Recording - March 2015 - 52

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to New York and do audio post-production, which I
knew nothing about! I started out as low man on
the totem pole, and worked my way up to studio
manager at Howard Schwartz Recording. We
worked with the Who's Who of Madison Avenue
on a daily basis, mostly doing TV commercials. We
also did a lot of sports TV shows. I quickly learned
that doing audio post was much more fast-paced

"Go for the emotion, vibe, and performance, and don't worry about
perfection."
-Neil Young
and demanding than engineering records. I also
engineered a bunch of jingles, sometimes with 30
players in the room. I got to work with guys like
Paul Shaffer, Will Lee, Steve Gadd, Steve Cropper,
and just about every A-List session player in the
business. The New York jingle business is extremely
demanding. You don't get to spend hours "getting
sounds." You've basically got to be ready to go and
roll tape as soon the players take their seats and do
the rundown. The five and a half years I spent
working for Howie Schwartz gave me a deep understanding of how music works with picture. I used
music libraries every day. Back then, they were on
1/4" tape and CDs. And virtually all of the music in
those libraries was composed and charted, then
played by A-List session players, not indie
musicians like it is today. Libraries sounded very
homogenous and "canned" back then.
Why did you start TAXI?
I moved to Los Angeles in 1988 to become General
Manager of LA Studios, the hot audio post house
on the West Coast. A year and a half later, I became
General Manager of Red Car, a company that shot
and edited big TV commercials and music videos. I
left there when I had the idea to start TAXI in late
1991. I had gotten pretty far away from the music
side of things and missed it. Home studios as we
know them today didn't exist, but Alesis had just
come out with the ADAT, and I knew that technology would make it affordable for indie musicians to
record what had been living in their hearts and
heads, but didn't make it to tape because the cost of
working in pro studios was out of reach. Little did I
know that everything I learned along the way
would make me uniquely qualified to start TAXI.
I had twenty-two thousand bucks in the bank, and
started TAXI out of a small, one-bedroom apartment. I'd gone through a divorce several years
before, and was paying alimony, child support, and
going to New York every other weekend to see my
kids. I met the woman who became my second
wife, and we got married right after I started TAXI
in 1992. I burned through my savings very quickly
and my wife was going to grad school, so we had no
52

income. We learned to live very frugally. We'd buy
huge bags of beans and rice at Costco, and slice up
hot dogs to top off the steaming pile of carbs and
protein. Our running joke was "Red beans or black
beans tonight?" It was character building, and I still
relate to "starving artists" more than most people
realize. Being broke is horrible, and it was demoralizing to rip eviction notices off the door every
month before my wife got home.
What mistakes did you make that might be good
lessons for the musicians reading this?
I don't think we have enough space to list them
all! But the biggest mistake is also the most common one I see musicians making today: Just
because you have something you think is great-
and it may be great-it doesn't mean people will
beat a path to your door. "Build it and they will
come," is a fantasy! You need to know what
you've got, who needs it, and how to let them
know you've got it. That's why I started reading
marketing books like crazy in 1993!
The other big mistake I made was underestimating how hard I'd have to work. I worked at least
18 hours a day for the first few years, and I still
work at least 60 hours a week 23 years later. If
you think success is going to just drop into your
lap because you deserve it, keep your day gig.
Do you think most of your members use all that
great stuff TAXI gives them - the Road Rally, TAXI
TV, the Forum, all the info on your website?
No, most don't, but those who do are inevitably
the most successful members!
Why do you think more people don't take advantage of all that education?
I think they believe that you're either talented or
you're not. And if you're not, then you're just
out of luck. I think it's kind of like golf. You can
have a great natural swing, but that won't make
you into Tiger Woods. Even Tiger Woods had to
learn more about the mechanics of a great golf
swing, and practice his swing a hundred thousand times until he was able to incorporate
those things.
The same is true for songwriters, artists, and
composers. They might be born with some talent, but learning more about their craft and
building on that talent is what takes them from
being good to great! Think about it-if you're on
the "buying" end of the music business, are you
looking for "good," or are you looking for something great? And they're usually looking for
something specific that fills a specific need.
So when you guys hear something that's pretty
good, but not quite great, why doesn't TAXI send it
to the A&R person or music supervisor and let them
contact the artist or songwriter and tell them how
to fix it?
That would be great, but the music supes are
already working at breakneck speed and don't

have the time to give feedback to every musician
whose song they hear. Especially music supervisors working on weekly TV shows. They're
hyper focused on finding something that's great
and works perfectly with a particular scene.
They're not interested in giving feedback and
waiting for those suggestions to be
incorporated. If you're shopping for a painting
for your bedroom wall and you see something
that's really close at Pottery Barn, but there's
another painting that really nails it a Crate and
Barrel, which one are you going to buy? With so
much music available now, the people who need
it just keep listening to more until they find
something awesome that fits what they need.
Do you think record labels are more open to finding
something new and different?
Yeah, but it can't be so different that it doesn't
fit a radio format. My advice is to take what's
working at radio and on the charts, and push
the envelope a bit. Try to be what's next, but not
so far out there that listeners change stations.
Florida Georgia Line combined Country with a
Hip-Hop beat to great success. But they wouldn't have been able to do that until the audience
listening to Country radio was the right age that
they also grew up hearing Hip-Hop. You've got
to introduce the next new thing at a time when
the audience is ready for it. Like so many things
in life; timing is everything.
Do people even want to be signed to record labels
any more?
It's cool to say that you wouldn't sign with a
major label, but I don't know many artists who'd
turn down a major label deal. I think a lot of
that "I don't want a record deal" stuff is false
bravado. It blows my mind that we don't see a
lot of 20-somethings joining TAXI or submitting
their music to the listings we get from record
labels... and really great record labels at that!
They're missing hundreds of solid opportunities
a year from A&R people who are hungrier to
find new artists than I've seen them in a very
long time. Popular thinking is that you don't
need a label because you can do it all yourself
with social media.
But it's nearly impossible to be a star at the Taylor Swift level without the big guns behind you.
Her label-Big Machine-is technically independent, but it's got Universal behind it. And
you need that bankroll, marketing expertise, and
radio promo to break big. There are a few exceptions, but comparatively very few. You can't
make significant money from music "sales" any
more, so you need to get tons of major market
radio airplay to build a huge audience and make
big bucks on touring and merch sales. Social
media and the Internet can certainly help, but
very few acts are flying around in private jets
because of Facebook and Twitter. In the end, all
the Facebook friends and Twitter followers on
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