Eclipse

Trent Reznor said:

Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters....

This brought about a thought.

Nowadays, musicians develop the album, record the album and tour the album. They avoid any leaking of the album until the time the record hits the shelves. U2, to name one I can recall, has worked hard to keep leaked tracks off YouTube.

But that isn't the only way. I recently watched a documentary on the making of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and before the recording, when it was still called Eclipse, they toured on it. I am sure that certain people in the know had and played recordings of the songs before they were officially released. Certainly that familiarity with the material and audience reaction helped in recording and editing of what has proven to be one of the greatest selling albums of all time.

So, what happens if you develop the songs, the overarching suite, and never go into the studio and record it? Release the soundboard recording of this part when you think you have it down, then another piece from another when you like that. Maybe go back to the first one if you play it well again.

I dunno. I'm just spitballing. Does this make any sense?

On and On and On and On, or "If you thought 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' was ironic, take a look at 'Die Young'"

I'm watching Heaven and Hell on VH1 Classic right now. For those who don't know, and who don't read I ♥ Guitar, Heaven and Hell is the new name for Black Sabbath, minus Ozzy and Bill Ward, plus Vinny Appice and Ronnie James Dio. Heaven and Hell-era early 80s Sabbath. Considering the revolving door on the vocalist slot since Mob Rules, the band has more claim to the Sabbath name than nearly any point in the last 25 years, occasional reunions with Ozzy like Live Aid to the contrary. Of course, any band that includes Tony Iommi with a detuned SG has the right and nearly the duty to call itself Sabbath. Which makes the H&H decision much more confusing to me. Maybe Tony's tired of "Paranoid" and "Iron Man".

But there is a big difference between Ozzy-led and Dio-led Sabbath, isn't there? Later Sabbath is more ambitious to my ears. I like Ozzy, really, but clearly Ronnie can sing circles around him.

But since the name has been left sitting around, I guess someone should pick it up. Seems it's Ozzy. This really puzzles me. By whatever name, Sabbath has been Iommi's band since before Ozzy joined in and now for 30 years after Ozzy was kicked out. I have problems understanding the grounds Ozzy thinks he has.

Oh well.

Broken English and Rubber Soul

Pribek said that John Lydon wants to work with Britney Spears.

Most comments said that nothing would come of it besides maybe John getting a happy. Which might be true. But I can't help thinking that something interesting could come from it.

I picked up a copy of Performing Songwriter. Like so many of these kind of magazines, you don't read it because you're a performing songwriter, but because you want to be one. In the news bits section, they have this:

Clive Davis, the behemoth starmaking producer and CEO of the BMG music label, recently mused on star inevitably wanting to craft their own material. Davis, who groomed such stars as Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys and the now independently artistic Kelly Clarkson, said such pop acts should leave the songwriting to the machines that made them. In a recent conversation with Billboard Music and Money Symposium Davis remarked, "The odds are already against you. You have got to go over the best material, and that should win out, not withstanding any track record. I don't care how many No. 1s you [a professional songwriter] have written in the past, have you written a new No. 1? Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra didn't write, and they are among Time magazine's greatest artists of the century.

Of course, that gets to me. How not rock'n'roll is that? But really, it's not Clive Davis' job to be rock'n'roll. It's his job to sell.

But there's a bill of goods that I bought a long time ago. Gary Busey as Buddy Holly explaining that he's the A&R guy taking the songs he wrote to the be arranged by him and then performed by the band he formed and leads. The old way is when the A&R connects songwriter to arranger to producer to "artist" (singer) and musician. The Beatles are good, by this thought, because after the early cover tunes, they did this. The Outlaws, Willie and Waylon and the rest, were cool because they wrote their own material and used their road bands in the studio. Punk was all about the DIY. My heroes have always been songwriters, and they still are today, to mangle Willie's words.

Consider how the pop acts are marketed these days. T-shirts, posters, etc. How is that substantially different from the Beatles when they first came to America? But we know that the same band that knocked out the hits like Meet the Beatles! can create things like Abbey Road and the White Album. (I'm a Stones guy, but I respect what the Beatles did and I like a lot of it.)

I kept hoping for the Spice Girls to break the mold and come up with something interesting. Obviously, they took their money and split well before that happened, but I held out that possibility. And I hold out the possibility for Britney.