A Night at The Cheese Box

August 14, 2009 - 3:29pm — AMP

by Chuck Gardner

I had just arrived back from a business trip to Alabama: It had been a rough flight, as the trip itself had been. I had managed to calm my assistant down to a tolerable level and there would likely be no problem boarding the flight as I had feared earlier. I had serious reservations that we would be detained and maybe even incarcerated under suspicious yet vague charges of spooking the shit out of the crew and/or passengers whilst in flight. Earlier in the trip things were progressing in a acceptable fashion when one of the clients, obviously at ease with our seemingly professional demeanor, leaned forward and asked my associate Chip “Do you dip?”. Chip originated from strange distant foreign shores and is not well versed of the local Southern argot, and unfortunately took it the wrong way; from that point on in the trip quite visibly shaken, the implications of the casual comment poisoning the usual placid waters of his eggshell mind. I managed to convince him on the way to the airport that his anxiety was simply over a misunderstanding, which helped till we hit ass-over-teakettle turbulence somewhere over East Texas. I breathed a sigh of relief whence disembarking, as there were no air marshals or otherwise paid, armed, and dangerous hired geeks waiting in the arrivals area. I had managed to beat the odds once again: I was home free and clear. What was needed at this juncture was some righteous musical maelstrom, And L.A.’s got it thicker than flies o’er the community cesspool.

No, after such an apprehension filled trip, what was needed more than anything was a little aural catharsis and atoning of sins, real and imagined. Perhaps a club hop with no apparent purpose, yea, perchance more than a scintilla of menacing trepidation and real endangerment of human life as I knew it at the time (things change). After scanning the local fish wrapper for club listings, I managed to glean a couple of likely candidates. There was those Black Metal sweethearts, Crib Death, with local bad boys Roadkill Sacrament executing bystanders at Club Foot, and over at the Cheese Box, there was brooding Post-Alternate, dialectical recidivists Stay Clean Mittens, with opening act, those art damage twins separated at birth, Scratch N’ Sniff. It all boiled down to both what order and what condition I wanted to see them in. Club Foot was in that decaying neighborhood just Northeast of Dodger Stadium where they had that big raw sewage backup recently that closed all the fast food restaurants for a couple of days, so I saved that for later in the evening when my olfactory sensibilities would be sufficiently altered by various nostrums of legal or substitute legitimacy.

I barely made it into the clove and bad B.O. scented climes of the Cheese Box when Scratch N’ Sniff were apparently close to finishing up their “set”. The lead “singer” was haranguing the audience for some unacknowledged sin of indifference they committed whilst in their hallowed presence, the bands collective beer bellies heaving orgasmic-like in sweat-drenched maddening fits as some noise producing electronic device bleated and mooed most un-rhythmically like some sex starved rabid cat in heat. I guess I missed earlier the best of what they had to offer as the stage was already littered with various famous designer knock-off shoes and the odd empty and lonely plastic drinking vessel. The gal sitting on the bar stool next to mine indicated that their final “piece” was their desperate endeavor at a “Top Forty” or “Mp3” hit, or whatever it is bands try to achieve in the sad state the current music market resides in. Though I was distracted by her obvious beauty (she was wearing some kind of see-through skirt/blouse combo with no observable foundation garments to be had!), the pseudo-acoustic impression made on me by their “Swan Song” sounded not unlike what you would expect to hear during a noisy chaotic sound check as several audio techies plug/unplug various chords and devices with the P.A. cranked to maximum speaker-shattering screech. I detected hints of “My Bloody Valentine” mixed with atonal clatter of say, “The Residents” – very unapproachable. It climaxed with something resembling a high-pitched fart noise as interpreted by your typical jet turbine. The vocals sounded like they were delivered through the world’s worst cell phone. I changed my current order and told the bartender to make it a double.

Stay Clean Mittens were all grave introspection whilst constantly checking if their respective shoelaces were tied, all the while cranking out some sorrowful but chirpy din, easily ignorable, except that the fashion plate next to me whose underwear budget was woefully under-funded couldn’t stop gawking at the love smitten singer apparently ensconced in some day of the week existential crisis (probably his trust fund lost 30% of its value), so I decided to weather on as long as I could. The mood changed from sorrowful murmur to a sort of confident morose drone, and even though I was enjoying the shit out of all of it (I’m funny like that), I decided to head up and over the miserably parched hills to check out what kind of train wreck Club Foot was foisting upon an unsuspecting but appreciative public.

It of course was Black Death Metal night, so all the wanna-bees, foo-foos, and metal retards abandoned their usual culverts and were out in full obtuse regalia. Although it’s always difficult in these situations to figure out the bands from one another, I gathered that I had not only missed all of Roadkill Sacrament’s set, but that the cops had already been there twice that night, the second time dragging three dim chuckleheads out for fighting with full on maces (????) during Roadkill’s “ballad” off their second album “Impaled for your Love” (something about a lonely nihilist’s yearning for the dead sex slave of his dreams), and were probably being pistol whipped just for being obvious and stupid. It seemed that if you could even find a chair or stool in working condition, i.e., four legs and a back, it either had some sticky substance or otherwise body temperate fluid of unknown origin on it, so I wisely stood in the back awaiting what either fate or Satan’s minions had in store for me next. Crib Death defiantly strode onto the stage, each attired in black leather (duh!) spiked football defensive linemen outfits as if they were casually sauntering towards some barbed wire thunder dome of torment. Then it began, the chrome-domed drummer jack-hammering some impossible double bass backbeat (???) while the rest of the guys (???)

strangled as much of a gleeful sonic caterwaul out of their instruments as is possible for mere humans. It then suddenly dropped down out of overdrive into second gear, the beat more of a triumphant Nazi victory march rhythmic skipping motif with superimposed uber-distorted chord structures (???) driving the whole melodic machine breakdown, with mutated cookie monster vocals topping off the whole mélange, like a sound track to what could have been the greatest Mad Max type movie ever made if it weren’t for the fact that Mel Gibson is such a subnormal dork. I got to admit, for as much as an abrasive apex (nadir?) as they were attempting to deconstruct, it was kind of catchy in a kind of simplified County and Western way. I was even tapping my toe. An added bonus: It was definitely softening the effects of my jet lag. And the mystery sticky substance was revealed on the very next song: fake blood spraying from the black lipstick festooned singer as a kind of clever off-camber counterpoint to when the bass player gave up all pretense of song structure and just started pounding open strings on his bass with his bloodied and gnarled paw. I would have stayed longer, but I kind of stood out, and as a wise patient once told me, once you get the message, it’s time to hang up the phone.

But the important thing to harvest from such a rich and fetid loam of music based opportunities in this land we love and scenic sewer of possibility, is that on any given night or furlough, there exists way too many means of creative discharge for mere humans to fathom. In this sweet or discordant ice cream store of harmonious prospects, anyone can satisfy the most cacophonous craving, be it Chicken Fat Ripple, Lasagna Chip, or Charcoal Almond Crunch with metal fillings.