String Theory Media

the music council's warm and fuzzy roll-out

It might be because we’re in the South, or because everybody in the music business practices relentless diplomacy with all possible future partners and clients, but Nashville is one polite place. I daresay your average church breakfast includes more controversial, debatable statements than yesterday’s first-ever town hall meeting with the Nashville Music Council. That’s not to say that yesterday’s hour-long session was vacuous or trivial. Not at all. But if you’re looking for a great debate over the direction of Nashville’s music/biz/tech infrastructure, that will have to wait until a future meeting.

This open-invite, standing-room session at the W.O. Smith School was chiefly about describing and explaining the activities of the NMC, formed just over a year ago by Mayor Karl Dean. And indeed, Dean kicked off the hearing by explaining the why and what of the 50-member group of business leaders. 

the Nashville Music Council to go public today

Scarcely a word has been written in the press about the Nashville Music Council since it was announced by Mayor Karl Dean in the Spring of 2009. That’s in part because Nashville is lacking in aggressive music business coverage, and it’s partly because the NMC has kept a low profile as it has figured out what it wants to be and how it wants to proceed in its mission to develop the Nashville music community and economy.

That changes today, as the NMC holds its first ever town hall meeting at the W.O. Smith School at four this afternoon. According to the official press release: “Mayor Karl Dean will deliver opening remarks at the meeting, followed by Music Council Co-Chair Mary Ann McCready, President of music business management firm Flood Bumstead McCready & McCarthy Inc. Presentations will also be made by the chairs of the Council’s four sub-committees: Music Education, Live Music, Creative Talent, and Branding and Jobs. Janet Miller, Chief Economic Development and Marketing Officer for the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, will moderate questions from the audience.”

new work: the nashville flood for premier guitar

 I was given the opportunity to write at length about the Nashville flood and its impact on Nashville's guitars, chiefly at the ill-fated Soundcheck facility, for Premier Guitar magazine. It wound up being the cover story for the issue just out on newsstands and digitally. Premier Guitar is cool because besides publishing a handsome print issue, they make their content freely available on line and in a very slick e-reader. Just look to the upper right hand corner of the page to download the full issue. To respect PG's model as well as their advertisers, I post only the first few paragraphs here. Please click through to PG to read the whole story. 

"Beware of Snakes!!!” That’s what a sign taped to the door of Soundcheck studios reads. This is good advice for anyone in the music industry, but they mean it this time. It is Friday morning, six days after the Cumberland River surged hard and fast into this flat industrial district of Nashville. And as if the toxic slurry of mud, chemicals, and mystery brown stuff left all over the floors wasn’t dangerous enough, the early responders to this massive complex of rehearsal halls, repair shops, and storage lockers encountered venomous, slithering reptiles angry about being beached inside.

People are checking in with employees at a table inside the door. Most media have been stopped at an outer gate. Soundcheck management, understandably, doesn’t want local TV news cameras and lights pointing at the musicians as they pull the corpses of cherished instruments out of their sodden cases and trunks. I have been added to the client list as a volunteer proxy for John Jorgenson, a globally admired veteran of country, rock, and jazz. He is on tour with his gypsy jazz quintet in Europe, doing his best to keep a calm head and coordinate an unprecedented, unplanned evacuation operation from thousands of miles away...

"the room flatters the music"

David Byrne offers this new TED talk about how performance spaces shape and influence music. 

From the sustained, slow notes of choir music in big reverberant cathedrals to the sharp percussive quality of Talking Heads music in CBGB’s, it’s a wonderful review of that rarely discussed musical dialogue between humans and their physical world. Design trends wind up changing sound and new sounds encourage new ideas about physical space. That said, most young people are never encouraged to listen to different rooms and spaces and develop notions of reflection, reverberation and the like, even though they can affect physical health, attention and emotional well being. People go in droves to big amplified concerts in hangar-like buildings designed for sports, which as Byrne says is a dreadful environment for music. They come home with their inner ears ringing and fail to recognize it as the major injury and self-inflicted abuse that it is. And we take amplification for granted when we go to "a show," even though the right music made in the right room with only the instruments and musicians driving the air has an emotional effect that can’t be achieved with cone drivers and electromagnetism. Thus the enduring allure of acoustic music in amplified times. 

new thing: musicians corner in nashville

Musicians Corner will be a new, free outdoor musical showcase launching July 10 in the lovely and sometimes under-loved Centennial Park. Home of the Parthenon, Shakespeare in the Park and perky water-fowl, Centennial once hosted regular concerts by artists from WSM and WLAC, from country to pop. The organizers of this new venture, including The Conservancy (a non-profit), BMI and American Songspace say it will take place every Saturday from 3 to 6 pm from spring to fall, whenever it's nice enough to be outside. The specific location will be the meadow on West End across from Springwater and McDonald's. The idea was inspired by London's Speaker's Corner, but in truth the musicians will be more curated and filtered than that area's famous free-for-all. From the official press release this morning:

A pastiche of musical performances featuring locally based favorites, original voices, and surprise guests will be augmented by lifestyle, food, and artisan vendors to create a community gathering space in Nashville’s Centennial Park.

Here is the official website, with a button to submit music. Here's the Musicians Corner Facebook page.  

the johnny cash project

Here's a gorgeous, original and extraordinary tribute to Johnny Cash, mixing art and music in a collaborative way that is only possible on the internet. Visit the site for details.

keeping it real

 From the weekend, an excellent episode of "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio. The topic was Authenticity, and starting about about 12 minutes in, host Steve Paulson interviews Yuval Taylor, co-author of Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. Taylor notes that authenticity is an over-riding value for some genres of music, such as folk, while others have complex layers of artifice and authenticity, such as punk rock. While few people ever debated authenticity in disco. 

By necessity perhaps, Yuval speaks of  authenticity as a kind of construct or academic concept rather than its simpler meaning, which to me implies honesty of communicative and artistic intent in the performer. Admittedly that's impossible to measure and it has something complex to do with ambition for commercial success, since musicians need to market themselves at some level. There's a great discussion of Leadbelly, who was a true folk artist who was managed by Alan Lomax into some rather phony situations designed, ironically, to showcase his authenticity. In modern pop music, you can't be a vessel of artistic purity and survive. That said, I don't think there's anything disturbingly phony about U2 or Prince or Madonna, even though each manipulates images and seeks wider audiences. Whereas an example of inauthenticity in popular music for me might be my favorite whipping boys Rascal Flatts, who seem to make every esthetic and commercial decision to maximize their mindshare among a target demographic. They would, I'm sure, take issue with that, as would their fans. 

I thought it interesting that the topic came up the same weekend that Nashville was hosting the CMA Music Festival downtown and Bonnaroo a few miles down the highway. It caused me to investigate my long-standing belief or bias that Bonnaroo's musical ethos is more authentic than the CMA's. That's based on musicological observations, such as the degree to which Bonnaroo performers are free to embellish on and adapt their songs in every performance, while the CMA crowd largely prefers performances that hew closely to the recorded versions, highlighted perhaps by a predictable array of crowd-rousing techniques of the 'put-your-hands-in-the-air' variety. There is also ample evidence that CMA country music is heavily leveraged to be part of a larger lifestyle marketing complex that includes carefully selected mass market fast foods, household cleaners, beverages, soap opera stars, sports figures and the like. Bonnaroo is obviously not free of sponsorships or lifestyle branding (though it used to be nearly so) but on balance, I'm more impressed by Bonnaroo in its fealty to the music and the artists who make it. It clearly represents a wider range of sound, including avant-garde ideas that would never make it on a mainstream country album, let alone a Fan Fair stage.

This is an over-simplified start to a very complex and interesting debate that could be and I'm sure has been the subject of PhD dissertations. I raise it because I've agonized for years about the degree to which country music, ostensibly a music rooted in authentic communication between artist and fan, has been interfered with by a variety of interests far more interested in separating Joe Six Pack and family from their consumer dollars than any song, sound or style that would one day be enshrined in the Hall of Fame. While from its inception, Bonnaroo has felt to me like a showcase for music itself, for people who live and breathe music and who are jazzed by witnessing its creation in real time, versus that less-than-satisfying group swoon over a handsome guy or pretty girl singing a song the same way for the thousandth time. 

small venues tussle with the performing rights orgs

The Boston Globe has what seems like an even-handed story on the PROs' efforts to collect performance royalties from small venues like coffee houses that host open mike nights or jam sessions. Most people have no idea that when they see an amateur musician play a cover of "Big Yellow Taxi" at some random bar in front of 17 people, a tiny ka-ching is supposed to happen in the bank account of Joni Mitchell. It doesn't work that precisely of course, but the systems developed over the years by BMI, ASCAP and SESAC to survey and pro-rate and account are astonishingly effective. At the beginning of the chain however, the PROs have to register venues and sign them up for an annual blanket license giving them permission to play any song in the catalog. According to the story:

With the music industry in steep decline, PROs are ramping up their pursuit of the little guys, who acknowledge that songwriters are entitled to compensation but are angry and frustrated at what they see as unfair targeting of small businesses and nonprofits that make no money from the music they present.

The reporter should have added the word "directly" to that last sentence. It's patently untrue that they don't convert music into revenue. If they didn't have the open mic night, not so many folks would be there drinking their coffee and beer. Radio doesn't make money directly off music either, but by god that's why people tune in. I can see why a small operator could be miffed that they have to pay THREE PROs to cover all their bases. The minimum of $200 to $400 seems quite reasonable at a dollar per day roughly, while three times that could definitely give a small biz person pause about having the occasional jam session or open mike. I also have a bit of trouble with the industry's definition of public performance including jamming gatherings where the listeners and players are the same people. I'm not aware yet of PROs raiding private homes and garages where pickers congregate. But if you've got a cash register in your place, and you pay the electric bill and the water bill, then getting bent out of shape about being asked to pay for that customer-attracting music seems to just betray ignorance of the basics of music commerce and the law.

new finds: balconyTV and allsouth networks

I got a nice heads-up email the other day from Sean Giovanni, who has launched the Nashville channel of BalconyTV, a worldwide webcast of single-song performances from, yes, balconies in Hamburg, Dublin, London and other exotic locales. Giovanni runs a recording studio called The Record Shop, so you can visit him there. And he's making a bunch of these BalconyTV pieces from that otherwise unsightly condo called Rhythm on the Row. They're loose and shaggy and much fun. Plus they make a great survey of the wide and wild breadth of  Nashville's singing/songwriting popsters, rockers and bands. Here's a recent episode featuring the very popular and entertaining Cheer Up Charlie Daniels.

And in another tip from friend Carolynne Harris, a music fan and museum consultant, check out All South Networks, a web channel covering culture, food, music and more from the region that gave our world all the best stuff, from blues to grits to Faulkner. Their feature on The Station Inn is great. Wish we'd made that!

the air castle paperback campaign

Dear Friends,

 In my line of work, marketing is unpleasant but necessary. I’m supposed to build my brand and grow my tribe. In general, it’s not my style. But now I have a cause, and I could use your help. 

My goal is to persuade the University of Illinois Press (UIP) to publish a paperback edition of my book: Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City. To achieve that, I have to sell about 750 hardcover copies by the end of the summer. We’ve sold more than 3,500 hardcover copies of Air Castle, and I’m grateful for every one. But about 1,000 remain, and UIP’s position is if they published a paperback now at a lower price (a much fairer price point to my mind) the remaining hardcovers would languish in the warehouse forever. 

Fair enough.

Unfortunately, UIP’s solution, constructive though it may be, is not cool, in my estimation. They’re planning to strip the covers off the books they have and re-jacket them with a paper cover. This is standard practice I suppose, but I don’t want it to happen to Air Castle. And furthermore, it doesn’t provide a chance to update or revise the book or get it in a format that will be easily accessible to students, newcomers to Nashville or regular folks out there who would like to know more about this special city and its relationship with WSM that made it what it is today. 

I have nothing but respect for U of I Press. Being published as part of its Music In American Life series is one of the great honors of my life. I also understand it’s a low margin business in tough times for publishing, and I’m not trying to start a battle. I’m trying to get you and your friends to send a message to them that there’s a market for this book. 

So I’m hoping you and your friends can do one (or more) of the following:

1. Buy Air Castle on Amazon.

2. Buy a signed copy directly from me by mail order for $25, shipping included.

3. Buy a signed copy at the gift shop at Music City Roots for just $20.

4. Email my publisher to tell them you would purchase a paperback or e-book (Kindle or iPad) version of Air Castle when it becomes available. 

You’re only really supposed to flog your book when it’s new, but I think the story told in Air Castle is even more relevant today than it was three years ago. WSM – and the Opry - will be 85 years old this October. And instead of coasting into the anniversary, the station was flooded on May 2 so deep only a scuba diver could have explored their offices and production studios. Instead of signing off to fix everything, engineer Jason Cooper and a bunch of our friends built a make-shift studio at dawn at the 1932 tower/transmitter building on Concord Road and went on broadcasting. The Grand Ole Opry, the longest running show in broadcasting, was also uprooted, probably for even longer. 

There’s also the show I work on, Music City Roots: Live From The Loveless Café, which we hope is updating and reviving the tradition of broad-based music shows on WSM’s AM signal and for its 21st century update, the internet. The station and the Opry both turn 85 years old this October, and I think that’s a landmark in American life and culture worthy of loads of attention. 

But even more important, the story of WSM and its many spun off businesses is packed with insights about how and why the music industry has lost its way and how it might find its way back. The station’s track record of rolling with the technological times, from clear channel AM radio to shortwave to FM to the internet, is a colorful case study of adaptability and leadership. We in the music business should all have a little bit of Harry Stone, Jack DeWitt, Marjorie Cooney and George D. Hay in us.