Voices From Beyond

Death has never really been the mandatory retirement age in Hollywood. Stars go in the ground, but marketable celebrity never gives up the ghost.

Nobody blinked when Ray Charles raked in posthumous Grammys, or when digital technology made it possible to cast Steve McQueen, who died in 1980, as the spectral pitchman in a Ford Mustang commercial, or when Laurence Olivier landed the role last year as the nefarious villain in the science fiction film “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” more than a decade and a half after his funeral.

But, as Dr. Frankenstein learned when he saw those torches outside, using science to break new burial ground is not always a crowd-pleasing stunt.

“Just because you can do something, well, that doesn’t mean you should do something,” said Jim Ed Norman, who speaks from firsthand experience.

Norman was behind a grand experiment in Nashville that used the miracles of technology to put new lyrics into the mouth of a dead singer, namely Conway Twitty, the country star who died in 1993.

“I knew it could be done. And once you know that, you get to thinking of all the things that could be done,” Norman said.

What do you want to hear? Elvis singing Eminem? Perhaps a Microsoft jingle from Frank Sinatra or a new antiwar anthem from John Lennon?

“Yes, all of that,” Norman said, “and more. And it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. I wanted to put it out there and see what happened.”

In one sense, the experiment worked perfectly: The finished track was seamless and completely believable to the average ear. Twitty’s family enthusiastically signed off on its release. The recording was a “duet” between Anita Cochran and Twitty on a tune called “(I Wanna Hear) A Cheatin’ Song,” which Cochran wrote.

The recording starts off as straight as a West Texas highway -- a simple song of honky-tonk heartache -- but it takes a sharp turn into the Great Beyond when, 2 1/2 minutes in, Cochran asks Twitty, her childhood idol, “Can you help me, Conway?”

The long-gone baritone answers, “Yeah.”

But maybe Twitty should have said “nope.” Looking back on everything that happened next, Norman reflected recently that “in a way, this was like opening a Pandora’s box.”

Norman has a long resume in country music, including producer or player with the Eagles, Hank Williams Jr. and Crystal Gayle, and then as an executive who nurtured the careers of tradition-minded singers Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam and Travis Tritt.

Another singer under his wing in recent years was Cochran, who grew up in Michigan but had a musical compass attuned South; her parents had left Kentucky for the job opportunities in the automobile factories, but their new home was still filled with the steel-pedal sounds of country.

Young Anita revered country songs of melodrama, and she especially loved Twitty’s melodramatic growl on songs such as “Hello Darlin’ ” and his frequent duets with Loretta Lynn on love songs for the world-weary, such as “After the Fire Is Gone.”

“That was who mattered to me,” Cochran said this week. “That was who I wanted to be.”

By 1998, Cochran was living the country singer life herself and even scored a No. 1 single on the genre’s charts, “What if I Said,” a duet with Steve Wariner.

By 2003, she was at a pivotal point in her career: There were big corporate changes underway at Warner Reprise, and with sales down and the industry in belt-tightening mode it was time to demonstrate her value to the roster.

Norman was sure he heard a hit in one of Cochran’s new compositions, the torchy country song called “(I Wanna Hear) A Cheatin’ Song,” and he thought it was ripe for a duet that would pair Cochran with a high-profile partner. Cochran joked that Twitty would be the best man for the job.

The notion wouldn’t leave Norman’s mind. He had years earlier helped Hank Williams Jr. record a “duet” with his late father -- the song was “There’s a Tear in My Beer,” a song the elder Williams wrote and crudely recorded but never released, so the duet was achieved by grafting the son’s work to a spruced-up original. The same approach had been used most famously in 1991 for daughter Natalie Cole’s Grammy-winning echoing of father Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.”

But “(I Wanna Hear) A Cheatin’ Song” took the beyond-the-grave duet to a whole new level -- this time, the posthumous performer was singing lyrics that he never saw in his lifetime.

It was achieved like this: Cochran and her producers, Norman and David Huff, pored over dozens of Twitty songs that he recorded with Warner Bros. in the 1980s. She listened intently to each lyric to pluck out phonetic utterances that could be used as building blocks for the new song. Some words were found whole -- such as “song,” in the title chorus -- but others had to be pieced together.

“He never sang ‘wanna,’ not in any of his songs,” Norman said. “So we took a ‘want,’ took off the ‘t’ sound at the end and then found an ‘uh’ sound.... As you can guess, this took a lot of time.”

It took months to identify, isolate and extract the syllabic elements and then put them together. Doing that alone would have yielded a song with all the choppy grace of a ransom note, but Norman and company had the magic of digital technology at their disposal. Norman used the software Pro Tools to assemble and smooth the vocals and correct tone and key. The software is a standard studio tool these days, and it is the reason many young pop stars so often sound brilliant on CD and shaky onstage.

Norman and Cochran spoke with Twitty’s widow, Dee Jenkins, and the singer’s children at the start of the endeavor, and the family signed off enthusiastically. They “saw this as an opportunity to keep his legacy going,” Norman said. “That’s a natural instinct, I would think.”

Cochran’s manager was Sandy Brokaw, who had worked for Twitty in the singer’s twilight years. He said the song was a valentine to old country that also pushed the envelope. “There was a big excitement, a lot of attention, and it was a great tune that made the family excited and even emotional.”

When do nostalgia and legacy enhancement slip into crass exploitation? That question was one not just for Twitty’s brood but also for all heirs of the famous -- and the musical community at large.

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Brand Extension

James Dean may have had the right idea: Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking digital image. And that keeps Mark Roesler busy.

Roesler is a gatekeeper for Dean and other Hollywood stars, and he handles the job with a mix of agent hustle and mortician sobriety. He lined up a breakthrough deal that put a shimmering Louis Armstrong and Humphrey Bogart in a Diet Coke commercial in 1991, a deal commemorated by a plaque on Roesler’s office wall in Indianapolis.

“Since that success the opportunities have been increasing and becoming more sophisticated,” said Roesler, chairman of Curtis Management Group, a top agent to famous names who have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Not only does Roesler act as business medium for Errol Flynn, Buddy Holly and Bogart, but he also represents sports stars (Babe Ruth, Rocky Marciano) and historical figures (Mark Twain, Malcolm X, Amelia Earhart). The digital offers coming in these days have eye-popping potential, he said.

“These stars are brand names,” he said, “and this is the ultimate brand extension.”

Now the brand extensions include entire feature-length films, such as the steady stream of project proposals for Dean, who died 50 years ago this September.

“We keep turning down new movie offers,” said Roesler, who handles the vast licensing duties of the Dean estate. “All of them would star ‘digital Deans.’ One of the offers was for an action-adventure movie costarring Marilyn Monroe.”

Roesler’s company and the Roger Richman Agency in Beverly Hills are leading firms for Dead Hollywood, so they keep tabs on new approaches for featuring “legacy celebrities,” and they also watch the public response to the tricky business. They paid attention when “(I Wanna Hear) A Cheatin’ Song” was released as a single on June 7, 2004, 11 years and two days after Twitty’s death.

Norman was pleased with the production values, but he was less certain about how the public would hear it. A press release was sent out with quotes from Twitty’s daughter, Joni Jenkins, who along with three siblings owns Conway Twitty United, the partnership that controls their father’s licensing.

“Daddy was great at picking songs, and I think this one is right up his alley,” Jenkins stated in the release. “And now I’m a big Anita Cochran fan! Even though his legacy continues to be bought, now there’s something new for the fans to hear. Technology makes it possible for us to still enjoy him, with new material. We’re so excited. And Dad’s smiling down, I know.”

If so, the smile was not returned by Nashville. The communities within country record companies and radio are far more tightly knit than those in other pop genres. The Dixie Chicks, for example, were frozen out of country radio abruptly and effectively in 2003 after singer Natalie Maines made a disparaging stage comment about President Bush.

“Country music may be a big business, but it feels like a small town,” Maines said ruefully late last year of her band’s sharp decline in airplay and on-air concert promotions.

Two days after the song reached radio, the Tennessean, Nashville’s leading newspaper, jokingly drew a line between the creation of “Cheatin’ Song” and the possibility of resurrecting Hank Williams to perform Shania Twain tunes. It quoted Vince Gill, the well-regarded country star, delivering a harsh appraisal that would echo in radio programmers’ ears. Early in his career, Gill had been a backup singer for Twitty.

“It’s bizarre,” Gill told the paper. “I heard the song and I didn’t recognize him. Taking a word, tuning it and placing it like that, I think it’s really, really, really wrong. I love Conway, but I think he’s got plenty of legacy for people to remember him by.”

Country music elder George Jones also publicly questioned the song’s ethics. The Internet spaces devoted to country music topics filled up with surprising venom.

“Corporate Nashville has already taken the heart and soul out of country music for more than a while and now they’ve one-upped themselves and taken the artist out of the art,” one pundit wrote on takecountryback.com, a hub for traditionalists.

“There was a real outrage expressed in some quarters, and it was expressed as a sort of trust betrayed,” said Jay Orr, senior museum editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame. “People looked at this and said now it would be hard to know what to believe when you heard it.”

Orr had heard the song early -- he was one of the confidants that Norman had brought to his office in the weeks before the single’s release.

“My advice to him was that I didn’t think it would be a problem,” Orr said. “I thought country music fans have been pretty forgiving of new ideas and engaged by novelties. Maybe I didn’t think it through enough. I was sort of sharing Jim Ed’s excitement. I liked Twitty’s vocals. It was fun to have him back again. I haven’t spoken to Jim Ed since the song came out. I hope he doesn’t think I gave him bad advice.”

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Repercussions

Brokaw, Cochran’s manager, was shocked by the venom.

“It was like Anita was a 5-year-old who came down the stairs on Christmas morning and there was the tree and the boxes, and all of them turned out to be empty.”

The next few months were a tumble of bad news. Lean times and leadership changes at Warner Bros. put some unmistakable writing on the wall, and Norman, once a proud pillar of the company, resigned after 21 years on the job. Cochran was dropped from the label. Her website still has a Warner press release posted on it that tells fans to watch for her album “God Created Woman,” but the album’s delivery date last September came and went with no new CD.

Public silence has continued for those involved. The Twitty family “is disappointed, as you might expect,” Norman said. They have stopped talking about the song publicly. Cochran is piecing her career back together. Tuesday she starts a tour that begins in Wyoming and will take her to Alaska.

Norman is also looking at latitudes far from Nashville; he has been visiting Hawaii to speak with music industry powers there who see the island music scene growing and expanding on its traditional sounds.

“Yes,” Norman said with a chuckle, “it is pretty far from country music, isn’t it?”

It’s hard to separate causes and effects sometimes, but Orr said that country radio was always looking for a reason to say no to a song -- there are so many releases, such limited airplay spots and so few risk takers -- and that “Cheatin’ Song” arrived with a big reason to say no.

“Country music is three chords and the truth, and tradition and authenticity and all that,” said KZLA-FM programming chief R.J. Curtis. “You don’t move cornerstones around. That’s why they’re cornerstones. This is a genre with a lot of protective people in it.”

With a sad chuckle, Cochran points out that Gretchen Wilson, the hottest young singer in country, has a music video that features dead country stars in it.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “Nashville is like one big company -- there’s a lot of buildings, but it’s like the people all work for the same company.... I did this because I wanted to hear Conway on the radio again. Who knows why people react the way they do.”

Some reviewers also noted that there was a certain stilted quality to Twitty’s vocals; that may not be the case the next time someone tries the experiment. Co-producer Huff has compared the Twitty pilot effort to the early colorizations of black-and-white films that were especially clumsy.

Norman paints the project as pioneer work.

“On some level,” he said, “we did this because it was something that had both problem and potential in it, and we knew that we might be the first to go down this path but there would be others to follow. Imagine Elvis singing a song he never sang and a song that you want to hear him sing.”

Norman said he didn’t have the right song at the right time, but that doesn’t mean someone else won’t find it.

“It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time.”