The Hotel Cafe Los Angeles

Los Angeles has birthed and bred a wide variety of music scenes, but they tend to burn bright and fade quickly. To name just two examples, the leopard-print glitz of '80s hair metal (in which a good riff was only slightly more important than a good dye job) and the reckless energy of the city's early new wave seemed designed from the start to live fast, die young, and leave good-looking back catalogs.
The local singer-songwriter tradition, however, has endured despite the passing of years and turning of trends. We've hosted acoustic soul-barers from Neil Young to Pete Yorn, and, when the genre was enjoying its heyday in the late 1960s and '70s, artists such as Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, and Crosby, Stills and Nash spread the Laurel Canyon love worldwide. "There was a moment here in the '70s where you couldn't be a singer-songwriter without having a major label ready to sign you," says local musician Gary Jules, who has been playing in L.A. for years. "It was an amazing time."
Such a time just may be coming around again, thanks in part to Jules himself, with a little help from the owners of the Hotel Café, a small Hollywood coffeehouse turned singer-songwriter haven. It's too soon to peg this intimate space – located in the heart of the Cahuenga strip between Hollywood Boulevard and Selma Avenue – as the next Troubadour or Whisky a Go-Go. But the club's name comes up a lot these days, usually attached to enthusiastic raves about such gifted songsmiths as Jules. Further bolstering the buzz, the Café has been attracting quality acts from out of town. Indeed, over the last two years, the small venue has hosted a steady stream of established and upcoming artists, and this loosely organized family of musicians has come to call the Café home.
"It's happened slowly," says Hotel Café co-owner Marco Shafer of the scene's build-up. "We didn't try to force it, so hopefully it will stay around that much longer."
"I like everything about the Hotel Café," says Trevor Lissauer, who currently has a monthly residency there. "I like how it looks, kind of like an old jazz club, and I like the fact that people actually come to listen. It's like a theater that way; the focus is on who's up on the stage."
In this way, the Hotel Café recalls Largo, the Fairfax Avenue nightclub that for several years has been one of the city's more notable venues for singer-songwriter performances. Like Largo, the Café also offers silence, shelter, and sanctity to acoustic artists ill-suited for noisy rock clubs. Yet Largo is decidedly upscale, with a larger room, a full bar, and an extensive dinner menu, while the Hotel Cafe remains true to its cozy coffeehouse roots. Although the club was recently granted a liquor license and now sells cold beer, caffeine remains the drug of choice. In general, the feel is low-key and comfortable, with a young, casual crowd of not only music fans but musicians as well.
"The whole idea was to have a place that would run itself, which we're laughing at [now]," says Shafer, who bought the space nearly three years ago with friend and business partner Maximillian Mamikunian. The pair hoped to create a comfortable late-night hangout. "We didn't have any intention of becoming a venue," Shafer adds. "We did some jazz stuff, but it was very sporadic."
Still, Mamikunian recalls, "Everything was trucking along and doing fine." Indeed, the Café was enjoying a brisk business, serving a regular clientele of insomniacs and caffeine addicts, when the events of September 11, ¯ 2001, threw off its momentum. "It destroyed us," Mamikunian says. "Everyone went back to their old haunts, to where they were more comfortable. We were dead in the water, and that's when, literally, Gary came riding by."
At the time, Jules had just completed school, a new album, and a successful residency at Largo. "I was looking for a place to play and do another residency," he says. "I had a lot of friends who were top-quality players. I felt like we just had to find the right place and make it happen." When he rode by the Café and saw the piano through the window, he says, "I came in and kept bugging them to let me play."
The result was a Tuesday-night residency, with Jules's band playing alongside acts such as moody roots band Minibar and the Jukebox Junkies. Eventually, the singer-songwriter began booking the club as well, and the response to his lineups was overwhelming. Shafer and Mamikunian had unwittingly provided the perfect atmosphere for the kind of music Jules and his friends were making – a quiet, intimate spot where people came to meet and drink, but mostly to listen.
"When I first walked in," recalls Ethan Gold, a singer-songwriter and co-founder of a songwriters collective known as the Expatriates, "I felt like I had found the Holy Grail of acoustic-music venues."
Almost all the musicians who have played the Hotel Café seem to concur with Gold's assessment. In a remarkably short amount of time, the place has become not only a successful live venue but also a kind of all-purpose clubhouse for this burgeoning community of L.A. songwriters.
"Most of the people who come here know each other," says Shafer, "because most of the people who play here, hang out here, too."
The Café gave these artists a chance to manufacture community, Jules notes. "L.A., especially Hollywood, is such a transient area," he says. "You need to create a space where it's like, ‘Hey, this is your place,' where people feel like they belong. The musicians who play here support one another. Instead of competition, you get encouragement, which is what you need to really build a scene."
Jim Bianco is another local musician who both performs at and patronizes the Café. "Go there on any given night," he says, "and there's really good music playing, Marco and Max are working, and half the crowd is musicians. I think everyone who plays there really enjoys coming to hear the other musicians, to see what everyone else is up to, what they're working on. There's definitely a community there, which isn't exactly something L.A. is known for. If you play there, you know you're in good company."
This good company includes not only Angelenos, but visiting singer-songwriters from around the country. The club receives 15 to 20 demos a week from as far away as Canada, Michigan, and New York. "And that's with a post on our Web site saying we can't take any demos right now!" says Mamikunian with a laugh.
"It's overwhelming," notes Shafer, who now books the club. "Right now we already have about 100 artists who are regulars, who do really well." Among these are quite a few established artists, including such up-and-coming musicians as Pete Yorn and Patrick Park.
"It's just a really good feeling in there," says Park. "For singer-songwriters, having to play at rock clubs is kind of a crapshoot, but the Hotel Café provides the kind of space you want."
What really sets the Hotel Café apart, Biano says, "is that it's owned by real music-loving people. And that's an understatement – these guys dig music more than musicians do. That's why it's got such a great reputation."
It's a reputation that only gets better with time, but Mamikunian isn't bragging. "We are what we are," he says. "We don't try to be anything. We just let the space do its own thing."
As Jules points out, "All a club is, is a room with music in it. The magical part is defined by the people that come there – by the things that happen there – and all the magic stuff that gets left behind. That's what people will talk about years later, and that's what makes a place really endure."
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