2006 Top 35 under 35 – Horst Shnicktauber

Once again, an enterprising Canadian has shown that you don’t need to have a deal with a major record label to make a commercial success of your music.

Horst Shnicktauber, of Fenelon Falls, Ontario, will sometime this month sell his millionth recording as he releases his first retrospective collection. And the remarkable thing is—he’s only 35, and all his records feature him yodeling

How did he get into this business? “I credit my family’s rich musical history and poor financial status” he said. “I grew up in a Swiss immigrant family, with a few records of the great Tyrolean yodellers like Klaus Rotweiler and Franz Klister. So the music’s always been there. As for the finances, I had to wear my brother’s hand-me-down lederhosen. And he was four sizes smaller than me. So I’ve always had a tendency to go for the falsetto side of things.”

During high school, he enjoyed singing with local rock, polka and ompah bands.After graduation, he spent three rather aimless years working at his uncle Karl’s strudel and bicycle repair shop, when he had an epiphany. “I was up late at night, flicking the channel, and there was this polite looking guy with a neatly trimmed beard, whistling some incredibly downbeat song (in fact, it was “Nobody loves you when you’re down and out”), with a grin from ear to ear. I had never heard of Roger Whittaker before, but I soon learned why he was grinning. He was selling zillions of records and people were paying good money to listen to him whistle. And I thought, if whistling can do that, think what yodelling can do.”

And he was right. He rented the local legion hall, hired his friend Donita Daschundhaus to play the accordion, and put up posters around town. “The yodelling side of me,” screamed the posters; “Horst Shnicktauber yodels Merle Haggard, Charlie Pride and Jim Reeves.” The concert sold out, and word began to spread quickly. He moved to a slightly bigger venue in Timmins, and then again to North Bay, and soon people began to ask him for his recordings.

And then he had another epiphany.Again, watching late night TV, shortly before an infomercial on gifted psychics and right after a program on meditative kickboxing, he saw an ad for a Rita McNeil collection (“Take your lumps—15 coal mining disaster songs”). What a concept, he thought—buy direct from the artist and cut out the middleman. And this, in turn, brought back all his high school training in commerce and marketing. He remembered that a barber can only cut 16 heads of hair a day at $10 a cut; but if a barber can produce a book on how to cut hair and sell it for $10, the only thing between him and his fortune is top-notch marketing.

“I wanted the best, but I had very little capital” he said. “So I went to the best—the people who’d done Veg-a-matic, and who were about to begin work on the Esteban beginners guitar campaign. They saw the potential immediately and came in for half of the action.” And they soon hit upon a smart strategy. Borrowing from the success of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books—which had a title for almost every constituency, like Chicken Soup for the Teenaged Internet Mogul—they decided to release a blizzard of recordings aimed at different markets. If some were failures, it didn’t matter, so long as some were home runs.

And sure enough, the home runs followed. “We marketed our first LP at a strategic time—right after a toupee informercial—and aimed it squarely at a key demographic.” “Twisted Klister” was both an homage to his yodelling idol and also a fresh presentation of heavy metal music that had previously been inaccessible to a large audience. It quickly paved the way for a string of other recordings, among which were:

– “Boogie Woogie Yodel Boy”—a tribute to the big band era.

– “Move over Ella it’s that YodelLing Fella’“—a yodealer takes on jazz scat classics like “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” in unforgettable fashion.

– “I heard it through the goatherd”—a tribute to Marvin Gaye and the soul music era; it never became quite the success that Shnicktauber expected. – “Modal yodel”—Gregorian chant presented in a way no one has heard before.

Shnicktauber has already got his next project mapped out. “Environmental or ambient music is very big right now…but instead of birds singing and streams rushing, we’re going to give people some alpine yodelling, recorded on a mountainside with a herd of cows.You can almost hear the edelweiss growing.”

And with that, Shnicktauber was off to his Uncle Karl’s for a pastry—or maybe to pick up an inner tube. Successful people just don’t sit still.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.