March 25th, 2009 by Poppy

Today I got an email from Tom:

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a little out there and antiquated, but some good points

This is from Steven Van Zandt’s SXSW address:

Good morning how are we? I see all my people.

Interesting time in our business, is it not?
Now you wish you listened to your parents and went to college, huh?

We are experiencing the biggest changes in 40 years as the main revenue-producing medium switches from the album to, we don’ t know what yet.

Keep in mind that until the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion landed in 1964, the vinyl single ruled what was called the business. it wasn’t exactly the business in truth, it was more like the Wild West with a bunch of freaks, misfits, outcasts, outlaws, entrepreneurs, renegades and hooligans running around making it all up as they went along.

Finally in 1967 the Beatles made an album called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — you can ask your grandfather to borrow his copy — and with that record the album became undeniably king. The difference between 79 cents for a single and $4.95 for an album created a music business.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed we’ve now come full circle back to singles and if you’re wondering what 1962 was like, well you’re looking at it. And if that wasn’t enough to deal with, just to make it interesting, let’s throw in a little worldwide economic holocaust, shall we?

You thought you were having problems a year ago? Heh, those were the good old days.

The truth is it might take a year or two but those things will literally sort themselves out. There will be some revenue model, be it the 360 thing, subscriptions or whatever, and frankly there have been enough boring discussions about the mechanics of our business, already enough to last a lifetime. And as far as the economy, well, Obama’s gonna fix the economy so don’t worry about that.

It’s the third topic I want to look at today. All we ever talk about is the delivery systems for the product, the mechanics, the technology, the infrastructure. I wanna spend just a minute on the topic that never gets discussed in the music business, and that’s the music.

The reason why nobody wants to talk about it, it’s understandable because it mostly sucks. I mean it blows, it’s terrible. It’s (long string of expletives). Who are we kidding here? Nobody’s buying records. No (expletive), they suck.

And I know why. Nobody wants to deal with this but, we have to.
Yeah we are expriencing big changes in the business but more impotrantly, over the last 60 years or so, we have been witnesses to a crisis of craft.

I started to notice this crisis right around the time MTV appeared, not that it’s their fault. One must assume the video was as inevitable as the combustion engine, food preservative, the digital format and all those other horrors of commerce disguised as progress. You could fight it, but you’re better off just adjusting and dealing with it. Save your energy because you’re gonna need it.
And MTV may come back around and save us yet. But more about them later.
Rock n roll is the working class art form. Real rock n roll, traditional rock n roll. The music you hear every week on the Underground Garage and every day on Sirius 25 and XM 59, is equal opportunity, regardless of race, education or how much money you got, since the working class don’t think too much about what is art and what is not. Mostly because they’re too busy working. They spend their time on their craft, the practical useful stuff. So let’s get back to basics for a moment, what is our craft?

Rock n roll had always been a two-part craft, performance and record-making, and that turned into a three-part craft for bands, when songwriting was added after the Beatles changed the world.
That self-contained archetype may have been a temporary blip in the big picture. Recent history started to suggest that the Beatles in that short little period may turn out to be the exception, rather than the new rule.

It was, after all, our renaissance. That approximate 20-year era, from 1951 to 1971, will be studied for hundreds of years to come and still informs everything that today is popular music.

So as to our craft — performance, record-making, songwriting — what happened exactly?

The crisis in performance is, I believe, based on one simple fact. When it started, rock n roll was dance music. One day we stopped dancing to it and started listening to it and it’s been downhill ever since.

We had a purpose, had a specific goal, an intention, a mandate, we made people dance or we did not work, we didn’t not get paid, we were fired, we were homeless. That requires a very different energy. To compel people to get out of their chairs and dance, it’s a working-class energy, not an artistic, intellectual, waiting-around-for-inspiration energy. It’s a get-up, go-to-work-and-kill energy. Rip it up, or die trying.

The advent of the video was just the final nail in the performance coffin, a coffin that had already been constructed by years of excessive immersion in ganja, hashish and all forms of water-cooled bong therapy. You didn’t have to make people dance anymore, they were too stoned to dance.
Now you didn’t even have to play your instrument anymore. All you had to do was act like a rock star and bada-bing you were a rock star.

Well now, there’s a new trend that’s even more dangerous, and this affects songwriting as well as performance. Bands are starting to skip the bar-band phase of their development and I’m seeing it all over the world. The club stage, where ideally you’re still a dance band.

But equally important, you get the opportunity to play other people’s songs, your favorite songs. Analyze them, understand them. All of a sudden, I’m hearing it’s not cool to play other people’s songs. That’s for the less gifted, you know, the losers. That thinking has been extended now to include anybody’s songs, you know any songs that didn’t come from your personal musical genius.

This is a major problem. Performance-wise, the energy you discover, manufacture and harness as a dance band stays with you for the rest of your life. You never lose that. And the analysis you must do while learning to play classic songs is how you learn how to write. The melody, this melody with that chord change, produces this effect. It’s how you learn to arrange. The verses go here, the bridge there, it’s how you learn the specific job of each instrument.

You learn greatness from greatness. Nobody is a born great performer, nobody is born a great songwriter. The Beatles were a club and bar band for five years, and then continued playing covers for five albums, the Stones did about three years and their first five albums. All of a sudden, we think we’re better than them?

Another nefarious infection regarding modern songwriting is the auteur theory, which means the person singing has to be the person writing or else it’s irrelevant. This became dominant as rock n roll became the art form of rock. Beginning in 1965, it was the year the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds and Bob Dylan influenced each other right into a new art form. Suddenly rock was personal.

It was important, and an industry of journalists sprang up to explain it to us. And that was, and is, great, except an inaccurate balance was created between the post-art-form rock and the pre-art-form rock, keeping in mind that the art-form rock was only the last quarter of the renaissance.

It was born in the folk-rock era, continued through psychedelic, country-rock, and into hard rock and the singer-songwriter era, where an inaccurate emphasis on the importance of the self-contained artist has led to the ocean of mediocrity we’re drowning in today.

Journalists work in words, they love words, they are words, so it’s perfectly understandable they labor under the misconception that lyrics are the most important part of the song. They are not and let’s keep in mind, there are of course, major journalist exceptions. The two best rock n roll books are after all Nick Tosches’ “Hellfire,” the Jerry Lee Lewis story, and Dave Marsh’s “Louie Louie,” both about pre-art-form rock and, don’t get me wrong, great lyrics make a song better. I made five political albums and spent months on the lyrics. Just don’t think that’s why people are coming to see your band. Because that is not enough reason. Bob Dylan is the greatest lyric writer that will ever live, but if he wasn’t a great singer and wasn’t able to write, or in the early days steal, great melodies, he’d still be in the Village at Cafe Wha.

The problem with this imbalance is that singers who don’t write or write about the correct subjects,
aren’t taken seriously. And it’s true, in spite of Elvis and Sinatra.

The 15 years of pre-art-form lyrics may not seem as important or meaningful in a social and political way, but as a 13-year-old hearing the super sexy Judy Craig and the Chiffons sing Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry’s “I Have a Boyfriend,” don’t tell me that wasn’t important. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to be that boyfriend. I still do. That was my “Blowing in the Wind,” my “Day in the Life,” or “Sympathy for the Devil,” absolutely. If you wanna write, then learn how to do it.

As one of the great song publishers, like Lance Freed, who were always encouraging young songwriters to co-write with older ones, said, just like it’s important to perform with a purpose, it is equally important to write with a purpose. Whether that purpose is to express your most personal anguish or to simply have a hit record, if you’re gonna do it, do it right.

The third part of our craft is record-making and that discipline has almost completely disappeared.
A record is four things: composition, arrangement, performance and sound. Four different crafts, overseen by a producer, who understands, to some degree, all four elements, plus the big picture of the industry, plus the psychological stuff, being the artist’s psychiatrist, plus the liaison with the business people etc., etc.

Where are they? Where are the real producers, the arrangers, the point being, once upon a time it took an army of very talented people to make records: writers, singers, musicians producers, arrangers, engineers. Now you have to do it all yourself? No wonder everything sucks.

Well, when the major record companies abandoned development, DIY was born, do it yourself. And the auteur theory works well with DIY anyway, so why not?

Well there is one reason why not. Everybody isn’t a star. Everybody isn’t a songwriter, isn’t a singer, isn’t a performer, isn’t a record producer. But who is there to tell them these days, who’s there to help, who’s there to suggest a different direction, to teach, to impose discipline?

Even the majors are starting to adjust, and I hope they succeed because right now in this new paradigm they are useless to us as banks. There’s nowhere to spend their money anymore.
It’s very encouraging and impressive that they stuck with MGMT for 18 months for instance, before it broke. Maybe they look back and learn from Steve Popovich, who stuck with Meat Loaf for over a year, when no one was interested. You know a little bit of this long-term patience is nice to see.
But mostly the majors have passed the creative stuff off to the production companies. There’s nobody home artistically. You know, they can still find a record, and occasionally break one, but they’re gonna have trouble with the second one, because nobody in the company knows how they made the first one.

There’s no development, there’s no long-term thinking, so, as usual, it’s up to the indies, right?
But indies, whoever it is, better establish a new work ethic, better find some new patience, better get back to the basics, and better be qualified to go the distance.

Standards have been set. The standards have been set by Sam Phillips, Leonard Chess, Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, Berry Gordy. You wanna be in the record business, those are the standards we must live up to. We must introduce, re-introduce, a new dedication to the craft. And worry about the new technology and the art later.

Thank you.

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Thoughts?