Shane Wilson's Nashville Hustle :: Shane D. Wilson
How can you make your way in Music City?
Lots and lots of hard work… Hear how Shane started as an intern in the UA tower, shifted to interning for Doug Sarrett, worked second shift at NTC (now home to Welcome To 1979), became an assistant at Quad, and then became a freelance assistant.
There's that weird nine-story, like, hexagon building on the Music Row on 17th Avenue that used to be called the UA Tower. Before I was even there on the eighth floor was a studio called Hummingbird and I interned there for three months. Right before my internship ended, an engineer offered me the prestigious position of unpaid intern with him going forward. The engineer's name is Doug Sarrett. So he was a guy who was frequently there as an engineer, and he liked something that I was doing, and he was like, “hey would you like to help me out going forward?” I didn't have anything else going on, so I said, “yeah.”
So then I had the benefit of learning one guy's way of doing things but in multiple rooms back when there were multiple rooms. Because he had his own gear, he had a gear rental company, so he had a lot of gear and so his gear would get carted from studio to studio based on the job and I could learn different rooms by being with him. I could do this, stepping back, the manager of Hummingbird had a contact at a tape duplication plant called NTC, National Tape Corporation, and it was a large-scale cassette duplicate... do you guys even know what the fuck cassettes are?
Actually, do you guys know Welcome to 1979, that really cool studio? That studio is the building that was National Tape Corporation... so if you've been in the control room of Welcome to 1979 and were sitting at the console, if you looked over your left shoulder into the back corner that's where quality control was, and that's where I worked. Quality control with cassettes is bullshit, there's no quality control, but that's what I did second second shift. So I would go to studios in the morning and about 1:30 or so I’d have to find my way to West Nashville which is harder than you think without GPS. If you're born in a corn field and you don't realize that the city in which you've lived is not parallel and perpendicular street-wise. Music Row is perpendicular to the rest of Nashville, and it took me two months to figure that out. I got lost every day getting to work almost.
But anyway I go to West Nashville and do my eight hours, and oftentimes at the end of the shift, I would either go back to where I had been interning. Engineers, if you're nice to them, will often be nice to you and I would approach them and say hey is there ever a time that you're not working at this studio where I'm interning that it would be okay for me to come watch what you're doing somewhere else? And there were a few engineers who were cool with that so I would leave my job and then find my way to wherever they were working late at night and hang out for a few hours before finding my bed.
Anyway, we're at Quad and as most audio stories go, I was interning for Doug but I’d been around a lot because we had worked at Quad a lot and the manager poked his head in and asked Doug to come out in the hall. They were gone a few minutes and then Doug came back in and he was like, “hey man, Kelly the manager just pulled me aside. They just fired one of their guys, do you want a job?” So I got my first paid gig because somebody got fired that day.
Thus began my first paid gig at Quad, which by paid, regardless of whether these are 1992 dollars or not, they offered me the whopping salary of $200 a week, no taxes taken out, and I worked whenever they needed me. In spite of it being a four-room facility, there were two guys employed as assistants and we weren't on shifts at the same time. One guy would work the days and one guy would work the nights, and then we would swap every other week who did which. So that way we could try to pretend like we had a life. But we got smart and realized if the night guy did the weekends, the day guy kind of felt like he had an extra day off so we started this thing where the night guy would kill himself and go ahead and do the weekend shift so that when you left Friday afternoon you didn't come back until Monday late afternoon, so it was cool. The bummer was you didn't really get the assisting experience as an assistant because you had four rooms to be the guy for, so mostly you were setting up and tearing down unless one of the rooms wasn't heavily booked and then you could kind of hang out a little bit. But not really because you're also the phone's guy and the message taker and the runner and everything else.
There were interns sometimes but you know it wasn't a great assisting experience and because of that, not too many months after taking the job, I left because there was a big CCM duo, brother sister duo, back then by the name of BeBe and CeCe Winans which whom you may or may not have heard of. Amazing singers, but BeBe would work there a lot. Fast forward to the next year, and BeBe asked if I would like to be his overdub engineer when he was producing vocals on his sister's record and BeBe was producing it. I'm not going to say no to BeBe Winans, so I didn't ask the manager, oops, but I set it up that the other night shift guy, who was a country engineer, that to my knowledge still works in Nashville, guy named Ricky Cobble. We were both staff guys at Quad, and I was like “hey Ricky, BeBe asked me to do this,” and he's like “we have to do this.”
I was like, “can you cover my ass?” and he said yeah. Well when the manager found out he was pissed. It's like dude, you're paying me $200 bucks a week, you're not taking taxes out, technically I'm contract labor and you're going to be mad at me for taking a gig that pays more than you pay me a week for one day's work? So in talking to my now wife I was like, “this is kind of weird you know? I feel like as an independent assistant I could make more in two days of just normal freelance assisting as I can a whole week.” So I kind of checked in with a couple of the people that I had worked with to say, “hey you know if I was independent is there a chance that you would hire me?” and they're like, “yeah” you know I'm sure something could come up.
So I quit. And the first question that Kelly asked me “is it about the money?”
“Are you really asking that question? Yeah it's about the money and it's also about the experience and it's not really getting the full on assisting experience.“
So I went independent and one of my first clients was getting a call back weeks later from Quad. Somebody was coming in to use the Trident room and they wanted an assistant who could be with them the whole time, so I became the number one call on their call list for independent assistants making, you know 15 bucks an hour, usually 150 bucks a day, so you know in two days I made 50% more than I had made. Not that it's all about the money, but you know, it's a little bit about the money. I mean you're trying to eat food. If you're trying to do it as a job, yeah there's a certain degree that it has to be about the money.