At the age of 26 I got to peek behind the curtain.
Up until then I was an acoustic guitar playing, local band singing, YMCA Battle of the Bands losing kid, whose idea of the music industry was names on the backs of albums and rock groups I saw on TV.
Imagine what it was like back then. There were no clubs or theaters to play in in Meriden, Connecticut. That part of the industry hadn’t been invented yet in my neck of the woods. If our band wanted to play, we had to do the aforementioned battle of the bands… or play for the Elks Club at an ice skating rink, or at a party when one of our friends parents naively went out of town. We had a bar called Johnnie’s but it was a biker bar. Bikers we had. I wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in a Biker Bar with this pretty face.
I think I’ve told you all how I wrote down the names and addresses of A&R people and sent them all tapes. One person out of eleven called me and I drove down into NYC to meet him.
This was the moment. I don’t want to belabor the Wizard of Oz references…. but this was the moment my life went from black and white to color.
I stood in front of The Black Rock. An enormous black tower of a building in Manhattan. The gentleman I was meeting, Harold J Kleiner, worked at CBS, I was going to go into a real record company.
I don’t think I would have been as nervous if it were the third floor. Or the twelvth. But he was up in the clouds…I remember it being the 365th floor or something daunting like that. I rode up in the elevator and it opened into the lobby of a real live record company.
Cubicles everywhere. Every person in every cubicle had posters of the bands they were working with and these were some big league people. I was escorted to Harold’s office. No cubicle for Harold. He had an office looking out over the whole damn city with a river and everything. The shelves lining his walls were piled with records and boxed sets of any artist you could think of. (as long as they were signed to CBS, And all the cool ones were!)
“Help yourself.” He said to me, as a way to break the ice. I like a nice ice breaking.
He bade me to sit down. That’s how cool he was. He BADE me.
I sat.
He described how he thought my career might go if we worked hard and had a little luck.
Writing with a goal in mind. A mentor to help me find my voice. Help me write the songs that would attract the luck. We would do sessions. Sessions with top NY players. Musicians that would make me stammer and try to play better, so I wouldn’t embarrass myself.
I’ve worn out the Oz metaphors, so how about this.
It was like I was in a casino and I was pretty sure there was a BIG game in a back room somewhere. I’d heard about it. It was legendary. But I could never find the door to let me in.
Then someone offered to show me where the door was and offered to help me gamble.
Nothing was ever the same after that day when I was staring up at the top of The Black Rock.
I drove home late that night with a new vision of myself. A new future with new possibilities.
And the complete boxed set of Mitch Miller.