1 My partner (in the old-school usage of the term) Dennis Lavinthal hired Karen Glauber to work at HITS 25 years ago.

2 I didn’t know Karen at the time. I think I had only actually seen her once before on the old A&M lot. I thought she did publicity. I was with the late, great Charlie Minor, who was then head of Promotion at the hallowed home of Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. I saw her with a group of people and Charlie commented, “You know who that is? That’s Karen Glauber—she runs Alternative promotion. She scares me. She wants me to work this Robyn Hitchcock song, ‘Balloon Man.’ I’m not gonna work that balloon thing. She scares me.”

3 Hence, I was scared of Karen too.

4 I mostly don’t talk to new people in my life, for a while. Maybe it’s natural shyness, or maybe it’s the “goldfish thing.” Karen claims I didn’t talk to her for the first two and a half years she worked at HITS. I think she is wrong and that it was only two and a quarter.

5 Karen is friends with lots of creative people, one being the prolific songwriter Dan Wilson. In his classic Semisonic hit, “Closing Time,” there is a point in the song where it stops for a beat or two and then starts up again. In Semisonic drummer Jacob Slichter’s book So You Wanna Be A Rock and Roll Star, Dan said Karen called this the “Clearmountain Pause,” which then inspired a chapter in the Pulitzer-winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. This pause can be heard in hits by our clients The Bravery and The Airborne Toxic Event, so we now just call it the “Glauber Pause.” I’m not exactly sure why; maybe you will learn or have learned from something said in this section. It’s too long for me to read the whole thing. Maybe she scared Dan too. Maybe there’s another reason. Whatever.

6 Karen knows stuff about music. Often way ahead of the rest of us. One day she walked into my office and dropped a CD on my desk (you do remember CDs, I hope) and said, “Listen to this.” It was a two-minute folk ditty that was maybe on one public station in Seattle (I think). She said, “Stand next to this and tell everyone that it is a smash. You will look smart.” 18 months later, Z100 and KIIS-FM were playing The Lumineers in power rotation, and a whole generation now thinks Ho Hey is the expression, and not Hey Ho. There are many, many of these examples. My memory is not that great these days.

7 Karen knows stuff about executives as well. She knew and identified Tom Calderone and Joel Klaiman and Lisa Worden and Marc Geiger and Leslie Fram and Pete Galli and Susan Busch and Stu Bergen and so many more of you way before most of us did.

8 So the point is obvious, if you haven’t gotten it yet. Karen Glauber knows stuff. And people know it.

9 So enjoy the section. I hope I properly introduced it. If you are reading this at the end, I hope I summarized correctly and cleared up some remaining issues.

10 Ask Karen. Don’t be scared.

11 Read on.