When I was 18 years old, I walked into a nightclub in Highland, Ind., with a woman 10 years my senior who was my teacher at the Barbizon modeling school in Chicago. ('Be a model, or just look like one!') My grandmother had signed me up for the class. She hoped honing my table-setting skills might land me a suitable husband, and if I learned the Dior turn along the way, that would be nice, too. My Barbizon teacher's presence matters only inasmuch as her looks allowed me into Club Dimensions sans ID. She bore a passing resemblance to Snow White (alabaster skin, glossy black hair, matte red lips). We were new friends, and I'd driven to her house in Highland for a visit from my apartment in suburban Chicago.
The club was dominated by a stage and large empty dance floor surrounded by black pleather chairs and chrome tables. Though the space held perhaps 300 people, only a dozen or so speckled the room. We sat at the bar and ordered fuzzy navels, or some such. This was the '80s and fuzzy navels were all the rage. The bartender chatted with my friend.
After a few minutes, the manager appeared. He started chatting up my friend and I felt my own inconsequence - I had neither looks nor experience to be of interest. You should see the place on a good night, the manager said, in a way that seemed overly hopeful. Saturday nights there were live bands and a packed dance floor. Big-name acts supposedly coveted gigs at Club Dimensions. My friend turned to me for a second, calculating. Then she nodded in my direction and said, 'She knows a band.'
Which was true. I did know a band. I'd gone to high school with the drummer. They called themselves White Lie. They had formed months earlier and were still mostly practicing in the garage. This was the age of 1980s poserdom when spandex animal print pants and long, puffy hair emerged as the dominant aesthetic; White Lie was a consummate exemplar of this trend. (I myself sported a bleached blond coif.) My role with the band up to that point had been perching on a stool in the garage and looking on adoringly.
'Your band got a promo pack?' the manager asked me.
I slurped my drink, cartwheeling through images of what may have constituted a 'promo pack.' 'Sure,' I told him. I could get him one in a week. (In the '80s, such turnaround was notable.) I had no idea if the band knew what comprised a promo pack, but I had enough sense to assume we could figure it out. I reasoned that it wasn't so much a lie as a learning curve.
He showed us around the club: 24-track mixing board, dressing room, light board. He let me press a few buttons and the empty stage lit up. He talked about payment, a flat rate versus a percentage of the door. I proffered a serious look and nodded sagely.
I understood that a negotiation was underway, and that I was, unbeknown to the band, White Lie's representative. Later that night, it occurred to me that they might be angry. But I consoled myself with the thought that they did want to play before an audience. So how mad could they be? My career as a small town booking agent had stumbled to a start.
White Lie played Club Dimensions many times, as it turned out. They enjoyed a modicum of regional success and most of the members still play music today - professionally or as serious hobbyists. The most remarkable thing about this story isn't the chutzpah of an 18-year-old posing as something she wasn't - what 18-year-old hasn't? - or that my relative silence with the club manager stemmed from deep terror. What is remarkable is that the silence afforded me some measure of confidence; my fear that the manager might expose my blank look and out me as a fraud didn't keep me from forging madly ahead, keeping the fiction up so completely that within weeks I watched my four friends on that very stage - and not alongside screaming girls and headbanging guys, but from backstage, wearing an all-access lanyard. The place where power, such as it was, resided.
The business grew. White Lie played nearly every weekend: clubs, festivals, parties around the Midwest. Sometimes the audience was four drunken patrons in a dive bar; other times a festival with what seemed a thousand screaming fans. I took 15 percent off the top, made dozens of promo packs - by now I'd learned it was a folder with cassette tapes, bios, publicity materials and professional photos. I drove all over Illinois and Indiana looking for venues and made business cards that said Midwest Artist Management. Other local bands auditioned to have me represent them, though I took on only one or two more. If the guys in White Lie ever had doubts about me, they never let on. We were good friends and deeply loyal. By the time I was 19 - still not old enough to be in any of these clubs legally - I was pulling in a little income.
At some point, I realized I was a very young woman in a decidedly male arena. The only other women around were groupies or sisters and maybe the occasional bartender. But no women played in the bands; none managed clubs or booked bands. Except me. I didn't know enough to let my fear stop me; the novelty of being the only woman seemed to help in those days, largely because I believe no one was threatened by me.
Self-employed booking agent had not been my first job. That honor goes to The Chicago Tribune, which I sold door to door at age 12, followed by work detasseling corn. I then moved into food service: a brief stint at Burger King followed by a local ice cream parlor and a Mexican restaurant. I cashiered at a gas station, answered phones at a lighting fixture company and cleaned apartments. My jobs were mind-numbing, dead-end positions, because I'd dropped out of high school after my sophomore year and just careened, lost, from one lousy job to another. I'd quit some, been fired from many more, and so when my grandmother sent me to Barbizon, it wasn't so much that anyone believed me to possess a model's genetic stock as that she was convinced I would never be self-sufficient. My own history had reinforced this. Barbizon was a last-ditch effort to save me from myself.
Learning to be a booking agent - a job I'd never even heard of up until the moment I began to do it - demanded something of me no other job had: fortitude. Failure or success was determined entirely by my own efforts. There was no one around to promote me. I was limited only by the number of hours in a day; even in my naïveté, I instantly saw that if I worked hard enough I could advance steadily. This was not true of any of my other jobs. Of course, such knowledge was accompanied by heady fantasy, too; I'd be managing Bon Jovi in no time, I imagined.
When White Lie cut their first full-length album in a Chicago recording studio, I'd been booking them for a year or so and their sound engineer - a guy named Frank Pappalardo - had once been in a successful band named Rampage. Frank invited me over one afternoon to his house, where he carted up an enormous box into his dining room. He pulled out old Rampage contracts, promo packs, publicity materials. He taught me about contractual language, rights, riders; he shared industry standards with me, what was reasonable to ask for and what wasn't. It was an afternoon crash course in the music business. And a reminder that despite all I'd learned, I was still of little consequence, because I lacked a key ingredient: education.
Frank convinced me that no matter how successful I was in the music industry, I needed college. Music was a business like any other, and demanded a skill set I didn't possess. This petrified me more than any other thing in my life had, up until then.
But I took his advice. And not long after, I was granted the biggest do-over one ever gets in this life; I started school at North Central College. I still booked White Lie during my freshman year, traveling on weekends to Illinois college towns: Champaign, Charleston, Peoria. But that afternoon with Frank had been a lesson not just in the music industry, but for my life. I went on to become a writer, with a professional life full of triumphs and failures, rejection and acceptance, fumbling my way through all the fear and disappointment and success that such a life produces. For that, I've come to realize, I've had the best possible training.
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