In life if you don’t make mistakes you just aren’t trying hard enough. Of course you learn from them and move on but oh can they be painful.
Let me tell you about one I made in 1987 that cost me more than I can even now imagine. I received a call from a guy in New York named John Titta. He had heard a demo of some songs I’d written and loved them. He was a song plugger at Screen Gems EMI who at that time was one of the top two publishing companies in the world. He wanted to sign me to a three year deal. They were going to pay me a nice draw plus demo and traveling expenses to fly me to New York to write with their writers four times a year. It was a hell of a deal looking back but being as green as I was, when the contracts came I handed them over to a non-music lawyer. It wasn’t really his fault he didn’t know the language and customs of the music business and so he chopped their contract up, rewrote it and sent it back to them. When they got it they realized they were not dealing with a professional and walked away.
In the mean time John had gotten me holds with three big acts. A hold is the first right of refusal to cut a song. Its kind of a gentleman’s agreement between a publisher and an artist that the publisher will stop pitching the song to other acts because the artist thinks it has a good chance of making an album. Of course once EMI walked away from our deal those all dried up and I was left with 100 percent of nothing, which looking back is exactly what I deserved.
This is by no means the biggest mistake I’ve ever made but its one of them and I learned a very important lesson. Always get a MUSIC LAWYER to handle music contracts and legal work. I’ve since shown that contract to one of the top attorneys in Nashville who laughed and assured me the contract EMI sent was a standard agreement and more than a fair arrangement which I would have been wise to sign. OUCH!
Oh by the way, John Titta the junior plugger at EMI who had gone to bat for me, is now one of the Vice Presidents of Warner Chappell (the biggest publishing company in the world) in New York. He’s not answering my calls. (Can you blame him?)