Article By Brad Balfour
Edit by Victoria Newman

Journalist, Editor, Network Executive, Author, Cartoonist, Family Man...these are some of the hats Senior VP/Editorial Director Bill Flanagan has and continues wearing to this day. What they have in common is Flanagan's first and foremost love - writing. From his youth growing up in Providence, Rhode Island's Irish American Community, he was a writer, telling stories about anything he could - and that lead him to rock journalism. Now at his VH1 office , the mid 40-ish father of three is talking about A&R, his bebut novel, his recent career as a top producer for the rejuvinated VH1 ( he creates Storytellers and other network shows) and the state of rock journalism - past and present. A&R (Random House) is only the latest of this senior VP's books; he also compiled Written in My Soul - conversations with songwriters - and UP: At The End of the World, A funny book with brilliant insight into the music business. A&R works without being too inside for average readers. Artists & Repertoire talent scouts nurture new acts and sign them to major record labels. Protagonist Jim Cantrone - the A&R man- has a dream job with WorldWide Records ( run by Bill DeGaul and J.B Booth ) but finds that he has to choose between honor and loyalty when Booth, blinded by his taste for power, tries a company takeover. Full of colorfun characters, exotic locales and exciting plot twists, A&R both entertains and is an informative read on the industry. In keeping with Flanagan's efforts from his days freelancing for rock mags, to a decade long editorship at Musician, Flanagan has had more first person exposure to the creative, famous and fabulous than few dream of. Yet he keeps a Providence, Rhode Island home, maintains his fatherhood with his wife and children in Greenwich Village and keeps his ego firmly screwed tight.

--Victoria Newman and Brad Balfour.

MAGAZINE WORK

The biggest adjustment I ever made in my career was going from being a freelance writer to being a magazine editor. I think of myself as a writer and became best known, because of Musician, as a music writer. I did everything when I started out. I began as a cartoonist and switched over to writing because I thought I would take a crack at it. I never thought, "Now I am a cartoonist and now I'm a producer and now I am a writer." I think it's all based on writing. The magazine was very successful at getting musicians who wouldn't talk to other publications. We had great relationships with them. The circulation was not as big as that of a lot of the magazines we were beating out. It was right at the height of the Guns 'n Roses controversy and we had Axl Rose on the cover explaining himself with a long interview, Paul McCartney was inside with a one-page frontispiece of Eric Clapton and Bone in the Musician section. I heard from another magazine that they got chewed out because their boss said,'we can't get any of these people for a cover story and here they are at Musician with a two column interview.' I believe if you create an atmosphere that is comfortable, they will trust you. It's really as simple as that. You have to remember for most of Musician's life and certainly for it's glory years there was no place to go; when Crawdaddy went out of business, Musician picked up. Its initial rise to glory was based on the fact that Steely Dan, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, as well as several others, didn't want to talk to Rolling Stone so they were grateful for another forum in which to talk seriously about music. That, in turn, brought a lot of other people to the magazine and it tended to fly the flag for things that became the mainstream over the course of the following years; a lucky position in which to be. Many people made huge contributions to maintaining the integrity of the magazine.

INTERVIEWING

When I wrote my first book about 15 years ago I had to do interviews and it seemed pretty natural. I am more reluctant to put on an act; you know what the person is looking for so give him the straight talk and don't do it in a restaurant with music playing. Give the truth and don't strike any poses. I think most people are savvy and know what you are looking for and I don't know how well emotional tactics work. You are just there to help them tell their story and if there is a part of it they don't want to tell it's up to you to encourage them to do it. The secret is doing whatever works for you. Larry King does good interviews by being basically uninformed and coming in and asking questions he thinks the audience wants answered. I think Charlie Rose is an excellent reporter but sometimes I believe he jumps in and does what he has to do to make the interview more interesting.

VH1 When John Sykes went over to VH1, and my friends started gravitating over there, I decided to give it a shot.' It was not like I was giving anything up. VH1 had been taking the leftovers of MTV. John, one of the creators of MTV was empowered to seeing if VH1 could live up to becoming a real music channel for grownups. One of the things we first ran into was a real defeatist attitude, "Oh, it can't be done; artists will never do that"... John was a real leader who overcame this losers' attitude with patience and tenacity. Basically, within a year, all the old executives (with one or two talented exceptions), would disappear. He brought in people (including me) from all different backgrounds who he thought could create a positive environment. He kept the ones who wanted to work and got rid of the ones who felt "defeated." One of the key challenges was to create VH1 as a successful TV station rather than a radio station with pictures. We said, "let's erase MTV from our consciousness."

We asked, "what do we want to see?" Television is not about a threeminute song, it's about a half hour story. We thought, "What can TV do well?" and we applied it to music television. So much of TV is joumalism and a lot of the great names in the TV Hall of Fame started out as print journalists: Waiter Cronkite, Ed Sullivan, Charlie Rose, Christiane Annapour. I think my skills as an editor first and my writing, second, had to do with my ability to do this job; not my ability as a journalist. A lot of the key people here never worked in television before, which is probably more typical these days in a lot of media companies. From magazine writer to VH1 was not so dissimilar to what I was doing although it was to a larger audience. I was hiring photographers and firing people, doing a lot of administration and adjustments, and therefore doing something similar in TV in the same building wasn't that big of a change. There's a lot of talented technical people who make sure I don't get near a camera. That's not where my skills lie. Everything at VH1 is on a bigger scale: the music, audience, budgets, etc., but I think you are still begging the people who you really want and saying 'no' to nine out of 10 who call every day. That was true at Musician and it's true here. The great thing was what John created worked and became a great success; even greater than any of us ever believed it would, and I've been there five and a-half years. Admittedly there were many lost weekends but the job didn't suck all the writing out of me. When I came home I was able to work on my novel.

BEHIND THE MUSIC, LEGENDS, STORYTELLERS

I am the executive producer for VH1 Legends and Storytellers. I do many of the interviews for Legends and occasionally some for Behind the Music, if I am requested. The culture is changing and what was done by magazines 20 years ago is now created by niche TV networks. I feel that I am doing something similar to what I did in my first book, Written in My Soul or at Musician--trying to get the artist to first relax then tell his own story and get out of his way. You are the agent to get the person's story out and if you have to be combative or flattering then you must be that. Behind the Music is Jeff Gaspen's show and I have a much more step-back role. There are dozens of people ,including myself, who have contributed something to it, however everyone who has been within a hundred miles of that show wants to claim credit for being part of it because it's such a hit. Gay Rosenthal has had a tremendous influence on the voice and tone of it. The recent Bon Jovi show was something we never did before. We raced the feed from the live show to the satellite. We were still working on the last sequence as the first sequence was being shown to the cable audience. It was Jon Bon Jovi's idea. He said,'Let's not pretty this up too much.' The show got a great rating!

ROCK & ROLL

You hope what you present is invigorating to the audience and part of it comes from having a perspective on it. It's saying that this rock era was exploding around us and now has an are going from beginning to end. Obviously, the fuse was lit by Elvis and Chuck Berry and it took off with the Beatles and Bob Dylan in the '60s, and it had its last burst of glory with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The concept of it being in the center of culture is kind of over now. I'm not saying that rock is over, it's no more over than blues or country are over. It's now being employed as TV background music, a soundtrack for a commercial or for big budget "dogfightin-the-air" movies. It's far removed from that aberrant moment we had when the most important artists were also superstars selling million of records and affecting commercial trends. The fact that part is over makes you stand back and say, "well, here's what it was all about and here's something interesting to write about." It takes a long time after the event to find your perspective and work out what you want to say about it. At the same time the audience and the writers are getting older and are interested in looking back on what we had in the past. Part of growing up is getting a better sense of what you enjoy in the moment, opposed to what you should enjoy, whether it's getting tickets for a concert, a play or going to Miami. You say to yourself, 'Is this just something I should see because everyone wants to see it and it's the thing to do, or do I want to see it because I want to see it?'

THE NOVEL A&R

If you think about it there are a lot of people who started out in the music business as rock journalists and went on to positions of power in the industry. I chose to write A&R from the perspective of the executives because I don't think people have a particularly easy time identifying with recording artists. Whereas the executives are in the same circumstances as the readers in that they get up and go to an office every day, albeit in a more colorful business. To some extent it's a book about office politics only on a large scale with guys who make a million dollars. Do you owe your obligation to the company or to an individual? It's a book about loyalty, ambition, temptation, and how far you'd sell out your personal principles for your family's security. You can excuse all your unethical behavior by saying,'I owe it to my family,' or can you? I wanted to write a commercial, popular fiction that dealt with real issues and real people and didn't go for the cliches or the easy way out. I wanted the characters to be as complicated as characters in real life and I wanted their motives to be as complicated. I first conceived the story as two guys who start out as best friends in business together; one of them loses it and the other has to get rid of him. I placed it in a workplace world I knew. I didn't realize there would be repercussions inferring that it would be a tell-all about the music industry. I didn't want to screw it up by being too timid and I didn't write it about anyone I know. Now people call me every day thanking me for the way I handled the music business scene. There is a reason the story has resonance because it happens again and again. Someone comes into the business and is the protege of someone important and then there's a showdown at some point. I have received at least 12 different interpretations of who the real-life counterparts of Booth and DeGaul are.

WHY I CHOSE THIS SUBJECT

I really don't think the music industry has ever been done in fiction particularly well and that was one of the things that attracted me. A few books came out while I was writing but I didn't read them until after I'd finished mine. One of them was "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," by Salman Rusdhie. I thought it was very good and he did a great job but it's a totally different thing. Mine is nuts and bolts guys on the ground while Rushdie's novel is abstract and meta phorical, taking myths that are common to most cultures and putting them into a R&R context. You cannot write about a pretend rock star. It's as dangerous as writing about a fictional painter or poet. Like an E Hollywood story about some guy in the back of a limousine wearing a fur coat taking drugs; it's not interesting. The Motley Crue story is interesting because it really happened.

WRITING

I did not intend to become a music writer or a specifically a rock writer but it got the biggest response, and not coincidentally, gave me the biggest paycheck. I alsojust loved it. To survive I started moving toward rock and away from stuff I did right out of college; which was publish a lot of short stol·ies, humor pieces and political essays. I kept my hand in a little bit but over the coul·se of my 30s certainly I was a rock writer and editor of 3 music magazine. The first books I wrote were about rock because those wel-e the opportunities that were presented. When I had established myself enough I was able to move into fiction. Its interesting that 1 wrote a book about U2, an Irish band, so much of the story took place in Ireland. When it was time to turn my big box full of material into a book, I went into a room in New York and wrote it. When I did my novel about New York I took my box full of notes and went into a room in Ireland to write!

CHOICE OF DUBLIN AS A LOCATION TO WRITE THE NOVEL

I'd wrote AKrR in Ireland for pl-actical reasons. I'd been writing it for over- a yeat- in my spare time and the folks at VHI were generous enough to let me disappear for a month to turn it into a manuscript. Thel·e was only one month when I thought it would be possible because there wel-enlt any events I had to attend in NYC and that was February. Every place I could think of posed too many distractions. At home (Greenwich Village) there were events and parent/teacher conferences; our second home in Providence, Rhode Island was too close so I would still get pulled back into things; a friend's house in Maine was too remote; in the Cal-ibbean 1 would want to go swimming; London is like NY- I'd still be going to concerts and then I thought of Dublin--it's a great city, a beautiful city that I love. It's not as distracting as London or Los Angeles are. It's literary, at first I thought that seemed pretentious but whatever tricks you into doing what you need to be doing is good. Whatever makes you happy to be thel-e is what you need. The more I thought of it I realized it was perfect--it's warm, it's home, they speak English, I know how to get around and I have friends there so that I won't feel completely isolated. I can work for three days and then go to dinner with friends. And that's what I did. II was a tremendous experience, really fun.

GROWING UP IRISH

I was horn in Providence, Rhode Island. which has a big Irish communi ty and I love it Ihele. I have to be careful of claiming more Irishness than I'ln entitled to. The Irish are very sensitive about that. My great-grandfather left Ireland as an orphaned child in 1850 so it's not like I have cousins back in the "Auld Sod." I think he came from Waterford or Wexford, but I'm not sure. My maternal grandparents were Irish as were various relatives in the family. I grew up with Irish, Italian, French, Portuguese and WASPS (the yanks). Everyone mixed as children but you were aware of your ethnicity. Rhode Island has the largest Irish and Italian population in the U.S. So you absolutely have a sense of yourself as being Irish in some ways but you're not seen that way in Ireland. It's funny, you think of yourself as Irish because that's what everyone calls you then you go to Ireland and they get mad at you saying 'Oh, you damn Americans, thinking you are Irish!' As people get safely distant from the bog they want to go back and celebrate 'oh, what a beautiful country.' In some way that's part of the problem. The Ireland that was preserved in the history and sentimental songs and stories of the Irish Americans ceased to exist a long time agonot that certain savvy tourist attractions have not been created to try and give the Americans what they want when they come over. If you go to Ireland now, and I have spent a lot of time there, it is a very, very progressive, urbane, exciting year-2000 type of place. Dublin is the hippest city in Europe and that is to say, in the world. That certainly was not true 15 years ago, but it is now. The first time I set foot in Dublin there was an immediate connection, which I don't think was just sentimental. I think it was because so much of the architecture, food, even the slang I grew up with in the Providence and Boston area was brought over from Ireland. Every Friday night we went to buy fish and chips wrapped up with vinegar and we didn't 'cut' school, we ' bunked' school. I didn't know all this was Irish. When I first went to Dublin I thought it looked just like Boston and Providence; of course it would because the Irish built those places.

SOME OF MY FAVORITE PEOPLE

Rock accommodates both the African American and the hillbilly. It's the British working class or Elvis the truck driver. If you look at the music of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Who, REM or Van Morrison; the songs relate to people with a college background. They also appeal to the working class, black leatherjacket wearer. Sure, I feel more kinship with Irish artists rather than, for example, Latino artists, because I can relate better to them. There is no secret that I think they are great. There are also people I think who are great but I don't connect with on a personal level. Let's say you, in the course of your job, meet 50 or 60 people a year; in my case they are all rock musicians. Some you willjust hit it off with and others you won't. It would be the same if you were a butcher. Over a period of time you would become friendly with some of your customers. I am not a professional oracle and it's not my desire to be the Boswell to any musician. Bob Dylan is probably my favorite artist of all time, we have a cordial relationship. He's been nice to me but there's no friendship; we don't exchange Christmas cards. It's not like, "Wow Bill, you really get me, come on over to my house!"'

THE FUTURE

There are some people who are as deep as a well and always have something interesting to say; Pete Townsend, Paul Simon and Keith Richards, to name a few. I want to keep talking to them so if the opportunity presents itself I'11 go for it; even if it's the 10th interview. The person I would love to interview is Prince. I've met him a number of times and chatted but have never sat down to a proper conversation. He's a great artist whom I admire tremendously. That would be fun.

WHAT ABOUT THE NEXT BOOK?

My next novel won't be about the music business. The one after that will be because there are many colorful people in the business.