Arnie Carver

Another common mistake that I see DJ’s make is letting their personal taste get
in the way of business. This is very bad. As a professional DJ, it’s my job to play
music that people want to hear. My personal taste in music is completly irrelevant.
When someone hires me for a job, it is to do what they want and this usually does
not include trying to expand their personal taste. I can listen to all the metal
I want in the car or at home, not while someone else is paying me to play Madonna.

Besides, there are a whole lot worse jobs out there. I know, I’ve done more than
enough of them.

’til next time,
Arnie

Here we are with my second of many installments sure to come about the business of
entertaining people. To dive right in from the start, my earliest memories are of
beating on pots and pans with wooden spoons pretending to be “The Cat-Man” Peter Criss
of KISS. As a child growing up on rock music, Kiss were the ultimate super heroes and
I wanted to be just like them. I guess I got my way, having played drums in several
rock bands as well as wearing a costume and makeup whilst claiming to be a super hero.
Just not at the same time. Maybe I’ll get into the whole super hero bit some other time
as it’s quite ridiculous.

I knew as a young child that settling for a regular 9 to 5 office job just wasn’t for
me. The next bug that bit me came when I was 6 or 7 tears old when I saw the movie
“Poltergeist”. To this day, I can’t remember being so scared. I had an old, half dead
apple tree in my back yard that looked all too much like the one that attacked the
little boy in the movie. How could something of pure fantasy illicit such a strong
emotion as fear? I’m still not sure I have a good answer for that one, but I’ve certainly
learned to recreate that feeling in others. Through the years after that, I became
increasingly fascinated with the genres of horror and scifi. I watched every horror movie
and TV show that I could find. Everything from “The Twilight Zone” and “Tales From the Darkside”
to the gore soaked classics like “Day of the Dead” and “The Thing”. My fascination evolved
quickly from fear to the art of creating monsters.

I would get my opportunity to try my hand at both soon enough. When I was in 8th
grade my school had a tradition of putting on a haunted house on Halloween to help
finance a field trip. Myself and a group of friends were charged with putting the
spookshow together. I wonder if the school district had any idea what kind of monster
they were feeding. With a big help from my dad, some cardboard, paint and a whole lot
of inspiration, we pulled it off rather well. Now 19 years later I couldn’t fathom doing
anything else during the Halloween season. Welcome to the haunted attractions business!

Lots more to come very soon……..

Arnie

There’s nothing like experience.

There’s a repeating issue in many job markets that goes something like this; “You can’t get experience unless you have experience.” Rookies make rookie mistakes. Of course I was a rookie and did the same and I bet you did too. It does not matter if it’s a hobby, a job or a new class in school, there’s always a learning curve.

The nightclub business is certainly not for everyone. As someone who has been in charge, I think it’s ok to hire inexperienced people as long as they have the right personality to fit the job. Just don’t hire too many “rookies” at once. These people need to be shown the ropes and that takes time. This also serves a dual purpose
as you can train them the way you want them to behave without bringing bad habits from their bars or clubs. This should not be a big issue because if they don’t work out, send them on their way.

The bigger issue that I see is inexperienced owners and management. This can cause immediate failure. Having been part of a crew that opened several new clubs, I’ve seen this repeatedly. Inexperienced owners or managers who thought they knew more than others with hard earned experience. I have personally seen three businesses utterly fail and another currently teetering on failure for this reason alone.

In closing, I have only one point with this blog:
There’s nothing like experience!

Arnie

In all of my years in “showbiz”, I can’t say I know it all, But I’ve learned alot.
Not just about entertaining people either. I think that I have learned more about myself
through work than I would have anywhere else.  Nearing my 20th year in “the business”
I still have just as many if not more questions as I did when I got started an the ripe age of
13. Of course then I thought I had it all figured out. I actually had it figured out when I was
about 4 years old. Yours truly was going to play drums for the rock band KISS. Well, I’m not
Peter Criss, Eric Carr or Eric Singer. I have however, played drums in a number of rock bands.
None of witch ever made it past the local bar scene, but most played a Kiss song or two.

With the entertainment industry you get both the best and the worst of people. Relationships,
both personal and professional have been formed and broken. Through the years many good people
that I’ve known have lost everything while some very despicable souls have excelled. This
isn’t always the case and just as often the opposite. One thing that I am sure of is that success
is relative to definition and determination with a little dash of chance. I’m not just referring
to becoming a “rock star”. I certainly am not nor have ever been one. This theory applies to any
walk of life that someone chooses, stumbles into or is just stuck dealing with for any amount of
time. To quote someone who’s name currently escapes me, “life is 10% what happens to you and 90%
how you deal with it.”

Much, much more to come on this subject……..

Arnie

With the recent death of Gary Hart and Wrestlemania right around the corner,
I’ve been wondering. What happened to managers in pro wrestling? It’s just
as if they disappeared. Not that long ago, they served as mouth pieces to
get over Wrestlers that weren’t good talkers. Nearly every great “heel” had
a great manager who did many things for their character. A heel manager was
one of the most common reasons a “good guy” went bad. Two that really come
to mind were when Bobby “The Brain” Heenan got Andre the Giant to turn on
Hulk Hogan and when Gary Hart did the same with Chris Adams against the Von Erich
family. These are two classic examples of how a great manager helped draw huge
crowds to wrestling events.

Speaking from experience, a wrestlers ability to get the fans to either love
him or absolutely hate him is just as important as their ability to work a good
match. As a “bad guy” or “heel” in particularly it’s important to make the
crowd hate you so that they will buy tickets to see someone beat you. If
you’re not a good talker, this is very hard to accomplish. Thus no one is
paying to see you get beat. If you’re not helping the promotion generate revenue,
you’re not an asset no matter your in ring ability.

In my short run in the world of professional wrestling I quickly rose to the
top of the promotion for one reason only. My ability to talk and make the fans
hate me. Compared to the twenty or so other performers that worked for the company,
I was an average wrestler at best. My matches weren’t the most exciting, but people would pay
to see me get my a** kicked by anyone. It was a very small oganization without a TV show
that would draw 100 or so people to see us wrestle at a local Y.M.C.A. type gymnasium on
friday evenings.

This was the late 1990’s when wrestling was really hot. There were three major
organizations (WWF, WCW, ECW) with a total of five prime time TV shows and more
viewers than anything else on cable television. People just couldn’t get enough
wrestling.

Much has changed since then. WWF bought out WCW and became WWE. ECW folded and
all rights were sold to WWE as well as many other smaller regional and defunct
companies. Somewhere in the mix the great managers were lost. With the upstart TNA
they have whom many consider the only great manager working for a national company
today. This being “The Sinister Minister” James Mitchell. WWE has had a few in recent
memory with Armando Estrada managing “The Samoan Bulldozer” Umaga and Paul Heyman
managing Brock Lesnar just a few years ago. Both of these managers were very
entertaining, but Heyman has since left the wrestling business and Estrada only
occasionaly appears on television.

This could easily change, WWE has many great talkers currently working for them
in non character roles. They are also a few great in ring performers lacking the
gift of gab. Matt & Jeff Hardy, The Big Show and Batista all come to mind as people
that could benefit from a great mouth piece. One of the all time great talkers is
right under their noses in Micheal P.S. Hayes. Why Hayes isn’t on the air is baffling
to me, as well as Estrada. I would pay just to here these guys talk because they
are both that good (or bad in a good way).

That’s what I think anyway…….

Arnie