 Welcome to the drum history podcast. I am your host Bart van der Zee, and today I am joined by Mr. Rob Cook. Rob, welcome. Hey, Bart. How's it going, man? Good. I'm pumped to have you back. We are pretty fresh off of the Chicago drum show. It wasn't that long ago. It's June right now. I had a great time. I know these are crazy circumstances here in, you know, 2021, but I think everyone really enjoyed themselves. I think so. It was pretty remarkable, even though we were down in attendance and exhibitor count enthusiasm was way up. I talked to exhibitor after exhibitor who had record sales in spite of the 50% drop in attendance. It was really pretty remarkable. Wow. Everybody seemed to do really well and nobody got hurt. That's always a bonus. The staff was encouraging as always. Things overall went pretty smoothly. And the best thing for me was I won the WFL3 snare drum in the raffle on the last day, which was like mind blowing. And it is awesome. I have it set up behind me right now in my drums. And I mean, the snare sounds just amazing. I've been playing the one that Bill and the girls gave to me just a few minutes before that. I just got it set up with the kit that I kind of bang around on yesterday actually. And I'm having a good time with that. They gave me a really nice drum that has the number 30 on the side in the skyline of Chicago. It was a wonderful gift and I really liked that drum. I think that was special for everyone to kind of stand there and just see him present that to you with his daughters. I went up to Bill after and thanked him and he was just such a nice guy. That was a nice perk to win a pretty expensive snare drum for $5. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, today, this topic, you are obviously one of my favorite guests on the show. You've been on the show a handful of times. It has to be four or five now and they're always great episodes. Today, we're talking about the history of endorsements. Such a unique and interesting topic. People might not realize that endorsements go back a long time. So why don't you just kind of take it back to the beginning and tell us about endorsements. And maybe before you start, you can actually define what an endorsement is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's one of my goals for this episode. That's kind of a pet peeve of mine is when it's misunderstood and misstated and so on. So we'll be going over that and going over the background of it. And we'll spend, I think, a fair amount of time going over the current state of the artist relations world and situation. And to kick it off, I'd like to give a tip of the hat to John DeChristopher. He's got this program live from my drum room. And episode number one, which is available on YouTube or accessible on YouTube, he starts it right off at the beginning with a really key point, which is one of my main goals. And that's to kind of give an definition of endorsement because words really matter and they're important. And if you misstate it, it makes you sound like you don't quite understand the situation and it can take away from your credibility a little bit. But as John points out, and I should also mention, John DeChristopher was the head of artist relations for Zilgen for quite some time. It was 15 years or something. And as one of the larger companies in terms of artist roster and endorsement program and so on, he's really seen a lot. And that's why this subject is key to him. And that's the definition. An endorser is a person who endorses a particular product. That would seem obvious, but you need to be clear that the company is the endorser and the artist is the endorser. And when you hear someone say, I am endorsed by XYZ company, that's not the way it works. What the artist needs to say is I endorse ABC drums. They don't endorse me. Another key point that I want to steal from John's presentation is the endorser wants to see a return on their investment. And I had never heard it spelled out quite the way he did, but from the Zilgen perspective, he mentioned that Zilgen wanted to see a tenfold return on their investment. Now, their investment obviously is going to be the money they spend on their endorser in terms of time that it takes for them to work with the guy in the first place. They've got an investment right out of the gate just by taking the time to answer the phone, answer the letter, get the agreement set up and so on. But then it goes on to providing merchandise, sending stuff out, buying ads. All of those expenditures are money that they're putting out that they want to return on. And in the case of Zilgen, John mentioned that they wanted a tenfold return. So if they're going to spend $100 on all of those things I mentioned involved with getting an endorser signed, they're going to want to sell an extra $1,000 worth of product. So for guys that are going out looking for an endorsement agreement, keep that in the back of your mind. You need to figure out how to present yourself in a way that's going to make the company money. I'm sure we'll talk about this maybe later, but maybe you can touch on it now. But it seems like one of those things that might be hard to quantify, though, because if I'm inspired by Thomas Pridgen or something on Instagram, and then I go out and buy a Zilgen crash, that information is not going to get back to Zilgen that I was inspired by him playing and using Zilgen. So it's kind of like, I wonder how that affects it. You can't tell sometimes. It's difficult, and that's where the artist relations people and the marketing people that they work under and the heads of the company and all that kind of have to get a feel for it and say, geez, we've seen these stick sales going up. I wonder if it has anything to do with the new artist series we just came out of, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, you're right. It's hard to narrow down to exactly what the return is. And it's also hard to even figure out exactly how much you're spending on artists giving all those different things that are involved in the artist relations program. So it's kind of a tough job for both the smaller companies and the huge companies. Definitely. Well, and I mean, I'm sure we're going to talk about the newer stuff, but social media, you're almost as good as your playing matters probably as much if not maybe less than your following count, where the number of eyeballs who are on you, like obviously you want to be a good drummer, but it's so important now to be like a presence online because that's huge. That's what it's all about. Yeah, it brings a situation to mind that's kind of out of sequence that it bears on that exact situation. So I'm going to go ahead and give it. And it's kind of bears on the current state of artist relations to because it was a fairly recent event. It was at the Chicago drum show. Of course, I deal with a lot of artist relations people when I start looking into clinicians and what kind of support they're going to get. From the companies they work with and all of that. And back in the 90s, I think it was I got a request from a young lady. She wrote to me a real nice, well written letter saying that she wanted to play at the drum show. And I wrote back and thanked her for writing and for her interest, but I explained it's not really that kind of show where you can just apply and appear. I explained that we have a clinic program, but generally the clinicians have sponsors and it's part of trying to attract attendees to the show and so on. Well, 12 months went by and I heard from the same young lady again, only this time she explained that she had endorsement deals and at this point she was like 15, I think. And she already had endorsement deals with Gretch and Zilgen and I think Firth or it might have been Vader. But that made me sit up and I thought, well, geez, I still haven't heard her play and I'm not sure that she's visible enough to put a lot of butts in the seat. But something is happening here. She's written twice. She's persistent over the course of a year and she's got a bunch of endorsements. I better pay attention to this. So what I did was I squeezed her in to the clinic program in an opening slot the first day of the show and early in the morning. And I kind of told my staff, this will be like a tech rehearsal, you know, it'll give us a chance to get the PA dialed in and everything. And when I introduced her, I remember explaining to the crowd, look, you may not have heard of this young lady yet, but she's got some pretty impressive credentials already. She's got deals with X, Y and Z. And I predict that this is a person you're going to be seeing in the cover of magazines eventually. And all of those companies were kind of stepping out in the same way that I was at that time. She was an unknown, but she had some persistence, good communication skills and definitely had something going on. I tried to cut the story off before it becomes the whole episode. That was Hannah Ford. Later became Hannah Ford Welton. And I took some guff, not only that day for putting her on as an unknown, but over the coming weeks after we put up a clinic highlight reel on YouTube, I routinely had to go in and take down some of the really rude and obscene, almost, comments on it just that appear, you know, people become cyber emboldened and so on. But, man, her career trajectory since then, she did end up on some magazine covers and ended up playing with prints and so on. The artist relations people have a lot of things to go on. It's not always you're playing. It can be your persistence and your presentation and all of that. I just wanted to squeeze that in. No, and I love it because I'm sure everyone like me was listening, kind of going, who is it? Who is it? I mean, that's a huge one. You know, and you were right to kind of like to give her the opportunity, but you can't like you said year one, you were like, listen, very respectfully, obviously, you were like, it's just not like that because there's just something about endorsements where everyone thinks they deserve one and they should be given one, but you just got to stick with it and you did the right thing. But then she was obviously persistent, which clearly worked out in her favor, you know? Yeah. Well, all right. That was modern. Now I'd love to go back and kind of touch on the origins of endorsements because I think, you know, there's a lot of just it's a big topic now, but you know, clearly people have had brands that wanted to get to more eyeballs and ears for a really long time. So what was the origins of it? Probably goes right back to the origins of entertainment. And when I think of drum world endorsements, I think of the early days of advertising of drums and that that brings to mind periodicals like the Ludwig drummer and the leady drum topics. They were, I'm not sure which was the chicken and which was the egg, but both companies that were at one time or another the world's largest drum company in the world and they both put out these magazines as kind of a PR tool. And they would be from 24 to 30 pages and a few editorial articles and ads on their product, but the overwhelming amount of page space was to their artists. And there was a certain amount of big name artists. Jack Powell and of course, Buddy Rich traps the drum wonder and so on. But there were an awful lot of local or regional endorsers, even whole groups marching bands and female bands, just all sorts of things. And by giving them space in this nationally distributed magazine, it enhanced their credibility locally. And I think it kind of grew out of that, of course, the bigger the name and the bigger the the more attention they were gathering with their band or as a soloist, the more print they would get and it would just kind of build from there. You know, it's, I almost kind of see a parallel to like like baseball cards or something where it doesn't really have much to do with the actual yeah obviously you'll have your stats on the back and I'm not really a big baseball guy or a baseball card guy but you you idolize these people it puts them in a different you know you you can stare at this card and it's more about the person that it is the just the statistics and things like that, whereas you know you don't put someone who's well first off you probably wouldn't be a major league player or a major league drummer if you weren't good so that's pretty much baseline but after that you can choose who you like and you can go oh I love Jack Powell or oh I love Buddy Rich oh I don't like whoever you know I don't say anyone's name but like so it kind of personifies them a little more and you might learn more about them and stories so it's really mutually beneficial the companies need the drummers and the drummers need the companies for obvious reasons I would almost say the companies need the drummers more than the drummers need the companies minus the gear and things like that really really big benefit to them. Exactly and again jumping up to current days and then we'll go back to Jack Powell and Trapp's because there's a few things I want to mention there but one of the things I found interesting in another one of John DeChristopher's interviews where he talks with Jeff Jonas and some other texts but one of the things that came out is the fact that Ringo never really had an endorsement agreement with Zildjian and Ringo never I know from working with the chief Bill Ludwig II there was also not an endorsement agreement there. Obviously a lot of drums were being sold because of their affiliation and a lot of cymbals because of the affiliations with Ringo but Ringo was making no demands and obviously they ended up supplying equipment. I mean all they had to do on a U.S. tour was let the Ludwig factory know how many kits they wanted in which location and so on and they were there but there was no business requirement there was no contractual obligation to do that. And the chief told me once that he used to refer to his house in Oakbrook as the house that Ringo built. You know he grew up in River Forest and built this large house in Oakbrook and always referred to it as the house that Ringo built and he told me that there were times when he was half afraid to answer the phone because he was afraid it was going to be Ringo with his demands and Ringo never made any. I mean they treated him well they gave him stuff and took care of him but there was no contract requiring them to do A, B and C and so on. So there was a good case of really the company needing the artist more than the artist needing the company. Yeah that's fascinating. I remember Gary Astridge talked about how he's not on Gary's episode about Ringo about how Ringo wasn't the biggest gear-minded guy in the world at all. And so maybe he didn't know but also probably he had bigger fish to fry being in the Beatles rather than to chase money through his drum endorsement. What would his demands be? Let's say if Ringo went the other way and was kind of nickel and diming a little bit what could someone in that position would they want a percentage of kit sales or his obviously his famous finish or what would that be? Yeah probably all of the above and certainly cash and we'll talk about that about the introduction of big cash because it became kind of a competition, a sweepstakes in the 70s and 80s. But backing up to those early days with all of those guys in the topics in the Ludwig drummer and even the big name ones and Jack Powell is a name I mentioned earlier that I want to come back to is in the 20s he was the highest paid salaried drummer in the world. He was making like $3,000 a week in the 20s if you can imagine. I mean that's just a mind-boggling figure and unfortunately when Vaudeville collapsed the career of Jack Powell did also he was kind of a specialty act. And you can probably even find him on YouTube. He did a lot of specialty things where he'd come out in a chef's costume and do all of his playing on pots and pans and stuff and he'd play on chairs on the backs of chairs and stand on tip the chair over and all this stuff. And I visited his son Jack of course is gone but I visited his son and suburban New York once and he was telling me about how his dad's career kind of collapsed and the guy was a tremendous entertainer but it was almost like kind of an idiot savant like he was limited to that. He wasn't transitioned to playing in a band and having long engagements and so on. It was kind of a spot thing. One of the funny stories he told me about his dad when he was trying to tell me about his dad's kind of tunnel vision and so on. He was obviously a smart guy, had great rhythm, incredible technique. I mean to be commanding $3,000 a week in those days. Obviously he had a lot on the ball. But the story that David told me about his dad was and as far as other skills he went out to trim some branches off of a tree by their garage. And he climbed up and got on a branch and reached down and sawed off the limbs below him because he could reach them easily. Climbed up a little bit further and did the same thing until he ended up so high up in the tree that he had sawed off all of the branches that were going to be needed to climb down and they had to call the fire department to come and get him down. It's literally the definition of like painting yourself into a corner where you're like, I can't get out now. Exactly. Wow. But in those days when he was making all that money, there's no mention of a payment and I'm sure there was none because I would have seen a mention of it somewhere. And all the archives I've dug through and the people that I've talked to doing the books on Ludwig Slingerlin, Leedy and Gretzch, there just was no cash for endorsers. They did obviously supply him with equipment. They gave him lots of press and that was valuable. Same kind of thing with Buddy Rich. When he was little, the chief told me that they used to supply him with a bass drum and his first performances, some of his earliest performances, as traps the drum wonder, he was small enough to play his opening solo from behind the bass drum and not be seen. And there was this tremendous drum solo, all this stuff happening and then outward step Buddy from behind the bass drum and people were astounded. Yeah, but there's a sailor outfit and stuff like that. Mel Tormé searched for years and never was able to come up with the video. There was a microphone video recorded with audio and the audio is still out there. You can access that. But Mel was never able to find the video footage. But the chief said they had to year after year make larger bass drums as he grew up to keep him hidden from behind it. But Buddy and Jack were not getting paid in those days. They were getting a lot of coverage. I mean, there was a Ludwig drummer with Jack Powell on the cover and it was a big time endorser. But people were not getting paid in cash. Well, I mean, so I just did a quick kind of Google thing where you, you know, what was it in 1920s money versus now and $3,000 a week is like $40,000 a week. Can you imagine money? Oh my God. Wow. And, you know, I don't it was it was a different time. Someone's going to Google it. They're going to say, why didn't you bring it up? Jack Powell, obviously being a vaudeville guy, he did do some things that maybe wouldn't be OK today with like blackface, the minstrel shows. Obviously, that's a completely different topic. But I figured someone's going to say, why didn't you mention that? But yeah. So anyway, now Buddy, he was obviously with Ludwig. Jack was with Ludwig. Their leady was endorsers, like you mentioned with the leady topic. So the magazines are going strong. Jean Krupa. These are some of the big guys we had back then, which all of these people created new drummers, which then sells drum sets to kids. And that's the whole goal is to just sell more drum sets. Yeah. Now Krupa was in a category of his of his own because just just to go back and listen to the Brooks Tagler episode. And I mean, the guy revolutionized the visibility of the drummer as a performer. And Slingerlin was obviously cognizant of that. And he also did not get a straight endorser fee. But when they recognized came to recognize fully his importance to the company, they actually gave him a contract that called for him to receive a royalty based on every drum that Slingerlin sold. Everything in their catalog. I mean, it's on their gross sales. There's a copy of it in the Slingerlin book. And it was signed in 1946 by Bud Slingerlin and Jean Krupa. And it calls for him to receive three quarters of 1% of gross annual sales every year for the next 10 years at that point. And I'm not sure after that 10 years how it extended out. But that was pretty unusual. And it's not something that you hear about anybody else getting back at that time. But but clearly he was responsible for selling a heck of a lot of Slingerlin drums. And yeah, and they wanted to secure his place. Yeah, it's also unusual. I should mention that you don't typically have someone who is so die hard connected to a brand like Jean Krupa and Slingerlin where he's on every cover of their their their catalogs. And it's just usually people switch around a little bit. And it's a big deal when someone switches from, you know, company X to company Y, but Jean was like through and through. So they probably just really had a really a great relationship. And we'll be talking about people switching around and so on. And I want to make it clear that I have a tremendous amount of respect for all of these artists. And it's they really can't be judged as a person or for their artistic skill based on what they did in terms of a business relationship. But it does give drum companies and cymbal companies and stick companies a bit of a headache when people switch around. John mentioned Johnny D and in his series mentioned that Armand had a firm policy of nobody coming back. If somebody left Zildjian, they could not come back because he didn't want to deal with, you know, what some people kind of off the cuff referred to as endorsement horrors. And that's a pretty derogatory turn, but you can imagine the frustration of, you know, working hard to develop a relationship and then see it evaporate as the person walks away. But it was in a situation that comes to mind is now Buddy Rich was started out with Ludwig, but he did end up with Slingerlin. In fact, I have to go back and take a look at that. There's a whole chart that shows when he was with whom because he was with Slingerlin a couple of times. He was with Ludwig a couple of times. He was with WFL even ended up with I think Trixon and of course Rogers. But the chief in his little section on Buddy in his book, The Making of a Drum Company explains that the way he was able to lure Buddy away from Slingerlin was to point out to Buddy that hey, you're always going to be number two at Slingerlin because Gene's going to be number one. You come to WFL, you're going to be number one and we're going to do everything for you and blah, blah, blah. And he says that that worked out. There may have been a cache. I'm not sure about that. And often where there was cash, it was kept secret because nobody wants that to get out, especially to your other endorsers. Then they want to know who's making more than me, why am I not getting as much as them and so on. But the chief did feel motivated to use that carrot to get Buddy away from Slingerlin and on to WFL. Which he's playing on his personality type of Buddy, which was very much like that. No, I'm going to be number one and clearly it worked. But these are the upper tier of upper tier drummers, Buddy and Gene. Literally we're talking about them now a long time after they were the top in the world and clearly they've left their impact. And you think of Slingerlin with Gene and Ludwig with Buddy. Well, Buddy, you think of different companies, but it clearly worked. So a good move. Yeah. Where the money really became a factor, I believe, was more like in the late 60s and then into the 70s and 80s. And the chief said that Buddy was at fault for generating the whole war because Henry Grossman started it all by paying $10,000 for Buddy to switch to Rogers. And that's probably a fairly reliable source because he was luring him away from Ludwig. So I don't have independent documentation of that $10,000, so I didn't want to take that to the bank literally. But that was the chief's story is that Henry Grossman, the owner of Rogers, paid Buddy $10,000 to switch to Rogers. Then later the rumor was that Buddy, when he was back at Ludwig, was getting $25,000. The war was on at that point. And Ed Shaughnessy was in the middle of it. Louis was probably in there. I know Carmine was in there. And all of these top drummers knew that other people were making big money, so they wanted the big money also. And the drum companies, especially into the late 70s, were highly motivated to keep their top stars and keep them happy. They were starting to be attacked by the Japanese. I mean, you've got Tama and Yamaha and everything coming in. And if you read any of the books in the late 70s, that's where it all started to hit the fan. All the American companies were starting to have difficulties. Rogers gets sold to CBS. Ludwig gets sold to Conselmer and so on. But in those final days of the late 70s before those corporate sales went on, they were starting to pay big money. And usually those endorsement deals went by the wayside when the company changed ownership. That was just kind of a given. They didn't have to be told that when you go to a new company, all bets are off. And in fact, Buddy was pretty excited when CBS bought Rogers because he was assuming that CBS would be signing his band and supporting his band and so on. And one of the stories I heard is when the affiliation with CBS didn't turn into a cash cow for him, that's when he left Rogers. And then Don Lombardi was mentioning in his interview with Johnny D. a story about Buddy being without an endorsement at about that time. And the question that led him into the story was, hey, I saw an early DW kid that was a Buddy kid. What's the story behind that? And Buddy did play it briefly. But just before that, Buddy was coming to LA to meet with Freddie Gruber and Don and a bunch of his old pals. And he gave them a heads up before he got there that he was shopping for an endorsement deal. And he wanted somebody to go to the Japanese and try to get him 100 grand. So he wanted somebody to go shopping with Yamaha or Tom and see who was going to pony up the 100 grand. And then the next debate was, well, who's going to tell Buddy when he comes that we couldn't do it? Who pulls the shortest straw? And they said no. So that led to him giving Don's drums a try. But 100 grand just, it wasn't going to happen. And going back to that idea of getting a return on your investment, can you imagine how many drums you'd have to sell to pay your artist 100 grand and figure it's going to boost your sales by a million dollars? Crazy. But that makes me think too. So we're talking about the kings of drumming here at that time. Not everyone was like that. So obviously there's different levels that people would be endorsed at. Which I want to talk about those. I have a great outline that you've sent me where it talks about discounts on gear, free gear and then cash payments. But what I want to know too is now we live in, you know, in 2021, you email, you send your YouTube clips back then. If I was trying to get an endorsement and I was I was at a level where I thought this makes sense. Like I want to reach out to let's say Ludwig and get an endorsement. Maybe they haven't heard of me because there's so many drummers in the world. I think, you know, man, I think I'm ready and I think I deserve an endorsement. How would I go about doing that? Would I send a letter? Would I invite them to a show? And then maybe we jump into those levels of what the endorsements might be. Yeah. Yeah. All of the above. Just a blind letter and it would get through to the right people. The companies weren't so big that they didn't know, you know, who that letter was intended for. Yeah. And the larger companies did start to formalize it with levels. And I don't have dates on that. But I'm thinking, I know just from being in the business and seeing it happen that by the mid 80s, some of the bigger companies had level one, level two, level three endorsers simply because they had so many and they had to codify it a bit. So a level one guy would get included in the ads. He would get free sticks. He would get maybe access to a kit at a certain gig. It was all down in black and white when they signed them. And then on up to, you know, a level three and it would become a little bit nebulous. They didn't want to put into black and white some of the things that they would do for their top flight. But again, those guys were kind of off the chart. There was a level one, two, three, and then they were their big stars that they were saying, yeah, we'll make sure to get you some magazine covers and stuff. One of the most interesting things I found when I went through the Slingerland archives in Nashville sort shortly after the Gibson bought Slingerland from Gretch was a file on Carmine. And it went through the contract where the contract was there. And I'll give you some of the details of it because there wasn't strictly a cash payout. But here's what he was getting. They set up an advertising budget of $25,000. So those ads were supposed to be split throughout the year, but they guaranteed Carmine that they would be spending 25 grand on ads that featured him. And those ads had to incorporate his concert tour and personal appearance itineraries and it promoted his LPs and books. And they were all subject to Carmine's approval. All of the ads. There was a clinic program that would book Carmine and it had to booking for 10 clinics and the clinics had to have a clinic fee involved of $1,000 to $17.50 depending on the clinic and then of course plus expenses. Also he got three complete drum outfits in the course of the year. And he was also paid for being at trade shows. He was committing to two trade show appearances per year at $1,250 a day with a $5,000 annual guarantee. So if they failed to getting the minimum of the four days at trade shows at $1,250 a day, they still had to pay him five grand. And that was kind of at the peak. I mean, within a couple years after that. That's not crazy to me. Like sometimes when like the stuff where it's just a straight here's cash to like buddy, I almost think of it's like it's like cash in an envelope wrapped in a newspaper that you hand as you're like walking by kind of like a shady thing. But with Carmine, he's a celebrity. I mean, he's a famous drummer that honestly seems pretty well spelled out. You don't want him not getting paid and struggling to live. So honestly, that's pretty cool. It's high level, but honestly, I don't think that's like exorbitant and like too outlandish. Because those require, he's working for those. He's doing the clinics. He's going to the shows. The first drum clinic I ever saw when I was really young was at Macon Music. Macon, you know, with an N and a apostrophe. Elmer Monk was my drum teacher. He owned the store and Carmine appeased at a clinic there. And that was the first one I saw. And he was great. And he did. He signed. I still have a signed photo from him from when I was like, you know, 10 years old. And it was really cool. So that's, you know, it worked. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was definitely worth it or and they and Slinglin obviously felt it was worth it or they wouldn't have agreed to the contract. They wanted him and they felt he was, you know, going to be able to deliver and they would make it back in spades. And they may have, but it didn't save the company. I mean, they, they were gone shortly after that. But it wasn't because they spent too much on Carmine or anything. But that was a one year contract. And near the end of the one year, Carmine's agent did notify Slinglin that he had chosen to go with another company and was not going to be renewing his affiliation with them. Yeah. Well, that happens. I mean, that's the power is really in the drummer's hands of, of kind of going like, oh, well, I'm going to go with someone else now. But that really must be kind of a bad feeling. Like you said, where, where Armand's agent was like, well, then you're, you're out. You're done. I'm done with you. Never again. But it must be bad for like an artist relations person to be like, oh, all right, well, I've built this relationship with this person. I know them. We hang out. You know, we talk a lot. And then they're gone. That must be not good. Yeah. And I suppose it's, it's one of the advantages for the owners of the company when it was family owned and so on. And when that's one of the advantages of having an artist relations person, somebody like John de Christopher, Lenny de Muzio, Mike Morse, who are very smooth, great people skills. And they can be a middleman. And, and the same would be true for the artists. It's, it's often helpful for the artist to have an agent or representative. Yeah. So they can, they can speak frankly back and forth to the artist relations guy and say what they're thinking without, you know, pissing anybody off. And the artist relations guy can say, Hey, here's what I can do. And I just can't do anymore. And whereas the owner of the company, if he's saying I can't do anymore, the artist is going to be thinking, Hey, you're the owner. You can do whatever you want. So it, it gives them a buffer. You know, I mean, that's a great kind of like detour to go down of like artist relation men and women. Like how do you get that job? How do you get into that? It's like such like, you know, like what do you put on your resume to get an artist relation gig? Like it's, and then maybe what is your day to day life like if you, if you're, if you know that. Yeah, that's, you get a feel for that. I think from John and that's a better question for John. But one situation that it, that it brings to mind is that I found myself falling into one. I was the artist relations guy for, for like two days at, for Slingerland as a division of Gibson and Gibson bought Slingerland from Fred Gretch. And at the time HSS was actually distributing and designing and marketing the Slingerland and Buzz King was the guy in charge. And he had an artist roster and so on. And the rug kind of got pulled out from under him when, when Slingerland was sold to Gibson and the whole artist relations program that Buzz had just evaporated. And it wasn't like, you know, you would think, well, I'm a Slingerland artist, maybe my agreement will carry over to this new company. But it did not. In fact, they didn't even get a list. I was contacted by the, the Slingerland folks in Nashville, asking who their endorsers were because they didn't even get a list. They didn't even know who Buzz King's Slingerland artists had been. It just astounded me. But then fast forward several years from there and I had a new edition of the Slingerland book come out and Gibson had helped me with some art and we did a special edition with one of their Nashville snare drums on the cover and so on. And they allowed me to set up a little table at their big Nam show booth and promote the book. And I got there with my little sign and a stack of books and so on. And one of the guys came over and said, oh, and by the way, our district sales managers will be bringing dealers by and asking you questions because they're guitar guys and they don't know anything about drums. But here's a Slingerland price list, current price list that you could look it over and kind of help these district sales managers with drum questions. I said, sure, sure, that'd be great. That'd be fun. And then as it developed over the course of the weekend, I also became the guy that they were sending all these people. There was a constant parade. You can imagine with a name that big and a show that big. There's a constant stream of people wanting endorsement deals. And it was easy for anybody in the booth just to say, yeah, go talk to that guy over there, which was me. Yeah, he'll tell you. Yeah. And some of them were kind of prepared and some of them weren't. A lot of them were just, they just figured they could come up and say, hey, I want an endorsement and tell me about what a great drummer they were and what a big shot they were in their local area. And boom, they would start getting free drums. So it was just one guy after another. And I got a Pat reply down after the first half a dozen or so. And I would explain, you don't want to tell them to piss off. And that's where the people skills of those people really shine is you don't want to say, no, never, forget it. You want to say, not yet. Because you never know. I mean, really? Yeah, exactly. This guy could be, you could be working for him in two years. You know, they're as strange as the business is. Yeah. So, but basically you had to say to him, you know, tell you what, you need to send me a bio and I'll forward it to the right guy. And in addition to the bio, we need to know, you know, who you're playing with. If you can send a copy of your latest recording, that'd be great. And then an itinerary where you're playing, who you're playing with and on and on. And, you know, as you're explaining this, you kind of see the face fall on some of them. You know, they're thinking, well, geez, I don't have a record deal and we're not doing any TV or touring right now and so on. But, and then also there's the importance of the advertising of an artist in his local area. Sometimes you're a big fish in the little pond kind of thing. And that's what I was seeing with a lot of these guys that were coming up to me at that show. They were very important in a certain region. And what I thought was really cool was one time I got an invitation. It was in the late 70s. And there was kind of a road show going around, kind of sponsored by Zilgen and Pearl. And they sent Lenny DeMuzio and from Zilgen, Walt Johnson from Pearl, Robert Zilgen was there. And they had Larry London present as a pearl endorser and artist. And it was for dealers only. And it was about 50 miles from where my shop was. I came to Lansing and they were doing like one estate or I don't know how many they did, but I know they did one in Michigan. And there were maybe a dozen dealers there. And one of the things that they rolled out that I thought was really cool on Pearl's part, they had a series of artist pictures that they were all 8 by 10s and they had a uniform border. They had the pearl logo and they had a uniform text at the bottom with the spelling out the guy's name and where he's located. And identifying him as a pearl artist. And they were opening this up for dealers to sign local artists as endorsers. So I could just take the best of my local barband drummers and sign him as a pearl endorser. All I had to do was send a picture of him to Pearl and they would provide me with the stack of these pearl endorser photos. And they probably didn't go any further than that. It wasn't like they were taking out full page ads anywhere or anything. But it was a big deal for that guy and that dealer because you had kids coming in and they see this on the bulletin board and you got this guy there signing them for the local kids and stuff. And I thought that was a neat way for them to try to involve the big fish that were in little ponds and give them some exposure at a local level. Yeah, I mean, it's like we acknowledge that this is a really good drummer who's doing great things in his region and we want to let people know that we know who he is and he's a part of our roster. Obviously, there's the huge tears. So that would almost be like the, if there's a one, two and three, that would almost be at like 0.5 of like we're not giving them, it sounded like you weren't getting really gear discounts or things like that, but you're just recognized. And I think that's... Exactly, yeah. That's at the core of all this, of the good thing of, I mean, I think we've both been pretty positive about endorsements and not very, because people can be cynical, but at the core of it, it's cool to get recognized by someone, a brand that you love, as someone who's worth, you know, them promoting you a little bit. It makes you feel great as a drummer to be recognized. So that's really cool that they did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was a neat program. And I think somebody should do that still. It helps to recognize people. And it sells gear. I mean, that's those people that are coming into your shop, they're seeing their local heroes playing at the garage bands, are seeing the bar band players getting some recognition and that the endorsements mean something to them. Yeah, possibly more than the mega drummers sometimes, because they might actually know that guy. He may actually work as a server at a restaurant or his regular job and they can say, hey, do you like what kind of pearl drums do you like? What's your favorite zilgen sizes? And then he can go, oh, yeah, I like this. And then, you know, because he actually lives there. Or, you know, I'm talking about local, local stuff. Yeah, yeah. But so that's super cool and very, you know, almost wholesome and on the up and up. But it seems like as we get more modern here towards the end of the episode, things now are just, they almost seem more murky where there's companies who are doing endorsements where like you get an endorsement and you get a discount on a symbol or a drum, but it was marked up and then the endorsement price brings it down to just what the normal price is to begin with kind of thing. Like there's a lot of weird endorsement stuff going on now. What is your take on modern endorsements? Well, I'm pretty close to the heart of that whole situation because of the drum show and getting people in who have endorsement deals. And may answer that question to kind of explain what I go through when I am seeking out a clinician. One of the first things I do is see who he works with. And sometimes they're not even quite clear on the concept. You know, I've had situations where I ask a guy who he works with or what brands of equipment he works with and he gives me a list. And then when I start going to those companies to inquire about possible support for that artist, I get a response saying, well, really, we don't have a deal with him. He may be playing our stuff, but sorry, we're not going to support. But what is typical with me with a clinician at the drum show is they often will have a fee of anywhere from $500 to $2,000. And then they also want their airfare and their hotel and local ground transport and all that. So I need to see if it's going to work, find out who they're working with and how much those companies are apt to help out with. And quite a few of them have budgets for their more visible clinicians. And it's not unusual. Let's say I've got a guy who's in the very top tier and flying him in from across the country and he's got a $2,000 clinic fee. So all in all, I'm going to have $3,500 wrapped up in getting him there and so on. I might have a drum company willing to pay $500 and then it usually slides. Usually a cymbal company, maybe $300, maybe a stick company, $100, a head company, $100, and you add all those up to kind of defray the cost. And those are cash payments that go directly to the artist. That wasn't always the case, but there were some unscrupulous promoters who managed to collect more in support than they were actually even paying the artist. So it's pretty much the rule of the road now that any support that's pledged from the companies to help you defray the cost is paid directly to the artist. So I go to the artist a few weeks before the show when I'm giving him his confirmation numbers and going over the flight details and giving him the number who's going to pick him up at the airport and all that. And then I go through the whole agreement again and say, okay, we agreed to pay you $2,000 in cash, but by the way, I have commitments from XYZ Drums for $500 and your stick company for $200 and blah, blah, blah. So the bottom line is I'm going to hand you an envelope at the show that has $600 in it and you'll get the rest of your fee from all these companies. So that's pretty much the way that works. And then they would hang banners or you'd put on the screen, Zildjian, Sabian, whatever, you would then promote them. But the trickle down, the actual end result of this for you is like I think of that the previous Chicago show scene like Glenn Kochi play and it was just like, this is awesome. This is why I'm here is to see this clinic with a great drummer and that's what it's all about is getting butts in the seat for you. I see the advertisers and it's boom, there you go. It's work. Yeah. And for any promoters that might be listening or thinking about putting on a clinic or something, yeah, your work isn't done when they say, yes, we'll support you. It's just getting started. You need to make sure that they feel they're getting their money's worth and they're going to give you banners and catalogs and so on. You want to make all of that stuff pay for them. You want to hand the stuff out. Any door prizes they give you, you need to make a very visible presentation. And in fact, what I've always done at the Chicago show is have a big screen behind the artist and it has the ReBeats logo in a PowerPoint along with the logos of all the companies that have kicked in and actually have it timed out so that the percentage of time that each logo is shown has a direct relation to the amount of support that they're offering. And then after the show, you want to supply all of those sponsors with action shots showing the drummer with that company's logo so that they can use it in their social media and so on. And send them a nice thank you along with those pictures saying, man, it really helped us to put this thing on that you were so generous with supporting your artist. And here's some pictures that you can use and thanks so much, because you want to be able to go back to them the next year and feel proud of what you did the first time around. Yeah, I mean, talk about doing it right and not burning any bridges and doing everything on the up and up and honestly to kind of as we wrap up to circle back to my question about what do you think about it today and it's kind of murky. I just think the takeaway is that, you know, you have to deserve, you have to really need the endorsement and it has to be mutually beneficial. And it has to, I mean, these are people's, literally these are people's jobs. This is the money for the company. This is on Rob's end. It's the actual clinic and it's not just, okay, this person has a pretty good following. Let's give them free gear. There really has to be reasons behind it. Yeah, you have to be self-promoting and it kind of goes back to Hannah. You know, you don't necessarily have to wait until you've got an agent or a manager out there and do all the legwork and get a tour and a record and all that. You can start out of the gate and promoting yourself, but do it tastefully and it's a lot easier if you do have the tour and the record and everything to then go and say, hey, and by the way, I really like these sticks. I've been using them, you know, what are the chances of getting an endorsement deal and what can you offer? And here's what I can provide, man. I'll be using, continuing to use these sticks because I really like them. Which reminds me, I've got time for a short stick story and this is Buddy again. Mike Walter makes sticks and mallets in Chicago and has a pretty big name in that corner of the percussion market. And he told me a story once about trying to get Buddy to play his sticks and he had an appointment to take a bunch of his sticks when he was first starting and show them to Buddy. And Buddy could be kind of a scary guy but he was always perfectly nice to drummers unless they were being rude to him or something. But Mike was really nervous. He takes a big double handful of sticks and at the appointed time he goes to the tour bus and he knocks and Buddy comes wearing nothing but a bathrobe and invites him on and Mike's got this handful of sticks and they both sit down and Buddy pulls up a cooler and he takes the first pair of sticks and he kind of weighs them a little bit, looks them over and does a machine gun single stroke roll and the cooler just and looks at them again, puts them down picks up the next pair of sticks does the same thing, plays every pair of sticks that Mike had brought and then gathers them up and hands them to Mike and Mike leaves the bus. He's afraid to even say anything and he never did really find out what that all meant. But I think if Buddy would have loved the sticks and it was something he was going to play he would have said more but he just handed them back and Mike left and end of story. He could have gone much, much, much worse so that's hysterical. I mean, there's no right or wrong way to do it. Well, there's wrong ways to do it. There's wrong ways of people to say, hey, be rude and say endorse me, give me money but you just be respectful, you give them a reason and all that good stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. I think that's, yeah, we've kind of laid out the blueprint for that. You need to give them a reason for why you're in good investment. Yeah, absolutely. It's just been awesome. And Rob, if you have a couple extra minutes I'd love to do one of our bonus episodes here and I'd love to talk about as it's been quoted as saying the endorsement whores who take advantage of things and really just go overboard with it. I've got a couple that you listed here and maybe we can do that for, you know, five or 10 minutes on the bonus episode if you have time. Cool, if you guys want to hear those bonus episodes with Rob and a lot of the other guests please visit www.thepodcast.com and there's a little Patreon link there and you can, you know, pay two bucks extra and up and get all kinds of features. So on that note, Rob, I just think you should, you know, feel really proud. The drum show happened this year. It was great. I think everyone's really excited for the Chicago drum show in 2022 when the world is more normal. I absolutely loved the venue. I know it was there before, it was great. 2022 will be back to pretty much full steam. It's May 21st and 22nd and we're even looking ahead to 2023 because next year, 2022, we're going to have the clinic program come back but at kind of a small scale. We're still going to be in the conference room upstairs in the main building but we have an agreement with the fairgrounds for a totally separate building for 2023, the old trades one building where the drum show was in its first few years at Cane County and that's going to be the clinic room. So totally different building. It's about 100 yards away and then the clinic program will be back to full steam at that point. So yeah, we're excited about the future of the show. That's awesome. Yeah, it's cool how there's the different buildings. This will be my first time there. I was there on Sunday, I missed Saturday because I had to work and I pulled up and I parked and I think there was a gun show or something across the parking lot and I pulled there first and very quickly realized I was in the wrong place. I was like, these are not drummers walking around here. So I went across the parking lot and found our people pretty quickly. Yeah, Rob, as usual, thank you for being on the show and sharing this with me. Everyone can go and find Rob and check out the amazing books and just everything Rob has going on. Thanks so much, Bart. I appreciate the opportunity. It's my pleasure. You're a favorite of the show and you get brought up in pretty much one out of every three or four episodes just out of respect. So I appreciate it, Rob. So everyone hang out and go check out the Patreon bonus episode and on that note, thank you, Rob. Thanks.