How I Went from College Professor to Deli Worker

started hey everyone happy saturday i was on last sunday but i'm now on saturday uh okay this is going to be a long convoluted story but i told it to my friend les the other day and he was laughing he could not believe the insane i had forgotten about this probably because it was selective memory i've tried to put it out of my mind but this is a story that i have no shame about at all but uh before we get started my discount code for today's live stream gonna use it again rb 250 is the sale if you're interested in improving your ear be out of ear training if you're interested in learning about music theory my biato book 65 percent off that your training course is 45 off and my quick lessons pro course is 45 off and by the way uh my rick biato 2 channel just hit 100 000 subscribers today thank you for subscribing to that i put my brian may interview on there and i'm putting new content up all the time on that channel so you guys got me to the um to the to another creator award so i'll get another plaque here okay so here's where the story starts so it's 1989 i'm a professor teaching jazz studies up at ithaca college in upstate new york so i'm playing a sunday night jazz gig solo jazz guitar with a classical guitar this is probably the hardest kind of gig you can have a three-hour gig of solo guitar playing standards and there's people out sitting in this restaurant restaurant held about probably 100 people or so and there'd just be college students milling around just sitting eating dinner drinking doing stuff like that anyways i had this buddy of mine that was in a local band named alan that came by the window one day he saw me in there and he probably could sense i was struggling to uh you know it was just a tough gig by the end of the night i was tired and he says hey let me go get my base and i was like yeah so he walks down the commons and ithaca yes it means on the corner of the commons in the middle of town he goes and grabs his base and base samp and comes back gets up on stage now allen wasn't really a jazz player but he had a great ear so um you know i said whatever songs it might be uh here's that rainy day stella by starlight or days of wine and roses whatever and allen could follow along i'd play the chord melody he had a great ear and play along so it was very helpful so the next week comes up and alan's like hey you want me to come in and play again just like yeah come on in and play so he comes in and plays so we start doing this regularly as a two-piece this goes on for probably about two months or so and then one day he says hey i want you to come over to my place i want to play something before the for the gig and he lived just off the comments so i go over to his place and he said i want to play a couple songs i wrote so he has his acoustic acoustic guitar and he sings he's got a phenomenal voice he played me a couple songs and they were really great songs kind of sounded like sting right but very well written songs great singers i said wow that's amazing i didn't know you're a great songwriter great singer he's like yeah he goes i'm doing this demo i'm borrowing an eight-track reel-to-reel from a friend of mine i want you to play on it and i was like no no man i don't i don't really play rock i you know i i don't know what to play or whatever i just i really don't play rock anymore he's like come on you used to play rock bands everything i said yeah i was here that was when i was in high school he was like listen just come down i got a guitar and amp and everything just come down and play some parts i'm like all right so the next week he's working on this thing there's no vocals or anything and he has me come in he's like yeah i want you to play something here so i played a part here i played a part there on a few songs most of the songs and there were eight songs so anyways about a month later he finishes the thing and he gives me a cassette and it just says alan on it and i listened to i was like wow this is great these songs are really really good okay so a couple weeks goes by and he calls me up at my office at ithaca college and he's like you got to meet me down at this park i was like what's going on he's like you're not going to believe what happened just just meet me down this parking so i'm just finishing up my last class here and i'll uh or finishing up my last lesson i'll meet you now so drive down this park he's like you're not going to believe this senior vp of electric records called me left me a message on my answering machine and say before i spend a quarter of a million dollars on your band uh or i got your tape it's amazing um uh you need to get a band and i want to do a development deal with you and i was like what is the development deal well he wants to get he says i talked to him he wants to give us money to record some more songs i mean what do you mean us he says well i don't have any more songs so i have to write other songs those were all my my songs and and i said how much money is he giving you he says five grand i said five grand wow now this is when i was a college professor in 1989 i mean no lie i made like 22 000 a year as a full-time college professor at the most it might not have quite been that much so anyway so so alan uh says i tell you what we're gonna go and why don't we take the money we can go into this eight-track studio that'll cost 500 bucks and do the debt we'll write the songs do the demos and we can get an apartment together and use the five grand to pay rent for a year and i was like i don't know and he's like no this is good i'll tell you but this will cover rent for years so we got this apartment that was 160 160 bucks a month alan and i and we start working on songs so he's like this is how you write songs now i'd written songs in high school and everything but alan's like gotta have a signature at the beginning gotta have this verse chorus you can have a pre-chorus and we'll do a solo and everything so so alan's telling me about writing songs and and he said well the beatles did this the stones did this all this stuff anyway so we write eight songs together we go and record it and we go down to new york city to this guy howard thompson's office howard was a british a r guy howard signed ten thousand maniacs he signed a lot of huge huge bans and we're in rockefeller center at electra records and howard is the nicest guy we listen through these eight songs and he's critiquing each one you know what this one has a great bridge but i think the verse is not is not strong enough wow this is a really good melody here but not there i mean very constructive stuff then he takes us out to eat lunch and we drive the four hours back to ithaca so uh there's no record deal or anything no talk about anything like that so alan's like well let's write some more songs so we write eight more songs and we demo them the next month and so we said howard we have eight more songs so we go back down to new york the next month and play him the eight songs and howard critiques him takes us out to lunch and we go back to ithaca no record deal well every month we did eight to ten songs new songs that we demoed on a four track okay no record deal howard then uh after the first couple months he's like well you should put a band together i'll i'll book you your first gig so uh i knew a bass player and drummer and i said i can we can get pete and charlie to play with us and uh and so howard calls up cbgb's famous club those of you that know new york city you know cbgb so so um the most famous rock and roll club the police played there the the the i mean every big band sex pistols played there the uh uh david byrne i mean everybody played cbg because every huge band played cbg so we go play cbgb's and we keep doing this thing we're playing there all the time no record deal but one night one night we get a guy from polygram that comes in he's like hey my name's john t i you guys have hit songs i want to send you to a publishing deal because this card and we're like i don't believe this so we had this lawyer that that i called up i said um i said is this real is this guy he's like oh my god he's like one of the head people at polygram you know this is a real deal thing so our lawyer starts negotiating this contract i'm teaching in ithaca still right so he says yeah this is going to happen so we get a deal of 85 000 deal we had a manager at the time and uh that uh that we had a manager and a lawyer so this 85 grand most of the money other than about 10 grand went to them went to the lawyer and the manager the manager's like well you owe us this much money and blah blah blah right so alan and i had about five grand a piece but i was like i'm to quit teaching in ithaca and go and try to make it in a band it's 1992. i take a leave of absence from school i tell the dean he's like yeah yeah no problem so anyway so i go and and uh alan and i moved to philadelphia and meet this drummer jj and we start playing together we had all these different names we toured around the country no record deal um and it just got to a point in 93. i mean i i didn't we we gave up our place in philly so any time that we were not out playing i would crash on people's couches in new york city just whoever friends i'd crash on people's couches that's that's what we did because i didn't have a place to live jj lived in philly with his dad alan went wherever so anyways come 93 yeah uh halfway through 93 we're out on tour doing stuff we're in boise idaho alan's like i can't do this anymore i i and we we realized that this was it this was the end of this this group at the time and we were going to go nowhere so i quit the gig i come home and i'm living back at my parents house i'm 32 years old we're just about to be 32. it's 1994. now it's it's what's it's november of well what happened it's november of 93 and i'm living in new york city crashing on people's couches but i was living off credit cards and they were all in hock and my honda that i paid nine thousand dollars for for brand new that i've been making payments on i couldn't make the payments i owed a thousand dollars on the car and i had to move home i moved in with my parents into my bedroom that i grew up in i'm from a family of seven we had three bedroom house everyone else had moved out where had were responsible had real jobs um and i'm living back in my parents house broke i've got my credit cards in the collection and the car is gonna get repossessed the car they owed a thousand dollars still on so my brothers and sisters like we need to have this intervention i go over to my brother lou's house all my siblings are there my six siblings i'm super tight with my family with all my siblings and everything so what can we do to help well my parents said listen we'll pay off the extra the thousand bucks in your car so you can't not have a car we'll pay off the thousand dollars you owe on the car so they don't repossess it my brother ray says i'll hire you to help me set up my computer system i'll pay you i can pay you 200 bucks uh or 300 bucks a week something like that which was amazing i was like wow so i start work and i start i call all the credit card companies i get back on track and everything and i tell the people i tell the um my siblings i said i'm only going to stay here for a few months and then i'm going to go back out and try and start another band because i want to play my own music no problem so i get everything kind of set i save up 200 bucks and then i decide okay i'm ready to leave and kurt cobain dies i love grunge you guys know i love grunge it's april of 1994. kurt cobain dies and i was like i'm leaving my house i get in my car i tell my parents i'm going where are you going i don't know i have a map in the united states i'm not sure where i'm going to go so i start driving west from rochester i'm just looking at the map there was a new york times article that talked about different music scenes that talked about wicker park in chicago there was bands like baruch assault and smashing pumpkins were from there there was chapel hill they had super chunk and ed polvo and had archers of loaf there was there were these music scenes all over the country that you know other than seattle seattle kind of was was this is just posted i mean seattle was still going on super you know soundgarden was releasing like records pearl jams releasing records this was that time period so i drive to chicago i pull into the wicker park area get out of my car to look around middle of the day and uh this girl comes walking up and she goes you're from ithaca i had an ithaca college stick around my car i was like yeah i said i used to teach ithaca college wow i'm from ithaca i was like what no way and she said what are you doing here so i'm thinking about maybe moving here and trying to you know start a band or get in a band or something she's like where are you gonna stay i said i have no idea she goes i got some friends that go to the art institute here in chicago let me give him a call so she invites me into her house she and her boyfriend are there and stuff and and uh she calls up hey this my friend rick is in town he's a friend of mine from ithaca and you guys have room in your place yeah yeah you tell them to come on over and crush so i go over to these guys houses three guys are art students they have all these all this stuff all over this huge loft and everything they're like yeah you can crash on the couch as long as you want so i started going out in chicago to see all these different things these bands and stuff i was like wow this is really cool really cool about 10 days go by and i'm like wait a minute my journey can't be over here this is kind of the same thing that i had gone through at ithaca when it was in the late 80s you know when i was thinking about quitting my teaching gig i was like i'm going to be here until i'm 60 years old and retire because steve my steve brown who was who hired me there he was a professor there he was a professor there from 1964 to 2011. and i was like that can't be what my life is about my life can't just be that i finished my master's degree and i taught college until i'm 60 years old which i'll be in six months i will be 60. that can't be my life so i'm in chicago i'm like this can't be the end of the story there's got to be more to this so so i tell the guys i wake up the next day i said you know i'm leaving here where are you going i don't know so i get my honda now the only thing i had was a mexican strat a white mexican strat and a pv classic 50 amp that's the only gear i owned i had that and a duffel bag in the back of my honda civic hatchback that's all the stuff that i owned in the world so i start driving south in illinois and i'm losing my mind i can't even believe it i'm like i don't know where i'm gonna go i keep stopping at gas stations looking at a map of the united states just just panicking where am i going to move to so i stopped at this phone booth and i said i'm going to call my friend paul in nashville and i'm going to call this girl cammy cammy booked my old band in denver i'm gonna call her whoever answers the phone is where i'm gonna go so i call paula and it's busy you guys know paul smitty he's the one who played chess with lyle mays and who is was in my my uh uh most complex pop song video of all time that's smitty okay so smitty's phone was busy i call cammy i tell her what's going on i said cammy i got to move somewhere i got no place to crash she said come to come to denver you can stay with donna and now you can crash on our couch it's 12 hours from this gas station to denver there's no cell phones so i was like all right so i start driving on my way to denver i've stayed at some cheap hotel and stuff in in kansas wherever and i go and i get to denver hold on i'll just say for those of you that just join my sale from last week is still on rb 250 is a discount code you want to support the channel and support yourselves musically get my ear training course get my beauto book or get my quick lessons course or if you want to donate to the channel to help support things like interviews and things like that that i'm doing i'll put a donate thing in in the in the description okay i get to chicago so cami says um she's like let's go out and see a band tonight say okay so we go and see a band and um i start meeting people she starts introducing me and then she's got she goes there's a band these friends of mine that don't have a bass player they need a bass player they're called sweet water well they've got a really good following so she introduces me to the guys that night they were out tony and dave the guitar player and and two guitar players and singers so they she's like yeah this rickett old friend of mine he was in a band that toured through here and everything and they go do you play bass i said yeah well we have a gig tomorrow night i'm like great so i go and rehearse with these guys the next day i play a gig and there's like 300 people there so i'm playing with this band playing bass and i start meeting all these people well over the course of the next you know a week or so i meet every musician in denver i'm going out every night there's a place uh what is it calvin's pool hall herman's hideaway these clubs like that that were there at the time this is 1994. so but i'm broke and i say cammy i need to get a job or something so she cami was a waitress at the university of denver she's like well you can be a busboy and i said okay so i she got me a job she talked to the boss yeah this is my friend rick i'm 32 years old i was a former college professor i already played with vinnie caliuta i had already played with you know all these great musicians i had written my biato book already but i wanted to make it i wanted to do my own music okay so it didn't matter i put on a polyester short sleeve shirt and a little hat and i was a bus boy busting tables for college students i was a college professor two years before knowing busing tables and cleaning up oj off the off the tables and carrying around a gray bin to put all the dirty dishes in so i do this for a couple weeks and kami and i are talking she's waiting to but she's like i hate this job i said so she says i'm gonna quit that's okay i'm quitting so we go in and we quit the next day i was like well i need to get another job so she says oh there's this deli i think it was like the cherry hill deli in denver i have a friend that works there you can get a job there i said okay so i go to this deli and i get a job at a deli making sandwiches okay wearing a hair net it was awesome i was telling my friend lestis the other day and he was laughing he said wait you wear a hairnet i was like yeah wear a hairnet you got to wear a hairnet in deli i'm making sandwiches for people i want to you know italian bmt with you know with with uh you know this on it i want this i want to tell you i was you know it's like a fancy deli i'm cutting the things making sandwiches for people for three months and playing gigs at night people would come in hey you're playing with that band sweetwater well or like you know i knew everybody in town i knew every musician in town anyway so i was like i just wake up one day and i said that to cammy and don i said okay i can't do this anymore this is not where the story ends this is not my own music i need to do my own music so i decide i'm going to move back to new york city where i have friends so i get in my car and i start driving 32 hours back to new york in my honda civic i get to new york and i have a friend rick harth and i say i go to rick was living in alphabet city in the east village i go to his place and i said man i need a place to crash he has a tiny tiny place he goes you know my friend roger has a place with an empty empty room i bet roger will let you stay there's one of those you guys remember roger i said yeah so he calls roger he's like my friend rick's and todd needs a place to crush oh tell him to come on over roger lived on first dave and saint mark's this is an area i used to hang out because i used to go see jeff uh jeff buckley at chennai because i my other friends i stayed with were all lived in the east village so i was in that area all the time you know 92 93 94. so i was like okay so i go i move in with roger roger helps me unload my thing i park my car i move in first thing i do is i get the village voice and i start looking for bands looking for players i answer five different things we're getting calls and answering machine so the first band i i get a call from is a band called iv now iv was a three-piece band and the bass player of the band was adam schlesinger who passed away last year who was in fountains of wayne and wrote the song that thing you do this was a band he was in that was a great band had a female singer a french singer her dominique and her husband andy uh they were and adam is just three people so they said you know can you play these parts there's keyboard parts guitar parts i said yes and i jammed with them they gave me the record i learned the parts well i got in all five bands one of the bands with this three-piece band that was playing bass and i play guitars and other bands so i started playing i was playing in this trio i'm there i'm there um and i get a job working on a boat as a bartender because i needed money i didn't none of the stuff paid i met this girl lisa who was uh had this punk rock band that i was playing with lisa and she's like well i work as a server on this boat and you can work as a bartender you know how to bartend i said no she said perfect so i go on this boat that goes around new york city it starts out at the world trade center and would go around make a loop and be a three-hour cruise you know fancy dining and everything and she taught me how to bartend really fast this pre-internet pre-cell phone so i'm doing this job every day and i'm playing in bands playing out so a few months go by and i'm playing cbgb's with this guy chris i'm playing bass and howard thompson the guy from electra records shows up at the club i hadn't seen him in years and he goes what are you doing here i said he's like why are you playing with this guy this guy sucks i was like howard i'm playing in a bunch of bands he said rick in his british accent you're wasting i can't do a british accent he said you are wasting your talent quit the span now do your own music you're too good to play with this guy you're too good to to do go somewhere where you can start your own band so i told roger the next day i was like you know what howard's right this is not this is the not the end of the story so i say okay i'm going to get in my car i'm going to go back home and figure out where i want to go so i drive back up to rochester i go back to my parents lessons i'm just here temporarily first day i'm there i get a call from a band i had met that's recording over in england we want you to come over we got a plane ticket for you uh some label thing so the next day i fly or two days later i fly to england to do this recording session at a studio called jacob's farm i'm staying there great studio so uh i go in with this band female singer a band from amsterdam anyways um i start rehearsing with them i'm playing bass on this and the uh label president comes in and everything and this thing just went haywire and it was terrible he's like you guys are not ready to record i'm not putting the money into this i'm not uh so for forget it so here i am in england i had five weeks a ticket for five weeks later and i said to you well just pay me my money so he paid me the three grand or whatever in cash and i had three grand in five weeks in europe so i'm like i'm going to go to bristol because portis said was happening there you know all the the bands that were happening in the scene there i went there i went to bath i went to to uh um i went to uh i went to wales to uh cardiff so i'm going around to all these different cities checking out the music scenes seeing if i could maybe i just moved to england and playing a band over there but the five weeks come by i'm we go to amsterdam and everything and i'm like i gotta go back because i basically spent all my money because i didn't have any place to stay so i fly back i'm back at my parents house again and i'm like okay i gotta move somewhere else and my parents at this time are used to this right so like okay where are you going i don't know i'm going to go to nashville and hang out with paul so i go to nashville i hang out with paul and i'm there for a few days everything i'm like no this is totally not it i'm gonna go to chapel hill so i drive to chapel hill and then to hold merge records all the whole chapel hill indie rock scene was really cool very into that super chunk all those bands but i was like there's no central town here i can't get connected with people um and i'm just crashing with people i just meet random people and they let me stay on their couch i slept on couches no lie all of 92 all of 93 all of 94. i crashed on people's couches i had no place that i lived so i go there i'm there for a week i said this isn't for me so i'm like i'm going to austin texas i love austin that's the place i'm going to be i get in my car i start driving down from chapel hill i'm like atlanta my old college roommate doug doug sandberg's here i'm going to call dog to see if he wants to have lunch pull into town i go to this mall up in buckhead area town and uh i called doug up he's like what are you doing here i said i'm just passing through i'm moving to austin i said i'm wondering if you want to have lunch he's like yeah i said where's your building he said see that big black building over there that's my building meet me over here i said i'll be over in five minutes so um so i get over there to meet doug for lunch and he says i got you a gig for tonight like what what do you mean i'm not staying no no no you got to stay it pays 150 bucks i was like oh what am i playing it's a cover gig you're playing base it's in lagrange georgia i said where is that he said about an hour and a half away who am i playing with my friend francisco as a matter of fact we got to eat because you have a rehearsal at his house at two o'clock he lives in college park down by the airport it's a little bit of a drive so i meet francisco and francisco says unload your stuff from your honda i was like no i can't dude i'm leaving town i'm going to go tomorrow after the gig we'll just leave it here i'll be safer in the house there's a house full of musicians so he and doug had hatched a plan unbeknownst to me doug's like make rick stay you have an empty room friend's like yeah well get his stuff in the room and just get have rick play a bunch of gigs because he doesn't have any money and he'll stay get him to stay in town so fran hires me and then there's oh no there's gig tomorrow night others get this next night yeah pays 150 bucks pays 150 bucks and i was like okay then i s the second day i'm here uh one of my roommates michael that the of the five musicians that live there says hey do you know the band jellyfish i'm like yeah he goes well the bass player tim smith uh is playing tonight with his duo and you should go check him out so i went to check him out and then tim meets me we start talking we know a bunch of the same people and he says hey we're doing a recording tomorrow uh over here at rob's house so um so i go over to rob's place and we start recording and i ended up being on this record with this band uma jets that roger manning from jellyfish produced that particular record and i'm still here but i was a bus boy i waited tables i was i worked in a deli i was a bartender i slept on couches not to mention the fact when i moved here my first job was working at blockbuster on peachtree road here in atlanta where i wore a blue shirt and i worked at the listening station for for minimum wage which was 425 an hour that was how much i got paid at all these jobs so i was a college professor right i quit that to work as a server and all these things which are wonderful things to do and you do whatever you have to do to make your dream happen i mean that's it right and you just you just have to have that vision and i know life isn't that simple always i was in my 30s you know at this point now i'm uh by 1994 i'm 32 you know 33 but i taught for five years in a music store here from 94 to 99 a place called buckhead music it's no longer here i taught 50 students a week that's where i learned all these songs that i know for what makes this song great because i learned every song off every record with these 50 students that was my education for really for songwriting it wasn't just playing in all those different bands it was about taking this um taking all this knowledge in and using it which is really what i do here on this channel but i did whatever i had to do and i wasn't above doing anything and will do any kind of job to make it and and i don't even think about it but i was laughing when i was talking to les the other night about having to wear a hair net to work and he was like no no you wore hair and i was i wore a hairnet in a polyester shirt okay i'm making sandwiches for people every day it's like what i was like oh yeah man you kidding me i was a college professor but i made sandwiches for people and it was great it was a great job it was a great job um but you never know you never know what life has in store um but i just you know try to figure it out one day at a time just like with this channel when i started this channel i didn't know what was gonna happen i just started doing it and that's the whole thing is just do stuff do stuff and then figure out your path um so that's my story for today um this is this is i've i've wanted to tell this it's it's a very convoluted story i've told some parts of it before but this is really the thing i i never mentioned this stuff i don't know why but uh i thought about it when i was telling lesson the other day and he's like you gotta tell this on your channel i was like okay i don't think any of my siblings know know this they probably never heard this billy do you ever hear the story no you never heard the story um you know blockbuster 450 425 an hour opening cd cases for people letting him listen to him put him in back i worked there for months until i got enough guitar students that's what i did elton john used to come into the store into the blockbuster i worked at anyways if you want to support the channel and support your own musical endeavors 45 off my beato ear training course discount code rb250 45 off my guitar course quick lessons pro um and 65 off my biato book which is my music theory book these are things that i created to help you become better musicians these are the things i sell if you want if you're not a musician you want to donate to the channel because you believe in the in the mission here i'll put a donate button on there or you can become a member of the biato club and get on have do monthly donations but but um i really appreciate you guys being here listening and uh sorry if this story went on a little bit longer than normal try to keep my live streams to 30 minutes because i know how busy people are you guys are amazing thank you for listening and um and have a great rest of your weekend see ya

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 467,360

Keywords: everything music, Beato Ear Training, Beato Book, Quick Lessons Course, Music, Musicians, Music Theory, ear training, Rick Beato, Record Labels, Youtube, Social Media, music education, Story Time, inspirational, inspirational stories, Music College, Bio, Biography, Guitar, Starting a band, Life, Debt, Loans, Living With Parents, Rent, Living on the road, Couch hopping, Road trip, Travel, Take Chances, Taking Chances, Life story

Id: wZDk94l57h8

Length: 34min 9sec (2049 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021