The day I got the keys to this house,
I opened the door,
Walked inside,
Closed the door behind me,
Turned around,
Put my back to the door,
And slid to the floor.
Safe at last inside my own four walls.
I have rarely gotten up from the floor since that day in June 2000.
The 9 months prior to getting my house I was literally homeless.
Luckily I never spent one night on the street or in my car.
But i was millimeters away from that on more than one occasion.
And the shit that happened in the 20 months leading up to that were the worst in my life.
I doubt that I have ever fully dealt with it.
I had left my dream world in the record business.
That was my whoooooooooole life.
It was everything I had ever wanted in life and I had achieved it.
At the time I was inches away from being a major success story.
My parents grew up on dirt poor farms and moved to the small city nearby (population 25,000 at the time - bigger then a town, but not much of a city) to take entry level jobs with glorified High School educations. (They graduated because if you showed up you got a diploma not because they learned anything.)
Yet somehow as they raised me and my brother we found the arts.
There was no art in our house.
To my parents Art was a nickname for a guy named Arthur. (I stole that line from Andy Warhol.)
How we found music first, then books and movies and then fine art I will never know.
We didn't have a an older sibling or a relative or a neighbor or a friend with an older brother or sister to turn us on to any of this.
Yes we played all the sports too and did all the things that normal kids do.
But for both of us by the time we were at our senior year in high school the arts and and especially music was everything to us.
I began to have this dream of rock n roll, and living in that world.
I didn't have the foggiest idea how one did that.
There were no role models for that.
At 17 I walked into a new little record shop that was opening and begged for a job.
A few years before that I had discovered another little record shop in town and had my mind blown by the music.
(The albums that changed my life were Easter, and Horses by the Patti Smith Group, and a compilation of local bands - I had never heard of a local band. Every band I saw either had a hit and played arenas or played covers of the hits of the day in bowling alley bars. In my world no one wrote their own songs and played at local venues.)
Before that we bought our 45s and LPs at the department store.
I had loved buying records since a young age but it was just the top 40 drivel.
As I got to 13 or 14 my love for rock n roll began to creep in.
Before I got that job at the new record store I, like every other kid, had a shitty job in a restaurant 3 blocks from home.
But this record store was "downtown."
It was me breaking free.
My parents were furious with me when I told them I got a new job and quit the old one.
"How will you get to work and back home? You can't walk. Its too far. We will have to come and pick you up and we don't have time."
They were not wrong about any of that, but I didn't care at all.
Really they were just scared because their kid was about to step into a world that they knew nothing about.
They could relate to the shitty job in the restaurant, and it was so close to home that I just walked back and forth, worked with other kids from the neighborhood, and mom & dad knew where i was all the time.
Now I was about to venture off into the unknown.
And boy did I ever.
That was December 1979, and from that point on, until I went to work at the college in Oct 2000, I never once applied for a job in the music biz, never had a resume, never even looked for another job.
Jobs came to me.
One after another.
People came to me offering me job after job.
I went from the new kid at the record counter to an executive at the biggest coolest record label in the world.
The home of some of the greatest musical artists of the last 40 years. (The list is gigantic.)
(Also tons of amazing artists that almost no one knows about cuz the sheep are too stupid to know good music when it kicks them in the face. The list of those artists we worked with is even more gigantic than the popular one.)
The label was so awesome because they never went out looking for teen pop.
They never signed the one hit wonders that every other record label signed.
We had no time for Whitney Houston or Brittany Spears or Justin Beiber shit.
We made real records for real people who loved music.
Everyone who worked there loved music.
We worked with artists not pop stars.
It was beyond anything I could have ever dreamed.
And it all ended in a giant ball of fire.
The ending story for me is not that big of a deal.
Nothing dramatic happened.
The world of the music business began to change dramatically in the mid 90s.
The corporate structure was taking over.
The stock holders demanded instant return on their investment.
They brought in new bosses.
Those people were idiots.
They didn't know anything about real music, real artists.
Really talented people had made 5 albums before they had a hit.
Those days were over.
Now you had to a have a hit on day 1 or you were out.
So I was out.
My contract had run out in the summer of 98 and a lawyer spent 6 months trying to work a new deal for me.
One day after many horrible months of trying to convince horrible people that I knew what I was doing I called the lawyer and said stop negotiating a new contract.
Negotiate my way out.
The moment my boss heard that he called me to his office and fired me on the spot.
You want out? Then get out.
That massive loser couldn't even look me in the eye as he handed me a huge pile of money to go away.
I literally flew-in one morning working for the greatest record company of all time and by noon that day I was unemployed.
I went straight back to the airport to catch the next flight home.
I remember standing at a bank of payphones and calling my brother and just sobbing.
He new.
I didn't have to tell him that it was over.
I got offered lots of other jobs.
But they were shit compared to who I was or what I wanted or demanded.
They were all horrible record companies who made the worst music on earth.
And I turned them all down.
In my last months at the label I had discovered this very talented new kid and so after I took a month off to recover I tracked him down, told him who I was and that I wanted to work with him.
Over the next 13 months he went from a kid who could hardly get a gig, and couldn't give away his cd, to being King of the Scene and rapidly taking over the whole region of the country.
We sold 10,000 cds. (At $10 a pop that was a cool quick $100,000 in our pockets.)
We turned down 4 out of every 5 shows offered to us because they were the right one for us.
Sold out big cubs.
Sold out 4 nights in a row at small clubs.
Artist Of The Year on local radio.
Cover of the weekly culture paper and winner of the best new band.
None of these people had given this kid the time of day for the 2 years he struggled before that.
But we did it all, took the city by storm.
And then after 13 amazing months he fired me.
He said I was bitter and angry and scary to be around.
Just before that went down with him the house I had been renting at the time was sold out from under me and I had no idea where to turn to.
I took everything I owned and moved it into a long term storage garage.
I went from couch to couch wearing out my welcome.
Creating a trail of people hating me.
And then a new story began.
The forest had been burnt to the ground.
It was all gone.
But new life eventually sprouted and here i am today.
11 years later.
The time flew by and I spent a great deal of it deep inside very safe walls that would keep out the powerful demons of broken hearts and destroyed careers.
Luckily during all of that I stayed sober.
I know that if I had been drinking alcohol or using drugs during that time that I would not be alive today.
Too many people I know died.
People close to me.
Literally dead from abuse.
And it runs deep in my family too.
That tree is littered with bodies (dead and barely alive alike) from abuse.
That is the one thing that saved me,
Being sober through it all.
I probably felt the pain a lot more intensely because I never self-medicated but at least now that I am finally healing I can use the memories of the pain as character and something to build on.
I just hope its not too late.
I hope I am not too old to give it another try.
That scares the hell out of me as I write today.
I lost a whole decade.
God damn, an entire fucking decade.
