We are only a week away from the premiere episode of the revolutionary new music show, Breaking Band on AXS TV. This show is not a competition, not a reality show, it is a docu-series that will soon bring together generations of music lovers. The new original series will be pairing up young emerging artists with legendary musicians for a once in a lifetime collaboration. Season One will be kicking off next Sunday, January 24th on AXS TV and airs at 9:30 pm.
The show is produced by Marc Scarpa and Donovan Leitch, a musician himself and son of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Donovan. Together these two have created a show that will not only invite musicians, fans, or music lovers to watch but generations as well. We had the chance to chat with Donovan and Marc and are pleased to share our interview with you.
We watched the premiere episode which features Dave Navarro and emerging artist, Andie Case and was really impressed, with not only the concept and production of the show but the positive nature and inspiration that comes from each episode. Donovan explains,
Well, I am a musician myself, and my partner Marc and I really love music and specifically love TV shows about music which is very difficult to get music on television. So you have to come up with some sort of unique way of presenting music, and there are so many great emerging artists on YouTube who have gotten millions and millions of views without the help of record labels, or promoters or anything like that. It is an entirely new way of becoming a rock star, these immediate rock stars.
Donovan adds about the first episode,
I was very nervous, I sent Dave Navarro the first episode to watch. Frankly, I didn’t know what he was going to think. He was kind of like texting me as he was watching it. But what he was saying was “Hey this is great, Looks really good” and then by the end of it, he was like “let me know if you need me to help to promote it. He was really encouraged.
Marc told us a very touching story about the inspiration for the show came from watching a Christmas Special as a child, Marc shares,
The inspiration of the show came from my childhood. I remember distinctively watching a Bing Crosby Christmas special and I had no idea who the hell Bing Crosby was but I knew very well who David Bowie was. (Interview was conducted prior to David Bowie’s passing) And I kept bugging my mom and my grandmother, “I got to watch this show, I got to watch this show. David Bowie is performing on this TV show” They were like what are you talking about. They didn’t know what I was talking about. I was “Bing Crosby TV show. Bing Crosby TV special” and so they played the Bing Crosby Christmas Special and there it was, when I was a young kid. Bing Crosby and David Bowie did a duet together on live television. That was the first time I was ever exposed to Bing Crosby. I thought Bing Crosby was like a talk show host with a talk show like Johnny Carson . I thought he was like on the Johnny Carson Show but he wasn’t, he was doing this duet show with the legend Bing Crosby and that was the first time that Bowie actually had gotten exposed to a national television audience. So the point of this story is that was the first time that I had ever listened and watched music with my mother and my grandmother. The three of us sat around watching this Christmas special together because of the mix and of course how Bing Crosby and he became famous and his career trajectory and how he got there was distinctively different than David Bowie and you are seeing in today’s music industry that same shift again. There is a new approach for emerging musicians and how they will come out on top but I think there is a place in the market for programming like this, the collaboration shows. You see it with top selling albums like Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, Tony did a whole duet series that was wildly successful. So did Frank Sinatra but they never did it in terms of broadcast. So we hope that this show will bring the spirit of musical collaboration together and really inspire families to watch and listen to music together.
The show will air on Sunday nights and is destined to become a family favorite. We discussed with Marc about how not only entertaining but how educational the show could become for musicians and fans alike. Marc explains,
We hope it becomes educational for other musicians to watch, we hope it is fun family entertainment. It sounds funny but one of the things we are really excited as producers of the show is that AXS TV chose to put it as part of their Sunday night lineup, it is an original lineup, there are three powerful shows, back to back to back and Sunday nights are typically a family night, in terms of family programming. We want families to watch this show. We have kind of a running joke amongst our crew and our team that most likely the parents will know who the mentors are and their children will watch the show because of the creators, who are the emerging musicians.
When watching the show, you can’t help but applaud the producers for maintaining such a positive aspect to the show. The artists have a great warm reception to having a mentor teach them, at the same time building them up, instead of what you might see on other shows; of tearing them down with non-constructive criticism. Donovan details,
I am a big fan of Voice, Idol, and I love those shows but that has kind of redefined the music business so it is sort of a new set of rules. I wanted to sort of peel back the curtain a little bit and show the audience what it really is like being a musician and what you have to go through and with the YouTubers , the one thing they all have in common on every episode is that they have never been on television. So by agreeing to be on Breaking Bands, they are on television because we are filming essentially ‘A Day in the Life’. They are going to come to YouTube Space to do a show and they know that we have invited one of their mentors to come and they don’t know who it is, or when they will meet them. The show has a very kind of live feel to it, very run n gun, almost documentary, a docu-series. It is kind of showing what you sort of need to prepare for a television performance.
This is a show for fans and musicians alike. It is a show like no other, as not only the emerging artists learn something but the mentors as well. Marc shares a great example,
The thing is that we are not making a reality show, we are making a collaboration show and it is a show for musicians, by musicians about musicianship and the collaboration between more experienced musicians and more emerging musicians. And we were really thrilled to see how both groups with distinctively different backgrounds came together and learned from one another. A specific example of that was with someone like Robin Zander, who is obviously a right for rock icon, who is about to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the guy has done over 5,000 live performance shows, countless amounts of TV broadcasts over Cheap Trick’s career, they went their traditional record label route. They came from the 1970’s and so on. Here he is, he got to collaborate with a young band Set The Charge out of Port Chester, New York, and these guys have about a million and a half subscribers on YouTube, they have never performed live, much less performed live for a live TV broadcast or live broadcast. Then on top of it, having to have the added pressure of having Robin Zander standing there and kind of judge them. But in fact, there was no judging, Robin Zander was thrilled and loved them, and Robin learned a lot from them. Here is a guy who doesn’t have a twitter account and then you’ve got these 20 year old guys out of New York who have a million and half subscribers on YouTube, he was just as much in awe with them as they were in awe with him. The conversation was really great and they learned from each other. Every show was like that. Every show the artists really came together and they learned from one another, they were all kind of… I don’t mean learn from another just musically, I meant from a business perspective and from just how they both had respectively had gotten their foot in the door in the music industry. So many artists now are using platforms like YouTube and most of our artists, our emerging artists come with a strong YouTube background. Which means they are their own writers, producers, directors in many cases of their music videos, they have their own channel, their own record labels and so on. They have to do everything themselves. Where some of the more seasoned legendary musicians went a totally different track. It was all about getting that record deal and all about performing live, doing as many tours as possible, and putting out albums. So you have most of the mentors that come from an album mentality, where all the emerging artists that we have come from a single, and a single video mentality, and community, fans, followers, subscribers and that thing. So bringing these two kind of worlds together was very inspirational, educational, and fun. I mean everybody just had a good time, because ultimately they bonded on the most important thing, playing music together.
Even the sharing of stories between the artists will be treasured as Donovan comments,
It is exciting and the rock stars that we had on the show, they were all so great. Each episode was different because they all had so much knowledge to impart, really, really great stories. We encouraged them to tell or asking them, asking Belinda Carlisle, “Hey tell us about your first television performance” and she is saying, “Oh man, you know I did Saturday Night Live, I was drinking back then and we went into the dressing room and there was a bottle of vodka, and I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to drink the whole thing before live television. It was a pretty horrific experience.”
I can definitely see it becoming a successful family show and I look forward to watching it with my kids. You have the two generations coming together for the music and the neat thing is they are building together relationships from these collaborations. You don’t know where they might go after the show, but they have forged a strong bond together. It is exciting to see how it continues and Marc shares how the relationships continue after,
… because what has come out of the show, every single collaboration has spurred more collaborations between the mentor and the artists. You will probably see some announcements later on this year, but at the end of each filming, because all this takes place in one day, they all exchange phone numbers, email, there were at least five out of six mentors extended the offer to the emerging band to be an opening act for their next tour, there is a couple of offers for collaborating on a song together, or doing just some one-off shows. So it seems like everybody, more or less, got along and we are really excited about that. We hope that things happen as a result of bringing everyone together.
They have shot the first six episodes and right now Donovan explains,
“We have shot the first six episodes as Access have asked us to do. So we are sort of, kind of waiting to see whether we are going to get another six, rather ten episodes ordered. We already have some really amazing rock stars lined up and ready to go and YouTube bands. We have YouTube Space again so we are thinking that in all likelihood, in April we’ll be shooting some more episodes. It is going to be running now starting on the 24th of January for six weeks. Hopefully we will get a lot of reruns and things like that. What is great too, is that we are programmed as part of an hour of programming, the other show is a show with Sammy Hagar. I love that AXS paired these two shows together and it just gives that hour a better chance of getting some attention.
We are excited for the season and hope you join us in watching each week and continue with follow up seasons. The music industry needs positive shows like Breaking Band which will help to bridge the generation gap for rock and roll lovers! Donovan shares with us what else he is currently working on,
Well, another project that I am busy working on is that I am producing a musical, actually it is based on the music of the Go-Gos, called Head Over Heels. It is Broadway bound and we just world premiered it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where it ran for five months. And it was pretty amazing and Gwyneth Paltrow is my producing partner on it and the next step is going to be doing a workshop in New York this summer. So it is really, really exciting show and I am part of a production company in Los Angeles called Insurgent Media and so I am focusing on doing a lot of television and just trying to get more shows like Breaking Band.
We asked Donovan if with his long musical background and experience, has he ever wanted to put on the mentor hat and do one of the episodes in place of hosting, he tells us,
Well, I’m not sure if quite have the number of record sales as everyone else does but I don’t know, if there was somebody who, it was an honest organic, like they really would enjoy collaborating with me, that would be interesting. Sure.
Donovan and Marc are bringing back the fun in watching television again and bringing the spotlight back on music. We asked Marc what else would he like to share and he adds,
I am just really thankful that Mark Cuban and the people at AXS TV took a chance on a show like this because it really doesn’t fall into any particular bucket, in terms of programming. And like I said, we feel like it’s a family and they have programmed it really well on Sunday nights. That is the right place for it to be. We were really grateful for that. Also my producing partner, Donovan Leitch was also the character, he plays the Producer, on the show which is a character that we created instead of calling him the host. He did a phenomenal job and what was great about Donovan as to why he was perfect for that role, was simply because he is a musician himself, he was born into the musician rock royalty, being the son of folk icon Donovan. He really understood the material and was able to bring the parties together. And then our director Mikki Willis is a phenomenal talent. What again we were looking for was not a reality show, we were looking for a docu-series and Mikki has a long history of directing award winning documentaries that have a very positive message, very soulful and very earnest. So we were happy to have Mikki on board and he was a very calming force and a very creative force with all of the musicians because clearly, there is a lot of stress there for both parties. Keep in mind, neither one of them had ever met before, let alone knew who each other was going into it. So a lot of trust going on with this show. You have emerging musicians and rock icons meeting for the very first time and in a day try to get out of it, what they all want to get out of it, which is the ability to play music together. We got lucky with season one where in fact everyone got along and there was just a lot learned and some really wonderful collaborations.
So for now, let’s tune in to Season One and fingers crossed for many more seasons. Let’s make Sunday night a family night of ROCK N ROLL! Who knows maybe we just might see Donovan in the mentor seat as well!
~ Marisol
- Website: http://breakingband.com
- Website: http://www.axs.tv/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/breakingbandshow
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