The Long Beach Loop keeps you rollin’ and rockin’ on the Big Red Bus

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
Arriving just after Labor Day, it’s hard to tell if Thursday’s Long Beach Loop is meant to say goodbye to summer or hello to fall, but it’s certainly an unprecedented celebration: nearly six straight hours with five local bands [...]

The Humpers reform (again!) for the greater good of punk rock ‘n’ roll

PHOTO by LISA JOHNSON
On Friday the Humpers will return to Alex’s Bar to remind all the tenderfeet in the audience that they are still the Eagle Scouts of rootsy punk rock. I caught up with founding member Scott “Deluxe” Drake as he babysat [...]

Riverboat Gamblers aim high

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
The Riverboat Gamblers began on the trending-legendary punker-house party circuit in Denton, Texas, where probably many a ceiling has a freshly plastered spot to mark the last time they played inside. Then as now they were Alice Cooper rawk riffs distended by a lot of Descendents lessons into potent [...]

Another top show piles on—by the way, didn’t look like Raekwon and Cappadonna showed yesterday, but it was a heartfelt effort—for Long Beach today at Alex’s with Platypus Beats’ (who had Dios at our very first release party) presentation of the venerable Very Be Careful, the loved-and-local Soft Hands (profiled here and here), the telenovelic [...]

Green Day’s formally unattached “Kinks-ian” “throwback” (not to be misread as “throw-up”) band swoops through Alex’s for a pretty choice date on a limited Southern California tour elsewhere booked into the Roxy.

Twenty years on Beach Blvd. with Vinyl Solution

ILLUSTRATION by BOB AUL
I first went to Vinyl Solution when I wasn’t even 20 years old—my friends weren’t yet 20, my car wasn’t 20, my actual record player wasn’t 20 (though it was probably closest of anything) and just about nothing in my life had any pretense of [...]

The Warlocks of Euphoria

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
The Warlocks overlapped their name with what the Velvet Underground was going to be called—“The Primitives” got used up the same way but someone can still try something with a modern version of “The Beachnuts”—and overlapped their sound with what the Velvet Underground was gonna do if John Cale [...]

The Good, The Bad and Los Mysteriosos

PHOTO by PAIGE MCCORMACK
Every Cinco de Mayo since their very first show, they ride in from the horizon: Los Mysteriosos, arguably the best-dressed band in Long Beach, though he wouldn’t want to sap the honor from the Bolides, says guitarist/singer El Mysterioso. As the house band at Alex’s Bar—in [...]

Fidotrust’s new compilation surveys self-sufficient music in a self-sufficient city

CRYSTAL ANTLERS by JENNIE WARREN
When The District started, I felt lucky because we fell into one of the strongest local music scenes in Southern California——underdocumented by Silverlake-scene media and underrepresented in the LA record stores, but still packed about to bursting within a little loop of [...]

Imaad Wasif washing the eye of the land

PHOTO by NICK ZINNER
Imaad Wasif and the Two Part Beast “Wanderlusting”

I hear an ocean in my head, says Imaad Wasif—the sound of drones from the classical albums his father shipped from India to Palm Desert, where they arrived soggy from steerage with their covers and labels peeled away, [...]