Spontaneous Combustion

Spontaneous combustion
By Joan Anderman

It's Friday night, and Jon Brion is doubled over, looking a bit mad about the eyes. He's fiddling with the knobs on a box that sits on the floor. The box begins to produce sounds - at first a gauzy sort of scratching, then a steady stream of woolly beats. Brion fusses for a good long time, sampling and adjusting, twisting and turning, hunting for some elusive blend of texture and rhythm. It's clear that he has no idea where he's going; one can only hope he'll know it when he gets there.

Brion, however, is cheerfully oblivious. The fact that a standing-room-only audience is watching him fumble toward a song doesn't seem to be cause for concern. Finally satisfied with the swarm of frayed sound loops he's managed to coax from the box, Brion raises his lanky body and turns his attention to a Yamaha home organ perched on the tiny, cluttered stage.

We are in a Hollywood nightclub called Largo, but the nondescript storefront surrounded by Fairfax Avenue's kosher delis and bagel bakeries is as unassuming as the mop-topped fellow messing around onstage. It's a plain, square room filled with small tables, bar along the back wall, lights down low. No one is talking on a cell phone or blowing air kisses. There are no clusters of scenesters trying to be heard over the performance they just paid to see. Everyone is ... listening.

Brion runs the old organ through a couple of fuzz boxes, making the usually braying keyboard squeal and sparkle. Suddenly a lush melody pours off the stage, and Brion's eyebrows rise with the swell of gorgeous notes. He seems to have surprised himself and quickly stretches for another keyboard. Now a sound like tuned gusts of wind blows between the notes and out over the hushed crowd.

"Somebody give me a title. Preferably for a song that hasn't been written," Brion pleads. He is drinking Guinness and coffee, the poor man's speedball, and promises to ride this beverage until he starts playing in tune. Song titles fly from the audience, and Brion considers the offerings: "Love Canal." "Going, Going, Gone." "Shiny Coat Bar." He's laughing, and then he's off.

In the span of a few minutes, Brion gives birth to a tune called "Dashboard." It's all pinging beats, softly distorted guitar, and Brion's voice sliced into a dozen perfect layers, courtesy of another little box called a harmonizer. The song is as close to a piece of pop heaven - a little bit Beach Boys, a dash of Elvis Costello, haunting echoes of the Beatles - as you can imagine emerging after days of laborious composing, let alone cobbling on the spot. The words tumble out unhesitatingly, in verse, although one would be hard pressed to say exactly what "Dashboard" is about. No matter - it will never be sung again.

Brion is on a roll now. He transforms the rock anthem "Itchycoo Park," by the Small Faces, into a dance-hall ditty. Next, he offers his idea of a love song, revealingly titled "You Can Still Ruin My Day." Then he reworks "Happiness," the first single from folk-punk songwriter Elliott Smith's upcoming CD.

And then, without warning, a remarkable pageant begins to unfold. One by one, a veritable who's who of music crams into Largo's little performance space.

British rocker Robyn Hitchcock leaps into Brion's arms and spews a string of incoherent rants into the microphone, capped by a cathartic take on David Bowie's "All the Young Dudes." Hitchcock and Brion are joined in short order by alt-rock hero Grant Phillips (of Grant Lee Buffalo), who has been sitting cross-legged on the floor at the base of the stage. Later, Neil Finn, from Crowded House, and Heartbreaker Benmont Tench, Tom Petty's keyboard player, emerge from a corner booth to join them, as does Wendy Melvoin (from Prince's band), who grabs a bass, and the illustrious pianist Mitchell Froom (who has produced albums for everyone from Los Lobos to Richard Thompson to Froom's former wife, Suzanne Vega). Froom's girlfriend, Vonda Shepard (Ally McBeal's musical alter ego), sings harmonies under her breath from a table in the back. Finally, at about 2 a.m., Elliott Smith saunters down the back stairs and onto the stage, where Brion bullies him into singing the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset."

Literally elbow-to-elbow, the spontaneously generated supergroup barrels through a raucous stream of covers pitched by the audience: "I Love Rock and Roll," "I Saw Her Standing There," "Jumping Jack Flash," "Heartbreak Hotel," and "Sunshine Superman." Brion is giddy and grinning, even a little insane-looking. The tiny stage looks as if it might cave in, not so much from the physical weight but from the sheer collective creative heft.

This is by far the coolest live show in LA. And its roots stretch cross-country, all the way to Boston's Kenmore Square.

In an age of factory-generated entertainers, mass-marketed style, and connect-the-dots hits, Jon Brion is a true original. He walks the high wire on Friday nights at Largo with his spontaneous compositions, but his influence spans the music world as a film composer, recording-studio guru, and master pop craftsman.

Since moving West from Boston nine years ago, Brion has slowly and surely infiltrated the Los Angeles recording industry, long dominated by guitar-slinging technicians and soulless programmers. He drives to recording sessions in his dented Volvo, laden with guitars and chamberlins, harmoniums and sighing machines, drums and basses, mandolins and music boxes. (He is, to clarify, a multi-instrumentalist.) Artists as wildly diverse as the Wallflowers, Nine Inch Nails, Macy Gray, Melissa Etheridge, the Eels, Taj Mahal, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, and David Byrne have called on Brion to contribute a sound that's simultaneously indefinable and signature. If that sounds like an oxymoron, it is. Brion has become unofficially known as "that weird-instrument guy."

A work day might go something like this: Walk into a session where he's been hired to play tambourine for two minutes, mention discreetly that he really just hears a vibraphone in the chorus, and maybe marimba and toy piano on the verse, and in the course of the afternoon he lays down 20 tracks of instruments.

Last year, Brion wrote the beautifully haunting score for Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia and finished work on his own solo album, Meaningless. At around the same time, VH1 filmed a pilot for a series based on the Largo shows. In the last couple of years, Brion has produced stunning albums for Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, and Fiona Apple that are as quirky as they are classic. In the bargain, Brion finds himself at the forefront of a renaissance in smart, spirited pop music.

For all his brilliant work as a hired hand, though, it's the Friday night residency that crystallizes Brion's musical raison d'etre and puts him at the epicenter of LA's new-Bohemian music culture. At Largo, there are no set lists, no guidelines, no forethought whatsoever. The concept is simple: an evening of spontaneous music by Brion and a revolving cast of talented guests. It's like a pop-music salon - a sonic Algonquin round table for the post-Beatles set.

It was just a few months ago that Beth Orton and Beck showed up at Largo's side door, guitars in hand. Neil Young, Michael Stipe, and Elvis Costello have dropped by. Rickie Lee Jones and Fiona Apple are regulars. But it's Brion, a New Haven native and former Bostonian, who leads the charge through these uncharted waters - armed with a passion for the vintage retro pop of the Beatles and Beach Boys and an insatiable desire to find newer and odder and more beautiful ways to build a song.

It might involve a 40-minute version of John Coltrane's take on "My Favorite Things," or a hushed sing-along of "God Only Knows," or a surf rendition of "Riders on the Storm." Brion once yanked a mariachi musician off the sidewalk to play with him. Odds are good he'll play an ending three times, just because it sounds cool. There's always a handful of Brion's winsome, literate originals on tap and no shortage of instant music.

It's no small trick, this composing on the spot or spearheading these rambling, shambolic musical affairs. For Brion, it's nothing short of a prerequisite, and he discusses his philosophy of modern pop with missionary zeal. In fact, it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that Brion is on a mission from ... well, who knows. We are ingesting caffeine at Stir Crazy on Melrose a few days after the show.

"The notion that we should be excited about a performance because it has two distorted guitars, a bass and drums, and hopefully a charismatic lead singer, doing their marvelous three to five pieces of music, is atrocious," says Brion. Thirty-seven years old, gangly and baby-faced, Brion is the picture of cheesy vintage-chic in green corduroy and plaid. It's clear after 10 minutes of conversation that he's the type who has always been too smart, too outspoken, too original for his own good. History bears this out: Twenty years ago, Brion was the whip-smart kid who failed so miserably in school that he wound up in special-ed classes. Today, he's the gifted songwriter who can't get his record released.

"I know a lot of the things that I like, like improvisation, have classically been referred to, especially in the postpunk world, as self-indulgent. But I'm sorry. I don't think that performing the same songs every night is even slightly considerate," Brion says. "When you're doing that, you are basically turning off your subconscious and turning off your own enthusiasm. And no matter how much gusto you try to play with every night, there's a spark that's missing. That spark comes from the moment of discovery, which is not a repeatable thing."

Which brings us to the verbal brawl at the breakfast joint in Kenmore Square a decade ago, with musician friends Aimee Mann, Buddy Judge, and Ron Baldwin.

Brion: Wouldn't it be great if there was somebody who never did the same set, ever?

Friends: It would suck.

Brion: It's gotta be hypothetical. A hypothetical performer who wrote all the songs on the spot.

Friends: Yeah, but then the songs would suck.

Brion: Please, hypothetical argument. Let's say the songs were as good as any Burt Bacharach/Cole Porter/Beatles/Hank Williams song. You name it. As good as anything. And they never repeated it. I say that you'd go see that all the time.

Brion, who recounts the conversation with glee, is quick to clarify: "I can't write like any of the people mentioned. But once I started doing the Largo thing, I realized that it was my opportunity to show that this can work. There are people who have seen over a hundred shows of mine. What's beautifully ironic is that after Aimee moved out here, she started coming every week [to Largo], and all she ever wanted to hear were songs made up on the spot. She would come with a list of titles she had been thinking up all week to throw at me. It was her favorite thing."

Talk to his friends, and Brion's Boston years would seem to be characterized by crashing on people's couches. "He lived on our sofa for a year and a half" when he arrived in Boston, recalls Mike Denneen, owner of Q Division, Boston's premier studio and record label. "When he got his own apartment, half the free world rejoiced."

Denneen and Brion played together in a band called the World's Fair, which did only a handful of gigs around town at the Rat and other area clubs. Mostly, Brion says, he spent his Boston years "obsessively writing songs and recording and gigging around town, helping Aimee out."

Brion speaks of Aimee Mann, the former lead singer for the band 'Til Tuesday, often and with great feeling. They met shortly after Brion moved to Boston in 1987 and are longtime collaborators and kindred musical spirits. Brion produced Mann's first two solo albums as well as the soundtrack to Magnolia, a collection of Mann compositions that Paul Thomas Anderson says inspired him to write his Academy Award-nominated movie. Brion and Mann were also lovers for much of the four years that he lived in Boston. (Mann is now married to singer-songwriter Michael Penn, actor Sean Penn's brother.)

Everything, Brion says, happened at Q Division. "Q was central to my creative life; it was the central creative place in a lot of people's lives. I'd play on things Mike was producing, and he'd engineer things I was producing. Not that there was a lot of session work in Boston. If you got $50, you were absolutely amazed." It was, however, the start of a working relationship and friendship that continue to this day. Brion and Mann returned to Q Division last year to record much of the Magnolia soundtrack, which Denneen engineered.

Anyone who's spent time with struggling musicians can attest to the fact that a large proportion tend to leave the television on a lot; it seems to function as some sort of comforting white noise, an equalizer, perhaps, to mediate the racket in their heads. For Brion, though, whose learning style has always been slightly left of alternative, vegging in front of the tube was an academic experience.

"In Boston, I used to watch TV with an unplugged electric guitar, on the couch, and commercials would come on, and I'd try to play along. It was one of the prime things I concerned myself with for several years, getting to the point where if I heard it, I could play it. You know, 'We're American Airlines....' " Brion sings and hums the rest of the jingle enthusiastically. "Then I started working on getting my brain to do multiple things at once. And having my hands translate them."

"He's a musical genius," Denneen says. "He can hear counterpoint in his head in less time than it would take to have it come out in the air. He can spatially visualize in his mind how lines will interweave. He has complete command of basically anything he has ever heard. No one knew what to do with him." That theme - of simultaneously being awed by Brion's gifts and not having a clue how to translate them into the mortal world - crops up again and again when talking with label executives, television producers, and colleagues. Denneen agrees that it's an archetypal artistic dilemma.

"He lives improvisation," says Denneen. "It's a daily way of life for Jon. His best creative work is when he's playing unconsciously, therefore the first thing that comes out of him is almost always amazing. But when we played in the World's Fair together, if you weren't ready to turn on a dime . . ." Denneen's voice falls off, suggesting disaster.

They were lean but fruitful years, Brion says, laboring to make the musical connection between his head and his hands and honing the art of distilling 30 years of pop songcraft and an obsession with jazz improvisation into a sound he could call his own. "Like everyone else, I just scraped by. But there were a lot of things that were very important to me about Boston," Brion says. "There was culture in Boston. I met intelligent people of all stripes. And I didn't have to walk around in defense posture, like I would have had to do in New York." Brion seriously considered moving back to Boston in 1993, after two years in Los Angeles. He returned often during the next year and a half, working on Mann's second solo album and sleeping, once more, on people's couches.

"I love Boston. I missed the architecture. I missed all kinds of things," Brion says. "When I visited, I would go to a party with friends and meet people and instantly have a two-hour conversation that I enjoyed." But the work in LA started trickling in, and there was precious little to be found in Boston. Just as he was poised to return East for good, "I got some calls to play on some sessions," Brion recalls. "It just started to snowball. And it turned into an avalanche."

The way LaRue Brion remembers it, her third child's predilection for music was apparent early on. "When other kids were batting their mobiles, Jon was sort of organizing little percussion ensembles with the rattles," says LaRue Brion, who recently retired as administrative assistant at a Yale residential hall and once sang in jazz bands. Brion's father, Keith, was director of the Yale concert and marching bands, and his siblings, Randy (now 43 and an orchestrator/arranger in LA) and Laurie (a violinist, 41), were both avid music students. By preschool, Brion was performing the Beatles catalog in a spot-on English accent. The Beatles are, to this day, the most obvious and pervasive influence on his music.

When it came time to start kindergarten, LaRue Brion recalls, "Jon was bitter. It cut into his drumming time." That same year, 1967, the family went to hear the New York Philharmonic perform Mahler's 9th Symphony. LaRue didn't think Jon would make it through the first movement. Much to her surprise, the boy didn't utter a peep. "He listened. He just listened." She still has Jon's kindergarten autobiography, in which he instructed his teacher to write down two sentences: "I am Jon Brion. I am a musician."

"Everything he did to learn music defied everything I knew," says Keith Brion, who works as a freelance symphony orchestra/pops conductor and leader of a John Philip Sousa band in California. "He was a Suzuki violin dropout. He had one or two drum lessons. He didn't take well to instruction. It just didn't ...work." Instead, Jon crawled under pianos, lodged behind drum sets, and listened. By the time he started junior high, Brion was skilled on piano and guitar and something of a drum prodigy. He had also become obsessed with jazz. At 12, Brion began sitting in with visiting jazz musicians like Benny Carter, Dizzy Gillespie, and Slam Stewart in New Haven clubs at the invitation of Willy Ruff, who ran the Ellington program at the Yale School of Music.

"Jon had studied old jazz records from the time he was a small child," says LaRue Brion. "He knew all the original arrangements. And he remembers every note he's ever heard." Keith Brion says he never heard Jon play the same eight bars twice. "We're talking about a 7- or 8-year-old kid. Usually a kid will play a pattern, over and over, and then play another pattern. Jon always twisted and turned."

Like many intensely creative kids, Jon Brion was a dismal student. "I had terrible study habits," recalls Brion, who wound up in a special-education class at Hamden High School with mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed kids. "Eventually, the teacher said to me, "I don't know if you realize what kind of trouble you're in. There's no place lower than this.' I was 14 or 15 at the time, but I was very conscious of the fact that every day there were six hours that I wasn't listening to records or playing music. Every day I spent in school was a day I wasn't working on my life's work." Or as Keith Brion puts it, "He wasn't rude or rebellious. The music in his head was just louder than whatever was going on in the classroom."

Brion wasn't a troublemaker, per se. He simply refused to pick up a pencil. "He wouldn't write anything," marvels LaRue Brion. "He sat in the cafeteria and drank tea." It would seem that Brion's penchant for improvisation was entrenched early on. Even now, he eschews the written note for the intuitive one. "We took him to psychologists and neurologists, and we finally just let him have his head, because we knew he was learning. We also knew that music was his destiny. If he hadn't had that, we probably would have been stricter or sent him to a private remedial school."

Brion credits his special-ed teacher with getting him through. "I finally told her that I had to do my work. I told her about music, and that if I didn't do it, I just knew it would be a waste of time. She shut up and left the room, and the next day she came in - this was one of the great experiences of my life - and she said, 'You're an artist. You know me as a teacher, but that's what I do to survive. I'm actually a painter.' She convinced the board of education to let her become my personal tutor for the rest of the semester in English and history. We met and talked. She basically got me through."

The Excerpts, Brion's high school band, was into the brainy pop groups of the day: Squeeze, the Buzzcocks, XTC. The band played clubs around New Haven but broke up during its first big gig, a monthlong tour of Japan in 1983, when Brion was 19. "We were like jealous girlfriends," says Dean Falcone, one of the band members. "Jon always had his hands in other things. He didn't just play our kind of music, and he was stifled. I mean, he'd play us his demos, and we'd try to play the music, and it was a nightmare. He was just so talented."

Keith Brion, who worked professionally with his son for the first time when Jon called him to play piccolo on a Magnolia session, was, and is, confounded and astounded by his son. It wasn't easy for an academic with multiple degrees in music education to raise such a fiercely unconventional child. But the day Jon turned 17, his father went to Hamden High, signed his son out for the last time, and they went for a celebratory breakfast at McDonald's. Jon has earned his living as a musician ever since.

"I've thought about it once or twice," Jon Brion says of never finishing high school. "But the longer I live, the more I feel indignant about the whole education thing. It was all about square blocks and square holes and fitting things together. It was the most offensive thing in the world. I feel like I've known what I was going to do with my life since I was about 7."

Brion's difference, his ill fit with conventional society, is, in the most cliched sense, his blessing and his curse. That utter lack of inclination to service the musical or commercial appetite of anyone other than himself has resulted in a brilliant and relatively anonymous career. It explains why - in an industry that values the easy sell over creative depth - Brion is the hippest guy you've never heard of.

"Unlike Kid Rock, I'm not gonna spend two years repeating the same song so people know me for the sake of me becoming famous so that I can become a Famous Person," Brion declares. "But I would not object to what I do becoming widely known. Fame would be a really handy thing for a lot of stuff I'm interested in doing. But they wouldn't be the typical things."

Nothing about Brion's life, it seems, is typical. Last we spoke, in May, he and his girlfriend of three years, comedian Mary Lynn Rajskub, were holed up in a small motel in Hollywood. They had had to leave their rented house and had not yet found a new place. His phone number referred callers to a friend's cell phone. Outside of writing, playing, performing, and watching other people perform, Brion's main interest is talking to people. He is not a sportsman, and he hates board games. He fantasizes about going on the road with a miniature band. "I have a miniature piano from the turn of the century," he says. "I've got a tiny drum set and a tiny guitar."

The two big mainstream projects he's attempted - a solo album of pop music and The Jon Brion Show for VH1 - have both derailed. Brion signed a record deal with Lava, an Atlantic Records subsidiary, in 1997. Over the next two years he recorded not one, not two, but three versions of his album Meaningless, all of which were rejected. The label finally gave him his walking papers, and his record back, last fall.

Brion tried to get the album out on the Internet, through the ArtistDirect Web site, but it turns out that an overenthusiastic fan in the Midwest had registered all the obvious Web domain names for Jon Brion - a situation that is still unresolved.

"I called and told him he'd created a beautiful piece of work. I said it was a work of art," says Jason Flom, president of Lava/Atlantic Records, who has enjoyed successes with Sugar Ray, Matchbox 20, and Kid Rock. "But I wasn't sure a major label could do this particular record justice." In other words, the label couldn't figure out how to market Brion's music in any of the handful of stylistic niches that define mainstream, major-label commerce.

"It's a weird one for me," says Flom, "because I'm a fan. I mean, Jon Brion couldn't make a bad record. If he decides that what he craves is mainstream acceptance, he'll make an album that could be tremendously successful. He could come up with a fantastic album that wouldn't sacrifice his credibility. It's just that he does whatever he wants to, whenever he wants. I'm not sure he isn't happiest doing what he's doing now: Largo, and producing [other artists], and writing movie scores."

For his part, Brion holds no grudges. He understands all too well how he fits, or doesn't fit, into the business model to which popular music is bound. Happily, Brion has no need for a day job. He's a busy session player, a film score composer, an in-demand music producer. "I like," Brion says with the guileless verve of one who actually can do it all, "doing everything. But would I like to be able to play my songs in nice theaters? Absolutely. It requires a certain amount of notoriety for the Bjorks and Tom Waitses and Neil Youngs and Elvis Costellos of the world to get away with the things they are doing. They're lucky to be making records."

Those artists are the exception to the rule, however. By and large, music fans have evolved into separate, narrow camps of followers: the Britney nation, the hip-hop nation, etc. And when it comes to music programming on networks like MTV and VH1, everything outside of those narrow camps has, for all intents and purposes, been squeezed out of existence.

Take the ongoing saga of The Jon Brion Show. Last spring, VH1 shot a pilot for what was originally intended to be a one-hour format based on the Largo shows. Michael McNamara, who produced the pilot, says, "It was like trying to put fireflies in a jar."

Without consulting Brion or McNamara, VH1 edited the pilot down to a half-hour, essentially compressing musical interactions that are meant to unfold into something more like promotional sound bites. There are some priceless moments: Brion performing a bossa nova version of Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" on banjo. Rickie Lee Jones reenacting how she played with her Barbie doll as a child while singing along to the Beatles' "Anna." Brion bringing unrecognizable instruments to a Cheap Trick session and jamming with street musicians on the Venice Beach boardwalk. But the pilot tested poorly with focus groups, and VH1 dropped plans to produce the show. In April, Brion shot another version of the pilot, one he says is much more intimate and successful. He plans to shop it to cable networks.

Nothing is settled. The album, the TV show, the living arrangement ... But Brion - a man who eagerly eschews the familiar destination for the bumpy journey, a man who would rather hear someone bang sincerely on the side of a suitcase than listen to a well-rehearsed drum solo - is preternaturally comfortable inhabiting limbo. It's what feeds his creative spirit and in turn makes his musical contributions so singular.

So what's a gifted, thwarted, revered, misunderstood musician to do? Here's an idea: Ring in the millennium playing Edison cylinder, electric guitar, and a few music boxes on the second "L" of the Hollywood sign. As Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and talk-show host Jay Leno flipped the switch on 2.7 million watts of electricity to light up the landmark at midnight, Brion proceeded to play "Auld Lang Syne" in 1,000 years of musical styles. Six cameras beamed the festivities to the rest of the globe.

Chances are good that hardly anyone in San Pedro, or Seoul, or Paris knew who the grinning musician perched on the Hollywood hillside was. "The only thing I can guess," Brion muses, "is that somebody at a production company in town was going, 'OK. We've got a job. It involves a musician, and it's strange. Who do we get?' "