Back in the early days of our band, Womanizer, everyone involved in the growing New Wave and Punk Rock music scene in L.A. read The Recycler, a newspaper of classified ads. This is where we looked to find replacement musicians for the band or for new used equipment or if we were looking to join a new band. If you wanted to advertise an upcoming gig you had to pay a fee but personal classified want-ads were free.
In order to promote the band without having to pay a fee we placed ads in the Musician / Personal section looking for “Groupies”. Since our band was called Womanizer, an ad seeking groupies seemed humorously appropriate. We never expected to get any responses, just exposure. We got some prank calls of course but surprisingly we also got some “legitimate” responses to our ad. In fact, the ad was so successful we kept it running continuously and took turns with the phone number we’d use. I won’t go into details about my personal experiences in this regards as I’m too much of a gentleman and am saving them for a future book, screw this free blog stuff, but another member of the band had a very interesting adventure.
One of our band mates whose phone number was listed in that week’s ad got a call from a lovely young lady who, as it turned out, owned a local recording studio. The two of them hit it off and carried on a telephone romance for several weeks. This was probably made possible by the fact that she never actually met him in person. After about a month she suddenly vanished. Our band member was crushed as he thought this could be true love. After a few more weeks she called again with this interesting tale; She called originally because there was a message that my friend had called her and she was expected to call him back. She had no idea who he was or in what regard he was expecting a call back but being a business owner she made the call. The original message was left for her by one of her recording engineers who, unbeknownst to her, was secretly in love with her. Having her make a call in response to an ad from a band called Womanizer looking for a “groupie” he apparently thought was hysterically funny. When she and our band mate made a connection over the phone the guy’s plan seemed to have backfired and he became enraged with jealousy. She still had no idea what was going on when an order of Chinese take-out food arrived at the studio for her late one night during a particularly long session. She thought someone had thoughtfully ordered her a late dinner and ate it not realizing her employee had poisoned it. She fell deathly ill and was rushed to the hospital which is why her phone calls had stopped. Discovering her food had been tainted the police became involved which lead to the eventual confession of the recording engineer.
This is just one of the stories that our zany band promotions produced back in the day.
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