Bands always seem to break up for the same reasons: drugs, alcohol, clashing personalities, and varying commitment levels. Sunday River was no different.
Looking back, the beginning of the end came in January 1995, when we played a gig for Music Box Live, a showcase at a supper club called Tatou. It was produced by a singer and dancer named Patrick Alan, who got his start as a casting director for the TV show Star Search. He’d worked with everyone from Michael Jackson and James Brown to Pharrell Williams. The energy and talent at the club were amazing, and when I saw people paying $20 a head to get in the door, I called Patrick.
“Hey, man, do you need an assistant? I’ll work for free…I just want to learn more about the business.”
“Really?” he said. “You’re gonna work for free? Okay.”
Patrick taught me how to create guest lists, work the crowd, and keep the acts moving. After paying the house band, he’d clear around $700, and he’d toss me $100 for my help.
In February, a few weeks after Patrick and I met, a legendary club on Fourteenth Street called Nell’s invited him to produce an R & B open-mic night.
“You can come along,” he said. “I’ll cut you twenty percent.”
I was in.
The night—which Patrick named “Voices at Nell’s”—quickly took off. Months later, we were running the most talked about open-mic night in the city. Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan, Brian McKnight, and, yes, Stevie Wonder would show up unannounced to perform. Patrick taught me how to be a nightclub promoter—how to bring top talent to the stage and paying customers into Nell’s. I worked hard, and he trusted me.
Voices at Nell’s grew. But then, Patrick was invited to sing on a world tour for a musical called Smokey Joe’s Cafe. We made a deal: For the next eighteen months of his tour, I’d run the showcase and put aside $200 a week for him. When he returned, I’d give him the cash and go back to being his assistant.
You can probably imagine where this story is headed. I was an immature nineteen-year-old, and eighteen months was an awfully long time. It didn’t help that the manager of Nell’s, a puckish punk rocker who went by the pseudonym Tex Axile, was constantly whispering in my ear, daring me to seize what was mine.
“Patrick? That guy’s trouble,” he said. “He expects you to do all the work for a year and a half and pay him? Pay him for what? Ditch him, and we’ll do our own thing.”
So I did. And when the Smokey’s gig ended, Patrick came home to find there was no money and no more Nell’s for him. I don’t think I even told him I was sorry.
Tex, who was almost twenty years older than me, became my new best friend and corrupter. He’d grown up in a small factory town in Sussex, England, and like me, had escaped to the big city (London, in his case) to earn fame and riches playing keyboard in a series of punk bands. Except Tex actually did it, collectively selling six million records in the ’80s. His real name was Anthony Doughty; his stage name was a play on the words tax exile, a concept he considered when he didn’t pay his for a couple years.
Tex had the foulest mouth of anybody I’d ever met, like a character in a Guy Ritchie movie. In addition to the frequent F- and C-words I already knew, I learned at least five or ten British swearwords I’d never heard before. Language that would’ve scandalized my parents or the teachers at New Life Christian School became shorthand between me and Tex.
As different as we were, Tex and I complemented each other. He was cynical, with no patience for prima donna types, while I was animated and deferential, eager to please any A-lister who walked in the door.
“Prince, what a pain in the arse,” Tex would say whenever the singer’s two black limos pulled up outside Nell’s. Meanwhile, I’d eagerly unscrew the lightbulb above The Artist’s favorite corner booth—he liked to sit in the dark—and then lead him inside, pulling up a chair for his bodyguard, who’d sit facing the crowd to keep people away.
When the club shut down at 4 a.m., Tex would invite me and some friends to his apartment, a run-down loft above Nell’s, where we’d blast music in his home recording studio and get hammered.
Tex hated my taste in music. “Wishy-washy, twinkly-twinkly piano, soft-rock American garbage,” he’d say whenever I played the solo from Hornsby’s “That’s Just the Way It Is” for the umpteenth time just to annoy him.
A sophisticated cook with a sommelier’s certification, Tex loved hosting impromptu four-hour dinner parties, with fresh bread, pasta, and expensive wine. Twice a year, a group of us would travel to his place in the French Pyrenees, a magical 1930s forester’s home that he’d bought as a tranquil escape from his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.
Once, when I casually mentioned to my dad that I was traveling to Tex’s house with a girlfriend, he sent me a four-page letter expressing his disappointment. “The reality hit me that you have completely abandoned your Christian upbringing and are not even ashamed of your behavior re: fornication,” he wrote. I was twenty-four at the time and didn’t have the heart to tell Dad that saving myself for marriage had been off the table for some years now.
Eventually, I think he figured this out, because when I asked him later about bringing a new girlfriend home, he laid down the law. “If you’re going to sleep in our house, you’ll follow our rules and sleep in separate bedrooms,” he said. “There won’t be any fornicating here.”
“No problem, Dad,” I said. “We’ll just stay at a bed-and-breakfast in New Hope. Why don’t you drive out and meet us for breakfast tomorrow?”
The next morning, he fumed over my lousy directions as he spent thirty minutes walking around New Hope, Pennsylvania, looking for the white Tudor manor where his son had just spent the night in sin.
But I didn’t care. I was living out my teenage freedom fantasy. I could eat with my hands, slurp my soup, and leave all the lights on in my apartment if I wanted to. I kept my clothes in loose piles on the floor. My cash was piled in stacks of tens and twenties in the fireplace because, well, where else would you keep your cash if you had a nonworking fireplace? And my mom, if she’d been well enough to visit, would have cringed at seeing how the walkway to my ground-floor apartment was littered with the cigarette butts I’d flicked out the window. It was messy because I was living.
Of all the changes instigated by my friendship with Tex, perhaps the most important was my decision to leave him and Nell’s behind.
“You’re a young man, and this is an old man’s club,” he said one night, after we’d been working together for five years. He knew me well enough to know that I was always reaching for the next rung. “Scott, once in a while, you have to break everything and move somewhere else,” he said. “And if you want to get to the top, you need to work at Lotus.”
Lotus, an Asian-inspired ten-thousand-square-foot supper club in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, was a mecca for fashion designers, supermodels, artists, media moguls, and the kind of people who actually read the articles in Italian Vogue. When it opened down the street from Nell’s in the summer of 2000, the four owners landed on the cover of New York magazine.
I took Tex’s advice and left message after message on the club’s voicemail, pleading, “Let me promote for you. I can bring great people. Give me a shot.”
After weeks of persistence, I finally got a break. One of the owners called me back and said, “Fine, you can promote Mondays”—the dead night. Still, I took that opportunity and made a career out of it. At Nell’s, I’d looked after the needs of R & B superstars. At Lotus, I would be treated like a superstar.