The Hotel Café: A Circle of Friends
How two young guys turned their struggling coffee shop into a community for aspiring Los Angeles singer-songwriters.
By Amy Kaufman
The L.A. Pilot
James, the door man, is thumbing through Marlon Brando's autobiography. James wants to be an actor. He never gets too many pages into his book, but when it gets slow for a while, he'll read a lot, he says.
A scruffy guy with a very thin tie and rumpled shirt drives up, so James stops reading and places his book down on top on the seats of two chairs which are flipped around to form a makeshift table. This is where he keeps the cash box, a lopsided candle that John the sound guy made for him, and a lighter with an image of a naked woman with enormous breasts on it. He's out of cigarettes.
"Hey, man," says the scruffy guy, edging his way out of his black Prius. It's Joshua Radin, a quiet singer-songwriter who's a regular here. "I'm just gonna say 'hey' to a few buddies inside for a sec, yeah?" he asks.
James doesn't charge Radin the cover. He says he knows every third person who comes to the door, but he usually makes them pay the 10 bucks to get inside. Tonight, Scarlett Johansson showed up. She was already on a guest list, so she didn't have to pay.
"I would have charged her just like anyone else if she hadn't been on the list," James says. "I mean, if anyone can fuckin' afford it, right?"
James is 32 years old and always wears a newsboy cap and some variation of plaid. He calls most girls "sweetie" or "cutie." Most nights, he doesn't mind talking, even to the drunks. He likes the company.
"I'm the alleyway psychologist," James says. "People tell me fucking everything."
He sighs and says he's tired. He had to kick a few people out earlier, since Meiko Sheppard, the Hotel Café's latest indie ingénue, is playing tonight and the room was over capacity at 200. He doesn't like turning people away but that's his job, he says, rubbing his chin.
It's calm now, though, and he can just faintly hear Meiko's slow guitar song slipping out from under the crack in the door. James picks up his Brando book again and starts reading; he's anxious to make it to the chapter about "The Godfather."
Our House
Imagine that the Hotel Café is a house: first, you drive by and almost miss the place, flashing your lights to make sure you've got the right address. 1623 ½ N. Cahuenga Blvd. No one uses the front entrance on the sidewalk, so you peek down a dilapidated alley. You're timid, but you saunter down towards the back entrance, round the corner and knock on the door. James lets you in. The first thing you pass inside is a darkened room, but you don't go in. This is the master bedroom, where the regulars hang out, make out, play the old piano and smoke. Continue through the red velvet curtains and you're in the back room, almost a communal kitchen. It's loud in here – people are slugging down beer, tapping their fingers on the wooden bar, picking at quesadillas with their backs against leather banquettes. You hear something coming from the centerpiece of the house – the living room. You walk through the swinging glass doors, pass another bar and there they are, your friends, softly facing the stage. It's tiny up there, and lots of instruments lie unused, like porcelain animals or snow globes on display on a shelf.
Once upon a time, he believes it starts, Marko Shafer and his business partner Maximillian Mamikunian decided to open a coffee shop. They were two young writers, 23 years old, who wanted a place to hang. Mamikunian had minored in economics, but Shafer had dropped out of Penn State after two years and had no business experience. They had no idea what they were doing.
So they bought this space that had been abandoned for 15 years, right below a hotel. And while they were puzzling together cheap, tiny pieces of vinyl to make the floor, they dug up an old hotel key, room B3. They thought about all of the hotels in the neighborhood; haunts that had been in Hollywood for decades while everything changed around them. So they named it the Hotel Café, even though it wasn't either.
Eight years ago, the Hotel Café consisted of a jukebox, a pool table and a couch. It didn't serve any liquor, but there was a lot of coffee. It was open from six in the morning to four in the morning. Occasionally, a jazz musician would come in and play.
And so the story goes, one day, a singer-songwriter by the name of Gary Jules rode by on his bicycle, spotted a piano in Hotel's window and halted on his brakes. Jules, who had gained popularity with the song "Mad World" on the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack, convinced Shafer to give him a residency on Tuesday nights. Slowly, singer-songwriters started trickling in. One guy, this musician Cary Brothers, had heard Jules's song and came by to hear him play. When Brothers walked in, he felt something.
Good Vibes
"I immediately felt like…something is happening here. There was a communal spirit. Bodies were packed into this room and it was B.Y.O.B., and everyone's got a bottle of wine and pack of cigarettes. People were just sitting on the floors, backed against the walls and it wasn't even uncomfortable. Everyone wanted to get in that room."
Brothers started playing at Hotel as much as he could. He felt like he could screw up a guitar lick and still be accepted at the Hotel. Sometimes, he'd be called on stage, playing parts to songs he didn't know with other musicians. He liked it there because "business existed outside of the room." He'd go to hang out, have a drink, laugh, have a good time. And when people from music labels or A&R would drop by, Brothers says, they had to come to the artists' playing field.
"It was like, 'we're gonna do what we're gonna do, and if you don't like it, fuck it. Let's go have a drink," he says. "There were never any cheeseballs at the Hotel Café. It was a douche bag free room, somehow."
Joshua Radin, the scruffster with the Prius, went to college with Brothers at Northwestern University. When his buddy raved about his new spot, Radin flew out from New York to check it out.
"And everyone was hanging out…everyone used to hang out right here," he says, scuffing his Clarks against the cement of the alley way outside. "It was like Tin Pan Alley back in the day. All the musicians would be smoking out here and talking stories, and I hadn't seen anything like that in New York, where every band kinda just sounded like The Strokes."
So he moved to Los Angeles. He and Brothers kept building a fan base out of their club house. And at the end of 2004, their close friend and fellow Northwestern classmate Zach Braff helped to catapult both of his buddies' careers. Braff, an actor on "Scrubs," placed a song by Radin and one by Brothers in his film "Garden State," whose soundtrack would later go on to win a Grammy.
The media attention from the soundtrack increased the crowds at Brothers's shows. He had to leave his living room, but he wasn't ready to do it without his friends by his side. So he talked to the owners and helped to form the first ever Hotel Café tour, sheltering the venue's lesser-known artists under its headlining acts on a national jaunt across the states.
"I knew that I didn't want to have success alone," Brothers recalls. "It's like, yeah, my career is in my hands and I have control of that. But once that's set, I want everybody to win. At the end of the day, everyone will gradually succeed and fail over the course of time. But if we're all part of this family, then everybody gets to share in each other's success together."
Family Tree
If the Hotel Café is a house, then it certainly has a family inhabiting it – an inner-circle that includes Shafer, Brothers, Radin, and a rotating cast of select musicians, girlfriends and band members.
The patriarch of the family, many say, is Brothers. He has a beard and a moustache. He usually wears a beanie. He's 34-years-old and grungy looking; unassuming.
Brothers was never into cliques, much. He calls the Hotel Café "'Cheers' with guitars." Any time he sees anybody new playing at Hotel, he says, he goes out of his way to grab them, hug them, buy them a drink and introduce them to everybody.
"Because that's the way I felt when I first walked in. Like, 'who are these people? They're never gonna like my music.' You want everybody to feel comfortable in your house."
Still, most nights, the posse is palpable. They all hang back, sipping on whiskey, eyeing the new performers and talking about their latest songs. Most of them have a bunch of facial hair and, like Radin, drive Priuses and live in Laurel Canyon, or Los Feliz – places with views of an infinite Los Angeles. They're all nostalgics, dreaming of an older, more mysterious and romantic generation from a time and place long before now.
"It's not exclusive, but at the same time, it is," says Eric Robinson, a 25-year-old with a fedora permanently topped on his head. He's a music producer who plays keys with Brothers and spends most nights at Hotel, too. "The people there are super friendly, and they wouldn't want it to feel elitist, but Hotel isn't a transient venue. I mean, the only thing that's consistent about the Troubadour is the door guy. At Hotel, there's a core community."
"So many other sects of musicians in L.A. are really cut off from others in their genre," says Robinson. "They're just really competitive, all out there fending for themselves. Artists are a particularly contentious bunch – very jealous people. But at Hotel, it's not a sales-based meritocracy. It's kind of like this beautiful level playing field where two heads are better than one."
"There totally is that group of us," Shafer acknowledges. He is 31-years-old now. He says the work is hard, and it's seven years later, and his twenties were spent stuck here. It's a lot of day-to-day, he says. It's sales tax, it's insurance, it's meeting the plumber because the men's toilet broke, it's 'do we have enough mayonnaise?'
So if it weren't for that group of people, Shafer says, he doesn't think he'd do this anymore. "We all hang out together here. We play poker sometimes or go to dinner together. But it's more important for the musicians. They go to each other's houses at 3 o' clock in the morning and write a song, or they run shit by each other, like, 'what do you think of this?' If there's somebody who's been through the ringer with a major label, they can give that advice to some of the younger people. It's a very nurturing environment."
"If you know, you know."
Shafer and Mamikunian have lots of big ideas for their brand. The Hotel Café tour is expanding to Europe and Japan next year. They want to open up other Hotel Cafés – some across the country, and definitely one in London. Shafer says there will probably be two others in L.A. – think the Hotel Lobby, an even smaller room, and then a larger Hotel Ballroom. Live recordings from the room will soon be available for download via iTunes. There's talk of a record label. Oh, and some cheap t-shirts.
"If you know, you know," went the Hotel motto. Now more people know. Brothers and Radin rarely play at the Hotel Café anymore – it can no longer hold their expanding fan bases. Hotel standbys, like Meiko, are scoring good song placement during kissing scenes at the end of popular television shows, attracting bigger crowds. More celebrities are coming by, too, like singer-actress Mandy Moore, who chose to conclude the tour in support of her first non-sugar pop album "Wild Hope" at the Hotel Café in October.
"There's this added cool air of credibility for someone like myself to be able to play there," says Moore, who discovered the venue with the help of her former boyfriend, Zach Braff. "Seriously, I feel lucky when I'm on that stage. I think I was more nervous to play there than I have been in huge venues. It's nerve-wracking, you know? You gotta step up when you play at Hotel."
"Yeah, so maybe we're popular now, but there's a reason for it," says Shafer. He ruffles his short hair and grins, eyeing dust on the floor he helped to lay. "That sounds really arrogant. But we are who we are. We're just honest. A lot of people don't wanna mix their personal life with their work. But my work is my personal life. I grew up here. And by mixing the two, we've created something real."
"When I'm 60 years old, I know I'm gonna be very proud of telling my grandkids about this place called the Hotel Café," Brothers says. "If any place has a chance to stick around for a long time, I think it's this place. It's gonna be here forever. And if it's not, then shit, at least for a while we had a place we could call home."