LOS ANGELES -- Rick Patterson's music gets more airplay than Mozart, Madonna and Mancini put together.
Every 45 seconds, a score written by the 36-year-old composer is playing somewhere in the country, either as background for a TV show or a commercial.
Patterson is one of the most successful score composers around, and on June 14 he hopes to become the highest paid. If his musical promo for a national syndicate of TV stations wins any of four Clio advertising awards it is up for that night, the Bertram-Ewing ad agency has promised to pay him $1 million for a 20-minute score with no set budget.
The former Hollywood High School drum major agrees that a million bucks would be nice. But it's the unfettered budget, he says, that has really turned him on.
'They'll give me carte blanche for recording the score,' he says excitedly. 'I can use the best rhythm sections from the pop world or hire the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I can bring in a banjo player from Nashville or a zither player from Transylvania.
'This,' he says, 'will be second only to scoring a film by Steven Spielberg.'
Patterson, a big guy who favors rumpled sports jackets and tennis shoes, writes scores for feature films and TV series, but his forte is advertising.
His partner, Ron Walz, writes jingles in their Los Angeles office - 'He's great at coming up with those tunes you can't get out of your head in the middle of the night' -- and Patterson fills in the musical background from his seaside Cardiff home.
To date, he has 2,000 commercials to his credit, with clients ranging from ABC Sports to Xerox. His music has helped promote the city of Las Vegas, the Department of Defense, the New York Yankees and the San Diego Zoo. He once scored a Michelob ad overnight as a favor to Anheuser-Busch.
The pressure to excel is far greater in advertising, says Patterson, 'because clients sometimes treat a spot like it's their last 30 seconds on earth. But look at the cost: ads for the Super Bowl are now over $1 million a minute, I think.'
Such high stakes translate into high budgets and, in Patterson's view, into superior music. Oscar-winning composers who have scored commercials include Jerry Goldsmith ('Patton') and Vangelis ('Chariots of Fire'). Jazz great Herbie Hancock won a Clio last year and John Williams' 'E.T.' theme has been featured in promo spots.
'Most people think that TV is somehow better than commercials, but it's not true,' says Patterson. 'The quality of commercials is far superior because they're budgeted for it. Let's say a client spends $1 million for a few spots. A single TV show would have to have a $100-million budget to compare with that.'
Ads also give composers an opportunity to shine, says Patterson, because the music is the star. 'When you're doing a movie, you're not the primary focus; you're there to support the action. But in a commercial, the music is the primary focus and the visuals are there to support the score.'
Patterson has a reputation as a quality fanatic and he upholds it by being somewhat choosy about his clients. 'I try not to do products I don't like,' says the ad music man, 'and I won't do politicians at all.
'If people don't like a product, they can take it back or throw it out,' he says. 'But you can't return politicians easily. ... I would feel very bad about using my skills to help someone who might betray the public. You don't have that same problem with, say, Ghirardelli Chocolate -- it's hard for a chocolate bar to betray people.'
Pattersongot into music as a teenage trombone player and started arranging tunes at age 18. 'During high school and college, I played with rock bands, did big-band jazz, performed chamber music,' he recalls.
His eclectic career as a backup musician includes stints with the Harry James Band, the Jackson Five and jazz innovator Don Ellis, who scored the Oscar-winning film, 'The French Connection.'
That musical smorgasbord has made him a tunesmith for all ears. A score he wrote for a Budweiser ad became so popular that 'we wound up doing it in every style -- from symphonic to hard rock to country-western to Earth, Wind and Fire, even disco when it was popular.
'Bruce Springsteen has influenced me as much as Shostakovich,' he muses, 'and a lot of my composer colleagues would have me hung for saying that. But what do the experts know? People used to say that Tchiakovsky was a no-talent hack who would never amount to anything.'
