FEATURE STORY - THE ROCK AND ROLL FARM - FEB 21, 2005 Saturday night I was downtown feeling the vibe of the music scene when I bumped into Nick/Tyler from Liars and Thieves. He was handing out my flyers! I am in awe of this kid; he’s got way more energy than I do and always has encouraging words and a smile. That’s not anything like this cynical old writer. Anyway, he said, “Hey we’re going to play at Jerry’s. Come on down and see us. We’ll be on around 11. It’s kind of late, but…”

Oh boy how could I resist? I just gave these guys the review of the century, and in another article placed them in my all-time desert island top five Bakersfield bands. (After seeing Karmahitlist—maybe they should be there too!) Luckily I had already downloaded the 3-song CD demo they gave me because that was stolen from me by some punk kid headed to LA. He wanted to listen to some kick ass tunes and had seen Liars and Thieves the night before. I had thrown the cd on and listened to their songs no less than ten times each, and now that they were on my hard drive, even better. They’re that good. There’s mucho talent in these three encheeladas. I have to get the scoop on them… a feature article, yes?

Later, around 10:45 pm I headed down to Jerry’s Pizza. Now I hadn’t been to Jerry’s other than for a greasy slice while on lunch break downtown. I don’t mind popping in for a slice now and then; the pizza isn’t all that bad, and I dig the crust. I ordered a pizza, sat in one of the booths and really started to think about what was going on around me. Man had this place changed.

Back in 1996-1997 Jerry opened the downstairs portion of his parlor. I don’t know how long it had been closed until then, but when he opened it, there was a refreshing sigh in town, because other than ‘the Cellar’, there was no other below ground band/bar hangout. There was no Lucky’s or Jellies back then. And it was clean. There was a cement floor, brick walls and a long wooden bar that was just beautiful. And so well lit too. I saw DIM and Jumping Trains play there several times. It was clean, it was cool, but it wasn’t necessarily always packed.

So I’m eating a slice when I realize that when one band is setting up either upstairs or downstairs, another band is playing. There’s punk-style kids everywhere, much more than when I wrote a poem about a few punk kids with their dog in downtown Bakersfield in the mid-1990s, and much more than Kenny Mount told me there were back in the lost days of punk when there were only perhaps 40-60 punkers throwing their fists around Bakersfield. I was around then, and let me tell you, he’s right, punks were scarce then, and a hell of a lot meaner than today’s blend of Hot Topic goth punks or Green Day Grammy punk junkies. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are a lot of hardcore punks out there. I’m just saying it’s a lot easier to be a punk these days. When you mainstream a counterculture phenomenon like punk, then the weekend punk warriors always come out of the woodwork.

The same thing happened with the heroin generation of hipsters. People like Jack Kerouac on a Benzedrine high broke a hole in the mainstream so counterculture/drug culture could drip its way in.

A generation later it was hip for Cosmopolitan supermodels to have a heroin-stained look, thin, glassy-eyed, mascara dripping—you know the ads, you’re attracted to them too. And that didn’t mean they were addicts. That meant the people taking the pictures set them up that way: the runny make-up, certain skinny female types, and so on.

The Beats had come of age. Hipsters, holy goofs and rebels all made their way into Americana. If you don’t believe me, just stop for a moment and get to know a local counterculture hero right here in Bakersfield. This guy has slept on the lawn of Dylan Thomas as a soldier; he’s written an exclusive book on what was a never-before-researched topic: the LA Beat Generation. His sensational, Venice West, is a narrative masterpiece that studies LA beat poets like Greg Foster, Stewart Perkhoff, and Lawrence Lipton; and these guys all knew Kerouac. And without a Beat movement, we may never have had an angry punk movement, or not as we know it. You know—I’d like to compile a list of the punks in Bakersfield in 1980—can anyone help with that? Kenny?

Back to the farm talk. Yes, Jerry’s has transformed. It has become a rock and roll farm. I walked downstairs to see how rapidly these bands were setting up and tearing down. They were playing brief sets of “Mother f***** I’m gonna melt inside you!” punk and then, boom, tear down the walls of Jericho, they’re out of there and on the road to the next village, the next outpost of progress, the next pizza joint heroin-den...

And that’s not all. The basement, it had changed. It had become a blackened dismal, trashy, smelly waste in a sea of human punks. I hit the bottom step and went no further. Something was missing. The cleanliness of the Jerry’s cellar of the mid-1990s had dissipated into a brackish hovel. This was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle right here in Bakersfield—punk factories out of control in a spiral descent with cookie-made cut-out punks ready to top your next pizza.

I hope to God they aren’t cooking rat pizzas in vats of sewage down there. I think I ate one, and it wasn’t that bad if it was. This was Jacob Riis tenements that he wanted people to escape. But these kids are drawn to it. Those rebellious punks. They never know better no matter what era they’re from. Did we? Did you, Kenny?

This definitely was not the downtown Seattle music scene that the lead singer of Ridicule told me he envisions. This was pizza and beer, punk and ska, alt folk and Brit pop, Latino music meltdown of yesteryear, now having become a punk hardcore metal frenetic zone where bands pay to play, and the young, like cockroaches scamper in to feel the music pitching them in a torrent that makes them ignore the slovenliness. They embrace Jerry’s as some kind of rebellious Bakersfield punk empire right in the heart of copland. But is it? Maybe. You answer that. I don't know if I'm qualified.

I’m not lying either. Well, actually, judge for yourself. If you want to know more of what this place looked like, there’s proof in the pudding (damn I hate clichés, I never use them). Anyway, this excerpt is from the novel, The Citrus Girl, written in 1998.

Now, my memory while writing in 1998 of Jerry’s in 1996-1997 couldn’t have been that bad, now, could it? Read for yourself:

From Chapter Nine:

Most weekends Pedro performed in downtown Bakersfield bars. Our favorite venue was to see him play in the underground bar beneath the Polish-owned pizza joint, where beers were plentiful, and the bar was long. The ceiling was low above brick walls and a cement floor. The room was brightly lit and had the cleanest and friendliest appeal of any joint in town. Pedro would carry in equipment from where he practiced in the basement of a building across from the Alley Cat in the alley cat alley. Pedro would complain, “This shit isn’t getting any lighter,” as he carried in bundles of wires and drum parts. He had skinny pale legs, a shaved head like Steve’s, and wore jeans and a striped button-up shirt that hung out over his potbelly. Ever-complaining Pedro—he never worked a day in his life other than as a drummer. He was rarely happy and still lived at home with his parents. He never had a driver’s license, but was a remarkable and passionate drummer in Jumping Fish, a Bakersfield band that was acoustically folk-based. Two others in the band: a bassist and guitarist-singer had side-jobs that supported the entire workings of the group. They had been losing popularity among the locals and lately there had been internal discord; Pedro admitted he was looking for a new project: “I want something that will take me to bigger and better places. It needs to be a dark band,” he said as he grimaced at me one night. He whined, “I just want to be happy and play music and drink beer.”

Pedro rubbed his cracked-callused hands on his head and looked at Steve, “I can’t believe you actually saw Eddie Van Halen and you didn’t talk to him.”

“He looked busy. Goddam, he was just getting a head of lettuce.”

That evening we drove back down the hill and wound our way inland where we hoped to end up in West Hollywood at one of our favorite burger joints. We passed the Guitar Center, street people, locals in glittering clothes, and we drove up-and-down Santa Monica Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard looking at all the star-struck people, the weathered buildings, the cafes—the congregations of mingling evening ritz and glamour, the street life—tattooed people and midgets and transvestites all beating their own paths down the walks, through the tourists, over the stars, the dirty stars with cigarette stains underfoot that glisten in American eyes. And we just wanted a hamburger.

The talk on the street. Well I won’t even go there. I’ve said enough already. And like I told an old friend in Chicago over the phone today: “Jerry’s is gone.” And I meant it. There was sadness. But then I said, “There is hope here for the under-aged. There’s the Mexican marketplace at the MWP, there’s the sports bar going in at the Dome. There’s the Gate, which I haven’t been to yet and Gigantic. But it will take a new generation of rebellious punks to pull that scene away from a place that really has changed from a less lucrative, but perhaps more innocent time. I’ll end by saying I left and didn’t watch Liars and Thieves after all. It was past midnight; way past the 11pm showtime that Nick/Tyler mentioned. And yet, Jerry’s farm, it’s machinery was churning them out as fast as it could. -N.L.