Bakersfield Bukowsi describes Sunday night's New Bakersfield Experiment in sound - by N.L. Belardes
I’m the Bakersfield Bukowski lost and melancholy and writing about life in the music-driven moment; last night I thought about a drink or two as I wandered from the ghosts of the Downtown Joe’s side of 19th Street. This was Sunday night in the Indie scene. Some scatterings of wind and rain made for a perfectly dark night to wander into Riley’s bar. Liars and Thieves, already deep into their set danced around the stage area singing their masterpiece, ‘We Own’. Rahl thumbed his bass, swung around while concentric circles of greenish and yellow light blistered the wooden floor. Sal, glowing in the darkness from sweat and song tore licks into his guitar, shaking it for a vibrato effect. I stood with Flower in the Dale. Her cherry tattoos peeked from the shadows. She missed her man from the coast; anxious, she had to get out of the house. She looked shy in this bar so filled with sounds of the New Bakersfield Experiment in rock and roll. She watched Tyler and said, “That boy’s got what most girls want.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“The high cheek bones. The long eyelashes…”
I stood by the sound booth and drifted until the music swept itself away…
“You know why I played so well tonight?” Tyler said after his set. “I was sober.” He laughed. He carried his drum set past us but then came back for a handshake and an introduction to Flower. I gave Tyler some pizza the other night, offered him some chicken in Pizzaville; artist to artist I offered not because I know his life and his needs but because I have slept in cars, homeless, stolen food, and searched as poets do in the darkness for a new beginning.
I saw Bobby standing in his Kerouac-hewn moment; not like a Dharma Bum dirty racing down a mountainside enraptured with the Void, but more urban counterculture, driving himself into the bar as an underground literary character, hovering from the darkness, creeping from the subterranean of dark apartments readying for a Sunday night in the downtown Bakersfield bohemia. He stood against the edge of a thin wooden counter, his hands tapping on it as he watched Broken Record Gospel tear into their set. On the opposite side of the bar stood Bonifacio, quiet, contemplative, not wondering about this New Bakersfield Experiment in sound, but just the music itself. He had just told me about his Mexican version of Star Wars, Luke with his great choriso sword I imagined glowing into an outer worldly Aztecan Paradise of flower-and-spear wielding Stormtroopers. I asked him for some of his Spanglish prose. He’s a teacher; his goes way back to the Bakersfield College Art Gallery under the pock-marked bohemian Joel Blue, the Andy Warhol lover, an old shoe salesman from Gemco-Stylco shoes who passed me strange bohemian tales while a young Conservative in the late 1980s—that was before his Bakersfield College days; long before my great transformation to become a non-mechanical artist and reach out to the arts and moderate philosophies. He was in love with a dancer named Vida back then; he had several kids and later divorced because of the dancer. He later ended up at the Bakersfield College Art Gallery when it was in a room accessed from a tunnel beneath the old junior college library.
But he taught Bonifacio too. He taught about Kerouac, Cassidy, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the Velvet Underground and showed dark bohemian films so he could infect the college youth; he was so childish; perhaps that was his appeal; Joel Blue with the blue eyes wanting everyone to feel art in Bakersfield’s little bohemia where college students, sons of field workers and truck drivers could begin to understand the greater worldview of bohemia.
Older now, Bonifacio, drank his beer; he offered his Spanglish but who knows if he will send to me. I am so poor with the language I wouldn’t understand much of it anyway. But that’s the linguistic appeal—just to see the artform…
There were two women with Bobby. Both in their Betty Page smiles and hairdos like Fifties queens of the night turned into dark urban bohemians, both beautiful in their skin-revealing glamour. One wore a dark black bandana, her black bangs hung onto her forehead, her large hoop earrings and black top pulled down over her shoulders showing her bra; on the front of her blouse an image of some silkscreened woman; on her left shoulder a tattoo of something I can never tell as she is always too far away. She didn’t start dancing much until Broken Record’s last two songs. ‘Dress Rehearsal’ faded into a finale of Jazz punk that only this bohemian band could fuse…
Several people danced as the crowd closed in. I leaned on a counter. I closed my eyes to rid myself of images… writers observe too much. I needed to focus on the sounds. The song was clearer in the blackness of eyes closed at Riley’s. The melodies of the music and song drifted strangely to my ears. I could begin to pull apart the layers... I looked and there was suddenly a darker appeal to the sounds. Here I could see the owner of the Silver Fox, infected with the music; Bonifacio, head bobbing, was lurid in his examination; so many eyes on the sounds, so many minds in wonder of such melodies emptying from the urban heart of Bakersfield, it’s creepy ghost streets, lamp-lit walkways, half-abandoned downtown hovels and buildings; there, where in the darkness I felt the musical firefly glow of the urban Bakersfield bohemia, and so wanted it to illuminate...
“Oh? What’s that?”
“The high cheek bones. The long eyelashes…”
I stood by the sound booth and drifted until the music swept itself away…
“You know why I played so well tonight?” Tyler said after his set. “I was sober.” He laughed. He carried his drum set past us but then came back for a handshake and an introduction to Flower. I gave Tyler some pizza the other night, offered him some chicken in Pizzaville; artist to artist I offered not because I know his life and his needs but because I have slept in cars, homeless, stolen food, and searched as poets do in the darkness for a new beginning.
I saw Bobby standing in his Kerouac-hewn moment; not like a Dharma Bum dirty racing down a mountainside enraptured with the Void, but more urban counterculture, driving himself into the bar as an underground literary character, hovering from the darkness, creeping from the subterranean of dark apartments readying for a Sunday night in the downtown Bakersfield bohemia. He stood against the edge of a thin wooden counter, his hands tapping on it as he watched Broken Record Gospel tear into their set. On the opposite side of the bar stood Bonifacio, quiet, contemplative, not wondering about this New Bakersfield Experiment in sound, but just the music itself. He had just told me about his Mexican version of Star Wars, Luke with his great choriso sword I imagined glowing into an outer worldly Aztecan Paradise of flower-and-spear wielding Stormtroopers. I asked him for some of his Spanglish prose. He’s a teacher; his goes way back to the Bakersfield College Art Gallery under the pock-marked bohemian Joel Blue, the Andy Warhol lover, an old shoe salesman from Gemco-Stylco shoes who passed me strange bohemian tales while a young Conservative in the late 1980s—that was before his Bakersfield College days; long before my great transformation to become a non-mechanical artist and reach out to the arts and moderate philosophies. He was in love with a dancer named Vida back then; he had several kids and later divorced because of the dancer. He later ended up at the Bakersfield College Art Gallery when it was in a room accessed from a tunnel beneath the old junior college library.
But he taught Bonifacio too. He taught about Kerouac, Cassidy, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the Velvet Underground and showed dark bohemian films so he could infect the college youth; he was so childish; perhaps that was his appeal; Joel Blue with the blue eyes wanting everyone to feel art in Bakersfield’s little bohemia where college students, sons of field workers and truck drivers could begin to understand the greater worldview of bohemia.
Older now, Bonifacio, drank his beer; he offered his Spanglish but who knows if he will send to me. I am so poor with the language I wouldn’t understand much of it anyway. But that’s the linguistic appeal—just to see the artform…
There were two women with Bobby. Both in their Betty Page smiles and hairdos like Fifties queens of the night turned into dark urban bohemians, both beautiful in their skin-revealing glamour. One wore a dark black bandana, her black bangs hung onto her forehead, her large hoop earrings and black top pulled down over her shoulders showing her bra; on the front of her blouse an image of some silkscreened woman; on her left shoulder a tattoo of something I can never tell as she is always too far away. She didn’t start dancing much until Broken Record’s last two songs. ‘Dress Rehearsal’ faded into a finale of Jazz punk that only this bohemian band could fuse…
Several people danced as the crowd closed in. I leaned on a counter. I closed my eyes to rid myself of images… writers observe too much. I needed to focus on the sounds. The song was clearer in the blackness of eyes closed at Riley’s. The melodies of the music and song drifted strangely to my ears. I could begin to pull apart the layers... I looked and there was suddenly a darker appeal to the sounds. Here I could see the owner of the Silver Fox, infected with the music; Bonifacio, head bobbing, was lurid in his examination; so many eyes on the sounds, so many minds in wonder of such melodies emptying from the urban heart of Bakersfield, it’s creepy ghost streets, lamp-lit walkways, half-abandoned downtown hovels and buildings; there, where in the darkness I felt the musical firefly glow of the urban Bakersfield bohemia, and so wanted it to illuminate...
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Monday, April 25, 2005.
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