What a Road It’s Been

Music has always been good to me.  I began singing and playing trombone, guitar and keyboards professionally at the age of 13.  Northern New Jersey was paradise for a working musician – I played dances, churches, parties, union gigs, in orchestras and theater pit bands.  Once, while playing guitar and singing a lead vocal, I had to slip out the back window of a bar that was raided by the police (I was 16 at the time).  But I got to play side by side with veteran musicians and learned to play pool and poker during our 15-minute breaks.

I was fortunate to receive an exceptional musical education (every kid deserves one) and began writing songs and arrangements while in high school.  In college, I had the opportunity of working with the earliest synthesizers – we had to use multiple patch chords just to create a single monophonic sound.  Then by “bouncing” tracks, we’d layer entire orchestrations onto a 4-track reel to reel tape deck.  The fidelity was awful, but it was a valuable learning experience. 

College for me ended with a bang, literally.  Mt St. Helens erupted and while gazing at the plume, I decided to write a song about Harry Truman (not the former president, but the curmudgeon owner of a fishing lodge which he refused to leave at the foot of the mountain).  The next day we recorded my ode to Harry (“Spirit of the Mountain”) at Rex Recording in Portland and the song quickly received nationwide airplay.  That became a lesson about the economics of the music biz.  Even though the song continued selling on compilation albums several decades later, my total take via royalties was less than a hundred bucks.  But it was worth it to turn on my car radio and hear my own voice. 

Performing extensively in various bands after graduation, I started realizing that I enjoyed studio work more than live gigs – better hours, less folks were inebriated, you didn’t have to play “Free Bird” every night and your clothes wouldn’t reek of secondhand smoke.  While playing on other people’s albums, I soon realized that there was real money to be made writing jingles, TV news themes, radio station “stingers” and soundtracks for industrial films. 

Money has serious downfalls, primarily because you run the risk of becoming beholden to it.  A decent income allowed me to raise a family and live more than a comfortable lifestyle.  But in the process, I worked over four decades only writing music intended to sell a product or someone else’s idea.  I also rarely wrote and recorded songs that weren’t exactly 30 or 60 seconds, which is somewhat of a noose creatively. 

I had the dubious good fortune of being diagnosed with stage-3 cancer at a relatively young age (53), which can be a good thing in that it forces you to take a candid look at your life.  Eventually, I decided to start writing and recording songs again with no intention of making a living off of them.  Suddenly “Free Bird” started making sense. 

A Note About Music Technology

Technology has made music performance and reproduction so much more attainable.  That’s a good thing.  I’ve never forgotten the story of Charles Ives, one of America’s most significant composers.  Ives wrote music that is still considered avant-garde practically a century later (as musicians would say: “he was a bit too hip for the room”), so his music was widely ignored during his lifetime.  It was only his wealth from the insurance business that allowed him to hire entire orchestras for private performances, so that he could actually hear what he had written.

Today, with affordable computer-based digital studios, musicians can record complex arrangements at home by themselves, often in broadcast quality.  That’s how I do it.  It can take several days to write a song, arrange it, record all the instruments and vocals, then mix and master it for the world to hear in perpetuity.  We’re all so much more creative when we’re not recording under the time crunch of commercial studios (costing hundreds of dollars per hour) or writing songs to appease the profit-driven motives of record labels. 

Thoughts About Music:

Rules ruin music.  Writing songs to fit acceptable lengths for radio play seriously compromises the quality.  As a trombonist performing with symphony orchestras, I found that music composed using the “12-Tone Technique” (often called “dodecaphony”) was nearly impossible to listen to.  Favored by composers like Schoenberg and Hauer, “12-Tone” music dictated that all 12 tones of the chromatic scale were used in relatively equal quantities.  That’s ridiculous.  Mathematical sequences can sound wonderful (listen to Bach), but when they become rigid requirements, they belong on a blackboard rather than in music. 

I love almost all genres, but I’m often asked why I don’t record rap or hip hop.  As a retired geezer, I sound a bit silly doing it.  But far more importantly, rapping is primarily monotone and the variation of pitch is what makes music so compelling and memorable. 

Pitch change is why music is universally loved, whereas poetry is mostly enjoyed by academics.  But here’s much more compelling evidence.  Can you sing a few bars of the Winston Cigarettes jingle?  Assuming you can, that’s astounding.  You haven’t heard “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” since 1970, because that’s when cigarette ads were banned from American TV and radio.  They were too damn effective.  Yet more than a half century later, you still remember the words, primarily because the variation of pitch encoded them into an area of your brain not cluttered by mere words.  That’s why many patients with severe dementia seem to miraculously respond to music. 

Here's another example for younger readers.  If I asked you to write down all the songs you can sing a few bars of, you’d be writing for hours.  Everyone can recall hundreds of them.  Now do the same exercise with speeches.  Not too many, huh?  After you’ve written down “I have a dream…,” “Four score and seven years ago…” and perhaps “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” you’re probably running a little dry recalling speeches.  That’s because speeches lack one crucial element – pitch variation.  If politicians could sing, we might actually remember what they were saying.  And if hip hop wasn’t primarily monotone, I’d try my hand at it.  But who wants to listen to an old guy complaining about cops?  And too me, a “bitch” is still a female dog or otter.