Groove Addicts, the three-year-old Los Angeles.-based music house headed by executive creative director Dain Blair, has signed composers Mark Snow and Michael Kamen for exclusive spot representation. It is the first commercial roost for the composers, who are both 20-year veterans of the entertainment music business. Snow is best known for composing the theme to The X-Files and last year he scored the big screen version, The X-Files: Fight the Future, as well as the feature film Disturbing Behavior. Kamen has scored more than 70 features, including What Dreams May Come and Mr. Holland’s Opus, and he co-wrote with Bryan Adams "Everything I Do I Do For You," the Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated theme song to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
For Snow, the signing comes six months after he hired a new manager, Robert Urband of L.A.-based Sound Image Network, to help him with "ancillary projects" other than TV and features, including commercials, records and interactive games. Earlier in his career, Snow said he took the spot market for granted. "[But] as I evolved, I started listening," he said, "and there’s some amazing things. Besides some amazing visuals and ideas and the thought behind these commercials, some of this music is really fabulous. It just [seems] so creative." He is also intrigued by the 30-second format. "You have a limited amount of time to get a point across," he said. "I thought that was very challenging."
As it turns out, Urband not only knows Blair, but manages Kamen, too. "[Robert] asked me if I’d be interested in Mark Snow," Blair said, "and of course I said yes. There is an awareness of Mark especially through The X-Files. I know he is capable of doing much more than [that] style, but immediately there is that awareness." At the same time, Urband mentioned Kamen’s interest in spots. According to Blair, the composer has done a limited amount of spot work over the years, has always liked it, and "would just like to do more. But he’s so busy doing movies and no one was out there looking for that work for him, so those opportunities weren’t presenting themselves." Blair also said his interest in Kamen was a given. "What can you say when you see those credits?" he asked rhetorically.
Blair estimates that Snow and Kamen will each score between two and five assignments under the Groove Addicts banner each year. "Some of [their availability will be dictated by] their film careers," he said, "but what I find is that … a lot of film composers work with large orchestral pieces so you’re usually talking big orchestras. So it’s got to be the right client with the right project and the right budget. But what’s great for us is that those are always great projects."
Separated At Birth?
Snow and Kamen have a lot more in common than their manager Urband and a spot roost at Groove Addicts. "They’re actually twins," joked Blair. Kidding aside, both composers hail from New York, where they played the oboe and attended the High School of Music and Art. Later, they roomed together while students at Julliard. During college they also formed a band together, the New York Rock ‘n’ Roll Ensemble.
After graduation, however, Snow and Kamen went their own ways and have led separate careers ever since. "We sort of evolved in the same way," Snow said. "Then [Michael] went off to London and I went off to L.A." While Snow found steady work in the TV series and movie-of-the-week genre, writing the theme songs to such primetime shows as Starsky and Hutch (’75-79) and Hart to Hart (’79-84), Kamen tackled the feature world. His early credits include The Next Man (’76), Pink Floyd’s The Wall (’82) and Brazil (’85).
Kamen, who was unavailable for comment at press time, rose up the ranks and went on to score the Die Hard trilogy and all four Lethal Weapon films. He has also collaborated with musicians such as Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and George Harrison. More recently, he scored Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and three installments of the 12-part HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.
As for Snow, it was The X-Files (which debuted on FOX in ’93) that would mark a turning point in his career. He has gone on to score X-Files creator Chris Carter’s second series, Millennium, and will also score Carter’s forthcoming FOX series, Harsh Realm, due out this fall. The X-Files also led to Snow’s first spot assignment, a job for McDonald’s Australia. When X-Files director David Nutter was approached to direct the spot for the burger giant, he asked Snow to score it. The spot features a grandfather figure and a young boy out in an open country landscape, looking up at the sky. The boy asks the older man "Do they have this?" and "Do they have that?" Finally he asks, "Do they have McDonalds?" to which the older man says, "Yes, I believe they do." Then the camera pans up to the sky to reveal a picture of Earth off in space.
Despite the spot’s we-are-not-alone theme, Snow is not solely interested in the paranormal. "I was a student in the ’60s and very much into modern music, avant-garde concert music and at the same time folksy stuff like [Bob] Seger and the Weavers," he said. The McDonald’s spot, he added, "was very mellow and sweet, not X-File-y at all." His strength, he added, is combining melody, sound design and rhythm.
Snow recently wrapped his latest feature score for Crazy in Alabama, a Sony/Columbia Pictures release due out this fall which stars Melanie Griffith and marks Antonio Banderas’ directorial debut. Kamen’s latest project is a symphony for the millennium commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra, which will premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in January 2000. While neither composer has a Groove Addicts project in the works yet, Blair is optimistic that it won’t be long. "This is really the official announcement," he said, "and we do expect people to take an immediate notice."
Blair, formerly a founding partner of now defunct Who Did That Music?, formed Groove Addicts in ’96 with the intention of bringing feature talent to spots. He said these latest signings continue in that direction. "That’s why we’re happy with these new relationships." The music shop’s core spot roster includes composers Al Capps, Clive Wright, Ralph Schucket, Billy Baker, Syn-G, Brad Chiet, Daniel Holter and Marc LeVang, and sound designers Robert Nelson and Jonathan Miller (who divides his time between spots and features). In all, Groove Addicts represents upwards of 30 feature film composers, including heavyweights such as Stewart Copeland and Danny Elfman. Recent projects include "Shockwave" for Mazda Miata out of W.B. Doner & Company, Southfield, Mich., with vocals produced by LeVang and sound design by Miller; 7Up’s "Motorhome" and "Mermaid" via BBDO, Toronto, with music composed by Schucket and Baker with Miller serving as sound designer; and "Attraction" for General Motors’ electric car, the EV1, out of Publicis & Hal Riney in San Francisco, which was scored by Holter. Among Groove Addicts’ additional clients are Mercedes, Pepsi, Levi’s, Gatorade, Calvin Klein, AT&T, Kodak, Miller Lite and Taco Bell.
Groove Addicts is repped on the East Coast by New York-based Elyse Emmer of The Emmer Group, in the Midwest by Chicago-based Elizabeth Mang, and on the West Coast by L.A.-based Connie Mellors of Connie Mellors & Company.
