Daily News from New York, New York • 54

ODBC) 9Cm jjumQDutzifj1 1 I doesn't talk about It, and flatly refuses to discuss his home life today with his three daughters. But someone who knew him then says that the time following his wife's death from cancer "was terrible for him," and there is evidence to suggest It changed him. Steve Karmen loves his success. Actually, he savors It and presents proof of it on request with a professional, he-man, pride. But Karmen at 43 is, by his own admission, not the obsessed man of yesteryear.

Now there is the time, and the desire, to relax into the life he has fashioned. Karmen manages his own business and refuses to disclose his Income. But he will discuss the creative process as it applies to the art of ingle-writing. His Job is to take the theme line from the ad agency nothing like the smile on the face of a kid eating a Hershey write the rest of the Jingle, set it to music, then produce the orchestration. Karmen writes classics.

Classics play longer than non-classics, and part of the reason Karmen is a rich man is that he is one of the few Jinglers who's permitted to retain copyright on his work. Therefore, he receives residuals. "I begin with the problems. The problems being, what do we want to say and what do we want to do. Then I Immerse myself in it and sit down clunking at the piano.

It's very difficult to describe the creative process, but It's one that is not an accident "There's that magical moment when it comes from the pencil to the paper. When you write dah, dah, and it says 'When you've said And I'll say, now that doesn't sound bad. I'll write that down and know I have my punchline. "Now I have to go back to the top and build up my lead in. I start to say, 'When you said that you've said a lot of things nobody else can Then I proceed to list them.

I go on, trying to Beneficial, doo, doo, you're good for So when the opportunity to score a spot for the Girl Scouts came along, Karmen was ready. "Doing that commercial made me realize there was a whole other business out there, and so, I started banging on doors," Karmen recalls. The doors opened, and In a relatively short time, Karmen was employed full-time in advertising. But he wasn't home yet He was the king of the obscure product Karmen was consistently scoring and writing commercials for products that had no public appeal. He needed a big one.

Of course, he got It Serendipity made Karmen a star. When he won the Salem Job, he was presented with a theme line "You can take Salem out of the country, but you can't take the country of Salem." And he intended to go with that, but he wrote the song too long, and at the last moment at an engineer's suggestion, he faded out the last line. When "You can take Salem out of the country, but bit the air, was besieged. "Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it made for a lot of talk," says Karmen. "After that everyone wanted me to write something for them with an ending that doesn't end.

"But my success was not an accident That commercial made me an entity. I was the hot new kid In town. But in order for me to get where I am today, I had to work seven days a week, 30 hours a day. "It's the only way to do it If you want to be a big musician, you've got to sleep with your Instrument I look back at that period in the early 70s and I know I was all-consumed by making it Those were the early years of my marriage and we had three children, yet my memories of that period are only of the music I wrote." In 1974, his wife died. Karmen i Recording a jingle In the studio: one more faulty starts, before he found his future in "You can take Salem out of the country, but Karmen dropped out of NYU medical school had to go one better than my brother, so I was going to be a brain to become a calypso singer.

For awhile there, it looked good for him. He did an extended stint on the Arthur Godfrey show, and then got a Job on a cruise ship. But while he was out of the country, calypso died. So he switched to the Bobby Darin, shlrt-and- tie, melody-to-match routine, Just as it into the folk vogue. Finally, he poured his total repertoire into the act and tried a combined approach.

"In the end, I found myself at He knows where you live. He insinuates himself, through his words and music, into your life. Grosslnger's doing a mix of shlrt-and-tie stuff, calypso, folk music, and opening with a Frank Sinatra number," he says, laughing easily at those early, woeful times. Never mind. It was all grist for the mill of the mind that would later set the nation humming "Sooner or later, you'll own Generals." But first he tried his fledgling talent on the stage with mild success, then Hollywood, with no success.

At that point he was 23 and married with his first child on the way. And he didn't work for a year. Something happened to the brash young man who'd gone West fairly confident of success, he says. To this day he hates Los Angeles, the place where first he came face to face with the reality that he, Steve Karmen, could fall. "Now when I go there on business, I fly In in the morning and get the first plane out in the evening," he says.

He came back to New York as hungry for opportunity as when he left Karmen touched base with a former contact, a man who made nudle movies. The producer's current flic was In the tin, but he did need someone to score it, he said. So Karmen went to work, and over the next several years orchestrated 30 porn movies. It was a living, but more important, it was an apprenticeship. He learned to set a mood with his music, to edit his score to film.

And he learned precision, the kind of precision with which, today, he can spawn, in 60 seconds, a melody that finds a home in your brain, the way a piece of grit does your eye comes the king, here comes the big number one, It's there, it's insistent and it won't go away. By SHERRYL CONNELLY DT'S THERE, toying at his Hps and he wants to sing It, he really does. But he's polite and more than a little engrossed in telling the story of his life, so he waits. Still, It's a long Interview, and once or twice the reporter senses he's prepared to abandon his chronological development and get right to It So what the heck. After all, this is the man credited with delivering this great city from Its own valley of evil, when it knew no favor, had no friends and precious few defenders.

The reporter asks. And he answers in song. "I love New Yorrrrrk," rasps Steve Karmen, his face alight with Joy at his. own composition. But there's something wrong here.

The author of the aforesaid, which by now has a recognition factor somewhere between "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The Star-Spangled Banner," belts out his ode so untunefully that at first the reporter thought he was breaking Into Chopin's Funeral March. Never mind. The reigning king of the jingle may not be able to sing it, but he sure can sell It His music, to sales, Is as a dart to a bull's eye, mainly because this old-style kappelmeiater of modern times has the wisdom of Advertising Age stored In a relatively young head. Yes, Steve Karmen has deadly aim. He knows where you live.

He Insinuates himself, through his words and music Is the Great American Chocolate Into your life. He's with you In your unguarded moments In the shower, walking alone, driving Into work. When suddenly you find yourself humming "Weekends were made for Mlchelob," know that Karmen has found you, and he won't easily let you go, because a good Jingle, like a bad meal, keeps coming back on you. Where did Steve Karmen learn to go straight for the Jingular? How did he know where It was? There was no school, no body of work, he says, from which a young Jingler to be could cull his craft There was, he claims, no past master of the form to Influence his work, to set a budding Jlngler's mind afire with possibility. As Woody Guthrie was to Bob Dylm, there was no one to Karmen.

Never mind. Karmen was a success looking for a field in which to happen. He barreled his way out of the Bronx, angry at the convention by which he was raised the son of an engineer and an accountant, the younger brother of a physician known for the invention of the Karmen Blood Unit looking to revenge himself on the restrictions of his middle-class background. And so he did, by becoming a millionaire In advertising. OK, so it wasn't quite that simple.

Yes, he struggled, foundered and fought to get where he la today. He got off to a faulty start too, In fact several time RICHAW LIS DAILY NEWS.