Meet The Rockers
Self-run websites help faded pop stars reconnect with their remaining fans. But what happens when the fans and stars finally get just a little too close?
BY JIMMY MAGAHERN
Published: Scottsdale Times, June, 2006
Until Emma Kenney came along, Andrew Gold had a pretty sweet scene going for himself on the web.
Gold, in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, is a veteran singer-songwriter who scored a couple of Top 40 hits in the late 70’s (“Lonely Boy,” “Thank You For Being A Friend”) and has produced and played on records for everyone from Linda Ronstadt to Jesse McCartney.
But these days he’s also a 55-year-old, twice-divorced single dad who’s done his share of Internet dating (he met his last wife in a chat room) and admits he’s not above flaunting his old album cover photos to win new fans, or even make a few new friends.
“I’ve started a few romantic interludes online with people who began as fans,” admits the engagingly direct Gold, calling from his home in Woodland Hills, California. “I feel kind of lucky that they like me before they meet me. Of course, it probably doesn’t hurt that I’ve got all these pictures on my website from when I was 24!”
Gold’s website, one of the first created by McCartney Multimedia, an artist-oriented website service with sales offices in Phoenix, is typical of those now being run by aging pop stars looking to the Internet to connect with their remaining fans and continue to sell records, if only to them.
Filled with old publicity shots and updates on the latest greatest hits re-issues and new independent releases, AndrewGold.com does its best to freeze-frame the former hitmaker at his prime while also providing a forum for fans to talk to each other — and often, when the web-addicted Gold is online — to chat with the star himself.
It’s the ultimate ego-stroke, and also a great place for Gold to keep in contact with the loyal fans who still buy his records.
It’s there that Gold first came across Emma Kenney, a woman from Wales who discovered Gold in the 80’s as part of the band Wax, a pop project with 10CC’s Graham Gouldman that produced a trio of hit albums in the UK.
Kenney admits it was “a purely lust thing” that first attracted her to the redheaded, bearded California popster, who had for years ignited similar passions among the women who first caught Gold as the hunky guitarist in Linda Ronstadt’s backing band and later, drooled over the sensitive, smoldering images on his own album covers.
“He started off my fetish for tall, hairy and bearded men — a trait that I still sadly have!” Kenney admits.
Kenney was crushed when, after hearing “Lonely Boy” on the radio one day and Googling Gold’s name for a recent image of her former fantasy man, she found a fairly new shot of Gold that showed he had ballooned up to a weight she read had reached 320 pounds.
She found Gold’s own website, too, and felt compelled to leave a comment in the forum contrasting the three-decade-old pictures she noticed Gold had decorating his banner with the more current image she’d just discovered.
In the subject line above Kenney’s comments, she typed, simply, “FATTY!”
The name-calling set off a firestorm of replies from Gold’s loyal fans, generating a string of “Re: FATTY!” comments that inevitably made the index of his forum page look like the bathroom wall of an elementary school.
Finally, before removing the forum completely and temporarily shutting down his website, Gold felt obliged to get in a few words himself. For the better part of a week before the site’s demise, Gold found himself squandering all his creative energies on writing witty come-backs for the “Fatty” nickname.
“At some point, I felt like just saying, ‘So it’s come to this!’” laughs Gold, who, over the course of his long career, has mingled with the cream of the crop of the literate singer/songwriter community, from James Taylor and Jackson Browne to Stephen Bishop and Art Garfunkel.
“I mean, suddenly I’m arguing with people online, saying, ‘Why did you call me Fatty?’ At some point, you just feel, ‘Okay, this is getting a little weird. This isn’t even fun anymore.’”
It seems like an ignoble way for any former hitmaker to have to make a living. And yet many do, boosting their own legacy, trying to market their own CDs, and in the process, dealing with all the major nutcases who are, as it turns out, their biggest fans.
While the world of Internet selling has opened up new opportunities for rock survivors to reach out and touch their aging fan base, the format has also turned artist into blogger, publicist and marketer, and has obliterated any wall of mystique that used to exist for the star. Even Neil Young has a MySpace page now; add the rock legend to your “friends” list, and you, too, can finally tell him what you think of those sideburns.
Still, most veteran rockers are happy to take the cut in ego if it means making their music catalog more accessible to anyone still interested enough to Google their name, and building a database of the loyal fans who are, in fact, their returning customers.
Enter Ruth McCartney, the Liverpool-born step-sister of Sir Paul and founder of California-based McCartney Multimedia and its flagship service, iFanz.
McCartney, a frequent visitor to the Valley who, with her mother, Angie, has become a familiar face at social galas and charity events here (a face which, despite the absence of blood ties, bears a striking resemblance to the famous Macca mug — “Something in the Liverpool water,” she surmises), recently partnered with the Phoenix firm Metis Communications to grow iFanz into the ultimate do-it-yourself fan club for rising — or fading — pop stars.
Offering access to a spiffy set of web tools that gather and maintain information about the fans who visit an artist’s personal site or MySpace page, iFanz also sells special accounts to artists that allow individual CD burns on demand and even instant printing on t-shirts, caps and other merch (“Never again worry about creating huge inventories that might not sell,” it promises. “One fan, one order, one royalty check”).
“Most musicians don’t really know who, or even where, their fans are,” says McCartney, who markets iFanz to artists under the slogan, “Your fans are your future.”
“But there are figures that show that each fan, if they are treated right, is good for $160 a year — in CD sales, t-shirt sales, concert tickets or whatever. Think about that. If you’ve got 10,000 fans, that works out to over a million and a half dollars a year. And if you just send them some newsletters, make them into your friends and get them in your corner, then they’ll be loyal to you forever.”
McCartney became aware of the intense loyalty of well-treated fans at the early age of five, after her mother, then 34, married Paul McCartney’s widowed dad, Jim, in 1964, at the dawn of Beatlemania. While most girls her age were just learning to read, young Ruth was helping her mom and adopting stepdad sort through the sacks of fan mail delivered directly to the McCartney home.
“My mom would write back to them, ‘Paul sends his love,’ and I’d get some of his little shirt buttons and guitar strings and we’d pack ’em up and send ’em to the fans,” she recalls. In return, McCartney says she’d get letters from the fans on her birthday and her own set of Christmas cards.
“It was obviously so important to them that they felt they had a relationship with someone inside the camp.”
McCartney came to value the fans as well. “I grew up thinking, ‘These girls are essentially my brother’s customers, and therefore they’re paying for my school, they’re paying the rent.’ You know?”
When Jim McCartney died in 1976, her “beloved brother” (who, Ruth attests, had always treated her fabulously as a child) abruptly cut off the allowance he’d been sending to his retired dad, reportedly telling Angie it would be “character building” for her and her daughter — who were by then managing a Wings fan club — to make it on their own.
Ruth took up the challenge, toiling away at her own music career for many years (developing a big following in Russia, of all places) before finally returning to a high-tech update of the after-school craft she originally learned in kindergarten: building meaningful relationships between pop stars and their fans. Mother Angie, now 76, handles all the bookkeeping and manages Ruth’s calendar. “She’s still rockin’!” Ruth says.
Today, iFanz users include young indie artists, as well as sports stars, comedians and even aerobics and Pilates instructors (“They have their fans, too”).
Still, it’s the older pop acts, like clients REO Speedwagon, Edgar Winter, America, Orleans and The Knack, that McCartney believes really need to develop relationships with their fans — and fast.
“When you’re one of these older rockers and you fall and have to go to the hospital,” McCartney says, citing one of the very real concerns for tour promoters booking rock’s heritage acts, “all of a sudden, you’re not able to make your money by playing anymore. Well, if you had been developing a relationship with your fans over the years, you could start selling your oil paintings or barbeque sauce or cookbook, and when you open up your little Internet shop, you’d already have a built-in base of customers.”
It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but one that a lot of older pop stars are willingly choking down as they rock into their golden years.
“It’s a hard life,” McCartney says. “But if you mind your fans and handle them right, they’ll stick with you.”
When Todd Rundgren’s fans first heard that their hero would be touring with The Cars as the replacement for founding lead singer Ric Ocasek, who was passing on the reunion tour (which stopped in Phoenix in May), many were appalled, feeling the inventive, legendarily creative Rundgren was selling himself short by subbing in a band with a catalog of music much less distinguished than his own.
“His shadow is a lot larger, legacy-wise, than The Cars’ is,” complained one fan in a weekly podcast (titled the “Toddcast”) produced by a network of die-hard fans. “If he needs money to support his family, I understand,” offered another. “I mean, I guess I’d work at McDonalds, too, if I had to. It’s like that.”
Rundgren’s fans felt a particular right to voice their opinions on his latest career move. After all, many of them are faithful subscribers to his own fan service, PatroNet, which charges fans $40 a year to be privy to exclusive new songs and keep up on the artist’s work in development, which the service effectively underwrites.
Like many experiments in Rundgren’s eclectic career, PatroNet was invented ahead of its time — in the mid-Nineties, presaging McCartney’s iFanz and beating by nearly a decade every music act on the planet now setting up their own MySpace page to bypass the record labels and push clips of their latest tunes straight to their fans.
Rundgren, now 57, feels indebted to the followers who’ve funded his off-beat projects for the last ten years, permitting him to live and create contentedly in Hawaii without setting foot in an L.A. record company. But he’s quick to add that even his most devout, dues-paying fans aren’t the boss of him.
“It was never my intention [with PatroNet] that fans should be able to vote on what you should be doing, or be somehow involved in the creative process,” he says. “And I don’t think my audience actually wants that. They still want to vest the creative responsibility in me, and they want to be surprised, to a certain extent, by what I do.”
He realizes most of his die-hard fans would rather see him on another solo tour or fronting his former band, Utopia, than mimicking Ocasek’s stuttering delivery on “Shake It Up.” But on that count, too, Rundgren insists he’s the Decider.
“The plain reality is that there are only certain ways that I can go on the road and properly capitalize on my career,” says Rundgren. “I mean, I’m not a missionary,” he laughs. “What this does is enables me to enjoy a level of production and expose myself to an audience of a certain size that I can neither afford nor create on my own.”
While Rundgren clearly appreciates the core fans who’ve stuck with him through the wild course his music has sometimes taken, he admits he gets tired of “playing to the same faces” every time.
“Of course, on this Cars tour, I’m thinking, ‘How much of this audience can I hang onto after the tour is over?’” says Rundgren, who confides he’ll be sneaking a lot of his own songs into the set.
As to the complaints from some of his PatroNet subscribers, who’ve balked on the Toddcasts about his “allowing us to finance this tour” against their wishes, Rundgren promises his would-be stockholders will ultimately be happy with the product.
“I do feel a responsibility to them in the sense that I owe them my best work,” Rundgren says, opining that “Not Tonight,” the first single by The New Cars, as they’re being called, is as good as any pop confection he’s offered in the past.
“My real responsibility to them is not to go into some safe retirement,” he says, laughing. “Or simply play on their nostalgia by just delivering my hits. I have to continue to create, and to create to a certain standard that they’ve come to expect.”
“I once saw Steve Martin beat up a fan,” Andrew Gold is saying, recalling a New York City cab ride back in the 70’s that Gold shared with Martin, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, following Gold’s appearance as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live.
“This guy had been pestering him for an autograph, and now he was running alongside our car, and finally Steve just said, ‘Stop the car,’” Gold recalls. “Steve got out of the car, went over and just punched the guy right to the ground. And everybody’s jaw just dropped.”
Gold allows he didn’t know the “back-story” to the episode — “Maybe this guy had been bothering him for years” — and says that every time he’s seen Martin since, the star has always been “very kind and thoughtful.”
But something about that incident stayed with him, and ever since, Gold has made it a point to remain atypically accessible and appreciative toward his own fans.
He claims he made time to personally answer all his fan mail in the pre-Internet days, and now that he’s online (and his re-built website is slowly coming back up), Gold is possibly the easiest multi-instrumentalist in the world to catch a chat with.
“He’s online all the time, and people know how to bug him,” says friend Ruth McCartney, laughing. “But he’s a great example of someone who’s developed a close relationship with his fans.”
Possibly because of that openness, Gold says he’s recently seen a resurgence in CD sales. An album he put out on his own nine years ago, “Since 1951,” has just been re-released on Universal and is now available on Rhapsody and iTunes. And his four hit albums from the 70’s were recently re-issued as part of the Collector’s Choice Remasters series.
“All of a sudden, I seem to be gaining in popularity,” he says. “I thought it would slowly wind down, but it’s actually speeding up. Probably because of the Internet, I guess.”
Ruth McCartney thinks there’s a direct correlation between Gold’s success and the way he treats his fans, and adds that there’s another hidden advantage to getting close enough to your fans that they’re comfortable calling you things like “Fatty.”
“The recording industry’s main concern today is fighting illegal downloaders,” she says. “But the bottom line is, people don’t steal from their friends. The whole point about developing relationships with fans is, are they going to steal from somebody that they feel is a friend, somebody that they feel like they know? No!”
It seems a simple truth, and yet one that McCartney says still eludes the grasp of the old-school record labels and the RIAA.
“If you really admire somebody and like them, why wouldn’t you want to be in their corner?” she says. “Why wouldn’t you want to see them do well?”
Photos courtesy Andrew Gold, Ruth McCartney
