2019
Elan Morrison, the famed Hollywood music producer, was sitting on a concrete bench carved into a retaining wall at the entrance to Wattles Canyon, on a terraced sidewalk path lined with stone pillars, steps leading up a narrow canyon above Wattles Mansion, tucked away from the roar, din, and noise of Hollywood; it’s main intersection of Hollywood and Highland barricaded; obstructed with a giant stage hidden behind a white curtain, the veiled preparations for the Oscars Academy Awards ceremony.
He sat lost in thought, admiring how after a few weeks of rain, the formerly
dry and brittle landscape had metamorphized, blossoming into green grass and
wild sage brush, tiny flowers, and sparrows swooping down, circling up and crying
out above the multimillion dollar mansions of Hollywood celebrities a few
ravine’s over from Runyon Canyon park.
I live in a one-bedroom apartment down the hill from the park and over a few blocks. Maybe just to collect my thoughts, clear my head, and reconnect with nature, I’ve been hiking a lot in this area, exploring new trails. I jumped out, seemingly from nowhere, descending a steep deer trail that vanished into the hillside, as I climbed down through brush and tree roots, then lowering myself onto the concrete bench where Elan Morrison sat.
I must have startled him as he sat there, hunched over, wearing a black hoodie, red and black sneakers, and a large shiny chain over his right wrist. We started talking; about Hollywood, my writing projects, his travels, and the commodification and distortion of music and art in Hollywood. Elan related how he was over the Industry, and wanted to get back to the art in its truest form; he described his work to overcome communication barriers and cultural differences, so that we can pop our self-isolating bubbles, humble ourselves, to learn from each other so that just maybe, just maybe, we can learn to understand, and have compassion for one another.
Especially today, in the age of social media and digital communication, big tech firms and media platforms need content more than ever. But we are always getting our perspectives and ideas from entities, corporations, news organizations, and nonprofit institutions. We never hear from just people, speaking their truth, how they see the world from their perspective. It distorts our sense of how things are, our world view. All our communication, our knowledge of the outside world is mediated and distorted by these big companies; we just get to see and hear what they want us to perceive.
Elan has lived here about 14 years; though lately he has always been out traveling; he hadn’t been back home in a while. For the past seven months he’s been working on starting his own company; to connect artists, the ones with great ideas and content, to those who are hungry to find them, and the audience that wants to connect with great music and innovative art. There are people out there hungry for content, who need great artists, but those folks don’t know how to reach them; he’s been trying to connect them together. In this information age, tech needs good content, and artists have more leverage than they think.
He had just returned from Haiti. “It was really something there,” he related. He went there, as part of his work, a mission really, to work with youth across the world to inspire and motivate them, to show them that if he can make it, they can too.
“I went to Russia, now that was something,” Elan related. “I was just at the Moscow School of Sound Design. The first question they asked me was, do you hate us or is it just your government? I was stunned. Of course not, I’m here to be friends, to hang out, and build and make music with you kids. It makes you wonder where all these stereotypes come from. We grew up with the Russians being the villains; the James Bond movies. But you have to realize too that the movies they saw about the United States portrayed us as these gestapo like figures.”
“There is such a disconnect between what information organizations and entities are telling us about the way things are, and how it actually is,” Elan related.
I asked him about what it was like as a music producer, in this age of social media and big tech.
“Spotify? Don’t get me started,” he chuckled. “I remember the days when it was $17.50 a CD.”
“They pay like zero point zero, zero, zero cents or less per play, or whatever, but when Eminem or P Diddy get played, their agents are able to negotiate a better price, even though they already are rich; others that may need the money more to sustain their art and their music get burned.”
.
“It’s the same thing on Instagram as well. If they put you on their feature page, you can get 100,000 new followers, which can pay eight to twenty thousand dollars overnight. They dictate their own economy, manipulating the market. We need equality in publishing.”
“Yeah,” I nodded my head, looking out across the canyon to a massive multistoried white mansion with floor to ceiling windows jutting out prominently into the hillside’s silhouette. “These platforms, It’s like they are their own market, and they can shut you down or prop you up as they see fit,” I concurred. “They pick the winners and losers.”
I mentioned how I have worked as a labor union researcher and organizer in Chicago and now LA. Teachers had just gone on strike in Oakland after winning strikes in Denver and Los Angeles this year.
“I went to some pretty shitty schools,” Elan related. “These kids deserve more. We have a musician’s union, but it’s pretty weak. No one wants to be the first to stand up to these streaming services; they’re scared.”
“In this town, people who are seen, who make it, it doesn’t reflect the work. Producers just outsource their work to other cities and take the credit.”
“When I started, I was an intern, cleaning floors. You don’t learn from talking; you work 23 hours a day, and did it because they promised something if you worked hard, and you got what you were promised.”
“Now it is who you know or who you are related to.”
“Like the NBA, 80% of players are there because of nepotism; the American dream is totally stacked.”
“I was born in the 80’s, millions came in into the industry since then; which has made it tough for folks,” Elan looked out, remembering his years in the music business.
“Isn’t that a good thing, though?” I asked. “That people have an opportunity to make music?”
“It’s great, it would be great really, if we had stuck by a code of,” he paused for a bit to find the right word, “ethics.”
“When I talk to artists; they are talking about the easiest hack to get their product out, not about what they are working on, or the message they are conveying. It takes money to say what they want to say. It’s kind of sad”
Elan and I began to talk about his travels, and how music brings people together, no matter what walk of life.
“You look at kids on the playground, they’ll bully each other and beat each other up, get in fights, and get some bruises and scratches, a few abrasions, and they’ll be back to playing with each other the next day.”
“Why can’t adults do that, get over their differences? They just harden in their positions, its pride or egos or something.”
“It’s not about the art anymore, but it’s treated like a product, a commodity, like oil.”
“There’s a lot of stereotypes and racism in our society, and from all the pain and hurt people take on, it digs into people, it inflicts years of bitterness. Even those who have been victims of racism take on racist characteristics. But to overcome that everyone has to be in the same boat.”
“When they look at you they have certain ideas, even if …… we’re not into them, just saying. People see so much conflict, so much pain over the past 500 years.”
“My heritage, I don’t know about you, but I’m a white man. People characterize you a certain way, but I’m not that. You have to take things at face value.”
“I work with a lot of black artists. When we make music, a lot of times, I’m referred to you know, who’s that white boy who can do that stuff?”
“A lot of people have no class; they won’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt.”
“How’d you get into music?” I asked.
“I had a shitty childhood. My dad’s a great musician. Music never let me down. Its been therapy, for years. Music is the best therapy; you can change your mood and whole outlook with a song. It’s incredibly influential; it’s the best way you can express what you feel.”
“For example, I was in India working on this song called “The Love Anthem,” with Akon and Rihanna and an Indian artist S & R; kind of like the Brad Pitt of southern India. I worked with an Indian crew, and our mannerisms were totally different, the head cock they do in their songs, what that is about. I learned so much. But through working together, through music we could understand each other. I often start with a translator, then usually take them out, we can communicate without knowing each other’s language, and really relate to each other, across cultures, just through the music.”
“This town thinks that it is all that. But in India, Bollywood sales are 18 billion dollars more than movies made by studios here in the United States. Shanelle Lin has sold more songs in Japan and Asia than Madonna, but no one here has ever heard of her. It’s just such a big market there. We are living in a bubble, isolated from the rest of the world.”
“I grew up in New York, so much different than Los Angeles. I grew up with Indian, Russian, and Ethiopian kids. A Russian guy I knew asked me if I wanted to go play chess with his friends, and he took me to a park where a bunch of Ethiopians were playing a tournament. It was really kind of cool.”
“Here people keep to themselves, we don’t interact with other cultures. Hollywood is here, the Mexicans are on the other side of town, its really segregated. People live in their own worlds.”
“I call it the United Nations of Los Angeles,” I replied, “You have people from every walk of life, but a lot of communities keep to themselves; like their own nations.”
“United Nations of Los Angeles,” Her repeated. “I like that.” Elan lit a cigarette. “You don’t mind,” he asked.
“As long as it doesn’t burn down the forest,” I chuckled. “It’s ok. I quit almost four and a half years ago.”
He took a deep drag and exhaled. At the same time a cloud of marijuana smoke drifted across the lawn from where a couple sat on a blanket a dozen yards away; the green grass and soil moist and soft from the month of needed rain.
“Good for you. I’ve been around so many artists, I’ve seen it all—heroin, you name it. I’m lucky that I only smoke these,” he raised his cigarette, its ember slowly burning the white bleached paper stuffed with tobacco. And weed. I still smoke weed.”
“Yeah that smells good, huh.”
It was starting to get dark. A few dense round low hanging clouds shrouded the sun for a second or so. The cool wind whisked through the canyon; one could smell a faint echo of Sierra mountain snow.
“Good to meet you,” I said. It was time for me to walk home. We shook hands.
“See that house over there?” Elan mentioned, as I got up, pointing to the giant white rectangle jutting out of the hillside. “Drew Barrymore lives there. “She has an underground firing range in her basement.”
“Hmm.” I replied. “Good to know.”