The Swimming Pool Q's - Jeff Calder's Personal Archive - Living By Night in the Land of Opportunity:

Jeff Calder's Personal Archive > Living By Night in the Land of Opportunity: (9)

Living By Night Section 1

Living by Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band

...what we need are good pictures...hand-made with love and passion and care by individual picture-makers, not by banks, or committees, or accountants, or lawyers, or office boys, or boards of directors who are really in the real estate business.
          --Frank Sinatra

Gigantic screwjacks will be required in order to raise the culture of the masses.
          --Leon Trotsky

The sense of the size of the margin...by which the total of American life...is still so surrounded as to represent...but a scant central flotilla huddled as for very fear of the fathomless depth of water, the too formidable future, on the so much vaster lake of the materially possible.
          --Henry James

You've had your shot, and now you're dead in the water.
          --Show-biz axiom

Thirteen years ago I began my journey along the margin of America's Pop Republic. The margin isn't such a bad place, unless, of course, one needs to eat. Unlike many on the margin, though, I've always thought that rock music could still be a creative mass medium. As a consequence, and after a great deal of frenzy and frusturation, I was drawn to the center of James's vaster lake. Then one day, while hard charging into the fog bank of the future, I suddenly met myself going in the opposite direction. That can't be me, I said. What happened to...him? It was a chance meeting, no doubt, but I knew then that a part of myself would always be roving around the margin, now with new tales about strange places with names like "Hollywood," where the squares blot out the sun. In the sudden shade on the vaster lake things happen more quickly that show-biz stoats with pinkies can bare their teeth and tell everyone the option's up.

The movie industry operates under a famous dictum formalized best by the screenwriter William Goldman: "The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry [is] NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING." Its withered twin, the music industry, is the same. They all act as if they know what they're doing. No one does. Which is why under no circumstance should anyone take seriously anything anybody at a record company ever says. This is particularly true regarding the merits of things musical. With rare exception record company people are so terrified of losing their jobs that they can't begin to listen to the first note of a song.


It may always have been this way, but somehow good stuff used to slip past. I grew up in the great era of rock and soul music. My favorite artists took risks; they had a way with words and a sense of vision. These qualities have been eliminated from commercial radio in America today. Back then, my favorite artists ruled the seedy AM stations and transistor receivers. Later, like many other teenagers in the late 1960's, I saw popular music at a point of departure. It would grow as we would grow, strictly onward and upward. By the end of that decade, pop music had become almost a religion for a big part of my generation. Now, twenty years later, the sanctuary has been defiled by market reasearch. Visionary artists are still out there, but the stream of rampant invention has lost access to the "mainstream": the powerful radio systems of America. If the most exiting pop music can't reach people, what's the point?

In 1953 Gore Vidal commented that "as the novel moves toward a purer, more private expression it will cease altogether to be a popular medium, becoming, like poetry, a cloistered avocation." Along with film, the novel was a popular medium of Vidal's youth. Fifteen years after his earlier observation Vidal would conclude:

"Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end.   Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like the priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

Those who grew up with artistic aspirations in the field of pop music now face a similar situation. We've become musical monks making music for other musical monks. How could it have come to this?


It was to be rock history's main irony. Much of American music in the 1960's was a promotion of freedom and openness. Its tremendous success generated huge profits. The profits brought in the experts: lawyers, accountants, marketeers. Their job was to maximize profits, and the way to do that in a volatile business is to create a more controllable situation. Threat had to be eliminated, and threat is defined as anything that might cause a listener to change the station. Station switching is reflected in surveys as a decline in listenership, or market share. A lower market share means a lower advertising rate.


The corporation--in this case the radio system--then makes less money, so any song perceived as being a threat-politically, culturally, or emotionally--must not be given airplay. In the 1970's, through a combination of consulting firms, advertising agencies, and radio stations, a "manufacture of consent" occurred. The audience came to expect and accept popular music of little vitality or depth. By the time the Sex Pistols arrived in
Atlanta in 1977, the process was complete. The Sex Pistols had the biggest media blitzkrieg since the Beatles thirteen years before. But they sold very few records. Why? No airplay. Why? Because the radio systems found them threatening. For once the program directors were right. Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols were threatening to a business that had become irrelevant even to itself. The Sex Pistols fell apart, and around the same time it looked like the music business might fall apart, too.
Living By Night Section 2

At the close of World War II Andre Breton was asked his thoughts on the future of poetry. Breton replied: "Poetry would betray its ageless mission if even the most harrowing historical events could induce it to diverge from its own royal road and turn
against itself at a crucial juncture on this road. Poetry must ceaselessly advance." If one makes the pop analogue, some old questions arise: Can pop music actually be a vehicle on the royal road, or is music making imbued with Breton's idealism only futile? How can one ceaselessly advance in a popular medium when access to a viable audience is denied?

In rock & roll today the royal road can be a lonely one. When you're living by night in the land of opportunity, it's nice to have a flashlight, but what happens when the people at the battery concession have vested interest in dark? America's radio stations may once have been laboratories of experiment, but at the squalid dawn of the Reagan\Bush era they were ruled by formula. Where was one to turn if one brought Breton's idealism to pop music? To Las Vegas and John Davidson, of course.


In 1982 John Davidson published The Singing Entertainer. It was created as a guide for someone who wanted to be a professional performer. Like Breton, Davidson and The Singing Entertainer are hefty counsel. Had such a manual been around in 1978 I would have been spared a great deal of public humiliation. The Singing Entertainer contains many helpful hints, like how to hold a microphone properly and body positioning. ("Mike hand should be relaxed," and limp wrists are too "blase"). On the other hand, I was spared the following rosy picture: "As we approach the 80's, the country is literally laughing, dancing, jogging, and dressing up again. We have entered The Glitter Era." My experience approaching the 1980's doesn't quite correspond to John Davidson's, though I do recall a number of people dancing and jogging on my head.


Davidson's other historical analysis would have struck home, however: "If you want to be a singing entertainer you probably couldn't pick a better time than right now. The role of the singing entertainer in show business never has been more significant."
Sometimes, when opportunity knocks, the best move might be to slip out the back way. But then I would have been denied the pleasure of my band's first critical notice: "Just plain awful." Or, a dozen years later, the following: "Kind of a sad story, really."

In the meantime, I had little preparation for being in a rock band. In high school I sold clothing in the afternoon and briefly managed a combo called The Prone Position. As "manager" I could occasionally land onstage and perform a song called "Torture Chamber" under the moniker the Black Cock. Later, in the mid-1970's, I put together a band in Florida named The Fruit Jockeys. That lasted two gigs because no one could stand the huge paper-mache globe-heads painted orange that I asked everyone to wear.

By 1978, though, I had become more serious about songwriting, which for me was an outgrowth of literary pursuits. Forming a real band became inevitable. Travelling through Atlanta on several occasions, I had met a prodigal teenage guitarist, Bob Elsey. We home-recorded some songs together and decided to call ourselves The Swimming Pool Q's. During this early New Wave period, band names were frequently were essay-length. As far as the name goes, marketing strategy was no consideration. The name the Swimming Pool Q's seemed appropriate for a band that was partially Floridian. We would spend years being asked to justify the name, but at the time it was a little less life-threatening than The Fruit Jockeys, especially in the South.

Something called Southern Boogie was still big at that time. The Swimming Pool Q's were one of the first groups in the region to stand in opposition to it. The wiggy twist that in 1980 I would have epithets hurled at me for having short hair by clodhoppers with long hair, who ten years before were hurling the same epithets at me for having long hair when they had short hair. Only this time it became important to savor the bating. At gas stations, for instance, the usual site of hayseed hassles, it's always fun to leap out of the car covered in lace and demand the location of the closest rare book shop.

Back then, the hip log-telegraph was pounding out signals in London and New York City. Some provincial ears were standing up, and with those ears arose the spirit of aesthetic opposition. Bands were formed by people who all seemed to come from the worlds of art and retail. Few had "musical backgrounds" or any knowledge of how to play their instruments. One learned along the way. Spirit was all. The word "career" wasn't in the vocabulary, and the prospect of making an album was about as realistic as time travel. I couldn't tune a guitar (not necessarily a disadvantage in this circle). My singing was croaking. My concept of "songwriting" was to jam showboat words and gags into an impossible musical structure with no sense of melody. There was no band, either, so we had to get one of those.

Our initial lineup was assembled from friends and disgruntled musicians (note: musicians are always disgruntled). Unlike most New Wave bands during this period (any band with the barest pretense to originality was considered New Wave) we always had great players. This would come to create problems. In the narrow world of the margin, self-conscious incompetence was
becoming sanctified. The spirit-was-all crowd held in disdain any display of technical mastery as a concession to faulty values.


The first thing to do with a band is to find something to do. At this point one initiates a chain of events to unfold in disorderly fashion over a five-year period, The Sphere of Work (booking and travel) which gets one to The Gig (the act of entertainment which is
both Work and Art) that ultimately transforms The Sphere of Art (song writing and musical ability), allowing for the creation of the first mechanical product (The Album). This process used to be called dues paying, a concept frowned upon during New Wave as a careerist. Nevertheless:

THE REHEARSAL
Usually a horrid nightmare. The less said about this the better. All it takes is one Bad Head to ruin a rehearsal, and at least one musician always has a Bad Head. Bad Head is usually the result of an unhip daytime job or a forever-failing love interest. Bands rehearse more often in the early days. After performing the material for awhile, they get together only to learn new songs. The first practice location is a parent's basement. This never lasts too long. The only alternative is to find a regular rehearsal space. This costs money. To get money, one must secure an engagement. This requires:

BOOKING

To cajole or con...Whatever it takes to achieve The Gig. This usually necessitates a telephone. Always remember, the telephone is your friend. Sometimes a friend must be punished. The punishment can take many forms (a hammer, the hand receiver, the back tires of an automobile) and usually occurs after a particularly nasty colloquy with a club owner:
"You're only as good as your last gig, and now I'm going to cut the wire!" Generally speaking, club owners don't care much about the music. They care about money. Money is generated by smashing as many human beings as possible into The Club. Both the club owner and you know that there's the possibility of a bad night. That's the club owner's cue to say,"Okay, I'll give you the guarantee, but if you don't make it back at the door you can just loose my phone number. You don't know me. You can forget I ever existed!"

Living by night is not the province of the dainty.

Booking, continued: a big part of booking is lying. Always lie. About what? Anything, from the weather and the number of cover songs you know to wheter or not you wear thin ties. In booking there are no moral or ethical consequences to lying. At the end of the engagement the club owner is going to pretend he doesn't remember anything you talked about regarding money, and you won't be able to find him anyway. Someday you'll get a big booking agency to handle the band and take the load off your
shoulders. That's when your problems really begin.

Our first engagement was on June 1, 1978. It was an art collective's fashion show called the Underwear Invitational. We weren't paid but received enough notoriety to con our way into a local club on a Monday night. Having almost no stage experience, it was to be an evening of terror and total confusion. It took months to feel comfortable on a plywood stage covered in dime-store carpet.
Living By Night Section 3

There was no New Wave or Alternative circuit in 1978. The best you could hope for was the open-minded club with an aclectic format of jazz/blues/folk with a little rock on the side. Early-in-the-week (Monday through Wednesday) gigs were no-risk situations. The Swimming Pool Q's played countless "New Wave Nights" on the no risk evenings.

The last New Wave Night we played was in the mid-1980's in Florida. The club owner said,"If you don't have a good night you'll finish New Wave forever in Orlando." To our mutual relief, we didn't, and we did.

After gigging around Atlanta for several months, we played our first out-of-town date on November 18 as the opening act for The B-52's at the University of Georgia in Athens. A month later we had our first big show warm-up act for Devo in Atlanta. The club management forced us to play two 45 minute sets in front of 1,200 people. It was trial-by-blowtorch in a kangaroo court. The rabble hurled pointed remarks and other pointed things, but we survived.

With the Devo slot as ammunition and a few telephone numbers laid upon us by Kate of The B-52's, we duped some nightclubs in Manhattan into booking us during a week-long blizzard. We weren't what they expected but poured on enough fake charm to get the hook at only one disco of the New Wave persuasion. We got the same question I'd heard asked of the Allman Brothers in 1969: "Are you guys really fromthe South?" Our rental van got us home ten days later with $58. More importantly, we were a mean little rock band now, able to lie and say that we'd taken Manhattan as we set out to conquer our own region.

THE ROYAL ROAD
The process of driving around in circles and becoming an alcoholic. In increases a band's resolve or destroys it. As a result of relative affluence, young middle-class white people develop bizarre tics which can create tremendous tension in the confines of a small vehicle jammed to the roof with gear and threatening to throw every imaginable rod at any given moment. There's never enough money for food. You never know where you're going to spend the night. You drive eight hours, and you're still late for the gig, and some club owner with one bucktooth is screaming at you to throw the amplifiers up on stage and play. People in black leather make fun of your tie tack. The club manager is jacked on the white lady and doesn't recall anything about the guarantee. A tiny detail that you forgot to take care of suddenly blows up in your face like the Hindenburg. I remember only the good things, like driving through Popeye's Fried Chicken and ordering a can of spinach.

Before the Royal Road, during the embryonic phase of the band, hometown supporters came to the gig and provided a cushion, allowing everyone in the group to overcome the panic of the first shows. Once the city limits appeared in the rearview mirror, however, the cushion disappeared. Traveling in the South required resourcefulness. Sure, there were towns like Tampa where the local radio promoted us as "a punk group from CBGB's in New York City!" We packed in a partisan crowd so starved for something new that it didn't matter we weren't Punk or New Wave, only different. The problem was in getting to the Tampas: that is, the gigs routed along the way to make the whole thing pay. Most of the joints were still mired in boogie. These places weren't exactly prosceniums flanked by Doric columns. The audiences were skeptical and not very interested in art songs with titles like "Walk Like a Chicken." They were more like potential pipe bombs which we had to disarm quickly to survive. It was frightening, but it was also fun and new.

Back to The Bible: In The Singing Entertainer, John Davidson writes, "You must take the audience on a well-planned journey, a journey on which the ride must be as enjoyable and fufilling as arriving at the destination." To be honest, most performances in which I've been involved have been more like mazes with the occasional sinkhole opening up in the pathway. Which brings us to entertainment. Like most jobs, entertainment is a learn-on-the-job situation. It's the only way to learn what works, and what doesn't work. You learn to improvise in order to get off the hot seat (equipment failures, broken guitar strings, Bad Head). You learn to handle the heckling jackass by inviting him onstage, sticking a microphone in his face, and introducing him as "Chuck."

At first you stand in one place because you're scared. Then you leap up and down because you're still scared and don't want to be anymore. Then you leap up and down because it signifies commitment to the massive energy and spontaneity of the music. Then you stalk the stagein order to demonstrate command. Then you go back to doing what you did in the first place--standing still--because it signifies even greater command. Then you do all of the above whenever you feel like it because you've finally learned not to care. The Tao of Performance: not caring is entertaining.

Above all, entertaining is a willingness to make a fool of oneself in public and enjoy it. It's not often while playing in front of a bunch of hopped-up kids that I ask, "What's the meaning of entertainment in America?" Ruminations interfere with the process which, when working smoothly, is like getting lost and found simultaneously.

Some exploding zeppelins include The Opening Act Situation and The Showcase. The Opening Act Situation mormally takes place on a bigger stage than one is used to performing upon. The length of the set is usually quite limited. Stage goons are there to insure that no one touches any of the headlining act's idiotic props. These constraints make improvisational flights-of-fancy almost impossible. The audience doesn't care about you. They're there to see the headlining act. The only sensible course is to take as little time between songs as possible. That way the yahoos and town scruff don't have enough time to scream the name of the headlining act ad nauseam while you labor in The Pit of Hell. And moving swiflty from song to song confuses the undecided part of the audience into thinking you might actually be good.

The Showcase, or the "Blowcase," is the occasion when the record company hacks fly in from The Coast to check out your act and maybe give you a recording contract. This means that everybody in the band goes out to buy new clothes and shows up at the gig looking like Napoleon during his scene with the pope. The elaborate new outfits make it impossible to strap the instruments on, much less perform. And it is a complete disaster. Later, the men from The Coast say you're a lot different from what they thought you would be just from listening to the tape, but please stay in touch.

More John Davidson: "A singing entertainer is a mirror for his audience. You must reflect both the time in which you are singing and the people who are listening." Here Davidson is not that far off the mark. Successful performers of any genre--hip or unhip--tend to reassure their audience through song and dress, and they allay the audience's insecurities: it's okay to have a certain haircut or sexual persuasion because the performer has one, too. This seems to be an important function of popular music. Unfortunately, many of us have never figured out quite what we're supposed to reassure the audience about, which has led to a monthly bank statement considerably thinner that John Davidson's.
Living By Night Section 4
    Writing songs begins as a private pursuit, and as with many private pursuits, the site of composition is the bedroom. There's a tape deck, an instrument (guitar or keyboard), and no awareness of "the general listener," whoever that might be. One writes to please oneself. Lyrics were my initial orientation: the music was there to serve the words.
Most of my first songs were overly long narriatives. Every time I came up with a new plot twist or good line, I'd write another musical part. Now, a song can be many things, but it's noot a novel or short story, even if it uses literary devices. By stages I learned that if a song is tedious, verses and details have to be cut at the expense of the
narriative.
    An example of tedium in song: "Shoot a Quick Nine," circa 1979, the story of a Durham family man who gambles away his house on the golf course.

    The kids are hung on the latest kick
    Mommy's fallen for a toothpick prof
    Heart pumping like a two dollar trick
    Can't turn his tummy off
    From a third story office on a Durham street
    He looks through venetian blinds:
    Shoot a quick nine

About ten minutes later he loses the house and the LTD, and we usually lost the audience. As their eyes glazed and jaws went slack, I eventually got the idea that this sort of thing might read better than it sang.
    The first two things to transform songwriting are the band and the live performance. The writer subtly adjusts to the strengths, weaknesses, and pecularities of the band. On a subconscious level he begins to imagine different musical possibilities for new songs. While songs were definite and rigid during the bedroom phase, the become more
plastic when introduces to others who have abilities the songwriter doesn't. Once the band is cooking, ideas can be developed collectively by jamming at the dreaded rehearsal (this is not advised during Bad Head). The jam can be taped and taken back to the bedroom, where it can be fashioned into a song. This kind of collaboration can lead to some good work. On the other hand, when five people have five different
ideas about how a song should be structured, the possibilites for confusion are extraordinary. This, too, can lead to Bad Head.
    As touched upon during the "Shoot A Quick Nine" episode, performing live can change one's songwriting as well. The grinding routine of one-nighters affects the pleasure one derives from singing and playing. As opposed to the big-layout tunes over which the audience might rub their chins to stay awake, songs with more emotional and
melodic content become more rewarding for the singer. The oddball things stay, but they function as pace changers and releases. Whether or not this is pandering to the audience is beside the point. The words and phrases become simpler as one begins to fuse them more deliberately to the music. One begins to lose the quirks that gave the
songs their unique character in the beginning. Now the challenge becomes giving the new approach an equally personal distinction.
    The Royal Road has its own special impact on songwriting in that it provides a portal to the world of rude experience. Travel can be a jarring ordeal that can influence the shape of songs, their emotional qualities. The alienation and fragmentation of the road can only have a deleterious effect on ones personal life. This can lead to much
whining, which is the source for much song. It's not uncommon for many songwriters to seek out trouble simply for the sake of new material. This is known as The Scientific Pursuit of Pratfall. A not atypical scenerio: songwriter develops a drinking problem for about twenty-four hours, pursues a half dozen indiscretions, gets in a fist-fight that
breaks his glasses and lands him in the pokey allowing for a thirty-minute peek at The Underside of American Life, after which he crawls back home and pleads forgiveness for something he denies ever having done in the first place.
    At this point, if one isn't too preoccupied with selecting a parole officer, the process of recording begins to make serious alterations upon songwriting. Recording a song on tape and hearing it played back for the first time can be an enlightening, exciting, and
often depressing experience. Besides discovering one's incompetency as a musician, the songs that everyone thought were so brilliant-the real crowd pleasers-sound terrible. On the bright side, the certain embarrasments show promise.
    Awareness of one's artistic deficiencies increases as the band moves from the home studio to the more serious and expensive twenty-four track professional studio. Simultaneously, the artist begins to improve as he becomes more comfortable in the studio environment. This is where the trouble known as The Hundred-Dollar-Per-Hour Dupe begins.One is made cocksure by the overwhelming bigness of the studio sound.
A vision of thousands screaming in a riot of approval dances in the head. Forty-eight hours later the cassette tape you made for free at rehearsal sounds better. Technology conned you into thinking you were better than you were.
    Slowly one develops the capacity to penetrate the deception of modern studio fantasy. In addition to avoiding any future high dollar quandary (usually the result of being unprepared), a recognition of musical clutter emerges, and the songwriter reminds himself of the revealed stylistic excess the next time he writes a song. At some point,
too, if the band has the opportunity to spend huge amounts of time in a sophisticated studio, it can develop a half-baked idea into a full-blown song in ways it never could have when jamming in the rehearsal room or playing live. The songwriter and the band are hearing the thing blasting back over the studio monitors as they're creating the music and as any casual listener will be hearing it in the future.
    Then there's the factor of radio airplay and its impact on the songwriter. If you're lucky, the recording is boomed over the vaster lake to the vaster audience you no doubt deserve. Suddenly the work is subject to the most intense mass scrutiny and self-analysis. An even greater responsibiliy suggests itself, but to whom and for what? The songwriter is no longer alone in his bedroom with the tape deck. He's internalized his experiences over the years and, perhaps, evolved from the more intellectual and eccentric to the more emotional and "sensible." He's begun to learn what's "effective," and what's not, but effective for whom? himself? some imagined listener? a perceived
radio audience? After a while can he even distinguish among the three? These bewildering questions loom on the horizon, but before they can be answered, one has to make The Album.
Living By Night Section 5
    In 1979 we released our first single titled "Rat Bait"/"The A-Bomb Woke
Me Up." We recorded it in Florida at a small studio that had been converted from a produce market. In the New Wave strategy dominant at the time we released it on our own label, Chlorinated Records. An Atlanta entrepreneur, Danny "The Anti-Mogul" Beard, who had backed the B-52's independent hit, "Rock Lobster," helped us plug "Rat Bait" in a growing national underground rock network of retail stores, small radio stations, and alternative press. It brought us some attention outside the Southeast. An A&R representative from EMI Records, a major label, flew in to record a demo tape with the band. It was a typically pitiful though not catastrophic session. Eventually EMI rejected the group ("not focused"). Other major labels gave us the characteristic deaf
ear. Undaunted, with our more extensive recording and performing experience, we were ready to make The Album.
    To make a first album requires three things besides a pile of cash: a record label, a producer, and a studio. First, I flew to Vegas with my life savings and generated a small fortune which I lost the next night in Reno. That left my family and friends. I "borrowed" about ten grand from an old pal who was heir to a supermarket chain. I was set for a return flight to the Green Felt Jungle when I was stopped by the aforementioned Anti-Mogul. He had started his own label and agreed to put out our record. The Anti-Mogul would serve as executive producer, and even vaguer concept that producer. In this case the executive producer would fetch soft drinks, tell jokes from Humpty-
Dumpty magazine, and run interference between the band and the producer.
    At this point none of us was very sure what a producer actually did. We used a fellow who had done some other projects for the Anti-Mogul. He stopped by and heard the group at practice one night. Like most bands' first producer he was a glorified engineer who impressed everyone with incomprehensible gizmos and tried to keep as many overdub ideas off the record as possible. Also, he kept the show running because it was obvious we didn't have a clue. We used the studio of his choice, and old Christian broadcasting facility. We had an enourmous pipe organ at our disposal, which we fired up like a lawnmower whenever possible.
    We began recording on the night John Lennon was murdered. It took about two weeks to make the record. We played the songs just as we would in a nightclub-with no alterations. The guitar solos, vocals, and pipe organ were overdubbed. Except for a few instances of meaningless tension (Bad Head), things went smoothly. The resulting
product, titled "The Deep End," sounded nothing like we thought the band sounded, but we were pleased. Leaping foward, here is the standard trajectory of a recording career:

    ALBUM ONE: Sounds nothing like the band.

    ALBUM TWO:More thought given to arrangements and playing in advance of the recording sessions. Still perform the basic tracks as on Album One for "the live feel" (it should be noted here that every band in the world sounds terrible live, but it's always important to get "the live feel" on tape.) Over-dub experimentation is allowed. More time and attention paid to the mix.

    ALBUM THREE: Band is now ready for daring "in-the-studio" moves. Vast amounts of time and money are seemingly squandered by Zen-like producer, but with often fantastic results. Studio Burn sets in; it's like being in a submarine for sixty days.
        Result A: Band makes first record "taking the listener into account."
        Result B:Just when band becomes capable of making a record that sounds like itself, it makes a record that sounds nothing like the band, curiosly returning to Album One though with different consequences.

    ALBUM FOUR: Since the other records have failed at the cash register, there's no budget to make another Album Three, so the strategy now is to "go for the live feel" and "get back to the roots" and try to make a more sophisticated version of Album One which never sounded "live" or even like the band in the first place, and which you only learned to make by going through the process of Albums Two and Three.

    Ten years after your first record is released you'll adore it because it has "charm." Meanwhile-back then-some of your first fans will hate it because you've gotten new fans and you're no longer their little pocket-pal to rub. However, radio stations will play the album and new faces will turn up at the gig. You might get more money from
the club owner who regarded you as a joke only six months before (this is the same clodhopper who'll ask you ten years later if you've "considered doing something else?")
    Some records get sold, but no one knows where the money goes so you can't pay back your friend. Your record gets to distant cities to which you begin traveling. The reporters' questions become a little more serious than "Where did the band get its name?" or "Are you New Wave?" Your personal lives become a metherworld of sex and drugs without the sex and drugs; clubs in towns that you can't find on the map rip you off; your records aren't in the stores and the ad wasn't in the paper; personnel changes occur because somebody told the bass player that the band wasn't popular anymore back home. In short, you need more money, better organization, equipment, bookings, and, above all, respect. In long, you need a bigger paddle with which to beat people who you wish would go somewhere and involuntarily explode.
Living By Night Section 6
At any moment in the music business almost nothing can happen.
-Show-biz axiom

To a lot of people I am an enigma. The enigma is enveloped in a paradox, and the whole thing is totally surrounded by a paradigm.
-Kal Rudman

    Kal Rudman publishes the "Friday Morning Quarterback," a music industry tip-sheet. Like all the Kal Rudmans of this world, Kal is talking about Kal. It's a self-portrait in gobbledygook. As a description of a big record company, however, Kal's enigma/paradox/paradigm becomes coherent. A record company is an institution shrouded in a dense fog that obscures all standard operating procedures. In short, almost no one knows what is going on, or what to do to make something go on.
    The people who make things like "hits" happen are the master navigators. They always find their way to The Fog Machine. Then they turn off The Fogger and go Top Five. Then they turn the fogger back on just to make it tough for everybody else. In the presence of these people I'd reccomend a powerful grease solvent. On the other hand,
they are just the few. They know how to get the job done, while the rest of us just float around. By the time you figure out how to get the job done, the firm wants you to take a long rest. Then they take back the keys to the company car, and your invitation to the annual picnic gets lost in the mail. Yet, when you were unknowing-before the
undoing-you managed to get part of the job done: The Record Deal.
    Making a record, like making a film, costs a lot of money. Unless you have controlling stock in Raytheon, you'll need The Big Record Deal to make The Big Record. Understanding The Big Record Deal, though, is quite simple. You get money to make a record. If itsells a lot of copies ("moves units") you'll make some money (maybe)
and get to keep making records. If it doesn't move units you won't get to make either. If you are with a major record label you will have to sell lots of records. Major labels are not patrons of the arts.
    Just to get the record deal, however, you need money to make a "demo tape" and , subsequently, to "shop the deal." This is where a means-to-an-end philosophy becomes necessary. If your band is any good at all it won't have a penny by now. That means somebody's parents have to come up with a credit card. Of course, not many recording
studios take American Express, but you'll need plastic to shop the deal, so you might as well start chiseling early.
    The demo tape is your first ploy. In theory, a person at the record company's A&R Department (A&R stands for Artist & Repertoire; they're talent scouts) hears the demo tape and, if he likes it, he signs you to a "deal," a recording contract. Just getting an A&R person to listen to a tape is an achievement. The exception to the demo tape process is The Buzz Factor. An artist may have a "bib buzz": hype generated by media or phenomenal grass-roots ground swell that catches industry czars by surprise. If a band has a big buzz it can sometimes go straight to the deal and obviate the demo tape.
    The demo tape takes a lot of work. You need someone outside the band who can give you serious musical advice. He can't just stop by the rehearsal and tell you that everything is fine because everything is never fine. Locating someone capable of giving you the help you need is especially difficult in the provinces, but let's say you get
lucky and find someone who really cares about your music.With that person's help you choose the best three or four songs, tear them apart, excise the self-indulgent parts and reassemble them. The tedium of this is always enhanced by a high-frequency whining emanating from the musicians involved. Once the alterations are made, the band plays the songs in front of audiences until the players aren't thinking about
the alterations anymore.
    Eventually, preparations for recording are complete except in the area of high finance. Here's where The Anti-Mogul steps in. He offers to bankroll the demo session. In return, if you fail to get the record deal, he'll release the songs on his small label. If you get the deal you pay him back the money he's sunk into the project, plus a
profit. A handshake occurs, and you cross your fingers behind your back. Then you book studio time and cut your demo. The recording session goes well, perhaps because you're prepared, for a change. It's important to keep the fall-back strategy with The Anti-Mogul in motion, so you shoot a picture for the record jacket cover and "master"
the tapes-the final steps before pressing the record. Meanwhile, you're about to run up even a bigger bill with American Express shopping the tape.
    Once you get beyond the petty, pointless humiliations, shopping the deal can be fun. First, you can't care whether you're accepted or rejected. Once you attain this carefree state you'll project an air of confidence that will impress record company executives into
thinking they might be missing something unless they give you some time. Second, you need to find someplace to go shop the deal. That's easy since there are only two marketplaces, New York City and Hollywood. Third, remember that you can learn everything you need to know about the music business in five minutes because (a) nobody knows anything, and (b) all you need is a telephone. The skills at connivance that you've mastered dealing with nightclub owners must come into play now, because it's time to penetrate The Fog.
    At the major record labels the secretarties are the custodians of Fog. They're in place to prevent you from reaching the inner sanctum of the A&R Department. Secretaries are like the sphinx, and the answer to their riddle is to know their names. But now do you get them? Armed with the name of the A&R person you wish to contact, simply call the main switchboard at the record company and ask for the secretary's name. This may require a minor ruse: "Good afternoon, this is Jack Tandy again. I was just speaking with Johnny Starmaker, and I'm supposed to call back some info the secretary by five o'clock. I'm embarrassed to say I can't quite recall who they said to ask for." The switchboard will be happy to give you a name just to get you off
the line.
    It's necessary now to give yourself a little pep talk. Say to yourself, "Remember, I'm the artist. Without me there would be no music business." After you've repeated this delusion, call back the record company, ask for the secretary, and say you're returning Johnny Starmaker's call. The secretary falls for the gambit, puts you on hold, and buzzes Johnny, who's in the middle of some mid-morning catastrophe and is in such a state of wild confusion that he can't remember whether he called Jack Tandy or not. So he picks up, and you slip your foot in the door of the inner sanctum.
    "Johnny, this is Jack Tandy with [name of band here]. I'm going to be in New York on April 1 for a few days. We've got a great new demo I'd like to send you, and if you like it maybe we could grab a cup of coffee." Johnny thinks he's heard of the group, remembers something about and Indie album and says, yeah, fine, call a week
before you come and anything else he can think of to get you off the phone. You say the demo tape will be on his desk tomorrow and ask "Is there a priority code I should put on the envelope?" He gives you the secret code that will get the tape right to his desk and not into the pile of a thousand cassettes on a table across his office.
    Now you're in business, and remember: there's no business without you. After you've finished with Johnny Starmaker, call the other New York record companies and pull the same stunt, only this time let it slip that you're meeting with Johnny on April 1. This is a
quick way of sowing seed in the hot soil of the A&R mind. Can't let Starmaker get a leg up! Of course, I'll meet with Tandy!
    Get the demo tape, first album, and press clips in the air as soon as possible. Book your flight with Mom and Dad's American Express card. In the week prior to April 1 make your final follow-up calls- "Just making sure everything is okay for the meeting, I hope
you like the tape," et cetera. Be sure to extract the name of each A&R person's California counterpart (and secretary) before you get dumped off the phone. Then pull the earlier telephone routine at the Hollywood companies, making sure you mention their New York oppositesby their first names as a reference, leaving a little leeway in your
tone just in case they hate these people.
Living by Night Section 7

    In 1982 everyone in Georgia thought the music business was located in New York City because the B-52's struck gold there back in 1979. We always got the gray granite brush-off, but this time the reception was warmer because of our more "mature" demo tape. The New York A&R people were still noncommital, being notoriously uncertain about what might be
good. They require support from other A&R people to help them confirm what's good. In the end, those who liked our demo had good things to say about it to their equally indecisive West Coast counterparts-sowing the seed, so to speak, for the next jaunt-partially justifying the next
month's credit card balance. Now it was time to go West.
   I floated some checks and flew to L.A. where I stayed with a friend who had just gotten a big job with a major label. I spent the next week driving around town in a rental car to the record companies and acting like I knew what I was doing. Pretending to be a manager wasn't too hard since everyone in California is pretending to be something. The feeling at the West Coast major label companies seemed much looser that in New York. Everybody was trying to come off as "just folks." Some people were enthusiastic about the demo tape ("heard some good things"), a pleasant change from the usual Manhattan chill. When I wasn't trying to impress them that I, too, was just folks and avoiding any real discussion as to the merits of my band, I was hanging
around the record company with my friend.
   The first thing I noticed about the record company was the large number of expensive, exotic motor vehicles on the lot. I assumed these plutomobiles belonged to the label's famous recording artists, but then I discovered they belonged to the guys who just worked there.
There was a rumor that the monster who headed the Radio Promotion Department had been given a Rolls Royce by Kenny Rogers as a tip. The more I hung around the more I realized that record executives think they are the stars. The point was made for me six years later when I
opened a copy of Billboard and caught a full-page advertisement for the movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner. Only it wasn't an ad for Field of Dreams, it was a duplicate ad announcing the installation of the new president of Capitol Records, with his head in the place of Costners.
   The A&R staff outside the field of hustle knew what I was doing in L.A., liked the demo tape, and never made me feel like someone toting a resume of lies. They stayed in touch with me after I returned home, and when we booked some gigs and got some wigs to fly in from
other labels, they said that they would send someone, too.
   Two labels flying in wasn't enough to constitute a "bidding war," but it did provide some incentive. The last thing you want in a bidding war-even a fake one-is for someone to put up a white flag, so I felt it was my responsibility to hint at other "interest." The hints were completely unconvincing, but that didn't stop the two A&R chiefs from flying into Raleigh, North Carolina, on January 27, 1984, to see the band perform in what formerly had been a tractor showroom
and now a nightspot called the Culture Club. Later that night one of the two A&R men said, "Let's make records." "Let's," we said.
   The Means had come to The End.
   Meanwhile, the American Express bill has arrived in the mail, but that's the least of your troubles. Now you're faced with decisions you've never had to make before, and they have to be made all at once. You've secured The Record Deal, but the real problems have just begun.
You've become a human ping-pong ball to be batted between the record company, the attorney, the manager, the friends. Once the word gets out on the deal, people yo thought were friends in the local music community stab you in the back. Hometown writers who were "behind the
band" now really get behind the band-with sharpened knives. A half- drunk jackass gets in your face and says,"You need to get back to doing what you were doing before people were telling you what to do!" It's quite an adventure, all the same. You have to rely on your instincts
because nothing that's happened before prepares yu for this. In show biz the past is never prologue, and the future unfolds as a series of non sequiturs ad infinitum. Overnight you've gone from being a dead-beat in a rock group to being "a serious artist with a career."
   Which brings me to The Attorney. It can't just be any old attorney. It has to be a Music Business Attorney (M.B.A.). In Hollywood there are many M.B.A.'s. In the hinterland, however, the attorney who can deal with the filed teeth at a record company is a rarity. When you finally find one, remember-he's working for you (and since he has an idiot for a boss, you'll probably end up working for him). Your first mistake is to act responsibly and listen to hours of legal discussions about percentage points, royalty rates, and film deals. None of this means anything unless you sell a bunch of records, and then you can holler "renegotiate!" If you don't sell a bunch of records it doesn't matter because you're going to get "dropped." Getting dropped hangs like a dagger over your head night and day. The kinds of commitments an artist really needs built into a recording contract aren't going to happen unless the artist is "established" or
has a huge buzz factor. So what you should say to your new attorney is, "Listen, I don't want to hear about it. Just get as much money as you can and forge my signature." The one thing of value he tells you is, "The record company is your enemy," but you won't understand this
because the record company people seem so nice and "artist-oriented" and want to spend all their spare time "developing" you.
   Once you have the attorney in the bag you need to choose The Producer. There aren't many of them out there, and there's always a scheduling conflict. There's no science to this, but it helps to understand what a producer really is: he's the guy who acts as if he's "into the project," and he usually is-for about ten to twenty-five grand. There's a lot of big talk about finding someone who "can take you to the next step." Oh yeah, and he has to have a "track record," meaning some success with a prior release. With the money in your recording budget you're not going to get the heavy hitter with the multi-platnum wall and-trust me on this-you wouldn't want to be around him anyway.
   Finding the right producer who can handle the budget, the recording console, and the five mental cases in the band is not easy. Eventually you have to settle on the person with whom you feel comfortable personally and artistically. We decided to make our album with the staff producer who had signed the band to the label. He brought in as coproducer an up-and-coming hotshot engineer from New York City who has since produced some very successful records.
We began "pre-production" in April 1984, spending two weeks in our rehearsal space-the basement of a bar. Then in May we spent thirty days recording at a twenty-four track studio in Atlanta. Our producer kept us calm while the coproducer got down in the trenches. Making an
album can sometimes be painful, but we learned valuable lessons about the way records are made. We brought the project in under budget, took the remaining money, paid off some debts (The Anti-Mogul), and bought a van.
   Getting this far without a real manager was a little unusual. The day after our album was completed our producer began prodding us about it. He knew what was in store for us at the label. There's some sense to this course of action (getting a real manager) since it's
impossible for a band member to take care of managerial responsibilites while touring to "support a record." Record companies don't like "dealing with the artist." The hard cases who run the label make a practice of referring to artists as though they were items for sale
in a produce market. They can't make cracks about an artist's complexion or dimensions if they're "dealing with the artist." They can say anything they want to a real manager, though, in an effort to avoid cutting a check. We flew around and finally found a real manager, so the label's accountant could tell us through him, "I just don't hear any hits."
Living by Night Section 8

    At the beginning, when you get on the inside of a record company, the first thing you discover is that all the departments hate one another. The second thing is that labels are in a perpetual state of renovation. The A&R man who signed you to a contract will probably be gone by the time your record is released. Here are the major departments and a brief description of their funcitons:

A&R DEPARTMENT          Talent Scout Hucksters
PROMOTION DEPARTMENT    Radio Airplay Hucksters
MARKETING DEPARTMENT    Get Product Into Store Hucksters
ART DEPARTMENT          Packaging Hucksters
MEDIA DEPARTMENT        "Column-Inches, Baby!" Hucksters
VIDEO DEPARTMENT        Useless-Without-One Hucksters

    The Master Navigators know how to make them all work together.For the rest of us, it's like keeping fifteen pie pans spinning on cue sticks. Though the departments hate each other, a successful record can provide incentive for harmony.
   Two outstanding inside lines:
(1) "It's in the pipeline, baby!" I wasn't certain what the pipeline was, but I knew it had been backing up since the 1970's. What it means is that your record has been shipped to retail outlets
and radio stations. What it really means is that your record will probably never see the light of day. Why? Because it's in the pipe- line, baby!
(2) "You need to become a priority at the label." If you have to ask what this means, you're probably not ready to become one. Asking a record company person how to become a priority often results in what Edmund Wilson called The Stalin Tic, a constant looking back over the shoulder to see if anyone is listening. Record company people are usually pretty circumspect when talking to artists about the business, and if they're not, they won't last long, or they're
too powerful to care. I finally found out what becoming a priority meant, but I can't tell you because it involves a secret handshake.
   People at our record company liked us at first because we made the mistake of being ourselves. Accessibility, however, is ultimately an anathema to the bogus distance of stardom. In the end, record company workers want you to be exaggerated in certain respects-that way you can dominate their unfulfilled star fantasies and they'll feel compelled to work for you even if they rightly denigrate you the second you leave their offices. So do you remain
human, or do you become a beast?
   THE HAMLET VARIANT. The record company, as were were constantly told, is working for you. I always thought that anybody working for you should be treated with at least a minor display of humanity. In show business, however, displays of humanity are a sign of weakness.
Being nice is a liability, and liability not only gets you nowhere, it "hurts you." This is the high dollar quandary of potential stardom: Are you willing to sacrifice a sense of humanity for opportunity? To be or not to be nice, that is the Hamlet Variant.
   After our self-titled album shot out of the pipeline, we received a good bit of critical praise in America and England (though we were predictably savaged in our hometown). Our first single elicited a "positive response from radio," and it became time to "tour in support of the record." Supporting the record means that you drive to and perform in about fifty American cities where, theoretically, the record company has a crack branch-office team making sure the album
is in the stores and forcing the big radio station to play your record. Our manager was able to pull in some mysterious old favor and arrange a support slot on Lou Reed's first national tour in many years.
   Reed is a quiet gentleman, one of the few with a large brain in the business. He treated us very well, which is more than I can say for the kingpins at our record company. Initially they had provided tour support to deger the ridiculous cost of traveling (road crew,
motels, gas, etc.). With tour support you subtract the money you make each week from total operating expenses. The label picks up the difference, "recoupable," as it were, against profits from your future record sales. Halfway through the Lou Reed tour the kingpins pulled the
plug on our support. I encountered The Top Pin during a three-night stand with Reed in Manhattan. Before I could say anything he quickly justified the plug pulling, saying, "I've seen the pattern many times before."
   After extensive travel you begin to comprehend how big America really is in relation to your hip little scene. We came back from the Reed tour a little rubbery-legged, trying to figure out our next move. Our second single was better than our first single because record
companies always choose the wrong first song to send to the radio station. Naturally it received a negative response from radio, and, with no tour responsibilities imminent, our album went back into the box, one made of pine.
   The dashing of our expectations made it difficult for the next few months, but by March 1985 we were back on track and flew to Hollywood to meet with Pat Benatar's husband about producing our next album. The A&R people were saying we needed to make a "competitive
record." But the Hollywood trip didn't work out. Then a British producer flew in for a meeting. He was to be an unusual choice. He was best known for producing some successful "synth-pop" English bands, and we were into small electric guitar symphonies. It seemed to work,
however, and we spent a total of three months making a pretty sophisticated recording. Our band was foolishly perceibed by the record company to be a "garage guitar band." When the head of A&R heard what we were doing, he was flabbergasted. "What?! They're making a forty-
eight track album?!" Unheard of, except for hugely successful bands. I flew to London where ours became the first record ever mastered on the world's first digital mastering console.
Living by Night Section 9

Once again it was to be pipeline time, and The Fog Machine was pumping full ahead. It's The Fogger's function to divert logical inquiry and make you think that it's only some shortcoming of your own that accounts for the fact that NOTHING MAKES SENSE at the record company. Example One: In a normal business a product can't be sold to the public unless the public knows that the product exsists. In the music business this goal is achieved through publicity, advertising, promotional materials (posters), videos, and radio airplay. The record
company has to do these things so that John Q. Consumer knows that the product-your record-exists. When the record company doesn't do any of these things, whose responsibility is it when nobody buys the record? The artist's, of course. Why? Because NOTHING MAKES SENSE and THE ARTIST IS ALWAYS TO BLAME.

Example Two: It makes sense to produce a good record for a relatively small amount of money so that the record will generate a return profit and the record company will have incentive to promote the product even more. Right? Wrong. When I suggested this to and A&R man at Capitol Records, he pitched foward into his soup. "My God," he stammered, "don't let anyone at the label hear you say that!" Why? Because you were too frugal. Unless you spend a million dollars making a record, the company won't feel compelled to promote it. Having created a masterpiece isn't enough incentive, and they won't know it's a masterpiece unless it costs a fortune. Put another way, they won't perform unless their job is threatened. The incentive is fear, and now things start to make sense.

So you have to "set up the record," and to do that your manager has to "work the label." This means he has to somehow extort commitments from the different department directors so that they'll kick in the promotion. Then at the right moment your manager has to coordinate the departments for a full-frontal assault.

A little while before our second major label release it was becoming apparent that we might not be a priority. One time we contacted the Hollywood A&R department to ask if we could send promotional video to the company's annual convention. First, we had to convince the secretary we were really on the label. Then we were told (exasperated voice) that any promotional video would be innapropriate because "this year we are only concentrating on the big winners, the
home runs."

Trouble began even before our album came out of the box. The record company's art department appropriated creative control over the packaging (the record cover). The results were preposterous, and theband was extremely agitated. Our manager pleaded with us not to "alienate the label." Meanwhile, he was too busy promoting big rock concerts and tractor-pulls to work the label on our behalf. And our big-time booking agency was doing a crack job of booking the band into clubs we'd played for years--and for about half of our usual guaranteed fee. Once we had go on strike at show time and renegotiate with the club owner inside of a truck while an angry mob pelted our one-man road crew with debris.

The strike was on February 21, 1986. Our new record was released two weeks later to "critical acclaim." Good press is better than bad, or none at all, but I've since discovered that terms like "Critically Acclaimed" (CA) and "Legendary" (L) often form one side of the following equation:

                          CA + L = No $

The radio airplay patterns were typically confusing. The big radio stations in Boston and Denver played the record, but The Good Guys at the big radio station in our hometown wouldn't touch it. Of course, not everything was terrible on the home front. The Atlanta chapter of a national organization presented up with the rock group category award for 1986. The awards ceremony was sponsored by a real estate firm. In our acceptance speech we expressed gratitude for the trophy but hinted that a house would have been nicer. No one was amused.

It gradually becomes clear that the full-frontal assault the manager was supposed to have coordinated has turned into Pickett's Charge. The phone calls stop being returned, even from friends like The Artist Relations Director, a nice man who's supposed to help you smooth out problems with the hierarchy. The toll-free number of the label mysteriously changes and no one seems to have the new one. Right around this time you get hit with The Star Question: Someone at the record company-usually the A&R person-asks," Do you really want to be a star?" This is when you should know you're in serious trouble because somebody at the label has expressed doubts in a meeting about the band's "star quality." The irony about this is that the person in the meeting was probably talking about some other artist, but your A&R person is so paranoid he thought the guy was talking about you.


"Do you really want to be a star?" To which you respond, being naively flattered, "Yes, of course. Please push the button." Only your idea of being a star is something quite different from the record company's. Your idea is chatting on the Dick Cavett Show about poetry and politics. The problem with this particualr star fantasy is that Dick Cavett hasn't had a show in fifteen years.

Along with The Star Question comes The Big Euphemism. The S.Q. fades away, but The Big Euphemism haunts you forever. What is The Big E.? Well, The Fog Machine is really cranking, and you can't see anything. So you start asking questions about this department's "sincerity" and that department's "commitment." They start calling you paranoid. Soon, when the dirigible bursts into flames, you'll realize that "paranoid" is The Big Euphemism for "Extremely Correct."

By the time you understand The Big Euphemism it's way too late. You'll be driving in circles around New England in July trying to find out whether or not you're playing some super-hip industry function in New York for which the record company said they'd pay, only nobody calls back to let you know one way or the other. So you head south and then you're standing in the twisted girders of a phone booth at Howard Johnson's not far from Gettysburg and someone tells you that you're a loss to be casually cut. That's when you realize you've been remarginalized. Certain people will soon trot out the word "bitter" and apply it to you, and you haven't even opened your mouth yet. When you do open your mouth you discover that the word "bitter" is just one more Big Euphemism for "Extremely Correct."

By then you've already driven back home where they've hung a banner at the city limits that says WELCOME TO THE REAL THING, BABY! and you watch an outer-space movie and pour down twelve inches of Old Repeater that at length has no effect but you still feel better that you have in 750 days, and you go to sleep for neither the first nor the last Sunday morning as the sun comes up over America's Pop Republic.

Time to raise the periscope, and questions and answers as well. I see a tree falling in the wilderness. No one is there to hear it. Is there a sound? Answer: Yes.

Question: If America is a level playing field, why am I always rolling downhill? Answer: Because I can't stop.

A few years ago I walked into an antique jewelry shop on the outskirts of town. The saleswoman recognized me, walked up, and said, "Thanks."

"You're certainly welcome," I said,"but I haven't bought anything yet."


She explained. Her family had owned a farm somewhere in Tennessee. Her dream had been to return after she received her college degree and establish the farm as an art therapy center for disturbed children. The previous summer, though, the mortgage on the farm had been foreclosed. Everything was to be auctioned off, including, of course, her dream. All she could do was sit on the front porch of the farmhouse every day and, while a century left her piece by piece, listen to music on her headphone set.


"Your album," said the saleswoman, "was the only hope I had, and was the only thing that got me through."

I put my sunglasses on and bought a red ceramic bracelet from China that had caught my eye. Then I walked outside into a storm of motes in a wide shaft of August light. What does this mean? Everything. And everything else means nothing.

--PRESENT TENSE
Rock & Roll and Culture
Edited by Anthony DeCurtis
copyright 1992 Duke University Press
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
The text of this book was originally published without index or the present preface as volume 90, number 4 of the South Atlantic Quarterly

JEFF CALDER has been a singer and songwriter with the Atlanta based rock band the Swimming Pool Q's since 1978. The Q's have recorded five albums, including the most recent World War Two Point Five [at the time of this publication] (Capitol Records, 1989.) He also performs with the group the Supreme Court. He has written for newspapers and small publications. The present piece is excerpted from his critical autobiography, I Posed with the Gods.

ANTHONY DeCURTIS is a writer and Senior Features Editor at Rolling Stone, where he oversees the record review section, and the pop music critic for Weekend All Things Considered on National Public Radio. He coedited The Rolling Stone Album Guide, both scheduled for publication in the fall of 1992. His essay accompanying the Eric Clapton retrospective, Crossroads, won the 1998 Grammy Award in the "Best Album Notes" category. He holds a Ph.D. in American literature and has taught at Indiana University and Emory University.