At the Dentist With Mach-Hommy

It’s mid-April in a nondescript parking lot in Northeast L.A. County. Mach-Hommy unfolds himself from an SUV, shouts “Paulie!” loud enough to rattle the sleepy neighborhood, and starts grilling me about the crumbling literary journal I recently left. Within minutes we’re lounging in the office of an unusual dental practice. I’ve been handed an oversize postcard with a beautiful portrait of Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of dentistry. Apollonia is said to have martyred herself rather than blaspheme after being tortured, in Alexandria, by men who shattered and then pulled her teeth. At some point, while staring at this reproduction, my attention wanders—and is then yanked back to the present by Mach’s eccentric dentist, Jamie Azdair, who contextualizes an anecdote by saying “This is before the mercury lobby tried to have me killed.”

Mach had a new LP finished and ready for me to hear when he summoned me, but this is a necessary detour. Five years ago I wrote, for GQ, the first in-person profile of the anonymous artist, who at that point had granted precious few interviews even via phone or email. I have never fielded so many incredulous calls and texts, or been accosted at so many shows and parties, over anything I’ve written—though only a little of this centered on Mach. The real star of that story was Jamie, who told me “the Charlie Sheen stabbing thing was overblown” and lamented, while driving me to Malibu at breakneck speed in his modified Volkswagen Beetle, that guys today were too busy “whacking off” to become the next Howard Hughes.

Jamie is a preposterously outré figure; even outside of his dental philosophy, the incidental stories of his life are bizarre, and ominous, and unforgettable. When I wrote about him in 2021, I compared him to a Thomas Pynchon side character. But there are times when he seems more like Pynchon himself, as when he talks haltingly about being shaken, in Hawaii, upon discovering a shack decorated with the hundreds of surfboard leashes that a pair of locals had cut off the ankles of tourists with knives they’d hidden in their swim trunks.

I have no idea if the Vegas mob in fact scuttled a multimillion-dollar contract of his to improve Olympic athletes’ health through dentistry because they were protective of Jamie, who might have been corrupted by the money. But he has never felt to me, taxonomically, like a liar. I’d been turning that notion over in my head in the years since I met him, and while sitting in that office, the reason came to me: it’s because he’s not a grifter. When he talks about driving to Desert Hot Springs every weekend because of the water’s healing properties (“There’s manganese in the water, the kids are calm, you see they’re not on iPads”) he’s not trying to sell you a timeshare, or even manganese tablets. He boasts about turning down money—then explains his practice in such a way that does make the time seem finite and the gross billings beside the point.

When we leave Jamie to play 5786 AM: Easy Listen and get dinner, Mach, his two friends, and I all laugh recounting things he’d said. But this is a platonic case of laughing with, rather than at: Mach has an abiding respect for his dentist, and it’s not hard to deduce why. There’s something humbling about being in the presence of someone with deep conviction in the ways to best help people; he wasn’t outsourcing all the fundraising calls he made in order to buy the decommissioned Air Force bus he plans to use as a mobile clinic for kids in need. And a lot of his gripes with industrial dentistry make intuitive sense: Of course, you think, of course Rockefeller investments in mercury coincided with the recommendation that it become ubiquitous in dentistry. You look down at the patron saint in your hands.

But perhaps more than anything, Jamie makes for a natural pairing with Mach because he knows how to turn a phrase. I will never forget the disgust dripping from his quip that some dentists in Beverly Hills are charging “a million a mouth.” On 5786, similarly novel scraps of syntax poke through at an impressive pace. The subtitle, Easy Listen, comes from the near-obsessive pursuit of sonic balance that extended the final mastering process significantly. “All the different sounds and textures were meticulously placed on the same broad bandwidth so that when you play it back in the same room on the same equipment more than once it’s going to sound different depending on where you are internally as the listener,” Mach says. “Your internal dialogue is going to influence how you listen and hear. Some days, you won’t be able to hear something that you’re hyper-focused on; other days, the one thing that’s been escaping you, for what can seem like an eternity, will jump out and grab you by the shirt collar, but only when you stop trying to control the experience.”

“This album is like the sonic equivalent of Michigan J. Frog,” Mach (who is stingy with on-the-record quotes until he has considered a topic enough to deliver a full paragraph) continues. “If you try and exploit it for personal gain, if you approach it with the wrong energy, all you will get is a ribbit from a frog in an old shoebox. If you approach it from a place of respect—mainly self-respect since you can’t afford to give what you don’t have—and just let it do its thing, you might fuck around and hear a show tune or even see a cane twirl.”