Standard Productions

Throughout the 1980s I found myself running several businesses, and I decided to organize them under one umbrella project called Standard Productions. Each little story will follow... (with a sincere tip of the hat to my graphic designer at the time, Tim Barrett)

Standard Institute of Musical Theatre

This project started out as simply me teaching singing-performance classes, but got more ambitious as time went on...more than 600 paying students passed through our doors. The project seemed interesting to the press, and several articles appeared about the classes, and about me.

The TX-Rack

As a follow-up product to their revolutionary (and hugely successful) synthesizer the DX-7, Yamaha essentially put that synthesizer on a single computer card, called the TF1, that would fit into a power slot, and be coupled with up to seven other TF1s to create huge, richly symphonic textures. The only catch was that they priced their simple eight-slot power supply unreasonably high, at around $1,300. Therefore, an engineer friend approached me with a proposal, that he would manufacture the power supply at a cost of a couple of hundred dollars, and we could go into business selling it for around half the price of Yamaha's product. I said yes and we were off to the races!

Personal Composer

It was the early 1980s, and IBM had just introduced the personal computer. A brilliant programmer named Jim Miller created a pioneering piece of software he called Personal Composer that allowed the user to create and print sheet music (remember, Apple had not yet released the Mac). I was thunderstruck and immediately bought an original IBM PC so I could play with this fabulous toy, and soon enough I was happily printing out music on my trusty Epson dot-matrix printer. Well, Jim Miller, who was a fabulous writer of code but was helpless at business, asked me to be the distributor of the software, and I took on the project (it also turned out that I was obliged to write the operating manual for Personal Composer and that turned into a seemingly endless challenge) but finally we were ready for the world and again, were off to the races.

Brochure covers ; "Modern Art" series

Brochure covers ; "Pulp Fiction" series

Brochure covers: "Show Biz Posters" series

Standard Piano

Because of my commitment to Beach Blanket Babylon during this period (remember, I was the understudy bandleader, on call eight shows a week, and shackled to my pager) I had to be ready to replace myself at a moment's notice if called away to play a performance. I developed a long list of pianists for this purpose, sort of the master list of pianists (I was a very versatile musician so I might need a jazz player one night, and a classical player the next). Since I ended up with a list of almost 500 pianists, naturally it occurred to me to go into business booking them! So indeed, I hung out my shingle as Standard Piano and created a new, nice little income stream. It was simple: I might charge the client $300 for a party pianist to play for 3 hours, pay the pianist $225 and everybody was happy. The secret was knowing who was appropriate for what.

With Standard Piano, I had enough "Standard" businesses! enough, already! I then had two employees coming in to answer the phones, ship things out etc. and there was enough money for all of us. Doing my taxes for 1985 I was startled to realize that I had grossed around $250,000 which was a awful lot of dough at the time.

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