I’m currently in the process of writing up a post about my short stint in Palm Springs, CA earlier this month, which will be followed by an in-depth look at my Bosch500 trip, from which I just returned home. In the interim, I located this piece I wrote in 2011 about Fuck Yeah Fest: the headliners that year were the Descendents and Death From Above 1979, and took place at the LA State Historic Park. The festival which was started by Sean Carlson in Echo Park in 2004 has since moved to the Los Angeles Sports Arena and Exposition Park. This piece was originally included in my senior thesis, “Small Things” (2014), and touches on several locations within Los Angeles where music continues to thrive; see also: the Smell, the Fonda Theatre, et al.

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Los Angeles, FYF Fest — 09.03.2011

The Blue Unicorn

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The baby blue unicorn etched on the underside of my wrist shoots me daggers as I drag myself from bed and throw myself together, anticipating Shirae’s early arrival that never comes.  Debauchery in the form of a stamp allows me to recall last night for what it was: bloody toes, crowd-surfing turned face-planting, mysterious conversations sent from a cell phone abductor, vodka shots swigged from a water bottle in the alleyway behind the Smell, and internal bruises and contusions traced with wobbly fingers hours later, wondering when the Hell any of us had beckoned for our mothers among all of it.  Friday was a series of misbegotten events that began and ended with Lily muttering from the back seat in her concussion-induced state, Amanda doesn’t know how to fucking drive.  The fact is I’m the one without the license; Amanda’s the one without the sense of direction.  Sometimes the combination proved problematic, but many times meant welcomed, albeit unexpected pit stops in Malibu at one o’clock in the morning.

Saturday is a different story.  Round two.  Touche Amore, Dangers and Joyce Manor are now just unicorn-shaped flashes of Friday’s past.  Anna’s spooning stale tortilla chips into her mouth with her legs folded under her when Shirae scrapes the bottom of her bowl of soup with a metal spoon and tells us that she no longer feels up to going to FYF Fest.  It’s the morning of and I’m speechless. She has the car; we have been fucked.  As it turns out, scoring an extra ticket to FYF Fest proves to be both a blessing and a curse.  The thought is fleeting, but in the moment I cannot help but think, Fuck No Fest.

In the duration of an hour and a half, the game plan is changed completely.  Daniel joins Anna and I, becoming our third musketeer and designated driver for the day.  He doesn’t have a driver’s license either, but does have a fully functioning car.  He chances the freeway, manages to cart all three of us to Downtown LA, Morrissey’s sonorous voice narrating the traffic we hit along the way.

It’s already one in the afternoon by the time we get to the LA State Historic Park.  We waste $2 on a parking meter with a one-hour limit, and end up spending another twenty minutes wading through pedestrian traffic and the hilly residential neighborhoods of Chinatown.  We retreat two miles downhill before making our way through the Metrolink depot where ticket scalpers stand in droves, escaping the harsh heat of the early September climate.

“Ticket!  Ticket!  Water!  Water!”  They enunciate, opening red and white coolers filled with refreshments buried beneath fragments of melted ice.  We walk on.

I’m exhausted before we even make it inside the music and arts festival.  I’m pained from the night before, and the night before that, and the week before that.  But I can pull through.  If I’ve learned anything since April, it’s that FYF Fest is a cake walk compared to Coachella.   What concerns me is how Anna and Daniel will perceive FYF Fest—neither of them has ever attended a music festival of any kind. Would they despise the crowd of 25,000 people, the overpriced foodstuffs, the static drawl of music played in an outdoor, day-time setting?  Little certain, we trudge through the police blockaded street, trailing past the blue and white outhouses with streamline precision.

The lot of us frolics through the dirt-patched line corrals, hop-scotching over empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s, crunched cans of raspberry-flavored Four Loko, and exploded tubes of sunblock.  After flashing our tickets and vendor wristbands, we beeline it to the Leonardo stage, where we catch the tail-end of the Head & the Heart’s formal goodbye to summer.  The combination of sun and set makes me perspire.

From then on, it’s Ty Segall and Japandroids and two-man outfits playing rowdy, twangy garage punk on the Michelangelo stage where mulch sits in place of grass.  It is all dirt and mud, all throughout the plot of land.  Festival veterans tramp about with brightly colored bandanas pulled taut over their mouths for this reason.  They know the drill—that the dirt will really kick up come nightfall; that the mix of filth and pungent air will cling to the nostrils and skin of sweat-sheened bodies.

For some reason, I’m on barricade for The Smith Westerns’ set, standing beside the step-brother of Cold War Kids’ front man.  To my left, a teenage male acts a chump, an ape mask draped over his skull.  Both appear enraptured by the smooth, quelling reverberation of guitar paired with eager, yet catchy bass lines.  The Smith Westerns prove too quiet for me, bridging too heavily in the pop stratosphere, their vocals too sporadic and hush-hush soft.  Anna and Daniel are taken by jet-lag-beleaguered Cults, who open their set with the Twin Peaks theme song.  Their performance is a mix of bondage, schoolgirl innocence, and lo-fi music box lullabies.

We wander through a group of thirty-some people huddled around a water spicket, slink past the fenced-in beer garden where we are confronted by the combined scents of mildew, dirt, ready-made pizza from the fast food trucks, urine mixed with UV Blue vodka, body odor, spilled beer, fog machine, and cheap marijuana.  It’s here that you run into guys who look at you like you’ve never met (though you definitely have), and you thinking, Thank God I chopped off my hair and dyed it purple.  You can’t afford food or a cup of $6 watered down lemonade, so you swash Listerine, and let the bright green liquid scorch your wounds because it proves to be more rewarding than leaving FYF Fest with an empty wallet.

“I just want popcorn, dammit!” Anna routinely repeats throughout the day.  A bag of popcorn lands at our feet during Descendents’ set, but we’re too busy pushing our way into the pit to rip into the snack food we spent a large portion of the day craving.  We toss dirt-encrusted smiles to each other before being swallowed by the swirling sea of rambunctious bodies.

We’re crushed against the chain-link fence, our legs crunched beneath us, trading looks between Guided By Voices’ gravelly, 80’s-throwback performance and the Los Angeles skyline illuminated by a downcast sun.  It dawns on us then that we’re sitting in the heartland of LA, buried in the gullet of that shady city sprawl, absorbing not only the dewy chill of the summer night, but the vivid incantation of live music.  This is all I really want and need in life.

Death From Above 1979 breaks into an erratic, frenzied set, tearing into heavy metal inspired dance-punk that makes me forget about this morning and last week and six months ago.  The recently reunited duo is a strict diet of bass and drums—loud, ferocious and cosmic.  It doesn’t ever cross your mind that the delicate flesh of your heel will be torn off by the stomping of a beer-toting male, but it happens nonetheless. We leave before their set is over, Anna wrapping napkins around my ankle where blood crusts in narrow streams.  I carry a handful of ice, dragging my ankle behind me, leaving a little shard of me somewhere in the pit that I’ll take away as souvenir the next time around.  A scar and a sway; we stray back to the car Daniel parked two miles uphill in residential Chinatown, appreciating the fact that all good stories conclude with blood and symbols.

Sunday is a different story. It’s round three and I’m (more than) slightly delirious. I toss the ice pack and prepare for Death From Above 1979’s stint at the Music Box, praying for what will be my third wind. It beats me over the head and by Monday, I am dead.