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

by Scott Bradlee

  Something I actually did know about, however, was the importance of connecting with fans. With this sincere goal in mind, I bought a hardcover “yearbook” and filled it with random pictures of us and asked fans to write their email addresses along with made-up memories of us, as though we’d attended high school together. It was a silly gimmick, but it was effective. Thanks to this yearbook, I slowly built a small mailing list, eventually growing it to the point where I could count on having at least a handful of people at every show.

  Tiring of The Sesha Loop concept after a year or so, I put it into hiatus (to Sesha’s relief) and rebranded our group as an even more bizarre project: a faux–British New Wave band called Gordon Hunter & The Wandering Rocks, fronted by none other than yours truly—with a British accent. My goal was to make us the most pretentious act in Hartford, and I’m pretty sure we succeeded. There were eight others in the band, in addition to my character Gordon, who channeled Morrissey vocally and a poor man’s James Joyce lyrically. Among these were a second keyboardist who was only allowed to speak French and a girl who performed dramatic monologues—ostensibly written by Gordon—in between songs. It was quite the spectacle. Per my own rules, we remained in character throughout the night, even when faced with significant setbacks. On one occasion, the second keyboard malfunctioned while we were onstage, which resulted in a minor crisis that became something of an international incident:

  GORDON: (in a poorly executed British accent) Bloody hell, Kate! What is the problem?

  KATE: (quietly, off mic, in American English) The keyboard, it just turned off. I think it lost power?

  GORDON: (over the mic, exaggeratedly) Kate! I know you ONLY SPEAK FRENCH, but tell me what’s wrong, please!

  KATE: (hesitating before obediently tapping into four years of high school French) Le clavier est cassé.

  GORDON: [beat] For the love of—! Does anyone here speak French and can translate what she’s saying?

  We weren’t well-known, even locally, but the people who stumbled upon our group were consistently amused by the onstage craziness, and I’d like to think that personal touch of craziness played some role in turning happenstance listeners into fans. When spectators complimented me on a job well done, “Gordon” responded with an egotistical “I know,” delivered in a crudely attempted London dialect. Being in character as Gordon allowed me to act truly obnoxious without having it reflect poorly on me; it was too much fun.

  While my collegiate creative pursuits could never be considered “successful” by any conventional measure, they did offer me ample opportunity to experiment, explore, and nurture my musical identities. Crucially, too, they encouraged me to bring other musicians into the mix. It was no longer just my piano and me; I now had access to a network of talented musicians who could make sounds that I couldn’t make on my own. It was my first taste of the magic of collaboration, which would one day lead me to fantastic new places.

  HOW TO PAY YOUR BILLS DOING SOMETHING YOU KIND OF ENJOY

  Let’s start with the bad news: When you take off the training wheels and get out into the workforce for the very first time, you are probably not going to be doing what you love. It’s a bummer, but the world doesn’t owe you this, and that’s not going to change just because you’re talented or graduated as the valedictorian of your class. The good news is that it is possible to find employment that, while it may not fill your eyes with stars, also won’t eat away at your soul entirely. As a creative person, landing a job of this caliber—and one that ideally leaves you with some spare time to hone your craft—should be your goal. None of your creative dreams can come true if you’re not able to pay your bills.

  Speaking of paying the bills… that’s a learning process in and of itself. And if you’re anything like me, it might take suffering the consequences of not paying them a few times before the lesson is properly instilled. In 2005, after I graduated from the University of Hartford (as a “five-year plan” student; I was still an underachiever), I spent the following year living in a house that I rented with four college friends in what became something of an extension of college life. We succeeded in getting evicted not once but twice, for falling significantly behind on our rent payments. Not that it’s any excuse, but we were all in our early twenties, with absolutely no financial wherewithal. The following conversation, which I distinctly remember having with one of the housemates, Hobbes, pretty much sums it up:

  HOBBES: (answers flip phone) Hello? (closes flip phone abruptly)

  ME: Who was that?

  HOBBES: It was that collection agency again. I owe them, like, two grand.

  ME: Shouldn’t you pay that?

  HOBBES: Nah, dude. Do you know what happens to those bills if they can’t get in touch with you? They just disappear, dude.

  ME: Really?

  HOBBES: Yeah man, they just give up. They can’t force you to pay. It’s the biggest loophole in the credit system.

  Indeed, our household was hell-bent on exploiting this supposed “loophole.” I surfed credit cards to outfit a home studio top to bottom with music gear, amassing over five thousand dollars of high-interest credit card debt, which I then quickly defaulted on by adhering to our game plan of not answering the phone. Our gas was shut off periodically because our bills went unpaid for months. Even our debts to one another were treated with the same haphazard, illogical care; at one point, the fifty dollars that one roommate owed me somehow became the responsibility of a different roommate. It was complete madness, and yet we did nothing to stop it for a good long while.

  It was only when our fiscal shenanigans resulted in a second eviction that I realized, with what felt like sudden clarity, that something had to change. Unable to rent anywhere else due to my now terrible credit, and certainly not swimming in cash, I needed to secure a steady pay flow, stat. The band thing was a lot of fun, but getting paid forty dollars to play songs with my pants half-off didn’t exactly qualify as “making it.” However, I was aware that better-paying music-related gigs did exist and that they were sort of in the realm of what I wanted to be doing with my talents. That’s right; I was ready to enter the exciting world of background piano gigging for weddings, cocktail hours, and bar mitzvahs. I knew that braving the obstacles posed by neurotic wedding planners, stressed-out parents, and the occasional keyboard malfunction would test my mettle, but the guaranteed payoff was significant: checks for two, sometimes three hundred dollars, and all the hors d’oeuvres I could want. Consume enough free hors d’oeuvres, some say, and you’ve scored yourself a free dinner.

  From my experimental mixing of hip-hop with jazz in high school, I’d learned that the surest way to get people excited is to start them in a familiar place and then whisk them away. In action, this can be as simple as trying out various styles of music on your listeners and paying close attention to their reactions. For me, the first step was to figure out what people wanted to hear at a given event. I already knew lots of jazz standards, and through trial and error, I began to sift out the ones that non-musicians liked best. “My Romance,” “Moon River,” and “The Way You Look Tonight,” for example, all proved popular in the greater Hartford cocktail hour scene. When people requested songs that I wasn’t familiar with, I made sure to take note so that I could practice and prepare them for next time. I always did my best to match the vibe of the room; more subdued crowds received the classic ballad and love song treatment, while energetic crowds were served upbeat jazz and the occasional Billy Joel or Beatles tune.

  The next step for me was to get leads—to locate the demographic that would want this type of entertainment. Some digging on Craigslist led me to discover its events section, which contains ads placed by individual photographers, event planners, and the like. Essentially, the section functions as a one-stop shop for anyone throwing a wedding or large party; surprisingly, this gold mine of client leads appeared to be largely untapped by musicians. Right away I built a webpage featuring a photo of me wearing a suit and a friendly expression and
a solo piano audio file of “My Funny Valentine.” I began drafting posts targeted at couples about to get married, with the goal of convincing them that hiring a pianist like me—presumably a class act with excellent credit who could play any song requested, from Gershwin to Billy Joel—would elevate their cocktail hour from conventional to something straight out of a celebrity wedding from Hollywood’s glamorous Golden Age.

  After a few trial posts and a handful of tweaks, the ad started garnering real results. Never one to shy away from an opportunity to break the rules, I developed a routine of refreshing the ad every other day so that it would sit near the top of the page, where it was more likely to be seen.

  Before long, I was earning referrals from many of the individuals and event planners who’d hired me through the site. This happened thanks to three factors, and I can’t emphasize enough how firmly I believe these should be standard operating procedure for anyone building a reputation in a creative field:

  1. I showed up to the gig on time and appropriately dressed.

  2. I was nice to the people who hired me.

  3. I had my own keyboard, amplifier, and transportation. (I didn’t own a car, but my fellow credit-delinquent friend Hobbes let me borrow his Dodge Neon.)

  To this day, it saddens me when I encounter musicians who don’t understand how crucial these three basic tenets are to finding employment. Throughout my life, I’ve met a lot of really fantastic musicians who unintentionally limited the amount of work they received by ignoring these basic rules. After a certain level of competence, above-and-beyond ability becomes superfluous on most commercial gigs. From the point of view of the person doing the hiring, it’s far better to contract with a competent player who has a great, professional attitude than with a brilliant but irresponsible and egotistical musician who will likely require reining in and micromanaging.

  No matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished, if you’re working for someone else, you must always have humility about your role. Try looking at it like this: When you’re hired to play background music, you’re essentially filling the same role as an ice sculpture. Sure, you’re playing music, but you’re meant to blend in as atmosphere. No one throws a party and thinks, “Man, I’d really like to bring in an ice sculpture that shows up late and half-sculpted, refuses to pose in place and keeps sliding around, and then demands to be compensated in full despite pulling a premature meltdown and leaving before the night’s over.” Similarly, no one throws a party and hopes that the hired musical performer arrives without a suit, refuses to turn down the volume after being asked twice, and then insists at the last second on being paid in cash instead of by check because rent is due. If you agree to be an ice sculpture, be the best damn ice sculpture you can be.

  I eventually acquired enough event work to pay my bills like the real adult that I was (at least in age), and you know what? I enjoyed the work much more than I had expected to. Of course, in addition to earning money, anyone who self-identifies as an artist also needs to be able to find inspiration in at least some aspect of what they do in order to be happy and succeed long term; creativity and talent will stagnate if neglected. I didn’t see myself finding that kind of inspiration in the corner of a banquet hall, watching the mother of the bride yell at yet another event planner over a tablecloth. So, when I wasn’t shooting covert, sympathetic glances at the latest victim without missing a beat in playing the music I’d been hired to provide, I kept an eye out for other, potentially more rewarding opportunities in my free time—which I found I had a lot more of now that I was no longer using it to creatively dodge calls from creditors.

  Soon enough I found one that piqued my interest: a gig playing Sunday morning services at a Salvation Army–sponsored rehab center. It was in downtown Hartford, a rough-and-tumble part of town that most people I knew avoided. On the upside, it would be a steady and reliable gig, and I liked the idea of using my musical skills for good. I was a bit apprehensive my first day on the job, since I didn’t know much in the way of Gospel music and had never met anyone who suffered from a serious drug addiction, but I donned my best suit, showed up on time, put a smile on my face (recall the first and second tenets above), and embraced the uncertainty… and how glad I am that I did. I was greeted by the choir director, a friendly, upbeat woman in her fifties whose obvious love for what she did worked wonders in putting me at ease. Together, we went over the center’s binder of songs; there were a lot of them, and all but “Amazing Grace” were unfamiliar to me. Before I knew it, the parishioners had arrived, and it was time to begin. I hoped I wouldn’t mess up too badly.

  Coming from a small country town in New Jersey, where crime was nonexistent save for the occasional cow tipping, I was nervous about performing at a rehab center, unsure whether the audience’s troubled histories might make them less receptive to my eagerness to connect with them musically. Nothing could have been further from the truth: They were incredibly welcoming, and their response to my playing was electric. I played boogie-woogie piano solos in the middle of Gospel standards, and the entire room would get up on their feet and cheer and clap and dance along. The whole experience—everything about it—was completely the opposite of the background music gigs I was usually hired to do. The members of the parish called me “Brother Scott” and told me that they prayed for me to find recognition and success.

  One week, after I mentioned offhand to a parishioner that someone had smashed the window of my leased Subaru Forester and stolen my keyboard, they held a moment of silence during the service to pray that I would be able to recover it. I was touched, but I also felt embarrassed; these people had real problems to worry about, and yet here they were, praying for me. It gave me a powerful sense of perspective on what it means to struggle.

  I wound up playing the Salvation Army gig every week for the next year, and it always felt good: humbling, eye-opening, and gratifying. The folks there were the best audience I ever had. Knowing that my music was bringing them real happiness and hope inspired me to play more creatively and with more passion. It reaffirmed for me that I was meant to do something in music, something with the power to inspire and uplift, something that could—even if only temporarily—transcend the differences between people and bring us all together for one beautifully joyful moment. I was finally, truly ready to give music everything I had.

  In the summer of 2006, I packed up my things and said a bittersweet good-bye to my friends from all the various gigs I’d played over the years. Everyone at the Salvation Army center was ecstatic for me. Amid hugs and farewells, they told me that they were certain this next step would lead me to stardom.

  I was to make a brand-new start of it in New York City.

  And so I set off in my Subaru Forester, full of my earthly possessions and topped by a mattress tied to its roof, to the city that had lingered in the back of my mind ever since I’d visited it for the first time as a teenager. A few hours later, just as the sun was setting against a skyscraper-filled sky, the familiar cityscape came into view. It looked like a future of fantastic opportunities was sprawled out before me.

  DEALING WITH FAILURE

  We don’t want the same things,” my girlfriend of two years sobbed, gesturing around at the messy, cockroach-infested apartment that we shared. “Nothing has changed! You’re never going to change!”

  “I just need a little more time,” I protested, though what I really felt was resigned.

  Because she was right. We had begun dating at the end of college, and she had moved to New York with me in the hopes that I would mature into something resembling marriage material. Instead, in the year since we’d moved to New York City, I’d managed to run up a hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt, drop out of grad school, and fail to make a single meaningful contact that might further my career. Worse, I was having more and more trouble booking gigs. What had worked in Hartford—self-promotion and sourcing clients through Craigslist—wasn’t cutting it in the much more saturated market of New York Ci
ty, and so I resorted to indiscriminately mass-sending business cards and CDs (that likely went unheard) to every restaurant and banquet hall in town. The popular talent booking agencies weren’t of much help, either; when I sent out a recording of myself playing a ragtime version of “Stairway to Heaven,” I was met with a spate of flat-out rejections—including one blunt “nobody wants to hear that stuff.” At one particularly desperate juncture, I even took to commuting back up to Hartford on a weekly basis, just so that I could take comfort in playing for familiar faces at familiar venues. It had become abundantly clear to me that making ends meet in New York City as a working jazz pianist was going to be far more difficult than I’d ever imagined. As an outsider in a city that attracted top talent from music schools all over the world, and where connections often carried more weight, even, than raw talent, no one was willing to open their doors for me.

  “I’m really worried for you. You’re twenty-six years old. How are you going to take care of yourself if you refuse to get a job?”

  My girlfriend stood at the door with her pink suitcase, looking at me imploringly, but also with real pity. I didn’t have a good answer for her because this was never part of the plan. I was supposed to come to New York and dazzle the city with my creativity before getting signed by a record label that would help spread my music around the world and send me on tour to prestigious jazz clubs.

  “Good-bye,” she said, closing the door.