PUTTING THE LIFE INTO LIFEBEAT

Veteran record exec Daniel Glass has been with LIFEbeat since its beginning 11 years ago. His friend Bob Caviano enlisted Glass after finding out that he was HIV positive. Glass and his wife found that there was nowhere for Caviano to turn on the medical side, where there was ignorance and fear of the disease. Glass and LIFEbeat have seen tremendous strides in both the perception of HIV-positive individuals and the life expectancy of people with AIDS. But Glass also knows that LIFEbeat’s true success will come when there’s no need for it. “I’d rather LIFEbeat be over,” he says from his office at Artemis Records, where he’s President. “I’d rather not have this problem. But there’s a long way to go. A long way to go.”

What was your role in the early days of LIFEbeat?
My personal role was the word “LIFE” in LIFEbeat. I learned through education, through Bob Caviano. He was nearing death, but he taught me about having compassion for people. People needed to eat and needed places to go. We made sure that people who came to us had both. We started visiting people in hospitals and began to bring musicians with us. And it was unbelievable how it cheered people up. That evolved into what we called the “Hearts and Voices” program. I remember visiting people and seeing how much it did for their day by just bringing food, saying nice things or having an artist come in.
It was very anonymous in the early days of LIFEbeat. People were really hiding, because being outed in the business was like being branded. In the beginning, there were very few gay people coming to meetings. They’d call me behind a veil and say, “Daniel, I want to help, but I can’t.” It was an interesting time for America. I quickly saw the fear and homophobia. It was one of the doors I had to knock down right away. That was my role, really. There was terrible prejudice, ignorance and fear. We knocked that door down by embarrassing people, explaining to people, enlightening people.

What other things did you do?
The other part was getting help for people who were HIV positive. The first thing was helping the people related to the music industry who said they needed help. Whatever it was, we made sure that person had the help they needed. If it was in a medical way, we referred them. I remember the first call when I manned the phones was an HIV-positive person from the Midwest who called because he couldn’t find a dentist who would treat him. We eventually found other friendly organizations that we tied into and referred people to.

How has fighting the disease changed?
The turning point really came when white, gay men got smart and realized that through abstaining or using protection, people didn’t get AIDS. The safe sex news got out. This was before drug cocktails and inhibitors. It was a major turn to get people educated. The word got through the club community very quickly. That evolved into the era of people getting help through medicine. And then the haves got the medicine and the have-nots didn’t get the medicine.
We went through periods of promoting the idea of people getting tested and making it easy for people to get tested, including a lot of PSAs from artists and famous people urging people to get tested.

What about now?
In the last five to seven years, what I’ve seen is that the cocktails and medicine have become the band-aid or the excuse for unprotected sex. There are a lot of young people who feel invincible because of the media slant that incidents of AIDS and HIV are down. That’s not true. In the last 12 months, there has been a tremendous spike. Many times the cocktails don’t work. We were upset in the last year about the glorification of AIDS in some of the media, how good-looking the people are—how virile and macho and gorgeous some of the women and men with AIDS were in the ads. Those are ads to sell cocktails and medicine. We want people to know that the picture of people with AIDS is not pretty.

What are some things LIFEbeat does within the industry?
We’re very active in bonding with artists. We are constantly on tour. My greatest joy is seeing people at concerts handing out condoms. That, to me, is the greatest thing we can do. That moment after a concert is when people think about having sex. LIFEbeat has volunteers that speak to people at concerts. One year, I think we handed out 1.5 million condoms at concerts. We also handed out lots of safe-sex paraphernalia. We go out on Warped Tour and Ozzfest and tours like that—because those are moments when people make the decision to have impulsive sex. We get support from tours that give us a surcharge on each ticket sold. We have tremendous support from the artist community. We got a 25 cents surcharge per ticket from the last Godsmack tour. John Mayer and the Counting Crows went out, B2K, Brian McKnight, Rod Stewart has been very supportive. These surcharges go to LIFEbeat to support our programs and the organizations we work with.

What are things that people from the industry can do to help?
In addition to the breakfasts and dinners we have, we hope that when people go on tour, they think of us for a surcharge—it goes a long way. Have acts participate in the “Hearts and Voices” program. We visit people with AIDS and put on a show for them almost every day of the year. We do it very quietly, very anonymously and it’s very satisfying for the artist. More importantly, it’s the best medicine we can give people. We need to spread the word among artists to talk about AIDS. It’s an issue that’s not going away; it’s perhaps worse than ever because of the worldwide situation. We need the issue raised. We need it at the forefront. I’d like to have more people volunteer. We could always use more involvement.