Recording - April 2015 - 51

APRIL 2015
Keynote Interview TAXI Road Rally 2014: Part One

Maureen Crowe: Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient
Interviewed by Michael Laskow
Michael Laskow's introduction: This year's Lifetime
Achievement recipient is both tough and loving.
She is hard-working, she's straight-talking, and
she's a true champion of great music and the people who make it. You won't see her wearing kid
gloves, and she won't sugarcoat the message, but
she'll always give it to you straight up with no BS.
If you look up "music supervisor" in the dictionary,
Maureen Crowe's photo will probably be there. She
redefined the entire scope of what music supervisors could do with her groundbreaking work on
the mega-hit movie The Bodyguard. She made us
laugh with Wayne's World; she scared us half to
death and made us gasp for air with The Perfect
Storm; she made Roxie Hart unforgettable in
Chicago; and she's been doing groundbreaking
music supervision on every single project she's
touched for three decades. But maybe her biggest
accomplishment is being the co-founder and president of the Guild of Music Supervisors for five
years. Let's hear a little bit of her work.
[Video plays]
Ladies and gentleman, it is my incredible pleasure
to introduce to you TAXI's Lifetime Achievement
Award recipient for 2014, Miss Maureen Crowe.
[applause]
MC: Thank you.... I am very pleased and humbled by it.
Michael Laskow presents Maureen Crowe with her well deserved Lifetime Achievement Award at TAXI's Road Rally.

What an incredible body of work, and you're still
doing it three decades later. You must have been,
what, four or five when you started?
Really. I was a protégé, that's it. How many people in the room remember Fame? [most hands
go up] That's great. It was a really wonderful
experience. I started in doing theater when I
was growing up, so when I interviewed for the
job, I said, "Well, yeah, but I can't transpose
music or anything like that." [They said,] "Oh
no, that's not the job." And after a while I was
able to start finding the music and learning
about all the wonderful songwriters that were
out there that could make the story shine and

touch people's hearts. So thank you all for being
part of that journey.
So if I remember correctly, when you started... I
had dinner with Maureen like a year ago, and I just
kept saying, "Damn, I wish I had this on tape."
Everything coming out of her mouth was
absolutely amazing, and I wanted to share it will
all of you guys, so that's why I got her here this
year. When you started out doing this, music supervision was a credit maybe, but it really wasn't a
defined art or science or job description, right?
Yeah. There was just the head of music and tele-

vision and film, and they usually just took care
of the score. It was at a time where there were
still kind of standing orchestras, and you could
actually call in an orchestra or small group or
something before home studios took over. I like
to think that it actually started back in the '60s
with Easy Rider. It was really the stories that
were being told that reflected people's lives, and
contemporary music was part of their lives, and
was a storytelling tool. So there was Easy Rider,
there was The Big Chill, all these different things.
Filmmakers really started using [music].
Continued on page 52
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