Culver City, CALIFORNIA June 1981

“I’m sorry I’m late…it was one hell of a party at Bette Midler’s last night. Too much cocaine.” His morning-after voice betrayed the fact that it was 2 o’clock in the afternoon and he was 3 hours late for our appointment.

I was irritated, hungry, and tired of waiting in the white-on-white reception area. But when I was waved back to his office, I was all charm and gratitude because I was anxious to meet the Vice President of Marketing for Columbia Records to learn how I could get a job on his team.

“Most of my people started in record stores when they were 15 or 16. They got to know the local reps and rack jobbers, then after high school moved to the warehouse, packing and shipping stuff. If they went to college, they attended classes when they could and they’d hunt for new acts in clubs at night. They’d be trying to find bands getting ready to break so they could bring them to A&R to get them signed.” He paused. “They’re junkies. You know, music junkies. They’ll do anything to score.”

In June of 1981, when I had finished my second college year, I went to LA for two weeks to figure out how to break into the music industry. I didn’t care if I broke into the industry as a performing musician or as a white-collar worker for a major label. My dream was to be close to my passion: music.

I loved music deeply (and still do). I have played guitar (and other instruments) since I was 10 years old. I started writing songs when I was 13 and started playing in bars when I was 14. (Prior to the pandemic, I play 30-50 shows each year.) In my teen years, I practiced hours every day and scarfed down opportunities to play. Any genre or format would do: old-time bands, folk song circles, rock cover groups, community theatre orchestras, jazz ensembles, and even some Latin folk music, from time to time.

My objective in LA in June of 1981 was to find a way to satisfy my passion for music. Consistently, for those two weeks, I met with record executives during the day and played open mics at night. I was bent on finding a way to service my dreams.

 

The Days

The days were filled with meetings like the one at Columbia. The guy at Capital Records leveled his gaze as he said, “Nobody gets into this building without paying their dues.”

An executive from Atlantic Records sipped scotch, chain-smoked Benson & Hedges, and fiddled with a large diamond ring from behind a desk the size of a Cadillac. He sermonized about the moral vicissitudes of the industry, warning me, “You can lose your soul in this business.”

The VP of A&R (Artist and Repertoire) at A&M Records spoke at length about his journey to the executive suite, emphasizing his cleverness at discovering great acts. Pausing for effect, he pointed to a couch across the room. “This business isn’t for everyone,” he said holding his arm outstretched. “I’ve lost 3 marriages on that couch.”

I wasn’t sure if the couch was the epicenter of illicit sexual rendezvous that killed his marriages or if it was where he slept after so many late nights at work. Neither sounded good. I was 20 years old and believed in monogamy, and to rarely, if ever, spend the night on an office couch.

By the end of the two weeks of dismal meetings with record executives, my dream of working at a label smoldered in ash.

 

The Nights

At a time when the industry was promoting Journey, ELO, and Blondie, open mic nights for white guys with glasses and acoustic guitars (like me) were oddly thriving. Each night, I found small clubs and signed my name to the open mic list so I could compare my songwriting and performing abilities to other white guys with glasses and guitars. I found I wasn’t always the best, but I definitely wasn’t the worst.

At an open mic in Santa Monica, I saw the name of Peter Tork a few names ahead of me. Peter was a member of the Monkees: a TV star and touring musician with radio hits. Upon seeing his name, I felt nervous and deflated. I left and never attended another open mic in LA.

My brain instantly concocted a story that Peter had been sidelined by the callous music industry execs I’d been meeting with during the day.

My brain built that story based on the context that I was in. And I believed it.

Every day, I saw how record executives were bad, the industry was morally corrupt, and artists weren’t appreciated. If Peter Tork can’t make it, neither can I. if the trigger was seeing Peter Tork’s[i] name on the open mic list, the gun was created by daily meetings with despicable industry leaders. My brain was locked and loaded.

Like so much in life, the open mic experience was all about context. My context. It was like an irrational media feed syphoning misinformation to me: Tim, you’re not suited for music. The framing that my mind built around me, not the actual facts, influenced my life for many years. I gave up pursuing life as a professional musician (and working for a record label) because of the story my brain put together.

 

The Role of Context

Behavioral science informs us that context plays a large role in our behaviors and decisions. The research generated by Philip Zimbardo (the Stanford Prison Experiments), John Bargh (unconscious goal priming), and the social psychologists Nisbett, Ross, and Wilson (our inability to understand our motivations), all point to the fact that most of the time, our behavior in any given situation is influenced by context.

Zimbardo witnessed it in 1971 with his Stanford Prison Experiment. Upper-middle-class college students became tyrants by virtue of the coin toss assigning them to the role of a prison guard. The same happened in 2004 – how guards behaved at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Zimbardo[ii] noted in a recent conversation that it’s more than just situations bringing out the evil in us, it’s the situation “putting evil into us.” Context is extremely powerful.

We’re often not aware of it – as I wasn’t – which makes context difficult to overcome. Behaviors get unconsciously amplified by context, as John Bargh[iii] put it, especially “when we already have those thoughts in our head.” For me, I already lacked confidence and it was easy to lock in on the idea that evil industry executives had kicked Peter Tork to the curb. And if that were true, I had zero chance.

For me, all of this context conspired to kill my dreams.

 

Good or Bad Decision?

Annie Duke[iv] isn’t fond of the fact that even our memories suffer from biases, but they do. She challenges us to be straight with ourselves, to see life as it is, not as we passively consume it. Today, I can use the lens of base rates[v] to process what happened, along with my decision to eject from the industry. In retrospect, I failed to consider any of these. (Annie argues that failing to consider base rates is yet another example of our bounded rationality.[vi])

Base rates for the music industry in the early ’80s were these: about 40% of those who considered themselves musicians earned above the poverty line. The 1970’s folk-rock era was withering, except for the artists who founded their careers solidly in its emergence. And the pop music charts in the early ’80s was a dry gulch for acoustic-guitar slingers, like me. In short: if I had continued as a performing musician, life would have been a struggle with a capital S.

There were also a couple of things going on that weren’t knowable at the time. First, the neo-folk movement was still 7-plus years away from my trip to LA. And, the industry was about to embark on an epic shrink due to the introduction of CDs and the digital revolution.

If I had found my way into an industry white-collar job, surviving the inevitable downsizing may have proved impossible.

In short, my decision to not engage in the music industry was a good one.

 

Closing Thoughts

Fortunately, the execs were effective in their efforts to wave me off, but the way I framed the LA music scene was totally off.

My irrational framing fouled up my self-schemas for years. For too long, leaving LA was a failure in my mind. Both the days and nights combined to be Exhibit A in my Confidence-Deprived Life and they’ve lingered a long time.

Dolly Chugh[vii], a psychology researcher at NYU, offered an important lesson about how to untether our new self from our old self. We were talking about learning to let go of old ideas when new messages and new understandings come to light. She refers to new data points and experiences as new “moments” of learning. She said, “If I'm holding onto [my old self-image] very tightly, I’m going to reject those moments … I’m not going to learn from those moments.” Her words apply to me and everyone else who might have trouble letting go.

For me, it’s taken 40 years to re-evaluate and re-process my trip to LA through a behavioral science lens. Re-working the story has been useful and I didn’t need to wait 40 years to do it. In fact, you don’t need to wait 40 years to re-process a memory through a behavioral lens.

The lessons have come late, but the moments of learning are clear. It’s possible that good decisions can still have undesirable effects. They were still good decisions, though. It’s time to let the learnings shine through. Time to let go.

 

 

End Notes

[i] Years later, I was told by an LA-musician-friend of mine that Peter used open mics to gather feedback on his newest songs. He loved open mics in out of the way places and without big crowds. He hadn’t been cast aside by a perverse industry at all; rather, he was making his way along his most preferred career course. My conclusions – based on my context – were all wrong.

[ii] Philip Zimbardo, conversation on May 14, 2021, Behavioral Grooves podcast episode 251.

[iii] John Bargh, conversation on July 29, 2021, Behavioral Grooves episode yet to be published.

[iv] Annie Duke, conversation on March 17, 2021, Behavioral Grooves episode 176.

[v] Base rates help us see the big picture, pulling us away from narrowly-focused data from specific situations.

[vi] Bounded rationality is a concept developed by Herb Simon while at Carnegie Mellon University. A concept proposed by Herbert Simon that challenges the notion of human rationality as implied by the concept of homo economicus. There are limits to our thinking capacity, available information, and time (Simon, 1982). It is similar to the social-psychological concept that describes people as “cognitive misers” and was the foundation for the concept of satisficing, mixing being satisfied with sufficing.

[vii] Dolly Chugh, conversation on February 26, 2021, Behavioral Grooves episode 230.

 

About the Author

Tim Houlihan is the founder of BehaviorAlchemy, a consultancy that helps Global 1000 organizations apply behavioral science to their employees, customers, and channel partners. He is also the co-founder of the internationally recognized Behavioral Grooves Podcast. With listeners in more than 120 countries, Behavioral Grooves was recognized in the Top 21 in 2021 list of psychology podcasts by Psychology Today magazine. Still a performing musician, Tim likes to play his acoustic-based sets in regional listening rooms.