How It All Started…
I used to be the young guy. I was often the guy with new ideas and the one music industry veterans would look to when they wanted to “shake things up” a little bit. I entered the industry in February 1994 with Gotee Records. We were brand new. We were unknown. A punchline. A certain failure that was only a matter of time, and a credit line, before we went belly up.
But a strange thing happened, or better yet, didn’t happen. It started working, and then it actually became quite successful in a matter of just a couple of years. TobyMac, just “Toby” at the time, was steering our ship with co-owners Joey Elwood and Todd Collins. The three of them had a feel for music like I’ve never seen before, and the brilliant ideas at Gotee filled the air each day so much that it was like swatting away flies on a hot summer day. There were just too many to count. People in the industry took notice of that, and they wanted it.
For a long time, Gotee and the core of our team remained intact, but life happens somewhere along the way. First, it was wives and husbands entering the picture as we all gradually got married, and then children. The next thing you know, we had been doing this for 10 years, and people suddenly called us “experts” in our field.
I was the first to break up the band when I accepted a job offer outside the “family” at Gotee. Joey always urged us to listen to any and all offers when people approached us, and we usually did, only to come back to what we knew and loved most: Gotee Records. However, I decided my time had come to leap from the nest.
Through the years, I’ve been blessed to have all of my family’s needs, and a lot of our wants, taken care of by this industry. But there is still a part of me that will always live on as an original member of the Gotee family.
I met my wife on a Gotee promotional trip with Out of Eden. I surfed, and crashed, at Laguna Beach, California, with Johnny Q. Public. I saw Jennifer Knapp perform onstage at GMA before we even signed her. She had a guitar, black trousers, a white collared shirt and black suspenders, and she killed it up there.
I saw Grits on tour with De La Soul. I saw a $15,000 marketing budget turn into a multiplatinum seller with Sonicflood. I drove a Ryder truck 26,000 miles in four months with Eddy and hit all four corners of the continental United States to promote Gotee at retailers across the country.
I went to London, Belgium, France, Spain, Amsterdam, most major cities in the United States, and even Peru and Canada, all numerous times while I was at Gotee. And Gotee’s health plan helped me bring my two precious daughters into the world as well.
All in all, you don’t often see what I was part of anymore: a group of people united for one cause and sharing a clear and defined vision to make great music with great artists for a perfect Lord and Savior.
I can’t say I regret leaving. That would be focusing on the wrong thing. I walked in there in good standing, and I walked out in even better standing 12 years later. I absolutely loved my days at Gotee. I’m fortunate to call these guys and gals my dear friends even today.
I still love this industry we’re in. I’m just not that young man anymore. I really do miss him, but I don’t regret that he isn’t here today. Twenty years of experience in the industry taught me that much.