Music Career talk 18

It's the early to mid 80's in Hollywood. On the weekends the Sunset Strip is packed, hard to walk from club to club. Big hair, spandex, and power ballads was the vibe du jour. My plan was to produce as many artists as I could for low to no doe if that's what it would take to get my name out there. A lot of the bands I worked with had attorneys shopping their music to major labels, I always made sure "produced by Dito Godwin" was on all the work I did so lawyers, managers, and record labels would see my name, and know the level of my work. I spent the remainder of the 80's producing artists in every style of contemporary music. My plan for exposing my name and brand really worked, though it took years. I started great relationships with a number of A&R reps at major labels both in L.A. and Nashville. I remember parking my car on a Sunset strip Saturday night and commenting to a friend that I had produced every headline act at the four largest venues in the area. Bands knew A&R would listen to music I produced so finding work back then was great. My calender was full most months of the year. As my name and reputation grew I started getting offers of production work from labels including Interscope, M.C.A., R.C.A. and the rest of the pack. I did very high quality work, stayed within my budget and artists loved working with me as I did with them. Enter the 90's still doing well, but starting to hear and see a shift in music. By this time I had produced a number of major artists, but felt a void in my professional life. My attorney (one of several) called me and asked if I would go to the Roxy to see a band he was representing. They were a good hard rocking alternative band, with a strong following and in possession of real potential. The band had a development deal with Interscope Records which didn't go anywhere. I met with their manager who hired me to record a few new songs and remix a few others. After a some of rejections from other labels the manager and I decided to put an independent label together and not wait for a record company to come along and offer us a weak deal. We formed the company, and as luck would have it got a three page cover story in a major music magazine. This article would draw the attention of a very famous musician interested in what we were doing as an indie label. As I said I wouldn't mention any names, but this person came from a band known for wearing lots of makeup in the mid 70's to this day. Signing this artist opened the door to world wide distribution. We signed several other artists spent hundreds of thousands dollars and started selling records, it worked. We ran the company for four years, did our own radio promotion which turned out to be more successful then using some of the high priced radio indies that helped us burn through our money. We got to travel all over Europe and met some great people I still work with today. You'll have to read my book (when it comes out) for all the dirt, and I will name names. The company was sold in the late 90's, the timing could have been better!! At this point I leaned into my production career which had been all but abandoned while running the record company. Building that back up would prove to be really tough. Some of my contacts at the majors were gone and the need to cultivate new relationships was looming and so time consuming. In a radical move I relocated my family to Ashland Oregon 700 miles north of L.A. I needed to slow it down, so we moved into a 100 year old Victorian home and I started commuting from Ashland to L.A. for work while my family got to do some well deserved chilling in Oregon. I'm going to cut to the chase (excluding a decade of music production) and let you know that several years ago the urge to have a label kicked up its ugly head again, and with that said got a deal with Universal Music Group, loaded up the truck (No Camero any more) and moved back to L.A. By the way my friend from that snowball fight back in the 60's is about to record an album with me some 40 years later. "Get a real job mom?" I got one.