Ya Ho Wa 13 makes Devendra Banhart look like Don Rumsfeld

To all the kids who roll up to the Little Joy in beard-beads and rhapsodize about lost Karen Dalton tracks: come back when you refer to yourself as Father Yod, take on more than a dozen 'spiritual wives,' singlehandedly breed and recruit a commune, found a vegetarian cafe and an all-improv psych band before perishing in a hang-gliding accident. Then we can talk about hippie credibility.

A reunion of Ya Ho Wa 13, the house band of the Source Family commune founded by Yod in the early '70s, was more unlikely than getting DLR back in Van Halen. But the surviving members of the group reformed Friday night at the Echoplex and proudly revisited an era when belonging to the counter-culture took a bit more commitment than joining a Facebook group.

Ya Ho Wa 13's music is purposefully obtuse and hypnotic -- tribal drums, sawing violins and group chanting made up on the spot -- but it's nothing you can't get from Animal Collective or Soft Circle today. The difference is that Ya Ho Wa 13 really, really means it. When the band implored the crowd to extend their left palms and inhale exactly 108 times before listening to the next tune, there was no whiff of self-awareness. The berobed masses offstage did their best to play along, but there was something vampiric about kids in tunics drinking comped vodka and Red Bull and texting while a photo of many very pregnant Source Family members was projected above the band. Ya Ho Wa 13 wasn't kidding at the time and it wasn't kidding on Friday. In the pseudo-VIP area, guys rolled around on throw pillows in designer print gowns but a spy tells us they were actually operatives from Flaunt Magazine. L.A. is famous for eating its young, but now the cool kids are learning to eat L.A.'s old as well.

--August Brown