MAKE MUSIC — NOT BUSINESS
1992 began an exciting time for new music in Los Angeles, especially if you were just starting to do A&R for a company with a checkbook: Bands formed only weeks earlier like Tool, Rage Against the Machine and Stone Temple Pilots (known as Mighty Joe Young back then and playing weekly at the Coconut Teaszer, later Privilege and XIV) played on the same bill at small venues for a few dozen early believers lucky enough to show up at now long gone LA clubs like Club Lingerie and Club With No Name.
A band coming into their own live like Rage Against The Machine in those days is an non-programmable dynamic of human emotion driven by collective human experience, and it’s not just about the music or the performance or even the audience. At those shows, if you weren’t outraged too, you just weren’t there to experience how a vocal, bass, drums and Tom Morello’s guitar could combine to defy everything you ever thought about music and reset your brain and whatever it had in about American culture, politics and art.
My boss at the time asked me to create monthly gig reports such as the one here as a guideline for tracking new artists at our A&R meetings. Nearly 25 years later it’s a Hollywood Rock relic, a snapshot of new music at the time across many genres.
If you were among those at some of these early performances, like Rage when there were less than 50 people at a show, it wasn’t just a great show, it was practically an electrocution — not just music, not just art, not just outrage — it was an initiation to a new way of experiencing life, and you can’t get that from Spotify regardless of who they acquire or how they curate playlists.
If you study the painting in some detail, you will perhaps recognize some other names alongside the rock stars. Others you will not recognize — Some might say they didn’t “make it.” But they too will have valuable stories for their children and grandchildren, perhaps, about the big show they once played opening for a the big name with more recognition, and perhaps some old scratched CDs or vinyl to pass on. But that’s mostly it decades later. No big royalty checks. No annual Grammy tickets from Clive, no bad hair and drug problem referenced in an edgy episode of Behind the Music and no Sugarman styled documentary.
How would the next great act make it today? Looking back at the painting, I’m reminded of some of the history long before these artists shot through a cannon or flew into a version of neutral — the blueprint, the DNA was always there and time revealed it. In other words, there are indeed many lessons around noticing how the patterns of belief and behavior, separate from the music, stacked the odds in favor or against, the fate of the artists above. For today’s industry, it’s all still relevant to examine around increasing and decreasing odds for success in today’s business.
Certain acts above simply represented perhaps a more compelling live show, or had better material than another — it still is possible that a single great song can transform someone from rags to riches and have the domino effect of even altering the financial destiny of an entire company.
But it is never simply a matter of talent. If I had to choose one single factor for success, it would be the ability to define your goals. It is critical that you define what you want so you can understand what you’re going to do to have to get it. All artists have their own definition of success and unique notion of how they are going to achieve it. Most aspiring musicians learn about the music business from the media, which is often manipulated to sell product. Rolling Stone celebrates the anti-hero in all of us, but if you became a manager you’d learn to resent its tone because success isn’t usually what it seems, and the stories about the lack of success are rarely heard.
Long ago I interviewed to one of the smartest guys I know in music, then and now — Clyde Lieberman: I asked him how the creative mind should work together with the business mind. A decade into streaming media, I find myself quoting him often and forwarding to new artists eager to put a secret formula to use:
Clyde Lieberman: I think it’s really important to post a caveat at the beginning of an interview like this. And that is: if you want to get paid for making music, you are going to have to start compromising immediately. It doesn’t matter if you are standing on the street corner singing “The Times They Are a Changin”’ for quarters — someone’s going to come along and say, “Can’t you play ‘Maggie’s Farm’?” It depends how bad you want that quarter.
There are a couple of things we would all agree with or be able to agree upon. One is, greatness knows no boundaries. I don’t think anyone ever told Joni Mitchell how to write songs, nor would anybody dare to do so. But Joni Mitchell was smart enough to hang out with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Max Bennett and Jaco Pastorius; to get into Charlie Mingus, to be friends with Neil Young, to hang around with Buffalo Springfield, to know Gordon Lightfoot and know Bob Dylan. These are things she was smart enough to know would help her. And she didn’t probably plot that every morning when she left the house — “I think I’ll drive by Stephen Stills’ house on the way down to the canyon” — but maybe she did. Today, artists are more isolated in home studios, making music frequently for themselves, by themselves, in bands where one per- son is the leader and the rest of the people are the followers. And making great art, while still in the minds of the artists, is just less likely to hap- pen right now. There are too many forces at work.
Let’s face it, one of the greatest artists of our time, who used to be called Prince and is now called The Artist — and there’s no argument that he’s head and shoulders above 99 percent of the people making records in the last fifteen years — got so frustrated by the music business and the trap he was in, that he almost quit making music altogether, or at least he quit making music for the public. And maybe if it hadn’t been for the Internet and digital music delivery and the things that have afforded the possibility- tee for it, he might not have come back.
But as someone working in this business, I try to understand and to define what that frustration is all about: what made John Lennon stop for two years, and why did Joni Mitchell stop making popular music and decide to start making jazz music?
All I can imagine is that when you’re making popular music, you reach a point where it’s something that can eventually be figured out. It didn’t just have to be random and it didn’t just have to be about a song. It didn’t just have to be about an album. There were other ways, there were bigger concepts; bigger fish to fry, for want of a better cliché. Believe me, if Joni Mitchell is around, a new Joni Mitchell, she’ll get on the radio. The problem is that the process requires time, and we expect our artists to burst forth from their eggshells and say “quack,” or whatever it is that they’re going to do, and for it to be brilliant. And it just doesn’t work like that.
The Beatles had a similar trajectory. These are, of course, all-time popular artists. Of course, it’s ludicrous to try and talk about someone in terms of a Joni Mitchell and those people unless you are willing to find me the Joni Mitchell right now. You could say, “Well, with all the crap that’s on the radio, how can anyone find Joni Mitchell?” Listen my friend, in the year that “Clouds” and “Both Sides Now” became hits for the first time, there was plenty of crap on the radio. It was called Fabian and Frankie Avalon and the Four Seasons, whom I loved, but in today’s terms would probably be considered crap by most people who follow “serious” popular music. Believe me, if Joni Mitchell is around, a new Joni Mitchell, she’ll get on the radio. The problem is that the process requires time, and we expect our artists to burst forth from their eggshells and say “quack,” or whatever it is that they’re going to do, and for it to be brilliant. And it just doesn’t work like that.
I think everybody in the business on the creative side is driven by desire — even the people with the biggest egos — driven by a desire to help artists be successful. They may have different definitions of what’s successful as to what the artists have, but in their minds and in their hearts, they’re making an assumption, which is: you want to be in the rock music business, you want to be in pop music business, you want to be in the hip-hop music business? You probably want to be a celebrity or a star, or you wouldn’t be doing this. That’s the assumption that has created that rift between the commercial music business and the indie rock music business — that turned into the movement that changed the face of popular music in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In that gulf, in that gap, a cauldron was formed where it was stirred and stirred and stirred, and all of a sudden, Kurt Cobain’s head came up through the miasma and said, “I’m here.” And he was talented enough, gifted enough, bright enough, and driven and sharp enough, to make music for the masses that was totally personal. So he was an artist. That’s what an artist is.
Right now, today, there are opportunities that didn’t exist in prior years. You can make music in your house. You can post it on the Internet. You can get it heard. There’s a way for self- expression now that’s better, more complete and more exciting than ever. My feeling about it is that artists should take advantage of all of it. But make music. Don’t make business, make music. That’s the biggest mistake I see made. People come into my office and they want to talk about a deal, and I say, “Well, have you got some recordings?” They put it on and our exchange might go something like this:
“You know, these songs aren’t really very good.”
“Yeah, man. But, like, how do I get a deal?”
“You want my advice? My advice is, go home, throw this away and start over. How many songs have you written?”
“Ah man, I’ve written fifty.”
“All right, are these the best?”
“No dude, you should listen to all of them.”
I say, “Well, okay, first of all, you need to know which songs are your best because I don’t have time to listen to fifty songs. I’ve got time to listen to three or four, maybe. So go home and figure out which are the best, and then throw three of the four away, and write fifty more. And then take the best three or four of those, take the best one of those and then write another fifty. And when you’ve written two hundred songs, and you have the four you sincerely believe in your heart and soul are the best, then call me.”Now obviously, I’m going to miss out on a lot of things by saying that to people because they might walk in with the first song they write and it’s The Song. But I’m saying from the artist standpoint, from the creative person’s standpoint, from the songwriter’s standpoint, never be satisfied. And yet you have to have an innate sense of how to edit yourself so you don’t just go in a big circle. That’s what the great artists have.
This article is one is a series by Justin Goldberg , Sync Lab
Got great songs we can help license? Send them to justin@sync-lab.org
