The LA trip started off with a bang. I started out Friday night at the EMI family and friends event where I saw my friend Will who plays in MGMT. We know each other from NYC and he was in LA with his fiance for Grammy stuff, as soon as I bumped into him he shot me a look as if to say “uh oh, Jingle Jared is in LA, this might get ugly”. The night did turn out pretty epic all things considered… I met my guitar hero Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine. Met Katy Perry, who I think is a pretty sharp songwriter, and I also met Perez Hilton who is single handedly responsible for decreasing office productivity across the world… which I told him.
Saturday morning I worked off the night before with a nice walk around the Getty Center with Sexy Joe. That night we headed out to the Primary Wave Grammy Bash which ended up being a really, really fun event. I rolled to the party with my sister, Sam, who ended up acting as my defacto publicist and somehow convinced many of the celebs there to pose for pics with me while holding up Jingle Punks schwag…ha! If it were not for her I may have spent the entire party in the corner twiddling my thumbs. That night we ended up going to another unsanctioned Grammy thing at My House, a club that was pretty fun… but what made it even more fun was a another friend of mine from out of town decided to throw down his card and spend almost 10k in one night there. Ha! Can’t argue with fun like that right? I’m usually not one for those types of places, but I’m also not stupid, so I went along for the ride.
Our night ended at the W Hotel in Hollywood where I bumped into the girl from “Precious” and asked if she wanted to party with the Jingle Punks. She said NO. I said why not? She said cause you and your friends seem really stupid. Go figure.
Anyhow, after spending some time at the W After Party we got word of yet another party happening in the Hollywood Hills, so the whole crew descended en masse in a fleet of rental cars provide by my aforementioned out of town friend. Once we got there I wandered around looking for a place to settle and ended up walking straight into a glass door that I thought was an entry way to the porch… the whole room laughed as I bounced back from the glass. Luckily I didn’t hurt myself.
At this point I realized it was time to call it a night…it was 5:30 am and I needed to get some sleep if I was going to go the actual Grammys and all the parties afterwards. I got back to my sisters place at around 5:45 and realized I had given Sam my keys to hold onto so I wouldn’t lose them. In my head my only option was to bang on her door until she woke up, which I did, for a good 20 minutes until her neighbor came out of his place in underpants, socks and no shirt pointing a gun at me and asking me to identify myself. After I pooped my shorts I told him I would figure out another way to get into my sister’s place. To compound the problem I also lost my cell phone so calling was out of the question. My only other choice was to throw a hail mary and see if she would answer the front door buzzer. Which she did… I got in and went to sleep on my inflatable bed that Sam so graciously let me sleep on during my stay.
Sunday… this was a tough day. I didn’t really feel like doing much early on so I took a nap till the Grammy’s were over, then Ant, Sam and I rolled to the W Hotel, which was hosting the EMI Grammy party. All in all the night was a far more chill evening than the previous night, but not without it’s share of full on surreal moments…
First off I saw Slash, who I hung with a few times in NYC, but this time around his handlers threw a pick and blocked me from talking with him. I yelled “Slash, you’ve changed!” then walked away sad… ha! I tried easing my pain by making small talk with Russell Brand who told me that he found me to be very offensive, but memorable. So I got that going for me. The fact that I was rolling in a Jingle Punks T Shirt with red bandana wrapped around my head to a semi formal event didn’t help matters much. I was also advised by B Real from Cypress Hill that technically I was wearing gang colors and should be careful walking around the streets of LA like that… big oops.
So basically that was the crazy fun part of the week I had in LA. The rest of the time was spent going from production company to production company helping to spread the word about Jingle Punks in a much larger way. My time in LA was wonderfully beneficial though as I was able to meet some of our favorite clients and large music companies, all of which had amazing things to say about our company which was very nice. We hope to be back in LA soon to catch up with all the great new friends we made this time around!
And now I shall regale you with pictures from my trip to Los Angeles
