From: Dave Mason
Subject: Traffic first album
Dear Bob,
I just read your piece on the the first traffic album and though there were no covers on the songs that I wrote, ( I was 18 at the time and frankly my attempts were a little immature at that age) though traffic did have a huge hit in Europe with my song "Hole In My Shoe" number 2 in England, at that time singles were a separate song from the albums.
I think of traffic as one of the first alternate bands, very progressive but with traditional roots. The second album "TRAFFIC" was I think the most cohesive work from the original 4 members and of course garnered one of the most covered songs "FEELIN ALRIGHT" though the way that I wrote and performed it, was very different from the Joe Cocker version, though without him the song would never have garnered the 48 versions ( Three Dog Night being one of them).
I hope that they will think of re releasing the second album at some point, regardless it was all a truly magic time for me.
Dave Mason
(Dave attached an MP3 of his newly recorded version of "Dear Mr. Fantasy", you can find a sample here: http://bit.ly/OHDs1L)
_______________________________________
From: Bernie Leadon
Subject: Re: Income Inequality Killed The Music Business
Bob-
I have to bring it back to copyright, man. Copyright was improved when it was deemed to exist from the moment of creation, instead of requiring a kid to make a lead sheet, mail it into the Library of Congress, and wait for a confirmation back. But copyright is not respected anymore, even though the nation's founders thought that patents and copyrights were essential to growth.
You can argue, and regularly do, that the cat is out of the bag, just get with the 21st century, you can't prevent people from taking your music, etc. So just give it away, as a promotional item, a "loss-leader". But then, as you explain, the power brokers realized that the only real money left was in live shows, have aggregated all the venues, all the ticketing, and unless a kid musician is content to play local clubs forever, there is a bottleneck that you have to sell your soul to traverse.
We should be promoting respect of copyright, of adequate protection for individual creative output. Yes, I think ways should be found in the digital world to protect copyright. Aggregators will make their money from such a system, but so would the creative food chain that has always been the lifeblood of the industry. Plankton are small, but form the basic level of the oceanic food chain. Kill the little guy, make it impossible for anyone who has not sold their soul to make a living in music, and you get what you get. Everyone starves.
With respect,
Bernie Leadon
_______________________________________
From: Tom Rush
Subject: Re: are you following all this?, re-Lehrer?
No. Damn! I have trouble getting too excited about the self-plagiarism thing, and some of the Dylan stuff I thought was quibbling. But other charges had substance. Too bad. Now the vultures will be pulling apart everything he's written looking for problems and not many of us can withstand that kind of scrutiny.
I still think he has a gift for assembling and synthesizing complex stuff and making connections between the work of different researchers. I hope the baby isn't thrown out with the bathwater.
T
_______________________________________
From: Tom Rush
Subject: Re: E-Mail Of The Day
Bob,
This brought a tear to my eye! It makes me appreciate how unbelievably lucky my contemporaries and I are to be entering this brave new world with an established fan base to turn to for support. YouTube, Facebook and the rest are fabulous ways to rally existing supporters, but it's a rough way to try to build a constituency. You need quality, of course, but also a talent for presenting your wares (Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter campaign did so much better than mine at least in part because her pitch was so engaging - also, she's cute, which I regard as a form of cheating), and a large dollop of luck. For someone just coming on the scene it's a rough and perilous way to try to pay the rent.
T
_______________________________________
(please withhold name thanks bob)
jobs I simultaneously held during the first few my yet-to-be-major-label-band was rehearsing, playing local gigs, touring in a shit station wagon and making pretty much no money (in boston, 2000-2003):
-street-performing living statue ($15-$50 an hour, depending)
-ice-cream/coffee shop barista ($12 an hour, plus free coffee and a basement in which I could store my street performance rig)
-nude modeling for painters at art schools and adult education centers, and occasional weird photographers (usually $15-$20/hr)
-doing clothes-check duty at an illicit loft that threw sex and fetish parties ($20/hr, plus all the free soda and chips and salsa I could eat while curiously watching people in leather fist each other)
-naming dot.com companies and researching free URLs for start-ups ($1k-$2k per gig, but infrequent. found the gig talking to a naming and branding company owner in the coffee shop)
-speakeasy parties in our house ($10 donation at the door, usually took in $1-$2k and provided a great platform for the band to play for people)
-stripping ($20-100/hr, depending on your luck and ability to convince sad lonely married men to buy you bottles of champagne)
-pro-dominatrixing ($200/hr, subtract hotel expenses, fantastic cheap room deals on priceline.com!)
only one of these jobs was over-the-table.
all extra money after rent and food and other basic shit was spent on the band and touring.
all the rest of my time outside work got spent on songwriting, band rehearsals, booking gigs and touring new england in a crap car.
if you want it, you figure it out.
there's tons of weird ways to make money.
you're supposed to be an ARTIST, right?
be creative for fucks sake.
(please withhold name in case the IRS comes chasing after me for back taxes....)
_______________________________________
From: Wendy Waldman
Subject: Re: The Lehrer Book
Love you much, Bob, as you know I read everything you write.
But gotta take issue with this statement here:
"Turns out the young are more creative. Because they don't know the game. They don't know what they can't do. You can be creative as you get older, but you must stimulate yourself by playing with younger people, having new experiences. In other words, the classic rock artists shouldn't work with their friends, but twenty year olds. Not necessarily flavors of the week, but those who are not in awe of the legends, who don't see what can't be done, only possibilities."
The late Beethoven quartets, the last things he wrote, the last work of Bela Bartok, the last works of Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Kurasawa, of many of the great authors, painters and film makers--at the end of their lives, having so much wisdom and craft, elegance and subtlety and NOTHING to lose--their finest works, no longer safe, often so far ahead of their time, not understood til years later.. at the end of their lives, with the real courage to put it all to work and to take real risks.
This myth of the genius of youth--yes, there is genius in youth, but many geniuses don't come to full fruition until they've worked at it for three, four, five decades. Mozart, better at the end than the beginning, genius though he was recognized to be at 7.
And I do not believe they were all hanging out with the younger generation to get their ideas--maybe some were, but that fire that burned in them was theirs alone, and they paid the price for it.
This shallow view of creativity, the notion that when you're young is when you have all the juice, is only half the story. Dylan wrote brilliantly as a kid, but some of his latest works are compelling and frightening and even deeper if possible--Gershwin wrote nice pop songs as a kid, and at the end of his life was writing Porgy and Bess and American in Paris.
Maybe the above statement is true within the tiny, myopic, limited confines of the current American pop music scene, but in the world of art as a whole, it's so far from the truth as to be laughable. In every field of the arts, you find elders who are taking so many chances that younger artists can't begin to fathom. Of course there are many young geniuses, but, like Beethoven, Picasso, Gershwin, Strummer, Martha Graham, Puccini, Mc Coy Tyner, wherever you turn--it's when these guys get older that it really starts to get interesting and scary.
You're SUPPOSED to get better as you get older--that's what it is to be an ARTIST. Now maybe I'm wrong because maybe we're not talking about artists, maybe we're talking about young American quasi-commercial "musicians,' and maybe, while they get some internet play and have some followings, maybe they really aren't artists. But let's see where some of these guys are in 20 or 30 years. Bet the bulk of them have long disappeared and a few will be out there doing remarkable work.
American pop music culture is not a good yardstick for what is art.
ps-this note has the approval of my very opinionated 23 year old...:)
xw
______________________
To: Wendy Waldman
From: Bob Lefsetz
Subject: Re: The Lehrer Book
Of course you're right, but in the narrow confines of those who've already been successful in rock music, not personally, but financially…they're afraid of change and risk, they're afraid of moving backward.
______________________
From: Wendy Waldman
Subject: Re: The Lehrer Book
yeah, you're right about that to a massive degree, and probably that is the way it's always been.
I figure for every adventurous artist who kept growing, there were probably 50 who retreated. maybe more like 200.
I spoke to a very very famous and still huge singer about a month ago, who is not much older than I, and she declared that she can 'no longer sing,' and is retiring. In her 60s, which is only a few years after Tony Bennett restarted his career--and I don't think there's anything wrong with her pipes at all, but there is plenty going on in her head. It's bullshit, of course she can sing, and probably brilliantly. What she can't do anymore, is compete. And here's the question for boomer artists--why should you have to? If you earned your stripes, and you're done with that part of the race, why not go ahead and make the records you always dreamed of and thought were too daring to do or that your record company wouldn't like? Especially for those who can afford it. You don't have a record company anymore, your true fans will be interested in wherever you're going, and the rest only want to hear your old stuff and don't care anyway so what do you have to lose, except regret on your deathbed that you didn't follow your creative dream?
It's hard to get older in this youth oriented commercial market--but as true baby boom rockers and artists, it's important for us to keep pushing and to look at the big picture, the great artists in every field who push and pushed boundaries as they got and get older....and one thing for sure, everyone will get older. I'm sure that Tom Waits doesn't give a fig for what's happening in the "modern" world of pop music and his records are amazing and weird and challenging as ever.
This relates to a personal decision I've made about my own work from here on out. I've had 2 years of shit starting with Kenny dying, Andrew, my dad, other dear friends, my mom pretty much in a vegetable state, my brilliant son going through a horrible phase that seems to have resolved itself thankfully, and for me diagnosis of precancerous cells resulting in a big surgery shortly --all of this, and my sister saying to me, "look, at this point in your life, it's time to retire and write string quartets...your version of that, whatever that is..." And I have wrestled with that decision and concluded that indeed, I'm sick of the race--in my case it manifested more in the race to work in the commercial music industry, which I did to support my family. I learned a huge amount, I played every position on the team from sweeping up after the elephants, singing background on Hee Haw (they let a Jew sing on Hee Haw!!! in the band only, of course..), working in Nashville and breaking a lot of ground there, producing country, pop, Christian and folk records--30 released cds in 25 years....studio player, team member, you name it...as they say, also backwards and in high heels....
but you know the truth about me, and with what time i have left, I am going to do the records I've been dreaming of doing--
and no one has to like them, G-d help me, Bob, not even you...:)
As long as I can eat and keep my studio open and my kids are ok, I'm going to work as much as possible for the rest of my life on pushing my own boundaries. This includes things like putting together vocal ideas such as the Guinnevere project with Karla, Cowan and Mietek--possible composition collaboration with George Winston, my next solo cd, song cycles, instrumental music, an album, I hope, on HB Barnum, whose arrangements are unreal--and to try to keep the "I have to do it cause it keeps me in the game" work out of the picture unless I'm starving. I actually don't care who's playing what on what internet station--my favorite current writer is AR Rahman and some of those awesome Indian songwriters-- and the great English writer Gerald Finzi who died in World War 1---I don't care who's hot or who's not, and neither does anyone that I respect, be they a young artist or an old one. I don't care anymore about most of the stuff that's going on in the world you report on (pardon my grammar) but I care increasingly about what I'm going to do for the next 15 years as an artist, and how far I can go personally.
And I suspect that is "age appropriate." I don't think I'm supposed to care at this stage, am I?
It sounds like a dream to me, to be able to go make the music you want, to experiment, to follow a hunch, to create and solve musical problems--I was doing some work in the early 80s with synthesizers and such, that according to my 40 year old mentor was years ahead of its time--and I was shut down by my publisher (___ ______) at the time who didn't get what I was doing--and I put that work aside and went to Nashville--it turned out ok, but as I've begun to look at that creative thread, and with Mark Nubar ever at my shoulder--and Mark is in the THICK of the world you are watching right now--I am more than ever excited to follow my muse completely--albeit scared shitless too, cause where do you start? But that's always the artists' dilemna, part of the hunt.
so, that's my rave. long way of saying, you're right, man. we have only a few choices. we get facelifts and try to act young but aren't.... we do nostalgia tours and make a shit load at state fairs if we are lucky enough....we collaborate with young people and return to the charts triumphant and we've seen that (your model suggesting the boomers collaborate with young artists, which can be brilliant)...we go into another area such as production, film, publishing, teaching ...we retire.....or we say fuck it, I'm going to make the music I want to make and die knowing I pushed my creative boundaries.
and you know in truth, they are all fair game, it just depends on which road suits you. I know mine without a doubt.
i ALWAYS enjoy reading you and you know by now that I read everything you write and sometimes I fire off a response so fast I bet I'm among the first!!!
Be in good health and best to Felice. We are going through putting my father's archives at Brigham Young with the venerable film music archivist Jim D'Arc, my favorite Mormon and a total film and film music geek.
XXWW
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