Once again, I had no clue about what I was going to see, I didn’t know that the band named 100 Flowers opening for the Urinals at the Blue Star on Saturday, were in fact the same guys. Let’s rewind and read some music history: The Urinals, which started as a parody of punk rock in the late 70s, were part of the UCLA scene, and counted among their supporters the legendary Black Flag, which often asked them to open for them. The Urinals changed their name to 100 Flowers later – talk about going from a place with a bad smell to one with a agreeable smell – but the name was not randomly picked at all as it was inspired by the Maoist quotation ‘Let 100 flowers bloom and 100 schools of thought contend’. I don’t know if they are still commies, or may be they have never been, but I want to believe that the name was rather making allusion to their more sophisticated approach to music, since, what they played was effectively going into 100 directions compared to the more straightforward punk they played as The Urinals.
On Saturday night, I was plunged into Los Angeles underground punk history at the Blue Star, a place where I had never been, but a nice café/dinner with an outdoor patio for music and a sort of Middle West ambiance, in spite of being located in the most desolated (especially at night) neighborhood of Los Angeles known as the warehouse district,… with this huge full moon in the dark sky, it looked a little surreal. But one thing was sure, they could have blasted loud music all night and not having any trouble with the neighbors! The crowd was quite different than in the usual Silver Lake-Echo Park clubs where I go all the time, I was surrounded by a majority of people in their 50-60s – hey, quite fitting the band members’ own age – and I could tell most of them were die-hard fans, filming the whole set from start to finish, or singing along all the lyrics.
Me? Remember I was clueless, I was there waiting for the main attraction, the Urinals, while watching their other incarnation and thinking ‘wow, these guys are really good!’ I was giving the trio more and more attention, as their post-punk music, still greatly impregnated by punk energy, was exposing its multiple facets. It was clear they were quite mixing genres, with John Talley-Jones’ powerful vocals while playing an aggressive bass, Kevin Barrett’s dynamic drumming and Kjehl Johansen’s complex guitar play, wandering into some pseudo-psychedelia or funk, with the same vitality. Their set was intense and dense, complex to describe, making new musical motifs appear one after another, as every song was driven by an urgency, a sort of playful non-sense, and some pure frenetic madness; I have read they are tagged as the inventors of geometric rock, whatever this means exactly. Even though I couldn’t swallow everything at once, their bursts of anger, their post-punk English influence but also their real pop sensibility were all alive in front of me, and people around me were totally enjoying the view.
They came back on stage as the Urinals with a slightly different line-up as Rob Roberge was on guitar, but Kjehl Johansen joined them after a few songs. As I said, the music took a more primal punk turn, with fast guitars and more aggression, a bit Buzzcocks, a bit Ramones, a bit X (or even a lot X on some songs), but showing enough diversity to justify being the precursors of the 100 Flowers. The songs, like ‘Black Hole’ or ‘I’m a Bug’ were very short and sent like playful little bullets to the public who didn’t want them to stop playing. ‘Hey it was our second set!’ said John Talley-Jones who came back with the rest of the band for an encore when it was already midnight. They were by the same occasion celebrating the release of 2-LP vinyl edition of their classic ‘Negative Capability’, and did offer a few free ones. During the whole time, there were no moshing, no stage diving, no crowd surfing for once, although all their songs well all mosh-worthy, but you know, after 50, who still want to do this crazy stuff! I recognized a guy I see at punk shows all the time, he was stage-diving-crowd surfing like a maniac at the Jubilee two weeks ago during Bleached’s set! When I left he was sleeping on a dinner booth inside, awww, it must have been the full moon, because the Urinals-100-Flowers’ hyper-post-punk-pop had shaken the place for close to two hours, demonstrating they were back in full bloom.
