almost almost famous
and how dave chappelle changed my career
It was a Monday night, and it was just shitting rain in LA.
I moved here to become a screenwriter. It was romantic, but hardly glamorous. Most days I’d bounce between coffee shops and working retail on Melrose, trying to make rent while cranking out spec scripts. Along the way, I fell into culture and music journalism, and spent my nights chasing weird gigs. Usually music. Always gonzo. Almost always for a zine or blog that’d be dead in a year. People seemed to dig that - my byline slipped into SPIN, Skinnie Magazine, LA Record. Small wins.
So when a friend said, “Comedy show?” I said, “Fuck it.”
Back then, Dave Chappelle had been MIA for years. So when he wandered onstage at The Comedy Store for an unannounced four-hour set, the place went feral. And we were in the front row. After, I stayed up all night writing a story, sent it to the Editor-in-Chief at LA Weekly, and (after he quadruple fact-checked what was a highly improbable story) somehow earned myself my first lede piece:
Watching the self-ostracized Chappelle rediscover the stage allows for a strangely candid look at a brilliant, yet jaded, man.
‘This is weird, right?’ Chappelle asks the front row. ‘You feel it too, right?’
Yeah, Dave, we all feel it. The same man who brought us Tyrone Biggums and ran out on a $50 million paycheck stopped by just to hang - a little out of the ordinary.”
That article really got my name out. But I never expected it to play out that way - especially since I shipped out to tinseltown to sling TV scripts - not cultural commentary.
In fact, I moved to LA with the Re:LAX pilot in hand.
Re:LAX was my first original TV show. The logline was “The Office meets Airplane.” It was a dry, character-driven sitcom based on the staff at LAX.
The pilot kicks off with the news: LAX was ranked the third worst airport in the country. We follow a timid, Prozac-popping, fear-of-flying General Manager into his office, where he receives an email putting him on notice.
The season arch continues with 10 episodes - each improving one aspect of the airport, from moving walkways to instituting a strict policy of racial profiling to expedite TSA.
Fortunately, mockumentaries were hot at the time, and Re:LAX earned me some street cred. And I used that momentum to spec for other shows.
Between screenwriting stints, I moonlit as a music journalist. And as the story goes, that’s where things picked up.
My first artist interview was with indie lo-fi revivalists, The Cribs. I showed up to The Standard Hotel, met their tour manager, and opted to interview the band by the pool. I felt like William Miller.
“‘We had a big stretch of time off,’ recounts Ross. ‘We were all together because we were friends, and we’d been hanging out. So, why don’t we get together and write some music, because that’s what you do when you’re friends, you know, people just jam.’”
^ That’s Cribs drummer Ross Jarman talking about how Johnny Marr from The Smith’s joined his band. It’s one of the more stoney-baloney quotes I’ve ever put in print.
I guess I had a knack for those type of artist profiles because the assignments quickly multiplied. I covered Dane Cook, Penguin Prison, Girl Talk, Johnny Knoxville - you name it. I interviewed OK Go at a coffee shop across from Amoeba Music.
‘What’s been so great about the explosion of possibilities on the Internet is that you really don’t need to stick to a form,’ explains [frontman Damian] Kulash. ‘We didn’t really even think of the backyard dancing video as a music video at first. It was just some crazy shit we made.’”
^ Props to me for capitalizing ‘Internet.’ Get it, girl.
That sort of artist engagement was cool, and led to a lot of new friends - one time I spent an hour chatting about potty training a puppy with Lil Jon (his, not mine).
Keeping it fun helped me write well, and writing well helped me earn a dozen or so print and online cover stories.
Pile the most serendipitous rainy day trip to The Comedy Store on top of those stats, and all of a sudden “Words by M.M. Zonoozy’ meant something.
And when you’re something, I guess people pay you to attend music festivals.
“We met on the first day of Coachella. It was your average wayfarer boy meets sun-kissed beach babe. She was wearing hot pink shorts, and so was I. For us, it was a total duh.”
^ Turning my Coachella review into a gonzo love-story added fuel to the post-Chappelle blogosphere fire, and earned me (and my friends) all access passes to all sorts of places where we really shouldn’t have had all access.
Hype escalated into a podcast, and later into a ‘docuseries’ TV concept. The series revolved around my coverage of artists and local music culture. The logline was “Anthony Bourdain meets Almost Famous.”
The show was called On Tour:
On Tour was optioned, and promptly shelved. Shit, that’s life.
Somewhere in that blur, my love for writing about media morphed into building for media. That’s how Bubbl happened - an interactive video thing I dreamed up that somehow snowballed into funding by Warner Bros. We got VC-backed, we got users, we got battle scars. And then, just as quickly, we got acquired.
After that, I took my curiosity into other people’s sandboxes. I was a Partner at BCG Digital Ventures, building new companies with the world’s biggest brands. Next, my dream job at Spotify running innovation - getting paid to live ten years in the future and design moonshot ideas for one of the most innovative companies in the history of, um, companies.
Now, I typically like wrapping up my stories with a cheeky little bow, but this one isn’t over. In fact, I’m back where it all started:
At a Dave Chappelle show.*
* I’m fucking with you