The Calculators & Hotlines, Live in Austin!!
We were scattered all over the world, in a virtual private network, driving a business that advised investors. In that journey a band evolved that enshrined the people and practices of the firm.
Music emanates from culture, no matter where you are in the world. You can’t have music without culture. When we started a virtual company in 1995 we had no idea that a band would emerge in its midst nine years later.
The whole virtual band thing started in a hotel room in New York City in 2003 with an acoustic guitar a few drinks, some laughs, and ended up in Austin, Texas at the Driskill Hotel six years later with a full on electric band, backup singers, and a 24 song set list, with all original songs written by the band about the people in the company, the situations we encountered and the way we did business. And it was dance music!
But back to the origins.
Our company, Off The Record Research (OTR), was a loose confederation of market journalists that we’d networked together from around the world. We all worked from our home offices in California, Montana, South Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Oklahoma, Florida, Texas, Paris, Bavaria, Tuscany, London, Novosibirsk, Shanghai, India, Rio De Janeiro … you get the picture.
The founder, Craig Gordon, envisioned a free spirited, creative, entrepreneurial journalistic environment based on passionate curiosity to explore business trends and supply chains around the world … and to spot unexpected inflections.
We soon joined forces with the trading group, OTA, in New York. Kevin Heneghan, a co-founder of OTA, supported the merger of the two groups and whole heartedly embraced the idea of a band within the company. The business worked and it amplified. We soon had over one hundred major institutions subscribing to our journalistic based stories, hunting for the inflections.
The Inflections and The Hotlines Emerge
We had musicians and artists in our ranks, who were also crack researchers and writers. As the company evolved over the years we became more and more familiar with each other and discovered that there was an emerging culture in our midst. A sense of humor, respect, and curiosity permeated everything. And you could work based from your home. People were loyal and stayed with the organization for years.
Our central office in San Francisco had only a dozen people. The New York trading group had double that, but the research group had close to 200 people scattered across the planet in various capacities.
After that night in the New York hotel room, one of our top journalists in the telecomm sector, Rick Hatfield, and I, started musing about a band emerging from this eclectic group of creators. I was an OTR co-founder and Director of Global Research.
Rick had a professional rhythm and blues background, leading trios and quartets for years, playing stages across the country and into Siberia. He was an exceptional guitarist, a vibrant singer, and his harmonica playing, stellar.
My musical background was layered in world beat styles. I’d played in a Yankee reggae band that toured the Pacific Northwest club circuit, from the Bay Area to Vancouver, BC. In the early 90’s I’d created the Timezone Music Project with Soviet-American musicians in concert (see Timezone in the substack banner above).
Our company - OTR - held an annual research conference, always in a different city. Rick and I decided to write a couple spoof songs each, to play at the next conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2003.
We recruited two players from our international side - Ron from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan who played bass and covered semiconductors; And Guido from Tuscany, Italy, on acoustic guitar-vocals, who was an enterprise software expert. Our two backup singers, The Hotlines, were Annie, our Director of Operations and Katie the Editorial Director, both from our San Francisco office. They wore hot metallic wigs and gogo dresses. Nobody in the firm even recognized them that night.
We played for about 100 OTR people from around the world that evening by the hotel pool. Rick kicked it off with a song he’d written that would become our signature piece for years - Marty Harmon’s On The Phone!
Marty was one of our senior sales guys. He was brilliant but a stickler for details. Any story we published he’d drill down into the tiniest detail to elicit insights and test the validity of the story. He’d really grill you. When the story was a hit he congratulated you. When it was wrong, he’d call and conduct a literal inquisition. Marty’s number would light up your phone and you cringed. The rhythm and blues song chorus line went, “Marty Harmon’s on the phone, Oh No! Marty Harmon’s on the phone, Oh No!”
I wrote a country western style piece for Scottsdale, called “ Pre-announced Again.” It was a western parody, the swinging doors, sitting alone drinkin, down on your luck type. It was based off of a few global projects we ran when we found major supply chain inflections in a story that were absolutely contrarian to what investors expected. But before we could publish the story, the company pre-announced the surprise and completely blind sided us. Three weeks of work down the drain.
In 2004 we played in Miami and built off the positive reception that we’d generated in Arizona the year before. Rick and I each wrote two more songs about the company. This time we brought our electric guitars, rented amps, and setup a PA system.
Plus we’d recruited a drummer into the mix. Jarret Harris (TJ) was a young Midwesterner with a journalist’s degree straight out of Peoria, Illinois. We’d just hired him before Miami. He covered heavy equipment for OTR. Over a beer, Jarrett later confessed that he jumped at joining the OTR band since he’d be playing with the Director of Research and might have less of a chance of getting fired if his journalism didn’t pan out.
Miami was an even bigger hit than Scottsdale. The band had momentum, new material and a full on dance style. It didn’t matter that our outdoor venue in South Beach got blown apart by sixty-mile an hour winds and torrential rain blowing sideways. We just moved inside to a ballroom and reset the stage. During our encore of “Marty Harmon’s On The Phone” Marty came up on stage and danced with his phone held up in the air, to a cheering dance floor.
When we played La Jolla California in 2005, Ron had left the company so we drafted bass player Michael Menduno (M2) from the OTR tech team. M2 had been gigging in the LA scene and was comfortable with whatever we threw at him. He was also a deep sea diver and knew how to keep his cool.
In 2006, we played Scottsdale Arizona again, then 2007 in Tarrytown New York, and finally Austin, Texas in 2008, at the Driskill Hotel. At the Driskill we had 24 songs about the OTR culture - three full sets.
Every year the band had a different name. We kept it fluid, in the moment. We started as The Inflections, and then The Insights, The Calculators, The UnWeighted Averages, Deadline Walking, and Thematix. Our backup singers were the Hotlines. All those names had some internal linkage to our operations and marketing lingo.
I think we became the Calculators after Saskatoon Ron left OTR. Ron had developed an Excel spreadsheet with a calculator attached to tally his data inputs and handed it off to one of our IT people, Lennie, who expanded it into a massive VPN automated database grid that recorded every single question and answer in every project with something like 15,000 annual interviews. That GRID generated a matrix of more than 300,000 data inputs every year.
Sometimes the online system would jam up in the early days, leave you stranded, on deadline, until an OTR IT person came to the rescue online. Rick captured the moment with a funky song called Gridlock! “You got grid!, You got gridlock!!, You got Grid! You got Gridlock!!” is how the chorus went, with verses singing out worst case scenarios.
By 2008, the whole OTR music endeavor was getting bigger and bigger. Almost too big. The band had to fly in two days before the research conferences just to rehearse and arrange the once a year songs. We had the two day conference loaded with workshops, client guest speakers, team sessions and dinners. Then the band would play the last night.
It was one thing to do a spoof of four songs, but a whole different ballgame to present three sets with 24 original song arrangements, memorizing the words, verse-chorus-bridge structures, timing, harmonies … for one night.
The stage was getting bigger as well over the years. While the core of the band became Rick, TJ, M2 and myself, we also had a French-Armenian keyboardist from the OTR European Team - Cedric - who had to crash the language barrier to decipher our arrangements. His UK girlfriend sang with us. And some wonderful chorus singers with Andy from editorial, Kate and Jason from the healthcare team, and Justin out the retail group. Most sang in choirs outside of OTR.
The Songs Just Kept Rolling Out
Black Rock City - Rock/Ska - a tribute to our IT Director - Irene -who built our Global VPN infrastructure that kept us connected around the world. She could tear down a motorcycle engine, perform fire dances, and for years, hosted the Thunder Dome at Burning Man
Carpe Per Diem - R&B - always conscious about expenses and saving money while traveling…an ode to our fantastic Financial Director Jeffrey … “Jeffrey said you had to take the bus…”
Halong Bay - Reggae - After an OTR Asia conference in Vietnam, we toured the majestic waters of Halong Bay by boat, then eventually ended up in a late-night Hanoi club, drinking shots with a Vietnamese General and his entourage.
Boomerang - Ska - “Boomerang, when you going to come back, Boomerang?” - tag line on a song written for people who left OTR for the outside world … and came back!
… and there were still 17 more, original songs!
The End of The Road
It was funny sometimes when strangers who weren’t in the company stumbled into one of our live events, with a packed dance floor and all these ‘in-house hits’ pumping away from the stage. Dance music! They would listen, somewhat bewildered. Look around and wonder why this music made any sense at all to this gyrating crowd? “Marty Harmon’s on the Phone, Oh No! … Marty Harmon’s on the Phone, Yeah Yeah!”
The band finally retired in 2009 when Rick left OTR and returned to playing live music in Florida clubs. For the first time in six years, we didn’t have a band at the annual research conference in Colorado. For me, without Rick, the catalyst was gone. It would just be golden memories at that point. It’s like we’d built a musical sand castle at the beach and the tide of time just swept it away. At least that’s what I thought.
But a year later, back in Miami at the 2010 OTR conference, I asked Rick to crash our conference and we played an acoustic - unplugged set - of some of our most popular songs.
The music was still alive!