_______________________________
Guest Post by Carl Wiser on SongFactsWhen Michael Jackson declared himself the "King of Pop," Dan Beck fought it. Beck was an executive at Epic Records who was part of Jackson's marketing efforts in the '90s, a time when his bizarre behavior was overshadowing his talent. By the time the HIStory album was released in 1995 (Beck came up with the title), Jackson was both the biggest star on the planet and the most scandalous.In his decades working in the music industry, Beck pulled the levers that shaped the trends (he takes credit and blame for the Lambada) and made the hits. These days, he's doing some songwriting, most recently for the Gary Lucas & Jann Klose album Stereopticon.We spoke with Dan about some of his behind-the-scenes adventures in the industry, including how Jackson crowned himself "King of Pop."rms of gauging what the artist wanted, and then if that consensus was there between the label and the artist, it was really obvious. But a lot of times the promotion department was extremely involved in that process and often went out and whispered in people's ears to get a radio opinion and you tried to bring as much information into the process as possible.I've worked with some independent labels, what I call hobbyists, who start a little record company because they have money or whatever, and they think because they're head of the record company they should pick the singles. I'd rather be in the process of finding out what other people think than sitting there saying I have golden ears. Carl: What you're saying is that it's research driven and that audiences hear this song before it's released in very structured environments. That's not the image of some guy sitting in his office going, "That's the single."Dan: Right. When an album is finished, it gets played around the company a little bit and everybody's a fan. Sometimes a song just says, "It's got to be me!" and you go with it. So much of it is trying to keep it as uncomplicated as possible with as much information as you can.There would be discussions about how a song is a great ballad but we can't open with a ballad at radio because it may take us too long for the song to burn-in and radio will get impatient and we'll lose it. So there's also the considerations of the process: how you get the momentum going in the right way. And that may affect how you select singles as well. Those are things we saw over the years many, many times.Carl: Did you ever see a specific case where they clearly chose the wrong one but didn't realize it until after that one tanked and the next song became a big hit?Dan: Usually if you're wrong you don't get the chance on the second one, and believe me, that's a huge case because it's a perception business. If people think it's not hot then trying to regenerate the momentum is very difficult. I can't think of a specific example where an obvious hit was missed, but so much of it ends up in the gray area and that's the bad place to be. Dan co-wrote six songs on the Stereopticon album with the performers, Gary Lucas and Jann Klose. Gary is an accomplished guitarist known for his work with Captain Beefheart and for his collaboration with Jeff Buckley – he co-wrote two key tracks on Buckley's only album: "Grace" and "Mojo Pin." Klose is an acclaimed singer/songwriter who was the singing voice of Tim Buckley in the film Greetings From Tim Buckley.
I'm too slow
You dream too high
And you come to know
You're born with nothing
You die with less
I'm living in the well of lonelinessIn that sense it was trying to do something that was conversational, something that seemed so natural to say. The music of that song reminded me of Three Dog Night, so I thought of what Hoyt Axton would write for Three Dog Night.Carl: Tell me about the song "Nobody's Talking."Dan: It's poking a little fun at the whole phone gazing thing and saying we all do it and we're all on different sides of every fence. It was writing a little kind of freeform, non-sequitur, just having fun with it. That was the sense of it. From "Nobody's Talkin' (But Everybody's On The Phone)"I said hey there
A little conversation?
I'm not a constellation
I'm just a starGary actually came up with the left and the right thing and I recalled Shabba Ranks when we were having a party for him to give him a gold record or something, somebody said, "You're such a star," and he was very humble. He said, "No I'm not a star," and then he paused a minute and said, "I'm just a constellation." It always stuck with me.It's also about people who communicate through their phones and people who are communicating outwardly, like the people that are passing a joint or having a margarita or having a martini – life is full of people being both those ways. It was a reflection on all that.Two years after Hurricane Sandy washed away parts of New York and New Jersey in 2012, many victims were still struggling. Gary, Jann and Dan wrote "Mary Magdalene (Cry Of The Banshee)" to draw attention to their struggles and offer support as rebuilding efforts continued.Carl: On your song "Mary Magdalene" there is this tremendous hook that comes in, which is one of those that you don't expect. The song straddles that line between being about this tragic event and finding a way through it. Can you talk about coming up with that song and if any of you guys were affected by that tragedy?Dan: We put the music down and we didn't really have a direction for it. It was the first song we wrote together, the three of us, and I took it home and was listening. It wasn't that long after Sandy, and I live on the South Shore of Long Island and there was a lot of impact there. Where I live is in Rockville Centre, just north of the people affected.We still had power, and a lot of people from the South Shore had no place to eat and their food was ruined, so everybody flooded to Rockville Centre. It was the only place there was a gas station open, it was the only place there was a 24-hour diner, and so people were lined up everywhere. My kids were working handing out FEMA packages and water and whatever else. So, yeah, I was moved by it and then hearing the music I started thinking of the song in two ways: number one, that this terrible thing happened, and number two, that we survived it. So, the verses really are telling the story, and to me the story really was in Breezy Point with these Irish firemen. It's somewhat of an Irish enclave down there, and firemen and policemen, their own homes were burning and they're in a flood. What they usually use to put out a fire was inhibiting them from actually saving their own homes, and it just was such an irony to me.So, I went back to Gary and Jann and I said, "I've got a little bit of an idea here about Sandy. How would you guys feel about that?" Because with topical songs sometimes people say, "Well, I don't really want to get that out front." And they both totally responded to it and started telling me about their own experiences – Jann going out to Staten Island and Gary talking about Lower Manhattan and the whole thing – and they were just like "Yeah!" So, it gave me the confidence. There are really two steps to the song: one is through the verses, telling the story, and the other is the chorus, where I envisioned the firemen exhausted, having a beer afterwards saying, "We got through this."They would complain like crazy: "Oh my god, how could you do something so commercial?And then I started thinking about the whole Irish impact. We had friends that lived out on Long Beach who lost their home, and started thinking about how their whole thing was trying to reconstruct their home. To me it was like a resurrection, and then I thought of old biblical stories. The first witness to a resurrection was supposedly Mary Magdalene, and I thought, Here's to you and me and Mary Magdalene. And let's toast to getting through this, let's toast to our survival and resurrecting our lives.I'd like to hear it get covered by a traditional Irish act with that instrumentation, whether it's bagpipes or whatever. I would find it interesting for an Irish act to perform a song about an Irish-American tragedy. It would make this song about 100 years old in a minute. I knew Shel Silverstein quite well. When I started my career in Nashville he would stop by my office all the time and we would sit around in the morning and have coffee and talk. And here is a guy who wrote "The Unicorn," which I always thought had been written 200 years ago. Shel and I would sit around and talk about "Boy Named Sue" and how he wrote that and "The Cover of Rolling Stone" but what always was amazing to me was that he wrote something that was like a song you would think was 100 years old. So, it was trying to write something lasting about this event because I thought this whole story is going to go down in history. People will tell their grandkids about that storm.Carl: A lot of people when they hear all those songs, they don't realize they're written by a Jewish guy from Chicago.Dan: Yeah, that's right!Carl: Thinking about the line, "The Only Band That Matters" for The Clash, that is about the most perfect positioning statement I can imagine, and it was very relevant in the '70s/'80s/'90 because when you were a disc jockey you were starved for this kind of stuff. You've got 12 seconds to talk up some song: "The only band that matters: here's The Clash."And today it would be a Tweet. It could be a hashtag. Is that what you guys were essentially looking for when you were in the marketing department?Dan: You work with lots of acts and every act that I was assigned to be the product manager, you meet the manager, you meet the act, and you try to come up with why it's relevant to you. You've got to put a lot of work into them. Sometimes you really like them as people, sometimes you love their commerciality – you try to find those things that motivate you. Well, with The Clash it was like, Oh my god, I'm so lucky to be working on something that you could be so passionate about. And that line, it wasn't like we were looking for something particular. Sometimes we were for other acts, but in the case of The Clash I think it was Gary just evolving what spoke to who the band were. It was right, and of course, everybody liked it.We had no real expectation at the time that it was a lasting phrase. We were looking for something of the moment and it just stayed with the band. It's funny because the band would come up on the floor – The Clash and Bernie Rhodes and Kosmo Vinyl – and I'd be out in the hallway and they'd say, "Oh, here they come, the guys that love to hate us."They loved it. They loved what we were doing, but they would complain like crazy: "Oh my god, how could you do something so commercial?" It's one of those great, fun moments in the business.Carl: Well, The Clash are funny because they were never on an independent label – they were always part of this machine. Dan: Yes, that's right. They really were.Carl: So, I wonder if you guys were ever sitting in an office trying to think of a positioning statement for a band, because it's not something that many bands have. For instance: The Rolling Stones – The World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band; Aerosmith – The Bad Boys from Boston. And then if you don't get one, people make it up for you, so Bruce Springsteen becomes The Boss, even though he never wanted that. Are those actual discussions?Dan: You're not looking for the ultimate tag. Maybe you're coming up with something for an advertising campaign for the record or something to give some definition.People say, "Oh, that's a combination of such-and-such a band and…" Why? Because it just seems that people need some direction – they need something to hang their hat on: "What kind of band is that?" So, we get into these descriptions. I think it's rare that it just really works. Michael Jackson manufactured "King of Pop," and believe me, we were trying to talk him out of it.Carl: Why did you try to talk him out of it?Dan: Well, our feeling was that radio was going to just roll their eyes and say, "Screw you!" This was around the time of Dangerous, the late '80s and beginning of the '90s, and here was a guy that the tabloids were starting to talk about his skin color, they were starting to talk about the plastic surgery and the Elephant Man and the hyperbaric chamber – I guess those were probably the first four aspects of Michael starting to take hits in the media. A lot of people in the media were unhappy with Michael because he didn't talk to them and Frank DiLeo [Jackson's manager] essentially kept him away from the press, I think with good reason because Michael only had so much to say and he also was a very vulnerable guy. He wasn't media savvy in the way of sitting down with a journalist and really having that engaging conversation. He was just too much in a bubble. Frank kept him away, so with all the success that he had there were some media people who were very frustrated that they couldn't talk to him. So, when things started to crack and there were more odd entities in his life, it started to turn negative. Well, now, Michael starts to evolve the idea of "King of Pop" and he passes that along to his new manager, Sandy Gallin, who starts presenting this idea that we're going to call Michael "King of Pop." At Epic, we were saying, "Sandy, stop, please. This is going to hurt him and we could have people turn against us."Were we over-concerned? Probably. We were all trying to make our own lives simpler. In the meantime, if you look back on the whole thing, he did become "King of Pop." I guess in immortality he established it and maybe he was working on that while he was alive.Carl: Yeah, and Michael Jackson's an artist that you don't need to have out there promoting his new album because it's a news event in and of itself, but most artists aren't like that. And some artists will promote themselves relentlessly, which in the '80s and '90s was this dog and pony show where you'd have to go to all the radio stations and play their silly events and do the meet-and-greets. The Barenaked Ladies would suck it up and do it, hit every town, whereas other acts would just have complete disdain for this [remember the Primitive Radio Gods?]. Did you encounter any acts that were one way or the other and see how it affected their careers?Dan: Well, we encouraged artists to get involved, to do the stuff they needed to do to ingratiate themselves with the market. You didn't want an act to be out there begging, since that was a bad image. But a hardworking act that knew how to say thank you and was interesting to speak with was a huge plus. We would sit down and evaluate the pros and cons of an artist. We certainly worked with acts who weren't good interviews or weren't good live: "Let's make a great video and keep them off the road!" We think of Living Colour breaking from the "Cult of Personality" video on MTV. We actually shot a video before that [for "Middle Man"] which floundered, and the band went on the road and built enough momentum going that I was able to go back in and ask my boss if we could try doing another video. So, it was their live thing that actually saved us in terms of marketing, and the video exploded but the fact was it was the band playing New Haven and Albany and Poughkeepsie – that's why the band succeeded. So, it was really looking for that "thing." Some acts in the meet-and-greets would just overwhelm people with how good they were at it, so we'd do that in every city we could.Carl: What are some of these acts that were killer in meet-and-greets?Dan: Cyndi Lauper was phenomenal at it. Stevie Ray Vaughan, you had to be very careful because he had some issues. A great guy but he had issues and also was a bit shy. You have to respond to people by who they are and what their personalities are. So, somebody like Cyndi you could put in a lot of situations. I took her to the National Record Mart sales convention and she jumps on stage with k.d. lang. Cyndi didn't know kd – they met for like two seconds, and they jumped on stage and sang "I Fall To Pieces" together. They just tore the house down.Carl: What were the acts you had to protect because they weren't good live?Dan: It was usually the kind of one-and-done hit single acts. We had people like Will to Power, and it was like, "OK, it sounds good on the radio but where's this going to go as a career?"Carl: Yeah. I couldn't tell you what any of those band members look like, or their names. What do you do when you're a record company and you have this song that radio's going to absorb but there's no interest in the act itself?Dan: When you look at these big companies, it's all heat seeking for revenue, and revenue also is dealing with the cost. So, what is our cost to take this further? Michael Caplan signed The Allman Brothers in the latter stages of their career and released the song "Seven Turns," which was great. To get that song on the charts meant tremendous album sales because when people heard the song and liked it, they'd go out and buy the new Allman Brothers album. But then you could have one of these pop situations where you'd have a #1 single but you wouldn't sell any album product.So, a lot of times it was an argument in the company. Promotion didn't want to have mid-chart records because they felt vulnerable to being accused of not getting it further, so sometimes you're saying, "Don't worry, we're not going to yell at you for mid-charting but if you can get this song another 15 spots up the charts we'll probably sell another 200,000 records." A lot of the criticism of major labels is the "big thing," but that big thing is really hundreds of people and it is an amalgam. You hear complaints about the Grammys. Well, NARAS isn't one person, it's 18,000 people – everything from a country banjo player to metal bands and hip-hop kids. So, it's not one thing. It's easy to say NARAS sucks and they got the nominations wrong, but there's so many battles that go on internally for priority. Everyone wants their band to be the priority.As head of marketing, I used to tell product managers at Epic, "You're not going to go in and convince the promotion department that your band should be the number one priority. The only person that's going to tell promotion who the number one priority is is the head of the record label."What you have to do is establish your act underneath with the assistants, with the field staff. You can build something underneath it – interest and momentum – that then gives the promotion departmen
t the kind of confidence and encouragement to say, "Hey, maybe we can get this on the radio." Oftentimes, that's the way bands were built.If you look at Bruce Springsteen, that's another era but it took three albums to break him. I think early on they were very careful about how they approached radio because they didn't want to push him so hard that they couldn't come back. Sometimes you had to be really careful about these things, and acts need to happen as the momentum is right. That's a lot of what we were trying to do.Carl: Yeah, and it is very interesting. I'm just fascinated by the Will to Power, Exposé kind of thing where you can get the songs on the radio, people are going to like them, they're not objectionable, but nobody will ever know who is in the band and the record company probably doesn't care, since the songs are getting eaten up by radio. Dan: And at every record company, those slots to have your promotion department focus on something means they're not focusing on something else. Let's say it's an act that has gone Gold eight times beforehand. Well, the finance people have budgeted that album to sell X amount, and if you don't sell it you have underachieved, so there's a whole lot about protecting the stars. So if you have a star that's struggling on the radio, it backs up everything.Now, if you have a star go on the radio and it explodes further, it drags everything else forward. All of a sudden you're at radio and they're saying, "Can I get them for an interview?" And you're saying, "Have you heard my other two records?"Success really does breed success and momentum and you see a lot of cycles where a company gets really hot, and that's because their hits drag more hits, and it creates room for them because if you have an explosive hit you don't really have to work it. All you're doing is managing the time frame and figuring out the right moment to drop the next single and how else to dimensionalize the project.Carl: It's almost a cliché how the record companies ruin lives and make musicians sign bad contracts. How predatory are the labels really?Dan: It's like sports. If you're a rookie on the baseball team, you're going to sign a $400,000 contract. And then you hit .310 and they renegotiate your deal. That to me, ultimately, is how the record businesses work: You're paid on past success. So if you explode, all of a sudden everything you signed doesn't matter – you re-sign. It's a leverage business and I've been on both sides of it, working at the labels and as a manager, and if you have no leverage, you have no leverage. When you walk in the door and you know you have no leverage other than the music that you've made, then you're betting that you can create the leverage. So, yeah, it's a gamble for talent. Hey, artists are entrepreneurs and it takes courage to be an artist. What is a record company? A record company sells these little round things and they're a bank. We can all say they're the bad guys, but they are holding the cards – they're the casino. And the fact is, if you can push the right buttons within that system, they will make you a multi-millionaire and make your career. So, they are a gateway.Today, it's for fewer acts. There is a healthier potential as an indie artist today, but I think it's harder than ever to be an artist because you have to do more things. There's more traffic, there's more distractions, it's just very, very hard. And the major labels, for some people, are an opportunity. For others they could be a negative stop on the way. Some of the accounting practices and some of the traditional language in those contracts, it's institutional. Doesn't make it right, but it's in the system. We have much more informed young people in the business, and there are opportunities to be an indie artist, so it's just a matter of what you want. I think everybody has to first say, I'm going to be an independent artist. If that other opportunity comes up, then it's one to be evaluated. What's my risk, what's my reward if I do this?January 8, 2016.
Get Stereopticon on iTunes or Amazon.Carl Wiser was a disc jockey in Hartford, Connecticut when he founded Songfacts as a way to tell the stories behind the songs. You can also find him on
Related articles
