Tag Archives: music

The Rise and Fall of Mega Music Bands

Memoirs, Music, Uncategorized, , , , ,

Years back, I was the security investigator for a major hotel chain, and I had been assigned to one of their large properties in San Francisco. As a somewhat superfluous member of that institution’s security department, it was never really understood where I stood in the chain of command, but it was always assumed that I was probably somewhere near the top, but never high enough to be one to make actual decisions. For a young man fresh out of the military, it was kind of comfortable because being in such a position meant access to whatever was going on without much of the responsibility for what was happening. If I had to sum it up, I was an executive at just looking good and being present for anything important happening.

Well, one of those things that happened was a major convention for a national music organization that sponsored a major headliner show featuring Huey Lewis & the News with an opening act by a young group Wilson Philips.

Now, at this time, Huey Lewis & the News was probably one of the biggest bands in America. And Wilson Philips, which acted as their starter band, was gaining a lot of traction with three hit songs that had been released earlier that year. So, it was expected that a lot of people were going to show up for this shindig to see the hottest show in town.

As this “important” security person, I was literally right there in the wings of the stage as the bands went on to perform. Around me were all sorts of music insiders who had serious clout with various record companies. And as I was dressed in a suit rather than casual wear, it actually appeared I was more connected to this industry than I was. In reality, I was the glorified security, but because my position was mostly a specialty of remaining undercover, people just assumed I was part of their crowd.

So, why am I sharing this? Well, one of the perks of this kind of position and such placement is that you begin to discover that musicians quite often are quite bored backstage and are constantly inundated with attempts by industry people to get their attention. My focus is always on just watching the crowd, so I kind of stood out because I was one of the few people there who didn’t appear all that interested in trying to gain the attention of the people who perform on stage. As a result, these stars had a tendency to sidle up next to me and start conversations.

And there were many of them, but one of them struck me as more interesting than the others. Chynna Philips, the lead singer for Wilson Philips, was wandering around backstage after their set, while Huey Lewis & the News were performing. She stood next to me and said: “Aren’t they great?”

I nodded and said, bluntly: “They used to be my favorite group.”

She seemed kind of surprised by my statement. I assumed most people probably spoke in awe of that band to her as she was basically delegated to being the starter band for a rock band that was extremely popular at the time. “Used to?” she said.

I nodded. “They’re kind of on their way out. Bands like yours are going to quickly replace them.”

She seemed actually pretty interested and then continued talking to me about Huey Lewis & the News, music in general and how interesting the industry was. Then she mentioned she needed to use the restroom, and did I know where one might be. I think she had realized I was some kind of higher up with the hotel because a couple of the security officers had walked over to me to pass on information to me while Chynna and I were talking. So, I walked her through the bowels of the infrastructure of the hotel to take her to the women’s restroom, choosing that path because I knew it would keep onlookers from intercepting her during the journey (something I’m sure happened quite often to a musician who was dressed in a very Hollywood-ish type ensemble for her performance.

During out trip, she shared a lot of interesting information about herself and the industry, and to be honest, I think she was just happy she was able to talk freely without having to answer questions as a “star”, which probably was the only kind of conversation she had been entertaining since gaining mass celebrity as a musician in a very popular band.

Anyway, this story isn’t really about that encounter, but to point out that she introduced a really interesting subject to me, something I hadn’t given much thought to before, and that’s that bands have an interesting life cycle that almost always seem to lead to inevitable conclusions. Even the band Wilson Philips made that journey, gaining mega fame almost overnight and then disappearing in a wisp of smoke so soon after appearing on the horizon.

What I hadn’t mentioned is that right before my conversation with Chynna Philips, one of the band members of Huey Lewis & the News was fuming backstage before they went on. This was while Wilson Philips was playing their set. But as I watched him, I had no idea what was bothering him, although he wasn’t focused on the music playing; something else seemed to have triggered him. And then they went on and did their full set, putting on what I honestly thought was one of their best performances to date. However, when they left the stage and walked by those of us on stage, I remember one of the stagehands saying “Good show!” to them as they passed him, and that musician gave him the dirtiest look I’ve ever seen from one man to another. I doubted the two of them even knew each other (that look he gave was more a “how dare you!” than a “Not this again!”). It was right about that time that I determined this band was about to end, and I didn’t know anything personal about any of their dynamics.

However, a short time later, the band fizzled and died.

This got me to thinking that most bands tend to go through this cycle of discovery, mega stardom and then collapse soon after. It’s almost as if they are only designed to last a certain amount of time before they implode and dissolve.

So, I thought I would focus on the different reasons why bands collapse after they reach their apex of success. So, generally, what are these reasons?

  1. Break-up: The quintessential example of this is probably the Beatles, a band that broke into the stratosphere and then imploded one day after recording “Let It Be”. It’s that one band that so many wished would have gotten back together again, but which turned out to be sustainable with each member alone until, unfortunately, several of their members lost their lives. As of now, two members are still active in their own careers, but the two we lost were definitely legends all on their own. Other groups that have gone this direction (with pushes and shoves to regroup and try again), include: the Eagles, the Everly Brothers, and Fleetwood Mac (although many others probably fit this category).
  2. Departure of a Main Influencer: This happens when one or a few members of a band decide to go their own way, and generally don’t come back. Examples of this include Van Halen when they lost David Lee Roth and Journey when they lost Steve Perry. The bands continue to try to recapture their momentum going forward, but in many cases they are never perceived to be the same powerhouse band they were back when they were previously together. This was somewhat the storyline of “This is Spinal Tap,” even though the band was mostly fictitious (but possibly better than some bands that actually took themselves seriously).
  3. Bands That Take a Bad Turn: This is really the story I probably started telling when I first started this article, as this was, in my opinion, the direction that Huey Lewis & the News took. Back in their prime, HL & the News probably could do no wrong, and it was a band that was at the forefront of setting trends during this period. And then, out of nowhere, they sort of died off. Strangely enough, I kind of predicted this was going to happen the first time I heard their last big hit, Hip to Be Square, in which it really felt like the band was trying to carry-over its coolness factor by purporting to be so cool that it could do so while being a total square. It sort of set them off on a trajectory of obsolescence.
  4. The Trend is Over: As much as I liked Wilson Philips, this was the direction they took when they released their second and third album. People were thrilled with their first album, but the follow-up albums felt a lot like they weren’t breaking any new ground. And they had received so much play time with the first album that people generally didn’t perceive any reason to want to continue buying much of the same. This is why a lot of groups really need to go big with their second and third albums, because the public is extremely fickle when it comes to music. If the audience doesn’t feel like the band is growing, quite often they will turn off the band going forward. A good example of bands and entertainers that have defeated this problem are Taylor Swift, Kiss, Madonna and AC/DC. While I definitely wouldn’t lump their music in the same category, their sustainability is about as legendary as the Rolling Stones.
  5. A Primary Member Dies: This is quite similar to one of the main influencers leaving, except that there’s not going to ever be a reunited tour somewhere off in the future. Lynyrd Skynyrd, besides being one of the hardest bands to spell correctly, was already established as a powerhouse in the music scene when its lead Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and back-up singer Cassie Gaines died in a plane crash in South Carolina; while the band has tried to recover with new players over the years, it has never reached the apex it achieved during those earlier years. Other bands that lose one influential member to death quite often lead to their demise as well.
  6. Unpopular Music Direction: From time to time, a band will have had a career of solid music and then take a completely different turn in its music, which immediately causes its audience to seek other entertainers instead. While this is a more subjective category, such bands can be included with this designation as Jefferson Airplane, Chromatics, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. What makes this category controversial and debatable is that quite often musicians that go this direction can make massive strides moving forward, but just in a completely different venue.

If anything can be said about the whole phenomenon of music sustainability, it’s that the artists rarely know what’s about to happen to their longevity before it happens. But that one evening that Huey Lewis & the News performed, it was obvious that that musician started to realize things were starting to unravel for his group. Either that, or he was just generally a sour person.

But one thing that was for sure was that Huey Lewis & the News stopped being the powerhouse it once was and no attempts to recover that lost popularity was ever going to succeed. So they may have been hip to be square, but unpopular was never going to be cool.

Revisiting the Rock Ballad Decades Later

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The other night, I was watching a video of the singer Meatloaf and a rendition of “Paradise By the Dashboard Light”. This is a song he made famous with Ellen Foley, and in case you missed the 1970s and the next few decades after, it tells the story of a young couple who are on a date in the guy’s car, and he starts to get a bit randy. And then he tries to go all the way. When he tries, it goes into baseball metaphors, and then there’s a huge confrontational scene where she makes him pledge his love for her before they can “go any further”. It ends like most love stories do: They can’t stand each other and are stuck with each other for life. Okay, maybe not like all love stories, but you get the idea.

When this song was first released, Meatloaf was fresh from the oven at about 26 years old. At the time, he could kind of get away with being a teenager, as the song suggests. And she was pretty young, too. So, it made a lot of sense.

The song basically became a metaphor for that date that goes a bit too far (or the one that caused dating to turn into something much more significant). It’s a great song opera and tells an awesome story.

So, why am I talking about it?

Well, we’ve slow forwarded to many decades later, and Meatloaf is now 71 years old. And last night, I caught a remake of the song where he performs with Patti Russo, who is much younger. Personally, I think the original version is so much better as Ellen Foley really has a voice that just brings home that song while Patti Russo seems to be more of an accomplished singer but seems more focused on sounding good rather than being as gritty as the original singer.

But what really gets to me is the sort of criticism I sometimes have when an old band or singer continues to sing old songs that are more relevant to that performer being much younger. Like Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll”. When she first sang it, it was a great song, and I could see a young Joan Jett picking up a 17 year old kid in a bar. But now, with her being somewhat beyond Cougar-age, her cruising for 17 year old boys seems a bit out of place.

And that’s the sense I get when I think about Meatloaf on his sexual conquest of high school kids. It’s really hard to watch him sing this song, realizing that he’s been receiving Social Security for the last six years. But then, I sometimes have to remember that the point of the song sometimes gets lost on me, and that it’s really about an older person reminiscing about a date in a car when he was a young man. When I think of it that way, it’s fine. But when watching a video with a 71 year old guy and a woman who looks like she just got out high school (although, for the record, I’m pretty sure she’s at least in her twenties during that video), it probably doesn’t help that her “costume” in that video happens to be an attempt at a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit. That pretty much reminded me that it’s no longer a geriatric memory but some old guy with some very young girl. And that just makes it somewhat uncomfortable.

But it’s a good song. I digress.

Is Taylor Swift Finally Achieving Her “Hip to Be Square Moment” of Her Career?

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Maybe she'll write a song about the relationship we never had
Maybe she’ll write a song about the relationship we never had

The other day, I was listening to a song on the radio, and it took me a second to realize it was one of the later Taylor Swift songs (from her 2012 album, Red), called I Knew You Were Trouble. As the song played, it started to dawn on me that I recognized it as a Taylor Swift song not because it was a great song (some of her earlier work has been phenomenal, like Enchanted) but because it had that same “I broke up with some guy and here’s another song about it” feel to it. The song wasn’t all that inspired, and for the first time, I actually found myself thinking, wow, this is the first time I’ve heard a Taylor Swift song that almost feels generically written to be a Taylor Swift song. And that immediately brought up the thought of a song I hadn’t thought about in ages, and that song is “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News. I guess I should sort of explain.

You see, back in 1986, on the album Fore!, Huey Lewis and the News released a song called “Hip to Be Square”. At the time, the group was riding high on its previous success with its album Sports, and it was seen as a continuation of a really strong career that was only going to be getting stronger. When this album was released, I was working for a large San Francisco convention hotel as a middle manager for the Security Department. Because this was a large convention hotel, we often received huge gatherings of hue corporations and industries, and one of them was a massive celebration of national record companies. Being a convention that catered to industry insiders, huge acts performed, and on one evening, the recently VERY successful music group Wilson Phillips was opening for Huey Lewis and the News. Because it occurred at our hotel, I was there that evening supervising Security staff who were there as the outer rim security for the whole performance. Due to circumstances of just chance, my job required me to wear a suit (not a uniform), so to anyone else there, it looked like I was probably one of the industry insiders who was probably part of the running of the show. This was made readily apparent when Chynna Phillips, their lead singer, stepped off stage after her show (and when Huey Lewis and the News was starting) and walked up to me, asking me if I could help her find a restroom. So, I escorted her to the back areas of the hotel, which was the only way to reach a location that I knew other guests wouldn’t be frequenting (which I wanted to avoid as this was basically a music star who could easily get mobbed by a crowd). Strangely enough, she took to me, and actually had a long conversation with me about music (after I stated I was a big fan of her group and felt that they were definitely on their to a great career, as it was very early in their music run), and then we got into a conversation about Huey Lewis and the News, where she stated she was in awe of their group, and for reasons I don’t even know why I shared, I indicated that Huey Lewis and his group was pretty much on its way out to the pasture. I went through a huge analysis of the song Hip to Be Square and how it was so generic that it showed their group basically lost touch with its musical roots and was either going to need to reinvent itself or never be heard from again. It was actually a really cool, long conversation, and when I brought her back to the backstage area after she finished what she needed to do, we parted in a friendly manner, and I cherished my one chance to have a conversation with someone I actually admired.

Shortly after that, Huey Lewis and the News finished their set and rushed off the stage, moving right by me. It seemed the obvious thing for everyone to say “great show” to them as they walked by, but I never forgot the look I got from the main guitarist of the group when I said it. He looked at me like I was some moron for actually complimenting him on a good show. Right then and there, I realized that it wasn’t just the song that I analyzed that was bringing about their demise; the group itself was no longer ingratiating itself towards the fans and actually looked like they were bothered by the fact that they had fans listening to their music. Not surprisingly, they fell into the “where are they now” file of musicians shortly after this industry concert.

This is kind of the feeling I’m getting with Taylor Swift right now as well. When she first made her launch into superstar ranks, there were already smirks about how all of her music is basically about how she can’t seem to hold a relationship. Hell, one of my earlier articles was a joke about how I was worried that I was going to accidentally get into a relationship with Taylor Swift and then discover she wrote about it in a song. I even imagined some of her lyrics:

You always leave the seat up

Never clean the bath tub

And always watch reruns of Star Trek.

Woooooooah!

Strangely enough, it wouldn’t be that much different from what she seems to be doing with most of her current work. I tend to believe that she has reached her “Hip to Be Square” point in her career, and like most groups that fail after this point, she either needs to reinvent herself in a way we haven’t imagined yet (kind of like Madonna did several times to continue remaining relevant), or she’s going to hit that point where people aren’t interested in going over the same sort of thing with each new album. Of course, there are always people who want nostalgia, but unfortunately, you have to put some time in the mix to make that work.

Nashville: A Great Show That Continuously Reminds Me That It’s a Show

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NashvilleMy Hulu Plus subscription is great for watching current shows, but at some point, and I reached it a few weeks ago, I ended up caught up to all of the shows that I actually wanted to watch. This left me with either stopping my watching of television or finding a new show that I might want to continue to watch. I tried a few, like Hart of Dixie, Killer Women and Salem. But all three of those reminded me of why television is usually the worst place to find quality programming. But then my recommendation queue kept showing me Nashville, and being someone who does like country music, I finally gave it a go.

First off, my recommendation after watching through one and a half seasons of the show is that if you like/love country music, then this show is definitely what you want to watch. The drama, which I’ll get into in a moment here, can sometimes be great, but at other times can become quite generic. But the stars of the show are definitely what make it worth your while. While I was not a previous fan of Connie Britton, her turn as the star of this show is definitely worth the watch. And then there’s Hayden Panettere, who was best known before this as the cheerleader in NBC’s Heroes (“save the cheerleader, save the world!”). In Nashville, she plays a pop sensation who is hitting the end of her 15 minutes of fame, yet is trying desperately to reinvent herself before the audience turns against her. Chocked full of Britney Spears/Lindsey Lohan types of adventures, her character becomes one of those “bad girl” types that you learn to love by proximity alone, and after awhile she becomes quite endearing to the audience so that you cheer for her, even though she’s done some pretty crappy things to other people during her run on the show. Britton’s role as the matriarch of Nashville’s country music is played quite well, and I’ve yet to feel a single scene involving her character has been any waste of time on screen.

Which brings me to the most important part of the show, and that’s the music. Like I said, I’m someone who really likes country music, but more of the contemporary stuff (Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, etc.) than the old die hard country music personalities of old. But what I’ve discovered is that the show is tempered enough to allow pretty much any kind of fan of music to really appreciate what they’re doing with this show.

Some of the music that they showcase in the show is all brand new, designed for the show itself, and some of it is freaking awesome. Some of it is somewhat generic, which you would think should be expected as this is a show that includes a LOT of new music that it is trying to pretend is a major part of country music popularity. This is definitely one of the high points of the show, but strange as it may seem to be that I’m saying this, it’s also one of its limitations. Let me explain.

Several of the characters in the show are up and coming musicians and songwriters, so they are often shown in the process of creating their magic that will later become big sensations. What that has done has created a quasi-fake Nashville that sometimes gets really annoying to watch. Imagine that you just drove into Nashville for the first time, and you’re a budding musician. You’d expect to go through a lot of angst and hard work and then hope that eventually it would just pay off because you stuck it out for years and sacrificed so much. In the show, some kid shows up in town, turns out to be the greatest sensation since Michael Jackson, and is immediately becoming a big star. NOTHING that person writes or sings is bad. It’s all freaking awesome and no matter what he or she performs, it’s the best of his or her game ever.

And that’s kind of what annoys me about the show. Every character on the show is at the top of his or her game 24/7. Even when they’re struggling with personal life stuff, they still churn out stuff that a seasoned musician might take a decade to try to figure out, but they do it in a weekend, or a late night session. Sure, it’s all supposed to be fiction and fantasy, but sometimes it starts to get on my nerves that EVERYONE that lives in Nashville is just another Shania Twain waiting to be discovered. I have yet to see a single performance by someone who wasn’t ready to rock the house if he or she was actually producing n the real world at that particular moment. They play a lot of bars and stuff, which would tell me that at some point there should be a bad band playing somewhere, or a twanging guitarist whose guitar strings break at a crucial part during a solo just once.

It kind of reminds me of the movie The Commitments, which if you haven’t seen, I highly recommend it. The movie is about a bunch of Irish misfits who create a rocking music group that wants to sing blues rock the house. In the beginning, their music is HORRIBLE. They are on stage rocking, but they’re music is so far from being good. Yet, as the movie moves on, they become better, and by the time they do their last performance, they REALLY rock the house, and they’re good. But you saw that transition from horrible to freaking awesome, and you lived it with them. I so want to see that in Nashville because then it would at least show me that these people might be real, not just be some fantasy of what country music wants us to believe it is.

The other problem the show has is what I like to call the Television Friends/Will&Grace Factor, which basically refers to the shows Friends and Will & Grace when they became so famous that they manufactured reasons why famous people should be on the show. Nashville has kind of the opposite problem of those shows, in that when it brings someone “famous” into the show, it’s usually someone not famous enough that they belong on a show that is showcasing the matriarch of country music. One example of what I mean is that they brought in Kelly Clarkson, and two characters were going to write a song for her. Meanwhile, there’s actually a story line going on about a music game show second place winner who is now signed to the label (which when they introduced that character, they were essentially using Kelly Clarkson as a pretty good model for what they were doing). As the REAL Kelly Clarkson showed up in that episode, all I could think to myself was “couldn’t they actually get a real country music star to do that walk-on part instead?” Sure, I like Kelly Clarkson, but that moment in the show called for someone with a lot richer history in country music than someone who just made it as a pop star. It was one of those moments that reminded me that I was watching a television show, and they effectively brought me back to reality when they were trying to do the opposite.

All in all, I think it’s a great show, and I’m still watching it through the last of the second season (the third season starts after summer is over). But those are my thoughts, and to quote a famous, former country music group that is talked around on this show but rarely mentioned: I’m not ready to make nice.

Does Censoring Profanity in Music Diminish the Musician’s Message?

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I picked up the new Pink cd the other day for her album, The Truth About Love. What I noticed is that a lot of her music this time around is filled with profanity. Personally, I don’t mind because I really like her music. But then it got me to start wondering about the purpose behind swearing in music, whether it was necessary, and whether or not the song would change its meaning by filtering out the swearing. This was brought home to me on the shuttle bus trip from the parking lot, when I heard “Blow Me (one last kiss)” on the radio speaker playing on the shuttle. The song, from Pink’s new album, is the first release, and the words “fuck” and “shit” appear quite frequently, including a part where the chorus sings: “I’ve had a shit day/You’ve had a shit day/We’ve had a shit day”. The radio version doesn’t even try to address this, basically sounding like: “I’ve had a it day/You’ve had a it day/We’ve had a it day”. In other words, they just removed the voiced part of the song to make the word miss the “sh” sound to it. This got me to wondering if the song actually still maintains the same meaning. The complaint in the song is that she wants to break up with whomever it she’s with and it’s part of the realization that she had a bad day, he had a bad day, and they both had a bad day, but she still needs to pull the trigger on the relationship. With “I’ve had a it day”, I’m not sure the point is completely made.

But going back to her previous album, Pink Greatest Hits…So Far, her hit F***** Perfect was probably the best example of the problem inherent in a musician trying to be mainstream, sell records, AND be played on the radio.  The actual song was titled Fucking Perfect, and she sings those words throughout the song, but in the radio version, the word “Fucking” is aired out, and all you hear is silence during that moment while she’s saying “Perfect” so you get the impression the song is called “Perfect”. What’s significant about this is that the whole song is about forced conformity, and her real dilemma is that people are forced to be “fucking perfect”, not just perfect. It’s somewhat ironic that the song is changed on her to conform to radio standards, and I would not have been surprised to hear that there were probably radio and studio executives who might have been advocating for her to call the song “Perfect” just to avoid the problems of disc jockeys not being able to say the correct name on the radio when announcing the song. What I did notice on the few radio stations I listed to was a tendency to just call it “Perfect.”

So, my question is: Does changing the author’s wording also change the meaning of the song? Granted, in some genres of music, and with some musicians, there is a tendency to add profanityjust to look cool or hip, but one thing I’ve always noticed about Pink’s lyrics is that she doesn’t appear to be doing it just to get a reaction. This latest album appears to have more blatant profanity than the previous one, but I’m still left thinking that that is just a part of her writing style, and that she probably talks a lot like she writes lyrics.

One day soon, I hope Taylor Swift writes a song about me

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(Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times)

I was just reading that Taylor Swift appears to be in a relationship with one of the Kennedy kids. Last week, I think she was dating one of the Schwarzeneger kids. The week before that John Mayer was complaining about how her song about him (“Dear John”) wasn’t really fair. According to the media, practically all of Taylor Swift’s songs appear to be about ex-boyfriends who dumped her, or were dumped by her.

Therefore, I am now convinced that it is about time that Taylor Swift think about writing a song about me. On the surface, her relationships don’t last very long, so for all jokes and giggles, we can say she and I have already run the course of our tumultuous relationship, and I’ll even accept that she dumped me. I mean, she’s Taylor Swift, and I’m just Duane Gundrum. So, I’m okay with that.

Now, it’s time for the inevitable song about our whirlwind relationship and eventual break up. Which leaves me wondering what great poetry she’d use to explain what went wrong with our romance. I’m thinking (just for some ideas to help her muse build upon):

You always leave the seat up

Never clean the bath tub

And always watch reruns of Star Trek.

Woooooooah!

Or something like that. Whatever she goes with, it will be a big hit and then I’ll finally have served my purpose in life.

So, Taylor, why you always leave me waiting?

Woooooooah!

The Death of Amy Winehouse & the Problem with Santimonious People

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The singer Amy Winehouse died a few days ago in London. From my understanding, she suffered from alcohol abuse and had a difficult time breaking away from the addiction. In the end, she lost her battle, and the world lost a talented young musician. She, like a number of others before her, died at the early age of 27.

I’ll go out on a limb here. I’ve never heard any of her music before. I was not a fan. To be honest, I rarely even followed her antics, other than peripherally hearing about them much like I heard about Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and various other celebrity names that had very little relevance on my normal, daily life. But I did hear about her, and secretly, it always bothered me that everything I heard about her indicated that this was a young woman constantly on a projectory towards where it eventually led her. Many others would point out that they saw it coming, but no one ever really “sees” it coming, and unfortunately, she’s lost, and her talent will never have a chance to create again.

So why am I writing about this? Well, the amount of chatter about her death has started to really bother me. The blogosphere, and the conversations that come from the usual suspects has really gotten on my nerves. People can’t be satisfied with pointing out that her life developed towards a tragic end and then move on from there. Instead, whenever I read about her and saw “common people” comment, I couldn’t help but read how some people can be so really mean towards another human being, even if they may have disapproved of her antics, her lifestyle and/or her way of handling her demons.

Part of the fame of Amy Winehouse involves a direct tie to her battle with alcoholism. There really can’t be any disputing that. She’s one of those artists who created while suffering, and I would argue that a lot of her creativity probably needed a touch of her suffering to make it work. It’s sad, but there have been great artists who needed that sort of connection to develop the work they did. Van Gogh was that type. I suspect so was Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, and Ernest Hemingway. She may or may not have her own place in artistic history, or she might not, but at the same time there are a lot of people who were touched by her music, and I think it does a horrible disservice to their memories for people to go on message boards ridiculing them, her and the music she created. There’s a lot of hatred in this world, and it really makes itself seen whenever an event like this takes place.

Part of the tragedy of Winehouse’s death is that it came at time where it cannot be examined without someone else believing it has to be compared to something else. Salon has a great article on this, where the author Mary Williams talks about how people have ridiculed her death by comparing the tragedy to horrific events in Somalia and even the recent horrible actions of some crazy right-winger in Norway. At what point did we make it so that people cannot mourn the losses they feel without having to be felt that their tragedy is not worthy?

One of the things that started bothering me about this incident was on the weekend when I heard about her death. I was on itunes, and I noticed that the service was trying to milk its customers by selling her most popular work, as if paying Apple money would be “honoring” the artist rather than helping executives at Apple profit from her demise. Then I found out that Amazon was doing something similar, and after awhile you just start to shake your head and realize that we live in a very greedy society that will do anything to make a buck. At some point I really should stop being surprised.

The biggest tragedy to me is that her music might have been great, and I never bothered to pay attention when she was still around. I kind of had that same feeling with Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. I never got to know the music until after he died. Others, however, were big fans long before that happened.

For me, I’ll probably start listening to her work to see if I can ascertain the message she was trying to deliver. She was an artist, and for me it’s important to try to find out what the artist was trying to share. Sometimes, the message is brilliant, and trascends time and space. Other times, the artist just wanted to make you snap your fingers and maybe tap your foot to the beat. And sometimes, we forget that that is important, too. I’ll listen and try to figure it out. If her message is knowledge, I’ll try to discover it. If it was just to make me sway with the rhythmn, that’s okay, too. The tragedy is in never bothering to listen in the first place.

The Music Industry Just Doesn’t Get It…They Lied to Us

Economics, Music, , , , , , , , , ,

You would think with the amount of money that goes into music studios that they would have actually hired someone who is capable of telling the executives what is really going on. Instead, we have a bunch of studio heads that are so convinced they understand the pulse of the consuming public that they don’t have to listen to anyone, and for some reason they’re losing more and more money every year.

The problem emerged in the beginning when music went from albums to CDs and then online. The old paradigm consisted of music studios finding talent, packaging it and then filtering it out to radio stations that then opened the doors for people to rush to record stores to purchase the brand new content. Well, somewhere down the line that model fell apart, mainly because a few little promises made never came through, and then the industry changed overnight as a result.

What I’m talking about was a promise that the music industry made to consumers when albums were on the out and CDs were coming in. The simple promise was that CDs, which were cheaper to make than albums, were going to be cheaper for customers. This was the selling point to get people to give up their vinyl albums and welcome CDs. The promise was that CDs would cost $9.99 all of the time. Well, when CDs first came out, that WAS the price, and then quickly they started to increase to $13.99 and other such prices. Now, if you’re lucky, a CD can be found “on sale” for $9.99 off of the retail price of much more.

We were lied to. Oh, the naysayers will claim such a promise was never made, but for those of us who were paying close attention back then, the promise definitely was made. Instead of following the plan, executives realized that consumers are stupid, or so they thought, so they just went back on their word and sold CDs for what they figured they could get, rather than for how much it was promised.

A funny thing happened right after that. The Internet showed up. You see, if that never happened, the music industry would still be the major entity it was a few decades ago. But no one anticipated that a couple of geeks at universities wanting to talk to each other would lead to something so powerful and so overwhelming. But the Internet happened, and the music industry was in the wrong place at the right time.

The consumer population was kind of pissed at the music industry at this time because of the whole lie thing, and then when the next generation realized that it could get all of this expensive technology for free, they jumped on it. So two things happened at once. The music industry cheated the older customers by lying to them while the younger customers grew up with a new paradigm where they got everything for free. You see, if the music industry hadn’t lied to the older generation, they might have actually had powerful allies on their side. Instead, they had a bunch of pissed off customers who decided to just let the music industry fend for itself. Where these people could have been the “moral” guides to the younger generation, who wants to be the moral guides to people who are doing something you figure the bad guys deserve anyway?

Well, the music industry sat it out, thinking things would fall back in place, but their real ally, musicians jumped ship on them as well. Oh sure, the established musicians were in their corner, but consumers are a fickle sort, dumping old artists for new ones because music really doesn’t have standards that are controlled by executives. Music is music and people will seek it wherever it can be found.

And a lot of future musicians realized that if they wanted to make it in the industry, there was a new direction to take, one that required they take their music directly to the people. This opened up the industry to everyone, and as more and more independent artists showed up, the music industry had less and less control over the content.

That’s kind of where we are today. The music industry is trying to save itself by reestablishing the controls, but no one really cares anymore. There was an attempt to force streaming content under draconian rules, but music executives are starting to realize that this isn’t leading to sales. What the music industry never realized was that the future was going to be somewhat of a free for all because if you can’t trust the industry to do what they promise, then you look elsewhere for results.

Recently, I bought a CD for the first time in about a year. Yeah, it’s been that long. I’m still pissed. It was Taylor Swift’s new album, and it was on sale for $9.99. Imagine that. Anyway, it’s a great CD, but it’s probably the only one I’ll buy for at least another year. I’m one of their solid customers, and it’s taken a long time to bring me back to the market. Before I stopped buying music, I used to buy three or four albums a week. They’ll never regain the market share they had before. It’s just not going to happen.

Like I said, the music industry lied back when it needed to win over its customer base. So, hopefully as these executives find new jobs mowing lawns, or whatever it is unemployed music executives are capable of doing, they’ll remember it was really their fault. And they should keep in mind that if they promise to mow someone’s lawn and then go back on their promise, they’re probably not going to get paid. The real world is kind of mean that way.

Grandpa Alex and “The Bologna Song”

Memoirs, Music, , , , , , , , , ,

My grandfather was a brilliant musician. While he couldn’t handle his liquor, he lived one step below a state of perpetual poverty, and he died way too early for someone of his passion and age, he had a gift for music like no other I’ve met in my limited lifetime. His instrument of favor was the mandolin, but he was the kind of man who could pick up a musical instrument, turn it over in his hands a few times, blow into it (or run his fingers against the strings, or bang on its surface) and he would have that device mastered in minutes. I’m not kidding about this. I handed him my violin as a child, watched him look at the bow curiously, pluck a few notes on the strings, run the bow across its surface a few times and then managed to actually start playing a novice tune. In an hour, he was composing music on it. After a few hours, you would have sworn he studied under several master violinists for years.

That gift was supposed to pass down to me. My mom was his only child, which meant she was supposed to inherit the talent, but she suffered a little too much in life to ever have the time or discipline to master a musical instrument. She died early, after a life of pain and suffering. Therefore, it was left to me to somehow be the prodigy that should have followed her musical genius of a father.

So I ended up learning how to play the violin. It was never my favorite instrument, and I was always looking for ways to take short cuts with it. My passion was the drums, but in my upbringing, you didn’t really get a choice of what you wanted to learn; you were given a musical instrument and then told “that’s the one you’re learning.”

I was never really good at the violin. I kept breaking from the music sheets and performing what I wanted to perform instead of what was on the paper. The director really didn’t like that. He never liked hearing something that wasn’t what he was expecting from the band. After a number of years of never really making him comfortable with my musical discipline, I sort of fell off the band wagon, for lack of better words, and I lost my interest.

Instead, I managed to end up in a choir instead. At six years old, my mom snuck me into the Santa Monica Boys’ Club (you had to be seven), mainly because she needed some kind of day care so she could work full time, and she couldn’t afford anything other than letting me run free until she returned home from work. The Boys’ Club was her answer. And within my first few days, I found a niche I didn’t realize I was seeking.

It happened on one of my first days when I was playing table soccer in the main room of the place with one of my friends from the place. One of the managers of the place announced that try outs were now being held for the Boys Choir. Not really interested in something like that, I found myself interested when that manager grabbed me and practically dragged me screaming up the stairs to where try outs were taking place. It turned out that they were “recruiting” everyone that was there at the time.

The director of the boys choir was a well known music industry man named David Forrester who was volunteering his time to create this new “event” at the Boys Club. Each one of the kids was required to sing a quick part of a song as part of the try out, and when it came time for me to do so, I wasn’t really expecting much, but as I blurt out the words to whatever song it was they had us singing, Forrester stopped the piano player and had me repeat what I had just sung. So I did. Then there was a bit of a commotion, and Mr. Forrester pulled me aside into another room and had me run through a scale of notes (although I didn’t know that’s what he was doing at the time). He then spoke to one of the managers, and I was allowed to go back downstairs and play table soccer some more.

I figured I had failed the try out, and that was that.

A few days later, my mom took me to a place in Culver City where this guy’s office was.  His office was extremely intimidating as he had pictures of himself with extremely famous music and movie stars, like Elvis, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Martin Dean. At the time, I had no idea who any of these people were, but my mom was extremely impressed as she walked around the room.

When he entered the room, he spent some time trying to convince my mom to allow me to take private lessons with him to develop my voice. I remember my mom turning him down, explaining that we just didn’t have that kind of money. He told her it wouldn’t cost us anything, that he really wanted to do this because he had heard something he hadn’t heard in a long time. After some time, she relented.

For the next few weeks, I attended singing lessons with him, and I was, as would happen with any six year old, convinced that this was some kind of punishment. I wanted to be in the regular choir with the rest of the kids, and he was telling me that I wasn’t ready yet. I wondered how come all of those other kids were able to get to start without having to take singing lessons.

When the training was over, I started up in the choir, and soon after that I ended up becoming the soloist for the group. And it was a thrilling experience that continued until we made a few records, and let’s just say that it was a life-changing set of events.

But I had been talking about my grandfather, because during this time, he was really the one encouraging me to embrace this part of my education. All of this time, I kept thinking that I wasn’t a real musician because I hadn’t been actually playing an instrument. I was just singing. And even though I was getting a lot of attention, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t really doing what was possible, considering my heritage.

So, during these years, my grandfather bought me a really cheap guitar, and I started playing with him while he would sit in the park, entertaining everyone who walked by. Unlike other park musicians, he never had an open case to ask for money; he played just because he liked to entertain people. And at the age of about seven and eight, I played right along side him with my little guitar, even though to this day I’m not sure I was playing it correctly.

One of the songs he used to play was an old classical tune from Chopin that he added lyrics to and called “My Bologna Song.” For years, I thought he invented that song all by himself, and then I was at a fancy shindig while at West Point, and the classical version of the song started playing on cello and violin. And all I could think to myself was, Grandpa’s version was so much better. Why did that Chopin guy have to steal his song?

Remembered lyrics to Grandpa Alex Romanuk’s “The Bologna Song”:

Just because you think I’m bologna

I’ll always be with you

Just because you think I’m bologna

I’m still in love with you

Everybody thinks I’m bologna

You know it’s all for you

Everybody thinks I’m bologna

As long as I have you

That’s all I remember of the song, but every time I hear the music play on a radio or in some movie, it’s always The Bologna Song to me.

Thumbs up for new Court Yard Hounds CD

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Most people are probably wondering who the hell is Court Yard Hounds, which is part of the interesting approach to this band. First off, the band is essentially two women: Emily Robinson and Martie Maguire, who you might know as the two back-up singers for the Dixie Chicks. Natalie Maines has been taking time off, so the two of them decided to release their own music while waiting for Maines to jump back on the music wagon again.

It’s a really interesting CD, too. The first release of “The Coast” has been climbing the charts lately, and it’s a pretty cool song. The other hit they have going for them on the album is “See You in the Spring”, which is a duet between Robinson and Jakob Dylan. But so far the really power ballad on the CD, in my opinion, is Ain’t No Son, which is this song that starts off very nice and sweet in typical country style and then kind of just erupts. The fascinating thing about these musicians is that, like their last album, Taking the Long Way, their music is really hard to pin to one genre; sometimes it has no tie at all to anything you’re used to. Ain’t No Son is one of those kinds of songs. It starts out with a sweet, little fiddle/banjo jingle and then just builds into something hard to describe.

The only thing missing is Maines’s distinct voice. Robinson, who does the main vocals on all of the songs but Gracefully (which is sung by Maguire) sounds a lot like Sheryl Crow without that distinctive Crow guitar. But the variation is definitely worth the journey until the Dixie Chicks reunite again.