Daniel Glass-Part 4

PART IV

RECORDING ARTIST AND RECORD PRODUCER

As both a session player and recording artist in his own right, Daniel Glass appears on no less than 30 records to date, including seven as the drummer of Royal Crown Revue. Glass has recorded for major and independent record labels alike, including Warner Brothers, Surfdog, Time Bomb/SONY, and East-West.

Producing the most recent disc of Royal Crown Revue, Glass has been at the helm for critically acclaimed records by numerous artists. The steady succession of production duties includes his own disc, entitled Something Colorful, as leader of The Daniel Glass Trio. Vibraphonist Eldad Tarmu’s Exotic Tales disc also features Glass as producer and drummer. Both discs are available on Glass’ own VeryTall Music label.

Click the above graphic link to visit www.danielglass.com

--------------------------------- September 2006 ---------------------------------

Q: As a recording artist, whether as part of Royal Crown Revue or as a solo artist, you’ve been on Warner Brothers, a major label. You’ve also been on independent labels as well in addition to running your own record company, VeryTall Records. What’s the difference in experience between all three of them?

DG: I really miss the days of Warner Brothers when we were on the label. There was a certain amount of breathing room; time to get shit going. In those days, we were lucky because we had Ted Templeman, a major big wig there who was, basically, our A&R guy. We had a lot of opportunity to do stuff that maybe other bands didn’t. Being on a major label, there’s a certain amount of security, flexibility, and moxie that you have in order to get done what you want to do; that’s for sure. Whether you’re going to make any money from your album sales, we all know that’s highly doubtful. Nowadays, you may be able to make more money from your album sales [self-releasing], but you don’t really have anybody out there promoting, pushing, or getting you to mass media on a larger scale. It’s much more difficult to accomplish that end of things as an independent artist. With the playing opportunities limited because of lack of venues, with people and their time being split between so many possible activities that they could be doing, and with the advent of electronic music, which is what people are seeing in clubs these days, not live music, it’s difficult for an independent artist. That’s the hard part about being an independent artist: How do you take care of all the rest of it, running your business? For somebody like me, it’s frustrating because I pretty much have to do everything myself until I can get to a financial level where I might be able to hire a publicist.

Q: That’s the primary difference between all three of them?

DG: Yes. The benefit of a major label is two-fold. One, a big, fat advance which you should take and run with, because that’s probably all you’re ever going to get unless you sell a million records. Even then, in the modern environment, selling a million records isn’t any guarantee that you’ve recouped because it took so much money for your product to rise above the noise. Obviously, a lot of money was probably spent to get it there. Number two is just having the ability to push you out there, promote your music and, hopefully, make some smart decisions while you have that power. For most people, it’s a fairly quick ride.

Q: Do you find that it is a lie or the truth when you hear major labels say that any artist has to sell half a million units to recoup their costs? They always say that if the artist sells less than that amount, it’s a bit of a loss.

DG: It’s a bit of a loss because those businesses are set up for the people at the top to make all the money. A lot of the money is spent on lavish lifestyles. Fancy lunches. Craft services. Limousines. Whatever.

Q: Not promotion or advertising?

DG: Right. Not promotion or advertising. I always remember that if some Warner Brothers person was going to come see us, the cost of them flying out, the cost of them being picked up by Music Express, the cost of their hotel, their daily expense allowance, by the time all of it is taken care of, that’s another several hundred dollars – minimum. It’s all put on the back of the artist. There’s really no other business that works that way in my understanding. The individual people, the artists, have to pay back the debts of the entire business. It’s a strange way to operate.

Q: In the corporate structure of a record company, why do you think it is that the artist has to recoup all the expenses, but the executives, or even a project coordinator, doesn’t?

DG: Because artists are shitty business people. That’s what it comes down to in essence. They’ve always been shitty business people because they’re focusing on their art. A lot of the time their personalities are geared towards coming up with something that’s outside the box. Therefore, they don’t have skills that are inside the box, which is why a lot of artists come away from their experience or go through life without making any money. They’re poor business people; their brains just don’t work that way; or that’s not what they put their time and energy into doing. I think that the rise of the record business is, essentially, a whole class of individuals who take advantage of that fact.

In the earlier days, they were individuals who were also producers and A&R people and salesmen and marketing. I look at all these old independent Rhythm & Blues labels which set up the models. You know, Atlantic, Mercury, and Warner Brothers started back then. Some of the greatest labels of today got their start in the Rhythm & Blues business. Suffice to say that what made the record business cool back then, and what makes smaller labels cool now, is that you have people that love music and are also in charge of the business.

Today, in the major label world, some people who are in charge of the business have absolutely no connection to music at all. They’re hired because of their business skills and because they sell millions of units to appease the stock holders. The driving force behind the major labels has very little to do with artistic anything. The stakes are so high now that they’re not thinking about anything other than the bottom line.

Q: The quick sell.

DG: Yes. The old days weren’t necessarily any better in the record business; but the chains of command were small enough that you could still have people that were visionaries and businessmen who were able to take risks. Atlantic Records is the perfect example.

Q: The Ertegun brothers.

DG: Yeah. The Erteguns, Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, who was their engineer, and Jesse Stone who was their black A&R guy who recruited a lot of those great acts. He wrote a lot of their great songs and produced a lot of those records, even though he doesn’t get much credit. In a way, they were kind of the original Motown. They saw Rhythm & Blues music as, “Yes, this is black music; but it’s also great music; and we don’t have to think about it as let’s-record-this-music-and-sell-it-to-the-black-demographic-that-will-buy-it.” They were thinking, “How can we make it into great pop music?” They saw how, throughout the course of the history of music, you’d have a great band like Count Basie who, essentially, created the whole riff oriented blues thing for big band. Within ten seconds, all of the white bands were doing exactly the same thing, making more money, and having better record sales because they were white. The same thing has happened time and time again. For example, in the 1950s, Lavern Baker had a song called “Tweedlee Dee.” It was on Atlantic Records. One of the major labels of the day, I don’t know if it was Decca or RCA Victor, put out the same record with the same string arrangement by an artist named Georgia Gibbs. No one has heard of her today; but she was a famous, former big band singer who was trying to have a hit in the 1950s. The label put out this record by her which outsold the Lavern Baker record. Basically, they put it to bed. My point is that Atlantic was able to say, “Look, we wanna make the productions of these records so strong that the white label can’t do more upscale productions of these songs or turn them from R&B into Pop tracks. We’re just gonna make it a pop track right from the beginning.” Suddenly, black music became just as quality or just as geared towards every audience. Traditionally, Pop meant ‘white’ and R&B meant ‘black.’ Atlantic was a label that was able to blur those lines. They did it with Ray Charles, Ben E. King, and The Drifters. All of that music was their way of putting out very high quality pop music; but it was also R&B that came from a Gospel background. It’s an example of a great label where the guys were visionaries.

Q: What do you think is necessary to bring this maverick mindset, this innovative approach at the vanguard of forward thinking, back into the recording industry?

DG: I think it exists in the recording industry. You still have small labels. They just get bought up by the majors fairly quickly. If anybody comes upon anything interesting, new, or cool on a small label, that label gets snatched up with an offer they can’t refuse. Whereas back in the old days, you had so many labels; that kind of thing didn’t happen as often. Nowadays, just like any of the other mega industries, if they see anything that will compete with them or will take away their market share, they’ll simply just buy it and either stuff it or let it thrive under their umbrella.

Q: You have your own label, VeryTall, on which you’ve released two critically acclaimed discs. One is under your own name, Daniel Glass Trio – Something Colorful. There’s also Exotic Tales by the Eldad Tarmu Quartet. You played drums and produced both of those discs. What’s it like to run your own record label and what do you foresee as being the future of it?

DG: It’s very difficult, most importantly, because I’m doing so many other things. The idea behind the label was to have another arm in which to promote all the various things that I was doing, something that would finance recording and, theoretically, bring in some profit as well. The reality of it was that without a team to help run the business part of it, it’s just too much work.

Q: You haven’t given up on the endeavor?

DG: No; but I want to get some of these other things together that will allow for the sales of the records, to put money towards making more records. I have some ideas of new people with whom I want to work, a new project that I want to put together in that realm. I honestly would love to have a Royal Crown band that is the Daniel Glass Band, but doing more Jazz oriented music; a vital band that could tour and play festivals.

Q: While signed to Warner Brothers as part of Royal Crown Revue, you worked with the producer, Ted Templeman. What’s it like to work with a big time producer? Do most of them on that level really know their job?

DG: Ted knew what he was talking about. At first, I was a little suspicious; but he totally convinced me the first day that we sat down in his office. He pulled out an obscure, ‘50s west coast Jazz record that he put on the turntable in his office. Then he asked, “What do you guys think about doing this tune?” We were all just, like, “Holy shit; this is our dude right here.” ‘Cause our thinking was, “Van Halen? The Doobie Brothers? What does this guy know about what we’re doing?” Plenty, it turns out.

So, I think that a great producer is very aware of music in general; and he listens to a lot of music and has a history. In a way, working with Ted was pretty incredible because we were still able to get in on the very tail-end of that…..(pause)……

Q: That Lenny Waronker era?

DG: Um-hmm. That master-apprentice kind of thing. Ted was part of a long line of a music tradition with a lot of tremendous artists, from Van Morrison to Bette Midler to Little Feat. Cheap Trick. Aerosmith. All the Doobie Brothers albums and the first five Van Halen records. It’s pretty intense.

Q: Is there a difference between a big time producer such as Ted and an independent producer who might be equally talented?

DG: The biggest difference is that the big-time producer has the big-time budget to take their time to come up with exactly the right thing. “Let’s go in this direction” or “Nah, that didn’t work, let’s try this direction.” Of course, it can be a quagmire. With too much time and money on your hands, you can quickly ruin a record. Some of the best records were done on a budget. The first Black Sabbath album was recorded in, like, two days. The first Police album was recorded for four grand. Etcetera. So, there are pluses and minuses; but if you have a great producer and they have a large budget and lots of time to work on things, then you don’t have certain pressures. With Ted, we were able to take our time making those records. They’re fantastic records. We also had tremendous engineers. We got to work with Lee Hirschberg who was Sinatra’s engineer, pre-two track machines all the way until Duets. [ed. Note: Duets is a latter day Sinatra record from 1993]. Talk about a guy who knew how to record a big band.

Q: Right.

DG: Anyway, we got to use some incredible studios. I had some really great ideas on a few things; so we were able to go and rent a couple thousand dollars worth of exotic percussion from Emil Richards.

Q: His percussion warehouse on Santa Monica Blvd. in East L.A.?

DG: Yeah. Anything you could imagine, they would make it happen. It was really the glory days of recording. We were so lucky to be able to make those two records. It was just incredible. I only wish that we had been able to capitalize on our Warner Brothers years a little more because we’d probably have much more of a career happening now.

Q: Why do you think that you didn’t capitalize on them more?

DG: A variety of reasons. There were personal issues in the band, for sure, that really detracted from what was happening. The label blew it quite a bit. They had just fired Mo [Ostin] and Lenny [Waronker] right when we got there. The label went through something like three or four new presidents the whole time we were there. They kept getting fired and golden-parachuting out to even bigger jobs; not getting us; not getting behind us. By the time they really got behind us, the whole swing thing had passed us by even though we were really the ones who started it. Things like Swingers (motion picture), our label wouldn’t let us be a part of it. A huge mistake.

Q: Why?

DG: At the time, it was Jon Favreau’s hundred thousand dollar home movie. We were just about to release our first Warner record; and they wanted to license three songs for a thousand bucks apiece. Warner Brothers wasn’t about to do it. I don’t want to point fingers, either. It’s just that things happen. Things have to come together to get a hit or whatever. It’s the conflagration of disparate elements all coming together; and the stars just weren’t aligned for that particular project during that period no matter what.

The good news is that we were a working band for five or six years before Warner Brothers. We’ve been working for six or seven years after that period, now. We’re still out here doing our thing. I still have a platform to do my thing, to get my drum stuff up and running. It’s why I don’t really care to look back. That era was what it was. Life is different nowadays. There’s no point in wishing for it to come back because it’s never going to come back. To me, it was an opportunity to springboard into what I’m doing now, to educate people.

I continue to play classic American music with just about every performer that does this kind of music in Los Angeles and elsewhere. I’ve been hired by one of the premiere swing bands in Japan. They’re called the Travellers; and I produced their album. I also toured Japan with them for three weeks.

Q: As a record producer, you’ve produced Jazz records. You just mentioned having worked with The Travellers, who are somewhat eclectic. How is the approach different from one context to the other when you’re producing records?

DG: I think you have to be very in tune with the artist, what their music is like, and where they’re going with it. I think that’s where it helps for a producer to have a very strong basis for having listened and played a lot of music; because then you can bring a whole arsenal of ideas. Even though it’s one particular style, you may bring a lot more to it.

--- Greg Debonne