AN ANONYMOUS HITS ANNIVERSARY GREETING

The following letter was received in the mail at HITS from an anonymous (and presumably long-departed) label head of promotion, so we published it as the intro to our recent 23rd anniversary issue, causing no small degree of curiosity and interest. So here, by popular demand, is that mysterious missive.

I got the call at 2 a.m. on the West Coast, which meant it was 5 a.m. in New Jersey and the boys were jacked-up on the “P1 eight-ball” I sent them (I wasn’t going to risk insulting THAT crowd with the stepped-on shit we send to P2s and 3s.).

“They took every title!!! Even the fucking stiffs,” were the first words I heard. “That’s the beauty of cleans.” He then shoved what I imagined was linguini in his mouth, yelled something to a guy named “Piney” and called me a good Jew before slamming down the phone.

Life as head of promotion is excellent. I go 50.50 with my sales guy, who delivers 10,000 cleans of any title above what it says on the official company PO. I send the bulk of those cleans to the guys in Jersey, who move them down the East Coast, while I quietly ship the remaining albums to you-know-who’s record store chain, which promptly sends them back to my sales guy as full returns—and kicks us back 50% of that in cash.

But that ain’t all. I give a wad of bills to my guy at Crazy Eddie, who sells me poached merchandise for 20 cents on the dollar with full ticket paperwork. I send the merch to my radio guys, who give me enough paper adds to buy a Breaker and then expense the merch back to my label at full price.

Sure it’s a good system, but it doesn’t come close to what those Casablanca fuckers were pulling off before the PolyGram Krauts shut them down a few years back. Nevertheless, it’s my little piece of this glorious Reagan decade, and it’s about to arrive, via Federal Express, tucked neatly inside a Krokus album jacket.

Then I woke up. It was 2009. Fuck.

Happy Anniversary.