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Hey Kid! Want Some Advice?
Larry Butler, the former Warner Bros. Records exec and GM for Bill Silva Management, has been coaching young talent at his Did It Music Management, Consultancy and Publishing, as well as offering advice on Twitter and his blog. He recently released his second book, “The Singer/Songwriter Boot Camp Rule Book: 101 Ways To ImproveYour Chances Of Success” and gave us some tips for free.
The book follows the well-received “The Twelve Lessons Of Rock N’ Roll (For Your Career And Your Life)” and is a list (101 to be exact) of what needs to be done to have a successful music career. It gives advice chapter and verse – literally. Each piece of advice is a chapter title (“Your hands and your voice are your livelihood. No screaming! And stop playing amateur sports or doing home and car repairs”) followed by however much verse the reader wants to absorb.
Butler’s résumé is extensive. He played keyboards in Ohio bands during high school and college, serving as band manager and lead singer. He opened for the Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys and The Byrds, jammed with Jimi Hendrix, and tour managed for artists like Randy Newman, Ry Cooder and Isaac Hayes. He was Warner Bros.’ first National College Manager, then West Coast Artist Development Director and, finally, VP of Artist Relations. He spent the next few decades touring with the label’s talent, handling accounting and budgets, and overseeing tour marketing and promotion. At Bill Silva Management he ran Jason Mraz’s publishing and served as day-to-day manager for Robert Francis.
– Diamond Dave & Larry ButlerLarry Butler and David Lee Roth finishing a three-week press and retail junket in 1990.
You say this book is 40 years in the making but how much actual time did you spend typing and editing?
I have a blog called ItAllStartsWithTheMusic.com that I’ve been doing for a couple years. About a year ago it occurred to me that I’ve been working with young singer/songwriters, trying to teach them how to become better singer/songwriters and … how to become entertainers and I found myself repeating myself over and over again. I thought, “I better start writing this stuff down.”
I just put the headlines in the blog. Last fall I was reviewing all my blogs and I thought, “Why don’t I take these 101 things and expound on them rather than just saying ‘Do this! I don’t have to tell you why!’ like a parent would do?”
Initially I didn’t want to say this is what you are doing wrong but this is what you need to do to improve. Writing that down really helped and now I have a whole different philosophy on how to help kids.
Cool format. The left page says, “Do this” and the right page says, “Because.”
You need to eliminate all the other things you do in your life. If you want to succeed you need to focus on this and nothing else. That’s the rule. If you don’t, that’s fine but just don’t expect to succeed. Don’t expect that the world owes you a living. There are another 100,000 singer/songwriters who are doing this, who have eliminated sports fandom, cats, plants, families, marriages, relationships, drinking and vacations. You need that mental attitude.
And you need to be physically fit. You need to eat right; back off the beer and whatever and get some sleep. You can’t just stumble into this stuff. James Taylor said, “When I got famous, everybody who wanted to be like me decided they needed to become a junkie.”
No, don’t do that. Learn how to write songs, sing and play first. Getting your life organized, taking care of yourself, being positive and eliminating the hindrances and the naysayers are important. You also need to eliminate or at least temper the do-gooders who say, “You’re so wonderful” because you’re not!
Everybody skips over the part in Keith Richards’ biography where he writes about the 12-hour-a-day practices, or the 10,000 hours the early Beatles logged in.
Bono said, “1978 was a really big year for us because we learned a fourth chord.”
This is in my first book: I was on tour with Van Halen, at the height of Van Halen (with David Lee Roth). We’re in Oklahoma City. We’re all staying at the same hotel. We get back from the show; I’m in my room. I’m brushing my teeth.
The bathroom vents are connected to all the rooms and I hear, upstairs, someone practicing this amazing riff. It’s 1 a.m.! Obviously Eddie can’t sleep. I go to sleep and get up at about 6 o’clock to pee or something. I go into the bathroom and he is still up there and he’s still practicing that riff. Four, five hours later – and he’s Eddie Van Halen!
That’s the kind of dedication it takes. He wants to be able to play that riff whether he’s asleep or skipping across the stage. The only way to do it is to get that motor memory, and he knows that.
That’s the kind of stuff it takes. Are you ready for that? If not, don’t do this, at least not if you have the expectation you’re going to be famous.
Saving the advice about addiction to the end (“Seek and accept help”) was clever. It was almost as if you were saying, “In case you didn’t think I would bring this up …”
That was my wife’s suggestion. She said, “You need to address people who do not have a lot of emotional stability and drug problems and don’t know what to do about it.” I couldn’t turn a blind eye to that.
– Larry Butler & Madonna
Do you think some of this advice would be accepted by those of us who may have played around town for 10-15 years?
Yes. If nothing else, just step up what you’re doing or at least put a reality on what is going on. If you’re wondering, “What should we do next?” or “What am I doing wrong?” there’s a lot in this book where you’ll think, “Yeah, I should have done that” or “Maybe I should try that again.”
Yeah, but I bet I could name five local musician friends who, if you walked up to them and said, “You don’t have to eat that mic,” they’ll bite back with, “I’ve been around these bars and clubs for 20 years and – I don’t care if it’s an SM-58 microphone – I have to eat this mic.”
Yes! It’s my No. 1 thing! I am about to post a blog that there are five things all singer/songwriters are doing wrong. I don’t even have to see your act to know you’re doing these things and, No. 1, is eating the mic.
By the way, it goes all the way to the top. I was watching Ed Sheeran on the Grammys and he was eating the mic. You’re on TV! You don’t need to eat a microphone. There’s no PA feedback problem!
But when I see that, I see a guy who grew up in clubs.
Bingo. But for every one Ed Sheeran there are 900,000 guys in clubs still eating microphones. You’re hindering yourself by cutting off the method by which you could be communicating to the audience. You think it sounds better. Who cares?
The audience is more tuned visually to what you’re doing. This is a live performance, not a recording. It doesn’t have to be perfect. They probably can’t understand a goddamned word you’re saying anyway because it’s a shit PA. Maybe they should read your lips; let them see your mouth for godsake.
Ugh! I can’t take it! And every artist I’ve gotten to stop doing that, I’ll go back and see them and they’re eating the mic again. It’s just a dreadful habit.
I’ve given them microphones! “Here is a $200 microphone! Use it!” Then at the end I have to say, “Give me my mic back. You’re not using it.”
Any other bad habits that are hard to break?
My ultimate goal is to get these kids to where they can perform without missing a chord or forgetting the words or shaking. Then, the key is to be entertaining.
The No. 1 thing is not eating the mic but the No. 2 thing is, “Your songs aren’t the secret to your live performance. It’s what you do between songs.”
It’s how you talk to the audience and what they see. If at the end of a song you mumble “Thank you,” take a drink of water then go off to the side to tune, you’ve just lost them. Why did you do that? You need to figure out a way that you never lose eye contact with the audience.
I talked to a major Springsteen fan who went to see him in 1975 and he had to admit that he couldn’t remember any of the songs Bruce sang but he remembered everything Bruce said. That’s why he went: he wanted to be entertained. He wanted the connection.
Talk to me. Tell me why you wrote the songs. Tell me about your day. Something I can identify with and thereby become more of a fan. That’s the key. If you just say, “Hello Cleveland” or just wing it, it won’t work. You have to script it, try it out, and correct it. Make your patter as good as or better than your songs. If you don’t believe that, you might as well leave the stage because you don’t belong there.
Unless something happened an hour beforehand and you’re passionate about it.
Right, but you need to have experience talking to an audience. You have to have an attitude and a style. And you also need to know how to speak slowly and distinctly. How many times have you not understood a word they were saying? They’re either talking too fast or talking off the mic or mumbling. If the mic is set to a certain level for singing, you need to talk at that level.
This is the stuff I teach. You don’t normally learn this until five years into performing. Why not start now?
What about the group dynamic?
You mean like bands? Uhh! This is why I address the book to the solo artist! I don’t have a lot of success dealing with bands. There are usually four, five different minds that are there for different reasons and in various stages of their expertise and career and placement. You just can’t talk to five guys or girls that really only pertains to one person in that group.
I’ve done classes, and will again, but they don’t work. There are 15 kids in the class but only three are paying attention because only three get it. It’s so much better one-on-one because everybody is at a different stage.
I was referring to how some bands can’t shut up. The singer will say, “What a great crowd” and the bass player will talk right over it. “Yeah! What he said! Great crowd!”
I worked in a band for years with a drummer (who shared the banter) but we had a repertories, a script. We knew what we were going to say and rehearsed it. We were like Martin & Lewis (oh god, that’s how old I am).
I don’t recommend that. There needs to be one person leading the band, speaking, writing and singing. That’s the ideal situation for the audience – not to be distracted by others in the band. The other four members won’t agree with it but, from an audience standpoint, it works structurally, visually, and they’re able to remember what went on.
There’s a group dynamic that’s really difficult. It’s a dysfunctional family. One member will have his shit together but you have to speak to all five of them? It ain’t going to work.
– Rod Stewart & Larry Butler
Who got all this advice naturally and who never got it and lost their way?
Oh boy. The upside of my 20 years at Warner was, if you got on the label, you had to have something going on. It wasn’t a school for artists; either you had it or you didn’t. There were a lot of young English bands that came over during the ‘80s that either took my advice or didn’t.
One band that I had nothing to say to was U2. They had their shit together the moment they got here. I just marveled every night at Bono. Here’s this frontman; nobody else was talking on the mic yet everyone was a distinctive personality. It was a band. It wasn’t, “I’m Bono and here are my three musicians.” They walked that line of group dynamic very well – as evidenced by them still being together.
The ones that didn’t work? There was a young band that was the hot new thing in England. You didn’t need to be a good performer there and they were shoe-gazers. They were on Sire. Seymour Stein signed them and brought them over. They had some college radio play; they were on tour in Texas and working their way to L.A. After three, four nights I was saying to the leader, “This may work in London and in some places in America but when you get to L.A., this isn’t going to work.”
One thing I said was that they needed to downplay the guitarist. The set was based around the singer but he would give undue time to the lead guitarist, and the guy wasn’t any good.
“Let the lead guitar part go. We have Eddie Van Halen in town. It’s embarrassing. You’re touting this guy as being wonderful; he’s not.”
I also brought up how he’s not talking between songs, looking at his shoes, etc.
This kid went bananas about how wrong I was. He called his manager and didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I got called in to the office and told I was off the tour. I said, “That’s fine. I don’t need to tour with this band.” I wrote my letter of apology and that was that.
They got to L.A. They played the show. It got panned. The band disappeared. That’s the last we heard of them.
That’s why I work with kids 16-21. They don’t have any bad habits yet. If they’re over 21, they know everything and their four years outweighs my 40 years. All I can tell them is, “We’re here at Hotel Café and 20 people came to see you. That’s great. Let’s meet here again in a year after the same 20 people come to see you we’ll talk. By the way, you will have lost an entire year wondering what to do next.”
That’s pretty much my farewell speech to a lot of performers.
What else?
I work with young kids and their parents are generally financing it. They have to; they’re not going to get anywhere without some kind of funding.
Still, I say to parents, “First, I’m going to save you $100,000 because I do not want your kid to make an album. I do not want your kid to make a video and I do not want your kid to tour.”
There are three money pits, right there. Your kid needs to be ready and that won’t be for a while. I’m going to work with the kid for six months to a year, however long the kid can put up with me. At some point you’re going to get better or quit and that’s when you’ll save your $100,000 or then spend it on the album, tour and video.
If they’re still willing to go for it, and ready, where do they play?
If they’re going to play out, I don’t want them to play where they will be seen. It’s going to be rough. First impressions are everything and you don’t want to come on too soon, too fast. You want to be in the coffee shop in that other, small town. That’s where you make your mistakes.
No matter how much you rehearse in your rec room and basement parties, once you step onstage with lights and PA, it’s a whole different ballgame. That’s why I recommend you build your own stage in your own garage with hot lights and a P.A. That’s where you’re going to be and you better get comfortable fast.
Anything you’d like to add in conclusion?
I say it a lot: It’s not about who has the most talent. It’s about who wants it more and is willing to go get it.