Warriors, Come Out to Pla-ay!
By Ron Garmon
Clown Summits: A ladyfriend’s end-of-week plans having zigged when mine zagged, I was left alone in L.A. last weekend, which was how the trouble started. I’d planned a decorous romantic evening, followed by Tantric exercises leading into an illicit Burner party up in the hills, the elegant debauch of which would produce copy for this, my column. Instead, I had transcripts to prepare for a plutonium hand-grenade of a cover story dumped in my lap on Thursday (and yours next week, kiddies; o just you wait) and no time at all for social exertions. This was how I wound up getting bitched at by Neil Innes for the evil state of American journalism on Friday night. The lead Bonzo Dog was in the rarest of jet-lagged form at the kickoff of the ninth annual “Mods & Rockers” fest at the Egyptian. Opening with “(I’m the) Urban Spaceman” (“My greatest hit,” he chortled), the songwriter for Monty Python wheezed his way through Lennon & McCartney pastiches, satirical pop-tarts and the entirety of “The Bruces’ Philosopher’s Song,” the room croaking lustily from the barroom vowel-howl opening of “Eeeeeee-manuel Kant was a real pissant.” Innes interpolated several unkind remarks on the subject of Fox News throughout the show, which he was more than glad to repeat as he signed my CD of The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse afterwards. The gravamen of the Rutle-in-Chief’s remarks was that the great weight of lying done by the American mainstream media in service of oil companies, Halliburton, and suchlike Brobdingnagian swine was turning the whole world into pigshit. Since these are sentiments I wholeheartedly share, I confined myself to Bud Abbott one-liners like “Indeed” and “Right on, mang.” I loped off to Little Joy on Sunset Boulevard, where the ever-delightful Dance Commander had arranged a meeting with Chicken John Rinaldi, freelance anarchist and onetime joke-candidate for mayor of San Francisco. Chicken regarded me with the same grinning unease as Jimmy Carter, in whose gimlet-eye I’d basked after asking about those pesky French indictments against his old pal Donald Rumsfeld. We all repaired to the Bonnelli Gallery in Chinatown, where they were giving away free daiquiris to anyone who slipped on a banana peel on the way in.
I Am Curious (Echo): Saturday night, I went to Book Soup to hear Beat editor Rebecca Schoenkopf read tales of her pieces to incredulous friends. There was a touched man out on the street giving away 20-dollar bills, which was as good a cue as any to haul my act over to Echo Curio on the furtherest fringes of Sunset. This storefront gallery/performance space has been a loud, colorful and ill-advertised hub in the Echo Park arts scene for about a year and a half. “We’re happy to be the first tier for bands that wind up at the Smell,” grinned Grant Capes, sardonic co-owner of the friendly co-op. “We tell the bands we book here that you’ll be interacting with the local community, and that sometimes means the occasional drunk walking in off the street and trying to sing along. We once had a girl run into traffic and some guy gave a beautiful impromptu performance on our rooftop.” Like the Smell, Echo Curio’s sole instance of cop trouble came from a noise beef, this time from yet another self-described “loudest band in L.A.” that drove patrons into the street. “We tell acts not to bring a Marshall stack,” Grant added, “a combo amp would be fine.”
“Warriors! Come Out and Pla-ay!” An art auction at the Curio made immediate prospects for music small, so I drifted west via public transport, picking up a haul of CDs from Amoeba and Virgin before legging it south to the New Beverly to observe a sacred, if long-neglected, personal rite – the Saturday Night Horror Movie. The midnight show was Humanoids from the Deep, a 1980 ultraviolent aesthetic atrocity from New World Pictures featuring Doug McClure, Vic Morrow and an elite cast of naked starlets battling giant mutant salmon bent on raping and eating an astounded humanity. I took this in with aid of three tiny sprigs of psilocybe cubensis, which I ingested one by one, holding each to the flickering Eastmancolor light. Time on the screen passed uproariously until the bloody maternity-room climax, when I sauntered out into the night air and caught a bus downtown. Exiting at First Street, I legged directly to a shuttle idling at the customary rendezvous point in Little Tokyo and bade the driver take me to the party. It was close to 4 a.m. when I arrived, stepping off at a super-secret underground partyworks that had the added advantage of being over a mile closer to my house. Sniffing spoor of a dead party, I tottered for home just as the last fat fungus I’d consumed began to detonate in my head. I covered most of the remaining distance through a neighborhood right out of Walter Hill’s The Warriors, but none of the thugz I encountered along the way seemed to want any piece of a clearly-deranged hillbilly with an ugly steel spike of a pen hanging around his neck. I was home listening to Beggars Banquet by the time the middle distance began to melt away
Published: 07/02/2008
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