Most teachers find that it's difficult to predict which students in their classroom will end up being most successful in life, so they try to somehow reach and inspire everyone. By most standards, Mike Lawson's success would not have been foreseen. (During his teen years, his high school nicknamed him "the visitor".) However, he had a couple of things going for him -- a love of music, specifically for the guitar, and a drive to success in the music business. He also had teachers who turned out to be an important influence in his life.
In Mike's case, his interest, knowledge, and talent for playing the guitar was the unifying factor that enabled him to go through a series of occupations, make important connections and choices in his music career. Eventually, he was able to implement some of his own personal vision in the music industry. He has been a professional musician in clubs and on tours, a songwriter and publisher, a marketing specialist for Gibson Guitars, and a pioneer in the use of the Internet to promote the music industry. His current position is General Manager for Mix Bookshelf, a publishing house devoted to providing information resources for professional musicians and educators.
Mike has an interesting collection of guitars. Click on these links to see photos:
Some music industry pictures:
CMEA met up with Mike at his home in the El Sobrante hills.
CMEA: How did you get your start in the music business?
ML: Speaking strictly of the business side rather than performing? The best place to start on that is when I left Pensacola and sold all of my gear, everything, to move to Nashville to get into the music business as opposed to be a performer or songwriter. I had my first child coming. Even though I was making good money performing, it was sporadic. I might go two months where I made three or four grand a month, and have two months where I'm making $150 to $200 a month. It really depended on the weather, and school seasons, college sessions, and home games and football games, and all kinds of things. So, I wanted something more stable.
The only thing I could figure out to do was try to start a business, sell my gear, and put together a good opportunity. My original intention was to publish music, and if I had to, work some kind of night job at the same time. I didn't end up having to do that for long, thankfully. I went to the South by Southwest Music Conference in 1991, and met a fellow there named Greg Forest. He was walking around with a book of contracts printed out with a floppy disk put in an envelope in the back. It contained contracts for the music industry, for working musicians, in all -- 75 to 80 different types of agreements in there. I thought, this is real good stuff for the average guitar player from Mobile or Pensacola who didn't have access to this information. This is a good product; I'll make them a publishing offer. As music publishers, we were starving. We pitched, and demoed some songs and things like that, ended up getting a cut with "The Dillards" and worked with a few writers as publishers. But we weren't really making any money there, so we put this software on the market, called The Entertainment Source Library. It sold pretty well for the year and a half or two years after we released it.
This was really when computers were on the edge of becoming household items. It was a DOS world and the best Mac out at the time still had a tiny black and white monitor. Then Windows all of a sudden came on to the scene, and the computer started going through a change and metamorphoses. I mean, this was when CompuServe was really the big on-line service, and nobody really knew quite what to do with online services. The Entertainment Source Library was a text entry thing, you know, when people were running 286's and Bill Gates said, ".. nobody would ever need more than half a meg of RAM." It became apparent to me that with Windows and color monitors coming out, and all the rapid changes to software as a whole, I would need to produce an upgrade, and I hadn't quite depleted the inventory I had already invested in.
So, I approached Mix Bookshelf and said "You've been a real big customer of mine. Maybe you should do the upgrade and keep publishing this program. " And they were interested, and bought the rights from me for a "song" -- inventory, publishing contract, everything. About the time that the buyout occurred I went to work for Gibson Guitar.
CMEA: What did you do at Gibson?
ML: I started out as the Marketing Coordinator for the Gibson USA Electric Division. It was an exciting year to work at Gibson, as 1994 was their 100th Anniversary. I did a variety of things there: setting up photo shoots for guitars as well as artists, hiring photographers, creating ad materials, overseeing the design and creation of different marketing projects, working with media buys, creating sell in and sell through concepts for products so we could move existing inventory and generate more orders. I did all the grunt work that went with it and I handled a lot of stuff with the entertainers -- the endorsers.
Once the Entertainment Relations Division signed an artist, it was up to each division's Marketing Department to try to make use of their name recognition. We had an Entertainment Relations Division at the time that was all over the country and world. They would sign endorsers, and we would try to do some type of promotion with the ones that hit our particular need at a certain time -- maybe a series of clinics where you send an artist out to ten or twelve cities. I did that with Me'shell NdgeO'cello. I did that with Hot Tuna (Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady) and Dennis Robbins. I also handled clinics with Alec John Such (Bon Jovi), Elliott Easton (the Cars), Ace Frehley (KISS), Herb Ellis, Mike Estes (Lynyrd Skynyrd) and several others. I had the privilege of working with some of the biggest names out in rock music out there: Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Aerosmith, The Eagles. I got to do a lot of promotions with a lot of artists. I can't even remember them all now. When many of the artists would come to Nashville, I would often get to take them through the plant. If the Entertainment Relations Division had made promises on certain types of gear, even if they were ones they perhaps should not have made, it would be, in many cases, my problem to physically go into the plant and put my hands on the instrument, rather than just looking at inventory and going "Oh, we don't have one." I may have to dig one up from repair and get the repair done quickly -- bugging people to get the thing built out and shipped to meet a deadline.
I did promotions for Gibson at different theme parks from Opryland to the Six Flags. I also used my past experience with software and some of the forums on CompuServe that I helped develop back in the early 90's. That became the most rewarding part of my time with Gibson.
CMEA: Describe some of the on-line projects you worked on.
ML: Another thing I did with Gibson was on-line interviews with a lot of different artists. I'll go into that a little bit, and then we'll talk about the Internet. The other thing at that level of the job, while I was still just the Marketing Coordinator, was I really wanted to make Gibson the first music instrument manufacturer to have an on-line electronic outpost, where they could be reached by consumers.
Now I had been instrumental in developing forums for some of the first record labels to come onto CompuServe. I did interviews on CompuServe with artists like Thomas Dolby, Bob Welch, and Lou Reed, while I still had the software company. I was, like everyone now, trying to figure out how to make money from this on-line thing, and at the time not being very successful at making any, at least with the people at CompuServe.
One of the forums I helped form was a music industry forum on CompuServe. I was trying to put Gibson on it immediately. The go word is "INMUSIC" on CompuServe. In there we had different companies, like Gibson, and Peavey, and all these other different types of manufacturers, some booking agencies, and people like that setting up shop there. A lot of very well run places, for the most part. It was kind of sporadic because you can't count on musicians for very long for anything. But we put Gibson in there and started a forum. Gave away a $10,000 Les Paul guitar on line as part of a contest that we had over 100,000 people enter via CompuServe for our 100th anniversary, and interviewed Jorma and Jack (Hot Tuna) with Robbie Krieger (The Doors) on line to give the thing away live.
Well, the CompuServe thing got popular, it was real exciting, all of this on-line stuff was starting to boom, all of a sudden E-mail was something people had, and it just kind of evolved. You saw it happen just before your eyes. For a brief period, CompuServe was still king and the forum was going very well. When the Internet browsers came around, I put a proposal together to Henry Juskiewicz, who owns Gibson, to let me leave the position I was in and start a separate division, if you will, to create an Internet site for Gibson. It was initially being tinkered with by some guys from MIS who had gotten some college students (the Web Guys) to come in and put something up there -- at least establish us as the first guitar company to have a web site. I wanted to come in and basically take the reins -- put the right marketing material in it -- make real full use of it from an editorial and marketing standpoint as opposed to just "Hey, we're online." We did some revolutionary stuff in my opinion. We did one of the first "webcasts" or "Cybercasts" where I interviewed Kris Kristofferson via the Internet using CU-Seeme video and real time audio through a Mac. People around the world tuned in for almost an hour and could hear and see everything Kris and I said or did during the interview and could interact by typing in questions using IRC.
So, we did some pretty extraordinary things online as far as guitar companies go. You've got to remember that what Gibson has done best for 100 years is take trees, cut them down, turn them into great guitars and sell them. So, this was really out of their field, right? Henry was really into it, very supportive, and let us buy an SGI server and get a T-1 line. I had about ten people working for me by the time I left the company. We built a 5,000 page site. To this day, it does about 65,000 to 75,000 hits a day on the home page, which is respectable. I hired writers for it, graphic artists, and a slew of part-time and full-time programmers.
Then Henry had this idea to turn it into a shopping mall and sell things on-line. I thought that would be cool for other people's products, like Mix Bookshelf. The shopping site with Mix Bookshelf opened on October 6th of 1996. It has been very successful so far in selling products to people from the four corners of the earth.
The best thing about the Internet for us is that we have found a whole new world of people from all over Europe and the Pacific Rim, and Australia, who are into our products. They're ordering books, catalogs, sending me E-mail, saying "Where have you been all my life?" So the information is out there, if you look hard enough. That's what we do; we publish information.
I was putting the deal together with Mix Bookshelf during the summer NAMM show in 1996 to take the Bookshelf catalog in its entirety and put it on Gibson's web site. The idea was to create a symbiosis for the two companies. Gibson would get additional content by having Mix Bookshelf on its site; Gibson would get marketing from Bookshelf by their advertising in the catalog that they're online in cooperation with Gibson. Each got the goodwill of the two company names side by side. Henry was for it, Bookshelf's parent company Cardinal Business Media was for it, so we did it.
In the process of doing it, Craig Wingate, who was General Manager at Bookshelf, left the company to go to work for the innovative San Francisco internet company "Vivid Studios." I had known Craig for years, he handled the buy of the software rights from me, and when he left, and I ended up finishing the deal with Cardinal's Vice President of the Sports and Entertainment Group. He was looking for a replacement for Craig and asked me several times: "We really need a new general manager out here quick. Do you know anybody that might be interested?" After three our four inquiries like that, we discussed it further, they made an offer and I accepted.
CMEA: Let's talk about some other areas of your background. How much of an important influence in your life has the guitar been?
ML: Oh, it's been my saving grace. The first time I saw a guitar, I think it was some kind of an epiphany. I knew, the first time I saw one, that I would have one by me the rest of my life at some point. I wasn't a kid who played baseball very well, or was interested in sports that much. That's a real common story we musicians have. That wasn't my bag when I was a little kid; I had to have something to do while the other kids were going off and playing little league or something. I thought it was much cooler.
Groups playing on TV playing really interested me. I used to beg to stay up late to watch "Midnight Special" and "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert". (I grew up in the age of Kiss) and I and my little friends said "we're going to be the next Kiss -- at least we're going to hold guitars and paint our faces and won't this be fun." So the three of us got guitars within two or three months of each other. I was eight, they were nine and ten. Their fathers got them pretty decent $60 to $75 guitars back then, which was a pretty good chunk of money in 1977. And I got one from K-Mart that was a horrible plywood sunburst three-quarter scale double pickguard nightmare. It was not only horribly ugly to look at, but it hurt my hand. It made me r-e-a-l-l-y, really, want to play, so I could impress my folks enough to help me get a real guitar. So I actually learned the chords and dealt with callused and close to bleeding fingertips.
CMEA: So how did that band turn out?
ML: It never happened. I was the only one who learned to play. I was in the fourth grade at the time, and two years later, I ended up playing with some kids from the local junior high. The first gig I ever played was also the first gig I ever booked -- I was in sixth grade. Now in Florida, we had at the time "sixth grade centers." You went to a K - 5 elementary school, and you went one year through a sixth grade center -- there were two of them in our county. Basically, they were old schools from black neighborhoods that were left over after integration. They had to figure out a way to make use of this property, and they felt it would be a good idea to prepare the fifth graders for changing classes and a different kind of high school environment before they get over there with the bigger kids. Junior high was seventh through ninth grades, and then tenth through twelfth grades for high school.
I went to the sixth grade, and the first gig I played and booked was at my old elementary school. They had a talent show every year. Now we didn't play in the talent show, but in between the talent show acts, there was an intermission. This was a big event: the spaghetti dinner and talent show at the school. I called the music teacher back at my old elementary school, and said, "Hey, can we come and play?" She let us play. So I called these guys and said "Hey, if you let me play with you, we can play at the school." (laughs) That was a quite a while ago. I was eleven years old, I believe.
CMEA: What did you do to develop your guitar skills?
ML: I didn't have guitar lessons as a kid. My folks couldn't really afford it, and back then, guitar lessons were $5.00 a half hour. Hell, I don't think my Dad was even making $10.00 an hour back then, and he wasn't about to pay some long haired hippy to teach me to play rock and roll for $5.00 a half hour when he wasn't even making that much.
I hung around the music store a lot and bugged the owners along with every guitar player who'd walk in for a tip or two. I also had a real good guy role model person in my life to help me with that, named Walt Hall, who was the director of the local Boys Club. His son, David, was one of the three guys that went out and got guitars. Walt had the most beautiful Gibson J200, a '66 or '67, beautiful tobacco sunburst finish. I was a little kid, and, man, that thing was HUGE on me. I couldn't reach my hands over it. So he taught us our first song, which is the only one I think those guys got anywhere on, and that was the Everly Brothers version of "All I Have To Do Is Dream." He basically made us draw four sets of six lines on a piece of notebook paper, filled in the frets with a C chord, A minor, F, and a G. We had to learn it in C, because he said F was one of the hardest first chords to learn. He said "when you've learned those chords, when you can finger those chords, come back I'll show you some more."
That was his way of teaching us. It's like, all right, you really want to learn, here you go, here's four chords, when you can play them, come back and see me. So I did, and he showed me how to strum it. And he wrote the words with it. And that's what turned me into playing.
I had song books, and I would buy sheet music of popular songs I liked, because they had chords drawn out over the words. I wasn't happy to read the staff or anything to do with the actual notation. I had the melody in my head and the chords, so I would play the songs from the sheet music real slow, and sing with it real slow. And my way of teaching myself was to do it until I could play it real fast. And then do it without looking at my hands. And then do it without looking at the music. That was my self teaching pattern. It works.
It wasn't until I was twelve and I had been playing nearly four years, that I got lessons. That was only because I found a non-credit community college course that was $25.00; I think it was two nights a week, three hours a night, for eight weeks. It was Beginning Blue Grass guitar. Now there was something my Dad could get behind. Good ol' hillbilly country music, and it was 25 bucks for eight weeks, you know, three bucks a week; he's doing the math, I could see it: "Aw, that's about 50 cents an hour, all right, okay, I'll pay for that."
But it was fun, because even though a lot of people said "Oh, you're gonna go play Blue Grass?!" -- you know, my friends. I'm, like, "Yea, but this is cool." So I got to go and learn. To be twelve, and actually be able to do that is pretty impressive to me, so, it was a pretty good thing. So those were the only formal lessons I had. That lasted a short while. By then I was dangerous, I thought I knew enough to play for money.
CMEA: Were there particular artists or albums that were influential to you?
ML: I had this teacher's assistant in the fifth grade who loaned me a copy of the White album of the Beatles. This album was ten years old by the time I got it. I remember going back and saying: "Could I buy that record from you or something?" And she goes "Well, you know, we've got a reel-to-reel copy at home, so you can just have it." That's when I really started getting interested in melodies and stories with words, and the lyric structure, instead of just loud banging Kiss music, which wasn't exactly meant for literary minded folks.
So the Beatles White Album was the first one that really kicked me in the butt. I listened to a lot of fifties music growing up, too, because my mother fought letting me have a Kiss album in the house until I was 9 1/2 or 10 years old. I would sneak one in now and then -- I was just getting into having a stereo and all that. She would go to the mall, from the cut-out bin, and she'd buy me Sha-Na-Na live albums and stuff like that. Which, I'm really happy she did. She was really into Elvis, so I listened to a lot of Elvis, and because of her trying to shield me from the blood-spitting-make-up-heathens, I got turned onto a lot of music that ended up being stuff I could play right away, too.
I got to where I could play that Everly Brothers song -- my God -- another epiphany, you know, I realized, hey, that's the same song (plays) -- that's like 500 fifties songs from the Sha-Na-Na albums! I can play "Tears On My Pillow" -- I can play "Silhouettes On the Shade," "At the Hop", all these different tunes! Eventually, Chuck Berry and Jimmy Hendrix became real important to me. At one point, the Grateful Dead's American Beauty album did to me -- almost ten years later -- what the White album did to me as a little kid. It gave me the same kind of awakening of another musical style out there. It turned out to be perfect for me. I was wondering "How did I miss this for so long?" Here's a band that's taking blue grass, jazz, and rock 'n' roll and kind of melding them all together with blues at the same time. It was just all the kinds of music that I liked, so I really got into Jerry Garcia's playing after that. I stuck with him as a big influence for a lot of years. I love what he does with an electric guitar, but, acoustically, the guy was just screamin'.
You ever heard the stuff he did -- some of his blue grass recordings -- like the Old And the Way album? That was a big influence. That was an album with Vasser Clements, Peter Rowan, and David Grisman. ...incredible. They took a Rolling Stones' song and turned it into a blue grass song. And that gave me kind of a reverse inspiration to would seek out blue grass tunes and give them kind of a Mississippi blues arrangement or something. It opened up my eyes, you know, you can have funk, you don't have to cover a song the way it sounds on the record. It's okay to go somewhere with it.
CMEA: What happened next in your career?
ML: I ended up quitting high school in 1984 and took my GED, because the judge said, "That would be the thing to do, son." So that's what I did. I was rather truant in my last year and a half in school, to say the least. They called me "the visitor" whenever I would show up at one of the music classes or one of the other classes. I was selective about it. I would go and get my unexcused absence pass, walk in the third period English class, hand it to the teacher, she would sign it, I'd walk back out and skip again.
So I wasn't going to make it in high school, and real college wasn't necessarily an option at the time. I did take Psychology and a Theater class at the local community college my last year of high school. I was in their production of "Our Town" and played the part of Sam Craig. But my parents were having trouble. So I ended spending a lot of time, where I grew up in Panama City, Florida, hanging around at the music store -- where I'd meet these musicians, working musicians, who would come in from all over the country to play all along the night clubs and bars and concert halls on Panama City Beach.
I ended up on the road, running lights and grunt work, and a variety of things for a short period with a band called The Pact that I had met at a night club. They ended up breaking up shortly after then. In Orlando, I spent about 90 days in Disney World working, sweeping streets there, which was a really bad idea. I realized, I play guitar. I shouldn't be out doing this, I need to go make money. I know how to do it; you call the club owners, you yak, you b.s., you go in and, hopefully if you don't suck too bad; you get paid and they ask you back. That's it in a nut shell.
In high school I played with a band with some guys from my local church. But when I left school, I started working with a lot of little bar bands in Florida, playing biker bars, beach clubs and all manner of places. I moved in 1988 from Panama City to Pensacola. When I got to Pensacola, I did about seven months with a blue grass band called "Cimarron", every Friday and Saturday night. There's a very Disney World-looking place called Good Time Charlie's owned by a very redneck Floridian. And while I was doing that two nights a week, I started doing solo gigs four or five nights a week at other places. I was working every night, I was single, I was in early 20's, and I'm making $100 to $150 a night, it's cash. I kept playing around and expanding a little bit, and put out a record in the beginning of 1990, called Underground which is since way out of print. It was an EP, six songs. I also wound up playing with a several different "Grateful Dead cover bands" in between playing solo gigs.
I wound up on tour with an avant-garde musician named Eugene Chadbourne. We did twelve cities - fourteen days - five states with this guy. Right after that tour, I went back and played the same cities again as a solo several times. Ranged from Austin, Texas, all the way through New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all those -- in Mississippi, and Athens and Atlanta, Tallahassee, -- basically the whole Southeast, into Texas. And the last tour I did was January, 1991 with -- a solo acoustic tour -- with the leader of of a Mobile band called Will and the Bushmen, Will Kimbrough.
Now Will had some things I thought I was aspiring to have. He had a band; he was from Mobile. He got signed by SBK records, was the first act to be signed by SBK (who later brought us such wonders as Wilson Phillips and Vanilla Ice). He had a publishing deal with EMI; he was doing well enough that he was able to buy his first house in Nashville. We went out and played in January, 1991, and the war started in the Middle East about half way through the tour. We basically had to go all the way to Austin, Texas, where the last show was, knowing that people were staying home and watching this Nintendo war on TV. So we just barely broke even the last half of the tour. Made good money up until then. After that tour I said "You know, I don't want to be like Will after all, I want to be guy that owns the copyrights to guys like Will." And that's what prompted me to say "I've got a kid coming now, this has been six or seven fun years, it's time to move on." That brings us up to Nashville.
CMEA: What was it like for you when you worked in Nashville?
ML: See, I'm one of these rare people that went to Nashville -- a musician that went to Nashville -- and didn't go to be a musician. I went there to stay around the music industry, be involved in the music industry, but not perform, not record, and not really to even write songs. I had to basically sell my gear to keep myself from playing gigs . I always said, if I have a PA system and an acoustic guitar, there's no excuse for me not making $150.00 every night. In order to make sure that I had to have something steady and constant for this new baby I was bringing into the world, I didn't go there with that intention.
But I ended up doing some sessions anyway...the office we rented in Nashville for the publishing business was in the old RCA building -- 30 Music Square West -- now owned by Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley and Harold Bradley. Owen is a legendary producer, and Chet, well, he's one of the finest players to ever hold a guitar. Harold was one of the most recorded session players in the world, he's the head of the Nashville Musicians Union now. That building had some great karma in it. In that building, there were a couple of studios.
One of them was Javelina Studios -- a huge room, you could play basketball in there; in fact they do. And down the hall was Studio C, and that's where RCA did the overdubs and the vocal parts for recordings back in the sixties. Fred Bogert, a former music educator, also from Florida, moved in to open Studio C. We met and got to be friends while he was getting his studio set up, and basically, we played songs for each other that we had written. He really liked some of mine, and said, "Why don't you do a record. I'll do a record for you, you don't have to pay for it up front and we'll just take our time. Just come in and we'll do a record." So, over five years, we did a couple of songs a year. That was all I could squeeze out of my time, and all he could squeeze out of his. I didn't have any financial incentive to rush to put a record out, so there was no reason to hurry.
It was a nice luxury, to have a brilliant producer who could also play a lot of stuff on the record. He told me "Why don't you get some of your friends to play on this with you?" So I ended up getting a handful of folks to play on it -- Jorma Kaukonen from Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna; Joe Lewis Walker (a San Francisco blues artist on Polygram/Verve Records) and Merl Saunders (Jerry Garcia Band) plays on it. Former Fleetwood Mac guitarist and solo artist, Bob Welch who plays guitar on a song that he and I co-wrote. And Dennis Robbins, who's among the most successful song writers in Nashville. He co-wrote "Two of a Kind -- Working on a Full House" for Garth Brooks (among others) which, I think, sold nearly 20 million copies, last I heard. Not bad.
CMEA: If you're giving advice to a young guitarist, what kinds of preparation and knowledge would you advise them to learn; what do they need to study?
ML: Well, you know, first of all, I'm really against forcing any kid to play as a matter of ritual or routine. I really don't think that's a good way to teach a lasting love of music and love of the instrument. There are exceptions to that, I mean, there are children who are virtuosos, and you stay with them, or we wouldn't have the Mozarts we have. But, when I would see a kid who has that same kind of fire in their eyes for playing, I was willing to help them learn.
CMEA: What was it like for you to teach guitar students?
ML: I taught a lot out of my house, most of the time after I left high school and performed music, I always had two or three students -- some of whom I charged, some I didn't -- depending on their situation and their impetus for playing. They had to really want to learn like I did. I got my first electric guitar by cutting eight yards in one day with a borrowed lawn mower -- front yards only, $3 bucks a piece -- owed the guy a dollar, after I paid him $24.00 for this guitar that he wanted $25.00 for; it was an electric, you know. If you really want one bad enough, and you're willing to go cut grass, then, hey, I'm willing to teach you for free or very little.
A lot of times their parents would come ask "What should we do? He wants to play. - OK, I'm willing to spend $150 or $200. Would you go to the music store with me? or would you tell me what to buy? Would you pick one?" I would try to make sure they had something that didn't break their parents, but was at least playable, so that they would be encouraged to keep learning.
I also usually recommended against rushing into signing up for intensive study classes the first year or two the kid has to be taught. Whether it's me or any other teacher, the way to get the most excitement from a student, in my opinion, is to sustain interest in the instrument by letting the kid actually hear himself doing something.
Most kids I ran across wanted to learn to play rock and roll, that's usually why a kid says "I want to play guitar; I want to be a rock star." They don't start out wanting to be a classical guitarist or something, in most cases. I would teach them short, simple, two-chord and three-chord 12-bar blues songs. Say, okay, if you want to learn to play rock and roll music like The Who, or Clapton, or Led Zeppelin, or these guys, you have to start with the blues, because that's where that music came from. So I would teach them three chords, even if they were just one finger variations of the chord, where they were muting the rest of the strings. Like: (plays) just two strings. If they learn to do this (plays), and give them some words written with the changes on top of them.
I said "Now when you can play a couple of songs, and both your hands are working together, we'll move on to the chords. (plays) --and how to do little runs with it and stuff. I haven't seen most of these kids in years or so, because when I left, they were playing, you know, they were enjoying it and they were into it. They were thinking of ways to buy more guitars, better guitars, or bigger amps, or things they felt they needed.
It's how you approach it. I always think the kid has to have the real desire to play. If they do, take them to the shortest path of accomplishment first, and give them the satisfaction of creating something and doing something, and they'll develop the desire to go and really study the instrument themselves for real on their own. That's my philosophy. It seems to work. Only because it worked for me, so it's the only thing I know.
CMEA: Tell me about this album that you just recently completed. Is that the one you started in Nashville?
ML: Yes, I finally finished up the project I started in Nashville about three days before I moved to California. I took it to the mastering house a year ago last week, in Nashville. We did the final mix on the last song the day before. When I realized I would be moving to California, all of a sudden in three weeks, I called up the producer and said "Hey Fred, I guess we've got to actually finish now, because I'm leaving."
Yes, it was a lot of fun. I co-wrote three of the songs; two with a drummer I worked with for about six years named Tod Davis, and one with Bob Welch, another song on it, it's an old black spiritual song, " And We Bid You Good Night" -- I did my own arrangement the way the Dead use to do their own. It was great. I never thought I'd have a chance to meet these folks who played on it, let alone write, record, and perform with them. When I came out here last year, in February, I opened a show for Joe Louis Walker at Sweetwater in Mill Valley. He really is a fabulous Blues artist. He offered to play on one of the tracks for the record. When he came to Nashville, I stole him away from Steve Cropper, during a mixing session for Walker's Verve release "Blues of the Month Club which he produced." I dragged him over to Studio C and had him play two passes on the song and got him back to Steve in an hour. And we did it.
CMEA: What's the name of the album?
ML: The album is called Mike Lawson and Friends, Volume One. I came up with all these other esoteric titles, and the label I was going to release it on hated them all. I decided not to pursue getting it released with that label on a friendly level. It looks like I'll release it with the help of Merl Saunders, and my main objective, really is -- you see, I don't have to sell it now to make money or even pay for the master -- so I probably just build a web site, sell it online and have some fun with it. Merl has some distribution, so it could get out there. Hopefully people are going to buy it who don't know me. Maybe they'll buy it because they're Jorma fans; or because they're Merl or Welch fans. Hopefully once they hear it, they'll keep it because they like what I did.
CMEA: Let's talk about the music industry now a little bit. First of all, tell me about the direction you'd like to see the Mix Bookshelf go, now that you're in charge.
ML: Well the nice thing about taking this job is I got to take a business that had been around for almost fifteen years, with the funding of a supportive parent company and turn the thing around into something real successful. Of course, we're a real niche kind of publishing company. We don't have something everybody has to have or thinks they have to have. We just have a lot of things musicians need to have.
One of the things that we did over last year was establish our distribution relationship with Hal Leonard. Hal Leonard has been around for, what, fifty years now. We're going to be dealing with them, so they distribute to all the trades the books that we publish. The goal now is to be a book publisher, who happens to have a retail catalog business.
The goal is to take the resources and the history, and all of the great elements of being affiliated with Mix Magazine, and Electronic Musician, and put those to work for us in the book publishing arena. We published five new titles last year. We have eleven on the plate right now, a real nice selection of books on songwriting and music publishing, performing, all the way out to home recording and how to run a professional recording session. It's going to be a real good year for us. We plan to do at least ten to twelve titles a year, which will fatten our publishing catalog. That will make a respectable impression on the industry. We just had our first NAMM show since doing the deal with Hal Leonard. It was extremely successful.
This is fun for me because I came from a struggling working musician background. The impetus for putting that software out was, I looked at it and said "Hey, I would have bought this." So I'm trying to put out books now, still thinking in the mind set of the guy who would get up at two in the afternoon and sit on the phone for three hours, calling night clubs all over the Southeast trying to find work, and getting work playing till 4 AM and then do it all over again. I'm trying to think of what tools could we make that would make their goal of working in the business easier. That's the focus we're taking.
CMEA: Comment on how you want to deal with the music education market. Do you have plans in that area as well?
ML: Well, we're hoping to have more involvement in the coming years from the education market, in terms of letting us know what kind of titles work for them and helping us keep an eye on that marketplace, developing the right tools for it. We need their input because we're not staffed well enough to aggressively track the trends of the education industry, if you will, in the U.S.
It came as quite a surprise to me, when I spoke at the CMEA Bay Section Winter Conference, that there are high schools with MIDI labs in them now. Quite frankly, it blew my mind. We were lucky to have sheet music, and tubas and things. Most of the educators know we're here; many have been customers for fifteen years. They subscribe generally to Electronic Musician and Mix Magazine through a lot of programs that we have for educators.
We're hoping that they'll make use the fact that there is a publishing company here that's trying to put together resources to help those kids do something with the music they're learning once they're out of school. It would helpful for me to hear from the schools. I'd like to know ways to reach out to them as well. If it's attending conferences or there's a mailing list to participate in, or something, because a smart marketer develops products for a market that has a need. Your market definitely has a need.
CMEA: Do you see the education market as an important part of your bottom line?
ML: Well, the interesting thing about the education market, is they don't enjoy discounts like retail stores do. I would assume the school would be able to generally buy the way a store would. Then I learned that even through our distributor, unless it's a classroom adaptation, or ordered through the college store, or the school store or something, the maximum discount is usually about 20% for educators. That's apparently standard in the book industry as a whole-- if you get that.
We do a business with a lot of schools through Mix Bookshelf, and I understand why now, because we'll give them generally 20% off in the catalog on a lot of the retail books they order from us for their classrooms. That's real handy. So we do a lot of business with the education market-- they do hit our bottom line. I think we'll do a whole lot more now that we're working with Hal Leonard, at least with the titles we publish.
I wouldn't be surprised to find "The Studio Business Book" as a classroom adaptation in a high school or community college that might have a recording program started. Once you get out of high school, if you want to work in a studio, you need to know how. We publish the bible on it. It's a hard market to reach too, because even if you reach them with a brilliant product, and they have a definite need, there's no guarantee that they have any money to actually buy it, at least through the school.
I'm preaching to the choir here, I'm sure, but I hear of some schools that can't even get adequate plumbing. How are they going to afford a $350.00 ear training course? It's a Catch-22 marketplace, isn't it? You have a need, and we have the right product, but there's no buying power for a lot of them, which is unfortunate, especially with some of the more conservative governments that have been cutting back in these areas of arts. I won't name names.
CMEA: Any final thoughts for music educators or music students?
ML: To the educators, I'll recap some of what I tried, not so eloquently at times to say when I spoke at the conference, and that's -- You don't know who's sitting in that classroom. He may be a pain in the neck kid right now, going in twenty different directions, but he might really turn into a great musician. Don't lose sight of that. Because some kids know they're taking band now because it's an elective and they have to take an elective. Some kids are in there because they want to be playing on the Tonight Show twenty years from now. I would ask teachers to recognize that there are some students out there who are going that way and to support them. Don't belittle them or say, "Hah, playing like that, you'll never be a success." To be supportive of playing music as a real career choice even outside of teaching, because it is a viable career choice.
Other than a couple of years of high school, I had no real formal education. The odds said I would be a failure and would be stuck doing a menial job all my life. Even thought I had some hard knocks, I was able to go forward. High school is a tough time for students. Teenagers go through a lot of emotional and physical changes. It's easy to squash a kid's enthusiasm at that age, or to develop him into something that's really going to be special one day. Every musician you see out there, at every level, at every gig making money right now, at one point, was a student sitting in front of you in a classroom. Teachers have a lot bigger influence on people's lives than a lot of students would be willing to admit, for better or worse. There's a lot of different pieces in this whole business -- from people that own and run record stores, to record labels to the guy who runs the sound board at the local amphitheater-- and it all starts in one place, and that's a love of music. I don't know very many people in the business who don't start out with that epiphany at some age.
So, as students, you've just got to press on. Sometimes the teacher is a little more right than you realize. Sometimes they don't have a clue. It's up to you to be able to figure it out which is which. Looking back now, with this many years between high school, it's easy to see a lot of circumstances where I was an arrogant little punk, you know? And some other ones where I can look and go "Man, that guy was whacked; that teacher was just whacked." If you are not getting out of your local school what you think you need to get into this business, there are great resources available if working in music is what you want to do with your life. Get through high school, college if possible, or try to get into one of the music business trade school programs ranging from places like Full Sail ( a recording engineer training school in Orlando, FL) or Musician's Institute ( an intensive music industry/performance school in Hollywood, CA.). If you can't do any of that, just start making music. And be prepared to live on a shoestring for a long time!
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