CHAPEL HILL -- Most music business types of a certain generation bristle at the mention of online piracy. Ken Weiss, however, doesn't have a problem with it.
"My mission is not to stop people from stealing," says Weiss, a music publisher for more than 40 years, "but to encourage them to do more of it."
Weiss, 62, co-teaches an arts entrepreneurship class at UNC-Chapel Hill nowadays, and he's done a little of everything in the business. But mostly he has worked in publishing - getting songs recorded and/or used in movies, commercials and so forth. And that gives him a perspective that is somewhat unusual.
"If only more people would take my songs without paying for them, I know what value that can create," Weiss says. "The more pervasive my music is, the more opportunity there is for ancillary uses. So my job with a song is to make it more pervasive. I'd rather 2 million people steal it than 50,000 buy it, any day of the week."
Over the past four decades, Weiss has worked with some of the biggest names in popular music. His house sports a wall of gold and platinum records, mostly for '70s-vintage superstars such as Crosby Stills & Nash, Firefall and Fleetwood Mac.
"When I first started, I wanted just one gold record," he says. "I figured if I'd get one, that would be it. And I've got 20, so it worked out."
Weiss broke into the business with Warner Music Publishing in New York in the late 1960s. It was a time of transition in how the business worked. The old-school way was for writers to write and singers to sing, with publishers acting as the middlemen who connected them.
"The great stars of the '30s, '40s and '50s did not write their own songs," Weiss says. "Then in the '60s, artists started writing their own stuff. I remember someone at Warner coming to me in about 1969 to say they were working on a music book for 'some guitar player named Hendrix.' I said he must mean Jimi, and the guy said, 'Yeah, whatever, I don't know much about his stuff.'
"I was astounded. The people managing the publishing industry were disconnected from what was happening right in front of them."
His own man
After a move to Los Angeles, Weiss left Warner to strike out on his own. He got close to Chris Hillman of The Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, which led him to Stephen Stills of Crosby Stills & Nash. Weiss signed Stills to his newly formed publishing company, Gold Hill Music, named after the Colorado town where Stills lived.
Between Stills' solo hits like "Love the One You're With" and Crosby Stills & Nash's popularity, Gold Hill was a gold mine.
The franchise grew more valuable when Weiss signed Hillman's old Flying Burrito Brothers bandmate Rick Roberts, who went on to have huge hits with Firefall - "You Are the Woman," "Strange Way," "Just Remember I Love You" and other staples of '70s soft-rock radio. Weiss also served as Stills' manager for a time, which he admits "had its challenging moments."
But it had moments when Weiss exercised some creative input, too, especially when Crosby Stills & Nash were working on an early-'80s comeback album. Another Gold Hill client, the Curtis Brothers, had written a song called "Seven League Boots." Weiss liked the song but thought the lyrics could use work. So he took it to Stills and suggested he rewrite it.
Stills wrote new lyrics for the song, rechristened "Southern Cross," which was the centerpiece to the 1982 album "Daylight Again." Though not their biggest hit, "Southern Cross" remains one of Crosby Stills & Nash's more enduring songs. When the group played Cary in September, Stills introduced "Southern Cross" by giving Weiss an onstage shout-out for his role in bringing it to life.
"[David] Crosby told me that song bought them another 20 years," Weiss says. "It certainly bought me close to that many. That's an example of what publishing can be, culling great songs out of the air - or out of existing material that needs a facelift."
Generating new revenue
Running an independent publishing company without a record-label bankroll taught Weiss to look for creative ways to generate revenue on his own. In the mid-'90s, Weiss was serving as music supervisor for a film and wanted to use "Disco Inferno." But the 1977 Trammps hit version was too expensive to license. So Weiss went into a studio and cut his own version, which went into the film (the 1996 comedy "364 Girls a Year"). Then he licensed his cover for a series of commercials including Budweiser, Southern Comfort and the "Tummy Burner" exercise machine.
By then, Weiss had turned his focus toward movies and Broadway, setting up a new publishing company, Bronx Flash Music. Bronx Flash's most notable writer is Frank Wildhorn, whose credits include the musicals "Jekyll & Hyde," "The Civil War" and "Dracula."
Most of Weiss' work happens over the phone or via e-mail, so he doesn't have to live in Los Angeles anymore. He was looking to escape the big city a few years ago when a friend suggested Chapel Hill, and a visit won him over. Then he struck up a friendship with UNC professor Mark Katz, which got him into teaching arts entrepreneurship last year.
"Ken has a huge history in music, film, Broadway," says Katz, Weiss' co-teacher last spring. "He doesn't do sculpture as far as I know, but he seems to have a hand in everything else. He was great in terms of bringing a reality check to people's ideas.
"And I was really impressed with him from an academic standpoint. He could've easily just come in to do color commentary, but he dove right in and did a huge amount of work. I actually had to push him to tell more stories. 'Nah,' he'd say, 'who wants to hear that?' Well, I want to hear it!"
One of Weiss' UNC students was Mariana Nepomuceno, who used connections from the class to land an internship at Universal Republic Records in New York after graduating in May. She calls Weiss her mentor.
Another was Reed Turchi, who took a class assignment to do a business plan and ran with it. Turchi started a niche blues label called Devil Down Records, which debuted in the fall with a much-acclaimed album by the late bluesmanMississippi Fred McDowell.
"Ken's attitude was that if you're willing to put in the work, there's no reason it can't happen," Turchi says. "We still meet pretty frequently, and he always says something like, 'Well, it's clear you have no idea what you're doing. But that's exactly where you should be. I didn't, either.'"
Weiss is co-teaching arts entrepreneurship again this semester, this time with music professor Evan Feldman. And he's still working on the publishing end of things. His client Wildhorn has a number of projects in development, all with needs.
"Among my many reasons for continuing to run my publishing business is to stay on top of the changing environment," Weiss says.
"Reading Billboard magazine is only one way to do that. I can talk about the record business from the '70s, '80s, '90s and 2000s up to today. It's a very different beast from what it used to be. But that's what keeps it going."
