Recently, I was doing some photo research with an art director friend and she came across The Fat Boys in my files. At almost the same time, in another room, I came across an article on “Slate.com” about them! It was titled: Why the Fat Boys still matter.

It reminded me of another time and place! My friend Dawn Bridges, one of the great publicists in music business history, was working for Charlie Stettler, a Swiss born promoter in NYC, who had made his first fortune by dangling a microphome out his kitchen window and recording New York street sounds and selling cassettes of them. She was doing publicity for his first band management project, a band called the Fat Boys, and wanted to know if I wanted to come to NYC and take some pictures for the cover of their next album, called Crushin. She was going to rent a photo studio, and the band was going to pose with a rented boa constrictor (Crushing- get it??). The day of the shoot, the owner of the snake arrived with the snake rolled up in a suitcase (He took the subway). He unrolled the snake and placed it across the shoulders of the guys, who freaked out. The snake was asleep, but weighed about 75 pounds.. As soon as it woke up, and moved, the shoot was over. But I worked fast, and got want was needed.

A couple of years later, Dawn asked me to come to NYC and spend an afternoon with the Boys. At that point, they were already huge stars, and walking through Harlem was quite the experience!

That was the last time I hung with them. Their first album is being released as a reissue this week, packed in a working pizza box. A very fitting tribute to a great group of guys.

Went to photograph JLo and Enrique Iglesias Friday night. YIKES!! More people on stage dancing than singing (During JLO’s set). Lots of running around and bringing audience members up on stage with him (Enrique).

But…man it was entertaining!! I have always been a big fan of Showbiz and this was it. Video monitors to the ceiling. Stairs to make grand entrances on. And two people giving their audience what they wanted. (IN THE AIR CONDITIONED COMFORT OF A HOCKEY ARENA) Meanwhile, across town 80,000 people were slogging through the dust, (and as I write this a driving rainstorm) to see?? Hear?? 150 bands this week at Lalapalooza. Looking out the window right now, I feel confident in my decision, made about 5 years ago, to never go to Lalapalloza!!

At many times and in many conversations over the past two years, the conversation has turned to the idea that journalism is dead. In Chicago, the daily newspaper keeps on getting smaller and smaller, and looking more like a comic book. I still buy the Sun Times every morning, wishing for better and Monday I got it!!

The cover story was about a 62 year old Mexican American man who was beaten to death by three gangbangers, who videotaped the attack and placed it on their Facebook Page. They were caught, and confessed.

But the deeper story was the man who was killed. Kim Janssen, a Sun Times reporter followed the coffin back to Mexico, and reported on the mans life, from Mexican musical star, to American citizen and back to the grave he had dug for himself next to the house he had built for his family with money earned from construction jobs in Chicago. THE ARTICLE RAN 5 PAGES!!!  The whole paper that day was only 80 pages. That’s journalism.

Does size matter???

Maybe not- This guy wailed on this thing!

The Stone Roses weren’t very good (or popular) when they were big!! Now they are making a “comeback.”

From the website Dangerous Minds:

Something has happened to The Stone Roses and it’s not good. Over the past week a battle has been taking place over who owns the rights of any professional photographs taken of the band during their forthcoming reunion concerts.

The original contract offered to photographers stated:

(For) the payment by us to you of the sum of £1 The group (to keep) all Rights in perpetuity throughout the world so as to enable us to exploit the Photographs and the Rights as we (and/or they) deem fit without further reference or payment to you. You agree to provide us with digital copies of any or all of the Photographs upon request.

YIKES!! Finally a band has told us exactly what we are worth! At today’s rate- about $1.56!!

As acclaimed photographer Ian Tilton told Dangerous Minds, “This kind of contract may be standard when a band pays for a dedicated professional photographer to shoot a performance, but not for invited Press Photographers.”

Outraged by The Stone Roses’ contract demands, Tilton organized a campaign via his Facebook page, for press photographers to boycott The Stone Roses tour. After a flurry of texts of emails, a new photo release form was issued on behalf of the band, which now included the following:

The license hereby granted to you to photograph the artist is limited to the above grant only and NO right to sell, license or reproduce the material for advertising or commercial purposes (e.g., for use as posters, calendars, T-shirts, biographies, etc.) either to be sold, to be distributed free or to be otherwise exploited in any manner whatsoever. Nor may any material arising from the said session be reproduced in any publication devoted exclusively or predominantly to the artist unless prior permission has been obtained from THE STONE ROSES and their management.

So…..Maybe if enough people speak up?????

Click here to read the whole thing:

I recently received a link to a White paper written by the folks at Alamy: http://www.alamy.com/

My responses are in bold.

They are a stock agency who convened a round table discussion about issues revolving around image licensing

From James West, CEO of Alamy:

There was much debate over the many challenges faced by our industry; such as how the global financial crisis has seen many companies reduce their picture budgets, increasing the pressure to drive down prices. Added to this, print media – one of stock photography’s biggest customers – is suffering from declining sales, reduced advertising revenues, and readers switching from paper to screen. And for photographers, the general trend to reduce prices and broaden rights is causing concern.

Of course- stock agencies are offering  clients bulk deals that are astounding- use of an image for under a dollar!

Further into the paper:

Stock companies can often resolve
 this issue by offering larger clients pre-negotiated rights at a fixed price, but this is not possible for the vast majority of customers, so a simpler system needs to be in place. The current licensing system also leaves photographers confused, they cannot understand how the same image can be sold for $500 to one client, and $1 to another.

“As a photographer, I have no control over any discounting or special offers – they’re set by the distributor.”   Chris Ryan, freelance photographer

One possible solution could be for photographers to place their images with a distributor who will protect their value, such as a specialist photo library, but this may have to be balanced against the global and marketing reach offered by the larger stock photography companies. Photographers could also deal directly with clients, perhaps using a low-cost broker as a link, and then set their own rates. But this could involve dealing with dozens of clients.

Photographers have no way to access as many clients as agencies do- this would be a full time job!

Some argue that it’s unrealistic for photographers to expect the same image to be sold for the same price, regardless of use, and that a move towards a segmented market (such as web, editorial, advertising), with an agreed minimum rate for
each band, would yield greater returns. Others believe that the focus should shift from price to revenue, and that photographers should now adopt a strategy of maximising revenues through higher volume sales. But many photographers would doubtless argue that bulk sales do not necessarily translate into higher revenues.

Although a nice check each month is nice, there is something very mentally debilitating about knowing that one of my photos is being licensed for under a dollar!!!

So….. Looks like the entire system is broken, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to fix it. It has, as Malcolm Gladwell says, gone past the tipping point. The young editors today do not see any monetary value in photography, just as they don’t see any reason to pay for music.

In the old days of music, musicians were social commentators. Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez- they all wrote about war and peace. The Staples Singers- wrote and performed about civil rights. Now there doesn’t seem to be much of that going around!

In 2007, Charles Barkley made a Nike commercial that said: “I am not a role model.”He suggested that teachers and policemen should be role models. Unfortunately, he was wrong. Kids live up to their heros and their heroes are musicians and athletes. But nobody seems to be addressing this in 2012.

BUT WAIT………….. In this weeks Sports Illustrated, there is an article about a University of Virginia football player who risks his whole career to go on a hunger strike to show solidarity with university employees who are not getting a living wage. His upbringing was inspiring. Homeless at times, his mother still instilled in him the drive to help others. This guy is a role model!!! Michael Jordan should read this article. The article explores the history of protest in sports, starting with John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who raised black gloved hands in the air during the playing of the National Anthem after winning medals in the Olympics in Mexico City in 1968 and continuing through Muhammed Ali giving up his heavyweight championship belt and going to jail to protest the war in Viet Nam.

But through this, most musicians, (Except for Bono) have stayed mostly quiet, taking their money home with them and buying cars and bling. They have the most hold on the younger generation- they should write something for people to get behind.

Last week there was an uproar over a posting by an intern on the NPR show “All Things Considered.”  Click here

She starts off by saying that she is almost 21 and has been spoiled by the internet, and she has only bought 15 cd’s in her life. Yet her library contains 11,000, She says:

“The truth is, I’ve never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I’ve never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.”

During my first semester at college, my music library more than tripled. I spent hours sitting on the floor of my college radio station, ripping music onto my laptop. The walls were lined with hundreds of albums sent by promo companies and labels to our station over the years.

YIKES!!! So she puts no value on the music she is stealing! Just like magazines put no value on the photos that we are shooting every day, and don’t care how much they pay us for the use of them.

So, a few days later, David Lowery, the singer of  Cracker responded:

Emily:

My intention here is not to shame you or embarrass you. I believe you are already on the side of musicians and artists and you are just grappling with how to do the right thing. I applaud your courage in admitting you do not pay for music, and that you do not want to but you are grappling with the moral implications. I just think that you have been presented with some false choices by what sounds a lot like what we hear from the “Free Culture” adherents.

I must disagree with the underlying premise of what you have written. Fairly compensating musicians is not a problem that is up to governments and large corporations to solve. It is not up to them to make it “convenient” so you don’t behave unethically. (Besides–is it really that inconvenient to download a song from iTunes into your iPhone? Is it that hard to type in your password? I think millions would disagree.)

I’ve been teaching college students about the economics of the music business at the University of Georgia for the last two years. Unfortunately for artists, most of them share your attitude about purchasing music. There is a disconnect between their personal behavior and a greater social injustice that is occurring. You seem to have internalized that ripping 11,000 tracks in your iPod compared to your purchase of 15 CDs in your lifetime feels pretty disproportionate. You also seem to recognize that you are not just ripping off the record labels but you are directly ripping off the artist and songwriters whose music you “don’t buy”. It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t take these tracks from a file-sharing site. That may seem like a neat dodge, but I’d suggest to you that from the artist’s point of view, it’s kind of irrelevant.

You must consider the fact that the vast majority of artists are releasing albums independently and there is not a “real” record company. Usually just an imprint owned by the artist. In the vast majority of cases you are taking money directly from the artist. How does one know which labels are artist owned? It’s not always clear. But even in the case of corporate record labels, shouldn’t they be rewarded for the bets they make that provides you with recordings you enjoy? It’s not like the money goes into a giant bonfire in the middle of the woods while satanic priests conduct black masses and animal sacrifices. Usually some of that money flows back to artists, engineers and people like you who graduate from college and get jobs in the industry. And record labels also give your college radio stations all those CDs you play.

Now, having said all that, I also deeply empathize with your generation. You have grown up in a time when technological and commercial interests are attempting to change our principles and morality. Rather than using our morality and principles to guide us through technological change, there are those asking us to change our morality and principles to fit the technological change–if a machine can do something, it ought to be done. Although it is the premise of every “machines gone wild” story since Jules Verne or Fritz Lang, this is exactly backwards. Sadly, I see the effects of this thinking with many of my students.

He said a lot more- search for his name on Google and read the whole piece- it is fascinating! He is right about one thing- the younger generation does not believe in the concept of intellectual property, and I will continue to get payments of under two dollars per image!

Earlier this week, Bob Lefsetz had a post concerning a photo show that had just opened in Los Angeles: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/   Search back for -Who shot Rock and Roll. It was an interesting post, and in a luke warm way, kind of gave photographers a little credit for helping bands with their photography. I sent him a response. He probably won’t post it- so here it is!

Hey Bob,

I have been a reader for quite a while, and am in agreement with most of what you say. I must comment on your most recent post. I am a music photographer entering my 37th year in the business. Although I was not asked to participate in the exhibit you mentioned, I think the exhibit is fabulous. Unfortunately, this show will never happen in the future, as the art of music photography is pretty much dead. Under the banner of “controlling their artist’s image” manager and publicists have controlled their clients to the point that no really good photographs are being taken in this century, and if they are, the photographer has no ownership or control over their own art. They are being relegated to only shooting the first 15 minutes of the show, many times from the back of the hall, and asked to sign away all the rights to their work to the artist they are photographing. They are also told that they can only license their photographs to one publication (most likely a publication that does not pay, or pays very little). In most cases, they will be hard pressed to pay back the cost of parking for the event!

Case in point: Yesterday I was hired to photograph some sound guys working on a major tour (Aerosmith and Cheap Trick). My deal was to photograph the sound guys late afternoon, and then photograph the concert, showing the artists using the equipment made by the company I was working for. In the past I have photographed these two bands a total of 24 times. I consider them friends. I had a great conversation with Robin Zander, shot my pictures, and started to negotiate access to shoot the shows. At 6:30, I gave up, went home and was sitting on my couch at home when the show started.

The opposite situation: A few weeks ago, the Beach Boys were in town. Through my friendship with the band their management, I was allowed total access to both shows. A journalist clued me in that the band would gather around Brian’s piano for one song (of course when all the accredited photographers were safely out of the building). I photographed that moment both nights, and it is not surprising that my photographs of that moment appeared in Rolling Stone and Newsweek shortly after. This was a moment that would have been captured by all the photographers you mentioned from the exhibit (none of them, as far as I know, are still actively photographing!) but is now being captured by almost nobody as the band tours the world.

In closing: You say “The photographers were hangers-on, but they were much closer to the musicians than us.” I disagree with that statement. We were an important part of the process of marketing and publicizing the artists, and worked together with management and publicity to further the careers of the artists we worked with. We were also documenting an art form, so that future generations could see what we were part of. Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist anymore. I would love to hear a conversation between a curator and a museum 20 years from now concerning mounting a show of photography of the 21st century. It would consist of boring pictures taken when the bands are warming up!

Peace,

Paul Natkin

Www.natkin.net

A few weeks ago,, I called a friend who works with Brian Wilson to see about photographing the Beach Boys when the played in Chicago for two nights. After a few emails back and forth, I was told that I could shoot the whole show from wherever I needed to on both nights. So off I went. I knew that this was going to be a tough shoot as the guys are spread across the entire stage. BUT… while having dinner with a New York based journalist who was in for the show, I found out that the guys started out the second set standing around Brian Wilson’s white baby grand! At that moment, I knew that the whole night rested on those five minutes!

Before the show, I walked up and down a few aisles and picked a few location/lens combinations. Most of the rest of the show was spent shooting individual shots of the 15 people on stage, but starting off the second set each night, I had the perfect shot at the “money shot.”

Over the course of the two days, I shot about twenty shots from two different angles. All the other photographers were already home by the time these shots were taken, and even if they were allowed to shoot they would have been shooting from the back of the hall and wouldn’t have gotten a good angle anyway. Pretty much proves the point that shooting the first three songs from the back will never produce a winner.

Case in point- last week, I had a photo in Newsweek and another in Rolling Stone. Probably many more that I won’t know about till my next sales report comes in.

Found myself watching a great documentary a few days ago. It is titled Respect Yourself. It is the story of Stax Records, one of the greatest independent labels  in the history of the music industry. The label was started by a brother and sister team- Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton. They bought an old movie theater at McLemore and College Avenues in Memphis, and turned it into a recording studio and record store, planning to record country music. Soon, musicians from the neighborhood started coming by and writing and recording some of the greatest soul and funk music ever heard.  The part of the story that was most astounding was that in racially charged Memphis in the 60’s, nobody cared if you were black or white- only if you could write and play! “We didn’t see color, we just saw talent,” was Estelle’s recollection of her protégés.

Many times backed by the “house band” which became Booker T and the MG’s and scored many #1 hits of their own, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas and Carla Thomas recorded the alternative sound track of soul (Motown was the other side of the coin). Many of the songs were written by the songwriting team of David Porter and Issac Hayes, who went on to become a great star in his own right. Atlantic Records started to distribute their music, and eventually screwed them out of all of their songs.

So, under the direction of Al Bell, who started out as the promotion director, and eventually became a co-owner, they started over. He pushed Issac Hayes to record his own stuff (Huge hits) and started producing movies, also releasing the soundtracks (Most notably Shaft). He found a gospel group named the Staples Singers, signed and recorded them, and brought them to the world.

So, after I post this, I will head downtown to photograph Mavis Staples. I will be thinking about all of the history of this great label while I am watching a great singer perform.