Category: Music

Thinking about monkeys and engineers and copyright

I just love this. First, take a folk song popular in the 1960s, written by someone born in 1896.

Once upon a time a engineer had a monkey and everywhere he go why he’d take the little monkey along and so the monkey would watch everything the engineer would do so one day the engineer had to go get him something to eat and so the monkey got tired of waiting so he thought he’d try out the throttle and down the road he went.

Once upon a time there was an engineer
Drove a locomotive both far and near
Accompanied by a monkey that sit on the stool
Watchin’ everything that the engineer move

One day the engineer wanted a bite to eat
He left the monkey settin’ on the driver’s seat
The monkey pulled the throttle, locomotive jumped the gun
And made ninety miles an hour on the main line run

Well the big locomotive just in time
The big locomotive comin’ down the line
Big locomotive number ninety nine
Left the engineer with a worried mind

Engineer begin to call the dispatcher on the phone
Tell him all about how is locomotive was gone
Get on the wire, the dispatcher to write
Cause the monkey’s got the main line sewed up tight

Switch operator got the message in time
There’s a north bound limited on the same main line
Open the switch, gonna let him in the hole
Cause the monkey’s got the locomotive under control

Well the big locomotive right on time
Big locomotive comin’ down the line
Big locomotive number ninety nine
Left the engineer with a worried mind
Left the engineer with a worried mind


It’s not just any old folk song, it’s a Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller song. [Do read about him, he’s a fascinating character].

Then, take that song and make it even more popular: make sure that the Grateful Dead play it regularly. In fact make sure they play it 31 times. For good measure, make sure that Bob Dylan also plays on it with them.

My thanks to dead.net for the wonderful photograph of Jerry above.

To make it a little more interesting, make sure someone, David Opie, writes an award-winning book about the song.

So now you have the song. The lyrics. The book. Some dead people. And some Dead people. And some alive people.  Make sure someone makes a video about the song/book/whatever it is by now. In fact go one better, make the video using Lego pieces.

Then get your children to draw what they see.

Song. Book. Video. A bit of Lego thrown in. More people involved than you can shake a stick at.

I think the Copyright Police should try and work stuff like this out every day. Because they’re going to have to.

It all began when the fat man sang

One of my favourite t-shirts, second only to Help>Slip>Franklin’s. [That’s a reference to one of the finest sequences ever played live or laid on vinyl: Help On The Way, Slipknot and Franklin’s Tower, taken in sequence from Blues for Allah.] Both t-shirts, by the way, available from zazzle.

You guessed it. I’m one of those. A Deadhead. And proud to be one. If you check out the end of the About Me section of this blog, written when I started blogging, you’ll find these words:

my thoughts on opensource were probably more driven by Jerry Garcia than by Raymond or Stallman or Torvalds

It’s been a long strange trip for fans of the Grateful Dead recently: For example, the March 2010 edition of the Atlantic Review had an article entitled Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.

Image credit: Zachariah O’Hora

The article talks about the inauguration of the Grateful Dead archive at the University of Santa Cruz. Some years earlier, Strategy + Business, a prestigious management journal, published an article entitled How to “Truck” the Brand: Lessons from the Grateful Dead.

Atlantic Review. University Archives. Management Journals. Just what is it about the Dead? A fan site that’s really a social network, one of the earliest to understand the value of social media in bringing the fan base together and giving them a space to inhabit. A dominant position in live music: the Dead have their own tab in the Internet Archive (the only entity, band or otherwise, to have one) and account for 10% of the overall Live Music collection there. A Google Earth mashup that shows you the precise locations and times of Dead concerts. Sites dedicated to trading the music of the Grateful Dead. A shirts Hall of Fame. A gazillion ties. [I should know, I have over 50 of them…]

A long strange trip indeed. So here’s my personal perspective on why the Dead succeeded.

1. It’s all about performance. Unlike most other bands, the Dead were a touring band. They played. And played. And played. Between 1963 and 2007 the Rolling Stones performed live 1597 times, or about 35 times a year. As against that, the Grateful Dead performed live 2380 times between 1965 and 1995, or about 77 times a year. Very few bands keep up that level of performance.

And so it is in business. People care about what you do, not what you claim to have done or how good your marketing is. Particularly now, when the cost of discovering truth is lower than ever before, what matters is how a company performs. Not how it says it will perform. Which is why customer experience has become so important.

2. It’s all about participation. Studio performances are not the same as live music: when you see what gets traded in Dead circles, you begin to understand why. Live sessions are real, organic, they change from session to session. Audiences are not locked away on couches or straitjackets, they participate. Because they can. And they want to.

Companies need to understand this as well, particularly as the analog world shifts to digital. The cost of participation gets lowered. There was a time when I used to get really irritated with management consultants who would bring their powerpoint decks when meeting with me, always in analog, always taking care not to leave it behind. [In case I tried to copy it or, Heaven forfend, amend it, add to it.] What tosh. I’d already paid through my nose for the material.

Contrast that sort of short-term thinking with the vision inherent in Garcia saying “When we’re done with it, they can have it”, when asked about fans taping their shows.

3. It’s all about improvisation. John Lennon, another of my favourites, is reported to have said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans

When you look at the way they performed at concerts, there were many interesting charcteristics. They didn’t seem to have a predefined list of songs or sets; there was a lot of jamming and improvisation within the songs, drawn from a vast array of songs whose “design” made such improvisation possible. Garcia suggested more than once that they made up the song list as they went on, basing it on active feedback from the fans.

Lineups varied; band members performed in other bands or groups; everything about the culture of the band screamed responsiveness, adaptability.

4. It’s all about passion. Quality matters. And quality is a function of passion, of persistence, or practice. What the Dead did they did as a labour of love. Unless you enjoy what you do, there isn’t any point.

When you’re passionate about something, then you take the values inherent in that something and live your life according to those values. They permeate everything you do. I had the privilege of spending some time with John Perry Barlow, erstwhile lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cattle rancher, founder member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, poet, what-have-you. And he was a perfect example of how his values affected everything he did and does.

If you haven’t done so already, you should read his essays The Economy of Ideas and  The Next Economy of Ideas, along with the oft-quoted A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

In the end, what the Grateful Dead stood for are principles. Principles of openness and participation, principles of performance and passion, principles that allowed them to improvise and respond.

Companies would do well to pay heed.

Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Brighter Day

This is a vote of thanks. An unashamed vote of thanks to someone who made my day brighter, my life brighter, and continues to do so. Jim Croce.

Jim Croce, born January 10, 1943, died September 20, 1973. A wonderful musician, and by all accounts a warm and loving husband, father and family man.

I remember the day when I first heard Jim Croce. I was in a record shop on Lindsay St in Calcutta, doing my usual trawl through new arrivals and trying to sweet-talk the man behind the counter into giving me some of his used publicity posters. [I was fifteen years old then, and music was an integral part of my life. Particularly folk-rocky poetic-singer-songwritery guitary music]. It was a Saturday, the 29th of September 1973. And the man in the shop had a new selection of albums that had come in, and he was sorting through them. I think there were only two companies making records in India in those days, The Gramophone Company of India and Polydor Records. Most of the people I used to listen to were released through Gramophone Company; a few “upstarts” , notably Jimi Hendrix, the Woodstock albums, the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton, were being released on Polydor, so I tended to go through both sets of releases.

It was a Saturday, the 29th of September 1973. And the man behind the counter, who was used to my hanging around there for eons, started unpacking the stuff that had come in. It didn’t matter that the albums were factory-fresh. He still went through the routine of taking each disc out of its polythene inner sleeve, checking for scratches and warp, and then gently replacing the disc. And he’d taken this disc out and was cleaning it lovingly when something about it caught my eye.

That’s all it appeared to have in the centre of the disc. A black and white vertiginous shape that shimmied and shivered. So I went to take a look at the album. It was by this guy I’d never heard of. But he’d written all the songs, played guitar for them, sung on them. Seemed interesting, it was the kind of guy I tended to like listening to. And I really really wanted to see how the label would look spinning around on the shop’s Garrard turntable. So I asked my friend the shopkeeper whether I could listen to the album. In those days, there were no headphones, no listening points or booths. If you wanted to listen to something, you needed to smooth-talk the shopkeeper. Who happened to be a friendly guy. So he put the record on.

September 29, 1973. And I heard the strains of You Don’t Mess Around With Jim for the first time. Predictably enough, he had me on “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim”. So I stayed on, listened to the rest of the album, also called You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, loved it, bought it and went home with it.

I couldn’t stop listening to it. All starting with the foot-stomping raucous tough-guy act of the title song. The gentle optimism of Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Brighter Day, segueing into the story-song of New York’s Not My Home. Then back to foot-stomping with Hard Time Losing Man, only to be suckered into the incredible soft beauty of Photographs and Memories. And led by hand from there to Walking Back to Georgia to end the side. Then you caught your breath and switched over reverently. The second side started with another gentle story-song, Operator. And then the haunting melodies of Time In A Bottle, written for his son AJ. Then, just in case you were getting too laid back, the rapid-fire Rapid Roy. And you were into the long straight home with Box No 10, another haunting story-song and A Long Time Ago, a beautiful ballad. And finally gentle optimism again with Hey Tomorrow.

September 29, 1973. I was so happy. Those were times when it was easy not to have a care in the world. And then I read that week’s Time or Newsweek. And found out that Jim Croce had died in a plane crash nine days earlier. Yup, there were tears in my eyes. [I was that kind of kid; when I read Love Story, there was a football in my throat; when I went to see the film, the football came back.]

If you haven’t heard Jim Croce, don’t waste any more time. Stop reading here, and go to Amazon or emusic or itunes and just buy this album. You won’t regret it.

Everything I’ve found out about Jim Croce says he was my kind of guy,  the kind of guy I would have gotten along with. I’ve only been to San Diego twice in my life, and both times I haven’t been able to make it to Croce’s Restaurant and Jazz Bar. One day I will. And maybe I’ll have the chance to tell Ingrid Croce just how grateful I am to her husband for enriching my life with his music. Maybe I’ll have the chance to tell AJ Croce just how grateful I am to his father for making this world a better place with his music.

Jim Croce, I salute you. Thank you for the wonderful memories you gave me with your music.

A coda. You can follow Ingrid Croce and Croce’s Restaurant on twitter.

Not enough joy

An old colleague, Andrew Yeomans, reminded me of this recent piece in Gizmodo, looking at digital music revenues for punk-pop band Too Much Joy.

Reflections on an industry screaming of incumbent inertia, lackadaisical about their figures and the meaning of those figures.

Lackadaisical where it hurts: in the income streams that trickle towards the artists. You know, the creative people.

The figures speak for themselves.

Thinking about food and music and climate change

I think about food. A lot. In fact I’m perennially hungry, have been that way ever since I can remember. So it should come as no surprise that every now and then, I try and view things from the perspective of food.

Take music for example. Recorded music. Music that has been bottled or canned or preserved.

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The ability to preserve music in this form is fairly recent in human history. And without this ability, the whole argument about downloads and ripping and  format transformation rights and I don’t know what else falls by the wayside.

So when I look at this diagram, and read this report, I begin to wonder. Incidentally, there’s a worthwhile series of posts on the subject here and here, dealing, for example, with the winner-takes-all bias in some of this.

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I know how I feel about preserved food. About preservatives in food. About additives and e-numbers and what-have-you. I know how I insist on using fresh herbs and spices when I cook, even though it takes longer and it’s more expensive.  I know how I dislike frozen food, how much I dislike frozen food. I will not knowingly eat something that has been microwaved if I can avoid it. These things I know.

There was a time when there was no such thing as frozen food. In the history of food the ability to freeze food and reheat later is fairly recent.

There is a cost to freezing and transporting and heating frozen food. That cost will soon become more apparent to people, as awareness of carbon footprint in the food transportation and processing business grows. And more people will start eating local produce again.

And maybe we’re going to see something similar about music and film and sport. If this whole DRM and downloads and intellectual property rights debate continues to get out of hand, criminalising entire generations and seeking to corrupt and destroy the value of the internet, then we’re going to see a revolution.

We will see a renaissance of live music, of live performances, of live sport. Local teams supported. Local farmers supported. Local playwrights and poets and authors supported.

We will see a renaissance of travelling bands, of authors and poets on roadshows reading their own works.

We will see a renaissance of people paying to see artists perform, rather than paying for the right to perhaps maybe one day hear something recorded, canned and preserved, something they have to climb DRM Everest to hear, and even then it may not be possible.

DRMers and dreamers. Which one are you?