Episode #2: Richard Gibbs
↓ English transcript ↓ ｜ Traduction en français
Richard Gibbs: The art of storytelling - Sailing the seas of the music industry & paying it forward
Gabriel Chesnet
Hi, I’m Gabi!
Cyd Levine
I’m Cyd!
GC
And this is Musicians’ Teatime.
CL
Today, we have a special guest that we were really looking forward to. He was one of the founding members of one of our favourite bands. Do you wanna talk a little more about our guest today?
GC
Yep- This is Richard Gibbs, and he is a music industry veteran, a real salty sea dog. Over the course of this interview, we follow his career from Berklee to Woodshed Recording, passing through rockstar life in Oingo Boingo, session work for the likes of Robert Palmer, Aretha Franklin or Tom Waits, film scoring, and more.
Very interestingly, we’ll go over the history of unionising in the music industry, but most importantly something Richard has been hosting for the better part of the last decade: The Composers Breakfast Club, a weekly Monday morning hang for artists and non-artists alike- as you’ll find out, it’s an interesting place full of interesting people to stimulate critical thinking.
CL
I love critical thinking. I think there’s a lack of it recently, but that’s another story.
Richard also has a podcast of his own, counting heaps of stories and anecdotes working 40 years in the music industry. It’s wholesome, surreal, heartwarming at times, thought-provoking and carefully crafted in both substance and form.
GC
Without further ado, let’s get straight to this kindly granted chat then. Relax and enjoy!
GC
Welcome, Richard, our second guest for the Musicians' Teatime podcast by Acid Airplane Records. We're based in France, and I don't know if many people do know you in France. Do you think you could introduce yourself and your career to us?
RG
Oh, geez. Oh, Google me. I mean, just go to Richardgibbs.com, I guess, and that's the easiest way to find out. I always feel uncomfortable talking to somebody and telling them what I do and what I've done. But in a nutshell, I am a reformed rock star, I guess, and session player turned film and television composer, and record producer, and studio owner and general entrepreneur in the entertainment industry.
GC
Right. So you own the Woodshed studio, right?
RG
It's called Woodshed Recording. It's online, it's woodshedrecording.com.
GC
Yeah, I did see there's some really nice fancy gear out there. Which we'll probably get back to later because there's a quite a bunch of things we can go over. But you also have a podcast yourself, you're a great storyteller, many people do tell you that.
RG
Yeah. It's invisiblearts.com. Arts being plural, invisiblearts.com. And it's called that because music is the only invisible art.
GC
True! I'd never thought of it like that. So myself, I'm 21, and I've just graduated with a music industry degree, and I've had that feeling getting into the industry that there might be a bit of feeling of hopelessness and disillusion. Did you feel this thing back then when you graduated from- you did Berklee, right?
RG
Yes, my degree is classical composition from Berklee College of Music.
GC
Right. How did it feel back then? You graduate and you just get into the industry? Was it different?
RG
Well, I was different. Everything was different. Yeah. I mean, I didn't go to Berklee with the idea of becoming a film composer at all. I studied composition, my degree is classical composition, but my goal... I wanted to be Joe Zawinul, and you probably don't know who that is, but he was my hero, keyboard player in the band, founder or co-founder of the band Weather Report. [GC: Ah, right.] He used to play with Miles Davis and everybody else. That was really what I wanted to do, to be like Joe Zawinul. I wanted to be a performer, a player and a composer in that realm. But fate had other ideas in mind for me.
GC
As far as I know, you did that for a while. And then...
RG
Not really. I didn't do what I really wanted to do, which was Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra and other bands. Other artists that are very much jazz fusion, it's all about the playing ability, the chops and the composition in that style. And I tried, I did some stuff like that very, very early on, but relatively quickly, started making all sorts of left turns. Actually, I have a podcast about that. One of my episodes is about Miles Davis and how I was drawn to the music of Miles Davis, how I started down that road and then didn't go there. I ended up going somewhere else.
GC
Right. I think I did listen to that one because I do tune in every couple of weeks as they come out. What is great about them I find is they're very bite-sized. They feel very comfortable. They really do feel like you're telling, as you've said, you're telling your grandkids this story.
RG
Yeah. You know, I script them. I use that term loosely, but I write it out first. Most of the stories are stories I've told a million times, but I write it out anyway. And then I create these, like, little radio shows. This is not a typical podcast, where typically, podcasts are interviews or a couple of guys talking around a microphone. Most podcasts are like 45 minutes to 2 hours long, and I find myself I don't have the patience for it. So as a listener, I like 'em short and sweet. I like a story. A beginning, a middle and an end, then wrap it up and be done with it. That's the goal that I started with.
I didn't start the podcast. I never started a podcast, that's the funny thing. I had a story that I'd been telling, a true story about how I ended up working with Robert Palmer. Again, you may not know who Robert was, but he had several big hits. [GC: I do!] Okay, well, I ended up recording, playing- being a session player on some of Robert Palmer's work.
That all started with me writing a letter of complaint to Robert Palmer, because I was staying in a condo right next door to him and his music was keeping me up at night. So it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek letter of complaint, because he was a hero of mine, and I ended up meeting him then playing on some demos which led to me recording with him in earnest in both Compass Point in the Bahamas, and then a few months later in Milan, Italy. And I played on the song "Simply Irresistible". That whole album was called Heavy Nova. I was playing keyboards on that. So that's that first podcast. That's a story I had told many times and I kind of had it down.
I knew I'd just told the story so many times, it was all memorized, and I recorded it just for grins because I got tired of telling the story. I just wanted to record it so if somebody were asking about it, I'd say, "Yeah, I'll send it to you later" (laughs). Then while I was at it with my engineer, we started having fun with it, and putting in sound effects, and dropping in songs that were appropriate to the story - including Simply Irresistible - you know, little snippets of stuff to kinda illustrate the story, and packaged it all up, sent it off to my manager, just said, "Hey, maybe you'll get a kick out of this. I don't want to tell the story anymore". And he flipped out over it. He thought it was great, and sent it off to this company, Pantheon Podcasts, who immediately offered me a contract to do a podcast series. They said, "Do you have more stories like this?" and I said, "Yeah, you know, yeah! I got stories for days".
GC
It's pretty crazy that they offered you a contract.
RG
Well, the contract is, you know, it's pretty loose. As you may know, there's not money in podcasts, typically. I mean, unless you're Joe Rogan, most people aren't making money doing podcasts. It's kind of a labor of love. Or the purpose of doing it is as a branding exercise to promote something else, whether it's your own career; or in my case, I'm promoting a nonprofit that I founded called Armory of Harmony, and I wanted to use it to promote that, and to promote my recording studio. So that's the reason behind doing it, but then it became more fun for me to think about it in terms of, "I'm doing it for my grandkids and great-grandkids" - you know, whenever they show up - so that people can hear the stories of my words instead of them being changed over the years or just forgotten. So that's it.
GC
That's a great endeavor. It always feels very, you know, the way that you put sounds in there, songs as well, really makes it all feel like it's got a whole ambience to it, and it just feels very - and maybe it comes from your background in film - but it feels very cinemato...graphic. Cinematic?
RG
I mean, yeah, I'm a film composer. I'm used to telling a story with music and with sound. That's fun for me, it comes naturally, I don't have to think about it. But it is time-consuming. Most people that are doing a podcast, maybe they'll interview somebody, like you're interviewing me right now, and you'll take whatever amount of time it is to do that interview, whether it's 10 minutes or an hour, and then edit it down, kind of wrap a bow on it, and put it out. That's pretty much it for a typical podcast, but I create these like radio shows. So, a typical podcast, somebody will spend an hour or two on it, making it, once they've got it down to a system.
But my podcasts, even though they're only 20 minutes long, typically take about three relatively solid days to do it. This is because, you know, we take our time about making sure we got the right song in there, we got the right edit of the song, making sure everything times out. Then, you know, laying in the sound effects, and then going back and editing the story a little bit, and making sure the quotes are correct and the things I'm saying are right. It just takes time to do it right, at least to my standard. So they're a little different than most podcasts. I mean, there are plenty of podcasts that are very well done, I think, but most are pretty slapdash. And this is not.
GC
Of course, well, because it's short, you could assume that it's made very quickly- but I would've never expected that it took days.
RG
Yeah, no, it's not. I think the shortest I've done one is two days, most of them are three. Sometimes, it might be three hours one day, four hours another. Sometimes it's like two or three eight-hour days, it just depends on the subject, all the research and all the sound effects. The last one I did that we just dropped on Monday, I did something completely different just for fun as an experiment. I recorded a rhythm track with a buddy of mine who's a guitarist. He just played a rhythm guitar, kind of like a Bo Diddley kind of guitar part, a shuffle. It was shuffle guitar part, and I played percussion, just played a very simple percussion part. Just made a loop of it, just so I had something.
Then I told the story to that. I was now kind of, in essence, the lead singer over a rhythm track, even though I'm just telling a story. I found that it gave me a different rhythm in how I told the story. I didn't use that track that we put down. No part of that is actually in the podcast, but it completely affected how I told the story and gave it a certain urgency and rhythm, that we then went back and laid in music and sound effects after the fact. It was kind of fun. Little kind of flip-the-script for a minute, I may do that more. I don't know, it was a fun experiment. Slowed down the process, but it was fun.
GC
Of course. Well, there is rhythm to storytelling, and that's a very big part of it. That takes a while to get down. [RG: Yeah.] I'm pretty new to podcasting. Well, you know, big, big ol' quotes around that, because that's just because of COVID. I used to do interviews at shows and festivals and such in the past. And so you know, the manager gives you a very short time period to do that, and you have to squeeze in 15 minutes, and then the person talks for 30 and you get yelled at, so it's just a bit more chill to do that online, although it would be much better to do a radio show format. [RG: Right.] But I personally am young. I don't have stories to tell. And you're more of a mentor type figure for some people, I think.
RG
Well, it comes with old age, I guess (laughs). Like you say.
GC
Oh, I've got some other words.
RG
Experience. Okay, it's seasoning, let's use that. I've been around, you know, I always like to sing that line. It's from... Where's that from? "I've been around", it's Al Pacino, and I think it's from... I can't remember the name of the movie, the one where he plays a blind guy in that movie.
The movie is called Scent of a Woman. At one point Al Pacino's talking to somebody and he goes, "I've been around, you know, me, like, I've seen it all, you know, you're not gonna pull one over on me". That's kind of me in a way in the music industry. I've been around and played a lot of roles, I've done a lot of different things. I've seen a lot of stuff, I've done a lot of stuff, so somewhere along the line I've developed some stories, and I know how sometimes I can guide people that are new relative newbies, and they want to know how to go about doing any number of things in the industry. I can speak with a certain degree of expertise about many topics; about what it's like to be a session player, I can talk about what it's like to have record contracts, being an artist, I've done that. I can talk about record production, I can talk about owning a studio and the ins and outs of that-- by the way, it's not worth it. And then of course, film scoring, and film production. These are all areas that I have more than the average amount of experience in, so if somebody comes- I have a standing rule with people.
Every once in a while I'll get an email or a text message from somebody who graduated from my alma mater from Berklee. Somebody said, "Oh, you should call up Richard, maybe he can help you, throw you some ideas how to get started". My standing rule is, you come out to Malibu, and we'll go out to lunch. You buy me a sandwich, and I'll talk as long as that sandwich lasts. That's my standing rule.
GC
I feel like that's something very particular with you compared to many other seasoned industry professionals I've been able to meet, or just share a room with. I suppose you have that very down-to-earth feeling. You don't look down on people who are just getting into the industry such as me; I've had my little nonprofit arts structure for about two years now, and I've never felt unwelcome at the Composers Breakfast Club. It doesn't feel like anything "elite" or VIP. It's just very, very welcoming. I feel like that's something you value.
RG
That's the whole point of the Breakfast Club. I mean, the whole point of it is to welcome people in and help each other out. I've been to many networking events over the years, where, you know, everybody has to wear a name tag, and everybody's kind of looking over everybody's shoulder like, "Is there somebody better I should be talking to?", and everybody is there - at least a majority of the people - are there to find out what they can get from other people. They're trying to take, right one way or the other, whether it's a phone number or a contact or whatever it is, they're looking for something. They come to these networking events, trying to further themselves in their career.
The Composers Breakfast Club started with a couple of other seasoned vets like myself getting together for breakfast, and just having breakfast together and sharing stories, just the three of us. Then we started inviting other friends. And we've kept that ethos all along. It's all about, how can we help each other? What what do we have to say to each other? What's going on? What's new in your world? It's so much more. Ironically, you get so much more as a result of that. Success. The ethos, I get more out of it than I would if I was saying, "Okay, what can you do for me", instead of "what can I do for you", and you learn so much more that way, you get so much more.
It's like the old line about teachers, teachers learn more than the students. In teaching, you learn because in order to teach somebody, you better learn! You better know your topic, and you better study up on it constantly. Then students bring something fresh that you never would have thought of. And that's what this is like for me, The Breakfast Club is- I meet people I wouldn't have met any other way. If I can help them, great, if there's anything I can offer, great. If not, that's fine, too. Then we started, for several years now, it started just people having breakfast. But then little by little, one of the other guys would say, "Hey, I've got this publisher who's got a new way to publish music, could he come speak to the group?", over breakfast. "Yeah, sure". Then we would always buy them breakfast for coming and sharing their story with us.
One time, we had a guy come who's the manager of a large studio in Nashville. He heard about the group, and he wanted to come to our breakfast and talk to us about what he was doing about the studio. He was going to buy - and he did - buy all of us breakfast, which was kind of a unique spin on it, he was basically paying to speak. And it was really fun! Kind of a little light bulb went off in my head, like, "Oh, this is a quid pro quo that goes on here, the speakers get something out of it, too". They're getting access to a very focused group of individuals, who by and large are pretty intelligent, certainly creative, and have a different spin on things than just going and speaking to, you know, a convention of accountants or something - not to disparage accountants (laughs) - but it's a unique group. Now, we've kind of built up this snowball effect, this head of steam, where the speakers that we've had have been so great that other people want to come in and speak. I'm flattered by the people that come and speak with us. And by the way, the role that I take is the curator of that. That's the one thing I enjoy, helping to find, finding people to speak that will challenge the group.
There are plenty of organizations already, there's ASMAC and others where you can go in and listen to composers speak. I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't have composers speak by and large. There's very, very few exceptions to that rule, and only because they had something else to talk about. I'm not really terribly interested in hearing how a composer creates music. That's what I do. I don't need them to tell me how to do it.
GC
You know already.
RG
Well, at least, I know how I like to do it. I'm more interested in the guy like the guy we had last week that broke the speed record for a glider plane. What was it, 543 miles an hour or something- it was a plane, a remote control plane with no engine on it, and got it to go that fast by playing with wind patterns. That's fascinating to me. And to me, that's more nurturing to creativity, to be challenged to think about things outside of your normal experience. So I try to find those people, even if they are musicians and composers or whatever. What I'm interested in is what they do that's outside of what they do as composers, other aspects of their backstory and what they do. So, you know, Stewart Copeland is a film composer. But I didn't really want Stewart to talk about that; he didn't. I was more interested in... He's also quite a musicologist, and music historian in a way, and a fantastic storyteller. And he was the drummer in The Police. There are a bunch of fun things to talk about with him. I wanted to hear that from him. So we've got... My buddy RZA is going to be speaking on Monday. And boy, does he have stories.
GC
Yeah, I'm not missing that.
RG
Yeah, that's gonna be a good one. I mean, he's an interesting human being, so that's what I'm interested in. It's interesting human beings with interesting stories that will inspire us all. I don't care even what they do, necessarily. It's how they do it.
GC
Yeah, it's always very interesting no matter the topic, and it can get people out of their comfort zone, when it comes to interests as well. Plus, they are just generally so down-to-earth and kind, it just makes you feel very relaxed about the industry as a whole, when it feels like a gigantic monster when you're young and little and getting started. You know, seeing nice people for a change is great.
RG
Yeah, I mean, I had people help me out when I first got going. For example, I don't know if you know the name Michael Boddicker, but Michael's a regular on the Breakfast Club. He's a few years older than me, when I first moved to town and was just getting started, one of the angles that I was working on was being a session player, and Michael kind of took me under his wing, and started throwing work my way as a session player- work that he didn't want to do, or might've been... Sometimes, back then, they used to do sessions on TV and film where they would hire three, four, even five keyboardists at the same time to all play at once, because composers didn't typically know how to program and do that stuff. Now, that doesn't happen anymore. But back then, if you wanted that sound, you've got a whole bunch of keyboard players in one room, and we all worked on it together. And Michael used to bring me in on those dates a lot, because I brought something different to the table than he did, so did the other guys, and I learned a lot from that. So I'm repaying that however I can, you know, paying it forward, as they say.
GC
It really does feel like you're paying it forward with just the fact that you're not being condescending, or looking down upon anybody. It's just something that I'm very, very thankful for.
RG
Well, let me correct myself just for a second, that makes it sound like I've got this altruistic streak a mile wide- that's not it. That's actually a lie. The truth is, I like doing this because I get these speakers that come in and challenge me. I want to have those conversations, I want to hear what they have to say. If it wasn't for having this group of people, I probably wouldn't get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to come in and talk about vaccines in my living room. But with a group of people, we can talk to RFK Jr. and have a fascinating conversation.
GC
But you could be an asshole about it and you're not.
RG
What's the point of that? I want to learn. That's the biggest part of this. That's the fun of it for me. If I was bored with the speakers that we had, and I already knew what they were going to say and all that, I wouldn't do this. Flat out. I'd just let somebody else do it. I'm not gonna do it. So that's what I get out of it. That's what's cool to me.
The guy that spoke, the glider guy, right? I didn't know him from Adam. I just happened to see... Something popped up in my Facebook feed, or somewhere, or in a news feed, that this guy had just broken the speed record for a remote control plane. I looked at the video and thought, "That's just cool as hell!" and put his name into Facebook. And sure enough, there he was on Facebook. I friended him, he friended me right back, I sent him a message and said, "Hey, I'd love to talk to you about this group", and within an hour, I had him booked to speak to the Breakfast Club.
GC
That's pretty much how it kind of works. You know, being gutsy. And the worst thing somebody can say is no.
RG
I don't consider that gutsy. I mean, who cares? If he said no, he said no, you know, it doesn't hurt me. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
GC
Exactly. That's what they told me. So, you know, that's just why I added you, you didn't know me, that's just how it happened. And I'm grateful that you're fine with talking with the little guys as well.
RG
Well, you know, it's also part of- I told you, I was gonna want to plug my podcast - one of the episodes is called "Never be home". The concept of that was that I realized, in retrospect, how much of my career was based on just being outgoing, being out in the world, literally never being home, going out. I mean, one of the stories in there is about how I got a job scoring a movie, because I happened to meet the director at Chuck E. Cheese of all places. So you never know.
GC
That's one of my favourite stories.
RG
You never know where you're going to meet somebody. Now these days - right now at least, we don't have that, so we have to do that digitally, virtually. It's not as good, but it does have its advantages. We can reach out to people all over the world much easier now. Everybody's used to this format, and meet a lot of people. We got a lot of people that speak at the Breakfast Club now that are all over the world. We've had people speak from London and Melbourne and certainly New York, plenty of people, and... Geez, oh, Vienna, all over, Tokyo. In person, that wouldn't be happening. But it's fun! You know, it's fun, but the point is, never be home. Get out, get out, get out, get out and meet people, and learn. That's where things happen. They aren't going to happen sitting at home. They just won't.
GC
Yeah, absolutely. It's like that really corny saying, that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take and so on. But when it comes to film gigs, scoring gigs, or even regular gigs, was it as precarious back then as it is now?
RG
Well, I don't know. I don't know how to answer that... Precarious. Again, this sounds a little weird, but as I already said, I didn't come to town to be a film composer. I came in town to be a player, to be a keyboardist. The film scoring work- the very first job that I got, as a film composer came to me. Somebody - an engineer buddy of mine - knew about this movie, where the director wanted somebody to do arrangements of Elvis Presley songs, and just do a different approach to film score. He needed somebody that was as much a record producer as they were a composer, actually probably more record producer than composer. I had training as a composer. I understood how film scoring works, and I had already had a fair amount of seasoning as a session player, and a little bit as a producer.
So I went and met with the director, and one of the first things he said to me was, "I'm not looking to hire a film composer". And I looked right at him and said, "that's great, because I'm not a film composer", I'll record anything. And we hit it off. Sure enough, he hired me pretty much on the spot, after I pitched how I would go about adapting songs into score for him. I was just winging it on the spot, just coming up with ideas how to do it. He liked the way I thought, and we're friends to this day still. Once I got into the movie, it became clear that he actually did need some music composed, not just arranged. You know, I know how to do that, I'm trained to do that. "Let me write some cues!" "Yeah, do it!". That ended up being my first film scoring credit.
That led to... The music supervisor on that movie knew about this job, being the musical director for the Tracey Ullman Show. The Tracey Ullman Show was on Fox at the time, and she had gone through a couple of different musical directors in the time period that she had started the show, for one reason or another, they hadn't worked out, or left, moved on. And so I said, "sure". They said, "you want to go meet with Tracy?", and I met with Tracy and the producers on the show. I didn't know any better, right? (laughs) I just walked in and they said, "Well, this is how we do it". You know, Tracy sings to a pre-record and that's how we're doing it. I said, "I don't want to do it that way", and they're looking at me- you just walked in, we don't know you from Adam, and you're telling us how you're going to do it, not listening to how we want to do it. I said, "Well, I think it's much more fun if the band is live on set, and we'll play live while Tracy sings instead of having pre-recorded tracks that she sings to", and I watched Tracy's eyes light up. She thought, "Well, that sounds like fun". I also watched the producers kind of shivering in their seats, like, "Oh God, what a nightmare, this is going to cost a fortune", and so on. But because Tracy liked the idea, they signed me to the world's shortest contract of two weeks, said, "Okay, let's see how this works".
And I figured it out. It worked perfectly. I brought in the Record Plant remote truck, brought in my own band - my own rock band at that time, who were all really good session players - and did exactly what I said we were going to do; we would be off camera, playing while Tracy's singing. And I'm learning how to be a musical director on the spot, and had a lot of fun with it. Tracy loved it. Next thing you know, I did that for a couple of years. That show, the Tracey Ullman Show, was the birthplace of the Simpsons. The Simpsons was a one minute short on the Tracey Ullman Show, with a whole another fun story how that came to be. But it was just these bizarre little one minute shorts, all different. The animation style was quite different. It was all hand-done.
I met Matt Groening- the shorts didn't have music, typically. But every once in a while he needed a little piece of source music or something, and he'd come to me and I'd say "yeah, I'll knock that out for you" and it'd just take me a few minutes. We kind of became friends. And they took a shot. Fox, that is, decided, let's put this out as a series. Let's do a primetime animated show, which was pretty unheard of, really. It was a hail Mary pass. Fox was going under. Fox was not a successful television network at the time, they were really struggling. And as such, were willing to try anything because they were losing money. So they did this Simpsons show and they asked Matt Groening, and the producers asked Danny Elfman to write the theme for the show.
The producers didn't even know. They came to me and said, "Would you score the show? Do all the other music?" And I said, "Sure". I'll never forget, one of the producers had a meeting with me about how I was going to go about doing it. And he said, "Well, do you think you can write in the style of Danny Elfman? Are you familiar?" And I look, I said, "Are you serious?" He goes, "What do you mean?" I said, "Yeah. Yeah, motherfucker, if anybody can write like Danny, I can. I was in a band with him for five years! Sure! No problem." Then Danny and I had a conversation or two about it and laughed about it. But I didn't interact with Danny, he kind of set a certain sound with that theme, and I just spun off of that and did something different.
They wanted me to score the show, by the way. They had budgeted it to do it with synthesizers and samplers. I refused, I said "No. No, that's not how we do this". They figured, because I was a synthesist, I should be able to save them a lot of money by doing it. And I could have, but I didn't want to! I thought that would sound like crap. I still don't like shows that are done that way. I said, "Look, I'm as good as anybody at doing that. I'm a synthesist by trade. I'm a programmer. And I don't want to do that. You've got a two-dimensional show here. It's a flat animated show. And you need to give it that third dimension, you need that other emotion to come off the screen, and that's only going to come from human beings in a studio playing the music to give it that depth and that emotion." And they bought that pitch. Still to this day, the show is done with live players. But that first season, I did it with usually about 35 players, a 35-piece orchestra.
I rambled there. I don't even remember the first question, but there you go.
GC
Oh, that's okay. It's really fascinating to hear. Like, thank you for rambling on. I do remember you telling a story about I think directing the orchestra during the scoring sessions or something?
RG
Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I learned a lot. Basically, I had an orchestra every week for 13 weeks, at my beck and call. And I was still pretty young, and I'm writing for 35-piece orchestra. Boy, I mean... I'd studied this in school, but I wasn't actually writing for orchestra every week. I wasn't writing, you know, 25 cues. I've learned all sorts of shortcuts, cool things to do, fun ways to work, and honed my conducting chops. They just gave me carte blanche. They meaning the producers, they just let me rip. They just let me do it because they didn't know. They didn't have a particular thing in mind, either.
My favorite story about that was, Matt Groening would always come to the recording sessions, but he would never say anything. Not a word! I might see him afterwards. He was like, "Oh, it was really nice. Thanks, thanks, good work". And one day, I saw him on the lot. Walking around the lot. I said, "Matt, you know, if you're having an issue with anything, if you want anything different, you can hit the talkback button while I'm conducting and tell me what you want. I mean, if you're concerned about what's going on, if that's why you're coming in--" He just said one of the sweetest things I've ever had somebody say to me, he said, "Oh, no, no, no, I just come because it's a free concert." Okay! It was brilliant. It was so much fun. [GC: So cute.] Yep.
GC
Sounds really fun. You were still young and you were learning as you go because the gigs just came to you. You didn't really actively seek out the gigs yourself.
RG
No, I wasn't hungry in that way. You know, I wasn't desperate. Still to this day, I don't operate from desperation. I don't think anybody operates well from desperation. That's not a good place to be.
GC
I just try to, as I manage a few artists and a few composers, I try to aim them in the right direction, but I'm not going to just give them something because they're desperate. You need a project that will fit them. And then it's something they actually want to do and not just... Sometimes they need to eat as well. [RG: Well, yeah.] So we joined a union. You may have heard of it, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers.
RG
Oh, the American Federation of Musicians?
GC
That's something else, but that's another union that's fighting for us.
Nowadays for younger people in the industry, the necessity of unions, you know, kind of working to get us to livable wages as musicians, whether we're doing session work or putting out albums or trying to get gigs.
RG
Oh, well, okay. I can speak to that too. The musicians' union, the American Federation of Musicians, is probably the weakest union in Hollywood, in terms of the country. They don't have much negotiating power here at all. It's very weak. It's very easy to work around the union. It's only on film dates and TV dates do they come into play much, usually on record dates, they aren't a presence at all. The way a lot of film, independent film and stuff is done- they work around the union, they do non-union work. And specifically, as a composer, they don't represent you. They will put you on a contract, there's a line in their contract for a composer, but it's a joke. What you get through the union as a composer, it doesn't even begin to reflect the amount of work that a composer puts in. So composers, here's the wild thing. Composers have no union, or Guild, in the United States at all.
GC
Nothing at all in the US?
RG
No. They have not since - I don't know the exact year - I'm gonna say 1972, but even prior to that, it was very weak. There used to be the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America. That was I think, formed in the 50s and was trying to build it up through the 60s, and the studios went after them, and basically destroyed them. The head of that guild for a long time was Elmer Bernstein. I don't know if you know Elmer's work, one of my favorite all time film composers. It pretty much broke Elmer. He was trying to keep it afloat with his own money for years. So there have been several attempts since then to organize a union for composers and lyricists. Each one has run ashore, has hit the rocks. I was on the steering committee of the last major attempt to do so a few years back.
We were organizing with the Teamsters. We were going to be teamsters, which is - I don't know if you know the Teamsters union - but that's a very powerful union in the United States. That's the truck drivers, right? All the drivers are Teamsters and the Teamsters have the power to shut down any production. Because if they say, "If you don't do what we say, your cameras, your set pieces, nothing's going to show up. It's just not going to get there. We're gonna shut down production overnight." And they've done it in the past. So nobody messes with the Teamsters, and they wanted to organize us to be part of the Teamsters union. It was an exciting possibility, but it didn't happen for a whole host of reasons. That could be a whole nother podcast unto itself. But I know, relatively, the nuts and bolts of how unions work vis-a-vis composers and musicians here. And it's not a pretty picture.
GC
I feel like it's very different when it comes to France compared to the US, because you probably know that France has built its workers rights and the fact that we have free health care and many things, thanks to unions and fighting a lot all the time over the past century or so.
RG
The French have always been much better with the arts. Right? I mean, don't you have like a ministry of culture or some equivalent to that? [GC: Of course! Yes, we do.] You say, "Of course", we don't have that in the United States! There's no equivalent.
GC
Yeah, it's true.
RG
There's no cabinet level position that deals with the arts- at all! It's ridiculous. There was a move afoot. When Obama was elected to form a cabinet position, have a secretary of the arts, there was a big petition that was circled around with hundreds of thousands of signatures to appoint Quincy Jones as the Secretary of the Arts, which would have been amazing. But I don't think they ever really took it seriously, and it never happened. It still needs to happen. We don't have representation at a government level, like most civilized countries in the world do.
GC
This is what makes it a little bit scary when you come from a country like France and you're thinking, "Well, I'm going to get out to California and meet people from the industry and see where I can go from there". Then you just get dropped by all the legal protections and state-level protections you have back home.
RG
You guys invented the PRO [Performance Rights Organization]. Right? Alright. SACEM was the very first PRO. Not us. You guys did that. [GC: Oh, the SACEM, yeah.] La SACEM was long before BMI and ASCAP, and is still a much more powerful and much better run organization than what we have going on over here. The representation for the Arts at the legal level, governmental and otherwise is really weak, very bad here.
GC
Well, the French administrative services are always very, very tedious, very slow. It really gets on my nerves when it comes to signing up an artist for SACEM, but you know that in the end, you will run into a lot less problems, because I remember some talks we had at the CBC when it came to black boxes- lots of money that just didn't go to the artist, that just went completely lost for some reason.
RG
Yep. Yeah, it's usually just simple incompetence. It's not usually some people trying to rip anybody off. It's just people are stupid, y'know? (Laughs) In a nutshell, the title, somebody's entering it into the computer, and they misspell the name of the cue or the name of the composer and it gets lost. It happens all the time. I've had a lot of money found for me over the years by forensic accountants going back in and figuring this stuff out. SACEM is so careful about how you input your music into their system that once they're rock solid, it's not true.
GC
Well, it's much more difficult to make sure everything is in place, but once it's in place it does tend to work pretty well for everybody, but it's something I'm scared about as somebody who's trying to export a little bit of my work to California as I'm going to be there for three months in mid August- given everything goes fine, we'll see about that.
I did have some questions from other people who mainly know you from Boingo.
RG
Okay. I'll take a Boingo question. What do you got?
GC
They got a couple. Earlier, you were talking about the Simpsons. You mentioned that you had to talk with Danny again. So I assume that you guys didn't leave on bad terms?
RG
No, not at all. I left the band in 1984, when our first son was born. That month, that's when I tendered my resignation, because my focus wasn't in the band anymore. I wanted to stay home, I didn't want to tour, I didn't want to do endless rehearsals. And I always made more money - always - outside of the band than I did within the band. I was a session player, and was making pretty good money. I was making more money than Danny then. Now he makes a lot more than I do (laughs). But I didn't need the band financially. I did it because I liked it. It was fun, and it was a great calling card for me too. But after having done that for three albums, and I don't know how many years, five years - four or five years I was in the band - it was time to move on. I didn't want to go out on the road. I wanted to spend time with my infant son. I didn't want to miss his first steps or his first words or any of that. So I left, that was why I left. We had a little bit of a legal kerfuffle a few years later, but it was never about harsh words or anything. It was just some money that that the band owed me- when I say "some money", I'm just talking about a few thousand dollars. It was nothing. Danny and I worked it out between us and all was good.
I'm still very much friendly with Danny. He's one of the few speakers I've had - few composer speakers I've had - to the Breakfast Club, because I knew everybody wanted to hear what Danny had to say. Honestly, remember what I said, why I said I picked people to speak; it's because I want to hear what they have to say. I already know Danny! I was in the band with the guy for five years, even though it was a long time ago. I have a pretty good idea and pretty good memory of how he thinks. And I'm friendly with him. I'm not going to learn much from Danny that I don't already know from him, so it didn't excite me, but I finally thought, "Oh yeah, everybody else here kinda wants to hear what Danny has to say, I should get him to speak", and I managed-- he kind of drove me nuts. He didn't want to speak at nine o'clock in the morning. It was too early for him because he's such a night owl. It was the only time we've held the breakfast, I think it was at noon or one o'clock. It's the only time we've ever done that, I did it for Danny. [GC: God...]
But yeah, I'm still very much on friendly terms with Danny and we exchange emails, some topic comes up or another that's of interest to one or the other. We flip emails back and forth, I wished him a happy birthday and all that kind of stuff. We were never like close buddies when I was in the band. We didn't hang out much or anything. I was the keyboard player in Boingo, that was kind of it. There were long term friendships within that band that predated me by many years. When I joined, I was the pup. I was the newbie, and I was the newbie until the day I left. So that was my relationship within that band. I'm still friends with all the guys, I talk to Johnny Vatos once in a while and Steve Bartek. There are other branches of the Composers Breakfast Club. There's one in Venice, that was meeting in person in Venice, and because that was close to Steve's house, he used to go to that one.
GC
Oh, nice. But creatively at the time, I heard that people besides Danny didn't really have much control, so maybe you found a better creative outlet elsewhere as well afterwards.
RG
Well, for me, yeah. I mean, that's a big reason why I left, it was that I'd already started my own band outside of Boingo so I could write for it. I wanted to write songs. My writing style is different than Danny's, and I had different ideas, just kind of stretching my creative wings. And I couldn't do that within Boingo. Boingo was Danny's vehicle, so I started another band that was my vehicle, which ultimately, we only managed to get one album out and then the band fell apart. But I was glad I did it anyway, it was fun.
GC
That was Zuma II, right?
RG
Yes, sir. Yeah, good luck finding that record.
GC
Ah! We can't find the record anywhere. There's just one very low quality music video.
RG
No, yeah. Somebody put that up. Somebody had a VHS copy of it. You can see that the VHS tape is screwed up and you can hear it warble and everything. [GC: It's so blurry.] I don't have a good version of it. The master tape I'm sure exists somewhere in CBS Records' vaults. And someday when I have time, and I feel inclined, I'm gonna go find somebody that will help me dig that out of the vault, so I can get a clean copy of that video, at least. That’s the least I can do.
GC
I would be excited.
RG
I will do that at some point. That'll be a fun project in and of itself, just doing it. That'll be a podcast itself.
GC
Oh, yeah. Well, we're looking forward to hearing so many other stories from you in that podcast, because you say a lot of, "Oh, that's a story for another time". And there's going to be many other times, I think.
RG
You know, I sat down with the guy that runs Pantheon Podcasts, [he] asked me, "Do you have other stories?" I said, "Yeah, tons!" And he goes, "Well, how many?" And I go, "Give me a second". And I sat down. I'm gonna pull this up right now while I'm talking to you. I decided to just write a list of topics, right? I knew that I had a story on each one of these topics. I'm looking at it right now, let's see... 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60... I'm gonna say about 70, 80 topics. And I've done 13 so far, so there you go. I got tons of stories. I'm starting now to kind of get a little more personal with them. All the stories, the first bunch were personal in that they're about my career. But I'm now also kind of going back into stuff that doesn't necessarily have anything directly to do with music.
GC
It was very interesting, the latest episode, just very good memories to hear about. You put a lot of ambience into it again, it was very fun to listen to and unwind after a long day.
RG
Yeah, also they've all been pretty - except for the one about the studio almost burning down - they've all been pretty lighthearted and kind of fun, right? They all have a smile in them somewhere. And the Woodshed Chronicles, there's not much to laugh about in that because our house burned down and everything that went on with that, but I felt it was an important story to tell. There'll be some more like that coming up. I guess I'm trying to pull everybody in with the fun stories, and then I'll start getting to the deeper stuff as the podcast progresses.
GC
Yeah, it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
RG
Right? It's not all sunshine and rainbows. Not at all.
GC
I'm glad that you've been able to tell these stories thus far and that you're going to have so much more in the future.
RG
Were there other Boingo questions, you said?
GC
Somebody wanted to know the meaning to "Whole Day Off", and I told them that you probably don't know, because you did not write this song.
RG
A. Yes, you're absolutely correct; B. Here's a funny thing. I didn't know the lyrics to the songs because I wasn't a singer per se. Every once in a blue moon I would sing; on some of the records, like on Grey Matter and some of the songs, the low vocal is me because I have a deeper voice than anybody in the band, my singing voice is low. But for the most part, I wasn't singing. I would just do low parts or shout parts. I didn't learn the lyrics. When I first started playing with the band, and we were playing at the Whisky and other places, I would watch the girls in the front row singing along and read their lips and go "Oh, that's what Danny sings!" (laughs). That's how I learned the words a lot of times.
I didn't really pay attention to the lyric, I still don't. It's not really my first love. When I'm listening to music, I respond to the music. I listen to songs, it's the music that gets me. It's not the lyric. Lyric is totally secondary to me. And if the lyric is good, then it's gravy. It's icing on the cake as it were, but I never start with the lyric first. I can't think of a single song that I listened to because I like the lyric, but I don't care about the music. Never. It's not how it works. So I didn't really pay much attention- I couldn't tell you what Danny's thinking when he wrote any of his songs, what they're about. I never asked! I didn't care. That's not how my brain is wired. Sorry. Tell your friends, "Sorry".
GC
That's okay. I would have asked you if you have- I mean, you probably have a lot of Boingo stories, but I'm sure that you're going to tell us a lot of those in the future.
RG
Well, I've dropped them in here and there on the podcast when it seems appropriate. But the podcast is not about Boingo, so I parse them out. I find that the more interesting stories are not about Boingo. When it comes up as I'm writing something, to bring in Boingo in the story, I bring 'em in! Plenty of the podcasts, Boingo's not even a shadow in it. I mean, it really was five years - four and a half - five years of my career. And I'm 65 now, so it's really a very small portion of my overall career.
GC
Okay, yeah. Well, in retrospect, it's kind of tiny compared to everything else that you've done.
RG
Yeah, I've been a film composer far longer than I was a member of Oingo Boingo. I've been a session player far longer. I've been a studio owner longer than I was a member of Boingo. I'm not denigrating my time in Boingo. I liked it, it was fun, and I'm glad I did it. But it doesn't define who I am. Sometimes, in certain contexts, I'll be talking to somebody and I realize they're likely to be a Boingo fan, and say, "Yeah, I was the keyboard player in Boingo", and that can open doors to a conversation, but it's not what I think about, by and large.
GC
No, of course, I imagine you'd like to be recognized for more than just being the keyboard player in Boingo, of course.
RG
Yeah, I don't even think about what I'd like to be recognized for. I think I'd like to be a podcaster. There you go. That's my new career. You know who Spalding Gray was? You ever heard that name?
GC
I've heard it, but I'm not sure I know.
RG
Spalding Gray was a monologuist. It was basically like, kind of live podcaster in a way. He is my inspiration for the style of these podcasts. He would go just tell stories on stage, and behind him, he would be projecting little clips or photos on the screen that would illustrate the point of the story that he's telling from his own life, or about somebody else's life. And I loved his format and how he did that. That's probably the biggest single inspiration for me as a podcaster. I could see myself, it would be fun for me to be able to do what he did, to perform live and tell these stories live, and bring another dimension to them on camera. On stage, you know, visual cues as well- it could take it to another place. If you go to the website for the podcast, invisiblearts.com, every episode has a series of photos, and some of the captions are little stories in and of themselves.
GC
I've seen that, yeah. I think that's a great idea.
RG
Yeah, that's just to further illustrate the stories that I tell in the podcast. Just fun little things, I could easily blow up that into a live show.
GC
That'd be an amazing idea, I think.
RG
It'd be fun! It's something that'd be fun to do, and you know, podcasts don't make money as we already covered. But my performance can. Public speaking can be quite lucrative. I have friends who do this, who don't have even a career I've had, that are getting 20 to $25,000 a night to go tell their stories. [GC: Jeez.] So that's made me go, "Hmm. Maybe I'll do that. That'd be fun, the last act in my old age." But I've got other things I want to do too, so I'm really aiming right now.
I can't make the official announcement yet, but I'm on the verge of starting a production company for doing films. I've got a particular project right now that we're looking to get up on its feet pretty soon. That's going to be pretty cool. It's going to be quite different. It's a documentary, but not like a typical documentary. Just like my podcasts are trying not to be a typical podcast. This documentary won't be a typical documentary. To be confirmed! [GC: Sounds really exciting.] Yeah, I'll let you know.
GC
Thank you for sharing the news. Do I get to keep that in the podcast?
RG
Oh, sure. I mean, this is nothing official that I've announced there yet. Sure.
GC
One last question while we're on air. [RG: Yeah?] What was with the two-colored haircut that you had in the 80's?
RG
Haha! That's pretty funny you would ask that.
That's actually one of the episodes I've been planning, one of the topics I put was just simply "hair". All my own personal hairstyles over the years. I started out when I was a little kid with a Beatles haircut, kind of, and then by the time I was in high school, I was a full-on hippie with long curly hair, you know, surfer hippie boy, and then went to Berklee, cut my hair at one point. I was at Berklee and then came out here and let it grow again. Then had a little moustache, a little goatee going for a while, and then I got the gig to join Boingo, which I tell how that happened in the episode called "Never be home". When I went and auditioned for the band, they liked what I did. I was like, "Okay, I got the gig". Danny pulled me aside and said, "Okay, there's a few things we need to talk about". I said, "Sure".
We used to rehearse in- Danny had a loft down on Washington Boulevard, an industrial part of LA, it was a very funky area. He had this weird loft room. In the back, this kind of small room in the back, the band was jammed in there, and that's where we rehearsed. And Danny pulls me into his loft space where his loft bedroom was, to talk to me privately. He goes, "Okay, there's a couple things". He kind of talked to me about how the band works, the politics of the band, and then one of the things was, "And you're gonna have to cut your hair, 'cause, you know, there's a certain image that we're trying to portray". It's all about the new wave punk era, and this long curly hair goatee thing wasn't gonna work! I just said, "Okay, all right, sure". I cut my hair. It's the first time I've had my hair really short. Since I was a little boy, really. It kind of threw me for a minute.
And, oh God, there's so many stories about hair I could give. At one point, one of our sometime roadies was also a hairdresser. He would do punk and new wave haircuts for people. And he said, "Hey, I got some ideas for you. You want to have some fun?" I go, "I don't care, yeah, sure". So he's the one who designed that whole thing where he bleached by the side of my head, and it came to a V in the back of my head, the bottom of my head, so the sides were like, white blonde.
The top was my natural brown, the rest of it was brown. Then he'd put a little bit of bleach - it always made me nervous when he did - it in my eyebrow, one eyebrow would have a little stripe of blonde in it, like white blonde. I thought it was funny and fun and why not, didn't think much more of it. Then I left the band, and I still had that hairstyle going on when I left. And I went to see the band play after I left, and there was a guy in the theater seeing the band that had cocked my haircut.
The guy was sitting in the theater and he had the exact same haircut that I'd had. And I said, "That's it. I've got- I can't do this". And I cut it and started all over. Since then I've let my hair grow out again, then I had dreadlocks almost halfway down my back.
And then coincidentally started working with Korn. [GC: Of course.] And my dreads were better than Jonathan's. You can tell him I said that. Munky had better dreads than I did, the guitar player. I had those for a long time. Anyway, long story, but as far as the two-color hair, that's how that happened.
GC
And that is a great story. Thank you. [RG: Sure.] Oh, God. Well, thank you so much for being here, for accepting this invitation because this was a long time coming, and I do wish you happy trails on your future endeavors.
RG
Thank you! Great!
CL
Musicians’ Teatime is a production of Acid Airplane Records, hosted by Gabriel Chesnet and Cyd Levine. All episodes come with a full transcript and translation into French on the Acid Airplane Records website. Thanks for tuning in today!