A Quote by Dion DiMucci
I left Columbia in the mid-'60s. I had a guaranteed contract for, like, $100,000 a year. And I just let it go. And I wasn't a rich man. There were a lot of bad vibes around the whole thing.
Related Quotes
There's a lot of unreleased blues stuff I did with the Apollo Theater musicians, and there was of experimenting going on for me in the mid-'60s in that studio, which I think frustrated Columbia.
My first contract I was offered by the UFC, or my second contract, it was 1-and-1, 2-and-2, 3-and-3. That's $12,000 for the year. Don't complain to me about fighter pay. It was $12,000 for a year, and it was exclusive.
As a kid, my parents had the typical stuff going on in the home, like Bee Gees, The Carpenters. Then I got exposed to what my brothers were listening to: a lot of classic rock, Led Zeppelin. It was around the mid-'80s when the whole Electro-Techno-Pop-House music thing started happening in Chicago.
Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it, sometimes 24 hours.
I thought if I had a Twitter feed and say I had a following of a 100,000, that means 100,000 of them would be interested in my book. It was logical, but it didn't turn out to be true. It turned out if I had a Twitter feed of a 100,000, four of them were interested in my book.
If you've got $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, you're better off paying off any debt you have because that's a guaranteed return.
I signed a $150,000 contract with TNA Wrestling for a year. I ended up 8 appearances for 40 minutes. Then I signed a second contract and they didn't use me. So, I'd like to thank them for $300,000 for 40 minutes' worth of work.
I don't really regret anything I've done, even if it's bad. I mean, I have a $100,000 Chopard watch. I don't need a $100,000 watch, but I like it. It's all diamonds. That's a little extreme, but I don't care.
The fifties were pretty rebellious, a pretty rebellious period, around that time. And it was preceding the whole zoot suit thing which I think really contributed to a lot of anxiety, to a lot of frustration, a lot of blaming. And it just like boom, it was very destructive for us as a people, that right away put us on like we had to defend ourselves on every level, every moment. We seemed like we always had to be on guard.
My first contract with WCW was, like, $70,000 a year. I didn't know you could make that kind of money doing this. I was like, 'Wow. I think I'm going to stick around for a long time.'
O.J. Simpson was primarily interested in O.J. His rise to fame in the late '60s coincided with the period where black athletes were more outspoken and political than in any era. You're talking about the generation of black athletes that came about after Jackie Robinson. Athletes after that were just happy to find a place in sports. But when you got to the mid-'60s, you had athletes like Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali, who were very outspoken on the issues of race and civil rights.
I remember a meeting I had at MGM. It was at the end of their reign. They say we have you under contract, and because you’re under contract, we’d like to you to work. I said, well, that seems fair. But if it’s a really good movie, they were going to give it to a particular actor that was not under contract. The bottom line was they were going to pay you more if it was a bad one and pay you less if it was a good one.
Our ages ranged from 22, down to 18, and we had a 6 month contract to go to Bogata, Columbia. And of course, it was during the depression, we were still with our parents, and things were still pretty tough on them back in the United States.
Jim Jones started out as a civil rights crusader in Indianapolis. As a young preacher in the mid-50s, he used members of his congregation to integrate lunch counters and all-white churches in rich neighborhoods; they'd just march in and sit down at the pews and see what happened. Often they were received with racist insults, and once with a bomb threat. But the fact that you had this charismatic, white man, aggressively promoting racial equality, was a huge draw for African Americans, many of whom felt the Civil Rights Movement had stalled by the late 60s.
I felt like Twitter was more of a place for people to just socialize instead of promoting. After I got off, I realized I could have used that energy and that lane to really promote some positivity. I had 35,000 followers before I left. I was like, "Damn those were 30,000 consumers." It kind of twisted my whole thought process so I got back on. I realized that I have a voice that people wanted to hear.
The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot. Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure. Norman Mailer and Vidal, the same thing. The bestselling writers now, there's no great animal energy with them.
Related Authors
Ani DiFranco Quotes
American
Musician
Bob Dylan Quotes
American
Musician
Brian Eno Quotes
British
Musician
Bruce Springsteen Quotes
American
Musician
David Bowie Quotes
English
Musician
Drake Quotes
Canadian
Musician
Elton John Quotes
English
Musician
George Harrison Quotes
British
Musician
Henry Rollins Quotes
American
Musician
John Lennon Quotes
English
Musician
Madonna Ciccone Quotes
American
Musician
Moby Quotes
American
Musician
Nicki Minaj Quotes
American
Musician
Patti Smith Quotes
American
Musician
Thom Yorke Quotes
English
Musician
Tori Amos Quotes
American
Musician