Cultural Sponge - The Joe Pagetta Blog

When I was 18 years-old and in my first band, I’d often find myself up late at night, confused and desperate, and although I didn’t know it at the time, depressed. Different thoughts would keep me up, and if reading or listening to music didn’t help me through the night, I’d write. Songs, poems, thoughts.

On one particular night, my depression had a rare side-effect: a call to action. A way out. I would write a letter to a local music reporter and tell her about my band. It was a rash decision, done without much thought. I figured if I could tell someone about me, and about my band, I could break free. Of what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. Maybe my bedroom. Maybe myself.

We were a good band that worked hard. We practiced five nights a week, played a lot of local shows, and took ourselves more seriously than 18 year-olds ever should. We had a live demo that kicked ass and was surely better than anything coming out of Hudson County in those days. Better yet, at the beginning of the 1990’s, Horror Time was easily the best band in northeast New Jersey. We knew it. The only problem was that no one else did. Know one knew we even existed. That meant, of course, that no one knew I existed.

So, late on this night, I sat down and wrote Cathie Coleman at the East Coast Rocker a long drawn-out letter introducing myself and my band and explaining how we could really use some press. It was that simple. We weren’t getting anywhere and weren’t really sure where we were trying to go. We didn’t fit in with Bon Jovi or Skid Row or God forbid, any of the hair metal bands popular on the radio and in the area. We weren’t heavy enough to run with the hardcore bands selling out matinees in New York or speaking for the angst of the kids in the suburbs of New Jersey. But then again, we weren’t just a Jersey rock band like the E Street Band or the Asbury Jukes, either. We kind of thought of ourselves as a thing and style all our own. We were an attitude and a philosophy. Four 18-year-old kids (three Italian-Americans and one Eastern Indian-American) on a mission to take over the world with six-to-seven minute songs (at least!) and a heavy dose of influence from the likes of the Misfits, the Ramones, the Gorilla Biscuits, Supertouch, Vision, Metallica and early U2. A strange mix of bands you’ve heard of and some you haven’t. You were going to hear about us.

First, we had to get out of Jersey City.

I took our live demo, my letter, a bio a friend had written, and a grainy photo taken by that same friend, and put it in a golden padded envelope. The next morning, I walked the ten or so blocks up to the post office on Central Ave near Grand Street.

I didn’t know anything about follow-up calls, so I wouldn’t be sure if Cathie Coleman ever got the package. There was no e-mail to do a follow-up e-mail, and no internet, where I might have been able to check the magazine’s web site. I would just have to pick up the East Coast Rocker every Thursday and see if we were in there.

My hopes weren’t high, because as far as I knew, bands didn’t get written about because band members wrote letters to music writers. There was some mystery involved in the whole process, I was sure. I used to make frequent trips up to Garden State News on the corner of Bauer Street and Central Avenue, not far from the post office, to pick up copies of Creem and Hit Parader. All the bands; all the stories. The magazines must have just known about these people and sought them out for interviews and features. When you’re great, I figured, magazines knew who you were.

In the weeks that followed my gutsy mailing maneuver, it was back to the routine. School, work, late night band practice, and fighting depression in my bedroom on the appropriately named Booraem (pronounced bore-em) Avenue in Jersey City Heights.

It was a dark bedroom. Enclosed by dusty gray paneling and anchored by forest-green wall-to-wall carpeting, it had one window that faced the alleyway between our house and Angelo and Hazel’s house next door. No natural light filtered into the room. What did, however, enter the room, was the occasional smell of cat urine that wafted over from Angelo and Hazel’s, who shared their house with at least 17 cats. Exactly how many cats they had was hard to calculate. Your best shot was to keep track of which ones were sitting in their front window and make a mental note of which ones you hadn’t seen before.

The bedroom held an additional darkness as well. I moved into it about a year earlier, after my family had moved from the second floor apartment of the house to the first floor apartment. The first floor was most recently occupied by my grandmother, and before that, by both my grandmother and grandfather, and before that by my grandmother, grandfather, my mother, and her two brothers, Joe and Vinnie. There was a lot of history in that apartment. My grandmother had been living in the apartment by herself for the last nine years, after the death of my grandfather in December of 1980, ten days after John Lennon was shot and killed by an obsessed fan outside the Dakota in Manhattan, just across the Hudson River from where we lived. When my grandmother succumbed to brain cancer in 1989, it was after only a few days of her being placed in a nursing home. For the many months before that, she’d laid in a hospital bed that had been placed in her living room. My mother, with the occasional help from me and my sister Mary and brother Nick, cared for her, emptying her bed pan, rolling her over to prevent bed sores, and giving her sponge baths. After her death, my parents decided it was best for us to move down to the first floor and rent out the second. My parents took the master bedroom, Mary took my Uncle Vinnie’s old room closest to the kitchen, and I took my Uncle Joe’s old room off the living room, the same living room my grandmother had floated toward death in only months before. Nick took the basement as his room, which meant the rest of us lost unrestricted access to it. We now needed his approval to wash our clothes.

It took a little over a month of trips to the newsstand on Central Avenue before I finally found out if Cathie Coleman ever got my letter and package. She did. There in her “New Jersey Newsbeat” column was Horror Time, looking tougher and more rock ‘n’ roll then we’d ever looked. We were the second item. She wrote a few paragraphs about us, telling folks that we were a band to look out for. She even quoted a few lines from our bio, and made a point to mention how young we were, even referring to us as a “baby band” in line with early 90s hitmakers, and coincidentally Jersey-based, Trixter.

The band was ecstatic. We were on the map. People knew who Horror Time was. It seemed like everyone saw the article, and for those who didn’t, there was sure to be a copy in each band member’s back pocket if necessary. I realized quickly that press could breed more press. And now that I knew you could be directly responsible for getting your band in the papers, I jumped on the opportunity to get us more. I was able to garner listings mentions, reviews and show previews in some of the other local newspapers, like the Jersey Journal and The Hudson Current. When Horror Time put out its first proper demo, I sent Cathie Coleman a copy and she wrote about us in her column again, and this time, we were the lead item.

One of the things I remember most about that time were many of the band’s friends and contemporaries asking us, “How’d you get that?” when reading stories about us. My answer was always the same: “I sent them some stuff.”

I realized that most people thought getting press was as mysterious as I once did. But now I knew it wasn’t. You had to let the press know about you. In the years that followed, through Horror Time’s demise and the building of my own singer-songwriter career, I gathered a decent collection of press clippings about my music in both regional and national publications. I learned how to write a professional press release and bio, how to write cover letters, and how to get professional promo photos taken. I built press and contact lists, and learned about something I didn’t know existed when I was 18 and in my first band: the follow-up.

I never again wrote a late-night, depression-fueled plea to a music writer to tell him or her about my band, although I sometimes wish I was still innocent enough to think doing so is appropriate.

It wasn’t long after that first bit of press that my family moved from Booraem Ave., forced out by uncles who wouldn’t accept my parents’ offer to buy out their share of my grandmother’s estate. At the same time we were preparing to find another place to live, my mother decided she wanted a divorce from my father after 25-years of marriage. Dealing with the illness and death of my grandmother, and the realization that her two brothers would just as soon as put her out on the street, had taken its toll on her. My father’s gambling and bitterness — something my mother had ridden the wave of their entire marriage — became magnified by the circumstances and grew to an intensity impossible for her to handle. It would break the future like it was breaking her. If there was ever a time to start fresh, that was it.

I couldn’t afford to live on my own at the time, so I popped back and forth. I lived a few months with my mother, then after she got tired of me, a few months with my father. It was a vagabond, pack-light existence, where I frequently slept at my girlfriend’s house, and on one occasion when both of her parents were drunk and vicious, in my car, parked in the covered garage under my father’s apartment building. None of that mattered, though. I was out of that dark and depressing bedroom off the living room. And I was on my way. More shows. More press. More existence outside of myself.

One day, during one of the brief stints I lived with my father on Sherman Avenue in Jersey City, the Jersey Journal sent over a photographer to take a few photos of me. I had won a singer-songwriter competition at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village, and in addition to the fifty dollars I received, I was given a showcase of my own at the club. I tipped the Journal off about the competition and show, and it decided to do a little piece on me, with an accompanying photo. The photographer took a few shots, and the paper ran the one of me sitting with my guitar propped up in front of me — the standard “musician who plays guitar” shot.  But there was another photo taken, that the photographer gave me later, which I’ve always felt captured that time in my life quite accurately. It was me, holding a lit cigarette and standing by the window, looking outside myself and my father’s apartment, toward a world that was beginning to know I existed. I had the photo and the story in the paper to prove it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Writings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.