Why I Never Talk About My Record Label That Failed

this is something i've never spoken about on my channel before but i had a record label called 10 star records that started back in 2007 and my partner in its name was johnny diamond i first met johnny in 2003 he sent me a band called the working title sent me a record and asked me if i was interested in working with them and i listened to this song it was one song that was 12 minutes long but it was really four different songs put together in a mashup and i said uh i called him back and i said you know there's a song in the middle of these songs that is really good maybe two songs even but this is almost like a medley and he and i said um yeah i'd like to work with them so johnny comes to town with a band they were from charleston and johnny comes uh comes to atlanta and we start working on the project together and i meet him and he's a young kid 19 years old very smart kid really good taste in music so we do this project together we did a five song demo and the band ends up getting signed to universal records so the next project he calls me about is a kid named owen beverly owen had some demos that johnny played for me and they were amazing so he came in and he brought a guy with him who played bass and guitar and his name was les hall who you've seen on this channel many times [Music] let me play a couple little bits from owen's ep entitled drunk lover [Music] so once owen's record was done i started getting calls from so many people other bands and johnny started saying oh this band you should work with this man you should work with there's a band called the falls lost and in that band the singer gill and his brother lance gill played guitar and lance played drums but there's a bass player named eric bass eric is now the bass player and shine down but he was the bass player in that band but because of the owen record so many people reached out to me because they love the record and but johnny said you should really work with this band jump little children if you heard of him so yeah of course i i've heard of them a great band so johnny hooked me up with the singer jay and i remember that jay said the only thing wrong with the owen beverly ep is that it only had six songs on it so owen's record started getting all these labels after him there's another guy i worked with named charlie mars same thing happening and i had jump come in and we did the record together and that was the story that i told about meeting elton john elton was a massive fan of jump little children so i did that record in 2004 so this is between 2003 and 2004 and then my dad passed away during that time period while i was finishing that record and over the course of the next couple years it was banned after band after band that johnny brought in eventually leading to bands like need to breathe who was a huge fan of jump little children of owen beverly of charlie mars and i ended up doing their uh second third and fourth records all of which uh were for atlantic records and i think they're all gold records if i'm not mistaken in 2007 johnny came to me he had moved to atlanta and he came to me and says um we should start a label together i said okay uh who are we gonna sign johnny he says well i got a couple bands okay the first band was out of memphis and they were called street side symphony and the second band was called crowfield also from charleston and that had two members the lead singer tyler meacham who wrote the songs and the piano player whose name was joe giant those two guys came in johnny had him come in and they played me some songs here in the control room johnny was there and i heard the songs they didn't have a band or anything but they had great songs tyler was wrote all the songs and he was an incredibly good singer so i said yeah let's let's do this now i had never signed a band to anything i really had only done one production deal ever which was this band i9 which i've talked about before on my channel so we decide to make these two records and the idea is i'll make the records i'm going to find session guys to play for the crowfield record and out of those session guys you've seen some of the people on my channel like les hall who played on the record les played oregon he played guitar my very dear friend dave rolfe played guitar on it dave honorado who you see on here all the time with me and rhett he played guitar solos on a couple of the songs the bass player from jumping little children johnny gray and the drummer wren vincent great great studio drummer friend of mine let me play a couple clips from each band i'm just going to play a little small excerpt this first is from street side symphony this song is called sun downer temptation the funny thing about street side symphony is we finished the record we printed it and then the band broke up and we never released it i think maybe after this video comes out i'll put the record up on spotify even though it's uh what 13 years old 2007. next let me play you a couple crowfield tracks [Applause] [Music] [Music] come on see how [Music] what makes you think you're sad the next song is called cardinal motion and it's my favorite song on the record it's one of my favorite songs that i've done i actually played a guitar solo at the end of the song it's funny because when we initially did the track the singer tyler was like i thought you were gonna put strings at the end of the song and i said i did put strings the guitar has strings on it check it out [Music] yes [Music] [Music] [Applause] is [Music] [Applause] so [Music] you [Music] sorry about the gratuitous guitar solo there that's one of my favorite solos to play along to when i played it originally i always said oh god i'd love to go out and play that with the band sometime and i mean they didn't have it was all session players when i heard the chord progression i thought this is needs like a peter frampton type solo with a leslie sound things like that so that was my peter frampton style solo after we finished the record the guys went back to charleston they put together a band and johnny started managing them during this time johnny was finding all these different artists not just for me to produce but ones that he was feeding to major labels and they were all getting record deals johnny really never got his due as an anr person but he was incredibly influential johnny ended up moving from here in 2009 he moved back to charleston he started having some pretty severe problems with depression he continued to manage crowfield crofield got a record deal with universal records ended up not really going anywhere it was it was kind of a nothing deal and had they had somebody with vision there they could have done something i believe with the record that we made which is available on itunes still and i'm gonna put it up on spotify but uh he had a really really rough time in 2010 and 2011. we kept in touch all the time um and we were talking about projects different uh you know we weren't doing that much with the label we only had made those two records and because johnny was no longer here in atlanta it was difficult to work on these things especially since he was having these these really difficult bouts with with depression and it was november of 2011. i remember i was uh in my car in the morning it was about 10 30 and johnny called me we were talking we talked for about 15 minutes or so just about different groups about nothing really and at uh 5 30 at night i got this frantic message from a guy named joel frank he was a one of the program directors of the from the charleston radio station he said call me i need to talk to you so i called joel back and he said johnny committed suicide and i said what i talked to johnny at 10 30 this morning he said and he went through and told me what happened and i couldn't believe it it just it was crushing um johnny had a lot of friends in the community in the music community not just from charleston but from all over the the country there were a r people that came from new york for johnny's funeral there were about 650 people that came for his funeral and he was loved by so many musicians i mean everybody knew johnny if i had to say you know that there was one person that was incredibly important to my career as a producer in music had to be johnny johnny diamond he was um he was an incredibly great human being one of the kindest people you ever meet and he had an amazingly good ear for talent he just he could hear things in their infancy that no a r guy could hear that you'd have to have complete finished songs but johnny could hear from the roughest demo he knew when people had talent he just had he had it and he never got his due while he was alive he didn't and so i wanted to make a video dedicating it to johnny diamond and to tell people to follow my channel about him and what a what an incredibly great human being he was and how much he did for me and for so many other musicians around the south and all over this country so this is my video dedicated to johnny thank you so much for watching i'm rick biatto [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 807,985

Rating: 4.9594388 out of 5

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, record label, record labels, starting a record label, Promoting, promoting music, Successful record, successful record label business plan, how to run a successful record label, Story, Reveal, failing in life motivation, motivational speech, Inspiration, tribute to friend who died, music business 101, music business 2020, Johnny Diamond, should i sign to a record label, music industry

Id: HHMpUYluaLI

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020