Bakersfield Bukowski 2: The Dark Streets, The Dalloways, Rural Rock Punk - by N.L. Belardes

The Dalloways: Quiet is the New Loud


The Filthies: Rural Rock Punk

It’s ironic that a recluse of a writer can find himself socializing at any hour; wandering Bakersfield streets in the downtown district, seeing Ben of Broken Record Gospel still pouring coffee at the Spotlight, the Filthies and Dalloways performing to a big crowd in the darkness of Kosmos. I’m not a night person. My friends know this. I’m not one to socialize. My few friends know this as well. But then, books don’t write nor sell themselves. So I have to meet people. I have to talk; I have to communicate about literature, and especially about Southern San Joaquin Valley literature and where it’s going. That is what I write, about this Southern Valley… In Lords: Part One I describe the Southern Valley as a very grey, ethereal force that permeates even the consciousness of the people. I will likely be pegged early on as someone who despises the valley and who only views it as a misty grey force that dominates this breadbasket, this fertile crescent and hydraulic society of mid-California. In Thick White Crust I describe the Southern Valley as a natural and mechanistic entity filled with the magic realism of a recent upheaval in historical forces. The Citrus Girl is altogether different and provides a romantic counterculture view of a land where people have the ability to ripen like the soil’s very fruit orchards: the vitriolic acidity of fruit blended with the fructose sweetness of a sugary bite, all grown from the fertile landscape.

And here I was last night, in the darkness, a melancholy mood, ignoring Freakfest, listening to a young high school band, and then the Dalloways, sitting in a chair, and hearing the rhythms of valley forces not unlike that Sonnenreise, that land of lemon blossoms writer and historian John Keegan once said was a fragrance opened up to him as he toured America as a young man. And here, Quiet is the New Loud, its Brit Pop Dream Pop Central California with Latino riffs blended in, not unlike such acidic sweet fruit blossoming in the valley winter months. A new sound, a new echo of old. A new blossoming. We never tire of lemon blossoms and rejoice upon the wafts of each bloom. Gehrard Enns was in full form, energetic, happy to be at home in song, coated in melodic riffs that swarmed and infested the stage, cut loose from his Rickenbocker guitar as if he’d just let the skeletons out of the closet of his mind; to tell us stories, so we can not just hear, but feel them, even in Aaron Wall’s percussion tour of life in drumbeats, in Matt Wall, friend of Jazz Greats and pouring his soaring bass lines into the heart of song. Ricky, that guitarist unheralded by the Bakersfield music scene, triumphant in the Fresno scene, was in his best form, pouring more of his Latino soul than ever into songs that could strangely echo from Manchester alleys and British industrial warehouses, were one to place them on such dark streets, on such dark industrial Isles of the North Sea…

During the Filthies set I walked through Kosmos, listened in different areas to hear how the bands sounds echoed through corridors, an opposite room, the pool table back areas, and even into the dark hall towards the men’s restroom, where voices muffled and guitar became a tinny lost echo of noise. I stood in a doorway and watched faces smile at powerful guitar work. I saw the eyes of those engulfed in the rhythms of rural rock punk. I wondered if many understood the energy of a music driven movement in new sounds: the rural countryside, the agricultural boom infecting punk sounds the way the great Dust Storm of 77 infected every home with raw dust and valley fever spores. What I heard were some of the early sounds of this. I was reminded how Green Day once played the old Bam Bams to maybe ten people, while fifty stood outdoors and smoked; no one knew the future. Will people ignore this music-driven movement for long? Their next album, Rare, is sure to mature their sound, to sculpt it into an even greater echo of life in the rural center of the Southern Valley… and here we will have it through the eyes, fingers, chords, instruments and lives of a few musicians… in the new punk genre, ‘rural rock punk’, that would get a historian like me to even think about such new sounds in music coming of age…

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Sunday, April 24, 2005. You can leave your response.