Other than How do I get a record deal? or How can I License my music? the question that comes up the most is How do I make it in the music industry?”
“Making it” to me just means making a living playing, writing and recording music.
Top 5 Behaviors that will help you make it in [...]
Paul Conroy is a music manager and co-owner of the company Good Fight Entertainment. Prior to running this company Paul had been an A&R representative, a music publisher and… ah hell I’ll just have him tell you…
Give me the really quick glance over your career. You started in the music business as a band manager, you’ve run labels and you’ve done both simultaneously. Why don’t you gloss over the past ten-twelve years.
PC:
I’m actually at thirteen years in the music business at this point. I started off as a local band manager in Philadelphia. I had no contacts whatsoever in the music business, and just through a lot of hard work and networking between Philadelphia and New York I was able to build some solid relationships. I went from there to work with Steve Hutton when he was managing Kid Rock over at Upper Cut Management. I did that for a couple years and then went from Upper Cut Management to Roadrunner Records where I was an A&R rep for about three years. While at Roadrunner I started doing A&R work in the area of publishing and while there went over to records and really learned that I did not want to be an A&R rep while at Roadrunner; however, it was a priceless experience for me because I learned how record labels worked from the inside, out. In my thirteen years as far as learning goes, my most intensive training came while I was at Roadrunner. After leaving Roadrunner with all that knowledge I went to work for Larry Mazer, and I was doing artist management with Larry Mazer.
For those who might not know – who has Larry worked with?
PC:
Cinderella, Nelson, Kiss, Pat Benetar, Cheap Trick and most recently Stone Sour and Breaking Benjamin. He’s got pretty much the highest pedigree as far as managers go. And in my mind, when you look over the last decades, to me, he was the most successful independent manager in the music business. I went from there to partner up with Carl Severson at Ferret Music. At the time Ferret Music was just a record label, and we had this vision to build this – for lack of a better word – “360” company. I helped Carl build the profile and business of the label and while doing that I started a management division, touring company .as well as a publishing company.
For those who wouldn’t be familiar, Ferret was primarily hard rock/metal stuff and it was primarily bands that would tour, tour, tour.
PC:
Yes. One-hundred percent. Carl discovered bands like Killswitch Engage and Every Time I Die. These were bands that when Carl found them they were basically playing VFW halls and basements, for the most part regionally on the East Coast. And the bands that were signed to Ferret beyond having a unique sound and being stylistically ahead of the curve as well as hard rock and metal goes, had a tremendous work ethic. Carl himself was in a hardcore band called Nora, which when he wasn’t working with the label, he’d be out touring as much as he could. The work ethic of the artists on Ferret were definitely an extension of Carl.
Tell me, how do you get a band that is playing VFW halls and basements to even become a regional act let alone national?
PC:
I have a good story about that. In April of 2003 there was a show in Bensalem, PA, at a VFW Hall, and there were about ten bands on this line up. Lamb of God was the headliner, Unearth was a support band, Every Time I Die was a support band, as well as Twelve Tribes, Nora, and A Life Once Lost. And the next summer three of those bands made up nearly ½ the second stage at OzzFest. That’s how quickly it happened, and then beyond that there were a couple of those bands that moved onto have pretty promising careers. It happened that quickly. It was in just a little over a year, from VFW Hall to OzzFest, playing in front of 10,000 people per day, which is crazy.
What did those bands do right that so many other bands don’t do from a business perspective?
PC:
Putting aside talent, the things that these bands do correctly that so many bands don’t do correctly is have a relentless work ethic. These bands basically would meet up at bigger VFW shows, or a festival called Hell Fest years ago where a lot of these bands would congregate, and these bands would put everything into playing shows with no concern for their own economics. They didn’t work day jobs, or if they worked day jobs they were jobs that afforded them to be out canvassing. And they were also savvy enough to network with each other. It’s amazing. It’s really easy to network in this day and age with Myspace and Facebook and everything else, but not so easy in 1999, 2000, 2001. You literally did your networking by meeting people at shows and staying in touch over the phone. From a promotional perspective, it was all about flyering. Beyond the bands, there were promoters that were relentless, and when they would put on a show they’d spend the eight weeks before the show flyering wherever they could to raise awareness. It was really work ethic that it came down to, and it is that simple.
You were at Ferret Music, you started doing 360 deals, you’re managing acts, you partner with Warner Bros and pioneered a tour called …
PC:
Sounds of the Underground was actually a tour we launched prior to partnering with the Warner Music Group. Just to be clear in terms of 360 deals, in 2004, 2005, we weren’t doing 360 deals. In 2010, we’re not really doing 360 deals because we don’t take touring revenue from our artists because we’re not staffed up to take touring revenue from artists. I don’t feel good about labels that do that. The reality is there’s no label on the planet that is staffed up enough to take touring revenue. That’s something I have an issue with in the music business. Anyway, we launched Sounds of the Underground which was a great vehicle to make big artists bigger and get smaller artists off the ground. We’ve had that tour for three years, and it’s something I’m quite proud of. During the process of launching that tour, we engaged in a partnership with the Warner Music Group, which was in 2006. The relationship with Warner was a 360 partnership of sorts where they were able to partner up and share in the revenue of our management business, tour business and record business and in exchange for that they provided support to us – financial support and a business acumen that Carl and I frankly didn’t have. They taught us how to run a business. We are quite proud of our history with the Warner Music Group. We are also excited to be truly independent again.
That must’ve been a great experience. Moving forward, you’re doing something called Good Fight.
PC:
Good Fight Entertainment is the next step in the Paul and Carl partnership. Leaving from a partnership with the Warner Music Group, we wanted to start with a clean slate, and we decided to rebrand our company. Good Fight we felt like was a name that was representative of where we are in music in 2010. When I talk about relentless work ethic and things of that nature, it’s more important now than ever. So we felt like “fight the good fight” was a name that would be synonymous with what we were going to put into our company.
Philosophically is it the same kind of company – making and breaking artists from as many angles as you’re able?
PC:
Philosophically it’s pretty much identical. I think for us starting the year off we moved into a different office space that we’re really excited about, and it was really a psychological thing for Carl and myself and the team. We’ve put so much into the last three years building up our company, and now we’re stepping out as a true independent, so we wanted to re-brand ourselves to serve as a continual reminder that we’re out there on our own now and we have to fight the good fight. Philosophically, I’d say it’s business as usual, but it’s more an internal, psychological thing than anything else.
Tell me who you’re working with these days.
PC:
On the management side, we’ve got bands like Between the Bird and Me and August Burns Red – two bands that are having great moments right now with their touring, merchandising and record sales. We also have more senior bands such as Cannibal Corpse who are the reigning kings of death metal or Behemoth, that is the prominent black metal band from Poland. I’ve got a band Children of Bodom as well too. Children of Bodom has Alexi Laiho, who is one the highest profile guitarists in modern metal right now. Beyond that we’ve got much younger bands. As much as there is a need for us to generate revenue being on our own, we can’t stop developing young bands even if the payoff is not immediate. We’ve got a hard rock band from Canada called Bleeker Ridge that just recently signed to Roadrunner and we’re very excited about. I’ve got a traditional metal band from L.A. called Holy Grail that I’m really excited about and I just picked up. It’s really important for music in general. There’s more pressure to generate revenue because times are getting tougher, but you still have to put energy into developing new bands. That’s just a reflection of the management side of the business, but the record side right now, we’re just finalizing a distribution deal and we’ll have a half dozen records that we’ll be putting out in the next six months on the label side.
Tell me a little bit about the elbow grease that goes into developing an artist. You’re obviously flexing your Rolodex and using your relationships. Is selling yourself business-to-business as an artist when you are just starting out kind of how you see management working, or how does it work for you?
PC:
Absolutely. The good news about the music business today is that due to the internet there’s no barrier of entry. The bad news about the music business is there’s no barrier of entry. You have a lot of bands that put up really terrible songs online that aren’t well thought out because they want to be a “band”. I’d say, first things first, stay in your rehearsal space and don’t put out songs until you feel these songs are ready to represent your band. I would say step one is to make sure you actually have your songs together and step two for me as a manager and label owner is I will not spend any time on bands that are not prepared to be self sufficient. That means living a lifestyle where you are 100% committed to your music. As a band, whether it’s moving back in with your parents, moving in together, quitting a day job to deliver pizzas or landscape. Whatever it is, you have to be committed. You have to be prepared to eat shit. I would say that’s really step two.
I think I’ve got the article title right there. “Eating Shit with Paul Conroy.”
PC:
Yeah (Laughs). The reality is, Rick, knowing me as well as you know – the dude who moved back in with his parents at 26-years old and was $40,000 in debt by 28-years old because I wanted to make it happen. This is what we do. This is a part of it, and if you’re not prepared to do it as a band, stop reading this interview right now and go back to college. With that said, prepare your lifestyle to dive into the music business and from there, one issue I think right now is so many bands put so much emphasis on building themselves up through community sites, which is awesome – Myspace, Facebook, etc. – but you also have to get out of your apartment and out of your house and physically be a part of it. When you’re not rehearsing and when you’re not playing shows, you have to be at shows. Seven days a week, even if it’s not the kind of music you’re playing, you have to be out there, you have to be active, you have to be visible. That’s the lifestyle you have to live. By doing that you’re going to make connections. And if you’ve got the right music and you’ve got the right work ethic, it’s going to happen. It’s really that simple.
Check out more on what Paul and his company are up to @ Goodfight Entertainment
Cameron Mizell is a professional musician, former record company employee and runs the website Musician Wages.
Tell me about how you came to New York and put have been able to become a full time musician.
CM:
I came to New York a little over five years ago, and right before coming here I’d been playing in Bloomington, Indiana and it was kind of a big fish/small pond situation, where’d I’d been playing a lot of gigs and was kind of one of the guys people would call if they wanted to get a gig. And I thought, “This is great, but I need to move on.” That was what prompted the decision to move to New York. My wife – then she was my fiancée – and I moved up here and had no jobs, no leads. We just decided it was time and decided to move. That – coming up here with nothing – makes it really hard to do music. So I had to find some kind of job to make ends meet, and I went through a couple sales jobs that I was terrible at, and then ended up at Verve Records as a temp and then eventually I was hired on full time.
I worked in the production department, and when the label was downsized in 2006 I was promoted by default. The downsizing made the label much smaller, so the lines between every department were blurred. I worked closely with the creative department and also learned what the marketing department did, what the sales department did, and I even learned from the label’s lawyer.
Thanks to all this, I started to get a better idea of who owns what and how deals work and what labels look for in an artist, and by doing that I figured out what an artist should look for in a label. That gave me a pretty strong background [in the music industry]. Then when I felt it was time for me to quit, I left that and started doing my own music full time.
Was there anything that precipitated you saying, “Now is the time, and now I can go do this, even if I don’t know if I’m going to make it?” Was it something in your label gig?
CM:
Well, yeah. I had been essentially doing all the production responsibilities for Verve, but my official title was Assistant Manager. I was very busy and working long hours, and it was a very stressful job. I felt like I could probably make this much money on my own doing what I love to do. Frankly, I didn’t even really have that much time to do my own music outside of work because I was working late and thinking about it all weekend. It was too much, and I decided I had to go. They weren’t going to be able to pay me what I felt I deserved to be paid. When it really came down to it, the money wasn’t important; I just wanted to be a musician.
Tell me about how you found enough money to survive when you were starting out?
CM:
My main source of music income, especially when I left Verve, was selling downloads, mostly on iTunes. I was able to create a decent amount of income by 1) having several albums available so there was more to sell and 2) I picked up some (sort of) tricks for promoting my music online. The thing that worked the best at the time was doing iMixes on iTunes. I wrote a whole article about that on Musician Wages. Essentially what you do is create mixes, or playlists, in the store. When people go to iTunes they’re usually there to buy music, so the best place to try to help people find your music is going to be in the store itself. As an independent artist you don’t get any page placement, so what you do is find similar artists and albums that are very similar to yours and make playlists of your music with those artists, so that over time people start to connect your music – like my jazz trio with John Scofield or Soulive or Medeski, Martin and Wood – similar types of music. So it helps establish these “listeners also bought” trends. Once that started to happen, I noticed more people were listening to my music through websites like LastFM, and could also see what else they were listening to.
And it gets you more feedback for creating mixes with other artists.
CM:
Exactly. Because sometimes the music that I thought my music was similar to actually wasn’t what other people thought. Other people thought it was similar to some other artist I’d never even heard of, so it helps me discover new music and new artists I can use in playlists. So it’s a self-perpetuating thing.
So does this method still work in iTunes 9?
CM:
iMixes were introduced in 2004 or 2005, so that’s been several years. In internet years that’s generations. I think it’s a lower priority, or the feature is further down the importance ladder at iTunes. I don’t think it’s as effective as it used to be. First, because it doesn’t get as much attention, but also because over time – and I don’t know if this is my fault or if people were bound to figure this out – people were doing this, and it was like blatant spamming, making iMixes that only use the top-selling artists, even if it had nothing to do with their music. The playlists were not really designed to be good playlists. They were just designed to put your track in front of as many people as possible. I feel like that kind of deteriorated the cleverness of this whole thing. It became really obvious when people were making iMixes to promote their music. I still make iMixes that are essentially like if I were going to make a playlist for myself or a mix CD for my car. I can turn all those things into iMixes. And they’re good mixes, because if I want to listen to it, maybe someone else will want to listen to it.
I remember you telling me you had some success with Christmas music as well.
CM:
In 2007, when I was still working at Verve, I really became aware of how much Christmas music sells, so I started to wonder if I could turn that into a revenue stream for myself.
People just buy Christmas music. In some ways it cheapens the whole idea of a Christmas album, because it’s blatantly commercial. My wife loves Christmas music , and she was always asking me, “When are you going to make your Christmas album?” And I said, “It’s way too early in my career to make a Cameron Mizell Christmas album.” There was no way I was going to do that. But then I started noticing other independent artists having a lot of success with their own holiday albums. One night I was sitting around with a couple musician friends and we thought, “What kind of Christmas album could we make? It needs to be very, very specific – the niche, the genre. It needs to be something that’s not very common. How about bossa nova? What would a Stan Getz circa 1964 Christmas album sound like?” So we went and arranged a bunch of public domain Christmas hymns as bossa novas – Girl from Ipanema meets O Little Town of Bethlehem, that kind of thing. We recorded it all at home so there was no overhead. We put it up on iTunes and the first year it did really well. iTunes included a track in one of their iTunes Essential playlists and put the album in a feature on the jazz page. We ended up making about $2500 bucks in a month from that album. We kind of realized, “Okay, that worked, what else can we do?” The next year we made an Americana Christmas album — the same guys with a totally different sound. These are all instrumental albums, so this is great background music for the holidays.
There are studios and session bands that do this sort of thing, which you might see on an end-cap in someplace like Target, so it’s not a new idea. Our approach is just less slick, more organic.
So it is music with a specific purpose. This project is Christmas music made for a certain type of consumer.
CM:
Exactly. That’s what we’re trying to do. It’s gotten to a point where if we do one of these every year – as long as we can make it good, because it’s not going to sell if it’s not really good – we get paid a good chunk of change after the Christmas season. It covers part of my rent for a year.
How did you find success being a session musician? I know you’re producing other artists, playing on other artists’ music, doing a lot of musical directing. How did you wind up going from someone who knew no one a few years ago to someone that is having that side of your career? A label gig is not always the best place to meet touring musicians,
CM:
Well, actually it’s kind of funny. Lauren Zettler, one of the people I work with most now used to work at Universal Music Group. So, in some ways because of working that record label gig I met the person who I now work with most. So she was doing her own thing, and after I quit Verve she gave me a call and wanted me to play guitar on a couple gigs, and that sort of turned into recording a new song she’d written. We did all this at my apartment in my little make-shift studio. Things clicked and that one song ended up turning into an EP, and we started to tour. With Lauren, it was really that she needed a sideman, and it turned into becoming more of a band endeavor where we both do a lot of work. We both know a lot about the music industry, so we are able to share responsibilities. That helps. All my other connections came from school. I went to University of North Texas, which has a great jazz program, and then I transferred to Indiana University, which also has an excellent music program. I know a lot of people from both those schools that are here in New York now. Once I quit Verve I had all this free time, and I could start getting together with people and playing a lot more. Really it’s all about going out to see people at their gigs, and they come out to see you at yours. Eventually if somebody needs a guitar player, they give you a call. It’s pretty straight-forward. If you’re good and people see you enough, they start to remember you.
Tell me about MusicianWages as a platform. Why did you build that, and does it feed into your career as a session player?
CM:
MusicianWages.com was an idea that Dave Hahn and I had going back several years before we actually started it. Dave is a great writer, and he had been blogging about his experience on a cruise ship – he had a cruise ship gig as a piano player. That blog got tons of traffic. It was the only place where people could find out any information about playing music on a cruise ship, because the agencies weren’t very forthcoming about what to expect. What kind of clothes do you pack? What’s the room going to look like? So he wrote about a lot of that. What we ended up doing was taking that cruise ship blog – Chronicles of a Cruise Ship Musician – and making it one section of MusicianWages. We figured a lot of people do the cruise ship and come off the boat and are looking for work and a scene somewhere. Dave had that experience, and then after the cruise ship he started doing tours, musical theater, and things like that. I had been doing the independent musician/freelance guitar player type of thing, and had experience organizing and leading a band and trying to do something with my original music. So we just started writing about all this. We thought, “There are very few resources out there that give you practical advice as a musician.” And frankly, we couldn’t really find anything that was very significant written by musicians. Because there are a lot of people that talk to you like, “I’m a marketing expert, and here’s how you should market your music;” but they’re not actually doing it themselves because they’re not musicians. That was the whole idea: “It has to be based on experience and it has to be practical advice; it can’t be an advertisement for whatever you’re doing, it has to be advice for someone that wants to do what you’re doing.” We asked friends that are all professional musicians to write as well. And then we had people that aren’t necessarily working musicians but work with musicians very closely – such as yourself, or Heather at Music Careers at About.com or David Rose at KnowtheMusicBiz.com, all those types of people started to contribute. We’ve built a pretty solid amount of content on the topic. Our goal is, if you search “musician,” we want to come up on the top page in Google. We’re there yet, but that’s our goal. If you go to Musician Wages, you’ll notice one of the things we try to stress is that our site is about the musician business, not the music business.
How is putting yourself out there in that manner and other blogs enhanced your career? Would you recommend somebody putting their experiences out there to help their career or their business?
CM:
Yeah. It’s definitely had a positive influence on my career as a musician, because every article has a link to me, and if people want to find out more about me, they just have to click on my name and it goes to my website. It’s hard to say how many sales that results in, but I definitely get e-mail on a regular basis from people through my website that are asking me more questions, or telling me they found my music and really like it. A lot of times those people come from MusicianWages. I know for Dave, for example, he’s definitely had some positive results from writing this. Dave belongs to the Musician’s Union. He wrote an article about creating a resume for musicians, and had a picture of his resume in the article. The Union paper, which goes out to tens of thousands of union members, has his resume printed in it because they re-printed his article
Do you have any closing advice or things you see a lot of people doing wrong that could be avoided?
CM:
The only other thing I wanted to add is that there are all these sites you could be on, and I think a lot of people find this overwhelming. I see a lot of really great musicians that don’t do anything online. I think if you don’t think about it as a bunch of separate things, but think about it as one organism that is all contributing to your internet presence and make it a habit to do a little bit here and a little bit there, it grows over time. If you Google your name – which every musician should do from time to time – you want to be the top result, and you want people to know you have music available and are playing shows. The only way to do that is to repeatedly be putting your name and your music on the internet so other people can pick it up. If that means blogging every day or blogging once a week or just posting your favorite music on some website somewhere, all of that contributes. That’s what I’ve been doing for years, and it works really well.
Learn More Cameron Mizell and follow Cameron on Twitter
For those who don’t know – Bif Naked is s a Juno Award-winning, American-Canadian rock singer-songwriter, poet, cartoonist, and actress. After re-connecting with her on Twitter she was kind enough to spend some time with me on the phone and tell me about her experiences becoming a full time musician.
Bif – give me a bit of background. How did you first put together a following and build up a band in what has become a twenty-year career?
BN:
I had no aspirations in any way, shape or form to go into the music business. I wanted to be a comedian, and decided to take theater at university, like a lot of liberal arts kids. In my first year of university at the University of Winnipeg, which for any reference just watch the movie Fargo, and that’s Winnipeg in a nutshell. There was a very healthy punk rock scene, like a lot of towns. This was ’89 or ’90 and I was a 17- or 18-year old kid just hanging out with some of my pals from theater and kids we knew that went to shows. We were all big DRI fans and Minor Threat fans. There was this band called Gorilla Gorilla, and their singer left the band very abruptly. He fell in love with a girl on tour, never to be seen or heard from again. And so they said, “We have this show coming up … why don’t you do it?” And I thought, “Yeah, why not?” For me, any experience on stage was what I was looking for at that time. I thought of it as a personal workshop for myself…
You weren’t a singer at that point?
BN:
Not at all. But you have to keep in mind, they were doing early Chili Peppers covers, Bad Brains covers, Black Flag covers and a couple of their own songs, which were just basically yelling. How hard can that be? Yell a bunch, hit the kids in the front row with the microphone. That’s basically what it was like. My mentors and idols at that time were Canadian punk pioneers like Joey Shithead, the singer for DOA and Chi Pig the singer for SNFU. That was the stage style and performance style that I loved and knew and was emulating…but as a female. At that time in Winnipeg, there really were no bands fronted by girls. We were very cautious about that because I was a very defiant little feminist wannabe at that point in my life. It was hugely important that I not be judged on my gender – very important. That was a bit of a fuel for the fire of trying extra hard to be very tough on stage. Frankly, it served me really well over the years. I cut my teeth in a certain genre of music during a certain timeframe in music fan society. We were playing to audiences that were extremely boisterous and rambunctious and at times rather violent. Back in the day they didn’t have a lot of clear etiquette for mosh pits and stage diving. We’re talking about little dinky punk rock clubs in the Canadian prairies. There was no security on the stage. Throwing kids off the front at a GWAR show. There were a lot of fist-fights. We used to have problems back then with Skinheads in Canada. Everybody would drop their gear and get mad at them. It was such a Gong Show. But I really love all those early memories. I think it was just such an innocent beginning for me. I was really naïve, and I think it served me well. There was no preconceived goal at all other than the show that day. Eventually we took that show on the road, and the novelty factor of me being a chick assisted us – much to my chagrin, as much as I tried to fight it. There was nothing else like it in that small little market in the Great White North at that time.
Were you performing as Bif Naked at this point?
BN:
Yeah, I was. Bif was a nickname I’d had. It was Gorilla Gorilla that really solidified that moniker. I had always been called “Bif” instead of “Beth,” clinging very dearly to wanting to be a tomboy. Bif Naked was the punk rock stage name I got. Everybody had their name. Mark Arm was Mudhoney, again with Joey Shithead from DOA. Everybody had their names, and there weren’t a lot of girls at that time. I wanted to be kind of provocative. And we were still trying to draw people to the shows. So if they came, everyone knew they had a chick singer in the band. “Gorilla, Gorilla, come see Bif Naked” would get bodies in the room. And we’d say, “Ha ha, we pulled one over on them.” But it got them in the room, and then we figured we’d just win them over.
How long did that go on, and what was the process of developing that band?
BN:
We were lucky because we would get a lot of opportunities to open for some of our touring friends that would come through town. We made a bit of a name for ourselves locally just by continuing to play, and play, and play and play at these little rinky-dink punk bars and skate parks – wherever we could. Chi Pig had split from his group SFNU and had started a side project called The Wongs. And The Wongs were going to do a cross-Canada tour in the fall of 1990. They asked us if we would like to open for them in a tour, and we said, “Yes, absolutely.” None of us worked. None of us had any money. We didn’t know what else to do. So the drummer, Brett Hopkins and myself decided to get married, because in Manitoba, which is very heavy with Ukranians- the tradition is to have a wedding social. A wedding social raises money for the young couple so they can either buy a potato farm or have a wedding, or usually she’s pregnant – who knows? So we had a wedding social. And people buy tickets and come and attend. And then we threw a wedding at a local cultural center – a place we played often – given to us for free to stage this wedding. We used a justice of the peace. And then what you do is say, “Presentation Only” on your wedding invitation, and that means “Don’t bring a gift, just put money in the jar.” So we got all this money, and as a result we had bought a Ford Econoline van that was just a piece of shit. But we bought that and a better drum kit for Brett, of course.
You’re basically telling me that you did the first fan-funded tour.
BN:
Basically… I continued that tradition the rest of my adult life. That was great. We did the tour and played in front of a much bigger audience than we ever had, and starved to death on tour like every band worth their salt that’s cutting their teeth. You split a burrito in the Mission District four ways and try to get free beer out of the promoter – none of us were straight-edge yet. We were flailing little teenagers basically. But it worked out well, and it was a great tour. And for us it was a big success in that it solidified us as a gang of four, and we slept in the van, did our shows, ultimately relocated to Vancouver from Winnipeg right after that tour because gone and played there and made a lot of great contacts with friends and other bands. We knew we needed to be in a bigger market.
Tell me about how that wound up and how you wound up starting a solo career and built that up as well.
BN:
Going solo was never anything I was really itching to do. I like the band situation and being on a team. I guess things run their course. Gorilla Gorilla – things were starting to change. My taste in music started changing a little bit as I became more exposed to music from the Pacific Northwest where we had just relocated. We were playing shows with MudHoney and Screaming Trees and these types of bands. And I was really getting into Soundgarden and stuff like Temple of the Dog. This was right after Andrew Wood died. I just wasn’t happy doing the punk/funk thing anymore. I was probably 21 or 22 and going through my own changes. And Brett and I, obviously that marriage didn’t last as it was done for a bit of the wrong reasons, even though we’re still great friends. I found an ad in the paper for this other band I’d been hearing about called Chrome Dog, and they needed a singer. So I thought, “I’m just going to apply. They’re looking for a guy, but I’m going to apply anyway.” And I applied and got the job, so the next thing you know, I’m in two bands at the same time.
It didn’t last. It was like having two boyfriends. I left Gorilla Gorilla and started playing in Chrome Dog, which was great. It was a very different type of music and a different genre altogether. I was able to really explore lyrics I wasn’t able to explore in Gorilla Gorilla, and that was hugely stimulating for me as a lyricist. I was able to start really trying how to learn to use my voice differently. That was extremely appealing to me, and I really enjoyed it. There was a different audience, a little more rock and roll. We started touring from Vancouver up and down the west coast of America and playing all the rinky-dink punk and thrash clubs we could. We were able to open for bands like Sublime and really start trying to carve out a niche for ourselves in that area. Again, starving in the van, sleeping in the van. It’s what you do.
Eventually two years in it started going sideways. A lot of the guys were not satisfied anymore with the small venues. We had an opportunity to open for a heavy metal band called Annihilator across Canada. That would’ve been a bigger tour for us. And I was dreading it. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to back on tour with those guys at all. I was starting to panic. By this time, because we’d played enough shows, people started writing up stuff about us in the local rags in our hometown. There was a guy who came out to one of our shows named Peter Karroll, and he had a management company. He was managing Annihilator, which is how we had an opportunity to do that tour as a support act. He started managing Chrome Dog.
It was probably pretty obvious given my immaturity and inexperience that I was discontent. It was actually with Peter’s encouragement and nudging that I decided to embark on trying to be a solo artist. He secured an opportunity for us to work with a producer who had a little baby label that was an offshoot of A&M in Canada at that time. So I made my first record with John Dexter who owned that label which was called Plum. He also produced my record. I got to write songs with him, which was a totally different thing altogether. Originally it was a dance label. So that type of songwriting was brand new territory for me, hugely stimulating and very creative.
We put the record out, and about two weeks later the company folded, as things go. At the time, it was the end of the world for me – tears, tears, such tears! My manager Peter just said, “Oh well. We’re going to form a label now.” And inconsolable as I may have been, that’s exactly what we did. We formed a label called Her Royal Majesty’s Records. And Peter started licensing it. The first place he licensed it was to Edel Records in Europe. And we went over there and toured. Around the same time Peter had started working with John Zazula of Crazed Management in the U.S. and some of his other metal projects, because Johny had Mega Force Records in the States.
I’ll never forget him, because he would call and announce himself as, “Rick, it’s Ever-Loving-Johny Z.”
BN:
That’s right and it was true… He’s legendary. He has the biggest heart in the universe, I swear. What an incredible opportunity for me. I was a fan of Anthrax and Suicidal Tendencies, all these bands I loved so dearly. He either managed them or put out their records or both, not to mention having started the whole Metallica thing. I couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful situation and opportunity to come up. It started getting co-managed by John and Peter at that point. And I licensed my first record to Edel in Europe, that at that point was headed by Jorg Hacker, who went on from Edel to be the head of Epic in Germany. We kept licensing wherever Jorg went, because we just loved working with him. We were lucky to be able to do that.
It ended coming out in Canada too, right?
BN:
It finally came out in Canada when Aquarius Records picked it up. Aquarius was an offshoot of EMI. Everyone from the rest of the world always hopes they can get a record out in the United States, and obviously we still held out that hope. After a few false starts with that first record, it was finally Michael Kaplan, who at that time was at Sony 550. I don’t know how it happened to come across his desk, but it did. And he wanted to move forward and do another record. We were very, very, very lucky. And the way it goes, as you know with labels, he introduced us to my producer, which would be Glen Rosenstein. Glen came up from where he lived in Nashville to Vancouver but with an engineer named John Petoker. And we started recording what would become the album I Bificus. When I think about it all in hindsight, it was really quite an amazing situation, and I don’t know that it happens anymore. We didn’t have an Aerosmith recording budget, but it was a very generous budget for an artist like myself, who really was just going on a prayer for these people. I didn’t have a platinum record that I was coming with or a huge tour bus tour and all this other business. It was really Michael Kaplan who really believed in me, and I was very lucky. We finished recording the record, which I was extremely proud of, and it got shelved. I’m sure it’s more detailed than that, and I as the ignorant artist trying to recall how it went doesn’t do the story justice. At that point, yet another situation where the rug is pulled out from under the artist, and the artist is left saying, “Gosh, I should just go back to University at this point.”
Jorg Hacker, who we knew from Epic in Germany helped us, and lawyers helped us, and Michael Kaplan helped us get that record back from Sony so we were able to license it to a company that did want to put it out that wasn’t changing guards. To make a long story short, somehow by the grace of God we met a gentleman by the name of Jason Flom who came and saw us play at the tail end of a big, grueling European tour. We had one stop in New York City. Jason was in the background of the venue, and saw us play in this Mickey Mouse show. I don’t even think there were proper lights on the stage – nothing. And that’s how we started working with Lava.
And you guys were there for the I Bificus record and the subsequent one, right?
BN:
After I Bificus we recorded a record called Purge. That was its own crazy adventure, because I had the great fortune of being able to write with people like Desmond Child and Linda Perry. I wouldn’t have had those opportunities had it not been for a bunch of visionaries at Atlantic Records taking a change on me – an artist who really didn’t have any remarkable sales, great numbers or great phones at radio. They still were willing to take a chance on me and put me in a room with those incredible writers. I had such a good time, really I did. I liked everyone I worked with. It’s very different when you’re working with a machine that works and works within the leverage of the history of their company and their artist roster. It makes a big difference, and it made a big difference for me, absolutely. I got to do a lot of publicity that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do had I not been with Atlantic as the parent company. And it was just fantastic.
We were on some great tours with some really amazing acts: Nicole from the Pussy Cat Dolls was the backup singer for Days of the New when we toured with Days of the New. And she was hot back then. It was just great. It’s always interesting, and you never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing that keeps you going. If you’re capable of doing tours and just really living for the show, tour or die, never say die. I just think you can really go far; and by “go far,” I don’t mean money and Range Rovers and everything that a lot of kids today think comes today with being a recording artist. I just mean an experience and great sailors’ tales. I just think it’s incredible. I’ve always been the kind o f person to really pinch myself with every little crazy milestone that happens. It’s all Forrest Gump all the time. You just never know what you’re going to get, ever.
What’s it like for you today? You licensed the one record and did another record with Atlantic and are back to where you started, doing it on your own.
BN:
Yes. We did Super Beautiful Monster, a record I did when I was working with Bo Dog, and that was a different record too. Each record is definitely very different from the one before, and I really like that. I credit my first producer and writer John Dexter from Plum Records back on that first record. It was crazy. There was a rap song on there, a metal song, a punk song, ballads. It was eclectic and all over the map and nobody liked it. Radio in Canada were like, You can’t do that. You have to pick a genre.” John Dexter and my manager said, “Why? She likes every kind of music, why should she?” Because of that first record I really think that people just went, “Yeah, that’s that girl – that tattooed one that’s all over the place and crazy and makes all different kinds of songs.” So I’m proud of all the different records we were able to put out and work with all these different people from different companies. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve always just had such a good time meeting people and working as part of their team and my job was to go up there and do the top hat and cane routine. Their part of the job was to make phone calls on my behalf and see if I had money for a burrito every now and again. It was just awesome.
Today we made this record called The Promise when I was in chemo. And again, that in and of itself was a great novelty for people – great novelty. I have to admit, it’s tough. It lends itself to a lot of self-consciousness in any individual that’s been through some “medical excitement,” if you will. Artists are hugely insecure, basically is my theory, because they’re in front of people. They’re just like a bunch of adult JonBenet’s on one hand, because you’re running around and people are going to look at you and talk about what you look like and what you sound like.
Musician Coaching: If everyone was looking at me all the time I’d be anxious about it too…
BN:
Absolutely. So it was really for me, psychologically, hugely riveting. Up here in Canada, we don’t really go to therapy. It’s not really part of our culture. So you just have to fly by the seat of your pants a lot of the time. When I look at it now in hindsight, because it’s six months ago, I start laughing and say, “You know? I was up there with stitches in my belly from having an ovariectomy, playing the Calvary Stampede for 30,000 people with these swollen lymph glands under my chin that really did make me look a bit like Rodney Dangerfield.” I don’t know how I did that, but I’m glad I did, and I can’t wait to do it again. At some point it’s just like, “I’ve kind of done it for so many years.” I have to look at where I’m at now and just think I always have such a good time I just can’t stop.
You’ve been doing it for such a while, why were you able to keep a career together when others couldn’t? What traits have you seen in others, other than talent, determined who made it?
BN:
At the end of the day, talent really isn’t going to get you through. There are a lot of people – the majority of people – who are much more talented than me, who are vocalists and songwriters.
What did you do well that made you make it through when so many didn’t?
BN:
I quit drinking alcohol at Pop Com in 1995. I think that’s a big part of it for me. You don’t want to do anything to compromise your ability to perform. You always have to be intellectually available when you’re doing press or when you’re shaking hands and doing “grip and grins” you want to be present. I don’t really know how successful musicians do it with alcohol and drugs – huge stars, mega stars. Somehow they manage to move forward and be successful with those hindrances in their lives. For me, it wouldn’t have worked out. I wasn’t very good at being a drunk. I would talk too much and lose my voice as a result. I didn’t sleep right, and that made me look pretty lousy. It was a no brainer. I either wanted to work hard or have fun. And I have fun doing anything, so it really wasn’t a difficult choice for me. That’s the first and foremost thing for me personally that enabled me to work hard. If you’re going to be a touring musician, you have to think like an athlete. You have to treat your body as your tool and you have to treat it right. The second thing for sure is always going to be the people that worked with me and believed in me enough to lend me a hand and worked very hard on my behalf – from management, to labels, to anybody. I could’ve never done it without thousands of other people that I’ve come across.
What tools are you using in a world that can be so direct-to-fan, and are the new technologies working for you?
BN:
It is interesting, because music has changed so profoundly for me even just since my last record. Technology changes so quickly, and everyone has to shift gears quickly and be flexible. I think that’s number one. You have to be mentally flexible. Because I went through almost all of my 20’s and most of my 30’s now being a touring musician, we were in vans and nobody had cell phones and nobody had computers all those years, so I never really joined a lot of my Gen X brethren with the Mac Book so to speak. I’m basically computer stupid to this day. I still don’t type well. I just think that if you’re computer savvy, you’re going to be able get your music heard and your name out there. I’ve discovered more artists on the internet by accident and by snooping than I did in my entire career. I think it’s like the Wild West and an amazing opportunity for bands to be heard. Now how you make a living doing it is going to be the part where you really have to be savvy. Don’t ask me how to do it, because we never made money on tour to begin with when we were coming up through the ranks. We really didn’t. I probably was on tour constantly for 10 years before I ever got a tour bus. A lot of people bail, because there seems to be a sense of entitlement that a lot of bands have. They get lost in the hype, and that’s just because they’re probably young and don’t know any better, but as long as you can really be savvy, you’re going to make money; but you have to be willing to starve, to really die for your art and get it out there to as many people that can hear it as possible.
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Check out what Bif is up to on her official page
Martin Atkins is a Chicago based drummer, producer, studio owner, songwriter, university professor and the head of his own label- Invisible records. He started his career as the drummer for group Public Image Limited (PiL) from 1979-1985 and went on to play with Killing Joke (who he also managed for a time), Ministry and started the industrial super group Pigface. Martin is also the author of a wonderful book called Tour Smart. Remarkably Martin is also the father of four, runs what he calls an “Occasional School” called R3 that teaches music business courses, runs a music publishing company and is in the process of writing a few books as a follow up to “Tour Smart”. I am exhausted just describing the many hats that Martin wears.
It is so much to cover, but tell me what was the “aha” moment when you decided you’d had enough experiences all together that there was a need for helping people tour? What was the moment that made you think you had to put it in a book and help people?
MA:
I started a book about my time in PiL. I have so many 35mm slides I took – candid to say the least. I have all my diaries, all the postcards I sent to my parents – they just sent those back to me – and I have all this material. I started to put my PiL book together, which would be quite timely if I had it ready now, because John’s recently put the band back together, or a version of the band back together. I went up to Columbia College in Chicago – which is just a couple miles north of us – to get some interns to help with some of the package tours we were putting together – lots of postcards, lots of promotional CD’s that needed labeling, sorting, sending out.
For your label, Invisible Records, right?
MA:
Yeah. I went up to Columbia and did a presentation for the faculty to show them why I was a good place to send interns and justify. They said, “Fantastic. When can you start?” And I said, “I can start taking interns now.” And then they said, “We need you to teach the business of touring.” And I thought, “Oh my God,” and nearly said “No,” because I was in the middle of planning a tour; that’s why I needed the interns. And I asked, “When does the class start?” And they said, “Two days from now.” And I said, “Well, how long is the class, is it an hour?” because I can fake my way through anything for an hour. I can pretend to juggle for an hour. They said it was a seven-hour class. My instinct was just to say yes, so I said, “Yes” and worked out all the details afterwards. I was busy planning a tour, rehearsing for a tour. And so I made myself a subject for the class. I said, “I’m going to lose ten pounds in the next five weeks, and you’ll watch me get cranky, probably accelerate it.” We had to postpone the last two classes because I was on the road for the next six weeks, but we combined the last two classes to be the last day in Chicago, which was the last day of the package tour I created. And I had my class in on settlement, load in, smelling the road crew’s armpits. It was great! Odorama! It was in that first class that I asked, “Which textbook are you using?” And I started flipping through the book and asked, “Who can tell me when this textbook was written?” And nobody could. It was 1962! If this was a restaurant, you would’ve sent this back. How can you spend your money or your parents’ money — $25,000 per year – and allow yourself to be taught from a book that was written in 1962? I started to create my own classes, and I think very quickly – we used a map, because I know agents that don’t have maps – and started to look at routing strategies. And I started to put these classes together, and it was huge for me. I think people say stuff like, “It was only once I began to teach that I began to learn.” And I always wondered what that was all about; but then I experienced it. I walked into a class, and I thought, “Okay, next week I can have my agent come in and talk for a couple of hours, and that would be good.” But then I thought, “No it wouldn’t, because he’s an idiot.” So I would excuse myself from class and fire my agent. It was talking to the class about experiences where I actually felt the penny drop for me. Still, Katie my assistant will say, “You know, this isn’t a very tour smart approach,” and I will say, “You’re right. I’ve learned this lesson already. Why don’t I start applying the lesson I’ve learned?” Accidentally starting to teach was really a watershed moment. Then, after visiting so many different facilities, from NYU to Drexel, to Loyola in New Orleans, to USC, Cal Poly, to the Cologne Institute of Music, to the Midi School in Beijing, to 25 different places in England, Scotland and Wales and three trips to Norway, you start to say, “Hold on a minute! I’m slightly becoming an authority on the state of music business education, not just in the States but around the world.” And then seeing what places like Columbia are doing or not doing then caused me to start my own school.
I’ve read a little bit about R3, and what always catches me is that you teach people how to hack a Xbox console or something crazy like that?
MA: One of the classes we do is X-Box controller modification. It’s a cool class. I’ve done a couple events in studios recently, and I was out in Union, MO, which is the worldwide capital of amphetamine sulfate, or crystal meth. I asked, “Hey kids, who has a modified X-Box controller for me?” And no one did. I thought, “Never mind bringing books to sell to you, I should’ve brought modified X-Box controllers and cleaned up.” It’s an alternative revenue stream on the one hand, and it’s another way in to say to a bunch of inner-city kids who might not be interested in the music industry, record labels, or recording studios – although many of them are – “Want to modify an X-Box controller?” They might not want to, but they might want to have one to give them an edge on the playground of X-Box Live. And once they come in, we can start to manipulate them and give them more of an educational experience. I like it as a flag to say, “This school is different.” We’re looking at starting a Vehicle Maintenance 101. We do hands-on dub mixing, screen printing, all kinds of stuff.
Why is it called R3?
MA:
The reason my school is called R3 is because it’s Revolution number three. The first revolution was the punk rock revolution, which I was involved in. The second revolution was the industrial music revolution, where computers became part of industrial music and industrial music became a caricature of itself – four guys with an oil drum and a sampler. I’m a punk rocker and open to anything – including writing a book and teaching. Punk rock became the exploited and a mohawk; that was the punk rock band. The third revolution is that all of the activity and revolution is coming in education. I’ve seen the state of music business education around the world and entrepreneurial education around the world, and there isn’t much. The longer you spend in a traditional facility, the less prepared you are to deal with the real world of entrepreneurial, turn-on-a-dime thinking.
The thing I find interesting is, I had this one lecture I was doing, which was “Tour:Smart” with captions from my book and some other cool stuff; and I started to embroider it, and people started asking me to do keynotes and commencements. So I started to riff on the idea of “What is success?” and “How do we define success?” and “How do we achieve our goal, whether it’s 20,000 in the stadium or building the Great Wall of China?” And now the seven lectures that I do that keep embroidering and keep developing are based on the state of the music business lecture that changes almost every day. I’m in front of fifty kids, and you expect, as a 50-year old father of four for them to be throwing things at you that you’ve never heard before, and that you’ll be completely unplugged from a new generation of tech-savvy nut cases. And the fact is, half the things I’m telling them, like “Press the insight button on your YouTube account” or “Do you know about hot spots?” They say, “What?” And you start to catalogue all these changes, just like Motel 6 are giving away rooms to bands, and all this other stuff that’s going on, and your head starts spinning. You realize this is another version of figuring out what software you’re using in the studio: Pro Tools; Deck; Sound Design; Logic. You get caught up in this other conversation, which has nothing to do with art and music and ultimately comes back to, “Are you making cool stuff?” It needs to be good music, well packaged with something else going on of interest with the band. You need four or five pistons firing, but once you have those pistons firing, you’re unplugged from the restrictions that we had in the early days of distribution, and barriers to entry. And it comes down to what’s your music like? I think a terrific example of that is a guy called Moldover. I did a free event two nights ago in somebody’s basement studio two nights ago with 35 people there. And this lawyer said, “You can’t give away stuff for free. What about the investment?” And I said, “You have to give stuff away for free.” And he went through and just destroyed the rules of business economy. This guy Moldover, on the back of his album all the song titles are written in circuitry, on a circuit board, etched. I guess he felt like, “What else can I do to this circuit board?” He built a light-sensitive theremin onto the board with a flashing light and a headphone jack. It’s $50. And here I am now telling you about this guy, and presumably you’ll put a link. And I’m not his record label, his publicist, his manager – I’m nothing. I’m just a fan. This album he made doesn’t make any sense, it’s ridiculously cost, time and energy prohibitive to make, but it’s cool as hell, and that’s all that matters. And he’s saving money on a publicist because it’s going viral; I’m just one person telling everybody wherever I go about this thing, passing his CD out to the class.
I don’t mean to switch gears, but tell me a little bit more about your book and what it is you see people doing wrong often, and what is not tour smart and what is NOT tour smart.
MA:
Not thinking about it, not having a map, trusting your agent, thinking you need an agent, a manager and a lawyer to get to phase one, two, three or four of your business. You don’t. You’re much better doing it yourself, because there are no economies of time or scale in terms of a band from Chicago going to Cleveland for the first time. Spend five days researching the bands you should play with, play the venue that’s too small. That’s a huge one. Every band, when given the choice, will always pick the venue that’s too big instead of the venue that’s too small. You need to pick the venue that’s too small, because the worst thing that can happen is the best thing that can happen – “Oh my God, sold out! Second show added!” Nobody thinks like that. Agents and managers are trained to go for the larger venue because it has the greater gross potential. But it also has the greatest potential to completely sabotage a band’s progress and throw cold water down the pants of any fan that does show up. People want to be crammed into a sweaty, jumping-up-and-down, small place. They don’t want to be with those same 150 people in a 1000 capacity room. It’s a buzz kill. Bands don’t make t-shirts. I don’t know what’s up with that. If I have ten bands in an audience, there are always three, four or five of them that don’t actually have a shirt yet or they’re working on some designs. Two or three of the other bands will have one design. Every band needs at least two designs, and need to learn to screen print. This is a distillation of a ton of stuff. I’ll tell bands, “You have to have more than one design, you need to have more than one album. You need your live album, your acoustic album, a collage of phone machine messages from when you fired your lead guitarist. You need tons of things to sell that people don’t have, especially when you go back to a city.” I think then one of the ways a band can create more goods to sell is by screen printing themselves, screen print a limited edition reprint disc, screen print a wrap-around of their first four EP’s, they can screen print their own shirt and experiment with their own design in very small quantities. The worst thing that can happen is, “Oh, we sold out in that design. Give me your e-mail address and your size, I’ll let you know next time we’re playing in the area, and I’ll have that shirt for you.” It’s huge. Learning to screen print is a huge thing. It removes the filter between you and the expression of what your band is.
The question I get more than anything is – and there’s this X Factor of talent and your building your music – “I am burning out my friends and family by asking them to come down to my shows, I don’t really know people in other markets.” What are the steps to breaking new markets?
MA:
Actually, the person that says that is two clicks ahead of the person that is, “No, everybody says we’re not playing too much.” Of course they do. It’s your friends and family, they’re there to support you and lie to you. I’ll tell a band, “Only play your local market when you have a new t-shirt.” That way you can say, “Hey, it’s $8 to get in, but you get a free shirt, and there’s a great deal on beer.” A great way to play another market is to gig swap. Find that band in Cleveland or Philadelphia, DC or Baltimore. If you’re talking about a band in New York, I tell people to forget about New York or L.A. It’s crazy. Nobody cares, and it’s an expensive city to be in. Look at Louisville, KY and compare your expenses. For the growing phase of a band – the first couple years – New York and L.A. are just horrifying places to be. They’re professionals, and everybody’s dealing with their own stuff and they just saw Elton John naked on stage with the reincarnation of Elvis Presley and free lobster appetizers and fireworks. I see time and time again bands succeeding in place you’ve never heard of, because nobody goes there. Immediately, there are no comparisons. You could take your own little P.A. system – someone from Marilyn Manson did this, and it’s detailed in a book – 300 kids a night going crazy because they have nothing to compare it with. So you don’t have to worry that the P.A. system isn’t as good as the one at BB King’s in Times Square because nobody has anything to compare it to. Just making the effort is worth a ton, because now you have fans for life. If you have a band in New York or wherever, concentrate on building your local fans. Play for nothing, busk, do other stuff. If you can’t afford to buy-on to play with a band that you think their fans would like you when they’re at Irving Plaza, for instance, then go to that show and, winter’s coming up, busk on the street. That doesn’t cost anything. If your band can’t busk, get large supplies of hot chocolate and work the line. Once the people are in the venue, they don’t care about the first band anyway. You’re not going to get a sound check, and the band’s going to sound terrible. If the doors open at seven, you’ll be on stage at 7:05, and there’s nobody there anyway. There are more people outside standing outside, bored and cold. Work that line with cups of hot chocolate, and everyone will be delighted to see you and will remember your name and give you their e-mail address. There’s a million things you can do to build your audience. Target some places that are easy for you to get to. Cleveland is kind of far, maybe Pittsburgh is far too. The problem with cities on the east coast is they are expensive to get to because of tolls, and it’s difficult to park. Philadelphia, those are big cities that I advise staying away from. Let’s go with the example. You find a band in Philadelphia, and once you’ve built your audience by giving away hot chocolate in the winter or Gatorade, spraying people in the face with cold water in the summer – whatever it is. If your bass player is a great baker, bake some brownies and give those away. Do something. Then, hook up with a band you think you might want to play with in Philadelphia and invite them to hook up with you in New York. There are bands in Philadelphia right now saying, “How do we get a show in New York?” You find a band with mutual interests and work with each other. That’s it. And you just keep doing it. There’s not one single button you press. It’s like I said with the great wall of China, “How did they do it?” It’s just a ton of bricks laid end to end, and that’s it. You take a step back from the Great Wall of China, and it becomes this unfathomable seventh wonder of the world. How did U2 fill a giant stadium with a huge inflatable helicopter? I saw U2 play to 17 people. They toured for five years straight pretty much in the early 80’s. We stayed with the same girls they were staying with off and on. That’s it. Once bands can get a hold of that idea, they can grow and start to build their brand. Yeah people should be O.K. musicians, but I think the amount of time you might spend going from “pretty good” to “amazing,” maybe you can fake “amazing” with a strobe light and some pyrotechnics. I would say, it’s a lot of effort to get from good to amazing. It’s probably the same effort getting from crap to good. What about learning how to maintain a vehicle? That’s concrete movement forwards, instead of ethereal, “Who’s the best guitarist?” stuff, which is way subjective. What isn’t subjective is, “I can change the oil, I can change the tire, I can deal with the serpentine belt, I’m all over this brake light.” That’s concrete movement forwards. Dealing with the internet, iMovie, so you can shoot some video, edit it and get it up really quick, and then there are 20 more people at your show. I think there are 25 other skills you could gain before you shoot for exceptionally amazing on any instrument.
I often advise people to collaborate with as many other artists as possible because it can be difficult to get somebody to show up for some band that somebody recommends or to stick around for the following band. But if you’re able to collaborate, even if it’s on a cover or write a song together online or actually get on stage during someone else’s set, I find that effective for some projects. Have you seen that work at all?
MA:
I think it’s a combination of whatever leverage and reasons you have to get people to stay and see you. I think a really big part of it is realizing nobody cares. I have bands that will send me a thing to my Suicide Girls column saying, “We’ve been playing for $75 a night, please can you give us the strategies where we can bump it up to $100 or $125?” And I say, “Yeah, play for nothing.” There’s never been an easier time for you to say, “Screw the $75.” By the time you pay for drum sticks, strings and gasoline it’s gone anyway. Play for nothing and find two or three other bands that will play for nothing and go to a promoter and say, “We’re going to play for nothing. Instead of you paying us this meaningless $75, now you’ve got $200 or $300, can we do a special on pitchers of beer?” And then you strategize the week out of the month you’re going to do that, which would be rent week – end of the month when everybody’s struggling. Set yourself apart from the rest, leverage anything you can and understand the situation you’re in.
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Check out Martin’s Website and Follow him on twitter
Ariel Hyatt is Music publicist who started her Career in the 90s as a traditional publicist doing PR for Artists like Lee Scratch Perry, George Clinton, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Project Logic, which was a project that featured John Popper of Blues Traveler and DJ Logic. Several years ago she decided to bring her business exclusively online and developed proprietary software that enables her to do Cyber PR campaigns for artists that focus on getting her clients reviewed online in blogs and websites and placement into popular podcasts.
Prior to you creating the software that allows your clients to track the music that goes out to the blogs you work with, what was the process of PR like for you? What were you doing to get your artists talked about?
AH:
The process of Cyber PR was born out of the utter frustration of being a traditional publicist. For ten years I was just a traditional publicist, writing press releases, pitching music journalists, newspapers, radio, magazines, TV and after September 11th I noticed the pitching wasn’t going well at all and there seemed to be fewer and fewer music journalists writing at local beats. The AP Wire seemed to have taken over running pieces in smaller magazines that were nationally syndicated, and my artists were getting fewer and fewer results. So I started looking online, and as I was doing all my business, in the back of my head a little voice would say, “Wouldn’t it be great if I had a system that would track all the people in Detroit so I wouldn’t have to go hand-pick a list every time” or “Wouldn’t it be great if while I was sleeping there would be something that would send out e-mail alerts about my bands” or “Wouldn’t it be great if I could actually see who was opening the envelope, and who was listening to the music vs. the people that were just taking it directly to the used CD store?” So Cyber PR was basically just a software that answered all my “Wouldn’t it be great if” questions.
So you contacted a bunch of developers, and what you just described is what you designed?
AH:
Exactly. I contracted many developers. And also, I must give Derek Sivers credit, because he was the first person to come up with the concept of Cyber PR. He came to my house one night and said, “You know why I’m doing so, so well with CD Baby and you seem to be doing okay but not doing as well as me with Ariel Publicity?” And I said, “I’d love to know why.” And he said, “Because I invented something that everybody is invited to the table for, and you do something that you have to be very careful and very exclusive about who you work with. If you could just come up with a PR solution where anyone that wanted it could have it, you would have tremendous success.” And I cried, literally and said, “Oh my God, that’s not possible.” But luckily for me, with the advent of the Internet and as broadband started becoming more and more available and as more and more people started blogging and more and more opportunities started happening, that’s exactly what did come to pass. Under Derek’s tutelage and guidance, he helped me discover Ruby on Rails, which is the language in which it’s written, and we went to several different teams of people who at the end of the day delivered a web-based boutique PR firm management system, and that’s what Cyber PR is.
Talk to me about the results of these campaigns – I am guessing they vary greatly because there’s nothing you can do when somebody doesn’t have a story. Should artists actually sit down before contacting a publicist and ask themselves, “What is our story? What is our press focus?”
AH:
Absolutely. I think the problem with any type of work for hire in the music industry is just because you can afford it and pay for it doesn’t mean it’s going to actually yield you the result you want. I think even before you look at your story, which of course a publicist or a marketer does need, you need to ask yourself, “What do I want? What is my end goal?” I think this is the part a lot of musicians struggle with because they don’t actually know. They work so hard to create an album, get it produced, get it mixed, get it mastered and get it out into the world, that they don’t think beyond the creative process of making amazing music. They just work so hard at their craft and don’t then think, “What am I going to do after this album is finished? What’s my goal? Do I want to tour and touch a lot of people live? Do I want to sell a lot of digital copies on iTunes? Do I want to place this music in film and television? Do I want to have just a physical thing I can sell when I play locally?” These are all things you need to begin to ask yourself first. What would the reason be for hiring a publicist? In order to do that you need to take it back even a step further and say, “What is the result when I hire a publicist?” I think literally nine times out of ten when people would come to me when I was a traditional PR firm, they wouldn’t even understand what a publicist did, they just somehow knew they needed publicity, so it made sense to hire a publicist.
I guess that leads to a good question: As someone that has done this her entire adult life, what does a publicist do?
AH:
I think a good publicist is one of the invisible members in your band. It’s the person who is the mouthpiece and helps you craft your story. Of course you have your story, but a publicist is the one that should be able to pull it out of you and position it. Your publicist should be able to leverage his/her connections and contacts they’ve had that they’ve built and connect you to them. And a good publicist should help you with strategy. It shouldn’t just be, “Here’s a list of 100 places we’re going to mail your CD.” What’s the strategy? Is this a music tech conversation you’re having? Should we be going for music tech blogs and publications? Or is this a lifestyle kind of thing? Are you also a fashion designer, and we’re going to try to get you placed in fashion magazines? Is this a human interest piece? Does your music somehow benefit a charity, or are you singing about something that is beneficial to other people? Are we going to go for humanitarian publications and magazines? I think just having a list of 100 random music people that like to review albums will yield some results, but with over 2,000 records coming out every single week, your publicist should really help you get a vision and help you say, “Here’s what’s special and unique” aside from just, “Here’s yet another good album.” Is it a local angle? Are you doing something very locally? That could be a good jumping off place. What’s happening in your local town? What other local bands are you playing with? Are you making an impact in your local community? And the more fodder a publicist can get to help you start to build your story, the better.
I guess that supports what I tell clients fairly regularly. “Dude releases record” is no longer newsworthy, so I would say even before you get to a publicist you have to think about what you’re doing that is newsworthy or setting out to do newsworthy things. Would you agree?
AH:
I would agree 100%. I look at Matthew Ebel, who is an artist I’ve been blogging about recently on Music Think Tank in my 1000 True Fans series. When I met Matthew, he had a really, really good idea to do a subscription-based website called MatthewEbel.net, where he was doing a weekly concert on YouStream, which now he has over 300 people come and tune in every week, which is amazing. He had this idea of recording a song a month and having people on a paid subscription basis gain special access to him and his music and his videos. And that was such a good and compelling story, and he started having success. All of a sudden the Boston Globe was calling me and saying, “We heard about this local artist, and would you comment on what he’s done?” He didn’t go after all the press in his local area and say, “Hey look what I’m doing.” He just created something that was compelling enough. And this goes back to of course the classic Seth Godin blog where he says, “Unless one person is telling the next and telling the next and telling the next, you don’t really have a viable, great product.” So in Matthew Ebel’s case, his project started taking off, and the media came to him. I’ve seen this time and time again. The national media will come to you, or any type of media, if you actually have a story that’s buzzworthy.
Tell me about some of your traditional publicity experiences…
AH:
When I was a traditional publicist, I worked with larger artists like Lee Scratch Perry and George Clinton and P Funk. What’s fascinating about those types of clients and so true is that you as a publicist are literally, in my humble opinion, only as good as your clients. So the day George Clinton got arrested – and I was representing him at the time – all of a sudden every single newspaper and magazine and music journalist started calling me. Rolling Stone called me, Spin called, Random Notes called. It was insane. And these were music journalists that I couldn’t get on the phone for years, and music journalists that I had sent literally 10,000 packages to over the years. And here was this big news story – which was a sad story – about one of the godfathers of modern music getting arrested, and this was when the press came to me.
The other thing where I had a really interesting journey was working with Sally Taylor, who had an enormous pedigree as the daughter of James Taylor and Carly Simon. Getting publicity for her was not difficult. All I had to do, unfortunately was lead with, “Here’s who this girl is,” and the phone would ring off the hook. So I managed to place thousands of articles. And with Lee Scratch Perry too, yet another living legend. It’s not hard to be a publicist for those type of clients. All you have to do is literally put the word out and sit back and wait for the phone to ring. I’m not saying you don’t strategize for major artists, because of course; Marilyn Laverty beautifully strategizes Bruce Springsteen. Every time he has a release, it’s artful to see how it all unfolds. But when you’re not at that level, what do you do and how do you get the attention? That is where a whole lot of misunderstandings tend to happen. And if you ask any publicist that’s ever worked for an independent musician or an artist that does not have an enormous buzz-worthy story or something crazy like a famous parent pedigree or a human interest that’s so strong, they’ll say it’s difficult. I remember once I got an editor of People Magazine on the phone and he said, “If your client survived cancer and came back from the brink of death, I might be interested in talking about their music. Otherwise, it’s not big enough for us.”
I remember feeling really humbled when he said that. I also will never forget when I sat down with David Wild from Rolling Stone after sending him thousands of CD’s. He knew who I was, he’s a huge music fan, he knew all or most of the clients I represented. I did one of those mentor sessions with him at South by Southwest. I was a young publicist, and I had fifteen minutes with him, and I was really upset when I sat down and said, “Why won’t you ever call me back? Why won’t you ever acknowledge when I send you all these artists?” And he said, “They’re not ready for me. I am at Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone has a readership of over two million, and your artists aren’t newsworthy. They’re very good, but they’re not newsworthy. And when they become newsworthy I will call them. And please tell them that the best place to get coverage is local newspapers, local beats.” This was back in the day when there was local beat. It doesn’t exist anymore, because when newspapers started to get into trouble, the local beat music reporter was the first on the chopping block. So that was a very long-winded answer, but your publicist should be able to strategize that type of conversation that David Wild had with me: “Where are we going to start? What is the story going to be?”
What are some of the success stories you’ve had since Cyber PR started? How have you built some of these people into getting regular press?
AH:
You know, it’s been really, really fun. One of our success stories where classic online publicity feeds major publicity is, we work with an artist named John Taglieri. John is an artist who for many years has been doing his own blend of classic rock. He took to Cyber PR like a fish to water, totally fell in love with the system, and he worked every contact that we introduced him to. He became a chart-topper on the PodSafe Music Network, and he got his music played on hundreds of podcasts. After that happened, Billboard Magazine was doing a story on podcasting and musicians and saw he was on the chart. They called him, and he ended up getting featured in Billboard. Now I could’ve Fed-Exed his album to Billboard and said, “Here’s this great record,” but it wouldn’t have meant anything to them. He built a story, and they came to him.
So it really is important in terms of building blocks. In other words, I just interviewed a radio independent who said as well, “We have to start with all the small stations and then the big stations look at the small stations” or agents who say “If you’re on tour, you get the opening slots or the Monday nights and then you build up from there.” I suppose it’s the same thing.
AH:
That’s absolutely right. I agree. Each thing feeds the next, and it’s so hard I think to determine what is the thing that’s going to hit. When I started publicizing John through Cyber PR, I publicized him the way I publicized a hundred other artists, but it was John who understood how to use the system and who went and introduced himself to every single podcaster and got himself fully involved in the system. And they liked him, and we had a national PR win. That was really exciting. I have a couple of case studies. One of our artists Omar Alexander said he saw a 20% increase in CD sales, both physical and digital since he hired us. Dudley Saunders, who’s from Los Angeles increased his email list by 102%. Kelly Richie, who’s a blues musician from Cincinnati received 90 placements on blogs, podcasts and internet radio stations. And Will Danes created a portfolio of all his exposure, which helped him sign to a national booking agency. And one other artist e-mailed us, which I was so excited about. Her name is Josephine, and she’s from France. She was about to be deported and by showing what we got to the NIS, she obtained an Extraordinary Ability Visa to stay in the United States. It’s funny, Cyber PR seems to achieve different things for different people. If I can just help an artist go from 23 followers to 1,000 in Twitter, I feel like we’re worth our weight in gold.
So, you’ve had this book Music Success in 9 Weeks for a couple years if I’m not mistaken.
AH:
Yeah. Music Success in 9 Weeks came out in June of 2008.
And you just released the second edition. What did you change, or did you just reflect the fact that technology has changed so much?
AH:
Well, when I first wrote Music Success in 9 Weeks, Facebook didn’t even have fan pages. The net changes at such breakneck speed. And when I first released it also, I was going on and on about how wonderful Twitter is, and everybody looked at me like I had seven heads. Now that Twitter has hit the mainstream, I sort of updated that as well and talked about some other musicians that have actually used Twitter to make money like Amanda Palmer, or musicians who have millions of followers. Of course I talk about John Mayer, who I think uses Twitter beautifully. I also added a lot about Facebook and the fan pages and why it’s so important to have those. I also completely rewrote the blogging chapter because blogging has evolved massively, and the NYU study that happened in 2007 was very interesting, but there have been some other studies that we’ve been paying close attention to here at Cyber PR including the 2009 Musicadium study. And so I wanted to talk about these new findings from an academic standpoint as well as from a musician youth standpoint. Also, there are so many new apps. iPhone wasn’t even really in the mainstream. All these apps that help people on their phones like Tweetdeck and Tweety and Tweet Later and all these amazing Twitter applications; none of these were really in existence, so there was a lot to update.
Any final words of warning for musicians if someone is not yet at the point of hiring a publicist? Any advice about approaching bloggers?
AH:
General advice is, “Don’t hype yourself.” The days of hyping are over. Don’t hype, don’t sell, it will just land horribly. Understand that we are now in a brand new world. PR 2.0 is here to stay, and it’s all about two-way conversations and understanding who you are talking to. The thing that’s amazing about social media – which is why I’ve completely moved my company over to be a social media PR firm – is, that is about understanding other people and understanding that you can’t just approach them with a “Me, me, me” attitude. So my number one piece of advice is, “If you can contribute and contribute in a way that makes people appreciate you, you will succeed with online publicity.”
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You can find out more about Ariel’s Cyber PR Service, her book Music Success in Nine Weeks or Follow her on Twitter
John Wozniak, has worn many hats during his fifteen years in the music industry: As Singer/Songwriter; Record Producer; Owner of Mushroom Studios (Vancouver, BC), A&R Rep (Capitol/EMI), but he’s probably best known as the creative force behind Marcy Playground; the band that brought you the 1997 hit “Sex and Candy.” Almost 12 years later, John continues to write and release albums with the band, and I was able to catch up with him by phone last week, as Marcy Playground’s “Leaving Wonderland 2009/10” tour found their bus rolling into Houston Texas.
This is part II of the interview with John You can find Part 1 here. We were discussing what it was like for John when they had their first hit twelve years ago and I was just about to get more current…
Musician Coaching: How has touring changed? What kind of tools are you using?
JW:
People think… even if you’re not selling records you can tour. Well, it’s expensive to tour. It’s not free, and it’s not cheap. First of all, you need a booking agent. A booking agent has to be good. They have be able to get you good shows that offer high enough guarantees to pay your expenses. They also have to know which promoters are legit, and which promoters are crooks. Otherwise you could end up in Europe, playing your heart out and never get paid. Don’t believe me? Watch the recent documentary on the band ANVIL. You also need a tour manager. Somebody has to advance the shows with the promoters, organize the travel plans, and settle at the end of every night. If it’s going to be your bass player, he’d better be really good, and have the patience for it, or he won’t be your bass player for very long. So if you’re going to have a booking agent and a tour manager, portions of the money you’ll be making on the road are obviously going to be going to them. Not only that, but you have to have a bus or a van with a trailer for your equipment, money for gas, money to eat. You might have to have a hotel room or two. If you can crash at people’s houses on their couch, good for you, most people can’t. So, the point is, touring is not cheap, and it is definitely not free. You have to find ways to pay for your tour other than guarantees. Sometimes there may not be a guarantee. The promoter might want to do a deal where you get a portion of the door receipts. Well, if nobody shows up that night, because the promoter didn’t feel like spending any money to promote the show, you’re going to be shit out of luck and out of money really quickly. Selling T-shirts is a good way to supplement tour income, as long as people buy them. But why would anyone buy a t-shirt from an unknown band? Who goes to a bar and buys a T-shirt from an unknown band? Not many people. I haven’t bought any. My experience has been that people only buy T-shirts from bands they know. What they will buy, however, is a CD. So, selling CD’s on tour is critical. If nothing else, you have to get your music out there. You should also be gathering names for your mailing list. It’s easy to set up a table with cards on it that people can fill out. If you have somebody’s email address, Facebook page, MySpace page, etc… you can keep them informed about what you’re doing.
So starting out, touring is not a good way to make money, or to get heard. If nobody knows who you are, there’s no impetus for them to come out and hear you play. So you almost have to get your music out for free on the Internet just so that people care. You can’t be selling a record if nobody has any idea who you are, and no idea of what they’re getting themselves into. It’s like trying to pick a prize behind a curtain where you have no idea what it is. Imagine trying to pay for that prize behind the curtain. Nobody’s gonna do that!
MusicianCoaching:
And you’re assuming the odds are it’s a prize. With what I know about music, most of it I don’t like.
JW:
Actually, I’m with you. I’m assuming it’s not a prize.
I think the way to do it in this day and age, if you’re going to do it at all, is to network. You have to get into a market, a place, a city where there’s a music scene and where people’s attention is focused on that music scene. Doing it from Kansas City, MO isn’t going to happen for you… just like doing it from Olympia WA wasn’t going to happen for me. You would be the luckiest band in the world if you make it out of some city in the Midwest that is not Chicago or Minneapolis. It’s almost impossible to do it. So move to Minneapolis, or Chicago, or New York, or LA. Move to a music hub. Seattle’s a poor place to do it at this point I believe. People are looking at Portland a bit these days, because there is a good music scene there. Atlanta, Nashville — there are a couple places where it makes sense. But you need to go to one of those places. Get involved in the music scene there, go see bands, introduce yourself to other musicians you like and find a community that accepts you. In that community, you can support each other. There’s always that guy with a ProTools rig in his garage with some killer gear that he spent his life collecting, that would be willing to record you for a small piece of the back end (2 or 3 points)… or just for fun. If you get a deal out of the demo he makes, you give him an override on the record.
One thing I want to be really clear on is, you have to be very careful about who you shack up with in business deals in the beginning. There are a lot of bottom-feeders out there. If you’re a young local artist that starts to show some real talent and potential in your area, you will find that there is no shortage of unscrupulous people who call themselves “Managers”, or call themselves “Producers.” Pond scum like that will likely weasel up to you and try to take a piece of your future. You need to be cautious and avoid those people. Do your research. Get books out of the library, or go to your local book store. Amazon is a really amazing place for buying used books for a dollar. There’s no lack of information out there on the business of music. Once you have that side of things figured out, and you understand the difference between a mechanical royalty and an artist royalty, you can better make decisions about your career. And then, when someone offers you a deal, you’ll be able to tell if that person is for real… or a weasel.
Another thing young bands have to be aware of these days is getting stuck in a “dead deal.” Let’s say you sign your five-album deal, two firm plus three options, and a month later that company no longer exists, you’re going to be kicking yourself while your contract is in probate for the next six months to two years, wondering why you didn’t research the company beforehand. This happens a lot. Bands get stuck on labels that don’t exist anymore. Unfortunately, somebody still owns the assets of that dead label, which includes the exclusive rights to your band’s recordings. In this day and age, that scenario plays out more and more. Labels are being sucked into other labels, others are being closed. It’s very common. Google is an amazing resource, and you can find out a lot about what’s happening at certain record labels, or their parent companies, just by Googling news and information on them. I personally think it’s worth doing a little Google research before doing business with anyone.
MusicianCoaching:
What tools are you using for Marcy Playground that have come around recently?
JW:
The most important thing we’ve discovered is the same thing everyone else has discovered. Social networking sites work. You can really start to develop a fan base through social networking: Myspace; Facebook; YouTube. YouTube is probably the most under-utilized of them all. As much as people like to listen to music, they’d rather see a video and music at the same time. On your website, you can always take the YouTube code and embed videos into your webpage … or your Myspace or Facebook pages. You should get yourself one of those $120 Flip video cameras and shoot yourself playing songs, or getting out there and goofing off to your music. You should develop a profile on YouTube where you can have a big presence. You can make them funny too, so they’ll have a better chance of becoming viral. The band “OK Go” put up that famous video of them dancing on treadmills, and all of a sudden, they have millions of hits for a video that they shot themselves. They came up with a really good idea… four guys dancing on treadmills. Next thing you know, the MTV Video Music Awards roll around and there’s OK Go doing the treadmill dance, onstage. Who had heard of OK Go before that? Not many people. Now that video has around 49 Million hits.
What would you do differently having lived through this experience as a new artist?
JW:
Nowadays I’d network like crazy, but still keep my core organization small and smart. That’s my philosophy on it. I think the fewer personalities involved in a creative endeavor, and the smarter they are, the better. There are a few large organizations in management that do very well for their clients, but sometimes all you need is one really aggressive, intelligent, self-motivated individual out there. That’s what we had in Chris Blake at the time when “Sex and Candy” broke. He was just one guy with a few key clients– Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Odds, and Marcy Playground – but he was super motivated and really smart, and we were able to make a lot of good decisions, and reap the rewards of his wisdom whenever he was around.
Aside from that, I would move to a big city, go out every night and see live local music, get involved with other musicians and collaborate a lot, write with other songwriters, be as social of an animal as I could possibly be, and meet everybody in that scene. I’d probably try to avoid the “open-mic night” crowd, since my experience has been that that tends to be a pretty “dead-end” scene – Find real musicians, including a real drummer, and get a real gig! – I would work on my song craft and make as many recordings as humanly possible, shooting for the best sounding thing I could possibly get. I’d bang down the door of the local radio station and get them to spin it on one of their “Featured Local Artist” segments. Most big stations have a segment in their programing like that, where they match your song up against another local band’s. I’ve seen those contests work for artists. In fact I recorded a band in Vancouver called Stabilo that had won one of those. Their demo for a song called “Everybody” was getting some spins on 99.3 CFOX in Vancouver. I owned a major recording studio there for over 7 years, called Mushroom Studios, so I was in town on business when I heard their song come on the radio in my car. I was surprised that it was a local band because it sounded like a hit to me. Shortly thereafter I went to see them play at a club on Granville Street called The Royal. There were 10 people in the audience, but the band was great. So I went up to them afterwards, introduced myself, and invited them to come to the studio the next day to discuss their career plans. We all hit it off, so I did a few recordings with the guys, pitched them to some labels, and did my part to help them become a national act in Canada. They’ve gone on to do quite well. If they hadn’t entered that CFOX local contest… who knows what would have happened. That sort of local success becomes incredibly valuable, because it gives you something tangible you can build upon and, hopefully, translate into something bigger. If you’re in an urban market, and your song is being played for millions of people, so much the better.
I’d get a band together and play local shows without spreading ourselves too thin. Instead of hitting the road and wasting a lot of time and money touring… I’d try to get a residency at one of the local bars or clubs in town, and play there every Tuesday or Thursday night and start to develop a following. If I knew of a bar that had one slow night a week… I’d ask the owner if they wouldn’t mind having my band play for free, and then I’d bring all my friends out. I’d keep a mailing list and inform the people who signed up for it of all my news and events. And, of course, I’d use the internet to socially network like crazy.
You just have to get involved, meet people, have new experiences and learn. Make yourself an expert on everything and be social. Don’t sit in your parents’ basement smoking pot, wondering when the A&R guy from Capitol is going to knock on your door and come down the stairs to listen to your brilliant music. It’s not going to happen.
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Check out what John is up to on the Marcy Playground Website.
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