Revisiting: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Audiobook)

 Revisited: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Audiobook)

   I was editing and revising my post 19th Century Literature + 1900-1919- which is an individual post I think about all the time because it is the largest period of time contained in any post.   I saw this post- which was my first post about an Audiobook- a format which has proved important for this blog.

  I think Sherlock Holmes... is pretty played out, as a cultural icon- or at least worn out- I think it was the Will Ferrell movie that pushed it over the edge, sounded the death-nell, as it were.

Published 10/20/14
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
 by Arthur Conan Doyle
AUDIO BOOK AVAILABLE ON SPOTIFY

     This was the first audio book I've ever listened to, period.  I found it in Spotify, where you could play it as two five and half hour "songs."  I listened to it mostly when running, and otherwise while driving between San Diego and Los Angeles.  So it is an eleven hour time commitment, and it seems like it would be much faster to simply read the 12 short stories that comprise this volume.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the classic single volume compilation of Conan Doyle's short stories, though they do not represent all of them- there were contemporary stories that were not selected for the book and there were the "return" stories, like The Hound of the Baskervilles.

   I would say that Sherlock Holmes is maybe the first biggest literary character to emerge out of English Literature in the 19th century: Frankenstein and Dracula would be the top two. Like those other two, Sherlock Holmes has long since become unmoored from the source material.  It's important to emphasis which 12 stories actually constitute the book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

"A Scandal in Bohemia"; Client: The King of Bohemia
"The Adventure of the Red-Headed League"; Client: Jabez Wilson
"A Case of Identity"; Client: Mary Sutherland
"The Boscombe Valley Mystery"; Client: Alice Turner
"The Five Orange Pips"; Client: John Openshaw
"The Man with the Twisted Lip"; Client: Mrs. St. Clair
"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"; No client.
"The Adventure of the Speckled Band"; Client: Miss Helen Stoner
"The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb"; Client: Victor Hatherley
"The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"; Client: Lord Robert St. Simon
"The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet"; Client: Alexander Holder
"The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"; Client: Violet Hunter

   There are other, unincluded short stories from the same time period, but they were not selected for this volume. Some themes do emerge: the theft of precious stones (The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle and the Beryl Coronet); noble clients (Noble Bachelor, A Scandal in Bohemia), and women in distress (Copper Beeches, Speckled Band, Twisted Lip, A Case of Identity.)  Although the enduring legacy has made Holmes a timeless figure, the original mysteries are interesting in terms of Holmes being simultaneously a "modern" figure, obsessed with the scientific method and the mysteries being quintessentially Victorian.  It is fair to observe that Holmes is a Victorian Hero, even though Conan Doyle was writing at the end or even beyond the end of that period, most of the mysteries are actually set several years in the past, with Watson being a veteran of the second Anglo Afghan war (ended 1870) and mentioning cases happening back in the 1880s. 

   Many of the edgier aspects Holmes character, his Cocaine usage, for example, are only mentioned in passing, his sex life not at all. 

    John Dowell is not the first "unreliable narrator"- the approach was not unknown during the sensation novels of the mid 19th century, but Dowell is the first unreliable narrator in the genre of the marriage novel.  He's not the first Author to use "impressionist"/stream of consciousness narrative technique, but the lack of knowledge and the way the knowledge (of her wife's affair with their bosom companion Edward Ashburnham) changes his perspective is the central technical concern of this book.

   Ashburnham is a bluff Englishman with a penchant for leisure and cheating on his wife, Lenora. Dowell revels in his ignorance, throughout the first hundred pages it is very much as if he doesn't want to reveal the truth: the affair, his wife committing suicide, the fact that Lenora knew about the affair.  He also learns that his wife had a prior affair, prior to their marriage, with a "low class" boy named Jimmy.

  Florence commits suicide after hearing Ashburnham, in the garden, with his young ward, Nancy- just released from a convent education.  The Nancy/Ashburnham's/John Dowell love rectangle also ends in blood and tears: Edward Ashburnham commits suicide, Nancy goes mad, and Dowell ends the story up caring for her.  Only Florence, who takes a dramatic turn towards villainess status in the third act, ends up happy-ish.

  It is an undeniably dark vision, pre-World War I in place and plot, but with a layer of dark, dark cynicism that guarantees it's relevance a hundred years later.

Revisiting: William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (2000) by Catherine Mulholland

  Revisiting: William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (2000) by Catherine Mulholland

    Back when I started writing about books... I was reading tons about the Middle Ages- it was very subject based, like I found a list of books in the back of a book by Norman Cantor, then I bought cheap copies of those books on Amazon.  I realized that books about the Middle Ages were not going to interest folks, so I thought maybe I'd focus on the history of Southern California which is interesting but short. This subject also contains many books aimed solely at specialists, not easy to obtain, cheap or particularly interesting.  After I moved to Los Angeles, and particularly to the area around Echo Park, I realized just how vital William Mulholland had been to the development of Southern California and decided to read a biography.  This is the book I picked, and I still think about it when I'm running around Griffith Park or walking to Zebulon from parking my car (he has a Memorial Water Department office down there). 

Published 6/24/17
William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (2000)
by Catherine Mulholland

  There is a foundation myth of the growth of Los Angeles, familiar to a generation of Americans.  It is expressed in the film Chinatown, by Roman Polanski.  The most famous academic version of the myth is Cadillac Desert- read by almost every American studies undergraduate class in the US.  The myth, which is described in the foreword to her excellent history of her father, William Mulholland, the architect of modern Los Angeles, goes like this:

   Once upon a time Los Angeles was a small Mexican village, after the United States took over, it wasn't long before a vast conspiracy, consisting of both public and private interests, launched a plan to steal water from a bucolic farming community hundreds of miles away.  This theft, engineered in secret, destroyed that community and constitutes an original sin that forever taints modern Los Angeles.

  I'm as guilt as anyone when it comes to embracing what is essentially a false story.  I've got a shelf full of books like Cadillac Desert- seeking to expose the corruption at the heart of the Southern California dream.  Well, Catherine Mulholland, daughter of William and esteemed historian in her own right, is fed up with that bullshit, and her book, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles serves as a counter-point to the more established, critical view point.

  I wouldn't say that she wrote this book to settle scores, but she does settle some scores while also writing a dense, well written, well researched, well cited book about the growth of Los Angeles.  First things first, William Mulholland started work in Los Angeles digging ditches for the pre-Anglo water department.  He moved up to work as a supervisor for one of the private water companies which preceded the (in)famous Department of Water and Power.  The early chapters shed little light on the meat of the book, but they are interesting if you live in the Silver Lake/Echo Park area.   Tracing out one of the maps in the early chapters, I actually found the original water pipes that served the Elysian Park Reservoir.

  The meat of Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles has to do with the oft recounted tale of the "theft" of the water supply of the Owens River Valley.  This act has been repeatedly portrayed as the theft of water from a group of innocent ranchers and farmers.  Some of the parts of this story turn out to have been true-  Mulholland did use a private citizen to acquire the rights in secret, then that citizen sold the water rights to Los Angeles.

  The representation that the Owens Valley aqueduct was simply to serve the land owned by wealthy Angelenos in the San Fernando valley is shown to be false.   Mulholland and Los Angeles were plotting to secure an enormous supply of water for the entire Los Angeles basin.  Wealthy Angelenos bought large ranches in the San Fernando valley because they were cheap, and available.  The two facts are not linked in time or motivation.  Those land owners did, in fact, benefit from the water supply, but then, so did every person in Los Angeles.

  Another assumed fact that is shown to be false is the idea that the Owens Valley actively resisted from the beginning of the plan to steal "their" water.  Mulholland demonstrates that the active period of resistance- with some physical sabotage- was not linked to the construction of the aqueduct, but rather to the period after, when there was a vociferous debate as to whether the power generating capacity of the new aqueduct would be controlled by private or public entities.   The acts of sabotage were supported by those who advocated for the private control of the power to be generated, financed by outside interests who weren't opposed to the aqueduct, but just to the public control of the resulting power generating capacity.

  The rise of Los Angeles wasn't the result of a criminal conspiracy, it was an obvious solution to a pressing problem, and it was executed with a style and aplomb that is rarely seen in public infrastructure projects.
  

Revisiting: Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009)by David Suisman

 Revisiting: Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009)by David Suisman

   I look back on a post like this one and I chuckle because... who is going to read this post on a blog? If you are going to write something this detailed, a blog is not the right place for it, even if it is your own blog.  Still, I was at my best here, really trying to write a post that had some substance and context. I was a couple years away from learning my lesson, that this type of writing wasn't interesting to anyone- the level of detail and complexity- just not the right tone for a blog, but when I look back on it it's like, "Wow- I wrote that?"

Published 7/22/10
Selling Sounds:
The Commercial Revolution in American Music
by David Suisman
p. 2009
Boston: Harvard University Press

   The strangest fact about this book is that there is another book called The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (2007) that covers much the same thematic territory.  I was also immediately reminded of That Moaning Saxophone: The Six Brown Brothers and the Dawning of a Musical Craze (2004).  All three books are an example of a renaissance in academic Interdisciplinary Studies.  The back covers of those three books provides an additional ten titles which all proceed from the same cross-disciplinary viewpoint.  I don't think ANY of the books or the books listed on the back cover would be considered a "hit" within the publishing world except for Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. (2003)  All of these titles represent a break down between departments in American Universities as well as a move away from trends in cultural theory during the 1990s.  The happy result is the production of relevant knowledge in readable language.

      Like the other books listed, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, selects different strands of music culture in the period between the end of the Civil War and the start of the First World War.  Really, the relevant time periods here (time periods are important) are 1880-1917 and 1918-1929 (Great Depression)  Like all of the books listed, Selling Sounds focuses wholly on the United States market.  Suisman's analysis is strong as far as it goes.  He uses the term 'culture industry' with comfort and his opening chapter on Tin Pan Alley is a tour-de-force.

    I think... the limits of this book are best expressed in the failure to introduce similar analysis of different groups of ideas that were "out there" at the same time during the course of the time periods here.  There was certainly a heavy exchange between Germany, France, The United Kingdom and the United States.  Specifically, one of the intellectual ideas that pre-dates the time period covered here is the "Folk Music" movement in EUROPE in the mid 19th century.

       I think the influence is especially salient when one considers the role of white European immigrants in the founding of record labels that specialized in African American folk music and jazz influenced popular music. This leads me to the other main omission in Selling Sounds, which is, by the way, an amazing book.  The second omission is any treatment of hillbilly music, the analogue to Suisman's focus on "Race Records" in this book.  There is hardly any overlap in the time periods covered in this book (1880s-1929ish) and the time period covered in Selling Sounds: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (1920-1970s.)  By the way- the overlap is "the invention of broadcast radio."

      As Selling Sounds eases into chapters on the recording career of Enrico Caruso and the lost history of the player piano, we move into familiar culture studies territories.  However, Suisman writes with a light hand and doesn't engage in debates of interest only to specialists.   A strong late chapter is his set piece on The Black Swan, the earliest substantial African American owned record label.  It's actually seemed to me that the book emerged out of that chapter, which has a somewhat clunkier theoretical apparatus then the rest of the book.  Also is the chunky conclusion, with a 'pointing out paradoxes' hook that left me yawning.

     I don't think you can talk about modern music culture without adding in the underlying folk culture.  Certainly, it might surprise a trans-Atlantic Professor of History that one would seek to write an account of a specific aspect of American Culture without discussing the impact of ideas generated wholly within Europe or the United Kingdom. Additionally, this is an example of what David Hackett Fischer calls the fallacy of presentism in his book Historians Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought. Fischer defines the fallacy of presentism as

"a complex anachronism, in which the antecedent in a narrative series is falsified by being defined or interpreted in terms of the consequent.  Sometimes called the fallacy of nunc pro tunc, it is the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past, and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world." (FISCHER: 135.)

   This fallacy is demonstrated in the omissions I just pointed out.  African American influenced music dominates the contemporary landscape.  Meanwhile, the intellectual discussion over folk music as practiced in Germany and the United Kingdom in the mid 1850s is a footnote to a footnote to a footnote, studied perhaps only in the John Hopkins Department of Comparative Literature.

  I don't think you can explain the commercialization of American music in the 20th century without reference to, first, the folk music culture of regular people living outside major cities as it existed before the Civil War, and second, the impact of ideas about Folk Music on the development of ideas about Popular Music in the 20th century.  That's a pretty big subject though, so I'm going to give Suisman a pass and instead congratulate him on what is an excellent book, inside or outside the University knowledge production system.

Revisiting: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

 Revisiting: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

I actually possess a copy of a zine I put together in high school- early in high school, and when I was looking at it a while back I noticed that I still have a similar authorial voice- that nothing much has changed over 30 years of amateur cultural criticism.  As I continue the process of editing this blog down to a manageable, exportable size, I notice that I said much of what I had to say about "big topics" way back at the beginning, between 2008 and 2011.  I haven't ever followed up or expanded on anything because this is an amateur affair, but as revise and edit, it increasingly looks like the earlier posts were more significant than anything I've written in the past decade or so- post divorce, let's say (2014).

3/2/10
John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle and the So-Called Aesthetics of DIY

Aesthetics (wiki entry) ("Modern Aesthetics interior section")
John Ruskin (wiki entry)  Section 2.1 Art and Design Criticism
Thomas Carlyle (wiki entry) (Sign of the Times essay)

    I was reading the Los Angeles Times free weekly the other day and I saw an alternative headline for the "Queens of Lo Fi" article.  The alternative headline, used for the cover of the free weekly, but not the newspaper articles was "Lo Fi is DIY"- and then it was the same article inside.  That is an equivalence I subscribe too, personally.  The essence of whatever you want to call lo fi is homemade, bedroom pop by individuals in non-professional surroundings.  As I said before, it is the mode of production, rather then any particular sound that results, which describes "lo fi" and therefore lo fi is simply an update of the familiar diy music phenomenon.

    In an attempt to describe a particular SOUND or LOOK or FEEL people will sometimes discuss the "Aesthetics" of a certain category of art.  "The aesthetics of diy" for example, though it could be "the aesthetics of heavy metal" or something not involving music at all.  Aesthetics has a visual and thematic aspect that recalls it's role in history as the "science of beauty."  Beauty takes many forms.  Aesthetics is the study and description of beauty.

       The first important point to make is that the discussion of aesthetics was not confined to debate over what popular musician is better then another popular musician or the merits of the latest Rodarthe rtw  line.  In England, in particular, writers like Thomas Carlyle and most importantly, John Ruskin created a comprehensive critique of 19th century industrial age English society by focusing on the ugliness of the environment.  These guys were super hoity toity intellectuals, criticizing  directly from where they considered themselves "above" i.e., they were into medieval architecture, understood the importance of craftsmanship in production, thought the middle class was stupid, etc.

      But when you talk about an aesthetic of diy, you are essentially talking about John Ruskin.  His ideas in turn inspired William Morris, who inspired the "Craftsman" movement of the United States in the early 20th century.  Perhaps the major difference between the aesthetics of John Ruskin and William Morris vs. the DIY ethic of today is that DIY today is slap dash and amateurish.  People aren't even trying for beauty, it is more important to experiment, express raw emotion or simply to exist.

     However, the larger audience has been taught by culture to seek beauty from art (see above) so these attempts, however satisfying they may be to the artist, are doomed unless they comport with contemporary ideas of beauty.  You might ask yourself, if you are going to make something that people will not consider beautiful, "Why bother?"  The value of art absent an audience is dubious.  The idea of art or beauty without an audience to perceive it is something that would have been foreign to the ancient Greeks (who invented the science.)  On the other hand, it is well in line with the aesthetic theory of the romantics (i.e. wildness, individualism, disregard of the group, etc.)

     Ruskin and Carlyle are more in line with the Ancient Greeks- that's something that separates their thought from the larger romantic movement in the UK and Europe.  Their whole goal is to persuade society of the rightness of their position, they actually involve out of the passion of romanticism.  Romanticism came first, then came the aesthetics of John Ruskin.

    Modern DIY is different from all this because the beauty is in the background.  It needs to be in the foreground.  An Aesthetic that isn't consciously concerned with the description of a particular kind of beauty, is not, in fact, an aesthetic at all, and so to the extent that DIY is not concerned with beauty, it is not an aesthetic at all, but simply a description of a particular form of mass production within consumer capitalist society.

Revisiting: Hold On, I'm Coming: The Independent Record Labels of Memphis, TENN.

 

   I'm not into self-promotion but I do think that I was on the money when I wrote this post about the independent record labels of Memphis Tennessee back in 2007 (based on a few books I'd read at the time).  Some of the stuff I say at the end has proven to be more true since we've learned more about the nature of the music streaming ecology, which, in 2007 barely existed.   I stand by all of what I wrote here back in 2007.

Originally Published 2007
Hold On, I'm Coming: The Independent Record Labels of Memphis, TENN.

Sun Studio Logo from Memphis Tennessee

Stax Records Logo

     It's a sad fact that those who like to wag their gums about what independent musical acts are 'good' or 'bad' are hugely ignorant of the actual history of independent music. Indie music didn't start with punk rock in the 70s- it extends back in time to the beginning of the music industry itself.
   

    I've been reading up on Sun Records and Stax: both from Memphis. Both were true indie record labels. Both had a decade plus long 'hey day' followed by descent to obscurity. And you know what? They had hits- for a time- then they didn't, and they disappeared. But man could they sell records back then.

    

     Take Stax- Stax sold almost entirely through mom and pop record shops located in "urban" neighborhoods- but the records sold. Here are some take aways from both stories: Hit records sell for a long time, a successful artist is someone who can sing a song written by someone else and make it into a hit, easy access to a recording studio is important.

      It's funny, because neither Stax or Sun had what you would call a "scene." In fact, if you actually look at the history of the independent music industry, you see that the idea of geographically specific "scene" doesn't reflect the reality of what independent records used to succeed.

   You can tell it's not the location that gives rise to the label, because indie labels typically disappear after the cluster of artists that rose to prominence either dies (Otis Redding, Buddy Holly) or is absorbed by the "major" labels of whatever era.

   Time and time again, independent record labels release a hit record, have trouble with expanding or being absorbed, fail to maintain their relationship with the artist who had the original hit, fail to duplicate the success with different artists over time and generally lose the personnel who were around during the glory days.

   I think the aspect of that is most applicable to the blog rock/indie scene of today is the relationship with the artist who has the original hit. I would hypothesize for the average independent record label starting in 2010 viability is an either/or. You either have an artist who sells or don't. I can't think of a single indie band where I would say it's the record label that "broke" the artist.

    Almost every independent label of today wants an artist to "walk in the door" with a finished product. In that sense it is analogous to the 50s-60s Sun/Stax mode of production where artists would come from the surrounding hinterland to record, and the labels would cherry pick the best, and the records would then sell. That is almost exactly what happened with bands like Wavves, Crocodiles and Dum Dum Girls.

   Neither Sun nor Stax had anything resembling "A&R": They literally relied on people coming in off the street. Another similarity between then and now is the phenomenon of sales independent of the largest institutional players in the music industry. Perhaps this sounds circular- but all you need to sell records is a place to sell records and a reliable postal service. The places that sell records are always looking for records to sell- it never ends.

   I would refer to this phenomenon (then and now) as a "fragmented marketplace." By fragmented marketplace I mean a marketplace geographically dispersed, unclear preference for format, no common sources of information, etc. While the disadvantages of a fragmented marketplace are obvious (Um- no one buys physical media, large sellers of physical media disappear) some of the advantage are less obvious.

    For example, one of the advantages of a fragmented marketplace is something I call an "infinite roll out." I'm using "roll out" in it's public relations/advertising period as in

ROLL OUT: The time period in which a new company, service or product is introduced to consumers.

     My thesis is that fragmented marketplaces give you basically an infinite amount of time to introduce your product/album/etc to the market place. Independent labels exist in a place that is beyond quantifiable time in that regard. They are not on the schedule, not on the list of "new releases."

   Here's the conclusion: In this context the label is just a conduit for the artist- it doesn't extend beyond whatever artist has a hit. But it's the environment provided by the label to the artist that allows the artist to have the hit, in that sense the label is both wholly unnecessary and completely indispensable at the same time.

Revisiting: Show Review: Avenue D, Beauty Bar San Diego 5/13/06

Revisiting: Show Review:  Avenue D, Beauty Bar San Diego 5/13/06

   I've been listening to the Charli XCX record, which is very much, imo, a love letter to the "indie-sleaze" era, and don't you know I lived it.   Back then they called it 'indie-dance' and here is one of my show reviews from that era.

May 14th, 2006
Show Review:  Avenue D + DJS
@ The Beauty Bar, San Diego May 13th, 2006.

      As I was walking out of the Civic Center Plaza in San Diego to my bank down the street, I passed the venue known as "Fourth and B". For the first two or three years that I was in San Diego, I would regularly confuse Fourth and B with On Broadway. Now I know the difference: On Broadway is the place that gainfully employs man-about-town Morgan "High Octane" Young, Fourth and B is the place that's being driven out of business by the House of Blues.

    I saw there on the marquee that DJ Tiesto was playing Fourth and B. Not only, that... it's sold out. What... the... fuck. In my "weekend preview" post, I talked about how San Diego was one of the centers of the "indie dance" movement. A fair question might arise, what is "indie dance".

      When you are trying to define a concept, it often helps to explain what the concept is not, which helps orient the listener to the ideas that you are trying to communicate. So let me try that approach: Sold out tiesto show at the fourth and b is NOT indie dance. Sold out Tiesto is what indie dance, in large part, arose in opposition to.

      That sold out Tiesto show was on Friday night. Last night, Avenue D took the stage at Beauty Bar San Diego and showed us all what indie dance is all about. Two New York girls, shouting out their gleefully obscene lyrics over a pre recorded cd. Maybe they aren't as angry as Peaches, or as art school as Le Tigre, or as talented as M.I.A. But they're white chicks armed with an 808 and they ain't afraid to use it.
          And that is what indie dance is all about. It's about pushing the DJ off his pedestal, smashing up his white label collection, and putting it back together with a bunch of outsiders.
Avenue D drew a hundred plus people last night. It was a good turn out. The Beauty Bar is undeniably the heart of its corner of the San Diego music scene. Most of that has do with the popularity of Gabe Vega. Pop Rocks is an undeniably solid night: Manual Scan and the Power Chords on a MONDAY night? You got the Pussy Galore on Wednesday night, Dirty Fridays, Creepy Saturdays. OK I made up Creepy Saturdays.

       Honestly, I didn't care for Avenue D. Their reach exceeds their grasp. I still had a good time. Good energy- oh- and I heard Blue Monday there for the one millionth time. Can somebody please put a stop to the playing of Blue Monday at every single indie/punk/new wave dance night?

         Hard not to compare Scolari's to Beauty Bar, but I won't for fear of death threats.

Revisiting: Show Reviews- Weekend in LA October 2012

 Revisiting:  Show Reviews- Weekend in LA October 2012

Show Reviews: Crocodiles, The Soft Pack, Cold Cave & Heavy Hawaii  (10/22/12)

FRIDAY
The Soft Pack
Crocodiles
Heavy Hawaii
@ The Glass House in Pomona, CA.

SATURDAY
"Saturdays Off The 405"
Cold Cave
DJ Mario Orduno (Dream Recordings)
@ The Getty Museum Los Angeles, CA.

The Soft Pack
Crocodiles
Heavy Hawaii
@ The Echoplex in Los Angeles, CA.

   I very much had baseball on my mind this weekend.  Watching the Oakland A's earlier this month had me thinking about "Moneyball" as a concept- the idea that you can find under-valued baseball players to make a small market team a contender against more wealthy clubs.  Naturally, I started considering the way "Moneyball" concepts might over-lap with the music business.

Ryan Vogelsong, San Francisco Giants pticher

  Last night though, I watched Ryan Vogelsong win an important game for the San Francisco Giants in the Major League Baseball playoffs, and his story- 10 minor league teams and 2 Japanese teams before achieving his current success in Major League baseball- seemed to drive home another, non-Moneyball related lesson about dedication to achieving success in a specific field.

  Although Moneyball is about more then statistics (it's about economics AND statistics), statistics play an important starting point for any Moneyball style analysis.  For a rock band, those statistics are show attendance for a specific market + Soundscan registered album sales in the same market.  If you add those two numbers together you get a number.

    Even if you don't know the exact statistics for a specific Artist you can look at the size of the venue they play and the total number of albums sold for a specific release and get a solid idea about whether a specific Artist is a Major league, Minor league or Amateur.  If a band can't even generate a score in 20 of the top 50 markets in the United States, they are in the category of Amateur- because Sound Scan is a relied upon indicator of album sales- albums sold outside this framework count for nothing.

   To apply "Moneyball" principles to these statistics would be to look for Artists who score low on the market ticket sales + sound scan album sales metric.  Obviously, bands that sell a million Album through non-Sound Scan channels are at the top of the list.

   For Artists themselves, understanding commonly relied upon music industry measures of value is a significant step towards professionalism.  Bands can pursue the goals of touring and album releasing without outside support- and if a specific act can't do that, then they aren't serious about becoming professional musicians.

   One key feature that pops up when you look at bands as baseball players is the value of endurance. (See Ryan Vogelsong's pre-San Francisco Giants resume.)  It's important to be able to maintain the statistical "heartbeat" of measurable album sales and event attendance figures within the last 24 months.

  Crocodiles, The Soft Pack and Cold Cave all fit within the same "league" of American indie rock bands.  Stylistically they occupy a spectrum from "syth rock" to "fuzz rock" but all three are bands that are fully within the Major/Minor league group of rock bands.

The Glass House in Pomona, CA.

   The Friday night concert for The Soft Pack, Crocodiles & Heavy Hawaii  was at the Glasshouse in Pomona, CA.   Pomona, CA is Golden Voice/AEG territory- I was told that Paul Tollett is the actual owner of the Fox Theatre down the street from Glass House- I assume it has a capacity of 500-1000.  Pomona, CA. is geographically located at the western edge of San Bernardino County and is hardly the most glamorous of locations.  The major east-west train line literally runs through the center of the town, Bakersfield, CA. style. You can actually sit in the park across from and trainspot.

      If you close your eyes it's easy to imagine the scene circa 1920 with hobos staring out of box cars in the dusky twilight, as a train rumbles by.

    The Glass House has an 800 capacity, and I saw it full for the pre-Coachella Jesus & Mary Chain a few years back.  Tonight was a more intimate affair, and during the show I was wondering why the Inland Empire doesn't have an Echo/Casbah size 21+ option- it seems like there are plenty of vacant buildings available to either renovate or build a more intimate 200-300 capacity venue that could take over flow from the other major Southern California markets.  You could put something over in Ontario that would be right in the center of a 4 million size market and would have, literally, zero competition- all you need is the booking contacts of the Echo in LA or the Casbah in San Diego.

The Getty Center Los Angeles, CA.

    Saturday I took in Saturdays Off The 405, a seasonal concert series that takes place at the Getty Museum  in the hills above West Los Angeles.  Cold Cave was the band, and Wes Eisold invited Mario Orduno to DJ.  When I heard about it, I thought it sounded like the most prestigious DJ gig you could get outside of working a White House dinner, but I suppose pairing indie musicians with museums is almost old hat these days

   Regardless, it was pretty incredible to watch Mario DJ for the Audience- which was eager to see Cold Cave.  I believe more then 1500 people showed up.  Cold Cave fans predominated- my speculation that the crowd might contain many people who were just there for the Museum and vibe proved largely unfounded.

Echoplex Exterior

   Saturday night was Friday night's bill repeated at the Echoplex.  This was my first trip to the Echoplex, which is located underneath the Echo, but with an entrance that is on a street that runs underneath and perpendicular to Sunset Ave.  The entrance is to the left in the parking lot with the mural on the fall wall.  I would rather see a band at the half full Echoplex then a bonkers Echo show- I can't even imagine what a sold out Echoplex show must involve.

  All the bands seemed happy to be home, they all seemed reasonably fresh considering the amount of time spent on the road. Heavy Hawaii in particular seemed to have grown in confidence and had a more convincing delivery then before they left San Diego.

 I think the over-riding concern confronting both Crocodiles & The Soft Pack is persistence.  Are they willing to stick it out for 10 years or more for the chance that they reach some kind of critical mass equivalent to that of the "Major League" rock bands of today, or can they find a different or smaller niche within the music industry or do they give up.  Certainly both band require growth in Audience size to sustain something resemble a sustainable, middle class life-style.  Both bands face the relentless pressure that time places on mid-level indie musicians- opportunities foregone and the sheer grind of playing to small crowds in minor markets.  Unfortunately, there is no better way to increase Audience size for a rock band.

  The existing Audience for rock music is older and less plugged in the disciples of edm and hip hop.  In that way, a contemporary indie rock band is more like a country artist then a hip hop artist.  Like country artists, rock bands are looking for an Audience that exists "off-line" and an "on-line" Audience that is skeptical of the  value of the art form itself.

  The only way to combat the lack of critical interest in rock music is to accumulate live show statistics and to continue to produce a new full length, sound-scannable album every 1-2 years.  The music industry itself doesn't care about the initial stages of internet acceptance for a new Artist, but if they see respectable sound scan figure from an indie released Artist, you can guarantee more interest from larger labels (with Soundscan access.)

 If an individual Artist is doing that it's just a question of when success will occur and if they are ready to wait it out and continue to produce music and tour.  Like Ryan Vogelsong playing for 12 years in the Minor Leagues.  He was willing to persist where many would have quit.