Most of Bridge Nine’s output in the ‘90s, including our tribute to the at the time, discontinued “It’s Ok Not To Drink” tee, originally coined by Positive Peer Pressure (right, 1999).
Bridge Nine’s office / apartment at 9 Sewall St. in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood (opposite, 1999).
Bridge Nine’s certificate to do business in Boston, with the address for my first apartment in the city (below, 1998).
I graduated from college in May of 1998, and the day after the ceremony, ended up breaking my ankle while out skateboarding with friends, requiring surgery to fix. I had already decided to move to Boston, not only because I knew a lot of people there from my hometown (over a dozen kids from Glastonbury lived in Mission Hill when I arrived), but also because the two active bands on the label were from Massachusetts. Two months later, I moved into my first apartment in the city on crutches.
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Like the first few years at college, the label wasn’t much more than a post office mail box and a bedroom. At first, everything was under my bed in boxes, as that started to expand out it went to a book shelf, then to one of the steel and fiberboard shelves procured from Home Depot, then two. I packed the records, t-shirts, stickers and patches that I sold, as well as the occasional skateboard, into envelopes and boxes and every few days dragged them down the street to the post office. There was no website yet, and no “social media” for the label. If kids wanted the current list of what was available, they mailed a dollar and I sent them a
sticker along with the latest edition of my cut and paste, photocopied “catalog”. The whole process took a couple of weeks. I had spent much of my formative years snowboarding, so my first job in the area was at a snowboard / windsurfing shop in Cambridge. I was fired within months for “having a poor work ethic” by the former windsurfing pro who managed the place, Which wasn’t true, I have a crazy work ethic, he was just not a good manager. Thankfully, I didn’t need to rush to find a job because I was making enough money on the side selling novelty stickers to Hot Topic. To help fund the 1998 releases, I started soliciting bumper stickers to their buyer at the corporate HQ. I had walked into the Hot Topic that my friend Matt Firestone managed one night and happened to notice a display case of stickers. I thought, “I could make those”, and over the next year proceeded to design and sell thousands of stickers to the chain store. It helped cover the pressing costs of those two 7 inches that year, and gave me a little breathing room as I looked for a new job.