Talking To Strangers
23/02/2015 § Leave a comment
As a kid, I had always wanted to sell enough stuff to absolute strangers in order to get those amazing prizes as advertised lavishly in comic books. You know, sell an inordinate amount of Peony seeds, or magazine subscriptions, or wrapping paper, and obtain a shiny new Schwinn Stingray Bike with a banana seat. Unfortunately for both the seed company and my parents, I couldn’t walk up to strangers and sell them junk they didn’t need, even when I was desperate to have that very thing that would make me cooler than my younger brother. I had the dream but not the wherewithal, so I needed my folks to spend real money in order to get the bike.
Here We Go Again
22/01/2014 § Leave a comment
To the cloud, again and again. When I first wrote this for MusicThinkTank, way back in 2011, Google was working on a hush-hush (though everyone seemed to know about it) service to shunt all your music up to a locker in the cloud. Since then, Apple has also pushed their iTunes up into the Cloud. The premise is you can play your music everywhere and anywhere on just about any device that the gods of I.T. can wrestle into submission. Maybe.
Maybe not. You may not even own what you thought you bought. I knew the guys in Business Affairs at the labels wouldn’t let these kinds of services fly without some kind of hindrances, the weight of which could cause them to plummet to earth and die a slow but sure death. And here it is, a start of something sinister: be advised if you use the Apple service, iTunes Match, not all your iTunes tracks will stay as your iTunes tracks. Yes, those tracks you have purchased through Apple may disappear and you can’t get them back. “What?” you may be pondering, though with maybe an expletive sneaking in there. « Read the rest of this entry »
Resume? Resume? I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Resume!
25/10/2012 § Leave a comment
Well, of course you do, but aim to have a boatload of material so you don’t have just your resume to show prospective employers. And then, during your first job, find time to do your own thing, by any means necessary, so that you don’t really need that resume after that. I landed the second job of my career with the film production house, Second Story Television without any resume at all. That was because I started that company with a few friends after gleaning enough experience and connections from working at a small film production company/ad agency based on the famed Madison Avenue in NYC. And jobs after SST were mostly pulled in from my network of friends. That’s the key and the underlying thought behind this bloggette: building your career, yourself, again, by any means necessary.
Rubber Rodeo: How The West Was Won / Eat Records / Second Story Television
A Letter Each From Yoko, Hunter, & Sublette
20/09/2011 § Leave a comment
Yoko Ono, yes that Yoko Ono. I was her product manager at Rykodisc and worked intensely with her over the course of releasing the Onobox and her solo albums (and those duo Unfinished Music albums like TWO VIRGINS that she created with You-Know-Who). And yes, Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Dead. And yes, Sublette, Ned Sublette. Who? Look him up. When Rykodisc was being pulled to NYC by Chris Blackwell, I decided to get a raise and a better position instead of going back to the Big Apple with no raise, no cost-of-living increase, and no moving allowance, and in the lowly position of PM. Lowly, as they were trying to de-Rykodisc Ryko at the time with tighter marketing budgets and other de-naturing parts of their new Palm/Ryko bidness plan.
Listen To Your Parents And Then…
29/08/2011 § 5 Comments
Full disclosure here: I’m a parent. My eldest is currently at Boston University and another one who will be college-bound in a few years. I would love for both to land a job directly from one of their internships; with their freebie work acting like one long interview process. That would be very cool. And it happens. I’ve seen articles outlining the successes, where to apply for these programs and how students should consider doing that very thing in order to streamline their career path. I also know parents push their children to look for internships at prestigious companies with this very idea in mind. Don’t do it. For a whole cartload of reasons. Or at the very least, don’t expect anything and carry on like you will never get the carrot of the job they are dangling in front of you. Because you might not.
You Don’t Know Anything and Your Ideas Are Worthless (No, Seriously, Get Used To It…)
23/08/2011 § 8 Comments
In your first job (out here in the business world) there will be times when people are not going to listen to you. Many times. Or worse, tell you how wrong you are to your face, if not in an all-caps email that gets circulated throughout the company. Get used to it because it never ends, even when you get that so-called “experience” under your proverbial belt. For whatever reason, and there are multitudes of them that I could not possibly list here and stay within my allotted 400 words. Let me just say the personal successes and failures of your co-workers and, most importantly for today’s blog, YOUR FUTURE BOSSES, gives them their own specific, personal tunnel-vision that you cannot expect to fully perceive, much less fathom. « Read the rest of this entry »
Kerouac-Kicks Joy Darkness – article for Borders’ Magazine
26/06/2011 § Leave a comment
Kerouac-Kicks Joy Darkness is a spoken-word tribute with music to the writings of Jack Kerouac through readings of his material (including a few previously unpublished pieces) by such Beat luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Burroughs; alternative music figures such as Michael Stipe, Eddie Vedder, and Patti Smith; and actors like Johnny Depp and Matt Dillon. Here David Greenberg, co-creator of Rykodisc’s Voices spoken-word recordings series, describes some of the special circumstances that went into the creation of this landmark recording.
This Is A Dangerous Album
20/06/2011 § Leave a comment
Alan Douglas licensed Rykodisc the rights to re-release Leary’s You Can Be Anyone This Time Around album in 1992. Originally, it was recorded at the heyday of Leary’s popularity in the late 1960s, but the full truth about the album sessions had to wait thirty years in the future, when we were allowed to put the full artist listing on the album. Jimi Hendrix played bass on one track! Okay, not earth shattering, but pretty wild to me, at least. Since Hendrix had long since passed and his record company—Warner Bros.—was not going to sue the ass off of Douglas for recording Hendrix outside of his contract and releasing an album with an illegal performance, we added this rock history factoid to our release. “Finally,” Jon Sebastian thanked me after sending him a slew of copies. “Everyone thinks I’m lying when I say I jammed with Jimi.” « Read the rest of this entry »
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