How Music Works
Page 29
5. RENT MUST BE LOW—AND IT MUST STAY LOW
CBGB was in a rough neighborhood. NowC there are gourmet-food shops and fancy restaurants nearby, but at that time D the Lower East Side and the area around the Bowery was in pretty bad shape. Winos were everywhere. It wasn’t romantic to see one of them pull down his pants in the Associated Supermarket and take a dump in the aisle; it was just disgusting and depressing, as was much of what we had to deal with around there. But the rents were cheap—$150 a month for the place that Tina, Chris, and I shared on Chrystie Street, though there was no toilet, shower, or even heat. You get what you pay for.
In the winter it was sometimes hard to tell whether someone you’d see passed out in the snow was merely drunk or high, or if that comatose body on the sidewalk was a dead person. Our apartment was near an area with the cheapest, skankiest hookers in town. Further east, heroin was sold pretty much openly on the street corners, and the clientele used the abandoned buildings nearby as shooting galleries. Empty glassine envelopes marked with the logos of the various “brands” could be seen all over the sidewalks. Succeeding in this world, becoming a Downtown star, was not exactly “making it” in the music business in any conventional sense. We might feel we were making it because we were being accepted by our peers, but all our parents and other outsiders could see was that we were still living in squalor.
But surviving and creating here meant you were part of a place where you could have a tiny sense of community. Even though by today’s standards the rents in the area were insanely cheap, the three of us who began Talking Heads all shared a loft to save money, like everyone else was doing. The Blondie loft was just a little south of CB’s on the Bowery, and Arturo Vega, who guided the Ramones’s style, had a place just around the corner.
A certain romanticism about the cultural history of the area did linger in our minds. People who were huge inspirations to us were still neighborhood fixtures—William Burroughs lived nearby, as did Allen Ginsberg—and we imagined that we were in some ways continuing their legacy. Though not musicians per se, they were as inspirational as the best music that had come before us. Though neither Ginsberg nor Burroughs could be classified as “romantics,” they, and their attitude toward life and art, were part of a funky mystique that gave the squalor a kind of glamour in our eyes.
Cheap rent allows artists, musicians, and writers to live without much income during their formative years. It gives them time to develop, and it gives creative communities that nurture and support their members time to form. Everybody knows that when these neighborhoods get gentrified, both the locals and the struggling creative types get pushed out. But not every neighborhood with cheap rents gives rise to a scene. I recently lived in the West 30s in Manhattan, where the rents used to be cheap, but no community ever arose there. Affordable rent alone is not enough.
6. BANDS MUST BE PAID FAIRLY
At CBGB, bands got either the entire door or a pretty good percentage of it, while Hilly continued to get the profits from the bar—which improved considerably as bands began to draw an audience. Talking Heads had day jobs early on, but after about a year we were able to devote ourselves to music full-time. Once we began packing the place, which meant a modest 350 paying customers, that door percentage was enough to pay our bills. Try that policy at a club today. CBGB was our safety net, both creatively and financially.
When I later heard about bands actually paying to play in certain clubs, I knew things had been perverted in a terrible way. The desperate, innate desire to create and perform had been exploited rather than supported. It was like taking a basic human need, like wanting to love and be loved, and then finding a way to make money from it. Sick. It was a sign of the times. The me-first decade had begun.
7. SOCIAL TRANSPARENCY MUST BE ENCOURAGED
At CB’s there were small dressing rooms without doors, so any passerby could watch you unpacking your gear and tuning up. There was no privacy—annoying sometimes, but maybe a good thing. Junkies and lovers managed to find places to hide elsewhere, but performers had to be transparent. Diva behavior was rendered difficult or impractical—the physical situation would have made it look silly. The performers were obliged to interact and mingle with their audience. There was no VIP area. The toilets were legendarily nasty—I’m pretty sure that for a while they didn’t have seats. One might have been smashed. This was not a factor that helped the scene; it was not charming or romantic. While being forced to put on a show with limited means and having to mingle might have actually been productive, busted toilets in clubs are just sad and mean.
There was always a jukebox playing when the bands weren’t. Hilly filled much of it with 45s by the local bands who played there, so if a band had paid for a song to be recorded and pressed up as a 45, you knew at least one jukebox in town where it could find a home. Of course, there were also plenty of talismanic 45s by other inspirational bands on that jukebox—the Stooges, the Mysterians. Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation could have taken up the whole jukebox and everyone would have nodded in recognition. Oddly, as musically disparate as the performers of CBGB were, we drew inspiration from a lot of the same songs and bands. Every night we received these aural reminders of where we all came from, where we were at that moment, and where we were going. This insular selection might seem a little dogmatic in retrospect—God forbid someone snuck a jazz or folk 45 in there!—but it provided a sense of solidarity, something rare for New Yorkers whose monstrous egos often stood in the way of forging a community. The jukebox was, in a certain way, crowdsourced, and it served as a kind of sonic adhesive, a social glue. The jukebox leveled the playing field as much as the lack of privacy in the dressing rooms.
Plenty of music clubs are set up like movie theaters: when the show is over, everyone is asked to pay their bar and snack bills and leave. You can’t go to most of these clubs just to hang out, because they have a schedule of specific show times, and if you show up before the show you came to see and there’s an earlier set, you’re not allowed in to see it. Needless to say, no one hangs out in these places. There is no community of musicians, and a scene can’t begin to develop. There is, I am told, a community of waitresses and bartenders—the few people who are allowed to be there all night. Bill Bragin booked a terrific few years at Joe’s Pub in New York, but as much as I enjoyed attending those shows, I also realized that the evenings were very structured. After a performance, I usually went right home. The music might have been excellent, but there was no possibility for casual or chance encounters—people only saw what they bought a ticket to see. Places like this make more money in the short run, because they can charge a separate admission for every show and have two, sometimes three acts a night, each with their own paying crowd. But there’s also no loyalty, nor any customers to fall back on who trust the place as much as the music. You know a scene is developing when you hang out at a place and you have no idea who’s going to be playing.
There are a few places like this in New York, still, though they tend to be small, like Nublu in the East Village and Barbès and Zebulon in Williamsburg. By the time this book comes out, they might not be around.
8. IT MUST BE POSSIBLE TO IGNORE THE BAND WHEN NECESSARY
CBGB originally had a long bar, and you had to walk past it and then past the little bandstand in order to reach a pool table located farther back. You could pass the time playing pool while watching the band (sort of—they’d be facing away from you) or while waiting for the next band to go on. CBGB was long and narrow, and only a small group of fans could actually stand in front of the stage. Most of the audience would end up at the bar, or hanging around the pool table, and those people behind the bands were often barely paying attention. It doesn’t sound ideal, but maybe not having to perform under intense scrutiny (it always seemed as if only the few folks in front were really paying attention) is important, even beneficial. This odd, relaxed, and even somewhat insulting arrangement allowed for more natural, haphazardly creative development.
In a way, the casual set-up reminded me of busking. When playing on the street, it was never hard to get one or two curious folks to stop and listen, but if you could get the ones who were walking purposely on their way somewhere else to pay attention, then you’d really made a breakthrough. Sometimes the person who seemed to have been playing pool all night was the one who came up to you afterward and said something that proved that they were the one who had really been listening.
THE LEGACY OF A SCENE
After some of the bands that emerged from CBGB were signed, they played there less and less. They went on the road or holed up writing and rehearsing new material, becoming a tiny bit more professional. Talking Heads was one of those bands. I remember writing in my East Village loft in the late seventies and then heading to CBGB’s after I’d gotten something down. Going out was some kind of reward for me. CB’s even found its way into a song we wrote, “Life During Wartime,” in which the club was imagined from the point of view of a member of a North American version of the Baader-Meinhof gang—urban guerillas who missed being able to go to the clubs where they used to hang. Being out in the world more, we all came to miss hanging out in an old familiar place.
I kept returning to the club throughout the following decades. The bands of the post-punk era—which, as I write this, are being rediscovered— filled the gap left by those of us who were on tour. They pushed their music and performances further, too. Some of them really took the ball and ran with it, making bands like ours seem tame by comparison. DNA, Bush Tetras, and the Contortions brought newer and sometimes more radical musical approaches to the club. In a way they kept the promise we had made. They continued to make raw and innovative music, and for years, the club remained a place to catch waves of emerging musicians.
As time went on, and you could hear new bands at a variety of venues. CBGB hung in there, and Hilly never entirely renovated or turned the place into a tourist trap or a theme restaurant, bless his heart. (Though there were rumors of a faux East Village to be built in Vegas that would include a recreation of CB’s.) The place used to shock visitors and tourists who expected some kind of imposing rock palace. CBGB doesn’t have grandeur, but it was a place to hear what was bubbling up for quite a while. I remember seeing a wonderful band there in the mid-nineties, Cibo Matto, and then a few weeks later seeing Chocolate Genius (Mark Anthony Thompson) in the CBGB lounge next door. The club remained a vital place for a surprisingly long time.
There was a period after that when I didn’t go there much, because the music I was interested in was elsewhere. And then there was the whole transformation of the Bowery and the surrounding area into a chic boho zone—a change that spelled the end of those old places that weren’t pulling in lots of cash (except from the souvenir T shirts). I didn’t miss CB’s when it shut down—it wasn’t a vital place anymore, and the waves of nostalgia that were being whipped up as its closing approached were a little obnoxious. There were other clubs that had also fostered scenes, but that weren’t mourned quite as strenuously—the original Knitting Factory, El Mocambo, Area, Don Hill’s, and Hurrah’s, to name a few. I guess CB’s had a grittiness that made for a better story. I tried to help broker a deal between the building’s owner (a charity focusing on the homeless) and CB’s, but I could sense that nostalgia was overriding reason and that there would be no compromise.
The rules I’ve enumerated aren’t hard and fast. Think of them as guidelines that can steer you away from what might at first seem like obvious or logical moves. One might, for example, think that making patrons pay rapt attention to the bands is key, but maybe it’s the exact opposite that fosters devotion to bands and musicians. What’s important is that local talent of whatever type is given an outlet. Newer places in the New York area have spawned scenes recently. I don’t know if the new venues follow all of my rules, but they are certainly relaxed places—you can hang out, and musicians come to hear other musicians. It’s a real testament to how much creativity we all harbor that scenes emerge the way they do. People and neighborhoods that were never suspected of being huge creative hubs—Detroit, Manchester, Sheffield, Seattle—exploded when folks who didn’t even know they had it in them suddenly blossomed and inspired everyone else around them.
CHAPTER NINE
Amateurs!
Music is made of sound waves that we encounter at specific times and places: they happen, we sense them, and then experience is not just those sound they’re gone. The music waves, but the context in which they occur as well. Many people believe that there is some mysterious and inherent quality hidden in great art, and that this invisible substance is what causes these works to affect us as deeply as they do. This ineffable thing has not yet been isolated, but we do know that social, historical, economic, and psychological forces influence what we respond to—just a much as the work itself. The arts don’t exist in isolation. And of all the arts, music, being ephemeral, is the closest to being an experience more than it is a thing—it is yoked to where you heard it, how much you paid for it, and who else was there.
The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. This might sound like I believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which I don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive. Our innovations and creations, after all, are what keep many seemingly unrelated industries alive.
EATING CANNED SALMON BY A TROUT BROOK
In his book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Mark Katz explains that prior to 1900, the aim of music education in America was to teach students how to make music. The advent of the record player and recorded music in the early twentieth-century changed all that.1 I know what you must be thinking—I am someone who to a large extent has made his living off the sale and dissemination of my recordings; is it really possible that I believe that the way technology changed how we receive music wasn’t entirely a good thing for creative individuals like myself, or for us generally as a culture?
Of course people have always been able to go hear professional musicians performing in big cities. Even in small towns, paid entertainers played at dances and weddings, as they still do in many parts of the world. Not all music was played by amateurs. But a hundred years ago most people didn’t live in big cities, and for them music was made locally, often by friends and family. Many people likely had never heard an opera or a symphony. Maybe a a traveling group would pass through, but for the most part people outside big cities had to be somewhat self-reliant when it came to musical performance. (By the 1920s, a network of ten thousand regional performance centers called Chautauquas had been established to serve as a way for people to hear music and lectures brought in from other places.A)
Ellen Di
ssanayake, a cultural anthropologist and author of Homo Aestheticus, says that early on—she means prehistorically early on—all art forms were communally made, which had the effect of reinforcing a group’s cohesion and thereby improving their chances of survival. In other words, writing (storytelling), music, and art had a practical use, from an evolutionary perspective. Maybe, like sports, making music can function as a game—a musical “team” can do what an individual cannot. Music-making imparts lessons that reach well beyond songwriting and jamming.2
In the modern age, though, people have come to feel that art and music are the product of individual effort rather than something that emerges from a community. The meme of the solitary genius is powerful, and has affected the way we think about how our culture came into being. We often think that we can, and even must rely on blessed individuals to lead us to some new place, to grace us with their insight and creations—and naturally that person is never us. This is not an entirely new idea, but the rise of commercially made recordings accelerated a huge shift in attitudes. Their promulgation meant that the more cosmopolitan music of folks who lived in the big cities (the music of professionals), and even the professional musicians in far-off countries, could now be heard everywhere. Amateurs and local music-makers must have been somewhat intimidated.