Bravo, L.A.--Even Your Off-Key Music Is Sweet

There’s an old guy who sits on a chair in the Music Center plaza every time there’s anything going on, singing the most tuneless song I’ve ever heard.

He has my sense of rhythm, which is no sense of rhythm at all, and a flat, off-key way of presenting his endless solo that is almost hypnotic. It’s like he’s singing to a cobra swaying in a basket.

I put a dollar in his pot one evening and tried speaking to him, but he just kept on making those dissonant sounds without even noticing that I was there.

I guess a buck wasn’t enough to interrupt his presentation, but that was my limit. Pavarotti he wasn’t.

Later I got to thinking that he was probably doing the best he could, and in a way was adding to the total sound of the city, which is not always on the level of grand opera.

In contrast to Mr. Music, we were at a performance of the L.A. Philharmonic that same night, listening to the heavenly compositions of Mozart.

I love the philharmonic almost as much as I love my dog, and I guess Mr. Music, defiling the very air with his atonal vocalizations, momentarily intruded on my rare infusion of haute musique.

But at least he helped reinforce my hypothesis that contrary to outside opinion, there’s music in the air in the City of Angles, even if it’s sometimes flat. The “Outside Opinion” was a musician friend in San Francisco who remarked when I was up there a few weeks ago that the only worthwhile sound in L.A. was the wailing of agents.

Well, I’m not exactly a civic booster, but the arrogance of the north rankled me and I went out to prove otherwise.

I don’t mean to imply that L.A. is anything like those old MGM musicals where waitresses and cops join in a song and dance in the center of town. Show me a cop who dances in the street and I’ll show you a narc who’s been sniffing the evidence.

You also don’t see troubadours on the corners in downtown L.A. at night because there’s nobody to sing to. Only downtown Oakland equals L.A.’s city center in its rate of abandonment after the sun goes down.

But we do have venues, as we say, where one can hear music to feed every taste. During a two-week prove-it period in Greater L.A., Cinelli and I went from a presentation of “West Side Story” at Moorpark College to an outdoor concert of the Topanga Philharmonic, with concertos as sweet as the day they adorned.

I was especially impressed by the college show. Drama professor Les Wieder, who produced and directed, prodded his all-student cast into professional performances the likes of which I’ve never seen in a college. The kids gave the music new energy and danced like the devil was beating time.

Two nights later we were in a back room of McCabe’s Guitar Shop on Pico, listening to a folk rock band called the Jayhawks. The music was OK, even though I find it difficult to appreciate vocalists who shout, whisper or sing through their noses.

What fascinated me was the back room itself, with a dozen or so guitars hanging from the wall, and folding chairs to accommodate the 150 people who can cozy into the room. There was kind of a 1960s feel to the place, except that there was no ropey-dopey smell in the air, and everyone had their clothes on.

A few days after that came the L.A. Philharmonic, and three days later Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, with its wide, and often strange, variety of street performers, some of whom might fall under the general term of musician.

On this particular evening, a little girl bounced out of a crowd that had circled around a man doing karaoke and suddenly began dancing. She was maybe 7 and was oblivious to her surroundings as she dipped and whirled to the music.

I don’t think she was part of the show because the vocalist seemed surprised by her sudden appearance, but it brought a surge of money into the pot.

I guess she could have been a shill, like the precocious little hustler Tatum O’Neal played in “Paper Moon.” Who knows? Kids learn fast.

The last stop on our two-week musical odyssey was “The Full Monty,” which is playing at the Ahmanson Theater. For those unfamiliar with the story, it’s about six unemployed steelworkers who become strippers in order to survive. The show’s title refers to the end of their act in which they, well, show it all.

It seemed to me the audience that night consisted mostly of women who voiced their pleasure by shrieking. One of the shriekers was a heavily made-up woman in her 40s who, I would guess, wasn’t exactly seeing naked men for the first time.

She was among the loudest of the banshees, and by the time the show was over, my ears were ringing. Only mortar shells exploding a few feet away had ever before caused a similar reaction.

The music was good and the show well done generally, except that God never intended men to prance around naked or even semi-naked. But I guess it wouldn’t be a skin show if they were wearing blue serge suits, and a skin show was what it was.

All things considered, at the end of the two weeks, I realized I didn’t have to prove a thing to the dude up north. We may not dance all in the streets down here, but there’s music enough if we wanted to.

Mr. Music was still singing away when we left “The Full Monty.” I gave him another buck and said “Bravo.” He didn’t blink an eye. Cool.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at [email protected].