Places That Are Gone

A Personal Ode To Rock & Roll Rehearsal Rooms

Scene from a recent Ridel High reunion rehearsal

Rehearsal rooms are sacred spaces when you play in bands.

Like many musicians, I started out jamming in neighborhood garages before graduating to bedrooms, living rooms, and hourly studios that required a lot of gear lugging (good practice for shows). Over time I graduated to more luxurious lockouts where we could keep our amps, drums and microphones permanently set up.

When I think back to the various bands and musical configurations I’ve been part of over the years, my mind often skips the memories created at clubs and recording studios in favor of those generated in smoky, beer-soaked rehearsal rooms instead.

That’s where the sparks really flew, dancing around in the electric air between us until a precious few became songs.

Magical spaces that were part clubhouse, temple, crash pad, makeshift venue, and mad scientist’s laboratory. Rooms where we could collectively work out the kinks, pushing ourselves before showing the cold and indifferent world what we created.

I assume that many of the structures I experienced over the years still exist, but the specific energy that we conjured together inside those walls vanished when we eventually handed over the keys—or got evicted—and moved on.

These are a few stream of consciousness memories from those long gone places.

---

The Condo in South Redondo

It was only by chance that I got sat next to Keith Brown in a high school English class during sophomore year. We didn’t know each other, but quickly bonded over music. He was a trumpet player who recently switched over to guitar and I was budding punk drummer. We decided to make music together, so my mom drove me and my rickety gear from where we lived in landlocked North Redondo Beach, CA over to his mom’s place near the surf and sand in South Redondo (the two cities share a name, but really have little to do with each other, geographically separated as they are). His bedroom was down in the basement, a couple floors removed from his mom’s up on the third floor, so making noise was allowed. The first song we ever played together was “I Got You” by Split Enz, just Keith and me (take that The White Stripes). The band was eventually filled out by a keyboard player named Paul, guitarist Greg McIlvaine and bassist Dan Kern (who lived in Santa Cruz, but came to stay with Keith for the summer…to learn how to play bass; he was later replaced by a talented local classmate named Al Lay when Dan went home for the school year). Paul quit when we refused to stop playing a Sex Pistols song at rehearsal, packing up his gear and storming out while the rest of us kept making a racket.

It was a dramatic turning point that eventually led to our Minneapolis-influenced punk sound. We had several names in the short time were together—The P-Bombs, The Chasers, The Elephant Men, etc.—but our only demo tape (recorded in a closet-sized room behind a Hermosa Beach guitar shop) bears the name The Hoods. We played a couple raucous keg parties in the living room of that condo (much to the chagrin of the neighbors who shared a wall). That band broke up before high school ended, but we all kept going to shows together: The Replacements, Alex Chilton, Gun Club, Hüsker Dü, Ramones, Camper van Beethoven, The Jazz Butcher, Soul Asylum, etc. Keith went on to briefly sing for an early iteration of Pennywise. The rest of us played in aimless, late-teen garage bands with names like Humpty Pumpkin.

---

The Lockout at El Cid

Three-quarters of The Hoods moved to Santa Barbara for college while I stayed behind in LA. I never had any intention of pursuing a degree until my dad gave me an ultimatum: attend the local community college, get a full-time job or move out. One of those sounded like more doable than the others, so that’s how I reluctantly became a college student. About a year later—after visiting Keith, Greg and Dan a few times to jam and party—they asked me to join them full time in the college town of Isla Vista. (I bussed tables at a seafood restaurant and attended Santa Barbara City College downtown…dad strikes again!) This new iteration of the band was eventually dubbed The Wonderfuls, a name we got from a Hüsker Dü interview on MTV’s 120 Minutes. (Sensing a theme?) Keith, who was always the most ambitious member of our quartet, secured our very first lockout space. It was a tiny room on the second floor of a storage unit complex—adjacent to a weedy pocket park called El Cid—that had been transformed into a hive of rock and roll activity by generations of music-loving students. (For context, an early iteration of Ugly Kid Joe rehearsed there around the same time, when they were still called Overdrive; UKJ lead singer Whitfield Crane III also lived upstairs from the apartment I shared with Greg, the same party pad where we briefly entertained Tommy Stinson when The Replacements came to town).

That apartment was about a hundred yards from our lockout, which we got to through a broken fence like some scene from The Outsiders (Hoods, indeed). The “soundproofed” walls were lined with styrofoam that Greg spray-painted, partially melting the surface and creating a psychedelic environment that was toxic for a few days—but that didn’t stop us from jamming. The complex’s owner was a sweet and supportive older gentleman who would pop by in a Chrysler convertible to check up on his property and collect the rent, strongly encouraging us to wear earplugs (man, oh, man—I wish that I had, um, listened to him). A lot of music and blurry memories were generated in that tiny boombox of a room, including rehearsing for the demo tape we improbably recorded at the famed Indigo Ranch studio in Malibu thanks to the generosity of Keith’s family. That band eventually broke up and I moved back to LA to finish my journalism degree (although I haunted Isla Vista on the weekends for the next few years, playing in an art-damaged hard rock band with Greg on guitar/vocals and our college friend Jeff Whalen on bass/vocals). Keith went on to form the band Popsicko with some talented locals. Dan and I eventually played in the band Tsar with Jeff Whalen (and another Isla Vista music pal, Jeff Solomon) a decade later.

---

That Hourly Rehearsal Space in Culver City

Popsicko bassist Marko DeSantis convinced me try out for a Hollywood band called Lunchbox in 1995. I was living in Hermosa Beach at the time and had no desire to drive back and forth to the Sunset Strip several nights a week, but reluctantly went to meet with lead singer/bassist Kevin Ridel and guitarist Steve LeRoy in Santa Monica. I instantly fell in love with the demos they played for me so we formed the power pop/geek rock trio that soon became Ridel High. This was my first real experience with a band “trying to get signed,” which involved recording various demos for managers and lawyers to shop around, enjoying occasional free meals and drinks with major label A&R reps and scouts, and playing countless SoCal club shows (including opening for Wesley Willis, Ween and Bis when they came through town). It also meant writing a lot of new material and practicing constantly. Ridel High mostly rehearsed in hourly studios during the early days, places where you could buy an off-brand soda and guitar strings in the same vending machine. Some only offered a PA and a semi-soundproofed room (aka “carpeted walls and egg crate ceilings”), others provided backline amps and drum kits to minimize the amount of gear we had to schlep.

Our favorite place was a very clean, nondescript brick building in Culver City run by a cool young couple we got to know pretty well (they later broke up and she disappeared—more drama!) We’d previously rehearsed in our fair share of sticker-covered junky dens, so this place felt positively luxurious. A lot of other up-and-coming LA musicians came through those doors, but the band I liked listening to through the thin walls was a heavier outfit called Pusher (more along the lines of ‘90s LA bands like Lifter and Campfire Girls than the pop rock we plied). Ridel High eventually got a lockout in El Segundo while getting ready to record our only album, Hi Scores, with Lagwagon frontman Joey Cape for his short-lived Santa Barbara indie label My Records (that album was later picked up by A&M Records and renamed Emotional Rollercoaster—mission accomplished!) We later landed in another clean Westside lockout where we worked on some new material before getting dropped and splitting up. I joined Tsar, Kevin and Steve started Peel.

---

Steven Adler’s Old Rehearsal Room

My late ‘90s/early 2000s band Tsar had a few lockouts over the years (shout out to both Nightingale Studios locations in Burbank!), but we prepped for the making of our debut album at a cinderblock building in North Hollywood. It was a rundown, cavernous room with it’s own bathroom (a real luxury) and street entrance (no stairs or elevators to schlep your gear up and down). This was the tail end of the '90s, so the room also had a dedicated landline phone, which I only mention because it would occasionally ring during rehearsals. More often than not it was the landlord’s young kid breathlessly asking if his dad was there. His dad (who claimed to look like Jim Morrison, which he kind of did!) was the one who told us that the room was once drummer Steven Adler’s personal rehearsal space in his post-Gn’R era.

I’m a music fan of a certain age, so I thought that boded well for potentially imbuing my tracks with a little of that muscly Appetite for Destruction magic (cowbell, etc.); but I also struggled with addiction at the time, so it makes me wonder in retrospect if I was tapping into something darker (not that my self-destructive tendencies needed any additional prodding). This was the room where our producer and Hollywood Records A&R rep regularly came to check on our progress, give notes on arrangements, and otherwise encourage us to keep rehearsing in preparation for the upcoming sessions. (To wit, this is also where I first grappled with a click track.) There was a market around the corner that sold cheap and delicious tortas. I think we lost that place when we went on tour, or maybe our landlord finally started a Doors cover band and needed the room back? Who knows. The details are lost to time, but the misty, magical feel of those rehearsal spaces—and many others—still remains.

---

⚡️ Tell Me About Your Rehearsal Rooms In The Comments 💥

---

Ridel High Is Playing A Reunion Show In LA—Sept. 22, 2024

Short sets by tons of ‘90s LA pop rock bands. We go on early (6:30pm-ish). All ages.

---

---