"Lemonade! Lemonade!"

“What kind of music you guys play?”“Reggae.” “Reggae? Aah! Reggae!”

The Sublime Stylee took reggae, island music that floated on good vibrations mixed with chords of dissidence, and mashed it up with punk and rock to create an earth-shattering new sound grounded in 40-ounces and phillie blunts. When this little interaction quoted above was dubbed into a song on their second CD, “Robbin’ the Hood” the guy responds to them “I don’t care much for reggae”. And at that time, a lost teenager in a blue blood feeding tank, I didn’t care much for reggae myself. But I’ve changed. I’ve repented. Sure, I may be limited to Tosh and Cliff and Damien and Ziggy and “Presure Drop” but I get the joke, that such peaceful music is really an underground expression of anger, frustration, and rebellion, laced throughout with the hope for a better day. And the greatest part is that the white squares put it into tourist commercials airing on travel planet and unknowingly get a little cooler and more free-minded without knowing it.

“One good thing about music – when it hits you you feel no pain.” – Bob Marley

Where’s this bastard going with this? Sublime and reggae tastes and  . . . just what the fuck is Unkal Ryno talking about?

The Sublime Stylee is still straight from Long Beach and since those demonic skater rockstars were the folks who first introduced me to the jah sounds, it should only be fitting that I come full circle and find myself in the parking structure of the Long Beach Convention Center on a cloudy February day, wishing we had brought our wooden piece and whatever was left in it from the night before.

The Long Beach Arena is a massive round holding tank that smashes into a few square buildings on the harbor in Long Beach, an area much more Miami than L.A.  We watched as the other cars and trucks pulled up, people puffing joints and bowls in their driver’s seat, completely unworried by the cop cars at the entrance.

We made brave steps out of the structure, past people who were either younger or mellower or dreadlier than us. Certainly much more stoned. We got in the line for Will Call to pick up my ticket as Bec’s friends had hers. We lined up behind a short, fat black man with red eyes and a couple college kids wearing colorful sweatshirts with shaggy hair and skate baseball catp. We saw a crowd of three young boys and three girls. These were the bad kids in high school, that little crowd who all the parents knew were trouble and told their respectable, jock children to stay away from. One of the boys, the shortest and the one who looked most distrusting of mainstream society, had dreads. The girls all dressed wholesomely but with thick hemp necklaces and Jerry Bear pendants. These were the high school stoners. Harmless, but stigmatized nonetheless. 

“Bec, was that you in high school?”

“Yeah. Kinda weird. We’re old.” And so we were as we waited behind various assorted derelicts, more younger than older. A few older black men walked around, usually walking with canes and an air of authority, the grand poobahs of these things, reggae men of yesteryear with class and presence.

We got the ticket and made our way back to the parking lot when Bec’s friends arrived bringing good vibrations, a concert ticket, and two fresh stalks of some dank. The one girl had been going for years, she said, and as such knew the ins and outs of sneaking smoke into such a place.

They patted us down at the doors, long lines into glass portals into a world of hippies and trustafarians, worshipers of the good king Tafari every one. There were pigs posted at the doors too, tall bastards in blue uniforms just waiting for the body searchers to snag an ounce of herbs off some poor little high school kid, then throw him in the back seat and watch him squirm as they talk about how his mom will look when she has to pick him up at Long Beach central booking. Sure, I’ll take out my wallet and my cellphone as you slide your hands up my legs – men checked men and women women, two lines as it were – and then I was through the doors, in the main room and surrounded by booths selling all sorts of hippie reggae shit a man could imagine. This was the Ragga-muffins event, a Bob Marley memorial overflowing with little leather wristbands in black and yellow and green and wooden head carvings and wall hangings and posters, all the crap the campus stoners buy to decorate their dorms.

 

Out back was where they kept the food vendors. It smelled like the old Tex-Mex restaurant I cooked at in Steamboat Springs some 10-odd years ago, fresh pork and beef and chicken being cooked over dirty grills that showed us the way forward through pulsing throngs of stoners stuffing their fatty faces with Jamaican jerk chicken and twelve-dollar Heinekens pints. A DJ spun reggae riddims in the corner while a dreadlocked black man spat iry rhymes. Nearby was a booth handing out Hemp gummies, sour- patched kids that tastes like stems plucked form the bottom of the bag and a hemp tea which tasted like a clean pothead’s gym socks. One of the guys I was with said that his man told him that Joe’s Jamaican food stand was the best there and he got in line for a jerk chicken kabob over rice and plantains served in a Styrofoam container that a more opinionated person would point out ran contrary to the professed hippie way of life. But maybe that was the whole tip here. These weren’t hippies, not in the traditional vegan jamband Colorado-Birkenstock-wearing “save the environment” way. These were reggae fans, revolutionaries who smoked pot, and certainly it needs to be noted we were in Long Beach. I pointed to two cops standing in the middle of the crowd, passersby giving them wide berth as the swine’s jowls were twisted into smiles. This was like fishing from the ocean floor for these bastards. I felt like they were just waiting for that moment when some poor 17-year-old deviant in a tye-dye t-shirt with Che Guevara on it would light up a spliff within eyeline so they could club the poor bastard into a fetal position and throw him in the back of the car. My friend who ate the chicken assured me they didn’t do that for weed but I wasn’t so sure.

 

Inside I perused the stands selling their hemp necklaces and wooden pictures of Bob Marley. One stand was full of Barack Obama plaques. All of them sold hippie t-shirts with pictures of Marley and weed and “Trenchtown” and tie-dyed flowing dresses and sarongs and Jamaica sandals and hempen wall-hangs, college dorm room stuff. A charismatic teenager came up to me and told me that in the next room a doctor had set up a booth and for $100.00 I could get my medical marijuana license. This was the spot, alright. We had been there for over an hour and other than the DJ outside hadn’t seen any music. But that wasn’t really what this was about for most of the people. This whole reggae thing was a cover. What it really was, what most of the people were really here for, was a celebration of weed smoking and what it means to us bastards living in the unholy land of Southern California.

 

Eventually we decided to walk into a gymnasium where the music was and the second we walked in the air was one massive cloud of THC and all of my thoughts and prcognitions were vindicated. This place harkened back to an old Bob Dylan classic, one embracing the lifestyle that these pot-smoking derelicts had taken to with a renewed vigor of which even they were unawares. At the Rag-a-muffins festival in Long Beach, everyone must get stoned.

 

It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. A sea of bodies bobbing up and down, mostly white teenagers eschewing their suburban splendor to pretend they were part of yet another culture which was never meant for them. Not that it was to exclude them, but what was originally based on the principles of a unified African and black community to strengthen against the white oppressors had become the anthem of their children. It hadn’t been meant for white middle-class teenagers with felt, psychedelic posters of gnomes sitting on mushrooms hanging on their bedroom walls. But just like rap and, before that, blues, it was looking like the white man was stealing even that.

 

Just past the crowd The Wailing Souls, 3 aging rastas strong with Jah, belted out some roots reggae as  our little group sat down in a circle on the fringe of the crowd. My friend who ate the jerk chicken earlier, a big man who said little because he didn’t need to say much, took out some papers and placed them in his lap, on top of his Indian-crossed legs. His girl, a spunky LBC local with hipster glasses 

gave him one of the two tree stalks she had snuck in for him by tucking it under her right tit. He crumbled off a massive pile and rolled it up into a tight small cigar. I was looking around, up into the stands and at the security guards by the doors 30 yards away, where the slight bit of light streamed in, and then at the people dancing near us. I felt exposed, like there was no way we would get away with this and I imagined telling my boss I was late for

 work on Monday for being in possession of copious amounts of doge. But nothing happened as the thing was lit and passed around to the chicken man’s sister and their LB local friend and the girl with the hipster glasses and Bec and me. Coughing. Burnt windpipe. Then the edges softening. Reactions slowed, smoothed out. No jerky motions. Just a simple flow to everything within and without.

 

A large black man danced in front of us with a 40-year-old divorcee with too much plastic surgery trying to gyrate like she was a Trenchtown local when the only time she had been to Jamaica was to stay at the Negril Sandals. We spoke about the scene and Bec and I leaned in to whisper how old we felt and how she remembered doing this so long ago. We talked about back in the day when we would fight to the front of the pit, get in the crowd and just dance for hours, off in our own stoney worlds amidst the chaos of a ganja-smoking public that time had forgotten. We talked about crowd surfing. I think the last time I crowd-surfed was 1995. Another lifetime. It felt strange to be back there but on the outside looking in as none of us dared crawl into the group. That was not our world anymore. Leroy Sibbles got up there and hit us with some more dance hall sounding reggae, though it was certainly all blending together, as was the air and the walls and the tall ceilings and even in the dark I felt like my vision was able to pick up the sharpness of color difference, shade difference, the observations gleaned at the benefit of the details of the outlines of things.

 

The re-emergence into the outside world was a painful one. Like a flop emerging from his dank basement epicly toasted, I found it hard comprehending the world of light which existed outside the concert room’s doors. My first stop was at a food stand where the girl behind the cash register asked me what I wanted in slow motion. I struggled to mutter “2 waters” and gave her a $20, conscious as I was digging through my wallet how long that was taking me, too long, I seemed stoned to be pawing through my empty billfold like that. She gave me back change for a $10. I pointed this out to here, wondering if it was because she thought perhaps it would slip past a stoney red-eyed Caucasian. Or maybe not. She was young, frazzled, braces and all. Probably first job. After some confusion and supervisor aid I finally got my correct change and my waters. Bec and I finished them quickly as we hunted for food outside on the patio.

 

The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, I thought to myself, was navigate through this pulsing crowd. It was much more crowded than it had been earlier, a maze where the walls were constantly closing and it didn’t help that my depth perception was all thrown off, my motor skills hindered and my judgment slowed. Bec and I had to hold onto each other because we were of the same mind and all I could think was “Goddamn, that bastard has some pharmaceutical shit.” It had been laced with purple and dipped in crystals, a pothead sundae for the finest of connoisseurs. And it was precisely because of this potent plant that I found myself in awkward situations where I was too close to people while trying to navigate the place, trappied in the middle of 3-person conversations as I realized I chose the wrong way and found myself at a human dead-end. I would tip my fedora and back up, lost, awkward, until I could right myself, like a car pulling out of a spot, and then we were outside. So many food options. All smelling good. All with long lines and lots of strange people surrounding us. Bec and I froze at the head of the stream. This was it. This is what all these freaks looked like.

 

“You always have to note, before you get into Orange County from L.A. you have to go through Long  Beach,” Bec said and I nodded. This was it. The great crossroads, a city with its legs planted firmly on either side of the LA/OC border. A strange conglomeration of all the freaks and geeks of a city that hasn’t gotten its own reality TV show sandwiched by two which have, both of which starred Lauren Conrad. LC won’t have a show in Long Beach any time soon, I should think. A square couple, a tall, lanky white husband and wife with short haircuts and khaki shorts and polo shirts – I think the wife was even wearing a fanny pack – walked around, holding hands, cautious and scanning like those National Geographic reporters when they first descend into a primitive village. It was a beautiful irony. In the outside world these people were it, they were the society and all the freaks had to play by their rules. Wear conservative clothes with collars and maybe even leather dress shoes, with white eyes and clean-shaven and all respectable-like. But now the mainstreamers were in the land of the lost, a thriving sea of stoners and derelicts and this was their world – the squares were guests and it was certainly a strange feeling for them judging by their faces.

 

As I stood there, my body melted into the concrete and I stood unmoving while my mind raced off to parts not visited for quite some time. I thought about Hemingway’s shortest story, a 6-word tragedy he wrote as a bet with his friends. “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn”. He said it was the best story he ever wrote and as I thought about it I realized it was. Because you could take those words and think deeper about it and you could find a story of loss, of excitement turned into panic turned into despair turned into sadness and then finally an emotional numbness that called for a woman to sell the shoes she had bought for her miscarried child. Hemingway always said he would leave certain details off the page but think about them enough while writing so that the reader could feel them. I understood that now.

 

I climbed back into my body and stared out at the scene unraveled before me.  Hipsters walked around next to fatties sporting hip hop t-shirts and crew cuts and bloodshot eyes heavy in their sockets. A group of high school kids, coping with being baked in public for one of the first times in their lives, were followed by a white couple in their 20’s. The man had on a t-shirt smeared in barbeque sauce with a gut bulging out underneath and a scraggly goatee on a face with looked like that of a simple grossero made human while the woman was a little thinner but certainly still thick by conventional standards with brittle, ringed hair and too much foundation. They were followed by a black couple, a tall ripped man in dark sunglasses and a Clippers jersey with a svelte little girlfriend with large, natural homegrowns. A boy dressed in a giant felt hemp  leaf walked around, advertising a weed legalization company I'd previously only seen advertised in Los Feliz, took pictures with random festival-goers and impressed impressionable young baked heinas. Bec and I did a lap of the food and still could not decide. Bec said she would eat whatever I wanted so I went back to the stand where my friend had bought his chicken earlier and bought some beef ribs which you had to tear off the bone and they tasted great and made me feel carnal as I savored the juicy flesh lathered with jerk seasoning. Bec didn’t want that – she had hoped I would buy a dirty dog. She bought another 12-dollar beer and we shared that.

 

The whole day had been soundtracked by the shout of grown men  hocking “Lemonade! Lemonade!”, a sweet concoction for the stoners who wanted sugar in their water to quench their thirst and their sweet tooth at the same time. One nearby was an older, thinner black man and he exuded more class than most of the people I knew on the outside. Next to him a mom held the hand of a 9-year-old boy whose eyes were dried and watering. It was obvious she had taken him into the concert hall. He was small, no more than 60 pounds. All the smoke that had congregated in the place would have easily pumped into his nose, into his lungs and his bloodstream and it was probably a scary experience for a boy in single digits to be stoned for the first time without knowing what it was. He probably thought something was seriously wrong with him. Hell, sometimes I think I’m dying off strong dank and I’ve been around it for almost half my life. I looked around at all the other parents carrying babies or escorting various other young ones and wondered if they got it. That perhaps the babes aren’t ready for this life of compromised morals and freaky, THC-filtered lenses. I saw her turn to the old man yelling “Lemonade! Lemonade! Lemonade!” and buy a  massive dose of the sugar water, which the kid downed quickly and without fear.

 

It was getting late. We all decided to go back inside and watch some of the next act before splitting out. We were tired. The ganj was wearing off, wearing down, and it was certainly warm despite the fact that it was cloudy. We had spent a lot of time on that back food patio staring at the outside of the round arena, painted with a seascape reminiscent of a half-rate  aquarium and the whole grounds opening out to the scenic Long Beach harbor that looked like Harborplace – or maybe more Annapolis. No, more Lauderdale. We had eaten and drank. In fact, the thing we had done the least was listen to Reggae. So it was once more into the auditorium, though now we ventured to the upper deck to sit down in the stands instead of the floor, to take a load off.

 

Pressure was performing now, more of the same though he threw in a riveting cover of “Three Little Birds” as the friend who ordered the chicken rolled another blunt and passed it. From the top we could see down into the crowd. The individual white kid, tripping on boomers, hopping around without any thought or semblance of a connection to the rhythm of the music on stage. A tall thin black man in an all white suit with a white robe and a hat covered in what looked like white terry cloth walked through the place like he owned the joint. We wondered if it was Snoop, in classic Doggfather mode like we hadn’t seen him in years. The man spoke authority with his mere existence and I thought that if he was a nobody outside of the Rag-a-muffins festival, he was a goddamn king there.

 

Some other girls had arrived earlier, friends of the girl in the hipster glasses. They were much younger than us, back in the yesteryear of the early 20’s when there are still no consequences but for the first time you can buy booze without a fake. The wonder years. They turned around with a bottle of vodka snuck in from a friend of theire working security for the event. I said no, I had to drive but Bec, channeling her best Chelsea Handler, grabbed the bottle, swigging it strong and shuddering after a heavy gulp of vodka. As we sat there my head trembled under its own weight, falling onto Bec’s shoulders as far away a black man with a British accent emceed the evening and more black men with Jamaican accents released flowing rhythms blending hip hop and island vibrations. With all signs pointing to the door we said our goodbyes, hugged and thanked the kids who had gotten us out of our normal zone and into the mayhem, and crawled out to the car.

 

We were there for almost 5 hours. Over that time we saw - I mean really listened to and watched – about an hour of music. Even when we were in the concert room that was mostly to roll blunts and hide from the sun and foot patrols. In the end that’s the rub, I suppose. Music festivals aren’t for the music, at least not exclusively. I thought about Bonnarroo and all the little bastards running around all weekend tripping face far from where the music was actually happening. It’s the scene, man. Music festivals, like everything else in modern America, are no longer contained to or even centered around the music. Like the people who go to Big Bear to put on snowpants and drink Bloody Maries at the lodge, these assholes are here for the ancillary, a new dynamic where the by-products are king. Just like HST first noticed at the Kentucky Derby, nobody’s watching the horses anymore. Everybody’s just there to get drunk in the infield. And that includes myself.

 

Now certainly there are still music fans who come to hear Roots reggae, who know every song and every performer, sure enough. But based on the disparity between the small numbers in the auditorium listening to the bands amidst an all-engulfing cloud of blue smoke and the ravenous crowd perusing the paraphernalia stands and food carts, I am led to believe very few of the people there really gave a fuck about the music. It’s just a neighborhood festival, like the Ventura County Fair but indoors and without a large ferris wheel. As I dug deeper into a teeming convention center populated by derelicts who all smelled like skunks it becomes apparent what the central theme of this festival is. They say it’s reggae but that’s the smoke screen, the secret word uttered by dopers all over for drug fest and goddamn! do we show up in big numbers, all clambering to be stoned together, in a place where we’re no longer the freaks, if only for a few hours. It’s like Mardi Gras for potheads, a place where you can be publicly intoxicated on your habit of choice and find it’s accepted if only because its an unspoken that the headfuck is really what we’re all there for. Doctor's smoke it. Lawyers smoke it. Judges smoke it. It's good for tuburculosis. Good for halitosis. Fat Tuesday? Never heard of it. The Wailing Souls? Wasn’t that Bob Marley’s group? No, they were the Wailers. Hmm.I have heard Peter Tosh's NORML anthem, though.

 

In the end, what we’re really all looking for is a departure from the norm; from the tedium of a life spent working too hard, relaxing too little, and too easily accepting the tedium of everyday life. Maybe the “Reggae Fest” is a misnomer just as is “Sundance Film Festival” and “The Preakness”. Sundance is really about the Hollywood scene taking a little ski vacation; The Preakness is (or had been until the bastards just passed some rotten law forbidding outside beer in the infield) really about getting violently wasted in the sun in Pimlico, watching drunk private school girls flashing their tits, and celebrating the beginning of the summer; and Reggae fest is about celebrating the life of RasTafari and, more definitively, smoking a lot of weed.

 

On our drive home we took Sepulveda up from Long Beach instead of the freeway. I don’t know why I decided to take the longer road, through little  neighborhoods I had never seen before. But nevertheless I did. We bought some tallboy PBR’s for the road as we passed the lights of Long Beach refineries and then small, dark communities far off the beaten trail of Los Angeles proper.  We stretched out the day as much as possible. And maybe what we really got from the reggae fest was a reminder of our youth. A reminder that sometimes the experience is more important than the destination. And that you make the best observations when you allow yourself to wander aimlessly and slowly, deliberately, from time to time. And if there’s ever been a music that fueled a lifestyle that’s about slowing down, feeling the flow, and appreciating the now while hoping for a better future, it’s those sweet island riddims. It’s always been about the reggae, even if it’s not necessarily about the music. About Songs of freedom. Cuz all I’ve ever had . . . redemption songs.