarrassment, the theme of British comedy from the year one, basically. That awkward, embarrassed, cringe comedy. That theme is a big part of British comedy.

You also worked on Four Lions, which to me is the definitive movie of the post 9/11 era in America and the post 7/7 era in Britain. In an interview, you were talking about Four Lions and said although you initially had reservations about doing the project, you realized that in the end, this was a story about four guys arguing.

They may be a different ethnicity and religion than you, but at their core, they are four guys arguing. Does this

observation serve you for writing women too? Because Peep Show is one of the few shows where women are allowed to be funny.

Obviously Seinfeld writers did write a great character for Elaine, which definitely inspired us, and we’re very committed to writing funny parts for women in Peep Show. And also Fresh Meat, our other show, has three female leads.

I think it’s a real shame if there aren’t funny parts for women. We spotted early on that there is a tendency, which we had early in our careers: the ‘sensible’ woman. The boring female sidekick or straight female character.

She’s really a death to comedy. We strived to not do that. There are so many talented character actors and giving them something to enjoy—and giving the audience something to enjoy—is ideal. The last few years it feels like there is more momentum towards female comedies.

Do you get the hook into those characters the same way? By thinking of them as archetypes? The bossy one, the idiot—those broad comedy terms?

The best way we’ve experienced writing women is not to think about them as women.

I think that’s the obstacle: ‘She’s a woman, so she must be different than me.’ But the best way in this case is, ‘OK—this character is an idiot, like a bloke can be an idiot, and this one is arrogant, like a bloke can be arrogant.’ And almost forgetting about their gender as you might do their race—writing a silly person or a stupid person or an arrogant person. That’s the way to go for us.

The other thing that struck me about Four Lions is that everyone in this film comes out looking terrible. The Americans at the end look terrible. The British police are useless.

The Muslim community has no idea how to handle the extremists in their midst. Did you set out on purpose to make everyone look bad? To highlight all the pieces of the puzzle that led us to this moment? It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen where you’re rooting for someone. even though not a single person looks good.

It was Chris’ concept and he definitely doesn’t take any prisoners—which if you’ve seen Brass Eye, you know. He tends to want to take everyone to pieces. It’s really a question of how can you take a comic view on everyone—whether its the police, or terrorists or whatever—that’s more fun than having a sensible group. Everyone’s an idiot, which makes it equal opportunity satire.

VISIT PEEP SHOW AT channel4. com/programmes/peep-shoW. PEEP SHOW IS AVAILABLE ONLINE FROM VARIOUS STREAMING SOURCES. 73

2015 L.A. RECORD READER POLL AND CONTRIBUTOR POLL RESULTS Besides our poll results, we wanted to shine a little light on local records that didn’t make the lists—but they deserve a listen just the same! —Chris Ziegler and Kristina Benson Baast Dimensions (Ubiquity/Initiates International) Mind-controlling electric Miles-style alien jazz from famous/shirtless DJ Johnny Basil.

Billy Changer self-titled (Lolipop) Haunting/haunted “mutant pop” from a Corners member trying to figure out where he fits in.

Bouquet In A Dream EP (Folktale) Tender Buttons meets “Superman” and Stereolab on an EP that practically hovers, with reverb-y vocals over Casiotone drum patterns and analog synths.

Colleen Green I Want To Grow Up (Hardly Art) Heavy like the Deal Sisters and deadpan like that dog., with blinds-closed bedroom sentiment and self-analysis somehow amplified by a full band.

After tabulating all the votes from L.A. RECORD readers from all over the city, we are proud (also exhausted) to present the winners of the 2015 L.A. RECORD contributor and reader polls! Each poll includes a category for fulllength album and EP or singles, and ‘contributors’ include anyone who helps make L.A. RECORD and ‘readers’ is of course anyone who reads it! Thanks to everyone who voted and nominated. We’ve also included a list of releases that we felt didn’t get the attention they deserved, complied by L.A. RECORD’s editor and publisher with feedback from L.A. RECORD friends and contributors, of course! 2015 was a great year for L.A. music!

CONTRIBUTOR POLL: ALBUMS 1. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp A Butterfly (TDE/Aftermath/Interscope) 2. Kamasi Washington The Epic (Brainfeeder) 3. Dam-Funk Invite The Light (Stones Throw) 4. Julia Holter Have You In My Wilderness (Domino) 5. XL Middleton Tap Water (Mofunk) 6. Froth Bleak (Burger) 7. The Gaslamp Killer Experience Live In Los Angeles (Low End Theory) 8. Ras G & The Koreatown Oddity 5 Chuckles (Leaving) 9. Fever The Ghost Zirconium Meconium (Complicated Game/Heavenly) 10. Fuzz II (In The Red) RUNNER UPS: Vince Staples Summertime 06, Father John Misty I Love You Honeybear, Girlpool Before The World Was Big, Blank Tapes Geodesic Dome Piece, Deradoorian Exploding Flower Planet, Dexter Story Wondem, Teebs AV ESTR, Knxwledge Hud Dreems.

READER POLL: ALBUMS 1. Vision Inertia (Burger) 2. Thee Commons Rock Is Dead …

(Burger/self-released) 3. Kamasi Washington The Epic (Brainfeeder) 4. Fever The Ghost Zirconium Meconium (Complicated Game/Heavenly) 5. Mystic Braves Days of Yesteryear (Lolipop) 6. FIDLAR Too (Mom+Pop) 7. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp A Butterfly (TDE/Aftermath/Interscope) 8. Fuzz II (In The Red) 9. Hanni El Khatib Moonlight (Innovative Leisure) 10. Earl Sweatshirt I Don’t Like Shit …

(Tan Cressida/Columbia)

RUNNER UPS: Bambu Par ty Worker, Drinks Hermits on Holiday, FFS self-titled, GospelbeacH Pacific Sur f Line, Jessica Pratt On Your Own Love Again, Michael Nhat Heads On Sticks.

CONTRIBUTOR POLL: EPs and SINGLES 1. Thundercat The Beyond/Where Giants Roam (Brainfeeder) 2. Eagle Nebula Space Goddess (self-released) 3. Pharoahs Rinse Dream 12” (Vinyls On Wax) 4. Zig Zags Slime (Famous Class) 5. L.A. Takedown self-titled (Ribbon Music) RUNNERS UPS: Rudy De Anda Ostranenie, NxWORRIES Link Up & Suede, Bombón A Date With …, Contact Field Orchestra Mapping The Futures …, Moses Sumney “Seeds,” Post Life Living Can Wait.

READER POLL: EPs and SINGLES 1. ViceVersa self-titled a.k.a. Da EP (self-released) 2. Thundercat The Beyond/Where Giants Roam (Brainfeeder) 3. Tracy Bryant “The Little Things” (Mono) 4. Zig Zags Slime (Famous Class) 5. Bombón A Date With …

(Burger) RUNNER UPS: Solvej Schou “Friendship”, Dead Ships EP1, Death Valley Girls “Electric High,” L.A. Takedown self-titled, Levitation Room “Minds Of Our Own.”

Drug Cabin Yard Work / Wiggle Room (401K) Byrds-y pedal-steel over understated L.A. pop (and wit) a la Ned Doheny and only enough indie rock to reinforce its independence.

Dustin Lovelis Dimensions (Porch Party) Beautiful/powerful solo debut from ex-Fling member that navigates the dark night of Big Star’s Third with lots of walking Beatles basslines and a Pixiesesque master plan to fool the world.

Empty Palace The Serpent Between the Stars (self-released) Shameless shredding from 70s/80s scholar-rockers into BOC, Maiden and Sabbath. Riffs, galaxies and a little Heavy Metal—the movie more than the genre.

The Garden haha (Epitaph) Hardcore like Hardcore Devo demos and punk like a Darby Crash Bowie cover, with zero fear of sample triggers and wizardly electronics. A clean and mean machine.

Jack Name Weird Moons (Castle Face) Chrome and Simply Saucer decide to take back Eno’s Tiger Mountain … which is on the dark side of a planet from which no one ever returns.

Jessie Jones self-titled (Burger) A wide-ranging psychedelic road/ head trip just as unpredictable and wild as the woman herself— like sending Neu! with Janis Joplin on I-10 through East Texas, and demanding an album upon arrival in New Orleans—but it gets you to an unexpected and unexpectedly satisfying place.

Richard Sax Ross Man From The Nearly Recent Future EP (JesusWarhol) Ariel Pink guests on an EP that takes The Idiot nightclubbing with Gary Wilson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed and porn auteur Rinse Dream. Impeccably produced freak sleaze.

Rules Follow Us Vol. 1 EP (Jazzcats) Rappers Huey Briss and Seafood Sam go beyond the reach of the psychological sciences on this tense and resonant EP built on beats sliced in pieces from a straight-to-tape freeform studio insanity session. Crystal Antlers’ Jonny Bell makes these cut-ups make way too much sense.

Tijuana Panthers Poster (Innovative Leisure) Beach punk? No, On The Beach punk for people trying to live as the world ends.

Bleak as hell, but hooks so sweet no one’s noticed … yet.

Versis copeæsthetic (self-released) Loose and moody beats make landscape and atmosphere around Versis’ resolutely personal lyrics, delivered in minute-long bursts that feel like fragments of the toughest conversations you’ve ever had.

Vial self-titled EP (Cut Rate) Punk like the Bags and the Dicks but really like a total existential commitment to the sound and philosophy (and song length) of Flipper’s “Living For The Depression.”

Vug Arakas “Strange Way” (self-released) Like the hurting songs from the Replacements’ Let It Be and the hopeful ones from the Feelies’ neglected Time For A Witness, which is just shorthand for “unsatisfied and a guitar.”

Zackey Force Funk Chrome Steel Tiger (Hit+Run) Sci-fi funk from singer who matches a Sky Saxon rubber-falsetto to don’tfuck-with-me attitudes on life and love, backed by a murderer’s row of producers.

IN 2016 KEEP AN EYE ON YPPAH, BRAIN STORY, POMAR, SEXTILE, XIANTONI ARI, HAMMERED SATIN, LITRONIX, ANTWON, FUMIGADOS, TERMINAL A, SWARVY, LINAFORNIA, CREATION FACTORY, SEX STAINS, BLAZING EYE, GOOCH PALMS …

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