‘E.T.’s’ John Tesh Juggles TV, Music Careers

Inside the uniform sheet metal of Sound Stage 28, tucked in the northwest corner of Paramount Studios in Hollywood, the 1,793 taping of “Entertainment Tonight” was taking place. On the set, host John Tesh had just stumbled over a line announcing Vanna White’s first television movie, “Venus: Goddess of Love.”

“I’m sorry,” he said to the crew as the camera’s eye temporarily blinked shut. “I can’t say Vanna’s name without getting all choked up.”

Tesh seems to find no harm in joking about his television peers. “I think people want to laugh at this stuff sometimes,” he said. “You can’t take it too seriously. You can’t take television too seriously.”

But after each show, Tesh quietly leaves the studio and drives several miles to a private hideaway where life is nothing but serious. His solace is a small recording studio he built piece by piece with money he earned over the years as a television reporter.

Tesh’s broadcast career largely overshadowed his skills as a composer and musician until last month, when he received an Emmy Award for the pulsing, energetic instrumentals he created and performed to accompany CBS’ coverage of the Tour de France.

The award was Tesh’s second Emmy. The 36-year-old composer was honored by the Television Academy in 1983 for a musical score he created for the Pan American Games. This is the sixth time he has written music for the Tour de France.

“When you win an award, for whatever reason you win it, even if you’re the only one in your category, it seems to suddenly validate you,” Tesh said, sitting in his studio control room surrounded by an array of 20 keyboards. “It lets others know something you’ve known about yourself for a long time.”

Away from the hot television lights, Tesh’s rugged, square jaw seems to soften. The strength he exudes on screen as Mary Hart’s co-host melts into the warmth of an artist eager to share his work. “A lot of times television can be a liability in the music business,” he said.

Jeff Klein, vice president of sales and marketing for Private Music, a New Age record label, signed Tesh last year to his first album, “Tour de France.” Klein said the transition from videotape to vinyl is rarely met with critical approval.

“ ‘E.T.’ is equivalent to People Magazine, but the music industry sees itself more like Esquire or Inner View. The notion of television personalities who are also musicians is often contradictory in our business,” he said.

“The world doesn’t like people who can do two different things,” agreed Carter Cathcart, a private New York record producer who worked on Tesh’s album. “It likes people who are easily classified. John’s image on TV is straight-up-and-down, so many people write him off right away.”

While some New Age music has been unfavorably compared to “aural wallpaper,” Tesh set out to create an aggressive blend of acoustic and electronic instruments more likely to crumble walls than decorate them.

“I try and use the word ‘powerful’ when describing my style of music,” Tesh said. “I can only write aggressively. Even my ballads use kettle drums, and lots of heavy strings and timpani rolls. The way I hear music is really the way I live my life, which is like being plugged into 240 volts.”

To experience Tesh musically, one need only talk with him about his passion for music. He speaks in 7/8-time. His clear, resonant voice rises and swells with each statement like a finely timed crescendo. His gestures are more animated than Leonard Bernstein conducting an orchestra of barnyard animals.

“From the beginning, we were somewhat cautious about John,” Klein said. “Here was a guy coming out of nowhere, who had no foundation as a recording artist, and an identity as something else. People were not necessarily negative; they were, like, ‘Come on, you’re kidding me.’ ”

“When some of the people I work with finally did listen to his album, they were surprised by its intensity,” Cathcart said. “There’s a darker side to John.”

Tesh’s primary composing tool, and the electronic heartbeat of his studio, is a $150,000 Synclavier Digital Music System. The 160-megabyte computer system, linked to a multi-track recorder, digitally samples and records sounds, allowing Tesh to alter the sounds electronically and assign them to keyboards or rubber drum pads for live playback.

“In his car, John carries a little Casio keyboard with a sampler on it,” Cathcart said. “On the way home from a recording session, we were sampling all kinds of sounds, like his car door closing. Later we fed that sound into the Synclavier and used it as the bass drum on ‘You Are Here.’

“Soon we were running around in the studio slamming doors and hitting the walls with pipes and yardsticks trying to find sounds for the album,” Cathcart said.

Tesh accomplished a lifelong dream when he recorded his album, and now he’s working to realize his next dream, composing a film score for a motion picture.

A devoted fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tesh watches videos from a television atop the baby grand piano at his home in Marina del Rey and with the volume off, has created scores for action and horror films.

Celebrities who try to turn television glitter into gold often fail, but for Tesh, broadcasting has been the diversion from a music career that began when he was 12. He grew up in New York studying Rachmaninoff and Chopin with Juilliard staff teachers by day and playing Blood, Sweat & Tears in bar bands by night. In high school he was chosen to play baritone horn in the New York State Symphonic Orchestra.

While at North Carolina State studying music, a local news producer overheard Tesh’s strong delivery voice on the college radio station and hired him. “My parents told me being in a rock band was never going to support me,” he said, “and here I was getting paid $140 a week, which was a lot of money, to report news. So I anchored during the week and played gigs on weekends. I was the only guy in the band with short hair, which I needed for television.”

A whirlwind of reporting jobs began that swept Tesh across the country and landed him at CBS Sports in 1983 reporting ancillary sporting events such as track and field, ice skating and biking.

“We were lifting instrumentals from popular songs for most of the music we used at CBS,” he said. “I walked up to my producer one day and told him, ‘I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but I think I can do better than this.’ The producer must have thought, ‘Oh great, I’ve got an announcer who thinks he’s a musician.’ ”

Tesh composed the musical score for the Tour de France as well as reported it. Every evening he retired to a production van with a small electronic keyboard and to feed his arrangements to a videotape editor, via satellite.

Tesh’s solid on air presence was spotted by Paramount and brought aboard “E.T.” in 1986 to complement Mary Hart. “Most people wait tables or work some odd job until they can get into television,” said coordinating producer Gary Grossman. “John happens to be working as a television celebrity waiting for his chance in the music industry.”

“The great thing about ‘E.T.,’ compared to any local news show in the country, is it doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not,” Tesh said. “It is entertainment news reporting. We’re not lying, we’re not going to anybody’s house with cameras rolling and we’re not ruining people’s lives.”

Even on the set, Tesh is never far from his music. He carries a keyboard when he travels and sleeps with one next to his bed. When inspiration strikes late in the night, he bangs out a tune and sends it over a modem to his Synclavier in the studio.

Tesh has no plans to abandon television anytime soon, but everyone who works with him knows where his heart lies. When “E.T.” covers a story about a singer or musician, Tesh’s banter on the set quietly fades. He stares at the monitor intently, perhaps paying respect to a fellow artist.

“You do a segment of “E.T.,” it’s sent out over the airwaves and then it’s gone,” Tesh said. “When somebody turns on their set, the show spills out. I mean, that’s it. The next day, you do another one.

“But I was in New York and I walked into a record store. I had just finished my album. I saw all those records on the walls and remember thinking, for the first time, how hard all those people worked.

“Then I walked over to the bin of T’s and saw my CD, right there behind Tangerine Dream. It’s unbelievable. I’ve done something that’s going to be around forever, for better or worse.”