Onward!

When I realised that it was not a good thing that the company I was working for was moving out of our sweet sweet office space and into the owner's home--not to mention the fact that he was using money *I* was bringing in by booking bands out to pay the bands *he* was bringing in (instead of paying me and my bands), I started looking for an hourly job. Sound Warehouse it was. Wow. They are still around too. You may remember that it used to be a chain, but in a big hooray for the little indie stores, when the chain started to implode, Rudy and Holly bought out the place and made it their own. Or something like that. The fact that they are still around makes me happy.

When I worked there, it was a combination video/record store. Yes, records. Vinyl. Cassettes. Old school, baby. I discovered Akira Kurosawa there, and named my (best friend's and my, that is) first-outside-the-safety-of-my-parent's-home dog after him. My Akira ate a bottle of blue paint and lived to tell the tale, but that's another story for another time.

I worked with a guy named Kevin Blakely (he played bass for Punkinhead)--the first black guy I'd ever really spent time around. His buddies used to come in and they would start chatting in this unbelievably incomprehensible way; it was utterly fascinating. I was too naive not to express my curiousity, and thankfully he was too well brought up to make fun of me or take offense about it. Thus I learned my second foreign language. The only thing I really remember is "Aight den". Which, of course, means "All right then".

I got a lot of free cd's and a lot more free passes to this or that live show. Mike Watt of Firehose showed up on my doorstep one morning after a show. He'd lost a filling or a cap or something during the show, wasn't going to be able to get to a dentist for some time, and I happened to have had a prescription for Tylenol w/ codeine (I'd recently had my wisdom teeth out and couldn't stand to take the stuff). Sleuth that he is, he got my address off the bottle, and showed up for breakfast the next morning.

And this one time, I got a boot to the head at an Agnostic Front show. Damn crowd surfers (thanks Shanny, for the proofreading!)

The job itself? I don't remember a whole lot about it, except for the part where we used to have to handwrite all the receipts. I used to be able to tell which album and which record label was represented just from the barcode. No joke.

Stay tuned for tales of how I moved on from my life in the music biz. . .