Depression era: The life complete with Frank Fairfield

 
Twenty-three-year-old Frank Fairfield, another L.A. denizen whose heart is firmly rooted in prewar times, is perhaps this city’s truest example of how the old-time feeling is creeping back into modern consciousness. A busker who used to drink gin and hang with the hobos in Tujunga ("Some real interesting drop outs there," he says. “I had my own spot and built a bunch of instruments out of junk."), Fairfield was "discovered" playing old-time music on his banjo and fiddle at the Hollywood Farmers Market.

Since then, he has signed a record deal with Tompkins Square Records (his album comes out in September) and recently returned from touring with indie folk darlings the Fleet Foxes. Fairfield takes his prewar obsession to its extreme, from his grandpa-esque drawl (he even speaks in the present tense when referring to the 1930s) to his attire -- he wears high-waisted, wide-legged, pleated slacks, and his hair is neatly Brylcreemed to the side.

Of the prewar musicians he loves, he says, "They have something that we’re losing -- something that we’ve lost. These people are connected to the earth. These people are singing straight from the ground. They walk past a rabbit, and they sing about the rabbit -- it’s real."

He owns several gramophones and more than 1,000 neatly ordered, prewar phonograph records, many made from brittle shellac compounds, which predated vinyl. He winds up his gramophone and plays "Pretty Polly," a murder ballad by Appalachian folk singer Dock Boggs, and stamps his foot on the floor of his sparsely decorated cabin in the Burbank hills. Pounding his fist into his hand in time, he has an  expression that carries the intensity of a thousand punk rock mosh pits. "This music is a lot tougher than anything happening right now," he says. "These murder ballads were written by real tough, hard-living men who were hopping trains. It’s about manliness, I think. That’s what I like"