Video: The Black Watch, ‘Get Me Out of Echo Park’

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The Black Watch (Photo by Brendan Holmes)
The Black Watch (Photo by Brendan Holmes)

Author, English professor and irrepressible indie-rocker John Andrew Fredrick is the most amiable of curmudgeons. He is the sexagenarian who, rather than growl “Get off my lawn!,” would probably pen a sonnet extolling the virtues of steering clear of his domain. And Fredrick — on the precipice of releasing his 17th full-length as the Black Watch — harbors a special disdain for what has transpired in his longtime Los Angeles neighborhood, Echo Park.

So he vents a little in “Get Me Out of Echo Park,” the first single from the forthcoming album “Magic Johnson” (out June 21). The song arrives via a wry video directed by one of Fredrick’s former students, Frank Victor Weinert. It is “meant to make not-too-terribly-caustic fun of the innumerable hipsters in my very own neighborhood, the super-gentrified Echo Park,” Fredrick told the Big Takeover, where the video premiered. “It really does seem like it’s Coachella here every blessed day, but I don’t let it get to me too very much — save when I overhear some ‘likespeak-spewing’ personage spewing likespeak. When even really highly educated people pepper their speech with ‘like,’ I just can’t listen. I’m sorry; I can’t. It’s a peeve [of mine] and I seem to have to pet it every time I go out my front door and walk to the lake or the bookstore.”

The new album, featuring the TBW lineup of Fredrick, Andy Creighton and Rob Campanella, will be released by Atom Records in conjunction with three compilations: “31 Years of Obscurity: The Best of The Black Watch: 1988-2019;” a rarities collection, “The Vinyl Years: 1988-1993;” and the band’s entire catalog, “The Completed Works: 1988-2019,” which has every TBW song ever released on a limited-edition USB thumb drive.

||| Watch: The video for “Get Me Out of Echo Park”

||| Previously: “Julie” (feat. Julie Schulte), “Georgette, Georgette,” “Way Strange World”