Many years ago, through a chance connection, a crap demo of an even more rubbish song I had written, ended up in the hands of a manager named Ian Wright. Ian who had passed the song around to a bunch of his producers, who had somehow miraculously reported to him that I had talent, had decided to sign me on as developing artist.

One day Ian and me were sitting in his Notting Hill office listening to my usual run of the mill rubbish, when Ian gave me a press copy of Achtung baby and said, “Steve (Lillywhite) just finished this and when we heard it we were all like holy shit. I think you’ll like this one”.

“Ian, why don’t you hook me up with Steve Lillywhite?” I asked.

“Nah, you don’t want to do that. Steve can make your record sound great but he can’t make it into a hit. You need to write that first and then give it your sound, he’ll then just make it sound great”.

Back then, of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. I was knee high to a chicken and thought my musical droppings where ultimately brilliant. In many ways I saw that as Ian denying me the opportunity to work with Steve, something that hurt me and ultimately led to the end of our working relationship.

Ian was right of course. Steve Lillywhite is a captor and what captors do is capture the essence of a band that has their songs, and has their sound, but needs to make sure their essence is not lost in the mechanics of the recording studio.

Steve Lillywhite has during his incredible carrier produced tons of great albums for bands such as U2 and Dave Matthews Band (including the famous Lillywhite sessions after which the band and Steve split and DMB for the most part lost the art of capturing their magic in a studio). If Steve would have only produced my album the ky would have been the limit. I would have formed a super band with Bono and Dave, been as cool as Jason Mraz and Chris Cornell….a boy can dream, can’t he…

Not so long ago I was sitting in Pete Glenister’s studio in London, working on Ashes, when we started talking about Steve (Steve and Pete have a long history). The conversation began with Pete mentioning to me that he had played Ruin to Steve. Steve had really liked it and had made a comment about how much he liked my voice, and asked to be sent a CD of my music. Steve was at that moment in time working at Columbia Records as an A&R manager.

Again, I jumped on the opportunity and said to Pete, “why don’t you ask Steve if he wants to produce this album with us?”

“Nah, not sure if he is right really. Steve is great at getting a band that has their sound and capturing them in the studio. I am much better at understanding what a singer/songwriter is all about. He just doesn’t get it.”

This time the older and wiser Raman knew exactly what Pete meant. Steve had just won a grammy for his most recent work on U2’s “How to dismantle an atomic bomb” and had produced really rubbish albums for Jason Mraz and Chris Cornell. Pete was right, but then again he is rarely wrong.

A few weeks later Steve Lillywhite called. He had received his copy of the Buddahead material and he invited me to meet with him at his office at Columbia Records. Armed with my copies of the Steve Liilywite produced albums I wanted him to sign I arrived at this office.

“You are a tart,” Steve said to me as he signed the album covers, “Shall we listen to some music?”

Steve looked entirely different to what I had imagined the great British producer who had produced so many cool albums would look like - he looked, well, to put it mildly quite Hollywood. Bleach blonde hair and chiclet white teeth. I stared at him while he played his air guitar along to a song from “Crossing The Invisible Line” called Strong.

“I love it mate. This is fab. So, I have an idea, can you write a song for Aerosmith?”

WHAT? WHAT THE HELL IS HE TALKING ABOUT?

“What kind of Aerosmith song?” I asked politely.

By then Steve was half way out of his office. He turned around hurriedly and said, “Anything. I need a new single for their greatest hits album”.

Ian Wright and Pete Glenister had both been right. Steve was not right for me. He got my music but not my essence. He didn’t know what to do with me. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the rule is that a singer/songwriter can never work with a Captor; but before you do you have to meet a very basic requirement: You must be really developed in your writing and performance, and confidence. So much so in fact that all you need is for your producer to figure out how to capture your essence.

A great case and point for this is the relationship between Andy Wallace and Jeff Buckley when they were working on Grace together. One night Andy and I were sitting in his studio listening to mixes he had done for Crossing the invisible line when somehow we started talking about his work with Jeff Buckley. That is when he told me the story of how Hallelujah was recorded. These are Andy’s words, pretty much word for word as he recounted the story. They have been ingrained in my mind:

“I knew that Jeff played a lot of shows around the city and he was really good live, and that everyone talked about his live performance. So, every night after we finished recording I would invite a bunch of people to the studio to sit around and watch Jeff perform. I would set him up like he was sitting on stage and then while he played I would just have the record button pressed. The album version of Hallelujah is just one of those performances. One night he just nailed it”.

So the lesson of this story is if you are an artist, and you really honestly have your songs and sound together but something is lost in translation when you record in a studio then you may benefit from a captor. Captors are not there to make you sound good from a technical point of view; they are the ones who capture the essence. Still, not every artist who is great is great because of his or her essence. Sometimes there is no essence to capture. From Chris Cornell to Jason Mraz, there is no essence. Essence is that identifying factor that no other artist or group of artists can recapture except for the one artist or the one band (and their captor). Think Dave Matthews Band, think U2: It is exactly that combination of musicians with that producer that make that sound happen.

Tags: A&R Manager, Achtung Baby, Aerosmith, air guitar, Andy Wallace, Bono, british Producer, Buddahead, buddahead ashes, Buddahead Ruin, Buddahead Strong, CHris Cornell, Columbia Records, Crossing the invisible line, Dave Matthews Band, DMB, How to dismantle an atomic bomb, Ian Wright, Jason Mraz, Jeff Buckley, Jeff Buckley Grace, Jeff Buckley Hallelujah, Lillywhite sessions, Music producers, Navigating shark filled waters, Pete Glenister, singer/songwriter, Steve Lillywhite, The Captors, U2
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In my opinion, music producers can be put into one of the following categories: The Operators, The Captors, The Middlemen, The X-Men, The Wizards, and The Charlatans.

We are starting with The Operator, and you will be forced to return to read my blog to hear about the rest! Ha-zah!

The Operator

When I was sixteen years old and enamored by Led Zepplein, GN’R, Queen, and pretty much all the legendary rock bands in the history of rock, I booked myself a couple of days at The Refuge, a local recording studio in Reading, near where I went to school.

A strange man who looked like Spike from Notting Hill’s identical twin owned the Refuge. He also had the strange habit of collecting his own shit and using it as fertilizer to grow his vegetables (which tasted much like the fertilizer).

Anyway, The Refuge was armed with Jim “The Tree” Warren. At the time Jim wasn’t “The Tree” yet but due to his height Thom Yorke purportedly gave him the nickname while Jim was working on The Bends.

What made Jim special was that he was in absolute control of the equipment he operated. He had the ability to “dial” in a recording or a mix so it sounded just right. Just right might sound ominous but there is no other way to put it. The Refuge was a small studio with only a few mics and a few pieces of outboard gear, an old Akai sampler, an even older 16 track Raindeer desk which ran with a two inch tape and used Notator as a sequencer. Most producers couldn’t imagine working with such an old and unsophisticated set up, but the Operator knows exactly how to make the equipment sound great, and relies heavily on his own ear.

When an Operator works on your recording it sounds professional and you basically cannot fault the recording and mix quality. Now, note I am not talking about the song writing, or the performance, or even the artistic merit. I am simply talking about the sonic quality of the recording.

The Operator cannot polish a turd. In other words, as Jim explained to me when I was sixteen, “Don’t come in here and tell me you want to sound like Eric Clapton – you have to play like Eric Clapton first”.

If, like me at the age of sixteen, your songs suck, your arrangement is crap, your performance is even worse, then working with an Operator will leave you with a sonicaly perfect fart. A fart that has been recorded perfectly and mixed to sound huge, is still a shit bubble.

An incredible recording of a slightly musical shit bubble is exactly what my recording session with Jim Warren ended up being. I was basically a teenage douche bag.

Not only I was a terrible singer and a horrible guitar player, when I played the drums I sounded like the Energizer Bunny…

So the first moral of the story is the first “shark” you will encounter when looking for a producer is your own ego. If you can’t look past your own ego and see that you might not be good enough or ready enough yet to get in the recording studio, then your recording will most likely sound like anal acoustics, or a great sounding one cheek sneak– remember what I said about polishing the ol’ steamer? So, be honest and true to yourself, put your ego aside, and don’t be a shit-head like I was.

The second moral of the story is that you should never be fooled by the size of a producers studio or the amount of equipment they have because The Operator knows exactly how to work a few pieces of equipment and make everything sound just right.

Also Check Out Navigating Shark Filled Waters Part 1

Tags: akai sampler, Captors, Charlatans, Energizer bunny, Eric Clapton, GN'R, Guns and Roses, Jim "The tree" warren, Jim Warren, Led Zepplein, Middlemen, Music producers, Navigating shark filled waters, Notator, Notting Hill, Operators, raindeer desk, shit as fertilizer, Spike, the bends, The Refuge, Thom Yorke, two inch tape machine, Wizards, X-Men
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Our old manager Merck Mercuriadis sent me an email today with the subject line Just look at this smile.

This article in Rolling Stone is an amazing revelation of how badly the music industry is doing. On the other hand I couldn’t stop smiling back at the photo of Debbie Southwood-Smith, an old friend from Interscope, someone who loved Buddahead when we were signed by Jimmy Iovine to the label. When I knew her she seemed lost, unhappy, and misguided by an industry she had poured herself into. She was great her job too - she discovered and signed Queens of the stone age.

I have an amazing story about Debbie and Jimmy Iovine but I am going to keep that for “Navigating Shark Filled Waters”, so until then I just want to say, “Debbie, if you read this, I want you to know I am so overwhelmed by happiness to see you so happy - congrats - and I forgive you for trying to get me to buy pants that are way too tight for me”.

Tags: ashes, Buddahead, buddahead ashes, Debbie Southwood-Smith, Interscope, Jimmy Iovine, Merck Mercuriadis, Navigating shark filled waters, Queens of the stone age, Rolling Stone
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Navigating Shark Filled Waters (filled with crap) will be an ongoing series of truth essays - the truth about music industry dirt bags and heroes and how to survive it all. Part 1 is about Music Publishers!

Before going any further, for the sake of those of you who are new to this site and buddahead, here is a little about me. I am older than the Jonas brothers and I am the kind of artist that Simon Cowell would probably hate - I am old and unmoldable. Still, I have my hair, I shit like a swiss train, and I am writing better music than ever before. I have had the record deals, I still have the money, and I pretty much know everyone. In other words, I have the beans and have nothing to lose, so i might as well spill them.

(On a side note: I am not really old. If I was an actor I would be considered young enough to play a superhero like Batman. For what is worth, Batman and I, or I should say Christian Bale and I are the same age…but this is the music industry).

So, what the hell is music publishing anyway?

According to Wikipedia: The primary job of the music publisher is to link up new songs by songwriters with suitable recording artists to record them, with the intent of creating a hit record and generating large numbers of sales and airplay.

Honestly, that is not what publishers do unless you live in Nashville and have the luck to bump into a Scott Gunter type! A Scott Gunter type, named after the real life Scott Gunter, is a traditional song man. The real Gunter has discovered a great number of the most successful country writers of our time. Gunters’ are music’s cupids searching to match the beautiful music of an ugly writer to the beautiful voice of an uninspired star. When a real band or a real artist walks in the room with music written without any intent of being covered by Faith Hill, the Gunter type is confused.

I remember when the real Gunter told me his thoughts about my song “When I fall”,

“Now Raymon”, he began in speaking in a southern drawl, words drooling out as slowly as molases, “I gotta tell you; I really gotta tell you; I just love this song; I mean it is a great song; this is a great song and I know that. I mean I just love the way you hold those long notes over the chorus and all, but heck, I have to admit, I just can’t figure out what the hell you are talking about”.

Just to clarify the mystique here is said chorus:

“When I fall, When I lose my head, you’re the one I call; when I fall, when I bleed, the one I need, the one I want, you’re the one I call” - Not exactly James Joyce now is it?

Listen to When I Fall

Gunter did his part for Buddahead. He tried anyway. He arranged thirty minutes for me to write a song with Craig Wiseman, one of the most successful country writers of all time. Craig is a cuddly bear of a man who travels with a goody bag his wife packs for him every time he leaves the house. Craig has the undisputable quality know by the French as Joie De Vivre (the joy of life). That afternoon, in castle in France, owned by Sting’s manager Miles Copeland, Craig and me met to construct the mother of all ballads. Craig broke the ice by saying, “I love your song When I fall, I really do, that is great. So dude, I have an idea for you, check it out.”

He then got his acoustic guitar out and started to strum the C chord, followed by an E minor, and then started to sing, “Shafts of moonlight beaming through my bedroom window”.

“HOLD IT SCRUMPY PUMPY”, I cried, ” I’m from London. I wrote most of the songs in a shitty room over looking a railway line in the pouring rain. There are no shafts of fucking moonlight beaming through my dreams even, let alone my bedroom window. Maybe a wandering hobo, but no moonlight.”

(Okay - that is not exactly what I said but needless to say, we did not finish writing about shafts of moonllght)

The point of this story is if you are a cool artist, and you write your own cool shit, you don’t need a publisher to hook you up with cheesy pop and country writers. Keep the rights to your own songs, join ASCAP or BMI, and keep all the money. So, WHY DID YOU DO IT RAMAN? One name: James Dewar.

(yeah I know, he looks just like James Blunt but trust me he is not nearly as whiney)

Hi, my name is James. I started work at Island Records in the warehouse in 1990 and progressed into A&R department where i found my true vocation. Moved to MCA Records for a year in 1992, before landing a job at independant publisher, Rondor Music in 1993 where i remained for 11 years signing such artists as William Orbit, Kaiser Cheifs and dEUS. Left Rondor after the company was swallowed up by Universal and took a sabbatical for a year traveling round the world and started at SonyATV publishing in 2005.

That is something James wrote about himself that I found on a social network I found him on.

Yes - it is true he started in the warehouse at Island.

Yes - it is true that he was at Rondor for 11 years where he signed loads of cool bands and artists including William Orbit.

Yes - he is passionate !!! about music, russian women, guitars, rock, the devil’s dandruff, Audi TTs, garlic, and traveling to the desert. He fights for you when he believes in you, will sign you for a nickel but gives you mad studio time and he will never put you on hold when you call him. He will always call you back about 2 hours later.

Yes - basically James Dewar made a shit load of money for the company he worked for and still Universal Music fired him when they bought Rondor.

But…the rumor is that James Dewar could not get another job in the industry because he passed on signing one of the greatest (not) rock bands of all time. This is why even with all his success he had to start as part-timer at Sony Publishing. The douchie von douchie pants band we are talking about is: The Darkness.

Hello industry! The man was right. Did you hear Darkness’s latest album? No? No worries, nor did anyone else. Give James his Audi back goddamn it! James Dewar fought for me. He gave me studio time, some money, introduced me to tons of cool people, spread my music, and eventually got me a record deal with Interscope Records. But there is only one James Dewar, try him: [Insert email] but if he doesn’t sign you…plan B is your only way to survive.

Plan B: So if you want to survive the music publishing industry my advice to you is this: If you are a song writer and want to write with other song writers and have other singers sing your songs then move to Nashville, get your music to Scott Gunter or some other Gunter type, and if he or they likes your music, you most likely will be made. On the other hand, if you are a an artist and you write your own songs then join ASCAP or BMI, keep your own publishing, get a licensing person to license your music out to TV, Film, Ads or whatever, and keep all the money and all the rights to everything you write. There is no need for you to sign a publishing deal. These days the money is not that good (the terms and conditions have never been good) and keep the right to your own songs.

Tags: ASCAP, ashes, Batman, BMI, Buddahead, Christian Bale, Craig Wiseman, dEUS, Faith Hill, Island records, James Blunt, James Dewar, James Joyce, Jonas Brothers, kaiser chiefs, MCA, Miles Copeland, music industry, music industry dirt bags, Music Publishing, Nashville, Navigating shark filled waters, record deals, Robbie Williams, rondor music publishing, sales and airplay, Scott Gunter, shark, shark filled waters, Simon Cowell, songs, songwriters, SonyATV publishing, Sting, successful country writers, superhero, swiss train, The Darkness, truth about music industry, truth essays, When I fall, wikipedia, William orbit
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