Earlier this week, I spent a couple of minutes talking with my friend Jim Bianco after his show at Schubas here in Chicago. Jim is one of about ten artists who I’ve come to know through the Los Angeles coffee shop-cum-swanky-bar-and-performance lounge, the Hotel Café. First intros came at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, when thtion with the brand created by co-owners Marko Shafer and Max Mamikunian. Not unlike the folk collectives in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and Laurel Canyon in the 1970s, the Hotel Café has mushroomed from a tiny, 55-person capacity closet of a venue to a sizeable national touring property and a veritable stamp of approval for artists on the rise. I’ve got several talented Chicago pals who’ve made the trek west and wear their Hotel Café performances like a badge of honor.

As I got to know some of the performers who call the Hotel “home,” a sort of mystique began to swirl around the whole scene. I remember Marko telling me once that on several occasions, he and Max would be unable to make bills and would go to the horse track at Santa Anita and try and win enough money to keep the joint open. It’s been 5 years now, and those guys can rest easy that the Hotel Café isn’t going anywhere.

But the view from the inside isn’t quite as optimistic. The ragtag group of guitar slingers I met in Utah almost three years ago seemed like a family – a gang of talented, gloriously messed up artists clinging to the idea that in a historically transient city like LA, they’d found a home. But LA is LA, and eventually egos and competition can crush those familial feelings. Another friend from the old school HC crew once told me that there are no bands in Los Angeles because the rampant narcissism has everyone wanting their projects to bear their own name, and they’re well over any concern about hurt feelings. Now that Hotel veterans are attracting label attention and seeing the financial and exposure-related rewards of placement in movies and TV shows, the “business” of the Hotel Café is the name of the game. It’s a bit of a bummer for those of us who had a glimpse of the all-for-one-and-one-for-all spirit of the earlier days at 16 ½ Cahuenga Blvd, but there’s something to be said for watching talent be rewarded with a modicum of success.

Jim Bianco - Handsome Devil (Reprise)

Jay Nash - River Siren

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