HOW TO MAKE A MILLION BUCKS IN THE MUSIC BIZ
By George Petersen
I’VE MENTIONED THIS BEFORE, BUT ONE OF MY weekend activities is flea marketing, which is essentially searching for the unexpected. After years of doing this, I have yet to run across that fabled mint LA-2A or box of old Neumanns for $15, although there is this persistent urban myth about some guy who bought a “defective” U87 in a pawnshop for $20. As the story goes, the pawnshop owner evidently tried to test it by connecting it to a mic input on an old P.A. head that didn’t have phantom power, so the mic “didn’t work” and he sold it cheap. If anybody out there knows any details about that, let me know so we can verify the story—or at least give me the location of that pawnshop so I can shop there too!
Anyway, a couple weeks ago, on my usual local flea market jaunt was this junk dealer with cases and cases of 45 rpm records. All by artists on the now famous (or infamous) Rocshire Records label. This immediately brought up my memory of interviewing the people at Rocshire Records, back in 1983. (It’s in the September 1983 issue to be exact, in case you want to read the entire text, but sorry, our online archives don’t go back that far—yet.)
The interview, made just as Rocshire was starting, painted a picture of how a dream label would operate. The concept? Rocshire’s slogan was “Home of the Artists” and was dedicated to total artist support. This included use of their state-of-the-art recording facility, and plans to build rehearsal facilities and a live sound company—all for the exclusive use of the Rocshire artists on their label. Run by Rocky Davis and his wife Shirley (hence the name “Rocshire”), it was a true family-owned business that really seemed to care about the acts on their roster.
Among those artists signed to the MCA-distributed Rocshire Records were 1960s Brit sensations Chad & Jeremy, former Tower of Power vocalist Lenny Williams, Detroit favorites Adrenalin, Alcatrazz (with Yngwie Malmsteen) and a number of other bands, including The Suttons (former Motown act) and Eddie & The Monsters, featuring former “The Munsters” child actor Butch Patrick (Eddie Munster).
And with a beginning roster like that, how could you lose? Well, there’s one point that I haven’t mentioned so far, and curiously, it wasn’t mentioned in that interview I did back when the label was starting out. You see, Rocshire was financed entirely by some 12-15 million dollars that Shirley Davis had embezzled from Hughes Aircraft, while she was working as an accountant there. Now most people who could steal such an amount would simply disappear and end up living the good life on some faraway country. Yet the Davis family somehow felt that laundering all that dough into some low-profile operation (like a record label) was a good idea. Not so smart, evidently. The pair were eventually caught and ended up serving time.
It just goes to prove that old adage. If you want to make a million bucks in the record biz, just start out with $15 million.
George Petersen is an independent journalist/author/producer. Visit him on Facebook or at www.audioinfosource.com.
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September 2nd, 2007 @ 8:46 am
I managed and produced Butch during this period and everything you say about Rocshire is true. After being signed and selling 80,000 units, we were completely abandoned by the record company. I suspect that things were beginning to boil at the time and saving their skins was the priority.
Unfortunately, I signed a production deal and only got my first check of $900…the next check of almost $50K was confiscated by the FBI and I went belly up
October 12th, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
I had a couple of songs on Lenny Williams Rocshire Album called Changing and like Phillip, I too did not get my royalties on the sales of the album which at the time was about 150,000 sold a decent little penny to start out. I’m wondering now does anybody knows who owns all the Rocshire Masters that were seized by the US government?
June 17th, 2008 @ 11:13 am
Coming to this article a bit late, but I was signed and distributed by Rocshire/High Velocity. The Band was called “The Din” and our first Lp was released in the spring of 1983 and sold close to 25k. We were shut down and completely demoralized by the Rocshire case. I would love to know where the “tapes” ended up, and also the gear that was seized by the feds. This was a long time ago, yet the questions still course through my head.–TV
REPLY: Tony, certainly you and everybody else who go caught up in this mess is wondering the same thing. If anybody out there DOES know where the masters from all the Rochshire artists wound up, please drop me an e-mail at gpetersen@mixonline.com and let me know. I’ll try to get the word out so at least part of this injustice can be undone. Thanks!–George Petersen
November 11th, 2008 @ 8:58 pm
hi
rocshire record is my fam we never got anything back
they passed away last year
the only alive is their kids
im best friends with the girl kathy in midway city, ca.
November 16th, 2008 @ 10:42 am
I was going through some old L.P.s and found my Din – “Great Tradition” album. It was great listening to it again. The engineer is listed as Lester Claypool – is that the same Les Claypool from Primus? He would have been 20 years old at the time.
Mark,
No, the recording engineer Lester Claypool was NOT the Les Claypool from Primus.
–george
December 10th, 2008 @ 12:04 am
I was an engineer who was involved with Rocshire for a short while. They were a total joke.
Lester Claypool was not the guy from Primus. He knew nothing and walked around trying to impress everybody he could telling him that he’d sign them to the label.
I could talk for hours about all the stupid things they did. Here is one.
I can’t remember the artist, but Lester tried to remix the songs, which were mixed in Europe and all his mixes were terrible. He ended up using one, but here is the kicker. The original masters were on 1/4″ tape and Lester mixed his song on 1/2″ tape. He transferred all the 1/4″ mixes to 1/2″ because he heard 1/2″ sounded better. So all the original mixes were second generation except for his which was horrible. We mastered with Bernie Grundman and I was totally embarrased to be there.
Here’s another quick one.
Lester built these custom monitors which had JBL, Tanoy, Altec and a few other drivers in them. He had a switchbox so he could switch speakers. I asked him who designed the boxes and he said he just threw them together. I guess he wanted to have them all in the same box so he could compare mixes on various speakers, but obvioulsy there is a bit more to speaker design than that. They sounded absolutely horrible. Oh, some of the speakers were out of phase from each other. When I pointed this out to him, he asked me how I could tell. No engineer would ever ask a question like that.
Man I could go on and on with this stuff.
March 25th, 2009 @ 2:21 pm
I worked with Shirley at Hughes, she embezzled “Medical Insurance Monies” which led to the entire company loss of medical benefits, not in totality but loss of percentage of benefits. She was only prosecuted for 12.7 million loss. Shirley claimed to have taken over 33 million. Which I do not doubt in any way. Shirley Lindsay Davis walked out of a secure facility with over $100,000 dollars a day for four years, in checks less than $10,000 each. The max we could print. She was the systems analyst, every problem medical file went through her, if you questioned what she did or why, you ended up on the hot seat. But with a staff of 60 people, 59 women and 1 man, who paid 3 to 5 million a week in claims, we worked our ___ off. She got off with a 10 year vacation, however her daughter Kathy who did help, but was only 18, the FBI declined to prosecute because of her age. Kathy ended up in prison for embezzlement less than a year later after she went to work for a van conversion company. Went to jail trying to use the same scheme who had better loss prevention. I guess Shirley’s punishment was watching her daughter go to prison after she was taught the ropes. However, as Shirley stated “you never know what you might find buried in my backyard”. Wonder if the FBI ever dug up the backyard on Riata, or were they never informed of this statement?
January 21st, 2010 @ 6:02 pm
Here’s wishing you a very happy and prosperous new year !
October 23rd, 2010 @ 4:03 am
Sweet post dawg, keep on keeping on
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