Seems there are a lot of lawyers attracted to drugs, sex and rock n roll. Many moonlight and play in bands - maybe to forget the pain they inflict on others or because they have delusions of grandeur. Most that moonlight in rock bands are losers and tend to be short in height and feel miserable about themselves. They look down on others as if they are better than them and associate with questionable people.
Lawyers Rock to the Beat of Their Own Drummer
Lemonhead-turned-lawyer jams at attorney-owned coffeehouse as both reprise musical past
Janet L. Conley
Fulton County Daily Report
June 16, 2008
If you dropped by Kavarna, a hip coffeehouse and music venue in Decatur, Ga., this past Saturday night, you probably saw two lawyers who love music taking center stage, each in his own way.
Behind the soundboard you saw Wystan Getz, a Decatur criminal defense attorney who owns Kavarna and serves as its sound engineer a couple of nights a week; at the mic you saw John Strohm, who once played drums and guitar with indie rock bands Blake Babies and the Lemonheads and who's now an entertainment lawyer in Birmingham, Ala.
Both Getz and Strohm, who met recently via MySpace, have found a way to mix their first love -- music -- with their day jobs in law.
For Getz, law practice isn't just a way to keep his hand in the restaurant business. It's a way to do what he believes in. And it's clear from the moment you walk into his law office that he's comfortable expressing his views. On his waiting room coffee table, you'll see a copy of High Times, where he advertises his practice, next to the Fulton County Daily Report and the music magazine Paste.
The former Rockdale County assistant public defender who self-identifies on his Web site as "marijuana defender" divides his time between his practice, which focuses on criminal defense work including DUIs and drug cases, and stop-in-for-a-latte-and-stay-for-the-show Kavarna.
JAVA JOINT
Kavarna got its start when Getz purchased an existing business in February 2007 and grew it from a morning java joint into a day-to-night coffee-and-wine bar offering sandwiches, small plates and, three nights a week, live music.
His wife, Jill Wasserman, a King & Spalding attorney, helps him with music-licensing issues that arise, and his own legal and entrepreneurial skills help him spot not just dram shop liability and employment law issues, they also help him handle organization, multitasking and -- believe it or not -- customer service.
"Being an attorney is, essentially, providing personal services to people, and that's what this business is, too," he said. "We're providing personal services -- although in the form of refreshments and entertainment rather than solving crises. In a lot of ways, it's the same."
He has an ex-Aurora Coffee manager running Kavarna, but acknowledged that the food-and-drinks business is taking up more and more of his time these days -- about 60 percent compared with the 40 percent he spends practicing law.
Getz, who plays the guitar, keyboard, oboe and English horn but hasn't performed publicly in some time because of a tremor that makes playing difficult, said one of his motivations for launching Kavarna was to stay close to his musical roots.
"I think that for me, that's some of the interest in this business," he said. "And it doesn't matter that my fingering technique is not that good anymore."
Instead, he handles sound engineering for the musicians he books. And he books musicians he likes -- including Strohm, who now practices at Johnston Barton Proctor & Rose in Birmingham, but who spent the 1990s rocking out with some of the country's most popular indie bands at the time. Strohm co-founded Blake Babies with Juliana Hatfield, now a noted solo artist; his then-girlfriend, Freda Boner, was the drummer. He later played drums and guitar and toured with the pop-punk band the Lemonheads and its lead singer, Evan Dando, performing on two of the group's albums, "Creator" (1988) and "Lovey" (1990).
LISTENED AS STUDENT
Getz, who's from Nashville, said he liked Strohm's music for years and began listening to it while a student at Williams College in Massachusetts. Strohm, for part of that time, was a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston and was an integral part of the Boston music scene Getz enjoyed.
The two never met during their New England days, but Getz said he knew Strohm had become a lawyer and sent him a message via his MySpace page recently to see if he'd play at Kavarna.
Strohm said yes.
In an interview from his office in Birmingham, Strohm said he rarely plays in public these days, doing what he calls "proper shows" only a few times a year.
The demands of a law practice and a young family -- he's an associate at Johnston Barton and the father of a 5-year-old and a 7-month-old -- keep him close to home most nights.
But he still keeps both hands in the music business. In 2007, he released a solo album called "Everyday Life" on the Superphonic Records label; music business contacts he made as a performer, he said, are what help him get clients now.
"The reason I'm able to attract clients is because I have this depth of experience on the artist side," he said. "All my work comes through word of mouth. It's very nichey. I have friends and contacts in the industry who talk me up."
'DAY JOB WENT AWAY'
But his role in that industry underwent a dramatic change in 1997. That's when the Lemonheads broke up. "What was essentially my day job went away," he said.
Strohm followed the woman who'd become his wife back to her hometown in Birmingham, where she'd landed a job in banking. He began looking for work, too, but there wasn't much available for a guy with experience as a touring musician and studio sound engineer.
"It was really a cold shot of reality, because I realized I just wasn't equipped to make a living unless I was traveling. I had an enormous amount of arcane knowledge and skills that were not useful in the job market," he says.
So, in his 20s, he went back to college and got a history degree with a music minor from the University of Alabama-Birmingham, then went on to graduate magna cum laude from Cumberland School of Law in 2004.
An Atlanta entertainment lawyer -- sole practitioner David Prasse, who'd represented Strohm when he was performing -- encouraged him to get into the legal side of the music business.
"That really meant a lot," Strohm said.
Prasse, who counts Mastodon -- named best metal band by Rolling Stone magazine in April -- and bluegrass band Act of Congress among his clients, said he'd done some record deals with Strohm and noticed that the musician "had an eye for the players in the industry who were good to work with and who to stay away from."
Also, he added, "I thought John Strohm had the intelligence and personality and experience to be a music attorney who could really help a lot of people."
Strohm started out practicing law at Bradley Arant in Birmingham, then moved to Johnston Barton where he represents a variety of indie rock bands, including Montreal, which rocker Kevin Barnes founded in Athens, Ga., in the 1990s.
Strohm said he had moments in law school where he thought, "Where am I? What am I doing? Have I completely screwed this up?"
But now he has no plans -- or desire -- to return to full-time performing. In his last few years as a rocker, he said, he felt a lot of anxiety because he really wanted a family but knew a music career wouldn't provide the stability they'd need. Real music careers are stressful, he said.
"I wanted to be involved with music but not sweat bullets like that," he said.
STABILITY
Law practice offers that involvement without the instability. "If one of my solo albums freakishly took off and did really well, that would cause a lot of problems for me," he added, pointing out that it is hard to take a family on tour. "My kids are used to seeing me every day ... they hate it when I leave town."
"Would I give up my practice at age 41? I doubt it."
Getz, too, says he doesn't plan to ditch his criminal defense practice and become a full-time restaurateur.
Getz -- whose most memorable cases include helping The Innocence Project use DNA evidence to exonerate Clarence Harrison in 2004 for an erroneous rape conviction and representing William J. Kollie, an armed robber who was slapped with seven consecutive life sentences, the longest in Georgia history -- said Kavarna helps him keep perspective on the stress his law practice creates, and vice versa.
"It's nice to have a little bit of diversity going on," he said.
