MUSIC-INDUSTRY TRYOUT FOR MINORITIES

When he finished his junior year in high school in June, Derrick Wade was planning to become a gospel singer.

A month later, that’s still his plan--but in the past four weeks, the 16-year-old also has been thinking about an alternative, just in case the singing doesn’t work out. He’s interested in becoming a record promoter.

Wade made that decision because of his summer job, he said. He’s one of the 50 minority youngsters who were given record-industry jobs as part of A&M; Records’ 11-week YES (Youth Employment Summer) to Jobs program. Besides earning $5 an hour for his work in A&M;’s promotion department, he learned that there’s more to the music business than music.

“My plans have drastically changed,” said the soft-spoken Wade recently in an interview on A&M;’s Hollywood lot. “I was headed for a conservatory of music. Now I’m going to go to a liberal arts college. I’ll still major in music, but with a minor in communications or something of that nature, (to learn) things I need to get into the promotion field.”

Because of the A&M; program, Wade is getting a view of the record industry available to few minority youngsters. Black artists may be responsible for many of today’s hits and much of the industry’s financial success, but they’re under-represented in the record companies themselves--and conversations with black executives and industry observers suggest that it will take a concerted, long-term effort on the part of white and, especially, black executives to give minorities a fair share.

YES to Jobs is neither long-term nor wide-ranging, but it will help a few 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds. In his first month at A&M;, Wade--a senior next year at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts--has done everything from answering phones and ordering records to entering chart information into company computers. He’s also learned a lot about A&M; itself--a company, he admits sheepishly, that he really wasn’t aware of until he saw a school bulletin about YES to Jobs.

“I don’t pay attention to labels,” he said, laughing nervously at the reporter’s tape recorder. “I’m sure my father’s got several records from A&M;, and everyone in my family had heard of (A&M; co-founder) Herb Alpert . . . except for me.”

For Derrick Wade, the nuts and bolts of the music industry were a mystery before he was chosen for the YES to Jobs program. But that’s hardly unusual: The record business can seem inaccessible and remote to anyone on the outside.

Black-interest groups insist it is vital that record companies attract and recruit blacks if they’re to deal with what they see as an industry-wide problem of under-representation in the executive ranks. The Black Music Assn. and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People have charged that influence and control in the industry is largely the province of white males, even though black artists account for up to a third of record sales and black consumers are responsible for some 11.4% of all purchases. But according to outside observers, and to some of the ranking black executives in the business, the industry is still largely inaccessible to job-hunting minorities.

“I don’t think that the younger blacks who are just looking into the job market are knowledgeable of the fact that it’s a vast industry with numerous opportunities,” says L. R. Byrd, a consultant who helped draft the NAACP’s highly critical March report on the music industry--and who enlivened the controversy when he appeared at a New Music Seminar panel recently in New York, criticized several record labels by name and hinted that boycotts were possible.

“Most young blacks think their interaction with the music industry is limited to singing and dancing, or being a deejay,” he said by phone from his home base in Greenville, S.C. “The YES to Jobs program is a token, but it is a step in the right direction, because we need programs like this that will underwrite jobs at record companies and radio stations--and I would suggest distribution companies and PR firms as well--and will sensitize young people to the numerous opportunities in the industry, from accounting and contracting to roadies (who assist touring artists with equipment).”

For the most part, he said, young blacks are simply not made aware of those possibilities. “It’s a problem of what I call imaging . The music industry has created an image and it says, ‘This is not your territory, so don’t come here.’ ”

Step Johnson, vice president and general manager of Capitol Records’ black music division, agrees that perception kept him from seriously considering the record business when he was working for his marketing degree at Loyola University in New Orleans.

“When I was in school, I wanted to get into mainstream business: Bristol-Myers or Johnson & Johnson or IBM or Xerox. . . , “ said Johnson, who declined to reveal his age but appears to be in his mid-30s. “Believe me, the record business had to be the last thing on my mind. I mean, it was one of those things that you didn’t even think about. As a young black, you stood a much better chance of becoming president of IBM than you did of getting into the record industry. Because it seemed like such a close-knit thing, where if you don’t know the right people, you can’t get in.”

So Johnson, who’d always been a big music fan, went to work for mainstream business, eventually marketing Tylenol as the consumer products manager at MacNeil Laboratories. But his wife knew the wife of the program director at a New Orleans radio station, WBOK, and at a station picnic Johnson met several black record promotion men.

“They were fun-filled guys, and they were making more money than me,” he said, smiling. “So I told (WBOK program director) Bobby Earl, ‘Man, I’d love to get into this business,’ and he said next time a job came open he’d let me know. I stayed in touch with him, and lo and behold, he let me know.”

Johnson got his first job as a regional promotion man--handling black music--for now-defunct ABC Records, moving to MCA when that label took over ABC. Before taking his current job at Capitol he spent some time at A&M;, where he was hired by and later became the successor to the national black music promotion director, Jheryl Busby. (Busby, who is now the executive vice president of talent acquisition and artist development and the head of the black music division at MCA Records, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

For Step Johnson, establishing strong business credentials wasn’t enough to get him in the door of the record industry; that took the recommendation of an insider. Two other local black executives got into the business via an entirely different route. But for both John McClain, senior vice president of artists and repertoire and executive vice president/general manager for urban music at A&M;, and Eric Nuri, vice president of artists and repertoire at RCA, a strong recommendation from another black executive was also crucial.

McClain was a successful guitarist and songwriter about five years ago when he met Jerome Gaspar, then A&M;’s national director of urban music. He grew up in an affluent section of the San Fernando Valley, went to a private school with the Jacksons and worked with artists like Diana Ross, Shalamar, the Sylvers and Lionel Richie.

He learned about the business by voraciously reading the trade publications and hanging out with his friend Jermaine Jackson: “Essentially, (Motown Records chairman) Berry Gordy taught (Jermaine) the business, and through hanging around Jermaine I got the second-generation version of what to do. In essence, I was preparing for something that I never did actually think about doing.”

But when he learned of an opening at A&M;, he was curious. “I went to the interview on a lark, and everybody was telling me that I wasn’t gonna be able to do it because I was a musician. So I figured I’d do it for six months just to shut up everyone who said I couldn’t do it. And the next thing I knew, I was hooked.”

Eric Nuri, 32, also started as a musician and then made the transition--but on a different coast, and in a different way. Nuri grew up in East Harlem but was bused to a strong academic school in the upper Bronx; he did well, and through the local Boys Club entered an educational program that sent him to a prep school in Massachusetts. From there he went to Harvard, where he took a leave of absence to think about his future after his first year of studies.

“I was always torn between music and taking advantage of my educational opportunities, because you don’t find many people from East Harlem with those opportunities,” he said. He played in prominent jazz and R&B; groups and did well as a saxophone player, but three years later he returned to Harvard, graduated with a degree in government and became the executive director of the Massachusetts Black Caucus.

However, he kept moonlighting, recording one of the first issue-oriented rap songs (“Let’s Vote”) and eventually heading up a series of small production, management and record companies. His contacts told him when a position opened up at Epic Records in New York; Nuri was hired as a product manager, where he worked with both black and white acts. He later moved from product management to A&R;, from New York to Los Angeles, and from Epic to RCA.

And now, he says, he keeps his eyes open for qualified black candidates--because just as he got his breaks from other blacks in the industry, he and his fellow black executives will have to supply breaks to those who follow.

“Black executives have to make an effort to find qualified black people that they can recommend,” he said. “Because we understand that most white executives are so into their own responsibilities that it’s rare they’ll make the extra effort it takes to reach out and find new black executives. We can say that given the, quote-unquote, ‘institutional racism,’ they should make that effort, but they have their own pressures, and we’re the ones who have to introduce talented black youths or executives.”

Step Johnson, for his part, thinks companies should actively seek young blacks (and whites) through the kind of on-campus recruiting that big mainstream businesses carry out. “There are great minds out there, and if Procter & Gamble and Xerox and IBM go out and recruit at the best universities, why don’t we?”

On the A&M; lot, meanwhile, John McClain isn’t even sure that Derrick Wade and his fellow YES to Jobs students will have an easier time getting into the record industry after the summer’s over. “I don’t think it’s gonna be any easier for those kids to get into the industry than it was a few years ago, because the number of record companies is diminishing.”

One building away, though, Wade is learning the business and making his new college plans. And the teen-ager who a few months ago had never heard of Herb Alpert is even beginning to sound a little like a record industry insider. “I know more about the field,” he says, “and I’ve been exposed to a lot of the other record companies, because I have to do the Hot 100. And now when I listen to the radio I know our product. . . . “