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I began my professional career as a DJ. You would probably be surprised how many artists and underground icons got their start this way. Back in 1996 when I started soundboy records, the best part of running the company was publishing the accompanying magazine. I combined all the things I loved and wanted to do as a career - write, interview, take photos, review and edit. It was glorious. But alas, the glory days would fade into the hip but ordinarily mundane tasks of indie record label biz. Then I was bitten by the film vampire - and I became one. Perhaps I should start from the beginning. I was born H. Allen Pulley II on July 22, 1972 at a Catholic Hospital in Downtown Boston Massachusetts. I was the youngest of three children. Both of my parents were affiliated with Boston University. My Mother was Assistant Dean of minority student affairs and my Father was a graduate student of Theology. We lived in the city on Commonwealth Avenue. Later that year we moved to West Newton, a few miles away. The following spring we moved to Greenville, New Hampshire near the Canadian border. Although I spent a lot of time there throughout my childhood and early adult life, I never really considered New England my home. In 1975 my family moved to western Pennsylvania. Although we didn't know it at the time, It was the beginning of the end. The following year my parents were separated. They were both originally from North Carolina, having met on campus at Livingstone College. Although I vacillated between them, I eventually came back to North Carolina with my mother and two sisters. We lived near Gaston College between the small towns of Dallas and High Shoals. I spent the majority of my childhood between there and Pennsylvania with my Father and half Brother. Beginning in the early eighties, I developed a fascination with music. I had a good voice but otherwise not musically inclined. I learned to play a few instruments, but I was not dedicated enough to become great. I collected 45's and played them on a vintage turntable in my room. I played any type of music I could get my hands on. By age 10, I was a vocalist. I sang in competitions until I was twelve. But I grew tired of constant rehearsal and performance. I stopped singing at 13, which is a critical time in voice training. When we are young, we often make mistakes we cannot see, or do not realize. In 1984, I would hear an album that would change everything. It was the debut album from a new your trio, RUN-DMC. At that point my friends and I realized that we could make records from records. It was a revelation, and a revolution. I still followed other styles; ska, punk rock, reggae, electronic, new wave, etc. - I was in tune to anything that was underground, away from the mainstream. In 1985 nothing was more underground than Rap. In 1986 my teenage hip hop group released two singles and two B-sides on an independent label. After three years of performing in high school gymnasiums, festivals and amusement parks, I wanted to return to my musical and artistic heritage. I fell into an "artistic phase". I formed my own band, nailed quilts to the walls of my bedroom, and cut a five song demo. Although I had been writing since I was a small child, I suddenly became proficient. Poetry and song became part of my arsenal. I was a high school senior in 1990. I won the national honor society essay award, I was selected for the future entrepreneurs of America, I had my first article published and syndicated and I won a freelance writing contest for a music magazine; all in the same year. It seemed as if I was about to begin a remarkable career. Then everything began to transform. I awakened spiritually and socially; as a direct result, ambition escaped me. I was anti-establishment, but I was also anti-everything else. My student career consisted of College, Jr. College, Film School and Vocational training. I made decent grades but I was bored, agitated and restless. I had no direction or drive. I switched majors five times. I then turned to music, as I often would through the years, and I started to DJ; the way I used to in high school and Jr. High. I was successful, or at least what society considers a success. I was periodically on the radio and briefly had my own show. Rapidly becoming an underground sensation only fueled my real passion; writing and producing film. Many of my peers saw believed them unrelated, but to me there was no separating the two. When an opportunity came in 1996 to direct a music video for a local band, I jumped on it. Entertainment now had its hooks in me. I did not want to do anything else. In the Summer of 1996 I started a small independent label and production company, called Soundboy Records. The focus of the company was music. My main focus was publishing the accompanying magazine. But all that time, I desperately wanted to learn film making. I had done my best Kerouac impression the previous year and released a spoken word album, Egyptology,1995. I finished my international business degree in 1998 and was more restless than ever. The next spring I threw all caution to the wind and enrolled in film school. I was 26 years old. At first it seemed as if I could make it work. I was no stranger to hardship and sacrifice. But when my resources ran out and the film community shifted gears, I saw my window of opportunity begin to narrow. For the next year I thought about what my next move should be. Feeling as if my career was over before it had begun, I leaned on the strongest pillar I had left, Soundboy; the company I had started just three years prior. After a conversation with another label owner, I established my home base in a record store located in Eastland Mall in Charlotte, NC. The label and accompanying magazine generated enough revenue for me to purchase some camera equipment. Together with my film school textbooks, four years worth of screenplays and friends as reckless as myself, I began to make independent film. I was inspired or driven by many factors that I did not understand at the time. My master (Stanley Kubrick) had been murdered. JFK Jr. had likewise been killed. I felt as if the stage was being set for a crisis of conscious, but I also felt that I was powerless to stop it. The first film I made was free radicals, 1999 a documentary of our everyday lives in filmmaking, pro skateboarding and raising hell in general. Being nihilistic seemed to accompany being young and unafraid. That project was followed by the ides of march, 2000. The next, was one of my proudest. I collected over 20 hours of footage from WWII in order to produce World Warrior, 2001, a conceptual documentary in my natural style of music video that I felt most comfortable with during this time. It made the festival circuit and received lukewarm praise. It was also tied to the subversive rhetoric of my writing style. Just before its release in the spring of that year, the circumstances associated with being independent began to overwhelm me. I was perceived as an insider on the outside. Most of my associates spent more time trying to figure me out than understand my work. Because I wasn't constantly talking about what I was doing, many people assumed I was doing nothing - or something I shouldn't. I admit that I had material that was hard to swallow, but I couldn't change overnight, even if I wanted to. It seemed to me that even without having a successful film under my belt, I was still regarded as an obvious "threat" to the establishment. But I come from a family of fighters, rebels and revolutionaries. Being methodical has made me relentless. I pulled everything together that summer. I began desktop publishing and mobile recording. I dug deep into the literary well and wrote a book from a group of essays called the Glint of Bayonets 2001 and began to try to get a grip on the industry. Then in September, on the eleventh, I was watching morning TV. It was something I almost never did; but there was an interview with a guy who wrote a book on Howard Hughes that I wanted to read. Suddenly, they broke in with a report that a plane had hit on of the WTC towers. Even though it had just happened, even though no eyewitness at that point said they saw a plane, even though nothing like that had ever happened anywhere ever before, they already had a news helicopter broadcasting images of a hole in the tower (which was disproportionate to one a 767 would make) yet no plane crash debris was on the ground or outside of the tower. And even though there are a dozen weather cameras pointed toward it, there was no video of the actual crash. It was surreal. Something about it was wrong, very wrong. A little while later I saw something even more ridiculous. There was a lady eyewitness on the phone live with the morning TV anchors. As the television audience is seeing what they believe is a jet crashing into the other tower, the lady screams and shouts that there was another explosion. She never mentioned a plane. The NBC anchors tell her it was a plane. She said she just saw an explosion. They hung up on her. A little while later, even though no steel and concrete skyscraper in the history of the world had ever collapsed from fire, including the one in Iran that was struck by a crashing 737, the towers began to fall, straight down, rapidly. I realized at once, especially as a video professional, that I was witnessing one of the biggest travesties in the history of mankind. I had always been a revolutionary, but now the ideal was cemented. Never again would I believe in the consensus of mass media or the public at large. The following month, I committed myself to making documentary films - and not just conceptual short subjects - making It my top priority. I immediately changed the name of the company to Soundboy America. I thought to myself, this is where it all began, and by god, this is where it will end. I spent the next year writing, unable to shake the questions in my head about the supposed attack and the rush to declare war on an imaginary concept, invisible bad guys and countries and people that seemed to have nothing to do with anything. As the country fell deep into depression, I followed. I tried to avoid the brown-people killing blood lust of the masses, but it was everywhere. In the fall of 2002 I met people who would become critical to my career. They didn't fully understand me, but they supported me and gave me confidence, and that was enough to regain lost ground. Gradually things improved. Although my heart was broken and my soul was crushed by the invasion of Iraq In 2003, I resolved to put it out of my mind, at least until I could articulate my anguish. When writing became too much to bare, I turned to spoken word, and self published the glint of bayonets, the book of essays and prose from two years before. In 2004, I decided to record some of the tracks and combined it with Charlie Parker outtakes. It was called Infusion: charlie and Me, released in 2004. It was my first spoken word project in almost 10 years. I began to tour with poetry groups and perform live in the coffee house and art gallery circuit. I was in the best physical and mental shape of my life. Expression without the pressure to entertain was liberating to say the least. Between recitation and writing, my friends and I shot some screen tests for my first independent short feature, lady luck, 2004. Despite attention and critical acclaim, I could not complete the type of "breakout" project I was looking to capitalize upon. Just as it had a decade before, it seemed as if I was destined to live my entire life as "the next big thing". In early 2005, I finally had a viable idea. I was planning to make a movie about a civil war regiment from North Carolina. Gradually it became a movie about symbolism. Then, it became a movie about the history of my family. I spent all that year filming it. Freedom vs. Liberty, 2005 in its long awaited premiere was watershed for me. I became disciplined, organized and professional. The next year brought a feeling of both relief and exhaustion. I decided to take a short break from film to do some corporate work in order to make more money. Accolades do not put food on the table. During this period of personal disillusionment, I was bombarded by fans of my now infamous 9/11 blogs to make a film. That summer I capitulated. It was simple at first, then more complex, then I began to wonder if it had been a mistake. the Big Takeover, 2006 has proven to be my most successful film to date. I do not measure my success by the commercial success of my films, but on how they are received by those I respect, and how I feel about myself when they are complete. I understand now what I did not back when I started: that I (not my projects) am the threat to the establishment, because my integrity is not for sale, at any price. I am not driven by ideology, I am driven by a search for the truth. If I die tomorrow, or as the old folks say, "if tomorrow is my great getting up morning", then I will die knowing then no man ever owned or controlled me. The things I sacrificed and went without were as a matter of course. In 2007 I finished my film degree and in 2008 I re-enrolled in tech school. This course of action has lead to a dozen art films, two novels and countless articles and webcasts. I have few regrets and very much to be thankful for. I have always been into tech, but now I realize that I need the association qualifications to make all my years of training complete. I also realize that I cannot just write material directed to myself, only about the subjects that I find relevant - as it would squander my gift, which I believe is of a higher purpose. Since I started making films I have become an existentialist and a pacifist, which is the definition of a true Christian. I have also become a feng shui master and completed training in martial arts. If you must judge me, do it not on who you think I am, but what I made out of my life. I know at the very least, whatever happens from now on, I am and always will be the Soundboy. Skip Pulley, Soundboy America |
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