Space Oddities - Looking For Rock In All The Weird Places

by Ali MacLean

In this town, it's easy to get jaded. Every club or party these days seems to need to top some pinnacle of bacchanale... a regular night with drinks and music just wont do. A warehouse rave is just ordinary. It has to be louder, harder, faster: rollerskating parties, dodgeball parties, plastic surgery parties, parties where you're in a video game, parties where you come as your spirit animal, parties in a subway car, parties in the basement of the Ramada, Edward Scissorshands parties, staring contest parties...the weirder the better.



And now rock shows are going by way of parties. It's not enough to just stage something in any old raw space or polo field. First Fridays sets up songs next to stuffed Woolly Mammoths and dinosaur bones. Tom Morello raged against deus ex machinas in a Venice Church. DJ Squeak E Clean has dropped it like it's hot at a Hollywood car wash while fashionista DJs The Misshapes have spun for the well heeled in an airplane hangar, complete with planes standing by.



It's time to step it up to the realm of absolutely bizarre. Rock show in a cemetery? Check.



Glasvegas are known in Hollywood more for their cataclysmic buzz and for disappointing a sweaty Coachella crowd by their last minute cancellation. Tough it'd be odd to see these Scots in a searingly hot desert rather than in pissing rain. Perhaps that's why their playing at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery just fit. But a show at