The HigherEdJobs Podcast is dedicated to helping higher education professionals find fulfillment in their careers and be the change agents that higher education needs in today's world. Join hosts Andrew Hibel and Kelly Cherwin, along with guest experts, as they examine job search strategies and break down the latest news and trends in higher education.
E11
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[00:00:00] Andrew Hibel: Hey listeners, I know you'll love this exclusive offer from our friends at TopResume. For a limited time, you'll get 25% off any resume writing package. These packages match you with an industry expert resume writer to craft a resume built to pass the AI applicant filters and impress people on the other side.
Use code higher ed 25 at topresume.com/resume-writing to immediately improve your number one tool in getting that next great higher ed job. This is the HigherEdJobs podcast. I'm Andy Hibel. I'm the chief operating officer and one of the co-founders of HigherEdJobs. And I'm not joined today by Kelly Cherwin, our director of editorial strategy, because she decided to take a family vacation to wonderful Los Angeles.
We miss you Kelly, but we're happy you're having fun in LA. We're joined today by Martin Atkins and we are actually doing our first remote podcast in a amazingly cool place called the museum of post-punk and industrial music here on [00:01:00] the south side of Chicago in Bridgeport, which as a proud White Sox fan is the home of the Chicago White Sox as well.
Martin is a professor at Milikin University in Decatur, Illinois, but Martin's also a professional musician, but for further description, Martin, how would you describe yourself as a professional?
[00:01:17] Martin Atkins: Thanks and welcome. Yeah, what's my job title? I would tell my students, you need five things. That's great you're doing that one thing with the mandolin or the whatever, what are the other four things?
So I'm a professional drummer started playing when I was nine years old. I joined a band with Johnny Rotten in 1979, Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols called Public Image Limited. And I spent five years in that band. I had quite a storied career bouncing around from different, pretty visible bands, uh, Killing Joke, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails.
I'd play on a Grammy award-winning track called Wish I'm in the head like a whole video with Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor is in my band Pig Face. A band I started in [00:02:00] 1990, which features probably six or 700 different musicians at this point, which is kind of like for your older listeners, it's my rolodex.
You might call somebody to go and have coffee, go and have a drink maybe I'd call people to jump on stage and go crazy with my band Pig Face. It's my social interaction with my fellow musicians. I started a record label in 1988 called Invisible. That's still going in a different form than it used to.
I have my own recording studio. I've written three books about the music business. And as you said, I'm now a professor at Milikin and I've been teaching for probably 17 or 18 years. Now I have my Master's degree and now I founded the museum of post-punk and industrial music on the south side of Chicago.
[00:02:48] Andrew Hibel: Thank you for sharing your story. It's really kind of indicative of the topic that we want to hit today, which is a practical music education. Obviously, when you started your career, the end goal was not to end [00:03:00] up at an institution of higher education, but the practical career that you had landed you in that spot.
And now you get to teach and share in many ways, kind of like Pig Face with many other collaborators. In this case, students. Learning about the music industry is one of your primary goals.
[00:03:20] Martin Atkins: Well uh, I don't wanna disagree with you two minutes in.
[00:03:26] Andrew Hibel: Oh okay. Let's do this. How do you want me to rephrase, let's scrap that's we can rephrase the question.
[00:03:29] Martin Atkins: It's fine. No, I'm I was just, I was using that as a, like, I don't know that I'm trying to teach the music business. I think I'm simply using the super cool engaging platform of music business. Music in general as the way to camouflage students learning about themselves, about logistics, about juggling flaming bags of things and making triumph in the face of [00:04:00] adversity, because that's what the music business is.
It isn't my goal I think to have people know about contracts. Let me tell you about contracts, logistics, mileage miles per gallon on a bus on a Tuesday, weather patterns over Florida. That's not my goal. I think I'm trying to get students to a different place for themselves through music business. I guess I shouldn't be telling everybody it's just a camouflage.
Cause if I said to people today we're learning spreadsheets, geography, and fuel efficiency across five different vehicles. People would punch me in the face and run. But if I say 10 years ago, 50 Cent went on the road for his debut album, with Warner Brothers, ah, Right now he's in a bus. Should he be in a bus with an Nintendo in the back or is he gonna be in a Prius?
Because a bus gets nine miles to the gallon. The Prius is, but anyway, accidentally, as far as the students are concerned, they learn all of this stuff.
[00:04:59] Andrew Hibel: [00:05:00] Well, thank you for disagreeing with me cause I think that does a much better job of framing the place where, where I was trying to get to, which is in academia, there's such a pedagogy of using different methods to teach.
I think some of those methods to teach thankfully are developing. And thankfully, I think in, in your particular case, it's actually something that sets your teaching apart and the experience that your students have. We saw a professor at a pretty elite institution recently who taught accounting, but he did so in videos disguised as a potato, you don't see many accounting teaching potatoes on a daily basis, at least I don't, but where you are at, how much more common over the 17 years you've been teaching, have your methods become as opposed to when you started this way?
[00:05:46] Martin Atkins: None, maybe slightly. And that's maybe that's unfair of me cuz my head is in my world, but there's a place in Denmark, Norway, I don't know over there, that it's [00:06:00] called Chaos Pilot and it's a school and they teach their students to surf on chaos.
Holy crap. So we don't know what the chaos is, but we know there's gonna be some and the students will be able to surf on it. Look, this is fantastic. I called them up. I was on a layover, I think in Amsterdam, and I called them up. I'm like, I'm reading about your school and left a message.
The guy calls me back two weeks later, this is somebody from the Chaos Pilot. It's kind of noisy. It's I'm calling you from Vietnam. I'm like, oh my goodness. I, I didn't mean to speak to you on your vacation. Perhaps call me back when you're, when you're back at the office. He said, no, I'm here with students in a helicopter, like, okay, uh, uh, what are you doing?
What's the plan? He's like, oh, it's something. And, and, [00:07:00] and I just thought, yes. So that's, I think that's something that I've aspired to is, you know, there's a military term that plan don't survive first boots on the ground. And the only constant thing is change or all of this stuff. So, if that's true, then it's kind of admirable and, and useful to talk about surfing on chaos.
I think one of the things, this is kind of punk rock. I'm happy to tell you a bit about punk if you want. But one of the punk rock things that I carry with me is it's not correct for me to say I don't care because I obviously do care a lot about a lot of things. But I'm not sure that I care about my reputation or being judged on a student project.
Whereas I think there might be people in an elevated state in academia who are very protective of their reputations. So if I was to put together [00:08:00] a, a violin concerto or something, I'd let the students figure it out and decide for themselves. We need 15 more rehearsals before tomorrow cuz we're kind of rubbish.
If they decide that for themselves, that's great for them. But sometimes I see academics drilling down harder and harder because of the perceived effect of the result on their reputations. So I'm constantly looking at everything I've done to see how I can use it. And one of the things I can use about all of the things I've done is not be so uptight about the results. So I'll say to students, there's no grade for this event we're doing at Reggie's Rock Club down in Decatur. There's no grade screw the grades, which of course they love. And all there is, is how many people show up. The yardsticks we use in the professional world outside of university.
Well that's so now [00:09:00] that no one's sleeping because we're all on board with this no grades business, we're just gonna use this regular yardstick of number of people buying tickets, and then they can deal with it. Nobody sleeps. Sometimes people get agitated, but it creates a way of cutting through all of the noise to like, hey, just dig deep and get on with.
[00:09:21] Andrew Hibel: It's amazing to hear that perspective because, and this is definitely for my wife, Elizabeth, that she always likes to remind me when we go on a cross country trip and we're in the car, it's all about for me making good time. You gotta make good time. I mean, that's what you're judged by and you have to get to the destination.
You need to get there hopefully early if we're making good time, but and Elizabeth likes to remind me, no Andy it's it's about the journey. It sometimes seems in, in the process of wanting to achieve results and giving kids a tangible experience that they can take to their lifetime that were focused on the results and [00:10:00] forget that understanding the nuance of the journey is probably a much more important skill that they can translate to.
And it's, it's fun that you brought chaos in here, the chaos that is the music business. If you want to choose the music business there is no order in the music business. There is no like in academia, there's no single path. If you maintain these sorts of metrics and you publish in these places and you achieve this result at this stage of your career, you will be and let's say your goal is to be a tenured faculty member, a tenured faculty member to be successful in music and new music business as well. You have to understand the nuance of the journey.
[00:10:42] Martin Atkins: Well, yes. But that all works as long as so, so academia is seemingly less chaotic and those paths work unless your institution goes out of business, which just happened at in Lincoln, [00:11:00] Illinois, that we're done.
We were hacked, there was a piracy ransom thing, and some other things happened, of course. We're done. So I don't know what happens to everybody that had a clear path. I don't think there's any such thing as security or safety. I just don't. I think that our safety is within ourselves. I mean, people all over the world are learning that.
[00:11:23] Andrew Hibel: That's so true and, and really the perception of safety and security and norms that if you follow them, these will result. Life doesn't follow blueprints, life follows life.
[00:11:33] Martin Atkins: So my friend, Jim, he runs a Ruby programming conference up in Madison. I have no idea how we started talking. He was doing planning a west coast trip and it all made perfect sense.
You know, I'm like, oh, you've done a really good job of like everything. Now you need a day with some unexpected stuff in there. He's like, what are you talking about? Like, well, you're gonna be in, I don't know if you were San Francisco or Portland [00:12:00] or Seattle, like, well, you've gotta stay at the ACE hotel.
He's like, oh, where's that? Cause it it's a slightly more of a chain now, but not really. And they have turntables in the room and if you're gonna have turntables in the room, there's a selection of vinyl. And the downstairs cafe is kind of cool look, well, you gotta stay there and hang out. Who knows who you're gonna meet there.
He hadn't planned that. And so I just said, look, if there's no straight line from A to B, why do you have this straight line that you just planned? You know, why don't you plan some kinks in the road here and be aware don't just wander off, but be aware and, and collide with some interesting people, which I think he ended up...
He went a little bit wild with that. He came back and he was like, yeah, this guy just released a hip hop album. He's performing in our office next week. We're part of his kickstarter. I'm like, okay then good. I mean, it was great, you know, but, um, but once you start to do that, then you start to do more of that [00:13:00] and you start to, I I'm relearning all of the lessons I think people thought I'd learnt before I told them the stuff, like great things happen when you do stuff nothing happens when you don't and people are like, oh, heavy, you know? Alright. But it's just, you know, so last week there was some tables set up down at Millikin, community awareness. The Northeastern community fund had a table, Casa, which, uh, protects, uh, uh, children. A couple of community causes and I went over and I'm shy and I go over and talk to these people. I'm like, hey, how's it going? And, um, they told me all about their causes, their community funds and everything like, well, okay, we're doing this thing.
And I've got an event tomorrow night at this bar down the street from the university. You're very welcome to come. Just to, just to, just to kind of tell them something about what we had going on. [00:14:00] And one of the women like, oh my goodness, my, my partners in a band were there. And not only did she show up, but she showed up with like three friends, which was a decent part of a hundred person audience on a Wednesday night, you know?
So it's always these tiny things that accumulate to become larger things. And sometimes when we're looking at a larger problem, the tiny things seem not important, but you just need more of the tiny things. And I'm still trying to navigate that and remind myself of that.
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So speaking of the tiny things and maybe looking at some of the things that I'm, I'm looking at right now around me.
Yeah. And [00:15:00] it's interesting to me, as I look around, um, the museum experience and the inspiration for the museum of post punk and industrial music, where did it come from? Why, why this, why now?
[00:15:12] Martin Atkins: Yeah. That's like, I think my wife would say that same thing and I can be frivolous. And it's also quite serious frivolously.
If I hadn't set up the museum, I'd be like arrested as a hoarder, you know? So I mean, that's easy and now people, now I can say, if you hoard it, you've hoarding. Why don't, you're like, no, I'm curating, you know, you know, so, so one is, I like to use different words, you know, so we put together 112 page magazine.
I call it a catalog. Ooh. You know, oh, it's a catalog. I mean, it's a magazine, but we've, I've been saying magazine since I was 11, you know, so it's nice to use these different words. The other part of this is. What can I do with the things that I have as a [00:16:00] starting point to differentiate what I'm doing? So I'll tell students, for instance, if you have the skill of screen printing, you can do something.
And then as you can see around here, and this is perfect for a podcast, cuz nobody can see what I'm talking about, but all around us there as P P I M lamps, right? They're up there. They're behind you, Andrew. And they're over there. So my skill of screen printing is like, we can have lots of lamps. So it looks like, wow, they've really got it together with their branding.
No, we bought some lamps at target and we screen printed them downstairs. It took a minute and cost like $4 total. So, but we look like, wow, those lamps everywhere, it must have cost of fortune. No, but so I knew I had a large collection that involved me cuz I've been in a lot of bands and I'm old, but I thought, what can I do with this?
If I use it as a starting point, I'm halfway to something really super cool that's beyond me. And so I did, so my [00:17:00] collection became the evidence. It wasn't just, if somebody sent me $125 as a founder's donation or a t-shirt or sometimes a ticket stub, whatever, it wasn't just gonna be on a wall. Here's the ticket stub that was gifted to us.
And here's a t-shirt people saw what was here and wanted their things to be on the same wall in the same building. It's really interesting. This one guy Brad called me up, he said, I have a suit worn by OGA. He's an industrial performer worn by OGA in 2015, signed by him, covered in paint and stage blood.
Okay, well, yeah, well send it, but there was this strange three months, almost a courtship where he is like, well, I don't know. And then he put it back in the closet and that bothered him, that the suit could be seen. But he put it back in the closet and then it worried him. He actually told me he [00:18:00] had a nightmare that he died, which I mean, I would think that would be bad enough, but his nightmare was actually that his kids came in, went through the closet, found this paint splattered suit said, well, this is irreparable.
Throw it in the trash. So he was woke up horrified. That this prize possession might just be thrown in the trash. So it was almost like this Disney movie of like, you can keep it for yourself and destroy it or give it to everyone. And, and so he ended up sending me his suit. He could have just flowed out with it, but a month later, I guess he was having separation anxiety. He flew out to see the suit it's out front, surrounded by related items in a very respectful way. And he was relieved. So this has been a journey for me as well, of what even is this. I thought it was going to be the end of my creativity. And that seems logical, like well I've done it here. It is. Have a look that's 1980 [00:19:00] over there. There's a ticket from Fenway park when I saw the Boston red Sox in 1980s, but it's actually fueled my creativity. It's fueled conversations. Some of the best hangs I've had with people I've known since '93, '94 have been here. So it's still unfolding for me.
It makes me want to serve food here. Fire up the espresso machine and do different things here where the museum is so important that we can let it sit in the background and do something else in here and have people discover this stuff.
[00:19:32] Andrew Hibel: That makes great sense. And, uh, I feel somewhat hard pressed to make this irreverent comment here, but obviously you just solved the whole hoarding issue and started a new, like cleaning phase that, Hey, look at the item and determine would your kids just throw this away?
If the answer is yes, then you need to find someplace else for it. Pretty much.
[00:19:51] Martin Atkins: Well it it's weird. There are, you could call them vibes or spirits, or if the intangible is [00:20:00] tangible, there are people who I've made music with, who aren't here anymore. But the music is here. So this stuff, I don't mean to sound like some ocultist, you know, when I say we can conjure up the spirits, but music does conjure up the vibe and the memory and the creativity, and I've forgotten your, completely forgotten your question.
[00:20:20] Andrew Hibel: There was no question. It was just kind of a irreverent remark. Oh, okay. We've talked a little bit about this and I, I think it'd be fun for you to share, but as an educator, how have you brought students and, and learning into the museum.
[00:20:33] Martin Atkins: I know I've given some presentations. Where I say you can print a $17 bill.
Cause he told me, well, you go up and down action with a squeegee to print a t-shirt cost $3. No squeegees were hurt in this podcast. Oh, okay. Um, you, you print a, t-shirt sell it for 20 you're printing a $17 bill and some students are like, okay, they appreciate the side hustle of that. Then I'll [00:21:00] point. I might have a slide of some of the scenery behind me, these dollar bills, which is illegal by the way, to print these dollar bills, even though they're three feet long, it's technically counterfeiting.
[00:21:10] Andrew Hibel: That that's why we haven't disclosed the actual address at the museum.
[00:21:13] Martin Atkins: And now you're a party to this act. So, so this is scenery from a bank called killing joke in 1990, whether the art is good or not, the scenery was used in a video. Now it's memorabilia. I have cut these out, but I wouldn't sell one of these for less than $500. And then probably not even then.
So now that same action with the squeegee not harmed in this podcast, it's now $497. Now I've got people's attention and I'll point to other things in here, the lamps, for instance, how you can uplift your image and your vibe and your branding by just going with a squeegee, printing a lamp and so that's good, but for me to stand in my [00:22:00] museum and say, I left school when I was 16, without any qualifications whatsoever, I've got my master's degree now.
I've got five different brands of coffee with dark matter. I've written three books. I've been all over the world, a keynote noted, Melbourne music week and race four kids. And I'm a terrible DJ. And if I can do all of those things, I guarantee you, you can do it too. And that the theater of that is just lovely.
[00:22:25] Andrew Hibel: Going in that direction. When you look at music and the experience of music and the experience of live music, What a practical way of trying to say, you know, we talk about the, the concert t-shirt suburban Chicago schools ehen a big band comes to town, you can pretty much count the next day, good portion of the high school who's gone to the concert's gonna wear the concert T-shirt right. But really for, for fans of music, Pulling out that t-shirt and, and I have t-shirts from the eighties t-shirts that I wore for various important parts of my life. The t-shirt's not the action [00:23:00] created by the squeegee, but their memory of what that experience was for me in experiencing it live.
The importance of being able to capture some of those moments. We spend our lives nowadays with a cell phone, with us at all points, capturing whatever moment of the day that we want at any given time. It's in some ways amazing. In other ways, it's a different life than the life the folks our age have grown up with, but being able to, to speak to the other part of the music experience that helps you maybe capture that memory in a, in a way as a fan is pretty important, but it's interesting to hear from the other side of the equation, as the performer, it's the same thing, being able to have that experience as a band, right? Maybe taking a step in that direction. We were talking a little bit about Pig Face before we started. And you had mentioned, this came as a shock to me.
Two part question. Okay. Uh, you had mentioned that there have been six weddings on stage with Pig Face. Share a little bit about that as you're [00:24:00] sharing a little bit about that. Give some thought to what advice have you offered married couples as they come to the Pig Face stage about getting married?
[00:24:11] Martin Atkins: Well, okay. Like so many things, one thing is born out of an idea or just comments. I was probably sitting where you are now. This used to be my office 15 years ago, somebody from our distribution company called I think they sent a fax. That's my second reference to the past. Rolodex and fax machine. We were distributed by Caroline EMI distribution.
And we got this fax saying, come on, everybody do more like this. It was a band from Chicago called Local H oh, you they're fantastic. Yeah. They used this new technology and this new platform called eBay and they Ebayed a gig. Everybody everywhere's in uproar, you know, we'll play anywhere. You want place a bid, your basement, your back [00:25:00] garden, whatever.
And there was some, there was some language, it must be on the broadly on the route of a tour we'll deliver within a year, blah, blah, blah. It was a really great idea. It got them a lot of publicity, but you can't just eBay a gig cuz they just did it. And I don't think there's much mileage in being a follower in my business.
So I'm like, we're gonna Ebay a wedding, and it will include a case of beer, a bottle of spirits, some champagne of course, admission for 25 people with a souvenir pass and this and that, and the couple get to choose at what point, like at the beginning of the show, which we kind of pushed for that, or halfway through that happened once and it was terrible. It really just destroyed everything. You know, people are just like, boo, get out what's happening. The bride is caught a shoe in the, you know, but the first wedding we did [00:26:00] suddenly you're at somebody's wedding. It's not like the wedding's over here. We we're tuning our instruments.
You're tuning your instruments at somebody's wedding. The bride had requested wine coolers, like, okay. So we got a case and ran out. So like, so you got an idea of what was going on. And we got, we sent out for more wine coolers
[00:26:20] Andrew Hibel: For those out there who don't know what wine coolers are. Maybe you could explain that.
[00:26:24] Martin Atkins: Oh what are they like, like wine with like Sprite? Seltzer wine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:31] Andrew Hibel: Before the, the seltzers were all the rage, the wine cooler was, was king.
[00:26:34] Martin Atkins: Well, that's my third reference for the past. It's just like a ZEMA, a clear beer. There we go. So I don't think any of them actually have wine in them.
So, um, but so suddenly you become friends. These people who are on, who got married on stage three members of Pig Face [00:27:00] are ordained. So that was kinda like, hey, what can we do with what we have? Right. We didn't need to spend money to bring somebody in. And it was theater.
I think at some point, I thought like, Oprah will be all over this, which of course she wasn't, but you just accidentally start to reach out to people. I think the last wedding that we had in Chicago was a couple, and this is where things get deeper. Neither of their families would sanction the wedding back then I thought, well, I was thrilled that they chose Pig Face to tie the knot, but really I should have been how tough is that where the only place you think you can get married is on stage with Pig Face. I still remember that the bride walked onto the stage on a bed of red rose petals. It was pretty wild. So you create these moments, which I guess I'd love to talk to some fans who were at these weddings, because then I don't not that I would anyway, cuz it would be [00:28:00] pointless, but then I don't have to grab the mic and go Shut up, everybody. This is important. This clearly is important. Cause someone's getting married in a minute. Would you shut up? And it creates a reverence and a, we are obviously respecting the couple and now the audience is involved in this thing. So, yeah. And if I could digress for a moment, one of my favorite hilarious moments, so I'm a crazy drummer.
So I, they, they requested that there'd be some kind of a beat and some atmospheric music while there who give her this woman, you know, whatever. And so I'm playing and somebody in the party had forgotten the petals. So they'd come to me, petals, petals. So I grabbed Jim who's, my drum tech petals, petals. So he looks around.
And goes and grabs the guitarist pedals, unplugs them. He's thinking change the batteries. The guitarist is in the middle of a solo at the Metro [00:29:00] 1100 people just starts kicking Jim, like, what are you like the opposite of what a crew person should do instead of keeping the, the performance moving forward, he's act actively destroying the performance.
So then he's like, okay. And I'm like petals, petals, petals. So he's like, okay, it's not the guitars pedal. It must be the bass player's pedal. So he goes, oh, Paul Raven, who's sadly, no longer with. He grabs Paul's bass. I think Paul nearly kicked him off the stage and then Jim comes off and I'm like petals petals.
And he realized, oh, when he came back upstairs with the box of petals, It's amazing that if that marriage did survive, cuz it was 15, 20 years ago, the sour emotions where he, he sprinkled these, they weren't petals of Goodwill and joy and future, they were the petals of spite and like, you know, yeah, sorry. That's good.
Nothing to do with, and then you find, [00:30:00] when you take a few steps over here and a few steps over. Oh, my goodness. We'd never have that story if it wasn't for trying to do something, no matter what happens, sometimes you end up with a really great story. I'm gonna let you off
[00:30:13] Andrew Hibel: I'm gonna let you off the hook for matrimonial advice.
But this one, I won't let you off the hook for, which is advice to job seekers for somebody who has served to hire folks, as well as somebody who has looked for jobs himself, what would your best advice be to somebody who's looking for a job in higher education?
[00:30:31] Martin Atkins: Um, okay. So you can interpret this in a higher ed way, but my easy answer is don't, and at the same time always be looking.