Rock ‘n’ Roll Riffs in a Warehouse Full of Dreams

Like a man on stage, Reggie Boyd sat on the platform of a dark loading dock, playing guitar in the long shadows of an arc light. It was just before midnight. The warehouse that served as his backdrop occupies a dreary section of downtown Los Angeles south of the 7th Street Bridge.

As Boyd’s rapid jazz rhythms filtered across the landscape of brick buildings and asphalt, only an occasional passing transient was there to listen. But the 37-year-old musician, who has spent most of his life chasing elusive dreams of rock ‘n’ roll stardom, sees a bright side to his gig here as a night watchman, strumming and looking for prowlers until 2 or 3 in the morning.

“You can play as loud as you want,” he said with a grin, “and nobody bothers you.”

That same reasoning has brought scores of others to this aging warehouse at a location that management wants kept secret. Inside, in this seemingly forlorn place, rock singers and musicians have found a haven, a place where they can jack up the volume and practice their percussive harmonies virtually around the clock.

No sign marks the entryway of Downtown Rehearsal, which opened three years ago in a once-empty, five-story structure built in 1916. The musicians who come here, booking time in any of 59 rehearsal rooms, are mostly Los Angeles club singers and band members struggling to become the next U2 or Led Zeppelin or Van Halen. Behind any door are the longhaired, jeans-clad members of the counterculture, jamming with their amplifiers, drums and electric guitars.

Down one long hallway on a recent night, songwriters Tim Coulter, 32, and Pat Vilicich, 31, were at work in a cramped room outfitted with an electronic console. They were tweaking the music mix on a master tape of one of their Beatles-like pop compositions. Their band, Big Vivian, hoped to use it to win a “demo deal”--a sort of test drive in which a record company pays to see what they can do.

“We’re like 99% of the other bands in this town,” Vilicich said. “We’re looking for people to get behind us.”

The two musicians, who hold day jobs in advertising and watch repair, meet here after work three or four nights a week, practicing well past midnight. Often, Vilicich said, the toil is demoralizing--”You bust your --- on a tape and it ends up getting rejected”--but always, just down the way, there is some example of a band that has hit it big.

For a while, Coulter and Vilicich would see a disheveled figure roaming the halls, night after night wearing the same black clothes, dirty sandals and Coke-bottle glasses. They assumed he was one of the many transients from the neighborhood, a guy who sneaked in. It turned out he was Stanley, the one-name lead singer of Life, Sex & Death (“LSD” for short), a heavy metal band that has since snared a lucrative recording and touring deal with Reprise Records.

“He’s filthy,” Vilicich said of Stanley’s rumpled attire. “(But) when he gets on stage, he sort of metamorphosizes into this rock god. He’s riveting.”

Proprietor Greg Kooch, 28, a longhaired USC Business School graduate who calls himself “a yuppie gone bad,” rents out space at Downtown Rehearsal for $400 or $500 a month. A former rock guitarist, Kooch lacked musical talent, but he can hit all the chords on his calculator.

“Business is easy for me,” Kooch said, likening his transformation of the warehouse to the systematic style of Japanese management. He installed soundproof, eight-inch-thick doors so that one band will not be distracted by the next, badgered the city into installing a new street light not far away and diligently keeps graffiti off the building. Kooch also hands out promotional T-shirts for every broken cymbal that various bands donate for his office wall.

The autographed cymbals form a powerful visual legacy of inner-ear damage.

“This is the Taj Mahal” of industrial-area rock rehearsal facilities, Kooch boasted.

After making his way up one of the wide concrete stairs, Kooch stopped in on a band called Stikkitty rehearsing in a high suite with windows overlooking the city. Kooch greeted bare-chested guitarist Breck Lampkin, 23, by playfully grabbing for the silver ring that Lampkin wore through a nipple.

Lampkin, recoiling out of reach, complained that Kooch had hurt him the last time he had pulled the ring.

Kooch laughed and they fell into conversation. Stikkitty was practicing for a gig on the Sunset Strip. With his flowing hair and skull-and-dagger tattoo, Lampkin was one of five dressed-for-rock-success band members who were here to mesh the alternately soulful and driving sounds that Lampkin later described as “rock psychedelic pop.”

Band member Vincent Kendall, 28, who wore a nose ring and beanie as he prepared to warm up near the warehouse’s half-open windows, called Stikkitty’s music a distillation of bands such as Queen, Jethro Tull and the Velvet Underground, among others.

“We’re batting a thousand as far as people liking us live,” Kendall said, expressing frustration with the music industry star makers who had yet to grasp Stikkitty’s potential.

All that will change, Kendall predicted.

“We believe we’re going to be the next big turning point in the history of society,” he said confidently. “And that just takes time to develop.”