Tag Archives: music business

Hanging Out Backstage With The Dead

Photo courtesy of Pixabay License.

When I first began working in the mailroom of a record distributor back in the early ’70s, one of the perks of the job was going backstage either before or after a concert. Documented in films such as Spinal Tap and One Trick Pony, the infamous music business “meet and greet” is a staple at virtually every concert. Usually, it’s simply a casual opportunity to say hi to the musicians, tell them how much you like their latest album and then finish it off by posing for a photo. I did hundreds of these over the decades and while often it was a blast, eventually I grew weary of this ritualistic and orchestrated event..

I can recall my baptismal “behind the curtain” invitation in September 1973 to a Grateful Dead show at Philadelphia’s Spectrum, a large hockey arena and a major concert venue of the day. My wife and I had spent all week hanging out with their advance man, legendary promoter Augie Bloom. We helped him contact local members of their fan club which predated and morphed into Deadhead culture, drovehim to radio stations, and smoked the best weed we’d ever tasted. On the night of the show he led us through the hallways deep inside the venue and then left us in a room overflowing with food and drink, not without warning us not to sip anything liquid unless it came from a bottle we’d opened ourselves.

That particular evening we never got a chance to chat with the band as they were busy with a crowd that could have easily come out of Hollywood central casting. Groupies, bikers, DJs, wives, girlfriends, a few kids, smarmy record label execs, retailers, wholesalers, hipsters, artists, local scene makers, and bored beefy security men who ignored the smells and snorting going on all around them. I suppose it sounds as if it was a great party, but on this particular night I witnessed an incident that has always stuck with me.

One member of the band was absolutely strung out, with his eyes rolling back into his head. He was being held up on his feet by his wife, who gingerly attempted to get him to walk back and forth in preparation for soon going out onstage. When he became loud and rude, roughly shoving her away from him, some of the roadies stepped in to drag him away and we left to find our own way out. Whatever thoughts of rock and roll idolatry I’d had quickly dissipated. Loved the music, hated the scene.

The lights came down just as we got to our seats. With the smoke around us rising up to form one giant mushroom cloud, the band took the stage. The dude who was barely able to stand up just a few minutes earlier played his ass off for the next several hours. Looking back, I suppose it was my first introduction to the principle of “the show must go on” and so it did, likely with pharmaceutical assistance.

I have a box in my closet stuffed with pictures of me taken backstage while standing next to lots of different musicians, almost all of them having no clue who I was or why I was there. A fast intro, a shake of the hand, maybe a quick chat, and then turn, pose, smile, snap, and move on. One of my favorites is of me and a few people from my office posing with The Rolling Stones. They preferred to do group shots rather than with individuals, and I recall that our brief intro came right after a group of Pepsi executives and was followed by employees of the local Budweiser brewery. As they say, it’s only rock and roll.

Easy Ed (far right) with The Rolling Stones at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Oct. 15, 1994.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. 

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

How Easy Is It To Find New Music?

Pixabay License

In a very different time and place in my life I used to sit in conference rooms with my colleagues, sip coffee or tea, eat fruit and baked goods, and listen to music. It didn’t matter the genre; who sang, wrote, or played on it; nor whether we liked it or now. This was certainly not the time, place, opportunity, or solicitation to publicly flip your thumb up or down. No, this was finished product — yes, it was always called product — that was essentially presented to our group simply as a record label ritual with the desired outcome that we’d become inspired and motivated to create the best marketing plan to successfully launch or propel a career.

The enthusiastic person who led the meeting was the liaison between the hipsters who discovered, signed, nurtured, and brought the musicians into the studio and those of us who were simply the dweebs and weasels who were responsible for taking the product to market and selling it through. Quite the juggling act, and I always admired that person’s ability to put a bright shine on even the dullest finish, and in truth our gathering was simply an exercise in groupthink, which the Oxford dictionary defines as “the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.”

The components of our marketing plans rarely deviated from the standard: Define the artist and project by comparing it to something already successful; plug in a timeline of press, radio, television, advertising, visits to record stores and buyers, and a tour; create a budget; and set a sales goal. You’ll notice the absence of social media only because my personal experience predated its arrival. With a battle plan devised and sent out to the field, you might think that there would be a fairly high success rate. Sorry, I just fell off my chair laughing. Imagine a large plate of linguini thrown against the wall with only a few strands of pasta not falling onto the floor.

When the Great Recession of 2007 hit the music industry, it was a reaction not only to the economy in general, but also to the “head in the sand” approach to the technological changes that many executives were sure wouldn’t prevail. Yet, in just one year record retailers and chains that had been standing for decades closed their doors, labels sold their catalogs to larger entities, thousands of people lost their jobs, and an ocean of fish turned into a lake of whales.

The upside for some legacy musicians was that debts they accumulated from recoupable advances were wiped off the books, and the downside, which continues today, is distilled to this simple question: How the hell can I earn a living making music? If I knew the answer to that question, I wouldn’t be spending my golden years standing on my feet eight hours a day at the job site while sidelining a gig as a columnist for No Depression. But I do know this: In a world where streaming dominates the music business and record labels no longer have open checkbooks, you’re pretty much left on your own to figure it all out. That old saying of “I am an artist, not a businessperson” is simply that: old.

With the exception of no more than a handful of companies offering marketing and related services to musicians within the Americana and roots music genre, there is a fairly large cottage industry that has evolved selling hopes and dreams with less than a wing or a prayer.

Many of these folks are past colleagues who flood my email inbox every day, and they are nice, well-intentioned hard workers who enthusiastically attempt to elevate their clients’ craft. I always read what they send me and sample the music. But sadly, for the most part, I pity the poor musician who’s dipped into their savings or borrowed money from friends or family to employ their services. A plan with a significant budget and a large organization to carry it out only works some of the time, but a cookie cutter email is just one delete button away from the trash file.

I’ll leave you with this, a make-believe email about a make-believe musician that I’ve cut and pasted from a dozen actual messages I’ve recently received. We’ll call the make-believe musician Choc O’Chips.

Hi Ed!

Hope you’re having an awesome week! As you are my favorite writer in the whole world, I wanted you to be the first to hear this amazing news directly from me.

Choc O’Chips has announced he is releasing his debut album, No Oatmeal or Raisins, early next year. As I’m sure you’ve already heard through the incredible street buzz he’s been receiving, his music has been favorably compared to great singer-songwriters in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Gram Parsons, and Steve Earle. Blending a mystical essence of vocals with futuristic and whimsical guitar riffs that harken back to Jerry Garcia, one of his greatest influences, this 16-year-old is poised to become Americana’s next superstar!

Recorded live at the world-famous Sun Studios in Memphis (Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis), each session utilized Uher M537 vintage dynamic microphones and was recorded using the same console that Ike Turner once leaned on. “It was an honor to play my songs in the company of these musical ghosts who my grandparents used to listen to,” said Choc.

This album will be released not only on all the major streaming sites, but independent retailers throughout the world will be offering an enhanced vinyl version scented with cookie dough that will be limited, signed, and numbered. We have been assured we may see cover stories from Rolling Stone, American Songwriter, Acoustic Guitar, and Baker’s Monthly, and be on the lookout for dates when Choc will perform on Austin City Limits, The Tonight Show, The Late Show, The Late Late Show, and Trisha Yearwood’s Cookies and Cakes That Garth Loves! Choc’s world tour with dates TBA may take him to the same stages Jason Isbell, Lucinda Williams, Wilco, and Paul Simon might have played on!

As you can see, we’re on our way and below you’ll find links to his website, Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram, SnapChat, Tinder, and Tik Tok, along with a secret download code so you can be the very first to hear his album.

All the Best,
Cookie Cutter Marketing
“We Take Your Dough to Make You Dough”

 

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. 

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Music Business Blues: 1972-1974

Photo by Stuart Hampton/Pixabay License

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” — Hunter S. Thompson

My wife and I were just 20 years old on our first wedding anniversary and were living once again in Philadelphia. We’d spent the previous winter in Toronto after eloping the old-fashioned way: I picked her up for a date, she tossed her suitcase to me out the window, we said “see you later” to her mom and headed off to the airport in a smoky car with a load of friends. With maybe a couple hundred bucks in our pockets, we sat white-knuckled inside a small twin-prop bouncing up and down in a snowstorm and fortunately weren’t hassled too badly by the customs officers when we touched ground. The next morning we were walking in the snow toward the city when a guy driving an Austin Healey Sprite with the top down pulled over and asked in broken English, with a little French thrown in, if we needed a place to stay. In less than an hour we were inside his warm, huge Victorian home filled with friendly people who shared food and smoke. I think our large furnished room cost only about $20 a week, and everybody contributed food for the communal meals. It was December 1971, and that’s how things happened back then.

A year later we were back home, I was registered at the university and she had just gotten a job at an independent record distributor. It was a bit different in those days, as the indies collectively owned about 65% of the market share and were still a decade away from being swallowed up by the big corporations. Every geographical area had several distributors who sold music as there was very little national distribution, and the company she worked for handled RCA, ABC-Dunhill, Chess/Checker, BASF, Roulette, Impulse, CTI, Playboy, and a few dozen others I can’t recall at the moment. It was a cool place to hang out and I was there every afternoon after I finished my classes, until the boss grew tired of me and said that I had to work if I wanted to stay. They put me in the mailroom where the radio promotion guys had their offices, and it was my first taste of the hustle and the game.

Before MTV and the internet there was really only one way to promote your music, and that was radio. Even though there was — and still is — a Billboard Top 100 chart, stations rarely played more than a couple of dozen songs and the competition to get airplay for your label’s records was fierce. The promo guys were the ones who were responsible to do whatever it would take to get in rotation, and it was a business built on relationships, personality, muscle, cash, drugs, and sex. Outside of one Sunday morning gospel show on a small station in Philly, there were zero women on the air at the time, creating a machismo atmosphere where anything goes, and it did.

For almost two years my job was packaging and sending out singles and albums to all the stations in our area, which went north to the coal region, south to Delaware, east to the Jersey Shore and west to Harrisburg. I learned all the call letters, the names of the music directors and DJs, and why a tiny station in Scranton or Allentown was important to pay attention to. It worked like a ladder: You got adds in the boonies, moved up to the secondary markets, and then worked the big city stations hard. Promo guys were on small salaries, with bonuses handed out based on what they were able to accomplish. With maybe 40 or 50 promo guys in a major market, and stations adding fewer than five new songs each week, it could be a bare-knuckles life.

It had been about a dozen years since the infamous payola congressional hearings and scandal that put many disc jockeys out of work, the most famous being Alan Freed. The feds prosecuted them on tax evasion charges for not reporting the money they received from the labels, but there were many other ways to cheat and steal: Freed’s name is still on dozens of singles as a co-writer, and Dick Clark held a stake in a publishing company and label for many of the artists who appeared on American Bandstand that he quickly dropped like a hot potato. Instead of going away, payola continued unabated and I’m sure that even today it continues in some form or another. Think of the “social media influencer,” for example.

During my years in the mailroom I routinely slipped plastic bags of white powder and weed inside promo albums, packed boxes with stacks of twenties, and bought money orders to pay for a music director’s monthly mortgage or car payment. Cases of liquor, expensive suits, a new appliance for the house, and tickets to any sports event or concert. Weekend getaways to Miami or Las Vegas were handed out like candy. And if someone needed companionship, it was just a phone call away. One promo guy I worked for, who would later have a book written based on his life, would sometimes carry a gun into his meetings and had a special relationship with organized crime syndicates from two cities. And then there was the popular music director and disc jockey who took in so much cash that he had to open an adult bookstore to help launder it.

With all the money flowing, you might think that individual record sales were so astronomical that it all paid for itself. Not quite. The music business has always been a “one percent scam,” where a handful of successful artists subsidize everyone else’s shortfalls. Throw a bowl of spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks was the model, and to understand the micro-economics you’d have to be like Trump and graduate from “the Wharton School of Finance.” In my two years of hanging out with the promo dudes, I learned that it wasn’t the life for me. But working with musicians, having access to great music, and earning a living while doing it sounded like a good career path. And for the next 30-plus years that’s just what I did. More on that another day, another time.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at the website of No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.