Hollywood Sign

Hollywood Sign - LA 2000
PRNewswire
December 31, 1999

At the stroke of midnight in Los Angeles, viewers around the globe will witness the first lighting of the Hollywood Sign since the 1984 Olympics. As Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan and Tonight Show host Jay Leno flip the switch on 2.7 million watts of power to illuminate the sign, they will also introduce the first-ever performance on a stage erected atop the Hollywood sign for the occasion by musician Jon Brion. Brion most recently composed the orchestral score for the hit movie Magnolia and put the polish on Fiona Apple's "Across the Universe" release for the movie Pleasantville. Brion will perform "Auld Lang Syne" live on electric guitar and other instruments in a sampling of musical styles reflecting the past 1000 years.

"Men have walked on the moon more in the last 20th century than have performed on the Hollywood Sign," says Dann Netter, Executive Producer for Television of Celebrate LA 2000. Netter, an executive at Smith-Hemion Productions, is producing the city's official 22-camera production that will be beamed to five community celebrations across the City of Angels and is expected to be seen by television viewers from Seoul to San Pedro, from Paris to Van Nuys.

"Jon is one of the most talented musicians I have ever witnessed," says Netter, who will cover the performance for television via six cameras perched around the sign. "We were looking for a singular musician who would use the theme of `Auld Lang Syne' to recap the history of music and bring it screaming forward into the new millennium," says Netter.

The extraordinary event is expected to be carried live via ABC-TV Network, CNN, Fox News Channel, PBS and many local stations and international networks.

Brion's Song

Brion's Song
Entertainment Weekly

JON BRION, the guy who put the polish on Fiona Apple's latest, is L.A.'s hottest producer and quirky King of Cool by Chris Willman

Jon Brion, studio guru, master pop craftsman, and current golden boy of the L.A. music scene, might be the late-'90s answer to the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. So it makes sense that he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt when we first encounter him. Brion's in Maui, taking a well-deserved vacation that began hours after he wrapped work on the orchestral score for director Paul Thomas Anderson's soon-to-be-released epic, Magnolia. Brion's enjoying his break, but there are signs that he just wasn't made for these climes; after two weeks, he's still pale as the tropical day is long. ''I'm not much for the sun,'' he says, explaining the pallor that's known in the trade as a studio tan.

It's been a while since Brion saw the out-of-doors. The three months he spent scoring Magnolia overlapped with the final weeks of producing When the Pawn..., the just-released, critically hailed sophomore album by Anderson's girlfriend, Fiona Apple. Before those projects, there was the matter of recording his own solo album; the constant calls to work as a session musician, with a resume that ranges from Melissa Etheridge to NIN; and the taping of a VH1 pilot. The cable series would riff on the format of Brion's musical residency at the L.A. nightspot Largo, where he has performed and hosted jam sessions nearly every Friday for the past three years. At any given 1 a.m., you might find Brion trading cover songs with the likes of Michael Stipe, Rickie Lee Jones, or some mariachi musician literally yanked off the street.

For these and a hundred other reasons, Brion might be the hippest guy that music biz insiders know and no one else has heard of. An enviable career, renown or no? ''To quote Spinal Tap, I'm jealous of me,'' he agrees, looking like he can't wait to get back to the mainland and strap on a bass.

''I think it's best to play a lot of roles within the course of your life,'' says Brion, who with his baby face, dark hair, and blond streaks looks like Duran Duran's John Taylor with a moptop. ''I don't think it's good to always be subordinate, or always be in charge. Going from artist, in which you get to be a self-centered adolescent, to producer, where you have to be film director and babysitter, to session musician, where your job is to make other people as happy as possible, to film composer, where you're creative but there are intense strictures...all these things are healthy, and I think I'd be really miserable as a human being doing [just] one of them.''

Brion enjoys a rep as the quintessential muso who can, and will, play any instrument; his production jobs for Apple, Rufus Wainwright, and Aimee Mann have brought a Beatlesque spirit back to pop with sonically enchanting shifts between distorted guitars, music-hall horns, gentle piano, and trumpet blasts. But it was his penchant for collecting half-busted synthesizers that got him known in early-'90s L.A. as ''the weird keyboard guy.'' That urge dates back to growing up in New Haven, Conn., the son of a part-time singer mother and orchestra-conducter father with avant-garde, Moog-playing friends. The morning after a living-room demo, Brion's parents found their 7-year-old asleep in his pj's, headphones on, draped over a modular synth.

At 36, the boyish wonder is excited about his newest instrument: the orchestra. He'd cowritten the score for Anderson's first movie, Hard Eight, but that was all synths. Chuckles the director: "I'm proud to say Magnolia taxed Mr. Musical Genius Boy to his ultimate brainpower." For Brion, hearing his score played by an 80-piece orchestra was "deeply enthralling, but also depressing, because it's so wildly cost-prohibitive."

So far, the only CD release for his magnificently brooding Magnolia score is a promo sent to Academy members for Oscar consideration. It may become an instant collector's item--just like the few advance copies that slipped out of Meaningless, the solo album Brion recorded this year for Atlantic Records. The label took out trade ads trumpeting its arrival, before quietly scuttling its release in September, believing the record's Squeeze-like power pop was too great a stretch for the marketplace. Lava/Atlantic Records president Jason Flom calls the album an "artistic triumph," but adds, quizzically, that "ultimately we felt neither Jon nor the songs...would be served by a major label release."

Brion seems thrilled to have been given his album back. He figures the last straw was when he informed Atlantic that he was reluctant to support the record with a standard tour. He'd been down that soul-sapping path with the Grays, a band that released one Epic album in '94 before flaming out. Why spend a year flogging the same set each night when new creative opportunities pop up every week at home? "The irony is, I love to play live, but I guess my ultimate would be a sort of rock Branson, where people could come see me in my natural habitat," he laughs.

Of course, it's not like they completely improvise their shows in Branson, Mo. It's the first Friday in December, and Brion, who returned from vacation the night before and is nursing a cold, is already back at his Largo gig. "Aloha. I'll be performing an all Jimmy Buffett tribute set tonight," he warns the crowd, referring to the lei around his neck.

The set includes just about everything but "Margaritaville." There are tunes from Brion's album (which he plans to sell to another company or distribute himself next year). There are experiments with tape loops. There's bona fide ragtime! When country crooner Gillian Welch and Grant Lee Phillips sit in, a Buddy Holly medley results. But when Brion is alone on stage, it's like watching a mad professor at work through a large observation window.

"To some it might come off as self-indulgent," Brion said in Maui, explaining the improv urge that may keep him from ever going through the promotional mechanics that would raise his public profile. "But I am so f---ing tired of people thinking it's not self-indulgent to have your carefully rehearsed 45-minute set. How dare you not put any of yourself on the line for me! I consider it a considerate thing to try and perform on the spot and take the knocks for it."

Back at the club, someone hollers out for "Someone to Watch Over Me." Brion plays it as an effective jazz-piano instrumental, but after a couple minutes you sense him getting bored. Then he's struck by an idea. The jazz rhythms turn into pounding chords, he starts singing in falsetto, and the lyrics become interspersed with grand, Brian Wilson-like "Ooh-ooh-oooohs." In an offhand, probably never-to-be-repeated moment, Brion has transformed the Gershwin standard into a great lost Pet Sounds outtake. Screw Hawaii, and the music-biz fast track: This is paradise.

The Producer

The Producer
Time Vol. 154 No. 24
BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY
December 13, 1999

Jon Brion's album Meaningless could have been one of 1999's best solo debuts--but you may never get to hear it. Lava/Atlantic, Brion's label, decided the CD wasn't sufficiently marketable and never released it. "I was treated as if I had handed in my 'art record,' as if I had intentionally done some horribly self-destructive thing," says Brion. "I thought I handed in something that was reasonably commercial."

This month the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter gets his chance to be heard. Brion, 35, composed the introspective instrumental score to Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia (Anderson is a longtime friend of Brion's) and produced five songs on the sound track (including Aimee Mann's intimate cover of the Harry Nilsson standard One). Brion also produced Fiona Apple's terrific new CD.

Listening to a Brion-produced song is like entering a tastefully decorated drawing room. Brion--who plays piano, drums and guitar--often fills his music with warm instrumentation but never overwhelms a song's emotional content. In his own compositions, his lyrics are playfully pensive. "I wish I could say that we'd fallen from grace," he sings on Dead to the World, a song from his solo CD. "But we never made it to that place." Says Brion: "The willingness to fall on your face pays for the moments that are a little more transcendent." He's now shopping his shelved solo CD to other labels, but with the Magnolia sound track, Brion has already achieved a good measure of grace.

Versatile Musician Creates, Waits

Versatile Musician Creates, Waits
Los Angeles Times
December 1999
By STEVE APPLEFORD

While producing hit albums for others, Jon Brion is patient when it comes to having his own music finally break out.
It isn't as if Jon Brion hasn't got anything to do. Just in the last year, he has produced Fiona Apple's acclaimed "When the Pawn Hits . . . " album, composed the orchestral score for Paul Thomas Anderson's hot new film "Magnolia," and maintained a popular weekly gig of pop improvisation at the Largo club on Fairfax. Entertainment Weekly recently dubbed the versatile sideman and innovative producer "the king of the L.A. music scene." He has little fame beyond that scene, but that situation was supposed to change with the scheduled release in the fall of his first album as a recording artist, "Meaningless," on the Atlantic-affiliated Lava Records. Instead, Lava informed Brion in late August that since the album had uncertain prospects for radio airplay, promotional support for "Meaningless" would be minimal. He was offered the chance to leave the label and take the album with him. And so he did.

"A dreadful inconvenience" is the way Brion regards the episode, which isn't too bad, considering. "One of the nice things for me is that I work on records all the time," he adds. "That's basically my life: playing with somebody else, or producing somebody else, or being peripherally involved in something. I've watched tons of compatriots go through hell over the years. I have a healthy dose of cynicism going in, so I'm not pissed off or even surprised."

* * *

The master tapes of "Meaningless" now sit as a conversation piece in the living room of his home in the Hollywood Hills, a repository for his songs of frayed love affairs and pop arcana, set to a sound that is undeniably modern, yet rooted in the experimental pop legacy of the Beatles, Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren and Stevie Wonder. Brion hopes to see the record released next year on another label. Meanwhile, he has few harsh words for Lava President Jason Flom, the man who ultimately rejected "Meaningless." Instead, he blames a music industry that he sees as increasingly unlikely to embrace music that lacks clear radio potential. With MTV playing fewer and fewer music videos, there is nowhere else to turn for exposure. Brion's unwillingness to endure months of touring, repeating the same set of songs night after night, was also a factor in the label's decision.

"I take my artists and my records very personally," says Flom, who has enjoyed mass success with such acts as Sugar Ray, Matchbox 20 and Kid Rock. "I consider them like family, and I never want to release a record if I'm not going to go to the wall for it. And I didn't think it was a record that would be embraced by radio. We were very limited in our avenues to promote this thing. "I had too much respect for Jon to just throw his record out there and see what happens. I can't do that."

* * *

But there were early signs that Brion's commitment to his own muse might clash with Lava's plans for him. He had nearly finished a mostly acoustic album a year ago when he first felt some resistance.

"They totally didn't get that," Brion remembers of those early sessions, which he also hopes to release. "And that was my first moment of 'Uh-oh, I could be in trouble.' I actually talked to them about the possibility of leaving the label then." Brion instead came back with the tracks for "Meaningless," which offered a rich pop sound not unlike the music he has produced for Apple, Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Mann. But he was finally told that there was no obvious single among the tracks.

"A lot of people I work with, who I respect a lot, make unpopular pop music," says Brion. 36. "It's an odd thing. Elliott Smith or Aimee Mann or the Andy Partridges [from XTC] of the world, these are talented people. And at best they occasionally reach [250,000 to] 300,000 people. These aren't looked on as good bets by record companies. The reason any of us manage to get signed is there are some music fans who happen to become record [business] people."

Brion's passion for music began when he was a boy in New Haven, Conn., where he collected old jazz 78s from the '20s and '30s. He soon mastered swing drums, and played behind the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter as part of Yale's Ellington Fellowship program. He changed course when he discovered punk rock at age 15, finding new inspiration in the pop and rock canon.

After arriving in Los Angeles at the beginning of the '90s, he embarked on a busy career, working as a sideman and producer with Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith, Apple and many others.

Brion fears that the days when big, successful labels could afford to support artists with uncertain commercial appeal are over. The careers of such major talents as Lou Reed and Neil Young have sometimes depended on that kind of support between hits. It was also an attractive signal to rising artists. R.E.M. famously signed to Warner Bros. in part because the company had nurtured such iconoclasts as Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks. And the aggressively anti-corporate Nirvana was comfortable signing to Geffen largely because it was the home of punk heroes Sonic Youth.

* * *

Are those days truly over?

"I'd like to think that's not the case," Flom says. "My label is a very small label. I only have about 11 artists. One of the reasons we're successful is that I'm able to spend so much time making sure those artists get promoted and marketed properly."

So instead of promoting his album over the next few months, Brion will now be writing new songs. And the phone keeps ringing with production jobs for new artists. "I've received [offers] for Atlantic [artists] since then, which my girlfriend and I have a nice chuckle about," Brion says. "Wait, you guys just got rid of me for not being commercial enough, and now you want to put me in charge and responsible for hundreds of thousandsof dollars and the future success of other artists?

"It's very ironic."

Pop Purée

Pop Purée
By Don Waller
Wednesday, January 27, 1999 - 12:00 am

"Supertramp!" shouts someone in Largo's Friday-night audience. Sitting at the piano, Jon Brion starts tapping out "The Logical Song." "Okay," he leers, "but you have to sing it." And they do, every bleepin' illogical word.
Thirty minutes later in the set, with the deathless tones of Jewel reading the audiobook version of her best-selling poetry wafting through the club's sound system, Brion wanders behind a conveniently empty drum kit, calls upright-bassist Glen Hollman to the stage and proceeds to provide suitably appropriate pseudo-jazz accompaniment. Sixty minutes earlier, Brion was singing ye olde Joe Cocker hit "You Are So Beautiful" over a trip-hop drum loop and a heapin' helpin' of white-noise guitar whizzums.

Somewhere in the hypnotic, splattered midst of all this guerrilla-pop theater, Brion tossed off faithful covers of Randy Newman's "Marie," Billie Holiday's "Me, Myself and I" and '80s Britpop footnotes the Korgis' "Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime" -- and a half-dozen of his own toppermost-of-the-poppermost tunes, some of which may wind up on the 35-year-old, multi-instrumentalist record producer's forthcoming solo album for Lava/Atlantic Records.

"I just got sick of going to see acts do the same 10 songs every night -- with the exact same song introductions!" Brion laughs. He's been doing these Friday nights at Largo for about two and a half years now -- maybe 120 shows -- and about a third of every show has been pure improv, whether he's taking requests, getting people from the audience up onstage or just inventing songs on the spot.

"And a lot of the credit," Brion says, "should go to Scott Fritz, who's sitting in the sound booth feeding me cues -- tape loops, musical samples, spoken-word stuff.

"But the real credit belongs to [Largo owner] Mark Flanagan, who's truly one of L.A.'s great cultural assets -- not just for allowing me to do these shows, or for giving Andy Prieboy a place to do his Axl Rose musical, but for helping me to cultivate an audience. I mean, it took about four months for the thing to really catch on." Since then, it's been sold out every week.

Soon, cable music channel VH1 will be shooting a pilot based around Brion's weekly shenanigans. "We can't do it at the Largo, 'cause there isn't room for all the cameras," Brion says. "But it'll be taped live in front of an audience. Obviously, because of all the improvisation, we're going to have to shoot for several hours and edit it down to an hourlong show. We'll have some guests, but it's not going to be where people just come on and play their hit single. If they do, we won't do it in the form that people are used to hearing it -- like maybe we'll do a heavy metal song in a Fats Waller stride-piano arrangement."

Brion's Largo residency has featured drop-in performances by everyone from eccentric pop-rockers (R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe, Neil Finn, Aimee Mann, Grant Lee Buffalo leader Grant Lee Phillips, ex Men at Work vocalist Colin Hay) and eclectic singer-songwriters (Rickie Lee Jones, Elliott Smith, Victoria Williams, Ron Sexsmith, Mary Lou Lord, Michael Penn) to seasoned session cats (Tom Petty sideman Benmont Tench, first-call drummer Jim Keltner, Pete Thomas of Elvis Costello and the Attractions fame) and two of Brion's current record-production clients (Fiona Apple and Robyn Hitchcock). Not coincidentally, Brion -- who's previously produced critically acclaimed albums for Aimee Mann and Rufus Wainwright -- has played upward of two dozen different instruments on many of these same artists' records. The former Grays guitarist can also be heard on discs by the Wallflowers, Eels, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, John Hiatt, Taj Mahal, Eleni Mandell and the Mommyheads.

"All that guest stuff got a little out of hand," Brion says. "People started writing -- often erroneously -- about who was going to show up, and all of a sudden there were all these Hollywood types standing at the bar, talking the whole way through the set, hoping to see . . . I don't know, Michael Stipe or somebody. Star spotting. I had to quit having guests for a few months to get things back to normal. I'd have to get up there and tell people, 'Look, if you came here to see some big rock stars tonight, you can get your money back at the door.'

"But the main thing I've learned from doing these shows is that the audience is much more musically sophisticated than anyone in the record business thinks. There've been nights when the audience is singing along, and half the people are doing all the weird background vocals in all the right spots -- in perfect harmony, too -- and it sounds just incredible onstage. Too bad I'm the only one who gets to really hear it."