L.A. RECORD ISSUE 121 - WINTER 2015

ISSUE 121 • FREE WINTER 2015

THE GARDEN WHITE BOIZ JESUS SONS SUBHUMANS DAVE DAVIES DANIEL LANOIS BILLY CHANGER MARGO GURYAN FRANZ FERDINAND & SPARKS KIM AND THE CREATED DISCO’S OUT ... MURDER’S IN! AND MORE

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THE GARDEN Chris Ziegler

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THE GARDEN Interview by Chris Ziegler Photography by Grace Oh

The Garden are a post-punk band in the same way Big Black were a post-punk band, in that they wanted to go past what punk was capable of doing—and then and now, that means electronics and noise and weaponized personality, as well as a live show where at least one person is gonna store up all their energy and try and climb a wall. On haha, their new album for Epitaph and Burger, the Garden are more polished, more clear and more focused than ever—this is a band turned into an industrial laser, designed to cut through anything in front of them and sear shut the wound on the way out. They’re currently on a worldwide tour, but L.A. RECORD got them to stand still for a few seconds to do this feature. Brothers (and occasional Yves Saint Laurent models) Wyatt and Fletcher Shears speak now about how you too can do what you truly want ... if you really want it.

Wyatt Shears (bass/vocals): The record is called haha and it has a very sarcastic theme to a lot of the songs—a very trickster-ish vibe. I wanna take you down a road lyrically where you think you’re going the right way but you’re actually not. It’s like here’s this toy … but it’s not a toy, it’s something else. A lot of songs mean a lot to me—what I believe in and what I stand for. Like ‘All Smiles.’ We have a lot of problems with apathy in music, apathy in hiphop, apathy in a lot of things. ‘I don’t care, I’ll sit back and smoke my weed cuz who cares, right?’ That’s what’s cool now. ‘All Smiles’ is like get up, shake someone’s hand, look ‘em in the eye and show ‘em you mean business. ‘I have a smile on my face instead of a frown.’

Fletcher Shears (drums): Apathy has become a huge trend and we’re not really about that.

W: We wanna show we have a purpose, we have a point and we’re driving forward. We wanna show you we mean fuckin’ business!

F: But at the same time— W: —we’re obviously very goofy. And that’s where the trickster sarcasm comes in.

So you’re against apathy, and apathy goes hand-in-hand with comfort. Do you have to make sure you’re uncomfortable to do the work you wanna do?

W: No, not really—it’s just a natural thing.

You’re naturally uncomfortable?

F: I think we’re perfectly comfortable.

You seem comfortable.

W: As far as the apathy and the anti-apathy, of course it’s one thing not to care—like don’t care about what another person says about your music or your style. But as far as not wanting to change the course of our generation creatively in any way and laying back and doing what has been done before … that’s apathetic in my opinion. That’s the form of apathy we’re talking about. Not our social environment. We’re in a generation where everyone is looking at us like ‘This generation INTERVIEW

sucks! It was better way back ten years ago, 90s 80s …’ Fuck the past! We’re gonna make this time the best.

F: We don’t care about the past, we don’t care about the ‘70s, we don’t give a shit about David Bowie—this is about Wyatt and us and what we’re doing. Nothing else matters.

We constantly get people coming up to us like, ‘Oh, Bowie, man—it MUST have been an influence!’ Dude, I’ve listened to one David Bowie song in my life. I don’t give a shit—I don’t base what I’m doing off past influences or things that have already been done. I’m basing things off myself and who I am as a person and Wyatt is as well. That’s what makes us happy. Cuz we’re creative ourselves. Not to emulate anybody else.

Doesn’t making something new get harder and harder as time goes on? It’s like settling a frontier—eventually people take every last piece of land. There’s always more and more of the past behind you, making sure there are less ‘new’ things to be done.

F: I know what you mean, and you’re totally right. You can’t really do anything without having to take something from the past. But it’s smarter to take a little bit of something from the past and put drops of it in what you do now, and that way you make it your own. You can build from there. Obviously you’re not gonna wake up one day and do something completely original. I mean— maybe if you’ve watched no TV, listened to no radio … some child that’s lived in the woods all of its life? But when you’re living in a city or living in a town, you probably are gonna take something, and that’s understandable. But we’d like to try to make it as ‘us’ as possible. That’s the overall goal.

You both had fairly regular childhoods in Orange County, right? Same TV shows, fast food and suburbs as a lot of people in California.

W: Yeah, we lived a pretty fuckin’ regular life.

I can’t really dodge that question, So how’d you go off the rails?

W: Like not going to school? We were kind of forced out of guilt and lack of a better option to go to college, so we went to a community college for one semester and just constantly ditched classes. Not cuz we were trying to be fucking cool—it just felt so off. We were playing shows at that time, but none of the shows were good. They were just shitty local shows.

F: The whole point of the progression and how we are now vs. how we were before this started … we’ve played around so many bands, so many cities and so many countries.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s great things out there. There’s good music. But the amount of bands and artists actually breaking the mold—a real mold—is really hard to come by. I think there’s only a handful of them.

W: You’d be shocked at the fact that you go somewhere like Indonesia and you hear a band in Indonesia, and you go back to America and a lot of the bands are doing the exact same thing. Maybe a tiny bit different based on your surroundings but basically the same.

F: The whole point of what we’re doing and the background of what we think about a lot is just trying to make something unique and that’s got a sound of its own. It’s own brand.

Without having to take so fucking much of what else is going on.

W: Because you don’t need to! You don’t need to base your band off another band. You can if you want, don’t get me wrong—it’s a fuckin’ free world and you can do whatever you wanna do—but you don’t HAVE to do that.

I think a lot of bands start off like, ‘OK, we gotta sound like some band to start off. Let’s sound like this band first and we’ll see what happens.’ You can start off with a blank slate.

That’s something you CAN do. But I think a

lot of people … don’t even think about that?

Which is fine?

F: We didn’t when we started making music.

We just made a stereotypical punk band. But when you go on and get a better view, you’re like, ‘Wait a second—I don’t have to stay like this.’ And don’t get me wrong—we’re not claiming to be the fucking gods of anything here! We’re still molding it ourselves and a lot of the time, we’re not content with what we have going on. It’s taking us a long time. But the record is where we’re at now, and the next one will be where we’re at at that time. When the record got put out, I don’t have a feeling of, ‘Ahhhh, time to relax!’ It’s more of a frantic feeling of, ‘OK—now to get on to the next thing!’

I never picture you relaxing. Maybe that’s what I was asking when I was asking about never being comfortable.

F: I love relaxing, man! Relaxing for me is riding my bike or getting exercise or sitting in my room making Puzzle music. Or just hanging out with my friends and eating Weinerschnitzel.

Your dad was in Shattered Faith—did you get a creative head start by being exposed to punk and hardcore at such a young age?

F: We started off listening to a lot of bands maybe people wouldn’t listen to when they’re younger. Like listening to the Prodigy on the way to kindergarten and misinterpreting some of the really nasty lyrics! It helped serve as a backbone. Also there were times it made it harder for us. I remember in high school, we’d be wearing spiked leather jackets to high school, and my parents weren’t into that!

Just like normal parents, I guess. I’d put my leather jacket in my backpack and when my parents drove off, I’d put it back on. So it’s not like our parents were open to everything we were into, even if it was something they were into.

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Did knowing your parents had made records make being a musician seem more possible? Or more realistic?

F: No, to be honest for me. The first time we made a record, I didn’t even realize what it meant. We were around musicians sometimes and we listened to a lot of music. I didn’t know if it was a record or CD—didn’t matter to me.

I was listening just as simple as you could ever listen, liking it for what it is.

W: Once we got involved with Burger, it gave us more of an idea what it could be. The first vinyl we ever put out wasn’t even Burger, now that I think of it. That was MHV—the old band we were in. Life And Times was the second vinyl. But two different bands so it doesn’t even matter.

You grew up in and around punk and garage music. In which way was it more helpful to you—showing what you could do? Or showing what you shouldn’t do?

W: I have to say, after a lot of years, I’m not a big fan of garage music. But originally finding it when I was younger, the biggest part that really appealed was the DIY aspect. And that anybody could do it. But that’s just me …

Wyatt Shears.

F: I never really got into the music as far as garage rock goes. It was a small part of my life when I was lot younger, where I liked it cuz nobody else liked it. Not a lot of young kids knew about garage at that time. ‘OK, I’m gonna try to like this cuz nobody really likes it.’ Then once I was really honest with myself, I was like, ‘I don’t really like the music at all.’

As far as punk goes … it’s just that energy.

You’re at a punk show and just RELEASING that energy. That’s one of the best things about music and playing—releasing that energy in the most uncontrived raw way. You’re not releasing the energy for the crowd, you’re not releasing it in a different way than you would completely by yourself naked in the woods, basically! A lot of bands release energy in their own way but sometimes it’s a controlled releasing of energy, and I’m just talking about literally letting go and making it as raw as you can. That really intrigued me about punk when I was younger. Not so much anymore cuz to me … every once in a while you hit a punk band but it’s just kind of like a repeat?

W: If it’s a repeat, it’s a not a punk band.

They’re emulating what punk was back in the day. Punk is a lot of different types of rap and a lot of different types of things, in my personal opinion. A punk band you’re not gonna hear do the typical ‘Dah na, da-dah-na, da-dah-na, da na!’ …

When and why did music become the thing you knew you were committed to?

When did you go from liking music to considering yourselves musicians?

F: We always do what we love to do, which is this, but we were doing it in different … environments. We started off fucking under underground—the sewers, basically. Now I feel we’re on our feet and have a goal and we know where we’re going. Before we played cuz we loved it but we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t even necessarily care if just one person was watching us, which happened many many times. It took us a long time to get where we are now.

W: We still consider ourselves small. We got a lot to do—but it’s a lot of fucking work.

So what is the goal? And what is the effect of even having a goal?

F: This might come off weird but … a samurai lives and dies by the sword. There’s not a certain goal. It’s living, honoring what you do and honoring your profession.

W: We wanna keep moving. If it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel right and I’m not gonna force it. But for now … we’re both 21 in 2015 and this is what we want and what we feel we’re supposed to be doing.

What inspires you now? Not what specific people—but what qualities? What do you like to see in other humans, and what does that do to you?

W: When I see another musician or a public speaker or movie director, I don’t consider myself on the same path. I consider myself in my own lane. But when I see someone play a show or doing something I think I could do, it motivates me to go and get what I need, you know? That’s the beauty of living life—not being restricted to the one person everyone thinks you are. You can do literally whatever the hell you wanna do. That doesn’t mean fake something and be someone you’re not. If you’re feeling it, fucking do it. There’s nobody stopping you. People say it all the time: ‘Be yourself.’ But that’s just one specific way. Change your whole image if you feel it.

Transition into a whole other phase of your life. You have the freedom. A lot of people live their lives not even thinking that’s an option but it fucking is!

How did this become a possibility for you?

Why did you realize you could take your own path?

W: Spontanaeity brings it out. Genuineness.

That’s what we like to do. When I’m on stage I’m not thinking what face I’m gonna make, what move I’m gonna do, how I’m gonna play my bass … people think it’s staged but I swear to God it’s not. It’s exactly how it comes out of me. People think we’re on drugs or drinking—funny cuz we don’t even do drugs or drink alcohol! It shows how much people don’t even think this can be a natural thing! ‘There’s no fucking way you’re not on heroin.’ That’s what ‘haha’ is about. Constant accusations. ‘Cells Stay Clean’ is that as well: ‘No, dude—this is raw energy. This is us when we go up there!’

The Garden seems like really it’s about change—the idea that you can change yourself, change the way you fit into the world, maybe change the world through that. Is there anything you think can’t ever be changed? What’s permanent to you?

W: As long as you’re in control of your own life and weren’t born imprisoned in any way, then yeah, you can change anything. Especially especially creatively, with your music. There’s always room for improvement or growth. But if you wanna stay the same, that’s fine too.

You’re also into the idea of shapeshifting— physical change, and putting the most fundamental concept of ‘you’ up for grabs.

That shows up in a few songs: ‘I want no part of my physical form…’ Why? F: That lyric for me was about getting tired of my persona and Wyatt’s as well—sometimes I just really don’t give a fuck about what I look like and I don’t want anybody to care what I look like. I just wanna do my own thing.

If you’re getting sick of it, don’t dwell on it, INTERVIEW

basically. A feeling of being over caring about the way I look.

Is this the part where I’m supposed to ask Fletcher why he liked to wear women’s clothing? That seems to have really captivated people who cover you.

W: Even though we don’t even fucking do that now, we still get the same question! They want to talk about something Fletcher did in 2012. Let’s progress here!

F: I was doing it cuz I was trying to make myself look and feel like an actual woman.

Because that’s how I felt—it felt right to me. It doesn’t feel right to me now so I’m not doing it. I still wear women’s clothes, I still wear men’s clothes … who gives a fuck! It doesn’t mean anything. That part of me was that part of me in 2012, 2013. I didn’t do it after that cuz I didn’t feel it! But people love to pin you down, love to feel safe: ‘Finally, we figured out Fletcher!’ No, that’s not what it’s about. If you’re not comfortable with me changing and moving on … they don’t pay attention.

How did you put haha together? Some of these songs go back to much earlier releases.

But it all fits together.

W: We don’t usually do a record like this. With Paperclip, that was ‘sit down, get it done, it’s done.’ We did it with a guy we didn’t know.

‘Let’s just call this guy.’ He was like, ‘Uh, OK—wanna do it for $140?’ ‘Uh, OK.’ So it was like, ‘Let’s do these songs really fast so we don’t have to pay him too much!’ He was like, ‘Come back and we’ll edit and mix’ and we’re like, ‘Nah, it’s cool! We like ‘em like this!’

And we sent it to Burger and that’s how it was.

This record obviously took a lot more time.

In the studio, we’re not like really focused and militant. Half the time we’re laying around, joking around. It comes naturally.

The recording process probably took less than five months. We actually calculated that. This one, we were doing a lot of things in our life— getting a label, a lot of touring. It couldn’t be done in one night. We were in a different headspace. Unfortunately—and we don’t like to do this—it was a couple pieces over time. It’s interesting—it feels more complete than Paperclip now. Feels like our first actual album. Obviously we still count Paperclip, but this feels like a really new beginning. And we’re stoked. We don’t like to waste a lot of time and we’ve never been the type of guys who are like, ‘OK, we’re going to plan for three years of records and it’s gonna be done in three years.’ We wanna get it done.

You like you’re very careful not to get ‘stuck’ in something.

W: Our appearance and what we’ve done can be deceiving. We’ve gotten called things before: ‘Oh, you guys are famous now!’

Actually, we’re not. We still share a room, we still pay bills, we’re still doing things almost how we were before. It’s a little upgraded at this point! But we haven’t felt like we’ve accomplished enough to wanna be done. We wanna make our musical mark, you know what I mean? We want people to look back and say, ‘Wow, they really did something.’

Instead of ‘they put out one sporadic album, did a little modeling and that was it.’ We’ll get left behind. We haven’t made enough of a mark to become a thing in the future in my opinion. We’ll be remembered maybe by some people at this point, but it will fade INTERVIEW

away very easily. There’s a lot we still feel we have inside us. For us, we know we’re gonna put this out and a lot of people aren’t going to like it, but it doesn’t matter for us cuz we know we like it and this is the direction we wanna go. We have a very checkered past when it comes to music. We’ve had a lot of EPs come out and then The Life And Times of a Paperclip, which is what people recognize us for the most. A lot of people have clung to that and put us in certain categories—‘garage’ or ‘lo-fi punk’ or blah-blah-blah. We’re having a good time shooting that down with this record. That’s why we created Vada Vada in the first place. We can call ourselves what we wanna call ourselves. Call us what you want, but this is what we are. I mean—we have like hip-hop tracks on this new album. What are you gonna do?

What’s the story on ‘We Be Grindin’? The Garden seems to have a fascination with ‘the club.’

W: I actually like going to the club! I like to go dance. It’s cool. But at the same time I like to make fun of people if that’s all they fucking talk about: ‘Up in the club!’ It used to be something obviously in the early 2000s—a very macho thing to say. ‘I’m in da club! I got girls!’ And in my opinion, a lot of the time its used in a very homophobic way: ‘I’m a big man, I walk in the club, everybody looks at me …’ For the most part, I like to make funk of it. But I like to go to the club—to be part of it! To just go!

And what’s with your fascination with writing from the perspective of inanimate objects? From Life And Times of a Paper Clip to ‘Everything Has A Face’ on this album—you like to give life to things that were never alive.

W: That became a thing when we were really little. We’d see a paper bag flying in the street and a car would roll over it, and we always felt bad for the paper bag—we told ourselves like, ‘Fuck that—why are we even feeling bad for that?’ But in a way it made us both feel weirdly bad. That was the start of us putting either music or personalities to objects.

How do your own limitations affect you?

Even with all the experiments you do, there’s still just the two of you live. In a way, you’re working with a lot less than a lot of other bands, even if you’re trying to do more.

F: At times it’s been hard. In the past when we started using a lot more electronics in our recordings, we got to a couple songs like, ‘Shit—how are we gonna do this?’ But we found solutions and pushed through all the questioning and wondering if we would figure it out. We’re able to play the album and that’s a good feeling. For a long time we’d do the electronics out of an iPod. We’d go on tour hoping it wouldn’t break every night—a fucking nightmare! Sometimes it didn’t work and sometimes it did. Now we have this thing called an SPD-SX—a little pad I keep next to my drums. It’ll do whatever I want.

What have you done on haha that you’ve never done before?

F: The song ‘Egg.’ The way we made that song and the way it sounds and the instruments in it are something we’ve never done before. We made it completely in the studio while sitting around bored. And the grand piano—we’ve never had anything like that.

W: Wait til you hear that on the SPD-SX! All these songs we have now like ‘This Could Build Us A Home’ or ‘I’ll Stop By Tomorrow Night’ have leads on them. It’s pretty interesting to work with leads. And ‘Gift’ has those violins.

F: It was really hard at first—it took us a long time. We’d mess up at shows.

W: A pretty cringe-worthy mess!

F: But we’ve got it down more than we ever have now.

Did your own creativity haunt you? ‘We’re dooming ourselves by using this string section.’

W: Sometimes it did. We really looked into what was possible live. I was nervous for a while: ‘How the hell are we gonna pull off “This Could Build Us A Home?”’

F: We’d start playing without any keyboard and it sounded ok, but you know—this needed what it was supposed to have. When we got the SPD-SX, we started going really hard at it so we could do it the right way live.

W: This is the whole point. Even though this thing was not fun to learn—kind of a pain in the ass!—we’ve grown from it. The point is to keep pushing ourselves musically and see what we can do. We wanna be versatile.

This is the way! You gotta do things you didn’t necessarily wanna do. Isn’t the whole point of rock ‘n’ roll to kinda do something new? Push any sort of boundary?

F: That’s more of a punk thing.

W: Or Vada Vada?

You’re a very active band—almost compulsively active. You’re always on tour or doing something. You never disappear.

W: We get paranoid. You consistently see artists like, ‘Where have they been? They were doing so well!’ For us, it’s a little depressing.

We try and stay active. The peole who listen to your music and look at your posts are there to support you. As long as you support them, they’ll support you.

F: I notice a lot of people going through the motions. Put out an album, tour, then stay quiet a long time. And then come back and do the same thing. To me, that seems a little robotic. Don’t get me wrong—I understand when you’re a band and you do what you gotta do and what’s gonna help you in the future. For us, we don’t wanna stay quiet for four months. We like to keep doing shit.

We’re very proactive and aggressive people. It wouldn’t feel right if we took a break.

W: Even a month off kept us pretty antsy!

F: We can barely handle four weeks!

Would you be able to be as disciplined as you are if you weren’t family? Could two strangers ever achieve this level of total band commitment?

F: A big part of it is we honestly love doing it. If we didn’t like it, we wouldn’t be doing it. We love doing it, we love performing, we love creating. Being brothers and spending 21 years in the same small room together has definitely helped. It’d be different even with just something as small as having our own rooms. We’ve never had our own room in 21 years! That gives us a specific kind of closeness a lot of people don’t have.

You talked before about dropping out of college—how do you make sure you’re still educating yourselves each day? And what do you think you’ve read the most: sci-fi, horror or self-help books?

W: I like sci-fi and horror but I’ve been trying to broaden my horizons and learn more about what’s going on in the world.

Not from a political standpoint but more issues people claim to care about here but then don’t look at other parts of the world at what’s been happening for a long time.

Recently I read about in the U.K. how a transsexual woman was put into a male jail and I’ve never heard anything like that before so I was really shocked: ‘Shit! That’s insane! That’s so fucked up!’ But then I read more and that kinda thing has been happening in Thailand for a really long time with the ladyboys and stuff—it’s crazy cuz nobody gives a shit unless it’s happening somewhere you’re ‘supposed’ to give a shit, I guess. Like America or the U.K. or Europe.

It is a big deal—but it’s strange cuz so many people are unaware it’s been happening in other parts of the world.

Did doing modeling work for St. Laurent change the way people think of the band?

Or the way people talk to you, now that you’re not just musicians but models?

W: That’s a part of us, and what we did means something to us. A lot of people ask if it annoys us when people come to shows just to look at us? You know, to be perfectly honest—if they wanna buy a ticket and come in and see us, what am I supposed to be mad about? Some people come for music, some people wanna meet us cuz we modeled for St. Laurent … whatever the case, that’s fine. As long as love is in the building and the energy is good, that’s my honest answer.

Did all those sewer-level shows you played help in any way once you got on the runway? ‘This is nothing, no one’s even throwing stuff.’

W: It wasn’t anything too different. It was like playing baseball and then the next day playing football.

F: On stage it’s more spontaneous. This was more controlled. You have to go out there and do a certain thing. You go out in front of people and do something not necessarily scripted but more controlled.

The similarities were the fact people were there watching, and that made me more nervous. I was nervous more than second time cuz I knew what it was about. The first time we didn’t know shit. The second time, I gotta make sure I really don’t fuck it up!

The first time Hedi Slimane came back out from hiding, we were kinda the first guys for him to present to the world—like, ‘I’m back in the modeling game!’ Thank God we didn’t know that at the time! We probably would’ve been a lot more nervous.

W: I can’t even explain how much ignorance we had about modeling. We had no fucking clue!

What dead or fictional person would most deeply understand the Garden? I don’t mean an influence—I mean kinship.

W: I would hope Socrates!

Because he asked question after question to get at the ultimate truth?

W: I guess so, yeah!

THE GARDEN’S haha IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM EPITAPH AND BURGER. VISIT THE GARDEN AT THEGARDENTWINS.COM. 9

KIM AND THE CREATED Interview by Daiana Feuer Illustration by Alex The Brown

Kim and the Created might be the most dynamic of all the bands that have come from the land of Burger/Lolipop Records, and certainly they’re a treat to behold—a radioactive but delicious piece of candy. The music grumbles like a sci-fi horror show and Kim House is the pretty monster, clad in a cat suit and thrashing around on a stage that can’t contain her mighty force. Like that classic tale of a woman grown to 80 feet tall who just can’t help trampling power lines and crushing buildings in her search for love and understanding, Kim comes from a place of vulnerability. She lets it all out on stage and it’s impossible to look away. She finished her Echo residency with a Halloween cover bands show, where she turned the Created into the Cramps, and here she lets us in on her tender side.

Where have you shopped most often and spent the most money: Halloween store?

Party supply store? 99 cent store? Pet store? Record store? Why? Kim House: Halloween stores, of course! It’s no secret I love costumes and spooky things.

For my residency at the Echo I was Batman characters every Monday: Catwoman, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn. Why? Because I like to have fun with it for myself. I think if I just get into what I’m doing, people will get into it, too.

Have you ever had a hair-dye disaster?

Any time it doesn’t turn out how I wanted, I just go with it. I wanted it black this time to match Lux Interior for the Cramps covers we did and it turned blue—fuck it! Now I’m blue for our European tour!

Do you believe in ghosts or spirits? Have you ever had a close encounter with the third kind?

I believe in life on other planets, and that we don’t know shit outside our tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny world. On this Earth, I believe in karma and trying our best to make the most of it. I think we are all in for a big surprise after we die … and that could just be that we turn to dust.

What is your responsibility as a woman in rock?

I am myself and use music as a way to release emotions I have trouble dealing with. It’s therapy. I don’t think ‘issues’ is a male/female thing—it’s a human thing. Just because I am 10

a woman, people want me to be some sort of image for all women. But I’d like to be an image for all people dealing with anything.

Is your performance style a form of rebellion?

I honestly just try to release my emotions and my body on stage. Whatever happens, happens.

Have you ever gotten hurt at a show?

I almost lost my eye at the Echo at Echo Park Rising 2014 when I jumped into the crowd … and into someone’s fist that completely opened my eye lid. Then it was swollen shut.

I kept playing with blood dripping down my face. I was wearing a Clockwork Orange outfit so it was all very strange.

Even with the snarling, animalistic movements, possessed faces, etc, there’s still make-up and skin-tight cat suits and playing dress-up … how is this a form of femininity?

I think it is really important to show that you can be ‘pretty’ and still have dark feelings or relate to many different ideals. In some ways, I am a normal person in this world and in some ways, I have feelings that make me feel different and on stage is the feeling of going through that. I hope that whoever feels that way too can recognize it in me and find someone they can relate to and that I’ve affected someone in some way. Everyone has many sides to them—it’s just how much you choose to show. And I’m getting more and more comfortable letting more of myself out.

Is the end goal to feel more normal or to feel more different?

There isn’t a goal. It’s just what is actually happening. I think everyone has feelings and thoughts that make them feel different and I just deal with mine by being open about it.

That’s what helps me. I think I’ll always feel different but the more people can relate to me the more that makes me ‘normal.’

What brought you to the whole catsuit aesthetic? Do you remember the first show you performed in one of these outfits?

I wanted something I could move around easily in with all the jumping, climbing, bar crawling … As a dancer, I’m most comfortable in spandex. They also feel like a costume—a character—which makes it easier for me to open up emotionally. The cheetah catsuit was my first. I guess it is sexy, but to me it felt totally covered and almost [like a] non-sexual alien type suit.

What kind of dance did you do? When you’re playing, do you ever have flashback moments where you feel like a dancer?

I took ballet, dance, tap, jazz and point.

I had lessons and recital and rehearsal for hours everyday. When people I play in bands with complain about practicing, I don’t get it. I don’t see practice as work. If I’m not practicing, what the hell else would I be doing? I don’t see much similarity between my band and when I would dance. Dance is more about structure and my band is about letting go.

What made you turn away from dance?

I didn’t leave it as much as evolve into acting and theater then into music. It all flowed pretty naturally and led me to today where I feel like I combine all of them into one with writing music, live performances, videos and so on. I like that in music I have more control over my creativity.

What were some highlights of that period of your life?

Performing on stage of course, but I loved intense practices several days a week.

Taking that many years of dance made me a stronger, driven person and I’m grateful for that time.

Why is it important to give less of a fuck?

For me, it was important to give less fucks because I was giving far too many fucks and it was killing me. I had to let go in order to keep my sanity, or least what was left of it. At some point you realize no matter what you do, it will somehow end up being negative in someone’s eyes so you might as well do and be exactly what you want and the right people will get it and you will feel finally comfortable in your own skin and head that you were completely yourself and, still, it was OK to be that way—to be you.

What does ‘punk feminism’ mean to you?

I think the same as it means to ‘give less fucks!’ Same answer, literally. Standing up for yourself and what you think and feel and being OK with that and strong enough to do it no matter what.

INTERVIEW

UPCOMING HIGHLIGHTS in Royce Hall

MUSIC IS LIFE...

Booker T. Jones and Black Joe Lewis

Lucinda Williams with special guest Bill Frisell plus Sean Rowe

Regina Carterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Southern Comfort plus Sam Amidon

Tigran Hamasyan Luys i Luso featuring members of the

Butler, Bernstein & The Hot 9 plus Red Baraat Mardi Gras Bhangra

EXPLORE ENGAGE EXPERIENCE

An evening with

Anoushka Shankar

Yerevan State Chamber Choir

...UPDATE YOUR PLAYLIST

Is there any part of the establishment that you hope to destroy or conquer?

Cliques. L.A. is one big giant high school cafeteria all over again. Who you know trumps what you do a lot of the time and it can be frustrating. Hard work vs popularity contests seems to be the challenge.

You channel dark emotions on stage—how much of it is performance and how much is personal? When bad things happen, are you like, ‘At least I can use this for a song’?

It’s all me, my feelings, and extremely personal. It’s what I’m currently going through, dealing with, trying to make sense of. It is the ultimate release—therapy. I do use music as a way to get through things.

Writing it out helps then getting to let it out psychically on stage—then being appreciated after helps too because it makes me feel OK with what’s happened. I don’t think artists have to suffer. I think there are people out there that can take a beautiful feeling and portray it to us in a way some of us can’t, and that’s what they’re here for. We all have a reason.

Do you have a pre-show ritual?

I like to sit alone in quiet. There is so much on my mind that I want to go over, and also I want to just chill out before the crazy show.

The show on stage—and after—takes a lot out of me, so I just like to save it.

What do you hope people get from your performance?

Just honestly hoping they walk away feeling anything at all is what gets me going. Even if it’s scared or confused, at least they are feeling something. I’m not trying to be a role model. I am only being myself—which includes the good and the bad. I just hope that sometimes some people can relate to what I’m saying and it helps them.

Do you feel the ‘Kim House’ persona is still separate from you? The more you perform, do you ever feel like you have to actively turn her off?

I do because I feel the pressure to be the exact same way on stage as when I am off stage and it’s hard because on stage is a release for me.

That’s impossible to be going through 24/7.

I hope fans who relate to me on stage can relate to me off stage as well.

What’s the new single ‘Get Go’ about?

It is about how when you’re suffering with a mental illness, although everyday is different, the feelings you have remain the same. So I say everyday feels the same from the get go. I think people who get it will understand what it’s like to wake up everyday feeling the same and not sure how to get out of the cycle or wake up to a new feeling. It’s the struggle.

The music isn’t the answer right now—it’s me going through it. Maybe the next album will be the answer—who knows? We recorded at Lolipop in a few hours and several one-take tracks. Wyatt Blair recorded us and has given me opportunities in music when no one else would and I am forever grateful for that.

How does Kim on cassette fit with Kim on stage? Obviously there’s a lot of physicality missing. Do the recordings have something the stage doesn’t? Do you need both together to ‘get it’? Or do they do different things? This question brought to you by Iggy Pop. INTERVIEW

They’re very different. First of all, because I am always playing with different musicians.

The first—the demos—the second and the third tapes are all different people playing on it. You could also see a live show and a week later it’s an entire new band. I think live has something the tape doesn’t—energy, and I don’t mean physically. Live is always louder—in your face. It can evoke more from the crowd, and you can feel it more … literally feel the sound. That’s part of why I rarely record. I don’t enjoy it as much as I love performing and feeling the live sound: I lay on the stage and can feel the bass drum while we play and it’s the best feeling in the world. To ‘get’ my music, I think you can get it on the tape by relating to the lyrics or live by feeling something. I think the entire point of music is to have someone to relate to—to find the words for you, or make you feel good and bad emotions. I think I do that.

Which of your songs is the most personal?

What inspired it?

They are all personal. I write as I’m going through the emotion. ‘Never Again’ is about a time I felt like giving up on everything and that’s the darkest song. It’s rough playing it live over and over and over again and putting myself in that headspace when I’m trying to move on in my life, but it’s important to me to be able to be there for others who might deal with the same thing. I aim to make the full-length different emotions as I’ve changed a lot the last year.

What are some of these demons you’re wrestling with? What’s wrong?

Like a lot of people, I’ve always felt very out of place. Being bullied in school or even recent life, feeling ostracized and like a black sheep in my own family … it’s led to trouble knowing what to do to feel better. I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety for significant parts of my life. I’ve had fucked up things happen to me, as I’m sure everyone has. I’m just trying to make sense of it all and do the best I can.

How does the experience of ‘performance therapy’ differ from normal therapy? Why does that work?

Therapy can be very scary, clinical, cold and even end up leaving you feeling more depressed and like an open wound. On stage you are free and then celebrated afterwards— they’re very different. On stage you’re in control and left feeling better afterwards, like there was some sort of resolution and you’re stronger for it.

You said: ‘The music isn’t the answer right now—it’s me going through it. Maybe the next album will be the answer—who knows?’ What would happen if you got an answer? Would you stop? Turn into someone or something else?

By answer I mean finding a way to deal with things. I’m sure it will be a life-long journey. No one is 100% happy all of the time. If I change, my music will too. I’m always changing. I’ve performed on stage through dance, theater, and music my entire life—I can’t imagine not doing it.

Sometimes I fucking hate it because of the business and I want to stop but then I think ‘What the hell else would I do?’ and I keep going.

If you were a superhero what would be your power? And your tragic flaw?

I’ve always wanted to be invisible so you see how people really act and think when they’re alone. It sounds creepy … but I just mean I wish you could see people at their true selves.

But then if I was invisible, my flaw would be feeling alone … and that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do in music.

How many band members have you gone through in the last year? Is that a challenge to being the Kim and constantly having to create the Created?

I have had almost 40. I like playing with different people and seeing how the songs change and having different adventures with different people. It’s pretty intense practicing nonstop but I’ve done it since day one so it’s become a way of life now. I’m addicted to change.

Los Angeles rock is sort of split between the hippie-dippy enthusiasts and the punk rockers. Is there anywhere these two approaches converge in your eyes?

I spent 20 years on the east coast so I think my sound is probably a result of a mix of sounds by a mix of geography. I think everyone is starting to play together and I think that’s cool … less boring at least [than] to see just one particular sound for hours. Mixing it up is way more entertaining. Now they call every single genre ‘psych,’ I guess.

If you had to go live on the moon and could only take three records with you, what would you take?

I know its probably ‘not cool’ to say the Beatles but it honestly is what I listened to most of my life. The white album especially.

Again, typical, but the Doors. It’s too hard to pick a favorite album because my favorite songs are split over many. Strangely enough though, one of my favorite tracks is an acoustic demo version of ‘Hyacinth House.’

I don’t see my stage performance as ‘punk.’ I idolized Jim Morrison growing up: swinging around, giving no fucks, scaring people, sending a message: all of it entertaining or dark, I loved it. I am a huge classic rock freak. Everyone thinks I’m super into 90s and punk and all these girl groups I’ve never heard of. 50s doo-wop and 60s and 70s rock ‘n’ roll are my favorite. I also listened to Billie Holiday on repeat my entire life. Her voice and deep emotions … you could really feel what she was feeling. I played trumpet and was a tap dancer so I really loved her music for many reasons.

Where on the east coast did you grow up?

What brought you to Los Angeles and what makes this city feel like the place you want to call home?

I was born in Virginia, but from 3 months old until 19 I grew up in Gainesville, Florida. I was a drama geek and outcast my whole life. I took band in school but sucked at it because I had a terrible teacher. In fact, I graduated in Education with a concentration in Psychology because school was so awful that I wanted to be a guidance counselor to help make it better for other kids like me. I moved to L.A. to become an actor but hated the business and found in music I could have more freedom. I like L.A. because it really does feel like you can do anything you want here and pursue any dream you have. I also

like that there is always something to do … even though recently we have been playing nonstop, so I rarely go out since my life is now being at shows. I picture myself one day moving to Europe. I love change and constantly moving forward.

As you have been touring more and more, do you see a struggle in being a woman in the music industry?

I find that people don’t like being told what to do by a woman, or even an artist in general. I work very hard and anything I say to someone in my band or in the business side is only to try and strive for the best, but even still people take it wrong and don’t like being told what to do by me.

When you look at festival line-ups, it’s almost 80 percent dude bands. Does that frustrate you? Where do you stand on the subject of classifying ‘girl bands’ and ‘boy bands?’ As a woman, do you have to be loud to be heard?

If the bands are good, then it doesn’t make me angry. Festivals are usually groups of friends working with other groups of friends and as much as that can be a beautiful thing, I hope merit will be more of a reason for things then just ‘scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’ People call the band ‘female-fronted’ and one day I hope it can just be called a rock and roll punk band. I’m loud because I am loud. I think to be heard you have to never give up and make them listen.

Can you describe the evolution of the vision and sound of Kim and the Created, from your first show two years or so ago to now? Have you always been comfortable with your body or is it something you sought to conquer?

I played drums because I always wanted to my entire life. I moved to the front out of wanting to push myself further as a challenge to myself. Everyday I try to push myself out of my own comfort level. I’m just changing and learning about myself—just like everyone else is. Catsuits make me feel like a truer sense of myself: I guess it’s like a character I developed that was from deep inside of me that I wanted to be more of, and that I am now becoming. Who knows what will happen next? Art imitates life. I never stopped ever no matter what got in the way or what I was feeling. I never thought I would be doing what I’m doing now. I always hated my voice and was uncomfortable in my own skin. I’m trying to be strong for myself and I think in doing that, it can show others to do the same. Give less fucks.

PABST BLUE RIBBON AND ALVA SKATE PRESENT KIM AND THE CREATED WITH RETOX, MIKE WATT AND THE MISSINGMEN, USELESS EATERS, DEATH HYMN #9, DUSTIN LOVELIS, RUDY DE ANDA AND MANY MORE ON SAT., DEC. 12, AT MIDNIGHT MASS FEST AT MADHAUS, 624 PACIFIC AVE., LONG BEACH. NOON / $15-$20 / ALL AGES WITH BAR. MIDNIGHTMASSLB.COM. KIM AND THE CREATED’S ‘GET GO’ IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM LOLIPOP RECORDS. VISIT KIM AND THE CREATED AT KIMANDTHECREATED. BANDCAMP.COM. 13

FFS

FRANZ FERDINAND & SPARKS Interview by Gabriel Hart Illustration by Dave Van Patten Not very many groups can boast the distinction of not only being the world’s best pop group made up of two brothers, but also maybe the longest standing—and I am going to unflinchingly say best pop group PERIOD—but since Sparks’ debut in 1969, they have not only remained ahead of but downright CREATED or IMPROVED every curve on the track. With Russell’s commanding falsetto and Greek Rock God good looks and Ron’s innate songwriting chops—a and bizarre personality that is so boiling and subtle that it’s impossible to replicate. although Paul McCartney once tried—they have an insular sibling magic so pure and unpredictable that it seems the world at large is always trying to catch up. Last June, the group pulled off another first, but this time with the help of new comrades: a band-on-band collaboration with Glasgow’s Franz Ferdinand they have named FFS. It’s a complete co-mingling of the finest elements of both groups without dimming their respective fire—in fact, it’s added a mysterious and highly flammable chemical to their output and they’re now spreading this napalm worldwide. I caught up with Russell upon his return the states after a globe-trotting tour that climaxed in Glasgow for Franz Ferdinand’s homecoming, just before FF came to the states to do the same in Sparks own Los Angeles.

We gabbed about the new record’s unique intercontinental songwriting process, whether or not we actually grow out of puberty, and the generational choice of cocaine vs. Adderall.

I can’t think of a time in my life where I got to see a billboard for a Sparks record!

Russell Mael (vocals): That’s a shock, I know!

I’ll be driving my van around listening to the new record and see a billboard for it—it almost makes me feel like a normal popculture person. And it’s certainly a triumph for you—Sparks is one of the original trollers of pop culture.

It’s a nice comment, and we’re happy the label has supported the project in that sort of way. It is something refreshing. In this day and age, it seems like things are going the opposite direction as far as what kind of music is supported on all kinds of levels—not just record companies, but radio-wise. To have that support now in our career, we’re really happy. Creatively, Sparks and what we’re doing—what we have been doing up until this album—we really feel we’ve done special stuff and special music that is not attempting to work within the system, and we’re proud of that. We’re doing things that are outside of, ‘Well, what’s the chart position?’ So when a project like FFS comes along and you not only don’t make any concessions to wanting it to be fitting in—in any way—and you also have the support of a company that thinks, ‘Well, this should be the norm rather than everything else’ … it is satisfying.

This collaboration is really more like two bands fused into one. It’s like Franz Ferdinand gain a keyboard player and another singer, and Sparks gains a seasoned backing band. Did you consider it a whole new band as you were making it?

It is—we really went at it that way. We wrote songs specifically for this new entity. We think it’s pretty precedent-setting where two established acts that both have their own careers have gone off and done an album of all new songs, for one, and then taken it further and toured together as this new entity. It’s INTERVIEW

unique in that way. You can think of one-off collaborations—hip-hop things and such— but something to this kind of extent where there’s spending over a year writing material and all … at least from our perspective, the amount of energy we put into it was to try and make it so it wasn’t just a one-liner of, ‘Oh, it’s Franz Ferdinand and Sparks.’ We wanted to avoid there not being real depth behind it. Once people got past the idea of the two bands working together, we wanted there to be music to support it.

It’s worked for me as a fan of Sparks—I’ve been a fan ever since the movie Rad came out when I was a little kid. I don’t know if it was my snobbery in my 20s, but when Franz Ferdinand came out, they didn’t resonate with me. But now I can immediately see the stylistic similarities and the daring movies toward reinvention that the two groups have made on their own. It makes me feel a bit foolish for missing the boat on them ten years ago.

Has this collaboration opened you to a younger crowd in the same way?

We definitely have attracted a lot of new fans from the collaboration. On this tour, we played really big festivals all around the world. There are obviously Sparks fans at those festivals, but there are fans too—in the reverse of what you just said about yourself not being attuned to Franz Ferdinand’s stuff—that were less savvy about Sparks. People come away like, ‘How did I not know about this band that has 24 albums out?’ That’s what’s really surprised people who may not have been aware of Sparks to this extent. It’s been helpful—we’ve gained a lot of fans in this endeavor.

The song ‘Collaborations Don’t Work’— obviously, the ultimate contrarian declaration of intent. Did that come from any actual tension? Or was it just an innocent ironic romp?

The first song written for the album was by Ron. It was ‘Piss Off.’ That’d been written eleven years ago when we first met Franz Ferdinand. For various reasons, the idea of working together hadn’t quite been implemented then despite there being a desire for both bands to do something. We broached the idea of working together then, but they were very busy and we were doing various projects, but despite that we came up with this song ‘Piss Off’ that we thought was a good opener. When we finally reconnected eleven years later with the idea of, ‘Hey, whatever happened to us working together?’ it seemed like both bands were excited again about that prospect, and Ron wrote that song, ‘Collaborations Don’t Work.’ We thought this would be a good … I dunno, it’s not a mission statement. Maybe an anti-mission statement?

Or not a statement you’d normally send to a band you’re about to collaborate with? ‘Hey, guys! Collaborations don’t work, and here’s all the reasons way!’ The potential pitfalls! But we thought lyrically it was really provocative— both to them and an audience as well, saying, ‘Hey, we’re doing what we think is a really cool collaboration and by the way, collaborations don’t work!’ And then musically we felt it was really … it was not conventional, as far as the structure of the song. It was pretty complex, and had various stylistic elements along the way, as we sometimes like to do. We thought if they’d like that song, then we maybe could proceed without fear.

What were the actual creative parameters for this record? Did you ever meet like, ‘Alright, we’re gonna do this …’ Is there a song that is completely 50-50 between the two groups?

There weren’t any creative discussions about what this should or shouldn’t be. That was really good, I think. We just wanted it to be as good as we could make it. Both groups wanted

this to be a unique project. Beyond that … we worked from 6,000 miles apart. We were in L.A. for the whole writing process, and they were in either London or Glasgow doing their bit. The writing was done in a pretty segregated way. We’re pretty insular, the two of us. We’ve not had a lot of contact writing-wise with the outside world. We don’t even really know how you do that process! We have our ways of working. I think the geographical barrier that was imposed on this actually worked to its favor. There were different ways the songs came about. A lot was completely from our side, where we would just have a finished song specifically for this: ‘Piss Off,’ ‘Johnny Delusional,’ ‘Dictator’s Son,’ ‘Save Me From Myself.’ There were some that were hybrid tracks—they sent us like ‘Police Encounters,’ and we did all the melody and the lyrics. Same with the ‘The Man Without A Tan.’ They sent us a backing track with nothing else on it, and we came up with all the lyrics and the melody.

And then there were a couple instances where Alex had a song that was his entire thing, like ‘Little Guy From The Suburbs’ was his.

‘Power Couple’ is Ron’s song. And there was one section in ‘Collaborations Don’t Work’ towards the end where it says, ‘I ain’t no collaborator’ that Alex came up with.

The first two songs on the album—‘Johnny Delusional’ and ‘Call Girl’ are these antihero love songs full of yearning, pining, paranoia and self-loathing. They’re from an older man’s perspective—but they’re so timeless, they could also be from a teenager’s perspective. Do you think we ever grow out of the awkwardness of puberty?

No—it’s always there. In some kind of way.

That’s a good observation. ‘Johnny Delusional’ is kind of universal. The specifics of what’s in that song—the person is delusional, but we all have our doubts, and maybe sadly it’s never gonna happen for this character in that 15

song. But you can expand that to be more universal as well. Having doubts and being delusional about other things. I really like that song—it’s one of my favorite ones, and one we came up with later in the process. There’s something in the melody of that song—it’s really bittersweet, and all about this guy who’s not gonna potentially reach this goal of what he wants in life, but there’s something maybe he’ll get? You’re kinda rooting for the guy despite the obstacles along the way. It’s sad but maybe uplifting as well in some sort of way.

Keep on trying—who knows? Maybe you’re not delusional after all!

Most of your output has had this undercurrent of self-loathing that to me always translated into an inexplicable feeling of empowerment.

‘When Do I Get To Sing My Way’ maybe touches on a similar yearning for something, and regret that hasn’t happened—when do I get to sing like Sinatra did? When do I get to feel like Sid Vicious did? And it’s not just touching those issues of seeking something you may not obtain or haven’t obtained. It’s also a way that theme is dealt with that makes it special. ‘Johnny Delusional’ is not a typical thing you hear as a pop song. It’s a unique and really personal and special way of treating that kind of theme. That’s what makes those songs different. It’s not only the theme—people can have that theme in a pop song in a general way—it’s the manner you write about it. It’s done in a clever and fresh way, too, and the analogies and metaphors in both those songs are both not hackneyed. That’s the ambition within Sparks songs from the past—wanting to write about things, but write about them in a newer way of dealing with subjects. Maybe it’s a love song, which is a not a particularly inventive topic, but it’s how you treat that topic, and what craft you put into the lyrics that makes it special.

I tell people that it’s hard to write a love song in the English language. Other languages have single words that we’d need a whole paragraph to explain.

It is—that’s something Ron especially and of course I do too take really seriously.

You use a lot of French on the new record, I noticed.

That too! There’s a craft to writing. One is having an ability to write things that at least in our minds have some weight to them. But there’s also having the desire just to want to be able to do something in a way that is fresh as well, and not going for the run-of-the-mill lyrics in pop songs.

Are you familiar with the Portugese term ‘saudade’? It’s a type of longing for something completely unattainable. Far beyond nostalgia.

Maybe we’re a Portugese group and we don’t know it? I know about fado but I wasn’t aware of that term.

They have a national holiday about that whole phrase—it’s one of those words where you have to explain a whole paragraph to get the word across.

That’s really cool. I even bought a poster when we were there on this trip—a movie poster of a movie made about a famous fado singer. But I wasn’t aware of that term.

Was there a specific political family that inspired ‘Dictator’s Son’?

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I don’t think so. I think Ron and I, we like the idea of— Like a universal thing? Like one dictator’s son could easily be the next.

Exactly. One dictator’s son fits all. There’s something appealing about a song from the viewpoint of the son of the dictator. This guy’s after all the ideal of all things Western that are really crass and capitalistic, and we thought there was something really appealing about that. Which isn’t far-fetched at all—you read about Kim Jong Il and they’re totally in American cinema and all this, and it’s mindboggling that their country is impoverished beyond imagination and then the guy’s a fan of importing models from Sweden to entertain him and watching American movies while everybody in his country is dying of hunger. There was something appealing about a song from the son’s perspective, like, ‘Yeah, you know, what he’s into is Hugo Boss and dental floss and Buffalo wings and all.’

Is that a lyric? Buffalo wings?

‘Wings and dip,’ it says—‘co-ed knees and BLTs.’ What about ‘Police Encounters’? I know there’s a voyeuristic love story in there, but was there inspiration from a;ll the recent police brutality caught on camera?

No—it wasn’t anything to do with that.

We liked the idea that was pretty much literal—like if it’s a pop song, it must be some statement about anti-police brutality cuz so much has happened in the past year, but what we liked was it was more a story about this guy who was in love with a policeman’s wife, and when she didn’t wear underwear. It was a literal story that didn’t have a politically correct theme to it.

The album seems pretty lighthearted until the last song, ‘A Violent Death.’ Why that final 180 degree turn? Besides the fact that we’re all gonna die?

The lyrics to that were done by Alex. We wrote the music. Again, there were no restrictions on what sort of subject matter could be entertained on the album. Alex asked us if we could do music around those lyrics. The process of the writing on this album is less mysterious than people think. We’re just really excited to play in L.A. with this. We played two shows in Glasgow, their hometown, and now we’re looking forward to the flipside.

What’s coming next for FFS? Neither band really knows the next step regarding FFS. We’re just really excited we got the project to this stage. It’s played 31 shows already around the world and it’s been wellreceived everywhere—playing Glastonbury and that sort of a thing has been very exciting.

We never thought this seed of an idea would involve billboards in Silver Lake or Los Feliz!

It’s cool it came this far. As far as what comes next, neither of us have gotten to that stage of thinking yet. We have a couple movie musicals we’ve been working on as Sparks— the Ingmar Bergman is still ongoing. We have Czech producers involved and we’ll hopefully be filming in Prague sometime next year. And we have one other we’ve written that no one knows yet.

FFS’ SELF-TITLED ALBUM IS OUT NOW ON DOMINO. VISIT FFS AT FFSMUSIC.COM.

BILLY CHANGER Interview by Chris Ziegler Photography by Debi Del Grande

Billy Changer is the bassist of the very formidable Corners, as well as an Echo Park engineer and now the very solo artist behind a just-out self-titled LP on Lolipop that’s part experiment, part self-expression and part shot in the dark—or maybe it’s more a flare fired into the sky in hopes of help or at least shining light on things for a second. It’s lo-fi in a careful way and it’s a home recording that doesn’t sound like it ever had a home, and Changer played every part of it himself.

(Even the chorus of responding voices that make him seem like he’s got a bunch of his friends with him—that’s just Changer and the miracle of analog multitrack technology.) The album art and that photo right there both transmit the mood in a moment: the human alone on the streets of the city they live in, looking back at you while you look back at them. Changer’s album is introspective and reflective in a way that perfectly serves the closeness of a recording like this—when it’s done playing, you might feel like someone just left the room. Changer speaks now about where he came from and where he—and we—might be going.

Where are you from? What was it like growing up there?

I’m from Calabasas. People call it Calablackless—that’s the kind of stupid neighborhood I grew up in. Serious conservative shit. I hate it. But my family was different—my dad is a rock ‘n’ roller.

Always has been and always will be. He never really played music, but he just loved the scene in L.A. He showed me the Rolling Stones, Hawkwind, Judas Priest, Frank Zappa, Yes, Grand Funk Railroad and Iron Maiden when I was really young. My mom, on the other hand, has been working full time for over 35 years. She’s takes care of us. I’m a late bloomer by nature. Always awkward and very sensitive. I was never the cool kid in middle school—always the one who wasn’t chosen after running my ass off to the basketball court. [When] I decided to go to college, I got hooked up with KXLU and started volunteering at the Smell every weekend and every summer. I linked up with Corners and I’ve pretty much been on and off of tour since graduating last year.

INTERVIEW

You’re making a lot of solo music right now—why? And why now? What do you get to do solo that would be a challenge in your band?

I’m making a lot of music because that’s all I really know how to do. I’ve narrowed my skill set so drastically that I probably couldn’t even work a cash register and can barely operate a car. From writing and recording so much, I’ve become a chronic single task thinker—I literally cannot think of more than one thing at a time. Being in a bad is rad, but you really have to give it all up and let the other cats shine on. Luckily I’m with a group of guys who are all in a similar boat—from the same area, the same generations, and same musicianship. It’s easy to let them shine on—it just ends up sounding good that way. That’s the beauty of a band: half of the work sometimes is just getting around everyone’s differences, but the remaining product is just so cool and unpredictable. I’ve started trying to incorporate that into my solo stuff now—even letting people into my private recording sessions.

How solo was this particular album? Is anyone else helping? Like on ‘Stranger Next Door’—are you doing your own backup vocals?

That song particularly was a hard one.

It’s all me performing it. I played all the instruments, I sing all the backup vocals.

This isn’t something I’ve done before. I’ve tried to write songs and record them, but I’ve always failed miserably. Or not had the confidence to show my friends to the degree that I have in this work.

What exactly does failure sound like?

A lot of it was my singing voice. I was a backup screamer in my first band. I’d practice screaming in my bathroom.

Did you wait for your family to leave?

Of course. I had to seize the moment. One time my next door neighbor called the cops, and the cops came over with their guns out—’Is everything OK?’ Really I was just screaming my ass off, trying to get the best scream I could. It was always really depressing lyrics: ‘Help me, you’re killing me, you stabbed me in my heart, I don’t wanna live anymore!’

19

New Album Is:

a toe tapper + a lip smacker a be bopper + a ShowStopper

“Melodies to live by, a dance beat to die for.” — LA Record

KʀSV ORYH\GRYH EDQGFDPS FRP

What a testament to the power of music— it got people coming to your house ready to kill you.

Then I’d show up to band practice and I’d try and scream and they’d be like, ‘You’re not doing this right. You don’t sound good.’

That made me realize no matter how much I tried, maybe I was never gonna be good. At singing—I could always play guitar a little bit. That was my main instrument. Singing was where I was most vulnerable. I never could do it! I felt good doing instrumental tracks, but it was like, ‘How do I tell a story with my voice?’ I’m a late bloomer.

I’ve been recording song by song for the last year and a half.

This was originally a split cassette with Tracy Bryant—did you mess with the recordings before you put it on vinyl?

Oh fuck no. I never went back to it. I refused. They haven’t been touched. It’d be smart of me to do that cuz my technique is a lot better now. Frankly, I love the lo-fi sound. I wish that maybe it was different, but I have to stand up for something. As Billy Changer and a solo artist, what’s different is I’m literally trying to capture a moment, a place, a time and an emotion.

If I fucked with it, it never would work out the way I want it to be. I definitely tied a lot of knots in my shoelaces recording this. I’m writing as I’m recording. Now I have these worried shoes, walking around as people are listening. My music is not about ‘Lemme try and amaze a bunch of people.’ I’m trying to connect on a one-to-one level.

I thought so, too. This is a very … notextroverted record. It’s not trying to convince me or sell something. It’s more like, ‘This is me, take it or not.’

I was purposefully doing that the entire time. I have a story about every song I’ve ever written. Unless it has something that moves me, it won’t come out. I’m not a realtor trying to say, ‘Hey, my art is great! You need to listen to it!’ I don’t know how it’s going to affect people. I’m hoping somebody can connect in a personal way. I recorded in a 4-track in my old apartment—my bedroom at times—with equipment I bought from playing local gigs, or a little money I got from my family to live. I’d spend it on gear you could buy from a local music store. I wanted it to be something that didn’t really involve computers—that was organic in that way. So I could push myself to this like … a musician who doesn’t really know how to sing, who never really wrote a record before, but he’s basing it off his emotional responses to how he’s living in this really crazy time in his life. And I was hoping someone would connect with that.

Do you feel at risk making something so personal? If someone doesn’t like this record, that means they don’t like you.

There’s a difference between worrying and caring. I care so much about what I do and the people around me that for some reason I don’t worry if people like it or not, or if they like me or not. I heard the other day there’s a group of guys who don’t like and they actually burned a Corners record! And almost burnt down their apartment while doing it.

See, physical media is the best.

And these are people I know—with music out on labels I’m associated with. I know they think I’m a douche or I come off in an unpleasant way, and it does bother me. But at the same time it fuels me. It’s the cycle of life—that’s where it all stems from in the first place. It fuels the fire.

What is ‘mutant pop’? You sing about that on ‘Island Fever.’ Is it pop for mutants? By mutants? Pop that somehow mutated?

It’s more from outsider art. I didn’t know how to categorize my own music. But if I created this own world, I could name it and make it into something and feel free to roam in this land of mutant pop. I can be as weird or cool in my eyes as I want.

It’s like your nature preserve.

Exactly. You can tell I’m a very sensitive person. I like creating a world I can roam in. I’m scared of people, you know? I don’t know. I think of pop as an actual burst. Or a lollipop. Something I can enjoy. Color.

Obviously it’s popular music. I wanna form an association between my music, maybe outsider music, and songs structured in a way that could be pop songs. They have standard structures, the melodies are singable.

What do you mean when you say ‘outsider art’? Who are you thinking of?

I love Daniel Johnston. He introduced me to music that was very personal. Other people who loved his music got him known. It wasn’t this big machine, this PR campaign … it was him and his drawings. And it was because he was weird and he talked about things he really cared about just with him and his little keyboard or whatever. The world was strange to him. I could relate to his lyrics. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s mutant, it’s weird and it made me feel like I could be myself.

What do you mean by ‘weird’? You’ve said that a few times, too.

I’ve never heard something so intimate in popular culture before. We’re talking about popular culture cuz everyone knows who Daniel Johnston is—or he’s impacted a lot of people. It’s weird because it’s not well-oiled, it’s intimate, it came about in a different way than normal and he challenges what it means to be in a band, an artist, a musician. It’s not like growing up and listening to the Rolling Stones and seeing glamour and big concerts. Like my dad showing me Queensryche or Hawkwind or these other bands that’d play huge massive concerts. That’s what I thought rock ‘n’ roll was all about, growing up as a kid. The Beatles! Taking over the world! This was something different. That’s why I consider it weird. Everything I thought I knew was not in this guy. It was not about that. He didn’t care, as far I know.

So you want a direct connection with the person you’re listening to, and you want to make an album that can offer that same kind of connection to your own listeners.

You want to send and receive an answer.

I know Corners is known cuz we love Joy Divison, and that’s why I love Joy Division—’Atmosphere:’ ‘Walk in silence / Don’t walk away, in silence / See the danger / Always danger / Endless talking / Life rebuilding / Don’t walk away.’ These are all very isolating personal feelings. That’s what INTERVIEW

I like. Trying to hit me—actually hit me— instead of hit the masses or some general area.

So what would it look like if you did connect with people one-on-one like you talk about? How do you know when the goal of your music is achieved? And once you achieve it, then what? In The Devil and Daniel Johnston documentary, he has so many songs about the girl Laurie that he loves. But when he finally meets her after all those years, it’s just kind of anticlimactic.

Every artist is scared to think about that.

A lot of people believe that you write the best music when you’re sad or depressed or going through a hard time pursuit of something. All those fucking crazy things in your mind making you feel like you wanna die and you don’t know what you’re doing … that’s what people want to hear.

As an artist, I realize I’m going to have to keep challenging myself to create. There is a way to do it. I have a grip on what I want to do and I have to hone in on it. You have to be aware of who you are and what you’re feeling and what’s going on in society around you—and how do you participate in that conversation? No matter what, if I can do that—and I’m trying—there is something unique I have to offer. It’s a different time, a different place, different people and I’m influenced by different things. I hope just by … suffering in that way I can offer something! (laughs) When it comes to making music, are there things you always try to do? Or things you hope you never do?

Writing songs and making music is my form of meditation. On a planet in a universe I don’t understand, surrounded by people who vary from self-righteous intellectuals to empty-headed bots, I don’t believe anyone has it figured out yet. Somehow songwriting keeps me sane and provides me a pathway to enter into a place I truly want to be, where music is the most important thing and the sole means of expression. You really think when aliens finally find our civilization that they’re going to want to talk to the president of our military industrial complex or the lawyer politicos ruining the planet? I believe they’re going to talk to people who actually create something important—the ones that can’t just burn up in a rebellion or some amendment.

Music is forever and truly pure. But rock ‘n’ roll is dying one lazy payola campaign at a time. So my responsibility, I guess, as an original songwriter is to just try something different—to give rock ‘n’ roll fans something to feel and listen to when tuning in, something they can dim the lights to and relate to someone else about.

I’m putting as much life into it as possible.

That’s my job as an artist—a vessel that someone can question, dig in to, and appreciate what we as a society take for granted every day.

Why is rock ‘n’ roll is dying? What is gone, and why does that matter to you?

It matters to me cuz I’ve chosen this as my life. I’m a rock ‘n’ roller. I’ve listened to that music since I got my first cassette player. That’s my roots. People who grow INTERVIEW

up differently with different music have different ethics, morals … like what constitutes a song? I don’t think it could ever be a real song if it didn’t have a little bit of guitar, bass and drums into it. Other artists don’t even need that when they write.

Lolipop is a rock ‘n’ roll label whether its garage or synths or that band Part Time which is more 80s—it’s all within the same roots. The problem I see is these well-oiled machines in the music industry. I don’t have anything against that. I’m sure it’s always been there. But I feel people are relying and dreaming upon the machine more than they’re really focusing on who’s driving it, or what’s driving them to go towards that? L.A. is crazy—you see all these people moving to Los Angeles, all these people doing things to try and get known, be heard. Really, they coulda started where they were from! Make music that was true to them where they were from and then let it emanate from them so people have to pay attention! It’s this constant wanting of acceptance, wanting people to go to your shows—who cares if they’re putting on the best show they can?

Or whether people are there are not? I see that as death to rock ‘n’ roll. It’s hard. You don’t see a lot of people coming out to these shows. My friends aren’t making a living, working part time or full time. I don’t see a lot of success.

Is this a symptom of something bigger manifesting in this part of music? Or is it something starting here that’s going to flow into wider society in a few years?

I grew up just in the time people were getting cell phones. I had a pager when I was young, and I had a cell phone that had ‘Snake’ on it. The only entertainment the phone got! I felt lucky to have one of those.

I’m on the cusp of all this craziness. I think people that are leading rock ‘n’ roll now are probably my generation. The problem is when I turn on the radio to 98.7 or KROQ or any big rock ‘n’ roll or ‘alternative’ station, you just don’t hear fucking rock ‘n’ roll anymore! You hear stuff that was done in the ‘90s—they’d rather play a song from ‘94 than a band big in rock ‘n’ roll now.

That’s the sign of the times. Something is not right. It’s on a personal level for me too.

I love my friends and their band, but on whole, there’s a reason why rap and hip-hop and R&B has really taken off—when you hear it, there’s something undeniable about the beat and the sound they’re making.

Maybe it’s the lack of budget—maybe there’s no budget for a band to make a good recording. What I find most is a lot of bands don’t have the resources to experiment in the studio. That’s where the magic was, and has always been. Bands just trying different vocal effects, drum sounds, different bass … now it’s expected like, ‘What budget can get the best sounding recording?’ Well, it’s not about that! Fuck—I’d hate if some labels told me, ‘We’ll give you this money to give us the best-sounding album you can.’ What the fuck does that even mean? I don’t know what to even do with that. There’s all this pressure to do very well with very little for rock ‘n’ roll musicians. I don’t even know the last band that had a huge budget that’s on the radio now.

So do you think being in a garage band now is a luxury, in a way? That’s tragic but bitterly hilarious.

Garage was born in the garage, right? But their access to equipment was at a way higher standard than what’s available now.

Whether their families or they got lucky with a record deal … there was money, still, in music. You were able to put out a single, sell a bunch if it became a hit, and make a living. Now it’s not possible. I don’t know what’s going on with the consumer but people are not willing to invest. Say you’re a fan of a band here in Los Angeles. I don’t see people giving them everything. Give ‘em your money, buy their t-shirts, buy their records, go to all their shows, make sure they have enough to make a great album!

As the saturation becomes overwhelming, the fans spread across the spectrum. You like my band? Then you like that band, you like that band, you like all the bands.

You don’t know which one to throw your money at. You just throw your money at the scene—buy whatever cassette comes out. But there’s not a deep investment.

That’s why none of these bands have any fucking money. There’s nothing for them to work off of. They’re scrounging change to record on low equipment. It’s not ready for the rest of the world.

It’s this weird collision of saturation and scarcity. It seems there are more bands— and the things that go with bands—than ever. But so many people are struggling.

I’ve found a lot of bands get their money from licensing—but the difference with getting your money from a corporation and not the consumer is exactly that. Every band wants to be trendy and cool-looking and sound great cuz those are the people who will buy your music: the trendy cool-looking people who have money and are in that market. When people were buying records because there were only records … you’d be getting money from the fans! People who were listening to your music—who expect more from you! Who want to see you be a rock star! Now it’s completely different.

What’s something you love spending money on—even when you shouldn’t?

And what’s something you wish was free all the time, and why?

Ha—I just had a fortune cookie that advised me to watch how much I spend. I have a spending problem when it comes to audio gear. All the money that comes in goes out the other end in the form of recording gear.

I just bought a Toft ATB mixing console.

I’m always happy to buy cool percussion instruments if I come across something.

Recently I’ve been buying all sorts of weird things from Richard Robertson, an amazing audio engineer in Echo Park. Just anything that’s not an 1176 [limiter] or a clone of something that has been abused billions of times. I wish recording music with super nice custom consoles was free or at least not so expensive, like how recording studios ran before the 80s. But the romanticism and money just isn’t there anymore. So everyone is recording and writing in smaller groups with shitty gear and computers. That’s where Rock has it all wrong—there’s no money in rock ‘n’ roll anymore and the government

invests nothing in music. I say stop funding the army and war on drugs and starting making science labs—and music, art, cinema, and dance studios—more available to the public. The library is the only free creative environment I get to utilize at this point. That needs to change.

You seem to have a very clear idea of what your songs are ‘for’—to communicate directly with select people. Do you think it’s important for writers to have a purpose for their songs? Or can a song just be a song, and that’s enough?

I do and I don’t. That’s what makes a great band and not an OK band. You have to live the life of what you’re writing about.

‘I want our new music to be really dance-y and cool and great!’ But are you the kind of person who goes out and dances and drinks and has fun every night? Or do you have different things in mind? You have to figure out who you are a person and how you can reflect that to other people. There’s nothing wrong with what is song is intended for as long as it’s genuine. As long as you’re living it, there are people doing it—you know it’s gonna be around in a couple years because you’re doing it! People are still rollerblading!

Going to roller rinks! And you know what they play? Disco! Disco’s dead, but when it comes to a roller rink, that’s the coolest fucking song you can hear.

You say you feel like an outsider in many places, but when it comes to music, you feel at home. Why? What makes this fit?

I didn’t for a long time. Then it clicked.

With practice and meditation and thought and just sitting there … sometimes I’d just sit there and look at my tape machine.

‘How can I use you in a different way than I have done before?’ Each song on my record was like that. Like I’d record drums first without a melody at all—’Sweet Time’ had no melody or guitar. I recorded a drum beat I liked and then formulated a song about it. Or I’d put the input into the output and put it through the tape return and see what that would do. Just experimenting—I felt at home. No one was telling me this is wrong or right or sounded good or sounded bad. It was really up to me to decide what felt good inside. That was one of the first times I’ve been able to connect with myself. Writing and recording a song is one of the only ways I really know what I’m doing. That’s why I feel comfortable doing it. And then you listen to it, and the human part comes in. It’s one long connection.

BILLY CHANGER WITH SHOCKING PINKS AND TRAPS PS ON SAT., NOV. 14, AT THE SMELL, 247 S. MAIN ST., DOWNTOWN. $8 / 9 PM / ALL AGES. THESMELL.ORG. AND WITH MOVING UNITS ON SAT., DEC. 19, AT THE ROXY, 9009 W. SUNSET BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $15-$20 / ALL AGES. THEROXY.COM. BILLY CHANGER’S SELF-TITLED ALBUM IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM LOLIPOP RECORDS. VISIT BILLY CHANGER AT BILLYCHANGER. BANDCAMP.COM. 21

DANIEL LANOIS Interview by David Cotner Photography by Ward Robinson On July 17, 1974, after working at Buck Owens’ studio in Bakersfield, guitarist Don Rich was killed in a motorcycle accident.

He left no skid marks when he died on Highway 1 in Morro Bay. In the liner notes for the album, Country Pickin’: The Don Rich Anthology, Owens wrote, “Something I never said before— maybe I couldn’t—but I think my music life ended when he died. Oh, yeah—I carried on and I existed, but the real joy and love, the real lightning and thunder is gone forever.”

With that in mind, I respectfully decline a ride on the back of Daniel Lanois’ motorcycle.

Daniel Lanois—the Québécois producer who has worked with everyone from Brian Eno and U2 to Bob Dylan and Rick James—is currently finishing up an album of ambient lap steel music. On the drive up the highway to Newcomb’s Ranch, the biker bar at which he’s working out both old songs and new, there’s a snarl in the traffic ahead.

Someone’s driven over the edge of the cliff at the side of the highway.

It isn’t Lanois, and anyway, looking at the accident is a passé and pointless pain in the neck, even if the helicopter sent down to retrieve the fallen rider produces an impressive sound that’s massive enough to almost touch. It is not for nothing—here in the upper altitudes amid the beauty of Nature and the suggested peril that lies in wait around every hairpin curve—that one’s mind turns toward transcendence.

We’re all going up, one way or another.

The lap steel guitar is intrinsically a contemplative instrument—and it challenges the player to go beyond the temptations of mere navel-gazing to reach that place that is outside oneself. It holds within it the promise of operating like a sonic Ouija board, here in the mountains saddled with names like “The Devil’s Backbone”; one last shot at communion with earthly spirits as they head on up and out. From the plants crawling up the side of the stage to the chimney to the crawlspace in the ceiling, so much here today suggests the promise of the Beyond.

Newcomb’s Ranch carries with it a high-altitude clearness of focus despite the revved motors and rubber burnt repeatedly though the dusty mountain road. Lanois takes the stage, his lap steel guitar making the room seem vibrant lighter than air, piercing the veil without piercing the ears.

Movements slow to a gentle crawl as INTERVIEW

the guitar tone clears the small-talk out of the room, replacing it with a warm and weirding otherness that’s easier to live inside than it is to describe.

People applaud when he’s done tuning up—just like they did for Ravi Shankar at Woodstock—reveling in a level of sound that exists somewhere between a harmonium and a Tibetan singing bowl.

Appealing peals sit high atop a throne of drones, forceful and then just as suddenly fading into the surrounding ambiance. Even the arcane hiss of the unused speaker seems to harbor some kind of eldritch potential, emanating slowly in an incessantly expanding circle. That’s the thing about the music of Daniel Lanois: when it’s over and the last note shimmers and fades, it’s remarkable even in its own absence.

Rocco DeLuca, the other half of Lanois’ duet, is lost somewhere on the way to Newcomb’s, so Lanois goes solo, and if one’s eyes are shut so that the ears are the organs moving the journey—the listening experience—it’s very much like that ride up the winding highway to the bar. He runs through “Still Water” and “Jolie Louise,” off his debut solo album Acadie; “Rocky World,” from its follow-up For the Beauty of Wynona; and “Here Is What Is,” off the 2007 album of the same name, placing him squarely in the chansonnier tradition of the Québec of the ‘60s and ‘70s, singing about love and loss and all that that implies.

DeLuca finally arrives, presently entering into a dynamic with Lanois that’s one of two like minds matched evenly in taste and passion. Outside, the notes and the tones sail along until they become part of the wind and the heat and the world that waits for them with open arms to welcome their haunting melodies into their rightful place in nature. DeLuca’s vaguely unearthly voice is an absolute highlight—lost but brave, essentially at peace and coming metaphysically correct.

Adjourning to Lanois’ home later in the week—an unassuming Silver Lake estate the street wall of which has been tagged with graffiti that pronounces him “Saint”—reveals a warm twilit cathedral of sound. The living room and first-floor quarters have been converted into a recording studio with soundmaking machines of every vintage; he constantly adjusts sounds and levels in his quest for a quality of sound the essence of which only he understands.

It’s a process that consumes the majority of his time now as he prepares the launch of this latest record.

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“My mother is cooking eggs for Rick Ja How do you think about these songs when you think about the limitations of putting them on vinyl?

I just think that in terms of attention span and getting to know a record intimately, it’s better for it to not be too long. It’ll be on whatever format—CD and otherwise—but I like those short sides. I like 16½ minutes a side—so I’m going to convince the record company to accept a 32-minute album. And that’s enough for me.

I’d agree, but I think ambient music tends to expand your attention span—you expect to keep going—and in their way, ambient music fans are really intense because they get into a piece and they don’t want it to end! [laughs] But you’ve heard how quickly the events come and go in this music, so it’s not a long textured thing. Some of it is quite demanding—it’s not coming at you; it has some welcome in it, but it has bends in the road. So it’s quite an active journey and I think that that means that it should not be … we’re not an endless desert expanse. The tonalities in this body are such that they wake you up!

And it’s not a shapeless fog—it’s not this miasma which is just something that sort of exists and then sort of ends.

Right—it’s not a shapeless fog. Well-put!

Use that! You’ve seen the full spectrum of the operation here—that sort of fragmented show up there in the hills and then the beauty of this estate and how devoted I am to my work; how much it means to me to build a masterpiece. I don’t rest until I feel that I’ve built a masterpiece. Somebody might say that I haven’t. But I’m certainly trying.

But you do it for yourself—and that way, it’s all the masterpiece you need.

That’s right, but I also do it for the listeners.

I’ve always enjoyed this idea that I would take the listener on a journey, and I feel a responsibility to make it as interesting as possible. For the scenery to be innovative and to be fresh scenery and not something that’s been visited in the past— —not back to the Airport— —and I’ve never bought into the idea that it’s all been said and done and that they’re all just variations on already-existing shades.

It’s tempting to buy into that, but it’s also an incredibly cynical observation.

I think so.

And of course the end result of that way of thinking is, ‘Why bother? [laughs] Exactly. So, I think I’ve broken new ground in this body of work and I’m very, 24

very excited about it. [In the kitchen, a stack of new CDs from Warp shrugs and collapses across the tabletop as we sit down.] We’re flirting with signing to Warp. The publishing guy—Alex Hancock—heard some of what you heard in there and he flipped out. He said, ‘Don’t sign anything with any publishing company until I can make an offer.’ So he’s going to put a good word for me to the fellows in New York; I’m preparing a presentation for the New York people—Steven Hill, the head of new projects, has relocated from London.

What does the presentation entail?

It just means I’m going to play them pretty much what you just heard. I’m going to have it hand-delivered! [laughs] I’m not going to have it delivered via satellite, I’m going to have it hand-delivered by my co-producer from Toronto in a little orange Pelican™ Case. Not to sit there and listen to it with them—but just as a sign of commitment to show them that we’re serious about what we do.

To literally go that extra mile.

It’s also so they can put a face to the production work. I also do business with Andy Kaulkin at ANTI- Records here in L.A., and I owe Andy one more record—so I’m going to play him this and say, ‘Andy, I think Warp should put this out—so let me deliver a more commercial record to you.’ I have another more rhythmic record on the boil and maybe that’s a better one for Andy. I know that Eno, who I saw earlier this year, said so many good things about Warp—because he’s on that label—and he made an introduction to Steven Hill for me. He says we should be label-mates. Hey, thanks for coming all the way out for the show, and coming here …

Considering I live in Ventura! But it’s worth it—if you want to go do something, you just go do it. Mileage means nothing!

I lived in Ventura myself for a while. I had my studio in Oxnard at the Teatro on Oxnard Boulevard. It’s touchy there—I got pick-pocketed there, at the Cielito Lindo Café across the street from the theatre. [laughs] I didn’t get hurt, but I lost some important papers like my permanent border crossing card to the States, and once that was gone…

What’s someone going to do with that!

Ah, they were just looking for money. But I lived in the projector booth in the theatre for a year. The pool table here was set up in the old popcorn area. Some strange things happened there—we had somebody drunk, driving a pickup truck, jump over the sidewalk and run right into the entrance of the theatre! Right through that gate!

OK—you know Buddy Burgers—up the block, north a bit? There’s that motel right next door to it. Every year or so, they have someone mount the curb and go right into the wall! It happens on a frighteningly regular basis.

They do have a bit of a problem. Usually on Sundays. And then I rented a little house in Ventura after the novelty of the projector booth wore off. There’s a nice little place as you head inland and then you come upon a bluff. The little house I was in was right at the bottom of that—and I loved it out there. It was sweet! I think that past Neptune’s Net, that’s the end of the earth. I was driving with a friend [back then] and listening to some music, and I saw the Teatro was for rent. And I thought, ‘This looks kind of interesting,’ and I took it with my partner at the time. Made a Willie Nelson record [Teatro] there; finished Time Out of Mind for Bob Dylan there. We started and finished Time Out of Mind in that place; did the soundtrack for Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade there. We found posters for the old movies, some real beauties. A lot of them were comedy porn—guys chasing girls with bras on their heads—Benny Hill-type stuff. I was out in Joshua Tree for a year with my studio— completely oblivious to all the Queens of the Stone Age, but two houses down from them.

We were hopping around with the studio. We were even in Ojai for a year. We were renting an estate—a big beautiful stone guest house in the outskirts. I got a little bit tired of being out there after a while so I took an apartment in the city—Cahuenga and Franklin in a very beautiful apartment, and then this [Silver Lake] came up. I snapped it up, got it for next to nothing 14 years ago. Back then, nobody wanted to spend money in Silver Lake.

Back then, it was kind of a rougher place.

It was a rougher place, and anyone that was looking was saying, ‘Well, let’s go blue chip— Beverly Hills, Hancock Park…’ … yeah, but this place has such character.

It has soul. I’ve never seen the kind of windows you’ve got in there before. It’s grown to become its own entity.

It’s a rare bird—100-foot pine trees, eucalyptus trees. When it rains, it’s fantastic. We even have our own weather here, a little bit. It never gets as hot as it would otherwise. It’s always a little bit cooler because of the reservoir. Anyway, thanks again for coming—it was a bit of a disaster up in the hills [at Newcomb’s]!

Here’s the thing: if you don’t tell people it’s a disaster, they’ll never know! It’s like that thing what Eddie Van Halen said about making a mistake on the guitar: do it twice

and smile. Everyone thinks it’s all part of the plan! There’s a lot you can get away with if you just don’t tell them you’re getting away with it.

Right! Well, we had this kind of romantic notion about having our friends who ride bikes being there—but none of them showed up! Bizarre.

Do you think it was the heat?

I think it was a little early in the day, and I think there were other motorcycle events going on, that’s why—some faraway ones. But I like the sentiment: the idea of motorcycles and music.

It was Rocco’s idea because he’s up there all the time. It sounded sweet.

Well, I will say, with ambient music, that it’s hard to make it sound bad. You get the right sound system going and it always sounds pretty.

Yeah, because it’s textural.

It’s different because when it’s beatoriented, there’s an obligation to go along in a particular kind of rock ’n’ roll direction. Sometimes you simply want to be transported somewhere else—and that’s what ambient music does best. It takes you somewhere other. But when you started doing ambient music, was there any kind of confusion or crossover with New Age music?

First of all, I met Eno in late 79 and then we made a bunch of ambient records in my studio in Canada. He invented the term ‘ambient music.’ We made half-a-dozen albums over the course of three years—and I loved it. I was very skilled, and I’m a good musician, and he came into my world with this vision, and I thought, ‘This is amazing—the least commercial thing I’ve ever heard, I’m most excited about!’ And we just forged ahead and made these records. We loved our work. We developed a whole system of processing that I still use today. I was not really hip to anything ‘New Age,’ particularly—I come from more of a folk and rock ’n’ roll and soul music background. I didn’t know who Eno was! That shows you how sheltered I was in that small town I was in—didn’t know anything about Roxy Music. So I quite innocently entered this world that he created, and I loved it—so I became very supportive of his thing and I was able to find him some shortcuts because he comes from art school and he’s a pretty good musician, but I was a studied musician. So I was able to say, ‘This might work better, try this, let me do an edit here…’—and things moved fast. So that was kind of the beginning of it, but … I don’t even know what New Age music is!

INTERVIEW

ames! Tell me that’s not rock ’n’ roll!”

Early ECM label releases. The Windham Hill label. [The artist] Deuter.

Ohhhh, Windham Hill! Was that not the beginning of the squeaky saxophone? I will say though that the saxophone has taken a terrible turn somewhere, where it got so squeaky to the point where the whole tourist business loves the saxophone. You can’t go to an airport without hearing [ … makes horrible sax sqronk sounds]. It’s like with Jaco Pastorius—that guy’s so great, he’s invented this form … then every bass player from that point on was thumbing the bass up the wazoo!

It was ridiculous!

It’s interesting how something like that, you wouldn’t think it would be so influential.

And then you’ve got decades of it.

Decades of it! I never bought into the ‘easybreezy’ aspect. I call it ‘massage music.’

Chocolate cheesecake music.

Just to ruin a form, or reduce it to something that’s so watered down and so far away from the origin of it that it’s maddening. But anyhow—that comes down to taste. I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved in what I call a few scenes—the rise of a scene.

Like the ambient records with Brian Eno—I don’t mind saying it: it was Eno’s idea, and I helped him the best I could, and we made beautiful records, and I was happy to have been part of the building of those beautiful records. They’ve lived on. We listened to The Pearl by Eno and Harold Budd—it’s a beauty! I recorded a Harold Budd record here, actually. It’s one that didn’t get noticed a lot; it’s beautiful, just straight piano. It’s called Bella Vista. I met him in a diner—hadn’t seen him for years—and I said, ‘Harold, I’ve got a really nice piano at my place. Could you come by?’ And I had the studio downstairs—he was not hip to the studio—and I had the piano already miced, and I brought a few girls over, had some wine. He came in and I introduced him to the girls and said, ‘They’ve never heard you play. Would you give them a little idea of what it is that you do?’ So Harold sat down and he played for half-an-hour—he played beautifully—and we did it again, another half-hour another time. And I was recording the whole time, and we went in, and with the engineer I was working with at the time— Adam Samuels—we put a lot of work into it. We chopped out the lesser-interesting material, and we made a record and presented it to him as a gift. I said, ‘Harold, this is my gift to you.’

Did he know you were recording?

No. So what did he say?

INTERVIEW

He was very pleased that I caught it in a naïve state.

Was that secret recording a technique that ultimately formed that record—that he was not self-conscious, knowing that it was being recorded?

He was obviously performing to the people in the room—and unaware that we were recording, I think it made for better playing.

He was not thinking, ‘I gotta get this right’ or ‘Oh, I made a mistake.’ He played beautifully and he was just so grateful—and at the time I felt that I owed a lot to Harold because it was the beginning of my relationship with Eno, and the record was just so beautiful. I just wanted to do that [recording] for him.

We got some great sounds. Just straight piano, no effects. All the recordings with me and Rocco—we didn’t come in with any motives thinking that we were even making a record. We were just playing. We’d come off the road—we played beautifully on the road—but it was not this material.

Are you going to take this material on the road at some point?

Yes—we start on August 29th across the street from the El Rey. Brian Foote [nb. of the band Nudge, on the Kranky label] is having an ambient music night with Tim Hecker.

So they came over here, and me and Rocco played a little bit; showed them what our setup was like, and Brian said, ‘Well, why don’t you guys come over and do this ambient night?’

So that’s what we’re going to do. They get a few hundred people in this place. So we want to take this on the road—we’re road dogs, anyhow. I told Brian, if you can get me some work, I’m happy to go out there—because we do the steel guitar thing, but I also do an electro thing. We could always do something at Hollywood Forever.

That would be the perfect place for it.

We’re ready to travel, man. We might take some of those little loops, get one going in a little box and play with that just to increase our palette of colors.

You should get some Buddha Boxes. Eno loves ‘em!

I have a bunch of little East Indian tabla practice boxes, and they’re great. Now you can get the app on your phone—that’s really nice.

What was the first sound you remember hearing in your life? [long pause] I can’t answer that. I don’t remember!

All right then—what’s the first sound you remember hearing that you remember really liking?

[Just then, his iPhone’s default ringtone sounds.]

Not that one! Well, musically, I love the sound of the violin that I remember from when I was a kid. My grandfather was a violin player—a violoneur—a fiddler; played jigs. My dad did as well, but my grandfather was pretty good. So I remember being mesmerized by violinists. I’m French Canadian, so I caught the tail end of those old country ways—gatherings of people who had no money, but set up entertaining shows at someone’s house, play cards, drink and shout and have a real good time with the violin. It made a big impression on me, and we were talking about this—me and Rocco— how in that kind of rock ’n’ roll environment, we never separated ourselves from the adults.

We didn’t think, ‘Well, these people are really out-of-touch, they’re corny, it’s a fucked-up situation—I can’t wait to leave the house!’

It was not the feeling [with us] at all! I loved my grandfather and the way he played the violin. These gatherings were significant to me, and we wanted to be like them! Stay up a little later, peek through the door, see a little hanky-panky going on—and it was exciting!

That was actual rock ’n’ roll! Rock ’n’ roll was not something you discovered once you leave the house—it was in the house!

So it wasn’t necessarily about rebellion for you when it came to rock ’n’ roll.

Not at all—not at that stage of it, anyway. I felt that that was the most interesting part of what was going on in the community—right in our houses—and it was at these gatherings.

And my uncles were funny and sang funny songs [sings in earthy and impenetrable French]—things like that. It’s about making a stew and everything has to rhyme with on— like croissant and so on—like it’s ‘99 Bottles of Beer,’ you just keep adding an ingredient.

I loved my uncles, and I loved that they were funny. I guess I didn’t even know what rock ’n’ roll was except that that seemed more exciting than the average life. I caught the tail end of 50s rock ’n’ roll—everything, all the cars that went with it. We wanted to be like our parents, our uncles; most kids grow up and they roll their eyes at their parents. It’s infinitely boring and they just can’t wait to escape this terrible ordeal—and it was not like that when I was coming up. I never rebelled! Ever! I had my recording studio in my mother’s basement for a decade! She loved it. I loved her. We grew up together. There was none of this, ‘Oh, I gotta get away from these people and be a punk!’

I was already recording Rick James in my house! My mother is cooking eggs for Rick James! Tell me that’s not rock ’n’ roll!

What did you record for Rick James?

It was not an album, it was demos. He lived in Buffalo, which was close to Hamilton in Ontario, and Rick was connected with Canadian musicians, because he was in a band with Neil Young called the Mynah Birds.

Eddie Roth, a great organ player in the area, said, ‘There’s a kid that you should record with, Rick.’ And we recorded some demos for him, and recorded a lot of fascinating people in this basement! In an average neighborhood! I don’t remember ever wanting to leave that house to find a more interesting place geographically where things would be ‘cool,’ or that my mom was not cool.

Well, you made your own scene.

Well-put. If you’re smart enough to build a scene, you own it—that’s who you are.

And you’re never bored.

Never bored. And we feel that way about what we’re doing here, playing this beautiful music—and it’s powerful, it’s orchestral; it’s profound. It is not coming at you; it is not pushy in any way. It was invitation in it—I think that’s what’s beautiful about it. As many bends in the road as there might be, I think there’s still a nice welcome mat, and it’s saying to the listener, ‘We invite you to come on this emotional journey with us.’ And I think that’s a very sophisticated place to have gotten to— we’re not ramming anything down anyone’s throat here.

You’re just being.

Just being. And we have no motives—we’re not thinking, ‘Jeez, let’s make this kind of record, for that kind of label…’ None of this kind of talk. And this gets back to how I’ve always operated: what is the matter at hand?

What do you have? Not what your proposal is, or what your spreadsheet is showing, or if you’re trying to get a budget or anything like that. No. Here’s what we’re doing—it already exists—and what do you think of it? It’s the only way I’ve ever worked. I’ve had hits. I’ve produced hits for a lot of people. But we don’t go in thinking that we’ve got to make a hit.

I’ve never worked that way—I was telling Rocco about that this morning. If something seems to be resonating, you stumble upon something through a natural way, and a little something sticks up its head and says, ‘I’m viable. I could get to another dimension if you just fertilize me and water me.’ At this point in my life, I just want to make the most beautiful music as I can make and have it embraced by as many people as possible.

VISIT DANIEL LANOIS AT DANIELLANOIS.COM FOR UPDATES ON HIS COMING ALBUM. 25

Even just looking at Jesus Sons lets you know that something’s happening here: unlike the ubiquitous beach goth crowd in their adopted hometown of Los Angeles, these denim-clad dudes know that boots are still in style for manly footwear, like they just walked out of an Eagles photo shoot circa 1973. But looks can be deceiving; while Jesus Sons definitely have a classic Americana rock sound, they’ve got more energy than all of Glenn Frey’s cocaine binges combined, and have been boogie-ing their way onto bills with garage bands for years with raucous rock copiously peppered with country lyricism and the kind of blues sensibility you used to have to sell your soul for. Fittingly, I caught them now at a crossroads: they’ve just lost their lead singer, but they’re also releasing the best album of their career, and may even have found a spiritual calling: making sure the rock world knows that the blues is about feeling good.

Are you guys scared about how this interview is going to portray you? It would be a tragedy for someone like me to say ‘Oh, you’re a blues band!’ Because that doesn’t really cover it at all.

Erik Lake (bass/vocals): Don’t be afraid of the word ‘blues.’ I think that’s what we always based the band on in the beginning. I know Shannon [Dean, lead guitar/harmonica] loved the Velvet Underground stuff, and [guitarist/vocalist] Brandon [Wurtz] loved Chuck Berry, and we all kind of got along because we love every form of the blues.

You can’t escape it. And I think every rock ‘n’ roll band that has ever been successful— or has not been successful but has come up with at least one song that has cut down to the bone—has been successful because the blues are in it. People run away from the blues, but it catches up with them.

But you guys do NOT have the Stevie Ray Vaughn-80s Eric Clapton approach that people may think of when you say ‘a blues band.’

EL: That’s a huge compliment! It’s very natural. We’re a very organic band. We catch a groove and we stick to it … maybe a little pullback. It’s a groove that I think those other blues musicians didn’t carry. It can be a simple song—and we have songs that are one chord the whole time—but the way we play , there’ll be a change in the groove, and people will think we changed the chord, but we didn’t.

That’s where blues comes from. Elmore James played almost the same slide on every song.

The electric blues definitely taught rock ‘n’ roll about ‘tone’—every great rock artist or great album has a defining sonic texture. How have you established your signature sound?

Shannon Dean (lead guitar/harmonica): On the first record, we were trying to find our sound. But by the time we did our Better Times EP, we went with the swampier, more upbeat vibe: stompy! Catchy! On this album, we wanted to put a couple slow songs on, too.

EL: It’s okay to ‘slow your roll’ sometimes, as cliché as that sounds.

SD: We wanted to make a good road record: something you could listen to all the way through, so we pulllllled back a little bit.

Made everything just a litttttle bit slower and a little bit groovier. Like a fuckin’ choo choo train!

26

EL: And a lot of it came from being on the road. That is actually THE reason we made this record. We’re on the road in the middle of the night with all those truck drivers, and you’re kind of alone in all this darkness in strange places, and you feel like you’re part of that. You’re in nature, but you’re not.

It sounds a bit scary.

EL: We hydroplaned pretty bad once in Oregon! We didn’t crash, somehow. But we were going through these hills late at night through a fog where you couldn’t see a foot in front of you with semi-trucks going by at 80 miles per hour.

When I think of trucker music, I tend to think more of country than of blues.

EL: Oh definitely. My father raised me on Merle Haggard. That was one thing I told Brandon: if you want to play with me in this band, I have country in my blood.

But at the same time, country is a form of blues. It’s different. There’s a dorkiness of how it’s portrayed sometimes. Being from California, I get it, how people have a bad connotation with country music and the way it’s become.

SD: These people, they didn’t have the International Submarine Band, they didn’t hear a lot of Gram Parsons stuff or even Waylon. And some of that stuff is incredibly, incredibly good.

EL: But at the same time, blues has become just as bad. There’s supposed to be a sweetness to it, in its limitations. And the simplicity of the blues is in country music.

And it moves your feelings. People can cover people’s songs over and over again, and it’s the way they put their emotion into that one cover. That’s the feeling of country music kind of pouring through. The Stones can kind of take it and flip it upside down.

But it’s another kind of blues, and people kind of need to recognize that. And that was one of our objectives when we made this last album.

You’ve got some song titles on this thing that totally remind me of country—like ‘Won’t Walk No Line,’ which is clearly a Johnny Cash reference, to ‘Outlaw Women’ which seems like a Waylon Jennings reference—but the songs don’t sound like those artists.

SD: When we wanted to add country elements, we never wanted to sound like a country band. We just thought those

JESUS S Interview by D.M. Collins Photography by Stefano Galli

SONS 27

“Like a fuckin’ choo choo train!” elements were important, you know? It’s like finding all these elements from all these different genres of music and then trying to put them together into something that sounds different than all of them, but that has … like, those good elements from all of them. When you’re writing a song that has a deep meaning that talks about real life situations but also has that pop element, and follows a very specific song structure that people are used to, that’s what they typically like.

EL: The blues is about overcoming your sorrow. Our song ‘Born to Lose’ is a perfect example of a song where things aren’t working out, but you’re fine. Every song of ours is a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, which I think is something we got from country.

SD: It’s about finding a balance between writing stuff that means something to you that has all the elements of the music that you really like, but that’s also easy to ingest and has that solid beat that makes people want to stomp their feet and dance because that’s super important. A good performance is about crowd participation, making people want to dance, and get crazy, and get fucked up!

How do you play backwoods countryblues but still get people up and dancing?

SD: I think it’s the stomp-your-feet swampiness. But also the sleaziness!

Putting in lyrics and talking about real life experiences. Throwing in things about getting high! That’s more real. There’s a lot of songs like back in the day. I feel like Natural Child is really good at that: they’ll have a killer song and a killer vibe that’s catchy on its own, but then a really insane lyric that makes you want to sing along.

That’s huge.

Are there other bands that may not sound like you, but which you think have the same idea?

SD: When we came down to L.A., there was definitely a super heavy 60s psychedelic vibe to a lot of the bands, and there had been for a long time. And we had a great time playing with those bands, but we never felt there was a band that fit with our exact vibe. There’s a bunch of stuff going down in Nashville with a very similar blending of blues and country and rock, and I’ve always been super interested in that. But I have seen more bands here starting to, like, talk about adding pedal steel and stuff. Pearl Charles is doing some really amazing stuff.

Scenes hop from era to era, you know?

It’s almost like everyone in L.A. is 1966, and you’re trying to coax them into 1969. That goes for recording style, too.

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Modern-day garage-y bands usually go for ‘lo-fi’ recordings, but that has to be consciously sculpted in the studio, just as much as the Beatles in the mid-60s. Your new album is a more naked, ‘live’ sound, more like … the late-era Beatles.

EL: We gave ourselves a week to mix it and record it. I like to put that pressure on myself, because otherwise you’re there for a week thinking about whether you should go back and overdub a tambourine on something.

SD: We focused more on the musicianship and piecing it together. It wasn’t as organic, in a way. A first recording might have an element that was so close but might not be quite right. So we might totally change the tempo or add some swing.

EL: We took three days of recording and tracking songs, and it was all sounding terrible to us. And on the fourth night, we all drank a few bottles of tequila, and the album we have now … it all just came to be.

SD: We tracked over 80% of this record live in one night, during the blood moon. We recorded through a Tascam 388.

EL: Rhythm guitar, most lead guitar, drums and bass were all recorded live.

SD: We did get to do stereo drums this time around, which was really exciting. And we wound up playing the drums back through PA speakers, and blasting them into this kitchen.

EL: There’s a triangle in the ceiling above the stove that creates a reverb chamber naturally.

SD: … and we put another mic at the end of that, creating natural echo on the drums rather than adding effects to them. Rob Goodson, our old bassist—he recorded our first album, and we flew him down to L.A. to record our second one. He’s got a lot of cool tricks up his sleeve.

EL: We put the rhythm guitar in the bathtub! That’s why I prefer recording in a house to in a studio. It fits our sound better.

A lot bands in the 60s did that because there were no technological alternatives, but people rarely take the trouble now.

SD: We try to do it as old school as we can do. Most of our gear is pre-1970. We’ve only recorded to tape. We try to do things as accurate as possible, too—how people used to do it. It’s like, if you look at a film photograph versus a digital photograph, no matter how good the technology is now, there’s something that’s missing, even if it’s subconscious. So if we record to tape and it’s all analog and it’s all live, then it has a life to it that you can’t really duplicate.

EL: We’re not really an ‘effects’ band.

Everything you hear on our new album

was very natural, coming out of an amp.

You can get a really good tone out of an old amp without a lot of pedals. You got to play it like you mean it—you can’t just click a button.

SD: We weren’t using a lot of effects at all.

A lot of the ‘grit’ you hear is just my amps pushed to the max so they’d break up and crackle.

The band Feels, who have a lot of texture and distortion to their sound, just had a ton of effects pedals stolen. What advice would you have for them to help them move forward without them?

SD: It totally depends on the vibe. A lot of the stuff we’re trying to do is just really barebones, as true ‘tone’ as possible. With a mess of pedals, I felt like I was trying to chase some tone that wasn’t quite there, until finally I wouldn’t even like it as much as if I just unplugged the pedal and didn’t use it. But I don’t know if that’s the vibe for everyone. A lot of people use a lot of delay and choruses and phasers. On stage I just have a tuner, a fuzz pedal that I built myself, and I have a boost. And a reverb, but only because the reverb on the Silvertone 1484s doesn’t work: it just sounds like birds chirping!

I noticed some of the new songs also have organ on them. What kind of organ is that?

SD: It’s a Korg organ.

Ha! So you’re not completely analog.

SD: Bert played that! We originally brought Bert in as a bassist, but then he had to leave for a little bit, so Eric jumped in on bass so the new drummer Chance could learn the songs. Then when Bert came back, instead of playing bass, he brought a guitar to do slide on, and he brought the organ in, and he started doing that, and doing percussion in the background, and really filled it out. Bert’s really good at doing stuff in the pocket. That’s another reason that the new stuff sounds so different—we just had more ability!

EL: We’ve got a lot of kooks in the kitchen, ha ha! There are a lot of egos in this band, in a good way.

SD: Bert would always have good ideas, and it was funny because on the rare occasions when he didn’t, you could really see it in his face, and he’d just not play. And then he’d just grab a maraca or something and it would always be perfect.

EL: I think a lot of the songs get a lot of places because Shannon is just an amazing musician. You almost always have to have that one musician in the band who kind of outshines everybody else—where he’s almost like an evil genius in a healthy way.

One example is the last song … Shannon was just playing this solo with his face red and his eyes closed, and we just let him

groove on it for awhile and then came back at the end into a very traditional Chuck Berry kind of blues song. That’s a perfect example. We just stepped back for a second.

Do you think the egos will be just as ‘good’ considering the recent lineup changes?

SD: When we moved to L.A., we had two other people with us—we picked up Bert, Eric, and Chance. Now Brandon is moving to Boise, Idaho, in January. Eric was doing a bunch of backup vocals already and him taking over wouldn’t sound that much different. But we’re considering adding Peter from Electric Magpie and adding a pedal steel and knocking out a bunch of new songs with the new lineup and pushing it even further.

Are you on good terms with Brandon? It’s hard when a front-man leaves a band.

EL: Brandon’s moving back home to Idaho.

No hard feelings! I’ll miss Brandon. To be honest, we were on a huge roll and then he had a huge change in his life. It’s not like because of something bad, like drugs, or because things weren’t working out between us.

SD: When Brandon got his wife pregnant, we talked about it. We knew it wasn’t conducive to having a baby and raising a family and being in a band, unless you’re making a stupid amount of money with the band. I knew if I had family in Boise who would help me raise the kid … I mean, the kid is going to be super brand new!

EL: He’s a great songwriter and lead singer for two records, if you include the 7”. But since that 7” and this album, we’ve really come together so I don’t think there’s going to be a significant change. We all kind of write the songs together. Shannon is almost the main songwriter in the band, and he has been since the beginning. The chemistry is still there between all of us. I write pretty much the same way as Brandon, lyrically too. We all have the same influences: Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, J.J. Cale, Chuck Berry, Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons, Jimmy Reed…

Do you have a fantasy that in 25 years, you’ll have a reunion tour, and Brandon will join you for all the old songs?

Brandon’s kid can come up and fill in the slot of whatever member dies along the way!

EL: I would love to! He even gave his daughter a great country music name: Etta Jane!

JESUS SONS’ BRING IT ON HOME LP IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM MOCK RECORDS. JESUSSONSBAND.COM. INTERVIEW

MARGO GURYAN Interview by Tiffany Anders Illustration by Rachel Merrill

I first discovered Margo Guryan when I was working at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. I had just moved back to Los Angeles after having lived in New York City for five years, where I had made and released a record. I had the honor of maintaining the oldies section at Amoeba where the re-issues and unearthed gems flowed in at a (no pun intended) record pace. It was encouraged by management to check out everything that interested us as to better inform customers, so we were given ‘loan logs’ where we could borrow most any used item that came in, and I certainly took advantage of this perk. I had highly anticipated getting my hands on a used copy of Margo’s Take A Picture, just based on the cover. I had re-stocked the new CDs of this album for the shelf so many times and the photo of this very thoughtful girl in a cozy red sweater staring out at the rain from a perfectly framed window had very much intrigued me. I assumed she was a French pop artist—it was like something out of a Jean-Luc Godard film. When I finally got my hands on a copy, I learned that I was wrong about her being French—but right in my assumption that this album would rock my world. It was filled with beautiful pop melodies that flowed from sweet, introspective dreamy love songs to complex pop infused psychedelia and made her songs stand out as quite different from the others of the time. I became a Margo Guryan fan from this point on. I found her on Facebook and was happy to learn that she was residing in Los Angeles and was teaching piano. I asked if I could take lessons from her, and was honored to be her student for a short time. It was wonderful to catch up with her for this interview.

When you were teaching me piano, you talked a lot about your love of jazz and studying jazz in school. How did you start composing on your own?

I began piano lessons as a child—at age six.

But I had ‘made up rhymes’—it would be overreaching to call it ‘poems’—earlier. As soon as I could put a few notes together, the rhymes became songs. I knew little about the different genres of music, though the first record my father bought for me was East of the Sun by George Shearing. I didn’t fall in love with jazz until I got to college in Boston and heard kids playing it in the practice rooms.

How did jazz fit into your life? Was it rebellion? Counterculture? A new home?

What made you connect with it so instantly and so deeply?

I think the connection was basically rhythmic.

The music felt so good. It also sounded so much better than the pop tunes I was accustomed to hearing. I guess ‘a new artistic language’ would fit best.

After college was your goal to become a jazz pianist? Or was songwriting and singing something that you practiced while studying jazz as well?

I think writing was my goal. I did study with Jaki Byard in Boston but I think I was a hard ‘teach.’ If you want to be a good improviser you have to be a fast thinker. You have to internalize the changes … know them almost intuitively. I’m a slow thinker. That’s fine for writing, but not good for jazz improvisation. It 30

became apparent the more I played with other musicians. You had to internalize the chord changes. If you had to think about where you were in a particular song or what chord came next, that stopped the flow. I never wanted to be a singer ... or performer of any kind. Some ten years before Take A Picture I was signed to Atlantic Records as a singer, mostly because they liked my songs. The one session I did was a disaster. They told me to ‘sing out,’ and the louder I sang, the worse it got. But it did get me my first recording: Chris Connor released ‘Moon Ride.’

How did you get signed?

It was a circuitous route. George Wein— in Boston—wanted to sign me to his Storyville Records. He gave me a contract.

My dad wanted a lawyer to look at it. The lawyer we saw didn’t like the contract but thought if there was interest in Boston perhaps there might be interest in New York. He sent me to see Herb Eiseman at Frank Loesser’s publishing company. I played some songs for Herb. He thought the songs not ‘commercial’ enough for his company, but he liked what I had written and sent me to Atlantic Records. My parents accompanied me to Atlantic Records—very embarrassing! I was called into an office and met Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun. They said, ‘OK, let’s have your demos.’ I said, ‘What are demos?’ They looked at each other with rolled eyes. ‘Well, what did you expect to do for us?’ they asked. ‘I thought

I was to play some songs for you,’ said I. ‘Oh!’ And they took me to another office which had a piano in it. I played one song … then another … then another. One of them reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a bunch of contracts. They asked me to go around the corner and do what I had just done while Tommy Dowd—their engineer in those days—recorded me. That’s how I found out what demos are! A week or so later, Wexler called my home and said they wanted to sign me.

I know you grew up in New York City, and I recall you telling me a story about sneaking out to see jazz as young girl.

I grew up in Far Rockaway, a suburb of New York City. It was more small-town life than city life. There were no clubs—or musicians, as far as I knew—in Far Rockaway. But when I got to Boston University, there were!

Storyville was the most popular venue for the bands that travelled and I made sure to take a History of Jazz class that was given at BU by George Wein, who owned Storyville.

George allowed me to enter the club through a rear door and instructed the waitpeople to ignore me as I was underage and couldn’t drink. One didn’t have to ‘sneak out’. You simply signed out of your dorm.

But there was a curfew and you had to sign in by that time. I heard a lot of great bands ... and once got to play intermission piano opposite MILES DAVIS! It’s a bit of a story which I’d be happy to tell you.

I do remember the story you told me about Miles Davis! I remember you saying he was quite flirtatious.

One night I went to Storyville to hear the Miles Davis Quintet. When I got there I learned the intermission pianist hadn’t shown up. The club’s manager asked me if I would play. I said, ‘No way!’ I was taken to George Wein’s office, given a shot of brandy and talked into it. They told me just to play until I was tapped on the shoulder, at which time I would be finished. Not being much of a jazz improviser, I just played my own songs ... one after the other ... until I was tapped on the shoulder. I got up and began walking down an aisle when someone approached me.

I couldn’t see who it was because the room was dark and I was still adjusting, having had a spotlight on me. The person put his hands on my shoulders and said, ‘Yeah, baby!’ It was Miles.

There were a lot of women as part of the songwriting boom working in the Brill Building in New York City in the early 1960’s. Did you hope to be a part of that?

Were there any female pop writers that you admired?

I wasn’t aware of the Brill Building writers at that time. And, in any case, they were writing ‘pop’ songs, which held no interest for me at that time. I was only interested in jazz—only listened to jazz on the radio and only went to clubs where jazz was performed.

I didn’t know—or know of—any female popINTERVIEW

writers. Or male pop-writers, for that matter.

I had written songs since I could put words and music together. They reflected what I heard on the radio, which was mostly fairly boring ‘pop.’ But when I got to Boston and fell in love with jazz, everything changed ... and everything I wrote reflected my new love.

The change from pop to jazz was exciting.

And after many years in this arena my friend, pianist-songwriter Dave Frishberg played ‘God Only Knows’ for me. That song was an incredible teaching moment for me. Brian Wilson’s chords almost never had the root in the bass. I thought ‘I can do that!’ I bought Pet Sounds, listened to it over and over, turned off the record player, sat down at the piano and wrote ‘Think of Rain.’ Voila!

Spanky and Our Gang first recorded your song ‘Sunday Morning’ which became a hit and then was recorded by several other pop artists—how did all that get started?

Bob Dorough—along with Stuart Scharff— was producing Spanky and Our Gang. We knew Bob and David Rosner, my publisher, suggested I bring a few songs to one of their rehearsals. They were rehearsing in a loft near where I lived and Bob invited me to attend a session. So, armed with two or three demos, I followed my ears and took what was surely a freight elevator to the large space where the group was ensconced. The group stopped singing as soon as I walked in and was introduced to them. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got,’ one of them said. Bob and Stuart were in a control room where there was recording equipment and a record player. ‘Sunday Morning’ was one of the few songs I played.

They liked that one. ‘Why don’t you save that for yourself?’ I recall Spanky asking. I thought it was an odd choice, as Spanky and Our Gang had just had a huge hit with ‘Sunday Will Never Be the Same’. But I said, ‘Oh, please—if you want to do it, DO IT!’ And they did.

Jackie De Shannon—a wonderful songwriter in her own right—recorded a version of your ‘Think of Rain.’ Were you aware of Jackie De Shannon as a songwriter?

For me, I’d consider it a huge honor to have someone like De Shannon record a version of my song.

Of course I was aware of Jackie DeShannon.

I especially like her ‘Think of Rain’ because it was one of very few that didn’t copy my demo. The arrangement was totally original. I thought Jackie did a beautiful vocal.

Tell me about recording Take A Picture.

Once again, David—and my demos—did the trick! David had taken the demos to various record companies to show songs for other artists. One record company exec asked, ‘Why don’t we just record her?’ There were a few offers and David chose Bell Records because it was a small ‘happening’ company and my record would be less likely to be lost among the popular artists who released albums on the big labels. Take A Picture was getting some good reviews and airplay. Larry Utall—president of Bell Records—called me into his office and told me that they wanted me to start performing: TV, record hops and such. I told him I didn’t want to perform—I simply wanted to write. All promotion was then stopped. The record tanked. I saw it in the 39¢ bin in Tower Records. A sad moment, 32

indeed. Of course I’d hoped it would be right up there with Harry Nilsson, the Mamas and Papas and all the other wonderful artists and groups who were changing the pop music scene. I did not expect Bell Records to call on me to perform. And it did change the trajectory of my career. I continued to write songs, but got more into production—via David Rosner—than I ever expected to.

Learned a lot, though. And I did manage to keep some of my own records.

Take a Picture is kind of the perfect Sunday listening record—it’s got a dreamy quality to it and strong themes of ideal romance.

Was there a particular time in your life that inspired those songs?

Youth! I think most writers—of music, poetry, books, whatever—find their voice as youngsters. That’s when you dream, hope, plan, imagine. That’s when each new relationship is a novelty, fresh, to be reinvented ... and to be voiced in song and story.

When you hear these songs now, what seems most familiar about the person who wrote and sang them? And what feels most unfamiliar?

Still the same person, I think. Today, I like some songs more than others...some records more than others. I can’t imagine anything feeling ‘unfamiliar.’ One of the earliest songs, ‘Good-bye July’ was one of the last demos recorded. Maybe I’ve grown a bit, but I don’t think I’ve changed.

Was there any kind of philosophical difference between writing for ‘someone else’ and writing for ‘you’? We’re inundated with the idea that music is so highly personalized to its creator—is it really?

No ‘philosophical difference between writing for someone else and writing for’ myself. I just hoped that some artist or producer would like a particular song and come up with a better arrangement. Unfortunately—to me—most artists and producers just copied my demo arrangement. The records I like best are the ones that didn’t copy my demos. And I don’t think ‘music is so highly personalized to its creator. I think Malcolm McNeill has made ‘Think Of Rain’ song his own.

I personally completely identify with being reluctant as a performer, but I find it really interesting that you were more interested in songwriting rather than performing— because I find your songs and the way you perform them so uniquely ‘you.’ Did you enjoy the recording process?

Years before I married David, I was married to Bob Brookmeyer. Bob was a performing musician; he worked with groups that included Gerry Mulligan and Clark Terry among others.

I got an excellent education as to the people you had to surround yourself with, especially if you were successful. Lawyers, accountants, managers, booking agents, club owners, and on and on. People told you where to be, what time to be there, what to wear, who to meet.

And on and on … It just wasn’t my cup of tea. But I did enjoy recording. Once it was discovered that if my voice was doubled I had an acceptable sound, it became great fun, and very satisfying. Turned out it was an easy process for me and the results put me in the Astrud Gilbert/Claudine Longet bag.

After the disappointment following Take A Picture, did you continue to write?

Of course. Many of them are on the ... Demos albums. In fact there’s a vinyl edition on Sundazed coming out soon: 29 Demos with two new ones added. They’re versions of my songs by Malcolm McNeill and Chip Taylor which I love and make the record unique.

And I was always more interested in being strictly a songwriter.

There are so many great songs on that collection, I am so excited to hear more!

They all seem to vary in styles. ‘California Shake’ has an almost country rock feel to it, with guitar and drums that are quite different from your previous jazz inspired songs—where did that come from?

‘California Shake’ is one of the few—if not only—songs I wrote with someone else.

Richard Bennett, who was Neil Diamond’s guitarist, suggested we write together. This had never worked out well for me but I liked Richard, thought he was a terrific musician and his idea was well worth a try. Richard played a melodic fragment for me which I found intriguing. I said, ‘That sounds like a disaster song.’ It made me think of the Bee Gees ‘New York Mining Disaster.’ We had just moved to Los Angeles and I was very conscious of the fact that I was now living in earthquake territory. That fragment evolved into ‘California Shake’. With Richard on guitar and Dennis St. John—also in Neil’s band—on drums it’s no wonder you perceive a different ‘feel’ on that song. I wrote the song on piano, but no doubt Richard’s guitar was an inflluence.

There’s a rumor you did a 70s disco song— is that true?

True. My step-son, Jon Rosner—who was 12 or 13 at the time±was into all kinds of music I rarely listened to. But I did enjoy ‘Saturday Night Fever’ and came up with ‘Hold Me Dancin’.

How did the re-release of Take A Picture happen?

One day David received a royalty statement from Japan. He said to me, ‘This statement has all the songs from Take A Picture on it!’

What he found out was that Keystone, a Japanese label had issued a pirate copy. Shortly after that, Cornelius—a Japanese artist—put my record out on his Trattoria label. This was soon followed by a release on Siesta [a Spanish label] for Europe. About this time my step-son, Jonathan Rosner, played ‘Sunday Morning’ for Linus of Hollywood—a local artist. Linus recorded that song. One day he came to my house to meet me. He walked in saying, ‘I want to hear everything you ever wrote!’ It wasn’t long before Linus asked to release Take A Picture on his Franklin Castle label. That turned into a lasting relationship with Carl Caprioglio who still releases my records on his Oglio label. Finally, I was home!

How about the demos album? Had any other artists recorded these songs before the release?

It was either Linus or Carl Caprioglo who thought it would be a good idea to have another record out, and all of my demos were highly arranged—except for ‘I’d Like To See The Bad Guys Win’ which was a piano-voice demo—and therefore suitable for a release.

By the way, ‘....Bad Guys...’ was written for Mae West after I heard her sing a Beatles song, but never got the song to her. Yes, other

artists had recorded some of the songs before ... Demos was released: ‘I Love,’ the Lennon Sisters. ‘Sunday Morning,’ quite a few. ‘Think of Rain’ and ‘I Think a Lot About You,’ Cass Elliot. ‘Shine,’ Linus.

Do you think the internet age has made it easier for those who are not interested in being performers—those who are more interested in simply writing and recording the music—to get their music heard and acquire a fan base? And do you think the internet has had something to do with your new fan base?

A qualified yes. I think writers still have to perform in order to get needed exposure. But music videos have made a huge step toward getting one’s music to its target audience. A hit video can take the place of many smalltown tours. And limiting performing to TV and videos can work for a lot of writers. But I think big city venues will continue to play an important role because of advertising and the crowds that show up to hear favored artists.

[Regarding the new fan base] again, a qualified yes. Don’t forget: it was Japanese record collectors who first sparked the interest in Take A Picture. I don’t think the internet had much to do with this. But today, with YouTube and social media, the internet plays a humungous role! It also makes correspondence between a writer and those who like his or her music possible. I assume this is gratifying to both parties.

Was ‘16 Words’ the hardest song you ever had to arrange? It only has 16 words, and few if any are obviously poetic.

I read Joe Wilson’s book The Politics of Truth.

He was the former Ambassador sent to Niger to bolster Bush’s claim that large quantities of uranium was sold to Iraq. He found the statement to be untrue. I took Wilson’s book to the piano ... opened to the page containing the ‘16 words.’ It wasn’t hard to come up with something that could be easily repeated. We recorded the track four times and proceeded to use different combinations of singers on three of them. We had one track left over—perfect for an instrumental! Probyn Gregory supplied almost all the instruments: guitar, trombone, trumpet. He was amazing! And then James Reitano created the video—a work of genius, I think. It wasn’t hard. And it was very, very satisfying.

You’ve recently recorded and released a few new songs, which are fantastic—I marvel at how your voice is still consistently wonderful. Do you have any plans to release a new full length album?

No plans. But I’ve been communicating with several wonderful young singer-songwriters and a collaborative effort is not out of the question. I’ve written a bit for Ashley Reaks, a terrifically inventive British artist who may weave what I’ve written into his startlingly original work. And I’ve sent Wyatt Funderburk, a Nashville singer-songwriter whose song ‘Cold’ knocked me out, some unfinished tracks which he has permission to use in any way that suits him. There’s a great example of how the internet connects people!

A NEW DELUXE GATEFOLD EDITION OF MARGO GURYAN’S ... DEMOS WILL BE RELEASED BY SUNDAZED IN 2016.

INTERVIEW

DAVE DAVIES Interview by Kristina Benson Illustration by Bijou Karman

Yes, he invented and/or globally popularized the concept of guitar distortion after he sliced up the speaker cones in his misbehaving amplifier, but the discography of Kinks co-founder and guitarist Dave Davies neither begins nor ends with “You Really Got Me.” Brother Ray wrote his share of hits, but Dave could have made a beautiful little solo album during the 60s—and would have, if music-biz static didn’t drown out the chance. Instead, his fearless and genuine songwriting was revealed mostly on B-sides and solo 45s and odd album tracks like the haunting “Strangers” and the uneasily psychedelic “Creeping Jean.” As the Kinks soldiered on, he’d eventually get his solo albums going and he’d lend a lot of power to the band when they entered their 70s revival. Then a few years after the Kinks collapsed in the mid-90s, he kicked off a solo career in earnest. His 2014 release Ripping Up Time is the fifth in a string of 21st century efforts, and he’s currently touring Ripping Up New York City, a live album that matches klassics and deep kuts (yes, “Creeping Jean”) to his new material. L.A. RECORD barely got any time to talk to Davies at the end of a long press day, but that’s OK—he’s always been a guy who can say everything he needs

to say in two minutes and change.

You said once that when you write, you don’t think—you just write. Is that still true even now?

The thing—as always—is getting ideas. The harder you try, you worse it gets. If I get an idea from a dream or a person I see or something, it triggers the whole process. If I overthink it, it doesn’t really take shape as I would’ve liked.

Is that scary?You’re really relinquishing control—at the mercy of inspiration.

That’s a tricky state of mind for anybody! Usually, you’re trying to find that mindspace … a place in your head that isn’t really anywhere. You have to have a sort of blind faith that things are gonna happen. Once you get started on an idea or a theme or a musical phrase or a riff, as long as you’ve got somewhere to start, you can try and get in that place in your head. It’s hard to explain, yes. And the harder you try, the more difficult it is. You have to let go of yourself a bit, let go of panicking or worrying or trying to hard.

‘Screw it, I’m done stressing—it’s gonna happen!’

Yeah—hopefully!

Something I really admire about your music are your sad songs—‘Strangers’ or ‘This Man He Weeps Tonight’— because they’re not just sad songs.

They’re complicated and melancholy, and they can be angry or frightened or lonely at the same time, too, which seems like a far truer reading of the concept of sadness.

It’s a kind of process—I find melancholery really really useful. It’s a way of remembering and trying to construct something hopeful for the future. Cuz you don’t want to wallow in sadness all the time. I find that the actual sort of … caring, it’s like caring about things and you use that. It’s not the same as sadness. I find I can get into that state of mind. There are many things that aren’t necessarily regrets, but maybe they aren’t happy, and those unhappy thoughts or memories you might ponder on and it’s better to try and work it out through art or music than to drag yourself down with it. If you confront these feelings, it can lead to hopeful ideas and positive ideas about the future. The song ‘Strangers,’ if you really think about it, is quite an optimistic song. It’s giving up something to get more. The guy in the song, the protagonist or the singer or me or whatever, he’s trying to say, ‘Alright, I’ve had enough—but what are you doing?

Maybe we can find out what life’s about together.’ Which in a way covers a lot of different aspects of the human mind and being, really. Because it could be about all of us. Maybe we’re all intimately connected at some level? Not just a boy and girl or two guys that meet and try and make a go of it.

DAVE DAVIES’ RIPPING UP NEW YORK CITY IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM RED RIVER. VISIT DAVE DAVIES AT DAVEDAVIES.COM.

WHITE BOIZ Interview by sweeney kovar Photography by Theo Jemison

At the beginning of 2015, my good friend Eric Coleman from Mochilla confided that Shafiq Husayn of Sa-Ra Creative Partners and Krondon of Strong Arm Steady were finishing an album. I asked what they were calling themselves. Coleman paused before answering: “White Boiz.”

In a world where being “Black” is constantly being dissected, what does “White” mean? The rhyme is never without reason. A devoted student of Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple of America, Shafiq was Krondon’s guide into a world of history, knowledge and symbolism obscured by modern culture. After years of discussions and debates, Shafiq turned on the MPC and Krondon stepped in the booth, both committed to bring the core of their conversations to wax. The result is Neighborhood Wonderful, out now via Stones Throw—a hard-hitting hip-hop LP equal parts high science and street corner content. So just how does high science and heavenly glory translate into rap music? I spoke with the two Master Teachers to find out.

I’m sure this is the first question everyone asks, and I’ll ask it too: can you break down the science behind the White Boiz idea?

Shafiq Husayn: White Boiz’ Neighborhood Wonderful is a venture into society that looks at the duality of things, to keep it short and simple. In the context of the white conversation, depending on what circle you’re in, white will mean something specific to you.

Everyone knows that white means purity.

Purity means God and God means the ruler of the land. A group of people have taken that construct and applied it to what you would call ‘race.’ We know there’s only one race— the human race. So that gives way to the conversation: ‘What is really white?’ White Boiz and the album Neighborhood Wonderful is our way of saying let’s have a conversation— let’s talk about it.

Krondon: We’re in agreement with that. When we were coming up with the concept, the basis of our conversations was to truly look at what the meaning of ‘white.’ Us being brothers of knowledge, we saw the breakdown in that understanding in society today. Obviously the perception over time changes, so in this time ‘white’ means something to this society in America today. That doesn’t necessarily mean that is the truth or that it is accurate.

Like with all things, the perception over time changes. We’re bringing it back to what the original essence of what that term means when you place it upon a people or society.

We’re taking it back to where it started. Not a racial term or a thing to describe a particular sect of people but more of a state of mind and state of spirit and state of being.

In the imagery you’ve released from the album—the teaser video, photos and even the cover—there’s heavy references to the Moorish Science Temple of America.

K: My initial experiences with the M.S.T. of A. were based on the teachings of Noble Drew Ali. Not delving too deep into it, but the basis of those teachings. Even prior to me recording with Shafiq, our conversations INTERVIEW

in the beginning were about us connecting the dots as brothers together. He opened my mind up to the intricate workings and the foundation of the M.S.T. of A. This was years before we even recorded one record. I have to give my brother Shafiq the personal credit for opening me up to the intricate workings. Growing up studying all things Black or so-called Black, of course I came across the teachings of Marcus Garvey, Noble Drew Ali, Master Farrad, all these people. I wasn’t able to get an in-depth idea into the M.S.T. of A. until brother Shafiq enlightened me. Then I was able to do more homework and research on my own. Then I was given some literature on my own. Then I attended some meetings and met some brothers. It was an organic thing for me to grow into that understanding of what that religious corporation really is and what it represents for not just our people but for the world. To touch on what you mean about the symbols in the imagery and particularly the flag we made, I have to say that the things I was exposed to in the M.S.T. of A. allowed me to see how America is made up and designed. Personally, as a man, the teachings allowed me to see America for what it really is. That’s why it was really important for us to put the Moor stars as the stars on the flag. By the way, when we were having the flag made, Shafiq didn’t even know about it. That was something that I pulled in at the last minute. The Ahk didn’t even know I was doing that.

SH: I had no idea. It just happened, and check this out—Krondon is not even an official member of Moorish Science Temple of America.

K: Not at all, but I am a believer and a follower of the understandings and the concept of what it is to be a Moor. I bring brothers to the temple. It’s really about us knowing truly who we are. Not who the preacher says we are on Sunday. Not who the newscaster says we are on Monday. Truly who we are and what

position we have here in America. That’s the most important part. What position do we have as a people here in America.

For some reading this interview the concepts and the terms associated with Moorish Science Temple of America may be foreign.

Can you break it down and explain whom you’re considering a Moor in present day?

SH: A Moor is what you might call an African-American, but you have Moors who are all over the planet because of the Moorish Empire or the Moroccan Empire or what later morphed into the Ottoman Empire. In the context of the Americas, it was never discussed that the Americas were actually a part of the Moorish Empire—actually the capital seed of the Empire. That was a conversation missing from the history books because of the bearing of the Moorish history inside of that. You can’t talk about the United States of America without talking about Moors. Impossible.

That right there illuminates another dynamic on the social conversation of ‘What is White and Black?’ or ‘Who are the White people and who are the Black people?’ Take it out of white and Black—what is a US citizen versus an American citizen? I’m at the DMV and the sister at the counter is generalizing America with the United States. I had to tell her you have other nations and governments that are in the Americas too. You have Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Belize. The United States does not make up the Americas. They are a portion of states that come together to form a unit called the United States of America. If you go back you’ll learn they were called the British Subjects of North America. That’s in the history books.

There was a Continental Congress. George Washington was a general before he was a President. In whose government was he a general? Who was the president? If you can’t behold these simple truths that are before you, then all this high science and heavenly glory—you ain’t ready for that yet!

K: Amin.

SH: You ain’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, is what they would say. Let’s have a conversation. That’s the philosophy behind White Boiz. Now let’s talk about creativity—every artist should have some kind of intention behind their music because your intentions dictate your expectations. When we put on this white garb and put on these names and monikers, there’s an expectation out of this. The expectation is we intend to provoke thought! The thought is the cause of it all. The thought is why in today’s society we got people walking around talking about this person is a White person or a Black person.

200 years ago, the thought behind that word was different. Krondon and I, 200 years ago, could be considered free white men. We would be considered slave-owners, or let me put it this way—we would be considered Slav-owners. 13th Amendment bans slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States except by crime or punishment. Ask the question: What is the difference between slavery and involuntary servitude? We ask that because involuntary servitude is what we suffered against our will. At one point, slavery was what you agreed to for services in exchange for your labor—you would go home. Involuntary servitude, they owned everything about you. They’ve attached another group of people to that word, ‘slave,’ when it was for Slavs.

Who were Slavs?

SH: Czechoslovakians, Yugoslavians, basically Eastern Europeans. My point is: names and terms get redefined through eras. In different social circles, names and terminology are used differently to express whatever everybody agreed to. Who agreed to ‘Negro,’ ‘Black’, ‘Colored,’ ‘Afro-American’ or ‘AfricanAmerican’?

K: I didn’t agree to that shit!

SH: Who signed up for that? I don’t remember a census coming out from us to vote for the Black President. Where is the Black flag?

Where is the constitution for the Black 35

people? Where is Black land? Even if you say African-American, we’re talking about two separate continents. Each of those continents have more than fifty sovereign nation-states with constitutions, with presidents, monarchs, kings, flags, histories, embassies, consulates, passports. What are we talking about now?

What is happening?

You mentioned sparking thought as an intention behind this endeavor—do you have any more specific actions or thoughts you hope to elicit with this work?

SH: We’ve been talking about White, right?

Let’s talk about Black. If you look at its etymology, ‘black’ comes from the word ‘bleak’ in German where we also get the word ‘bleach.’ If you say ‘black’ what is the first shade it shades to? Grey, and then from grey it fades to white. It never passes through the color spectrum. Now let’s talk about color. What is color? It’s anything that has been painted, stained, varnished or dyed.

Inanimate objects—things that aren’t living— you can paint that and it can be washed away.

When did the real living thing get turned into an adjective? ‘Black person’ is not real. White Boiz is a reset. When you have a painting you want to paint over, what do you do? You take some primer and you white wash it. You might still see remnants of the old piece there but it’s a blank canvas. It’s taking the concepts out of the linear conversation of Black/White and now we’re going to put it in color—in real life. Everyone has had their chance to white wash the first stone that was here, the Moorish history, so we’re going to white out the white conversation. It’s a reset because it’s the original conversation. White means purity, purity means God and God means the ruler of the land. Amin.

K: We want what’s happening right now. We want what is happening to you. When you saw it, when you got the album, you had all these questions. Now you’re privy enough to know Shafiq and be one of us so you’re able to call and email and send out a kite and get us on the line. For those that can’t do that, which is the majority of the world, they gotta talk amongst each other. They gotta research and go online and utilize this information highway that we have for more than just porn and promo music…

SH: …and fuckery.

K: They should go and engage in some history and engage each other, the way you’re asking us these questions. They should ask their mothers and fathers, their uncles and cousins these questions. What we’re saying overall is that the conversation needs to be had.

SH: If Black lives matter, then this conversation about what ‘Black’ is matters. There is polarity in everything, so within the so-called Black conscious community, there is a divide on topics. The common things we agree on are like the need to have our own voice and so on—the divide comes in the way to achieve that. You have one perspective who says we need to assimilate and you have another group that really wants to go back to how it used to be—a reset. There is a duality in everything.

You may have foreign sympathizers to our plight and obviously you have oppressors who still want to carry out atrocious and heinous acts on our people. That’s why there is always going to be a conversation whether it’s ‘Black 36

Lives Matter’ or something else. Our people is not going to get any redress by identifying themselves with a title that is at bare minimum culturally ambiguous. ‘Black’ and ‘AfricanAmerican’ is still culturally ambiguous—at bare minimum. There is not nationality attached to that. Everyone else has some flags that they can pull out on their day. What does the so-called African-American Negro Colored, descendant of a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow-ism have? What flag do we pull out?

That conversation matters. Who is the father of racism? Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, German scientist, anthropologist, psychologist from the 1700s—what some would call a renaissance man. He is the one who came up with the modern day racial classifications.

This is the 1700s bro! This concept of Black/ White back then was a new thing, so to speak.

It didn’t mean anything in the context of what we’re meaning now. Just like how hiphop—in its inception and in its purest form and then through the different eras—it has morphed into this new age form. Is it in its purest form? No, there are remnants of it. Just like there is only remnants of the Moorish history. You see everybody else wear our stuff and acting like us, but the people who are party to the contract don’t know they’re party to the contract.

It sounds like you have some strong and specific intentions with this work—I’m curious about your process of creation.

K: It started off as a personal admiration of each other’s craft—what we each represented in music. Then the conversation quickly illustrated how similar our minds were and how similar our backgrounds were and where our mentality brought us in music today. It just continued on until an album was made.

We had more conversations then we did studio sessions. It’s the conversations that shaped the music.

SH: That’s a very good point. This shows you the professionalism between the both of us. What he’s saying is the time to actually perform tracks and make tracks … it’s like really no time. That thing doesn’t really take much time to do. It’s the philosophy and intention behind going into the vocal booth or getting behind the drum machine or keyboard that’s now spearheading this.

K: True indeed!

SH: Our technical prowess and abilities are already there but we have to plant an intention behind it now.

I especially love the guests on the album.

Can you tell me a bit on how D Prosper, Chace Infinite and Blu landed on the project?

K: We had ideas going into this on who we wanted but the scheduling and timing didn’t allow us to get everyone on the crusade. Chace Infinite is probably my personal favorite MC. He’s also on of my mentors and biggest supporter in music my whole entire career. It was so spiritual for me. He’s honestly the only rapper that I truly cared about being a part of this. Spiritually he’s one of my soul mates. He actually had another verse for us that did not make the album, but that’s neither here nor there. Chace was the only one to do multiple records for us. If you know Self Scientific, if you know Chace Infinite individually and what he’s doing with A$AP and all of that, you

know that he’s one of my biggest influences.

Blu is just a genius with words to me. He’s a big fan of mine as I am of his. I’m really big into omens and I felt like it was a good omen to have Blu a part of this thing. You see how we used him and D Prosper as kind of guest trumpeters or guest violinist that we brought to our jazz jam session. D Prosper is a musical savant and he’s been behind some of the best things to happen in music in the last 10 plus years. Spiritually it was very important to have him be part of it as well. Again, I stress that these were spiritual decisions more than just, ‘Oh, they’re dope rappers’ and so on.

Of course they are extremely talented and extremely acclaimed in their own individual ways but for Shafiq and I it was spiritual. The same goes with everyone else—Thundercat, Iman Omari and Jimetta Rose.

Was most of the production made from scratch? Or was Krondon able to peep into the Shafiq Husayn archives?

SH: It was strictly Krondon peeping into my archives. There may have been some songs we touched up but most of the production was gems from the archives.

K: I have to be honest—as an MC coming from Strong Arm Steady, with this LP I was able to do and express exactly what I wanted to. As far as the music goes, you already know brother’s music—there was so much! I sat up for months just listening to music. I just wanted to make sure that I didn’t pick music from any other place but my spiritual energy.

The thing that made the album a whole was that spiritually it was connected in what it was that we were doing. I didn’t speak to the music until the music spoke to me. The first record we ever recorded was ‘Bloomingdale’s.’

That’s the first beat that I picked and that’s the first record that we recorded and this is after a year of vibing and conversation, three months of studio sessions just listening to music. Then I heard the ‘Bloomingdale’s’ beat and I knew that was the first one. I asked him what the name of the beat was. He said it was called ‘Bloomingdale’s.’ I’ll never forget—I said ‘Is that right?’ I went into the other room and wrote the song because—no bullshit—the music was telling me about every woman that I met that were schemers and scammers, that led tricks and beat niggas over they head, that had four or five kids and was out with me every night. The music was telling me, ‘Do you remember that time?’

When I heard the beat for ‘Mary’s Son’—this is before there was any instrumentation on it, before any Thundercat or Chris Dave or anything—that beat spoke to me. It said, ‘It’s going to be OK. Your momma wasn’t there, your daddy was gone, you had a baby at 14 and look, it’s OK!’ This is my most honest record. It’s the most transparent as an MC that I’ve ever been.

SH: We keep overlooking the big elephant in the room. Krondon is Albino. For all intents and purposes, he is a ‘Black’ man.

His momma and daddy are so-called ‘Black people’ from the ‘hood, the real ‘hood, from the seed of what you call Gang Bang L.A. It don’t get no more ‘nigga’ than this nigga. So what is that in the context of what you would call a ‘white’ person? Krondon has a whole other science on that. He gave a bar out on The Breakfast Club radio show in New York

that’s still resonating within the M.S.T. of A. I’m going to let Brother Love go in on that.

Back to the father of racism, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach—he was basing his findings on what he called phenotypes, cranial science and other features like the nose. Based on that he came up with a system to say who was intelligent or who wasn’t, who was superior and who was inferior. That’s where the ‘who’s better than’ from today came from—that’s why we call him the father of racism. You have to now deal with where did you come from, Johann Blumenbach? Who are you?

Albinism is a pigmentation demonstration.

It still doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re talking about.

K: You got white people like Brother Ali. I love Brother Ali but nobody wants to ask Brother Ali what he really is though. Hello?

Anybody heard me? He can rap, be Muslim with a name like Brother Ali and yet no one wants to ask him what he really is. A white man with a white mother and white father— albino though—who has a Black wife and came up Sunni but because he’s Muslim and wears a kufi and does his surahs, no one wants to ask him. His being albino has made him as an individual racially ambiguous. To a lot of people, he is racially ambiguous. You gotta know that’s my brother. I gotta send Ali this album. I’m trippin’ not sending Ali this album.

Here’s a white man who is proved a white man but racially he holds no moniker. If you talk to Ali, you might can’t tell. He was raised in the Midwest, the whitest part of America, he’s a Muslim who raps and sounds like Martin Luther King. He’s racially ambiguous.

My point is that if we fit genetically and we speak about what we know as the 36 shades of Black, and we speak about what my brother said earlier regarding where the word ‘Black’ came from and it’s original origin, then who are we talking about? The Holy Father’s genetic make up. This is just how he made us.

You can’t change how he made us, it’s just how we’re made. It’s what they call the gene pool.

It has a beginning and it has an end. This is just the truth. If Brother Ali and Krondon are both Albino. If I have a baby with a white woman, Black baby. Right? If a white man has a baby with a Black woman, Black baby.

Right? When we speak about ‘White’ and the true essence about what race is, Brother Ali and I are representations of what God truly is, even without melanin. You gotta take that. If you want to look God in it’s purest forms you have to look at my brother and I and see what God is telling you through us two individuals.

We’re reshaping how we view these things because propaganda can be confusing if we don’t really do our real homework on what it really means to be these things. How did these titles and monikers that we put on ourselves come to be?

WHITE BOIZ WITH GUILTY SIMPSON, PEANUT BUTTER WOLF, J. ROCC AND SAMIYAM ON THURS., NOV. 19, AT THE REGENT THEATER, 448 S. MAIN ST., DOWNTOWN. 8 PM / $10 / 18+. REGENTTHEATER.COM. WHITE BOIZ’ NEIGHBORHOOD WONDERFUL IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM STONES THROW. STONESTHROW.COM/WHITEBOIZ. INTERVIEW

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ONE REPORTER

THE EX Interview by Christina Gubala Illustration by Angie Samblotte

Genre-spanning Dutch quartet The Ex have a 35-year history of forward thinking experimental collaborations and thrilling live performances. Though their instrumentation has remained rooted in rock—just bass, guitar and drums—they’ve managed to interweave elements of European folk, African rhythm and melody and free jazz in thoughtful and fresh ways, often as a consequence of the places they’ve traveled and friends they’ve made. The Ex ooze positivity, take care to avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia, and offer some very sound advice for anyone hoping to keep the punk fire burning after decades on the road. (Hint: eat well.)

What is your favorite album of all time?

Arnold de Boer (vocals): The first thing that comes to my mind—it’s always different for me, personally. Tomorrow will be different from today. But right now is Ethiopiques Vol. 14— Getatchew Mekurya. It’s a series of Ethiopian music and it’s from the 60s and 70s, the golden age of the Ethiopian jazz and swing music. And in this series there is number 14 with all the music of Getatchew Mekurya, the saxophone player that we’ve also played with and made two albums with.

That record, I think we all agree, is super special. The story is that they made it with the intention of making an album that was really good to play in restaurants! It’s totally screaming and obnoxious and urgent and also super beautiful, and a keyboard that is like a rock ‘n’ roll organ, and then Getatchew really going all the way and breaking all borders you can imagine. It’s a fantastic album.

The Ex as a band and you specifically have affiliations with Ethiopia, but there’s also some Ugandan riffs that were referenced in some earlier projects. Are there other destinations in Africa you hope to travel to and explore the music?

Terry, the guitar player, with Emma, his girlfriend, wife, they traveled through the whole of Africa for a year, more or less—they were seeing almost half of the countries.

There is a village in the Congo that has a lot of Ex cassette tapes. There’s exchange anyway with them! This was in the mid-90s. It’s complicated, but at one time, the car they were with got stuck, and a lot of people from the small village helped them to push the car out of the mud. And in exchange to thank them, Terry left a lot of Ex cassettes in that village. None of us has ever been back there, but maybe …

There’s a passionate fan contingent there?

You never know who is inspired by the Ex! We played in Egypt a few years ago. That was quite interesting because it was a festival INTERVIEW

of new music, set up by the people after the first revolution on the Tahrir Square. At the point they decided to do the festival, they were super happy because it seemed like there was gonna be some sort of a change and more freedom. So they invited us to play the festival but at the moment we came to play, there had already been a regime change. On the one hand, it was great to do the festival. On the other hand, all the people involved knew this was the only time they could do it and next year—the year after—it’d be impossible to do it again. It was a bit of an intense situation.

But it was great to play. There were a lot of people and we played in an old cinema—it was fantastic.

It sounds very bittersweet.

In a way—the moment you can do something and that night and the exchange with the music and the people there and all the stories, in itself was of course fantastic.

I can’t think of many bands that have played a festival on the eve of re-revolution. What’s it like for such a politically literate band to be put in that situation?

People involved in that festival came from different countries from North Africa and the Middle East. Some of them lived in Europe before and had seen the Ex. The invitation was not based on The Ex’s political outspokenness from the 80s albums. I think those things lay more subtle and I think it was mostly a musical choice. It has to do with who we are and how we do things. That fits with a festival like the one in Egypt much better than with Lollapalooza, for example. We are part of an underground metro network and we ourselves are a station, too. We travel from station to station and these people set up a station in Cairo and we fit there. And Cairo was full of surprises too for us—we were not confident and outspoken, we were curious and surprised and went fully into the sound on the Friday at midday when the prayers came from hundreds of mosques.

You have a lot of experience on the festival circuit—how has festival culture changed in the last fifteen years?

That’s a hard question to answer. Every now and then, we end up in festivals that are really special—not connected to LiveNation or something. Imagine a small village somewhere in the mountains where the local people are preparing calamaras and there’s no security and there’s only one cop who got really drunk the night before because he liked the music so much. That kind of festival culture … that’s from all times. Sometimes if we think there aren’t any good festivals around then we organize our own festival. That’s what we did last year. We called it the Ex Festival. Every now and then, luckily we end up quite a lot of times in places where people create festivals on a very simple human level. Not a big blah-blah-blah.

What is the least festival-like festival the Ex ever played, and what happened?

I think of our show in Ankara, Turkey, which was not informal at all in the first place. The reason for the invitation was 400 years of cultural and trade relations between Turkey and the Netherlands. A few people working at the embassy were Ex fans from their youth and they suggested the Ex to come and play. All was well-organised but the place where we played in Ankara was tiny and we had to improvise with the sound system. Andy had to stand in front of the entrance since the stage was too small so people bumped into him all the time. But a hundred people were there and went wild, dancing and shouting. The people from the embassy were happily surprised, and it was a great night. This formal informality is great—there is always a way to leave the paved road with the signs and rules and that’s very important in music.

Why has the Ex lasted so song? What keeps you going?

Making exactly the music you like to make, and keeping changing and don’t get stuck in some way mono-minded thing. That helps— variation helps. Not doing really long tours helps to survive! Eating good food helps. Like we’re having now for Kat’s birthday a very nice meal! And on tour also, playing in places where you meet people who have a heart for the music and do their best not only to get loads of people into the venue but also organizing it really nicely—having a good meal and a whole entourage of people, and as you go from place to place you are welcome.

You have a direct human connection with the people who set up the show. Some people became really good friends through the years. That really helps as well. One thing is to always work on new music and to never create any borders, or accept any borders. And not doing any super-long tours. Terry is also saying—what is quite important is not trying to have your band in some sort of expansional growth, a thing that you have to get bigger and bigger within two years or three years or blahblah-blah. Try to not work with managers and lawyers. And don’t sign any contracts!

Security is always dangerous! We don’t like security at the gigs, and they are there anyway!

They don’t understand that we don’t like them to be there. Sometimes it gets a bit irritating on both sides. They usually have no idea what kind of situation they are in, and they behave like they’re in a warzone while the opposite is true—they’re in a place where music is happening. They start doing things that work so against the whole evening and the whole thing going on, and we don’t like that so we start to send them away. And of course they think they are the people who should send people away, so then they get confused and then we usually win! It happened a few times that security started to push the audience, and then we start pushing the security and then … it’s not something brag about! But that’s a thing that can be annoying.

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The Ex has always had a political undertone.

Do you find yourself leaning toward the political when you compose lyrics?

I write the lyrics but it’s not something I do completely alone. Because the four of us are … we make the music together, so when I write lyrics, I write things that come to my mind, of course. But it has to do also with the four of us. I’d never use some lyrics that the three other people don’t connect to. And sometimes Andy comes with ideas or just says something in conversation that triggers an idea for lyrics.

Because we speak English most of the time in the band because Andy is from the U.K., it’s not just only me and something that comes only from my mind. Then again, I don’t see it directly as a pure political thing. It’s more collected with the way we do things anyway.

And that’s independent and everything. If some people think the ideas and the words that are in the song are political, that’s their take on it.

So more of a personal politics?

I’m definitely not preaching. I’d rather trigger people to start thinking for themselves about something. It’s not one direction—not how I think is how everybody should think. That’s not it. Actually the opposite! We talk a lot, we travel a lot, we have ideas and dialogue and that already gives a good basis for what fits the Ex and what not. But yes, in the end it’s what I come up with: stories, observations, views that I put in such a way that they are never pedantic but rather challenging the mind— turning brains upside down and convictions inside out.

Is there any pressure to maintain the momentum and experimentation the Ex has had through the years? Or does it just come organically? There have been countless projects everyone is involved with at any moment. Is it ever exhausting?

No, no—it’s the opposite of pressure. It’s the freedom you experience and the freedom you take to do whatever comes up in your mind and out of your fingers and voice and hands.

The music especially … if there’s no pressure and no obligations, it gives a lot of energy.

It’s the opposite of feeling burned out. If you ever feel tired, I advise people to start making music and they’ll get a lot of energy.

So re-energizing the soul?

Definitely! Cars could run on music, I think!

Probably your music! You’re a thrilling live act. Have you had any favorite moments on tour? Or met any crowds that struck a chord with you?

The amazing thing about touring how we try to do it is to make every concert different from any other concert. So to not have something like … to feel like it doesn’t matter where you are? We always say immediately yes when there’s an invitation from a country that we’ve never played before. Because that always gives an extra chance to a complete new experience.

That makes it hard to choose! If every gig is the same and there is one with one person clapping really loud, you might choose that one as being special. But because we play in Romania and Ethiopia and Russia and Brazil and the U.S. and Scotland and Mexico, the excitement is in the fact that the people in the audiences are really different. Maybe in Finland during the gig, the people are a bit cool, and you think, ‘Ah, I don’t know if the 42

gig is so good?’ But afterwards, people come up individually, completely raving and buying all your CDs! It’s completely different from Mexico where people climb on the stage like, ‘Arg-rg-rg-rg-rg-rg!’ And it’s both great, and the fact that it’s different is great.

How frequently do you find yourself experimenting with new instruments? Do you pick up instruments as you travel?

It’s not really in the instruments. The Ex started 37 years ago and Terry still plays the same guitar! But it’s the way of playing that’s different. We’re quite simple with the instruments, actually. The only thing that’s changed in the last ten years is Andy plays a baritone guitar also, but he changed it a bit to his liking. The [2011] Catch My Shoe album is the first one that doesn’t have a bass player— it’s Andy playing the baritone guitar.

You joined the Ex as a singer in 2009, but you’d collaborated with them before that. How did you first start working with them, and how did you end up their frontperson?

We met once in 2004 when we were playing a concert—I was playing with a duo Zea and the Ex was playing, so we met, blah blah blah. It was great, actually! When the Ex had existed 25 years in 2004, they did this amazing big convoy tour with lots of musicians, including Getatchew Mekurya from Ethiopia and Mohammed Jimmy Mohammed, many Ethopian musicians, but also musicians from France and Italy. And they also invited us—me and [co-founder] Remko—to come and play, so we went with the convoy tour. And that’s really a good way to get to learn each other much better!

After that, we did some tours together more and more. Then in 2008 … the Ex has been doing lots of projects in Ethiopia, and they thought it would be a good idea to bring me and Remko to Ethiopia, and that was really fantastic. I also played with Terry and Andy in the Ex. That’s a quick history of how we met and performed together before I joined the Ex. When they asked me, I was surely into playing with three amazing musicians and starting something new. I asked my mom and my girlfriend and they said that I should do it, so I did. We started from scratch making all new songs—it felt like a new band.

You have so much history—how do you put a set list together?

It’s always the new songs that we play. The newest set we have. We don’t go back in history too much. Now we will be playing with Ken Vandermark and we’ll rehearse with him and also adjust the set a bit. It’s more the fact that when we play with Ken, maybe we think about the set a bit different than yesterday or last weekend. But it’s always focused on new songs.

Why? Nostalgia is like a drug—like Ritalin. Maybe nice at times, but it slows you down. We always have new ideas and new things to say and that gives loads of energy and so we can continue. New ideas and new music are the best drugs—that’s why.

THE EX’S THE EX AT BIMHUIS IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM EX RECORDS. VISIT THE EX AT THEEX.NL.

SUBHUMANS Interview by Linda A. Rapka Illustration by Walt! Gorecki As the frontman of influential English anarcho-punk band Subhumans and punk/ska groups Citizen Fish and Culture Shock, Dick Lucas expounds against war, corruption, corporate greed, and systematic cultural oppression. Subhumans formed in Southwest England in 1980 and experimented with rock tempos, blues melodies and instrumentation not usually heard in traditional punk.

Splitting in 1985, they entertained several brief reunions until reforming more permanently in 1998 with an extensive tour of the UK and U.S., and continue to perform regularly. Rotating among an incestuous mix of musical projects, Lucas has remained steadily active with Citizen Fish—which shares several Subhumans members—since 1990, and recently regrouped with Culture Shock, a short-lived band formed just after the initial Subs split (featuring several members who went on to form Citizen Fish).

I was your pen pal when I was 12.

Dick Lucas (vocals): What? Really?

In the early 1990s, soon after I discovered punk and the Subhumans, I sent you a letter in the mail and you actually responded. Do you still write back to fans?

Yeah, you know—I try to. Of course now it’s all by email.

At the first Subhumans show I went to, someone threw a shoe at your head, a crowd of people jumped onstage and unplugged your equipment, and we were all pepper sprayed.

I remember one massive show we did in San Bernardino, in 1998. That’s right—a shoe did hit me in the head. It was the most ridiculous show we ever did. The place was the size of an airplane hangar. It was just stupid. We were just so minimalized by the whole event. We were on a massive stage standing as close as possible to each other just to remind ourselves of what we actually were: a punk rock band.

There were two to three fights breaking out every five minutes off in the distance.

The power went out and the crowd started chanting ‘bullshit,’ and the security guard came out with his batons and pistols and whatever else was wrapped around his waist looking at me saying I had to tell all the people to get off stage. There were about 200 people on the stage who wouldn’t move at all—they were just shaking my hand saying, ‘Hey, Dick great to meet you! Will you take a picture?’

Luckily the sound came back on and we were able to keep on playing.

Your lyrics raise a lot of political and social issues, from war and corporate greed to systematic cultural oppression. What is the most significant issue facing the world today that you feel most compelled to create a conversation about?

The biggest in the world today is what will happen if we continue the way we’re treating the planet. Estimates I’ve read about say we’ve got about 85 years before the food runs out.

That and pollution, the ice caps melting… the environment, in one word. I think personally feeding the food we grow to animals who consume such a vast amount of these resources—and then eating the animals—is a dumb way to go about it. We should leave the animals out of the chain altogether and go vegetarian. Not necessarily for moral reasons but out of necessity—it’s better for the planet. Underlying—or overlying—our INTERVIEW

problems is that people’s greed goes before need, perpetuated by the banks, governments and the whole corporate way of dealing with everything that the 1% use to keep us tied down by economic chains.

These problems have persisted for a long time. Too long. Is there hope?

There’s got to be hope. Without hope that’s it—game over, everyone goes back to being selfish and debased and not doing anything nice to anybody else. It would become every man for himself, and there are too many people doing that already. Hope has to spring eternal.

It’s when enough people come to realize that their lifestyle is supporting the status quo, and the status quo is not supporting their lives on the planet. People changing their own personal behavior, en masse, makes a lot of difference.

I’ve always been curious about the inspiration behind recording your friend Steve Hamilton’s song—and a personal favorite of mine—‘Susan.’ A dark piano ballad of sorts. It’s an unexpected departure from the traditional punk oeuvre.

Steve, a local friend in England, wasn’t in a band and asked, ‘Can you do something with this?’ And I thought, ‘This is quite good.’ I used to like messing around on piano so I sat down and worked out how it could fit to a piano tune. It was recorded on [guitarist] Bruce’s grandmother’s piano onto an oldfashioned tape recorder, the kind where you press play and record—clunk!—with a cassette tape. I played through the song with the lyrics in front of me a few times, with the lead break in the middle just made up every time. Then we got to the studio and Bruce recorded bass and some clicking noises for some reason.

There was no sort of ‘It’s not punk enough!’ or whatever—we just did it.

You should have performed it in San Bernardino.

That might have have started a riot.

The last Subhumans studio album, Internal Riot, was released in 2007. Are there plans for a new record?

Our drummer Trotsky lives in Germany and it’s very difficult to get the time to get together and practice. If we all get together over four days, the new songs need to be played a lot. Internal Riot took a few years to get all the songs written. It’s on the list of things to do. High up there. We’ve got a few new songs but nothing is ready quite yet. There’s

another dysfunctional thing going on in that our original bassist Phil is learning ‘The Knowledge’ to become a cab driver in London.

It’s an immense task that takes three years of learning and passing a series upon series of tests. He’s approaching the end of it but luckily we have a chap called Jay who’s able to play gigs while Phil’s busy expanding his brain cells. It’s a fact that cab drivers’ brains actually increase in size physically. The dendrons and neurons actually grow in order to have the capacity to hold all the new knowledge.

Does this make you want to become a cabby?

It doesn’t necessarily make you smarter—it just makes your brain larger.

Your other group Citizen Fish remains active—you just released a new album.

And Culture Shock also has some tour dates coming up soon. How do you juggle all these projects?

By sort of working out a few months in advance what everyone’s doing with childcare and part-time jobs, and which band’s free when. It gets a bit tricky with kids and when time is taken up by serious regular-money jobs like teaching music or whatever. Being in a band is neither predictable nor reliable. At least not these bands, anyway! It’s remarkable these bands can function at all considering we’re approaching 45 or 50, but it’s fun trying. It sounds like you enjoy keeping busy.

It’s good to be busy. You need free time in order to create the stuff with which to keep busy. For us, without new songs there’s nothing for a band to keep touring with, and if you haven’t got free time you can’t create new material. It’s a lot to do with just turning off the laptop and phone—not watching telly which I don’t do much of anyway—and setting up a few hours before going to sleep and just having a go at it. You also paint. How did you get into art?

I bought some cheap acrylic paints when we did a gig in Poland in the 90s that cost the equivalent of £2, and I went home and messed about with them. I didn’t do much for a few years, then started having another go at it in the 2000s. I knocked out about 200 paintings in about two years. I paint 10 a year now instead of 100. More thought and skill go into them now. There’s a website, madasabrush.org, on which me and my partner Michelle have put up quite a bit.

Do you display your work in your home?

Every available space is covered in paintings.

My garage has about 100 tacked up. The other year there were all these wasps in front of the paintings, and I had to hire someone to spray and get rid of them. I’d been keeping the paintings back-to-back in plastic bags to avoid water damage, and the wasps had gone in between them, eating their way through the plastic and the canvases. We found a whole wasp nest nestled in between two paintings.

They had made a giant hole right through the middle of the two paintings.

You could have made that into its own unique piece. Wasp art.

Right—what you could do is varnish it to make it a work of art in itself. But wasp nests are made with amazingly complex filaments, and you touch them and they fall apart. I could start a wasp farm inside my paintings.

How big is the wasp market?

What are your thoughts on the upcoming U.S. presidential election? What would you do if you lived here?

Emigrate? Politics are run by trillions of dollars. Money runs the entire political system in America. I’m still trying to catch up with what that Bernie chap is saying, but he seems to be on the left side of politics and up for social reconstruction instead of screwing people over, which is breath of fresh air—but it may be made up, who knows? Donald Trump is worse than a joke because he’s being taken seriously by people. He must bring out in people the sort of nasty caveman, guttural, selfish instincts they dare not say in public, but on telly with Trump saying them they think it’s OK to say yes to his reactionary racist homophobic misogynistic bullshit. Trump being on TV is just a sign of the times, and it’s awful. He’s a Republican. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. If he could see Trump now he would be turning in his grave.

This is exactly why we need music and art to inspire the type of alternative thinking needed in the world.

Right. If I put what I wrote in my lyrics into a book I could sell maybe fifty copies. But more people will be interested if it’s set to a good tune. Music also brings people together in social gatherings like gigs and shows. You can’t get that on the Internet.

VISIT DICK LUCAS AND SUBHUMANS AT CITIZENFISH.COM. 47

VIAL Interview by Kristina Benson and Chris Ziegler Photography by Christina Craig Vial’s songs are roughly one and a half minutes long each—there-and-gone bursts of energy that practically burn you as they come out of the speakers, just like good hardcore punk should. After a well-received demo and some random press from Pitchfork, they released their debut vinyl—a 7” EP on Cut Rate, also home of a great Audacity 10”—in September. They’re modest (and hilarious) in person but they’re ferocious live, and their songs have much more going on than just high-intensity complaining. In just a few seconds, they dismantle and examine topics like gentrification (as in the song “Move”) and gender relationships (“You’re Not Safe”) and the general alienation of wandering through the world of today. They speak now from their Egg Van as confused trick-ortreaters sneak peeks from across the street.

At what point did you cross the line from ‘people in a room together, with instruments’ to feeling like you were really a band together?

Kaitlin: I still feel like we’re barely a band.

Other bands play with us and we’re like, ‘They’re real bands.’

Krista: It’s like outsider art—for me at least.

I’m not musically inclined, and when I’m writing lyrics, I’m like, ‘OK, this is what sounds good.’ I feel like that’s how outsider artists do it. I think the less, the better.

What was the first show you ever played?

Denee: The East 7th Street warehouse—just a weirdo punk warehouse downtown. I think with Blazing Eye. It was pretty good for a first show—we were all pretty nervous, we hadn’t played in awhile. But it was fun—it’s a good full community there.

The coverage of Vial is like all random people who saw you at a show somewhere and loved it, and then Pitchfork. What does being on Pitchfork do for a band like Vial?

Denee: It was like, ‘What the fuck were we doing there?’ We do get a lot of really good random blogs from people who’ve seen us. Then there was the Burger Boogaloo reviewer—she hated us! She said we were really yell-y and only played twelve minutes.

‘The food here is awful, and the portions are so small!’

Kaitlin: We enjoyed that a lot! And they called us a girl band.

Jon: ‘I was really excited for this all-girl band, but they were really yell-y and played for twelve minutes.’ We were like, ‘We’re doing something right!’

Krista: We get compared to riot grrl a lot— Denee: And we’re not even all girls.

Which of your elementary school friends would love Vial the most and why?

Denee: I have a best friend from elementary school—she’s basically like my sister. And she was always super encouraging and we would jam together when we were younger but I never played in a band with her. I think she would be stoked for me—I wouldn’t say she’d be surprised.

Kaitlin: Krista went to pre-school with me and she’s the singer. I think we were just like freaks from the get-go. You know there’s that one other kid in the first grade: ‘Oh, you get benched all the time too?’

Which of your teachers would be least surprised that you’re in Vial now?

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Denee: I was pretty openly weird from an early age so I don’t think anyone would be surprised. But I was really close to my high school French teacher. I had her four years, and she had very interactive class projects and I was always singing or dancing. I think the first time I actually played guitar in front of my peers was in her class doing a weird French song for a project so I think she would be really stoked.

Kaitlin: Honestly, in high school there was like us, and there was like the rest of the school.

So none! We were just freaks. All of our guy friends were skateboarders and we just hung out with them—they were barely graduating.

I don’t think any of our teachers would be surprised. We had different colored hair and we had cat collars and all that.

Do you feel like you chose freak-dom or was it thrust upon you?

Kaitlin: Probably both. If you’re not conventionally what-is-beautiful at the time, you’re not going to be popular. Or if you don’t have a lot of money. And I also chose it by being attracted to extremes. When I first met one of my best friends, I was in seventh grade and I saw her and I was like, ‘I have to be friends with this girl!’ She had a shaved head and bangs. It was the first really extreme female that I’d seen like that. And when I first started hanging out again with Krista in junior high, I totally remember we had no friends.

What is something you know to be true that no one else believes?

Krista: Hmm—shopping at places like H&M and Forever 21 does matter and it does affect other people. Being in [the] fashion [industry], one of my main reasons why I make clothing is cuz I don’t want them to be made in China or in third world countries. All my teachers would be like, ‘No, it’s fine—they’re not being made in third world countries.’ I feel like people don’t realize that.

Denee: There’s a lot of people playing music today that don’t really give much of a fuck about the music itself. I feel like a lot of people want to do it for like Internet popularity or something, and that’s like a sad truth. That’s what makes the real stuff that much better— people who are actually doing it for the right reasons. It’s necessary for them to be a happy person or to just get by. That’s their creative output and that’s what they have to do. And that’s the sad truth—a lot of people are just doing it for the wrong reasons.

What are the right reasons?

Denee: For yourself, and not to please anybody else—not cuz you’re thinking about what your fucking rating on Pitchfork is going to be. And also that the phrase ‘girl band’ is necessary to use when talking about a band.

It isn’t. Even if the band is comprised of all females, ‘band’ works just fine.

What is the most irreplaceable record or tape or physical music artifact you have?

Denee: The one record I’m super protective over is a 7” by this obscure UK punk band called the Molesters. One of my favorite punk songs of all time—given as a birthday present from my boss Larry Hardy, along with a stack of amazing rare punk singles. And ALL of my Neil Young records. He’s the best songwriter.

He’s gotten me through a lot of tough times.

What prompted you to write ‘Move’?

Krista: My fiancée and I had already lived in L.A. for a year, but we were moving into a new house. I got in a weird altercation with my neighbor—she was pissed I was there, but she had every right to be angry. I was just as angry when I lived in San Francisco. It’s full circle.

She’s allowed to be mad. We’re all allowed to be mad. But we can try to be decent to each other. I can point the finger, and people can point it at me. It’s a neverending cycle.

Kaitlin: Some people move to town like, ‘What’s up! I’m here!’ Dude, there is so much more here than just your fucking party.

On ‘You’re Not Safe,’ Krista sings: ‘You’re not safe, I’m the enemy.’ Who is ‘you’ and who is ‘I’?

Krista: For that song, I’m singing about being a woman, or a girl, and growing up and feeling I’m supposed to act a certain way or be a certain way. I was singing to the men in my life. Not ones I’m dating, but family members—or like to any older male in general, where it’s like … I’m not this cute young girl. Like, ‘I can stand my ground.’

Being a woman you can feel threatened, and I was trying to be like, ‘I’m not just going to bow down—I’m not submissive and weak, so sleep with one eye open!’

Do you feel like you’re part of a counterculture right now? A subculture? Or just some little tentacle of mass culture?

Jon: I feel like we maybe grew up in our respective subcultures … but it’s hard to claim that when you’re a little older? We’re doing our thing. We don’t feel the need to be like, ‘I’m punk.’

Kaitlin: Which is sad!

I like how you’re like, ‘Yeah, we’re not really punk, other than being in this ripping punk band.’

Kaitlin: We can’t talk to people about it. I just don’t tell people I’m in a band—people you meet at school or work who are like, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I hang out with my friends.’ You know: ‘You’re in a band? Do you play arenas?’

We’re really so insular.

Do you feel like there’s a limit on where the band can or can’t go because of the things you sing about? Like your future as a band means you’re going to get pushed back in line by bands that sing about nothing?

Jon: We don’t have a future!

That’s kind of refreshing!

Kaitlin: We’re not trying to live off it.

So what is the least likely next step for Vial?

Headlining Coachella? A reality TV show?

Denee: We’re not really going anywhere, just like Jon said. And that’s where we want to be. We don’t want to make this into a job or anything—we want it to be fun and we just want to be able to hang out every week. If we happen to put out a another record, that would be awesome.

Krista: We’re just so go-with-the-flow, but we’re not going to headline some corporatesponsored show, Kaitlin: We talk about a West Coast tour but it costs money and time—everyone has jobs or in school full time so it’s hard. I hope we can at least record a tape again. I can’t imagine us having a reality show? I don’t even know what that would be—drinking beer and making fun of each other? It would be very boring. It could be a bedtime show. We are so bad in front of the camera.

But you’re so fearless about playing shows.

Kaitlin: But we get so nervous.

Is that what all the beers are for?

Kaitlin: Yeah! We hype each other up too. It’s nerve-wracking. You get up there and it’s like, ‘This is what I made.’ And everyone could be like ‘fuck that!’ We’ve played shows where we don’t fit in but we’re always like … fuck it, as long as we’re having fun, that’s what matters.

VIAL’S SELF-TITLED EP IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM CUT RATE RECORDS. VIAL PLAYS WITH FLESH WORLD ON SAT., DEC. 5, AT A SECRET LOCATION. VISIT VIAL AT VIAL-BAND.TUMBLR. COM FOR MORE INFO. INTERVIEW

GDNA Interview by Darian Momanaee Photography by dana washington

GDNA is one of those producer-musician polymaths who can pretty much do everything. A former (and disillusioned) electrical engineer turned composer-guitarist-singer after a chance encounter with an instrument he initially didn’t even want to touch, he now produces and makes music that he describes as “organic soul with future essence.” (And he’s right.) Besides this year’s solo release Quadrants, he has recently put out a project with rapper Soopacrzy, and he has much more on the way. He joined L.A. RECORD to talk about the barriers that musicians face in a post-label era, how long it took him to convince himself this is what he wanted to do, and how to get the courage to make fear into something good.

Youssou N’Dour—what is your connection to his music specifically? Personally and in terms of African diaspora?

When I was three, when I would play back his Recordings Live In Concert, my dad would also record other live concerts—different African musics across the country. And they’d be speaking in some African dialect, and I’d always say, ‘Mom! Dad! What are they saying?’ My parents speak Amharic, one of like eighty dialects in Ethiopia, but as a child I thought it was all a homogenous thing.

One African language. So discovering the depth of uniqueness, the languages across the continent and across the world of Africandash-Black music was good for me early on.

I thought of Africa as a monolith, and I think that’s difficult to avoid when growing up in America. I’d ask questions like, ‘ … are there PlayStations in Africa? Are there … roads in Africa?’ Having so many African musics playing inside my household … it definitely formed my worldview. And having a father with such Pan-Africanist ideologies was definitely strong for my development.

Tell me more about your dad.

My dad … he’s had an interesting childhood himself, given that a lot of Ethiopians listen to Ethiopian music. His father played a lot of music from around the world: music from India, Latin America ... something he was very fortunate to experience, and he passed that lineage down to me. My mom mainly listened to Ethiopian music—that and Celine Dion. So my dad made it a point to play music from around the world so my sister and I would have a deeper understanding of music.

So he did that instructively? Like he was trying to teach you?

Yeah, but he did it passively. He never told my sister and I, ‘This is a lesson that I’m teaching you right now!’

What was it like growing up in the Inland Empire? Did you feel like you were growing up in Los Angeles?

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Not exactly. Los Angeles still felt like this distant exotified place. I had been to L.A. many times growing up, but never really got to experience it. Something funny I just realized: the local television news and radio were all Los Angles based, so half of the information was irrelevant to our lives. Like city politics, crime, traffic reports and a lot of the times the weather—local weather reports would post about L.A. weather but not Redlands. And we got the tail end of L.A.’s pollution. The I.E. is surrounded by mountains so the smog would just sit there … all menacing-like. Inland Empire is pretty diverse overall, but Redlands not so much. A quaint conservative middleclass suburb where I was called a ‘nigger’ by age five. Now those instances were few and far between … but that wouldn’t be my last.

Great school district, though …

What kind of person do you feel like you were as a child? What changed you? What would have been different without music?

I was the sensitive kid that picked flowers with the girls and made bracelets for our moms. I paid dearly for that braclet. I had some low-key bullies, nothing crazy. In fact, in rebranding efforts, I joined their ranks and started bullying another kid. It never felt like me, but I guess that’s ‘fitting in,’ right?

I eventually got to apologize to the kid in middle school. I was also obsessed with video games and Pokémon cards. Still obsessed with video games—I camped out for an xbox 360. I continued onto high school, much to my ire—I’ve hated school all my life. I had one of my bigger musical awakenings at that time. I discovered artists like Erykah Badu, the Roots, D’angelo, Prince, A Tribe Called Quest … at the same time The Chappelle Show was happening along with The Boondocks. My entire worldview was formed around these movements. Hip-hop even got me to start reading recreationally—a practice I would not previously dare partake. Real-world me felt a sense of disillusionment from the student loan debt, coming into a fuller realization of

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what it means to be black in America, and the role of capitalism in our lives. With that disillusionment also came growth as I got a fuller understanding of myself, the world, and my role in the world. In childhood I revered my sister. She was older and cooler. In high school I started becoming more independent of her influence, which led me to cool new musics. Coming out of college in debt and realizing I didn’t want to be an electrical engineer led me to make some interesting calls—some good, some bad. But that’s life, and we’re all gonna die one day so fuck it. As a listener, music has helped form my view of politics, social justice, and the world. As a creator, in addition to everything that came with listening, came a deeper understanding of myself. Unpacking and discovering the difference between what I believe and what I’ve been socialized to believe—which is an entire rabbit hole in and of itself.

You and your sister made something on BandCamp together—is she making music right now?

Not at all. When she was in high school, she tried to start a rock band. She got a guitar for Christmas. My parents said they weren’t gonna do it but they did it, and played for about a few weeks. She was really excited at first! But from them on she dropped it. Years later I ended up picking up guitar, completely forgetting my sister’s experience. And I had a $60 secondhand First Act drum set—you know those? From Target? I bought one secondhand. All my life I wanted to play the drums, but I never lived in an environment where I could play the drums and not annoy my parents, my sister or the neighbors. So in college I navigated a way I could play drums while the roommates were in class. I got my first electrical engineering internship and absolutely hated it. I’d get to work at 7:53, sit in my car for 5 minutes knowing I could clock in and get to my desk in 2 … I’d get it down to the minute. I realized I had to do something with my life but I didn’t know what. So I took a fifth year with the intention of figuring out what to do with my life cuz that wasn’t gonna be it. I went back home and me and my sister crossed over—we were home at the same time. I started playing drums and was recording through Audacity—free recording software, very limited. My sister said, ‘Let’s record’ and I started doing really silly freestyles as a joke and we released it on BandCamp that evening. All my friends thought I was serious and they were disappointed when they heard it: ‘Oh, I thought it was gonna be for real?’ So after hearing that and having enjoyed recording, I got bit by the bug and I put out my first project two months later.

What was the first show you ever played like? Was it what you expected?

It was another cringeworthy experience.

This time last year actually! I was singing along while doing APC stuff, playing my soul-infused electronic goodness. Even had a guitar solo. That show was bad for three reasons. One, feedback. Two, bad sound.

Three, it was an EDM night … I wasn’t told.

Made a few fans amidst what felt like a world crashing down around me. I’d been holding off live performance for a while purely out of fear. But as with most things in life, you just have to get in there, suck, and suck less every INTERVIEW

time. On a long flight back from Ethiopia a few weeks after releasing my first project, I spoke with an older man that sat next to me. He said something along the lines of, ‘If you’re not feeling out of your league or underqualified on a daily basis, you’re not living.’ So whenever I feel like a small fish, I remind myself it’s a good thing.

How have you grown since you first started?

It’s been a short time since 2011.

Absolutely. The smallest aspect is actually having gotten better at music—more refined as far as my understanding and what I wanna create. Having decided to enter music as a fulltime thing … it took me about a year to tell myself that’s what I wanted to do, and it took about as much time to tell my parents. In that time there was a lot of ups and downs. Fears of potentially ruining my life! I haven’t escaped that, but I’ve gotten far more reasonable. I’ve really been forced to come face to face with my insecurities and understand who I am and how I interact with people. There was a time where I was an extremely thirsty producer: ‘Hey, I do music too! We should collab!’ Even though I hadn’t even heard their music! You see their play counts, you see that they’re bigger and that’s something you wanna be a part of.

The biggest part was realizing you don’t have to make music with everyone you’re friends with. Let things happen naturally and be OK with yourself.

What is the role that vulnerability plays in the music you’re making right now? Do you feel vulnerable as an artist?

Absolutely. The biggest was when I started singing. For about two years I’ve been singing.

All my life I sucked! My parents and my sister let me know, and I knew it! But I just wanted to sing. I loved singing. Knowing that I sucked did not stop me! Something that kept me going … I don’t wanna say brilliance, but ‘moments of brilliance’ is the phrase. I’d think, ‘That ONE second did not sound bad! Everything else was horrible, but there might be something there!’ That was gnawing at me, and one day I decided fuck it—I’m gonna do it. I did a remix of ‘Fall In Love’ by J Dilla and ‘MmmHmm’ by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, and the day before of releasing it, I was so scared! I’m singing on a song! The idea of singing and wanting people to think that it was good was something 23 years of my life had built of knowing my singing was bad. Having to unpack that, get through it, develop my voice, be secure in my voice … that’s the part I feel vulnerable.

You produce for other acts—what do you think of your work when you aren’t singing or doing vocals?

It’s like a different part of me that I’m able to satisfy. I absolutely love producing for others or having people come on to my tracks without my voice on it. I do love to sing. But sometimes you just like to focus on the production. One of my favorites I did with my longtime collaborator from Chicago, Frank Leone, Donnie Trumpet of the Social Experiment and Akenya—she’s an amazing vocalist who was on Chance the Rapper’s #10Day project. ‘Windows,’ with Alex Wiley—she did the vocals on it. One of my favorites is a song I did called ‘Bad Mutha Fucka.’ I did that in the basement of my uncle’s home in Denver while I was

figuring out what to do with my life, and I had this rapper Macon Hamilton and now one of my favorite people to work with and a great friend, Waju. I DJed for him this past weekend at a block party or little festival and to see him go from zero to 60 … beforehand, he’s just relaxing, really dead on energy.

And when he goes on, he’s just channeling something. The first time we worked together was ‘Bad Mutha Fucka.’ That got me my first good looks, you could say. I think that one got me Anthony Valadez’ attention—he has a show on KCRW. He’s a figure I pay attention to. So for that to all come together … one of my first collaborations, one of my favorite people to work with and the song that kinda got me recognized by someone I had a deep respect for … that takes the cake. Some stuff I’m working on now that’s not released—one song with Ill Camille, which I am singing on, but I love the production and I love her rapping. I did music with Fat Ron, an Inglewood rapper who was recently on SiR’s album Seven Sundays on ‘In The Sky.’ We have a lot of shared ideas beyond the music. I love when I’m able to work with a rapper, singer or other musician, and the first times we meet are just hours of talking. Doesn’t have to have anything to do with music.

What role does the internet have in your music, and in your life?

Everything. I don’t believe there would have been a chance for me musically five or ten years prior. A piece of it was that instant gratification with that first pretend project I put out with my sister—to hear instant feedback without having to pass my demos in Venice Beach or whatever. And not only that, my brand of music and the music of so many others don’t fit the mold of most labels. We talk about gatekeepers today if I’m talking with other musicians or other creatives trying to break in, and it does not compare to the gatekeeping that the labels had once had. I’m able to put out my music how I want without having to appease a noncreative executive that wants to feel creative and have that spill over to me and my music.

The feeling of freedom! Although … I love social media and what it’s allowed me to do, but there’s a whole host of questions.

I’m at an event and I want people to know I’m at this event, so you have to make sure you’re always thinking about these things that really don’t matter? But then I get to connect with people that listen to my music and I get to hear how it affects them. So pluses and minuses. But the internet … I’d be nowhere with out it. Musically. And the ability to download software, whether legally or illegally … I don’t know what it’s like to download illegally. I won’t speak for it. But the ability to have thousands of dollars of software on your computer—cuz the barrier for access to music or really a lot of things is so high that if I’m gonna get into music at a young age or any age, I better come from wealth! So if you’re not coming from wealth, you can’t go out on a limb and say, ‘Lemme get that $1,000 software, mom and dad!

Lemme get this brand-new keyboard that I can’t shop for on eBay or Craigslist!’

Do you have any musical training? What’s your history as an instrumentalist, and in finding your voice?

The training for the guitar was minimal. This isn’t me bragging. This is a bad thing! I’ve only had two or four months of guitar training.

But I’ve been playing guitar since I was 16.

One day my friend came over and we were gonna watch a movie, and he said, ‘Want me to bring my guitar?’ ‘No, man—don’t. I don’t want you to bring it!’ He brought it against my wishes and he started teaching me basics.

Like a G major chord, C major—he had no idea what the names were and I didn’t either. I was bit by the bug that night. At that point I was obsessed with video games entirely. When my dad saw I had an interest in something that wasn’t video games, he bought me a guitar the next day.

He was just happy you weren’t playing video games?

Absolutely. I was practicing for hours. Probably six to eight hours per day. I was always a good student in like AP classes, but my grades started to tank cuz I just loved the guitar.

When I first learned various techniques, I’d sit there for hours and zone out to reruns of the Cosbys in my room and just practice til I got it. I just would not quit! From there I went to college and my guitar playing dropped. I was an electrical engineer major and that took a lot of time. I’d have spurts of inspiration … but in college there was a piano in one of the dining halls, so I’d learn songs from YouTube on my phone. Once I decided to start making music, I started being able to record myself. I’d record myself vocally when I had a suspicion there might be something there, and sure, it didn’t sound great, but I could hear myself and hear what needed to be fix and re-record it and it continued to get better and better.

From there, I started playing piano, got a MIDI keyboard. It was backwards. From there I learned how to play the bass, and then I got better on keys. My second project, Basement Therapy, was when I was learning how to play the piano. Quadrants, the project after that, I was learning how to sing—I sang on every song. On Basement Therapy, I sang background on some songs—I needed paint where it ain’t! And for this next project, I realized I might’ve done maybe one guitar solo on Quadrants. But the instrument I started with was being represented the least. All of these were like training exercises! So after coming to that realization … the next project is incorporating everything I’ve learned about guitar and everything I’ve learned along the process. And that is where we are today—that is how this all came into one.

What do you feel want to get out of making music at this point in your life?

Freedom, autonomy, self-discovery, and getting a deeper understanding of the world around me. People form much of their understanding of the world through art, media, and entertainment—for better or worse. I try not to let my ego shut down ideas before I can explore them. And I hope to never make music I don’t like for whatever reason—for a check or to cash in on the latest musical trend—because that goes back to identifying where society ends and you begin and of course the inevitable gray area in between. Being honest to the world also means being truthful with yourself.

VISIT GDNA AT GDNAMUSIC.COM. 53

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★ NEW THIS ISSUE!

VAS DEFERENS ORGANIZATION

by CHRISTINA CRAIG

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LIVE PHOTOS Edited by Debi Del Grande

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album reviews

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WAYBACK MACHINE Ron Garmon

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THE INTERPRETER Vas Deferens Organization

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COMICS Curated by Tom Child

REPORTER’S OPINION 68 ONE Chris Ziegler

72 BOOKS Disco’s Out...Murder’s In! Chris Ziegler

LIVE PHOTOS FALL 2015 The Melvins August 2015 The Observatory

ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR DEBI DEL GRANDE

Babes August 2015 The Echo

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

CHAD ELDER

Chelsea Wolfe September 2015 The Regent

Radkey October 2015 Alex’s Bar

MAXIMILIAN HO

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

Eagles of Death Metal October 2015 Teragram Ballroom

Tijuana Panthers September 2015 The Regent

MAXIMILIAN HO

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DEBI DEL GRANDE

LIVE PHOTOS

Plague Vendor September 2015 Bootleg Theater

Raw Fabrics August 2015 The Roxy

DEBI DEL GRANDE

Mikal Cronin October 2015 The Wiltern

CHAD ELDER

Thundercat August 2015 Low End Theory Fest

DAVID VALERA

The Lovely Bad Things October 2015 The Observatory

Big Business August 2015 The Observatory

LESLIE KALOHI

LIVE PHOTOS

MAXIMILIAN HO

SAMANTHA SATURDAY

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ALBUM REVIEWS and Eddie Cochran, but with subtle elements reminiscent of acts such as Tijuana Panthers, Alan Vega, and Bruce Joyner, too—and all with a distinctly upbeat twist.

—Desi Ambrozak

THE BUTTERTONES American Brunch self-released

The Buttertones are an up-andcoming young band from L.A. and Long Beach (with current and former members of Cherry Glazerr, Jeffertiti’s Nile, Wild Pack of Canaries and Crystal Antlers) who blend together all the best elements from 50s and early 60s rock ‘n’ roll. Their style, however, is a very extreme and dramatic divergence from the bands they come from, except in terms of its intensity. American Brunch is ten high-energy tracks built from twangy surf guitar riffs, rockabilly rhythms, a rockin’ saxophone, and very distinctive crooner-style vocals.

The opening song “Dak’s Back” sets the standard for the album. Most of the songs are very up-tempo with intense build ups and comedowns, but my favorite is the single exception “Baby Doll,” which has a slower, more dreamy and ethereal vibe.

Genres are blended here in a way that compliments and highlights all their best aspects, while maintaining a their speed, energy and intensity. These songs recall early masters like the Ventures, Gene Vincent,

THE CHAPIN SISTERS

Today’s Not Yesterday Lake Bottom Over a decade ago, I walked into the Echo and feel immediately in love with these voices calling to me across the darkened room— the voices of three siren sisters who had sultry alto harmonies so tight, they hurt my heart. (I almost didn’t notice they were playing tricky guitar and banjo parts at the same time.) I’ve been chasing that emotional high ever since, but being a Chapin Sisters fan is excruciating, since they record only sporadically and are more comfortable doing covers of Britney Spears and the Everly Brothers than writing solid material of their own. Since the departure of sister Jessica Craven in 2010 (“Craven” because she’s Lily and Abigail Chapin’s half sister, the daughter of the Freddy Krueger guy instead of the “Cats in the Cradle” guy’s brother), Lily and Abigail have

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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taken turns singing lead. I admit to being slightly more on Team Lily: her country-ish breakup track “Love Come Back” may be the best on the new album, with a sultry, almost slurred vocal that’s naive at the same time, like if Paul Williams and Jessica Harper’s characters from Phantom of the Paradise had actually found genuine love and sired a daughter who’s now having boy troubles: “I can’t sleep without you because that’s when the demons come. And I hurt myself like you hurt me / you showed me how it’s done.” But every track on the album is a triumphant return to what we really want: a 70s Troubadour sound that never really existed but had really good pedal steel guitar and organs when it did. And ohhhhh, those sinfully good harmonies.

Prepare to lose your soul.

—D.M. Collins

source material and brought to life with keyboards and atmospherics a la Pink Floyd. There are tones—and songs—here reminiscent of early Moby recordings at times, as well as some as strange as anything that Tom Waits has come up with. (The guitars themselves sound haunting and even slightly drunk.) At times, music really can be the highest of art forms, and here we are given a great example.

—Daniel Sweetland

DIVA

Divinity In Thee Circle Star

DEXTER STORY Wondem Soundway

CONTACT FIELD ORCHESTRA Mapping The Futures Gone By EP Hit + Run

This album plays like a good cocktail made from the best ingredients. Don’t rush it and don’t try and analyze it—just let it sink in and then breathe. Like the best found-footage movies, Contact Field Orchestra’s fourth release is an example of connection in the weirdest way, layering incredible field recordings with precisely perfect overdubs. Sans keyboards and guitars, these songs would already provide a powerful and a transformative experience. But with the added keyboard parts, the listener is struck by a haunting link between old and new. It’s a thoughtful and deliberate experiment in creation in the spirit of a mad scientist from a B-movie, built from raw sampled beats excavated from the original

another great contribution to the burgeoning and diverse jazz scene developing in Los Angeles today.

—Zachary Jensen

Dexter Story is a prolific artist and multi-genre musician who has worked with the Gaslamp Killer Experience and contributed to compositions for the amazing Ethiopian jazz ensemble Ethio Cali, fronted

by Todd Simon and featuring local legends like Kamasi Washington.

Now Story returns with his second solo album. Co-produced by Carlos Niño with recording and writing

by Story himself, this is an album inspired by a love of soul, jazz, and funk via the sounds of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, and Kenya. To combine these vastly different musics into a cohesive experience is no simple feat, but the result is quite interesting and enjoyable and Story somehow makes it sound easy. Fans of the Mulatu Astatke sound will enjoy the first single “Lalibela,” which starts with a mesmerizing repeating keyboard track and rhythmic drumming, joined by the horn section and melodic vocals.

Other standouts include “Without An Address,” featuring a Sudaneseborn singer Alsarah whose singing is nothing short of enchanting. “Merkato Star” is another hit, which starts off with a handclap rhythm as horns fade in as if from a great distance, setting up the song to build to colossal heights. Over all, this is

It’s rare for such an incredibly personal album—one steeped in the vernacular of new age meditation and liberated from the oppression of negative thinking—to manifest as playfully and bubbly as Diva’s latest effort. Jump-rope rhyme phrasing, synthesized clav clicks, cyclical static transmissions and a downright sexy bass line (or two) are just a handful of the distinct touches that make Divinity in Thee both by and for Diva. Instead of the self-serious pomp typically associated with healers, Diva uses her gentle vocals and focused lyrics to engage the listener in the first person, and it’s more than just charming—it’s inviting. She opens with a request for an open heart and open mind, and springboards into the cosmic swirl of “Satori,” a Buddhist term for “understanding.” The sultry “Blessed” and the bright, clean beauty of the earworm title track intertwine the notions of divine and romantic love; lust and yearning are allowed to thrive in the context of purity and worship. “Infinite Gradient” surfs along with cosmic Brill Building shimmer, but instead of wondering if you’ll still love her tomorrow, Diva gives herself to the harmony between darkness and light. Guest musicians Zumi Rosow and Matthewdavid provide delicate licks of saxophone and lute respectively, harmoniously situated within the pastel tones of Diva’s production—and it’s that notion of harmony that perhaps best defines Divinity in Thee.

—Christina Gubala ALBUM REVIEWS

DEREK CASTELLANO A Modern Ecstasy self-released

A Modern Ecstasy is a strange and powerful journey through a wide range of stylistic and emotional changes. We move from the raw and unnerving “Sanguine,” where Castellano sings of destruction and evolution, to the whimsical and lovely title track where we find some curious images of balloons and legal rights. There are hints of Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa sprinkled throughout but the sound is something more akin to the Silver Jews mixed with the Gorillaz. In other words, this is a refreshingly creative album. Castellano is in full-on selfdiscovery mode on this debut, exploring not just ideas and images but also a wide variety of sounds and rhythms. The album fittingly ends with an 11-minute mini-opera of sorts with Castellano jamming over some strange samples of Alex Collier, the Andromeda alien contactee. As Collier tells his story, Castellan’s sounds and vibes echo the bizarre tale being told. Castellano recorded this album in a wide array of bedrooms across Irvine, making it a collection of lo-fi techniques and styles dictated by what was available to him at any given moment. The album plays like a diary reads— lonely and beautifully disconnected at times, but insightful at others, and always somehow intriguing.

—Daniel Sweetland

DUDERELLA

Sophmore Slump EP self-released It took all of thirty six seconds into L.A. native Duderella’s third EP, ALBUM REVIEWS

Sophomore Slump, to decide that I have never—and probably never will again—heard something quite as tenacious, as gutsy, or as defiant as Duderella’s Daniel Reyes with a mic against his mouth. To state that I could very literally feel his spit on my face would be an understatement. With tracks like “Supreme (fuckface)” and “NSFW,” one certainly has a clue what to expect, but the songs will still leave listeners in shock. “Sophomore Slump” is the most obvious standout, yet “Yin Yang” and “Attention” are the strongest lyrically. The combination of strained yet almost sensual vocals, pulsating bass and lyrics that would hurt even the hardest of hearts makes Duderella a rare breed. Love him or hate him, one thing is for certain: Sophomore Slump will stick with you long after you’re done wiping the spit from your face.

—Audra Heinrichs

high school when my older brother came to pick me up in his 1975 Ford F150. Smoking cigarettes and listening to a Sisters of Mercy tape, he drove slowly through fender high puddles to the Buena Park Mall, an indoor shopping center that probably hadn’t been remodeled since the truck was new, in order to buy the first PlayStation. We walked through this soggy relic, obtained the pinnacle of 1995 gaming entertainment, went home and played Tekken. My brother isn’t around anymore but listening to this album brings me right back to that moment for some reason—which may not mean much to anyone else but it’s high praise, I can assure you.

—Tom Child

Careless Dais

Just in time for the grey skies of El Nino comes the second pressing of this synth-electro-goth marvel from Deb Demure’s perfectly named Drab Majesty. Much like the aforementioned weather phenomenon, Drab Majesty occupies the creative sweet spot between ice and warmth, producing an album that is the aural equivalent of floating suspended in an isolation tank. Leading off with “The Foyer”—not only the album’s most immediately striking track but one of my favorite songs of the year—Careless remains engaging throughout its relatively unwavering emotional and sonic palette, evoking all the legends of 80s synth (Gary Numan, Seventeen Secondsera Cure, Siouxsie, some of the more downcast moments of Depeche Mode and New Order) with the visual aesthetic of an occult Klaus Nomi. Demure cuts quite a figure onstage as well, playing guitar along with pre-recorded backing tracks and projecting a surprising intensity. I remember one stormy day in

THE GARDEN haha Epitaph/Burger

FRANKIE AND THE WITCH FINGERS DRAB MAJESTY

one out. Alternately swaggering and groovy, sometimes within the same song, this is one of the strongest contenders for garage psych album of the year. Dig that album art, too.

—Tom Child

self-titled Permanent

In the interest of full disclosure before I get too far into this review, I will admit that I’m a bit of a sucker for modern garage psych, which can make it a little hard to trust my own opinion. Do I love Los-Angeles-byway-of-Indiana’s Frankie and the Witch Fingers’ self-titled album because it’s great or do I love it because it knows exactly which of my buttons to push in order to provide maximum visceral retro pleasure without challenging the established touchstones too much? Ultimately does it even matter when the end result is so much fun to hear? This is a one hundred percent reliable garage psych album from start to finish, played by musicians who obviously know and love their influences … and who can actually play! For sure it’s frequently one of the most authentically period albums in the genre that I’ve heard in some time. With its echoed vocals, Cream-esque harmonies, Farfisa, electric 12-string and sitar cameos, you could have put some of these tracks on a Pebbles comp right between Nasvhille Teens’ “Widdicombe Fair” and Deepest Blue’s “Pretty Little Thing,” and you’d be hard pressed to identify the odd

The Garden—twins Fletcher and Wyatt—are a couple of really nice kids, but when it comes to their music you’d never guess. On their newest and most precise album yet, the Garden are in the business of the strange, the bizarre, the angry, the loud and the volatile. With their always powerful kick-and-snare combination and funky but intense bass lines, the Garden have made a huge name for themselves in the last few years, climbing from a garage level to tours of Europe and highprofile shows in America—and that must be why they’re so comfortable with how do things big. haha displays hip-hop hooks and old school punk feel in front of a psychotic backdrop. The lyrics are as strange as ever, powered by the spirit of what they call “vada vada”—a Gardencreared philosophy of life dedicated to always creating and living outside of predetermined genres and styles.

That’s haha in a sentence, and with Epitaph Records in their corner now, the Garden are headed toward a beautiful kind of destruction.

—Daniel Sweetland

HOWLS Come On EP Buddyhead

Christian Stone and Annalee Fery of L.A. based rock outfit Howls know a thing or two about the ticking of

life’s proverbial clock: after years of quiet yet consistent admiration of one another’s work, Stone and Fery ultimately decided to marry their respective talents and all at once, Howls was born. If their first labor of love, an album released in 2014, failed to excite the ears and gladden the hearts of listeners, this new EP entitled surely will. “Krusht,” the first track and undoubtedly the strongest, will sufficiently soothe the sting of the inevitable end of a summer romance with its pulsating drumbeat, straining synths, and tender but truthful lyrics about the passage of time. The hook will remain in your head long after the leaves have changed color. Melancholia takes center stage in all five tracks of Come On, but somehow the EP remains entirely danceable.

“White Noise,” for instance, evokes a dizzying sense of darkness when coupled with Ferry’s haunting vocals piercing through the bass-filled reverie. While heavy, it never once loses speed. Much like the people who made it, the EP and all of its polarizing facets just make sense.

—Audra Heinrichs

LOVEYDOVE Showstopper self-released

Azalia Snail has once again demonstrated the power of a simple song.

Now with music guru Dan West as collaborator, Snail delivers an eclectic and electrically exciting blend of excellent songwriting and pinpoint precise production, with melodies to live by and a dance beat to die for! Snail has always been known for her wonderfully simple and subtly strange lyrics, and mixing that with possibly the highest production value of any album in her catalog has done something special for this veteran of the lofi indie scene.

With danceable and sing-alongable anthems like “Luka Fisher” or the powerful opening number “Crown Dancer,” Loveydove has released a consistently piece of work that pushes this duo toward a new sound. Their mission is ambitious but refreshingly simple, too: Loveydove is here to make you dance, smile, and have a good time!

—Daniel Sweetland 61

Elyse Weinberg Greasepaint Smile Numerophon

Her debut Elyse made favorable impressions upon release in 1968 on Bill Cosby’s Tetragrammaton Records and with that, Elyse Weinberg sank into obscurity. The non-appearance until this past summer of Toronto-born Elyse Weinberg’s second LP was due in part to the label’s financial ineptitude and in part to a resurgence of interest in her first LP and the folk milieu from which she emerged. Not that Greasepaint Smile is any patchouli-soaked extravaganza; thematically, the ten tracks recall Nico’s famously bleak The Marble Index more than what was then dropping on the West Coast in the way of country-folk.

“City of the Angels” is something Lou Reed never had the guts to write; a nasty-ass rocker excoriating showbiz L.A. long before such contempt was fashionable or even noticeable in a town where most of the rockers were busy getting themselves photographed with Groucho Marx or Vincent Price. This shit sounds like something Neil Young might’ve done and here he is picking away on “Houses,” along with his usual producer David Briggs at the knobs, plus J. D. Souther on drums and Nils Lofgren on guitar. Holy shit. “Its All Right to Longer” is the tender skewering of a persistent dolt and “Gospel Ship” sounds like a Notorious Byrds Brothers track. “Your Place or Mine” reminds me of one of the faux-retro tunes Dan Hicks was churning out at about that time and the title track is the kind of fierce introspection John Lennon was just then honking at a startled world. Weinberg’s third album (recorded for Asylum) went unreleased as well and she left L.A., changed her name to Cori Bishop and later resumed her career on a modest scale in rural Oregon. A very late-breaking Great Lost Album of the 1960s.

Lee Michaels

Heighty-Hi: The Best of Lee Michaels Manifesto One-hit wonders just as often represent the commercial peak of a long career as the fast flameout of some skyrocket act. In the case of Lee Michaels, his one hit eclipsed everything else about him but vague memory of a longhaired imp snarling goofily while pumping an oversized Hammond organ. Lee was a member of San Luis Obispo surf hodads the Sentinals and later a busy session man and oddball live act prior to signing for A&M records as a solo artist in 1968. This was during 62

the brief period when major labels were signing everybody who played at the Fillmore and Herb Alpert’s corporate behemoth took on Michaels without even hearing his music. This retrospective covers Lee’s extensive recording output for a label that backed the eccentric rocker to the hilt until it inevitably backed him out the revolving door in 1973. The tracks are presented higgledy piggledy in non-release order and one gets little sense of Lee’s evolution. What you do get for your ducats are unexpected treats like “Heighty-Hi” with its lengthy R&B derived protoJesus rock fadeout, “The War,” an anti-draft protest tune decorated with harpsichord, and the acid-etched sunshine pop of “Carnival of Life,” along with “Do You Know What I Mean,” a snide circus calliope Michaels dashed off one morning that whirred to # 6 on Billboard Pop and still follows him around like the Ghost of Xmas ATM Machine. Also included are his only other Top Forty outing, a bad cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness” along with a bizarre pass at Moby Grape’s “Murder in My Heart (For the Judge).”

By his own admission, Lee ran out of creative energy well before the end of his career, bashing out LPs so he could get back to the serious business of ingesting drugs. Retired from the music biz for decades now, Michaels is a restaurateur and owner of Killer Shrimp in Marina Del Rey.

Harmonia Collected Works Grönland

These five noble pieces of boxed vinyl represent the entire recorded output of one of the great side projects of all time. From 1973 until 1976, Neu!’s Michael Rother partnered with Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster for the closest thing kosmische ever came to that studied Anglo-American agglomeration, the supergroup. Coming as it did during nearly the height of transatlantic interest in so-called krautrock, 1974’s Musik von Harmonia is a startling early example of what would later be called “ambient” and enough to make Brian Eno (no less) proclaim them the most important rock band then detonating before the public earhole. Critics say the album is more Cluster than Neu!, but such curious judgment has more to do with what reviewers like to cut ‘n’ paste twenty minutes before deadline time. This debut is a sublime weld of both sounds into a new synthesis; a thing that happens so rarely these days we may forgive bloggers their crimped notions of the possible. Deluxe (1975), their sophomore album, was crafted at the band’s homemade studio in rustic Horst. Structurally, this one is a bit tidier but doesn’t subdivide the soundscape into sonic tract housing in the manner of many a Tangerine Dream film score.

The presence of Mani Neumaier of Guru Guru on drums nudges proceedings in a rockist direction, with “Gollum” a genre-bending standout. Though it went unreleased until 2007, Live 1974 is just as gorgeously bejeweled as their formal LPs, being perhaps the first recorded instance of three musicians having the same acid trip at once.

“Arabesque” is the track most rooted in any kind of rock idiom, while “Ueber Otterstein” is a nine minute interstellar fantasia that makes most

prog rock of the era sound like Marvin Hamlisch.

Documents 1975 consists of scattered works recorded in studio and live in Hamburg before the band broke up then reformed for a few days for the glorious Tracks and Traces. Credited to “Harmonia ’76” when finally released by Rykodisc in the nineties, this double-length album is where Eno himself finally clambered aboard the project, contributing some reptilian bass along with the occasional moaned lyric while pulling the whole album into territory familiar to fans of Another Green World. Included in the set are a booklet, a poster, pop-up artwork and a code for the whole works on digital. Stupendous all-day listening.

Paul McCartney Tug of War (Deluxe Edition) Hear Music

Though the Cute Beatle’s knack for composing singles of superior hummability still had some years left to run, this is probably the last even half-great Paul McCartney album. The genial fun, Beatly conceptual density and music hall razzledazzle that was Macca’s post-Ram catalog had worn to obscurity by the late seventies and the Wings concept seemed trite years into postpunk and months after John Lennon’s murder. Paul retained Linda as backup vocalist and souvenir of Band on the Run while bringing in heavyweights like Ringo, George Martin, Stevie Wonder, Carl Perkins, Stanley Clarke and more for collaborative muscle. The LP opens with the title track’s babble of grunting and straining, over which Paul mournfully sings of peace on distant worlds and the strife in this one. Thematically, this is up on the stained-glass window with “Let It Be” and like all McCartney protest music, is as painfully earnest as his partner Lennon tended to be sneeringly raffish with similar material. “Take It Away” is one of Paul’s better late-period commercial joints and a wistful gaze into his own past, which he reimagines as a Fab Four-free utopia of overlaid harmonies and fatback horns.

“Somebody Who Cares” is the traditional Side One throwaway and “What’s That You’re Doing?” is a funny and slick venture into electro-funk and the better of the two tracks with Stevie Wonder.

“Here Today” is a simple and spare meditation upon Lennon, paying tribute first and last to his fabled stubbornness and unfailing humor. The mood is splintered with “Ballroom Dancing,” a bit of stonefaced satire that would’ve slotted nicely on Abbey Road to however great the displeasure of George Harrison. “The Pound is Sinking” is a Rubber Soul throwback, “Wanderlust” the traditional side two throwaway, “Get It” a charming little retro duet with boyhood hero Perkins, “Be What You See” a nice shot of white album garble and “Dress Me Up as a Robber” the alltime favorite McCartney song of some Stereolab fan who’s been stoned since 2003. “Ebony and Ivory,” a much-parodied plea for tolerance that sounds far better as closer to this album’s manically veering jollity than it did as dentist office music for the next twenty-five years. Bonuses include plentiful demos, “Rainclouds,” the B-side to “Ebony and Ivory” and “I’ll Give You a Ring,” the underbelly of “Take It Away.” Both are negligible and irresistible.

ALBUM REVIEWS

MILD HIGH CLUB Timeline Circle Star

Never was there a more aptly named band than Mild High Club.

It’s mild in emotional statement and in musical directional shifts, and everything flows at cruising altitude on Timeline, the band’s debut full-length release on Stones Throw’s Circle Star imprint. The edges of sounds, like the glittery synthesized harpsichords on “Windowpane”, have been sanded off, allowing the listener to swim about in the zero-gravity realm the band creates when they are hovering (intentionally) above the fray. There is a fascinating aural double-entendre that underpins this effort from Alexander Brettin and company, perhaps hinted at by the band’s punny name. Buried in the mix, iPhone ringtones mimic the sound of oldtimey telephones. The Summer of Love in 1967 feels present and yet routed through the glamorous prism of Ariel Pink’s lush brilliance.

“Note to Self,” a particularly blissful track akin to a leisurely wade in 70degree 2-foot surf, is punctuated by a single pure tone—the texture of a field recording, raw and personal. In fact, multiple tracks on the album end up with a little tail of acoustic strumming and analog instrumentation, perhaps most notably on the tender “Elegy,” revealing an earnestness buried in the palimpsest.

—Christina Gubala

MEDIA JEWELER $99 R/T Hawaii Fire Talk ALBUM REVIEWS

Orange County band Media Jeweler presents $99 R/T Hawaii, a work consisting of seven mostly instrumental tracks performed on electric bass, drums, guitar and trumpet. The track lengths span between one and seven minutes, with a total listening time of 22 minutes, and the band crams a tremendous number of musical ideas into that small space—these are tracks put together as if they were jigsaw puzzles. Instrumental motifs are overlaid to form patterns, the length and intensity of which varies with the addition and subtraction of motifs, and these patterns are laid end-to-end to create the individual tracks. This results in variations in musical tension: tension is increased by overlaying dissonant layers or adjoining dissonant patterns, or it is decreased by removing layers or adding consonance. The few lyrics presented on the album are exclusively shouts and chants, with no narrative voice. In sum, the album is essentially clinically precise mood music for those with short attention spans. A lyric on track 3, “Passport Invalid,” aptly summarizes the album: “More black coffee. Anxiety.”

It succeeds in being musically challenging, masterful and cathartic, while struggling to be cohesive or make a lasting connection.

—Josh Solberg

Opio came up in the early 90s and spent most of his career delivering witty, articulate lyrics over scratches and 808 beats. Alfaro has hip-hop roots, but his beats are distinctively of the 00s, weaving jazz, psych, electronic and krautrock into a distinctive sound. Together, the two made songs for Sempervirens that both seamlessly blend their talents (“Psych Ward,” “Dirt Nap” and “Backseat Driver”) and also represent a shift in approach for both (“Tu Sabes,” “Fuego” and “Opiopia”). For Opio, it’s a return to the sonic experimentalism that fueled those early hip-hop days; for Alfaro, it’s a new frontier of producing music for vocals. It’s less stoner Sunday afternoon and more underground basement party of the future—let’s hope the spirit of Sempervirens encourages other L.A. beatmakers to spread new wings as well.

—Sarah Bennett

Sempervirens Pinky Up

For anyone still skeptical of what happens when experienced rhymespitting meets L.A.’s new-wave beatmakers, there is Sempervirens, the 13-track album from Low End Theory vet Free the Robots (a.k.a.

Chris Alfaro) and old-school Oakland rapper Opio (of the seminal hip-hop group Souls of Mischief and the Heiroglyphics crew). It’s always a treat to hear the results of an unlikely meeting of the minds like this—you know, for experiment’s sake—but it’s even more of a delicacy when the results reveal something new for both involved.

1989 Pax Americana

Living Can Wait EP Papermade Music

Romantic Thoughts EP Fairfax Recordings Paul Bergmann released his first album 1 a little over a year ago, and for those in the know, it was a sleeper hit that stayed in regular rotation. Clear nods to the man in black and Bergmann’s ominous baritone vocals established his sound, and this latest 5-song EP finds Bergman taking the best aspects of his debut and elevating them to new heights. The musical growth demonstrated here is quite remarkable, with a new complexity in songs that tug at multiple emotions. Take, for example, the opening track “You May Never Know,” which starts with a very “Be My Baby” drum beat and gently introduces a distant tambourine and light and catchy guitar riff.

The song’s warmth, along with the dreaminess Bergmann evokes with his vocals, makes for pleasant contrast to the somber and heavy lyrics. The rest of the album continues this full and genuine expression of Bergmann’s musical talents.

Highlights include the Americana-

without a low point. Yes, punk rock is tired. But if anyone tries to tell you it’s “dead,” hand them this tape.

—Geoff Geis

RYAN ADAMS

POST LIFE

PAUL BERGMANN

OPIO x FREE THE ROBOTS

influenced ballad “Wishing Song,” a lovely duet with Warpaint’s Emily Kokal, and my personal favorite “Ocean Song,” which is a slow and twangy song that proves Bergman’s skill as a songwriter. The simple piano part, the quiet drumming, the subtle guitar melody and of course his signature soaring vocals work together to create something heartwrenching in all the best ways. If this EP is any indication of what we have to look forward to from Bergmann, we are in for something great.

—Zachary Jensen

Punk rock has become pretty boring and formulaic in general, but that’s just because most everyone does it wrong. Post Life, a fiery, exuberant power-pop quartet, proves that punk can still be invigorating in its fifth decade, so long as it’s made with talent and a sense of purpose. Post Life has both, and debut EP Living Can Wait presents a sound that is familiar enough to be immediately accessible, novel enough to interesting, and sticky enough to demand repeated listening. Drummer Erik Felix is a relentless rager, locking in with Greg Shilton’s melodic yet ferocious bass playing to form a formidable rhythm section under lead guitarist Michael Reyder’s furious and metallic riffage.

They provide a strong foundation for singer/guitarist Brianna Meli, whose performances perfectly walk the line between confident restraint and passionate abandon on concise and compelling songs that explore existential dread (“23”); frustration with animals (“Warehauz”); and a relationship in crisis (“Dissolve”). The whole thing builds towards the closer “Post Life,” a menacing, stoic rumination on the finality of action that concludes with an affirmation: “There is no rewind, there is no undo, what you do is up to you—yes, you.” It comes across as a formidable mission statement, and it’s the high point of a record

Ryan Adams’ new album is a study in songwriting and understanding. In a career of risks and experiments, he’s taking aim at Taylor Swift’s massively successful 1989, breaking down the already beloved (and awardwinning) album and recreating it in a way that not only sounds but feels like a Ryan Adams record. His take on “Welcome to New York” kicks off like an angry Springsteen jam, which he quickly follows with “Blank Space,” originally a gargantuan dance single that’s redone here as a Neil Young-esque folk tune drenched in heartache. Adams, who Swift has referred to as a personal songwriting hero, destroys the conception of a pop song on the next track “Style,” where the original’s massive keyboards are traded for loud guitars and angry Sonic Youth references. (The lyric “James Dean day dream” is swapped for “daydream nation,” an obvious nod to the album).

The album finds its most heartfelt and dynamic moments towards the middle, where Adams takes on some of the most emotive aspects of “All You Had To Do Was Stay,” a new wave-y bassdriven song about regret that he turns into a gut-wrenching song about loss and anger. Adams is always at his best with strong melodies and heart-warming and honest lyrics—that’s what fans loved most about his Love is Hell, Demolition, and Heartbreaker. The beautiful thing here is that he’s already been given both. His only job—and one he’s always done well—is to create a sound that matches. On 1989, he’s heartbroken, nerdy, obsessive and a master of his craft.

—Daniel Sweetland 63

THE INTERPRETER

VAS DEFERENS ORGANIZATION Curated by Kristina Benson Photography by Christina Craig

Vas Deferens Organization is a long-running outfit for musical manipulation, which could take the form of a band or a production session or even the much-loved and much-missed Mutant Sounds blog, now back in action as a Dublab radio show! Recently VDOers Matt Castille and Eric Lumbleau moved within range of L.A. RECORD’s reach, so we asked them to ... interpret something for us. They responded with their usual spot-on style: “Because the dead-eyed mechanics of modern pop culture conspire to cocoon our collective consciousness in vacuous plastic wrap, it’s easy in such fallen times to lose sight of the more psychically transformative dimensions of music and just how deeply musicians once strove to make of their sonic art a hammer not just to break on through to the other side but to demolish that boundary entirely. These are the albums that are currently offering us succor and inspiring our flights of fancy inside our gilded cage.”

JEAN-PHILIPPE GOUDE & OLIVIER COLÉ JEUNEES ANNEES (SARAVAH, 1976)

MASSIERA/TORELLI TURN RADIO ON

‘The first of two French albums on our list, though we could have made a list of nothing but them as this scene has been a deeper well of influence for us than even Krautrock. At this precise moment in time though, it’s this highly obscure album by keyboardist JeanPhilippe Goude and drummer Olivier Colé thats been blowing our hair back, with its maddeningly cyclical and pitch-bending cul-desacs and rubberized roundelays tattooing both of our brains like a nuclear powered ear worm. Goude was the former keyboardist of the band Weidorje, an offshoot of the legendary Magma, and his angle of approach here is as cockeyed as it is catchy—the ivory tickler’s equivalent of circular breathing. This also happens to be the lone title on this list procured from one Steve Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, part of whose collections I absorbed circa the mid 2000s, though it’s only recently that it’s ascended to godhead status for both of us.”

“French producer and surrealist mad hatter Jean-Pierre Massiera has been with us as a cornerstone influence almost from VDO’s inception, but this collaboration with his half-brother and long time sideman Bernard Torelli is our current point of mutual obsession.

Turn Radio On is a perfect mixed-nut assortment of Massiera’s most winning and screw-loose gambits distilled down into single serving sonic ampules. This album also acts as a late 70s counterpoint to his notorious and berserk late 60s outing Les Maledictus Sound, with its concisely arranged and campy melange of cosmic disco and library music kitsch deformed by dadaist interjections. This one would have been an eBay score from the early 2000s, before the price on this thing went through the roof.”

(MARCY MUSIC, 1977)

Dr. John the night tripper gris gris (ATCO, 1968)

PIERROT LUNAIRE GUDRUN (IT, 1977) “Seeming to have drifted into being from some eerie magisterial parallel universe and filled with the wailing ghostly operatic voice of Welsh expat Jacqueline Darby, this Italian masterpiece highlights an approach to arrangement that seems guided by pure dream logic. It manages to bridge a gap between the Philip Glass and Terry Riley-informed systemic electronic rock of Franco Battiato and the sorta castles-in-the-clouds fairy tale-like edge of the symphonic progressive genre embodied by Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso in Italy and Curved Air in Britain, but undermines those developments with a subversive Faust-like streak of surrealism. This album is part of a specific VDO arsenal of higher key medicine that we periodically unleash on select parties nearing the clear light stage of an acid trip, and it has reduced several music editors of our acquaintance to slack-jawed awe and flowing tears under those circumstances. But lo and behold, this album still works a charm and conveys a soul punch even absent those specialized conditions.”

BOZ SCAGGS DOWN TWO THEN LEFT (COLUMBIA, 1977)

“Yes, Boz Scaggs. Situated between his breakout success Silk Degrees and his slicked-up 1980 outing Middle Man, this is a lowdown sweet throb of an album evoking endless studio time neck deep in blow and finesse. Has any human ever sounded so simultaneously soulful and so like Kermit The Frog? Boz was obviously taking copious notes while he was hanging out in the studio observing Ken Scott producing the Tubes’ Young and Rich and the results are writ large on tracks like ‘1993’ and the very Todd Rundgren-like ‘We’re Waiting.’ I discovered this one and passed it along to both Matt and our other bandmate Chris a few years back and it’s never been out of rotation for any of us since. Why? Because all three of us in VDO are fundamentally perverse creatures and in love with a certain kinda 70s super sleaze and on those terms this album is breathing some rarified air.”

“Given that this is Matt’s initiatory album for baptizing select parties into the deeper recesses of musical enlightenment, he’s the one to expound more on this one: ‘This album’s high ceremonial magic—evoking for me the ghost parade before Zulu—has been the soundtrack for both my most reverent moments of acid mysticism and for the countless nights of my misspent youth, dragging my drugged and drunk ass home through the New Orleans gutters at dawn with these songs ringing in my ears. It wasn’t until Eric moved to New Orleans in 2005 that he was able to truly understand the deep psychic energies coming off of this album, and ever since his initiation, our music has taken an even deeper turn. I speak of Gris Gris in this way because this is an album that one can only really relate to others in terms of testifying.’”

PHIL MANZANERA DIAMOND HEAD (ISLAND, 1975) “Arguing that some species of prog actually reached their imaginative pinnacle circa the latter half of the 70s—the ostensible era of their dinosaur demise—is counter-intuitive, but history is never such a tidily proscribed thing. Alongside genres like Rock In Opposition and Zeuhl, select forms of sophisticated prog-pop were peaking in their potency at around this time and no one did the latter with more panache than former Roxy Music artists like Eddie Jobson with his outfit UK and the work in question here, the debut solo outing of Roxy guitar god Phil Manzanera, whose work in this zone he’d carry on under the band banner 801 henceforth. From the Robert Wyatt guest vocals that garland album opener ‘Frontera’ onward, this is an object lesson in both advanced acid-rock studio dynamics and ubercool pop instincts—some of the best featuring guest vocals from Brian Eno—with the scorching tones of Manzanera’s axe—think Roxy Music’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’—front and center. I picked this one up sometime in the early 90s at a record convention and both Matt and I have long had a high regard for it but it’s only recently that it’s become such a central concern within our private lexicon.”

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ALEX CIMA COSMIC CONNECTION (POLYDOR, 1979) “This obscure Cuban-American electronic artist was our answer to the kind of effervescent, hyper-melodic and suavely library music-like electronic sounds proposed by Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, France’s Space Art and the early recordings of JeanMichel Jarre. This more giddy, kitschy and instrumentally ornate dimension of electronic music has slowly gotten its hooks deep into both of us, bouncing as it does off of vague, half-remembered soundtrack fills, TV backdrops and ‘visit our concession stand’ advertisements from our early youth. I defy anyone to hear this album and not walk away with one or more of these themes buzzing in your brain. This one was a blog discovery of mine from three or four years back and was subsequently acquired by both Matt and me in its vinyl reissue form, given the cost prohibitive nature of an original.”

severed heads city slab horror (ink, 1985) “The significance of this album and the degree to which it has scarred our psyches cannot be overstated. Indeed, this era of work by these ascended Aussie masters of queasily pitching and diseased-sounding post-industrial quasi-electro pop runs like a silver thread through both the work of VDO as well its offshoots, like Matt’s solo Muz project and my other band of the late 90s/ early 2000s, Sound. In spite of its ostensible surface darkness and deathly audio pallor, this is paradoxically some of the most positive and life-giving music we’ve encountered. Its eerie and oddly emotionally charged keyboard themes rake against the grain of their churning and devolving rhythm box loops and deformed vinyl extracts like a mink coat rubbing against a mass of body hair, creating a palpable and almost erotic frisson. Both Matt and I were turned onto Severed Heads by our respective childhood best friends while in our late teens and as such their music and this album in particular has accompanied all manner of misbehavior over the years for both of us—so this comes front loaded with all of those sorts of mental associations for us as well.”

TODD RUNDGREN A WIZARD, TRUE STAR (BEARSVILLE, 1973)

“We hesitated before adding this to our list. After all, one half of this album—which seems calculatedly divided between its straight and stoned sections—is comprised of a kind of blue-eyed soul that largely fails to engage with us. Ah, but that other side! All three of us in VDO saw the light and have never fully recovered from our first exposure to side A of A Wizard, A True Star and Rundgren’s exploded and psychologically shattering vision of pop music found therein. Todd had begun to experiment with LSD at this time and the damburst of unfettered consciousness he experienced is conveyed with almost harrowing intensity here, with all of Todd’s latent strangeness and prankishness coming screaming out of the gate on a gale of extreme phasing on “International Feel” and then spiraling down a wormhole into a parallel reality for the remainder of the side—one in which pop song structures exist to be playfully molested, tied in pretzel shapes and folded in on themselves like origami.”

HOSONO & YOKOO COCHIN MOON (KING, 1978)

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“Despite our protestations of love for Yellow Magic Orchestra in the Alex Cima piece, Cochin Moon ultimately remains the alpha and omega of Harumi Hosono’s musical career in VDO’s book and even all these years later is situated in all three members of VDO’s top five albums of all time. This album—recorded the same year as YMO’s debut and ostensibly a collaboration with visual artist Tadanori Yokoo, whose work is limited to the cover graphics—contains some of the most vivid and delirious music any of us have ever experienced, electronic or otherwise. This is music that seems to function on an almost cellular level, as if the microscopically arrayed stratums of intertwining electronic themes here were actually capable of entering your pores as much as ears. I was turned onto this by a dear and sadly deceased friend—the brother of Jim Edgerton, VDO’s 90s-era guitarist, who taught me so much of the musical esoterica I know about and whose collection—including this LP—I purchased after he passed away.”

BRIAN BROOKS

JOHN TOTTENHAM

LILA ASH | INSTAGRAM: SECRET_HOTGIRL

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COMICS

BILLY CHANGER

BOMBÓN

Billy Changer has the name of the everyman in a Philip K. Dick story, and like the everyman in a Philip K. Dick story, there may be something special about him— something powerful even—that he neither knows about nor fully controls. This selftitled LP—originally one side of a split tape with Corners bandmate and frontman Tracy Bryant—is an understandably uneven listen. It was put together more from experiences that transformed into songs than as a plotted album, so you can’t ever be sure what’s coming next. Maybe an experiment: “Black Angel,” like the very early Spacemen 3 when they couldn’t quite keep their heads held up, with intently reverent subwaysound Velvet Underground guitar. Maybe a scene from a movie never made: instrumental “Chiller” is strange and a stand-out for it, a song with vibes so heavy it needed like an actual vibraphone. It’s urgent, nervous, even menacing—a walk alone as headlights flash off your back. Or maybe a deep one like “Sweet Time,” a Daniel Johnston heartbroke valentine with loose-as-hell Sticky Fingers production. Side two is where the album starts to dissolve into itself, where the songs can’t quite hold to each other and Changer brings out the slide guitar to show just how slidey everything can be. By closer “You’re My Girl,” we’re in a Flies On Sherbert waking dream with a song so loose it’s suddenly all around you. What makes this album far different from the usual “I made this!” autobio recordings are the vast wells of tension and want and id within—and the way the songs drift uneasily above them, sometimes warping and distorting in ways you’d never expect. “Band of Brothers” seems like it must just be about a night out with friends … but there is something staggeringly desperate and even tragic happening there, too.

It’s like a song from a car going off a cliff—a snapshot of the instant just before moving forward becomes falling down. If there’s a Joy Divison influence at work here, it comes in three places: the lockstep rhythm at the second half of the resolute “Island Fever,” the razor’s-edge production precision and then these stark and fearless moments at the precipice. Changer always brings you back, but I wonder if that’s even scarier—he does know the edge is there, right?

A Date … starts with lullabye-xylophone and ends with a spaghetti-western trumpet salute echoing toward infinity, and wouldn’t that make a movie you’d wanna see? (Like the band told us when we interviewed them: “Quentin, call us.”) Unlike other bands currently confused about the difference between saying something and actually doing something, Bombón really is a surf-garage band, with reverb and fuzz to indicate degrees of drama and pipeline runs down the E-string when the big waves are coming: “Cosmic Surf” is that song, a water-born descendent of the underappreciated Bananas’ “Pink Tuxedo” that sounds more ghostship-py than space-y, with honking bari sax and a Dick Dale break in the middle. But lots of the rest of this is Bombón gone rock, with “Somebody Told Me” as thee crusher: a glorious/fearless Pandoras stormer with four chords, tuff harmonies and a ferociously corrosive “WAAAAAAAAGH!” in the first 15 seconds. Middle break is bleeding reverb— nice touch, a lesser band woulda done the expected fuzz—and like the Sparkles’ “No Friend Of Mine” or the Haunted’s “1-2-5,” Bombón rides the riff til the wheels fall off.

“Pow Wow” is like the Sweet’s “Wig Wam Bam” as re-wrangled by Sam The Sham, with appropriately wolf-y ah-woooooooos and a waterfall of guitar, and “Swedish Fish” is rivet-popping Milkshakes/5-6-7-8s instro-rock. Opener “Dance Like Annette” is Shangri-Las/Leslie Gore melodrama about Funicelloid beach drama, done with punk sarcasm a la David Johansen and the way he says L-U-V. And closer “La Sirena” is the grand finale, a Ventures-style closing-credits epic with Morricone horn flourishes and a dynamic shift in the middle that probably indicates the part where the gunslinger staggers back into the scorching desert. If they still made movies like this, you could call this record cinematic.

self-titled Lolipop

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A Date With Bombon EP Burger

FUZZ

II In The Red And now comes the time for Fuzz to ask itself, “What is Fuzz? And who are Fuzz? And why is Fuzz? And can Laena Geronimo play strings on this?” (Yes to the last one, and it’s

great!) With original Fuzz bassist Cosio departed and new Fuzz bassist Ubovich (the Chad in the Meatbodies) on deck, Ty Segall and heavy comrade Charles Mootheart have redoubled their efforts in pursuit of everything the band name implies, resulting of course in a double LP for their second album. But there are also visible attempts at doing something different here. The first Fuzz album (2013) was so effortlessly joyful, even with those lyrics about the sickness of isolation: it felt like three literate, articulate and even athletic musicians doing their instinctive best to just make … something … heavy, and like every heavy thing, it pulled you along with it. On II, that spirit’s still here. “Pollinate” (with its Leigh Stevens redline guitar solo) and “Bringer of Light” make a killer single lurking in the center of the record, with a tempo shift in “Light” that’s sickening in an extremely satisfying way.

And the spirit of Sabbath, their lord and master, won’t ever be dispelled: “Pipe” is one step sideways from “Sweet Leaf,” with eerily Ozzy-ish vocals and a dinosaur-enraged riff.

But then the clock hits 2:35 and in comes the synthesizer like a killer comet streaking across the night sky, and so Fuzz claws its way toward the unknown. What I’m saying is there are cracks in the monolith now: #1 was almost magically coherent, an alien statue cut from a single giant rock, but II is like a Stonehenge, built from different rocks (of various weights and sharpnesses) for mysterious primal purposes. “Red Flag” is fast punk with at least half the feel of ’82 Black Flag on shouted chorus and Greg Ginn-style guitar acrobatics. And “New Flesh” and “Let It Live” are unexpectedly … Ty Segall-ish: the Manipulator arises again for songs more like Sweet b-sides or heavy Status Quo than Pentagram or Bang. (“Say Hello” is also answering “Wave Goodbye” in a way, once it’s done with the Eastern-style psych prelude.)

“Sleestak” is a percussive instrumental with sci-fi synthesizer and “Silent Sits The Dust Bowl” deposits Marc Bolan and his string section (courtesy Geronimo) on the Planet of the Fun House Outtakes for half the song.

(Don’t worry, Sabbath saves them … as it saves everyone.) This isn’t a lesser record just for having a different kind of geology; it’s just not the singular cosmic bolt from nowhere that was the first album, and if it was, I’m sure there would have been plenty complaints about Fuzz not trying new things. II is the document of those new things in the trying, left sizzling as they first hit the tape.

Put it this way: the first Fuzz gave a lot and asked nothing in return. But this Fuzz … this Fuzz needs you to come with them.

FRANKIE DELMANE Collected: 2003-2014 self-released

Post-modern proto-punk power-pop rock ‘n’ roll: from Frankie Delmane, can you expect any less? Much like Sonny Vincent, Delmane is a longtime practitioner and devotee of all things high energy and high-octane, with an

appropriately colossal discography—he was most recently on vinyl as part of L.A. pub rockers Crazy Squeeze, though I could definitely be missing something newer—that goes back for decades. Naturally, he deserves a greatest-hits compilation, and naturally— in a world where underground rock might mean Urban Outfitters has it online but not in the store—he put it out himself. Main mode here is grinding Gizmos/Testors cusp-of-the-80s semi-fi punk, with artful changes any time you might get bored and timed-just-right bursts of wild guitar. (“I Don’t Want To,” “Freebasing With My Best Friends,” “Never Let You Go,” done with Delmane’s band the Injections.) But Delmane is a man of many talents, and he can do sentimental (“Electric Thunder,” acoustic desolation) and sappy-hook-y pop (“I Want Something More Than You,” which comes off like the early Zero Boys or maybe Real Kids hijacking the Stones’ “Dead Flowers”) and even a dynamic longform downer like “On The Day, The Day That You Die.” Oh, and of course a good old-fashioned scorcher like “Working For The White Pigs,” which explodes into riffs, screaming leads and a lot of “Oh yeah!”s for its big bang ending.

There’s good stuff in here, and since Delmane is currently publishing a song a day— for 365 days!—online, there’s a lot more where this came from.

GIOVANNI MARKS Double Tech Jeep Music HIT+ RUN

So this is “crev-wave,” the label tells me.

When you’re already in the underground and you fall down an even deeper hidden hole, that might just be kind of the crevice we’re talking here. And whether or not that’s why Gino—a.k.a. Subtitle, one of the first people on an L.A. RECORD cover—picked the name, the concept fits. Double Tech is a set of mostly instrumentals—although much like the city late at night, you may occasionally hear a furtive human voice— that put new high-tech life into the sound of low-budget VHS sci-fi horror films of the 80s a la Cronenberg, Carpenter and crew.

You remember that midnight basic cable aesthetic for sure: agitated, pixelated, alienated and mutated. “Put Name Here” (with bass from Coto) describes the vibe in two minutes: a distant, industrial lo-fi pulse and a clear and penetrating digital beat. That’s a lot of weight at opposite extremes, and you can hear the metal inside every song bend, like when big trucks drive over little bridges.

First few tracks set the scene—like the Blade Runner opening credits, but from the perspective of the man in the city canyon, not the eye flying through the fires in the sky— and it gets heavy and alien by the second half on tracks like “Youth Is An Arc 78, 88, 98, 08” and UFO-landing-and-abduction sequence “Zartan Is Crev.” It’s an album that sounds very now and very familiar at the same time—a future arriving in pieces that you need to put together yourself.

ONE REPORTER

POMAR

The Chung King self-released Chinatown band POMAR give birth to a beautifully faithful krautrock album with synths and sounds done just right— even that motorik snare sound, which is where the rubber hits the road with this kind of thing—and endlessly satisfying re-translations of the golden age of Can, Neu!, Faust and the offshoots/one-shots/ solo projects that took a genre and turned it into an ecosytem. (If any locals remember Long Beach’s Magic Lantern and their maximally menacing song “At The Mountains Of Madness,” those locals need to immediately check out POMAR.) Truly, The Chung King supplies something for everybody who ever suffered what a wise man once called “German Import Disease”: the end of “Rickshaw” is the foundling descendent of Neu!’s “Negativland,” “In Need” is a breathlessly atmospheric fly-by of La Dusseldorf’s Viva and “Too Early” is glowing with the gentle guitar influence of Michael Rother. (Actually, there are points here and on the heavenly anesthetic closer “The Room” where POMAR get so dissipated they actually start to drift into toward Spacemen 3’s Recurring.) Further notable moments: “Ricksha” and “Top Down” and the happily distorted “Sour Pout,” each doing some aspect of “Yoo Doo Right” right.

Someone should put this on vinyl—it deserves it. Germany, you out there?

TIJUANA PANTHERS Poster Innovative Leisure

Beach punk? No, this is On The Beach punk, for people trying to live their lives like they always did as the world ends slowly around them. Way back when, they made a song called “Summer Fun” that wasn’t about summer fun, and ever since Tijuana Panthers have been daring people to listen to the lyrics. Says “Set Forth,” an propulsive anxiety-rocker equally dedicated to the Swell Maps’ clatter and Alternative TV’s disillusionment: “She loathes the beach / no progress, just regress / hey, nice dress / when’s recess?” If I didn’t know (and couldn’t tell) how funny and sharp these guys are, I’d call this a bleak and even angry record. Of course the very next song starts out, “Send down the bombs / on our heads tonight / oh yeah!” but maybe that’s what you’d call dark humor? Really, Poster is an outside-looking-in album in the

psychic and sonic tradition of groups like the Crazy Rhythms Feelies, the Embarrassment and even (demos era) Modern Lovers or (demos era) Devo: people who took a step back from the world and saw the cracks and dirt intended to stay hidden.

Says slo-mo closer “Trujillo”: “We comply with your corruption / it facilitates my false comfort / I saw the angels, they told me / my beliefs that will rescue me.” Summer fun! Other hits: “I Hate Saturday Nights” and “Gated Patio” are spin-offs from the Cure’s “Grinding Halt”—both the music and the “no people” part, with varying levels of detachment —and “Miss, You Hardly Know Me” is the unsettling story of unmooring one’s personality. (“I was sick of dreams / I wanted sympathy / human contact / ‘Miss,’ I said, ‘You hardly know me.’”) Producer Richard Swift finds a meticulously ramshackle sound that fits the band and the mood: things COULD fall apart, but we’ve got it how it we need it … for now. (A cover of the Muslims a.k.a. Soft Pack underscore same: “I don’t know what’s right, I don’t know what’s wrong anymore / I tell you it’s no good hanging people out to dry!”) In a way, Poster offers a sort of conscience for its genre, whatever combination of “surf” and “punk” and “garage” history determines that to be. These are pop songs where someone says (once again) that the way things are in pop songs is not the way things really are at all. Obviously, this is my favorite thing they’ve ever done.

VIAL

self-titled EP Cut Rate Four songs and about six minutes of corrosive punk from this L.A. foursome who like things powerful and to-the-point—there’s aspects of the Bags and the Dicks and even the very earliest Black Flag/Panic tracks here, mostly because of the hack-and-slash guitar. But really this is like if a band decided to model an entire ethos on Flipper’s “Living For The Depression.” (Which bands should.) Political lyrics, in that they identify and attack bullshit on contact, but with more perspective than just “shit sucks,” although yes, they get that shit sucks. Gentrification examination “Move” aims negativity everywhere—including inward—and “No One Understands” is bleak and heavy and gets bleaker by its end, while closer “Void” is an all-out wrecker. Singer Krista really pours out the napalm on this and the whole band sounds like they came, they pressed record and they caught fire.

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SEXTILE

A Thousand Hands Felte A Thousand Hands, the debut album from L.A. four-piece Sextile, was reportedly inspired by the occult experiments of guitarist Eddie Wuebben while practicing what he calls “open-eyed meditation.” In Wuebben’s words, he felt as if “thousands of hands reached towards him,” a vision that struck him as “frightening” yet “exhilarating.” Bear this backstory in mind when lending an ear to the frantic sounds of Sextile. The album is an unexpectedly cohesive collection of call-to-arms anthems and primitive, post-punk earworms.

“Can’t Take It,” the standout and attention-catcher on the album, is an amalgamation of all things aggressive as lead singer Brady Keehn rants and raves his way toward cathartic release.

The album’s space-y synth, guttural guitar, and punchy percussion will hit you where it hurts, and lyrically, Keehn is at his best when he’s brooding. (Drummer Melissa Scaduto’s vocals take center stage on “Mind’s Eye,” however, and I found myself subconsciously searching for the same kind of sensual strains on the remaining tracks.) Either Sextile is almost painfully in touch with both the head and the heart, or they’re simply on a superabundant supply of drugs. Either way, one thing is clear: this foursome is positively fearless, and they’ve concocted one hell of a musical cocktail that will surely have a thousand hands anxiously awaiting a sip of the strange.

—Audra Heinrichs

SOCAL TENNIS PROS MMXV self-released 70

SoCal Tennis Pros’ self-titled fulllength is high-energy Latin punk at its best, with ten hard-hitting tracks full of subtle surprises. It has a very distinct flavor that sets it apart in many ways from most of the bands doing this type of music.

For one, the level of musicianship is of a much higher caliber than you’d expect from typical garagepunker hooligans. The chord progressions are more complex, the rhythms are tightly woven together with dramatic change-ups, and the production reaches a level of professionalism you almost never hear for this type of group, thanks to the involvement of Grammy Awardwinning Long Beach icon Ikey Owens (of The Mars Volta, Jack White’s band and of course Free Moral Agents) who recorded, produced, mastered, and even played on a few of the tracks. “Tap Water House” is one of my favorites and starts the record off with blaring guitars and screaming vocals mixed together in a melodic style reminiscent of bands like Gorilla Biscuits and early Turbonegro. “Lionessa” is another gem with Latin-sounding keyboard and very catchy lyrics.

There are a few slower jams that smooth the gnar a bit and a lot the singing is in Spanish as well. I’m really keeping my fingers crossed that this makes it to vinyl!

—Desi Ambrozak

SUMMER TWINS Limbo Burger

Summer Twins have been teasing us with a gorgeous combination of nostalgia and street grit for some time, and now the band has unleashed the best of both with this album steeped in anger and grace.

On one hand, some could say that what the band does is commonplace in an age of mix-and-match bands who try so hard to be different that they end up sounding the same as everyone else. What is truly different here, however, is that Summer Twins actually pull it off: there’s an honesty and true love and passion in these songs, more than apparent on tracks like “Our

Word” or “Dreaming,” where they allow the vintage sounds and vibes to take lead. But it’s on the darker and brooding tracks like “Demons” where the real magic happens, with sharp lyrics about what happens when demons sneak up on you and you have to shut them up. It’s an unexpected moment that reveals the whole album in a new way— as something simple yet haunting, and remarkably executed.

—Daniel Sweetland

TRAPS PS

Real Corner Shock Papermade Music

TEEBS AV ESTR Hit + Run

Mtendere Mandowa—better known as Teebs—is a master at composing what has been described as beat music, but what he creates is much more than that. He’s developed a unique electronic sound, filled with delicate yet hard hitting moments so unique that in mere seconds you can recognize his work. Just a year after his 2014 breakthrough ESTARA, Teebs has decided to give fans a taste of what goes on behind the scenes with AV ESTR, a vinyl-only album of outtakes, remixes, and tracks previously available only on a limited tape release. The lightness of his previous albums is still present here, but the source material is a little more out there and so we get to see a different side to Teebs. The natural sounds, bells, chimes, crunches, delays, loops, and overall characteristic dreaminess are still present, but here they provide a much different effect. Call it night and day, with this album representing Teebs’ wondrous daydreams. Another notable difference: no guest vocals, which doesn’t hurt at all thanks to Teebs’ production skills—if anything, it strengthens the album. Picking a few standouts from the album is difficult since practically every track could be a single, but one stand out would be “Yellow Cover” with its gentle and delicate build-up of strings and tambourine that breaks through halfway and slowly but eloquently leads into the next track.

Once you put on this record, you won’t take it off—until at least until the next one comes out.

—Zachary Jensen

For years, Traps PS has been one of the most exciting members of the Smell/Pehrspace cohort. Many current bands look to 70s no wave and post-punk for influence, but Traps PS does so with a hectic energy that sets them apart from their peers and makes them seem like an update, rather than a retread. They’re masters of the manic explosion, and their live set so assaultive and ruthlessly frenetic that it would come across as spastic if the trio weren’t such proficient players. Their brilliance comes, in part, from seeming like they’re always about to trip over themselves—but they never do. This kind of lightning is hard to bottle, but Traps PS pulls it off on the 14 funk-infected blasts performed with mind-numbing dexterity on Real Corner Shock. At first listen it comes across as a cacophony, but repeated spins reveal layers of twisted hooks on tracks like “Quiet Now” and “Icon Accent.”

Traps PS is abrasive, but they occasionally veer towards catchiness on songs like the surprisingly anthemic “EQ” and the singalong breakdown of “New City.” But nothing on this record lasts very long, and the band seems to delight in creating brief transcendent moments and then taking them away. While Real Corner Shock clocks in at around 20 minutes, it still feels like a journey.

The album is highly recommended for anyone who wants to rage.

—Geoff Geis

VISION Inertia Burger

Inertia is a killer collection of raw rock songs from a group of no-longer-all-ages punk rockers. Grown up? Yes. But less angry? No. If punk is more a way of life than a defined sound—as Joe Strummer, Johnny Ramone, and countless others have shown us—then Vision is clearly a punk band, from the powerful opening number “What I Need” (where the band pleads “Don’t take my soul from me!”) or the soft-spoken but still aggressive closer “Endless Flow.” Vision’s new album stands toe-to-toe with the band’s previous effort, both in terms of writing and raw emotional energy, as well as the on-point bass playinag and ferocious vocals—signature traits of a band that has always deserved more attention than they’ve been given. This is a raging collection of ten well-delivered and strongly produced songs. With age comes understanding and Inertia is telling example of that principle in action.

—Daniel Sweetland

XL MIDDLETON Tap Water MoFunk

Why has XL Middleton taken so long to put out a full-length solo album? Is it because he’s been too busy making killer funky loops for friends like Eddie Funkster and Moniquea or was he too gfunk deep in his alter-ego’s Big China Mack’s gangster-rap album? Either way, we’re glad Tap Water is here because, like DamFunk and others, Pasadena-bred XL Middleton is a pro at taking the heavy funk bass and melodic synthesizers of the once unjustly derided boogie genre and giving it new life. XL strays from mostly instrumental modern-funk here by giving most of his roller-rinkworthy boogie renditions their own simple and direct lyrics. On “High on Your Love,” keyboards twinkle like a high school slow dance as XL sings about getting addicted to a beautiful woman.

“Exception to the Rule” and “Bumpin” both use a vocoder; the latter track filled with enough ALBUM REVIEWS

heavy bass claps and nasty-girl squiggles that it manages to pay homage to both 80s Prince and 90s hip-hop. But this isn’t a nostalgic record. With cameos from contemporary funk singers Moniquea and Diamond Ortiz, it’s very much made for blasting through today’s speakers. XL is a funk connoisseur and it shows on Tap Water, where songs take pieces from all corners of the genre’s decades-long history and turn the familiar into something new again.

—Sarah Bennett

ZACKEY FORCE FUNK Chrome Steel Tiger Hit + Run

Zackey Force Funk’s got a light touch when it comes to his vocals, whether he’s layered them into a spindly lattice of syncopation or left them naked in the spotlight for the listener to examine every sensual articulation. He whispers directly into your ear, floating over musical metaphors concocted by an arsenal of the inspired producers on Chrome Steel Tiger. “Hearts on Fire” is an instant burner, as producers XL Middleton and Eddy Funkster summon the infectious momentum of a cosmic roller disco. The Egyptian Lover/ Brian Ellis-produced “On The 1” throbs to a climax while an insistent cowbell (and a panting Egyptian Lover) play off Zackey’s narrations. Tom Noble sets a futuristic, seductive scene in some luxuriously unlimited love den on the synth-y “Lover Lane,” and Zackey slips right into spotlight.

Although the classic Minneapolis sound is recognizable throughout CST, the album veers into Gainsbourg territory, flirts with crackly sample-era hip-hop textures and sends the listener away on a pink satin cloud of samples and a promise for peace. Chrome Steel Tiger is a perfect reminder that you don’t have to hit it too hard to hit it right.

—Christina Gubala ALBUM REVIEWS

LOCAL RECORD SHOWS & SWAPS

FFS

ALL EVENTS ARE ALL AGES UNLESS NOTED

self-titled Domino The most clever, catchy and inventive pop record of the last decade should need no introduction. You saw my interview with Sparks’ frontman Russell Mael elsewhere in these pages and you’ve seen the billboards all over town. The unlikely collaboration of Sparks and Franz Ferdinand works so immediately well that it actually becomes something VERY … well, likely, as if there might be some kind of absurd coherent justice to pop music after all.

If you’re anything like me, you acknowledge that Sparks either invented or improved on EVERYTHING COOL in pop music. And if you’re anything like me, you are such a diehard Sparks fan that you even kneel at the altar of their more lackluster monuments— because even at their most squirmy and retroactively what-the-fuck, they never lacked guts and wit. That made them the notorious group we know and love: the forever underdogs that the world may never completely catch up with, which speaks more of our culture’s foolishness than their own.

And if you’re anything like me, you may have scoffed at Franz Ferdinand when they made their debut in the early 2000s. We were such reductionist snobs then, refusing to separate them from the disastrous tsunami of Nouveau Disco Punk (what wave was that supposed to be, anyway?) that gave us expendable, insulting acts like Interpol and Bloc Party, shamelessly pretending that Factory Records had never happened. Well, shame on us as well: Franz Ferdinand were always steadfast subversive playboys of the highest order, just as our beloved Sparks. For anyone that truly understands both bands— and the naked impact of their jagged contributions to the goddamned grid—it should be no wonder that this collaboration would be inevitable.

Like oil and water in a swirling translucent rainbow ballet over the gutter’s grime, the album’s opening is just as grandiose as you’d expect: it seems like a classically informed Sparks overture, but it’s pleasantly interrupted by the calm and unmistakably confident voice of Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, rubbing our faces in the mud of studio writer’s block—or the tongue-tied paralysis of communicating with a woman, which is often one and the same. “Words are in my head, but I can’t enunciate them clearly,” he sings, “Headphones on your head, they prevent the chance to even try.”

One could either imagine ear buds crammed into the holes of the gorgeous yet aloof object of his affection, or the studio headphones of Sparks vocalist Russell Mael, who chimes in to complicate things further, as another self-loathing voice in the protagonist’s internal conversation: “Some might find me borderline attractive from afar/ But afar is not where I can stay and there you

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are.” There you have it—a triply poetic homerun, encapsulating not just the universally obsessive desires of the anti-hero of a song called “Johnny Delusional,” but our broader disconnect from one another in society as a whole, AND ALSO a clever wink to the challenges of two bands collaborating across the ocean from two disparate continents. In this economy, can it get any better?

The sound and sentiment of FFS is modern day science non-fiction, propelled by Sparks’ icy keys and operatic delivery and balanced with Franz Ferdinand’s uncanny knack for confectionary glam guitar tones and near-fascistic metronomic rhythm. Alex and Russell are a two-headed snake, their forked tongues never competing as they know they share the same rattle. These two nail all the icky subconscious emotions to the cross so we don’t have to—like the pining sadness of nostalgia and defeatist nihilism in “Little Man From The Suburbs” with the haunting refrain “There are no heroes in this life… I didn’t make it like I hoped we would…” Meanwhile, “Save Me From Myself” transmits paranoia so thick and convincing that I’m already looking out my window wondering where it all wrong.

FFS is the kind of record that makes you feel like you’re on a mission. There’s the intercontinental tangle of “Police Encounters,” thrusting us into a tale of jaunty espionage where a wrong place/wrong time meet turns into lusting after a policeman’s wife. “So Many Bridges (In The World To Jump Off Of)” is another globe-trotting indictment of jaded splendor, this time with wildfire gentrification and the docility of said inhabitants in FFS’ rifle sights. And though it’s their most cheeky and self-referential moment, “Collaborations Don’t Work” is the most interesting and defiant track, as well as the most enjoyable if you’re playing the “Who did what?” game.

And let’s face it: sometimes when you boil down rebellion into it’s most potent essence, the simple truth is that you’re just sick of everyone’s shit. That’s why closer “Piss Off” should be considered the flagship anthem of this record. It’s de-evolved delinquent spout offs are the perfect contrast to a collection of songs that should double as an instructional manual for how to intelligently maneuver through this twisted life—or how to at least vent about it eloquently!

—Gabriel Hart

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71

DISCO’S OUT... MURDER’S IN! Interview by Christopher Ziegler Illustration by Nathan Morse The history of punk gangs in L.A. is still a secret history—something that persists in the credits of obscure 7”s, in the archives of Flipside or the Whittier Daily News or in the memories of the probation officers and the punk rockers who were there. But most of the L.A. punk bibliography agrees that at some point, the art-freak-weirdo scene of the 70s metastatized into hardcore punk, which brought with it hardcore violence that left victims brain-damaged, paralyzed or dead—and which eventually, as this book and others put it, “ruined the scene.” The new book Disco’s Out … Murder’s In! is the first-person account of a self-described “ultra-violent punk rock gangster” who helped ruin the scene: Frank the Shank, eventual underboss of the infamous-even-now La Mirada Punks, known city-wide as LMP. Authors Heath Mattioli and Dave Spacone were on the periphery of L.A. hardcore as kid­—about the same age as Frank, whose first show was X at the Whisky when he was barely a teenager and who’d witness his first murder before he was a freshman in high school. They’d meet him decades later at a funeral for a friend, the all-too-appropriate place where the idea for this book was born. Through six years of interviews and research, they pieced together the story of Frank, LMP and by extension the story of the punk gang era in Los Angeles. Although it seems like a lifetime, it really only spans a short stretch the 80s as Frank hauls himself out of a poisonously broken home, cuts his hair to get into punk— and meets the punk rockers famously in possession of The Car, a murderous Lincoln Continental that starred in the 70s b-movie of the same name—and soon finds his peers, his purpose and his passion in the La Mirada Punks. Of course there’s no happy ending—there’s no happy anything, really. Instead, as Frank and friends noticed then and note now, it’s the ultraviolence of A Clockwork Orange with a homegrown punk soundtrack and an unhealthy dose of nuclear-holocaust nihilism. Mattioli and Spacone speak now about life and death in LMP. Who was Frank the Shank?

H: Frank the Shank was a kid from an L.A. suburb about 20 minutes outside Hollywood—a confused and impressionable kid who was deeply abused.

D: A youth—like many—who turned to punk rock for its volatile mix of excitement, nihilism and danger.

H: Frank unfortunately transformed into a monster, thinking the world was probably going straight to hell via nuclear holocaust.

Why not take people out ahead of time?

What was a day in the life like for Frank and members of L.M.P.? What did they want? Where did they go to get it?

D: Start the day: figure out a way to get money and get loaded. This entailed all sorts of gangster business, big and small.

H: Off to Hollywood to swindle and see where the neon nights took them. Scam on chicks, spread fear, go to gigs. They really never looked much past that day.

How did these punk gangs in general work?

What made them different from other gangs? And from other punks?

D: Gangs center around neighborhoods, correct? All over the world. Punk gangs center around neighborhoods. What makes them different? Their commonality and what binds them together is their love of music. Gangs forever have always had dress codes. So punk rockers—because of music—in punk gangs had dress codes. They adopt from the gangs around them. Remember, in the suburban overlap of Los Angeles, every neighborhood’s a gang neighborhood, and if it’s not a gang neighborhood, it’s connected to one. Other gangs control territory for profit. The punk scene was something to be controlled basically for the thrill of it.

H: And just violence for the sake of violence.

These kids really didn’t think they were gonna be around tomorrow. Most of these kids weren’t given any love, you know? That’s a big part of this—the fact that all these psychopaths found each other in the name of BOOKS

‘punk rock violence’ is just … L.A.! Nowhere else in the world! It is a hybrid of gangster. In L.A., there’s a lot of hybrids.

D: And the music was the soundtrack. Come on—are there happy punk songs? Anybody who’s ever even been connected to punk … you’re listening to it in your car, this new music form, and you just wanna step on the gas, don’t you? The music came at just the right time, but also just the wrong time. It may sound a little kooky, but it was a soundtrack to get psycho.

The classic themes of gangs are they need to protect themselves from somebody, but they have an extra component of wanting to also revolt against something. What are all revolts?

Tantamount to revolution in some way shape or form, and revolutions are violent. This was gonna get violent, like it or not!

Frank at one point says something like, ‘The records told us to destroy society, so we were destroying society.’

H: They took that message personally! These kids wanted the ones that hated themselves!

Hated their parents! The ones that were totally confused! This was a perfect fucking outlet—other kids to identify with! ‘Look at that dude! He’s a fucking mess, I’m a fucking mess … fuck yeah, punk rock! Let’s join a gang and fuck you up!’ That’s another reason we wrote this book—to let people know how dangerous it was to be a punk rock kid in Los Angeles. Nowhere else was it as dangerous to be a punk rock kid.

What kind of place was La Mirada then, and how did it affect who the L.M.P.s were?

Why were punk gangs coming from the suburbs and not Hollywood where the first L.A. punk bands had started?

H: La Mirada, the East Side and as well as parts of Whittier—they called it ‘Shittier’— was low to even lower middle class families.

D: Mostly white families, but also Mexican as well. Second and third generation Chicanos with old-time L.A. ties.

H: L.M.P.’s got advice from the gang leader’s father, who was an East L.A. veterano.

D: They called him ‘The Godfather.’ He filled them full of street smarts.

H: Most punk gangs came from the suburbs because their families had split the city years earlier. Hollywood was a place for the down and out, the spun out and the disfranchised.

D: Those families were chasing the better life dubbed the ‘suburban’ dream. A few punk gangs did actually come from Hollywood, though—L.A. Death Squad being the most noteworthy. LADS were strong allies with LMP in the early years.

Frank’s first show is an X show at the Whisky, and his last in the book is probably the hardcore party where everyone gets stabbed. What is happening musically over the course of the book? How does punk change around—and because of—LMP? H: Punk rock music and the L.A. scene evolved constantly, battling back and forth with England who eventually moved on.

Punk rock wasn’t built to last.

D: Punk bands seemed to be playing harder and faster to keep up with the violence—or vice versa. Eventually most petered out. Punk folds up its tent because it couldn’t go on forever. LMP continued.

Were you prepared for the level of mayhem you’d confront in this book?

D: Absolutely—we grew up on the sidelines picking up all the street lore. We knew their exploits well. It’s what kept us away from the flashpoint.

H: Frank was forced to relive his horrific past when signing on to the project. Sometimes he didn’t like it and had to walk away. We on the other hand never wanted to hang up the phone or leave the table. [But] Frank definitely changed through this process.

D: He did the work. He dug deep and acknowledged his part in ruining the scene.

The book is subtitled ‘the true story of L.A.’s deadliest punk rock gang.’ In the book, Frank even says that other gangs were hesitant to kill, but LMP wasn’t. Is that what set them apart?

H: Not all the gangs, but a lot had a killer or two in the gang. But that is what separates LMP. They did a lot of dirty deeds, man. A lot of stuff other punk rock gangs weren’t aware of: do whatever you want in the city, jump in a car, hit the freeway— —and you’re gone?

H: There’s no cameras, there wasn’t that many cops, they got away with murder many many many times. I can’t speak to other punk rock gangs. I’m sure they all had murderous people. But we didn’t go interview them and we can’t speak for them. Without being biased here and not having interviewed these other guys, we have spoken with many people in the scene—really in the scene—and they’ll tell you the same thing.

You’ve got newspaper clippings and photos that document things Frank talks about.

What due diligence did you have to do to make sure that you had the ‘true story’ part covered? And how did you do it? This is not a very publicly documented culture.

H: We were here in L.A. in the 80s. We’d hear these stories back then. And all the blanks get filled in 30 years later. The story of the Car—I saw them driving by Knott’s Berry Farm one night! Years later we get the whole story.

D: The very first stabbing in the beginning of the book—the Pig Children stabbing is legend. We were friends with the girl that was dating the dude that got stabbed! And since we were tangentially connected to everybody and knew Frank, we knew who did it! Remember how small L.A. is? It was even a lot smaller back then, and if you were connected to punk rock, it was even smaller.

H: The mod stabbing in Hollywood was another one people knew about. No details, but we knew the two gangs that were involved.

D: Everybody has bad guys. But back then, LMP was just extra deadly. That simple. They had such a legend and the more you talked to people, the more you found out LMP was behind it. ‘We got into a fight with LMP and 73

we got some bats out of the car, but these guys came back over the wall with axes and meat cleavers!’ We didn’t have any problems after doing our due diligence to call them ‘the deadliest gang.’

This book reads like Frank just talking directly to the reader—is that how it was?

What kind of work did it take to make this feel so immediate and raw?

H: That was the challenge—getting Frank to go back to that moment and not write it from how he feels today in hindsight, but how he felt as a youth. He’d hang up on the phone with us—we’d get to a moment and there’d be a silence, and he’d be like ‘… I gotta go.’

He changed as a person, I’ll tell you that.

That was the challenge: getting Frank to go there and be raw and completely honest as a kid. That’s why we chose to write it that way.

Unapologetic—that’s how Frank was. If we wrote a book from Frank’s perspective today, it woulda been totally different.

D: Frank is always gonna be a tortured soul.

His relationship with God and finding God … it doesn’t wipe it away. Also remember something: gangsters are forever. Frank will forever be a gangster. So he is apologetic but at the same time, quite conflicted. That was the person he was back when he was a kid, and that’s who we got him to be again.

H: He makes no apologies because as he looks at his ‘career,’ those were the rules. Now, OK—a couple innocent guys got killed. He wasn’t really a participant in the innocents, like the mod driving down the alley.

That’s one of the worst moments in a book full of bad moments.

H: That’s the one that seems to affect him the most today, still. But Frank is a gangster forever—how it changed him as a person is he started as saying LMP was the backbone and punk rock gangs were the backbone of the scene. By the time we got to the end of it, he’d look us straight in the eye and say, ‘Man, we fucking ruined the scene.’ So he’s accountable.

Frank’s a sharp guy. No pun intended.

Is this book going to solve any unsolved murders? Are you or Frank liable for prosecution now that this is out?

H: Listen—we knew we could open a cold case here in Los Angeles by writing this. Frank got all the OKs by all the players that are still around.

D: That gang’s still around today. All the players we spoke of and that we list in the end of the book—the ones we have access to, the ones that aren’t locked up—we had conversations with them as well. There was a lot of politics involved.

This is a very shadowy and undocumented part of L.A. music history. If it’s known at all, it’s known as part of the reason why the punk scene in L.A. changed. But until now, few if any people have talked to ‘the other side’ who ruined it. Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L. did his American Demon book in 2011, and in 2013 ANP Quarterly did a feature on L.A. punk gangs, and Craig Ibarra’s recent A Wailing Of A Town book talks directly to someone who was in plenty of fights at punk shows. Now you have your book. How is new information on this time going to change the history of punk music—and music—in L.A.?

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D: It’s not gonna change the history, but what it will do is actually tell the history—give the history a rich narrative. What we’ve always thought is a very L.A. narrative. A place where people made their own rules—often quiet violently. Maybe punk rock in L.A. is gonna have to examine itself and ask itself hard questions: ‘Why did we do this?’ We knew we were gonna take the elephant out of the room and stampede him through the public.

This isn’t a romantic book and Frank isn’t one of these Hollywood anti-hero types—it starts grim and gets grimmer. What makes telling such a brutal story worth it?

H: Like Steven King said, don’t come to the page lightly. This story needed to be told.

There is a million perspectives from the musician, the singer … ‘Look at the life I lived backstage with all these women and the drugs!’ We’re only hearing that perspective from punk rock. There’s not a story from the trenches. We knew it was gonna be exhausting for the reader. But why hold back and why try to romanticize it or be flowery about it? It wasn’t like that. These kids were a mess! Let’s show it and tell you how it really was!

D: If you’re our age or were around at the time, you knew that hardcore in Los Angeles was really hardcore. It’s the absolute merciless and horrific nature of it that makes it have to be told. And also—nobody really knows what ended punk rock in L.A. This is what did!

H: We started this process after Frank telling the stories to us and other friends telling stories to us and saying, ‘Hey, let’s tell the story of the punk rock gangs in Los Angeles.’

All of them! We were gonna go to the leader or whoever was the mouthpiece for the gang.

Then we realized … that was too much.

This one person’s perspective to us was more important. Obviously a lot was left out. But we feel if these other punk rock gangsters could take their colors off—so to speak—for a minute, they’d recognize it’s the same story.

So for you, Frank’s story is really the story of the L.A. punk gang era?

D: Correct.

There’s that part in the book where Frank says: ‘Everybody was pointing fingers at the kids who lived brutally. Bands were upset over losing friends to the crusade, but still kept feeding it with their lyrics and sound, then wanted to cry about it? Every single band wound us up like A Clockwork Orange, yelling something violent and negative on every single record.’ I’m sure you both remember decades of like ‘Violent music causes violence’ campaigns, and the answers from the musician’s side that of course it doesn’t. But here’s a very violent guy explicitly saying, ‘No, violent music actually did make me violent.’ Was punk music responsible after all for creating punk gangs?

H: As a kid, Frank didn’t get it. He thought these musicians were with him! One big tribe!

Then all of a sudden in Flipside and other magazines, here comes Keith Morris or Rollins or whoever complaining about the violence in the scene and not identifying with it. And Frank, obviously lacking depth as a youth, is so confused: ‘Whoa, wait a sec—now they’re attacking us when we’re paying for their tickets? And they’re preaching this stuff to us?’

He didn’t have the depth to look into what they’re saying. Maybe they weren’t necessarily saying ‘Go fuck this dude up! Fuck the system!

Kill your parents!’ But … how could you do that to kids, at the same time? They need to be responsible for what they were doing and not just put their hands up in the air and say, ‘I was AGAINST violence!’ Well, read your fucking lyrics—no, you weren’t!

D: Let’s also look at how old he is. Do you really expect some kind of in-depth introspection from such a dysfunctional wild youth at the time? What do kids do? They find something to blame for it.

H: But at the same time … [the musicians] need to take responsibility for the lyrics! You can say Frank was wrong and he didn’t have the depth, but these guys were pandering to these kids cuz they knew they were selling tickets!

D: We want you guys—the journalists, the readers—you cut up that blame pie. We’re not gonna go on record and say it was on them.

There’s so much to share. That makes this a wondrous story and a nightmare. And here’s the thing. There’s this big myth that there’s these ‘HB-ers,’ these ‘jocks’ came in and they were really football players and you know something? That pisses Frank and all these guys off. The gangs started way before that.

And the musicians had no clue and wanted to assign blame to them. They couldn’t imagine that youth from their scene that they started had banded together and started doing this at shows. The HB-ers, the jocks—no. That was a myth. Punk gangs formed to protect themselves from jocks, from longhairs, from cops … all these guys beat on you! Funny enough, some punk rockers were big guys!

Strong guys! Crazy guys! Maybe they look like jocks to you, but no.

H: People like Jack Grisham from TSOL— he owns it. He’s like, ‘Hey, man, I was a dysfunctional motherfucker and you put a mic in my hand. I was part of the problem.’

Instead of putting his hands up like, ‘I didn’t want anything to do with it!’ He knows he was inciting it.

Then there’s that part where Frank, a guy who acknowledges ruining the scene, is actually complaining how the scene is ruined for him—full of ‘posers,’ ‘jocks’ and ‘hippies.’ He even says, ‘Our music and message didn’t matter.’ What was the message? What happened to punk that made Frank feel like it wasn’t the same for him anymore?

H: Any subculture has this. Even ‘burbs and areas like Silver Lake: ‘Oh, it wasn’t like it used to be!’ Everyone can identify with that. Part of it was more jocks started coming in—people that the year before were saying ‘What the fuck is that?’ and next year they’re the punkest of all the punks. Frank was complaining people were getting beat up that he’d been hanging out with the week before—it got so big and his own gang had so many chapters and there was new recruits within these gangs, it was hard to keep up. And the punk rock sound changed, the look of these frontmen changed! And of course they changed because they’re artists and artists don’t stagnate. They move on with culture and what’s happening.

Frank didn’t wanna move on!

He starts out getting into punk because it’s new and like nothing he’s ever seen—but then he wants it to stay frozen that way?

H: That’s right. We probably can’t relate to this completely but I got as close as I can to it over the years with Frank to understand what it’s like. Frank, first off, was a goodlooking guy. Charming and sweet, believe it or not. But he had that other side of him, man. And he was a fucking god. He walked in anywhere he wanted in L.A.—to have that feeling, that energy, that tingling around you that no one’s gonna fucking touch you, you can get any fucking girl you want, you’re gonna kill anyone who gets in your face and you got 20-30-40-50 guys right behind me.

Imagine that! I don’t think I’ll ever get that.

And he’s maybe 16 years old.

H: Correct. So how and why would he wanna move on from that? But then these girls who six months ago were looking at him and winking at him are now giving him the look of ‘Ew!’ They’ve moved on. And in the punk rock magazines, everyone is moving on.

D: Let’s do an entertainment parallel— these guys fancied themselves like a mob, correct? Remember the end of Goodfellas?

All of a sudden it was over. And he was an ordinary guy. That’s exactly how these guys felt. Walking into a Tex and the Horseheads show—their style was tired and the ladies didn’t care. It’s over. That’s hard to face.

That makes the book hard to read, too. You wonder—what was it all for?

D: All of this can be looked at as ‘What is the story of man?’ When man has nothing to do, he just destroys things. That way he can take ownership of his life.

So that’s the story? Pursuing power by causing pain.

H: And what was it all about? It was about that moment. They never looked past it.

Maybe [LMP founder] Santino did with his gang growing, but the soldiers didn’t look past that moment. So what was it all for? Shit! For nothing! Just that night, just that day.

What would L.A. punk have been like if these gangs never existed?

H: The deeper I got into it, I realized this is the byproduct—it was impossible not to exist. At least in Los Angeles. Everything good has that dark side. I can’t imagine punk rock being some beautiful artful place for expression … there just had to be a dark violent side.

Frank makes it simple: ‘So much hate, so much fun.’ Is that this book in six words?

H: To get another person to suffer like you suffer … maybe there’s some type of fucking commonality there in that moment? [‘So much hate, so much fun’] says everything.

That was Frank’s mentality. He hated himself, man. He knows still today … that was the price to pay to be that evil and that mean and heartless and to look back now, it saddens him. It was all for naught! What did he get from it? Nightmares for the rest of his life. But the hate was fun—it was so deep and dark he found a love of it. He loved to hate.

DISCO’S OUT … MURDER’S IN!: THE TRUE STORY OF FRANK THE SHANK AND L.A.’S DEADLIEST PUNK ROCK GANG IS AVAILABLE NOW FROM FERAL HOUSE. FERALHOUSE.COM. BOOKS