Bill Young, President, Bill Young Productions, Houston, Texas
by Jerry Vigil
Chances are you've dubbed a multitude of spots bearing his name on the box. Those of you who are veterans in the industry may well remember him as the winner of several Program Director of the Year awards during his lengthy and successful PD stint at the 70's powerhouse, KILT in Houston, Texas. Join us as we visit with Bill Young and get the story about how he built a multi-million dollar business from what started as a few free-lance concert spots on the side.
R.A.P.: Where did your career start and how did Bill Young Productions come into existence?
Bill: I started in high school in Lufkin, Texas when I was sixteen years old. I wound up attending Baylor University, as a ministerial student of all things, and working nights at WACO in Waco, Texas. Eventually, I was offered the job of Production Director at WACO. At that time, I didn't even know what that meant. I assumed that I would direct disc-jockeys to do good production on the air. I didn't know what the Production Director did, but very quickly I learned that it meant recording commercials. This was back in the fifties, and back then we didn't have commercial limits like we do today. We were running thirty to thirty-five commercials per hour, and I had to record all of those. There was no one else there to do it. It was a full-time job and quite an education.
Then I went to Omaha, Nebraska as the morning man at KOIL. Bill Western was my air name there, but I didn't know that would be my air name until after I got to the station. I remember driving into Omaha, listening to this station I was going to work for. The promos all said, "KOIL goes western Monday morning!" I thought, "Oh, my God! What have I done?" I walked in Monday morning, and they said, "Hi. Your name is Bill Western."
I moved back to Texas in the early sixties and became a Program Director in Tyler. It was then that I quickly learned that the true way to paint the sound of a radio station is with what comes out of the production room. All the commercials that came in from outside were predetermined -- all the national and regional commercials -- and I had no control over the sound of these spots. As Program Director, I had no control over the music other than the order and the selection of the songs. As far as the sound of them, I had no control over that. Again, the commercial limits were not what they are today, so I had to do lots of commercials. Doing that volume, you not only learn how to record them, but you learn how to write them, too. In some cases you learn how to schedule them, also. And all these commercials had to be done quickly, so I learned how to be fast. I also learned some basic engineering skills at that point. Probably, most of my learning years were those five years in Tyler, Texas, in a very small operation where you had to do everything. You could not be a specialist because you didn't have that luxury. You just had to learn to do it all -- then go out and sell it sometimes.
I left Tyler and went back to WACO for a couple of years and was then offered the Program Director's position here in Houston at KILT which at that time was a major top-40 station owned by the Gordon McClendon chain. In the fifties and sixties, that group was at the top of our industry. So the chance to come down and program KILT under Gordon McClendon was quite an opportunity. I served as Program Director of that station for fifteen years, both the AM and the FM. But even though my area was programming, I still loved to spend a lot of time in the production studio. I felt, and still do today, that this is where the true sound of the radio station can most be influenced on a local basis. It's something shared, I think, by most successful stations; you usually find real good production techniques and skills somewhere in that facility.
At the end of that tenure as Program Director, I discovered that most of my headaches were coming out of radio, and by that time two-thirds of my income was coming from doing commercials on the side. So I left in 1981 and formed what had just been the name of a company. Bill Young Productions was nothing more than a bank account. When I left, I was doing most of the commercials for Pace Concerts here in Houston and Beaver Productions out of New Orleans. I kept those clients when I left KILT. I had a number of offers to stay in radio, but I had pretty much made the decision that radio programming, for me at least, had ceased to be something that I wanted to continue to do. Being a rock-and-roll Program Director at forty-plus years of age is not the greatest place to be. I felt I wanted to do something on my own for myself, and something that had a more realistic future. My parents had always said I needed to get a real job, so it was time to get a real job.
I had no intention at that point of building a studio. I found myself going to recording studios to do the kind of production that I did, and that was unheard of. Here were these engineers I couldn't even communicate with. I was trying to do broadcast production, and they were doing high-end recording. The two never meshed. So I thought, "Why couldn't you do a recording studio environment from a quality standpoint, and yet use many of the techniques that I had learned in broadcasting?" So we built our own studio, and by that time people were beginning to contact us about national tours. I actually did the first national tour ever done, to my knowledge, in 1973 when I did commercials for the ZZ Top World Wide Texas Tour, but I had never pursued the national tours as a true business until 1981 when I went into it full time. By that time, Joe Kelly was pretty well entrenched in the concert field with a company called SuperSpots. We pretty much went directly into competition with Joe and in time achieved a certain degree of dominance in that area.
R.A.P.: What was that first studio like, and how did the studios develop over the years?
Bill: We built the first studio in a little office strip which was all we could afford at that time. We put some rather neat things on the wall to deaden the sound and that sort of thing. It looked good for a studio, but it was not a studio; it was a glorified office. We were always fighting grounding problems and the kinds of things we all have to deal with. I eventually added a secretary and someone who could do the billing and that sort of thing. Then we added a second production man who built tracks and would take care of the dubs at the end of the day. That's how it took place the first couple of years.
As it grew, we added two true radio production men/voice talents. It was my dream to someday be in the position to really do it right. We eventually bought the building. The offices were in good shape, and all we had to do was put some paint on the walls for the offices. For the studios, there was this big twelve-thousand square foot warehouse in the back. It didn't even have air conditioning in it. It was just open space. We were able to go in and build studios that were independently isolated. We had Russ Burger, who's the leading studio designer in the business, come in and do the acoustical design. Then we hired technical designers who came in and did the wiring schematics -- I mean really first class. It was done the right way. Now we have some twenty-five employees in our own sixteen-thousand square foot facility with six audio suites, three one-inch video edit suites, and a sound stage. I'm a production man first and foremost -- always was and always will be, and this is kind of a production man's dream come true.
I always felt there was a commitment I, as a production man, had. I don't know if your readers would share this, but I bet it's a chord that we all felt at one time or another. There we are working til two o'clock in the morning to get a certain sound right, and I think good production people do that not for any other reason than that thing inside of you that says, "I can make this better." Then you have the manager and the Sales Manager pulling up in new cars and getting the benefit of that while we're doing it for the joy of doing it. That joy was really the only reward for many of those years. So it became an obsession to do the company just for production people. Production people run our company.
One of the things that concerned me the most, and one of the things that was most disappointing to me was that, as a production man, you're alone in radio. There's usually not more than one or two production people at any one facility. So there are not a lot of people to bounce things off of, and you find your work being critiqued or judged by people who really do not understand what it took to get it done. You're sometimes judged by people who don't know, if you will. Now, it's good to be in an environment where there's a bunch of us, and we're all kind of pushing each other. When someone makes a comment, you know they bring a wealth of experience to the table to be able to make that judgement and that suggestion to you. It's very exciting to be able to creatively feed off of other production people.
R.A.P.: How did the video work come around?
Bill: About four years into our company, we would get requests from people to do audio tracks for television commercials. We would simply supply a thirty-second radio commercial, and they would edit that to whatever music videos they had to do an "MTV version" of the spots we were doing. That was fine until I started seeing some of those commercials. I thought that some of them were rather cheesy, and I was not necessarily interested in even having my voice on them. I thought they were a quality statement that we shouldn't be making.
I believe that radio production men, or at least the better ones, think visually anyway. When I got into radio, I got into it because of the theatre of the mind. I'm old enough to remember the Lone Ranger and programs of that type where you painted your own mental pictures. Early music radio had a lot of exotic kinds of promos that allowed you to be very visual. Thinking that way anyway, it was very easy to transfer this into "well, all you have to do now is paint that picture realistically." So, we finally put in our own edit suite, and that mushroomed and put us into overdrive. Now we have a rather large film and video commitment. The only difference is that the dollars are incredibly different and the technology is extremely costly. Our investment in video equipment alone is literally in the millions. Today, I couldn't go into video work, but doing it a piece at a time like I did, we were able to grow into it.
R.A.P.: Is the video work mostly concert related?
Bill: Primarily. It's music related. We do a lot of commercials for record companies and Broadway tours, and we do some music videos. So I'd say it's primarily music and entertainment related; however we also have our "legitimate" advertisers too. We do newspapers and banks and car dealers and grocery chains, both on the audio and video end.
R.A.P.: Was it pretty easy for you to leave KILT and go out on your own, or did you have your fair share of fears like most people who leave a job to open their own business?
Bill: Even though most of my income at that time was from outside commercial work, it was still scary. I had never had to do my own withholding tax, my own hospitalization insurance, and I was not nor do I still consider myself much of a business mind. Those were scary things about stepping out on my own.
While working for yourself certainly has its rewards, you give up a lot of freedom that you have when you work for someone else. You don't really own the company, the company owns you. Imagine sitting for twelve hours a day with earphones going full blast, and that's just to service what you have to to meet your payroll. And at night you have to do the creative parts of developing the new business. That's seven days a week, and it goes on year in and year out. While it's certainly an independent feeling, it's not for the weak hearted, I assure you. It's more demanding than any job I've ever had in my life.
R.A.P.: How many producers do you employ?
Bill: Audio only, we have six. Then we have six video producers.
R.A.P.: Who are some of the producers in the audio rooms?
Bill: Steve Kelley is in one of our rooms. Again, all of these people came out of radio. All of them were Production Directors, and in some cases, Program Directors. Steve Kelley was a Program Director for many years, and he also had the benefit of being a record promotion man for many years. Steve Kelley is very strong in many areas, and is a big part of our sound. All of us have strong music backgrounds. And in that sense, that's why I'm glad I also had the programming experience because I think I understand that a sixty second commercial needs to flow musically the same way as a radio station would flow or a good, balanced hour would flow. It needs to have its dynamics -- its up and downs.
John Williard is in one of the rooms as a voice talent and producer. John is the newest member of our staff. Like Steve, John is a very strong, world class voice talent and is doing a variety of projects for us.
Harry Schluderberg is in another room. Harry was with a number of stations in Kansas City for years as Production Director. He's very good at our theatrical work like the Broadway tours, but he also has strengths in many of our R&B tours.
There's Rusty Ford who was with 93Q here and a variety of stations around the country. Rusty is very good in the alternative/new music area.
Eric Young, my youngest son, builds music tracks for us. He also voices some tours. He voiced the last two REM tours because they wanted that college radio sound, but Eric mainly builds tracks for us. He works on the AudioFile digital disk recorder and is very fast and very musically oriented. And then I work in another room. Each one of us has a variety of projects going at any one time.
R.A.P.: What did you personally do today?
Bill: Today, I probably did four or five Van Halen markets. I think there were two Tom Petty markets that I did. There were four Paula Abdul markets. I did three Natalie Cole markets. I did a Six Flags Great America Chicago commercial. There were many others, but I can't remember them.
I also did some TV spots today. I did a George Michael spot for Houston, and I did some Van Halen markets. What I'm doing are the audio tracks. The video department takes the audio tracks and marries them to the pre-built video tracks, adds local information, and makes the dubs.
R.A.P.: Are you actually cutting up the music beds for the spots you do?
Bill: I do some, yes. All of the producers do some.
R.A.P.: I had this image of you spending your day in a voice-booth laying tracks for a couple of hours then calling it a day.
Bill: Oh, God, no. As a matter of fact, I can't even do that kind of voice work. I can't walk into a room, put on some headphones, and just voice something.
I can't even write copy unless I've got a music track. I have to go cut a music track and make the integrity of the music track right, make it flow, make it stand up as a sixty-second piece of music with no copy. Then copy tends to write itself, for me anyway. All I'm doing is filling holes, writing copy one line at a time. That's easy for me. I find that with a redirection of thinking, most of the people that go to work for us, once we talk that concept through, find it very simple because that music track is everything. And I'm not talking about just music related spots. We do the same thing when we do a bank commercial. We work around the music because that is the essence of the spot. That is what really makes it work.
I love sound effects work, too. That has been one of the most thrilling discoveries for me, doing sound for video. I remember a situation where we had to get a sound of steak sizzling on a char-broiler for a commercial we were doing for a supermarket chain a few years ago. We could never get the airiness that we needed for the sound the fire makes when it flames up around the steak on the grill, which was the scene we were looking at. We finally discovered the openness and the dimensionality by taking a particular brand of cereal and pouring it dry into a bowl. That gave us that "pshhhh" sound.
When I worked at KOIL in Omaha, I worked with a young man, Steve Brown, who was the national Program Director of that chain. He was brilliant in the production room because he had no personal boundaries on his ability to do things. I remember he was looking for a particular explosion, but not a true percussive explosion. He just wanted that kind of impact sound, but the explosions from the sound effects libraries would not work. He reached over and wrapped Scotch tape around the needle on the tone arm, set the turntable to 78 rpm, and dropped the needle onto that rotating platter with the reverb unit wide open. The sound that came out of the speakers was just mind boggling. I thought, "What a free mind it is that can invent these sounds!" That moment, my whole perspective of sound design changed, and that's one of the areas I thoroughly enjoy today.
R.A.P.: How many spots would you say Bill Young Productions is producing every year?
Bill: I haven't really done an estimate in the last year or so, but two or three years ago we did a count, and a pretty educated estimate is that we ship about fifty thousand commercials a year. We've had people come to work for us who in the first week walked in and said, "I really don't want to work this hard." That has happened on two occasions.
R.A.P.: We heard a rumor that you have an outrageous FedEx bill. What is it?
Bill: Well, because we're such a large shipper, we've been able to get volume discounts. Even with those discounts, it is well into six figures annually.
R.A.P.: You mentioned that you have the AudioFile digital recorder. What gear is in the other studios?
Bill: We have 16-track, 8-track, and 4-track machines. Ninety-five percent of our work is done on the 4-track, again because speed is a major thing we're concerned with. Virtually all of the music beds get cut up on the AudioFile, at least eighty percent of them. Then they get transferred to 4-track, so you get two tracks for music and two tracks for voice.
In the mixdown process, we're all producers and voice talents. We each lay the voice tracks and mix them down. If we're doing the pre-sale spot, we lay that voice track, mix it down, then go to the next spot. If you had to stop and mix eight tracks every time, the redundancy of hundreds of markets facing you every day would make it impossible.
We keep it real simple. Our entire operation is very simple, from the order taking process all the way down the line.
R.A.P.: What's in the studios in the way of effects boxes and processing gear?
Bill: Obviously, we have the normal group of Yamahas, SPX 900's and 1000's. There are Eventide Harmonizers, and I have a varying number of things around from Lexicon including the 480L. Some of them we like and stay with. The Harmonizer, of course, year in and year out becomes a very usable tool. It's hard to replace one of those. That's probably one of the few pieces of gear that you just keep in the studio. I'm excited about some of the new units that are out that we're listening to. I love the Aphex processing equipment. They're very transparent. We try to keep things as unprocessed sounding as possible and yet still get the full sound. That's always a fight -- keeping the dynamic range, and yet still delivering a product that sits up there and pops out, too.
R.A.P.: What are the 8 and 16-track rooms used for?
Bill: To be totally honest, when we hire a new production man, almost invariably, each one will say, "Oh, I can't do this on 4-track. I've got to do it on 16-track or 8-track." So we always have one around for new employees. Then, usually after a couple of weeks when they see the work load stacked up there, they say, "It really is faster on 4-track." It's usually a decision they make on their own, but I don't ever want technology to be something that holds us back.
R.A.P.: When you hire new producers, do you look for a style of production and a voice that is already what you want, or do you mold new producers to the Bill Young sound?
Bill: A little bit of both. We're never always looking for the same thing. As we have grown and acquired different clients, different needs have developed. We go searching for people who can fill those needs. It would be wrong to say that we look for just one sound. In the most recent case, we were looking for one man and found two. They were both very different, but we liked them both. So we rearranged plans and hired two people just because that kind of talent presented itself to us.
I'm a real groupie when it comes to voice talents and production people. I copied a lot when I started in this business, and I really encourage young people to copy. I don't think there's anything wrong at all with doing that. When you start basic art, they have you re-doing simple little paintings by some master, and in the process you learn how he mixes paint and colors and what brushes he uses. My career began as one of the best copiers in the business. I'd hear something, and I'd have to go do it. Then, over a period of years I began saying, "Well, what if he had done this?" And all of a sudden, I was putting some of me in there too.
When looking for people, I want to hear some innovativeness. I want to hear someone trying something new, and yet I want to hear somebody that understands basics. I like good voices, but that is almost a curse in many cases because many good voices don't know how to use those voices. It's very unfortunate that, in radio, our programming styles demand a certain kind of delivery, and we don't necessarily teach people how to be good voice talents, how to be good interpreters. If you look at most of the successful voice talents that are out there -- the million dollar a year men -- not a lot of them came out of radio.
One of the best voice coaches in the country from Los Angeles did a seminar in our studios a year or so ago. The first thing she had us all do was take the headphones off. It was amazing to hear how different the voice talents sounded without the headphones on.
R.A.P.: You recently changed your logo from the familiar blue-gray Bill Young Productions to a bright red "Y" done in a paintbrush style. What was the purpose there?
Bill: Our company is more than Bill Young. I wish I had not named our company Bill Young Productions. It's probably the biggest mistake I ever made because the company is really not just Bill Young. It's as much Steve Kelley and the rest. So I wanted to move it more into a trademark kind of thing than a name. I think what we do would be good even if Bill Young weren't there.
I think the logo says a lot. It's kind of an artist's stroke. It's simple, and it's easy to see and recognize. Yet it has that artsy appeal that's kind of a statement that we're not doing exact science here.
R.A.P.: Before you left KILT, you had already established a "Bill Young" sound that didn't involve any other voices or producers other than yourself. Can you nail down what that Bill Young sound was that your clients wanted?
Bill: Actually, I had for many years, a major asthma problem, and to sit and read a sixty second commercial was virtually impossible for me. So I had to figure out a way to make it through a sixty second commercial. I discovered with multi-track that I could read with myself; I could bounce tracks. In doing that, I discovered that I could almost treat myself as two different voices. I could stack things in a way that would not just continue but actually enhance the delivery. It was purely by accident. I was trying to accomplish something else, but in so doing, I hit something that, at least at that point in time, was rather fresh sounding, and that was the ability to do two voice commercials which I still think are extremely exciting, and I know now are considered passé in many cases. Someone told me there are actually policies now against two voice commercials. God, what a waste. They are wonderful! There is no question that for sheer excitement, the two voice commercial has something that we've never been able to duplicate.
During my formative years, I was Program Director in Tyler, and I don't know if anybody remembers this, but there was this station that went on the air in Dallas. I was weaned on KLIF in Dallas, the Gordon McClendon sound, but then here comes this station called KBOX. Every production man who ever lives in the future should have the opportunity to study that radio station. It was what formed my entire opinion from that point on about the effect of production on the sound of a radio station. It became such a nationally copied radio station. Program Directors from all over the country were flying into Dallas and taping this station. Even the newscasts were highly, musically produced. Every single disc-jockey on that station was a production man first. So you had many versions of KBOX pop up around the country in varying degrees -- WNOE in New Orleans; KYA in San Francisco. I don't know that those stations would ever admit they copied KBOX, but they were certainly influenced by KBOX. And then you look at the staff members at that station. Johnny Borders was one of those people, and he went on to become Program Director at KLIF. The morning man was Dan Ingram who certainly went on to great success. But the sound.... Every promo was this two voice, driving sound.
My ability to stack voices gave me the ability, by myself, to become those two voices, and I could do it with a change of inflection, with a change of intensity and all the other colorations that are available. I could do those same two-voice commercials, and that's how I came up with the Bill Young sound, if there is one.
R.A.P.: Were you marketing yourself back when you were at KILT?
Bill: No, not at all. Zero. Of course, back then there were just two clients, Pace and Beaver, and both of them had strong Houston bases. I don't have any marketing people now and never have had.
I'm very proud of the work that we do. We're a very strong service organization. I'm not sure that anybody cares as much as we do about what we do. I'm not sure that came out right, but I'm not sure how many people would get up at two o'clock in the morning and do a session time and again. I'm not sure that many people have that kind of commitment.
R.A.P.: Did you do concert spots from the beginning and up through the present day because of a love for that kind of spot, or did you see a hole in the market for someone to produce those spots then try to fill that demand?
Bill: Oh, I love that kind of commercial because it has a very creative palette to work on. I didn't see concerts spots as something to pursue. I had never heard of Joe Kelly until I actually got out there and started doing it. I didn't know anyone was out there doing it. There never was any design, and I never assumed that we would be doing this many concert commercials. I wanted to keep the clients that I had and service them, and then build into local agency work and do a lot of that. The more we did, the more people said, "Hey, these guys really do this right."
We have competitors, and some of them have achieved, and I'm sure will continue to achieve, a certain degree of success. And I'm sure over a period of time there will be more. But, we have a tremendous facility, and there are not a lot of people that would be willing to make the financial commitment to have a facility to service an industry like we have. You're not just going to go in on weekends and do this, for a variety of reasons. You have issues like collections, and that can put you out of business if you're not real careful. It's one thing to go collect from a few clients. It's another when you're getting small amounts from LOTS of clients. I would not be able to compete against us today and sufficiently beat us.
R.A.P.: Do you ever turn work down?
Bill: Yes.
R.A.P.: Why? What work do you turn down?
Bill: I turn down some things that I just don't feel good about doing. I believe that there is an order to this world. I happen to believe in a god, and I think he has been very good to me. There are certain responsibilities I have, to do what my conscious tells me. Sometimes we're presented with opportunities to do things that I just don't feel clean doing. So I just don't do them. I don't have to do them. I don't want to do them.
On the other hand, we do a lot of free stuff, lots of public service things. I happen to believe in the Don Henley project. There's no charge for those projects because I believe in them.
R.A.P.: What kind of turnaround time do you have?
Bill: You can order spots from us at seven o'clock in the evening and get them in the morning. And that's what I'm saying; you've got to have a staff and a facility large enough to do that. You've got to be big enough to negotiate with Federal Express so they will not come until nine-thirty at night. A one-man operation just couldn't do this. I suppose if someone wanted to invest ten million dollars, they could be there from day one.
R.A.P.: Are you doing a lot of work outside of the U.S.?
Bill: Oh, yea. We shipped spots today to Australia. A lot of the tour business involves world tours that will come to America, but they will also go to other places. Lately, we've shipped a lot of things to Mexico. It was very thrilling this past year to do the Rolling Stones tour worldwide. The spots for the London show were a lot of fun because I could imagine Paul McCartney out there hearing the commercials, and I'm enough of a groupie to appreciate those things.
Many times we will just ship music tracks and kind of supervise, but in many cases we will actually voice them in English. There's a lot of that in Mexico. The AC/DC tour we did throughout Europe all in English. There were tag spaces left where they would fill it in with local languages. In Mexico right now, a major thing is for an English voice to do a line, then a Spanish voice comes back in behind the line and repeats it. We also do a lot of radio station ID's down there.
R.A.P.: Are you producing a lot of station ID's?
Bill: In Mexico we do a lot. We don't here in the States, and that's for very clear reasons. We have lots of opportunities to do them, but it's an area of work that can sometimes conflict with our core business. We could be doing ID's for a station that happens to be in a very competitive situation with a station that our leading promoter client happens to work with, so we've compromised our-selves in that market. Plus, ID's chew up voices real fast.
R.A.P.: Referring back to your thoughts about KBOX, do you feel, as a former Program Director, that this kind of highly produced sound still applies to successful radio today?
Bill: It does, and only because it's not being offered. The times that I have seen it reoffered -- the resurgence of some of the "Power" formats is an example -- those times I felt were very exciting from a production standpoint, and those stations certainly achieved a degree of success. KKBQ, back when they really hit hard, was very highly produced. But I don't think it's being offered today, so I don't know how you could research whether or not it's effective. I don't know how you'd research it anyway.
R.A.P.: Any parting thoughts for our readers?
Bill: I would encourage everybody to strive to go the extra mile. In searching for a production man this past summer, I had the opportunity to listen to lots of tapes. There is a lot of room for improvement out there, and there is obviously a real opportunity for people who care, who are willing to go the extra mile to do very well for themselves in production. There's a whole new world out there to be learned, technically.
I've often said that I was very fortunate in that I learned things in a time when I could afford to live in Tyler, Texas making fifty-five dollars a week. The economy of the world at that point in time allowed me to learn all those things. It took me twelve years to get to a major market, and unfortunately now, not many people would stay at it twelve years at those kinds of salaries, and certainly not while having to put up with doing every single thing in the radio station, and then go in and type the log themselves. I hated every minute of it and complained, but I learned how to do it.
Today, as an owner of a company, I know how to do those things, and I would not have known had it not been for Lufkin, Tyler, and Waco, Texas. If someone truly wanted to make the investment in their career, I'd say go someplace where you've got to learn to do everything. Put up with it for as long as you can possibly do it. Don't be in such a big hurry to get to a position where you have all the tools. When you only have a 2-track Magnacorder to work with, you have to be rather inventive.
♦