…Adam Schlesinger
Right after I got out of college I was working at the Courtyard Marriott on 19th Ave here in Nashville. I was a front desk agent.
(Sidenote: they CAN give you a discount, no one is getting charged for being an hour late for check-out, yes sometimes the wake-up call isn’t entered in correctly)
Being that the hotel is close to downtown, it would get booked by bands and artists playing the various venues or festivals that happen down there. Even Evander Holyfield stayed there once…I shook his hand…his giant, strong hand.
But I was getting off my shift at 11pm one night and saw a long haired guy sitting in the lobby. Looked like a music dude, probably was, couldn’t really tell. As I walked through the lobby (in my front desk vest, and baggy pleaded pants) he turned his head just enough that I could tell…it was Adam Schlesinger!
I knew what he looked like because I was completely obsessed with That Thing You Do from an early age, so I had already done all the research on who wrote it, yada yada yada.
So I stopped and said hello (painfully agonizing that I had to meet him in my dumb font desk uniform and not in my cool “I’m a musician too” leather jacket).
We ended up talking for ten or fifteen minutes and he graciously answered my million questions about the song and the movie.
He wrote it as an assignment from his publisher in a few days. The assignment was to write a song called That Thing You Do for ‘a 1964 band who loved the Beatles’. He wrote a few different ideas, showed some buddies, and finished the best one.
It’s easy to look back on success and say ‘of course it worked’. Of course Adam Schlesinger’s version of That Thing You Do (and there were 300 other writers’ submissions) was the best one and he was going to make lots of money from it and have a front desk hotel worker notice him in the lobby.
But all Adam really did was show up and work. It was a writing assignment, that’s it. He’s a huge Beatles fan so he took a crack at it.
It is as boring and unromantic, and REAL as that.
Showing up and doing the work. Nothing magical…except that the magic decided to show up when Adam showed up! If Adam doesn’t show up, the magic would have been left alone in the writing room and we wouldn’t have the song that made the movie.
Keep showing up. Keep digging. Keep finding ways to get recharged and make another go of it.
*This one was suppose to go out Friday. Sorry about that. I hope today is a good enough consolation prize.
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I’m always interested in your perspective, whether affirming or dissenting. Continue the conversation anytime: gabethebassplayer@gmail.com