On the morning of July 22, local singer-songwriter David Safran walked into Careers in Nonprofits in the hope of landing some work unrelated to music. The 31-year-old writes and records jingles for a living, but, he says, “Every few months I have a horrible thought about quitting music altogether.” About a month earlier Safran had written a Newcity cover story on Chicago music clubs’ payment practices with local musicians; Safran laid out his argument about an unfair system and in response he says he got banned from several area clubs and received nasty e-mails, all of which only compounded the feelings he had about leaving music. When he left Careers in Nonprofits that morning he checked his e-mail and noticed an unusual pitch for a jingle: “Why don’t you write one for a three-hole sex toy?”
Sloan, a Skokie native, is no stranger to the press. In 2009 TechCrunch called him the “Kinky King of Beijing.” Sloan moved to China following a 2007 incident in which the Chicago Police Department confiscated human skulls Sloan had sold on eBay (Sloan had earned his living reselling antiques since leaving his job as a lawyer in 2004). According to the Tribune, local artist JoJo Baby made the call to the cops after he dropped by Sloan’s Bucktown apartment to purchase some mannequins and noticed one of the skulls boiling in a pot.
