Taking It From the Streets : How Geffen’s ‘street scouts’ have changed the way the record industry finds gold in L.A.’s hard-rock scene

One wall of Vicky Hamilton’s tiny office on a Hollywood side street is covered with framed photos of celebrated Los Angeles hard-rock bands of the ‘80s--Motley Crue, Stryper, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Faster Pussycat, Darling Cruel, the Lostboys, Salty Dog.

Hamilton, 31, is more than a fan of these groups. During the last seven years, she discovered them and helped develop their careers: getting them gigs, putting them up, feeding them, working with them on image and sound--sometimes for pay, but other times just for the love of it.

While it’s surprising to find a woman so heavily involved in a field dominated by macho images, the most remarkable thing about Hamilton is her consistency in spotting upcoming talent. In baseball terms, Hamilton is batting a scorching eight for eight.

All of those bands have landed record deals, and the first five already have hit albums. Motley Crue and Guns N’ Roses alone have sold more than 20 million records.

“All these bands had that extra thing that was gonna separate them from the pack,” Hamilton says, pointing to the photos on the wall. “When I see it, I know. If I feel a passion for it, I’ll go after it with that same kind of passion. That’s why I end up with them before anyone else--because a band can sense the enthusiasm.”

It was the remarkable track record of this one-time record store clerk that led Geffen Records artists and repertoire (A&R;) executive Tom Zutaut to hire Hamilton three years ago as an independent talent scout. (She has since been named a full-time member of Geffen’s artists and repertoire staff, though she continues to work out of her own office and manage some bands, including the Lostboys).

As Hamilton settled into her new Geffen job, the hard-rock den mother became one of the prototypes for a new breed of A&R; specialist--the “street scout.”

These talent searchers are non-corporate, night-blooming mavericks hired by record companies to scour the clubs in search of promising young rock groups. Geffen has had so much success with its team of scouts that almost every other L.A. record company and major music publisher now has at least one scout on its payroll.

But in many ways, it was Zutaut himself who wrote the street scout handbook. He first made a name for himself in 1982 when, as a 22-year-old Elektra Records salesman, he persuaded dubious label executives to sign Motley Crue.

The band was once the laughingstock of the L.A. club scene in its high heels and makeup, but the laughter stopped when the Crue went on to sell millions of records and inspire countless other glam groups.

Zutaut followed that left-field coup, which in effect ignited the L.A. hard-rock boom, by signing Dokken to Elektra before going on to Geffen and sniffing out Hamilton’s discovery, Guns N’ Roses.

Typical of the renegade street scout methodology, Zutaut didn’t learn about Guns N’ Roses by taking a call from a high-priced attorney. He simply walked into Vinyl Fetish, the trendy Melrose Avenue record shop, and asked the clerk if he’d heard any good bands lately. The rest is clubland history.

While virtually every label now has its man or woman on the street, no record company is as fully committed to the concept as Geffen, whose scouts have brought in a dozen L.A. bands, ranging from Guns N’ Roses to neo-folkies the Brothers Figaro, whose debut album is due this spring.

One of three key A&R; executives at the record label (John Kalodner and Gary Gersh are the others), Zutaut is the informal leader of the company’s sizable street-level force.

The lineup includes street scouts Hamilton, Mio Vukovic and Anna Statman; tape listeners Maria Niles and Todd Sullivan, and a pair of “undercover agents” who roam the clubs literally incognito. (Former scout Jeff Fenster, who signed the Brothers Figaro, recently became the director of A&R; for Charisma Records, a newly reactivated spinoff of Virgin Records.)

Operating autonomously, each member of this informal team spends several nights a week in the clubs, frequently scheduling two or three stops per outing. (See Club Guide on Page 66).

Neil Portnow, who runs the West Coast office of Zomba Enterprises (Jive Records and Zomba Music), acknowledges the impact of the Geffen approach.

“I’m not sure that Geffen was the creator of the (street-level A&R;) concept, but I would say that they have taken it to its furthest development,” Portnow says.

“What Geffen has done is to make a real commitment to it, just in the sheer numbers of people that they have. Consequently, they’re reaping the benefits of having a number of people whose primary focus is developing new talent from the street level up, as opposed to the attorney/manager, Establishment route.”

The emphasis on this artist-oriented approach is consistent with the vision of company head David Geffen, who founded and ran Asylum Records in the early ‘70s and personally orchestrated the careers of such artists as the Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne.

After Asylum merged with Elektra two years later, Geffen left the record business for a time, returning in 1979 to launch Geffen Records. Originally conceived as an A&R; satellite of Warner Bros. Records, Geffen Records has gone on to become the most successful independently owned label in the industry.

Geffen’s extreme A&R; orientation “comes from a combination of David’s background and my background,” says label president Ed Rosenblatt, a veteran record man. “David’s always been involved with artists, and that’s what we both felt in our initial conversations that a record company should be about--which is the artists.

“(But) neither David nor I felt that we had the talent to go into these various clubs and be able to look at, say, the second of five bands you see that night and discern that ‘if you get rid of the bass player, (we could sell records).’ So the first employees we had were A&R; people, and we grew from there.”

While Geffen and Rosenblatt have surrounded the A&R; department with a crack team of promotion, sales and marketing specialists, the impetus for Geffen’s efforts--and numerous successes--continues to emanate from the hands-on activities of Kalodner, Zutaut and Gersh.

“Without the music it doesn’t mean anything,” Rosenblatt says.

Seated behind a cassette-strewn desk in his first-floor office on the Sunset Strip, the bulky, baby-faced Zutaut looks and sounds more like a grad student than a record executive. He chooses his words carefully, speaking in well-constructed paragraphs, as if he were delivering a lecture.

“The future of any record company is finding new talent and bringing it to the forefront, and that’s my particular speciality,” Zutaut says. “But John Kalodner, Gary Gersh and myself were getting so busy in the studio and following through on the projects we had that we couldn’t be in the clubs every night.

“It seemed like there was gonna be a renaissance of bands, and I didn’t want us to miss out on what was going on at the street level. . . . We realized that we really needed street scouts.”

So Zutaut began searching in unconventional places for fresh A&R; talent. He lured Statman away from independent label Slash, grabbed up Fenster from the business affairs department of Warner Bros., and found Vukovic at the underground club Scream. Zutaut took Hamilton, Statman and Fenster under his wing, while Vukovic was placed in the care of Kalodner.

Once the street team was in place, the Geffen brain trust immediately granted the new apprentices full signing power. The act of signing an artist sets in motion a sequence that typically adds up to an outlay of from $200,000 to $400,000 in recording, touring, video and promotional expenditures.

Many record executives might be reluctant to give a fresh-faced kid, even one blessed with “good ears,” a quarter of a million dollars to play with.

Not the Geffen leadership.

“Even the newest person here, if they really believe in a band, they can sign it,” Zutaut says. “You can’t have a committee that decides. You pick people with great instincts, and then you have to let them sink or swim. Everybody has three or four years to come up with a winner, so if it doesn’t happen, you have only yourself to blame.”

The primary challenge for Geffen’s night patrol is finding some viable bands--not an easy task when you have to sift through the hundreds of groups that might pass through local clubs in a year.

According to Don Grierson, the head of A&R; at rival Epic Records, who’s been searching for a plugged-in L.A. street scout of his own, “No matter how many people you have, they’ve got to have an awful lot of contacts out there--their little spies who always come to them (with leads). That’s the key.”

Intuition also plays a part in the search.

French-born UCLA grad Vukovic, 26, cultivated his network of contacts during his years as a club-scene regular. Several of them mentioned a particular new band to him, but it was the group’s intriguing name--Junkyard--that initially drew him to the group.

He became even more interested when he discovered that one of the guitarists had played in two Austin punk bands that Vukovic admired. Yet Junkyard, he recalls, seemed only adequate at best the first two times he saw them.

“But one night they were playing at Scream with a new rhythm section, and all of a sudden they had my attention,” he says. “The songs were happening--they had this Southern flavor, like Lynyrd Skynyrd meets Motorhead. I go, ‘Cool, this is the stuff.’ ”

The band’s debut album, “Junkyard,” released last summer, has sold more than 150,000 copies. While far from a hit, the LP has established a base for the young group, which was previously unknown outside Los Angeles. Vukovic considers the LP “a successful first outing.”

With such high stakes involved on the L.A. club scene, one of the most difficult tasks for record scouts is trusting their instincts rather than being swept along in the hysteria that sometimes surfaces when several companies zero in on the same new band.

“There are so many cretin A&R; people running around the streets,” Vukovic says. “They all get into a club, they see each other, panic, and start throwing money at bands. And these poor bands, they don’t know what is going on. That’s the worst scenario.”

In just his second year, Vukovic, 26, is already an A&R; man other A&R; people watch closely. So closely, in fact, that it’s becoming a problem for him to go to the clubs (just as it is for Zutaut and Hamilton, who for years refused to be photographed to avoid being recognized by bands and managers).

Zutaut says, “You know that the minute Geffen Records wants a band, every other label is gonna offer them a deal. So then it’s up to you to convince a band why you’re the right place for them to be. We make very fair deals here, but not to the point of ridiculousness, where it takes someone an extra $100,000 to $200,000 to bribe somebody to go with them instead of us.

“We’re not gonna match a ridiculous deal, but we do give people plenty of money to survive on for a while and plenty of money to make a good record with.”

Attorney Michele Anthony of the law firm Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips has made deals with Zutaut for three of her clients--Shadowland, King of Kings and Edan.

“What’s unique about Tom’s approach is his development-type deals. He’ll sign a band, commit to an album, give them $4,000-6,000 a month to live on, stick them in a studio, buy them a tape recorder, and make them write. . .and rehearse. At the end of that period they’ll have a bunch of great songs, and the band is really reaching rather than doing that (junk) that you normally get on a first record.”

Signing a band is just the first step. The next is the crucial matter of developing a band’s potential. Before getting promoted to full-time A&R; rep, Vicky Hamilton brought Salty Dog and Shadowland to Zutaut. While both are now considered to be “Zutaut bands,” Hamilton, an acknowledged master, was put in charge of what she calls their “refinement.”

“Shadowland started as a demo deal,” Hamilton recalls. “We did a demo and it was good, but Tom still wasn’t sure. Then we went to a couple of shows, and it became more evident that the guitar player wasn’t cutting it.

“We got a new guitar player and put the band on a six-month development deal. Geffen gave them some living money, paid their rehearsals and helped them get an eight-track board so that they could record their songs at home. The record deal was already a part of that.”

Hamilton continued the development of Shadowland and Salty Dog, which also involved replacing the guitarist in the latter band. “Tom made the records,” says Hamilton, who discovered the bands while she was still a mere tape-listener, and so yielded official credit to Zutaut. “Both the records are amazing, so I don’t really feel bad about (not getting the credit). Had I been under (the present deal) and that happened, I would’ve been (angry).”

Few would disagree, however, that acknowledgment is essential in the A&R; sector, where a street scout’s career can be made by being credited with the discovery of a hit band. When Hamilton finds a band, for example, she immediately faxes Rosenblatt and Zutaut, in effect laying formal claim to the act in question.

Like her fellow street scouts, small, blonde Anna Statman, 30, prowls the clubs night after night in search of a band that will elevate her tentative status in the A&R; community.

Unlike her high-visibility colleagues, though, Statman is rarely recognized. “Besides, I stand at the front while the band is on stage, and I’m so short that nobody ever knows I’m there,” she jokes.

“There’s a camaraderie among the A&R; people,” Statman says, “but at the same time there’s a little bit of competitive edge. But it’s not a problem. I get along with Tom great. If it weren’t for him I wouldn’t be here. He’s taught me a lot in a very short time, and I still feel like I’ve got years and years to learn from this guy.”

But Statman admits that she and Zutaut have their disagreements. Just a few minutes prior to meeting with a reporter, in fact, the two could be heard arguing about whether to mix a track recorded for Statman’s Lock Up project. Statman felt the song was “too pop” for the band’s street image; Zutaut insisted “you never turn down a (potential) hit.”

Hamilton says, “I have those spats with him too. Tom is like my big brother, and I don’t ever hold anything back for anyone. That’s why I don’t have an office at Geffen. I can go there, have my spats, come back to my office and be normal again.”

According to Hamilton, the ultimate mediator of A&R; spats is Geffen himself.

“There’s no one more flexible than David Geffen. I had a problem this weekend, he talked to me on the phone for an hour on Sunday trying to resolve it for me. He’s great, he’s very funny. David Geffen’s best line is, ‘Vicky, I’m not a psychic, I’m just the keeper of the asylum. You have to tell me your problems in order for me to be able to deal with them.’ ”

Zutaut is well aware that the bulk of Geffen’s L.A.-based roster--and by extension the “ears” of its young A&R; staff--has yet to be tested. The debut album by Zutaut and Hamilton’s Salty Dog has just been released, and the debuts of six other Geffen club bands will be coming out in the next few months: Nymphs (Zutaut), I Love You (Zutaut-Todd Sullivan), Little Caesar (Vukovic-Kalodner), Lock Up (Statman), the Brothers Figaro (Fenster) and Shadowland (Zutaut-Hamilton).

The impact of most of these albums won’t be known until well into the year. By then, the Geffen record division may well have been subdivided into two labels, each with its own A&R; and promotion staff.

This second promotion force has been reportedly assembled in an apparent attempt to increase the chances of Geffen’s non-hard-rock acts, which have had a significantly lower success rate than the label’s rock bands. If the widely rumored split materializes, it would no doubt mean the break-up of the Gersh, Kalodner, Zutaut A&R; team.

The move might also put the ambitious Zutaut another step closer to realizing the dream he’s had for 15 years--ever since, as a Park Forest, Ill., high schooler, he read a Rolling Stone article about David Geffen and decided to emulate the young record mogul. He speaks of someday running his own record company.

“I still feel like a kid in a candy store,” Zutaut says. “I’m just waiting for the generation ahead of me to hand me the reins and say, ‘Ride, captain, ride.’ ”

Hamilton wants her own record company too. Statman’s goal is somewhat more modest. “I just need that one band to come find me,” she says.

Will Geffen’s night patrol find that the streets of Hollywood are still paved with platinum? Which inmates will be transferred to another Asylum? Ultimately, who will sink and who will swim? Will Zutaut and Hamilton get the chance to head their own labels? The answers are lurking somewhere in the L.A. night.