Finders, Sleepers

If you ran into Mitchell Frank at a club, you’d probably think he’s just another guy making the scene. Stocky, laid-back and 40-ish, he tends to wear sneakers and T-shirts sporting a picture of his baby nephew.

You would hardly guess that Frank is an arbiter of taste who’s had a hand in minting the “It” rock bands of this year and years past, among them Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Clinic and the Vines. These acts have recently popped up on the radar of mainstream music fans, but Frank was hip to them in their obscure days. He brought the now-celebrated Detroit duo White Stripes to Los Angeles three times when it was mostly squeaking by as an opening act for Weezer and had not yet been decreed the great hope of American rock ‘n’ roll.

Frank, 41, is the talent booker for the Silver Lake club Spaceland, and for a big chunk of the past nine years, he has handpicked the nightly lineup there. The club sprouted in the mid-’90s and under his direction morphed into the mother venue of the alternative music scene in Los Angeles, showcasing the spectrum of international independent rock, from garage rock to introspective folk to cutting-edge electroclash.

Spaceland remains a pit stop for artists on their way to mainstream recognition, and a platform for some of the best local bands. Everybody from Sean Lennon to Cornershop to Beck got up to play on Spaceland’s rinky-dink stage. And that was because Frank thought they were cool enough to be there.

Frank and his counterparts at some of the city’s other key nightclubs--the Troubadour, the Knitting Factory Hollywood, the Garage, the Fold, et al-- are crucial links in the rock chain, the people who plug curious music fans into nascent movements. By setting the agenda for the club scene, they give music lovers a chance to discover new bands, and offer touring acts an opportunity to make converts, or at least gas money.

Their job description? Preach the gospel of good music and make sure that people come to listen. Embark on a needle-in-the-haystack quest for the bands that are going to happen next, and book ‘em before anybody else does. Watch, inevitably, as said bands get too big and famous to play clubs like Spaceland. Repeat.

Several of the new bands that have broken big this year were not discovered by record label scouts, but rather developed a steady following by playing in small venues around the country until they grew ripe and ready for big-time contracts.

When acts reach that kind of critical mass, they move on to rooms way larger than Spaceland, which fits about 260 people tops. And that doesn’t bother Frank in the least. “We’re a knowing and willing steppingstone. We take a band up the chain.”

Drawing crowds remains a concern, of course, but talent bookers such as Frank say they are motivated by much more than financial success. To the extent that a club has a personality, it is the booker that develops it.

“We try to book good bands, I think we definitely have a statement about what we like,” says Frank, sitting in his tiny office in Glendale, where a tornado seems to have blown through and deposited CDs, music magazines and posters. “It’s like being a disk jockey with live bands.”

Talent bookers in Los Angeles play a significant role in the fate of musicians, says Ron Laffitte, an A&R; executive for Capitol Records. “Those people have their fingers on the pulse more than anybody,” he says. “Some bookers are very good at identifying, before it hits the mainstream, who the kids want to pay to see play.”

In the business of music, that is nothing short of the Holy Grail.

So how do club bookers do what they do?

The recipe is simple: a lot of disciplined research with a sprinkling of witchcraft.

“We try to be three to six months ahead of everybody else,” Frank says. A booker’s goal is to ride a trend right before it crashes into the mainstream--but not a minute too early. “Sometimes I was two years ahead of the curve, but ideally, you want to be only three months out there,” he says.

To keep abreast of trends, Frank and his booking partner, Jennifer Tefft, check out everything from record charts to tour schedules to magazines. He also goes to see bands play live around town and sifts through tons of demonstration recordings.

From this angle, the pursuit of cool can look a little geeky. There is a lot of paperwork to be filled out, a fair amount of grunt work (helping bands lift drum sets on stage, for example), a lot of time spent in the office chatting on the telephone, shooting the breeze with various elements clued in to the music scene.

In that respect, a club booker is not unlike a reporter on the police beat who routinely places rounds of calls to the cops just to keep warm in case a big homicide story breaks. “I know a lot of bands in town, so we interact with them. It’s like a filter,” Frank explains. “If someone I know tells me there is a good band, I give the band a call.”

“Everybody knows more than I do, but I just talk to them,” says Paul McGuigan, who booked bands for West Hollywood’s Troubadour for eight years.

And you better be good with numbers, because a central part of what a booker does is figuring out how much a band gets paid for playing in a club. Fees range widely at these rooms, says McGuigan, who after his stint at the Troubadour has been booking bigger bands at larger venues for the promotion firm Goldenvoice. Local bands are likely to make their money from a percentage of the ticket sales, while touring acts usually get an upfront fee, which can range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

In Frank’s office, “The MBA Guide to Accounting and Finance” occupies a prominent spot in his Ikea-style bookcase, and Frank has a business degree under his belt. “Look at all these contracts,” he says, ruffling little mounds of paperwork strewn all over his desk. There are even more contracts stuffed into several white filing cabinets with orange trim.

Propped against the wall is a wood cassette rack storing Frank’s prized collection of old demo tapes. They belong to some of the bands Frank first booked at Spaceland, some of which remain obscure today (Touchcandy, Giant Sand, PopDefect) and some of them better known, such as Eels. “These are tapes of the bands I liked,” he says, easing them out of their plastic shells and handling them like valuable china.

Before he began booking in earnest, Frank, who grew up in L.A. and lives in Los Feliz, dabbled in other music-related projects. He played keyboards and percussion for Gutbucket, an act that combined samples, live beats and rap into space-funk routines. He ran the indie label Nickelbag in partnership with the Dust Brothers, and was a fellow in the directing program at the American Film Institute before leaving to run a recording studio with a friend.

In December 1993, he started his first club prototype, Pan, at a Top 40 and Latin music bar called Dreams on Silver Lake Boulevard. The seeds that would eventually blossom into the epicenter of the Silver Lake scene were planted there in early 1995, when Frank threw himself into his most ambitious enterprise yet. It took two years of nightly travails, he says, to launch Spaceland into orbit.

He’s still at it.

These days, he may spend less time cobbling together every night’s lineup and more time overseeing the club’s artistic direction, but the fact is, he’s in the office eight to 10 hours a day--sometimes on weekends too. And he still finds time to see the acts he books--as many as 15 shows a week, he says.

He splits his time between Spaceland and the Echo, a smaller club in Echo Park that specializes in DJ acts and dance fare, where he’s a co-managing partner and talent booker. Frank operates under the banner of his own mini-booking agency, Spaceland Productions, which was partly responsible for the impressive bill of this weekend’s Sunset Junction Street Fair, with Sonic Youth, grunge pioneers Mudhoney and original riot grrls Sleater-Kinney among the headliners.

Spaceland Productions, which works as an outside contractor for the owner of the Silver Lake bar, also puts on the occasional rock show at UCLA’s Royce Hall, and Frank has plans to funnel his booking smarts into a planned club network--”a la House of Blues, but with smaller venues.”

Above all, Frank is still on the hunt for new cool, and depends on his nose for spotting the one group with a bright future in a lineup of competent ones. He stores several music reference books in his office, although he appears to have already accumulated enough information about music acts--local, foreign, deceased, broken up, on the cusp--to write a music encyclopedia himself. Throw any band name at him and he bounces back with a quick comment, a descriptive phrase, a flicker of recognition.

“It was really easy when there were only a few hundred bands to remember,” Frank laments. “Now I have to remember a few thousand!”

For an anthropologist of cool, there is a lot of slogging through dry patches, but it’s definitely worth it.

“There is only one thing that gets me elated now--discovering a new band,” Frank says. “The record company suits are these guys who have zero clue--I mean, they are definitely competent people, but they have lost sight of what good music is,” Frank says. They focus instead only on what promises quick record sales.

When big-label scouts come to a club show, their eyes are fixed on the audience and its response, not on the band on stage, says Toast, a woman who made her reputation booking the storied downtown dive Al’s Bar. She now helps local bands secure cross-country engagements and occasionally books for the Garage in East Hollywood.

She says immediate payoff is not her first consideration when she books a band. “I’ve had some different club owners accuse me of doing bad business because I booked bands that didn’t draw. But I know when a band is good enough that they will draw.... Most bands do when people give them a chance,” she says.

Her favorite example is the Riverside-based BellRays, a band that has simmered for years in the Southland and seems to have become a prophet in a land other that its own, recently generating lots of buzz in England.

“I looked at them and realized instantly, this is a professional band. You hear that band and you know it’s talent, and it’s my job to expose them to more people,” says Toast, who says that she is more “curator” than scheduler of bands. The key to being a successful booker is to put on a lineup that is “unpredictable but reliable,” she adds. A music club can flourish and continually expose audiences to fresh, quality acts only when a loyal community of clubgoers comes to trust a booker’s choices for the bill.

“You have to be willing to book bands that you don’t necessarily like, because it’s financially necessary to do so,” says McGuigan. You have to be careful that you’re not burning people out on the same shows, on the same bands.”

Still, a booker may have ulterior motives to line up a band for repeat gigs. At Spaceland, Frank introduced monthly residencies for selected acts, who get to play free shows for four Mondays in a row. In July, the Monday-night slot went to Silversun Pickups.

“For me, it’s a chance to highlight a band and give them a chance to develop and hone their set,” says Frank. And the musicians can draw benefits from playing the venue beyond the obvious one--a chance to get up on stage and reach an audience.

“If the band keeps playing again and again, they’re gonna get better,” says Silversun Pickups bassist Nikki Monninger. “Sometimes a booker can make a difference with a band. If they like your music, they are likely to give your demos to their friends, and their friends tend to be people who [have some clout] in the music industry.”

She adds, “People respect a booker’s opinion.”

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Sorina Diaconescu is a Times staff writer.