Music Union : Live Your Music

Story by Alexis Hawkins

Quazar of Quazar and the Bamboozled asked a tough question to the crowd at Spaceland: “You know, you come to a show, you pay your $10 to see a show and you’re listening to the band, and you think, ‘when are you gonna rock me?’ And you think to yourself, ‘even if you’re not that good, just try to rock me.’”

“Welcome to Silverlake!” someone shouted. This was met by laughter.

“Welcome to L.A., for that matter,” responded Quazar. Not so much laughter from a room maybe half full of musicians and other artists who, well, might not be that good.

Quazar, let me get this straight. Are you trying to tell us that Los Angeles is somehow not the Mecca for all artists, whose talent simply swelled beyond the capacity of whatever the Podunk town they migrated from, forcing them to abandon the notion of mediocrity forever in order to thrive in the City of Angels by writing an album about the life they left behind and the guy they blew for 15% of a used amp that looked way better in the Craigslist photo!?!? I simply don’t understand, Quazar.

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I had arrived at Spaceland with low expectations of Quazar and the Bamboozled. In fact I was checking to see if one of my favorite bands, Local Natives, was still doing their residency there. But ironically, the band called Local Natives had embarked on a world tour just a couple weeks prior.

As luck would have it though, the residency had been filled by The 88, a band I’d seen in my college days — by the way, for a band playing in a milkshake stop on a college campus, they were actually pretty decent.

I checked out the other bands billed that night on MySpace to see how long of a nap I could squeeze in before making the long ½-mile journey to Spaceland. Lucky for me, every opening band sounded like a nightmare, and the one called Quazar and the Bamboozled sounded a lot like Randy Newman wandering around a carnival.

So I thought that I had timed it just right to arrive at the advertised start time of The 88’s set. But my meticulous plans were abruptly foiled, as Quazar was just setting up when I finally arrived at Spaceland. Moreover, I also found out that Spaceland doesn’t allow any professional cameras, which meant that my gazillion dollar Canon that I bartered for one of my limbs and more could not accompany me inside to confirm my regal status as a professional photographer.

Quazar and the Bamboozled were taking forever to set up. It seemed that Quazar and the Bamboozled were more like Randy Newman and the Wu Tang Clan. Well, not really, but there were at least 30 people in this band, just like the Clan.

Except that there was something different about this gang of merry thugs:
There was the Mad Hatter front man; the Beer Maiden; the Gay Office Worker; the Gypsy…; come to think of it, they were just like a hipster version of the Village People, you know, had the Village People paid more for their second-hand costumes than buying them new at a cheaper price.

Everything about this scene made me brace myself for a disappointment, but something inside me, perhaps the cynic-loving bitch, wanted to believe in Quazar, especially after his quip about the shortcomings of the L.A. music scene.

The band itself equates their sound to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Phantom of the Paradise in a junkyard fight next to a Parliament/Funkadelic concert.” But I’d like to take my own stab at the postmodern Myspace description of the unholy combination that bore the band’s unique sound, and pronounce the sound of Quazar and the Bamboozled that of The Animal Collective, only if they had been orphaned at a young age and was raised by a very good but very white gospel choir –led by the love child of the one-hit wonder Mungo Jerry and Randy Newman,– and was cast in a low-budget, high-school musical production of Alice in Wonderland, directed by Courtney Love (the bruised, cracked out Courtney Love, not the rehabbed, anorexic one).

In short, they were a feel good band whose “Cajon blues written by a white Jewish boy from the Valley” really got stuck in my head, especially the track “Women Women Women.”

And now, the photo of the “professional photographer,” who was obviously more convincing than me to get inside with a nice camera. Why didn’t I think of dressing in all black with the headlining band’s T-shirt? I’m such a loser.

Photographer (n.) – a man walking around with the great purpose of changing the battery on his large camera, as if it were an incredibly esoteric magic trick that only he could perform in the whole world, with the right combination of his own concentrated glance on the camera and the incredulous sideways glances of the hot girls his way.