MUSIC REVIEW: SUNSET STRIP MUSIC FESTIVAL 2011

Making the LA Music Scene Amongst the Mayhem of Legends & Newcomers

By: Josh Moorhead

August 22, 2011

(August 18th t0 August 20th in Los Angeles, CA) Tall tales are always told of the Sunset Strip. Lurid and wacky nights of Hollywood participants in sweaty back rooms and wannabes in long lines to small clubs in their best shoes and their strongest gels. But for a few nights a year the whole thing gets blown wide open by virtue of the power of rock. The Sunset Strip Music Festival brings it hard, even if you've become so jaded with LA that the thing you identify the strip for most is traffic.

Words like the Roxy, Rainbow Room and Whiskey A Go Go dance in the heads of Hollywood dreamers and TMZ watchers the world round. This is the Hollywood of legend and tragedy and nipple slips and famous gigs. What the Strip does first and foremost is make it all accessible. The music festival ain't a new idea, a stage here, a stage there, an over-priced water bottle that-a-way, but the extra "umph" of the Strip fest is that your stages are Hollywood's most storied clubs. The contrast is something stark, looking in there on the bands vying to make it, their earnest, vivacious performances on the foreground surrounded by stills of Ray Charles, Springsteen and acts of the past and ads for impending shows with the hitters of the present, like the Chili Peppers. This is Los Angeles. This is your rock star hopes playing in the dark at 5 in the evening while Bush competes on the main stage outside. But yet still there you are, in your mohawked glory in the Roxy. It could all work... it could all happen... it could, it could, it could.

I'm not a good reporter. I haven't the foggiest recollection of who this band was that I saw in that room of that club as I was simply trying to find a pisser. But stumbling into it I realized the scope of this fest, as put on by 98.7 here in LA, so good job there radio. Anyway there was enough going on for three days of the fest that it'd be easy not to know the particulars of all of it. I know, for example. that the lead singer of this band really, really hated his ex-girlfriend. I know that they were some thrashing rock. I know that the line to the bathroom was long. And I could feel the sheer LA-ness of the Strip fest in the air of the club as it breathed in and out from the lead singer's wails to my lungs.

Here more than maybe any other three nights a year the Strip is a SCENE. Droves of people pour in and traffic is diverted. Bands blast through 40 minute sets in the clubs fighting for attention over signed acts and food truck sandwiches while the concert goers walk back and forth, up and down the hill, bumping between the main stages wondering if Matt & Kim are too new and if Bush is too dated, stopping only for coffee or maybe a dildo in the Hustler emporium, a sake bomb or a tattoo across the street. Yeah, it's a scene.

I only got in for Saturday, and didn't even kick it until the 1 am after party rollout, but my socks were still sufficiently rocked by the time all was said and done for myself and my plus 1. While it's incredibly rare to be wandering around the four or six lanes of street on Sunset on any occasion, I imagine the wanderers don't often look how they did Saturday either. Being that the main act was Motley Crue the look was very Sons of Anarchy, which was interesting juxtaposition for say, the Matt & Kim set, even though in one of the stranger "Never thought I'd see that" moments a middle-aged woman in a sundress ate salad in front of me throughout Public Enemy's set as raised middle-fingers waved side to side all about her.

The crowd was a collection of people who wouldn't be there otherwise, and those that wouldn't miss a reason to be there anyway. Falling somewhere in between as the subpar journalist I am (I was going to say objective, but really I mean cheap - it's green that usually keeps me away from these hootenannies) I was pleasantly surprised. Besides the goofy anecdotal incentive of saying "I saw Tommy Lee live!" this type of hair and thrash rock need not much apply to me. But dangnubbit if it wasn't fun, and thank goodness for delightful acts like Matt & Kim and awesome, less easy to come by sets like that of Enemy's.

I came across Matthew and Kimberly first. They were definitely the freshest act there, and very much of the generation of 20 somethings now that are hip, ironic and a little silly. Like the White Stripes by way of clown school (I mean that in the most positive way possible) Matt & Kim are just a guy on a keyboard and a girl on the drums. It sounds like a bad middle school talent show but it's actually a walloping party ready to be enjoyed by big ol' venues at a time. The duo, a seemingly impossible couple together, weren't shy about or pretentious about their influences either, easily slipping out of one of their own jams to play a current top 40 hit, or to get the crowd to sing "Just A Friend", or string in some Luda. They were about the funnest act I've seen in an ever ago.

They effectively made everyone feel like we were all just hanging out while getting us to hop and down and party. I guess this is why they're described as "dance punk." They threw balloons to the crowd for blowing up and playing. Kim climbed out and did some hard booty-dropping over the crowd being held up by what was determined to be the audience's strongest looking man. I must have been too far away to see? After we all sang along good enough Kim, on the performance adrenaline, showed us all a tattoo of an arrow pointing down at her lady bits on that precarious area between the belly button and the promised land. "I can't believe I just did that." She exclaimed. Matt tried to make her feel better. "Ya know Kim just went to the gynecologist for the first time in like 10 years, and they said they were impressed." Also impressive about these two besides their demeanor, cool and showmanship? Their jams. "Daylight" "Good Ol' Fashioned Nightmare" and "Yeah Yeah" play like gangbusters. And if you don't know what gangbusters are they're dance punk anthems played with the gravity of a beach ball and the lightness of being of a day at the beach. It's good times.

But ah, then the one thing that made me go chasing press passes to begin with: Public Enemy. Let me tell you there's things few stranger in life than when you find yourself taking instructions from Flava Flav. "Put your hand in the air like this, then do this with your fingers, then say this..." and so on and so forth. Any astute human being would be forced to wonder if seeing Flava Flav on the stage is like seeing Old Yeller in the backyard. A few years of VH1 senility from the guy makes everything seem a lot less "Shut 'Em Down" and a lot more "eat your vitamins with your applesauce." As further evidence I once saw the guy in a parking lot. He looked a little tired - but away as he seemed I was one curious "Flav?" from a "Yeeaaaah Boooooooy!" He seemed like he might always be ready to go. That was especially true Saturday as this guy still rapped without a mumble, had all the stage presence of a viking (so that's where the hat comes from) and even played bass and drums at various points.
 

Chuck D, less the spectacle, still anchors Enemy, bringing most of the rhymes and almost all the political consciousness. Education, immigration, poverty all came to the mix between hits and surprise guests like Anthrax's Scott Ian. Go figure. The night ended in Flav preaching over Marley's "One Love" playing on the speakers about equality. It's easy to see with these fathers of Hip Hop how acts like Rage Against The Machine grew into being. And it was refreshing to get some message around the spectacle. Holding a fist in the air for Enemy means more to them than the fact that you're ready to rock, or that they're the cause you're supporting. It was fantastic set, salad lady or not, and besides the genuine interest the whole betterment of our world and the strengthening of our communities bit, these guys were genuinely thankful if not even still a little awestruck for (and about) their success. When rap started I think everyone wondered "But yeah, these guys aren't B.B. King, they're not Otis Redding, they're not Neil Diamond - what are they gonna do, rap when they're 50?" Uh, yup.

Bonus note: for the first two songs I contemplated how I'd later have to disappointingly write about how Flav totally wasn't rocking a clock. Conclusion: easiest way to make a crowd go crazy at an Enemy concert: pull out a clock from under your shirt with the third song.

Finally there was the Crue. Not so sadly I was with a nurse who had been awake for 48 hours helping people not die, so she couldn't stomach Nikki Sixx and the Crue, but I did stay just long enough to say anecdotally that I saw them live. I had done it. On the Sunset Strip I was part of the scene.