Music Monday - When Music Turns Into Work

My nephew The Donald has been blogging a series on the various jobs he's had over the years... Whether you know him or not, they are an excellent read that I think all of us can relate to in some way. Read all about them here.

As I've read his tales of employment I've reflected upon my own... Specifically, the period between June 15 1992 and August 31 2001, the AEI Music Years.

This was about as close to a dream job as I'll ever have. I got paid to create four hour mix-tapes that were played in businesses all over the country - and occasionally the world! While I worked there I produced music specifically for NikeTown, Williams-Sonoma, Bennigan's and Steak & Ale Restaurants, Lane Bryant, Rave, Avenue clothing stores and many others, as well as programs that went into a general catalog that any of AEI's customers could pick from. One of the highlights of my career there came at the Red Robin in Kennewick, when I realized that they were playing one of my dance-mix programs! I slyly thanked the manager for playing such great music, and he said that it was his favorite mix out of their whole library. After that I couldn't keep quiet - I told him I'd made it, and gave him one of my business cards. It was pretty much a rockstar moment, and I went back to work the next week all fired up to keep giving the customers more of what they want.

I don't remember exactly when that encounter took place, but it had to be somewhere fairly early in my career with AEI. See, although the company was founded by music lovers in 1971 who decided to do something to combat the horrible Muzak that was being piped in to businesses, by the time I got there in the '90s it was all about the bottom line, and the nonstop cashflow express. The founder and several long term employees were still there, but had grown so distant from the music itself that they were unable to think in terms of what it really takes to make a great program. All they cared about was how many programs can you churn out in a week. Now, I admit that when I first started there, I couldn't imagine that would even be a problem. I mean, how long can it take to put together a four hour mixtape? Maybe six hours if you include time to put all your CDs away when you're done??

But there were other factors that made it slightly more difficult. For starters, once we used a song, we weren't able to repeat it on another program for 12 months. That meant that when you were assigned a new program, the first thing you had to do was run a report of all the songs used in that category program for the last year. Talk about limiting your choices!! Most formats received a new entry every month, and with 40ish songs per program, that was nearly 500 songs on the blacklist.

Luckily, one of the things that got me the job over the 150 other applicants (you can imagine how many people wanted to do this for a living) was my broad and deep personal knowledge of many genres of music. So my first couple times around the programming carousel were mostly easy, breezy, beautiful. Then I too started struggling. It wasn't actually BAD mind you, I was still getting paid to sit in a studio with what was billed as "the world's largest privately held music library" at my disposal. It made finding those gems that hadn't already been exploited much easier. Also the fact that I didn't have a uniform or a name tag helped put things in perspective whenever they did get rough.

But remember how earlier I said that the management had shifted from a musical focus to a financial focus? Well that was NOTHING compared to what our contacts at the stores cared about. In general we worked with Directors of Visual Merchandising or some such title. The Visual in their titles is there for a reason... These people could design a menu, or store layout, or catalog layout with one hand while heavily sedated. They truly had a gift. And the price for their visual excellence was that they didn't (in general) GET music. Part of the process of custom programming was to send off a demo of what we'd like to use in this month's programming. Ideally, my contact would listen to the demo, call me back, say something like what the Kennewick Red Robin manager had said, and I'd run off the final program and be done for the month.

What actually happened was quite different though. I'd send off a demo, and wait for the phone call. Then I'd call and leave messages... Finally I'd get a call back that sorry, they hadn't listened to it yet, but would right away and call back. Then the call would come and I was always amazed at the need these people had to throw their weight around... Usually the demo was pretty much on the mark, but they always felt the need to say "I don't really like this song here..." and I'd then have to send another demo, of alternate songs. Often the songs that were rejected one month would be approved without incident the next month. One contact was notorious for HATING a song one month, then a few months later I'd slip it in again, and she'd say "You know what song I really liked on this month's tape?" Yep. That one. They rarely actually listened with a mindset of "will people dining/shopping in my establishment enjoy this?" It was something that they didn't really like doing, so they figured they had to at least make it feel like work for me too.

So you can see how with all of that going on week after week, music began to be a chore rather than the passionate hobby it had always been.

I found an outlet a year or so after starting at AEI when I landed the Friday night shift at KNHC, Seattle's C-89.5 FM.

This was my refuge from neurotic visual merchandisers... After a year or so of playing the station's regular music from 8 to Midnight, I convinced the program director to let me create the Friday Night PartyZone, where I did non-stop beat-matched music for all four hours, and had complete creative freedom. I played what I wanted, I played what I liked, and I felt incredibly blessed that the listeners loved what I loved. For several years, my show pulled in record amounts of money during the annual Pledge Drive, (like what PBS does all the time, only we didn't show Riverdance marathons) and according to the official ratings, I had 45,000 people listening at any given point each Friday night. Talk about rockstar moments! C-89 pioneered the concept of radio stations streaming on the internet, and I took full advantage of that. I had my own website for the show (here's an archived version, sadly I lost all the actual files years ago) that featured live playlist updates, a chat room and an in-studio webcam. During that stretch, I got email from people all over the world, and established a friendship with a guy in Australia that continues to this day!

The good times just got better and better up through sometime in 2000. Station politics started to get ugly, and I was no longer considered one of the cool kids at the station. Since I kept moving further and further south, and the drive was getting really long, I stepped down from the PartyZone in early 2001.

Meanwhile, AEI "merged with" (aka got bought by) DMX Music in April 2001, and I was informed that my position was duplicated. They kept me on until the end of August to help the transition my functions to the "non-duplicated" people. Between the C-89 nonsense and the AEI nonsense, I was burning out hard on music. In my car it was almost exclusively talk radio. By the time August came to an end and I found myself unemployed (just prior to 9/11, no less), I just wanted to let music become a fun hobby again. And slowly but surely, it has become just that.

In the nearly seven years since I started using my other skill (really - I only have two!) to make a living, my musical self has had a reawakening... I still maintain a small production studio downstairs (in the "cave") where I record the kids playing their instruments for band tests, voiceovers for church productions, and the occasional new dance mix CD for the car. Just did one of those this past weekend in fact! It was the first time in three years that I'd done a new mix, and it was SUCH a therapeutic experience. With all the home/yard repairs and work we've been doing, do take a couple hours and thoroughly get lost in music was like medicine to my soul. I did a retro mix, made up of some of the PartyZone's greatest hits. Nothing newer than 2001. Recapturing my glory days. And it worked... When I let the last note of the last song die off, I felt a sence of creative satisfaction - and as I've listened to it in the car, it's brought a smile to my face. I think it's safe to say that I'm back to having a passionate love for music!

(oh, and if you want to hear my new retro mix, just click here!)