Smarter in Sixty Seconds: How to Land a Fat Gig in Lean Times

July 3rd, 2012 by Mark Hermann

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If your last name isn’t Zuckerberg and you’ve bravely chosen (against your mother’s fruitless pleading) to make a life in music, then you probably don’t need me to remind you that this moment in history may not exactly go down as the “Big Gold Rush” for musicians.

Need to serve up a big fish for yourself? The Rock and Roll Zen master will show you how.

That said, in every river teeming with fool’s gold there are still some real nuggets out there to be found. You just have to know where to look.

If You Want To Catch a Big Fish You Have To Learn to Think Like a Fish

Now it may seem counterintuitive to tell a music producer to go fishing for their next gig in the Real Estate section of the New York Times. But that’s exactly what I did a few years back, smack dab in the heart of the Great Recession, when the New York Times decided to do a story on the renovation of our 100 year-old Harlem brownstone.

It was the typical renovation story that starts off like a fairy tale (“Imagine if we ever lived in a brownstone”) and quickly spirals downward into the pit of hell (“How the hell did we get here?!”). Only New York-style with far more villainous swine: There was the unscrupulous contractor who stole most of the money, the bumbling-but-well-dressed-architect who couldn’t measure properly, and a thousand other gems that damn near sunk the whole dream.

Use Every Lure In Your Tackle Box to Catch That Fish

Once upon a time (pre-children) my wife and I used to love to chill on the weekend and read the Times. We especially loved the colorful renovation stories in the Real Estate section. So my wife starts pestering me that I should write to the Times and tell our harrowing renovation story since we had a pretty juicy one —  and after all, I do like to write.

“Oh, please, I’m a music producer,” I said. “Who’s going to take me seriously as a writer?” (note the fear of stepping out of one’s comfort zone)

“Oh, I see. You can ONLY do one thing? Can’t walk and chew bubble gum? I get it.” she says. (spouses)

And this is how she shamed me, after a few months of lame excuses, into finally sitting down and writing our story and then sending it off to the Times. Of course, there was no response, as I fully expected and I got on with the album I needed to focus on.

Then, to my utter shock, a few months later the Times wrote back and said they wanted to interview us for the story.

A Day In the Sun For A Fish Out Of Water

It was pretty cool when the article came out. People from every corner of the globe and every era in my lifetime came out of the woodwork to congratulate me on the article. Even an avant garde jazz oboist I did a gig with once in high school backing a poetry reading in a delicatessen (it was called “Pickles and Poetry”) found me on Facebook to say he had seen the story.

But the truth is that while it’s nice to see your name in print and your picture in a big newspaper like the NYT (and witnessing first-hand the power of reaching a readership of some 30 million people), I had other motivations.

Would a Times article return our hero to “The Tudors?”

The Band, Elwood. The BAND!

You see, I had a band at the time and we had just licensed one of our songs to be featured in Showtime’s hit series, “The Tudors.” It was a big deal for an indie band and I wanted to milk it for all we could. So when the Times offer came up I told them I wanted coverage of the song and a shot in my recording studio in the cellar. It was all about the music angle. They agreed.

I figured maybe a big movie director sniffing around the real estate section for new digs or maybe a music supervisor for a hot TV series might see the story, all in the hopes that we could score a few more big music licensing deals while we were hot. But the fish that ultimately swam by and took the bait caught me completely by surprise.

A Fish That Was Not Called Wanda

A week or so after the story came out I received an email from my Website; someone who had seen the article, checked out my music and said they liked my production work. And would I be interested in producing a couple of his songs?

Now anyone who came up in the New York music scene and ever put an ad in The Village Voice looking for a singer or other musicians, knows all too well that way down in the deep dark recesses of Gotham City lie some truly scary denizens of the deep.

They’re swimming around the dives and back alleys, bottom feeders many of whom will surface to answer your ad, who either can’t read or have a very loose translation of the specific influences you describe for the candidate you’re after. (That’s a movie in itself, Wanted: Singer For a Band.)

Nonetheless, I told him to go ahead and send me a CD. (Let’s just say I wasn’t holding my breath thinking I was about to discover the next Beatles. But hey, you never know, right?)

Never Too Old To Rock and Roll

A few days later the CD arrived in the mail (yes, before even CDs were considered old hat). Looking around the cover and back for a clue about what I was in for, I opened it up to find a picture showing a distant shot of a guy off in the woods wearing sunglasses. He seemed a bit older but had a cool vibe.

So I threw on the disc and had a listen. It was rock and roll, which is what I do — so points for that — but it didn’t take long before I quickly lost interest; amateur production, out-of-tune vocals. I was already onto the next thing on my To-do list.

About a week after that, I got another email from the artist stating that they hadn’t heard from me, so I must not be interested. OK. OK. I guess this was life telling me to do the right thing and at least respond.

I wrote back to him and explained that if he liked what he heard of my work, that I couldn’t possibly take what I was given and turn it into anything even closely resembling that production.

But to at least present him the option I said that if he wanted me to do everything like bring in the musicians, arrange the songs, etc… and have him just come in and do his part, I could do that for X, where X is my rate for doing serious work. It may not be record company money from the glory days but the rate is high enough to immediately separate the wheat from the chaff. You find out very quickly how serious the artist is and if they pass, choosing to go the DIY route instead, no problem.

To my surprise, he responded, “Great! Let’s get started.” Huh?

Good Things Come In Small, Padded Packages

Sure enough, a padded envelope arrived in my mailbox containing of all things A CASSETTE TAPE! (see Wiki for definition) Who sends a friggin’ cassette tape AND…a check in full for both songs? (I don’t remember asking for a check, let alone a check in full up front!)

These technological wonders began to have deep meaning for Mark.

“Did you Google him?” my wife asks. “Who sends that kind of money to someone they never met?” Hmmm, maybe she had a point.

So I Googled the name and found one isolated link to a story about someone by the same name retiring from a high position on Wall Street. Well, it could explain the money part any way if it was him.

That night I popped in the cassette (yes, I still had a cassette deck in my studio for that very rare occasion, and here it was). It was just a raw take of him and an acoustic guitar, singing into a tape recorder. Suddenly I could hear a vibe, a bit unpolished but it was a good song. I could do something with this. Kind of like Tom Petty meets Gordon Lightfoot.

Doing The Work

So I spent some time with the arrangements and tightened up the songs and then called my A-Team list of killer players to record the songs. They had by now heard my tale of how the session came about and the not-so-great CD I received. But they all told me, after hearing his voice and playing on the songs that they really dug his music.

By the time I finished mixing these first two songs, I had grown quite fond of them and the artist was thrilled with the results. So he asked if I would be interested in doing more. He had at least three more songs ready. Absolutely!

Now, I could hear his writing style emerging. Now I could see the artist missing in the first CD I heard. Now I could help someone realize their musical vision, which is what a producer is supposed to do, right? And now I was excited to be able to help him get there. This is what makes me smile.

Sure enough, a few days later came another padded envelope in the mail, the cassette tape and the check. (This began a kind of Pavlov’s dog response: padded envelope = more songs to produce = Ka-ching…Nice!)

Pavlov would have been proud.

The Incredible Expanding Album Project

Then the five songs turned into eight. Eight turned into eleven and ultimately we recorded fifteen songs, by the time he asked if I would redo some of the songs from the original CD to bring them up to snuff.

Now you could just pocket all that money and make a very good record these days with the tools we have available to us. I could have programmed everything in my computer, played the bass and guitar parts and done a perfectly fine job for this artist that I’m sure he would have been very satisfied with.

But that’s not how you do business if you really want to put great work out into the world. It’s your name on there forever as producer. What do you want people to say about you when they see that credit? So I chose instead to bring in the baddest musicians I know to make every track the best it could possibly be.

Then I took a good chunk of that money and bought some studio toys I had my eye on for quite some time: the hot rod Mac Pro, the Chandler TG-2 EMI Abbey Road preamp (it still wins every time in a comparison shootout to build a vocal chain), a couple of Beyer M-160 ribbon mics. All in the name of delivering an exceptional product for this artist.

Within a few weeks of completing the album, he called to tell me that he had just licensed one of the new songs to ESPN and got paid for it. Now for a guy coming off of Wall Street, the money isn’t even worth mentioning.

But the feeling you get when a big time network decides to license your original music for the first time when you’ve never had anything like this happen? That’s priceless. He was psyched. I was even more excited, having helped someone to have that experience.

When it was over, I gained so much more than just a satisfied customer. I gained a great new friend who has proven over time to be a valued adviser and confidant.

The Secret Decoder Ring Part

This experience taught me so many valuable lessons. Here are just a few of them:

1. Learn to fine-tune your radar to be on the lookout for opportunities that arise from totally unexpected places and situations. Recognize that opportunity lies everywhere but often beckons with a whisper, not a bullhorn.

We spend so much time and energy in life trying to break down a door to a room that we convince ourselves is the one and only place where our success must reside, only to find that one day we do something totally contrary to all our previous efforts, and suddenly a door down the hall opens up and the voice of opportunity says, “I’m over here. C’mon in. Where have you been all this time?”

Open your mind…and a masterpiece may get through.

2. Never judge a book by its cover (or an artist by just one recording).

A Fortune 500 headhunter would probably tell you they can sense a candidate’s prospects within the first couple sentences of an interview. A good A&R man might tell you the same thing about watching a band within the first couple songs.

But beware such trappings. Judging art can be a bit more elusive. Lest we forget how Decca Records passed on The Beatles because they said guitar music was on the way out. Or how Berry Gordy fought vehemently not to put out Marvin Gaye’s magnum opus, What’s Going On, because it was too political — which went on to become the largest-selling record in the history of Motown.

Your knee-jerk response to a situation or an artist may cost you dearly. Had I chosen not to respond to this artist when they first emailed me, it would have been a costly mistake on several levels.

3. Be open to possibilities.

Kill the Mr. or Ms. Know-It-All in you that thinks they have a lock on how it will all turn out. The truth is you don’t know shit! Revel in that. It makes life so much more interesting, no?

So What’s The Strangest Place You Ever Found A Great Gig?

Peace,

Mark Hermann

NYC-based producer/artist/engineer/more Mark Hermann spends his life in the professional service of music. He has toured the world with rock legends, produced hit artists, and licensed music for numerous TV/film placements. Hermann also owns a recording studio in a 100-year old Harlem Brownstone. Keep up with him at Rock & Roll Zen.