7: Get A Leg Up

There's a song from the mid nineties that I keep coming back to. It's called Everything Falls Apart from a band called Dog's Eye View.

Fall then Against the Shadow Food.

In fact, it's about being young and frustrated and a little bit self destructive, which I for sure was at the time. It came out in nineteen ninety five, right when Sudden Impacts relationship with Michael Bivens was falling apart, and its lyrics, whether or not the writer knew it at the time, are ripped from real life. Dog's Eye View was a band started by a guy named Peter Stewart. Peter had always wanted to be a rock star, to have a song on the radio, to have a video

That will make me a whole person.

And as Everything Falls Apart began to take off that wish like it was just about to come true. He remembers a moment in Paris during a European tour when he heard what he had always dreamed of hearing.

So We're playing four nights there and maybe night two. You know this is pre international cell phone, maybe night two. I go down and there's a payphone downstairs, and I'm told that my manager wants to talk to me.

Dog's eye View had toured with Counting Crows the year Counting Crows blew up. Adam Duritz even wore a Dog's Eye View T shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone. But what Peter wanted for himself to have a video on the air on MTV had remained just out of reach.

And so do do do?

Do?

Do? Do?

Call him up long distance and he says, I have great news. MTV added you. You're in the buzz bin. They're playing it six times, sixteen times a week. I remember this clear as day.

Right.

The video for Everything Falls Apart didn't just get added to MTV's rotation. It got added to the buzz a thing MTV did from nineteen eighty seven until it stopped playing music videos. The buzzbind was a seal of approval from the network, like a verified blue check mark that said this is an artist to keep your eye on. Other buzzband artists from around this time were Dave Matthews, band Stone Temple, pilots, counting crows themselves. Dog's eye View

Right? Yeah? Was it?

That was like there was no moment of jubilation. There was no there wasn't like there was no arrival. It was fucking devastating because it was like, I need more, like that's not that's not enough.

I'm going to talk to Peter Stewart about the Dog's Eye View experience, what was good, what fell apart, and where he is now, and I will continue on my quest to track down all of Sudden Impact, a group for whom everything fell apart before it even had a chance to come together. This is Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project. So here is where we stand.

That meant I could too.

Peter had dreams of stardom, he had plans, he had persistence. But I think what I really connected to about him, what really inspired me, was his ambition.

I'm in awe of people who just decid.

Guide what they want from life, no matter how unrealistic or improbable, and don't let anything stop them from getting it. I think it's why I'm attracted to the sudden Impact story. Honestly, if I were those guys, I would have thrown in the towel three names ago.

They kept pushing, and I admire that. So did Peter.

Peter got into music with a head full esteem, but it was what was on his head that might have made the difference.

This is where my entire life turns on Jewish hair.

Later in this episode you will learn how the sensible Long Island buzz cut of Peter Stewart met the infamous San Francisco hair extravaganza of Counting Crows Adam Duritz and changed his life forever. But before that chance meeting with a famous quoth, Peter was figuring himself out. He was just out of Northwestern University, playing music, living in a

I think we were either called the gravity Beavers at that point or Monster, both terrible names for what we were doing. Monster is a bad name in that I think people think you're going to show up and be heavy, and then you show up with an acoustic guitar and and you know, it's sort of you look even less cool.

Chic that's a really cold option. That's a really cold thing to do.

But you needed that kind of gumption if you were going to make it in the early nineties, and as we know from sudd An impact, if the right person sees the right poster, this guy's the limit. After a couple of years on his grind in Chicago, he determined that he was ready for the big time. He packed up and moved to New York with a pretty sweet opportunity right off the bat.

I'd been talking to this woman at a record company called Imago for months and she was, you know, yeah, come to New York.

I'll get you a gig. Come to New York. I'll get you a gig.

And she kept saying, you know, every every Tuesday. I think it, well, I don't know if it's Monday or Tuesday. Every xt day of the week. There's this guy named Jeff Buckley. He plays at this place called Shane. I'll get you a gig. Play before him. You'll see, you know, you'll play to tons of people. He's the thing in New York right now, right, I've never heard Jeff Buckley at this point. Great, so I literally moved to New York and she gives me this gig at Shane, and I am, this is it right?

This is one of many? This is it? That we're not it?

But I get there and my first night there, I go down to Shnee. This is my big gig and it's literally Shane who ran Shane, and like someone making coffee and a person because for the first week ever, Jeff's run has ended. Jeff had finished, he'd finished a big finale the week before. He's done with Shane, and he's moved on to greener pastors and off to make Grace. So my first big gig was literally like thud.

Kiss that is last Goodbye from the classic album Grace that Jeff Buckley had just left Shane to make. And that voice is why Jeff Buckley influenced a whole generation of singer songwriters, including Peter Stewart. We'll come back to Jeff Buckley a bit later in the show, but for now, like me in New York in the mid nineties, Peter is tempting to pay the bill. He's getting some stage time where he can, and what happens next is a real ride.

A friend of mine called me and asked me to open for a band, an Irish band called The Fat Lady Sayings, And so I went down I can't even remember where. It was, some tiny club and I went down to open for them, and it was fine and they were cool, but they were taking five to ten minutes between every song to tune their guitars and like

Can you do that?

I was like, yeah, absolutely, So I went up and did that for them, and at the end of that show, they were like, look, we're going off on this two month tour of the state. We could use a roadie. You can open gigs for us if you do it.

How about it? Yes? Absolutely.

The band and the sound guy and Peter tour the States. Seven people, four of them chainsmokers, one van. The tour is not boring.

They were sleeping on people's floors in Boston. They were sleeping on floors of some people who are running guns for the IRA, so there was a lot of weaponry around.

Terrific.

We came back to New York where they played Cafe Wah as an Irish band opening for a funk band on Funk Night, which was not great. The singer broke his arm skiing in the middle of the tour, after we'd had to send the road the sound guy home because he had a mental break, full psychotic episode. Then the singer broke his arm and I had to play guitar for them.

It was a very exciting tour, but through.

All of it, Peter is listening to a cause that of a record that hasn't been released yet.

I had had an advanced copy of the first Counting Crows record, August and Everything after someone a friend of mine who worked at Gefen, had given me a cassette and I was obsessed with it. I loved it, and it was before it had come out. I was just it killed me right. It was right in my vein of what I like to do and I like to hear. And so in the middle of this Fat Lady Singhs

Peter is a big Counting Crows fan at this point, he's dying to share a bill with them, So, like Todd and Allen of Sudden Impact, with a dream in their hearts and a poster in their hands, he takes a chance.

I said, look, I know there are two other opening acts I need to play on this gig. I love this fucking band. Let me play on this gig. And someone relented and said, you can play literally at seven o'clock when the door's open, doors open, you play fifteen minutes.

So great.

I'm on the keg fifteen minutes of stage time at seven pm, before anyone's even left their homes to come to the venue, while the bartender is still cutting up limes. But it's enough to give him a little swagger when he has that important interaction that hinges on Jewish hair.

So before the show, we're up in the dressing room. Since just sort of one communal dressing room and Counting Crows are not known at this point, there's been no radio play, there's nothing. They're just building up and I see Adam from across the room, and I walked up to him and I said, hey, how are you doing. I'm the opening act, right, which is way better than saying like I'm a big fan. So I said, hey, I'm the opening act.

My name is Peter.

He's like, oh, hey, great, great, nice to meet. I was like, listen, I've always wanted dreadlocks. How long did it take you to grow those? He was like about like three hours.

Man. I was like, what do you mean.

He's like, it's a weave, it's it's I was like, all my life I could have had dreadlocks if I just like spent money.

Peter and Adam Durrettz get friendly. They exchanged phone numbers, and because this is a time in history when you would talk on the phone, they do.

And a few weeks later they were coming to maybe a month later, I'm not sure how long. They were coming to New York to play a gig at Wetlands. The night before they played Saturday Night Live, and somehow I was you know, I was pushy and doing a lot of finaggling. So I basically said, hey, I have a band, can we open for you at Wetlands?

It's like, you're sure open for us at Wetlands. That'd be great. And I think what it may have even been worse than that.

I think there was someone opening for them, and then they played, and then we closed for them at Wetlands, right, so after everybody left, we started playing.

But again it was one of those things like I just want to be in the game.

A few days later, Peter's phone rings, and again, because this is a time when people talk on their phones, Peter picks up.

Adam called me or his manager called someone did and said, look, we had an opening act for two weeks. You know, we're going off on the Northeast tour. We had an opening act. He just dropped out. Can you do two weeks of touring with us solo? It's like, yeah, yes,

It just changed, right, It immediately. You know.

I was on tour with them, and it went from like playing the Wetlands to playing a bigger place to the small place you're still booked in is packed and everyone like, all of a sudden, you could feel this thing rolling.

It's very rare.

That a band has like a meteoric rise like the Crows had.

And I rode that. I rode that whole thing. You know.

It was like they're on the cover of Rolling Stone, They're on cover of Spin, They're on you know, all these things they're doing, like these TV shows, and I got to be along.

For all of it, right, and just like yeah, yeah, And they're not just on the cover of Rolling Stone. Adam Durretz is on the cover of Rolling Stone in a Dog's Eye view T shirt.

Yes, which again goes to how annoyingly uh in it?

For myself I was.

I mean, I was just constantly pushing, like which I think you have to do to some degree. But it's like I'm the guy going, oh, well, what you need is for me to come on the road and roady for you and open for you, right, and and Adam's about to go do the you know, his first ever like magazine cover shoot, and I'm like, so, so you're gonna wear my shirt?

Right?

Can you please wear my shirt? Well?

It worked, it did, but it's it's you know, okay, sure, yeah, it's a little cringey in retrospect. But as we've learned by now, even the least probable, even the wildest kind of ambition, can pay off. Peter Stewart has found himself in the right place at the right time, and that's because he's made the decision to be everywhere. Roadying for bands and playing for empty rooms brought him luck, but

So I set an alarm for four AM.

And when that alarm clock screamed at me that morning, those tall red digital letters spelling out four too, my eyes burning and my body horizontal and cozy, I said.

What am I doing? I'm twenty seven, I have a job.

It's time for me to put aside childish things like showing up and trying to be a VJ for a network who's demographic I aged out of a month ago. Who does this? How foolish? Go back to sleep and then go to work like a man. I turned off the alarm. I blinked a heavy, sleepy blink, and then another longer one, a third blink, and I would have gone back to sleep. My eyes would have just stayed closed until it was time to go to my regular job, and I would have gone about the business of a

We were the same size.

I got to practice Awards show podium banter on Live TV with Pauli Shore.

I think I made a biodome jo.

Kathy Griffin did a challenge where she was a different kind of difficult interview for each of us. We had to run across the street to the Virgin Megastore and grab our three favorite albums and defend them.

Mine were the first Benfolds five record, day, Las Souls.

Three Feet High in Rising, and Tommy Keene's songs from the film Perfect Now. It was obvious seeing Jesse Camp, this tall, beautiful, eighteen year old weirdo, that he was gonna win. He was a character, and that took the pressure off of me. I relaxed, I enjoyed myself. I bantered with Kurt Loder. I sasked him back when he said he hated Paul McCartney in Wings? How can you hate Paul McCartney in Wings? And the voters voted and I lost, And I said, Dave, have your emotions about

So I guess the moral here is say yes, get.

Up early for that stupid audition, Print up your poster, even if there's nothing for that poster to promote. Ask a famous friend to wear your T shirt, make a T shirt, take a chance.

Success often really does.

Come down to being in the right place at the right time, and there will never be a right time for your right place to be bad. So Peter Stewart and Dog's Eye View are on tour with Counting Crows, the band that is becoming the biggest band in America, and the buzz is growing for Dog's Eye View as well. What were you hoping? Was it fame that excited you. Was it connection with an audience that excited you? What about your music, like, what was the impact you were hoping to make.

Well, it's complicated, right, and I've had a lot of time to think about it, so I'm not sure. At the time, it was a combination of a couple things, right, So in it, in the roots of it, it started with a combination of I was incredibly depressed, very lonely teenage boy, right, and I picked up the guitar. And the first thing that happened to me musically in a lot of ways was you know, my dad had died when I was really young. I had all this stuff

It and it moved me so deeply.

So part of it was wanting to participate in that, right, wanting to be moved by music, and wanting to move people and wanting to you know, explore that. And part of it was you know, sort of self therapy. Right, write sad songs about sad things I'm feeling, and I feel like less sad and if anyone, if it communicates with anyone, great.

That's mixed almost fifty to fifty with.

Being around at the inception of MTV, right and and I wish that this was less the case right for coolness. But part of it was the Wanted Dead or Alive music video by Bonchovi.

Right.

I was, you know, sitting in my room. I'm you know, I'm in high school or junior higher high school, and there are all these shots of like, you know, like guys getting into like limos and guys getting into planes and guys getting girls, and you know, I've seen a million faces and I've rocked them all. It's like, fuck yeah, fuck yes, that's what I want.

Right.

So, so it's this weird combination of those two things. And on the darker side, which comes out, you know, sort of proves itself later, you know. So much of it was the chase, like I just want to get a record out, I just want people to hear me. I just want that thing. But there was some internal

Skin and happy dog's eye view gets to play in bigger and bigger venues. Peter sees okay, maybe not a million faces, but certainly into the thousands of faces, and he rocks most of them softly. But most importantly, he's selling his homemade cassettes at his merch table and people are buying. He attracts the attention of Columbia Records, who fly him to New York to meet the big wigs.

I literally the next week went to Columbia Records, and it was sort of like all the dreams.

You would have of like, you know, Dylan or you know whoever.

I went into a conference room at Columbia Records with Donnie Yner, the president of the Wibel and my manager at the time, Marty Diamond, and this guy Mitchell Cohen, and okay, play a few songs in the least acoustically friendly environment you've ever been in. Right, it's a fucking conference room that's deadened, and it's like you play guitar and goes yeah yeah.

And totally adiseptic and clean and floresca and just just nothing. But you know, I remember playing the song.

And just sort of like walking up a chair onto the table and playing it above them, and I remember going, oh, you know, I like this kid, I like this, And you know, a.

Couple days later it was they're going to offer you a deal.

The band records the album Happy Nowhere, which contains the single Everything Falls Apart and honestly about a half a dozen more bangers. But for a long time, Happy Nowhere sits on a shelf, waiting to be released and waiting some more. As we know by now, that happens a lot. Sometimes those albums never stop waiting. This feels like something Pixar should explore, and then a very strange gig changes everything.

The record was either going to come out in ninety five or ninety six, right late late ninety five or ninety six, and it was unclear what was going to happen, and it wasn't necessarily you know, no one necessarily heard a big hit on it, and it wasn't necessarily a priority at Columbia. And I had a very weird gig come up, which I got asked, and this is before we were assigned, Yeah, I mean before we were the records out.

There's no way people really knew about.

Us, right, So someone reached out to me and said that Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, his son is graduating from college and really wants you to play at his graduation. First of all, I know that they wanted Soul Coughing to play, or they wanted Cracker to play, or they wanted someone to play, and their dads had gone down the list to who's an artist who we can get to play? Right, There's no way.

It's a dual graduation party, Michael eisen Son and the son of Mickey Schuloff, who at the time was the president of Sony, which owned Columbia Records. It is a very weird and suddenly a very important gig.

And then we set up and play and it's among the worst gigs you can play.

Right.

It is both of those families in a restaurant, an Italian restaurant, both of those extended families and grandparents and uncles and aunts and some teenagers, you know, and the kids graduating from college. And the first thing that happens we step on stage and it's just fucking squealing feedback, and you will just watch a bunch of old people eating, just grimace. And then we play some folk songs for these kids on their college graduation because their parents got

I don't know. I'm not that kind of guy. I don't have songs to jam on.

I don't and we don't have another guitar, so it wouldn't be appropriate, right, So I turned that down. And then they asked us to play a second set, and we do and some kids are like, you know, parents were like, oh, dance, dance, and we're like, play the most upbeat, sad folk song you can play.

Thanks probably to an open bar, the gig is a success and Michael Eisner intervenes on Peter's behalf.

And Michael Eisner goes, so, when is your record coming out? And I said, you know, I don't know. It might be it might be October, it might be next year. We're not sure. And he goes, no, It's coming out in October, Mickey October, and literally, like they get into this weird power play about when Sony's gonna put out the record, and the next day it got slated for October.

You know what happens next, The video gets added to MTV's buzz bind, it gets played sixteen times a week, and the thing that Peter thought would fix him doesn't. That is very much in keeping with the character of the lyrics, you know, which I think at the time like listening to it. So if that if the album came out in ninety five, I would have been twenty four, and I was in New York and you know, sad and lonely and self destructive and self hating and all

That record continued to grow and continued to be a hit single, but there was a there was definitely you know. Part of the reason I mentioned that the ascendancy of the Crows, right and that thing, is that that just never happened for us.

Right, We by by by all.

Accounts right as successful, like more successful than you could really hope to be.

Right.

You play a lot of shows, you get a record deal, you have a hit single, like that's that's dreams, right. Thirteen year old me is like yes, right, but there was a weird thing when it didn't progress to the next level, right, it didn't. You know, we went on Letterman and the next day was a day and there was this sort of slow realization that it was just it had gone really well and gone up and was blowing up and things are great and it's a hit record and now go do another one.

And how are like, are you psychologically do you have the self knowledge to know that this is not this is not feeding you the way that you were hoping that it would.

There was a lot of me trying to push it. I'd done so much to push.

It uphill, right of like let me be Erodi, let me wear my shirt, let me do this. You know, push, push, push, and at a certain point you can't individually push the machinery anymore.

Right, So it got to a.

Point where you know, I would just I mean I had to, you know, really make amends to my manager years later because I realized, like I would just call him twenty times a day and going have you done this?

Have you done this? Have you done this have you called this person?

And so I spent a lot of time worrying about trying to push it forward and zero time enjoying the experience of it, the process of it. It didn't fix me, so it had to get bigger to fix me. Like I knew then, I knew that if the record sold a million records or we had a second hit, then you know, and I was playing bigger venues, then I would feel better.

This speaks to a thing I've been thinking about a lot lately. Dreams are good for you. They can give your life purpose, direction, discipline. But the essential problem with dreams is that they don't make sense.

When you set a big goal.

You know, when there's like a dream you have for yourself, you imagine it happening, but it is happening to some future version of you who's like something has been fixed in between the dreaming and the event, and ultimately, you know, I've achieved a few of the goals that I hope to achieve, and it's like that just happens to you.

It just happens to the dumb version of you who was there before.

Yeah, it happens to the version of you that happened yesterday and you don't feel any different.

Yeah, it's kind of incredible that Peter Stewart can write those lyrics I got what I wanted and now my life is just boring, and then be surprised when they end up being exactly true to his life. Self knowledge is a process. But Dog's Eye Views album Happy Nowhere stalls after everything falls apart as it's run on the charts. They don't even make a second video from that album, but they do go back and record a second album, Daisy.

So that record there.

Was a combination of things, right, first thing was that they weren't promoting it. Second, you know, it didn't have an obvious hit on it. Third, the initial the launch for that record was, you know, we were going to go tour Southeast Asia and Australia and New Zealand with Counting Crows, and like a week before, like that's the week before the record comes out, and a week before the tour, they were like, we're not going to do the tour, and they just canceled the tour. So we

Right, and play.

And so we flew back and playing some radio station show for some radio station that wasn't playing us anymore. And it was the first time, one of the only times, but I got completely blackout drunk on stage. I was so pissed off to be there and so done with it. And I found out the next day that we that we did a three song encore that I had no memory of. I'd been on stage playing in a blackout. It's a little scary, but it's also a little rock

Like that big Eddie Vetter stage move. The second album, Daisy does not quite land. Columbia Records drops him. Peter's on his own again.

Matchbox twenty would take me out on a tour, playing second stages on their arena tour, like on their Amphitheater, right, So I would drive the eight hour Hump alone in a rental car and then play it two in the afternoon on the second stage and then watch my friends play, you know, the lights would go down and people and I watched them play and I'd think, I'm not this is not working, man. I'm not growing. I'm not like, I'm not developing as a human. I'm seeing the same places over and over.

I was drinking more because I was miserable.

Peter gets sober and he likes it. He begins to get work as a sober companion for actors who were trying not to relapse on set. He gets to travel the world, and his cover story is that he's the actor's assistant.

I'm the assistant who in the person says, hey, get me a cup of coffee.

I go.

You can get your cup of coffee, get your own coffee. So when a director turned to me one day, he was like, you're the worst assistant I've ever seen.

Something else is going on here.

In the meantime, Peter has recorded an album under his own name, and the independent label he signed to wants him to go off on tour the way that he had been driving himself from town to town. But he's over that by now, so that album kind of fizzles. And it's a shame that Peter stewart solo album, Propeller is really good. It's on streaming services.

Go listen. He'll get two millions of a penny.

And the final indignity of my interface with the music business was literally so I was I had a publishing deal at the time, and the publishing deal owed me some money, and I didn't have a lot of money left. And the label had said, hey, you know what, We're going to put the record out, but we're just going

Don't pay you.

So I had to get the record company to print a box of CDs and go put one at Amiba Records so that it was in a store that I could get paid. And I know they printed, you know, maybe I don't know, a couple hundred CDs and I have most.

Of them in my garage.

But it was just so like on the way out the door, it was like, here's the thing you gotta do. You gotta beg for them to print a CD so you can get paid.

What had begun with high hopes and ambition ended with an errand and that was that for music as a profession. Peter went to graduate school to get his masters in clinical psychology. He worked in in patient substance abuse treatment for a few years and now he's in private practice as a therapist in Austin, Texas.

Does that fill you in the way that you were hoping music? Would? You know? Yes? But other things do too.

Right, if I was looking just to this job for fulfillment, it wouldn't be enough, you know. And similarly, you know, if I could go way back and have a life with other things in it when I was making music, maybe I would have been more fulfilled by music, right, But because all chips were in on how my record was doing on any given day, there was no fulfillment.

Or other things.

As with a lot of people who decide to get sober, Peter's decision was motivated by a moment of clarity. And honestly, Peter's moment of clarity it's pretty fucking glamorous.

You didn't ask this, but I'll answer it just for fun. I had a moment like part of my you know, moment of clarity, as it were, of deciding to get sober, thinking I might need to get sober. I was in Las Vegas for a wedding. My girlfriend at the time had just dumped me, and I was in Las Vegas on a boat on Lake Mead or whatever it's called lake whatever, the fake lake is out there sitting on the roof of the boat, tripping on ecstasy, and I had this, you know, I was on ecstasy sitting in the boat.

I felt amazing.

Everything was great, and my friend, who had a bunch of drugs with him, was swimming from the one boat to the other boat, and I knew he was bringing more drugs. And as I was to come down from the ecstasy. I started thinking, you know what, there's not enough ecstasy in the world to keep me feeling the way I'm feeling. And there's not enough there aren't enough women in the world or relationships in the world to keep me happy, and there's not enough money in the world.

What happens? Then?

Am I willing to make that deal? And I didn't know that was going to happen. But if i'm what if? I what if it happens? Am I willing to make that deal? And I just had it.

I was right. I was like, you know what, fuck it?

If it's that, if I have to be If contentment and happiness means I never write another song, I'll take it because I can't.

I'm so fucking miserable that I can't do that.

And as it turned out, I feel like I wrote my best songs after I got sober. But in a way, later as as I've eased out of it. You know, I've written probably three songs in the last fifteen years because I don't have There's just nothing I want to I'm not in that pain, I'm not.

In that turmoil.

The day after I spoke with Peter, he emailed me, and I'm just going to read his email out loud. I woke up with a memory of something that I wished i'd said on the podcast. Don't know if you can add more later. Basic gist was this realization I had. And let's say two thousand and seven or so, I was doing a sober companion gig in Australia and I was running on a hotel treadmill, looking at the Sydney

It's funny to think about.

What we're sure we want at the time and how lucky we turn out to be not to get it. So I have some leads on the guys from Sudden Impact. Aside from Dave Smith, I have an interview request out to Michael Bivens. I am inching closer to finding out what happened to those guys. But as that story comes together, the other bigger mystery still eludes me. Why does this story have meaning for me? Why can't I stop thinking about it? As I often do when I'm in need

We grew up with records that stayed on the charts years, but I mean like kids that went once yeah.

And now is it a volume game?

Is it just there's so much stuff? It is?

It's that there's so much stuff. And then it's also you buy something or no, actually you don't anymore?

If you stream.

Something, yeah, like it was, you know, you saved up a little bit of money and you bought the cassette or the CD, and then it was there to remind you that you had it, and you could listen to it right and play it in your car, and then that reminds your friend, Oh I got to pick I gotta get that too, And then that lasts like so now, even records that I that I stream when they come out and love the next day, I've completely forgotten and there's nothing to remind me.

It's just stuff to keep me swimming forward. A simple prop to occupy your time, simple to occupy my time.

You know, we've we've talked about sudden Impact for eighteen years now, right, and that's the thing that didn't happen, that stayed in our minds well.

But there was enough of a repeater that of Motown, Philly that initially it was like what was that at the end, Like oh, wait, that thing's coming up at the end, to like oh I can't wait for that thing to come out of the end. Yeah, the repetition of the video engaged your imagination, and I think that seared it into our brain forever.

And then in addition to that, it never being fulfilled.

Yeah, the mystery of it never been satisfied.

I don't have a good memory, but I know I'll remember that moment the rest of my life from that video, and I will never not take a moment to think about it. Even if you get closure, whatever the ending is, we know that that record didn't come out. It didn't there was no music video to follow that up, there was no additional move to the point point ended it. And thus it's just a prime example of ambition and potential. And I don't think it has a negative valance on it.

There, Scott has said a word that really resonates with me, a word that gets right to the point of what I'm trying to say here.

That word just keeps on coming to mind. Audacious. Wouldn't want to be audacious like that?

This is my moment of clarity. Audacity.

That is what this show is about, people taking bold action and seeing their lives change because of it. If VT Nicole Brown showed up at a hotel lobby in the middle of the night and sang in her idol's face, so did Hayden. Todd and Allen ran up on a celebrity and asked him to sign a poster for a group that barely existed.

Aaron Kane hit on someone's girlfriend.

Audacity is what connects all of the people I have spoken to so far. Karen Kilgareth got up on stage to do something that scared her to death. Peter Stewart struck up a conversation about here Damien Fahe spent two hundred dollars its structure. It's why I connect to the story of Sudden Impact. The things in my life that I'm proudest of my book Esquire getting up at four am to do something embarrassing that bought me a new life,

Let's put it in Counting Crowe's terms. Listen to this yeah.

Yeah, That yeah is from the very end of rain King. From Counting Crowe's debut album August and everything after that is the yeah of enthusiasm. Of confidence, of optimism. That is Adam Durrett saying I'm gonna be famous and I cannot wait.

That yeah is all of our best selves.

But too often we get weighed down by self doubt, by insecurity, by fear or vanity or shame, and we end up like this, yeah, Yeah, that is the yeah that ends counting crows a long December just three years later. All of life can be summed up by those two yeahs. It's easy to be a long December at this time in history, but the world needs you at a rain King.

Be rain King, Friends, I am getting the life lesson I.

Didn't even know I needed, and I'm getting it from Adam Duritz and Sudden Impact. Next time, I'm going to talk to a guy who joined Sudden Impact in their final form, the one that actually finally released music. And because I am going rain King from here on out, I'm going to track down one of the most famous faces in music via history, A guy who inspired a million swoons, and I know that because about four hundred thousand of them came from me.

Baby, Baby, you do not want to miss the next.

Episode of Waiting for Impact, a Dave Holmes passion project. This has been an exactly Right production written by me Dave Holmes, produced by Hannah Kyle Crichton, recorded, mixed and sound designed by Andrew Epen. Additional engineering and assembly by Analise Nelson. Music by Ben Wise, artwork by Garrett Ross. Executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer. Follow the show on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at exactly