I love this place

[len bullard <cbullard@hiwaay.net>]

I love this list.  What a great place to 
rant with the best on the Net.

Heat on the list.  Good.  Been too thin here for too long.

Sorry, Chris, but I disagree.  Rock is burned out.  
Now, that doesn't mean there aren't bands out there 
doing great stuff, adding an original touch here and there, 
and even getting a crowd to its feet.  Critical acclaim? 
Well, who cares.    The correlation between critical opinions 
and success by any measure important to a band is zero.

When I say burned out, I mean compositionally.  For 
anyone who really has played the music for a long 
career, Nirvana, Green Day, et al, don't offer much to emulate, 
that is in the sense that learning their songs teaches one 
anything new.  To be clear, yes,  I have heard the songs 
and yes, we perform some of them.  Hey, we even do 
Weazer, and for some of these I say, clever and crafty.  
But innovative, groundbreaking, something one learns 
to increase one's skill: nope.  No beef there.  It is a continuous 
retreading of chops that were pretty much dead by the 
time Parliament Funkadelic called it quits.

As for the generation wars, that's the heart of an argument 
that ALWAYS ends the same way:  you become a variant 
on your parents.  So, pick your heroes, express your 
angst, get happy and partee until the sun comes up.
We did it too.  So did our parents.  So did their parents.
Then get a job.

As for the music business, both John and Don are right.  It is a 
venal corrupt business.   So is any business where there 
is enough money to feed leaches with a grip.  The software
business is becoming the music business, uses the same 
tactics, gets the same results.  Music is just that with more 
drugs and fewer suits.  Pretty soon, it will be the same suits.

As for who needed who to make it:  Alannis didn't 
need Sarah or the Lilith tour.  Heck, outside the 
eclectic egghead set, not a lot of people know what 
the Lilith tour was or care.  Alannis needed Glen 
Ballard, a 42 year old producer who knows how to 
put it together.  Sorry, Gen-X, but just as it was 
in the sixties and seventies and eighties ... yawn... 
with few exceptions, the generation in front or you 
makes the hits.  It takes a long time to learn all the details 
and the folks you worship are all too often just 
models, as Bo Diddley told Chrissie Hynde (sp?).
You'll get your chance, but you have to pay your 
dues first.  When you see Jagged Pill, you see what the 
machine can do if it uses nitro in the gasoline to ignite 
the burners.  The nitro gives it the acceleration, but 
the gas keeps it on the road.  Check the tires for a long trip. 

It is not enough to be lucky like Alannis who has 
Glen Ballard to sweat the details.  The person who 
leads, their character and their conviction are 
the difference between a simple hit and a career.  
Taking care of business means taking care of people 
and that takes dedication and a certain selflessness.  For my money, the 
finest female artist to emerge in this decade is Mary 
Chapin-Carpenter.  Her work with Jennings and Schultz 
is quite beautiful, commercial, deep, and pleasant.  She is 
also an example of what Kate managed:  she takes good 
care of her people.   One can say Kate has ignored her 
career, but actually, she has ignored the parts and people 
in the machine who only exist to take money.  The artist 
and their bands and associated support are screwed blue 
in the music business.  Kate has kept quite a few people 
in shekels and she has made sure they were the real 
contributors to her work:  not the FooFiDoo who 
cling to the business like leeches on a soldier's boots.

If you want to see who makes the 
money and how, check out the last issue of Musician 
magazine which very accurately breaks down the 
shredding of the 'natch.   However, ignoring the business 
is just as unproductive as embracing it.   An artist 
needs the machinery to make an impact on an international level, 
or at least, did until the Internet opened the pipes again.  
It isn't cheap to launch an act into a system that controls 
the distribution and media pipelines as completely as 
they are controlled in this decade.  OTH, the Internet is 
making it possible for independents to be more profitable than 
an artist with a major label deal and three successive top 
ten hits.   This is no exaggeration.   It scares the hell out 
of VPs at labels who are the very highly paid members of the 
food chain.  They see something they have yet to master.  
Of course, eventually they will, but in the meantime...

For the artist or listener who wants to expand their tastes, 
feed their soul, dodge the commercial bullet et al, we are 
currently in a window of opportunity where the music of the 
world is available to us via streaming technology.  Further, a
new art form is emerging as the cheap multimedia technologies 
spawned by the WWW are being combined with the ultra-cheap 
recording technologies that emerged in the eighties and are 
even better now.  No time in history have we as composers 
had access to such powerful toys and such a worldwide 
access to sound and colors.  These are good days for the technically
adept and 
those who can sweat the details.  I am stoked!

Kate is as good as she is because all of the time everyone 
else was chasing hits, she was chasing sounds and colors.  
It is a lesson those here who want to make something of 
their art should pay attention to.    When Kate emerged, 
it took a lot of resources to get the materials she has used. 
So yes, she was very very lucky to have patrons like Gilmour 
and EMI.  She has acknowledged that.    Today, we are 
very lucky that for the price of the machine and the hookup, 
we can access and use resources she couldn't conceive of.
Kate was smart enough to take advantage of the resources. 

You have more than she did.  Use them.   Enjoy!

BTW:  Karen.  You are a great lady with taste and skill, 
but for your information, Charlie Daniels is one of the 
a talented, productive and generous guy in 
Nashville.  Think what you will, but for a certain 
time, place, and people, he said what needed to be 
said, and he did it very well.  He deserves his place 
on the bus because he made it work for both himself 
and the people he supported.   Leave the longhaired 
country boy alone.

Cheers folks.  Things are hot here in the South, so 
the gigs are sweaty and loud.  You good eggs down 
in KiwiLand, we're thinking about you.  Stay close 
to the fire.

len