In 1997 I was living in Daytona Beach and a friend asked on a Friday night if I wanted to drive down to Orlando to go to a party. Sure!
We go to someone’s house and there’s about 30 people there and I don’t know any of them but they’re all super friendly and outgoing and it’s apparent most of them know eachother. By the end of the night I’m on a first name basis with most all of them.
On the way back to Daytona I ask my friend how they all know eachother.
“Oh, they all work together.”
“Where at?”
“Nickelodeon studios.”
“Doing what?”
“They’re all actors and actresses.”
“Are any of them on shows?”
“Yeah, all of them I think.”
So the next day at home I turn on Nickelodeon (which I never watch) and start watching some of the live action shows. And sure enough, all the adult actors (in their 20’s and 30’s) who have smaller roles in the mainly kid cast shows are all the people I just partied with the night before.
And more! I lived on the same block as G.W. Bush before he was governor of Texas or US President. His dad was president at the time, so he and his daughters (who were just kids at the time) were of course known as the son and grandkids of GHW Bush.
I was also good friends growing up with Brooks Crudup whose brother Billy Crudup has gone on to Hollywood success.
That was in the late 80s? In the summer of '79, I was in the summer program at Berklee (I think this was pre-Kevin Eubanks). There was a teacher-led band called Battle Axe that did some heavy metal-style jazz fusion. Us wide-eyed kids were total camp followers. They gave a concert one night, as the openers for that teacher’s previous project, a band called Winter. Vai was in that band. So that predates your story by a decade. And it wasn’t long after that that he was working with Zappa, David Lee Roth, and Johnny Rotten.
(I had to look that up. I had no idea what happened to him after that night.)
So what was his mother doing promoting him in the late 80s?
My friends’ band opened for this asshole who called himself Kid Rock at Peabody’s in Cleveland. His little buddy (Joe?) was there too, getting high in Peabody’s sorry excuse for a “green room.”
I didn’t meet him, because none of us were into meeting him being that he looked and acted so skeevy. We made sure to keep our distance.
Seriously? I hadn’t realized that there were CSR/client privileges. It must be something embarassing…
So, what was it? Couldn’t get the teen Asian porn off the computer? Misprogrammed the Roomba and it vacuumed up the cat? Put the name in the wrong place on his GPS, and couldn’t understand why the street signs said “Seattle” instead of “Pennsylvania Avenue”?
Or was this the original guy who broke the “cup holder” on his desktop?
For a while I worked as a manager at the Loews (now AMC) Lincoln Square in NYC, which is a pretty big movie theatre.
So I’ve ‘met’ some famous people but once I met a soon to famous person. We had this movie opening and it had been a royal pain so far as the producer Scott Rudin was a PITA about his posters and standees and such. The film starred a bunch of unknows playing High School kids. Opening weekend, the main ‘star’ came and ask me if she could hang out where the movie was letting out. Seems she was supposed to sort of be there as an appearence but there weren’t any studio people around and they never told us that this was happening so I helped her out and she signed some autographs for people on posters I provided.
The film was Clueless and it was Alicia Silverstone.
Actually, it’s probably no big deal. I’ve mentioned talking to Julia Child at the same job. And the guy could probably use some free publicity.
His name is Sam Menning.
And it wasn’t embarassing. He was just a little slow getting things running. It took three hours to install Windows. My favorite line from him? “OK, it’s rebooting. I’m going to go get a beer.” That happened about six times during the call.
Had a friend who called me one night to come visit him and intro’d me to his cousin as we were all into the same kind of music. Guy was quiet, a bit strange but a nice fellow and bright. We talked about music and he said “Well, I got a recording contract with TvT records but I dunno where it’s going to go.”
A week later this friend calls me up, yelling that his cousin Trent’s CD was selling like mad and the first video for the album was on TV.
Yup, 'twas Trent Reznor. I kick myself so much that I didn’t stay in touch with him. I rather liked him…sigh.
Thinking back, it was probably '87 or so. Yeah, we were idiots and apparently I can’t even count it as “pre-famous.”
Was that his mom? I have no idea but it could have been. She was annoyed that we turned out to be a shitty little college station that hardly anyone listened to anyway.
Oh, yeh, I forgot to mention that when I was still just dating my daughter’s father, right before he moved to Seattle, his best friend (soon-to-be-roommate) sent us a copy of a demo from his next-door neighbors. The cd was friggin amazing and we drove the local music store nuts trying to get them to pre-order the cd when we found out the band got signed.
When we both had finally moved to Seattle and met the guys in Alice in Chains, they thought it was hilarious that they had this huge following in TN because of us pimping them to everyone we knew. I think they got huge not too long after that.
I knew John Turturro in high school. He attended Delahanty (no more) - I attended St. Francis Prep - we did the play “Pippin” with John as the narrator. I was one of the three chicks doing that intro dance.
Gack! No, you said agent. Sorry. But the way you phrased everything else in that paragraph made it sound like it was mom pushing little Stevie.
One of my college professors told the story of a friend of his that was in a band. They were playing one night, and a kid, maybe 13 or so, asked if he could sit in.
“Go away, kid. Us grownups are working.”
“Please, mister? My guitar teacher says I’m real good, but I need to learn to play with other people. Just one song? Pleeeeeease?”
“Alright. Just one song.”
The kid played.
“Hey kid, you’re pretty good. Give me your autograph so that when you’re famous, I can show it off to people.”
I saw John Prine at The Cellar Door, in Georgetown about six months before his album came out. There were about twelve people there, besides me and my three friends. I don’t know if he is even famous anymore. He used to be. He was only a little bit drunk during the second show when I saw him. That changed over the next few years.
Oh, here’s another. Probably even bigger than my last one.
Once upon a time I served a Mormon mission in Ecuador. One of my mission pals was a guy named Andy, from Mesa, AZ. We hit it off well because we were both musicians and had a lot of the same tastes in music. He would often talk about his younger brother Tom, who was considering going on a mission as well (this usually happens when Mormon boys are 19), but was kind of wavering because his band was starting to take off. “Take off,” apparently, meant incessantly touring through tiny clubs, house parties, and whatever bars would let a band of 18 year olds onstage.
When Andy and I got back from our missions, we both ended up at BYU and stayed in touch. He gave me a copy of Tom’s band’s first album, released on a tiny indie label from Mesa while we were in Ecuador. A few months later, he was proud to tell me that the band had been signed to Capitol Records and would be coming through town on tour soon. We went to see them headline over an ultra-popular local band. The small venue was packed with about 250 people, and Andy, two of our friends and me were the only ones in the house who weren’t there to see the local stars, or who had even heard of Tom’s band. The crowd actually thinned to about 100 people by Tom’s second song, but we stayed there, riveted. One of the best shows I’d ever been to, and we and the band went to Taco Bell afterwards - no debauched after parties for this band of 20 year olds.
