Outside the Jukebox

by Scott Bradlee

  “Fancy” contained all the elements that make a Postmodern Jukebox video so uniquely great: a strong performance, a clever arrangement twist that manipulates the context of the lyrics, and just a hint of playful irony. Iggy Azalea may have been maligned by some critics, but by no means was this a biting parody; we were simply taking the source material of the original and altering it to imagine how it would have sounded in a different historical period. In doing so, we drew parallels between the popular music of today and the music of the 1920s, as if to say that, when all’s said and done, not much has changed; there will always be songs about dancing, reveling in the night, and, well… looking fancy.

  As my subscriber base grew, I continued to expand the Dream Factory’s stable of singers even more. Miche Braden, the very singer who had inspired me to become a producer in the first place, made her debut on a New Orleans blues–style remake of the Guns n’ Roses song “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” In studying the lyrics, it had occurred to me that the ’80s classic fit the popular verse/refrain format of early folk and blues songs. That Miche’s Bessie Smith–like voice realizes this so stunningly and with such power on the track makes this video one of my all-time favorites.

  Another superstar vocalist joined the Postmodern Jukebox universe when Broadway star Morgan James recorded a soulful, Donny Hathaway–influenced version of Maroon 5’s “Maps” with us. Morgan already had a record deal, but her label wasn’t quite sure what to do with her since she kind of defied classification. She had the vocal chops of Céline Dion with the blues sensibility of Nina Simone, and from the first time she sang with Postmodern Jukebox, it was obvious that she was born to perform on stages worldwide. “Maps” was a vocal master class, a soulful demonstration of the wonders of a vocal instrument trained to perfection.

  The biggest viral smash of the Dream Factory that year, however, existed thanks to Kate Davis, an incredibly talented young vocalist and bassist I’d met when she auditioned for Sleep No More. Dressed in a patterned vintage frock, she was quiet and thoughtful, and her simple, beautiful rendition of the standard “If I Had You” left me speechless. She sang with the honesty of Billie Holiday, accompanying herself with only an upright bass. In the middle, she took a break from singing to play a yearning, lyrical bass solo. It was a masterful performance, one that showed a maturity and introspection well beyond her years.

  I had been searching high and low for just the right song to showcase her remarkable talents when, seemingly out of nowhere, it materialized: Meghan Trainor’s anthemic hit “All About That Bass,” which was climbing the Billboard charts at the time.

  The song’s title was a clever analogy celebrating body positivity, but in our video, the title took on a very literal meaning, with Kate meticulously plucking out the bass notes while singing the titular refrain:

  I’m all about that bass, ’bout that bass, no treble…

  I entered on piano with drummer Dave Tedeschi, and the song took on a second-line, New Orleans vibe. Kate’s crystal-clear voice coyly caressed the melody, and then, in the final third, she played a blazing-fast double-time upright bass solo that would make the jaw of even the most cynical redditor fall agape. When she finished, she just sort of smiled and blushed with satisfaction, and the Internet fell in love. In the weeks that followed, Kate gained tens of thousands of fans and was offered record deals left and right.

  Facing a surplus of creative hunger, I went on to launch a new humorous YouTube series, titled Saturday Morning Slow Jams, to complement the Postmodern Jukebox series. The idea was to recast popular animated TV show themes as ’90s R&B, using all the hallmarks of that style. For example, I cast my old Walmart orchestra-turned A Motown Tribute to Nickelback sideman Steve Ujfalussy in an open shirt, shades, and a gold chain as the oversexed EWI (short for “electronic wind instrument”) player Steve Sweat. Our first Slow Jam featured the hilariously gifted Karen Marie as a character she created named POW!GRL, a counterpart to Steve Sweat that satirized the “tough girl” image of many of the female rappers in the ’90s. Her take on the DuckTales theme was an instant hit with many memorable moments, not least at the end, when she engaged in an improvised and very sensual “duck, duck, goose” chant with Steve Sweat.

  Suffice it to say that life at the Dream Factory was never dull, frequently hilarious, and sometimes almost unbelievable.

  THE POWER OF ABSURDITY

  It was the week before Halloween in 2014 when the front desk of my apartment building called to tell me that a very large clown was downstairs, holding a sign with my name on it. I wasn’t concerned, which was probably a great relief for them. Personally, I find it hard to imagine there are many people a desk clerk might encounter who would be more unsettling than a giant, silent, bald-headed, sad clown with a golden crown, an old, beat-up suitcase, and a lantern.

  “That’s Puddles. Just send him up,” I said, nonchalantly.

  I had first encountered Puddles when I was working at Sleep No More and he was the after-show entertainment. One day I’d been informed I was to accompany him on piano—and that’s all I was told.

  Puddles was one part Andy Kaufman, one part Tom Jones. He started his set by stumbling through the crowd, using his lantern to light the way to the stage before literally crawling onto it. He was huge, nearly seven feet tall from the tip of his crown to the toes of his oversized shoes. Every pair of eyes in the place was on him as he dusted himself off and got behind the microphone, and then he did something brilliant: He stood there silently for nearly five minutes, nervously scanning the room and pretending he was trying to motivate himself to sing. The dramatic tension was unbelievable. When Puddles did finally sing, he unleashed a glorious baritone that filled the room, eliciting cheers from everyone. I had never seen anything like it.

  The set consisted of three songs, whose sheet music he presented to me in the form of crumpled pieces of paper fished out from his pocket. Throughout the performance he pulled various stereotypical clown props out of his suitcase, but he didn’t do any magic with them. Rather, he just used them to antagonize the band, at one point sticking a long plastic flower into the face of the saxophone player while he was trying to solo. On “Lonely Guy,” his grand finale, he threw tissues at the audience as he sang, ending on a big high note that resonated through the room. Then, as the audience went wild, he grabbed his suitcase and stormed off. It was perhaps the most entertaining fifteen-minute show I had ever witnessed. The ridiculousness of his act—paired with his utterly straight-faced delivery—was mesmerizing. He’d created an entire world around this character, and the more absurd his world grew, the more it drew in the audience.

  The real person behind the clown was Mike Geier, or Big Mike to his friends: an eternally friendly guy who in many ways was completely the opposite of his stage persona. As he sat backstage, wiping the makeup off his face after one of our Sleep No More shows, I approached and told him about my YouTube channel. As a veteran musician who had learned (as had I) the value of always keeping an eye out for new opportunities, he was intrigued.

  Eager to lock in his participation before he could give it more thought and potentially change his mind, I made a bold promise to him, declaring, “I know how to make Puddles into an Internet star.” If Big Mike doubted me for even a split second, he didn’t let it show, and we agreed to meet the next time he traveled to New York City. The song I’d picked to arrange for his debut was “Royals” by New Zealand singer/songwriter Lorde. It seemed almost too perfect: a middle-aged sad clown, wearing a lopsided gold crown on his bald head, singing a song about being an outsider and disdaining the conspicuous consumption of the “royals.”

  Since Robyn and Cristina were both approximately the same height, I placed them on either side of Puddles and instructed them to mostly just solemnly snap their fingers throughout the duration of the video. The height difference was a visual gag, but it was also to show just how big Puddles actually was, which elevated the already absurd absurdity of the scene. Puddles’ walk-on entrance
was probably the most challenging part to land. His hurried exit, on the other hand, was a no-brainer: Puddles is a clown with places to be.

  All we needed to do now was to get this video into the right hands and watch it spread from there. Releasing the video on Halloween, I billed Puddles as the “Sad Clown with the Golden Voice” and once again targeted the Reddit community, knowing how receptive it was to all things weird. From there, the video ripped across the Internet like wildfire. News blogs soon were picking it up left and right because of the Halloween/Stephen King connection. YouTube itself promoted the video as an example of a creative and unexpected cover. The view count soared, and Puddles became famous overnight.

  In some ways, Puddles was made for the modern Internet age. He’s a reflection of our loneliness and confusion in a world that’s come to be increasingly characterized by those emotions. Humans have never before lived in a time of such constant stimulus and abundance of choice, and part of me wonders if experiencing life as one big dopamine rush isn’t making us less happy instead of more so. In the end, aren’t we all just wandering through life with a suitcase and a lantern, searching for a place where we belong?

  TAKING THE PLUNGE

  The window is open now. We need to jump while we can. Otherwise, we die.”

  I frowned, perplexed, and uncertain what Jaron was getting at on the other end of the phone. He did have a flair for the dramatic.

  “That sounds serious,” I said. “What are we talking about, again?”

  Postmodern Jukebox was growing steadily in popularity, and I was enjoying the freedom of producing music from my home, with guest performers and friends constantly dropping by. Jaron, however, saw the signs that this could not last indefinitely. YouTube audiences are fickle, and he had seen too many artists skyrocket in popularity on the platform before falling even faster into obscurity. Crossing over into the “real world” was something that needed to happen soon if we wanted to create something enduring for years to come. That meant touring—and lots of it. It’s difficult to make the jump from online to IRL (“in real life”), and at that point, only a few YouTube acts, like Lindsey Stirling and Boyce Avenue, had done it successfully.

  The Internet, I was learning, is a place for growth, a medium where anyone with the right idea, some talent, and a lot of ambition can go from anonymous to beloved almost instantly. Indeed, it’s often the best place to launch your idea and pull in potential fans. However, the fact that it’s a medium on which free content is broadcast around the clock means that it’s also a place where the advantage of being an established incumbent is minimal. Put simply, everyone likes the shiny new toys.

  “We’ve got to make the jump from YouTube to the stage now, while we have the chance,” Jaron continued, dramatically. “Once you have the attention on you, the meter is running. And once that window closes, it doesn’t open back up.” Using no fewer than three analogies to explain the situation could only mean one thing: My salad days—that time when youth, enthusiasm, and idealism all combine into one exhilarating and unstoppable force—were officially over. The salad days don’t last forever, and neither does Internet fame. Quite simply, there are a host of new, exciting creative exploits happening all over the world at any given second, and the novelty of “the hot new thing” is doomed to wear off eventually. When that happens, there are only two paths forward: to give up or grow up.

  Let the growing pains commence.

  Paradoxically, the biggest hurdle we faced in moving our operation offline was convincing others that we were a legitimate act. There were a number of obstacles in that regard. One was the rotating cast; after expanding the group to incorporate a number of vocalists, it was even less clear to outsiders who was actually in our group and who was a special guest. The name was a problem, too: Scott Bradlee & Postmodern Jukebox sounded like a double bill. Even the living room setting came under scrutiny. “Why don’t you have a real music video backdrop?” asked one promoter.

  These were all understandable points of confusion, and it didn’t help our cause that, on top of all that, YouTube acts had a reputation for not drawing many real-life fans to shows. We had been working as live performers for many years, but we were outsiders in the touring circuit, with no track record or proof of concept. The promoters would need to experience us live to appreciate what it was we were pioneering.

  Fortunately, that crucial opportunity to prove ourselves materialized when YouTube invited us to perform alongside John Legend, Lindsey Stirling, and other notable acts at YouTube OnStage Live at the Kennedy Center. It was the break we so badly needed: a four-minute medley of Postmodern Jukebox remakes performed by our cast in front of a live audience, on a stage with full production quality and no expense spared.

  In addition to Robyn, Cristina, Ashley, and Drue, we also recruited a young singer I’d recently begun working with: Kiah Victoria, a twenty-year-old NYU student with an uncommonly rich and powerful alto voice. The producers of YouTube OnStage went wild for her, and so we selected her to kick off our performance with a stripped-down piano-and-vocal version of Macklemore’s “Same Love.” From there, I arranged a medley of some of the biggest current pop hits for us to funnel through various genres. Naturally, we lined up Tim’s Tambourine Guy character for the finale, though, come sound check, it became apparent that the producers didn’t share our enthusiasm for him:

  SHOW PRODUCER: (pointing to Tim) Can we have you in the area to the left of the piano?

  TIM: Okay… but there are no lights on that part of the stage.

  SHOW PRODUCER: Yes, I know.

  TIM: So you’re sure that’s where you want me?

  SHOW PRODUCER: Yes.

  Playing on Good Morning America was a surreal experience, but it still felt like performing to a camera, so not all that different from what we did in my living room. YouTube OnStage was a whole other story, and when we arrived for the first rehearsal, we all just kind of stood there, looking around with dumbfounded expressions on our faces and mouths agape. The theatre was cavernous, with lights and speaker columns and state-of-the-art projectors creating vast, ever-changing visuals behind us. We were nervous, but it helped that a few of us had family members coming to the show. At least with them there, we could perhaps try to pretend it was just a student recital instead of a four-minute make-or-break, once-in-a-lifetime dream gig.

  I remember looking out at four thousand people and hoping for the best, and then it all just kind of happened. Within an hour, the video was posted to YouTube, and we had the best sales pitch for a Postmodern Jukebox concert we could have asked for: a four-minute sample of our show, recorded live at the prestigious Kennedy Center.

  We spent the rest of the night watching the other performances and hanging out at the reception with our families, most of whom were meeting each other for the first time. At one point, my mom cornered Jaron with a series of logistical questions about the recently discussed plan to send us on tour, starting with “Will there be someone there to make sure everyone gets enough sleep and is eating well?”

  Once a mom, always a mom.

  After circulating footage from the night’s performance, ICM was able to secure us exactly what we were hoping for: a brief North America tour in small venues across the Northeast. We were taking this show on the road… whatever “this show” was.

  In all seriousness, though, I’d had a working idea for the format of a Postmodern Jukebox stage show since long before I had the name “Postmodern Jukebox.” Indeed, ever since my early ragtime piano experiments, I had viewed these pop culture transformations as existing in something of an alternate universe, with conventions as different from our world as those in comic books. The best way to present this alternate universe, I determined, would be by modeling it after variety shows from eras past, complete with an emcee, an assortment of acts, a house band—the works. My grandmother and I used to watch The Lawrence Welk Show together when I was young, and I described to ICM what I had in mind for the act as being “Lawrence Wel
k with a hundred percent more twerking.” With this in mind, we were going to need more than the usual four or five members that most touring bands brought. Adding extra talent would mean stretching our already low performance fees even further, but it wasn’t even a question to me; Postmodern Jukebox was an extravaganza, a spectacle, and we weren’t going to give audiences anything less than the full experience right out of the gate.

  I remember the day of our first appearance so vividly. We walked around Toronto, looking for any and every opportunity to tell people we were on tour. At the time, it just seemed terribly far-fetched to me that a few hundred people in a different country altogether would come out for an act whose popularity was primarily confined to YouTube, and I was secretly concerned that we’d be playing to a nonexistent crowd. This being Canada, I wondered if perhaps the Motown Nickelback show would have been a better choice.

  But this was no time for calling audibles. Clad in a white dinner jacket and black bowtie, Drue was the first of our group to step out on stage. From backstage, I heard the crowd roar, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Hello, Toronto! My name is Drue Davis, and I will be your emcee this evening—hence the fancy suit. I picked this out myself, thank you very much. Tonight, we’re going to be taking a trip back in time.…”

  Once he’d given his welcome speech, I joined Drue onstage to the tune of the band playing “The Final Countdown.” The place was packed, I was shocked to see, and it took a moment for it to sink in. I waved awkwardly and then launched into a ragtime version of the Super Mario Bros. theme, an homage to my YouTube channel’s roots. Next, Drue introduced Robyn, who kicked off the first full song of the night: “Thrift Shop.” The audience went absolutely berserk, with people swing dancing and singing along. We knew our act was entertaining and that we could impress any old crowd that stumbled across us at a party, but to see that we had exuberant fans—and lots of them—as far away as Toronto was a real “pinch-me” moment for all of us. It rendered us speechless, as we shot incredulous glances at one another onstage. Perhaps the oddest yet most fitting validation of our fans’ adoration was how dolled up they got to attend our show. Zoot suits, vintage dresses, flapper costumes—you name it, and it was there, despite the fact that I’d never mentioned anything about dressing up in our promos. It dawned on me then that, although we were just meeting them for the first time, our fans had been there on the other side of the screen all along. Like us, they had been waiting for this day to arrive.