Gig Young Quotes

Although this scouting gig sounded like a financial hit, it made Nonie extremely nervous. She feared someone slip--that someone being Buggy--and others would find out Nonie's secret. And if the wrong person caught wind that she could see and speak to the dead, word would spread through Clay Point like ants at a picnic.

I'd like to give every young teacher some good news. Teaching is a very easy job. Administrators will tell you what to do. You'll be given books and told chapters to assign the children. Veteran teachers will show you the correct way to fill out forms and have your classes line up. And here's some more good news. If you do all of these things badly, they let you keep doing it. You can go home at three o'clock every day. You get about three months off a year. Teaching is a great gig. However, if you care about what you're doing, it's one of the toughest jobs around.

A gig, I realize now, is a place where people come together and give permission for anything to happen. Things can be said and shouted and sung; people get pissed; people get kissed-there is a communal agenda of joyous wilding. These are the boardroom meetings of young people, where we establish our vibe.

I recommend every young entrepreneur do some gig work at least for research purposes. Get out there and work for Lyft or Uber or Instacart or whatever. These platforms allow a person to experience a direct conversion of value created to income earned, whereas most jobs and most entrepreneurial ventures have a lag. And the more intimately you understand value, the better.

When I got to the gig I was told I would be singing for a male vocalist. In walked this sexy, serene, toasted-almond-colored artsy young man—he just looked like the definition of an artist. His thick, dark hair was just in the beginning phases of dreadlocks. He had a perfect five o’clock shadow, with a thick stripe of goatee down the center of his chin. He was dressed rock star casual: heavy black leather vintage motorcycle jacket, black jeans, black T-shirt. He had a thin ring in his nose and smelled how I imagined ancient Egyptian oils would smell. His face was kind and fine, with a boyish smile. He went by the name of Romeo Blue. His friends called him Lenny. And about a year later, the world would know him as Lenny Kravitz.

In 1991, a college sophomore studying music in the American Midwest made the mistake of selling some drugs to the wrong person. Until then, he hadn’t done much more than smoke pot and sell some of it to his friends. Petty vandalism at his high school was as high stakes as his criminal career had been. Then, as these things tend to go when you’re just 18 years old, he tried to push the envelope and test his boundaries. He started experimenting with hard drugs like LSD. But he was naive, and the brashness of youth got the best of him. He sold some of that LSD outside his circle—to an undercover policeman. And as if his luck couldn’t get worse, like a scene out of a TV movie of the week, the judge, under pressure to make an example out of this young man, sentenced him to 6 to 25 years in prison. It’s a faceless, timeless story that transcends race, class, and region. A young kid makes a mistake that forever changes their lives and their family’s lives as well. We are all too familiar with how stories like this usually end: The kid spends their most impressionable years behind bars and comes out worse than when they went in. Life on the outside is too difficult to contend with; habits learned on the inside are too difficult to shed. They reoffend; their crimes escalate. The cycle continues. This story, however, is a little different. Because this young man didn’t go back to jail. In fact, after being released in less than 5 years on good behavior, he went on to become one of the best jazz violinists in the world. He left prison with a fire lit underneath him—to practice, to repent, to humble himself, to hustle, and to do whatever it took to make something of his life. No task was too small, no gig was too tiny, no potential fan was too disinterested for him not to give it everything he had. And he did. The story is a little different for another reason, too. That young man’s name is Christian Howes. He is my older brother.

college was a wonderful gig, thousands of hours to tend to yourself like a garden.

A gig, I realise now, is a place where people come together and give permission for anything to happen. Things can be said and shouted and sung; people get pissed; people get kissed - there is a communal agenda of joyous wilding. These are the boardroom meetings of young people, where we establish our vibe.

A gig, I realize now, is a place where people come together and give permission for anything to happen. Things can be said and shouted and sung; people get pissed; people get kissed—there is a communal agenda of joyous wilding. These are the boardroom meetings of young people, where we establish our vibe.

Like the journalist Walter Lippmann, who was two years ahead of him in the class of 1910, he did not fully realize how many Harvards there were, and how little they overlapped. 47 There was the Harvard of the privileged young men from proper families such as the Cabots, Bancrofts, Winthrops, Welds, Lodges, and Saltonstalls, with their “final clubs” such as the Porcellian, the A.D., and the Fly, who might or might not go to class and aimed only for a “gentleman’s C” average. There was the Harvard of athletes; the Harvard of intellectuals intent on an academic career; the Harvard of socialites focused mostly on having a good time and securing a gig on Wall Street; the Harvard of iconoclastic outsiders looking to find their way; and the Harvard of public school graduates, many of whom commuted from home every morning and returned home every night.

An automobile ties up capital with the purchase and entails significant additional annual costs in terms of fuel, parking, insurance, and repairs. Young people with college debts or “gig” jobs may not want the added burden of ownership. Compare the economics. Let’s say the average number of miles driven in a year in the United States is twelve thousand. Owning a car for that year would cost around $7,000, including the proportionate cost of car ownership, fuel, and other operating expenses. Given the average ride-hailing trip, $7,000 would equate to around six hundred separate trips per year, or twelve per week—almost two per day. Of course, on the other side of the ledger, there’s no residual value from Uber or Lyft rides, as there is when selling a used car. And no pride of ownership.

Wayward Brahmin: 'I can buy all the ginger and pepper you can grow.' Spice Islander: 'Marry my daughter!' The young bride melts into his arms. Wayward baron: 'But isn't it forbidden to marry outside caste, my guru?' 'Unless gig is very, very good, my disciple.' A century or so later: 'You grow all the ginger and pepper we can buy!

So keep this to yourself. Joe Bedecki was the easy collar, and the sheriff’s office has always liked it easy.” “ ‘Easy collar’ how?” “Joe’s family was poor, and he’d gotten into trouble with the law more than a few times before he landed the janitor gig. He was young, handsome, known to flirt with the girls at school. They narrowed in on him right away.

A gig, I realize now, is a place where people come together and give permission for anything to happen. Things can be said and shouted and sung; people get pissed; people get kissed — there is a communal agenda of joyous wilding. These are the boardroom meetings of young people, where we establish our vibe. By way of contrast, everything else I am doing is just sitting, and waiting. God, I want to go out again.

I want to take a second here to talk about my decision to go to school for music, since I get asked for advice on this pretty often. If you’re a young musician (or dancer, or musical theatre actor, or any type of creative performer for that matter) and you’ve progressed in your abilities to the point that a career in the arts seems like a viable path forward, it’s only logical that you’ll find yourself considering a formal continuation of your music studies post–high school. Whether you go the route of the conservatory or enroll in a music program within a more traditional college, you’ll receive training from professional musicians, perform in ensembles alongside other talented students, and have access to state-of-the-art facilities and concert halls. The icing on the cake? You’ll get to sleep in late on weekdays, take classes that appeal to you, and surround yourself with artsy, inspiring kids who share your interests and passions. If all that sounds like a dream, it’s because, in many ways, it is. But any dream has its potential downsides, and I think that it’s important that you’re aware of them, too.

The most difficult battles we face in life are those we wage within. Self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness, and fear of rejection: This is the trifecta of demons that holds us back from reaching our full potential. We’re not born with these demons; for proof of this, one need only look at how free and uncensored young kids are. By the time most of us reach adulthood, however, we’ve devolved into a tangle of insecurities and negative experiences. From what I’ve seen and from what I’ve suffered, I’d wager that perfectionism hits artists the hardest. Artists—whose very calling is based on the expression of feeling—tend to be more introspective than your average human being and spend much more time living internally. Releasing a creative project out into the world requires ceding a part of yourself to the world and exposing it to the slings and arrows of external criticism. So, it’s only natural that the artist, aware of the vulnerability and invitation for judgment inherent in the act of creating publicly, would take painstaking care to ensure that whatever is released into the world is as close as possible to “perfect.” If left unchecked, this tendency to obsess and strive for perfection can lead the artist to devote months, if not years, to producing a single flawless creation. The truth of the matter, though, is that our actual creations will never be so perfect as we’ve dreamt them to be; they can only be perfected in the sense that, when released, they exist. Sometimes, it takes losing control to gain control over this obsession with perfection.

To get back into the creative groove, I need to be relaxed enough to allow my mind to drift, with no thought of deadlines or other obligations. Of course, creativity usually needs something else, too, to flourish, and that something is what I call creative hunger. For me, it’s the name for what happens when creativity is mixed with profound inspiration. If you aren’t filled with creative hunger, then it’s all too easy to put things off, rationalize that a project is too difficult to tackle, or decide that you would be just as content watching TV instead. Ambitious young people generally start off with a great deal of creative hunger, but as they age and experience tastes of success here and there, the drive has a way of dissipating. After you’ve got a hit under your belt, it’s tempting to simply keep enjoying the fruits of the labor you’ve already harvested. If you want to stay at the top of your game, though, it’s imperative that you stay hungry.

Jimmy’s goal since childhood, he explained to Siegel, had been to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. He was endearing. After a two-hour call, Siegel offered to represent him. She had one question, however. “Why don’t you stay and graduate?” Jimmy was a semester shy of a degree. Siegel suggested that they get started in the summer, so he’d have a bachelor’s degree to fall back on, just in case. “No, no,” Jimmy insisted. “I need to get on Saturday Night Live, and you’re going to make it happen, because you know Adam Sandler! I don’t want to do anything else.” Siegel knew this was a long shot—and a long-term endeavor—especially for an out-of-town kid with zero acting credits. But for some reason, she couldn’t turn him down; she had never met someone as focused and passionate about a single dream as this grinning bumpkin from the tiny town of Saugerties, New York. And though his skills were rough, given some time in the industry, she thought he might just make it. “OK, let’s do this,” she said. So, in January 1996 Jimmy quit college and moved to Los Angeles. For six months, Siegel booked him gigs on small, local stand-up comedy stages. Then, without warning, SNL put a call out for auditions; three cast members would be leaving the show. Having worked with one of the departing actors, David Spade, Siegel pulled a few strings and arranged a Hail Mary for the young Jimmy Fallon: an audition at The Comic Strip. SO HERE HE WAS. Fresh-faced, sweating in his light shirt, holding his Troll doll. In front of Lorne Michaels and a phalanx of Hollywood shakers. When Jimmy ended his three-minute bit, the audience clapped politely. True to his reputation, Michaels didn’t laugh. Not once. Jimmy went home and awaited word. Finally, the results came: SNL had invited Tracy Morgan, Ana Gasteyer, and Chris Kattan, each of whom had hustled in the comedy scene for years, to join the cast. Jimmy—the newbie whose well-connected manager had finagled an invite—was crushed. “Was he completely raw? A hundred percent,” Siegel says. But, the SNL people said, “Let’s keep an eye on him.

Iris Whitney, a former showgirl that frequented Malachy’s bar on Third Avenue, became my friend with a story. The same year that I had graduated from High School, she had been frolicking with John Garfield in her two room Gramercy Park apartment. On May 21, 1952 Garfield was found dead of a heart attack, in her bed. When I first met Iris I didn’t know anything about this but even if I had, all I can say is that I enjoyed her company and survived the experience. Of course she denied having been intimate with the actor the night that he died and added that John had not been feeling well. When the police arrived and had to break the door down, her explanation was that she thought that they were newspaper men. Several years later, in Connecticut, I had the occasion to talk about old times and some of these events, to the popular stage and screen actor Byron Barr better known as “Gig Young.” Sitting with my wife Ursula and Young at the open bar alongside the Candlewood Theatre, in New Fairfield during the summer of 1978, everything seemed normal. Coincidentally I also knew his former wife Elizabeth Montgomery who was married to him from 1956 to 1963, since she was my neighbor living on the nearby Cushman road in Patterson New York,. On October 19, 1978, two months after seeing Young, I read that he had shot his wife Kim Schmidt and committed suicide only three weeks after their marriage. Apparently Young had shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself. They were both found dead in their Manhattan apartment but the police never established a motive for the murder-suicide. I knew that he liked to drink and this may have been a part of the problem, but he always seemed congenial and there was no hint that it would ever come to this.

Singer’s lethal potion is concocted of hundreds of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul,” Singer describes a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach spa converted by Trump from the 118-room Hispano-Moorish-Venetian mansion built in the 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post and E. F. Hutton: Evidently, Trump’s philosophy of wellness is rooted in a belief that prolonged exposure to exceptionally attractive young spa attendants will instill in the male clientele a will to live. Accordingly, he limits his role to a pocket veto of key hiring decisions. While giving me a tour of the main exercise room, where Tony Bennett, who does a couple of gigs at Mar-a-Lago each season and had been designated an “artist-in-residence,” was taking a brisk walk on a treadmill, Trump introduced me to “our resident physician, Dr. Ginger Lee Southall”—a recent chiropractic-college graduate. As Dr. Ginger, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her résumé or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?’ The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.

Please to See the King is a piercing, keen-edged record, perhaps the closest a British act has come to what Bob Dylan, speaking of his own recordings of 1965–6, called ‘that thin, that wild mercury sound … metallic and bright gold’. The title, taken from the song ‘The King’ that Carthy introduced to the album sessions, was spoken, according to custom, by ‘wren-hunters’ who went knocking on doors and requesting money in return for a peep at the slaughtered bird in a coffin, bound with a ribbon. And like the wren-hunters of yore, the early Steeleye found themselves in the midst of a difficult economy, hawking their wares around the country at a succession of student-union gigs, in the community which was most receptive to this new incarnation of folk music.

time. The first Fairport Convention gig as a four-piece (with original, short-lived drummer Shaun Frater) took place on 27 May 1967 at St Michael’s Hall in Golders Green. Even in that momentous year for rock music, the date was auspicious: Are You Experienced? had been on the streets for a week and a half, and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was five days away. As they

We were five gigs into a tour of more than thirty dates and Barney had had enough already. He was in the worst mood you could possibly imagine, not helped by the fact that Moby and, in particular, Outkast were going down a storm, while we were being met with young indifference and treated like dinosaurs.

It wasn’t investigating my family history that put me on the lookout for cooperatives. I started looking because of stirrings I noticed as a reporter among veterans of the protests that began in 2011, such as Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s 15M movement. Once their uprisings simmered, the protesters had to figure out how to make a living in the economy they hadn’t yet transformed, and they started creating co-ops. Some were doing it with software—cooperative social media, cloud data, music streaming, digital currencies, gig markets, and more. But this generation was not all lost to the digital; others used cooperation to live by dirt and soil. The young radicals turned to the same kind of business that my buttoned-up, old-world, conservative grandfather did. Following them, I began following in my grandfather’s footsteps before I even knew it. Both