A couple of weeks ago, Paul and I went as envoys to a conference called the Taxi Road Rally.  If you're not familiar with Taxi, it bills itself as "The World's Leading Independent A&R Company".  It's kind of like a club songwriters join to hock their intangible wares.  Basically, you pour through their "leads", send your stuff to things that fit your style, and wait for them to tear your beautiful new opus apart.  As you can imagine, 2,400 starving artists crowded into the LAX Westin can make for some interesting occurrences. 

When we got there, I was already dog tired.  I'd had something like 3 hours of sleep the night before, and I've always had trouble sleeping on planes.  I have no idea why.  Anyway, we got into town sometime around 10:30 in the morning, which gave us essentially the only real "down time" we had for our whole visit.  As we waited to meet our good friend Raj Sharma and the generous people at WEA Music in Burbank, Paul and I decided to head to a virtually deserted Venice Beach, where we enjoyed a liquid lunch and I bought a cheap substitute for the sunglasses I had so foolishly left behind in Nashville.  The best part was when Paul asked the diminutive Asian proprietor about their "return policy".  (He laughed in our faces)

Not long after piquing our appetites with the beverage Ben Franklin touted as proof that "God loves us and wants to be happy",  we decided it would be in our best interest to eat…and when I'm in L.A. and don't have much money, I head for one place…that's right, In-N-Out Burger.  We ended up at the one on Sunset in Hollywood, the one where Paris Hilton got a DUI.  It was still busy at 2:30 in the afternoon, but since Paul had never before ingested the greasy ambrosia that is the Double Double with Cheese, it was well worth it.  In fact, I'm could really go for INOB right now.  It's too bad we don't have them here, because I'm sure they would be uber-successful: A Christian Company in the buckle of the Bible belt serving fried food?  I mean, come on.  Someone needs to look into franchise information. 

After a meeting with Raj (whom I call by a corruption of his name, because that's the first way I learned it) at WEA, we did the very out-of-towner thing of trekking all the way back to LAX, to check in for the conference.  By the time we get there, we take our place in the back of line composed of hundreds of people who all look like they're sussing each other out.  It was a good thing that we were in the spot we were, because we soon met a couple of super nice guys from Wisconsin who'd been to these events before and kind of gave us the skinny on how the weekend would go.  It kept us from discounting the entire event and hauling ass out to Joshua Tree.

After we registered, we made the same long drive to Hollywood to crash at Raj's pad.  Although we were still fatigued, the excitement of Hollywood was too much to ignore, and we ended up having Margaritas while watching the action on the cluttered sidewalks.  Again, it didn't look like I was going to end up with much sleep.

Surprisingly, we had very little trouble getting up Friday morning.  We managed to get down to the conference on time, and spent the bulk of the day in seminars.  It soon became apparent to me that if there were any good contacts to be made, they would probably occur at the hotel bar.  We resolved to devote Saturday night to that endeavor.  The cool thing was when I noticed a big black bus with the words "NOW IS ALL YOU HAVE" written along the side.  The band, abbreviated NIAYH, ironically shared the same stage with us at Hempfest in Seattle two months ago.  It was great seeing them again.  We swapped CD's, which led to a mutual admiration, and we fully expect to make beautiful things happen when they roll through Tennessee this April.