Same As It Ever Was

 

I was reading an article on the Black Keys recently. They have a new album out, one where they've recorded some of their favorite blues tunes. This is not a new phenomena, in fact, it has been around for 60 plus years, most notably during the British Invasion, when young English white dudes presented American Blues right back to us.

The irony was noted then, as it is whenever articles like this come out.

Now before you get tight with me, thinking I'm dissing on the Keys, the more interesting part of the story is the Keys fear that the blues, in particular southern rural blues, will be extinguished from the good earth due to an antipathy to it by the general public, and its apparent preference for good ol' generic pop, pumped out by photogenic youngsters who are typically white, but not always. (Ironically, this dismisses Rap, which is still predominantly black, and perhaps surprising to some, more popular than...pop!)

I'm shocked.

Fortunately, I've been shocked—but not really, as I've been hearing (but mostly reading) this for most, if not all, of my lengthening life. Southern rural blues, like R&B, Americana, which is real country music, Bluegrass, Jazz, have been given last rites only to live on in the communities that love them. Granted, these communities are not large until you put them all together, and then you see that all music outside of that which is considered commercially viable—read the stuff you're going to hear on TV award shows, is substantial. We're just not getting rich off of it.

That includes all of us pining away locally.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the article is how the life of a song changes over the lives of the people who keep the songs going. In some respects it is this that keeps and will keep all the genres of music alive beyond that heard by teenagers, and as we have all been there, let's not harsh them too badly.

In fact, the beauty of being little known is that the songs are allowed to change with time, with different performers in different places and with different instruments and interpretations. The rigidity of well-known songs by specific performers—think of every concert you've gone to by acts from your youth—is, inevitably, once they're past their prime, nothing more than a replay of their greatest hits, over and over again. Fleetwood Mac is not going to completely reinvent their catalog because they've done it the same way for 50 years and are sick of it. (This is why Robert Plant has consistently squashed every hint at a Zeppelin reunion.) Fans would not pony up megabucks to hear the songs played any other way than how they remember them. That's not a problem in the rest of the music world. Mostly... I'm looking at you, Beethoven fans.

And while we all harbor a secret, or not so secret, desire to make it big and be bored that our back catalog is what's keeping us going, we still get together, write, perform, and enjoy because it's in our natures to do so. 

For those of us who just want to play, we play, and often we tweek, or change, or rearrange, and it's all good, and it'll never leave us.

©2021 David William Pearce

All Hail the Hobbyist

 

As a rite of spring, or any other season for that matter, blossom those for whom opprobrium is manifest in declaring who are the true professionals and who are the mere hobbyists. Like a fine muscatel, each year produces another screed upon which those of us who aren't yet important enough to declare our ever move, personal or professional, super important and the necessary glue holding society together, must confront the very nature of our musical and artistic credentials.

Most important indeed.

Two things are, naturally, fundamentally intrinsic to this: money and suffering.

Most of us are convivial, if not occasionally troubled, by the first, and lacking in interest in the second. Consequently, it is framed as paying dues, doing time, and struggling for an admired goal. Nevermind the near astronomical odds of actually "making it." We can dream. And many do. Many also come to the realization that for all their hard work and perseverance, they will never achieve their dreams of being big in the business, at least not as the main act.

Many do stay in the business, but as something else-mainly to help those who still harbor the dream of big things to come. And someone has to fill those occupations that aren't as glamorous, but certainly vital to the machine, such as record execs, PR shills, and the A&R people, assuming they even exist anymore.

As you may note from the tone of this, the idea that only those who spend their lives living hand to mouth, filling odd jobs, and hoping that a health crisis doesn't bankrupt them or worse, are the true professionals, and all the rest of us hobbyists, is the usual tinfoil hat that keeps artists poor and working for "exposure" rather than a decent wage.

That doesn't mean not going to open mics or booking gigs, however much or little you make. The machine does require a dogged perseverance if you want a certain kind or level of fame, just don't be surprised if even after all that, you're still making most of your income from waiting tables, or God forbid, working a mainstream job.

Most art isn't going to pay the bills. Sadly, it probably never will.

And if you feel the need to say that because I choose to go a different route (and I have been paid for my work) I'm just a hobbyist, knock yourself out. I'll still come hear you play and wish you well, having been there.

©2021 David William Pearce

The Terribly Exciting World of DIY Recording

 

I often feel the need to pontificate on the "joys" of Do It Yourself (DIY) recording. I don't know why, other than some perverse need to bore people-though, I must say, there are those who, remarkably, find this all somewhat helpful. That, and it justifies the many hours I put into making music in the first place.

The beauty of DIY is total control. No pesky producer or engineer poo-pooing your cogent insights or desires to make what you're certain will be a timeless addition to the world's greatest music.

And in this period of quazi-quarrantine, the opportunities to hole away in one's hovel (see above photo) are plentiful. Being mindful of this, I have been dutifully working through my late-life magnum opus-what used to be the double album when records were the dominant means of entertaining the music listening masses. 16 songs and 2 chants, one to open the record and one to close it.

Why would I choose to do this? Don't ask.

I also felt the need to challenge myself as far as how much I could get away with, whether I had the talent to pull it off or not. That invariably brings up what to play on what instrument in what time and what key on what song. The benefit and curse of having more than one guitar, or instrument, is working through this one and that one, hoping the answer would present itself.

Fortunately, it often did.

Having a home studio also allows those of us who work slowly to do so without going deeply in debt. And with the advent of digital recording, you can record and re-record to your heart's content, or until you run out of space on your hard-drive (and no pesky generational degradations that you use to get with tape, not to mention the warehouse you'd need to store all those reels of tape). This is good and bad. Good that you can work through idea after idea, and bad, when after idea after idea, you're still not happy or even close to finishing. I call this the Peter Gabriel dilemma, as he was known to tinker and tinker and redo to the point of his producer's distraction.

Sometimes this leads to making tough decisions and completing projects or lots of started but never finished ideas. Personally, I have an abhorrence to not getting all my brilliant ideas out there where they can be ignored en masse. 

Which allows me to solder on.

©2021 David William Pearce

Long Dead, Like New

 

Believe it or not, there's an AI program that creates new songs by dead artists because isn't that what we really want: bad, fake Kurt Cobain songs.

Now I could waste the next few minutes of your time pontificating on the value of such an enterprise-as the articles note, this was done as an example of "what if" they, Cobain, Hendrix, Winehouse, hadn't died early-but I think what's more interesting, at least to me, is how this could help aging types, like me, milk out more songs, that quite frankly might be better than anything I could come up with myself.

In fact, think of the potential across the musical board!

Why waste time trying to recreate a particularly period in your musical history when you can get your computer to do it for you? Sweet, huh? Some of it might even be sorta, kinda good. A bonus. Because, let's be honest, writing and crafting a new song is a lot of work, and sometimes it goes nowhere, or even worse, you get it half done and can't figure out a workable bridge, or that last verse, etc. It can be too much!

Bring on technology!

Now some of this requires enough source material for the AI program to actually produce more songs in the idiom you're looking for, without reproducing the same song many times over because it's got only 2  or 3 source songs to work with. Probably not worth the cost of the program, assuming it doesn't cost a fortune to begin with, which assumes you have a fortune to dispense.

If you think this is hooey, well, good for you. All crafts need those hard-nosed types, face to the grindstone, spending untold amounts of time eking out a song now and then, and for what? But for all the rest of us, pressured by the flacks of modern social media, who demand that "content" be pumped out week after week, month after month, year after... well, you get the drift. It's all too much. It's quantification over quality, assuming that matters at all anymore.

So I say, if computerization got us into this mess, it can help us deal with it.

©2021 David William Pearce

Is Rock Like Jazz Like Classical

 

Recently, the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth was celebrated around the world by those who have an affinity for the man's work and his place in the classical canon. (More amazing, to me, is that in 6 years it will be 200 years since the death of Beethoven and we still celebrate his work.)

It also brought out those who are angered by the predominance of dead white males in Classical music-which is somewhat odd as Classical music is mostly European in origin (Meaning what else would it be?). This isn't about that, though I will say that rather than bad-mouthing Ludwig Van, it might be better to actually schedule and play compositions by those commonly left out of the repertoires of leading orchestras.

But what I really find fascinating by this regular occuring hubbub, is that it's beginning to play out in Rock, just as it has in Jazz, which had its heyday in the first 70 years of the 20th century. There are the titans of Rock and everyone who followed. With the deaths of Eddie Van Halen, Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead), and others, the pantheon of the Rock-n-Roll era continues to pass into history. The question then becomes will anyone take their place or like Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc., will they forever be the standard and the iconography of Rock music?

This isn't an idle question. Name a single recent rock band. If you can, can you say they're distinctive enough to stand out against what we've set up as the Rock standard? And if you think this is bunk, think of Jazz and how anyone coming up is inevitably compared to the titans of Jazz, be it Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Coltrane, or Miles. Every genre has its glory period, and the greats of that period, whether you like it or not, dominate.

For those of us so blessed to have grownup with and seen, live and in person, these bands and performers, it is, in some sense, our gift, just as it was for all those who first heard something new and vibrant in classical music and Jazz. And it's hard to deny their place when their music, now some 40-60 years old, is still being played and the artists continue being venerated by young people, not just us geezers. That doesn't mean they always will; all greats go through periods of diminishment and reassessment, as Ludwig Van did, but he never went away and the quality of his works remains.

 This doesn't mean people won't continue to play and write within the rock idiom and all of its subgenres, I imagine they will, but I also think that for the foreseeable future, and perhaps beyond, the greats will continue to be the standard.

©2021 David William Pearce

An Obligatory Look Back

 

Ah, 2020, that you should go quietly into that good night. (I started this before all hell broke loose... so... but that's for another time and blog.)

Having not written anything in the couple of months for this blog, I wondered if an end of the year navel gaze was a good idea. Aaaa... sure why not.

In normal times, I would brag about everything that was accomplished-and there was some of that-as well as all the good times that were had throughout, though after March, there was not too much of that. 

Mostly.

I had big plans, but most of us did that did not come to pass. Concerts, open-mics, even general get togethers were canceled or replaced by Zoom meetings, which are not terribly conducive to good sound, not to mention the human qualities of being "in the room" when there is a performance. Again it's what we have at our present disposal.

On the plus side, I released the last of my "legacy" albums, Fingers in the Air ('85), No Love Here ('86), and Nothing Left to Say ('91), which means that all that fit to release has been. I've also finished half of the upcoming album, This Wonderful Life, which I hope to complete and release sometime this year.

In addition, I helped with the recording of songs for Joy Taeko, and Benny Lee. They came out quite nicely such that neither Joy or Ben have disparaged me terribly.

I would like to believe that 2021 will be something to behold, though I'm not holding my breath. And I'll hold off wondering if all this is an utter waste of time. This is a honored tradition for those of us yet to hit the big time. Those who have, spend their time trying to stay hip and relevant, as well as selling some or all of their catalog now that their revenue streams have gone off the road into a ditch.

I, fortunately, do not have that problem.

My problem is how much time and effort to put into this, which might sound somewhat defeatist (and I'll cope to that), but that is going to come (and hopefully go) as one does these creative types of things. Maybe it's just the product of a difficult year. Only time will tell. 

I'll ponder that as I try to make good in my other life as a writer of scintillating mysteries. 

Because if there's one thing we all know, it's how easy it is to make it big in the entertainment business.

Happy New Year.

©2021 David William Pearce

The Distant Past Comes Calling

 

Awhile ago, I foolishly admitted to still having old cassette tapes from the late 70s of me singing demos of songs I'd written. Like most people of a certain vintage, I have vague recollections of that time, some good, some not so good. This carries over to my memory of the songs themselves and whether they're worth the time and effort to review.

And paradoxically, it did take time and effort for all my cassette players, except for the one in my wife's car, no longer functioned. Apparently, not using them for years at a time comes at a cost. Something I'm especially eager to find out.

However...

As I mentioned, the cassette player in the car still works, no doubt because it's not nearly as old as my beloved Nakamichi LX-5. 

I don't even want to think about trying to get that fixed.

That aside, I bravely mustered the courage to listen to the tape, which was recorded in the Spring of 1979. It's a collection of songs written that Spring as demos for a possible album (3 of the songs ended up on my first album, PearceArrow). Surprisingly, I did not find myself aghast at my terrible-ness. That's not to say I found the experience super wonderful.

My tendency in those days to play a riff over and over was on full display, nearly every song is way too long (It's a demo, man; keep it short and sweet!). More than once I yelled at the machine to "Get on with it!" It also shows its age, lyrically and musically, assuming you have any memory of the 70s and the songs from that era.

On the plus side, it turns out the songs aren't terrible, and, other than me, were well received by those fearless enough to take a listen. We are talking about songs sung into a mono cassette deck, not something known for its aural fidelity. And I didn't think the songs were bad, per se, only that they were those confessional singer/songwriter type songs that now give me the heebie-jeebies. 

I know, I know; it's my problem and I'll deal with it.

The one question that does arise, beyond what I'll do with all these leftover cassettes if I don't repair the LX-5, is what to do with the songs. Let sleeping dogs lie, or produce a more stereophonic version (Minus the neverending riffing).

First I'll have to sit in the car and try to remember what chords I was playing.

©2020 David William Pearce