For someone with even a passive love for music, Larry Rodriguez (aka DJ Larry or The Flower Vato) can be a pretty intimidating figure. Not only has he been making Sacramentans sweat for 20 years with his wildly popular Dance Party at the Press Club on Sundays (affectionately called “Church” by people in the know), but he’s provided the soundtrack to what most of us have been doing for the past two decades with his insane record library and encyclopedic music vocabulary. Every time he’s in control of the decks, I go home with a list of music to look up.

Maybe the most impressive part is that he’s been at it for most of his life, like the cool kid in John Hughes movies. “I was that dude in high school who was always concealing a boombox in his book bag in case there were any breakdance battles at lunch,” Rodriguez says.

As a 16-year-old, he landed a show he called Soul Sauce on a community radio station, where he played records people twice his age didn’t know anything about—jazz, funk, latin grooves, reggae and international jams from Africa and Brazil.

He gained notoriety and rose through the ranks, DJing at Jerry Perry’s legendary clubs Vortex and Cattle Club, but it wasn’t until he saved the night at a real dance party that Dance Party started to take form.

“On New Year’s Eve of 1996, I was chilling in my attic, having a puff and listening to some sides when [my brother] Mike calls from a party that some kids from The Loft were having,” Rodriguez recalls. “He told me to bring my funk and soul records because they were dancing to Billy Idol and Duran Duran singles. So I show up, throw on In the Jungle Groove by James Brown, and the joint was jumping. The rest of the night was great even with just one turntable and a rickety stereo unit. Afterward, Marla Kanelos who booked Old Ironsides asked if I wanted to do a weekly dance starting the following Sunday. That’s when Dance Party was born.”

He’s been stoking Sacramento’s flame ever since. DJing at KDVS, hosting dance nights and even doing wedding gigs.

“I’ve done cowboy weddings where all they want to hear is country music and hip-hop,” he says. “I get a perverse kick knowing what we’ve always known as rednecks are actually opening up to black culture more than we know. I was playing ‘Boot Scootin’ Boogie’ back to back with ‘Whip the Nae Nae.’”

Every time I run into Rodriguez, I walked away marveling at how deep his love for music runs. I caught up with him after a long day of making people move. His enthusiasm is so contagious that it’s hard not to catch on.

First things first: if everyone reading this was with us in your living room, what record would you put on?
I have a stack cued up by the record player right now. Looks like the first few records we’d be listening to are Bent City by Phil Yost, Plastic Ono Band by Yoko Ono, America Eats Its Young by Funkadelic and Modern Journal of Popular Savagery by Porest.

With that out of the way, tell me a bit about who you are, how you started out and ended up here?
Though I was involved in hip-hop culture as a teen, I would also listen to KDVS where I’ve irregularly been hosting shows for the last 13 years. KDVS opened my mind to many types of music. Not only were they the first local station to play Grandmaster Flash, The Jonzun Crew and Afrika Bambaataa but the DJs would mix it up with punk, new wave, reggae, etc. I was hooked.

Around that time a great venue for teens interested in post-punk and new wave dancing was Jerry Perry’s Vortograph Center [The Vortex], near 15th and C streets. The whole room smelled like cloves, which I found rather exotic and it’s where I first met DJs Dave Mier and Danny O’Grady who were cool enough to let me in the DJ booth to look through their records and to see how it was done. I was definitely interested in DJing but discouraged by how expensive it would be.

Jerry Perry let me spin in between bands several times at the Cattle Club around 1989 or ‘90 but it wasn’t until the beginning of 1997 that I first started DJing regularly at a club. I can thank my brother Mike and Marla Kanelos for springing that into action.

What’s a typical day in the life of Larry Rodriguez like?
A typical day for me is constantly pulling and filing from the sprawl of my own music collection. It’s a full-time librarian job that’s never finished. I also spend at least 30 hours a week researching and discovering new and old music, whether at record shops, flea markets, thrift shops or even on the web.

YouTube is a great place to educate yourself and discover all sorts of music—it’s a deep well. So is the KDVS library … I can go in there with a list of 10 things I want to look up and end up spending six to seven hours finding other music in the process.

There’s a lot of talk about the ebb and flow of the Sacramento music scene—you’ve been around for a lot of it, you wanna weigh in?
I’ve enjoyed the Sacramento music scene over the years. It seems like every 10 years a whole new renaissance of bands emerge that make the music scene fun again.

Speaking of, I have a killer lineup for the Dance Party’s 20th Anniversary show at the Press Club. We have Sacto Storytellers and The Scratch Outs, both hard-hitting rocksteady reggae bands featuring members of Filibuster and The Steady Ups. Then the Cuf is reuniting for the night. All the hip-hop heads in town are hella excited about that, and there’s The City of Trees Brass Band, who are not only badass and funky but several members are regular attendees at “Church.” Opening the show is Swank [Ike Burnett] who is the brother of MC Ride of Death Grips and closing the show is Roman Austin, a neo-soul R&B crooner who wrote a sexy jam [“Church (Rollin’)”] about the Dance Party.

What about for you? Dance Party has been going for 20 years now. Has it changed much since you started?
Though Dance Party started at Old Ironsides on the first Sunday of 1997, the first run at Press Club was from ‘98 to 2003. Dan Montoya was the manager then, and he persuaded me to bring my night over there after hearing that Ironsides let me go because of graffiti constantly marring their bathrooms. At the Press, it’s well known that the heavy volume of graffiti in their restrooms began to resemble a Jackson Pollock painting, so it was a better fit from the get-go. We had a great run, won some awards, had some good writeups and Sunday eventually branched out to an additional Friday and both nights were well attended. I eventually fell out of there while clashing with the new management so I kept the Party going weekly at The Distillery and Blue Lamp with occasional nights at Old Ironsides. In 2005 Dance Party picked up Wednesdays at the G Street Wunderbar in Davis, where it’s still going.

The second run at the Press Club started in 2010 when Kirk Johnston asked me if I wanted to come back. I said “hell yes!” I’ve always loved the Press Club even after getting thrown out, to this day I’m happy as a clam to show up there and play music. Kirk died a few years ago but his brother Roger still owns the place and he’s always been a great guy and I love the manager Susan Durst, who’s been with the club after they ran out the asshole who ran me out.

I have a friend who got pregnant after starting her night at Church. How do you feel knowing you’ve been an accessory to so many people getting down—in both senses.
I love it, and I will gladly keep facilitating those activities as long as it keeps everyone happy.

I’ve had couples pay for my dinner when they saw me at the same restaurant because they met on my night, some wedding gigs have come out of it too.

Do you change your set around if you see couples need a certain mood?
While DJing any dance, it’s always a good idea to read the room as a whole and not just cater to that one bratty bro or ‘ho that’ll constantly pester you with inappropriate requests.

They usually claim to speak for “everyone” in the room while in the meantime the whole room is busy getting down on the floor. It’s a good idea to expediently cut these pests off because they tend to interfere with your work while you’re trying to focus on the set. If they keep bothering you just squirt cold water at them from between your teeth, they’ll leave you alone.

You’ve been doing this a while. Where do you see yourself in 20 more years?
If I’m still alive 20 years from now, I can see myself being the house DJ at an old people’s home. Maybe do something with experimental sound therapy or shamanism to help people prepare for crossing over to the other side or at least be at peace with it.

The 20th anniversary bash for Dance Party will take place at The Press Club (2030 P St., Sacramento) on Jan. 8, 2017. (You should be over your New Year’s hangover by then.) Cover charge is just $10, and the event will feature The Cuf, The Scratch Outs, City of Trees Brass Band, Sacto Storytellers, Roman Austin and Swank. Keep your dance card open, and get ready to throw down at 7 p.m.

Hustle & Struggle

To the average passerby, the intersection of C and 14th streets in Sacramento might have come off as exceptionally eerie in the final few hours of Oct. 30, 2015, right before Halloween officially got underway.

Surrounded by a small, abandoned industrial park on one side with a spread of Victorian-style homes in the Mansion Flats neighborhood of downtown sitting adjacent to the other, not a single soul could be spotted in any direction as the night crept on toward the nine o’clock hour.

About 20 yards down the block, however, a barbed wire-lined gate had been pulled wide open, leaving a clear entrance to the loading dock area of one the nearby properties.

There were people inside, and they sure seemed busy enough to make up for the near-dead silence just outside the barricade-like wall separating them from the road.

As it turns out, two different teams had been hard at work at 1425 C Street (formerly part of Hangar Studios): one setting up a stage in the lower-level courtyard, another building a set inside the east side warehouse.

Among the dozen or so indoor crew members was local artist Shaun Burner, bustling back and forth between a jumbo-sized horse’s head and an even bigger headless horseman towering behind it—both of which were still being worked on.

Burner had been approached by TBD Fest founders Michael Hargis and Clay Nutting about a month earlier to help create the artwork for their upcoming Halloween show, slated to feature DJs Slow Magic and Com Truise.

Just one day away from its doors opening to the public, Burner appeared surprisingly at ease during a cigarette break, saying he was confident the project would be finished in time.

“I feel like we’re on pace,” Burner said, adding that he was also up against another deadline designing signage for the new B-Side bar opening on S Street. “We got the meat of the structure up; now it’s just kind of detail work. I think we’re at a good place.”

Burner said he felt he had slowly taken on the role of artistic director and project manager over past few weeks, delegating tasks to volunteers that had often fluctuated between four and ten on any given day.

While he said he and fellow artist Franceska Gamez had mostly built, chicken-wired, papier-mached and painted a lot of the main set pieces for the Sleepy Hollow-themed backdrop, others had helped bring more subtle elements of the concept to life—like the giant tree up against the north wall of the warehouse, which had gnarled branches extending throughout the ceiling.

With time running out, Burner said he was grateful for whatever help he could get.

“It’s good having other creative weirdos to kind of help make this happen,” he explained.

Growing up in Rancho Cordova and then traveling the world to spread art with different collectives through much of the ‘00s, Burner said he considered himself to be one of those creative weirdos as well—albeit one that had been working professionally almost his entire life.

After moving downtown nearly 15 years ago and being introduced to mural painting by his friend Mike Rodriguez, Burner gradually became involved in many community-based projects within the area, including one where he helped complete a mural for the Sacramento Chinese Community Service Center.

Before long, he had joined Sacramento’s Sol Collective and was eventually invited to attend an arts tour of Puerto Rico with the group.

“We were traveling with about 30 people—musicians, poets, artists,” Burner said. “We were doing workshops; we were painting murals for the community. And that’s where I met some members of Trust Your Struggle,” an art collective based out of New York and the Bay Area.

Burner says he decided to try his hand at living amongst his East Coast collective counterparts upon returning from the Puerto Rico trip in 2005. During his three-year New York stint, he ended up working extensively in film production and set design, and even embarked on another mural campaign—only this time around the United States.

The domestic tour was dubbed “Trust Your Hustle,” Burner said, as he and fellow painters and activists traveled to Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco and New Orleans, among other cities, to help communities build “from the ground up” with artwork and, at times, actual infrastructure if needed.

It wasn’t until he and a couple other members extended the tour to Los Angeles that Burner found himself evaluating his financial situation.

“We were super broke,” Burner said about his arrival in L.A. “At one point, we did this mural where we like traded for food … We were like trading for cheeseburgers.”

Burner stayed with family in Southern California for about two years before he started seeing more mural work coming his way regularly. After entrenching himself in the film industry in New York for so long, Burner found himself circling back to his first true love in painting.

According to his website, Burner was involved in seven separate murals in the Los Angeles area between 2008 and 2009, on top of the other 18 murals he participated in during the same time period.

His site doesn’t show any work of past 2010, which was around the time he opted to move back home to Sacramento after more than five years of being away.

“My nieces are growing up, and I want them to know me,” Burner said, explaining one of the reasons for his move to the Capital City. “I didn’t want to be away and just be the uncle who came in every now and then. So just come and be around my fam, and then build some rad shit in this city.”

Since his return, Burner says paid commissions have sometimes been hit or miss, but that he tries to not let that discourage him.

“I mean, it’s feast or famine. You know what I mean?” Burner says. “It’s kind of a funny thing—it fluctuates. Sometimes I will have all these jobs come at once, and I have to take them on and just get them done, and I’ll be working like crazy. And then other times it thins out a little bit.”

Either way, though, money hasn’t ever stopped him from continuing to paint in Sacramento, whether he’s commissioned or not. And when the rainy season hits, he adds, and the conditions aren’t the best for mural work, “That’s a good time to leave town and go to another place where it is.”

Aside from his constant flow of mural paintings, Burner also co-manages an art gallery called 1810, located inside the Warehouse Artist Lofts off of 12th and R streets.

Open only during the first Fridays and second Saturdays of each month, Burner says he’d like to start running more regular hours once he can find someone to run the establishment on a consistent basis. The gallery, he says, has a lot of potential to showcase local talent and to possibly bring a different flavor to the art scene in Sacramento that’s possibly not getting exposure at the moment.

“Even with that thing,” Burner points out, “selling art can be a hard gig, you know? So it’s not like we’re making money off of that. But it’s more about just doing it and just trying to bring cool stuff to Sacramento.”

In the end, that’s really all Burner really wants: bringing more art to wherever it’s needed.

“It’s such an amazing way to communicate with people and just brighten up a city and bring some culture to a city and make you feel proud about where you’re at,” he says.

“I’ve made amazing connections with people through art. I’ve painted with people that don’t even speak the same language as me. And we’ve hung out and we’ve been able to connect and make beautiful work together.”

While he says he would eventually like to see more consistent commissions so he could one day support a family just on painting alone, Burner acknowledged that he works best under pressure—time and again finding himself able to rise to the occasion when things aren’t so easy.

“I feel like you can get really comfortable sometimes and not make things happen,” Burner says. “But when push comes to shove or you’re under the gun, you can make amazing things happen.”

That’s why he enjoys work like the Halloween set that he finally finished over the next 24 hours.

“I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, we got work to do. But we’re gonna get this shit done, because we need to.’ There’s no time to second guess it.”

Submerge would like to thank Shaun Burner for providing his rad artwork for the cover of our 200th issue! For more on Shaun and his 1810 Gallery, check online at Facebook.com/shaunburner916, Shaunburner.wordpress.com or 1810arts.com.

See Sacramento as an Open Air Art Museum

May is Bike Month is back, challenging all to abandon four wheels for the environmentally friendly alternative of pedal power, (which means riding bicycles versus gas guzzlers…keep up!). With miles logged and events listed, there’s still one more idea to add to this sunny month’s itinerary: the annual Submerge Bicycle Mural Tour. For three years now, we’ve scouted the entire Midtown and downtown areas looking for eye-catching artwork decorating businesses, like HR Sports Cards and Collectibles (2231 10th Street) and even discovered a growing number of collaborative art murals brightening up dingy alleyways. Grab a date, some friends or all of the above and visit each location to see the work of artists such as Shaun Burner, Mike Rodriguez, the women of the Few&Far movement and many who prefer to remain nameless. This year, I’ve included some bonus murals for all participants to find along the way. Plus, the routes are near many local businesses to turn a tour of alluring wall art into an all-day affair that ends near the Sutter’s Landing river entrance on B Street. Will you spot the lion’s head with a multi-colored headdress, or perhaps successfully stumble upon the woman underneath the moon? Pedal forth, keep an eye out and most of all ride safe.

Few&Far Animal Rights Mural
1800 24th Street alleyway

This marks the beginning of this two-wheeled journey. It appears that Sacramento’s alleyways, once dark and desolate locations, reeking of piss, have now transformed into a sort of new wave art exhibit. Who knew a splash of color and a concept could turn an industrial building with broken windows (1800 24th Street alleyway) and rusted fans into a tribute to all the cute, furry creatures of the world? Last September all day and throughout the night the Few&Far movement, a group of women all experienced in graffiti art joined together for animal rights. See doe-eyed giraffes, pink leopards and even a brown-eyed girl with butterflies, birds and daisies decorating her flowing locks. The mural is the collaboration effort of over a dozen artists from all around the world and yes, even Sacramento. Get involved at http://fewandfarwomen.com/.

Coexist
2321 10th Street on W Street

Members of the Kids Crew warn passersby that this wall, the second destination of the tour, is a “mural in progress.” The mural displays six gods of various religions—representing everything from Shiva, a Hindu deity, to Sikh and even Buddha. Each god is depicted in various colors and holds unique distinctions like the Koran or lotuses scattered below one figure, the lotus flower being a symbol of purity and enlightenment. What better way to bring peace to a neighborhood where according to manager of HR Sports Cards and Collectibles (2321 10th Street on W Street), Parker, is an unfortunate hot spot for tagging. “We have this mural because it protects the building from getting tagged,” he says. “Here, even the taggers respect mural art. It’s a really nice work of art and it gets so much attention.” Parker explains his interpretation of the mural as a call for all to coexist peacefully within all religions. After sifting through a box of comics—it was Free Comic Book Day after all—he then offered a little insight to what became two bonus stops on the tour.

Bonus find: Lion’s Head
W and 10th streets

Head up 10th Street just past the comic book shop where a Mayan-inspired lion’s head with multicolored headdress growls from the top corner of a gray building, protected by fencing. Spot the lion and pedal forward.

Bonus find: Woman Beneath the Moon
W and 10th streets

Just before reaching Osaka Ya (2215 10th Street) a downtown joint known for their enormous shaved ice treats and mochi. Turn right into the alley to spot the second bonus find on this year’s mural tour painted by artists Shaun Burner and friend Rubio. A solemn-faced woman with golden eyes stares into the alleyway, two male figures on either side of her raise their hands to a white moon at the peak of this decorated garage.

“I painted the outer sides with the two figures giving it up to the heavens praising the sacred feminine,” says Burner. “They are just giving up blessing to the universe. The sacred feminine has been so lost and disrespected at this point in time.”

Crest Theatre Alleyway
Alley between J and K streets near 10th Street

Behind the Crest Theatre (1013 K Street) is an alleyway. And, along the walls of this alleyway is an astronaut floating through a space of vibrant blues, magentas and various shades of greens. The mural, painted by Jason Bove and various artists, extends halfway through the entire stretch of building lining the alley and ends with all the colors of the rainbow dripping in succession from rooftop to pavement.

The Showplace of Sacramento
25th between J and K streets

A boy dressed in ‘30s-style knickerbockers and suspenders gazes into the past of Sacramento’s historic Alhambra Theatre, demolished in 1973 to make way for a Safeway supermarket. Even though all that remains of this historic building is the original fountain still working at the south side of the parking lot, this mural on 25th between J and K streets, with its complementary blues and oranges will forever be a window to the past.

Contemporary Dance Conservatory
213 26th Street

Starting the tour at W Street and ending at the Contemporary Dance Conservatory (213 26th Street) is perfect for two reasons, one being the mural at the entrance of the building painted by Mike Rodriguez, Shaun Burner, Letter D, Miguel Perez, Stephen V. Williams and Mark Prick. And secondly, it’s next to the Sutter’s Landing river entrance on B Street. Owners of this building grew tired of painting over tagged walls, so they invited a few good artists to hold a freestyle session using their dance studio as the canvas. Neighbor to the studio, Evan Duran, brought the collaboration together, “People respect art. If there’s already art on the wall, they won’t tag on it. But if it’s a blank canvas such as a buff building, it’s pretty much just asking kids to paint on it,” he says. The mural portrays a young figure riding in a car at the edge of a cliff; a shaman-like character to his right holds a key in one hand and blesses him with vision from a heart as the young figure faces the obstacles in front of him.