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Whatever happened to suburban rhythm?: The unsung music of Long Beach, California

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Whatever happened to suburban rhythm?: The unsung music of Long Beach, California

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Content WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SUBURBAN RHYTHM? THE UNSUNG MUSIC OF LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA By Sarah Bennett A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM December 2012 ii Table of Contents Abstract iii “The Honey In The Carcass Of The Lion” 1 “Iʼll Sleep When Youʼre Dead” 4 “Thatʼs No Moon—Thatʼs a Space Station!” 7 “Whatever Happened To Suburban Rhythm?” 12 “Truth Sets In” 16 References 21 iii Abstract It has often been said that the city of Long Beach, California only exists to those who live there—and yet the laid-back autonomous port city 25 miles south of Downtown Los Angeles has been birthing major contributions to popular music for decades. What is it about Long Beach that has made it the logical home of global artists as diverse as Snoop Dogg and Sublime? And why is there little mention of other influential local acts such as Suburban Rhythm, the funky-punk band that catalyzed a 3 rd -wave ska revival in neighboring Orange County? The story of Long Beachʼs music scene is not only a story of the city itself, but of Southern Californiaʼs multicultural identity as a whole. This is the sonic history of a pop musicʼs secret weapon—a forgotten city sitting in plain sight. 1 The Honey In the Carcass of the Lion On a recent mild spring evening, dimly-lit Alexʼs Bar—on the Eastern edge of Long Beach, Californiaʼs Cambodia Town—was alive with the Tecate-induced energy of the cityʼs music community in bloom. It was a Friday show at the punk-rock-meets-Dia-De-Los-Muertos dive bar and an interesting mix of local twenty and thirty-somethings brought the room to its 200-person capacity. The mixed crowd was not one that would commonly appear in Los Angeles just 25 miles to the north, but here in Long Beach—the most diverse large city in the nation 1 —itʼs the norm. Black hip-hop heads in lifestyle-brand t-shirts hung with white Orange County-bred co-eds dressed on daddyʼs dime who talked to first-generation Hispanic desk-jobbers who mingled with thrift-store-plaid clad hipsters of all skin shades as tough-as-nails locals in home-silkscreened hoodies made their rounds. An equally as diverse lineup was set to perform. One opening band played psych-tinged instrumental prog, its black female drummer channeling both Shiela E. and Zach Hill. Another sounded like 60s Brazilian tropicalia on a ride through Southern Californiaʼs pan-Latino influences. And a third performed excerpts from their latest rock opera, which was somehow right at home with the both the sequin-loving Queen fans and leather-bound Iron Maiden lovers in the audience. None of the bands were out of place that night and none of their fans were either. Instead, conversations about mutual friends, mutual experiences and mutual hometown love crept through the silence between songs and it didnʼt take long to realize that the whole bar was full of Long Beachʼs music-minded 1 Ness, Carol. "S.F.'s Diversity Comeuppance." San Francisco Chronicle [San Francisco] 04 Jan 2001, n. pag. Print. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/01/MN34884.DTL>. This statistic indicates that the likelihood of choosing two citizens at random and having them be of a different race or ethnicity is higher in Long Beach than anywhere else in the U.S. 2 faithfuls—each one separated from the other by fewer degrees than Kevin Bacon. Not a bad turnout considering that the showʼs Facebook event page only listed 90 people attending. 2 Then again, Long Beach is a place where word of mouth is worth more than an army of Twitter followers and itʼs not every day that a band from this often-overlooked city on the outskirts of Los Angelesʼ endless sprawl plays a homecoming show with cross-country and European tours under its belt. Yet, here it was, April 2011, and the Long Beach-based Free Moral Agents were back in town, surrounded by friends at Alexʼs Bar after two months of shows that for the first time took the six-piece music collective from Krakow to Kansas City in support of their second album, Control This. "It feels so good to be home and see all of you," said Free Moral Agentsʼ half-Japanese vocalist Mendee Ichikawa, wearing a floral print dress and black leggings. She looked around the room, nodding lightly to all of the familiar faces in the audience while the rest of the band readied itself for the set. It was just after 1AM. A sleepy guitar riff drifted over the crowd followed by a slow, almost tribal bongo beat that soon met Ichikawa's voice. "When I smile," she sang repeatedly until a crescendo no one knew was building broke into a head-slam flurry of melodic guitars, frenzied hi-hats and tweaked keyboard notes. A few minutes in, the beat changed up and dropped, as if it was now going backwards and Ichikawa's refrain returned, this time met with a pulsing bass line and stampeding Korg chords that dragged it into the next verse. The song—like the others on their recent album Control This—is not quite rock, not quite jazz, but not quite electronic music either. It has the ghost of King Tubby and a love of Sonic Youth, but remains funky and trance-inducing like a late 60s psych-rock 7” all while shaking hips, bobbing heads and moving feet 2 All descriptions of this concert are from notes taken by the author while attending the event. 3 with the excitement of a modern hip-hop track. Free Moral Agents occupy a place between all of these sonic arenas and more—an experiment in post-genre soundscapes where disparate fragments come together to form new possibilities. But the creators of this mish mash of styles are not digital millenials, whose identities are shaped by the stylistic free-for-alls of the Internet. The members of Free Moral Agents are, however, citizens of Long Beach—a city whose industrial roots, ethnic diversity and uncharacteristic-for-Los-Angeles urban density has been fueling similarly groundbreaking cultural collisions for more than 30 years. Taken more broadly, the bandʼs sound is an organic representation of Southern Californiaʼs multicultural landscape, a product not of RSS blog feeds and Spotify playlists, but a lifetime of interactions with a city that—unlike neighboring areas such as South Central and Orange County—has long embraced the differences of its residents. 4 Iʼll Sleep When Youʼre Dead “Long Beach is a weird place," Long Beach keyboardist and producer Isaiah “Ikey” Owens told me one Super Bowl Sunday when he suggested we meet for mid-morning drinks at a Downtown Long Beach dive bar 3 . "Itʼs a ghetto. Itʼs a city. Itʼs suburb all at once. There are just a lot of weird influences here.” Free Moral Agents began in 2003 as Owensʼ solo project and is now a collective of local musicians who blend jazz, funk, dub, hip-hop and psych rock as though it were second nature. At 36, Owens is not only the band's instigator, but—as one of the few local musicians whose decades-long career stretches outside of Long Beachʼs borders—he is also its most Google-friendly member. From 2002 until 2011, Owens was the Grammy-winning keyboardist for The Mars Volta, a progressive rock group known for its blending of jazz, Latin- American music and math-rock time signatures. Though the bandʼs main members—Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez—are originally from Texas and the band currently claims residency in El Paso, the Mars Volta formed while the two friends were living and experimenting with music in Long Beach. Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez had disbanded their long-running and influential post-hardcore group, At The Drive In, and began a live dub band called De Facto. After relocating to Long Beach where some friends were from, the two recruited Owens and played with several other local musicians before morphing into The Mars Volta, a modern-day arena act that consistently sells out world tours. The cityʼs eclectic music community seemed to not only give the Texans a slew of new sounds to work with, but encouraged them to not be afraid of blending the ones they were already interested in playing. "The coolest thing about here is that no bands sound alike,” Owens says of why Long Beachʼs music scene is different. “Youʼre not going to see four 3 Personal Interview. February 5, 2011. 5 bands that sound the same at a Long Beach show. That is really rare to say— across the country itʼs rare.” Owens has channeled the cityʼs ostensibly schizophonic landscape into a variety of projects since he began playing keyboards as a student at Long Beachʼs Polytechnic High School—an institution more renown for its contributions to professional football than popular music. But in the early and mid-1990s, Owens met other musicians through the school and eventually played with a number of local bands including ska kids Pocket Lent, power-pop act Teen Heroes and the Long Beach Dub All Stars—a reggae/punk fusion group that featured ex-members of Sublime. For a while afterwards, Owens dropped his instrument altogether and followed a growing interest in electronic music and dub—the remix-heavy Jamaican-born sound that emphasizes songsʼ bass tracks. He was a longtime attendee of Crucial, a still-running popular monthly dub and reggae club night at a cave-like bar inside a Long Beach steak restaurant. After running into Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez at a hip-hop show in 1998, however, Owens picked up his keyboard again, joined De Facto and dove into an experimental dub phase that found him mixing the genre with rock, rap and electronics for other projects and collaborating with acts as far-apart as Hispanic rapper 2Mex, heavy metal band Mastadon and jazz-in-his-blood DJ, Flying Lotus. Today, in addition to playing with Free Moral Agents, Owens is also a producer-for-hire, working with everyone from San Franciscoʼs openly gay electro-clash group Gravy Train!!!! to Atlanta, Georgiaʼs instrumental psych rock band The Odist. Most recently, he was hired to play keyboards for Detroit rocker Jack White of The White Stripes on a solo world tour, adding yet another dimension to Owensʼ mainstream presence. 6 Owens is one of many musicians who rose up in Long Beachʼs music scene during the late ʻ80s and early ʻ90s—a time when the cityʼs diverse, blue collar population was melding local punk, surf and hip-hop cultures with global music forms coming through Long Beachʼs growing port complex. Rap, rock, hardcore, reggae, ska and Latin music equally flowed through the sun-splashed streets and unhindered artists discovered new possibilities at these unlikely intersections. The cityʼs place as both a port town and an urban space in the shadow of Southern Californiaʼs larger cities resulted in hybrid sounds that RJ Smith wrote in Spin Magazine, “would be positively radical if it had come from Los Angeles.” 4 "In LA, people are so spread out that in order to get community, they have to align themselves with a genre of music," says Aaron Carroll, a Long Beach- born music geek who managed local independent record store Fingerprints for most of the 1990s. 5 "Here, there are lots of different sounds and some people listen to some stuff more than others, but when it comes to genre's, it's always been just one big Long Beach scene." Though sometimes behind the scenes, Ikey Owensʼ two-decade presence in popular music is emblematic of the longtime relevance of Long Beach, his longevity owing as much to his stellar musicianship as it does to the range of unique influences acquired in Long Beach 6 . From the early days of 3 rd -wave ska to the latest folk revival and every dub and hip-hop resurgence in between, Owens has dipped his fingers in seemingly disparate genres and brought life to projects on all ends of the spectrum. Owensʼ history with the diverse Long Beach scene has made him an ideal facilitator—able to connect with a myriad of bands with different backgrounds and sounds. “I was the kind of kid who knew everyone. And I still like to hang out with all different kinds of people,” Owens says. “To me, music is all the same thing.” 4 Smith, R.J. “Ugly Trend of the Year ʼ96.” SPIN. January 1, 1996. 5 Personal interview. December 20, 2011 6 Ziegler, Chris. “From Long Beach to Mars Volta and Beyond” The District Weekly. April 7, 2007. 7 Thatʼs No Moon—Thatʼs a Space Station! Stretching inward from a horizontal coastline on the southernmost periphery of Los Angeles County, Long Beach, California might as well be on the moon. Separated from the Hollywood egos, hyped hipster haunts and pay-to-play shows of L.A. by a vast spread of concrete freeways, de facto segregation and working-class suburban sprawl, the city lives not only in another region of the county, but in another state of mind. Its 490,000 ethnically and racially diverse residents live smushed-together amongst oil rigs and dive bars, shipping cranes and coffeeshops, potholes and art galleries, in an urban village crucially situated at a global crossroads on the Pacific Ocean coastline. Long Beach has always existed as a notable extension of Los Angelesʼ sprawling Plains of Id, a term coined by architecture critic Reyner Banham to describe the Great Basinʼs endless grid of streets and houses. 7 An early 1900ʼs seaside destination and site of a prominent naval base as well as one the largest oil strikes in the country, Long Beach welcomed tourists, workers and seamen from all backgrounds. But Banhamʼs groundbreaking observations of L.A. in the 1960s—which for the first time positively viewed the region as a new kind of city, one with “no urban form in the commonly accepted sense” 8 —do not factor kindly into the singular personalities of the municipalities embedded within it. For Banham, Long Beach was part of L.A.ʼs “Surfurbia,” a harbor city that was “mostly a creation of the Pacific Electric” similar to Venice Beach, Manhattan Beach and Seal Beach. 9 In the latter part of the 20 th century, however, Long Beach expanded its deepwater port, opened up international trade and grew beyond Banhamʼs rearview mirror, into a cultural petri dish for globalized America. 7 Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies. Penguin Books, 1971. 8 Banham, 76. 9 Banham, 32. 8 As Joe Day writes in the forward to the 2009 edition of Banhamʼs book, “more than $100 billion of goods move through the ports of L.A. and Long Beach each year…playing an unrivaled role in delivering the fruits of neo-liberal free trade to its largest market in the world.” 10 Though often forgotten because of its mid-size population and proximity to the much larger Los Angeles, Long Beachʼs history as a prominent L.A. suburb, its solid transportation infrastructures connecting it to global networks and diverse demographics make it a unique locus for cultural production. “People are very surprised by the richness here,” says Jennifer Volland, 11 who co-wrote a coffee table book about Long Beachʼs place in Southern California architectural history. 12 “We talked to several publishers at first and they couldnʼt get into the whole regional thing, but once we showed [Hennessey & Ingalls] all the photos from Julius Shulman and Marcus Grant—great architecture photographers—they knew just from the images that this was also about something bigger.” In its turn-of-the-20 th -century heydey, Long Beach was a working-class oceanside resort and blue-collar city based on an all-American foundation of trade, military, oil, aerospace and defense. 13 It was then-known to both detractors and boosterists as “Iowa-by-the-Sea” and even as a popular stop for well- traveled Naval seamen, showed only hints at the global city it would become. But like other parts of the Los Angeles region, the latter part of the 20 th century brought periods of economic decline for the residents of Long Beach as the Naval shipyard ceased operations, the Signal Hill oil wells began to dry up and the military-industrial complex that once flourished on its shores waned in the 10 Day, Joe. “After Ecologies.” Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies. Penguin Books, 2009. pp. xvii. 11 Personal Interview. January 31, 2012. 12 Mullio, Cara & Volland, Jennifer. Long Beach Architecture: The Unexpected Metropolis. Hennessey & Ingalls, 2004. 13 Mullio & Volland, 14. 9 final decades of the Cold War. Though the waterfront remained dilapidated and local gangs crept into the unkempt downtown during this time, the Port of Long Beach—and its sister Port of Los Angeles across the San Pedro Bay—grew larger and more prominent. As international trade and the global flow of consumer products increased in the 1960s, the combined ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles steadily expanded, becoming a major connection point between the United States, South America and the Pacific Rim. Today, the attached ports are one of the largest oceanic transportation complexes in the world, handling more than 70% of the Pacific Coastʼs waterbourne trade and making it the largest customs district in the Western Hemisphere 14 . Along with goods from around the world, so, too, come people and—by extension—their different experiences, cultures and customs. Port cities have always been rich laboratories for global culture for this reason: where else can so many different groups of people be thrown together in an urban blender? Throughout history, cities such as Venice, Lisbon, Amsterdam and New Orleans have emerged with unique hybrid identities because of the transnational connections made through their ports. Modern Long Beach is no exception 15 . Immigrants from now-connected parts of the world descended on Southern California in the ʻ60s and ʻ70s, and many settled in the affordable neighborhoods of Long Beach. Whatever was left of the idea that Long Beach was “Iowa-by-the-Sea” soon became lost as Dutch, Greek, Latino, Cambodian, Portugese and Spanish immigrants found their American Dream there. In the 1980s, City Hall put forth a new official nickname for Long Beach, adorning signs and businesses with a modern declaration—“The International City.” 14 Erie, Steven. Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development. Stanford University Press, 2004. 15 Burke, P. Cultural Hybridity. Polity, 2009. 10 “It says something that we have these great secret neighborhoods and all these little businesses that we have,” Volland says. “Itʼs not like these people come from money. I wonder if sometimes these harsh, gritty conditions lend some creativity that makes it better than L.A.” But Long Beachʼs connection to an international port only explains half of the cultural flows the city is working with. Its proximity to Los Angeles has an equally as important role in Long Beachʼs place as a cultural laboratory. Local and regional movements canʼt help but pass through the centrally-located city, which in addition to its autonomous municipal government and geographic distance from other downtowns and urban spaces, differs from Los Angeles in very major ways. While L.A. is often cited for its invisible racial borders and built-in social distance, Long Beach sets itself apart with density and diversity indexes that are uncharacteristically high for Southern California. The likelihood of living next door to someone of a different racial background is higher in Long Beach than anywhere else in the country and the number of people living per square mile is more than four times the L.A. County average. A “Distribution of Racial and Ethnic Groups” map generated through Long Beachʼs 2010 census data shows most of greater Los Angeles as well-defined patches of solid colors, indicating dominance of one ethnic group in certain areas. The city of Long Beach, by comparison, is entirely covered in a thick blanket of rainbow confetti. 16 So with a geographical position at the crossroads of flourishing global networks and its closeness to a metropolis that billed itself as the City of the 21 st Century, Long Beach in the 80s was on the cusp of a cultural breakthrough, its residents just starting to experiment with decades of transnational cultural input. 16 “Mapping America.” New York Times, 2010. <http://www.projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer>. 11 Former Long Beach City Councilmember and urban planner Marc Wilder predicted it best when he told the reporter Joel Kotkin in 1989, “Weʼre going to be different from anywhere else. And weʼre going to do things differently because a Cambodian, a Hispanic and a Jew share the same space. We will see new kinds of institutions made by new kinds of people.” 17 17 Rieff, David. Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World. Simon and Schuster, 1991. 12 Whatever Happened to Suburban Rhythm? Despite a moniker that conjures up images of pastel-toned tract homes and unhip dad dancing, Long Beachʼs Suburban Rhythm grew out of a world just the opposite. One look at the ethnic makeup of its main band members 18 —which consisted of singer Dennis Owens (whose dad is black), keyboardist Rodi DelGadillo and drummer Carlos De La Garza (both are Hispanic) and bassist Ed Kampwirth and guitarist Jake Kline (both white)—and itʼs obvious that this act didnʼt form on the wide, segregated streets of any sprawling suburbia. In fact, the demographics of the band members line up almost perfectly with Long Beachʼs census data for the time, which showed large numbers of blacks, whites and Hispanics co-existing in the same neighborhoods. “You looked at the band on stage and you couldnʼt help but see a reflection of the city we lived in,” Aaron Carroll, who followed the band during its early ʻ90s heydey, says. “Not just racially, but also musically. Theyʼre the ultimate Long Beach band.” Formed in 1990 when its members were just finishing high school, Suburban Rhythm evolved out of The Silent Invasion—a ska and punk fusion band featuring Dennis Owens (no relation to Ikey), DelGadillo and Kline. Dennis and DelGadillo had been friends for years, bonding over a mutual love of British two-toners The Specials, South Bay punks Circle Jerks and the “Godfather of Soul” James Brown. “Everything is so culturally smushed together here,” Dennis says. 19 “Unlike L.A. where everyone can have their own little islands, everything that happens in Long Beach happens in such close proximity. Thatʼs why there are so many cross-cultural things. You get shows that are diverse and people checking each otherʼs shit out because you canʼt help it. Itʼs there. Thatʼs the nature of the city.” 18 See also, music video for “Coming Out Of The Woodwork.” Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS_vZsPSnnU 19 Personal interview. August 8, 2011 13 Long Beachʼs culture of forced collisions is what ultimately created Suburban Rhythmʼs combination of bass-slapping punk, up-stroke guitar work and genre-bending composition. The sound took note from ska-punk pioneers Fishbone but gave the concept more funk, more fun—more Long Beach. The band exuded genre-melding skills and life-loving positivity in opposition to other area acts such as Comptonʼs hostile gangster rap and Red Hot Chili Peppersʼ sex-laden alternative L.A. rock. Suburban Rhythm, on one hand, was the sound of Long Beachʼs sense of glocal place. On the other, it was the sound of American multiculturalism—that optimistic 80s buzzword that rarely found reality outside of United Colors of Benneton ads. For a small-time local band, Suburban Rhythm appealed to kids across a wide spectrum of backgrounds and hometowns. They attracted a devoted, rabid following that was thoroughly disappointed when, in April of 1994, Suburban Rhythm played its final show. Many of those involved in the scene at the time believe that Suburban Rhythm is the ultimate Long Beach band that never made it. 20 "We were convinced that Suburban Rhythm was the local band that was going to blow up," says Aaron Carroll. "But all of the guys that opened for them and looked up to them made it big instead." Suburban Rhythm isnʼt necessarily a household name like Long Beach reggae-fusion contemporaries Sublime, but it was this bandʼs short-lived-yet- prolific career that sparked a nationwide ska revival still felt to this day. Their only-in-Long Beach take on Caribbean music forms resonated with others attempting similar punk fusions in nearby Orange County and by 1997, bands such as Reel Big Fish, Save Ferris and No Doubt—names that often appeared 20 This sentiment has been echoed (unsolicited and almost word for word, both during interviews and casual conversations) by nearly everyone I have mentioned this project to. 14 alongside or underneath Suburban Rhythmʼs on photocopied show flyers—were in heavy rotation on MTV and radio stations across the country. Orange County became ground zero for what was eventually dubbed the “3 rd -wave ska revival” and the areaʼs output of multiple pop-friendly ska-punk bands ignited the subgenreʼs global success. Many of Suburban Rhythmʼs contemporaries continue to pay homage to their favorite local band: No Doubt members penned the liner notes to a 1997 posthumous compilation of the bandʼs songs and Reel Big Fish still performs its song “S.R.,” which laments the loss of the band with a catchy chorus that is often played in the style of other genres such as rap, punk, country, reggae, blues and metal. 21 Whatever happened to Suburban Rhythm? Why did Ed and Scott quit? (Would you please drop some bass and shit?) Please donʼt go, Suburban Rhythm. All the other bands are just shit. (You said it!) The question posed in “S.R.” might be a literal one —why did a favorite local band break up?—but heard today, it also resonates with a deeper inquisition. Whatever happened to the legacy of Suburban Rhythm, the band that catalyzed one of the most important music movements in Orange County history? Why is the band nowhere to be read about except on Reel Big Fish fan forums and an unreferenced Wikipedia page? Better yet, whatever happened to Long Beach, the city that birthed not just Suburban Rhythmʼs proto-third-wave ska, but also new sounds in surf rock, gangster rap, reggae fusion, alt country, hardcore punk and Mexican-American 21 This description is based on personal attendance to Reel Big Fish concerts by the author. 15 norteño music? 22 Why is it that when most people think of music from Long Beach, itʼs really only two names that come to mind—Snoop Dogg and Sublime? Dennis Owens has similar questions, especially now that he is playing bass for Free Moral Agents. “Whether you like them or not, Sublime and Snoop Dogg are two of the biggest musical things to come out of Southern California in the last 20 years. What comparably in L.A. has come out? A lot of important things have happened in this area that never got recognized which is insane to me. Huge movements in youth culture happened here and Long Beach is still the last place to get covered for anything. As I always say, ʻLong Beach is the city L.A. Weekly forgot about.ʼ” 22 Examples of Long Beach artists in each genre mentioned, in order: The Pyramids, 213, Sublime, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, T.S.O.L. and all those on Pedro Riveraʼs record label Cintas Acuario. 16 Truth Sets In It was only 10:15PM when the cops showed up. A Long Beach Police Department squad car drove onto the front lawn of the house at 5 th St. and Rose Ave. and unceremoniously announced to the living room full of spectators that they were to vacate the premesis. Avi Buffalo—a four-piece Long Beach band of then-high schoolers who had only played three of their intimate indie-rock songs—calmly unplugged their instruments and waited for drummer Sheridan Rileyʼs dad to pull the minivan around. 23 “Sorry guys,” singer and songwriter Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg told the 75- or-so people who had piled into the frequent site of house shows that night in May 2009. Outside, as his band loaded equipment into a navy blue Toyota Sienna under the watchful eye of the police, barely-18-year-old Zahner-Isenberg accepted hugs from disappointed friends talked with his bandʼs manager, a low- key blonde from L.A. She loves their new material, she said. She sees a lot of opportunities for them on the horizon. Within a year, Avi Buffalo would be the first Long Beach band to take over the blogosphere—the curly fretwork, world-wise lyrics and pop charm won over harsh critics everywhere from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork even before their self- titled debut album became the soundtrack to 2010ʼs endless summer. 24 The suburban-Long Beach teenagers were thrust into the indie-rock pantheon: after signing to Nirvanaʼs former label Sub Pop Records, Elliot Smithʼs buddy Aaron Embry invited them to record at his new home studio in L.A. and before the album was even pressed, they were hand-picked by Pavementʼs Steven Malkmus to play at major festival All Tomorrows Parties. “Aviʼs guitar style is different from every other indie pop guitarist,” Sub Popʼs head of A&R told the L.A. Times shortly after signing the band on the hinge 23 Descriptions of house show based on personal attendance by the author. 24 Thompson, Paul. Review of Avi Buffalo self-titled album. Pitchfork.com. April 27, 2010. <http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14175-avi-buffalo/> 17 of a few Bandcamp demos. “Heʼs not just hammering out a bunch of chords, heʼs pretty much soloing through his songs with these crazy jazz rounds.” 25 Zahnerʼs skillful, blues-based approach to jangly college radio jams, however, is not the organic product of pre-Internet cultural collisions in late ʻ80s urban Long Beach like Sublime, Snoop Dogg or Suburban Rhythm. Nor is it the result of a culturally isolated teenager who uses his bandwith to collide with the world. Avi Buffalo is the songwriting experiments of a naturally gifted suburban- Long Beach millennial, who “was of the age to get really into the Postal Service” and yet grew up listening to his dadʼs collection of “weird classic rock and pop stuff” and jamming with old blues musicians in beachside bars. 26 “Iʼm of the downloading-a-bunch-of-music generation,” Zahner-Isenberg admits when we meet for coffee one afternoon, “but I kind of feel cheated by the fact that everything is so available on the Internet. Youʼre able to just type in ʻalbum, artist, Mediafireʼ on Google and thatʼs all it takes. Itʼs awesome, but thatʼs versus everybody else growing up before us who were like, ʻOh this is the only way to get this CD and I value it a bunch.ʼ” It might be easy to lump Zahner-Isenberg in with other musicians around the country starting bands and coming of age in the digital era, but he is still one artist that could have only come from Long Beach—a city with a penchant for community forever distanced from sonic fads. Youʼd never know that by scouring any of the numerous pieces about his music that continue to cycle through the press, though. Most of them use “Long Beach” as an adjective not a selling point—the city that created him becomes a fleeting descriptor on the way to more flushed-out thoughts. And thatʼs if Long Beach is mentioned at all. 25 Weiss, Jeff. “Where the buffalo roam: Avi Buffalo signs to Sub Pop.” Los Angeles Times. October 22, 2009. < http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/10/where-the-buffalo-roam- avi-buffalo-signs-to-sub-pop.html> 26 Personal Interview. 12 Feb 2012 18 Like other artists from this compacted port city, the importance of Zahner- Isenbergʼs hometown is never questioned. Even with a news cycle that insists every piece of culture be explored to the depths of its capacity, Long Beachʼs influence on the music it has produced is rarely suggested. Though many well- regarded and comprehensive books exist on Southern California music history, itʼs a struggle to find evidence of Long Beach in any of them. Nowhere, for example, in any of the dizzying number of encyclopedic looks into elements of the 1980s hardcore punk movement 27 will you discover that the scene-changing record label SST as well as SST Studios occupied a noisy corner-lot warehouse in Downtown Long Beach for more than 30 years. Prehaps it required too much of a digression from the atomized myth of South Bay hardcore to explain why SST spent most of its life located 20 miles south of where it first originated or how come the member of Black Flag with the most eclectic music tastes (“He dug Motown, disco artists, country artists…and adored all kinds of jazz from big band to early fusion,” Michael Azerrad wrote of SST owner Greg Ginn his book Our Band Could Be Your Life 28 ) felt comfortable cementing business in fiercely diverse Long Beach. So why is searching for information on the musical history of one of the largest cities in California like searching for a lost boat in the Bermuda Triangle? Is it merely the fault of geography, which shows Long Beach as yet another easily-forgotten municipal wisp on the edges of Los Angelesʼ notorious sprawl? Maybe, but the unique makeup of the city implies something more. Because of its uncommonly high density and diversity, Long Beachʼs musical output happens in a drastically different way than it does in L.A. Instead of splintering into separate scenes like singer-songwriter folk rock, lo-fi garage rock, leather jacket cock-rock and socially conscious hip-hop, Long Beachʼs 27 Such as Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California by Dewar MacLeod and Steven Blushʼs American Hardcore: A Tribal History. 28 Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. Little Brown, 2001. 19 close-knit music community operates as a singular scene, one with multiple influences and tastes. This has blessed Long Beach musicians with open minds and multicultural inspirations, but has also prevented any of them from solidifying around a particular “sound.” Good news for musicians looking to branch out, but an unappealing sell for record labels and journalists. “Sublime and Snoop Dogg arenʼt from Long Beach in the same way that Nirvana is from Seattle,” says Aaron Carroll. “Itʼs easy to say Nirvana is emblematic of a certain style of music that other bands were making in Seattle in the early ʻ90s, but Snoop Dogg and Sublime? There was nothing else like it at the time—not even in Long Beach." For Zahner-Isenberg and other Long Beach musicians, the unification of disparate music scenes that would elsewhere be heavily fragmented continues to allow the city to be a natural hotbed of creativity, even when threatened by Internetʼs mix-and-match reality. With a post-genre music scene fueling his preternatural talent, then, it doesnʼt seem odd that Zahner-Isenberg returned to Long Beach from European and North American tours and decided to spend a year self-releasing a flurry of trippy, psych-jazz solo recordings. 29 Nor was it weird when he began showing up in a local Baptist churchʼs Sunday gospel band or making small-time appearances as the low-key guitarist for his friendsʼ blues, folk, jazz and rock acts. In Long Beach, itʼs entirely normal for a 20 year-old Jewish indie-rocker from the suburbs to play improvised keyboard tracks over pre-programmed hip- hop beats with the old-guard black, Japanese and Latino members of Free Moral Agents. 30 Even in modern times where young artists can remix the worlds they encounter with the ease of Garage Band, music from this oft-ignored city 29 Avi Zahner-Isenberg. Phantom Trannies. Self-released, 2011. Mp3. 30 Which Zahner-Isenberg did in December 2011 for the forthcoming Free Moral Agents album. 20 resonates with a worldy aesthetic that could only be obtained in the diverse cultural laboratory of post-industrial, post-genre, post-mainstream Long Beach. “In L.A., there are definitely strong waves of whatʼs cool—these overwhelming trends,” says Ikey Owens, who is a huge supporter of Zahner- Isenberg and other young local artists. “But I remember being in the ska scene and that was the downfall of it. You have to work within this singular motif and itʼs so limiting. Eventually that leads to everyone dressing the same way, using the same instruments and talking the same way. Bands in Long Beach donʼt have that—there isnʼt a ʻsoundʼ going on here and thank God. Youʼre not trying to fit into anything so you can be truly creative. Artistically, itʼs perfect.” 21 References Interviews Aaron Carroll, December 20, 2011 Rodi Delgadillo, August 9, 2011 Dennis Owens, June 25, 2011 and August 8, 2011 Isiaiah “Ikey” Owens, February 5, 2011 Abe Tostado, March 13, 2012 Jennifer Volland, January 31, 2012. Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, February 12, 2012 Publications and Articles Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. Little Brown, 2001. Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies. Penguin Books, 1971. Blush, Steven. American Hardcore: A Tribal History. 2 nd ed. Feral House, 2010. Burke, P. Cultural Hybridity. Polity, 2009. Day, Joe. “After Ecologies.” Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies. Penguin Books, 2009. pp. xvii Erie, Steven. Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development. Stanford University Press, 2004. “Mapping America.” New York Times, 2010. <http://www.projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer>. MacLeod, Dewar. Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California. University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. 22 Mullio, Cara & Volland, Jennifer. Long Beach Architecture: The Unexpected Metropolis. Hennessey & Ingalls, 2004. Ness, Carol. "S.F.'s Diversity Comeuppance." San Francisco Chronicle. January 2001. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/01/MN34884.DTL>. Rieff, David. Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World. Simon and Schuster, 1991. Smith, R.J. “Ugly Trend of the Year ʼ96.” SPIN. January 1,1996. Thompson, Paul. Review of Avi Buffalo self-titled album. Pitchfork.com. April 27, 2010. <http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14175-avi-buffalo/> Weiss, Jeff. “Where the buffalo roam: Avi Buffalo signs to Sub Pop.” Los Angeles Times. October 22, 2009. <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/10/where-the-buffalo-roam- avi-buffalo-signs-to-sub-pop.html> Ziegler, Chris. “From Long Beach to Mars Volta and Beyond.” The District Weekly. April 10, 2007. Recordings Avi Buffalo. Avi Buffalo. Sub-Pop Records, 2010. CD. De Facto. ¡Megaton Shotblast! Golden Standard Labs, 2001. CD. Free Moral Agents. Control This. self-released, 2011. Mp3. Free Moral Agents. Everybodyʼs Favorite Weapon. Gold Standard Labs, 2004. Avi Zahner-Isenberg. Phantom Trannies. Self-released, 2011. Mp3. Reel Big Fish. Turn The Radio Off. Mojo/Jive, 1996. CD. Sublime. 40oz. To Freedom. Skunk, 1992. CD. Sublime. “Badfish.” Single CD. Skunk, 1995. Suburban Rhythm. Suburban Rhythm. Solid Records, 1997. CD. 23 Concerts Avi Buffalo at the Rose Temple, May 2009. Avi Zahner-Isenberg at Harvelleʼs Long Beach, April 2012. Free Moral Agents at Phantom Gallery, February 2011. Free Moral Agents, Chicano Batman and Bella Novella at Alexʼs Bar, April 2011. Reel Big Fish at House of Blues Anaheim, July 2004.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bennett, Sarah (author)

Core Title Whatever happened to suburban rhythm?: The unsung music of Long Beach, California

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 08/27/2012

Defense Date 12/27/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag California,cultural production,culture,hardcore,hip hop,Long Beach,Los Angeles,Music,OAI-PMH Harvest,popular culture,popular music,Port,rap,ska,sublime,Urban

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kun, Joshua D. (committee chair), Anawalt, Sasha (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email thesarahbennett@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-93633

Unique identifier UC11290076

Identifier usctheses-c3-93633 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BennettSar-1170.pdf

Dmrecord 93633

Document Type Thesis

Rights Bennett, Sarah

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA