Write An Old Friend

I was on all three of the Wilmington music anthology releases from Plus Records, and I don’t regret it.  Brad Thomas gave a lot of us our first chances to be on CDs, and the monetary compensation arrangements were made perfectly clear.  Nobody held a gun to anyone’s head to force them to contribute their talents to those records, and I, at least, was sober when I agreed to participate in those projects.

Furthermore, Brad shared whatever resources he obtained for those projects broadly and generously.  He bought a lot of beers for a lot of people and arranged bookings for lots of area players at Burrito Bob’s, Water Street Restaurant and the IceHouse.  He brought me onboard to write for the Burrito Bob’s website, which got me online for the first time.

Not even Wilmington musicians are dumb enough to have ever thought that those recordings were being done strictly for the charitable cause, Habitat For Humanity, and Brad never tried to tell anyone anything except that one dollar from every CD sold was going to them.  I think the finances became a bit complex, what with Burrito Bob’s advancing some funds against anticipated CD sales and, later, some truly questionable expenses related to recordings and release parties being billed directly to Habitat For Humanity, but I don’t think that anyone was misled about the portion of CD sales proceeds that was earmarked for donation, and I don’t think there was any hanky panky with that portion actually being donated.

No, the musicians just tried to label it a charity project so that they could posture about their selflessness while raising hell about me reviewing Ladies of the Cape Fear as an album that is difficult to listen to, even though my verbiage made it absolutely clear that the difficulty had nothing to do with the musicians.  I suspect that Brad Thomas helped some of the musicians who recognized his superior vocabulary and energy come up with the particular spin they put on that review in order to cover his ass, because my criticisms were of his marketing decisions, and that’s the first bad thing I’ve got to say about him.  He never ripped me off or hustled me into doing anything that I regretted or felt was inequitable.  A few paragraphs down, this essay will let us know whether he ever misled me or not.  As of this writing, I have no clear evidence that he did.

A lot of the clamor that eventually built up against him was instigated behind the scenes by people who saw him getting some accolades and some major positioning boosts in the Wilmington arts community’s favorite game, which is called “Sucking Up” for putting together local music projects, media events and warm, fuzzy alliances with community causes, and they wanted those accolades and “Sucking Up” boosts for themselves.  Instead of coming up with their own projects and causes, which would have required energy and originality they didn’t and don’t possess, they maligned Brad, helped to run him out of town (I gather that he would have run himself out of town without any outside help if he’d been left to his own devices, but that’s hearsay and not the point of this article) and then proclaimed themselves rightful heirs to the throne of whatever fanciful shitheap it is that the “Sucking Up” players envision.

Common belief is that Brad was a con man and a hustler.  He acted kind of like a con man, but try to list the rewards a good old rational con man would get out of being Brad Thomas in Wilmington and you’ll come up with a virtually empty page.  He got some records that won’t sell in significant quantities.  He got some master recordings of some pretty good musicians and songwriters, but he was the sound tech for most of those recording sessions, and the results are not worth much, because Brad as an engineer had the uncanny ability of getting feedback out of just about anything …  

WHEHEHHEHIEIEIEI!!!!!

“Goddamit, Brad, what the hell was that?  I’ll be deaf for a week!”

“Hang on, I need to test the cables and set up some focus groups and drink three more Buds over it.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES PASS

“Okay, I think we’ve got the problem solved.  It was a flea farting in the Burrito Bob’s industrial, triple-insulated refrigerator back in the kitchen 200 feet from the microphone, and you know how those things are known as the sound engineer’s nightmare …”

His sound work may have improved since then.  Anyway, it seems to me that if Brad was a con man, he must not have been a very good one.  Either that, or points in the game of “Sucking Up” were worth a lot to him.  You see, when you’re winning that game, more people suck up to you than you have to suck up to, and I think Brad was probably winning that game for awhile.  I don’t play it, so I'm not all that sure.  I do know that as of this writing, some of the Wilmington musicians who tried to work with him are pursuing legal action against him, but I don’t know anything about their specific cases.  As I hope I made clear above, I don’t have any such complaints about the man myself.

There was, however, one strange incident in my interaction with him.  Because I was on all three Plus Records Wilmington music anthologies and am as vain as any other musician, I became curious about how Internet search engines were handling that company and its products.  Oddly, there was no way to find Plus Records through online search tools.  Continuing the experiment, I looked for Brad himself, and he, too, was an online enigma.  The next day, while wandering the streets of downtown Wilmington, as is my habit, I went to the library and looked back through several years’ editions of the city directory.  Still no Brad. 

Well, I concluded that one would really have to try to achieve this degree of anonymity, and so I wondered who Brad was hiding from and why.  I asked him about one day when he and Gary Allen stopped by my house and Brad and I were drunk, and Brad assured me that he wasn’t hiding from anyone and that he planned to register Plus Records with the search engines as soon as the website he’d had up for several months was up to his standards.  Okay, I believe he’s not hiding from anyone, and I ran across his current e-mail address recently.  It’s bradthom@mediaone.net.  Write him.  I'm sure he won’t change his address or disappear or hide or anything, and that he’ll be glad to hear from you.