Real Bands and Common Currency

Hipgnosis, 64 Quartets, Pandemic record collecting, Dave Parker, Thulani Davis

The story behind Pittsburgh Pirates’ Dave Parker and the t-shirt that was inspired by Parliament he wore during the 1976 season (See Bonus Tracks below).

So, there has been some infield chatter recently about the assertion that younger people who are into music nowadays aren't that excited by the concept of 'the band.' First, we had Maroon 5's Adam Levine talking about the lack of enthusiasm for records by bands. That's been followed up with some articles about how younger listeners don't relate to the concept of a band anymore. "When the first Maroon 5 album came out, there were still other bands," said Levine. "I feel like there aren't any bands anymore, you know? That's the thing that makes me kind of sad, is that there were just bands [back then]. There are no bands anymore. I feel like they're a dying breed."

A few bands took time to refute Levine's statements (Paramore, Garbage), while many on Twitter pointed out that Levine is in a band, which really isn't the point. I understand what Levine is saying and it is, overall, true. The music scene has changed a lot since Maroon 5 first hit the charts alongside bands like Matchbox 20, No Doubt, Green Day, Evanescence, Foo Fighters, and Coldplay. Levine qualified his statement somewhat, indicating that while there may still be plenty of bands out there, they are not as visible on Billboard charts. 

The thing is, our very definition of what constitutes a band has changed dramatically over the years. One of the best and truest statements I've ever heard about the formation of a band was made by Bruce Springsteen:  "So, real bands -- real bands -- are made primarily from the neighborhood. From a real time and real place that exists for a little while, then changes, and is gone forever."  Don't get hung up on the word 'neighborhood,' even though that has often been the place where many bands met and started playing together. Instead, focus on the second sentence. A real time and real place that exists for a little while, then changes and is gone forever. That is real life, folks. Impermanence.

The music--the records and live shows--is supposed to be a hedge against the passage of time. It is supposed to confer some level of immortality on those who play it and on the fans who listen to it. When we hear a song we know and possibly love we are home, we are safe. Because we too know that everything in our lives exists for only a little while before it changes like a kaleidoscope pattern, and then is gone forever, like a mandala drawn in the sand and then blown away. Earlier this year NYC-based music writer Caryn Rose tweeted this following the death of Sylvain Sylvain of the New York Dolls: "I was obsessed with the New York Dolls as a teenager & Syl’s passing is hard not necessarily bc of that but more bc it is another chain in the link of things that made up the common currency of my world & someday they’ll all be gone."

The bands with whom we share an experience of growing up in a certain time and place, or with whom we share certain attributes or beliefs, the bands who look like us, who live like us, who eat the food we eat or play the music that seems to speak directly to us and our lives, is a hedge against this disintegration of the chain that forms the common currency of our world. But that has changed a bit with the advent of the internet and with the trend we have to live and interact more globally. More than ever, performances can be created by musicians who are separated by space, and by time. Technology has made it possible not only to record separately and edit together performances as has been done in the modern studio for decades, but to play together while separated in space as well. That is one element that helps unravel the need for a band. Sometimes these long-distance collaborators share more artistically and socially with each other than they do with their more physically immediate communities. 

When you have a band, it is made up of a certain number of people (from two to six or more) and, generally speaking, each of those people are in the band for a reason. John, Paul, George, Ringo. Jerry, Bob, Phil, Pigpen, Bill, and Mickey. Roger, Pete, John, and Keith. The band itself is comprised of these individuals, each with a unique personality and their own strengths/weaknesses on their instruments not to mention individual musical styles. When egos are held in check in the interest of the strength of the unit, the band concept has produced some of the best and most interesting music imaginable. 

For long-running bands, the stories, the history of the band, became an extremely important part of their overall package. There is the origin story that explains how the various members came together and how they realized that they should form a band. There are the road stories and the studio stories and the stories that create the drama of our daily lives. Part of these stories feature members who leave the band or who die. Often these members are replaced. Over the years most long-running bands have sort determined the members who they would not replace in order to continue as a band. For the Stones, it's Jagger and Richards, for The Who it's Townshend and Daltrey. For Led Zeppelin, it was none, the band folding at the loss of its first original member, drummer John Bonham. 

But over the years bands have pushed the limits of what constituted the original group. Yes and Journey are bands that have replaced frontmen with distinctive voices with varying degrees of success. Kraftwerk swapped members in for retiring members without much fanfare. The Beach Boys continue to tour with universal pariah Mike Love at the helm, but what are they really? The music Brian Wilson created was often beyond the ability of the band to play them and studio musicians were brought in. In fact, studio musicians like the Wrecking Crew and the Funk Brothers are responsible for a large part of American pop-cultural musical history. Steely Dan's entire career was a transition from a traditional band that came together, wrote songs, and toured to a duo who surrounded themselves with studio musicians and rarely (until a late-career reunion) played live. 

Springsteen makes the distinction between real bands and some other, presumably manufactured bands (supergroups, for example) that do not satisfy the definition of real bands. Real bands come together because there are people looking to write and play music and they seek other like-minded people to help them do that. Along the way, chemistry is there or isn't, and group lineups gel or not as musicians come and go. Sometimes the group doesn't survive these transitions, but other times it continues until that indescribably 'right' combination is made. 

But Springsteen is also very clear that these states are temporary. They 'change' and then are 'gone forever.' The Beatles' Liverpool, Springsteen's Asbury Park, Prince's Minneapolis, Joy Division's Manchester, Dylan & The Band's Woodstock--all of these and many others besides are examples of places that have assumed mythical proportions in our minds because of the music that was born and created there but where the ethos that existed at the time these bands came together and started to record has evaporated. It's not always a location on a map. Sometimes it is a mental construct or a specific moment in time that fosters a local scene or an expression of developments in society at large. Examples of these would be psychedelia, the hippie movement, punk rock, indie rock, etc. 

One reason bands may not be as popular is that at this point we see bands as more similar to a corporate entity, or perhaps more accurately, a brand. It is always a challenge for a band to grow outside its original parameters while still satisfying its original audience. There is always a certain tension there--will the band stay true to its brand, or will they surrender key elements of its identity in order to gain additional fans? 

But all of it is impermanent: the band, the neighborhood, the venues, the labels, platforms, formats. Our youth, our health, and eventually, our own lives. But before that, there is a gradual stripping away of the familiar, the things we once knew and loved, the things that make up the common currency of our world, as Caryn Rose says. That's what the music, and the records, and the live shows, and the whole thing, really is for: it helps us to remember the world as it was and connects us to the people and experiences that made it that way. 

Our idea of what constitutes a band may have changed, and in many ways audiences find the idea of a band as a self-contained unit of individuals who together create something that is more than the sum total of its parts to be less compelling than they once were. Adam Levine's lament that there are 'no bands' anymore isn't true objectively, but in terms of how people relate to music, how it creates memories and helps define their world it might sometimes feel that way. We can't go to Bruce's Asbury Park or to CBGB's in 1976, but we can still put on the records and find the essence of those times and those places once again. 

Bonus Tracks

Next week I'll be publishing a piece for paying subscribers with some thoughts on Hipgnosis and other investment funds set up specifically to acquire publishing rights to popular songs. In the meantime, you can check out 'Mass Hipgnosis' by Rich Woodall at The Baffler. I find the assertion that the treatment of songs as investments will prove to be the end of innovation and disruption in popular music to be worthy of some deep thinking time. 

Groups may not be as popular as they once were, but you can find out why people have cared about bands so much for so long with a visit to 64 Quartets. Written by Chris O'Leary, the blog contains writing about that most symmetrical of groupings, the quartet (or is it a double duo?). As you'd expect from the author of the two volumes of The Songs of David Bowie as well as the Bowie blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, 64 Quartets is full of wonderful writing about some stunningly great music. 

If you are used to going out and searching for that record you have to have for your collection, the past year of lockdowns and social distancing made it more difficult to get your fix. But you could still spend plenty of money on your vinyl addiction, as Carman Tse notes in 'Feeding Your Record Collection In A Pandemic Always Comes With A Cost': “'No more records, for a while.” That was the edict given to me by my more-sensible partner after I dropped a hefty sum on a single LP last year. I won’t say how much it was, but I can admit it was large enough to warrant a statement like that. I agreed to that edict. How could I not, given the current state of, well, everything? But I never actually kept that promise. There was no way I could.'

Making the rounds at a few sports newsletters this week was a piece from MLB's website about Dave Parker of the Pittsburgh Pirates and his 1976 team motto t-shirt inspired by Parliament's 'Mothership Connection'. "Sure, it was early in the season and there was no reason to panic, but Parker realized that he could offer something that Stargell couldn't. So, with a poetic flourish just as memorable as anything Walt Whitman ever penned, Parker composed the most legendary baseball T-shirt of all-time: "If you hear any noise, it's just me and the boys boppin'."'

Since its inception in 1964, the Grammy for best album notes has been awarded to just three women. Thulani Davis, who won in 1993 for an Aretha Franklin boxed set, was the first.  "If it’s Grammy season, it’s time for the annual attention paid to what many see as the Recording Academy’s longstanding and well-known diversity challenges, its preponderance for awarding Black artists in “niche” rather than mainstream categories, and its poor track record acknowledging the contributions of women across the board."

I leave you this week with Charles Mingus performing his composition 'The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers' originally recorded for his album Let My Children Hear Music, one of my favorites.

Have a tremendous week and I'll see you all next week.