The Swimming Pool Q's - Jeff Calder's Personal Archive

Jeff Calder's Personal Archive > Living By Night in the Land of Opportunity: (9) > Living By Night Section 1

Living by Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band

...what we need are good pictures...hand-made with love and passion and care by individual picture-makers, not by banks, or committees, or accountants, or lawyers, or office boys, or boards of directors who are really in the real estate business.
          --Frank Sinatra

Gigantic screwjacks will be required in order to raise the culture of the masses.
          --Leon Trotsky

The sense of the size of the margin...by which the total of American life...is still so surrounded as to represent...but a scant central flotilla huddled as for very fear of the fathomless depth of water, the too formidable future, on the so much vaster lake of the materially possible.
          --Henry James

You've had your shot, and now you're dead in the water.
          --Show-biz axiom

Thirteen years ago I began my journey along the margin of America's Pop Republic. The margin isn't such a bad place, unless, of course, one needs to eat. Unlike many on the margin, though, I've always thought that rock music could still be a creative mass medium. As a consequence, and after a great deal of frenzy and frusturation, I was drawn to the center of James's vaster lake. Then one day, while hard charging into the fog bank of the future, I suddenly met myself going in the opposite direction. That can't be me, I said. What happened to...him? It was a chance meeting, no doubt, but I knew then that a part of myself would always be roving around the margin, now with new tales about strange places with names like "Hollywood," where the squares blot out the sun. In the sudden shade on the vaster lake things happen more quickly that show-biz stoats with pinkies can bare their teeth and tell everyone the option's up.

The movie industry operates under a famous dictum formalized best by the screenwriter William Goldman: "The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry [is] NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING." Its withered twin, the music industry, is the same. They all act as if they know what they're doing. No one does. Which is why under no circumstance should anyone take seriously anything anybody at a record company ever says. This is particularly true regarding the merits of things musical. With rare exception record company people are so terrified of losing their jobs that they can't begin to listen to the first note of a song.

It may always have been this way, but somehow good stuff used to slip past. I grew up in the great era of rock and soul music. My favorite artists took risks; they had a way with words and a sense of vision. These qualities have been eliminated from commercial radio in America today. Back then, my favorite artists ruled the seedy AM stations and transistor receivers. Later, like many other teenagers in the late 1960's, I saw popular music at a point of departure. It would grow as we would grow, strictly onward and upward. By the end of that decade, pop music had become almost a religion for a big part of my generation. Now, twenty years later, the sanctuary has been defiled by market reasearch. Visionary artists are still out there, but the stream of rampant invention has lost access to the "mainstream": the powerful radio systems of America. If the most exiting pop music can't reach people, what's the point?

In 1953 Gore Vidal commented that "as the novel moves toward a purer, more private expression it will cease altogether to be a popular medium, becoming, like poetry, a cloistered avocation." Along with film, the novel was a popular medium of Vidal's youth. Fifteen years after his earlier observation Vidal would conclude:

"Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like the priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

Those who grew up with artistic aspirations in the field of pop music now face a similar situation. We've become musical monks making music for other musical monks. How could it have come to this?

It was to be rock history's main irony. Much of American music in the 1960's was a promotion of freedom and openness. Its tremendous success generated huge profits. The profits brought in the experts: lawyers, accountants, marketeers. Their job was to maximize profits, and the way to do that in a volatile business is to create a more controllable situation. Threat had to be eliminated, and threat is defined as anything that might cause a listener to change the station. Station switching is reflected in surveys as a decline in listenership, or market share. A lower market share means a lower advertising rate.

The corporation--in this case the radio system--then makes less money, so any song perceived as being a threat-politically, culturally, or emotionally--must not be given airplay. In the 1970's, through a combination of consulting firms, advertising agencies, and radio stations, a "manufacture of consent" occurred. The audience came to expect and accept popular music of little vitality or depth. By the time the Sex Pistols arrived in
Atlanta in 1977, the process was complete. The Sex Pistols had the biggest media blitzkrieg since the Beatles thirteen years before. But they sold very few records. Why? No airplay. Why? Because the radio systems found them threatening. For once the program directors were right. Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols were threatening to a business that had become irrelevant even to itself. The Sex Pistols fell apart, and around the same time it looked like the music business might fall apart, too.