Crashup Derby, LA for Arthur Nights, Maerz blogs up some of the music scene with her UPCOMING MUSIC PICKS.
Fall's the best time of year by far. The air gets cooler, the leaves change color, and the pumpkins come out of hiding. Not that they were ever really kept under wraps.

There's music in this blog, but I'll just warn you it's not as much as usual. I've been taking mini trips to such mysterious locals as Petaluma, Los Angeles, and the city of Oakland, with music as sort of a side attraction to whatever else was going on. A crew of us went to Petaluma to hit the raceway one weekend, but first we hit the pumpkin patch. So many varieties of squash. I remember in ye olde days when you just had big orange or little orange as your choices.

It kinda tripped me out that when I told my friends in other cities that I was going to a pumpkin patch with a corn maze, they were going through corn mazes of their own that very same weekend. Who knew mazes were something of a phenomenon? (Not recommended: eating an entire bag of kettle corn in said mazes).

The real reason we were in Petaluma, though, was not to lug brightly colored squash around or to run our grimy hands over all the beasts with the underbites in the pumpkin patch petting zoo. It was to hit the Petaluma Speedway ("the fastest 3/8 mile dirt oval") for the Crash Nationals (aka the demolition derby!).

When I went to a demo derby in Seattle last year, it was insane. There were figure eight races, heats involving school buses hauling speedboats, and a big fireworks finale. The Petaluma race was very different. Part one of the big event involved two dozen or so hot rods (my favorite of which was pure black evil straight out of "Repo Man") doing laps around the track. Let me rephrase that. These cars did 200 laps around the track. Two hundred. It took two hours. Fun to watch, but you could like go get a bunch of corn dogs, watch a car's wheel fall off, get some beer, watch that same car get back in the track, go get some hot chocolate, watch another car's wheel fall off, and the race would still be going. It took two hours.

The second part of the derby involved a lot more crashing then the first. In fact, it was all about crashing. The officials penned about a dozen of the most fucked up, duct-taped cars I've ever seen into a small corner of the track and let them ram into each other, last-man-standing style. It was awesome.

People rubberneck so much because they know deep down that there's something very satisfying about the crunch and bang of two steel barges banging the shit out of one another.

After that there was really no choice but to go hear some loud 'n' rowdy rock 'n' roll. Oakland's Thunderbleed was playing a house party that very same night. When we rolled up, frontman Ajax was just hitting his stride on an extended guitar solo from the roof. Of course I have a Canon Powershot camera -- which I've come to realize is a piece of shit because the lens will just randomly decide not to open sometimesÂ…so I could not capture the magic that was Ajax on the roof. But I did capture this.

Thunderbleed sounded like one near approximation of a Thin Lizzy song after another (and I mean that as a good thing). It was just hyper masculine rawk, with galloping guitars and songs about mustache rides and stuff. I later learned that every song they played was a cover of some dollar bin gem.

The next day I hit open studiosÂ…where I saw some cool stuff, but to be honest what really caught my eye was the still-life wreckage left in the junkyard near one of the studios in the Dog Patch area.

My favorite was this skeleton of a really old bus, with these other car carcasses dropped on top like some end-of-the-world blockbuster starring Tom Cruise. And then there was some sweet graffiti all around it.

The next week it was off to the Stork Club, for a night of good ol' fashioned garage punk. When we walked in, Traditional Fools were on the stage. They're a band from "Trashcancisco" according to their MySpace page, and that description makes me dig them already. They're snotty, sometimes surfy punk rock Â… a little like the Black Lips before that band deepened the roots of its influences. Live they were great. They even have a song about being in college, although they barely look to be out of high school.

Then it was off to LA for Arthur Nights -- four nights of all kindsa music, from space rock to freak folk to intergalactic jazz. We road tripped it down there for the weekend.

Stayed at the Best Western Hollywood Hills, which I highly recommend. Not only for the view.

...and the parking lot art

and the bathroom décor

but also for the pool, which was full of bugs and yellowish blue colored water. All the same, it was a perfect distraction to sit by and drink a beer on an 80 degree evening.

Then it was off to the Cha Cha, a bar in Silverlake opened by Kevin Willis a friendly bar owner who's also a great artist. If you've been to the original Cha Cha in Seattle, the place should be home sweet home, only twice as big and with slightly different artwork

The bathroom is very red.

And then on to Arthur Nights, which was in downtown LA at a place called the Palace Theater. It was an amazing venueÂ…super old with gilded surfaces and old murals decaying on the walls... like an ornate theater that had just been let go partially to shit.

The first band we saw that night was Tav Falco of Panther Burns.

Tav's quite the legend. He's been playing guitar since before I was born (hence, the, um, Little Richard pancake makeup on stage) and has played with a number of Memphis legends as well as founding the band Panther Burns with Alex Chilton in 1979. In the early '80s he hung out with the New York no wave dudes, but his music is more of this gothic rockabilly garage dirge stuff, something sinister and mucked up that reminded me of druggy Elvis rocking out with the Cramps. Really cool stuff. His bassist chewed gum and looked pretty bad ass the whole night

Arthur Nights did not skimp on the heavy. Boris and Om played near the end on Friday and Saturday, right when all the sauce kicked in and your spine just liquefied in a puddle at your feet. (The next five photos are thanks to my pal Chrissy Loader. Once again, the Powershot hath let me down.)

To counter the metal, though, they also booked trippie backwoods folk from New York -- White Magic. When she came out from behind her piano, the singer's voice was so powerful you just wanted her to sing creepy funeral ballads all night

Although I was too wiped out to stay through the entire set, the most outta left field performance Saturday was beamed down from the Sun Ra Arkestra: over a dozen jazz dudes in golden sequence hats and shirts and other shades of sparkly lifting off into some truly adventurous music.

It was a performance I can only hope to see again (in a little less of a music marathon setting) but pretty awesome nonetheless. They stunned the crowd into stock-still (stoned-still?) appreciation.

At the end of the night, it was time to cool off with a treat from the free ice cream man (mochi balls!). I love LA.

End note:one other thing I love about LA... the local news never gets tired of their live car chases. OJ's legacy lives on in infamy.

Show picks: MSTRKRFT (11/1, Mezzanine)
Howlin' Rain (11/4, 12 Galaxies)
Gris Gris (11/10, 12 Galaxies)
Lemonade (11/10, the Rickshaw)
Roommates, the Lights (11/10, the Hemlock)
**Budget Rock Festival** (11/10-11/12, Stork Club), **Be the Riot Festival** w/ the Rapture, Girl Talk, Diplo, Clipse, Zion-I, so much more (11/11, Bill Graham Civic)
Wolf Eyes, 16 Bitch Pileup (11/11, Bottom of the Hill)
Lupe Fiasco (11/12, Independent)
the Drones (my new favorite band, 11/14, Bottom of the Hill)
Lady Sovereign, Mickey Avalon (11/14, Mezzanine)
The Psychic Paramount (11/17-11/18, Hemlock)
Hot Chip (11/17, Mezzanine)
The Slits, the Mall (11/18, Mezzanine)
Big Sur Folk Yeah Fest w/ Vetiver, more (11/17-18, Fernwood Resort, Big Sur); {moscomment}

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