photo by Amber Lessing
I used to work for "a record company" ( smooth
jazz... yack.) A fly by night subsidiary of a much bigger fish. Maybe it was Virgin records...I forget...
I was hired by a nice guy walking his dog who liked the drum beat I was playing inside my open garage door one day. The whole company was situated cliffside on Birdview Ave. where the stars all live overlooking the ocean. (The neighborhood was not particularly happy about our presence.)
I was hired by a nice guy walking his dog who liked the drum beat I was playing inside my open garage door one day. The whole company was situated cliffside on Birdview Ave. where the stars all live overlooking the ocean. (The neighborhood was not particularly happy about our presence.)
I was in for a serious education. In a
nutshell, the acts
are a product like a can of peas. I'm not being creative. Exactly equal too a can of friggin
peas.
And
I am grateful for what I was on hand to witness. Being a musician / songwriter
myself, what I wanted most on earth at that time was a record deal.
1.
Appearances are everything. In response to a bad financial year, what you do in
Malibu to pull yourself up by the
boot straps is wholly counter-intuitive. You fire 2 people, buy a new Beemer and
start taking people out to dinner at an accelerated rate...
2.
All the artists coming in are suckers. They are wined and dined in order to
have themselves on the Pitney Bowes mailing machine. It is all charged back to
them with smiles, kisses and incense burning in front of a Buddha in a sand
garden with the sun going down over the pacific. As soon as they were out of
ear shot I heard with my own ears a proper gang of wolves snickering about how
they would divide their next kill. A gotcha vibe overpowering the patchouli
with little fragments of sentences that fell into my ears that I can never....
un-hear.
"We
own the masters so fu%# em"
After
hearing a little gem like this one, I raised
my eyebrows in shock, not saying a word. My expression was spied by a coworker
on the higher end of this food chain. His response, leaning in close with one
closed eye.... "and we’re the NICE
record company"
Long
live the web.
Brandon
Earl Bristow
P.S.
I am now living happy and contract-free
on bandcamp.com.
It's FREE! The new paradigm - I
love it.
No comments:
Post a Comment