BEWARE! Don't play that song!

A musician I know recently received a list of approximately seventy artists he's no longer allowed to play at a particular restaurant. They include: Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, The Eagles, Smokey Robinson, Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen. Luckily, the inclusion of Megadeth on the list didn’t affect my friend’s playlist, but the others did.

So, what do all of these artists have in common?

They’re all part of the company Global Music Rights, a music publishing entity led by Irving Azoff whose mission is to collect higher performance royalties for artists, some of whom haven’t played music for decades by virtue of the fact that they’re dead. John Lennon, for instance, and Ira Gershwin!   

On the surface, demanding more money from radio conglomerates and on-line streaming services like Pandora might seem like not only a reasonable business pursuit, but even a moral one, the equivalent to Major League ballplayers demanding more of the pie from greedy owners back in the 70s and 80s. According to a New York Times article on the topic, a song that’s streamed around 40 million times on Pandora only collects approximately $2200 under the traditional publishing compaies of ASCAP and BMI, and since the music industry has taken such a tremendous hit on physical sales, it's reasonable that some artists would try to make up for the loss elsewhere. 

Of course, nothing is forcing a radio station to play Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” for the billionth time. Hell, maybe Global Music Right will be doing everyone a favor by eliminating overplayed songs from our radio dial. But either way, I concede this end of the business strategy. I don’t care if 97.1 FM "The Drive" in Chicago (which is of course owned by a large broadcasting company) has to pay a little more to play “Hotel California.” (Though can we all agree that the estate of Ira Gershwin should give it a rest, already?)

But what about musicians? Not DJs, mind you, who play the original recording, but musicians who play an interpretation of the song? Should the arms of performance rights enforcement extend this far? 

I will play around forty gigs in 2016 plus another forty-five church services and will be lucky to gross – get this – $10,000 for doing so. I’m not joking. I earn less per hour than my teenage daughters. And yes, just like no one is forcing a radio station to play Journey, no one is forcing me to play music for money. I could call it a day and start working in human resources again and within a matter of months slit my wrists.  

But the questions is: should musicians really be restricted by what songs they can play? And should restaurant owners really be paying licensing fees for hiring a cheap-ass band on a Saturday night doing serviceable covers of well-known songs? I see small restaurant owners, program managers of struggling park districts and night-shift supervisors of dive bars on a weekly basis, and they’re not exactly driving Teslas to work. Still, my musician friends often have to protect themselves and include a clause in their contracts stating that the restaurant owner is liable for any licensing fees associated with hosting live entertainment.

What about large national restaurant chains that own hundreds of locations nationally? Surely they can pony up the cash to the publishing companies, right? Perhaps. But I know of at least one national chain that has opted not to pay the likes of Irving Azoff, and who wins in this scenario? Not the musician. Not the music publisher. Not the composer. Not the patrons (unless avoiding certain artists is a plus). And not the restaurant owner. It’s a lose-lose-lose-lose arrangement.

Should live performances be exempt for paying licensing fees? If yes, what if James Taylor plays a Carol King song at Wrigley Field next week (as he most surely will)? Should Carol King get a cut? What if I play a Carol King song this weekend at a dive bar? The two scenarios are not equivalent, and I could imagine the law drawing a distinction between the two. But where should the line be drawn? Should licensing fees only be paid when an artist plays in front of an audience of 500 or more people? 1000? 10,000?  

I can't say for certain, but I can say that it would be ridiculous to ask a rock band making a cool $400 on a Saturday night to pay performance fees, just as it's equally ridiculous to ask the small bar that's hosting the music to do so. Something's gotta give here.

Maybe restaurant owners nationwide will wise up and refuse to pay licensing fees altogether, and bands can go back to doing what they used to do: play original music. Who knows? A musical renaissance may be just around the corner!

Does It Matter How a Record is Made?

Watching Peter Bogdanovich’s extremely thorough yet watchable documentary on Tom Petty, Runnin’ Down a Dream, I was struck by something Petty said about his work in the early 90s, during which he and producer Jeff Lynne began to use the studio as an instrument and recordings became less about a live performance. "I like whatever makes good records," he said. "I don’t care how it’s made. Nobody cares how a record is made. They care if they like it or not.”

I’ve thought about this quote often as I struggle mightily to complete my current album and employ studio tricks that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Yesterday I wanted a cymbal where there wasn’t any recorded during my day-long studio session in late February, so I simply copied a cymbal from one section of the song and pasted it onto another section. On the same song, I noticed that several of the notes I sang were slightly out of tune, so I simply shifted key notes into tune. As for the acoustic guitar I’m currently recording, this I have to do section by section, and sometimes measure by measure, as my playing is so poor that I can’t complete an entire verse or chorus without accidentally deadening a string or striking an unwanted open string. Even my piano tracks – definitely my best instrument – needed a little tweaking, as yesterday I erased an erroneous low note that was clashing with the bass part.

Clearly, I’m not recording a live “performance.” Is this cheating?  Does it matter if it is?  Is Tom Petty correct that nobody cares how a record is made?

In his illuminating book, Here, There and Everywhere, Geoff Emerick writes about late-night sessions during which Paul McCartney would record bass parts over and over until he had the perfect track. Impressive, though I've no doubt that were Emerick recording The Beatles today, he would splice together various bass tracks to create one usable one. Is one technique more pure than the other? Does it matter?

For Tom Petty and The Heartbreaker’s first several albums, they would track everything live at once until they had a perfect take, effectively rehearsing until they got a great performance. This is in stark contrast to the recording of Into the Great Wide Open, during which a musician like Benmont Tench would be asked to play a particular keyboard part during a few measures of a song, and then leave the studio.

On his recent interview on the radio show Sound Opinions, Geddy Lee of the band Rush discussed recording the album Hemispheres. The band initially tried to perform the ambitious side-long title track in its entirety, but ultimately had to record it in sections. Does this fact make the recording any less impressive?

Even Steely Dan, who employed arguably the best musicians on the planet to play on the album Gaucho, used recording tricks to the get the sound they wanted, as producer Roger Nichols created a drum machine called a Wendel to perfect drums parts initially recorded by the likes of Jeff Porcaro! 

Clearly, even getting past today’s largely sterilized recording techniques, we can come up with multiple examples of musicians and producers doing whatever it took to get the sound they wanted.  But is Petty correct when he says nobody cares how a record is made?

I suspect it depends on the listener, on the band, on the era, and on the circumstances. For guys like James Taylor and Jackson Browne, who get to play with the greatest musicians known to Man, I like to think that the albums they record are more performance-based and less studio-trickery, and I would hope that studio guys like Steve Gadd and Michael Landau would insist upon it. And part of the joy of listening to, say, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, is knowing that I’m listening to a live performance. Something would surely be lost if it came to light that “So What” had been recorded track by track. 

It's also kind of sad that our ears have gotten used to hearing perfection, because there was a time when the performance was more important. Keith Richards’s fuzz guitar errors on “Satisfaction” can be heard loud and clear fifty years after the song was recorded. Would the song be any better if it had been recorded in 2015, when no doubt Richards would have rerecorded the guitar part (or, more likely, would have recorded the tune several times and then spliced together various parts for the perfect take)? Do the mistakes take away from the song, or somehow make it more endearing? I don't know.

For now, I continue to plow through what has been a somewhat grueling recording process and attempt to make the best-sounding record I can using the resources available to me. And some of those resources are digital. The Palisades will be complete by summer’s end, and God-willing, it’s going to sound great thanks in large part to modern technology. I’ll take this over a bad-sounding "authentic" record any day.

Maybe Petty has a point.

Carol Burnett at the Chicago Theater

It’s true. I paid more on Tuesday night to watch an 83 year-old woman stand on a stage for 80 minutes than I did to watch Paul McCartney transfix an audience for 170 minutes back in 2013. A silly decision, right? Perhaps not if you consider that standing on stage was the iconic Carol Burnett, whose 70s variety show captivated my childhood’s Saturday nights, and who is as sprightly, funny and personable in her later years as she was back in her hey-day. 

Performed at the Chicago Theater, the evening was an extension of the Q&A sessions that often began The Carol Burnett Show, interspersed with video clips of some of the show's more memorable moments. Ushers with microphones and flashlights spread out over the theater, and audience members – after the initial gushing that was as inevitable as it was graciously received by Burnett – asked questions, ranging from what inspired the performer to succeed, to “Would you sing me happy birthday?”

I’d heard Burnett on NPR’s Fresh Air a year or two ago, and she told some of the same stories on Tuesday night, but with a methodical pacing that sounded fresh, as if she were sharing the tale for the first time: how she tried to pay by check absent an ID at a posh Manhattan department store, how she and Julie Andrews played a prank in a D.C. hotel that led to meeting Lady Bird Johnson, and how she first met her future co-star Vicki Lawrence when the latter was just seventeen. 

Audience members asked questions that naturally led to predetermined video montages that Burnett deftly segued to when the time was appropriate, and they often generated the hardiest laughs, as no doubt many in the audience were reliving their childhoods or their young adult years, when for a time Saturday nights included All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show and The Carol Burnett Show. I’m not sure you could come up with a better three hours of television. But as funny as many of the clips were, for me there was also a slight pang of loss, as face after face of entertainers no longer with us graced the screen.

I miss them, and hell, I even miss the dead variety show format, though I understand why it no longer exists, and I understand that we remember the best bits and forget the cheesy and underwhelming song and dance numbers. But on Tuesday night, though far too short – another fifteen or twenty minutes would have been appropriate – it was the best bits.

Record Night Celebrates 1975

After a five month absence, record night returned with a vengeance last Saturday night to Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, as five high school classmates converged to celebrate 1975.  For me, ’75 is a bit of an oddball year.  None of the punk and post-punk bands I admire (Graham Parker, The Clash, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, The Police, The Cars, The Knack, The Kings, Off Broadway, Nick Lowe) arrive until another year or two, and some of my prog-rock favorites (Yes, Genesis) are on hiatus that year.  Peter Gabriel, Rickie Lee Jones and Heart haven’t put out an album yet, the Rolling Stones are off, and so are Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot of great stuff from the middle of the decade that I most admire, and much of it was unknown to me, which just goes to show you that even five like-minded white middle-class guys can surprise each other once in a while.  My favorite surprises of the evening: Ambrosia and Roxy Music.

Here’s the list (note: a few of these songs were released on LP in ’74 but charted in ’75):

Boogie On Reggae Woman, Stevie Wonder

Magneto and Titanium Man, Wings

Jesus Christ, Big Star

Superstarz, Black Sabbath

Black Diamond, Kiss

Gratitude, Earth, Wind and Fire

She Sells, Roxy Music

Travelin’ Man, Bob Seger

People, People, Tommy Bolin

Lorelei, Styx

Down the Road, Kansas

Running Out of Time, Climax Blues Band

Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen

I Don’t Know Why, Rolling Stones

Sexy Thing, Hot Chocolate

Dan Dare, Elton John

Easy Does It, Supertramp

Sister Moonshine, Supertramp

Nice, Nice, Very Nice, Ambrosia

Fame, David Bowie

Across The Universe, David Bowie

Buckets of Rain, Bob Dylan

Mystery Mountain, Journey

Love Roller Coaster, Ohio Players

Nights on Broadway, Bee Gees

Slipkid, The Who

Kojak Columbo, Harry Nilsson

Slow Ride, Foghat

Heard it on the X, ZZ Top

Lady Marmalade, Patti Labelle

Meeting Across the River, Bruce Springsteen

Custard Pie, Led Zeppelin

Beggars Day, Nazareth

Please Don’t Judas Me, Nazareth

Ballroom Blitz, Sweet

Wouldn’t You Like It, Bay City Rollers

Now Look, Ron Wood

I’m So Afraid, Fleetwood Mac

The Hard Way, The Kinks

Kung Fu Fighting, Carl Douglas

Do the Hustle, Van McCoy

I Believe in Father Christmas, Greg Lake

Deuce, Kiss

Fountain of Lamneth (part 1), Rush

Never Been Any Reason, Head East

Chevy Van, Sammy Johns

Round and Round, Aerosmith

South’s Gonna Do It Again, Charlie Daniels Band

Have a Good Time, Paul Simon

Ride the Tiger, Jefferson Starship

Something’s Coming’ Up, Barry Manilow

Sister Golden Hair Surprise, America

Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow, Joni Mitchell

Misery, Soul Asylum (a night’s end post-1975 selection)

Girls with Guns, Tommy Shaw (a night’s end post-1975 selection)

Financial Advice for my Children

I’ve made a few (hundred) bone-headed financial blunders in my past, probably starting with my purchase of a poorly made Yes t-shirt in 1984, but I wish I could say my financial ineptitude ended there. Within the last two years I was late with a credit card payment (really dumb) and didn’t consider the tax implications of some of my family’s finances (also dumb, but more forgivable, unless you conclude that we should have hired an accountant years ago and called it a day). But of course blunders can be and should be avoided. Last week I wrote about the essay Neal Gabler authored in the May issue of The Atlantic, wherein he too admits to his financial gaffes, albeit in the context of a larger national epidemic of financial illiteracy. But here’s the thing: financial illiteracy isn’t a condition. It’s a choice, at least for those who know better (and Gabler certainly does). Yes, I’ve made my mistakes, but I’ve kept reading and over time have done less harm and more good for my family’s finances. 

(Of course, someone could simply argue, “You want to do good for your family’s finances? Get a fricking job!” Fortunately, my wife is not among those someones.)

But even those who've managed to do a fairly good job of staying on top of the myriad of investment choices, saving maxims and cryptic tax laws might find themselves doing a piss-poor job of passing on that education to their children. I’ve found that while my parents had good sense and certainly taught me the value of a buck, most of my education was self-initiated by way of living and screwing up royally from time to time. I would like to see if I can spare my children of too much learning by living, because it seems as though these days the stakes are a bit higher. Growth is down, good jobs are more scarce, college costs are higher, housing is through the roof. It’s all gotten a little more insane.

So, recognizing that I’m offering nothing new here that hasn’t already been stated countless times before, I offer my children my twenty pieces of financial advice.

1)      Become educated. Hey, some people might make fun of Suzy Orman, but the gal can teach. Clark Howard is also a personal favorite. There is a ton of material out there, whether on TV, radio shows, books, DVDs or simply the Internet. I started way back with the books The Wealthy Barber and The Millionaire Next Door and went on from there. Sometimes it helps to read a well-written book instead of plowing through dozens of articles on-line. Whatever method you choose, there is no excuse to be financially illiterate.

2)      Avoid dept.  Aside from a mortgage, a car, a personal business investment, and (maybe) higher education, never pay for something you can’t pay off at the end of the month. Never.  

3)      Start saving now, gradually building to an amount equal to six month’s salary for emergencies. Yes, it will take time to establish such a fund. Start saving now. Even setting aside a few hundred dollars a month for a while will be helpful. And don’t settle for the crap interest rates that your bank offers. Consider looking at online banking (Barclays is currently paying 1%) or joining a credit union. 

4)      Always pay off your credit card bills each month. Always. I’ve missed I think three in my life, and that’s three too many.

5)      Start saving for your retirement immediately. Parents, you can open up an IRA for your child and invest any money they make (and that you claim on their taxes), even if they personally keep what they earn. I opened up IRAs at eTrade for my daughters when they turned sixteen and managed to match what they earned for a couple of years. Now that they’re in college they certainly can’t afford to invest all they earn, but even a small percentage is preferable to nothing. Five percent would be a nice place to start. Once you have access to a 401K that has a company match, max out your 401k up to the point of the company match, and then invest the rest in a Roth IRA, if eligible.

6)      Once you do start saving for retirement, never, ever, ever (this is for you, Neil Gabler) take out money from your 401k for something as stupid as a wedding. By definition, spending a ton of money on a wedding, a bar/bat mitzvah, a confirmation or quinceanera is stupid. Paying for it with a 401K is beyond stupid.  It’s colossally moronic.

7)      Stop eating out so much. You have an oven and a stove. Use them. When you do eat out, if things are tight play it smart and don’t pay for a $10 martini. Go to BYOB places, or pack a picnic and watch a free concert in the park. You can live well without living like a king.

8)      Don’t indulge in every desire, and if you do want to indulge in something, have a plan. If it’s going to take six months of saving before you can buy that musical instrument or take that vacation, then save for six months.

9)      Try not to take any loans out for college, but if you have to, don’t graduate with more than $30,000 in loans, and I would argue that this should only be for majors that will definitely result in a good paying job. $30K in loans means $333 a month for ten years, before rent, before food, before insurance, before utilities, before anything else. That’s a lot of money if you’re intending to major in political science. I can’t recommended highly enough Frank Palmasani’s book Right College, Right Price and I wish many of the parents I’ve spoken to had read it before sending their kids to college that will result in a degree and $80,000 of debt. You’re not doing your kids any favors by having them graduate with whopping debt.

10)   Don’t buy life insurance unless you have people dependent on your income, but once you do have dependents, buy a long-term term life policy while you’re young and healthy.  Lock it in.

11)   Once you have a legal partner and/or dependents, suck it up and pay an attorney for a will.  Don’t leave the government in charge of your death and your assets.

12)   Don’t get divorced. Seriously. Yes, the idea of marriage being a financial partnership isn’t sexy, but if you can avoid leaving your partner, you’ll be way better off financially. Of course, if there’s abuse of any kind, get the fuck out. But if not, see if you can work it out.

13)   Speaking of marriage, don’t wait until the wedding day to find out your partner has $150K in debt (think it doesn’t matter, that love conquers all? Think again.) or wants to open up a pizza joint in Little Italy. For goodness sake, talk about some of this stuff while you’re deciding to spend the rest of your lives with each other.

14)   Budget. Back in the day my wife kept a written log in a notebook of various things we were saving for (a wedding – which we paid for – musical instruments, a down payment on a home, etc.). Of course, once I transferred this log into Excel it became my responsibility, so my next piece of advice is: don’t transfer your wife’s written log into Excel.

15)   Give to charity. You’ve got to be one sorry sack not to give some of your time and money to others in need. And I don’t mean donating your old clothing. I mean feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, protecting wildlife, teaching a child or an adult. Help someone other than yourself.

16)   Don’t lease a car and don’t buy a new car, at least not until you’re in good shape financially. You could consider leasing if you’re someone who truly gets pleasure out of having a new car and who wants one every couple of years. Most of us can get by without this.

17)   Speaking of cars, drive your car until it costs more per year to repair it than it does to buy a newer used car.

18)   And one more about cars – don’t skimp on the obvious: change oil according to manufacturer’s instructions, check brakes and tires regularly and stay on top of other maintenance issues.

19)   Of course, the same can be said for a home once you own one. Take care of it. That doesn’t mean indulging in additions and renovations you can’t afford, but at least maintain the property.

20)   Speaking of mortgages, when rates are low, lock in and pay the minimum. If rates go up at some point (and they will) lock in but pay attention and refinance when appropriate (and don’t pay for the refi). I refinanced I think seven times in nine years when we first moved to Illinois.

So there you are. I’ll probably think of another twenty in the next few weeks, but this is a good place to start. Children, read and take heed.