Behind the music

Bill Flanagan skewers the record industry in A&R

by Bob Gulla

Bill Flanagan

Bill Flanagan seems happy to be back on his home turf. A native of Rhode Island and a veteran contributor to the NewPaper and the Providence Journal, he has spent a great deal of the last 20 years pounding the pavement in New York City, where he worked initially as editor-in-chief of Musician magazine and currently serves as a senior vice president and editorial director of VH1.

He's back in Rhode Island only temporarily, stopping off to plug his book and have some laughs with old friends. He'd just gotten off a two-week vacation in a Maine cabin, his customary summer destination, and he looks rested, sanguine, a little pink in the cheeks. Over breakfast at a not-so-classy joint in the not-so-classy reaches of the Route 2 business district in Warwick, Flanagan and I got a chance to sit down and discuss a few things: his book, his career, the music business, and his short-term plans.

"Ever since I was 24 or so I've called myself a writer. But it wasn't an honorific, something to be proud of. It was more like calling myself a carpenter or a plumber, something I just did," he admits. Flanagan's new book is A&R (Random House), an exploration of the music industry that's been getting terrific notice from both the critical and popular sides of the book business. In his first novel, Flanagan traces the opposing trajectories of two A&R reps at a fictional label called WorldWide Records, one on the rise and the other flagging, both of whom are faced with difficult moral decisions in a changing record business. The book is sensitively written, offering shades of gray instead of black-and-white moral lessons that clearly delineate good and evil.

"No, it's not a black-and-white book," he agrees, "because the music industry isn't all black-and-white. There are struggles between regimes, the old school and the new school, and references to the way the old sensibility of signing artists out of passion and belief is being forced out because of commerce and other considerations. But I tried to connect the dots in the story to emphasize the gray areas."

I tell him the movie rights would sell quicker with more emphasis on black and white. "The movie rights have already been sold," he says matter-of-factly. "Warner Bros. bought them a year ago, before the book was published. But I have to admit, an executive did approach me to suggest I tweak the ending for effect." Bill smiles and denies acceding.

A&R is not Flanagan's first book. Back in 1995, the author broke through with U2 At the End of the World, a musical travelogue/biographical odyssey in which he traipsed the world with Dublin's biggest rock band. Further back, in 1986, he compiled Written In My Soul, a compendium of rock's great songwriters talking about creating their music, including many marquee interviews he'd done while helming Musician.

"I decided to take this VH1 job while I was working at Musician," he says. "I'd seen the writing on the wall really early on with the magazine. I knew when they started pulling it apart that it was headed in the wrong direction. At the time I was working in the same building as all those MTV executives -- young executives with nose rings were riding in the same elevators as the Billboard and Musician editors and the network was really on the move. More and more floors of the building were being occupied by music television."

As Musician's ship appeared to be sinking, despite herculean writing efforts from Flanagan and his acclaimed stable of contributors, Bill scrapped his idea of writing full-time to jump on with VH1, along with the talented John Sykes. The pair, along with MTV network prez Tom Freston, yearned to create an intelligent music channel for adults. Of course, you know what happened next. VH1 has became one of the great success stories of the music biz in the '90s, with Flanagan, in part, credited for that success. "I'd put an episode of our Legends up against almost any rock journalism these days," says Flanagan, with a little sadness. "I really feel that there's just not the kind of talent coming up in the field that there once was."

Flanagan is bittersweet about music journalism's lost art. "Rock critics painted themselves into a corner with this punk orthodoxy. For a while, anything remotely related to punk was implicitly credible; it had a stamp of approval almost immediately from a hip group of writers. But I dare you to ask anyone in that cabal to tell the difference between the Sex Pistols and the Damned. Did they know that one was a very good band and one was a crappy band? I don't think so. Because of that orthodoxy, musicians and writers attempted to align themselves with punk to gain credibility. That was the end of open-minded rock criticism."

Flanagan has avoided that constriction, choosing instead to abide by more mainstream tenets. It's one of the reasons why his appointment and rise at VH1 makes so much sense.

Because of Flanagan's insider perspective of the music industry, A&R comes off as a sort of black comedy, a tragic, even pathetic view of a once-majestic institution. The book is littered with thinly disguised characters drawn at least in part from real-life personalities. "People ask me all the time who those characters are supposed to be and everyone has their guesses," says Flanagan, perhaps flattered that folks would read into his book on that level. "But the fact is, I had this story and these characters before I had any notion of who they might be in real life. As I made my way through the book, I began placing certain traits onto my characters based on people I really knew, real voices I heard." In a recent excerpt of his interior monologue written for the highbrow Web site Slate, Flanagan explained how Sinéad O'Connor had heard that one of his characters had been directly based on her.

"I found myself basing character's speech patterns on real people. At first I was not conscious of doing it. Once I recognized it, I realized that I had used a high-school friend for this character's voice, a fellow I work with for that one, a powerful rock manager for a third, and Sinéad for one of the female leads. I don't mean to suggest the character is Sinéad . . . I had the character before I had her speaking voice. It's more like Sinéad is the actress I cast in my head to portray this character while I wrote her dialogue."

For readers who have been around the Rhode Island music scene since, say, the '70s, it's fun to read the book and ID certain familiar personalities, or at least read vigilantly for off-the-cuff local references. (Phoenix columnist Jim Macnie and local musicmakers Emerson Torrey and Klem get namesakes in the book.)

It's been mor than a year since Flanagan's finished writing A&R, and he's now 100 pages into his next book, a novel of a more domestic nature about "husbands and wives and relationships." He admits, "I never wanted to be pigeonholed as a novelist who always wrote about music. Someone said to me once, `You could become the John Grisham of the music industry.' But I know of novelists who keep going to the same well time and again, and after five or six dips into it, they're no longer the kind of quality novelists they started out to be. If I try a new area -- while at the same time continuing to live my life in the music business -- I can ultimately go back to writing about music. Then I'll have something to go on, something fresh to return to."

WANDERING EYE. A unique and uplifting program of stories, songs, poetry, drumming and chanting returns to That Little Coffee Place on Post Road in North Kingstown. Strong Oak and Mary Wheelan give an encore performance entitled Sings In the Night. The title comes from the name of the main character in a collection of stories written by Strong Oak. The songs and music presented in the program come from Wheelan. The two, partners for 22 years, present in a variety of venues but the small, intimate atmosphere of TLCP is likely to be a perfect spot for an unusual evening of entertainment.

WishingTree Records' guy David Silva is excited about some reason news. He writes in with an update on the progress of WishingTree Records. "Our first release, The Amos House Collection, will be released worldwide on December 12." Bands participating now include Aden, the Aluminum Group, Wheat, Spoon, Idaho, the Lilac Time, Departure Lounge, Death Cab For Cutie, Beulah, the Clearing, Pino, the Ladybug Transistor, and Sparklehorse. The Amos House record will be kicked off with a huge party at a venue in Rhode Island, with, allegedly, most of the bands on the compilation. Good luck, DS!

Bob Gulla can be reached at b_gulla@yahoo.com.