December 2009

For the end of the year, I will not rip on anyone in the music business (Will probably start again in 2010, but you never know!)

Instead I want to talk about something that is taking up most of my time these days. About five years ago, my friend Alice Peacock and I started a not for profit called Rock For Reading. We do two things:

1.We give monetary grants to small after school reading programs and small organizations that help with literacy issues in the Chicago area. At this time we have made monetary grants totaling $250,000.00.

2. We acquire books from book drives and from publishers and supply them to schools and after school reading programs in the area, many times stipulating that the books need to go home with the students- sometimes the first books that the child has ever owned! To date, we have donated 425,000 books. We recently received a donation of 93,000 books from a publisher in Minnesota, which will be sorted and inventoried this week and distributed after the first of the year. Also, I have just come home from the second of two days of driving around in a rental van (through a driving blizzard yesterday) picking up 300 boxes of books from 21 Borders book stores in the Chicago area. Borders held a book drive between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we are the recipients of all the books. Total should be about 30,000 books!! They will be sorted and distributed after the first of the year.

Doing this makes me feel like I am doing something positive in the world. It also makes me forget about all the morons in the music business that I have no interest in dealing with! (Couldn’t resist!!)

Happy New Year!!!

Early in my career, I met a person that I still to this day think was the greatest publicist in the history of the music business. His name was Paul Wasserman, and during his career, he worked with the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Jacksons, Tom Petty, The Who, and later in his career- U2 and Depeche Mode. He passed away in 2007 after his career unraveled at the end. But during the active part of his career, he was the best there was. He had the incredible ability to say NO in such a way that no one went away angry, something he had to do often, as most of his clients were such big stars that they didn’t need to ask for publicity, they had to manage it.

Probably the most important piece of information he ever told me (during a flight in a small plane that we all thought was going to crash in central Florida while on the road with Tom Petty) was this:

There are two kinds of publicists-

The good ones– they are the ones that tell their clients what they should do, as the client is paying a lot of money for the publicists advice!

The bad ones– they ask the client what they want to do (when of course the client will agree to do as little as they can get away with). These kind of publicists are basically just glorified secretaries!

Unfortunately, these days there are many more of the second kind than the first kind in the business today. When I ask for more access than what is usually given, more often than not the response will be, “I wish I could help you, but the band doesn’t agree.”

A good publicist talks the band into granting more access, because he or she knows that this will help the band.

Final thought: When we were flying in that small plane, through a thunderstorm, toward Gainseville, Florida, to meet Tom Petty for his first major hometown concert, one of the thoughts going through my head was:

Obituary-

Legendary music publicist Paul Wasserman dies in plane crash, music photographer also perishes!

In 1992, a Canadian film crew made a documentary called Blast Em. It was an indepth look at the Paparazzi scene at that time (in the days when paparazzis were just assholes, not MONUMENTAL assholes. The film was broken into three parts, one exploring a Hollywood guy who followed movie stars such as Sally Kirkland around awards shows, another exploring New York based photographer Nick Elgar, who is quoted in the film saying that stars such as Robert DeNiro have no right to any privacy, as they are celebrities, explaining why it is Ok to sneak through the kitchen at the New York Hilton to crash a private event to which he was not invited  to get photos of DeNiro eating and then harassing him for blocks as DeNiro was trying to walk home after the event (something most major celebrities cannot even try to do today).

The third part focused on Victor Malafronte, a New York “photographer” who, at the beginning of the film set out to get a photograph of Michael J. Fox, his wife Tracy and their newborn child (apparently, they have no right to privacy, either). He built a World War Two style bunker in Central Park across the street from the building that the Fox’s lived in, supplied it with his equipment, food and drink, blankets etc. and proceed to wait a few days for the family to leave their house. He runs after them with a camera and very long lens, gets in front of them and takes an incredibly lousy, out of focus photo of the Fox’s. The photo commanded about $100,000 from a tabloid.

Moving forward to today’s economy, last month www.thedailybeast.com wrote a blog post exploring pricing of celebrity photos. Their conclusion was:

The price for paparazzi photos has plummeted 31 percent, according to an exclusive Daily Beast survey. Is this the end of the celebrity economy?

They continue:

Recently the celebrity media bubble has burst—destroyed by the recession, among other factors—leaving hordes of paparazzi, the agencies that employ them, and the magazines and Web sites that showcase their wares, facing a new, very bleak reality.

Brandy Navarre of the X17 agency calls this new world, “the Post Britney Era,” seeing as it was Britney’s much-publicized downfall that coincided with, and fueled, the paparazzi industry. In 2007, paparazzi agencies estimated that 20 percent of their coverage was devoted to the fast-falling pop star. X17 had 15 photographers devoted exclusively to Spears.

Real photographers can only hope that this trend continues!

My theory concerning music critics:

A music critic cannot like anything that is popular.

Reason 1: They have set themselves up as “experts” on popular music culture, and as such, have assigned themselves the task of advising the rest of us about what is “cool and hip” and letting us know what new band is going to be the “next big thing.” They also have the self assigned task of letting us know what is relevant.

Reason 2: To justify their jobs, they have to “find” new artists before the public does to justify their job and quantify their hipness.

Nobody ever seems to be keeping score to determine how many times their “next big thing” ends up working at a fast food restaurant within a year!

In his latest book, Chuck Klosterman, in my opinion the best popular culture writer working today, while talking about a journalist questioning ABBA’s relevance in the world in 2001:

“I suppose it is true if you use the word relevance like most people who regularly write about music, but it is false if you think about how the world actually operates. As a rule, people who classify art as “irrelevant” are trying to position themselves above the entity; it’s a way of pretending they’re more in step with contemporary culture than the artist himself, which is mostly a way of saying they can’t find a tangible reason for disliking what something intends to embody. Moreover, the whole argument is self-defeating: If you classify something as “irrelevant,” you’re (obviously) using it as a unit of comparison against whatever is “relevant,” so it (obviously) does have meaning and merit. Truly irrelevant art wouldn’t even be part of the conversation.”

There was a time when music critics had a pretty good track record in finding and exposing good new bands. There was a large quantity of publications, both local and national, who assigned a lot of column inches to new music. That era seems to be disappearing. Seems that most new music is discovered on the internet. Column inches are getting harder and harder to come by, and are mostly taken up by superstars and the “flavor of the month.”

More next week.