Almost Famous: Why Record Labels Suck

this is cameron crowe you guys know famous director and writer he did fast times at ridgemont high vanilla sky almost famous singles jerry maguire elizabethtown say anything and this is carmen keegan's harvey carmen has been on my channel before in fact she's saying on one of my videos the song wild horses by the rolling stones here it is [Applause] [Music] [Applause] this is carmen and cameron crowe together you're probably thinking why are carmen and cameron crow together back in 2005 i signed a band a four-piece band from columbia south carolina really orangeburg south carolina to a production deal it's the only band out of the 25 years i worked as a music producer that i signed to a production deal this is a letter that i got from cameron crowe that i'll tell you about here in a minute back in 2005 i got approached by a guitarist named brian brian whitman and he wrote to me about his band i9 that carmen was the singer of and said they'd really like for me to check out their music and i didn't do anything about it i didn't even listen to it my assistant ken listened to and he said this is really good you should check it out so a couple months went by every time ken would say to me you should really check out i-9 i think you're going to like it so finally brian said listen myself brian and they're cellist in the band that a cellist his name was brian as well brian gibson said they were coming to town and they wanted to see if they could have lunch with me take me out to lunch and i and ken said you need to listen to this i said all right play it so he plays i said wow this is amazing who is this he goes this is the band i've been telling you about for the last three months so the guys come here to atlanta and meet me at the studio i was working at the time and we went out to lunch and they said we're playing a gig at eddie satick eddie's attic is a club in decatur georgia it's not far from here not just outside atlanta we want you to come to it so it's like okay so i go to the saying it's a battle of the bands i get there just before they're ready to go on i'm standing there and all of a sudden they come out four piece band acoustic guitar cello bass and a female vocalist with shiny blonde hair and they start their first song and all of a sudden i'm thinking wow this is unbelievable this singer was so charismatic and had one of the best voices i'd ever heard blew me away so they end up winning this battle of the bands and the band comes out to meet with me i'd met the two brians but i meet carmen for the first time and i said you guys were amazing blew my mind and they told me that they're planning on moving to atlanta in the next few weeks so they move here and i get together with them we start talking and i said i'd really love to record you i thought about it and i said um i want to sign you to a production deal now i've never signed any ben they're the only band ever in 25 years that i signed to a production deal they didn't have any resources or anything to make a record and i thought i really believe in this this is incredible i want to make a record with these guys and it's going to take some work they have to find a drummer we got to do pre-production and maybe six months down the road we'll make a record whenever they're ready so we start doing that over the course of probably about two three months or so and in the meantime i start working on a record with tree anastasia from fish and we're here in atlanta when i'm working with trey i said oh we should get carmen to come sing some backup vocals i said that to myself and i brought her into the studio when trey wasn't there and carmen sang on one son and trey came in the next day and was blown away he said who is this this is unbelievable so i had carmen come up to the studio and funny thing is that the night before the band was playing again at eddie's attic and i said here's 20 bucks have shalom the sound guy who was actually the sound guy originally for jellyfish he was the sound guy at the club haven't recorded your set so i can hear it he always did great board tapes so carmen comes up to the studio to meet trey and hands me the cd here's a cd from last night's gig and then trey starts talking to carmen he says what is you're in a band she's like yeah she's what do you sound like and so i said well let's check out the uh let's check out the disc so i play it and i listen to a second of it and traces did you write this you said yeah we wrote this as a band anyways the next day i was going to new york city trey was playing at carnegie hall and i had some meetings set up with some record label presidents actually one of them was this guy avery lipman who's the president of universal records and couple other labels but high up people presidents of labels right so i go there and i'm meeting with avery's great guy and i'd done some work for for i'd had bands signed to universal records recently one's at johnny diamond if you've watched that video about johnny that johnny had found that it signed a universal and so i'm meeting there with avery and he says to me is there anything new that you're working on i said i actually signed a ban to a production deal that i'm i haven't gotten in the studio with he says really what do they sound like i said they're kind of like a i don't know like a female led zeppelin or something like that the singer is amazing rock singer but it's got these folk elements to it rock elements uh really nothing like you've heard he goes do you have anything to play i said well i got this board tape from that they gave me last night well let's play it now i'd only listen to a couple seconds of it and i'm thinking like should i play this for the guy i was like yeah i'll play it so the thing comes on and it starts playing this one song called ickiswish check it out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] he listens to this to the first right through the bridge of it he said this is unbelievable let me hear another song skip to the next science this is amazing i want to see this band it's like okay so i go to my next meeting and it was with the president of columbia records and i was like he said what are you working i said i got this band i'm in town for trey i've got this band i-9 that's uh assigned to a production deal i just played it for avery lipman he's coming down to to atlanta to see him play oh my god let me hear this play it for him and then i went to another meeting i forget what it was another label president this i probably it was about four different label presidents over the course of two days i go back home the next week at my place that i was living i was living in a loft at the time uh another part of town and it was big you know one room loft with a big echoey sound and start having these a r guys showing up by that by the next week everyone in the music industry had heard about this band and heard this this live board tape right and probably the funniest thing that happened is i came home from somewhere and i saw i had the answering machine message and i listened and i hear uh rick yeah it's clive davis i really love the i-9 thing i'm thinking i-9 clive davis says he's calling me at home i i mean i've not gone in the studio with the band yet all i've done is pre-production for a few months with him so they start pulling up to to my place at the time and i set the band up in a semi-circle and i forget who who came first some some head of a r for some label limos were pulling up literally outside they come into my place and the band sang and they just blew him away then we would go and eat lunch come back it'd be that was at noon and then at four another limo would pull up and be another person from a label and there were about seven labels that came over two-day period it wasn't just labels it was managers uh the manager for motley crew alan kovac came down and gary gersh who is the guy that signed nirvana to geffen back in the 90s he was came down to meet the band as well then the next thing that happened is uh they wanted to see the band live up in new york they wanted to fly him up there so the next week we go up to new york and they start playing at these uh different record labels they went into columbia records and played for the president of columbia record and the whole staff maybe 30 people all the a r people for for that worked at sony you know columbia records epic records all those things and the band never played a bad set over the course of the of a few weeks they played about 25 showcases in the highest pressure situations with everybody from clive davis to donnie einer from sony to you name it all the heads of every label with under the most highest pressure gigs and they killed it every time so in the meantime i'm going out to to la and i'm working with trey and one morning i'm at bob's big boy eating breakfast before i go into the studio and i get this call rick it's cameron crow i was like i mean how many camera crows are there i was like uh what's up cameron he's like where are you sound like you're out someplace i said i met bob's big boy over in burbank he says you're kidding me i go i go there all the time cool the reason i'm calling you is because i got the i9 live tape and i said okay he said it's one of the best things i've ever heard it's one of the best live gigs i've ever heard and i have a new movie i'm doing called elizabeth town and i want them to do the closing credits song now the band's not signed anything just signed to my production company is this something you'd be interested in i said absolutely so cameron said well i don't have the song finished yet when we get it done we'll send it to you guys so you can rehearse it and then we'll figure out about the recording of it i said okay cool in the meantime i gave him carmen's phone number he really wanted to talk to her so they start talking and cameron said carmen i want to send you something she's okay so cameron sends these two boxes of lps to carmen to listen to these are his favorite lp's well they happen to be the lps that his sister gave to him now if you know the movie almost famous that's about cameron crowe that's he became a writer for rolling stone magazine when he was 15. these are the same records that they talk about in the movie this song explains why i'm leaving home to become a stewardess we can't talk we have to listen to rock music so in the meantime i'm working on these projects and and cameron calls me and says okay i got the song that i'm going to send to you and he was married to nancy wilson from heart at the time he says nancy's going to send it to you and we need it by tomorrow we're going to mix it in la tomorrow now we haven't even recorded it yet okay this is four o'clock in the afternoon we need you to fly to la tomorrow for the mixing session we're gonna have this guy jack joseph puig mix it nancy's gonna meet you there i was like okay so they send me the song a song called it's the same in any language that cameron wrote the lyrics and nancy wrote the music too so i get it and i said all right so i called the man i said listen we need to book time in a studio and we have a session at 7 p.m so we went to this place tree sound to record the song in the meantime we're figuring out how to play it play for the band they're like okay we got it and we record the song next day i get on a plane i fly to la i meet nancy wilson at the studios at ocean way and i meet jack joseph puig who's the engineer and it was an honor i love hart nancy wilson is i mean just amazing right so we start talking we're there for the whole session now cameron never came to the session he couldn't make it down so that happens the song's gonna go in the movie in the meantime the band gets offers from about seven different label labels massive record offers i said to them you guys i mean they're signed them to my production company but i'm not going to make decisions for who they should sign with they need to make the decisions uh because i don't want to be the guy like oh well you made me sign with this label and and uh if it doesn't work out then i'm the guy that you know that's the blame for it i didn't want to be responsible for that so i said you need to met with all these people you need to decide who they should work with so they decided to go with rca records this is where it started to go really uh sideways as they say and that's clive davis and the anr guy that's the guy that actually signed the ban to the deal he's the guy that you interface with every day he last i heard was out of the music business and he had bought a couple laundromats in la that's what he was doing so we go to la to to start recording this and they made me work with this engineer and we were working at the studio in la the village recorder well john mayer had a room upstairs at the village recorder and john was uh his manager was matt started managing the band his manager at the time he's not with him anymore and john came down to meet the band and i knew john from here from atlanta because john used to play eddie's attic where the band got signed from john used to play just like anybody else he'd play a set of his own original music back in 99 2000 before he got a record deal i have i start recording some of these songs and i had some demos and and i was doing some editing on some stuff the band had left and and i was going through listening some tracks and john came down to the studio and and he said can i hear something it was just me and john there and i said yeah let me play so i played this song [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] me [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so john's listening to it and he's like that's amazing wow the singer is incredible i mean this is really great and i said well they're coming back so they came back john met the band and was really really cool then this is where everything started going south the a r guy decided that he was going to take control of the project and push me out it started with him saying you know the song i'm alive yeah well here i want you to check out my four track demo of it this is how i think the song should go he's playing it for me in the band i'm like the band's all looking at each other what and it was horrible he can't even play anything he couldn't play the song right and he actually made up his own arrangement for it and he started to to tell the band that this is his vision for the song in addition he's like i'm gonna fly josh freeze out to play drums on the demo you're going to have josh freeze jeff freeze who plays in a perfect circle in the top la session drummer he's going to fly to atlanta to play drums on the demo so you can imagine where this is going from here and slowly but surely this guy started to make decisions and make it impossible for the band to do anything artistically that they wanted to do and make it impossible for me to be part of the project so he just muscled his way in using his position as the anr guy and then essentially forcing them to do things because they were signed and they had no choice at this point this is how the record business used to be right they signed this record deal they have all this excitement everything but one person that's in control convinces the label that this is their vision for this they don't care about the band and then they force the band to do that and if they don't they'll either just shelve the record not put it out and the band is stuck and they can't do anything it's over because i told them when you sign a record deal that's the beginning of the end there's two things that can happen either you have success you get to make more records or more more likely the record flops and you get dropped and that's it so getting signed is really the beginning of the end there was no internet at the time well there was internet but there was no youtube or anything where you could build a following organically and actually make a name for yourself as an independent artist i mean if they came out today no problem no problem so this ended up becoming a complete disaster within probably two months i was off the project and they started putting them with all these songwriters and writing these horrendous songs a band wanted no part of it but they had no choice they literally had no choice in this so after about a year of the label spending all this money bringing in all these songwriters and ruining everything about the band forcing them to do all this stuff that they didn't want to do they ended up not even playing on the record i don't think or maybe one of them did carmen sang on it she hated the stuff the record got released or a couple songs got released then the anr guy got fired the band got dropped then they went on to do other things in fact the cellist brian gibson went on to play with chris cornell [Music] so all this happened 15 years ago after the band broke up everyone went their own ways but last fall brian whitman the guitar player called me up and said you know what we've been writing some songs together and we're going to do some recording i said really i said yeah so they finished a record and they sent it to me and they're calling themselves heavy ways the king which happened to be the title of the record that they hated from back then that was on rca or j records or whatever it was let me play a little bit the sky here's another one [Music] i can feel the heat in my hands and it's burning [Music] burning by the way this note says this is from cameron before they even did elizabethtown dear rick and all you hallowed eye niners here's my script hope you like it 100th as much as i love your music very best cameron cameron was really the one that got this all started he had the vision he heard that initial live board tape and knew there was something important there but all it takes is for one record label to screw everything up let's hope this is a story of redemption though maybe i-9 or heavyweights the king becomes something in 2020. that's all for now please subscribe here to my everything music youtube channel if you're interested in the biato book go to my website at www.rickbeater.com the new biato book 4.0 is out check it out check out the new biato ear training program if you go to beautiertraining.com watch the introduction video if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the biato club thank you so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato

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Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, almost famous, cameron crowe, cameron crowe movies, I Nine, John Mayer, Chris Cornell, Trey Anastasio, music business, music business 101, record deals explained, Story tel, success and failure, success and failure motivation, music documentary 2020, Cameron Crowe, cameron crowe nancy wilson, Clive Davis, Film Director, Youtuber reacts

Id: 6oWsgTAXc8U

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020