Versatile Musician Creates, Waits

It isn’t as if Jon Brion hasn’t got anything to do. Just in the last year, he has produced Fiona Apple’s acclaimed “When the Pawn Hits . . . “ album, composed the orchestral score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s hot new film “Magnolia,” and maintained a popular weekly gig of pop improvisation at the Largo club on Fairfax.

Entertainment Weekly recently dubbed the versatile sideman and innovative producer “the king of the L.A. music scene.” He has little fame beyond that scene, but that situation was supposed to change with the scheduled release in the fall of his first album as a recording artist, “Meaningless,” on the Atlantic-affiliated Lava Records.

Instead, Lava informed Brion in late August that since the album had uncertain prospects for radio airplay, promotional support for “Meaningless” would be minimal. He was offered the chance to leave the label and take the album with him. And so he did.

“A dreadful inconvenience” is the way Brion regards the episode, which isn’t too bad, considering.

“One of the nice things for me is that I work on records all the time,” he adds. “That’s basically my life: playing with somebody else, or producing somebody else, or being peripherally involved in something. I’ve watched tons of compatriots go through hell over the years. I have a healthy dose of cynicism going in, so I’m not pissed off or even surprised.”

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The master tapes of “Meaningless” now sit as a conversation piece in the living room of his home in the Hollywood Hills, a repository for his songs of frayed love affairs and pop arcana, set to a sound that is undeniably modern, yet rooted in the experimental pop legacy of the Beatles, Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren and Stevie Wonder.

Brion hopes to see the record released next year on another label. Meanwhile, he has few harsh words for Lava President Jason Flom, the man who ultimately rejected “Meaningless.”

Instead, he blames a music industry that he sees as increasingly unlikely to embrace music that lacks clear radio potential. With MTV playing fewer and fewer music videos, there is nowhere else to turn for exposure. Brion’s unwillingness to endure months of touring, repeating the same set of songs night after night, was also a factor in the label’s decision.

“I take my artists and my records very personally,” says Flom, who has enjoyed mass success with such acts as Sugar Ray, Matchbox 20 and Kid Rock. “I consider them like family, and I never want to release a record if I’m not going to go to the wall for it. And I didn’t think it was a record that would be embraced by radio. We were very limited in our avenues to promote this thing.

“I had too much respect for Jon to just throw his record out there and see what happens. I can’t do that.”

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But there were early signs that Brion’s commitment to his own muse might clash with Lava’s plans for him. He had nearly finished a mostly acoustic album a year ago when he first felt some resistance.

“They totally didn’t get that,” Brion remembers of those early sessions, which he also hopes to release. “And that was my first moment of ‘Uh-oh, I could be in trouble.’ I actually talked to them about the possibility of leaving the label then.”

Brion instead came back with the tracks for “Meaningless,” which offered a rich pop sound not unlike the music he has produced for Apple, Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Mann. But he was finally told that there was no obvious single among the tracks.

“A lot of people I work with, who I respect a lot, make unpopular pop music,” says Brion. 36. “It’s an odd thing. Elliott Smith or Aimee Mann or the Andy Partridges [from XTC] of the world, these are talented people. And at best they occasionally reach [250,000 to] 300,000 people. These aren’t looked on as good bets by record companies. The reason any of us manage to get signed is there are some music fans who happen to become record [business] people.”

Brion’s passion for music began when he was a boy in New Haven, Conn., where he collected old jazz 78s from the ‘20s and ‘30s. He soon mastered swing drums, and played behind the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter as part of Yale’s Ellington Fellowship program. He changed course when he discovered punk rock at age 15, finding new inspiration in the pop and rock canon.

After arriving in Los Angeles at the beginning of the ‘90s, he embarked on a busy career, working as a sideman and producer with Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith, Apple and many others.

Brion fears that the days when big, successful labels could afford to support artists with uncertain commercial appeal are over. The careers of such major talents as Lou Reed and Neil Young have sometimes depended on that kind of support between hits.

It was also an attractive signal to rising artists. R.E.M. famously signed to Warner Bros. in part because the company had nurtured such iconoclasts as Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks. And the aggressively anti-corporate Nirvana was comfortable signing to Geffen largely because it was the home of punk heroes Sonic Youth.

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Are those days truly over?

“I’d like to think that’s not the case,” Flom says. “My label is a very small label. I only have about 11 artists. One of the reasons we’re successful is that I’m able to spend so much time making sure those artists get promoted and marketed properly.”

So instead of promoting his album over the next few months, Brion will now be writing new songs. And the phone keeps ringing with production jobs for new artists.

“I’ve received [offers] for Atlantic [artists] since then, which my girlfriend and I have a nice chuckle about,” Brion says. “Wait, you guys just got rid of me for not being commercial enough, and now you want to put me in charge and responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the future success of other artists?

“It’s very ironic.”