LARGER THAN LIFE
Fatso Jetson Finds A Place

(c) 2002 by Jay Babcock [jaybab@mindspring.com]
 
 

Look closely at almost any significant rock band’s background--at its deeper,
hazier context, at its place/space in its particular subcultural zeitgeist--and
you will find someone who acted, perhaps unwittingly, as a crucial instigator: a
subtle yet critical link without which the chain would not hold. Led Zeppelin
had Roy Harper. Nirvana had King Buzzo. And Queens of the Stone Age, arguably
the best American melodic hard rock band since Cobain exited in self-disgust,
have guitarist-singer Mario ‘Boomer’ Lalli.
        "Boomer has this one quality that I’ve been searching for since the moment I
saw him, and that’s Boomer’s un-heckle-able," says Joshua Homme, the leader of
the Queens of the Stone Age, who‘s been watching Lalli play since he (Josh) was
14. "There could be a wide array of reasons to heckle Boomer--but it’s
IMPOSSIBLE when you watch him play. The second he starts to play, when he
squints his eyes? I’ve never heard anyone go, ‘bleh, shut up!’ I’ve seen people
not like it, but I’ve never seen anything thrown at him. Nothing. Because you
believe it.
        "It’s for real."
 

Born in 1966 as ‘Mario‘ and quickly tagged with the impossibly appropriate
nickname Boomer, Lalli was raised in Palm Springs, where his parents, a pair of
opera singers, ran an Italian-themed restaurant called "Mario’s-Where They Sing
While You Dine" with Mario Sr.’s brother Tullio. At Mario’s, which re-located to
Pasadena earlier this year after three decades in the low desert, Mario Sr. and
Edalyn lead the ‘Mario Singers,’ a small group of performers, most of whom have
other roles at the restaurant, in belting out two 30-minute shows (three on
weekends) every night for the diners. (Now 80, the senior Lallis are still
working/singing every evening., even on Sundays at 9.)
        "Our family has had a restaurant there for 30 years," says Boomer. "For 20 of
those years it was very successful, and summers off were just party time, just
great. But now, it’s just changed. There’s a lot of big corporate money doing
the restaurant thing  there, so a unique little place like we had, is tough to
make it work there these days. Our lease was up in the desert and we just
thought What the fuck, let’s go for it in Pasadena. And you know, as great as
the desert has been for our music, it was a terrible place to play music."
        Since he was 16, Boomer has been doing music that didn’t exactly fit the format
at Mario’s.
        "We grew up on Aerosmith and shit like that, but that was fantasyland. But when
we saw D. Boon and Mike Watt and the cats in Black Flag and the guys in Redd
Kross and the guys in Saccharine Trust, and these guys were guys like us!
They’re just DUDES. And skateboarding too had a lot to do with it, because it
was all about Find a place. You wanna go skateboard? Find a pool, bail it out.
You do all that work, you put effort into it, and then you’ve got this place.
And that bled over into music."
        A turning point occurred when Boomer’s friend Dave Travis, invited Boomer and a
pal to jam with him up in Pacific Palisades, where he lived.
        "You couldn’t play around there," says Boomer. "So we pulled off of Mulholland
somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, into a turnout, near a silo or a gunnery site,
unloaded his band and he started up this electric generator! And we just jammed,
me, him and my friend Mike Glass. And that was like Whoaaaa man. It was
beautiful, it was really cool. But the problem was guys would toss a few back
and they’d think they could go up that tower and get stupid. We just decided it
wasn’t a great place to go. But in the desert, there’s all that space out there
where you don’t have to worry about the cops and you can go and drink and just
raise hell. I said, Dude, I got places at home where we can get 500 people out
there when we play. A month later, he did one out there, and it just grew. I
know now that it was nothing new--guys in the late ‘70s, going out in the
desert, partying with the generator and some rock bands, but we didn‘t know
those dudes then! So we’d be creative: we’d get a hundred feet of extension cord
and a blue 100-watt floodlight and climb up in what one of the eroded dunes and
place it up there, shining behind the band. All you needed were trash cans, a
good generator, with a voltage regulator so it doesn’t blow everyone’s shit,
some ice chests and some word-of-mouth. Cuz people are so fuckin’ desperate for
someting to do. It’s nice and quiet and mellow, there’s a lot to enjoy there,
but there’s no culture. You gotta make your own culture. It’s like cheese: you
gotta make your own."
        Just 18, Boomer had already become a legendary figure to musically inclined
teenagers in the Low Desert. One of them was 12-year-old Brant Bjork, who would
go on to co-found a pre-Queens band with Homme called Kyuss.
        "I asked a buddy of mine, who was a Kiss fanatic, Who’s the Man in local
music?," remembers Bjork. "And he’d said, Mario Lalli. He’s the godfather of the
punk scene, he’s the fuckin’ shit.’ So, Mario Lalli was already mystified back
then! He was this fuckin’ bearded, dreadlocked, gnarly pissed-off looking burly
dude in a trenchcoat that I’d see driving around the parking lot of the mall in
his van with the name of his band ‘Across the River,’ spraypainted on the side.
I’d hear stories about Across the River playing out in the desert, so it became
was my JOB to attend one of these things. My first time was around ‘85, and I
just continuously went after that.
        Boomer had been in a series of groups before joining a guy named Herb Lineau
and fellow-Low Desert fellas Alfredo Hernandez (drums) and Scott Reeder (bass)
in an L.A.-based band called Dead Issue. (Although the three were the same age
and from roughly the same area, they’d gone to different high schools.)
        "When I moved to L.A., my point was to go make music," says Boomer. "That was
the only reason I moved there. I didn’t move there to go to school, I didn’t go
there to do anything but play music. When we first moved out here, we all lived
together in a little apartment in Culver City. And we befriended some guys that
worked with SST. So we’d drive all the way down and rehearse there. Got to see
those guys and hang out. That began this friendship."
        Lineau lost interest--Dead Issue died--and the remaining three formed a new
band, Across the River.
        "We played some shows with all the jam bands," says Boomer, "the type of guys
that would go and play the Dead shows’ parking lots--October Faction, Painted
Willie, Saccharine Trust."
        SST’s Joe Carducci and Chuck Dukowski showed interest in releasing an Across
the River album on the label ("the bassist played barefoot--always a good sign,"
remembers Carducci today), but a combination of poor timing and miscommunication
meant that it was not to be. Eventually, Boomer, Hernandez and Reeder all moved
back to the desert.
        "It just didn’t work out," says Boomer. "I had to move home and things
happened. I got married, I had a couple kids, and we got head over heels
involved in the family business. So, priorities."
        Hernandez remembers Across the River as "a heavy thing, with a lot of
bluesy-type beats, with a punk rock edge to it. We bought our own generator and
started doing our own shows here every three months. We called em dust festivals
cuz the sand would kick up and everybody would be in the middle of this cloud.
We kept gigging, trying to get the sound out there. We had this van called The
Provolone we’d use for roadtrips, Black Flag style. We’d go to L.A., Phoenix,
San Francisco. People would see us come in before we set up and be like who are
these freaks and then we’d start playing and they’d understand why we looked
like freaks. People would come up to say and you guys sound like Soundgarden.
I’d be like well, I don’t know who that is. They were just barely coming in to
the scene. I just wish we coulda hung in there..."
        Boomer: "I dunno, maybe you could say we didn’t have the balls to shine. But by
then? With kids? I’m not so sure months in a van is a good idea, you know?"
        Across the River’s inability to tour meant that they were also extremely
unlikely to ever land a recording contract. Unsatisfied, Reeder amicably left
(leapt?) Across the River to join the Obsessed, a hard rock band recently
relocated from D.C. to Los Angeles.
        With Across the River broken up, Boomer and Hernandez started an instrumental
band called Englenook [CORRECTION: Gary Arce was not in Englenook.]. Then there was Yawning Man, another band
with Boomer, Hernandez and Arce. Boomer’s cousin Larry, son of Tullio Lalli and
two years Boomer’s junior, joined on bass at some point in there, and Arce was
in and out, playing guitar. It was this Boomer-fronted band that Homme, Bjork
and future Kyuss vocalist John Garcia saw most often while they were teenagers.
(Garcia, one year older than Homme and Bjork, however had seen Boomer perform
before, at an impromptu Across the River lunchtime performance on his high
school campus.)
        "Yawning Man was the sickest desert band of all time," says Bjork. "You’d just
be up there in the desert, everybody’d just be hanging, partying. And they’d
show up in their van and just, mellow, drag out their shit and set up right
about the time the sun was goin’ down, set up the generators, sometimes they’d
just go up there and drink beers and barbecue. Sometimes it would be a scene;
sometimes it would be very intimate. It was very casual and loose and everybody
would like, while they’re playing, everyone would just lounge around. They were
kinda like a house band. It wasn’t militant like Black Flag. It was very
drugged, very stone-y, it was very mystical. Everyone’s just tripping, and
they’re just playing away, for hours. Oh, they’re the GREATEST band I’ve ever
seen."
        Hernandez: "We recorded two albums in Yawning Man but never did anything with
em. If we really had of pushed it, it probably would have done something. But
the situation then was not as easy I guess. Maybe some of the songs will be
redone in the future."
        With two Yawning Man albums recorded but left unreleased, the closest most of
us can get to hearing this band’s music is, fittingly, on Kyuss’s final album,
...And the Circus Leaves Town, released in 1995, at which point the band was
composed of Homme, Garcia, post-Obsessed Scott Reeder, and...Alfredo Hernandez.
The album’s penultimate listed track is a gorgeous cover of Yawning Man’s
tranquility-in-the-sandstorm "Catamaran" [written by Gary Arce and Boomer.]
Placed next to the heavy
testes-crushers that most of the album is composed of, it shows, simultaneously,
a certain amount of courage on Homme and Garcia’s part--e.g., we’re not afraid
to play a song that in some way outshines our own--as well as a genuine sign of
respect, of making plain an artistic debt to some important template-builders.
 

But back to the early ‘90s. Just as Kyuss was beginning its career in earnest,
Boomer had lost interest in rock music. He formed an experimental jazz group
with Hernandez, Larry Lalli and Arce called The Sort of Quartet.
        "When Kyuss were just getting to L.A., and all the bros in the desert were
goin’ to the parties to see em play, I was listening to jazz," says Boomer,
laughing. "I mean, my days burning doobies out in the fuckin’ wash and listening
to Black Sabbath were when these fucks were still in high school! So I was like,
Rad. Right on for them. But I had Thelonius Monk and Eric Dolphy in cassette
player, I wasn’t listenin’ to rock. So we’d get up and go
doo-doo-dee-doot-biddy-doo-did-do. And everyone’s going , ‘Whatever...’"
        The Sort Of Quartet started playing shows involving artists operating at that
exciting outer edge of ‘80s punk where it rubbed up against experimental jazz
and performance art.
        Hernandez: "Zappa was a major, major influence on Sort Of Quartet. The band was
instrumental, but it had a lot of structure. We were really into Universal
Congress Of. Just soaking that up, bursts of energy. I went to MIT in Hollywood
for a summer session, pretty much had taught myself playing punk rock, rock n
roll music and then I hit a wall. I wanted to open up my ability. I learned jazz
and all the South American music. And we were into Black Flag and Miles Davis.
Pretty much combined the two. We had a trumpet player in the second album to do
trumpet, just took it to another level."
        "The Sort of Quartet got a chance to enjoy the real underground music scene in
Los Angeles," remembers Boomer. "The only gigs we’d ever get were in those kind
of scenes--playing at the Alligator Lounge, with Nels Cline, Joe Baiza,
Universal Congress Of, Eugene Chadbourne. Now, that scene is ALL about making
music. That’s all it’s about--there’s no thought about career, selling records,
it’s all about fuckin’ makin’ music. And when you respect that, and you get
respect from those people, it changes the way you think about the music industry
and about music, you know? We immersed ourselves in it. I wasn’t goin’ to rock
shows much cuz I was really experimenting with a different music scene, if it
makes any sense. That whole period, what rock shows would we go to? Maybe the
Butthole Surfers, maybe Sonic Youth. But not, I dunno, it was weird, we were
detached."
        Homme: "The Lallis have cleared rooms through the years like you wouldn’t
believe. But only because they’re always two years ahead of everybody. They
can’t help it! They just ARE. Those people that left will like it in two years,
if they stumble on it again. This is the bittersweet side of what the Lallis
are: they’re just playing because they love to play, that’s good enough, and
anything beyond that, they’re thankful and they’re happy for. And that’s so
inspiring."
        In the mid-’90s, while Sort Of Quartet was winding down, Boomer and Larry
started another band, the rock-oriented Fatso Jetson, with drummer Tony Tornay.
        "I’d come back to appreciate punk rock and rock n roll and just getting off on
the energy of it," he explains. "Frankly I got a little bored of spending so
much time thinking about what we’re doing and not just getting into the energy
of it, which is where it started in the first place."
        Around the same time, they opened an actual club called Rhythm & Brews in the
desert, as a way of joining their work experience with their artistic ambitions.
Generator parties had become a nightmare.
        "It had got very violent. Before, it was just the friends of the band and the
people that dug music. Then it because just a party and the music had nothing to
do with it--it was just a place to go fuck shit up and people were showing up
with guns, and knives. There were cholos and skinheads. All this weird shit
colliding. And I just stopped doin’ it. We had a big finale, we called it The
Splattering of the Tribes, we had like 10 bands. It was just ridiculous, and
there was like 1500 people there, Rat Sound brought a huge PA. In the first
three hours after dark, guys were coming up to me, bloodied heads, ‘where’s the
First Aid tent?’ And my van was packed in with like 30 cars, and he’s going
‘Where’s the first-aid tent?! You set this think up, man?! You’re fuckin’ nuts!
You shoulda had an ambulance out here!’ and I was thinking, ‘Oh, what did I do?’
Turned out some guys hit him on the head with a wrench and took his car. And I
felt responsible, for the whole thing, you know? And we paid for it. Bureau of
Land Management fined us two grand each.
        "All these people were taking acid and climbing up on these sandstone rocks and
then they couldn’t get down," says Larry. "Stuck up there. People freaking
out..."
        Boomer: "El Duce was lost in the desert for god knows how... His friends were
all, they thought he was dead.:
        Larry: " We thought he was a goner, just drunk and parched, lost in the
desert."
        Boomer: "He showed up. But later he ended up doing the same thing out in front
of his house and got hit by a truck."
        Larry: "He missed his fate out in the desert.
        Boomer: "After that we just said, You know what? FUCK THIS. All this shit we’re
going through, we could open a place up. We had been booking shows around the
desert for ten years before that. So at Rhythm and Brews, we were trying to do
bands that came through L.A.: Melvins, Unwound, etc. But it just didn’t work, we
couldn‘t draw enough people."
        After all these years, Boomer and Hernandez  were finally releasing studio
albums, and they were doing it through SST, the very label they‘d always adored.
SST would release four albums by the Sort Of Quartet (Hernandez departed for
Kyuss after the second Sort Of album). SST also released the first couple of
Fatso Jetson albums.
        "We did all of that with not touring," says Boomer. "We’ve never been a touring
band. The only times we’ve been able to tour is because the Queens or Kyuss have
taken us under their wing when it was summertime and we could split. A creative
outlet was what was important to us. Selling records isn’t important to us. You
can say Oh yeah, the guys always say that. ‘The Art!’ But honestly, it’s like...
It’s our thing. It’s what we do. It’s the only thing we do that really, where
you feel at home, where you feel like I’m really do something here with my
life.’"
        Ensconced in their new Pasadenan enviorns, these days the Lallis are now
concentrating on powering up Fatso Jetson as a local presence. And, with Sort Of
Quartet no more (at least for now), Boomer has re-activated Yawning Man with
Hernandez and Arce.
        Homme: "So many people in the desert are so negative and bitter. They [the
Lallis] never were. And still aren‘t. They were so encouraging of any band of
young people playing. Because that was the thing! And that’s so rare to see.
It’s like spotting a diamond in shit: you just see it, instantaneously. The best
description I can think of for Boomer is, ‘benevolent godfather.’ Because for
all these years, all these parties, it’s been just one generator. It’s Boomer’s.
It was borrowed from him. That’s heavy for everyone that was there. When I
realized that, which was a couple years ago, and I said that to Brant, Do you
realize that it’s only one generator? Brant went, Whoaaaaaa..."
        Post-Kyuss, Homme has kept turning the spotlight towards Boomer. In June 1998,
he invited the Lallis (and Hernandez, as well as others) to one of the Desert
Sessions he organizes for a few days every few months, where artists gather at
Fred Drake’s studio in Joshua Tree and workshed new material. One of the tracks
they recorded at this session was the obscure chestnut "Eccentric Man," a song
of defiant, non-hostile different-ness by ‘70s British prog-blues band the
Groundhogs well suited compositionally to artists like these guys, who spend
working in a heavy rock idiom. But when you listen to Boomer sing lyrics like
"Call me an eccentric man/But I don't believe I am/ The people think I'm
crazy/But I know I'm wiser than all the sages," and when Homme refers to the
Groundhogs as "apparently were the best band that opened for everyone and no one
ever knew who they were," the connection deepens. To have someone like Boomer
Lalli--a six-plus-foot-tall mountain of a man given to wearing thick rimmed
glasses, driving a hotrodded purple ‘67 Cadillac Hearse, who’s labored
heroically in near-total obscurity for almost two decades, you see the perfect
conceptual maneuver Homme is pulling on top of everything else. Boomer doesn’t
just sing the song here--he embodies it.
        The same Desert Session (the fourth), resulted in the recording and subsequent
release of a Homme-Lalli collaboration, "Monster in the Parasol," which would be
re-recorded for the Queens of the Stone Age’s major label debut, 2000’s Rated R.
The fifth session saw the debut of the best Lalli-Homme collaboration yet, "You
Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire," which was
re-recorded by the Queens with Nick Oliveri on vocals for the lead-off
amplifer-destroyer on the band’s Songs for the Deaf, released this past summer.
Finally, Homme is personally releasing Fatso’s fifth album, Cruel & Delicious,
on his new Rekords Records label. (Previous Fatso labels were SST, Bong Load and
Man‘s Ruin). C & D is a typical Fatso album: expansive, knotty, heavy, melodic,
and flat-out powerful affair for the trio, somehow weaving together psychedelia,
punk, blues, Dick Dale and heavier metal with long prog unison diddles, lengthy
jams and vocals that will remind some listeners of D. Boon. And then there’s the
lyrics and song titles...
        "No one’s better with titles than Boomer," says Homme. "Kyuss always had
strange song titles, and Queens did too in general--that comes from just being
around Boomer, him just rubbing off on us. His lyrics are so good. There’s a
song called ‘Vatos on the Astral Plane’ and the lyrics are so good and they’re
about a guy who’s a friend of ours who went to jail for dealing speed. And he’s
able to convey it. If you don’t know the guy, it’s a great song that conveys
something to you. But if you do know the guy, it’s a real tearjerker."
        "We’ve been accused of being an in-joke band," says Boomer. "It’s true to a
degree. But you’ve got to have fun with this stuff. Everyone takes themselves so
seriously, being in this ‘human drama.’ But life is’s so whimsical most of the
time. Devo was a teacher to us, an opener, with their reflections on being
human, and how absurd and comical it is, and how you’re always gonna be in a
battle between your brains and your nuts."
 

One final Boomer story before we go, this one from Mathias Schneeberger,
producer and keyboardist for the earthlings?:
         "Boomer calls me up,  says Hey there’s this cool generator party, come on out,
bring your guitar. He gives me these directions, I drive out there, up through
mountains, on dirt roads. And I can’t find it. I’m in this dead end street in
this canyon and it‘s totally dark--totally Twilight Zone. I stand on the top of
my car and listen for music. Nothing. Then I hear this guitar, off in the
distance. Then, for another 20 minutes, nothing. So I drive another 100 yards,
go back on the top of my roof. Finally around midnight I make out a little
lightbulb in the distance, in the middle of the desert. I drive out there. And
here’s this plateau, with a full back line set up--a little PA, drums, bass amp,
a guitar amp--but there’s not a soul around! I’m like, ‘What the fuck is
this?!?’ So I take my amp, put it out there too, and start playing out the
blaster amp, in the dark, with no moon out, in the hot air. Then out of these
bushes come these two kids that I’ve never seen before--and they start jamming
with me! ‘Who are you guys? Do you know Boomer?’ ‘Yeah, he’ll be here, he’s just
making a beer run.’ Finally at like three in the morning Boomer comes back with
his Hearse full of people.
        "And we jam for the rest of the night."

===

Fatso Jetson’s newest album, Cruel & Delicious, is available from
rekordsrekords.com

For more info on the Lalli family's restaurant,go to
www.marioswheretheysingwhileyoudine.com
 
 

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