Brian Bergeron

This entry isn’t much about music…In a way it touches on it but there’s much more personal tourist information and sightseeing. I’m writing it for friends and family to read and for my own personal use so I don’t forget what happened because of my oft-cited bad memory

I’m sitting in Gate 47B at Los Angeles International Airport waiting for the flight that will take me home. I don’t want to say that I’m officially no longer scared of flying but I certainly don’t dread it like I used to. Before this trip I hadn’t flown since 2003 so I think it’s just the unnaturalness of the act and the infrequency of it that I was afraid of. My dad, however, travels a ton for work and he flies just about every week. I know that he would be just as scared of it if he flew as little as I did but I guess you kind of just get used to it.
My flight has been delayed an hour-and-a-half so I have 3 hours here to kill, which I figured would be prime time to start my blog for my California trip. I wish I had thought of this in San Francisco when I had an equally as long waiting time for my flight to LA. Alas, I hope to capture most of my trip now because I don’t have very good memory and there’s a good chance I have forgotten part of it all ready but we’ll see how it goes.

Day 1 — Sunday
I woke up at 4:30 to pick up my grandparents. My grandparents were the whole impetus for this entire trip. They were going to visit my great aunt/great uncle in Pleasanton, CA, which is less than an hour south of San Francisco. My dad and my uncles cornered me on Christmas and said that I should fly out there and escort them to Pleasanton and in exchange I was able to weasel out of them a hotel and flights to San Fran and LA. Sweet, huh? Yes, I know I am spoiled but it was a fact-finding mission also. I realize that I might have to move out of Boston eventually because I don’t think the city is helping to mature my career much so I’m checking out what other options are out there.
I picked up my grandparents and we drove into Logan airport and made our flight at 7 o’clock. That was cool. The flight was long and I spent my time shuttling between listening to my iPod (selections for the trip were OK Computer by Radiohead and Jacksonville City Nights by Ryan Adams), watching The Office on my iPod, and reading this super comprehensive, 900 page biography on the Beatles, which I’m hoping will encourage, motivate, and inspire my music for at least a while (I think it’s going to produce an additional blog entry as well). We picked up the rental car and drove to Pleasanton, where I stayed with family, had some home cooked food and did some of my Teacher’s Assistant work.
This whole week was spent playing catch-up with my TA work. As a TA, I usually do the bulk of my correcting on Monday but there was a problem with one of the assignments so it was due Monday instead of Sunday and I wanted to be out in the city as much as possible so I would do little spurts of correcting but I didn’t get it finished until Thursday night. Nothing super eventful on Sunday other than traveling and chilling with the family.

Day 2 — Monday
I got into San Francisco around 11am and parked my car at the hotel. I am a cheap skate and not in a position to blow money on anything with the uncertain income of being a musician. Even though I’m on a vacation that is largely paid for, I had to prowl around looking for cheap parking but alas, that wasn’t an option. I ended up parking that day for $27 at the hotel and the next day I moved my car to another lot for $15 and then shuttled it between meters my final morning to make it as cheap as possible. Luckily, I didn’t have to pay for parking during my next leg at LA but we’ll get to that. That was the only real drag in San Francisco. I was in the financial district and it was expensive but that’s not too big of a complaint when all is said and done. All the meters were 1 hour limits and a quarter only got you 8 minutes. Why am I saying this? Like I said, because I’m a tightwad! I’m sorry I just wasted your time with that.
Anyways, I got out and walked straight north to the Embarcadero waterfront and all the piers. It was only about 10 minutes from my hotel so I was very fortunate. I went to San Francisco once when I was 8 for a couple days with my family but do not remember a single thing. I wish that the piers left some kind of impression on me but they didn’t. I loved being there this time around. The weather was beautiful, which was a welcome change from Boston (they had TERRIBLE weather this week) and I was able to wear pants and a coat and be very comfortable. They had great shops and everything was clean and vibrant. I got a smoothie and walked around looking for street performers. One part of this mission was to find street performers to see if they were able to make as much income as I can make in Boston (to further see if a move is possible). I took notes of who I saw but I don’t have that info with me right now. I know I saw a saxophone player who I think was named Stephen Dreyfuss (or something like that…), an American roots blues player whose name completely escapes me, and a female singer-songwriter named Justine Bennett (myspace.com/Justinebennett). I ended up e-mailing Justine because she is closest to my age and is probably going through similar struggles to see what she thought of the San Francisco scene and streetperforming. I sent an email her way, received a reply, and have another one out to her as well.
The idea of being able to street perform (which I will refer to hereafter as ‘busking’) on a Monday in February appeals to me for obvious reasons. The Faneuil Hall season isn’t particularly short, but I wish it was longer. I’ve tried Faneuil Hall a few times this winter and it’s largely depressing. Even if I’m able to make a little money, it’s not nearly as fun for me to do as the summer. It’s definitely a blessing to be able to play outside in the beautiful summer weather and to be able to maximize that would be awesome. I did, however, find out later that the weather I had the entire time in San Francisco (sunny and 65) is an anomaly during this time of year. It’s usually closer to 50 and cloudy/rainy. The idea of being able to busk early in the spring through late fall and even during periods of the winter is definitely really attractive to me. Once I receive the details of busking in San Francisco, I’ll be able to weight the pros and cons. It doesn’t seem to be as organized as Faneuil Hall—which is one of the best things about performing in Boston—but I could be wrong.
Like I said I spent some time walking around the piers, checking out buskers, and just getting a sense of that part of the city. I really like the way the city is landscaped. I know it is famous for its hills and I think it really complements the area because you can be at a lower part of the city looking up at the buildings and I’m never one to notice the architecture but I think its all very charming. At the highest points of the city you can see sites like the Colt Tower and there’s another tower near Golden Gate Park that I can’t recall it’s name. Anyways, it’s a plus in my eyes.
I walked around until it was time to check into my hotel. I checked into the hotel and hung out a bit, showered, and headed over to my gig. I decided to pull a gig together when I put the trip together and scheduled it at a martini bar called Blondie’s, which hosts a Monday night acoustic showcase. The MC for the evening was a cool guy named Cory Dale and the show itself wasn’t too eventful. I played well enough in front of about 10 people who I don’t think could have cared one way or another but Cory was a cool guy and I’m glad to have met his acquaintance and think it would be mutually beneficial for us to stay in touch in the future. He’ll be a good resource should I decide to make the move out here and I hope he looks me up the next time he’s in Boston. I dug his kind of brash acoustic Americana/Indie blend.
My show was in the Mission District on Valencia Road. The Mission district was charming in its own way. It wasn’t incredibly clean but it had a lot of street art and culture to it that I enjoyed. I ate what was probably the biggest burrito of my life at this little hole in the wall and had what was probably the most stale, burnt tasting coffee of my life at a café across the street from the venue. I don’t see myself going out of my way to spend time in that area in the future but I can’t say I explored much of it outside of a few blocks. I stayed pretty immobile in that area because the handle on my guitar case is pretty near broken and it’s a pain to carry that thing around. I got home from the gig and went to bed early because I had to get up the next morning and plow through some work before heading out on the city.

Note about my guitar case: it’s a hardshell case and half of the handle has broken off. I borrowed ‘gorilla glue’ which bubbles up and hardens and each time I put it on, I let it dry over night only for it to crack off the next morning. I might need to glue gun that business if I decide to go forward with repairing my case but I usually try and bring my soft shell case everywhere.

Day 3 – Tuesday
I woke up around 6:45 to move my car into a cheaper parking lot and headed back to the hotel to do work. I worked from around 7-10 and headed out for breakfast before getting out on the city. It was a bit stressful being away from home and my interns James and Tara because we’re now officially two weeks away from the Paradise gig and there’s a lot to be done. We’re rushing trying to get the CD reproduced and we ran into issues with the artwork, which is a drag because it holds things up but I wanted to make Tara do the work instead of paying SuperDups to make the changes because I want her to get the learning experience, even if it’s at the expense of the project finishing in time for the gig.
While Tara was sick last week, James was sick this week, which is a drag and I’m worried that I’ll be sick soon because I’m pretty much the only person I know who hasn’t been down and out over the last month or so. James worked a lot this week on Nicole Berke’s show in Connecticut. We’re booking Nicole through Danger Room Productions and I have my interns doing promo for her now. It’ll be good to have them back fully for next week as we make the last week push for the Paradise show. I’m appearing on Wentworth’s radio next week, maybe Northeastern’s, and I’m trying to orchestrate going through WERS but have been unsuccessful. As I write this blog I’m reminded of all the things I have to do this coming week because I’ve been away and I kind of dread it. Ha! I’m not one to take vacations and I’m glad I did but there’s much to be done. That being said, my interns did a lot of good work while I was away but I look forward to getting back into the swing of things with them.
OK, at 10:30 I headed out into the city. I went through Union Square, which is the primary shopping area I believe. It wasn’t for me but for a shopper I bet there were a lot of cool areas. I headed towards AT&T Park (where the San Francisco Giants play) and walked around that area for a bit. It’s a beautiful park and a reminder of how small Fenway Park is. I then walked over to Market Street, which pretty much splits the city and walked to the United Nations, which is a beautiful building. I took pictures of everything and will have a separate blog I think with the pictures. I then made the walk west towards Golden Gate Park. I took Haight Street up through the Ashbury/Haight neighborhood, which is where the hippest of the hip hang out. Once again, I don’t think that neighborhood would be much for me but it was an interesting walk through. I saw this record store Ameoba’s, which I believe is pretty historic. At the very least, I know I’ve heard of it. The Ashbury/Haight area is where the whole summer of love/hippie revolution was centered around, I believe. There was also a Ben and Jerry’s right on the corner of Ashbury and Haight, which I found fitting.
I made my way through the park and came across this big lawn bowling area, which I essentially thought was the same as bocce but I could be ignorant and wrong. Still, think of a big well manicured lawn that is like 6 lanes deep and 50 elderly people dressed in white spending their afternoon tossing the ‘ol bocce ball. That’s what it’s like. I think it’s a private club too.
I saw some tennis courts, which made me happy and a bunch of hippies up on a hill—which looked EXACTLY what I thought it would look like…wait for the picture—and just went through a nice walk through the park. By now, my feet were getting pretty tired so I stopped around 1:30 for some iced tea an to stretch out. I decided that my game plan would be to leave around 2 and walk northeast to Lombard St. (the famous ‘crooked’ street) and back towards my hotel through the North Beach (a neighborhood that takes claim to the birth of the Beat Generation), but that’s where everything went awry.
I thought I was going out of the north side of the park but I was going out on the south side. The street names were the same (I walked up 10th street, which APPARENTLY is on both sides of the park) and walked for about an hour before realizing that I was going the wrong way. Nothing was adding up and there was this huge tower (the name for that escapes me) that shouldn’t have been within my view that tipped me off that I was going the wrong way. It was past 3 and I had been walking since 10:30 and my feet were KILLING me. I have had bad feet all my life. I’m both pigeon-toed and flat footed (makes me sound like a freak) but for the most park it doesn’t bother me. During the long walk today it definitely bothered me. At the point of discovering that I went the wrong way I realized that I wasn’t going to make it to my scheduled stops. Luckily, I had a bus map and due to my fearless attitude towards public transportation. I was able to get on a bus ride that took me right to the end of the street where my hotel was on. The ride took about forty minutes and by the time I got up after sitting for so long, I didn’t think I could walk anymore.
One aside about my bus ride: A black man sat behind me with a boy, presumably his son, who had just had oral surgery. The boy was dazed and was probably 16 or 17 and for the whole ride he sat there just kind of sick-like and his mouth started bleeding towards the end of the trip. A lot. It was gross. That wasn’t the curious part of the ride though. The man who I thought was his father gave me a business card (I think I lost it) that had a few words on it in a foreign language (no idea which) that basically amounted to the human spirit being the most important park of oneself and to nourish that spirit. Well, someone else got on the bus closer to my age and the man gave him a card. This guy, who was Islamic, got into a long ideological discussion about praising God being the one true path to enlightenment and everlasting happiness and the two started debating one another. The Islamic man was much more poignant and every once and a while this other girl who was on the bus would give her two cents. It was weird being on this bus when all of a sudden a philosophical and theological discussion just broke out. Anyways, it made things interested.
I got off the bus and limped back to my hotel and got off my feet for a couple hours. I made my way through more work and showered. I got an e-mail from Justine the busker to check out a show that was like 10 minutes from my hotel. She said her friends were playing there but she got her dates mixed up so there was some old blues guy there. I hung out for a half hour but didn’t stay for the music. I had a beer and a steak and cheese (with French fries and cole claw IN the sandwich…how curious) and headed down to the piers again. This place was called “Giordano Brothers”.
I wanted to see if there were buskers at night much on the piers but when I got there around 8 the last guy was just packing up. I walked around a bit and went to Ghiradelli Square (where chocolate is made) and got the richest hot chocolate of my life. I spent some time just walking and then just headed back to the hotel. I was exhausted and sore by then and ready for bed.
Day 4 – Wednesday
I woke up around 6:30 again to have breakfast and talk online with my interns. When that was done I packed up and headed to the airport. I’m always a person who likes to get EVERYWHERE early, especially if it’s some place unfamiliar. When I got to San Francisco International Airport, it was 8:15 and my flight was scheduled for 11:30. Flights left every hour it seemed for LA and I was debating trying to get on the 10:30 but I decided that I didn’t know how long it would take to get through security and elected to go for my regular flight, which was a dumb move. It left 40 minutes late, which means I was sitting around in the terminal for 3 hours (much like today in LA…). When I arrived to LA I had to wait for one-and-a-half hours for my luggage because apparently they shipped my guitar in the flight AFTER mine and didn’t tell me about it. So by then I was pretty grouchy because I was getting out of LAX at 3 and I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about LA traffic. I decided not to check into my hotel and head straight to Hollywood, where I was going to meet my friend Katie from Northeastern, who I had not seen in about 3 years.
Getting to Hollywood wasn’t too bad. It took about an hour for a flight that usually would take 35 minutes. I found parking and walked around. I didn’t plan as well for LA as I did for San Francisco so I walked around the Hollywood and Highland area and did the whole walk of fame bit and took a picture of the Capitol Records building but was largely unimpressed by this area of Hollywood. I don’t know why but I have this bias against Los Angeles as a possible candidate to move to even though there are a lot of resources that would be beneficial for me as well as it being one of the three music centers in the US. I feel like the whole time I was here I was looking for things that were wrong with it whereas in San Francisco I was looking for what was right about it.
Anyhow, I walked around Hollywood and about an hour after we scheduled to eat, Katie called me and asked where I was. I told her I was in Hollywood where I said we’d meet and she was surprised and had apparently not received the three text messages I sent her when I had arrived, which was a drag. She turned around (because she had driven almost home) and we ate Thai around 7:30…I was starving by that time.
I kind of picked her brain about what she liked about LA because I couldn’t quite figure what was appealing about it. There are TONS of music companies and colleges and people move here to ‘break’ but I find it unappealing, slightly trashy, and cluttered. Plus, I don’t think their public transportation is very highly regarded, and I hate to drive everywhere. Basically, she said that there were so many things to do and if you weren’t into a particular type of thing, there was always something else. She said there’s ALWAYS music coming through, which is great and she has been able to go to Grammy parties and stuff and see celebrity. I guess I’m not super concerned with the idea of celebrity but I’m just looking for a place where I can maximize my career and I don’t want to admit to the fact that it might be LA. My girlfriend, Marie, likened the reason people like LA to the reason I was so drawn to NYC. There’s just such a life and so many opportunities but there are so many ugly aspects to it and it takes a certain class of person to be able to adjust and thrive in that kind of environment. I all ready know through my experience in NYC that I’m NOT that type of person so that’s probably largely why LA is unappealing to me.
It’s a shame Katie and I didn’t get to spend more time together but we had dinner and I was beat from waiting everywhere all day and was also still a little grouchy so I decided to go to the hotel and get some rest so I could make a better go at it in the mornig. Ironically, my dad was staying in LA the same two night that I was for business and literally the minute after I checked in he walked through the door. We hung out for a little bit but I was starting to fall asleep and not make much sense I decided that we’d do breakfast and I’d catch him later.

Day 5 – Thursday
I woke up around 7:30 and by this time the trip was making me tired. I was getting less than a normal night of sleep and if there is one thing I need to function it’s a full night’s sleep. I had breakfast with my dad and went back to my hotel to get some work done. I needed to get my TA work finished today because e-mails from students who didn’t have grades yet for assignments kept pouring in. I had emailed them several times letting them know that I would be behind this week. Anyhow, it was getting frustrating. I got out around 11 and decided rather than heading into Hollywood, I would go for a scenic drive. I drove up north and went through Topanga Canyon (I think that’s what it was called), which was pretty and windy but I didn’t find it as cool as my dad had raved. I was going to go north some more and go through Malibu but I had to meet my dad at 4 and didn’t want to cut time away from Venice Beach and Santa Monica, both of which I wanted to scope out. It turns out I could have done Malibu because I was at Santa Monica for 20 minutes and was largely unimpressed by the pier. I bet there were more things in other parts of Santa Monica but I didn’t do enough prep for LA like I would have liked to and didn’t have enough time to go explore.
I headed further south to Venice Beach, which was cooler than Santa Monica (by a lot). I walked out on the Pier, which had a great view and was long and really windy, and then walked on the boardwalk area on the water, which was interesting. I was excited to check out Muscle Beach, made famous by the Arnold Schwarzenegger generation but there was only one guy there…Oh well.
I checked out the buskers and some of the shops set-up and saw a DJ—the first time I saw a DJ busker—and a guy who played electric drums. I got a smoothie and walked around and just vibed on the area. It was like Hampton Beach (where I’ve spent many summers of my life) on crack. That’s the best way that I can describe it, ha. It was all right and I’m glad I checked it out but I don’t think I could make the adjustment to do that kind of streetperformer. LA continues to baffle me.
I went back to the hotel, showered and did some work and then my father and I went out for dinner. We got some Italian food down on Manhattan Beach (10 minutes from the hotel) and walked around a bit. Manhattan Beach was the nicest and quaintest area that I saw while in LA and reminded me sort of like Portsmouth or Newburyport back home. There wasn’t terribly much in the pier/downtown area but it was still pretty cool.
I went home after that and by this time I was unmotivated to do anything else. In LA you have to drive mostly anywhere and it was around 7pm and I knew I’d have to make a commitment to go out if I wanted to make it happen. I opted to finish my TA work and get to bed around 10:30 so I wouldn’t be sick…I know I’m lame.

Day 6 – Friday
So now I’m just about caught up. I woke up early and had breakfast with my dad. I then packed up my room and headed back to Manhattan Beach. I walked around for about an hour and headed over to the airport, which is where I am now. I’ve been writing for about an hour and a half and am getting ready to get some lunch before heading over to my gate. Only an hour left until my flight and this has been a great way to kill some time. I was going to have to do this eventually so I’m glad I was able to work my way through it right now!
I am intrigued with the idea now of maybe making the move to San Francisco. I have to do a lot more scouting around about the music scene and the busking scene to make sure it’s a good fit. In a lot of ways it would be a big adjustment but I’ve also started looking at school in the area because I’m still considering maybe getting back in school. Right off the bat I’m discouraged by learning that the winters aren’t nearly as warm as I thought but it’s still a hell of a lot warmer than here. Also, I found this cost of living calculator and San Francisco is much more expensive to live in than Boston. The biggest thing is the idea of moving away from my family for a couple years to check out the west coast because I’m convinced that ultimately I’ll make the move back home but the window is closing on me to be able to just up and move and try out another locale. So I’m going to crunch the numbers more and explore the school possibility and check out the music scene and see what I can dig up. It’s all still up in the air but I’m not ruling it out.
I’m glad I made the trip and am eternally grateful to have been given the opportunity. We’ll see what happens going forward but it’s been a nice reflective piece to be able to look back (as far back as 6 days) and write about all the things that have happened on this trip. I hope you’ve enjoyed.