From a rainy show in DC just before the start of Gulf War 1.

A companion piece to the anatomy of a record contract, some of your friends are already this fucked, and Dick Dale’s sage advice.

I stumbled across this via the excellent site Downhill Battle. This is what the clauses in a typical record contract actually mean, and why you can sell 250,000 records and still owe your record company money. From the original text:

What we are saying is this:

1. The majority of these clauses exist in the boilerplate language of
   the standard contracts offered to artists by each of the five major
   labels.

2. The majority of these contract clauses are considered “deal
   breakers” for all but the most powerful artists.

3. The majority of artists regularly sign contracts that seem to go
   against their best interest as a concession for gaining access to
   the means of production, distribution and promotion that is increasingly
   controlled by five labels and their parent corporations.

4. Outside of the major label music world many of these clauses are
   seen as an affront to basic logic.

• If, for example, a label is offering a specific mechanical royalty
  rate that is decreed by statute and dictated by law, why should
  they then be allowed to artificially diminish that rate contractually
  through “controlled composition clauses”?

• If easily broken acetate recordings are no longer manufactured
  or sold, why should artists be forced to sign contracts that diminish
  their royalties due to “breakage fees” which entered the
  standard contract language back when a legitimate amount of manufactured
  records were broken before they could be sold?

5. We can’t understand why, in a supposedly fair market economy
   with full competition, one of these five labels hasn’t seen the
   competitive value of removing these seemingly illogical clauses and
   offering a better deal to artists.

For the full article, visit the Future of Music Coalition Website.

This makes an excellent companion to the earlier posts with Steve Albini and Dick Dale.

Steve Albini wrote this rant for the Baffler (which is presently offline) in (I think) 1994, and it has been reprinted in Maximum Rock and Roll and a host of other places since then. It remains the most straightforward critique of what’s wrong with the music industry one is likely to see.

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

For the rest of the text, go to The Problem with Music.
It makes a nice companion to this little clip of Dick Dale.

Harry Smith included this performance of Ommie Wise in his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music. It’s a good old-fashioned song about killing. Smith described it thusly: “Greedy girl goes to Adams Spring with liar; lives just long enough to regret it.” Educational.

Ommie Wise (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org.

Nothing beats a good old-fashioned smutty old-timey tune. Clarence Ashley was a versatile musician who worked the medicine show circuit for decades, and made his first recordings in the late 1920s. Like many of his peers, his recording career didn’t survive the Depression. The 1960s folk revival saw a renewed interest in his work, and he made some excellent recordings with Doc Watson and toured internationally.

My Sweet Farm Girl (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org.

This is an oooooooold tune, but I’ve never heard it performed better than in this 1927 recording by Virginians G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter. Whitter was one of the earlier country musicians to record, but his solo work is not especially strong. Paired with Grayson, though, he made some great records. Their versions of Train 45 and Short Life of Trouble (both of which Tangleweed still play) are superb.

Handsome Molly (MP3)

Courtesy of Archive.org

There’s a lot of surface noise on this old recording, but the performance still shines. Robert Zimmerman recorded this one one of his long-playing phonograph records as well.

See That My Grave is Kept Clean (MP3)

For you format snobs, you can download it in flactastic FLAC format.

Courtesy of Archive.org

More recent Letterman footage, this time it’s banjo-man Tony Trischka:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jn3KCZEqxc&mode=related&search=

This song is called The Crow, and is from Trischka’s album “Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular“.

Trischka is accompanied here by banjo-diplomat Bela Fleck and funnyman Steve Martin.  Your bonus for reading this far is a classic version of Ramblin’ Guy from The Muppet Show:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi8NW29xCso