Record Producer Opens a Label
By Don Wilcock -
The Record
"I think the lesson of the past (for record labels) is you should be opened up to more artists. You should listen, and when you hear something new and exciting, you should embrace it. You should put it out and let the public be the judge. You should support it."
That was the last thing I expected to hear from an academic who's just put out a CD of cover songs from the "race records" catalog of a label that was started in the 1920s in Port Washington, Wisconsin, by a chair company. But then Charlie Dahan doesn't fit the cliche of your standard academic.
The former A & R Director of the eclectic independent Shanachie label, he now owns his own record label, Larchmont Records.
He produces records for other labels, is a music columnist for several national magazines and is writing a book on the history of Gennett, the 1920s jazz label that discovered Louis Armstrong.
And, by the way, he teaches courses such as "Contemporary Issues in the Music Industry" and "Record Labels in Pop Culture", at SUNY College at Oneonta, a small liberal arts college with 5,700 students. "We should stop trying to justify our artists with mathematical formulas," says this Grammy-nominated label exec. who left Shanachie because he felt the company was heading in a different direction than he wanted to go. "The one lesson I learned at Shanachie, and I tell my kids about A&R today, is that it's no longer really about music. It's about math. What that means is, when I had an artist l wanted to sign at Shanachie, I had to go into my general manager's office and say, not that I had a great artist that was original and talented and had a great sound or was really compelling, I had to go in and say they do 100 dates a year.
They sell 5,000 records on their own. They can draw 100 people a night per club. I had to give them all the numbers and stats before I said, 'And they're a compelling artist.'"
Dahan's own label, Larchmont, has just put out "Future Blues - A Celebration of Paramount Records. "The CD is a
surprisingly eclectic-sounding collection that includes New York City blues rapper Michael Hill covering Blind Blake and Ida Cox standards.
Bluegrass trend setter Rhonda Vincent does a version of Wilmer Watts' classic "Been on the Job Too Long" that sounds like a knockoff of "Orange Blossom Special." And The Blues Rockets rock up Ma Barney's often copied "C.C. Rider Blues."
The title song, "Future Blues," is a Willie Brown chestrnut that Langhorne Slim does in an alt. rock manner that would put him right at home with Michael Eck or even Hamel on Trial.
"(Langborne Slim) was actually a student of my partner's at Purchase College, and he . brought me down when I was at Shanachie to see him, and I was just floored by him," says Dahan. "This kid's got a lot of potential. And on his own, this kid is touring with rock bands, he's touring with folk artists. I mean he's crossing over ail these boundaries and barriers we always put up with our music. You know why? He doesn't know better. He goes to these clubs with anti-folk kind of music, kind of like Ani diFranco. He wins'eni over."
Listening to Dahan talk about how the different artists made it onto this record, it becomes obvious that he has studiously avoided the mathematical formula he had to apply at Shanachie. "Sue Foley (who-covers Charlie Jackson's "Mr. Man, Part 1" and Louise Johnson' "On The Wall") was an artist I signed when I was at Shanachie, and my partner produced an album or two of hers. "Michael Hill is an old friend of Joe Ferry, my parfner. Deanna Bogart was an artist of mine at Shanachie, and then Rhonda Vincent was just someone my partner fell in love with watching on television. We just called her up, and she was really excited about it.
"So we got to work with her, and that was kind of a shot in the dark, getting her on. Everyone is either a friend, an old friend or a new friend. And that's the way we approach it. We start with who we know first and who we'd like to work with."
Dahan uses not just songs from the past but recording strategies of the past to make this record startlingly fresh and decidedly unlike most of today's corporate recordings.
As with The Washington Chair Company that started Paramount Records to create product to push demand for record players, Dahan let the artists do what they wanted on these cover songs. He did not even dictate that they stick within the blues genre.
"The
concept we had was to take some of their reptoire and give it to today's artists, and then we let them figure it out. We didn't tell them, "Do an exact copy' or 'do it their style' or 'do it this way.' "We just said, "We'll see you the studio next week, and we'll figure it out there, or you'll figure it out beforehand. Whatever they play is what we record."
What I like about Dahan's way of thinking is that he uses lessons of the past and applies them to today's musicians hopefully to come up with tomorrow's sounds.
Those sounds forecasting the future are noticing to come from major labels that think mathematically instead of musically. Unfortunately, the truism in any of the arts is that real innovation comes at the expense of profit. Artsts starve before they make it big.
"If you want to be an eclectic artist and sell a million copies, this is not the time for you. Radio is not ready for you," warns Dahan. "Clear Channels is not going to put you on, but if you can operate, within the margins, I know plenty of artists who sell 10, 15, 20,000 copies and make a great living working, selling records, putting out their own records. I think the advent of new technology like the Internet, like now, supposedly, the new legal downloading systems that are being put into place? This is where we stand to benefit because we don't have to depend on whether Tower Records is going to buy our record or they're going to go out of business."
From my perspective as a veteran music writer, I have seen a widening generation gap between youngsters who see nothing morally wrong with downloading free music that once was the artist's "intellectual properly", and their source of income. As a professor who interacts with college students, the primary market for free downloading, Dahan sees that gap narrowing. To put it bluntly, "students are afraid of the man
since several law suits have
been brought against young
people caught in the act of illegally downloading. When you say $10,000 fine to a 19-year-old, they're being watched, and they see it in the news and talk about it in class. They see it in the school paper."
"Yeah, they might find creative ways of doing it, but I know the schools now have no tolerance for it because they don't want to get sued. I know they're afraid of it, and at the end of the day, what am I really doing?" As for the moral issue, Dahan says students think CDs are too expensive and that the record companies are keeping the profits at the expense of the artists. They don't see their illegal actions as hurtful to the artists. They see them as a response to corporate greed.
Like Will Ackerman (see last week's column), Dahan sees the corporate labels imploding and boutique labels like his putting the emphasis bade" on the artist.
"There's some good people out there doing good things, and we have to keep supporting them as an industry, and we'll find our place."
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