Drew Tewksbury: Multimedia Journalist

New Music Tuesday: Adanowsky, Can’s ‘Tago Mago,’ and David Lynch

Drew Tewksbury — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 07:47:30 +0000

New Music Tuesday: Can’s ‘Tago Mago,’ Adanowsky and David Lynch’s Debut by Drewtewksbury

HOST: Our regular music critic Drew Tewksbury reviews three new albums. He takes a listen to the latest from the Mexico City performer known as Adanowsky. He also talks about music from the legendary German band Can and the first album by director David Lynch.

Adanowsky’s Amador

DREW TEWKSBURY: Adanowsky is the project of Mexico City singer songwriter Adan Jodorowsky. His intimate album, “Amador” explores love ballads from around the world. There’s creaky saloon pianos, gentle strums, and Adan’s Serge Gainsbourg-style croons. The album is music for rainy mornings with a French press brewing in the kitchen. It’s melancholy music for the last couple on the floor, slow-dancing after the bar has cleared and the chairs are stacked.

Adanowsky – Un sol con corazón from Adanowsky on Vimeo.

If the name Jodorowsky sounds familiar, that’s because Adan is the son of Chilean cult film director, Alejandro Jodorowsky. His father’s films “El Topo,” “Santa Sangre” and “The Holy Mountain” are mainstays of film schools and midnight cinemas across the world.

Adan grew up in a avant-garde household in Paris, where George Harrison taught him his first guitar chords, and James Brown showed him how to dance. As a boy, Adan starred in his father’s grotesque horror film, “Santa Sangre.” His music, however, is all about beauty and love.

Can’s Tago Mago

Can is the kind of band that can only happen once. With their minimalist rock beats and far out sonic textures they laid down the foundation for future bands like Kraftwerk, Sonic Youth, Radiohead, and even Kanye West. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of their landmark album “Tago Mago,” the band has reissued the record, with expanded live sessions. The reissue reveals Can’s visionary sound that came straight from Germany, before punk and funk.

Everything about Can sounds so modern, that it’s hard to believe that they were playing in the same time as Led Zeppelin and Captain & Tenille. Later, the band devolved into making theme songs for game shows and eventually split up. But Tago Mago remains one of their greatest experiments.

David Lynch’s Crazy Clown Time

David Lynch is known for making creepy and captivating films like “Blue Velvet,” “Mullholland Drive” and “Eraserhead.” Now, at 65, Lynch gives us his musical debut, “Crazy Clown Time.” Like you could expect, the album is evocative and otherworldy, it’s moody, and sometimes creepy. Lynch has created a pretty good collection of outer space blues and electropop.

Lynch sings and plays bluesy guitar, while his producer Dean Hurley provides the lurching drumbeats. When his vocals aren’t processed to sound like a robot, Lynch’s untrained voice strains for notes, and crawls along as he tells twisted stories. Like Lynch’s movies, not every part of this album works. Often his experiments are too esoteric. But overall, David Lynch’s debut album is fascinating piece of outsider art from one of world’s greatest innovators.

Daft Punk Pull Back the Curtain on ‘Tron: Legacy’ Soundtrack

Drew Tewksbury — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 08:33:08 +0000

Few musical groups have the power to bring worlds together like robot helmet-wearing French beatmasters Daft Punk. In the ‘90s, they merged the disparate worlds of techno and rock; the following decade, they created a dance-floor quake that was part disco, part heavy metal. Now, Daft Punk has bridged the gap between fan-boys and technophiles with their ambitious soundtrack and orchestral score for Tron: Legacy.

The duo of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, as they’re known sans headgear, provided the pulse-raising beats that drive the sequel to the 1982 original. In fact, as only their fourth studio album in nearly 14 years, news of the soundtrack prompted electronic musicians around the world to make their own fake Daft Punk tracks, anticipating what a futuristic vision coupled with the group’s cutting-edge electronic stylings might sound like. But with all the bogus “leaks” onto the internet, the real Tron: Legacy soundtrack explores an entirely new sonic direction for the electro maestros, juxtaposing their drum machines with the lush textures of a full orchestra.

The Hollywood Reporter recently met up with the Grammy Award-winning musicians at Henson Studios in Hollywood to discuss their first venture into film scoring, philosophies on the future and what happened behind the scenes on the set of Tron: Legacy.

THR: How did you get involved with this film?

Thomas Bangalter: We first heard that their people had tried to contact us without really succeeding, so we got back in touch with them. That was quite a long time ago around fall of 2007. I think we were really approached by [director] Joe Kosinski in the early process of the early research and development of the film. It wasn’t greenlit yet, and there wasn’t really a script per se. We were on tour at that time, and it took almost a year to decide whether we had the desire and the energy to dive into something like that.

THR: What made you think that this film would be good, even though you had no script and the production hadn’t started?

Bangalter: You never know whether something will be good, but the interesting thing for us was that Joe was concurrently working on this film with Steven Lisberger, the director from the first one, for which we have great admiration and respect as a human being and the legacy of that film. Having Jeff Bridges on board helped too.

We were interested in the relationship between society and technology, and how the place of technology in the world had changed so much. The first movie in 1982 was a very colorful, hopeful, naive look at technology, and the power of the computer. Thirty years later, this new movie would be a dark and not-innocent look at technology. It was in common with how we feel about technology, which is this love-hate relationship with it. It can be wonderful and terrifying.

THR: How did you feel about all the fake Tron tracks that were being passed around on the internet?

Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo: As long as we’re putting out better music than what’s out there, then it’s not hurting us.

Bangalter: There’s a lot of expectations and fantasizing of what we are and what Tron is, and it can be an exciting thing and everyone can have their own different thoughts of what they would like it to be.

De Homem-Christo: And it has to do with the fact that we don’t do music very often and these big expectations of what Tron could be.

THR: What was your first experience seeing Tron as a kid?

De Homem-Christo: We didn’t go to the movies much as a kid, but I remember going with my parents, and my brother and me. We saw the posters, which got us excited. I was 8 years old.

THR: How did that first experience of seeing the original Tron influence the style of Daft Punk today?

Bangalter: I think Tron is a good example of minimalism. That’s what we liked with the direction of the new film. It can be huge film, but there’s a lot of negative space, so there’s this certain minimalist approach, that “less is more” feel, that we appreciate artistically.

There is also a timeless quality to it. In the first Tron, one thing that really resonates with us was the influences that it carried from the past. It almost looked like Georges Méliès silent film, Voyage to the Moon or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It was shot in black and white, and then animated, but also it was the first film that had computer graphics. This bridge of being something that looked like it was being made in the 1900s as much as something that looked like it was 20 years ahead of its time is always something that we really liked in art.

THR: There is an anachronistic feel to the soundtrack too. There are electronic elements, but there are rich textures to the strings as well. It’s got a Lawrence of Arabia feel to parts of the score.

Bangalter: It’s funny you mention Lawrence of Arabia, because when we started to look at that concept art, we actually started putting music together before we had the script. We thought of the digital world as being like a desert. Jeff Bridges’ character almost looks like the Ten Commandments. We liked this idea of taking classic Hollywood scores and try to clash it against electronics and 1970s science fiction soundtracks with a much darker feel, like John Carpenter.

THR: Tron: Legacy deals with the idea that technology helps us create another doppelganger in the digital realm. With social media and interactivity as it is today, we all have another persona. How do your costumes reflect this idea of embracing another persona?

Bangalter: We really feel like The Wizard of Oz sometimes; we’re the guys behind the curtains pushing some buttons. We like this idea of stimulating the imagination and blurring the lines between fiction and reality. But technology is actually making this thing harder. In the same way that you’d have a magic trick 30 years ago, the same magician who does the same magic trick today in the digital age, it’s much more complicated to keep the secret, and to make the trick happen, because of this access.

THR: Would you ever do away with your costumes?

De Homem-Christo: This all existed before the costumes.

Bangalter: We feel like we’re building something aesthetically, so we like the idea of the evolution. So far, each piece of music or everything has been to expand it, instead of backtracking or trying to destroy what we have done.

THR: Are you working on any more soundtracks?

Bangalter: We never say never. We want to do more Daft Punk music. We’ve learned a great deal of things from this. We like the idea of having this addition to our palette. It definitely opened up some new possibilities of adding traditional instruments with electronic ones. We are trying to find every artform to express ourselves.

THR: What about a new Daft Punk record?

Bangalter: We just finished this thing, which was a challenge, and we’re now working on things to come.

De Homem-Christo: We like to keep things as a surprise. It’s always better like that.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Hollywood Reporter Online December 16, 2010

Solidarity of Sorrow

Drew Tewksbury — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 08:21:35 +0000

Death can overthrow the status quo that a family relies on. Death creates a new kingdom that a grieving family inhabits, and it is here, in the world without a loved one, that families learn to exist and to move on. Welcome to the new normal.

Director John Cameron Mitchell explores this “world without” in “Rabbit Hole,” based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s heart-achingly raw play about the death of a child. The director of “Shortbus” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” has never been afraid to delve into taboo subjects, and “Rabbit Hole” strips death naked, revealing the reality of grief, sorrow, and recovery with unabashed honesty.

Nicole Kidman plays the stoic Becca, a mother who tries to forge through the emotional devastation of losing her 4-year-old son, Danny. Alongside her husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), she tries to shed her conflicted emotions—rage, denial, hopelessness, apathy—and ultimately learns that each person’s recovery is distinct and unique.

Kidman bravely plunges into the role, drawing from her own personal experiences—including the recent birth of a child with husband Keith Urban—to make Becca nuanced and real. She expresses Becca’s emotions with her whole body. Her anger courses up the musculature of her neck, her hands twist like winter tree branches as she heaves with tears.

Back Stage recently spoke with Kidman about “Rabbit Hole” and discussed living in a house with the cast, finding a studio to back their film, conjuring up gut-wrenching grief, and how her character infiltrated her dreams.

Back Stage: This film is brutally honest about such a taboo subject. What interested you about this script?

Nicole Kidman: I think the intimacy of it. It was really raw, and I just felt that it was very real and delicate. The way in which the scenes were written and the emotions were handled were not histrionic. People have said that it feels very “real.” And that, as an actor, is something that you want to hear. I think that someone said that it was like watching your neighbors, like you’re peeking through the window at them and watching, hoping that they’ll get through it.

Back Stage: When was the first time that you read it?

Kidman: I read it as a play first. That was years and years ago now, because it takes such a long time to develop and then film and release. It’s been a long, long road for us, and this is obviously difficult subject matter, so just getting it made was hard, just getting the money to make it was hard.

Back Stage: What difficulties did you face with financing the film?

Kidman: We just found the financing ourselves, and we did it for a very, very low budget, and that was it. So we could choose whichever director we wanted, and we had all the power over it.

Back Stage: What was it about John Cameron Mitchell that made you know that he was the right director for this film?

Kidman: I just think he’s very, very talented, and I also think he’s very raw, which suits this material. I think a director that’s very cold, or that’s slightly removed or stoic, wouldn’t have been so good because the script itself was very restrained. So it was the combination of a very raw director with a restrained script, I just thought that was interesting. And I just like him.

Back Stage: The subject is so taboo, as well. It must have been really difficult to have to sell people on a film about a child’s death.

Kidman: When we were trying to raise the money for it, as well, it was right at the time when [the economy] had crashed, so everyone’s saying, “No, no one wants to see anything like this; they want to see popcorn movies, big entertainment.” And I said, “But this is real, this is entertainment—it’s just maybe not comfortable entertainment.”

Back Stage: The movie seems to be about catharsis and about moving on, as well as solidarity in grief. Everyone feels sorrow, and that fact can unify us.

Kidman: I think it’s hopeful, I really do, because it’s about people coming together through pain, and I think that’s an important thing for us to see, that people can fuse that way.

Back Stage: What other characters from other films, or books, or any sort of media did you look to for inspiration for your own character?

Kidman: I read [Joan Didion's] “The Year of Magical Thinking.” But part of it, as an actor, is that just, when you hit a certain age, there’s a well of experience and a well of emotion that exists. For me, having just given birth a year prior, having three children, having been through many things in my life over the last 43 years, I just think, if I stay open enough, then there’s all of that to mine.

Back Stage: Was it difficult to dredge up these difficult feelings?

Kidman: Well, I’m not constantly mining it, because you know this was a six-week shoot, so I kind of go, “Okay, I’m gonna go into a place that’s taboo, that’s deeply disturbing.” But I want to do it because that’s part of being an actor, it’s part of being an artist, I suppose. I have no understanding of why, but at the same time, I know that I want to tell stories that somehow connect us, and I feel like this is one of those stories.

Back Stage: Grief often manifests itself in physical ways. As an actor, you have to become these characters and take on their grief. In what ways did this grief physically affect you?

Kidman: Just in my sleeping. I really didn’t sleep well. It was disturbed. That’s when I know my psyche is disturbed and I’m deeply involved. It’s really layered and connected. I just have to go, “Okay, I’m just really not going to sleep much.” And weird dreams and nightmares permeate my psyche.

Back Stage: Did you begin to dream as your character?

Kidman: No, but the emotions arise sometimes, even that you’ve [performed] days before. It’s so strange how the subconscious plays out, suddenly there’ll be those similar emotions, very, very present and very, very powerful, you know? I’ll wake up crying or I’ll wake up in a fetal position or wake up terrified and not know where I am.

Back Stage: Were there any points in this movie where you thought that you couldn’t do it? Perhaps that this might be a role that’s too difficult, too emotional?

Kidman: Oh yeah, as is my way, I sort of get dragged kicking and screaming to make it, and then when once I’m in it, I don’t want to give it up, and then when I’m finished, I think, “How did I even go there?” It’s a strange process, but I get there. I just was like, “Oh, my God, I can’t do this now. I just had my baby. Why would I want to do this? I don’t want to do this,” and then, “Whoa, you have to do it. We’ve raised the money, you can’t get out, you’ve signed the contract.” And then I go, “Ugh… okay.” But then I go, well—I suppose a lot of it is saying, “I need to honor this. This is an extraordinary role; people go through this.” And that’s my way of honoring those people and, in some way, reaching out to them.

Back Stage: You’ve been acting quite some time now. Do you find these “difficult” roles are easier now, with experience?

Kidman: I’m just very careful about what I choose now because time is so precious. I’m just not willing to waste the time, whereas maybe in my 20s, I was willing to try anything. But life is not about the past. My husband said a wonderful thing to me: He said, “The rear-view mirror is small; the windshield of a car is big.” I really try to approach my life that way.

Back Stage: And that’s such a great thing for a country singer to say. That’s a lyric right there.

Kidman: You’ll hear it in a song. [Laughs.]

By Drew Tewksbury

FromBack Stage Magazine, December 8, 2010

Spaceland Is the Place

Drew Tewksbury — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:31:01 +0000

In the long history of nightclub openings, Spaceland’s introduction to Los Angeles in 1995 stands out as particularly troubled. In the pouring rain, Mitchell Frank — then a 33-year-old musician, DJ and promoter — moved his sound system into the venue, where he acted as booker, doorman and soundman.”That first day was so chaotic,” Frank says 15 years later, sitting in the comfort of the downtown offices of his Spaceland Productions and remembering the wet March evening when the Silver Lake institution first opened its doors.

On that first night, L.A. music writer (and L.A. Weekly contributor) Jeff Miller was just 16, and he almost didn’t get in because he was underage. “There was that biblical, torrential rainfall, and we were sitting at some restaurant across the street just waiting to get in. Rob Zabrecky [the singer of Possum Dixon] had called me earlier and left a message saying, ‘Come see the show tonight, we’re opening for Beck and some band called the Foo Foo Fighters.’ ”

Back in 1995, Frank was one of many budding promoters hosting bands. Today, he’s a successful entrepreneur and the Spaceland club is one of his many endeavors, which include El Prado bar, cantina Malo, the twin Echo and Echoplex venues, and his umbrella organization, Spaceland Productions. He also serves as president of the Echo Park Chamber of Commerce. If you’ve hung out in Silver Lake or Echo Park, chances are you’ve set foot somewhere connected to Frank.

“I just never wanted to be that guy with a gray ponytail sitting at the back of a show — no offense to guys with gray ponytails,” Frank jokes. “So I branched out to other businesses.”

Though his canny entrepreneurship would help redefine the demographics of Silver Lake and Echo Park, back in 1993 the first inklings of the concept that would end up becoming Spaceland stemmed from a stereotypically slackerish “Eureka!” moment.

“I was watching TV late at night and we were spacing out and we saw these girls scantily clad with T-shirts, and [the soundtrack] was like, ‘Dreams, Dreams, Dreams of L.A.’ Then this guy came on and hosed them down, very sensually. Then the address popped up: 1717 Silver Lake.”

Frank lived a few blocks from Dreams of L.A. and was convinced that this was the perfect spot for a different kind of club. The goal was to create a place in his neighborhood where he and his local friends in bands could hang and play without having to go to Hollywood. And the Dreams of L.A. location was central to the artists and musicians gathered in the hills of Silver Lake.

Mitchell then approached the venue’s owner, a German expat named Horst Wolfram, with a proposal to host a monthly night called Pan. Wolfram had owned the building for decades, first when it was called Red Chimney in the ’60s or the ’70s (memories are hazy — it might or might not have been a gay club), which he then turned into Dreams of L.A. during the disco era. At some point in the ’80s it mutated into the Top 40 club Frank saw advertised.

When he and his associates approached Wolfram with the idea for Pan, the club owner begrudgingly gave them Thursdays. Gradually, over the next two years, Frank split with business partner Nancy Whalen, expanded the club night to three days a week, and eventually, after a rebranding as “Spaceland,” took over the entire operation in 1995.

With the help of talent buyer Liz Garo and booker Jennifer Tefft, Spaceland developed a reputation among musicians and fans for breaking acts before they hit the big time. Frank readily lists the many legendary nights he witnessed at his club, including Jenny Lewis’ first impromptu show, where she just walked onstage and began to play. “She wasn’t on the bill, so I was about to throw her out. Then we heard that voice,” Frank recalls.

They once booked Elliott Smith for a “secret show,” one so secret that fewer than 100 people showed up. “This was before text messaging and the Internet, so I just got on the phone and called everyone I knew and said, ‘You have to get down here now!’ ”

But few of those early shows matched that first rainy night, when Frank made up for the less than ideal atmospheric conditions with a now legendary roster. Foo Fighters had just formed and Dave Grohl was still considered just the drummer from Nirvana (their last-minute addition did not even make it to the commemorative poster).

And the headliner had only recently graduated from being a folk musician playing Silver Lake house parties to national attention through the unexpected hit “Loser.” “Before the ‘Beck thing’ happened,” Frank laughs, “he was just the guy who would show up and play Woody Guthrie songs till early in the morning.” Beck of course would soon become a little more than a one-hit wonder — leaving behind poster mates Lutefisk and Possum Dixon.

Possum Dixon’s singer helped the underage Jeff Miller and his friend sneak into the club, claiming they were his brothers. “We caught the last songs of the Foo Fighters, and Beck went on,” Miller remembers. “He was still a performance artist at this time, and near the end of the show, he put a walkie-talkie up to the microphone, and went into the bathroom with the other walkie-talkie and interviewed a guy peeing.”

Miller, like so many who had “found” Spaceland, spread the word about the “Eastside.” Then the L.A. Times proclaimed Frank as “The Mayor of Silver Lake,” and the hype of the “Silver Lake scene” began. Longtime residents of this narrow corridor would see housing prices jump from $200,000 to $2 million, and soon boutique coffee shops replaced corner bakeries and gentrification swept in. Spaceland — and the always-diversifying Frank — have gotten flack for being the shock troops of this demographic shift.

But whatever the larger social implications, Spaceland did become the hub of a certain bohemian music scene, a site Giant Drag frontwoman Annie Hardy calls “the place to play if you were wanting a quality audience and venue.”

“Having a residency at Spaceland totally makes you develop as a musician,” Hardy adds, “and it really helps to develop a fan base. Our residency there ended up getting us a record deal, I think.”

For some bands, says Joey Siara, guitarist and vocalist for the Henry Clay People, Spaceland is an essential place to cross-pollinate ideas and plant the seeds for larger projects.

“There’s kind of a Cheers vibe going on,” Siara says. “Monday nights are free, so it’s easy to just end up at Spaceland. You get enough other bands hanging out and drinking beers, and all of a sudden you have a music scene, where bands are constantly challenging and inspiring their buddies to make more — and hopefully better — music.”

For other bands, Spaceland is an integral step in solidifying a sound that bridges the gap between obscurity and accessibility. Nikki Monninger, bassist for the Grammy-nominated Silversun Pickups, says Spaceland made her want to move to Silver Lake, and the club served as an incubator that helped to launch her little band toward stardom: “We played our first L.A. show there. They were very supportive at a time when we really didn’t know what we were doing. If Spaceland didn’t exist, I’m not sure we would.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, April 9, 2010

Space Is The Place

Greenberg: A conversation With Writer-Director Noah Baumbach

Drew Tewksbury — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:40:59 +0000

Few directors can tackle insecurity, existential crises and serious emotional baggage with the lighthearted finesse of Noah Baumbach. Whether it’s a well-dressed fox who can’t give up chicken thieving, an overeducated ’80s family with underdeveloped communication skills or college grads who just want to hang, Baumbach deftly switches between melodrama and humor like a tennis pro switches from forehand to backhand. In short, Baumbach makes melancholy marvelous.

In Baumbach’s latest effort, Greenberg, Ben Stiller plays an emotionally fractured New Yorker, Roger Greenberg, who tries to regain his mental balance by house sitting his younger brother’s lavish Los Angeles home. Greenberg’s only goal: do nothing. But instead of rediscovering his emotional center, Greenberg’s life is upturned when he becomes romantically involved with his brother’s personal assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig). Almost half Greenberg’s age, the aimless Florence looks to him for stability, but together they’re an awkward, slightly endearing mess. Back in L.A. after a long absence, Greenberg’s past reemerges as he confronts the friendships that faded as well as the lover he lost, played by Baumbach’s wife and Greenberg producer/co-writer Jennifer Jason Leigh. When Greenberg contacts his old bandmate, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), Greenberg obsesses over his decision to break up their band on the brink of success. Surrounded by the effects of his choices, and a now unfamiliar youth culture, Greenberg is an anachronistic man trying to withstand the inertia of time.

Like all of Baumbach’s movies, Greenberg’s soundtrack acts as both character and setting. At times it antagonizes, drawing attention away from the action, while other times it carries the story. For a film about musicians, Greenberg’s soundtrack could not be an afterthought, and Baumbach put the important task of scoring the movie into the hands of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. Baumbach worked closely with Murphy, who is a newcomer to the art of film scoring, to find the right sound for the Greenberg’s unique vibe.

Baumbach was not hesitant to bring in other up-and-coming players, including Mark Duplass—actor, director and one of the founders of the lo-fi “Mumblecore” film movement—and Greta Gerwig, Duplass’ friend and frequent co-star. In the end, both left behind the largely improvisational, one-take ethic of their Mumblecore background for the detailed writing of Baumbach’s introspective and absurdly funny meditation on identity, aging and second chances. Here, we visit with Baumbach to talk about being in bands, resuscitating friendships and when to give up on your dreams.

One of the central themes of Greenberg is deciding when to relinquish your dreams. Do you encounter this problem often in your real-life experiences?
I’ve seen it with friends and in my own life. People deal with it all the time. There are the bigger ones: people who wanted to be a rock star but became a computer programmer. I think the movie deals with the smaller, more hidden aspects of your hopes and idea of yourself, as opposed to how you really are or how things have turned out. I think it’s a major thing for a lot of people.

Why do you think being in a band is such an important, and sometimes emotional, part of young men’s lives?
At some point, most boys and young men fantasize about being in a band. I know lots of people in artistic professions who have been in bands, no matter what they went on to do later. It’s something that they start or pretend to start but never finish. I say this although I’ve never been in a band—I have no talent, that’s why. If I had some talent, maybe I would have…

Have you seen friendships dissolve over band conflicts?
I think a band is a good way to explore the intricacies of friendship, particularly male friendships that turn into commerce. I have a lot of experience with young friendships that, as we started to inch into the professional world, became really affected and hurt by the transition. We were all too young to handle it. We all got into these things as friends, as potential artists with the right intentions, and then something else happened when the air of professionalism dissolves.

The landscape of this movie is very L.A. With The Squid and the Whale it was very Brooklyn. How did the landscape influence this story, or was it the other way around?
The goal was to make it in L.A., but to make L.A. look like a real city, in the way I experience it. My wife, Jennifer, was integral in making that happen. She grew up here and in a lot of ways my acclimation to the city comes through her seeing it as a hometown. I think it’s helped me appreciate Los Angeles a little more.

How did you get involved with James Murphy?
When I was writing Greenberg in L.A. and missing New York, Jennifer and I were in the car and Murphy’s song, “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” came on. I think I was intimated by the song, because it addresses something so directly. I was like, “Who does this guy think he is?” I loved it. I hadn’t heard of LCD Soundsystem and somehow missed the whole “Daft Punk is Playing at My House”-era. I started listening to Sound of Silver a lot when I was working on Greenberg because it felt like another Greenberg-esque voice. Murphy was dealing with a lot of things—aging, identity, self-consciousness—things that I was tackling in Greenberg. It was an inspiration in that way.

Greta Gerwig’s character in this film, a woman in her 20’s trying to find herself in the world, is pretty dead-on for people dealing with quarter-life crises. It’s almost too close to home for a lot of us. How did you develop her character?
She’s a person I knew really well but I hadn’t seen in movies. I didn’t know exactly how to get her in the movie, but when I figured out that she’d be a personal assistant, then it expanded the character. Greta understood it implicitly. She was incredible in her past movies, which were unscripted, but I didn’t know if she would act the same way in a scripted movie. I didn’t want any improvising, but she was so prepared and knew all the lines that I didn’t have to worry. She was so in tune with the character that I often just got out of her way.

“It’s a huge conflict to jettison your dreams and address your reality.”

In the film, Gerwig does embarrassing scenes with great ease. How does one manufacture awkwardness?
The script is the root of the awkwardness, and I try to lay the script out as true as I can. If the actors are being truthful, it takes care of itself.Greenberg is so afraid of embarrassment and so much of what he does is a way to hide and protect himself. Florence, on the other hand, is ready to take people at face value and rolls with the punches. She is open to embarrassment because she is not afraid of it. So when you have two characters in a room like that, it makes awkwardness more likely.

Ben Stiller has been described as a meticulous actor. In what ways did that present itself in the making of this film?
Ben is super prepared and works as hard as anybody. You want everybody to work that hard, and I think it rubs off on people. I chose Ben because I wanted someone who knew what was funny even if he wasn’t playing funny. He had to see the funniness underneath. Jeff Daniels was the same way in The Squid and the Whale.

For the characters, the scenes are extremely serious, but for the audience, we think it’s funny. Is that absurdity intentional?
I’m trying to get to what’s authentic in a moment. I am interested in how smaller moments in our lives have huge impacts. It’s all about the little moments, not the big ones. I had so many friends who moved to L.A. to live their rock and roll dreams and it just didn’t happen. I think Noah, as a writer, addresses the periphery of emotional flux. Most writers invest in the opera or the intense cacophony, but Noah observes a change in the human psyche that happens on the periphery. That’s what I responded to with this script. To play a guy with broken dreams who was trying to address his future with a limp of the ambition of his past. It’s a huge conflict to jettison your dreams and address your reality.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Filter Magazine, Issue 39 2010

The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell Gets a Grip

Drew Tewksbury — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 06:34:33 +0000

There’s no shortage of unsung heroes, could-have-beens and flameouts in the long, strange history of rock & roll. But few rockers had as much grit and grime, swagger and sneer as the Stranglers. Formed in 1974, they were scrappy, straight-up punk pioneers. Their machismo-drenched pub rock would have been forgettable if it weren’t so smart and irresistibly catchy. Film aficionados will recognize the off-kilter waltz “Golden Brown” from the pikey fight montage in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 film Snatch. The same year found the Stranglers’ “Peaches” used in the opening scene of Jonathan Glazer’s superb gangster flick Sexy Beast.

In the golden era of London punk, the Stranglers played alongside the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and Patti Smith. But unlike the Roman candle that was most punk bands of the past (and present), the Stranglers adapted, evolved and endured for the next 30 years. In the 1980s, they surfed the New Wave swell and fell in line with ex-punkers Blondie, the Police and Dire Straits. Hugh Cornwell, guitarist and lead growler, says that instead of sticking with one genre, the musically adept, cocksure Stranglers weren’t afraid to experiment.

“No one really cared whether we were or were not punk,” he says. “We were just excited to make records. Call us what you want; we didn’t care.”

One band especially took notice of the Stranglers’ iconoclastic, genre-smashing sound: the Clash. “I actually got to know Joe Strummer quite well when he was just starting,” Cornwell says. “We struck up a sort of a camaraderie with him. Before the Clash, he had a band called the 101, and we were doing the same shows on the same bill, so we used to sit around and compare notes on life.”

In 1990, Cornwell broke off on his own to reclaim the raw, stripped-down sound that earned the Stranglers mainstream success back in the early ’80s. In the early 2000s, crate-digging, Internet-scrounging DJs rediscovered the Stranglers as gems from the early days of punk. One Stranglers devotee was White Stripes recording engineer Liam Watson; the power trio’s garage-rock sound had a major influence on Jack White. Watson approached Cornwell and recorded his recent album, Hooverdam, on vintage equipment in his London studio—the same way the Stranglers used to do it.

“At no stage did Hooverdam have any digital work at all,” Cornwell says. “[Watson’s] got this tiny little 8-track studio, and he has 1-inch analog tape. You mention computers to him, and he breaks out in a rash.”

Although the production of the warm, garage-pop rocker Hooverdam was analog, Cornwell embraced the audience who found him through the digital domain. In 2009, Cornwell offered up Hooverdam for free through his website, in the spirit of Radiohead. “We didn’t want to sell this record to just some core Stranglers fans,” he says. “We wanted it to go viral and for young people who had never heard of the Stranglers to get it just because it’s free.”

Though digital distribution is an up-to-the second business model in the free-flailing music industry, Cornwell maintains that social media and the viral nature of music today are really in tune with those early days in London, when the Stranglers played to a devoted audience that Cornwell says was “mobile.”

“People would just call each other and say, ‘Hey, the Pistols are doing a gig,’ or, ‘The Stranglers are doing a show,’ or, ‘The Buzzcocks are down from Manchester.’ All this without texts and mobile phones—just land lines and meeting one another on the streets and at the cafés.”

Now 60 years old, Cornwell has lost none of the energy that drove the Stranglers’ success. His live show, he says, is a “chop and change” of Stranglers hits interwoven with the catchy tracks from the crunchy Hooverdam. He embraces the past while looking to the future, bringing together the old hits and the new cuts, the analog and digital, cutting-edge social media and the old-fashioned, hard-knock life on the road. Thirty years after sitting at the pub with Strummer, speculating about punk rock’s future, Cornwell is still most at home thriving in the rock & roll underground. “It’s all come full circle, really,” he says

By Drew Tewksbury

from O.C. Weekly, Issue March 25th, 2010

Tinariwen Unleashes a Saharan Dance Party

Drew Tewksbury — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:53:56 +0000

Tinariwen are not from around here. They’re not from a world of autotune and product placement. They aren’t American Idols, or Guitar Heroes. Tinariwen are “people of the desert,” poets and musicians from the southern Sahara, who wandered into UCLA’s Royce Hall stage Saturday night to share the sound and vision of a world apart. Their bodies draped in robes and faces obscured by tagelmust headwear indicative of their fellow Toureg desert nomads, the musical collective shared their songs of revolution and poems of desert solitude driven by Stratocasters and hand claps. Tinariwen opened a gateway to another reality, holding the thread of ancient rhythms and universal songs sung across the continents, and the ages.

Onstage, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib strums a green Stratocaster, clothed in colorful robes. He doesn’t wear the face-covering tagelmust, like the lanky bassist or drummer, instead his hair extends in every direction, salt and peppered with gray, and his face cut deep with lines carved from his 50 years in the desert.

In the dust and rustle of Ibrahims voice, we hear the pain of his father’s incarceration and execution he witnessed as a boy, the scattering of their cattle heard by Malian army, and exile into Algeria. In Ibrahim’s guitar, we hear the dreams of a young boy who built a guitar from a tin can, stick, and a bicycle wire, inspired by the troubadours of the American west, who roamed the range not unlike his own. His guitar is an extension of his voice, with tiptoing notes, soaring bends, and dissonant chords intelligible in any country. Like the droning dirge cast by opening Tuvan throat singers Huun Huur Tu, (who proved that, as death and drone metal afficinados already know, that one person’s burp is another person’s music), Ibrahim’s voice tapped into universal emotions.

Tinariwen’s effervescent beats are driven by handclaps by Wonou Wallet Sidati, her hands bringing together the waving vocals, lumbering basslines, and Ibrahims short bursts of guitar. When Royce Hall’s crowd began clapping along, she would begin to dance toward the edge of the stage. Clothed in black fabric and a headscarf, Sidati’s face and hands became the focal points. Her hands moved like two birds playing in an updraft, before she returned to the microphone so sing a response to Ibrahim’s call. Touareg women have relative freedom–after all, the men wear the veils– and they are important to driving the rhythms of these nomads. This is little surprise, after all, women are inherent beatmakers, every person ever has listened to a mother’s heartbeat for those nine months in the womb. And so goes Sidati’s steady handclap, the extension of her heart, creating the foundation of a song that everyone can dance to. And they did. Halfway through the show, much of the audience left their seats to dance near the front of the stage: white men Ibrahim’s age raised their hands and swayed, a “Jersey Shore” bro-alike yelled “sooooo good” while punching the air, and a woman performs a lap dance (probably learned from YMCA pole dancing lessons) on her seated companion. All this at UCLA’s concert hall. But that’s the power of the rhythm, the lifebeat, and Ibrahim’s electric guitar.

Tinariwen’s story is not a different chapter in rock music’s history, it’s an entirely different book. While displaced in Algeria and Libya in the late 1970′s, the listless, jobless Touareg youth would gather together and sing songs in camps outside of town. Here, amongst other Touareg who also had been displaced by droughts in Saharan villages, they brought together their own nation, an intangible, borderless country that would materialize whenever these nomads would meet. Here, they shared familiar music and stories, and Tinariwen was born from desert jams sessions where the youth played music ranging from Arabic pop to traditional Touareg anthems to Led Zeppelin. Leading the group was Ibrahim, a rambunctious guitarist and singer, who wrote songs about the political struggles of the Touraeg.

Although the troupe uses the tools of Western music, guitars and electric bass, comparisons are inadequate when it comes to Tinariwen. Aligning them with Western music often falls short. Rock ‘n’ roll found its roots in the blues, and blues found its roots in American slavery, but Tinariwan, quite literally is “revolution rock.”

In 1980, when Colonel Gaddafi encouraged Touareg men to join the army, Ibrahim and Tinariwen followed the call. While training, they met other musicians and even built a studio, where they recorded cassettes. They passed out the cassettes, which reached the far corners of the deserts. They returned to Mali in 1990 just as the revolution broke out. They fought for 9 months for freedom, then put down their guns and picked up their guitars once again.

The Tinariwen who joined Ibrahim onstage is no longer the Tinariwen of the past. The original members have passed on or moved on, but the band itself is comprised of the Touareg raised on those desert cassettes. They continue the lineage and songs that brought the rebels and the outcasts together. As they bring the songs that started a revolution to the Western ears, the temptation to remix, remaster, adapt, option, and exploit Tinariwen is ever-present. But please don’t. Just share the songs, sing the songs, and let their music wander like it always has. Tinariwen’s crossed huge distances and difficult times to get here. Let them enjoy this oasis in the dunes. Like Ibrahim sings in the show-closing “Cler Achel,” “I spent the day and still the following night, I spent the whole season travelling.”

*

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly’s blog, West Coast Sound, Feb 23, 2010

Mumford & Sons

Drew Tewksbury — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:24:55 +0000

IN 1972, George Carlin famously ranted about seven words that couldn’t be uttered on television. The verboten expressions were offensive to the sensibilities of purportedly well-mannered people everywhere. For some in the music world, however, there are not seven forbidden sounds, just a single four-letter word: folk.

The London quartet Mumford & Sons, however, realigns folk’s paradigm with soaring harmonies, banjo, upright bass and a single kick drum. The stigma of a genre seemingly relegated to youth groups and corporate coffeehouses is beginning to heal, as folk continues to evolve and grow. “Folk music suffers from [people’s perception] that it is a soft art form,” says keyboardist Ben Lovett. “But I think it’s the hardest to write and perform. You can’t hide behind fancy frills and bells and whistles. You’re not singing about something you don’t care about.”

On Mumford & Sons’ U.S. debut, Sigh No More, the band culls its stripped-down sound from three self-produced EPs released since 2007. Marcus Mumford is essentially a one-man-band as he confidently croons and strums the guitar while stomping a tambourine and bass drum with his feet. Joining him are Lovett on keys, Ted Dwane on upright bass and Country Winston Marshall, who plucks the banjo with rapid-fire precision.

To complete Sigh No More, the band worked with Marcus Dravs, who has produced Björk, Peter Gabriel and Arcade Fire albums. “[Dravs] really encouraged us to think hard about the songs before we recorded them,” Mumford says, “to play the best we could, and to be self-controlled with the kind of crazy ideas that new, over-excited bands get the first time they go into a studio.”

Although the influence of Arcade Fire in Mumford’s powerful voice is undeniable, Mumford & Sons’ sound is shaped more by the distinct colors of folk in Britain. “American folk was partly born out of the ever-evolving forms of blues and civil unrest, whereas British folk has more classical origins from composers like Haydn infused with traditional Celtic music,” Lovett says. “But it’s important to our music to digest everything around us, from music to literature to everyday life. If you put all that stuff in, the music you write will only be richer.”

Sigh No More is emboldened by riches. The lush vocal harmonies concluding “White Blank Page” rise to the sky as the instrumentation falls away, leaving the voices to tower like a Sequoia that withstood a forest fire. “Roll Away Your Stone” shifts from a ballad squeezed deep from Mumford’s lungs to a swirling square dance, best performed from back porches or in veterans’ halls. Squeezeboxes, floor stomps and tambourines evoke an intimacy carved out by Mumford & Sons. These songs are invitations to spaces long forgotten.

With rhythms more at home in the Laurel Canyon of the 1960s, it’s hard to believe that the band comes from the urban sprawl of West London, but it embraces this dichotomy. “We are both urban and rural folk,” Lovett says. “We live and breathe the city of London and whichever cities we have the fortune of visiting on tour, but we run for the hills when we can and relish the space and the beauty of our countryside.” In London, they are not alone as folk rock revivalists; along with rough-folksters Noah & the Whale and the honey-voiced Laura Marling (with whom Mumford occasionally drums), Mumford & Sons are in good company. But unlike their cohorts, Mumford & Sons stays true to songs of old that were hummed in the times of yesterday, plucking strings connected to history and the heart.

“We’re not writing coffee table music,” Lovett says. “We want to write with a purpose. We want to write music that matters.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from “Getting To Know,” Filter Magazine, Issue 39 2010

View a PDF of this Article from Filter Magazine

Images for the Post-Video Age

Drew Tewksbury — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:13:26 +0000

The shoot is like any other. The craft-services table offers stale bread, a plastic knife juts out from an open peanut butter jar, and the red light of a coffee machine glows. More than 100 extras sit on foldout chairs in the parking lot, all clad in athletic gear from this morning’s K-Swiss commercial shoot. Earlier they had run a minimarathon down Hollywood Boulevard past Mann’s Chinese Theatre. Now they wait. The 5:30 a.m. call time ensured the streets would be as vacant as the extras’ bored stares. One man hangs his head and sighs, “What’s the director’s deal?”A few blocks away, that director, Keith Schofield, looks at a monitor, and politely asks the runners to assemble in front of the camera. There’s not much to see, but a mother and her adolescent son, lost tourists from Florida, stand behind Schofield and watch anyway.

Then through the crowd of extras — some checking their iPhones and others flirting — something happens. “Oh, my gosh, look at that!” the mom exclaims, as a man wearing purple tights and a silver cape strolls through the extras; then a masked Mexican wrestler, a luchador naked at the waist with action figure–size muscles, follows him. The kid’s mouth is open, the mom is smiling.

“Wait ’til later,” Schofield says nonchalantly. “That’s when the tricycles, scooters and fireworks come out.”

It’s not all tricycles and fireworks for the 30-year-old director, but when it comes to non sequiturs, WTFs and moments of wonder, few filmmakers do it better than Schofield. He has directed commercials for A-list clients like McDonald’s, Virgin Mobile and, most infamously, Diesel, for whom he created the successful viral video “SFW XXX” in 2008, featuring comically amateurish animations obfuscating the nasty action of vintage porn. Think ice cream cones, horseback rides and pinball machines drawn with MS Paintbrush over videos suitable only for late-night Dutch television.

His commercial success, he says, comes from his music-video background. Although music is heard through video games and commercials, interactive iPhone apps and ringtones, the music video has returned as a powerful medium in the post-MTV media climate. And Schofield’s videos are tailored to the ADD, concept-starved audience of the Internet era.

His roster is a litany of established and rising artists: the Ting Tings, Death Cab for Cutie, Fatboy Slim, Justice, Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg, CSS, Mims and Supergrass. In 2008, he won best rock video at the U.K. Music Video Awards, for his guitar-smashing, gravity-defying treatment for Supergrass’ “Bad Blood.” Schofield was chosen to speak at the Flux Screening Series at the Hammer Museum in 2008, where he presented a naked-dance-party video (censored with creatively placed black boxes) for Fatboy Slim’s Brighton Port Authority, featuring Dizzy Rascal and David Byrne. He led a PowerPoint presentation of weird Internet photos. His dry sense of humor and simple commentary confused some of the audience as he displayed an astronaut with pancakes for a head, and a skateboard resting on cheeseburgers. A year later, Schofield returned to the Hammer’s film series to debut his Gainsbourg video for the Beck-produced “Heaven Can Wait,” featuring more than 50 live-action reenactments of his bizarre image collection, pancake head and all. He was joined by the visionary director Michel Gondry.

But before Schofield’s awards, speeches and magazine covers, there was 120 Minutes. As a kid in Chicago, he used to tape his favorite video off the MTV alt-rock video show. Schofield grew up in the Golden Age of videos: the 1990s, when video budgets were fat and the spots were more than merely a commercial for a band, or an album. These videos were in fact a short film, a visual poem. It could cover up an unremarkable band or highlight an underrated one.

“I still remember that Spike Jonze video for Wax, the one with the guy running in on fire in slow motion,” Schofield says, “and it was totally unforgettable, even though the band was. But then there’s Weezer, who before that Buddy Holly video, they were just the guys with the ‘Sweater Song.’ ”

In the works of Jonze and Gondry, Schofield recognized the freedom that comes with collaborations. Videos were the haiku of film; they were stripped-down, three-minute bursts of strong concepts. At NYU Film School at the turn of the millennium, he began directing music videos on the cheap; when he moved to L.A., his reputation for microbudget, lo-fi videos with high concepts helped him to connect with other artists.

But midway through the 2000s, the music video died as its main avenue, MTV, shifted from clips into scripted and reality shows. Some cable channels attempted to pick up the slack, but few would ever have the cultural clout MTV had wielded in the 1990s. Internet video was shoddy at best, and any videos worth watching were diminished by slow connections. But as high-speed Internet became nearly ubiquitous on college campuses, the viral video was born. And Schofield was at its forefront.

In 2006, L.A. band Wintergreen approached him for a video — but they had no budget. Schofield’s solution? He recalls thinking, “We’re not going to be on MTV, we don’t have any money, so let’s do a video that will appeal to video-game nerds online.” He capitalized on an Internet urban legend about Atari’s 1982 E.T. video-game flop, and a New Mexico landfill where unused cartridges were buried. With a simple story of Wintergreen setting out on a quest for the cartridges, Schofield released the video on his Web site, presenting a DIY, nerdy narrative that earned him nearly a million online hits, before YouTube was even launched.

Appealing to Web audiences gave Schofield a new philosophy for creating videos in the post-video age. “I wanted to make videos that could never be shown on MTV, using nudity, brand names, drugs, whatever.”

For Wintergreen’s second video, “Can’t Sit Still,” Schofield pushed the drug theme beyond its limit, featuring a how-to guide for making crystal meth, which the band concocts and ingests. The recipes, made from kitty litter, bleach and other household ingredients, were entirely fictional, but the video stirred up serious controversy.

“We didn’t get much reaction at first when we put it on YouTube, but when we titled it ‘How to Make Meth,’ the reaction was crazy. It was featured on a newscast about online meth recipes — even though it was fake.”

Wintergreen singer/guitarist Drew Mottinger witnessed the effects immediately. “Some fans loved it. Some fans hated it. Most people believed it. Some parent coalition started a blog trying to get it banned. My parents definitely hated it. I still get e-mails from kids claiming they made the drugs and that they worked.”

Now, as countless video sites populate the Internet, the computer is the main dispensary of music, and of the images that go along with it. Schofield helped to resuscitate music videos and adapt their content for an increasingly digital age. But for Schofield, it was no big deal.

“I’d hate for people to pretentiously think that there’s some meaning behind it. I mean, it’s not rocket science.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, published March 11th 2010

Talulah Riley: Life on Mars?

Drew Tewksbury — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:03:04 +0000

It’s a hot day in Venice Beach, the hippy stalwart, faux bohemian enclave sitting on Los Angeles’ coast. We’re gathered in this magazine’s American headquarters preparing to photograph the subject, Talulah Riley, along the Venice canals. As the makeup artist curls her eyelashes and paints her nails, Talulah broaches a discussion of dreams.

The actress, who stars in the recent Richard Curtis film Pirate Radio, is undoubtedly a dreamer. Playing the under-aged temptress aboard an offshore pirate radio station, Riley snatches scenes away from her heavyweight co-stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, and Kenneth
Branagh with effortless magnetism. Charming not only the film’s protagonist but also his veteran mentors, Riley manages to blend an ingénue’s wide-eyed innocence with a seductress’ sizzle. It’s clear, she knows what she wants and more often than not, she knows how to get it. But for those things still left undone, she has a list (in descending order): 1. Climb to the top of Macchu Picchu and ride a horse at sunset. 2. Sleep in a bed of caribou fur at Sweden’s Ice Hotel. 3. Swim in a bioluminescent bay at
midnight.

Riley may not have experienced the glowing micro-organisms (Pyrodimium bahamense) of Puerto Rico, but the 23 year-old actress has already checked off some impressive tasks on her to-do list. Star as the lead in the successful redux of U.K. film series, St. Trinian’s? Check. Sign on for Christopher Nolan’s next film, Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Caine? Been there. Get engaged to Paypal founder and multimillionaire Elon Musk, owner of commercial spaceflight and rocket company Space X, and visionary electric car company Tesla? Done that.

In comparison, my dreams seem much more modest.
I tell her of my dream to visit the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where plastic Biblical figures mingle with pterodactyls, mastodons, and other animals anachronistically coexisting in the seven days of creation. She gets excited and says that she may make an addendum to her list, while looking at the ceiling as the makeup artist draws a thin line under blue eyes.

I tell my vision of Jesus wielding a blow torch and a machine gun, firing indiscriminately in the air while riding the back of a reared up brontosaurus. She imagines Jesus nestled against the bosom (if they have one) of a T-Rex, held lovingly in those good-for-nothing, limp little dino arms. Riley, it seems, is the quintessential 21st century British girl: she’s quick with a joke, holds her own with the boys, and drops names of philosophers easier than shout-outs to Jay-Z. She’s smart, and witty; a girl to share afternoon tea or to get a book recommendation, and as she leaves the room to change into her dress, I think she may just be one of us, a regular person. But when she returns, she stands tall in the doorway in a gorgeous black dress, all leg and long slender arms, backlit blond air glowing in the daylight, the room goes quiet.

Talulah Riley is far from ordinary.

Riley entered the world’s stage as Mary in Pride and Prejudice, having been snatched up almost directly after high school. Her career progressed quickly, jumping from project to project, including stage adaptations with Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic, cameos and starring roles on British television.
“I don’t feel like I’m that great of an actress; all I get to play are British school girls, which, essentially is me.” But in every constrained motion, in those breath-stealing moments before a kiss in Pirate Radio, and sassy quips in St. Trinians, she is a woman in control, an actress on the verge.

A week later we meet for afternoon tea at Musk’s Bel Air estate (Elon is parasailing in Egypt for the weekend), perched upon a hill from which the ocean is a thick blue line scrawled on the horizon. “Sorry for this look,” she says, “I’m auditioning as a slutty secretary in a little bit.” She’s wearing a tight ray skirt and a pinstriped shirt buttoned pretty far down. From where I’m sitting on the couch, catching glimpses of her between sips of tea from a “Late Night with David Letterman” mug, Riley radiates charm. She has an infectious laugh that seems to start somewhere deep inside her, bubbling up long before you ever see or hear it, a slow tsunami that washes over her as she scrunches her nose and as laughter dances out from her coy smile.

Then she talks of dreams again. She was always a dreamer, she says, with her face buried in books or in conversations with the animals at her Gloucestershire family farm. “I’ve always wanted to drive up the coast to Big Sur,” she says, holding the mug tightly. “If you’re going to drive through Europe, you need a VW camper with a mattress in the back; you want to do it old school. America’s big and you want to do it in a big way, in a Winnebago,” she pauses, cracks that slow smile again, and suggests, “or a Tesla.”

We seem to have the same idea, and moments later we head to the garage, past her father, who is reading Harry Potter in the kitchen. “It’ll leave your heart and kidneys behind!” he says about the Tesla Roadster’s rocketlike acceleration while Riley grabs the keys and walks barefoot down the stairs. “Here’s the Batmobile,” Riley says of her future car (“We’re getting another one soon, so this one will be mine”), unplugs the cable and starts it up not with a rumble but a whisper. Riley tears through the Bel Air curves, and I laugh uncontrollably; only on rollercoasters have I felt this velocity. As she presses the gas with her bare foot, and her hair flies wildly, I begin to wonder — she has her dream job, a dream car, and her dream guy, so if all your dreams come true, what do you have left to dream about?
For Riley, the well of dreams is bottomless.

“Elon asked me to go to Mars. I’m thinking about it.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from Intersection Magazine, Winter Issue 2009

View a PDF Tear Sheet of this Article

Yeasayer and Warpaint Besiege the Natural History Museum

Drew Tewksbury — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:23:47 +0000

A show is never just a show in Los Angeles. It’s a plague, or a slow-burning forest fire creeping across the city days before a performance takes place. It starts as hype metastasizing across online social networks and water cooler conversations, then becomes a scramble for tickets, followed by a wait in line, wallowing with others mired with doubt: “Are we going to get in?” The emails, tweets, and texts started days before: “You going to Yeasayer?” The main event will own the stage for a fraction of the time spent thinking about, planning, and traveling to the concert, so this better be worth it. But for every hoop you jump through to see a performance at the Natural History Museum, like Friday’s Yeasayer and Warpaint, fortune favors the brave.

First Fridays at the Natural History Museum has become one of those distinctly L.A. events that defines a season. Coachella ushers the end of Spring. Summer starts when the Hollywood Bowl opens and revival films begin in the cemetery. But winter belongs to the Natural History Museum. Amid Friday’s rain and cold, the Museum was was cozy and intimate. For those lucky to get in (the show sold out quickly), this second installment of First Fridays was a fine time to gather with your closest corpses (living and taxidermied).

L.A.’s own Warpaint enveloped the audience with the driving rhythms of their ethereal and full-bodied rock. Dual singers and guitar players Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman traded chugging strums and soaring vocals. Kokal, the blonde on stage right, emitted a voice powerful and aching, sometimes warbling or slow-climbing. On “Elephants” Wayman quickly finger-picked crystalline arpeggios, clearing the way for Kokal to lonesomely sing, “I’ll break your heart,” while thick bass of Jenny Lee Lindberg, and Stella Mozgawa’s killer drumming lit the flames that propelled Warpaint as precisely interlocked machine.

With their straight-forward set up, just guitars, bass, and drums, Warpaint refreshingly created rock that wasn’t poppy, but still swarmed with hooks that dug deep to the heart. Enrapturing and evocative, their airy and slightly foreboding sound opened doors to introspective spaces far away from the stuffed marmots and caribou of the North American Mammal hall. Ending with their stripped down Sonic Youth-sans-noise, “Krimson,” Warpaint redefined the way rock is written, and written about. Their guitar playing isn’t cocksure, and the bass isn’t ballsy. They don’t swagger or strut. They rock but aren’t rock stars. And they aren’t just an all female band, whose prowess is defined by their sex. They’re not a riot grrls, a chick band, or Lillith Fair fodder. Warpaint is a distinct rock band whose songs stand on their own. They do not exist in comparison to male bands, or as a minority in the rock world. They are what they are. So music writers, let’s take an oath.

I, (state your name), do solemnly swear, that as a music writer, I will forever refrain from calling a musical act made up of women a “girl band.” I will stop highlighting women who play guitars as oddities, or note that a female drummer is good “for a girl.” Let’s not marvel in their ability to rock, as though it were lightning unable to strike the same spot twice.

Let’s grow up.

Signed, (Your Neighborhood Music Writer)

As for Yeasayer, they’ve grown up a lot since they piqued indie media interest in 2007. Their often reported arrogant demeanor and navel-gazing experimentalism has fallen away, as they fine tuned their multi-genre mixing into a more streamlined unit. The five piece filled the stage with keyboards, drums, guitars, and even cowbell on a podium. The Brooklynites served up a dancey set, infused with electonic beats, organic instrumentation, with Chris Keating leading the sonic circus on vocals. The heavy bass of Ira Wolf Tuton, who was dressed in a wifebeater (we should stop using this term too, right?) while sporting some sort of midieval hair cut, rumbled and popped.

Shifting from dubby fretless bass to rafter-quaking synth bass, Tuton held the band together, whose disparate elements (and egos) led them astray in the past. Now, on the eve of their new record release, Yeasayer shows the same focus that appears on the forthcoming “Odd Blood.” The rhythm heavy “Ambling Amp,” provides a lighthearted bounce, and the Arcade Fire-ish “I Remember” centers around an ascending piano line and falsetto vocals. They also gave some crowd favorites including their swaying single, “Tightrope.” For a band that was subsumed in so much hype, they have apparently learned to not take themselves so seriously. Brooklyn can be insular, but the world is not. So as Yeasayer forges on into more inclusive direction, making more music to dance to, we say to Yeasayer:

Welcome to the world.

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly’s West Coast Sound Blog Feb 8th, 2010

Best Coast Forward

Drew Tewksbury — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:00:51 +0000

So much for the Southern California sun. The rain has been pouring for days, clogging the freeways and prompting tornado warnings, delivered awkwardly by local meteorologists. But here at Bethany Cosentino’s home in LA’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, it’s warm. She sits on the couch and pets her Garfield doppelganger, Snacks, while a space heater and two candles keep things toasty. Warmth is important to Cosentino: It’s the reason she left New York City, and it’s the way she describes the sound of her band Best Coast.

“There’s something warm about the lo-fi sound,” she says, clutching Snacks, her wool socks resting on the coffee table near a pair of broken sunglasses (not that she needs them on this gloomy day). Best Coast is the 23-year-old’s sun-kissed fuzz-pop band, her vehicle for resurrecting the 1960s Spector sound, infused with some Sonic Youth. Imagine a Ronnettes record blasted through a blown-out speaker or Kim Gordon if she had the voice of a girl-group chanteuse.

“This is Real” features Cosentino’s oohs and ahhs over jangly chords, in a song fit for Marty McFly and his mom to dance to at the Enchantment Under the Sea Ball. It has fuzzy guitar, soaring vocals, and, yes, analog warmth. But Cosentino’s songwriting process begins digitally. “I usually will bring a guitar out here,” she motions to an empty chair with a blanket adorned with a lion’s face, “and will lay down a few guitar tracks into GarageBand, then I’ll send them to Bobb.”

“My first project sounded like Jenny Lewis meets Tori Amos—y’know, the kind of music a 16-year-old girl makes. Then I got into punk.”

That’s Bobb Bruno, a musician, producer and longtime friend of Cosentino’s (not her former babysitter contrary to popular belief), with whom she crafted Best Coast’s sound. Bruno is a staple of LA’s music underground, performing with psychedelic sage Imaad Wasif and as a solo act opening for Wilco and Fiona Apple—sometimes dressed in a Takashi Murakami-styled bunny suit. Cosentino and Bruno were ensconced in the music scene surrounding LA’s all-ages venue the Smell, where Cosentino played with the drone-y experimentalists Pocahaunted.

“When I was about 16, I started working—at the Hot Topic at the Burbank mall, actually—and I started thinking more about music,” Cosentino says. “My first project sounded like Jenny Lewis meets Tori Amos—y’know, the kind of music a 16-year-old girl makes. Then I got into punk.”

The La Crescenta native’s father was a musician, who, she says, also works at the church Miley Cyrus frequents. He encouraged her to train classically as a vocalist, so Cosentino took opera classes and did session work during her teen years. Then came Pocahaunted, followed by an extended stay in New York.

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, then Cosentino’s year in the chill of Gotham helped her fall in love with California again. “It was too intense there,” she says. “Within two days of coming back to California, I started writing Best Coast songs.” On her MySpace page, written shortly after her return, she sums up her vision: “So, I am back in California, and I thought what could be more fitting than to record a bunch of songs about summer and the sun and the ocean and being a lazy creep? So, this is what I’m doing.”

“When I’m With You,” from her 7-inch on Black Iris, encapsulates the carefree spirit of Best Coast. It feels like summer sunsets in Topanga Canyon, faded ’70s photographs, and slow swaying to Melanie or Janis Joplin. Produced and recorded by Lewis Pesacov, of LA’s polyglot party bands Fool’s Gold and Foreign Born, the song captures a firefly in a Mason jar, creating a single that should glow brighter with time. Pesacov is recording Best Coast’s debut full-length due out later this year.

Music mags and blogs have raved about “When I’m With You,” but Cosentino is wary of the hype. The pigeonholing of Best Coast as purveyors of the “California Sound” has created too many expectations, she says, “Sometimes I’m not in the mood to write something sunny. Sometimes I feel more minor-key.”

As for Best Coast’s subject matter, Cosentino likes to keep it simple: boys. “When I was first writing songs, I would try to find the perfect metaphor for telling a boy I liked him without really saying it,” she explains, “but now I just say it.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from O.C. Weekly, Feb 4th, 2010

*

.

Motion City Soundtrack: ‘Nerds at Heart”

Drew Tewksbury — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:49:15 +0000

Motion City Soundtrack have a confession to make. “We’re just a bunch of nerdy kids who are old,” says lead guitarist/co-founder Joshua Cain. He and longtime friend and lead vocalist/guitarist Justin Pierre started touring the world after leaving their respective Minneapolis homes more than a decade ago. Though, as they’ve matured, some things stayed the same. “We’re still playing video games and love pop culture,” 33-year-old Cain says.

Despite their adolescent sensibility, Cain and his hyperkinetic, power-pop cohorts have encountered the very adult challenge of identity as they face a crossroads in their personal and professional careers: joining a major label. For five years, Motion City Soundtrack (MCS) were signed to seminal label Epitaph (NOFX, Rancid, Pennywise), founded by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz. For their just-released record My Dinosaur Life, MCS moved to Columbia Records, where their label mates include AC/DC, Beyoncé and Susan Boyle.

As Cain talks on the phone while walking between tour buses before a show in Cincinnati, he sounds confident that the quintet’s new label will be a good move in the rapidly changing music business. “After being on a great label like Epitaph, we didn’t want to sign something that wasn’t as good of a deal,” he says. “We had so much control of what was going on for us. We haven’t lost much of that, and [Columbia] is more supportive of us because they know everyone is trying to make ends meet. It’s a different culture now than it was 10 years ago.”

For their major-label debut, MCS enlisted some music-industry heavyweights to craft their album in the studios of North Hollywood. With legendary engineer/producer Andy Wallace (Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana) helming and Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus helping out, they forged a sound that was familiar but more accessible. “This new album was such a heavy record that we wanted to try Andy Wallace out,” Cain says. “The past few records were catchy, maybe the lyrics were dark. But for this album, it’s dark songwriting and dark lyrics. It felt like a straightforward rock record.”

Hoppus provided a much-needed outside ear to help shape the record. MCS took finished tracks to him, and he would then assist in fine-tuning their big-guitar aesthetic for a broader audience craving sweet hooks. “Mark came out to rearrange songs and told us to rewrite parts,” Cain says. “He comes from the same school of thought that we do most of the time; he knows what we’re looking for.”

“[Columbia] is more supportive of us because they know everyone is trying to make ends meet. It’s a different culture now than it was 10 years ago.”

That said, Cain insists the sun-soaked, pop-punk style of Blink doesn’t dominate the record. “I wasn’t influenced by Southern California music; we grew up in Minneapolis, so Chicago bands were big for me and that DC sound, not the pop-punk thing of Southern California.”

Even with the high-powered producers behind them, Cain says there’s no formula for the perfect pop song, no matter how hard they try in the studio. It just happens.

“Sometimes we’ll be writing a song, and you just know, ‘This is it,’” Cain explains. “I’ve tried to analyze it at times, but it’s just a moment when something sounds different from anything you’ve heard before. Some songs are just magical, and there’s nothing to do about it.”

My Dinosaur Life pushes the band’s sound past the Rentals-influenced, synth-nerd style that earned them attention in the early 2000s. The new disc is fuller and edgier, but it’s never harsh or alienating. “We’ve heard a lot of moms tell us, ‘I got your CD for my kid, but I ended up listening to it all the time.’ But I still see myself in a lot of the kids who come to our shows. We’re still nerds at heart.”

As MCS embark on their first tour of the new decade, they face serious questions and an uncertain road ahead. How do they go mainstream without compromising their confident, carefree sound? Can the band—and their friendship—withstand such pressure?

Cain’s not too worried about it. “We don’t try too hard to do anything, really,” he says. “The key is we’re going to be ourselves. We just do what we like and hope someone else likes it, too.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from O.C, Weekly, Issue February 11, 2010

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Skull Sessions

Drew Tewksbury — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:44:31 +0000

Trepanation, as the procedure is called, is an ancient medical maneuver that’s been chronicled in 16th-century German engravings and found in unearthed skulls dating back to prehistoric France. Medieval doctors believed trepanation — drilling a hole in a living person’s skull — was a way to get demons out, and early 20th–century neurologists prescribed it as a cure for mania.

In 2007, the very nonmanic French singer-actor Charlotte Gainsbourg sustained a head injury while waterskiing. Persistent headaches prompted her return to the doctors, who, after conducting neurological tests and an MRI, discovered a massive brain hemorrhage that was caused by the accident. The prognosis was serious, Gainsbourg explains: Blood clots, and a small hematoma, had gathered around her brain, “like the one [late actress] Natasha Richardson had,” threatening her life. To save her, the doctors drilled a small hole into her skull in order to release the blood.

The procedure worked, and in coping with the shock of it all, the singer learned that maybe those medieval doctors were on to something. “[My realization] wasn’t that dramatic as the surgery itself,” she qualifies, “but I was very, very close to death. I thought I was very courageous toward life and death, and I didn’t really care, but when it happened, I realized how scared I was.”

A native French speaker, in English, Gainsbourg saunters through sentences, tiptoeing from word to word like she’s crossing a creek one stone at a time. Twenty years passed between the creation of her first and second albums, and she rarely performs live. But then, she’s never had to make music in order to eat. During those two decades she was busy becoming an A-list celebrity in France where, as the daughter of beloved late crooner and mischief-maker Serge Gainsbourg and French actor/chanteuse Jane Birkin, she has been in the spotlight for much of her life. She’s steered that good fortune in fascinating directions. As an actor she’s worked with a long list of esteemed directors: Michel Gondry, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Todd Haynes and Lars von Trier. “I’m not an artist,” she protests. “I’m not even a musician. I can play the piano, but I’m not that good, anyway.”

Still, while getting her MRI and lying in the tube, Gainsbourg started to think about songs. “When I was inside that machine,” she says, “it was an escape to think about music. It’s rhythm. It was very chaotic.”

She stored the memory away, and after she recovered, serendipity put her in the path of Beck Hansen, whom she met at a White Stripes concert in L.A. She and the singer-songwriter had a brief conversation, initiated by their common bond, producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, U2, R.E.M.), who had worked on Gainsbourg’s 2006 return to music, 5:55, and three of Beck’s most critically acclaimed records, including Sea Change. Gainsbourg and Beck met again, backstage at a Radiohead show in Paris, which prompted her to explore the possibility of making a new record. She called Beck and was soon working with him in his Silver Lake home studio. Casually, the two began to record, minus any concrete expectations.

“It wasn’t planned that we’d do a whole album together,” she explains, “but Beck was inspired by my accident.”

He worked the instrumentation and co-wrote the lyrics, and Gainsbourg provided the inspiration by explaining what she’d experienced in the hospital. “Take my eyes and paint my bones/Drill my brain all full of holes,” she breathily whispers on “Master’s Hands” over Beck’s lurching guitar rhythms, producing what would become the first track on IRM (or imagerie par résonance magnétique, the French translation of MRI).

In the same session, they recorded “In the End,” a stripped-down acoustic ballad that layers Gainsbourg’s wafting hums and smoky vocals over glockenspiel and strings arranged by Beck’s father, David Campbell. But the sound, as with many of IRM‘s string pieces, faintly resembles the sensual, warm string sections of Gainsbourg’s father’s. (Beck, in fact, sampled Serge’s “Cargo Culte” on his track “Paper Tiger,” on Sea Change.) “I think they use strings in an entirely different way,” she says of her father’s propensity to use arrangements as a punctuation, as opposed to the Beck family’s more atmospheric runs.

Finally, Gainsbourg and Beck pieced together “Heaven Can Wait,” a poppy piano-driven stomp that would become IRM‘s first single. (Its bizarre, wonderful companion video is by Los Angeles director Keith Schofield.) When these initial songs were complete, Gainsbourg and Beck parted; he needed to finish his own album and she was working on film projects, most notably her shocking, award-winning performance in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

As she let those initial sessions breathe, the singer decided she wanted more and asked Beck if he’d do the whole album. The phone call didn’t surprise the musician. He’d been continuing to write music with Gainsbourg in mind, and in the next 18 months, they built IRM‘s stylistically disparate but impossibly cohesive vision. So she returned to Silver Lake.

“[Beck] wakes up with a new idea every day,” she says. “Beck wrote all the music and most of the lyrics, but I was reacting to what he was doing. I could have continued forever, but we stopped when the album made sense.”

The function of IRM, like that of the machine that inspired it, was to penetrate her head, Gainsbourg explains. “It was a chance to look at memory and looking into the brain in a more abstract, more poetic way.”

The album avoids the kitschiness of Beck’s genre chop jobs and funky electro-soul breakdowns but maintains his style throughout. Like the best producers, he helps Gainsbourg to speak for herself.

“My creativity comes out with others,” she acknowledges. “That’s why it is such a pleasure to be involved with Beck. I can’t do anything on my own. I like the idea of entering someone else’s world. I find more freedom inside someone else’s work rather than being completely free, and able to create anything.”

Yet, with the album complete, Gainsbourg faces a new obstacle: her first-ever American tour. Since that first time she sang with her father 26 years ago, on the notorious hit single “Lemon Incest,” she has rarely performed live. She says her father and mother, actress and “Je t’aime … moi non plus” singer Birkin, only performed after many years of commercial success. “My mother was my age when she went onstage,” she says. “She had about 10 albums by then. Even then, I saw her terrified backstage.

“It’s very disturbing, in a way, to put yourself out there. One side of me wants to be daring and wants to do it, and to be able to do it. Another part says, ‘You don’t know how to do anything.’ ”

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, January 27, 2010

Cobra Commander: Dissecting the Improv Music Sessions at Machine Project

Drew Tewksbury — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:11:25 +0000

Machine Project presented an improvisational music class throughout January that was based on experimental “game” by visionary jazz innovator (and antagonizer), John Zorn. Cobra, as Zorn named it in 1984, is a complex systems of cards, hand symbols, and, yes, hats that signal various actions to be performed by a musical group. No musical experience necessary (which was good for this West Coast Sound correspondent, whose only lessons in bass playing came from sitting in front of a 1990′s boombox) and a wide swath of abilities and instruments showed up. From upright basses, trumpets, and bassoons to tambourines, accordions, and ukuleles, each class created a different dynamic as musicians brought various instruments through the door. How would the trombone interact with melodica? What kind of duet involves a bass guitar and a jaw harp? What happens when two accordions attack? In Cobra, chaos and beauty could coexist.

The first sessions featured pianist Rory Cowal, who taught guided improvisation through unconventional techniques. He instructed musicians to play along to a sentence he read from a book, and selected two musicians to musically complement and antagonize each other. Then musician and composition doctoral candidate, Isaac Schankler, led the Cobra sessions, first teaching a simplified version of Cobra, then acting as prompter.

Schankler stood at the front of the room with a table of various cards. He held up a “Pool” card, and without any communication, instruments began to chime in. An accordion oom-pahed, while a vocalist whistled or gurgled, then a saxophone’s skronk would raise up the volume, and suddenly drop away as Schankler signaled for a cello solo. The cellist plays a slow melody for twenty seconds, then Schankler motions for one loud note from all instruments. The piece is over.

Later Schankler introduced the notion of guerrilla tactics, where musicians in the group could overthrow him, and become the prompter.

Do you play along or create something new? Do you stay safe or take a chance? Does your instrument define you? How do you get your voice heard? Who drowns you out?

Cobra’s rules are complex; John Zorn encourages accidents, misinterpretations, and mutations, but the lessons are simple:

-Know when to start

-Learn when to stop

-Don’t be afraid to follow

-Don’t be afraid to lead

-When a system is failing, tear it down and start again.

Try Cobra on for size.

By Drew Tewksbury

from LAWeekly.com Jan 27, 2009

Cold War Kids’ Lukewarm Friday Night at the Wiltern

Drew Tewksbury — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:30:36 +0000

View more photos in Timothy Norris’ “Cold Ward Kids @ Wiltern” slideshow.

It all started with a WTF moment.

The stage lights set the Wiltern aglow in a lavender haze, four video screens blasted ambient images, but the Cold War Kids were nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t one of those Sun 0))) moments, where mystique was the goal, instead technical problems made the Cold War Kids begin with a hiccup. Trudging on through the false start, Long Beach’s finest (sorry, Sublime), rolled out a relatively reserved show for a band who used to really rock it.

If we set the Wayback Machine to 2007, we’d see the Cold War Kids owning the stage, Nathan Willet leading his bandmates in sweat-drenched, flailing homages to Bijou porch-stompers. But four years later the Cold War kids have cooled off a little.

(Same Venue in 2007, same band though?)

Their self-described brand of soul-punk, has evolved lately, largely leaving both soul and punk by the wayside. Willet’s pipes still are the finest in rock when it comes to lung-busting crooners, but the new material feels a little “Top 40″ and mainstream. Maybe that’s their goal. There’s nothing wrong with getting big. But can they still rock by taking it down a notch?

They debuted the piano heavy, “Audience,” singing an ode to an “audience of one.” The Wiltern’s audience swayed and chatted over drinks, but only got semi-raucous when The Cold War Kids dropped their phenomenal anthem, “Hang Me Up to Dry.” The song from their 2006 album Robbers and Cowards, still has the power to move. The simple bass riff interlocks with the drums, laying down solid foundation for Nathan Willett’s howling voice that could raise a congregation’s hands to the rafters, or to God, or to whatever.

When Willet pleaded for a death row pardon during “St. John,” the sense of urgency, and passion dripped with the swagger of classic Cold War Kids. With a jammy cover of “Long As I Can See The Light,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, they gave another shout out to the songs of the South. But the South Bay residents have largely abandoned their swaggering, backyard sing-a-longs, for more streamlined pop-rock sound. Cold War Kids aren’t becoming Coldplay, yet, but they are definitely growing up.

Death of the Dive Bar?

Drew Tewksbury — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 02:50:10 +0000

Aproper dive bar should be as much about the spirit of its characters (aka alcoholics) as about the lack of polish. I had found a favorite in Rae’s Lounge in Culver City, only to show up one day to locked doors and a notice that it was soon to become the Westside branch of the Bigfoot Lodge, that synthetic log cabin-style bar in Atwater Village. In search of a new haunt, I headed to a minimall on Sepulveda that is home to two of the last remaining dives in L.A.: Roger’s Exciting Tattle Tale Room, with its red, white, and blue backlit sign, and the Scarlet Lady Saloon, its name spelled out in hokey western script.I’d heard there was a feud between the joints, so I sought answers at the aquarium shop, one of two businesses separating them. “In the 20 years I’ve owned this store,” said Ruben Peters, “I’ve never set foot in either place.”

“Some guy got stabbed in the Tattle Tale,” chimed in a (heavily inked) employee. Later I learned the shanking occurred in the parking lot of the adjoining vacuum cleaner store—a fact that didn’t give me much comfort.

I stepped inside the Scarlet Lady at noon. The cowboy motif yielded to a 1970s sports bar complete with a NASCAR-shaped light over the pool table and a dartboard flashing like a slot machine. Watching over the bar was Red, clad in sweat shorts with a braided ponytail sprouting from his balding scalp. Ted Danson he was not. When I mentioned the Tattle Tale, his convivial face turned somber. “I don’t know what their problem is,” he said, “but Roger won’t let his employees in here.” I decided to cross enemy lines.

I pushed open the heavy Dutch doors of the Tattle and waded toward a bar stool, blinded by darkness so thick it had a smell. “Do people still smoke in here?” I asked the bartender, Joanie Pleasant, a name I’m not sure she’d earned. She reached up and wiped the low wood-paneled ceiling with a cocktail napkin to reveal a yellow streak of nicotine. An enlightening trip to the gentlemen’s room uncovered vending machines with glow-in-the-dark condoms and 50¢ matchbook-size pictures of naked ladies. Back at my stool, I became ensnared in a conversation about gout. “Uric acid!” shouted a man with a belt bisecting his spherical stomach. My hour at the Tattle stretched into five; time was obliterated over Pabst Blue Ribbon and stale peanuts, and I was left with this thought: Do these warring bars understand that they are a dying breed that thrives on breakfast whiskey and bad lighting? The only war they should be waging is with time itself.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Los Angeles magazine, September 2009

UNDER PRESSURE: Going the distance with jump-cut electro rockers Jogger

Drew Tewksbury — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 03:16:04 +0000

Jonathan Larroquette and Amir Yaghmai sip beverages and talk with friends on the rooftop bar of the Downtown Independent Theater. Streetlights illuminate the late-night party crowd congregated for chill-out drinks and conversation. The pair, who perform under the name Jogger, nonchalantly maintain the appearance that they haven’t just done something amazing, as if the two longtime friends didn’t just execute a mind-bending, genre-obliterating set for L.A.’s most discerning group of beat aficionados.Earlier that night the duo had stepped onto the Downtown Independent’s stage for an installment of the Brainfeeder Sessions, a gig gathering L.A.’s avant-electro intelligentsia and video artists, curated by hot L.A. beat generator Flying Lotus. Alongside an impressive lineup from the city’s hot experimental electronic scene — including visionary Angelenos Gaslamp Killer and Daedelus — Jogger unleashed the fury of Yaghmai’s guitar melodies and Larroquette’s slice ’n’ dice beat-machine manipulations.

Yaghmai strummed the guitar chords and sang the opening lines of “Biss”: “They say he’s coming back again/he’s coming for the rest of us.” His delicate voice shifted to minor key and wavered like Antony Hegarty’s falsetto as Larroquette looked down, tucked his dark hair behind his ear and triggered a cymbal-smashing beat punctuated by synths. A chopped-up, robotic vocal sample fell away, leaving Yaghmai’s multilayered vocals as a centerpiece.

Jogger’s cut-and-paste aesthetic aligns jagged beats with Yaghmai’s precise harmonies. The latter’s guitar, violin and vocals are fed through Larroquette’s effects pedals, samplers and laptop, where he tweaks the incoming sounds live. In essence, Larroquette helms the digital sphere and Yaghmai handles the organic analog. No two performances are the same, and much is done on the fly as the pair creates songs, some of which are narratives, others musical movements, hulking like icebergs as guitar finger-picking melts away and rolling snares emerge and coalesce into a driving beat. The audience members nod their hats and hoodies, some tapping feet next to backpacks, obviously approving of the relatively new addition to L.A.’s eclectic-electronic underground milieu.

Jogger put in their time in the scene’s crown jewel, the Low End Theory club at Airliner, and developed the complex technology of their live show during a European tour with Daedelus. Their debut full-length album, This Great Pressure, is the first release on Magical Properties, Alfred “Daedelus” Darlington’s new label.

“This Great Pressure captures the best of Los Angeles’ sprawling, many-limbed scene,” Darlington says. “It isn’t from anyplace, and yet it whispers, as much as it yells somewhere.”

“For each new segment of a song, we’d essentially create a new band for it,” Yaghmai said

A few weeks earlier, Larroquette and his cohort were sitting in lawn chairs in Yaghmai’s West L.A. home. Construction workers moved two-by-fours from tables, cleaning up sawdust from the studio-in-progress. Fog rolled in from the ocean, touching the treetops with mist. “Thanks for your help, guys,” Larroquette yelled to the workers as they left for the day.

Both men grew up in L.A., and the musical roots of Jogger were laid down in living rooms, garages and homes across the city over the course of their long friendship. Like Jogger’s dual-digital and analog dynamic, the pair comes from different backgrounds. Larroquette is the outspoken, free-spirited son of actor John Larroquette (best known for his character Dan Fielding on the sitcom Night Court), while Yaghmai is a lifelong instrumentalist with a well-studied, understated demeanor. He’s also a working musician who recently toured Europe with Charlotte Gainsbourg, played with the Bird and the Bee, and has done session work on various film scores. He once had a run-in with pop queen Shakira at the Latin Grammys. “It might have been a Shakira look-alike,” jokes Larroquette.

“It was a Gypsy number,” Yaghmai explains. “There were wagons around and I was lying on these stairs. Then, as she comes down the stairs I would stare at her. I was supposed to serenade her, then salsa away while flames shoot up over my head.”

The gig never happened, though. They canceled the performance because of 9/11. Larroquette explains: “Apparently, they hate us for our freedom, violin serenades and pyrotechnics.”

Since 2005, Larroquette has hosted a successful comedy podcast, Uhh Yeah Dude, with friend Seth Romatelli. The two provide dramatic readings of craigslist casual encounters, hilarious personal stories, and offer, says Larroquette, a “weekly roundup of America through the eyes of two American-Americans.”

Although his musical background involves 100 percent less Shakira than Yaghmai, to Larroquette, music is no joke. He is self-taught (“I was the worst guitar student ever,” he confesses) and gleaned programming and synth experience from working in a keyboard shop with a loose lending policy.

“A lot of our music was driven by the gear we would get from that shop,” Yaghmai says. “We’d get a new piece just to see what it did.”

“Then we were, like, ‘We need this in our lives,’ ” Larroquette adds.

Yaghmai: “For each new segment of a song, we’d essentially create a new band for it.”

Jogger was born from this spirit of experimentation. They perfected the technological aspects of live mixing and guitar integration and began recording material. Larroquette’s meticulous attention to detail helped to create the frenzied beats driving the duo. “Sometimes I’ll even make the beats by programming everything one note at a time,” Larroquette says while pointing to notes on an imaginary musical scale in front of him.

It wasn’t until Yaghmai’s high school friend Daedelus gave them a nudge that they began to get serious. In early 2009 he invited them to put some tracks on Friends of Friends Vol. 1, a compilation of experimental digital sounds, then took them on an international tour. From those beginnings came This Great Pressure.

“They have been making this record (or some version of it) forever, and just needed someone to impose deadlines to force their completion,” Daedelus says.

Jogger isn’t just all over the musical map; the duo redraws it completely, delineating a new sound for a future L.A.

Daedelus sums it up best: “Kids should be growing up with these sounds.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from L.A. Weekly, December 9, 2009

The Alchemy of Fool’s Gold

Drew Tewksbury — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:43:44 +0000

Inside the Ethiopian Merkato, everything smells like sage. The market sits in the middle of Little Ethiopia, a half-mile stretch of Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants, Jewish thrift stores and an erotic-cake shop. Along the Merkato’s walls, DVDs and CDs showcase the profiles of African pop stars, and baseball hats emblazoned with green, yellow and red decals of the continent are stacked neatly against a shelf. The aroma of curry greets customers as they walk in the door, and, for a moment, the sage mingles with the restaurants’ scent wafting down Fairfax Avenue.

In front of a case of glass pipes and fake gold jewelry, Luke Top and Lewis Pesacov kneel and rifle through a bucket of cassettes. Top wears a fedora and Pesacov’s sunglasses rest upon his head. The two members of Los Angeles musical collective Fool’s Gold carefully inspect the Merkato’s choice collection of African hits. A young black child leans on the display, and stares at them, mouth slightly ajar. “Are you guys,” he starts, stops, squints his eyes suspiciously and continues, “famous?”

“Not quite yet,” Pesacov says, smiling, hands still full of tapes.

“We’re in a band, and we’re just trying to sound like this guy,” Top adds, holding up a tape with an African man, whose white robe fades into a cloud scape. “We’re not there yet,” Pesacov tells the boy, “but we’re getting there.”

As a matter of fact, Fool’s Gold’s self-titled polyglot pop album does sound like Mahmoud Ahmed (“Nadine”), the beloved Ethiopian soul singer on the cover of that tape. But their sound also gleans the rolling congas of Cuba (“Poseidon”), the guitar gymnastics of Mali’s Tinariwen (“The World Is All There Is”), and the saxophones from Detroit soul (“Night Dancing”).

“Some of our songs are a heartbeat, some singing and a melody, it’s so simple,” Top tells me over a lamb plate at Messob Restaurant, across from Merkato. “Purely visceral and emotional.”

The band members, a 10-person collective of friends and neighbors, represent a cultural cross-section. Some come from L.A. bands, including drummer Garrett Ray, guitarists Matt Popieluch and Pesacov of eclectic rockers Foreign Born; Brad Caulkins, saxophonist from Jail Weddings, and flutist Mark Noseworthy of Pink & Noseworthy; and Mike Tapper, ex-drummer from We Are Scientists. Keyboardist and backup vocalist Amir Kenan immigrated from Israel when he was young, and became friends with Top at a summer camp in Reseda when they were 10. The percussion team adds international flavors to the musical gumbo, with Argentine pop star (and Latin Grammy nominee) Erica Garcia, Ghana-trained percussion leader Orpheo McCord (who also plays with Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros), and Brazilian/Mexican visual artist Salvador Placencia.

“Some of our songs are a heartbeat, some singing and a melody, it’s so simple. Purely visceral and emotional.”

“It comes from the same place, you know, the slave trade brought people from all different cultural points, like West Africa, Cuba, to Louisiana, to Brazil,” Pesacov says. “And there’s a point where they all overlap. Music from the Congo was really influenced by Latin music. So there is a place where African drumming overlaps with drum-line music in New Orleans, and where that overlaps with Samba in Brazil.”

Fool’s Gold is an extension of this cross-pollination, but not a means of culture-vulturism purveyed by other musicians, looking to capitalize on the next big craze, Top says. “It’s not like Diplo just playing a sample. We’re actually playing this music and digesting this music through our bodies,” he explains, diffusing the authenticity argument waged by so many music writers upon American bands with African influence.

“Ethiopians are influenced by Western music,” Top says, “and we’re bringing it back here, redigesting it into Western music. It’s a cycle.”

“It’s a dialogue. We’re praising it, and lifting it up. Through learning to play it, living and breathing it,” Pesacov says.

Pesacov’s musical background is far more heady than the others’: He studied under American avant-garde composer Mark Randall Osborn in Germany. “I’d spend seven months just writing one piano piece,” Pesacov says. When Randall Osborn died in 2002 in a traffic accident, Pesacov picked up his guitar again. “I haven’t figured out how it informs what I do now,” he says. “When I’m onstage [with Fool’s Gold], I’m not thinking. It’s coming from the body, not the mind.”

“That music lives in the brain, whereas Fool’s Gold lives in the heart,” Top interjects.

Top plays bass and sings lead vocals. His voice soars high or wavers like a shaking leaf as he sings in Hebrew. Like Mariah Carey, Ahmed and, more recently, Dave Longstreth from Dirty Projectors, Top practices melisma, the vocal act of singing a single syllable and extending it over many notes. This vacillating vocal style appears in African-American gospel and R ’n’ B, but is largely absent from most American music, especially rock. It’s the sound, to reduce it to its barest element, that sounds “foreign.”

“Ethiopian pop and Eritrean pop? I don’t know why I love it so much or identify with it, but I just do,” Top says. “Why do I feel this shit, why do I have to do this shit?”

Here, in the idea and culture of Ethiopia, Fool’s Gold takes root. After all, Ethiopia is a land of origins and sanctity. It is the cradle of civilization, home to Lucy, the 3.2 million–year-old Australopithecus skeleton, and early–20th century Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, exalted as god incarnate by Rastafarians.

Top’s mother, he says, thinks he has a spiritual connection to Ethiopia’s Jewish heritage. The Beta Israelites of Ethiopia believe themselves to be the lost tribe of Israel, and Emperor Selassie traced his lineage to King Solomon. Though many Ethiopian Jews were airlifted back to Israel in Operation Moses in 1984, and Operation Solomon in 1991, Top and Pesacov dream of going back and playing Hebrew Ethiopian soul for those left behind.

The decision to sing in Hebrew was natural and unexpected, says Top. “When we started the band,” he explains, “[we] just jammed with no vision. Then it just seemed organic to sing in another language, because the music we were listening to [at that time] was in another language. So I was, like, BTW, I know another language.”

Top was born in Israel to an Iraqi mother and a Russian father. He came to California at 3 years of age, and lost the connection to his Israeli roots. “I grew up thinking I had no home,” he says, “and I didn’t really identify with the people here. Singing in Hebrew now helps me explore this side I barely know. It allowed me a freedom. There was a bit of a security blanket in knowing that people couldn’t understand what I was saying. They were connecting with the pure sound of my voice.”

Fool’s Gold aren’t world music, but they are worldly. They represent real stories of L.A., about immigration and assimilation, outcasts and innovators, co-existence. “Growing up with this strange duality maybe led me to seek out different [cultures] to identify with. I really identify with this meld of Eastern and Western music, it’s everything I am. I think we’re punk.”

Photos and Test by Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, October 9th 2009

Writing the Trains: Graffiti on Freight Cars

Drew Tewksbury — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:29:43 +0000

The underside of freight cars smells like wet dust. The cold metal rail digs into your knees while you hide between tanker cars, waiting in darkness for a pickup truck to pass. The sound of tires on asphalt grows closer as the truck passes, its headlights flashing from behind a tanker car’s wheels.

Jaber, a graffiti artist, waits patiently, then picks up his backpack clanging with spray cans, affixes his paint mask, and says, “I think we’re cool, let’s go.”

He walks quickly across an empty track and grabs the tank car’s ladder. Hand over hand, Jaber climbs atop the black tanker. The pickup truck is nowhere to be seen, but the Port of Long Beach is in full view. Red flames burst from smokestacks set against a sea of lights, and freight cars line the tracks like steel sausage links on rails. It’s an industrialized version of hell, half Blade Runner and half Hieronymus Bosch, but for Jaber and the countless freight writers across the world, the train yard is their home.

“When I’m out here, I really get time to think,” says Jaber, who gave his graffiti name but did not want to be further identified. He climbs off the tanker and returns to a mural he has started on a primer-gray boxcar. He sets out his cans in a line, looks at the series of lines and angles scrawled across the car. Over the next 45 minutes Jaber sprays colors and designs that are difficult to see in the darkness.

He is creating a “burner,” a multicolored piece that spans most of the boxcar. Burners are a distant relative to hobo codes, the markings written on freight trains by train-hopping hobos of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those codes are some of the earliest forms of graffiti in California, written in coal on trains and under the oldest bridges, where traveling hobos slept.

For most of his life Jaber has walked along the tracks to tag his signature image — a cartoonish profile (possibly a self-portrait) — on the underbelly of trains and on industrial complexes. Now in his early 30s, Jaber makes his living with his art, selling canvases of his works, live painting at events, and working in the film industry.

When he has the time, he returns to his roots in the train yard. He never hits a “holy roller,” a car carrier named for the small holes in its metal walls, which would allow paint to penetrate and damage the autos. He also is careful not to cover train identification numbers or other markings essential to the rail officials.

“If you do it right, they don’t really care and your piece can run for years, all across the country,” Jaber says.

He was right. Earlier that day, Jaber spotted a car he had marked in 2007. “I remember that very night,” he said, smiling slightly at the sight of his old friend.

Los Angeles city officials are trying to end freight writing. In August, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich told the L.A. Times about an “end of days scenario” for graffiti crews, in which injunctions would make it illegal for taggers to hang out together. It’s the same tactic the city uses on gang members.

“If you want to tag, be prepared to go to jail,” Trutanich said, “And I don’t have to catch you tagging. I can just catch you … with your homeboys.”

A spokesperson from Trutanich’s office tells L.A. Weekly that the plan is just in “an exploratory phase,” and his office claims that 32 million square feet of graffiti were removed in 2007-2008 at a cost of more than $7 million.

Like Jaber, many graffiti writers are not “homeboys,” and they don’t tag over city murals or private property. With the evaporation of school art programs in underserved communities and the inaccessibility of high-priced art programs — where an MFA is almost always required — the wall, billboard or freight train presents a better opportunity for artists to get seen.

The periodic fetishization of graffiti by the art establishment — from Basquiat and Banksy to Shepard Fairey — sends the message that street art is more than a hobby. It can become a lucrative and important branch of America’s folk-art lineage.

Union Pacific railroad has a different view. The painting of freight cars is illegal and unsafe, and violators are subject to arrest by Union Pacific police, says Tom Lange, communications director.

Jaber knows all of that. But it doesn’t stop him.

“That’s it,” he says of his work, moving back from the boxcar. He holds up his camera and takes a picture. In the flash, Jaber’s mural comes into view: the jagged blue letters unfolding like feathers or vines, the imperial-purple waves crashing behind the text, and black script reading “Lost Angel.”

Then darkness returns. Jaber puts the camera in his backpack and leaves the train yard and his burner. Tomorrow the train might be gone, but in the unsaid mantra of the freight writer: What you create comes back to you.

Photographs and text by Drew Tewksbury

from L.A. Weekly, Nov. 4th, 2009