Live in LA

Photos by Wild Don Lewis

2005 U.S. Air Guitar Championships
at the Key Club, July 14

On one of those magic, even-traffic’s-not-that-bad summer nights, the Key Club became a sweaty Justice League of America for a motley crew of Super Friends, each with their own shtick, and each with a so-wrong-it’s-right love of the air guitar. This was the 2005 U.S. Air Guitar Championships, and L.A. was represented proudly by Silver Laker Fatima “Rockness Monster” Hoang, who competed against 15 locals and six regional champs.

It was a tight race. Judges — including Veruca Salt’s Nina Gordon, actor John Cho (Harold &KumarGotoWhiteCastle),Matchbox 20 drummer Paul Doucette and musician Ben Moody — doled out points based on technical merit, stage presence and “airness,” the latter defined as “the extent to which a performance transcends the imitation of a real guitar and becomes an art form in and of itself.”

As in ice skating and gymnastics, competitive air guitar is judged on a series of mandatory and freestyle performances. Hoang, New York champ Dan “Bjorn Turoque” Crane, and Andrew “William Ocean” Litz of Chicago were neck and neck, all three turning in terrific renditions of the mandatory “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” But when Hoang ripped into his final freestyle selection, Jane’s Addiction’s “Stop!” (Here we go!),bedlam erupted in the capacity crowd. It was clear no one would be spared from his blistering, invisible ax.

Bjorn Turoque

The airness of Hoang’s improvised routine earned record-setting unanimous 6.0s, edging out Crane by two-tenths of a point.

The night was not free of controversy. 2003 L.A. champ Gordon “Krye Tuff” Hintz criticized the scoring that he felt helped the night’s only female performer, Elaina “Cherry Lain” Vaccaro, defeat more technically savvy players. Vaccaro’s performance of the Rippingtons’ “Star-Spangled Banner” was marked mostly by her impressive legs and a good deal of jiggling. Said Hintz, an assembly candidate in Oshkosh, Wisconsin: “The integrity of air guitar in year three is seriously under attack. Air guitar has turned into a joke . . . The more skin you show, the better your score gets.”

Still, even Hintz acknowledged that the night’s winner deserved the laurels and that the contest helped strengthen the community. Watching Hintz and the other warriors gather on stage for a final, en masse rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” you’d have to agree. As Jeremy “Yngwie Hendrix” Levy put it, “I believe in peace through air guitar.”

—Ben Sullivan

Bossacucanova, Röyksopp, Basement Jaxx
at the Hollywood Bowl, July 17

It’s wise to be leery of “world music” these days, as the much-bandied term is applied more often to a bossa nova swing poured over a Starbucks-ready house beat than Senegalese xalammusic. So what did the lineup of KCRW’s latest World Festival have to do with this gentrified genre? Well, the three acts did come from different parts of the world — Brazil, Norway and the UK. And opener Bossacucanova did exemplify its current definition, with their highly energetic but barely engaging blend of samba and jungle. Fortunately, the night improved exponentially from there, causing the crowd, heavily weighted toward KCRW’s target audience of 30-something urban consumers of downbeat and lattes, to get up, shake their asses and even wave around a glow stick or two.

Norway’s Röyksopp (“progtronica,” according to host Jason Bentley), recalling Siegfried & Roy in their white turtlenecks and MiamiVicesports jackets, took the stage as the dark crawled into the Bowl. As a fierce light show blazed behind them, the duo’s electro beats blasted ecstatically forth; washing over the smiling faces of the crowd, their blend of Euro-trance, hipped-up-hop and techno attempted to release acid lodged in corners of one’s brain from raves eight years ago. If that didn’t work, the ridiculoid circus party that was the Basement Jaxx live show had to get the job done. These “rude boys of house,” according to one of their many singers, performed with an amazingly controlled chaos, culminating in a Carnivale gathering on stage replete with guys in ape suits jumping around. From “Where’s Your Head At?” to “Oh My Gosh,” their perfect tech-pop gems, colored slick and grimy, brought the Bowl to a frenzy. If this is the new world music for our New World Order, consider me a convert.

—Jonah Flicker

Sufjan Stevens
at the El Rey, July 16

Illinois,the second installment in Sufjan Stevens’ project to write an album for each state, has the quality of a research report laboriously compiled by a precocious, very bright 11-year-old. Such musty figures as poet Carl Sandburg are earnestly, if a little woodenly, memorialized, and his lilting piano lines hit with the plum satisfaction of vocabulary words used correctly. Stevens writes lovely, jeweled songs, but all the sparkling perfection makes me want to play the class badass who gives Stevens his first cigarette. Does he ever loosen up? Make mistakes? Take risks?

Maybe, but not in his live show. Never one to go halfway on a concept, Stevens and his band take the stage in full-on Fighting Illini regalia: orange athletic pants or skirts, navy blue T-shirts emblazoned with a fuzzy orange “I” and pompoms for the three ladies. Trapped in the El Rey’s muggy heat, the crowd is silent, drinking in the “The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders,” with its Mr.Rogers–stylepiano and twirling woodwind chorus. Afterward, they clap politely and enthusiastically — opera applause. Every now and again, Stevens and his band perform oddly fractured cheers, holding up a crudely rendered Illinois flag. Stevens shortens one cheer, and laughs in his comfortingly adenoidal Midwestern accent, “It’s called an eee-kah-no-mee of words.”

If Stevens takes two years to write each album, as is the gap between Illinoisand his first, Michigan,the 30-year-old will be well older than 100 by the time he finishes. Even if he quits after 10, his lofty concept and accomplished talents will only continue to attract more fans, as quietly rabid as many at the El Rey. Will he always match their inspired devotion? Will he ever disappoint them?

—Margaret Wappler