The story · 2 of 3 · 1995
Why aren't you doing this live?
The impolite question that wired fifteen nightclubs to the web.
In 1995, Andrew Rasiej, who at the time owned Irving Plaza, hired me as registration admin for the first New York Music Festival.
Just the guy processing badges, assigned to a desk in the office of a chain-smoking music director with a temper. I was about ready to quit when someone invited me to the first meeting about the festival's website.
Somewhere in that meeting I asked the question that changed my life: "Why aren't you doing this live?"
Michael Dorf looked at me. "You know how to do that?"
"No. But we're in Manhattan, the new media capital of the world."
"If you can make it happen, go for it."
So I went and made it happen. Zero budget. I recruited a team of forty volunteers and partners: engineers, artists, people I found because in 1995 Manhattan, if you asked loudly enough, the people who could do impossible things showed up. We wired fifteen nightclubs to the World Wide Web and put a live, multi-venue music festival on the internet, the web's first. The New York Times wrote it up before opening night. Time covered it. And MTV News sent cameras, which found me in "Web Central" on the first night, mid-crisis, troubleshooting the network.
Careers launched off that week, deservedly. It took a lot of people to make it work. For a season after, I was a minor prince of the New York new media scene, because everyone wanted to build something with the person who had just wired Manhattan. I did a trial run with Adeo Ressi at his first web agency, since I could recognize a mover when I met one. Then Apple called, and I had to choose.
I chose Apple. That is the next chapter.
Nobody in that room was waiting for the registration admin to change the plan. I asked anyway.