Even when you're as talented as The Fat Man and his group, Team Fat, computer game music is better than working at a head shop or renting out videos at Blockbuster.
"Counterclockwise, yes; the smoke should go counterclockwise ..."
George Alistair Sanger closes his eyes and imagines a Lakota Indian warrior. Sage burns nearby in an oyster shell. Sanger and his band, Team Fat, are getting ready for a recording session, and they're trying to create an indigenous-people mood. It smells like a prairie fire to me.
We're in El Rancho Gordo, a one-story house 20 miles northwest of Austin, and I'm glad there's a police station next door, because the gray haze created by the smoldering sage is giving me a minor case of smoke inhalation. Through the haze, you can barely make out the decor: ratty sofas, assorted containers of glazed doughnuts, a coffee pot, a plastic container of Diet Dr Pepper,
a box of candy canes, a few cans of Ranch Style Beans. Scattered about are boxes full of unplayed computer games. There's also electrical equipment with bleeping lights and a tangle of cords that look like slithering black snakes.
Sanger, who looks a little like Lyle Lovett, straps on his glittering gold 1958 Gretsch guitar - the one with "Cousin Ernie" printed on the front. It was once owned by country-western legend Tennessee Ernie Ford, who grabbed the nickname during a guest spot on I Love Lucy.
Doiing, doiing, doiing.
The song sounds like the theme from Goldfinger. "Go from B minor to C and we're cool," he says to the other four guys in the room.
Doiing, doiing, do-ooiing.
This could be any band with hopes of getting a platinum album. Daydreaming about rock groupies ... tumbling into a receptive mosh pit ... getting totally stoned while jamming at a stadium concert. But these are not young rock studs. Guitarist "Country" Joe McDermott, 37, is a struggling songwriter who looks like a chain-smoking Don Knotts - except Joe has an earring. Kevin Weston Phelan, who calls himself The Professor, struts around on a pair of the skinniest legs I've ever seen while he simultaneously thumps on a bass and gives me nasty looks. Handling the sound today is David Govett, 29, who has a black beard and is trying to lose 20 pounds around his tummy. Govett, who also plays drums for the band, is a former marine, lives with his mom, and works as a movie projectionist for minimum wage. Dave Sanger, who sits in on drums,is George's brother. He's got the most street cred among the group, having won four Grammies with the Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel.
Sanger and his band, Team Fat, are working through a song for No Man's Earth, a new game by Kinesoft, a 20-person company out of Buffalo Grove, Illinois. It's the company's first original title, and project manager Lou Zucaro says the sound has to be great. So he asked eight different groups to come up with music. The best gets on the disc; the rest go packing.
Sanger and Team Fat sit in the stale smoky room and ponder the preposterous instructions given to them by Kinesoft:"The music should have a cinematic quality to it in terms of a theme that can be revisited from time to time, as well as a memorable, melodic quality which will make people want to listen to the soundtrack on the way to work in the morning."
I can't help but snarfle. The friggin' game is about "Gray aliens (the Sekra) who travel the galaxy playing their little games with no regard for the life of others ... they get rid of us worthless humans - remnants from the victorious Primates in the Last Great Battle." Now they're back on what's left of Earth, fighting mountain goats, dolphins, cockroaches, and rats. Hard to imagine listening to the soundtrack on my way to work.
They're all looking at notes scribbled on a whiteboard and working through the song "No Man on Earth." The lyrics?
No Man on Earth
Makes this world a perfect world for me
No tiresome people, they bore me
In the world that I'd kill to have all around me
"So," says Country Joe, "it's like:
I hate you, I hate you,
I'm going to kill your entire kind."
Everyone laughs. Everyone but Sanger, who has his eyes closed and is transporting himself to this faraway galaxy. In front of my eyes, he turns into The Fat Man, his music biz alter ego. "I ask myself," he says, "What would Mozart do?"
This is not a joke. This is serious business. Because The Fat Man is not just another hack computer-game musician. His rich orchestral scores are a far cry from the bleeps and bloops that make up most game soundtracks. He's a superstar.
Sort of.
"The Fat Man is the guardian angel of all computer music," says a breathless David Javelosa, author of the forthcoming book Sound & Music for Multimedia. That's a semihefty responsibility, according to Yobie Benjamin, associate director at Cambridge Technology Partners, who says the computer game industry will generate US$1.25 billion this year.
While Sanger's name may be unfamiliar, you've undoubtedly heard his music if you're one of the millions of people who play make-believe through computer games. He's written tunes for LucasArts, Compton's NewMedia, and Electronic Arts and has done more than 100 computer game soundtracks, including monster sellers like The 7th Guest, Wing Commander, and The 11th Hour. If you consider how many times kids play these games, you realize they hear more Fat Man music than any Alanis Morissette tune. Some developers have even started advertising The Fat Man's soundtrack on their boxes.
But The Fat Man, 39, isn't really famous or rich - nor is he even fat (170 pounds and 6-foot-1). Sure, he has his little dweeby fans. Some know-it-all video addicts see him in his cowboy hat and ask for his autograph; boys at game conferences just want to touch his rhinestone-studded suit; others send him groveling email of self-loathing. A typical example: one Fat Man fan described himself as a "lower wormling" compared with the large one.
Come to think of it, he is strikingly similar to Michael Jackson: full of paradoxes that aren't - and maybe shouldn't be - easily explained. Michael Jackson has his Neverland Ranch; The Fat Man has El Rancho Gordo, a $900-a-month rented house. Michael has his glove; Fat has his thrift-store handmade Western suits inspired by the late Nudie, Elvis's designer. Michael is into being white, yet he's not; The Fat Man is into being a Texan, yet he's a Jewish guy from Southern California. And they have each sold more than 20 million CDs.
Losing fat
There are probably a few (game) boys who would give one of their recently descended testicles to be me. That's because I'm hanging with Sanger, and we're doing the junk again. We're no longer in the "studio" making music. He smiles as he pushes back his cowboy hat and rolls up his sleeves. "I love this stuff," he says. Many thriving musicians shoot heroin to kill time between gigs, but that's Little League stuff to Sanger. He battles a more insidious and deadly killer. He moved from California to Texas to get the purest juice into his system. He usually gets his fix three or four times a day.
Sanger is slamming grease again.
It's only 11 a.m. and he's already had two scrambled eggs with pico de gallo, queso, refried beans, three strips of bacon, two tortillas, and a Dr Pepper. Maybe heroin would be safer.
He's munching on a bacon cheeseburger with fries at a place called The Silverado Cafe. "Mmmmmm, another burger!" he says in his inflated Texas accent. Before my eyes he's transforming himself into The Fat Man, an obnoxious Texan good ol' boy who smokes cigars and yells "YEE-HAW!" It's not hard to get his belabored point: all music - even computer music - needs a little bit of showbiz.
But while insiders might form a cult around The Fat Man, it must seem odd to be one of the most popular musicians in the world and barely able to pay the guys in your band. What's it like to listen to alternative Muzak from Hootie & The Blow- fish and know that those dimwits are making about $3 zillion more than you?
"I honestly don't think about it," says The Fat Man. "I love what we're doing!
I LOVE IT!"
I'm searching for irony in his voice, but I don't find it.
The Fat Man smiles at me and jams a fry into his mouth. Ever since I've offered to pay for every meal on this visit, The Fat Man has been doing his best Bill Clinton impression with the junk food. "Are you sure you want to pay?" he asks, eyeing my bacon. "I mean ... I would ... but things are kinda tight right now."
The Fat Man still lives gig to gig. He makes about $12,000 for 40 minutes of music, plus he gets 1 percent of a CD's sales. But he hasn't had a hit since The 7th Guest came out four years ago. He won't tell me how much he made off the music, but most people estimate that he grossed $250,000. Not bad, except that he has to pay five employees and lots of overhead. He needs another hit to make that kind of cash again. He was able to buy a Miata, which he calls "Sweet Imagination," but the rest of his cowboy composers drive junkers.
"Making money and a name for myself gets me up in the morning," he says.
With most true innovators, the public initially believes the person is a loser or a crackpot. In fact, The Fat Man likes to compare himself to Walt Disney. "When Disney started in the cartoon business, it was considered a low art because it was," he says. "As he worked with it, innovating through Snow White, Fantasia, and eventually the great masterwork The Rescuers, it became a greater thing. Disney elevated cartooning by loving it and working hard at it."
The Fat Man hopes to do the same thing with computer game music. Some record companies are marketing game music (Astralwerks, for instance, has released the music CD for Wipeout XL, a compilation of electronic tunes that provided the aural backdrop for several Sony PlayStation games), but in general "music is a bastard cousin to these games," says Cambridge's Benjamin. "Game programmers are videocentric, and there's no room on the games for music. It's usually overlooked."
So is The Fat Man. And you could argue that Fat doesn't really believe in the sanctity of computer games. For all the Walt Disney talk, Sanger rarely plays them. He knows the games suck. But he also knows software companies are bankrolled. He doesn't want to be a starving musician. He has a wife and two young kids who live with him in Austin.
Says one Team Fat band member, "Once a year, George says, We have to play these games! For a day we all play them and get bored and then we don't look at them ever again."
What's the ultimate goal? Movie soundtracks? Commercials? Concerts? The Fat Man won't say. What will happen to The Fat Man if the likes of Soul Asylum, Pearl Jam, and Madonna get into the CD-ROM game act? Will The Fat Man simply go down in music history as a studio musician without a hit record but with a major cholesterol problem?
He knows the cornpone accent and brightly colored suits are a stretch. But he also understands the most important Hollywood axiom: It's OK to be talented, but better to be remembered.
Baby Fat
How does one become The Fat Man?
We know Sanger always had a penchant for playing dress-up. That's what his brother, Dave, tells me, anyway. While attending Coronado High School near San Diego, for instance, he showed up one day in an Abe Lincoln outfit. His band teacher, Bob Demmon, describes him as "a little skinny kid with large feet and a big mouth."
Demmon adds: "He was the kind of kid who would write the important directions to the next high school band review on his hand. Then George would go home and wash his hands for supper. Later on that evening, his mother would call me and have me repeat my directions so George would be where he was supposed to be."
Sanger went to Occidental College, where he majored in music. After college he spent a lot of time playing in his band, The Phlaix. They never signed a record contract and mostly played original tunes, plus the occasional cover from the British Invasion era.
Around that time, Dave Warhol, the roommate of Sanger's other brother Rick, was writing games for Mattel Electronics's Intellivision. George sensed an opportunity. So he asked Warhol if he could do something for him. "You know, if I could take out the trash or ... anything." Warhol asked him to write a tune for one of the games. Sanger wrote a 15-second piece using a guitar and a four-track recorder. Warhol translated it into electronics, and it came out in the game. Sanger received $1,000.
A bell went off in his head. The market was in its infancy, and music for the games was an afterthought consisting of annoying beeps. Hell, The Final Frontier needed music, right? And he could make his physician parents proud. Says Sanger: "I thought that videogames could be the rock and roll of the future!"
For several years he operated a mobile recording studio for struggling composers and musicians in Los Angeles, charging $10 an hour. He also sold coffeemakers and Amway products. After a stint at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, Sanger seemed destined for a life of sour notes. He decided to move to Austin, Texas, where his brother was making a go of it in the area's thriving music scene. It was 1985. Shortly after arriving Sanger told himself, "I'm going to be The Fat Man of Austin." He compared himself to the cheapo automobile paint king Earl Scheib - he'd write a snappy three-minute number for $79.95.
But he was also doing some stuff for games: Capture the Flag was one. A quickly defunct Atari 800 demo cartridge another. After establishing his reputation by doing some Nintendo games, He began to write the music for the LucasArts game Loom. Game designer Brian Moriarty didn't want beeps and boops. He wanted Tchaikovsky. With better sound boards, better music was possible. Sanger borrowed tempos from Swan Lake. The music in Loom was one of the first rich-sounding game soundtracks.
"Turn off the music on a movie like The Ten Commandments or E.T.," says Moriarty, "and watch what happens. The experience goes flat. The same is true of games, when the score is more than an afterthought."
Which is why The Fat Man gets a little bent out of shape when people dis computer game music as a backwater. "The record companies can't give you this music because it's too risky," he says. "We can make it any length. We can use any instrument. The lyrics can be about anything we want. We don't kiss anybody's ass."
Two weeks later, Team Fat has been given the thumbs-up from Kinesoft. "The music was out of the ordinary and had whimsy and was clever," says Zucaro, who sounds like he should be on American Bandstand. "They're fast and flexible. They came up with the music within a week, and it was great."
Great news for the team, but also somewhat depressing. His good song will be hidden in a computer game. But what the hell, it's a gig. When you're as talented as Team Fat, computer game music is better than working at a head shop or renting out videos at Blockbuster. At least they're not sitting in a Starbucks whining into their latte. Plus, if they keep at it, there's hope for real stardom. In Japan, computer game musicians are celebrities. Of course, we're not that lame in this country, but you might someday be able to buy a Fat compilation CD. They've had discussions with some record labels - Virgin, BMG, RCA, among others. Moreover, they were asked to write some music for a new Fox television show.
"If John Williams can go from scoring Gilligan's Island to Star Wars, then certainly a composer of music for interactive games will make it into the world of major feature films," says Bob Rice, Sanger's agent. "Perhaps even The Fat Man."
Perhaps.
But even if they never score a bad television show or a movie; even if they never get on MTV's playlist, they seem to like their life enough. And they're not starving.
We wander around Sixth Street in downtown Austin and land in a noisy bar, puffing cigars and listening to a great blues band. The musicians are gray-haired African-American cats. "These guys are really great," says Sanger, a smile crossing his lips.
Only problem is that there are just a handful of people in the place. Even in music-manic Austin, performers don't always catch a break. We listen. Underneath their dumb image, The Fat Man and Team Fat are pretty damn cool and talented. They're passionate about their music and about other people's music.
But as we sit there, The Fat Man is quietly turning into George Sanger again. The twinkle in his eyes fades. His shoulders slump. He becomes introspective and almost sad, losing his blow-hole demeanor. Maybe The Fat Man is right. Maybe it is better to be unknown but listened to by millions rather than unknown and listened to by a handful. "These guys are great," he says. "But you know something? Real celebrities don't have to talk very loud for people to listen."
