One problem that we human beings have that won’t endear us to our future alien overlords is the way that we tend to take personal, subjective experiences and try to turn them into universal, objective truths. Probably 3 billion or so murders could have been prevented throughout the history of the world if we were not cursed with this trait. (Also, there would be no religion.)
We tend to do this because our egos tell us that we are more important than we actually are. Which is okay, really. That’s just what we do. Entire industries have risen around our need to quiet our egos: alcohol, television, and music, for example.
As a writer and a (sort-of) musician, I am guilty of the over-statement of my own importance perhaps 370 times a day. But since I usually move on to another town every 24 hours, I’m hoping it won’t catch up with me.
All that said, I would like to offer my humble and brief perspective on the last 50 years of Western pop music.
Pop music is one of the few fields in this modern world that is not moving towards specialization. In fact, it seems to have started out very specialized and is moving the opposite way. Most fields that you could make a career out of, say for instance civil engineering, started out very broadly and have since become more complicated and full of subdivisions that one person can’t easily move between. With pop music, however, everything started out very specialized: you had the singer who had a killer voice and the pretty face, like Elvis. You had the lyricist who could turn a good phrase and convey a feeling in a small amount of words. You had the songwriter who could put together a memorable melody. You had the arranger who could figure out what instruments should go on the song and who should play where. You had the musicians themselves who played all the individual instruments. You had the producer, the engineer, the second engineer, the mixer, the manager, the A&R man, etc., who all had important roles in the delivery of a song to the audience. The expense and complexity of the recording of music back then meant that not just anyone could do it. You had to audition for someone, put together a band, prove that you had songs and could perform them before you were allowed inside a studio. There were many filters to weed out untalented people at every step. This is not to romanticize the music of the past or to say that it was all high quality, but just to say that it was certainly produced by a large team of people who each had a specialized role.
Then came someone like Buddy Holly, who could write his own songs and sing them. Then came The Beatles, who after a while would ONLY play original material, and sing and play almost all the instruments themselves. Then recording technology progressed to the point that you didn’t have to record a song in one take anymore; you could do different parts at different times, which eventually led people to realize that, for instance, maybe they didn’t necessarily need to hire a drummer to play the song. Maybe they could just learn to play the drums themselves and be their own drummer. What a revolutionary concept!
And then just in the last 10 or 20 years, it became possible to have a relatively decent recording studio in your own house, so you no longer had to go into someone’s office and beg them for thousands of dollars to make a record. You could just buy a few devices and set them up in your room. And then in the last five years, certain internet sites made it possible to distribute music without getting approved by some giant corporation. To have a band today means something very different than it meant 50 years ago. You can literally decide to start a band, come up with a name for it, write and record songs and have them out in the world within an hour. And so, to break through in pop music today, it’s quite an advantage to know many different skills; to be able to play multiple instruments, to know how to work a microphone, to know how to book a show, and more importantly, to have a good sense of how to run a business. The more roles that you can take on for yourself, the better.
And so… is this a good thing or not? Well, who can say for sure? I know that if I were alive 50 years ago and trying to make it in the music business, I probably would have been encouraged by other people to be a lyricist, if anything, and probably, well, DIScouraged from attempting to sing into a microphone. And maybe THAT would’ve been a good thing, I don’t know. But now that I’m out here living the life I’m living, I can say thank God for Bob Dylan and John Lennon and all the folks down the line who learned how to do more than one thing in music and move us along into the future.
Now, given all that, me and my band took a few steps backward this summer by recording an album completely live in the studio. At times there were 10 of us playing in the same room, plus an engineer, a producer, and a mixer in the next room. And it was all mixed directly to tape as we played it, so any mistakes that were deal-breakers meant that we had to play the song over again. But it wasn’t as stressful as it sounds. In fact, it was kind of a relief from the tension and heaviness that I’ve always felt in recording studios. In a lot of ways the burdens were gone: all each of us had to do was go in and perform our role, and there was no time to over-think things or get caught up in our own heads. The playing of the music was the only thing that mattered. And that album, A Narrow Way, is the album that we bring with us on this current tour, which takes us around the country in a clockwise motion. Whether that album is good or not, whether the results were fruitful, whether I should be allowed to sing into a microphone even in the modern age is not for me to say. I just wanted to mention the process, for what it’s worth.
Ultimately I say all this to bring up my main issue about the making of music today, in a time where it seems that a musician has to assume so many different roles: that often times the actual creative music-making becomes an afterthought. And it’s an easy thing to fall into. I know I’ve done it many times. And in a place full of such musical excitement as Portland, Oregon, there are certainly a lot of things swirling around in the air that are about music, but which somehow distract from the music itself. I’ve had many conversations recently with fellow musicians about split-points and record deals and such, which is all important and purposeful, but often we hug and say goodbye and I’m walking to my car and I realize that I just spent an hour with a brilliant songwriter and I forgot to ask him or her about songwriting.
Anyway, this is a tour diary and not a religious tract, so I’ll move on. We drove through the Gorge on a sunny Wednesday morning in our little van, this time with five of us packed in there with an upright bass and a drum set. There is a plastic torpedo on top to carry extra things, but really, I’m not sure how we all fit in there. We’ve made some concessions and sacrifices and are very conscious about extra weight, just like when Charles Lindberg flew over the Atlantic and was concerned about a fly who entered the cabin adding too much weight. Squeezed into our little van, we drove past a burning brushfire in the high desert of Eastern Oregon and arrived in Boise, Idaho to play two shows in one night. The first was two sets outside in the courtyard of the Modern Hotel. The second was two more sets in a crowded bar called Pengilly’s. After four hours of playing we had gone through most of our catalog twice, which was a good way to sort out tempos and remember parts, in the cases where they might’ve been forgotten.
The next day we drove to Salt Lake City, where every band gets lost in the bizarrely named streets. The street names are comprised of a direction, a number, and then another direction, all apparently radiating out grid-like from the Mormon Temple, so that you can be on the corner of S 300 W and W 300 S and you, as a non-Mormon, have no idea where you are. And every band gets lost in the streets and eventually finds Kilby Court, the coolest venue in town, and goes on stage and tells the audience that they don’t understand how the streets work in Salt Lake City and the audience lets out a soft chuckle, because they’ve heard the joke dozens of times before.
This particular show we happened to team up, purely by coincidence, with fellow Portland band Blitzen Trapper. It was a pleasure to meet up with a professional, tight, and totally awesome band from Portland on the road. They are a rare band that arranges their songs well, and new sounds bubble up in every song and you have to scan around the stage to see who’s making them. At one point I heard a harmonica and looked at every member of the band and saw that no one was playing one, and then I noticed that the drummer had stopped playing the drums and was covering the harmonica riff for a few measures before he picked up his sticks again. Music-making! Let us never forget again.
