James Maddock plays the Hollywood Bowl, much to his own delight.
James Maddock has played rooms of two hundred people and called it a good crowd. He has built a career, one gig at a time, out of a modest but devoted following on the East Coast, where Columbia Records first brought him from England years ago, and where he still tours as an independent artist with no label behind him. He makes his living from the road.
Saturday night it was just the Jimmy and Immy show, as Maddock paired up with his longtime musical cohort, David “Immy” Immergluck.
So when a spot opened up at the Hollywood Bowl and Maddock got the call to fill it, stepping in for an act that could not make the date, he did not know quite what to do with himself. Now he does. “The best gig I’ve ever done in my life,” he said, standing near his merchandise table after his set, still coming down from his stage high.
“I would think so,” we told him. “You can’t beat that. You played where the Beatles played.”
“Where the Beatles play,” he repeated, correcting the tense without seeming to notice he had done it, the moment still very much present tense for him. “We can’t beat that. And to look out and see all the people like that, and all the history, and that amount of people. That’s a huge amount of people. I normally play for much less people.”
Two hundred people is a good crowd, he had said a moment earlier, and he said it again, as if to measure the distance between that number, and the crowd facing him from the bowl-shaped hillside above Highland Avenue. “So it was a thrill of a lifetime,” he said. “Unforgettable, last night and tonight.”
Our affection for Maddock is totally biased. We discovered him by accident as we drove north to San Francisco 5 or 6 years ago to cover the Dodgers. Somewhere between Seacliff and Santa Barbara, “Beautiful Now” filled the car’s interior, and we thought, “Who is this?” We’ve been hooked ever since.
Fans who had just watched him were moving past his table in twos and threes now, some of them still humming, most of them looking for restrooms, unaware that the man next to the merch booth a few feet away, was the one who had just played the show of his life. That contrast, the quiet stretch of asphalt at the Bowl’s main gate and the roar he had just walked off of, seemed to be exactly what he was still turning over. He is not an arena act, and by his own account does not want to be one.
“I’m not like the Rolling Stones,” he said. “But I love all the fans so much. I can’t believe it when people come to my gigs and actually pay money to see me.”
He talked about his small New Jersey apartment, the money he has, the money he does not, and none of it sounded like a complaint. “You live according to your social conscience,” he said. “Wherever you are is where you are. And my life is the size it is.” He has a deep catalogue behind that life, records going back through his time with the band Wood and into two decades of albums under his own name, much of it funded directly by the same fans who came out that night, and he speaks about that arrangement less like a business model than a kind of trust.
“Everyone is a precious person,” he said. “Over the years, I’ve put out records and music, and I’ve been able to just sustain it and keep going, largely due to the generosity of the fans that finance the records.”
Somewhere in the crowd that night, a couple of hundred yards from where he now stood, a fan he had never met sang along to a lyric about keeping a dream up, one of his own lines coming back to him from strangers in the dark. He mentioned it almost in passing, the fact that people knew the words, as if it still surprised him after all these years on the road. It is the kind of detail that explains why a gig booked at the last minute, at a place built for orchestras and fireworks, could become the best night of one working musician’s life.
He has played thousands of venues. This was the one with history in its air, and for one night, his name was on the marquee.
‘90s alt-rock hit machine Counting Crows headlined the show.
Hollywood Bowl: The Rest of the Summer Season
August 9: “How to Train Your Dragon in Concert,” a live-to-picture performance of John Powell’s score, with the film shown in full.
August 15: “Top Gun: Maverick in Concert,” conducted by Lorne Balfe, featuring the film’s Hans Zimmer, Harold Faltermeyer, Lady Gaga, and Balfe score.
August 22: Foo Fighters join Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil, part of Dudamel’s farewell season as the orchestra’s music and artistic director.
August 31: Muse, with Portugal. The Man and The Temper Trap.
September 1: Dvořák and Bruch, with Anja Bihlmaier conducting and Bomsori on violin, alongside the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
September 3: “Amadeus in Concert,” the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing Mozart live as the film plays on screen, conducted by Norman Huynh.
September 4 through 6: “Maestro of the Movies: A Tribute to John Williams,” with David Newman conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic through scores from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, Jaws, and Jurassic Park.
September 8: Los Angeles Ballet makes its Bowl debut, performing with the LA Phil.
September 27: Jon Batiste closes out the Bowl’s produced programming for the season.
More information on tickets and showtimes is available at hollywoodbowl.com.
