L.A. RECORD ISSUE 120

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ISSUE 120 • FREE FALL 2015

DAM-FUNK • PEARL CHARLES DERADOORIAN • DRIVING WHILE BLACK LEON RUSSELL by NICK WATERHOUSE THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN SLEAFORD MODS • SMOKEY SHANNON AND THE CLAMS JESSIE JONES • FRANK ZAPPA ALBUMS FILM AND MORE

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SHANNON AND THE CLAMS Gabriel Hart

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DAM-FUNK Chris Ziegler

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LEON RUSSELL Nick Waterhouse

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DERADOORIAN Daiana Feuer

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PEARL CHARLES Daiana Feuer

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JESSIE JONES D.M. Collins

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THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN Kristina Benson

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SMOKEY Chris Ziegler

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SLEAFORD MODS Kristina Benson and Chris Ziegler

LEON RUSSELL and NICK WATERHOUSE PHOTO by WARD ROBINSON

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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 Frankie Alvaro, Desi Ambrozak, Ron Garmon, Jason Gelt, Gabriel Hart, Zachary Jensen, Eyad Karkoutly, sweeney kovar, Danny Holloway, Daniel Sweetland and Nick Waterhouse.

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DAM-FUNK PHOTO — Ward Robinson DRIVING WHILE BLACK PHOTO — dana washington DERADOORIAN PHOTO — Daiana Feuer PEARL CHARLES POSTER — Alex The Brown and Jun Ohnuki

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SHANNON AND THE CLAMS Interview by Gabriel Hart Illustration by Bijou Karman For the conspiracy theorist and/or dedicated pop culture spelunker, the lineage of Shannon and The Clams’ meat-ground prom-gonewrong party anthems may be traced back to some far darker origins. It was disgruntled child-actor turned black magic gossip guru-magoo Kenneth Anger who was the first to use 50s/60s oldies music in ironic and unsettling contexts in his disturbing experimental films, and he then influenced the Kuchar Brothers who quickly influenced the Pope Of Trash John Waters, whom the Clams have been conjoined with as a constant reference point mascot. Clearly, it is natural to see the Clams as the most up-to date surfacing of this twisted sentiment.

In fact, you could say that any Clams record is a grand cinematic supercut of the all the best parts of every oldies song you’ve ever loved.

Their new album Gone By The Dawn marks an interesting turning point for the group, a maturing of their signature kitsch that at times may have softened a misunderstood, wailing catharsis. Now we see them feeling confident enough to let their bleeding hearts glisten in the open. My own group Jail Weddings could be easy contemporaries to the Clams, as we began around the same time in 2007 with similar intentions of bringing a modern mutation to oldies while exposing the writhing serpent hidden within it, so we had many parallels in our respective reality tunnels when we spoke.

You just played Burger Boogaloo, where John Waters was the host. Did you get to meet him? What was it like—especially considering he’s always used as a reference point when people talk about the band?

Shannon Shaw (vocals, bass): It was great meeting him. I was super intimidated and scared, and sort of avoided him, but he summoned me and kissed me on the cheek and told me I was beautiful and asked me how I was so tan. He was very gentlemanly and elegant all while being just as hilarious and crass as you would ever expect. He really knows how to zero in and make you feel good, especially if he can smell that you’re nervous.

He and I hung out during the entirety of the Black Lips show and man, he was joking and being so effing funny the whole time but I clammed up—no pun intended—and I could not relax or for the life of me be my self.

No charm or good jokes came from me. Just this agreeable meek version of Shannon that only came out when I was still Mormon, or when I’m taking a class for the first time at the gym or am having social anxiety! I hope he saw through it ...

The best bands, in my opinion, are not the ones that just bang out the chords and melody but the ones that offer an invitation to a whole alternate universe they’ve created.

What kind of world are Shannon and the Clams beckoning us to?

I hope that we have a created a world where people feel like if they wanna do it they can.

I’ve been telling any person lately who tells me ‘I wish I could be in a band’ or ‘I wish I could dress like that’ or ‘I wish I could sing’—I’ve been saying, ‘If you want to play music you CAN and you SHOULD.’ I didn’t even start singing or playing bass till I was 25 for crissakes! And no one made me do it. I just really wanted to. It was really hard and really rewarding and I am so glad I did. We have really created the kind of music that we wanna hear and I strongly believe that if you want to do it, you can. So the world we have created is one where you can do anything, be anything, look anyway, and feel good. It’s cheesy but it’s true.

You’re obviously inspired by oldies music— it’s of course antiquated pop music, but INTERVIEW

it possesses an inherent dementia that no other genre can claim—I always imagine a bunch of girls wielding knives when I hear ‘I Will Follow’ by Little Peggy March.

Where do Shannon and The Clams fit in?

I’m drawn to this era of music for a few reasons. First off, it’s mostly what I grew up listening to. A lot of music from that time is seriously emoting. Whether it’s embarrassingly vulnerable, heart-pouring-out borderline pathetic and definitely desperate, or a fullon loss of control complete with ‘had it up to here and I can’t take it anymore!’ voice cracks—Etta James, Little Richard, Timi Yuro—they hit home.

The singer can have all the range in the world, but if there’s no pain in the voice, it’s just not convincing enough for me as a listener—or even as a fellow human.

It’s like their display of emotion and desperation and absolute emotional breakdown is sort of sweet release for the viewer or listener. We’ve all felt this way but for someone to be willing to use their raw power and pain and display it … it gives all us shy guys a silent cathartic passage to relief—or to understanding. You get to live through them and take a break from your own reality yet it can help work your own shit out. Like watching E.T. or Stand By Me or Dumbo, or reading Murakami or Steinbeck or Lord of the Flies, looking at those Dust Bowl portraits or smelling your grandma’s scarf and your great-grandpa’s leather book and feeling the handle of your dad’s old hammer. It’s a transportation to elsewhere.

The last time we played San Francisco it seemed like the whole city had changed —there were all of a sudden no cool bands to play with and we got stuck having some Alanis Morrisette cover band opening for us. A lot of the heavy hitters and lightning rods of the scene had scattered like roaches, either priced out of the city or just disgusted with what it had become. Do you see Oakland falling victim to this? Do you feel cornered, like this real estate class war is just inevitable everywhere? What is still cool about San Francisco?

It’s really a weird time in the Bay Area like it is in other places due to cost of living and the hand-in-hand effect of gentrification. I

actually think this affects many aspects of life aside from housing and leaks into other places like the arts. Many bands I knew are gone to L.A., disbanded or got ‘real’ jobs. I think the bands left just have a huge divide between them now, kind of like the citizens of Oakland. It’s currently tons of wealth and tons of poverty, and with the bands, it’s either tiny bands struggling to start anew or hanging onto threads of the old scene, or huge bands that were not as affected by the economy change. There are barely any middle buddies left! They all went to L.A. where it’s more affordable. I will say that there’s tons of cool stuff bubbling up. The punk scene in Oakland is always rad and scary and creative and ever-changing. There’s nothing like it.

What is the worst thing about being in a modern band compared to how it was even ten years ago? Let’s dig deeper than just saying ‘the internet.’

I can only speak from personal experience and the only thing that comes to mind is seeing other bands we love that started at the same time getting torn apart and dissipating from drugs or moving to L.A.—no thanks to the San Francisco tech boom. Also, back to the economy thing, warehouses were what made the Oakland scene—and other scenes—super special and now it feels like that time has ended. Venue options in Oakland have really dwindled down to nuttin’, honey. The bigger things get, the more rules you have to follow, and that is not easy for me to get used to.

Gone By The Dawn and the new single ‘Corvette’ seems a little more heart-onsleeve without the Clams’ usual liberal dose of camp. What inspired this?

Believe it or not, I try and steer clear from kitsch and camp! Other than the fact that Cody and I are accidentally living cartoons, All my records have been honest and open and a roller coaster, even if the lyrics are not typically a literal reflection of the true story.

This album is a departure in that sense. It shows flashes of agony and a pinch of rage, but mostly understanding and letting go, and just being OK with sitting inside of these painful moments and looking around a bit. I don’t know if I could ever write music from a purely camp point of view. My songs always

come from a real place even if they turn out with a sense of humor or sarcasm. This album is just more concentrated.

Do you see yourself as doing all this because it feels like an emergency—that you could be doing nothing else? There are some artists that do what they do as a ‘hobby,’ and others who would be hardened criminals if they didn’t have this chance to express themselves.

I do feel like I have to do this. Since I was a kid I always had a creative outlet and really needed it to just get by. Anytime I would get in trouble or be devastated or have serious family troubles, I would lock myself in my room and make up songs about my plights or draw tons of pictures. I wish I kept them all because they would be hilarious now. I remember one time when all three of my brothers were picking on me and I got sent to my room, I drew for hours this comic of me as a karate master taking turns beating up each brother. They were super-detailed and I would include lots of little digs like my brother had a long pony tail at the time, so I would put a little bow in his hair because I knew he would hate that, or my little brother I would always give him stink lines, flies and lice. I get the same rush of matched stimulation, then vindication and release that I do when something happens to me and I get in my car and speed up into the mountains screaming lyrics or moaning melodies till they become song scraps. The creation process is cathartic, as most people know. I don’t know how I would deal if I didn’t have any type of creative outlet. Maybe I would be a boxer? Or a knife thrower!

SHANNON AND THE CLAMS PERFORM ON WED., SEPT. 23, AT THE EL REY THEATRE, 5515 WILSHIRE BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 9 PM / $20 / ALL AGES. GOLDENVOICE. COM. AND ON FRI., SEPT. 25, AT THE CONSTELLATION ROOM AT THE OBSERVATORY, 3503 S. HARBOR BLVD., SANTA ANA. 8 PM / $12 / ALL AGES. SHANNON AND THE CLAMS’ GONE BY THE DAWN IS OUT SEPT. 11 ON HARDLY ART. MORE AT SHANNONANDTHECLAMS.COM. 7

LEON RUSSELL Interview by Nick Waterhouse Photography by Ward Robinson

Leon Russell is the Okie Trojan Horse of rock ‘n’ roll music—he dropped acid with Willie Nelson, played the piano intro on ‘Strangers In The Night,’ wrote Gary Lewis’ ‘This Diamond Ring’ and made Elton John cry into his Adidas tracksuit. He grew up in the piano bars of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then made his way deep into the underbelly of the recording industry in Los Angeles, all the while faking that he could actually read music. In the thought-lost but just-released film A Poem Is A Naked Person by the late Les Blank, you get to see the most laconic man in the business—except for when he once stood on top of his piano and shouted down Phil Spector—eat BBQ, preach for twelve minutes and reveal the true connection between Hank Williams and the Lord Jesus Christ’s gospel choir.

Your BBQ entrance is the first thing we see when you enter your own film, and I was so blown away by your ease on stage. I wanted to congratulate you for my favorite filmic entrance in any music documentary.

You come up with a paper plate and there’s two minutes of it resting on top of the piano while you play—that’s some of the realest I’ve seen. I imagine ten minutes later you push the mic back and take another barbecue break.

Well, I didn’t get to eat!

Watching the film, I understood that everything might just come from somewhere between Hank Williams and the sanctified church. That was something I always heard in all your tunes, but I felt this was a real accurate— —exposé?

—well, a documentation of what I was trying to get as a listener of what the feel was at the time. Watching now, do you feel this is a far reflection?

I think so. I went to my grandmother’s house one time. She was a very elegant lady, and she was doing her hair in the bathroom. It came down and hit the floor and went over about six or seven feet, and she wore it in a bun. So while she was messing with her hair, I went into her bedroom and she had a little phonograph record by her bed and it had a little record on there called ‘Blood On Your Hands.’ I said, ‘Lord, grandma’s listening to murder songs?’ I played that record, and it INTERVIEW

said, ‘Is there bloooood / upon your hands?

Do you daily take his holy name in vain? / By the very fact you do / you can crucify him too / and in evil life you’ll never cleanse the stain.’

I said, ‘Lord, help! I’m a hillbilly!’ And that was my first knowledge of what the family music background was.

That seems to run all the way to present day—‘Blood On Your Hands.’ I hear that in a lot of your work, from the very beginning.

Not really from the very beginning. I didn’t know anything about hillbilly music until I was bringing the car back to Tulsa from California. I never played any bands or any of that stuff. I always played piano bars, played ‘April In Paris’ and that kinda music.

But I was bringing the car back to Tulsa and one of these truck stops, they had thousands of cassettes. They was three dollars apiece.

Hillbilly cassettes. We’d always talk to the studio in L.A. about the guys from Nashville and how they were always ready to play— they’d talk three or four minutes, write some stuff out on a piece of paper and we’d play it.

They were always ready, they said. I said, well, I’m always ready! I gotta go down there and play with those guys.

How’d you get out here to L.A.?

It was a Greyhound bus. I was 17 and I got on a Greyhound bus and got down to L.A. I supposedly had a job at a place in Torrance called The Golden Arms. I went out and got in a cab and said, ‘I wanna go to the Golden

Arms.’ And he said, ‘Where’s that?’ ‘In Torrance.’ ‘Where’s that?’ And I said oh Lord, I’m in trouble. He said, ‘See that bus over there? Go get on that bus and put in 50 cents and they’ll take you to Torrance, and then you ask somebody where it is.’ I just got off the boat, so to speak.

Where’d you stay?

If I was lucky, I might’ve stayed a night at the Travelodge. The rest of the time, I was at people’s houses. I used to go to the Palomino all the time and Curtis Lee was the bass player for a guy who’d been there for years named Gene Davis, and he quit and got that job over at the El Rancho Grande and got James Burton to play guitar and me to play piano and that’s where I met James. James played for a month or two and then got a job with Bob Lumin in Vegas when Bob had that record ‘Let’s Think About Livin.’

Did you ever cross paths with Mose Allison?

Or the Coasters?

I went to see Mose down at Shelly’s Mannehole. The thing about Mose … the songs he sang were blues songs, but his piano playing was jazz, like Art Tatum or something. Very strange. I could never figure it out. All the songs he sang were blues and all the stuff he played was not.

You did ‘Smashed,’ one of my favorite tunes of his.

I just love all his tunes. I saw Bill Evans at the Manne-hole too. I always felt like I didn’t hear the music if I couldn’t sit down and play it

after I heard it. Bill Evans was so far above my head. I saw him play for about 45 minutes, then he took a break and never came back.

I never met the Coasters either, but I always thought they were cool, in a way.

What’s the first time you heard ‘Young Blood’?

Probably when I was a teenager—probably at the Circle Theatre. I saw The Girl Can’t Help It there. It was a hangout. They had those kind of movies, and not many other people did. I played standards a lot then. I didn’t really play much rock ‘n’ roll in Tulsa. I did play a little bit.

Did you meet Willie Nelson in L.A.?

I played on a record of his— –the Liberty stuff? Those are my favorite Willie tunes.

—yeah! It was some publisher putting a piano player—me—on there. I was sitting down at Willie’s house in Austin, and Willie swears he was there but he was not there. Cuz if he’d been there and I’d have met him, I’d have remembered. It would’ve been a big deal to me. But he wasn’t. There was this guy whose name I can’t think of—a country music guy—I was sitting with Willie in his house and I was like, ‘That guy’s playing my stuff!’

And I listened to some more—‘Oh, that’s me!’ And then I remembered the session.

I grew up listening to that not understanding why the groove was different than Nashville records. I thought it was a Nashville record for the longest time.

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“Lord, grandma’s listening to murder songs?”

It was a Nashville record.

But it was all you in L.A. playing on it.

As far as I know, I was the only one. They cut it in Nashville and took my piano—I was unaware if any other guys played on it.

I’ve been spending all this time thinking it was Earl Palmer drumming.

It could’ve been, I don’t know. The first time I remember meeting [Willie], he came to one of my shows in Houston. He was out in the front row of the audience watching the whole show, and he came and introduced himself.

And I went to his show in Albuquerque the next night. He was traveling in a motorhome about the size of the one I’ve got for sale—if anybody needs a small motorhome?—and he had his whole band in there. About ten or twelve of him. This motorhome was built for two. I met him there and he came to Albuquerque and we just kinda hung around, and he came to Tulsa to my house.

Was Waylon hanging around then too?

No but a funny thing about it—Herb Alpert called me up one day and said, ‘I want you to come help me—I found this singer in Phoenix, he’s kind of a hillbilly singer and I want you to come help me.’ I went down to Radio Recorders Annex and of course Herb, you know, he’s a dynamo. He’s got his own drum, so to speak. He’d come over to me and say, ‘I can’t quite get this, what do you think?’

‘Well, do this and do that.’ He’d go do that— or wouldn’t do it, more often than not—and I come to find out it was Waylon Jennings.

He’d picked him up in Phoenix and brought him to try and make a star out of him.

Were you the first call guy when somebody like Herb Alpert was like, ‘We got a hillbilly here!’?

Yeah—Herb called me a lot! I don’t know if I was first call. Some guys called me for classical music. Bob Costa called me when I played with Johnny Mathis. He didn’t like to write the piano parts. He brought me a little simple melody line and chords and say, ‘Play classical here, play blues here.’ And I’d just make up some stuff to play it. I’d much rather they did that then try and write it out. There was a writer from New York City named Stu Phillips who heard me play one night: ‘Oh, I’m so glad I heard you play! You’re the guy I need from for my Hollyridge Beatles string collection!’ He had sixty strings and writing Beatles songs. I said, ‘Well, Stu, I don’t read well. If you need reading, you gotta call Lincoln Mayorga—he’s your reading guy, not me.’ He was trying to act like I was being falsely modest and I said, ‘No, that’s absolutely incorrect. If I could do it, I’d tell you, but I’m not your guy.’ I later met Lincoln Mayorga. He came to one of my shows and I was so amazed. He came rather a long way—a hundred miles—to see me. He said, ‘Yeah, Stu Phillips—I used to write some of his piano parts for him.’ He was so magnificent.

He told me about a session we were on some 10

time, together. Both of us. They wanted an arpeggio on the front of the record, so they said, ‘Lincoln, play an arpeggio!’ and he said, ‘I played an arpeggio, a perfect arpeggio.’ ‘And Leon, you play one.’ And I played one. And the guy said, ‘Well, I think we’ll take Leon’s.’

But I had this fake stuff—these tricks from being paralyzed at birth! I played one of my fake arpeggios.

How do you mean fake?

I’m an illusionist. I give the illusion of being a great piano player, but actually I’m a magician.

If it’s my own playing, I do good. But the guy who wrote the Christmas song—‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire …’—he heard me play and said, ‘You’re the guy! I need you for this!’ So he got me on this session and he’d written all the stuff he heard me play and he wanted me to play it on Hammond organ.

I said, ‘Look, I’m not an organ player, I can’t read—even though you heard me play this stuff, I don’t know what it looks like on paper.’ It’s hard to tell ‘em that stuff. I guess they didn’t wanna believe me. In Stu Philips case, I was sitting there with 60 musicians and I couldn‘t play it. He insisted I take it. The page was black with notes. I said, ‘Stuart, I can’t even experience this in my mind, much less play it.’ And he tried to play it and he couldn’t play it. I told him he should’ve called Lincoln.

There’s a quote from you I read as a teenager and it stuck with me a long time. You said, ‘Economics and politics are false sciences.’

Someone was asking you right when you were starting Shelter. You said they’re based on poor communication.

That’s great stuff—I’m not sure who wrote that or said it cuz it doesn’t sound like me.

But maybe I did?

I could see that in the way you were operating. Part of what was so fascinating for me about the film was the notion of you going back to Oklahoma. You went inside to get out—you’re like the Okie Trojan horse of L.A. music to me.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

You do your deal with Danny and work with people like Freddy King, run your own TV—it’s this crazy great American independence that I felt was reflected in that quote. I hate getting asked about things I said in the past, but that was something philosophically I think I see threaded you the film. This wild independence. You talked too about running the Mad Dogs tour as a collective. I dug that it wasn’t overtly political, but it was also a way to remove yourself from the machines of capital. You were doing your own thing.

It just seemed to me that there were so many Stepford people in the entertainment business. Like that Republican guy, leader of the house—he’s a Stepford guy. Mitt Romney, Stepford. I always get nervous when I see those Stepford champions that they’re gonna

get elected as political figures because whether or not they know anything doesn’t make any difference. It’s just how Stepford they are— how politically visually correct they are.

How Stepford were they in the music industry? You built your Sky Hill studio here early on—you were already starting to distance yourself from having to rely on a system.

Truth be known, I was pretty much scared whenever I was about to go in the studio and the red light would go on. I was real nervous about whether or not I’d be able to play it. So I wanted to build my own studio and practice being in there so I wouldn’t be so nervous.

I was still nervous when I went down there and the red light was on. It was the idea—I thought maybe if I lived in one, I wouldn’t be so threatened by them.

Did surrounding yourself with people like Snuff Garrett set you at ease? I know you did a bunch of work with him.

He actually drove me nuts.

I heard he was a big gambler and a hustler.

He did all that stuff. I don’t wanna talk bad about the barely living … he had very weird musical taste and I always wondered what my life would’ve been like if I’d met Cheech Marin first instead of Snuff Garrett.

When did you meet Cheech Marin?

Sometime in the past. He was a great guy, though.

You got any Bobby Keys stories? Did he drive you nuts?

I got a million of ‘em. I try not to be driven as much as possible. I try to do my own driving.

I’ve heard a lot of stories about him I didn’t have anything to do with, cuz he got the job with the Rolling Stones—him and Jim Price— primarily cuz Jagger saw him in the Mad Dogs And Englishmen movie. Jim Price told me lots of stories about him going to restaurants when he was on the road with the Stones and running up $60,000 champagne bills.

So you got lucky.

I consider myself lucky.

As a bandleader and producer and arranger, it’s keeping a lot of plates spinning.

It’s a weird thing, you know? Herb Alpert was a friend of mine and he is a friend of mine, and I used to come down when they had their little office on the Sunset Strip. There’s boxes of product—Tijuana Brass was hitting real big. There was more merchandise than there was employees in there. And he came to see me when I was leading that band, after he’d bought Charlie Chaplin’s studio—I’ve used that big room over there to rehearse the band—and he said, ‘This is so amazing to me—I’ve been around you for years and you never said anything, and suddenly you’re doing this!’

Did you get that a lot? I get the impression you got that a lot.

Well, yeah. When I was playing on people’s records, I attempted to keep my mouth shut

and do the job. But when I was doing it … I mean, I know how to do that. That’s what I’ve always done. I’ve always been a band leader.

Sometimes when they hired me to play piano, they didn’t want me to do that routine.

And you played guitar as well?

I try to play guitar. I do a bad Albert King imitation.

Did you take lessons from James Burton?

I did but he didn’t know it. I watched him like a cat. He was great and then some.

Back in those days, there wasn’t any Ernie Ball—specifically gauged strings. James told me when he started playing, he bought an A banjo string at the drug store and he used that in this way, and he bought a different kind of string and used it this way … he told me how he strung his guitar. He told me a lot of stuff. Also he was always very big on—he’d play me his new record with Merle Haggard or whoever he was playing with and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Listen to this!’ Make sure I heard all of it. Usually we’d be riding around in one of his Cadillacs. James was my idol, musically and sort of just historically.

Was that who you ended up with when you first came to L.A.?

I ended up in a band with James out in the San Fernando Valley—me and James and a guy named Curtis Lee who was a bass player at the Palomino and a drummer I can’t remember. I was a pretty bad drunk when I was a teenager, and in those clubs, that was the first chance I had to get drinks. I’d get drunk on my ass every night and they’d carry me back to my hotel a couple blocks away. James’d come pick me up the next day and take me down to see Ricky Nelson who he was playing with at that time, take me out to eat, take care of me.

I heard a rumor Tommy Tedesco talked about taking you on tour as a revival preacher.

There’s one period of time where we’re playing a Phil Spector session, and I had a trumpet player named Roy Katin who was my copyist for all my writing for orchestras. We’re sitting there together and he suggested we go to the liquor store next door to get something to drink. So I got a bottle of apricot brandy and drank all of it and was drunk on my ass, and ended up standing on top of the piano yelling at Phil Spector. After that Tommy came over to my house the next day, and told me he wanted to take me on the road as an evangelical preacher. Said he’d buy the tent, pay all the expenses. All I had to do was get up there and do the same thing again.

I see a little of that in the film. There’s a lot of standing, preaching—it carried over.

I try not to do that too much anymore.

MORE INFO ON LEON RUSSELL AND LES BLANK’S A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON AT JANUSFILMS. COM. VISIT LEON RUSSELL AT LEONRUSSELLRECORDS.COM INTERVIEW

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PEARL CHARLES Interview by Daiana Feuer Photography by Alex the Brown Poster by Jun Ohnuki and Alex the Brown

Pearl Charles got her start at age 18 in country duo the Driftwood Singers, singing sad songs steeped in dust and old time-y folklore.

Then she joined the Blank Tapes as drummer, immersing herself in 60s-inspired garage rock and traveling from coast to coast in a stoner haze of fun in the sun. She’s cruising through her favorite decades of music, and she’s picked up what she loves about each era while coming into her own as a musician, singer, and songwriter. Now at age 24, she’s the frontwoman of her own band. The cover of her debut EP on Burger Records depicts Charles with a cloud of smoke rising from her lips. While it indicates one of her favorite pastimes, it’s also symbolic as a sort of waiting to exhale moment: standing on her own, doing her thing and feeling good about it.

You’re coming out of a series of bands that had someone else as lead songwriter—how have you found a groove for your own original music?

My music came to be what it is now because of the experience of being in Blank Tapes with Matt Adams. He produced the EP so it’s really rooted in that sound. And I was writing a certain kind of song because when I started this project I was still in Blank Tapes. At first I was scared to break ties with that sound. I really relied on him. But having not been in that band for a while and finding other people that I feel as comfortable with musically … that’s when my music started having a life of its own. I’m interested in co-writing. That’s where I came from. It was Driftwood Singers from when I was 18-20. Then Blank Tapes from when I was 20-22. And now I’m 24.

That was also my boyfriend cycle … and now it’s me and I’m independent!

What were you scared of?

In high school I was writing my songs. Then I got to CalArts and everyone was like, ‘First day of school! Look at my song! Look at me.’

Songwriters are the most self-centered people in the world in my opinion, which isn’t bad because you have to be that way in order to care enough to share your music, but ... I’m trying to think of a less vulgar way to say it’s a constant dick measuring contest. I was excited when I got to CalArts but also scared. Then I met Chris Hutson and he was an amazing songwriter and really able to help execute a vision I had, which it just so happens he also had. We hit it off. He encouraged me to write but he was so good I just didn’t see the point. I should have realized that the way you become better is by actually doing it. I just wasn’t brave enough. At the end, the last thing we did together was write a song about us breaking up and it was amazing, but it never saw the light of day. He wrote a bunch of awesome ones, though.

Yes, he did write a bunch of awesome songs about you breaking up.

Ha! Then I started playing with Blank Tapes, even though I was more invested in Driftwood Singers. But Driftwood fell apart. And Matt was such a strong committed songwriter, and though he definitely encouraged me, it was really his band and his songs. I got so much experience. With Driftwood we started from nowhere but with Blank Tapes I jumped into something that had momentum and it helped me level up. It feels like climbing a ladder.

It’s interesting that the first project was old-timey country, and the next project was 1960s rock-influenced—you’re passing through decades. You took in elements of each one that made sense to you.

That is my story. I feel like I went timetraveling. With Driftwood it was emulating super old music, and with Blank Tapes we were emulating something too. Both of those projects were like character-museum pieces.

INTERVIEW

I was playing a character and it was fun. We had the outfits and it was very much trying to evoke a certain era, but at the same time both guys are individuals and very modern in their own ways. But now it’s me and I’m coming into what I’m about. I live in the present of 2015. As much as I love to talk about the ‘60s and ‘70s and San Francisco and Laurel Canyon, I don’t want people to think that’s all I’m about—that I’m trying to recreate something that already happened. I’m about infusing something distinctly now into my inspirations. ‘Be here now’ is a huge part of my philosophy. You know about Ram Dass?

The book Be Here Now? There’s also a book called The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle and then there’s Alan Watts’ and Timothy Leary’s writings. They’re all about this idea—that you may realize when you’re on psychedelics—that there’s not anxiety or fear when you’re in the moment. It just is what it is and you deal with the present. But when you’re worrying about the past or the future then you’re no longer being present. That’s a philosophy that I love and something I hope to carry into my music.

I’m trying to be of the moment. I make music for myself, but I want to share it with others.

That goes back to what I was saying about being a songwriter—slightly narcissistic. But every creative person is like that, and every person. That’s just natural. We’re just trying to validate ourselves. But writing a new song and sharing it is the most rewarding thing in life for me. I think the reason the music we look back to was so powerful is because it was really connecting to the people of that time. If you want to emulate the 60s and 70s, the best way is to be in the now and connect to what’s around you.

And part of you is the girl smoking a joint.

It’s funny. On my album cover I’m smoking a joint. In the video I’m smoking a joint.

Smoking weed is part of my personality and I’m just being honest. Someone asked if I think that would alienate people. What people truly connect with is being authentic.

I wasn’t trying to be defiant but I realize that it does say something. But in this day and age, weed has changed. It’s practically legal here.

The cops aren’t going to come after me for smoking in that picture.

You dabble in several ‘arts.’

I did musical theatre growing up, and I realized rock ‘n’ roll was more fun. So I decided that was the direction I wanted and never looked back.

I wanted to be an actress when I was young and go to New York and be on Broadway.

But after a funny experience in high school of sneaking out and getting pot, I didn’t end up getting a part in a play. The school found out on the same day as auditions so they made an example of me. It was vindictive so I was like ‘fuck this.’ I was always better at singing anyway. I remember seeing myself on screen and I was like, ‘Wow, not an actress.’ I’ve gotten into modeling lately because I love

fashion and vintage clothes so much. I fell into it accidentally. I was with a friend and we did a shoot in Austin and it came out well.

Then suddenly I got more into it, and started to learn more and I really enjoy it.

How do you look natural in front of a camera? I don’t know how to smize.

You just have to be naturally comfortable in front of the camera. Then again, as a musician, you will get your picture taken. I’m not saying you have to be conventionally pretty but you got to get used to people taking your photo.

You have to get your picture taken, you have to perform in the studio, you have to perform live, you have to do interviews. It’s a little bit of everything. Even some acting is involved.

Making music is kind of a catch-all for those things, and it’s fun. But it’s important for me first and foremost to be a musician. I’ve been playing music since I was five years old.

Everything comes from music first. It’s fun to play dress-up, though. Modeling is just grown-up dress-up.

You mentioned that co-writing is part of your background—is it still part of your method?

On the EP, I wrote most of the songs but had help tweaking them. Lately I’ve been writing a lot with other people—going in with an idea but writing lyrics and other instrument parts with someone else. I love that experience.

You come up with ideas that you’d never come up with when you put two heads together, especially with people who have more experience than me. I’m surrounded by so many talented musicians, so it’s cool to see it as a resource. There’s only one song on the EP that I have 100% writing credit for officially: ‘You Can Change.’ That one is special— somewhat of an experiment to me.

The project has sort of laid itself out for me. I haven’t had to put so much work into making it happen. Like squeezing a puppy too hard.

That’s how it felt before. I’m letting it happen organically. People approach me and we work on something together. Joel Jerome was playing drums for me for a while and has an awesome studio. One day Joel called me in and he had this song his friend Miguel wrote and they wanted to see what it was like with a female singer. I’d never heard the song. We did three takes and it was just great. I was hesitant to put a song I didn’t write on the EP but then I thought of Linda Ronstadt and how in those days everyone would cover other people’s songs—that happened much more in the 60s and 70s. I’m a songwriter, but I’m also a singer. I’m not just one thing or the other. If you let things breathe, then you can let things happen. I wanted to do this project differently. I’m happy with the way everything is going. I was scared before, hiding behind other people’s songs so if something fails, it’s not on me. But taking the risk—these are my songs—so if people don’t like it, then it’s me they’re not liking. Fortunately, people like it!

Why did you do an EP and not an album?

It seemed like these songs vibed together, and though I have more songs, I didn’t want to cram it all in. Better to have more to choose from in the future. My influences have shifted even in the time since these songs were completed. I became super-obsessed with Fleetwood Mac and Gene Clark and J.J. Cale.

Less of the surf-psych-garage, which is what I was going for on the EP, though I think the songs took on more than that. I didn’t want to just put out another garage album.

You don’t really have a ‘garage rock’ voice so it’s not really something you can label like that. Your voice also has an intrinsic country vibe.

I like that. And you know I love country rock. It’s like what you were saying before: first I was in the country band, then I was in the rock band, and now I’m in the country rock band. When my parents got a house in Joshua Tree, that’s when I started getting into classic country music. It feels appropriate there—Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.

I love cosmic mystic shit, don’t get me wrong, and this might sound hippie-dippie but I felt like there was something pushing me towards that music when I went to the desert. The spirit of Gram Parsons is heavy out there. And that’s my zone. I’m happy to carry that torch. Desert people are a breed of their own. I love it out there. And the house is such a piece of art by my mom: the desert nature and the house décor, her painting everywhere in the house, from the kitchen cabinets to the walls, the way it all looks. And the parties I’ve been able to have there where a cross section of people come together and just meet and bond.

That’s a cool thing to have in your life.

You’re a California girl, I’d say.

Totally, and proud of it. California has such an amazing music history. It has the country roots and the rock roots and the psychedelic roots and it all comes together. I love it here. I get jaded once in a while, but that’s part of it.

And this ties into my trajectory. I was saying before that Driftwood was one character for me and Blank Tapes another—and this now is me.

PEARL CHARLES AT THE DESERT STARS FESTIVAL ON FRI., SEPT. 25, AT PAPPY AND HARRIET’S, 53688 PIONEERTOWN RD., PIONEERTOWN. 1 PM / $55-$75 / ALL AGES. DESERTSTARSFESTIVAL. COM. AND ALSO WITH JOHNATHAN RICE ON WED., SEPT. 30, AT THE BOOTLEG THEATER, 2220 BEVERLY BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 8:30 PM / $12$14 / 21+. BOOTLEGTHEATER.ORG. PEARL CHARLES’ SELF-TITLED EP IS OUT NOW ON BURGER. VISIT PEARL CHARLES AT INSTAGRAM.COM/ PEARLCHARLES. 15

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN Interview by Kristina Benson Illustration by Angie Samblotte In the fall of 1985, “We Are The World” and Whitney Houston were dominating the charts, and then out of nowhere came the Jesus and Mary Chain on a mission to destroy rock ‘n’ roll in order to save it. Their debut Psychocandy started riots—or at least really enthusiastic fights—when it came out thirty years ago, and now they’re touring an anniversary set to celebrate the power of negative thinking. Co-founder Jim Reid reveals the worst decision the band ever made, and explains how to disgust a record company exec without even trying.

Your first shows in Los Angeles were in Huntington Beach in the winter of 1985.

That was your first time in California. Did you go to Brian Wilson’s old house?

Jim Reid (vocals/guitar): When we got to Los Angeles in 1985, we were looking for a version of America, a version of Los Angeles, that didn’t really exist anymore. Having said that, it didn’t really disappoint us. For us it was like walking about in a movie. You grew up watching it on TV. I can’t remember if it was on that particular trip, but I remember I was quite into Lenny Bruce at the time and I went to the house he used to live in. I was reading Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce by Albert Goldman, and I went to the outside of the house and I picked a dandelion from the curb outside the house of Lenny Bruce and I still got it in a jar.

You were so confident back then. There’s a video of a journalist asking why people love you and you say because you’re the best!

It was bravado rather than confidence. It was really the opposite of confidence, when you’re really not sure of where your place is in the scheme of things or you kind of decide you’ll kind of bluff it a bit and that’s the way it comes across. We hadn’t a clue what we were doing, we didn’t know what we were up against, and we just talked it up a bit—it’s as simple as that.

It’s very convincing.

We were terrified.

There’s an interview where you say that you’ll be bigger than the Rolling Stones.

And then [drummer and later Primal Scream founder] Bobby [Gillespie] starts making out with his girlfriend.

Oh God. I think we got our confidence from inside of a bottle back then. It’s hugely embarrassing! That particular interview follows us around. I know it came out on our reissues. But even before that, people would talk about it. At the time, someone said like, ‘The guy that is going to interview you, he’s a massive Joy Division fan, so whatever you do, don’t upset him.’ That was like a red flag to a bull, so we went out and said Joy Division were dreadful and he was certainly disgusted.

I was a massive Joy Division fan myself, but I didn’t realize I’d be talking about these things thirty years later.

Jesus and Mary Chain basically broke up in L.A. in 1999—and didn’t [your brother] William get arrested after the last show for trying to fight a cop?

William got absolutely wasted, I think. He got chucked in the drunk tank because he was drunk and disorderly. We were a bit out of control at that time. Unfortunately the last 16

time we played in L.A. is what broke the band up. We played at the House of Blues and the hostility between me and William was barely contained … and then it wasn’t contained, and we went for each other on stage, and that was the end. We broke up after that.

When you went to Warner for Psychocandy—or a hybrid of Warner and an indie called Blanco y Negro—one of the marketing people told a journalist that you were ‘one of the most revolting and disgusting groups he’d ever seen.’ I imagine he’d seen a lot of revolting and disgusting groups, being a record executive. What about you was so extra disgusting?

It was the 80s! Thatcher’s Britain! Everybody that worked for a record company then was dressed up in Armani suits. We probably spilt a bit of egg salad on the trouser leg of his Armani suit. They weren’t used to little working class kids that didn’t come from Chelsea or the King’s Road. We were disgusting to them because they were disgusted by anything, almost. It says more about the record company than it does about us.

How many albums did you have to sell before they started to pretend to like you?

They never pretended to like us. It was always a kind of an us-and-them attitude. And we more or less we were signed to Warner.

I mean the Blanco y Negro thing … it was Warner, any way you want to dress it up. And we had Jeff Travis [of Rough Trade] in the middle. He was kind of the guy that was the interpreter, if you know what I mean. They never understood us—they barely tolerated us—and it was always a constant struggle to get what you wanted from them. It was not an ideal situation. If I could go back and do it again, I’d probably do it differently. That was the biggest mistake we made of our careers, was to sign to Warner Brothers. records. At the time, we grew up watching Top of the Pops on TV. It was a national institution in the U.K. And watching David Bowie and Mark Bolan on ‘Top of the Pops,’ we thought, ‘That’s what we want to do.’ That was at the time of the indie scene in the U.K., but we had ideas above and beyond that. We wanted to be like T. Rex, we wanted to be David Bowie, and we thought you had to go through a major label to get to that. Boy, were we wrong. It was never going to happen. We just existed in the wrong decade for that kind of pop stardom. We did all right, but it was a constant struggle. Those people at Warner Brothers didn’t have a clue about what we were trying to do. They were selling music the way other people sell cheeseburgers. We didn’t quite see it that way.

What do you think people may have missed on Psychocandy? What wasn’t really appreciated at the time?

The record has really been pulled apart. I suppose just that it is a pop record as much as it is a noise record. Everything is in the title: ‘Psycho candy.’ It’s a one-word review of the contents of the record.

You said being in a band that nobody knows about is the worst thing that could happen.

Was that why you wanted to be famous?

That kind of goes without saying, really. Same with anything. If you’re going to write a book and no one’s going to read it … I can’t think of a sadder thing than that. You’re going to make a record that no one ever hears? I mean, that’s terrible! If you’re going to be in a band and no one knows you exist, it’s almost like, ‘What’s the point?’ And that’s kind of like what I was saying about why we were kind of pushing against the indie scene. It seemed like a celebration of failure—it seemed like bands were happy to play in a room above a pub for twenty of their friends. To us that just seemed like, ‘Why? Why bother?’ The idea of being in a band that no one knows about, to me, is just depressing beyond words really. We felt pretty good about what we were doing and we wanted as many people as possible to hear what we were doing, and that’s it.

At the same time, the music you were making—it’s Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain, and ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ is topping the charts.

And there you are making out with your girlfriends on TV and telling journalists that Joy Division is rubbish and everything is terrible. How were you reconciling this thing where you wanted to be famous, but you also wanted to be negative and make hostile music?

Because we weren’t happy with the state of music at that time. We actually were naïve enough to think we could actually change it. We thought that if people could hear an alternative to the kind of crap coming out the radio at that time, they would buy into it. We felt if we could get our music to a certain level, then after that, it would happen by itself. We thought that people bought all that crap in the mid-80s because they didn’t hear anything else: ‘Well, yeah—rock ’n’ roll music has lost its teeth! Let’s give it a bit of attitude again!

There are people making all these records and videos where they’re all standing holding guitars but you can’t fucking well hear them so why don’t they turn the guitars up?’ We thought that somehow rock music had lost its way and we wanted to put some of the values back into it that we’d grown up with.

We’d just gone through the whole punk thing and it seemed to go from punk attitude to the opposite of the punk attitude within a couple years. We couldn’t understand what had happened so we were trying to set things right. We were spectacularly naïve. We really did think that the music we were making was good music, so therefore we felt it would be played on the radio—and even to this day, if it had been played on the radio the story might have been different. We were never going to change the music scene in the mid-80s, but we could have changed it a little if we’d been given a bit more opportunity. Unfortunately the attitude of these idiots that worked at Warner went right across the whole industry.

The people who chose what got played on the radio or MTV ... that’s just how music executives were in the mid-80s. We were a tiny little speck that really couldn’t have made much of a difference. But we had fun trying!

In the U.S. we’re constantly encouraged to be positive, but in the past you were relentlessly negative, to the point that you spoke more about what you didn’t like than what you did. So you’ve had a fruitful and productive career due to negativity— That’s the reason why we came up with title for our box set. The Power of Negative Thinking. It was a reaction to all that kind of Oprah Winfrey-ism, positive attitude, positive outcome … that’s utter bollocks. That’s bullshit. That’s not true. It’s a reaction against that—most of what spurred us to get up and get off our asses to actually do anything has been how bad things have been. It was more driven by being disgusted with the music and the state of the music scene than being inspired by other great music. We couldn’t stand the records we were hearing on the radio. Even on the pages of the NME: ‘Why are Kid Creole and the fucking Coconuts on the cover of the NME? Let’s sort this out, let’s stop moaning about it and get up and fix it!’

That’s what we were doing. The Power of Negative Thinking.

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN PERFORM PSYCHOCANDY ON WED., AUG. 19, AT THE HENRY FONDA THEATRE, 6126 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $35 / ALL AGES. GOLDENVOICE.COM. AND ALSO WITH FRANK OCEAN, MORRISSEY, D’ANGELO AND MORE AT FYF FEST ON SAT., AUG. 22, AND SUN., AUG. 23, AT THE L.A. SPORTS ARENA AND EXPOSITION PARK, 3939 S. FIGUEROA ST., LOS ANGELES. FYFFEST.COM FOR ALL INFO. INTERVIEW

SLEAFORD MODS Interview by Kristina Benson and Chris Ziegler Illustration by Nathan Morse

Nottingham’s Sleaford Mods are a band at the very edge of being a band: Andrew presses play on the laptop with the drum loops and Jason splits the difference between John Lydon and George Carlin on high-speed no-future rants about paycheck-to-paycheck half-life in the last days of late capitalism. (In other words: two shit jobs and a microphone.) They have extremely detailed opinions on wankers and fakers and their latest album Key Markets is out now. Here co-founder Jason Williamson is at his happiest when he’s talking about revenge on everyone who’d written him off.

You used to work as a benefits advisor—the U.K. equivalent to getting food stamps or disability or welfare here. What things did you see there that made their way into Sleaford Mods songs?

Jason Williamson (vocals): I always got that kind of a thing from any job that I did. [The people] were always quite real, so to speak, and sort of at the bottom end of things. What did stick out was the effect certain policies from the government had on certain groups of people: people with depression problems, mental issues, people with injuries—work injuries—that simply couldn’t work. Single mothers trying to find work, getting work and then finding that they were much worse off, actually, working than they would have been claiming benefits. I got an insight into the pointlessness of existence in that level— you know, people who just had enough. Life was not something that resembled life, you know?

They had to think about the present— short-term survival.

You’d get some people that were brilliant at managing what little money they had, and it was unbelievable. Some people would come in and calculate what they needed to do. They had it all worked out, and bearing in mind, they were claiming very little income with lots of other responsibilities—two or three kids.

This is mainly women. I was in awe at this resilience. But then the other end of that was people with depression problems—a lot of exservicemen who were completely disoriented and just alienated—let down—and so would direct their anger at the implements that the government would put into the psyche of the general public. Which would be the immigration problem—stuff like that. So people, such as ex-servicemen or people in general, would be depressed and pissed off and vent their anger at these targets put in the propaganda machine by the U.K. media. You saw how it worked, from a local government point of view. That’s what differentiated that job from all the others.

This has to be what ‘Face To Faces’ on the new album is about: ‘Free money, mate. / Just fill in the form and if you can’t I can help you / Put yourself in the queue and I’ll come out to you.’

Yeah—you would sort people out on the phone and take phone calls in the morning, INTERVIEW

and then in the afternoon you’d be on the phone but also take people actually coming in, so it would be a face to face thing. That’s what they were actually called: ‘Face To Faces.’

The first line was actually something one of my colleagues said to someone, that it was free money: ‘If you can’t fill in the form, then I can help you / put yourself in the queue and I’ll come to you.’ That’s something that we regularly said because people— a lot just couldn’t be bothered, a lot of people were frightened of forms … I’m sure it’s the same in your country. The application is purposely complicated.

By the end of that song you seem absolutely disillusioned: ‘The passive articles on political debate / the implications are fucking meaningless, mate.’

I just find politics and everything about it—the people—disgusting. The various sort of repairs they could do on politics are absolutely pointless. It’s all self-serving. At the minute it’s completely one-dimensional, it’s full of careerists. And as an actual mechanism, as a social mechanism, politics is just dead.

All I keep going back to is it needs to be abolished—I mean, it’s stupid. There really isn’t any other way. But then again, I’m sure something else will come on top as well. I just find it so tedious and crap and it’s just pointless.

I can’t find anything in it whatsoever.

In your music, you’ve given yourself permission to be brutally honest about the problems that you see around you. And here in the U.S., at least right now, there’s this relentless push for people to be positive.

My time in America, any time that I’ve ever gone, I’ve noticed that. There’s this big push for positive thinking, and people are very polite and blah-blah-blah. I think in England, as you’re probably well aware, people are ‘Ughhh.’ That kind of thing is pushed in the sense of keeping yourself fit, trying to eat well—yoga, stuff like that. And also in consumerism, as well. Like if you’re wearing certain things, that’s going to make you feel good about yourself. That’s going to make you look good in front of people, and that’s going to create an air of positivity.

Are Sleaford Mods responding to that?

A little bit. With Sleaford Mods, I’ve always tried to soundtrack what I see around me, which most of the time was not positive and was a very different picture painted to what

you see in the media programs. But I’m no different from anybody else. I take great enjoyment in buying things and thinking about buying things. I’m a complete victim.

I’d like to think that there’s a certain bit of rationality with it, as well. I think a lot of people are that way inclined.

The Guardian said Sleaford Mods reflect the character and condition of the country.

Specifically, something like ‘England’s completely fucked, and these guys are talking about it.’ Yeah, it’s fucked. It’s really fucked. You’re alright if you’ve got some money, but if you haven’t got any money, it’s hard work. I know it’s always been like that, but it’s more so like that these days. There’s a lot more crooks coming in. There’s a lot more fear that’s being heaped on minority groups, on people earning low wages—obviously women. So it’s definitely like that.

You don’t pay for healthcare yet, do you?

No, you don’t.

Notice I said ‘yet.’

It’s getting to the point where it certainly helps if you can.

In the city I live in, the city council just passed a measure that said if you call 911 and they come and offer you any medical help whatsoever, you owe them $250.

You’re fucking joking.

Reporters and reviewers will engage with you and your music about the topics that you’re writing about, and then you have the opportunity to talk about stuff like gentrification. But other musicians I have blocked themselves in, in a way. The image they’ve developed is one of a person who doesn’t talk about those things, so now they can’t talk about them. Like … Lupe Fiasco, two years ago, tried to start a conversation about Marxism on Twitter, and then his team just pulled him off right away.

You’ve hit the nail on the head with the word ‘team.’ Was he connected with a major label or something? That’s the thing. If you’ve got a team, it’s like you’re working for a company, and you’re basically an employee, and as much as you think that you’re this free agent writing music and taking your abilities and talents to its pinnacle, you’re just an employee, really.

That’s what I’ve noticed over here—nobody says anything. Primarily because they’re told they can’t. And so I started to look at that a few years back, and I thought, ‘Well, you’re

not musicians, you’re not artists. You’re not honoring the idea of creativity. You’re just willing to be paid a bit more money to do what somebody else wants you to. As much as you think that you are exercising your own interests, and whatever else you think comes through your music, at the end of the day, you’re working for somebody else.’ I believe that—if you’ve got a team, you’re fucked.

Some people want a team. A lot of people just want a team, and they want fame. But what they have to remember is that it comes with a price, and that price is that you just look an absolute wanker. I’m not saying that Lupe Fiasco is—not at all. But in a sense, well, if you’re getting paid for pulling off what you say on Twitter, it’s not right.

Especially because it’s his own image, you’d think he’d be able to control it— Completely. It’s not right. I don’t agree with it.

Is there a flip side to this? Where now the only stuff you get—‘get’ in quotes—to talk about is all this depressing reality? Do you feel you’re locked into this image now in a similar way?

That’s a good question, actually. It’s still important to talk about the things we have been talking about, so it doesn’t really bother me. It’s what motivates me to write music, at the minute.

Is this what ‘No One’s Bothered’ is about?

‘You’re trapped, me too / Alienation, no ones bothered …’ About how no one is able or willing to say something is wrong?

Someone pointed out—a critic—they said they really liked the song, and was floored that people actually are bothered.

He had a point, but we still don’t seem to be collectively, though. People may moan against things, but to proactively do something about it is a completely different matter. That’s what that was about — one minute you’re watching four hundred people in a boat off the coast of Syria capsize and they all drown, and then you look up the road and someone is driving in a gleaming brand new Range Rover that cost £80,000. When you put those two things together it’s absolutely insane. I was just trying to capture something like that. I suppose the world has always been that way but it still doesn’t make that feeling any less diluted. It’s quite an oppressive weight to carry around.

21

I think about how if someone showed me Sleaford Mods on paper—‘They’re kind of aggressive and confrontational; they’re very minimalist, and they talk about capitalism and critique austerity.’—I’d think, ‘This sounds like something I’d be super into and no one else will like it and it won’t go anywhere.’ Obviously that’s totally wrong.

So what does the success of Sleaford Mods reveal about the way we’re told the music industry works?

People hone into the fact that it’s organic home-grown music that’s well-written. At the end of the day, me and Andrew are musicians.

We’re really interested in the idea of music and getting good songs going, and we always have been. And I’ve laid it with this kind of observational thing. I always wanted to be in a band that was like the bands I was into.

Sort of like good street music. Not necessarily the bloody working class, but just good real music that reminded you of just what you see around you. For some reason, it’s just worked out like that. We never thought for a minute that it would go outside of England. We just didn’t. And yet it caught on. I don’t know if it’s because at the minute, the musical landscape in England is completely shit. There’s not many bands you can really get your teeth into.

There’s been a vacuum and we’ve sort of come along and taken advantage of it.

What was missing? When did it go missing?

It went missing sort of about the beginning of the 21st century—like the year 2000, it really started to go quite stale. I couldn’t really get any massive mileage out of any kind of music that I was getting into. But I kept going. I kept trying to connect myself to various genres of music like folk and funk. I just kept wading through the mud and the shit for a long time, trying to do things and not really connecting with them til around 2006, when I started to do the early version of the Sleaford Mods.

What were you ‘supposed’ to do with your life? Where would you be if you’d never started the band?

I don’t know. A call center or a pub and that would been it, and I would have to start seriously thinking about giving up drinking at the age of fifty.

What would you think if people followed Sleaford Mods? I don’t mean like people followed like the Grateful Dead, although that would be fantastic. But if this sort of thing sparked a call center awakening, or a shit job awakening …

I’d think that was great. I think a lot of people really did write me off and write Andrew off, and we’ve obviously proved them wrong. A lot of people have had to eat their own hats, so to speak. And that’s such a good feeling.

So revenge is the real motivator?

Oh, fucking big time. It’s the sweetest thing that has happened about this. I couldn’t really give a fuck about the money or any of it, but the revenge thing has been the best thing ever about the success of this band. You would not believe it—you would not believe that I walk around now with my head in the sky, instead of when people look at you, you talk to your shoes, you know what I mean?

Do you run into specific people who looked down on you, so you can revenge them directly?

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Not yet, not yet!

Are you hoping for that?

Oh big time! Fucking—big time! Yeah!

Have you made a list of people you want to sarcastically thank if you ever win a Mercury Prize?

No, not at all. I don’t want to put the final fucking knife into them. I just want to let them lay there with the wounds.

I like that you’re so open about the positive aspects of revenge.

Yeah, fucking hell—it’s just great!

I interviewed Henry Rollins last year, and he worries that when he gets too comfortable his writing won’t be as good. The more comfortable you are, the less sensitive you are, and the less exposed you are to what’s going on around you.

I do agree with that. But there’s always discomfort even in comfort. I’m not the type of person to totally switch off and become complacent, I don’t think, unless I get completely fed up with the whole thing and then my passion for it slowly starts to disintegrate without me knowing. But I do understand what he means. And he’s considerably older than me, so it probably gets to a point in your life where your energy kind of runs out, I suppose? I don’t know.

I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that if someone gets famous in their 20s, it’s because of luck; if it’s in their 30s, it’s because of talent; if they got famous in their 40s, it’s hard work.

Yeah, it’s hard work. And persistence, and I just really wasn’t going to quit on it. I really had a point to prove. I don’t know if it was fired partly by wanting to show people that I wasn’t that useless, drug-addled tosser that everybody—a lot of people—kind of thought I was. But also I have this vision: I see these people just acting like wankers, and it was doing my head in, and I wanted to get that on paper—to nail that. I wanted to express that. The world around me was based around monetary gain and what people owned, and once you got these people on their own and started talking to them, they really have fuckall to say. I started noticing that more and more, so I started exploring that. That fueled the lyrical formula of Sleaford Mods, really.

At this point, how connected do you feel to other people? Or to put it another way— how much less alone do you feel now that you’re in the band?

When we play live, I just look out and I’m joking and twatting about and there is seriously no pretense whatsoever. It’s almost like a stand-up comedian type show, but with some music. Obviously there is a lot of posing and a lot of this and that, a little of the odd pout, because you just can’t help it. I don’t feel singular or on my own; I think a lot of people feel the same way—frustrated. I think there’s different levels of frustration, and people communicate their frustration in different ways. But once it’s done I just blend back into the crowd. Me and Andrew are in the papers and everything else, but once that’s over, we blend back in. Ideally after Sleaford Mods is integrated into the public’s consciousness, I just go back to being the person I was before.

You’ve minimized some of your posing— Andrew just pushes play on the laptop and hangs out with a beer, instead of hunching

over and pretending he’s working so hard to keep the song going. It’s kind of refreshing—that’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do, isn’t it?

I wanted him to do that. He wouldn’t have it for about a year. He still had the psychology of ‘I gotta look like I’m doing something’ because—he’s just as good a musician as any credible guitar player, I think. Anybody else, a drummer or a bass player, whatever.

But he was like, ‘This is just fucking mad, I’m just going to stand there?’ ‘Yeah, you just stand there. I’ll do the work, you just press play.’ But he just gelled with it—it just worked completely. He does get involved a little bit—he shouts out the choruses a little bit, and he’s a good prompter as well.

What’s the point of having a drummer and a bass guitarist when he’s probably going to slow the tune down or speed it up? It probably won’t be right, so what’s the point?

Why not have the exact loops playing? And that’s it? Provided I do my job correctly, I don’t think the power of that will sort of falter.

Have you read the E.P. Thompson book, The Making Of The English Working Class?

To be honest with you, there’s only a couple of political books or books that have critiqued society that I’ve managed to read all the way through. I’ve been trying to read a bit of Marcuse and stuff like that, from the Frankfurt school, and it’s completely brilliant.

You just know it’s completely brilliant, you start reading it. But it kind of alienates you because it’s just too deep. You’ve read it? What did you think of it?

It’s kind of a slog. I got to give it to you there. But it is pretty fascinating. He takes on the idea of Luddites being people who feared technology. The Luddites realized the mechanization of labor was only primarily going to benefit the people who owned the machines. It’s not going to benefit the worker. They also realized that before the industrial revolution, people had a lot more leisure time, and they thought it was the stupidest thing: ‘Now I have to go make stuff that I don’t need, so I’ll have money to buy more things that I don’t need, made by other people.’ They didn’t understand the sense in it. Meanwhile, there were all these laws being passed to take away their pasture lands. So when they would go break the machines, it wasn’t because they had this irrational fear of technology. It was because they knew that their way of life was going to disappear, and that they wouldn’t be benefiting from it.

So was he critiquing that? That’s interesting. I didn’t know that they were viewed as people that were fearful of technology, but then again, you would question that, wouldn’t you? That’s just stupid. Of course they were sticking up for their own rights. They’re absolute bastards, aren’t they? Always trying to keep us down, one way or another. It’s not looking good for us, as a race. It’s not looking good at all.

We’re going to get it at some point. It’s pretty fucked, isn’t it really?

This is a personal question but I’m curious— you say the human race is fucked, but you also have a child. And having a child is in a lot of ways an act of optimism.

To be honest, I didn’t think I was capable, you know what I mean? I’d been drugging it up, so I didn’t think there was anything in between my legs that was going to do anything about making anybody pregnant. So I agreed to do it, and then two weeks later, bang. But like we were saying earlier, it is fucked. That doesn’t mean to say that life won’t carry on.

From the age of 20 upwards, it dawned on me that life wasn’t very good at all. Don’t get me wrong—I’m quite a happy person, and I do see a lot of beauty in existence, but generally speaking, the umbrella above us isn’t very good. I’m sure my daughter will find that out when she gets older, when she gets to a certain age, like anybody will. And she’ll make her own way, like I did and like you have and like anybody has. There’s two ways to go. You can either become that turned-off kind of … just functional form, or you can think about things and try and grapple with that and make the compromise between the two.

I think about if somebody says like, ‘How does 2050 sound? Does 2050 sound like it’s going to be a good time?’ And it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be so great.

No, I don’t think so. And also the powers that be are just too strong. I was talking to somebody the other day about it. The only way I can see this trying to change is through violence, but even that’s just stupid, saying that. There’s enough violence in the world.

Why add more? But these people are just laughing at us.

The last song is ‘The Blob’: ‘The blob ain’t bothered / the slime don’t care.’ What’s that about? Who is the blob and who are the slimes? The same ‘these people’?

The blob is meant to be like almost like the Biblical—not religious, but that kind of comparison with a force of nature that’s so fucked up. It’s all these false, egotistical, careerist, wanking musicians. Just these crap bands that are empty so-called rock stars and stereotypical people walking around. The blob is kind of like … ‘One day there will be a real rain that washes the scum off the streets,’ that kind of Taxi Driver thing. A sort of a merciless force coming down and wiping off all these people. Not to wish death on anybody, cause that’s just stupid. But like— De-wankerization of society?

Yeah, definitely. More than anything as I get older, the unjust nature of everything is really a massive thing for me. In my own personal world, I’m quite secure. I’ve got a lot of love around me and my domestic situation is OK, but—it’s partly because I’ve experienced misery, I’ve experienced not having any money and being hungry, those things, and I’ll never forget them and I seem to have carried them with me. I know hardship, I know what it’s about, I’ve seen it, and I think—to me it’s an inspiring thing. I used it instead of letting it use me.

If I look around, I just connect those past memories with what I see around me. It’s always at the forefront, and I think it will always be in there. I can’t really see me having a predominant theme in anything else. I don’t think anything else is as important to talk about.

SLEAFORD MODS’ KEY MARKETS IS OUT NOW ON HARBINGER SOUND. INTERVIEW

DAM-FUNK Interview by Chris Ziegler Photography by Ward Robinson

As appropriate to Dam-Funk’s well-known Gemini nature, the new Invite The Light is an album of two halves—the first an exploration of the light and the sky, climaxing on the Flea / Computer Jay / Dam collab “Floating On Air,” and the second a strapped-for-battle fight for survival on the dirty surface of the Earth, announced by the crushing “HowUGonFuckAroundAndChooseABusta?” (And exploded by the merciless “Hunt And Murder of Lucifer,” too.) Guests like Snoop Dogg, Jody Watley, Q-Tip, Ariel Pink, Leon Sylvers III and IV and more slide through The Light, which begins and ends with underground-radio-style stay-strong messages from funk legend Junie Morrison, and which takes everything you recognize as the sound (and soul) of Dam-Funk and reveals new vision and power. If his 2009 debut Toeachizown demonstrated everything Dam could do, The Light demonstrates everything Dam is: it’s a focused and intensely personal album as it glides from bright to night, with long moments where the bleakness and the beauty dissolve into the same fundamental thing. On Invite The Light and in this interview, too, Dam reveals himself as an artist aiming for the horizon instead of just for the hit—he’s the kind of musician who always wants to go a little further. He speaks now about freedom, healing and how there might be just one more Dam-Funk record left.

So much of Invite The Light—and all your music—talks directly to the listener. If you’re talking specifically about yourself, it’s usually to communicate a larger lesson or an observation. There’s not a lot of ‘me me me’ songs. Even the title here is an instruction. Why is this kind of dialogue important to you?

It’s a maturity—to be fair, if I was ten years younger than what I am now, I probably would be thinking in a different mindset.

You know when they crown someone an adult at 18 or 21? A lot of us know that you’re nowhere near an adult at 21 or 18. Nowhere near. The longer you exist and travel through the maze of our lives, through this planet that we’re on, you learn lessons, and you start to learn from different peoples. Along the way, you meet fantastic people. Along the way, as well, you’ll meet some horrible people. And whether it be naturally horrible or good, or naturally evil or whatever, maybe due to mental illness or who knows the reasons?

But you’re going to meet different people and experience different things, and from those experiences, you have a choice. You can either become evil like them, or you’re going to remember your past and your memories and the way you used to be, and you’re going to try to hold on to some of those aspects that you learned along the way. What I decided to do, even while being hurt in life—after I graduated high school and jumped into the big pond—I decided to not go negative and try to give a positive energy out there but still not be Mr. Perfect. As you can see, in the middle of the album, the record gets dark.

It starts off positive or optimistic, then gets dark and then ends in a positive way. That’s what I’ve been into the last five years. Invite 24

the Light is about that. I hope that more of us can invite it. And you don’t have to hear a lot of crazy-ass B-words and N-words and shit like that. I didn’t want to give an album like that. It’s like every record that a lot of these cats are doing right now has the n-word every four and six bars. Nobody knows what they want to do as far as … do they sing the lyrics at the concert? It’s like motherfuckers is confused. I’m tired of being involved and contributing to that type of bullshit. The last couple years now, it’s becoming a gimmick to say the word in the songs. This is really weak.

You got a lot of ways to be able to heal people through music, and they keep perpetuating and making up reasons why—why can’t you just do what you know you know in your heart? You don’t have to make the song like that every fucking time you’re out the gate.

What this album seems to say—what a lot of your music seems to say—is that there’s something more than what’s on Earth.

‘Something more’ is maybe the driving theme of Dam-Funk. What exactly is that something more? What happens when we go further?

I do feel like there’s something more. Further is, to me … imagine like 2,500 years from now, or maybe 500 years from now, and we got to a maturity level where we were so cool and not tripping on each other where another civilization would actually stop and land and speak with us. That’s the kind of mind pattern and frame that I’m thinking of, even though I get distracted like all of us. That’s what I’m saying: ‘Invite the Light.’

They’ll never pass by Earth and stop right now because of the idiotic ways that we operate, but also we have this immense love that I’m sure that they would love to experience. But

they can’t get down here and risk it because we act so crazy still. I mean, look at Donald Trump with the idiotic comments. We’re not developed. We’re not ready yet. The vibe in that music is based on the fact that I know we can be better, and I know that there is another place out there that one day we will be as humanity. When we pass away, I do believe that there’s another place that we go that’s just a higher level, and I believe that before we’re born, we’re somewhere as well—who knows the dimension? This dimension right now is so surreal and so alive in our face right now that I think that the next level is just so beautiful—that’s why they never really come back and give us the full details. It’s really the challenge up to us to see how we’re going to end up going through this era of our lives.

So you want to create something that goes beyond the human.

The chords we’re using, and some of the music that we’re doing through funk—and even the ambient record I’m going to be coming out with after this—will be delving more into that. That’s the stuff that I’ve really been trying to tap into. So that’s always been the thing, as far as reaching more—beyond where we’re at now. We have a lot of things to deal with: ‘Oh God, we have so many problems to deal with now on Earth. And we’re dealing with other things on another planet?’ I got you, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have to think about all of it from an intergalactic perspective. That’s what makes us so selfish, every day. We don’t act as if others are paying attention to us in a different galaxy. That’s probably a little too heavy, but I just think of music as beyond Earth, you know what I mean?

So again—you’re saying we can do something more?

It is all of us. It isn’t just music—it’s authors, it’s all kinds of things that you do. It’s building a building. You think on a higher level, and that’s what’s missing, I think, in this game. Everybody’s so focused on money and having a hit that they’re not thinking about something that could be around and the consciousness and the years to come. I know that even with Toeachizown … I knew that it took a while for it to catch on. Even with this album, I’m pretty sure—that’s my luck—that it’s not going to catch on right away. But I’d be proud if later on people pick it up, like ‘Now I get it.’ I’m always a little ahead of the time, even though I’m not old or as young as a lot of people in this game.

I’ve never seen an artist like—a recording artist—I don’t like to say ‘artist,’ because it’s almost like self-inflammatory— I’ve never seen somebody relevant, and I say that humbly speaking, at the point that I’m in right now.

They’re usually young or old-ass dudes who are relevant: Paul McCartney, and then you go down to like the young guys. I appreciate that people still think I’m cool and relevant, but what I think that maybe helped me is that: don’t jump in the game so fast. If I had jumped in the game when I started fucking with MC Eiht and the Westside Connection and put out an album then, it probably would have been over by now. I waited for a while. And also it’s about keeping your health right and taking care of yourself and looking good. You keep yourself up. You stay fly. It’s no reason that dudes younger than me are looking way older than me. You just don’t let yourself go. That’s why I consider myself timeless. I’m not about this old thing and this young thing. If anybody asks you your age, you just say, ‘I’m timeless.’

INTERVIEW

You’re in the bridge generation that grew up before the internet but then adapted to it—you’re part of the old world and the new world. How does that guide the way you make your music?

I try to keep plugged in. I just choose to— even my lady. We both stay plugged into a lot of different things, and all of us are a part of a generation where we were already bucking the system with the hip-hop thing and the punk world. We were the first generation after all the wars to keep bucking the system.

I’m glad you brought up bucking the system—to me, funk has always felt like battle music. It’s not casual or vacant.

It’s fighting for something, and against something. Real funk has fight to it—so what is the fight?

It fights for freedom. The musical genres— especially R&B and soul—those are very traditional parts of the Black experience, and also beyond Black, because funk allows different musicians and different backgrounds to be involved in the music. Soul and R&B is more segregated. It’s just like country music and certain aspects of rock after we created it, but beyond that—funk allows everybody, just like house does. The point that I’m trying to say is that some of these genres spawned from a reaction from the norm. And then also fuck the marketplace. I’m really trying to say what we go through as human beings. Funk is the soundtrack. Like I always say, to me, I describe funk as a smile with a tear. It’s not just party music. That’s the difference. The fight that you hear in the music is because it’s sometimes sad music with a beat. I don’t think that’s focused on—I think that’s very overlooked. When you hear Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ joint, that’s of course the happy part of funk. But then when you hear stuff like Junie Morrison’s stuff or Ohio Players and even the Parliament stuff, and some of the things that they’ve done … Certain parts of ‘Be Alright’ from Zapp, like the ending part of the song. Or even ‘(Not Just) Knee Deep’ from Funkadelic. It’s a 15-minute song, but the last part where it’s the guitar solo, that is the example right there—you can hear the soul and his emotion that’s going on when he’s playing that guitar solo, Michael Hampton, on ‘Knee Deep.’ It’s fucking spiritual. That is like the epitome of funk, right there. And then even like Mtume, even with the lyrics that they fooled you with … the music, when it first drops—beyond Biggie Smalls, I’m talking about the original version of ‘Juicy Fruit’—when the chords drop and no singing is on it, that is the shit right there. That’s funk. People don’t know what they’re dealing with, though, because they had to put those kind of lyrics on top of it, but that mood of the music is funk.

That’s the battle, too. Someone told George Clinton once, ‘Oh, you guys are selling out,’ and he’s said, ‘We’re not selling out—we’re going behind enemy lines.’

Exactly. That’s what’s going on, man. This might be one of my final shots, but with this record, hopefully people do realize the reason I haven’t changed is that I am bucking the system, and I’m not going to give up, and I’m not going to bend, and I’m not going to do some bullshit that I don’t believe in—and at this point, I don’t have to. Humbly speaking, 26

I think that I’ve made a statement so far, just with one album. But with this one now … I might go for three and then just change my name or something. I think that three is a charm. I’m really thinking about it. One more after this under Dam-Funk and then I’m just going to leave it but go under some different pseudonyms or just use my real name. I’m almost ready to do that. I just want to be remembered as somebody who came in the middle of all this bullshit that we’re involved in and actually stood for something. I always tell people, ‘stand for something.’ If you can.

What do you stand for?

Me, I’m standing up for funk—but in a way other people can use it as a metaphor to stand up for something that you believe in. That’s really it. If you believe in anything in life, don’t give in. I chose to ride for funk. If somebody wants to ride for being a plumber—the best plumber that they can be, without selling out to some different type of plumbing agency— yeah, then that’s what it is. I’m trying to inspire people to do what they want to do. And I’m also about positivity, even though I do have some breaks. Even at the Morris Day [and the Time at Santa Monica Pier] show, I was going to kill people in the audience.

What happened?

I forgot that it was a family crowd, and I forgot that people were there, really for [Morris Day and the Time]. I knew people were there to support and check me out, but it was really a bunch of random tourists and bobble-heads out there walking their dog and stuff. I really didn’t anticipate. What it was … I started the set off cool, but then halfway through, I decided to speak about why I changed the lyrics from ‘niggas hit the pavement’ to ‘brothas hit the pavement,’ and that’s when all hell broke loose. And it wasn’t bad—it was just that I had to explain something that was a little more heartfelt, and the crowd wasn’t having it. They just wanted to party and shake their booty to the Time. So I said, ‘OK, let me get off of it.’—you know what I’m saying? Then the rest of the time, I just shredded a fucking solo in their face for like seven minutes straight. It just wasn’t connecting except for my people that were there. Sometimes art is uncomfortable, and I’ve dealt with it. We made up for it at the Hammer Museum when I bought the band and that was one of the greatest shows I’ve had in L.A.—just ups and downs.

What do you mean by being positive? You aren’t shy about recognizing and talking about things you feel are wrong. It seems more complex than just looking happy all the time, and pretending we’re living in a perfect world.

Definitely. We’re not. To me, positivity is just like staying optimistic. It’s like looking at the cup halfway full instead of halfway empty. It’s just if people thought more optimistically and positive about getting to their next goal in life instead of giving up. And also not talking shit about people. It’s so easy to get to a level where all of a sudden you start shitting on somebody in a group of people at a bar. Why not just extract yourself and just listen? Don’t participate in that stuff. It just perpetuates a negative vibe, and it’s like why destroy somebody else?

You said recently that, ‘I’m too weird for the mainstream, I accepted it.’ George Clinton said something like—how Funkadelic strived to become underground, and how they made records they didn’t want on the radio. His rationale was that he didn’t want to compromise, he wanted to be different, and he felt that anybody who connected to what he was doing would be a lifelong fan.

That’s definitely where I’m at. It’s about putting together work and a catalogue that you’d be proud of, 80 years old on a beach somewhere—you’d be proud that you never really bent. That’s where I’m at. I want to be happy about the music I gave people, and I want it to be something I wasn’t pushed or guided to do in a false way. I respect George Clinton and what he’s talking about because some of us do think like that. I was always a little bit different than everybody in my area. I was the kid who was playing drums at show-and-tell in elementary school—me and my dad used to take the kit there on Fridays.

And then I was into Rush and KISS and Iron Maiden. I just did my own thing. What I’m trying to explain is I never really think about giving up. I’ve had dark moments, but I never gave up on the music because it’s so embedded in me. I was able to be confident and secure enough to know that one day, something will be achievable—like making a living with music. I guess I can give props to my father and my mom. They raised me to not give up.

How does being a record collector affect your music? In one sense, finding some unbelievable but obscure record is encouraging—it shows you talent and creativity are always out there. But it’s discouraging in that you see how many unbelievable records went nowhere.

I know what you mean. You never know how things are going to work out. You’re transcending people who really don’t go further in it. Some of those artists that really had the goods to do it, but they got distracted along the way. I make my music and stand my ground for that reason. I think the battle can be won. It depends on what people you get around and [if you] treat people a certain way. Leon Sylvers III told me that it’s all about relations—I don’t want to believe that because that’s almost like borderline nepotism.

Like: ‘Who you know.’

Exactly. But what I feel he’s saying is that it’s about how you treat people in order to have some of your dreams come true. It’s a natural universal karma thing. If you act like an asshole, things aren’t going to happen for you. Even if you don’t have a dime in your pocket, it’s the way you treat people—come to the table with something. If it’s not money, come to the table with something that benefits the people involved in the situation to help your dream come true. It doesn’t have to be monetary.

So be ready to give people something?

Come to the table with something instead of asking. That’s what’s going on in this area now—like the ‘let’s work’ comments. ‘Man, I like your stuff, let’s work.’ I’m like … ‘I don’t know you. What are you talking about?’ It’s not that easy. Back in the day, I would have never been able to go to Gene Simmons and ask him to blow fire at the concert.

You were ‘on your own’ for a long time before you got signed—you had a lot of time to figure out who you were and what your sound was and why before you starting getting records out. What kind of foundation did that time give you?

I came up in a weird period because it was right before the internet blew up. Right when I first got my stuff out, that’s when it was picking up. I wasn’t able to benefit from the fast-paced snap-your-fingers success deal by hype, like a lot of people are doing it right now. I was already working different day jobs while I was trying to develop my music. I never rushed into the music industry.

I didn’t graduate high school and think, ‘I’m going to go get an album deal at Warner Brothers.’ I was just making music from the heart, making tapes. My friends around me, we were all just concerned about, ‘Yo man, where you going to work at?’ ‘I’m trying to get a warehouse job at Sears.’ ‘Oh, I’m going to try to get one at Bullock’s.’ My friends were always about making money because we didn’t want to sell dope, so we made money to take our girls out and buy clothes and go to clubs. I always told myself, ‘You know, man, this is never going to be in the mainstream.’

So thank God for labels like Stones Throw or I would have never even been out. I just refused to get the big studio stuff. Then the technology got better. It allowed some of these people you see get signed overnight to go to Guitar Center and get a rig and a program and start making songs that sound—a lot of times—horrible. But none of us care about it because all the music sounds like that. We’ve been duped into thinking that an 808 bass kit and a snap and a little tone of a nursery rhyme bell sound on the track is dope because it got the market and the market got flooded with the same sound, so the powers that be think, ‘Oh, this is what the kids are doing.’

But they really don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. It’s been flooded with that type of music. So people who play keyboards, who play guitars, bass, drums—they’re the weirdos now because it only takes a certain box unit or program to make music that sounds cool to the money people, the bean counters, who are just paying people out. And also the crowd has been hypnotized now because everything on the radio and movie soundtracks and TV background music is all sounding like that.

You have to just stay grounded in what you really know as a musician and just not bend.

Stones Throw gave me that chance to keep this type of music alive and put it alive, where a major label probably would have never did.

What ultimately happens to music and musicians like that? Obviously they can become pretty popular and successful.

It just doesn’t last as long. The root doesn’t last and the tree ends up falling over sooner, and that’s why people like Frank Zappa and George Clinton—a lot of these cats are still around because they didn’t stop making hits, and like you said at the top of the interview, people will always stick with them. That’s the type of artist I’m striving to be now. I’m never going to be into what’s going on. I just exist in a different vibe. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back or anything, I’m just trying to give you the vibe of what’s going on. I was INTERVIEW

talking to somebody the other day … When we were younger, we never asked—we never knew—what age Prince was. We never knew what age Stevie Wonder was. No one cared.

But this era, everyone is Y-U-N-G, young this, young that. I’m like, ‘You’re not going to be Y-U-N-G young in three years,’ so it’s like shut the fuck up. Everybody’s going to grow older. If these people keep latching onto the fact that they’re young, it’s cheesy. They don’t even realize how cornball that sounds because the real legends—you never cared how old Miles Davis was. You didn’t know John Coltrane’s age. That’s the kind of existence— as far as perception—and the kind of artist I want to be. My album comes out, it shouldn’t be, ‘old-school,’ or ‘He’s not part of the young L.A., but he’s a part of the …’ whatever—it’s just a musician who exists and is just making some stuff. With that said, I just feel that right now, the fake thing … to be fair, I don’t think anybody jumps into it and puts on like a fake suit like, ‘I’m going to be fake today, and go out and try to pursue this!’ But there are a lot of opportunities, and there are a lot of people who are in this game. They move to L.A. and then they have this agenda, and they could pluck somebody out of nowhere and try to make them a star musician, and that person that they plucked might not have the same passion. So here they are on the charts, bullshitting with some overly produced candy-ass track. You’ve got other cats who’ve been doing this shit for years, but they bypass them because of what’s going on behind the scenes with the business—the cute face and the young thing, and whatever.

Do you still practice your NONCAT philosophy? ‘Not One Negative Comment Action or Thought’?

Of course I would love to continue practicing it, but it’s that’s all it was—a practice. It’s not something that any of us, humanly, can abide by because we’re just human. I still have it in my mind. I have it on my answering machine.

It’s just an interesting way to try to calm down the storms that are in all of us when we’re dealing with people and different things we see. It helps stop you from getting online and destroying somebody on Facebook or Twitter or that kind of thing. When I made ‘I Don’t Want to Be a Star,’ I was serious—it was a statement on how it’s not even alluring or cool anymore to be a ‘star.’ Everybody is getting clowned. People who work day-today jobs get off work or during lunch break, all they do is go online and just kill anybody who’s an entertainer. I don’t consider myself an entertainer.

What’s the difference between an entertainer and what you do?

Art is pouring your heart, blood, and soul into something that you believe in. An entertainer is pleasing others. When you’re doing art, you’re healing yourself and putting energy into something that you would like people to experience to maybe heal them, too. Entertaining is about focusing on the people. Being an artist is somebody who’s just doing it—you don’t care about the opinion somebody is saying about what you just created. You understand? If you drop the juggle ball, at a circus, then you better be worried.

INTERVIEW

You’ve talked about music healing in really precise way—even using healing chords.

What is a healing chord?

I grew up on choosing certain songs that made me feel that way inside that I liked. Prefab Sprout is one of my go-to bands—groups that really have that vibe. Curtis Mayfield, another one. I started narrowing down my record collection in order to get just those certain vibes. Even Rush has some of that stuff going on. With the chords I use, I know what to push to make it feel a certain way, and it evokes memories; it evokes certain things. I’m getting even deeper into it soon. I’m going to start riding those chords a little more. I think right now I’m just going to start talking to people who have supported me, and I’m going to always make music for myself and them from now on. You’ll start to hear more where I ride that type of shit—where you can actually feel that way.

Like medicine.

Definitely it is. Music is the most awesome free drug that we have.

This album begins and ends with that transmission from Junie Morrison. On the first instance, it says, ‘If we invite the light, it will surely come to us. If we invite the funk, it will never let us down.’ But at the end, he adds the line: ‘Therefore, we must invite the light, in order to survive.’ That raises the stakes—is this album about life and death for you?

I appreciate you asking. In order to survive … it’s supposed to be almost like a blueprint, in the way it starts out optimistically and then goes deep into the darkness and then comes out. I’m telling you right there, in the record, that if you just free your mind of all negativity … like ‘Virtuous Progression,’ I’m saying if you get to that point that you can actually calm down the voices in your head and whatever distractions you have, to live this kind of life.

Yeah, we can laugh, we can play—and also do some devious things as well, because it’s just human nature—but at the end of the day, you have to realize, ‘I still want to invite the light in my life and walk through that door.’

There’s a promo—a little 15-minute thing that I’ve done on my Instagram—and I’m walking towards a door and I open it and I walk through the door, and there’s a big light shining. That right there is summing up the record. It’s a choice. You don’t have to stay in the darkness all the time. A lot of these motherfuckers are always talking about the darkness. It’s too easy to remain in the dark and be trivial with trivial-type bullshit that we all exist in. You have to break that spell. I feel that the best way to exist on this planet, the way it is now, is to try to invite the light. That’s what I’m trying to say in this record. Don’t stay in the darkness.

DAM-FUNK PERFORMS WITH NITE JEWEL AND MOON B ON SAT., SEPT. 5, AT THE TERAGRAM BALLROOM, 1234 W. 7TH STREET, LOS ANGELES. 8 PM / $18 / ALL AGES. TERAGRAMBALLROOM.COM. DAMFUNK’S INVITE THE LIGHT IS OUT ON FRI., SEPT. 4, ON STONES THROW. VISIT DAM-FUNK AT STONESTHROW. COM/DAMFUNK.

SIC U M ILS IVE A L T K D E OC C T F CURAT RA shows - 21+ no cover - live &C

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448 S. Hill St. BASEMENT Los Angeles, CA www.MrsFish.com 213.873.444 No Cover 21+

DERADOORIAN Interview and photography by Daiana Feuer

Ever since putting out her solo Mind Raft EP in 2009, Angel Deradoorian felt a calling to pursue her own music further. But she happened to be a member of a very popular band called Dirty Projectors and since cloning herself was not an option, there wasn’t enough room in her life to fully commit to both projects. In 2011 she made a big choice—she left the band and moved to California.

She spent the next three years exploring her own sound and writing the songs that would eventually be collected on The Expanding Flower Planet, her new album for Anticon. Her jams direct the listener inward to a sandy shore of consciousness, and invite us to swim in our own self-awareness like a dolphin searching for the cosmic horizon.

You’ve been in Big Sur for a few weeks. Was that for pleasure?

Because I’ve been floating around so much I just really wanted to be alone and play music.

And since I don’t have a studio situation set up, I went with all my instruments and wrote and played music and cooked for myself and looked at the ocean. It was cool. It was also wildly pretty intense.

Intense to be by yourself?

Yeah—because I was in a dark zone for a while, and that was sort of the culminating end of it: being there and having to sift through some heavier emotional stuff in a very solo way.

What is your interest in self reflection?

On your album there are themes of mindexpanding, knowing thyself, figuring things out in your head …

For some reason it feels very important to me. I think a lot of the truth seeking or understanding things that I look for are within myself first. I have to figure it out through me as opposed to an extroverted finding it out in the world. There’s an important aspect of introspection that I need in order to feel like I can keep creating or moving forward. I need personal time to process. I’m very emotional.

I hold on to emotions in a way that I don’t even realize sometimes how deep it goes. And when I go into those modes I can actually deal with it and become a better person or more clear. And that contributes to creating or understanding the world.

Is creating a necessity for you in that process? To put ideas into music?

More and more, as I get older, that’s how it feels. I’m not a person who does a ton of creative output. I’m pretty slow.

It only took you five years to make this album.

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Ha! As I get older it feels more and more necessary for that to accompany my life—the creative output—even though it’s slow. It feels necessary. Living on earth and in society, it’s one of the ways I can handle being alive.

What are your ideas on mind expansion and how music might be a way to access that? Without necessarily just taking acid and staring at the wall?

Well, I did a little bit of that! But music is a universal language and it doesn’t have to involve talking so it’s a way to access deep breathing and exercise your mind. Psychedelics and music are both access ways to not talk but ‘experience.’ So going into those zones with music takes you out of intellectualized mental space. It’s a freedom experience. And on my end to be creating that is a personal level of expansion. Sometimes I will just play an instrument for a while. As I was writing the album, I would get too stoned sometimes and just hold down a key on the synthesizer for a while and just sit there drifting off. It sounds good in there. I love drones. It feels good. The physical experience of music affects your mental and spiritual space. I like the connection that I got to discover just by experimenting. It was a nice alternative to maybe taking psychedelic drugs. Music is like a smaller or different kind of dose to take—it doesn’t deplete me in the same way, it’s not as demanding, and it’s rejuvenating in its process. A lot of growth can come from doing mushrooms. Those moments are a big leap.

But more so than those experiences, maybe it’s the afterthoughts from those experiences that make me realize I don’t know anything—like that’s the big answer. All my experiences are subjective. I’ve had some objective experience of myself, but it all comes back to realizing

I’m not right about something. Maybe you are … but you aren’t because it’s all relative to yourself. Every day something happens that guides me. As of recently I’ve felt lost in what I know.

Why? Just the social issues of the world, and not being able to fully relate to all the pain that people are going through in the world or to understand their lives. I really only have my life and my experiences. I just have what I have.

The more I start to think about those issues, the more I feel disconnected—feel that I don’t know anything. It makes me re-evaluate my spiritual beliefs or personal beliefs, or want to refine those beliefs and stay open. There’s not one way—there really is not. You will never know all the ways that there are to ‘be’ in the world.

You’ll get bogged down if you’re always comparing your way to the ways of others.

When you decide that you want to be the kind of person that’s constantly exploring and expanding your mind, you feel really alone.

It’s scary. You don’t have anything or anyone to rely on when you start to process that kind of stuff. There’s no outline for your trajectory.

For instance, I’m not just going to pick a religion and live within the confines of that religion. I want to keep exploring and I don’t know where that’s going to go, and I don’t have any fixed answers for any fixed questions.

I understand why people need those things: structure, guidelines. You’re going to go fucking crazy without a good balance.

But is the aim really to find an answer? Isn’t it to be always questioning?

I definitely don’t think there’s an answer but I want to access the places where I feel in this metaphysical way that I’m hoping to get to. I

don’t know if I will get there but at least I can explore it. And that’s kind of hard to explain— what that ‘thing’ is—but it’s something I want.

Trying to actualize experiences that either I feel or have inside … I want them to be a physical reality but they won’t be because they’re not real … in the physical plane, that is. It is real to me. But it’s also just fun to ask questions all the time. Just keep asking. I appreciate the stoner people of the world who ask stoner-y questions because they can really take you into these different places. People get made fun of for asking silly existential questions but they’re totally reasonable.

Those are your people!

Totally. I’m down! I’ll go there.

As you grow older, no one is giving a purpose to your life. You’re no longer doing what somebody says. You have to find a reason that makes living worthwhile.

Definitely. Going through that process and doing that alone feels really important but it’s also intense and difficult. But it’s the way I want to do it. It makes me realize how much I need to rely on myself and trust that I’m making the right decisions for me. And I feel that I have. But it doesn’t just come to me. It doesn’t just happen. I have to apply myself to a process.

Some people just coast through life while others dedicate themselves to making sense of it. Coasting might be a little easier but is it as fulfilling?

Either way you have this incessant worry that’s in you. You’re coasting and worrying about money and security, or if you’re working to be a creative person, it’s also really hard because you’re worrying about the same shit, plus trying to come up with a way to make life relatable to others. And you’re dedicating INTERVIEW

time to something that’s not going to pay you right away—you’re not part of a company and you’re not in school either, so it demands a lot of yourself. It’s all on you.

But you need to do that because it ties into the type of person you are.

It’s true. Also being a woman and being in a male dominated industry, and being in bands since I was sixteen and working with a lot of men, it’s made me even more motivated to do things on my own. That’s how the guys work.

It’s more the mentality of focusing on one thing that I’ve been around a lot. I had that notion before I was in bands but it all became more real as the years passed for me and I put the idea into practice. So by the time I got to do this album I didn’t want any help. I wanted to show myself that I could do this.

How planned was the process of creation?

This was pretty concentrated actually. There was a point with Dirty Projectors where we were about to head into the Swing Lo Magellan cycle of recording and touring and that would have been about two or two and a half years of work, and I already had a solo project going. But it’s such a time consuming and demanding band to be in because of how difficult the music is, so you kind of have to dedicate yourself to one or the other. So me leaving at that time, it was for this. I didn’t work on anything for two years after my EP, since I was still in Dirty Projectors, and I’m a one thing at a time type of person. That’s why the decision had to be so clear-cut. Nat Baldwin is able to be in the band and make [solo] records somehow, but I’m not so much like that! Then I started writing and never stopped until it was done. It took about three years. It was 2011 when I started and I finished in 2014. Then I had to find support, once I mastered the record and it was all done.

Did you play most of the instruments?

I had drummers come in and redo some parts that I wrote, and Niki Randa and Arlene, my sister, came in and did some extra vocals.

Everything else is me.

Do you think the technology or instrumentation you use lends itself to the outcome of the music?

These are all instrument songs. There’s not a lot of in-the-box editing. I treat GarageBand® like a 4-track. I will say that it’s true the instruments I have dictate the outcome for sure because they’re such specific sounds. I never really thought about what I have being part of me in the creative process. But now I hear it and I see that it’s all my stuff in there— all of it. In order to maybe create new sounds or new songwriting structures or progressions I need to get different instruments for the next record!

How did you figure out the live show?

I took an economical approach. First I thought to bring in my sister for shows to sing vocals but as we started rehearsing I realized we could do more. So I incorporated the loop pedal more and have her playing drums, and that way I have more time to play other instruments. We created this live set that works well between the two of us to re-imagine the songs from the album. It’s nice actually because it’s a fully different approach to the songs. It doesn’t have to be exact in any way.

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It’s cool to watch the songs create themselves in the moment.

Merrill of tUnE-yArDs did a similar thing when she was playing solo and I really admired her ability to create these songs on her own.

We toured with her a lot and I was inspired by the possibility of building a live show with less people in your group. I also didn’t want to use a computer on stage or use computer beats. I just had to learn to really use the loop pedal in a live context and not be afraid of it. Also because you want to engage people. I wanted to create an interesting live performance and challenge myself.

How do you think this format might engage people on a meditative level?

People generally respond to it much more than I thought they would. I had this complex that my music was boring for a long time. I had to tell myself to not think that. Coming from a band that’s so stimulating and interesting … whereas now I play slower, repetitive music, and I thought I would lose people’s attention.

But it turned out not to be that way. People seem to get into it. And then other times people are just talking loud over your music and don’t give a shit.

Which begs the question … why did they buy tickets to see a show?

It’s distracting more than anything. You just got to play anyway.

What was the band you were in at age 16?

It was called An Angle. And I was in that band for a couple of years—from Sacramento. I really wanted to be in a band. My brother played music and I was like, ‘I want to do this.’

I was doing visual arts and music growing up and I got to a point where I wanted to decide on what to focus. Music won. I played in tons of bands after that on the west coast, then on the east coast, and I finally moved to New York in 2006 and was playing in six bands at once, which was crazy. But I wanted to play music as much as I could. And then I joined Dirty Projectors two months later and went on tour … for a long time.

Your music isn’t bound by genre. I mean— would you even try to classify it?

I don’t want to be bound by genre. When people ask me what it’s like, I say ‘There’s a lot of singing.’ Even the people that I feel influenced by … some people know about them, but they’re not super mainstream. It kind of depends on who you are explaining it to and how much they know about certain kinds of music. I might explain a certain influence or the sonic aspects of the music.

When I applied for Red Bull Music Academy,® I had to sum it up and I said something like ‘shamanic cave-woman choir’ or something silly like that.

That works.

‘Women singing on a mountain with a loop pedal and a synthesizer.’

DERADOORIAN WITH LAETITIA SADIER (STEREOLAB) ON TUE., SEPT. 22, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $12-$14 / 18+.

THEECHO.COM. DERADOORIAN’S THE EXPANDING FLOWER PLANET IS OUT FRI., AUG. 21, ON ANTICON. VISIT DERADOORIAN AT FACEBOOK. COM/DERADOORIAN.

JESSIE JONES Interview by D.M. Collins Photography by Abby Banks

She may look it, but Jessie Jones is no longer the same shy, young singer from Orange County with the bold, weathered, jazzy old woman’s voice that she was when I first interviewed her in 2010. Back then, she sang with the psychedelia-tinged Burger Recordsapproved garage band Feeding People, who then seemed to be just approaching the lip of the cusp of the edge of greatness. Instead, they quickly burned out, but Jones never truly faded away. After a few years in wandering the country trying out dead-end jobs and engaging with supernatural phenomena, Jones re-emerged in full force in 2015, first on a triumphant tour co-singing lead vocals with Death Valley Girls, and now—as of last month—with her first solo album, which has been tickling the fancies of folks from the bowels of Gnar Burger all the way to the corridors of NPR. (Recorded by Bobby Harlow, it also features Tomas Dolas and Wyatt Blair from Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel as well as Hannah Glass, Corey Gemm and King Tuff.) We now meet again for a very candid interview at the vegan restaurant Sage in Echo Park, a place so opposed to animal cruelty that even the arachnids have started getting cocky …

So I have a confession. Remember when I interviewed Feeding People in my backyard in 2011? You were all so young and so charming; it was obvious the band was going to implode horribly, and soon.

I should have said something. Do you forgive me for not warning you that your life was about to go to shit? It feels like it was just yesterday: you and Louis Filliger put together a new version of Feeding People out of the ashes, then you put out a second album, then it broke up entirely, and then you left town for years! And now you’re back. Feeding People even had a reunion show.

It was, like, such a long period of not playing together, and having all the emotions come out, and hating each other. In the end, you just come back to why you got together in the beginning, and it was just the pure love of it, and wanting to express yourself … I think we just matured. But I never knew people cared!

I didn’t know that I was connecting with anybody, maybe because I was afraid of being heard.

What’s happened to you in the years between the Feeding People breakup and these new solo recordings?

A few nervous breakdowns, a few lapses, two or three million miles across America, a few abductions…

Abductions? Who abducted you?

Aliens. Mostly they were just dark, shadowy characters. I didn’t get to see their faces. But I’ve had dreams where a wand-like device was injected into my brain, and a silvery substance came out…

INTERVIEW

It sounds rather Freudian.

It does have a lot to do with the subconscious overlapping that state.

Can I posit the idea that they might be waking dreams? A lot of people have sleep paralysis, and even feel a ‘dark figure’ hovering over them, but there’s probably a psychological reason ...

I wasn’t having a lucid dream, where I couldn’t move because something was pushing me down, like normal paralysis. I was in this structure and there were figures steering me around in this underground locked-down zone. I’ve seen UFOs. I’ve been on a good one just experiencing paranormal activities in different parts of the country and learning about the occult, and developing more as an artist. Most musicians, whether or not they admit it, do certainly acknowledge a higher power, or transcend this reality through music, which is a religious experience. Maybe it’s different in my perspective because I’m actively trying to pin down where it comes from, and what it’s called, and how it relates to other authors or schools of thought. I’m trying to recreate, through my music, the notion of nature and the divine ‘other.’ I just discovered a couple months ago there was a scientist/ philosopher/astronomer named John Dee, he calls this form of magic ‘Enochian’ magic, and I really believe in it! It’s one of the things I really believe in—that I can talk to angels and angels can talk to me. I definitely get a ‘Glenda the Good Witch’ vibe off you.

White magic, only!

What’s a way that you’ve used your powers for good?

To get this record, for sure. I just, like, prayed every day, up until I heard Bobby [Harlow, who recorded the album] said yes. That’s all I wanted. Bobby recorded it, he engineered it, and he produced it. He and I were working on everything together. And he was so excited!

I feel like we were both trying to contact each other. He only wanted to record very unique types of people. So the only other records he did in L.A. were with King Tuff and White Fang, and both those groups are pretty distinct.

There are little nuggets of philosophical truth all through the songs on the new album—like on ‘Butterfly Knives,’ which is strung together with beautiful koans such as ‘nothing changes like destiny.’ When you say these things, are you speaking directly from your own perspective? Or might you also speak from the perspective of different characters, maybe not always ones we should trust?

Through all my lyrics, I’m definitely channeling whatever is speaking through me, which could be from another plane. But I wouldn’t speak it unless I mean it. I always try to disappear from myself so that other characters can inhabit me; I open myself up to all influences. So sometimes what I’m saying is inspired by another person. So maybe that’s the mysterious force that makes you wonder?

With your song ‘Make It Spin,’ with lyrics like ‘You know I want to quit/you have got that energy/it’s glowing from within…’ I thought it was about smoking meth! But I have a suspicion I’m wrong.

Ha ha! It’s a positive song that is totally

natural and has nothing to do with being high. I honestly wanted to write a song for my friends who are all under the age of 12.

They were so joyful and so happy that I took on that childlike innocence. Again.

I had childhood innocence once! I even believed in God, and losing that faith was kind of a tragic part of growing up. You still seem to have kept your connection with God. Sometimes, though, I sing to the Devil.

Sometimes I sing as an evil person.

What do you sing to the devil?

There’s some songs that I do where I take on that personality. I guess that makes people a little scared.

Does he talk back to you? ‘Now I want you to sing an E flat, and now I want you to butcher a child! I’m Satan!’

[Laughs] I mean, he doesn’t have a name!

You’re starting to sound like Roky Erickson.

At one point he thought was divine, but then he thought he was the devil, and at another point it was aliens…

Yeah, you get possessed. … But I don’t want you to end up like Roky! I want you to be famous like him.

But I want to make sure you don’t end up in an insane asylum, where you have to play in a band with murderers.

But, I mean, that’s the sacrifice you have to make. And I think that’s why they say that you ‘sign a deal with the devil.’ You’re giving him, it, everything: access to your whole soul, maybe. I mean, just that belief in itself is pretty schizophrenic. Or, I mean, delusional.

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Is that what the song on your album, ‘Prisoner’s Cinema,’ is about? ‘God is the devil in prison, trapped in the hearts of those chosen…’

That one is about the phenomena of people in solitary confinement, who often start hallucinating. They’ll see nightmares, or angels. When I lived in Orange County, before I left, that was the first song I wrote, kind of a manic confession!

Orange County as Orange Is the New Black?

Oh, absolutely! I kind of have to retreat and become a hermit to be in touch with my creative side.

Things got even more remote after you left, right?

I went through Colorado. I went to Oregon first, lived in the forest in a tent. Saw Bigfoot several times. At first it was a joke. My main source of income was working at a campground, checking in campers, so we had to kind of wait it out to see if it was legit. It got to the point where we heard it shrieking, and we had to hide. We were so scared that we left a couple weeks later. But we couldn’t leave, because we had to stay and work for the rest of the summer, so we ended up renting an old CCC shed, used for storage. It was really scary, because as soon as the sun went down, you didn’t know if you were going to hear anything, or if it was just a hallucination. But we were completely isolated.

You’ve told me that your favorite bogeyman used to be Charles Manson. And there was a little Manson Girl influence over some of your older work. Is that an influence you’ve shaken off the new album?

I don’t know! I mean, the last song, ‘Mental Illness,’ was made towards the end of the recording, and that was when I was when I was reading the book about the murders, and had a dream about killing them ...

I thought ‘Mental Illness’ was a heartwarming song about how everyone has a little mental illness, but that’s okay, because we’re all in this together. But you’re saying it’s not okay, because we’re going to get together and butcher a child.

No, no babies! I haven’t killed babies. I haven’t killed anything besides a rabbit, in South Carolina. That was kind of mean … that was really gross. We hunted it, and I skinned it. Ooof, that sensation will never leave me.

People who only go to the grocery store and buy fresh meat, they don’t even know.

Aside from Charles Manson and Roky Erickson, what other artists who inspired you to record songs like this?

Broadcast is a group from the U.K. that ended abruptly because the singer died, but she was one of my favorite singers, an artist I listened to constantly while I was away that gave me a lot of hope and inspiration. I mean, one of the main artists I was really obsessed with, and still am, is Kendrick Lamar. He’s absolutely genius. Like, the whole album m.A.A.d. City.

He’s just such an urgent, fearless singer. And that gave me so much drive to, you know … not care. The vocal styles are very upfront, and I tried to borrow that from him. Like, ‘Quicksilver Screen’ was written when I was listening to m.A.A.d. City constantly, and the dangerous attraction that that album has. Of 34

course, I adore everything that Bobby Harlow has done with the Go, and the Conspiracy of Owls…

His production on your album seems so different! It’s not lo-fi, it’s not bombastic like Feeding People was, and it’s not exclusively psychedelic—it’s very different from song to song. One might sound like the Doors, and another very poppy. There’s even a violin on ‘Butterfly Knives’ that sounds like something from the 70s UK kids program, The Wombles.

That was Bobby’s idea. Bobby is the brains behind the operation, for sure! The songs as skeletons came from my own writing, so we just met in the middle. He would say things like ‘Well, this sounds like an Italian wedding song,’ so we would use, like, Eastern scales, or certain instruments.

Did you ever push back on his ideas?

‘Noooo piccolos on this goddamn song!’

No! All his ideas were really great. We worked really well together, with his experience and ear for music, and my complete naivety. Like, I had no idea until recently how important tones were, or what kind of equipment makes you sound like this or that. I thought music was just this magical, surreal blend …

I was just caught up in the moment, or the conviction, the person’s heart, what they’re trying to recreate. I’m not very scientific when it comes to that.

Were you afraid that all these choices might be hard to recreate in a live setting?

Yeah, but I just did it for the sake of creating.

I wasn’t really concerned about going on tour.

I just wanted to make one last album before I die. It was, like, my death wish.

Your ‘death wish?’ You think you’re going to die?

I think so. Something weird is going to happen, for sure.

Forever Changes was made because Arthur Lee thought he was going to die. But he didn’t. How soon do you expect to die?

I don’t know. It’s not just me! I think I’m just really being paranoid about the state of the world. It’s all fleeting! I just felt that there was this closing window, and if I didn’t change what direction I was going in, it was never going to happen. I literally started to feel the creative pitch, and contacted everybody, including Bobby Harlow. I found out later he was planning to leave in two months. Some kind of premonition told me to go for it. I just had to do it. I felt like since I left Orange County—April 2013—there was just such a depression, in L.A. and globally. Everybody was just neglecting … The psychological state of Los Angeles is very morbid, in a weird way. And it’s really dreamy, because no one knows where they are. But it’s a total fantasy world. And if you go to other countries, or if you just kind of step off and go to the really small towns, like in the South—South Carolina, when I was just living in the middle of nowhere—that’s where it hit me: there’s so much poverty, such a lack of education, and not a lot of opportunity for people who are born without any guidance or any money.

Just seeing how capitalism and consumerism really exist only when you’re in the eye of the storm. And when I was working weird jobs and stuff for companies in weird factories

to keep existing, and I could see like, all this crap is coming from China. And I’m sending it to some person’s house in like Anaheim or Chicago, but they don’t see what’s going on behind closed doors. It’s like I could finally see how big America was, how small I was, how small my little bubble in Orange County was.

And I had to talk about it, I guess. I had to get it out. And with all the revelations I had with all my relationships ending … all that waste of time, or emotions, and not really expressing who I was because I was sucked into this kind of weird Stockholm Syndrome kind of relationship, a really obsessive, super intense, passionate world. I had no idea what was going on! I had no grasp of reality. And then when it was starting to explode, I was just like, ‘Aaaaaaaaah, I have to do something with this or I’m going to die! I don’t want to waste my life anymore.’

But you put some of that impulse on hold this year in order to tour with Death Valley Girls—you were sharing lead vocals with Bonnie Bloomgarden on songs mostly created before you came on board. Have you learned any solid lessons from that experience?

Yeah! Showing up and playing shows and getting people excited and making eye contact, and just performing and getting lost in the music, and getting into that rhythm.

I never went on tour for that long before, so that was new! It showed me how to be in a band. I love all of them! They wanted to jam and learn a few songs, I guess in late February, and then I just started playing with them live, right before SXSW. I had four weeks to rehearse! That was my first time playing shows since 2012, so that was crazy, just being on a stage again. Because I have a lot of anxiety! I used to get knots in my stomach, but now I get on stage and it’s like ‘I know how everyone feels.’ And that scares the shit out of me.

Have you ever thought about deflecting the intensity by performing as a character instead? Certainly some of your songs are about interesting characters. Like in ‘La Loba.’ Could you be that character?

Yeah, sometimes I use certain archetypes, and I pretend to be them. But I’m doing that in my head, and it takes up so much energy.

And it’s really intense. That’s usually what’s happening on stage. In that song, it’s about a woman that turns into a wolf, and she finds bones in the desert, and she sings over them.

And the bones come to life, like skeleton animals, and they run off into the horizon. It’s like a folk tale from Mexican folklore.

Walking skeletons … add that to the aliens, and what’s left? Vampires? Chupacabras.

I think chupacabras have a good chance of being real because you have no idea what’s in the middle of nowhere unless you go there!

Some people think they are aliens.

Like alien coyotes? Some kind of wolf-alien hybrid? Very possible.

You’re a hybrid! You’re this sweet, warm, innocent person who speaks from your heart. But there’s a serious dark side to you that thinks about alien wolves. What’s something terrible that you’ve done?

Sometimes I steal food from the grocery store?

One time I stole clothes from Goodwill. I think my shadow side is mostly self-inflicted.

I wonder if that’s from being raised in an Evangelical church. How old were you when you realized most people don’t go to church where they speak in tongues?

I think I was probably 11 or 12. And I was finally getting to the end of junior high, beginning of high school years.

I’m glad, for selfish reasons, because that’s where you learned to sing. Is singing to God like a first date? Like, you want to look good, but you also want to be yourself?

It’s like singing to your true love. Like, you want to give them everything. You’re not afraid. Like you embrace who they are, exactly who they are, no judgments. It’s just pure love, like all light, no negativity. It takes up the whole room. It’s like your whole day. Like you bring yourself from, like, every single moment you’ve ever had, and then you release it. And then you are just nothing. And then, I don’t know—you cease to be a human.

What you’re describing sounds so much like enlightenment. Like a Buddhist thing.

It is, like, everytime.

And if rock music is nothing else, it is the secularization of that feeling, from Ray Charles to Little Richard to Elvis, who always wanted to make gospel albums.

You know, the gospel style, you sing with your whole body. I didn’t realize that was a part of what they were doing. With Bobby, I remember we were using different mics in the booth, and he would say, like, ‘You need to stand with your whole self present. You need to make sure that your warmth is coming into that microphone from your body, not just your voice.’ And so I definitely take that from church. You’re not singing to everyone else. You’re not caring if anyone else can hear you. You’re singing to God, you know. Like the best listener. The only one that matters.

You know, so, I think, that’s maybe a big part of it.

As a kid growing up in that, was there a musician or rock band who taught you to rebel?

Yeah—the Beatles, for sure. It was on the radio at youth group. I was with all the other girls, and it came on, and I was like, ‘Who is this?!’ And they were like, ‘The Beatles. You haven’t heard of it?’ I didn’t even know about the 60s. I had no idea.

What’s your favorite flavor of the 60s now?

1967. That was good for everyone.

Sometimes it’s scary to think about how many people from that era, they’re either dead, or they’re crazy or …

Or they’re missing.

How will you avoid going missing?

I’ve considered a witness protection program.

I have Plan B. That’s why I don’t have kids—Plan B. No, I mean like an escape route!

JESSIE JONES WITH CAT POWER, THE JULIE RUIN AND MORE AT BURGERA-GO-GO 2 ON SAT., SEPT. 5, AT THE OBSERVATORY, 3503 S. HARBOR BLVD., SANTA ANA. 1 PM / $40-$80 / ALL AGES. OBSERVATORYOC.COM. JESSIE JONES’ SELF-TITLED ALBUM IS OUT NOW ON BURGER RECORDS. VISIT JESSIE JONES AT FACEBOOK. COM/JESSIEJONES4EVER. INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW

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SMOK Interview by Chris Ziegler Illustration by Joe McGarry

On recent reissue How Far Will You Go, Smokey are revealed as one of L.A.’s great lost proto-punk bands. They were contempories of the Berlin Brats and the Dogs, they had James Williamson and Randy Rhoads in the line-up and they pressed their own 45s for $100 a run. They were at the right place, but it must have been just before the right time— they never got signed and until now, they disappeared. Now singer Smokey and producer EJ Emmons (Suburban Lawns) tell the tale of the lost tapes.

You opened for Van Halen, marched for Stonewall, partied with John Waters—how is this all true? How did you end up at all these moments in history?

John “Smokey” Condon (vocals): I don’t know— since I was a kid that always happened to me.

I marched with Cesar Chavez and the grape pickers to Washington. I went to Europe with the Doors. It’s always happened to me in weird kinda ways. I dunno how to explain. You have to something inside of you in your gut that makes you wanna do this. Even at three or four years old—EJ had it, I had it.

Why did you two click so well? Normally people who made music together 40 years ago just get back in touch to sue each other.

EJ Emmons (producer): I can’t imagine why!

JC: EJ wanted to make records since he was a kid and I only wanted to sing. And we had that bond. Plus we had the love for each other, a really strong strong love for each other. You can’t live with somebody for eight years and not get to know them well. EJ would never hurt me, I’d never hurt him—we’re like brothers at this point. It’s really a strong strong love bond.

It was there from the beginning. We clicked from the beginning.

EJ: It was meant to happen in some fashion.

Life just takes care of how.

JC: And we were opposites! If you look at pictures of us, I had on snakeskin platform shoes and long hairs and EJ was wearing moccasins and smoking dope. He’s a gearhead who can take apart an engine, and I look at an engine and go … what? But we just really clicked.

What was happening in L.A. then? It’s after psych and hippie and punk and glam aren’t in yet. I always hear it described as a wasteland—a no-man’s-era.

EJ: No! It was a transitional era between old Hollywood and the Hollywood of the 70s and 80s, which is also completely gone too. It seemed like the whole thing was kind of busted wide INTERVIEW

OKEY open. You think of things like Bread coming out and wondering what the fuck this could be, and then there’s David Bowie showing up and Suzi Quatro … We’d done the psychedelic— my God, I thought we were DONE with that!

And we’re still doing heavy metal! Can we get over it? I thought that was over with Led Zeppelin III. But oh no! Anyway—it seemed wide open and I thought, ‘What the fuck, let’s go for it—what do we got to lose?’ 22, 23 years old and let’s tell it like it is!

JC: The groups we played with were thinking the same things, whether it was the Motels or the Dogs or Zolar X or the Berlin Brats—those were our peers. EJ was into David Bowie but I didn’t even know who he was. I’d heard of Lou Reed and I keep getting compared to both of them. One of our first reviews, I’ll never forget, compared me to a cross between Jim Morrison and Donna Summer—a woman and a dead musician. It was anything goes for music. Nobody was listening to the Eagles and nobody cared except they were playing them on the radio. You have no idea what it was like to grow up when FM first started—without commercials!—to experience all of that, to experience the summer of love, to experience psychedelics, to experience all of it … and then come to California and it’s mellow and laid-back and it’s like … ‘Ugh! This is awful!’

You had a lot of groups trying to make it. The one I liked best was the Dogs and they never got signed. They were incredible. Incredible!

Now they play music on these FM stations they’d never have played in the 70s. KROQ was the only station trying to push people’s buttons. Rodney was trying really hard to break through. The Runaways came after us, and then Michael Jackson and Madonna and new wave and punk! And hair bands!

EJ: I wanted no influences from the present, or as few as possible. I didn’t listen to the radio.

I’d go to Rodney’s and listen to stuff there, but I was really trying to not be influenced by the current stuff cuz I was trying to create the future, you know? Like Phil Spector said on his record jackets: ‘The sound of tomorrow, today.’

I wanted the sound of tomorrow to be like three or four or five years ahead! That’s what I was targeting and I got it wrong by thirty years … but that was the idea! Be way ahead of our time and not do what other people were doing.

Not use the same fucking effects! The same drum sound! All those things I figured might seep into my unconscious and the next thing you know, they’re gonna tell me, ‘Oh, yeah, you sound like Badfinger!’ ‘Uh … OK … great?’

And then you gotta go back and remix it!

JC: EJ’s always been modest. He worked for some of the best people in the world and EJ’s credentials are really impressive, and he could’ve taken snippets from their sound and put it into ours and he never ever did. We were very original when it came to the studio. We’d go in at 2 AM and record.

EJ: We were underground! There were venues for anybody who wanted to play, so we did. I INTERVIEW

had made a bunch of records with Tom Ayres who was close to Rodney and somehow those guys got and said, ‘I think we should all open up a club!’ Rodney said, ‘That sounds like a great idea!’ So we put a sound system for him and put up lights. There was no money in that club at all. But the next thing was already rolling and here comes Smokey, so let’s get the kids together and put on a show! We got a band together and Rodney said, ‘You can play down here!’ and we’d made the record already.

So what came first? The songs? The band?

The idea to make a band?

EJ: We went right into the studio. Within two weeks of meeting each other, we went and cut ‘Leather’ and ‘Miss Ray.’ There was no rehearsal.

Rehearsal was done in the studio, working out was done in the studio. I had a slew of studio time cuz I was doing an album with my best friend Gordon, and we used his band to cut the record—it was one of those charmed situations.

The band came after we pressed the record and realized we’d have to play out.

JC: The way that happened … there was a guy Nickey Beat. He came to my house one day and said, ‘We’re booked at Rodney’s.’ He was driving for a limousine company and we threw a band together. It took me by surprise. He got a stretch limousine and took me to the club and played drums that one night and that was it. Then Randy Rhoads got into the group. But yeah, EJ’s right—it was underground, it was anything goes. It was fun! It wasn’t wasteland as much as a party.

EJ: Listen to the Who record—‘Don’t be fooled again.’ ‘Teenage wasteland?’ That was bullshit.

JC: Yeah—we hung at Rodney’s, I hung at the leather bars, Rodney played the Sweet ‘Ballroom Blitz’ and Bay City Rollers and all that. I thought it was a party town! I didn’t find it to be a wasteland.

Did you have any songs at that first show?

JC: We were working out ‘Strong Love’ and ‘This Love Of Mine.’ We just played a set, really!

EJ: We did a lot of blues, which can take up a lot of time! ‘Key of E, everybody! 128 bars!’

JC: I play harmonica, so we could throw harmonica in there as well.

EJ: But it had to be soaked in beer. It sounded a lot better having been soaked in beer.

As an audio engineer, what beer is best to soak an instrument?

EJ: I think it was Budweiser.

JC: We’re working on new music now, actually.

EJ: I’m basically pulling together all my musicians—they’re getting resurrected one way or another. John McBurney—he was in Suburban Lawns. Fantastic guitar player. I’m feeling pretty jazzed! We already got Chuck Roast, we already got Vex Billingsgate, so the Suburban Lawns are basically playing in a couple bands I’m working with which is nice.

It’s incredibly incestuous, and we’ve all known each other literally since Smokey first started.

It’s like family coming back together. We’ll prevail! Smokey’s written some new tunes, and we’ll figure out what we’re gonna do and do it.

When you started Smokey, what kind of band did you want to be?

EJ: I don’t think we had any particular idea. I was listening to David Bowie … Lou Reed some.

All my old rock ‘n’ roll from the 50s. I’d been playing records since I was born. Fats Domino,

Little Richard, some Beatles, some The Doors, a lot of jazz and classical music. When I started making records, I stopped listening to the radio on purpose so I wouldn’t be influenced.

JC: I grew up on country western. Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells. Country western and Black music in Baltimore. I’d never heard David Bowie. EJ was listening to him. I saw the one picture of him behind Rodney’s bar laying on the chaise lounge, but I’d never heard him before our songs came out. I’d heard Lou Reed ‘Walk On The Wild Side.’ But no—we just kept experimenting. And as different musicians came through the band, they brought with them their music abilities. Between James Williamson and Randy Rhoads and Adrian Belew and Hunt and Tony Sales—Hunt Sales is a powerhouse drummer! You have to step up your game if you’re going to hang or sing with these musicians. We had a nine-piece funk band when we did ‘Piss Slave.’ We changed but we had to bring our A-game for the musicians we were playing with as well. When we did ‘Leather,’ I considered that a rock song—but we did a lot of blues that never got recorded. I love blues. When we did ‘Leather,’ the backup vocals … Sandy Brown, this guy that kinda lived on the street, he brought in three girls and they rehearsed and we did it. He went insane and disappeared into an asylum years later.

EJ: We were doing it from a point of pure having a good time. Like, ‘Try it! Here’s an idea—let’s do an a capella song.’

JC: And the fucked thing is we can’t give anybody credit on this fucking album because they’re just … everybody’s so into money.

Still too punk for your own good?

EJ: Tough shit! It’s what we felt like doing and we used what we had available to us at the time.

Rare Gems came in cuz I did a record for them that was a hit on Casablanca called ‘What Is Funk.’ I did the album that followed that and said, ‘Hey, I’ll do one of your tracks if you’ll do one of mine!’ ‘Sure!’ So I’d record a song of theirs and they’d record a track of ours. We had these big musicians for nothing. It was very loose. Musicians wanted to go into the studio and be making records. They weren’t all nervous about it like maybe people are these days—it was easy to get them to come! ‘We can go to Paramount and record!’ ‘Oh boy, let’s take off this Saturday night—sure, we’ll go!’

Rodney called us—he shut down his nightclub one night and said, ‘I’ve got James Williamson and Hunt and Tony Sales, Adrian Belew, Sneaky Pete … we’re coming into the studio!’

That’s how those sessions happened. Nobody was into, ‘Oh, I need my union dues and I need my agent involved.’ It was, ‘Let’s go play music.’

And some of the songs are from that night.

What are the lost songs like?

JC: There’s one called ‘Lost Again’ which we can’t release. It was the whole intro to the CD— but the Stooges won’t let us release it. It was their track that James gave me that Iggy didn’t do vocals on, and then I did a vocal on it, and then EJ reminded me that I threw the 24-track at him one night on Santa Monica Boulevard.

We did a song called ‘Two Bit Hustler.’ About hustlers on Santa Monica Blvd.: ‘You see me on the street / or on your bed at your feet / I’m known as a two-bit hustler …’ and then it went into a blues thing. ‘Go on and pick me up, take me home.’ Yeah, I remember that one.

EJ: You don’t still have a cassette of that one? If you do, I’d like to hear it. I forgot all about that until this minute.

JC: We did ‘This Love Of Mine’ … We did ‘Runaway’ cuz we were hanging with Del Shannon at the time. EJ’s still got that. When we signed with BUG Music, we were hanging with Dan Bourgoise who owned it and Dan was good friends with Del Shannon so we started hanging out with Del, and then we went to Magic Mountain and partied together.

EJ: We ran around just like kids!

JC: So I said, ‘Well, “Runaway” was always one of my favorite songs when I was a kid, so do you mind if we do it?’ He said no, so we did that. We never released it cuz we we were living behind Bonnie Raitt at the time, in the guest house, and we were coming home every night and playing the mixes to see what it sounded like— playing it really loud—and I’ll be damned if she didn’t come out with her own ‘Runaway.’ That’s the kind of shit that kept happening to us! I’m not gonna say she took the idea, but we played it loud every night, you know?

EJ: I have a two-track master of that—I was organizing tapes last week and shit, there’s ‘Runaway.’ ‘Oh boy, we can listen to that old potboiler one day!’

JC: We did all kinds of songs in the studio.

EJ: There were a lot of experiments, but unfortunately they were all lost in a fire. I moved to San Francisco in 1984 and I stored 25 or 30 rolls of two-inch with a friend of mine who also had a studio. He was into dolls and candles. Unfortunately the dolls and candles got intermixed one day and the studio burned and the tapes went with it! I kept some cuz I wanted to do stuff with ‘em—‘Piss Slave,’ ‘I’ll Always Love You.’ The others I considered done so they were just for storage and well …

JC: A lot of those outtakes and weird songs we’re discussing are just plain gone. I’m sure we’d have saved ‘Look Through Any Window’ with Randy Rhoads. Before he moved to Quiet Riot, we did that song in my set.

You were both openly gay, and we always hear how fashionable it was then to seem like you were at least bi—a la David Bowie. Was that actually how people felt at the time?

EJ: Kind of—you know who said it best? Boy George. ‘Kissing To Be Clever.’ I had a chance to pick him up, goddammit—what was I thinking? We could’ve made such great records together. I kept getting flyers, like ‘Come see me!’ and I was so busy with the Suburban Lawns I didn’t think about it. Then he comes out with ‘Karma Chameleon’ …

JC: I think a lot of people had more foresight and maybe a five-year plan on where they were going. EJ and I were like, ‘Ah, let’s do this!’ I was partying and EJ was doing his thing and people analytically ... like Bowie had a five-year plan to where he wanted to be. We just did it as it came along. That was a big difference.

EJ: Yeah, there was no plan.

JC: It was whoever was in the studio: ‘Can you sing? Can you do back-up vocals?’ Somebody told me they had an acetate of ‘Leather’ with different back-up vocals. There’s two mixes of ‘Million Dollar Babies’ with different vocals. If people were in the studio and could play guitar or piano, we’d use that. We didn’t have a plan.

We wanted to play the Hollywood Bowl.

How close to playing the Bowl did you get?

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JC: We did the KROQ Cabaret multiple times. That was scary! The last show we did. It was pouring rain and we were with the Motels and the Berlin Brats. It was EJ and our roadies and they were protecting me—people were ripping my clothes off, standing and hollering on the tables …

EJ: We had a wonderful time!

JC: It was really scary. I didn’t know if we’d make it out alive. I hadn’t seen it rain that hard in L.A. for years. They were sold out.

There was well over a thousand people in this building and they were standing on the tables screaming, ‘Miss Ray! Miss Ray!’ It was like, ‘Oh my God—let me out of here!’

So a thousand screaming fans ripping your clothes off is not the rock ‘n’ roll dream come true I’ve been told it should be?

JC: No—it wasn’t fun at all. And we couldn’t get signed! Seriously. That was the disheartening part. It was like … what’s going on?

What was missing? What went wrong?

JC: If I had shut up and been silent. Seriously. If I’d been in New York. If we had somebody with the foresight to say, ‘This will sell.’ Somebody did it with Grace Jones. Somebody did it with people that were different. But they weren’t there, and EJ and I weren’t going to sacrifice what we were doing just to get a record deal.

EJ: If we’d kept at it another couple years, we woulda got signed. We were on that path—I could feel it. Just watching the imaginary 45s spinning between the speakers while I was making ‘Hot Hard And Ready.’ I knew—that’s a fucking hit! I already had a hit on the radio at the time, so I know what one sounds like.

JC: When you hear Joan Jett talk about being turned down by what—32 labels? And finally getting into the Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame?

That just shows you. Record executives are just that—executives. They don’t know music. They don’t get it. Let me tell you something: do you know who [violinist and electronics pioneer] Jean-Luc Ponty is? We played ‘Piss Slave’ for him and Larry Hirsch one day. Remember that, EJ? They could not stop laughing when it started with ‘I wanna be your toilet.’

You guys met everybody!

JC: EJ got me into situations I would never have been in. I got to see Vincent Price record. I got to see Linda Ronstadt and how she recorded, I got to see Bad Company—I got to play air hockey with Paul Rodgers [of Free and Bad Company]. It goes on and on and on. I know people heard our music!

‘Piss Slave’ is such an innocently cheerful song, and then it hits you with the lyrics. Did you want to trick people into playing it?

EJ: It’s specifically arranged that way. I took it to the Odyssey—I had a dub cut at Gold Star and and the DJ at the Odyssey was like, ‘I’ll play anything you want!’ He was a good friend. So OK, and the queens start dancing and dancing and two minutes comes up and then two minutes and 34 seconds and oh … shit. Jaws dropped, circular mouths, crowd going, ‘What the fuck is this?’ After about eight bars, they had to segue to something else so people would start dancing. They were just standing there!

Was that the filthiest song on Earth at the time?

JC: We were hoping nobody would do anything that would go beyond ‘Piss Slave.’ But it seemed to me that it was, except for some blues things from the 30s I had.

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Like Lucille Bogan’s ‘Shave ‘Em Dry’?

JC: That’s exactly the song I’m thinking of! At Christmas shows we did a song called ‘I Wanna Hang My Balls On Your Christmas Tree.’

Why has Smokey been left out of the histories? You’re not on the comps, you’re not in the books—but you had records out and as much if not more press than anyone else.

JC: No idea. EJ and I were the people who did it. We’d walk into a record executive’s office and he’d have a box full of cassette tapes people had given him. So EJ said, ‘Let’s press our own records.’ We were the first to do that. We’d walk to the pressing plant, pay I think $100 to have ‘em pressed up 100 at a time. We’d do colored vinyl. And people copied us a lot. Why we’re not in any of the history of L.A.? Clueless. We were on Rodney’s show twice, once with James Williamson. Rodney said, ‘This is my number one song,’ and they played ‘Leather.’ I know—I got royalties for it! Tell me why? I’m clueless.

We took it pretty far.

You were really ahead of your time in terms of making your own records and doing your own recordings.

JC: We had no choice.

EJ: But that’s what I wanted to do!

JC: EJ wanted to cut records, I wanted to sing—it was what we wanted to do. I think we sold 5,000 copies of our records collectively.

They were on sale at Tower Records, and people would come back and say, ‘Oh, it’s on Elton John’s jukebox.’ Stuff like that. So we thought, ‘Our little record went around the world.’

Looking back, did you get anything that you wanted?

EJ: We wanted notoriety! I think we got it!

Being famous is too much responsibility and whatever money you make they take anyway.

I’d rather be infamous.

JC: We’ve done I think 16 interviews at this point and 2 radio interviews. The thing that I’m cool with you is that you don’t play up the gay thing that everybody keeps playing up.

EJ: That’s right. We haven’t gotten through that this time. That’s cool.

JC: I keep putting that down. We weren’t a downtrodden gay group and I don’t wanna play up that angle. We were just musicians.

People were Facebooking me this week like, ‘Was Randy Rhoads bisexual? I heard he’s got a boyfriend that shows up every year at his memorial.’ Get a clue, dude! He was just a musician. People wanna make it what they wanna make it. I wasn’t a downtrodden gay artist. We didn’t get signed, somebody did call us faggots, but it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we don’t want you cuz you’re gay.’ It just wasn’t the right time.

People ask us the same five questions. ‘Did you party with the John Waters people? Did you on throw up on David Geffen? Did you not get signed because you were a downtrodden gay artist?’ It’s like, ‘Fuck, come up with some questions of your own, dude.’

If you had gotten signed, would these songs have changed? They’re pretty uncompromising as they are now.

JC: It would’ve changed nothing.

SMOKEY’S HOW FAR WILL YOU GO? THE S&M RECORDINGS 1973-1981 IS OUT NOW ON CHAPTER MUSIC. VISIT SMOKEY AT FACEBOOK.COM/ SMOKEYMUSIC.

PHOTO: FUNK FREAKS by STEFANO GALLI

ALBUMS 50

ALBUM REVIEWS

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THE interpreter: Funk freaks Collected by Kristina Benson

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WAYBACK MACHINE Ron Garmon

HOLLOWAY FILES 58 THE FRANK ZAPPA (1972)

59 COMICS

Curated by Tom Child

PHOTOS 60 LIVE Edited by Debi Del Grande

FILM

Edited by Rin Kelly

WHILE BLACK 62 DRIVING sweeney kovar AIM IS TRUE 66 HER Rin Kelly

ALBUM REVIEWS perhaps some inner Sid Vicious, hyperliterate but given to swinging with heavy force. Don’t tell me this rock thing is over, hoss; Original Sin don’t go down that easy.

Ask any Republican.

—Ron Garmon

is that most people these days prefer a cleaner, more produced-sounding record; however, the vintage nature of the Bums’ sound suits the extremely lo-fi album that they have produced here. Overall, this album would make a great addition to almost any record collection.

—Zachary Jensen

THE BIRD AND THE BEE Recreational Love Polydor

The Bird and the Bee are a wonderful experiment with the mashing of styles—the incredible folksy and whimsical voice of Inara George on one hand, the big bright production of Greg Kurstin on the other, and bits of jazz and folk popping through.

The Bird and the Bee’s strength, however, lies in their jazzy play on modern pop; after an amazing collection of Hall and Oates tunes five years ago, the duo spent the last few crafting songs until they deemed them perfect, and the result is simple tunes and summer fun. The beautiful hometown-influenced “Los Angeles” is a stand-out on an album of solid writing. While the album may get a little too tame from time to time when the duo seems to rest on their strengths and stick to the comfort of home, on the whole Recreational Love is a charming release from two wonderfully talented and entertaining people.

—Daniel Sweetland

CIGARETTE BUMS

Bring Blossom Theory Records

Son of the Bums EP self-released The Cigarette Bums have a penchant for heavy 60s-style garage rock that pairs well with a wild night at a bar.

This is evident at any live show that they play. The Bums have a new EP entitled Son Of The Bums that they recently laid down at the Lolipop Records studio. The album is a sixtrack super lo-fi gem filled with all the pops, hisses, and distant-sounding vocals that you’d get from an old record you found in a thrift store, but with an updated flair. The tunes on this release are a mix of catchy licks and aggressive power tracks that give a great sampling of what this group has to offer. One of the definite highlights of the album is the track “Steal It,” which starts out with a fast and gritty guitar track that carries the melody for Steven Carrera’s belts and screeches of the song’s lyrics. The song cuts with a razor’s edge. Another great track is the western-influenced ballad “Stella,” an ode to love and longing. The heavy guitar twangs and bells really set up the slightly melancholic mood of the track. The only caveat

ALBUM REVIEW SUBMISSIONS

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

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

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DAWN OBERG

COROMANDELLES Late Bloomers’ Bloomers Porch Party

With French lyrics, famous sidemen, and a hell of a band name, Coromandelles set a pretty damn high bar for themselves, and luckily for us the bar is more than met. Always writing at a high caliber, Tijuana Panthers bassist and vocalist Dan Michicoff has brought out some serious tunes with the help of Matt Maust of Cold War Kids and fellow Cold War Kids alum Joe Plummer, who has also played with the Shins and Modest Mouse. Here is a band that has decided to ditch the preconceived idea of who these individuals are as musicians to bring out the fire of creativity, and the result are songs that stretch the listeners’ ears past the typical point of accessibility and allow the the artists to say what they want how they wants and it whatever language they really want as well. The Coromandelles is a perfect example of what a side project should be: nothing short of awesome and everything the band wants their art to be. And without being heavy-handed or overly pretentious, these three friends and Long Beach natives have sculpted a great collection of original and organic music and melodies.

—Daniel Sweetland

I heard the clever, acidulous Ms. O do her stuff at Genghis Cohen, a famed oldtimey folkie joint over in the Fairfax District. She took this tiny space filled with shuffling strangers completely into her confidence by force of eloquence, yes, but mainly by force.

As lyricist, Oberg is has all lightly mocking wiseass of Noel Coward plus a sentimental side very much in the old Master’s line, if completely beyond most of his imitators past and present. She excels at everything our old Angeleno pals Stew & the Negro Problem do, only by herself with no more unction or showbiz razzle-dazzle than Randy Newman or the eloquent drunk at the end of the bar. This abbreviated set, she kept reminding us, was but aural proxy for the magnificence of her third album, which I was slipped on the way out. Bring is like one of those LPs Harry Nilsson would bring out in the early Seventies to sparse notice and one-lunged acclaim. Wry, gently bitter yet faintly humming with the kind of optimism that must see rainbows flashing out of dumpsters or go mad, these nine songs are like a chapbook from west coast rock’s own Gertrude Stein. Starting with “Caitlin and Fire,” a dainty account of setting a high school locker ablaze and winding up with the Stan Frebergian “Republican Jesus,” we’re treated between times to sweet diversions like “Incantation,” a straight-out rocker, and “Martini Geometry,” with its slyly liquid evocation of Euclid and the High Llamas. On disc, the impish Oberg is incisive and refined, but alone on a stage, something definitely more sanguine is plain in her songs and their delivery;

DE LUX

Generation Innovative Leisure Starting out with a catchy-asanything drum beat and neardisco atmospheric tone, De Lux starts things off huge with their new album. “L.A. Threshold” is a clear statement of origin and love. Name-dropping the things we all love and hate about this place so many call home, heaven and hell really do collide on this outing: a new, darker but shinier, and more concise version of a band that already has made so much of a statement in the little time they have been around. As much as I hate to name token bands like LCD Soundsystem and Talking Heads, that seems to be the only place I can think to place De Lux when talking in terms of of sonic contemporaries. “Simba Simba Simba” is a wonderful break in the middle of all the chaos with a great almost-spoken-word-meetsmad-rambling. With fast beats, dancey tracks, (like “Center of L.U.B” and slow. dreamy phrasings like the ones found in “No One Really Cares Who You Are,” De Lux span the gambit of everything one would want to hear on a summer night of heartbreak and late night drives through the downtown smog with the windows down and your glasses on, taking in the aesthetics of broken-down beautiful Los Angeles.

—Daniel Sweetland ALBUM REVIEWS

DORIAN WOOD DRINKS Hymn to Freedom EP Atonal Industries

Hermits on Holiday Heavenly Recordings

Dorian Wood is an artist in the purest sense. From his music, performance art, operatic scores, and even the disturbing illustrations he creates, there is something divine in the way he presents himself. Seeing him perform is a revelation, or even something akin to a holy experience. His voice has a hauntingly beautiful quality to it that can resonate long after he leaves the room. In between work on his forthcoming studio album, Wood has decided to grace us with a little taste of what he has been working on in the form of the three-song live EP Hymn to Freedom. These songs, recorded live at the Blue Whale (arguably the best place to see jazz in Los Angeles right now) have such an intimate yet well-produced sound you would swear they were done in a studio. The title track finds Dorian Wood looking outward at all of the violence that has occurred in the United States at the hands of the police.

With a dark and simple piano that builds and carries his poetic words, he has crafted a song that speaks of the anger, fear, hope, faith, and compassion that many Americans are contending with right now.

It’s a very timely and profound ballad. Following this there is an amazing solo piano version of “La Cara Infinita” which was one of the singles from his previous release Rattle Rattle. The subdued nature of this version shows another side of the heavy and almost manic desperation that the original had. Closing out this live session is an amazing duet with Danny Graziani on viola for the track “Mirr’rd Song”—he composed the pieces for Dorian Wood’s chamber orchestra project last year.

Overall, the delicate nature of these songs sheds new light on this multifaceted artist.

—Zachary Jensen

Velvet-throated folksinger Cate Le Bon first met good friend Tim Presley when his band opened for hers at a gig in Los Angeles. Instantly a very smitten Presley prompted Le Bon to tour the U.S. with him as the guitarist for his California psych-rock outfit White Fence.

She agreed, and with time the pair found they were far better working together than they ever were apart. Thus is the origin story of Drinks. “Hermits on Holiday,” the title track of the album, has proved to be a catchy first single since it hit airwaves weeks ago, though it is a far cry from the wildly psychedelic LP. Between the whirring percussion, quirky lyrics and freewheeling guitar solos, Hermits on Holiday is likely to have one’s head spinning, but album-opener “Laying Down Rock” certainly lays down a firm foundation and guarantees a repeat. Le Bon and Presley prove that Drinks is worth a lot more than just a sip.

—Audra Heinrichs

ALBUM REVIEWS

not far off, but I might just say it sounds like “drugs.” Not “druggy,” or “drug-inspired,” but like actual fucking drugs. And from the press release, which describes this record as “a collection of songs musically interpreting the third dimensional integration process from the perspective of vital force energy incarnating into the physical world,” I can only ascertain that this is on purpose. That’s fine. Fortunately, these drugs are particularly good and this LP is both whimsical and addictively alluring. Lacking traditional structures, the album’s tracks wind their way through hypnotic grooves, odd noises, and revelatory moments of pop transcendence, coming across less as songs and more as all-encompassing experiences -episodes on an epic, awe-inspiring journey. Though it’s dense enough that first-time listeners might want suggestions of songs to start with, Zirconium Meconium is a long, strange trip and it’s this reviewer’s opinion that it is better experienced as a whole. Fever the Ghost synthesizes glam, psychedelia, Krautrock, and pretty much every sonic style into something that may make you forget that other music even exists.

—Geoff Geis

Zirconium Meconium Complicated Game “It’s 1968 and the Rolling Stones don’t make Satanic Majesties Request — Rush do. And Rush are like 13 years old.” That’s what the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, who helped introduce Fever the Ghost to the world by featuring them on the first track of his band’s Beatles tribute album last year, said after hearing Zirconium Meconium. He’s

Ego Death Columbia

Pacific Surf Line Alive Naturalsound

Velvet Rut Papercup Music God, this album is good, even if it’s hard to pinpoint what makes Gal Pals stand out from all the other bands who’ve come along in the past decade who are also aiming to cross off very similar items on the grocery list of garage rock: dueling female harmonies, or omitting a bass player, or a dorky love of American 60s garage and Phil Spector “Girl Groups.” Other groups sing sad odes to lame boyfriends/girlfriends, and happy celebrations to their best friends. Maybe it’s this last ingredient that feels the least like Gal Pals?

Despite their name, and feel-good anthems such as “Here’s to the Gals,” there’s a delightful streak of self-interest, even malice, brewing just below the surface of some of this album’s stompers. It feels par-

the breakdown palace of the history of L.A. music, reeling through the years: the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Doors, Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles. But ultimately, the song “Out of My Mind” romantically encapsulates the vibe of the album: one equally a facsimile of a postcard from the death of the hippie dream as much as a secret transmission over the wires of hope and sunlight with its eager refrain “…it’s only just begun…it’s only just begun…”

Let’s hope this is just the beginning for GospelbeacH and not an end.

—Kegan Pierce Simons

THE INTERNET

GOSPELBEACH

GAL PALS

FEVER THE GHOST

ticularly cathartic on “Earthquake,” a delightful put-down that hints at the schadenfreude treasures Lauren Marie Mikus and Jillian Talley could bring to the table if they’d only explore life’s immaturities a bit more, in the vein of the Descendants or early Donnas. But maybe that’s my hangup. Gal Pals’ vocal arrangements are their real secret weapon, and they’ve gotten even tighter since they moved from Austin. Bands like Summer Twin generally keep their voices in the pocket; Gal Pals’ tones slip and slide all over each other, calling and responding, evoking 60s groups such as the Luv’d Ones or Suzi Quatro’s teenage Pleasure Seekers while still keepin’ it real like the Modettes. At the moment, only Death Valley Girls’ vocals are more interesting. Luckily, it’s not a contest!

—D.M. Collins

Rising from the resin of bands such as Beachwood Sparks, Further, and The Tyde, GospelbeacH’s debut LP Pacific Surf Line reminds the listener that there is still stardust to be found in the search for the endless summer. The perfectly dosed tracks here toe the line between hippie sunshine daydream, Sunset Strip wooziness, and high-andlonesome sadness. Featuring members Brent Rademaker (Beachwood Sparks), Jason Soda (Everest), Neal Casal (Ryan Adams and the Cardinals), Kip Boardman, and guest Nelson Bragg (Brian Wilson), the band works less like a supergroup than a cohesive unit locked into a groove, eye to eye, upturned chin to chin. Fans of Beachwood Sparks will break into a smile when “Mick Jones” kicks up its heels and boot scoots. “Your Freedom” features some nice flute and jazzy guitar harmonics that recall Fairport Convention. But the album really drops into gear on “Southern Girl,” a bruising sandstorm of a song that peaks with a whiplash of a guitar solo before receding to a female voice counting upwards from “71, 72, 73, 74…”

It’s as if she is our guide through

From the moment you let it shine for what it is, the music begins to drip, blissfully slowly, into your soul and elevates you towards flickering scenes of outer realms. Ego Death, the third release from The Internet, is funky evidence of an artistic evolution—one that is orchestrated through psychedelic patchworks of rainbow blues. This unique collective of creators, consisting of Syd the Kyd, Matt Martians, Jameel Bruner, Patrick Paige, Christopher A. Smith and Steve Lacy, have come together once again. With a much more refined artistic foundation, they have finally developed their sound in a way that reaches beyond the simple label of “alternative r&b.” Since Purple Naked Ladies and Feel Good, each member has grown more comfortable in the experimentation necessary to let everyone know where they’ve come from and where they’re headed. Amidst today’s shifting musical landscape, The Internet’s Ego Death fades into focus between its movements—shuffling between coolness and blueness.

Simply stated, this album oozes sass and funk. Bass lines and drumbeats reach beyond jazz and blues; heads nod in affirmation between slips of hip-hop rhythms—you’ll be keeping this in constant rotation. From the opening track “Get Away,” The Internet hits the ground straight grooving. This tune, with its funky heavy sway, sets the tone for the dynamic movements of the album. The collaborations with 51

Janelle Monáe, Vic Mensa, James Fauntleroy, and KAYTRANADA, accentuate, rather than overshadow, the Internet’s artistry. With “Penthouse Cloud,” Syd the Kyd’s lyrical content truly takes a turn—moving away from hip-hop braggadocio to a vulnerable assessment of today’s social current. Overall, Ego Death is that summer centerpiece that you’ll keeping close for accompaniment as the temperatures begin to dip low.

—Stephen Jason Esguerra-Jungco

JEW COCKS Full Release self-released

JESIKA VON RABBIT Journey Mitchell Dionysus

“I’m pretty much channeling a modern female Willy Wonka,” sez Jesika von Rabbit and such handtipping might make a review for this record unnecessary but for the ten songs therein. The Joshua Treebased Gram Rabbit is “on hiatus” (showbiz-speak for “It could be years and it could be forever”) and this solo debut brings vast tracts of Rabbitty desert lysergic reverie blowing into our familiar L.A. nightmare. “Glamorous Misery” is a danceable club satire, “Psychic Spice” is the synth-tinged hallucination about the kind of ego-soaked, bottle-serviced club-bot that makes the Friday night side streets off Hollywood Boulevard so ennobling to the human spirit and “The Way That I Want” is a nice blast of new wave car radio noise circa 1981. “Gaydar” and “Looking for a Weirdo” take in fascination and its pursuit and the finale, a spare, haunted pass at Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop,” takes us far beyond city limits, dumping us in a fast-fading LSD stupor someplace deep in Ventura County where people’s eyes rest on the same side of their faces. Danceable, commercial and first-to-last catchy, this album’s assortment of deliciously sweet and pretty poisons indicates a von Rabbit rapidly Wonkafying, cybernizing and de-rusticating. She may well have more reinventions in her than David Bowie, whose gelid fantasias Bring resembles not a little.

—Ron Garmon

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They’re called Jew Cocks, their 13-song debut is titled Full Release and clocks in at less than 15 minutes, and they’ve issued it not on vinyl, CD, or cassette but as a download accompanying a special edition condom packaged with an illustration of a beaming, jizzdrenched, and yarmulke-clad cartoon dick. Audiences, therefore, can be forgiven for intuiting that these Jew Cocks are delinquents.

But while the spastic spirit of juvenilia abounds on Full Release, don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s all the band offers. The album does include throwaway numbers like “Yeah!” and “St. Bernardus” that appear to be inside jokes intended only for the hardest of hardcore Jew Cocks cultists, but more of its runtime is devoted to ragers that demonstrate the group’s propensity for dirty and efficient punk rock.

A standout is “America,” a twisted take on “Louie Louie” that begins to make a point about the American Dream before evaporating prematurely after one verse. The best song is “Texas Vibrator Massacre,” a back-n-forth between singers Todd Sender and [L.A. RECORD contributor] Walt! Gorecki that sounds like an adrenalized Cramps riffing on “Happiness is a Warm Gun” at a Halloween carnival with Fred Schneider and guest members from the Magic Band.

—Geoff Geis

The title of Julia Holter’s latest release on Domino strikes with an immediate, mid-sentence intimacy, a present tense ownership of both person and nature. It’s not surprising, then, that an album of such nomenclature would feature its creator in graceful control as a central, spotlighted storyteller. While in the foreground, Holter’s measured narrative voice spins stories of marooned Ariadne figures and the proper way to ask for a cigarette, delivered with her characteristic wide-eyed clarity.

Meanwhile, pastel background vocal brush strokes engage an array of classical instruments in evocative interplay, creating a cinematic and emotionally complex experience. The bright baroque tinkles of a harpsichord, a somber double bass (both plucked and bowed), and fluttering violins swirl around, and though these instruments represent humanity’s cultural distance from the wilderness, the resulting sound evokes natural, organic images— lush aural thickets and swirling, climactic maelstroms. When Holter chooses to loosen the reins on her voice and howl at the moon a bit, as she does on the sublime and bittersweet “Betsy on the Roof”, the result is particularly thrilling. The melancholic sentiments behind the title track and “How Long?” are not undermined but rather underscored by its more sun-dappled moments on tracks like “Feel You” and “Everytime Boots”; as in life, perceived moments of joy and sorrow naturally complement one another, and the results are supernatural.

—Christina Gubala

LA LUZ

Weirdo Shrine Hardly Art

JULIA HOLTER

Have You In My Wilderness Domino

La Luz has done what many wish they could and created an amazingly strange and beautifully eclectic blend of atmospheric textures and enchanting rhythmic simplicity. With crystal clear yet hollowsounding vocals and great guitar playing, their dark, brooding surfinfluenced sound has taken huge steps with this album, thanks in part to growing skill and influence

but also largely due to the addition of producer and wunderkind Ty Segall, who helped the band to stick to a bit more of a raw sound. Segall’s decision to leave in all of the little quirks and mistakes that oftentimes are taken out in mixing has created a wonderful and energetic sound closer to the energy and noise that La Luz is known for creating when they play live. The newest album from La Luz is a wonderful new chapter in a previously great story from a remarkable band! ­—Daniel Sweetland

LOS CRUDOS Doble Discografia Maximum RocknRoll

Holy Shit! Maximum RocknRoll magazine brings us the ultimate Crudos discography in the shape of a 2xLP set complete with an awesome poster and lyric book inside! Let’s be honest, in the world of hardcore and punk, Los Crudos need no introduction. Formed in Chicago in 1991, the humble Martin Sorrondeguy and crew have been producing rabid, politically fueled, piercing punk jams and continue to do so to this day. Think Youth of Today meets Minor Threat in a steel cage match in Spanish and you begin to get an idea of how EPIC this band is! Songs like “Tomando Los Golpes” (“taking the punches”), “Migra Violencia” (“violent deportation”), “Vendedor de Dolor” (“vendor of pain”),” “No Estoy Convencido” (“I am not convinced”), and “Tierra de Libertad? (“land of freedom?”) are all about racial injustice, prejudice, and the struggle against a racist system. Doble Discografia contains every essential Crudos release you can hope for. From their first self-released cassette “Libertad,” to their first split with Spitboy “Viviendo Asperamente,” to their first full length LP Canciones Para Liberar Nuestras Fronteras that consists of seventeen songs in FOURTEEN MINUTES in addition to the Cobardes 7” (from the La Vida Es Un Mus label in London) and other various singles you probably don’t have unless “you were there, man”.

—Michale Herrera

MICHAEL NHAT Heads on Sticks self-released

Even for a rapper known for using his art to bring a very unique American experience to the public eye, Heads on Sticks is extremely personal and extremely bleak, one of the grimmest and most torturedsounding albums Michael Nhat has yet recorded. And there’s not a lot of redemption here: Michael, accompanied by synth riffs that could have been rejected from Castlevania by child psychologists for being in a key too minor for minors, segues from growing up poor and Asian in Iowa, to witnessing a rape as a teen, to blaming his mute brother for a childhood crime, to a very grim and specific account of trying to kill himself as a young person by gobbling up rat poison. Even his cover song, “To Bring You My Love,” by PJ Harvey, is accompanied by Death Grips-style beats slowed down to half tempo, like it could have been the diary entry for a ne’er-do-well such as himself during those tragic 90s days. And when he’s not talking about his own horrors, he’ll go back even further, to the primordial ooze from whence he came, his ancestors in Vietnam and Cambodia and the atrocities they received at the hands of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, as in the radiofriendly title “Jesus Was a Gook.”

It’s at this point that most rappers would contrast their hard-knock past with their glorious present, but here perhaps Michael is at his least observant, rapping about rejection from the rap establishment and even from Asian blogs, when the truth is, the rappers he (perhaps) aspires to to be like--folks like Busdriver, for example--spend far more time crunching tight packets of dense rhyming words together; Michael, however, often rhymes a word with itself or skips the rhyme altogether, the story being more important than the method of telling it. Just because you pick and choose what rules you follow doesn’t mean you’re not playing the game, son! Yet I really hope this time that Michael does find a home for his rap in the pantheon of

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local hip hop artists—as it is, this is a work that stands naked and defiant above most of the lyrical works around him, proving true the adage that the personal is political.

—D.M. Collins

PINK SIIFU UaReL self-released

PEARL CHARLES self-titled EP Burger Records

Pearl Charles, the drummer of the Blank Tapes, has a brand new project that is one of the most exciting projects to come out in 2015. Her Blank Tapes bandmate Matt Adams backs her, and while this is partially a realignment of the previous group, this project has a sound all its own.

The downbeat sleepy psychedelic sound of Blank Tapes with the occasional Americana twist to it has been taken to a more upbeat place with pop songs that have a slightly western cut to them. The Pearl Charles self-titled debut EP packs a punch from the very first track.

The vocals have a touch of raspiness, full of sultry tones that hit the right melody. The six songs on this release are deceptively simple at first listen due to their very catchy nature, but are very complex upon further examination. Take, for example, the first single and one of the many greats on this EP, “You Can Change”: it has a repeating guitar hook and minimal keys that sweep through the background as Charles’ vocals carry the weight of the song.

The structure itself consists essentially of one verse that is slightly altered each time it is sung, but it is so clever in its execution that it is pleasantly infectious. The same formula goes for the majority of these songs with occasional alteration to the backing music, such as on the track “India Burnout,” which plays with some chanting and psychedelic sounds. Closing out the album is a track entitled “Idea To Her” that takes things to the ballad realm with a traditional song structure that winds down the album nicely.

Overall the tunes here are perfect to dance to or even make out if you are with someone special.

—Zachary Jensen

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“Woke” is the word that sticks out after tumbling down this rabbit hole designed by the artist formerly known as Ronee Sage. The messages on this web-only album are often as cryptic as possible while still retaining the irresistible kernel of true life experience. “Siifu” means “master” in Chinese, and Pink is influenced not only by master musical linguists Ornette Coleman and J Dilla, but also by Frusciante, Sun Ra, Lynch, and Seurat. I don’t care if this is rap, or even if it’s music: it’s brave art. Use of foley and field recordings reveal sunny outdoor spaces at times, but at others recall goosebumped moments staring at raindrops on the window of your mind’s eye.

Eludem-produced “hendrix” is one of those beats you wish would go on forever, and like Jimi Hendrix’s own “Little Wing,” the song ends just as it was getting started, leaving us wanting more. “forest/ park” is pure, honest poetry, while “slave song” uses a descending Donald Byrd sample to create a feeling of wastedness. This is by no means an easy record to listen to the first time, but great things are often challenging at first. For his integrity as a creator and curator, we owe Siifu a debt of gratitude for making a truly masterful album that should be celebrated by rap fans and vaporwavers alike.

—D. Momanaee

RULES FOLLOW US

Rules Follow Us Vol. I Jazzcats Records

West coast cool kids Huey Briss and Seafood Sam, otherwise known as Rules Follow Us, have managed to make a mark with newly released Rules Follow Us Volume I; considering that it is four short tracks, less than ten minutes in total, this is no ordinary feat for the twosome. Production credit goes to the duo as much as it does Crystal Antlers’ frontman Jonny Bell, who built each beat from the improv booms and baps of Briss and Sam toying with instruments in the studio. The haphazard percussion, coupled with the seemingly effortless rhyming of words and stacking of syllables, makes for music magic, heard best on the manic “Two Psychiatrists,” and the slow as syrup “London.” The true standout however, is “Taxi,” with its old-school beat and tonally serious riffs; it’s the ideal track to close out the EP. Rules may or may not follow these two, but with the release of Volume I, those with a hip-hop heart and fresh ears will surely want to.

—Audra Heinrichs

creating momentum even during its most meditative moments, like on the churning “Avial Flue”. Interestingly, the philosophical crux of the “gazebo effect” concept is that in order to indulge the desire to sit centrally within a space and observe, one must construct within and thus alter the space. While Stallones, Brown and Gray may wander the aural garden as individuals, they observe and react to one another attentively, and consequently build structure within the nebulousness.

—Christina Gubala

SPARE PARTS FOR BROKEN HEARTS I Love You II self-released

SO MANY WIZARDS Heavy Vision Lolipop

S. ARAW “Trio” XI Gazebo Effect Drag City

Cameron Stallones, aka Sun Araw, has long exhibited a willingness to lean against the outer walls of melody, song structure, and more significantly, consciousness, in search of whatever force it is pushing back on the other side. When joined by collaborators Alex Gray and Mitchell Brown to form S. Araw “Trio” XI, the improvised exploratory process becomes more complex. The Gazebo Effect is an exercise in the creation, analysis and cultivation of what Stallones calls “non-dimensional objects”: rather than “songs,” 7 organic bodies breathe, bob and swell over two discs. A bamboo saxophone, ¼ inch magnetic tape, and Stallones’ MIDI-guitar are just a few of the ingredients strategically added to the recipe, yielding a telluric yet extraterrestrial feel. The trio pushes and pulls against itself,

in Wizards’ music, such that the comparison is scarcely a nod. This is summertime music for sure and So Many Wizards do it so well.

—Zachary Jensen

Nima Kazerouni has crafted a unique sound with his band So Many Wizards amongst the sea of music flooding the world these days. His talent and presence are so great that he consistently draws in other amazing musicians to work with him on his projects (such as Frank Maston of Maston and Jacco Gardner). The latest offering from this powerhouse finds Kazerouni bringing us a charm similar to what he previously released, but with a large amount of growth: The 12 songs on this album have his signature lo-fi manic desperation packed into energetic pop songs, such as on the track “Summer Days,” that speaks of wanting to do something but not knowing how. The guitar track is fast and harmonic, which, paired with the upbeat drumming, makes you feel hopeful, while the vocals that switch from fast and frantic to slow and methodical and back again tell of the current generation’s lostness. There is so much levity to the music that it is hard not to float away; at the same time, there is a melancholic air to it that it brings you crashing down to earth. Another track that exemplifies this feeling and is a personal favorite would be the song “Before She Runs.” It’s slightly similar to what the early Shins were doing but there is way more energy

Spare Parts for Broken Hearts’ third EP, I Love You II, is very much a sequel to 2015’s “I Love You” in more than just name.

Each EP wears both its emotions and its affection for ‘90s era grunge on its sleeve without indulging too much in the attendant messianic posturing that frequently plagued the postNirvana alt-rock landscape. The five songs on this new release exist almost as mirror images of the track list on “I Love You,” as though this were side B, though I Love You II seems to display a slightly more aggressive emotional touch, a little more speed and edginess and a little less melancholy. Much like the previous release, this is an EP completely comfortable with the entire spectrum of human experience.

The interplay of guitarists Sarah Green’s and Laurita Guaico’s vocals and instrumental work are remarkable and mixed appropriately highly, as the situationally bombastic and restrained percussion of drummer Mikey Vallejo provides the supportive rhythmic framework. While this is still as deeply sincere an EP as I Love You, both musically and lyrically, a track like “Moto” injects an element of humor and abandon that wasn’t quite as apparent on the previous release and it’s hard not to imagine that it wouldn’t have been a single on KROQ had Spare Parts for Broken Hearts been a band around the time that The Doom Generation was released, though anyone looking for an ironic approach to alt-rock should look elsewhere.

—Tom Child 53

THE INTERPRETER

FUNK FREAKS Collected by Kristina Benson Photography by Stefano Galli

Funk Freaks is a crew of friends and family from the OC and the IE, joined through their love of all things funk. In the past six years, they’ve started a record label and toured Europe, and you can check them out live on their I Am The Funk tour in East L.A. on August 20, Santa Ana on August 21 and Riverside on August 22. Check out facebook.com/funkfreaksrecords for more info.

GLENDA McLEOD “NO STRANGER TO LOVE” 7” (HGEI, 1983) “The reason I picked this record: it’s a catchy lil tune and the words and the melody go sick together, and the story is a heartbreaker so most likely females relate and dance to it—also sing along to it. First heard it in 2006, even though it’s been out since 1983. ‘No Stranger To Love’ was the sound for me. I’ve always spun hip-hop and old school 80s since I’ve started spinning, but when it came to hard-to-find rare g-funk I was hooked and started digging and collecting. There’s a never-ending story when it comes to 80s funk …” —Mr. Groove

HOTLINE YOU ARE MINE (blackspot, 198X)

“I chose to introduce my Hotline You Are Mine LP—it is mega rare, out of Nigeria. It may be one of the most in-demand funk LPs out of Nigeria. The year—doesn’t say but sounds 83 or 84. This LP brings not only amazing composition in horns and Moog bass and synthesizers but great vocals, and it reminds me of what the Orange County funk sound is—which is googie, rare and extra raw A.K.A. gangster funk— so sit back and enjoy the funk!”—Frostnasty

prince charles and the citY beat band GANG WAR and STONE KILLERS (Solid PlatinUm, 1980, and virgin, 1982)

“My favorite funk LPs. Both albums have that raw, uncut O.C. Funk sound that we are known for. [Stone Killers] came out in 1982 on Virgin and contains funk classics like ‘Cash (Cash Money),’ ‘Big Chested Girls,’ ‘I’m A Fool For Love,’ ‘Bush Beat,’ ‘Don’t Fake the Funk’ and ‘Tight Jeans.’ My favorite funk song, ‘In the Streets,’ [is on Gang War.] I love their style and how they get down. It might not be the rarest LP, but definitely one of the dopest in my crates!” —DJ Loser

ago FOR YOU (fUll time, 1982) “The reason I selected Ago’s LP is because as a kid I always played his songs in my Walkman. I never once in my life thought that I would meet him or hang out with him. Dreams come true. I got the chance to meet Ago and have my LP signed thanks to my brother DEBO and LUER. We spent time in my house [and] at our shows cruised all over Orange County with him riding in the car, laughing [and] screwing around—memories that I thought I’d never have. The song from the LP that is my favorite is ‘For You.’ I can relate to this track because of what he says: ‘Is there any thing I can do? / there isn’t anything I won’t do.’ Traveling to school, partying, and late night driving home bumping Ago out my Camaro puts a smile on my face—if I’m down and out, this jam picks me up. I live my life like the song says—‘Is there anything I can do? / There isn’t anything I won’t do’ to reach my goals and keep pushing to make my self succeed and my CREW FUNKFREAKS.” —Ney

the bar-kaYs PROPOSITIONS (polY-gram, 1982) “I pick the Bar-Kays LP Propositions. I could have picked many others like One Way, Cameo, Prince, General Caine, Rick James … But this one has everything from funk to boogie to soul. I’m known as a hardcore collector but all the 101 jamz are the best—you play any jam from the Bar-Kays and it’s guaranteed to get the dance floor packed.

My favorite track from the LP is ‘Tripping Out.’ Ha ha—too many memories! I want to send a shout out to all my #funkfreaks #family and a special shout out to my homie a.k.a. my brother Ivan Marquez a.k.a. DEBO and to his beautiful wife Faith. Much luv to both of you!

Gracias!” —LilMan 55

RUN DMC “you be illin’” 7” (profile, 1986) “Honestly, it was really hard to pick one record to write about. The reason why I chose this record is because it is the first record that I ever bought with my own money at the age of nine years old—long time ago!—at a Music Plus record store in Riverside. So I guess you can say that’s when I started collecting vinyl. I remember the reason I bought this record was because the lyrics always cracked me up and still do today. I’m happy to say that my record is still in near mint condition and I still have the original picture sleeve to go with it. So this little 7-inch record is definitely a keeper in my collection for life.” —Bosoe

The Days of Wine and Roses Omnivore

“The record I picked is the first record off my crew’s label Funk Freaks Records, a great track by a group out of Sydney, Australia: Confection.

From the moment I heard this track, I knew this was a sure classic in the making. Every element of the song was spot on—Juanita Tippins’ alluring voice got me from the first verse. Mixed with heavy synthesizers and a mean bass line, this track for sure funks up a party every time. The track represents our party and how we get down.” —DJ Clos

Nothing else from L.A.’s fabled Paisley Underground movement of the early 1980s shows as much staying power as this assortment of cheerily overcast tunes. One of those albums that gave greying hippies something else to mourn over in the Reagan years– some may still remember the wails of crusty Woodstockers over how everything in record shops sounded like VU or the Stooges. In other words, this was a modern classic practically out of the box and the start of a career that would haul frontman Steve Wynn into the era’s rock iconography. For people who still listen to albums, there is much to learn in this one’s slow dazzle. “Tell Me When It’s Over” sets an tone of righteous hopelessness that the rest of the tracks—especially “Definitely Clean” and “Too Little, Too Late”—elaborate upon and make grungily grandiose. Liftoff is achieved on “When You Smile,” when the entire jangle-pop superstructure finally goes up in gusts of distortion. The title track, an acknowledged classic, does a J-turn and takes us careening through the album’s emotional and sonic rubble for one last rearview flash before blitzing to full stop like Kowalski in the movie Vanishing Point.

Extras include unreleased studio rehearsals and a slew of new liner notes for your edification.

PRINCE & THE REVOLUTION “LET’S GO CRAZY” 12”

Executive Slacks

fabulous Dutones “set it out” 12” (laKesiDe ltD, 1983) “It’s some heavy Moog bass slapping funk that will be sure to get any dance floor packed once the synth and bass hit. More up-pace boogie with cowbells and wicked synthesizer leads that send goosebumps down your arms ... Songs basically about going out to party and have a good time with friends, and let no worries, money, or problems affect you We are FAMILY and out to have a good time.” —DJ Luer

vaughan mason & butch Dayo FEEL MY LOVE (salsoul, 1983)

“If one record can fill up a dance floor with just seconds of playing, it’s ‘Feel My Love’ by Vaughn Mason and Butch Dayo. This record made people fall in love with the funk. As a DJ/collector, its one of the top most-requested and a dancefloor panties dropper in Orange County.

The whole mini-album was produced perfectly and is always hard to find when digging—it’s just that bad ass of a record.” —Lewis

confection “I gotta thing (4 U)” (funK freaKs, 2012)

(Warner, 1984)

“Hands down my favorite 12” of all time. As a kid I remember really dissecting the lyrics and thinking to myself “Did he just say that?”

Especially the chorus on ‘Erotic City’: ‘If we cannot make babies / maybe we can make some time / … / We could fuck until the dawn, makin’ love til cherry’s gone.” This was 84 and there wasn’t really any hip-hop with profanity on the airwaves. The fact that L.A. radio DJs were slipping this joint in rotation still shocks me. It’s the B-side to ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ so the only way ‘Erotic City’ was available was on the 12”. It was 7 minutes long with a dope intro and killer outro that made it a DJ staple. Prince proved all he needed was a LinnDrum and a dirty synth to single-handedly produce a timeless dance floor classic.” —Ryan G

FAST FORWARD “WATER BED” (Hi-In-Er-Gy, 1986) “Every record in my collection has a personal story attached to it. The record I picked is one that I have been looking for over four years and for some reason I knew that I would one day own it and have it in my collection. The record I am speaking of is Fast Forward ‘Water Bed.’ This is a 1986 production with the sound of what we came to love of 1983. The arrangement of the track—the synthesizer pulling at the back of your neck and a heavy bass line—just gets the body moving.

The track represents that Funk Freaks slapper style we are known for.

I finally got this record via a trade from one of our Funk Freaks crew members from Paris France. I traded a rare Louisiana boogie 12-inch

by Bruce Sampson—‘You’re Bad.’ It was a tuff one but the crate wants what the crate wants.” —DJ DEBO

sugar hill gang “rapper’s Delight” (sugarhill, 1979)

56

The Dream Syndicate

“I was 15 years old when I first got this record, and still have it today. I had a pair of technics 1210s and no records. My homie came over and said his stepdad had a bunch of records sitting at home so I went to check them out. Hip -hop was all I knew at the time and what brought me here today, so that’s all I would dig for. I ended up leaving with a stack that day: this Sugar Hill Gang, Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde and a bunch of other jams but every time I hear ‘Rapper’s Delight’ playing on the radio it always brings me back to that day when I dug up my first records.” —Isaac Rodriguez

Complete Recordings 1982-1986 Cleopatra Records Back when “industrial” betokened actual industry and a goth was just a punk with a Bela Lugosi fixation, this visionary Philly trio began the long slog to genre obscurity. Named after an ad for men’s pants, these art-rock filibusterers did the now-normal thing of playing in empty warehouses full of bohos and winebibbers before moving up the exploitation chain to punk venues, opening for out-of-state dignitaries like the Stray Cats and finally a micro-label record deal. “The Bus,” a madly clattering synth workout, became a hit in Belgium (!) and a brace of EPs led to their 1985 debut album Nausea on Fundamental Records, a boutique label then specializing in fringy sounds, with few fringier than this raucous and elephantine post-punk dance music. This LP shows a definite upgrade in the Slacks’ sound, as interesting experimentation matured into finished compositions of some merit, like heroically malevolent opener “In and Out” and a trippy instrumental title track that both sound like bootyquake elements of Miami Sound Machine tossed into a haybaler. This forward-looking stuff was followed by Fire & Ice, released in 1986 as industrial was becoming established and just the tiniest bit familiar. Resolutely uncommercial and un-funky, this joint hit with college radio audiences. The Slacks’ pass at Gary Glitter’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll, Pt. 1” wound up on an episode of Miami Vice before the band splintered

entirely on the cusp of a deal with Warner and lost a chance to be remembered with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Was (Not Was). These discs document one of the era’s great lost bands.

The Muffs The Muffs Omnivore The Muffs played their first show in 1991 at the Shamrock (Cheetah’s since 1994) and began gigging at other long-gone rocker hangouts like Raji’s (defunct since the Northridge earthquake) and Coconut Teaszer (little better than a Gregg Araki movie set with a cover charge by the time it shuttered in 2003) in what is now widely mourned as the last gasp of the genre’s golden age in Hollywood.

By the time The Muffs dropped in mid1993, the original quartet was as slick as anything else rolled out at Warner Bros. Widely dismissed at the time and not much defended by its creators until recently, this album is fun, surprisingly well-paced and nowhere near as dated as most of the era’s punk sounds now, with “Lucky Guy” and “I Need You” standing out from the blare.

“Everywhere I Go” wound up in a commercial unseen by me and local music TV pioneer Korla Pandit appears on “From Your Girl.” The original sixteen tracks are supplemented by a radio remix, a cassette-only alternative version of “Everywhere I Go” and half an album’s worth of rejected songs. Kim Shattuck and Ronnie Bartlett contribute candid and wiseass liners.

The Bee Gees Trafalgar Atco/Polydor, 1971 Unless you have a line on the recent Japanese mini-LP reissue or lust after the sound of 44-year old crackle, forget about dropping a needle on this ninth Bee Gees album. CD copies are likewise scarce and what’s left of the Australian trio’s worldwide fan base clamors for a definitive reissue. Contributing to the bewilderment around this record’s half-forgotten status is the current preponderance of male voices wailing their bust-ass hearts out over what’s left of pop. Time and perhaps a coarsening world have made the culture that cherished “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” as remote to us now as Billie Holliday was then but that distance vanishes with Proustian abruptness at the twenty-seven second mark. A few one-offs and pastiches aside, Trafalgar is the three-part harmonized last shout of a pop era that began with Rubber Soul.

THUNDERCAT

The Beyond/Where The Giants Roam Brainfeeder

SWAHILI BLONDE

Deities in Decline EP Neurotic Yell There’s a lot to love about this tantalizingly short 4-song EP, which gives us just one brief song for every year since the last proper Swahili Blonde release. Theoretically, there’s a lot to miss in this relatively minimalist EP, the most obvious example being all the actual members of Swahili Blonde, none of whom accompany band leader Nicole Turley on this comeback (well, except for Laena Geronimo, but her Scheherazadeinspired violin playing is always the exception that proves the rule). Apparently, despite the wild live band, Turley has always considered the studio version of the band to be her own baby, and I can’t argue with results: these sleek, Eno-esque reggae funk brooders are a fantastic return to form, with more space and 4/4 mechanized angles than came before, and yet all the instruments are played at least as well by Turley as by her former ringers. The basslines alone are so minimally funky, combining the cool dub punch of Jah Wobble with a bass bounce that sounds more like Duran Duran than the actual bassist from Duran Duran, John Taylor, did when he played in Swahili Blonde! If you follow that bouncing bass across the Metal Box-esque first track, through the exultant Prince Rama revelations of “Discover Aurora,” into the Taking Tiger Mountain mystery of “Three in the Tree” and onto the white chanteuse rocksteady-dub of “Magdalene,” (like if Extra Classic got a little less classic), your deities might die, but I think the sun is gonna come on out anyway.

—D.M. Collins

Thundercat is an amazing vocalist and bassist who is in high demand these days, appearing on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Kamasi Washington’s The Epic, two of the year’s most celebrated albums. After a two-year wait, we are presented with a release of his own work courtesy Flying Lotus’ imprint Brainfeeder. This 6-song release really shows off his talent for composition and singing. Mixing elements of soul, hip-hop, beat, and funk, the sounds hit hard and push the limits of genre. As if returning the favor for all the work he has been putting in around town, there are some great collaborations and cameos on this album as well: Kamasi Washington appears on the funk-driven track “Them Changes” with some saxophone hooks. The song starts off with a hip-hop driven drum beat that is quickly followed up with a funk bassline. The high notes that Thundercat hits on some verses and the sheer range he pulls out on this track alone make this album worth the listen. Other cameos include the legend Herbie Hancock on keyboard for the track “Lone Wolf and Cub” which has a bass solo that really sets the somber and dark mood. Flying Lotus coproduced half of the tracks on the album, giving it some of his signature flair. Overall, this is a great album from a highly sought-after musician. The only complaint is that it’s not longer.

—Zachary Jensen

TRACY BRYANT “The Little Things” 7” Mono Records

Tracy Bryant is a steady hand in a very shaky music scene—he is a master of dance beat punk on his solo project and with his band Corners, and an amazing singer, performer, and writer. Tracy’s newest single “The Little Things” is an example of everything we love and

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respect about this post-punk maestro. With beautifully delivered and toned guitars and a wonderfully catchy vocal line this is a song to be sung loud and on repeat. The B side is a tom-drum pounding anthem to hope and despair. “If I could be the only man, at least I did the best I can,” he sings with regret and love. The single is filled with shoegaze-y vocals and exceptional guitar paying. Tracy is backed by Joo Joo Ashworth (lead guitar) Jeremy Katz (Bass) and Cameron Allen (Drums) all from Froth, and recorded by Joel Jerome. Whether alone or with his band, Mr. Bryant is on his game every time.

—Daniel Sweetland

TWO SHEDS Assembling Crossbill

Assembling is the second full album

by Two Sheds, the creative vehicle of spouses Caitlin and Johnny Gutenberger. The work consists of fifteen tracks that generally hew to the conventions of female-fronted country rock, in the vein of Mazzy Star. The album’s press blurb intimates that the songs were compiled from two days of writing sessions, and were recorded in four days. That compressed schedule helps explain much of what is right and most of what is wrong with the album. The album’s failings derive from an apparent lack of editing, as with the inclusion of weaker tracks, notably “Choose” and “The Feel,” as well as some recording choices, like the decision to include vocal count-ins on “Heavy” and “Gone.” Regardless, the album succeeds by virtue of songs that sound fresh, crafted by musicians without time to second-guess their instincts. On standouts “Bully” and “Gone,” Caitlin Gutenberger showcases a plain, strong female voice that stands out in an indie rock milieu beset with affectations. In turn, each of the instrumentalists brings a straightforward, thoughtful approach to his or her instrument, creating a seamless, unpretentious, eminently listenable whole.

—Josh Solberg

WAND

1000 Days Drag City Wand’s new album is a fantasy voyage into long forgotten rock’n’roll landscapes. With heavy 70s guitar and Jethro Tull-esque arrangements, Wand have taken their brand of garage rock and pushed the boundaries farther than previously this band had shown they could go. Flexing new artistic muscle, the band sets the tone right away with “Grave Robber” and its atmospheric layers and chaotic nature. The album delves into this sound, with the acoustically driven but powerful “Paintings are Dead,” pushing even further into a place where jazz, prog, and rock dovetail. In a place like Los Angeles where every band sounds the same and trends reign supreme, Wand is a wonderful sonic relief. In a short time the band has taken huge steps, and if 1000 Days is even just a hint of what’s to come, we all need to hold on for a wild ride.

—Daniel Sweetland

WET WOOD SMOKES Organ Donor self-released

Wet Wood Smokes are on the verge of an explosion, and hewing as close to indie pop as possible while still maintaining some incredible artistic, musical expression. Organ Donor features soulful vocals on tracks like “What is This Place,” with lyrics like “We are the traces of the same places... where can I go where can I hide / from 2 AM or Madeline and the boy with the glass eye?” Ad-

ditionally, they show some grit on other tracks, such as “Cold” and the opener “A Better Man,” where lead singer Josh Bowman belts, “if I could find a better man I’d leave and not come back again.” It’s an honest expression of love and dedication, but the beauty of this band is in its simplicity which seems to be feared in music these days. Toeing that line, Wet Wood Smokes has put together a great collection of pop tunes begging for radio pay and bigger audiences.

—Daniel Sweetland

ZIG ZAGS Slime EP Famous Class

Zig Zags had a triumphant 2014— their In The Red full-length debut was a total destroyer, and year endcap “Humans March (Let’s Die)” (on a split 7” celebrating the blitzed-out Keller/Neely comic The Humans) was a spot-on celebration of 70s weirdo exploitation that was half Sabbath crawler and half high-octane rocker. And now they got the slow stuff out of the way: the Slime EP is two fistfuls of songs scooped from the ooze of 80s hardcore. Yes, it does include a 7 Seconds cover—a fully committed ‘“Gonna Have To Fight”—and opener “Gröth” sounds like something yanked off MRR’s Not So Quiet On The Western Front. The real core of this is the “Slime” / “Sunken City” twofer: “Slime” is like a riff on the No Life Til Leather Metallica demo, attached to a midnight-movie horror concept and a guitar break that cranks up the chase-scene tension, and “Sunken City” is like a Static Age Misfits song with some bad-kid vocal hooks and an adorable chorus: “In the sunken city / where I fell in love …” (Shocked they had the restraint to not put “Whoa-oh-ohs” all over this!) Consider it a set of songs that’ll stick to you.

—Chris Ziegler

“ONE REPORTER’S OPINION” WILL RETURN NEXT ISSUE! PLEASE VISIT LARECORD.COM FOR INTERIM REVIEWS!

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THE HOLLOWAY FILES

FRANK ZAPPA (1972)

VINTAGE INTERVIEWS BY JOURNALIST, PRODUCER AND DJ DANNY HOLLOWAY You’re a songwriter and guitarist and an arranger. Is there any one of those particular things that you really feel fulfilled with?

No—what I do is when I get up in the morning, I feel that there is a certain amount of work that I have to do that day, and it’s in one of five different fields. So if I get up that day and I’ve got to write lyrics, I go downstairs and I sit at the typewriter and when I get my work done at the typewriter, the next day, if I have to go back and write the music to those lyrics, I pick up a piece of paper with funny lines on it.

And when I’m done with that, I’m glad I’m done with that. Same thing goes with all the other things—I take them as they come along.

That’s very academic.

Well, that’s honestly the way I feel about it Is it a forced effort? A pre-planned thing that you have to push out of yourself?

No. I don’t write lyrics unless I feel like I’ve got something to say. Or if I have a good idea for a song, then I’ll go down and do that. It’s just—there’s a lot of different kinds of tools that you need to use for all the different jobs that you have to do. One day you’re using a typewriter, the next day you’re writing by hand, the next day you’re playing the guitar or waving the baton. But I enjoy doing all those things and I try to do them as good as I can. It’s not forced—it’s just something that I do.

I saw one of your live shows and you were trying to educate the audience to the music that you were doing— the time signatures and that sort of thing. Are you still interested in educating people?

Only to the extent that … I found out from past experience that most people don’t want to know, so I don’t want to waste their time. I’d be happy just to play and if they’d like to listen to it that’s fine, and if they don’t, there are plenty of other groups to listen to.

Are there any guitar players that have influenced you? Or any certain thing that you try to put across while playing guitar?

The things that I’m interested in mostly when I’m playing the guitar is the expansions of the possibilities of a small number of notes around a limited tonal center and the altering of the meaning of those notes by changing the rhythm that the notes are played in. It may sounds a little academic but that’s what’s happening.

Could you name some records that have influenced you?

Frank Zappa was a well-known musical satirist, but what happened to him at London`s Rainbow theatre on December 10, 1971, was no joke. While playfully launching into a cover of the Beatles song “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” an irate 24-year-old male fan rushed the stage and shoved Zappa into the orchestra pit.

“The band all thought I was dead,” Zappa said at the time. “My head was over my shoulder and my neck was bent like it was broken. I had a hole in the back of my head, a fractured leg and one arm was paralyzed. The album was made in the studio while I was in a wheelchair. I was writing music even when I was in the hospital.” This interview was one of the first Zappa did after his recovery.

Non-Angelenos may not fully appreciate what most locals know: Zappa is a giant in L.A. musical history for his genius, daring and inventiveness.

So there’s Arcana—a recording of an orchestral composition by Edgard Varese, and it was recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for RCA. And it’s a very nice recording, a very clear recording by a good orchestra, a nice piece of music.

Are there more? Usually we have five or six different things.

I’d hate to single out five or six different things. As a matter of fact, that one album that I gave you would probably rank equally with ten or twelve other ones. And my identification with it is probably unfair to the other composers or orchestra to do it that way.

It was 67 or 68 when there were a lot of drugs being flashed around—you were condemning the whole thing.

Do you still feel strongly about that?

I may still feel strongly about it but I don’t like to talk about that because then the idea of just using drugs for recreation has become a firmly established social concept that I don’t identify with myself because I don’t find it to be socially productive. But I don’t think it’s in any less productive or any more destructive than getting out of your mind on alcohol.

Do you have any opinions about the upcoming presidential campaign?

I would say this: it’s as predictable as all the rest of them. Because all it ever comes down to is money.

You’ve been credited with discovering Alice Cooper. What do you think of his career—the theatrics and the type of music he’s doing now?

I haven’t followed their career or their theatrics.

In the past you’ve had comedy in your music—are you going to keep that in the act?

I wasn’t thinking of it as an act, but that might be a little more accurate because it’s an electric symphony orchestra. Aside from the recognizable pieces of rock origins, there are two or three of my symphonic type suites built in there that are of a humorous nature simply because of the subject manner that inspired them. But as for a bunch of people jumping around on stage or falling down and zany stuff—we’re not applying that to this music.

How happy were you with the film 200 Motels? I know it had reactions from most people that saw it.

In what regard? Happy with it— Artistically. Did it transfer onto film what was in your head?

I would say that within the scope of the budget, I’d say I got 40 to 50% of what I wanted to get out of it. The rest you have to sort of kiss goodbye because there’s no time and there’s no money to do it perfect.

Will there ever be another movie?

Oh yeah. I’m working on one now. I’d rather not talk about the film. But we are working on one.

Do you have any comments about the Flo and Eddie split?

I would say that most of the press releases that they have put out have been involved with their own promo as a group have been quite unfair. I just want to say that most of their attitude comes down to an extreme interest in money.

What’s your side of the story?

If I had some specific article or press release to respond to I could take it point by point and give an analysis of something, but ‘what’s your side of the story’—I’m not interested in playing that kind of thing.

Because they’ve more or less put down you and your form of leadership with that particular group.

Yeah, well—anything specific that they said? If you had something specific, I could comment. But the main thrust of all of that print material is geared towards exploiting them as new artists and it’s partially due to the record company’s interest in selling records, and apparently they believe that it’s ethical to do this at my expense. Most of what they’ve said isn’t ethical or particularly scrupulous or truthful.

I’m extremely disappointed in that behavior. There was a time when I thought they were my friends.

COMICS CURATED BY TOM CHILD MORE COMICS ON PAGE 65

LILA ASH | INSTAGRAM: SECRET_HOTGIRL

JOHN TOTTENHAM

SPENCER HICKS

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COMICS

LIVE PHOTOS SUMMER 2015 L7 July 2015 The Fonda Theatre

ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR DEBI DEL GRANDE

The Growlers June 2015 Bonnaroo

DEBI DEL GRANDE

DEBI DEL GRANDE

Jurassic 5 July 2015 Club Nokia

Feels July 2015 The Echo

DAVID VALERA

CHAD ELDER

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

Best Coast July 2015 House of Guvera

Beach Party July 2015 The Echo

RACHEL DOE

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EVERETT FITZPATRICK

LIVE PHOTOS

Noa James April 2015 Club Nokia

X July 2015 The Observatory

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

DAVID VALERA

Health July 2015 The Echo

The Muffs July 2015 The El Rey

DEBI DEL GRANDE

MAXIMILIAN HO

The Gooch Palms July 2015 Viva Pomona

Waters July 2015 The Getty Center

MAXIMILIAN HO

LIVE PHOTOS

LESLIE KALOHI

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DRIVING WHILE BLACK Interview by sweeney kovar Photography by dana washington

With a brazen title like Driving While Black, the new film written by Dominique Purdy a.k.a. The Koreatown Oddity seems straightforward—a 90-minute exploration into police harassment of Black folk. While that certainly holds true, the film is also much more. It’s a hood flick without the condescension. It’s a piece about Black lives that doesn’t leave white folks out. It’s a meditation on the physical and psychological violence of police without requiring a college degree. It’s a hip-hop movie that doesn’t make you cringe. It’s a serious film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. In the wee hours of the night, I caught up with the MC-turned-screenwriter to discuss Driving While Black, the real life experiences that influenced the film, the art of not doing too much and why this ragtag crew of filmmakers decided to bypass the traditional movie industry structure to distribute DWB directly to the people.

I just re-watched the movie with a friend of mine from high school. He’s white as hell and doesn’t watch movies outside of the mainstream. He was really bugged out by the movie.

Dominique Purdy a.k.a. Koreatown Oddity (actor and writer): That’s what I like. You don’t really know what it’s going to be. It has enough of everything. We didn’t want to make it all funny shit and we didn’t want to make it all serious because life is not either-or. Life is really both. Even when the most serious shit is happening, life is full of the smile and the frown.

Where did the original idea for the film come from?

That shit is straight my life. Obviously there were situations we didn’t have enough time to put in there that would have been really funny or really interesting to have, but it all stems from my life. I hooked up with Paul Sapiano, the director, on some other shit initially and we’d just be kicking it. I’d tell these stories of getting pulled over by the cops and they’d be funny for the most part, even though it’d be fucked up at the same time. We both thought it would make a dope concept for a film. He likes doing stuff that’s different and not being corny.

He was down with doing it and he let me really put my foot in it. Paul is a British white guy. He has no idea what driving while Black is. It’s totally not in Paul’s realm of knowledge. Throughout the process of us doing the film, I remember I’d be driving somewhere with him and at the end of our drive I’d ask him how many cops he saw during the trip. He might say whatever and I’d come back with a precise number, way FILM

higher than his. Even though I might not say anything, I’m always looking for them and I’m trying to see what they’re doing and if they’re about to fuck with me. I remember one time we were driving and a cop drove past us. I made eye contact with the officer who was driving. Paul is in the car with me and I looked at him like, ‘I guarantee you these dudes are about to pull a U-turn just because we made solid eye-contact and I’m Black and you white.’ Sure enough, they bust a U-turn and drive up behind us. I tell Paul, ‘Watch this. They’ll follow us for a little bit, they’ll check my plates to see if anything is cracking. When they find out that there’s nothing on here, they’ll bounce.’ That’s exactly what they did. I’m saying all these things as we’re driving and they’re happening right as I’m saying them.

He was dumbfounded.

It’s hard to separate driving from the overall experience of being Black in America. When was the earliest that you remember noticing that your experience as a Black man is different than say my experience as a light-skinned Mexican or someone like Paul?

In the movie, during the riot scenes, that’s literally the first time I noticed that something was different. That’s real shit, the nigga with the Jheri curl and everything.

I remember us being out in the riots. I remember seeing the Rodney King verdict on TV and I remember knowing people were mad. Remember, the riots didn’t happen after the beating—they happened after the verdict. My mom picked up her friend and we were driving around during that shit. For me, I can’t lie—that shit

was fun as fuck! I can’t even front. I was not scared at all. I thought it was crazy.

There were people hopping over the hood of our car and running around but no one was really fucking with us like that. White people were getting pulled out of their cars and getting their asses whooped, which was fucked up. I still have a couple of VHS tapes I got during the riots. There’s this iconic image of these old Korean cats on top of a California Mart with shotguns. The California Mart is on Western and Fifth. I lived literally a block and a half over on St. Andrews and Fifth. When we were driving around, we saw them on the roof in real life.

Then we went in the house and saw that shit on TV. That was the first time I really thought to myself, ‘There’s some kind of beef between Black people and the police.’

What are some things you wanted to put in the film but couldn’t fit?

One Saturday in high school I went to play basketball with my homie and his brother and his cousin. Afterwards we go by this Sears near Santa Monica and Western and the homie’s brother has this fake gun.

It looks real but it’s a BB gun. They were messing around with it while the homie was getting a sound system installed in his Honda Civic. Me and the homie go to the liquor store to get some snacks or whatever.

We come out like, ‘What the fuck?’ There’s a helicopter outside, there’s four police cars and there’s somebody on the speaker yelling.

We’re thinking somebody is getting fucked up and then we look and realize they’re yelling at us! We don’t know what the fuck is going on til we see the homie’s brother and his cousin on their knees facing a brick wall.

Now we’re all on our knees and we still got on shorts. There’s jagged rocks and glass in the street right there, grimy-ass shit. There’s a cop that has a shotgun at the base of the homie’s cousin’s skull. The cousin is talking mad shit. He’s older than us—he already had a license while the homie and I were in like 10th grade. So he’s talking shit like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna kill me?’ We’re trying to calm him down. We’re not trying to see him get his head blown off right there. Then we realize that somebody must have looked out the window and seen them playing with the BB gun and called the police like, ‘There’s niggas out here installing speakers in their cars and playing with guns!’ What is even crazier is how fast they got there. We were in that liquor store for like five minutes, tops.

So they searched around for the gun. They didn’t find it. Either the homie’s brother or the homie’s cousin put the BB gun under the Honda. Five cops search for this gun and no one thought to lay on the ground and look underneath the car. They didn’t find it and finally let us go. We look and the BB gun is still laying there right under the car and that was it. They left and we carried on with our day. I would have loved to put that in the movie.

I was really surprised at how nuanced of a portrayal of the police you had in the film. You didn’t just vilify them. You tried to make everyone a full person, even the asshole cops.

We knew we wanted to do something different. It’s easy for us to go in and bash them fools, especially for me! Let’s do something different. Let’s show more sides of cops. Even if you don’t like the police, 63

you definitely experience more than one type of cop. Not all of them was up in yo’ ass—maybe most of them but there’s also those you can count on one hand that was cool.

That also reminds me of another scene early in the film, where you show a pair of Black cops reproducing the kind of discrimination you would normally associate with white cops. I thought that was an interesting way to complicate the situation.

I wanted to make sure I didn’t front. Can I really say that it’s only white cops who have fucked with me? Nah, I would be lying if I did. The majority have been white but there’s also been others. I think I’ve experienced damn near every race of cops.

That scene actually happened, some Black cops fucking with us. They were doing it just for fun. I wanted to show that too.

Sometimes they just be bored. They can fuck with you because they have the power to. That’s why in that scene you see them literally just fucking with us because they can and as soon as they get the call on some serious shit, you see them change.

This is just what they do to pass the time and have fun. They don’t think anything of it but it actually does affect people like me. The movie’s subject is not funny, but it is a funny movie. The way to do that is by treading lightly and you have to be the type of person that’s really thinking about all that. I was just the type of person that it worked for. I really feel like people are going to try to do something like this after watching the film. It’s tough to do if you’re trying too hard.

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That’s a really good way to put it. The film gets its point across without trying too hard. There’s so many cooks in the kitchen with a film versus music—how did you keep that ‘not trying too hard’ vibe while making the movie?

You already know me from a music perspective. I apply that same mindstate to every project: I’m trying to make some dope shit that’s quality and I want people to get something out of it. That’s my aim with any project. Not doing too much comes naturally to me. I have to enjoy myself. I’m always talking shit like, ‘That’s corny.’ I was a part of every single thing with this film. Paul made sure that I was CC’d on everything.

Literally everything. Wardrobe? Let me see what they wearing. That’s cool. That’s wack.

Ask the homie to bring some of his own clothes. Casting—if I wasn’t able to be there for auditions they sent me the videos so I could check actors out. I knew when I saw the right actor for the right part. Sometimes I had the homie play a part. There’s people in the film that weren’t real actors but they could pull that particular part off right. The selection of the cars was another thing I was hands on with. We went out to Leimert Park scoping locations the night after Bobby Womack passed and we saw this car show.

Paul and the location scout were shook but I was cool—I put my arms around them and strolled over to the group. They were mad cool. They turned out to be some classic dudes. Individuals is a classic car club— niggas recognize the name. They’ve been shouted out in all kinds of rap shit in the 90s and all that. They were on set chilling, showing the actor that played Debricshaw

how to use the switches. The gangsters in the movie are real gangsters. They gave me a bunch of pictures of some actors trying to be gangsters and they looked like actors trying to be gangsters. Music—obviously I took control over that. I wanted to create a world with the music. I feel like movies don’t really think about music like that anymore. I wanted to bring that shit back, that hip-hop movie shit back. They’re hip-hop movies not just because of the music they have in them but because of the language and vocabulary and the things the characters do in their daily life. You see me in the movie smoking mad weed! I’m wearing this Conart sweater throughout the whole movie. I’m wearing these Adidas. I’m getting CC’d in every person’s email for every job from the director of photography, to the casting director to the editor. If there’s something I don’t agree with they’re going to have to holler at me about it, straight up.

You guys went straight to the people with the distribution. You haven’t gone the traditional route with the film.

The people that are behind this film, they made other movies before this that didn’t make any money because of weird ass deals they were in. So yeah, we talked to distribution companies. We’re still talking to those motherfuckers right now but they’re all full of shit, at least the ones we talk to. I be looking people dead in the face.

I’m a part of this shit. This is my life. The topic is bigger than me. This shit is super important. I’m down to grab that shit and hold onto it and not care whether some company wants to back it or not. I didn’t realize how foreign this type of movie is

until I started showing it to movie industry people. They don’t understand. If we would have came out ten years ago, it would still be relevant. This is the most relevant right now just because people other than Black people know about this. White people see this type of harassment because everyone has a camera on their phone. 10 years ago you could brush it off like, ‘Nigga, that ain’t true! They might beat up a couple of y’all niggas but they’re not fucking with you like that.’ Now the whole world can see it. It’s even more relevant. For someone not to recognize that, they don’t want a movie like this to be in the conversation. This movie is also a reflection of my L.A. My L.A. is not really segregated. Yeah, there’s pockets that are predominantly this or predominantly that but I go everywhere. That’s all L.A. to me. That’s what I wanted to show in the movie. I feel like the lukewarm response from the industry is because this movie goes against the norm. So we’re doing everything street. We’re putting up posters. We’re going to the people directly. Independent is the best route for this project. We keep hearing at these meetings that it’s never been done.

If it’s never been done, then I want to do some shit that’s never been done. If we can have a successful film just selling it off our site, that would be the shit for me. It could be something that inspires other people to do their own films. This is from some real motherfuckers. This ain’t Hollywood doing this.

WATCH DRIVING WHILE BLACK AND GET MORE INFORMATION AT DWBMOVIE.COM.

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champoyhate CARA ANN DOLIM COMICS

DAVE VAN PATTEN

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HERAIMIS TRUE

Interview by Rin Kelly Illustration by Rachel Merrill

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Before Jini Dellaccio, rock stood still. There would be four young men, sometimes five, staring into the camera, posed just so.

Standing in a studio, smiling far too politely, bands weren’t often paired with visual art to match their own. But Dellaccio never paid attention to the way things were supposed to be. A musician herself, having begun as an irrepressible teenage vaudevillian who went on to tour the U.S. as a saxophonist with the all girl “Sweethearts of Swing,” the charm bomb born Jini Duckworth in 1917 just felt something different behind the lens. She was self taught, self assured, and endlessly playful—and she was already a sweet middle-aged Seattle lady when she discovered rock photography and dug right in. She would be right there at the edge of the stage for the Wailers and the Sonics, turned out elegantly amidst the ruffians and crafting live shots and promo shots and record covers out of pure atmosphere and invention, movement and feeling. The Sonics’ Boom was all Jini, and soon her unstuck style was in demand. She shot the first U.S. tours of the Who and the Rolling Stones, captured the Yardbirds, the Mamas and the Papas, Patti LaBelle, the Beach Boys, Neil Young in Laurel Canyon in his buckskin fringe. But Karen Whitehead’s Her Aim is True isn’t the usual film about an undersung artist who helped invent a genre without becoming a name: it’s a portrait of a scene, a love letter to living, and the story of a phenomenal spirit sparkling with curiosity and creativity and real-deal joy. Jini Dellaccio, quite simply, can change your life.

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I came away from the film wanting to stock up on berets. I want to be more like Jini Dellaccio.

Karen Whitehead (director): Yes, a lot of people have said that. Watching audiences at many of the screenings we’ve done, from the film festival circuit onwards, there’s this palpable sense in the audience that they’re so entranced by her. It’s really inspiring. She inspired me—I look at her, and I think, ‘Will I be making films when I’m in my nineties?’ And I hope so—because she inspired me to believe that you can reinvent yourself several times. She was always so unconventional in her approach and not afraid of anything. I think that we need role models like that. Very much today there’s so much about women’s roles and even now I’m looking for positive role models for girls and you just look at her life and you think, ‘God, how could she do that?’

And yet she seemed to present herself as someone who emerged almost fully formed. Usually you watch a documentary and there will be a lot of detail about how someone started in one place and struggled, full of doubt, to land in another. But she would say, ‘I wanted to learn photography so I went out and did it.’ And pretty soon she’s a fashion photographer.

Yeah—it’s not a conventional biopic. We have this incredible archive and she’s a great storyteller, and we have a lot of the musicians who were able to fill in their encounters with her. But I always wanted her to drive it—I wanted it to be her voice as much as possible.

As a filmmaker, I felt like we were invited in to observe her artistic journey.

It’s one of the few documentaries I’ve covered that didn’t have moments of terrible darkness. It always carries hope, but not fake ‘Oprah hope.’ It’s creative hope. Hope that comes from someone who is very free.

Normally one of the ‘rules’ in film is that you want to always have a conflict. But this is genuinely what her life was. She set out to do this. It’s an artistic journey, and it’s the story of her creativity and it wasn’t always easy. She did grow up very poor, but she forged forward and believed she could do something. She was inspired by her mother, primarily, who despite all their challenges and poverty, was able to give her children—including Jini—a sense of ‘You can do something!’ and ‘Have music in your life!’ and ‘Be creative!’ Being a Brit, I can also tell you that we’re not into that ‘Oprah hope’ thing. I’m not interested in that. In some ways it’s not popular to make hopeful, cheery things. But this was the story!

This was her life! And it’s in her eyes, and I wanted to keep that perspective because that’s who she is. I also wanted it to not be driven by celebrity, because I love revealing hidden voices, and I think she is a truly original spirit—and it is an indie voice that we have not heard.

Was she out going to Wailers shows and to Sonics shows in those early days, this Katie Hepburn-ish middle-aged lady?

She was out there doing it. You can imagine these early teen dances, and she’s there in the middle of it. They encouraged her—up to that famous first time she met the Wailers at her house—they encouraged her to come listen to the music at the Tacoma Armory, so that’s

why she was shooting at the Tacoma Armory.

She had shot in there before for shows, and she went several times to hear music and to discover what this rock ‘n’ roll stuff was— what this sound was—and she fully embraced it. She really wanted to know who they were as people. She was as interested in their artistic journey as in her own.

In music documentaries it’s almost a necessary cliché that somewhere in there will be severe depression or annihilating addiction or people dying young. This is so different from the story you get used to about artists—she was about creative spirit and exchange with other people, and she never seemed to fall down.

On one level you could say it might seem very unusual, but you’re judging her—as you say—against the cliché of rock’n’roll. The whole point is that this woman was observing and really a documenter of early rock ‘n’ roll in the Pacific Northwest, but she did it on her terms. We put in the film—which I think is a fair description—a comment by one of her subjects that there is an innocence about her that enabled her to see things differently.

Maybe innocence is the word I’m looking for. Because it’s not entirely musicians.

It’s also other photographers, like Dianne Arbus, who had these very tragic lives. She’s the anti-Dianne Arbus, connecting just as strongly with her subjects but in this a uniquely eager, open way.

People have asked me, to be frank, why I made this film, and what drew me in. I always thought rock photography—when you think about women—started with Annie Liebovitz, probably, and that’s well over a decade later. It’s interesting that they’re very different characters, obviously. If you look at Jini’s work and the playfulness in it and what she was doing, it goes back to reflect her openness and a quality of innocence. It’s a very natural process for shooting. She was very engaged with people and loved people.

The film is about love, really. God, it sounds a bit like Obama and as you say ‘Oprah hope’-y stuff, but it’s not. Jini couldn’t be at a lot of the film festivals and at those screenings we did.

I asked people to write notes to Jini—little comments that I sent her. They were all about how inspiring and what a role model she was, and how it made them think about things they could do in their lives—their own dreams and pursuits, or how they were inspired to pick up a camera again. I had several people say that they’d played with photography earlier but didn’t think they could do it, and that they wanted to return to it because they saw the film. I think that’s great! We all need stories like that.

Annie Liebovitz in 2015 does these very static, staged photo shoots: completely pasted together, mannequin-people sort of pictures. Jini is the opposite. Her stuff is movement. What is unique about her work against what was being done at the time?

A lot of people see the Neil Young image, right? But you take that on one side, and on another side you take the Wailers in a tree, or the Sonics in a tree in her backyard in the mist, and there’s this playfulness and the outside and the cheekiness, like, ‘Well, what do you do with men? Well, of course they like 67

to climb trees! That’s the normal thing to ask them to do!’ Then you look at the date and it’s 63, 64, 65 … and this was not happening.

I’m trying to think of the equivalent at the time. When she was in the middle of doing this the Beatles’ movie Help! came out—well, maybe Hard Day’s Night. At the end of ’64 Hard Day’s Night came out. Hard Day’s Night is a fascinating film itself because of the way it was shot documentary-style, and we did sort of have a bit of homage to Hard Day’s Night when we shot her with the Moondoggies— the way we shot her in the studio listening to them and then her in the train station, it was a little bit of homage to Hard Day’s Night. But that’s the only thing I can think of, do you know what I mean? Jim Marshall—if anyone can name a rock photographer who was world-renowned, most people probably say Jim Marshall, right? He shot the Beatles, and of course we did shoot him. But he died right after we shot that scene with him meeting Jini at the opening of the Taking Aim exhibition.

You know—he was inspired by Jini. We know that. It’s fascinating that she was crafting and creating something that hadn’t really been seen on any scale or done before. Because it really was studio shots. You look at the Beach Boys and their first album—if you take any album cover from the early ‘60s, I dare you to find a band sitting in a tree, or surrounded by fog and mist. Really. The basic point that the film concludes with, from our contributors and Jini’s own perspective, very much relates to the fact that Jini was not a rock photographer.

Jini had forged a path in fashion photography, and her shoots doing portfolios for models in Long Beach produced striking images that could stand next to contemporaries such as Richard Avedon, whose work dominated the covers of Harper’s Bazaar. Some of Jini’s portraits were mistaken as work by a male photographer—according to anecdotes from models about reactions from Hollywood agents when they saw these shots. Jini brought a new sensibility and fine art approach to photographing bands. She definitely helped define a new genre in the field, and she started her professional career as a fashion photographer in Long Beach, even taking photographs for the Long Beach Museum of Art and having a solo exhibition of her work there as early as 1960. One of the early fashion portraits used in the film I initially discovered in the archives of the museum as well—part of their permanent collection.

Didn’t she take one of the first pictures of the Who with the guitar in the air?

That is a really extraordinary photo in photographic terms, on the scale of it. And remember when you think of this—the Who were not known. This is the first time they were doing this smashing-their-guitars act.

They were only really known in the U.K. at that stage. It’s amazing to me, that photo.

She just caught it naturally.

Yeah! With a Hasselblad! If you talk to a photography expert, there’s so many things about this that are really extraordinary. This woman in her late 40s: how is she doing this?

And she’s doing this with a Hasselblad!

What was her own music career like? Was there a whole world of touring all-girl swing jazz bands people don’t know about?

FILM

There have been a couple of documentaries recently that have made a bigger attempt now to highlight women in jazz. There were jazz singers, and there were these band leaders and there were a handful of small bands. Again, it’s part of women’s hidden history. She was able to be part of that movement and it did come out of vaudeville and family groups and she was able to work her way into that. She did just love playing saxophone, traveling with bands. To her it just seemed like the perfect thing to be able to do. During the war, she was playing to crowds around military bases and the troops, and it extended for like ten years. We couldn’t find any actual recordings of her band, or any of the bands that she was in—but it’s not surprising.

Did she tell you anything that you couldn’t get in the film?

The problem that every filmmaker has is that there are always things you would have liked to include. We put in the stories that really sort of showed her, and worked with the stories that were able to complement the bands’ memories of the shoot. My favorite stories were around the Daily Flash when she would take them to the library around the campus at the University of Washington.

She would just march around and say, ‘We’re going to shoot this!’ They’d walk around and all these people were studying, and she’d have this camera. She’d just go anywhere and do anything! Or when she was shooting the famous photo used on the Wailers album cover where they’re walking through a park and it’s like they’re in a row and it looks like they’re walking a dog. Apparently there were some passersby and they just grabbed the dog and said, ‘Let’s borrow the dog!’ It just showed her incredible spontaneous personality. Her work is very playful.

In the documentary, when you first meet her, she’s in her 90s and she remembers everything that’s going on in the photos, what was happening during each moment.

Yes! One of the things I admired is that she was open to this process of talking about her memories and having a documentary crew around. She wasn’t afraid—she just said ‘Why not?’ Which is what she said her whole life.

I’m not sure in my 90s that I’d be keen on a documentary crew following me around.

It’s so positive and hopeful. And there can so much pablum with those ideas, but with Jini she will say ‘I love you!’ to someone she’s just met and you believe it. She loves this band, she loves these people, meets the guy from the Moondoggies and says, ‘You have the same name that my husband had!

I like you a lot!’

She has a great sense of humor, and that’s what comes across in the film. I don’t think we should be afraid of hopeful stories because if we hadn’t made this film no one would have realized the story behind this incredible archive—this woman—and her story really can keep inspiring others to be creative and make music or make photography. Arts education is so under pressure right now, but look at the values that it gives. There’s a much deeper important point when we share stories like this: these are genuine stories, and it may not be popular to have these hopeful stories of rock ’n’ rollers as redeeming conquerors,

but I think we need them. It’s valuable to have them alongside all the other stuff. I don’t think that to be creative you have to be a dark, tortured soul.

You can’t disentangle that from her work.

Her positivity was the creative process.

And she was very daring and courageous.

I don’t want it to seem through rose-tinted glasses that there was this … You know, we do make quite a bold statement in the film with the commentary we have. She is definitely an early inventor of the rock’n’roll photography genre, measured by the definition of the date of what she was doing. She was doing these concerts and capturing people like the Who and the Rolling Stones in their first tour of the U.S., and [then there’s] the relationships she had with bands like the Sonics, who are now reunited and playing a worldwide tour.

Their story is intrinsically linked to Jini’s story—a fifty year legacy of what happened, and it’s all coming back now. There’s a lot of stuff there that’s really gritty. I mean, let’s face it: what on earth was a woman doing shooting pictures of guys who were singing about drinking strychnine? Just imagine it!

That’s what drew me in, and I think that is quite courageous. And her innocence did enable her to do things differently. One of my favorite comments that I had is from Doug Hastings, who was in the Daily Flash—he said, ‘She just said, “Come in! Why don’t you have some tea? Let’s eat!” She treated us like we were people when most adults were afraid of us.’ She treated them like people— she treated them with respect and she did not dismiss them. You’ve got to look at the context of the time and that’s what the rest of the world were doing. I think that’s very interesting.

Women are still tokenized in many music scenes, and we’re made invisible with age—you can’t imagine what it took for her to be standing there below the stage in 1964. You feature a female drummer talking about how people would see her putting her kit together and think she’s doing it for a man, that she’s not a musician. Every female musician friend I’ve had has had multiple experiences of that happening to this day.

Every female film director has that experience too. I could tell you some stories! That’s what I’m saying. The times I’ve been called … ‘Oh love, I’ll do that for you, I’ve got that.’ ‘Who is the director?” Oh, that would be me! Yeah, it happens! We’re still talking about this in 2015! One of the common questions I’d get at screenings would be, ‘Was she a feminist?’

But I don’t think that we can see her in those terms. She was an individual who didn’t feel confined by her sex. Her gender didn’t stop her from doing anything, and she worked around it and she never took it on board that it would inhibit her. I talked to her about sexism and her role as a middle-aged woman in this scene, and sexism and ageism were not something that was going to stop her. She just did it. I think that is her essence. We all get stuck in our corners about gender roles and such, and it’s important to remember how this is a great story of someone who just kind of went for it. She did not let conformity dictate to her then. We all still get caught up

in that sometimes. But she wasn’t a sort of a burn-your-bra … in the context of the time, she wasn’t what you would think of in terms of the women’s movement.

She lived the way we’re all meant to, as though those barriers were already broken.

My goal is that people get to know her story, and it’s very challenging. That’s why I appreciate the opportunity to be in a festival like this. She doesn’t have that kind of celebrity name attached to her but her story is very important. I think people might spread the word and share it.

You didn’t dwell on her exclusion as much as other filmmakers would have. It’s reality, but it’s not a defining one, and that approach really mirrors her own. Is she largely excluded, except for that Neil Young photo that no one ever realizes a woman took?

It was very challenging to make the film because no one had heard of her, obviously.

And it was an archive that had been buried.

Then this great work was being done by an archivist and her trustee. They’d started digitizing the work. That’s when I became aware of her—I found out through a friend of a friend who had seen one of her photos on the internet. But you still have to go by the band names, really. The same with Neil Young. That gets people’s attention. It was very easy to try to have more of a celebrity angle, but you know—then there’s this old lady standing at the front of the stage taking photos. Then we’re not talking to Jini, or Jini’s not telling her story. I thought that the way to get round was, ‘No, you don’t know her but you should know her, and here’s her telling her story.’ I didn’t want to do it the obvious way, like a real conventional music documentary. From my point of view, I try to not be stopped by convention about trying to create something that’s not there.

The whole point is that she did disappear because of her later age, and then she retired with her husband. She was so much older at the beginning of the scene, and then the bands break up and retire and she’s doing other photography and then they retire to Arizona—and then she reemerges, kind of like the bands start to. I thought that was really interesting but there is this gap, because of it. But well … so what? It’s still a valid story. There’s a decade in her life of which fascinated me because it was looking at the rock ‘n’ roll period, which was a decade of her life—really looking in detail. And that is a way of telling her whole story as an artist.

HER AIM IS TRUE FEATURING AN APPEARANCE BY FILMMAKER KAREN WHITEHEAD AND ACCOMPANIED BY SHORT FILM FORTUNE, DIRECTED

BY GALAXIE 500’s NAOMI YANG AND FEATURING A SOUNDTRACK

BY DAMON AND NAOMI SCREENS AS PART OF THE DON’T KNOCK THE ROCK FESTIVAL ON THURS., AUG. 20, AT CINEFAMILY, 611 N. FAIRFAX AVE., LOS ANGELES. 7:30 PM / $16 / FREE FOR ALL MEMBERS / ALL AGES. CINEFAMILY.ORG. TO VIEW THE FILM DIGITALLY SEE HERAIMISTRUEMOVIE.COM. 69

200 W. 2ND STREET POMONA, CA 91766 WWW.THEGLASSHOUSE.US (909) 865-3802

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