FYF Fest: Afternoon sets by White Fence and Nick Waterhouse

After Saturday's marathon day and night at the FYF Fest, which stretched until 1 a.m. and continued long thereafter with surprise sets by Decline of Western Culture and Lightning Bolt at the Smell, fans on Day 2  of the downtown Los Angeles festival are straggling in. 

 The sun is hot and beer is sweating out of many people's pores, but the Sunday artists are nonplussed. The evidence was there a few hours past noon, when Los Angeles four-piece guitar band White Fence took the Hill Street Stage. The band, led by talented singer and songwriter Tim Presley, offered catchy, smart rock songs that suggested the more melody-laden end of the late 1960s psychedelic underground. Presley is best known in Los Angeles for his work with Darker My Love, and is also member of an underrated Austin, Texas, guitar band, the Strange Boys. 

But he fully owns White Fence, and it showed on his band's final song, 'Harness,' from his 2011 album 'Is Growing Faith.' 

PHOTOS: FYF Festival 2012

Competing for attention on the stage next to him was the updated throwback pop of Nick Waterhouse, a well-dressed young man with Don Draper hair and an obsessive affinity for late 1950s and early '60s rock 'n'  roll. The affection would feel more anachronistic if Waterhouse and his six-piece band weren't so tight and focused, and his songs weren't so catchy. On the main stage at 2, he brought two saxophonists, who pushed through songs with the confidence of a Stax horn section -- albeit with less precision. 

Unlike many bands at the festival, who use effects pedals and looping devices to beef up their impact, Waterhouse's power came only from the convincing runs on his Epiphone and the Fender amp it was plugged into. 

In the hours to come my agenda will include sets by, among others, Sub Pop Records recording artist Father John Misty, Florida punk band Against Me!, minimalist techno producer the Field, Providence art punk band Lightning Bolt and, well, about six others later into the evening. I'm hoping Black Dice will destroy my brain for 45 sweet minutes. Check back Monday (or Tuesday) to see if I survived. 

Follow Randall Roberts on Twitter: @liledit

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FYF Fest: Ceremony thrills, but fest has room to grow

The second and final day of the FYF Fest in downtown Los Angeles was three hours old before it received a wake-up call. It came in the form of a menacing bass rumble and a cloud of dust, the latter of which was quickly becoming visible from a nearby tent dedicated to comedy and electronic music. From a distance, it looked as though something may have been wrong.

Security need not have worried, even as officials kept a nervous eye on the swelling mosh pit. All that was happening was a mid-afternoon set by Ceremony, a Northern California punk band that understands the value of musical thriftiness, the importance of a fist-in-the-air guitar riff and the crowd-unifying power of a simple lyric.

"Gonna do a new song," said singer Ross Farrar. "It's not on the Instagram or the Playstation," he added referring the mobile photo application and the video game system. "It's called 'Everything Burns.'" He paused and then added the following, just in case anyone needed clarification: "Burns. Buuuuuuurrrrrrrrns." Burrrrrrrnnnnnnnsssssssssss."

PHOTOS: FYF Festival 2012

It's not hard to figure out what followed. The bass was sharp, ready to slice anything was put in front of it, and the guitar came spiking down, the kind of riff that makes fans pretend to air guitar. As for the drums, those came in stop-and-start fits for maximum tension -- or maybe that's aggression. 

Some Ceremony songs last all of 30 seconds. Some are just moments longer. No matter how brief, they manage to pack drum solos, guitar solos and enough frenzied lyrics to make the more concerned wonder how Farrar hasn't yet destroyed every single one of his vocal chords. 

The FYF Fest, now in its ninth year and held once again at downtown's mice-infested Los Angeles State Historic Park (mice count at the time of writing: two living, one dead), specializes in this kind or rock 'n' dance simplicity. When it works -- and make no mistake, Ceremony works, managing to make the ferocity of the Sex Pistols and the bluesiness of the Stooges sound completely fresh -- the results are glorious. 

When the results aren't so winning, the FYF Fest can feel as though it hasn't yet shed its more amateur roots, when FYF events were staged at random venues or festivals were planned without enough water for the 20,000 to 25,000 fans who would attend. By and large, this year's FYF Fest is a professional event, once again a party thrown in conjunction with promoter Goldenvoice.

This also marks the first time that FYF, in its downtown location, at least, has been held over two days. And perhaps this is just the heat talking, or frustration at the fact that water on a day when temperatures topped 80 degrees are overpriced at $3, but it was becoming increasingly clear as Sunday afternoon transitioned into Sunday evening that FYF hasn't put together a lineup quite worthy of the multi-day expansion. 

With 80 or so artists, there are always going to be exceptions, and FYF has done well in booking its headliners. Sunday's headliner Yeasayer is coming off its most experimental album, and on Saturday night, Sleigh Bells singer Alexis Krauss led listeners into a fantasyland of hyper-colored noise while Tanlines created an exciting mix of synthesizers and guitar rock.

Yet it's the details that matter, and Sunday afternoon offered little to get excited about. Local rock band the Allah-Las were a pastiche of AM radio sounds, with vocals that echoed from another era and guitars that would have made Del Shannon proud. It was pleasant enough, and just a day removed from when local punks FIDLAR shouted that they felt "80 years old." 

They weren't talking about the FYF lineup on Sunday, but they may as well have been. Nick Waterhouse has a kicking band and knows how to throw a party that would have been all the rage in the days before the Beatles visited Ed Sullivan. Meanwhile, King Khan & the Shrines had a blast worshiping Sly Stone. 

Even when Sunday's artists got a little closer to the present, they were still looking backward. Wild Nothing had a few hooks, but most had already been written better by New Order. Still, one of the best of the bunch was local rock band Papa, whose swift rock 'n' roll had the power-pop flair of Big Star or "Summerteeth"-era Wilco, but unexpectedly laced the songs with keyboards drenched in soul.

A band worth watching, Papa's arrangements were leaps and bounds ahead of any number of FYF garage rockers. Leader/drummer Darren Weiss would frame songs around wind-gusts of guitars and shout a lyric before being suddenly detoured by his keyboardist. "I just want to be quiet now," he said, before instantly changing his mind and yanking the song elsewhere. 

Heavily lacking at FYF was any hip-hop, and Aesop Rock became a must-see Sunday simply for that reason. His beats offered a bleak vision of the future, and his well-detailed songs could touch on a teenage rebellion just by discussing a haircut. His late-afternoon set focused heavily on new material, which delivered social commentary with monster movie characters.

Electronic music did have a heavy presence, but FYF's electronic selections weren't all that different, in spirit, from most of its rock acts: low-fi and sometimes not ready to be heard outside someone's bedroom studio. The loungey keyboard schlock of Daughn Gibson was an unfunny joke, notable only for his Nick Cave-like voice. Yet snythy atmospheres and spoken word rarely work well, especially when the word "bone" is used as a verb.

Violinist Kish Bashi offered at least a hint at how FYF could better incorporate electronic acts. He's essentially a one-man band, and while he was no doubt sweating in his tux, he looped melody upon melody until the violin sounded almost animal. His singer/songwriter vocals offered a unique counterbalance. 

Yet it was the words of Allah-Las singer Miles Michaud that were echoing throughout the day. "It's a beautiful thing," he said of FYF, adding that it "came out of very humble beginnings in Los Angeles."

He's right, and it can indeed be a beautiful thing. Celebrating the weird, the underground and the local is a noble cause, but FYF, with two-day passes that sell for $100 once service fees are factored in, is no longer humble.

Events such as Echo Park Rising and Make Music Pasadena may lack FYF's headliners, but they book a number of like-minded artists and are free. In contrast, FYF has grown-up quick and is still booking a fest heavy on acts that would sound great at a $5 house party. Unlike Kish Bashi, FYF hasn't yet found a way to fit into its grown-up suit. 

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Summer dreamin' of summer songs

The season of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" is winding down, her so-called "wish in a well" has long been thrown. The addictive ode to obsessive ambivalence, propelled into the heads of millions after a Justin Bieber tweet in the spring, can safely be called the proverbial "song of the summer."

At slumber parties and pool parties, during barbecues, while jogging or making out, in front of YouTube on repeat, remixed and covered thousands of times by amateurs, "Call Me Maybe" has been everywhere. And as such, it joins past season conquests such as Nelly's uproarious "Hot in Herre" from 2002, Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love" ('03) and Rihanna's breakout hit, "Umbrella" ('07). But summer hasn't been all roses: Recent years have seen the oppressive dumbness of the Black Eyed Peas, Katy Perry's mindless poses and LMFAO's punch-in-the-head party anthems. And gazing back further, two decades ago summer was all about Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back."

Will Jepsen join Sir Mix-a-Lot and Hoobastank ("The Reason," '04) in history's dustbin? Maybe. "Call Me" was certainly alive with pleasure, but far from a classic, especially considering what else happened this summer in pop music: Frank Ocean, Frank Ocean and Frank Ocean.

INTERACTIVE: The stars on Hollywood's Walk of Fame

Which is to say, Jepsen's light pop track will likely be more of the "Baby Got Back" variety song fondly recalled but more as an asterisk. Few remember 1992 as the summer of Sir Mix-a-Lot. That was the summer Nirvana's "Nevermind" reigned supreme, and much of non-rocker Los Angeles ' and America ' was singularly obsessed with Dr. Dre's "The Chronic," which didn't contain a song of the summer so much as a vibe of the summer.

Jepsen's light pop gem is better than "Baby Got Back," but isn't as good as "Hot in Herre," the Neptunes-produced banger about a heat so burning that the singer and his date gotta take their clothes off. Nor does "Call Me Maybe" touch the sheer power of "Crazy in Love." For my money, Nelly Furtado's brilliant Timbaland-produced summer track "Promiscuous," from '06, is so much more dynamic ' and empowering ' than "Call Me Maybe."

But it certainly does its job: Jepsen has ruled my internal jukebox since I first heard it, and its "Hey, I just met you ..." chorus is rolling around in my head ' against my will ' as I write this. Like many others around the world, it's been competing for space in there (again, not that I'm happy about it) with Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know."

LIST: 100 things to do this summer

In the realm of non-Aussie sunroof jams perfect for driving, much cruising was soundtracked by SchoolboyQ and ASAP Rocky's "Hands on the Wheel," which rumbled with more urgency than the season's commercial hip-hop success story, the middling rapper 2 Chainz. My favorite single of summer 2012, the one that I'd place qualitatively higher than any other track, was Usher's searing "Climax," his face-the-facts breakup breakdown. Not a happy song, what's a summer without a little private bummer?

For me, a few different musical moments will remain imprinted in my memory when anyone mentions the summer of '12. The first occurred on July 17 at Ocean's sold out gig at the Wiltern. He'd released "Channel Orange" the day before, and as he came out onstage to big applause, he broke into "Thinkin Bout You," its first single. The song isn't your typical summer anthem. It's hard to sing along to at full volume, the lyrics are jam-packed with syllables and internal rhymes ' and there are so many of them.

But as Ocean crooned, nearly the entire theater sang along, illustrating how the thousands had internalized not only the words but every rise and fall of Ocean's singsong phrasing. While tweens and their moms were bouncing to Carly Rae's easily memorized ditty, a generation ahead of them was obsessed with the vast lyrical programming within "Channel Orange," which announced a major new talent with courage to speak the truth.

The other moment happened far removed from the crowds and featured as its soundtrack the Emerson brothers' slow jam "Baby." A 40-year-old song resurrected by both a reissue and a well-timed cover version by L.A. singer Ariel Pink (who released it as the first single on his new record), "Baby" became my singular obsession in June. I thought it was mine alone.

But one gorgeous night as my fiancée and I were walking through my apartment building's courtyard, the Emerson song was on repeat in my head. As that was happening, Donnie Emerson's innocent falsetto drifted out of a neighbor's window, as though we'd conjured it into being. Its presence startled me. This, I had thought, was our song. But leaning against the window was a couple kissing as though the moment were staged. Presented for our enjoyment, "Baby" come to life in West Hollywood.

randall.roberts@latimes.com

All the world's onstage at Levitt Pavilion

As dusk fell over the Levitt Pavilion at MacArthur Park one recent Friday, Eddie Cota drank in the scene with quiet satisfaction.

On the lawn, kids and adults executed Brazilian capoeira moves while an impromptu drumming coterie tapped out muscular rhythms. Nearby, vendors selling tamales and pupusas did a brisk trade with Central American and Mexican families who were popping open picnic coolers, while clumps of twentysomethings spread blankets and snogged under the trees.

Half an hour remained before the evening's free entertainment, the Brazilian American soul-funk-samba artist Quetzal Guerrero, was due to step onto the Levitt bandshell and fire up his electric-blue violin. But the atmosphere already suggested a friendly fusion of neighborhood block party and indie nightclub.

"MacArthur Park, it's possibly the most interesting neighborhood in the country right now," said Cota, 29, artistic director of the Levitt Pavilion summer concert series at MacArthur Park as well as the Levitt Pavilion's sister series in Memorial Park Pasadena. "Within a five-mile radius, the number of ethnic cultures and city cultures and subcultures and pop cultures that I have access to is mind-blowing. And it takes one artist to bring all those people together."

Superlatives aside, Cota indeed could make a strong case for the Westlake neighborhood's ethnic wow factor. But what's equally striking about what's happening this summer at MacArthur Park is the range and vitality of the Levitt Pavilion's performers, especially its slate of Latin-alternative and progressive world-music acts such as the Colombian electro-tropical ensemble Bomba Estéreo and the Malian hip-hip folk group SMOD.

The Levitt's lineup in those categories easily ranks among the country's most cutting-edge, drawing hundreds and sometimes thousands of weekend visitors to the city-owned urban oasis just west of downtown.

"The core is Latin and also it's an experimental community," said Cota, who spent several years working in radio station promotions before joining the Levitt organization in 2008. "We just had Nosaj Thing. That to me is very sophisticated music that just happens to be electronic, but there's classical elements, there's jazz elements. It's a very complicated neighborhood, and for that reason complicated music works."

Thanks in part to the Levitt Pavilion series, MacArthur Park's growing reputation as a warm-weather cultural hub has cast a new light on the surrounding area: a blue-collar but gentrifying enclave that's trying to shake off its old image as an after-hours paradise for gangbangers, crack dealers and fake-ID hustlers.

"I think the work Eddie's doing is amazing," said Guerrero, who moved to L.A. from his native Arizona six years ago, "because he's giving a stage for a lot of obscure or outside-of-the-box, outside-of-the-status-quo musicians and artists to really express themselves."

The 6-year-old Levitt series at MacArthur Park and its 10-year-old Pasadena sibling are relative upstarts in Southern California's outdoor concert universe. Unlike the Greek Theatre or Hollywood Bowl, which lean toward familiar names with the proven power to draw, the Levitt series favor artists just surfacing from below the radar. And unlike those venerable venues, the Levitt series are free and open to all comers. So if you're accustomed to VIP parking and luxury-box seating, you're pretty much out of luck.

Or in luck, as the case may be. Three weeks ago, at the Quetzal Guerrero show, the attendees sprawled on the grass included not only working-class immigrant families who arrived on foot but also Elizabeth Levitt Hirsch, vice president of the Mortimer Levitt Foundation and daughter of the late custom-shirt magnate Mortimer Levitt and his wife, Mimi, the New York philanthropists whose largesse helps support Levitt pavilions in several cities in addition to those in L.A. and Pasadena.

Each pavilion has its own independent board of directors and must secure additional individual sponsors and grants to meet its financial goals, said Cota, who estimates MacArthur Park's annual budget at $650,000 and Pasadena's at $480,000. It's up to Cota, who oversees booking at both sites, to recruit artists who will give each space a separate and distinct identity.

Cota said he pays artists competitively so he can keep up with bidding against clubs such as the Echo, the Troubadour and the Satellite. Artists who've performed at MacArthur Park say they enjoy playing to audiences that are more demographically diverse than a typical club crowd.

"It's very exciting to see how it's developing," said Levitt Hirsch, who was accompanied by Renee Bodie, executive director for the Levitt Pavilion MacArthur Park. "Eddie has an intuitive sense about how to mix music and community and blend that experience. Eddie will go to every club imaginable and Eddie will go into that underground-DJ, 5-o'clock-in-the-morning experience to hear what's going on so he can be that much ahead of what everybody else is doing."

This summer's MacArthur Park series will continue Sept. 2 with a 7 p.m. show by Dehli 2 Dublin, a Canadian band that mashes up Celtic music, Bhangra, dub, reggae and electronica. Sept. 6 will bring the garage jazz of Killsonic, followed on Sept. 7 by the AfroBeatles, which is just what it sounds like: a hothouse hybrid of beats by Afro-pop pioneer Fela Kuti and tunes by the Fab Four.

On Sept. 8, the Levitt will host a Colombian double bill of electronic-dance artists Palenke Soultribe and Monsieur Periné, a photogenic young gypsy-jazz swing band that Cota recruited after spotting them at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

Cota, raised in San Diego by Tijuana-immigrant parents, said that programming Latin and world music doesn't just fit the Levitt's core mission "to reflect the community." More to the point, he believes, Latin culture is becoming the mainstream culture of a city whose population is about half-Latino, plus a recombinant ethnic cocktail of everything else.

"When you go to a La Santa Cecilia show you see everybody dancing ' black, white, yellow, brown," Cota said, referring to the neo-folkloric pop ensemble that performed last summer at MacArthur Park. "La Santa Cecilia isn't a Latin band; it's an L.A. band."

Amy Davidman, a booking agent at the Windish Agency who has arranged for several client artists to perform at Levitt MacAthur Park, said Cota and his colleagues have brought much-needed attention to emerging Latin and Latino artists.

"I don't think it takes away from a focus on any other group," Davidman said. "The thing is that the community gets marginalized and not focused on all the time, so I think it's great to put some extra emphasis on that community."

Other local Latin-music advocates echo that assessment. Tomas Cookman, founder-owner of Nacional Records, a North Hollywood-based label that specializes in alternative Latin music, said he thinks "it's really brave of them doing the programming that they have done." Last year the Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux, who records with Nacional, drew more than 2,000 people to MacArthur Park.

"The challenge that they have is that it's still MacArthur Park, and as warm and fuzzy as people may want to try to make it to be, it still can get a little shady at times," Cookman said. "But if you can get beyond that, and I think enough people can, then I think it's great."

Cota said he wants the Levitt Pavilion not only to draw attention to up-and-coming L.A. bands but to let L.A. artists hear the great music the rest of the world is doing and be inspired to raise their own games accordingly.

"I want you to look at my season and see a story of what Los Angeles is," he said. "And I feel like every show is a page in the book."

reed.johnson@latimes.com

Billy Ray Cyrus plays L.A.'s Bootleg Bar

Twenty years ago Billy Ray Cyrus was feasting on the fruits of his debut album, 'Some Gave All,' which spawned the hit single 'Achy Breaky Heart' and became the biggest-selling disc of 1992.

On Friday night the country singer played a concert for approximately 200 people at the Bootleg, a funky indie-rock club near Echo Park.

Yet this wasn't a case of a has-been music star sopping up the dregs of his residual fame. (Or at least it wasn't that entirely.)

Cyrus, 51, was launching what he referred to as a world tour with his new band, Good Bad Habit, in front of a rowdy crowd populated by friends and family, including his daughter Miley. The show came at the start of a busy fall for Cyrus, who's due to perform at Nashville's hallowed Grand Ole Opry this month before joining the cast of 'Chicago' on Broadway.

Near the end of Friday's gig he asked for the Bootleg's air conditioning to be turned off, as he was 'sweating like a hog,' he said, and didn't want to develop laryngitis before an upcoming appearance on 'The Tonight Show.'

More surprising than Cyrus' packed schedule ' to anyone, that is, who's witnessed the diminishing artistic results of his last several albums ' was the quality of his 40-minute set.

Forceful, precise and clear-minded about its virtues, the show felt like the exact opposite of the straw-grasping exercise you might've expected. It cleared a space for Cyrus as something more than a one-hit wonder, which may have been his goal: 'This was my second No. 1 record,' he said before 'Could've Been Me,' in fact a No. 2 record according to Billboard but a very handsome tune all the same.

Backed with compact Southern-rock muscle by the five-piece Good Bad Habit, Cyrus sang 'Could've Been Me' in an aspirated growl that sounded inspired by Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp; his voice has grown burlier and less refined since his early days, a tone the part-time actor put to natural use Friday in 'Hillbilly Heart,' which he recently performed on the CW's '90210.'

That song was one of several Cyrus played from a new album due out later this year, along with the Black Crowes-ish 'Change My Mind' and a raucous number whose chorus repurposed a down-home aphorism he said he learned from his father: 'The more you stomp in poop, the more it stinks.' (Cyrus somewhat famously utilized the saying on the 'Today' show in 2008, explaining his reticence over a controversial Vanity Fair photo in which daughter Miley, then 15, appeared to be topless.)

The singer also did 'In the Heart of a Woman,' a schmaltzy power ballad from his 1993 album 'It Won't Be the Last,' and, of course, 'Achy Breaky Heart,' which rode a stiff honky-tonk groove.

But in his bumptious new material Cyrus was purposely breaking from his old image as a slice of undifferentiated country-music beefcake ' Nashville's Michael Bolton, more or less.

At the end of the poop-stomping number, his band, with one guy who looked like he might have been in Train and another who seemed on loan from some Laurel Canyon indie outfit, segued into a breakneck double-time version of Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode,' electric guitars squealing like sirens.

Presiding over a small but loyal audience, Cyrus was relishing an unlikely opportunity to be bad.

Celebrating iconic songwriter Hal David

Hal David, the lyricist of pop music standards such as "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" and "(They Long to Be) Close to You" has died. He was 91.

David died of complications from a stroke Saturday morning in Los Angeles, according to the Associated Press.

David and his longtime partner composer Burt Bacharach etched an indelible footprint on the American songbook when they penned dozens of top 40 hits.

WATCH: 10 iconic Hal David songs

The two crafted a slew of memorable singles in the 1960s and early 1970s for a range of artists including Dionne Warwick, the Carpenters, Dusty Springfield, Gene Pitney and Tom Jones.

Some of the standards in the Bacharach-David catalog include "Walk on By," "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," "I Say a Little Prayer" and "One Less Bell to Answer" ' and dozens more that were hits on radio and on soundtracks to film and TV for decades.

This year  the two were honored with the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song during a White House tribute concert attended by President Obama.

To celebrate his permanent mark in American music Pop & Hiss has collected a few looks at some of David's classic works:

"One Less Bell to Answer / A House is Not a Home" -- "Glee"

"Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" -- BJ Thomas

"(They Long to Be) Close to You" -- Tamia feat. Gerald Levert

 "What's New Pussycat" -- Mike Myers

 

"I Say a Little Prayer" -- "My Best Friend's Wedding"

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Burt Bacharach prepares for 'Some Lovers,' his first stage musical in four decades 

 

 

In Rotation: Joey + Rory blend sharp humor and sincerity

A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers and contributors are listening to right now...

Joey + Rory's "His and Hers," the third album from the husband-wife duo Joey and Rory Feek, is a balanced blend of traditional country deep emotion and good-humored irreverence that turns the spotlight more often on hubby Rory's modestly engaging voice after this collection's two predecessors chiefly showcased Joey's sparkling singing.

The opening track, 'Josephine,' is set against the Civil War but skillfully probes the multiplicity of emotions all soldiers go through not knowing if or when they might come home. Led by Rory's winsome vocals, 'When I Grow Up' visits the average-Joe territory Garth Brooks plied so well in his prime in a charming and lighthearted song about the stuffy qualities that are often attached to society's idea of what defines adulthood.

The duo invoke the lively sound of 1950s Sun Records in the frisky 'Let's Pretend We Never Met,' while 'A Bible and a Belt' is certain to incite debate over its proclamation of the necessity of both items in the raising of children.

They've got a certified tear-jerker in 'When I'm Gone,' a slice of advice from a loved one who knows she won't always be around, and 'Teaching Me to Love You' is one of those country message songs that too often sinks into bathos, but Rory's delivery deftly dances around sappy sentimentality.

The homespun feel of it all dovetails warmly with the mostly acoustic instrumental backing, fleshed out with judiciously applied Nashville orchestration.

Joey + Rory

'His and Hers'

(Vanguard/Sugar Hill)

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