A TASTE OF RAINMAKERS:
AMBROSIA HEALY
Capitol Music Group EVP, Head of Media Strategy & Relations Ambrosia Healy has only had three “real” jobs in her life—two of them at Capitol Records. Though she quickly developed a reputation as one of the most adept publicists in the business, Healy has grown in her role at the Tower, becoming a crucial member of the company’s inner circle—most recently under chief exec Michelle Jubelirer, whom she describes herein as a “powerhouse.” Over the years, in various capacities, she’s worked with Dave Matthews Band, Coldplay, Nine Inch Nails, Katy Perry, Beck, Sam Smith and countless other artists.
Healy is acutely sensitive both to company dynamics and artist sensibilities, and as adept at messaging as anyone in the game. Here she tells her own story, for the first time ever.
Tell us a little about your background.
I’ve had such a crazy life. I was born in San Francisco into an extremely unconventional family. My father, Dan Healy, was the sound engineer for The Grateful Dead for almost 30 years. The Dead was my family’s life. When I was two, my parents brought me to Altamont; my mom tells the story of having to hold me for 18 hours because there was no place to put me down and no way to get out of there. [Presented by The Rolling Stones, 1969’s Altamont Speedway Free Festival is remembered for the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter. The Grateful Dead were scheduled to perform but declined just before their scheduled appearance due to increasing violence at the venue.]
My family also owned a radio station—which was in our house—and I slept in the record library. From eighth grade until my senior year in high school, one of my household chores was hosting a radio show on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings. I remember the click-clack sound of the AP newswire, which sat right next to my bunk bed. I’d jump out of bed, grab my records, rip the news off the wire and pick out stories based on whether I could pronounce all the words.
So it’s safe to say growing up around The Grateful Dead inspired you to work in the industry.
It was definitely my dad’s work and being around it all the time that, in retrospect, got into my hard-wiring and gave me a lot of life skills for the music business. But it never occurred to me that you could get a job at a record company—I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a publicity department.
My father is one of my great mentors. He always told me, “Figure it out for yourself and don’t take any shit.” The Grateful Dead was such a big operation that lots of family and friends would stick around and work jobs within the organization. One day, Dad took me aside and said, “This isn’t yours. You need to go out into the world and find what your thing is going to be.” I get goosebumps when I say that—he wanted me to move beyond the comfort of working in that setting so I could grow.
Because of that, I never actually had any intention of working in the music business; my intention was to become a schoolteacher. After college, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, to get residency to qualify for in-state tuition for what was then the best program for experiential education. At the time, I was working three jobs trying to make Boulder rent. One of my jobs was for the Fox Theatre, a venue in Boulder with music seven days a week. I spent most of my time making posters at Kinko’s and faxing show listings to the local media.
Clearly, at some point, PR overtook teaching.
Well, while I was working there, around 1994, Dave Matthews Band came through Boulder when they were starting out, and I met their manager, [Red Light Management topper] Coran Capshaw. He saw what I’d done locally to promote the show and said, “We really have something special with this band—would you be our publicist and do what you did here in Boulder everywhere else we go?”
That became my hard left turn. I never did go to graduate school. Instead, I became Dave Matthews Band’s tour publicist, before they were signed to a major. It was a big deal for me. I was making $100 a week at the Fox Theatre, but I mustered the courage to ask for $200 a week to be the band’s tour publicist. Not that I really understood what that meant.
I reached out to The Grateful Dead’s PR person, Dennis McNally, and said, “Dave Matthews Band asked me to be their publicist. What is that, exactly?” So he sat with me in The Grateful Dead’s office with this yellow legal pad and we went through all the DMB tour dates, and Dennis gave me the name and telephone number of every person to call, like Steve Morse at The Boston Globe, Tom Moon at The Philadelphia Inquirer and so on.
Because of my background, I instinctively understood the mindset of building a following. Going into the job of tour publicist, I did know who did what and how things worked in a touring-band situation. I knew how to talk to artists and journalists, and I understood what information people needed. I just didn’t know that’s what publicity was.
Read the complete interview here.
