The following was originally published: August 22, 2002 in the LA version of the New Times. All copyright, your soul, and other stuff of the same nature is owned solely by the New Times. Yay!!!
Don't Tell Nobody
If you screw up the Hotel Cafe, Kate will kick your ass.
BY KATE SULLIVAN
Party People, I've found a magic place, for real.
The Hotel Café is its name, and beautiful unplugged shit is its game.
L.A.'s got some OK acoustic venues, fine. But until now, there's been no place that felt like home. The kind of place where you just want to hang out till the chairs are upside-down on the tables -- and then you want to help sweep up, and then stand on the sidewalk talking about nothing for an hour.
The Hotel Café offers a critical mass of talented musicians, for sure: about 47 million solo songwriters (give or take), tons of bands (including rock bands unplugging for the night), and nifty people who just come to hang out (like Lucinda Williams last week).
But my secret reason for loving it: the angry chef-ghost. (The space used to house a restaurant.) Another secret reason: When they were excavating the filled-in floor sink, the owners found an ancient hotel key buried in the plaster, room B3. It's now affixed to the cash register. (The Café shares a building with a dive hotel and the Burgundy Room on Cahuenga, just south of Hollywood.)
The owners, two young writers named Maximillian Mamikunian and Marko Shafer, opened the place in December 2000. It was supposed to be a jazzy-bookie place for people to read and drink coffee and occasionally hear some live music. Then last March, indie-folkies Gary Jules and the Group Rules had a residency at the Café. Pretty soon, Jules was booking the place.
Through the loose network of indie acoustic musicians, the Café has quickly become a fully blossomed scene, in the best sense of the word. It hovers in an ephemeral state of grace: Nobody knows about it, yet it's full of great people. In fact, it's so relaxed and un-Hollywood, so untouched by A&R gel and desperate silicone, that if you go there and act "cool," I will totally kick your ass.
"It's amazing," says singer-songwriter Julianna Raye, who's been in L.A. 15 years. "It's got such a warm and inviting energy. It's so unpretentious. It's just wonderful to have finally found that in L.A. after all these years."
Like most good art, the whole deal was borne of desperation. Jules, whose A&M record deal went bust after the Universal merger, had just recorded an independent CD last fall. "I went to Café Largo to see if I could start doing gigs there," he says. "But it was so busy and so high-profile now that I couldn't get in as regularly as I wanted to. One day I was riding my bike by [the Hotel Café] and I saw the piano in the window. I walked in there and the first second it was like, "Oh, this is it.'"
"When I first saw it, I said, "This is the two yellow lines in the middle of Fairfax Avenue,'" says Rami Jaffee, the Wallflowers keyboardist who ran the boozy Kibitz Room hootenannies in the '90s (across the street on Fairfax from the "more anal" Largo, as he calls it).
He and Pete Yorn and Marc Dauer (of Jukebox Junkies) just started an indie label, Trampoline Records. Their first record, a compilation of major-label survivors, will include lots of Hotel bands like Minibar, Phil Cody, Pete Droge, Peter Himmelman and Ethan Johns (CD party August 31 at the Café).
The most important rule at the Café is the one nobody ever talks about: Musicians gotta stick together. If you want to backbite and compete for A&R guys, go to a rock club. All you're going to find here are a lot of DIY guys helping each other out.
Jules says that the Café's family vibe was inspired by rock and punk. "The cooperation and laid-back atmosphere among musicians, and not competing for record-industry cheese, has a lot more to do with Black Flag than [anything]. It's a very do-it-yourself, indie type of vibe, which [people] learned from the Replacements, punk rock, R.E.M."
So, with people like me talking about it, is the Café doomed to lose its hothouse magic? Jules is unromantic: "It can stay cool only for so long anyway -- that's just how it works. But it's not like Max and Marco are these cunning businessmen who are going to run it into the ground. They don't know how to. They're just kids who opened a coffee shop."
Which brings me to the final, secret reason to love the Hotel Café. Remembering the pre-Gary Jules days, Max recalls, "There were times when we thought we were done for -- particularly after 9/11. But this must really be meant to be, because for several months the Café survived off Marko and me going to Santa Anita every Friday. I'd drive out here -- Marko doesn't even have a car -- and Marko was, like, "We need to win this amount today.' And we would.
"It was very Bukowski."