Live Performing Woes, part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote about how performing live music – and industry already on life-support – is additional burdened by restaurant and club owners having to pay royalty fees  to musicians who are already rich and – more and more often – dead. I spoke with a musician last week who said that back in the 80s a good musician would have to be paid a minimum of $250 just to hold a Saturday night. That’s no longer the case.  Save for the big acts, live music earns a fraction of what it used to earn, and the strict enforcement of music licensing fees aren’t helping matters.

Or perhaps I have it wrong. I received a number of terrific comments for musicians and non-musicians alike, and the take away for me is that not everyone agrees with my conclusions and even those who do aren’t sure how to rectify the problem. 

One reader questioned whether small establishments are being paranoid to think that the big music publishing organizations are really going to charge fees for not following the rules. I wish that were the case, but unfortunately there are well-publicized examples of restaurants and clubs getting hit with fees from ASCAP, BMI and the like.

A friend of mine shared this little tidbit: a coffee house here in Elmhurst no longer allows musicians to play cover songs because they find paying the ASCAP fees prohibitive.  Another musician said that his band once had to change its playbill from “rock and roll covers of your favorite bands” to “live music” (or something equally generic) because of concerns of music licensing fees.

Other musicians noted how unfairly stacked the music industry is against the “little guy,” not only when it comes to live performing, but in the realm of downloads, streams and radio play.  As he says, “more opportunities equals harder to track,” and companies like ASCAP and BMI definitely have their hands full when it comes to figuring out how to collect fees for all of the different mediums out there. I couldn’t agree more. I believe that listening to a recording should garner income. I’m not as convinced about live performing, nor was this reader. After all, imagine if the Top Ten Club in Hamburg or the Cavern Club in Liverpool had been hounded by music royalty collection firms. Would The Beatles have been able to make a go of it?

But perhaps this view is erroneous, because it’s based on an entirely different system. One reader commented that back in the day everyone was working together: musicians would pay the union, the union would ensure that musicians were being paid properly, the clubs paid fees to the publishing companies, and people paid for live music. Today, people don’t want to pay for music unless it’s big time acts, and therefore club owners don’t want to pay fees (or musicians). This person wrote: “If successful songwriters remembered what it was like to play songs they loved for peanuts and (if) record companies kicked a little more back to the writer/artist they wouldn’t feel the need to squeeze as much as possible out of the everyday live musicians.”

But the model of people paying for music is “dead and buried,” lamented another reader. The songs are now “the fuel for the touring engine” whereas several decades ago the reverse was true. Fewer people are playing out on the weekends and they are earning less than ever, so the music collection companies must really be desperate to go after the little guys.

Another reader wrote that “both the bar and performers make money from playing music someone else wrote,” and he understands why fees should be collected. He does feel that the fees are out of proportion with the income that’s being generated, however. Another reader agreed, stating that “others should not be free to profit off your work without some remuneration to the owner,” but was at a loss as to how the current model can be changed.  He thought perhaps some percentage of total revenue generated from covering music should be paid as music royalties.

These were all welcome comments, and though I might wish that today’s business model were similar to that of decades ago, the time of musicians, music unions and clubs all working together to give patrons a quality live performance are largely gone. It all comes back to the consumer: if people aren’t willing to pay for recorded music and if they aren’t willing to pay a cover for a live band, then the whole system breaks down. What remains is a poor replacement. Good musicians – and some really, really bad ones, too – are being paid poorly for club owners who are probably being paid poorly but who still have to pay fees for already-wealthy musicians who no longer make money off of their old catalog because consumers are downloading it for free.

Say it with me: “Oy!”

BEWARE! Don't play that song!

A musician I know recently received a list of approximately seventy artists he's no longer allowed to play at a particular restaurant. They include: Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, The Eagles, Smokey Robinson, Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen. Luckily, the inclusion of Megadeth on the list didn’t affect my friend’s playlist, but the others did.

So, what do all of these artists have in common?

They’re all part of the company Global Music Rights, a music publishing entity led by Irving Azoff whose mission is to collect higher performance royalties for artists, some of whom haven’t played music for decades by virtue of the fact that they’re dead. John Lennon, for instance, and Ira Gershwin!   

On the surface, demanding more money from radio conglomerates and on-line streaming services like Pandora might seem like not only a reasonable business pursuit, but even a moral one, the equivalent to Major League ballplayers demanding more of the pie from greedy owners back in the 70s and 80s. According to a New York Times article on the topic, a song that’s streamed around 40 million times on Pandora only collects approximately $2200 under the traditional publishing compaies of ASCAP and BMI, and since the music industry has taken such a tremendous hit on physical sales, it's reasonable that some artists would try to make up for the loss elsewhere. 

Of course, nothing is forcing a radio station to play Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” for the billionth time. Hell, maybe Global Music Right will be doing everyone a favor by eliminating overplayed songs from our radio dial. But either way, I concede this end of the business strategy. I don’t care if 97.1 FM "The Drive" in Chicago (which is of course owned by a large broadcasting company) has to pay a little more to play “Hotel California.” (Though can we all agree that the estate of Ira Gershwin should give it a rest, already?)

But what about musicians? Not DJs, mind you, who play the original recording, but musicians who play an interpretation of the song? Should the arms of performance rights enforcement extend this far? 

I will play around forty gigs in 2016 plus another forty-five church services and will be lucky to gross – get this – $10,000 for doing so. I’m not joking. I earn less per hour than my teenage daughters. And yes, just like no one is forcing a radio station to play Journey, no one is forcing me to play music for money. I could call it a day and start working in human resources again and within a matter of months slit my wrists.  

But the questions is: should musicians really be restricted by what songs they can play? And should restaurant owners really be paying licensing fees for hiring a cheap-ass band on a Saturday night doing serviceable covers of well-known songs? I see small restaurant owners, program managers of struggling park districts and night-shift supervisors of dive bars on a weekly basis, and they’re not exactly driving Teslas to work. Still, my musician friends often have to protect themselves and include a clause in their contracts stating that the restaurant owner is liable for any licensing fees associated with hosting live entertainment.

What about large national restaurant chains that own hundreds of locations nationally? Surely they can pony up the cash to the publishing companies, right? Perhaps. But I know of at least one national chain that has opted not to pay the likes of Irving Azoff, and who wins in this scenario? Not the musician. Not the music publisher. Not the composer. Not the patrons (unless avoiding certain artists is a plus). And not the restaurant owner. It’s a lose-lose-lose-lose arrangement.

Should live performances be exempt for paying licensing fees? If yes, what if James Taylor plays a Carol King song at Wrigley Field next week (as he most surely will)? Should Carol King get a cut? What if I play a Carol King song this weekend at a dive bar? The two scenarios are not equivalent, and I could imagine the law drawing a distinction between the two. But where should the line be drawn? Should licensing fees only be paid when an artist plays in front of an audience of 500 or more people? 1000? 10,000?  

I can't say for certain, but I can say that it would be ridiculous to ask a rock band making a cool $400 on a Saturday night to pay performance fees, just as it's equally ridiculous to ask the small bar that's hosting the music to do so. Something's gotta give here.

Maybe restaurant owners nationwide will wise up and refuse to pay licensing fees altogether, and bands can go back to doing what they used to do: play original music. Who knows? A musical renaissance may be just around the corner!

Does It Matter How a Record is Made?

Watching Peter Bogdanovich’s extremely thorough yet watchable documentary on Tom Petty, Runnin’ Down a Dream, I was struck by something Petty said about his work in the early 90s, during which he and producer Jeff Lynne began to use the studio as an instrument and recordings became less about a live performance. "I like whatever makes good records," he said. "I don’t care how it’s made. Nobody cares how a record is made. They care if they like it or not.”

I’ve thought about this quote often as I struggle mightily to complete my current album and employ studio tricks that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Yesterday I wanted a cymbal where there wasn’t any recorded during my day-long studio session in late February, so I simply copied a cymbal from one section of the song and pasted it onto another section. On the same song, I noticed that several of the notes I sang were slightly out of tune, so I simply shifted key notes into tune. As for the acoustic guitar I’m currently recording, this I have to do section by section, and sometimes measure by measure, as my playing is so poor that I can’t complete an entire verse or chorus without accidentally deadening a string or striking an unwanted open string. Even my piano tracks – definitely my best instrument – needed a little tweaking, as yesterday I erased an erroneous low note that was clashing with the bass part.

Clearly, I’m not recording a live “performance.” Is this cheating?  Does it matter if it is?  Is Tom Petty correct that nobody cares how a record is made?

In his illuminating book, Here, There and Everywhere, Geoff Emerick writes about late-night sessions during which Paul McCartney would record bass parts over and over until he had the perfect track. Impressive, though I've no doubt that were Emerick recording The Beatles today, he would splice together various bass tracks to create one usable one. Is one technique more pure than the other? Does it matter?

For Tom Petty and The Heartbreaker’s first several albums, they would track everything live at once until they had a perfect take, effectively rehearsing until they got a great performance. This is in stark contrast to the recording of Into the Great Wide Open, during which a musician like Benmont Tench would be asked to play a particular keyboard part during a few measures of a song, and then leave the studio.

On his recent interview on the radio show Sound Opinions, Geddy Lee of the band Rush discussed recording the album Hemispheres. The band initially tried to perform the ambitious side-long title track in its entirety, but ultimately had to record it in sections. Does this fact make the recording any less impressive?

Even Steely Dan, who employed arguably the best musicians on the planet to play on the album Gaucho, used recording tricks to the get the sound they wanted, as producer Roger Nichols created a drum machine called a Wendel to perfect drums parts initially recorded by the likes of Jeff Porcaro! 

Clearly, even getting past today’s largely sterilized recording techniques, we can come up with multiple examples of musicians and producers doing whatever it took to get the sound they wanted.  But is Petty correct when he says nobody cares how a record is made?

I suspect it depends on the listener, on the band, on the era, and on the circumstances. For guys like James Taylor and Jackson Browne, who get to play with the greatest musicians known to Man, I like to think that the albums they record are more performance-based and less studio-trickery, and I would hope that studio guys like Steve Gadd and Michael Landau would insist upon it. And part of the joy of listening to, say, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, is knowing that I’m listening to a live performance. Something would surely be lost if it came to light that “So What” had been recorded track by track. 

It's also kind of sad that our ears have gotten used to hearing perfection, because there was a time when the performance was more important. Keith Richards’s fuzz guitar errors on “Satisfaction” can be heard loud and clear fifty years after the song was recorded. Would the song be any better if it had been recorded in 2015, when no doubt Richards would have rerecorded the guitar part (or, more likely, would have recorded the tune several times and then spliced together various parts for the perfect take)? Do the mistakes take away from the song, or somehow make it more endearing? I don't know.

For now, I continue to plow through what has been a somewhat grueling recording process and attempt to make the best-sounding record I can using the resources available to me. And some of those resources are digital. The Palisades will be complete by summer’s end, and God-willing, it’s going to sound great thanks in large part to modern technology. I’ll take this over a bad-sounding "authentic" record any day.

Maybe Petty has a point.

Record Night Celebrates 1975

After a five month absence, record night returned with a vengeance last Saturday night to Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, as five high school classmates converged to celebrate 1975.  For me, ’75 is a bit of an oddball year.  None of the punk and post-punk bands I admire (Graham Parker, The Clash, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, The Police, The Cars, The Knack, The Kings, Off Broadway, Nick Lowe) arrive until another year or two, and some of my prog-rock favorites (Yes, Genesis) are on hiatus that year.  Peter Gabriel, Rickie Lee Jones and Heart haven’t put out an album yet, the Rolling Stones are off, and so are Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot of great stuff from the middle of the decade that I most admire, and much of it was unknown to me, which just goes to show you that even five like-minded white middle-class guys can surprise each other once in a while.  My favorite surprises of the evening: Ambrosia and Roxy Music.

Here’s the list (note: a few of these songs were released on LP in ’74 but charted in ’75):

Boogie On Reggae Woman, Stevie Wonder

Magneto and Titanium Man, Wings

Jesus Christ, Big Star

Superstarz, Black Sabbath

Black Diamond, Kiss

Gratitude, Earth, Wind and Fire

She Sells, Roxy Music

Travelin’ Man, Bob Seger

People, People, Tommy Bolin

Lorelei, Styx

Down the Road, Kansas

Running Out of Time, Climax Blues Band

Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen

I Don’t Know Why, Rolling Stones

Sexy Thing, Hot Chocolate

Dan Dare, Elton John

Easy Does It, Supertramp

Sister Moonshine, Supertramp

Nice, Nice, Very Nice, Ambrosia

Fame, David Bowie

Across The Universe, David Bowie

Buckets of Rain, Bob Dylan

Mystery Mountain, Journey

Love Roller Coaster, Ohio Players

Nights on Broadway, Bee Gees

Slipkid, The Who

Kojak Columbo, Harry Nilsson

Slow Ride, Foghat

Heard it on the X, ZZ Top

Lady Marmalade, Patti Labelle

Meeting Across the River, Bruce Springsteen

Custard Pie, Led Zeppelin

Beggars Day, Nazareth

Please Don’t Judas Me, Nazareth

Ballroom Blitz, Sweet

Wouldn’t You Like It, Bay City Rollers

Now Look, Ron Wood

I’m So Afraid, Fleetwood Mac

The Hard Way, The Kinks

Kung Fu Fighting, Carl Douglas

Do the Hustle, Van McCoy

I Believe in Father Christmas, Greg Lake

Deuce, Kiss

Fountain of Lamneth (part 1), Rush

Never Been Any Reason, Head East

Chevy Van, Sammy Johns

Round and Round, Aerosmith

South’s Gonna Do It Again, Charlie Daniels Band

Have a Good Time, Paul Simon

Ride the Tiger, Jefferson Starship

Something’s Coming’ Up, Barry Manilow

Sister Golden Hair Surprise, America

Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow, Joni Mitchell

Misery, Soul Asylum (a night’s end post-1975 selection)

Girls with Guns, Tommy Shaw (a night’s end post-1975 selection)

Father John Misty at the Riv

A year ago I didn’t even know that Father John Misty existed, but last night I found myself at Chicago’s Riviera Theatre (which, despite being a shithole, has its charms) to see the singer-songwriter perform before a packed house. Backed by a terrific five-piece band (and sometimes extra backup singer) the artist plowed through a powerful set that faithfully reproduced the lavish production of his most recent album, I Love You, Honeybear, and enhanced the sound of 2012’s Fear Fun.

A commanding presence on stage – tall, bold and limber – Father John Misty uttered virtually not a word between songs, but what he lacked in banter he made up for with his intensity, taking over center stage with passionate dips, angry kicks and desperate gesticulations. He knows how to get an audience excited. Midway through “Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Cow” I witnessed what had to be the longest and highest launch of an acoustic guitar I’ve ever seen (the stagehand caught it – but just barely), and it was met with enthusiastic approval. 

Like the production of his most recent album, the extensive layering and reverb of the live performance sometimes masked what is one of the singer’s greatest strengths – his witty, sardonic, and occasionally moving lyrics. Listening from the balcony, had I not already known songs like “I Love You, Honeybear” and “The Perfect Husband,” I wouldn’t have understood more than a few words of these performances. Perhaps it sounded clearer on the first level, though I distinctly remember Joe Jackson complaining about the acoustics of the Riv back in 2001. Judging from the peeling paint on the ceiling, I suspect the theater owners haven’t done much to improve the sound or anything else in the intervening decade and a half.

Most effective to me were the times that the band broke down and allowed Father John Misty to shine in a more intimate setting. “Bored In The USA” – a song that would have felt right at home on Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection – was the highlight for me, with the fans interjecting faithfully the canned laughter of the recording. First encore “I Went to the Store One Day” – the sparsest performance of the evening – was also terrific, along with “Holy Shit,” whose mellow first half was interrupted by such a frenzied finish that the downbeat jolted a listener to my left practically out of his seat.

These moments of potency were supported by the most impressive lighting I’ve ever seen at a small venue, especially the effective use of moody backlighting that bathed the stage with eerie reds that silhouetted the band, and the strobes used prominently in the frantic finale of “Perfect Husband.” 

Aside from a cover of Nine Inch Nail's “Closer,” the 110 minute performance consisted entirely of tracks from Father John Misty’s two albums, ignoring the repertoire of the singer’s previous monikers. Surprisingly absent to me was the song that first introduced me to the artist: “The Night Josh Tillman Came to our Apt.,” and I wonder if he’s already grown tired of its overly mocking, cynical lyrics. 

At thirty-five, the former drummer of Fleet Foxes has been recording and performing for a hell of a long time, reaching his recent success a little late in life. It was worth the wait. Here’s hoping he hangs in there for a while and releases a few more gems along the way.