by John Tamny
“The successful conduct of business demands qualities quite other than those necessary for passing examinations—even if the examinations deal with subjects bearing on the work of the position in question.”1
—Ludwig von Mises
In December 1965, the world of popular music changed forever. The Beatles released Rubber Soul, introducing to the hypercompetitive music market what became known as the “concept album.” Instead of a random mix of hits and filler, the album was a coherent whole to which every piece contributed. Each song on Rubber Soul was “seemingly more brilliant than the one before it,” writes the pop music historian Kent Hartman.2 A new standard for music making had been set.
The Beatles were at Capitol Records along with the Beach Boys and throughout those heady days “maintained a friendly rivalry” with the Californians. Brian Wilson, the brilliant leader of the Beach Boys and creator of their sound, was keenly aware of how much the critics loved Rubber Soul. As Hartman tells it, he began “to scramble in reevaluation of their own efforts. He wondered how the Beach Boys would even be able to compete.”3
Wilson’s frustration, born of his admiration for the work of the Beatles, speaks to the beauty of competition. In economics they call it free trade. The Beatles’ shot across the proverbial bow sent a message to Wilson that if he was going to be taken seriously by critics, peers, and the buying public, he had to have an answer to Rubber Soul. Wilson delivered with Pet Sounds.
In those days, some bands toured while their creative forces behind them stayed in the studio to make music. Wilson sent the Beach Boys out on tour while he worked on his masterpiece with a group of studio musicians eventually nicknamed the “Wrecking Crew.”
Wilson was an “outsourcer,” as it were, and the Wrecking Crew were among the best studio musicians in the industry. Wilson brought them together for three months to make what Paul McCartney viewed as “the greatest pop album of all time.”4 The principal musicians on Pet Sounds were Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye, and Glen Campbell, with Wilson himself as the maestro orchestrating the Beach Boys’ response to Rubber Soul.
None of the players involved had a traditional musical education. Wilson was deaf in one ear, and while he grew up in a musical family, his schooling was conventional. A big guy, he played on the football team. But something about music clicked with him. One of the best ways to understand his genius is to listen to “God Only Knows” from Pet Sounds, noting the multitude of instruments and what bass player Jerry Ritz called “countermelodies.” As Ritz saw it, Wilson combined sounds and melodies in completely new ways.5
Drummer Hal Blaine grew up poor in Hartford, Connecticut. There was no extra money lying around to pay for musical instruction, so he learned how to drum by “watching” drummers he admired—“one of the only affordable methods of instruction he could manage.”6
Guitarist Glen Campbell grew up even poorer in Billstown, Arkansas, passing many a night “lying on his stomach while pressing his fist into his gut, trying to quell the gnawing pangs of hunger.”7 In Campbell’s destitute family of twelve, focused as it was on putting food on the table, there was “little emphasis on schooling,” and even when Glen made it to class, he “showed little natural interest in sitting behind a wooden desk.”8 Yet music evoked from him another kind of intelligence. As Hartman writes:
From the time almost anyone could remember, Glen showed a preternatural aptitude for anything to do with a musical instrument. By the age of ten he’d ably learned to pluck notes and strum chords—all by ear, no less—on a cheap five-dollar acoustic guitar that his father purchased for him from the Sears & Roebuck catalog.9
Carol Kaye was the daughter of failed musicians whose lack of money led to lots of arguing and ultimately to divorce. For years her mother had put coins in a piggy bank, which she cracked open the day a steel guitar salesman came to the door. The price of the instrument included a few lessons, but it was not until an accomplished guitar teacher heard Carol play (she tagged along with a friend who could afford lessons) that her musical career took off. Recognizing the girl’s extraordinary talent, the guitarist offered to teach Kaye if she would help him instruct his students.10
The creators of Pet Sounds were not Juilliard grads, but their skills remind us that passion and talent are more important than classroom instruction. Phil Spector, one of the most prominent producers of the 1960s and a constant presence at Wrecking Crew sessions, did receive a first-rate musical education, but it proved meaningless. He yearned to be a top jazz guitarist, but his teacher told him bluntly,
No, Phil, in truth, I don’t see that for you. You’re lacking one thing that a musician absolutely has to have. And that’s meter. You don’t feel when one musical phrase ends and another begins. I’m sorry. But I can’t teach you that. I don’t know anybody who can.11
How lucky, then, that Spector could recognize in others what he himself lacked. No amount of education could make up for Spector’s lack of talent. He could hear what sounded good but couldn’t play it.
Pet Sounds was a commercial disappointment when it was released, but today, despite the humble credentials of its creators, Rolling Stone ranks it the second-best album of all time.
The story of the Beatles is similar. While they came from varied economic circumstances, all were poor by today’s standards. None of the Fab Four’s families even owned a car.12
The poorest was easily Ringo Starr, whose early life was, in the words of the Beatles’ biographer Bob Spitz, “a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune.”13 In a world in which education was the “way out,” Starr found school “a great and terrifying burden—he felt ostracized there—making it easier just to stay away.”14
A bout with tuberculosis put him even further behind in school, and he never returned. But in the tuberculosis ward, he developed a knack for the primitive version of “drums” at his disposal: “cotton bobbins to hit on the cabinet next to the bed.” Spitz writes:
There was something familiar in the process, a natural feel to the way he held his hands, the impact of the sticks on the wooden surface, and the colorful patterns that emerged. He didn’t just make noise; there was more to it than that, there was a complex range of sounds he could produce just by experimenting with his wrists.15
Music would be more than Starr’s “way out.” It would be his life.
Guitarist George Harrison didn’t distinguish himself in the classroom either. Yet he was the first musician to play the wildly complicated sitar on “a major pop recording”—Rubber Soul. With no previous training on the instrument, Harrison “worked night and day to try to master its intricacies.”16
Paul McCartney “picked up instruments the way some people pick up new languages; he had the ear for it, with all the proper accents in place,” writes Spitz.17 As his brother Michael explained, once Paul picked up a guitar, “He was lost. He didn’t have time to eat or think about anything else.”18
Like the other Beatles, John Lennon had no time for school of any kind. He “responded wretchedly to anything structured, and guitar instruction was no exception.”19 By his teens, he was failing his classes, but it was of no consequence to him. As he told a teacher with total conviction, “I’m going to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer.”20
So the greatest musical act ever, the Beatles, was composed of four guys who not only had no formal musical training but also couldn’t even read a note of music.21 That’s a powerful reminder that education is generally about teaching yesterday’s news, while economic and commercial progress is about doing what’s not been done before.
There was no school to teach the Beatles how to get to where they wanted to go. And while they had myriad musical influences, the excitement that greeted their arrival on the musical scene indicated something quite original. Again, unteachable.
Another case in point is the Rolling Stones. Keith Richards’s mother, Doris, wanted to be an actress or a dancer, but opportunities for that were rare in 1950s England (or anywhere else, for that matter). With the global economy on i
ts back in the aftermath of World War II, there was lots of hard work to be done. So Doris got a job demonstrating washing machines. She was good at it, but her family couldn’t even afford the machines she was explaining to others.22 They also didn’t have a record player for much of Richards’s early life.23
The Richardses didn’t have phonograph albums, but Doris was an expert with the “knobs,” bringing music into the house through radio, and Keith learned to play his friends’ guitars. When he was fifteen, Doris purchased his first guitar—acoustic, since they couldn’t afford an electric one. As Richards would point out decades later in his autobiography, “if you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom.”24
“I’ve learned everything I know off of records,” recalls Richards, a listener to music out of economic necessity. “Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn’t necessarily afford to learn to read or write music.” The well-heeled could go to music school or concerts, but as the British economy developed, radio and the proliferation of records made it possible for someone like Richards to get a musical education on the cheap.25
In April 1962, Richards sent a letter to his Aunt Patty updating her on his doings and mentioning his encounter with one Mick Jagger at the train station. They’d begun to play music together, and as Richards relayed to his aunt, “Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don’t mean maybe.”26 A band was starting to take shape, its members filled with passion but none of them educated in music.
More modernly, it’s still true that the undereducated in a musical sense have the chance to thrive musically. John Mellencamp (“Hurts So Good,” “Jack & Diane,” and “Pink Houses” to name but a few of his hits) is a self-described “stupid hillbilly” from Indiana who could barely type and was a terrible speller.27 But something about music clicked with him too despite his lack of broad knowledge. In a 2016 interview with the Wall Street Journal, in which he talked about how he made the smash 1986 hit “Small Town,” Mellencamp admitted that “I never had a guitar lesson in my life and I still can’t read music.”28 He’s yet another reminder that while there are music schools galore in the developed world, and there are countless talented musicians who can provide lessons, an inability to attend or partake in either thanks to a lack of school smarts or funds is not a barrier to achievement.
Indeed, there’s a pattern emerging here. It’s not an exact one, but it’s a pattern nonetheless. It seems no degree is required to make a fortune in music. Of course, the odds of achieving success on the level of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones are similar to those of making it in the NFL. The music business can be quite lucrative as the previous examples reveal, and no degrees are required.
Still, it wouldn’t be unreasonable at this point for readers, in a repeat of chapter one, to be asking why people would urge someone to skip traditional education on the microscopic chance that he’ll be the next Keith Richards. That’s a reasonable objection, but again, it misses something important.
An evolving and prosperous economy makes it more likely that someone will have the chance to develop his talents. Mellencamp may well be a “stupid hillbilly,” but thanks to him having been born in the United States, rather than an impoverished country such as Peru, he was able to pursue the kind of work that revealed his musical talent. Life would be bland if there were guarantees, and nothing about what’s written guarantees that a reader who loves playing the guitar or singing will, upon reading this book, be able to ignore everything else on the way to musical stardom. But, because of our economic evolution, there’s a much greater chance today of making a living with music than ever before.
When Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones were starting out, it was a big deal to get to make music at all. It was one thing to perform live, and the Stones did a lot of that, but studio time was expensive. When the Stones were on the outside of the music business looking in, Richards recalls, “It was nearly impossible to get into a recording studio. It’s bizarre that now anybody can make a record anywhere and put it on the internet. Then it was like leaping over the moon. A mere dream.”29
Today, as Richards says, anyone can make a record. And musical acts have the worldwide web as an inexpensive way to project their sounds globally.
Justin Bieber was a twelve-year-old nobody from Stratford, Ontario, when he began posting videos of himself singing on YouTube. The views picked up steam, and Bieber was discovered by the talent manager Scooter Braun. A bidding war broke out, and soon the boy sensation had a recording contract.30
The XL Recordings label discovered Adele after her friend posted a demo on MySpace in 2006. Carly Rae Jepsen’s modest fame was limited to Canada until Bieber tweeted about the catchy nature of “Call Me Maybe” in 2011.31
None of this is to say that what Bieber, Adele, and Jepsen achieved was easy, or even likely. But it is to say that the musically passionate should feel more comfortable about shunning the traditional “get an education, then find a job” career track that is the historical norm. In an increasingly prosperous global economy, more people can confidently focus on what they’re best at, then work feverishly—including working for a living on the side—to amplify those skills. And it will be a lot of work.
Brian Wilson labored over Pet Sounds for “three grueling months” of work, usually “from seven at night until early the next morning.” Blaine regularly slept at the studio, while “Birthdays and anniversaries were forgotten, school plays were missed, and in several instances marriages sadly ended.”32
With the Beatles, the music was all-consuming. Radio Luxembourg broadcasts barely reached Liverpool, but its “rock ’n’ roll” music captivated John Lennon, who had no interest in the dated offerings on BBC Radio. Those broadcasts were his education, and he took it seriously. Furthermore, he didn’t have the luxury of buying music on the cheap to listen to repeatedly. Records were costly, and a young man of modest means had to rely on radio broadcasts from the Continent.33
Once the Beatles were big enough to tour, they would perform at night after working all day, spending the hours on the tour bus writing song after song.34 As their biographer explains, “Their peers all had day jobs; the Beatles had never even thought seriously about punching a clock. It was only ever music, only the band, only the Beatles. There were no other options. This was their life’s work.”35
So it was for the Rolling Stones, who endured “constant, unmovable” poverty on their road to fame.36 Richards’s diary from the period is filled with notes about their “gigs” and what they were paid, if anything: “January 21, Ealing Club, 0, January 22, Flamingo, 0, February 1, Red Lion, £1 10s. At least we got a gig. As long as you’ve got a gig, life is wonderful.”37
Although the Rolling Stones later developed an impressive party reputation, they couldn’t afford those luxuries when they were on the other side of stardom. If they weren’t performing, they were working:
We needed to work together, we needed to rehearse, we needed to listen to music, we needed to do what we wanted to do. It was a mania. Benedictines had nothing on us. Anybody that strayed from the nest to get laid, or try to get laid, was a traitor. You were supposed to spend all of your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig.38
The point is that if your work is an expression of your talent and intelligence, it may be hard but it’s not drudgery. You excel at something, perhaps many things. The goal should be to identify what that is and match what you love with extreme effort. Richards is working to this day. Now the picture of rich and famous, Richards “can’t retire until I croak. I don’t think they quite understand what I get out of this. I’m not doing it just for the money or for you. I’m doing it for me.”39
What would you do for yourself if given the choice? You will have choices, and while you might choose a more traditional career path, one thing’s for sure—education will not make you. History is fairly c
lear there. Traditional education opens some doors, but it is no guarantee of success. Hard work is the path to achievement, and that’s why it’s important to figure out what you’re good at and what you love.
Traditional thinkers will question your pursuit of a career that requires your talent and the perhaps unconventional education that prepares you for it. But there’s less and less to be said for conventional education. Jeffrey Selingo, a professor at Arizona State University, points out that while more people are going to college, “nearly half of new graduates are working jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree.”40 And Jane Shaw, a leader in the push for education reform, accuses elite universities of “doing a disservice when they lead students into majors with few, if any, job prospects.”41
Selingo and Shaw are hardly alone in holding such views. It’s a common complaint that universities aren’t teaching what’s relevant to the working world. That’s certainly true, but it’s also always been true. Anyone who thinks that higher education can prepare students for the work of the future assumes that education reflects what’s actually happening in commerce. But it doesn’t, and it can’t. In a prosperous and economically dynamic society, the nature of work is always changing. Universities will always be behind the curve. So will trade schools. Even the people driving all this change can’t predict the future.
In late 1977, Digital Equipment was a blue-chip technology corporation. But when its CEO, Ken Olson, was asked about the personal desktop computer that rival IBM was readying for the market, he responded that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”42 At the time, Harvard dropout Bill Gates’s obscure startup, Microsoft, had thirty-eight employees.43
Gates plainly didn’t agree with Olson about the future of the personal computer, and neither did his eventual rival Steve Jobs, the Reed College dropout who founded Apple Computer in 1977.44 Four years later, Apple went public in the most oversubscribed initial public offering since 1956,45 turning three hundred Apple employees into millionaires.