Sammy

As dinner service winds down, a line starts to form outside. Girls in short dresses stamp their feet to stay warm as most of them didn't wear jackets to avoid the hassle of the $4 coat check charge.  Guys in jeans and button down shirts smoke cigarettes and yell into their cell phones. A bouncer towers by the door calmly repeating himself again and again "Doors open at ten".

Inside the doorway someone else is yelling into their cell phone. Taking calls, furiously sending text messages, and surveying the crowd outside searching for groups that look like they can afford to cut the line.  As he thanks the departing dinner guests for coming, the radio in his ear crackles.  He counts out tickets and wristbands, dividing them into groups of "VIPs" and "Reduced Guest List". Ten different people have questions and problems. He runs to the elevator taking it up to the top floor where the DJ needs extra cables and someone to show him how to set them up.

As people start trickling into the club, he is shaking hands and kissing cheeks. Escorting groups to their private tables, he introduces the cocktail waitress with a wink and a nudge to his new buddies.  He hands out business cards and sends over free drinks here and there, answering calls and yelling into his radio piece like a frantic secret service agent.

His name is Sam, and he is a promoter. Unlike New York, Miami, and Las Vegas, Boston is a small pond with few big fish.  The nightlife industry in Boston consists mostly of Irish pubs, sports bars, and college dives catering to the type of crowd who prefer cheap domestic beer and chicken wings rather than private table service and world-class DJ talent. Sam packs them in every Friday and Saturday night. They line up and wait in the cold to pay $20 a person just to get through the door, $12 for cocktails, and upwards of $1000 for a private table.

A Cambridge native, Sam grew up hanging out in the "pit" in Harvard Square. While blond lacrosse players and Asian bookworms walked to class, Sam and his friends tried out skateboard moves, hustled dime bags, and heckled the suits coming out of the T station.  

A nice Jewish boy living on Lexington Ave, Sam had always had an entrepreneurial spirit. He got his first job on a paper route when he was 12. While most kids would want to sleep in as late as possible, Sam had enough hyperactive energy to make the rounds delivering the Globe at 5am rain, snow, or sun. Sam stayed back in first grade, back when scientists and educators were first toying with the new term “ADHD”. A case study for attention deficit disorder, Sam had trouble listening and paying attention. He had trouble reading and staying on task, preferring instead to talk to his classmates and steal the spotlight from the teacher.

Hoping to find an outlet for Sam’s creative energy, his parents enrolled him in summer theater camps. Sam, with his enthusiasm and unwavering confidence, was a natural and landed the lead role in countless school plays, and even on a kids program during Fox 25’s Saturday morning lineup. The year after starting the paper route, Sam began attending countless Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. The entertainment was always the same, some corny guy on the microphone trying to get everyone to do the hokey pokey and mispronouncing family members’ names. Unimpressed, Sam cashed in his paper route savings and bought turn tables and a dual CD player. Sam was comfortable on stage, and naturally intuitive about how to hype up a crowd. He saw a business opportunity that played to his strengths, and he capitalized on it.

It was the mid-nineties, and hip hop and grunge were already considered old by most teenagers. Transplanted from London and gaining popularity at underground Chicago warehouse parties, electronic music was just creeping its way to the Northeast. Like fans of punk in the 1970's, Sam and his friends saw this new genre of music as an active form of rebellion, something completely foreign that their parents didn’t understand or want to hear about.  Techno, as some people called it, involved mixing different synthesized hooks and melodies together. With plenty of Bar Mitzvah experience already under his belt, Sam became a full fledged DJ, playing at raves inside abandoned MIT buildings and getting his first taste of the nightclubs on Landsdowne Street.

ADHD held Sam back in school. His initial diagnosis named “language processing” as a weakness in addition to attention deficit and hyperactivity.  At theater camp he excelled at improv, could easily imitate emotions and play off his fellow actors, but needed extra help memorizing his lines. Music and numbers made more sense. He liked the fast paced beats per measure of electronica, and the tangible dollars he could count after each successful gig. The 12 year old mind that had convinced the Globe to let him have his own route in West Cambridge was the same mind adding up the numbers every time he attended a large scale event. It didn’t take long to go from wondering who collected all the money these people were paying for entrance fees and drinks, to becoming that person himself.

At Bentley college Sam learned the ins and outs of business. He also threw the biggest parties his fraternity had ever seen, tripling chapter profits in less than a year and avoiding ever having to pay dues of his own.

Sam is a big fish in the small pond of Boston nightlife. He is successful in an industry he helped create, an industry that his hyperactive and distracted personality blends seamlessly with.  He knows how to massage egos and promote his own, making his events seem fun yet exclusive. At the end of the night, he makes sure everyone gets a flyer for next week's party.  Counting the cash drawer he checks off a list of people to pay:  the DJ (someone else now that he is in charge), the group of guys he calls his "subpromoters", the guest list girl, and the bouncer who let in those international kids with fake Saudi ID's.  He hands out envelopes of cash with a smile and a word of encouragement, keeping everyone on the team motivated to produce next week.  After everyone and every dollar is accounted for, he goes home with double.