Mardi Gras Time Down at the Big Amoeba!
Amoeba Hollywood

Yes it’s the olde tyme holiday of Mardi Gras once again, a pagan carnivale of fun & frolic where you get all the good times out of your system before you gotta fast for Lent. They celebrate it all over the world but mostly in New Orleans, with their famous parades and parties, and every year Amoeba declares our kinship with that great city by celebrating it here in the store! This year Shrove Tuesday fell early in February, but despite the chilly weather we did it up right, with decorations, floats, masks, horns, beads, and the biggest, craziest parade this side of the Mississippi!

The decorations started creeping out a week before… soon everywhere you looked there was purple, gold and green streamers and the anticipation was getting hot! Many of our customers did ask, “is there some kind of holiday?” We tried to explain. But really there’s no way to explain… you just gotta be there.

The night before we had a little pre-party with our Vampire Weekend in-store… we had a mega-capacity crowd for this much-hyped young Brooklyn band, and everyone had a blast. Meanwhile the krewe was out in the loading dock working on the floats for the big parade…

Tuesday morning we broke out the beads and the costumes, and put some Mardi Gras mambo on the stereo. The parade was hours away but the mood was good. It was Super Tuesday in more ways than one… Democrats had much to celebrate and ample reason to vote in the morning’s California primary for either the first woman president or the first African-American president in our history, which was reason to celebrate in itself!

Amoeba Hollywood Wraps Up 2007

There’s always lots of fun stuff happening here at the big Amoeba in beautiful downtown Hollywood CA. But 2007 was just bananas! Rock stars, reissues, bashes, balls, Beatles, etc. etc.! Should auld acquaintance be forgot, I shall now fire up my poor abused memory chip and attempt to recall all the good times from last year. For auld lang syne that is!

Surely the most memorable event of 2007 was our biggest in-store performance ever, when Paul McCartney played a “secret” 90-minute show on June 27! Yes that Paul McCartney, “the cute one” as teen Beatles fans knew him in the ‘60s! Sir Paul had just released his latest album in the Spring, his best in years, entitled Memory Almost Full and he wanted to celebrate with secret shows in London, New York and Los Angeles.

His choice of Amoeba as a venue (while enormously flattering and logistically terrifying to us) showed his true lifelong passion for music. What better way to show it than to play a career-capping concert in a room full of every kind of music from around the world, past present and future?

Suffice to say, the “secret” of his secret show got out somehow and next thing you know, we had a half-mile long line of fans camping out outside our building! 400 fans made it in at last (along with plenty of VIPs including Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne and more), and Paul showed that he’s no fossil – he rocked harder than most young’uns on a joyous set of Beatle favorites and his newest tunes.

When the giant inflatable green-and-purple Frankenstein arises from the center of the store to welcome all visitors, you know it's... Halloween at Amoeba L.A.!!!

The store looked spooky for weeks... cobwebs, bats and pumpkins everywhere, skeletons dancing... even a skeleton with a handlebar moustache over the info counter!  Hmmm... also an old-timey gentleman skeleton in a top hat lounging above the opera CDs in the Jazz Room.  A spectre from beyond the tomb hung over our eerie Halloween section, filled with spooky sound effects, every compilation ever made with "Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo on it, and some Jennifer Lopez movies.  Creepy!

Halloween dawned bright and sunny (as it sometimes does in L.A.) but we kept it appropriate in the store with some Cramps blasting on the stereo and candy bowls everywhere for trick-or-treaters.   Many folks arrived in costume... I was particularly startled by a co-worker dressed as Richard D. James a.k.a the Aphex Twin!  Pretty scary... and a really good cardboard robot (the Bot-O-Tron) and a girl with her head in a milk carton that said "Missing", and many more... Minnie Mouse, a mime, an evil clown, a melancholy bumblebee even!

At 3 we kicked the party off with our Halloween DJ, DJ Heebie Jeebies (real name Mike Dehlin, frontman for local psychobilly outfit The Goddamn Gallows).  He kept it real (scary) with lots of good old evil tunes from "She's My Witch" by the Sonics to "Run To the Hills" by Iron Maiden, interspersed with amazing horror movie trailers (the one for the transgender "Dr. Jeckyll and Sister Hyde" was my favorite!).  Around 5 the excitement was building... it was almost time for our annual Halloween costume contest!

As the many spooky contestants gathered round the stage, I donned my giant silver head with the monocle and purple moustache (no catchy name for this costume... I called it the Old Time Space Gentleman, others thought it looked like Mr. Peanut or the Monopoly Man, but all in aluminum foil).  Like Ed McMahon to Johnny Carson, I introduced our host and handed off the mike -- it was our old friend Lance Rock!

We certainly don't mind little plugs like this. Check him out at the 1:55 mark.


This clip also educated me to the fact that Takashi Murakami created the artwork for Kanye's new release. If  you're a fan (and / or collector 8) of Murakami, make sure to catch his show at the MOCA.  Word has it that  Kanye is the guest of honor at the ultra VIP night.....  Looks like I'll miss that and have to make the "public" opening. Works for me....