Occupation, or Not

You Can Keep the Gold Watch; I've Got a Guitar

Note: This one is a bit longer, but if you are interested in the music part of this journey, here is where it begins.

A.C. Nielsen marketing researcher

This would be my first real post college work. Soon after getting back to Chicago, I found out from a Kentucky friend that he was working for A.C. Nielsen in my hometown of Northbrook—and they were hiring. I was ready to get serious and work for a company for the rest of my life until I could put my feet up with a gold watch and nest egg. That was still the reasonable expectation in 1980. Nielsen was legendary in my mind—t.v. ratings people—who didn’t know The Nielsen Ratings? The job I would be doing, however, had little to do with television. Nielsen also did high quality market research for the grocery/drug store world. Clients paid for information compiled by scores of field reps assigned across the country.

Training took place on the then modern corporate campus, and I was one of a couple dozen of new recruits. There was a fake store with products on the shelves, and our job, once in the field would be to take inventories by hand with pencil and binder, noting promotional and positional product placement.

At the end of the training, the whole U.S. was possible for an assignment destination. My one request was to please, please assign me to a major city. Anywhere. Just be major.

I was assigned to Horseheads, New York. This was the smallest possible place to be assigned. Really? I guess they figured they needed somebody in that region, and I was most likely to stick it out. So, on Easter weekend of 1981, I checked into a hotel ready to work.

My assignments would take me all over central New York. I had a number of stores to inventory on my own, and I would meet crews in places like Binghamton and Ithaca. I drove my new Fiat Strada all over the place. Got an apartment in a classic old house with creaky wood floors. Neighbors were nice enough, but not really in the same age/interests category. It didn’t take long for the loneliness to build. I could get my work done in less than forty hours a week, with half of it possible to do from home. I’d package up my work to send to Fond Du Lac for processing. I had tons of free time. I had a Pentax camera, no television, a stereo, and my old roommate’s ‘67 Telecaster. I’d wander the town, alone with the voice in my head sounding more desperate by the day. I had a tic where I would touch each of my fingertips to my thumb as I walked. Over and over. I can still see myself walking through the park, wondering why I was doing that. I felt invisible, yet intensely self-conscious. In retrospect, I think I was close to a breakdown.

Every night, I’d dive into my Neil Young Zuma songbook where it showed how to make the chords. I read a lot. I felt desperate a lot. I had to get out. One weekend, I decided to make the drive to New York City for a first time visit. I had no plan. I drove down from the north of course, and I figured I would head to Times Square, park, and look around. I came in through what I thought might be Harlem, but who knows. I finally made it through the traffic to Times Square and parked. Twenty bucks? You gotta be kidding! It was mid-day when I stepped out of the garage and went to cross the street. Looked up, because, New York, and just avoided getting hit by a taxi. I found myself outside of Bond’s International Casino. I recognized it because I had been picking up the Village Voice in Elmira and knew the Clash had a sold out run there. Thing was, I didn’t know, was that they added a matinee show. A guy asked if I wanted to buy a ticket. It wasn’t even being scalped, and it was dirt cheap. It felt like a ripoff, but when I walked in, quickly found how real it was. The Brattles opened and the Clash ripped the roof off the joint. Sandinista! After the show, I got back in my car and drove back to Elmira.

I ended up making many trips to NY after that, always hitting Bleeker Bob’s for a stack of post punk imports. I saw a couple of shows, both at the Ritz. The first was Gang of Four with a very young, pre-Chronic Town R.E.M opening. I bought the Radio Free Europe 7”. Go4 was my favorite band at the time, and it was an amazing show. I danced the whole time, alone, together with everybody else. These trips saved me from losing it.

In the meantime, work was easy, too easy, but I enrolled in a photography class at the art museum and learned to develop my own photos. I don’t think my technique was all that good, but I had an eye for framing things. There was a show of the classes’ work and I felt excited to be part of something. Still, I had my sights set elsewhere. I had to get home to Chicago, but you couldn’t ask for a transfer until you put in a full year. So, I moved to Ithaca.

I had a store that I inventoried in Ithaca at the top of the hill leading to campus from downtown, so I appreciated what it was. Ithaca is a beautiful town, for sure. I got an apartment on State Street in the heart of the area closed to traffic. I had acquired the Moosewood cookbook when I still lived in Northbrook where I had become a vegetarian. And now the Moosewood was just a couple of blocks away. I used to open my windows to the foot traffic of the street mall, blasting P.I.L. Metal Box and Mission of Burma just hoping someone would notice, knock on my door, and be my friend. No luck. I attended a weekly reggae night at a local club. Saw Peter Tosh there. Didn’t make any friends. Still lonely. That soon changed.

My friend from the U of Kentucky dorms, who had moved to San Diego, had a friend he was going to set me up with—a blind date. She was from Wayne, New Jersey and was home for the holidays and I would meet her at her brother’s house and drive into the city for a date. We had plans to go to the infamous Mudd Club.

Susan was cool, and we hit it off right away. I had been so freaking lonely, and it was really nice to meet somebody who shared my musical tastes. Driving to the Mudd Club was not so easy. In my head, I remember White Street, and I don’t know if that is the street it was on, but in any regard it was difficult to find. And Susan, who I thought knew the city a bit, got totally lost and took us over the Brooklyn Bridge. We finally found the club. Wall of Voodoo played. Fun night. And we hit it off. Saw New Order at Peppermint Lounge. Susan moved across the country to Ithaca with her cat, Aurora, and I was lonely no more. Eventually, I got the transfer back to Chicago, cat in tow, with Susan to follow after I found an apartment. Got a place near the tracks on the south side of Lunt. Renamed the cat, Pigeon, because he would sit in the window stalking the flock of grey city doves in the eaves just feet away from him through the glass. And Aurora was a crappy name for this wild boy who must have had mountain lion in his blood.

Starting back with Nielsen soon had me thinking maybe I should have been more careful with what I wished for. Where the upstate New York assignment was pretty much a breeze, Chicago was a slog, and the work week often got up to 60 hours. We worked on a “flex” contract which meant you got paid the same whether you worked 30 hours (as I had in Ithaca) or 60. Sixty became the norm. I did enjoy driving all over the city, and we got reimbursed by the mile at a decent rate. My assignments would take me to just about every neighborhood in the city and suburbs. I knew every hot dog joint there was. There were no bad ones in Chicago.

The places I worked at were often unpleasant. Sometimes, where I went through boxes, rats would scurry around. I had to go through shipping and receiving records too, and I could tell from their dirty looks, which stores cooked the books.

I liked going into the Northbrook hq again, and it was nice to be closer to my parents again. Something was missing though. I had played bass in a punk band during my post college Lexington year, and I wanted to find a band to join. I scoured the Reader for opportunities and failed the one audition I went to. I was trying out as a guitar player, which I barely knew how to play. I had spirit though.

It turns out my relationship wasn’t the same, and it was evident it had been born more out of loneliness than love. Overworked, not in love, and looking for something more as a musician, changes would be coming.

Exit Susan, enter Janet Bean. Spring 1983. I wish it had been as easy as that sounds. But within a few months, Janet would be moving to Chicago to attend Columbia College. She set up in an apartment in a Boho building across the street from me w/ the train tracks and Heartland Cafe a block away. Before long, Janet and I were jamming. She got a job at the Heartland where she worked with Shu Shubat, an artistic woman with similarly undeveloped musical aspirations, who filled out the band using my bass and amp. We came up with the name, Eleventh Dream Day which Shu warned must be spelled out for karmic reasons.

I continued to work, the band made a demo which got into the hands of some people who spread the word, and we made a very quick climb into the Chicago music scene and onto WNUR college radio where the buzz put us on the main stage at the Armadillo Day spring festival in 1984.

On weekends, we would pile into my tiny Fiat with our amps, and even friend Raoul Stober, and travel to Lexington, Louisville and Cincinnati. Janet and I wanted a bigger, more aggressive sound for the band and Shu quit when we started auditioning guitar players. Baird Figi, who we had met at Round Records, eventually joined the band (we also auditioned a young Jim Ellison), and he brought in Doug McCombs who also worked at the store and could replace a fleeing Shu on bass. The band that you know today truly formed then in 1985, and with the momentum we had already achieved at home and in the English fanzine world, we rapidly climbed the ladder. Sue Miller started throwing us $50 opening slots at West End and then Cubby Bear. We opened for The Feelies, Replacements, Slickee Boys, and The Wipers. Then Joe Shanahan brought us to the Metro stage to open for The Long Ryders. This one, and the opening slot for the Meat Puppets really got our name out there, and our first ep plus Prairie School Freakout got international attention.

Back at work, I was only thinking about the band really, but I was good at my job. In fact, I don’t think there was anybody as fast or as accurate as me. I was extremely reliable. And although I might play a gig in Minneapolis at the Uptown on a Sunday night, I’d be there at the inventory in the morning, shirt changed, with tie attached while we got gas. In all fairness, I should have been offered a job in client services. That was the pinnacle in terms of money and prestige at Nielsen, and I kept getting passed over. Perhaps it was my look. I did stick out a bit in hair style and I preferred skinny new wavy ties over the double wides of the day. I also got leap-frogged by a couple of less experienced women, because Nielsen, like many other companies of that era had zero females in the upper echelons of the company and they need to catch up. It was affirmative action for sure, but I got it, and agree with it to this day. (It was all white back then too!) The thing that really got my goat though was the Reagan era changes that seeped in. I found myself having to train part-timers to do my job. These part-timers didn’t have to go through the same process that we went through and were thrown into the fire, They dragged down our teams and were incompetent and unreliable. But Nielsen didn’t have to give them benefits or profit sharing like I had. That’s when the fabric of America changed, my friends, under Ronald Reagan, who shifted the paradigm toward unrestrained corporate profit and trickle down economics. The loyal, company man would be no more. David Byrne would ask the musical question, “How did we get here?” Ronnie effing Reagan.

It was 1988. The band had done self-booked tours West and East, and Prairie School Freakout was hitting the college charts with New Rose getting us distributed in Europe. Janet and I decided to get married. We had a show booked at Metro with a honeymoon jaunt to Europe to hunt down all those people who had sent us fan mail to see if they would host us on their futons as we back-packed and Euro-railed across the continent. The only way to make this possible; resign my job of eight years.

I called my boss, who I really liked, to set up a meeting to tell him the news. He told me that the company wanted a meeting with me to give me some news. Hmmmm. So, I sat down with Art and somebody way up the food chain from him. They explained that I was being offered a new opportunity and a massive raise that would almost double my salary. It wasn’t the client service job I had sought—it was something brand spanking new. A new technology using scanners at grocery checkouts was rolling out in the area, and so that Nielsen would be on top of the technological shift, I was being offered a job where I would have an integral part of it moving forward with the electronic developments. We had already moved away from doing our work on paper in favor of hand held computing and this was a logical next step.

Ummm, thanks, I sputtered. I appreciate that you thought of me for this, I sputtered. But I, sputter, sputter, am resigning. Pffft. I quit. Gathered up my profit sharing pile that had accrued and quit. Eight years. No gold watch.