Summary: Collaborations: creative partnerships in music | Peter Doyle <strong>‘Working for the man’: figuring the artist-producer (or artist-agent, artist-manager, artist-entrepreneur, artist-hustler) relationship</strong> It is a commonplace of popular music studies that records are manufactured things, that the sonic ‘production’ itself is worthy of attention, that producers matter, and that in the larger history of popular music recording, producers not infrequently matter more than artists. But despite that, the stories of producers, managers, entrepreneurs, engineers (often overlapping categories in the pre-rock age) remain largely untold. Over the past couple of decades many quality biographies of musicians — most typically ‘unsung heroes’ from outside the pop mainstream — have appeared, and so too various scholarly and popular histories of fringe scenes and subcultures. Yet such hugely important figures as Jack Kapp, Ralph Peer, Milt Gabler, John Hammond – each of whom had decisive influence on the emergence of twentieth century popular music ‘genres’, and each of whom worked in both the mainstream and on its hipper fringes – remain little known and written about. In this paper I wish to identify some of the narrative default settings which have been used to characterise the relationship between the creative artist and his/her first point of contact with ‘the business’ – be it producer, engineer, manager, agent etc. Descriptions of the artist-producer relationship, I will argue, typically invoke a set of deep and enduring narrative tropes — mythic, archetypal, folkloric, literary and pulp – and these almost unfailingly operate to the detriment of the producer. One near constant has been the valorisation of the artist as romantic, often tragic, indeed, as <em>sacrificial</em> figure, and with it a concomitant tendency to typify the producer/mentor/facilitator/’suit’ figure as venal, mendacious exploiter, and as unrepentant corrupter of artistic purity. The pop biopic, itself closely aligned to such forms as the boxing film, has further served to lock in those settings. Other representational strands co-exist with these: with the coming in the 1950s of what Keir Keightley has called ‘record consciousness’, for example, the producer was cast, again largely by default, in the role of the scientist or technician (buttoned-up and colourless, in horn-rimmed glasses, white dust coat), which as corollary, cast the studio as a kind of laboratory (maybe like the ones in the newsreels, where they handle microbes, or radioactive isotopes, or make atom bombs, or experiment on human brains). Which in turn simultaneously opened the door to ‘producer as auteur’ as it did to the trope of producer as mad-scientist, deranged megalomaniac.
