The ticket cost $18.

Joe Firstman was a month shy of 20 and determined to bust out of North Carolina. He had a vision of California that involved beaches, pianos, and beautiful women, a far departure from the Baptist Belt background he and generations of his family had endured in the Carolina countryside. He booked a Greyhound bus ticket four months in advance and girded himself to a California dream.
So one day in February, 2000, this young man who’d never before left the South ‘ he’d never even been on airplane ‘ arrived in Los Angeles. He had a beat-up guitar, a bunch of songs in his head, and little else. He’d found a room on the Internet and sent a man he’d never laid eyes on most of his life’s savings, $1,200 for four months rent. Before arriving, he called to figure out just exactly where his new home would be.

Hey man, are you in, like, Hollywood?

Oh yeah, the man said.
That’s good, Firstman thought. Hollywood is cool.

They pretty much cleaned the transvestites out around here, so you’ll be better off, the man added, helpfully.

What’s a transvestite? Firstman wondered. I had to ask somebody, he recalled later.

He got off the bus and found his way to Cahuenga St. and Santa Monica Blvd. The apartment building, he quickly realized, was a sort of free-floating insane asylum.

I was the only person in the entire estate that wasn’t on Social Security, Firstman said. Not old people, just plain good old affected crazy people. I was right in the thick of them, and I felt right at home.

On his second night in town, he found a band. A bar around the corner from his apartment let him in despite his age, and once inside he couldn’t take his eyes off a woman across the bar.

This guy was sitting across the bar with a bunch of girls, and I noticed one the girls was from some movie I’d seen ‘ it was Girl, Interrupted ‘ and I was like, ‘Cool! The girl from Girl Interrupted on my very first night! This is great. It’s all true what they say about California!’

The guy sitting with the actress walked over to where Firstman was sitting and asked him what he was staring at.

That girl is in a movie, Firstman said.
No shit, bro, the guy said. You can stop looking now.
Firstman apologized and told him his story.

I just moved out here, he said. I got my guitar and I got my songs.
It turned out the guy was also a guitar player. So we had a party at my house that night, Firstman recalled. Everybody came back to my little room.

The party was just beginning. Within a year, Firstman was packing Sunset Strip clubs such as the Viper Room. He was named singer/songwriter of the year at the 2001 Los Angeles Music Awards, and in 2002 he signed a deal with Atlantic Records. His first full-length record, The War of Women, was released in late 2003 and won effusive praise. He was heralded as a new singer-songwriter star, and his songs ‘ delivered in a throaty, soulful southern voice with an assurance way beyond his years ‘ charted his delirious climb.

In the songs of Joe Firstman, sensitive young men prowl the hills of Los Angeles, searching for fame and beauty, only to find self-destructive behavior and egos gone wild While Hollywood’s peaks and pitfalls have been prominently charted by songwriters from Don Henley, Stevie Nicks and Jackson Browne to Warren Zevon, Firstman aims to reinvent the milieu for his own generation, critic Jim Farber wrote in the New York Daily News.

Firstman was the toast of the town. He toured with Sheryl Crow and Jewel, played poker with Jesus Ferguson, partied with Leo DiCaprio and his posse and basically went out of his Carolina boy’s mind. Somewhere in the heady haze of this rock n’ roll dream, however, it began to dawn on him that this wasn’t what he wanted at all.

It was a terrible time for the people that were around me, I’m sure, Firstman said. I was out of pretty control with alcohol and ego. But nobody caredwe were having an awesome time.
He’d come to California with a dream of stardom, but even more, his vision was of life on the beach. Firstman, who appears three nights this week at Cafe Boogaloo, has left his wilder days behind. He now lives in El Porto, commutes to his day job (as the musical director of the Carson Daly show) via bus and train ‘ he doesn’t own a car ‘ surfs every chance he gets and tends to a little crop of homegrown tomatoes.

I’ve got some theories about composting, he said in an interview this week.

Meanwhile, his music has gotten more raggedly beautiful with each passing year. He has formed a revolving collective of musicians dubbed the Firstman Family Affair, which is not so much a band as it is a sprawling epicenter of musical riot. His move from Hollywood to the beach has lead to a blossoming, both in his own songwriting ‘ his new EP, Fell Swoops, reveals a genuine artistic emergence ‘ and in the moveable musical feast that has followed Firstman to the beach.

It was a dangerous move, in a lot of ways, as a musician, Firstman said. I could have stayed up in Hollywood and administered to the Hotel Cafe sceneI got this crazy job that was paying me a lot of money, but what I really needed to do, when I looked at it all, was to not be in Hollywood. It was time to come out here and go swimming, and breath, and figure out what you’ve got to figure out to be betterTo get real. It’s a beautiful life down here, and I’m glad to have had it twisted this way.

Straight outta Charlotte
The music took root early, as did the strong independent streak. Both were Firstman family inheritances.

Leland and Marlena Firstman were unusual ‘ and unusually musical ‘ parents. She’d had a strict Southern Baptist upbringing but she’d shown a rebellious streak from a young age. Her high school was the first in the nation where forced racial integration took place via busing after a Supreme Court decision in 1971. Campus race riots resulted. Marlena was a senior that year and 60 Minutes later did a special focusing in part on her relationship with African-American student she’d grown close to ‘ they met in the school choir and had wanted to attend prom together.

Marlena met Leland in Charlotte as a college student and fell in love.

She married my dad, who is Jewish, who is from Charlotte, who went to ‘NamHe’s a hippie, he plays guitar, he’s a singer and a fucking wild man, Firstman said. She was trying to get anything that was furthest away from her upbringing. That I can say cleanlyShe came from an incredibly sad southern scene ‘ I mean, ‘Bastard out of Carolina,’ hard-core. Her brother was a pastor and alcoholism was rampant.

His mother was a touring opera singer with a company out of Charlotte when Joe was growing up. She converted to Judaism and later became a cantor (she is still a cantor and now lives in Tel Aviv).
She has lived like 1,000 lives, Firstman said of his mother. She is the real fucking maverick.
Music was a constant in their home. Marlena recalled trying to teach Joe piano at the age of four ‘ the age Mozart started, she figured ‘ and having no success.

He sat at the piano and wouldn’t touch the keyboard, she said. He kept his hands in his lap. After a few lessons I gave up and kept teaching his best friend.

Shortly thereafter, while traveling with her opera company, she received a complaint from Joe’s little brother Sammy. Mom, he told her on a phone call. Joe plays the piano three hours a day. It’s driving me crazy.

The minute I went on the road, he sat down at the piano, she said. I had no idea. It was a big secret. I still haven’t figured that out. He just smiles when I ask, but I was a failure as piano teacher for him. He figured it out on his own.

Joe wrote his first song when he was five. It was called Number One Girl. He remembers the lyrics, which were chorus heavy: Will you still be my number one, still be my number one, favorite girl?

I’m not sure he’s ever wrote quite as great a song as that one, his mother said.
She also recalls getting a phone call from Joe when he was allegedly attending college at North Carolina State in Raleigh years later.

He called and said, ‘Mom I’m dropping out of college. I’m going to LA, and I’m leaving Thursday. I have my bus ticket.’ That was like Monday. You could have heard me scream from there’I don’t want to waste any more time’ he said. I was not in favor of it.

In truth, he barely attended school. He was amazed when he received a grant check as a freshman, a lump sum he quickly spent on making an album with his pop-rock college band, called Firstman. He had no illusions that he was college material.

I couldn’t believe they would let me into college, he said. I guess I filled out my application creatively, or drew a picture or something, but they let me in I knew what I wanted to do. There was never any doubt it was about the music.

He was waiting tables at a restaurant in Raleigh when he met a man named Bob High, a brewmaster from the Brewski Brewing Company in Hermosa Beach.

You got some charisma, High told him. You should go to Hermosa Beach and hang out there, dude. Just go.

Firstman had been dreaming of the beach since he was a child. His family used to make occasional pilgrimages to Myrtle Beach, where he fell in love with the water, and later he saved up money mowing grass so he and his teenage buddies could go there for weeklong vacations in the summer.

We’d chase girls and boogie board and go to the arcade and I was like, ‘Fuck yah, this is clean living, riding my bike around whistling at girls with my buddies and getting some ice cream, he said. The sand is like hard as concrete, there are no waves, there are shells everywhere, but it was incredible to me. Of course, the first time I saw the beach out here in California, my mouth dropped openBut the beach is what I really wanted to go to ‘ I wanted to go to Hermosa Beach.

As he concocted his plan, he made a slight alteration. I started preparing and I realized, man, I play piano and sing, he said. The beach is probably not where that stuff is going on.
So he boarded the bus and four days later stepped out blinking and bewildered into the bright glare of Hollywood.

A family affair
The rest of Firstman’s story is pretty much recorded in song.

War of Women, his first full-length release, on Atlantic, is a sprawling, inclusive affair that tells tales of mean LA women, men behaving badly, abandoned altars, twisted love, beauty and swagger. When Atlantic signed him, they identified Firstman as a potential major star and cut him loose inside the studio. The music was pouring out of him; he recorded 120 songs, 16 which made it onto the record.

I was having so much fun in the studio and they opened the checkbook, Firstman said. It was just the bare end of recording company thing, where they said, ‘We see he needs to develop a bit, and we are going to pay for it.’ I was in the studio all day every day for two years.

The songs collectively have the feel of a young man trying to squeeze everything he’s seen and felt onto one recording. It’s music somewhat reminiscent of early Bruce Springsteen ‘ not derivative, but with echoes of Greetings from Asbury Park or The Wild, Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle era ‘ songs of fresh experience sung with a holy wild exuberance. Musically, he’s all over the place ‘ an iTunes critic wrote that the album should be a disaster but somehow works, mainly because of its sheer passion ‘ and it almost seems like he’s making a statement: I can do this, or that, or any damned thing I please. His voice and his bluster are big enough to pull it all off.

Some of the songs are true keepers. Can’t Stop Loving You is a jangly soul masterpiece, an irresistible groove with a writerly edge. The album’s closing track, After Los Angeles, is a mournful window into a creeping sense of misgiving:
I got a hair cut
A dress shirt
A St. Pauli’s girl
But I don’t need any of that
Got a number on a napkin
A soup can to sing through
A tune in its worst mood
I got a temper like fist fight in tavern after midnight
And a right fast woman
And there’ll be hell to pay after Los Angeles
And you won’t believe what I seen.

His live shows at the time were famously stellar. At one show ‘ Radio City Music Hall, opening for Sheryl Crow ‘ the crowd barely allowed him to leave the stage. A New York Post reviewer was astounded: His brief, eight-song set earned him a standing ovation, unheard of for a warm-up act, the paper reported.

Atlantic was less than pleased. War of Women, sold only 30,000 copies. Firstman also had a growing sense of unease with how the company was trying to define him. He was beginning to see the harder edge of the music industry, as well as its possible confinement. Meanwhile, he was ensconced in a fairly self-destructive Hollywood highlife. The rock star dream was coming true in unexpected ways.

It was a crazy time, he recalled. To be honest with you, it was way too much. I needed to be still playing around town. It’s too bad they didn’t have money for three years for me to sit there and work on songs, like record companies used to doThe expectations were so high. I sold 30,000 records, but they wanted a million records. I was like, ‘I’m sorry guys.

They sent him back into the studio with another half-million dollar budget but were unhappy with the results (that record remains unreleased to this day). The company wanted to hook him up with a high-powered pop producer, but more and more he was yearning for his freedom.

We recorded up in Santa Barbara again, he said. They moved the whole band there. Before the record, I went to New York, and I said, ‘Drop me while I’m still a commodity, guys. I have a record that people all around this business like’. They didn’t want to drop me, and then it took a long time to do anything.

Luckily, Firstman met some wise musical elders. He toured in support of Willie Nelson and Family. He paid attention to how Willie and his band lived and conducted business and become ever-more certain that there was another, healthier, happier way to exist in the music industry. He needed to make a career on his own terms.

Willie was the real thing, Firstman said. You looked out there and you saw it was a conceivable life, and you saw ‘ it wasn’t about the cool factor. That is non-existent with Willie. It’s about getting people up here and playing with your bros. Like he says, ‘The life I love is making music with my friends.’ You start realizing that is really what you are out there doing each night, then you mind doesn’t wander into the creeps of negativity.

That is how I started learning how to do it, he added. You start to remember everybody’s name. You become the life, dude, and that becomes a certain kind of family and brotherhood. We got the hookup.

Mickey Raphael, the legendary harmonica player who has toured as part of the Willie Nelson family for four decades, remembers observing Firstman. He saw something familiar.

He reminds me a lot of us when we were young and starting out, with a death wish, partying all the time, Raphael said. Most of us don’t get fucked up as much as when we were young. You know, it was like, he can do what he wants to now, but you can’t afford to go 1,000 miles an hour the rest of your lifeI thought, this guy is having fun now, as long as he knows when to put the brakes on. I never said anything because, you know, who am I to talk? I was trying to kill myself until I was 38.

Raphael also took note of Firstman’s startling talent and balls-to-the-wall attitude on the stage.
He’s was great, he said. In fact, he went through trial by fire, because he played our crowd and we get older people and younger people, but the tours he did with us it was the oldest crowd we’d ever played forHe’d come out there and just fucking rock, and the audience would just sit there. It was like blue hair blowing from the sound waves, teeth falling out on the floor and shit. He would get out there and I’d think, ‘Oh god, they are going to fucking hate him’, but he approached it like he was playing to 16-year-old screaming girls. He just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe he’s pulling this off.’

Willie had Joe come on the stage every night to play Amazing Grace with his band. When the tour reached Los Angeles, the Firstman family connected with the Nelson family in a way that Firstman will never forget.

My grandmother came out, he said. I think she had only flown once in her whole life. We were playing the Wiltern, and we all got to the back of the bus to meet Willie. My grandmother, she walks up to Willie. ‘It’s great to meet you. Let me give you a hug.’ And he’s like, ‘Let me give you a kiss.’ She’s got to go back to Shelby [North Carolina] and explain this to people. They are like, ‘You are fucking crazy.’ But you know what? It’s all true, dude.

And with that kiss, Firstman’s rock star dream began to depart, to be replaced by something deeper, truer, and far more pacific.

Silver Track
Everything began truly falling into place about four years ago. Firstman fell in love with beautiful woman, model Amera Lewchalermwong, with whom he moved to Manhattan Beach, and he took a regular gig as the Last Call with Carson Daly bandleader.

The television gig is looked upon somewhat suspiciously by some industry types, but it has enabled Firstman to enter a new, more stable phase of his life and career.

We work, he said. What the fuck do we know? We are a working musician family. They offered, ‘Do you want to come work, and play songs?’ ‘Yeah, I’d love to do that.’ ‘We’ll give you two months off in the summer so you can stay on the road.’ Perfect. I get to play every day with guys that are way better than me, and they let me hire them because they like the way I put songs together and shoot the shit with the guys.
Since several shows are taped back-to-back, Firstman often only works a few days a week and a couple weeks a month. In the last three years, he’s released three more albums ‘ two on his own label, Firstman Records, and a beautifully rough-hewn live set released by another small label that essentially captures him and his band rehearsing in a studio (the song Pretty Things would have been a soul classic in a saner radio time and place, say circa 1969, Memphis).

He’s growing. His songs are more shambling and rootsy and the production is considerably less slick than his Atlantic output. He’s still got that special effervescence and crazy versatility, but his voice is emerging stronger and clearer with each subsequent release. His most recent work, Fell Swoops, is a sure-footed four-song EP that in its short span artfully veers into some hippity-hop rock and occasionally even gets a little psychedelic. He’s not forcing anything; the game is coming to him. As he sings on Silver Track We can make it/to the city/And we can get back/on the Silver Track/Let’s get in the Now/Let’s get in the Know/I’m glad/I’m blindly/full of hope.

Firstman toured nationally last summer with a wild gathering of musicians he called a Firstman Family Affair that featured fellow singer-writers Tony Lucca and Brian Wright. They ended the tour with a show at Cafe Boogaloo that turned the joint upside down. Now Firstman is bent on bringing a bigger, weirder, and wider musical feast back to Boogaloo. This version of a Firstman Family Affair features more than a half-dozen bands, including actor/rocker Lukas Haas, the seldom-seen sometimes legend Jay Buchanon, saxophone colossus Kamasi Washington, and down-in-the-groove trio the Electones.

A young rock band from Souix Falls, South Dakota, called Liquid Thin ‘ whom Firstman met on tour this summer ‘ have quit their day jobs and this week drove a min-van across the country to play Boogaloo and introduce themselves to California. They heard the tale of a 20-year-old guy from Carolina and a Grayhound bus, and they rolled the dice.

Whatever happens, happens, said lead singer Isaiah James, who also played on the Carson Daly this week. All of us in the band are stoked and ready to do whatever it takes, so if we end up moving out here, we’ll stay. Whatever. I’m pretty much doing whatever Joe wants right now.
Firstman is convinced that the best parts of the scene he left behind are discovering the hidden charms of playing the South Bay.

Everybody will come down here, he said. It will dominate, because the money is going to get tight, and the club scene is less rewarding. It’s too thick and fluffy, and people are going to want to watch bands again. So bands are going to come down here and it’s all going to gravitateYou come down here, and it’s already sold out, and you don’t have to slave and people aren’t scrutinizing you.

It will be a distinctly un-rock-star event, with musicians hopping on and off the stage and jams that might go just about anywhere. Firstman calls it a musical circus. It will be, in other words, a family affair.

All these other cultures have these songs that they sang together, yet Americans are so obsessed with the star on the radio that is in our imaginations, so that we kind of distance ourselves from it instead of going towards it and being a part of it, Firstman said. We are fanatical about it instead of involved in it. Look, a lot of music doesn’t have a lead guy. It’s just about the band getting along together, maybe sometimes it’s about the people dancing. Whatever you guys want to do, we are here for you. You’ve got to fucking enjoy your life. ER