Mickey sez: ‘Blame the Clenis!’

Yes, this column is normally about music. But first, a word about television—specifically, The Path to 9/11, the “official true story” docudrama that ran last Sunday and Monday nights on the ABC network, the Disney-owned subsidiary whose broadcasts run on KXTV News10 here in Sacramento. Now, lefty-left conspiracy kooks are complaining that the miniseries blames former President Clinton’s regime and exonerates our great and glorious leader George W. Bush’s administration for the mistakes that allowed 9/11 to happen. But I don’t think ABC went far enough; every schoolchild knows that those airliners were malevolently guided to slam into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by evil death rays emanating from Big Bad Bill Clinton’s penis, and The Path to 9/11 should have reported that fact. Also, the miniseries aired too early; ABC should have saved it until the November weekend right before the election. Perhaps the Mickey Mouse Network can show it again then.

Of course, being a conservative blogger, I’d already received and watched an advance screener, so I was able to go out and “rock and roll” on Sunday night (as Saturday marked the 20-year anniversary of America’s Most Wanted on Fox, so that night was out). Actually, Pastor Sneedleroy phoned to say he’d come up with a fresh box of diamondbacks down at the Patriotic Victory Tabernacle on Sunday night, so I had to go down there and pass a few rattlers around and shout “yabba dabba doo” with the faithful, instead of reporting on the cowboy karaoke that I’d planned.

Speaking of sin, this show at the Blue Lamp has haunted me for a week: No, it wasn’t Los Angeles techno-raunch trio Spores, with its demonic puppet show and possessed frontwoman, Molly McGuire, although her Jezebel-style antics effectively got a rise out of certain members of the crowd, if you know what I’m talking about, and I think you do. Nope, it was the train wreck that preceded the Spores.

I’m talking about that Sonic Love Affair combo. Now, this local band sure knows how to play the kind of toluene-saturated yowyow that recalls the old spot-remover-sniffing gang in junior-high woodshop class—y’know, those retards by choice who sat with their faces buried in rags out back, huffing like devil spawn, blasting the same Stooges eight-track over and over: “No Fun,” “Not Right,” “Real Cool Time.”

The best thing about SLA is that the band has distilled this style of proto-punk glue rock into its own bucket of demented Yardbirdsian glee. Guitarists Curtis Franklin and Rob Alper whip out the riffs, backed by Rudge on bass and Jerry Fiore on drums, and the ensuing racket gives the animated frontman, Dylan Rogers, definitely a Dan Clowes character, something to hang on to as he careens across the stage and into the audience, flailing his arms, barking and spitting into the mic and blowing his harmonica. At one point, his performance was so convincing I had to go into the bathroom and look in the mirror, just to make sure I hadn’t stumbled into the pages of some new Clowes Eightball comic I hadn’t bothered to read.

And that’s pure rock ’n’ roll, the kind we could use way more of these days.