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" He's doing something he loves, in a place he loves, at a time he thinks is pivotal. "
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By Norm Shaw
Sometimes it's hard to picture Jon Hornyak in his current role as executive director of the Memphis chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. If you've known Hornyak over the years, you don't picture him as the jacket and tie type. But he's grown into the role honestly, going from musician to engineer to producer to promoter to executive director. Along the way he's never lost his passion for helping musicians, and for promoting Memphis and its music. His job now lets him hobnob with the bigwigs (see the photo gallery on the right for proof of that), but you'll still find him checking out new talent in the bars and haunts of Memphis. That's what makes him perfectly suited for his job. He's doing something he loves, in a place he loves, at a time he thinks is pivotal. BlueSpeak editor Norm Shaw sat down with Hornyak in his offices on Beale Street to talk about NARAS, Memphis, music and Hornyak himself. As always, he was honest, sincere and genuinely nice. That's just they way he is. ***BlueSpeak: When did you first get into music yourself? Hornyak: The story I always think of is when I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. That's the first time I remember getting excited about pop music. I played in junior high band and stuff like that, but seeing them on the Ed Sullivan Show made me want to get a guitar and learn how to play. I'm from a small town in the bootheel of Missouri, and surprisingly enough there a lot of people in my high school who played music that were way ahead of me, so I just tried to learn to play guitar as quickly as I could and get in to a really cool band there. And the other thing, is that when the Beatles played Memphis, I had tickets to go, but I also had an opportunity to play in a band in my town. So I passed on seeing the Beatles to be able to play this gig. That was one of those things. I hated to miss the Beatles, but it got me into that band and led to me really being a musician. And I kind of think if I hadn't done that, not gotten into that band, I maybe never would have pursued being a musician. I had to work really hard to stay in the band. And then I came to Memphis to go to college. ***To the University of Memphis? Yeah. In Carruthersville (Missouri) we always got Memphis radio and TV stations. I really came here just to be a part of all that scene. In college, besides booking my own band, I started booking others. Right out of college I started a sound and lighting company. And that was just about the time the Southern music explosion was starting to happen with Wet Willie, Marshall Tucker, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers. With the exception of the Allman Brothers, we worked with all those bands, and really hooked on in a big way with Lynyrd Skynyrd. They went from being a bar band to an arena band in a real short period. I also worked with Billy Joel, Barry Manilow. It kind of introduced to me to the big-time rock 'n' roll scene. After that we ended up in the late Seventies I merged my company with another company, and we ended up just getting out of business because it just became too complex and too crazy. A lot of the work and a lot of exposure for a small amount of money. I worked at Strings and Things as a manager for a bit, and that led to build my own recording studio in my house, which is were Sounds Unreel actually started. We started getting record deals for bands, like the Brakes, Cobra, Zayvian. Zayvian was a really cool black band with a lot of rock influences, sort of pre-Living Colour. They were really cool, just way ahead of their time. The record deals for all those bands came from stuff that was either cut at my house or when we drug our equipment to a club and recorded it. And also the Larry Raspberry demo of "Tired of Being Blonde" that Carly Simon cut was demo'd at my house. We actually had country chart records and R&B chart records, and all that stuff was recorded in my spare bedroom. (Laughs) And that led to actually getting a building in the Cooper-Young neighborhood and building a real studio. And that's how I became involved with Rob Junkglas and Jimmy Davis. Don Smith and I were partners in that, and we recruited Jack Holder as a producer, engineer, musician, just to kind of help us do what we were trying to do. And we really focused on focused on artist development, trying to get new artists from Memphis and this part of the country record deals and publishing deals. ***Is that what led to Crossroads? Actually, the Memphis Producers showcase was the predecessor to Crossroads. That was when us, Ardent, Eli Ball and some other people were all trying to get our artists signed to major record labels. We decided let's get together and pool our resources and our contacts and we'll do an event to showcase all our bands and it won't cost us as much individually. If you do it on your own, it cost several thousand dollars to showcase. If you didn't get a deal, you were kind of in trouble. Also, when we started pooling our contacts, we figured we could get a lot more people here. I think '87 was the first year for that. I remember a reporter being there from Rolling Stone and commenting about there were more A&R people than actual people in attendance. Did it at the New Daisy and what is now Willie Mitchell's. We just alternated between the two clubs. It worked really well, it just we didn't have that large an audience. Now Crossroads has really grown over time. At a certain point, Crossroads evolved from that. Producers Showcase was just the six or seven companies involved showcasing their won acts. There were just 15 or 16 acts that got a shot. The acts that didn't get a shot were not happy about it. That led to Crossroads being totally open to any band or artist that wanted to play. I was the director of Crossroads the first three years of its existence. It was a natural extension for me of trying to get the artists I was working with record deals, and so I tried to help a lot of artists. Besides the showcase aspect, it was showing people a good time in Memphis. I learned early on that people love to come to Memphis and stay at the Peabody and go to Graceland. ***And that led to here as executive director of NARAS? When the Recording Academy reorganized and took all the chapters into one national organization they hired full-time executive director. I got that position. Two days after Crossroads was over with in '94, I flew out to LA to take this job. ***Is this kind of a dream job? I was just thinking today, this is the right job for me at just the right time, too. We've been involved in five events in the past six days, starting with the note ceremony (for Bobby "Blue" Bland), the Premier Player Awards, the Bobby Bland thing the next night, the CD release party for Crossroads and the Beale Street Music Festival on Saturday and then yesterday and last night we did a concert at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre with Lily Afshar and Joyce Cobb. We did it in the morning with school kids and last night for adults. There could be worse jobs. (laughs). It gives me a chance to work on behalf of the Memphis music scene to really try and make some things happen. Because of all the things I've done, I know so many people here and am fans of so many people here, it just feels very natural for me to be doing this. As my wife says, I'm not really working. It seems like the chapter is involved in a lot things right now, more so than in the past. You're taking a more high-profile role. Let's talk about some of those plans, such as the Pyramid. It's all part of the new united NARAS that we get involved in more things. Personally, I think that the Memphis chapter of NARAS should be very active in the music scene and it should nurture and support it and try and bring people together. It should really be the organization that brings the Memphis music scene together and take it to a whole new level. We've done that. We've recruited a lot of more new members, since October of last year we've recruited close to 100 new members. Our total membership is now over 400, which is great. We have new people like Garrison Starr, Todd Snider. And we have people like Herman Green, Bobby Bland, Isaac Hayes, Sam Philips, David Porter. More and more it is virtually all the key people in the music community are members here. The different events we've done try to bring all these people together. The Premier Player Awards the other night was a great example of that. You had Garrison Starr, who is just 20 years old, and then Rufus Thomas and Herman Green, who are older. We had young guitar players seeing Calvin Newburn for the first time. They didn't even know he existed. The reverse is true too, with the older cats seeing youngsters. And then to honor Bobby Bland like that, where it really meant something to him. Having B.B. King come in. The warmth and sincerity that was in the room was amazing. That was one of the times I felt like this is one of those things that makes this job so special, to be a part of something like that. For the first time, we're all starting to feel like we're all in this together, rather than we're all in these little pockets competing with each other. It's not about that. Together we can make a lot more things happen. That was the advice Isaac Tigrett had for Memphis at last year's Memphis/Delta Music Heritage Conference. He said you've got all these resources, you've got to get everyone to talk to each other. And you're doing that. I think that makes for a more connected music community. The Dutch Treat events we do, any of the things we do, that's a big part of it. And once people get together they realize they have so much in common. I think the Premier Player Awards is really the event that focuses of all that. People come together to celebrate. You look at the diversity of winners, and the diversity of performers, just diversity of people there. We're really starting to come together finally. ***You've got the Premier Players, the Dutch Treats which are monthly luncheons... And the Songwriters' Nights that we're doing with Keith Sykes, and we are developing what we call NARAS Nights, which are just networking. The first one we did was a Rhythm and Bluegrass night, and we had Wendy Moten and the River Bluff Clan play. About as diverse as you can get. But that worked out really well, so we're going to try to do one of those once a quarter. One of the things people say to me is that it's great that we have this chance to get together. Once people start getting together, then someone will say, "Why don't we write songs together." People are talking about wanting Lily Afshar to play on their records. To me the fact that Lily Afshar wins best guitarist (at the Premier Player Awards) in a male-dominated, rock, soul and blues dominated environment means we're starting to have an impact. ***Tell us about the Grammy in the Schools program. Next year will be the eighth year of that. It's like a career day for high school kids. We bring out a lot of professionals and give the kids a chance to interact with them and ask whatever questions they want to ask, whether it's how much do you make or what's it really like. And we get people like O'Landa Draper or Wendy Moten, people who really have careers. We also get attorneys and managers so they find out more than just what it's like to be a performer for kids who maybe don't have the talent to be a performer but they could be a publisher or a publicist. There's a lot more careers in music than just performing, and we try to point that out to them. We try to give them a solid dose of reality. ***What kind of goals do you have for the chapter and where would you like to see it go from here? I think the main thing is I want to continue to grow our membership and see us really have an impact in making Memphis think of itself as a music city. We obviously are a music city. There's no denying that. ***It goes back to a line you hear around here a lot: "We're more appreciated everywhere else." Is that a valid complaint? I think it is absolutely true. I think all of that is changing. It's just like the Music that Made Memphis CD. Most people wouldn't know that all those songs were recorded here. I think we still have a bit of an identity problem outside of Memphis, that we're not a country town. We don't really have a defined image of what Memphis is as a music city. But definitely we're better known outside of Memphis - in Europe and Japan - than we are here. But I feel like that's changing. I think the mayors, Kevin Kane (head of the Convention & Visitors Bureau), just calling Memphis "Home of the Blues, Birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll" rather than "America's Distribution Center." When the city fathers start saying music is the city's heritage is the number one thing we have, then we're starting to be more active. I just sense that more and more that when I'm out and about, music is cool now. I certainly remember when it wasn't. It's really just in the last two or three years that this transition started to happen. A big part of our mission is to keep that going. That's kind of led to this whole Grammy museum in the Pyramid. That's absolutely the right thing for the city to do. Having a major, world-class attraction like that here, then we can tell the world about what happened here, the musical history that happened here and how it impacted all that's come since. I think that's the connection why the Grammy museum makes sense in Memphis. The roots of virtually all popular music are in this region. And once people start putting that together, then the possibilities are enormous and we could really have a lot going on. ***Let's talk a little bit about Beale Street. We're sitting here looking out over it now. Is this the right place for you to be? I think it's the perfect location for us. It's important for us to feel we're right smack dab in the middle of things. It's great to be able to walk across the street and go to something at B.B. King's (Blues Club), or walk up to the Orpheum tomorrow night to hear Tori Amos. It 's reallly an energizing thing for me. And plus, knowing that all this history was made here. It's impact was more than just the blues. I remember reading a story about Sam Philips driving up Beale Street and that was one of the things that inspired him to open the studio. It's a special place. It's where we should be. We right in the middle of all this history. We're just trying to put a present and a future with that history. I think that's what its all about.
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