Premises, Premises
I wrote words and music to this cabaret revue which I also funded with my own money and played piano for, five shows a week as I recall. The songs were random and unrelated, mostly fast and/or funny though I did include my best love song. The cast was really excellent, I must say - some of the "usual suspects" on the cabaret circuit who really knew what they were doing onstage. We ran several weeks at the Plush Room before giving up the ghost. Although the reviews were bad, lots of people in the audience liked it - or so they said.
Commissioned Work
From time to time jobs would come up where I was to write original music for other people's projects. One that springs to mind was a theme song for a comedy group, The Mommies. Another was a single movement for the Kronos Quartet. I forget the occasion for this...
Industrial Shows
An "industrial show" is a production tailored to a business's internal usage. It can be a video production, or I guess an online one, but my specialty was in creating live-performance shows. This was super fun, and lucrative as well as it exploited lots of my skill set. After securing the gig (normally for a fee of $15k or $20k), the first step was to have phone interviews with key players: the CEO and other leadership, plus lower-downs who knew what goals needed to be acompllshed (pump sales? team-build?) and something about the corporate culture, i.e. where the laugh-lines would be for inside jokes. Then, having secured the cast (usually 4 excellent performers plus director/choreographer) I would write the material, ALWAYS using existing, recognizable songs and crafting special lyrics to fill the bill. I think I did between 15 and 20 of these projects.
Seagram Classics, the wine distributor, was a client for a few years running. Toshiba hired me once to promote their MRI machines. We had a field day at the annual meeting of Solid Waste Management, where we had the audience rolling in the aisles at Masonic Auditorium. Exotic locales played a part; someone flew us to Cancun one year.
When the San Francisco Conservatory of Music celebrated MIlton Salkind (for I think 30 years of service as president) they hired me to create a show, which I based on Cole Porter tunes. Now THAT was a blast: Laurette Goldberg playing Anything Goes as a fugue on harpsichord; a quartet of bassoons playing Don't Fence Me In, etc. etc.
The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau commissioned me to write a show promoting SF, and we toured it to meetings of convention planners in (as I recall) in Chicago, New York and Atlanta. That one was complex as it involved a slide show, the old-fashioned kind with, you know, actual slides.
Once (for a client I forget) I was stationed at a booth at a trade fair, performing my 10 minute act every hour as "Danny Sincere". Picture a lime-colored two-piece suit worn over an orange ruffled shirt, that was Danny. Cheesy? you have no idea...
Danny made one final encore appearance, at the fifth annual meeting of the San Francisco Advertising Club, held at the Palace of Fine Arts. Since I figured there were a ton of potential clients in the audience (these were all creative directors etc. in the ad biz) I did it for minimal pay, and brought along Val Diamond to help, as she was a hell of an entertainer. The songs were all Beatle tunes.... I followed up the engagement with a brochure containing all the lyrics mailed to all the attendees. I got zilch, bupkiss, nada work out of the experience, but the souvenir is below (NOTE: of these tunes, only "Graphic Designer" had a life past that night, which has been an occupational hazard for me: much of my creative work, for ads and special shows, has been ephemera, written only for the moment, and then discarded. Sigh.):
