Where it Listeth - want ads for musicians - Brief Article

National Review, Sept 25, 2000 by Richard Brookhiser

I live in a neighborhood with lots of university housing, so a walk down the street on a weekend night passes many a Stygian den disgorging kids, the smell of beer, and the detonations that are called music. How do they get there? I know how the kids get there: They want to puke and copulate; what being could enjoy greater felicity? But how do the musicians get there?

Flipping through one of the weekly downtown papers, looking for the cartoons, I found the answer: two pages of ads from musicians who are looking for work and each other. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Gabriel Oak had to appear in the market holding his crook when he needed a job tending sheep. Now he would fax in four lines.

Services lead off the listings. "BEAUTIFUL WOMEN NEEDED For Busy Escort Service." Must have been a collapse in the groupie market. "VIDEO DIRECTOR SEEKS BAND for new videos. I provide equipment, you provide budget." But who will provide the film editor whose attention-deficit disorder will make the video suitable for MTV?

The ads for musicians themselves are quite specific, sometimes combative. "No Riot Grrl BS," warns one. "No Jewel ripoffs," says another (maybe those two advertisers should trade their rejects). Some ads tell you more than you want to know. "We're like bubble gum that explodes all over your face." I'll pass on that one. ". . . noisy, over the top rock band-like a gang." That one too. "TRANSVESTITE MUZICIAN VOX into pagan rites, orgiastic rituals, prophetic ecstasy, heavy beats & hemp. ISO compatriots and producer." Read on, Sir/Madam: "UNUSUAL SIDESHOW ACTS and Musical Oddities wntd for NYC shows . . ."

Often a winning hopefulness breaks through. "All decent musicians call me to start new band," begins one ad modestly, then defines "decent musicians" as "Folk Rock originals (like Dylan)." So if you happen to be on a par with one of the most influential singer/songwriters of the last 35 years, and you're just twiddling your thumbs, call now. Even more heartening than the hope is the idealism. "INEXPERIENCED YOUNG SINGER sks experience & evolution w/others into truth in sound. Be smart, emotional, dedicated/unable to survive w/out your music." That is how Socrates described the pursuit of knowledge. But, alas, virtue attracts predators. "SONGWRITER w/Excellent Nashville connections seeks collaborator." If your Nashville connections are so excellent, Mr. Songwriter, why are you seeking collaborators in the Weekly Ragpaper? Another songwriter seeks "FEMALE LD VOCALIST" to accompany him on "public access TV show. Great exposure." Yes, Channel 77, the observed of all observers.

The listings are eclectic enough to include a few non-rock musicians. "OBOE/ENGLISH HORNIST" says he can play "All styles," as well as saxophone, bass, guitar, and "other insts." "CUBAN PROF PERCUSSIONIST . . . Reliable, old timer/prof'l image." Didn't I see this man in The Buena Vista Social Club? The phone number in this ad has a northern Jersey area code, probably representing Hoboken, where Elian Gonzalez had almost as many well-wishers as he did in Miami.

Popular music, especially rock, feeds off two myths-the myth of raw youth, and the myth of the Volk. Every rock musician's biography begins with some kid thrashing around in a garage. But rock music is an industrial process. At the pinnacle sit the modern-day equivalents of the top-hatted, walrus-mustached millionaires on Monopoly cards: sleek trisexual culture warriors like David Geffen. These ads troll for the nuts, the bolts, and the drones. A hit of the doo-wop era urged teen listeners to "Get a Job." So does the music business.

The other supposed wellspring of popular music is poor America. In the hollows of Appalachia, where they take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; or deep in the Delta, bent over cotton and tobacco plants; or on some Spartan prison farm, among the gamblers who cut each other in knife fights-this is where Pan resides. Modern mythology has added an urban soundscape, the projects echoing with the fusillades of drug dealers. But they're still dirt- (or concrete-) poor, and most welfare cases are only three generations away from the farm anyway. This mythology looks back to the field recordings of Alan Lomax and finds gaudy expression in the Anthology of American Folk Music, a 1952 compilation from old 78s by a hunchbacked Greenwich Village drug addict named Harry Smith, which was reissued a few years ago by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. "Here," fume the fevered liner notes, "is a mystical body of the republic . . . a declaration of a weird but clearly recognizable America within the America . . . of institutional majoritarian power."

There's only one problem with rooting around among the hillbillies and the sharecroppers and the homeboys: A lot of the music is lousy (Smith, more than Lomax). It is painful to listen through some of the yokel blundering and reflect that at the same time that it was being recorded, Louis Armstrong was playing his arias in Chicago, and George Gershwin distilling late-Romantic chromaticism into three-minute sonnets in New York. The spirit may blow anywhere, but once it alights, it has to be shaped, produced, and marketed. That happens in cities, because that's where the audiences who buy it, the equipment that records it, and the colleagues who refine and criticize it are. "Truth in sound," as YOUNG SINGER knows, comes from "experience & evolution w/others."