When I got back to South Beach, following the storm, I began, with no help of my school, an internship I’d scored at a music label in South Beach.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The label had big name stars, mostly in the Latin music market, and, for a time, we had Pitbull signed to us.
Pitbull, then, was only big in Miami, relatively unknown in the rest of the country, let alone the world.
I met him once, found him to be a quiet, friendly guy. When he blew up, became a superstar, went from “Mr. 305” to “Mr. Worldwide,” I couldn’t have been happier for him. A local boy made good. Everyone I know who knows him, or has worked with him, only has positive things to say about him.
There was a comedy sketch show I saw not long ago, parodying him. Skewering him for being a douchebag. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He’s a kind soul, has done numerous works of charity for his community, and has established charter schools, helped greatly improve the quality of education in Miami.
Fuck you, Alternatino, and fuck you, Arturo Castro! Yes, the Pitbull douchebag skit was clever and funny, and Pitbull himself, being a chill dude, having a sense of humor, probably laughed at it. But, in honesty, it couldn’t be farther from an accurate depiction of the man…
Back to the label. That label was full of dramatic people, crazy incidents. Working there as an intern, I saw how the music business worked, from the inside, not just in books and secondhand stories. I saw it up close.
There was a guy I worked with there, another intern, called Hamlet, who I became friends with. We’d usually be assigned to work together on various gopher, intern type tasks...
Hamlet was a rosy-cheeked, slender, tall and handsome young man, nearing college graduation.
As a youngster he’d taken an interest in the performing arts, in acting, and he’d performed in local theater groups and went on to appear in a handful of television commercials airing in the Miami area.
Told he resembled a young Ashton Kutcher, a local casting agent signed him and scored him some modeling work for a local restaurant and clothing store and a gig as a dancing extra in the background of a Spanish language variety show, clapping his hands and smiling and laughing on command.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The aspiring actor/model split his time between acting/modeling auditions and gigs, bar jobs, and college classes at FIU and interning at the record label.
Hamlet had taken the internship eager to soak up its perks. Such as free entry to nightclub VIP sections, free concert tickets, and meeting famous people and getting free CDs and merch. Like me, he’d also thought of maybe using the connections from the record label to make further contacts in showbiz.
His duties at the record label were like mine, and included much of the usual intern drudgery, like fetching coffee, xeroxing, answering phones.
While I’d be on the computer more, sending emails, completing and sending out expense reports, Hamlet was usually posted to the front desk, filling in for the secretary. I think the label heads liked having his pretty face perched out front…
At the front desk he’d not only answer calls, but register visitors, many of which were uninvited artists who’d show up to the front door of the label’s office. These intruders would often barge in, immediately begin singing, dancing, rapping, strumming a guitar at Hamlet or whomever occupied the front desk or had just happened to be standing or sitting in the lobby. Our accounting department sometimes would have a mariachi band rush up to them, begin playing their guitars, accordions or whatever.
Such encounters could get weird and desperate and required dispatching security, who, sometimes with the assistance of label staff, sometimes me and Hamlet, literally dragged or pushed the aspiring artists into the street, their guitars and everything, them rapping and singing as the door slammed in their face.
It was pretty sad.
The aspiring artists would at times be in tears, too, attesting to having taken a bus for 10 hours. Claiming that they had no money for a return ticket.
But they’d always be told the same thing. Hire a manager and send us an official demo, registered mail.
I’d like to think our bosses or executives at the label were listening to the artists, gauging their talent, but I’m not sure they were. They seemed more annoyed by it than anything else.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I’d once heard that Puff Daddy listens to anyone who jumps up in front of him and starts rapping. I’m sure that happens a lot to him, that people pop up out of nowhere and rap to Puffy or yell and rap at him from a distance. Call his record label and rap into the phone when a secretary answers. And I say I know this, because this stuff happened to us…
(Our phones rang sometimes, with people singing at us when we’d answer…) ((Nowadays, artists can upload stuff to YouTube, become famous online without major label help, but back then, in the early to mid-2000s, that was less common.
But I’m sure major labels still have tons of demos sent their way. Since, as cogs of media conglomerate machines, they function as gatekeepers, and do still control, dominate many media channels…)
Not every aspiring superstar showed up at our door or had a manager send their demo, though. Many demos came to us every day, mailed to the label, directly from the artists themselves. They’d often be crude home recordings, but sometimes were high quality, professional looking CDs, tapes, occasionally even vinyl, accompanied by press kits and merch.
Our label’s official policy, such as that of many large, successful record companies, was not to listen to any “unsolicited” demo, that is, one sent directly by an artist and not a reputable manager, lawyer, or industry insider.
However, the label’s A&R brass was always hungry for the next superstar who could emerge from nowhere. And we would in fact have any demo received via mail screened and any promising material forwarded to the head honchos for further review.
But screening these demos was no simple task. Thousands were received weekly.
Huge piles stacking up in the corner of the low-level A&R execs’ offices.
Such an undesirable task as screening those piles was often left to interns like Hamlet and me. It was tedious, extremely so, sorting through them, hearing endless hours of what resembled Tourette’s syndrome sufferers and banshees and bathroom recordings with out of key singing (this was before auto-tune).
There were animal sounds, horrid wannabe rappers and boy bands, and so on.
Imagine the worst “American Idol” contestants, hearing that, again and again.
That’s what it was like, listening to many of those demos.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Only maybe one of fifty demos were at all decent. Only one of a hundred actually good.
After careful, painful screening, we’d filter the demos into two piles.
One pile being the “promising” pile that we’d forward to the head of A&R. The other being the “pass” pile that’d be destroyed, either by shredder or smashed up with a blunt object before being thrown into the garbage…
The head of A&R was a character worth mentioning. She was a bombastic, voluptuous Colombian lady, 30ish, with super high cheekbones and a shiny mane of silky waist length jet black hair. She wore black everything, every day, black pants, shirts, dresses, skirts, handbags, shoes, every article of clothing, every accoutrement, black. Black as her hair. And was she ever a looker. A bombshell.
Like an actress from a telenovela.
Her sultry looks, however, masked her personality. She was a dragon. She had a fiery, explosive temper and was always involved in a dizzying array of telenovela-like blood feuds with everyone in every other department. Not only that, but she’d recently had a boyfriend up and disappear and everyone gossiped about it, suspected she’d murdered him.
Her looks and reputation made her unapproachable to most, but I did my best to keep on the vixen’s good side, and she was always friendly with me. I think she appreciated that I wasn’t scared of her and that I smiled at her…
As for the demos, and why they had to be destroyed, the vixen told me the reason for destroying them was simple. It was to avoid lawsuits. So no artist could claim they sent their song to the record label and then the label stole their music, later released it without their permission.
If somehow that did happen, coincidentally or otherwise (this being the music business!), the record label wanted no proof of the demo being in its possession.
No evidence portending to that could exist.
So, again, here’s where me and Hamlet came in. The label execs had been quite pleased with him and me. We were both hard-working, punctual, and polite. But most of all, we were both calm, patient. Hamlet was especially patient and mild-
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent mannered. I never once saw him get riled up about anything. The dude was the definition of stoic.
The weekly intrusions of aspiring artists bursting into the office, singing, dancing and rapping, didn’t rattle him. Nor did the daily screaming matches between label executives that sometimes became physical; nothing got under the kid’s skin.
I must admit, as a former musician, the desperation on the faces of those artists who’d barge into our offices, that disturbed me, visibly so. But Hamlet, never. He was cool as a cucumber. Always.
Of all the interns, his physique was the best, even better than mine; dude was an aspiring actor/model, after all, but, also his demeanor, of anyone, was the coolest. Because of his build, but probably more due to his steely resolve, I guess, A&R staff figured he’d be the perfect person to take on the undesirable task of destroying the unwanted demos.
(Most interns and lower level staff dreaded doing so, as it was mentally demoralizing and physically exhausting. Literally. Shattering those tapes and CDs.
Smashing people’s dreams to shreds. But Hamlet and I accepted the task with no complaints.)
Each week, he and I would take the rejected pile of CDs and tapes, in big black garbage bags, to the balcony outside the A&R office. There, we’d smash the demos up with a sledgehammer. The press kits and paper materials we’d then feed to the office document shredder. The mangled remains of the demos we’d sweep up, back into the garbage bags, and carry, drag out, like corpses in war, and toss ignominiously into the dumpsters in the alley behind the office building.
(I’d once darkly joked to Hamlet that I wished we could do the same to the musical intruders we’d have in our office. Like one of the rappers who’d barge in, rapping at everyone in the lobby. If we could bludgeon him into pieces with a sledgehammer, throw his remains out in the dumpster. Hamlet just grunted and nodded at that. I’m not sure if he’d been agreeing or not finding it funny. He did laugh when I joked that I thought the head of A&R had maybe chucked her boyfriend’s remains, hidden in a pile of smashed up demos, out into the dumpsters…)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent ((We were either more merciful or less so than other labels, depending on one’s viewpoint, in that we didn’t send any rejection letters out for these destroyed demos. The only rejection letters we sent were for those demos that ascended a few levels in the label’s hierarchy and ultimately failed to garner a contract offer.))
Of course, for me, smashing these demos caused me to think of my own music that I’d submitted to record labels. How they’d been destroyed. Shredded. And I wondered who the destroyer was, what they looked like doing that, which method of destruction did they use to murder my brainchild... My demos like aborted fetuses in the dumpster… Something I knew pain about too…
While it was usually Hamlet as the angel of musical death, I was dispatched to join several times, bashing demos.
I have to say, it felt better to be on the other end of the equation, lowering the hammer to the CDs and tapes. Beating and breaking them. Feeling the plastics crunch. Hearing them crack and pop. It was cathartic, in a sense. And when I brought down the hammer, I let it rip extra hard and in doing so released a lot of inner pain. My misery loving company.
(Although it’d bother me at times if I had to see the CD covers, the faces of the musicians when I whacked at their demos. I preferred to keep the CDs inside the garbage bags so they wouldn’t make eye contact with me as I murdered them…) Hamlet, though, the true quiet man, the man of few words, showed no emotion as he fed press kits into the shredder, or destroyed the CDs.
He’d have made a fabulous poker player, I thought.
There was one afternoon that Raya, a spunky college girl, another intern, an Indian American girl with big horse teeth and a long, crescent moon shaped face, sauntered out to the balcony where Hamlet and I were swinging at demos.
Hamlet was using a hammer. I’d been provided a baseball bat. And we took turns whapping at the piles of demos inside the bags.
Raya had a painfully obvious crush on Hamlet and was always trying, unsuccessfully, to make conversation with him. Slipping in through the balcony’s
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent open door, she smiled and asked us, half-jokingly, nervously giggling: “Doesn’t it bother you guys, doing that? Like, crushing all those people’s hopes and dreams?”
Hamlet, resting the hammer on his shoulder as he readied up another pile for the balcony of broken dreams, just shrugged, wordlessly.
She continued, her tone sobering, and she pointed a particular demo out; one that’d fallen from a garbage bag: “Oh, I like totally remember her. That girl called here the other day, crying and freaking out, saying she’d like sent us her baby photos, along with her demos. She was all begging us to mail them back to her.”
I peered down for a second at the demo in question, a cute teenage Puerto Rican girl in a pink halter top and black miniskirt, sticking her tongue out on the CD’s cover.
“I remember that,” I said. “The baby pictures had already been shredded.
Lawsuits, you know…”
I’d been the one to shred the girl’s baby photos, not knowing, of course, that they were the only ones. I must say, I feel even worse about that one than I do about the water gun drive by, shooting that guy in the face with piss…
Maybe out of self-hate, I lined her CD up, singularly, and flipped it on its obverse side, which didn’t have any pictures, only a track listing. Then I cracked it with the aluminum bat three or four times, splitting the CD into a scattering of sharp plastic slivers. Then I swept its remnants up into a dustbin, dumped them into a garbage bag full of demos of the dead.
Raya glared at us both, noticeably put off by our apathy. After that, she didn’t talk much with either of us…
I don’t know what became of that baby picture girl, or the Raya girl, but I do know, through a friend of a friend, that Hamlet, like me, had given up on his initial childhood dream, his dream of being an actor, and later he’d become a high school drama teacher. I think his stoicism probably served him well in that role.
But I couldn’t be that stoic. It affected me, trashing those demos. But also working at that label, it wasn’t much fun. It was obvious that it was a sinking ship. You could feel it, in every corner of that office. People were leaving the label. Other
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent labels were going out of business or consolidating. The entire business model was in disarray.
The music business, at least that of traditional record sales, was in the toilet, thanks to online piracy. But, these days, circa 2020s, they have adjusted, somewhat, with the “360” deals, taking parts of an artist’s income from all sources, be they merchandise, live shows, licensing music.
So, really, just like in the past, with CDs, records, tapes, now with digital sales, streaming, the artists are still fucked. They’re always the ones to be burned, save for a few of the smart ones, especially some of the hip-hop guys like Jay Z, who’ve gotten business savvy, diversified, made tons of cash, and rightfully so.
But most musicians aren’t smart business-wise. They’ll always come up short.
Part of me thinks the digital implosion of the music business was a type of karma for the music industry. All the musicians that’d been exploited, extending their hands from the graves, as digital poltergeists, returning to wreak havoc on the industry that wronged them.
But it’s not a total zero-sum game. Many artists now are taking advantage of new platforms, social media, digital ways to spread their music, talents, and make a living, and some are even getting rich. Anyone now can release a record online, and if it sounds right, the artist has the right look, whatever, if it strikes the chords, it can take off, and superstars can still be born.
Justin Bieber was just a kid strumming his guitar and singing in his bedroom and was discovered on YouTube. Now he’s a megastar. It’s incredible that can happen nowadays and would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. Aspiring artists don’t have to burst into record labels’ offices or send out demos that might wind up in a dumpster. They don’t need to rent an expensive studio and can make professional sounding music on a home computer.
It’s both an exciting and horrific time for musicians. But I guess it’s always been like that, to some extent.
It’s saturated, the landscape. And there might not ever be another Madonna or Michael Jackson. MTV is done as a kingmaker in music. But new music, new stars
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent will always find us, some way or another. Music will always exist in one form or another. It’ll never be stopped. Music will always be with us.
Like a graffiti mural I saw once in Miami, which read, in squiggly letters, “Will there be music in dark times? Yes, and it will be music about the dark times…”
And while I don’t like much of the new music I hear, especially a lot of mumble rap and auto-tune stuff, I can recognize that that’s largely because I’m older.
When you stop liking a lot of the new music, it’s often because you’re getting old.
And that’s okay. It’s Gen Z, or whatever the marketers want to call them, it’s their time. I accept that. I pity the older folks who can’t.
I was happy to have gotten my music out to tons of people all over the world. I didn’t become a rock star, but I did get heard. Think of the millions in their garages and crappy bars whose music never got beyond their immediate friend circle or hometown.
And seeing from the inside how the music business worked, how scummy and fake a lot of the people in it were, how our label execs would always wear these fake smiles, kiss artists’ asses, and then talk trash about them behind their backs, rip them off, how this is the way most of showbiz works, the schmooziness of it, it turned me off. And I lost my desire to be a part of it.
And that’s also okay.
I remained hugely into music, always listening to music, on my phone, computer, wherever, always listening to new groups, old favorites.
(Still spontaneously dancing at times, when no one is around…) And while I got out of the idea of making music or participating in the industry, I started focusing on what I did need, especially as a recent college grad, and especially with no jobs available at that record label or many others. I started focusing on money. Needing it. Wanting it. I also became increasingly focused on finance, financial markets, the stock market, futures and commodities, and I decided to change career paths, find my way into a job in financial services.
Little did I know that I’d again be hoodwinked and find myself in a place I never knew existed. A boiler room…
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent 42
South Florida is full of boiler rooms. But I knew little about them. Unfortunately, I’d not seen the eponymous film or perhaps I’d been better prepared. Being a naïve, fresh college graduate, I didn’t know what I was diving into when I answered a newspaper job ad for a financial services company seeking salespeople. I had a whole different idea in mind when I put on a suit and tie and drove out to the office for an interview.
I was thinking I’d be in a palatial office building overlooking a lake or a causeway, watching boats cruise by, because it was Miami, after all, so when I got to a nondescript strip mall, with a couple empty storefronts, a liquor store and a Chinese restaurant, I was taken aback.
The company was next to the Chinese restaurant and one could smell and hear the crackle of cooking oil outside the office’s front door, which was tinted dark black and locked (you had to be buzzed in).
When the door unclicked, and I walked inside, I found the place way more basic and understated than I expected. Just a small, cramped office space, with rows of tables, lined up closely together, in three long horizontal rows, all with phones, stacks of white papers and guys (only one or two women were there) yelling into headsets. The way they moved, heads bobbing like pigeons, and how animated they were with those mechanical mouthpieces, they were something akin to angry robots. A few looked happy, jovial, their lips twisted into smiles, but most of them had bitter, twisted faces, sinking eyes.
No one acknowledged me as I stepped in. They seemed possessed, all lips and teeth, speaking in sales tongues. One or two eyed me suspiciously, with upturned lips, but most stayed affixed to their headset, ignored my presence.
The whole room was so alive with their chatter. It was almost deafening, the humming din of voices in their various stages of plea.
At the front of the room were a couple 60-inch flat screen TV sets tuned to CNBC
and Bloomberg, and on the far end of the room were three small closet-sized
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent offices that housed the bosses, next to those offices was a two car-length mini-meeting room.
I wandered like a lost puppy dog, not sure where to go or who to talk to. I certainly didn’t want to interrupt any of the chattering phone people. Fortunately, I spotted a man in the corner of the room, in the threshold of one of the offices, waving me over, as if I were a truck backing up into a parking lot.
The man, Rocky, one of the bosses, was a loudmouthed New Yorker, from Staten Island. He was a short, stocky, Italian American man, about 30 something, wearing a stylish gray pin-striped Armani suit, Armani belt and alligator skin wingtips. I noticed he wore a lot of gold- a chunky gold chain necklace with a gold crucifix, a shiny gold watch, and several gold rings on both of his big meaty hands.
He shook my hand, with a very firm, clammy shake, and had me sit down across from him at his smallish desk (that was empty, save for a stack of papers and a black office phone).
He leaned into his black leather swivel chair and smiled, smugly, at me, his face full of white teeth. He skimmed over my resume for a few seconds, and then lifted his intense blue eyes, locked them to mine, and posed to me an unexpectedly philosophical question.
“So, if I gave you a shovel, and told youse to shovel a big pile of shit, every day, for a year, and at the end of that year, you’d get $1 million, would you do it?”
I was slightly flabbergasted by his question. I wanted to jokingly ask if this would be my job, shoveling shit, because I thought I was here to interview for a sales job in finance. But I caught on quickly to his angle. He was gauging my drive. Would I go above and beyond, shovel shit if it meant becoming rich… He wanted to know just how money hungry I was.
Bills mounting up after doing an unpaid internship, I was becoming very money hungry.
I told him I would shovel that pile of shit, and I likely would have shoveled that shit, in the balmy Florida heat, for that sort of cash.
He nodded and his grin and white teeth grew larger. Then he reached his meaty gold hand for mine, again, and offered me a job. I was to start immediately.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent 43
The company was pushing foreign currency investments, mainly selling stakes in euros. Every agent was to cold call numbers off a “lead sheet,” a list that had only the prospective client’s name and phone number. If or when they answered, we read off a script, and the script seemed to be about scaring the people more than anything.
The script was all about how the price of oil would skyrocket because of more cars on the road in China and events in the Middle East and how this would cause the dollar to lose value and the euro to appreciate in value.
That was the script, at least, I got, the first few days. There were other scripts saying the opposite, that the dollar would go up and the euro or the yen would go down. You never knew which script you’d receive when you arrived to work; you’d only hope that people would answer the phone and that they’d talk to you and not just hang up or curse you out, because that’s what most of them did.
There were also people who liked to fuck with us, string us along, let us read off the script and then make a joke or say something outlandish, like they were the police or an alien or a ghost or their house was on fire or something.
It was terrible work, I must say, and I knew quickly I wouldn’t stay with it for long, but as a fresh college grad with little full-time work experience, only part-time jobs and internship experience, there weren’t many jobs available. It was quite the conundrum. Employers wanted applicants with job experience but if you couldn’t find a job in the first place, how could you have work experience? It sucked. Hence, I wound up in a phone room.
(Again, I thought back to my online gigs, and music, thinking that I really should have ripped off a social media idea like Zuckerberg did, instead of being Crack Whore Lewinsky…)
The job ad didn’t mention telemarketing. But that’s what we were doing. We were glorified telemarketers, cold-calling people. I realized it my first day, sitting there, at that desk.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent It was humbling, doing that job, being on the other side of the phone. I’d usually just hung up on telemarketers, and there was the one vacuum cleaner salesman I’d cursed out while I’d been tripping on acid. Now it was me being cursed out by people. And with how enraged many of the folks I called sounded, I didn’t know if they were tripping on acid or just mad, but they didn’t appreciate me either way.
The few people who’d talk to us often were old people. They were senile and lonely. Probably didn’t get out much. It was sad that they were the only people who’d be nice and wouldn’t curse us out, but sometimes they did. The Canadians we called, too, were quite polite. They’d rarely rage at us. Just graciously decline.
My coworkers there were a motley crew. Some real weirdos and misfits. Most were young loudmouth carpet baggers like Rocky, the Staten Island guy, but weren’t dressed as well, wearing tacky suits, clip-on ties. Some were old men with orangish skin, toupees, and fake teeth. Many were real ra-ra types, yelling into the phones, amped up, high-fiving when they’d make a sale or kicking a trash can if they lost out. Most of them smoked cigarettes, and there’d be dudes in the stalls snorting coke during breaks (these were the people that bouncer from the club was angry with, I bet).
Worst part about the job was that it didn’t pay a salary, only “draw” which is where you get paid a small sum, like $1000 per month, but it’s an advance on your future earnings. So when you do make sales, and earn commissions, that money will then be “drawn” from those earnings, sort of like a loan or advance.
So, really, it was commission only sales work.
Not that I didn’t notice how awful it was from the start, and I thought I could handle it for a short time and then move on to a better job in financial services, at a real company, with a position that had growth potential and allowed me to genuinely help clients as well as help the company profit.
(Something I’d noticed right off the bat with the boiler room was how they never talked of making their clients any money. It was always about themselves. Every agent bragging about their commissions. Soon enough, I saw that they were burning through these people. Losing all the clients’ money and going on to the next victim. The agents at the company even referring to the people on the phone number lists as “bastards” or “pikers” if they wouldn’t buy anything.)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent It was gross, at that place, seeing the ugliest form of American capitalism and the worst of greed and human behavior. I’d been there for only a week and started to have nauseating premonitions, feeling something was amiss. I again searched online into the history of the company and found, buried deep, deep in the company’s paperwork, that they’d changed their name.