{"id":3953,"date":"2013-04-17T15:23:53","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T15:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lbpost.com\/articles\/life\/whatever-happened-to-suburban-rhythm-the-unsung-music-of-long-beach-california-part-1\/"},"modified":"2013-04-17T15:23:53","modified_gmt":"2013-04-17T15:23:53","slug":"whatever-happened-to-suburban-rhythm-the-unsung-music-of-long-beach-california-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/hi-lo\/whatever-happened-to-suburban-rhythm-the-unsung-music-of-long-beach-california-part-1","title":{"rendered":"Whatever Happened to Suburban Rhythm? The Unsung Music of Long Beach, California: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Eds note: This is Part 1 of a longform nonfiction piece on Long Beach’s often-overlooked music scene that eventually became my thesis. The next two parts will run tomorrow and the next day as the lead up to 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

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The Honey In the Carcass of the Lion<\/strong><\/p>\n

On a recent mild spring evening, dimly-lit Alex\u2019s Bar\u2014just east of Long Beach\u2019s Cambodia Town\u2014was alive with the Tecate-induced energy of the city\u2019s music community in bloom.<\/p>\n

It was a Friday night show at the punk-rock-meets-Dia-De-Los-Muertos dive bar and an interesting mix of local twenty and thirty-somethings brought the room to its 200-person capacity. The mixed crowd was not one that would commonly appear in Los Angeles just 25 miles to the north, but here in Long Beach\u2014the most diverse large city in the nation\u2014it\u2019s the norm.<\/p>\n

Black hip-hop heads in lifestyle-brand t-shirts hung with white Orange County-bred co-eds dressed on daddy\u2019s dime who talked to second-generation Hispanic desk-jobbers who mingled with thrift-store-plaid clad hipsters of all skin shades as tough-as-nails locals in home-silkscreened hoodies made their rounds. An equally as diverse lineup was set to perform.<\/p>\n

\"LBmusicpullquote2\"One opening band played psych-tinged instrumental prog, its black female drummer channeling both Shiela E. and Zach Hill. Another sounded like 60s Brazilian tropicalia on a ride through Southern California\u2019s pan-Latino influences. And a third performed excerpts from their latest rock opera, which was somehow right at home with the both the sequin-loving Queen fans and leather-bound Iron Maiden lovers in the audience.<\/p>\n

None of the bands were out of place that night and none of their fans were either. Instead, conversations about mutual friends, mutual experiences and mutual hometown love crept through the silence between songs and it didn\u2019t take long to realize that the whole bar was full of Long Beach\u2019s music-minded faithfuls\u2014each one separated from the other by fewer degrees than Kevin Bacon.<\/p>\n

Not a bad turnout considering that the show\u2019s Facebook event page only listed 90 people attending. Then again, Long Beach is a place where word of mouth is worth more than an army of Twitter followers and it\u2019s not every day that a band from this often-overlooked city on the outskirts of Los Angeles\u2019 endless sprawl plays a homecoming show with cross-country and European tours under its belt.<\/p>\n

Yet, here it was, April 2011, and the Long Beach-based Free Moral Agents were back in town, surrounded by friends at Alex\u2019s Bar after two months of shows that for the first time took the six-piece music collective from Krakow to Kansas City in support of their second album, Control This<\/em>.<\/p>\n