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Chapter Six - Hell, Part 1 - |
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I arrived in L.A. armed with two liabilities: first, nobody knew me as a musician and second, nobody knew me, period. With 3b in tow, there wasn’t much call for me to exercise my charm muscles, so I let them atrophy. Starting a band from scratch is tough in any town and downright deadly in L.A. The talent pool in Hollywood was ridiculously rich and competition fierce. My awakening was not polite. Back home, club rats and journalists starve for something to get excited about, so the gigs and the column inches are easy to come by if you have even a modicum of talent. It’s pretty easy to be the best band in town. It’s not that easy in Los Angeles. Bar bands compete with superstars for stage time and ink. I jumped from the top of my hill to a tar pit at the bottom of Mt. Everest. This was no place for the faint of heart. Starting out at the bottom in any town means no money. Working your way to the top of the club scene in So Cal still means no money. There’s a bizarre algebraic formula that club owners use that states the greater your chances of getting “discovered,” the less you get paid for your sweat. Great. Now, not only am I an unknown, I’m a broke unknown. For the first time ever, I realized I needed help. I sucked it up, called my ex-partner and lied. “You've got to get out here, man. It's fucking great. This town is ripe for the pickin's and you and I can get a deal in like five minutes.” I don't know that he's ever forgiven me.
•••
These were desperate times, indeed. Now what was I supposed to do? My marginal ability on the guitar wasn’t going to get me any session work. I had no marketable skills. My brush with the public school system put the kibosh on my higher education.
Let me insert this here: I was a smart kid, yet nothing was done to accommodate my needs. In the Midwest education model, you are groomed for either college or the foundry. Those bound for higher learning and every mouth breathing knuckle-dragger on the wrestling team got special attention, but I was left to my own devices to find challenges and expand my horizons. Is it any wonder I tired of the whole system? Isn’t there a lawsuit I can file? Thank you.
No skills, no degree. Where am I to get a job that doesn’t involve French fries? The film industry, of course. Former bank teller 3b quickly landed a job at a film payroll company. Her Boss’s Old Boyfriend worked as an editor for a large independent film company and needed someone to do some grunt work for about six days. Wonderful. What sort of shit job could they not find someone in Hollywood to do? Visions of the grease pit in the hamburger joint where I worked at 16 turned my stomach. This was no time to be proud, and besides, it meant the heretofore unheard of sum of four hundred smackers a week. If they were willing to pay that much money, this was going to suck hard. Shows you what I knew about Hollywood and money. I showed up at the address on Sunset and somehow found Boss’s Old Boyfriend working in one of the editing suites. The whole thing was very casual. He led me to a closet full of miscellaneous boxes and reels of film and recording tape strewn about in no particular order. “There it is,” he said. “What?” “I know. It’s pretty awful.” BOB was sympathetic. To what, I didn’t know. “If you don’t want to do this, I understand.” “Do what?” I asked. Something was not filling in my blanks. “Clean up this closet,” BOB replied. “You’re kidding,” I said. “Eighty bucks a day to clean up a closet?” “I tried to get you more,” he said sheepishly, “but they’re kind of cheap around here.” I laughed out loud. “I think I can handle this.” I learned that day that no one in the film industry has ever spent so much as an hour in a foundry or a factory or some other crap job. They don’t know what shit work for shit pay is. Granted, people do work hard and long hours in the entertainment industry, but it’s not that demeaning, spirit breaking, end of the line labor that sucks the life from you (I never worked for Disney, but you hear talk). Someone put it best when they said that Bruce Springsteen hasn’t worked as hard his entire life as the people he sings about do every day. I dove in and cleaned that closet like it had never been cleaned before. I organized and alphabetized. I spit and polished. I picked out burrs, combed its fur and licked its butt. At the end of my six days they offered me a full time job. How I wish I’d seen the detour sign for what it was. That job was the first thing that sucked me in and steered me off course. I was in a totally new environment, arguably in the most glamorous industry in the world. The overtaking of me was gradual and insidious. I didn’t even realize till years later exactly how completely it had changed my life. Suddenly, I was faced with the challenges I craved, but never had in school. My brain exercised for the first time in years. It did the stretches, a little weight training, some cardio, and finished off with a sauna and massage. I met new and interesting people from all over the world, some with incredible life stories. The state of the club scene in Hollywood was such that bands couldn’t realistically play more than a show every few weeks before over-saturating their audience, so I had a lot of time to fill my head with new information that I never knew I wanted to know. I got so wrapped up in working in film that I lost sight of my purpose on the planet. I started caring about movies and the people who made them. I read the trades, for fuck’s sake. I worked longer and longer hours, learning about development and production and post-production and distribution. Eventually, I worked my way up to a position that required I do things like scream at vendors because they didn’t deliver my stuff on time. I actually referred to it as "my" stuff. This was important shit here. I lost my music altogether. I couldn’t bring myself to play one more night at Madame Wong’s or the Lingerie or even the Whisky. Writing songs was something that I used to do. It was gone, done, over.
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