R4949 Starr

I’ve had a couple books on the go recently and they’ve both had something to say about the status and economic worth of vinyl records. First, there’s The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1: 1950-1967, a brilliant collaborative venture between Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan and Emma Webster. The book seeks to redress the balance of most accounts of the music industry, which, as the authors rightly point out, ‘over-privilege the recording sector at the expense of the sector in which most musicians in all genres have been located historically: the live arena’.

In the period that this first volume covers even the most well known musicians made more money from touring than they did from recording. The authors quote Gordon Thompson, who states that in the mid-1960s ‘recording contracts provided so little money that a band such as Herman’s Hermits needed to tour because most of their income came from live performance’.

            As so often, what was true of Herman’s Hermits was also true of the Beatles. The second book I’ve been reading is another opening volume: Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, the first part of his trilogy of books covering the Beatles’ history. The book is unusually forthcoming about recording contracts. It reveals just how little the Beatles stood to earn from their record sales. Lewisohn writes:

the everyday business of management was the stage. No ‘pop stars’ could live off broadcasting fees and only the very biggest of chart stars could live off record royalties, so miniscule were the percentages. No one even tried. The sole object of making records was to attract a bigger profile and so earn higher fees from concert and ballroom shows – and, if the artists were lucky to be chosen, to appear in summer seasons in seaside resorts.

The Beatles’ initial contract with EMI gave them a royalty rate of one penny for each single sold (taking into account both sides of the record). This was payable on only 85% of sales (the other 15% was kept by the record company in lieu of ‘records returned and/or damaged in transit and/or used for demonstration of advertising purposes’). Albums were calculated proportionally, ‘usually as six or seven singles’. The royalty rate was halved for sales outside Britain. Lewisohn does the maths:

In the Beatles’ case, this penny they’d get on 85 per cent of sales would have to be divided five ways: 15 per cent to Brian [Epstein, for his manager’s commission], the rest split between John, Paul, George and Pete [Best]. If they sold a thousand records, they’d get fifteen bob each, and if they ever managed such a famous, gilded, pinnacle-of-career accomplishment as a million-seller, they’d each get £750. If this happened in America – which was, quite obviously, ludicrously unlikely – it would be £375.

He also has the figures for their first EMI royalty statement, which rewarded the band for the sale of 36,868 copies of ‘Love Me Do’. The total received was £130 11s 6d, out of which the Beatles took just £27 15s each. Lennon and McCartney earned more from their songwriting royalties for the single than they did from their record contract. According to Lewisohn, the ‘mechanicals’ for this volume of sales would bring in £325. After Epstein’s 20% commission on this income, this would give the composers £130 each. However, this songwriting income paled in comparison to the money the band was earning from live performance. At the time of ‘Love Me Do’ the Beatles were commanding £50 for each concert appearance.

            And yet it was not live performance that the band venerated, it was records. Here’s Ringo, recalling the experience of seeing ‘Love Me Do’ pressed up as a 45:

[It was] The most momentous moment – that we had a record out, that we had a bit of plastic with us on it. Just the idea of being on a bit of plastic was really incredible after all those years of playing. My God, a record that you hadn’t made in some booth somewhere . . . you don’t believe how great that was.

Ringo, lest we forget, would earn less from recordings than the other Beatles. He wrote the fewest songs. He’s not alone, though, in lauding the moment of seeing yourself on record for the first time. Here’s Keith Richards, talking about the Rolling Stones and their contemporaries:

In a way, in those days, being able to get into the studio and get an acetate back sort or legitimized you. ‘You’re now a commissioned officer’ instead of being one of the ranks.

If only someone would ask him, I’m sure Peter Noone has a similar quote up his sleeve.

            Reading these books made me think about my own work. In Vinyl I argue that one of the distinguishing features of the analogue disc – from the 1880s to the present day – is that it is very difficult to manufacture copies within your own home. This is a format for professionals. As Keith Richards says, it legitimizes you, and it does so in a way that live performance can never do.

            Thus far Ringo and Richards back up my claims. I have paused for thought, however. In the fourth chapter of Vinyl I write about the desire of musicians to escape the commodification process, focusing in particular on the the negative comments rock musicians have made regarding the transformation of their art into serially produced consumer goods. However, it is clear that most musicians (myself included) loved the experience of being pressed into a record for the first time. Consequently, I would now temper my analysis in two ways. Firstly, mass manufacture is not always spurned. There are many artists (and consumers) who place their faith in the most multiplied of products. Jimi Hendrix was amongst them (at least when it came to guitars). According to Charles Shaar Murray:

he seldom bothered with special left-hand models, both because right-handed guitars were more plentiful and easier to obtain, and because – with a touchingly American faith in mass-production – he believed that they were likely to be manufactured to a higher standard.

This depiction of the performer as consumer leads me to the second aspect that I would now change. In the chapter I make a crude distinction between artists and audiences. In doing so, I draw upon the work of Jon Stratton, but I now realise he may have led me up the wrong path. Stratton’s argument is that, in creating a vinyl record

The music is not only commodified; in the process it is also distanced, alienated, from the artist, and becomes an object which is understood to exist in its own right. It moves from the private domain of the artist to the public domain of the market place. Reciprocally, the artist experiences a distancing from his or her music as it becomes product, and is experienced as existing in a different social context. The record company, like a book publisher, acts as a gate-keeper shifting the experienced position of the music from the artist’s individual identification with his/her music to the experiencing of the music as a commodity in the market place.

He suggests that, as this happens, the artists aren’t only distanced from their music; they are distanced from the fans. The musicians stand at one end of a process, their audience is at the other. In between is the apparatus of recordings, gatekeepers and mediation.

He’s clearly right that the music becomes a product and that it exists in a different context. He’s wrong about other things, though. By entering the market place, the music isn’t distanced from the artists: they are consumers too. In fact, one of the reasons why artists are excited about seeing their work on record is because it enters shops in which they have browsed their whole lives. This isn’t alienation; this is coming home.

            What’s interesting to note, though, is that artists’ excitement about the commodity form always seems to come in relation to their first record releases. In the Beatles’ case they each knew by heart the R4949 catalogue number of ‘Love Me Do’. It had become etched into their memories as they had gazed at the record label for so long. And yet, once they had a few releases under their belts, the band members struggled to remember in which order those records were issued or which songs each album contained. Maybe the point at which pop stars become alienated is not when their music is turned into product, but when they stop hanging out in the market.

A Bit of a Blur

Although the ‘Blurred Lines’ legal case hasn’t been heard yet, it’s still making the news. Today’s Complete Music Update reported on the fact that neither ‘Blurred Lines’ nor the song that it is allegedly indebted to, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’, will be played in court. Instead, the case will be decided by analysing the sheet music for each song. This is clearly to Robin Thicke’s and Pharrell Williams’s advantage, as the sheet music for ‘Got to Give It Up’ doesn’t include any of the distinctive backing vocals or rhythmic nuances that inspired the creation of ‘Blurred Lines’.

This reliance on sheet music will strike most popular music fans as being unfair. It is evidence that the legal system is geared towards classical conceptions of composition. On the one hand, it favours melody and harmony. On the other hand, it ignores what Paul Théberge has termed popular music’s ‘primary site of creation’: the recording studio.

There is some sort of legal logic in this, however. Artists don’t usually own their sound recordings; record companies do. It is the composition of ‘Got to Give it Up’ that is on trial, and it is the composition that is owned by Marvin Gaye’s estate. Howard King, the lawyer who is defending ‘Blurred Lines’, has said: ‘A truly fair trial requires only a comparison of the compositions, not the sound recording which is not owned by the Gayes. Given the fact that the compositions have absolutely no substantial similarities, there is little chance the Gayes can prevail at trial or on any threatened appeal’.

Another way of looking at this is that artists should own their sound recordings. They are more obviously the creators of these artifacts than record companies are. Moreover, it is in creating the sound recording that the principal act of pop authorship often takes place.

One final thing. I’m pretty sure that the focus on sheet music in this case is a quirk of American law. I used to work for PRS for Music and the regular advice we gave to songwriters was that, in order to copyright their works, all they needed to do was to post a sealed copy of the recording to themselves and ensure that the received package remained unopened. And so, in the UK the recording can be considered to be the composition. And yet who usually claims to be its author?

LitPop: Writing and Popular Music

Late last year, Asghgate published the collection LitPop: Writing and Popular Music, edited by Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen. The book includes a chapter from me, titled ‘Audio Books: The Literary Origins of Grooves, Labels and Sleeves’, which expands upon research I undertook for Vinyl, concentrating on the moments where the packaging of the analogue record drew inspiration from the packaging of the novel. The chapter can be accessed here.

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Vinyl reviewed by Roy Shuker in Popular Music

The latest edition of Popular Music (34/1) has a review of Vinyl by the great popular music scholar Roy Shuker. Happily, he likes the book, saying that it ‘makes an important contribution to the now extensive body of work dealing with the development of recorded sound and its cultural implications’, and adding that ‘A wealth of detail is included, with many informative asides and extended footnotes, all in the service of a frequently insightful general account’. In conclusion he states, ‘This study of vinyl as both a recording format and a material artefact is informative, entertaining and thought provoking, showing the complexities which lie behind what are often taken for granted in musical practices and products’.

The Ancient and the Modern

On Sunday I went to the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve had my fill of ancient artefacts. Do I really need to see another broken arrowhead or shard of pottery? Figurines are a different matter, though. There’s something about sculptured images of the human form that cuts through the ages. And this museum has some great examples. It has plenty of Cycladic figures of the ‘canonical’ type. The arms are commonly folded in the same pattern and only the nose is shown in relief. The example below dates from 2800-2300 BC.

Better still, for me, are the Cypriot ‘plank’ figures. Although of a later time period than the Cycladic figures (the example below dates from 2000-1800 BC), they are also more basic. The head and body are blocked out and the only thing shown in any detail is the arms.

This simplicity doesn’t make these figures seem ancient. If anything, they are utterly modern. They remind me of Mark Rothko’s great late works, and help to prove that there’s nothing ‘abstract’ about paintings such as No. 12 (Black on Dark Sienna on Purple) (1960). Instead, as Rothko claimed, his pictures are ‘expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on’.

After the gallery I went to a bar with some friends. In the bar they were playing a compilation of 1950’s Chicago blues tracks. Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’ came on. It stopped me in my tracks. Is there a more powerful voice in the history of recorded sound than that of the Howlin’ Wolf? And is there any other singer who has been able to communicate more of his body through his voice? The chorus of 'Smokestack Lightning' hit me with the same force that the plank figures did. And it hit me in the way that I feel when I look at a Rothko. I was confronting humanity head on. For me, there’s nothing postmodern about linking Cycladic art to the Chicago Blues. I also fail to see anything ‘primitive’ or 'naive' in any of this art. Instead, the feeling that I get from 'Somestack Lightning' and from Rothko and from the figurines has more to do with what Greil Marcus once wrote about ‘Holidays in the Sun’: ‘no one has yet seen all the way to the bottom of [it], and probably no one ever will’. But these depths keep on drawing you in and you keep on staring.

Reeling in the Years

Songwriters and producers provide their hits with hooks, but they can never be sure what they are going to catch.

            I saw in this New Year in at a family party in Cyprus, where I heard two songs whose hit potential was surely realised beyond the artists’ greatest dreams. The first was Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’. I have no doubt that he knew at the time of the record’s release that the ‘magic break’, the thundering entry of the drums held back until 3 minutes 40 seconds into the song, was a high point of the recording. And yet he could never have known just how popular this break would become. Over the years it has grown in stature so that it is now the main hook of the song. Collins acknowledges this and in recent concerts has provided a teasing performance in which he parades the stage in the early phases of ‘In the Air Tonight’, making the audience think he won’t make it back to the drums in time for that famous roll around the kit. And who can resist playing air drums along with him? Audiences revel in this moment. And this isn’t just Phil Collins’ fans either. This run around the drums is probably more popular than the rest of his repertoire combined.

            From the sublime to the ridiculous. The second song that I heard was Tom Jones’s ‘Sex Bomb’. We were having a dancing competition, in which various older couples had to improvise routines and be judged by the youngsters in the room. ‘Sex Bomb’ was, of course, hilarious. The couple who danced to it played up to its unsubtle theme and brought the house down. The song was performing as its creators hoped it would. It was working because it is a Tom Jones’ song: it is not quite ironic. Jones’s is being playful with has playboy reputation, and yet at the same time there’s no way that he’d want people to think that he’s not a sex bomb. The same thing applies to the people who dance to it. They’re being silly and yet at the same time they want to be thought of as sexy too. Ultimately, however, the main reason why the song was working at our party was because it was a big hit. Its success in the dancing competition was reliant on the fact that everybody knew it. 'Sex Bomb' has done what its writers hoped; at the same time it has had resonance beyond their wildest dreams (could they have envisioned our party in Cyprus?). It has also become more enjoyable than it would be if it didn’t have the ability to provoke public fun. When I first heard ‘Sex Bomb’ on its release in 2000 I thought it was horrible. This New Year, when people were calling it for it to be repeated, I thought for the first time in my life, ‘yes, I do want to hear "Sex Bomb" again’.

How do you like your Hits: Overdetermined or Underdetermined?

It’s amazing that any wannabe artist thinks that they could be signed on the strength of their demo recordings. And maybe nobody ever is. Perhaps the procedure exists in order to give musicians (and audiences) the impression that success is the result of music alone.

            There are at least two reasons why it’s impossible to judge an act’s potential from its demos. One is that the success of a recording is overdetermined. Record companies line up a number of causes in order to effect a hit. The music if obviously important, but so are the various promotional activities that are put in place. Chief amongst these is the creation of a ‘star text’. As Andrew Goodwin has pointed out, there are various narratives at play in every recording. One of these is the narrative of the song; another is the narrative of the star. They reflect upon each other. The star’s life forms part of the story of the song, and the song forms part of the star’s story. Unsigned artists face a problem: they have no narrative depth. Hence the record companies’ conservatism when it comes to signing acts. Hits maybe the surest way of creating stars, but stars are the surest way of creating hits.

            The other difficulty in judgement comes from the fact that hits are underdetermined. They are launched into the world with no guarantee that they will be a success. This isn’t just because artists and record companies don’t know what they are doing and can’t judge the mood of the public. On the contrary, the most knowing popular music is made with full consciousness that it can’t assume the activities of the public. It is deliberately unfinished. The skill lies in allowing some room in the music for ‘articulation’, ‘participatory culture’, and all those other re-appropriative tactics that cultural theorists delight in, while at the same time ensuring that this audience activity doesn’t lose cite of the original recording. Here we come full circle. A star text both helps to make these reworkings possible, as well as to keep them grounded; just think of all the audience activity that takes place around a Madonna or a Morrissey, as well as the sales of recordings that these artists generate. Once again, this causes problems for anyone judging a demo recording. How on earth can they foretell the audience’s interest, not just in taking the music up, but also in taking it over?