Pressing On

Episode 36

Well, hello!

First things first: thank you for your patience while I’ve been under the weather. I originally planned to knock out all three of those 15 Albums posts in a single week, before my knee surgery. Afterward, I found out I wasn’t supposed to sit at my desk for a minimum of two weeks (no bending the knee). Now I’m easing back in. I’m up to a couple of hours at a time without paying for it too much, lol. That’s enough to get back to writing fresh content and recording the audio versions like I was doing before.

So, where were we? Oh, right… Dallas.

As a teen, Dallas was the only big city close to Tulsa. If a big name concert tour was rolling through, you went to Dallas to see it. I remember going to see INXS and PiL at Reunion Arena on a school night. My mom said I could go as long as I went to school the next day. Pretty sure that was a sarcastic statement, but my friends got the same instructions. So we drove to Dallas after school, saw the concert, drove back to Tulsa, and went to school the next morning. Ha!

My point is that Dallas wasn’t a new place to me. I’d been there many times and knew what it was all about. As a teen, I thought it was cool to be in a big city. The older I got, the more I disliked big cities, because you have to compromise so much for a taste of culture. After you’ve aged a bit and experienced that culture, it’s not a lure anymore.

Mike’s transfer landed us in the Metroplex, and we found a place in Allen, which was on the outer (back then) north side. We figured, okay, it’s not that deep in, we can make this work. So we moved.

Since I’d been in software, I tried finding a job in that realm that wasn’t too far into the city madness. I landed at a place in Richardson that made stock market software. It was boring, and the clientele and the people who ran it were financial types, so it was not the same vibe I’d experienced before. I kept searching while I worked there.

I found another place in Richardson, a CD and DVD manufacturing plant. They were hiring a project manager to handle CD and DVD production from start to finish. I applied, and somehow I got the job. I’d later find out the reason people weren’t applying like crazy was the pay. But it was a job, and I was okay with the pay cut because I thought the work would be interesting. And it was! Incredibly stressful, but fun, too.

I remember early on, a tour bus rolled into our parking lot. It was Ray Price and his band. Emerging from a cloud of cigarette smoke flowing from the bus, the manager came in with a CD in hand. They were on tour and running out of merch. Could we make them a couple thousand real quick? Sure! And we did.

I also did a series of Selena’s Greatest Hits albums and worked directly with the Quintanilla family, Suzette and her father, Abraham. Selena’s sister was a hoot and a lot of fun to work with. Another time, a stout man made an appointment to discuss a DVD job. He was Elvis’s stepbrother, and he’d made a movie about his experience with Elvis. He needed some promos made, and I worked with him to get them out the door.

The place wasn’t a big competitor, but I was able to ship a good 15 to 20 jobs a week. Unfortunately, the pay was very, very low, and I just needed more money. So I applied for the same role at a competitor in Plano. Since I was experienced, I got the job, for about a whole dollar more an hour.

The difference was that this place was huge and had big accounts, Warner Bros type accounts. I handled a few labels and some corporate accounts. It wasn’t quite as exciting as the previous job, because it was big business, but every so often I got to work directly with artists on their projects, and that was always rewarding.

Then there was a circle-of-life moment. Remember when I told you Joe Christ turned me on to A&R Records in Dallas for vinyl manufacturing? A&R became one of my accounts. I told Stan, from A&R, how much I enjoyed his mastering of records for electronic bands like CCCP, MCL, and Voyou, and we had a friendly working relationship. They used us whenever someone wanted a companion CD with their records. One Christmas, he had an electronic project come in that was right up my alley. He knew without my saying anything. Sure enough, after I shipped his CDs, vinyl showed up on my desk with a “thanks, I thought you might like this” note from him. That memory always makes me smile.

My claim to fame there, lol, was handling Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack promo DVDs. Yes, I played a small part in bringing sexy back. You’re welcome.

Throughout my time at these plants, I was still trying to figure out what was next on my musical journey. N’Elvis was fun, but I didn’t think I could pull it off properly, and I knew that if I couldn’t do it right on its debut, it wouldn’t work at all. I wanted to do a N’Elvis Taquito Bar show, where he sang about food (including a cover of “Tequila” by the Champs, with “taquito” in the title spot) and brought a fabulous taquito bar into the venue. It was too elaborate for a project without a following. At the time, it was also too regional. Mexican food hadn’t gone mainstream across the country the way it has today.

But I really liked the lounge singer aspect. Around the same time, Mike and I started going to a lot of Jimmy Buffett shows. I didn’t love the music, but it has its place, and the culture back then centered on drinking and partying while raising money for charity (aka Partying with a Purpose). So I decided to try writing N’Elvis a Christmas song with a beach vibe. I wrote and recorded the first version of “Christmastime on the Beach” in 2007, in the spare bedroom of that Allen house.

We’d been going to Bennigan’s to play trivia every Friday night since moving to Allen, and we’d made a group of bar friends. I told a few of them what I was up to, and they kind of became my market research team for my “what’s next” thing. I had the song. I had the vision of the singer: a washed-up lounge singer with a hankering for booze, Vegas, and the beach, who only sang holiday songs. Now I just needed a name.

We put together a poll and posted it online. I didn’t even include Jeff Elder, because it just looked too flat on paper. On the ballot were Jeffrey David (my first and middle names), a very Classic Hollywood-sounding name inspired by the place where White Christmas was filmed – Monte or something like that, and Roy Holliday. Roi is French for king, and Holliday is a play on holidays. So Roy, with a y, Holliday would be the king of holiday fun. It was wordplay, like Adam Baum was. Very me, looking back now. I didn’t explain how the name was built in the poll. The winner was Roy Holliday, by a long shot.

So, there in Allen, Texas, in the summer of 2007, Roy Holliday was born. I spent the fall cleaning up that bedroom recording and making plans for bringing Roy to life. I bought royholliday.com and started getting the ball rolling.

Then it was time to move. My time in the Metroplex wasn’t long, just a couple of years, because Mike received a promotion. While I really enjoyed the project management work, it still didn’t pay enough. You have to understand, it was kind of a dream job for any musician who needed a “real” job, and the owners of these places knew it. So they paid rock bottom because they could. I was okay with moving again, and this time it wasn’t really a setback. We’d be landing in New England, and I knew that area was much more appreciative of the whole lounge thing, as well as things that were different from the norm. I figured once I got there, I’d find another manufacturer and apply. So I readied everything as much as I could, then put Roy on a brief hold as we moved to North Providence, Rhode Island.

I have no regrets from working at those plants, though. I learned so much about the manufacturing and legal side of production work. In my role, I did everything from fixing artwork to clearing intellectual property rights. I touched every aspect of a project from start to finish. It positioned me to put out my own music without paying someone or relying on anyone else. It was a valuable education, and I still use those skills today. I also plan to use them going forward. I’m working on a new service offering that builds on that same experience, and I’m hoping to launch it within the next year. More on that down the road.

Next week, we’ll dive a bit deeper into New England and what became of ol’ Roy. Oh, and Halloween, too. You know I have a new Halloween EP out, right? lol.

Until then, more road ahead. Try to make yours a good one.

Jeff

Audio credits: Intro/Outro music: Intro – SexyBack by Justin Timberlake, Outro – Trick or Treat by Jeff Elder.

Listen to the “What Was That Song?” playlist, featuring music mentioned on Jeff Elder Isn’t Real: