Johnny Goudie
Johnny Goudie has been championing the Austin music scene, both by talking with artists on his podcast and being a long-time musician in it himself. Having had multiple chances at mainstream success with a few bands on bigger labels, he is contempt with being just who he is, honestly and admirably. We talked about topics ranging from his experience with major labels to his inspiration to create his podcast “How Did I Get Here?”.
I heard that you didn't set out for your podcast to be on the Austin music scene, but it ended up being that way because of your involvement. As a musician, what made you set out to to create your podcast?
Johnny Goudie:
My initial thing was to reflect back to when I was a kid. I’m 55 and when I was growing up I always enjoyed these shows with Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas, which were these guys that would sit and talk to people for an hour. It was pretty obvious the guests were promoting something, but they focused more on the interaction between the people. I really was attracted to that sort of thing. Then as I got older, my parents were divorced, I lived in Texas and in California; except, my dad lived in Miami. When I would go to Miami in the summer I would listen to Larry King, who ended up being on CNN later. He would have these hour long conversations with all different kinds of people. Whoever was in pop culture at the time. They would have really candid conversations. In 2010 I was listening to to podcast versions of shows that I would listen to on the radio like NPR shows. I didn't realize that people were making their own content and putting it out. When my cousin told me abou that I was finally like ‘ohh man, here’s my chance!’ So, I spent the next (in all honesty) 8 months trying to figure out what it was I wanted to do.
Then I realized something I've done throughout my whole music career was that I would stay after work and hang out and talk with the other musicians. I'd be at the club until four or five in the morning, finish cleaning up and talk to the other musicians and people about our lives. I saw a guy from Austin that's a friend of mine, Nakia, he was on The Voice for the first season. When I saw that, I had seen him play at Saxon pub a week before to like 25 people, but on The Voice he's singing to 1,000,000 people. I thought I bet he's asking himself “how did I get here?” and that's when I thought of the name of the show.
The inspiration came from being exposed to really cool conversations and then finding out that a podcast was something I could do; partly because I had a recording studio in my house already. I realized like back then in 2011 there wasn't really a podcast with a musician talking to another musician. There was a lot of comedians talking to other comedians, so I saw a lane that I could have. I have so many friends in this scene that I had at least a couple years worth of shows just by calling people I know. So as, I said, I didn't set out for it to be in an Austin music podcast, that's just my surroundings. I mean I've had tons and tons of people from all over the world and people that don't live here on the podcast on a pretty regular basis.
I agree that I really haven't seen another podcast where it's a musician talking to another musician. That's a great idea and I intend to listen to more of your podcast. Other than hosting your podcast, do you do music part time or would you consider yourself a full time musician? Are you on retainer with a band?
Johnny Goudie:
I’m a full time musician. I’m not on retainer with a band. I'm in a band in a business sense, we are legal partners together in a band called Skyrocket! But, otherwise I do my own music I have another band where I'm one of the songwriters and singers called HappyLand. I do a lot of solo stuff since I play guitar and keyboards. This last summer I went out with the band Fastball out there as their guitar player and keyboard player and the extra guy in the band. With Skyrocket!, most of our stuff is private and corporate stuff since it’s a cover band/ a party band.
Cool, that sounds fun! Is navigating the local scene in Austin easier or harder than it used to be?
Johnny Goudie:
I would say it's harder than it used to be for somebody like me, just simply because it's grown so much. There's a new bunch of young people that are kind of running it now. I've done a lot of this stuff in this town and I can call a place and be like ‘hey it's Johnny’ and I've been doing stuff here for 33 years and it's gonna be good so they'll book me. I don't really have to prove myself to some people, but then there's people that are like ‘hey I don't care how long you been playing, I've never seen you’. It could be a little bit tougher as you get older if you don’t stay engaged.
I've worked with the Austin music foundation for like 7 years doing an artist development program with them. Also kind of moderating a lot of their panels and stuff so I am in contact with them. I would say now that it's so much bigger and there’s so much more of it. I don't know if people realize that when I was coming up in the 90s there was only a few different kinds of bands. There were really only a couple of different scenes under one giant scene but now it's a whole lot of scenes.
What do you mean by different kinds of bands, like genres?
Johnny Goudie:
Yeah, like different syles of music. Now you think about it there's music that people listen to you mostly in the world, like the mainstream music, isn't the kind of music you're going to come across at the Continental Club [a historic venue in Austin]. If you watch a lot of young new musicians, there's not a lot of full bands. It's like electronic media, they're using tracks and stuff. So we have all these different generations, but also all these different scenes here.
So there’s not only one music scene in Austin, but multiple.
Johnny Goudie:
Yeah, there's several. There's the Austin music scene, and then sub-genres of that scene. There’s the rockers, there’s the electronic music people, etc.
Do you prefer being more closely connected to the local scene versus being known elsewhere? How much are you known elsewhere?
Johnny Goudie:
That’s an interesting thing. To me they're two separate things. I love being part of a local scene, but I don't wanna play in the same place every night. That's not really a music career, you gotta kind of get out and move around. So I love being a part of the Austin music scene and then being a steward of it as I travel to other places doing it. When people come up and they're like ‘hey man you're really cool’ and I tell them they should check out the other guys where I’m from.
What has navigating the music industry been like for you?
Johnny Goudie:
Well, I mean, when I navigated the biggest part of it when I was much younger and less experienced. The bulk of my music industry success as an artist came when I was much younger and didn’t quite understand it. There’s a lot expected of you as an artist that you don’t really realize until you get into the situation where someone’s giving you a whole lot of money and is like, ‘alright, now you got to do this!’
It's tough because I feel like now there's way more resources. You have like YouTube stuff where there's panels where people talk about it, but when I was coming up unless you knew another dude with a record deal that could tell you things, [otherwise it was hard to find out what the truth is about the music industry].
You know what I learned about the music industry throughout all of this? Is that no one really knows how to make something go and become successful. Nobody actually knows. There's so many factors that have to go into something succeeding, that you can just think you're laying out the pathway for it to success, but then they build another road next to that one.
It's constantly evolving, it's constantly changing and so many stars have to align for you to, not even Taylor Swift status, but like to even get half of that success. So many things have to line up and be great.
Do you think that there are certain gates being kept closed for certain people in the music industry? Like if you were like a young artist?
Johnny Goudie:
Well, I mean as far as that goes, there's less gatekeepers than ever but there's also just more competition than ever. You might be able to put up some amazing song that you created in your bedroom all by yourself on Spotify, and if there weren't 40,000 people putting out a song that same day you might have a chance of getting noticed. So it's very difficult, before there was less music bands and more gatekeepers, so it was harder to get through. But now the gatekeepers are gone, but it's the guy that's running the race with you that you gotta worry about.
Not only does it seem like there's so much competition worldwide, but also just in Austin alone. I'm an artist too and I’m trying to do something different with this magazine project, because there's so much competition out there. It’s like ‘where am I going to fit in? It’s nuts.
Johnny Goudie:
It's difficult because I'm having this genuine sort of conversation thing [with my podcast]. You're keeping human beings connecting and relating to each other. I don't know how to turn that into 10 seconds of something that I could put on TikTok. I can't really reduce what I do to sound bites and clickbait.
The Internet has been talked about so much about creating connections or whatnot, when in reality it’s just creating more and more competition.
Johnny Goudie:
That’s what I’m saying, the gatekeepers aren't there like they once were in the pre Internet days but it doesn't matter because there's so many people running the race now that it's insane.
As you're setting out to do something like this, what you're doing with the magazine, what I do with my podcast, there is like .00001% chance of it lasting because the odds are so against it. But I do applaud you for doing it, if it ends up being very popular and lots of people see it then that’s amazing. If it doesn't that's still ‘congratulations’ you tried to do something that's not very easy to do.
You really don't know what's going to come of it. I’m really not expecting success. When you started out with music were you expecting success originally or were you just trying it out?
Oh no, from the second I decided to do this, that was it man. Obviously I was a kid from the 80s and I was like OK well let me try and be Bono. Try and reach that level of success. U2 was a very big band at that time. Success where you don't have to compromise your music. Metallica has that kind of freedom. Nobody acknowledged that Metallica was selling millions of records until one day they woke up and they were the biggest band in the world, and they did it on their own terms.
What does success mean to you?
Johnny Goudie:
The way [the idea of success] is used by people is numerical and going on a scale of return. In my estimation you'll end up killing yourself as an artist if that's how you measure success, because you're always failing someone. I measure success based on whether or not you’re being true to what you're creating. You're being honest about it and there's some soul put into it. If I look at the success of my music career I can say like well shit I'm still 55 and I make a living playing music. That's not easy to do. It's not just running around being Johnny Goudie and getting paid just because they want to see me, but I have found a way.
Luckily when I was a kid, my mom was friends with a lot of professional musicians and my mentor was a guy [Mark Hallman] who had just produced Carole King. He was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame sometime in the last couple of years. He toured with Dan Fogelberg who was playing basketball arenas. He had his own band where he was trying to make this thing happen. Writing songs, playing gigs, and recording. He also played in a cover band.
If you want to make a living playing music you got to be open to doing all the stuff that playing music does. Like, ‘do I want to be the band who plays the fundraiser for Halliburton?’. No, but that's just one of the things I have to do to make money. Of course, it’s from that perspective of an artist where you're trying to be true to yourself, and at the same time trying to make a living off of it. I'm sure you've gone through many of those moments where you might be torn between those two ideologies.
Have you had an experience with a major label?
Johnny Goudie:
Yeah! Lars from Metallica had a label under Elektra records [called The Music Company] and he signed my band Goudie. We put out a record in the summer of 2000 from that experience.
How do you feel like those kinds of labels play into the music industry and the gap between the art versus success?
Johnny Goudie:
In all sincerity, it is a very different world now than it was when I was doing that. I don't know what the pressures are now.
We had a super small record deal and our advance was like $100,000. You gotta pay taxes, you gotta pay 20% to your lawyer and to your manager and split it up four ways. In the end it's not really that much money. I had friends back then that were getting $1,000,000 like just for signing a record deal and that already started to drop off by the time I got signed. I know someone that was signed to a label that would have probably given them at least $150,000 twenty years ago that gave him $20,000 now. That's not your recording budget, that was just our advance. I mean we ended up at the band spending $750,000 but we only got like $100,000 of it in advance.
You would think nowadays the advances would increase.
Johnny Goudie:
When I got signed the record company only got money from the sales of your album. In essence I could have gone out and re-recorded that album afterwards and released it and there's nothing they could do about it. We left our label in 2001, and in 2003 or 2004 it was the advent of this thing called the 360 deal, where labels could get a part of your merch, touring, and publishing profits. Beforehand the label never got a cut of those things, unless there was some squirrely deal where they took it. You had other ways to make money that they can get their hands on now.
In a way that seems like self sabotage for a record label, because these bands won't be able to sustain a living to make the art that would be making the label the money in the first place. I mean there has to be more of a balance, it's just ridiculous.
Johnny Goudie:
Before those record deals they would give you the money in advance. But from then on in your partnership, you got like 9% of your sales. It was Michael Jackson and The Chicks were the only ones that [I remember] ever went and fought and made their record label give them more than standard; and they all ended up only getting 13%.
Wow. Instead of a 50/50 split being the standard.
Johnny Goudie:
Right. Trying to get a gigs and making a record on your own, and then trying to sell it and make sure it's in these places. All of those pressures are real different than when someone gives you a whole lot of money and it's like ‘hey man you gotta get out there and pay me back’. There was an amount of pressure when I was on that label. You can't really conceptualize it until you're in the moment and you're like ‘ohh man… everybody's mad at me and I didn't do anything bad’.
Are you on a label now currently?
Johnny Goudie:
Yeah.
Do you make more money now than you did on a major label?
Johnny Goudie:
The least amount of money I ever made as a musician, except for at the very beginning, was when I was signed to a major label. The idea is that if you signed to one of those labels you would make the big bucks. It gives you the opportunity to make the big bucks. If we were to have sold millions of records, then we'd be having a completely different conversation.
It just seems like being on a major label for many artists is just an unsustainable and unreliable thing. It depends too, I mean you would have to get really lucky.
Johnny Goudie:
The thing is you have to be good, and you have to get lucky more than once. Every day you have to win the lottery. The odds are stacked against you.
I was thinking it's sustained success versus a burst of virality.
Johnny Goudie:
Exactly right.