Function At The Junction
From upstarts to golden geezers, festival bands offer many splendored sounds
By Ron Garmon
Should your feet take you past Broadway and First Street downtown on any quiet evening post-midnight, you can watch the sewer rats at play. Shy during daylight hours, the vermin crawl from cracks in the pavement to skip, dance, and squeal with enthusiasm all night, heedless of any humans tromping nearby. Don't sneer and don't shudder; these sportive rodents have more public fun on a weekend night than most Angelenos, perhaps because they can't read Arthur.
Well, rats can't pay a cover charge, either, but I hope the audience at this weekend's 25th Annual Sunset Junction Street Fair will follow their example anyway. Two days of noisy entertainment, commerce, and art spread over three stages, the fair features a live music schedule that's a grab-bag of demography, iconography, scene representation, global gesture, high art, low humor, ethereal dainties, and blunt-force trauma. Dance beats and noble old soul jostle sweet cheek by wattled jowl with indie ambition and hard-luck punk heroes sucking the reboiled bones of their reputations. A core sample of current mania, the whole promises much to console footsore attendees for the loss of 10 bucks per day.
Saturday's slate at the Edgecliffe stage begins with Tyler Crosby (whose 1996 album, Black Canary, must be fondly remembered by someone), then it's Mesmera (tres-hot star of the belly dance who gives the occasional showcase at Dar Maghreb restaurant), legendary Afro-Cuban drummer Bobby Matos, and Brazilian street percussionists Alma Da Batucada, before the amazing Freda Payne takes the stage at 6:30 p.m. By commercial standards a "one-hit wonder" with 1970's "Band of Gold," Payne's early-'70s Holland-Dozier-Holland singles for Invictus were miracles of force and tenderness, and this occasion more than calls for a rendition of her 1971 protest song "Bring the Boys Back Home." Following Freda, Scherrie Payne, Linda Laurence, and Freddi Poole cruise in under the name "Former Ladies of the Supremes" - which is only accurate for the first two ladies. Richard Street (who replaced Eddie Kendricks in the Temptations) closes out the night. He's not completely unfamiliar with the great soul act's back catalog, having sung sweetener harmonies on many of their hits prior to officially joining in 1971.
There's a comforting continuity on the Sanborn stage over the two-day event. The Silverlake Conservatory of Music will offer a three-hour set on both Saturday and Sunday, before turning matters over to the likes of L.A. Latin roots act DomingoSiete, Oakland partytime funsters Gravy Train!!!! (Saturday), and Argentine dance synthesists Los Pinguos plus Southern soul-stirrers Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings (Sunday). Then it's local and imported DJs churning the booty cauldron until the cops shut everything down.
The Bates stage is the rock 'n' roll game preserve, offering on Saturday such femme-fronted noshables as this-year's-model punk grrls the Ettes (who don't mind missing the occasional note or beat), followed by sentimentalists Let's Go Sailing and Reagan-age pop throwbacks Vagenius. Run, Run, Run will drop a cube of exquisite LSD in the mid-afternoon heat that will swell your head to twice-normal size before Something for Rockets' Vicodin dance-toons smack it to the pavement with a sick rattle. Foreign Born was started by high school chums (and Kinks fans) Matt Popeiluch and Lewis Pesacov, and Black Mountain are Canadians touring with Coldplay next month. Indie dear-boy Jason Falkner won my ears with his guitar playing on the first Jellyfish album way back in 1990, and the creepy Beatle-y pop of his 1996 solo debut Presents Author Unknown gave him a cult following that should be out in force at the Junction.
All this will be so much skid-greasing for fans there to see the evening's golden geezer, John Cale. Founding member of the Velvet Underground, Cale's output has been varied, prodigious, and terrifying since Lou Reed kicked him to the curb after White Light/White Heat. If you go in expecting chunklets from Vintage Violence and Paris 1919 to be muted in favor of treats from his upcoming album, blackAcetate, your disappointment will be minimal. Closing out the night will be pop wunderkinder Rilo Kiley, whose music makes my facebone ache.
Sunday's headliners at the Edgecliffe stage include platinum urban dance diva Jody Watley, who will most assuredly perform her Top 10 hits "Lookin' for a New Love," "Don't You Want Me," and "Some Kind of Lover" or fans will know the reason why. She yields to no less than Chaka Khan for the final spot, and the sheer weight of such combined coozadelic sophistication should be enough to twitch the hips of a dead Methodist.
The second-day rockpile at the Bates is some kind of triumph of out-of-the-hat programming. Leading off at noon (!) is the weed-whacker punk of O.C. noize-brats the Willowz, guaranteed to frighten children and set dogs to howling as far away as Koreatown. Silver Lake space-babies Viva K will, with synth and sitar, calm all resultant anxieties, lifting the crowd to that special place where the 'shrooms are peaking and ladies' fingers idly trace gentlemen's inseams. Expect another neck-snapping change-of-pace from that pride and terror of Torrance, the Rolling Blackouts, whose canny update of '70s Stooges/Stones/Raspberries diamondback riffage will blot out all memories of the Leaving Trains from audience brain pans before they even happen. All the beer 'n' cheap weed in L.A. won't make the experience of Burning Brides better or Nebula worse, but expect there to be considerable audience attempt. The afternoon will be waning by the time we're treated to L.A. creak-punks the Weirdos (their "We Got the Neutron Bomb" defined Angeleno snarl back in the Carter administration) and far gone before Portland new-kidz Gossip wind up a set of dance-art-noise damage.
Eagles of Death Metal is a gibbering joke of a side project from Queens of the Stone Age: part Stones pastiche, all blustery/bluesy/ballsy swagger. Their testosterone pump will know glorious release with the erotic burlesque of the Suicide Girls. This tits 'n' tats rock skinshow is without peer on the circuit today, with Coop Girl hotties performing acts of lesbian and S&M mimesis with spankably innocent abandon. Stuck with some Westside PC harridan for a date? These artistes will provide all the compensation your fingers can't reach.
The good news is the final spot is reserved for the New York Dolls. The bad news is they were spent as a creative force in 1974. In the interim, three members died, and one mutated into Buster Poindexter. Worse, Live from Royal Festival Hall showed the Morrissey-inspired reunion project up as a 2004 Bad Idea comparable to John Kerry's presidential nomination. Critics were predictably kind, but anyone familiar with the Dolls' thin but still extraordinary catalog can't help but wish it hadn't come to this. Some "special guest" might happen along to liven things up, but keep your expectations low. Hearing Television maul "Marquee Moon" at the Fonda months ago was probably the worst moment in my career as a rock critic so, anxious to keep the memory green, I'll be gone before "Vietnamese Baby," even if I have to arrange arrest by the LAPD.
In short, unless the Texas National Guard tries to remove Cindy Sheehan's supporters from their blistered vigil at Crawford, you can't hope for a better show the weekend before Labor Day.
Published: 08/24/2005
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