{"id":3950,"date":"2013-04-18T08:51:13","date_gmt":"2013-04-18T08:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lbpost.com\/articles\/life\/whatever-happened-to-suburban-rhythm-the-unsung-music-of-long-beach-california-part-2-2\/"},"modified":"2013-04-18T08:51:13","modified_gmt":"2013-04-18T08:51:13","slug":"whatever-happened-to-suburban-rhythm-the-unsung-music-of-long-beach-california-part-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/hi-lo\/whatever-happened-to-suburban-rhythm-the-unsung-music-of-long-beach-california-part-2-2","title":{"rendered":"Whatever Happened to Suburban Rhythm? The Unsung Music of Long Beach, California: Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ed. note: This is Part 2 of a longform nonfiction piece on Long Beach’s often-overlooked music scene that eventually became my thesis. The first part was posted yesterday (please read it before moving on; all the parts rely on each other for information)<\/a><\/strong>. The last part will run tomorrow, on the day of a public discussion and panel I will be co-presenting on the topic–along with Cal State Long Beach’s American Studies Program Director Brett Mizelle and local musicians Dennis Owens and Marshall Goodman–as part of the EMP Pop Music Conference being held at USC on Friday, April 19. For more information on the EMP Pop Music Conference and to see L.A.’s schedule of talks, visit empmuseum.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"long<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s No Moon\u2014That\u2019s a Space Station!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stretching inward from a horizontal coastline on the southernmost periphery of Los Angeles County, Long Beach, California might as well be on the moon. Separated from the Hollywood egos, hyped hipster haunts and pay-to-play shows of L.A. by a vast spread of concrete freeways, de facto segregation and working-class suburban sprawl, the city lives not only in another region of the county, but in another state of mind. <\/p>\n

Its 460,000 ethnically and racially diverse residents live smushed-together amongst oil rigs and dive bars, shipping cranes and coffeeshops, potholes and art galleries, in an urban village crucially situated at a global crossroads on the Pacific Ocean coastline.<\/p>\n

Long Beach has always existed as a notable extension of Los Angeles\u2019 sprawling Plains of Id, a term coined by architecture critic Reyner Banham to describe the Great Basin\u2019s endless grid of streets and houses. An early 1900\u2019s seaside destination and site of a prominent naval base as well as one the largest oil strikes in the country, Long Beach welcomed tourists, workers and seamen from all backgrounds. But Banham\u2019s groundbreaking observations of L.A. in the 1960s\u2014which for the first time positively viewed the region as a new kind of city, one with \u201cno urban form in the commonly accepted sense\u201d \u2014do not factor kindly into the singular personalities of the municipalities embedded within it.<\/p>\n

For Banham, Long Beach was part of L.A.\u2019s \u201cSurfurbia,\u201d a harbor city that was \u201cmostly a creation of the Pacific Electric\u201d similar to Venice Beach, Manhattan Beach and Seal Beach. In the latter part of the 20th century, however, Long Beach expanded its deepwater port, opened up international trade and grew beyond Banham\u2019s rearview mirror, into a cultural petri dish for globalized America.<\/p>\n

\"pikeAs Joe Day writes in the forward to the 2009 edition of Banham\u2019s book, \u201cmore than $100 billion of goods move through the ports of L.A. and Long Beach each year\u2026playing an unrivaled role in delivering the fruits of neo-liberal free trade to its largest market in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though often forgotten because of its mid-size population and proximity to the much larger Los Angeles, Long Beach\u2019s history as a distant L.A. suburb, its solid transportation infrastructures connecting it to global networks and diverse demographics make it a unique locus for cultural production, especially music.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are very surprised by the richness here,\u201d says Jennifer Volland, who co-wrote the book The Unexpected Metropolis<\/em> <\/a>about Long Beach\u2019s place in Southern California architectural history. \u201cWe talked to several publishers at first and they couldn\u2019t get into the whole regional thing, but once we showed [Hennessey & Ingalls] all the photos from Julius Shulman and Marcus Grant\u2014great architecture photographers\u2014they knew just from the images that this was also about something bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n

In its turn-of-the-20th-century heydey, Long Beach was a working-class oceanside resort and blue-collar city based on an all-American foundation of trade, military, oil, aerospace and defense. It was then-known to both detractors and boosterists as \u201cIowa-by-the-Sea\u201d and even as a popular stop for well-traveled Naval seamen, showed only hints at the global city it would become.<\/p>\n

But like other parts of the Los Angeles region, the latter part of the 20th century brought periods of economic decline for the residents of Long Beach as the Naval shipyard ceased operations, the Signal Hill oil wells began to dry up and the military-industrial complex that once flourished on its shores waned in the final decades of the Cold War. Though the waterfront remained dilapidated and local gangs crept into the unkempt downtown during this time, the Port of Long Beach\u2014and its sister Port of Los Angeles across the San Pedro Bay\u2014grew larger and more prominent.<\/p>\n

As international trade and the global flow of consumer products increased starting in the 1960s, the combined ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles steadily expanded, becoming a major connection point between the United States, South America and the Pacific Rim. Today, the attached ports are one of the largest oceanic transportation complexes in the world, handling more than 70% of the Pacific Coast\u2019s waterbourne trade and making it the largest customs district in the Western Hemisphere.<\/p>\n

Along with goods from around the world, so, too, come people and\u2014by extension\u2014their different experiences, cultures and customs. Port cities have always been rich laboratories for global culture for this reason: where else can so many different groups of people be thrown together, for better or for worse, in an urban blender? Throughout history, cities such as Venice (Italy), Lisbon, Amsterdam and New Orleans have emerged with unique hybrid identities because of the transnational connections made through their ports.<\/p>\n

\"lbmusicquote4\"Modern Long Beach is no exception.<\/p>\n

Immigrants from now-connected parts of the world descended on Southern California in the \u201860s and \u201870s, and many settled in the affordable neighborhoods of Long Beach. Whatever was left of the idea that Long Beach was \u201cIowa-by-the-Sea\u201d soon became lost as Dutch, Greek, Latino, Cambodian, Portugese and Spanish immigrants found their American Dream there. In the 1980s, City Hall put forth a new official nickname for Long Beach, adorning signs and businesses with a modern declaration\u2014\u201cThe International City.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt says something that we have these great secret neighborhoods and all these little businesses that we have,\u201d Volland says. \u201cIt\u2019s not like these people come from money. I wonder if sometimes these harsh, gritty conditions lend some creativity that makes it that much different than L.A.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Long Beach\u2019s connection to an international port only explains half of the cultural flows the city is working with. Its proximity to Los Angeles has an equally as important role in Long Beach\u2019s place as a cultural laboratory. Local and regional movements can\u2019t help but pass through the centrally-located city, which in addition to its autonomous municipal government and geographic distance from other downtowns and urban spaces, differs from Los Angeles in very major ways.<\/p>\n

While L.A. is filled with invisible borders and built-in social distance, Long Beach sets itself apart with density and diversity indexes that are uncharacteristically high for Southern California. The likelihood of living next door to someone of a different racial background is higher in Long Beach than anywhere else in the country and the number of people living per square mile is more than four times the L.A. County average.<\/p>\n

So with a geographical position at the crossroads of flourishing global networks and its closeness to a metropolis that billed itself as the City of the 21st Century, Long Beach in the ’80s was on the cusp of a cultural breakthrough, its residents just starting to experiment with decades of transnational cultural input.<\/p>\n

Former Long Beach City Councilmember and urban planner Marc Wilder predicted it best when he told the reporter Joel Kotkin in 1989, \u201cWe\u2019re going to be different from anywhere else. And we\u2019re going to do things differently because a Cambodian, a Hispanic and a Jew share the same space. We will see new kinds of institutions made by new kinds of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"suburbanrhythm\"<\/p>\n

Whatever Happened to Suburban Rhythm?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite a moniker that conjures up images of pastel-toned tract homes and unhip dad dancing, Long Beach\u2019s Suburban Rhythm grew out of a world just the opposite. One look at the ethnic makeup of its main band members\u2014which consisted of singer Dennis Owens, keyboardist Rodi Delgadillo, drummer Carlos De La Garza, bassist Ed Kampwirth and guitarist Jake Kline (later replace dby Scott Moran, pictured above)\u2014and it\u2019s obvious that this act didn\u2019t form on the wide, milquetoast streets of any sprawling suburbia.<\/p>\n

In fact, the racial makeup of the band members lines up almost perfectly with Long Beach\u2019s census data for the time, which showed large numbers of blacks, whites and Hispanics co-existing in the same neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou looked at the band on stage and you couldn\u2019t help but see a reflection of the city we lived in,\u201d Aaron Carroll, who remembers the band from its early \u201890s heydey, says. \u201cNot just racially, but also musically. They\u2019re the ultimate Long Beach band.”<\/p>\n

Formed in 1990 when its members were just finishing high school, Suburban Rhythm evolved out of The Silent Invasion\u2014a ska and punk fusion band featuring Dennis Owens (no relation to Ikey), DelGadillo and Kline. Dennis and DelGadillo had been friends for years, bonding over a mutual love of British two-toners The Specials, South Bay punks Circle Jerks and the \u201cGodfather of Soul\u201d James Brown.<\/p>\n

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