It is not just any Tuesday.
It is 9 p.m. on a dreary night in Shadow Hills, just miles away from the lush foothills of the Verdugo Mountains. The delicate pitter-patter of a drum’s cymbal is the only sound to break through the thick brick wall of the obscure performance venue, Sun Space, and reach the wide, desolate Sunland Boulevard.
There is no sign outside, but follow the noise inside to find the Host arrive on stage from a door hidden behind a hypnotic dayglow projector visual. He’s wearing a gold sequin jacket over a fresh-pressed polka-dot shirt, fuchsia bell-bottoms and yellow trucker’s hat with an Appalachian-style beard.
The Host is just one of a strange cast of characters to escape the loose folds of Noel Rhodes’ mind and make it on-time to the circus. Rhodes, 63, founded Sun Space in 2017 as a performance art venue for wayward artists who don’t properly fit the rigid mold of the Los Angeles club and bar circuit. The space is “not quite open mic,” Rhodes says, but all lovers of experimental ambient music, free-form jazz, observational comedy, paleontology and asteroseismology lectures or just plain old rock ‘n’ roll are welcome on the schedule, nearly every day of the week.
Tuesdays, however, are somehow more unusual.
The crowd drowns in the second-long tension as they sit below teardrop-shaped papier-mâché stalactite hanging from handmade alien geodes on the ceiling. A 2-foot-tall, human-goat lovechild mask rests on the stage. Demographics for Unusual Tuesday range from late teens to septuagenarians, mingling and meandering as they await the start of the show.
“Let’s all together, as one great rising cluster, try, together, to accomplish one thing,” says the Host.
“Let’s figure out what this whole thing is!”
The house band drums intensify, a violin cries and guitar chords growl.
“It’s Un-usual Tuesday,” the congregation replies in song. “And all of those other days, like Friday and Saturday and Sunday … are just big wastes of ti-ime!”
Chaos breaks loose. Rhodes’ bones transform into wild, loose cartilage. Tonya Lee Jaynes, the drummer, puts her entire life force into the bass and snare. The crowd sings chorus in dissonant harmony.
On an entirely normal Wednesday walk through a nature preserve north of Los Angeles, Rhodes says the idea for Sun Space and the hallmark Unusual Tuesday came from small fundraiser shows his father put on for their small Pennsylvanian town when Rhodes was a child. Vague memories of “The Little Rascals” and “Monty Python” influenced the sketch-based, psychedelic feel of Unusual Tuesday, with Sun Space serving as an outlet for other misfit artists looking to perform on the other days of the week.
“My goal was just to cover the rent with volunteers and equipment already bought,” Rhodes says. “I knew it would work if we weren’t having to pay our home rent on it, you know, our medical bills … as long as it stayed afloat.”
Despite its obscure location, stuck between a cafe and vacant building, the weekly show began to attract an eccentric crowd of artists and attendees.
“The whole ethos is creativity, expression and most importantly, freedom,” says Eddie Loyola, who has attended Unusual Tuesday near-weekly since 2017. “It’s really unusual. It helps support the idea of ‘come show us what you got’ rather than something that’s just cliquey, like at other venues.”
For a fledgling artist like Bailey Zabaglio, who most commonly performs electrocrash music at small house shows, Unusual Tuesday can be a time to experiment with other genres outside of their comfort zone. On the last Unusual Tuesday of April, Zabaglio performed soft electric-indie ballads to a roar of applause as the first act of the night.
“The fact that the demographic is so vast and wide and every person you meet is such a f— character, it’s really cool,” Zabaglio says. “It’s so beautiful that everyone agreed to get off the phone, off their couch on a Tuesday in the middle of the week.”
The social media presence of Sun Space is sparse, so Unusual Tuesday attracts most of its attendees by word of mouth. Zabaglio’s brother, Jamie, visited from Washington and performed a witty free-form comedy act only a few slots after his sibling.
“I used to have a variety show in Washington, and this whole trip has been very healing for me,” Jamie says. “I started my own show and I was just doing whatever I could. … I felt like I would never experience something like that again, but I got it again tonight.”
Booking for this specific show is a strange calculus, says Jamie Inman, who does scheduling, sound engineering and other odd jobs for Sun Space, which he now co-owns with Rhodes. Acts are booked two to three weeks in advance and selected from a pool of artists who expressed interest in performing.
“Every single Tuesday is different. Some weeks are singer-songwriter heavy, some weeks are modular synth heavy, some weeks are everything in between,” Inman says. “Sometimes we have expert lecturers come. … We just mishmash everything together until it makes sense. Or if it doesn’t make sense, that’s fine too.”
The only break in the show’s near decade-long history came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when artists all around the city were holed up in their homes with nowhere to play. Rhodes, Inman and Chris Soohoo, Sun Space’s visuals engineer, threw together a Twitch livestream to continue the chaos.
“[Unusual Tuesday online] was nothing like this, but we all learned some new stuff, like, I got into all the visual stuff,” Soohoo says. “Someone said that their first Unusual Tuesday experience was the stream, and now they get to come here in person. … It’s good to know that we did what we could.”
During the online show, Rhodes’ character Austin Drizzles, who performs the crackpot weekly weather report, would field calls from crazed viewers. Now, back on the regular news cycle, Drizzles accepts photo submissions from viewers before the show with added commentary at the end of Unusual Tuesday.
“This was sent in by Rebecca,” Drizzles says of a photo of a squirrel. “That is a cute little wild dog. … The effervescence there. I hope they eat a banana just like they always do.”
Left Unsaid, a jazz breakbeat fusion duo, performed live for the first time at Unusual Tuesday‘s last April show. Lucian Smith and Sander Bryce, who formed the group this year, say performing in L.A. proper to an attentive audience can be a difficult feat, but Unusual Tuesday provides a full venue for nontraditional acts.
“There’s so many venues where people are waiting for you to pull them into it,” Smith says. “But here everyone seems like they’re getting something special, and they’re excited to see what they’re gonna find out. … Coming from having no audience, I loved having this.”
For the faithful observers, many of whom attend weekly, Unusual Tuesday is welcomed as a reprieve from the stress, struggle and day-to-day drag of the working week, says August Kamp, an artist and regular attendee of the weekly sermon.
“I think we’re over-saturated with mundane everything,” she says. “The fact that there is a day of the week where I know I’ll feel extra alive and that it’s a day that is otherwise not allocated for that is really valuable.”
Many interviewees likened Unusual Tuesdays to church, a cult or a religious movement. Rhodes, raised as a Swedenborgianist — a Christian denomination that emphasizes “divine love” based on the writings of theologian Emanuel Swedenborg — does not outright reject the comparison.
“Unusual Tuesday is definitely a church service in that we get together and hypnotize the musicians, get into a rhythm and all that stuff,” Rhodes says. “Get people into us — into a vibe.”
Near midnight, following Austin Drizzles’ weekly forecast, the church once again erupts into the Unusual Tuesday gospel. A rapturous feeling takes over the room, as if all of the disparate identities and backgrounds came together in spiritual tune — the cluster having finally come together. Some mouth the words, but others belt away, letting all the emotion built up over the six other days of the week fall onto Rhodes, who’s not Rhodes then, but simply the Host.
He delivers only one promise, which he no doubt will keep: “I will see you in six days, 22 hours, and however many minutes, for Unusual Tuesday!”
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