The Musical Life
Comeback
by Alec Wilkinson
December 14, 2009
If you want a license to perform music by Philip Glass, you have to call Glass’s company, Dunvagen Music Publishers, whose director is Jim Keller. Keller is fifty-five, tall and lanky, and is also a musician—he sings and plays the guitar—and he recently finished a record, “Sunshine in My Pocket,” consisting of songs he has written lately. With luck, one will sell a million copies, the way another of his songs, “867-5309/Jenny,” did, in 1982, when Keller was a member of the band Tommy Tutone, and “Jenny,” for a while, was No. 1 on the Top Forty.
The other evening, after rehearsing with his band in a studio on Eighth Avenue, Keller said that he wrote “Jenny” with a friend, Alex Call. “Nothing is cooler for a rock-and-roll musician than to hear yourself on the radio of a car driving by,” he said. “Then, however, you’re trying to follow that up. The record company was handing us songs that it thought would duplicate the success, and we started not getting along, and with a band, if you’re not having fun you’re in trouble, and then it fell apart, as it should have. Do I miss it? All you have to do is watch any of those ‘Where Are They Now?’ shows. It’s not a pretty picture. Someone could find the cure for cancer, but if he ended up on one of those shows he’d still look pathetic. I miss it, but not anymore does it dictate how I operate.”
After Tommy Tutone dissolved, Keller struggled for a number of years to make a living playing music and finally gave up. “If I’d had three hits, I wouldn’t have needed a job, but one hit I couldn’t live on,” he said. Roughly fifteen years ago, a project led to his calling Glass’s office. When he called a second time and heard that the guy he’d been speaking to had left, he asked if the company was looking to replace him, and then talked his way into an interview with Glass. Glass recalled that when he interviewed Keller “he had none of the conventional qualifications that I thought someone should have. I asked, ‘What do you know about the music business?,’ and he said, ‘Only what I learned on the street,’ but that’s how I learned, so it didn’t sound bad to me. He said, ‘What did you pay the last guy?,’ and I told him, and he said, ‘I’ll come and work for you for that, and, if I double your income in the first year, you’ll double my salary.’ I thought about that for about thirty seconds, and I realized, That could be great for me, and he did it.”
Keller figured that Glass had plenty of people around him who appreciated his music. “He didn’t need another Philip Glass fan in his life,” Keller said. “The company, though, was saying no to everything, and I thought maybe the answer could be yes, if you were willing to do things the way Philip wanted to do them. I knew the way it worked on the pop side, so I set about to learn how it worked on the classical side. My first day, I showed up in a tie with a lunch bucket practically.”
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisIn the meantime, Keller put his guitar in its case and left it there for ten years. He got married, and he and his wife had a daughter, who is now twelve. When he began playing again, about four years ago, he said that he “had to find guys I could be terrible with.” Glass asked why he had suddenly started writing new songs, assembling lyrics in taxis and on subways, using what little free time he had, and Keller told him, “To save my life”—“It’s what any artist would say,” Glass said. Glass, however, has never heard Keller’s music. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “He’s never played it for me, and he never invites me when he plays, either. I understood that he wants a lot of room to be back in the music world on his own terms. He didn’t need to go out there again in the pop-stardom way. He’s had that.”
Keller often plays at the Lakeside Lounge, on Avenue B, in a storefront room adjacent to the bar. The room has five tables, and the other evening Keller’s audience, which included two people when he started, grew to about fifteen. When he played “Jenny,” several people turned with quizzical expressions from the bar and the television. By the end of the night, Keller seemed very pleased. “If I can write something that works for me and then also in a bar band, I’m in heaven,” he said. ♦
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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/12/14/091214ta_talk_wilkinson#ixzz0jteFKi08
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