but mostly avoided subprime loans, has no plans to sponsor another house band, but the Q Express is still running, sending employees on retreats, free of charge. In the last two years, few regular folks can claim such charitable employers—if they’re employed at all. Their disgust with the financial industry in particular has rightly festered as details shake out about multi-million-dollar bonuses, corporate retreats, and taxpayer-funded bailouts (an estimated $23.7 trillion), often of the very corporations that overinflated the economy until it burst: AIG, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and the like.

Almost 200,000 Wall Streeters have lost their jobs in the last two years, according to Bloomberg News. Oppici was laid off in November 2007 (he spent all of 2008 unemployed before landing at institutional brokerage Concept Capital). Co-vocalist Hall switched jobs shortly thereafter. But none of the Wall Street players interviewed for this story were on food stamps. By the end of 2008, Marriott had logged insane hours for Credit Suisse— 38 days in a row for one epic stretch, he says—helping the bank extract itself from the toxic subprime mortgage-backed bond market. Then, after 25 years in banking, he retired. Along with his wife and kids, he spent most of this summer at a vacation home in Florida. Umezaki, formerly of Lehman, was recently having renovations done to his Madison Avenue penthouse.

As band members, though, these guys are facing new tests of mettle.
Many have had to settle for smaller venues and pay for gear and promotion
if they hope to keep on rockin’ in a world that’s no longer free.

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NY BUNCH OF Wall Street rockers ever hoping to grace
another Hard Rock stage in this economy would be wise to study
the business model of the Subscribers. They’re a self-described
“hedge fund band” who started playing charity gigs in 2004
and incorporated in 2007 as a full-blown, nonprofit 501(c) 3 foundation.

“The Subscribers never were and never will be a corporate band,” founder, guitarist, and Lazard Asset Management director Chris Heasman wrote in response to an e-mail that lumped him in with other Wall Street groups. They fund their own gigs and aren’t affiliated with any one firm— members work for Schafer Cullen Capital Management, Barclays, and others. And although he has jokingly referred to his guitar playing as his “midlife crisis,” Heasman (who says he’s “under 50”) points out that the concept of a house band performing in front of a banner bearing the corporate logo “feels like an idea from a different era, like guys riding their Harleys and playing their guitars because they never got to do that as kids.”

The Subscribers say they’ve helped raise more than $7 million for a dozen nonprofits, far more than any corporate-rock act. Even in a time of increased scrutiny of traders, bankers, and hedge fund managers, “People think of their events as doing something good,” says Gayle Silverman, the Subscribers’ self-described “biggest fan,” who’s booked them repeatedly for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Black Tie & Blackjack event in Manhattan. The last party in February drew 700 and raised more than $150,000. At the 2007 Hedge Fund Rocktoberfest at Manhattan’s B.B. King’s Blues Club & Grill, Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke sat in as the Subscribers brought up five women dressed in pink wigs and French maid outfits to dance to “The Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Friends and fans at a more recent gig at Greenwich Village’s Sullivan
Hall showed up in jeans and button-downs, heels and driving moccasins,

paid $10 a head (profits still went to charity), and packed the house. The
band opened with “Higher Ground,” more the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ver-
sion than Stevie Wonder’s. Tim Wheeler, a straw-locked surfer dude who’s
a bankruptcy attorney by day, a singer in sunglasses at night, worked the
grand for regional entry fees). No company would say exactly how much it
spent on its group—in most cases, the costs were included in overall travel-
and-entertainment budgets. But band members estimate that the price for
one-off events often went into five figures.

“There were probably a fair amount of people who thought we were the poster children of the excesses of Wall Street, that we were being supported by the company,” Aged Inventory guitarist Kaiman says. Marriott adds, “They would’ve thrown the parties, anyway. We were free. What we did do was raise a lot of money for charity, and everyone associated us with Credit Suisse.”

Not everyone did it for charity. When it came time to celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2005, Quicken booked the Black Eyed Peas and Kid Rock at its own Cleveland arena and invited its house band the Loaners to open. Quicken flew them to the Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville, too, where they shared a stage with Cheap Trick and Gretchen Wilson. “It was like being a garage band with the power of corporate dollars behind you,” says former Loaners singer-rhythm guitarist Brian Macias, by phone from Berkley, Michigan, where he now runs a consulting business. He also wrote many original songs to complement the Loaners’ repertoire of covers. “We had T-shirts, all kinds of trinkets. You don’t pay your dues like everyone else.” The company rented charter buses, dubbed the “Q Express,” to send 300-plus employees to the Loaners’ performance at 2006’s Battle of the Corporate Rock Bands. “Of course, when you pack 300 people on a bus and they’re cheering for a band from the company they work for, you also kind of feel like a fake rock band,” Macias says, laughing.

When the market turned in 2007, and Quicken slowed down its once-furious hiring, it became clear that financing the band would no longer be a priority. “We’re in this economic crisis,” Macias says. “Sending people to Cleveland for the Battle of the Bands isn’t a priority.” Bryan Stapp, Quicken’s then-chief marketing officer and the Loaners’ lead guitarist, left in 2007. “That was the nail in the coffin,” Macias says. Macias himself left in October of that year, and the band that once jammed twice a week dissolved. A

Quicken spokesperson says the company, which wrote plenty of mortgages THE LOANERS’ BRIAN MACIAS

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“IT WAS LIKE BEING IN A GARAGE
BAND WITH CORPORATE
DOLLARS BEHIND YOU.”

68 NOVEMBER 2009 / EVER YONE WHO’S AN YONE READS SPIN.COM