The Easy Part Is Playing It
April 30, 2011
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George Gershwin plays I Got Rhythm like he’s got a bus to catch. He made more money than any other composer ever did, or ever has.
I’m Unsure Of The Exact Tipping Point When The Only Persons You’d See In An Enormous City Dressed Like Businessmen Were Just Pretending To Be Businessmen
April 17, 2011
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If “synchronized phoney businessmen dance” isn’t a euphemism for the last decade …
I just made it a euphemism for the last decade. So there. Or those Japanese fellers did. Someone did. Whatever.
How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall? Make Pianos
February 9, 2011
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The heir was pawing through the Neflix streaming catalog, which consists mostly of movies that no one wants to see. Going where others do not often go can sometimes yield gems, found among the tailings — while everybody else ranges all over the Big Rock Candy Mountain of entertainment and gets a bellyful, and a bellyache. And a headache, if it’s in 3D. He found Note By Note, a little movie about the Steinway factory in Queens. It’s terrific.
The movie is aimed at the urban intellectual. It is not a craft show, though lots of craft is shown. There’s a hint of noble savage-worship from the filmmakers as they observe the people that make the things. I’m sure a lot of intellectual dots are connected wondering why every factory can’t be like that. Maybe we can pass a law.
The dirty secret is that there can be only one factory like that. All the rest must be run out of business so that Steinway can charge a hundred large and get it. It reminds me of 95-year-old Yankees wondering why everyone doesn’t eat only rhubarb, pork fat, and canned wax beans, take cold salt water baths and live in an unheated house — which they paint every five years with good old lead paint, and wash the brushes out with gasoline. It killed everyone else that tried it, but the last person to tell the tale always says it made them what they were.
This observation shouldn’t diminish the value of the work done in the factory, or the work that must be done to get the dough to buy one of the things, either. I get my economics right from the tap, so the word “factory” holds no terrors and few secrets. I like it in the original iteration: manufactory. It’s the manu that matters. Always will. I have a teeny tiny embryonic version of what I watched on the screen. I’m still alive in an industry that’s mostly dead, which is no small feat, but I know to end up a Steinway in any business is very, very, unlikely. Someone’s going to outlast me and get the only ring, as I’ve outlasted many others.
Steinway isn’t kidding when it says it pretty much does everything the same way it always has. Check out this video from 1929, when some of my immigrant relatives were working in a piano factory in Boston, waiting for Steinway to put them out of business.
I’ve been a professional musician, likewise in a very small way, so Note By Note (note: website autoplays noise and music) doesn’t leave me in the dust when the talent shows up. Like the Steinway factory guys, I don’t presume to be just like them, but I know enough about the business to know what’s going on with them. And let me tell you, the jerk that plays the Charles Ives cacophony at the end after torturing the Steinway people through the whole thing is being snickered at, deservedly, behind his back at the factory.What a fraud.
The tears in the eyes of the mother and father and grandparents when a teenager gets his Steinway and plays it beautifully for them in their living room is very, very real though, and worth the price of admission.
Four Years To Go
February 8, 2011
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And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river.
And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, well-favoured and fat-fleshed; and they fed in the reed-grass.
And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favoured and lean-fleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river.
And the ill-favoured and lean-fleshed kine did eat up the seven well-favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.
Thank You For The Party. But I Could Never Stay
January 19, 2011
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Don Kirshner passed away yesterday at the age of 76. The 1970s needed an Ed Sullivan, too, and he was it. Here’s a Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert show I remember from 1973, with Sly Stone doing Thank You Fahlettinme Be Mice Elf Again (I hope I misspelled that properly)
Let’s not beat around the bush. Don was a hardnosed guy. People like to pretend that the music business is all unicorn farts and rose petals, with a few Machiavellis thrown in to supply the cocaine and enforce the contracts; but truth be told, with the exception of a few blithe spirits like the obviously Stoned Sly right here, the music business is Kirshners all the way down.I’m sure every person composing music in the Brill building resented the fact that they did all the work and Kirshner got all the money. I bet every one of them would call Kirshner if the toilet outside their office didn’t flush. Someone’s got to figure out how to pay the rent — first, last, and always.
That’s why Kirshners are around. People would never pay money to see or hear anything that came out of Kirshner’s mouth, but without guys like him, guys like Sly Stone would never show up. He figured out what melange of money and drugs and threats and more money would work to make even the most reliably unreliable people in the world appear and — get this — perform live with no lip-synching and precious little audio spackle to paper over the cracks. There is an edge to live performances that is more or less lost to popular music today. This is the ragged edge in all its glory.
Don Kirshner was a wooden emcee with a stone heart. Thank god for it.
Tag: New York
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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