NYC.

First day in NYC we woke up at Jean’s tiny apt in Brooklyn and hit the street for some breakfast. I ordered really delicious eggs in a coffee shop where they charge $11 for really delicious eggs. (Must be gold in them thar eggs.) Hipsters slunk throughout the small cafe sipping at bowls of latte disaffected and angular with ill-fitting clothes and baby-powdered hair (apparently it allows for a dirty look for those who wish to maintain a hygienic lifestyle). They were are welcome relief to the mourning presence of the city.

New York is jarringly different in the aftermath of Sept. 11. There are flags everywhere. Someone has literally made a flag stencil and spray-painted them on all the sidewalks of Brooklyn. (I’ve got stars on the souls of my shoes) Every storefront, every cab every car’s antenna, entire billboards wave with old glory. Even chain store and fast-food restaurants sneak pro-America quips into the spaces between extra-value meals and prices on the overhead menu-boards. My friend Tim Quirk told me a story about seeing a flag-shaped shopping bag on a sign with the tag line…”They can’t keep us down.”

(jay tobey in front of the laundromat that never sleep)

Here, like many of you, I struggle to find words that integrate the latent sentimentality and patriotism that woke in even my most cynical cells as I watched the collapse of the towers, with an activist core that identifies the origins of that violence as an act as distilled Nationalism.

Later that night Whitney, Tim, Kevin and I walk below Soho following the eerie glow emanating from the void where before stood the towers. Now only lingering smoke and the hum of a thousand floodlights pouring forth their unforgiving clarity onto consecrated ruble where in every minute of our imagination, fortunate human hands reclaim another brick, pail of gravel, smiling desk-photograph for someone’s history for someone’s headstone.. Desperate for gentle acts we adopt a lost Frenchman on the street dragging his bad English and bad directions to a dive bar with worn wood tables and a bartender easy with the TV remote. Life begins again and forever in the easy grace of a place where again and forever we save ourselves in the task laid out… unzipping our understanding and resolve with liquor and conversation. To fuel with exhausted laughter the light which haunts the air of our peripheral consciousness with a defiant hope. We willfull…pushing deliberate the bright hypothesis forward further against a ravenous fear which unmet would easily consume the most generous and curious heart.

Mercury Lounge had a 2pm load in for an 11 show. Clearly the liquor lobby is working with rock establishments to increase rocker alcoholism by forcing said rockers to spend 9-hour stretches in empty bars.

This schedule change unceremoniously removed me from my responsibility to the CMJ panel that was scheduled for 3:45. I swung by CMJ to apologize in person to Megan who’d been coordinating the panels. Ever since Sept 11th she’s been on my mind whenever I had to pick up the phone and make a business call to someone in NYC…wondering the emotional state of the person on the other side of the line. What incredibly difficult work she must have been doing in the past month. CMJ was stark and the empty halls were another sad reminder.

Before the show I had the privilege of meeting Storey Littleton the four-month old beautiful giggling mass of Dan and Liz’s collective genetic material. Dan was sitting in with the band so we went back to his house to run through Nashville songs and meet the family. Liz was radiant and Storey was a solid distillation of joy. She is super fascinated by sound and pays remarkable attention to music. Watch out world for the swift debut of Ida family singers.

The show itself was a lot of fun. We played with Matt Pond, PA and another band that was a mess of strings and horns. We were lousy with strings and literally tripping over cellos in the dressing room. My brother and mother came with an entourage of 9 or so…and there was a lot of Pho in the house due to CMJ. The show still had the unreal quality of an early tour show and the
climate of mourning infused the entire evening. The house was packed…but sad.

Philly/Temple University

(kristin and jay, loading the van)

It’s almost a week in and there hasn’t been a minute to write. I knew it would be that way until we got past Boston and on to Buffalo that we’d be in the meat of tour. The long drives that let you know that you aren’t just playing a weekend show. In the 15-passenger van now with 7 hours of remarkable autumn leaves between hotel and rock show there finally seems like a second to process what’s happened so far.

Philly was a whirlwind. It was a speaking date and a panel and two shows… The whole thing went by in a flash. All but my speech, which is still about 20 minutes too long. (Note to self… fix that before California). The speech was well received and followed by a panel of mostly lawyers who mostly disagreed with me for a variety of reasons.

The fella to my left wanted us to believe that the internet would fix everything through disintermediation so my speech was unnecessarily alarmist. He seemed to be arguing that we should just sit back and watch the revolution. Of course he made no mention of how trends towards increasing limits on internet architecture are already narrowing our access to information and control at an atomic level. His later comments about the beauty of the unfettered free market economy underscored what I suspect is near absolute faith in the unquestioned truth of capitalism.

The three fellas to my right thought I was being too critical of the major label music system. One of the three, who was among other things, Grover Washington Jr’s lawyer, talked at length about how much he loved getting huge advances for his clients and how great it was to have a label paying 3 million to radio to get an artist airplay. It wasn’t until the end of the panel that he had to admit that he makes his living as a percentage of that advance. The resulting laughter in the audience was one of the most reassuring moments of the entire event for me.

Later there was some common ground established when he admitted the difficulty that even he (and most lawyers) has with negotiating certain clauses out of label contracts. When we discussed things at that level there is no question that we had more in common than “in conflict” and yet it was very important for them to dismiss my critique of the current structure and to fix themselves firmly on the side of “other”. They also tended to paraphrase my statements in extremist terms as if, for example my elucidating the negative aspects of the major label advance system is the same thing as attempting to abolish it. It’s very interesting to me that the dominant music business model which predetermines how we find music and what music we find and which makes it super difficult for other models to flourish or even compete, is also seen by some as above criticism and requiring of absolute defense. One of the panelists even framed it in those terms. That we could either control everything by disallowing radio station payola and making positioning fees at large chain stores illegal or we could not control anything and allow the beautiful freedom of the market to take care of everything. He actually said that we had “two choices”. As if! We never have “two choices”… I certainly have never found myself represented with in the language of one of two choices. It’s also willfully a-historical…as if the government hasn’t already established the legal precedent that the process of payola is illegal. As if there was no history of anti-trust law in the US. As if an artificially constrained market place could ever function as well as a legitimate free market economy.

The most disheartening panelist was a lawyer/composer who had completely internalized the concept of musical Darwinism. He seemed perfectly happy to have the entirety of the experience of the musicians expressed through those few human vehicles who had historically placed themselves in that role.

One of FMC’s main critiques of the history of the creation of most music and technology legislation is that artists are not invited into the room when the legislation is drafted. To this, the composer panelist offered the historic fact that many of the original music publishers were also composers and that with people like Gershwin and Victor Borgia in the room representing artist’s
rights he felt “fine”.

When Professor Post asked him if he thought those publishers represented a broad range of artistic experience he acted confused. Later he grudgingly admitted that maybe all perspectives weren’t being represented but only after Post pointed to the financial disparity between superstar publishers (who incidentally have twin interests (at least) at play in any artist negotiation), and the overwhelming majority of incredibly poor musicians who are never invited into the negotiation chamber. When I asked him to agree rhetorically to the fact that representing a diversity of musician’s experiences was important, he said “yes”, but it seemed he was comfortably invested in an elitist system that equates success with merit and not money.This seemed particularly sad considering the fact that he himself and the odd instrumental music he makes is locked from an audience by the same system he nonetheless supports.

When it was over David Post congratulated us on being able to hold our stake in the middle ground. It was good for him to remind us of what we are trying to do. It’s strange…that is our real goal. To balance spin and power and precedent with information. Still, it’s getting to be a bit exhausting spending so much time doing the important (though redundant) ground work substantiating the failures of the established models. I’d much rather be propping up and helping to build the new ones. It reminds me of my undergraduate thesis at Georgetown which talked about sexism in language and the transcendent power of poetry. I wanted to spend the majority of my writing focused on the ways that context sometimes removes or twists the baggage of sexist language but instead I had to spend 50 pages explaining that there WAS this thing called sexism in the world and that that sexism is woven into the language that women use every day.

Ah well… when the panel was done David Post opened for us in the rock portion of the night in a Temple Law Lecture Hall. He played acoustic guitar covering Bob Dylan songs and dragging other students up on stage to play with him. Apparently they take regular trips to the Law School roof to jam and call themselves the “roof rats”. For his finale David did a version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” reading out Woody’s irreverent copyright postscript from the originally published sheet music which says that anyone who plays this song without the permission of the author is to be considered a good friend.

(amy and jean)

We took the stage shortly afterward and the set had all the earmarks of an unprepared beginning of tour show. It was Jay’s first show with us and he was still working some things out…and for me…well it always takes me a couple of days to get out of activist head and remember how to play my songs. In the midst of the chaos there were some very nice moments and considering every other thing that was distracting us I was pleased to have the first one behind us and be safely speeding towards NYC in the rental car with Jay and Jean and the Impressions blasting.