custom query returns nothing, please help!

I have this query below, selecting data based on meta fields. It returns nothing in WordPress. If I run the same query in MyPHPAdmin, it works as expected.

This line is giving me trouble:

AND wpostmeta.meta_value LIKE ‘a%’

If I change it to:

AND wpostmeta.meta_value LIKE ‘ab%’

It will return records. Of course, this is not what I want. I am trying to alpahbetize. Either way it works in MyPHPAdmin. Strange, please help!

$querystr = “
SELECT wposts.*
FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta
WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id
AND wpostmeta.meta_key = ‘artist’
AND wpostmeta.meta_value LIKE ‘a%’
AND wposts.post_status = ‘publish’
AND wposts.post_type = ‘post’
AND wposts.post_date < NOW()
ORDER BY wposts.post_date DESC”;