River Runs Red

While at Fifth Colvmn Records, I would make frequent trips from our "main office" in Washington, DC up to New York City to meet with Jared, the label General Manager and Chemlab head honcho as well as Brian McNelis, our indefatigable marketing consultant. Although Brian was based in California, he made trips to New York City semi-annually and we were happy to schedule meetings around him. Making this trip up from DC would be myself, and Zalman, of course, the leader, sometime sugar-daddy and enabler. Zalman was the logistics man for these trips. It would be Zalman's mode of transport, his timetable and inevitably his dime since the rest of us were not really earning enough of a salary to put together these NYC trips on a whim. In fact, I always admired the way Zalman would often piece together accomodations and other arrangements while in the car on the drive up. The first call would be to Brandy his travel agent. This guy must've been on call 24 hrs a day/7 days a week as it seemed Zalman never got Brandy's voicemail and was never disappointed. Perhaps this could be because Zalman had lots of money to play around with and was not exactly looking for a last minute deal only last minute options. While Zalman's financial situation began to change over the years (the subject of a future blog post) in the early days of FCR, Brandy's last minute fixes would lead us to suites not just hotels.

For the purposes of this post we found ourselves at the opulent and elegant Roger Smith Suites. Not someplace where you'd expect to find an Industrial Rock mogul and his "team" but we stunk up the joint anyway for a couple of days. We each, of course, had our own room and being that Zalman was the label owner, the suite I shared with Zalman was a little larger so that we could host the actual meetings for the 4 of us. This would've been the very early days of the label's history so I don't believe Todd was on board at this point. In fact, the last time the FCR staff was in New York together prior to this story, we witnessed one of our colleagues overdose on heroin. But with business to discuss, we plowed through a full day of marketing, operations, deal making, legal and financial talk. The label was just starting to become a real (albeit short-lived) business and most of our discussions were very basic.

After a full day of this and the appropriate drinking, dining and attending of gigs that followed, we prepared to return to Washington, DC the next morning. With all of us gathering in our suite to say goodbye and offer final thoughts we piled into the elevator to check out in the downstairs lobby. As we made our way to the street however, we noticed an inordinate amount of activity out on Lexington Avenue. In fact, a rather large crowd of people had gathered in a semi-circle around the building where the police had closed part of Lex. In the middle of this semi-circle was a large yellow shapeless tarp with a thick, viscous red river flowing slowly towards the curb. The tarp did not give away what it was covering but the crowd of people, the river of thick red liquid and the police detail gave it away. Some poor soul had evidently decided to end their life right there at the Roger Smith. I guess the service was a little short of exemplary. But the shock of this violent scene knocked our group a little silly especially considering the last time we had been together in NYC we also witnessed a dead body - at least this time it wasn't the dead body of a friend.
"Oh God " Jared hoarsely whispered.
"Shit", echoed Zalman with emphasis.
I'm pretty sure we were all thinking about Craig, our friend and co-worker who had od'd just 4 months prior in this same city, when we made sense of the carnage outside on the street in front of the Roger Smith. There was no easy way to say it nor any real need to bring it up as it was clear on the face of each us as we saw NYC's finest noting details of the scene and keeping curiosity seekers back behind the guardrails, that NYC seemed like a cruel and violent city from witnessing these two bloody and deadly acts taking place within months of each other. We exited the hotel each heading our own separate ways. Even though none of use knew the person who had flung themselves out a window of the hotel that morning it left an impression on each of us as if we had.