For ten years up in New York he played bass in the Tony Award-winning Broadway show, “Rent.” He also recorded with Grammy Award-winning artist R. Kelly, along with others. He even had a successful writing career, having written instructional books for Mel Bay Publications and articles for Bass Player Magazine. He had graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in music performance. He has a book called, “Unbreakable: The Secret to Getting Anything and Everything You’ve Ever Wanted” and is also the host of a brand new podcast called, “Be A Dick.”
“I came home from that gig and I called my mom and I said, ‘I wanna be a musician. That’s it. I wanna have an impact on people like that for a living’.”
“I walked into Berklee with a different kind of way of looking at it than I think most people did… I walked in there wanting to learn as much as I can, but, putting almost more weight in knowing as many people as I could… because I saw it as a business.”
“Broadway had this thing that it was a steady gig, it paid really well, and it was very prestigious. So, it was something to run towards. It was this impossible goal that I really knew I had no shot at getting, but, why not. It seemed like, if you’re gonna get a steady gig, this is probably the one.”
“I was told I wasn’t good enough. I was told I wasn’t well connected, I was too young.”
“…still doing a little bit of that ‘I gave you something, now you owe me’ and people don’t like it when you do that, when you send them a bill with the thing that you volunteered to do.”
“I really got that this wasn’t about me doing it for me. I really did it for him and I really gave back and it was really about adding value to another human being and doing the right thing.”
“As a sub your number one job is to make sure that nobody knows that you’re there.”
“I was too young and dumb to know that I wasn’t supposed to get the gig.”
“My mission, my goal, what I’m meant to do is just to make an impact anywhere I can.”
“One of the ways of making a living as a musician is to dip your toe into everything that you can. So, I was in a wedding band, I played in a jazz trio, I played in a rock band, I taught bass lessons – I did everything I could… because I met people at all these different things that I did.”
“That’s how you build rapport. And that’s how you build a relationship. That’s how you build up that love or reciprocity where if I give to you enough, at some point you’re gonna feel obligated to give back. And it’s not gonna be my idea. You’re gonna give back because you want to.”