Friday's Short Attention Span Theatre by George Ziemann -- February 15, 2008 In an e-mail exchange with someone who was interested in my opinion on a few things, a question was asked that made me pinpoint the reason why I stopped buying music. The funny thing about it is that, when you get down to the core, it has everything to do with copyright, predates Napster, and has nothing at all to do with the RIAA. I just looked back through my iTunes playlist. The only major label tunes from after 1999 are Weird Al's "Don't Download This Song" (source -- Weird Al's website) and Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere" (Source: Guardian). Two albums from 1999, Echoes (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) and Supernatural (Santana). Nothing at all from 1998, and 1997 seems like a couple of Columbia Record Club "I forgot to say no" selections. 1996 was the last year I was still actively buying music. After 25 years, I just suddenly stopped buying music. When Napster came along, having a Mac kept me out, but I really wasn't interested in these things they called mp3s, which seemed to sound like tinny crap. On the other hand, I could see the potential of being able to find any song you could think of. Remembering that I am a musician, 1997 must have been the year the band I was in (TrainWreck, on the music page) stopped learning cover songs and started writing and recording. Had nothing to do with "new music sucks" or the labels ripping people off, or in protest of anything. At that point in time, we still thought a major label contract was a good thing. Although we were actually pretty well informed about "the way things are," we were also saying, "Okay, so if we sign a contract, the record label is going to keep almost all the profits. They're going to rip us off. After they give us $5 million..." And everybody laughs. I stopped buying music so I wouldn't steal it. Now, this is way back in 1997, when copyright still made sense and copyright infringement was what happened when you wrote something that sounded like something else. Ironically, the reason I had bought so much music in the 25 years prior was to learn to play it. I've always played by ear. Sheet music helps to figure out the chord structure or pin down notes on a questionable part, but it is notoriously inaccurate, often in the wrong key and a host of other potential problems that simply listening to the actual song eliminates. Beyond just learning the notes, a good cover musician is capable of grasping and recreating the sound and style of the original tune. A Skynyrd song should not sound the same as a U2 tune. Zeppelin shouldn't feel the same as Santana. If you're gonna play someone else's tune, you either need to nail the original player's style or throw it out completely and do something unique. Most bands choose the first option, which is how most of the audience would also vote. When we first started doing originals, we immediately ran into the problem of unconscious theft. The guitarist goes, "Check this out. New tune. Wrote it last night." About 15 seconds into it, the drummer says, "Wait a minute... Play that again." He plays it again. The drummer starts singing the chorus of a well-known song, which just happens to fit perfectly over what the guitarist is playing. "Hmmm...," says the guitarist. "What if I use the same chords, only play them backwards?" "That might work." It's happened more than once. The point of this long conversation is that, after 25 years of trying to absorb every sound around me, clone it and be able to duplicate it on command, I hit a spot where it was time to stop doing that. Now the only music I listen to is the stuff we are working on. It's not because I'm self-centered, arrogant, and just too damn cool to listen to anything else; it's because I've already stolen enough riffs and I'd like to make up my own now. Looking at it from a less idealistic viewpoint, I spend so much time listening to every detail of what we're working on that when I'm not doing it, I really stop "listening," and let it be background music. So that's why I stopped buying music. Hip-hop on a Santana record didn't help much, either. That was more than a decade ago. You would think that in 10 years, something would break through, hit my ears, and I would be compelled to turn it up and listen for a change because it is just so freakin' awesome, fresh and... whatever else constitutes a song that you just fall in love with the first time you hear it. Maybe it's because Clear Channel was rising to power, removing the possibility of hearing anything new, followed by the RIAA coming along and telling people not to listen to their music because it was somehow suddenly illegal. Then the labels banned their own music, and raised hell everywhere they found it. I was always amused at that. The government spent almost 50 years trying to ban rock and roll, but it took the record labels a fraction of that time to actually destroy the market. And they're doing a damn fine job of it, too. Now, it's a matter of principle. As long as the RIAA is there, pushing DRM and suing everyone on the planet, I'm not buying anything connected with it. Meanwhile, I've got a drum track to do.

I'm trying to make a habit of remembering to write some sort of a column or article every Friday, regardless of whether or not I have posted something earlier in the week. I used to write on a deadline and not having one has allowed me to blow it off if I don't feel like writing.