Cadence recently had the chance to catch up with Vancouver-based engineer/music producer-extraordinaire Jonathan Fluevog, one dude who’s really got a lot going on.
Not only has the veteran soundman — with over a decade and a half of experience and his own studio, Vogville Recording — recently found himself managing up and coming pop/rock act the Light Machines, he’s also kept busy with organizing Vogville’s Day & Night Festival and exploring the possibilities of documentary filmmaking and performance video with his insightful, illuminating, and talent-promoting monthly web series Vogville Presents.
Though he’s eldest son of famed shoe designer John Fluevog and ’60s supermodel Kecia Nyman, Jonathan’s very much his own man, as his extensive work in BC’s — and Canada’s — music community has earned him both a strong reputation and a fathoms- deep well of knowledge of, and experience in, all things music.
What sparked the idea for your web series Vogville Presents?
Well, it actually came about from a few different things. It started because I was managing a band called the Light Machines last year, and I did this festival. I noticed that there’s a lot of new music coming out. There are so many new artists — on a daily level — and so many people from Facebook and Myspace and everything were just bombarded by new music all the time. What I found is that artists need to be promoted and put out there in a different light, in a different way than the way that everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s doing music videos, and it seems like every artist has one — and it’s great; music videos are fine. But the music videos, people generally just kind of pass over. They’re not really that interested.
Same with a lot of new music. There’s so much new music out there that no one would really have the time to sift through it all. And what I thought is — what I’d love to do is — showcase the process a little bit — of being in the studio, getting to know the people behind the music, what they’re about, and really showing the personalities, not just the music. I think a band needs to sell their personalities and sell themselves as well; it’s not just the music. When you think about Jimi Hendrix or any of the great stars or Led Zeppelin, you think about the personalities behind the people, not just the music itself. This is a great way for people to see that, and it’s not just another music video. That’s one of the ways that it kinda came about.
The other way it came about is because I own a recording studio where we have so much amazing talent coming through all the time that I just thought, You know, there are so many people that don’t know about these bands or don’t really understand what they’re about. They’re touring, they’re out there, and their market is growing; but people don’t really know who they are and don’t really understand what they’re all about. And this is a great way to tell a story about that.
You raised some good points there, particularly what you were saying with social networking and music videos. It’s obviously the time of Facebook and Twitter and all that. And for anyone who’s trying to promote themselves, social media is a must, right?
Absolutely.
You raised another good point – it’s not just the music an artist needs to sell, it’s an image, a personality . . . a slant that they have.
Well it comes down to something that I always say, which is you need talent, charisma, and a little bit of business savvy these days in order to get anything happening. You can be talented — that’s great — but if you have no charisma whatsoever, people aren’t drawn towards people with no charisma at all, just in a life-sense. If you have no charisma, it’s tough in life in general, so artists need a little bit of charisma so people go, “Hey, there’s a spark about them, there’s something interesting about them.” When I think about all of the great artists that I’ve always liked, they have lots of charisma. Or they’re promoting the anti-charisma thing — you know, they go so far the other way that it’s actually charisma. I was reading a book once and it said, “Everybody’s playing the same game. It’s just whether you’re apparently playing it or not apparently playing it; you’re still playing it.”
Absolutely, even with that whole punk attitude — rebelling against the establishment — that in itself is a form of charisma.
Oh, totally. Actually, what I love about that, too, is back in the day when you had all these punk kids, you’d look at them and they go, “I’m an individual. Just like my 40 friends right here.”
Back to the webisodes, in regards to taking that on, was it daunting for you to go from exploring music as a producer to taking on a film medium?
Absolutely, it’s completely different in the sense that you actually have to go in with a very — [pause]. Well, it’s different in a lot of ways and then it’s the same in a lot of ways. Like, making an album; you go in and you have to know what you’re gonna do. Otherwise it’s a very expensive process; you have demos and you have it blue-printed out and you have it set up. With this, on the other hand, I went through trial and error basically. I went in — I found a band and I went, “Okay, this band is great. I like what they’re doing. I like their attitude. This is pretty good. Let’s go in, shoot a whole bunch of footage.” Every band’s story is different, right?
For instance, as these webisodes go on, I’m telling more stories. So another one that I might do — coming up — is about a kid that’s doing sort of pop-punk music, in a way, in a market that’s demanding of youth and vibrant people and all the rest. But he has a problem with his legs, a physical deformity . . . That market, they don’t wanna see a kid with gimp-legs; they’re not interested in that. And so how are they gonna overcome that? They are overcoming that, and they’re actually doing okay despite that. And that’s a story that I’m interested in telling because people don’t see that; people never ever hear about that or think about that. All you see is this glamorized, beautiful version of everything that’s going on, and people with money and all the rest of it. They never see that there are people out there that are trying to move forward even with the problems that they face.
Back to doing the webisodes stuff, it’s kind of like doing an album but it’s a lot different. The first time I went in, I said, “Let’s just shoot a whole bunch of footage and we’ll kind of create the story out of the footage and the interviews that we get.” Now what happened, though, was that no story emerged whatsoever and it turned into a rock video. It was a complete disaster. It turned into this really expensive, really nice looking rock video that I will never release to anybody because it’s just a disaster [laughs], so complete trial-and-error. The next one, with the Matinee, it was scripted. I knew kind of what I wanted. I wanted to showcase a hard-working band that’s charismatic, and you know — they have a following and they have their own sound — and just showcase them. A little bit of trail and error on that front.
Were there any specific music documentaries or films in general that you turned to for example or research when you were setting out with Vogville Presents?
Great question — Decline of the Western Civilization Part Two.
Oh really? What about it?
It was one of the first documentaries that I ever saw where you actually had fans and people talking about the bands. And the interviews were done with just a straight backdrop. It was flat, there was nothing behind them whatsoever. And I’d never really seen that so much before. You’d see . . . bands like Poison and that kind of stuff, and they’d interview them with just this flat background — no music underneath it, no thing, no fluff, no extra — and I really was impressed by that. I got so many ideas from that actually.
Yeah, it’s a very honest filming style. To what extent did your collaborative skills as a producer cross over when you were working on the webisodes?
Um, basically I took a lot of the same organizational skills — this is ongoing; we’re doing one a month. So I’m taking a lot of my producing organizational skills and applying them to the webisodes. And that’s from really being in the studio and getting to know the people. Most people don’t get to know the artists that they like and listen to on the radio. I’m in the studio with them and I know who these people are as people — the good, the bad, and the ugly, everything. . . . Every time I’m in the studio, everybody talks about this kind of topic; it comes up eventually at some point. It’s great to know what, inherently, people are like in the studio, and you also learn when’s a good time to talk to them in the studio. If you talk to them at the beginning of a session, everybody’s very hyped-up and they’re not settled. If you start too late in the session, everybody’s kind of burned-out and tired from being creative all day. You kinda gotta time out where it is, so that really has come into play.
Yeah, you really have to catch them at their most natural, as opposed to — like you said — when someone comes in and they’re not totally comfortable yet, or later when they’re exhausted.
Exactly.
Yeah, and that plays into something else — you were mentioning in an interview recently that, for your studio, vibe is the number one integral to recording. To what extent did you intend to reflect that and make it play a part in the webisodes?
Absolutely, from the very word “go” I knew exactly what I wanted vibe-wise. I wanted these webisodes to be shot where the camera isn’t still all the time, where it’s just in one spot. I didn’t want wide, gaping shots of everything. I wanted everything to be fairly tight and close up, but I wanted it where – let’s say you’re doing an interview with somebody – it’ll go from their face to their hand and it’ll blur out and come back. I wanted it to be like you get this whole sense of the vibe of it — everything’s very soft in a way, there are no hard images. My studio — the vibe of it — you have . . . silk on the wall and all that kind of stuff, and it looks a bit Victorian, mixed with a few other things. I wanted that reflected in the video in a large way, just to where you watch and you get a sense of [pause] not luxury, but everything is very smooth. It’s very real . . . It’s not just about the person talking. It’s not just about the studio. It’s about the whole thing, all together. Usually shots where it kinda blurs out and it’s not just focussed on one thing at one time — I feel that you get this sense it’s not just about that; it’s about the ring on the guy’s finger. He’s got a skull ring or he has a diamond or whatever he’s got. That’s part of who this person is. It might go to their shoes for a second — that’s part of who they are, not just their hair and their face. It’s all of it. It’s everything together.
Absolutely. What have been some of your favourite aspects of doing the Vogville Presents series?
My favourite aspect so far has been really getting to know the people beyond recording. I know people on a recording-level and that’s great. I’d like to get to know them through stories. Being in the studio and talking to the Matinee about stories that are just hilarious, where they’re talking about [pause] they drank a bit too much and they’re in Manitoba. And one guy wakes up in the morning to go get a glass of water. He sees their drummer running in front of the lake with a swarm of mosquitos behind him, and he’s buck naked because he went skinny dipping [laughs] — stories that were funny, that are part of the road, or how somebody put the band up in their home or something, and some crazy thing where the roommate didn’t know they were there, walks in and goes, “Oh, my god!” You know, just interesting stories that you just don’t normally get to hear; so that’s probably been my favourite part so far.
Now, what I’m really enjoying is the real stories about people who are triumphing over adversity . . . people have to go through so much, you always hear about people getting things as “I picked up my guitar one day and it was just great. Wrote a few songs, sent them to a record company and got signed. And you know, the rest is history.”
Okay well, we all know that story’s crap, how about the real story of how you had to play in a . . . hotel, in the ballroom, or bar-room, or whatever it is. And you got beer bottles thrown at you because people wanted you to play Lynyrd Skynyrd instead of your own tunes. And how you got ripped off by your manager, but more so, you burned other people. Artists burn a lot of people, and that is something nobody talks about. Everyone goes, “These poor artists. They are taken advantage of by everybody.”
You know what? I’ve known more artists that have taken advantage of my side of the industry than I have [known] my side of the industry taken advantage of them. Me, myself, right? I mean, Motown deals were pretty bad deals back in the day, I heard, so I can talk about the past, but we’re gonna talk about now. It’s interesting talking to artists and going, “Where have you really messed up and made major mistakes?” And have them talk about that, about stuff that has just been a disaster, so anyone watching it can go, “Man, you were dough-heads.” But they’ve still persevered. They pulled through and they managed to do something that’s spectacular. Not just this rosy, rose-coloured glasses view of musicians, and everyone’s out to get them and all the rest. It’s like, “How about their own follies?”
What words of wisdom can you offer aspiring talents?
I could offer a whole seminar-worth [pause]. I could go on forever on that, and I do go on all the time on that stuff. All I can really say is know where you want your music to fit. If you want to make a living doing music, you need to know what market it’s gonna fit into, be it the metal market, be it folk/roots music, be it any kind of music, be it blue-grass. You need to know what people are doing in that market and what the demand is within that market. You need to kind of fit your music into a slot. It doesn’t mean pigeon-holing yourself, but it does mean that you need to know where you’re gonna fit. And if you don’t fit into a market, then you need to really work on a marketing and a business plan that’s gonna fit the alternative fringes of that market. Also, realize that the further you go from the centre and into the fringe markets, the less chance you’re gonna make a living playing music.
Now, if you don’t wanna play music for money, then what I could really suggest to people is still take pride in what you’re doing recording-wise and video-wise and stuff. Don’t just half-a** it. Spend the time to make sure that it’s something you’re proud of down the road. If you’re not gonna make money, make sure that you can play it to your kids or your grandkids or whatever it is, and you’re still proud. Take the time in crafting everything you do and be proud of it. And don’t just sort of go, “Eh, it’s just something I’m doing,” and “Ah, whatever.” Really put your heart and soul into it and make it something that stands out.
For more Vogville Presents info, be sure to check out Vogville Recording’s official page .
