World Cafe Radio Show - Silk Degrees Story

By Boz - October 2001

"I was meeting a prospective manager, he was one of the major guys at that time in the mid 70's in the record business, he was probably the biggest manager in the business. I had an appointment to meet him at a small record convention and there were other big shots, lawyers and industry executives around. I was meeting him in a room off to the side and I had a demo copy of Silk Degrees with a white label on it, it had just come from the pressing plant, it wasn't even an official record... an acetate as we used to call them. I put it on the turntable and he sat down and we started to listen, Lowdown was on the turntable and it started playing, then someone came into the room and distracted him. They were shaking hands and talking, they talked through Lowdown, so I took the needle off the record and waited till he finished that conversation. He came back and sat down again and I put on another track and he listened for a minute then someone else came into the room or he thought of something he had to go tell someone."

"Of course I'm sweating bullets, and on top of my nerves this added to my insecurities about his inattention and what not. Without him even realising I got up and took the record off the turntable and walked out the door and down the hallway. There was a garbage can at the end of the hallway and I threw the record into the garbage can and went back to get into my rental car and leave that town. Just before I left in fact I checked messages at the hotel that I was going back to. There was a call from this other manager who said 'I just heard your record and I think its blah blah...' it was the positive news that I'd been missing.  But it was from hell to heaven in 5 minutes there."