Dog Days of the Music Biz

This weekend ends it for February 2009. Where did all the good times go? I peer in the mirror and see middle age branded indelibly in every line (lots of lines) upon a face I sometimes hardly recognize staring me down. The value of my holdings plummets in precipitous free-fall of late.

Also, many items I held in high esteem are very low on the mass market of worth these days. I never thought music, art, literature, journalism and film collectively would be worth less than a big dairy's lagoon of trapped methane. But that is what has come to pass.

I feel shitty about the current state of the music business today. Hard to believe we live in a world of commerce for music product that is controlled by Apple and WalMart. Or that Front Line Management would become Ticketmaster and dominate the concert market to such an extreme. Honestly, did you ever imagine that the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC and Journey would decide to sell any of their releases exclusively through WalMart? Did you ever imagine that mp3 sound would become the standard of the music industry? Why bother with a recording studio if you want make a product that has an audio range a little better than a telephone receiver? Cassette tapes are high fidelity compared to mp3s. What happened?

I get the fact that people want to be paid for their work, and that file sharing put a big crimp in royalty payments. Al Kooper wrote a great piece on Napster back in 2001. You can find it on his website, which I've linked here, and on the old side panel with other artists I find pertinent. (It's a cool site, and the man who brought a Norman Granz soul-jazz-blues element to the rock world 40 years ago with Super Sessions still has some juice.)

I recently wrote a brief few lines on this blog about record labels, and their total irrelevancy today. They were very important when the men who created the vision with like minded artists collaborated on music and put the sounds into the air and on the streets. That model broke down along the road somewhere in the late 20th Century.

Selling art like a commodity demeans and devalues art. Exclusives kill commerce, competition and creativity. This "new" business model only furthers a monopolist's control of content and marketshare. This type of deal only favors music artists who have become brands. The other 99% of musicians who toil honestly and creatively have no shot in this economic model. This is the blatant reality of an American Idol world, where the only creative forces in play are the promotional tools to get you to think this crap has any value. It doesn't.

Dream a little dream of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis or Thelonius Monk selling exclusively to Sears or Montgomery Wards back in the day. Maybe you can picture Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly doing an exclusive deal at Woolworths or J.C. Penney's. Creeps you out doesn't it? People were technologically more primitive back about 50 years ago, but they weren't stupid. Can't say the same today.

I Still Think In Pink

I received a terrific gift not long ago, Remember That Night David Gilmour Live At The Royal Albert Hall on DVD. I'm a big Pink Floyd fan, and did get an opportunity to see them in Sacramento about 20 years ago minus Roger Waters at Hughes Stadium. It was an amazing show. Timeless really, a 1989 Delicate Sound of Thunder tour, which Floyd seems to always personify at each marking point along the journey.

Watching this DVD of David Gilmour without the giant albatross of Pink Floyd expectations by audiences is a real treat. He has some unlikely guests, Graham Nash and David Crosby, to accompany the band and bring a new perspective to some old classics. The great guitarist from Roxy Music, Phil Manzanera, is part of the band along with longtime friend and Floyd mate Rick Wright, who only last September passed away suddenly after losing the battle against cancer.

This DVD showcases the last major tour David Gilmour undertook in 2006 to promote his On An Island cd and to pay some final homages to Pink Floyd's original songmaster, Syd Barrett. The concert footage is wonderful and David Bowie makes an appearance singing Comfortably Numb and Arnold Layne. Enjoyable high fidelity concert sound and vision.

The real treat for me with this 2-disc DVD set, however, are the three documentaries included on the second disc. You feel like a guest on tour with very unpretentious and cool people you would like to hang out with. It is striking to also see a real commitment to very worthy causes from David Gilmour and crew. There are special humorous, inspirational and touching moments throughout the documentaries. I don't want to give away great surprises but the use of wine glasses and an appearance by an old chum rehearsing in a separate sound stage at the same studio facility as David Gilmour's group is very cool.

For much of the world this music still is the right stuff, and retains the power to cast wonder over audiences in the east and in the west. David Gilmour and his music remain a very special gift people should indulge in more frequently.

Labels Are for Bottles, Boxes and Cans

The dishwasher hums under Chet Baker with strings. If you want to capture the true definition of melancholy listen to Chet Baker. His songs evoke Technicolor scenes from the 1950s and early 1960s with some shadows framing a man with a glass within swirls of smoke and a lady silhouetted against a large windowpane of city night sky. His life played out like a black and white Film Noir creation of despair confronting fading hopes.

The Fifties are now remembered as the decade that ushered in Rock 'n Roll and Leave It To Beaver episodes. It is not remembered as that time of post war reality when men and women had to learn to live "normal" lives again with each other. The struggles of men who survived with memories of battles and other images of war pitted against the awakened aspirations of women who had held responsible jobs in areas formerly reserved strictly for males can be heard tugging against heavy wool on cotton in Chet Baker's music. There is no embrace, but really a tired collapse amid the daily grind.

Chet Baker and his music bore the label Cool Jazz during the post war era, and really until he died falling/pushed from the second story of an Amsterdam hotel. Listening to his music today you have a hard time figuring out the "Cool" within the jazz inflected heartache of the songs. After World War II, many of the seminal jazz greats had drug addiction woes to ease their decline from public popularity while the world embraced the 4/4 beat and stripped down arrangements of bass, guitar, piano and drums. The planet became rock.

Labels have been around on everything we buy from clothes to medicines. Labels adorn bottles of all types and boxes of every size. Labels belong on packages, not people or art. In the downturn of our fortunes during this decade too many of us rely too heavily on marketing tags to define our world, making our lives smaller and less interesting as a result.

In the sound recording world labels were the visions and results of dedicated dreamers who defined musical moments with a roster of musicians and songwriters. These recordists captured their day's vibrations authentically. What vast talents these people uncovered and brought to the public defined their label for all time. Record labels have no meaning today. We live in a world of URLs in cyberspace and the vat of waste that Target and WalMart permeate in the brick and mortar world of consumer convenience.

There is a bright moment weekly on the television when Mad Men runs, and captures the 1950s to 1960s moments of divine tragic-comedy when Madison Avenue dictated lifestyle to America. A show that illuminates how labels were attached to our conscience, and how hollow they all have become. Reach for a Chet Baker tune and pour yourself a drink. You'll feel better.

Fang-Tastic

The dog caught his tail in the door!

The Strange Case of the 2008 NFL Season

The NFL Playoffs entered week two pitting the final eight survivors of the NFL regular season, which ended December 28, 2008. 2008 was a strange year for pro football, and two developments stand out for me. There was way too much really bad professional football week in and week out, and the NFL officially tuned out the West Coast fans and cities. If you don’t think the national media has turned off everything football in the Pacific and Mountain time-zones here is what Peter King wrote this week in Sports Illustrated about the first NFL Playoff weekend:

-Over the weekend, only Arizona-Atlanta was a relative snoozer. We had one game go to overtime, another close game get broken up by Ed Reed's acrobatic brilliance, and Brian Westbrook break up a two-point fourth-quarter game by being, well, Brian Westbrook.-

I’m sorry, Peter, but with all your travels up and down the eastern seaboard you could not have watched the same games our western feed delivered to our living rooms and bars. Both of the games on Sunday were brutally predictable and had no drama in the fourth quarters. The Falcons-Cardinals game on Saturday was pure drama, which came down to the final drive with Arizona crossing up conventional wisdom by throwing for first downs instead of running into the line for the obligatory three and out. The final score was 30-24. That was pressure, not watching Chad Pennington throw one more interception with a game long since lost. The scores of Sunday’s games were 27-9 Ravens over the Dolphins, and 26-14 Eagles beating the Vikings. Do those scores sound anywhere as close as 23-17 in overtime, and 30-24, with both games decided on final drives?

I guess when only one team not found in the Central or Eastern time-zones has a winning record for the season it makes for the big snooze on the coverage for the entire region.

Here is a funny note on the season, the Cleveland Browns, perennial losers since coming back ten years ago as an expansion team, were showcased 5 times on prime-time NFL broadcasts (Monday Night, Sunday Night, Thursday Night and Thanksgiving) this year. Only the Dallas Cowboys with six appearances on these prime-time telecasts were shown more often nationally than the hapless Browns of 2008. Two playoff teams, Atlanta and Miami, did not get on one of these prime-time broadcasts all regular season, but the winless Lions did on Thanksgiving Day. The Falcons and Dolphins joined the state of Missouri (with bad teams bracketed in the Western Divisions of the AFC & NFC) in being excluded from view this year from the national population.

Of teams playing half their schedule on Pacific time, only the San Diego Chargers made it into the top third of teams playing prime-time football this past season with four games shown. Of the 12 franchises that played at least four games on the big media schedule, the Chargers join only the New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers as clubs that still have a shot to win this year’s Super Bowl. The Broncos, Packers, Bears, Cowboys, Browns, Patriots and Redskins all with four or five nationally shown games did not even get to the playoffs this season. Four of those teams did not even have winning records. The Colts joined this elite most-shown group of clubs and made the playoffs, but lost in the wild card match-up weekend to the Chargers.

Speaking of San Diego, the last California city to host a Super Bowl, this year’s scheduled NFL Main Event in Tampa Bay will mark the longest continuous time that this game has not been played in California. The first Super Bowl was played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum back in 1967. The longest stretch of Super Bowls played outside the Golden State before returning to California was the five games between 1968 and 1972 with the 1973 game back in Los Angeles and played at the Coliseum. In Super Bowl history California hosted one game of three played in the 1960s, two games in the 1970s, five games in the 1980s, two games in the 1990s and one game in 2003 this decade. There is no future Super Bowl scheduled for California at this time. Florida will have the next two and Texas is scheduled to have the 2011 game.

2008 was also the year that the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were finally displaced as the worst team in NFL history by this year’s Detroit Lions. The Lions gave up 517 points on the way to their 0-16 record. Only the 1981 Baltimore Colts gave up more points (533) in the 30 years that the NFL has been playing a 16 game regular season. As bad as that Colts team was, the guys on it still won two games during that 1981 season.

The dreadful 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers had a built in excuse for their infamy. They were an expansion team that year, and got the very worst players from the rest of the league to start their franchise. The Seattle Seahawks also began playing as a team in 1976. The Seahawks were bad, but at least they won two games in their first year of existence. The 2008 Lions have no excuses, just ill fitting coaches and players working for the worst management in football.

2008 saw the word parity temporarily vanished from the NFL lexicon. Parity has meant that on any given Sunday the bottom dwellers could rise from the ashes of their ineptitude and grind out a win over a title challenger opponent. The distance from the bottom of the standings to the upper echelon teams is ever so slight when parity rules. Only a modest adjustment, a player or two, or a coaching change is needed to propel a team in the outhouse to the penthouse. This year there were simply too many teams that had no chance all year long. Just ask fans in St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, Detroit, Kansas City and Cincinnati if competitive football was happening with teams in their zip codes.

The NFL provides a wealth of statistical information on players and teams in the league. Fantasy Football can take a bow. One of the interesting stats to help determine a team’s relative strength or weakness is the difference between points scored and points allowed for the games played in a season. This point differential tells at a glance how great, putrid or mediocre a team is for any given season. Historically, very few dominant teams have posted better than 200 plus point differential.

In the past ten years two franchises have gone a regular season with better than a 200 point positive differential: the 2007 New England Patriots and the 1999 and 2001 St. Louis Rams. The Patriots demolished the differential spread by going 16-0 in 2007 and beating their opponents by a record 315 point difference. This is a team that averaged a 20 point margin of victory over their opponents for the whole season. And they didn’t win the Super Bowl. Neither did the Rams of 2001 who bettered their opponents by 230 points for the full season or by an average of two touchdowns every week. The 1999 Rams with a spread of 284 points over their opposition did win the Super Bowl with a saving tackle at the one yard line as time expired. The Minnesota Vikings of 1998, who went 15-1 with a point differential of 260 over the teams they played, did not even make it to the Super Bowl held in 1999. You can’t count on the best in the fall to deliver the goods in winter.

On the flip side of that point differential are the really putrid teams in a given season that get beat over the length of a season by more than 200 points. This doesn’t happen very frequently either. Just like the very few dominant teams, the NFL gets a stinker club or two in season once every three years. This just completed 2008 NFL campaign had two teams that were so bad (Lions and Rams) each cumulatively lost by more 200 points. In the thirty years that a 16 game schedule has been in place this has happened just four times (2008, 2000, 1990 and 1984). There has never been two dominant 200 point plus teams in a single season.

I’m rooting for magic this month where the Arizona Cardinals wind up meeting the winner of the Steelers-Ravens. Quothe Ed Hochuli nevermore? It’s been that kind of year.

Good Luck football fans, everywhere!