The Whitest Fest You Know

Went to Coachella this weekend and had a pretty good time. There was one thing though that bothered me a lot about the direction of the festival. For a "hip" festival it ain't very hip, and it's not open to any really adventurous acts.

In the first years of the Coachella Festival there was definitely an attempt to bring in acts from all of the music spectrum. Over the years DJ and Hip Hop acts like the Chemical Brothers and Black Star played the main stage while more exotic fair like Tricky and the Nortec Collective played in the tents around the grounds.

Now the only acts that one might consider soul or R & B are either British bands featuring mostly white performers or older acts that have long ago been given the "whitey" hipster stamp of approval. Acts like De La Soul and Jay-Z who might have been radical choices when they first came out are hardly adventurous choices in 2010.

Even the couple of older acts that peaked my interest, Sly Stone and Gil Scott-Heron have both long been the kind of artists that old hippies point to proudly in their record or CD collections. Proof that whitey white white folks have a little subversiveness in them. Let's face it. Sly Stone was a headliner at Woodstock and Gil Scott-Heron played on the original Saturday Night Live a generation ago.

Oh, sure their were some DJ's on the bill. But even the dance music was mostly played by white British folks and hippie types. There were no underground hip hop acts, no jazz and other than a couple of hipster Latino acts like Aterciopelados and Calle 13 very little Latin flavor. Considering SoCal is a mostly Latino enclave that was pretty much a big middle finger to the people that live in the area.

Coachella isn't about the people of Southern California. It isn't even about music at this point. It's about making a buck.

I've always said the album that kills a big act isn't the one that sells poorly. It's the album that sells a ton of records and CD's that really stinks. You know the album I'm talking about. That real stinker that you and all your friends purchased and now the Used Record Store won't even take it back. That's the one that kills a career. Not the well regarded follow up record that no one buys after being burned on the last record.

The same is true of big events. No one went to Sundance last year despite some of the best films the festival has shown in years. Why? Because of all the years of crappy films made by a small handful of filmmakers. The years of crappy mumblecore, big actor vanity projects and the political screeds masquerading as documentaries have made Sundance a pale shell of the festival that once defined independent film. Sundance lost the adventurousness that made it a top festival and now people are turning their back on it.

The same thing will happen to Coachella unless they go back to the things that made the festival great.

What happened to popular music in America?

Tonight I was watching a little American Idol to kill time. It was the elimination episode after the usual karaoke performances from the night before. This week the Idol contestants were butchering the catalogue of Lennon-McCartney. It's really hard to take Beatles songs and make them unlistenable, but the Idol crew did their best.

I think the most noticeable thing about most Idol contestants is their overwhelming love for maudlin crooning. For that reason they almost uniformly picked the later Beatles ballads penned by McCartney instead the great pop numbers McCartney and Lennon churned out as a writing duo in the mid-60's. This meant a long and winding parade of the sap that Sir Paul specialized in over the years.

I was pleasantly surprised when the long haired rocker kid did the classic Lennon solo number Jealous Man until I began to worry this might open the door for another contestant to choose a later McCartney number like Ebony and Ivory.

To make a long story short, I started getting bored watching the show tonight and I started You Tube spelunking to kill time. Going to my front page I saw that a whole lot of old Smith's videos had been queued up for me because I had watched Morrissey's Every Day Is Like Sunday the other day.

Wow, they were a great band. I mean, really f-ing great. I watched them play early small shows on German TV and later big shows in front of tens of thousands in Madrid. Johnny Marr playing that great guitar and Morrissey doing his odd sensual geek boy dance while singing the most disarming, funny and heartbreaking lyrics.

It was about the time I was watching the lads from Manchester playing There's a Light That Never Goes Out with the audience singing so loud to almost couldn't hear Morrissey singing that I looked up and saw the Ryan Seacrest intro-ing current pop star Rihanna, She was singing her newest single Rockstar 101.

Good lord, what dreck. She comes out in a what appeared to be somewhere between a bondage outfit and a wetsuit. Then she proceeded to sing about being a rock star with lame keyboard sounds playing behind her in the background. I'm not sure what you call the kind of music the band was playing but it most certainly didn't rock.

Near the end of the song someone brought her a guitar to put on and she played a couple of chords while striking her best "Rockstar" pose. I'm not sure who she was trying to imitate but the guys in Zeppelin don't have to worry about copyright infringement. The bottom line is Rihanna may be a step up from the Idol contestants but she doesn't have the kind of unbridled energy that a great performer should have.

The fact that she is considered a star right now says a lot about the current pop landscape.

It's not that there isn't great music out there. There is.

And a lot of it is coming from the US. It's just not being promoted on TV right now in this country.

Over in Europe there are still a lot of great music shows and they broadcast live from all the big festivals. When I meet young people from Holland, France, Spain and Britain. In Europe American bands like MGMT, TV On The Radio, the Black Keys and Deerhunter play in front of large crowds in the thousands at the big festivals.

Festivals here in the US like Coachella, Bonneroo and Austin City Limits also draw large crowds. But nothing like the festivals in Europe. And these bands are almost never on TV with the rare exception of an occasional one off on Letterman or Leno.

Americans are force fed the likes of this Idol cast and Disney's latest cupie doll pop tarts like Miley Cyrus or Demi Lovato while our best bands are playing overseas.

It's sad state of affairs if you ask me.

Animal Boner isn't dead: A short history of punk rock.

The other night I was hanging out with some old friends who I've known for a good number of years. We were commiserating after hearing that a friend of ours had OD'd and died up in San Francisco. I'd like to say that's unusual, but for this group of friends it just isn't so. We've had a number of friends die that way over the years.

But that's not what this blog is about. It's about the last days of punk rock.

There was only three true punk rock scenes in the history of music. The first one in New York with bands like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Television.

The second and probably most famous scene out of the UK with the Sex Pistols. the Clash, the Buzzcocks, the Damned and so many others names both famous and infamous.

Finally, there was Los Angeles and Southern California. This was the Screamers, the Weirdos, X, the Germs and the like. This was the last original punk rock scene.

There are people who will debate this basic truth. But they would be wrong.

These are the people who want to include places like Washington, DC and Boston in the mix. But those scenes happened later and were much more influenced by the Hardcore Scene. That was a scene came out the last throws of LA's punk rock scene and included bands like Black Flag, the Minutemen, Husker Du and the Meat Puppets.

And yeah, I know the good folks at Sundance tried to pawn off that awful, revisionist piece of crap American Hardcore as a legitimate documentary of a scene. But then the film festival geeks tend to get everything wrong.

So, my friends and I were discussing the death of this friend and it was mentioned along the way that he used to hang out with a bunch of other punk rock kids at the old Cathay de Grande in Hollywood.

The Cathay de Grande was one of second generation punk clubs in Hollywood and as such was what might affectionately known as a dump. According to one newspaper it was also known as "The most dangerous club in America."

According to Wikipedia this was "Due to problems with neighbors, violence caused in part by punk gangs such as the LADS gang, FFF, HRP and others, and legal problems related to business conflicts, the Cathay de Grande closed in 1985 With Violent Psychosis, The Mentors with El Duce and Circle Jerks performing the farewell show. Shortly before,Dobbs, the booker at the Cathay de Grande, started Raji's a block to the north on Hollywood Boulevard.

This was the club where punk went to die. where the last remnants of the original dream of freedom turned into a cesspool of drugs, violence and excess. It is also where the last punk rock kids got the last punk rock names.

See the original punk names out of New York were things like the Ramones, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine. These names, while colorful, were almost stately compared to the next generation of names out of London like Johnny Rotten and Rat Scabies. Then came the LA names like my pals Smog Vomit and Dick Rude.

Then came the fans started giving themselves punk rock names and everything got even nuttier, or better depending on how you want to look at it.

Suddenly there was a kid named Animal Boner. Who we ended up talking about because he was a friend of our friend who passed away. He was one of the kids at the Cathay de Grande when it was fucked up and violent right at the end.

Naturally we assumed Animal Boner went the way of all those other kids. No way he wasn't dead from a drug overdose after all these years.

"Let's face it," my pal Bob said, "chances are you're not gonna live a long life if you're drug dealing punk rock kid with a name like Animal Boner."

"Animal Boner isn't dead. " said Andre, another friend of ours, "He's a born again Christian in Seattle."

At that point we all laughed. Laughed hard. Piss your pants laughter.

Go figure. Kids named Jason and Jimmy didn't make it out, but Animal Boner did. And so did some other friends who no one thought had a chance.

It's good to be alive.

FYI - I do know that's a picture of DC stalwarts Minor Threat playing at the Cathay de Grande. The mantle was passed from punk to hardcore at venues like this and Perkins Palace.