Get Out of Your Own Way Guide to Life. Justin Loeber

      Within seven days of the ordeal at Heathrow, I was flown back to the States with no place to live. Before leaving for the UK, I had sublet my apartment to the manager of Wayland Flowers and Madame, a famous and flamboyant ventriloquist and his puppet—and no way was that manager leaving my roost prematurely. (I’ll talk more about this towards the end of the book.) Not only did I lose my techno-pop recording career, but I was shut out of my apartment and was destined to sleep on my parents’ couch (my parents this time around consisted of my mom and my stepdad Tony who you’ll get to know later)—they were the only ones to open their doors to me. Hit hard by that fact, I was in a deep shock and depression.

      #Devastating moments are just a test for you to decide whether or not your life choices are worth fighting for.

      Six years after L’exit (short for Larry’s exit from Britain), I was now armed with two more dance record contracts in America—one with Vinylmania (where the famous dance music producer, the late Sergio Munzibai, remixed my song, “Those Words,” originally recorded in London), the other with Emergency Records (where renegade dance producer, Freddy Bastone, remixed my original, “Love Me or Leave Me”). According to my Emergency contract, I had the right to approve my mixes; however, at the time I was told when to show up at the studio, the fucker had mixed my record already, and in a few hours I apparently morphed from a techno-pop recording artist to a Latin Freestyle singer. Don’t get me wrong. If I could have pulled off the Latin vibe like Ricky Martin, you would not have heard me complain. What would you think if U2’s music was mixed into Country? I hope I rest my case. What a branding nightmare. Both singles permeated the New York dance clubs in the 80s. And that’s not quite all of the music drama: I later negotiated another recording contract, with music legend Sid Bernstein and his New York Music Company (Sid told me he brought The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, among others, to America)— that contract went by the wayside; and another contract with Buddy Allen Management (which represented The Spinners, Stacy Lattisaw, and Brenda K. Starr, the 80s dance recording artist who gave Mariah Carey her first break as a backup singer, plus more) proved another waste of time.

      #Why is the music business

      so complicated and dysfunctional?

      With all the complications that surrounded the music business and me, none of them compare to what happened on the self-proclaimed “last night” of my music career—which literally ended with a bang. At my last gig, at a club called 1018 (later known as The Roxy) in NYC, someone shot a gun—not a cap gun—above the crowd. I came to realize that the gunshot was meant to be a spiritual “period” at the end of my music sentence—and by “sentence,” boy, I mean it felt like a prison sentence. It was time to blow the dust off my wounded lyrical soul and move onward (Another shift in gear.) I was absolutely done with record labels that screwed me and with snaky club owners who didn’t pay me. I had an urge to surround myself with supportive and trustworthy people who didn’t care about which bass drum sound supported my backing tracks. I finally turned off the music, at least for now, because none of these opportunities paid the landlord’s rent.

      #When the work don’t pay, do not stay.

      Even though that gunshot closed the door to my music, it opened the door to reinvention. As part of it, I was on a road to switching my middle name for my first (which I finally brought to unofficial fruition in 1990, when I hosted a “Just Say Justin” party for my friends and relatives).

      While simultaneously recording music in the US, I needed cold, hard cash; for seven years, I landed at NYC’s MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) Data Center, working as a temp who typed on a Wang word processor. During that period I was still taking a ton of dance classes, just as one of my buddies asked me to fill in for him as a go-go dancer at a club called Danceteria in NYC. That was the weirdest thing I ever did; however, not surprisingly, the nightly pay was more than I made in the music business. After my experience with the MTA, I spent fifteen years in the restaurant business, working my way up from host (at Tavern-on-the-Green, where my manager, the soon-to-be-legendary NYC restauranteur, Drew Nieporent, managed me), and waiting tables (at such places as The Duck Joint, where I served the ravishing, Catherine Deneuve), to general management at the now defunct Triplets Romanian Steakhouse in NYC, an old-time Jewish eatery. Triplets was run by a set of triplets who were separated at birth—two of whom ended up at the same college nonetheless, serving up dinner and dancing as a belly-dancer wiggled around for tips. It was a show put on by the waiters—and me. So the waiters sang show tunes, and I (awkwardly) sang my techno-British-ish pop tunes to my backing tracks, playing to an audience that included, on every Jewish holiday, none other than one of the great music mavens of all time, Clive Davis, who would bring his family. (For anyone who hasn’t heard of Clive, please do your research.) Here I was, a self-served, washed-up recording artist almost no one knew, singing my disco dance hits to a crowd one step removed from the Borscht Belt circuit. Unfortunately, even though Clive Davis coincidentally happened to be a childhood friend of a family friend, I was not destined to be discovered during the High Holidays. The famous record producer (rightfully so) focused on eating his chicken soup with matzah balls rather than listening to my rendition of “Spirit in the Sky.” (I loved singing that song at this Jewish place with the lyric, “You gotta have a friend in Jesus!”)

      As fast as the waitstaff hustled at Triplets, I realized the restaurant gigs were bringing me back to my “Fat Larry” days—where I was constantly surrounded by food. That’s when I seized the next 180 degree opportunity—in publishing. At the age of thirty-three, and taking a forty thousand dollar annual pay cut from Triplets, I took a temp job answering phones in the publicity department of Villard, a division of Random House. I was searching for a career change. I tinkered with the thought of designing baseball caps of all things; however, my friend and awesome publicist, Sharyn Rosenblum, presented the PR temp job to me. She and her boss, publishing dynamo Jacqueline Deval, weren’t necessarily looking for someone “invested” in the “opportunity”—they simply needed a body to pick up the phone and say, “Hello,” by the second ring. This gig was a little “administrative,” but I did not leave it every night smelling like chopped liver or singing to thugs with guns! I remember Sharyn silently suffering because I was so awkward in the traditional workplace—Jacqueline got a kick out of me, I think. I had never worked at a publishing company, let alone read a book since reading 1984 in high school. (Incidentally, 1984 was the year I was performing in London—yet surprisingly, wasn’t mentioned in Orwell’s book.)

      The people in publishing seemed a helluva lot more honest than the musicians and kitchen staff I had encountered—even if the publishing set in general were a bit snooty and very impressed with their college degrees. For whatever reason, no one in the industry ever questioned my educational background; I guess I looked like someone who went to school—albeit just high school and one (or was it two?) years at NYU.

      #Typing well, without grammatical errors,

      can get you into publishing. (At least in those days.)

      That’s how I broke into the book business—seizing an opportunity with bright eyes open and without a college degree or any experience other than an interest to learn, a passion for showing up on time, an ability to type documents, a knack for organizing storerooms of books, some fun stories about performing music in London, and a will to see beyond a temporary position. Less than thirteen years later, I ended my corporate publishing career as a Senior Vice President, Executive Marketing and Publicity Director for Regan Media (run by the colorful Judith Regan), after enjoying other great job opportunities at William Morrow, Broadway Books (Bantam Doubleday Dell), Ecco (HarperCollins), Running Press, HarperCollins, and Atria (Simon and Schuster).

      During my time at William Morrow, I saw firsthand just how powerful PR can work for some. Maybe you’ve read, or at least heard of, the Penguin Group’s best-selling book, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride. I was surprised to learn that McBride’s mother was my mom’s first cousin, a fact which my mom learned when she heard an interview on NPR that had been set up by the author’s book publicist. Through the power of this PR interview, McBride’s mission for his book—reuniting his mother with her relatives—was accomplished.

      After all my colorful corporate