Jingles, circa 1988.

Composing music for commercials in a recording studio, often as clients waited, was my dream job. This was a good chunk of my college internship. For a short time afterward, it became my full-time job.

But all things balance out in life. While the pay was abysmal, the experience and development of my skill set was absolutely worth it.

My “not likely to happen but let’s see” goal when entering college was to eventually compose music for filmscores. It seemed a lofty aspiration, but I got close, albeit on a smaller scale.

Actual dramatic filmscores were not going to happen, but I figured out commercials would do. Also there were some “industrial films” (i.e. company training films and sales films) that needed soundtracks. They were close enough.

I declared a Music Business major at ISU, partially because I had friends in that major, but more specifically in hopes that I could someday land an internship in a recording studio. One of my college roommates off campus, Scott Mercer (a very talented guitarist and vocalist), was in the same academic program, but ahead of me. He did all the research, phone calls, paperwork, and footwork to do his internship in Indianapolis at a Jingle studio called Bennett Music. As a result of Scott making the introductions, I was able to easily follow suit.

Bennett Music had a 24-track 2-inch tape machine, two mastering half-track machines, a bunch of expensive mics, a giant board, a set of midi keyboards that I didn’t have to buy, drum machines, and an Atari computer sequencer that would sync with the tape machine via SMPTE. All of the masters were encoded with Dolby, so they would be useless at any other studio.

This place produced a lot of music for regional commercials (Their most famous prior to my time there was for Tom Raper RV in Richmond, IN) and soundtracks for industrial training films.

For the first couple months of my internship, until I got the hang of things, I was simply the “gopher,” often sent to the corner gas station to buy cigarettes for the engineer or clients. The rest of my time was spent putting up drywall, cleaning, emptying ashtrays (almost everybody smoked in those days), making coffee, washing coffee cups, cleaning, typing invoices, picking up lunch orders, and so forth. Frankly, the first few months were pretty demeaning.

But I was encouraged to stick around after hours to work with and familiarize myself with the equipment. Once I “learned the ropes” with the various components, their basic minimum functioning procedures, and the studio’s counterintuitive patch bay, I could start using my own creative skills with the recording equipment.

My first project was to play “Take Me Out To the Ballgame” for the background of an ad that played in Chicago. I don’t even remember what it was for. My first original multitrack project was done in the new 8-track studio—a space where I had just nailed up the drywall. This project was a soundtrack to go along with a slideshow of a social-work agency in Indianapolis. I was to write music and record it with a set of midi keyboards (mostly mine that I already owned and brought into the new studio) and sync it to go with each slide. Then I added the “dings” that would make the slideshow automatically move forward to the next image. My efforts produced several contrasting moods, appropriate to each subject addressed in the slideshow presentation, but transparent enough to only enhance, not distract. The client loved it. Joe, my boss, reached down and shook my hand.

Eventually I started to get the hang of the equipment in the larger 16-track studio, and on the days we got to compose and record, it was a heavenly job. The main engineer who always sent me to the gas station to buy his cigarettes moved on just as I was figuring out how to reliably control the equipment, and Eric Poole joined the team so I was no longer the “new guy.”

Eric was a fabulous vocalist and had a jazzy style at the keys that I did not yet possess. Between Eric, Bob Haggard (a master engineer and salesman), and the owner Joe Bennett (master salesman and engineer, great vocalist, and good acoustic guitarist), we wrote and recorded lots of music and entertained countless advertising agents. Much of our work was speculative; that was our primary niche in the Indianapolis market at the time. Ad agents with an idea for their client would hire us (we were the cheapest in town) to come up with music that fit their “copy” and, on the spot, we would create something right there, right then—usually me at the keys and and Eric at the mic. The agent would either nod or shake his head as we kept fishing for sonic moods. When something got a raised eyebrow, we would develop it from there, to specific guidelines of time constraint.

Unless it was for an industrial score, it would have to break at :29 and :59. Radio spots are always a minute long; :59 allows for a reverb trail. TV commercials are :30 seconds long—again, one second is left for the reverb trail. Write a piece that has breaks at both :29 and :59 and it could be edited for both. Then you made “Doughnut” mixes where the vocals would be at different combinations of the beginning and end—with a “hole” of instrumental music in the center for the announcer to give weekly specials, etc.

Some of our work made it on the air (it was a sweet feeling to occasionally hear one’s own work in the background of a commercial on the radio while stuck in an Indianapolis rush hour), but most of our efforts never made it beyond the board room. Nevertheless, my time at Bennett Music was so important in being able to be creative, on the spot, to specifications of the product or service sold. The experience was invaluable as a working musician. And I was in my early 20’s.

Writing and recording music was the best. However, on days where we just recorded voice-overs for commercials, the job was tedious. While some of the voice talents were wonderful people (Steve Salge and Billy Moore [the voice of “MONSTER TRUCKS!”], to name a couple), others were not as pleasant to work with. Still, I learned a great deal about the advertising business and especially the personality quirks of many of the copy writers in the Indy market at that time. Ad agents were much like the voice talent, in that some were almost never satisfied, but most were very easy to work with. I was always amazed how much studio time we charged while copy writers brought announcers to the recording session and the announcers tried to read more words than could fit in a minute. They had to streamline and rewrite the copy with the clock ticking on both the studio and the announcer’s time. Often they were on the phone with the client during this, seeing which parts of the advertising plan could be sacrificed for time.

My boss Joe Bennett was an old-fashioned salesman/business owner who worked the telephone all day long, every day, going through his Rolodex of clients and potential clients, always looking for a lead or cutting a deal. Often he would schedule social meetings with current and potential clients, just trying to stay on their radar. This was just what he did, and thank goodness he enjoyed it, because he would just call and call and call previous clients and make small talk for days on end, occasionally wandering down the hall to check up on our progress.

Joe was nefariously intelligent with the psychology of advertising agents. He had an old Coke machine next to his office that he stocked with beer, and at 4:30 each day we had a client in the studio (for official reasons or not), it was called “Beer 30” and everything would stop and we would all have a beer together. These ad agency people would want to be there simply for their free bottle of cold beer and to hang out and chat. Pretty soon I realized that our successes had as much to do with that, and with our open account at the Chicago’s Pizza that was down the street (we could take a client to lunch and charge it to Joe) as it did with our product.

There were more stories than I could ever go into, but the thrust of this page is to show off some of the musical fruits of our labor at the time. Many pieces you will hear on the following demo never made it beyond a board room, but on the other hand, I got to hear some of my work on the radio. Those were wonderful moments.

Eventually, after completing my internship and working full-time for nearly a year (all while living on the couch at a high-school friend’s apartment in Indianapolis), Joe called me into his office one day and—unexpectedly to me—let me go. The advertising world revolves around VOCALISTS, and though I was a creative keyboardist and composer who could consistently write appropriate and exciting music to the needs of :29 and :59 second specifications, business got slow. This was in mid-August. I was furloughed, but was able to transition almost immediately into graduate school for Music Theory at Indiana State University. This is where I met my wife Shannon.

It’s definitely a good thing Joe let me go—Shannon and I just celebrated our 30th anniversary.

Seeing the writing on the wall with a slow end of summer, my boss Joe Bennett encouraged me to put together a cassette demo/sound portfolio of some of my creative work with his studio; the following recording is from that demo. The longer pieces (Allied Van Lines, Airstream Trailers) are industrial soundtracks—Allied for an employee training film, and Airstream for a promotional sales video. I shopped myself around to other competitors but it was getting slow for everybody at that time, so grad school was my next chapter. Within two weeks I was sitting in a graduate medieval music class at ISU, trying to take notes and not daydream, but at the same time wondering what happened. It was frenetic, but nice while it lasted.