An unusual Tuesday gives creative freedom to Los Angeles artists

It's not just any Tuesday.

It's 9 pm on a dreary night in Shadow Hills, just a few miles from the lush foothills of the Verdugo Mountains. The delicate clatter of a drum cymbal is the only sound that passes through the thick brick wall of the dark performance venue, Sun Space, and onto the wide, desolate Sunland Boulevard.

There's no sign outside, but follow the noise inside to find the Host arriving on stage from a door hidden behind a hypnotic daylight projector. He wears a gold sequin jacket over a freshly ironed polka dot shirt, fuchsia flared pants and a yellow trucker cap and has an Appalachian-style beard.

The Host is just one of a strange cast of characters who will escape the loose folds of Noel Rhodes' mind and make it to the circus on time. Rhodes, 63, founded Sun Space in 2017 as a performing arts venue for wayward artists who don't adequately fit into the rigid mold of the Los Angeles club and bar circuit. The space is “not quite an open mic,” says Rhodes, but anyone who loves experimental ambient music, free-form jazz, observational comedy, paleontology and asteroseismology lectures, or just plain old rock 'n' roll is welcome on the show, most days of the week.

Patrons gather outside Sun Space during a break between performances in the intimate atmosphere of Unusual Tuesday.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Tuesdays, however, are a little more unusual.

The crowd drowns in the tension of the second as they sit beneath a teardrop-shaped paper mache stalactite hanging from handcrafted alien geodes from the ceiling. A 2-foot-tall human goat beloved son mask rests on the stage. Unusual Tuesday's demographics range from teenagers to septuagenarians, mingling and milling around as they wait for the show to begin.

“Let's all come together, as a great group on the rise, let's try to achieve one thing together,” says the Host.

“Let's find out what this is all about!”

The house band's drums swell, a violin cries, and guitar chords growl.

“It's an unusual Tuesday,” the congregation sings in response. “And all those other days, like Friday, Saturday and Sunday… they are just huge wastes of time!”

Chaos breaks out. Rhodes bones transform into loose, wild cartilage. Tonya Lee Jaynes, the drummer, puts all her life force into the bass and snare. The crowd sings the chorus in dissonant harmony.

On a completely normal Wednesday stroll through a nature preserve north of Los Angeles, Rhodes says the idea for Sun Space and the Unusual Tuesday label came from small fundraising shows his father organized for their small Pennsylvania town when Rhodes was a child. Faint 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 other days of the week.

“My goal was to simply cover the rent with volunteers and already purchased equipment,” Rhodes says. “I knew it would work if we didn't have to pay rent on our house, you know, our medical bills… as long as it stayed afloat.”

Despite its obscure location, sandwiched between a coffee shop and an empty building, the weekly show began to attract an eccentric crowd of performers and attendees.

“The whole ethos is creativity, expression and, most importantly, freedom,” says Eddie Loyola, who has attended Unusual Tuesday almost weekly since 2017. “It's really unusual. It helps support the idea of ​​'come show us what you've got' rather than something that's just cliquey, like other places.”

For a newbie artist like Bailey Zabaglio, who often performs electrocrash music at small house shows, Unusual Tuesday can be a time to experiment with other genres outside of his comfort zone. On the last unusual Tuesday in April, Zabaglio performed soft electric indie ballads to huge applause as the first act of the night.

Musician Bailey Zabaglio performs an original song on an electric guitar during Unusual Tuesday.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

“The fact that the demographic is so broad and broad and that every person you meet has so much character, it's really cool,” Zabaglio says. “It's so beautiful that everyone agreed to hang up the phone, get off the couch on a Tuesday in the middle of the week.”

Sun Space's social media presence is sparse, so Unusual Tuesday draws most of its attendees by word of mouth. Zabaglio's brother Jamie visited from Washington and performed a witty free-form comedy act just a few spots after his brother.

“I used to have a variety show in Washington and this whole journey has been very healing for me,” Jamie says. “I started my own show and I was just doing everything I could… I felt like I would never experience something like that again, but I did again tonight.”

Booking for this specific show is a strange calculation, says Jamie Inman, who does programming, 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 are selected from a pool of artists who have expressed interest in performing.

“Every Tuesday is different. Some weeks are singer-songwriter heavy, some weeks are modular synth heavy, some weeks are everything in between,” Inman says. “Sometimes expert teachers come… We just mix everything together until it makes sense. Or if it doesn't make sense, that's okay too.”

The only interruption in the program's nearly decade-long history came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when artists across the city sheltered in their homes with nowhere to play. Rhodes, Inman, and Sun Space visual engineer Chris Soohoo hosted a live stream on Twitch to continue the chaos.

“[Unusual Tuesday online] It was nothing like this, but we all learned some new things, like I got into all the visual stuff,” Soohoo says. “Someone said their first Unusual Tuesday experience was the broadcast, and now they can come here in person. … It’s good to know we did what we could.”

During the online show, Rhodes' character Austin Drizzles, who does the wacky weekly weather report, was fielding calls from crazed viewers. Now back in the regular news cycle, Drizzles is accepting photo submissions from viewers before the show with additional comments at the end of Unusual Tuesday.

“This was sent in by Rebecca,” Drizzles says of a photo of a squirrel. “That's a cute little wild dog… The fizz there. I hope they eat a banana like they always do.”

Left Unsaid, a breakbeat fusion jazz duo, performed live for the first time at last April's Unusual Tuesday show. Lucian Smith and Sander Bryce, who formed the group this year, say performing in Los Angeles before an attentive audience can be a difficult feat, but Unusual Tuesday offers a full venue for non-traditional acts.

A customer watches the Unusual Tuesday show in very low light at Sun Space.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

“There are so many places where people are waiting for you to attract them,” Smith says. “But everyone here seems to be getting something special and is excited to see what they're going to discover… Since I don't have an audience, I loved having this.”

For faithful observers, many of whom attend weekly, Unusual Tuesday is welcomed as a respite from the stress, struggle and daily exhaustion of the work week, says August Kamp, artist and regular attendee of the weekly sermon.

“I think we're oversaturated with everything mundane,” he says. “The fact that there's one day of the week that I know I'll feel most alive and that it's a day that I wouldn't otherwise be allocated for that is really valuable.”

Many interviewees compared Unusual Tuesdays to a church, a sect or a religious movement. Rhodes, raised in Sweden (a Christian denomination that emphasizes “divine love” based on the writings of theologian Emanuel Swedishborg), does not outright reject the comparison.

“Unusual Tuesday is definitely a church service where we get together and hypnotize the musicians, get into the groove and all that,” Rhodes says. “Getting people closer to us, to a vibe.”

Near midnight, following Austin Drizzles' weekly forecast, the church once again breaks out into the unusual Tuesday gospel. A feeling of excitement takes over the room, as if all the disparate identities and backgrounds were coming together in a spiritual harmony: the group had finally risen. Some say the words, but others walk away, letting all the emotion built up during the other six days of the week fall on Rhodes, who is then not Rhodes, but simply the Host.

He only keeps one promise, which he will undoubtedly keep: “I will see you in six days, 22 hours and however many minutes, for an unusual Tuesday!”