Resume? Resume? I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Resume!
25/10/2012 § Leave a comment
Well, of course you do, but aim to have a boatload of material so you don’t have just your resume to show prospective employers. And then, during your first job, find time to do your own thing, by any means necessary, so that you don’t really need that resume after that. I landed the second job of my career with the film production house, Second Story Television without any resume at all. That was because I started that company with a few friends after gleaning enough experience and connections from working at a small film production company/ad agency based on the famed Madison Avenue in NYC. And jobs after SST were mostly pulled in from my network of friends. That’s the key and the underlying thought behind this bloggette: building your career, yourself, again, by any means necessary.
Rubber Rodeo: How The West Was Won / Eat Records / Second Story Television
FreeDub Missive
16/08/2012 § Leave a comment
A missive for the IR release 26.1 FreeDub. You can download it HERE, but do read on with what some might call liner notes, others might call a diatribe, which we call our infomercial for dub living. Basically pulsed out to the press and available to the public in each and every download of IR26.2, giving up the history of the IR label and the why and wherefore of the musical collective known as Indigenous Resistance. As culled from the writings of Tapedave and IR’s creative liason and traveling dignitary, The Ghost.
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FreeDub for the people. What does that mean exactly, specifically? It’s not exactly free as we are not exactly free as a people, anywhere. Where there is a power structure it’s never a zero sum game. There’s winners and losers, the losers just need to lose a little less and win more. That is where the words come from, that struggle for freedom, that struggle for respect, the struggle continues every day.
So it’s a double-edged sword this FreeDub, it is free — “getcha download here, extra dub on the side” — but it also speaks to being free, the urge, the want, the need. Revolution you can dance to has been part of the IR mission since the beginning of crafting and splicing spoken word dissent into deep bass-laden tracks of dance, dub, techo. Tracks that were crucial, but lacking interest from the wider music industry, and so limited distribution made even more limited when one record company courageous enough to take it on, went out of business, kaput, taking masters, artwork, and royalties down the rat-infested drain. With help from Dorado, another courageous outlier of the music industry (before they dissolved), IR regrouped, reinvested with time, spit energy and re-engineered itself. The music can now be found on iTunes (and elsewhere) through Believe Digital, with some releases in the earthbound form of CDs through CDBaby. But dems the dub that helps pay the way for getting the real deal back to the people; the indigenous, those who need to hear the words and dance to the music, to break down the barriers put up against the hand-packed brutality of their day-to-day, to push off the trod that downward, and incessantly, presses against their very soul. As well as you, reading this, slogging it out against selfishness and the grubbing for winning over losing, wanting for a bit of individuality and mindfulness, in this time and space we share. « Read the rest of this entry »
Marketing OneOH!One: Break On Through To The Tangential Side
17/02/2012 § 4 Comments
When I interview interns for the Ted Kurland Associates program, which I oversee here at TKA, more than a few want to know if they are going to work directly with the agents, or with management, as if the marketing side of it were tangential to their education, not only as an intern at TKA, but as a whole to their career. Of course, working with the artists is more interesting than working with the pictures of the artists; getting into the thick of the business of music is really the key to their understanding of the booking process. I know that, which is why I try and give them face time with the agents.
Artists just starting out, you may have a real career where you can afford to shave off a nice percentage for a manager; a manager who understands all this tangential business kind of stuff and can honestly oversee a marketing crew who can use all the bleeding-edge tools-of-the-minute in order to shoot your career into the stratosphere, and, even more important, keep it there. Before you get there, here is one basic term you need to understand. It’s not too hard to get, though I am perplexed when starving artists don’t even have this tool tucked under their belts. Perhaps that’s why starving artists are starving?
The marketing term for today is AUDIENCE.
As in those people who want to hear your music. To get gigs, you must have a loyal fan base. Clubs want to fill their rooms with paying customers so those customers can buy drinks, eat food, pay for all the stuff that gets labeled as “overhead.” Don’t even expect to be considered by a promoter at a large club unless you have an audience that can minimally fill his room.
Mud Folio, Almost Here
19/10/2011 § 2 Comments
It’s been a hard slog to get this sucker, THE MUD FOLIO, published in book form. A real book, with spines, a cover, cut to size, even an ISBN number and a UPC code, not the PDF download that’s up there now.
Why? Well, while I figured out a nice looking layout for an 8.5 x 11 page print-out LULU prints their trade paperbacks at 6 by 9 inch, a bit of a different ratio. If I wasn’t so anal, I’d just change the page dimension in InDesign and be done with it. But, I had to tinker, then the tinkering didn’t look right. Then life got in the way, and now, just about THREE FREAKING YEARS later, I am ALMOST done. Not yet, but almost.
We’ve had a few hiccups along the way as well. I added them on a timely basis — updates as they happened rushed to print, “copy, boy!” — to The Mud Folio page on Facebook, which I know you’ll “like” ASAP so you can get all the up-to-the-minute info on publication dates, and news and reviews, and future attempts at humor. (I sure hope we get us some reviews. I sure hope you can get the humor.)
Now, all in one place, here’s what’s happened to us to throw us off course, delay publication, fray nerves, and otherwise make us ready for those many Fridays when just one beer would not do. Though not first in the long list of detours, that Okie Poetry Slam was perhaps the hairiest of all.
BOOK BURNING
« Read the rest of this entry »
A Letter Each From Yoko, Hunter, & Sublette
20/09/2011 § Leave a comment
Yoko Ono, yes that Yoko Ono. I was her product manager at Rykodisc and worked intensely with her over the course of releasing the Onobox and her solo albums (and those duo Unfinished Music albums like TWO VIRGINS that she created with You-Know-Who). And yes, Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Dead. And yes, Sublette, Ned Sublette. Who? Look him up. When Rykodisc was being pulled to NYC by Chris Blackwell, I decided to get a raise and a better position instead of going back to the Big Apple with no raise, no cost-of-living increase, and no moving allowance, and in the lowly position of PM. Lowly, as they were trying to de-Rykodisc Ryko at the time with tighter marketing budgets and other de-naturing parts of their new Palm/Ryko bidness plan.
On Innovation, Flying Deloreans & Explosions In The Desert
06/09/2011 § 1 Comment
Innovators are a strange breed. What makes them move ahead against all odds? Especially hopping over the road blocks and avoiding the potholes placed there by zealous department heads who are managing according to company policy and frameworks, plans, etc. The very fact that a plan is notated and written places it firmly lying down in the past, while the innovators are working in the present, edging toward the unknown of a future.
Jed & His Mighty Camaro & Other New Art Werks
30/08/2011 § 9 Comments
A while back, Jed Drake, an old friend of mine from New Canaan, where we grew up among the high and mighty denizens of corporate-land, asked me to scan in a picture from our Senior yearbook so he could, I’m projecting here, luxuriate in the wayward youth of his high school years. New Canaan, for all of you not really interested in such things to know these facts already, was the home of Watson and Watson Jr, both of IBM fame, Noyes, who gave IBM, Mobil Oil and Westinghouse their look and feel, Johnson, he of the Glass House which is also in town, and Symington, Senator Symington to you, bub. Letterman lived there for a bit, Jack Paar too. Harry Connick Jr is a resident, as is Brian Williams, Glenn Beck, Paul Simon and Anne Coulter. Now there’s a group I’d like to see pull up to MacKenzies for the Sunday paper at the same time and bash it out with their views on the weeks events. Hey, I saw Letterman pull up there one Sunday, so it could happen.
Jed, back then, never did luxuriate in anything; he was passing through too fast to do any such thing, unless he had too many beers. Which was few and far between, as Jed never met a six-pack he couldn’t handle. But now, as a high-powered exec with many minions to handle and keep in line, including kids, I’m guessing he wanted to have that picture around to remind him of those 1970s. I got around to the scan too late — already on vacation, good scanner still in the office, time was not on my side, etc. — and so Jed got his wife to do it, which I didn’t know when I did finally scan it in at high-resolution and took the time to tweak the image a bit so it would look all dandy in his nice corner office.
That’s Jed there in the shadow of the window, huge freaking smile. Who wouldn’t what with that car, those cheerleaders, in that town? Yeah, yeah, it’s a Chevelle SS 396 w/ Cowl Induction, as Stu Young commented below, not a Camaro, as a handful of guys have since corrected me, not a Camaro. Like I knew cars back then? Or now? I could tell you who was in The Mothers Of Invention, that Max Ernst called his painting style, frottage–sexual innuendo embedded to disrupt the art establishment–and knew the words to Yes’ “Roundabout”, but don’t ask me what they mean. (While I could now ask Mr Anderson, as we rep him at Ted Kurland Associates, some youthful enthusiasms that I thought profound then should best be left unquestioned.) I could also tell you that since this was a bright sunny day, the shutter speed for this picture, if it was shot on Plus-X, was probably 200, with an f-stop of f16 or smaller. But cars, as you see, I knew a little more than squat. Which is one reason I’m taking the picture and Jed is in the picture. With the girls. Cowl induction? Sorry, but not in this kid’s lexicon.
Listen To Your Parents And Then…
29/08/2011 § 5 Comments
Full disclosure here: I’m a parent. My eldest is currently at Boston University and another one who will be college-bound in a few years. I would love for both to land a job directly from one of their internships; with their freebie work acting like one long interview process. That would be very cool. And it happens. I’ve seen articles outlining the successes, where to apply for these programs and how students should consider doing that very thing in order to streamline their career path. I also know parents push their children to look for internships at prestigious companies with this very idea in mind. Don’t do it. For a whole cartload of reasons. Or at the very least, don’t expect anything and carry on like you will never get the carrot of the job they are dangling in front of you. Because you might not.
You Don’t Know Anything and Your Ideas Are Worthless (No, Seriously, Get Used To It…)
23/08/2011 § 8 Comments
In your first job (out here in the business world) there will be times when people are not going to listen to you. Many times. Or worse, tell you how wrong you are to your face, if not in an all-caps email that gets circulated throughout the company. Get used to it because it never ends, even when you get that so-called “experience” under your proverbial belt. For whatever reason, and there are multitudes of them that I could not possibly list here and stay within my allotted 400 words. Let me just say the personal successes and failures of your co-workers and, most importantly for today’s blog, YOUR FUTURE BOSSES, gives them their own specific, personal tunnel-vision that you cannot expect to fully perceive, much less fathom. « Read the rest of this entry »
Kerouac-Kicks Joy Darkness – article for Borders’ Magazine
26/06/2011 § Leave a comment
Kerouac-Kicks Joy Darkness is a spoken-word tribute with music to the writings of Jack Kerouac through readings of his material (including a few previously unpublished pieces) by such Beat luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Burroughs; alternative music figures such as Michael Stipe, Eddie Vedder, and Patti Smith; and actors like Johnny Depp and Matt Dillon. Here David Greenberg, co-creator of Rykodisc’s Voices spoken-word recordings series, describes some of the special circumstances that went into the creation of this landmark recording.
tapedave 