So I was in college, but it was the summer of my sophomore year or freshman year, and I had gone to a BBD concert and met Jeff Dyson, who was one of the new editions. He had long time been a new addition bodyguard. He was on the road with BBD.
Last time on waiting for Impact. My friend Scott and I found out we were one degree of separation closer to sudden impact than we ever knew we were. We have a friend who was a recording artist in Michael Bivens' East Coast family and you know her too. It's twenty twenty one Emmy nominee if that's Nicole Brown.
And I told him, I say, I want to sing for Michael bibbns. Can you please let me backstage?
Like me in nineteen ninety one, if that had big dreams, but unlike me, she knew how to manifest them.
And he was like, I cannot let you backstage, but I can tell you that they're staying at the Sheridan in Cauiahaga Falls. So if you happen to show up, you know at the Sheridan. You didn't hear it from me. To this day, I know Jeff. Now you know Jeff and our friends now. And to this day he says he doesn't know why he did it. He was just like, I don't know something about you. Just felt like I was supposed to help you.
Evett loved Michael Biffins, She loved New Addition, she loved Belle Bivdevaux, and she loved to sing. So she found Michael Bivens and she sang.
And so I went to that hotel, stayed in the lobby until four o'clock in the morning when BBD came to the hotel and I followed Michael Bibbins around and I was like, mister Bifman's massing for you, mister Biman's massing for you, mister Bimin's messing for you.
And then finally he was like, oh gosh, like just sing.
He was mad.
I was mad, like it had been at an opus to get to this moment.
That's the thing about taking big swings. Sometimes they're mortifying, but sometimes they actually work.
He finally let me sing for him and asked for my number, and then called me the next day and invited me to be a part of the East Closet family.
We're going to talk to a vete, Nicole Brown, about her time in the Coast Family, about what it was like to wait for your moment in the spotlight as a singer, and about what you do when it never comes, And we're going to find out what she knows about sudden Impact.
Also, we'll talk to Karen Kilgareth. She and I were leading more or less the.
Same life back in nineteen ninety one, So we're going to talk about what she learned that got her to where she is now. And we're going to talk about another big thing we have in common, a pivotal career moment that involves losing a big contest on national TV. This is Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project.
So here's where we left off. As I began my search for Sudden Impact, my friend and fellow pop culture obsessive Scott Gimple, found a nineteen ninety two music video from the East Coast Family, a group of pop, R and B and hip hop artists signed by Michael Bivens to his record label biv ten, a subsidiary of Motown. The song and video are called one four All four to one. By the way, the title of that song
never gets any easier to say. You always have to kind of prepare your mouth, but it is what we would now call a posse track. There are rap moments from Mark Finesse, from two young kids called ten ten who have their suspenders on backwards a little like the other young rap duo of the time, Chris Cross, probably a coincidence, and from mc brains who would go on to have a top forty hit later in nineteen ninety
two called Uchi Couci. There are moments that are sung by a big frat boy looking guy named Hayden with a sport coat slung over his shoulder, and by a group called White Guys whytgi Ze who look a little like Sudden Impact. And then there's a young woman with a clear and beautiful voice and a warm and familiar smile. She goes by the single name Yvette Vete Nicole Brown Sunday.
I can't stress you just how my job just dropped.
My friend Scott, who we met in the last episode, is the chief content officer for the Walking Dead universe, and a Vett is a Walking Dead super fan. Vette and Scott, as we learned, are real friends in real life. But this is a part of her story that he didn't know anything about. And we now have the connection to the East Coast family and maybe sudden impact that we've been looking for a backstage pass, if you will.
So I asked Scott to reach out to a vet to see if she'd be interested in opening up about her life in the East Coast family. And while we waited for an answer, I wanted to go a little bit deeper into the early nineties and what life was like for a young dreamer back then. And I know someone who I bet has some very good insights. What was Karen's nineteen ninety one esthetic talk?
What's you wearing.
At Jesus H, I'll tell you, I'll tell you it's not good news.
That is Karen Kilgareff. She's a comedian, a writer, the co host of My Favorite Murder, and the co founder of Exactly Right, the network i'm doing this podcast on. In nineteen ninety one, Karen was working a look.
Because I was out of the house and I could so. First of all, I died my hair black, like the second I got a chance to. That was incredibly like invigorating, and like, you know, I know what I want.
I dyed my hair black. I was pale as a ghost.
Karen's a friend of mine now, but in nineteen ninety one we were strangers leading very similar lives.
I started working at the Gap, and that really, that felt bad, That felt real goad.
Again, we're on parallel tracks.
Did you work at that?
I did? I ever the winner of Navy and White Cap? I was there. What is white cap? I asked, I said white. It's just a different word for white.
It's a way to say white and really set yourself apart.
In nineteen ninety one, in separate malls, in separate cities, two thousand miles away from each other, Karen and I were doing the same thing, suffering through eight hour shifts, pushing pocket t shirts and high waisted jeans, listening to four or five spins per day of that corporate mixtape, dreaming about the lives and careers we would have someday, lives and careers we couldn't even picture because they didn't even really exist yet. Back then, we were on the outside,
with our noses pressed up against the glass. Right now, Karen is a big deal, like few other people I know. She went out and got her life. But in nineteen ninety one. We were both very busy daydreaming about what our lives in the future could look like, and we were both hard at work fucking up our lives in the present.
Who was Karen Kilgareth in the summer of nineteen ninety.
One, Oh god, well, I just turned twenty one.
Oh boy.
I was living in Sacramento at the time. I had flunked out of Sacramento State University.
Congratulations, thank you so much. Not easy to do.
Took medication, and it took a real know how and perseverance.
To be asked to leave a state school.
That was basically took all comers and didn't give a shit.
Now, once again Karen and I were leading parallel lives there. We'll get into that shortly.
But in order to give her life some direction and stop feeling bad about failing out of school, Karen tried something new.
The good part about this era was just before it, when I was twenty, I started doing stand up comedy as a desperate move to stop being such a loser who had flugged out of school and just had and basically was kind of going nowhere in the Central Valley.
So I think by the time my twenty first birthday rolled around, I had felt that I had actually begun on my path toward my dream, which was always kind of a secret, Like I really knew I wanted to be a stand up comedian for a long time, but I I just didn't believe I would ever do it. And then this kind of amazing combination of good and bad things happened, and then I.
Got to start.
Karen transferred to Sacramento City College, where she met some cool artsy kids from the theater department. Can't you just see them? Her new friends were more edgy and mature. It was a new, better support system and like any good nineties arty kids, we have to imagine them smoking clothes at night.
She's beginning to do stand up, but in the daytime it's the gap.
There is an oppressive feeling.
I used to get in the middle of like an eight hour shift, you know, the mixtape that would play and it would be on like the fourth cycle, where I You'd just be going a little bit crazy and I would be standing there kind of staring at like the fluorescent lights, going how much longer are you going to do this?
Like?
Is this going to be the rest of your.
Life, because because there's part of you that was at least brave enough to get on that stage until of what are now some of the worst jokes of all time. But you know, like I did have that leg up that that I had done. So there was a little bit in me that was like, but I think I can do something. I don't think I should have to work at the gap for the rest of my life.
But then there was parts of some of the time when I was there where I was just like, I can't breathe, and I'm going to be here forever.
I know that, feeling extremely well, and I remember that what I wanted from life back then was vague. I wanted to express myself, make a mark on the world somehow. I wonder what did she want back then?
I think fame the idea, the made up childhood idea of what fame is and what and what all that kind of glory would be.
What is that child version of fame.
I think it's like it's like entering anywhere through double doors and like putting your hands out in front of me is literally like the It's kind of that kind of like as if you'd go into restaurants that only had double doors and do like hello everyone.
There was just here.
Oh h yes, it's me, I'm here waving as you eat dinner kind of idea. I think that was that was part of it, but I do think it was holding my own with men who do comedy.
Karen was learning stand up, finding her place in the Bay Area comedy scene, looking for clues.
The improv was my first one where I got on stage, so it was kind of like the closest one to my heart, and it felt so because it was one of those clubs that was downstairs, so it was really like cellar feeling, which the you know, all the walls were painted black.
You could only I could see one top.
Matt, the bartender, was really tall and he had like bleach blonde hair, so I would focus on watching his head move during my sets to know whether or not I was doing good. So if he was like doing head bobbing, like laughing, I was like, all right, so I'm fine. Like you know, there's there's all these kind of images in my brain that are seared there forever of how I'm going to do this thing that's really
hard and incredibly frightening and make it work. So those magical things are happening to me at night, and then at eleven am, I'd have to show up and fold down a sweater wall or whatever and go back to just being the person that's trying to sell you socks along with your three T shirts. And it was just I was very indignant about the fact that I had to work there, but that also it was such a corporate It was so easy to do things wrong at
the Gap. I was wrong all the time. I was always doing it wrong.
You know there is one way to fold a pocket too.
For real. Yeah, they'll check it.
And then a big moment happened on TV. America's Funniest People comes caught.
How dare you.
Talk about it if you don't want to?
Did you do research?
I saw it?
Let me set the scene. Karen had been getting better at stand up. She had been coming up with a group of friends, Andy Kindler, Vernon Chapman, Brian Possain maybe you've heard of him. She entered a comedy contest at a club in Sacramento, and she made it to the finals.
And then and at some point they're the manager of that comedy club was like, hey, America's Funnies people's in town come to Old Sac and they just you're basically just do some jokes on camera.
And so one of my.
Bits was I was at it was it was my impression of a cheerleader auditioning for a Shakespeare play. So essentially it's a classic fucking hacky stand up thing where you recite something impressive in a different voice. So I was just doing a valley girl voice.
Of Richard, I I.
I exactly.
So yeah, so that's what ended up on America's Funnies People.
So I mean the answer is, yes, we are going to listen to some of Karen Kilgarriff on America's Funniest People.
I'm presenting my version of a cheerleader auditioning for Shakespeare play. Okay, So like I'm auditioning for this or whatever, and I'm gonna be doing a monologue from like Richard I I I, And like what it is is, I'm lady Annette and like this guy totally killed my husband, Richard, and so he comes to the funeral just to make problems, just like Rick bar did that time of that party when he's gonna throw the keg through the window. Do you
remember that? Well, anyway, so like, he totally shows up and I totally get mad and I totally say this to him. I go like, I go like, foul devil for God's sake, Hence in trouble us, not for that's made the happy Earth. Eigeh Hell filled it with cursing cries and deep exclaims. It's not the like to view thy heinous deeds. Behold the pattern.
Of your butcheries.
Not what she would do now, probably, but it's funny. Her perspective is very clear. If you want to see more, it is on YouTube and it's worth watching. It's like a muppet baby's version of the Karen Kilgarriff We know now.
And then I got called by the producers saying do you want to come down to Burbank because you made it to the final three? So all of a sudden, you know, and that I recorded it well in Sacramento and then got into a car accident. My mom's like, that's it, You're moving home. You're just up there fucking around. I moved home and got the call like from my parents' house. So again, basically, after having flunked out, I floated for a little while in this comedy thing that was happening.
And then I was like back, moved back in with my parents, so almost like a new low. Then the America's funniest people called, So now I'm back up and like show biz time, and I flew down to that show, sat in the audience was, you know, like the drum roll with the Dave Coolier was one of the hosts.
It was like the whole.
Thing TV's Calliope.
Calliope from Days of Our Lives. It was a dream come true.
In the video, Karen is right there in that studio audience, in that very chic Jet Black nineteen ninety one one hair and Karen does not win.
I won third prize. A four year old girl beat me and a man. She said a joke. She was what did the farmer say when he lost his tractor? Where's my tractor?
Fun?
That was?
I know. No, she's talented, she was good. She was she deserved it as ten and the man probably. I bet we could track her down to who it is. No, and that girl is Ariana Grande.
The guy who won the big prize was a seventy year old guy dressed like a miner from old cowboy movies. He did a strip tease to mc hammers, you can't touch this, and he won ten thousand dollars, but Karen didn't walk away empty handed.
I think I got four thousand dollars before taxes.
But I mean that's early nineties money. That's not bad.
It was, you know what it is.
It got me out of my parents' house and into my apartment to moved to San Francisco to work at the Gap and start stand up again with a It basically relaunched my barely having begun stand up career.
Where did you see yourself as an adult in that situation?
Like?
What did I think I was going to do?
Yeah? Where would you have imagined you'd be?
Now? Honestly, I kind of like this is the dream. I'm doing it and I'm thrilled and thrilled every day about it.
And has a career in comedy looked the way that you imagined it would in nineteen ninety one.
The thing that I didn't understand is that everybody that moves to Los Angeles is baseline talented at least one thing. But there is a ton of people here who are insanely talented at like four things. And that I think I had that was the part that I was the most wrong about was Oh, like, I'm super funny, and I know a bunch of really super funny comics, and we're like the funniest people, and it's like, no, no, no, there's actors.
Who also are from Broadway who are ten times funnier than you.
Like those those lessons as I lived in Los Angeles and became intensely bewildered at the level of true talent that comes to this town and tries to make it. I just wanted it to be like, no, I'm a natural and you know I'm the best or whatever.
But it was like quickly learning that, like you.
Want to tell yourself that, like those pretty hot girls that are going in just for the ingreen new roles aren't funny, they fucking are. They're funny. They can tap dance and their models, So go fuck yourself, Karen from Petaluma, because your shit ain't flying. You know. There was that
lots of adjustments like that that were really bewildering. But then I think, thank God, somewhere along the line that idea came to me is like, if I want to be in this business, I should learn the business so that I know what I'm doing and not just be standing out here trying to be like an actor or a comic, because those people have the least amount of
power or control. And that's what led me into writing, and that's what led me into being behind the scenes and learning how it actually works and what the real business is.
Yeah, and you've been I mean you've had many, many ups and downs, Like there were things that you know, they're America's funniest people. I mean, it launched a career, but it was you know, you weren't flucked immediately from that to super stardom. So how did you keep What did you tell yourself to keep going?
I told myself I was funnier than that four year old girl every goddamn day.
I want to get back to something Karen said at the beginning of our conversation. Karen flunked out of college. So did I. I left for college in nineteen eighty nine a place called Holy Cross in Massachusetts. I'd been on the waiting list, and I think that is why I was so determined to go there.
You don't like me perfect, let me chase you.
I got there, I was surrounded by people who looked like they had it together, which I very much did not.
People who were good at being normal, which I very much was not.
A lot of kids from New England, where making fun of you is how they show affection, but it's also how they make fun of you. Holy Cross is a great place. I did not fit in there. This is the thing I would find out later. Early in the first semester of my freshman year, a bunch of the guys on my hall apparently had a big conversation in the common area about whether I was gay, which I very much was and still am, and at the time I was very much not ready to deal with it.
In this conversation, a classmate from my hometown apparently confirmed that yes, the general.
Word on the street was that I was very gay.
That kid apparently called another kid from my high school who double confirmed it. And if you've worked in journalism, you know a fact is not considered credible unless it can be double verified.
So I was out. I was out. Heead now.
I was not in the common area on my hall the day this conversation took place. I wasn't on campus at all because I had gone to the local mall to go to a record store called Sam Goody to pick up a cassette that had just been released and was sitting on my desk later that day when my roommates and some of the guys from the hall gathered to go get dinner, and that tape was the album Results by E Liza Minelli, which was produced by the Pet Shop Boys and has a Sondheim song on it.
So my gainness was now a triple sourced story.
Anyway, the guys on my hall, who I thought I'd been doing okay with, suddenly.
Began to keep their distance. That's what life was like.
In nineteen eighty nine at a Catholic school, and that's probably why this Catholic school in nineteen eighty nine had zero out gay students. I was having trouble making friends for the first time in my life. What middle aged Dave can see very clearly is what I should have done, which to just say, yes, yeah, I'm gay, do you.
Have any questions?
But I didn't. What I did but instead was spiral. I was out every night, drinking like a maniac. I skipped class on the regular. I was crying for help and pretending everything was great all at the same time. It was exhausting I didn't do well. A couple weeks into the summer of nineteen ninety, after I had finished freshman year, I was at my parents' house in Saint Louis.
I went to check the mailbox and there was a certified mail notice oh one six one Oho the zip code of holy Cross, and I just knew I had never failed at anything in my life, and suddenly there it was a massive, humiliating public failure.
Karen puts the feeling into words better than I can. Did it feel like flung it out of college? Which I also did? Oh d oh yeah. Yeah.
After my freshman year Holy Cross in Massachusetts, very conservative Catholic place where I did not fit in at all, and they vomited me out very quickly. However, it was actually it was like a one year suspension, and so I did, like go and get my grades up, and then I went because I felt like I have to finish what I've started.
I went back, which was a mistake, and.
I delayed my actual maturity by many, many years, and it was for me very difficult to scrub off the scent of failure.
Yeah, is that does that resonate with you at all?
A thousand percent yeah, I never saw myself when I was a child. I was smart and good at school, always liked it, And that lasted right until seventh grade, and then it all changed, and along with like puberty and adolescence came this kind of like I don't I'm not the smartest one in the class, therefore none of this is worth my time, or like I can't stand out and I'm not standing out in the smart way.
I'm not standing out in like the pretty way. I'm trying to be loud and funny, but that isn't very appealing to anyone anymore. Like it was one of those kinds of things where I just didn't I just didn't know what I was doing really or how to do anything. So I didn't see myself as the kind of person who would like flunk or fail or disappoint her parents.
Same when it started happening, it really did feel like I'm sliding backwards down a mountain and I can't stop myself and I can't do anything about it, so I might as well just stay in bed, drink some beer, you know what I mean, Like, just dig all the way into this failure act.
If I'm going to fail.
I definitely got lost in a loser moment for a while. After this happened, I was able to pull myself out of the downward spiral eventually, but still, more than three decades later, the sense of failure is still something I catch on myself.
It's still my reflex.
To think of myself as a failure, to focus on the things I haven't succeeded at instead of the things I have Now, thanks to therapy and the wisdom of age, I can shake it off when I feel it on me, but it gets on me still, and I can't help but notice something when I look at ut an impact. Even though that moment in that Motown, Philly video is all I ever saw them do, I don't think of them as failures. What I see is a big launch
that didn't pan out. What I see is some guys who had a plan and it didn't happen, and now I just want to know what they're doing. I see them as people who might have succeeded in a way that I couldn't see, and I want to know what that way is. I have a certain amount of curiosity and goodwill for them and for their story that I can't muster for me or for mine. Maybe that's why I'm so obsessed.
I want to play something for you.
Okay, it's not America's funniest Thank god, here there they are.
Yes, sudden Impact, Yes, just yeah. Do you remember this video at all?
Yes?
I do, the Motown Philly video where it's everybody they go through and it's like a yeah.
It's the East Coast family.
It's perhaps even though they get it to BBC.
Yeah, I don't know the exact part.
That's the one.
Yeah, it's this sudden impact. We are we are tracking them down. Do you have a favorite?
I mean, if I had to pick, and I love first of all, this has always lifelong been my favorite thing of picking a favorite guy in a band. Yes, and and people fighting about it or discussing it or whatever.
Where I remember I would do like for Duran.
Duran Obviously John Taylor the guitarist was the hottest and the one I liked, but that's the one everyone picked. So I was like, I like Roger the drummer because I Dave we are so Nate.
Absolute so much.
I yeah, no, absolutely from the jump it was Roger.
Some people divide the world up into astrological signs I do it by who's your favorite member of Duran Durant? And I knew Karen was a Roger. All the best people are Rogers.
Yep.
I was just like, sure, it's a given you're gonna like John Taylor. He looks like almost like a big girl, which everybody loves in rock and roll, Like there's something about that that's so soothing to a young girl's soul. But what's this Italian doing over here? What's this little guy that's that's holding down a rhythm section.
Who looks a little out of place and uncomfortable.
He looks like he hates it, which I love it.
Yes, And it's so when he becomes the first to leave, it's not surprising at all.
No, I was proud of him.
Yeah, goes and lives on a farm, and it's just like, I don't guy's cocaine is bad.
Let's not do it anymore.
Guys, you're doing much and you all you now look like middle aged women.
Okay, so wait, let me look at this.
Yeah, so I can really see for sure. Yeah, and you're gonna want to look close.
But did these guys release a video or like, is there a reference of any kind of me knowing them that would Okay.
That's the whole thing, is that this is what they did. Oh so my understanding is that they have continued to make music in some way or another, but I don't know where they are. And this was such a massive like platform to be given really before you've done anything.
And then kind of nothing happened, which is fascinating to me.
And then we get to the points of this show, which is the point in the Motown Philly video which I never get.
Tired of looking at.
I got to pick the guy in the center with the bow tie, which makes me think he's somehow the lead made something made or he or he is smart enough to notice set himself apart.
Yeah, Barber streisandstyle.
And it is a tuxedo shirt if you look closely, Okay, it is a tuxedo shirt. And it's it's definitely it's an Italian restaurant waiter.
Yeah. I was gonna say, did he have to pick up a couple tables after this shoot?
And he had to go straight to his dad's restaurant And it's.
That might have been the take, you know, that might have been the only take. You know, they're young they're full of promise. It's nineteen ninety one.
What advice do you have for Sudden Impact about a life in the arts.
You know, don't be afraid of a safety net if you have if you have an accounting degree, that's great. If you don't put all your eggs in one Sudden Impact basket, which hopefully they didn't. But like that was the thing that I did, really did learn coming to Los Angeles as a stand up comedian, that I better get some other skills going very quickly, like learn learn things. Have someone teach you how to write sketches, how to
write scripts, how to be an assistant, something else. But like flexibility, I guess resilience, adaptability would be.
My advice. That's the key.
So maybe the boys of Sudden Impact did just take a more practical path. Maybe they went back to school, or maybe they're still grinding.
It out now. I have no idea.
But at long last, after three decades, I know someone who might well Sudden Impact have existed in my mind as a symbol, a moment from a music video, a mystery I've never known how to solve for a vet Nicole Brown. They're friends co workers East Coast family, siblings. You know, a Vet from community, from Drake and Josh, from generally being the best thing about whatever she's in. But she's also a singer. She was a part of Michael Bivens's East Coast Family with Sudden Impact. My friend
Scott put me in touch with Evet. And what's fascinating is that she got her dream life and then got a new dream life.
Because she walked up and asked for it.
Karen and I were dreaming and folding denim in nineteen ninety one, Vet was manifesting.
Did you did you just always want to sing?
Oh?
Gosh, you couldn't tell me I wasn't going to be a singer. I oh, I mean I grew up loving Michael Jackson and Jackson five, and I.
Was I'm not that old.
Ever I found them they were already grown and as they were the Jacksons by the time I was born and realized what the Jackson five was and how amazing
it was. And I listened to just a lot of old R and B. Like, well, it's old now, but it was like eighties R and B when I was a kid, and I just loved music and I loved singing and I thought I was going to be and one of my favorite groups was New Addition, and my thought was, if I'm going to marry one of them, I need to be on tour with them, and so the only way I could ensure that is for me to sing.
So that was one of the other.
Reasons why I wanted to be a singer, because I wanted to marry somebody. A New Audition, So there you go, there's my secret.
New Edition were the biggest boy band since the Jackson five. They were so big when they fired their manager, he went out and started a new boy band just out of spite, and that boy band was New Kids on the Block.
More on that.
Later, but New Addition were huge in nineteen eighty four. And like with Duran Duran, you had to have a favorite. So now it can be told, like who in New Edition I loved?
I loved Ralph and I loved Michael. Those were my two favorites. I love them all, But if I was gonna marry someone, who would have been those two?
Okay, so you had a double bias.
Yeah, I mean, I mean Ralph was first and Mike was second. And Michael knows this, so I'm not telling tales out of school. I'm not he's not finding out here that he wasn't.
My favorite.
New Edition had been put together by music producer Maurice Starr, who got them in a recording studio, released their debut album, Candy Girl, and when a couple of the singles started selling well in Europe, sent them off on a world tour. They came back from that tour and Star mailed them a check for their year plus of hard work. That check was for one dollar and eighty seven cents, not
five checks. One check for them all to split. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but adjusted for inflation, that is.
Yeah.
No, that's still some bullshit. So they fired Maurice Starr. They moved to MCA Records. They released the album New Edition, which went double platinum in the States. They released five more hit albums, and then they took a break. In the late eighties, the individual New Edition guys began to go their separate ways. When Bobby Brown went solo, then his replacement Johnny Gil did the same, then lead singer
Ralph Tresvant. That left the other three Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, and Ronnie de Vaux to form Bell biv Davoux, who blew up in nineteen ninety with the album Poison and Listen. I tried a lot of things when I was trying to break into this business, but there is one thing I never thought of doing, and it's just going up to my hero and demanding a job. Ivette sang for Michael Bivins in a hotel lobby and then he called her up and signed her to his label.
So tell me where you're feeling that in your body when you get the call.
I mean, it's you know, my whole whole everything just like lights up at the thought of that. Because one thing I didn't tell you about meeting him that Kaihaga fall Sheridan was one of those atrium hotels, so like the center of the hotel, you can look all the way up and see all the floor, so it's like
a big square and you can look up right. So every time I asked Mike to sing for me, I asked when he walked in the door, when he was getting his key from the front desk, as he went to the elevator, he said no to me like three times. So he got on the elevator and went up to like the six or seventh floor, and as he gets off the elevator, I hear singing coming from the six or seventh floor and I look up and there's Michael Bibbin's letting somebody sing for So I get on.
The elevator and I punched it.
I get off the floor and he's just finishing up listening to someone that said, you just really messed up that I've been asking you, and I really would like to sing for.
You, sir, and let me, sir.
He was like, he's a kid too, I'm like, sir, and so he said, well, just go on and sing then, and so I sang angrily.
He listened angrily.
He took my number angrily like it was a really like contentious, you know situation. But he was like, I gotta get her number because she actually can sing, like and he was looking for talent.
What's truly wild about this story is if that's absolute certainty about it, not just now, but then it's not like she went to apply for a job.
The job was hers and she knew it. She just went to pick it up.
There's one other thing about it.
Dave the fall whatever year, I think it was a freshman year, sophomore year of college is the same year that Michael discovered Boys to Men. And Michael was on BT with Boys to Men introducing them to the world. And I was in college watching BT and I said to my roommate, my friend Nikki, I said, he's going to manage me. I'm like, I'm I'm Michael's going to manage me.
And she was like sure. I felt in my heart, I'm like, he's going to manage me. Like I just knew.
I didn't know how it was going to happen. I just knew that he was part of my destiny. Like whatever I was going to be in entertainment, that Michael Bibbins was part of it.
I can just feel it.
Yeah, I can just feel it. And you manifested it.
Yeah, or God knew what was going to happen and put it in my mind.
So you get signed to Motif ten MM, and then then what happens.
We do a video, We do a song, and we do a video and that's where we worked with Well, they were they were the white guys by the time I did the video.
They started a sudden impact.
Yeah, I knew sudden impact became white guys and now I have a thousand more questions for Sudden Impact, Slash White.
Guys another Bad Creatures, so many great talented people.
We did our.
Video Bivin's put a Vette Hayden and another singer into a vocal group together.
We were putting a group called Different and we were brought out my my junior year, I think, yeah, the summer of my junior year of college, we were brought out to California school.
Yep in school.
We were brought out to California to record.
And so I spent the summer of my junior year out here and we were like just hanging out around the pool and going to parties, like we hadn't recorded yet. And it was coming up on the middle of August and I said to Mike, I said, you know, I got one more year school, like I'm almost almost have my degree, like I need to. I hate to go back and do this. And so he was like, we'll
go home, finish your degree. You can come back and we'll do it, you know after, And then of course by then, you know, the music industry change.
As the early nineties became the mid nineties, popular music got a little dirtier. I love your Smile by Shenise became freakd Like Me by Adina Howard mc hammer, whose nineteen ninety song you Can't Touch This was so wholesome it won a seventy year old guy ten thousand dollars on America's Funny As People. By nineteen ninety four, was doing a song called Pumps on a Bump with a video that features him in a speedo. The videos on YouTube watch at your own risk. Sexy Jams was just
not a direction if that wanted to go in. She wanted to do uplifting, almost gospel style R and B music, So her time as a singer never really came. Are you frustrated during this time, like while you're signed?
And you know, I wasn't frustrated, but I'm someone that likes to be efficient, and I just felt, like, you know, laying out by the pool is fun, and going to these parties is fun, and it's great to be around Michael and stuff. But my dream, or my mother's dream, even more than mine, was for me to graduate from college. And I wanted that for myself. I wanted that for her, and I had put in three good years and I had scholarships and pill grants, and you know, I really
worked hard. I had work study all through college, so I earned, you know.
The right to be there.
And I felt like, though it was fun to be out in LA, if we're not recording, I don't need to be here.
I need to be recording.
So it was the frustration of it not being an efficient amount of time spent.
So at what point did you say music is not happening.
I've always felt like, you know, you race towards the thing that's racing towards you, and so music just didn't like me that much.
It just wasn't you know.
It thought I was cute, Yeah, but it didn't like me like that, right where acting loves me, like acting things I'm great. And so when I started auditioning for commercials and that started to take off, I was like, well, this is what it should be.
The dream of singing receded into the background while the dream of acting took over. But singing never completely disappeared. And this is the funny thing, Dave.
I sing on just about every show I get, every show that I've been a series regular on, I've sung on every single whie. So the gift is still being used and I do a lot of cartoons, a lot of kids shows, a lot of cartoons, and I've been singing on all of those as well. So it's not like it's gone. It just didn't manifest in the way that I thought it would.
If that is at peace with the way her career turned out. She didn't get to be a big famous singer, but it's not because of anything she did or Michael Bivens did. The world was just a different place back then.
We were very young and naive and didn't understand what it was. And I don't know that I don't know that any of us back then had the killer instinct you would need the killer instinct that performers now are like born with. We didn't have a social media. All
the meeting is that they had to read. They could read up on anybody they wanted, They could find out about anything, they could put out their own music, like the world was wide open for that generation, and so I feel like those of us back in the East Coast family, we didn't have those those opportunities to figure it out. So that's why some of us made it, and some of us are still trying to get to whatever place we wanted to get to because it's just
not laid out. There was no blueprint back then, like it was a record label and that's it. So many ways to make it now. Yeah, if some an impact was out right now, they would be they would you know, be streaming, they'd be on YouTube, they'd be doing TikTok videos like we wouldn't know them.
They'd be super duper famous as a.
Boy band right now, right right.
They just didn't get their shot, right, they get their shot, you know. Yeah, Hayden didn't either. Hayden Heide was such a great You need to talk to Hayden.
If you watch that one for all for one video, you remember Hayden. He sticks out like a sore thumb, looks like a frat boy on your college rugby team.
But that voice. How was this guy not a star? Yeah? I would love to talk to Hayden. Do you know how?
I sure know how to get you in contact with Hayden?
Not sure would be fantasy?
Yeah, no, that would be No.
You got to talk to Hayden because he's he's first of all, he's that's someone I hope puts out an album.
Yeah, his voice is he was like a white one.
Yeah, incredible voice. I mean, all I've heard is is you know from No He.
Had a whole He had a whole album on Motown. It never got released. He remade PEG Yes beautiful, Yes, amazing version of PEG never came out. It was something that something happened with the label. I can't remember. But there's a whole album of music that is done. Hayden's album not being released is a tragedy. It's a tragedy for music that blue eyed soul. He would have really yeah he did. That's a loss for all of us.
We are one step closer to meeting Sudden Impact. If that's gonna hook me up with Hayden, another act from Michael Bivens' East Coast family who could have been huge.
I want to know his.
Story, and not for nothing. He might still be in touch with Sudden Impact or White Guy's or whatever their name is. Now we'll talk to him, and we'll take a deep dive into the pop landscape of nineteen ninety one and how one procedural change in the way charts were compiled changed what the entire world listened to with pop chart columnist.
Chris malanfe That's Next Time on.
Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project. This has been an exactly Right production written by Me Dave Hormelson, produced by Hannah Kyle Crichton, recorded, mixed and sound designed by Andrew Epen. Additional engineering and assembly by Annalise Nelson. Music by Ben Wise, artwork by Garrett Ross. Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hart Stark and Danielle Kramer. Follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at exactly right
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