My column's introduction in Anvil Anthology magazine has been pushed back to the third issue. Until then, I will do essays here on a roughly monthly basis.
On February 5th, 1996, FreeHead, the band featuring cartoonist Jim Smith, broke up. They did not break up due to personal differences within the band...the guys are still the best of friends. They did not break up due to musical differences...everyone involved would tell you that FH was the best musical project they had ever been involved in.
Rather, the band broke up due to the timidity of the American record business, and the horrid conditions in the Los Angeles Rock club circuit.
Let me break it down for you. First, rock clubs in LA are different from rock venues in practically every other part of the country, although people from San Francisco, New York and to a lesser extent Seattle might find that what I am describing here somewhat familiar. For the rest of you, to quote a line from the movie JFK, we're through the looking glass here.
In most places, musicians get paid to perform. A music group performs a service, and that service is compensated by the club owner. The club owner deals with the publicity and advertising. All the group needs to do is show up on time and play to the best of their ability.
In Los Angeles, however, musicians usually don't get paid. There are so many bands jockeying for a chance here that they are ripe for exploitation by mercenary club owners. It's a buyer's market. Club owners and bookers can get away with not paying bands to play because if you don't take the gig, there are literally thousands of other bands perfectly willing to get exposure and not require being paid.
But this isn't the worst part. Some club owners require the bands to pay for advertising costs, and if the band doesn't pay, they don't get mentioned in the ads. And worst of all are situations where the band has to go into the business of selling tickets. Promoters and club owners call this practice "pre-selling", but bands refer to it by the more accurate term of "pay-to-play".
Yes, bands in Los Angeles often have to pay for the privelege of playing their music. This might be a little hard to understand, so I will illustrate it another way. You work at a crummy, boring job. However, you don't get paid for your work. Rather, you work for free, for the purpose of "exposure" to get more clients for your work and to perhaps ingratiate yourself to one of the Fortune 500 companies. And in some cases, you actually have to pay your boss for the privelege of working at this crummy, boring job.
This is not a "music scene"...it's slavery.
Secondly, the popular music industry has not taken any real chances since the mid- 1970's, when "corporate rock" first blew onto the scene.
Before the mid 1960s, there was a similar lack of guts among the recording industry. First, the music which was the major origin of Rock N' Roll, rhythm and blues, was segregated out of the mainstream of the recording industry. There were labels which handled what was once called "race" music, and labels which handled white "pop" stars.
By the mid-1950s, it was determined that American teenagers were listening to this "race" music regardless of the color of their skin or the social class they belonged to. So the "race" was on to find white people who sounded like the black R&B performers. Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly were only a few of the performers who were discovered for the sole purpose of putting an acceptable white face on the music that was so strong on the "street", as music industry folks call the public at large.
However, it took until the mid-1960s before another "street"-level trend changed things in the music industry. Even after the Rock N' Roll era took off, bands were packaged by record company executives. A musical group would not write their own material...the record company would say "these songs are good for you" and have you record them with a producer of their choosing. They would be sent on package tours with several other bands, and the bands which sold the best or which the record company wanted to give an extra promotional push to would wind up in arranged appearances on TV shows like "American Bandstand," "Shindig," and "Hullabaloo."
In the mid-1960s, however, bands began to spring up in Los Angeles, New York and most visibly San Francisco which wrote their own material. These bands became a SCENE in the strongest sense of the word. Clubs were started by people who really cared about the music, some of them even musicians themselves. The old guard at the record companies saw what was going on and were puzzled, but realizing that there was a strong chance of making money involved, they signed these bands en masse. It didn't matter that the old guard didn't understand the music..."the kids" liked it, so they took chances.
By the early 1970s, the old guard grew frustrated with the hit-and-miss nature of just signing bands, and hired "kids" in their A&R department to sniff out the "good" ones. These "kids" liked their exalted station in the industry, and gradually got more and more conservative in their signing of bands. In short, they became just as bad as their predecessors were back in the '50s.
In the beginning of the punk rock era, the bands were once again by-and-large ignored by the mainstream music industry. Small, independent labels sprung up, labels like SST, Touch And Go, Alternative Tentacles and SubPop, and the music got out to a smaller but appreciative audience. The audience began to grow, and the recording industry had to do something about it. Rather than go on a signing spree, however, the recording industry began to package a "safer" version of punk that they called "New Wave." Initially, these repackaged bands were very true to the punk rock ethic, bands like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Gang of Four, and The Clash. But as the '70s yielded to the '80s, a safe, packaged version of punk began to be pushed by the music industry and by a new cable network called MTV. Phase two of corporate rock began.
This phase has continued, non-stop, into the '90s. Street-level trends continue to be co-opted, from Hip-Hop to so-called "grunge", and modified into "safer" and more commercially marketable forms. The contractions in the music industry has meant that less and less chances could be taken with signing bands. And so we see what exists today: safe, homogenized, sanitized for your protection.
This is why music sucks nowadays. This is what killed FreeHead and many, many other bands that didn't fit the mold du jour. The only thing that will perhaps make a difference is if people stop settling for less, stop supporting the music business with your dollars. But that might not even help.
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