Bohemian rhapsody

By Richard Cromelin

Oct. 24, 2002 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Four or five nights a week and a few times during the day, the men of Wiskey Biscuit plunge into the clutter of instruments, wires, heaping ashtrays and empty beer bottles inside a former beauty parlor on Echo Park Avenue. There’s a battered upright piano against one wall that they found abandoned on the street and pushed six blocks to the studio -- the unofficial Echo Park recycling system.

The five (sometimes more) smoke cigarettes and down a beer or two, shooting the breeze as they plug in to rehearse or record or, on a show night, slowly load their gear into their cars. Then the caravan heads off to play another gig--rock ‘n’ roll if they’re Wiskey Biscuit tonight, or dub reggae if they’re Future Pigeon.

At his house just a couple of roller-coaster hills west of the salon, Justin Burrill puts his guitar into his white minivan and rolls down the narrow street to a rehearsal with W.A.C.O.

Around the first curve, he passes the street where Mark Wheaton and Weba Garretson live. Chances are that the recording studio in their basement will be humming, with either a nocturnal client or one of their own projects.

You can complete the loop by going back along Echo Park Avenue to Farmer Dave’s apartment, directly across the street from the converted beauty salon. Dave Scher’s band, Beachwood Sparks, has just finished a long tour of the U.S. and Europe, and he’s determined to hole up here and write some music, do some drawing. But before long he’s so busy playing with neighbors’ bands that he has to bow out of a Future Pigeon show. That’s the way it’s getting to be in Echo Park. You can hardly pick up a puerquito at a Sunset Boulevard panaderia or climb one of the hillside stairways without running into another musician. These days you could form a band, practice, make a record and play some shows without leaving the neighborhood.

You can still find dirt lanes and hear roosters crow in this district between downtown L.A. and Silver Lake, where the small canyons north of Sunset form a knobby terrain of angled ridges and steep hills crowned with palms and eucalyptus.

Cut off from the surrounding areas by the Hollywood Freeway on the south, the torrential traffic of Glendale Boulevard on the west, Elysian Park on the east and the Los Angeles River on the north, Echo Park maintains a sense of psychic separation that has always attracted artists and social mavericks.

For the past couple of years, its musical life has been building toward critical mass, and the area is now generating some of the smartest, most diverse and unpredictable music in Los Angeles.

How unpredictable? In Dengue Fever, the bassist from the folk-rock Radar Brothers and three other musicians play funky, international grooves behind Chhom Nimol, who sings and dresses in the glamorous pop fashion of her native Cambodia. There’s a whole cadre of challenging art bands, including Listing Ship, whose singer, Heather Lockie, also plays viola in W.A.C.O. and lives in the same building with members of the winsome pop bands Irving and Let’s Go Sailing.

Idaho Falls and I See Hawks in L.A. play country rock, Dntel emits a sublime electronic pop and veterans the Warlocks and Brian Jonestown Massacre churn out classic garage-punk. Dreamy pop group Rilo Kiley just released a new album, and rock en espanol guru Gustavo Santaolalla makes his influential records at an Echo Park studio. Two great ‘90s albums, the Eels’ “Beautiful Freak” and “Electro Shock Blues,” were recorded mainly in the laundry-room studio of leader E’s house at the foot of one of the city’s steepest hills.

Artistic, affordable

People might talk about the cultural diversity and the views, but the real prerequisite for an artists’ enclave is cheap rent. That’s been a given in Echo Park, but the rates are starting to rise now. Everyone has a story of a friend being priced out of the neighborhood.

Maybe it’s an inevitable result of discovery and demand. Echo Park has long been a low-key outpost, conducting its creative commerce quietly and privately. But now public spaces have sprouted, from the Chicken Corner shops on Echo Park Avenue to Sea Level Records on Sunset, from the Short Stop bar on the east to the Downbeat cafe on the west.

“The character is a very precious balance at the moment,” Scher says. “The mix of cultures is not like something you’ll find in any other part of L.A. It’s something that’s that is easily damaged.”

Farmer Dave Scher is intimately acquainted with the transformation. His girlfriend, Kimme Buzzelli, owns Show Pony, a hot boutique in one of the storefronts at nearby Chicken Corner.

The intersection is named for the poultry-themed mural on the north side of the building. The strip of businesses includes a mom-and-pop market alongside the new art galleries and shops. Show Pony occupies a space that formerly housed the Suku Suku Club, a bar that was closed down after a 1993 slaying. Instead of gun-toting hotheads, the sidewalk now swarms with L.A.’s art world cognoscenti when the galleries stage their opening nights on the first Saturday of the month.

Scher’s cluttered, unkempt one-bedroom apartment, on the second floor of a building owned by ceramic artist and Echo Park arts patriarch Peter Shire, is not exactly a rustic retreat. Scher does what he can, placing a board along the bottom of his living-room window to eliminate the parked cars from his view of sky and treetops. “For all you could tell, we’re in the woods right now. You can maintain such illusions here quite easily,” he says, speaking with an oddly delicate, lilting twang.

He grew up mainly in Long Beach, then lived in Westchester when he was program director at Loyola Marymount University’s FM radio station, KXLU (88.9). He discovered Echo Park through Wiskey Biscuit, whose members were regular callers to his show and invited him to a party at their house.

Beachwood Sparks is signed to Seattle indie label Sub Pop, and its psychedelic spin on country rock has drawn the foundation of a following and great reviews.

But when the group’s not touring, cash flow can get “a little patchy.” Thus, Farmer Dave’s Hot Nuts: Scher cooks up his aunt’s recipe for spiced almonds, packs them in bags at $2 increments, slaps on a hand-drawn label and peddles them where he can. Scher also gives music lessons, paints furniture with a friend, installs drip systems in gardens and draws designs for his girlfriend’s store.

“Everybody seems to be able to balance drudgery with having a quality existence,” Scher says. That means hikes in Elysian Park and coffee with friends at their homes or at the Downbeat. Best of all, he’ll set up his pedal steel guitar in his living room and record some music that he couldn’t make anywhere else.

“It’s hard to describe exactly how this neighborhood influences the sound, other than that you receive the impressions and it comes out of you. That’s why artists try to live somewhere interesting usually.”

Making ends meet

You’ll sometimes find Farmer Dave’s Hot Nuts at Cooke’s Family Market, north of Malibu. Scher’s friend Danny Preston is the manager of the store and also plays keyboards for Wiskey Biscuit, a band whose ramshackle music and unflagging energy have made it an anchor of the Echo Park community.

Don’t be misled by the slacker vibe they spin when they sing “I like sleeping all day long....”

“Hey,” says singer Jason Mason, “just give me a chance to slack and I will. I just don’t have a chance right now. I can’t ditch the Dub Club, I can’t ditch Future Pigeon. I can’t ditch Wiskey Biscuit.”

Mason, 30, a slight figure emanating rock-star cool, is sitting with the Opie-esque Preston, also 30, in the living room of a funky Craftsman in the throes of a remodeling. Mason lays three cigarettes on the heavy wooden table and lights a fourth, while Preston rolls his own. Their street tilts toward the downtown skyline and the rear windows and downstairs deck afford a million-dollar view of L.A.’s western plain.

“It’s better to be on a hill,” observes Mason, who spent his preteen years in San Antonio. “It’s the only place in L.A. you can get a breeze. Unless you’re on the beach, and who can afford to go over there?”

Preston bought the house at auction six years ago, after two years of communal band life in a Hancock Park mansion courtesy of a two-album deal with Geffen Records. (Results: one album recorded, none released.)

Then Mason got $10,000 for helping his father with an advertising project, Preston refinanced and they made “Santa Ana River Delta Blues” (the band members met in Orange County high schools), which they released in 2000 on their Shipwrecords label. Preston refinanced again, and they recorded a second album, “Zig Zag.”

Rootsy in a folk-country-blues-Cajun way, with the bite of a post-punk “Exile on Main Street” and the loose camaraderie the old Faces, Wiskey Biscuit’s music has a sloppy charm and easy appeal. But though they play regularly, they’re not a big draw, and they haven’t made any money from their records.

Faced with this absence of career momentum, they’ve become even busier and more diversified. Donning masks, helmets and, in Mason’s case, a blinding red suit, they periodically mutate into a group called Future Pigeon, playing deeply grooved, heavily echoed dub reggae. Their record producer Eddie Ruscha, Scher and assorted sidemen usually join the party.

Future Pigeon has released one album, “Golden State of Dub,” and on Wednesday nights Mason and Ruscha spin reggae records at the Short Stop, a former hard-core cop bar that recently changed identities and became a hipster’s destination. They call it the Dub Club, and they get paid 10% of the bar, which has become considerable since the place caught on.

It all helps. Mason, who pays rent to Preston for his room at the house, also DJs Fridays at the Short Stop, and three days a week he and Ruscha work as assistants for Eddie’s father, famed artist Ed Ruscha. Preston, meantime, runs the market in Malibu (it’s his family’s business) five days or more a week. He and Ruscha share the rent on the beauty parlor rehearsal room.

Sometimes it can look precarious, but Mason has no concerns.

“I know Wiskey Biscuit is gonna be playing forever, so I’m not worried about that. We’ve been so consumed for so long that it has taken this mellow feel. ‘Cause it’s so much a part of us now.... There is no goal because it’s part of us.”

Studio with a view

For Justin Burrill, who grew up in the Connecticut countryside, Echo Park’s hills and trees were definitely a major attraction when he bought the house in 1999. In fact, when he had a recording studio built just off his living room, he had the designer install French doors and a window in the control room.

Burrill, who lives here with his wife, Suzel, and their two children, ages 8 and 16, says the rear section of the house was moved here from Compton in 1950. The high-ceilinged living room was a later addition.

Suzel works full time for Vivendi Universal as a marketing assistant in international TV distribution. Burrill’s primary occupation is hiring out the studio and his services for everything from rock-band recording sessions to voice-over work to mixing, mastering and film post-production. He’s also the producer of W.A.C.O.’s records.

The group evolved from Wild Stares, a band Burrill, 44, and high school friend Steve Gregoropoulos formed in New England in 1979. Their long odyssey took them to Europe and eventually Los Angeles, where an acoustic night at Al’s Bar in 1993 triggered their transformation into the Wild Chamber Acoustic Orchestra, now 13 members strong, idiosyncratically original and defiantly impractical.

“It’s far from self-supporting,” says Burrill, sitting in front of the soundboard in his incongruously sun-drenched control room. “We’ve gone on the road a couple of times, but to do any extensive touring is just impossible.... But we’ve been doing this a long time, and we’ve always managed to make recordings. Where there’s a will there’s a way.”

Gregoropoulos’ house is just across the Silver Lake border, and the long living room this rehearsal night is packed elbow-to-kneecap with cellists, violinists and reed and horn players. At regular intervals, the front door opens with a thump against seated bassist Pablo Garcia and another musician squeezes in, scanning the room for a vacant space and empty music stand.

Burrill sits on a high stool by the kitchen door with his old Gibson guitar, stitching intricate chord patterns into the tapestry of horns and strings. Gregoropoulos, who looks like Crispin Glover portraying a mad composer, is W.A.C.O.’s singer, songwriter and arranger, and he leads his group with a firm but friendly hand. They’ll be recording these songs for an album soon and the players bear down for most of the two hours, crafting a rich, sophisticated orchestral pop.

W.A.C.O.’s records come out on True Classical, a co-op label founded by Gregoropoulos and Lockie. Among the artists it releases are singer-songwriter Michael Whitmore and such experimentalists as Ape Has Killed Ape, Listing Ship and Ultra-Red.

It will also put out the debut album by Weba Garretson’s group, the Eastside Sinfonietta, featuring a set of Weill, Brecht and Eisler songs, due in January. Like Burrill, the singer and her husband, Mark Wheaton, are in the business of renting studio services, and their basement operation, Catasonic, has mixed, mastered, edited and recorded everyone from jazz artist and former Mothers of Invention member Don Preston (a neighbor) to L.A. avant-garde leaders Nels Cline and Carla Bozulich.

In this family of two, there are no day jobs to fall back on.

“That’s what’s kind of fun about it,” says Wheaton, 53. “You wake up one morning and you don’t have any work and you think, ‘Well, I guess I’m gonna have to go out and look for a job,’ and all of a sudden the phone rings and you’re back into it.”

Wheaton and Garretson, who married in 1986, have been fixtures on the city’s avant-rock and performance-art scene since arriving here from Seattle and New York, respectively, at the dawn of the ‘80s. They moved to this house in 1992, first renting and then buying it in 1996. That makes them pioneers of sorts in Echo Park’s new musical age.

They’ve turned their frontyard into a thriving garden and they’re re-landscaping their sprawling backyard, whose most prominent feature is a low enclosure for three desert tortoises.

“I really like the fact that we can work in the garden and decompress from the things you get wound up in when you’re creating,” Garretson, 44, says. “The only way we ever really stop working in the studio is go outside and don’t bring the phone, or leave.”

The transformation

The changes have come quickly to Echo Park: live rock and other music in the bar at the 75-year-old French restaurant Les Freres Taix; DJs and electronic acts at the Echo, opened by the Spaceland people last year in an old Spanish restaurant; in-store performances at the indie-centric Sea Level record shop; Chicken Corner and the Short Stop as trendy spots; the Downbeat as a neighborhood hangout.

“It reminds me of when the East Village [in New York] exploded again in the late ‘80s,” says former Afghan Whigs singer Greg Dulli, one of the six partners who bought and transfigured the Short Stop last year. “A lot of people who were pushed out of neighborhoods that had become super-gentrified needed a place to go.”

Will the same happen here? Locals keep a wary eye out for leakage from the mercantile boom a couple of miles west in Silver Lake. “I don’t think it would take much to tip this neighborhood,” Farmer Dave Scher says, sounding more fatalistic than fearful. “But at the moment it’s a really brilliant place.”

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The neighborhood sound

If you want to compile a mix CD for a hike through these hills, you can find a good sampling of Echo Park music from this assortment of CDs.

Eels, “Beautiful Freak” (DreamWorks, 1996). Contains the mother of all Echo Park songs, “Susan’s House.”

I See Hawks in L.A., “I See Hawks in L.A.” (Ethic, 2001). In the title song he wrote, guitarist Paul Lacques turns one of the neighborhood’s regular aerial features into a potent image of loneliness.

W.A.C.O., “Game of Cards” (True Classical, 2001), Listing Ship, “Dance Class Revolution” (True Classical, 2002). These intertwined outfits are the leading exemplars of Echo Park’s art/experimental community.

Beachwood Sparks, “Make the Cowboy Robots Cry” (Sub Pop, 2002). The six-song EP takes the band’s cosmic country into an almost pointillistic realm, with electronics help from neighbor Jimmy Tamborello, who records under the name Dntel.

Wiskey Biscuit, “Santa Ana River Delta Blues” (Shipwrecords, 2000), and “Zig Zag” (Shipwrecords, 2001). If any band defines Echo Park’s distinctive mix of urban grit and country greenery, this is the one.

Future Pigeon, “Golden State of Dub” (Shipwrecords, 2001). Wiskey Biscuit’s other incarnation reflects the neighborhood’s substantial reggae vibe.

Hear the ballads of Echo Park

Downbeat cafe

1202 N. Alvarado St., Echo Park. (213) 483-3955.

The Echo

Future Pigeon with Jamaican dub master the Scientist, Oct. 31.

1822 Sunset Blvd. (213) 413-8200.

Les Freres Taix

1911 Sunset Blvd. (213) 484-1265.

Music Thursdays-Sundays.

Sea Level Records

1716 W. Sunset Blvd. (213) 989-0146.