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, [...]

Everything about the Stitches is true

The Stitches were almost called the Nubiles—names logged on a list singer Mike Lohrman kept at his now-shuttered Underdog Records in Laguna, in case he ever led a band—and that’s probably the most benign ‘almost’ the band ever experienced. The rest are rougher: almost made it big (Was Epitaph or [...]

Crystal Antlers find van, return donations

ILLUSTRATION by SHEA M. GAUER
Crystal Antlers bassist Jonny Bell answers his phone inside the same van that was almost lost forever—with the same select set of vintage equipment packed safely somewhere behind him. During the early morning of Friday, Feb. 8, just after Bell and the Antlers finished a set [...]

Von Iva, Tina Turner and the techno from ‘Terminator’

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
Tina Turner and the techno track from Terminator—Linn  Van Hek’s “Intimacy”—team up for most of the sounds made by San Francisco’s Von Iva, who wear custom clothes and play custom drums crafted out of junk and who recorded their last bionic pop record through [...]

Jackie O points out how the strict-punk diet of Alex’s early days has dissolved now into a diverse calendar including funk instrumentals by Slippers and Odyssey and Oracle-ization by Greater California—but this is a birthday for a bar at a bar and that demands as much or more power as pop.
FRIDAY, JAN. 25
THROWRAG Salton [...]

They oughta name a drink after Alex Hernandez

ALEX HERNANDEZ by JOHN GILHOOLEY
When Alex Hernandez needs a day off from his bar Alex’s Bar, he goes to another bar, which if it isn’t the V Room is the darkest old-man bar he can find. (“We all look better in darker light,” he says.) And when Alex [...]