Bobby's
drivin' through the city tonight, through the lights in a hot new rent-a-car.
He joins the lovers in his heavy machine; it's a scene down on Sunset
Boulevard. Say goodbye to Hollywood, say goodbye, my baby. Say goodbye to
Hollywood, say goodbye, my baby.
-
Billy Joel
Well, what an
extraordinary and amazing day this was!
It started last night
at the Lakers game when I was texting back and forth with my friend Nate
Morton, who is a bad-ass drummer who now makes a living playing in the backing
band on The Voice, which is a major cultural phenomenon screening on NBC here.
Suddenly, Nate’s organising us VIP tickets to go and watch the dress rehearsal
of the Monday night performance show.
We drove down to
Universal Studios and the back lot, which is basically a whole city that stands
autonomously from the rest of Los Angeles – everything you can imagine in a
city, they’ve got inside the back lot. We had to provide government ID to get
into the lot, and once we were there, Nate took us down to Sound Stage 12,
where The Voice shoots. It was amazingly nice of him to organise access at such
short notice.
Security gave us VIP
cast/crew passes and we went into the studio, which is a mammoth facility, full
of the biggest cameras and brightest lights I’ve ever seen. It’s a beehive of activity,
with people running seemingly uncoordinated in all directions, but it all comes
together in the end. Organised chaos is probably the best way to describe it. There’s
a Starbucks outlet on set, which dispenses all the free coffee you can handle
during filming.
In the middle of the
impressive and brightly-lit stage, is the band’s position. These guys, led by Musical
Director Paul Mirkovich, are red-hot. These guys are the best musicians you’ve
never heard of, and have featured on dozens of mega-selling studio records, and
have toured with the likes of Cher, Pink, Paul Stanley (KISS), Michelle Branch
and New Radicals. They’re as accomplished as you can get in this city, and,
better still, awesome guys.
Sasha Krivtsov, who we hung out with at Starbucks in Valencia yesterday morning, is the other half of the rhythm section,
and he showed us around, too. Nate on drums and Sasha on bass: a potent musical
combination. We met a bunch of great people, who were all excited to hear that
we’d come in from Australia and how Nate and I first met. We are getting so
much love from so many people for being Aussies! There were a bunch of reports
in the house as well.
The Voice is down to
it’s Final Eight, so we saw eight performances – everything from Queen to Etta
James – and a few ensemble performances. The remaining contestants, including a
16-year-old from New Jersey and a single father from the south, are brilliant
singers. I don’t know how they’re going to pick a winner. The acoustics in the
studio are as good as any I’ve ever heard. They ran through the show as they
would when it was filmed, though Carson Daly (host) and the judges Blake
Shelton, Christina Aguilera, Cee-Lo Green and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine were
absent, their places taken by stand-ins.
Watching live television
happen from the studio floor shatters all your illusions and preconceptions of
what happens. It’s far from a polished final product that appears on the
screen. It’s a high-stress environment, and the star you see on screen is at
the mercy of producers and directors yelling at them, and there’s a ferocious
amount of activity as people swarm on during commercial breaks and those video
montages you see on talent show broadcasts to dismantle one set and assemble an
even more elaborate one in it’s place.
There were three different
band sets on the main stage, and so many other props and scenes set up for the
performers. And the crew is working to a strict timetable. They have to be done
by the end of the commercial break, and although it doesn’t ever look like
it’ll all be done in time, somehow it is. After five seasons, the crew is a
well-oiled machine. It’s almost militaristic, the way they go about things, but
it always seems to work. That’s why the rehearsal is done to the strict timing
of a real show, complete with the cameras filming it.
After the show, we
went up to Universal CityWalk for lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe with Nate. We
walked up the hill where the Backlot Tour trams go down, and it was quite a
trippy experience to have people waving at us out of the trams, just like we
were doing on Saturday. The Hard Rock is an awesome place with great rock and
roll memorabilia and amazing food. We sat at the bar and chatted with a cool
bartender known only as Moose. Turns out, he’s a major AC/DC fan, and that
makes him great in my book.
We left Universal
mid-afternoon and endured a hellish trip to Disneyland that, in LA traffic,
took nearly three hours. We arrived in time for our pre-booked dinner and to
watch the fantastic holiday edition of Disney’s World of Colour, which is an
amazing show where they project images on thousands of fountains. It’s one of
those things you have to see for yourself. No photo or video truly does it
justice. After the Christmas imagery, I’m really ready for the holidays to
come.
Later in the night, we
rode a bunch of rides in Disneyland – the recently-refurbished Matterhorn
Bobsleds, the Autopia cars and Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters, which is one of
my favourites – and got almost down to boarding the Space Mountain
roller-coaster before it broke down. That was how our day ended, apart from a
speedy drive back to LA.
Probably my favourite
day of the trip so far.
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