Music Before the Money

The 3rd Maritime Beatle Event is only a week away and ticket sales have been going quite well. headlined by the Hungarian-based band The Blackbirds it proves to be an awesome event.

The event organizer and entertainer Hal Bruce just got back from Louisville, Kentucky where he headlined The Abbey Road on the River Festival

Here are the headliners for this year’s show:

The BlackBirds (Budapest, Hungary)
Jay Goeppner (Illinois)
Hal Bruce (Nova Scotia)
Hal Bruce & Ticket 2 Ride (NS)
Summer of Love Band
(International All-Star Band)


ADDED GUESTS

Mark Rashotte (Ontario)
Ian Sherwood (Nova Scotia)
Stan Bullock (North Carolina)
Scott Ferguson (Nova Scotia)
Mark Beyer (Kentucky)
Michelle Gill (Nova Scotia)
Donna Scaglione (Nova Scotia)

For tickets click here: Maritime Beatle Event

In Victorian England the word “pub” was short for “public house.” In small towns the pub, alongside the church, was a meeting place and there were even a few hangings from the beams. In other words the pub was “public.”

The MC of the pub was called a “publican.” He knew everyone in the pub and welcomed strangers into the midst. The publican was part of the entertainment because he was either a storyteller or encouraged patrons to tell tales.

If you go into traditional British pubs in this country you’ll rarely see a publican anymore, because a publican can be a bar manager but vice versa is not the rule. In fact these days many bar managers so are so busy they rarely get the chance to meet new people and a lot of them never acquire the people skills for the job.

This is where live entertainment used to fill the gap. And for about 25 years it worked. A good band made up for the management and staff lacking interpersonal action to maintain good customers. However, bands and other music forms were not enough to draw the crowd. They could hold most of whomever came in but there was something lacking. It’s not what was missing, it was what was added: video lottery termnals and large screens.

Yes, many of the bars you go into these days have multi-media diarrhea going on. Along with blasting canned music there are the electronic sounds of people losing their money on machines that never let them win and 10 screens showing sports that maybe 15% of the customers want to see.

So, last weekend I had the gall to approach a manager in one of these establishments and ask if he could shut off one of the big screens, the one beside the group, because it was distracting. Your see, even though I didn’t ant to watch the screen my eyes were drawn to it every now and then.

To make a long story short the manager ignored my request. I trained myself to ignore the big screen and the night was very pleasurable.

But anyway, that’s the way it is these days. Because, the reason people aren’t flocking to these places anymore has more to do with the atmosphere than what band is playing or how much the booze costs. And this takes experience and a knack for attracting a client base.

But in almost every case they’ll blame the high cost of live entertainment.

I constantly hear people my age (around 45-50) say that “Music has gone to the dogs, man!” They bemoan rap and dance music, as well as the drugstore cowboys who wail about their own favorite topic: “My baby done gone.” Well, Sparky, as an oldtimer who remembers Bobby Riddell in Bye Bye Birdy, I have seen many musical style come down the road and just as many go.

Modern music, they say, began with freed black slaves in the south picking up discarded band instruments when the Confederate military bands threw them away as they trudged home after a defeated army. This is just folklore but it makes sense for a small part of the music. They learned on their own and began their own style of playing around the blues and gospel songs they knew so well. But this is not as much blues as it is folk music.

Music that comes from you life lives on despite the trends set by marketers in cubicles trolling for keywords. But I can’t knock their way because in 1965 a group called The Monkees was put together by marketers taking all the similarities that kids liked - The Beatles, clothes styles, comedy - and then generating a band and a television show. And before that they took Ricky Nelson off Ozzie and Harriet and made him a teen idol. And before that they got white guys to sing black guys’ songs - Elvis Presley - and made money that way. Well, that and paying off disc jockeys.

“Montana Slim” never came from Montana he was Hank Snow and he came from Nova Scotia, which is hardly cowboy country. But he learned singing while he was out on the choppy Atlantic being a fisherman and then taught himself trick riding with a horse. And the Jackson 5 were so bullied by their father that they went on to great success at the cost of Michael’s identity. This is sort of mass-production but under a baseball bat.

The point is that the Baby Boom generation is so hung up on their songs that the marketers now get radio stations to play great songs like Layla - which used to be one of my favorite songs - over and over until now it’s a bad noise.

Frank Sinatra thought Elvis was just a passing fad and would go down fast if he broke a hip. Sinatra also was disgusted with The Beatles and he hated the music of the mid-60s’ until his daughter, Nancy, became famous with These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ . Then he, himself, made a minor hit out of Something.

I’m not a fan of gangsta rap. But then I’m probably the only one my age who doesn’t like U-2 (Irish guys with presumptuous names like Bono and The Edge who preach from pedestal aren’t my bag). But U-2 are one of the biggest bands in the world and rap is a huge musical form. Yes, I said musical.

Because it doesn’t matter what keywords that the instant internet polls spit out it’s all music for, and of, the folk. That will live on around campfires and kitchen parties because that’s the way it was always done before.

“And the evening sings in a voice of amber, the dawn is surely coming,
The morning road leads to Stalingrad, and the sky is softly humming.”

Al Stewart - Roads to Moscow

It’s a chicken-and-the-egg question: Which came first, the music or the lyrics? I guess you’d have to get a good definition of what each word means. If music means a cave man imitating animals or pounding on a long and lyrics means grunting to some thought then we are at a stalemate.

But then came folk songs and opera and all the other forms where lyrics tell a story. I don’t mean the fanciful serenades of wooing or of nationalistic bravado but sagas put to music. These are songs that make you listen closer and want to hear the song again and again to make sure you got he meaning.

What comes to mind are cowyboy songs, the forerunners of country and popular music. The cowboy lived in an amazing time and his music reflected this life. And if we went back further we would find Irish, English and Scottish folk tunes influenced the cowboys who learned them from their immigrant parents. Bluegrass can trace its roots to the British isles and Ireland.

Harry Chapin and Gordon Lightfoot lead the list of modern storytellers. The Taxi and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, tell two completely different stories but more people know the story of these two songs than almost any other song written. It’s not because the stories were sad but that adds to the poignancy. Bob Dylan wasn’t a storyteller but their were snippets of stories in his work. Except for songs like George Jackson and The Hurricane, which were stories, his work was philosophy and getting people to listen. Lightfoot and Chapin wrote songs as if they were telling us, “Gather ’round the fire and I’ll tell you a story.

Al Stewart wrote very long stories like Roads to Moscow and Nostrodamus. These were historical tales which emerged before Chris DeBurgh although the latter’s Spanish Train is one of the greatest “Devil vs. God” ever written.

The songs in Marty Robbin’s album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs are the quintessential storytelling songs. El Paso ranks as one of the most popular country and western songs ever recorded. And Alan Toussant’s Pancho and Lefty, a huge hit for Willie Nelson, carried on this tradition.

With today’s beat and riff-driven dance songs, fluffy, airy panderings of love-sickness and betrayal and the bawlings of the disaffected-white-guy-band the story is lost because there is no story. They are themes that have been beaten to death.

Streets full of people, all alone
Roads full of houses, never home
Church full of singing, out of tune
Everyone’s gone to the moon

- Jonathan King, 1965

One of my favorite all-time songs of the ’60’s was Jonathan King’s Everyone’s Gone to the Moon. It peaked at #17 in 1965. In fact I liked it so much I recorded it in 1985. However, I never released it. It was actually a big hit Noel Harrison, Rex’s kid.

King has had a different career. He was, and is, a songwriter and producer who won awards in the early 1970’s as a producer beating out luminaries such as Mickey Most. But his life is overshadowed with charges of stalking and having relationships with, basically, children.

That aside, Everyone’s Gone to the Moon came out during the magical 1965, the same year as Mr. Tambourine Man and Satisfaction. The production was really heavy on the strings and Harrison’s voice gets lost in them at times. I guess they were trying to get spacey before synthesizers.

Listening to this song at night with a 2 -transistor radio made it even more eventful. Y’see I was picking it up on the skip because we couldn’t get our weak radio station at night. So I would hear The Byrds, Beatles and Stones, but just snippets of 10-20 seconds. Yet in that small isolated town, in 20 feet of snow, it was like being connected. . . like there were people out there who knew I was around.