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Chapter Two - My Career Is Nowhere - |
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My career is nowhere, my marriage is a failure, I'm in debt up to my eyeballs, and I'm turning thirty.
The Mantra of Twenty-Nine. If I had a dollar for every time I repeated that phrase, I could have lost that third comma. Career, marriage, debt, thirty. Career, marriage, debt, thirty. These were the nightmares that consumed me. Don’t ask me why the music career hadn’t hit they way I’d intended since I was in grade school. Certainly it was not for lack of trying on my part. By this time in the Big Plan I was supposed to be in the middle of a fabulously successful career. Filthy rich, adored by millions, supermodel girlfriend, a stint or two in rehab, and on every A-list in town. I felt more like I was participating in the federal witness protection plan. “Here, put him in a band in Hollywood. No one will ever hear from him again.” Since arriving in Southern California I played every sticky-floored club in Hollywood, West L.A., the valley, and downtown. I plastered the town with posters, handed out countless tickets. I begged, borrowed, and stole studio time to record the demos. I licked a thousand envelopes. I came up with creative ways to get the demos into the hands of the right sets of ears. (Delivering the tape inside the pants of a hooker was really effective.) I hired the managers, played the showcases, and took the meetings. I read the trades, bought the books, and went to the seminars. But more important than these logistical errands, I wrote. By god I wrote. I wrote till it hurt. I poured my blood into my songs. I wrote songs that made young girls cry. I wrote songs that made white men dance -- teary confessionals about my tenuous relationship with my parents, gut-wrenching accounts of my failed romances. This was good stuff. My songs filled the soundtracks for some fairly big films and underscored the very special episode of several television shows. My music made decent money in the film world. Why couldn’t I crack the record biz? There was something wrong in the equation. People Magazine, Billboard, and Variety touted my mad skills. How could so many people on one side of the entertainment industry take such a liking to me, while the other side wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire? It had to be them. It certainly couldn’t have been me. Could it? Let’s say it was them. What went wrong? What stone went unturned? Whose dick went unsucked? “You just haven’t been in the right place at the right time.” That’s the consolation of friends who don’t know how else to not contribute to your suicidal tendencies. “The record business is just not happening in Los Angeles.” Normally a sentence like that would elicit a raised eyebrow and an “uh-huh” from me, but I uncovered evidence to support that theory. One of my cold calls went to a Young A&R Rep at a small label featuring a roster of bands that were alternative before alternative went mainstream. “Where are you from?” Young Rep asked. “Originally, Milwaukee,” I answered in all honesty - a practice I abandoned shortly following this call. “Oh.” “Oh?” “Oh. Well, that was last year.” “Excuse me?” Did I actually hear what I heard? After she confirmed that my ears were, in fact, functioning, she sighed and inquired where she might see the band perform. I was ready for her. I just happened to have a show booked in a couple weeks at a club in Hollywood favored by the A&R community. “Oh, you’re playing in town?” “Yes, I thought that might be convenient,” I said, my sarcasm lost on Young Rep. “Oh, no one goes to see bands in town anymore, it’s much more fun to travel. Tell you what, why don’t you send me a tape, anyway?” I was incensed. Who was this little c-word? Just how did she get her job? And why does she begin every sentence with “Oh?” “What for?” I bellowed. “You obviously have no interest in my band. Is your label so hard up you need my tape to record over?” And I hung up. You think I’m making this up. Everyone did. I had trouble convincing people that phone conversation actually took place, until I met the editor of a music magazine who happened to be in Young Rep’s office at the time. For years he had been regaling friends and acquaintances my story without knowing the identity of the sad sack on the other end of the line. Nice to be able to put a face to a story. Later, Young Rep moved to a Major Label and was in danger of losing her job because, shockingly, she hadn’t signed anything. The manager of one of the Major Label’s hot new acts happened past her office. She begged him please, please, please for the name of any new band he thought was hot. Without hesitation, he gave her my number and told her that I had the best band in town. She thanked him profusely and never called. Was it really them? Way back when, in my years of over-confidence (roughly nineteen to twenty-four) I had nothing but scorn for aging rockers who hadn’t made it and didn’t have enough sense to step down with dignity. Get off the stage, old man. You’re breathing my air. Didn’t they know they would never happen? Wasn’t it obvious? When I was on top of the club scene in Milwaukee I had occasion to play with a bass player the ripe old age of thirty-five. My verbal attacks were merciless. Thank god everyone was too drunk to remember my instructions to shoot me if they ever see me playing in a bar at that age. So what do you do? You load up the truck and you move to Beverly...Boulevard, that is. And you load you gear into Club 88, because that’s the only club unknown bands were allowed to play. Then you graduate to the downstairs stage at Madame Wong’s West on a Wednesday at midnight. And if you draw a few people your next few gigs and put up with Esther’s ranting, you’ll be give the golden opportunity to play Wong’s Chinatown on a Sunday. And if your gear doesn’t get stolen, you can beg and plead for three months to get a review in the Music Connection magazine. If MC gives you the thumbs up, you graduate to begging and pleading with the booker at the Club Lingerie, who finally lets you fill his 1:00 a.m. slot on Tuesday. More precisely, he calls you at 4:30 in the afternoon and says he’s got a cancellation that night. And, by the way, if all the guys in the band get on the phone now, you should be able to pull in about eighty people if you ever want to play one of his clubs again. On the nights you don’t play, you hang out on the Sunset Strip and try to figure out how these guys with poofy hair and tattoos get all these insanely hot, dim girls to pay ten bucks to get into the Whiskey (forget the cover charge -- these guys had the girls paying their rent!) while you have to cajole you friends to come to your shows on the free list. And you read the full-page ads in the local music rag paid for by someone’s dentist and wonder why nobody’s throwing stupid money like that your way. And you tell anyone who will listen that these long hair bands aren’t going to happen, none of them. Not Poison, not Rat, and especially not that yucky Guns ‘n Roses. And then the director of a film currently in production approaches you at The Viper Room (nee The Central, now with working toilets) and wants to put you in his new movie. Your lawyer boasts how he beat down their lawyers and you get to keep all your publishing royalties, but in reality the production company has no interest in your publishing because they have no interest in putting out a soundtrack album since they got so badly burned on their last soundtrack deal. They will, however, let you screen a print for any interested record companies, who will politely watch the film before they turn you down because there is no involvement from the production company. Everyone is convinced the film is not going anywhere. Then opening weekend comes and the movie rockets up to number one on the charts, knocking a Big Studio Film off the top spot and pissing off Warner Brothers and taking everyone, including the production company, who now have their first box office hit, by surprise. And no one knows what to do because it’s too late to squeeze out a soundtrack album, so nothing happens. Then your lawyer’s partner hooks you up with a manager who comes recommended by Polygram Records and you sign with him, not figuring till years later that a record company might refer a manager because they had him in their pocket. That becomes the least of your worries when it dawns on you that this is the same guy who ripped off Badfinger so badly that TWO of the members hung themselves. Then your writing partner announces he’s leaving the band to star in a high-visibility one-season television show. And your manager tries to explain that he put the deal together because of how it will help the band. As you fire him, you ask the manager to please explain how splitting up the creative force behind the band will help the band. And you feel so guilty for not knowing your rock history that you vow to beat the crap out of the manager on behalf of Badfinger’s estate if you ever see him again. And you re-group. You get together with some old players and a couple new faces that might breathe some life into things. And then you get the great idea to record your own 7” single. This, of course, seven years before college radio embraces vinyl singles in a CD backlash. And you gather together some money from your friends who think you’re really swell and you hire a promoter from the shadows of Georgia to push the record on something called Gavin stations with the idea that once you prove yourself the record companies will come beating down your door and toss huge piles of money on you. You get a rave review in Billboard and twenty confirmed adds in the Gavin report. You even get a rave review from a Rolling Stone reporter. And it means nothing because this is years before Hootie And The Blowfish did the exact same thing and again you’re too far ahead of the curve. Your calls to the record companies still go unanswered. You can’t get the record in the stores because the distributors want nothing to do with you, as there’s no money to be made in singles and the indie market has yet to explode. So you live with the shame that you just couldn’t do it and the guilt that you blew your friends’ money. And you shut down. And you shut down. And you shut down.
The dream was over. My muse had moved to Cincinnati. I hadn’t written a thing in ages. The thought of holding on to what was left of my band made me mildly ill and I couldn’t stomach putting a new act together. I just couldn’t take a punch. There was not a song to be found anywhere near my heart. I was over.
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