Without Faith To Plug The Hole Belief Will Dissipate

In 2007 my life sucked.  I had made a series of bad decisions that started in 2003, and within 4 years I had really fucked shit up.  I was living in a mobile home in Edmond Oklahoma.  Opossums were living in my air vents and when the unit would kick on the smell of their feces and dust from their fur would fill the house.  I had just been fired from my job for not being a Christian.  I found out that the law allows faith based organizations to discriminate in that way.  I was struggling to raise two children, and losing the fight.  I have never considered suicide, but that year I started most days with the thought “If I die today it would not be a bad thing.”  In 2007 my life sucked.

Buddha said something about to find yourself you must lose everything.  Maybe that is true, but it seems more optimistic than what I experienced. Being somebody that desperately wanted something in which to believe, losing everything killed what little bit of faith I had left.  I had previously believed there was always a ray of hope, you know, goodness in everyone.  After 2007 the world has always seemed a much darker place to me.

I wish I could say that I pulled it all together and got things back on track, but it’s not true.  I drank heavily.  I eventually lost my house, and then custody of my children.  I would later get custody back, off and on, but things were never the same after that year. 

The only point to any of this is to say that by the end of 2007 I knew that everything that had happened in my life was based on my decisions.  Though I was previously ignorant to the fact, I now knew that I have control over my life.  The only problem was that I wasn’t exercising that control. I had never considered myself a victim, but none-the-less I was living my life as if I were one.

Months earlier, in late 2006, Billy and I started recording music together.  It was sloppy and without direction, but it was how things got started.  We would do things like record without a metronome, and then realize the timing was really bad and scrap the song.  Of those recordings only two survived: Magical Purple Hair, and The End Seems Strange.

We were both dreamers with impractical expectations.  We thought Frankie Sharp from Sharp records was going to knock on our door and say he heard us performing in our house from his limo and wanted to sign us to a record contract.  The thought seems like a really juvenile cliché.

Despite the ignorance of thinking that way, via the internet our music did get heard, and without playing a gig a record company did express interest in what we were doing.  We were at the right place at the right time. Everybody from major labels to indie labels were combing the internet for raw talent. Magical Purple Hair was released in 2008. 

The record label promoted it and within a year it sold over 10,000 downloads from various sites such as Myspace, iLike.net, etc.  So as much as I laugh at people that believe such things will happen for them, I often forget that it did actually happen that way for us.

The truly naive thing was that we thought we were a snow ball rolling downhill: we were only going to get bigger and bigger.  Instead we rolled about ten feet, hit a tree, and stopped. Our next two releases did nothing.

In 2009 my ex introduced me to a very awesome singer named Bria Nicole.  I asked her to join us and we gave the band a name.  Prior to Bria joining us the songs had just been released under my name.  Bria is a spectacular spirit and with her being a part of what we were doing both Billy and I felt a surge of optimism.  We began working on our first LP.

On that album we released the song "If You."  Though the album was not well accepted, the song "If You" got us a lot of positive mention.  It also earned us the attention of a couple of publishing companies.  I think they genuinely believed they could sell the song, but nothing ever came of it.

I am of the opinion that music is now expected to be stuck in a box. Though we all claim we want something new, people trying to be different are more often spurned than praised.  I remember when the album Soup was released by the band Blind Melon Rolling Stone Magazine criticized it because the songs didn't have a verse chorus verse structure.  They criticized it further saying that most the songs didn't even have a chorus.  That album would later be accepted for the genius that it is with catchy songs that don't need a chorus yet they still have hooks. 

The album Abby Road by The Beatles, everybody likes it.  Nobody pays attention to the fact that side one has the song Come Together, and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.  Come Together being one of the heaviest songs The Beatles ever recorded while Maxwell’s Silver Hammer is a cabaret song which could easily fit in a Shelly Winters performance.  Today if somebody did this they would be accused of having “a lack of focus” and of being “inconsistent.”  Those are some of the words that have been used to describe us.

During the making of that first album we had many discussions about whether or not to include the Country song Thank You Lord For Willie Nelson.  The Rolling Stones did it with songs like Far Away Eyes, but today bands are expected to be stuck in one genre.  Making the decision to include the Country song on an otherwise Rock oriented album led to us also making the decision to call the album Go Fuck Yourself.

We never told anybody that the title was intended toward music critics.  Without even asking the meaning of the title, music critics could focus on nothing else.  Almost all the reviews we received ripped the album apart consistently using the name of the album as the anchor for their decision.

Go Fuck Yourself was released in 2010.  Before the album was finished, Bria made the decision to quit the band.  She never really said why but I am sure I had a lot to do with her decision.

In the movie Harvey Jimmy Stewart's character said "my mother used to say to me... In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant."  Unlike Elwood I don't know if I have ever been smart but during my awaking, as I became more aware, I fear I forgot how to be pleasant.

In 2007 the world began to become a darker place to me.  By 2010 I was determined to exercise my control over my life.  It is possible I went too far.  I was telling music critics to go fuck themselves, and I was telling my band mates things were going to be my way or the dirt road.  
 

Black Is Beautiful

Chapter One

On season two, episode eleven of The Henry Rollins Show, Hank interviewed Gene Simmons of KISS fame.  This interview is a few years old, but I only recently viewed it for the first time.

During his traditional nonsensical ramblings, Mr. Simmons made a comment that Rap is huge and Rock is dying because Rappers are the new Rock Stars.  He explains that, with Grunge, Rock Stars wanted to be viewed as normal.  According to his logic, folks don’t want their celebrities to be normal.  We want to idolize people that are super human, or at the very least, people that aren’t scared to do the things from which normal folk shy away.

What Gene is describing was heavily utilized by Johnny Cash in his Man In Black, Outlaw persona. Being a bad boy was such an integral part of what people loved about him, the majority of society chose to turn a blind eye to the fact that he was arrested for smuggling a very large amount of drugs in 1965. Considering he only had to pay a $1000 fine, and serve a 30 day suspended sentence, even the court seems to have taken a “That’s just John being John” approach to the situation.

I wish I could prove Gene wrong, and find a contemporary rebel Rock Star, but none come to mind.  While metal tries to portray itself as evil and dark, you still see the members of Slayer attending the Grammy’s with their kids and being sincerely, decent parents.  Rock has grown old.

Also, while Rock musicians pride themselves on not selling out and not going commercial, they probably can’t afford to constantly get into trouble.  Meanwhile Rap performers are selling us everything from Toyotas to tampons. If Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dog, formerly Snoopy Doggie Dog formerly Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr) wants to participate in a 1993 murder in broad day light, at a heavily populated park with several witnesses, why wouldn’t he? All he has to do is start selling something like Snoop Poop Adult Diapers, and boom, the killing pays for itself.

Glen Danzig is a musician that made a career out of being intimidating, and being viewed as a rebel.  In 2004 a video was circulated via Youtube of him being punched in the face by an obese rocker.  Neither striking back, nor even verbally assaulting his attacker, Danzig did nothing in response.  Later in an interview he stated that as a celebrity people are often looking for reasons to take you to court and get some of your fortune.  His explanation for doing nothing was to avoid being sued.  A Rapper would have just shot the fat fuck, and then paid to make the problem go away. 

In the same interview, Danzig also said that he has never been paid for any of the recordings he did with Rick Rubin.  Assuming lyrics like “Hacking off little girls heads / hang em on my wall” never got him a cell phone commercial, Danzig and his like can’t afford to be rebellious, and Rap is now the new Rock.

If it was ever proposed to him that he was the genesis of the Rapper’s persona, I wonder how Johnny would have felt about that.  The key difference is that Johnny Cash wasn’t really a bad guy.  He was a knucklehead, and he was addicted to drugs that at the time were still not completely illegal. It wasn’t until five years later that Nixon got the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act passed.  I could be wrong, but I can’t imagine Cash would have ever condoned the killing of another person. The similarity in Johnny’s “Outlaw”, and a modern day Rapper’s “Outlaw” is that both are demonstrations of the common man.  But the common man of 1965 Nashville and the common man of 2015 New York City, are pretty different. 

Part B

In an interview I read with Everclear singer Art Alexakis he explained that while he was getting started and signed to an indie label he realized that being signed didn’t really mean much.  While most musicians would assume the label is going to promote their albums, he instead took it upon himself and paid out of his own pocket for promotions.  He went on to explain the importance of a publicist which he also hired and was responsible for compensating.

At the time when I read that I didn’t know anything. I was young and stupid.  While I had seen characters in movies portraying publicists I still didn’t actually understand what one did, or how they were hired.  Alexakis explained that a great band with no publicist can easily go unnoticed, while a mediocre band with a great publicist can get all the attention in the world (e.g. KISS).

It wasn’t a long article, but it was extremely informative.  Art, though not a Grunge musician, obviously shared the Grunge train of thought regarding an open, honest, human approach to being a celebrity. Clearly this is the opposite of how Gene Simmons believes musicians should behave. Gene believes that providing the audience with too much information makes you human and less than a God.

Mr. Simmons would have you believe that KISS earned fame based on their talent, and would choose to leave out details about extremely talented business people that made the mediocre band what it became.  The people Gene doesn't want to talk to you about include an impressive list of songwriters that penned most of the band’s hits, while the Grunge band’s he criticized wrote their own material.

Anyway, I don’t really know where I stand on this discussion.  While I don’t agree with Gene’s logic, I do agree that Rock music is suffering, and it’s players are no longer iconic.  I also agree with him that the world wants celebrities to be unrealistically super human.

A couple of side notes to all of that:  Gene simplified the problem without taking into consideration the current climate of the music industry.  Major labels are not offering record deals to small rock bands as they did when KISS first got signed.  Most large labels (like Interscope) no longer even have a rock department.  That means they only focus on Top 40 and Hip Hop. Gene did not mention the possibility that maybe Rock music is dead because nobody invests in Rock music, while Rap is heavily financed.  Why?  Who knows?  Maybe it is easier to control one performer than it is to control 3-5 people in a band, but it is not due to a lack of public demand.

The Blink 182 reunion album Neighborhoods (Interscope, 2011)  was highly anticipated.  At the time of its release the band was selling out large arenas all around the world.  People were excited about Blink 182 being back together and looking forward to their first album in 8 years.  The album’s sales were less than impressive and can easily be credited to piss poor promotions.  With no Rock department, Interscope didn’t have a single employee with connections in Rock radio, or Rock press.  Their employees had to start from scratch to promote that album.

Other side note: my experience is that people don’t want the truth.  I can tell a journalist the quick and easy story of how we did what we did and they will say “there is no story here.” But if I church-it-up and emphasize the action words then I am guaranteed attention.  In the documentary TAD Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears Jonathan Poneman discusses this. He mentions the importance of having a creative back story.  He says something along the lines, and I am paraphrasing here, "oh you're in a band and you make music just like the tens of thousands of other bands out there? Well that's not very interesting." So as much as I hate to admit it there is some validity to Gene’s theory.

The Day Fame Changed

Napster is often credited for being the catalyst of the internet boom.  Once people found out they could get music for free they became interested in the internet.  Once they realized that changing the file extension from .avi to .mp3 they could use Napster to trade porn, the internet became a must have. With larger file sizes being traded came a demand for broadband internet speeds, and the world will never be the same.


The internet world as it is didn’t pop up overnight.  There was an approximate 10 year evolution that started around the end of 1999 with the release of Napster.  For the longest time, during this evolution, major labels fought to keep people buying physical copies in stores. It was during this time that independent artists ruled the information super highway. With little concern about piracy and a great deal of interest in promotion, unsigned artists pushed their music online like a dealer in a school yard.


Sites dedicated to promoting independent artists began to multiply like rabbits: Garage Band (the web page not the Apple program), MP3.COM, iLike, Reverbnation, etc.  A friend of mine once referred to these sites as circle jerks.  There aren’t really any fans on these sites, just bands telling each other how great they are even though they aren’t actually listening to each other’s music.


During the height of its popularity the social networking site Myspace decided to make self promotion an option for their users that were musicians.  For a brief couple of years this changed everything.  Sense Myspace was already being used predominately by people that weren’t musicians, but were music fans, the ability for us to put our music on our profile meant that music fans might actually hear it.  Better than playing in a bar to drunk people that would rather watch the game on TV, Myspace was like radio in the 1960’s. People would set down and focus all their attention on just what they were hearing, and probably some photos of some slutty girls (Myspace had lots of those too).  People would hear you. They may decide they don’t like it, but they made a decision to click on your player and give your music a chance. It worked. Big bands like OneRepublic owe their early success to Myspace, and little bands like Magnolia Electric Company were stars for a week due to the same.


During this time, in 2006, we released two songs on Myspace.  They were Magical Purple Hair and The End Seems Strange (trailer park demos).  We received some positive attention from these releases.


I want to take a moment to mention something.  If you are a local band, it doesn’t matter how great you become, you are still just a local band.  If you are from New York trying to get a gig in New York, you are a local band.  But for some reason just being from somewhere else makes you exotic.


In Oklahoma it is hard to get respect as a band from Oklahoma.  It doesn’t matter if you are The All American Rejects, The Flaming Lips, Blake Shelton, or half of OneRepublic, you are just a band from Oklahoma.


So our songs on Myspace got us some attention from outside the state including an indie label from New York that invited us to participate in a compilation album they intended to promote.  Our first single was Magical Purple Hair.

Somewhere in this general time frame, around 2008, major labels were begrudgingly realizing that this internet music trend was not going to end.  For the first time Billboard started counting online sales, though at first they only counted the sales from certain sites like iTunes.


A lot of the sites that had been based around the idea of promoting independent artists began offering the ability to sell your music on their site.  I remember that the whole thing was very sloppy initially. Uploading was not convenient, the player didn’t always work, and the hosts gave little effort to accurately tracking sales.  This type of service was new to everybody and most people didn’t see it as a lasting thing so there was no big push to streamline it.


Hindsight is 20/20.  When these events were happening I was only barely aware of what was going on.  It is often easier to see what happened, than it is to see what is going to happen.  To their credit the indie label that released our song on a compilation saw internet music for what it would become.  They were on the cusp of every change and every new service that related to music promotion.  They were also very good at promoting their albums.


Our first single did very well and we saw a huge jump in our fan base and our online sales.  We followed that up by releasing two more singles with the same label, and nothing happened.


A lot of that blame falls on me. Admittedly the songs were intentionally abrasive.  We were asked to do a “green friendly” song for a hippie album they were doing to raise money for a nonprofit organization.  We sent them the song Lovelock with lyrics like “desert storms in Phoenix fill the sky / The Colorado River is damn near dry / You think recycled paper will set things right / Tell yourself another lie.”  We expected them to reject it.  The fact that they put it on the album surprised us.  Looking back, I now know they didn’t listen to any of the songs, they just threw the album together haphazardly.


Hindsight is 20/20.  I now know that during the release of that album the label was falling apart.  They had made a bad business venture and it led them to bankruptcy.  The bankruptcy was filed during the release of the second single, and was finalized before the release of the third.


By 2010 our rollercoaster ride had temporarily come to a stop. We had experienced (what was to us) a great success, and then two great failures. We received kudos and applaud, and then sunk back into obscurity.  We had already begun working on a full length album, but no longer had a vehicle with which to promote it.  In 2010, our options were limitless.

Dispelling Compelling Complaints

2014 was a kick in nuts. I suspect that the year will silently slip into the history books mostly unrecognized for the significance it represented.

When R.E.M. broke up in 2011 they said it was pointless to make music in a world where nobody buys music.  Likewise in a 2014 interview Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer stated that while the band is not breaking up and will continue to perform live, they probably won’t release any more albums because "Records don't sell... There's no record companies to pay for it, so you have to pay for it out of your pocket.”

Kramer Interview

In November of 2013 Billboard released an article listing the top ways to get your album to sell.  

Billboard Article

The options listed were pretty ridiculous.  One of the suggestions is that you should do a guest appearance on The Voice.  They didn’t say compete as a contestant. They said be invited to do a guest appearance.  That’s easy enough, right? 

On that list of virtually impossible goals, option number five is "Home-page placement on iTunes." (which means have your album appear on iTunes Home-page for others to see, which is also not easy to accomplish). A few months after this article was released, the guys in the band Colourmusic achieved that goal but did not reap the promised reward.
 
Wait, let's look at that once more. In November of 2013 people still bought music. The same month Billboard released an article saying that being placed on iTunes home-page meant that you would sell a lot of music.  Five months later, in April of 2014, people no longer bought music, and being on iTunes home-page did nothing to spin that fact.  What changed?

2014 was the first year in history that only one album went platinum. Disney will argue that the soundtrack to Frozen went Platinum that year, but it was released in 2013.  Taylor Swift’s “1989” was the only album released in 2014 to go platinum in 2014. 

I assume 2015 will be the first year no album goes platinum.
 
In the grand scheme of things, who cares?  None of us are selling platinum, so why do we care whether or not anybody else is accomplishing that status? Well if you consider the scientific algorithm designed during Reaganomics and apply the Trickle-down theory to the current number of units being moved, you will see that if people don’t buy music then people don’t by music, across the board.

I recently attended a meeting at The Academy of Recording Artists (the GRAMMY folk) and the chapter president said that their members, all over the country, are reporting that they can no longer sell albums at their shows. 

Touring musicians have always relied on "at the show" album sales to compensate for the next-to-nothing wages the bars pay them.  Previously people in the audience would buy albums even if they didn’t intend to listen to it, because they knew the artist needed the help.  Today that revenue source has virtually disappeared.

What changed?  Why 2014?  Looking further back, since the introduction of Napster the music industry has feared that illegal downloading would bring the end, but it didn’t.  We had 14 years of piracy and still enjoyed sales that provided a livable wage.  Today’s new adults (18-25 year olds) are the first generation to grow up knowing that they don’t have to buy music, but up until now, they still did. So again, what changed?

In December of 2013 (one month before the year the music died) Spotify made their smartphone app free to everybody.  If you illegally download a song you still have to put it on something like a CD-R, or an MP3 player.  If you are going to go through that trouble you might as well occasionally buy a CD. Now free music is effortless. You don’t have to carry around a CD or a MP3 player.  An unlimited library of music is on your phone, your phone is always on you, you don't have to wait for it to download, and best of all it is completely legal.
 
At the time, as this was changing, I acknowledged that things weren’t the same, but didn’t know why. Our album Paradigms in the Design was released in September 2013.  We had a healthy first few months, then suddenly we hit a wall. People started telling us “I don’t want a CD cluttering up my house or car.”  There were occasions where we would offer free CDs to friends or family and they would decline our offer saying “is it on Spotify?  I will check it out there.” People no longer want CDs.
 
Despite the fact that they sold more albums than any other performer, Taylor Swift's business team made the decision to pull all her music off Spotify.  As ridiculous as it is, that made me realize something. Spotify did not sneak into my house late at night and take my music.  I gave it to them by choice.  All of us were concerned that our livelihoods would be stolen from us forcefully by pirates.  In the end we volunteered to give it away.  All musicians (like the Academy Of Recording Artist) complain about “the state of the music industry.”  The music industry is what we have designed it to be.  People don’t buy music because we give it to them for free.  It’s not Spotify’s fault. It’s not the fan’s fault. It’s the fault of the musicians.

The very awesome band "The Harmed Brothers" received 65K Spotify plays in one quarter.  If 15% of that number represented people that bought one single (not the whole album, just one song) they would have broke even, and the album would have paid for itself. That didn’t happen. Instead 65K plays earned them an amount less than $200.  

It shocks me at how many artists defend the decision of putting their music on Spotifiy. Musicians have argued with me over how great it is that Spotify allows a widely unknown band (The Harmed Brothers) to reach over 100K listeners, but is it really great?  If the band constantly has to consider whether or not they can afford to continue, does it really matter that people in Egypt love them?

More specifically if people LOVE us but they aren't buying anything from us, does it matter that they love us?  The answer is no. It doesn't matter.  Why would I care what they think?  I am not really desperate for attention?  I don't require the acceptance of other people to feel validated?  It's the same as having a store and having everybody say "I love that store.  I just don't shop there."

So all of this is a long winded way of saying I got depressed. Starting around October 2013 and up until now I was sinking.  Not just because it was difficult to make a living as a musician, but also because Brooke and Rebecca left the band.  All and all things seemed hopeless.

In an attempt to turn things around I changed my environment. I met some new folks.  I met engineers that previously worked with Destiny's Child, and I met musicians that (10 years ago) had gone triple platinum, and I eventually noticed that they are in a similar situation as myself.  

What we are witnessing right now is a great equalizer.  If nobody can sell music, then nobody is selling music.  Of course I say nobody in the broad sense.  Business folk like Scott Borchetta are always going to generate a return on their investment by catering to the teenage girl lowest common denominator.  None-the-less big name bands like Blues Travelers are left with little option but to beg for money via Pledge Music.

Blues Travelers / Pledge Music

To say that somebody is begging for money is harsh and somewhat  mean even though it is true.  I certainly don't mean to pick on The Blues Travelers.  I am a fan, and have always dug what they do.  Also I don't want to insinuate that they are alone.  That is not my point.  Look at the list of artists that have had successful Pledge Music campaigns.  There are a lot of big name acts out they're begging for people to help them.  That makes me feel optimistic.

It’s not a matter of misery loves company.  What I am saying is our chance of selling albums is next to none, but their chance of selling albums is also next to none which means we have just as good a chance as they do. The glass is half full of nothing.

It is March 2015 and we have begun working on our third studio album.

This Is That And Those Be Them

If you believe in evolution, then the egg came first, and if you believe in creation then it was the chicken.  It’s obvious. So why do people keep asking the same question over and over?  

Creationism means that one day, along with a few other things, God created a chicken which then laid an egg and out came another chicken.  Evolution follows the belief that the chicken evolved from something that wasn't a chicken.  One day that "something" laid an egg (first) and out came a chicken (second).

I would argue that most people know the egg came first.  Christians will claim to believe it was the chicken, but they are riddled with doubt.  That’s the whole reason they throw the word “faith” around so much. They will say “preacher it seems so obvious the Bible is full of shit” and the preacher will say “that’s why we have to have faith my son.”

Personally I can never remember if Noah built an arc or if Jack climbed a bean stalk.  I know one of them is true and the other is so obviously stupid only a child would believe it, but I just can’t remember which is which.

I am not saying Jesus was wrong or that Christianity is baseless.  I am just saying the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is full of fairy tales, and children’s stories.

Science seldom offers more answers.  At one time science taught us that the atom was the smallest thing.  Then we busted it open like a piñata and found out there were all kinds of subatomic-candies inside. 

Even right now there are people that still believe the universe is the largest thing that exists. Meanwhile all signs point to the existence of a multi-verse of which our neighborhood-universe is only but a part. 

Today’s popular opinion is that the universe is finite which means, just like the earth, if it was possible to stand in one spot (in the universe) and walk forward in a straight line you would eventually end up at the same spot.  Granted you would be dead before completing the trip, but you get the point.

I often don’t agree with Christians, but I REALLY don’t agree with Atheists.

My name is Sky and I am in the band Less Love. This is about that.