They’ve got it covered if it’s a hit
Rockabye Baby!, Vitamin Records and other labels turn pop, rock and punk into instrumental adaptations for adults and kids
Over the last four decades, a stubborn, curious Silver Lake music company called CMH has found a niche in the ever-competitive record business.
CMH stands for Country Music Heritage, but many of its projects in 2016 have little to do with picking or twanging.
Instead, while most labels patiently await an artist’s would-be masterpiece, CMH earns a lot of its income pumping out record after record based on others’ successes. The company scours the charts for hot songs and then records instrumental adaptations of them.
Ignored by some music snobs as cheesy profiteers of the creative music business, CMH’s output mostly exists outside the purview of the Billboard pop charts, but it couldn’t survive without them.
CMH was born as a Los Angeles bluegrass label — a partnership between a German emigre, Martin Haerle, and Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith. The latter wrote the hit “Dueling Banjos,” and the former was so obsessed with country and western music while listening to American Armed Forces Radio in Stuttgart after World War II that he moved to Nashville.
David Haerle inherited the company after his dad died during a hike in Griffith Park in 1990, and he has since transformed the business into a collection of musical lines called CMH Label Group that meet unsung needs in the music industry. Among the brands: Rockabye Baby!, Pickin’ On and Vitamin Records, which houses the quasi-classical works of the Vitamin String Quartet.
On a recent afternoon at a studio just south of Leimert Park, four string players of the Vitamin String Quartet did a first-run through an arrangement. Today’s assignment? Radiohead’s “True Love Waits.”
In 2014, the Vitamin String Quartet — a rotating collective of players — sold out the Troubadour even though the group itself is anonymous. Haerle was dumbfounded: “People were lining up to see the Vitamin String Quartet. And I know that sounds rather basic, but they were up at the front of the stage cheering and singing along.”
The Vitamin String Quartet has turned contemporary pop into instrumental string works for the last 17 years — consider it an updated take on elevator music of yore. Sneak in its version of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” onto your Auntie Gwyneth’s cocktail party playlist, for example, and the irony might fly right past her.
The company’s Rockabye Baby! imprint produces gentle instru-