The Day It Rained Pigeon Shit

I was driving to work this morning... my usual route, all the way down Melrose into Beverly Hills. You see many different aspects of LA on this path. I drove my visiting relatives down this path so they could see the shops that intro the TV soap Melrose Place (although Wacko is now in Silverlake): all the trendy knock off places and tattoo parlors, trendy cafes and vintage shops. As you head west, the shops get fancier: Fred Segal's, serious antiques, Betsy Johnson, etc...

But the first part of this drive, the part that leads you away from my place, is the very eastern end of Melrose that starts in Silverlake and passes under the 101 freeway. This is the part with the trashy streets, homeless guys and stray dogs. This morning, I was stuck at a stoplight with about a million other cars. This morning, there were an awful lot of pigeons perched on the wires above us. I'm talking Alfred Hitchcock amounts of birds.

This morning, all those pigeons let loose on us.

It was pretty incredible. It really was like rain, because I thought we'd been splashed with a sprinkler at first. But no, it wasn't water. And for the remaining 30 minutes of my morning commute, I had to peer at the sunny streets through poorly windshield wiped bird shit. Thank God there is a guy in the garage at my work who washes cars, so that the morning will be a distant memory when I get back into my car tonight.

So this reminds me of a story.

Jon Wahl, frontman of the insane superrock band Claw Hammer (I don't think they exist anymore, but my friends & I used to see them all the time because they were so NUTS), told me a story about the time he was working at Epitaph. He worked in the mailroom (this was not so long ago, during Claw Hammer's productive period) in some scummy part of LA. One day, he came out to his car, and it was completely covered in bird shit. Like, so bad that everyone made fun of him for it. People left notes on his car about it. So, of course, he wrote a song about it. The song was cleverly titled "The Day It Rained Pigeon Shit" and involved a whole lot of yelling.

(No, this was not a roundabout way of doing the band for the letter "C." That's still to come...)