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

by Scott Bradlee

  Suddenly, it was just me, alone in an apartment that I couldn’t afford, in a city that didn’t care to know my name.

  That night, the same empty feeling washed over me that I’d felt sitting on the curb outside my high school, waiting for my dad to pick me up after a night of watching my classmates dance from the sidelines.

  … What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here…

  Radiohead’s “Creep” had never felt more apt.

  Life generally doesn’t go according to plan. This is a tough pill to swallow because a big part of being human is making plans and trying to anticipate, if not outright influence, the future. In my case, I had designed what I thought to be a great plan to gain a foothold in the New York City music scene. I’d applied and been accepted to a prestigious grad school with a great reputation for the arts, and I was certain that the program’s high-profile faculty would immediately identify and help foster my talent while providing me with ample professional guidance and career opportunities.

  Not so. The program, as it turned out, was in the midst of a chaotic time; the department head had stepped down, and the interim head hadn’t yet proved capable of restoring any sense of order to the place. I had some good professors, but a number of my teachers canceled class regularly and seemed to fail to offer much in the way of career guidance to me and other students. I dropped out after a year and never went back; I’d made a painful, naive mistake in putting all my trust in a name rather than fully thinking through what I needed, which realistically was just another laboratory in which to carry out my musical experiments alongside other young, talented performers. No musician needs a degree testifying to his or her ability to play. Every musician, however, needs the networking and support system that comes from collaborating with ambitious, creative people on a daily basis.

  And that’s how I found myself in massive debt, with zero career prospects on the horizon, and with no girlfriend by my side now, either. My life was in shambles, but somehow I still more or less managed to look on the bright side. After all, I had my musical instruments, some recording equipment, and my own place to live: a basement apartment, in a building in Queens, owned by an older Greek woman named Agatha.

  “I charge fourteen hundred dollars for the basement,” she’d said when we first met. “But for you? Nine hundred. You look like a good boy, so I take care of you. But, let me tell you something—NO DRUGS!! You hear?”

  Agatha was quite the character, and I mean that in the best possible way. Her entire family lived in the building, and under her guidance maintenance and repairs on the premises were generally carried out by these family members with varying degrees of competency. She had a strong maternal streak and would often leave food out for me… albeit in slightly inconvenient locations and often without any sort of heads-up. It was not unusual for me to return home after a weekend of gigging back in Hartford to find a leg of chicken propped on the air conditioner outside, or to find a bag of soggy bread tied to my car door on a rainy day, or to be greeted upon entry into my abode by a garbage bag stuffed with literally hundreds of discarded bagels from the shop she owned. The impromptu food bonanzas were an endless source of humor for me, and I eagerly awaited the next bestowal so that I could recount the story of it for friends and family. At the same time, though, Agatha’s offerings, odd as they were, made me feel good. It was comforting to know that, in her own way, she was looking out for me and truly cared about my well-being. The city can be very isolating, and for me, especially, in the wake of so much disappointment, it had become exceedingly lonely. To have tried so hard at something only to flounder spectacularly had taken a serious toll on my psyche, and I was grateful to have some semblance—any semblance—of family around. And Agatha, from the instant she had me drive her to the bank to deposit my first rent check while she further admonished me to “be a nice boy” and “say no to the drugs,” was definitely family.

  My apartment was cold and unfinished, with essentially no natural light to speak of. It had few of the standard comforts of a typical apartment; there was no stove, and I slept on a mattress on the floor next to the boiler room, which doubled as a heat source in the winter months. And yet, despite all that it lacked, it had everything I needed. All I wished for was a room large enough to fit a drum kit, multiple keyboards, a PA system, my recording gear, and “A Great Day in Harlem,” which I brought from New Jersey and hung on my wall as a visual reminder to stay inspired. Most of the neighbors didn’t mind the noise of my practicing; the only real issue I had resulted from a disgruntled tenant calling the housing commission to report that I was possibly occupying an illegal apartment in the basement of her building. Agatha, advanced in years but ever the quick thinker, saved the day by explaining to all parties that I was her nephew. Well, all parties, that is, except for me, which led to this exchange:

  AGATHA: Scott! From now on, when you see me, you call me “Aunt Agatha.” It’s very important. I tell them your parents are dead and you must stay with me to go to school.

  ME: I don’t know, Agatha, that feels a little weird. You know, because my parents are alive, and I dropped out of school, and… well… you’re not my aunt?

  AGATHA: (firmly) No! Do as I say. You must call me “Aunt Agatha.”

  ME: (resigned) Yes, Ag—I mean, Aunt Agatha.

  Before long, I was holding jam sessions in that apartment, and I hosted a few parties there, too, the most memorable being a ’70s roller disco–themed affair that had guests skating on the hard basement floor. It may or may not surprise you that Agatha encouraged the music and partying; she loved having young people visit the building, and she often dropped off gifts for us, such as a five-gallon vat of split pea soup and leftover Greek Easter bread. As a thank-you, I would pass along information about the vacant units in her building to everyone who came through; you just never know who might be in the market for an apartment that includes the occasional free meal. I may have been broke, but I was having a blast.

  FINDING A NEW WAY FORWARD

  Midway through 2008, I arrived at a crossroads. I finally had enough consistent work, teaching piano lessons and playing cocktail hours and restaurants, to make ends meet in my cold little basement apartment in Queens, but the life I was leading was still worlds away from the glamor of New York City. I was surviving paycheck to paycheck and now solidly in my late twenties—far past the age where the “struggling artist” trope has any allure. My musician friends were mostly in the same boat as I, and one by one, they began abandoning their creative projects for more stable employment. But whereas they often seemed enthused about their new opportunities and content to leave behind their dreams, I felt unable to give up on my pursuit of a music career, no matter how much it was causing me to suffer.

  And artistically, I was suffering. I was stuck. I began having visions of a future in which I was in my forties and still living in a basement, hustling for the next hundred-dollar gig, all the while railing against the “establishment” and bitterly blaming the unsophisticated audiences that failed to see the artistry of my career’s work. Scarily, it didn’t feel so far-fetched.

  “I read an article in the New York Times about how today’s college graduates are taking a much longer time to find employment,” my mom said to me over the phone one day, as I sat on the couch preparing yet another CD package to send out to yet another Manhattan restaurant. “I guess it’s just more difficult these days.” I could tell how hard she was trying to be upbeat, and still I could sense the sadness in her voice.

  This was not at all the life that I had envisioned for myself back when I was spending eight hours a day practicing piano so that I could gain the chops to reignite the world’s love for classic jazz. There was a part of me that wondered if my dreams, encouraged by my supportive parents and helped along by so many others over the years, had ever been anything more than fantasy. Perhaps, I reasoned unhappily, this is what life really amounts to for us music kids: You peak early, you grow up, you find a “real job
,” and you settle down and wonder what might have been. Was there an alternative? I wasn’t sure.

  As my disillusionment with the plight of the musician’s life in New York City bloomed and spread, I found myself looking for an escape hatch, a career that could provide the sort of stability my friends now entering law school were also seeking. On a whim, I picked up a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time at a local bookstore, with the goal of broadening my horizons a bit. It seemed to do the trick; reading about the wonders of the universe provided temporary respite from the doldrums of my daily existence. I soon discovered that despite my high school track record of solid D’s in science, I really enjoyed reading about the origin of the universe and the physical laws that governed it. I didn’t understand many of the finer, more complex arguments in the book, but it allowed me to meditate on the abstract, big-picture concepts of reality instead of fixating on the immediate difficulties I was having. Indeed, my career troubles seemed to miraculously retreat when considered alongside the sheer vastness of the universe. I was hooked.

  I started digging deeper, next reading about great physicists like Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. Forget Gordon Hunter; Einstein and Feynman were true rock stars; brilliant, free minds who led unconventional lives while pursuing greater truths about the mysterious universe in which we live. Feynman even had some musical interests; in a move that undoubtedly must have confused his peers, he spent a year playing bongos in South America. For the first time in a while, I felt inspired, and it got me wondering if I could somehow contribute to a noble and respected field like science in my own creative way.

  Contemplating a return to higher education, I set out to spend the next year teaching myself calculus, the mathematical underpinning of physics. During breaks at my piano gigs, I worked hard at deriving equations and tried my best to internalize fundamental concepts. Just as practicing piano had functioned, for me, as an escape from the horrors of adolescent life a decade and a half prior, so studying physics provided me with an escape from my failure to launch a career as a musician. In early 2009, I sent in my application to CUNY Hunter College and was accepted to begin studies that fall as an undergraduate. It was time to face the music, gain some practical skills, and get myself a “real job.”

  In a strange twist, the promise of this impending escape hatch actually freed me up artistically. You see, in all those years that I’d seen music as my future, I’d been terrified of releasing anything less than stellar, lest it harm the reputation I had built for myself in my mind. As a result, I never released anything, too paralyzed by worry to permit myself to engage with that fundamental building block of creativity: risk.

  But with the assurance that I was soon to become an upstanding scholar of science, my capricious musical experiments lost their burdensome weight. They no longer mattered. And so it was that in May 2009 I set up a cheap Flip camcorder on a tripod and angled it down toward my bright red keyboard. Recently I had noticed many musicians gravitating to a video-sharing site called YouTube, which I had previously steered clear of because I had always believed myself to be too “professional” for a venue populated with so many amateurs. Since that was no longer an issue, I was curious to see how some of my more cutting-edge genre mixes would be received on there.

  The piece I recorded that evening was a medley of ten ’80s pop hits by ten different artists, including Madonna, Bon Jovi, and Dexys Midnight Runners. I had played ragtime medleys like this for my friends in the past, of course; it was my tried-and-true party trick. This particular iteration, though, I purposefully hadn’t rehearsed. I may have shed my fear of failure, but I still retained pride in my composition ability, and I wanted to give myself the excuse of having improvised the whole thing on the fly in case I made too many mistakes. Besides, improvising was my preferred mode of playing anyway. I did have a rough idea of the transitions between songs in my head, and I had a list of the songs scribbled on some paper atop my Nord keyboard, for quick reference. Attempting to mimic the look of a saloon pianist, I dressed up in a waistcoat and tie for the occasion and, after a quick run-through, pressed the Record button, took my place at the keyboard, and stretched my fingers in an exaggerated fashion. I was off to the races.

  I filmed a few takes before downloading the video to my laptop for reviewing. From the plastic-y creak of the keys picked up by the camera’s onboard mic and its low-res rendering of me as an amorphous blob of uncombed hair, to the string of flubbed notes I’d made while attempting to play the medley at the upper limit of my speed, nothing about the video looked remotely professional. Still, I had nothing to lose. I uploaded it to YouTube under the username “ScottBradleeLovesYa,” the first username to pop into my head, and hit Publish.

  Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.

  HEY NOW, YOU’RE A YOUTUBE STAR

  June 3, 2009: It was a Wednesday that started like any other. I woke up to my alarm, threw on some clothes, and grabbed my backpack and one of the bagels from the giant bag Agatha had left for me before heading out into the world.

  On Wednesday mornings, I ventured into Manhattan for my “day job,” accompanying a singer-guitarist named Tim Kubart in music classes at a pre-preschool for some of Manhattan’s most distinguished babies. It was exactly as you might imagine, should you ever find yourself imagining what a pre-preschool music class for elite infants looks like. We played songs at babies (not “for babies” because that would imply that they requested songs, and as advanced as their parents may have believed them to be, at the end of the day they were still… babies). As you also might imagine, they largely ignored us in favor of doing baby-like things, like crawling around the room and clumsily hitting each other with tiny, drool-coated fists. When they weren’t ignoring us, the babies threw some pretty impressive tantrums, just like non-wealthy babies did.

  It was a strange but amusing job, and Tim and I had fun with it. Together, we would improvise ridiculous, pop culture–themed lessons and perform them for our largely disinterested audience (but really, mostly, for our own entertainment). One morning, for example, we performed “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” as if it were a duet between Eminem and Rihanna. Another time, in the much more advanced three-year-olds’ music class, we paralleled the plot of MTV’s Jersey Shore by pretending to work out and get a fresh haircut before finally letting loose at a dance party of fist-pumping proportions in “the club”—where “the club” amounted to Tim simply flicking the lights on and off while I played a medley of house music hits on the piano.

  During the lunch break, I logged onto the staff computer to check my email for new comments on the YouTube video I had recently uploaded. I could hardly believe my eyes; unless there’d been some mistake, there were literally hundreds of emails notifying me of comments about it. I quickly loaded the video to see what was happening. It had gotten over twenty-five thousand views, and additional comments were appearing by the minute. Many of them referenced a certain “Neil Gaiman,” whose name I promptly Googled. And that’s when it all came together. Gaiman, the celebrated British author of The Sandman, American Gods, and Coraline, among other works, had, just a few hours earlier, while I was performing to an audience of infants, tweeted a link to my video with the caption “What the world needs now: Ragtime covers of Come on Eileen, etc.”

  If this was what overnight celebrity felt like, fifteen minutes wasn’t going to be enough.

  The rest of that workday was, basically, a lost cause (sorry, babies). I spent it obsessively refreshing my email for new comments while fielding calls from the handful of friends who had witnessed the video take off. I couldn’t get out of pre-preschool fast enough that afternoon, and as soon as I got home, I glued myself to my computer to watch my small-time celebrity soar. I was now at thirty thousand views, and the comments were, for the most part, very positive, with “Amazing!” being the most commonly used adjective. One commenter mused on what life would be like if every song had a ragtime version. More than one viewer com
mented that she had spontaneously become pregnant as a result of watching my video. That seemed to be a bit of an extreme reaction to the sound of ragtime piano, but it was flattering nonetheless.

  That night, I did what I do whenever something thrilling occurs in my life: I didn’t sleep. Instead, I spent hours trying to process what had just happened and wondering if and how my life was going to change. For once in my life, I felt relevant. It was the same sensation I’d experienced back in eighth grade, when playing piano for my classmates earned me their respect and a round of boisterous cheers, except now it somehow felt more real—even if I couldn’t see my audience.

  The video went on to rack up sixty thousand views in total that week—a sum that was far greater than the total number of people who by that point in my career had ever seen me perform live. I briefly considered how I might profit from all the video traffic, but alas, I didn’t have anything to sell, so instead I wrote a blog post about the video, in case anyone wanted to learn a bit about my background. In all honesty, I had no idea what any of this meant, or what to do with the attention, or even how much attention this really was when it came to the Internet. Was I famous now? I got my answer to that one real fast, when I mentioned my video to a couple on the subway I’d overheard talking about Neil Gaiman. “Cool,” they said dully, before resuming their conversation.

  So much for that.

  This video, I soon realized, was just a starting point. I was a little disappointed that no one recognized me at the grocery store after my YouTube hit and that Agatha didn’t look particularly impressed when I told her that I had made her building Internet famous. The video, it seemed, wasn’t going to lead to immediate fame, wealth, or happiness. It did, however, inspire me to record a twenty-song version of the medley as my “iTunes debut.” I wanted higher production quality this time, but I couldn’t afford to rent a recording studio with a grand piano for a day. So, I lugged my mics and audio gear—that ever-present reminder of the credit card debt I’d accumulated in Hartford—to the music room at my old high school.