by “JEWEL: So when I got discovered, there ended up being a bidding war over me and I turned down a million dollar signing bonus as a homeless kid because I had read a book about how the business works. That it was a loan, basically. I owed that million dollars back through record sales and that I would never make any more money until I paid that money back”
“So I was just cheap and worked hard. I did coffee shops or high schools in the morning. Then I would do usually two radio shows, at least one record store, a show out in the parking lot. Then I would open for somebody like Peter Murphy of Bauhaus at night. I paid him to open for him. I paid him $500 a show. Then I did a solo coffee shop gig at midnight. That was my day. I did that for over a year. I would do these little circuits where I called it “hard wood grows slowly.”
