Unfaithful music

With apologies to Elvis Costello

David Sherman

Whether you’re a fan of Elvis Costello or not, his autobiography’s title speaks to the fickleness of popular music. Some say it’s dead. Some say it sucks. Some say today’s pop isn’t music, echoing what my parents said when they heard “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah.” They might’ve been right.

Costello, like hundreds if not thousands of others, was a star one day and a memory and scarred CDs the next.

For the most part, music’s needle is stuck somewhere in the 60s and 70s, decades of good, bad and indifferent popular music that won’t go away. If I hear My Brown Eyed Girl or Hey Jude one more time, I might have to trash the cover band crooning in the corner of whatever resto/pub they’re disturbing digestion.

The Great American Songbook is musicologists’ attempt at collating an era and sentiment when New York’s Tin Pan Alley – the songwriters’ and song pluggers’ chunk of Manhattan – ruled with tunes that never died. Depending on who’s compiling the list, it’s anywhere from 100 to more than 400 songs long.

Examples would include: "Summertime" (George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, Ira Gershwin) "Someone to Watch Over Me" (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin) "Fly Me to the Moon" (Bart Howard) "Night and Day" (Cole Porter) "I Get a Kick Out of You" (Cole Porter) "As Time Goes By" (Herman Hupfeld) "Singin' in the Rain" (Nacio Herb Brown, Arthur Freed) “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Mood Indigo” (Duke Ellington) “Ain’t Misbehavin’” (Fats Waller) and a few hundred others.

ASCAP collected royalties for these tunes, mainstays of radio, nightclubs, Broadway and Hollywood musicals. When they became greedy, BMI owned about three-quarters of U.S. radio stations and bristled at paying inflated royalties. They formed their own royalty collection service. Problem was, they were missing songs. So they began buying and playing the Less-Than-Great American Crapbook, highlighted by “How Much is That Doggie in the Window” and other classics.

This, of course, was before Buddy Holly, Elvis and the Stones starting shaking their money makers and rock ‘n’ roll was born.

Rock and pop seemed to have their years in the sun in the 60s and 70s, often in the form of bands, often led by one or two singers and one or two screaming guitars. Of course, there were also Van Morrison, Gene Pitney, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra (swimming against the tide) and the soft rock sounds of the Lovin’ Spoonful, Eagles and Beatles and Motown. Pop music became more sophisticated and edgy with the Stones, Eric Clapton and his various collaborators, The Band, Led Zeppelin, etc. Maybe, if you were lucky, on late-night FM, you might hear Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or Chuck Berry, the master many stole licks and phrases from, if not entire songs. See Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA.”

For a generation, music was life, culture, sex, the air we breathed.

Montreal, like most towns, big and small, had a bunch of low-rent beer joints and a bunch of more cognac and bottle-of-wine clubs. And a few coffee houses where folkies gathered to hear the new guy in town.

For prices insignificant or extravagant, you could hear classic or new jazz, classic or new rock and folk and a number of guitar and piano heroes who sounded as if they began playing in the womb. Hotel bars had over-priced drinks but piano players compensated.

A guitar hero was not a video game where people pretended to play a piece of plastic but a human who grew up obsessed with a real guitar, fashioned from fine wood for tone, sustain, range and feel. As the old saying goes, the guitar player was the one guys wanted to be like and the one women wanted to sleep with. Not a tough gig. Back when. Just had to play until your fingers bled for a decade or more.

At a bourgeois burger joint, surrounded by six giant TV screens, music is playing. But it’s not music. It’s beats. Not too loud, not too soft, just there, pounding out a be-quick-and-free-up-the-table rhythm. It’s played by a computer. It’s not designed for listening but to goose your nervous system and keep staff hustling.

At the gym, music plays at a reasonable volume. I believe it’s called dance music but can’t be sure. In the background is the same electronic beats as the restaurant, not the same beat but the same computer-generated dead rhythm and a singer, male or female or perhaps a harmony of voices repeating the same lyric. Over and over and over and over again. Could be “I need you, I need you, I need you.” Or, “Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.” Or “Come back to me. Come back to me. Come back to me.” It doesn’t matter because the electronic beats and overdubbed voices and echo and reverb turn the lyrics irrelevant. It’s not a song as much as an electronic stew.

Walk down main street of nearby town and live bands are playing a few bars, usually a pretty girl with a microphone in her hand, sometimes a guy and a guitar and they’re cranking out mouldy hits like a juke box. The solo acts usually complement their voices or guitars with electronic drum beats or bass lines. They do a lot of Beatles stuff. “Yesterday seems so far away.” If only it were true.

A guy fronting a five-piece band at a party tells me they play three gigs a week, more work than they can handle. They play only covers. A bar outside Ottawa has live bands every week but only cover bands. They pretend to be a popular group from the 60s or 70s and play their songs and look like them. Elvis impersonators gone wild.

Music stores in Montreal and overseas have shrank, others disappeared. The refrain is familiar. People aren’t buying instruments. People don’t want to take the time to learn to play an instrument. These days, it can seem the music has died.

When the market for LPs and turntables had been filled, Sony wanted a new format to entice people to buy new everything. And they begat digital which begat the CD and the CD player. Digital was a twin of the Internet and digital music could be shared. Consumers sidestepped the record companies and shared music. Free the music. And soon music was available everywhere for nothing.

YouTube, flooded with ads, has much of the best and newest as well as the terrible and discouraging but most of it is free. Of course, the quality is no match for vinyl, a device’s speakers no match for real speakers, but after a time, few notice and less care. There was less and less music in the music –1,000 songs on the head of a pin –but much of the sound was disappeared, the bytes plucked to make transmission faster. Less to listen to, less to move you.

The CD business was vapourized. Clubs died. Others survived on the “no risk” model – give musicians a part of the gate with no guarantee, or have them play for free in what are now ubiquitous “Open mics.” Musicians, desperate for audiences, play three to five songs for free, usually to an audience of other musicians waiting for their shot in front of the mic, buying food and drink. In other words, they pay to play.

Guitar heroes became who knows what. There are a handful of big stars making big money, often women in not much clothes. Tickets sold through a strange monopoly, somehow legal, called Ticketmaster, where concert and professional sports-goers everywhere get legally scalped by the same corporation.

But some couldn’t be defeated. Dylan and the Stones still tour. As does Taylor Swift and a handful of others. Overnight social media stars like Justin Bieber.

For us little people, our computers and maybe a couple of blue tooth speakers mean we can get almost all the music we want, often with video – our own MTV – and get it for free.

There are many great songbooks, American and otherwise, and now we can watch and listen to almost anyone. If you pump up the volume, juice the bass and treble, it’s almost what it was. The song’s the thing.

The industry might not be faithful, but a song can still break your heart.