It’s an old story, and in many ways distinctly American. This is how it goes.
A young artist from a Southern city, in this case a musician from Nashville, wants to “make it.” He puts his band together and goes out gigging in search of the first big break. Hard work and talent pay off; a record deal is signed.
Then comes The War, in this case Vietnam, and the band loses half its members to the draft. They try to recreate their success with fill-in players, but lose their record deal in the process. The new band goes out gigging in search of the first big break.
One rainy night in Owensboro, Kentucky, the band plays another in a string of miserable shows to a nearly empty house. The artist reflects in a parking lot, soaked, dejected and defeated. He gives up.
He moves back to Nashville and tries to find gainful employment. He interviews for two positions and gets hired for neither. In his third interview (for a job as a salesman) he sits across from a brick wall of a man with a marine tattoo on his bicep. Two paragraphs into his speech, “I’m a hard worker and…” the marine cuts the artist off.
“What are you doing here? You’re wasting your time and mine.”
“No I’m not. I really need the work!”
“Come on. You’re a musician. You shouldn’t be here. Go play music.”
The artist would reflect later, “All I needed was permission.”
He leaves the office, walks down the street into a recording studio and asks for a job. For $50 a week, he is hired to sweep the floors.
A few months later, a guitar player is needed for a session and he sits in. It goes well. He goes back to sweeping floors.
A few months after that, the studio needs somebody to sing a jingle and he rises to the occasion. It goes well. He goes back to sweeping floors.
About a year after he first picked up a broom in that studio, he gets his first big break. The recording engineer scheduled for the day’s session had gone on a bender and was nowhere to be found. The artist is asked if he can record the session. He says yes, though he has never recorded anything in his life.
That was the first day Paul Worley recorded a session.
Sometimes the story starts in a Northern city, in this case Philadelphia—the Philadelphia Boy’s choir to be exact. A young boy has a voice and a passion. He meets some talented friends. They practice their harmonies in a high school bathroom because they like the acoustics.
One night, the group sneaks backstage at a local radio show and run into a producer. With an impromptu a cappella performance, the boys sing their way into a deal.
The young boy was Shawn Stockman and those boys were about to become Boyz II Men.
Artistic origin stories have their own special mythology. They serve as the dramatic first act of every “Behind the Music,” before the great heights, drug spiral, break-up, sobriety, and reunion.
Every great origin story has a combination of two elements, prodigious talent and sacrifice.
Paul Worley’s story resonates because of his hard work, determination and humble pursuit of any opportunity to get his foot in the door. We can identify with the struggle, the doubts, and appreciate that ultimately the hard work paid off.
Shawn Stockman’s story is less about relating to an artist and more about marveling at raw ability, believing that some people have something so undeniable that it is by chance, rather than design that they make it. We like to think that they possess something so wonderful that the rest of the world has no choice but to find it—a precocious group of kids who knew they had the chops and were just waiting for an opportunity to show them off.
Some other precocious kid once sang “the times, they are a-changin’,” [1] in a moment of profound tautology. Much has changed since the day that song was penned, including the very way that kid would have gotten his first big break. The world now requires less travel to find which door to open and, for better or for worse, we are likely past the days where talent can hide behind a broom for a year.
Paul Worley, who traded in his broom for a pile of Grammys, is now on the other side of that proverbial door (which one seeks out with outstretched foot). As a producer and session musician with over 30 years in the business, he has seen many come searching for what he terms “The Answer.”
The question: “Do I have what it takes?”
Some artists spend their entire lives in search of the opportunity to ask that question to somebody in Worley’s position. Whether the answer is closer to “no” or “yes,” getting that chance to share with an expert and get his or her feedback is a milestone in the life of an artist. It is an opportunity, the search for which gives us many of our great origin stories. The climax in the story of the young artist is the moment after that question is spoken, as it hangs in the air. Maybe, just maybe…
Living in Nashville, Paul Worley is surrounded by aspiring talent and their ongoing origin stories. What he is most struck by is the severity of the sacrifice he sees.
“For thirty years, I’ve watched people completely uproot their lives and destroy their families to move to Nashville for the chance to put themselves in front of somebody to get The Answer."
And The Answer, if it ever comes, is almost always “no,” a rejection that comes at a high cost. Says Worley, “It can be pretty tough. Ninety-five percent don’t even make it through the first door.”
Worley refers to working with aspiring talent as his calling, but for a long time felt that the system for finding talent was inefficient and resulted in too much suffering. Then, he found out about what he calls “a great leap forward.”
In 2007, Corey Stanford and Nathaniel Casey began working on an idea: use the Internet to get talent in touch with experts. Simple. They took the idea to Ronald Harrison, and on November 1st 2009, BlazeTrak was launched.
This is how the BlazeTrak system works. An artist signs in to the website and looks through the roster of available experts. He chooses which expert he would like to get in touch with, pays a fee (which differs by the artist, but generally seems to me very reasonable) and sends that expert his pitch: a video, an audio clip, a resume, etc. Once his material is sent in, the artist is not only guaranteed that the expert will look at the material in its entirety, but also that the expert will respond--personally and with a video. The Answer. Guaranteed.
The fee is key. Says Casey, “You have to put something in the middle. Money increases value, decreases volume and pays for time." The fee is enough to keep out the noise of submissions who are not serious, but isn’t enough where is it the main focus of the interaction. Most of the experts on the site donate the money they make or reinvest it in their collaborations.
So, if not the money, what is in it for the experts? Even though each BlazeTrak Professional I spoke with had different reasons for being on the website’s roster, there were many common threads.
Says Grammy-award-wining producer, Infinity, “it’s all about building my team.” To stay at the top, you need to surround yourself with talent. A few months ago, Infinity met an aspiring a piano player through BlazeTrak who he now calls whenever he wants a piano part on a track. He is currently looking for a new song-writer to work with.
Says Kerry Bannigan, CEO of the fashion company Nolcha, “Our whole goal is to help aspiring talent and give them a safe professional haven.” Nolcha ran a design competition through Blazetrak last year and the winner is currently selling through them.
Says Shawn Stockman, yet another Grammy owner, “I love to speak to people one-on-one, to let them hear my voice and find theirs. I like passing on information. People get in the business for all types of reason and a lot of them are really distorted. They don’t really understand the secret to being in the business longer than a year. Real talent only takes a nap, it never dies.” Stockman has given that message to over one hundred people, one-on-one, since joining BlazeTrak.
It’s easy to forget that people who “make it” are still artists first and foremost, and love their art. The art is at the center of their work with aspiring talent. It’s not only “giving back” but also making something new. The BlazeTrak system seems to help this process. Each Professional I spoke to said that it was very important that they were required to respond to everybody and that they knew the quality of their submissions was going to be high enough to be worth giving their time. The system insures that everybody is held accountable.
So, artists are using the Internet to connect to other artists in increasingly convenient and efficient ways. Is this the death of origin mythology? Probably not. This is a better way to get The Answer, but the interest is always in who is asking The Question.
---
[1] Okay, using that song as a transition is comfortably in the top 10 hacky writer moves, but I really couldn’t resist. Mostly because I keep hearing that voiceover bit from Anchorman in my head when I read it.
