The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (14 page)

***

In No Age’s Dean Spunt and Randy Randall, Jim Smith found his two most dedicated and willing volunteers—true sons of the scene. Like most of the kids who’ve found purchase in The Smell’s hallowed space, they were refugees from the city’s rock club circuit. “One of the first places I ever played was the Cobalt Cafe, in the Valley,” says Spunt. “They’d do a bill of six local bands and when you walked in they asked you what band you were there to see. Once you got over 50 people for your band, which was impossible, then you got 50 bucks and a dollar a head after that.” He adds, “They made you really feel like a kid.” Never mind that he still was one.

“The first time playing Smell, it was the anti-version of that.” No booze. No tickets. No backstage. No bullshit. No security hassling you. No pay to play. The Smell is the very definition of anti-club. “At The Smell you were treated as an equal,” explains Smith. “The kids that come, they are people, not ‘patrons.’”

When Spunt and Randall discovered The Smell in 1998, it wasn’t the province of teen punks, but a dingy downtown venue that’d been colonized by the experimental noise scene—Nels Cline and Win Records bands. The two promptly began booking shows for their then-band, Wives, and as Spunt puts it “we took the place over.” They began booking hardcore and punk bills, including an all-female crust band from the Valley, Dead Banana Ladies, who would soon become scene-queens Mika Miko. Exit old noise dudes, hello excitable tenth graders of the Inland Empire.

Spunt’s devotion was instant: “The first time I went there I thought ‘I want to be here every day!’ and until about a year, year and a half ago, I was. I was there every day. It was so crazy and so special.”

Spunt and Randall joined the cabal of people around Smith who were deeply involved in keeping the place open. In 2002, after the Great White club-fire tragedy in Providence, The Smell, like many on-the-fringe-of-legit spaces around the country, was closed by the fire marshal. For the next six months the Smell crew worked to bring the club up to code as quickly as possible. Spunt moved all the shows that had already been booked into a squat where he was living in Hollywood. Almost nightly, there was a four-band bill in his living room, and almost every day the two would be down at The Smell, putting on new doors, building and painting, alongside Smith and the rest of the regulars.

Amid the process, The Smell became more than a hangout, it became a place Spunt and Randall were responsible for keeping running. “Anthony Berryman from Soddamn Inssein came down to the video store where I worked,” explains Randall. “He told me ‘Jim cannot do this by himself. Listen, you are going to get keys. I don’t want to hear that you are flaking on shows you booked or not showing up.’ I had to learn how to do sound, how to put the mics up there and run the soundboard, be there every night. Jim would try and pay me, and I would avoid him. He’d try to slip a twenty in your pocket somehow.”

“And then we did the same thing to Mika Miko, because Wives were going on tour for four months. They were there everyday and playing twice a week,” says Spunt.

In the years since The Smell’s re-birth, the venue’s stakeholders have gone from being just a trusted few bands and regulars to the scene at large. The door was thrown open for everyone to get involved, and it wasn’t simply an issue of good intentions. No Age began to tour frequently (sometimes with Smith in tow), as did Mika Miko, Abe Vigoda and longtime Smell booker/compatriot Brian Miller. Randall explains, “Jim figured that it had to get bigger than just us and other bands, it had to be the kids, too.” He made a “What Would Jim Do” book that volunteers consult; a dozen volunteers have keys. The Smell transitioned from the hands of a few to any and all willing hands.

“[Jim] really sent it out to the community, that they
have
to
do it,” says Randall. “People complain that The Smell won’t book their band, but then you have to ask them, ‘Well, how many shows have you been to? Have you volunteered there?’ It’s about nurturing the community.”

***

Backstage after No Age’s show in London in late October, a young blogger has been waiting, impatiently, for the 30 minutes since Spunt and Randall got offstage, to interview them for her website. They are soggy and winded from their set and trying to get it together to walk across the street to play a second, “secret” show for 120 die-hards at a 90-capacity sushi bar. Despite the fact that the girl is openly resentful and has a list of 40 terrible questions, they indulge her. With smiles. They are unwaveringly polite. It is the California way to never offend anyone, but their gentleness, removed from the context of The Smell’s downtown alley, becomes immediately recognizable as the spirit of Jim Smith. After 10 minutes, they have to go. They invite her along—she carries the cymbal stands.

At the packed sushi joint, kids are blowing up balloons, and Smell-scenester Vice Cooler is deejaying R. Kelly too loud. The band heads backstage—a stairwell to the roof—where they learn the Misfits’ classic “Where Eagles Dare.” Someone had dialed up the guitar-tab on their iPhone, learned it and proofed it against the collective memory of the band’s friends that have gathered in the stairwell. Five minutes later, Spunt and Randall open their set with it. Ebullient fans scream along: “I AIN’T NO GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH! YOU BETTER THINK ABOUT IT BAY-BAY!” The floor begins to flex wildly under the pogoing people, so, at the behest of Randall, the audience sits down, which sparks a pig-pile pit. The band blazes through a short set with everyone rolling on each other, singing along and writhing on the floor.

At the club show No Age played just an hour before, for 1,200 composed Londoners, they were great—a truly fun band. But to see them play a party at this too-small spot, heavy with die-hards, is to see No Age at their incandescent, miracle-band best. It is then that you get that they are so much more than a band. To so many, they are deliverance, they are everything everyone says they are—everything we’ve wished and waited for in punk.

Since its inception 30-odd years ago, punk has had a spotty history of living up to its best intentions, which is part of its charm. Periodically, there have been bands—most notably Crass, Fugazi, Bad Brains, The Ex, Bikini Kill—or labels (K, Dischord) or scenes that sprang up with radical notions that inspired a paradigm shift. It is a matter of inspiration—and great records or live shows are necessary to back it up, to wrap people up in the big ideas—the pugnacious do-it-yourself dogma is transmogrified into something urbane and empowering. It’s a rare sort of once-or-twice-a-decade thing, when a band shows us we can be more than fans, and that this can be about something other than entertainment, getting wasted or getting laid. It is an alchemical shift, where music becomes exactly what you believed it was when your heart was 15 and pure, and all the hope and time you’ve given it pays out. The Smell is home to one of these coalescent moments, No Age is one of these bands.

***

While The Smell may have indoctrinated No Age on how to approach their career and given them an ideological toehold for their music, it didn’t necessarily prepare them for success. The band is being held up as an emblem of positivity in the media, hailed as a signal of a new Los Angeles, and the band is wearing the weight of those expectations. “We want to play and do our thing but the visibility puts a lot of stress on people around us, the community of L.A.,” says Spunt. “I have to wonder, like, did we fuck something up?” What happens in a scene of equals when suddenly one band is declared king?

***

It’s the morning after what should have been No Age’s triumphant return to The Smell. It’s been a big year for the boys; their debut on Sub Pop, Nouns, has the underground hyperventilating with glee, and has brought them to the attention of the overground: they have been profiled in
The New Yorker
and played on a late night chat show. They have been nominated for a Grammy for their album packaging. After months of non-stop touring, they had almost two weeks home for a break, and booked a hush-hush show at The Smell. The show was moderately attended, but the audience had few familiar faces. Then, after the third song, in a pocket of strange silence, a kid yelled giddily from where the pit should have been, “YOU WERE ON MTV!” Dean and Randy exchanged glances and Dean quickly counted off into the next 4/4 blitzkrieg; a handful of kids pogo, while the rest gawk silently at the band.

No Age shows here, historically, have been a crush of sweat and scream-alongs. The show had a curious pall for a band that has enjoyed such a fast ride to fame, and it exacts a toll from the already-exhausted boys. Randy explains, “What was weird last night was that we were in our home, but there were a bunch of strangers in it. Normally we might yell out to our friends in the audience, but there were so many strange faces.”

“It was just weird. It was The Smell, but it wasn’t,” says Spunt. “Me and Randy were pretty much just hanging alone. It was fine, it was cool, but it wasn’t our friends. I wasn’t concerned with [the] amount of people. It was just… All of our friends were busy—Mika Miko was playing a show, Abe Vigoda was doing stuff, everybody is doing stuff on a bigger level, so…” He trails off. As the No Age’s profile has risen, so has that of some other Smell bands, namely Mika Miko and Abe Vigoda. Lately, the press has portrayed both bands as No Age’s retinue rather than the close-knit cabal they are.

“After last night, I was bummed. This morning I was trying to get clarity on it and I cried. It’s not that I’ve lost my friends—but doing this was fun because we were doing it all together,” Randall confides. “Being gone so much, you miss the parties, you miss birthdays, and then after a while I’m not expected to be there, so no one is bummed when you don’t show up. I have lost certain community ties, friends.” He continues, “Last night I was thinking, ‘What makes you think you can just come home and expect everyone to show up?’ Who am I to ask for that when I am not there?” He sighs, “The reason I cried was the sacrifices. There’s been too many. Too many little things that I didn’t know were on the line.”

It is Jim Smith, more than anyone, who insists that all the attention on No Age and The Smell is not having a corrosive effect. Despite what naysayers may predict, The Smell isn’t losing its vortical tension. While a lot of the regulars insist that shows regularly sell out now—which would have been a freak occurrence in the past—Smith is reluctant to cop to any discernible shift, in attendance or otherwise. “Sure, The Smell is in transition,” he says, “but it’s always been that way, since the beginning—evolving and growing. Fundamentally, nothing is different. We still operate on the principles by which it was founded. The energy is still there. We have remained intact.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE DESERT:
COACHELLA

Chicago Reader
, May 2005 

As soon as my friend and I got out of the car to begin our mile-and-a-half-long walk from “Coachella: The Parking Lot” to “Coachella: The Music Festival in the Desert” a couple weekends ago, I could hear them, faint but instantly recognizable and uniquely heartwarming to a girl of a certain age: Ponies. Ponies neighing. Coachella kicks it upscale—instead of spreading out a zillion-band lineup on the sticky blacktop of a sports-arena parking lot, the fest rents 78 acres of manicured fields from the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. And before you get to the bands, or even to the long snaky line for the sun-ripened Port-O-Lets, you walk past the barns and corrals that house the scene’s year-round residents. When I got there, they were stamping and saying hello to a few of the roughly 96,000 people who’d come to pass out face down in the grass, relive their goth teenhood, and/or see the Arcade Fire.

The line for admittance, even for press, was half an hour long. I immediately lost track of my friend and wound up tagging along with Kelefa Sanneh, a pop critic for
The New York Times
. Once inside the festival grounds, we started making our rounds like dutiful interns, visiting the main stage, the side stage, and the three performance tents—Gobi, Sahara and Mojave. Our conversations went like this:

Me: “What band is this?”

K: “The Raveonettes” / “Snow Patrol” / “Eisley.”

Me: “Really? They’re awful.”

K: Makes razor-sharp joke referencing the band’s audience, influences or publicist.

(Repeat for three hours.)

I noticed that Kelefa was barely taking notes on the groups we were watching, and because I didn’t want to look like a fastidious cub reporter by comparison, I only pulled out my own notebook once all afternoon. When I opened it again to remind myself what I’d been inspired to write down, all I found was “Jamie Cullum: piano = awful.”

I decided to skip U.K. hype victims Razorlight, since I felt like I already knew everything I wanted to about them—sitting behind me on the flight from Chicago, they’d spent the entire time talking loudly about how fucked-up they’d gotten at such and such a party and which extremely famous persons they’d been hanging out with. Instead I went to the VIP area, where I saw the very-sweaty editors of several major American entertainment magazines shaking hands with the bassist from Snow Patrol. Then I overheard a couple of them trying to decide which one of the two black dudes wandering around the tent was the black dude from Bloc Party.

Around 7 p.m., just as Wilco was starting up, the sun began to set over the mountains that surround the Coachella Valley. Maybe people just needed a rest after spending hours cooking in the desert sun or getting sloppy with the mamis in the beer tent, but it seemed like everyone was prone on the grass, taking in the scenery. Wilco’s breezy sound, trilling Hammond organ, and soft-thrill solos turned out to pair well with sunsets and swaying palm trees—I felt the majestic rightness of it in a sudden easy swell, my first “Ahhh…Coachella” moment of the weekend.