JIMI B. GOODE

Anthony DeCurtis’ recent New York Times article, “Beyond The Jimi Hendrix Experience” (2/28/10) is refreshingly accurate, especially about the circumstances of the great guitarist’s death, which he attributes correctly to “misadventure” as opposed to a heroin overdose (so often reported as fact especially in anti-drug propaganda). However, his characterization that Jimi “never spoke out about the pressing civil rights issues (of his day) either in his lyrics or in interviews” is simply not accurate. A look at some of the facts reveals an essential part of the man, his music, and his times.

Though it may not reference them directly, his song “House Burning Down,” (which appeared on the “Electric Ladyland” album) was written following the 1967 Detroit riots and implores in one lyric, “Try to learn instead of burn, hear what I say.” In live performance, Jimi usually dedicated “I Don’t Live Today” to the “American Indian,” in part, as tribute to his Cherokee Grandmother and in a heartbreaking description of the blight of reservation life. Any listener interested in his attitude toward race should reference the lyrics to both of these songs.

The scorched earth instrumental “Midnight” is apocryphally said to have been an improvisation recorded in anger and outrage the night after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Transcending color is a major theme in much of his body of work. It is also a featured element in his legendary and as yet unreleased musical autobiography, “Black Gold.” He spoke about civil rights during many interviews as well including one in which he said, “I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.”

According to some of his closest friends, the fact that the African American community did not embrace him during his lifetime is said to have troubled Jimi. Despite his free street concerts in Harlem, promotion as the “Black Elvis,” attempts at recruitment of him by the Black Panthers, and his replacement of the original Experience with the all black, Band of Gypsies, Hendrix’s fan base remained largely middle-class and white—even though he greatly influenced contemporary black musicians like Miles Davis and Sly Stone. Among the biographies that treat this aspect of his life are David Henderson's well received, "'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Chile" and "Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy" by Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek (founder of the Hendrix Information Center).

Like the era with which he is so synonymous, Jimi Hendrix was complex, conflicted, and deeply indebted to African American musical tradition. His success—typified by the fact that he was the first rock performer of any color to earn $100,000 for a single concert—was the hard earned result of playing as Little Richard’s guitar player, working the chitlin’ circuit with the Isley Brothers and other major R & B artists, and in acknowledging still other forebears as he did with his definitive, non-chalant cover version of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (memorialized in the documentary, "Jimi Plays Berkeley").

Today, Jimi’s legacy as a fearless virtuoso is common wisdom. But, the part of his personal story that also needs to be told is that he was truly an artist beyond color—and that is why, as Mr. DeCurtis observes, he also continues to be “an enduring symbol of personal freedom.” His breakthrough as one the most celebrated rock stars of the sixties—and the only one “of color”—is an achievement that should be considered enough of a statement about race relations at that tumultuous time.

MY FIRST RECORD

Do you remember the first record you ever bought? Well, I guess that I’m already dating myself here by referencing vinyl—in this case, 45 rpm recordings. But, I was given solace recently on a field trip with my son to a restored Victorian home nearby. We were touring with a couple of other families with children about his age who were around 8 or 9, when we entered what in the 1890s was called the “salon” and what we know today as the living room. Inside, the importance of music and conversation were in clear evidence with numerous chairs, settees, a large couch, a Steinway square grand piano that had made it by boat from New York and around the tip of South America, and an Edison Wax Cylinder Phonograph.

When the docent started explaining how this device was used, one of the kids who was inspecting its parts rather intensely asked with a shrug, “Where does the CD go?” It made me smile, but also feel better because he hadn’t asked where you would click to get downloads. The technology and instruments that humans have developed to capture sound and its organized form that we know as "music" may change, but whatever the manner in which we first hear and understand its existence is only matched by the musical entity who introduces it to us. And in a way, that primary experience can say a lot about us as individuals as well as initiate a trajectory for our musical futures. The extra step that we take when we actually consume music as a purchaser—whether on vinyl or digital format—may also serve as a sort of musical version of carbon dating, since music is distinguished as an art that lives by and in time.

In my case, my first acquisition as a consumer was at the age of seven and was Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”, released in 1960. I don’t remember where I bought it or what led me to buy it in the first place—though, when in doubt about my early music history, I usually blame an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. But, I still remember that it was on Cameo Parkway Records and that the red and black label had an actual gold lined, cameo image of a refined lady in profile on it. This visual element is one that I grew to associate with music—and 45 labels were nothing once I graduated to albums, which arguably had already become an art form—if often a kitschy one—in their own right during the 1950s.

MTV added motion video to music, which to my mind often held the artist and audience hostage to a music video director and record label marketing department’s “vision” and “interpretation”. In the world of the download, we’ve now gone full circle. Once upon a time, it was the packaging that made opening a new record “album” like Christmas every time you went to the record store—even though you couldn't always judge a record by its cover. Now that has all but disappeared. More important, packaging was not only a marketing come-on, but also influenced music discovery.

I remember haunting my local record store as a teenager and seeing certain album covers that lured—and even frightened me into buying them. When a friend told me in 1967 that there was this band from England that were louder than The Mothers of Invention, I went and asked for “Are You Experienced”. When I saw the cover, adorned by a leering trio splashed in psychedelic finery, beckoning out of a fisheye lens with a look that dared me to enter—I had to think twice, but am forever glad that I didn’t hesitate too long. The first several bars of the opening song actually flicked a navigational switch on in my brain that has been setting a course for the heart of the sun ever since. It was also a record that was to rear its surrealistic head in a book I did with rock critic, Dave Marsh, who I collaborated with on the long out-of-print, The Book of Rock Lists published by Dell and Rolling Stone in 1981.

Part of the book included a year-by-year breakdown called “Top of the Pops” which codified our own version of the Top Forty Hits in Rock and Roll from 1955 to 1979 and we described as, “For the authors, one of the great incentives in a project like The Book of Rock Lists is the opportunity to inflict on the unsuspecting reader personal opinions about the greatest and most essential records of all time.”

Another series of lists set about codifying the greatest “Top 40 Chartmakers” or forty albums from each year (beginning in 1963) that made Billboard’s Top 100 Chart. There were many conversations about ranking these records. But, when we came to the seminal year of 1967, we had a lot to consider with The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, The Mothers of Invention “Absolutely Free”, “Otis Redding “Live In Europe”, “Fresh Cream”, The Doors’ debut album…and “Are You Experienced?” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Ultimately, Jimi won out, though in retrospect, “Sgt. Pepper” would seem the logical winner over time as classical rock music. No matter—it was all meant to provoke friendly debate just as Dave and I had experienced in its creation. And rock and roll doesn’t suffer academic treatment very well. I always cringe when I see it offered on some over-reaching college syllabus. It seems like the last nail in its coffin (see my earlier post, The Vampire Theory of Rock and Roll) to stuff Rock Music like some taxidermy object to gaze and wonder at, if not dissect for hidden meaning.

Another record that I saw on and off for months at my local record shop was Dr. John’s first record, “Gris Gris”. I was actually scared by the cover, which dripped with Voodoo talismans and trimmings and an image of a somewhat diabolical looking madman in shocks of red and green like some New Orleans Halloween hallucination. Somehow, I knew that if I bought that record, that my ears would never be the same. When I finally put my money down and listened to the spooky likes of “Croker Courtbullion” and “I Walk On Gilded Splinters”, this wasn’t just music—it was theater of the mind—and it was also introducing me not only to mojo roots, but to Mac Rebennack’s musical roots and opened up a lexicon from Huey Piano Smith and Duke Ellington to the weird, ethnographic swamp soup of Voodoo chants and Afro/Yoruba trance dance. Again, I’d never heard anything like it and my brain was imprinted with coordinates for future navigation to the Mississippi Delta and points east across the Atlantic and beyond to the so-called genre of “World Music.” It’s a journey I’ve been on ever since.

The other thing that Dr. John’s album came with was liner notes, a sub species of the album as an art or non-art form that is now all but disappeared with virtual music consumption. I’ve delighted in showing my daughter the liner notes from Bob Dylan’s many early albums written in his e.e.cummings mirror style of lower case, West 4th Street stream of consciousness. Dr. John’s liner notes were also written with a voice that echoed and added detail to the musical phantasmagoria within.

Liner notes were long established in the world of classical music and jazz, where the “seriousness” of the exercise inspired, no doubt, the necessity of anatomical dissection and explication. But, rock and roll was a late comer—I mean, what can you possibly dissect about “The Who Sell Out”, Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols” or even “Sgt. Pepper” for that matter—but as the music developed a history and became more popular and recognized, the addition of liner notes made more sense depending on whether a musician could actually write or if an eager rock critic was available. A rare few, like “Freak Out” , provided a bonus map of an artist’s musical DNA. By citing his artistic influences at some length, Frank Zappa added to my future discoveries and not all were restricted to music.

How do digital music consumers discover new sounds today? The retail store has gone the way of the dinosaurs with the large chains going under from lack of relevance, but thankfully, with hearty, last of the independents like Amoeba Records flourishing as beacons in the wilderness. But, downloads and ringtones now have overtaken the brick and mortar market. According to Techcrunch, in 2006, music downloads were increasing at a pace of over 50% a year, while CD sales declined in that year 20%. More recent stats would certainly reflect this trend.

Collaborative filters like the iTunes Genius Bar are only as good as artificial intelligence can be in making associations between individual personal taste and similarities of potential interest. Peer-to-peer sharing of music is still a huge factor, even in the post-Napster universe, with Limewire and others still booming. Sharing lists of favorites on social media networks allows another view into personal taste that speaks to music as first and foremost a community of specialized interests. Music may have actually been the impulse behind the first human communities when their members invariably gathered around a campfire on the African savannah to sing for the hunt to go well and rain to abound—but that’s another story. The affording of samples on services like CD Now and Amazon are likewise helpful, but all of the above tactics still miss some of the mystery for me that exists when you enter a place like Amoeba in LA.

Usually, I am looking for something specific, like a digitized version of an old record—yesterday, for example, I was searching out a copy of The Rolling Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesties Request”—their characteristically dark answer to “Sgt. Pepper”. But, what I usually come out with is anything but what I originally thought I’d be buying. My friend, Jeff Elmassian, a brilliant composer and virtuoso in his own right and CEO of Endless Noise, a premiere music design firm for commercials spoke of an interesting experience while taking his teenage daughters on a pilgrimage to Amoeba.

On finding a certain record she was looking for, one of them told her father that she only wanted one song on the album and didn’t want to buy the whole thing in order to enjoy it. I remember the feeling many times myself when I had to fork up the dough for an entire album in order to claim the one song I liked. Not all albums were created equal and quite often, the hit single was a teaser that was the loss leader for an album that disappointed. We’ve come a long way in the universe of the singular download and shuffle mode mentality.

Singles were another method of music discovery back in the day when they were often pre-releases for albums by new artists as well as established ones like The Beatles, who would lead off with a taste of what was to come. Sometimes, singles had added value when they didn't appear on a follow-up record or when they did, only on a record several years later. The world of digital downloads has put the model of releasing singles on steroids—but now, the consumer has a choice to not buy an entire “album” and very often, there isn’t even a long form version to follow suit. My daughter was telling me last week about a new band whose “album” of four tracks she really liked. I crankily responded that we called a record with so few songs on it an “EP” in my day, and that it didn’t really qualify for the designation of “album” at all.

I forgot how polarizing and magnetic music is until a recent post which elicited a great response of emails and comments for which I am grateful. One such comment came from Kevin Henry, who inspired this present post. He described buying his first single, The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, “a simple song at best and not earth-shattering my any means”, as he describes it, but one with the inherent power to inspire him remembering “clearly my father yelling to turn that crap off.” He goes on to say: “Today, when I look in the mirror, I wonder who that old guy is and I always sing a little to myself…’hope I die before I get old’...feeling a little sorry for myself and then a magical thing happen the other morning...my 17 year old daughter picked up my iPod by accident on her way out the door and when she walked in that evening she said with a smile...’who are these guys...this stuff is incredible’...and at that moment a connection took place between us as told her the story of my youth and realized that the revolution lives on.”

I’ve had similar cross-generational experiences with my teenage daughter who has embraced a lot of music I grew up with, some of it out of curiosity, some out of enforced listening, and some organically out of her own path of discovery. It’s inspired conversations over the years with younger co-workers at various places I've worked about how great it must have been to experience the 60s and whether “my music is better than your music.” I never quite got that line of attack. If, as Kiki Dee once sung, "I've got the music in me," then what we don't like may result from the fact that the music hasn't connected to where it plays to a harmony inside us.

To me, it’s all a continuum as Kevin Henry's anecdote above reflects so well. But, our first records put a stake in the ground, a tent pole like a clef which affixes music in our memory as the soundtrack to our lives that sets up thematic mileposts made up of sound. They have a way of intersecting our life stories at critical points where music can speak to us as if it were written just for us. Certain records entered my life in this way almost as if they were chapter titles—“Meet The Beatles”, “Absolutely Free”, “Muddy Waters: The Real Folk Blues”, John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, Miles Davis “Kind of Blue”, several classical music albums…and the list goes on.

It’s interesting to me that my very first record was a dance song. I had no idea at the time what a cover record was and that Chubby Checker was experiencing success with a number that was originally written and recorded by Hank Ballard. I also had no real idea what sex was at the age of seven either—“To make (beautiful) music with someone or to ‘have sexual intercourse’ is cited by the Online Etymology Dictionary as arriving on the scene in that “seminal” year of 1967. The more recent euphemism of “The Mystery Dance”, may be the more useful expression here.

But, on a primeval level, I guess we're all genetically wired to understand sound as rhythm first, whether it’s the pulse of our blood that steps up with excitement of different kinds, the rhythm of language before we know what words mean, the different kind off beats in the cries that a baby makes depending on her hunger, pain or want of company, the consuming, inspirational sounds of the natural world, the clickety-clack made by toy trains, the delight of tapping out rhythms with a pencil on our school desk to annoy the teacher—or as discoveries in what quantum mechanics has verified in what the Vedantas and the mantra tradition have known for thousands of years—it’s all vibration, man.

Bassist Victor L. Wooten describes it succinctly in his book, The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music: “A-440 means that a note vibrates four hundred and forty times per second…if you keep cutting that number in half, 440, 220, 110, 55, etc., you will eventually get beats per minute. At that point, it’s called rhythm.” The oldest musical instrument that has been documented in the archeological record may be a bone flute from the Upper Paleolithic, but my money would bet that percussion was the original featured instrument of our furry, low browed ancestors. Click sticks like those used by the Aborigines in Australia most likely have forty or fifty thousand years of use. Banging on so-called “ring rocks” or using stones hit against each other seem like another natural movement.

What is music and where does it come from? Wooten refers to its unique origin as a word comprised of an ancient term for “mother” which is “Mu” and “sic” which he attributes as an abbreviation of “science”. Traditional etymology would cite the word's origin as a tribute to the Greek goddesses known as the Muses who are known to have served up a variety of artistic elements for humans to play with. Regardless of its meaning, music is unique in existing in both space (in memory and physical vibration) and time. Its very existence points us to the place that Dizzy Gillespie so eloquently describes as “place between the notes” and as memorialized in John Cage’s famous piece, “4’33”. It is the place where we literally catch our breath, our heartbeat, and where music is created out of the void, out of the great expanive silence, out of that Big Bang of Original Compressed Sound where the first note of song reverberated the original vibration as the Music of the Spheres and frequency that we all carry with us regardless of our preferred musical tastes. Or as the great classical composer of the 20th century, maestro Frank Zappa once said, “Music is the Best”.

I am very interested in readers sharing stories of how their first records impacted their lives and welcome all submissions to the comment section below.

THE VAMPIRE THEORY OF ROCK AND ROLL

Nobody knows exactly when or where rock and roll started, but it’s probably a good bet that it started at the crossroads in Mississippi where blues legend, Robert Johnson, made his pact with the Devil. There are many variations on this theme as all great origin myths deserve. One describes how Johnson was directed to arrive at midnight at a plantation crossroads where the Dark Stranger tuned his guitar. In another version, he was given a guitar by the father of all agents and learned how to play like a demon in just one night while sitting on top of a gravestone in a local cemetery. What we do know from Johnson’s contemporaries who described his amazing, seemingly overnight talent and success, and his surviving masterpiece recording are enough evidence to speculate on a supernatural origin for his unique skill. Whatever actually happened, the Faustian bargain certainly informed a lot about music industry business models ever since. But what’s more important is that rock and roll has always been informed by a death wish probably since it’s an adolescent music at heart that is uncertain about mortality, but as foolishly daring as a teenage driver with a fast car.

The first recording with the actual title, “Rock and Roll”, was released by the Boswell Sisters in 1934. Hardly a rhythmic cousin inspired by the long snake moan of the Delta Blues, this trio’s song spreads the message in a big band, pop setting, but the meaning is still clear despite it’s white bread, if swinging delivery. It’s still all about sex even though drugs and electrification would arrive later. Rock and Roll takes a cue from the industry standard of “farewell tours” in that, its death has been exaggerated and proclaimed many times from early cynics like Frank Sinatra and Steve Allen. The former loudly denigrated rockers as lowlifes, miscreants, traitors, and troglodytes. He especially singled out The Beatles who he called “creeps” and cultural enemies of the state—though he was later to repent with a rather flaccid cover of “Something”. Steve Allen famously tried his best to cut the young upstart rock and roll down to size by humiliating Elvis Presley during an early TV appearance when he had the King sing “Hound Dog” to a real dog set on a pedestal.

They were not alone in the 50’s when “concerned” parent groups, white “citizen’s councils” and other community organizations attempted to alert families to the dangers of this musical form which created juvenile delinquents and whose connections to African Americans and the sensual abandon of jazz were clearly outrageous game changers. Nobody could have predicted what was to come despite early warnings like the West African beat of Bo Diddley. You didn’t have to drum along to the “bump de bump, bump, bump, bump” to add the grind to the recipe and realize that this music was all about the beat and like a jungle telegraph echoed its earlier tribal origins.

Maybe the white status quo sensed that this revolutionary music of slaves and field hands like the great American 20th century poet, Muddy Waters, could lead somehow to overturn the Establishment—their instincts were correct given rock and roll’s eventual cutting of a swath from the Delta through to America’s blackboard jungles, urban sprawl and a neo-tribalistic sequence of youth mutations of sock-hops, boogeying in the back of mom and dad’s car and at the drive-in, screaming Beatles fans, love-ins at Monterey and Woodstock, fan sites, Hip Hop culture successfully invading the suburban mall, and web rings, and Band MySpace pages.

Even the attempted co-opting of rock and roll by safe, white singers like Pat Boone, for example, who hijacked Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” , divesting it of its undulating, native rhythms and innuendo (“Got a gal named Sue, she knows just what to do”) was only a blip. Disco was another Barbarian at the Gates which ultimately failed to take its mantle and actually inspired post MC5 punk, and was ceremoniously served its own funeral pyre at a disco record burning at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1976. In a frightening reprise of 50’s censorship and parental concern, the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Council) spearheaded by drummer and Vice Presidential spouse, Tipper Gore, was successful in providing convenient labels for popular music to point out its incipient dangers to parents too lazy to listen to the lyrics themselves. Rock and roll survived the labeling system and other vain efforts to stop the beat of time.

Who killed rock and roll, then? Well, like its historical collateral damage of multiple rock and roll suicides, it actually succumbed to self-immolation like a speeding kamikaze guitar run—not in a grand crescendo of Marshall stacks feeding back overamped to 11 with smoke bombs and drums thrilling in deafening splendor—but in greed, naiveté, and most of all, as the result of a generational shift. The beginning of the end was actually in 1968. It was in that year that The Doors decided to sell “Light My Fire” to Buick as a soundtrack for a car commercial. It not only was a source of contention between Jim Morrison and the other three band members—because Jim didn’t want to do it—but the start of a lethal love affair between Madison Avenue and its musical concubine. It was Advertising that killed the Beast.

If Mad Ave killed rock and roll, then MTV was the nail in the coffin. The idea of “music” television may have sounded like a good idea at the time because the inmates had never run the asylum. Rock and roll was always an embarrassment in the television of the 50’s and 60’s. Shows like “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig” suffered from producers and network executives doing too much frugging at clubs with go-go girls and having bad acid experiences that became the TV light shows of op-art, fisheye, multiple single-frame, swirling psychedelia of wall paper surrounding recording artists of the day. Rock was certainly the wicked stepchild of the musical arts. It always seemed to be introduced as the embarrassing poseur, and black sheep of the family—which it was proudly when it worked well.

Ed Sullivan opened up the television stage in what seemed to be a genuine commercial desire to connect with music of all kinds—but the network censors did their best to emasculate bands like The Doors—who infamously did not change the word “higher” in their performance of “Light My Fire” and The Rolling Stones, eventually to become one of rock’s billion dollar conglomerates who did, in fact, change the lyrics to “Let’s Spend The Night Together”, by substituting “some time” in lieu of “the night”. Maybe the art of negotiation made them a better business proposition in the long term. As they say, "you can’t always get what you want."

But, creating visual interpretations by twenty-something, music video “directors” is dodgy because it eliminates the primary experience that is the salient feature of music as an art form. Music videos substitute a visual interpretation that is often quite literal or at the other end of the spectrum, totally contrived, as a substitute for the listener coming to terms with their own experience as it connects with what a song is saying. They were also blatant commercials to upsell records. When The Beatles did early videos for songs like “I Am The Walrus” from “The Magical Mystery Tour”, and “All You Need Is Love”, there was a purity and charm to them because they were unpremeditated and seemed almost like afterthoughts.

The other danger factor was pointed out to me once during a conversation with Frank Zappa just after MTV came on the scene. “How did MTV change music, Frank?” I asked. Without losing a beat, the Maestro intoned, blowing out a plume of smoke, “It turned musicians into models.”

It also had the effect of connecting popular music more directly with the advertisers who would be its nemesis. While it was a rarity for rock and roll to infiltrate the province of Madison Avenue jingles and Hollywood soundtracks, that began to change as rock and roll, itself, became less of a movement and more of a business. Its mass appeal could no longer be denied as it became newsworthy when colorful, Dionysian multitudes grew to attend festivals and stadiums. Even the gold and platinum standards for record sales had to be adjusted higher to accommodate increased audiences for the category. Movie executives were also smoking dope and doing the Swim, and started catering to yuppie audiences with nostalgic, Motown-infused soundtracks replacing or augmenting original motion picture scores. Like music videos, some movies such as “The Big Chill” leaned far too heavily on conveying emotional weight by literally using “The Weight” instead of dialogue and character to drive story structure.

In the 50’s and 60’s, rock and roll wasn’t really a business yet because it was easy to deny. I remember a visit with Little Richard at his house which had been at the Hyatt on Sunset for many years. He proudly displayed his gold records to my brother and me, and remarked that they were the first he’d ever received. This was in 1995. The rip-offs of seminal artists like Richard, Chuck Berry, and others who were denied royalties or entered into bad deals is now the stuff of history with some reparations made, usually through court settlements. Contracts in the 60’s looked like they were signed with a pen in one hand and a joint in the other. I watched “Monterey Pop” recently with my kids who are 8 and 15 and saw that—through their eyes and questions—that it was almost like viewing an ethnographic documentary. It all looks so naive and innocent, and many of the musicians were, too, with respect to the business side of music.

I’ve worked with D.A. Pennebaker on a number of projects who with Richard Leacock and also with the Maysles were largely responsible for cinema verite style of film making. Pennebaker is also well known for his great documentary, “Don’t Look Back”, which documented Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. When I was clearing the video rights for “Don’t Look Back” and “Monterey Pop” as well as on another project for the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, I had to reference the original artist contracts. Jimi Hendrix’s contract for Monterey was signed by his lawyer and most likely never seen by him. The Who were paid $2500 for their Woodstock performance, and were only among several who insisted—and actually got paid for the celebrated free festival. Although he was the first artist to be paid a hundred-thousand dollars for one concert, Jimi left only twenty-thousand when he died. Tom Petty talks about when, as a teenager, he first signed with MCA Records and didn’t understand how books entered into it when he saw the clause about “publishing”. He had the courage and fortitude to eventually sue to get his royalty earnings from publishing, but many such sagas do not share such a happy ending. Even if artists were not paying a lot of attention to deal terms, there were a lot of record company executives, managers, shysters, agents, interlopers, and operators who were.

It was only natural that rock and roll became an industry in the 80’s fueled by cocaine, hookers and other fresh marketing tactics that innovated from the original 50's payola techniques. But most of all, it was the introduction of the CD format that changed the business model. And why shouldn’t it have? Imagine the first meeting where the concept was tendered: “I want to replace vinyl with this!” (Holds up disc which glints like gold in the Hollywood sunlight streaming through the high windows). “What is that?” “It’s plastic. The total cost is going to be about $2.50 to manufacture and including all your distribution and marketing costs! And guess what? We can mark it up as much as 100%! And it will create a whole new market for players, too!” The executive probably was cynical at first, especially at the low cost, but the rest is history as we replaced our collection with an audiophile digital version—even though “Who’s Next” still sounds better on vinyl.

Inevitably, in a lesson that Wall Street should have paid attention to, greed caught up. The Industry now only consists of several major labels left standing or somewhat tottering worldwide in a landscape of thousands of independent labels, a new singles business invented by iTunes, Limewire, MySpace fan pages, Mac garage band, and Amazon downloads. The Internet broke the bank with the Napster peer-to-peer sharing model and a generation that took piracy to another level entirely—evidenced now by Apple relenting last week on DRM. Not only were the inmates now running the asylum, but they were controlling the distribution, too.

The record business is now the iPod economy with well over 100 million sold, over half a billion iTunes software downloads, over $120 million in 2007 profits, and well over a $1billion worth of digital downloads annually. The major labels should have seen that we were on the eve of a new singles business—instead it decided it was a better idea to sue its own customers.

As the mass audience for music grew in the 80’s, arena rock established the tour and merchandise as the revenue model. With the decline in record sales in the last decade, looking to the 90’s heyday when million-sellers used to be the rule, now a hundred thousand unit seller is a big deal outside of certain legacy performers. The only two growth markets for records are for world music and Christian rock which grew from 4% of overall sales in 2000 to over 10% last year. Maybe Jesus will resuscitate the Big Beat, but given the cryogenic state of the industry today, it is clearly a job for an entity with supernatural powers.

Where we are now is that the music, itself, is the Trojan horse stalking consumers as the advertisement for the tour and merchandise. On average, there are forty-thousand concerts a year with average attendance of five thousand tickets sold. The average merchandise per person is 6-8 per customer, but it can be upwards of $20 depending on the artist and with annual market of approximately $1.5 billion. That’s a lot of t-shirts.

The band logo is the final stamp of the rock group as corporation. Advertising killed rock because it legitimized it. Rock and roll’s very existence was that it was the illegitimate child of rhythm and blues, jazz, the Delta, and far off Yoruba beats. As the baby boomers grew older, they became the captains of industry and technology and Madison Avenue and selfishly wanted to hear their own soundtrack—even if appropriated to a thirty-second spot. Bruce Springsteen ordered a cease and desist when Ronald Reagan tried to use his “Born In The USA” for promoting the Republican cause in the 80’s. That should have been a sign.

I mean, Fleetwood Mac in association with Bill Clinton is self-explanatory in a cuddly, yuppie sort of way. But now, rock music is a featured player without guilt and plays party agnostic at political conventions, on the campaign trail, and inaugural balls. How does this scenario equate with “Born To Be Wild” and the bikers getting blown away at the end of “Easy Rider”? How does political endorsement add up when compared to the spirit of Jimi Hendrix’s deconstruction masterpiece performance of the National Anthem during the Vietnam War and Berkeley riots?

When I was growing up in the 60’s, my junior high school gym coach used to call me “Hair” and vilified my music wishing that it would die. It made my passion for the music even stronger. Now, I find it irksome that Bruce Springsteen and Prince perform at the Super Bowl, and rock and roll is the soundtrack to television sports—adding its energy, guitar army, and percussive attack to connect with its viewers who all apparently have grown too old to remember when rock and roll was outlaw music. And am I alone in wondering what “Who Are You” has to do with forensics? Maybe it’s in memories like my battles with the gym coach where rock still lives—as a memory, the music exists as a reference point in time when a song or a band or a show references a moment in our lives that was significant—or even if it was insignificant as Robert Plant once put it—as something “deep and meaningless”. He also said, “I’ve lived a hundred years in rock and roll.” Perhaps that’s long enough for those who have really lived it, but that’s another story…

The day after Keith Moon died, my brother, Jeff, finally got to interview John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey for his movie, “The Kids Are Alright”. During the interview, he asked Roger about the future of rock and roll—a pointed question for The Who, at least, given that they’d just lost their key man. Roger said to him, “Rock and roll doesn’t have a future, so shut up!” That sort of ended the interview, but Jeff still used “Long Live Rock”, with its anthemic refrain, “Rock is Dead” for the end credits of the film—whether to give hope or irony, I’ll never ask for fear it would be a repeat of what Pete Townshend once said to him when Jeff asked what the meaning of his song, “Who Are You” was. Pete replied slyly, “Ask Harold Pinter.” My brother and I always wanted to riff on Pete's famous lines from "My Generation" and say to him, "Hope we get old before we die..." But, we never found the right moment and the lyrics seemed to have haunted him ever since anyway. Rock and roll does not look well in the mirror.

Rock and roll suffers from having become our classical music. It’s cross-generational now. When I was running the Jimi Hendrix Foundation, he had a greatest hits collection called “The Ultimate Experience” that had been selling twenty-thousand units a month for almost two years. Estate Creative Director and former Hendrix producer, Alan Douglas, wondered who was buying all these records and conducted a marketing survey. The results were that 60% of the albums were being bought by fans under twenty. Jimi was now effectively converting his third generation of fans from beyond the grave. But, then again, Jimi is a classical composer now.

Rock and roll shouldn’t age gracefully for some kind of old timers day, endless reunion tours, and unplugged sets. Maybe Keith, Jimi, Janis, Jim, Brian, Buddy, Ritchie, Gene, Eddie, Otis, and all the others were lucky in some way to be frozen in time. The problem with rock and roll is that it was always a euphemism for the mystery dance, so perhaps we were screwed from the beginning. And maybe, just maybe, rock and roll isn’t dead after all, but is just about to start out on one of its annual “farewell tours.” As the song says, “Hail, hail…”