Getting a rush from the Kristine W mix, he decided to dive head-first back into the remix fold full-time. "I said, 'okay, I'll get a new manager, and it will all be good.'" When the Kristine W mix finally came out, the phone didn't stop ringing. Hydra. Robert Owens. Grace. They all wanted remixes. So he hooked up with MCT Management, the New York management team who look after the careers of Moby, B.T., M.K., Paul Van Dyke amongst many others. "When I met with Marci Weber [head of MCT], I explained to them that my career in the UK was self sufficient and I wanted some exposure in America as well as moving on to the next level of album producing and serious music producing." Enthusiastic, Weber told Dekkard that they didn't run their operation like 7PM, and that they could take him to the next level. Weber immediately responded by getting Dekkard four mixes. Paula Cole, Noa, The Eels and OMC all in one week. "The OMC 'How Bizarre' was awful. I did a really, really good mix of it, and the A+R man at Mercury called up and said 'hey, can't you do something a bit more fun?'" For the first time in his career, he pandered to a record company and re-did his work. Disliking the end results, the record company loved it, but from then on, he swore never to re-touch his work again.
Taking a look back at Dekkard's remixing career, there's a consistent string that runs through the whole of it, that he really likes to sink his production teeth into darker songs. That said, he was getting really antsy that MCT was only getting him remixes from happy-go-lucky artists like White Town, Jon Bon Jovi and OMC. Then he would get phone calls from them saying, "oh, we got you this mix..." for artists he did want to mix such as Lamb and Depeche Mode, and he would start work on them only to be told that the deal had fallen through -- the label wanted somebody else to do the mix. In addition, he found out later on that in fact those four initial mixes he had done were spec mixes, and had the labels not liked them, he wouldn't have gotten paid. To add insult to injury here, MCT didn't fulfill their promise of getting him an album deal or a publishing deal, so it all came to a head one day when Weber told Dekkard that all of his past success didn't mean shit in today's world. "I told her, 'I'll bet I could pick up the phone and get a remix before you can, and I'll also bet that I get paid before you as well.'" Sure enough, Dekkard immediately called and got a remix to Kristine W's "Feel What You Want" in a matter of five minutes. Weber called back and told Dekkard that she could place him as a keyboard player on David Byrne's world tour. At that point, Dekkard said 'I don't need a manager' and fired MCT right on the spot.
The interesting footnote to all this mess is that Dekkard's first love, writing songs and getting an album deal has recently been fulfilled without the benefit of him having a manager. Just last week, he signed a six-figure publishing deal with Warner Music based on the fact that when he remixes songs, he essentially re-writes the lyrics (listen to his Paula Cole mix for evidence). So after all the learning, getting screwed over and doing mixes for songs he wasn't really that mad for, Dekkard is ready to take that next step over to real songwriting and production. In fact, Kristine W is one of the people interested in being produced by Dekkard, as well as his good friend Dido, who finally left the 7PM stable after she too got dicked around. So get ready for a whole new era in dance music: real songs from a real talented producer -- Rich Dekkard.
Written 7/7/97
Originally posted by Jennifer Warner, reposted with permission.
