Our Hometown

     This may seem like an odd subject for a blogpost, and we won’t hold it against you if you decide

not to stick with it, but we present it because it will sort of go along with some features in the future.

     

This week, we write about our hometown, Riverside, California. Now, to quote Public Image Ltd., this is no love song. But it’s not a hate song either.

    

  Most of you around the country and around the world have no idea we even exist. And why should you? For most of our history, there’s been nothing exceptional about this town. But, there are some cool things a lot of people aren’t aware of, and we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs later. It sounds like I’m a bored person who’s doing a hit on his uptight hometown, but please do read the ending paragraphs.

     Suffice to say, if you look up the word “bedroom community,” you’re likely to see a picture of Riverside. A friend once told us perhaps the truest summation of Riverside ever: “It’s a nice place to live but you wouldn’t want to visit there.”

     This is true. Riverside, along with the now-infamous San Bernardino, our neighbors to the north, plus other cities such as Redlands and Ontario, make up what is known as the “Inland Empire.” We’re about 60 miles from the nearest beach, though we may as well be hundreds, as the surfer culture or any other culture related to oceans is largely absent in this area, which marks the beginning of Southern California’s massive, plain-looking desert.

     Traditionally, Riverside is the place where you stop for a burger and a restroom visit if you’re traveling between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, a city inexplicably seen as more glamorous than others nearby.

     Downtown, there’s the Mission Inn, a fancy Spanish-style hotel famous for being the place where ex-President Richard Nixon spent his honeymoon and which has been a location shoot for such cinematic classics as Bug, Black Samurai and The Sword and the Sorcerer.  The Mission Inn was bought some years ago by a frozen burrito magnate and is still seen as the focal point of downtown.

     Though it has become one of California’s biggest mid-sized cities, there’s about as much to do here as, say, a town of 20,000 in Illinois. It’s not what you would call a cultural powerhouse, despite the presence of three universities and one college.  Another anecdote says that faculty of the University of California always send their kids to study at UC Riverside because of the low amount of distractions.

     Riverside rarely makes national news, but sadly, when it has the stories mostly have not been pleasant. In 1998, a disgruntled volunteer burst into a city council meeting, wounding six, including one Charles Beatty, who was my principal in high school.

    There have been a couple of incidents that have sparked some racial outrage as well. In 1971, Riverside made headlines when two white  police officers, Leonard Christiansen and Paul Teel, were shot and killed while responding to a burglary in a primarily African-American neighborhood, with the acknowledged killer, who was African-American, somehow being aquitted. As is often true in cases such as this, there was plenty of ugliness to go around.

     And in 1998, 19 year-old Tyisha Miller was shot dead by police officers, who reported she was passed out in her car, then reached for a gun, to which the police responded with several shots. That was bad enough, but officers were recorded at the scene making some very questionable racial comments afterward.

     One personal note: shortly after the incident, I was lucky enough to interview Will Calhoun, the

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amazing drummer for the equally-amazing rock band Living Colour. He asked me where I was from, and I replied “Riverside, California. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of it.”

    “Unfortunately, I have,” Calhoun replied. “Nuff said.

     OK, so it seems that we’re ripping Riverside a new one. It’s a cultural desert that’s a gateway to a real desert, right? Well, there’s maybe a bit more to the story than that.

     There’s no disputing that culturally and musically, Riverside will not pose much of a threat to the primacy of Los Angeles in the area. It has become one the world’s biggest housing tracts, with parts of the city looking like one giant cookie-cutter metropolis. And yet, for those of us who have been here for a while, there is the sense that things in this city are changing for the better.

     Riverside was always one of the most conservative cities in Southern California, and we had tremendous trouble keeping any kind of microbrewery open, thanks to pressure from nearby churches. Why is that even relevant? Well, as of this blogpost, there are at least four in town, brewing excellent-quality beers. Some economists feel the vitality of a city can directly be measured by how many microbreweries and gastro-pubs an area holds.

   Now we get to what this blog is about: music. Riverside’s musical history is fairly sparse at this point, but far from non-existent.

Alien Ant Farm

    Perhaps our biggest band, maybe the only rock band to attract major media attention was Alien Ant Farm. Who in the early part of the last decade managed to get MTV airplay with their punk-leaning cover of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” But the band quickly faded. 

Other acts known beyond our city limits include include uber-traditional country singer Heather Myles and the talented rap duo A Lighter Shade of Brown. And perhaps the best blues harmonica in the whole wide blues world is one Rod Piazza, who is born and bred right here in Riverside.

Rod Piazza

    

  But Riverside has contributed other cool music to the world, including two great garage rock bands, one still kicking out the jams and one that has become legendary.

     The Bell-Rays are also from Riverside and have been blasting out severely cool music since the late ‘80s. The band’s one two punch includes singer Lisa Kekaula and guitarist Bob Vennum. Full disclosure – I do know them personally (albeit not all that well) and further disclosure, we have been in communication about an interview. But everything I have to say in the next few paragraphs is exactly how I see this band, and have for a very long time.

The Bell Rays

      The only way to describe Kekaula is the heart of Iggy Pop and the soul of Aretha Franklin. She is truly one of the great singers in all of rock and roll. It’s not just her homies who think this. She guested on Stooges’ guitarist James Williamson’s solo album, singing the beejeebers out of the Stooges’ “I Gotta Right.”

     Vennum is no less a monster in his own right, a truly magnificent guitarist who can play punk, metal and rock with the best of them. In a truly just world, Vennum would be mentioned in the same breath as Jack White, a one-man lick factory to be reckoned with.

     Yet, look at their tour dates, and you see they’re almost always in Europe, where at least by my understanding, they are far more appreciated, a rather sad circumstance for so many great American artists.

The Misunderstood

     There is also one fantastic garage rock band from the ‘60s, the Misunderstood. More honesty here – I have been listening to them for years. I had assumed they were British, and it’s easy enough to see why. They were championed by the likes of BBC radio presenter John Peel and much of their notoriety comes from shows and releases from swinging London. It is only in researching this post that I found out they were actually from Riverside.

     

There are a smattering of other very cool bands from Riverside as well.

      Riverside has actually had a couple of important ska bands. The Skeletones, who re-form on and off, could rightly be regarded as spearheading the ska revival – at least the Southern California portion, which would birth No Doubt from nearby Orange County, that happened in the 1990s. They never really got their due credit, and were one major league ska band, in the talent department at least.

      Still soldiering on are the Voodoo Glow Skulls, who have been hybridizing punk, ska and traditional Mexican music since the late ‘80s, though they are probably best appreciated live. Again, if the music biz were anything even vaguely resembling a meritocracy, these bands would all be well-known.

     As mentioned last week, we do have some great features coming up, but it must be a busy time of year, There’s also a nasty flu going around, at least on the West Coast, and at least one interview has been put off because the artist says he feels like garbage. But stay tuned!