This was certainly an easy story, because all I had to do was let the lovely and spirited Brenda Lee show me around her new Country Music Hall of Fame exhibit. But it sure was a treat. Here's the host intro and a link to the story:
A star by the age of 13, Brenda Lee became one of the most stylistically diverse and world-famous singers to ever come out of Nashville. Now she’s the latest member of the Country Music Hall of Fame to be featured in a close-up exhibit in the hall’s museum. WPLN’s Craig Havighurst recently took a tour, with Little Miss Dynamite herself as his guide.
Last night I finally got to see Any Day Now, the feature-length doc about Nashville's Ten Out Of Tenn, a collective of songwriting artists who've released three compilation CDs, embarked on three significant tours and generally bolstered each other's careers. The project works at a lot of levels. Economically, it's smart because it pools resources, like a bus, that would be out of reach of the artists individually. It's building a trusted brand and franchise by letting in only exceptional artists. It creates a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts vibe that generates a lot of enthusiasm and passion. It re-brands Nashville as Music City for all, not just country.
And unlike almost every other artist development plan I see playing out in this new music business, TOT either got smart or lucky and had filmmaker Jeff Wyatt Wilson document the first tour. The result is Any Day Now, and I'm happy to say it's elegant, entertaining and important all at the same time. Wilson defines the personalities of the artists so that by the end we know ten distinct voices rather than a crowded stage. We learn just enough about how the group came together and how it threw together rehearsals and made the most of everyone's skills as musicians. We feel life on the bus, and if the artists spend a lot of time hamming for the camera, at least the filmmaker picked some damn funny bits to keep the levity up. Above all, the music is simply extraordinary. When did you last see a music documentary without a single weak song? And how did these guys pull together such rich arrangements of complex pop and rock songs in just a couple days? And what must these performances sound like NOW after three tours?
A DVD is in the works. Here's the trailer:
Last note: It is my mantra, my soapbox speech, my self-interested marketing spiel that Nashville needs WAY more documentary about its music in this post TNN, post MTV, post radio world than it is making. Stop spending so much money on publicists to pitch your story to a dying print infrastructure and instead spend a little money making the story you want to tell in the medium of today and then send it directly to fans and fans of other artists like you. With Any Day Now, these savvy artists and their savvy behind-the-scenes folks have not only made a piece of art. They've made a giant and lovely commercial for what they are. And when historians rifle through the archives of Nashville circa 2008 one day, they'll find this film and say thank god somebody thought to do this.
Today the Bluegrass, Old-Time & Country Music Program at East Tennessee State University will be releasing this video profile. Please do share this link with anyone you know who has ties to the bluegrass community.
Up in the hills of East Tennessee it's no surprise to find bluegrass musicians, but a university program dedicated to its practice and preservation is a surprise indeed. Last winter, ETSU's bluegrass program asked us to document and explain what it is, what it does, and how it shapes lives. I shot for three days in Johnson City Tenn. in April and produced this 9-minute profile of a unique and special institution. Its instructors are remarkable musicians and educators, and it was a huge pleasure to work with Raymond McLain, Karen Sullivan and co. If you aspire to playing or managing professionally, check this out.
"The boom and bust pattern of each recorded music format adds up to an overall rise and decline of corporatism in the recorded music industries. Culturally, this could well be something to celebrate."
And there's a more pressing, modern-day inequity that needs to be remedied in that internet radio licensing was approached from the get-go with the assumption that both songwriters and artists would get paid for performances. If the new radio has to pay both parties, then legacy radio should have to as well. The traditional broadcasters, it seems to me, have gotten everything they could ever have wanted over the past century, including billions shaken out of the record business for all that invaluable promotional play and of course, thanks to Bill Clinton, virtually unlimited corporate behemoth-ism since 1996. The new artist royalty, if it passes, would probably only serve to make wealthy artists wealthier since new artists hungry for airplay will likely waive their royalty. But the status quo has made broadcasters far too influential over who gets heard and promoted and made song copyrights more valuable than the music itself.
The chart below is from today's New York Times and a column by Charles Blow about the truly dire state of the music industry. I'm an aficionado of graphic displays of information, and this is one of the most stark, revealing and stunning statements I've ever seen of where the biz is. In a situation like this, the majors can only afford to work potential pop superstars. It's a cataclysm for innovative artists who don't draw massive audiences right away. Who's going to fix this?
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Air Castle of the South
Craig's book "Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City" chronicles the 80-year history of the broadcaster that turned Nashville into a music town.
