What really sticks out from that meeting, though, isn’t the empty promises, but something the record-company president said almost in passing: “I don’t want to fuck you up.”
At the time, Delegato didn’t know what he meant.
"Six years later, he has an idea. Plucked from Portland, where it labored in obscurity, and deposited directly into the machinery of the British music industry, the Hugs were, for a flash of time, England’s next big thing. Of course, over there, next big things come and go with editions of the Daily Mail. After 2 1/2 years of building buzz around its guitar-driven, ’60s-inflected garage pop, the subsidiary label that signed the Hugs folded, its album never came out, and the band returned to Portland, where it was no less obscure than when it left. Looking back, Delegato understands why the label head said what he did. It was a warning."
“He was basically saying, ‘I don’t want to destroy you as a kid,’” Delegato says from a table at the Starbucks near his home in Northwest Portland. “Because we were kids, y’know?”
At 24, Delegato still looks very much like one. Tangled black hair hangs to his shoulders. His boyish face, dotted with a teenager’s blemishes, is augmented by round-frame glasses. Naturally, Delegato is a bit sick of discussing those days in London..." More
