Аманда Палмер - The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

They all said yes, and sent checks. I mailed them all printed letters so that they would have some sort of a legal record, even though they knew we weren’t going to run off to Mexico with the money. They trusted us.

I thanked them all profusely.

We spent a couple of harebrained months driving back and forth from Boston to Brooklyn, where we slaved over the record, and we hired two of my Cloud Club housemates (Zea, the painter, and Thom, the graphic designer) to create the album artwork. Then we sold the CD (which we titled, simply, The Dresden Dolls ) straight to the fans at the shows for $10 a pop. We quickly sold out of the first batch of 5,000 and ordered another. My kitchen became a wonderland workshop of envelopes and packaging as we started mailing them out to fans in more and more distant states and countries, and to labels, radio stations, publicists, and managers, hoping someone would help us run our business—answer the phones, mail the T-shirts, handle the bookings. We couldn’t cope with all the work. We were getting overloaded.

After two years of constant gigging with no manager, no booking agent, and a growing pile of rejection letters from every indie label on the planet saying “we don’t sign goth bands” (we weren’t a goth band, dammit!), I started to get desperate. We were drawing five hundred people a night by then in a handful of cities, and though I was enjoying our Bohemian Traveling Circus Fantasy, our time between shows had become completely consumed by emails and phone calls, trying to organize our schedule while trying to get signed. I couldn’t keep up with being the touring act and the office manager. We got bigger and bigger, but nobody would sign us. We were too strange. We didn’t sound like any other band currently becoming famous.

Then a promising email came in from a guy named Dave. He wanted to talk to us. I’d never heard of his label, and when I googled it, I found bands with names like 3 Inches of Blood, Baptized in Blood, Make Them Suffer, Mutiny Within, and Satan. A METAL label? I’d been hoping to get signed by Matador. Or Mute. Somewhere we could stand alongside Belle and Sebastian, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Magnetic Fields, The Pixies, and other arty indie bands with harmless names. I found a music lawyer and showed him the contract.

They basically want to give you fifty grand to sign away your firstborn , he told me. They’d take a cut of everything you ever earn, now and forever, including your merchandise and the rights to every song you ever write. Are you sure you want to sign with them even if I sweeten up the deal and let you keep your firstborn?

I wasn’t sure, but we were working as hard as we could and nobody else wanted us. We were desperate.

Let’s de-firstborn it , I said. I’m game to try .

We played a show around that time with Karen Mantler, an off-the-wall jazz singer who, after releasing three CDs on an indie, was picked up by a major label ( bloodsucking scum , is how I believe she referred to them) only to learn that the major considered her, as Karen put it, a “tax write-off.” She told us that after her album, of which she was incredibly proud, had been released, they’d mailed her ten copies, fired the guy who’d signed her, and did absolutely nothing else to sell or promote it—you literally couldn’t find or buy it in any stores. She was completely disillusioned, but fighting back, in her own way. At the merchandise table after the show, she was selling hand-burned copies of the CDs that the label wouldn’t put into circulation; she even designed a new cover that declared, “KAREN MANTLER’S PET PROJECT—BOOTLEG EDITION,” with a message on the back explaining how her label had screwed her.

I think we should sign , I said to Brian. I mean… we’ll always have a CD burner. We can always go all Karen Mantler on their asses .

After a few more go-rounds with the lawyers, we signed the contract in blood. (Actual blood. It was a metal label; we figured that was appropriate.) They paid us $100,000 for the eternal rights to the album that we’d recorded for $20,000 (territory: “the universe,” just in case our albums started selling big on Mars). Thanks to the lawyer, I kept my firstborn—my publishing and merchandising rights.

First, we paid our lawyer.

Then I wrote checks to pay back all the loans, which I mailed back with thank-you letters. Then Brian and I took all of our parents out to a celebration dinner in a restaurant fifty feet from my main Bride spot in Harvard Square.

And then we quit our ice cream, statue, and stripping jobs once and for all.

I introduced Neil to Anthony in an Italian restaurant in the North End of Boston. Neil and I had been dating for a few months. If they didn’t like each other, I was going to die.

We ate and drank wine, discussing all manner of things, and I couldn’t help feeling that they were tactically sizing each other up, like two dogs in a park.

Neil seemed to like Anthony just fine.

So? So? What did you think? I asked Anthony the next morning, over the phone.

Anthony said: I don’t know, beauty. He’s smart, that’s for sure. But he seems nervous. You know? Like, freaked out .

That’s because he wasnervous and freaked out, clown-head. I’ve been talking about you since I met him. He was terrified you wouldn’t like him. So… do you like him?

Anthony made a hmmmmmmm sound.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??

Why’s it so important to you what I think?

I dunno. Because you’re you. Just help me out here, okay? You know me better than anyone. And you’ve saved me from like, what—five fatal relationships?

I have not , said Anthony.

You have so. Remember Mike? Remember how I thought it would be hilarious to get married in college because NOBODY would BELIEVE IT ha ha ha?

Well, yeah. That’s true .

And Oliver? The one who OD’d?

Well… okay .

We got a lot of fan mail. Some of it was hate mail, and we built a special page on our website to feature the worst of it. I hand-selected some choice excerpts for the website back in the day:

You are the worst act I have ever heard. Avril Lavigne is WAY better than you. BUT so are The Backstreet Boys. And THEY FUCKING BLOW. You ugly-looking fuck and the hairy French lookin’ Chinese chick [sic].

I’m not usually into violent imagery, but when I’m forced to listen to your album I start channeling violent thoughts .

This shithead in my work (where we have an employee playlist on all the time) keeps putting “Coin-Operated Boy” on the playlist. I hate you, and I hate her. The female in the band looks like German Gestapo unshaven monkey shit. The dude in the band is a coin-operated child molester. Please eat shit and die .

The hate mail page included, as the centerpiece, this letter to the editor in a Boston music zine:

It always amazes me how easily impressed Boston audiences are. Especially when it comes to an act like The Dresden Dolls, who are not only mediocre as a duo, but totally unoriginal as well. Amanda can’t get through a show without trying to shock people… and her piano playing is atrocious. It’s obvious that the real brains and the real musician in that band is Brian (stellar drummer by the way, too bad his playing is totally mocked by Miss Palmer). I can’t help but wonder… if Amanda didn’t act like a total ass, or rather, an attention-starved daddy’s girl, flaunting her flabby, hairy body to everyone and playing herself off to be “a performance artist”… would anyone care?