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). 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
That’s No Moon—That’s a Space Station!
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.
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.
Long Beach has always existed as a notable extension of Los Angeles’ sprawling Plains of Id, a term coined by architecture critic Reyner Banham to describe the Great Basin’s endless grid of streets and houses. An early 1900’s 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’s groundbreaking observations of L.A. in the 1960s—which for the first time positively viewed the region as a new kind of city, one with “no urban form in the commonly accepted sense” —do not factor kindly into the singular personalities of the municipalities embedded within it.
For Banham, Long Beach was part of L.A.’s “Surfurbia,” a harbor city that was “mostly a creation of the Pacific Electric” 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’s rearview mirror, into a cultural petri dish for globalized America.
As Joe Day writes in the forward to the 2009 edition of Banham’s book, “more than $100 billion of goods move through the ports of L.A. and Long Beach each year…playing an unrivaled role in delivering the fruits of neo-liberal free trade to its largest market in the world.”
Though often forgotten because of its mid-size population and proximity to the much larger Los Angeles, Long Beach’s 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.
“People are very surprised by the richness here,” says Jennifer Volland, who co-wrote the book The Unexpected Metropolis about Long Beach’s place in Southern California architectural history. “We talked to several publishers at first and they couldn’t get into the whole regional thing, but once we showed [Hennessey & Ingalls] all the photos from Julius Shulman and Marcus Grant—great architecture photographers—they knew just from the images that this was also about something bigger.”
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 “Iowa-by-the-Sea” and even as a popular stop for well-traveled Naval seamen, showed only hints at the global city it would become.
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—and its sister Port of Los Angeles across the San Pedro Bay—grew larger and more prominent.
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’s waterbourne trade and making it the largest customs district in the Western Hemisphere.
Along with goods from around the world, so, too, come people and—by extension—their 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.
Modern Long Beach is no exception.
Immigrants from now-connected parts of the world descended on Southern California in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and many settled in the affordable neighborhoods of Long Beach. Whatever was left of the idea that Long Beach was “Iowa-by-the-Sea” 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—“The International City.”
“It says something that we have these great secret neighborhoods and all these little businesses that we have,” Volland says. “It’s 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.”
But Long Beach’s 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’s place as a cultural laboratory. Local and regional movements can’t 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.
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.
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.
Former Long Beach City Councilmember and urban planner Marc Wilder predicted it best when he told the reporter Joel Kotkin in 1989, “We’re going to be different from anywhere else. And we’re 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.”
Whatever Happened to Suburban Rhythm?
Despite a moniker that conjures up images of pastel-toned tract homes and unhip dad dancing, Long Beach’s Suburban Rhythm grew out of a world just the opposite. One look at the ethnic makeup of its main band members—which 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)—and it’s obvious that this act didn’t form on the wide, milquetoast streets of any sprawling suburbia.
In fact, the racial makeup of the band members lines up almost perfectly with Long Beach’s census data for the time, which showed large numbers of blacks, whites and Hispanics co-existing in the same neighborhoods.
“You looked at the band on stage and you couldn’t help but see a reflection of the city we lived in,” Aaron Carroll, who remembers the band from its early ‘90s heydey, says. “Not just racially, but also musically. They’re the ultimate Long Beach band.”
Formed in 1990 when its members were just finishing high school, Suburban Rhythm evolved out of The Silent Invasion—a 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 “Godfather of Soul” James Brown.
“Everything is so culturally smushed together here,” Dennis says. “Unlike L.A. where everyone can have their own little islands, everything that happens in Long Beach happens in such close proximity. That’s why there are so many cross-cultural things. You get shows that are diverse and people checking each other’s shit out because you can’t help it. It’s there. That’s the nature of the city.”
Long Beach’s culture of forced collisions is what ultimately created Suburban Rhythm’s combination of bass-slapping punk, up-stroke guitar work and genre-bending composition. The sound took note from ska-punk pioneers Fishbone and up-and-comers No Doubt, but gave the concept more funk, more fun—more Long Beach. The band exuded genre-melding skills and life-loving positivity in opposition to other area acts such as Compton’s hostile gangster rap and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ sex-laden alternative L.A. rock.
Suburban Rhythm, on one hand, was the sound of Long Beach’s sense of global place. On the other, it was the sound of American multiculturalism—that optimistic 80s buzzword that rarely found reality outside of United Colors of Benneton ads. For a small-time local band, Suburban Rhythm appealed to kids across a wide spectrum of backgrounds and hometowns. They attracted a devoted regional following that was thoroughly disappointed when, in April of 1994, Suburban Rhythm played its final show.
Suburban Rhythm isn’t necessarily a household name like Long Beach reggae-fusion contemporaries Sublime, but it was this band’s short-lived-yet-prolific career that sparked a nationwide ska revival still felt to this day. Their only-in-Long Beach take on English-via-Caribbean music forms resonated with others attempting similar punk fusions in nearby Orange County and by 1997, bands such as Reel Big Fish, Save Ferris and No Doubt—names that often appeared alongside or underneath Suburban Rhythm’s on photocopied show flyers—were in heavy rotation on MTV and radio stations across the country.
Orange County became ground zero for what was eventually dubbed the “3rd-wave ska revival” and the area’s output of multiple pop-friendly ska-punk bands ignited the subgenre’s global success. Many of Suburban Rhythm’s contemporaries continue to pay homage to their favorite local band: No Doubt members penned the liner notes to a 1997 posthumous compilation of the band’s songs and Reel Big Fish still performs its song “S.R.,” which laments the loss of the band with a catchy chorus that is (appropriately) often played in the style of other genres such as rap, punk, country, reggae, blues and metal.
Whatever happened to Suburban Rhythm?
Why did Ed and Scott quit?
(Would you please drop some bass and shit?)
Please don’t go, Suburban Rhythm.
All the other bands are just shit.
(You said it!)
The question posed in “S.R.” might be a literal one —why did a favorite local band break up?—but heard today, it also resonates with a deeper inquisition. Whatever happened to the legacy of Suburban Rhythm, the band that catalyzed one of the most important music movements in Orange County history? Why is the band nowhere to be remembered except on Reel Big Fish fan forums and an unreferenced Wikipedia page?
Better yet, whatever happened to Long Beach, the city that birthed not just Suburban Rhythm’s proto-third-wave ska, but also new sounds in surf rock, gangster rap, reggae fusion, alt country, hardcore punk and Mexican-American norteño music? Why is it that when most people think of music from Long Beach, they think it’s all Sublime and Snoop Dogg?
Dennis Owens has similar questions, especially now that he is playing bass for Free Moral Agents.
“Whether you like them or not, Sublime and Snoop Dogg are two of the biggest musical things to come out of Southern California in the last 20 years. What comparably in L.A. has come out? A lot of important things have happened in this area that never got recognized which is insane to me. Huge movements in youth culture happened here and Long Beach is still the last place to get covered for anything. As I always say, ‘Long Beach is the city L.A. Weekly forgot about.’”
Video playlist for this part is below. Watch, listen and share!