Rock for Sale 1969

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Rock for Sale

Interesting look at the marketing of rock music from 1969 which includes a fascinating little insight into how The Doors were run as a business.

IN 1956, WHEN rock & roll was just about a year old, Frankie Lymon, lead singer of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, wrote and recorded a song called ‘Why Do Fools Fall In Love?’ It was an immediate million-selling hit and has since become a rock classic, a true golden oldie of the sweet-voiced harmonizing genre. The group followed it up with other hits, starred in a movie, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, toured the country with Bill Haley and the Comets, and did a tour of Europe. Frankie, a black kid from Harlem, was then thirteen years old. Last year, at twenty-six, he died of an overdose of heroin.

Despite the massive publicity accorded to rock in the past several years, Frankie’s death received little attention. It got a bit more publicity than the death in a federal prison of Little Willie John, the author of 'Fever', another classic, but nothing compared to that lavished on the break-up of the Cream or on Janis Joplin’s split with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Nor did many connect it with the complete musical stagnation of the Doors, a group which in 1967 seemed brilliantly promising, or to the dissolution of dozens of other groups who a few years ago were not only making beautiful music but seemed to be the vanguard of a promising youth culture revolution.

In fact these events are all connected, and their common denominator is hard cash. Since that wildly exciting spring of ‘67, the spring of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, of be-ins, love-ins and flower power, of the discovery of psychedelia, hippies and "doing your thing"—to all of which "New Rock" as it began to be called, was inextricably bound—one basic fact has been consistently ignored: rock is a product created, distributed and controlled for the profit of American (and international) business. "The record companies sell rock & roll records like they sell refrigerators," says Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane. "They don’t care about the people who make rock or what they’re all about as human beings any more than they care about the people who make refrigerators."

Recently, the promoters of a sleazy Southern California enterprise known as "Teen Fair" changed its name to "Teen Expo", but the purpose of the operation remains the same: to sell trash to adolescents while impressing them with the joys of consumerism. Nine years into the '60s, the backers decided that the fifties image of nice-kid teenagerism had to go. In its place, they have installed New Rock (with its constant companion, schlock psychedelia) as the working image of the "all new!" Teen Expo.

By the time the word gets down to the avaricious cretins who run teen fairs, everybody has gotten the message: rock & roll sells. It doesn’t make money just for the entertainment industry—the record companies, radio stations, TV networks, stereo and musical instrument manufacturers, etc.—but for law firms, clothing manufacturers, mass media, soft drink companies, and car dealers (the new Opel will "light your fire!"). Rock is the surest way to the hearts and wallets of millions of Americans between eight and thirty-five—the richest, most extravagant children in the history of the world.

From the start, rock has been commercial in its very essence. An American creation on the level of the hamburger or the billboard, it was never an art form that just happened to make money, nor a commercial undertaking that sometimes became art. Its art was synonymous with its business. The movies are perhaps closest to rock in their aesthetic involvement with the demands of profitability, but even they once had an arty tradition which scorned the pleasing of the masses.

Yet paradoxically it was the unabashed commerciality of rock which gave rise to the hope that it would be a "revolutionary" form of expression. For one thing, the companies that produce it and reap its profits have never understood it. Ford executives drive their company’s cars but Sir Joseph Lockwood, Chairman of EMI, the record company which, until Apple, released the Beatles’ records, has always admitted that he doesn’t like their music. The small companies like Sun and Chess Records which first discovered the early stars like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were run by middle-class whites who knew that kids and blacks liked this weird music, but they didn’t know or really care why. As long as the music didn’t offend the businessmen’s sensibilities too much—they never allowed outright obscenity—and as long as it sold, they didn’t care what it said. So within the commercial framework, rock has always had a certain freedom.

Moreover, rock’s slavish devotion to commerciality gave it powerful aesthetic advantages. People had to like it for it to sell, so rock had to get to the things that the audience really care about. Not only did it create a ritualized world of dances, slang, "the charts", fan magazines and "your favorite DJ coming you way" on the car radio, but it defined, reflected and glorified the listener’s ordinary world. Rock fans can date their entire lives by rock; hearing a "golden oldie" can instantaneously evoke the whole flavour and detail of a summer or a romance.

When in 1963-4 the Pop Art movement said there was beauty in what had been thought to be a crass excretia of the Eisenhower Age, when the Beatles proved that shameless reveling in money could be a stone groove, and when the wistful puritanism of the protest-folk music movement came to a dead end, rock ‘n’ roll, with all its unabashed carnality and worldliness, seemed a beautiful trip. Rock, the background music of growing up, was discovered as the common language of a generation. New Rock musicians could not only make the music, they could even make an aesthetic and social point by the very choice of rock as their medium.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

That rock was commercial seemed only a benefit. It ensured wide distribution, the hope of a good and possibly grandiose living style, and the honesty of admitting that, yes, we are the children of affluence: don’t deny it, man, dig it. As music, rock had an undeniably liberating effect; driving and sensual, it implicitly and explicitly presented an alternative to bourgeois insipidity. The freedom granted to rock by society seemed sufficient to allow its adherents to express their energies without inhibition. Rock pleasure had no pain attached; the outrageousness of Elvis’s gold lame suits and John Lennon’s wildly painted Rolls Royce was a gas, a big joke on adult society. Rock was a way to beat the system, to gull grown-ups into paying you while you made faces behind their backs.

Sad but true, however, the grown-ups are having the last laugh. Rock & roll is a lovely playground, and within it kids have more power than they have anywhere else in society, but the playground’s walls are carefully maintained and guarded by the corporate elite that set them up in the first place. While the White Panthers talk of "total assault upon the culture by any means necessary, including rock & roll, dope and fucking in the streets," Billboard, the music trade paper, announced with pride that in 1968 the record industry became a billion-dollar business.

Bob Dylan has described with a fiendish accuracy the pain of growing up in America, and millions have responded passionately to his vision. His song 'Maggie’s Farm' contains the lines, "He gives me a nickel, he gives me a dime, he asks me with a grin if I’m having a good time, and he fines me every time I slam the door, oh, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more." But along with Walter Cronkite of the New York Yankees, Dylan works for one of Maggie’s biggest farms, the Columbia Broadcasting System.

Mick Jagger, another adept and vitriolic social critic, used rock to sneer at the "under assistant west coast promotion man" in his seersucker suit; but London Records used this "necessary talent for every rock & roll band" to sell that particular Rolling Stones record and all their other products. For all its liberating potential, rock is doomed to a bitter impotence by its ultimate subservience to those whom it attacks.

In fact, rock, rather than being an example of how freedom can be achieved within the capitalist structure, is an example of how capitalism can, almost without a conscious effort, deceive those whom it oppresses. Rather than being liberated heroes, rock ‘n’ roll stars are captives on a leash, and their plight is but a metaphor for that of all young people and black people in America. All the talk of "rock revolution," talk that is assiduously cultivated by the rock industry, is an attempt to disguise that plight.

Despite the aura of wealth that has always surrounded the rock ‘n’ roll star, and which for fans justified the high prices of records and concerts, very few stars really make much money- and for all but the stars and their back-up musicians, rock is just another low-paying, insecure and very hard job. Legend says that wild spending sprees, drugs and women account for the missing loot; what legend does not say is that most artists are paid very little for their work. The artist may receive a record royalty of two and a half per cent, but the company often levies charges for studio time, promotion and advertising. It is not uncommon for the
maker of a hit record to end up in debt to the company.

Not surprisingly, it is the black artists who suffer most. In his brilliant book, Urban Blues, Charles Keil describes in detail how the blues artist is at the mercy of the recording company. It is virtually impossible, he states, for an unknown artist to get an honest contract, but even an "honest" contract is only an inexpensive way for a company to own an artist body and soul.

A star’s wealth may be not only non-existent, but actually a fraud carefully perpetuated by the record company. Blues singer Bobby Bland’s ‘clothes, limousine, valet and plentiful pocket money, says Keil, "are image bolsterers from Duke Records (or perhaps a continual ‘advance on royalties’ that keeps him tied to the company) rather than real earnings." And even cash exploitation is not enough; Chess Records last year forced Muddy Waters to play his classical blues with a "psychedelic" band and called the humiliating record Electric Mud.

Until recently, only a very few stars made any real money from rock; their secret was managers shrewd to the point of unscrupulousness, who kept them under tight control. Colonel Parker molded the sexual country boy Elvis into a smooth ballad singer; Brian Epstein took four scruffy Liverpool rockers and transformed them into neatly tousled boys-next-door. "We were worried that friends might think we had sold out," John Lennon said recently, "which in a way we had."

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The musicians of New Rock—most of them white, educated and middle class—are spared much of what their black and lower-class counterparts have suffered. One of the much touted "revolutions" that New Rock has brought, in fact, has been a drastic increase in the power of the artists vis-a-vis the record company. Contracts for New Rock bands regularly include almost complete artistic control, royalties as high as ten per cent, huge cash advances, free studio time, guaranteed amounts of company-bought promotion, and in some instances control over advertising design and placement in the media.

But such bargaining is at best a futile reformism which never challenges the essential power relationship that has contaminated rock since its inception. Sales expansion still gives the companies ample profits, and they maintain all the control they really need (even the "revolutionary" group, the MC5, agreed to remove the word "motherfucker" from an album and to record "brothers and sisters" in its place). New Rock musicians lost the battle for real freedom at the very moment they signed their contracts (whatever the clauses) and entered the big-time commercial sphere.

The Doors are a prime example. Like hundreds of New Rock musicians, the four Doors are intelligent people who in the early and mid '60s dropped out into the emerging drug and hip underground. In endless rehearsals and on stage in Sunset Strip rock clubs, they developed a distinctively eerie and stringent sound. The band laid down a dynamo drive behind dramatically handsome lead singer Jim Morrison, who dressed in black leather and, writhing with anguish, screamed demonic invitations to sensual madness. "Break on through," was the message, "yeah, break on, break on through to the other side!"

It was great rock & roll, and by June 1967, when their 'Light My Fire' was a number one hit, it had become very successful rock. More hits followed and the Doors became the first New Rock group to garner a huge following among the young teens and pre-teens who were traditionally the mass rock audience. Jim Morrison became rock’s number one sex idol and the teenyboppers’ delight. The group played bigger and bigger halls—the Hollywood Bowl, the garish Forum in Los Angeles, and finally Madison Square Garden last winter in a concert that netted the group $52,000 for one night’s work.

But the hit ‘Light My Fire’ was a chopped-up version of the original album track, and after that castration of their art for immediate mass appeal (a castration encouraged by their "hip" company, Elektra Records), the Doors died musically. Later albums were pale imitations of the first; trying desperately to recapture the impact of their early days, they played louder and Morrison lost all subtlety: at a recent Miami concert he had to display his penis to make his point.

Exhausted by touring and recording demands, the Doors now seldom play or even spend much casual time together. Their latest single hit the depths; Cashbox magazine, in its profit-trained-wisdom said, "The team’s impact is newly channeled for even more than average young teen impact." "Maybe pretty soon we’ll split, just go away to an island somewhere," Morrison said recently, fatigue and frustration in his voice, "get away by ourselves and start creating again."

But the Doors have made money, enough to be up-tight about it. "When I told them about this interview," said their manager, Bill Siddons, sitting in the office of the full-time accountant who manages the group’s investments (mostly land and oil), "they said, ‘Don’t tell him how much we make.’" But Siddons, a personable young man, did his best to defend them. The Doors, he said, would make a lot of money if they toured more often and took less are in preparing each hall they play in for the best possible lighting and sound; none of the Doors lives lavishly, and the group has plans for a foundation to give money to artists and students ("It’ll help our tax picture too"). But, he said, "You get started in rock and you get locked into the cycle of success. It’s money, the group are out there on stage preaching a revolutionary message, but to get the message to people, you gotta do it the establishment way. And you know everybody acquires a taste for comfortable living."

Variations of the Doors’ story are everywhere. The Cream started out in 1966 as a brilliant and influential blues-rock trio and ended, after two solid years of touring, with lead guitarist Eric Clapton on the edge of a nervous breakdown. After months of bitter fighting, Big Brother and the Holding Company split up, as did Country Joe and the Fish (who have since reorganized with several replacements from Big Brother). The Steve Miller Band and the Quicksilver Message Service were given a total of $100,000 by Capitol Records; within a year neither one existed in its original form and the money had somehow disappeared.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Groups that manage to stay together are caught in endless conflicts about how to make enough money to support their art and have it heard without getting entangled in the "success cycle." The Grateful Dead, who were house and bus minstrels for Ken Kesey’s acid-magical crew and who have always been deeply involved in trying to create a real hip community, have been so uncommercial as to frustrate their attempts to spread the word of their joyful vision.

"The trouble is that the Grateful Dead is a more ‘heard of’ band than a ‘heard’ band," says manager Rock Scully, "and we want people to hear us. But we won’t do what the system says: make single hits, take big gigs, do the success number. The summer of ‘67, when all the other groups were making it, we were playing free in the park, man, trying to cool the Haight-Ashbury. So we’ve never had enough bread to get beyond week-to-week survival, and now we’re about $50,000 in debt. We won’t play bad music for the bread because we decided a long time ago that money wasn’t a high enough value to sacrifice anything for. But that means that not nearly enough people have heard our music."

The Jefferson Airplane have managed to take a middle route. A few early hits, a year of heavy touring (150 dates in 1967), a series of commercials for White Levis and the hard-nosed management of entrepreneur Bill Graham, gave them a solid money-making popular base. A year ago they left Graham’s management, stopped touring almost entirely, bought a huge mansion in San Francisco and devoted their time to making records (all of them excellent), giving parties and buying expensive toys like cars and colour TVs. They’ve gone through enormous amounts of money and are now $30,000 in debt. But they’re perfectly willing to go out and play a few jobs if the creditors start to press them. They resolve the commercial question by attempting not to care about it.

"What I care about," says Paul Kantner, ‘is what I’m doing at the time, rolling a joint, balling a chick, writing a song. Start worrying about the ultimate effect of all your actions, and in the end you just have to say fuck it. Everybody in the world is getting fucked one way or another. All you can do is see that you aren’t fucking them directly.’

But the Airplane also profess political radicalism, and, says Kantner, "The revolution is already happening, man. All those kids dropping out, turning on – they add up.’ Singer Grace Slick appeared in blackface on the Smothers Brothers show and gave the Black Panther salute; in a front window of their mansion is a sign that reads "Eldridge Cleaver Welcome Here." But Kantner said he hadn’t really thought about what that meant: would he really take Cleaver in and protect him against police attack, a very likely necessity should Cleaver accept the welcome? "I don’t know, man, I’d have to wait until that happened."

Cleaver would be well advised not to choose the Airplane’s mansion for his refuge. For Kantner’s mushy politics—sort of a turned-on liberalism that thinks the Panthers are "groovy" but doesn’t like to come to terms with the nasty American reality are the politics of the much touted "rock revolution". They add up to a hazy belief in the power of art to change the world, presuming that the place for the revolution to begin and end is inside individual heads. The Beatles said it nicely in 'Revolution': "You say that it’s institution, well, you know, you better free your mind instead."

Jac Holzman, president of Elektra Records, said it in business: man’s prose: "I want to make it clear," he said, "that Elektra is not the tool of anyone’s revolution. We feel that the ‘revolution’ will be won by poetics, and not by politics—that poetics will change the structure of the world. It’s reached the kids and is getting to them at the best possible level."

There is no secret boardroom conspiracy to divert antisocial youthful energy into rock and thus render it harmless while making a profit for the society it is rebelling against, but the corporate system has acted in that direction with a uniformity which a conspiracy probably could not have provided. And the aware capitalists are worried about their ability to control where kids are going: "There is something a bit spooky, from a business point of view," a Fortune issue on youth said recently "in youth’s widespread rejection of middle-class lifestyles (‘Cheap is in’). If it becomes a dominant orientation, will these children of affluence grow up to be consumers on quite the economy-moving scale as their parents?"

So the kids are talking revolution and smoking dope? Well, so are the companies, in massive advertising campaigns that co-opt the language of revolution so thoroughly that you’d think they were on the streets themselves. "The Man can’t bust our music," read one Columbia ad; another urged (with a picture of a diverse group of kids apparently turning on): "Know who your friends are. And look and see and touch and be together. Then listen. We do."

More insidious than the ads themselves is the fact that ad money from the record companies is one of the main supports of the underground press. And the companies don’t mind supporting these "revolutionary" sheets; the failure of Hearst’s Eye magazine after a year showed that the establishment itself could not create new media to reach the kids, so squeamish is it about advocating revolution, drugs and sexual liberation. But it is glad to support the media the kids create themselves, and thereby, just as it did with rock, ultimately de-fang it.

The ramifications of control finally came full circle when Rolling Stone, the leading national rock newspaper, which began eighteen months ago on a shoestring, had enough money in the bank to afford a $7000 ad on the back page of The New York Times. Not only was this "hip rock" publication self-consciously taking its place among the communication giants ("NBC was the ad the day before us and Look magazine the day after," said the 22-year-old editor Jann Wenner), but the ad’s copy made clear the paper’s exploitative aim: "If you are a corporate executive trying to understand what is happening to youth today, you cannot afford to be without Rolling Stone. If you are a student, a professor, a parent, this is your life because you already know that rock & roll is more than just music; it is the energy centre of the new culture and youth revolution." Such a neat reversal of the corporate-to-kids lie into a kids-to-corporate lie is only possible when the kids so believe the lie they have been fed that they want to pass it on.

But rock & roll musicians are in the end artists and entertainers, and were it not for all the talk of the "rock revolution" one would not be led to expect a clear political vision from them. The bitterest irony is that the "rock revolution" hype has come close to fatally limiting the revolutionary potential that rock does contain. So effective has the rock industry been in encouraging the spirit of optimistic youth take-over that rock’s truly hard political edge, its constant exploration of the varieties of youthful frustration, have been ignored and softened. Rock musicians, like their followers, have always been torn between the obvious pleasures that America held out and the price paid for them. Rock & roll is not revolutionary music because it has never gotten beyond articulation in this paradox. At best it has offered the defiance of withdrawal; its violence never amounting to more than a cry of "Don’t bother me."

"Leave me alone; anyway, I’m almost grown"; "Don’t step on my blue suede shoes"; "There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues"; "I can’t get no satisfaction’’ the rock refrains that express despair could be strung out forever. But at least rock has offered an honest appraisal of where its makers and listeners are at, and that radical, if bitterly defeatist, honesty is a touchstone, a starting point. If the companies, as representatives of the corporate structure, can convince the rock world that their revolution is won or almost won, that the walls of the playground are crumbling, not only will the constituents of rock seal their fate by that fatal self-deception, but their music, one of the few things they actually do have going for them, will have been successfully corrupted and truly emasculated.
Michael Lydon, Ramparts, 1969

[darkstar]

Great article, Alex. Thanks for posting it. It's nice to be able to obtain information from a time period long gone by and equate it to what has happened to the rock music business now days.

I know that when you are I were growing up and attending concerts arena rock was all the rage. Looking at an old Talent & Booking Directory from 1976 I see all kinds of ads for not only music equipment, (which you expect) but magazines such as Creem and Rolling Stone also have full page ads. Theres even petrol companies ads in this book. Moving on to the 90's I have another Talent and Booking Directory this one isn't world wide though it only covers Southern California. The 90's directory contains alcoholic and soft drink, phone and electric company ads...... now days we hear an abundance of commerials on tv using 60's, 70's and even songs from the 80's in commericals.

I was talking to a friend the other night about concert ticket prices and how many thousands of percent they have gone up. Tickets that cost $4-$9 in the seventies and even early eights climbed to $35-$60 in the 90's and nowdays unless the venue offers a discount you could pay $200-$800 for one ticket just to see a concert.

My theory is if people refused to pay those outrageous prices for shows the booking agencies and the bands themselves would rethink the size of the entourages and frills that seem to come with the territory these days. Considering the rise in ticket prices I can't imagine in 5 or even 10 years what people will pay to see a concert. I guess it all boils down to demand...if the demand is there people will pay if not maybe these promoters will rethink their earnings status.

Theres three bands I want to see this year but if the ticket prices are too high then I'll have to be satisifed in listening to their CDs.

Thanks again for posting the article from '69 very interesting and informative. Considering what the article said about the Doors financial affairs in '69 seems bland in comparison to what has become of what is left of the band in this day and age.