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West Hollywood scene
Wednesday, April 14 1999
I thought it was the fifteenth and, in a mad rush, filled out all my taxes. I was most pleased to discover that I'm getting a nearly $600 refund, largely because I was unemployed for most of 1998.
After work, the plan was to drive up to Los Angeles to see a show by a band called Cyclefly. They're from Ireland and have a vocalist who sounds a little like Kim Deal by way of that guy who sings for Rush. The instrumentation is a late-90s hybrid of punk and metal, with a pleasant dash of Middle Eastern influences. We're familiar with this band from a CD that one of Kim's Newport Avenue punk rock friends gave her.
When I got home, I was already tired and would have been happy to kick dust bunnies around the house. Kim seemed the same way, but she kept trying to convince me to want to go anyway, perhaps so I would convince her that going was a good idea. It was a multi-step process of motivation.
I think it was the website (link above) that finally convinced me.
Soon enough we were heading north on I-5. I hadn't noticed it from the last time we drove to Los Angeles, but they have this whole extra highway system for car poolers (cars containing two or more people). It's separated from the conventional system by a wide swath of yellow lines and even, in some places, concrete walls. There's almost no cars on this secondary system at 9:00pm at night, so we could zip along at fairly high speed without competition. The only concern was that perhaps the police pay more attention to drivers in the car pool system; if you were hauling drugs, you probably wouldn't drive there. But the non-carpool system are where the action is, so it's also possible that cops mostly ignore activity in the carpool system. Of course, generalizing in this way is never a pragmatic way to approach situations in the real world.
On the way, we stopped at a Taco Bell, mostly to empty our bladders. But while there, we also got some coffee and Gorditas. This was the second round of Taco Bell I'd had today, though today was the first time I'd eaten Taco Bell since getting to California. It's awfully hard to contemplate Taco Bell after you've had real Mexican food. By the way, the coffee was powerful stuff. It didn't taste too good, but it sure packed a stimulatory punch. I wonder if one of the guys in the back had to hide his cocaine stash super fast and the coffee machine was right there.
For much of the drive to Los Angeles, the highway is frighteningly curvy. These curves have nothing to do with the topography; the land is very near flat. The curves are mostly around parts of the highway currently under construction. As I've mentioned before, the cracks, seams, and embedded artifacts in the asphalt tend to distract from the bearing of the lanes themselves, thus adding considerably to the overall tension of trying to stay within them.
I'd thought ahead and gone to the Yahoo Map site to figure out the fastest way to get to our destination on Santa Monica Street in West Hollywood, so we didn't spend a lot of time driving around lost. Sophie was with us, but she had to stay behind in the car. This wasn't as bad for her as it might have been; Kim had forgotten all about a Taco Bell burrito in a bag between the two front seats.
The bar was a place called "The Dragonfly" (and also, on some days, "Pretty Ugly"). The people out in front were all in hard rock uniform, some punked out, and others looking like relics from the late 80s metal scene. Hair dye was a common feature, as were facial piercings and tattoos. Strangely, cowboy hats seemed to be in fashion among people from all the subcultures.
The band that was playing when we arrived was an almost all-girl act called "Cuntagious." They had a massive bass player whose pock-marked faced seemed perfectly befitting his role in the band. I could see the girl members of the band (two of whom were fairly cute) approaching him with the line, "Dude, we need a bass player!" They did a pretty good show, reminding me of a lighter and somewhat more talented L7. L7 itself used to play often at the Dragonfly back in the day.
We were drinking cocktails and taking in the ambience. Everybody seemed so sincere and for real in the scene. It was so much more fun, honest and interesting than anything I encounter in, say, my workplace, that it made me reconsider what the hell I was doing in the jaws of the corporate world, where fun and beauty (and, should it be judged to be worth anything, even irony) are simply commodities to be obtained at the lowest possible price. Symbolic of the overall don't-give-a-fuck attitude of the place was the skirting of the stage, a score of upside-down American flags.
The second band was the one we'd come to see, Cyclefly. A few of them came out and tested their instruments against the sound system, then there was a pause, then they all leaped up on stage and immediately launched into a song. That's when their front man, Declan O'Shea, finally made his appearance. He's was a scrawny guy in a shimmering green vinyl outfit which he gradually shed throughout the show. His hair was a chaotic mess of bright pink dreadlocks into which he occasionally poured his Corona. On stage he commanded absolute attention as he charismatically dashed about or stood for pensive moments as if in a trance. Occasionally he'd go off to nether parts of the stage or even the audience, casually though instantaneously returning to the microphone just as its technical difficulties were corrected, just as the instrumentalists reached the part of the song that required him to sing. On CD, a certain mystical quality to his high-pitched, powerful voice is lost. But when you're right there in the audience, he reminds you of all the great enigmatic rockstar gods who died young at or near their prime. I've never seen Jane's Addiction, but there was definitely a Perry Farrell thing going on here as well. Cyclefly could easily be viewed as a late-90s Janes Addiction, built on the shoulders of speed metal, post-punk, grunge and hardcore as opposed to the Led Zeppelin foundation of that earlier band.
Most of those present didn't seem to have come to see Cyclefly since they weren't especially pumped up for the music. Declan even attempted to stage dive at one point, but there wasn't anyone to catch him so he had to land on his feet. Kim and I were among the few there who could sing along. Mind you, the lyrics are just a little adolescent for my taste, for example:
"I am the heroin you sought, the bloody foetus you abort, I am the pleasure you call pain, the flash that lacerates your brain, the undisputed king of shame."
But I think this is a band to watch, especially with the re-emergence of glam elements in pop hard-rock. Like everything else, glam comes and goes in cycles. The next wave of glam will have to come through the prism of rawness and jaded emotions typical of 90s music, and that's exactly where Cyclefly is coming from.
Another thing: though Kim never said so directly, I could tell she thought Declan O'Shea was pretty fly for a white guy. She couldn't help herself, he was.
With as powerful a band as Cyclefly being the middle band, the last band was going to have to be a memorable event. And I wasn't disappointed. The last act of the evening was called Impotent Sea Snakes. Their shtick is best summarized with their logo: the last three letters of a big KISS lighted sign left over from the 70s. Musically, they weren't especially interesting, sounding like a no-name metal band still playing Kiss and Aerosmith covers after all this time (though not as loud). What made them special was their stage show. They weren't just a music act; they were a pervert circus and peep show as well.
The show began with multiple monitors on the back of the stage showing scenes from Disney's animated version of Alice in Wonderland. Then a busty, blond (though vaguely wholesome) chick in an old-fashioned, skimpy, (though vaguely wholesome) farmer girl dress pranced up onto the stage and passed flowers out to those of us in the front ranks of the audience.
Then came the band. They were all men dressed in women's clothes (or something vaguely like women's clothes), swaggering and strutting about the stage with their axes. Their crotches were all padded so as to exaggerate the size of their genitals. The guy closest to me, the bass player, had a ripped seam on his pants and the birdskin surface of his scrotal sack could be plainly see poking through. An older blond woman who became fast friends with Kim was apparently part of the ISS groupie scene and hoped to score with this bass player. As he thrust his hips on stage above her, she brushed her flower against his bulbous. (After the show she tried to get Kim to join her in a mission backstage.)
There was too much activity onstage to digest all at once. There were the monitors with whatever animation was playing. There was the little guy who sometimes handled an enormous snake, walked on stilts, or, most of the time, played with fire. There was the military guy with two long braids who did various dominant male things to the two highly-compliant bondage girls who kept appearing in various fetishistic outfits. About halfway through the show one of them came out as a dominatrix and pulled the ugliest guy in the front row onto the stage, spanked him good, made him sit still for a moment, then rewarded him with a bone-shaped dog biscuit. The music, the lyrics, the vocals, all that conventional stuff was entirely secondary to the show. The only thing that sucked were the loud explosions at the beginning and end of the show. These left my ears ringing even as we were walking back to the car. I'm getting up there in years and I need to be treating my ears better than that.
Possible lesson of the evening: have your girlfriend get the drinks. The bartender always makes them stronger for the girls.
Los Angeles is a friendly city, and when we got lost on our search for Highway 101, we stopped at a gas station and a friendly cabby told us to follow him. I slept most of the way home. It was after 4:00AM when we came rolling into Ocean Beach, San Diego.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990414 feedback
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