Outside the Jukebox_How I Turned My Vintage Music Obsession Into My Dream Gig

by Scott Bradlee

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Postmodern Jukebox Productions, Inc.

  Jacket design by Carlos Esparza

  Jacket photos courtesy of the author; film strip © limpido/Shutterstock; author photograph © Braverijah Sage

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Hachette Books

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  First Edition: June 2018

  Hachette Books is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Hachette Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  Insert photos are courtesy of Scott Bradlee, except as follows:

  here: © Adam Brown

  here: © Michelle Hayes

  here: © Paul Madrinan

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934274

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-41573-6 (hardcover), 978-0-316-41572-9 (ebook)

  E3-20180421-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  PREFACE

  MY FIRST GIG, OR HOW I GOT FIRED FROM WALMART

  HOW TO SKIP YOUR LESSONS AND STILL BECOME A MUSICIAN

  FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE PROCESS

  CREATING THE FUTURE BY EMBRACING THE PAST

  AN UNDERACHIEVER’S GUIDE TO FUMBLING THROUGH HIGHER EDUCATION

  FINDING MY NICHE

  HOW TO PAY YOUR BILLS DOING SOMETHING YOU KIND OF ENJOY

  DEALING WITH FAILURE

  FINDING A NEW WAY FORWARD

  HEY NOW, YOU’RE A YOUTUBE STAR

  THE MONSTER CALLED PERFECTIONISM

  EMBRACING CHANGING TECHNOLOGY

  FROM PIANIST TO PRODUCER

  FINDING INSPIRATION IN THE MOST UNLIKELY PLACES

  THE QUIET BIRTH OF POSTMODERN JUKEBOX

  GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER

  HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE MY YOUTUBE TROLLS

  THE INTERNET AS AMPLIFIER

  MAKING IT ON A BUDGET

  HOW TO GO MAINSTREAM—WITH THE HELP OF MILEY CYRUS

  BUILDING THE RIGHT TEAM

  CONSTRUCTING A DREAM FACTORY

  THE POWER OF ABSURDITY

  TAKING THE PLUNGE

  HOW GETTING KICKED OUT LANDED US ON HOLLYWOOD’S MAP

  THINGS FALL APART

  UNCOVERING THE AWESOME POWER OF COLLABORATION

  TAPPING THE AUTHENTIC SELF

  SUCCESS (AND ITS DISCONTENTS)

  MAKING IT WITHOUT A RECORD DEAL

  SETTING UP SHOP

  MAKING A GREAT IMPRESSION

  THE ADVANTAGES OF AN ENTOURAGE

  THE SEARCH FOR FREEDOM

  THINKING OUTSIDE THE JUKEBOX

  THE SHOW MUST GO ON

  A COMMUNITY THRIVES

  RETURNING HOME

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NEWSLETTERS

  PREFACE

  My name is Scott Bradlee.

  I grew up in rural New Jersey, in a small town, in a middle-class family. We lived in an unassuming house and did unassuming things, like watch Jeopardy!, play Scrabble, and go for after-dinner walks down to the end of the cul-de-sac on which we lived.

  We didn’t have any relatives in the entertainment industry, and none of us had ever been west of Pennsylvania, let alone to Hollywood. Ours was a simple life, where a trip to Krauzer’s Food Store for ice cream sandwiches was a cause for celebration.

  But from an early age, I have never been someone who could let a simple thing go uncomplicated. Within days of opening a Christmas present containing a shiny new toy, I could be found dismantling said toy, eager to discover its inner workings. When Scrabble (and Monopoly and Battleship) got old, I invented my own board games with my own rules—to the eternal frustration of those unlucky enough to play them with me. Whereas other kids were content to simply enjoy the songs they heard on the radio, I had to know how they were made.

  And so when I entered my teen years and fell feverishly in love with jazz and decided—with characteristic determination—that I was going to pursue a career as a jazz pianist, it didn’t really take anyone by surprise. My parents were supportive, but they also feared that I wouldn’t be able to support myself.

  I auditioned for and got accepted to music school and eventually earned a diploma. I moved to New York City, where I lived in a basement apartment in Queens that flooded every time it rained, with a sweet older landlady who used to bring me bread, and I spent a couple years in grad school studying music composition, before unceremoniously dropping out. Ten years out of high school, when most of my peers had already shacked up with their childhood sweethearts and bought houses not far from home, I was a twenty-seven-year-old with no career prospects and a hundred thousand dollars in debt. I was barely earning enough money to cover rent and had to claim hardship to defer payment on my outstanding student loans.

  Then everything changed for me. Not all at once and not conspicuously, but gradually, beginning with a single video performance I recorded at home and put on the Internet, just for kicks. The video went viral, and suddenly, I was inspired again. I began making more videos that combined my love of “vintage” styles of music with modern pop culture and invited my artistically inclined friends to join me in them. I had no idea where this new pastime might lead, or if it even would lead anywhere at all, but I knew that I enjoyed doing it and that viewers seemed to enjoy watching me do it, too. It wasn’t long before I’d racked up a few more viral hits and light press coverage; then requests for interviews began rolling in.

  In a couple of years, ScottBradleeLovesYa—the YouTube channel I’d launched to house these videos—grew from one subscriber (thanks, Mom!), to a thousand subscribers, to ten thousand subscribers, to one hundred thousand subscribers. Eventually, those online subscribers turned into something more tangible: I started to actually make money from them. I upgraded to a nicer, non-basement apartment (sans sweet landlady, sadly), and got invited to appear on national TV. I kept making those videos.

  When my channel passed a million subscribers, I changed its name to better reflect the project it housed. (Branding, like everything else about being an entrepreneur, was something I learned on the job, through trial and error.) I put together a live musical act based on the channel, and we played our first tour of small clubs outside New York City, selling out every show. We toured Europe for two weeks. I moved to Los Angeles and arranged a residency for the group at a local nightclub, which continued to run even while we toured. I was offered multiple record deals but turned them all down to stay independent and went on to release seven albums in a single
year on my own label. I kept on making those videos.

  I brought on more performers and established a small touring company, which saw us playing gigs in venues twice as big across the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. Those venue sizes doubled again the next year. Along the way, we helped launch the careers of many talented performers, earning us the reputation of being “Saturday Night Live for singers.”

  By 2016, our roster of performers had blossomed into a full-fledged artistic community. We sent multiple casts on the road, simultaneously—an unprecedented feat for a concert act. I bought a very large house in Los Angeles to serve as the headquarters of the project… where, yes, I continued making those videos.

  Later that year, I found myself near Times Square, watching a longtime dream come true. There, on the marquee of Radio City Music Hall, just a couple miles from the basement in which the project was originally hatched, were my name and that of the group I’d created. It was, to put it simply, surreal. I visited my old landlady and invited her to the show. She declined but asked if I could play the piano for her Christmas party.

  This is the story of just how my life changed and how an improbably crazy idea grew to become a grassroots, global phenomenon. This is the story of Postmodern Jukebox.

  MY FIRST GIG, OR HOW I GOT FIRED FROM WALMART

  Attention, Walmart shoppers: Come to the paint counter and get your groove on as we present the sweet sounds of Scott Bradlee and his Intergalactic Purveyors of Funk.”

  Long before the sold-out tour dates around the world, before the hundreds of millions of YouTube views, and before all my wildest dreams actually came true, this was how I announced my first public appearance as a bandleader: over the loudspeaker at the Walmart at which I worked. It wasn’t exactly well-received, either; instead, it got me fired.

  The Walmart in Clinton, New Jersey, was a logical place of employment for me in high school, mainly because it was the only place that was interested in hiring a very unskilled seventeen-year-old kid. It also happened to be the workplace of one of my best high school friends and fellow ne’er-do-wells, Cody (who, notoriously, would be fired not long after I started for making price tags that read “MY HAIRY ASS—$1.00” and slapping them on items around the store). In the brief, blissful time that our shifts overlapped, before Cody met his fate, we spent most of our on-the-job hours goofing off and talking music. On one particular afternoon, I had the idea to take things to the next level and actually perform music instead of merely sitting around talking about it.

  I won’t claim to have thought, at the time, that bringing in a live band to perform at the paint counter would result in anything other than my termination as a Walmart employee, but I do know this: Even then, the idea of putting music where it didn’t belong fascinated me enough to throw caution and my Walmart career to the wind, just to see what would happen. The musicians who accompanied me—Cody on bass, Steve Ujfalussy on sax, and my friend Josh on conga drums—knew the drill; after all, I’d talked them into performing for confused customers at a gas station convenience store the previous week.

  Upon arriving at the megastore that day, I channeled my inner James Bond and hijacked a large dolly, so as to wheel in my 1978 Fender Rhodes electric piano and a battery-powered amp in the smoothest, least obtrusive, least suspicion-stirring way possible. Realistic? Not at all. But it’s the strategy I’d landed on, and I was committed to seeing it through. I pushed the array of instruments down the frozen food aisle, conscious, of course, of the weird glances I was receiving from customers. But there was no backing out now. This was my musical debut for the entire world, and the number one rule in showbiz is that the show must go on. With steely resolve, I executed a wide left turn into my usual station at the hardware department. With the help of my friends, I quickly set up the instruments around the paint counter before taking my place at the piano. Then, over the public-address system, I made the announcement that begins this tale.

  The set began with a favorite of mine: Sly and the Family Stone’s “If You Want Me to Stay.” If nothing else, Walmart’s customers seemed mildly entertained by this departure from the paint counter’s usual programming, which consisted of my mixing paint for them and occasionally supergluing objects to the countertop out of boredom. A few even nodded their heads to the beat. It wasn’t enough people to qualify as a crowd, exactly, but it was enough for me. I imagined myself onstage somewhere grand, with throngs of screaming fans cheering my every note.

  A minute or so into the song, as I was passionately digging into the keys and wiping beads of sweat from my brow, I looked up to take in the sweep of my adoring fans only to find, instead, a formation of managers descending on us in a classic pincer movement. I snapped back to reality and stopped playing. A wave of discomfort washed over me as they arrived. My boss spoke.

  “Scott, what are you doing?”

  I felt it should have been obvious, but I figured I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and reply; he was my superior, after all.

  “Playing a concert with my Intergalactic Purveyors of Funk, sir.”

  The requisite blank stare.

  “You think this is a joke?”

  There was no discussion about the artistic merit of what I was doing. I was fired on the spot, made to turn over my badge, and ordered to leave the store immediately. I complied, though not before belting out one last battle cry of rebellion with the band: a performance of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” in protest, right outside the store’s entrance, until the police were called. So ended my first show—and my last day of working for corporate America.

  I wasn’t troubled by this in the least. As I sat in my parents’ driveway, trying to figure out how to explain my latest predicament to them in a way that might provoke some sympathy, I found my thoughts drifting to visions of someday getting the opportunity to tell this very story in front of a live audience. That’d show those managers the mistake they’d made, I thought. And in my rebellious teenage mind, anything seemed possible.

  HOW TO SKIP YOUR LESSONS AND STILL BECOME A MUSICIAN

  “24 minutes. 32 minutes. 28 minutes. 16 minutes. 29 minutes.”

  I was in the back seat of a silver Toyota Camry driven by my mother, a spiral-bound notebook splayed open in front of me. In it, I was furiously writing down my practice times for the previous week, meticulously alternating between using pen and pencil for entries. I wanted to create the illusion that I filled in my practice log daily and accurately, not arbitrarily and all at once on the ride over to my piano teacher’s house. Truthfully, the amount of time I spent practicing piano each day of the previous week was quite easy to remember—because I never practiced the piano.

  That I never practiced the piano was no secret to my teacher; I was a terrible liar, especially for an eleven-year-old who probably had a lot of things to lie about and, as such, had just as many opportunities to hone his lying skills. Every week, she would put the same Clementi sonatina in front of me on her cherry upright piano in her immaculately maintained parlor room, and I would do my best to pretend that I had spent hours practicing each section on my parents’ spinet piano. Every week, I would express faux frustration at my predicament.

  “I practiced this part so much last week.… I don’t know why I can’t get it to sound right! Maybe I’m just not able to learn piano.”

  My teacher was too gentle to call me out on my lies, but on this particular day, as she demonstrated how the section I’d been assigned for the past three weeks was supposed to sound, she looked more dispassionate than usual. That’s because she’d already decided that this was the last lesson I would be taking from her. Suffice it to say, it was a decision that improved both our lives.

  In retrospect, I’m able to clearly see that formal lessons were never going to work for me—for two reasons. First, I loathed being forced to do anything I didn’t want to, and the lessons always felt like something I was enduring to appease my parents. And second, as I realized much la
ter on, what appealed to me so much about music, in general, was its potential for rebellion—the fact that you could elicit a range of emotions, from bemusement to shock, in an audience, merely by playing something unexpected. In the drudgery of the Czerny and Hanon exercises that I was learning, there didn’t seem to be any space for that sort of magic.

  That I allowed my parents to waste their money on lessons I wasn’t committed to is something that I still feel pangs of remorse about all these years later. They were too generous and sweet to deserve that, and although we were by no means poor, we also weren’t wealthy. Born to a blue-collar family and raised in Brooklyn, my mother, Sunday, was a Spanish teacher at Amityville High School. She played violin and sang in college, and to this day she still picks out songs on the guitar that she learned to play during a year abroad in Madrid. My father, Richard, a computer programmer, was raised by a single mother in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up to be the honest, loyal father that he never had. My parents had been married five years when I was born, but they were still finding their footing in their careers. Through sacrifice and a few years of diligent saving, they were able to scrape together enough for a down payment on a plot of land in an undeveloped neighborhood in central New Jersey, away from the hustle and bustle of New York City. They wasted no time getting down to building the small, contemporary-style home they’d envisioned for their family, and in many of my photographic appearances as a five-year-old, I’m wearing OshKosh overalls and a painter’s cap, attempting to help apply a layer of primer on the interior. I wasn’t much help, but I was cheap labor, requiring little more than an arrowroot biscuit and an Ocean Spray juice box for compensation. The home they built for us—first, for just we three, and then, too, for my sister, Mollie, who came along seven years after me—was a happy and loving one. We may have spent an initial few years without proper flooring or heating, but in terms of growing up with a stable family life, I was indeed very, very fortunate.