I Tried to See a Red Hot Chili Peppers Tribute Band and Accidentally Went to a Sex and Magic Show

Photo via stevemagic.com

Last night, the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed at the Super Bowl halftime show for about ten seconds, pretending to play instruments in the gargantuan creative shadow of Bruno Mars' award-winning haircut. To commemorate this, my editor at Noisey suggested that I report on a RHCP tribute band called SexMagik. I don't really like the Chi Peps, but I figured I could squeeze in some cultural critique about cock socks or Anthony Keidis being the most effective proponent of scatting since Scatman John, so I said yes. All I got was a night and an address—Friday, somewhere in Van Nuys, where the meth gets cooked and the porn gets shot. Perhaps the location should have raised suspicions immediately. I managed to rope my main squeeze into coming with me. Her name is Lucy and we met on OKCupid a couple weeks ago. She doesn't like RHCP either. She never told me that explicitly, but our 99% match indicates that our opinions are identical.

The guy manning the door seemed really, really happy that we had showed up. As Lucy and I walked around the venue, we found a lot of small rooms with velvet-draped mattresses in dark corners. And lots and lots of gloryholes. The interior of the place was somewhere in between a lazer tag arena and the set for a snuff film. Nobody seemed to be acknowledging one another, let alone speaking to anybody, or mentally preparing themselves for a sick Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute set.

Somewhere in the main hallway, we came across a man in a suit nervously shuffling a deck of cards. It was then that the reality of the situation began to seep over me like so much semen dripping down the rim of one of the myriad gloryholes throughout the establishment. SexMagik was not a Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute band. I didn't know what this event was, but it definitely involved magic and probably involved blowjobs.

After a brief conversation with the man in the suit, it was confirmed that, yes, he was a magician, and yes, this was a sex party. He seemed relieved that somebody else was a little confused by the whole thing. He suggested we take a seat in the adjacent room and wait for the show.

We were alone in that room except for a stripper pole and the occasional lookie-loo poking their head round the door to see if anybody seemed appropriate for a sexual encounter. I held on to Lucy pretty close lest any frisky wallflowers get grabby hands. A moment later, the same portly man from outside bustled into the room, grabbed a microphone and instructed everyone to come to the main area for the magic.

A few more people trundled in, but there couldn't have been more than six or seven of us, one of whom was a drag queen with huge sunglasses, a platinum blonde wig, and a set of legitimately boner-inducing legs. And then walked in the magician. He strode over to an iPod speaker set and put on this song (you may recognize it from the scores to American Beauty and Pay It Forward):

He introduced himself as Steve Owens, a sleight-of-hand magician who had trained at the Magic Castle and worked in Bangkok. He was the winner of ten awards. Slowly people began to filter in: An ancient old man in a seersucker suit spent the whole performance glued to a smartphone except for momentary kisses with his gurlfriend. Next to us sat a pretty square-looking post-menopausal couple. The man kept tugging at the woman's nipples through her blouse. She barely responded, which was sort of magical in itself to watch.

The magic was actually pretty entertaining, although the crowd reaction was lukewarm. The coup de grace of the whole spectacle was when Steve placed a small foam ball into the hand of a gurl who had spent the majority of the performance nonchalantly snacking on tortilla chips and wafer cookies while dressed in a full cadre of discount lingerie. When she opened her grasp, there were four foam balls in her hand. At that moment, I noticed that a testicle had snuck out the side of her satin panties. So, uh, turns out Steve made five balls appear.

Steve valiantly ran through his repertoire and played it straight the whole time—he didn't acknowledge the unique environs once, despite the fact that he was performing in betwixt a crusty old sign stating "Safe Sex Only" and a gloryhole. The portly gentleman (who was the life of the party) brought in a friend of his, a frumpy woman who tepidly tried to engage the crowd with some stand-up comedy. After her opening joke about tittyfucking fell flat, she gave up. We decided to take another once 'round the space.

Every room led into another, smaller room with less furniture, sort of like if Theseus were looking for the Minotaur while wearing a gimp suit. Despite the prospective trappings of kink abound, the whole place had the vibe of a 6th grade dance. Everybody wanted to get down but nobody wanted to make the first move. The tension was so thick you could have cut it with a sharply filed buttplug.

Steve's second set featured a display of shadow puppetry much like the one below, except this time the kissing shadow kangaroos also fucked. It was awesome.

Unfortunately, it turns out that shadow puppetry isn't much of an aphrodisiac. Still no actual sex. In fact, I heard a few people grumbling that there wasn't nearly as much fucking as usual. I did see a dick, though, when a fried looking older couple, both wearing fishnets, flailed about in a corner during a display of some BDSM ritual I couldn't follow.

As we stepped out for a cigarette, a guy who looked as if he really liked KoRn insisted on showing us a YouTube video in which a magician fucks up his saw-in-half routine and kills his assistant (who happens to be his wife). As we watched Steve unloading his gear in a bit of a hurry, Lucy started yawning and we decided to leave. Not only was she not freaked out by the whole thing, she even managed to get a teensy bit bored. Before we skipped out, decided to ask Steve a few questions:

Noisey: How did you end up performing at a Sex and Magic party?
Steve the Magician: They just found me on google and sent me an email, said it was kind of a strange show…I gave my price and I was okay with it.

Did you feel weird at any point?
I would say in the beginning. When I was approached by a crossdresser asking me questions…I'm not usually around that sort of thing, but, y'know, I found out later in the night that people are people. I didn't feel too strange as the night went on. I just did my job, y'know.

Did anybody hit on you?
I couldn't tell to be honest! Possibly one in the beginning. I just did my thing and got out and that was that.

Was is the strangest place you've ever performed?
It was by far the weirdest place I've performed, but I think they liked it. I think it went over pretty well.

Would you invite your friends?
No. I wouldn't.

All in all, it was an evening of surprises and contradictions, which, in a way, are two essential pillars of magic itself. To the gurls and guys and girls of the Van Nuys anonymous pansexual fuck scene, though I never personally observed any coitus, I salute you and your pursuit of new sexual frontiers. Even though the whole thing was weirdly kind of wholesome, it was more entertaining than a RHCP cover band, or even the real thing, could ever be.

Jemayel Khawaja previously reported on musicians on Skid Row for Noisey. He's on Twitter - @JemayelK