Success Quote by Robert Quine

It lands like a throwaway confession, but the rhythm is doing real work: “Meanwhile” shrugs off drama, “failing the bar twice” drops a life-altering fact with the flatness of a grocery list, and “I knew some people” turns reinvention into something as casual as crashing on a couch. Robert Quine’s voice here is anti-mythmaking. No destiny, no grand rupture, just a series of small defeats and social threads that happen to reroute a life into the downtown art world.

The subtext is a quiet rejection of the respectable script. The bar exam stands in for the straight path: credential, profession, stability. Flunking it twice isn’t just academic failure; it’s a door closing hard enough to make “musician” less a romantic calling than a practical pivot. Yet he doesn’t frame it as tragedy. That’s the point. The deadpan posture is a defense against sentimentality and a statement of aesthetic allegiance: the same cool, unsparing sensibility you hear in Quine’s playing, where virtuosity shows up as precision rather than showboating.

August ’71 matters, too. New York then is pre-“brand New York,” cheaper, harsher, and incubating the scenes Quine would soon thread through (punk, no wave, the CBGB ecosystem). The line captures how culture actually gets made: not by flawless résumes, but by migration, proximity, and the networks of “some people” who pull you into a room where the future is being improvised.