Why Music Stopped Growing

The musical sky is falling. CD sales have disappeared and iTunes barely keeps the industry from falling off of the radar entirely. Did music stop, did people stop caring about music, or did the music business just shoot itself (starting with the feet and working upward)? I vote for the latter option.

One place where that is most evident is in concert ticket sales. Sellouts are about as common as unicorns, where they used to be expected. Part of the blame for that has to come from ticket prices, typically in the range of a working person's daily income. I was reminded of how dramatic a change this is when I attempted to nail down a date for a show I saw in Denver in 1994. I was surprised to see that the all day 1994 LoDo Music Festival, that headlined James Brown, and was previewed by the Radiators, WAR, Marcia Ball, and the Sundogs cost  between $24 and $28 and there were no bad seats. JB was at the peak of his reincarnated career, still cruising on the Livin' in America popularity bump and promoting the 1993 release, Universal James. The Radiators were also doing well, riding on the resurgence of R&B and New Orleans funk. War, of course, never fails to attract their core audience. It was an amazing day and JB's band was unforgettable. It was the last time I had an opportunity to see the King of Soul and it was as good as every other time I'd seen him. (This would be when I normally might say, "Fuck the critics, I still love Gravity." I guess I did, didn't I?)

In his intro to Behind the Glass, Volume II, George Massenburg wrote, "What happened was that in the late 1980s large music corporations were consolidated, and often bought5 out, resulting in debt requiring a great deal of cash; cash that labels of the day were hoarding after the huge success of re-releasing their catalogs on CD. Music men--people like Mo Ostin, Lenny Waronker, and Bob Krasnow, among others-- were ousted, to be replace with accountants, themselves responsibly only to new managers; managers who simply saw no reason to continue old policy, methodology, and style. Among those axioms bushed aside were the importance of building an artist's long-term career and the expectation that no more than one out of 20 recordings would turn a profit. Labels' bank accounts were stripped of cash to pay off corporate debt, leaving nothing for development, let alone artist support. Projects were directed by numbers alone; gone were the men and women who made decisions from their instincts, quick brains, sincere heart, and guts." That's a pretty good wrap-up of the decline of the American Empire, let alone the reason why the music died.

Offensive Technique

In my field recording class, we recorded a 3-piece rap/hip-hop/dj sorta thing with a jazzy rhythm section. It's safe and honest to say this music s out of my normal territory. I get so little of it that you'd be fair in saying I don't get it at all. The usual simplified rhythm and shortage of musicality, based on the restrictions was typically overbearing, but I can live with that. Back in the 70s and early 80s, I recorded a collection of "poetry" performance artists in southern California and that was a similar experience: lots of angry women and upset boys cursing the bad luck of being born of educated middle class parents and suffering the usual slings and arrows of affluence. All done with a background of meandering saxophone "jazz" or electronica. Rap is more authentic than that, so I can sympathize if not appreciate. I don't love it, but I'm OK with it.

The usual black on white conflict was a good part of the act, but that doesn't bother me. Most of that complaint is true and I sympathize and appreciate that struggle. Ever present were the strings of four-letter words, apparently intended to shock either the college-age audience or the small percentage of instructors in the room. I work on my own mechanical devices and electrical/electronic equipment. I can cuss the chrome off of a Harley and strip the bare metal suitable for primer. Nothing any kid can say will come close to the noises coming from my garage when I smash a finger or drop some expensive piece of hardware. I'm ok with that.

After the show was over, the mc came back to FOH to thank us for doing the show and asked if he'd offended us with the language.

"Nope, I was offended by your mic technique, though."

It's a fact, I am not OK with that lack of skill. Design engineers work hard to design microphones that convert acoustic energy into electrical signals. It's not a simple task to accurately reproduce the movement of air into electricity and back again. When an "artist" disrespects the effort that goes into the equipment they use, I can be offended.

For some reason, a generation of modern black artists have decided to toss off the skills of 40 years of R&B and imitate a marginally talented white boy. Mic Jagger taught scores of R&R kids how not to use a microphone and that lousy technique seems to have filtered across genres into rap/hip-hop/dj/whateveryoucallit. Worse, the music they are promoting is, supposedly, all about the lyrics. Since they have banished melody and harmony, and the lyrics are unintelligible, it seems to me that what hiphop is selling is noise and attitude. Nothing new there. Teenagers have been making noise and pretending to be something they aren't for centuries.

Another Current Show: Kill the Vultures

Februrary 10, MPR/The Current and Dave Campbell ran another of the school's Soundbite shows, this time with Kill the Vultures. The student who recorded and mixed this show, Darren Prentice, did an outstanding job and David gave him well-deserved credit for the work. It starts at about 56 minutes (http://www.thecurrent.org/listen/minnesota/the_current/programs/2013/02/10/the_local_show/the_local_show_20130210. 

Milk of Human Kindness

Not much more to say about this, is there? Scott Jarrett is one of the most insightful artists I've ever known and you can never go wrong with his music.

The Perfect Application

Incredibly, someone found a practical use for one of these things. She asks, "Tell me dad, how are you managing with the new iPad we gave you for your birthday?:

Another Current Show: Chastity Brown

November 25, MPR/The Current and Dave Campbell ran another of the school's Soundbite shows, this time with the incredibly talented Chastity Brown and her band. The student who recorded and mixed this show, Joe Kimple, did an outstanding job and David gave him well-deserved credit for the work. It starts at about 19 minutes (weirdly, right after Funkytown):



The story of the whole show can be seen here http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/11/21/chastity-brown-soundbite and heard here:

Making Music from Scratch

While American music school students whine about not having the right pitch-correction plug-in, a non-vintage Mexican-made Strat, or having to suffer with the indignity of small audiences, these students are creating music and community with "recycled instruments" (instruments made from landfill trash):



On the technology side, give a kid a computer and you might end up with something either surprising or terrifying: "We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

Another Current Show: Zebulon Pike

This one could have gone better. The session was pretty convoluted, my MSCM student bailed at the beginning of the show and only sort of made it back for the wrap-up. The mix delivery was scheduled for Wednesday, 13 days from the night of the show. Wednesday afternoon, I received an email from MPR asking if the mix was going to show up on time for the show planning.Because nothing else had gone right that evening (including Pro Tools crashing once before the show and twice during the interview), I'd made a check mix for a backup. The check mix is what MPR aired and is on the attached link.

On the plus side, Zebulon Pike put on a good show and Dave's interview was his usual outstanding work. I haven't had this much trouble doing one of these Soundbite Shows since we started the series. Hopefully, the next one will be easier.

Another Current Show: P.O.S.

P.O.S. had just escaped from the hospital, after having an insulin delivery system implanted while he was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. Tracks from the show can be found at 16 and 101 minutes. The local media (the Trib, City Pages, and others) all indicated that P.O.S. delivered an abbreviated show, cutting it short to head back to the hospital. That was untrue. P.O.S. played a solid hour show, stuck around for another hour for the interview with Dave Campbell, and even helped a bit with the load-out. The man is a professional and truly deserves the title of Prince of Punk Rap. Listen to the interview, he's a classic revolutionary.

Joe Kimple's mix of the P.O.S. show is what aired on the Local Show and is on the link below. My grandson, Wolfgang's, edit of the interview is included in the segment.

Dodge City and R&R History

If you passed through Dodge City, Kansas any time in the last 30 years, you wouldn't think the place spawned anything more interesting than ammonia, methane, and rednecks. It's a pretty dismal place in the 21st Century and has been that since the early 1970's. However, it wasn't always a dying town in the middle of the Great American Desert.

In the 1960's, Dodge City was home to Dodge Music, owned by the same people who ran Hays Music from Hays, Kansas. At one time, during the mid-60's, Fort Hays State University was the Playboy "Party School of the Year," two years running. The place was jammed with musicians and bands and some of that spilled over to the Dodge city store. Dodge Music was the first place I ever saw Gibson, Fender, Ovation, Gretch, Guild, and Martin guitars hanging on the same wall. A few years later, I was in Hays and saw about five times that many guitars on a wall, but I was a jaded Kansas Rock and Roll'er by then.

The garage in the middle of the building was the spot where the stage for the Dodge Music Battle of the Band would sit. At the end of every year's weekend "battle," the bands would select the members of an "All Star Band" made up of the folks the bands thought were the best players at each instrument: drums, bass, guitar, keys, horn/reed, and vocal. I was once on that stage and it put me in contact with two of the guys who would become the short-lived, but excellent Living Stereo Quintet.

I was reminded of all this when I stumbled on a few pictures I'd taken in my home town more than a decade ago. The Dodge Music building had been abandoned for years at that time. I don't know if it's standing today. Not much about Dodge City is musical, in any form, these days. Like most of Kansas, the place has fallen on hard, pseudo-conservative times and if anything creative dared to rear its head in the place, it would be cut off in moments. There is a reason that the Midwest has suffered a brain and population-drain in the last 100 years and will continue to do so until the state's IQ is so low that the residents forget how to feed themselves.

Not far from that music store's location was a place most locals barely knew existed, Evans Drums. In fact, Evans was at the other end of the same block, if I remember right.According to the current Evans Drumheads website, in 1956 Marion "Chick" Evans was the man (maybe the first) who fitted Mylar film to a snare drum; later to the whole drum kit. Not being a drummer, I don't know nearly enough about the history of this man and his business. His company was successful and active all through my years in Dodge, but I missed it. Evans sold the company to Bob Beals, when the inventor retired. Beals sold the company to  D'Addario and Co. in 1995 and that company moved production to Farmingdale, NY. I don't blame them.

The dreaded front entrance to Century 

Recording Studio. Some musicians claimed

the climb to the studio was "at least three stories"

of hellish stairs. It wasn't, but it was a climb with

a B3 to tote. I dreaded this entrance because I
was tossed out this door too often to count.

Another famous (to audio professionals) ex-Dodge City musical figure is Larry Blakely. Larry owned, managed, and engineered Century Recording Studio in downtown Dodge. Century Recording was the only game in town and, practically, in the state for the years Larry ran the studio. The place cranked out a boatload of regional and a few national hits and most of the bands in the area (and the area included Oklahoma City to St. Louis to Omaha to Denver) wanted to record with Larry. In my usual clueless fashion, I never knew why Larry left town, but I suspect I do now. It just seemed to me that one minute Century was the place to be, the next it was gone. In fact, I think that's exactly what happened.

Larry tossed me out of his building too many times to recall, when I was a wannabe musician/engineering kid between the ages of 14 and 16. I tried hiding in every stairway and cranny and behind every large piece of equipment in the studio, the nights when bands played gigs in the performance area the day before their recording sessions with Century. I thought I was clever, Larry thought I was an idiot. He was right.

Not long after his personal catastrophic moment in Dodge, he moved to LA and became a big time engineer. In 1983, we ran into each other while suffering Xmas in Dodge, struck up an adult friendship, and a few months later he got me a job with QSC Audio Products. Larry didn't do much for my recording or musical career, but he was key to my engineering career and I owe him a lot.

The building that used to house the
worst bar in Kansas, the Hillcrest Inn
(or Hillcrest Tavern, depending on the
moment).

The last "famous" place I took pictures of was the decaying hulk of the old Hillcrest Tavern on the northeast end of Dodge. This place was "famous" only in that it was infamously the meanest bar I ever set foot in. A night that didn't end with a riot at the Hillcrest was a night the place wasn't open for business. Dodge City high school kids and St. Mary of the Plains College boys (mostly guys from the East who thought they were tough) went to the Hillcrest to burn off testosterone and donate blood to the sawdust covered floor. Good times.

I got the nickname "Panda" from my days at the Hillcrest. A friend, Mike Morlan, and I used to find a wall to prop ourselves against, get a couple of fists full of beer, lean our bar stools against the wall, and watch and wait. Sometimes, we'd make it through the night without a scratch. Sometimes, we'd be in the middle of whatever riot was going on. Either way, we were doing what we could to get back to our wall and back to drinking beer and watching the morons beat each other to death. Someone said, "You guys are like a pair of bears, hiding in a cave ready to tear a new asshole into whoever comes into your lair." I became "Panda." I don't know why. Mike was "Grizzly." He earned that name. Mike died in 1996, after a rough career as a lawyer and dubious career as an investment adviser.

If the Blues Brothers had played the
Hillcrest, they'd have had their asses

handed to them.  Chicago wimps. 

The Hillcrest actually paid bands pretty well and in later years put up a screen between the band and the crowd. I think it was to protect one from the other. The world got a look at that environment in the cowboy bar scene in the first Blues Brothers. The drummer for the band Ten O'Clock News got the job because he could snap a drum stick with a rim shot and throw the busted stick like a knife through the screen and into anyone who threatened to claw through the chicken wire. Several of my fondest musical moments in Dodge are tied to some jackass drunk howling in pain as he stumbled away from the Hillcrest stage with a gory wound and a drum stick poking out of his body.