opinion@dailylobo.com
I got back from Los Angeles on Jan. 28, the final part of my 50th birthday celebrations.
I was in LA to hook up with some old friends, among other things.
Boy, what an amazing, busy, grotesquely perfect metropolis Southern California is. The beach and the mountains are within a day’s drive. At 30,000 feet, you can easily see them both from the window of a Boeing 727. Usually you can see the smog, too.
My wife and I moved from Riverside, about 60 miles inland from LA, to Albuquerque almost 20 years ago, but we’ve been back to LA several times over the years. Still, whenever I return to LA, I’m struck by the mind-boggling enormity of it all. From above, it’s most impressive. But while I gaze down from my window seat as we descend through the clouds, I’m also reminded of why we left LA in the first place: too much traffic, too many people, nowhere to park, way too expensive to buy a house and not enough decent jobs.
Another issue I have with LA is Hollywood and what passes for the “entertainment industry.” What a narcissistic bunch of self-congratulating incompetents they are. Year after year, they shove a poor-quality product down our throats, mixed in with a few very lucky exceptions. I mean, how many bad remakes of already awful movies do we need? The American movie industry has been stagnating for many years.
I grew to loathe celebrities and the mediocrity they stood for.
Trust me, most of them are no more talented than you or I; they just know someone in the business, or, more likely, they’re related in some way to a celebrity. You think nepotism is bad in New Mexico? It’s nothing compared to the entertainment industry.
I became convinced an earthquake was going to wipe the place out any minute. It could still happen. In some ways, it should still happen. It would be great if the San Andreas Fault miraculously opened up directly beneath Hollywood, sending all the studios and actors and writers and producers down to the hellfires below where they belong, leaving the rest of the city intact, and saving us all from banality and mediocrity forever.
I’ve given up hope of this ever occurring in my lifetime, however.
Forgive me. Despite all that, I still love LA. What I really miss about the big city is the huge support for the arts in the metro, and the promotion of a variety of cultures, with plenty of museums, libraries, a vibrant nightlife and a downtown where you can go and enjoy live music without having to worry about getting stabbed. And how about a decent newsstand on a corner somewhere?
Nothing is open after 10 p.m. in this town except the bars, even on the weekends. It would be nice to have a real beach, too.
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I miss having 24-hour access to everything, though, not just Wal-Marts and fast food joints. The Frontier isn’t even open 24 hours anymore. I mean, it’s beautiful here and everything, and the people are real nice, but the luster has kind of worn off of Albuquerque over the years, especially for a big-city boy like me.
Part of the reason I was in LA was to check out the annual North American Music Merchants gathering at the Anaheim Convention Center. The event is pretty amazing. It’s incredibly huge, but not open to the public. You have to know somebody to get in. We have friends in the business. We were subjected to very high security.
Do not make eye contact with these people … or make jokes about them being high … but that’s another story.
In any case, if you’re a musician of any kind, this NAMM thing is like a million Guitar Centers, Grandmas and Music Go Rounds all rolled into one. I was like a kid in a candy store. Can I come up with any more tired cliches to describe it? I’ll get back to you.
NAMM was enormous, and just an earsplitting cacophony of noise, really. It was absolutely jam-packed with LA’s finest poseurs, except in LA they’re not poser poseurs; they’re authentic poseurs.
One lady was painted white and hardly anything else, claiming to be a space alien of some kind. Another guy looked just like Emperor Norton. Many guys looked like they could have been Nikki Sixx, Duff McKagan or Rob Zombie; lots of vampires and women in leopard skin.
Cloud technology is the next big thing, apparently. They had portable cloud units at NAMM that looked like switch boxes. I have no idea how they work.
I found a booth for a company that makes stainless steel guitars.
I still can’t get my head around that one. The guitars weighed a ton. Close by was a bass guitar the size of a ukulele with a sound that could blow down walls. The strings were weird, almost like rubber bands.
Then there were these guys playing a wooden box. The sounds they got out of that thing were incredible. They’re called “Dube boxes.” We saw plenty of DJs and turntables, too. I picked up a bass that was made of wood so light that when I put it on, I actually lost weight.
The vendors were a lot stingier with the free stuff this time, compared to the last time I was there 10 years ago. That was a little disappointing. Last time, they gave out free strings and drumsticks and other stuff — maybe even straps — and you could pick up any instrument and play it. This year, the most expensive guitars and basses — like Rickenbacker and Gretsch — had locks on them, so that mere mortals like me couldn’t smear their inferior DNA all over them, I guess.
I walked up to a Duesenberg guitar — super high-end — and the guy goes, “Can I help you?” I asked him if I could play it. “No,” was his curt reply. “Well, then I ain’t buyin’,” I told him. Hell, for all he knew, I was a multimillionaire music producer. What a snob!
It’s also good to know that quality radio programming still exists in Southern California. How I miss those classic radio stations like KLOS and the now defunct KMET. Good, old Rodney still has his own free-form music show on KROQ — but only for about one hour late on Sunday night.
I had the pleasure of being on the plane with one of the actors from “Breaking Bad” on the way back to Albuquerque. I have no idea who he was, because I’ve never seen the show — God forbid — but some other passengers recognized him. He’s the tall, skinny, black-haired kid with the underbite. Someone said he plays “the son.” He seemed nice enough. A guy asked me to take a picture of them posing together. Exciting.
