My Music History Part 5

In Part 1 I wrote about getting into music, playing in a kiddie orchestra at Carnegie Hall when I was 14, and my friendship with Barry Goldberg. Part 2 detailed the 70+ bands I saw during my first trip to London in 1972 and my days as a college radio DJ. Part 3 was all about how I was a shitty manager of shitty bands, with a sidebar about the time I met Bruce Springsteen. Part 4 detailed my owning and running what I believe was the first CD-only store in New York City. This is the final chapter for this, um, saga.

The CD Hotline

As I wrote in the previous chapter, it’s now the fall of 1986, the CD store has failed, and I have no idea what I’m going to do next. But one of my former customers presented me with an opportunity. This guy came into the store every week and asked a ton of questions. Usually I knew the answers. But what I didn’t know was that he was kind of a big deal in syndicated radio. His name was Paul Zullo and he was the producer of the King Biscuit Flower Hour, a weekly concert series on syndicated radio that at its peak was heard on over 300 different radio stations around the country. That’s a pretty big fucking deal.

So Paul knew radio and had connections. His partner, Trev Huxley, was the grandson of Aldous Huxley. Trev had money, real estate, and connections. Together the three of us started the Digital Radio Network. The Grateful Dead Pension Fund was one of the investors. I was the first employee.

We sat in the basement of Paul’s brownstone to discuss setting up the business. I asked if I would get to be a partner or get stock in the new company. They told me, “Well, we’re both putting up money to start the business, what about you?” I barely had a dollar to my name, so no partnership or stock for me (and no stock options at any point in the future either). If this was 15 years later, giving me some stock or options would have been a no-brainer. But this was 1986 and I suppose the concept didn’t exist at that point. The thing is, they never could have successfully launched the business without me. The entire thing was based in no small part around the knowledge in my head. They never would have survived the “audition” with WBCN (which I describe a few paragraphs down) without the knowledge I had and the work I had done. Obvious it irks me to this day.

Next, we divided up the work. They looked at me and said, “You’ll be in charge of computers.” Why me? “You have an Atari at home, that’s more than either of us have!” They hired a genius programmer to create the database that would hold all of the CD information. He lived in Schenectady, about 2 hours north of New York City, and he was a quadriplegic, so he could never come to our office. He taught me everything about computers and programming over the phone.

I spent the next several months in Paul’s basement typing everything I knew about every compact disc that existed back then into the database, which was running on a rented IBM desktop PC. Artist, album title, label, catalogue number, year of release, and anything and everything I knew about each particular album. We’d get the Schwann Catalogue (a monthly publication that listed every record currently in print in the US) each month and I’d go through it line by line to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Weekends were spent in record stores, notebook in hand, noting all of that week’s new releases.

The original concept was to have a one-hour radio show each week, syndicated to radio stations on a barter basis (each station would get the show for free but would have to give us X number of minutes per hour that we could turn around and sell). We would discuss notable releases and play songs or excerpts from them.

One day we were visited by one of the DJ’s from WBCN-FM in Boston (I can’t remember his name, it might have been Oedipus). WBCN was a hugely influential FM rock radio station, known across the country. The DJ tried to stump me. He would name obscure bands or albums and I’d smack a couple of keys and show him that we not only had all that band’s albums in the database, we had all sorts of trivia in there as well. Everything he asked about was already in our database. He was impressed. We passed the audition but ….

He told Paul that he had a thousand proposals for syndicated one-hour radio shows sitting on his desk that would never go anywhere and this would likely suffer the same fate. But the database, that was something unique. He wanted that. What could we do with that?

So the concept mutated. No more show. Instead we would have a toll-free 800 number. People could call the number and ask questions about CDs. “What CDs does Yes have out?” “How many Elvis Costello CDs have been released?” “When is the new Springsteen album release date?” “Which version of the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet has the best sound?” And so on.

Each radio station would get the service as an exclusive in their market, they could brand the service as their own, and give us X number of minutes per day of advertising time that we could sell. The CD Hotline was born!

We set up an office in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, decades before it became the trendy, expensive place that it is today. (Peter Luger’s was just down the block but I couldn’t afford to eat there unless someone else was paying.) We had perhaps 10 or 15 people sitting at computers answering phones and typing updates into the database when there were no calls. I was in charge of the database, I guess you could say that I was the editor (as I reviewed every new entry in the database) and I was also the equivalent of a CTO.

In 1987, computer networking was all but unknown at our level - at the end of each day each computer operator would export their day’s work onto a 5-1/4 inch floppy disk, I’d take all those disks and update the main database from them. A year later when Novell Netware came along, that was like a miracle. I never got any training in it, no classes, no videos, I read the manuals that came in the box and got it set up.

On the personal side, I was able to use my position as the “editor” of the database, along with being a co-sysop of two music forums on CompuServe (RockNet and Consumer Electronics Forum), to get on many record companies’ mailing lists. It meant that almost every day I’d come home to find a box of free CDs waiting for me.

Here’s a thing - Trev invited me to visit his compound in Vermont for a weekend. I drove up with my (first) wife. It was a magnificent place. There were quite a few people up there that weekend. One of them was John Oates’ then-wife, Nancy Hunter, who was a super model (Oates wasn’t there). For some reason, my wife became convinced that Hunter was hunting me. I said to her, “What, are you fucking crazy? She’s married to a rock superstar/race car driver, and she’s going to be interested in me?” But she wouldn’t back down and insisted that we leave the next morning - two days early. I had to go along with it and I didn’t give it much thought at the time but in retrospect I think leaving early like that for such a stupid reason damaged my relationship with Trev.

As the business took off, I felt that I was getting left behind. As I said, I believed that they could not have started the business without me, and I didn’t believe I was getting my fair share. Plus my work was getting boring - the same thing day after day for months on end, with no possibility of anything different as long as I stayed with the company. I started getting depressed and it was noticeably affecting my work.

And then I made a bad mistake, one that I can’t blame on anyone except myself.

The Howard Stern Show ran an all-day telethon (radiothon?) to raise money for the NYC Police Athletic League and we were going to handle all of the technical details. Stern would devote a day to this fund raiser and give out our phone number, people who wanted to donate would call us to pledge, our computer operators would input the info into a new program that our remote programmer had created, we would pass the info back to the PAL and they’d send out envelopes to collect the donations.

This gets more than a little bit technical, so bear with me please.

The day after the telethon, after all of the donations were in, someone called up, he wanted to change his pledge. The call was passed to me and I said fine. The application didn’t offer a way to edit an existing pledge. I needed to delete his original pledge and create a new one.

The thing that I didn’t know at the time was that dBase III had a bug when running on Novell Netware - if you deleted a record in the database, it would place an end-of-file marker at that point and delete everything after it rather than just that single record. This guy’s original pledge was number 56, and we had well over 200 pledges. When I deleted record #56, dBase III then deleted everything from record 56 onwards. We were left with records of only 55 donations.

(Stop and think about that for a minute. This was 36 years ago and I can still remember the record number.)

Some of you are thinking, well, simple enough, no big deal, right? Just restore from a backup. But there was no backup to restore from. Because me.

You see, I had been running back-ups daily, they could not run unattended, and as the system grew larger, the backup could run for hours. I realized that there was no need to run daily backups on system directories on executables, just on the data directories, since those were the only things changing every day. I wrote a program to manage that, to just run the daily backup against specific directories rather than everything. When we added this new program for collecting PAL donations, the program’s data, the records of the pledge donations, all went into a new directory, but I never updated my program to include this new directory in the backups. So it wasn’t backed up.

Here is a point that I don’t recall. Did I not remember that my backup program only hit specific directories? Did I think to myself, “We’re only holding the data for one day, I don’t need to bother to back it up.”? Whatever it was, the records of roughly 200 pledges were deleted.

The first thing I did was to run around the office pulling the plug on every computer, because I knew that the drives were continually being written to and that this data risked being overwritten. But after I did that, I had no idea what to do next. I had never been in a situation like this before. I had no training for it. I was in “deer in the headlights” mode. One of the bosses lost it and started screaming at me. He didn’t want to tell the PAL people that the pledges were lost, this was the police and who knew how they would react?

But how the fuck was I supposed to know what to do? The company never paid for any training for me (I never asked for any), the only things I knew about computers were things I’d learned over the phone or by doing. Finally we found out that there was such a thing as data recovery services - and that they charged thousands of dollars for their service. There was no alternative. We sent the hard disk to one of the services, most of the data was recoverable, and it took several days but eventually we got the information back to the PAL people. (To the company’s credit, I was deathly afraid that they were going to make me pay for the data recovery services, which would have killed me. They didn’t do that.)

Needless to say, if I was getting depressed before this happened, after it happened I just sank deeper and deeper. I’m sure people noticed but no one talked to me about it, no one asked if I was okay or offered any kind of help - not at work and not at home. I felt trapped in a downward spiral or an endless maze.

There was one thing that I didn’t know. I didn’t know that all of the computer stuff that I had done over the past two years, everything I learned and did, I didn’t know that it had any value in the world. I didn’t realize that companies of all sizes needed people just like me every day. I didn’t realize that the fact that I had learned all of this stuff over the phone and from reading manuals and then was doing it for years counted in my favor, that it actually meant I had some real aptitude for this IT shit. It came to me so easily, I assumed it was the same for everyone else in the world, I didn’t know it was a “thing”. I could have taken the knowledge I had gained, put it in a resume and gotten a decent paying job with any one of thousands of companies right then and there. Except at the time I didn’t know about any of this. I thought, fuck, they’re gonna fire me, I’m gonna be out on the street, what the fuck do I do next? Work at Tower Records? Drive a taxi for the rest of my life?

Back To School

It’s now late 1988 and I was 34 years old. One night my father called me up. “Kid?” “Yes pop?” “You’re not getting anywhere with this arts shit, are you?” I had to admint to it. “No pop, you’re right.” “You seem to like messing around with computers, did you ever think about going back to school and doing something with that?” “No, pop, I didn’t, but that’s a damned good idea!” My father almost never offered me any advice. In fact, I can only recall two times that he did, and I didn’t listen the first time. This time I listened. (The first time was him wanting me to go to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill instead of NYU, long story.)

I figured that I’d go to school for a few weeks to properly learn dBase III, or maybe a new piece of database software called FoxPro that was coming on strong as a dBase competitor, and then go out and be an independent consultant doing that. I had a friend who was working as an independent FoxPro consultant and he seemed to be doing more than just okay.

I started looking around for a class I could take and somehow ended up wandering into an open house at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education. They were talking about the development lifecycle and structure project management and software like Oracle. I raised my hand and asked, “but what about FoxPro?” The professor looked at me, a touch of sadness in his eyes, but the answer he gave me was simultaneously intelligent, easily comprehendible, and even respectful. I knew then and there that I wanted that man to be my teacher. They had a one year certificate program in Computer Technology and Applications. I enrolled in that.

It was a year of night school - 6 courses over 3 semesters, plus lab work, which I did on the weekends. I’d go into CD Hotline during the day, spend as little time there as possible, and then go take my classes at night. I learned everything I could about relational database design, programming, project lifecycles. As a music collector for decades I intrinsically understood how these databases should be structured and would function. That made my final project an easy one - I did a total redesign of the CD Hotline database. My final project was a looseleaf binder with literally hundreds of pages of diagrams, analysis, code. Six courses, I got 5 A’s and a B, and given that I had mostly been a C student when I was younger, this proved to me that I was finally on the right track.

The Dawn of My IT Career

I graduated from Columbia in early 1990. It took a few months but I managed to get hired as a junior database administrator at Barclays Bank. I brought the documentation from my final project at Columbia to the interview. The guy stood me up against a whiteboard and grilled me on it for what seemed like hours. Afterwards he said to me, “I wanted to hire someone with more experience, but you seem to know databases better than anyone else I talked to.” I got the job, and I got a starting salary that was 50% higher than my CD Hotline salary.

So I got my first suit-and-tie corporate IT job at the age of 36. The first year was pretty rough going for me because I was hired to work on projects that never launched and I was stuck doing maintenance on bullshit crap. But within a year and a half I was the development DBA and designed the database when Barclays decided to migrate their entire commercial loan system from mainframe to client/server. I did the database design myself - and I got it right the first time. I was at Barclays for three years and spent most of that final year in London.

So what happened to the CD Hotline and the Digital Radio Network after I left? In the 90’s they were very successful. They came up with the idea of having the database - my database! - on in-store kiosks that people could use to look stuff up on their own, and their first client was Tower Records. And then when Amazon decided to start selling CDs, I think they used the database - my database! - to get started, until they could replace it with something of their own further down the line.

But Netscape was released at the end of 1994 and that changed everything, slowly at first but eventually at warp speed. There was no more need for the CD Hotline when the internet meant that you could have everything everywhere all at once. The company was bought and sold at least a couple of times. I don’t know if it exists in any form today.

So on the one hand, I don’t believe I ever got my fair share from that company. I don’t think they could have launched without me and I don’t think that was ever recognized in any meaningful financial way. On the other hand, that “you’re in charge of computers” comment in 1986 led to my finally having a very successful career, not in the world of music but in the world of IT, a career that would take me around the world many times over and that led to my living in Asia for more than 25 years.

My crappy attempts at a music career ended. In 1990, I started formally working in corporate IT, and that’s what I’m still doing 34 years later. There was a few years in the 00’s when I was writing a regular column for BC Magazine in Hong Kong that I was writing some music reviews and doing music photography. And through PASM, the Hong Kong photo studio that I owned with friends from 2009 to 2016, I started shooting local bands in the clubs and in my studio, and I’d occasionally get a “three songs no flash” pass for big acts. My photos ended up on posters, handbills, some CD booklets, and a couple of group exhibitions. But Covid came along and put an end to that and in 2021 I sold off all of my camera gear.

Of course, even if I was no longer trying to establish myself in the music industry, I was still a fan. Sadly, I sold off all my vinyl (thousands of records) in 2001, when I was about to move to Hong Kong for the second time. I didn’t want to ship them across the Pacific and didn’t want to pay for endless storage. The unfortunate thing is that I sold them at the bottom of the market - there were major IT layoffs in 2001 and everyone was selling their collections off.

I kept spending ludicrous amounts of money on CDs (and Blu-rays) up through 2015. When I bought the house in the Philippines and we moved to Manila, I stopped buying physical media. There are thousands of CDs (and DVDs and Blu-Rays sitting on shelves and in boxes in Manila. I don’t know what to do with them any more. I suppose when I retire I’ll put them up on eBay and see what happens.

Coda

So 70 years of being a music fan but 10 years of trying to establish myself in the music business, in one way or another, without any luck. I’m smart and I love music and I know more about it than most people and yet I couldn’t turn that into a career. Why not?

Writing this five-part post, reliving those days, running them through my memory has been fun. But it has also been painful. I’ve relived the happy times but also the painful times, the mistakes that I’ve made, the opportunities that got away.

I don’t blame my failures on anyone but myself. I know it was me. I’m broken. Yes, everyone is broken to some extent, I think I’m more broken than average. I know there are parts of me that are broken. I don’t know how they broke (there is a lot of my childhood missing from my memories) but they’re broken nonetheless.

I’m broken in some ways that I can now identify. I can’t go back in time and fix the past. I think I’ve gotten better every year, that I almost qualify as human now. Not quite. I’ve thought about going back into analysis - I’ve tried it three times in the past, without much success. Does anyone even start analysis at 70? Does that even make any sense? I know I’m better in some ways, at least.

I’m more aware of some of the mistakes and bad behavior in my past. I credit this increased awareness to my wife. She’s the first person who decided that I was worth working on, that she wouldn’t put up with my bullshit, and she was (and continues to be) relentless about it.

I’m well aware of the mistakes I made in my 34 years of working in IT (not technical mistakes, people mistakes, political mistakes). I have learned from that and there are days even now when I feel as if I’m working at the top of my game, that I’m working as well or even better than I did at any time in the past.

I don’t think age matters. One should never stand still. One should aim for continuous improvement, in every area of one’s life. That’s one of the creeds that I live by.

This isn’t the ending you were expecting, right? But it’s the honest ending that you deserve, especially if you’re someone who knows me in real life or at least has been reading my stuff for years. Thanks for standing with me. I know it hasn’t always been easy.