The Guy From Camper Van Beethoven v. The Intern Girl v. The Internet v. Me

You've probably seen some form of this point-counterpoint on your Facebooks or your Twitters or, who knows, maybe someone took a screenshot of it and ran it through some "scratched Polaroid effect" filters and put it on Instagram.  To save you all those precious minutes you would have to spend reading the original piece, the rebuttal by the guy from Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven and then the counter-counterpoint by some guy from The Dismemberment Plan, I'm writing this. 

(Editor's note: I have no dog in this hunt but I would like to point out that David Lowery from Cracker teaches at my parents alma mater, University of Georgia.  Go Bulldogs!)


Intern Girl -

"I'm 20 and have never known a world of either buying a physical product which contains music or paying for the digital dots in the sky also known as MP3s.  From Napster to Spotify to YouTube to torrenting to Rdio, I have never needed to actually purchase music I wanted to hear.  So there's that."

Cracker -

"You and all your generation are wallet raping artists and you don't understand how much blood, sweat and tears go into making an album (not to mention you would have to double that amount if the album in question is a Blood, Sweat and Tears album) and you just steal it because you feel you're entitled to do so."

The Dismemberment Plan -

"I like making mix tapes."

Ok, that's perhaps not the most accurate representation of all sides but you really should try to be less of a lazy fuck and go read the three pieces. 

I get all sides of this thing.  I've mentioned it before but it bears repeating that I personally suffered from the collapse of the music industry.  And by suffered, I mean that I no longer rode the gravy train of free dinners and trips and shows and never having to pay for music or tickets or having to sit with the unwashed masses.  I kid (kinda) but the industry was out of fucking control by the late 90s/early 'aughts when I started toeing into the water. 

I would have loved to see a cost efficiency consultant walk through any of the regional major label offices.  Let me go ahead and state this as an almost-guaranteed fact:  the thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of food, drinks, perks and swag that labels funneled towards me as a music writer almost certainly never increased the sale of any given record by even .01%.  Don't get me wrong, it was fun.  But they probably would have been better having the "street teamers" stacking bills in a pyramid and KLF'ing the money into a towering inferno of wastefulness.

The labels sold a good story to artists.  Think of how many iconic black and white images you've seen of bands signing their big record label deal.  Obviously, signing a deal meant that you were only a few radio adds from Led Zep mud shark sexytimes.  Only, you know, that never actually happened to any bands other than, like, three. 

You'd have to sell millions upon millions to recoup and be in the black, according to major label math.  That studio time wasn't free.  That bus wasn't a gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  The major labels were the biggest bunch of payday loan sharks out there, with their soul patches growing darker and more defined with each band they signed.  I bet it's a real swell feeling to sign on the dotted line as an affirmation that the music you make has been deemed not only good but marketable.  But bend over, Abigail Mae.  It won't end well.

So unless you are just a nostalgia buff who longs for the simpler times of segregation, your doctor smoking Lucky Strikes during an examination and record labels never paying artists anything, stop acting like those were the Halcyon days.  They weren't.  They just seemed cooler because you were a kid and those people got to be on TV and fly on private planes with their names on them.  Anyone who was actually on a major label in the heyday of rock and roll would probably tell you a much different story.  Go down to Austin and ask Ian McLagan about that.

Guy From The Dismemberment Plan notes that way before the mean ol' internet caught on, there were mixtapes, dub clubs and (my personal favorite) taping off the radio.  There was even a darling, adorable (said in an extremely condescending tone) movement called "Home Taping is Killing Music" lead by the industry. 

So GFTDP (Guy From The Dismemberment Plan) has a point that this "they're stealing our musics!" hysteria is far from new.  Sure, the internet might allow kids in remote villages better access to the modern version of home taping.  But how many independent mom and pop record stores are being forced to close because some kid in Belarus really wanted to download all the Bloodhound Gang's back catalog?

Which brings me to my main issue with GFC&CVB (Guy from Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven) and his argument.  A musician friend of mine, when posting this article on Facebook, mentioned that he instructed folks working the merch table to give anyone who was on the fence about buying his music a copy for free.  I like his style.  At the end of the night as you're drunkenly trying to Tetris cases into a van, are you going to be thinking about how awesome it was to a) sell 10 vinyl copies of your stuff or how awesome it was to b) give 40 people who expressed some interest a shitty burned CDR copy of your music?

I can't imagine anyone answering A, to be honest.  While they might recoil at the perceived insult, there's an egotist in the core of every musician.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  But you have to be self-assured that the music you're making is so one-of-a-kind and awesome to even have the balls to play it live or commit it to tape (hard drive?).  So it's a no brainer that they would choose the option where more people hear them, thereby increasing the chances of getting that soul stroking email about how awesome their music is. 

So why do I get tiredhead when I hear musicians hem and haw over how iTunes/Bandcamp/Uncle Shady's Sweatpants and Digital Download Distribution LLC have ripped them off?  Because they're still stuck on the part where you make money from your music as a product, full stop.  Guess what?  The guys in Goldmine didn't make money hand over fist from RCA and you're not going to either now in the digital age.  But don't go David Carradine-ing yourself in a Thai hotel.  You've actually got it better than they did, delicate little musician flowers.  Dust off your pantaloons and come with me on this mathematical journey:

Everyone before you had to, as we've already discussed, recoup expenses.  Therefore, if you can pay out of pocket (pick up extra shifts at the massage parlor or whatever) for studio time, producing and mixing, you are already ahead of the game.  You literally have a better financial outlook than Masters of Reality-era Black Sabbath did, not to mention there's a pretty good chance you still have all your fingers, unlike Tony Iommi. 

So now you tour.  Again, that tour bus that you think is the iconic symbol of having "made it" (not realizing that in reality, it is a rolling sweatbox full of dirty laundry, tense phone calls, the same 5 DVDs and humans who are holding in bowel movements on pain of death) is being loaned to you at a steep cost.  One that you will discover much later, unlike your phone charger, all your socks and most of your dignity which all managed so escape somewhere in the deep, sticky vinyl folds of the bus.

So you tour in a van.  You pare down the number of breathing, eating, shitting, phone call making humans you need to make the music you want to make to the quality you can make it.  And by that I mean, unless you're the Happy Mondays and he's Bez, leave your roommate who plays two finger keyboard parts back home.  Now you're touring and you're paying for gas and lodging and food but any money you make is going straight back into your pocket.  Not to mention the incalculable value of spreading your music around to people who might come back to see you and bring their friends. 

Then there's the big one.  There's licensing songs.  Ok, we're all over the "ewwwww, that's dirrrrrrty" thing about licensing songs, right?  We know that it's how you eat these days.  And there's nothing wrong with hearing your song pop up as they remove the maggot ridden corpse on CSI or hear your music used in the background as the girls from Girls walk around Greenpoint talking about how great it is to be a spoiled, self-centered boil in human form, right?  Well think about it this way, all your heroes back in the day had much less control over those things.  Sure, in theory, they had a label to shop their music around for those opportunities.  But you also got little say in whether or not your song would be used to sell fungal cream or whatever. 

So what's my point?  Jesus, you should know by now that I rarely have a point and tend to just ramble incoherently.  But if I had to brass tacks it, it is this.  No more essays about how "stealing music is wrong!"  Please.  Music is an umbrella under which reside many cottage industries, all of which are supported by as many people as possible knowing said music exists. 

All the fall of the music industry did is make it hard to be lazy and successful.  It was WAY easier to get signed, do blow and let publicists worry about the legwork.  Now the hustle's all on you.  If you don't have the hustle in you, then learn programming languages, make bank and form a band that plays on the weekends at places called Captain Racks.  Just please, please, please stop writing essays about how people are stealing your music.  It's murdering my soul.

In Preparation for Tonight's Jesus and Mary Chain Show

I was 17 years old and the album Munki had just come out. I was beyond obsessed with the album and played it constantly. Then the band announced their US tour dates and they were playing Fort Worth at a long-since closed Caravan of Dreams. My best friend Chrissy, also a devoted fan, did what any music loving teenager in the pre-internet world. We lined up at Albertson's to be the first to buy our tickets at 10am the day they went on sale. Sometimes I miss the tenacity involved in loving music before the internet made everything painless and easy.

Not satisfied with just seeing them once, and hearing talk of this being the infamous FINAL TOUR, I bought a plane ticket to Atlanta to see the show after Fort Worth. I remember talking to my dad on the phone, breathlessly explaining how this was the greatest month of my 17 years on the planet because I was going to see my two favorite bands, Jesus & Mary Chain and Spiritualized within weeks of each other. My dad told me he was glad I was finally listening to Christian rock. I never bothered correcting him, lest I break his small-town heart. I was a pretty feral teenager.

Chrissy and I planned to hang around the venue all day. In the decade since that show, I've met more famous people than I care to count. Some were cool, some were not. I certainly lost the stardust feeling when I met a musician I respected somewhere around age 25 or so. But this was before all of that and I was going to meet my idols, Jim and William Reid. Only one problem. The brothers had one of their infamous brotherfights and William had left the tour. Secretly, I always liked Jim better and since he was the cuter of the two, I felt no huge sense of loss. Chrissy and I wandered around Sundance Square for hours, pretending to shop for knick knacks and taking pictures of points of local interest. Of course, what we were actually doing was a very innocent version of stalking. We were harmless.

As show time neared, I found myself crestfallen that we had yet to have a single sighting. We finally gave up and got in line so as to be the first in the venue. Now's probably a good time to mention that Chrissy was one of those people who would run to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and inexplicably return with a story about running into the entire reunited cast of Cheers. And they were always true. So obviously, Chrissy went to the bar to get our non-alcoholic beverages and returns 30 minutes later to let me know that she was now friends with two of the guys from Mercury Rev and they had invited us to join them at a bar down the street after the show. We'll ignore the part where they were inviting 17 year old girls to sneak into bars with them because this was a much simpler time. This was 1998.

My memory of Mercury Rev and JAMC's sets seem to have faded into one huge bright light and a constant buzz saw sound. Like a near death experience in noise rock purgatory. But I mean that in a good way. After the show, I begged Chrissy to give it one last try. We just HAD to meet Jesus and Mary Chain. She said we could wait for a few minutes outside, then we were going to have to go meet up with Mercury Rev. Because the last thing you want to do is disappoint Mercury Rev. So we waited. Nothing. I must admit, I was a little heartbroken. So we turned away and started walking towards a bar we were not old enough to get into and whose name we were pretty sure we were remembering incorrectly.

As we were walking across the street, far enough from the venue to be considered semi-deserted, we saw a backlight group of large men coming towards us. Before we knew what was happening, the large men in the matching shirts were picking us up and literally dragging us away. Somehow in the melee, I got a look at their shirts with the Welsh flag on them. Yes, we were being abducted by the very drunk Welsh rugby team, who were in town for some sort of goodwill games. I decided that the best way to ensure our safety was to try to talk our way out of it. I said, "You're from Wales, I know Wales!" They looked at us with disbelief. What they didn't know is that Chrissy and I were quite possibly the only two Welshophiles in Texas. Yeah, we were weird kids. One rugby player asked me "What do YOU know about Wales?" I meekly replied, "Cardiff?" and the entire team cheered loudly, grabbed us by various limbs and continued to cart us away.

I had, up to that point, never had to devise a strategy for escaping an abduction by a rugby team. That's when I heard Chrissy's voice. She was in the fray somewhere behind me, also swallowed up in a sea of Welshness. "Oh fuck!", Chrissy screamed. "What, is Jesus and Mary Chain across the street or something?", I joked. "Yeah. They are." You know those stories of mothers who harness superhuman strength to lift cars off their own toddlers? Chrissy and I somehow summoned a similar inner strength and broke away from our captors, with them following hot on our heels. We ran up to Jim Reid and Ben Lurie, who are not what anyone would consider physically intimidating men, and spit out some combination of the words, "Big fan" and "Kidnapped by this Welsh rugby team".

Then it happened. Without skipping a beat, Jim Reid put a protective arm over my shoulder and Ben followed suit with Chrissy. In a scene that would not be out of place in some 1950's greaser movie, Jim informed the rugby boys that they might as well forget it, we were with them now. There was a little back and forth about each group's respective countries and then, like that, the Welshmen turned tail and left. Once we were safe, we remembered that we probably should thank Jesus and Mary Chain. They told us that we could repay them by helping them find their hotel. It was a long walk. We walked past a karaoke bar where a drunken frat boy was warbling a Radiohead song. Jim Reid talked some trash about Radiohead, with his primary diss being his impression of Thom Yorke which consisted of him saying, "Hi, my name is T-H-O-M York. With an H. I'm a knob." It was a pretty good impression.

With the adrenaline still pumping, I realized Chrissy and I should probably try to sound smart so Jesus and Mary Chain didn't discover that we were two teenage dorks from the suburbs. Chrissy commented on the architecture of one restored 1920's building as we walked past it. "I think that's considered Art Deco" she told Jim Reid. "It's crap is what it is" was Ben Lurie's response. Zing!

So we safely escorted these men who just hours earlier, we had been staking out like a bad 70's cop movie. As we walked into the lobby, the guys invited us to join them at the hotel bar for a drink, turning to the night desk clerk asking for directions to said bar. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the night desk clerk was John Lithgow from Footloose and tersely told us that there was no hotel bar. Jim Reid inquired on the availability of a mini bar in the rooms. I don't think the clerk even dignified the question with a response, more just a grimace. We took that as our cue to leave. We repeated our thank yous and left in a hurry. Oh and of course, we had forgotten the name of the bar at which we were supposed to meet Mercury Rev.

Two days later, my naive and trusting father dropped me off at the venue in Atlanta. I told him the whole tale of the night before and he probably only understood every fifth word out of my mouth. A cab pulled up and dropped off Jim Reid. I told my dad that was the man who rescued us on that dark street. My dad, a large man well over 6 foot tall with a deep, booming Southern voice, got out of his truck to shake Jim Reid's hand. I think he told him something like, "Thank you for looking after my little girl the other night." Jim Reid cracked a smile, patted my dad on the back and replied, "I couldn't bear it if she'd been chopped to bits." With that, my dad got in his truck and drove away. That night, after the encore, Jim Reid came up and placed a guitar pick in my hand.

I met my friend Tommy that night when he was the local opener and we're still friends to this day. I accidentally left the pick in a cab. And for the record, Chrissy has since moved to London, gotten married and become a mom. Oh yeah, and her husband is Welsh.

(mildly clever title TBD)

(The blurry Blackberry picture I took of the tunnel at AAC; I didn't want to get busted in all my dorky glory so I didn't use the flash.)

I have a confession to make. As you may have read on this blog, I was a music journalist in the past. I loved music. I went to shows every night. And then, after a few years, I became bitter. I felt like I had been there and done that. No one could impress me. I basically existed just to rip into bands and hand them their aspirations on a plate.

So I stopped doing it. Then I started this blog. I loved sports. Specifically, I loved the Mavs. I would write about them even if no one read it, which was the case for many months. Then I started getting a little attention. Not much but just a little.

But with that attention, also came that feeling that ripping into teams and athletes and shaming them for actual losses or perceived failures was the key to personal success. And guess what? It sucked the fun out of sports for me again. My sense of Dallas sports fan entitlement told me that if my team “only” made it to the playoffs then got knocked out in the first or second round, they were losers. Burn down the stadium. Sell off the team.

So I stopped blogging about sports. In the meantime, I became a columnist for Quick. A nightlife columnist, if you want to get specific. And through that, I was offered the chance to write the 2010-2011 Mavs Season Preview. You will be able to read that preview on October 21st.

Today I went to Mavs team practice to interview players and Coach Carlisle. Like a kid from a high school paper, I stood outside the Mavs office during practice with clammy hands. I looked over my list of questions approximately 12.5 million times. Which ended up being fruitless since my questions pretty much went out the window the moment I opened my mouth.

Now all of this would have been an undeniably awesome sports moment for someone who started a Mavs blog out of sheer fandom room four years ago. But as the other members of the press and I waited to be given access to the players, we all huddled around a small TV to watch the Rangers game. I know it’s fashionable to downplay ones enthusiasm and to apply a liberal coat of indifference to writing about things like this. But you know what? It was fucking awesome. Waiting to talk to the team I have loved for decades while watching a team I have grown to love? It was a moment I probably won’t forget any time soon.

Then we were ushered into practice. I’ll save most of that for the article. I hope that it wasn’t too obvious that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I remember looking down at my recorder while Carlisle was talking and realizing that there were still beads of sweat across the screen from my nervous hands. I am as noob as it gets. It probably showed. My voice didn’t crack, as far as I remember.

I know I should be cooler about this. I should have asked some sort of hardball questions of the players. I should have been the young, snarky blogger who was there to call someone out. But it never crossed my mind. I’m a fan and I will give this Mavs team a chance and enjoy the basketball they give me and any games I am able to attend.

Because as I sit here at my desk listening to the Rangers play their first playoff game in 14 years (and lead it 5-1), I am just about as sports happy as a girl can be. If the Rangers can make it to the playoffs after all they’ve gone through this past decade, anything is possible. Losing my grip on sports cynicism is almost certainly a detriment to my career as a blogger. But the world needs one more cynical, armchair quarterback blogger like…….well, like the Lakers need one more ring.