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To Live and Shave in L.A.

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Founded by Tom Smith, To Live and Shave in L.A. is a band that featured Ben Wolcott, Rat Bastard, Weasel Walter, and other noise luminaries. Their approach and energy inspired scores of similar bands, and eventually produced seven known offshoots, two of which included TLASILA members. To Live and Shave in L.A. 2 did not feature Smith, but To Live and Shave in L.A. 3 appeared on at least one occasion with Smith.

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History

To Live and Shave in L.A. (TLASILA) arose from Smith's previous band, Peach of Immortality, that terminated in 1990 after a six-year run. After moving to South Florida in 1991, Smith befriended South Beach post-punk scenester Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra, and the two quickly set about crafting a new sound based on a mélange of the former's love of musique concrète, dub, '70s glam, free-improvised music, and the works of a variety of transgressive authors and filmmakers. TLASILA were acclaimed as the most literary group to arrive on the avant-garde rock scene since The Fall, and they made no effort to dilute their lyrics or soften their approach. Falestra was an experienced audio engineer and bassist with both manic technique and a penchant for throwing his instrument into the crowd. Smith wrote the lyrics, developed the sonic collages which served as the band's backdrops, and matched Felestra's stage aggression lurch for sybaritic lurch. They were initially associated with Miami's burgeoning noise-rock scene of the early 1990s, but neither To Live and Shave in L.A. nor their contemporaries (primarily Harry Pussy) could be so easily labeled.

1994 saw the release of their first compact disc, 1994's 30-minuten männercreme, and the addition of Oscillator player Benjamin Wolcott. A flood of recordings followed, many of which would not be issued until years later. With Wolcott's departure in 1996 (he joined another Miami group, the "neo-scum" quartet Frosty), TLASILA as a live entity weathered numerous changes. Following a pair of European tours featuring Smith, Falestra, and a revolving cast of stand-ins, To Live and Shave in L.A. returned to America with their "PRE (R)ocktober 1999" tour, featuring a newly expanded roster that included "brutal prog" kingpin Weasel Walter, percussionist Nondor Nevai, and stripper Misty Martinez.

The quintet split up following a festival appearance in 2000. Some sources say the newcomers (accompanied by Falestra) split from Smith to explore a different aesthetic approach, while others suggest that they resigned before Smith could dismiss them due to their poor performance at the aforementioned festival. After the formation of the TLASILA spin-off To Live and Shave in L.A. 2, a variety of "clones" flooded the underground, sporting such names as "I Love L.A.", "To Live and Shave in L.A. 1975", "I Live in L.A.", "Born in East L.A.", "Black Heart Rockers Burn in L.A.", and the like. (There was also an "alternate" TLASILA 2, which only served to further blur the distinction between Shave-ian representation and reality.) There was no To Live and Shave in L.A. proper to meet the demand, however. Smith called a halt to the project in 2000, angered with Falestra's decision to tour with TLASILA 2.

The spin-off craze quickly subsided, and was already a receding memory when TLASILA's autobiographical two-disc set, The Wigmaker in Eighteenth Century Williamsburg, was released in 2002.

Falestra and Smith revived To Live and Shave in L.A. in late 2003, assembling what many observers claim to be the best line-up in the group's history. MTV2 personality Andrew W. K. joined the band, as did respected guitarist/producer Don Fleming (a friend of Smith's since the mid-1970s) and Mark Morgan of New York neo-No Wave trio Sightings; Ben Wolcott also rejoined the flock. A new album (God and Country Rally!) and tour followed in September 2004.

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Philosophy

In a Blastitude interview, Smith said that he created the band with Bastard to uphold the idea of "PRE" in contrast to what he called the wrong idea of "POST," which he derides as the scholarly fallacy of "the errant supposition that spiffed-up or newly hatched movements supplant others fit for retirement." In other words, Smith sees all genres and movements as being part of the same essential energy and movement, and equally valid—as opposed to a Platonic or historical hierarchy structure—mirroring Martin Heidegger's rejection of the progressive in favor of a Eternal Recurrence of the Same.

According to the philosophy of "PRE", Smith sees all art, high and low, as folk art and the idea of "genre" is meaningless. He sites The Three Stooges, James Joyce, a Tom Verlaine guitar solo from Patti Smith's Horses album and Edgar Allan Poe as influences and aesthetically co-mingling examples. He named his group after a Ron Jeremy porno parody of the film To Live and Die in L.A. as a righteous example of this idea.