Elyse Weinberg, termite art, earning money & spending time

“I don't think I lost faith in the music business, I just drifted away.”

There’s a great moment in the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream: he’s just made it from Florida to Los Angeles, and as I recall it, steps into a phone booth to page through the directory when serendipitously, on the floor between his feet, he finds a sheet of paper listing the phone number of every major record label. Great, he thinks, this saves him a lot of time and trouble. Then the fact of this list makes clear the commonness of his dream and his odds dawn on him: He’s not the first guy with this plan for rock n’ roll stardom, nor the only.

A more common story than Tom Petty’s, and the one that interests me more in many ways, is that of everyone else who has stood in the phone booth for whom something goes wrong, including the ones for whom some important things go right; who get record deals but whose rising stars somewhere along their ascent fizzle out.

Although Elyse Weinberg, by her own telling, didn’t sputter and fall. She zipped over to another solar system.

“I don't think I lost faith in the music business,” she told an interviewer in 2010. “I just drifted away.”