The Hair Job III: How Deep Is Your Mix?

Oh dear. Another post about my frigging hair. The Hair Job III. Well let me tell you about it - if you had my hair, you could write about it too. From the 70's through the 80s and 90s, if you had a picture of my hair, you could tell the history of the time by it's styling because if it wasn't an exact replication of the fashions of the day, it was a folicular forcast of what was to become. My hair, in historical retrospect, has been nothing short of hilarious. Consider the photo attached. Ha! Thank the 80s, thank Wham, thank all the gay hairdressers on the planet because if I wasn't gay I was doing a damn good job looking like I was. This particular hair was courtesy of MIA Salon in Dallas Texas and imported to Washington DC for my work with the Earle Palmer Brown Agency on the Marriott Family Restaurant account. I do believe I am wearing a black bandana as well, giving the whole affair that boy-band poofed up look. Makes Lisa look like a man comparatively.

The woman on the right is Lisa Hagen, my creative partner at the time and the man in the middle is Brad Colerick, then a young music producer with Music Animals of LA and now, Owner and Partner at DeepMix, a commercial music production house in Hollywood. Those who know this blog will be familiar with my association with DeepMix from my previous post, "Introducing WWED Radio" and know that there is also a commercial interest in this partnership as well.

Look at this blog. Do you see any cheesy advertisements for travel services or Vietnamese hotels or any of the other gawd awfull dreck that Google AdSense can come up with? Of course you don't. Because I simply won't have it. Oh, sure, there are a few little links you can click on that come at the end of this post, but they are as unobtrusive as possible and made me a whopping total of $4.82 cents last year because I just don't want a bunch of mass transit garbage mucking things up around here. I only want to work with people I can know and recommend and that includes advertisers and clients.

You and I all create the environment in this space and if anybody is going to muck it up, then we've got first refusal rights on that claim - so let's get on with the story and see how I might effectively monitize the site without inflicting pain on the residents here.

Brad and I met in the summer of 1988 while I was involved in producing a series of commercials for the Marriott Family Restaurant concept Allie's. Allie was the nickname of Bill Marriott's mom, Alice, and after a long and expensive brand reinvention investigation was chosen over the recommended name of Barnie's. It lacked the "bilabial fricative" (linguistic terminology for what happens when the two lips come together to form the B sound - and highly memorable according to the naming consultant) complained the branding agency, but was cetainly do-able as it was the client's mother's name and he was paying the bill. Funny how decisions in corporate America are made no matter what the budget.



Make sure to turn off the music in the podcast before playing.

Our campaign didn't have a big budget but it did have a common self effacing, tongue-in-cheek touch that attracted Gary Johns and Mark Gorman (the rage in hip directors at the time) to shoot it and the Music Animals, one of Hollywood's hottest commercial sound houses, to write music for it. In the end, the entire campaign of over 10 commercials and a whole bunch of print and design projects garnered a One Show Award in New York, Four CLIO finalists and a boatload of local and other creative awards. It was by far, the most awarded work the agency had produced to date and probably remains so to this day.

And Brad helped make that happen. In the advertising business it's common for the writers to take charge of the music production side of the business and there's absolutely no fucking reason that I am aware of for that, but I was technically raised as an art director and that brought some confusion to Lisa and my respective responsibilities on this project. My love and talent in music go way back, and although you would choose not to have me playing the piano at your next Bar Mitzvah, you'd be hard pressed to match my knowledge and appreciation for almost any style of the art. Brad & the boys at Music Animals including Joe Lubinski and Howard Pfiffer, engaged me and added conceptual flourishes that not only improved the scripts and film we had brought to them but raised a few of the spots to nearly high art and comedy with everything from toy pianos to opera singers and Tarzan swinging in the jungle as background support. Working with them was a joy seldom seen in most types of work. It was an absolute blast.

So Brad and I have remained friends and colleagues to this day. In 1996, for my 40th birthday, my wife asked me what I wanted. My request was to be able to invite all off my good friends to visit our lake house in Michigan over the course of a month. Brad and his wife Celeste were two of the caravan from all over the US who took us up on the invitation and came in all the way from LA. Man, that was cool.

Earlier this year the subject came up of how to make Brad's firm, DeepMix more present here in Asia and one answer has come as a presence here on the Wild Wild East Dailies. DeepMix has worked with agencies from Tokyo to Singapore but not yet Vietnam and Thailand should certainly be on the list. Brad has asked me to help develop and work as an agent on the firm's behalf in Southeast Asia and I have agreed. And yes, there's money in the deal. I don't get to sit around and just blog for free. The music you are listening to right now on the podcast is all from DeepMix as producers, and as you hear now, is not for commercial purpose but from Independent artists. Make sure to download an MP3 of it from the podcast control if you like it. And for commercials purposes, be it TVC work, radio, film and TV soundtracks and the like, please do talk to me about your needs and ideas. You'll be surprised at how reasonably a top LA shop can be when it comes to working in this market - as well as how a conceptual and currently hip score or remix can increase the value of almost any project.

Take a listen to DeepMix and an over 20 year old friendship that still works as good as new - except Brad doesn't look nearly that cute today and neither do I. No news on Lisa.

Post Script: And do note the shirt I'm wearing. It's says Chả Giò and was from the café of the same name in Atlanta. A Vietnamese café. How's that for predicting the future with fashion?