For the fans by the bands.

LOS ANGELES

THE teenagers streamed in by the dozen past the electric gate, the 12-foot-high manicured hedges and the gleaming Lexus sedans in the driveway. They made their way to the backyard, where a makeshift performance space had been set up between the tennis court and the rose garden.

Hugging one another and milling around in skinny jeans and Converse high-tops, they took drags from their cigarettes.

It was a clear evening on a recent Friday. Behind a sprawling home in Encino, a grassy Los Angeles neighborhood on the edge of the San Fernando Valley, the gathering of nearly 300 teenagers included students from many of the area’s elite private schools — Buckley, Oakwood, Marlborough, Crossroads, Wildwood, Campbell Hall — and more than a few were Hollywood offspring.

The well-heeled children of Los Angeles are often derided as a lacquered tribe consumed with shopping and status, a stereotype sustained by the likes of the recently revived “Beverly Hills, 90210” franchise. But a different scene has been thriving here lately, composed of kids in thrift-store threads churning out homespun indie music and flocking to shows often held in one another’s backyards and living rooms.

“It certainly seems to be a phenomenon over the last three or four years,” said Linda Lichter, an entertainment lawyer whose two musician sons graduated from Crossroads. “I have a whole bunch of friends and clients whose kids are out there playing in bands. Kids aren’t responding to TV or movies anymore. Music is what’s cool.”

IN the summer, the scene coalesces at house shows like the one in Encino, a pastoral setting that made the event resemble a junior version of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Attendees chipped in $2 to watch a half-dozen acts, including a solo electric bassoonist and an experimental folk-punk band, Slaying Chickens.

Tallulah Willis, the youngest daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, staked out a prime space close to the stage. Keely Dowd, the daughter of Jeff Dowd, a producer on whom the Coen brothers based the main character of “The Big Lebowski,” ambled past the pool with a friend.

Emma Tolkin and Taylor Thompson, both 18 and with an entertainment industry pedigree, stood in front of the crowd in cute gauzy dresses with a guitar and bass slung around their respective necks.

“This song is called ‘Shootin’ With Rasputin,’ and my grandfather wrote it,” Ms. Tolkin announced. They launched into a catchy tune with honey-voiced harmonies, recasting lyrics that had been written by Ms. Tolkin’s late grandfather, Mel Tolkin, the head writer on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows.”

Indie music has a long and storied history in Southern California, dating back to the punk scene that flourished in Orange County in the late 1970s, and continuing today at popular all-age sites like the Smell in downtown Los Angeles and Pehrspace near Echo Park.

But to veterans of this scene and the latest crop of show-going kids, elements of the city’s music landscape have lately been skewing even younger and emanating from tonier enclaves, like Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood and Hancock Park.

And unlike other parents who may caution against pursuing rock ‘n’ roll careers, especially as the record industry crumbles, parents here can be encouraging and even aggressive about guiding and promoting their children’s bands. Ringing up their professional contacts and ferrying gear to gigs, they engage in helicopter parenting for the future rock-star set.

Hudson Franzoni, 17, started drumming five years ago. To encourage his development, his parents built him a studio at their home in the Malibu hills.

His father, David Franzoni, a screenwriter whose credits include “Amistad” and “Gladiator,” has invited agents to watch Hudson’s bands play in the family’s backyard, with its panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. He and his wife, Nancy, have also arranged for their son to continue his drumming lessons during their summers in Italy and while on location for movie shoots.

“I don’t want Hudson to wake up someday and say, ‘What happened to that thing I dreamed about when I was a kid?’ “ Mr. Franzoni said.

As involved as they are, the Franzonis complain about other parents of aspiring musicians. Mrs. Franzoni recounted an incident two years ago when some Malibu parents auditioned Hudson as the drummer for a band they were assembling for their child.

“It was full-on pedal to the metal,” Mrs. Franzoni recalled. “They hired a manager, hired another guy for recording, had band rooms, recording rooms. But they wanted us to sign contracts saying he would stay with the band after high school, no college, and he would only play their music. Hudson said ‘This isn’t what I want to do.’ ”

Hudson joined another band, but after it broke up, the group insisted on keeping songs in its repertory that Hudson had helped write. Now, the family’s personal lawyer copyrights every song Hudson writes and regulates what he puts on his MySpace page.

“It gets strange in L. A.,” Mrs. Franzoni said. “You’re a leg up to a kid in Nebraska, but it’s extremely pressurized with all the agents and managers. I’ve been heartbroken by the cutthroat competition.”

Pulled strings or not, some musicians with industry connections have attained measures of success lately.

Z Berg, the willowy 22-year-old lead singer for The Like who also attended Crossroads School, is the daughter of the music producer Tony Berg and niece of Jeff Berg, the head of International Creative Management. The band, whose two other members, Charlotte Froom and Tennessee Thomas, also have parents in the music industry, was signed to Geffen Records in 2004.

And Michael Shuman, the bassist for Queens of the Stone Age who went to Campbell Hall, is the son of Ira Shuman, a producer of “Night at the Museum” and the new “Pink Panther” films. The band is signed to Interscope Records and performs its psychedelic-tinged hard rock around the world.

But many of those flocking to house shows in Los Angeles shrug over such associations. Mostly college bound and unfettered by the worldly concerns that usually occupy musicians struggling to make it, they are free to indulge their whims, an impulse that eclipses the desire for broader recognition.

As children being raised in a town obsessed with celebrity and success, their form of rebellion, it often seems, is the feverish generation of art for its own sake in a scene that remains below the radar.

“I guess that growing up around Hollywood gave me a general sense that success in show business isn’t that far out of reach,” said Ms. Tolkin, whose father, Michael Tolkin, wrote “The Player” and other films and novels. “But I don’t want to feel like a sellout. I like the D.I.Y. aspect of this. I like that it’s just me and Taylor playing music.”

AT the Encino show, she and Ms. Thompson ran through their set of poppy, three-chord driven songs with sweet, sincere lyrics about friendship, science, bicycles, sleeping bags and the weather.

Many of their teenage fans sat on the ground with legs crossed, singing along like eager kindergartners. When the young women fumbled over a song, they giggled, pushed their hair from their faces and started over with the crowd’s encouragement.

Offstage, their talk was not about their rock-star ambitions but about their coming high school graduations, their college plans for the fall, and their latest musical obsessions (“I’ve been having a love affair with Scandinavian pop and bluegrass,” Ms. Tolkin gushed).

As night fell, lighted cigarettes and cellphone screens flickered on the lawn like fireflies. People drifted into the guesthouse, where three young artists had built an installation out of old car parts and a smoke machine. Others swung on a swing set and applauded loudly as the last act of the night, a raucous nine-person juggernaut called Limetree Warehouse, took the stage.

Flat broke blues
Toronto.
After breaking the bank on cabs and strings, I’m singing my last note
By Emily Weedon
I’ll never forget the first time I hung out after the show.

The lights were up, smoke had cleared, the band leader was paying the band. I loved how he slipped the bills into each musician’s hand like a Mafia handshake. A secret sign. They were members of a club. I burned to join it.

For two years I paid my dues and then became a band leader myself. I schlepped my guitar on the bus in snowstorms or on my bike after TTC hours, intent on saving cab fare.

Over those first two years, going twice a week to open stages, I figure I spent some $500 on TTC fares, another $1,000 on cabs and some $5,000 on pints! And I’m a light drink­er! And then there were the gui­tars, keyboard, cables, tuners, music books, metronome, strings and repairs.

I cut my first CD, which got stalled at the $1,000 mark. Without a steady job, I had trouble paying rent. But after spending a few hundred on making promo packs, I got my first gigs.

I held down odd jobs in those days. I did the door at shows. I saw how much came in, who got paid what at the end of the night. I kept track of how many people came through, how many drinks they had, how much the bar was making.

Most nights, three bands brought in a hundred people. People could be counted on to drink an average of three drinks – $1,500 to the bar, minus staff, electricity, weekly advertising for live music.

To the bands, the door brought $400. Headliners might get $150; the other two bands split the rest. Bottom line, each player walked home with two “free” beers and about 30 bucks per musician.

With bigger gigs came more stuff and the need for transportation. As a singer/songwriter, I had to get my drummer and his equipment to the show on my coin. I tried for years to perfect a system of lugging my 88- key board and guitar on the subway, and I discovered that saving taxi fares wasn’t worth the hassle.

Average budget for one gig: cabs $50, drummer $50, strings $6, photocopying flyers $40, beer (self and bandmates) $40.

Income from show $80 (shared equally between four bandmates); income from CD sales $20.

Net loss: $150 per show.

I was playing six shows a week, which added up to an impoverished lifestyle.

I recorded a few more CDs, got some airplay on CBC, even got placed in a few TV shows. Suffice it to say, the debt owed on my Visa is still in the high four digits. Revenue trickles in, to be sure, from SOCAN and from Indie Pool. The last check from Indie Pool, reflecting Internet sales, was for $4.53.

My last tax return claims over $13,000 in music expenses: recording, publicity, duplication, printing, posters, in­stru­ments, research, repairs, piano tuning and promo. None of this puts a value on the 40 hours a week that went into all the promo work, writing, recording, planning, rehearsing and increasingly fretting that all this paying out was starting to outweigh the fun of grabbing my guitar and playing solo.

I’m amazed thinking about the sheer effort people out there are making: on any given night in Toronto, some 30 establishments are offering live music at nominal or no cost to enhance the drinking experience. And some three bands or so will take the stage at each of these venues, chasing dragons of their own.

I kept that tradition of paying my band with the Mafia handshake. Fans who stuck around after the gig got a kick out of it. The truth was, I’d learned to do what others had before me: don’t let the audience see how much I pay. The trick is to make it look like we’re getting big whacks of cash to follow our bliss.

I didn’t get into music because of the money. But looking back over 10 years of living the dream, I admit I’m getting out because of the mo­ney.

Emily Weedon is a writer and soon to be ex-singer/songwriter
Contact
RockOn@RocktheNation.org