...I was enthralled with Giacchetto. "You must meet him, he is
inspired," I told a successful friend. "Oh, if you have any money you
should invest it with him." Now this friend says to me, "Emily, I'm glad
I didn't listen to you."
I knew Dana before the time of the celebrities and I watched as the
celebrities transformed his life. I met him in 1992 when he came to
Seattle to begin work on what would be one of his most famous deals: the
selling of Nirvana's first record label, Sub Pop. My husband was Sub
Pop's general manager. He owned a 1 percent share of the company, and he
made enough money from the deal to buy a house and give Dana $100,000 to
put into a "safe bond." Rich ended up losing $80,000 of the investment,
but that was later, after the nineties boom had imploded and Dana had
become just another felon.
Because of my entanglement with Dana, this is not an objective book
about his life; and although he initially cooperated with it, it could
hardly be called an authorized biography. He agreed to a rule of "no
editorial control" -- that the story I wrote would be the one I
remembered and uncovered. Yet as the story unfolded for me, he became
furious that he couldn't control it. We parted ways before I finished
the manuscript. Throughout the process of writing about him I have
grappled with my memory of him in the nineties, when I thought he was
some kind of rescuer.