3: The Promise of a New Day

Let's talk for a minute about Akron, Ohio. It's a historical site for pop and rock music. It turns out it's where the Black Keys met and Devo. It's Chrissy hines hometown, the city she wrote my City was Gone about. And then that song became the theme for the Rush Lim Boss Show, and that makes me feel bad. And somewhere in that city there's a Sheraton hotel lobby that, for a brief moment in nineteen ninety one, was a

I sang for him in a hotel lobby at like two in the morning, and he called me the next day and he was like, going off for your record deal. Whatever.

Hayden hi Do was eighteen, a jock with a voice big enough to fill a Sheriton Hotel Atrium. He sang for Michael Bivens, and his life took a detour, one that went right through the East Coast family, one that lasted about a decade, one that involves Beyonce. He's gonna tell us about it right now on Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project. While Hayden Hid's life was changing,

I was in the East Coast family, so I was a solo artist signed to bit ten Records.

When I speak with Hayden over Zoom, he's in his basement back in Ohio. He looks about the same as he did in the video. He's unassuming friendly. The music business is a memory for Hayden now, and probably a complicated one.

When my album was due for release, two weeks before my album was released, the CEO of Motown, Jerald Busby, resigned, so they put me on hold, and I was kind of in a holding patterns.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Hayden Haidu grew up in Akron, Ohio. He was an athlete, a football player, but one who also liked to sing. And in the eighties you were supposed to stay in your lane. Mixing sports with the arts unthinkable. Zac Efron and Corbyn Blue hadn't even been invented yet. That's a high school musical reference.

I sang in choir my senior year. I did a play by vi Berdie. But this was before you know, now you have athletes that want to get into acting because you know, Disney's really popular, and it's the thing when I was in high school, like, if you played football, you didn't like do the acting thing, you know, I mean you were either an athlete or so. I was kind of, you know, I was kind of breaking a barrier.

I think Hayden's plan was to go to college, but he wasn't much of a student and his football career wasn't enough to get him a scholarship. So he applied to Ohio University and he sang for them.

I ended up going to OU and was offered a vocal scholarship. I went down and sang for them because I didn't have the grades.

But late that summer, just before he was about to start his freshman year, Hayden decided to take bold action.

Before I went down, Michael Vivins, the Belvit Devo, was doing a tour and they were in Ohio and Afron, Ohio, and that was right when Michael Vivins had founded Boys to Men, So every time he came off tour in this hotel, there were thousands of people going to sink form.

Yeah, join that East Coast family.

Yeah yeah right. And a buddy of mine called and he's like, dude, you got to get down here in sink for him.

When you showed up at that hotel lobby to sing for Michael Bivens, what did you want? Did you did?

You know?

Like, what what did you picture?

I think, honestly, I was I had no I had no idea. I was so innocent. I wish I could go, you know, like I knew I could sing, but I just got up and just sang, you know, And I didn't I didn't have any you know. My buddy called me and I just went up there and all these people were singing, and actually I was just waiting and I was like the last person to sing for him, and he just he wrote down my number on like the little gum wrapper.

You know what happened next? Bivins called an Offred Hayden a record deal. Now you may be asking yourself, how does Michael Bivins have the cloud to just be tossing recording contracts out to strangers and share it and hotel lobbies. It's a good question and we will try to answer it later in the episode. But Bivin told Hayden, I'll call you back in two weeks. Write a song. Hayden had never written a song, but he figured he'd learn. He actually did go down to Ohio University to start

I was wet behind the ears. You know. I was a Midwest kid from Ohio. Who you know. I mean, I signed my record deal and then I went off to OU my freshman year, so I didn't even go to class. You know. I was like, I'm out of here, you know. I mean, it was not it was not a good mix for me.

I bet was there money involved at that stage?

Well? Yeah, so when I signed, when I signed the deal, at first, yeah, they gave me a little bit of money and then I just went to college and he was like, look, you know, we got to get things set up and so it was about seven or eight months in and then I started going out to LA quite a bit, and it was just too hard for me to do both. You know. My dad was kind of like, are you sure you want to do this?

Yeah. And then once the ball started rolling and you got signed, what were you picturing?

I think in my mind, I thought I was going to like be a superstar. Honestly, I think I thought like, and I don't say this in a bragging way because I'm older now, but but I don't think I realized maybe the talent that God gave me. And then when I started working with like real professionals and they were like, you're You're really good.

They settled on an image for Hayden. They wanted to make him like a nineties blue eyed soul man. They recorded an album, and Bivens kept working on Hayden. If you know the story of New Edition, you know, these guys worked their asses off to be the biggest and the best, and Michael Bivens expected that kind of discipline from his artists.

The Big ten label was more. They were really hands on, right you know Mike. Mike's a different dude. Like, you know, I would be in an airport and he would be, I, dude, get on the tart, like, get on the you know, get up and start singing. He was like old school Motown. Oh yeah, like embarrassing moments like we did a restaurant. He'd be like, stand up, start singing and people are like, what are you doing?

So wait, so what what does that feel like to have to do that?

You're like, you're, well, you don't want to crap your you don't want to crap your pants because you're you know, yeah, you're you know, every time you do something, it's like it's live or die with him. You know, he grew up with you know, he was from an era where you know, you worked for everything you you wanted to make you a real artist. Right, So at the time you don't know that. You know, at some point you're thinking, in my am I filling up this guy's ego And

If you remember, Evet said she loved that Hayden album, An event does not lie. Hayden's proud of it too. It's got a cover of Steely Dan's PEG with gospel group Take six doing the background vocals. They made a video for the first single, Funhouse, with Hayden kind of doing a James Dean thing out in the California desert. Motown was on board. The album was about to drop. You finish your record, and then then what happens.

Well, I get home to Cleveland and we shoot a video and it's like we're ready to go, like we're looking for a promotional tour two three weeks, and then all of a sudden, Joe, you know, I get a call Gerald Busby's resigned. You know, obviously Motown's on hold.

This is a tale as old as time. A big executive gets excited about you, signs you to a deal, invests some time and money into you, and then that executive goes somewhere new maybe they get fired. Maybe they just get a new job somewhere else. But you can't follow that executive to where they go because you're under contract to the place they signed you too. You're obligated

Actually, the album we did was it was a really good album, but it just it never surfaced because you know, when Jerald Busby left Motown, there was quite a hiatus for a while.

I'll say a couple of things here. One, after I spoke with Hayden, I emailed him to ask whether it's possible to hear that album anywhere, and as of now, he hasn't gotten back to me. It might be a sore spot. I would understand if it were, but I'm dying to hear that record. And Two, I tried to track down Jerald Buzzby and he died in two thousand and eight. But Hayden's album sat on a shelf. It's nobody's fault. It's just the way it goes. It's actually the way it goes. A lot.

I don't think anyone goes in and makes an album and says this is this is going to fail, especially then because you know at the time, like you know, Motown Price spent one and a half million dollars on

Man, justin Timberlake cannot catch a break this year, can he. Hayden's debut album is gathering dust. Motown's not releasing it, and because he's under contract, nobody else can release it. So Hayden is in a holding pattern. He's in Hollywood, collecting a stipend, playing golf, starting to drink a little. Like his album, He's just sitting there waiting, even.

Just trying to find some side projects for me to do. And at this point, you know, we're becoming like brothers. We're really tight because we've kind of been through the war together. And I think in his defense, you know, he was pushing this Midwest stern white kid and era where you know, like you know, there was no cross pollination of like music, and he's trying to figure out his way and I'm hammering him like, dude, I'm ready to go. And through all that, I think we're really close.

Hayden was getting frustrated his college years had passed him by, his hopes had been raised and then dashed too many times. Something had to give.

We did a demo and then we we ended up doing a couple of other songs outside of what he was having us to do, and eventually we got to deal with Columbia. That was out, you know, that was not a part of Michael Bibbins at all. And that's when our relationship just it ended. And I've reached out a few times, but how did you leave it? Well, so I you know, at the time we had hired an attorney. He called Mike and it was like breaking up with your It was like the breakup, you know.

You know?

And I didn't. I couldn't really see the forest through the trees. I had to make a tough decision for myself and what I thought was best. I kind of moved on. And you know, my attorney was like, that was unbelievable. He's like, you two grown men. It just broke up, like two heterosexual males just broke up.

Now I can't help but notice, as Hayden says this, that he's not angry. There don't seem to be any lingering, hard feelings. It may have been a heterosexual breakup, but as with a vet, it's pretty obvious Hayden still loves Michael Bivens. The music world turned upside down in nineteen ninety one as the smooth listen at work sounds of Top forty radio gave way to alternative and hip hop. For some more insight on that, I turned to my

Let's see a pop fan who also cared about hip hop and alternative music. A writer for my college music magazine, A guy who read Billboard every week, because that's the kind of nerd I am. I've been that nerd since the mid to late eighties, so that's made great.

I love it. And now look at.

You, yeah and my Bowie T shirt. Fifty years old.

I knew the pop music world that's sudden impact. Evtnicole Brown and Hayden we're trying to break into really changed around this time. But I hadn't really thought about how that all happened until I got a hold of Chris. It all boils down to a Barcode scanner.

Ninety one is the year. It's the BCAD moment of chart following because it's the year of sound scan. It's the year that SoundScan is added to the album chart in May, the Hot one hundred in November, and it utterly changes our understanding of how songs and albums become hits.

Billboard Magazine is a music industry trade publication whose album and singles charts are the gold standard. It's the singles chart Casey Caseum used for American Top forty. That's how legit it is, and starting in nineteen ninety one, they began using Nielsen SoundScan data collected from scanners at record store cash registers. You bought a record, the person behind the counter wave the wand thing at it, it went boop.

We had our Billboard had been phoning and faxing retailers and radio programmers to ask them, give me your top thirty records this week or whatever, and then they would rank them. It wasn't as if the system was devoid of data, but it was very imprecise and frankly fudgeable data. Fudgeable is my favorite adjective for it, because it suggests all sorts of nefariousness without actually coming out and saying it.

So.

Up until this point, the album and singles charts that I had grown up following were tabulated by like rumor.

And what it did was it taught us that the patterns that we had been assuming albums and singles would follow were basically all wrong. The simple way I like to say it is albums open like movies. We used to think that an album would open somewhere in the middle of the chart and then rise to number one or number five or whatever. An album's biggest week is its first week, and we only learned that through SoundScan.

Skien were clearly skid Row if you want, like they were big for hair metal in nineteen ninety one, but like they were not even the biggest hair metal band at the time.

Yet they were the first Scouts sound scan, excuse me, the first act in the sound scan era to debut at number one on the album chart. They that's a record nobody can ever take away from them.

When skid Row debuts at number one with a record that doesn't even have a single on the radio.

You know, the culture is changing, and what it's told you right away is, oh, this is not special anymore. This is just going to keep happening week after week. And now if you look at the album chart most weeks, you know, call it thirty to forty weeks out of a fifty two week year. The new number one album is a debut. It's a brand new album because it opens like a box office hit. It opens like a movie. Right, Avengers Endgame doesn't open at number ten and rise to

That's how albums open to singles charts the top forty. You know what Casey Casem used to do. They're a combination of record sales and radio airplay. And in nineteen ninety one, Nielsen also debuted Broadcast Data Systems, an early version of Shazam that listened to and report did which songs radio stations were actually playing. Previously, Billboard had just had to take the word of record stores and radio stations,

I mean, you're already you're already seeing hip hop make a run at the charts prior to sound scan, right, You've already seen everybody from mc hammer to Vanilla Ice to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, you know, make a run. Tone Lok in nineteen eighty nine got a couple of top three hits. But what changes is that now it's much more plausible that rap can.

Top the Hot one hundred, the.

Very first this is not a terribly hardcore street rap record, but the very first number one on the Hot one hundred the week they flipped the switch towards SoundScan and BDS is set a drift on Memory Bliss by PM Dawn. That's a very poppy, catchy, mainstream friendly record, which was already in the top five before they flipped the switch, but by the following summer baby got back by Sir

Like Chris, I was in college that winter when Nirvana's never Mind went to number one. It was astonishing something so strange and so seemingly unradio friendly becoming an actual hit. It was a sea change. I watched it happen, but it wasn't until just now talking to Chris that I thought about how it happened.

So, like, I mean, you know the Nevermind phenomenon, right, that's unimaginable without sound scan. That's more on the album chart than the singles chart. Although Smells like teen Spirit is a top ten hit, it goes to number six.

Just breaking in here really quickly to tell you, I could talk to Chris malanfe about what songs peaked at what position on the chart all day long, and for all of the terrible things the Internet that has done, I am so glad it has facilitated this conversation.

But get this, but that fabled moment that everybody talks about where Nevermind knocks out Michael Jackson's dangerous that is entirely due to SoundScan. I actually did a whole Hip Parade episode about this moment, because it's actually a widely understood moment. According to Billboard's chart dating system, it happened

Teenage rebellion by way of gift card. I love it. But what we were learning was that the young people with disposable income who buy records and drive trends and dictate what gets played on the radio, we're going for something harder and heavier than what Hayden and Sudden Impact slash white guys. We're trying to make the market for a blue eyed soul singer or a boy band who looks a little like New Kids on the Block was less friendly than it seened just a few months before.

I probably was working a shift at my campus job, which was the Durfy Sweet Shop at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, and I'm pretty sure that that's where I heard Poison for the first time. And that record is just catch as hell and it leaps out of the speakers like a rap record.

Poison sounded like nothing that had been played on Top forty radio before. Bell Bivdevou described their sound as.

Mentally hip hop smoothed out on the R and B tip with a pop feel appealed to it.

It's a mouthful, but it's accurate. And then after Poison, do Me, a song so filthy you couldn't believe you were hearing it on the radio in the daytime.

And the fact that Doomy came right after, and Doomy was just as huge, and there was I remember, you know, I was already a Billboard reader in college, and there were radio programmers kind of fretting a little bit about do Me, because like, can we play this record during you know, sort of the homework hour, The hour when the really young kids are listening, you know, like do they know what?

You know?

Is he doing her hair? I remember this quote in a Billboard story of like a radio like, you know, I'm playing the regular version and we haven't done anything to it because they don't actually curse in it. But it's pretty filthy, you know, and yet they were playing it, you know.

But it was that kind of PG thirteen content, that hip hop inflected production, that mixture of pop and R and B that mentally.

Hip hop smoothed out on the R and b's hit when a Pop Fail Appeal.

Yeah, that that made Motown take notice.

I think that Michael Bivens. But the reason he got away with, you know, playing with house money as it were, was that a he had had an enormous hit, and b he had he was helping the labels solve a problem they were having.

You know.

My most recent episode of Hip Parade, the one that just came out a couple weeks ago, was about Millie Vanilly, And one of the arguments I make about Milli Vanilly was that whether you know, fraudulent as they were, they were important to the hybridization of rap and pop on top forty Radio in nineteen eighty nine and ninety They actually even appeared on Billboard's first hot rap single, art

You know a thing I really should have known is that somewhere in New Haven, Connecticut, a twenty year old Chrisma Lanfe was watching that Motown Philly video and clocking the same thing.

I was and and what's funny about Motown f Philly when when Boys to Men show up? I remember being slightly cynical about Boys to Men, even though I love to Motown Philly the song because I'm like, this video is just one long branding exercise and.

It's it's their first single, and it mentions other artists. It mentions ABC and BBD, which is like, it's it's big of them. Yeah, you know, include other like promos for other artists in their debut single.

I guess, or it's or it's the price of fame, you know, the ticket for entry, right is that Michael Bivens says, I'll record you guys, but you got to promote my other acts while you're there.

Yeah. And then in the video, as we're getting our family portraits taken old timey style with the cape and the the thing that you hold, we meet five young men and five white shirts and five neckties called Sudden Impact, and that's the first and last time we see them, right, right, do you remember that moment? Like, do you remember seeing it? Do you remember it? In real time?

All I remember about it, if I'm being honest, to reiterate something I said a little while ago. Is this added to my cynicism because okay, correct me if I'm wrong. By the time Motown Philly hit or dropped, another bad creation had at least had a hit or two playground in Aisha Aisha. I think Ayisha was first. Aa was Yeah, yeah, and they were both top ten hits, So like, okay, at least they're promoting an act that's actually had a couple hits in BBD the prior year had been huge.

Except that phrase didn't exist in nineteen ninety one. Glad we should have invented it. Yeah, I know. It is an introduction to the Michael Bivens extended cinematic.

Universe, right, another thing that didn't exist in nineteen ninety one, But that's exactly it.

Yeah, let's talk about Chris for a minute. He's taken his obsessions and made a career out of them, and so have I. But neither of those careers even existed when we were twenty. Chris in nineteen ninety one, where did you see yourself at fifty?

I'm not sure.

Do you have a clear idea of where you wanted to go?

I mean, the reason I can't answer this from the vantage point of nineteen ninety one. I've often said this is that a lot of things had to be invented for me to have this particular career. Like, right through the nineties, I was writing record reviews for CMJ, making beer money to do that, while I had a a completely separate day job. But like blogging had to be invented, podcasts had to be invented, The whole ecosystem of online

So there's today's lesson kids. That thing you love more than anything, that thing you know more about than anyone, keep exploring it, keep learning about it. There's a perfect job for you out there. You're just gonna have to invent it. But back in the nineties, especially if you wanted to be a pop star, you needed other people's help. Powerful people could make you and they could break you. When we left Hayden, he had just broken up with

He ran into three guys from New Jersey who were looking for a lead singer, and we ended up linking up. We got together, we made a demo, and we ended up leaving Michael Bivens, which I think to this day, you know him and I had it since then, so it was it was you know him and I was. It was almost like a divorce. But that group was called Signature.

Signature is of course spelled as yg NA t U r E. I don't know what was going on in the nineties with the creative spellings, but Signature's manager was about to become a big deal in his own right thanks to a daughter who you might have heard of.

Beyonce's dad. Matthews was our manager.

Yeah you heard him, Yeah, Beyonce's dad. And it's nineteen ninety eight, Destiny's Child is taking off and those Signature had begun as a vocal group in the style of the sexy R and B groups of the time like Jo Deasy and Drew Hill. Matthew Knowles noticed a change in the atmosphere.

When Destiny's Child at the time went on tour with Back three Boys.

He really changed the direction, right.

Yeah, he saw how good Back three Boys did, and I think he saw dollar sign that he kind of changed the direction of kind of what we were doing. So we were really more of a real R and B group. So we actually were signed to the Urban Division of Columbia REQ. So it was right around there, you know, Carson Daily TRL. I mean we So our first tour was we were the opening act for Christina Aguilera. It was Christina Aguilera Destiny Shout. There was another group. We were like the pre opening act.

Right, Just gonna interject here real quick and tell you the other group was sole decision. This story just got so nineteen ninety nine. My tips frosted themselves.

We didn't ride it toward us, but we were really close with Destiny's Child. We really we wrote the coattails of their success because Fiata's dad was our manager. So we were doing a mall tour and we were doing like we were doing a teen people mall tour with them, and then we were doing like outdoor arenas and then we went overseas to London and Ireland and did some stuff over there.

But this chapter in Hayden's career was the same as the last, more waiting for the record label to push the album, more trying to get his manager's attention, while someone else became a superstar of it. This time it was Beyonce. When Hayden sang for Michael Bivens in that hotel lobby, he was a now he was twenty seven.

We were on tour, we were doing we were singing with Deptony's Child. You know, we had done this tour, we had gone to Europe, we had come back, our album still wasn't being released. I had noticed what I would say is some shady stuff from Matthew Knowles. I was seeing some things that I was like, you know, I don't like not taking money from us because we weren't making money, but like, what's going on? And you know,

And Matthew Knowles had a lot of power at this moment in time, with Destiny's Child blowing up, he had proven he could make you or break you. Just ask LaToya Luckett or Farah Franklin or Latavio Robertson, and those are the people he kicked out of Destiny's Child that we know about. We can't say for sure whether it was Matthew who started those rumors, but we can say they worked. Can I take it back? To that call with your lawyer where when he said, you know, nobody

Like?

Awful? Like everything? I mean it was. It was awful. It was terrible because that's that had been, that had become my identity, right. I mean I went from like, you know, I was like I lived in a small little community in between Akron and Cleveland, and Cleveland's not that big. When I came back from fifth ten, man, I mean I was like the shit, you know, like

It wasn't good. Hayden was nearly ten years into his music career and he was out of options. He stayed in Ohio. He got a job selling used cars.

I went through like a you know, I mean, I went from playing even though you're the opening act right playing an Arenas to like I had to go sell cars and I live in a community where they're.

Like, dude, what happened?

And I just I would act like nothing was wrong. But it got it got pretty bad to me, so I ended up. You know, I started drinking a ton, just fell into like a really bad like drinking depression.

Things go sideways in a million different ways for everyone.

Yep, no matter what it is absolutely.

That you set out to do in life, you know, jobs go away and plans change, there is a special kind of I don't know if shame is the word that the world makes you feel. If your plan was an artistic one. There is something about, you know, going back to that hometown after going to the big city to make your dream happen and having it not pan out the way that you had planned that can make you feel a different kind of way.

Well yeah, I mean, you know, shame is Shame's pretty dangerous, right, Like, you know, you have guilt and shame, right, and you know you're guilty because you did something wrong, right, But shame is like the penance that you give yourself for doing something. So you know, people don't jump off bridges because they're guilty. They jump off bridges because they're filled with shame, and shame is like, you know, and that's

You said something that that I want to like push back on a little bit. You said, you know when when you when you you know, so go for your dreams and you fail, a certain thing happens. Do you think that you've failed?

No? I don't think that failed. No, I think I was thrown a curveball or it, just like sometimes I think it's things just are meant to go, you know, the way that what our expectations are, you know, expectations are resentments waiting to happen, right, And you can put expectations on things. And I think what my expectations were from when I started to when it ended were very different. But I don't think it was a failure because I think, you know, I think that's failure is a strong word.

Sure, right, Yeah, I'm I'm not as rich as I would like to do, right, But I'm happier than I thought I did.

Well, yeah, and if you were, Yeah, And happiness has nothing to do with like how much money you have.

No, not at all, not at all, you know.

I mean it's nice, you know, like not having to worry about paying the bill. Ever, it's fantastic.

I'm sure that would be lovely, but.

I would spend it on some crap I didn't need anyway.

I don't think Hayden failed. I don't think Hayden thinks Hayden failed. And yet as we talk, I keep trying to figure out how it could still happen for Hayden. I'm trained to think in those terms, even as we talk about how small minded it is to think in those terms. You know, I want to fix it, but I can't fix it because it's not broken.

I've had some opportunities, Dave, I've pat you know. I had the executive producer of the Voice called me and say, hey, you know, I became friends with a guy named Jeremy Spun who is pretty high up with the show, The Voice, and he's reached out to me and I sent him a couple of videos of me singing, and the executive producer of the Voice was like, hey, you can get through all the roundings. We'll push you into the TV

Hayden doesn't have the music career he thought he would have. What he has instead is a life.

I'm coming up to almost eleven years of being sober at the end of this month. So I think through all of that and seeing what I have now and just by the grace of God being sober. I think for some of it, it's like for me, I look back and go, you know, I don't know, like I might not have made it through being an artist. I don't think I ever wanted the risk going back and doing that because when you really have sobriety, like nothing really comes in front of that because you know how

Hayden II do. He survived nearly being famous, he survived the shame of coming home. He's made his impact, and he's happy. And that's good because it's impossible not to root for the guy. In the meantime, I've done a little more digging on Sudden Impact. I have found one article about them, and it's not even an article. It's a stub of an article from a local Virginia newspaper's