07.21.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund at 2:45 pm by George Smith
Johnny Pantywaist performed live in Pasadena over the weekend.
You’ll surely enjoy the loud electric folk of the Dick Destiny Band, in this case the Modern Gothic tale of an attack on Rupert Murdoch by a clumsy man with a shave cream pie.
A psychedelic three minute diversion after another day of open hostility in the Corporate Bund.
You can throw a couple dollars for strong beer or guitar strings in the tip jar here at the bottom of the page, but are not obligated. Or if you are in the area you can as to come see up perform such ditties for free every week.
Permalink
07.17.14
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 11:16 am by George Smith
Sad, in Zurich.
A Los Angeles Times piece this morning noted in the early 70’s Winter “helped drive a germinating boogie rock movement.” Certainly true. Johnny Winter was all over big stages, as part of the Blue Sky roster of artists (think the Edgar Winter Group and Rick Derringer), he was one of the most influential and widely-seen hard rockers of that time.
And he looked the part, as seen in the segment from Don Kirshner: Top hat, glam rock platform shoes, a big white beard, well before ZZ Top took the image, only accentuating his albinism. And, of course, volume, big amplifiers and an unrelenting beat.
A nasty heroin put him on the bench for awhile and he returned around ’76 with “Still Alive & Well,” written by Rick Derringer and the title of the Winter album it appeared on. Johnny Winter would relapse to alcohol or drugs from time to time, the last crisis being in the mid-90s, I think.
But he got through it all, returning to the stage seated although it was clear his health had deteriorated.
I have half a dozen or so of his records and like them all, “Let Me In,” from 1991 being the favorite. The boogie rock is at its peak on a live album on Blue Sky in ’76 in front of a stadium crowd. That band minus a second guitar player is on display on the 20-minute segment from Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. Dig the bass player rocking the fake fur lady’s hat.
Another seller was an earlier live album with Derringer in Johnny Winter And although I like the debut studio record, self-titled, more.
I interviewed Winter in 1991 when he was in Allentown at the Fairgrounds opening for George Thorogood. He was quite the Texas gentleman.
Here it is, reprinted from here:
Johnny Winter talks with the kind of Texas drawl that makes you think he’d be a good neighbor, the kind you could share a beer with.
The tall, pale guitarist says that he had recorded a song about drinkin’ for “Let Me In,??? his new disc on Point Blank, but he decided to leave it off because … well, you know how that kinda thing got George Thorogood in hot water.
Winter said he’s never heard Thorogood’s “If You Don’t Start Drinkin’ (I’m Gonna Leave).??? “But I’ve heard plenty about it,??? he laughed.
Asked if he thought that anyone would have made a fuss about this song if it had been recorded five years ago, Winter said he didn’t think so.
Which makes one think about what’s going on with rock ‘n’ roll these days. Don’t rock bands advertise beer? And where do you often see them perform? Smoky bars, right? And what’s served in bars? Think about these things too much, and your head will throb.
So it’s time to move on and say why Johnny Winter’s opening for George Thorogood at the Allentown Fair tomorrow night. Mainly, it’s in support of “Let Me In,??? as fine a rock record as you’ll hear this year.
It should be a good show. After all, there’s lots of cool stuff from the disc that Winter can play. For instance, “Barefootin’,??? which was a great cover when Brownsville Station performed it as the B-side of “Smokin’ In The Boys Room??? many years ago. It still sounds pretty good on “Let Me In.???
And one could yell for “Sugaree,??? where Winter plays some lowdown stop-’n-start guitar boogie riffs that sound real fine in the summer time.
There’s plenty of blues on the record, too, so the purists that regularly rag Winter about whether he’s a rocker or a bluesman can still get their bile pumpin’ over whether “Let Me In??? is more “blooz??? or more “rock.???
“I was getting s— about that in the ’60s,??? said Winter. “I don’t really understand it — you’ll always have someone who isn’t comfortable unless there’s a title on it. But it’s just the way I play.???
Which brings to mind his last album, “Winter of ‘89.??? Produced by Terry Manning, some of it had a ZZ Top throb to it that made the purists scream blue murder. Actually, the record wasn’t bad — there was the usual helping of fierce playin’ and singin’ that you can find on just about every Johnny Winter album.
“It was an attempt to be more commercial,??? said Winter. “But it wasn’t that good an experience. I did my part and left and then the producer did his. I like to get more involved in the recording, so we didn’t get along too well.???
Why does Winter have to be “more commercial???? It’s hard to figure out, considering the big draw he was in the ’70s with records like “Still Alive And Well,??? “Second Winter??? and “Saints And Sinners.???
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Winter recorded for Alligator, an independent blues label for most of the ’80s. You do that kind of thing too much and businessmen start calling you uncommercial.
But Winter made his first and only video for Alligator. And then it went and got aired on MTV, but it was hard to tell if that helped much because fans of Winter apparently don’t watch MTV.
Although it’s up to Point Blank, his new label, Winter said he’d like to make another. “The one I did was fun. We found a guy who hadn’t done any videos, just commercials, and he agreed to do it. I couldn’t bitch. I don’t know anything about it.
“He’d say, `Walk over here,’ and then I’d do what he said.???
Which seems like a sensible way to make a video when you take a gander at those on MTV –most of which are “tasteless and horrible,??? according to Winter.
It is indeed hard not to like Winter. You can listen to his guitar-playin’ of which much great stuff has been written. You can remember when he used to wear a neat top hat, or you can recall that he’d been laboring in Texas backwaters for 10 years before one paragraph in Rolling Stone magazine made him “the next big thing??? more than two decades ago.
It was just a short blurb and, Winter said, “It surprised me to death. It was just what this one guy said. I couldn’t believe it; it still seems impossible.
“And then the same record company people that I’d been trying to talk to for 10 years were all calling me at once.???
A documentary, released this year, to what seems like virtually no distribution.
Permalink
07.15.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 11:28 am by George Smith
Today venture capitalist Tim Draper, dean of Draper University for Heroes and bringer of BitCoins to Argentine investors who need something like gold to replace their pesos, successfully submitted the necessary signatures to get his Six Californias referendum on the ballot in 2016. This, you recall, the campaign to free the Silicon Valley from the rest of us who aren’t destined to be disruptive world-changing entrepreneurs.
He put 4 – 5 million of his own money into it, considerably less than the 19 million spent on 30,000 BitCoins from Silk Road, which will — one assumes — still have good value after 2016.
“He’s got a pretty high bar to pass,” Corey Cook, director of the University of San Francisco’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, told the San Jose Mercury News. “There’ll be a general skepticism of how dividing the state would improve it.”
And here is another swank video of a perfect Culture of Lickspittle moment, Draper singing “The Riskmaster” backed by WJM, a band of 11-year olds seen much more frequently than might be expected on Bay Area stages if their parents weren’t well-heeled investment managers and disruption consultants.
There is much video on YouTube and a photo spread at the SJ Mercury News here. Jello Biafra wept.
But there is no denying they do one music genre well: Perfect dad rock by 11-year olds for the pleasure of upper class parents throughout San Francisco, San Jose, Mountain View and Menlo Park. It’s a not inconsiderable audience and one that still has money to spend.
Readers will note pictures of the approving fathers and mothers in the Mercury News feature, one “who is managing partner and president of Palo Alto Investors, LLC, an investment management firm founded in 1989 with $1 billion in assets invested in healthcare.”
Another is a principal in something called the W20 Group, the website of which advertises its expertise in “pragmatic disruption” and “entrepreneurs in a state of ‘do’ — blowing up existing models one at a time.”
Permalink
06.06.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 4:29 pm by George Smith
The still life of a thicket of Colt 45s grows more lush. At the very end, the hand makes an appearance.
The glitzy version, full rock band with swiped GE commercial, was made about three years ago.
Since then, not so amazingly, nothing has changed.
And Tapatio sells more at my neighborhood market than Sriracha (1) so it makes an appearance. The packets come in bags of potato chips from Mexico, not at all a bad idea.
As an existential question that falls naturally from the music: What is one to do when you’ve been locked out of everything you are able to do in American life?
Since it’s now a condition that affects millions, it’s of some importance.
My answer is that in choosing not to answer it, the country will be an historic and unique example of a corporate fascist state characterized of crushing poverty and small enclaves of well-being where the wealthy and their high-button servants live, sub-nations where the people are protected by the security infrastructure and the general national character of servile obedience to wealth.
Fed by workers who bring them their meals through TaskRabbit, they will be continually delighted by consumer electronics from Apple, always enhanced by apps which allow them to use simple finger motions to summon the help.
1. Town burghers decided they did not want to continue bad relations with the company, anyway. Two weeks after the national news fight, everyone made nice.
Permalink
05.31.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:44 pm by George Smith
Apple, with regard to music (now almost everything, actually) is similar to a disease for which finding the cure is fiendishly difficult. It’s tech malaria, with the efficiency and presence of the common cold thrown in. (Amazon fits the bill, too, but I’ve already spent a lot of time on the Empire of Bezos.)
The pic above is Apple’s Eddie Cue, the architect of the company’s recent deal to acquire Beats, the streamed music and half-assed tech company of which Dre, record mogul Jimmy Iovine and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, are equity partners.
This is what Cue had to say, as reprinted from RockNYCLiveand Recorded:
“Music is dying???, says Apple executive Eddie Cue, the man responsible for the Apple buy out of Dre and Iovine’s beats …
It is hard to know where to begin with this stuff but let’s start by saying OK, music is dying, how the hell does Apple buying Beats change anything at all?
Eddie Cue is being silly. If he means that the music business is dying, well, welcome to 2002, now fuck off.
Cue’s worth the derision. And read the whole thing, The Apple/Beats Deal For Dummies,” here. It’s short but effectively captures the nut of it.
Apple felt the need for a streaming music service because those services, the most famous of which is Spotify, are cutting into iTunes’ lunch. Streaming music, as opposed to downloading files of it, left Apple out of the mix.
In terms of being good for music or artists, neither are. People get paid less and less, unto virtually nothing, courtesy of the technology. Only those who own the services make the piles.
However, in paying $3 billion dollars to get a really-not-that-good music streaming company that started as a maker of unremarkable name-branded headphones, you have a really good example of how gargantuan piles of money are made in the Culture of Lickspittle.
Our world, any part of it, music or otherwise, hardly required Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and will.i.am to be turned into tech billionaires for little more than being there.
It’s a working example of the central thesis of Thomas Piketty’s Capital, the one that says a big pile of money trumps everything, even world growth, because our social economic structure just makes big piles of cash bigger faster than everything else by dint of their nature as big piles.
So you can think you want about the latest scam as some kind of new tech coup of wonderfulness and disruption but if Iovine, Dre and company are the faces of innovation, I’m Ernest Hemingway.
An interview at Fortune with will.i.am underscores how nothing instantly becomes worth a billion dollars. The only thing necessary is to just be on the receiving end as the river of money goes sloshing by from A to B.
In the process people are seen to turn from human beings with good qualities, the making of music that has made millions happy, into model plutocrats. Someone already very wealthy is given another king’s ransom for, essentially, zip, a null that has only the most trivial social potential for good.
In one effortless step they’re catapulted into the realm of compensation of the maligned American corporate CEO, you know, the class that’s now the constant symbol of advancing inequality.
At Fortune, will.i.am is interviewed and extolled, for vesting into the billionaires club for just being himself. This is described as “tireless promotion.”
The quotes are fatuous. It’s remarkable anyone even sat still for them.
“This is the craziest rollercoaster I’ve ever been on,” will.i.am tells the interviewer of the couple of weeks it took to make the Apple/Beats deal.
In 2003, will.i.am tells the journalist he saw camera phones in the audience: “[And] I tell Jimmy, ‘We need to make hardware. The world has changed. Hardware, hardware, hardware, hardware.’ ”
So what’s world-changing hardware, hardware, hardware?
A headphone. That he didn’t make. Never mind the only reason the transaction occurred is because of Beats transition into a digital music service from one that sold unspectacular but high-priced headphones and speakers.
“It’s not just good for the company, it’s good for the culture,” continues will.i.am.
“You have to look at it like, How is it good for kids in inner cities first? How do kids in inner cities not only dream about being athletes and musicians, but now, entrepreneurs, and bringers of new, disruptive, cool, lifestyle products.”
I think we can be certain, new disruptive lifestyle products will not and do not solve impoverishment and zero opportunity in America.
It was Steve Jobs genius, well after Apple was virtually destroyed in the PC and corporate network business by Microsoft, to remake iStuff as “lifestyle products.”
And such lifestyle products they were and are, priced well more than what they’re worth, but which people have to own because they are the electronic convenience baubles of our age.
iStuff has certainly not increased opportunity or empowered everyone to be their own entrepreneur. Polls show, although hardly ever well-publicized, that the majority don’t even want to be “entrepreneurs.”
Live in the distressed section of Pasadena, like me, and everyone owns smartphones, many of them Apple “lifestyle products.” They act as sole connections to the global networks, one of the major conduits of entertainments, and the only phone service.
Although often hyped as modern Philosopher’s Stones, capable of transmuting your leaden life into gold, they are not. Ownership doesn’t make you a small businessman, a self-made man or woman, a maker of new and upcoming “products.”
What, the Fortune interviewer asks, did Jimmy Iovine “want [will.i.am] available for?”
Answer: “I still don’t know, to this day.”
Permalink
05.13.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, Rock 'n' Roll at 11:30 am by George Smith
J. Everett Dutschke, the only alleged ricin maker to ever be a finalist in a Budweiser beer Battle of the Bands contest is in the news again. And I cannot do it justice.
So, here, from the local newspaper:
A man accused of sending ricin to President Barack Obama and two other public officials, then framing an Elvis impersonator recanted his confession at a sentencing hearing this morning after pleading guilty four ricin-related charges …
[Dutschke] reportedly recanted his confession and launched into a rant against Kevin Curtis, the Elvis impersonator he attempted to frame for the letters, comparing him to Barney the Dinosaur. Then Dutschke compared himself to an Olympic gymnast.
Dutschke then said that he would happily empty the contents of the letters he is accused of sending into a peanut butter sandwich and eat it to prove it was not poison.
J. Everett Dutschke — and a whole lot more — from WhiteManistan blog’s incomparable archives.
Permalink
05.12.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, Shoeshine at 12:00 pm by George Smith
At RockNYCLiveandRecorded, a music website edited by Iman Lababedi, an old regular at the long defunct Creem magazine:
Stenography, that is to say, the passing on of favorable publicity and hagiography, is the major business practice of the mainstream media. Having the temerity of daring opinion in relationship to power, or money or whatever the majority feels is great consumer stuff, went badly out of fashion in the last few decades. So Lorde can be forgiven for believing something stupid, but which sounds superficially fair on first hearing, about the original nature of entertainment writing.
Stenography, or the rote passing on of free publicity, is a decades old problem, spread across many genres of journalism.
When I started writing for the Morning Call newspaper of Allentown in the late Eighties it came at a time when the entertainment section’s function was to be exactly that — providing of stenographers for the local arts people and those coming through town.
When that changed to sending in reports that frequently afflicted those deserving of it, it created a substantial short term fit. The assistant managing editor did not at all like getting angry phone calls on Monday morning, the first time he could be reached after the weekend bits had run. There was no e-mail you could just delete. You had to listen to grumpy people on the phone. In his estimation, the job of features section journalists was to make their subjects happy …
Read all of it.
Permalink
03.24.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 4:32 pm by George Smith
From the world of the WhiteManistan Blues Band.
Real sweat worn 2003 Gibson Melody Maker, P-90, red, one volume knob, one tone, and a big noise in twang town.
Permalink
02.24.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China, Rock 'n' Roll at 10:35 am by George Smith
From USA Today:
Here’s a Stars and Stripes shocker: Prior to Friday, flags bought by the Department of Defense weren’t necessarily 100% American-made.
But going forward, flags purchased by the military must be wholly sourced from the U.S. — and not have any elements from overseas, according to a Department of Defense purchasing rules amendment that went into effect Friday.
While the Department of Defense’s major flag vendors are American companies, the flag material — such as ink and fabric — could have come from foreign markets prior to the change.
“Our men (and) women in uniform should serve under American-made flags,” Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., said on his Facebook page last week. He proposed the legislation requiring the flags to be 100% American-made.
“After Thompson posted news of the regulation on his Facebook page, it spurred much debate among users on that site … Some applauded the rule … Others said flag production should be done by the most cost-effective source, even if that meant going outside of the U.S.,” it continues.
“I would like for someone to offer one economically sound reason we should show preference to the more expensive American made American Flags, rather the affordable flags made in other countries,” reads one such comment. “I cannot support this crony capitalism.”
Markets must not be constrained by government order! Liberty! Atlas will shrug!
Whenever you see the slogans and beliefs now it’s always the property of the WhiteManistan boys club, people who deserve a kick in the butt and superciliousness.
China makes American flags more cheaply, the article notes.
In 2003 I sent off a parcel of cheer-you-up-type stuff to an US Air Force friend who was serving in Iraq. In return he sent back an American flag in a box that contained an official notice that said flag had been flown in a combat mission in an A-10.
I was informed the flags were bought and sent out on sorties for just such purposes. The flag, which was made a nylon fabric or something similar, had a made in China identification.
I no longer have it.
I don’t care whether stuff is made in China. It’s all I or lots of Americans can afford.
The piece of minor legislation by a Democrat is very small beer. It makes no difference at all to our collective fortunes. If an American corporation must now have the flags it supplies to the US Dept. of Defense made in America, it will either find a way to still use Chinese-made flags and have them fall under the made-in-America stipulation by having US workers add one little thing before they’re put in boxes or pass the slightly higher price on to the taxpayer.
Big deal.
My Fender telecaster is made-in-China.
It’s part and product of an economy where American corporations have been allowed to prey on the civilian population for decades, pushing pay for work down until all that could be done to keep a semblance of middle class life going was to buy goods made by ever cheaper labor. Nationally, paying people fairly became equated with the source of all evil, government.
Of course, you can have an economy in which people are paid more and the corporations are allowed to do many things, just not cannibalize and liquidate the lives of their domestic workers.
We don’t have it. Some European nations and other more progressive economies, places that aren’t slumped like the US, do.
A telecaster guitar has a simple specification. It can be made anywhere.
A Chinese factory can make them as effectively as the Fender Custom Shop and its alleged Master Builders.
The only reason the “Master Builder” employee description took hold in this country is its convenience as a marketing tool for the artisan work “crafted” for the snob buyer market. In this market the guitar is an investment, to grow in value as it ages.
But electric guitars are by no means scarce goods. They are not precious jem stones, old classic muscle cars, gold, the first Amazing Spider Man comic book or even BitCoin.
Leo Fender would have snorted at the warping in today’s American guitar markets.
“China Toilet Blues” is, amazingly, four years old. Which is when I started doing my “protest” music set to video. It was the first.
At 21 seconds, the commonly seen American flag lapel pin on insincere patriots and politicians. There’s Hugo Chavez, now dead. And who’s the crazy mullah? I don’t remember.
I still have my Mojo Deluxe harmonica but I no longer see the original book it came with and it’s no longer being marketed as new.
The market for weekend retreats in which corporate middle-managers have their leadership and creative skills strengthened by learning to play blues harmonica never blossomed as planned.
The image of a roomful of managers from Kraft Foods or directors from the American Society of Forensic Laboratories learning to “blow their blues away” on Chinese harmonicas during a compulsory leadership get-together is a shattering one. You would be hard-pressed to think up a situation containing less “mojo,” creativity and fun although you might be able to imagine it as a potential TV movie in which special punishments in Hell are meted out to the deserving. — 2008
Of course, you can still buy many harmonicas from China. My favorite package, from a couple years ago, was the Piedmont Blues pack.
The $180 3D-manufactured American super harmonica flopped.
The company, tits up, two years ago:
The only harmonica made in the U.S. was manufactured right here in Rockford. It was a business so unique, many thought it would take-off and create a hundred jobs. Instead, Harrison Harmonicas abruptly closed about a year ago, leaving no employment future and customers without their pre-paid orders or a refund.
Bum-bum-ba-bum-bump!
A blast from the past, February 2010:
Fender Musical Instruments is another example of ‘artisan’ business.
The book on its musical amplifiers entitled The Soul of Tone is an unintentional profile of a company that went from being a middle class employer in California, one making things for the middle class, to a company that sent all its manufacturing overseas, reserving its domestic manufacturing — greatly decreased — to stars and big deal corporate lawyers.
In the context of the book, it’s written of as straightforward smart business. When it was published, three years ago, it seemed that way.
Now it reads poorly. The first part of the book is filled with great amplifiers made in America by guys and gals in Hawaiian shirts.
The end of the book is quite different. It’s filled with oral history from its current designer/artisans explaining how they ship their everyman stuff manufacturing to whatever overseas place is the cheapest.
Coincidentally, all the guys pictured in the front of the book are dead.
This transformation is encapsulated in a quote about one premium domestically made guitar amplifier, the Vibro-King, a $2500 item used by Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend.
“If you’re a rock star or a lawyer who wants a Vibro-King, you’re gonna get one, but the Cyber-Champ (a low end Chinese-made Fender-branded amp) is an example of the relentless march to Asia for manufacturing,??? states Shane Nicholas of Fender.
Coincidentally, all economic reports indicate that class hit hardest by the Great Recession has been the low wage earners, those customers targeted by Fender’s cheap goods made in China.
And, of course, the update, a Captain Beefheart-themed version starring Tom Friedman, quoting from one of his columns:
Well, folks, Sputnik just went up again: China is going clean-tech!
What a perfect asshole.
And this week, an odious lecture from someone at Google, passed off as how-to-get-hired advice.
Permalink
01.28.14
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Uncategorized at 4:09 pm by George Smith
I interviewed him once for the Allentown Morning Call. His was a gentle soul of great accomplishment and generosity.
From February 1990:
There was a time not too long ago when Sing Out! magazine was in such dire straits that one of its founding members, folk hero Pete Seeger, had to sell the rights to his best-known song, “If I Had A Hammer,” to an English tea company, to keep the quarterly afloat.
The tea company wanted to use the song in an advertising jingle. “I don’t normally do that kind of thing, but there was a need and the money was used to pay off some of Sing Out!’s outstanding bills,” Seeger recalled wistfully during a telephone interview last week from his home in Beacon, N.Y.
That low point came in 1982. Sing Out! was $35,000 in debt. Things were so bad that during the summer, the magazine closed its New York City office. The office’s contents were loaded into a U-Haul truck and taken to Easton, where old copies of Sing Out! and files were stored in the basement of a sympathetic bicycle dealer. The publication’s future was uncertain.
Now, however, financial turmoil is a distant memory, a sour note whose sound has been drowned out by ringing chords of revitalization. The South Side Bethlehem-based magazine started in New York City by Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays is enjoying a banner year as it celebrates its 40th anniversary.
Sing Out! circulation is at an all-time high of 10,000. The quarterly currently employs three full-time workers. After recent remodeling, the magazine occupies about 1,800 square feet of office space at 125 E. Third St., plus another 900 square feet of basement storage.
In May, the Sing Out! Resource Center will open in the publication’s Bethlehem office. The center will give the public access to an extensive collection of books, manuscripts, reports and recordings relating to folk music, folklore and folk songs.
There also is a news-style radio magazine in the offing for the last quarter of 1990. (“It will be sort of the `All Things Considered’ of folk music,” said Sing Out! editor Mark Moss.) In addition, Sing Out! will stage four festivals this year. The first will be May 18 in New York City and feature Seeger, Dave Van Ronk and other folk artists. Others will be held in Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., throughout the year.
Along with those projects, Sing Out!, in conjunction the C.F. Martin Guitar Co. in Nazareth, has designed and produced a limited-edition commemorative instrument. All 40 guitars are signed by Seeger and the rest of Sing Out’s board of directors. The guitars never reached stores; demand was so great that the instruments were sold before most were made. The guitars reportedly listed for about $3,400 …
Seeger, Sing Out!’s sole surviving founder, was enthusiastic as he reminisced about the magazine’s shaky financial history. “The publication actually started just after World War II in 1945 under the name People’s Song Bulletin — Songs Of Labor And The American People. I had been in the service; Woody (Guthrie) had been in the merchant marine. Along with Lee Hays, we thought that our good contacts in the labor unions would be very beneficial for a magazine dealing with music for and by the people.
“Well, the Cold War came along and dashed our hopes for that. So People’s Songs folded in 1949.”
For one year, Seeger put out a mimeographed newsletter, which he continued until 1950, the year Sing Out! — essentially a reborn People’s Songs — was started.
“Sing Out!’s circulation eventually rose to a high point of about 10,000 during the great false folk boom of 1964 — thanks to The Kingston Trio,” Seeger recalled. “The magazine, however, was always on the brink of bankruptcy.
“By 1982, the editors had said to me, `We’ve tried everything. We can’t continue working without being paid. There’s no hope.’ ”
Seeger then produced a Sing Out! newsletter which asked the readership what should be done to revitalize the publication. In the meantime, he sold the rights to “If I Had A Hammer.”
Moss, then on the Sing Out! editorial board, remembered, “The ’70s were a difficult period for us. Sing Out! was seen by its subscribers as moving between being an eclectic music magazine and a magazine with a more political bent. And it was seen as not doing both particularly well by readers who favored either camp.
“The seed money that Pete raised was used to hold us over while we polled the readers on what they wanted and ran fund-raisers to bring in more revenue.”
It turned out, said Seeger and Moss, that readers wanted the magazine to refocus on folk music. There wasn’t a need to beat them over the head with all things political. Nor was there a need to continue three-color layouts and standard magazine size.
“The readers wanted a return to a smaller size which better matched our print size,” said Seeger. “It was relaunched with the idea that the editor needed more support from his board of directors.”
In August 1982, the magazine’s supporters began in earnest to pay off the $35,000 debt. Through benefit concerts and donations the debt was eradicated by the end of the year. Enough money also was raised to re-start the magazine, and in 1983 Sing Out! began publishing from a vacant warehouse on 4th Street in Easton. The first issue went to press in April. Sing Out! moved to Bethlehem in December 1987, when the Easton building was sold.
Seeger believes that, in part, Sing Out!’s rejuvenation can be attributed to the quality of the writing. “Most of the arts publications I’ve seen aren’t very well done. The mural painters’ newsletter and one devoted to ceramics are good examples. Obviously, some artists aren’t very good with words.
“But Sing Out! seems to be better than most. It should be . . . folk artists deal in words, so they should be halfway decent at writing, don’t you think? They remake songs; they know how to cut and paste.”
Permalink
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »