Miscellaneous Music Musings

A couple of years ago, a singer-songwriter friend of mine attracted the attention of one of the Big Labels. They offered her a whack of money upfront, plus a contract she could drive a truck through (her lawyer confirmed this). She signed on the dotted line. A few weeks later a big shot from New York graced our village with his presence.

He'd been in the scene since the 60s and had a million stories. I caught a few of them second-hand, the most amusing of which involved Paul McCartney. This was in the 80s, and Sir Paul was in NYC laying down some music for his yearly album. Things mustn't have been going as smoothly as he wanted, because he abruptly announced, "I think what this session requires is a large bottle of Jack Daniels." He signalled for the gopher, who trotted over. McCartney opened his wallet and fished out ... a five-dollar bill. "The largest bottle of Jack Daniels," he emphasized.

The gopher looked helplessly at the producer, who gently pulled the gopher aside and discretely told him to use the company credit card. Then off he went. Mr. New York's theory behind this episode was simply that it had been so very many years since McCartney had purchased anything with cash that he simply had no clue what a bottle of Jack Dans actually cost.

ANYWAY. It's been a couple of years since that contract was signed, and odds are the Big Label didn't quite manage to make my friend a spoken name in your household. I recently asked her what she thought of the industry. "The industry?!" She snorted. "The industry doesn't have a clue. It's in a complete free-fall."

Indeed. This is the record industry's worst year of sales to date. According to this Rolling Stone article: "The record companies have created this situation themselves," says Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group, which operates Virgin Megastores. While there are factors outside of the labels' control -- from the rise of the Internet to the popularity of video games and DVDs -- many in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities. And among the biggest, they say, was the labels' failure to address online piracy at the beginning by making peace with the first file-sharing service, Napster. "They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster -- that was the moment that the labels killed themselves," says Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm. "The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. They were all using the same service. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other [file-sharing services]."

I'd love to put the blame solely at the feet of record companies, but let's not forget that Metallica deserves some credit, too. Here's the notorious Napster Bad video (language warning). Non-metal-heads might require a little context: the metal scene of the 80s and 90s grew in large part from kids joining pen-pal lists and mailing each other mixed tapes of their favourite bands. There was a day when Metallica's Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield not only endorsed the practise, but did it themselves. Then Napster came along and performed this function with a vengeance. Ulrich and crew were clearly displeased with the way this cut into their still-considerable profit margin. They may have won in court and by some miracle retained their fanbase, but they loaded (pun intended) the torpedo which sank the industry.

I agree with the article's premise that suing Napster was a fatal tactical error. I also regard iTunes copy-protection as invasive and malign. But I make it a point to avoid file-sharing, choosing instead to pay for my music in the hope that the musicians will get a little coin for their product.

I'll bang the drum for eMusic, one more time. $10 a month gets you 30 downloads with no copy-protection or any other computer-fouling nonsense. And the sound quality of their mp3s is surprisingly fine.

True, I once lamented the "thin" sound of the mp3. I'd downloaded Beneath This Gruff Exterior by John Hiatt & The Goners. When I burned it to CD and played it back, I thought there was some sort of "space" missing in the overall sound. Could the bass have been richer? Was there some mid-range layering I was missing?

I loved the music, so I finally bought the CD and gave it a spin in the car stereo as I drove home. For the next 20 minutes I courted death by reckless driving as I fished out the official CD and plugged in the eMusic disc, then swapped them again, and again and again. There was no discernible difference in sound. At home I put them on the master stereo and did the same exercise. No difference. I put on the Sennheisers. Same as it ever was.

I performed another experiment: I extracted the first track from the CD and compared its file size as an OGG to the file size of eMusic's mp3: 4.4 MB to 5.6, respectively. I ripped the OGG to mp3, and the file size of that was 4.6 MB. I don't know what any of that means, except that I now discard the notion that studio CDs somehow possess a sound quality lacking in eMusic's mp3 files.

Lately I've been taking the greatest pleasure in rediscovering jazz music. Those jazz musicians -- particularly in the 50s and 60s, God love 'em -- sure didn't mind putting out albums with only four or five (very long) songs. For a subscriber, that's an incredible value. Take something like Miles Davis's Blue Moods. All Music says the disc set the standard for its day, but that at 26 minutes and 51 seconds, the CD isn't much of a value. So far as I'm concerned, that's just four downloads out of a monthly 30. That's less than $.60 a track. Consider me sold.

Alright, time to wrap this up. My aforementioned friend is Brooke Miller, and she's coming out with new music on Canada Day.

Firefly: I like it. She likes it. What went wrong?

While browsing about in one of the ubiquitous box stores, I noticed that Firefly: The Complete Series was being sold for a nickel shy of $20. “The Complete Series” sounds rather grand, but really we're talking about a total of 14 episodes since Fox TV canned the show after a single season of mediocre ratings. Still, twenty bucks is what some people charge for a single CD, so this looked like a value I shouldn't pass up.

In concept Firefly is as pure a Space Opera as you can get: a group of misfit smugglers pilot an old ship on the fringes of the galaxy, trying to avoid run-ins with the law. It's even got six shooters and horses, which should qualify it for a whole new genre: the Space Horse Opera. And I'll be hog-tied and warp-fried if the whole durn hash doesn't work.

I need to point out here that this concept doesn't just work for me (a soft touch for this sort of thing); it works spectacularly for my wife, who mostly regards my fondness for all things Trek with a raised eyebrow. Unlike the recent generations of Trek, where the method was to establish the new franchise with three seasons of creaky scripts and bad acting, Firefly begins with a bang, quite literally, and it never lets up. The central character appears to be fighting guerrilla warfare on behalf of some holy cause. Things go badly for his team, however, and he is forced to surrender. The story begins there, and picks up six years later when he's become an outlaw.

The show's intelligence (here's a good time to credit creator Joss Whedon) is in its leisurely unveiling of significant details. We know our hero is now apostate and grotesquely disillusioned, but only over the course of the season do we get any idea why that is or what's really taken place to get him there. He is, of course, struggling to figure out which values he still holds dear and which he can do without. Meanwhile, he is surrounded by a crew of strong characters, half of whom are strong women (no small appeal to viewers like my wife).

Firefly also doesn't skimp on humour, some of it of the shoot-and-throw-the-corpse-over-the-gunwales variety that you get in Spaghetti Westerns. And there a few winks thrown toward the concept's absurdities. But for all the fruitiness of the gig, it works excellently because the visual signifiers — six shooters, cowboy talk and character stock pulled straight from Gunsmoke — work as a shorthand that emotionally pulls the viewer in to the concept's trickier conceits: a slow and morally ambiguous struggle against an enormously corrupt corporation that values technology, material gain and corporate power, and doesn't hesitate to exploit the weaker members and discontents of its own society.

Despite the fact that Firefly in its entirety works better than all but a meagre handful of the (egad!) 726 episodes of Trek, it seems to have died quite typically from a spectacular case of network neglect. I should also say that my affair with Firefly started off on the wrong foot: a year ago I rented Serenity, the movie that followed hot on the heels of the series' cancellation. I couldn't finish it. It was like beginning a mystery with the last chapter. It's wrong, and it just doesn't work.

It also highlighted a peculiarity of sci-fi television — the fetish for perfectly coiffed hair. What is it about Space Opera (and as with everything else about the genre, Battlestar Galactica pretty much sets the standard in this department, too) that requires its heroes to look like they've just left the stylist's chair? Especially for a concept like Firefly, I'd think there might be some leeway in the hairstyle department. Make it more like Deadwood In Space, perhaps.

Anyhow, the hair is just one small nit to pick, and it's foolish of me to complain when the leads are all so easy on the eyes. Firefly is television at its best, and my wife and I are now among the slowly growing legion of fans who would dearly love to see its resurrection.

Q: When is a song more than just a song?

A: When the year is 1965 and the song is Bob Dylan's “Like A Rolling Stone.”

I have some thoughts of my own about the cultural significance of Bob Dylan and his songs, but first take a gander at this snippet of prose from Greil Marcus's Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads, and see if his voice doesn't remind you of someone else's:

And then the song took off, over mountains, through valleys, across rivers, across oceans, each line more expansive, more triumphant, heroic, and modest than the last, for the singers were claiming no more than what anyone else could take as a birthright. As the choir thundered again and again, with [the singer] oddly taking its place and the choir his ... you rose to the story as you listened, eager to join it, even if, then, if not before, you realized that the massed voice of the choir stood for all the voices of the dead, and [the singer] ... was the voice of an adventure that had come to an end before he was ready to take part. As you listen, you hear history tearing the song to pieces — but the song will not surrender its body. At five minutes it seems to go on forever, and you want it to. You can't play it once.

Alright, back to Bob. One of the bitter disappointments that comes with reading a singer's memoirs is the realization that this person isn't quite as clued in as you once assumed. Alice Cooper, for instance, has a facility for clever lyrics that work with the rock & roll template, and he still has terrific instincts for what thrills an arena-sized audience. He's obviously got a shrewd sense of the music biz. But beyond that, he's just a guy who golfs a lot, goes to church and pays a shrink to help him puzzle over why he wants a beer for breakfast.

There is a good reason why the majority of entertainer's memoirs deliver that come-down: it doesn't matter what sort of entertainer is under the microscope — actor, musician, bodybuilder, politician, preacher or stand-up comedian — they have to have the capacity to present a blank screen on which the audience can project their desires, fears and fondest hopes. The performer provides a few bold details (“Check this out: I'm freakishly huge!”) while the beholder fills in the blanks with personally revealing nuances (“He's big and NO-ONE CAN PUSH HIM AROUND!!”).

Some personalities have an easier time holding up this screen than others, and Dylan is a cat who has to work harder at it than, say, Alice Cooper does. Dylan's brain is on a constant low boil: he can't resist a beautiful woman, or just about any direct appeal to his religious sensibilities. And if his memoirs are any indication, the drugs he took in the 60s don't seem to have damaged his encyclopedic knowledge of traditional American music. He meditates on just about everything, but still refuses to be pinned down on any given issue. Frankly, the guy strikes me as being a bit crackers, but that's not an altogether bad thing. He is the Jokerman, and so shall he be to the end of his days, because anything more definitive than that is downright unattractive — to him, and to us.

I don't mind saying I'm a fan, but I still find it galling that this guy is THE cultural presence of the last 40 years when the vast majority of his songs could mean this, or they could mean that, or they could mean nothing at all. The effect of his best music is to suggest that he isn't just deeply inside a given cultural moment, but that his point of view actually transcends it as well. But does it really?

I was born the day Dylan laid out “Like A Rolling Stone” on the reel-to-reel. I own a worn-thin copy of Highway 61 Revisited, and I've got to say: “Like A Rolling Stone” just doesn't do much for me. It's always sounded to me like Dylan's being snarky to an ex who's fallen on hard times — a real class act, that's only marginally easier on the ears than “Positively 4th Street” and its grating Hammond Organ hook: “Dee-Doodely-Doot-Doot-Dooo.” Man, those two songs ... I'm begging here — no mas!

“Desolation Row,” on the other hand, knocks me on my ass every single time I hear it. The lyrics are typically dodgy, but they evoke for me my handful of years in Bohemia when everyone who walked into my studio apartment seemed a little dangerous, and a little sad. I figured I was living on Desolation Row; as far as I'm concerned it's still just a block or two away from where we live.

Unlike yours truly, Marcus Greil was a cogent-sounding young guy back when “Like A Rolling Stone” hit the airwaves. For him, the song's blank-slate quality invited the public to project their anger and anxieties over the struggle for racial equality, the Vietnam war, and all those debilitating assassinations that struck at the heart of the nation. The song stood up to all this and had the strength of architecture to carry it, too.

I wasn't there (not really), so I'm not entirely convinced. But I'm digging Marcus Greil and just about anything he says, and here's why: that quote I began with is his riff off the Pet Shop Boys' “Go West.” Again, I can't say that particular song inspires quite the same reverence in me. but I get a kick out of the way it inebriates Greil, 'cos it reminds me of this guy:

The tenorman's eyes were fixed straight on him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was, and they began duelling for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries, cries, “Baugh” and down to “Beep!” and up to “EEEEE!” and down to clinkers and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down sideways, upside down, horizontal, thirty degrees ... finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everybody else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming in from the nearest precinct.

That's Kerouac, of course. And Greil, God love 'im, is Kerouac's natural heir apparent — encyclopedic, unashamed to employ exaggeration, surprisingly unsodden, yet every bit as passionate and persuasive. In other words, an American Original, something I rather enjoy reading — on occasion.

Seven Unlikely But True Things About Me

In response to DarkoV (whose seven actually make for entertaining and enlightening reading):

(1) When I was an 11-year-old slingshot-totin' boy, I nailed a redwing blackbird in midflight.

(2) Ten years later I repeated the stunt on a grouse (yum!), this time with a .22 rifle.

(3) My right (sighting) eye is near-sighted, my left (alignment) eye is far-sighted. In other words, these feats of marksmanship were the result of dumb luck — but you knew that already.

(4) I own a hunting bow.

(5) I haven't drilled so much as a paper target with it.

(6) Our countryside is lousy with deer.

(7) I've yet to taste a venison dish I could finish (if you think you have a winner recipe, go on and e-mail it to me). The only meat that tastes worse than deer is moose.

My tags: you (and I'm not naming names, because no-one bothered themselves the last time I did).

*Cough! Hack!! Wheeze!*

My blogging, which for the most part has been cheerful and (as DV puts it) “phlegm free” seems to have undergone a slight shift in tone recently. One could reasonably assume that after lying in bed for the better part of a month, I'd arise with the sun and sing cheerfully with the birds. Instead I slouch to my keyboard and expectorate.

Take the last post (please): do I really want to see some guy get handed his walking papers? Chances are the guy has a wife and kids. Chances are even better the next editor in chief isn't just going to scrap the fiction (Granger's biggest crime, so far as I'm concerned), but the journalism, too. Esquire vs. Stuff — you want it, you got it.

Maybe I'm just succumbing to a dangerous nostalgia. Guys my age tend to do that, particularly in Generation X. We were born nostalgic — and why not? The Flower Children may have been a filthy clueless bunch, but our contribution to the scene was Grunge: Punk, phase II. Filthier, with just a touch of me-first nihilism. Our gift to the world, and you're welcome.

Three weeks in bed tends to have a reverse-Van Winkle effect: the world hasn't changed in any discernible fashion. It's the same as it ever was, if by “same” we mean, “Steadily getting worse.” I wake up from three weeks' slumber, and what's the big news? There's a new phone!

People: we don't need another goddamn phone!! Forget the bees for a second — these things are killing us! First off, there are the traffic incidents — the faster, gentler way to go. Secondly, there's the technology itself. In order for you to talk to your spouse, that handy little device has to broadcast microwaves to the nearest cell-tower. If those microwaves have to go straight through your head, so be it. Just think about where you keep that phone while you're waiting for it to warble: if you're a guy it's probably on your belt, snug against your kidneys and prostate, and not too far from your balls; if you're a woman, it's in your purse, which you sling under your arm and cosy up to your ribcage. And I'm not even mentioning the landfill issues.

It'd be nice if Apple, or any other corporation, took these issues into consideration before they introduced a new doo-dad to the market. But the free-market assumption is the consumer has the knowledge and the will-power to make her own responsible decision. That's the generous take. Not-so-generous: if Steve Jobs thought he could make a buck selling you a bullet for your brain, he'd do it.

Three weeks in bed, so much of it sleeping, so little of it dreaming. My breath, my energy and my mojo are slowly returning; last night I finally had an honest-to-God dream. I should be happy, but the killer is I dreamed about buying CDs. All my sick-bed epiphanies — time is of the essence, love is the only engine of survival* and what does the Lord require of thee but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?* — all washed away by the glittering vision of a good ol' shopping spree. Eef — go ahead and count me among the chimps sprinting from the trees toward that flashy thing on the horizon.

Sigh. I'll be fine, I'll be fine. My pleasant disposition will return. I've just got to clear all this gunk from my lungs, my head, my soul....

Angelina Jolie + Esquire Magazine = "Worst Celebrity Profile In The World, Ever"

Good grief. Someone tell me when David Granger finally gets shit-canned, 'cos that's the Esquire issue I want to buy.

Update: the culprit behind this puff-piece is Tom Junod, a writer who ought to know better. Indeed, he almost certainly does know better. One possible, albeit exceedingly generous, interpretation of what's just happened: Junod and Granger are deliberately driving a stake through the absent heart of the celebrity profile.

Or not. Look, I'm not the only guy who's noted that the last 30 years have not been kind to Esquire — or is it the other way around? If you want some evidence of just how abysmally far this "men's magazine" has fallen, go to your favourite on-line used book emporium and plonk down some change on Smiling Through The Apocalypse: Esquire's History Of The Sixties. Pick a random page from that collection, then read it and ask yourself, "When's the last time Esquire published anything nearly this good?"

Or just head for the cover archive and scroll through the 60s. Do you think there's any chance this men's magazine can ever re-grow a pair big enough to put on a cover like this one from 1966?

The Great Canadian Superhero

"There is something about Canada that resists superheroes," says Jeet Heer (via ALD). I've got a few ideas what that "something" might be, but the largest, inescapable reason why our country hasn't produced a single superhero "fit to hold the cape of Superman or Batman" is: we don't have a New York City. Say what you will about superheroes being nationalist allegories (I won't argue), but if the United States didn't have New York City, they'd have never had superheroes, either.

I remember visiting Toronto when I was 16 and thinking, Spider-Man would have a territory of six city blocks to swing around in. After that he'd have to go on foot. You can't be "super" in a city like Toronto or Vancouver! And just try being super in Montreal or Halifax! People will see through that "super" disguise toot sweet, my friend: "'Super' is he? Ha! And him with the print of the pail still fresh on his arse!"

No, only in New York City does anyone get to be "super." 'Cos it's the world's first super city, doncha know.