Boss Radio

In the USA the NAB have begun their campaign against the proposal that they, like radio stations over the rest of the world, should pay the artists who make the records a commision for playing them. On their website there's an article with the same title as this blog (No, I'm not paying them commision for it). It reads:-

Olympians aren’t the only ones who bring home the gold…

Local radio stations provide billions of dollars in promotional value to artists and record labels. In appreciation, the record labels bestow upon radio stations "gold" and "platinum" albums to show their gratitude.

So why do labels now want to "tax" radio for playing music – a practice that has put money in their pockets for more than 80 years?

I would venture to say that the reason is because the rich b@$#@£ds who run the record companies are thanking the rich b@$#@£ds for... let's not call it 'payola', let's call it 'services rendered', and it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the artists get paid their dues.

Since it will never see the light of day, here's the letter I've sent to the NAB today:-

I can't help thinking you're being more than a little frugal with the facts about performance tax, known to me and my brother as 'royalties'. The fact is that when a US artist gets played on the radio almost anywhere in the world, even Cuba, they get paid performance royalties, but when a foreign artist gets played on US radio they get nothing. The US is one of just five countries in the entire world that don't pay performer's royalties, and the other four are 3rd world nations.

To say you offer free publicity is nothing short of dishonest. When scores of US radio stations were chasing the Beatles around the globe they weren't doing it because they wanted The Beatles to be big stars, they were doing it because The Beatles were making big money for them, and in the majority of markets that's still the situation, from everything I've heard of US radio over the internet over 90% of the material they broadcast is from already successful recordings.

As far as I'm concerned if radio stations in the richest nation in the world can't afford to pay me and my brother our miserable pittance then there is something majorly wrong with the way those radio stations are being run, and I would suggest that the guys at the top take a wage cut immediately for manifestly failing in their jobs.

Maybe I should put my mouth where my money is and get Boss Radio onto the air...

Just to show 'them' that it can be done of course.

As part of an ongoing discussion about the Sex Pistols on Red's blog I mentioned how the guitarist and the drummer got started by stealing another group's equipment, something which, to the best of my knowledge, they have never made reparations or even apologised for. This in turn reminded me of one of my early guitars which got stolen.

Thinking back, that little Harmony Rocket II probably saved my life.

A guy off his skull on something came into the venue we were playing and apparently asked the idiot on the door if he could sing with the band. The idiot says "Sure." Neither of them thought to tell us so the first I knew about it was when this guy leaps onto the stage, shouts "Tramp!" into the mike, and jumps off again.

This happened 5 or 6 times then suddenly he decided that if I wasn't going to be a Rufus Thomas to his Aretha Franklin then he wanted to sing more than one word and tried to wrench the mike away from my face. Naturally my first instinct was to grab it back, and suddenly I found myself losing a wrist wrestling match with a gorilla. This was when Macho Man decided to borrow my body. With one final massive effort I wrenched the mike out of his grasp and went on with the song.

For about 0.5 of a second.

Next thing I know the guy's back on the stage slamming his fist into what he apparently thinks is my stomach, the fact that I'm wearing a guitar seemingly having missed his attention. His fist hit the strings and continued on until it hit the pickup - and the screws that were holding it in place. Macho Man was incensed, his immediate reaction being to whip my guitar off and punch the guy's lights out right there on the stage, but he was already gone, running out of the hall with blood pouring from his hand and leaving me with no recourse but to make chicken noises from the stage.

The guitar was pretty bloodstained so I stuck a "This machine kills" notice on the pick-guard and polished the stains up to a nice lustre.

Suddenly I feel really bad about losing that guitar.

If I should ever see a Sex Pistol in possession of it... He shall die!!!

So, I know you're all wondering what I've been up to whilst I was out there battling the ISP foe to a standstill. I can feel the vibrations. Either that or my hard drive is going down.

It seemed like the whole time that I was offline there was just an endless stream of blogworthy incidents happening. I guess that's what goes on when you're not online. Stuff happens. Certainly it seemed like at least twice a day something would happen which would make me think "Must blog this... Gah!!"

One thing I didn't expect to be blogging about was picking up a book called '40 years of NME charts' a few months ago.

Doesn't sound very promising, does it? Go ahead, you can say it, even now as I type this it sounds like the prologue to something I wouldn't bother to read. A blog about a book. Worse, a blog about a list of Hit Parades masquerading as a book. I think I'll stop right now.

Only I haven't. Nope. Still here.

For those not in the know, the New Musical Express was the first UK publication to feature the recorded music charts. Yup. Charts based upon the number of gramophone records sold in the previous week. Hard to imagine it was such a novel idea, eh? The fact is that until rock'n'roll and skiffle no one was particularly interested in what was selling, but once someone turned the electricity on - as another blogger somewhere once put it - there was no stopping us. Admittedly I was just a kid, but rock'n'roll was definitely different even to those of us still in short trousers, and (Much to my dad's chagrin), as soon as I realised that there were charts with the names of rock'n'roll and skiffle stuff in them, I wanted to see them. It was probably the only time dad wished that I hadn't learnt to read so early.

To my mother the idea that I might start school without being able to read was complete anathema, and with the aid of Korky the Kat, Little Plum (Your Redskin chum), and Desperate Dan in the Dandy and the Beano I started to learn to read. Dad never actively participated in 'putting the shoes on Willy', that I can remember, but he certainly approved to the point of not playing any of his 78s while I was learning. Little did he know that it was shortly to start costing him something in the region of 1/- a week.

The first thing I noticed as I perused the book for the first time, was that there was no rock'n'roll in the earliest charts, but since at that point I wasn't long seperated from my mother's womb I guess this was to be expected. The next thing I noticed was the mistakes. When you publish a weekly chart you can get away with the occasional error, but when they're later displayed in sequential order it becomes kinda easy to notice when a record vanishes from the charts for a week, only to come back the following week with a 'Last week's position' displayed alongside it. The 3rd thing I noticed was that you don't hear this music on the radio any more.

That 3rd thing turned into a kind of quest which is going to require its own blog entry. When I got back on board there were 298 messages awaiting me in one of my mailboxes, and 342 in the other, and some of them were replies to mails I've been sending out about The Quest.

If you're a post-war baby boomer you'll be interested, if you're not you'll be surprised at just how dumb some people think you are.

More later.

Time for my annual 'How old are your kids?' call to my brother in the vain hope of getting a clue as to what to buy for them this Christmas, and as usual we have a moan about eBay and how easy it is to spot a con once you've fallen for it. Then we move on to music, which used to be how both of us earned enough to live on (Not so easy these days unfortunately), and from there on to the subject of Where It All Began.

Music, that is.

You see, he says (And I don't actually disagree with him on this) that you can trace the origins of any style of music back to before it supposedly began, whereas I maintain that you can pinpoint when various fashions in music occured. Well, OK, not pinpoint exactly, but I do have a rule that places everything into a window of maybe two to... erm...five years. It's my two stages of music theory, each stage of which takes 5 years.

It seems to me that real exitement in music must have started in the mid 50s when Rock'n'roll errupted. My brother can point to numberous other artists who were recording r'n'r-alikes way before that, and I don't deny it. Howlin' Wolf was recording architypical rock'n'roll way before then, and Hank Williams recorded a song called 'Move it on over' which was 'Rock around the clock', but that's not the point. Even though I was just a kid, I knew that something was happening when rock'n'roll was 'born'. One day music was boring, the next day some of it wasn't, and the newspapers were all trying to tell me not to listen to the exciting stuff. You don't have to be grown up to know that you're onto something here when that happens...

Of course, since then I've seen film of how it was when jazz broke out, and it obviously was just as pleasurable to that audience as rock'n'roll was to me, but I didn't know that then, and in any case rock'n'roll was the first 'Teenage' music. No one had ever created music for the below-adult-above-child-status audience before, because it didn't have any money then, now it did.

For around 5 years rock'n'roll drove the establishment crazy. Religiously inspired record burnings were organised by Church leaders who interpreted the Bible in such a way as to prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that rock'n'roll was the devil's music. Apart from anything else it was causing ordinary white kids to dance just like... well, nowadays we'd say 'Black kids', back then if you were one of the dancers you'd call them 'Negroes', which was way better than what these Holy-men were calling them. Then, as if by magic, the guys with the money realised that they were missing out on a profit opportunity and started marketing rock'n'roll properly. For about 5 years after that the music started to stagnate as everyone tried to find the lowest-common-denominator between teenage-wild and family-friendly.

Then along came the Beatles. In fact all they were doing was reinventing rock'n'roll. 4 long haired kids who couldn't play their instruments that well but sang great songs with verve and abandon. Plus the girls loved them. Once again the industry was taken by surprise, and for about 5 years music flourished, but by the end of the next five years it was stagnating again.

Then along came punk. A lot has been said and written about punk. In truth all they were doing was reinventing rock'n'roll again. You remember my post about the roackabilly buskers? There's a bit I didn't mention. Not everyone liked them. Two small kids walked past with their hands over their ears. As I said before, the music wasn't loud, you could talk over it, the hands over the ears thing was a critical opinion, but hey, they were just kids. About quarter of an hour later a young mum walked past with her hands over her ears, now she was old enough to know better, expecially since her kid was looking at her in that way that kids look when their parents are doing something really really embarrassing. I looked at the guy next to me with a knowing look. "Ah, she's alright," he said. "Let's face it, music really started in the 70s." I was standing there thinking "Don't say it, don't say it."

But he did.

"Punk." He said. "It all started with The Clash".

That what's they always say. What is it about the punk generation? They all know that The Pistols were supposed the punk band, but they also know that they were largely manufactured by Mr. M. McLaren, and that's not cool. So The Clash have become the band that started music in the 70s, and what were they really? They were a bunch of shaggy haired kids who couldn't play their instruments that well but sang great songs with verve and abandon. In fact most of their material would be filed under 'Protest songs' which was pretty much a staple diet of the 60s music scene. A lot of bands cashed in on the punk scene, including The Clash and The Stranglers, but the sad truth is that most punk hits were by the previous generation simply jumping on the bandwagon (Can I mention The Stranglers again?...).

Who, of the real punks (If there ever was such a thing) actually had more than one hit single? Toyah maybe, but she was just Lulu for a new generation, Siouxsie And The Banshees fared pretty well although they had to enlist a little help from The Beatles to maintain it. Not that any of this mattered anyway because the punk ethic quickly gave birth to UK Bluebeat on the one hand, and a new breed of boys dressed as girls on the other, and so it goes...

In other words my theory is that somewhere around the middle of each decade something happens to give music a kick up the bum, and for around five years it thrives, and for another 5 it dies, then someone else comes along and gives the scene another boot up the backside. I just wish there was some way of making money out of this theory. Even if it never works again it would've made me filthy rich by now.

On the other hand, the smoking in public ban comes into force in slightly over half a year, at which point I might just dust off my guitar and take to the stage again, all ready to reinvent rock'n'roll.

Maybe no one'll notice that I'm not a hairy kid any more...