Around the time the Dolls and Springsteen were going for stardom, Elliot Murphy was the darling of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which didn’t lack for cachet because of that whole Velvet Underground thing.
One day when I was in high school I was in New York City for some unremembered reason, and I was on the Long Island Railroad headed home reading Interview, a feature about Elliot Murphy, and I look up and there on the danged LIRR car is Elliot Murphy, wearing a neon blue (aqua) feather jacket, like a true rock star, with hangers on (friends) and everything. On the Long Island Railroad! Though I’m not sure the record was even out yet, which may explain something.
Murphy didn’t endure nor soar the way the Dolls and Springsteen have. I don’t have a theory why. He seemed very delicate and kind of made up on the train. Aquashow was a good album, but careers get derailed in many ways. Stardom selects in reverse. Many aspire and a few survive the gauntlet.
In any case, Murphy didn’t stop. Here’s a version from a live show in Italy in 2006. No longer innocent nor callow.
I’m listening to this new Bob Dylan booleg, The Cutting Edge 1965 – 1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12 (6 CD Deluxe Edition), which is full of alt takes of songs he recorded on his three epic albums of 1965 and 1966. It all sounds great, but this backing track for the stately (in its official release) Visions of Johanna is unlike anything else, unless maybe something from the future. This hard driving rock doesn’t really work with the song, but for at least a few minutes it sounds pretty terrific.
On the first New Yorker Radio show, the most excellent rock writer Kelefah Sanneh goes to the Philly suburbs and talks to the guys in the band Spraynard.
Now, I’ve only heard the radio segment and my first impression is these pop punk guys are as formulaic as the death metal guys. What’s with that voice dudes?
But the interview is worth a listen, especially since it takes place in a batting cage.
I like the Roberta Flack version, which is direct and simple. But apparently Ewan MacColl, who wrote the song, thought it was too pop.
It is pop, it has strings, which is why it was a big and deserved hit.
There is a new album of Ewan MacColl covers out. A tribute album, as it were. He was a giant of the Englishy folk scene of the 50s, and married Pete Seeger’s sister to boot. He claimed their version of this song was the best, stripped down and weird, but he’s wrong (though to be fair he died before Johnny Cash recorded his version).
For the record, here’s the lovely Roberta Flack version, which is also better than MacColl’s.
I was at dinner with some friends the other night, when talk turned to Elvis Costello’s new book, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. Many people there that night claimed fandom, but I think I won with my story of being at the first show at the Bottom Line, standing on our chairs so we could look over the fucking piano, and telling the bouncers to go to hell, since we didn’t want to look in the stupid mirror they had for those of us in our blocked seats.
I also told the story of hanging at the bar with Joey Ramone, talking about just how sucky the Tuff Darts (opening act) were.
But then I told the story of seeing Costello and the Attractions on Saturday Night Live, and I got the whole story totally wrong. In my head, the label wanted Elvis to play Allison, and he instead played Radio Radio.
But the clips are clear. He was scheduled to play Less Than Zero, a track about British fascist Oswald Mosely, and who could know it would later become a Bret Easton Ellis post teen drug romp novel and movie, but played instead the insolent and immature but uberly catchy Radio Radio.
For this, Lorne Michaels or NBC, I’m not sure which, banned Costello from NBC shows. Wow.
But on the 25th anniversary of SNL, Costello was back, recreating the moment (equally awkwardly) and played Radio Radio with the Beastie Boys. It’s cool, and I think shows just how tight the Attractions were.
These guys are pretty much forgotten, no? This song was written by Michael Kamen for the hippie rock western Zacharia, which I liked a lot at the time, and touches on our necrophilia and halloween themes.
Their biggest song was a cover of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto.
Here are some thoughts about streaming and recorded music from recent reading. In some sense, this is a dump of links for future reference, but I hope I connect some dots, too.
Ben Sisario told the story, in yesterday’s New York Times, of a songwriter name Perrin Lamb, whose independently released song ended up in a popular playlist on Spotify and earned him $40,000.
Which reminded me of Rosanne Cash’s comment that 600,000 Spotify streams earned her $104. She called streaming “dressed up piracy,” but I think she misses what’s happening here. The streaming services are often owned, at least in part, by the big three labels, and the labels collect money and distribute it to their artists (while taking their own cut, just as they did off records). As the artist in Sisario’s story shows, if you don’t have a label more money passes through to you.
One problem with the idea that streaming services are ripping off artists is that the streaming services are all losing money. Pandora announced huge losses this past quarter, plus ended settling with music publishers for three times the cost it want to pay for the rights to stream music written before 1972. Pandora has tens of millions of customers. If it’s still losing huge numbers and it’s costs are going up, how is it going to survive? Spotify is in a similar position, losing lots of dough despite being the leader in subscribers.
Making money on recorded music, this guy Philip Kaplan argues, was a historical accident. Records were meant to be a spur to get people to buy record players, but the software companies that eventually emerged figured out ways to make more money selling copies of music than the machines to play it on. Streaming services, Kaplan argues, are simply restoring market efficiency to a process that was exploited by the labels.
A guy who has a blog called Startups and Shit, pointed me to a NY Times article from 2007 about how cultural hits, like hit songs, happen. According to the experiment Duncan Watts writes about, predicting hits is so hard because there is no single line of taste that hits have to cross. Not quality, not simpleness, not nothing. In fact, hits erupt out of apparent quality blips, in which a small network likes something which somewhat randomly spreads to other related networks simultaneously. When enough networks light up, there it is, a hit!
These network explosions amplify the perceived quality of the hits, though objective analysis among any of the individuals in the network would show a small advantage in quality. Watts calls this a “rich get richer effect.” Watts writes:
This, obviously, presents challenges for producers and publishers — but it also has a more general significance for our understanding of how cultural markets work. Even if you think most people are tasteless or ignorant, it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow “better,” at least in the democratic sense of a competitive market, than their unsuccessful counterparts, that Norah Jones and Madonna deserve to be as successful as they are if only because “that’s what the market wanted.” What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wants” at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply “reveals” what people wanted all along. In such a world, in fact, the question “Why did X succeed?” may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise best seller, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”
The Startups and Shit piece links the hitmaking effect of networks with the network the major labels control most tightly, namely radio.
His suggestion for the streaming services is to sign their own artists and try to break them on their own radio services, much the way Perrin Lamb, who surprisingly earned $40,000 for a song from an album that wasn’t even on Spotify when it broke on Spotify.
In this way, Spotify and other services, could break the discovery grip of the labels on radio, and arrange to get more money to artists at a lower cost. Win win.
Well, not for the labels.
This leads us back to Philip Kaplan, whose piece ends with a link to a band called Extinction Level Event’s lead guitarless metal viral hit, Entropy, and to his own band’s self produced and promoted metal band, Butchers of the Frontier. Rockers, he says, from recording, promoting, selling tickets and merchandise, are doing it for themselves, as they should be.
, which is full of alt takes of songs he recorded on his three epic albums of 1965 and 1966. It all sounds great, but this backing track for the stately (in its official release) Visions of Johanna is unlike anything else, unless maybe something from the future. This hard driving rock doesn’t really work with the song, but for at least a few minutes it sounds pretty terrific.
. Many people there that night claimed fandom, but I think I won with my story of being at the first show at the Bottom Line, standing on our chairs so we could look over the fucking piano, and telling the bouncers to go to hell, since we didn’t want to look in the stupid mirror they had for those of us in our blocked seats.