Three Days in L.A.

Three Days In LA

Three long days in LA just went by very fast. I return with a maze of contradictions swirling inside my confused brain. I went to LA to attend an event called the Taxi Road Rally, an annual convention sponsored by, you guessed it, Taxi, which calls itself “The World’s Leading Independent A&R Company”. Taxi members, of which there are over 11,000 including me, may attend the convention free, not counting transportation, lodging at the Westin, food, etc. Why attend? For specialized seminars put on by industry insiders willing to reveal the 6 secrets of this, the 10 secrets of that and the secret handshake too, all of which is pretty much guaranteed to catapult you to a higher tier of the musical food chain. I couldn’t resist.

Any Taxi member in attendance might, if chosen at random, have the opportunity to perform live on a big stage before hundreds of fellow musicians with the tantalizing possibility that one or two actual industry insiders might be in the room. Lucky me, I got to perform and it was the high point of my experience. But it didn’t come easily. In order to play, you had to be present when they pull your name out of a hat. In my case, that happened so late on Friday night that only twenty some folks were still in the auditorium---not exactly prime time---and this was, oddly, the best thing that could have happened. Why? Well, strangely, the next thing that happened was that they closed for the night without putting me on stage. The guy running the show felt so badly about this that he promised me a showcase opportunity on Saturday night.

Sure enough, he put me on-stage Saturday night when things were at their peak. I performed my song “Crawford”, a political rocker which takes some well-earned jabs at the Current Occupant of the White House, and received a rousing ovation. In fact, the crowd liked the message so much that during the course of the song, I received loud applause three different times. Moments such as this explain why I love being a musician. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Not to suggest that it was all nirvana and bliss in LA. Far from it. Which gets me back to the confusion and contradictions. While attending many seminar presentations at the convention, it became evident that the presenters don’t see things in their industry the same way.

Contradiction #1: “Great songs will always be recognized as such and will somehow find their way to a mass audience” vs. “No matter how great a song is, the only realistic chance for it to gain a mass audience is by first having massive exposure”.

Contradiction #2: “Hit songs require mass audience appeal; great songs appeal to the masses by avoiding controversial topics and using family-friendly lyrics with traditional song structure, i.e. verse/chorus/bridge” vs. “You greatly increase your chance of recognition and success as an indie artist if you take a unique or better yet weird approach and appeal to a niche audience”. I could go on. But trust me---nobody really knows what works and why, and anybody who says that there’s a guaranteed way to create is hit is nuttier than Mr. Hanky’s unfortunate son. Howdy ho.

And so it went. The industry insiders can’t seem to agree on many basic tenets of how the industry actually works. Then there were the Listening Panels. Musicians had the opportunity to submit songs which were then reviewed by panels of 4 or 5 A&R bigshots in front of hundreds of attendees. There were a few problems. First, so many songs were submitted that the mathematical chance that my song would be played at a session was approximately one in forty three.

Second, the average song was played for less than forty three seconds.

Third, if your song was actually played, the panel either liked it or didn’t or they couldn’t agree, and either way, it didn’t mean a thing. Some of the material was truly awful and the panelists generally found nice ways to say so. Other times the material was quite good but it’s not like any panelist was ever gushing with “I want to sign this artist now” enthusiasm.

Being a musician at the indie level is not an easy road. The journey has its highs and lows. This LA experience, for me, included plenty of both. I left safe with the knowledge that I was in good company.