Busywork and its year of total harmony

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
When Dan Sena co-founded Busywork with fellow resident DJ GMO (Guillermo Arce) his life was in limbo: He’d been floating between various dead-end temp jobs and his band, Bullet Train to Vegas, was stuck working on a doomed follow-up to 2005’s We Put Scissors Where Our [...]

Look listen vibrate Red Pony Clock

PHOTO by LIZETH SANTOS
Gabe Saucedo sings and plays guitar, organ, banjo and trombone in San Diego’s Red Pony Clock, an enormous cheery pop band famous for its everything-but-the-kitchen sink instrumentation, theremins, sousaphones and marimbas, and earnest if goofy lyrics. He grew up in San Diego—humorlessly describing his neighborhood as “the [...]

Davie Allan takes on Peter Fonda, fuzz guitar and Nazi bikers

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
Davie Allan comes from the era when bands wore uniforms and stood motionless on black and white TV, changing positions only when the camera did. Back then, he and his band were just “the Arrows” and America had the patience to watch [...]

Paradise maintained with Coolio

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
Coolio’s been on a comeback from the get-go. Even his major-label breakthrough It Takes A Thief (which won the rap Grammy in 1994) was a rebound from late ‘80s radio play on long-lamented KDAY and early ‘90s work with WC and the Maad Circle, each of those sorta-successes followed [...]

Codpiece live sweat, sweat light years

PHOTO by JEFF GOULD
After he graduated from CSULB, Casey Lombardo toppled into retail, recommending Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley to high school kids at Barnes & Noble—“I never saw them again—the little bastards!” he laughs. And after his system was necessarily pickled, he located two important friends and made two important [...]

Matt McCluer starts band, IHOP closes

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
Two years ago Matt McCluer released his last official solo record—at least he says it was his last. A Good Day to Rock was 15 home-taped pop songs with ooh-ahh harmonies, double-tracked vocals and therapeutically selfish breakup lyrics, opening with “I fell off the earth/but I promise [...]

Aceyalone’s omnipresent ambition

Aceyalone wants to make hip-hop an art form, he says. So it makes sense that he’s doing a poetry book, and that he has ambitious ideas about what an album should be. 1998’s A Book of Human Language was literary to the hilt—different tracks are chapters, not songs, and he recites Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” [...]

Positive vibrations with the Black Angels

PHOTO by BRIANA PURSER
There is that lonesome, crazy, almost-poisonous sound that was there in American music almost as soon as they began recording it—what B.B. King said came from breaking the verbs in the blues, and what Wayne McGuire’s lonely essay found in “Sister Ray.” It was the drone, the [...]

Beam me up, Billy Bragg

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
Billy Bragg was at first a baby punker in a band whose best song was about girls, and he was so lost after that he signed up for the British Army, officially opting out during training because he kept thinking of songs he could write. Elvis Costello was [...]

How Darondo got over

PHOTO by MORGAN HOWLAND
For 30 years Darondo had two identities, even though he never knew it. The first was William Daron Pulliam: 62 years old, a retired physical therapist and family man from Berkeley with a voice that immediately sets you at ease and a tendency to tell long, rambling stories about [...]