I can remember it like it was yesterday.
There was me and my two pals sitting on the front porch of my house in Seattle in 1992. Bruce Springsteen had just released two new records — Human Touch and Lucky Town — and we were listening to them on the porch that hot spring afternoon over a few beers. The three of us agreed that neither of them were very good, even though we were hardcore fans.
Then the phone call came.
The CD player was shut off, and I told my two friends Greg and Brett to get lost for a minute while I took the call that was about to change my life. Because the guy on the other end of the line was Rick Rubin, and he was about to offer me a job with his label, Def American Recordings. I'll never forget that phone call for as long as I live.
Six months earlier, I had been unceremoniously fired from my position as National Retail Promotions Director for Nastymix Records, a Seattle based independent record label where I had, with considerable pride, helped build the career of Seattle rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot from the ground up, particularly with the independent retail record stores that paved the way for Mix's eventual mainstream success.
Things had been really great there for about three years — it was a dizzying ride with platinum album sales and the like — but they had since gone terribly wrong. But that's another story, left for another article that one day I hope to grow the balls to write.
Anyway, back to Rick's phone call. Rick Rubin was about to offer me a job.
Two weeks earlier, I had been flown to Los Angeles to meet with the man who was in many ways an idol of mine. We had met briefly once before, in 1986, when he was the Beastie Boys' "DJ Double R," and they were the opening act for Madonna.
At that time, I was assigned to interview the Beastie Boys for Seattle's Rocket Magazine, and they had just been booed off the stage at Seattle's Paramount Theatre — it must have been something about that whole "Kings of the Paramount" thing that rubbed the Seattle crowd the wrong way. I should add that this was roughly six months before the Beasties changed everything about music with the Rick Rubin produced album Licensed To Ill.