Twenty-six-year-old Michael Leyva, garbed in a Hawaiian-style shirt and a red, Michael Jackson-esque jacket crisscrosses his legs and pumps his fists in sync with the music.
He trips on a chord, unplugging a band member’s guitar. The guitarist playfully whips Michael with the chord and they exchange bashful smiles.
For self-ascribed Latino alternative band Los Dharma Bums, playing on stage at the Nugget Pub and Grill at California State University, Long Beach is just one more step closer to surfacing from the underground music scene of the greater Los Angeles area.
“At the risk of being controversial, the underground scene is a little stagnant because there’s too many bands, a lot of [them circulating on the] Internet, or just starting out,” band guitarist and lead vocalist Joey Jimenez said. “They don’t really do the scene justice.”
The Underground Music Society, a club at CSULB, holds free shows and performances at the Nugget every third Thursday of the month to highlight local talent. On Thursday, UMS held its spring semester kickoff, hosting Los Dharma Bums, Vox Amoris and Los Hermanos.
UMS event coordinator Oscar Bautista said the club is planning to highlight more genres than the typical punk rock variety this semester. UMS will unplug for several acoustic shows and will experiment at the Soroptimist House in April for a night of psychedelic sounds.
“It doesn’t matter what genre [or] how long you’ve been playing,” Bautista said. “If you’re in the area and you want to put yourself out there, we’re here for you guys.”
The community vibe drove rock band Voxa Amoris during its performance. Guitarist and lead vocalist Alex Sundstrom reaffirmed the airborne amity by encouraging the line-up of bands to stay after their sets to support their stage-mates.
“The issue isn’t even the people listening because it’s not their responsibility to support you if they don’t like your music,” Sundstrom said. “But the other bands that play with you that night, it should be a lot more of a comradery thing, and that’s the hardest thing with the scene right now.”
Akin to the theme of crowd contentment, band members Chris Don and John Komotos originally from the band Suns of Jimi wrapped up the night with an impromptu performance under the moniker Los Hermanos.
Don said he and Komotos did not want to stand up the Nugget crowd when they found out the rest of their fellow band members were unavailable for the gig that night.
With its sound inspired by some of rock’s greats like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, Don said Suns of Jimi has been trying to break into the college scene for some time now.
“Local music, something’s coming,” Komotos said. “[Music culture is] in a midpoint of where record companies are done and doomed and independent companies [are stepping up]. We’re just in a transition process … And it’s a kind of a standstill point right now.”
Each band stayed for its predecessor and melted into the nearly full audience of about 30 onlookers gathered around the stage. For Los Dharma Bums, surging up from the subterranean requires more than support from the community and other bands though.
“[Local bands] don’t really take the audience into consideration or anything like that,” Jimenez said. “That’s what’s ruining the underground scene … you don’t want to go out and watch a bunch of amateurs enjoy themselves and not give anything to the audience.”
Gabriel Maldonado, the bassist for Los Dharma Bums, said that what makes the band stand out is the genuine personality it puts into each show.
According to Leyva, having a bad time at their show is simply not an option.
“You’re going to be like, ‘wow, oh damn I saw that for free?’” Leyva said. “But we’re not going to play for free forever. We ‘gotsta’ get paid!”
The names Michael Leyva with a V for Vendetta.
Thank You.