Jon Franco said (words to the effect of) “Hey guys, you know what? Me and my roommate Josh were thinking we should have a benefit, you know? For, like, Haiti? Since we’re all musicians and this is a way we could do what we do and try to make a difference. You know? Guys?”

So we all said, “Sure, go for it!”

And Scott Keil said, “Oh, hey, you got it man,” and he went and found a venue (Los Angeles Music Academy, in Pasadena, where Scott went to school and where he is now employed) and some sponsors (Red Cross, Habitat For Humanities) and set up about twenty bands, who were generally amazing (I was in three of them, and I had friends in a few more, and then there were these amazing 70s-era samba-funk people from Brazil called “Muamba” and some great locals called “Big Moves” … and on and on…) and there was food and two stages in different rooms and … wow … what a solid cool day. Mad thanks to everyone who put it together.

I’m pretty sure John Boyd got Cricket’s and Amanda Jo’s sets on video, so those might show up online eventually. Amanda’s set included debut performances of her songs “Get It On Up” and “Ho Dogs Rocka Rocka Anybody See Them” and also guest performances by Jef Hogan (electric bass guitar) and Jym “Snake” Fahey (harmonica).

Also, I believe it was the first day of spring.

Sodden palm fronds line the pavement like drowned monkeys, figments of last week’s rain, and I believe yesterday was the 1st day of spring.

Which is a radical thing to say about January 30th. But this is Los Angeles, and I can feel it. There is said to be more rain yet to come. But I’m putting it on the line right here and now that it is going to be a spring rain.

Their 3rd full-length album, second on Drag City, second self-titled release for that matter, follow-up to the noise-clot double LP “Twin Infinitives,” Royal Trux (s/t) has just been re-issued. It’s really good … low-fidelity, low-budget, and somewhat more (deliberately?) noisy and sloppy than I can imagine it really needed to be … but the songs are there, and they are solid songs, and the instrumentation is sparse and effective (usually rhythm even acoustic guitar, drums, vocals, maybe bass, often a distorted electric lead … reminds me in many ways of the sound on Cats And Dogs, which makes sense as that was the follow-up to this, or even a low-budget Accelerator, which makes less sense except in that it is of course the same band and was all along … but they sure sounded different for a minute there on Thank You and Sweet Sixteen, and again on Veterans Of Disorder and Sweet Sixteen … so, what?)*

Anyway, I’ve played it twice and I’m digging the hell out of it and I might finally be ready to go back and give Twin Infinitives the proper examination it requires / deserves.

Also currently listening to (on CD … dammit … though it comes with a DVD which I haven’t looked at but fully expect to be amazing) and also from Drag City is a recording of Moroccan Gnawa trance music … which is unreal good, like maybe it’s the cool glass of water of musics. Especially when you take into account water’s potential as a spiritual conductor.

And also listening to a disc on Sublime Frequencies by Group Doueh … so lo-fi it makes Royal Trux sound the Dave Matthews Band … but if you have ears, you gotta listen. It’s desert guitar from Ali Farka Toure’s barbed wire nightmares. It’s the best use of a cheap flanger pedal, ever.

* Or was it the same band, really, since they (uh, “deliberately”) changed sidemen/rhythm section constantly, album to album, tour to tour … it was the same guiding mental lights, anyway. I might have to try and learn all these songs (offa s/t), just to see what they look like in the light.

OK, so in terms of my thesis re: the subtleties of Los Angeles weather I could not have picked a worse time to begin. The weather here this past week+ has been nothing if not DRAMATIC. One 40-something Los Angeles native and lifelong resident told me this was the wildest set of storms he’s ever encountered here - before embarking on a rant about the misnomer that is “global warming” … hence, I advised, the increasing usage of the more accurate term, “global climate change” … and there we are.

The last few days have been cool, mellow, round, pleasant, the sun not showing it’s face until late morning but then coming out in strength … but a benign strength, and the air has been very clear, tasty and breathable. We’ve been up in the canyon a part of the time, where it’s just bound to be nice … but it’s been nice down below, too. I was there.

Yesterday it rained a bunch more. I took a couple of mid-length walks in it, to the library and to the rekkid store (more on that later I magine). A pleasant woman working as security on a media shoot of some description (I mean, they were filming something … not that they were shooting at the media, fortunately or un-) asked me where my umbrella was, and I replied that I am from Seattle … which is true, although more by inclination than by birth. It felt good to say it, and not at all dishonest, and it is in fact probably why I don’t use an umbrella.

But as I explained to my climate-concerned friend, although it does rain most days in Seattle, it does not DELUGE or DOWNPOUR so very often, and it almost never rains ALL DAY.

OK, and as for the effects of the aberrant weather on the Los Angeles population:

There was a woman pacing up and down on the sidewalk across the street from my apartment. It was not an even pace. She tended to cover ten to fifteen feet at a circuit, but not always the same ten to fifteen feet, meandering up and down over thirty yards on a five minute cycle (yeah, I paid way too much attention to this). She was blonde, pudgily proportioned in a lump and unhealthy way as if she had been stuffed badly, wearing mainly a shapeless black dress and little white heels, carrying an umbrella and talking on a cellular phone into which she was hollering:

“WEEAUUGGGGHHHH! WHOA! YEEOWW!”

Each exclamation punctuated with a wobbly marionette-like dip of one knee.

“God is ANGRY!!! Get thee behind me, Satan! YAAAUUGHH!!”

… And on and on, some of it less intelligible than other.

From time to time, either she lost her phone connection or she got hung up on. When this happened she would calmly and quietly, picture of normalcy, stop her pacing, examine the phone, re-dial, and then pick up right where she’d left off, pacing and kicking and glossolating.

When it rain down here, the crazies come out.

That was thunder as big as I’ve ever heard, set off car alarms on our street, sent the qat under the bed, I barely counted to 6 between the flash and the bang … Whee!

* EDIT *

… and now there are tornado warnings in Long Beach! Of all things.

Current listening includes “Fight On, Your Time Ain’t Long,” a collection (sans liner notes) of acoustic gospel including a track by Bukka White and also a whole lot of amazing stuff I’ve never heard of with lines like “I wouldn’t mind dying / but I got to go by myself…”

This LP is fun to play GO to. Really. Just ask John Norwood. It’s on Mississippi Records, if that helps you any.

On cassette I am playing close attention to “Good As I Been To You,” an early-90s recording of acoustic folk-blues by Bob Dylan. Favorite tracks on there include “Blackjack Davey” and “Jim Jones” though “Froggy Went A-Courting” is hard to deny. Bob still using his ’80s voice for the most part. He settles back down through-out his next, similar, album, “World Gone Wrong” and has regained his fullness by “Time Out Of Mind” yea unto the present day. Go Bob!

And, of course, anything that sounds good in the rain is welcome on my turntable today. Time for coffee and staring into the clouds.

Several days of rain - putting the lie for sure to my assertion that there is no weather here. I am as happy as a pig in the rain.

The day before yesterday, Z felt that it was a bit cooler than is normal for this time of year. And maybe a bit on the clear side. I did not notice anything.

Yesterday (really only yesterday?) we began the day with a hike up above Mandeville Canyon. Beautiful day, cool and clear (both of which are the case with pleasing frequency in that part of town and at that elevation but which were accentuated on this occasion). We spoke with many ravens and observed a red-tailed hawk. The crows don’t talk - they tick!

We felt the first drops at the top of the hill, and it was sprinkling softly but without urgency by the time we reached the car. This became a more certain rain, but that did not prevent us from taking lunch on a vaguely-roofed patio by a koi pond. “Beatific” comes to mind.

Later in the evening it became a solid downpour and has continued as such. On the street we’re seeing umbrellas, last year’s shoes, refugees from mudslides, inexplicable traffic accidents, nasty moods and terrible driving. But we are not on the street today. We are inside, drinking tea and talking to the cat. I haven’t had a day like this since Seattle (two years).

Mornings are often nice at this time of year. Morning are nice anyway, but there is sometimes a cool, clear quality to a January morning in Los Angeles. If you are fortunate enough to have vegetation in your immediate area (we have a palm tree and a few potted plants of vaguely tropical appearance in our concrete courtyard) then the experience is enhanced. It is almost but not quite reminiscent of Florida. Though not nearly humid or rainy enough. This is not the tropics. This is a desert.

Something about the feel in the air on this kind of morning even makes things seem a little quieter. Maybe it’s relative humidity.

Last night I was up on Washington Heights for Rough Church practice at Greg’s house. The weather up there, being above the basin, is often a bit closer to “normal”. Last night, for example, it was very windy. The air is generally clearer up there, and there is an amazing view of the city, which I especially enjoy after dark when it is all lit up. From Greg’s kitchen I watched the branches of trees blow around like crazy (you could almost have called it “blustery” … but not quite) and then later after the sun had set I wandered out onto the (3rd floor) balcony. The breezes were soft and constant.

It rained. During the night. When I woke up this morning I was dreaming about snow. Specifically that I was in the house next door to the one I grew up in, encountering many strange coincidences involving my banjo-playing pal Paul Johnson, Mr John E, a Los Angeles-based band called Seasons which I encounter from time to time, and maybe some other things and people I don’t quite remember. A series of half-recognized women were introducing us all to each other via references to shows in Seattle and New Hampshire and the realization that we were all far more interpersonally interconnected than ere we had suspected … well, that was the substance of the dream. Not bad.

But all I wanted to say was, it rained last night.

I’ve been ranting for about two years now to anyone who will listen that, while I don’t have a problem with 70 degrees and sunny, anything gets old if it’s every day. Give me wind, give me rain, give me snow - doesn’t have to be for six months at a time, just a little bit of something for variety.

After two years of ranting like that, I decided that Los Angeles does have every bit as much meteorological variation as anywhere else, but it takes place on a subtler level. So subtle that most people don’t notice it. The desert people, the rural ones, I’m sure they catch it. But here in Smog City we don’t pick up on it so much, I think to our detriment.

Can’t get away with that in Boston or Seattle. It rains, it’s raining. It snows, it’s snowing. Deal with it. Here, OK, the temperature dropped a degree and a half. What of it?

But I’ve decided to start paying attention, see what happens. Weather has always been a big part of my life, whether it’s walking to work in air so cold my hair freezes and breaks off, or watching the ice chunks float downstream in the spring, or sitting by a river in the late summer and smelling fall on a warm breeze with a cool center.

I’m going to have to attune myself to more subtle weather situations if I’m going to appreciate and relate properly to the Los Angeles experience. So:

It rained last night. I don’t know how much, cos I was asleep. It is drying up already, though it is not yet especially warm out (tho hardly chilly - bare feet and a lightweight longsleeve is fine). The air still smells moist, but not deeply or densely so. I knew something was up because the sky was white when I woke up around 9:30 (plus I’d been dreaming about snow. For a moment I thought perhaps it had snowed here. Before that I wasn’t sure exactly where I was). It is still a bit dim out, the light from the sky is mellow. This will likely change by early afternoon at which point I expect we’ll get back to about 70 degrees. And sunny.

More later,

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