What is Burger Records? For one thing, it’s a record store, located in a strip mall in Fullerton, California. But it’s also a label, one that primarily issues albums on cassette. It also promotes concerts and produces a web series called BRGRTV, all of them informed by a Southern California punk-rock mentality. Or, as the label describe themselves on their Facebook page: “Burger Records is a rock n roll philanthropic quasi-religious borderline-cultish propaganda spreading group of suburban perma-teen mutants!!!”
All of those elements combined this past weekend during the fourth annual Burgerama festival at Orange County’s OC Observatory, a raucous, amped-up event that made use of the venue’s two indoor stages, as well as a giant outdoor stage in the parking lot. Opening night headliners Weezer compensated for their relatively brief, 55-minute set time with a few surprises—most notably, bringing out frontman Rivers Cuomo’s father Frank to join them on “Back to the Shack.” On the second night, Ty Segall invited the crowd to join him on stage, and closed out his set with a blistering cover of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” on which he was joined by fellow Bay Area rocker Mikal Cronin.
All of the groups that played expressed enthusiasm about Burger’s mission and vision. Ryan Lindsey of Broncho praised the label’s lo-fi aesthetic. “I love tape,” he said. “I love cassettes—I love any type of tape. When we record, we record to tape, so I’m all about anybody who’s in this really small world. Whether this is a fad or not, at least when people are listening to these cassettes, they’re hearing stuff the way I used to listen to stuff when I was a kid. I grew up in the cassette era, so it’s cool that people are hearing it. A lot of people otherwise wouldn’t be listening to these nice, crunchy, warm recordings.”
“[Burgerama] probably means 100 different things to 100 different people,” said Nate Shaw of the Relationship, the band he’s in with Weezer’s Brian Bell. “For me, this is kind of exciting. I just drove down from my apartment in Echo Park to play this festival. This is where I grew up. So for me, It’s like everything my friends and I wanted to do when we were kids, but nobody paid attention. And here we are some years later and the Orange County music has finally risen to this critical mass. It’s exciting!”
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