After running the A & R department at RCA Records for a number of years, and a lot of big hits, I found myself the COO & EVP at Bertelsmann’s Ariola-America Label.
In 1981, while sitting at my desk at Ariola-America, I decided to start Perfect Sound. I had worked at Associated Recording from the time I was 11 until I was 20 and always loved the idea of owning a recording studio. Originally, I thought of it as a place for me and my friends to make music.
Then in 1986 I came up with a project, “What If Mozart Wrote Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, and it was a big hit on RCA’s Red Seal label. There was a tune on the second album, “Get A Job“, that RCA wanted me to make a video of. I wrote and produced it and It was nominated for a Grammy, but we lost to George Harrison’s video. Well, now I was smitten with video.
Around the same time I was asked to write some music for a Xerox Corporate video, and It turned out great and for ten years we produced music for a number of music videos and produced and edited an audio radio format show for Citibank, called “Talk Phone”, which won a IABC Gold Quill award.
For the next five years Perfect Sound produced a number of recordings with Ann Hampton Callaway, Frankie Laine, John O’Conor, Barbara Carroll and Julie Budd. There was a lot of traveling to Finland and Estonia to sweeten the recordings with a 100 piece orchestra. Then things changed again.
I wound up as the head of Manufacturing and Distribution at TVT Records, Tommy Boy Records and Urban Box Office, where I produced a number of best-selling DVD’s.
Never a person who liked standing around, I started taking my editing skills and applying them to video. I had been using Sound Forge for music editing and after Sony bought them, they created a multi-track version called Vegas, which people were using for video editing. It was a natural transition. After I left UBO, I focused on video and now I have the best of both worlds.