Crazy Talk!

Industry, Heal Thyself

A recent poll of music consumers reveals what I've long speculated (and personally felt) are the true causes of the withering of conventional music sales in America. The product sucks, costs too much, and is often designed to suck money out of our wallets and nothing more.

Many of those polled noted that the current price point for a vinyl compact disk is at $20 at best ridiculous and at worst a sham. Similarly, they noted that a much more reasonable-feeling price point is the 99-cents charged by Apple's iTunes music store.

This isn't difficult to decode. The record labels aren't operated by music people. It's music industry people now. The focus is on quick return on label investment, quick return on multi-mode marketing of artists (leading to wretched 'duets,' bizarre appearances promoting watches and erectile-disfunction medicines, Super Bowl appearances and Burger King tie-ins), milking it for all it's worth until the public, hungry from eating such thin gruel for 12 to 18 months, moves on to the next puff of air out of the factory. Maroon 5 anyone? Jo-Jo? Didn't think so.

Morning Becomes Concerned

KCRW's Nic Harcourt is apparently the musical brains behind the new guy-from-Ed vehicle "Love Monkey." This concerns me because, well, I think Harcourt is super, but I can't find a way that, even accidentally, this partnership won't diminish him in my eyes. And because he surely doesn't have final say on the content of the show, and there's no way to find out what he does have say over, things like this will make my blood boil: [Lead character Tom] "Farrell's hot new co-worker, Julia, is cool because she gives him a boxed set of all the songs Bob Dylan ever recorded." Right. Doesn't exist.

Turns out Harcourt, whose capacity for enthusiasm about even the most tepid of Swedish bands, also did music for the "Dukes of Hazzard" and "Anchorman" movies.

25 Years Ago Today

I was thinking earlier this week about the anniversary of the death of John Lennon. Mark Chapman shot and killed him 25 years ago tonight in front of his Manhattan apartment building, the Dakota. My wife and I were looking for some Christmas music to play for our son that we would also enjoy, and I came across one my Ringo Starr (which we didn't acquire, natch). What would a 65 year old John Lennon be doing right now? Would the Beatles have reunited before George passed away, succumbing to nostalgia and the lure of easy money? Would John have been one of those talented figures receiving a career revival in the late 90s? Would he have ever stopped making music?

There aren't any John Lennon's today, mostly because we don't let such a thing happen anymore. We tear things down, destroy the mystery and demand all from our artists today. A million little opinions snap and snivel, churning up the endless cycle of hot, hyped, hopeless and gone. The Beatles were like fire; the more we threw at them, the bigger they grew. But the whole time, they were burning up. John was willing to play along with the destruction, because he was a personality that believed everything we said about him.

I'm sad that there wasn't more John Lennon for us to enjoy. I don't know what a genius looks like today, and I don't know what a great man of music can be for these generations. But I knew about one once. And in his sad, ravaged eyes, I see all the lessons we never learned.

The New York Times unearthed the photograph above and this remembrance from photographer Jack Mitchell.

Why Record Labels Will Always Suck

I really thought that we had finally stopped all the bitching from those pigs over at the music labels. "Woe is us," they moaned, "that big bad internet is taking all our revenue." This annoyed me to no end because in reality, they were often producing a product which people got a little nauseous paying real money for. That, in my opinion, fueled the file-sharing revolution. I was part of it, and I'm proud.

I'm proud because it brought us here, to this moment in time where legal music download services have placed the threshold for paying for music precisely at the spot where it belongs: $10. When I first moved to DC about fourteen years ago, a small music chain sold almost every new CD in the joint for $10. (Kemp Mill records, which, after raising its prices has since gone away save for a single, independent location.) It was wonderful and during those first few months in college I hoovered up CDs like a meth addict in the Sudafed aisle.

Therefore it is no coincidence that the iTunes Music store sells CDs for about $10. $18 was too much to pay for a CD, as was $15 and even $12. At $10, I don't think twice about clicking the link and picking up a disc (or two) because this is the threshold that I'm sure careful research, conducted with frequent downloaders like my former self, revealed. In my head, when I was a young music pirate, I knew that to get the album I wanted, I didn't just go willy-nilly downloading stuff. I dug up the entire tracklist, compared time signatures, listened to the whole record to be sure I wasn't getting spoiled goods. I re-downloaded crappy rips of songs, rejected whole albums because they were sonically displeasing. I did all this because $18 is and remains too much to pay for a CD!

Back to the mope-a-dopes over at the music industry. The prices were soaring, they sobbed through their thousand-dollar botox-treated faces, because the big bad Internet was stealing all their profits. We didn't understand, they whined, how expensive it is to make talented artists, plus all the packaging, the raw materials, blah blah blah.

Well, the Internet does its own promotion now, fatty. What once required a team of kids running out to record stores and shipping off from distribution centers now happens on the web with a third of the manpower and twice the effectiveness. And every single one of those electronic CDs that Rhapsody, iTunes, the new Napster and the other services sell is 100% revenue, without a penny for raw materials. No vinyl, no outsourced packaging, no time delay for pressing and shipping, nothing. Record it, upload it and Apple is selling it by midnight.

But these sons of bitches are whining again. They want more money. They think this unadulterated stream of revenue isn't enough. They don't care about the threshold (how I love that threshold), they want more more more. They are perfectly willing and able to make the same mistake they made before, the mistake the now-defunct Kemp Mill Records made. I remember a conversation I had with a manager there when I briefly worked for Polygram as an intern. I asked about the $10 price point and he laughed. He had fought with (in a sense) my bosses because they weren't 'valuing' the music highly enough.

Steve Jobs isn't going to roll over and let them gouge us again, and I think he knows what he's doing. I'm a loyal iTunes customer and I have bought maybe three or four actual CDs in the past two years. Everything else has happened legally on the iTunes Music Store. And if the prices went over that threshold, I think people can probably guess where I'll end up.

Music: Thoughts on Bob Dylan

"John the Baptist after torturing a thief/comes up to his hero the commander in chief/and says tell my great hero but please make it brief/is there a hole for me to get sick in?
"The commander in chief answers him while chasing a fly/saying death to all those who would whimper and die/and dropping a barbell he points to the sky/saying the sun's not yellow, it's chicken."
--Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues, Highway 61 Revisited

What an apocalyptic savior prophet this fucker is, no? Seriously. I'm re-reading his book and I have all his goddamn records and all he says is that he was just writing something and not the voice of a generation at all. Well, with all due respect, sir, bullshit.

Today. <b>Today</b> this man is writing these words for us from beyond history. He recorded this verse forty years ago, and he saw it in our dear leaders of the past and he has packaged it up and sent it to us today.

I have revelations like this one every time I really listen to his words. I hear them about 40 times a week, but I listen less often, to keep from going insane, I believe. On 9/11/01, he released a record which somehow told the story of the events of that very morning and the recent unfolding disaster of Hurricane Katrina. "High water rising/the shacks are sliding down," he wrote blithely, and later in the same song, playing in my office that very morning as I watched our national agony unfold, "coffins dropping in the streets like balloons made out of lead."

Bob's latest gift to me is the collection of alternate takes from the "Highway 61" and "Blonde on Blonde" sessions contained in "No Direction Home," released last week. The music serves as something between a musical travelogue and an actual soundtrack to a new film Martin Scorcese will release this month about the life of Bob, up to his bike accident.

The words of these alternate takes, these lost tracks, are poignant and as any Dylanophile, I find myself poring over the differences between these versions and the final released versions for both verse changes and musical modifications. Overall, there are few major word changes I will discuss here (though one or two could make another whole post here), but there are remarkable musically stylistic changes. The takes that didn't make the cut remind me -- strangely -- of the sound of Bob's band on "Love and Theft." Masterfully, Al Kooper and the gang are having an incredible time, filling in these arch songs with sweet, melodically, rich fills runs and riffs -- almost none of which survived to the final Highway 61 tracks we all know and love.

Listening to "L and T", I hear a band free to take the license Bob wasn't willing to give in '65. The songs I'm finally hearing today is this band's  take on Bob's music, but their comfort was misplaced. With the release of "No Direction Home," we find these well-worn but beautifully performed takes alive and well.

It was worth the wait.