A Calm Hand at the Controls

When Glen Ballard turned his back on a scholarship to the University of Mississippi Law School and headed for Los Angeles in 1975 to pursue his pop music dreams, he had $400 and one phone number in his pocket. It was all he needed.

One of thousands of hopeful musicians who arrive here every year, he used the cash for a room at the Sea Gull Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard while he looked for an apartment. Then he dialed the one number that got everything started for him.

A record company titan?

A hotshot agent?

A big-name club owner?

“Nothing like that,” Ballard says, smiling. “When I told my uncle I was coming out here, he gave me the name of the only person he knew in L.A. It was a golf pro at Bel-Air Country Club, and I called him and asked if he happened to know anybody in the music business.”

The club pro knew one person--a recording studio owner in Hollywood. Ballard called the studio and was soon on a journey that would make him one of the industry’s most unique success stories--someone whose comforting, laid-back approach to record-making makes it easy to think of him as the pop equivalent of Zen-like Laker coach Phil Jackson.

As songwriter and/or record producer, the razor-thin musician with the collar-length hair and rock-star mien has been involved in albums that have sold more than 150 million copies. You’ll find his name in the credits of hits by a galaxy of stars--from Michael Jackson and Aerosmith to Wilson Phillips and his mentor, Quincy Jones.

Two projects, however, cemented Ballard’s reputation in recent years as an A-level player.

* At the urging of his publisher, Ballard met in 1994 with a 19-year-old former teen pop star from Canada who wanted to write in a more mature, introspective vein. The singer was Alanis Morissette, and in two months they crafted “Jagged Little Pill,” which sold 30 million copies worldwide and won a Grammy for best album of the year. The collection too is credited with helping usher in a new era of strong-willed female voices in pop.

* When frustrated mega-seller Dave Matthews needed help last year on his new album, he turned to Ballard, and the pair ended up writing 10 songs in nine days. The album, “Everyday,” has sold 2.5 million copies since March.

Now, the pop world is awaiting Ballard’s next project: the new album by Shelby Lynne, the soulful country-edged singer whose stark, confessional “I Am Shelby Lynne” album won her a Grammy this year for best new artist. Also on deck: the long-awaited debut from Lisa Marie Presley. And down the line: some tracks with Cristina Aguilera.

“I’m really proud of him, man,” says producer Quincy Jones, a 26-time Grammy winner. “He has great talent. He knows how to work hard. And he’s got humility. That’s a rare combination these days. If I could clone the ideal producer, Glen is what you’d come up with.”

“W ell, I was on the road to somewhere ...”

Lynne’s sultry voice pours from the state-of-the-art speakers in an upstairs room at Aerowave, the Encino recording studio where Ballard, 48, does most of his writing and recording.

Unlike the cold, dungeon-like design of most commercial studios, Aerowave feels more like an upstairs guest room. It is, in fact, an upstairs room in a house on a quiet residential street where Ballard lived for more than a dozen years before buying another home in Beverly Hills four years ago. You can see trees through the window.

Sitting behind stacks of equipment, Ballard asks engineer Scott Campbell to stop the Lynne track after about 10 seconds and to replay it. Ballard closes his eyes as the vocal again fills the room.

“Well, I was on the road to somewhere ...”

It’s easy to listen only to Lynne’s voice, which is so rich with the sensual edges of Southern pop, rock and R&B; that it recalls the lure of the late, great Dusty Springfield. Lynne has been destined for stardom ever since she began recording in the late-’80s in Nashville, but she rebelled against attempts to push her in a conventional country direction.

It wasn’t until “I Am Shelby Lynne,” produced by Bill Bottrell, that she finally made the kind of personal, artistic statement that captured her magic. Despite the acclaim, the album sold fewer than 200,000 copies in the U.S. Lynne hooked up with Ballard in hopes of reaching a wider audience.

But Ballard isn’t listening to Lynne’s vocal at the moment. He’s focusing on the strings in the background, and Campbell plays the opening sequence again.

“Well, I was on the road to somewhere ...”

And again:

“Well, I was on the road to somewhere ...”

This is the tedious, trench work of record production. It’s a necessary step, but it’s not why Ballard is so much in demand.

Unlike producers who write songs for artists or find the right material for them, Ballard’s strength is in helping songwriters realize their artistic vision. As he did with Morissette and Lynne, he usually co-writes all or most of the songs on their albums, specializing in the music rather than the lyrics.

“It’s easy to see why people want to work with Glen,” says Lynne, who steps outside the studio for a cigarette. “He brings out the best in you by creating this environment where you feel safe to let go and take chances. It’s totally different from anything I’ve been involved with. I’m his biggest fan.”

Actually, Lynne may have lots of competition for the title of Ballard’s biggest fan.

Ballard’s style has sometimes been criticized as being too slick and pop-minded, and he hasn’t always come up with hits. The absence of a bestseller from his Java Records is especially noticeable. He’s not naive enough to think that labels don’t turn to him in the hope that he can work some of the Morissette sales magic on other acts, but he doesn’t pride himself in being a hit-maker.

He says he looks for interesting voices and tries to help them live up to their artistic potential. If he were looking simply to maximize sales, he probably never would have taken a chance on young Morissette at a time when independent female voices were far off the commercial radar in pop-rock.

It’s this sense of artist-driven intent that has industry pros, from rival producers to musicians, singing his praises.

Recalling the difficulties of trying to get anyone to take her seriously as an artist when she was 19, Morissette says, “Glen has the ability to listen in a way that allowed him to tap into the truth of who I was as an artist, and he let that stay at the helm of the entire recording and producing process. His ability to play almost every instrument and to honor the creative process in both of us put him in the ranks of genius in my eyes.”

It’s a few days later and Ballard is sitting at the breakfast table in his drop-dead-gorgeous 5,500-square foot residence a short walk from the Beverly Hills Hotel. He is dressed in a stylish white sweater and pants from Prada, an outfit that varies from day to day only in color--all black or all white. “It’s just a holdover from the uniforms I wore in Catholic school back in Natchez.”

The Spanish Andalusian house, which is featured in this month’s Elle Decor magazine and was once owned by comic marvel Stan Freberg, is a reminder that Ballard--and record producers generally--are well-paid.

Typically, a top producer receives an advance of $250,000 to $500,000 against royalties, which could be 4% or more of an album’s wholesale price. If you co-write 10 songs on the album, for example, you could also collect an additional 35 cents or so per album as well as more royalties from radio airplay.

For a million-seller at today’s $11 wholesale price, that could mean $850,000 to $1.2 million for someone of Ballard’s stature. If you think of all those millions of copies of “Jagged Little Pill” sitting on CD shelves, you can imagine the size of his investment portfolio.

Given the pressures surrounding him, the striking thing about Ballard is his sense of calm.

Your first guess is the man spends six hours a day in stress-reducing yoga classes, especially when you see his 6-foot, half-inch, 130-pound frame. But he says he just spends half an hour or so mornings in a home gym and meditation room.

“He’s always had this inner peace,” his wife, Liv, says one morning at the house, where they live with their boys, B.G., 15, and Mac, 9. “He’s very even-tempered. If he is under pressure, I could never tell unless he told me. He works at the same intensity all the time, whether he’s under pressure or whether things are going great.”

The Ballards met while students at the University of Mississippi, long before Ballard even talked about heading to Los Angeles. He had been making some moves toward a musical career, but his triple major consisted of English, journalism and political science, not music.

“Deep down, I really couldn’t picture Glen doing anything other than music in his life,” she says. “He was just so passionate about it. So, I wasn’t surprised when he decided to head to Los Angeles. It just seemed so right. I went to Paris to graduate school for a year and a half. By the time I came out here to be with him, he was already working with Elton John.”

From his Beverly Hills house, it’s just a 20-minute drive to Hang Suite, the Hollywood studio that Ballard sometimes uses rather than drive to Aerowave. The studio is in an old office building in a still unpolished stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, the kind of place where Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective Philip Marlowe might have rented an office in the ‘40s.

In the old days, an elevator operator would have taken you to the seventh floor and pointed out the studio at the end of the hall, but now you just push the elevator button and search for the unmarked door on your own.

Ballard may have even chosen the location because of its old-Hollywood feel. He’s a huge movie fan and is actively pursuing a career as a writer and producer. Ballard’s first venture into movies--as screenwriter for the low-budget, critically drubbed “Clubland” in 1998--sank without a trace. Now, he’s executive producer of “24 Hours,” a thriller starring Charlize Theron, Kevin Bacon and Courtney Love.

It’s Monday morning and the beginning of a hectic week in which Ballard will spend most of his time in the studio with Sheila Nicholls, a promising young singer-songwriter working on her second album for Hollywood Records.

Before leaving in four days on a Paris vacation, he’ll also help close his Java Records office at the Capitol Tower (he is moving the joint-venture label to the Island/Def Jam family of labels) and he’s scheduled to talk to Aguilera about working together. He also needs to check with Capitol Records about the status of the Lisa Marie Presley album, which will stay with Capitol.

After flirting with a singing career for years, Elvis’ daughter hooked up with Ballard three years ago.

“I was impressed right off by her voice, but I wanted to know the old question--did she want to be an artist or just make a record?” Ballard says. “She said she wanted to be an artist and that meant she had to work on her writing. There were times when she got frustrated because she felt the process was taking too long. I’m sure she wanted the record out right away.

“But she had to find out just who she is and put that into the songs, and she did. This is a record about Lisa, not Elvis Presley’s daughter, and I think people are going to be knocked out. She’s fierce and uncompromising, and she has a real gift of expression.”

Ballard was hoping the album would be released late this year. But a Capitol spokesman says the collection has been pushed back to next year, and that Presley is continuing to work on it, this time with producer Eric Rosse, whose credits include Tori Amos.

Born Basil Glen Ballard Jr. on May 1, 1953, Ballard had a comfortable childhood. His grandfather, John R. Junkin, was a speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives and a successful businessman. Ballard’s father worked for his grandfather and his mom was a homemaker.

Inspired by the Beatles, Ballard didn’t feel confident enough about his voice to be a singer himself, but he honed his skills in just about every other facet of the music-making process, from songwriting to arranging. It all came in handy when he got to Los Angeles.

The name and phone number he got from the golf pro was Salvatore “Tutti” Camarata, owner of Sunset Sound recording studio. Camarata, also a noted musician and arranger, invited the 22-year-old Ballard to stop by to watch a classical recording session. While there, Camarata needed a male voice to sing a couple of lines and Ballard did it. A grateful Camarata gave the young man some free studio time, and he spent hours there, working on songs and exploring the recording process.

A studio employee happened to mention one day that Elton John had just launched Rocket Records and there might be something for Ballard to do there.

Hooking on as a gofer for John’s band, Ballard quickly graduated to doing some musical arrangements and other fill-in roles with the band. His break came in 1978 when Rocket’s Kiki Dee recorded one of Ballard’s songs, “One Step.”

An MCA Music Publishing executive liked the song and signed Ballard to a contract that opened other doors. None proved more important than the one that led in 1980 to Quincy Jones.

“Quincy has great musicality, but he also creates a comfortable atmosphere in the studio where people not only feel they can do their best, but want to do their best because he inspires them,” Ballard says, echoing his own blueprint.

“It was eye-opening to me because I had seen other producers just blow up and cremate a second engineer or someone if something went wrong. When you do that, it makes everyone on edge. Working with Quincy, I could see there is no comparison between having a warm, positive environment and a tension-filled, mean-spirited one.”

Suddenly, Ballard was on a roll.

Prolific and tireless, he quickly assembled a wide array of credits. He co-wrote “Man in the Mirror” for Michael Jackson, “The Places You Find Love” for Barbra Streisand, “Mercy” for Aretha Franklin and “State of Attraction” for Paula Abdul.

“I’ve known Glen for 25 years and the amazing thing is how consistent he is as a person,” says Michael Gorfaine, who, with partner Sam Schwartz, manages Ballard, John Williams and Randy Newman, among other composers. “What has always impressed me is his quiet faith in himself

Except for “Mirror,” which was a No. 1 single, most of these tunes were simply album tracks. The commercial breakthrough was his teaming with Wilson Phillips, the trio with the all-star Beach Boys/Mamas & the Papas pedigrees: Carnie and Wendy Wilson plus Chynna Phillips. The group’s self-titled debut album sold more than 5 million copies in 1990.

If the album stamped Ballard as a hit-maker, the collection’s glossy pop sheen led some critics to typecast him as a slick pop packager. It would take the Morissette album, six years later, before Ballard begin to chip away at that image.

“I loved her spirit right away . . . the fact that she wasn’t talking about having a hit single, but how to express herself,” he recalls of Morissette. “Just hearing her voice was enough for me. I could sense the power and depth inside her. We started work that same day.”

If Wilson Phillips triggered offers, the success of “Jagged Little Pills” multiplied them. Not all Ballard’s decisions proved wise.

He still shudders at the six months he spent in Miami working with Aerosmith on an album that was eventually turned over to another producer. Ballard is still close friends with the band, but the recording process seemed endless because of complications in the studio. For once, Ballard’s patience was stretched. He jokes now that he never quite knew if he quit the project or was fired, but he wanted no part of more months in Miami. But Ballard did co-write a hit: “Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees).”

From there, Ballard walked into the cross-fire with another classic rock band, Van Halen.

Things started off with a big row in the studio that ended in lead singer Sammy Hagar leaving the group, he says. If the blowup seemed like a scene from “This Is Spinal Tap,” another scene was even more farcical.

To fill in for Hager on some tracks for a greatest-hits package, Van Halen brought back David Lee Roth, who had been estranged from the group because of personality differences.

‘I thought it was good because the band was back together again, but within two days, it was horrifying,” says Ballard, laughing at the memory. By the end of the session, he says, guitarist Eddie Van Halen and Roth couldn’t be in the same room with each other. “Literally, Ed, whom I adore, would stand in the doorway out of David’s sight and comment on everything David was doing.

“In one ear, I’m hearing David’s vocal and in the other I’m hearing Ed say, ‘No, no, this is awful. Why don’t you just tell him to stop?’ ”

But adjustments are a way of life for a producer and collaborator, including such traumatic moves as Morissette’s decision to write and record on her own after two albums with Ballard. But he downplays any bruised feelings.

“H ow strong am I? ...”

It’s Tuesday evening and Ballard is back in the studio with Nicholls’ voice coming through the speakers. They’re working in a large commercial studio in Hollywood because Ballard needs the extra space to work with several musicians at once.

Nicholls is a fiercely independent Englishwoman who greatly admires Ani DiFranco’s music and her decision to work outside the major label framework. Nicholls signed with Hollywood Records only after getting strong creative-control clauses in her contract. She is so wary of any outside interference with her music that she had great reservations about even meeting with Ballard after her label brought up the idea.

“I had big trust issues, but I couldn’t have chosen anybody better,” Nicholls says during a dinner break. “He listens to what you are saying and asks the right questions. He extends your thoughts to find more things in your own song that you didn’t necessarily know were there in the first place.”

“How strong am I? ...”

The vocal again fills the room, but Ballard is zeroing in on a piano part being played by Walter Miranda, a young musician who has worked with Ozomatli and other bands. “Beautiful,” Ballard says after each take, before gently prodding him for more emotion. Nicholls too cheers after each take. The spirit is warm, supportive.

It’s a testimony to Ballard’s spectacular rise that if any pop hopeful today arrived in Los Angeles with $400 and one phone number, there aren’t many more valuable ones than Ballard’s.

But don’t try calling Ballard on the weekend.

Even though he has worked what seemed like 24/7, he has begun gradually cutting back on Saturdays and Sundays to spend more time with his family.

His pride in his family is obvious during the interview at his house. He talks glowingly about his oldest son’s love of film, and he coaxes his shy 9-year-old downstairs to introduce him. He also eagerly points to the article in Elle Decor, chiefly to praise his wife for her role in overseeing the restoration. He pulls out another magazine that features their Paris apartment, again praising his wife.

One reason Ballard is close to his family is that he and his wife lost their year-old daughter, Banon, to liver cancer during the making of the Wilson Phillips album. Rather than sink into depression, Ballard buried himself in his work. One of the album’s songs, “The Dream Is Still Alive,” a Top 20 single in 1991, was written for his daughter.

“I never stopped working and that’s probably my nature,” he says at the Hang Suite. “I looked at Banon as a dream that didn’t come true, but a wonderful dream. But there was another dream that did. If Banon hadn’t died, I don’t know if we would have ever had Mac. We might have stopped at two children and never had the joy of loving him.”

Quincy Jones believes this inner peace is one of Ballard’s strengths. “A teacher once told me that music can never be more or less than you are as a human being, and Glen has a wide soul, man,” Jones says. “He has gone through some trials in his life and he has respect for people. I think that’s why people feel safe with him in the studio.”