Almighty Opp puppet shows draw massive crowds to L.A. street corner

The artist known as Jeffrey’s Human Person remained anonymous for nearly 25 years; This was also the same time he staged guerilla-style musical puppet shows titled “Jeffrey’s Human Persona.” “Great Opp” On the last Saturday of every month on a sandy street corner in Koreatown. He missed only three shows in the first 19 years of what he called his “services.” But the COVID-19 pandemic forced him online in 2020, and a family tragedy kept him out of the corner for a few more years.

In December, he returned live to his used car dealership at Western and Elmwood for the first time since the pandemic-induced shutdown, drawing a crowd of several hundred devoted fans. It organized its first ticketed event in February. “Services in a Secret Place” The event was attended by nearly 50 guests who paid $100 per person for the pop-up show, held at a private residence in the San Fernando Valley, where Particle Kid, the art rock project of Willie Nelson’s youngest son Micah, was the opening act.

“I’ve missed funerals, I’ve missed Christmases, I’ve missed my friends’ birthdays. I’ve never taken a vacation,” Jeffrey explains of his commitment to monthly performances in a recent phone interview following his late January show, which also attracted a large, enthusiastic crowd of supporters. “I acted as if a knife had been stabbed in my heart.”

“Great Opp” is really about Jeffrey’s heart. Services take place on a specially designed black stage filled with a variety of custom-made puppets. These creations are not from Mister Rogers’ Make-Believe Neighborhood. At a recent demonstration, the ringleader wore a red elbow guard, gray knee socks and black ankle boots. On top of his angular head was a green felt crown; its toothy mouth a sinister, grimacing slit; his eyes darkened with what appeared to be charcoal. Other puppets swirled around him: a chubby, clown-like, snowman-like creature spraying water into the crowd; a tall, spindly clown wielding a miniature pump; a strange sock puppet made of adhesive bandages; A discarded, disheveled doll tied to strings.

“Great Opp” is one of the main puppets used in the street show. The puppets sing songs written by the show’s creator, Jeffrey’s Human Persona.

(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)

Music is the focus of every service; Behind the curtain, Jeffrey plays guitar and keyboards, singing in a tremulous voice reminiscent of Jeff Mangum about the topics, ideas, and emotions that have occupied his mind at various stages of his life. To date, “Great Opp” has revealed: 33 albums on Bandcamp It features songs from services over the years with titles like “Every Day’s the Worst Day,” “Misbegotten Human Beings” and “Bubble Burster.”

“As long as we say we do it, I act like I have a choice, but it’s a lot worse now than it looks five years later,” sings a puppet that resembles a grotesque Humpty Dumpty with a huge egg head on red trousers during the show in January. “You support someone else’s dreams because your good nature is being used.”

“Great Opp” uses richly detailed, handmade puppets. The show’s creator once worked as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden.

(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)

The common refrain sung by almost everyone gathered on the gum-stained sidewalk is: “It’s okay to not be okay.”

Jeffrey loves the spontaneous possibilities of the street corner and what he calls the “casual” nature of services, but his core audience is made up of returners. About 200 people gathered just after 9 p.m. on this January evening, standing on stools and chairs in the back and resting on their elbows on the pavement in the front. They scream, they sing, and they sing along. At different points in the show, when Jeffrey encourages them to meet their neighbors, they turn and hug each other or shake hands.

Lars Adams attends the “Supreme Opp” show on the last Saturday in January. During the performance, the crowd is encouraged to turn and greet their neighbors.

(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)

“Even though I perform, I don’t consider myself an artist,” Jeffrey says. Although his shows are free community events, he’s also not a busker. And he doesn’t call “The Great Opp” a puppet show, even though there are puppets. He says he is an “obsessive producer.” The audience “comes for me – the journey of life – just to find out how I feel at that moment. It’s like a Catholic Church service where the sermon changes but the structure stays the same.”

Unlike a church service, performances are loud and somewhat freewheeling. A bus whizzes by, a homeless man screams as he passes by with a shopping cart. Jeffrey’s wife, known as Shambles, manages the puppets from behind the curtain and carries their 5-year-old daughter, known as Crumbo, in a sling. Two other assistants named DingDing and Cylo can also be seen behind the black curtain; their faces are hidden by knitted clown masks or protected by make-up. Near the end of the show, Jeffrey stands in front of the crowd wearing a white mask and a red hoodie and asks the audience to testify. People are standing up and talking about how the show has changed over the years.

That’s what happened with Micah Nelson. It came when Jeffrey held a mirror in front of people’s faces and made them watch as the crowd watched. The sessions were uncomfortably long. Nelson later contacted Jeffrey to tell him that he had covered some of his songs and that his experience with the mirror had made a profound impact on him.

When Nelson introduced Jeffrey on a recent show “Secret Somewhere,” the things he said about Jeffrey made the artist blush. Life comes full circle in a funny way, Jeffrey said.

Having originally created “The Great Opp,” Jeffrey’s Human Persona asks audiences gathered on a Koreatown street corner to testify about the spectacle he calls “service.”

(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)

Jeffrey moved from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in 1995 when he was 19 years old. When Jeffrey found himself in a bit of a pickle with his friends and getting into the wrong kind of trouble, his father bought him the plane ticket. He wanted to work in the film industry; He thought Los Angeles would be like Jim Morrison’s fever dream in the 1970s, but he didn’t find it that inspiring. The movie business, where he worked to make fantasy art and other fabrications, was not a creative refuge but a soul-sucking void.

One day he said to a friend, “I’m tired of making other people’s puppets,” and “Great Opp” was born.

“If you’re coming to get paid, what are you actually doing?” asked Jeffrey during our interview. “I’d rather be a flop and believe it.”

Children gather at the front of the stage at the January “Supreme Opp” show, which features original songs on guitar and keyboard. There are a total of 33 “Yüce Opp” albums on Bandcamp.

(Carlin Stiehl / For the Times)

He built the original puppets and wrote the first “Supreme Opp” album in the second-floor apartment where he lived; just a stone’s throw away from the corner where he still performs, the corner where he would propose to his wife at a particularly difficult time in his life. To support himself all these years he worked in a variety of creative roles: in the toy industry; briefly for Disney Imagineers; and for nearly eight years he worked as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden, whose dazzling future estate, “Metropolis II,” is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he helped create it.

Now that “The Great Opp” is back on the air, Jeffrey is tapping into the therapeutic aspects of writing about his feelings and experiences. “Service to a Secret Place” will continue once a month, maybe every other month. Guests can: check out Instagram For tips on how to score a coveted ticket that comes with your own hand-crafted entry token and a map of the ever-changing special venue. Jeffrey builds large puppets for these shows (one is 2 meters tall) and experiments with the format of the event.

Still, the street corner will remain the soul of the operation, and music will be at the heart of it all.

“It’s all about integrity, and the people who get it and keep coming know it’s definitely the real thing,” he says.