INTERVIEW:
LARRY FAST
OF
SYNERGY
(Interview by ELANA, all rights reserved, etc, (c) 1990)
DREAMS WORD: What inspired you to get in this music in the beginning?
LARRY FAST: I was both somebody who liked music and also was interested in wiring things and making them light up. Electronic music was the merger of those two main interests. I was one of those kids who wasn't into sports. I took piano lessons - the usual childhood training - and I got into hi-fi, then stereo when it came along.
DW: As I understand it, your process of entering the music business did not involve any big 'break'. You seemed to have just grown into it naturally. Could you describe that?
LF: It sort of unfolded. I was in college from 1969 to 1973. Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. There I got into college radio early on. As the years went by, I moved up the ranks of the radio station so that by the time I was a senior I was General Manager. During that time I was interviewing up-and-coming groups when they were touring, before they got really big. There was a lot of networking. For instance, I would get to know the record company college radio rep who then was the low man in the "food chain" in the industry. As I was moving along in my career doing session musician work or a little bit of junior- league production work or whatever... that same guy was moving up the ranks of the record company. Some of these people are very powerful people at the major labels now. We have long term relationships that go way back.
On the technical side, I was always building music equipment, for myself mostly. It wasn't as good as Moog's stuff, but it was enough so that I ended up getting a few commissions to build custom units for established recording acts. That was another way I established connections that got me in the studios. I was hanging around and not getting paid very much, but learning an awful lot.
In 1973, for example, I had built some synth equipment for Rick Wakeman. He then invited me to come to the studio where he was going to use that equipment. That was the beginnings of my learning about commercial major label record production, how it's done, how sessions are run, etc. That studio was in England. I had just graduated from college.
DW: It sounds like you spent almost a year in that country.
LF: No, it was only a number of weeks.
DW: As I understand it, you also got yourself a deal with Warner Brothers for your own album while you were there. Obviously, if you could get that far at age 21, it was because you were just in it 100%.
LF: Yeah, it was a pretty big commitment. I look back on it now and I realize that was kind of aggressive of me to go to another country, work on an album with a major group and then try and sell my own music. I was knocking on the doors of important people who knew me from radio but didn't know that I also did music. All of a sudden I was trying to sell them on an album project with me at the center... and they bought it!
DW: They bought and released your first album?
LF: No. There is something called a development deal in the major-label record business where they will pay for a demo or part of a recording on an album. They usually do that on a letter of agreement which gives them the option to not go for the rest of the album if they feel the project is not going to be right for them.It's been a way of dealing with new acts for quite a long time. It's good for the label because it's a real scary thing to talk about the investment that's required to do an entire album plus promotion and these days, video. Each label handles it differently. Record companies will sometimes not pick up the option. They can love the music, but say "Our promotion team isn't good at doing this kind of music. We wouldn't force you to change, 'cause if you tried to change your music to do what we think it ought to be, you are just going to do a bad ver sion of what we think it ought to be". That's what hap pened with me and Warner Brothers.
DW: So they gave you a development deal based on the contacts you had in the UK, and you went back to the US and starting recording for a period of time. What was the music like? Was it like the first album "Electronic Realizations For Rock Orchestra"?
LF: Some of the themes that appeared on that are the same ones. Unfortunately my feeling at the time was that doing it all electronic was going to be too unusual, too different from what they were expecting. So I had a real drummer and a real bass player, etc. That made it an odd band. That may have been the reason the label declined the option. So when I realized that it wasn't going to fly that way, I ended up on my own just doing it all by myself.
DW: What happened then?
LF: When they declined the option, I got to keep the tapes. Later I got signed to Passport Records who were a very new label, just starting up. They released "Elec tronic Realizations..." in 1975.
DW: As I understand, you also worked with digital synthesis at it's early days at Bell Laboratories. How the heck did you manage that?
LF: That started in 1976 right after the first album came out. Bell Labs wanted somebody who could 'speak music' and who also was technically oriented. They had contacted Bob Moog because they had a project of developing digital synthesis. This involved sampling and resynthesis and a lot of things that are available now. But some of the stuff I worked isn't even available yet commercially. Even though I majored in history in college I took enough electrical engineering to be dangerous. It was not enough to be certified as an working engineer, but I've got some pretty good design engineering background and an awful lot of machine- level software background. I could talk cogently with the engineering people.
DW: Talk about getting in at the ground level...!
LF: At Bell Labs, they had already been doing various forms of computer music since the 1950's. So I was like a kid looking around in the candy store. I learned a lot in the days before home computers really happened. They were doing serious phone company stuff and serious research papers during the day and at night we were there havin' fun. We called it playing around with the equipment after the grownups go home.
DW: Obviously your next album would have evolved out of your Bell Labs experience.
LF: Actually it didn't. There wasn't too much that could come out of Bell Labs for about two years because during that time it was pure research. It wasn't until the fourth Synergy album (Games) that anything I was doing at Bell Labs could make it to an album.
DW: Your next albums were...
LF: "Sequencer" in 1986, "Cords" in 1978, "Games" in 1939, then "Computer Experiments" and "Audion" in 1981.
DW: And this was all put out by Passport or Jem.
LF: It's weird. Even though Jem owned Passport Records, they did not distribute it themselves, They were distributed by other record companies because Jem as a distributor was too small in those days.
DW: Has Passport supported you through all the years of your nine Synergy albums?
LF: The record companies don't really support you. They're not your patron. They pay your bills to get records made and until the album recoups their money, your account is in the negative flow. If you sell enough records, then they pay you royalties once the albums have recouped the expenses they've already advanced. I want to be really clear about how it works. Even though the Synergy albums were not very expensive to make, I always wanted to use the finest equipment and go with the good studios. I wanted these to be audio phile quality. That means they had to sell that many more copies before they would go into the black. As it turns out there is not a very big electronic music audience. That audience, even if everybody there buys your record, would get it to just about break-even. The Synergy albums have been a labor of love. All the other things I have worked on in different production capaci ties supports my having been able to do Synergy records. I am talking about my work with people like Peter Gabriel, Hall and Oates, Bonnie Tyler and some movie productions. That's where the bigger bucks are.
DW: I remember in the early 1980's you did a sound track to "The Jupiter Menace". I heard it was controver sial. Was it a bad film or what?
LF: It was terrible! All the technical staff were just laughing behind the producers back. He didn't know. He thought it was great. Still, it was a good experience for me. I hadn't scored a film before. I may have done a couple of commercials. "The Jupiter Menace" was relatively easy. It was done in just a handful of weeks. Most film scores are like that because you are usually not given very much time to do it. At least I got to make my stupid mistakes on a movie that no one was ever going to see.
DW: Let's talk about the last two albums.
LF: The record company did a compilation album called "Semiconductor". The cover was either going to be the electronic component (which it is -ed) or a little short guy with a baton. I did "Metropolitan Suite" in 1986. I broke the economic mold at that point of how things were done in terms of financing a record. I paid the bills myself so I could dictate how it was done.
DW: You were able to grow into and work with the music industry and that's how your career progressed. Once in a while I will hear artists squawking that there is some kind of closed situation out there and you can't break in, especially for this kind of music. I know you have your own opinions on this...
LF: Yeah, I could comment on that. What appears to be a 'closed' business is not so much that it is a 'conspiracy' to keep electronic music unknown to the masses. It's really simply that record companies will respond to anything that's selling if they find a spark of interest that can make them money, they are more than happy to go for it. They really have no preconceived no tions about artistic values. In a way, that's bad because there's less sensitivity to the artistic concerns at certain levels at the record companies. On the other hand, the average record buyer is younger and less sophisticated. They are not in the patient frame of mind for the kind of art and subtlety that goes into most electronic albums. Inherently it's going to limit the audience.
DW: I heard that only 10% of albums released make any sort of a profit...
LF: I would say it's probably even lower than that. The interesting thing is that those albums that sell absolutely huge numbers help support those that don't, like the electronic music albums or whatever. Record compa nies would love for all of them to sell, but the fact is they don't.
I'm not a huge jazz fan, but in terms of audience and how it's dealt with there is a very similar parallel. There's a lot of "Lite" jazz out there but there's not a lot of serious jazz. It makes an occasional comeback and then it goes away again. The only difference is that jazz has got decades longer in terms of cultural roots to pull from. There are many companies who sponsor jazz festivals . . . stereo companies, beer companies, etc. They are underwritten because the president loved jazz music in his college days way back when and now he has got financial power to contribute. It's good advertis ing for those companies, thus they can justify spending that money. Unfortunately, electronic music hasn't been around long enough for that to happen. Maybe in the first decade or two of the 21st century we will see the equivalent of what happens in the sponsorship of jazz festivals.
Getting back to your original question...I really haven't seen anything of a conspiracy. There aren't any 'secret board meetings' held at the upper levels of MCA Re cords or someplace where these guys are putting hoods over their heads, sitting in a dark room and saying "We got more of those damn electronic music tapes; let's burn them all!!"
DW: You have a great balance of perspective. OK, let's talk about the Passport crash now. You were creative director at the place. What happened?
LF: Around 1986, the New Age boom was getting big and Jem Records didn't really want to take Windham Hill or some of the other piano solo labels head to head. It seemed, however that a possible area ripe for creative growth was electronic music. Since I was recognized as knowing something about it, they proposed forming a new label, Audion. They would assume the financial risks and if I was interested then I could join. First I was offered to join on some kind of salaried basis. I did not want that because I didn't want to report to the office on a given day or a given hour. We came to an agreement where I would help screen through the thousands of demos they were getting. Even there I didn't have the final decision on everything. I could sort of nudge it artistically into the direction that I thought it should be going.
DW: So what was the eventual artist lineup at Audion?
LF: It changed a lot. There were about ten or fifteen artists on the roster at any one time.DW: What exactly did you do at Audion?
LF: I had to go onto the office a couple of days a week to review tapes. I would try to make sure that people were getting either encouraging or somewhat encourag ing rejection letters. I didn't want to get too wrapped up in that work because too easily I would have gotten sucked into running a label. I have wanted to do an awful lot of things in the record business, but running a label isn't one of them. So I was very careful to try and keep myself a "spiritual guide" for where the label was going to go.
DW: Could you explain how it all fell apart?
LF: In the early days when Jem started Passport, they knew that Jem wasn't big enough to distribute records successfully. They could only really do esoteric import records and some domestic products. If they were trying to have a major hit record, it would have been futile. They just didn't have the distribution power to do it. So Sire Records and Jem records together owned Passport and Passport was distributed by ABC Records. Then ABC got out of the record business and in their place Arista Records distributed Passport. Around that time there was a parting of the ways between Jem and Sire. Sire went to Warner Brothers where they still are. Passport was now 100% owned by Jem instead of only 50% like before and soon Jem was distributing the Passport group of labels.
For reasons that are still not clear, Jem, the distribution company, started to lose money in the late 80's. Jem started to use the subsidiaries to try and keep them selves afloat. The Passport label group, including Audion weren't making money hand over fist but they were holding their own. That money, which should have been poured into artist development and expanding the labels, was being used to keep the lights on and pay the bills over at the distribution company. I supposed you could see what was going to happen. If they hadn't sucked the future out of the labels, something might exist today. There was a downward spiral that was inevitable. Then there was an aborted merger/buyout which is still all in the courts. The aftermath - which had very little to do with me - was a hostile takeover in the summer of 1988 by another group of investors who fired all the original owners. They put it all into Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization and even today it's very unclear exactly what happened.
Whatever it was, they were never able to pull it out. After Chapter 11, they went to Chapter 7 which is forced liquidation by the courts. That's where it stands right now.
DW: How is it that they claim to own the rights to the Synergy albums?
LF: The first five albums, the compilation and "The Jupiter Menace" were all recorded under budgets furnished by Passport Records so they claim that they own those masters. That's where it stands right now. "Computer Experiments" and "Metropolitan Suite" are not included because I paid for those. I, however own the name "Synergy" as a federally registered trademark. Anyway, what the bankruptcy courts say is that they own them and they are going to sell them to some liquidator or something . . . anyone can buy them. My contention to them is to say you can try to sell them but they'll have no value because I won't allow anybody to release them under the name "Synergy". And I control the publishing.
DW: Interesting. So is that getting through to anybody yet?
LF: Basically we are having a standoff because I'm telling them: "Since they're not worth anything to you, you might as well just give them to me." Of course, they are not happy with THAT idea, but I can just wait them out. If they don't do anything then under New Jersey law they'll be considered abandoned within the next year or two. Then I'll just grab them anyway because I have the other rights and I can block anyone else. However, I'd rather come to an agreement with them in the short term over the next handful of months.
That's why the albums are not on the market now. Between 1986 and 1988, all the albums had been digitally remastered and reissued on CD. I suppose I could just go out on a limb and manufacture them on my own, but until the legal stuff is resolved I would be putting myself in some legal jeopardy. I don't want to get myself into that kind of situation.
DW: So now you are waiting for time to put things in your favor.
LF: I've got all the cover artwork, I've got the negatives, I've got everything needed to license to another label. There have been numerous inquiries from other labels. Ican't really go anywhere with them until this gets resolved because they would require that I indemnify them from other claims the bankruptcy court may have. At this point I can't guarantee that. I can't say that there will not be a knock on the door from the bankruptcy marshall's office until I get a letter saying "We relinquish all rights, they're your records, do with them as you wish". I could do that with "Computer Experiments" and "Metropolitan Suite" but I'd rather have the whole package.
DW: So would all of your fans. I have a lot of people saying to me to tell you "Good luck". There have been a lot of positive thoughts.
LF: Well thank whoever it is. I have a question for you now as editor of DREAMS WORD. From the feedback you get from around the world, would there be enough demand for "Metropolitan Suite"? If I were to spend the money to create a couple thousand CD's, would there be enough demand to buy them? I don't like the idea of having a garage full of unsold CD's any more than I have liked the idea of having the album off the market com pletely.
DW: I do know that there are a lot of fans out there asking "Where's Larry?". However your question is not something I can answer. To be honest, I am dealing with 300 copies of DREAMS WORD per issue. If I had thousands of subscribers I could answer that question right now with a serious certainty. How about asking the DREAMS WORD readers yourself?
LF: That might be an idea.
DW: Phrase it your way.
LF: Until this whole situation with the older records is resolved, there's no reasonable way I'll be able to release those albums. However since "Metropolitan Suite" is not considered part of the bankruptcy turmoil, it could be made available on a mail order basis if there was enough interest shown. I could get it rolling tomorrow. I need to know will there be a demand for it or has everyone who was interested in buying that CD already bought it?
DW: I think a lot of people will just because you do have fan loyalty. Your fans are a tiny group but they're out there and they're discovering this newsletter one by one. We will see what they say to your question. You will see them in the letters column in the next issue. Alright! Now Mr. Fast, let's talk about the future -- the next Synergy album. Can you describe your vision at all?
LF: Well, no. It's not that I'm being secretive about it, it's just really difficult to describe it. It'll certainly be related to the type of sonic environment that Synergy albums have been created from in the past. However it hasn't pulled together as far as a cohesive theme is concerned. Also, finding the time to finish the album is very difficult. But I will find it. I guarantee I'll find it along the way.