Folks dressed up all freaky... devil music on the sound system... zombies and skeletons dancing onstage... was it Halloween or just another normal day at Amoeba Hollywood? The distinction is not always crystal clear in the 90028. But if you peruse these photos, you will discover that yes, it was definitely the most haunted day of the year! A day when tombs open and spirits arise, and all manner of ghoulies and beasties come forth looking for out-of-print CDs and groovy dollar records and classic horror movies on Blu-Ray... the lurking madness of Halloween at Amoeba!


We kicked things off with a little Misfits on the stereo (endorsing the patronage of Glenn Danzig, loyal Amoeba shopper) and the costumed Amoebites began arriving in full-on freak regalia! Scott showed up to staff the hip-hop section in the grey beard and American flag headband of the typical Vietnam veteran acid burnout, and got to work upstocking the J. Dilla section while mumbling something about Charlie and the Da Nang Bridge. Edythe and Saffron were resplendent as an old-time groom and bride, Jamie rocked a fabulous handmade Indian squaw shabooz and Annie made the scene in slinky Panther Pink.  There was a sexy vestigial midget nerd (best description I can muster), a purple cosmic space witch, a putrefied but spirited zombie cheerleader, a fearsome Lucha Libre wrestler, and a va-voom Poison Ivy impersonator (the Cramps guitarette of course, not the Batman villain).  Things got really wild & crazy when Kris and Javi showed up as Weekend At Bernie's, in board shorts and Hawaiian shirts with a very authentic-looking Bernie corpse. Melody's outfit was typically mind-blowing, a black vinyl recreation of Klaus Nomi! Juan was regal in Roman toga and Chuck Taylors, Scott was futuristic in a baby-blue flannel onesie as a Twitter post. And Melissa was magical as an alluring marionette. Not one but two serial killers stalked the mezzanine, Travis as Leatherface and Matt as Dinky Doodles, the smiley slasher.  Joel further indulged his aeronautics obsession as the black box from the Air France plane crash, complete with French moustache and attitude. Did I miss anyone? I'm sure I did, but hopefully the pictures got 'em all.  My own disguise was a bit tricky to identify but it was meant to be Peter Gabriel's sci-fi look on the cover of Genesis Live, as the Watcher of the Skies. (Or perhaps Xenu, the god of Scientology, as someone suggested.) Lucas improved on the general idea when he put it on and went around muttering to the staff his dead-on impression of my voice, doubling the horror and really freaking some folks out!

Every year the staff of Amoeba Music in Hollywood get together for a no-holds-barred musical cage match called Amoebapalooza...20 Amoeba bands get as crazy as possible onstage for 10 minutes each!

How crazy IS possible?

Very crazy was the answer this year...and/or very glamorous, creepy, rockin', shockin', wild, wonderful, and dancetastic! One of the most wonderful and insane Amoebapalooza lineups of all time took the stage at the King King on Sunday night and showed how it was done. Surely any unsuspecting patrons to walk in from Hollywood Boulevard must have thought they had stumbled onto the set of some kind of psychedelic rock opera written by Andrew Lloyd Webber's brain-damaged evil twin, and hopefully they stuck around to enjoy it with the rest of us.

As our lovable and pants-wettingly funny host Brently Heilbron put it, it's the last Amoebapalooza of the decade...soon we won't have the Oughts to kick around anymore, and it'll be the Teens! Taking this temporal warning to heart, the musical freaks of Amoeba made sure they sent the Oughts out with a kaboom. Have a drink with me and let the show begin...

The lights went down on the red velvet curtain, and the festivities began with a Jaco-Pastorious-on-PCP solo bass guitar odyssey from gangly wunderkind Ben Ricci, bravely kicking off this night of strangeitude. Is the bass meant to make sounds like that? Dunno. Ben's bass wizardry was closely followed by the hard-charging sounds of Thin Lizzy tribute band Emerald, with one Sam Rodriguez channeling the spirit of the late great Phil Lynott. Sorry if I'm leaving anything out...the next thing I remember was the always mind-blowing cabaret fantasia of Cream Puff, the one-man show of antique futurist foppington Joey Jenkins. There really is nothing like Mr. Jenkins...jigging, chanting and prophesizing from the stage, in his knickers and mountaineering headgear, he makes you feel like you've wandered into one of David Lynch's weirder dreams. He ended by collapsing in a grand death scene, instantly growing a marvellous flower from his heart. Showbiz!

With every Brazilian Independence Day (Sept. 7th) usually comes a plethora of great Brazilian music to Los Angeles. Still, it was a shock to see Os Mutantes on the Amoeba instore calendar when it was posted back in August. I’m sure it was more of a coincidence than something planned, but In the back of my mind I thought, “How cool is that!?” To say that I’m a fan of Os Mutantes is an understatement; in fact, it's probably one of the few groups that most Amoeba employees with all our collective vast tastes in music can agree upon. Since their reunion, or rather, their resurgence back in 2006, I have managed to miss all their shows in Los Angeles due to plain old bad timing. At last, I would finally see the band that was the gateway for me and so many others to discovering Brazilian music.

In the early nineties, I read an article on Os Mutantes. They were referred to as “The Brazilian Beatles,” but that is not what drew me to them. It was that they, along with the other Tropicalistas Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso and Tom Zé were radicals and into taking all influences, whether they was Brazilian, European, Avant-garde or folk music, and putting them all together. Mutantes were the easiest to digest because they had much in common with other Psychedelic groups of that era, but after listening to them on a continuous basis, I started to notice their musicianship and songwriting was much more advanced than most groups of that time. They were the best of the Avant-garde rock bands because they could swing better than any of them. I remembering going to a record store and buying all their import CDs that I could find. From there I got into Caetano, Gilberto Gil, Tom Ze and soon started to venture out into other non-Tropicalia artist such as Milton Nascimento and Jorge Ben. From then on, the doors of Brazilian music became wide open. My discovery of Brazilian music from Jobim to Funk Carioca is due in part to Os Mutantes.