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A Small Label With a Big Mission. |
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Interview From "Music from the Movies"
Since our last issue, another new film music label is offering a trio of special recordings, and MFTM thought some background information on Perseverance Records and its releases would give readers an impression of the hard work involved in getting good music to the soundtrack marketplace, and maybe evoke some inspiration to realize dreams of releasing soundtracks through their own ventures. "I was always disappointed that there wasn't enough soundtracks out there that I really would like to own myself," explains owner Robin Esterhammer, "and I figured [because] I live in Los Angeles, where there are all the resources and the composers and the studios, I figured why not approach some of these people to see if we can release some of these soundtracks that I've always wanted to buy." Though Esterhammer had already been working on an expanded promo CD for David Bergeaud's music for the cable TV movie Prince Valiant, it was the infamous cult film Dr. Phibes Rises Again that made the label a reality. "Dr. Phibes was always one that I really wanted to put out, and actually had sort of started the creation of the label, because originally I had wanted to do a promo score with John Gale, but he said he would only be interested if MGM gave their OK. Then I contacted MGM and they said they weren't really interested in doing a promo score if no one gets paid, and so forth; and then I said well, then let's do a commercial release, and that's actually how the label got into being." MGM's financial requirements for an advance were sufficiently amenable for the fledgling producer, and Esterhammer decided to keep costs in check by staying away from more costly union recordings. Luckily his first two releases - Denny Zeitlin's impressionistic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and John Gale's Dr. Phibes Rises Again - were ideal choices. The saga of the Phibes music is serendipity thwarting near-tragedy. "MGM didn't have the masters," explains Esterhammer. "The masters were in England with John Gale, the composer, who got them, as you will read in the liner notes, from someone who found them in a trash can at CTS Studios. Apparently when the old studio was demolished to make place for a sports arena, they just dumped a whole bunch of files and documents and master tapes into a trash can, and then somebody just stumbled upon them. Because he had such a fond recollection of Dr. Phibes, he just rescued the tapes." Luckily the 1/4" tapes were in very good condition, and didn't require any "baking." As Esterhammer explains, "You stick [the tapes] into an oven and heat it up, so that the emulsion sticks to the base. What happens over a long time of storage is that the emulsion kind of peels off the base, and what happens when you bake them is they become a little bit more cohesive, so when you play them over the tape heads, the tape doesn't splinter off... Usually what you do is when you play, you usually transfer to another tape [or digital format], but that's usually what you do, because you can't get too many plays out of it anymore it just disintegrates." Though pretty terrifying, a more humorous account of tape baking - the name flows like a Monty Python sketch - is archived with greater specificity at Wendy Carlos' Web page, since her personal tapes for The Shining and Tron were ultimately affected by this insidious, slow-moving defect. With a clean set of tracks from Dr. Phibes, Esterhammer sent the tapes to a mastering house, where they were transferred to the digital realm, and he kept in regular contact via email with John Gale. "He's a little older gentleman who's about seventy now, and he was very helpful, and we've been in contact over email pretty much ever since we got the project started... He helped me identify a few cues that I wasn't able to get by watching the film, and he wrote down little essays about his recollections in working with Robert Fuest the director, so he was very helpful. It was very nice working with him." A one-time film composer, Gale also acted as music consultant on The Killing Fields and The Frog Prince (both 1984) - the latter a collaboration with Enya. Another one-time film composer is Denny Zeitlin, a brilliant jazz pianist whose score for the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers remains both a cult favourite for its weird sonic textures, and a near-perfect marriage of picture, sound effects, and music in a science-fiction film. As director Philip Kaufman explained in his commentary for the MGM DVD, "Denny was a friend of mine from college; I've known Denny for many, many years. He's a psychiatrist, practicing in Marin County and San Francisco, and a well-known if not great jazz pianist and composer. I took [producer Robert Solo] to see Denny I just had the feeling that Denny would understand the nature of paranoia, and he had some very avant garde techniques in his jazz playing, and because we were friends, we worked really closely throughout on the scoreŠ I remember he worked with an assistant named Phil Sawyer who was savvy not only on film music but film sound effects, so that a lot of Denny's score moves into the sound effects area." Working again with MGM, Esterhammer discovered the master tapes for the score's recording sessions "were completely lost. No one knows where they are. So we had to go with the master tapes for the old LP that they still had. [MGM] sent me a CD of the unmastered music for the LP, which I then had to master myself - or actually, I had someone else master it for me - and that way we were actually able to get our hands on the music. "Originally I wanted to have an expanded version of the score, which was at the point where I didn't know there were no masters left at MGM, so I mentioned that to Denny Zeitlin, and he said, 'It would be terrible if there were some bad outtakes that I didn't put in there in the album in the first place, because I didn't like them. But if you want to take up more of the room on the CD, why don't we do an interview.' "And I really liked that idea, and originally contacted Philip Kaufman to be a part of that interview, but because of is shooting schedule he was just shooting a new film we couldn't coordinate that, so I had to fly to San Francisco, and one Monday night I interviewed Denny Zeitlin, just up in a hotel room, in San Francisco." Taking a nod from the DVD world, Esterhammer has edited their conversation into a 7-part session that adds almost a half hour of material onto the final soundtrack album. As for Kaufman, his comments on the DVD commentary sum up Zeitlin's decision to stay away from film composing: "I've asked Denny to do scores on other films but he's said this one was so hard and so difficult that he just doesn't really have the time or inclination to do it, and that's a shame." Esterhammer adds, "That was the only thing he's ever done, and he said it was so disruptive to his life that he decided never to do it again." Still a psychiatrist, "he has a well-going practice up in San Francisco, and he works there everyday, and he tours as a jazz pianist." Perseverance has chosen to release Prince Valiant and Dr. Phibes Rises Again simultaneously, with Invasion of the Body Snatchers to follow. "I have a distribution deal with Intrada, who put my CDs into all the specialty stores around the world; I'm also going to be on Amazon.com, who recently merged with CDNow [and] I'm going to be on their web site; and I'm on my web site [http://www.perseverancerecords.com/ - which also features MP3 extracts]; and I'm also looking into getting national distribution, but that's a little bit tricky just because I'm so small, but hopefully at some point I'm be able to find a distributor who is willing to take a chance on a smaller label." - Mark Richard Hasan (2003)
Article originally published in Music From The Movies (www.musicfromthemovies.com) Issue 37, Winter 2002/03 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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It all ends here.
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