Commercially Speaking, the Jingle Business Is Still Playing Hamilton’s Song

As a child, Susan Hamilton was a piano prodigy, playing Mozart at 7. Now she produces commercials, extolling such as Fuji Film, Miller Beer and Amtrak. A far cry from Mozart, no?

“Yes and no,” she said. “I still believe good music is good music.”

A breezy, brown-eyed woman who favors cowboy boots, Hamilton is president of HB&B; Productions, a top New York company in the obscure, lucrative world of radio and TV jingles.

In jingles, they sing of products instead of love.

Romantics may weep. But the goal is to sell a product, said Hamilton, perhaps the only Fulbright scholar in the business, not to mention a Phi Beta Kappa key-holder from Occidental College in Los Angeles, whence she graduated summa cum laude in 1965.

Her company is relatively new. She formed it in January with veteran jingle composers-singers David Buskin and Robin Batteau, and is producing an album of folk songs by them--songs about modern times, not products.

In addition to the album, she has produced NBC’s theme music for the fall TV season and the themes of its since-axed “The Jim Henson Hour” and upcoming “Mancuso” series.

But jingles remain her main event. She has been at it for more than 20 years as a producer, writer, player and singer, part of a small but influential part of show business that you regularly hear but rarely see.

She has watched them come and go, the singers and the styles--the latter ranging from a 40-piece orchestra to a relatively recent development known as a “total machine date” of synthesizers and random-sampling replicators.

As for those who sing the songs that advertisers hope will sell the goods, the men are currently faring the best, she said: “The biggest voices in jingle-singing right now are the big male ‘beer voices,’ as we call them.”

Stars like Carly Simon and Barry Manilow have worked her sessions in past years. Richie Havens and Phoebe Snow have worked more recent ones, for Amtrak and General Foods International Coffees, respectively.

There also are a few unknown-to-the-public vocalists who sing jingles exclusively. That can be a nice career; a national campaign can earn its singer $100,000 a year in residuals.

But “the longevity of a jingle-singer’s career has shortened considerably,” Hamilton said. “The industry eats them up, chews them up, overuses them and spits them out in a much quicker style than before.”

This can truly be sad for some. Because, as she and others said, the big money in commercials is not from writing or producing them, but from performing them.

“It’s a very strange arena . . . the majority of the money in the jingles business comes out of singing on commercials,” Hamilton said.

It’s usually the norm, she said, rather than the exception, that jingles composers and arrangers “wind up singing on the jingles. That’s really where we make the bulk of our money.”

Thrice wed and divorced, and mother of an 8-year-old named Alec, Hamilton does her jingling in mid-town Manhattan in three floors of a five-story townhouse. The bottom floor holds two 24-track recording studios, the top floor several small studios. The third floor is her office, where her cat wanders casually amid tape decks and visitors.

Born in East Rutherford, N.J., she is the daughter of an inventor. Her father didn’t fare too well in his line of work, she said, his only major success being a toy called a Zoomerang.

When she “insisted on playing the piano” at 4, her folks dispatched her a year later to New York to study at what she recalls as “an incredible piano school run by two fanatical Germans.”

“It was a sweatshop for kids,” said Hamilton, who quickly left it when her family moved by car to Los Angeles, with her father selling Zoomerangs all the way to pay the way.

There, she became a child actress--if you see the Robert Mitchum movie, “Not as a Stranger,” she “was the little girl who swallowed a safety pin.” But she opted out of that and returned to music.

Heading for a career as a concert pianist, she went to Occidental as a music major, then got a Fulbright to study in Rome, “where I had all those young-American-girl-in-Rome adventures.”

But after a few concerts, she decided that it was too tough, too lonely, a life:

“I think in order to be a good concert pianist you really need a chip on your shoulder, in a way. You need a reason to stand up against the world, have something to say.”

She came to New York, seeking employment. A job at a jingle house owned by Mitchell Leigh, composer of Broadway’s “Man of La Mancha” failed to pan out, but she landed a job as a $90-a-week girl Friday with Leigh’s former partner, Herman Edell. She started producing commercials immediately, she said, and eventually bought out his company.

Now, in addition to her composing, she also is plotting a Broadway musical. About what, she won’t say, but it’s not about the jingles business: “I think the jingle industry deserves a sitcom.”