In a blog entry a few weeks back, I mentioned that the next No Depression bookazine will include a piece I wrote about Jimmy Webb and the Webb Brothers, whose collaborative album is due out on overseas label Proper U.K. in late September. I noted that my interview with Jimmy had gone off on some interesting tangents about the state of the music industry, and suggested I might pass along some more of that ancillary conversation in a subsequent post.

To that end, what follows are a few excerpts regarding what Jimmy referred to, on a couple of occasions, as his "treatise," amid a discussion that weaved from the impact of technological innovation to corporate irresponsibility to historical race-based injustices to misguided legal code.

(Toward that last matter, Webb stressed one point in particular -- "The United States is the only country in the world where composers are not paid royalties for performances in a theater" -- by requesting specifically, "I really wish you would print that"; though these offshoots didn't really fit within the scope of the family-based article which will appear in the bookazine, this blog is an effort to honor his request regarding that particular line of discussion.)

OK, then. As we pick up the dialogue here, Jimmy and I have been talking about the differences between the modern musical experience and the experience of his parents, during what was "almost a century of self-entertainment in America -- where Americans gathered around the piano, or played the guitar, or went to the dance, where there was a local band, and we were not tapped into this huge grid, and force-fed this kind of mass-produced, robotic entertainment."

Jimmy continues along those lines for a bit, before delving into deeper territory:

"There was something quite sweet about -- and very convivial and social, about the hours after dinner, when the family would tell stories. And it was a very creative, it was almost like art class. It was a very creative and nurturing process, for children who might have thought about being writers or musicians or whatever. It was like home schooling for artists. Of course we don’t have time for that anymore, because the kids are off in another room either with their iPods and their earbuds stuck all the way up to their inner ear, or they’re plugged into a video game and playing some sort of life and death game in virtual reality. It all sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it?

"But, I mean, to go from that to this, in my lifetime, has been -- it’s taught me a lot. It’s taught me that change is not always good. In fact, I’m deeply suspicious of change. When the salesman shows up at the door and says, I’ve got this new thing, and it’s great, you’re gonna love it, my hackles rise. I go, no, I dunno, if it’s a new thing, there’s a better than even chance it’s bad. It’s either gonna be bad FOR me, or it’s gonna change the world into a worse place, or -- I know that may sound a little old-fashioned to you, but -- I have a computer on my desk, and I do e-mail, and I mail mp3 files, and, in fact, I’m recording part of this album here at home, because I’ve been out to California about three or four times, but I just can’t get out there this time, so I’m gonna be overdubbing some vocals at home. And that’s kind of a miracle, that’s kind of wonderful. So, you know, it’s not ALL bad.

"On the other hand, sitting on the board of directors of ASCAP for the last, almost ten years, and just struggling, almost on a daily basis, with the issues that the internet has brought to copyright and intellectual property, it kind of leaves a sour taste in your mouth. Do you mean to tell me that the people who wired this thing up didn’t know that it was capable of destroying copyright? I don’t think that’s possible, I think they knew it. And it’s doubly frustrating because the record companies knew it. The loudest complainants were the guys who pursued most aggressively the policy of punitive, well, just call it a punitive policy toward copyright infringers. Sitting in their glass and aluminum towers and their boardrooms high up on the 42nd floor, [they] were all briefed and told that the web was coming, that it was going to be potentially dangerous to traditional brick-and-mortar record-selling establishments, like Tower. Which, you know, Tower seemed impregnable. It seemed like, are you kidding? Tower? All these thousands of CDs and customers rushing through the door to get the latest Springsteen -- it seemed impossible that they would fold. At that point, I was already halfway through this timeframe that I had given brick and mortar record stores to withstand the economic assault. And I was just about to the day accurate when I said they’ll last about ten years.

"So it was, you know, it was something. And I’m no rocket scientist. So people who were trained to know these things, and brief people on things -- I serve on a big board, I know how these things work. I know they were warned, I know they were told, this is a potential threat. And yet, you can see how badly they missed the boat, and how frantically they’re trying to claw their way back onto the boat.

"I’m disappointed; I’ve been disappointed TWO ways. Disappointed by my OWN industry and its late-off-the-blocks approach to a technological innovation, which could have been for the music, could’ve been VERY good for the music business. But apparently, someone was busy doing something else. AND I’m disappointed in the system itself.... We have the FCC, this gigantic governmental bureaucracy, employs thousands of people, just to keep track of what these nefarious little radio stations are up to. These guys who are broadcasting in the open and charging for advertising, and we have this, it’s almost like an FBI-like organization, to check up on them, and make sure that they’re following the rules. And we wired up the internet without one law, without one regulation, without one commission, without one office, with no supervision whatsoever, we wired this thing up and turned this on. It just seems like one of the most irresponsible acts that’s ever been committed, if you get into things like the dissemination of child pornography, just for example. Wouldn’t that have been a good thing to cover?

"I just think that it clearly is a monster that got out of the cage, and surprised the hell out of everybody over 21. I think that teenagers knew perfectly well what it was. Like, they said, let’s just wait, when this M-80 goes off, watch em jump, you know? I think they knew, and sensed, that here’s a very powerful tool, for good OR evil. Or just for fun. I think most of them do just have fun on the computer, and I think that’s fine. For it to get out of the box the way it did, right under the noses of these federal bureaucrats, who, their job is to, well, one, we have in Washington D.C. a thing called the copyright office, that’s probably bigger than the neighborhood you live in. And its job is to protect, and make sure, that copyright isn’t infringed. And somehow the internet was wired up and turned on right under their noses. And, so, you know, anyway, we can move on to something else.”

Yeah, that’s a never-ending spiral of a subject, I’m afraid:

“Yeah, it is. And it, well it is particularly for me, because, as I say, I serve on the board of directors at ASCAP, in fact I’m vice-chairman under Paul Williams, who’s now our chair. And we’re just a couple of old songwriters, kids who grew up in Hollywood writing songs. There’s nothing special about us, in terms of education or anything like that. But somebody has to try to make sure that there IS a world where there is a job for songwriters. Where you get SOMETHING for writing a song. You don’t have to write it for nothing. So, that’s what we’re doing. To the best of our abilities, anyway.”

You were telling me earlier that you were also writing another book; I’m interested in hearing more about that:

“Well, it’s a memoir. It may be just a little, a tad early for a memoir, but...it's a book about how a kid from Oklahoma suddenly finds himself in the middle of this, you know, kind of arch-business. It’s quite devious, most of it, as I’ve learned over the long haul.

"You know, the record business started out under a cloud, with black music. Because, as you know, a lot of black music were just, black musicians were paid 50 bucks on the back of a barrel, and that was it, that’s all they ever got for things like, uh, I don’t know, Arthur Crudup’s record that he recorded in 1947, that Elvis eventually recorded in -- I can’t remember the name of the song right now, but I don’t think he never really got anything for it. And years later some of these guys came in and tried to sue, and -- it was rather, well it was, it was poignant, it was hard, you know, the court would come back and say, well, we can see the absolute correctness of your position, but unfortunately the statute of limitations has lapsed on this, Mr. Waters, you know, to Muddy Waters. And so, it was always under a cloud because it was always based on exploitation. And it was easy to exploit black musicians, because they were poor, they had no lawyers, they had no schooling, and they were glad to get the 50 dollars and go on their way without being molested any further.

"And then sharp people started getting into the record business who realized that money could be made. And some of them were very good people. Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin, all good men. Berry Gordy’s very good, I’m extremely fond of him; we’re like father and son in a way. You know, my first job in the business was at Motown, and my first cut was with the Supremes, and so I’m not, by any means, you know, painting the whole industry with the same brush. But I’m saying that in general, [there was] the practice of elevating people to stardom and then, to put it as nicely as I can, discarding them.

"When it started up, we had, artists with what I would call proper careers, like Frank Sinatra, who sang all his life, Nat King Cole, we had Rosemary Clooney, we had Ella Fitzgerald, we had Count Basie, we had some of these bands, and these people made money -- they had careers, they made money, they were treated with respect. But also, if you wanna hear me go on -- if you wanna interrupt, it’s OK, but this is my treatise! But somewhere along the way, someone even sharper and more devious than that average record guy -- which, uh, wouldn’t be hard to find, but -- but someone even brighter and more devious, said, 'Why do we need to sign artists that come back to us and want to renegotiate contracts at higher royalty rates, and want special treatment, and want to fly in airplanes, and want dressing rooms, and want this, and want that? Why do we have Frank Sinatras? Why do we have Elvis Presleys?' Because they’re too much trouble to deal with, and it costs us too much money. Let’s have artists that are -- let’s create a product that has a limited lifespan. It has a limited shelf-life.

"And at that point, the Tony Bennetts of this world began to disappear. And you had a new ilk of artist that was -- you had a Fabian, you had a Frankie Avalon, you had artists that were put in the spotlight, and some with limited abilities, but that didn’t matter, it doesn’t happen today. I said the other night at a seminar in New York, in pop music we sing as well as we can, and that’s good enough. And everybody laughed. And I listened to them and I thought, yeah, I guess it is funny, but to me it’s not funny, it’s fact! In pop music, you sing as well as you can, and that’s good enough! That’s what you do. That’s what Sheb Wooley did. That’s what Ernest Tubb did. That’s what Hank did. Hank Williams did very well. Some of these homemade singers are great. Glen Campbell, you know, he’s the greatest natural musician, probably, this country ever produced. But some of them aren’t so great, and that’s all right too. It doesn’t matter, there’s no criteria that you have to meet in order to be a recording artist. You don’t have to go to school, you don’t have to get a diploma. You don’t have to be a good singer. You don’t even have to know how to play the guitar. You can pretend to play the guitar and have a guy stand offstage and play it. (Laughs) It’s a big show, folks!

"And the record [business], when it came into its own, in the '50s and '60s, was almost purely sex-driven. It was teenage female dollars that bought most of those records in the '50s and '60s. It was about exposing this sexuality to the world. And the lyrics of rock 'n' roll were clearly expressive of, let’s come out of the closet about how boys feel about girls and vice-versa. That was the reactor that was driving this whole thing. And artists and careers, like Lena Horne’s career, for instance, became less important. And, it was easier to deal with artists who didn’t have magnanimous reputations and personalities. Now, we still have people like Bono and Madonna, and, there’s Springsteen still sort of lurking in the wings there -- I like Bruce a lot, by the way -- and Billy Joel. So, there’s a handful. But, where there used to be dozens of artists, we now have a handful. I mean, we literally have a handful. And those are our only viable artists who could count -- I’m not so sure. I’d put a question mark after that -- who could COUNT on record sales if they put out a record?

"So, if you take it to its extreme, to, as far as the pendulum has swung to this date, in the sort of exploitation of the artist, at the artist’s expense, it would be something like American Idol. I’m not saying it WOULD be American Idol, I don’t wanna be sued, but it would be something modeled along the lines of American Idol. Where you have these false moments of dramatic revelation, as when Susan Boyle sings her ‘I Had A Dream’ and everybody goes teary-eyed, and she almost literally has the Andy Warholian 15 minutes of fame. And then she goes to the number-2 spot, thoroughly exploited, I would say, and then drops off the map, never to be seen or heard of again. And so, the model is almost perfect. The only thing is to get the timespan down so that it’s even shorter. But, you don’t have to deal with someone like, you don’t have to walk into an office and sit across the table from Mickey Cohen and Frank Sinatra, and renegotiate a new record deal. That’s just something you REALLY don’t have to do anymore. With the exceptions of a couple of dinosaurs who are kind of hanging on, and roaring out of the bush from time to time.

"It’s not even the recording business, in that there’s no such thing as a record anymore, so we should stop calling it the recording business. And we should stop calling these companies record companies. They’re digital content providers. We should be honest, because ‘recording companies’ sorta makes it sound all warm and fuzzy. It has a nostalgic kind of friendliness to it that is NOT present. It’s not there, folks! (Laughs) It’s really become something that that is unrecognizable. Now I don’t know whether you know this old expression from the second World War, FUBAR -- that’s the record business. Or what used to be the record business, and I’m not sure what it is anymore. It’s kind of the television business, internet -- it’s bundled, that’s a very popular word. Even the words have a lifespan now. You know, bundled will be very popular, I predict, for a period of time, and then it too will be retired. Nothing is sacred. You know, expediency has become not just a description of efficiency. Expediency has become the name of the game. So, as quickly as we can manufacture content, exploit it, and then get rid of it, because -- content that is exploited too successfully becomes content that talks back to you, and tells you what it wants, and tells you what kind of a deal it will or will not sign.

"So, that is kind of a nutshell version of my treatise on what began years and years ago with the exploitation of poor black musicians, and also, incidentally, piano players, who were paid a dollar a day to sit in an un-air-conditioned movie theater, and play music along with silent movies, that, without that piano player, there would’ve been people leaving in droves. Because there’s nothing more uninteresting than silent movies with no music. (Laughs) And so, they dug deep in their pockets, and they paid a dollar a day! And, even today, because of a bill that, I don’t want to get into a lot of detail about it, but it began with a feud -- a spat, let’s call it -- between the MPAA and the American Society of Composers and Publishers, over the performance royalty that would be paid for performances in the theater, by, we’re talking about legitimate artists like George and Ira Gershwin, OK? And we’re talking about the MGM musicals, we’re talking about BIG-time entertainment. And we’re talking about a dispute over how much performance royalty was gonna be paid inside the theater. And because of the way that was handled, without going into detail, the United States is the only country in the world where composers are not paid royalties for performances in a theater. I really wish you would print that.

"We are also, right now -- if you want to carry that over to the internet, because these things have a way of being self-procreating -- you establish a tradition in the '40s with black musicians, and somehow it resurfaces in the digital age, on American Idol; it’s almost unrecognizable, but yet, you can see that, yeah, that’s the same animal -- so along with the fact that we’re not paid royalties in the theater, and this started out with the guys who were getting a dollar a day, remember those guys? -- we currently live in the only country that does not pay a royalty for an audio-visual download. All the other countries do. If you download a movie in Brussels or Paris or Madrid, you pay a royalty to the composer. But if you download a movie in the United States, it’s free! Because, for some reason, we are their children, but they disown us....American music dominates the world. And yet, in our own country, we’re treated with disrespect. And we’re still, they still wanna pay us a dollar a day. And now they don’t wanna pay us anything.

"And, some people are OK with that, and say, ‘Well, we’ll just give it away, then!’ Well, why don’t you just cut your head off while you’re at it? Or like my mother said, ‘If somebody told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?’ ‘Yeah, we just won’t take, we’ll just GIVE our music away.’ Well, you know, some groups have tried that, like Nine Inch Nails, and found to their great dismay, that there is no magical alchemy to that. That’s not bread on the water, it doesn’t come floating back in some other -- it’s supposed to come back to you in some magical three-dimensional way, or fourth-dimensional way. Maybe you’re happier after you give your music away, I dunno! But I know that you don’t make any more money. And that you can’t keep your kids in private school, and that you can’t put gas in the tour bus, and that you can’t cough up 50 grand to make your own album, because the record companies won’t GIVE you that 50 thousand dollars to make an album anymore. It’s a mess.

"This album, the Jimmy Webb and the Webb Brothers album, is an act of faith. We took our own money, we went into the tiniest little studios, we worked on a shoestring, we hoped that we might have something, without assurances, without a label, without anything -- and almost every musical project that takes place in the world today is an act of faith by somebody. They’ve mortgaged their house, or they’ve borrowed a lot of money from Uncle Charlie, and there’s just -- and maybe, you know, well, I’ll continue philosophizing. Maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe you SHOULD have to risk something to gain something. And maybe that’s the lesson we’re being taught, is that, you know, then, when nothing is risked, then nothing is gained."