A Band in a VW Bus and Other Music Tales

Most young bands are looking for a break. Nate and Josh are just looking for a parking space.

Nate and Josh, who operate under the name Friends Forever, don’t play rock clubs. Lord knows they don’t play theaters or arenas. They don’t do school dances, or even serenade the neighborhood from their garage.

Nate and Josh play inside their van. This Archie and Jughead of Generation X Minus One load the old VW with amps, instruments, smoke machines and dogs, and patrol the highways of America from their home base in Colorado. When they arrive at a destination, they park, set up and unleash an ungodly sonic squall. Curious onlookers--and sometimes, apparently, actual fans--gather to bathe in the din, to wince or to voice their objections at being disturbed.

We meet Nate and Josh in exhaustive detail in “Friends Forever,” a feature-length film by Ben Wolfinsohn that embodies the cutting edge of the music documentary form. That’s the proposition presented by a two-week festival called the HIQI Film Series, which opens today at the Regent Showcase Theatre with a program that includes “Friends Forever” and the L.A. premiere of “Radiohead: Live in Dublin.”

“I think there is an audience that either grew up on or likes the MTV-style programming,” says Oren Bitan, the festival’s organizer. “They like the sort of fast-paced and varied programming, but they want better stuff. And I think this addresses that.... ‘Friends Forever’ and ‘Driver 23’ are about a lot more than the music, because of the characters and the lifestyle of these guys.”

Rolf Belgum’s “Driver 23” (like its sequel, “The Atlas Moth”) is another cinema-verite study of rock-themed eccentricity, this one tailing an intense Minneapolis musician named Dan Cleveland. A tightly wound motor-mouth with an obsessive drive to succeed with the archaic metal of his band Dark Horse, he expends vast amounts of energy tinkering on studios, instruments, stage ramps and makeshift exercise machines.

But the HIQI series goes beyond slices of aberrant Americana, with a lineup ranging from the new hip-hop documentary “Word” to the indie-rock blowout “Try This at Home,” from “Electronica,” an anatomy of the Southern California desert rave scene to genre classics “Blank Generation” (punk-rock) and “Rockers” (reggae).

The films are all from the vaults of HIQI Media, the production and distribution company that Bitan founded last year. He previously worked in marketing and acquisition at Seventh Art Releasing, where he handled such projects as the Radiohead profile “Meeting People Is Easy” and the electronica survey “Better Living Through Circuitry.”

“Between ‘Circuitry’ and the Radiohead movie it was really encouraging because there was an audience and I saw a lot more potential for it,” says Bitan, 27. “The people that showed up were the hard-core fans, and I could see a lot more people who had vaguely heard about it who were interested and came by. If there was more information and a better way to get them to hear about it, they would want to see it.

“I wanted to create something big that focused on music films and brought together these different underground musical genres that I thought would benefit from cross-promotion. Most of these films wouldn’t get a theatrical release on their own, and even if they did, they most likely would get lost in the shuffle, so the idea was to make it something bigger.”

The HIQI festival (the name stands for “hit it and quit it,” a phrase from an old Funkadelic song) is booked to play 10 other cities, but Bitan has something in common with some of his films’ financially challenged subjects. He’d hoped to raise a $100,000 budget through sponsorships and other means, but he’s running the event on $7,500. Opening last week in New York didn’t help.

“It’s pretty bare-bones and really DIY [do it yourself],” he says. “The filmmakers are helping out. It’s pretty much me in my apartment and a lot of talented people around me helping out for little or no money.... But if L.A. does all right, we’re gonna be good.”

And the event might even get an attention-getting hand from Nate and Josh. Friends Forever is due to arrive in town and play in front of the theater today or Saturday, depending on parking spaces and the unpredictability of the road.

Says Bitan, “They get there when they get there, and rock out.”

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The HIQI Film Series, today through Oct. 4 at the Regent Showcase Theatre, 614 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., starting at noon. $10. Schedule available at www.HIQI.com . (323) 934-2944.