Meiko's Rise from the Bar to the Stage

How singer/songwriter Meiko Sheppard went from serving drinks at the Hotel Cafe to performing on the venue's legendary stage.

By Amy Kaufman
The L.A. Pilot

Meiko performs at the Hotel Cafe. PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Milz
Gossip blogger Perez Hilton liked Meiko's tunes. PHOTO CREDIT: John W. Macdonald

Meiko’s inside, rocking on her tiptoes and singing about how one day, she’ll get out of her shitty apartment, and how one day is all it takes for things to turn around and that all she knows is she’s got you and you’ve got her, babe.

She’s looking out at the crowd like a third grader at a ballet recital, squinting through the stage lights, seeking her mother’s approval. Meiko is 25 but she just looks like a young tomboy, maybe 17. A locket, heart-shaped, hangs open against her clavicle. She’s wearing a red checkered dress, skinny jeans and a floppy pair of plastic sandals. She has a last name – Sheppard – but she never uses it.

 “I’ve been playing some fucking crazy places, man,” she says, after she finishes the song about her shitty apartment. She’s telling the crowd that one of her songs is going to be played on “Grey’s Anatomy” tomorrow night. When they whistle and clap, she nods and says, “Yeah, right? So anyone I, like, owe money to…I’ll pay you back now.

“Hey, Dieter or Mike, can one of you guys bring me a red wine?” she asks, looking at the back bar and tuning her guitar. “Shit, man, there’s no place like the Hotel Café.”

It’s fall now, but last month, Meiko was delivering cold slices of carrot cake to the audience here. She waitressed at Hotel most nights for the past two years, writing music when she didn’t have a shift to cover.

She moved to Los Angeles from Georgia when she was 19, playing mostly open mics at first, not getting anywhere, like everyone else. Then her friend, a music producer, introduced her to Marko Shafer, one of Hotel’s co-owners, who immediately hired Meiko to cocktail and started letting her play small shows.

“I would have worked anywhere then, as long as I wasn’t prostituting,” Meiko laughs later, after her set is finished. “But soon I realized that this was, like, my dream job. I was getting to see so many musicians play every night and I was getting so inspired.”

She’d get frustrated, now and again, waitressing. It was hard to squeeze between the tables that were too closely scrunched together in such a dimly-lit room. But she knew she had to pay the bills. Still, some nights, she’d look up from cleaning up a broken beer bottle and wish she were the one up there, singing about love and her shitty apartment.

Perez Says

Meiko was at dinner with her parents when her phone rang, July 17th, last summer. It was her friend, calling to say that Meiko had been featured on gossip blogger’s Perez Hilton’s website.

“Meiko is her name, and you will be hearing a lot more from her!” read the words that changed everything. “If you like singer/songwriters, then you will be foaming at the mouth for Meiko. This new artist grew up in Roberta, Georgia. The first time she sang in public was at an all black Southern Baptist church when she was eight.”

Hilton, who says he daily receives over 50 emails about burgeoning musicians, had discovered Meiko while sifting through the solicitations and posted clips of her music linked from her MySpace profile to his webpage.

“There’s just something about her music that really speaks to me,” Hilton says.

He’s liked the music of other Hotel regulars, too – Eric Hutchinson, Jenny Owens Young – who got a lot of attention after being mentioned on his website, which gets millions of hits per day. Meiko, whose album was self-financed and completely independent, broke the top 50 best-selling albums on iTunes and was featured in the store’s indie spotlight after the Perez mention.

Hilton has never been to the Hotel Café.

“Not a single show,” he laughs, embarrassed. “I know, I should go, right?”

Marko Shafer believed in Meiko, so he slated her as the opening act for performers who could draw bigger crowds – people like Patty Griffin and Rachael Yamagata. At first, she got little response, but Shafer kept pushing.

“I pitched her to everyone,” he says, “bookers, agents – and they’re all like, ‘Yeah, it’s okay.’ Nothing, nothing, nothing.” He’s sitting on one of the banquettes, twirling a Bud Light cap between his fingers. “And then Perez says she’s good and a week later, every major booking agency, five labels and management are crawling down her door.”

Yet even as the Hotel veteran scores song placement during kissing scenes at the end of network television dramas and continues to attract bigger crowds, she says she’ll always remember her roots.

“I’ll always play at Hotel,” she says. “Cause you know, when I’m there…I do kind of feel like I’m a part of a movement or something.”