Bakersfield Bukowski resurfaces in strange snowless weekend - By N.L. Belardes

I haven't written one of my Bakersfield Bukowski pieces in a while...

I’m at the Smoke Hole thinking about a cigarette but instead remind myself there’s more smoke inside this little downtown side street bar to fill Staples Arena with a Marlboro mushroom cloud. The dark length of a bar fills itself with people of all shapes and sizes. There’s the hipsters in the corner smoking with their starry-eyed visions of themselves like ghosts in the smoke clouds, and the big buttery fellow drunk off his own stink. He’s smoking and staring up at a television where remnants of an ancient AC/DC video blink in the room. “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” is as silent as the big man’s stares. He quietly longs to be at the concert on the screen, wonders where the 80s have gone, bows his head and takes a shot of cheap tequila. He could never be a rock star for all of his lost longing memories of the stage. And he knows it.


Image of the Indians from Azuls

I meet a lady who shows up for an interview. Her friend just died and she’s got a few tears that dry up from the smoke. We wander outside into the dark, sit in a car, and talk about one act plays and directors. A little devil in my head grumbles, “The show must fucking go on.” It does. I go back inside and watch the Indians sing a Doors’ tune. The drummer kicks into two solos and screams at his friends in the crowd while a drunk blonde grinds her fat hips on another woman’s kneecaps. I stay on the opposite side of the room, down a drink and wander back outside to interview a Bakersfield guitarist who now lives in Nashville. He’s a dive-bomber, careening into the dive bars where he hovers around legends to watch old timers pickin’. He couldn’t see such licks in Bakersfield unless he slunk into Korn’s bedroom windows to watch Munky, or if he popped out of Buck’s fireplace to see him on his big crystal horse in his overalls licking “Tiger By the Tail” with a corn cob pipe between his aged teeth. In Nashville this dreamer taps into the dark pit of country music where lap steel rhythms grow like fungus and creep out into the face of country music like a disease.

I don’t stay much longer as the Indians finish in a wild tantrum by the drummer who laughs and rocks out in merriment. The next band is Pangolese, a loud smoking rock band with a bass player whose hair changes color each week. He drinks more beer than all the pitchers on the bar and still plays straight up jams. There is a soulless pit in the room and lead singer Dave’s ass is showing a mighty crack. He doesn’t give a shit and smokes a cigarette while his glasses are so thick I think he might be Fatt Katt’s little brother. Right then I realize Bakersfield has more red-headed rocker fuckers than any town in America: Calico Sunset, Pangolese, Fatt Katt, 28s, Box Jumper… did Kenny Mount ever have red hair? I hear it changed colors after a devastating air hockey game.

I ignore the music scene the next night even though one of my favorite bands, Throatshot is performing at Sarah Fest, a local show, and there’s a reunion of Mission : Tonight, a local rock band dug up like a distant memory down at Sandrinis. I give up and stare at my computer screen and think I might write about Lords of Bakersfield creeping in downtown shadows in my big blackened sequel to bastards in Bakersfield… That or a children’s story so fantastical even demonic shadows could become gleeful fairytale moments of candy-coated trolls skipping around cotton candy goblin heads.

It’s now Saturday morning and there’s no snow. The daughter of a woman who suffered two heart attacks last week, one on an operating table, fully awake, and her heart about to explode—her daughter bets me a quarter, saying it’s going to snow. But then, she was just suckered by the media. The media builds up wars and tragedies and blizzards—doesn’t she know this? The media feeds on the consciousness of the people who remember 9-11 tragedies the way they remember big Bakersfield snowstorms, and so the people can’t wait for more of either because it gives them something to talk about in corporate hallways or dark Smoke Hole bars… either way, people watch the news, read the papers and infectiously talk to one another while I laugh that everyone is suckered as if Simon Sundale had risen from the dead and just declared the next Bakersfield snow apocalypse.

Sure, it’s raining and cold and there’s a hailstorm where the snowy hard chunks look like fluffy Styrofoam packaging bits that soon fill lawns. But it’s still not snow. The hail passes and in a few hours a young man stares into the darkness, hoping his band can perform in sun or rain like some strange Woodstock of hockey song heroism. He ends up singing a rural rock punk version of Johnny Cash’ “Folsom Prison Blues” that gets the crowd going inside the Rabobank Arena. He and his buddies “pop punk you can dance to” gets the crowd moving on such a dismally dark day.


The War Days director turns rural rock punk hero...


With a new drummer, Dirty Spanglish still rocked the Casbah...
Old drummer, Doug is in a new band called Paradigm Shift. Play the kitten cannon on their site!






The War Days Director on the cover of the hockey CD shown at the Rabobank


In disbelief, this digitally enhanced photo shows
the War Days director in a shocking jumbotron moment...


And then Meathead from KRAB radio tried to kill him. Really!

And then there’s the Whores, the dark angels of post-grunge angst. Three Chord Whore’s Darcie Blake, once a lonesome dark Bakersfield alley sight stands in front of 5,800 people and sings a song I wrote called, “Zamboni Zombie”. She’s frightfully unmoving, a Zamboni Zombie herself who doesn’t dance like I’ve seen her in the Bakersfield Bukowski bar haze shadows. Who would have thought that a rock band would calm such energy as that of Darcie Blake? “We’re going drinking after the show,” she says like a rock star, full lips, big eyes and a pink polkadot dress like she’s stepped rebelliously from a Doris Day movie turned counterculture rockfest. The blimp drops band stickers on a night of great camaraderie with radio people and band people alike. KRAB’s Meathead sings back-up with Dirty Spanglish on “Zamboni Zombie”, a song originally backed by Patchboy and the Bakersfield Condors.


Signs, signs, signs, and Three Chord Whore fans...


Darcie is the ZAMBONI ZOMBIE!!!!


Guitarist and historian guru Heather...


"That's the Fuckin' Zamboni! With a zombie on it!" Darcie Blake screams.


Shantell Waldo taunts Nate Berg who once said Three Chord Whore would never play to more than 12 peeps. Try 5,800 rabid hockey song fans.


Meathead from KRAB radio gets ready to sing back-up.

Marc DeLeon of Mad Dog Tattoo and American Standard did the sound for the night. He hung out on the Condor’s couch and made jokes before talking to me about the famous DeLeon photo where he flipped me off. I said, “I called Matt Munoz and said to flip me off.”

Of course Marc was naturally flipping me the bird. The image made its global rounds. And we had a good laugh at the moment.

“Jon saw those photos you took,” he said. “Yours were probably the first images up of Korn Row.”

Oh yeah, the search engines did me proud.

We then talked about where the Korn Row sign had disappeared to… Stolen? Or just for show? Who knows?




DeLeon is a Bakersfield rock legend. Get used to his name. Here he is sleeping because the Condors were the OTHER Zamboni Zombies....


Please fight more...

The hockey game itself? An embarrassing 5-1 home loss to the bumblebee jersey wearing Stockton Thunder. It was a game as dark as the mood of Bakersfield Bukowski. Perhaps we should have all watched the game half drunk in a smoky bar, with cross-checking images up on the AC/DC screen and the bands playing the entire time into the smoke.

Either way, I win 25 cents. I didn’t see a damn drop of snow in Bakersfield.

Sunday I wake to hear a woman screaming outside my front door. She jumped out of a moving van and runs across the street to a Catholic church. The van turns around with an open passenger side door and bolts back down the street. In such darkness there is a snowless Bakersfield storm. On my computer there is an email about myspace hate (not aimed at me or my family). I read it and wonder what’s going on with the youth of Bakersfield. The hate is so strong I wonder if there are murderous intentions. In a few hours, with a migraine headache I head into the Tehachapi snow. Fuck the weathermen and snow hungry hysteria they create, I’m going to go enjoy myself and throw snowballs at little kids.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Monday, March 13, 2006. You can leave your response.