Small is Beautiful: Burger Boogaloo

Last Sunday afternoon, I parked my pretty new car in a very empty space next to a very seedy Carl’s Junior on a sketchy corner in Oakland, and left it there for 6 hours. Of course I know that this is not an advisable move, especially as I didn’t quite know where I was going, but needs must when the devil drives, as the saying goes, and I was cruising around looking for Burger Boogaloo. I could hear it but not see it, so I pulled the trigger and parked. And immediately, I knew I was where I wanted to be when I saw a couple walking down the street who were clearly heading for the same location.

The woman in the couple was wearing a polka dot mini skirt, hot pink biker shorts and white Docs, and she had a cotton candy colored beehive hairdo. The man was sporting tons of tattoos, a baseball hat and black t shirt with a zombie on it, and strapped to his chest was a baby Bjorn stuffed with a little bitty rockabilly baby. Somehow,  the three of them epitomized all things Burger Boogaloo: unified, defiant, fun, happy, and strangely untouched by the ravages of our era. They looked like they’d stepped out of one of those fun 1980s indie movies, like “Repo Man” or “Liquid Sky.” They were very awesome, especially the baby.

Burger Boogaloo is the three year old music festival sponsored by Burger Records that takes place in Mosswood Park in downtown Oakland.  I didn’t have a ticket, but I figured I could pick one up outside, and indeed I could: before I’d walked very far down MacArthur, a nice scalper guy offered me a cheap-ish VIP wrist band.

 “But how do I know it’s genuine?” I asked.

 “Oh I’ll walk you in and you can pay me inside the venue,” he said.

Done. He put it on my wrist, we walked in together – chatting about the glory of Iggy Pop’s set the day before, exactly as if we knew one another! – and then I paid him. It was unbelievably civilized. I told Caitlin it was the nicest illegal ticket transaction I have ever been involved in, and she said I should start a website, like www. Ratemyscalper.com.

Burger Boogaloo takes place in the kind of very urban park that, even in the midst of a punk rock extravaganza still has a pick up basketball game on its courts. It’s surrounded by beautiful oak trees (not for nothing is Oakland called Oakland, folks) and Kaiser Permanente, in an area of the town we used to call pill hill. It’s a particularly weird place for a music festival, but a) Burger Boogaloo is a weird music festival, and b) Oakland has changed, like everywhere in the Bay Area, both for better and for worse. Some bits of it – Mosswood Park, for example -- are nicer than they used to be. Others, not so much: later that evening, someone actually OD’d in the restroom of that Carl’s Junior, and alas, I am not even joking.  

Anyway, having moved back to the Bay Area from verdant Washington within the week, being in Oakland attending a punk rock concert seemed somewhat jarring. Almost everyone in my family has lived in Oakland at some point or other, but it still wasn’t quite the Oakland I remembered. At one juncture on my way to the concert, I found myself on Market Street or Telegraph going under an underpass, and it was the underpass from hell. It looked like a homeless encampment in a dystopian movie like “District 9.” Later, I asked my Oaklish friend what that was.

“Oh that was Mortville,” she said.

“Mortville?”

“Yeah, you know…like in the John Waters film ‘Desperate Living’ – it’s like a shantytown where people go when life has mortified them.”

 ‘When life has mortified you.’ Hmmm. I need to think about that. Many of us, not just those poor people under the freeway, feel mortified a lot these days, so it seems like a fairly insensitive designation. John Waters, however, was an apropos cultural touchstone for my friend to quote, because at Burger Boogaloo, he is the MC. Last year – and this will sort of orient you to the Burger thing – it was Traci Lords.

I should probably clarify that I got to Burger Boogaloo very late on the second day, having missed what everyone said was an amazing set by Iggy Pop on Saturday: my lateness is the reason my VIP pass was so cheap. When I arrived, Shannon and the Clams were performing on the ‘Gone Shrimpin’ second stage, and it was packed. People wearing witches hats were sitting in the plethora of oak trees, looking down on other people, who were moshing in the tiny pit, and the band was rocking out.  Before I even had a moment to gather my thoughts, however, I ran into someone I knew – my friend Michele, who is also my hairdresser, and who has a very broken arm.

Michele was wandering around the park not sitting down, because she couldn’t get up again if she did.  So we wandered around together, and soon discovered that, probably much like Coachella or Bonaroo,  Burger Boogaloo was full of swag. Within a few minutes I had a free t shirt advertising a Vodka company, two peach flavored chapsticks, a bandana, a pin, and several cans of soda and cold coffee from Stumptown, a Portland-based coffee shop that must be coming to Oakland, because it was promoting itself here.

Stumptown gave us many  free cans of cold coffee soda til we were buzzing like nobody’s business: soon, we could have easily thrown ourselves into the Shannon pit, but frankly, like many people there, we were too damn old. Instead, we went to the merch booths and saw a lot of very cool stuff, much of which said FUCK YOU on it. The merch booths were all local artisans and vendors, and included an anarchist book collective, something advertising a new documentary about Gilman Street, and a bunch of tables selling items with the Burger aesthetic. What is that, I hear you ask? Musically, I think of Burger bands as being garage-rocky: three, four chord stuff with a kind of happy-go-lucky vibe; slightly beachy (the label is located in Southern California), slightly rockabilly and slightly tawdry. Lyrics are funny and tend towards bathroom talk: the label t-shirt has a toilet on it, and last year’s festival featured a giant blow up vulva. In terms of fashion, Burger people often have hair dyed lovely colors and clothes you can’t buy at Forever 21. Boots and beehives, fishnets and fifties dresses for the ladies; beer bellies on the guys.

The other notable thing about Burger is that they are for the most part a cassette only label, releasing music in old fashioned format and thus avoiding competition from other labels (indeed, other labels LIKE them, which is refreshing). According to one source I saw, Burger has sold over 100,000 cassettes, of god knows how many bands, and given the current music business, that is sort of the musical equivalent of publishing handmade chapbooks that were written typewriters, into a market of people who know longer know how to read.

But I still know how to read, and I also still know how to play a cassette, and nothing makes me happier than knowing that a whole bunch of other people do too. To honor that perspective -- to participate in an old technology -- is the whole point of attending Burger Boogaloo: it is to celebrate a certain kind of capitalism, not capitalist realism, but merely like what Michel De Certeau discusses in “the practice of every day life,” that is, the tactics and strategies that make life under capitalism possible for those who wish to elude it: not how to live without capitalism, but how to live within it.  Anyway, all this explains why I was able to get something really sweet and handmade for my daughter’s birthday. I am always talking about the waning of authenticity (Or as they’d say at Burger Boogaloo, the waning of fucking authenticity), so the fact that I was able to get her something one of a kind made me really happy.

The Burger Festivals, Boogaloo in the Bay Area and Burgerama down south, don’t only feature their own bands, but hire bigger bands who somehow fit into either the musical aesthetic or the mindset of the label. This year’s Burger Boogaloo had an excellent all day line-up, but due to my lateness I was only able to see three acts of it: the aforementioned Clams, X and the Buzzcocks. To be honest, three acts is about all I can handle these days, and I can’t say I even handled these all that well. I loved hanging around the park with all these likeminded people, participating in a culture that felt comfortable and familiar and friendly, away from the soul-sucking, and yes, always mortifying, content of American daily life. The bands – these bands -- were somehow just an excuse for that to happen.

X is a band I have seen so many times I can’t count – the first time, believe it or not, at an actual dorm at UC Berkeley (Barrington), and if that doesn’t date me, nothing will. My liking for X has waxed and waned though, and currently it’s at an all time low due to the fact that at least two of its members are rightwing nutjobs. I know full well that judging bands on its members politics or assholickness is a fools game -- and as one of my friends rightly said on Facebook, “it’s not like you are being asked to have dinner with them” --  but in today’s awful psychic headspace, the idea of being even remotely with supporters of YKW is pretty awful. And it’s not just him they profess to believe in. Exene, the lead singer of X, is actually one of those Newtown deniers.

X.

Their music notwithstanding, at this point in time, I wouldn’t give X a dime of my money, in case that single dime wound up in one of their awful causes, but as it is, I didn’t have to. And I will grudgingly admit they did a good set: heard from afar (I didn’t feel a need to see them up too close), their sound was still pretty amazing. Zoom’s guitar has this particular engine sound to it, like a see-saw, that I just…like, and their boy-girl vocals seem to get better with age. However, it was an oldies set – “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline,” “The Hungry Wolf,” “Nausea,” “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts,” and so on – and although that was fine, it wasn’t exactly necessary.

The Buzzcocks, who appeared soon after, as the sun was going down, also put in a good set. I’ve seen them relatively recently (meaning, in the last decade), and they were one of the few reunited punk bands that really still had it, but to be honest, they aren’t a band that should be heard outdoors. To really enjoy the Buzzcocks, I think, you need to be smashed up against your friends in a little club, buzzing hard, and despite Stumptown, I was not. About half way through their set, I said to Michele, “I really love the Buzzcocks, but I think I like them more heard one song at a time on a mix tape,” and she agreed, so we left.

how about a buzz,cock? 2017

Outside the enclosure, we came on a number of Oaklish people, watching from through the fence, and honestly? The sound there was just as good, if not better. So Michele and I watched from there for a while, until after a while, we slowly backed away, dawdling down MacArthur, still rapt, but getting  gradually less involved in it, like when the music fades out into the record grooves on a vinyl LP record.

 It wasn’t quite dark yet, the sky was an amazing color, and about a block from the venue I suddenly stopped short. Sometimes I just like to do that, to walk away from concerts listening to the music as it fills up the atmosphere, hearing it all from another perspective, away from the venue and the comfort of the crowd, out in the real world, where it actually matters. I like to think of it as radio waves made real. Instead of being invisible and being captured by your radio, during a festival like this one, the immediate world is suddenly forced to hear your music. No more personal soundtrack playing in the vacuum sealed of your headphones, or your car. No more Taylor Swift in high rotation; no. Whenever this happens, I think, very briefly, the world has to listen to MY music. For a moment that night, Oakland was held captive by the Buzzcocks, and that, to my mind, is how it should be. 

the butt stage from the back

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