The other night, I got rejected, straight up, no debate. It happened at a West Coast Songwriters song screening and, as with every other time I’ve been rejected (and there have been many!), it taught me something.
As I walked home from Fort Mason (see photo from other night), where the screening was held, I replayed the moment when Sammi Moore said “this isn’t for me”. And as I thought about that moment and how it could have been so uplifting but was not, I realized that pitching a song is really hard for three reasons (aside from the obvious, which is that you’re baring your soul!):
1) The person looking for a song is most likely looking for something way more specific than, for example, a country rock song; no, he or she is probably looking for a song that “could appeal to both country and rock fans and that suits my voice and where I am in my life right now and my dog’s howl and the sound of the train that passes by my house every night at 4:00 AM and the feeling I get when I drink two beers but not three and would sound good emanating from both a Prius and pickup....” And I mean all that very seriously, because to get behind a song you have to be able to make it your own.
2) Equally important to the above point, a song has to fit into the context of the album being planned or the artist’s current focus. It’s the eye of a needle, for sure.
3) Last but not least, quality is subjective. Sure, in your opinion, your song might have a great verse, a killer chorus and hooks galore, but in someone else’s mind, it’s a snore-fest.
And so, given these hurdles, I had to be honest with myself. Sammi was right to reject my song. It was “too rock” in her mind, not in keeping with the other songs she had planned for her album and not so amazingly good that it could overcome her concerns. I think I was about halfway back home when I accepted the rightness of Sammi’s decision, and instead of further mulling the defeat I’d just suffered, I turned my attention to the warmth of the night, the absence of wind, the lake-still water of the bay and to the fact that Catherine was waiting at home with two little girls inside of her. Suddenly, rejection wasn’t so bad.
I recently installed the DISQUS system which moved in like Microsoft code, happily pushing aside all old comments for new ones only and disabling some Squarespace functionality. I am going to NUKE DISQUS now and all old comments should re-appear. Please stand by.
Special note to Bret, Nicholas and Justin: I have saved your comments from the DISQUS system and will re-post them, along with replies, soon. Thank you for reading and offering your thoughts. I really appreciate every single comment I get!
The other day I posted about Music Theft and the Culture of Free in which I lamented how it has become perfectly acceptable to get music without paying for it.
A commenter named Justin offered a critical comment that got me to rethink my own point of view, namely that file sharing is stealing. Justin thinks it’s nothing of the sort and brought up the scenario of a baker in which someone takes a loaf of bread from the baker without paying for it. To Justin, this is true theft because the baker no longer has possession of the loaf of bread and will never be able to recoup its cost to him. File sharing, on the other hand, is copying not stealing, because the file owner always retains possession of his file and can still earn money from it. It’s an interesting point, but I am positive that whoever wrote our copyright laws thought of this, because copyright law around music stipulates that if you buy a song you are only buying a limited set of rights to listen to the song, nothing more. In other words, you are not buying anything physical (save for some paper and plastic), you are only buying a license, which grants you limited rights. In my opinion, the originators of US copyright law foresaw the “baker” argument and wrote the law accordingly. Which is why just about every CD/record/cassette has the phrase on it “unauthorized copying is punishable by federal law”. In other words, if you download a song and then violate the rights to which you are bound, you’re breaking the law. Maybe the legal definition of stealing doesn’t fit, but so be it, that’s why we have copyright laws.
So, what should do? If everyone is trampling all over copyright law, should we engage in mass prosecutions, should we only go after the biggest offenders, should we do nothing and just let current law lapse into irrelevance, or should we re-write the the law? I honestly don’t know what the best path forward is, but I certainly believe that current law should be enforced because to not do it sets a dangerous precedent.
Another idea, and this is being done now, is to change some of the fixed royalty fees to reflect new media channels, but this will take a lot of time, too.
One last thought, and this to me is really interesting, in the computing world, open source software has been a raging success, and I think the principal under which open source operates could be applicable to music. In the world of free open source software, developers operate under a GNU license, which is defined in this pull quote from gnu.org:
“Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.”
Could music operate under such a licence? Creative Commons is the guinea pig, I think, but to hedge their bets, both GNU and CC offer sets of rights that are more restrictive than those that govern free open source software. In open source, this is called commercial open source, which lets you publish only portions of your code. In music, for example, Deep Purple might let anyone use the phrase “smoke on the water” but the riff, well, that would be protected!
I’m sure the debate over file sharing will rage on, and all I can say is that if I ever have a big hit song, whatever laws/practices are in place let me make a buck or two.
NOTE: I'M TRYING A NEW COMMENT SYSTEM, IF YOU LIKE IT, LET ME KNOW, IF YOU THINK IT SUCKS, LET ME KNOW THAT, TOO! YOU CAN ALWAYS USE THE EMAIL BOX IN THE RIGHT SIDEBAR TO KEEP THINGS TOTALLY BETWEEN YOU AND ME, IF YOU PREFER THAT! THANKS FOR READING.
Since starting work on my album back in late 2006 (I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S BEEN THAT LONG), I’ve spent countless hours combing the Internet for advice on everything from writing songs to selling them. I even started a links page (soon tbe updated!) on this blog to chronicle and preserve my quest for knowledge. The Internet changes so fast, though, that many of my cherished links have become outdated or were on sites that are now defunct. So I spent some time this morning culling the best and still relevant of them and adding some new ones, then organized them to reflect the order in which an independent musician should read them. Note: these are directed toward non-gigging musicians, since that’s what I am, thanks to my brain injury!
BEST BLOGS FOR INDEPENDENT SONGWRITERS
Start with these to begin wrapping your brain around the complex, daunting and, at times, overwhelming world of DIY music.
We All Make Music I just discovered this last week, but it seems to be really good.
EMAIL SERVICE
From everything I have read, the first thing you want to get sorted out is your email list. You could use Gmail or Yahoo Mail, both of which are probably fine, but true email services automate a lot of the drudgery of maintaining a good email list and since time is your most valuable resource, anything that saves it makes a lot of sense.
Reverbnation.com I have not personally tried this service, but I have read good things. Plus, it’s free! ConstantContact.com I tried this for a while and found it very complex. They have since simplified the service some, but it remains daunting. If you’re going to try to be as big as U2, go ahead and hire some geeks and have them run your CC stuff, otherwise pass. Fanbridge.com I settled on these guys for the simple reason that they offer text-only emails. Personally, I find fancy HTML emails off-putting in that they always look like spam and feel impersonal. Sadly, Fanbridge’s user interface isn’t very good, but then neither is anyone else’s, so I can’t worry about it too much.
PACKAGING/REPLICATION FOR YE OLD PHYSICAL CD
If you’re going to go pure digital, please skip this section. But if you’re going to make a CD, you might as well make a nice one, and the best service I know of is Oasis CD. They have tons of choices, killer quality and great customer service. If you don’t what to print 1,000 CDs, consider KONAKI.COM or CDPRINTEXPRESS.COM, which let you print as few as one CD.
OasisCD.com This is the service I used for Deep Salvage, a four-song EP I did with a friend, and I was very pleased with the result. Oasis CD is not cheap, but they’re not expensive either, when you consider that you are getting true CD replication (plain duplication can lead to playback problems) and pro-quality printing.
cdprinexpress.com I’ve used these guys for one-off packaging, one-off CDs and both, and they are great. No, the quality of the printing is not what you would find on a retail CD at Starbucks, but it’s pretty damn good. Pricing is under $5 per CD, or less, depending on quantity, packaging and printing choices.
Kunaki.com Super innovative service in that the per unit price is only $1 for 1-to-100,000 units. You can even have them drop ship your stuff, so you never have to worry about storing a mountain of CDs. The catch? One-size fits all, in that all CDs are packaged in a standard jewel box and all artwork must conform to a standard template.
BEST SITE FOR ENABLING DIRECT SALES OF YOUR MUSIC
Amazon and iTunes are great, because most music fans are comfortable with them, but your cut is only about 10%. What to do? Post your music on bandcamp!
Bandcamp.com This KILLER service was launched by the dude who sold Outpost to Yahoo for a few billion, so they have SOLID financial backing and they are absolutely devoted to creating the best experience possible for musicians and fans. Price? FREE (unless you actually sell something, in which case bandcamp takes a paltry 15%). View my current bandcamp pages here (for my music) and here (for Deep Salvage, a collaboration between me and Dave Tutin).
BEST SITES FOR HOSTING YOUR MUSIC FOR PURPOSES OTHER THAN SALES
To me, bandcamp is the best music hosting site around, but what if you want to let someone hear a track without being a digital clod and sending an MP3 (faux pas!) or giving the rest of the world access to it? Consider:
Soundcloud.com Not free, but worth every penny, I think. Best feature: private links, which let you grant access to a track or tracks via a simple email link. Slick. The players also let you highlight places in your track of special notice. For example, you could annotate your track with stuff like “start here for killer guitar solo” or “my best bridge ever.”
Mobileme.com Definitely not as slick as soundcloud, but not bad if you just want to be able to post your track to the cloud (via iDisk) and send out links to it. Cost is $100 a year.
Google Docs This started as online wordprocessing and spreadsheet software, but now lets you upload files. So, like mobileme + iDisk, it’s a killer way to offer people links to tracks, except it’s free!
DISTRIBUTION TO iTUNES/AMAZON
If you want to get your songs onto iTunes and Amazon, just choose either one of these services. I’ve tried both, and they both rock.
Every independent artist should have a Web site. Sadly, Web sites are hard to build, so I recommend used services that simplify the whole process, yet don’t limit you should you decide to get more ambitious down the road.
Blogger.com Google’s free blogging service is your best choice for a site that will offer decent functionality and be able to handle loads of traffic. You can even set up Google Analytics (if you can figure it out!) for accurate stats.
Typepad.com The original service for bloggers, as far as I know, and a great one. If Blogger is your Toyata, this is your Lexus, but still basically a service for blogs and not full Web sites.
Wordpress.com These days, it seems like EVERYONE is using Wordpress, and why not? It looks pretty great. You can either use their free templates or hire a Worpress programmer to build you full functioning Wordpress Web site. Expect to pay at least $2500 well-spent dollars.
Squarespace.com This is what I use, and while it may not offer as much flexibility as Wordpress, it’s better for me because it’s easier. With a Squarespace account, you can set up a simple Web site like the one you’re on now, or get more ambitious by either learning HTML or hiring a Squarespace developer. Either way, Squarespace hosts your site, so you don’t have to bother with this yourself. Customer service is THE BEST and reliability is TOP NOTCH.
BEST WAYS TO GET HONEST (IF PAINFUL) FEEDBACK
If you play your songs for your friends and family they’re going to say they like them. The rest of the world? Who knows? So, to help you decide which songs to put the most effort behind, here are some ways to get feedback (hope you have a thick skin!).
Broadjam.com If you only do one thing, put some songs up on Broadjam. The base membership is free and for every review you submit of other people’s music you will earn one review credit, which means one of your tunes will be put into rotation for others to review. Within a few weeks, you will have lots of reviews of your stuff and you will have heard lots of other people’s stuff. Plus, the process of reviewing is helpful, I think, as it really forces you to think about music critically. Sadly, the Broadjam community does not take kindly to brutal honesty, so most people tend to award three stars to stuff. My advice: pay attention to the four/five-star and one-star reviews, but only if they are accompanied by thoughtful notes.
Soundout.com Do you feel tough? Is your skin thicker than an T-Rex’s? CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH? If so, try Soundout. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but for $30, you can get be reviewed by 80 people, whose collective wisdom will be presented to you in a PDF report. Click here for a review of the service.
BEST SITES/SERVICES FOR LETTING THE WORLD KNOW ABOUT YOU
Now that you’ve got your email service up and running, your physical CDs sorted out, your tunes posted to places where people can buy/download/stream them from, your Web site/blog up and running, and some ideas about which of your tracks best represent you as an artist, how do you let the world know you exist?
ArielPublicity.com Probably best for gigging musicians, but I plan to use these guys regardless. Here’s how they describe themselves: “Ariel Publicity is a New York based digital firm that connects artists to blogs, podcasts, Internet radio stations and social media sites. Over the past 14 years our firm has represented over 1,500 musicians of all genres.” Their cheapest package is $2,000, but probably worth it. Stay tuned for more info as I come across it.
Sonicbids.com For finding licensing opportunities, sonicbids seems solid, but they offer EVERY DAMN GIG under the sun, meaning it’s on you to determine the quality of the opportunity. I’ve been a member for a year, but have not used them much, because I have not have my songs ready. Argh, I’m a moron! Next year....
Taxi.com If you want to get your songs licensed or covered by other artists, I think this is the best avenue. It’s not cheap -- $300 per year -- but for your money you get access to a team who has contacts with the major publishers. If your material passes muster with Taxi, they will forward it on and it will be listened to because it came from Taxi. The per submission cost is $5. I’m pretty sure they offer in-depth reviews of your submissions, too. If you visit the Taxi site, be forewarned, it’s a nightmare of relentless promotion. For an honest review of Taxi, click here.
Jango Back in the good old days, if you wanted to get your music on the radio you just bribed the station. It was called payola, and while it was/is illegal, I’m sure it continues to be a standard practice for the Guys With the Big Bucks. What of the poor independent sap? Jango! Yup, Jango is legal pay-to-play. You simply create an artist account, upload the tracks you want to have played on Jango’s radio network, and pony up! $100 gets you 4,000 plays over the course of a few weeks. You can accelerate or slow your plays, as well as geo-target them. Best of all, listeners will occasionally comment or even send you their email. Pretty cool, but be careful: once you sign up, Jango happily bills you for 4,000 plays a month, so you have to cut them off manually.
thesixtyone.com This is a cool music discovery site. You post your tracks and if they catch on, thesixtyone continues to play them, but if they don’t, all quiet on the western front. The best way to get some listeners and comments is to be an active listener and commenter yourself. Here’s a cool post on how to use thesixtyone: What Artists Should Know About thesixtyone.
That’s it, so far. If anyone has anything to add, please let me know in the comments.
The launch of my new album might be interstate, or international, or interstellar or even interuniverse, but regardless, it will most certainly be internet, as I have no intention whatsoever of following T-bone Burnett’s advice to “stay completely away from the Internet”. Which has me thinking about net neutrality, because I would not want to see my album’s bits shoved aside to make way for Justin Beiber’s.
But first, a definition. Personally, I like Tim Wu’s, who is credited by many as The Mind Behind The Phrase net neutrality. Tim’s definition is clear and simple, namely “all content is treated equally.”
For a nobody like me, knowing that my content (MP3s and blog posts, mainly) will travel across the Internet with the exact same priority level as as anything Justin Bieber sends out makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. In other words, the Internet service providers just see packets and do not differentiate between those being sent by a no-name, brain damaged musician, such as myself, and a Rock God, such Justin. Pretty cool. So cool, in fact, you might wonder why anyone would really want to change this. But they do.
To understand why some might wish to fire a BFG-9000 at net neutrality, let’s revisit why the Internet was created and how it works.
THE COLD WAR AND THE INTERNET AND HOOKERS.
Back in the cold war, the US was trying to develop an headless communications system, because, let’s say all traffic going from D.C. to L.A. gets routed through Chicago and in a sudden burst of Comradeship, Kruschev hits The Button. Before his aids can smash him over the head with a vodka bottle, a missile gets away and decides for itself that Chicago is “my kinda town.” In the aftermath, as Chicago smolders, how on earth will the president be able to arrange to have some hookers waiting for him at the Beverly Hilton when he lands in LA the next day? The Internet, that’s how.
Unlike other communication systems at the time, which worked by connecting bits of wire through central offices to a create a physical signal path between callers, the Internet used packets. So, to send a file or some text, the message would be broken up into packets, each containing info on where it was going and where it fit in the larger message, and be sent out over the wires, with routers along the way choosing the best path for each packet to take. For example, with Chicago gone, packets heading from D.C. to L.A. would simply cruise around Chicago, with some possibly going through Texas and others taking a more righteous path through Kansas. Seconds later, all the packets of the president’s missive would reassemble in L.A. and inform the Secret Service to “PLEASE ARRANGE TO HAVE MS. SMITH MEET ME AT THE USUAL PLACE.”
SYA ?HWAT
For years, decades really, packet switching was used to send things that did not need to be experienced in real time, so the lag time as packets found their way across the myriad networks connected by the Internet was no big deal. Besides, when your Word document arrived, Windows would probably crash, so speed was hardly of the essence. Then someone had the hair-brained idea to send voice and video over the Internet. Unlike static files, streaming content, such as the president yelling at the Secret Service leadership back in D.C. about the brown M&Ms he’s just discovered in his hotel room, well, that’s got to arrive in the right order. Otherwise, the Secret Service might hear, “ckarMshatthefudoiningdregiebrownufucktaM&nmyfuckssingroomyord, BIATCH!”.
Which brings us back to net neutrality. Service providers such as Comcast and Verizon are saying that the whole “all content is equal” hippy dippy mumbo jumbo is, well, hippy dippy mumbo jumbo. What the world needs to do now is to change the Internet a bit so that packets that have to arrive in real-time can be given priority over those that do not. For example, telephone calls would be routed differently from MP3 downloads, since telephone calls require data to arrive with very little lag time and in the right order, whereas a file can arrive as a jumbled mess and be reassembled without inconveniencing anyone. Naturally, the service providers want to be able to charge more to carry stuff like video and voice and here is where the real trouble arises. Damn capitalist pigs.
WTF DO WE DO NOW THEN?
The number one concern about service providers being able to tier content and charge accordingly is that they will route their own content ahead of other people’s. For example, a television show produced by Time Warner would be given priority on Time Warner Cable over the competition’s content. I think this is a valid concern and in my opinion there are three paths we can go down:
WE MAKE NET NEUTRALITY DA LAW. As an investor in telecom stocks, I would be hit very hard by such a law, but I digress! Personally, I think this might be the best path in the long term because over time the Internet will get faster. If every service provider has to make the best of a bad situation they will, eventually. Sure, near term, investment would fall off and there would be some economic pain, but down the road, we would all be better off under such a scenario.
WE FOLLOW THE GOOGLE/VERIZON EXAMPLE Google and Verizon have inked some sort of agreement that maintains net neutrality on physical wires but nukes it for wireless. I have not seen the actual plan, but on the surface it seems good, stipulating that the vast majority of the Internet would function under net neutrality, while the wireless slice (which is growing fast, I admit) would be allowed to prioritize certain kinds of traffic over others. To G/Vs credit, they define that traffic as categories, not as specific traffic within a category. For example, video would travel faster than PDFs, but within the video category, no one would get special treatment. Seems okay, right? Yes, but down the road, the temptation to route your own traffic ahead of your competition’s would be great, perhaps too great.
WE MAKE IT DA LAW THAT SERVICE PROVIDERS CANNOT CREATE CONTENT AND CONTENT CREATORS CANNOT OFFER SERVICE. Man, this is so simple and seems so right, but then, Washington hates simple laws, so this will never see the light of day. But imagine, under such a scenario, service providers would clobber each other to be the best conduit for content, and content creators would be sure that their stuff travels with the same authority as anyone else’s. I know, I know, content providers might ink exclusive deals with service providers, who would then accelerate that traffic, but to solve this, I would just mandate that every content creator must offer his stuff over a minimum of three service providers.
So there you have it. As Meg Whitman would say (in that annoying, condescending voice of hears), that’s my stand, what’s yours?
Let’s start with his unsound observations on sound quality. First, if by “tape” he means a 2” master running at 30” per second and being played through thousands of dollars worth of gear, including state of the art studio monitor speakers, vs. an 128Kbs MP3 downloaded for free off of Limewire and being played through an iPod and earbuds, well, he has a point. But if he means a cassette vs. a high quality MP3, both being played through some decent ‘buds, he’s also got a point, but for the wrong reason. The MP3 will smoke the cassette, which willl have tape hiss, wow and flutter, no highs, and drop-outs. Here’s the bottom line: not all MP3s are created equal and if you’re listening to what is standard for MP3s today, namely 256 kbps, you’re getting a level of sound quality very close to that of a CD, which uses AIFF files. Don’t believe me? Grab a CD and rip it into iTunes using AIFF, the convert those files to 256 kbps MP3s. Now, put on your best headphones and A/B them. Told you so.
Now, about T-Bone’s other bit of wisdom, staying away from the Internet. Again, not sure what he mans here, does he mean never use it or just don’t put your music on it? Whatever. If he means never use it I would have to ask how he would suggest we discov new music, book gigs, find musicians, stay up with culture, learn about new gear, find the best local music shop, seek vinyl records and on and on and on. As for the notion that putting your music on the Internet “reduces its value to zero”, man, all I can say is a disagree.
T-Bone is hardly a clear thinker on all this, so parsing his words for real meaning is impossible, but he seems to be mainly upset about sound quality, which, in my opinion, is worryingly stupid, but he also seems to think that as an up and coming musician you should do nothing but practice and the Internet is just a distraction. Wow, what a dope. I mean, for starters, the Internet is packed with killer education videos that I would have killed for when I was a kid. Did I get better because I had to spend hours trying to figure something out and then most likely figure it out wrong? I doubt it. Sure, there was some value in my exploratory work, but far better would have been to hop on the shoulders of giants and then start exploring.
Maybe T-Bone was just trying to be provocative, who knows, but if he’s serious, here’s my advice: stay the hell away from T-Bone.
Here is one more vidoe from my 3-day session with guitarist Tim Young. Unlike the other two videos, this one is just straight up rhythm, but with such a simple part, perhaps especially because of the simplicity of the part, you can truly see Tim’s talent. I mean, he’s just so relaxed and grooveworthy. I’ve also posted some pictures from the sessions. To see them, just click on “Fotos” above and click on the first album, which is called Three Days with Tim Young and The Guitarsenal. I apologize for the fact that almost all the photos are taken from the exact same angle, but chalk it up to my brain injury, which forces me to stay sprawled on the couch in order to remain comfortable and make it through a longer day.
For the gearheads out there, here’s a list of the Guitarsenal!
Maton Supreme EG 240S - I just call this guitar The Maton, for it is righteous and deserving of titles, worship and awe. The backstory starts in a dumpster in Australia back in the early 70s, I think, when a friend of mine (not at the time, of course!) was being punished by his school for some offense and was out picking up trash when he noticed the neck of The Maton sticking out of a trash can. He knew instantly that he was looking at the remnants of the guitar a patron had bought for his school just weeks before but had been smashed to pieces by some irate kid. He dove into that dumpster and pulled out every last piece. Back home later that day his dad took pity on him and offered to pay to have the guitar fixed. And so my friend brought it to the Maton factory. A few years ago, when I first “borrowed” the guitar, I noticed the neck beginning to separate from the body. I panicked, called my friend and told him I would pay to have the guitar fixed if he gave me the okay. He did and the guitar was made better than new by the wizards at Gary Brawer guitar repair in SF. Since I first came into possession of The Maton, it has been the guitar I write songs on, or maybe it writes the songs, I don’t know. All hail The Maton!
Fender “The Strat” - I bought this way back in 1980, when Fender first introduced this model as the kickoff of a long-term plan to start building good guitars again after the debacle of the post-CBS era (CBS bought Fender in 1965 and the company’s quality took a nosedive for about the next 15 years.)
1966 Epiphone Olympic - One of Tim's, who says "I bought this from a friend in Portland who had 3 of them and who turned me on to the feather-light body / heavy-weight sound of this little beauty."
1967 Hofner 459 - Another one of Tim's: "I saw Jon Brion playing one of these when I auditioned for Fiona Apple 15 years ago (to play vibes- I didn't get the gig). Saw two hanging next to each other at Emerald City Guitars in Seattle. Eryn and her mother, Karyn bought it for my birthday 5 years ago. It is the guitar I use the most, but sadly very difficult to find parts for! It has an active circuit (9 volt battery)."
2007 Taylor GC-7 - Tim's prized acoustic: "Got this at McCabe's in LA. I went in there and played all the top notch guitars until I found the one that sounded the best to me, then I tried to A/B it with less expensive guitars until I found THE ONE in MY PRICE RANGE!!!"
Gibson Les Paul - My first guitar. I -- er... my parents bought this guitar for me from Gelb Music in Redwood City. I know every player says his Les Paul is the best, but mine really is.
2003 '57 Re-issue Fender Telecaster - Tim's workhorse: "This guitar was a gift from Eryn's mom and the first guitar I had that really sang. I took a lesson from Tele great Jim Campilongo to learn how to play that particular guitar. He told me to take the finish off the neck; I did so with acetone and a popsicle stick then polished it with steel wool."
Gibson 336CS - When I turned 40, I asked my folks to go halves on a new guitar with me. They did and this is what I picked out, a staggeringly beautiful update of Gibson’s classic. Believe it or not, I ordered it online. The first one that arrived was not up to my mysterious snuff, but this one spoke to me.
And here are the amps!
Carr Mercury 10” with a KT-66 tube - I bought this on the way to client presentation in 2002 or 3, maybe even 4, I’ll have to check my records to know for sure. How best to describe this amp? Put it this way, at Hyde Street Studio C, where I keep it, it has become the go-to amp for clients. They plug in, they pick up their jaw, they rock.
EarCandy SweetTooth 2X10 - I had this built for me just a few years ago in the vain hope that I would someday play live again and need a bit more stage volume than the Carr can deliver on its own. Together, this cabinet and the Carr create the best rock guitar tone I have ever heard.
1965 Fender Princeton Amp - When Tim shows up for a gig, this is the amp he always his with him: "I got this from New Yorker Adam Levy (Norah Jones, Tracy Chapman...). At first he 'lent' it to me; had it shipped in its case to me so that he could have an amp in LA should he need it for gigs here. Then a couple of months later he asked if I wanted to buy it, so I unloaded a '75 Princeton Reverb (hugely inferior in sound and heavier) and made that happen."
Silvertone - Jaime found this outside a bar. It had been left for trash pick-up! Crazy world. He rescued it and it is the amp to use if you want authentic vintage tone.
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week, I was at Hyde Street Studio C recording with Tim Young on guitar and Jaimeson Durr on engineering. We did THIRTEEN TUNES, some with as many as three guitar tracks. If you've ever been in a recording studio, you know how incredible this number is and Tim can take soul and sole credit for our MASSIVE productivity. Music just flows from the guy and his idea well is bottomless. Equally staggering, most of Tim's takes were totally killer, we only wanted to make them even more killer or fix some little nuance that only Tim or Jaime or I would ever notice. For example, nothing wrong with the above guitar solo, right? But we did it a few more times just to get what we were all truly after. I'll post more videos in the coming days -- photos, too! -- but for now I need to reconnect with the world and do some practical stuff like organize the session files, jot down all of my notes from the sessions into one place and, yes, pay invoices. Tim, I thank you from the very deepest places in my heart. You rock, and that is the highest compliment I can pay anyone.
Over the past several years I have read countless articles on the trend toward music being free and most, if not all, get it completely wrong. The prevailing point of view seems to be “you can’t legislate the weather”, meaning simply that free music is inevitable and we should just accept that fact and figure out how to operate in such a world. What a load. Here’s the situation as I see it:
1) Compression technology has enabled music files to be shrunk to a fraction of their uncompressed size with virtually no loss in fidelity.
2) The Internet has enabled people to “share” music with every single person on the damn planet.
3) Thanks to teensy file sizes and a ubiquitous way to “share”, music files can be copied nearly instantly and without inconveniencing either the sharer or the borrower in the least. (Remember, copying music used to be both real-time (a minute took a minute) and physical (you had to get up off your ass and DO something to share or get your music).
These three factors are why EVERYONE is sharing music but they do not make it okay to break the law. Personally, I think the law is valid in that I think people’s ideas should be protected. Now, if you CHOOSE to give your music away, great; but if you choose not to, that doesn’t make it okay for people to steal it just because they can. And fundamentally, that’s what this whole debate should be about: are we going to enforce our laws? If so, we should start. If not, we should not simply give into to Mob Rule; instead, we should figure out why we’re not enforcing the law and determine if the law is, in fact, enforceable and if not, how should it be changed so that it is.
And rule of law is a powerful force in our society, as it should be. Sadly, in what I call The Culture of Free, there is a new force in society that, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call The rule of me. In other words, there are millions of people out there who think they should be able to have what they want. But they’re not going to walk into a bank and take money, too risky; music, however, is just so easy to steal and damnit I want it and I’m worth it and I’m owed it for all the sucky albums I bought so I’m going to take it. Intellectual types love to theorize on why this is not only okay, it’s healthy. To read some of their tortured tripe, you can click here for a post on why people engage in file sharing and why musicians can’t do anything about it, or here to read about why the founders of Pirate Bay are heroes. Go ahead, give these a read, take your time, then try to repeat what they said to a friend. Good luck. And that’s the problem. The arguments for throwing away decades of established law in the most advanced country in the history of the world (that would be the US, in case you’re not sure) in favor of a bunch of common thieves are just not any good. If they were, they wouldn’t be impossible to explain.
So this is where we stand: a bunch of people breaking the law (yours truly, too, on occasion) because technology has made it east to do so. Either we have principals and figure out how to write our laws and regulations so that they are enforceable or we just give in. From what I can see, we are giving in. Sad.
2006. 2007. 2008. 2009. 201? How long will the effects of my brain injury last? And I don’t mean the good ones -- my new-found talent for songwriting, for example -- but the bad: the constant lightheadedness, the vertigo of bending down, of looking up, of looking left, of looking right, the twitchiness. Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where these problems have truly started to wear on me. In and of themselves, they’re not that bad, but their constant presence is like Chinese water torture, and I have no idea when or if they will ever completely go away. But hardest of all is the realization that I might never again do some of the things I used to love to do. For example, fishing in Wyoming with my folks.
Way, way back in the early 1960s, when my sister and I were toddlers, my Dad took the family up to Sunlight Basin, Wyoming, for a fishing vacation. I don’t remember the trip at all, but I grew up with the pictures, which showed cabins and a stream and trout hanging off of line. And I remember my parents talking about the trip (my Mom less enthusiastically than my Dad!) but we never went back. No, Sunlight Basin remained an imaginary place to me, a place where the waters ran clean, cold and fast, the mountains stood rocky and near and the trout always bit,
I can’t say what the catalyst was, but in the late ‘90s, my Dad started talking much more seriously about going back to Wyoming. I suppose it was because he was no longer running companies or flying around the world trying to figure out where to invest the ample cash of a Swiss power company. Or maybe he just figured, goddamnit, I like Sunlight Basin and I want to go back.
By 2005, we had been going annually for several years, every time, save for the first, we stayed at Hunter Peak Ranch. We developed a routine. First, we would drive from the ranch over to the Jeep road and down to Crandall Creek, which we would fish all the way down to where it meets the Clark’s Fork and then we’d fish up the Clark’s fork a little ways. A day or two into our typically four-day stays, we would take horses up the valley carved by Crandall to where the fish were big for mountain trout and where our catch was always best. With so many fish to eat, we had them for lunch, for dinner, even for breakfast, sometimes cooking them ourselves, sometimes having Shelly at Hunter Peak would cook them. Drink was always beer (Michelob) or a little wine we had bought on the drive in or brought from home.
Then I fell. As I lay on my hospital bed, I never for a moment thought that my fishing days might be over. Hell, the doctors just chuckled when I asked if I’d be okay to make a ski trip I had planned in a few weeks. “Sure,” they said, “you’ll be fine, just rest up.” Months later, I was still taking stairs one at a time, and I do mean one. at. a. time. I’d step up with my right foot, then my left, and repeat. I had a cane. Oh, and there was the little plastic bags Catherine carried with us whenever we went anywhere because you just never knew when I was going to get sick.
2005 was the last year I was in Sunlight Basin. As with every other visit, our fishing luck was strong, the weather good and the scenery just otherworldly. That year we finally ventured a little beyond the Clark’s Fork and Crandall for our fishing expeditions and drove up the Beartooth Pass to some alpine lakes, which are set in a treeless landscape that would be right at home in the Lord of the Rings movies. The Jeep road to our chosen body of water was especially rough, and I remember being once again amazed at the capabilities of 4X4 SUV. I don’t think we caught anything -- our tackle was wrong as we had spinners not hooks off of floats -- but I remember thinking that next year we probably wouldn’t bother with the lakes. They were pretty, but we were river fishers and that’s what we were best at.
Since 2006, my Mom and Dad have continued to make their now-annual trek to Sunlight Basin and every time, as the month of August approaches, I like to think to myself that maybe I will finally go back. Then I think about the rough terrain, the high altitude (causes me headaches, now), the bumpy drives in the 4X4, even just the plane ride to get to Cody and I know otherwise. But that’s what is. And what used to be is over. For now.
Earlier this year, songwriting blogger extraordinaire Tom Slatter published an e-book called 10 Tips for Songwriters. In it, 18 independent songwriters wrote out their top ten tips, and if you write songs you really should get a copy for yourself. It’s free, so no excuses! Anyway, I went through the book recently and pulled out the tips I think have the most meaning for me.
1) Throw away the good bits. (Contributed by Edwin Songsville @ www.songsville.org) In advertising, they call this practice “kill your babies.” Its meaning is simple: if you love a line you’ve written but know it’s wrong for your song, grab your cleaver. I’ve done this many times, and I have always been better off in the end, though the decision can be wrenching and the process bloody.
2) Take a walk. (Contributed by Edwin Songsville @ www.songsville.org) I can not even remember how many times I have been out on a walk -- maybe to get a coffee, maybe just to get some sun (or fog, as I live in San Francisco) -- and an idea hits me that’s a keeper. Sometimes I’ll go for a stroll with a specific problem to try to solve, but the best ideas seem to come when I’m just walking on an errand and not trying to think of anything.
3) Creativity can be practiced. (Contributed by Errol @ www.geeklovesongs.com Who knew? It’s true, though. The more creative things you do, the better. I used to believe that if I took on too many creative projects all would suffer. Not true. The creative act seems to be like weightlifting in that the more often you do it, the stronger you get.
So true. I firmly believe that creativity needs limits. Take them away and you can just go too many places. Bohemian Rhapsody aside, most songs that throw away all convention are just too quirky or self indulgent for others to enjoy. Obviously, if you only want to write for yourself, well, do whatever you want, but it you’re hoping to sell your songs, limits are your friend.
5) Don’t be too much of a control freak. (Contributed by Susan Wenger @ http://www.cinderbridge.com) I confess, I struggle with this one, because I always want things played exactly the way I played them on my demo. But you know what? Nearly every time I have asked for someone else’s idea, the song gets better. For example, Here Comes the Weather was originally going to be a guitar-driven, sludgy slog, a la many a live Neil Young and Crazy Horse song. But Sam Bevan, who is primarily a bass player, heard a piano. He also heard a slower tempo. And so we rewrote the tune in Hyde Street Studio C and now it sounds like this.
6) Before you decide to use a line you’ve written, sing it out loud. (Contributed by Susan Wenger @ http://www.cinderbridge.com) Truer words... I have written countless lines I thought were made of 100% pure Awesome, only to sing them and discover they were made of that much more common element known as Suck.
7) Never doubt the power of harmonies. (Contributed by DF Taylor @ http://dftaylor.co.uk) I still remember the very first time I attempted a to sing harmony in a band setting. I was in high school and we were rehearsing at my house. I’m 90% sure the band was the powerfully named Pegasus, and consisted of me, Toby Germano, Phil Henderson and Mike Price. I’m 100% sure we were playing Jumping Jack Flash. We taped it and on listening back I couldn’t believe it. My harmony line actually sounded decent. From then on I was hooked. In my opinion, harmonies not only make songs better, but also more fun to perform.
8) Be organized. (Contributed by XEW @ http://xewmusic.com) My Holy Grail. I will never fully get to the promised land of Organization, but I try. Best tool I’ve found for lyrics is Google Docs because it lets you store all your songs on the Internet and there fore eliminates the problem of multiple files spread across various computers. It also tracks your revisions, every last one, so you can go back and read earlier versions in case you start to get away from your original intent and want to get back on track. Still struggling with how bet to organize my Pro Tools demo files.
9) Do it because you love it. (Contributed by DF Taylor @ http://dftaylor.co.uk) Obvious, I know, but easy to lose sight of.
10) Have a creative brief for each song. (Contributed by me!) In adland, every project kicks off with a creative brief which, if it’s any good (a rare event) describes what your ad needs to achieve in one simple, clear, compelling line. My version for songwriting is to complete this sentence: This song is about ______________. Probably way too literal for most people, but it works for me.
One of my very favorite times of day to work on music isn’t a time of day at all, it’s a time of night. Best is between 10:30 and midnight, when I love to sprawl on the couch with my guitar and pluck out chords and mumble melodies to myself. Outside the window lurks the San Francisco Bay, which is watched over by the slow, steady sweep of the lighthouse beam shining out from Alcatraz.
Mostly I use these sessions to solve problems. Maybe I need some better chords or maybe there’s a lyric idea I just can’t quite find the words to express or maybe it’s some combination of words and music I’m after. No matter, the night time is the right time (couldn’t resist). However, come morning, I confess, many of the ideas I thought were so great the night before seem incomprehensible, but I understand why. It’s because when I work late at night I’m in that in-between place where you teeter on the edge of sleep and your mind works in ways a fully awake mind just doesn’t. Thoughts you would dismiss at noon are welcomed and you will chase ideas you wouldn’t entertain for a minute over breakfast.
On those lucky mornings when the bright light of day does not incinerate the work from the night before, but rather glints off of its polished surface, you know you have something of profound value. Because you have come back from that in-between, near make-believe place with something real. Imagine if you could wake from a dream in which you were wealthy beyond measure and in your hand was the massive gold coin you had been holding in your dream. You would close your fingers over it, put its reality to every test you could imagine, you would not believe your luck. It’s like that.
My tunes are full of examples of nightwriting, but I think my favorite is the middle 8 of The Forgotten Place on Deep Salvage (listen below!). The words to the song were written by my friend Dave Tutin and the music to the verses and chorus had come easily and quickly. But the middle 8 resisted all of my attempts to crack it. Morning after morning I awoke to replay what I had played the night before, only to set my guitar back down in failure. Until one morning I replayed the night’s work and... liked it. I played it all that day and the next and the next, I recorded a demo, I played the demo in the car, I put its reality to every test I could think of... I still liked it. Finally, I recorded the song. And that section, for me, is the gold coin brought back from a dream.
Thank you, water, light and dark. I hope to jam with you many more times in the future.
The other day, I got an email from Gibson about the 50 greatest guitar solos of all time. I couldn’t resist, so I read it, then I read Guitar World’s list, then I got to thinking about my own. I’m lazy, so my list is going to be limited to ten. Further, for my list, I thought hard about great soloing vs. a great solo. To me, a great solo has to be as much a part of a song as the vocal melody. It also has to be infused with the emotion of the song, and, as a result, further the entire song, not just a part of it. I think a great solo also has to be something you can hum in your head (within reason!) and that you like humming. So, with all that as criteria, here are my top ten solos (in no particular order and I’m sure I’ve forgotten something):
Van Halen - “You Really Got Me” When I first heard Van Halen, I simply could not believe that a guitar player could be so good. I still can’t, really. Eddie Van Halen is the greatest hard rock guitar player I have ever heard. No one else can touch his technique, which is driven not by the whammy bar or the tapping or the “brown sound”, but by rhythm. Truly, no other hard rock player is anywhere near as rhythmic as Eddie Van Halen. And for money, all of Eddie’s prodigious talents come together in glorious gobs of guitarista goodness on “You Really Got Me”. The solo starts out all Chuck Berry and then just sales off into mad L.A. hair-ness, leaving every shredder before and after in the smoggy dust.
Pink Floyd - “Time” I remember once telling a friend how “Time” was my favorite David Gilmore solo and he just nodded a little sadly and said, “Grasshopper, listen to Comfortably Numb.” I did, and for awhile I, too, joined the sage masses who proclaimed Numb to be Gilmore’s best. No more. To me, the solo on “Time” is The One. Can you imagine it being played any other way? I can’t. The watery flow of Gilmore’s Echoplexed Strat sounds like the flow of time itself.
The Eagles - “Hotel California Over the years, my appreciation for the genius of the solos on this song has only grown. Yes, many, many bands have put down harmony solos, but “Hotel California” trumps them all. Crushes them, really, under the able hands of Don Felder and Joe Walsh. Whenever this song comes on the radio, I listen to it all the way through, because once Don Henley gets done pissing and moaning about who the fuck knows what, the guitars start and all is right with the world.
Led Zeppelin - “Rock and Roll (Song Remains The Same) There is no sloppier live guitarist than Jimmy Page. I mean, his playing can be amateurish and not in a good way. Missed notes, muffed chords, bent bends -- all are hallmarks of James Patrick Page’s live legacy. But on the opening track of “The Song Remains the Same”, Page’s plectrum problems are all but forgotten has he rips through “Rock and Roll” and combines noise, music and ‘tude to create one Zep’s finest moments (at least that I’ve heard).
Aerosmith - “Walk This Way” I think Joe Perry kicks ass and the fact that his band writes such good songs has overshadowed just how great he really is. He has many, many fine moments, but the solo that ends Walk This Way stands apart. It’s a much thicker tone than you normally hear in Rockdom and there is no flash. It’s all about groove and space and hitting just the right notes. Oh, and the fills are killer, too
Neil Young - “Powder Finger” (Rust Never Sleeps), “The Loner” (Live Rust) I debated between these songs, but in the end had to go with both. Hell, I’ll just say it: Neil Young is my favorite electric guitarist of all time. Sure, I spend more time listening to Keith and the Stones and my own playing has been way more influenced by The Human Riff than anyone else, but for pure electric genius, it’s Neil Young. Why? Because he understands that the electric guitar is as much about noise as it is about music and to get the right noise you have to play more than strings, you have to play your amp. In both of these performances, the noises are as important has the notes as Neil coaxes his melting tubes to transmute the sounds in his head in to sounds everyone else can hear.
Richard and Linda Thompson - “Walking on a Wire” When I was in college in the ‘80s, Rolling Stone magazine reviewed all of Richard and Linda Thomson’s albums in a single issue. I think the albums had all been re-released, but regardless, the review was maybe the most positive I had ever read. I bought all the albums straightaway and they have been among my favorites ever since, not only for the songs but also for Richard Thompson’s guitar playing. He is one of the greatest in history, of that I am sure, and for my money, his finest moment is on Richard and Linda Thompson’s last album, “Shoot Out the Lights”. In fact, I think this is the greatest guitar solo of all time.
The Beatles - “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” I’m not a fan of Clapton. I know that’s a sacrilegious thing to say (he is God, after all), but he just doesn’t do it for me. Except for this performance. Is there a more perfectly matched solo and song out there? I can’t think of it.
Peter Frampton - “Do You Feel Like We Do” (Frampton Comes Alive) I have heard this performance way more times than I can remember, and every time it captivates me completely. Frampton’s playing and tone are just so musical and sparkling and right. Oh, and to be clear, I’m not talking about the first solo, no, it’s the second solo that gets me, the long, drawn out one, the kind of thing I normally hate! In less able hands, this would be a wankfest, but Frampton keeps things interesting with peerless note choices and dynamics. Truly incredible. I only wish he didn’t use that infernal Talkbox. He doesn’t need it.
Back in the very early days of my new life as a brain injury victim, I wrote a song called Coming Together (By Falling Apart). The song is about how Catherine and I became much closer after my brain injury and how her unwavering support and love finally woke me up to what she really means to me. When I finished the first demo of the song, I was determined to do everything possible to make it a success. I wanted the world to know how I felt. So I contacted my close friend Cory, who knows Buddy Miller, and asked if he thought Buddy might sing the tune for me. Cory, ever the practical dude, simply suggested we give it a shot. Well, um, Buddy proclaimed the tune not really his thing, but he’d do it anyway. Someday. He just needed to finish his album first. Then he got hired to join the touring band for Plant/Krauss. Then he had a heart attack. Then Robert Fucking Plant asked him to record his next record for him. Somehow, my song didn’t stay at the top of Buddy’s To Do list.
I was feeling very sorry for myself about how this song that meant so much to me would never be sung in quite the way I’d hoped. Or played, for that matter, as I was holding out a candle for Buddy to slap a little guitar on it. Then Andy “Thump” Korn radioed me about a singer he thought I might want to work with, a guy by the name of Elliot Randall. I checked out Elliot’s site and was pretty blown away, so when I first wrote him, I thought he’d politely turn me down. The opposite happened! He told me that Andy had sung my praises and in Elliot’s mind anyone who could get Andy excited was worth a shot. Even better, Elliot knew a female singer named Heather Combs who could help out with the harmonies. (To hear a clip of Elliot and Heather singing together on KFOG, a San Francisco radio station, go here and scroll down the player to Ol’ 55. Also, be sure to check out some of Elliot’s tunes. They rock.)
Our first session was a few weeks ago, and the minute Elliot started singing, Jaime Durr turned to me in the control room and said, “Wow, this is the perfect voice for this tune.” He was right. Elliot delivered a nuanced, emotionally dead-on vocal, with just a touch of twang and weariness. A few hours later Heather showed up and put the harmonies on the chorus and everyone was feeling mighty fine (it’s a country song, so that’s how we were feeling!).
Once I was aware of just how great Elliot and Heather were, I went back and gave the song a very hard look to make sure my music was worth of their talent, rewrote the chorus for the third time and scheduled another session, which was yesterday. It was an even better session than the first, and we also made serious headway on a second country tune of mine called I Got Religion (And It All Went To Hell).
Now, I can’t lie (well, I can actually, I’m an adman for god’s sake!), I would still be deeply honored to have Buddy put a vocal on Coming Together, but if he can’t, it’s cool. Elliot and Heather sang it so well, I’d wager Buddy might just say, “What do you need me for?” And as for the guitar, I’m just going to say it: Tim Young is among the greatest ever, in my book, and would probably impress the hell out of Buddy. Even Plant.
Just about 40 years ago, The Rolling Stones released Get Yer Ya Yas Out, and me, being always on the musical vanguard finally listened to it around 1978. At the time, I was into Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, Van Halen and many other guitar-driven hard rock bands, and, in my educated opinion, The Stones were lame. I mean, Jimmy Page could run circles around Keith Richards, right? And Ian Pace of Deep Purple vs. Charlie Watts? No contest. As for vocalists, well, Rob Halford was a force of nature while Jagger, like, um, talked instead of sang.
My change of heart came, as it always does, over time. I first checked out Ya Yas based on the recommendation of a camp counselor, who scoffed when I sang the praises of Zep. Per his advice, I bought Ya Yas and put it on and... whatever. I mean, compared to The Song Remains The Same, well, it was amateur hour, I thought. But little did I know Yas Yas and the Stones had hooked me. Bad. Because I kept coming back to that album and every listen revealed more layers, whereas, say, Song Remains the Same started sounding a little stale. Plus, I started suggesting a few Stones covers for the various bands I was in and they were the most fun to play and always sounded pretty good. Especially Jumpin’ Jack Flash. But try as I might, I could never get the guitar parts to sound right on any of the Stones tunes we played and my obsession with figuring out all things Keith began.
Finally, in college, a friend showed me the all mighty open G tuning that Keith uses for so many Stones hits. Within months, I’d learned Honky Tonk Women, All Down the Line, Start Me Up and many more but one song still defied my attempts to learn it and no matter how many ways I tried to play Jumpin Jack Flash from Ya Yas it just sounded wrong. After college, when I was G.I.T., I asked couple of the instructors to help me, but the disdain these virtuosos held for Keith was palpable and their attempts to help me were somewhat half-hearted. And wrong.
It would be several more years before I finally learned the secret to the Ya Yas version of Jumpin Jack flash and it had two parts: an open tuning and a capo. The revelation came in a magazine article that walked through several examples of The Human Riff’s finest work, and when I first strummed out the song according the directions, it was... still wrong. I consulted the directions again and then followed them very, very carefully and, well, suffice it to say, I played Jumpin Jack Flash for days.
In the end, the quest Ya Yas sent me on changed the way I listen to music, changed the way I play it, and changed the way I write it, all for the better I think. Before Ya Yas, music was in two camps for me: songs and performance. In the song camp were Paul Simon, the Beatles, and a few others. In the performance camp were all the hard rock bands, with their crazed solos and stage antics. Ya Yas brought the two together for me. The album is neither song nor performance, it’s just music and everything matters: the groove, the hooks, the lyrics, the playing, the crowd, the sound, the mistakes, everything. Yes, I know the album was doctored in the studio, but I don’t care. Get Yer Ya Yas Out has stood up to more listenings than any other album, BY FAR, for me, and it set me on a musical path I have never left and probably never will.
Ages ago, when I was living in L.A. and going to G.I.T., my roommates, Mike Northcutt and Erik Eff, and I got into a late night music debate about who was a better singer: Mick Jagger or Steve Miller. My position was that Steve Miller was just another dude who could sing on key, big deal, whereas Jagger was something much more. Mike’s position was a whole lot simpler, he just liked Steve Miller a lot more than he liked Jagger. I was aghast, appalled, surprised, befuddled. Steve Miller a better singer than Mick Jagger? I couldn’t believe anyone, much less a killer musician like Mike, would think otherwise.
I dug in my heels and laid out my theory about there being fundamental levels of talent in the world and Jagger was on a way higher level than Steve Miller. When I finished, I thought I had a made a persuasive, cogent argument for my position. But Mike’s response was emphatic: “I like Steve Miller more.” Finally, Erik weighed in... on Mike’s side. I couldn’t believe it, Erik Eff, co-writer of White Punks Dance Too Fast (listen below!) and Turkey Franks, two seminal punk songs we had recently penned together (listen below!), was voting for Steve Miller over Jagger? I took a huge swig of beer and prepared to deliver my argument again. But Erik clarified. He explained that he didn’t agree with Mike about Steve Miller being better than Jagger, just that art was subjective and Mike liked different stuff from me. I tried to argue that over time Mike’s opinion would change, he would see the light, etc, blah, blah. But in the end, I agreed with Erik and to this day, I struggle with why.
I can’t deny that one person’s art is another’s trash but surely some art is fundamentally better than other art. I mean, Blowin’ In the Wind is a better song than We Built This City On Rock and Roll, right? I think so, but plenty of people would disagree with me. In fact, I could argue until I was blue in the face about how Dylan’s tune is more innovative, has far better lyrics and incited social change while Jefferson Starship’s tune is rife with cliches, has a terrible melody and sounds like it was recorded by robots. But if someone simply likes Starship more than Dylan, I will never prevail. And this where discussions about the market always end up. Does a song’s popularity indicate its quality? I think not. I mean, there are so many songs I just love that have never seen much in the way or airplay or sales, and many, many moreI hate that are on the god-damned radio all the time.
And yet, if the goal of the artist is to create popular music, as mine is, the market can’t be ignored. But it is not, as I wrote in an earlier post “a reasonable judge of my abilities as a songwriter”. Nope, I’m with Bret now, who commented that the market is “a pretty indirect indicator of quality.” All the market really does is let people choose what they want and what they’re willing to pay. And what people want is often completely unrelated to quality.
So down the road, if no one buys my songs, either to license them or listen to them, I won’t necessarily think I suck as a songwriter. But I will be disappointed in not reaching my goal, which, for the record, is modest: at the very least, I would like to make enough money to buy a nice guitar, say, $3,000. At the most, I would like to be able to recoup my recording investment (about $50,000) and, going forward, be able to finance my music with the money it earns (probably about $15,000 annually). And either way, I’ll need a little cooperation from the market!
(By the way, in case you’re wondering about the photograph, it’s of Jake the Cat, who is sitting in the very room where that discussion from so long ago took place, possibly even listening to said discussion and thinking humans are odd.)
When I was in my teens, anyone in his late 20s seemed old, but as I got into my 30s you had to be in your later 40s and now, as I enter my later 40s, well, no one really seems all that old at all, especially if old means you are done living and, as Townes van Zandt put it (in a different context) just waiting around to die.
This is heartening, to say the least, but especially so as it applies to the world of music. For taking stages around the world are “old” guys and “old” people are going to to see them in droves. Of particular note is James Williamson, who was in the original Stooges with Iggy Pop but left music for decades to become a business executive. Today, following an out-of-the-blue phone call from his true boss (that would be Iggy) he is now back on the road playing hard rock. How cool is that? The man is sixty. Also, think about Jagger out there in his late sixties,or Dylan or McCartney.
Most heartening of all to a guy like me -- a guy getting started late in his quest for rock stardom -- is Buddy Miller. I read recently that he didn’t even make his first album until he was in his early 40s. And now, a mere ten years later or so, he’s recording an album with Robert Plant, who, by the way is also “old”.
So there’s hope for me yet, I think. If I can just make a great album, work hard to promote my work and get a few lucky breaks, rockdom just might welcome me with open, tattooed arms.
Everyone involved in the arts muses on what defines success and almost no one wants to admit that it’s popularity (nor should they necessarily). Additionally, it is deeply uncool to care much about money. “Do it for love and the money will follow,” intones the true artist, “and if it doesn’t, well, fuck the world.”
I am uncool.
Because I’ll say it right here and now: I want to make money from my art and I am not above calling the marketplace a reasonable judge of my abilities as a songwriter, especially as a songwriter who is seeking to create popular music. Yes, I love quirky music, I love stuff that’s completely weird and unconventional and I fully admit that progress is made at the fringe not at the center. Rock needs Pink Floyd, The Police, The Violent Femmes, The Beatles at their weirdest, Bowie and all the others who have pushed the boundaries out a little farther. But I will argue that even at their most odd, these acts never completely walked away from the tenets of popular music -- a build, a strong chorus, a compelling (if ridiculous) lyric. Like any great craftsman, they didn’t say, “You know, chairs are a lame.” Instead, they said, “Chairs are cool, but they’ve gotten boring, how could I improve the common chair, freshen it a bit, get people to say, ‘wow, cool chair?’” And that’s me, really, just trying to take a popular musical form and do my best to improve it a little, or, at the very least, do it really, really well. And when I finish a song I want to be able to play it for others and have them say, “Wow, cool song, I gotta hear that again.”
Call me a whore, a sell-out, a fake, I don’t care. I could care less whether anyone thinks I’m an artist. But if no one likes my songs, well, that would break me in two. Maybe even three.
(This post was inspired by a recent comment from Bret. Thank you, Bret.)
Last week, Catherine and I took time off from our busy pool schedule to drive from Palm Springs to Joshua Tree. We went during the early afternoon, so the light was not photo perfect, but still, in a place like Joshua Tree, even the shadow-starved light of midday is pretty cool. And with rocks like the one in the photo, well, what’s not to love?
The other night, I got rejected, straight up, no debate. It happened at a West Coast Songwriters song screening and, as with every other time I’ve been rejected (and there have been many!), it taught me something.
