Outside the Jukebox

by Scott Bradlee

  The first step was to identify a great music director who understood the act. Todd Schroeder, who had done such an excellent job helping shoot our viral cover of “My Heart Will Go On,” popped into my head right then. In addition to having a background similar to mine in ragtime and stride piano, Todd had been music director on shows for literally hundreds of Broadway and Hollywood stars—everyone from Tom Jones and Liza Minnelli to Jason Alexander and Josh Gad.

  As we made the jump from small rock clubs to bigger theatres, Todd’s background in Broadway proved to be a huge asset for us. Whereas concepts like blocking (telling performers where to move onstage, for visibility or dramatic effect) and lighting cues were foreign to me, they were both squarely in Todd’s wheelhouse. He also knew how to build a set list into a dramatic presentation and maximize the impact of each song. Having proper song transitions creates contrast, the same way having proper lighting can highlight the features of a subject in a photograph. We began meeting regularly to pick apart the existing show’s format to see what and where we could improve. One element that we both agreed should be increased was group numbers; despite having five superstar singers in any given show, only “Burn” and “All About That Bass” featured more than one vocalist. We also discussed giving members of the group more chances to interact with the audience; up to this point, most of the dialogue had been presented by the emcee, and the singers were paraded out silently (with the exception of Casey; we kind of let him do his thing, which at times involved him balancing a step ladder on his hand or wheeling himself around on a dolly, facedown, while introducing a song). We had a lot of vibrant characters on this tour, and we wanted the audience to feel like they knew each and every one of them personally by the show’s end. Our goal was to build a show format that would best highlight the unique qualities of each cast member without elevating any one person over another.

  The cast had recently seen some new additions, and we were eager to harness their various skills and strengths and fold them into the show. At the tender age of twenty-two but already with years of stage and TV experience, Sara Niemietz exhibited a rich, perfectly controlled alto beyond her years and masterful phrasing that recalled the jazz and soul hits of generations past. Aside from her obvious gifts, she also had the ability to light up a room with her positivity and enthusiasm—a tremendous asset when it comes to the often uncomfortable and physically draining experience of touring. It’s hard to tell who loved Sara more—the audience or her fellow cast members.

  Aubrey Logan was another newcomer recommended to me by Shoshana. “You need to work with her,” she swore, by way of prefacing our introduction. And so Aubrey and I met up and did what seemed to be the natural thing to do: We recorded a jazz version of the SpongeBob SquarePants theme for my Instagram. She sang it the way Ella Fitzgerald would have sung it and capped it off with a trombone lick. I was reminded of something that day, which I’d learned back in my early days living in LA: Shoshana knows best.

  I was impressed by Aubrey’s talent from the get-go, but I discovered the true depths of that talent when we produced her debut video for PMJ: a quick jazz version of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” The original featured a couple rap verses by Kendrick Lamar, which I suggested we turn into some sort of bebop melody. Aubrey demoed the verses, transforming them into a rhythmically complex vocalese that could have come straight out of the horn of bebop legend Dizzy Gillespie. It was brilliant the way she used her voice as an instrument, effortlessly traversing its entire range. We expanded the arrangement and then brought in Adam on bass and Martin Diller on drums. It was a difficult arrangement, but the hardest part was coming up with a clever way to hand off to Aubrey a trombone to solo on after the bridge. In the end, we had Rook throw it to her—after checking to make sure it was fully insured. In the video, you can see that a brief flash of terror crossed Aubrey’s face as the trombone hurtled toward her, but she quickly regained her composure in time to catch it and whip out a great solo.

  When it came time for rehearsals, I gathered the cast—old and new—together and formally introduced them to Todd. Because of all the planned changes to the show format, I explained, rehearsals for the tour were going to be a lot more rigorous than they had been previously. Not everyone took to this development—particularly those who had been on the much looser, earlier tours and were accustomed to my (I like to think charmingly) disorganized management style.

  TODD: So let’s take a look at this script I wrote. The girls will read this line before “Burn—

  THE CAST: We don’t read lines in the shows, Todd.

  TODD: Okay, well what do you do to fill the time while you’re setting up for a song?

  THE CAST: Scott told us to make stuff up on the spot and try not to be offensive.

  If we were going to make this upgraded Postmodern Jukebox show work, we had to be willing to commit all the way—no half-assing, no cutting corners, no avoiding long-term change for the better just because it might be uncomfortable in the short term. Todd had his work cut out for him, but it would take much more than a little resistance from the cast to deter him. He was so in demand for a reason: He knew how to craft a show that held appeal for a wide variety of people, and he was patient. He was used to working with artists and knew that artists are often a bit possessive of their creations.

  Even I was initially skeptical of his ideas, fearing that the show might veer a little too far to the “Broadway” end of things. But in the end, I came around to many of his suggestions, and Todd familiarized himself with my aesthetic preferences for PMJ. One of his ideas that I agreed to try was a duet to end the show: a mashup of “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca and the PMJ version of “Someday” by The Strokes. It would be a blend of old and new, a symbolic declaration, if you will, of the progressive future we had in store for Postmodern Jukebox. I was hesitant because we had traditionally ended the encore set with something upbeat and danceable—Mark Ronson’s “Valerie” in the first tour and “Shake It Off” after that. But Todd’s idea was to have the cast invite the audience to slow dance with one another and send them home with that special moment. The cast could even bring some audience members onstage to dance with them. It sounded a little schmaltzy to me, but I agreed to see if it took at our next show.

  After finishing rehearsals in Brooklyn, we piled aboard the bus and set off for Baltimore for opening night at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Lots of the cast members were meeting for the first time, and we all stayed up late telling stories and generally getting to know one another. Something about the tour bus encourages deep conversations among relative strangers; it falls somewhere between a cocktail bar and a psychologist’s couch, in terms of being this reliable—yet also magical—safe space, where airs are dropped, vulnerability is embraced, and everyone wears pajamas.

  We arrived at the theatre—a major upgrade from even our last tour, with multiple dressing rooms and a rehearsal space with a piano—and went through our standard pre-show rituals: sound check, Talent Corner, dinner. When the show began, however, I didn’t take my customary seat at the piano; I took a seat among the audience instead. It was going to be the first time I got to see a Postmodern Jukebox show from the audience’s perspective, and I had butterflies in my stomach.

  The show kicked off in blazing fashion, with a full cast performance of “Fancy” that concluded with a wicked tap solo by Sarah Reich and four-part cast harmonies. The crowd was rapt. Next, the show weaved through some of the fan favorites in the PMJ repertoire. I finally came onstage following “All About That Bass” and told a short version of the PMJ story before closing out with my usual crowdsourced piano mashup, an homage to my Robert Restaurant days. I’ll admit, it was reassuring to receive the same exuberant applause as always, despite not being onstage the entire time. I could get used to this, I thought.

  Watching the show from the audience was a surreal, almost out-of-body experience. Although I knew the arrangements inside and out, there was something magical about listening to
the cast breathe new life into them night after night after night, from the audience’s point of view. I imagine it’s probably similar to what a screenwriter experiences when watching his or her script come to life as a movie: the feeling of managing to create a work that endures beyond oneself.

  In those moments, I was watching as not just the show’s creator but as a fan, too. I laughed when Casey went out into the audience to sing “Sweet Child o’ Mine” to a darling elderly woman, and I held my breath during superstar emcee LaVance Colley’s high notes in “Halo.” Slowly, I felt my need to control every aspect of the show retreat, to be replaced by something far preferable: a peaceful sense of family. I wasn’t alone in Postmodern Jukebox, and I didn’t need to try to do everything single-handedly. I now had a family to build this universe with me.

  At the start of the final encore, I took to the stage once more and played the intro of “As Time Goes By,” while Cristina charmingly coaxed the audience to stand and encouraged them to dance with one another. Slowly but surely, everyone joined in—even our stage crew and the venue staff. It was a touching moment, and one that wound up feeling surprisingly sincere. We were all family. Backstage, we celebrated a great opening night with champagne.

  While I was busy feeling like a proud parent, my own parents were bursting with pride over the new tour, which finally included a date near my hometown. They spent their first year in retirement watching every video, live stream, and bit of social media posted by every performer involved in the project. My mom in particular loved to research the performers and dig up interesting details about them—to her, it was reality TV for real.

  It was with this loyal enthusiasm of my parents in mind that I planned an early morning tour bus stop at my parents’ house, en route to our show in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The cast—which at this point included Casey, Haley, Sara, LaVance, and Todd—was tired from the previous night’s show, but they managed to wake up in time to see the bus parked at the top of a driveway in rural Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Rook, naturally, had a video camera at the ready to capture my mom’s reaction.

  No sooner had the doors on the tour bus opened than we were greeted by the sight of my mom skipping up the driveway, like some five-year-old given rare permission to select a handful of sweets from a candy shop. She was excited to see me but maybe even more excited to see the performers she watched on her computer each day. She made little attempt to hide her excitement over meeting Casey, screaming upon recognizing him and hugging him.

  “I LOVE YOU!!” my mom shrieked. She was the biggest fangirl.

  “The love is mutual,” Casey said.

  After letting my mom make the rounds, we all trooped inside, where we spent the rest of the morning hanging out with my parents, having breakfast, and cracking up at all the awkward family photos of me from adolescence. Casey had fun perusing my parents’ old record collection and gave our breakfast an impromptu ’70s soundtrack.

  After a truly chaotic year, this merging of my work family and my actual family was the bit of normalcy I was searching for. I didn’t want to be famous; I wanted to hear my parents call me “Scotty,” like they always had. I wanted to joke around with the cast and exchange childhood stories of rebellion. I wanted to create a place where we all belonged, where we could suspend time and the rush of the world outside, where we could be in awe of one another’s talents and feel all those same feelings that I’d felt at thirteen, listening to a Louis Armstrong record that I’d recorded onto a cassette, off those same living room speakers we were now seated around.

  For the first time in a long while, I felt strangely content.

  THE SHOW MUST GO ON

  Although I had successfully pulled myself out of the center of a creative crisis, my life was still far from stress free. Delegating so much responsibility to others meant that I wasn’t always onsite when problems arose, and attempting to put out fires from afar, I found, was often even more nerve-wracking for me than being there in the thick of it. At the end of the day, my name was on the project, which ultimately made me responsible for whatever happened on the road—whether I was personally on that road too or not.

  A particularly difficult set of problems arose during the three-day trip to Aspen, Colorado, that I made at the end of 2015. The most recent Postmodern Jukebox tour was slated to end there the next day, and I’d decided to take Natalie with me and arrive a day early, before the tour got there—a rare vacation. After all the challenges of the previous year, I was looking forward to taking a breather, for once, from being in constant work mode, and just enjoying some carefree winter fun.

  The plane touched down and, like clockwork, I instantly turned on my phone to catch up on any emails I may have missed (old workaholic habits die hard—even on vacation). My phone buzzed with a veritable jackpot of notifications: four missed calls, three voicemails, and five text messages, mostly from Jaron. The most recent text of his just read “Call me ASAP.” My stomach turned. This can’t be good.

  My gut instinct was correct. The touring cast had a show in Denver that night, but the bus was snowed in somewhere in Wyoming, with all outbound flights canceled. Oh yeah, and Joey Cook—the accordion-playing American Idol star who name-checked us on national television and had by now become a PMJ cast member—was in jail. It was a lot to process at the start of what was supposed to be a vacation.

  The group was coming from a day in Rock Springs, Wyoming—a small town located just off I-80. The bus was scheduled to drive to Cheyenne, where I-80 met I-25, the interstate that led to Denver. But a sudden blizzard had forced closure of the highway, leaving nearby travelers stranded. Frustrating, but hardly surprising. This was, after all, the Great Northwest. When Will had explained the situation to me the day before, we’d agreed that our best bet was to ditch the tour bus and fly everyone into Denver early the next morning. It was a quick flight, and planes were still taking off, so the odds were in our favor.

  And so while I was en route to Aspen, Will put the new plan into action. The cast and crew woke up extremely early, grabbed all their earthly possessions, and set out for the airport. The airport was small and empty except for a few other unlucky travelers. One by one, the sleepy tour party passed through security and congregated on the other side, antsy to board so that they could go back to sleep. It wasn’t long before they noticed, however, that one of their peers hadn’t made it through security: Joey.

  It had been a rough tour for Joey. At twenty-two, Joey was our youngest cast member and by far the least experienced performer. She had gone straight from busking on the street to American Idol fame and had joined our group after recording some stellar videos with us at Bro Mountain. The breakneck pace of touring day after day was taxing on her vocal cords, and she fell ill within the first couple weeks.

  Joey had a prescription for medical marijuana that was legal and recognized in her state, as well as in the flight’s destination state of Colorado. However, marijuana, even for medicinal purposes, wasn’t yet legal in Wyoming, and the small amount she had in her backpack was enough to get her in not-so-small trouble. She was summoned out of line at security, and like dark magic, a group of police with drug-sniffing dogs materialized. The color drained from her face when she realized what was happening. She was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was told that the judge would be sentencing her the next day.

  Meanwhile, everyone else (save for Will, who’d been called by Joey to come tend to the situation at the jail) had boarded the jet. They had been sitting there for nearly an hour, waiting for take-off, when an announcement came from the cockpit: The airplane was grounded indefinitely due to the weather and everyone would be deplaning. It was yet another item of bad news. We’d exhausted all commercial options for getting the cast to Denver in time for the show.

  Back in Aspen, still aboard my own flight as it taxied to the gate, I relied on Jaron to keep me updated. The whole situation was looking pretty grim.

  “I really don’t want to cancel the show. We’ve
never canceled anything,” I sighed.

  “We’re not canceling,” Jaron declared, resolutely. “We’re going to figure out a way to get them to Denver—trust me. Did I ever tell you about the time that I got a military helicopter to rescue my girlfriend from Key West when she was stranded in the hurricane?”

  I rolled my eyes. I had heard the story more times than I could count.

  “Let me call some buddies who work in aviation. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Sure enough, not thirty minutes later, he called back excitedly.

  “I have no idea how I pulled this one out of my ass, but we are about to save the day right now.”

  He had found two planes for under ten thousand dollars in total—a fraction of the typical cost of chartering a private flight. It was expensive, but it meant the show could go on. I wired over the money without hesitation.

  Joey, meanwhile, was still in jail, but Will had succeeded in convincing the judge to sentence her that day so that she wouldn’t have to miss the show. The most surreal part for Joey wasn’t the five hours she spent in lock-up, however. It was what happened after that. As soon as she was released, she discovered that her face had already been plastered on the home page of TMZ, the notorious Hollywood gossip site. It turns out that one of the airline employees was an American Idol fan and had contacted TMZ right away, in the hopes of profiting from Joey’s misfortune. Other outlets picked it up, and Joey’s mugshot—a shock of blue hair and just the hint of a smile—became the talk of the town. She rolled with it pretty well, all things considered.