Side Jobs Become Noteworthy Careers : Musicians: They still play, but they also invent, record or refurbish.

By JAMES E. FOWLER

Nov. 25, 1989 12 AM PT

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Dave Borisoff, David Pearlman and Janine Johnson were all San Fernando Valley high school students in the early 1970s who decided to make music their life’s work. And like thousands of other musicians, they were frustrated in their attempts to have a full-time musical career.

But each found a way to keep the musician part of themselves alive and at the same time keep body and soul together with food, clothing and shelter.

According to Ken Shirk, assistant secretary of the American Federation of Musicians’ national office in New York, only 5% of its 190,000 members in the United States and Canada make a full-time living from music. And even in major recording centers such as Los Angeles, New York and Nashville, Tenn., only 10% to 20% of the local membership are employed full time, he said.

Many musicians work at sales or menial jobs for relatively little pay--waiting for their time to come. Others teach or work in music stores. Some, with a little ingenuity and chutzpah, start their own businesses. And musicians such as Dave Borisoff, who are doing something music-related, can mix business and pleasure.

Borisoff’s business started with an idea.

“I was playing pedal steel guitar--which is a cross between an electric piano and a portable barbecue,” he said. “I was playing, and I was watching the guitarist, and I made a transition between my instrument and a regular guitar.”

The resulting idea was a new design for a device that is known as a B-string bender. B-string benders allow a regular guitar to simulate the sound of a pedal steel guitar, a popular sound in country-and-Western music.

There had been other B-string benders, but Borisoff had invented a “better mousetrap.” He called his invention the “Hipshot,” and it varies from previous B-string benders because it is activated when the guitarist presses a small lever against his hip, and it can be installed without permanently altering the instrument.

“On the pedal steel, when you push on pedals and push on knee levers--you pull and lower strings,” Borisoff said. The next day he had the guitarist in question try a Hipshot. “It worked fine, and he really liked it,” he said.

At first, Borisoff made Hipshots for friends and other guitarists on an informal basis, but after six months he decided to mass-produce them. With a $1,000 initial investment, Borisoff started Hipshot Music Products in his father’s engineering shop in Van Nuys.

Six years later, he said, the firm is seeing a 150% annual growth. The company has a secretary and three other full-time employees. “Last year, I was worried about sales; now I’m worried about filling orders on time,” Borisoff said.

Then he invented another product, an extender key for electric bass guitarists that allows them to play a note as low as a C below their low E by flipping a small device near their tuning pegs.

“On our first brochures, I put it on the last page--as kind of a throw-away item. . . . But, the Bass Extender Key is now outselling the Hipshot,” he said.

“Most musicians love their instruments more than they love their wives,” he said, “so you have to design something that’s not going to screw up their instruments.”

The Bass Extender Key was an instant success with many professional electric bass guitarists, among them Bunny Brunel, who is a bassist with jazz artists Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock and also a record producer.

Brunel has Hipshot Bass Extender Keys on each of his eight electric bass guitars. “I’m using that gizmo he invented,” Brunel said. On the electric bass, “you only have four strings,” he noted. “But you can flip a small lever and hit a low D without having to retune. And you can flip it again and it goes back to the E, and it stays in tune--he’s very clever.”

Borisoff, 35, grew up in Woodland Hills. His grandmother was a concert pianist in Germany in the years before World War II, and an uncle later was principal cellist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

As a child, Borisoff took piano lessons from his grandmother but never developed an affinity for the instrument. When he was 12, he started playing five-string banjo, the instrument he describes as the “most far-removed from the piano.”

“I was rebelling, in my own little way,” he said.

Borisoff played in bluegrass bands for several years. In 1977, when he couldn’t find enough work as a banjo player, he took up the pedal steel guitar and worked in several musical groups in the Los Angeles area. He and his wife, Kate, a singer and fiddle player, met while working in the same band. They were married in 1982 and have two sons, ages 5 and 3.

“I love musicians. All my truly good friends are musicians,” Borisoff said. “That really helps me in my business because I know my customers--because I am one of my customers.”

David Pearlman, 33, doesn’t miss playing at all.

“Both my parents were musicians--my father was a music teacher--brass and strings,” he said. “When I was 3 years old, my father had me reading drum charts--rhythm charts. I had private violin lessons with my father and then later with the first chair violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.”

By the time he graduated from Chatsworth High School, he had added guitar, pedal steel guitar and drums to his list of instruments. He enrolled at Cal State Northridge as a music major, but was soon lured away from academia by offers of professional work as a pedal steel guitarist.

When he wasn’t on the road touring with stars such as Dan Fogelberg, Hoyt Axton, Bobby Womack, Phil Everly or Bill Medley, he was forced to work in small clubs for much less money.

“I was so burned out of playing clubs,” Pearlman said, “and so frustrated with that level of having to play what somebody wants you to play and not being able to play what you really love. I used to drink to numb myself so that I could get up and play garbage.

“Even though I had got to the point where I kinda made it as a player--I had done a lot of television and movie scores, commercials, and made real good money at it--I just wanted to find something where I could make good money and stay home.”

John Molo, the drummer with recording artists Bruce Hornsby and the Range, worked with Pearlman in various bands. “We used to car-pool--that was one of David’s goals--to get out of clubs, to work in the music biz, but not be a sideman.

“He’s the perfect guy for being an engineer--he has a good ear, a good vibe, and he’s very confident. He’s also very good with gadgets, and he’s a good player,” Molo said.

Pearlman decided to change a longtime hobby into a new business.

“My father was an audiophile,” he said, “and as a kid, I was always working with my father’s sound-on-sound recording equipment.

“My father had a recording studio in the 1940s in Texas--direct to disc--I still have the disc cutter. When I was in seventh grade, a friend and I did a history report and actually cut it onto a disc and presented it to the class on disc.”

In the early 1980s, when the first four-track cassette recorders were introduced to the American market, Pearlman bought one to record his own music but soon realized he could turn it into a business. He started informally but soon had to build a room onto his home to accommodate his clientele.

“When it first started, I thought I could make a few extra bucks while I’m playing,” he said. “It slowly did start to dawn on me that this really will get me out of the clubs--and it has. Now, I really do only the good gigs--I just did a beer commercial with Eddie Rabbitt.”

Pearlman calls his Van Nuys facility Rotund Rascal Studio, based on a self-description after a sushi binge, he said.

He gradually upgraded his equipment first to an eight-track and recently to a 16-track capacity with a 24-channel mixing board. With no formal training in acoustics or sound engineering, he has learned by doing.

He has recorded opera, country, Dixieland, jazz, rock, comedy and even two orthopedic surgeons discussing knee surgery. “It lasted for two hours, and I had no . . . idea what they were talking about,” he said.

He specializes in what he calls “live” music--with real instruments, real drums and real amps, thus bucking an industry trend of using synthesizers and electronic drum machines.

“A lot of the studios are MIDI and computer and garbage like that--and that’s great,” he said, “but they only have to have a studio that’s as big as a bathroom--whereas I have to have a big room in which drums will sound good.”

Through the portals of Rotund Rascal have come the famous and the not-so-famous. Country music’s Freddie Hart produced a session there recently, and members of Georgia Satellites, Highway 101, Herbie Hancock’s band, the Desert Rose Band and Dwight Yoakum’s band have recorded there. Pearlman estimates that 20 to 25 albums have been recorded at Rotund Rascal.

“Playing was a real passion for me--like a raison d’etre kind of a thing,” he said. “My main love is that country-swing-jazz-flavored type stuff, but there’s really very little call for it anymore.”

The world of the classical musician is more formalized than that of the pop musician, but one no less financially insecure. Nevertheless, Janine Johnson, 32, has found a niche.

Classically trained as a pianist and harpsichordist, she gives her present job title as piano technician/artist. Her duties include painting and decorating harpsichords, creating lid paintings and restoring the original paintings on the lids of antique instruments.

She works closely with harpsichord builder John Phillips of Berkeley, and with her own clients, to provide them with a unique instrument. She likes customers to provide basic guidelines. Then, after referring to photographs of antique lid paintings, she makes her own sketches. “Then I can paint what I want,” she said. Her passions in painting are flowers, clouds and “all wild living things.”

She also mends older pianos, particularly Viennese models, whose keyboard actions are different from modern pianos, replacing the parts that are leather, felt or wood.

“One of the things that’s difficult about being a free-lance artist is that you either have feast or famine,” she said. “Right now I have a feast, and I have too much work.”

One of her recent projects is the restoration of a 10-foot-tall pipe organ built in 1747 and owned by recording artist-harpsichordist Alan Curtis. “This pipe organ had been whitewashed--sort of made ugly in the 19th Century, and we had nothing to go on except photographs of instruments from the period,” she said.

She also recently finished decorating one of Phillips’ harpsichords, which is going to a client in Paris. Johnson created the lid painting on the instrument, illustrating the fable of the frog king from Jean de la Fontaine, the 17th-Century French storyteller.

Phillips said what he likes most about Johnson’s approach is that she manages to work with “aplomb and precision” even though he admits that would seem to be a contradiction.

“She’s able to pull off the casual quality of 18th-Century style--but with a practiced hand,” he said. “The style is practiced and formulaic--she executes quickly and precisely. That’s why I use her. This is a commercial venture.”

Phillips said Johnson is good at bringing out fresh ideas within the “rules and constraints” of the older style. “She’s very willing to try out new ‘old’ things,” he said.

Johnson started studying piano and art while growing up in Northridge. At 15, her life was changed when her piano teacher gave her a recording of Wanda Landowska playing the “Goldberg Variations.” It was her first encounter with the harpsichord, and she fell in love with it.

Since she could not afford to buy a harpsichord, she decided to build one from one of the many prefabricated kits available through mail-order catalogues. With a $300 loan from her eldest sister, she scraped up $700 for a kit from a company in her father’s home state.

“All the brochures looked alike to us, so we chose that one because it was in Nebraska,” she said. Working by herself, she completed the harpsichord when she was 17.

“I painted it very much like a high school person interested in art would paint something,” she said. “It ended up looking like a van--very bright colors, volcanic scenes with dragons and morning glories.”

“It wasn’t the greatest instrument in the world--but it actually turned out pretty well, and I got a lot of mileage out of it. I used it at college and everyone loved it.”

After winning first place in a competition sponsored by the Music Teachers Assn. of California, she entered Cal State Northridge on a Music Achievement scholarship after graduating from Granada Hills High School. She pursued a double major in music performance and two-dimensional art, although her goal was a professional concert career.

As a sophomore at CSUN, she won the annual Music Department concerto night competition and was a featured soloist with the university orchestra.

She played piano and harpsichord for a while, then stopped playing piano to concentrate on the harpsichord. In 1978, she and her husband at the time, Paul Poletti, started a harpsichord-building business. They began with the prefabricated kits, but were soon building the instruments from scratch. Their first “original” was a copy of a 16th-Century five-octave Italian instrument.

Over the next eight years, the couple built 10 harpsichords and seven fortepianos. Their clients included San Jose State, Oregon State University and Cal State Los Angeles.

When hard-pressed financially, they would have to sell her personal instruments, and she would not be able to play for a while. And financial necessity made this a routine practice over the next few years. “Whenever we’d complete an instrument,” she said, “I’d play it until the instrument was delivered.”

Johnson said being without an instrument for long periods “derailed” her dream of a concert career. “You have to make a living--there’s a real world out there.”

Johnson’s financial picture has improved along with her business in recent years, and she now has a piano in her home and is looking for a new piano teacher.

“I probably will never perform professionally, though, because I don’t have the time to practice,” she said. “I can only devote about one or two hours a day to practicing now.”

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