Bob Golden: Out of His Comfort Zone
Throughout Bob Golden’s career, the musician and potter has reliably demonstrated a gift for creating opportunity, and, like any good drummer, his timing has been flawless.
It would have to be, given the astonishingly tight deadlines in the world of music for television. Case in point: Mr. Golden, who lives in Springs, returned from a tour with the Laurie Berkner Band on Sunday with an assignment to complete a theme for the National Geographic Channel due Tuesday.
He’s a relatively recent arrival to the popular children’s recording artists’ group, formally joining in 2009, but the role represents the culmination of innumerable composing, performing, recording, and producing gigs, each seeming to segue naturally to the next.
“It’s a bifurcated mess,” he said of his life and career, “but there’s also a central groove.” Born in Manhattan, Mr. Golden grew up in the West Village and then Ridgewood, N.J. “New York City gave you this eye into very creative things — art, progressive schooling. When I went to Ridgewood, it was ‘Get on a bicycle and start to have some fun.’ ” As a child in Sea Girt, on the New Jersey shore, he took up surfing, a passion that continues on the South Fork.
He also took up several musical instruments, but drums prevailed. In high school, bands and pottery became primary interests. “I picked up several things pretty quickly and never let them go,” he said. While at Brown University, he also attended the Rhode Island School of Design’s ceramics program and played in a popular band. After college, though, “it was the late ’80s, and I had no idea how to make a career of any of this.”
Back in New York, Mr. Golden formed a rock ’n’ roll trio that attracted attention from the right person. “A guy from Profile Records hired me because I was promoting the band in an interesting way.” That gig led to one at Broadcast Music Inc., or BMI, the performing rights organization. There, Mr. Golden remembered, “I got an eyeball into a business model that made sense, and started seeing how you can make money if you write songs. I thought, if I get music on television, I’ll be going forward.”
Apart from playing in a band, outlets for original music were pretty much limited to soap operas, jingles, documentaries, or children’s television. Composing music for “Sesame Street” was “a real coup,” he said, “because it was impossible to break into that hierarchy — it was a very protected thing.” But break in he did, and the doors began to open. “I went after children’s television in a big way, and I ended up going from ‘Sesame Street’ to cold-calling Shari Lewis, who had a show called ‘Lamb Chop’s Play-Along,’ and got three songs on that show.”
More TV composing followed, including “Dora the Explorer” and “The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss.” “It would be two to three songs an episode,” he said, “and you would have one week to write the music, the lyrics, the arrangement. Then you would record the cast singing the songs.”
Mr. Golden realized that owning a studio where he could demo his work was more cost-effective than booking time in expensive commercial facilities. When equipment from defunct studios came up for auction he was there, cobbling together a broadcast-quality setup. “It was a lot of learning very quickly by the seat of your pants, with no instruction manual. It’s kind of a trial by fire in most things I’ve done.”
He purchased a duplex west of Times Square — “a terrible area at the time,” he said, but a space large enough to accommodate cast recordings. He also made a leap to writing and recording for programming on the Comedy Central channel. The stand-up comedian Dave Attell was doing the pilot episode for “Insomniac,” and Mr. Golden was hired to demo a theme song.
“We didn’t even have a budget for a singer, so I had Attell sing it, and it became the theme,” he said. “They did four seasons, and a season would be 10 or 15 episodes each.” At the same time, he was working with Michael Moore, who subsequently hired him for films including “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
More recently, Mr. Golden produced music for Larry David’s Broadway show, “Fish in the Dark.” Right now he is composing for “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” with a musical commentary on the political campaign — a song called “Don’t Use Our Song,” featuring Usher, Sheryl Crow, Cyndi Lauper, Josh Groban, John Mellencamp, and Michael Bolton — a recent highlight.
After a “minimal health scare” in 2010, the musician returned to pottery. “One thing I had neglected for 15 years was throwing,” he said, “so I found this little place” — Amagansett Applied Arts — “and became enmeshed in the ceramic community and started doing shows.” Soon, the restaurateur Zak Pelaccio saw his work and asked for 1,000 pieces for a new restaurant in Hudson, N.Y.
The problem, Mr. Golden said, was that “I had gotten back into clay for the joy of it. What I had done in music, which had sort of burned me out, immediately became the thing that happened in clay.” A new approach was in order, and he turned to gallery work. “That’s when I met Sara DeLuca at Ille Arts, who talked about ceramic lines, which was far more reasonable to me.” A launch party for Mr. Golden’s line was held at the gallery on July 30.
Success, he said, has come from “putting myself in uncomfortable positions.” Right out of college, “I was setting up shows before I had a solidified band. It’s the same with episodic television: I had no idea if I could pull off two songs a week for months, and figure out how to record everything. Even with clay and the Zak Pelaccio restaurant — I had never made more than 20 or 30 bowls at a time. People tend to not push the envelope. If you’re going to do something, you can think big, or think huge, or at least get out of your comfort zone.”
In taking that approach, chance encounters and “lucky accidents” tend to occur, such as a meeting in East Hampton with the film director Volker Schlondorff, who asked Mr. Golden to provide music for an upcoming film. “That is the quintessential experience for me in East Hampton,” he said, “how opportunity presents itself in the right moment.”