FOGHAT II How To Market Magic

FOGHAT II How To Market Magic

by

Ben Edmonds

(Paul Fishkin is Director of Operations of Bearsville Records. Bearsville is the brainchild of Albert Grossman, whose name became, synonymous with rock & roll management (and success) during the years he directed the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. Under Fishkin’s field generalship Bearsville has established itself as one of the finest small labels in the business, having seen Success thus far with Todd Rundgren, Foghat, arid Paul Butterfield’s Better Days. Ostensibly talking here about the campaign to break Foghat, Fishkin tenders some insight into the machinery that gets record's out of the studio and onto your turntables. — Ed.)

In some ways, you didn’t push the Savoy Brown connection with Foghat as hard as you might’ve in the beginning...

It might not’ve been that visible, simply because we didn’t do it in terms of press and hype a la Slade. We made a conscious decision to avoid that style of promotion with Foghat. Where we did do it pretty heavily was on a more one-;to-ohe level with radio stations, calling that to their attention immediately; And that was our only hook, because it was a very grass rootsey kind of thing.

We did it with record store and radio people first. We could do that right over the phone.,... It was on thfe level of a kid behind a coynter in a record store recognizing the names and then playing the record in the store. We did add a sticker to the album, after-the-fact. It said “3 Former Members of Savoy Brown,” and it listed their names. Once we got a sense of what we had to do, we did it. And it was a big decision, because of course we didn’t want to come off looking tacky. But we were talking about three guys whb’d already done five Americart\tours, and had x amount of following. It didn’t mean that the record would sustain airplay; it didn’t mean that they would like it any better or worse; but it was an immediate point of recognition and it got the album listened to. But above all else, the album and the* group were legitimate. And when that legitimacy is there, you don’t feel qualms about utilizing any tool.

You came close to having a hit with ‘T Just Want To Make Love To You”off that first album, didn’t you?

We just missed breaking it nationally . Demographically, it was a pure male age 16-17 record. Well, most males buy albums. .So we were selling less singles, but the song and album wer^ hits. But when it came time for the AM stations to survey the record stores, and surveyed “I Just Want To Make Love To You” against an R&B record, the R&B record showed ten times the strength in sales when in fact the Foghat song was just as popular.

But that’s a chronic situation in this business, and that’s why it’s so difficult for pure hard & heavy rock records to become hit sirigles. It wasn’t a tragedy that this record missed being a hit. because everywhere it got played it Sold tons of albums. It was a tool, it was one of the components in the process of establishing a new act. So we wound up with a “Frankenstein” or “The Joker” on our own level: one cut that sells the album.

Wasn’t there some problem, chart-wise, with that album?

We were hurt by the fact that The album went right by the trade charts. It had a lot to do with the fact that the album broke over such a long period of lime; market-to-market. And the last thing that a trade chart can react-to properly, by the nature of the \yay they’re set up, is a market-to-market success. It’s not their fault; they’re dealing with relative sales, not totals.

But it still hurts with the rack jobbers. [Rack jobbers are those people whose responsibility it is to see that product in any given market reaches the record store shelves — Ed.] You may be nickel & diming it to death — which is what we Were doing with Foghat, and it was selling extremely well — but we weren’t getting visibility in terms of the racks. They won’t buy an album in quantity unless it’s top 50 or like that. The album may be selling, but the big racks won’t believe it unless they see it on the charts. It’s a chicken and egg situation.

It’s ironic. The album jumped on the charts after much agony, during a lull period. Then as the single picked up and the album started to take off, it went off the charts. It was off the charts for the four week period when it was actually taking off. Then*it came back on, got a few bullets and died in the 120s. We’d sold 225,000 albums by that time. There’ve been albums that’ve gone top 30 and have sold less. It just has to do with how it’s sold.

What’s been the key factor in breaking the band?

It was just plugging. And I still feel that we’re plugging with Foghat; the point still hasn’t been reached where you clearly see that it’s bust-out time. On the first two albufns it was an amazing effort — every inch of the way — between myself, the band’s management* and Warner Bros. [Bearsville’s distributor. - Ed.

The band’s cooperation was rewarded by cooperation on everybody’s part, so that it became a real nice thing. It was fun. Those tours were not just drudgery, because every place they went there was support on one level or another. Thus a continuing renewal of interest. They’d play in St. Louis and find a promotion guy there who loved them, and then we went to Milwaukee and did a thing for a bunch of salesmen, or to Pittsburgh to do a barbeque for a record chain. Some of them failed, but it was a real exercise in cutting out the fat and getting down to basics cooperatively.

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FOGHAT II

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What are you going to do about a single from Energized?

“Step Outside” is a real album-selling song. It’s a hit, but it’s a question of whether we can pick up the demographics to bring it all the way. This is where it gets complicated. “That’ll Be The Day” is an across-the-board demographic record. Even though it’s probably weaker in terms of selling the artist Foghat and the album Energized, it still looks like a pure pop hit.

It’s so paradoxical. When you come out with a single, you don 't want to sell albums. You want to see the single so that an AM station will pick up the reports and continue to program it. You almost pray that the albums are locked up somewhere. And then after you finally crick the single, well the only reason that you cracked the single was so that you could in turn sell the album, right? ’Cause singles don’t make any money. So then you start pushing the album, at which point you couldn’t care if the single doesn’t sell another Copy. It’s bizarre; it’s just totally bizarre. ^