Randy Poe - Stalking the Red Headed Stranger

Copyright 2012 by Randy Poe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2012 by Hal Leonard Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

7777 West Bluemound Road

Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

The Girls I Never Kissed (Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller) 1972, 1986 Jerome Leiber Music/Purple Starfish Music. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Photos on pages by Randy Poe. All other photos are from the authors collection.

Book design by Damien Castaneda

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poe, Randy, 1955

Stalking the red headed stranger, or, How to get your songs into the hands of the artists who really matter through show business trickery, underhanded skullduggery, shrewdness, and chicanery as well as various less nefarious methods of song plugging / Randy Poe.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4584-0274-5 (pbk.)

1. Music tradeVocational guidance. 2. Popular musicWriting and publishing. I. Title. II. Title: Stalking the red headed stranger. III. Title: How to get your songs into the hands of the artists who really matter through show business trickery, underhanded skullduggery, shrewdness, and chicanery as well as various less nefarious methods of song plugging.

ML3790.P64 2012

781.64023dc23

2011052638

www.halleonardbooks.com

Contents

There are no bad days

Randall Poodie Locke, 19482009

I finished writing Stalking the Red Headed Stranger in the wee, small hours of Sunday morning, August 21, 2011. Less than twenty-four hours later, Jerry Leiber passed away at the age of seventy-eight.

As you will read in the pages ahead, Jerry Leiber is a very important part of this story, just as he has been a very important part of my life for more than a quarter century.

As I sit at this keyboard trying to envision a world without Jerry, my mind drifts back to a business meeting at Leiber and Stollers publishing headquarters several years ago. Mike Stollers son Peter and I were sitting with the two songwriters, excitedly expressing our latest ideas on how best to promote what we kept referring to as the legacy of Leiber and Stoller. Peter and I had used the word legacy about a half dozen times, when Jerry slowly raised his left hand to silence us. After one of his perfectly timed dramatic pauses, he looked me right in the eye and said, Dont say legacy. Please. Say, living legacy.

Jerry Leiberthe consummate word man.

And so, for this book, the living legacy remains, and the tense shall not be past. If theres one thing of which I am absolutely certain, it is this: the songs of Leiber and Stoller will outlive us all.

To quote one of Jerry Leibers most famous lyrics, Lets break out the booze and have a ball. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed writing it for you.

August 23, 2011

One day in 1969, Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter, were sitting in their house in Hendersonville, Tennessee, when a helicopter landed on their lawn. The pilot was a young songwriter named Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson stepped out of the chopper with a beer in one hand and a cassette tape of Sunday Morning Coming Down in the other.

***

I saw Johnny Cash perform Sunday Morning Coming Down on TV one night and listened as he told the story: Heres a song written by my friend Kris Kristofferson, and I got it in a very strange way, Cash said. I got it right out of the sky. One afternoon, June said, Some fool has landed in our yard in a helicopter. Here was Kris, and he said, I thought this might be the best way to get a song to youbring it right out of the sky. I said, You got it. Lets listen to it.

Johnny Cashs recording of Sunday Morning Coming Down hit the country charts in September of 1970, eventually reaching No. 1. The record even made the Top 50 on the pop charts, and went on to receive the Country Music Associations award for Song of the Year.

Ive heard a lot of great song plugging anees during my thirty-plus years in the music business, and the one about Kris Kristofferson pitching Sunday Morning Coming Down to Johnny Cash via helicopter is among my all-time favorites. And of course, hardly a word of the tale is true.

Kristoffersons first album included his own version of Sunday Morning Coming Down, as well as a song that would become a posthumous hit for Janis Joplin. After Janiss record hit the top of the pop charts, Kriss debut album was given a new cover photo and a new title: Me and Bobby McGee.

Johnny Cash had a very creative memory, says Kris. The songwriter did, indeed, land a helicopter on Johnny Cashs lawn oncebut as Kris recalls the events of that day, Cash wasnt even at home. And the tape Kristofferson had with him that he wanted to give to the absentee Cash was actually a song nobody ever cut called It No Longer Matters. As far as the beer in one hand and cassette in the other is concerned, Kris points out, If Id ever tried to fly a helicopter with a beer, I dont know where the hell Id put it, because youve got to use both hands to fly! Luckily, Johnny Cash wasnt one to let the truth get in the way of a good song plugging story.

Back in a previous millennium, I wrote my first bookMusic Publishing: A Songwriters Guidewhich explained how the semi-mysterious business of music publishing works. Even though Im a music publisher myself, Im first and foremost a lover of songs and a fan of songwriters, so I wrote the music publishing book in an attempt to create a more level playing field for those wanting to get their songs published without getting ripped off too badly in the process. In those pages, I covered practically everything I knew about the subject of music publishing except song plugging. I provided a definition of song plugging in its simplest form (matching a song with an artist and then attempting to get that artist to record the song in question), but I didnt go into much detail about the history of song plugging or how songs are pitched. Why not? Because I figured it would take another entire book to try to cover the subject properly. Turns out I was right.

In truth, there isnt any one specific way to plug a song any more than theres one specific way to sell a used car, pitch a script to a motion picture studio, or convince your kids to brush their teeth. In the end, its about strategy and salesmanship. And you cant possibly make the sale unless you first devise a successful plan for familiarizing the potential buyer with what youre sellingbe it a song, a car, a script, or the concept of cavity-free teeth.

I once saw a television commercial promoting a medical treatment center. Throughout the TV ad, there was some tiny type running across the bottom of the screen. Eventually curiosity got the best of me, so I rolled off of my sofa and got about six inches away from my television set. After no small amount of effort and squinting, I could finally read the phrase scrolling across the screen: No cases are typical. Now I had seen ads in the past with the disclaimer Not all cases are typical, but a disclaimer that absolutely no cases were typical didnt strike me as being the greatest sales pitch in the world (which probably explains why the type was so tiny). But as phrases go, its a perfect description of song plugging.