RIDE OR DIE

At a Halloween house party in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, last year, I saw Natalie Mering, a.k.a. Weyes Blood, emerge from a dark hallway dressed as an 18th-century French lady-in-waiting. Her face was powdered white with rosy-blushed cheeks, red lipstick accentuating her cupid’s bow. She smiled and entered the kitchen with the artist Jordan Wolfson, a notorious provocateur known for his unsettling animatronic sculptures and video work. Within minutes, Wolfson, whose face was painted as a kind of generic ghoul, was reclining on a window seat talking to another woman dressed as a cheerleader. L.A. cool-guy shit.

Mering moved to stand at the threshold of the French doors overlooking the party, watching people in full costume as they smoked and drank on the crowded patio. 1 approached her to say I was going to be profiling her for CREEM; her eyes widened with recognition. In her low tomboy California dialect, she said some kind words about the magazine’s legendary status, making apparent her role as an acolyte of 70s rock ’n’ roll. Then she descended the stairs and disappeared into the crowd.