The Hanslick Rebellion played a gig on March 2 – our first in four years. It was awesome (for us, anyway). We agreed to keep things going in spite of the band members’ various familial commitments and the physical distance between us. Playing shows together is difficult, but recording is always possible, and since the Rebellion always goes big we decided to tackle the most daunting monster project in my catalog: the unfinishable Rise And Shine.

We’re talking 40 songs in almost as many genres. 15 singers. Two-and-a-half hours of music. My last attempt to record this thing put me off music for over a year.

Rise And Shine is a musical stage play I’ve been working on since 2000, when Arturo Vega informed me that he’d strung together 20 or so of my already-released tracks to tell a story and had already begun writing the script. We brainstormed a complete three-act arc and I began writing new songs to fill in the gaps – 20 additional pieces of music in all. By 2005 I was well into a fully-cast demo of the thing with an incredible and diverse group of singers that included Dicky Barrett, Brian Dewan, Jessy Moss, Matthew Bair, CJ Ramone, Maryann Fennimore, Bryan Thomas and Kitty Kowalski. But we couldn’t stop tweaking, and what was, in retrospect, the perfect version of the play got mauled to death by revision after revision. I gave up on the demo in 2006 because I just couldn’t keep up with all the changes. By the time we took our last meeting, in 2010, we couldn’t even explain to an interested investor what Rise And Shine was supposed to be about. That’s when I packed it in.

The storyline, as plotted in 2000 and held consistent until 2005, is fairly simple – two college friends reunite at a New York City nightclub five years after graduation. One night, a girl from their past appears at the club and fucks all their shit up. That’s basically it. You’ve got a cast of colorful supporting characters representing various denizens of early-aughts New York nightlife, each with a mini-drama woven around the main thread, but it really is straightforward, linear and fun.

Hanslick Rebellion is the no-brainer choice for a Rise And Shine recording. A number of the songs Arturo wrote his script around, including “We Wait And We Wait”, “Leave Your Boyfriend”, “Starlet” and “Grub”, are Rebellion tunes. Better yet, because the Rebellion only recorded live, there were never studio versions of these, so it’s not like we’re being redundant. Plus Mike and I sang the two male leads on the original Rise And Shine demo, with some surprising lead vocal reversals that add a twist for longtime Rebellion fans (for example, Mike sings “Grub” in the play). It’s just right.

My first move in reopening the Rise And Shine case was to sift through the aborted demo recordings and see what might be salvageable. Sadly, not much. For all the vocal talent we had lined up, most of the tracks are unusable. We had such limited time with many of the singers that in some cases we were racing through 20-30 songs in a day. You obviously can’t get good takes that way. Then there’s the file management and handling of those vocal tracks – many were hastily and poorly auto-tuned by the engineer and then the original tracks were discarded! Unbelievable now, but at the time there were no best practices for Pro Tools workflow. The only singers whose work I can confidently keep are Maryann Fennimore, Brian Dewan and Jessy Moss, and those only because their vocals were cut so late in the process that the project stalled before the engineer could mutilate them. Everybody else has to be rerecorded (which is impossible in several cases) or replaced.

On the other hand, all 40 songs are written and arranged right down to the vocal harmonies. It’s all laid out… everything just needs to be properly performed. The undertaking is massive – recording it is only the beginning. Mixing and mastering 40 songs will cost a fortune. I get queasy just thinking about it. Unfortunately, the folks who were willing to invest in Rise And Shine the stage play are probably out on Rise And Shine the album. I understand; there’s a lot more potential ROI in the former.

In order to make this happen as quickly as possible (ha ha) I’m throttling back on my other projects for a while. That means April’s Single of the Month will be the last. My next solo album is just about done, so I do plan on putting it out later this year. But other than that I’ll be in Rise And Shine land for the forseeable future.

As we power through this thing, we’ll do our best to document the process with a series of video clips. Here’s the first one. This is actually an excerpt from a short film made by Emily Sheskin and Serena Kuo in 2004? 2005? I forget exactly. But it features Arturo and me talking about the musical and how we came to be writing partners:

Last night I watched a Saturday Night Live broadcast for the first time in a while – I usually just cherry-pick on Hulu after the fact. Jimmy Fallon was the host, which is weird because I remember that in one of the dude’s very first appearances on the show, like late ’90s, there was a Christmas Carol sketch with a glimpse of a future in which he hosted the 2011 SNL Christmas episode. Whoa!

Though I haven’t seen much of his Late Night, I do think Jimmy Fallon is pretty funny. I watched him open for Tenacious D at the Town Hall ten years ago with a bit of musical standup that was fuckin awesome. But every time I see Jimmy Fallon on a stage or a screen, I am reminded of this thing that happened back in 1993 or ‘94, while I was a student at UAlbany:

I got a call from a friend of mine named Jenn Donovan. Jenn needed a lift to an audition for Metroland’s Loose Camera, a locally-produced sketch comedy pilot that was to air on the Albany FOX affiliate. I was promised dinner if she got the part, so I said of course I’ll drive.

We arrived at some officey-looking building. I don’t remember details; I was a college student so every building that was not a restaurant, bar or mall looked like an office to me. There was a waiting room with two guys sitting in it… one of them was Jimmy Fallon.

A few minutes passed and no one else came in. It began to dawn on me that Jenn and these two dudes might represent the entire pool of potential Loose Camera cast members. Now, I’d been a fan of sketch comedy, particularly SNL, since I was a little kid. And I thought: This turnout is so weak, these TV folks might get desperate enough to hire anyone who can move around and say words… and those are definitely things I can do. With odds this good, maybe I should audition?

Jenn had been given a script to read; I asked her if I could look it over. I’m a little hazy on it now, but I think the sketch was about two mechanics who were either in gay denial or obsessed with masturbating. Either way, the piece struck me as ignorant, cliché and unfunny. I decided there was no way I was saying that shit out loud in front of strangers. I handed the script back to Jenn and hung out in the waiting room until it was time to go.

Anyway, Jenn got the part; so did Jimmy Fallon and, I guess, anybody else who bothered to show up and read. She never bought me dinner, though. I didn’t watch Metroland’s Loose Camera when it aired – I was too pissed off about the dinner.

A year or two later, I was living at 1011 Madison (since razed by Saint Rose), one floor below a fellow named S. Dion Flynn. All I knew about my upstairs neighbor was that girls never stopped coming to his apartment, and he played “Blackbird” on an acoustic guitar every night at 8 right above my living room. Maybe whichever girl came by at 8 really liked that song, I dunno.

I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but Dion had once been the singer for a band called Empire, which included John Delehanty on guitar and Sirsy’s Rich Libutti on bass. He’d also been a cast member on Loose Camera.

One day Dion mentioned to my roommate Mechno that a new sketch comedy show he appeared in would be airing on public access. I don’t remember the name of the show. Wait, yes I do – 40 Whacks! So Mike Keaney whipped us up a big batch of his signature dish, plain spaghetti with some bread crumbs in it, and we all gathered round the TV.

Sure enough, there was Dion – opposite Jimmy Fallon in that mechanics sketch from the Loose Camera audition, repurposed… nay, regifted for us by the masterminds behind, apparently, both shows. It still wasn’t funny, but I guess Dion and Jimmy were good in it!

So there you have it: another chapter from my never-to-be-published autobiography Shit That Would Turn You White. Merry Christmas!

My dear friend LB went on a quest for a deck of Oblique Strategies cards last night. She discovered that a fresh deck can’t be had for less than $60, and the aftermarket is even more outrageous.

I’ve had an Oblique Strategies randomizer app on my iPhone for some time, but it’s no longer available in the App Store. Too bad for LB, because it beats carrying around a deck of cards; at least I could tell her from firsthand experience that the “wisdom” contained therein is not worth this economy’s version of 60 bucks. I’m all for allowing circumstance and externals to color the creative process – back in my, uh, academic days I even wrote an exhaustive paper on ways John Cage used the I Ching to supplement his compositional decisionmaking* – but in my opinion many of the Oblique Strategies are just stupid.

I decided to save LB a few bucks by making a set of my own Strategies. I posted these on Facebook as they occurred to me, between midnight and 2:00 this morning. Here, in no particular order, are my collected Obtuse Strategies. Feel free to print them on cards and slip them into your Oblique deck.

First, do nothing. Then something. Then stop.

Make a list in reverse order.

Third things eighth.

Let the Wookiee win.

Lunch break.

Start a fight. With silence.

RUN

Take off all your clothes except one.

Do this all day.

Cry laughing.

Pretend to care.

What seems to be the problem, officer?

Writer’s block is for pussies.

Do the best thing you ever did.

Drink.

Put it out. But first, set it on fire.

Why can’t they appreciate your genius?

Turn left. THE OTHER LEFT!!!!!

Give up.

Never, ever do that again.

Don’t get caught.

Make out with the person to your right.

Find a parking lot with only one handicapped space. Park in it.

Get lost. Not in any metaphorical sense – go away.

Abuse your power.

You were doing better, like, three Oblique Strategies ago.

4, 23, 5, 395. What number comes next?

Fire yourself.

Is this the card you were hoping for?

Accept all substitutes.

Wrong again. -sigh-

Spend more money.

Why is this taking so goddamn long?

Whoever is worst at this, let him do everything.

NOblique Strategies! HAW HAW!

Lock your bandmates out of the studio.

maybe

You’re on a roll. A SHIT roll!

What if you woke up retarded?

LIAR

Stop taking your meds.

Plagiarize without shame.

Don’t listen to anyone, including yourself and me.

Did you leave it in your pants? Where are they?

You’re the problem.

The glass is ONLY half full.

Play only wrong notes. Yeah, sounds fucking awesome.

Ennui

Spray-paint a record gold. Hang it on your wall.

You can probably do this.

Fried ice cream. WHOA

Put it away. On second thought, throw it away.

What exactly IS a vitamin?

Be really annoying.

Do the same thing you just did, except standing on one leg. Now both. Now grow a third and stand on that. Only that.

You’re just gonna have to work this one out on your own.

Goonies never say die.

What’s something you would regret for the rest of your life? TOTALLY do that.

Don’t accept responsibility for anything.

If the solution doesn’t come to you in a dream, go back to sleep.

——-

* “Exhaustive” because Cage only used it one way – in conjunction with sectors of numbers on a grid – but I had to fill 10 pages.

This dude has been in the news a lot, talking all kinds of weird shit while telling people he wants to run for President. There is a disgustingly rich guy from New York City who might make an okay president, but it’s Michael Bloomberg, not Donald Trump. My humble opinion.

Anyway, I have a few Facebook friends who seem to be taking Trump’s candidacy pretty seriously. I try so hard not to judge, but I’m only human, and also, I enjoy judging. Instead of getting cranky with people I like, though, I’ll just offer a simple anecdote. This, excerpted from my never-to-be-published autobiography Shit That Would Turn You White, is why I couldn’t possibly vote for the guy:

October, 2003. I’m at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to play keyboards with Jessica Simpson’s band. This concert is being filmed simultaneously for Jessica’s reality show and the season finale of another program, which has not yet begun to air – something called The Apprentice. (All through rehearsal, a woman named Omarosa has been hovering with a camera crew and claiming to be the hotel’s liaison to the band… but whenever we actually need anything she refers us to Jessica’s production manager and disappears. In the broadcast cut of the show, Omarosa will be featured in a lengthy plotline about “losing the band at the airport” which I, watching for the first time at home, will find funny because we took Amtrak. I know, I know, we’re all aware that reality shows are phony; we’re just humoring the nice people who make them.)

The band has been briefed on how to interact with The Donald should he enter the room in which we are sitting or possibly standing. Rules include “Do not make eye contact” and “Do not speak unless spoken to.” Our production manager jokingly tags “Do not ask him about his masterpiece, Purple Rain” at the bottom of the list.

So it’s the night of the show, five minutes after what was supposed to be our downbeat. The Taj Mahal’s sold-out Xanadu Room is packed with 14-year-old girls and their moms. Back home in NYC, everybody’s watching the last game of one of the many, many, many World Series the Yankees would not win between 2001 and 2009. Jessica is still in her dressing room for some reason. And the band is chilling in a makeshift greenroom at stage right, enjoying soda from an iced tray of those cute little hotel bar bottles. From down the hall, we hear this:

“That’s it, this concert’s over. We’re going to the Yankee game!”

And then, about twenty seconds later and a few yards closer:

“That’s it, this concert’s over. We’re going to the Yankee game!”

The voice is familiar. It also says:

“KWAME!”

We, of course, have no idea what KWAME means because no one has seen The Apprentice yet. In his search for the mysterious KWAME, Donald Trump enters the room. As per our orders, we ignore him, and he leaves. Then we hear, from just outside:

“She’s not coming out. Forget it, this concert’s over. We’re going to the Yankee game!”

Why does the dude keep saying the same thing over and over again? For the cameras, maybe? There had been a couple in the greenroom earlier, but they’re gone now. Has he just been repeating himself to random people as they walk by?

Trump re-enters our little space, paces, checks his watch. We decline to make eye contact and speak unless spoken to about Purple Rain. Trump grabs a hotel bar bottle of soda, opens it, takes a sip, screws the cap back on and returns it to the tray. He turns to us and speaks:

“So you guys are the band?”

We nod. Trump selects a fresh bottle from the icy tray, opens it, takes one sip and puts it back.

“How long have you guys been together?”

No one in the group says anything. It’s my first gig with these guys and the drummer’s second. Not much of a story there. But somebody has to respond, so I blurt out:

“We’re celebrating our second millennium together.”

The band laughs nervously; Trump gives me this weird look, as if to say I can and will have you killed if you are in fact sassing me. Then he swigs from a third bottle of soda and puts it back. Jessica is now about fifteen minutes late to the stage. Executive privilege! The Donald sez:

“She’s not coming out. Okay. This is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna go on stage. I’m gonna say to the audience: Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, Jessica Simpson can’t be here tonight. But it’s okay – I’ve got my band here, and I’m gonna RAP. How about that? Should I do that?”

We laugh as if we think he should do that, but of course we don’t really think he should do that. He sips from a fourth bottle (this time a bottle of water with his face on the label). Then some guy comes into the room. Trump says – with identical inflection:

“She’s not coming out. This is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go on stage with the band. I’m gonna say to the audience: Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, Jessica Simpson can’t be here tonight. But it’s okay – I’ve got my band here, and I’m gonna RAP. How about that? Should I do that?”

The guy laughs. This delights Trump so he delivers the same line to the next three people who walk through the greenroom. There are no cameras present. Is The Donald really this needy?

Forty-five minutes pass before Jessica finally emerges, which gives Trump time to sample every bottle in our beverage tray. We have an otherwise pleasant conversation, but it’s like he’s compelled to exert dominance – my hotel, my drinks.

The band takes the stage; Jessica waits in the greenroom. Trump delivers an introduction that I think is meant to be the announcement he tried on us and four civilians, except with three thousand people watching, this is what comes out:

“Ladies and gentlemen, sorry, Jessica Simpson’s not here. Naw, here she is!”

I don’t normally share stories like this in public forums. In this case, I feel like I’m providing a service. Trump, to me, is the living embodiment of the Baby Boomer disaster that has been inflicted upon our society. He’s greedy, needy, intellectually lazy, entitled, arrogant, myopic, destructive and weak. I saw everything I needed to see that night… Facebook friends, if you trust me at all, believe it when I say that Donald Trump is not Presidential material. Now if only you’d stop posting photos of babies where pictures of you are supposed to go. I’m sure you all still look better than I do.

I’ve been sick all week… flu or something. Whenever I lie down, my nose clogs up and I get too uncomfortable to sleep. The lack of rest is making it tough for me to get better. I was using nasal spray earlier in the week, but you can’t use that too many days in a row so I put it aside. Decongestant pills don’t seem to do much of anything. This is a tricky one!

This is the worst I’ve felt since my 2006 pneumonia, which was really bad. If you want to see something rough, search for The Hanslick Rebellion’s Checkerboard Kids performance on YouTube. I was just beginning to recover from pneumonia when we did that gig. I’m wearing like a dozen layers, I couldn’t speak or sing, and half the muscles in my body were pulled from coughing so every movement unleashed bolts of pain. Even after I got over that pneumonia, it was still two years before my immune system worked properly – I was sickly the whole time. I don’t want to get anywhere near that point ever again.

I’ve been trying to relax at home, do a little tidying up. I moved here way back in May but the unpacking part never really ends. I came across this old J-Bird Records box tucked into a milk crate; I assumed it was surplus copies of We’re All Going To Jail! or some shit, but it turned out to be full of 4-track Portastudio cassettes.

I thought I knew where all my old 4-track tapes were… this was a secret stash of about twenty cassettes dating all the way back to 1992. There are Skyscape tunes I had totally forgotten about; collaborations with old friends like Joe Aversano; some of my earliest solo demos; the only existing recording by Pavlov’s Dogs, my freshman-year band with Mike Keaney; even multitrack takes of live gigs where we used my Portastudio as a mixer. I’ve started dumping them into Pro Tools and playing around – the perfect way to pass sick time at home!

I’m no mix engineer, but the raw material is lo-fi enough that even I can’t mess it up. There is a lot of charming stuff here. I’m polishing and putting snippets online as they catch my ear. Here they are, with more to come – a work in progress, 19 years and counting.

I particularly love “Wheelbarrow Rosebud”, the Joe Aversano track. Joe was (and still is) a really unique guitarist, and he writes such pretty stuff. His delivery on this tune is totally 1992, straight out of “Valerie Loves Me”.

Then there’s “Hippies On The Road”, which always started as Skyscape’s cover of “Riders On The Storm” but inevitably morphed into whatever Dom wanted to sing about that day (most often something concerning the Brady Bunch). The drums were recorded mono, so I shoved them into one channel and compressed them until they blew up… then I dropped them out in spots and added some 909 kick and snare. The bass is the keyboard bassline as I originally played it, but dumped into Melodyne, converted to MIDI and now triggering a Fender Rhodes Bass sample. I then EQ’d the bass out of the keyboard track so only the new Rhodes part remained. I guess I could just do clean, faithful mixes of everything, but this isn’t about preserving history – it’s about making cool shit!

Dom and I have been secretly working on a new Skyscape record: Dr. Des Moines. Like Zetacarnosa, it’s a mashup of hi- and lo-fi sounds from the present and the past. I recently unearthed a couple of unfinished tunes from 1992, “Poetry Read-In At Bob’s” and “Motorvate”, with the intention of slipping them in amidst the newly-written material. We’d gotten far enough with them that keyboard sequences exist, but I couldn’t find lyrics anywhere. Turns out there were 4-track demos of both songs that I’d completely forgotten – so not only do we now know the words, but I’ve got classic takes of Dom singing them that I can weave into the 2011 versions. This is awesome.

I lost about half my wardrobe to water damage right before I moved upstate; what remained when I got to Albany included a number of green plaid shirts that I hadn’t worn since college. Some had purple accents so I busted ‘em out and started wearing them to work on Fridays. School spirit thing, purple on Fridays. Anyway, I’ve named the project after these shirts, which, like the 4-track jams, originated in the early ’90s, sat in the dark for almost twenty years, and are now back in action. These are my Green Plaid Recordings.

Sevendys’ next session: Presidents’ Day weekend in sunny LA. Chuck Rainey will be joining us once again, along with a few other surprise guests. The venue: EastWest Studio Three, where The Mamas & The Papas used to record… and the Beach Boys created Pet Sounds. We’re pretty psyched!

Here’s Collider performing “California Sun” live at CBGB, December 17, 1999, at an event called the Ramones Cyberpunk Blitz. [The Blitz was technically the launch party for Arturo Vega's officialramones.com, which was and will always be the only website endorsed by all of the Ramones while they were alive - both ramones.com and the late band members' individual sites were developed posthumously by their families, who then strongarmed Arty into giving up the officialramones domain and changing his site's name to RamonesWorld.]

The Cyberpunk Blitz featured 10 bands doing Ramones covers and a performance by Joey. All of the participants were asked to play under a Ramones-themed pseudonym; we changed our name to Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Stuff for the occasion. Because we were the only band with a keyboard player, we got to do some of the more esoteric tunes – “Howling At The Moon”, “We Want The Airwaves”, “All’s Quiet On The Eastern Front”, and this one.

That’s Chris De Rosa on drums, Bonnie Bowers on bass, Sean Gould on guitar, and yours truly. Video courtesy of Chris De Rosa.

Just want to let you know that Bob Lefsetz has been posting some particularly excellent stuff of late. I’ve dogged him (to you, my three readers) about never offering solutions, but then he wrote this:

The Long Haul

It’s abstract, but that’s really what makes it so useful.

And I was cheering when I read last Sunday’s piece on Imogen Heap’s entitlement issues:

Imogen Heap Sings The Blues

It’s time to get over this “artist as beggar” thing. Like this Kickstarter shit. I’ve supported friends who have used it, but come on. If you’re so passionate about making something, work for the money to make it. Don’t fucking beg.

Seriously, what is it you want? You want to make music on your own terms? Then why are you offering friends and family (or, as you think of them, your fanbase) a stake in your album in exchange for a handout? What are you really doing this for?

I’ve worked two jobs for the better part of a decade so I could make music exactly the way I want it. Music is my thing. I don’t want to be married; I don’t want to have kids. I couldn’t care less about any of that shit. I have songs in my head, and I want them out where I can listen to them. With the words I write, as I write them, arranged as I arranged them, played as I want them played, recorded as I want them recorded, and packaged as I want them packaged.

The idea of a “day job” is anathema to wannabe artists for some reason. When I ask these folks why they’re so averse to employment, the explanation I’m most often given is: When I get home from work, I’m too tired to make music. What?

People have the energy to do all sorts of things when they get home from work. How about raise kids? I hear that requires at least as much energy as dicking around on a guitar. Yet I know quite a few people who seem to have no problem doing it after a day of work.

I spend the money that I earn from one job on bills and material pleasures; I spend the money I earn from the other on my music. If I get an idea in the middle of the workday, I hum it to myself in a voicemail. I create when inspiration strikes, I edit when it doesn’t, and my shit gets done. On lunch breaks. In the middle of the night. Am I tired? Sure. But why is that bad? I hear people complain all the time about how tired they are in tweets and Facebook statuses. Everybody’s tired. If you really want to do something, you’re gonna do it no matter how tired you are.

Then there’s this one: I need to be free so I can devote 100% of my time to my art!

First of all, that’s not what you’re gonna do if you’re “free”. I know; I’ve been there. There’s no urgency. You fuck around. The work expands to fill the time.

Second, if you do nothing but “make art”, then you get no life experience other than “making art”. What the fuck are you going to “make art” about? I couldn’t have written “You Are Boring The Shit Out Of Me” or “Now I Have A Job” if I didn’t work in an office.

I went to visit Sean at Berklee during our freshman year of college; I thought I would be intimidated by all the supercool music cats there. Instead I found myself surrounded by nerds who had spent high school practicing scales in their bedrooms. Their scintillating conversation involved such subjects as what key the background music on the TV was in. You gonna write a deep and meaningful lyric about that?

The two best things that ever happened to me as a songwriter: going to a liberal arts college and entering the workforce. What gives lyrics depth and resonance is their human element; what gives them richness is the experience you draw upon to describe things, your vocabulary and your references. If you only interact with one kind of person in your life, or do one kind of thing, how deep and rich are your songs gonna be? Look at all the ’80s hair metal bands that got signed just out of their teens. The only thing they could write about was partying. They didn’t know anything else. When they mentioned having a job in a lyric, it was in passing so they could get to the part about how they’d rather be at a party. They had to do it that way; they didn’t know what a job was. They just knew it was something bad, something that you couldn’t do and party at the same time.

When we’re in public school, we learn about the de’ Medicis, the Roman Catholic Church, and the concept of “patronage”. According to your 10th grade social studies teacher, an artist cannot create without a patron. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d speculate that this shit is intentionally slipped into the curriculum to marginalize any potential artists in the audience.

Without patrons, where would Michelangelo and Mozart have been? Why, penniless in the gutter, of course – see how Mozart died broke after leaving his patron? Artists are weird! Deficient! They have no common sense! They cannot manage their own financial affairs! Without someone else handling the money, the artist becomes the starving artist!

But… if artists are born without common sense, then why do people turn to song lyrics and poems when they have real-life problems? If that shit was written by perspectiveless weirdos with no grasp on reality, what would be the point of looking for wisdom in it? Artists have plenty of sense – arguably the most sense.

An artist can be his own patron. He can manage his business affairs. But the concept of the self-sufficient artist is a frightening one to the powers that be, one that needs to be disqualified during our formative years.

Imagine an artist beholden to no one, free to make and disseminate his work as he sees it, no matter how incendiary. Is there such an artist in the world today? Who is not corporate sponsored, or status-obsessed, or beholden to friends and family? Who doesn’t think about what he has to give up to someone else so he can get something?

Then there’s this idea that an artist’s work is only validated by one of two “successes”: public adoration or monetary return. Do I get back the money that I spend on music? Not directly, no. Do you get back the money you spend on vacation? When I’m making music, I feel like I’m on the greatest holiday you can take – and I take it almost every day. Each time I hop in the car and listen back to my music, I’m reminded why I work so hard on it. I don’t need cash back, or the approval of strangers.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy having fans. I throw everything of myself into the music; if it resonates with someone, then we share something in common. This is a meaningful connection, and I appreciate it. Nobody likes my music because of how I look; I look like shit. The people who like it do so because they identify with it – which, if I’m writing honestly, means they identify with me.

And it’s not to say I haven’t received tangible benefits from making music. In fact, it’s probably fair to acknowledge that everything I have, I have because of it. My best friends are the people with whom I make and talk music. I met LB when she came to one of my shows after finding a CD of mine in a Colorado record store, and now she is the most important person in my life.

My college degree is in English and philosophy. Yet I’ve made my living as a graphic designer for fifteen years. How? Using the self-taught skills I developed in order to physically and electronically package my music. Beyond that, I’ve been offered job opportunities – and even housing – simply because someone liked the music I make. But it’s not a chicken-or-egg thing; I made the music first, my way, and then they came.

If you want to create something, create it, down to the last atom of your vision, no matter how long it takes. Release it into the world however you can – it might make some cool person’s life a little better. It might make some asshole’s life a little worse, which may help him find the perspective to not be such a fucking asshole. You never know.

If people give a shit about your art, awesome; if they want to give you money for it, even awesomer. But don’t wait for someone to come along and bail you out, and don’t ever go begging. Let work set you free. Work is good.

My pal Matt Biscuiti likes to ask my opinion on the future of magazines. I’m not sure if this is because he actually wants to know it, or if he just likes to watch me rage.

I worked in the magazine business for 15 years. I am one of a lucky few people who still do, though it is no longer my main source of income. I love print magazines – the way they are made, the way they present information, the thought and imagination that goes into everything from the images to the text to the layout to the paper stock to how they’re bound. But the Internet has destroyed print, mostly because a bunch of Baby Boomer assholes got greedy and interacted unwisely with a technology they didn’t understand.

Which, come to think of it, is the same reason the Internet was able to destroy the music business.

I don’t think either industry is coming back – at least, not any way like it was. And I could go on at length about both, but I gotta go have dinner with my friend Al, so I’ll leave that for some other post. I do want to share a question that Matt just e-mailed me, along with my answer.

First, though, I ask you to keep in mind that what makes magazines and newspapers money is ads, not sales of the actual printed product. Craigslist has virtually eliminated classified ad revenue, and no matter what that’s not coming back. So the question for periodicals is how to maximize the remaining potential ad dollars – not necessarily how to get people to purchase their magazine or newspaper. If you can tell advertisers that 100,000 people will see their ad, then the advertisers will buy, and your periodical will stay afloat whether most of those readers pay the cover price or not. That’s long been the idea behind cheap and free subscriptions.

The Web has killed print because these dipshits who put all of their content online for free didn’t realize that the ad paradigm is different on a computer screen. People can block ads and scroll past them; we’re trained to ignore banner ads. Ads generate a much smaller response on the Web than on the printed page, and thus are worth a lot less – so much less that you can’t keep your business open with revenue from online ads. That’s money publishers were counting on when they made their product free on the Internet (information is the product; not the printed piece, which is just the delivery system) and now they can never go back to charging for online content. Oops.

Putting content behind a pay wall is not really about bringing in revenue from readers. It’s about making it less convenient to read on screen, thereby encouraging people to they go back to the print edition, where ads are actually worth something. Print ads are hard to ignore; they’re tangible and they last for as long as that copy of the periodical exists. They have value that the ephemeral Web ads don’t.

Okay, that was two more paragraphs than I intended to write on this subject. Before I bore you with any more of that shit, here’s Matt’s question:

MB: So has the designer in you been inspired by the iPad yet, or do you still think the business model won’t make up for all the $ given away by the free interwebs?

And my response. I welcome comments on this as it’s a debate I’m passionate about. (Wouldn’t be sharing it here otherwise.)

Newspapers and magazines need one of two things to happen:
- Apple adds a section to its iBookstore for periodicals, with a proprietary reader that you can use in iTunes on any computer.
or
- Everyone in the world gets an iPad.

Magazines and newspapers are reading material – the race should be on to work out a standard, but flexible, iPad magazine format which would be available in the iBookstore, along with everything else people buy to read. There would be cross-pollination on a virtual magazine rack, and it would be one less thing for people who want reading material to think about. And back issues would be easy to format and sell, complete with ads (which would help periodicals increase ad rates – “your ad will be in people’s faces for as long as they’re buying our back issues”).

Honestly, all of these magazine apps seem to be overpriced and stupid. A 500MB download for one issue of Wired, at higher than subscription prices?! What the hell is the point of that? Doesn’t matter how good it looks if no one will bother with it.

Jed.

My first job out of college: ad copywriter for a direct marketing company on Long Island. I wrote catalog and space ads. I think they hired me mostly because they needed one more Jewish male to make minyan.

I won’t name the company, for reasons which will be made clear. But I will say that they were legendary for once running a promotional offer of one real diamond with every catalog purchase over ten dollars. These diamonds absolutely were real – real, industrial-grade, and just about worthless. The ad wasn’t lying; you got a diamond for ten bucks. A shitty diamond.

Every morning, I would punch the clock and wade into a stack of sell sheets detailing garbagey non-products no one could possibly want or need; bland bulleted lists which I’d have to turn into tight, bright, appealing ad copy. Sometimes I’d get to play with the items themselves. Like the Musical Sweater – an ugly off-red pullover, embroidered with reindeer and snowflakes, which played an 8-bit “Jingle Bells” when you pressed a button on the collar.

(Right now you’re all like, Musical Sweater = WANT! I know, right? But ad copy man, can I wash something like that? Jeez… I have no idea! That info was not on the sell sheet.)

I knocked out copy until lunchtime, and then I had one hour to pull off as much awesome shit as I could. I might meet Chris Hug at one of Long Island’s finer Toys ‘R’ Us locations, or visit Nathan’s at the Broadway Mall with other members of The Hanslick Rebellion, or make out with Cheryl Mare in the IHOP parking lot… but even as all this adventure beckoned, some of my favorite lunch breaks were the ones I spent alone.

There was a great comic book store in Hicksville which no longer exists; I would go there every Wednesday, pick up the week’s new releases, and read them in my car with some drive-thru Wendy’s and Mike and the Mad Dog on the radio. Pure 21-year-old Long Island dork bliss. I still fondly remember the day the Knicks signed Allan Houston and Chris Childs. I didn’t give a fuck about basketball; I just loved listening to Mike and the Mad Dog bitch while I ate my Triple with cheese and caught up on some Justice League.

On non-comic weekdays I might follow the same routine, except with a newspaper or a copy of the Star or National Enquirer. I used to find space ads I’d written all the time in the Star. One that comes immediately to mind was for the Comfort Air Cushion, which was an inflatable pad the size of a car seat that you’d blow up and put on top of your car seat. Yeah, I know, I know.

We don’t often appreciate how pervasive even the most mundane advertising can be, but it is no exaggeration to say that this company’s ads were seen by millions of people. In addition to running in circulars and tabloids, they were mass-mailed in catalogs and sweepstakes packets designed to entice a less cynical population to open and read them, carefully targeted to the Americans most likely to buy a Glow-in-the-Dark Doorknob, or an Adorable Kitten Throw Rug, or any of five-dozen guardian angel-themed products: the Guardian Angel Picture Frame (guardian angels watch over your loved ones when you place their photos in these delightful frames!), the Guardian Angel Lamp Topper (now you can have the warmth and cheer of a guardian angel fill your home every time you turn on the light!), even Glow-in-the-Dark Guardian Angels (who knows what the fuck’s the point of this shit!).

I wrote ads for cheap mail-order shoes, toy trucks with wheels that didn’t turn, and devices which projected an illuminated target into the middle of the toilet bowl so you wouldn’t have to turn on the bathroom light in the middle of the night. I learned the power of phrases like “now you can”, “wherever you go”, “orthopedically designed” and “toasty warm”, and the mystique of the “AS SEEN ON TV!” burst, which was so potent that you could fill the same rounded red box with “not ON TV!” and people would buy the product as if it were on TV. And more housewives and geriatrics read my writing than Stephen King’s, which sounds wonderful but is something I try not to think too hard about.

After a few months on the job, I earned a transfer to the company’s top book, which advertised what were purportedly health products. There were lots of pills in the catalog, yeah… but all of the pitches were circumstantial. The tagline for Shark Cartilage pills was “SHARKS DON’T GET CANCER!” So what? You’re not a shark. And the catalog’s Diet Tea could be part of any weight-loss plan, sure, but there was nothing special about it; all tea is low-calorie until you add sugar. I wasn’t allowed to promise any results in my copy; I could say that a product might “help promote” health benefits, but not that it actually did anything.

I acquired a reference library of alternative medicine textbooks and encyclopedia, which I pretty well wore out trying to find an honorable basis for selling these products. I’m not going to say that alternative medicine is bullshit, because there is plenty of evidence that some disciplines are beneficial. But in the year-plus that I worked on that catalog, I wrote ads for dozens of “holistic” products, from ginkgo biloba to St. John’s wort to tea tree oil, none of which could legally be pitched as providing any medical benefit whatsoever.

I still shiver a little at the memory of my first health catalog meeting. The buyer, who ordered all the stock we’d be writing about, sat at the head of the table showing off the latest products. One of the products appeared to be a hot water bottle.

“Check this out,” the buyer said. “Looks like an ordinary hot water bottle. And it is! But when you add this tubing here, it becomes a do-it-yourself home enema kit! One of the worst things about an enema is that you need to have somebody else administer it. How embarrassing is that? You have to call a friend to shoot water up your ass. Well, not anymore!” Then he whirled around and pointed in my direction.

“Davis, give me a headline!”

What popped into my head was not acceptable, but I blurted it out anyway: “With enemas like these, who needs friends?”

“Good,” replied the buyer. “Clean it up; go with it!” What?!

“This next product is for people who suffer from incontinence. Studies show that anyone can control his bodily functions – if he is aware of them! Incontinent people are not! But this device will change all that. It slips comfortably into undergarments, and has a sensor which detects moisture. At the first sign of wetness, the device emits a mild electric shock which makes the wearer aware that he is soiling himself – so he can stop! No more embarrassing, bulky diapers! It’s a miracle product! Davis, give me a headline!”

The dude was clearly not gonna pay attention to anything I said, so I offered: “Stop pissing your pants – NOW!”

“Good! Clean it up; go with it!”

One day, a sell sheet for something called “Royal Jelly Pills” landed on my desk. It had no bullet points – no list of benefits for this product. I spent an hour trying to find a mention of royal jelly in my various books, but no luck. I went to the buyer, and he had no idea what these pills did, either.

“Well,” he asked, “what do we know about royal jelly?”

“If this is the same royal jelly that comes from bees, then it’s the compound which is fed to a larval bee that makes it grow into a queen bee,” I said.

“Go look up the life expectancy of a queen bee as compared to a worker bee,” said the buyer. “Then clean that up and go with it!”

So if you’ve ever seen an ad for utterly useless Royal Jelly Pills with the headline “DISCOVER THE SECRET OF ROYAL JELLY!” and the tag, “Worker bees live for three weeks, but the queen bee can live up to three years! Royal jelly is the difference. Find out what it can do for you!” Well, that’s mine. Yeah, I know, I know. I know.

The job began to weigh on me. Writing ads for junky nicknacks made me uncomfortable, but the products were so overtly ridiculous that I could justify the gig: anyone stupid enough to think his life would be improved by something called Glow-in-the-Dark Reusable Snowflakes deserved to be out five bucks. The health catalog was different, though. It was all semantic gymnastics to offer benefits yet avoid promising any result, because no result had ever – or could ever – be proven. And it was targeted at low-income hypochondriacs who had more important things to do with their money, or worse, at genuinely ill people and people in demographics most at risk of becoming ill, who really had more important things to do with their money.

I had begun making websites by then, and I devoted part of mine to detailing all the ways I perceived this company to be ripping people off. It was 1997 and weblogs hadn’t been invented yet, but that’s what this was. I wrote in secret, mostly to soothe my conscience, and the blog wasn’t linked to anything – but I made the mistake of sharing the address with one coworker. Next thing I knew it had spread across the entire company, and I became the first person ever fired for blogging. To this day, it’s the only thing I’ve done online that could be construed as going viral.

Apparently I never learn, ’cause here we are. But that experience did teach me one rule of thumb: never take a job you would negatively blog about. This policy has enabled me to enjoy work – and to keep it.

Yesterday I ran across an old demo of “Hold On To Your Soul” from 2001, recorded after my deal with Kasenetz-Katz went south. Listening to it reminded me of my copywriting days, which in turn made me realize how similar the music business is to that job, and how I was probably never meant to have a “record contract”. When I did get one, I wrote shit like this to ease the guilt of recording for The Man.

Jed Davis | “Hold On To Your Soul” demo | August 1, 2001

Sometimes I fart around on music blogs or MySpace, just to hear what people are listening to. I always go in optimistic – maybe I’ll find something new to love. I do like some of what I hear; most of it I can’t stand. But is that really any different from how I felt about new music five years ago? Ten? Twenty? I wonder whether the ratio of stuff I like to stuff I think is shit has changed at all.

Do you read the Lefsetz Letter? I enjoy it; Bob Lefsetz writes some galvanizing stuff, even if the dude contradicts himself like crazy and has never, ever offered a solution for any of the socioeconomic problems he claims are destroying the musical universe. I like his bluntness; I like when he goes all RAH-RAH about artist empowerment, as hokey as that can be; and I love when he really gets into a song and parses it, section by section, from where he was the first time he heard the intro to what tragedy the chorus got him through.

What Lefsetz doesn’t seem to appreciate sometimes, though, is that even if he doesn’t enjoy a style of music, even if he thinks it’s vapid or crummy, there are people who derive just as much meaning, pleasure, and catharsis from it as he got from the records he listened to in college. I don’t care to listen to Breaking Benjamin or The Devil Wears Prada or Fleet Foxes… they aren’t saying anything I haven’t heard before. But to people coming of age right now, these are comforting or invigorating or nourishing or sympathetic voices.

Gen Xers like me think that our music was the last great music; we were too shrewd to fall for “sell-outs”; we stomped all the crap dead, killed all the idols and embraced only the best, the incorruptible. But none of that is true at all. We loved Poison. We loved Warrant. We loved the New Kids On The Block. These assholes still have careers… thanks to Generation X.

There was shitty, stupid, pointless music in the ’90s. In the ’80s. In the ’70s. In the ’60s. And people of every decade – smart people and stupid people alike – bought the fuck out of it, let their lives be shaped by it.

I used to feel like my generation got the shaft. We were dismissed as “slackers” and told that we’d be the first Americans to experience a lower standard of living than their parents… that we should pray for the Gulf War to last forever so we’d have something to do when we got out of college. Then we recognized the potential in a new technology, the Internet, and cultivated it into something world-changing. I saw Gen Xers as no-nonsense heroes, rising above the petty criticisms of those who could never understand us.

But in reality, no generation is more laudable than another. WWII’s so-called “Greatest Generation” was the most destructive in human history; they murdered more people than had ever been killed by man; redrew the map in ways that create war and turmoil to this day; did horrible things to our environment; were sexist and racist; and invented weapons that still threaten human existence. They may be the worst generation of all.

The Baby Boomers squandered a cultural revolution, turned their backs on their own message and went corporate. Then they managed to derail a second revolution by being too intellectually lazy to appreciate what the Internet actually was. They thought of it as this abstract thing which could be harnessed simply by invoking its name – the way characters in the comic books they grew up reading might be powered by gamma radiation or cosmic rays. So with no viable understanding, the Boomers who ran the newspapers and the magazines and the record labels raced blindly to integrate, to annex the Internet… changing it from a communications tool to an entertainment service, rendering all of their product valueless, crushing entire industries, and doing incalculable damage to our culture. Now they complain that we are becoming a socialist country. Of course we are… that’s what happens when you destroy capitalism by making everything free.

Millennials are unwitting victims of the Baby Boomers’ mistakes. They grew up just in time to understand content as free, no matter how much it costs to create, and will never accept having to pay that tab. They’ve been given access to a virtual Library of Alexandria, except most of it is junk – where previous generations got their information from trained journalists and experts, processed through armies of fact-checkers and made readable by editors and proofreaders, Gen Y’s worldview is shaped mostly by uninformed opinions. Years of watching edited, scripted television shows which are sold to them as “reality” and reinforce the idea that they might be selected for fame and fortune at any moment have engendered a deficiency of perspective so severe that many Millennials would rather run themselves out of the workforce than accept the possibility that they may only be qualified for entry-level jobs.

And then there’s my generation. Once defined by our righteous rage, Gen X has grown punchy and dull. The babies we were aborting ten years ago, we now keep, if only because everybody else is. And we smother them in rock t-shirts and G.I. Joe t-shirts and Transformers t-shirts, pretending it’s because we still appreciate irony while secretly, desperately hoping they will like all the things we liked and grow up to be our pals. And when something pisses us off, we vent on a Web site read only by others who share the same opinion. Sometimes we get so passionate about a tragedy or injustice, we do something that we were probably gonna do anyway, like join a Facebook group or grow a mustache, to “raise awareness” about it. We are out of juice, which is extra weak when you’re the generation that was all about being the one with the juice.

[I understand that I've been generalizing; that's what happens when you get demographic. How about this: if any of the above gives you weird uncomfortable feelings, let me know and I will write you a special note to keep in your pocket that says it does not apply to you.]

There is something I do in my songs which I only came to notice in the past year or two: I always keep it ambiguous as to which side I am personally taking. For example, if I write a song about a character who’s a dick, I will usually write it from his perspective (some of you probably feel like I wrote this entire post from the perspective of a person who is a dick, ha ha). I’ll try to make you understand why he is the way he is, maybe even agree with him for a second before you catch yourself. What I’m still trying to figure out is whether that’s because I believe everyone is wrong, or because I don’t believe anyone is wrong.

We are all so excellent, and so disappointing.

Okay, that’s enough!

Hmm… maybe that should be my new signoff. Okay, that’s enough!