Nothin' New Here

For as long as I have been aware of pop music, I have noticed a particular decline-and-fall-and-reinvent cycle for failed rock stars. As their rock careers either begin to fade or never get started, they merge into country “artists.” Of course, even more country stars gave up on the rock bit as soon as it was obvious they didn’t have what it takes, before anyone even noticed they were ever rock-wannabes they move to country.

Why? Because country music is a much less competitive field of music and you can get away with a lot less talent, creativity, or attractiveness. In fact, you can be seriously old and ugly and still be a country star, at least if you’re male. An article about the motivation for this career path was explained in a Houston Press article describing that Aaron Lewis’ “rationale for going country was a smart one. After all, country fans are some of the most loyal when it comes to purchasing music and listening to terrestrial radio.” You can certainly point to seriously skilled musicians and vocalists who have moved to or stayed in the country genre, Brad Paisley for example, but those exceptions are proving the rule. As always there are monster players in the studio background regardless of genre.

When your music trends change on a glacial pace, it’s hard to become obsolete in one lifetime. Check out this partial list of pop/rock-to-country stars:

• Beyoncé
• Bob Dylan
• Bon Jovi
• Brett Michaels
• Carrie Underwood
• Cindy Lauper
• Conrad Twitty
• Darius Rucker
• Don Henley
• Elvis Costello
• Jelly Roll
• Jerry Lee Lewis
• Jessica Simpson
• Jewell
• Kenny Rogers
• Kid Rock
• Lionel Richie
• Michelle Branch
• Nelly
• Post Malone
• Ray Charles
• Shania Twain
• Steven Tyler
• The Byrds and Roger McGuinn
• Tiffany
• Tina Turner
• Tom Jones
• Van Morrison
• Ween
• and the plethora of singer-songwriters who have skirted both genres for their whole careers; Jimmy Buffett, for example.

So it goes for hip-hop/rap, without the fading and restarting part. Skipping the hassle of learning to play an instrument, obtaining some kind of vocal ability, rap allowed some serious no-talents to jump the fence from spectators to “producers” without any wasted time learning a “craft.” So, the 2nd comparison is between soul/R&B and rap/hip-hop. If you don’t have the chops for the first, you might be over-talented for the 2nd.

You can like this, laugh at it, or hate it as “racist” or intellectually unenlightened. I don’t care and you have a right to and might be right in your opinion. Country music is largely less sophisticated, far less innovative, and less difficult than comparable pop/rock branches (heavy metal vs country metal, for example). Rap is a tiny fraction as musical as R&B. 50 Cent couldn’t do any part of Seal’s musical act, but anyone who can read fairly quickly can pull off a 50 Cent vocal performance. And Kanye West’s total failure to “sing” any part of Bohemian Rapsody (Rapshoddy?) pretty much put the nails in the coffin that carried his self-image as a singer.

What Are You Going to Do with It?

Since COVID shut us down locally, some friends and I have been “getting together” to play music  online regularly for about 4 1/2 years. It began when a couple of us, who had been getting together once a week at the local music store for a few hours of round-the-circle music, wanted to keep something like that going while the world was shutdown. We started out fumbling around with Zoom and the other online meeting platforms, but they are all half-duplex (like cell phones) and that is pretty hopeless for music. Eventually, one of us found Jamkazam and we used that for two years. Weirdly, when Jamkazam started charging for the service in January of 2021 the program and support went to hell. We paid for it for a year, as a group, but eventually quit fighting and moved over to Sonobus, which is still free as of now. Both platforms allowed us to record our music and we shared the duties of organizing the performances/takes into recording sessions. Sonobus turned out to be massively better for recording purposes than Jamkazam.

Now, almost 4 1/2 years later, we have managed to record sixteen original songs written by one-to-three of our group and twenty-five covers. A while back, I took to putting all of our stuff on the USB sticks that provide the background music in our two vehicles and I’ve had a great time showing off what we’ve done to friends, family, and other victims who happen to find themselves in my car. I put one of the first songs I’d written and we’d recorded on YouTube and, mostly, re-discovered how much I hate video editing in the process:

In a fit of ego and silliness, I put about half of my compositions and productions up on Distrokid last year and made about $8 in streaming “income” from a $10 initial fee. I did my annual purge of credit card re-enlistments and I’ve been getting Distrokid warnings (“UPDATE: Your music is at risk of being deleted”) on a weekly basis since that initial subscription ran out. A friend who is much more committed to promoting his music said I actually did “pretty well,” but for most of us bothering with streaming distribution is obviously more about ego than anything else. All I have to do is look in the mirror and my ego is busted to bits. I am old. The normal Distrokid price is $20/year and that’s just silly and Distrokid is the cheapest way I’ve found to get nearly universal music streaming distribution.

About 40 years ago, after 15 years of being all sorts of bands and blowing my wad on owning a sound company and recording studio, a friend (Mike) called me with an “exciting opportunity” to be lead guitarist for a band he was assembling. Mike’s band had serious promotion, gigs lined up, and financial backing. I was well into my career as an electronics engineer, about half-way through my zillion-year attempt to get a college degree, and had just moved my family to Omaha, Nebraska. I was burned out from beating my head against the local and semi-national music scene and in a bad mode.

“So, what you’re asking is do I want to leave my family for several weeks while we woodshed somewhere putting together a line-up, spend a bunch of money on equipment I just got through selling, drive a few hundred miles every night for six months, every night haul a ton of equipment up or down stairs to the gig, set everything up in an hour or so, maybe cram down a bar burger before the show, play music I don’t like for three hours for a crowd I won’t like, tear everything down and haul it up or down stairs, load the trailer, probably sleep in the van half the time on the way to the next gig, and take my shif driving about the time I finally start to fall asleep? All that to, maybe, clear $5,000?” I pretty much delivered that soliloquy in one breath without thinking.

Mike was quiet for a bit. “You could have just said ‘no.’”

“Sorry, Mike. I probably didn’t know that would be the answer until I was about half-way through that rant. But, yeah, no. I’m good. I hope your blow ‘em away and have a great tour, Mike. Thanks for thinking of me.” We signed off pretty quickly and I didn’t hear from Mike again until several years later when he was in a similar situation with a band in Denver. That band wanted to record two of my songs—”Down on the Beach” and “I’m Gonna Quit”—without paying me anything for the publication rights. I passed on that “opportunity for exposure,” too.

Other than as a technician, I was pretty much done with the music business by 50. I was a technology instructor at a music college for 13 years, but if students were looking for an encouraging word about making a living in music they went to someone else. When a friend listened to one of our latest recordings, he asked “So what are you going to do with all that material?”

“Listen to it, enjoy the memories, share it with friends and family.”

“You don’t want to try to sell it? Put it on the Internet? Maybe put a band together and play this stuff for an audience?”

“Oh hell no! I’m happy that we managed to put up with each other for so long. I love putting on a set of headphones and recalling the feeling of playing with these guys over these past 4 years.” I told him about my experience with Distrokid. “There are a lot easier ways to lose $10 a year and more fun, too.

“And I definitely don’t want to be in a band ever again.” And I explained to him why, “Again, I can find easier ways to lose money than playing gigs. This is one of my hobbies and one that I enjoy. I’m not going to do anything to mess that up.” 

Sloppy Luck, Part 1

I’ve had “sloppy luck” for most of my life. I’ve never won a lottery, but I’ve won some stuff at company parties. My “career plan” was squashed in infancy, but my emergency “plan” (to grossly abuse that concept) turned out surprisingly well. There is nothing special about my genetics, but I have often “been able to take a punch” of all sorts and make some kind of comeback and keep going. Best of all, I have had a life full of wonderful, reliable, loving, brilliant friends. That is plain good luck.

One of my first sloppy luck moments was when I was 11 or 12-years-old. On a whim, I signed up for the Columbia Record Club’s “special offer.” I remember it being 10 for $1, but that was a long, long time ago. First, I had to pick a music genre and I didn’t know squat about music except for my parents’ 78-rpm collection that I’d listened to in the basement of our home when I was supposed to be baby-sitting my 8-year-old brother. All of the records in our basement were from the 1940s or earlier and that big wooden console record player/radio had a tone arm that probably weighed a couple of pounds. My mother had died just a couple of years earlier and the records might have been hers. I never really saw any evidence that my father cared about music, other than singing in the choir or pep bands leading cheers for his basketball teams. The records I’d experienced were “classics” by Spike Jones, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, etc. On a whim, I picked Jazz and from among the jazz record category options I picked:

• An Electrifying Evening with The Dizzy Gillespie Quintet (still my all time favorite record)
• Birth of the Cool, Miles Davis
• Sophisticated Swing, Cannonball Adderley
• After Hours, Sarah Vaughan
• Silver Vibes, Lionel Hampton
• Cool Velvet, Stan Getz

Over the next year, every month the “pick of the month” card would show up in the mail and I’d procrastinate sending it back to reject the selection because I didn’t even know how to buy stamps. (The card with the original offer was postage paid.) After most of a year, I had a pretty decent collection of jazz albums and owed Columbia Record Club more than $100 before they stopped sending me the “pick of the month” selections. I listened to every one of those records practically until I could see light through the grooves. With those monthly picks and the Columbia catalog I discovered Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” “Brazil, Bossa Nova & Blues” by Herbie Mann, “Time Out” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Wes Montgomery’s “Movin’” and ”Bumpin’” and special members-only records by Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk.

After receiving a half-dozen unpaid-for-records , Columbia Record Club became less friendly. In fact, their letters became downright threatening. Their pick of the month was “only” $7.95, but after shipping-and-handling it was closer to $10. It’s only fair to mention that 1961’s $100 is the equivalent of more than $1,000 today. My father’s high school teaching annual salary was about $5,000 that year. For quite a while, I managed to intercept the mail before Dad got home from school, but eventually he spotted on of the “final notice” envelopes and opened it up. By then, I was getting the occasional bill collector telephone call, too. After chewing my ass into bite-sized bits, Dad got one of the bill collector calls and the conversation went something like this:

“Hello, who is this””

“My name is ____ and I’m calling for Columbia Record Club. Is this Mr. Thomas Day?”

“No. This is his father, Fred Day. What can I do for you?”

“Thomas has received almost a dozen records from our company and he owes Columbia Record Club $__. How do you plan to pay for the records?”

”I don’t and if you know how to put a lien on an 11-year-old boy I suggest you proceed with that action. However, I am not responsible for his bills and you should be ashamed of yourselves for being foolish enough to give credit to an 11-year-old kid. Tell you what, though. I’ll put all the records in a box and leave them on the front porch and you can come pick them up at your convenience.”

We didn’t hear from Columbia Record Club again and Dad, eventually, let me take the box of 33rpm records back to the basement where I totally wore out all of them. Listening to Gillespie and Davis inspired me to want to play trumpet. Being always short on cash, I eventually inherited an awful Conn cornet from my step-mother’s brother and discovered that I had no talent for teaching myself trumpet, let alone jazz trumpet. A few years after taking up the trumpet, I managed to score an awful Sears Airline acoustic guitar. After struggling with that instrument for a while, I used my paper route money to buy a $35 Airline electric guitar from my local Western Auto store. Thanks to my Columbia Record Club jazz exposure, no part of early 60’s vocal music appealed to me, but I could get my teeth into The Ventures, Dick Dale, The Surfaris, and, thanks to the local music magician, Howard Roberts.

By the time the Beatles and the British Invasion straggled into the Midwest and KOMA radio, I had no interest in either British muppet music or vocals in general. Somewhere in that period, I found WLS out of Chicago and soul music. Imagine hearing Wilson Picket, James Brown, Otis Redding, the Staples, the Bar-Kays, or anything from Motown before you hear the Beatle’s chipmunk voices and the Stone’s limp R&B imitations and you’ll have a clue where I was coming from as a wannabe musician. It wasn’t until I heard “The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan” before I developed any kind of appreciation for lyrics.

I consider all of that sloppy luck. Every bit of it, from mailing in that Columbia Record Club enrollment card to picking “jazz” as my musical preference to that  music leading me to R&B instead of R&R pop to the trumpet-to-guitar progression to becoming who I am as a person and a still-tryin’-to-be-a-musician 76-year-old. It was all good luck.