Tag Archives: music biz

Pop Will Eat Itself

“Everything come out alright?” Chris said. “Yeah, fine.” No one said anything for a few minutes while we ate, mouths full. And then Jordan started the talking the next time. “So how many tunes do we have to work with?” He was picking pieces of fatty beef out of his noodles with chopsticks and eating [...]

Smoke On The Water

Digger left the contracts with me and I decided to read them later. The plan was to mail them to him with a list of the things we wanted done right away, and then he could get started. We left the studio shortly after that, Chris begging off with a tricky wrist and reminding me [...]

(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone

It was two o’clock when I went up to the studio, and from the look of the pile of gear inside the door Chris had been there and then left. I set about setting up his Roland D-50 for myself on the off chance that I might have to play it. I was never a [...]

Once Bitten

I have this memory from my early childhood, one of those things you forget and then periodically remember. I must have been maybe four or five, and my older sister Beth was doing a piano recital. The recital was at the piano teacher’s house, and all her current students had little songs to play while [...]

Pour Some Sugar on Me

The buses pulled in to our hotel at about 7 a.m. and we were shuttled into rooms where we went immediately back to sleep. At ten a.m. the phone rang and I noticed that the message light was on. John was asking if I was awake and I told him that I was because the [...]

Money For Nothing

In the morning I woke up to find him asleep in the other bed in his room. I guess I’d conked out in the wet spot. The connecting doors were still open and I wandered back into my room to get my toothbrush and such from my bag. Here were two unmade beds. I went [...]

Rock and Roll High School

The next couple of weeks were uneventful. Bart and I took a few trips to Providence to do some sessions with someone he knew there, a violin player doing some kind of electric avant jazz, which was fun and paid okay, and Moondog Three played out about once a week. We opened for Dali’s Express [...]

Doo Wah Diddy

After Bart dropped Ziggy off, he turned the car toward Cambridge. We parked behind the McDonalds, but crossed the street to the Middle East where greater quantities of food could be had, cheaper, if you didn’t mind rude waitresses and a lot of spillover noise from the club room in the back. He wanted to [...]

Never Mind the Bollocks

The name on the card Artie had given me was Michael Knight. I had figured he’d be a guy a lot like Artie, but he wasn’t really. We played phone tag for about two weeks and then one day his secretary caught me at home and told me Mister Knight was on the line–after which [...]

Maybe I’m Amazed

I was late to the Wenco office. I could probably have been on time, but when I woke up and felt my head and tasted my mouth, I knew I had to have a shower. Jeremy had every shampoo known to man in his bathroom and offered me the use of his hair dryer, gel, [...]