Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion states that “an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”1 Newton’s second law of motion states that the acceleration of an object is dependent upon two variables—the force acting upon the object and the mass of the object.
Twenty years earlier, when I decided I’d had enough pup tent camping and backbreaking construction work in Raleigh, I created, with my demo tape and persistence and focus on finding purpose, a forward motion. In roughly thirty-six months that forward motion landed me a spot as a CBS television news correspondent in New York City at only twenty-three years old (the youngest reporter in the newsroom). The momentum of that force, combined with the acceleration of God’s will, propelled me around the globe for CBS Sports by the time I was thirty and into the seven-figure seat next to Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight when I was thirty-five. Yet I was still, at my core, a musician. I had enjoyed a supernatural path to success in the world of broadcast media, but music kept hijacking my attention.
It you had asked anyone at ET to describe me during those years, they would likely have said that I was not “also” composing music, but rather that I was “also” doing a television show in addition to writing theme music and orchestrations. My work environment (and habits) would have proven them right. There was a practice keyboard in my office. There was a second keyboard, microphone, and multitrack recorder in my dressing room. Connie still tells the story about how I would come home from the set and go right into our recording studio. Then, as she was preparing dinner, a commercial would come on the TV with my voice promoting what was coming up on ET that evening. Connie would page me in the home studio, anxious for details about the lead story, and invariably I couldn’t remember a single detail. Often, I couldn’t even remember reading the story. I was clearly off in some other music netherworld while I read the teleprompter. Connie was the first person to fully affirm that my heart really was in my music.
Early in my tenure at Entertainment Tonight, Mary Hart and Lucie Salhany gave me some insight into my focus too—or lack thereof. They helped me see that I wasn’t fully committed to my role as a television host.
I’d barely been co-hosting with Mary for a month when Lucie called me into her office to inform me that she had decided to send me for “body language” training in Dallas.
“What? I’m not doing that” was all I could find for a reply.
She continued. “Our focus group research studies are telling us that viewers feel you don’t like Mary. You’re not reacting to her comments during the host chat. You’re even rolling your eyes at times. Plus, your body language comes off as condescending. John, Mary is the franchise of Entertainment Tonight. Her Q-rating [recognizability and likeability] is through the roof, and you’re not doing yourself any favors by treating the star of the show like this.”
My mouth was agape. I will admit that I tried to project a “newsier approach” on the set. I also occasionally and intentionally delivered my copy tongue in cheek. But I certainly didn’t think I was being mean to my partner. Nonetheless, Lucie and Frank Kelly required that I spend three days in Dallas working with a body language coach.
When I arrived for the training, the coach was armed with dozens of clips showing transitions on the set where I was being a terrible co-host. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The evidence was clear. I was being a jerk. It was right there on the screen. It wasn’t surprising that viewers noticed.
And so, with a stack of fifty old ET scripts and the coach pretending to be Mary, we set about “fixing” Mary’s co-host. After about three to four hours, I settled into the process that was both demoralizing and enlightening. You know when your spouse says, “Stop being a jerk” and you think they are nuts? Well, now I can tell you that it’s probably a good idea to take a closer look at yourself. I gained even more respect for Mary during this process because when I watched those clips, I realized that she had been putting up with a lot of petulant behavior, the kind perpetrated by someone who deep down didn’t want to be there, even if he didn’t know it consciously at the time.
Ultimately, I was able to swallow my pride. Of course, if I had refused to go to “host school,” I probably would have Mr. Cool-ed myself right out of that job, a job that eventually led me to the IBM gig in Palm Springs, which led me to Connie, which led me back to music where all of my available focus was now trained.
I had been professionally composing music since the opportunity arose with CBS Sports. I composed and recorded hours and hours of original music during the Tour de France coverage and had hundreds of letters from bike racing enthusiasts asking how they could get the music from the TV coverage. I had duplicated a few thousand cassette tapes—and I bought an advertisement in Bicycling magazine—then sold a few hundred tapes. Since I also had fifteen to twenty million viewers watching me on ET six days a week, I didn’t need a whiteboard and a brainstorming session to come up with my pitch to the record companies.
I assembled a demo tape of three songs. Then I laid out all of my promotional assets and the reasons why the project, John Tesh: Music from the Tour de France, would be a huge success and sell millions of records. Unfortunately, a stack of rejection letters began to form on my desk. A&M Records: “Thank you for your submission. This is not for us right now.” Columbia Records: “We are not accepting unsolicited recordings at this time.” Warner Brothers, Geffen Records, Polygram, Arista, Island, Virgin—all said thanks but no thanks. Finally, the fledgling label Private Music agreed to release the “Tour” record. To where they released it, I do not know, because it barely made it into record stores. The project bombed and I was quickly dropped from the label. The problem was, while I was equally a sports announcer and music composer in the eyes of bike racing fanatics, my connection to everyone else began and ended with my role as commentator. When millions of viewers see you introducing TV clips each night, that’s who you are to them.
I was not all that surprised by this turn of events. Nobody but me (and, thankfully, Connie) cared that I wrote “musician” on my tax returns. It was enough, for a while, that I was blessed with a schedule at ET that ended each day after we delivered the show to our syndicated stations at 1:00 p.m. via satellite. I could then rush home from the Paramount Studios to work on my music, with the full support of my wife, who even got behind the construction of a small recording studio behind our house from which we would eventually start our own record company, GTS Records (Gib. Tesh. Sellecca).
I realized that trying to slowly bludgeon my way out of my current talking-head job description was not much of a strategy. I needed a unique and powerful way to create the good ol’ paradigm shift.
Then, in the spring of 1994, two things occurred that, on their own, didn’t mean much to me. But taken together they would obey both Newtonian laws of motion and send me hurtling toward three gold albums and two Grammy nominations.
First, in March, I stumbled upon Yanni, Live at the Acropolis and The Moody Blues, A Night at Red Rocks airing back-to-back on PBS. These were epic performances. Spectacles. Amazing.
Second, ET producer Bob Flick handed me an advance copy of Life Is a Contact Sport by super-manager Ken Kragen, who had worked with entertainers Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, Trisha Yearwood, Olivia Newton-John, the Bee Gees, Burt Reynolds, and the Smothers Brothers to help them move to the next levels in their careers. In 1985, he secured the talent that appeared on the fund-raising single “We Are the World” and album of the same name.
I devoured Kragen’s book in one afternoon. In it, using his artists to illustrate the theory, he makes the convincing argument that in order to introduce an artist to the marketplace, or to reinvigorate their career, you had to create a huge event. The event had to be epic in scope and differentiate itself and the artist simultaneously. Having mounted the legendary We Are the World project, and later Hands Across America, Kragen had cemented his reputation as a public relations genius. He knew of what he spoke.
And like a flash, my revelation for life as a concert pianist materialized from the pages of Ken Kragen’s book and the PBS pledge programs. I had to create an epic concert event. It was the only way through.
Connie and I brainstormed the concept. The show would combine five key elements: my original music, the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Olympic gymnasts Bart Conner and Nadia Comăneci, and David Michaels and his production team.
It would be called John Tesh: Live at Red Rocks with the Colorado Symphony.