Brain zest, really.
Alot of racket on friends' blogs lately about the wheezing music industry, all its various pitfalls and wrinkles, characters and charlatans, etc. With all due (overdue?) respect to my dear friends, it's all very boring.
An ad I saw on Craigslist today, verbatim (aka cut and pasted), all typos and non-punctuation preserved for your enjoyment:
"Hey whats up, we are looking for a lead guitarsit, someone who would be able to write the lead parts, most of the song writing is done by the lead singer, but we dont mind mixing things up and listening to everyones ideas.
We play music thats somewhat pop punk, indie, and a bit screamo. We have many record company intrests and are working with a studio/ venue/managment agency.
The type of person we hope to find is someone who can practice 3 times a week, someone who is between the ages of 17 to about 20 or 21. Also having skills with a keyboard would be a big bonus, and if you have some singing abilty. Also we do not want someone who is planning to do this for a couple of months, we have many opportunities to make our music come out big, so please only serious and friendly musicians."
Puts me in mind of a remark someone made about me behind my back many years ago, summer of 1989, while camped out on a big rock in British Columbia:
"Yeah, I like Eric OK. He's pretty smart. For a musician..."
To her face, and with utterly undiluted venom, I gleefully raked this person over some very hot coals for that stupid remark. I was only 21, but it was one of my finest oratories ever. "It doesn't matter what you do in life," I probably yelled, "you have to be smart no matter what. If I was not a smart, capable, talented person, never mind being a musician, I wouldn't be perched on this freezing soaking boulder with you, you spoiled little half-witted semi-literate twatty shrew." I might not have said it quite like that, but I like the way it ended up sort of rhyming...
We later shipped her home because she couldn't hack it. I think I scared her. But her remark has stuck with me over the years. As evidenced above, musicians are generally branded among non-musicians as illiterate morons (drummers and viola players), egomaniacal martinets (guitar players and conductors), drooling geek doormats (bass players), primadonna vibrator-up-the-juxie whip-crackers (keyboard folks of every flavor), and, well, losers on their way to the gig, trying to beat the dead frog (french horn, etc). I think that's why my esteemed fellow trench-dwellers have been venting lately.
The music industry is what it is. Agreed, it is unconscionably corrupt. But that's nothing new. Here's the cure as I see it. Invent your own music industry, and just do everything you can to carve out your own little corner of it. Record like mad and make records however you're able, make your own flyers and album covers, do whatever it takes to get it out there. Somebody will like it, and buy it. Learn how to be your own publicist, booker, manager, accountant, producer, engineer. None of it is rocket science. If you happen to get some mailbox money along the way, major bonus points and consider yourself lucky. If you got into this to get rich, you made a big mistake.
Just don't make crap. That's all I ask. If you want to be soaked in ducats in this racket, learn how to "sing" like Celine Dion, and then never talk to me again.
A very fun show at the Red Devil last night. Oh, how Griddle just makes me smile and stomp my foot. Prog rock without the elves, indeed.
RIP Robert Joseph, fellow musician. What happenned to ye? A heart attack at age 34? Why? Huh? What? Whaaaa...? No sense being made here.
Oh, how I love Flanders and Swann...
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The Reluctant Cannibal
by Flanders & Swann, circa 1956
Seated one day at the tom-tom, I heard a welcome shout from the kitchens: “Come and get it!”
Roast leg of insurance salesman.
A chorus of yums ran round the table. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.... Except for Junior, who pushed away his shell, got up from his log, and said, “I don't want any part of it.”
What? Why not?
I don't eat people
Eh?
I won't eat people
Huh?
I don't eat people
I must be going deef
Eating people is wrong
It's wrong?
Don't eat people
Have you gone clean out of your mind?
I won't eat people
What's the matter with the lad?
Don't eat people
He keeps on repeating
Eating people is bad
But people have always eaten people, what else is there to eat? If the juju had meant us not to eat people, he wouldn't have made us of meat.
Don't eat people
Oh no, not again
I won't eat people
All the day long
Don't eat people
He keeps on repeating
Eating people is wrong
Well, I've never heard of a more ridiculous idea in all my born days. To think that a son of mine should grow up to be a sissy... Me, chief assistant to the assistant chief. I suppose you realise, son, if this was to get around we might never get self-government.
I won't eat people!
Have you been talking to one of your mothers again? You're not getting to be one of these cranks that thinks that eating people is cruel, are you? You see a man sitting in a pot and think he's suffering? Oh, it's not like that at all. Why, he's just had an invigorating chase through the forest. He's sitting there in the nice warm water, with all the carrots and dumplings and things, he's thinking “Oh, the pleasure and happiness I'm going to give to a whole heap of people”, that man in the pot there, he enjoys it.
Eating people is wrong!
Look, son, son, I admire your sincerity. Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not. You're young! When you're young, you think you can change the whole world overnight, even eating people, I know, I've been young myself. Take it from your old dad, you've just got to learn to take the world as it is.
I won't let another man pass my lips!
I know why you say “Don't eat people”, because you are a coward, Francis, that's your trouble, yes, a yellow-livered coward. You wouldn't mind eating people if you weren't afraid of ending up in the pot yourself. How despicable. Go on like this and you're liable to get me into hot water.
I won't eat people!
That's enough!
I don't eat people!
I don't want to...
Eating people is wrong!
Communist!
Going around saying “don't eat people”, that's the way to make people hate you! We always have eaten people, always will eat people — You Can't Change Human Nature.
I won't eat people!
I don't eat people!
I won't eat people!
I don't eat people!
I won't eat people!
It must be someone he ate
Eating people is out!
I give up. I give up. You used to be a regular anthropophagi. If this crazy idealistic idea of yours was to catch on, I just don't know where we would all be. It would just about ruin our entire internal economy. Fortunately, I suppose its catching on isn't very likely. Why, you might just as well go around saying “don't fight people”, for example...
Don't fight people?!?!?!? Ha ha! (Both convulsed with laughter)
Oh, that's my boy.
(In chorus:) Ridiculous!
For those I know and love, you're probably going to roll your eyes at this. My near-obsession with The Plimsouls is well-known and much snickered at. And so it continues...
Last night Wendo and I went to see Peter Case at the Cafe Du Nord here in SF. What a show. Just him and a guitar. For those not familiar with him, a little background is in order.
Peter Case was in the much-storied punk band The Nerves in the late 70s. From there he went on to form the world-storming power-pop band The Plimsouls in the 80s. They went on to become one of the world's legendary one-hit-wonders, penning what I maintain is The Perfect Song, "Million Miles Away." Remember the movie "Valley Girl?" If you're so inclined, please go to the mp3 section here and check out my version of it. I don't think I quite did it justice, but it's pretty close. After releasing a couple albums independently, The Plimsouls signed to Geffen Records and released "Everywhere At Once," an absolute masterpiece of pop confection, yet to be surpassed in terms of songwriting and delivery. Second perhaps only to Beatles '65, it is still pretty much my favorite album of all time. They broke up a couple years later, reforming in the late 90s to release the almost-as-wonderful "Kool Trash" on Fuel 2000 Records, with Clem Burke from Blondie on drums.
When I was about 12, I was visiting my dad at his lab on the UCSD campus on a Friday afternoon. From somewhere I heard the sound of live music, and decided to investigate. I walked over to the Student Union, and saw a band in the middle of a soundcheck in preparation for the weekly "TGIF" party on the main quad. I later learned that it was indeed The Plimsouls, and it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. At that point I was firmly ensnared in my unflapping devotion to Kiss, blissfully unaware that I was probably another unwitting participant in a pretty medioce band's publicity/marketing juggernaut. But this stupid little soundcheck was a complete revelation. And it was loud. Perfectly so. A couple things I took away from it; Telecasters are so much cooler than Flying-Vs, and lefty Samoan bass players are pretty damn nifty.
In high school any band I was in or went to see cut their teeth on "Million Miles Away." It was mandatory. It's not a terribly hard song, but there are important details you have to pay attention to. If you fucked it up, people remembered. Anybody could play "Red Skies" or "Rio" or "Everybody Wants To Rule The World", and you could get away with a few clams. But if you wanted to play "Million Miles Away", you had to get it right. If you did, you earned some stripes as a non-lame band. There was a band called The Pinstripes in SD (probably still there, and still a band name I wish I had thought of) that got it perfect, and they played most of our school dances. There was a band called The Neat who did not get it at all right, and was run out on a rail even though they did a better "Over Under Sideways Down" than anyone else.
Fast forward to 1998, and The Plimsouls return to San Francisco for 3 shows at the Great American and Slim's. I was at all of them. Aside, Eddie Munoz belongs to that highly underrated school of guitar players that truly knows what real rock and roll guitar playing is all about. George Harrison, Paul Weller, Mike Campbell, and especially Elliot Easton also belong in that group (just the 4 that pop into my head at the moment). Go back and listen to "Shake It Up". That's a very fine solo.
So, about 25 years after I saw The Plimsouls soundchecking, I shook Peter Case's hand this weekend. It's not often one gets to meet, for want of a better word, a hero. It's even rarer to walk away from that encounter not disappointed. He was friendly, he remembered my name after I introduced myself, and the show was spectacular. He mentioned on stage a recent magazine interview he did, wherein the interviewer asked what would prompt a man to "quit a perfectly good rock and roll band to become an obscure solo folk artist." Then he launched into "I Shook His Hand", and that pretty much answered the question.
Thanks for the great show, Pete. Thanks for the wonderful b-day gift, Wendo. Just what I needed. "I was proud to say I shook his hand."
See y'all at the Red Devil this Saturday.