Those of us lucky enough to be in L.A. for the 4th wave of garage rock in the 2010s suddenly find ourselves mourning the fact that it’s gone … long receded. We hardly even noticed. What the fuck happened?
words: Brent Smith
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I see them around- skulking the Zebulon smoking patio or pounding cheap beer at the Taix bar in motorcycle jackets and old band shirts (that their friends are in) and black denim and dirty Chucks. The weary look of defeat in their bloodshot eyes as we see each other (through the endless, bobbing sea of Benson Boone clones) and head-nod and ask if we met at that one Desert Daze when Iggy headlined. I see them around. The Echo Park refugees of the 2010s wave of garage rock.
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And yes, this is my declaration that the 2010s merit a mention in the annals of American garage rock — ’60s, ’80s, ’00s … ’10s. The Fourth Wave. If you’re some music nerd who disagrees you can go fuck yourself. You couldn’t swing a dead cat on Sunset without hitting a /psych/noise/punk/post-punk/ garage rock band.
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The new wave of garage rock started in a car park and sparked in the gutters with shows like FIDLAR being played on sidewalks and eventually busted up by the cops (singing the lyrics “Me and my friends in a hundred-dollar Volvo/ Busting down the street while cruising Alvarado/ Getting fucked on the 101/ Shootin’ our guns and having fun/ Forty beers later and a line of speed/ Eight ball of blow and a half a pound of weed.”) It bookended with glimmers of mainstream heights via Jay Reatard and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
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I only got an itch to write this because of how quickly the face (and sound) of Echo Park seemed to change. The vibe has just been a little *ahem* Brooklyn-y these days. (The fuck happened to Little Joy … or the Gold Room … no one ever went to El Prado because they didn’t serve cheap tall boys … and what the fuck’s a DADA?)
In the last few years, the indie literati flooded the boulevard and poetry readings have dominated the scene. You heard that right. Poetry readings managed to supplant garage rock shows in the Mideast Side enclaves of Los Angeles. If you told me that eight years ago, I would’ve laughed in your face. But here we are, poetry readings, rife with rich kids with MFAs and indie book deals. Like the final boss of gentrification. And I should know. I’m one of them. Somehow, I’ve found myself swept up in the currents of the new Echo Park. And instead of seeing secret Ty Segall shows, I’m suddenly going to late-night Car Crash Collective readings at Footsies or book release parties at Stories every other day. I jumped ship from one scene to another, like an Anne Rice vampire watching one world die while witnessing the birth of another.
As a writer who’s been around the block in Echo Park, there weren’t any fucking poets around — not ever. Poets were deserted islands in LA. I knew that, and I expected nothing more. The only way I was able to find community was through rock bands. So I started hanging with rockers and covering live shows, despite the fact I wasn’t a journalist, and had never seriously written about music a day in my life. But it didn’t matter, because, in the old world, you could go to The Echo, the once communal and fun-loving hub for local talent, and there was always a great show by any one of these bands. And as word caught on, garage bands from all over the country did what they could to move here, ground zero. 100’s of bands from Atlanta, New York, New Jersey, the U.K., Australia and all across the globe claimed their hometowns but lived here. And it was endless. Fucking endless. Any night of the week, roll the dice, I would be at a sweaty, drunken, fun, high-as-fuck, life-changing show. And there would still be three other shows across town I was missing.
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And what was the killer of all things fun and loud and fuzzed out? What else. Fucking COVID. I hate to bring it up. But we’re still reeling. COVID happened, we blinked, realized we were suddenly thirty-five, and right under our noses the Echo was sold off to LiveNation — becoming another faceless music venue that locals don’t go to, for the most part — while most of our other beloved, small cap venues buckled and closed under the weight of the lockdowns. Just as we basked in the realization that we were neck-deep in a rare and beautiful garage rock scene, it was already over.
That shitty fucking year. 2020. Twenty-twenty. Like a bad echo. And now it’s bad echoes all around. We’ve swung into a bad, bizarre new world order and 2020 was the hinge. But enough complaining. There’s too much of that these days. All bitching and moaning aside, I’m grateful. I witnessed two revivals back-to-back: garage rock and poetry. That’s probably so rare I don’t even want to think about it. Rock + poetry. The way I see it, nothing’s more American.
In no way is this meant as a disrespect to the current scenes spreading east through L.A. Both the hardcore and post punk/goth scenes have been creating new lore in their own genres’ in this city. New homegrown bands forming local scenes from within and attracting others from around the world to participate or cash in, along with old music industry guard and new. Only time will tell how iconic the current scenes are amongst the next crop of nerds like me. This is just my appeal to historians who record the perpetual boom/ bust, destruction/creation bubbles that have been forming and popping since Sun Records made Sinatra uncool or the Visigoths first sacked the Roman Empire.
Enough time has passed where we can get retrospective about circa 2015. Early swells of the Fourth Wave of garage rock were detected in 2012 when local West Coast acts like FIDLAR, The Black Angels, Ty Segall, Bleached, Wavves, Hot Snakes, and Thee Oh Sees made a major blip appearance on mainstream radars when they were featured on the GTA V soundtrack. They merited curation by someone tuned in at Rockstar Games and it hinted something raw and concentrated was brewing in modern garage. Call it what you like but major representation like that by, yes- an American cultural institution like Grand Theft Auto is an indication that there was a major mass lurking beneath the tip of the iceberg that was exposed to the world.
The sheer amount of “female-fronted” bands that the Fourth Wave of garage rock produced needs to be mentioned. One could argue it was unprecedented. You could tell because the bland music press was always hard-pressed as to how to describe it. “Riotgrrrl” this and “riotgrrl” that and always “female-fronted” instead of just calling them “bands.” But pure rock is what it was. Clementine Creevy of Cherry Glazerr, Arrow de Wilde of Starcrawler, Lydia Night of the Regrettes. I saw Night open for Kim and the Created at the Echo when she was only 15, and it was a big deal for Night, who, after her set, changed from miniskirt into skeleton suit and go-go danced during Kim’s cover of “20th Century Boy”. How quickly the Regrettes blew up and left Kim in their dust. These were just a few of the front(wo)man names that started popping up on marquees and in online interviews. And once the floodgates opened, more and more bands engulfed the streets, as if banshee-screaming straight out of L.A.’s dark underbelly. Death Valley Girls. L.A. Witch. Deap Valley. Paranoyds, FEELS. The Coathangers. Le Butcherettes. Savages. The Flytraps. Please don’t make me name them all!!! Oh, and once again, Bleached — the millennial Go-Gos as far as I’m concerned.
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And though the Fourth Wave can’t be traced to any one act, a big and prolific instigator was Ty Segall. To date, Segall has 17 studio albums, not including his side projects. It was Segall’s early bands, The Epsilons (with lifelong collaborator Mikal Cronin) and The Traditional Fools made rumblings up and down the West Coast with chunky surf punk and a rude and crude homages to timeless lo-fi garage. But where would Segall be without John Dwyer, ringleader of Thee Oh Sees (and all its incarnations) and early supporter of Segall. When a Traditional Fools show was canceled, Segall decided to go on as a one-man show. It didn’t take long for Dwyer to offer to publish Segall’s solo album Ty Segall on Castle Face Records. And the swell only grew from there, hitting the shores of L.A. in just a few years’ time.
Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees and the origin of their bodies of work is so amorphous and labyrinthine (on purpose) that it’s defeating to trace. It’s widely reported that the sentiments surrounding the constant changing of his band’s name (Oh Sees, The Ohsees, OCS, Osees, etc.) was just to annoy music journalists. It doesn’t matter anyway. With little to no social media presence, and unending mutations of project after project with different names and personnel being put out through different record labels (Subpop, Lolipop, In The Red, Goner, Suicide Squeeze, Sacred Bones, whatever), musicians like Segall and Dwyer inherently defied the 2010s norm of artist identity and image coming before the art. Them and their collaborators—Wand, Meatbodies, King Khan, King Tuff, Charles Moothart and Mikal Cronin. To these garage heads, the output is all that mattered. Who and how be damned.
And those who were tuned in,turned out, and the live show—the living present—was all that mattered too. And try as you might to capture it on your phone and post it for anyone who wasn’t there it just didn’t cut it. You had to show up. And the permutations of garage bands that ensued were infinite. Whether it was post-punk (and it usually was), cowpunk, psych, death rock, punk rap, darkwave, etc. And it didn’t matter what venue you showed up to, there was bound to be a killer line up.
The wake of the Fourth Wave is still being felt. Garage rock is an American institution that’s spread all over the world and it will never die. I was floored by the massive success of Destroy Boys, and I love that Amyl and the Sniffers, Frankie and the Witch Fingers and plenty of bands across the pond like Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are still ripping and getting talked about by normies. It’s DIY or die. Truer now than it was then. It took no time at all for Ethel Cain to go from solo to major right back to riding solo again. The music industry is dead, but so what. It has been for a long time. It’s not even a conversation worth having anymore … no matter how much we have to put up with it convincing itself of its own relevance, propped up only by streamers and billionaire popstars and Ticketmaster- a majority of it’s payouts going to venture capitalists and other investors.
The real music industry is in the hands of those that do the music and always has been. Those who write the riffs after falling into altered states and offer us listeners altered states in return. It’s a happy coincidence that the Fourth Wave came in tandem with the rise of psychedelia and its decriminalization after fifty years of war-on-drugs suppression and bans on research. It was around 2011 that for the first time since Nixon, studies and research could be carried out with MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, etc., and everyone I knew was tripping. Liquid light shows started to accompany most rock shows. Desert Daze was a three-day trip. Even Tao Lin published Trip in 2018, detailing his transition from pharmaceutical bardo into psychedelic healing, and there was a fleeting moment of optimism for the future and top-down catharsis — mentally, emotionally, spiritually — a la Terence McKenna. Like I said, fleeting. Now it just seems we’re stumbling in the malaise of a brown acid hangover.
But no matter how cynical I get, I still fancy myself an optimist. Heaven is always just a blink away, whether it’s in politics or in music. If Echo Park Rising 2025 was any indication of what’s down the line, then maybe we’ll be seeing some good shows around Echo Park sooner than later. I got intel from someone on the ground it felt like the Burger Record days of old. It’s a shame that the problematic inner goings on at Burger Records might’ve tainted their entire catalog of artists, because it was Burger (along with Lolipop Records) that corralled all these bands and distributed it to the world via analog tape cassettes and some streaming- yet another beginning to the end.
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I write all of this to say that it wouldn’t have occurred to me write all of this if it weren’t for the recent nostalgia coming up in random conversations when I’m out at bars. “Yeah … it was a moment, wasn’t it?” as if recalling a forgotten dream. Now it’s a waking dream. And the Fourth Wave deserves to be immortalized by the mark it left in the sand.
