The streets are paved with pyrite

David Lowery wrote a fascinating article about the music business, and it got me thinking.

I met Mr. Lowery right when Cracker was new (right after Camper van Beethoven broke up) – they played a little show in the University of Utah student union building. That was the first time I was start-to-finish responsible for running sound (such as it was – it was a mostly acoustic show, with vocal and acoustic guitar reinforcement). I’m still mystified that “Low” became the big radio hit rather than “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)”, but hey, you can’t understand them all.

I was pretty happy with how nice he was to me – I was the 18-year-old student promoter who thought I was all worldly, and he humored me and was both professional and charming.

Now, on to the essay – I think he’s on to something: that while the de jure royalties and margins nowadays look better for artists, de facto they are not, and the reason is that we no longer have labels making bets on bands (where the bands fundamentally keep the bet if it’s a loser).

However, I’m not sure that a single variable is the way to view this. Start by imagining sales as a curve, where some bands are ultra-mega-sellers, some are in the middle, going all the way to the band who sold 11 copies to friends whom they dragooned into buying it (no, I don’t resemble that at all). Then it becomes clear that (as he says) the folks in the middle (the “unrecouped”) benefited tremendously from the old system, and pretty much get the shaft in the new one. The ultra-mega-stars? They’re making boatloads of cash either way, and their attorneys can fight it out. However, there are some winners in the new system: the long tail bands (like mine) – these are bands who aren’t doing this for their primary living, and yet can make some music that (a small number of) people like. The new system lowered the barrier to entry to the point that you don’t have to be able to convince a label to fund you – you can save up and record your own album.

This is a pretty nice thing – I’ve encountered some bands who came nowhere near a label, and yet made music which is on my top rated list (ADHD, Hudson River School, Welbilt (cheating slightly – Virgin records did fund a demo of theirs, but then passed on it), and of course my hero Jonathan Coulton) – each of these are bands I never would have heard of had it not been the random drift, and they’ve all had the option of making some money from me. Other little bands like Dayglow and Grandma’s Mini I discovered (and fell in love with) due to playing shows with them.

I do think Lowery is right on the money in one sense, though – the folks advocating for “free stuff” and thinking that creators shouldn’t get paid for stuff they create are behaving in a jerky manner.

Persistence of Vision

I had an odd interaction yesterday. A person wrote me out of the blue, looking for the version of Rorschach which used to get played on Big Monkey Comics’ Superhero Radio. See, I had first met Scipio, the proprietor of Big Monkey, when he was outside with his dog on Wisconsin Avenue. We chatted a bit, and I mentioned that my band did geek rock, and he mentioned that he did Internet radio, so I quickly got him a few early mixes from the sessions that would become To the Rescue!. Well, it turns out, and I had forgotten this, that I had given Scipio a version of Rorschach which had Anna singing on it rather than Noah (which ended up on the album), and this fellow liked Anna’s version better. So a trip down memory lane reminded me of why I couldn’t help him out: I lost all those originals to a spectacular hard drive crash. We had had to re-record Conception in B, Rorschach, and I had to pretty much re-create the electronica for Seven Layer Cake. So no file for him.

I have a sensation like the image which lingers after seeing a bright light: translucent and elusive – it’s a constricting narrowness, to look at the younger me, who wrote and played with abandon, and not remember what it’s like to feel that way.

I tried playing guitar last week. I made it about 15 minutes before my wrists rebelled. Perhaps it’s just a matter of de-conditioning, or perhaps something else, but it didn’t feel natural. I might force myself for a while: like making a kid sit through lessons, the discipline could bring enjoyment back. Or maybe it won’t.

I expect this to be a week of high emotional stress – part of me wishes I could lose myself in playing for a bit, but another part sees that as escapism. Then again, is escapism really so bad?

For as bad as my health trouble is (and I certainly don’t recommend it), I know several peers who have it a lot worse than I do – I don’t know whether they escape or not, or whether they have their version of the Bene Gesserit Litany on Fear:

I must not fear
Fear is the mind-killer
Fear is the little death that brings total annihilation
I will face my fear
I will permit it to pass over me and through me
And when it has gone I will turn to see fear’s path
Where it has gone there will be nothing
Only I shall remain.

I think Herbert was on to something when he wrote that – fear of pain is for me worse than pain. And yet the fear is such an insubstantial thing, but it has a way of focusing attention and capturing imagination which isn’t quite like anything else. It’s almost like a mental hard-drive crash, and that brings me back to where I started, except I’m perhaps a bit more aware of the cost of a crash.

To put away or not to put away

When I was 15, I bought a bass guitar – it was 3/4 scale (but I didn’t realize that at the time) cherry red, and I flailed away on it a bit. I had previously had fantasies of rock stardom which had been only prevented by my complete and utter lack of talent or effort. I was flipping back and forth between punk and hippie phases, and pretty much stunk.

Eventually, I got Dar Q (drums), Tammy H (keyboard, vox), and Steve D (guitar, vox), and we formed a band called Peristalsis. We sounded about as good as you’d expect a band named after a digestive process to sound, and made up in enthusiasm what we lacked in talent. Eventually, this stopped – I was working too much in fast food (30+ hours OT / week = how to make a minimum wage job pay well).

Then I went off to UMd for a semester – this wasn’t my idea: I was pretty much forced into going, and I didn’t want to be there, so I flunked out, but before I did that, I spent a few hundred dollars on a Fender acoustic 12-string, and started indulging my assorted fantasies of dropping out of polite society to become a street musician.

The lack of realism there is evident to any stringed musician: playing outside is rough on one’s tuning under the best of circumstances, but keeping a 12-string in tune (or even close enough to not sound painful) is quite laborious. Oh, yeah, and then there’s the fact that “street musician” is not a career path which includes being able to pay rent consistently without trouble, and I was pretty dead-set on getting myself into a heck of a lot of trouble.

I came back to Utah, and got back together with Dar and Steve, only this time we called ourselves The Sunmasons, after a poem by a former High School classmate whose last name was Mason. In this configuration, we played a few shows, mostly with the other tiny local SLC band Painted Cloud. At one point, Jon B (other drummer) joined the band, and we had a massive stage presence (two drummers will do that). That lasted a while, and we actually put out a cassette (“It’s OK, I’m with the BAND”). Eventually Steve became (like many, many other musicians) overcome by a drug problem – the music for a song I wrote about that ended up getting a second life later on as “Ender.”

So Dar and I decided, in an evolutionary manner, to shake up the band a bit: I moved over to guitar (I had a knockoff of an Ibanez X), Dar moved to Bass (in a beautiful midnight blue, which was much closer to dark purple), and we got members Corinne (guitar, vox), Joe (percussion), and Leon (crazy, yoga-guy drums), and turned into a vastly jazzier incarnation of the Sunmasons. In this lineup, we played a few all-ages clubs (only Leon was over 21), a few outdoor festivals, and had gigs with larger local bands Ali Ali Oxen Free and My Sister Jane. I was halfway through my hippie phase, as evinced by the presence of a percussionist and by my outlandish costuming and extremely long hair (to be fair, the hair was actually a chick magnet, but the women at the U of U were more interested in playing with my hair than actually dating me). A couple more of my songs date from this period – the music to “Lojack” and “Vorlon” and the actual song “The Girl Next Door.” But this too faded away – I had been running a group house and making the incredibly stupid move of renting rooms to my friends who were terrible credit risks. When that came to a thundering halt (basically I walked away, and let the landlord come and kick everyone out, because they hadn’t been willing to pay me their share of the rent and I lacked the wherewithal to evict them), Leon vanished, and Joe and Corinne faded out shortly thereafter.

So Dar and I were again left without a band. We re-contacted Jon B, and it turned out that he had just kicked Steve out of his band at the time, and was left with Yuri (bass, keys) and Zack (lead guitar, flute). Dar and I joined them, and for a while had the dual-bass player thing going on, which was exceedingly cool. We played some gigs, and went into the studio to record, getting so far as to have four songs which were album-ready (with the exception of Jon’s inexplicable decision to use electronic rather than acoustic drums – the drums were passable, but the cymbals were atrocious). Music I wrote for Dar’s song “Airflesh” later became “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” It felt like we were on the cusp of something – a real shot at making a career out of making music. I had just gotten a gig promoting concerts at the U of U, and at the time was wholly shameless about self-promotion (I had not yet learned the lessons regarding pride and falls). But sadly, this too was to come to an end. I had a pretty explosive temper, and would never back down or compromise. After one particularly loud and yelly practice, Jon unceremoniously kicked me out. Dar quit a bit later, and that was when I stopped seriously following them. I was not gracious – had they asked me for a favor I wouldn’t have done it, but they never asked. They did eventually go on to put out some music (I believe with a wholly different lineup – I don’t even know whether Jon was involved at that point).

At this point, I was pretty lost musically – I tried a few things as as soloist, but could never really get any mojo. A friend and I did a coffee-lounge gig of mostly covers as “The Indigo Guys,” but anyone who said we were any good was either generous or extremely stoned. I tried being a music major – I did classical guitar lessons, got a cheap ($50) drum kit and took some lessons, and even took some piano and theory classes, but I couldn’t really compete with the people who had actually been serious about music for decades. Eventually I realized that.

The drum set died when my ex-wife took it apart too far during a move when I wasn’t around (she took all of the hardware bits apart, and then most of the washers, springs, nuts, and the like were almost instantly lost, and what was left wasn’t worth saving). For the next year or so I would occasionally play a cover gig at a restaurant or the like, but nothing to write home about.

After that, I didn’t do anything with music for years. After moving East, getting a divorce, converting to Judaism and getting re-married, and several more years, some of my friends indicated that they were starting a Jewish a cappella group called Makela. I auditioned by singing “Southern Cross” (I was later told I was the only person who didn’t come in singing something Jewish), and got in. A funny part of this was that I auditioned as a baritone / bass, but they told me that I was a tenor. After I learned more, and worked on my voice for a while, I realized that not only was I a tenor, I was a very high tenor (I can get well into Alto).

I had a good time doing that – it had some cheesy choreography, uniforms, and the like, but it was a fun way to pass the time. Their shtick was either translating secular songs into Hebrew (eem etahev = “If I fell”), doing well known Hebrew songs (Dodi Li), and they eventually wanted to branch out a bit into home-written lyrics. Another member was struggling to re-write Toto’s “Africa,” to make it about Israel, and I stepped in to help do that. I wrote the words to be “I face the wall in Jerusalem” and the like, and that was popular with them. We were starting to home-record an album (on a system which was pretty advanced at the time, but now would be viewed as paleolithic). Then there was trouble: the owners of the Toto copyright wouldn’t give us permission to do this recording, and the price of doing this without permission (via mechanical license etc) would have been extremely high, especially for a self-financed CD. So the band was about to go try to find another melody to use with those words, when I suggested that I could go write one. Ilana B and I knocked out “Aliyah L’Regel” (about traveling through three cities in Israel to end up in Jerusalem) in about a day (partially because I could recycle the music from one of my old Sunmasons songs, “Kiwi”), and that was a smashing success. Shortly after the CD was recorded & released, there was more trouble: Ilana had done something (I don’t remember what) which pissed off the bandleaders so much that she was kicked out. I disagreed with this, and resigned in protest at the same time.

So now I was again musically adrift – I was thinking that playing guitar would be a good idea, but had no idea where to really start. About a year or so afterwards, Sarah introduced me to Patrick, and the two of us played together as multi-instrumentalists – he’s mostly a drummer, but also plays guitar, and I’m the reverse. I bought a Washburn J-9, which has become my primary guitar – the only thing I would do differently if I had to do it over would be get one with a fixed bridge. We got some others and became The Franchise, and were able to release three albums (with a different lineup on each one). We were halfway through the fourth (with yet another lineup), when I got sick last year. I couldn’t play guitar at all for several months, and drums were right out.

And so now I come to the crux of the matter. I haven’t played guitar in about six months. I don’t know whether this is the start of a long drought or just a dry spell, but the space which has been my music room is idle. It’s full of music stuff – guitars on the walls (mine, Patrick’s and Don’s), Patrick’s drum set, our PA, a bunch of amps, and oodles of recording gear & microphones with cables carefully run along hooks on the walls and ducts.

But if this is a long thing, I need to not store unused music stuff there. The space is just too valuable – if the musical detritus wasn’t there, Sarah would have turned it into an exercise room long ago. I haven’t felt the pull of songwriting at all, and am more at peace with myself than I’ve been in my recollection, so I have no reserve of angst from which to draw out new songs.

I guess this is the process of determining whether this is a childish thing which should be put away — I’m at a crossroads with this, and I’ll need to do some praying about it before I can decide which way to go. I do know that either way will be tinged with the question of the road not taken, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Still, more food for thought.

Concentricism

I am filled with anger and frustration today. I got an email from the fellow who used to run one of the great venues for small-time local bands, indicating that he’s now the booker for a new club, and asking whether we’d like to come play.

Well, yes but, it just so happens that I can’t play guitar for more than 5 minutes without hurting myself, so I’ll have to take a rain check on that.

And then there’s the sudden, unpleasant GI distress, coupled with the back pain from the blood patch, not to mention the various and sundry unwelcome side effects of the pain meds, and all in all, it leads me to a pretty unwholesome place.

It feels like my world has gotten smaller all of a sudden: that the boundless possibilities I had merely last year are so far beyond reach. Hell, the ability to take public transit to work as a choice would be nice- I’m a conservationist and all, but I miss driving.

And the worst part of all of this? I still don’t have a diagnosis with more explanatory power than “you’re broken right now, but if we wait long enough, maybe you’ll get better on your own.”

So today is not a good day. Maybe tomorrow?

Fear Itself

I’m a bit scared right now. I have mystery pain and neuropathy in my hands, arms, and feet, and it has proven to be resistant to the attempts to treat or diagnose it. Some things I know:

My EMG was normal (but very, very painful – I would put it in the same league as a pelvic fracture or a kidney stone), so I don’t have nerve or muscle problems in my extremities. My blood-work shows a whole bunch of things I don’t have: no lupus, no lyme (well, at least not a standard Western Blot, but these tests are notoriously inaccurate), and no thyroid problem. I know that it’s no longer Parvo – it was either a co-infection, something that the parvo triggered, or something that was masked by the parvo. I’ve got a series of MRIs tomorrow where they’ll try to determine whether I have any brains or any backbone, so we’ll see what it says.

I’ve now had three courses of prednisone, multiple different systemic NSAIDs, topical NSAIDs, muscle relaxants, and other pain-relief drugs, and none of them get me to a point where I can play guitar for more than 10 minutes without my left hand going numb. Then, of course, there are the side effects of the meds, which range from the merely unpleasant to the thoroughly embarrassing.

Sarah’s being a trooper about all of this – she’s tremendously supportive, and I have no idea how I would deal with this if I were (God forbid) single – but I know this is draining for her too, and of course all of the above things aren’t a recipe for me being in a good mood…

So I’m scared. I know that I have some of the best physicians in the DC area looking at me, and I know that Sarah will be by my side no matter what happens, but that doesn’t actually settle down the emotion. So now, I go try to relax for a bit, and perhaps tone down the anxiety.

My Fantasy Life

In my fantasy life, the parvo infection I had went away without leaving me with any lasting damage. I’d be able to bicycle to work (and even give MJP‘s bike back, and get one of my own), and my upper body strength and overall fitness level would have been increasing all spring. I’d also be able to devote some serious time to finishing the album – I’ve barely used my amp since it got repaired – and maybe even get some of the half-songs I have half-written turned into whole songs.

Even better, I’d be able to take a new rider class at the best named dealer ever, and hopefully get started on the great-gas-mileage-but-made-of-awesome experience which is commuting by motorcycle.

And a pony – gotta have a pony.

But back in this world, my health isn’t letting me get to riding right away, and music has been on hold. This came up for me today because I saw some of Rolling Thunder, which I think is about the coolest thing ever. Hopefully soon I’ll be over this stuff and can tolerate the vibrations – right now an electric razor is about my limit – because it sure would be nice to enjoy the commute to work a bit more.

A few weeks ago, I was in a conversation with some friends about my desire to ride, and the general sense was that I’m sufficiently accident prone that this would be a death sentence. I don’t agree with this – the accidents to which I’m prone are qualitatively different: the bicycle accident I got into was not while I was riding, but rather was walking into a crotch-height bike rack. But time will tell as to whether this is an option of any kind.

I fought the law

I was somewhere between Bobby Fuller and Judas Priest recently.

To start from the beginning, back in April, I was driving home from work in Herndon, and as is my typical pattern, I took the Dulles Toll Road (motto: “why pay less?”). I have an ez-pass, because Big Brother watching me sounds like a great idea if it saves me time every day, so when approaching the toll plaza, I got onto the far-left side lane.

Here’s a map of where I was:

View Larger Map

This happened to be one of the days that the beltway entrance was backed up all the way to the toll plaza. There’s a join between the inner lanes (the access road) and the outer lanes (the toll road) right after the toll plaza – this is fundamentally so that access-road users can get to the beltway or to Route 123. However, there isn’t a sign indicating that one can’t go the other way, and inherently it is just a typical freeway merge. Seeing the complete backup, a whole line of cars merged left onto the access road (toward I66).

And that’s when I saw the trooper who flagged me over. D’oh!

So I know better than to hassle cops – I had no idea what I had done wrong, but I figured it was something. I noticed that they were pulling over all of the folks who had merged left. I figured this must have not been legit (although why there was no sign saying “don’t do this” or perhaps any of those little poles to make it actually impossible I don’t know)

The citation I received was for reckless driving, which in Virginia, unlike pretty much everywhere else, is a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by gigantic fines, jail time, and all sorts of employment-unfriendly side-effects. Yikes! The irony of getting accused of something like this is not lost on me – I’m the person who gets mocked for not jaywalking, so this is pretty rich.

A conversation with a dear friend who is an attorney let me know that this was something where I was going to need to hire someone to represent me – it turns out that the court date you get is an arraignment, where your options are (a) plead guilty and receive punishment, (b) plead not guilty and get a trial date or (c) have your lawyer negotiate with the prosecutor to agree to a different charge, and then plead guilty to that. He was able to get me a referral to an attorney who was pleasant and good, and she agreed to represent me – she said the airport police are pretty aggressive about calling things “reckless,” and that statutorily, “reckless driving” was supposed to mean “a danger to people around you.” Interestingly, unrepresented individuals are NOT allowed to negotiate with the prosecutors – to me this smacks of being a jobs program for lawyers, but what do I know?

After a nerve-wracking month, during which I had Passover, the death of my father-in-law, shiva, and continued inflammation / likely severe long-term inflammatory problems with my hands, I finally had my day in court yesterday. By “my day in court” I mean “my day waiting in the coffee shop of the court house, followed by 90 seconds in front of the judge.” My attorney negotiated this to “improper driving conduct” (which makes it sound like I flipped someone off or something), and I pled guilty to that. I’ve rarely been happier to pay $300 in traffic fines than yesterday – that was a simple infraction of the “got a traffic ticket” variety rather than the “do the crime, do the time” variety.

My bandmate Patrick includes this verse in the song Silver Line Special, on our forthcoming album Movers and Shakers

If you’re ever in Herndon, you’d better use your brain
Don’t let the troopers pull you over, in that HOV lane
Cause the sheriff will get you, gonna take you down
And the next thing you know, your penitentiary bound

So that is one chapter closed, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this, it’s to avoid the Dulles Toll Road whenever possible.

In a Blaze of Glory

So a recording session scheduled for tonight had to be cancelled because all four of us are sick. I think that’s a new record.

In my health news, as the steroid tapered off my symptoms returned (although not as bad as they were initially) – but now I have the additional joy of what feels like a bungee cord around my chest centered on the solar plexus. I’m trying to keep myself from doing too much Internet-looking, because I am aware of the danger of convincing myself that I have ebola and the flesh-eating-bacteria, but it is a bit alarming that there are multiple conditions in play which are primarily diagnosed by exclusion. Now, one thing I’ve remember from my grade-school algebra classes was that you can use multiple equations to solve for multiple variables, but you need at least one equation per variable to solve, or the best you can do is reformat them into something a little prettier than when you started. So the fact that a bunch of conditions have similar symptoms and exclusionary diagnoses but are radically different in mechanism of action and ideal treatment tells me that there is a lot more unknown than known about medicine.

In keeping with the DC tradition of having sports teams which get smeared by our competition, the DC All-Stars lost to the Maine Port Authority 83 to 162 yesterday. Ouch. I will say that ME’s jammers were really good – I haven’t seen anyone who could jump sideways while maintaining forward momentum on skates before – and their pack was much more effective strategically: when a DC girl was lead jammer, ME would speed up the pack a LOT, minimizing DC’s ability to catch up. Also, DC had a very large number of fouls, and that let ME rack up a lot of unanswered points. We had to leave before the second half of the double-header because Sarah’s back was hurting, but it was still some great rollergirl action.

9CHVQECCFENG

Winsome, lose some

So the band has been working on laying down basic tracks for our album, and our setup up until recently was a 1st-generation Macbook pro (Core Duo) with an Alesis io26 Firewire interface, using GarageBand (!) and it met our needs pretty well – although the speed of the processor doing things like saving or initializing left something to be desired.

Well, that laptop finally died – it was having a rough time of it (water spill), and then after being left plugged into the firewire long enough, the battery just wouldn’t hold a charge anymore, and then it got to the point that enabling phantom power for the condenser mics was just too much for the thing, and it would crash spectacularly.

So I started using Sarah’s laptop – a more recent generation MBP (i5), and we were noticing a strange bit of static in the playback – I thought that this was merely an artifact of a crummy headphone cable. It turns out that I had forgotten that years ago when I had first gotten the Alesis, that installation takes a little doing: you have to install drivers from the Alesis site or a CD, and also install a hardware device monitor (basically a soft-control for the whole system), and you’re supposed to do this before activating it at all. I hadn’t done this for Sarah’s laptop, so it was using the embedded driver via the Firewire cable (labeling it “Alesis 1394″ which should have been a clue: nothing Mac-like uses the “1394″ nomenclature).

At least I’ve now figured this out, so we have only lost two recording sessions, and can hopefully make those up relatively easily. It’s too bad: the take of Don’s song Wanna was really excellent, but the static is quite unpleasant, and I don’t think it’s fixable.

In any case, I had gotten a Mac Mini for just this purpose, only to find out that the monitor I was planning to use had an ADC connector rather than something that anyone actually uses. The ADC DVI converter was discontinued by Apple last October, and is now ridiculously priced, so a cheap monitor is in my very near future.

I have found favor in the eyes of God

Sarah and I experienced something tonight, and I found it moving in a spiritually profound manner.

We went to hear the most recent of the Dumbarton Concert series, which in this case was Andrius Zlabys performing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I and Adam Neiman performing Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28. I had expected to hear all of the Bach, and then all of the Chopin, but in this case, the program was structured as alternating pieces according to the ordering Chopin used.

The sheer beauty of the pieces brought tears to my eyes multiple times – Bach’s no. 24 in b minor and his no. 16 in g minor were particularly striking: I heard in Zlabys’ performance the hints of walking basslines such as would be fully at home in a modern jazz band, and the edifice Bach created has formed the basis of pretty much all of western music. Chopin’s no. 15 in D-flat major does a phenomenal job of capturing the emotion of a single line of music – he reveals depths formerly hidden, and it is sheer joy.

I hear their passionate music / Read the words that touch my heart
I gaze at their feverish pictures / The secrets that set them apart
When I feel the powerful visions / Their fire has made alive
I wish I had that instinct / I wish I had that drive
Rush, Mission

Hearing these excellent performances of some of the finest works ever written for keyboard instruments, I realized that, like Salieri, I have the ability to appreciate genius in composition without being one myself; unlike Salieri, I see this as a sign that God has favored me in showing me beauty. I will never create a work which is their equal; however, I can appreciate the things that they have done and allow it to inform and uplift me – my eyes when closed see the majesty of the works of God which He shows to me via their work. And thus, I feel the blessing of the Holy One, Blessed is He.