1L

2001, The Year of Selling Out

One of the most pervasive - and in retrospect problematic - Gen X tropes is “selling out.” In Steven Kurutz’s commentary on his recent New York Times article on Gen X creatives facing career obsolescence, he notes that fear of selling out is a factor that makes it difficult for us GenXers to reinvent ourselves. As if anything off our strict creative path is an unacceptable compromise. Dan Ozzi’s recent book, Sellout dives deep into the murky waters of punk culture, where literally everyone who ever performed in public has been called a sellout. The only acts that could pass the purity test with flying colors were the trust fund kids.

For the most part, younger generations don’t share this world view. Or do they? Spoiler alert: read on. In my work life, I don’t encounter many current artists who wring their hands over being seen as a sellout. From time to time, however, I still see it happen. It happens when an artist compromises their values for financial gain. It happens, and people get called out for it.

I recently gave a lecture to a college music business class, something I do pretty often. it was an interview format; I told my story. People in these classes want to find their way in the business - they appreciate hearing from those of us who have fumbled our way in. They want to know how to succeed, and how to not fail. Most of us can offer perspective on either topic.

During the Q&A, a student raised their hand and asked, “Would you say that you sold out?” Taken aback, I glanced at the moderator, a fellow GenXer. He gave me a bemused look, like “this again.” I answered no, I’ve always stayed true to my values in serving the creative community. I’ve always held onto the lessons and ideologies of my hardcore punk upbringing. But is that accurate? I’ve been turning it over in the back of my mind ever since.

I’m glad the idea of “selling out” is mostly a quaint Gen-X trope, even if it still makes us act contrary to our interest. We all had to subject ourselves to the various purity tests of the “scene.” Our 90s alt music community frowned upon people who licensed their music, signed to labels, or for that matter made money. I avoided so many opportunities that would have made my life easier because I didn’t want to be called a sellout. Nevertheless, I worried about money constantly. I went back to school because I wanted to make enough money to raise a family, something I felt I couldn’t accomplish as a full-time creative musician.

Recently a couple of my close friends have called me for advice as their kids apply to law school. One of my kids has been threatening to take the LSAT. I don’t think these young folks are thinking about whether attending law school is tantamount to selling out; it’s just an extension of school. They didn’t have ten years in the underground music trenches to worry about being called a sellout before they actually sold out and put on a suit. Even the most idealistic of incoming students eventually dons a business suit. Everyone enters the door as an individual, with various freak flags a-flyin’, and leaves in a business suit. You don’t even know what hit you; it just happens.

After my touring with The Lemonheads came to an end in 1998, I decided to finish my long-neglected undergrad degree. I wanted a real change. I moved to Birmingham to be near my girlfriend, Heather. With two years of Berklee credits, I spent a couple years touring part-time and taking classes at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. I graduated with a History degree (with honors!), and I realized that didn’t really qualify me for any job I’d want. Other than proving I could finish something, I wasn’t really any better off, practically speaking.

I enjoyed my classes, and I liked the anonymity. I wanted to shed my skin and start over. Nobody I met at UAB knew I played music. I was just a 30-year-old dude taking core classes with a bunch of teenagers. I was invisible and I liked it. Ten years of full-time music messes with your head. There’s no goal except “success,” and there’s no end except “failure.” Every new album is going to change everything, put you on easy street. And when it doesn’t happen, that’s okay - you’ll just make another one and get back on the road. It’s easy to burn 20 years on that merry-go-round. I decided to get off, but it felt like the death of a dream.

I liked the idea of taking on a bigger challenge; I wanted to see if I could reinvent myself in whole cloth. Heather encouraged me to open my mind to the possibility I was cut out to be something other than a musician. I wanted to be in music, but even more I a steady job to support a family, to stop worrying about money all the time. I’m sure every self-employed musician can relate.

I didn’t take the application process too seriously. I suppose I was in denial. I took the LSAT once, without sufficient prep, and scored well enough to get into the only accredited law school in Birmingham, Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. Samford is a beautiful place, but it isn’t somewhere I’d have ever thought I’d end up. Clean-cut, well-scrubbed undergrads carry their bible everywhere. Law students are degenerates by comparison, but it’s pretty conservative across the board. I spent the summer of 2001 touring the country with my band, then I returned to Birmingham and presented for law school orientation.

During my first week of classes, I had the rude awakening that people seemed to know what they were talking about. They somehow knew this secret language of law school. How did they find this confidence? What did I miss? I quickly learned that Cumberland offered a pre-law summer program that a significant portion of the class had taken. I felt a queasiness in the pit of my stomach that rarely left me for the next few months. What else didn’t I know about? Had I made a terrible mistake?

Heather and I got married the previous summer and moved into a modest town house 20 miles from campus, which was close to Heather’s work. For my first year, we shared a car. Heather dropped me off around 8:30 every morning, and picked me up at 6 in the evening. I tried hard to make myself invisible in those early classes, terrified a professor might call on me.

My contracts professor was the highly theatrical Professor Bolla, an intense guy with heavy eyebrows who charged around the horseshoe-shaped classroom as he coaxed from us the definition of a contract during our first class. He posted an assignment of a very long, convoluted case from the 18th Century. I sat next to a woman about my age I’d briefly met during orientation, a former paralegal. With the class seating chart established, I’d sit next to her for the entire semester. I asked her if she’d been able to identify the issue in the case. She turned to me and stared me down for several seconds. “Listen,” she said. “I want you to understand that I’m not going to carry you this semester. You’re on your own.”

One morning, the Monday of our third week, Heather dropped me off as usual. We listened to a breaking news report on NPR that a small plane had collided with the World Trade Center. Weird, I thought. Could such a thing happen an accident? I walked inside the main law school building to attend my contracts class and discovered dozens of students and faculty clustered into a break room with vending machines and a TV tuned to CNN. As I entered the room, the second plane struck the towers.

Professor Bolla cancelled class and Heather picked me up and drove me home, but I still had torts with Professor Nelson that afternoon. Surely he’d cancel as well, right? I called the office and they said it’s up to the professor. I drove back to campus and walked to class, where I found everyone assembled as usual. Professor Nelson taught the class without once mentioning the attack. It remains one of the strangest hours of my life. That was a strange time for everyone, and it left feelings of tension and unease that lingered throughout first semester. Maybe it never left.

I met some nice classmates, eventually made a few friend. Mostly I just kept to myself. My classmates formed study groups and quizzed one another, but I went it alone. I was afraid I’d embarrass myself. I had one friend when I started, a 2L I’d met when I worked at a local independent record store called Magic Platter. Woodrow Hartzog, Neal to me, was a local amateur musician who liked to hang out at the record store and talk music with the staff. An amiable guy, Neal took me under his wing. He became my Yoda. Being friends with Neal proved to be one of the luckiest things that’s ever happened to me.

Neal, rather Woodrow, has done well for himself. He’s a world-renown privacy scholar, a distinguished law professor at Boston University. That is to say he’s incredibly smart and hard-working. A career like his doesn’t come down to luck, it’s earned. Neal showed up to law school much like me, unprepared. His first semester grades weren’t great. Then second semester he’d cracked the code, put in the work. He made the highest grades in his class and made the Law Review, a distinction reserved for the top 15%. He broke it all down for me and taught me how to study. He gave me great advice, from how to use my time efficiently to which commercial outlines I should use. Professors always tell you not to use commercial outlines; he told me that was terrible advice. Neal even explained to me what most professors wanted from an exam answer. I took his advice to the letter. What choice did I have?

The old fashioned way to teach law school is for the professor to call on a student, have them stand up, and proceed to interrogate them about our reading assignment, painfully extracting the right answers - sometimes for the entire class period. Professor Bolla was very old-school in this respect. One class late in the semester he called my name and I stood, heart suddenly racing. He asked me to recite a case and I did, an older case about a dispute over a glockenspiel.

Professor Bolla asked me if I knew what a glockenspiel was. I said I did, and I said yes, it’s like a small xylophone with metal bars you play with a mallet.¹ He asked how I knew so much about music. I said, well, I’ve always played music.

Suddenly Bolla turned to face the class. “Did you hear that, everyone? He’s a musician!” He explained that just a few years ago I’d been in a famous band called The Lemonheads, and that I’d been on MTV. Everyone in my section suddenly stared at me blankly. Then one guy I’d never spoken to looked at me and shouted, “No way! I LOVE The Lemonheads!” So much for anonymity.

By the time of the first exams I worked like I’d never worked before. I found another gear, and a few after that. I spent the first couple months spinning my wheels, barely making progress. Then once I knew what I was doing I dug in, made up for lost time. I worked.

I discovered that a skill I developed as a musician came in very handy: memorization. As a musician, I might end up having to learn an entire set of songs in a couple days. I’d go onstage in stressful situations and have to access the lyrics to different songs every night. Any musician would show up with a great skill set for committing a ten-page outline to memory. I could recite my outline in my sleep, and I knew how to put it to use.

I managed to keep the anxiety at bay through exam week, but I felt increasingly uneasy with my exam performances. It felt so frantic and chaotic. In law school, you’re only tested once, at the end of the semester. Typically you have three hours to write an answer, and you use every second. We used to write everything long-hand, in these exam booklets called bluebooks, flimsy little lined notebooks. You write a bunch of stuff and then you hand it in. And then all that’s left to do is worry.

Over the holidays after first semester, I became more and more anxious and agitated about my exams. Had I messed up? I thought so. I remembered things I’d written that seemed incredibly stupid in retrospect. I obsessed. I revisited the exam questions over and over, and convinced myself over time that every word I wrote was completely idiotic. I’d just learned that Heather was pregnant with our first child, which sent me deeper into despair. I ruined my Christmas, and by New Years I’d become convinced that I would be forced to leave school. I guessed I wasn’t cut out for professional life. All I’d have to show for my misery was a huge dept.

Then, just after New Years, my first grade appeared in the online portal. I’d made an A in Legal Research and Writing. Thank God. No matter how bad the rest of my grades would be, that A would keep me in school, right? Then I got another A. And an A-. I couldn’t believe it. I had a 3.7 GPA. My only thought was massive grade inflation.

But no, it wasn’t. I did better than I’d dared to dream, third in my class. This isn’t some humblebrag - I was truly, genuinely shocked by this result. Back then, Cumberland was a “tier 3” law school in the rankings - middle of the pack. Many students graduate without a job. Everyone knows who made the top grades, and many are not happy after the shakeup. I went from zero profile to having a target on my back. Everything changed after that, and not necessarily for the better. For one thing, I hardly thought about music for a few years. Ask me about any music that came out between 2001 and 2004. I’m clueless.

When I cashed my lotto ticket by landing in the top 5% of my law school class. I bought in to the corporate law game. It’s hard to avoid, they call you into career services and tell you that you have to interview for summer jobs. You’ve earned it, they tell you. They get you on the practice interview schedule with a top firm to give the firm a first look. I slotted every on-campus interview and donned my lawyer costume at least a couple days a week second semester, outing myself as a lotto winner in case there was any doubt. I enjoyed seeing some of the more arrogant, loud-mouthed students fade to the back of the class after grades were posted. I bought in, and maybe I sold out. Putting on the suit and playing the part seems in retrospect a lot more of a sellout than letting someone use my song in a bank ad or signing with a corporate record label. Whatever. We do what we do to make a living, and I have no regrets.

I have nothing against corporate lawyers. Some of my best friends, etc. etc. I spent years in that suit. Even after I became a music lawyer and started representing artists you’ve heard of, I made my living primarily from financial services work. It took almost a decade to become a full-time music lawyer. I dipped back into BigLaw a few years ago when I needed a job, and I was super grateful to have the skillset. I ended up enjoying law school enough to end up teaching for a couple years, something I hope to do again. As the child of academics, it’s hard to stay out of the family business.

I suppose I’m writing this as a more thoughtful answer to that student’s rather inappropriate and disrespectful question. It made me think, and it made me reassess the whole idea. Those of us who come from hardcore punk should be held to a different standard, and it should be a personal standard. The moments I feel I’ve sold out are the ones where, as part of my job, I ignored my values. I steered clear of certain types of legal work that I found abhorrent, types of clients I found objectionable. Now, it’s a simple standard. I’m an artist advocate. I use my skills to support artists or to support businesses that support artists. The decision whether or not to sell out is day by day, client by client, matter by matter. Whether or not I thought about it that way in law school or early practice, I now have that clarity and presence of mine.

1. Yes I did mention Born To Run in my description