The Advertising Thing

I’m in the process of adding ads to this thing, strictly as a means of survival. I’m sort of opposed to it, but obviously not enough to shut ‘er down. Nevertheless I am a bit sad about it in some ways and thought that some clarification was in order.

Everyone that blogs is to some degree narcissistic. I have to be, because I’m an entertainer. And because I’m an entertainer I have no problem asking people to pay for my “deep thoughts.”

But ads are a bit insidious, first of all because they seem so innocuous. Just having the things sitting there subtly changes the experience. Even if I tell you (and you believe) that I have no investment in any of the specific companies (and in fact, may have no idea which ads are being “served” at any given moment.) Their presence changes the game, just like billboards in the outfield of a baseball field change the game a bit.

The second point is that they will help make up for a lack of proper income (ie. income from sales of albums and concerts.) That in and of itself is a deal with the devil. How much income is acceptable from a source that is not your main deal before you gotta worry? In other words, at what point do I stop being a musician who blogs and have to admit that I’m a blogger who does some music. (A similar problem exists in my actually ‘playing.’ I’m currently a songwriter who makes some money playing guitar. But as CD sales decline when do I start to say that I’m a guitar player who happens to have a couple of CDs available on-line?)

In both cases, I’m concerned in taking your attention off of what I want you to focus on and allowing it to drift somewhere else. I’d much prefer that you focus on the ‘me’ as a composer and not so much on the ‘me’ that plays guitar or blogs. But when you need to play guitar to get people to buy the records then you give up some of that control. But at least there’s a direct line back to the songs.

However, when you take ad money for people reading about what you think about your work then you’re just begging to lose the connection back to the songs. It is now valid to see me as a guy who writes some copy just to draw clicks.

And if that’s the case? Man, I better learn to write a lot more interesting stuff!

The Lesson Of Michael?

After I heard about Michael, I started thinking about this guy ‘Bev’ I worked for years ago who helped organise The Crossroads Festival. For those not ‘down’, this is a very famous get together for Transvestites and Transsexuals. People come from all over the country for the a totally swank party where the only rule is: Ya Gotta Look Fabulous.

As I said, I worked for the festival. They would put a call out for musicians to play in a big band at their big Gala Ball and it was a gig that was coveted by almost everyone in the biz… In addition to being paid an UNFUCKIN’ BELIEVABLE amount of money for a 4 hr. job of really excellent charts, we were all fed scrumptously and generally had a total blast.

The common thing about all these gals (?) in their Halston gowns was that all of them wish they were someone or something other than what they were. And this ball was a chance for them, if only once a year, to live the dream. Looking around at all their feminine beauty, you’d feel a tinge of sadness because they were all so perfect.
…er… except for the ginormous lump that would occasional mar the curve of the Versace cocktail dress. And …er… the adam’s apples might temporarily blow the illusion of femininity. Oh yeah, and sometimes the body hair might bring me back to reality for a second. But except for the baritone voices and the odd bald spot? They were ALL WOOOOOOOOOOOOMAN.

Unlike most of us, Michael got a chance to live out his dream 24/7/365. But inside? He just wasn’t what he tried to be. And no matter how hard ya try? Every ball comes to an end. No surgery makes ya what you ain’t.

Having limits on our dreams and fantasies is what keeps most of us grounded. As much as the ladies of Crossroads dream of a world where they can wear capri’s and floral scarves any ol’ time without anyone batting an eye, the fact is, they know they can’t. Or rather, they can, but they have to develop a pretty thick skin. (Moisturise, ladies!)

If you were Michael? You could afford to have people tell you all the time how fabulous you were but you’d never develop the inner toughness that the ladies of Crossroads take for granted. Evidently he paid through the nose to maintain his little world.

I wish that he could’ve been happy with his manifold accomplishments. He did so much that was real. Why does the human heart so often want and need what it cannot have?

Regardless of your feelings about the guy’s persona, stop for a moment and think how damaged he must have been; to have so much that was real and still it was never enough. Is that genetic? Or did something happen from which he couldn’t recover? I’ve had friends who were survivors of Auschwitz. And these people were genuinely happy! What have they got that Michael didn’t?

So, me being me, I gotta bring this round to me, of course. And here it is:

I think about how much crap I gotta put up with in order to sell my pathetic lot of records; how much pressure there is to ‘go straight’ and get a ‘real’ job. Then I think about how much crap the ladies of Crossroads have to put up with to proudly live their lifestyle and all my whining goes out the window.

At the end of the day? I really cannot mourn Michael all that much. He had it all. If he coulda been ‘fixed’ (ie. made to be happy and stable–not what you were thinking!) he coulda done it. He had opportunities that you or I will never have.

I salute the ladies of Crossroads. If they can be happy, I can be happy. And Michael sure as shit shoulda been able to be happy.

I’ll continue to listen to his stuff, fer sure. Like Charlie Parker or Wagner have aptly demonstrated, you don’t have to have a high level of moral fiber in order to make great art.  But to me the takeaway is a cautionary tale about a lack of personal responsibility. He shoulda found a way to be happy without all the silly crap. Forget all the pedophile junk and the giraffes and mansions. To me he was emblematic of many of my fellow baby boomers—he just never had the stones to grow up.

Big Champagne: P2P Re-Purposed For Profit

A while back I ranted on the enormous number of ‘free’ downloads of my stuff.

Now here is a very interesting article about how at least one company is making serious money helping record companies convert some of this activity into sales.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare.html

In short, Big Champagne gathers stats on P2P file sharing data as demographic marketing information; the frequency by which songs and artists are being downloaded in various cities, states and countries. They then sell this in digestible chart and spreadsheet form to record companies so they can determine which artists to push in which markets.

So while the record companies are trying like crazy to shut down P2P sites, they are also not above getting whatever benefit they can out of their predicament.

I’m sure you’re at least vaguely aware of all the valuable medical information that came out of those Nazi experiments during the war. Same deal. People have to hold their nose to use such data, but it’s just  too valuable to ignore simply because the source was so reprehensible. And the labels are willing to pay through those nose to get it.

See the record companies have to swallow hard because, frankly, their own marketing efforts just don’t work. The data that Big Champagne offers is far more accurate than anything they get by normal market research.

The irony is so rich it oughta be illegal. Like paté. I love it.

Does this mean I’ve ‘seen the light’ regarding illegal downloading? Heck no. Just because some small good is coming out of P2P for record companies doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly lost my mind. As an artist I see zero personal benefit to this dynamic. And furthermore, I think the record companies better not get to enamoured of this new found marketing data lest they take their eye off the ball.

What Big Champagne offers is a lot like using your credit card to make mortgage payments. Yeah, it’ll work. For a while. And then?

If the record companies need good marketing data to make good records again, I understand. And I wish them all the best of luck. But even though I dearly love the idea of them having to use info gleaned from bad acts as a fabulous form of payback, I really do want to see the industry find a way to get good info about users without needing them to do the very things (file sharing) that are killing creativity as a way to make a living.

To me, Big Champagne is kind of like pollster who interviews people to find out what they’ve stolen as they exit each shop and uses that to determine what kids like. You shouldn’t have to learn how many people are boosting iPhones in each city to learn where to put one’s marketing dollars.

Bamboo Percussion

My neighbour has a totally annoying and invasive bamboo forest which is constantly threatening my garden. As part of my strategy to fight this monster I began cutting this stuff back and turning the dead into musical instruments.

I’ve made a range of things from Boobams to Kung Fu style transverse flutes to big  clavés like the ones you see polynesians beating on at those touristy Luaus.

Making musical instruments is fun and educational. As a starting point I would suggest checking out the action-packed little book ‘Vibrations’ by David Sawyer. It’s pretty much the Bible for DIY noise making projects.

I used various home-made, bamboo percussion sticks and drums extensively on the title song off of the recent Beautiful Sounds album starting at about 6:00 in.

Totally apropos of nothing, at least one inspiration for that section came from a song off an old Cat Stevens’ (néé Yusuf Islam) record ‘Catch Bull At Four’… where there is a percussion ‘breakdown’ in one of the songs using similar timbres.

DIY (Part 2) My Bedroom Vs. Your Bedroom

Way back in the day, I had the great fortune to watch Prince one night doing his thing as a young man all alone in a Minneapolis studio. The talent the guy had was palpable. And the fact that he not only sang like Prince,  played like Prince, but could also run a complex studio? That was really something. No amateur could do that back then. You had to pay your dues simply to learn to get a proper sound on tape.

It’s technically a lot easier to do it yourself nowadays.  The past decade has delivered the same revolution in audio computing that occurred in the mid ’80′s with desktop publishing. The parallels are many and in fact, I would describe most music software programs as something like ‘Desktop Music Publishers’.

Like DTP, DMPs make it very easy for pretty much anyone with the right hardware to create something that kinda/sorta looks ‘professional’. Kinda. Sorta. And like DTP, the output devices have been dumbed-down which can make it harder see the amateur-itude of it all. For DTP, the movement to plain paper, the wide availability of ‘templates’ and the low-res web masks much crummy technique. For music software, MP3s tend to obscure sound quality. Loops can make almost anyone sound like, well… almost anyone.

This has happened just as the record industry has changed from being a farm system, that hired talent and worked it through a system, grooming talent up to The Big Leagues, to basically something resembling Hollywood–you find a way to make your work of genius on your own and then they help with the distribution. Period. So you have to not only write the great song, you have to make the great record and build the fantastic fan base on your own. Frankly, they are nothing now but financiers.

I dunno if the two trends are causally related, but it’s sure a good thing the technology improved when it did.

The bad news is that DMP, like DTP has created so much bad output that it’s gonna take quite a while I fear before the world learns to recognise The Good, The Bad and The merely Ugly. When anyone who can run a PC wants to make a record real bad. There are going to be a lot of real bad records. And with no record companies to act as gate-keepers of some minimal level of professionalism? Oy veh.

You can say what you want about the evil record companies, but at least when you used to get a ‘real’ record, you were pretty much assured of some basic level of performance and production. I was listening to the Sex Pistols the other day. I seem to recall a lot of attention being paid at the time to how crappy the record sounded. Distorted. Out of tune.  Serious problems with details like a time signature. In other words, it just wasn’t professionally recorded from a basic production standpoint. But we loved it.

The funny thing? When I listen to Anarchy In The U.K. now, the recording quality sounds positively pristine when compared with a lot of the home-brew stuff I routinely wade through on the web. I wonder if the guy in his bedroom can tell why Never Mind The Bollocks is good crappy production and his chef d’ouevre is bad crappy production. Or, put another way, why are Jackson Pollock’s speckles worth $1,000,000 and your bedroom painting accident is only worth a quick laugh on a home movie.

The answer sounds impossibly snobbish and elitist, but the difference between my bedroom production and some other guy’s bedroom production is that I know the difference so the tools don’t matter. I’m not blinded by the gee-whiz vanity of ‘Wow, I’m making a record. Check me out!’ Does that matter? I hope so, insofar as it makes a difference in the end product. I hope one can actually appreciate the difference in. I know one can hear the difference. But appreciate? That’s a toughie, alright.