I met Danny Schmidt at The Sisters Folk Festival nine years ago. He had invited me to attend, though I am sure he forgot it right away. I know I surprised him. My first words to him as he passed by to play a set in a tented area were “The Longhorns suck” which brought the Look of Death for Danny was and is a fervent Texas Longhorn fan, him having grown up in Austin and all. I realized my mistake right off. He had no idea who I was, having never seen me before. And it wasn’t his best day.
Have a safe and happy Canada Day…I love you all. And yes…this IS the Greatest Country in the World…even if some of us don’t know it.
Portions of this column originally appeared in FYIMusic, Cashbox Canada, and DBAWIS.
Women. You can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em, so the general attitude seems to be. These days, it’s a topic I would rather not broach, so many ready to take offense at the drop of a hat, but who can blame them? The United States, in my mind one of the most open cultures in the world (until the Orange Shitgibbon came along), never gave them their just due. We said we did, but saying and doing are so far apart anymore. Maybe always was. I was fortunate enough to have grown up in a family which was as close as you could probably get to democratic. Not in the early days, of course, but who would want to put a family at the mercy of a five- or eleven-year old? Still, us kids were included in most decisions— the ones which involved us kids, anyway.
This is not my favorite column to write. In my youth, death was death, something which happened to everyone else. As a young man, I looked upon it as simply draining the talent pool because by then I was consumed with music— immersed in it to the point that life beyond it was a blur. In middle-age, it began becoming personal— friends and favorites taking the dive either stunningly quick or in dire circumstances.
Music used to be all about hits, and before that, artists, and before that, publishing. Recycling music was written into the process from the beginning, but when the LP came along, recycling became a way of life. To be fair, early reissue albums were not reissues at all but were what they termed “budget” discs, a term also applied to albums of “generic” music by artists of little known or unknown cachet. Labels such as Harmony and Pickwick and Design once filled drug store racks with albums of dubious distinction, filled with either deep tracks of a popular artist or tracks by bands put together in the studio to recreate hits of the day.
After reading what I consider Cam Carpenter‘s best column ever this past week (if you missed it, read it here), I could not help but look back over my years in the business. The big difference between Cam and myself is that I spent all of my years on the bottomside, i.e. retail, and started those years looking longingly at the labels, hoping to score that most wonderful and elusive job in A&R (Artists & Repertoire— the people who spend ungodly amounts of time listening to live tapes and demos and sucking in smoke in scuzzy bars looking for that next big thing in music). Cam did that.
It’s called introspection, sports fans. We all feel it every once in awhile and I have been under its spell for the past week and the result has been a total lack of perspective and thus, no cohesive idea for a column. I don’t know why it happens but I do know that it is indiscriminate, that it is sometimes a struggle to even look at the blank page without it beating you to a mental pulp. For myself, the one thing I fear beyond misspelling a musician’s name is the inability to write at all and we are all under deadline, the scourge of any supposed journalist. In the movies, the reporter is always able to crank out a barnburner of an article at the last second, saving his/her job and possibly the future of the newspaper itself. Well, that’s Hollywood, folks, but it does give you an idea of what it is like to produce under pressure.
This is a slightly revised column from November of 2011. Thought I would share it with you gain because, well…even though I am supposed to be taking the week off, I’m not, so there will be a couple of new posts here later this week while the rest of the crew takes some much needed (and deserved) time off. Have a safe and happy Canada Day…I love you all. And yes…this IS the Greatest Country in the World…even if some of us don’t know it.
I’ve often wondered if previous generations of humans are as fucked up as we are about relationships. I watch TV, go to movies and listen to music all the time and it appears to me we are a nation if not a world of basket cases. We’re all self-involved and needy and greedy and sex-crazed and have so many phobias experts are identifying new ones all the time in an effort to keep up. Growing up, I thought everything was laid out for us and it looked like gooey fun, but then when I was growing up we were in the era of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, The Three Stooges and that strange teen phenomenon which circled around a mashup of James Dean and Marlon Brando (the young Brando and not the Godfather-era). Were we fucked up then? I suppose we were.
Whaaa-a-a-at, you say? 2012 ain’t over yet? You’re right. It ain’t. But if the Mayans have it right, it will soon be all over so if you don’t mind the indulgence I’ve decided to do what I do every year— post my list of albums which have floated to the top a month early. I do it for a couple of reasons. One, I hate for my list to get mixed in with the rest of those end-of-the-year lists which swarm late December and early January. The timing is all too predictable and if there is anything I don’t like, it’s predictability (which is why I don’t go gaga every time Keith Richards adds another day to his fossilized remains or Mick Jagger farts).
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 