5,456 miles. 11 hours. Three meals. Four
movies.
Sunglasses hanging out of my shirt pocket and rolled-up trousers, I was representing the British traditionally at LAX.
I had smuggled in a box of Kipling’s French Fancies and two packets of Walker’s Sensations Crisps. This felt like a massive victory against the system and I coolly answered, “No mate” when the guy with the moustache and gun asked if I was bringing in any food or vegetation. One-nil, America.
I had vaguely arranged to be picked up by the guy who I’d emailed, and I’d lazily written down his ‘cell’ number on my flight details sheet. Despite four years at University studying Economics, amounting to tens of thousands of pounds, I still have an embarrassing problem:
“Is that a 3 or an 8!?”
Relying on my student instincts of beggary and cost-avoidance, I searched for a kind-faced stranger. (What really happened was that I couldn’t work out where to put the stupid dashes in US mobile numbers, so I looked completely mental at the payphone.) A friendly dude let me use his iPhone. For free. Two-nil, America.
So having not been shot, frisked, or generously searched with Vaseline and no trousers, I stepped out on to the bus station where I had organized my lift. In the heat and hustle of afternoon LAX traffic, I was half expecting a Bonnie and Clyde style situation, where I would hear a car screech around the corner, and some lunatic would swerve across three lanes of traffic and skid up to the kerb.
Ten minutes passed, and my mind began to introduce the notion that this was all a massive, expensive (but admittedly) hilarious practical joke, and a camera crew would sneak up on me for Ashton Kutcher’s new show, “Punk’d for Poor People”. I even began to prepare my reaction…
Also prepared, was my ‘play it cool, kid’ first impression.
‘Don’t seem too desperate and excited, Jack. Don’t be pathetically over-friendly…’
I was revolving from time to time looking for a slowing car, like I was being watched but couldn’t figure out where from. On rotation number three, I glimpsed a figure walking towards me, phone in hand. No camera crew – phew. Cue a characteristic composure fail.
My first impression will forever be a grinning man-hug.
“It’s real, kid.”
Jet-lag is a bitch no matter how excited you are, so I was dropped off at the place I was staying for the fortnight to get a few hours rest before some dinner that night. The place I had been set up with was right near the Beverley Centre, and the pool-house in which I was sleeping was better than my flat at University. I will always be grateful to the couple that put me up there, you have an incredible house.
LA has this weird three-topic conversation list. Learn this, and you can survive the first twenty-five minutes of conversation with anyone in town. Then you better have a personality, or be rich and willing to invest in the project they’ve been working on for the last thirty years:
1) The Weather – The slightest indication of rain sends everyone scrambling to the basement like they own flying monkeys and hate tin men. Town shuts down.
2) Traffic – I nearly lost my life on several occasions to the ‘silent tarmac assassin’ that is the Toyota Prius. A hugely embarrassing way to die, but LA is crazy about them. If you’re speaking about LA to anyone, but you haven’t been, here’s the skinny on traffic: It’s everywhere. Always. Done.
3) Eating Out – If you can’t recommend a new restaurant, or don’t know the ‘staples’ of Los Angeles dining, some people look at you like you’ve walked into their house and set fire to their pets on Christmas Day. However, there is this trendiness that transcends snobbery which is awesome. Eating at a top new place is socially balanced by these little delis and pancake places that sell-out every lunch time, but resemble shanty-towns from the outside (in a good way!). It’s a truly uniting theme and really puts a lot of people in perspective, which is awesome. More on this later!
First night in town: Barbeque.
Dumbledore, (we’re using Harry Potter names for the sake of identity by the way, he’s not just the weirdest-named dude ever), established early on that he has a hatred of two things: bullshit and onions.
To my relief, there was no bullshit at all, leaving only one vegetable to avoid. We made this clear to the standardly attractive WAIT/ACTress, who I was told are numerous in their ambitions. She seemed nice enough, just trying to force the champagne lifestyle from a lemonade turnover.
It’s really hard to know someone without the visual element. Dumbledore had gone out of his way to rescue me from under the stairs and he’d been giving me advice for months via email and 3am phone calls due to the time-differences. Still, without the physicality behind the delivery, conversations can drift into ambiguity, like hearing the script without Jack Nicholson’s expression. But as soon as my nerves and the social decency of professionalism had been put in their rightful places, the whole situation felt completely natural and everyone could breathe out. Just as the situation found it’s own equilibrium…
“What the fuck!? These beans have onions in them!!”
At/With? Who cares, I laughed.
A brief tour around the offices that evening, meeting other people at the company, some of which had naturally asked the obvious question that I still struggle with, “Why THIS kid?”. That’s not a false modesty right there, just the reality that a kid from Youtube, with no numbers, no EP, no real fan-base, no real original gig experience, is given this chance. People are bound to ask that question, because I do.
The next day, after being sucker punched by the realization that I was waking up in Los Angeles, (and doing a little excited dance in my boxers to ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Katrina and The Waves) [Yes – really], I got to meet my Trans-Atlantic homeys, who were my designated carers, tour guides and drinking partners for my stay. A brief introduction is in order:
Ron – Like most people in LA, she wasn’t from there and spoke in a diluted soft Southern accent. [Kinda like she had been weaned off of shooting guns from porches at an early age and moved to California.] A genuinely kind and generous person, that knew every song on the radio and touched the roof of her car whenever she ran through a yellow light, in an infectious apologetic gesture of superstition/guilt.
Harry – Just like Ron, Harry wasn’t from LA originally. She had grown up in New England, and had only moved to town in the past couple of years to work in the music industry. Externally a chilled and passive person, Harry had mastered the ability to combine confusing human anatomy with East-Coast slang in order to insult rude strangers. For example:
“Man, that tour bus driver is a wicked dick-face!”
Neville – An ex-brit, whose family had re-located to California. Full of a super-fast wit and generic optimism, she was a genuinely fun person to be around. We managed to negotiate a free luxury box to see Aziz Ansari, in which we drank from smuggled Margaritas like mischievous school kids. It sucked that she was sick during the first week, but seeing a Jesus lookalike at the 101 Café made us both laugh at our stupid private joke, even if no-one else did.
As well as the secondary objective of my music career, my main concern during this trip, was the location of cult hero and basis for my physical appearance, Chuck Norris. Ron and Harry were on the case, hunting down Mr Norris, who can only be found if he wants to be.
I saw the Hollywood sign, and my inherent English pessimism allowed me to point out that they need to move the ‘D’ in a little, as it reads, “Hollywoo…d”. My 1990’s digital camera, which weighed more that my checked baggage, lasted literally five pictures with new batteries, so this became an object of immediate ridicule among the Hogwarts students. I was emailed this picture, with the filename “JacksCameraIsBiggerThanLA.jpg”:
One thing that really puts you in perspective in with the music industry, is getting to visit somewhere like the Hollywood Bowl. Ron’s parking brake was broken, so we just used my camera behind the wheel to stop the car moving…
Let me pretend I know what I’m on about here. The bowl was built in 1989 JUST for Hall and Oates to play “You Make My Dreams Come True”. If that’s not right, then it should have been. All I know is that it hosts the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and is constructed in such a way that a clap on centre stage can be heard perfectly resonantly in every seat. That’s cool! Here’s me not getting my posing time right for a photo in the bowl:
Later, we ate at the Hard Rock Café, and the waiter immediately went into ‘impress-to-get-tipped’ mode, when he picked up that I was visiting town. Let’s call him Dobby:
Dobby: Hi, Sir. Did I hear that you were visiting town?
Me: Yeah mate.
Dobby: And that you’re in town as a musician? Are you a fan of The Doors?
Me: Yeah, kinda I suppose.
Dobby: Well you see over there, that table in the booth at the back?
Me: Yeah-huh.
Dobby: You see that guy sitting there in the black shirt, to his left?
Me: (Perching up out of my seat, totally sucked in like they were going to have Jim embalmed in a case wearing a shirt saying ‘You Rule Jack!’) Yeah…!
Dobby: (Pointing to a glass case, smiling at my obvious excitement) Those are Jim Morrison’s trousers!!!
Me: (Sitting back down, as Ron and Harry laugh behind their drinks) So… I’ll have the burger…
The same day, (that I have now reclassified as my birthday), this happened:
Oh, man, I totally forgot to talk about the eating out thing that I said I’d go back to. That’s just bad narration, so let’s tick that one off right now.
Eating out in LA:
There is a universally unspoken exception to the rule of high-class eating snobbery that exists to a certain extent in Los Angeles. Not even in a ‘guilty pleasures’ kind of way, or a ‘don’t mention the war’ taboo. You could eat $1000 sushi and be seen in places with the cast of The Hills and Gossip Girl, and socialites would applaud your correctly-spelled tattoos and how much you contribute to the environment by only having a 3 litre engine. These are, from my experience, luxurious and perfectly reputable places to eat, and the niche food they offer is really good. On the flip-side, there are the places that you can’t tell are still open and, on a daily basis, people queue for hundreds of yards to get in. One such place, is my favourite: Irv’s Burgers.
The hut that you see there, is the kitchen/take-away collection/service area and storage. The lady behind the counter is one of the most genuinely happy and friendly people I ever met in my 22 years as a large-faced child. She asks you what you’re doing that evening, or how your day’s going and you think it’s just friendly business. When you sit down on the plastic table and chairs under a make-shift outside roof, it feels like you’re waiting for you dad’s bad barbeque. When they bring your burger over, the lady is still smiling and is very specific about the order in which she places your burger. This is because every single burger comes with it’s very own caricature of you, with a caption picking out something you’d forgotten you’d said in the earlier conversation. That is enough to bring a smile to the faces of everyone that eats there. A few years ago the city tried to shut it down and the people of LA signed petitions in their thousands to keep this miss able little place alive. That is fucking awesome, and transcends the elitism of $2000 meals in one tiny little drawing. Everyone can relate to that.
Eating out: done.
As you would expect due to our similar life achievements, we had to take Chuck bowling. Turns out he sucked…a lot.
Santa Monica Boardwalk
The cool thing about the boardwalk, is that not a lot of people that live in LA have been there. Both Ron and Harry hadn’t. Ron at the wheel, we repetitively tapped the roof as we sailed through multiple yellow lights and tried to rinse the overwhelming smell of jasmine that the cleaner had overused from our noses. Five minutes into the journey, just as we drove past Bel Air and I kept an eye out for Uncle Phil, ‘American Pie’ by Don Mclean came on the radio, causing the patriotic reflex of volume increase. Twenty-five minutes, and thirty verses later, we arrived at Santa Monica with the same song still playing just in time for the sunset. I had some fantastic notion that David Hasslehoff was chilling in this cradling that weird red mini-surfboard thing he uses.
If you hang around town long enough you might get to see some odd reality of a supposedly ‘glamorous’ industry. Here’s an example. It was pretty chilly that evening at the boardwalk, so much so, that even I – a British holiday maker – was wearing a couple of layers. As we navigated the boardwalk, dodging running children and guys selling extremely cheap hats and Chinese versions of you name, we got to see LA in action. Struggling to balance, freezing and pouting, these girls were ‘living the dream’:
Now the boardwalk is great at sunset, but actually comes to life at night, in all its neon loveliness:
Right, that’s the tourism part of the trip out of the way. In the interests of your sanity, and my fingertips, I’ll split this blog up into two parts, the second of which will give you a run-through of all the industry-based stuff I got up to.
So here’s my interpretation.
Los Angeles is the kind of place that really messes with your expectations. The ‘high flying’ and the ‘shutdown’ co-exist and no-one bats an eye-lid, like there’s some natural selection to what survives and what turns into a liquor store.
Culture defies mathematical logic, and 400 people queue up outside a club that only lets 50 people inside to maintain its exclusivity. Those inside will tell you what they do before you ask, and you become protectively aware of your assets as a result; like you’re holding Mayfair and Park Lane but have no cash-flow.
Migrants come in their millions to audition for one role, all with their suitcases and rehearsed spontaneity, and even if you ‘make it’ you might wind up with your star outside a closed-down theatre.
Hollywood isn’t as shiny as you think, and you don’t get shot in the face every time you go to Compton. A bus driver told me, “Son, it’s like anywhere in the world – don’t be an asshole and people will be cool with you.”
He’s right. I went over there with half measures of naivety and honesty. Be willing not to take yourself too seriously and realise there’s thousands of people out there that do what you do, but better.
Smile at your good fortune and have faith that, like me, you will meet some of the gentlest, fun and kind people that make a town full of make-believe a very real and happy place.
Second part coming soon,
Jack.
