In pitch with music industry: Kevin Lamb blazed a career trail for Blake McDaniel

By Chelsea Retherford | Living 50 Plus

Kevin Lamb had stopped teaching at the University of North Alabama by the time Blake McDaniel enrolled as commercial music student in the fall of 1992.

Still, McDaniel, who went on to work as a talent agent for Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in Nashville, Tennessee, before founding his own company, Daps Landing Media, said he considers Lamb a mentor in the industry.

“There are so many ways, I don’t even know where to start,” McDaniel said when asked how working alongside Lamb helped shape his early career.

“Well, if you’re like me, you didn’t know anything about the business,” Lamb chimed in. “Just to have that education from UNA to give you the foundation so that you know what you have to do. I got the foundation to try that.”

Lamb, who was one of the first UNA students to graduate from the Commercial Music Program — now known as the Department of Entertainment Industry — admits he had no idea a career in the music industry was possible if the aim wasn’t to become an artist or musician.

When he first enrolled as a student in the late 1970s, although he was passionate about music, he first pursued a degree in chemistry. One elective class in music publishing completely changed that trajectory.

Lamb, who graduated in 1978, returned to adjunct teach that same class a year later as he was building his own career in publishing at Wishbone Studio in Muscle Shoals.

Unlike Lamb, McDaniel knew he wanted to pursue the business side of the music industry right out of high school. A native of Athens, he said it was the Commercial Music Program that drew him to UNA in the first place as the program was the only one of its kind at the time.

“Before I started at UNA, I knew there was something called music business. I knew nothing else,” he said. “I just knew there was a way to make money and have a job doing something with music. I came here to figure out what that was.”

McDaniel earned his undergraduate degree, as well as a master’s in business, from the program. With a better idea of what his career might look like, he headed to Nashville. Resume in hand, McDaniel thought his MBA in music would make landing a job as easy as a cake walk.

“I got rejected by everybody,” he said. “All the major labels. All the publishers. Rejection, rejection, rejection. So, I go to a staffing agency — one of those staffing agencies that staff like receptionists and that kind of stuff — and I said, ‘Look, I’ve got to have a job. I’m about to run out of money. I will work minimum wage doing any job as long as it’s in the music business.’”

McDaniel said he was presented with two options. One was a receptionist’s position for a local publishing agency, and the job began that Friday. The other was for a company called CAA that began the following Monday.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m going out of town this weekend to hang with my buddies,’” McDaniel recalled with a laugh. “I said, ‘Whatever the job is that starts Monday, I think I’ll take that one.’ I showed up, and the rest is history.”

McDaniel started with CAA doing small, odd jobs like cleaning the office, filling in for the receptionist, and filing paperwork. Eventually, he worked his way up to become a talent agent with one of the biggest agencies in the world. He spent 24 years with them.

It was with CAA that McDaniel won a Daytime Emmy alongside Jennifer Nettles for Outstanding Original Song, which Nettles co-wrote with Bill Sherman for a show that McDaniel pitched for PBS called “American Anthems.”

“We got it on PBS, and we got four Emmy nominations and won an Emmy for Jennifer,” McDaniel said of the project, adding that he had a second project around the same time earn a Grammy nomination.

Of all those achievements, McDaniel said one of his proudest moments came early when he was trying to establish himself as an agent with CAA. Lamb helped him land with the band Alabama.

“It’s almost like Kevin and I each bookended Alabama’s career in a way,” McDaniel said. “He was in it with those guys when the rocket ship was blasting off, when they first started.”

While Lamb got his start locally with Wishbone Studio, he eventually ventured to Nashville in the early 1980s to run the band’s publishing company, Maypop Music. In his nine years with Maypop, Lamb published dozens of Alabama’s hits, including “Old Flame” and “Mountain Music.”

McDaniel, who became Alabama’s agent when the group relaunched its career in 2011, said he owes that arrangement to Lamb.

Though he didn’t have Lamb as an instructor at UNA — aside from hearing Lamb speak to his class one semester — McDaniel said their paths eventually crossed after Lamb had gone into business for himself.

Though neither of them could pinpoint the moment they began meeting for lunch to “talk shop” about the music business, they each said they built a working relationship based on swapping advice about their shared industry.

“So, I was working hard trying to be a successful agent, you know, but then Kevin calls me,” McDaniel recalled. “He goes, ‘Blake, keep this quiet, but I’m hearing rumblings that Alabama may be getting back together.’

“At that point, they’d been retired for years, and everybody thought they were done forever. Kevin goes, ‘Would you be interested?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, 100 percent! I’m their guy.’”

McDaniel said Lamb helped coach him through developing a pitch for when the time came, and eventually a meeting was secured.

“I was going up against the head guy of our competing agency — who, by the way, was Alabama’s agent when they retired — the president of another agency that flew in for the meeting, and various other people,” McDaniel said. “So, I did my research. I put together plans on how Alabama should return to the marketplace, and I got everything together for the pitch.

“The other people thought they could just sit there and wheel and deal and that would be it. I went through everything with them — finances, different ways of coming back into the industry, things that probably wouldn’t work, timelines, and all these things. It landed. It was crazy.”

McDaniel remembers getting the confirmation call the day his newborn daughter arrived home from the hospital. While he was ecstatic, he also learned he had just seven weeks to plan a comeback concert because the band wanted its first event to double as a fundraiser for victims of the tornadoes that had ravaged north Alabama just weeks earlier in April 2011.

“It was so profound to start my time off with them that way,” McDaniel said. “For that to be my first event, and I was able to help give back to my home state, it was just amazing, and to watch how those guys really care about everyday people.”

While McDaniel is grateful to Lamb for his help in guiding him to Alabama, he said he’s even more grateful for the role Lamb has always played as mentor. He and Lamb both attribute their successes to the foundations they said were laid back at their university.

“People like Kevin and other alums gave me hope that I could do this,” McDaniel said. “I realized at UNA, there really are people out there who are doing it. There are really people out there who are successful.

“It’s a very powerful thing to come into this industry knowing that you have people who have blazed the trail in front of you and are there to help you when they see the opportunity.”