Music: It’s Live in L.A. : Folk Songs, Country-Western, Blues Are Spice of Southland’s Night Life

It’s Saturday night at the Shamrock on Hollywood Boulevard. Around 10 o’clock the crowd begins to come in. Stan Sherby, perched on a bar stool under the red lights of the makeshift stage area between the Naugahyde booths, leans back with his eyes closed and croons a tune about a girl he knew back in Minnesota. His fingers deftly draw a rhythmic, harpsichord-like accompaniment from his old battered Yamaha 12-string.

Stan’s been singing since 8 o’clock, mostly to a couple of disinterested regulars, the music punctuated by the clack of billiard balls from the next room. His tip jar is empty.

But now, with the influx of a younger, hipper crowd, a number of whom have just come from an art opening at nearby Barnsdall Park, the atmosphere in the dark and cozy dinosaur of a bar livens up. A number of the newcomers are delightfully surprised to find a place with live entertainment--and someone who honors requests (when he knows them). Soon the whole place is singing and clapping. Stan’s tip jar grows green with cash.

A Rough, Disappointing Life

Great nights such as this are few and far between. The life of an itinerant singer/songwriter can be pretty rough and very disappointing, sometimes. But Stan doesn’t mind.

More times than not in his 25 years of entertaining, he’s sung to a row of backs in some dive somewhere, performing for tips, free drinks, or, if he was lucky, a weekly wage for a couple of weeks or months. As often as not, the only girlfriend he’s had is that one demanding mistress: music. The romance of this sort of life is purely in retrospect, and only in the eyes of others.

So why keep it up? Stan Sherby’s not a kid anymore. He’s 40. Can he still nurture dreams of “making it?”

“I think making it is inevitable,” he says, nursing his drink during a break, while the jukebox blares a country tune.

“I’ve paid for the privilege. It’s my turn. I’ve spent over half my life doing this. If I didn’t believe I’d make it, I’d have become a bricklayer or something by now.

“I’m driven, I guess. Do you think I like living in a car?

It may not be generally known outside of musicians’ and folk music-lovers’ circles, but Los Angeles is full of places where you can go to hear real-live home-grown music--blues (Simply Blues, Gorky’s Cafe, the Studio Suite); folk & acoustic (the Shamrock, Lhasa Club, the Music Machine, the Ensemble Theatre’s Titanic Lounge, Club Lingerie); original rock and art music (Al’s Bar, the Central, Fellini’s); traditional, Irish and original songs (Molly Malone’s)--performed by modern-day troubadours such as Stan.

The best of these performers are usually in their 30s and 40s--folks who grew up during the ‘60s and early ‘70s, and preserve the ideology of those times.

This ideology was particularly pertinent to an artistic temperament, the folk/blues musician’s ethos being molded by the likes of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Bob Dylan and Jerry Jeff (“Mr. Bojangles”) Walker.

An Underground Industry

Like the growing jazz scene (see Zan Stewart’s “All This Jazz,” The Times View Section, Sept. 19), the folk/blues scene is, to be sure, something of an underground industry--underground simply because this area is so full of major auditoriums, theaters and music halls, which cater to the popular scene dominated by big-name acts playing contemporary rock, heavy metal, country, punk, New Wave and other forms of mainstream popular music.

But you don’t have to look very hard to find small bars and clubs where you can listen to old favorites and new compositions, and sing along.

Perhaps more than any American city other than New York, Los Angeles attracts droves of hopeful musicians and songwriters every year. They come here looking for that big break or just for better wages. Some come as bands that have already established themselves locally elsewhere; others, like Stan, are solo blues, folk or rock singers, just hoping to get heard by a record producer or big-name performer.

There is, after all, considerable precedent for coming to Los Angeles to “make it.” It wasn’t too long ago that Linda Ronstadt was singing at Monday night open mikes at the Palomino, a country/Western/rock club in North Hollywood, where many aspiring musicians pay $3 for the chance to sing (one song each) before a large audience and, frequently, talent scouts and producers.

Not so long ago, Tom Waits was hanging out at the Tropicana, banging the keys and belting out the blues wherever and whenever he could around town, and Billy Joel, now a big-time rock star married to Christie Brinkley and touring all over the world, was playing at the now defunct “Executive Room” on Wilshire Boulevard downtown.

Joel’s popular tune, “Piano Man,” is all about playing in the Executive Room--the kind of place in which many young musicians wind up entertaining. In the song, he mentions “John at the bar . . . / who gives me my drinks for free.” Well, John the bartender is in fact John Maclean, who is alive and well and bartending at El Chiquitos in Burbank.

Maclean, a once aspiring actor and part-time professional photographer, remembers Joel vividly, as well as the characters decribed in the song--the kind of characters any musician who plays bars and clubs gets to know intimately.

“He wrote that song when he was working there,” says Maclean, “in about ‘72, or right in there. All the people he talks about were real. That’s what I admired about his earlier stuff; he took real people and real situations for his material.”

Maclean is an amiable, cigar-chomping sort of guy who’s seen a good deal of the bar-music business in Los Angeles. Like others--players and listeners--he laments the passing of a once-popular place in Burbank called Jason’s. This club, now a parking lot for El Torito, was until a few years ago a magnet for up-and-coming talent. “Juice Newton, Kenny Davis . . . a lot of people used to play there,” he reminisces.

Indeed, Los Angeles is a mecca for all kinds who want to get somewhere in the entertainment business. Thousands of people come here looking for success and fame, but only a very few succeed. And the bars and clubs of the area are full of those who finally gave up their dreams and settled for whatever they could get.

But there are many musicians who are still plugging away at it faithfully--and they make some of the best music. In an age where the popular music scene is dominated by loud electronics and monotonous hammering dance rhythms, Los Angeles offers the unusual opportunity to hear what’s happening on the folk level; places where you can still hear ballads based on personal trials or successes; good ol’ plain ol’ rock ‘n’ roll; irreverent, humorous ditties commenting on contemporary politics and so forth, and where singing is still frequently accompanied by the warm sound of steel strings and rosewood.

One thing that keeps many of these unknown but earnest musicians going--besides the overriding dedication to and love of music--is the dynamic and unpredictable atmosphere of this area’s entertainment industry. Let’s face it: how many other places are there where you can go out for the evening to see a local band perform at such places as Club Lingerie, McCabe’s or the Palomino, and have Bob Dylan or Roger McGuinn suddenly get up on stage from the audience to do a few tunes?

No doubt about it, the opportunities are here.

Even if the celebrity achieved on the bar/club scene is principally local, such as that attained by popular area performers such as Los Lobos, or folk singer Peter Case, or rocker Chuck E. Weiss--local celebrity in Los Angeles can have far-reaching consequences. Los Lobos, for instance, wound up playing on the sound track of the hit film “La Bamba.”

In other words, when you stop into one of the local music bars to listen to somebody you’ve never heard, you never know if you’re listening to the next top-of-the-charts artist. The music scene here is very easy going and remarkably devoid of the kind of pomposity that characterizes so much of the entertainment industry.

Big-name performers can often be seen and heard at any number of local bars and clubs, and, if they’re impressed with the work of a local artist, that person just might find unexpected work as a studio or back-up musician.

“I should have come to Hollywood years ago,” Stan Sherby says. Traveling here across country from Mason City, Iowa, in a converted school bus in 1982, he stopped first in San Diego before coming to Los Angeles. Along the way, he “stopped in at every bar I passed. Just took my guitar in with me, and sooner or later someone would ask me to play a song.”

The bus engine finally blew a few months back, which is why he’s now living in a 1962 Plymouth Valiant. Sure, it’s kind of cramped, but he’s taken out the right-hand seats to make room for a bed, and he’s got his portable mini TV that he plugs into the cigarette lighter. What more could a guy want?

Actually, Stan doesn’t have it too bad right now. He’s begun to get some attention, he’s done some recording--supposedly one of the tunes he co-wrote should be airing on the radio soon--and he’s got a steady job at the Shamrock.

Playing Street Corners

Another musician from the East Coast (Norfolk, Va.), who goes by the sobriquet Rip Tide, can be heard playing his battery-powered electronic keyboard in front of the Pioneer Market on Vermont Avenue between Sunset and Hollywood boulevards. When he gets club gigs, Rip Tide displays a whole gamut of talents, from playing popular tunes and singing to stand-up comedy.

Johnny B., a blues and rock guitarist based in Van Nuys, came to Los Angeles from Florida seven years ago and has played with bands throughout the area, doing such clubs as the Central on Sunset Boulevard, Little Nashville in North Hollywood and gigs out in Topanga Canyon--an area that has gained a reputation for promoting impromptu rock gigs, outdoors and indoors.

Yeah, the musicians are out there, and they’re working. So, if you’d like a change from the standard radio fare, heavy metal, punk, nightclub cocktail music or headliners at the Greek Theatre, go on out and poke your nose into some of the little bars and clubs around town. You just never know what you might find.