Back in the day, I believed that if my annual salary matched my age (with a few zeros attached), I was winning. The year was 1991 and I was turning 30. I worked at Spin. I made $30,000. Therefore, according to my playbook, I was winning. Yes, faulty logic and as I’ve mentioned in these pages before, math. baaah. Anywho, there I was on my birthday sitting at a table in an Indian restaurant on Sixth street, NYC, with a publicist from Epic records and an up&coming band called Pearl Jam, who were performing the next night at the New Music Seminar, which happened every July for some amount of days. Musical moments would spring up all over the city, panels would take place at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square, and folx would pour in from all over the world to either see or sign bands and the like. I would often be on one of those panels talking about the future of alternative music or possibly the financial folly of Grunge fashion…stuff like that. So there I was at that aforementioned table on my birthday making an annual salary that matched my age and feeling in my bones that I was in fact acing it. That there were a rotating series of bill collectors leaving messages on my answering machine at that very moment did not matter. I was here sitting and eating naan with a group of musicians who were quickly becoming some of my favorite people and one of my favorite bands. At home later, I would listen to these people telling me I owed them money. They would sound kind of angry or maybe just stern but I’d be pretty buzzed. I was probably still smiling from my last few hours of happy times. Yep, I was bottom-l$ne broke, yet I didn’t actually care having developed a completely nihilistic view toward what credit scores meant and a total denial of how that might affect my future self.

Inside of this headspace I was proud of how scrappy I thought I was. Because SPIN editors were constantly being taken out for food by record executives, I would go, order a lot of food, eat a little, then box up the rest and take it home to feed me for as long as I could make it last. This never embarrassed me one bit. In fact, I felt like I was really smart for figuring out how to live in this uber-expensive city, have a job I loved, and survive (if you ignored all those effin messages on my machine).

The record company meal event was a reliable thing in the industry. A publicist (always only a publicist unless the band was huge and this was a celebration of their releasing a ten-millionth album or whatever, then the whole caboodle of execs would descend from on high and a fancy-ass place was chosen. More on that later.), so anyway, a publicist would want to take the editors at SPIN out with an artist/band in hopes the magazine would write about them. The band was meant to be on at least passable behavior, while the editors could be any way they wanted because we were the ones meant to be impressed. This was sometimes embarrassing. I’m pretty sure it was never lost on a publicist that the editors at SPIN could be complete and utter children. There were three of us in particular that I remember being fed and finagled by a regular rotation of publicists. Some of them were our friends and some became friends, which could be awkward when we were particularly badly behaved (i.e., drinking too much, telling bad or off-color jokes, ordering much-too-much food, etc.). Others quite literally gritted their teeth and bore it when they took us out with a band. The artists sometimes enjoyed the irreverence—I think? I’m not sure I paid enough attention.

But some of those meals stand out. Whether because I really enjoyed the people (see Pearl Jam, above) or because there was messiness, maybe fisticuff, often dry cleaning bills. Then I would feel very bad for the publicist in charge. One of those occasions was a 1992 dinner with Megadeth as they were doing publicity for their album Countdown to Extinction. Let me start by saying I am not a huge heavy metal fan. I have a great appreciation for Metallica. Dave Mustaine, founder, singer, guitar player for Megadeth, had been in Metallica for a minute in the 80s (for the cringy firing anecdote and even cringier photo, click here). The dinner, as I remember it, was in the back room of an Italian restaurant: one long table, family-style platters of food, many, many, many, many bottles of red wine on the table. Mustaine, who, if you checked the why-he-got-fired-from-Metallica link above you know, can be a piece of work, was sitting one person down from me on my left (I remember this vividly). At some point during the meal I knocked over a glass of red wine and I watched with not much concern while swiping with a napkin that turned out to be useless, as it made a steady river toward him, maybe splattering the person to my immediate left. The redness rolled on and then onto his general person, into his blue-jeaned lap. I felt mortified because I’d been clumsy. I was not at all expecting what happened in the next few minutes, which was an explosion of actual rage not at all commensurate with the thing that had just happened. Or at least I didn’t think so. With maybe a modicum of memory embellishment, a torrent of nasty words flew toward me. They included, but were not limited to, “dumb bitch,” “fucking ruined,” and on like that. Then the person on my left told Dave Mustaine to shut up (or something along those lines) and someone hit someone (maybe slapped), and I pushed away from the table. The publicist rushed over. I think at first I figured it would all pass and I’d sit back down, but once the actual slapping started, I figured it was best to leave. My exit is quite literally a blur. The only take-home I got that night was a container of confusion, which eventually turned to anger. Why I never wrote about that in the magazine, I don’t know except maybe our advertising department needed to keep Capitol records as a client and advised me not to torch the band in print for that reason. We also presumably paid the dry cleaning bill for his jeans?!

Years later, in 1999, I was on the other side of the music biz fence working at Elektra Records as the head of video promotion. AC/DC’s Stiff Upper Lip album was readying for release so a big meal was planned where all the honchos would use tiny crab forks at an Italian seafood restaurant. (Italian food…well, sure, this was the whitest scene ever. I don’t know exactly why I’m connecting that to Italian food but I am.) My job at the time was to take the videos of the label’s bands and get MTV or VH1 to play them. In this case, the title track of the album “Stiff Upper Lip” would not in any way be a hard sell. It was AC/DC for feck’s sake. They are in fact legendary and kind of silly, but ultimately they are AC/DC, say no more. And really super nice as well. I did not spill wine on any of them. They did not yell or throw food or slap each other … or anyone as far as I could tell. Angus Young did turn up wearing his trademark English schoolboy shorts, as is his look (yes, he was in his mid-forties at the time. No, I don’t know what age you shift into another persona, but I am not now and have never been mad at this whimsical fashion statement of his. The absurdity of how music is age blind is both hilarious and kind of awesome as this AC/DC clip shows. Again, not mad about this, just saying.). They were all very funny with great stories about their decades touring and so on. Plus, once the dinner was over, there was a ton of food left over, which I could have packed up and taken home if I’d wanted too. But by this time, at the age of 38, I was actually clearing about double my age in salary (with the zeros and everything).

A year later, I left Elektra and the attendant salary (promotion, it turns out, is not my jam, and apparently no amount of financial security could change that). I decided to try my hand at freelance writing, then I taught writing workshops in the city schools, then I worked for a focus group company sometimes standing out on midtown sidewalks trying to interview people and often wondering where I’d gone wrong in my life, then I went back to copyediting and freelanced and freelanced and freelanced, then got a full-time job(!!!) where I had my own desk and phone and benefits, which made me inordinately happy.

Paying some attention to what my financial road has been reminds me how I’ve never done it for the money, yet that’s a complicated and also somewhat enraging thing: It’s not that I decided to always be worried about money for nobilities sake. It’s more that this country of ours does not respect working artists enough to pay them an especially livable wage. And when you consider a place like NYC, in no universe can a person who is pursuing creative arts as a career survive unless there is help involved or side hustles nonstop. It’s always been thus. There are millions upon millions of articles, books, films, and pieces of art based on that very fact. It pisses me off that this is so and that artists are sold a bill of bullshit around what it means to be in the arts and therefore are expected to get used to financial struggle. It was my foundational mindset as a budding music journalist that if I made a dollar figure matching my birthday (with those few zeros attached), I was winning. It’s not like I’m starting a petition here about that. Gawd knows there are so many important petitions going around for other insane moments that need fixing, yet this is important and somehow I hope working creatives can understand in their bones that they’re worth so much more than they no doubt get paid AND it shouldn’t be a trade-off: money or creativity.

So that’s my PSA for this particular weekend. Sending a whole lot of smiles, maybe some creative finger painting, or fist-pumping your way!