My brother recently posted the picture below on Facebook. He said it immediately took him back to the Dick Lurie Guitar Studio in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I knew just what he meant, and so did a bunch of other old musician friends from Cleveland’s east side. For Dick’s store is where we each began our personal journey with the guitar or the bass.
Ben and I studied with Dick himself. Later, my brother also studied with Bill Jeric, who apparently had been a member of the James Gang at some point. Bill was the rock teacher.
Dick, who was probably around 60 at the time, had a long history as a local jazz player and session musician. He was also quite a character. But whatever his eccentricities, you’ve got to give the guy all due respect: He managed to make a career out of music, and that is no small accomplishment.
As for the store, well, I’d say in retrospect that it was more of a front for the guitar lesson business that happened in the back. Over time, I came to realize that there were better places to go looking for guitars (e.g., there’s probably a good blog post to be written about Barry’s Mayfield Music, which wasn’t far from Dick’s studio).
Dick didn’t actually have that huge of a stock of instruments and amps in his shop, and a lot of what he did have wasn’t necessarily top of the line (more Hondo II guitars and Marlboro amps than Gibson, Fender, and Marshall–although he did get a Mesa Boogie combo in there at one point). This was mostly stuff for beginners, and one imagines, stuff where the manufacturers were more willing to offer a store owner favorable credit terms.
But as a 15 year old kid, there was plenty to be learned in Dick’s store, and the dudes behind the counter were always kind to us in our ignorance. Whether they were actually cool, I’m not sure, but at the time, they seemed pretty cool to me, because they were already inside of a world that I very much wanted to enter. So any little tidbit they laid down about that world, I was going to scoop it up has fast as possible.
We had no Internet back then. We just had guitar shop dudes, Guitar Player Magazine, and our own over-active imaginations.
Anyway, with that brief introduction, I give you a few random Dick Lurie memories:
1. Christmas Eve 1978: My dad, my brother, and I entered Dick Lurie’s for the first time on Christmas Eve 1978. Ostensibly, we went to get Ben a bass as a Christmas present. Our dad knew Dick, because he taught guitar in the music department at Cleveland State University, where dad also taught.
While we were in there, my dad turned to me and asked “You see anything you want here?” After I timidly said “Maybe a guitar would be cool,” my brother walked out the door with a low-end Fender Precision Bass copy, and I walked out the door with an electric six-string that said “Alpha I” on the headstock and made a Hondo II Les Paul copy look like the real thing.
Imagine two pieces of 5-ply plywood glued together to double the thickness, then cut into a Les Paul shape, finished with a bad red tobacco-sunburst, some humbucker shaped pick-ups, and some volume and tone nobs (no pick-up selector switch). That was the Alpha I.
But it wasn’t a bad guitar for what it was. Action wasn’t bad, intonation was okay, and down the line, after I got some new tuners on it, it stayed in tune pretty well.
By Apple, Inc. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I was on Facebook earlier today and came across the comment below from Tim Quirk. It’s apparently about Apple’s new streaming music service, which is slated to launch later this year. Tim’s a musician and has also spent time working at Rhapsody and Google Music, amongst other places.
WHO’s telling you to listen is far, far less important than WHAT they tell you to listen to. Also, GETTING you to actually listen.
Reading the comments underneath Tim’s post, I came to understand that it related to his criticism of what he asserted was the personality-based approach that Apple seems to be using with its new service.
One commenter, Jamie Dolling, asserted that the new service was as much about “personality as it is about music,” and worried that this approach couldn’t help but “poison the water.”
Subsequently, Jon Maples, a digital music consultant formerly of Rhapsody, indicated that it was the same..old…’human music curation’ approach without any understanding of what the listener actually wants.”
I started adding my own comment on that post, but as its length ballooned it seemed to be morphing into a blog post. So I moved over here.
Anyway, here’s my take on this stuff.
As Tim correctly points out, getting listeners to break out of their default is the challenge, because most listeners just want to keep listening to the stuff they are already familiar with (and consume the same products over and over again as well).
To my mind, personality-based approaches to marketing and publicity can be one way to accomplish that goal. Even if there’s an element of bullshit, snake oil to it, they wouldn’t still be using it if personality-based publicity and marketing didn’t sell shit.
For many people, who is telling you to listen/buy is inextricably bound up in what they are telling you to consume. That’s the whole point. It’s a gestalt experience.
The further you move to the right in the diffusion curve on anything new, the less likely consumers are to use their own research and judgment when making buying decisions. These people are much more likely to look to trusted people (opinion leaders) for signals about what choices to make.
This is not a new thing. It’s as old as consumer capitalism (or actually even older still). And while I pride myself on doing my own research on lots of stuff and making my own decisions, there’s lots of other stuff where I just don’t care enough to do that. I want somebody else to point me to an answer that is good enough (or better still, great). The whole point of doing that is that I don’t know what good is, so I can’t really effectively evaluate the quality of the thing being recommended. If I could, I wouldn’t need somebody else’s advice.
So the personality/trustworthiness of the person making the recommendation is extremely important. It becomes a proxy for the knowledge I lack about the thing being recommended, because, rightly or wrongly, I do feel comfortable evaluating what I think about the person doing the recommending.
The logic goes something like this. I don’t trust my judgment about what cool clothes are. This person over there seems to be a person who I think is cool and has on cool clothes (or at least a person who I understand from their reputation is supposed to be cool and wearing cool clothes). Therefore, their judgment about cool clothes is probably better than mine. So I’ll see what they think I should wear, and moving forward I’ll look to them for more clues and cues on that subject.
Unlike data driven metrics, this isn’t just about figuring out what I want. It can also be about creating a new want, because while I may know what I think I want, I may not actually know what I want all the time. Data driven metrics may do a good job of figuring out what I think I want right now or even what I might want based on what I have wanted in the past, but they don’t do such a good job of determining what I don’t know that I want right now but what I might nevertheless want in the future if it was put in front of me in the right way. The right sort of charismatic curator/opinion leader has the ability to do that.
For many people, music is something they are unsure about. It’s also something where they don’t want to have to filter through all the noise to get to the signal. They like having music around. They also know that what music they like says something about them, so there’s something at stake there beyond just the hedonistic experience of consuming the music.
But in many cases, they just want to be pointed towards some good stuff. If liking this good stuff also seems to help make them seem a little bit less uncool, well, even better. Because in 2015, nobody wants to seem uncool, not even middle-aged people like me. Indeed, seeming/feeling less uncool may be just as important–or even more important–than liking what has been recommended.
So yes, Apple’s new music service is a publicity/marketing platform. And yes it appears to be personality-based. That’s because the biggest objection that the music industry seems to have about many of the other streaming platforms is this:
They may deliver a good user experience to certain users, but despite many assertions to the contrary, they have not yet proven themselves to be particularly good marketing/publicity platforms for companies trying to focus demand on a limited slate of new releases (the only way to generate the kind of cash they need to stay in business long-term). They can service demand when it arises. But they don’t drive demand or significantly shape it.
Moreover, to the extent that these services create new wants in people, the want pattern is much more diffuse than in the old system. So the old-line music industry is still trying to find a marketing/publicity platform that looks and works more like terrestrial radio did in the glory days, because that was a great platform for focusing demand on a limited slate of new releases. It had a focused want pattern.
It’s a fair criticism to say that trying to find that sort of platform is a pipe dream. That we’re in a new reality now, and the desire for that sort of platform reflects an unwillingness to get with the times. But there remain very practical reasons why that sort of platform would still be useful to the music business. So it makes a certain amount of sense that its members continue to chase it.
Apple seems to be taking a stab at trying to provide that sort of platform with a more personality-based approach. But just because Apple may, in part, be trying to solve a problem for the music industry, that doesn’t mean their solution is inherently at odds with the user/audience.
After all, terrestrial radio has often been a personality-based marketing/publicity platform both for labels and all the advertisers that subsidize it. But it’s also beloved by many users, because they value both the curation and the personalities they find there. Often, those things cannot be separated.
That doesn’t mean that human curation is always good. Indeed, on average, algorithmic approaches may now be better at delivering a good-enough experience that is more personalized than the average human curation experience.
But when human curation is good, I think it remains the gold standard for curation, even when it is less personalized. Maybe I’m showing my middle-age here, but that’s how it seems to me. That sort of curation is inherently personality-based. That’s a big part of its appeal. You trust the curator enough to give up control and let them take you on a journey of discovery.
In the process, you bond with them, for being associated with a cool personality has the capacity to make you feel cooler and a part of the world they have created around their personality. That experience creates a want in you.
An algorithm rarely makes you feel cooler like this, because it’s a tool. You might use it for the purpose of doing your own research and discovery. It might even show you some things about yourself that neither you nor other people readily see. That, in turn, might allow you to feel cooler when you deal with other people, because of the knowledge you’ve gained. But even when the algorithm is doing a good job delivering quality suggestions to you, it still makes you feel a little bit more like a data point and less like a human.
A friend of mine recently started a Spotify mix-tape group on FB. Each week a different member delivers a 90 minute playlist to the group (a virtual mix tape). So far, this experience has been infinitely better than any algorithmic experience I’ve ever had, because each group member actually takes into account what other people have done and who the audience is.
So if somebody included a track last week, that track isn’t likely to be in this week’s mix and more than likely neither would that artist. Although if it made aesthetic sense in the context of the mix to include the same artist or track two weeks in a row, maybe it would be in there anyway. But in any case, these mixes have a much richer sense of the many contextual factors that contribute to creating a good mix. The same is true of a great show on a non-comm radio station like KEXP. As a result of this, these kinds of mixes reinforce a sense that the group members are part of something bigger than themselves.
Of course, if that mix tape group was me and 25 kids who are under 15, the quality of the curation probably wouldn’t seem as good to me, although I’d probably still hear an occasional great tune I would have missed otherwise. I’d also feel more like an interloper in that group. Maybe that distinction is actually demographic rather than personality-based. But to me, issues of demographics and psychographics are embedded in the idea of personality-based branding. You are buying the gestalt experience that you associate with that person or company.
This is why an anonymous human curator is less valuable than a curator with a personality/reputation that is known and trusted by users, even if the choices of the anonymous curator are objectively just as good as or better than those of the known curator. The lack of an identifiable personality makes it harder to evaluate the utility of the suggestions. And once you’re dealing with that problem, you’re pretty much right back where you started. The curator is no longer solving a problem for you. Now, you need a curator to sort out the anonymous curators for you.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t use algorithmic radio ever. I do. A group of my college friends made a playlist that encompasses many of the songs that were on the jukebox in the coffee house that was in the basement of our dorm at the University of Michigan (the Halfway Inn). Spotify generated a radio station based on that playlist, and it works pretty well, although it still does a poor job of managing repeats of the same song and multiple related songs by the same artist or by related artists (e.g,. Velvet Underground and solo Lou Reed).
A good human curator does not do these things. That’s part of the artistry. They take those things into account. Like I said above, they have a better and richer contextual awareness. Also, part of the reason that particular Spotify station works as well as it does is because it’s based on a playlist that was human curated. So it’s bootstrapping on the contextual awareness of the people who compiled that list.
If enough people trust a guy like Zane Lowe, some of that is his personality. But his personality and that trust is also a function of his talent for curation.
Grunge/Alternative rock broke on commercial radio back in the ’90s in no small part because of Seattle DJ Marco Collins. The relationship that people had with Marco at that time was very much personality driven. They liked him. He was a dynamic on-air personality, and they thought he was cool. But a big part of the reason why was that they came to trust his taste.
If Marco said something was cool and played it on the radio, people gave it the extra listens they needed to appreciate why it was worthwhile, even when their first impression might not have been great. Twenty years later, his impact is clear enough that somebody recently made a movie about him.
Some people have that intuitive gift for knowing what new stuff people will like if they just give it a chance. Computers are also getting better and better at deducing that information based on prior user behavior. But I’m still not sure those two approaches always lead you to the same place.
What’s that term? “Filter Bubble,” where your perceived options keep getting smaller and smaller as the search algorithm feeds back based on your previous choices. At its best, human curation seems less prone to the filter bubble (although it has its own problems and risks–e.g., it’s probably more prone to personal politics and lobbying, which can create a bureaucratic capture problem that undermines trust–See e.g., payola). But human curation only works if people trust the human curators and don’t have to invest too much energy vetting them.
Apple is a high profit-margin, gold standard brand. That’s why people pay extra for it. Its whole message is grace, ease of use, and quality (even if these things are not always actually true). Historically, it’s been about finding the spot where technology and people align. You know, a mix of art and science.
That’s the value proposition it is selling. The personalities are at least theoretically in the service of that. They are supposed to be part of the art that interfaces with the science and tech.
Part of the art is also the fashion sensibility. Undoubtedly, that’s part of what must have attracted Apple to Beats. I have mixed feelings about that. My feathers get ruffled thinking about paying hundreds of dollars for a pair of headphones that may be fashionable but ultimately aren’t very good sounding headphones for the money.
But at the end of the day, I guess I’m a bit of an engineer at heart. I value function over fashion, and I especially hate the idea of paying a premium for something just because it is perceived as being fashionable. Nevertheless, I also recognize that many people are not like that, and that these kind of people are more than willing to pay a premium for something they perceive as fashionable. Indeed, in many cases they are the highest margin consumers.
The personality-based approach also dove-tails with Apple’s history and culture. Before the death of Steve Jobs, it was a personality driven company. It’s also an opinion leader brand. So while it collects plenty of experience data from users, it has not historically solicited explicit input from the public about what it wants. It doesn’t have the same sort of beta-testing developer blogging, two-way conversation that many other companies have as they develop their products.
I once had conversation with a Boeing IT guy in a bar here in Seattle. He said they loved Microsoft, because they were much more open with his department about what they were working on and where it was going.
Typically, Apple hasn’t shared where it’s going until it releases a product for the public to see. It’s not looking for that sort of approval and feedback. When it releases something, the message is this: “Here’s our new thing. We’re cool. We think our thing is cool, and if you try it, we’re confident that you will think our thing is cool too, even if you don’t understand right this minute why it’s cool.”
Over the last decade, it’s had a pretty good track record doing that. So even when it does something that other people have arguably already done, it typically re-contextualizes it in a way that makes it sit differently with the public
We’ll see if Apple’s new music service provides that sort of bold leadership and delivers on the idea that theirs is a place where art does a better job meeting science than at other places. We’ll also have to wait and see whether their approach resonates in the market.
If it just ends up being a re-branding of the Beats music service, then I think the answer will be “no.” While there was nothing really wrong with Beats and it looked cool, at the end of the day, I didn’t find it qualitatively different from its competitors, either in terms of user experience or curation.
So to succeed, imho, Apple will need to extend things considerably on the personality front and keep their curated playlists and other personality-based offerings far more dynamic than they were on the old Beats service. Otherwise, it’s just the same wine in a different bottle.
Back in March, the Verge reported that the Beastie Boys had settled their lawsuit against educational toy company GoldieBlox. That suit alleged copyright infringement, trademark infringement, false advertising, false endorsement, and unfair competition, stemming from GoldieBlox’s unauthorized use of the band’s song “Girls” in the company’s popular Internet promotional video.[no_toc]
Photo by Masao Nakagami
According to the Verge, “[a]s part of the settlement, GoldieBlox will no longer be able to use its parody of the Beastie Boys song “Girls” and will publish an apology to the band…The toy maker will also make a donation based on a percentage of its revenues to a charity selected by the Beastie Boys that supports science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education for girls — the very subjects that GoldieBlox’s toy lines try to promote.”
Until recently, the specific amount of GoldieBlox’s donation was unknown. But on May 12, 2014, Digital Music News reported that the amount of the donation had recently been detailed in court filings from the Beastie Boys’ copyright infringement lawsuit against Monster Energy drink: To compensate for its unauthorized use of “Girls,” Goldieblox will donate 1 percent of its gross revenue to the Beastie Boys’ specified charity until it has paid a total of $1 million.
With this final piece of the puzzle in hand, now seems like a good time to offer a little recap commentary on the GoldieBlox drama, highlighting a couple of the important story lines and the lessons they offer for content users and content owners.
The Artist is a very romantic figure in our culture. There’s a lot of ideological mumbo jumbo attached to what an Artist is and what an Artist should be. It’s one of those paradoxes. The dominant ideal is that art is about freedom of expression. Yet lots of people would put a lot of rules on art given a chance. People love to set up boundaries and categories. Some people might even try to shatter the whole notion that Artists making art is a romantic ideal.
I like those kinds of high-minded debates. But this isn’t the place for them. So I’m not going to get into that stuff here. Instead, I’m going to accept the following premises: (1) being an Artist and making art represents a noble pursuit; and (2) if there is anything pure and good in the music business, it starts with the Artists and the art they make.
Why am I going to the trouble saying this? Well, the further you venture into the Fog Machine, the easier it is to lose sight of these ideas. And once you forget them, you’re sunk, especially if you see yourself as an Artist.
At the same time, it’s important remember that Artists make art in a context. Our context is a market economy, where people have to make their living somehow. And the ideals of making art and making a living don’t always easily co-exist.
But if you are an Artist, you have to find a way to deal with this reality. Usually, that involves figuring out where your compromise point is on a broad range of issues. As an Artist, you’ll probably have to face this process head on. But never forget the idealistic goal of art: that the product should come first regardless of what the market seems to be saying.
Sometimes that can be a tough one, especially when people who are supposedly experts about the market are challenging your judgment. But never forget the reality of the Fog Machine. Ultimately, a lot of these folks don’t know anymore than you do. And oddly enough, when an Artist has talent and stays true to his or her ideals, it’s actually pretty surprising how often that resonates in the marketplace.
[no_toc]As I’ve mentioned before on this weblog, there wasn’t much Judeo-Christian worship in our family growing up. Nevertheless, there was always plenty of religion in our home. Through the years, my brother and I absorbed large helpings of an eclectic gospel authored by our father, Edwin London, the founder and sole rabbi of the Church of Dissonance.
When we were growing up, our church didn’t yet have a name. It was more of a free flowing set of ideas and attitudes–a way of being, or an outlook, if you will. The name came much later, courtesy of our buddy Pete Sheehy.
At a summer barbecue around 1999 or 2000, I was describing to Pete the childhood experience of attending my father’s atonal, contemporary music concerts, and how hard my brother and I found it to sit still through music so difficult to absorb that 10 minutes of it often felt more like an hour.
“That sounds a lot like it was for me going to church when I was a kid,” Pete interjected.
“You’re right,” I responded, “I guess we were raised in the Church of Dissonance.”
Since that day, I’ve intended to record the most important lessons of our church for posterity. And now, on Father’s Day, in the year of Edwin London’s passing, I think the time is finally right.
So I give you 17 lessons learned in the Church of Dissonance (“COD”):
1. Avoid cheap beer, rot-gut whiskey, and sweet mixed-drinks.
When I was in high school, my mom cut a cartoon out of the New Yorker and put it on the wall in the breakfast nook of our kitchen. There was a guy sitting at a bar talking to the bartender. The caption read “The good Scotch James. My body is my temple.”
Drinking was not frowned upon in the COD. But drinking low-end alcoholic beverages was. On more than one occasion, I got advice along the following lines from my dad:
“If you don’t like the taste of an alcoholic beverage on its own, don’t drink it mixed with other stuff to hide its flavor. Very little good ever comes from doing that. If you can’t afford to drink the quality, good tasting stuff, save your money until you can.”
As I enter my 35th year of drinking on a semi-regular basis, I’ve found my dad’s advice on these matters to be solid. I don’t always follow it (I do enjoy a limeade Shandy; sometimes, I make it with cheap beer), but when spirits are involved, dad was right: If one anticipates a long night of drinking, it’s best to avoid the Well and confine the mixer to an H20 derivative (e.g., ice, water, or club soda).
(Poster above by Ed Fotheringham. Printing by the Vera Project. There are still a limited number of posters for sale. Proceeds go to Music for Marriage Equality. Starting on August 27, 2012, you should be able to buy one at www.music4marriage.org. Nice, professional, B&W photos below by Niffer Calderwood. Video by Chris Swenson. Blurry color photo of Ed Fotherginham’s feet by me and my Droid Incredible.)
I saw an impromptu reunion of the band Flop last Saturday night in the living room at my buddy Whiting’s house. For those who don’t know them, Flop was a band from the era of the Seattle grunge explosion, but never quite of the Seattle grunge explosion. They made three great full-length records, filled with melodic pop/punk. Then they disbanded around 1995.
In a alternate universe, destiny might well have delivered to Flop the fame that Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden received in ours. Meanwhile, Kurt Cobain, after years spent touring and trying to make it in the music business, might have put his art skills to use and stumbled into a successful career in web design, all the while continuing to play music shows and release records of great quality.
But in our universe, that fate belongs to Rusty Willoughby: art director by day, musician and songwriter 24/7/365. Whether with Pure Joy, Flop, Llama, or his most recent project, Cobirds Unite, few Seattle musicians have matched Rusty for longevity and consistent quality of output. Indeed, the Cobirds Unite album is easily one of my favorite records of the last 5 years.
Rusty may have never amassed a fan base comparable to that of the icons of grunge, but his audience remains passionate and loyal, a fact that was plainly evident last Saturday night. People were in high spirits, and Rusty, Bill, Paul, Nate, and Dave did not leave them disappointed.
The show somehow managed this amazing trick of being filled with wonderful nostalgia while simultaneously remaining absolutely rooted in the now. Maybe it was having everyone packed into such a small space (a great call on Flop’s part). Maybe, because Rusty’s current songs are still so great, nobody had to feel secretly sad that all the good stuff was in the past. Whatever the reasons, Whiting’s living room felt refreshingly devoid of ironic self-consciousness.
This, in and of itself, was notable. For few in the annals of history have wielded the protective shield of cynical, self-aware, irony more proudly and completely than the people of my generation. Boomer hippies have their free love, patchouli, tie dye, consciousness raising protest marches, and self-righteousness. We have our irony.
If I had any doubt about just how much our ironic outlook marks us as creatures of a particular time and place, a recent weekend spent amongst the sincerely earnest young songsters at the Doe Bay Music Festival made it plain for me again.
But last Saturday there was no one foot in the water and one foot on the shore. Everyone in the room seemed to want to be there all the way. And they looked like they belonged there too. Scanning the proceedings, I had an odd sensation, as if somebody had taken a picture of a house party from 1992, put it in Photoshop, and applied the “middle-aged” filter.
I know that probably doesn’t sound very attractive in the abstract. But it was really quite awesome in the flesh. The years had not transformed anyone into a sad, unrecognizable caricature of their younger self, and Flop was still great too. Yes, there were some bald heads and grey hair. But cosmetics could not obscure the unbroken thread running from Whiting’s living room all the way back to where it all started for Flop years ago in a shared U-District house.
Video by Chris Swenson
There was no bittersweet paradise lost vibe. There was only a joyful feeling of renewal, as we reconnected at the most basic and visceral level to what for many of us is the formative, shared-cultural experience of our generation, our storefront church, our Festival Express: the small-scale rock show–band and audience crammed together, wall between them destroyed, pulsing and undulating as one, senses completely immersed in the moment.
I’m not sure how the night could have been any more right. For my people have always been mostly about little cultural moments like this, shared with our immediate community, in places like basements and living rooms. We might not have invented doing it yourself, but our most significant cultural contribution has probably been making it something that everyone throughout the world immediately understands when they see the letters “DIY”.
The ethos of DIY is a modest one. Rarely, does its reach exceed its grasp. To a large extent, it exists in opposition to the grandiose. Indeed, it was probably observing the very public foibles of the Greatest Generation and the early Baby Boomers that led many of us to cling so tightly to the more modest goal of keeping things real enough that they don’t get too overblown and polluted.
Perhaps, it’s fair to criticize our lack of grand, widescreen audacity and ambition. But on the other hand, our DIY ethos seems to have aged better than tie dye and patchouli.
And that’s no accident. It was by design. For metaphorically speaking, DIY isn’t one particular suit of clothes or a specific fashion trend. It’s whatever you happen to be wearing at the moment you decide you’re going to get off your ass and do something, however small or personal it may seem in the grander scheme of things. In this regard, DIY is a timeless outfit that’s always in style.
Over the last 30 years, we’ve helped grow a lot of cool stuff out of the DIY soil. Even if it wasn’t a stated goal to begin with, some of it has changed the world. In the process, we’ve acquired power. Many among us are now the Man or the Woman.
So it’s both foolish and impossible to pretend that we are still part of some sort of underdog insurgency. Our sensibility is everywhere, in all kinds of improbable places, like State Farm Insurance commercials and sports talk radio.
Indeed, it increasingly feels like the entire mainstream is populated with people like us, cultural omnivores, making sly references to things like Gilligan’s Island; John Cage; Rush; Miles Davis; the Three Stooges; Apocalypse Now; and Tony Orlando and Dawn. It’s not just for margin dwelling hipsters anymore.
That can be pretty weird to contemplate sometimes. But still, even in middle age, a different thread also remains, one running slightly under the surface, but nevertheless hardwired into our collective identity. We don’t seem to know any other way than to keep going back to the DIY soil, wherever we may find it.
When in doubt, go to the basement, the living room, the practice space, the workshop, the drawing board, the word processor, or wherever else you do your thing. Make something.
Why? Because you want to. Because you have to. Because the act of doing it feels good in and of itself, even if the process ends up being more important than the outcome in the grand scheme of things. Express yourself. Remind yourself that you are still alive. In doing so, maybe help remind your friends and family that they are alive too.
That’s what Flop invited us to do with them so joyfully last Saturday night, put our hands in that dirt, rub it on our sweaty, beer-soaked faces, and remember something that has shaped so much of what we’ve done to date: No matter how much our worlds may change, with careers, kids, and lots of other cool (and not so cool) distractions and responsibilities, that soil remains ours to work in. We don’t need anyone’s permission to sow our seeds there. All we need is a little inspiration, the tools at hand, and the will to follow through.
I’ve had a K-Mart radio for over 30 years now. It receives AM, FM, and shortwave frequencies. It was made in Japan before that was a compliment. Nevertheless, it aspires to be hi-fidelity, with knobs and switches for bass, treble, volume, and loudness, plus a separate woofer and tweeter. It even has inputs on its side for things like microphones and electric guitars. Yes, I have played guitar through it.
A while back, a housemate of mine moved out and took the boombox from our kitchen. After months of cooking without music, I remembered the K-Mart radio, dug it out of storage, and put it back into service. Worked like a charm. No CDs, cassettes, or MP3s. Just whatever’s on the terrestrial airwaves when you power it up.
Around 1975, my dad gave both my brother and me one of these radios for Christmas. For me, it replaced an old tube table radio that had originally been my grandmother’s. That radio had a cool orange light on the front of it and wood on the sides. But it was on its last legs. As it heated up, the volume would drop until you couldn’t hear much of anything. It also didn’t have good AM reception. So I couldn’t listen to WLS, the Top 40 station from Chicago. But I did listen to Champaign’s WLRW Solid Gold FM on it: “Poison Ivy,” “Charlie Brown,” “Rag Doll,” and things like that. Strange to think that those oldies were younger in 1975 than the K-Mart radio is now.
I come from a mixed faith marriage. My mom is Episcopalian. My dad is Jewish. There are undoubtedly a lot of reasons why the faith of the mother determines the faith of the child in Judaism. But one reason might be that women are often the ones who maintain the family cultural traditions. That was pretty much true in my family. Perhaps because of the mixed marriage, I got very little traditional religion growing up. We never attended church or temple. Mostly, we worshipped in the Church of Dissonance, which really wasn’t a place as much as a way of being. But that’s a subject for another time.
We did, however, celebrate Christmas. Presumably, my mother was the instigator of this. As a very little boy, we went at least once out to Oakland, California to celebrate it with her mom. Probably, there were more times before that. But I don’t remember them. Maybe we celebrated it for Grandma’s sake. I don’t know. But when I was 5, Grandma died, and we kept on celebrating Christmas. So it either meant something to somebody, or by that time the habit was formed. The Londons are nothing if not creatures of habit, and Christmas certainly helped organize our yearly consumption of consumer durable goods. It also gave me one less thing to feel like a freak about (let’s just say that most of the kids I knew growing up did not worship in the Church of Dissonance).
Kids and Christmas are a very comfortable fit. At least that’s how it’s always seemed to me. Everyone is happy to see kids. People give them things. And why wouldn’t people give them things? Kids really make Christmas fun. They embody the joy of the season. Even today, it’s easy to please a kid with less than ten dollars. Try really pleasing an adult with less than 10 dollars. It’s virtually impossible. Only a kid delivers that much positive feedback for ten bucks.
As a kid, I didn’t think much about Christmas. It was just something we did. Consequently, I never really considered the possibility that my dad, the Jewish guy, might have a more complicated relationship with the holiday than I did. Of course, in retrospect, it’s clear that he did.
On the one hand, my dad definitely had the outsider’s anthropological curiosity about Christmas. In the late 1950s, he wrote an opera about Santa Claus to complete his Ph.D. in music composition. And in the 1970s, he composed a suite of Christmas music under the pseudonym “Bjørne Enstabile”. (Maybe he determined that since Irving Berlin had written a famous Christmas tune, it was a rite of passage for all Jewish composers to try their hand at writing one too.)
On the other hand, I think celebrating Christmas was always a little bit weird for my dad, like getting an invite to an annual party you have routinely been excluded from in the past. Even if the party is pretty fun, you never completely shake the sense that there’s something a little wrong about being there.
I’ve dated a few Jewish gals over the years, and on a couple of occasions they celebrated Christmas with me. While I don’t want to project too much of their experience with Christmas onto my dad, talking with them about it did provide me with at least a little bit of third party Jewish perspective on what it feels like to participate in the Christian rituals.
My takeaway from these conversations? Dad liked the family togetherness of Christmas. He seemed to like that low budget positive kid feedback part too. But he was nevertheless ambivalent about the holiday, and he expressed this ambivalence each year by putting off his Christmas shopping until the last possible moment.
Typically, the drill went something like this: Finals would end a few days before Christmas at the University of Illinois, where my dad taught music theory and composition. Then on December 23 or December 24, my dad would go have a few afternoon drinks, maybe with his friend Salvatore Martirano, maybe with some other folks, maybe alone. I don’t really know. But having some drinks was usually involved. Then he was ready to head off and do some Christmas shopping.
The year of the K-Mart radio was definitely a Christmas Eve shopping year. In fact, I think it was an unprecedented Christmas Eve night shopping year. This is probably how K-Mart got involved. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been dad’s go-to shopping destination. But it was one of the few stores open late on December 24th. So he didn’t have much of a choice.
The K-Mart in Champaign, Illinois was on Bloomington Road near Prospect Avenue (it’s a Home Depot now). From our house on West Hill Street, you drove north up Prospect across the railroad tracks, past Unc Blacker’s Tavern (“Coldest Beer in Town”), Top Boy Hamburgers, Putt Putt Golf, Dairy Queen, Shakey’s Pizza , Dog and Suds, and Foremost Liquors. I think there was a Red Lobster up there too.
We didn’t live far from the K-Mart, maybe a mile or two away. Once I got to junior high school, I biked it pretty regularly (indeed my junior high school was between our house and the K-Mart). But it was definitely in a different part of town. Our neighborhood sort of defined the northern edge of the nicer part of Champaign. It was nothing fancy, but it mostly consisted of reasonably well-kept, middle class, single family homes. As you headed north out towards K-Mart, things got progressively more low rent and run down. If you headed due east from K-Mart, you eventually found yourself in a poorer, African American part of town. And if you headed due west, you’d find a lot of poor and lower middle class white folks.
Whatever their ethnicity, these people were the regular customers of the K-Mart. And that Christmas Eve night was no exception. My dad later painted a rather bleak picture of the scene: people struggling under the dingy glow of the fluorescent lights to get some last minute shopping done with whatever cash they’d managed to scrape together before the impending deadline–many of them undoubtedly hoping their meager budget would be enough to win some positive feedback from their children.
Dad, the tipsy, middle-class academic, was most definitely a tourist in that sea of desperation. But he was not a stranger to it. He’d grown up poor in Philadelphia during the Great Depression. While he never said so explicitly, I’ve wondered whether the scene conjured up some unhappy childhood memories for him. All I know is that he never hit the K-Mart on Christmas Eve night again. And he rarely went to K-Mart at all after that.
So this night was different than all the other nights. It was like a higher power drew my dad to the radios. For they were of a quality rarely encountered at K-Mart before or since that day. I can’t remember anything else I received for Christmas in 1975, but the K-Mart radio left its indelible mark almost immediately. How different our lives would have been if dad had not gone to the K-Mart that night.
K-Mart Radio Era London Family @ the Sheraton in French Lick, Indiana. Seems entirely plausible that Post-IU/Pre-ISU Larry Bird was hanging out down in the basement bowling alley as this picture was being taken.
The day after I got the new radio, I was a little more of my own person than the day before I got it. Receiving it was like encountering Martin Luther’s 95 Theses during the Protestant Reformation and contemplating for the first time the possibility that no sacerdotal middle man was necessary to convene with the divine. Suddenly, I had my own direct connection. Now, it was about me and my peers. What did I like? What did we like? Who was cool? Who wasn’t? Before too long, we had our own cultural theology.
Of course, thinking about it almost 40 years later, my illusions of autonomy seem pretty quaint. Even if the K-Mart radio took my parents out of my cultural loop, there were still plenty of adults in the abstract ether of the mass media, constructing and structuring most of what we kids consumed. Sure, there was a symbiotic feedback loop. These people were eager to see what we liked, because their livelihood depended on it. But ultimately, it was a very top down system of dissemination with an incredibly powerful supply-side filtering mechanism. Many were called. But we only heard the very few who were chosen by the gods of the mass media.
Today, we live in an era of media fragmentation. Choice and individuality are buzzwords. The old enforced scarcity of mass media and supply-side filters has given way to a networked, hyper-abundance of digitized culture products. Often, it feels like almost everyone is both a publisher and a consumer.
Contemporary kids embrace a cultural theology far more radical than anything we could have conceived of in the 1970s. Many aren’t just skeptical about the privileged role of the sacerdotal middle man. They question the entire notion that any divine “other” exists outside the confines of the peer-to-peer Hive Mind.
Devices like the iPod allow people to carry tens of thousands of songs around in the palm of their hands. To anyone born before 1980, having easy access to such a huge archive of recorded music feels like an episode of Star Trek. All you have to do is say “Computer, play me some John Coltrane, Chuck Berry, Mississippi John Hurt, Minutemen, Hank Williams, Nick Drake, Death Cab for Cutie, and Soul Asylum.” A few moments later you’re listening to it.
In the face of this abundance, the shuffle feature has become a popular tool for addressing its challenges. Don’t know what to choose? Put it on shuffle. Who knows what it will play next? When shuffle does a good job, one may even entertain the possibility that the algorithm is tapping into something divine. But this is an illusion. Ultimately, all the control remains with the user. Don’t like the song that comes up in the shuffle? Skip it. Or put on your own customized play list. In the end, each iPod user has the godlike power to craft their own personal pop cultural experience.
That sort of power seems pretty great in theory. But in practice, wielding it can be rather overwhelming. Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice, eloquently addresses this conundrum. More choice, he argues, doesn’t necessarily mean more happiness. Often, it leaves people drained and dissatisfied. So many choices. So many what-ifs after a choice is made. Did I really make the best choice? Maybe I should have gotten the Chipotle, Cool Ranch Doritos instead of Extra Spicy Nacho Cheese.
This problem is particularly acute in the context of music consumption. So much old music is easily available and so much more new music is constantly being released. It’s like trying to drink from a high-pressure fire hose. Gerald Casale from the band Devo recently addressed this in an NPR interview: “What’s happened is that so many CDs are put out per month, possibly 10,000 a month. Nobody can possibly even know half the music that exists out there.”
For the people who try to keep up with current releases (e.g., critics and super fans), it can feel less and less like it’s about the pleasure of listening and more and more like it’s about just trying to find a way to process the never ending stream of data.
One wouldn’t want to miss out on some important new release. Yet is any release important anymore? How do you even locate and contextualize various releases when there’s such a glut of old and new music floating around in the big atemporal reservoir of song.
Radio, of course, doesn’t work like this. It’s less about control and more about collective experience. As my buddy Pete Sheehy put it to me a while ago, “a radio is a wePod not an iPod.” Everybody gets the same playlist and the same three choices when they tune into a radio station: (1) listen to it, (2) change the station, or (3) turn it off. That’s not a lot of choices compared to an iPod, especially given the limited number of terrestrial radio stations in most markets.
But even with these limitations, radio remains a great deal. It gives you the music for free, and it simply asks you to keep listening when the commercials come on (or the sponsorship messages, or the pleas for donations). Evidently, enough of these commercials have been listened to year-in and year-out to keep the business model viable for many decades.
Probably, I’m just getting old and nostalgic, but I often prefer letting someone else choose the playlist, especially if they are good at it. Compared to the average shuffle mix on an iPod, the classic top 40 of the 1960s and early 1970s still provided a more cohesive mix. Whether it was Motown, British Invasion, Stax/Volt, or San Francisco Psychedelia, if it made it on the top-40 in this period, there was something catchy and pop at its core.
Hell, the same could probably even be said about the average 1970s free-form station. There was a human filter involved, somebody with judgment. There was also the knowledge that a bunch of other folks in your town were listening to the same thing at that very same moment that you were.
When I first visited Seattle in the summer of 1990, my brother had KCMU on in his house (the predecessor to KEXP for any youngsters or Seattle newcomers reading this). As we moved around his Capitol Hill neighborhood, it seemed like every business we entered also had it on.
Fugazi was scheduled to play a show at some movie theater in Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood that has long since been razed for condos or something. Riz Rollins was the afternoon DJ then, and on the day of the Fugazi show, as he talked about it on the air, it really felt like Seattle was a very small town and everybody who lived there was going to be attending the show that night. I found that astounding, especially in a city the size of Seattle.
At that moment, I was reminded of the power of the wePod, and I understood why Seattle’s vibrant music scene was fast becoming an international phenomenon. Along with local music magazine “the Rocket,” KCMU was taking the energy of the local scene, aggregating it, amplifying it, mixing it with complementary stuff from the world outside Seattle (like Fugazi), and reflecting it back to the local community. All you had to do was tune in to be a part of it.
Today, social networking sites like Facebook seem to offer a richer platform than radio for aggregating and sharing these sorts of social experiences. So perhaps we don’t need radio as much for that anymore. But as I celebrate another year with the K-Mart radio, let’s not prematurely write off the venerable wePod either.
Sure, its status and cultural relevance may have declined somewhat in recent years. And it certainly has its flaws (the present state of most commercial radio offers ample proof of that). But in the right hands, a radio can still change your life, just as it changed mine that Christmas morning many years ago.
Everyday, staff members at stations like KEXP continue to drink deeply from the fire hose of cultural production, distill it, and beam the results back to the people. In doing so, they reaffirm that a carefully curated set of music provides an unparalleled opportunity to sidestep the noise and commune with the divinity of the pure signal.
[starreview tpl=16 size=’16’] [Another piece from the archives–written in 2008. You can purchase Holy Cow at CDBaby.]
Back in the mid-1980s, folks didn’t know everything about everywhere. There were no online virtual communities. Home computers weren’t multi-track recorders in waiting. DIY home recordings weren’t ubiquitous. We flew a lot more blind, because it wasn’t all a keystroke away. You had to know people who knew things. If you didn’t, you had to hope you could find some people who did. If you couldn’t, you made do with what you had.
In this Paleolithic era of the cassette porta-studio, every thirteen-year-old kid didn’t have one yet. In fact, you were lucky if you even knew someone who had one. And notwithstanding Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the conventional wisdom was clear: People didn’t make records on a porta-studio. “Real” records were made by professionals in big fancy studios that cost lots of money to rent. Even so-called “Indie” records involved open reel tape of some sort.
Those folks audacious enough to make a record on a porta-studio were in for an uphill climb. The available knowledge about recording was spotty and mostly passed on by word of mouth. Equipment was hard to come by. Nobody took you very seriously, either, especially if your musical vision didn’t sound like Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” with gated digital reverb on the toms and thick layers of Yamaha DX-7 digital synth filling in all the cracks. If you deigned to release the finished product on cassette, well, how could you even really call that a “record”?
But some determined people did–people like John de Roo of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Often, these folks simply didn’t know any better. They had something to say, and they just wanted to capture it before it slipped away forever. So they used the available tools–in this case, Dirk Richardson’s Yamaha 4-track cassette recorder and whatever other gear they happened to have. And when it all came together, well, a little gem called Holy Cow was created.
Today, there are whole genre categories like “Lo-Fi” and “Freak Folk” that describe this homemade approach to music making. Nobody questions its legitimacy. When you use those terms, people in the know immediately understand what you mean. But when John de Roo recorded Holy Cow, that stuff was still being figured out.
Guided By Voices hadn’t even released their first porta-studio album. So when a friend gave me this cassette and said it was John de Roo’s “solo album,” I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. To be honest, I was probably in the camp wondering how anything available only on cassette could even be viewed as a legitimate record.
But as I listened to it, I overcame that bias. Maybe it wasn’t as slick as Van Halen’s 1984, or even Husker Du’s Zen Arcade, but between its great songs and arrangement choices, it made a virtue of its limitations. Be it the ethereal beauty of the opener, “Castle in the Water,” the acoustic earthiness and pond sounds of “Snapping Turtle,” the inspired cover of Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” or the outright weird psychedelic pop of “Elizabeth Loves Orange Soda,” Holy Cow delivers from start to finish.
It turned out to be one of my favorite records of 1986. I’m happy to find Holy Cow sounding better than ever in digital format. I’m also hopeful this reissue will help it to find a wider audience. It’s most definitely worthy. Stuff like Phil Collins sounds dated today, but Holy Cow is strangely timeless. It almost makes more sense right now than it did back in the day. Whether you’re hearing it for the first time, or getting reacquainted all over again, you’re in for a treat. Enjoy.
[Another old piece of writing. Kind of a sibling to the Replacements piece. Consolidating it over here.]
Recently, the band Kiss made a triumphant return to the limelight. It was fun observing the whole resurgence. It got me thinking warm thoughts about my life as 7th grader, listening to the Big 89, WLS AM Chicago, and the 50,000 watts of top forty power it beamed down to Champaign, Illinois. But before I’ve even finished singing “Beth” to myself, my mind invariably wanders forward to more recent Kiss related memory: a night a few years before this recent resurgence when I unexpectedly found myself going to see Ace Frehley, Kiss lead guitarist, perform at a local rock club with his own band.
“Whadya think he’ll play?” one of my friends wondered out loud as we drove down to the club.
“Hope he plays some Kiss songs,” another one replied.
“He better,” we all agreed. “Or it’ll be a rip-off.”
Inside the club, the band room had been transformed into the “hard rock zone.” The stage was filled with tall stacks of Laney amplifiers belonging to Ace and his band. In many trips to this club, I had never seen a full wall of amps like that in there.
Outside the band room, by the bar, I ran into an acquaintance of mine who said he had been there when the bands loaded in their equipment and that Ace was surrounded by three body guards.
“I couldn’t tell if they were protecting him or holding him up so he wouldn’t fall down,” he explained.
About twenty minutes after the second opening band finished its set, Ace emerged with his band. From my vantage point he looked like a cross between a puffy-faced vampire and Elvis after he discovered Carbohydrates. “Relaxed fit” blue jeans were a necessity rather than a fashion choice. Surrounding Ace were three comparatively younger musicians of the hard rock persuasion, sporting an array of tight jeans, colorful vests and scarves that would have made Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler proud.
At this point, even a jumbo helping of Generation X ironic whimsy seemed unlikely to salvage the evening. But when Ace slung on his cherry-sunburst Les Paul Custom and the band launched into “Detroit Rock City,” I was forced to reconsider my position. The band sounded good, even if Ace’s vocals were a little thin. All those amps made one hell of a loud pummeling sound. The kind of loud you get when you send two Les Paul guitars into eight hundred watts of overdriven tube amplification and back out through thirty-two 12″ Celestion speakers–a muscular, we’re not even pushing these rigs, kind of loud. I stood there, slightly in awe, the bottom end of the guitars washing over me, and pondered whether the best Kiss songs didn’t embody, in a hard rock context, the very principles Strunk and White preached in their Elements of Style: clarity, directness, concision, and careful organization.
Then a strange thing happened. The voice of my sixty-five-year-old dad echoed through my head:
“He’s really working up there, isn’t he?”
Although the meaning of this statement was immediately clear to me, it probably needs some explanation here. My dad has been involved in music professionally for about fifty years. He started out doing popular stuff, playing trumpet and french horn in jazz and swing bands back in Philadelphia in the 1940s. Since 1960, he’s been a composer, a conductor, and a professor of music composition. He’s written three operas and numerous other orchestral and choral works, most of which have far more in common with the work of Schönberg and Cage than with that of Ace Frehley.
But despite their stylistic dissimilarities, over the years, dad, like Ace, has made his living through music. It’s art to him, and he takes his art seriously. But it’s also a job and a career. So when my dad says “He’s really working up there, isn’t he?” it’s a knowing comment about a reality that binds all professional musicians together, regardless of how different they may be in musical style or taste. They’re all hustling and trying to make a living. They’re not just artists. They’re workers too. Music may be everyone else’s break from everyday life, their entertainment. It may even be a welcome escape from the tedium of the nine-to-five world for the musicians themselves. But if you do it regularly for money, eventually it’s work.
So when my dad made a similar comment as we watched James Brown do the splits on the David Letterman Show about thirteen years ago, I took it as a statement paying respect to James Brown for taking his craft seriously, for being my dad’s age and doing the splits on Letterman, for still getting out there and singing “Cold Sweat” with energy and conviction. I took it the same way when my dad used similar language to describe seeing Elvis in Las Vegas in 1972. And when my dad took my brother to see the Who in 1982 and he came back and said the same thing, I knew what he meant. I doubt the Who touched his life significantly, but the fact of their longevity did make an impression on him. They were still doing it after almost two decades. And they put on a good show. Their job was to entertain and they did their job.
We children of the rock and roll era don’t have much respect for the notion of craft to which my dad’s comment refers. It’s really a pre-rock-and-roll notion, one born in a time when craft was usually a precondition to making a living as a musician. Songwriters wrote songs. Musicians played these songs. There was a lot more live music and bands were bigger. They had big horn sections with intricate arrangements. To make these arrangements work, bands generally worked from sheet music. This practice also facilitated more fluid employment relations. Individual musicians were less tied to particular bands. The “show went on.” If Saxophone A couldn’t show up, you brought in Saxophone B, gave him the music, maybe rehearsed once and played the show.
This still goes on today in at least some segments of the music industry. But in many respects, rock and roll changed all this, because the ethos of rock and roll is hostile to such notions of craft and professionalism, even though this sort of craft and professionalism has always been a part of rock and roll. As an ideology, rock and roll has always been about “anyone can do it” and “raw emotions” expressed in an “authentic” way. So a song’s a little raw. So the guitars are out of tune. Who cares? It’s sincere. It’s honest. It’s what I was feeling. Don’t put you’re standards on me. I can do what I want. It’s rock and roll.
In this ideological framework, craft, in the pre-rock sense, is among the worst evils. It’s about elitism and exclusivity. It’s the end of innocence, the beginning of self-consciousness, the arrival of artifice and insincerity. It’s the hand of “the man” sanitizing the music, white-washing the truth. It’s the world of commerce rushing in and trampling the sacred world of “real” artistic expression. It’s people carrying on after the thrill is gone in order to make a living. It’s people making decisions for business rather than artistic reasons. It’s not very romantic. In short, it’s the everyday life of the real world, the world from which rock and roll is supposed to provide an escape.
In this regard, rock and roll seems to share more with the world of sports than with the musical genres that preceded it. You either make it big or barely make a thing (The NBA vs. the CBA). In addition, rock and roll seems to be viewed as a game that you play, not a job that you do. God forbid you ever think of it as a job (especially out loud). You’re supposed to play it for the love of the game, and feel grateful for the privilege. You’ll work a day job if you have to, in order to play on your own terms. That’s far more honorable than sullying yourself in a cover band playing weddings.
Rock and roll is also like sports in that successful rock and roll musicians aren’t just musicians. They’re “stars.” As a result, we’ve tended to look at successful rock musicians in much the same way we look at successful ballplayers. There’s a tacit agreement: you play the game as well as you can and we’ll give you more money and adulation than most people receive in a life time. But remember that it’s a young man’s game. When the time comes that you’ve lost the spring in your step and you can’t pull the ball down the line anymore, leave the game gracefully and retire or go sell insurance. We don’t want to feel embarrassed for you. Because if we have to see you as you are now, we’ll have to look at ourselves as we are now. We’ll have to face the here and now, as opposed to that fantasy world of the past that your music creates for us, that place where we’re all forever young.
Ace Frehley is the walking embodiment of this phenomenon. In his case, it’s even more pronounced, because he spent the most successful years of his career performing in make-up and a costume, surrounded by a vast array of pyrotechnics. Maybe he looked like a puffy-faced vampire in 1975 too. We never knew, but we could sure see him now in all his middle-aged, burned-out splendor. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
But there’s more to it than that. Even if Ace was as fit as Steven Tyler–the Dorian Grey of Hard Rock–seeing him perform would still engender a complicated mix of emotions. For at some level, seeing Ace is seeing Kiss. And unpacking the cultural significance of Kiss has proven to be far more complicated than anyone ever expected. After all, rock critics and the hipoise always hated Kiss, precisely because Kiss was always about craft. It was crass. It was completely contrived. And in the eyes of the critics, the “philistine masses” ate it up, because they lacked the hermeneutic skills to shed their false consciousness and see the horrible truth about the band. They were too stupid to see through the artifice, to see that there might not be any “real” emotions underlying Kiss’s music, to see that “Art” took a back seat to entertainment.
What the critics missed is that music is a two way emotional street. It isn’t just about a musician bearing his or her “real” soul and the listener bearing witness to the “authenticity” of this experience and absorbing it. It’s about listeners making their own meanings out of the music. At this level, the distinction between “real” emotion and craft is a lot less important. Craft can be a virtue, because craft is a powerful thing. That’s why rock and roll has always been wary of it, even as it tacitly embraces it. Craft is knowledge. It implies an understanding of the ways in which music affects people physically and emotionally and the ability to use music’s power to manipulate people’s emotions and senses. In the case of pop music, it’s the ability to write and record a song that people like, a song that people will pay money for.
On this level Kiss was always a phenomenal success. Whether the band members wrote the songs themselves or brought in song doctors like Desmond Child, someone knew what they were doing and cared about doing it well. Hell, the band might not have even played on the records. And whether the songs expressed “sincere” emotions is anyone’s guess. Maybe they just wanted to make money or be famous. But someone had pride in the product. Sure, it was candy, but for those of us who came of age with Kiss, it tasted pretty good.
We were touched by the band’s craft. It seduced us and made us like the band’s music. And we’ve built emotional attachments to Kiss’s music that are personal to our own experiences. At least for me, these attachments don’t have much to do with the “deep issues” of pain and loss and the contemplation of the artist’s soul. They have to do with being twelve years old and listening to the radio and singing “I want to rock and roll all night and party every day” without really even knowing what the hell these words meant. They were just catchy. They still are. And I don’t want to belittle this experience just because I was twelve years old and lacking the sophisticated interpretive tools possessed by rock critics and my friends’ older siblings. I learned those later. They’ve brought me pleasure and enlightenment. But so has Kiss, a pleasure I’d hate to lose, but can never fully explain.
So as I watched Ace playing up on the stage that night, it was strangely uplifting. “Rocket Ride” felt good. “Back in the New York Groove,” from his solo album, felt good. So did the encore, where he pulled out “Rock and Roll All Night.” Sure it was bittersweet. It was hard not to feel a little sorry for Ace. There was no big arena, no make-up, and no pyrotechnics. Ace was no longer a mega-star. But even knowing how drunk Ace probably was, he did not seem pathetic to me. Ace was working and there was a love and understanding of the craft that came through. He was up on that stage entertaining us, and he acquitted himself quite well. The band sounded good and Ace’s guitar playing was there too. Nobody ever would have confused him with Ritchie Blackmore or Eddie Van Halen. But nobody ever has. So why start now? He played his solos and rocked out in a down right dignified way. Well, as dignified as a person can be who uses the words “fuck,” “fucker,” and “motherfucker” in every sentence. But after all, Ace wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t. He’s a free bird. It’s rock and roll, and Ace is a rock and roller.
[I wrote this years ago, mostly just to try and understand some stuff that was bouncing around in my head. Moving it over from the Myspace page, so it’s here with other stuff I’ve written. The piece was never formally published. It’s just been bouncing around the web. But the people who’ve read it, seem to like it.
For example, in his book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson called it “a 1996 lost classic of rock criticism…”
David Cantwell, author of Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, this great New Yorker piece on Sam Cook’s “A Change is Gonna Come”, and co-author of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles called it “one of the best, smartest, most insightful music pieces I’ve ever read. Period.”
Have look. Maybe you’ll enjoy it too.]
By Jacob London, copyright, 1996. All rights reserved. No commercial use without author’s express written permission
A while back, my local “alternative” radio station began playing a cover version of the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” by the U.K. band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. The first time I heard it, I didn’t think about changing the station, even though the Rollers were one of the most critically unhip bands of the 1970s. Instead, I sat back and listened, slightly amused, but mostly taking the whole experience for granted. Such is the state of things now that the practice of “alternative” bands covering “bad” songs from the 1970s has become so commonplace. If it isn’t Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, it’s Seaweed or Smashing Pumpkins doing some Fleetwood Mac song like “Go Your Own Way” or “Landslide.”
Few question the full-on embrace of 1970s popular culture anymore. It’s even got it’s own “American Graffiti” film in Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.” Linklater’s take on the past is a little more self-conscious and cynical than George Lucas’s vision of the early 1960s in “American Graffiti.” But Linklater’s remembrance of teen life in 1976 remains a warm one, especially in its unselfconsciously reverent use of the period’s music. It pushes all the same buttons as Lucas’s film, although neither Linklater nor his audience would ever completely admit it. For even as the residue of 1970s has reasserted itself in the American cultural life of the 1990s, a lingering tinge of reticence remains, as people continue to adjust to the idea that openly embracing the mainstream culture of the 1970s no longer entails being instantly labeled a loser or a philistine.
Back in the early 1980s, when I was starting college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, things were a lot different. There was plenty of risk involved in embracing the mainstream music of the 1970s, at least among the community of rock and roll hipsters I hung out with. A friend later summarized the stakes very well in a different context: “There’s a lot on the line when you tell other people what kind of music you like; people know they’ll be judged based on what they say. If they give the right answer they’ll be accepted. If they don’t, people may look down on them.” This was true in Ann Arbor during that time–as it has been everywhere I’ve lived since. The rules determining inside and outside were generally unwritten, but they weren’t hard to figure out.
Punk rock was cool. Some New Wave was cool. David Bowie, he was pretty cool (his glam rock was sort of New Wave and Punk before they were invented). Dylan, the Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones, the Who, Motown, and the other classics of 1960s rock, that was cool too, as long as you weren’t too much of a hippie about it. But the mainstream music of the 1970s was not cool. Disco sucked, including George Clinton and his P-Funk allies. Foreigner was not cool. Lynyrd Skynyrd was not cool. Neither were Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Peter Frampton, Foghat, Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, or Alice Cooper. Black Oak Arkansas was not cool. Neither were Head East, R.E.O. Speedwagon, the Michael Stanley Band, the Eagles, Kansas, Styx, nor any of the other music Richard Linklater put in his movie.
In this environment, it is no surprise that my good friend Larry felt compelled to show his allegiance to the clan of the rock and roll hipster by throwing his copy of Led Zeppelin IV against the wall of the University of Illinois dorm room where he was staying during the summer of 1983. I seem to remember trying half-heartedly to convince him not to do it as he raised the record to hurl it.
“You sure you want to do that man,” I said. “A record is a record. You might regret it later.”
“No way man, I’m gonna throw it,” he said, cocking it behind his ear. “I’m ashamed I own this; it sucks. If I hear ‘Stairway to Heaven’ one more time I’m gonna lose my shit. It sucks. ‘Black Dog’ sucks too. It all sucks.” And with that, he whipped the thing at the wall and it shattered into numerous pieces around the room (he told me recently he bought it again on CD a few years ago). We put something like “Armed Forces” by Elvis Costello on the turntable, opened up some cans of Stroh’s beer, and cracked up for a while, completely confident that justice had been done.
