Posts Tagged ‘80′s music’

By Joe Klein

It’s just wild how things from your past come back to haunt you when you least expect it!

Okay, I wasn’t really haunted by this. But, it still was quite a surprise! Here I was face-to-face with a decades-old radio commercial I produced that’s just found a new life—online!

Back in 1990, I was still producing radio and television commercials, mostly for record albums and movie soundtracks, as president of my Los Angeles-based production company, L.A. TRAX, INC. The very idea of becoming the leading producer of music spots happened pretty much by accident way back in 1977, when SCOTT SHANNON was working for CASABLANCA REOCRD AND FILMORKS president NEIL BOGART, and he met me at a recording session for the record label where I was the engineer. Scott and I became good friends almost instantly. I had been a radio deejay for about a year as a teenager back in the early seventies, and Scott had been a deejay himself before coming to L.A. and getting into the music business.

One thing lead to another, and, within weeks, I started producing ads for Casablanca. The commercials must have “done the job” pretty well because, soon, I was producing several commercials every month for the label. It got pretty crazy.

(On the POP MATTERS website, a really great and in-depth story about CASALANCA RECORDS, written by free lance journalist CHRISTIAN WIKANE, which includes the story of how I got started producing ads for Casablanca, was posted earlier this year.)

Within a year or so, I was producing spots for a few other labels and, by 1980, doing ads for several more record companies. It was crazy, and it ended up in a fifteen year-long run of producing well over 1,000 record and soundtrack ads for just about every major label based in L.A., which was pretty profitable for me and, apparently, VERY profitable for the record companies that became my very loyal clients!

As much as I enjoyed producing all of those crazy record spots, the money and success I found from that endeavor pretty much derailed me from my dream of being a record producer and having a big hit, or two, or a dozen!

My career as a “record ad man” came to an end in 1992, when I, and the music business, mutually decided to stop producing radio and television commercials as an important element in the marketing of music. By that time, music videos had become the big thing, and the budgets for commercials were all but eliminated. I continued on as a voice-over artist for a few more years before dropping out of the business for nearly a decade.

In 1995, I re-entered media production, but, this time, in “new media,” and launched THE PODCAST VOICE GUYS, which was renamed NEW MEDIA CRATIVE back in the summer of 2008.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I got an email a few days ago from the administrator of the website for recording artist JANE WIEDLIN, (former lead guitarist of the huge 80’s girl band THE GO-GO’S). She had heard an old radio ad I produced for Jane’s solo album TANGLED, which was released on EMI Records back in 1990. I had produced and ad for this album, featuring the single WORLD ON FIRE that same year, and, as it turns out, it was the very last ad I produced for that label!

I was asked if it was okay to post the spot on YouTube. I didn’t see any harm, so I agreed. Just a few hours later, my crazy little record ad was posted and even appeared as an item on JANE WIEDLIN’S BLOG!

Too crazy. I admit that I haven’t really spoken publicly of late of my “past life” as a producer of record and soundtrack album commercials, because I am a “new media” guy now. It never really occurred to me that there would be much interest in the “old skool” stuff I produced so many years ago. But, I guess there comes the time that “Everything Old Is New Again,” eventually!

So, here is that wild and wacky old radio spot in all it’s glory, for your dining and dubbing pleasure! BTW it’s yours truly who performs BOTH of the male voices on the commercial because the announcer I hired for the voice-over near the end of the ad called in sick at the last minute!

Here is the full music video for WORLD ON FIRE, which actually inspired the crazy commercial. I have to admit that Jane is pretty HOT, indeed, in this video! What do you think?