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 EPISODE 7: songs 143-149
MUNG JUNG BUSHI (2004)
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Tacoma Ballet keyboardist Diane Naegel was staying with me while interning with a designer making stunning pop art purses used by celebrities on the red carpet. Diane heard Mecca Normal was playing the Silverlake Lounge. She talked Ronnie into going so she could get a ride. Ronnie was haunted by his mother’s mental illness and impending death. That night Mecca Normal performed a song called Family Swan that swept the ashes off him. He thanked Jean for the healing and a friendship was born.
What can you say about Mecca Normal? The New York Times said: "Mecca Normal has inspired a larger movement of feminists in their teens and early 20s who call themselves Riot Grrrls." Melody Maker called them "a two-person guerrilla campaign against apathy." Kerrang said: "More unsettling than four Ministry fans with a rack of samplers could ever be."
The story goes that at Mecca Normal shows in Olympia, Washington you’d see the kids who became Bikini Kill, Nirvana, and Kill Rock Stars. Fugazi points to them as inspiration. How many other bands can boast twenty years of consistent innovation, independence and quality? Their last couple tours have combined artwork with music at galleries, museum film installations, clubs, and classrooms.
LaFrae Olivia Sci is one of the great unknown drummers of American music. She’s not that unknown. She’s musical director for Sandra Bernhardt, she’s played with Branford Marsalis, and she was drummer for the acclaimed Rachel Z Trio. Veteran of country music recordings, doo wop live bands, metal shredding sessions, and countless drop ins for a night of playing jazz in New York City, she ought to be a legend.
When Mecca Normal next toured through Los Angeles they asked us to open for them at a couple of shows. Lafrae flew out from NYC and some friends joined in for the noise orchestra I would attempt to improvise vocals over. Our show together at The Smell was interesting. Carla Bozulich disappeared in the middle of her set. The reviewer from the L.A. Weekly said Lucid Nation seemed to be a project by art school kids and sounded like “Patti Smith trapped at a Godspeed You Black Emperor rehearsal.”
Mecca Normal and LaFrae were staying over so jamming was natural. In our rehearsal room we had a giant 16 track board built in the early Seventies, a rare Soundcraft Series 3, with a sound like a Neve. Supposedly the board had first belonged to Heart and then to Soundgarden. I sold it because the only tech who could fix it was the busiest tech in town and it was constantly broken. He got all misty eyed when he saw it though.
It’s funny that two such vocal women as Jean and I didn’t do any vocals for these recordings. But I think we both enjoyed having a vacation from being verbal. We had no plans. We just wanted to capture the mood of that day. Strange currents were in the air. We had talked till late in the night about how the world was changing. About how much the world of music had already changed.
Jean Smith named our experiment Mung Jung Bushi: a mixture of Japanese and Chinese that roughly translates to “grumpy dance.”
John X mixed these tracks. Mr. X besides being quite a beloved musical character of the Los Angeles underground, and a fez sporting good Samaritan, is also a mixer and producer whose credits include Marilyn Manson, Bowie, and the Rolling Stones. |
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Jean wanted to give the songs neutral, innocuous names so listeners could bring their own imaginations to the tracks. One of the titles she mentioned to Ronnie as an example was fork. It could mean the fork in the road, the fork on your plate, Sartre’s flying fork of Nausea, the action of sticking an object with tines.
But for me this gamelan like song built around Dave’s echo guitar patterns and Lafrae’s African thumb piano work is about a fork in the road. Indie was dying just as quickly as the corporate dinosaurs it fought. Never before had so many of the old formulas suddenly failed. Whole touring circuits disappeared: great clubs like Small Intestine, Jabberjaw, 17 Nautical Miles, indie distributors and record stores disappeared with them.
The Internet loomed as the portal to our future. But the future wasn’t here yet and giving away music for free is a poor option for musicians like Jean who have no other steady livelihood. |
Beverly Boulevard used to be the favored shortcut for those in the know from where I live in Hollywood to downtown places like The Smell, Silverlake Lounge, Spaceland, Luna Sol, MOCA, and Little Tokyo. It’s still the shortcut late at night.
The streets are lined with butcher shops with Carcineria signs. Each one has its own visual flavor depending on where the proprietor came from: Guatamala, Bolivia, Mexico, El Salvador, Burbank.
Some have hand painted signs, some are no more than simple black letters but many feature colorful scenes. Late at night they are a hub of activity where working people end their day and nightshifts start theirs: millions of stories to be told.
I think Carcineria is Spanish for food that kills but dying never tasted so good. |
For his graphics series Inspired Agitators, David Lester created a poster for the great Sioux chief Red Cloud. Now Ronnie is a Crazy Horse man. He got to talking about how Red Cloud wasn’t that great a guy. David stood up for Red Cloud. Ronnie stood up for Crazy with Courage Horse (the Sioux war chief’s real name).
I was waiting for some coups to be counted.
It is true that Red Cloud’s great grand niece weaved a beautiful painted quill bracelet for Ronnie while they talked one afternoon when we toured through South Dakota. But we spent the Fourth of July on Bear Butte where Crazy with Courage Horse loved to meditate.
As a Cherokee, I yanked out a hunk of hair to leave as a prayer flag on one of the trees way up the butte. Lightning was playing all around over the plains.
I think both chiefs were quite magnificent. And I think it’s wonderful that two white boys could get so passionate about them. |
The other show we played with Mecca Normal was at Soapbox at Koo’s new location, with Family Outing, Jody Bleyle’s band with her brother. It happened to be the night of Morrissey’s comeback tour hitting town so nobody showed up for our show. To Jean it didn’t matter how many people were there. Her message of transformation through self expression was even more powerful in such an intimate setting.
Mecca Normal’s show at Spaceland was strange. They performed a brilliant set to a sparse audience that later became enamored with the emotional breakdown of a local star on stage. What must it be like to have given birth to a scene, and then on the other end of it, to be ignored by people who don’t realize who you are or what you did for them? Another sign of the disconnect afflicting the music world at the end of a cycle. |
We talked late into the night about the changes we were seeing. While having nowhere near the illustrious career of a Mecca Normal, Lucid Nation has been around long enough to see the bottom drop out of the music scene (and to bitch a blue streak about it). When we started out riot grrrl was already beginning to decline but was so huge to us it seemed to be only getting started. I was always pissed when I’d hear Kathleen or some other riot grrrl authority warn that the glory days were quickly passing. Boy howdy, were they right!
Don’t get me wrong. The scene wasn’t that great. There was lots of high school politics and back stabbing, the bands were mostly shits to each other, half the clubs were run by perverts, and the clubs were usually in parts of town where police laughed at you for being there. But there were plenty of great bands and fans anyway.
It’s strange that it wasn’t the Internet and the disinterest of a new generation that wrecked the scene. A rebirth of conservatism inspired fire marshals and councilmen to dig up reasons why kids couldn’t get together.
The Internet arrived like the dawn of a new day. We all knew the day the Internet came to town everything before it became the distant past. Mecca Normal continues to trail blaze. DIY video received mass media certification when MTV2 accepted for broadcast Jean’s haunting video for the Mecca Normal song “Attraction.” |
On the subject of malfunctioning vintage gear that makes people go misty eyed, Ronnie drove Mecca Normal to their gig at Spaceland in a broken down silvertop 1966 Pontiac GTO coupe.
Because the trunk was rust eaten it filled with exhaust which spilled into the backseat till the passengers were dizzy. But the beautiful heap hauled ass on the freeway when Ronnie demonstrated what it could do. It had the California license plate Artcore.
Eight cylinder guilt, it haunts me, that thrill I get from the rev and torque of a big block engine. I love a car that jumps up when you shift it into second. I am an American, damn it, and I like that. I’m so ashamed, but Delorean was inspired when he designed this biosphere killing machine. |
Late into the night we talked about the future. The audience hasn’t yet learned that the great art of the future will be DIY and hard to find, not corporate and handed to passive consumers everywhere on a silver platter. Remember, average people didn’t know who Beethoven or Van Gogh were during their lifetimes.
Here in Hollywood the movie, TV and music corporations, most of which are divisible into five giant octopus corporations, are scared shitless by the changes technology is bringing.
What happens when there’s no more forced programming? Instead of having to wait till 8 PM to see the show you want to see (and if you don’t have Tivo and you miss it well you’re screwed) someday soon you’ll search for the show on a search engine just like you search for music files.
Instead of a few commercial stations and a couple hundred cable stations we’ll have millions of directories and blogs, and huge databases just waiting to be enjoyed by explorers in pajamas.
Make no mistake, great artists of the future will use the most direct means for their self expression. With a good DV cam and Pro-tools and a website as their outlet they will reach millions. Maybe someday some of them will even make millions, too!
EPISODE 7 THE END
NEXT (mini) EPISODE Public Domain: The Best of Lucid Nation |
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