Fiction Engine

Ever since Charlie Christian hot-wired a mike to his guit box in the 1930s (or maybe Eddie Durham did it first) and Gene Krupa went nuts on a full drum kit (though maybe he should be let off the hook on this one, he has enough to answer for in every bad drum solo performed since 1927) — rehearsal space has been at a premium for amplified American music.

The ranks of available garages have thinned — though the suburbs may still offer them. Booming urban real estate with condos, lofts, office space, and parking have fed the need for virtual or cyber bands rather than the real thing. Still, the lofted gentry, the same yuppie dot-com moguls who are pricing out the scruffy and scrabbling rockers and jazzbos, are the first to whine around the Gaslamp, The music scene here sucks.

If you’re a kid from North Park, El Cajon, East San Diego, or Clairemont, you’ve got your bass player and drummer and you can all pool some change from your jobs at Dominos or Starbucks, you’ll be dealing with either Senile Republican Realtors Inc. or Gucci-Frappacino Rentals for practice space. That’s the way it is.

Here’s the way it is in the heart of downtown San Diego (the center of the universe if you’re from here) at a top, double-secret location beneath the very noses and feet, concrete, asphalt, cables, water pipes, and decrepit infrastructure of Our Town: down among the rats and the darkness, the frayed wiring and extension cords that feed the electric dreams of three-chord poets and the statistically doomed: still expensive.

A couple of reasons to be nonspecific about where, exac tly, this place is: for one, there’s a lot of expensive equipment down there. The kind of stuff that makes instruments real goddamned loud (loud enough to vibrate loaves of fresh-baked bread off of “the bakery center” above) and there is a brisk mug’s trade in hot Marshalls, etc. Security is good, though. So good, potential thieves might as well just go audition for World’s Stupidest Criminals before attempting a job. Of course, stupidity has never dissuaded any thieves I know. Another reason is that there is some question as to whether or not the landlord of this historical building has any idea of what’s going on under the butts of the lawyers and corporate consultants to whom he is leasing his address. Entrepreneur and business manager of the rehearsal and recording studios Johnny (“just Johnny”) says the owner is an older, wealthy gentleman and knows about it. Okay.

Exploring this underground terrain, I feel I should ha ve a pith helmet and khaki shorts, a clipboard and tape measure. I will ask my assistant with the camera to capture moments with me and rock/roll renegades like Swan and the Fiction Engine. Get a shot of this: me like an anthropologist from the future, winding my way through Sheetrock corridors, avoiding rat traps, pointing to frayed, hanging cables, extension cords, and duct-taped leads from recording equipment to amplifiers to vintage guitars — mutants of 3/4-length necks, Gretsch monstrosities and hot lace Stratocaster pickups promising and delivering screams, inhuman moans, cat-in-heat-dream-growls, and punctuations to puberty-gone-wrong nightmares. I envision a photo taken of me in my pith helmet and shorts, grinning at the camera, with my tape measure around the skull of a San Diego rock musician.

Lost in the drywall maze of half-baked dreams or fully baked dreams in progress, looking to trace the sounds of sex and technology pulsing through the corridor from some nonspecific direction, I want to raise my fist and shout, Spinal Tap ishly, “Hello, Cleveland! Roke an’ roawl!” But after ten minutes of wandering the underground maze, completely lost, I can’t find my way to anything except the CIA-locked, super-secret-coded elevator, like you have to have high security clearance to enter and perceive Rock Limbo. Give me a break. Well, this shit costs money...okay?

Swan is the loudest rock and roll band I have ever heard. I have heard the Who live many times, Hendrix, Blue Cheer, and high on the list is Keith Richards, well into his 50s with the X-Pensive Winos, drowning out openers and industry sperm Soul Asylum. Swan shuts ’em all down, no kidding, and it’s not just garbage. The bassist has mastered the effect of his Fender at high volume in an arcane way: an artform John Entwistle, Roger Waters, the guy from Ten Years After, and in this century, Flea — though I hate to say it; I’d rather punch him than admit, as I’ve done, that he’s good.

I was invited in to Swan’s rehearsal space by (I guess) their manager/sometime drummer, Angel. Mostly their drummer is a cat named “the Matrix.” The very act of opening the door is to be gut-punched with the sound of Ragnarok, Armageddon, the sounds of huge machinery manned by robots (like in Terminator) being randomly destroyed in an explosion of glass, metal, and men by sonic weaponry. Two of the members — a very heavily tattooed youth (you can’t quite call him a singer, so he doesn’t either) who introduces himself only as “Robert Kain, Dragon Stylist” and the above-mentioned bassist, even more thoroughly tattooed, though it hardly seems possible, and bald — have extended, stretched earlobes. The entire effect is bizarre. The bassist looks exactly like that guy in the original Moby Dick, only instead of a harpoon, he is wielding a huge Fender bass. All social graces fled, I just looked at him, shook his hand, and said, “Holy shit, man! You look like a fuckin’ Maori harpoonist!”

He actually said, “Thanks, man,” and smiled. A nice kid. His name is Jaya Maphava — don’t ask me.

On keys is the “Preying Mantis,” and on that day they were auditioning for guitarist. Tonight’s contestant was a shy-looking, kind of punked-out young lady who played the most amazing notes. With calm, decisive authority, on top of a rhythm section that sounded like a rabid rhino charging at trash cans full of household appliances (like blenders) and broken glass and bullets, she would find a sustaining discord from God-knows-where on any fretboard I’ve seen. And do it like Yehudi Menuin or Heifitz with no doubt of the aptness, the perfection of that particular choice. I don’t think the auditionee made the cut, but it gave me pause for days as to what the criterion may have been.

After four songs in that room, I felt as deaf as the unholy offspring of Pete Townshend and Helen Keller. I stood, shook hands with “the Matrix” or “the Dragon Stylist,” or it might have been Angel. I shouted, “You guys are pure, undiluted evil!” Smiles and thanks.“I have to go now. I’m scared,” I said. This was answered with grins and bobbing heads. Great guys, really. Very understanding.

The other group I visited has a name I truly love: “the Fiction Engine.” Their names are Frankie Fiction, Albion Nathaniel, and “the Rig,” and you can hear them at mp3.com/fictionengine. They have been together for over a year, or four years if you count the songwriting and incubation process. I was kept off-center, standing out in the street (a main drag downtown) while several members of TFE kept saying “cheers” to absolutely everything I would say. Back in my day, by crackies, that meant someone was buying you a drink — or at the very least offering congratulations. To these guys it expressed general agreement, a generic affirmative. These punks today picking up crap from Australians or Italians or wherever — it don’t sound American, I’m here to tell you that!

“It’s definitely an alternative style of dance rock,” says Frankie (or is it Albion?) in describing their stuff. He invites me in through the swinging stone portals that will moan open when the correct brick is pressed (third on the upper left, just above the gargoyle knocker).“People say we have the elements of the Rolling Stones, the Smiths, and the Cure — and a lot of Brit rock.” The band comes from as far as Chula Vista, Mission Hills, and University Heights. The songwriter/guitarist Frankie has wavy black hair and nearly jaw-length sideburns. This effect is romantic; less rock ’n’ roll than Byronic.

Taking a torch through the dank stone corridors that lead to their chamber, being careful to step over the skeletal remains slumped at random angles, I mention the 19th-Century poet look. He seems pleased and tells me a huge influence on him is Keats.

“Well,” I say chuckling, “how about that ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ eh? I mean, ya got no complaints there.”

He looked at me a little oddly but nodded,“Cheers. A literary man, eh?”

I chuckle again. “Aw, yeah. Hell, I could tell you stories.”

At the end of a winding staircase, we come to the chamber. It is the Fiction Engine’s work space and the home of Stingaree Records. Now Stingaree is a small enterprise. And speaking of the Enterprise, their sound booth looks like a miniature set for the old ’60s TV show Star Trek. Even more, really, like a set for one of those old 1950s black-and-white space operas like Queen of Outer Space (with Zsa Zsa Gabor, by the by) or Destination Moon. Unconvincing-looking gadgets, gizmos, winking lights, you know. But you don’t need any room anymore to turn out first-class recordings. What they’ve got is better than what was used on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Owner Beau Hart and partner take up only about a fourth of the area in the room. The rest is all the Fiction Engine’s.

Now you don’t invite yourself to someone’s rehearsal and then review them — only a cretin would do that. But I like FE’s music. Frankie has a neat sense of pop song construction that’s less and less easy to find out- side of Fastball or the Barenaked Ladies, and the bass player actually plays scales. Walking scales! Think Chas Chandler or Bill Wyman. And he knows what he’s doing. You just don’t hear rockers under 90 playing, at least not

electric , this way and it’s great stuff.

Listening to them, I was mentally rubbing my hands together thinking: I should produce these guys! I could guarantee them huge industry success in a couple of weeks if they just do everything I say!

Down the hall is Modesto. Four guys who are not hard to listen to either. I could fix them in about ten minutes (fire the singer, get the Dragon Stylist, fire the guy on the Richenbacher, and get that chick that was auditioning with Swan) — just kidding. They’re a corn-liquor, fishing poles, and bare feet kind of REM. Or think Echo and the Bunnymen on mescal, sitting around a desert gas station picking on an old steel guitar. What I could hear of their lyrics was so interesting, I asked Tex or Sam (I know it wasn’t Jack or TD) to send me some if they had ever written them down. They arrived on greasy fast-food wrappers from some BBQ house.

• Leavin’ Modesto
• I forgot my dobro
• It was sittin’ with a six-
• pack by the door...
• Santa Monica rises up
• in my windshield
• And the ocean, baby’s,
• so wide
• It won’t yield...to no
• horizon line

They also sent me liner notes (or “Modesto Manifesto”) for their new CD, The History of Driveways. Here’s part of it: “Tex and Sam had writ some great and simple songs in the sand and learnt ’em before the hot low winds could blow ’em away. They premiered as the duet, Thumbdaddy, with soulful abandon, a biggish voice, and an unwieldy Ric hollowbody, in a San Diego peehole called the Tiki House, to thanks and claps on their backs and smiles a mile wide. Shrugging, the accidents were happy ones.... “

All called it MODESTO and got a room with ’lectricity in town, under the street, where more’s been writ, and on....”

Manager Johnny (from Jersey) is running a valuable operation to the local scene, but even he admits it ain’t cheap. Maybe he could have a word with the mysterious elderly gentleman who owns the place and ask him, “Excuse me, sir, but exactly how much more damned money do you need?”