Faculty Spotlight

The Portrait of This Musician as a Young Dog (apologies to Dylan Thomas)
By Bill Ferns

People who know me know that my first career was in music—during the late 1970s and early eighties I made my living performing mostly in New England and New York. That was a relatively nasty time on the job market for new college students, and I was one of the few people I knew who was actually working in the field of their college degree (BA in Music). As a bassist, I could find plenty of work, but mostly playing bad pop music at weddings, Ramada Inn lounges, you get the idea. People sometimes ask me why I changed careers, and I consider giving them the artsy answer—I’d rather make my living doing something else, and keep my musical activities strictly to my liking.

But in reality, I wanted a dental plan.

Background
When I moved to New York City in 1979 to play music, it was, for musicians, the best of times and the worst of times. It was just after NYC’s close brush with bankruptcy (funny, the federal government didn’t think NYC was too big to let fail), and the 1977 ‘Summer of Sam’. Although bad for NYC in general, for haphazardly-working musicians that meant cheap and available apartments in Manhattan. The cheap rents spilled over to the retail real estate market, so that there were more venues that were open to a wider variety of music. They could actually pay their musicians decent pay and still make their monthly bills. So the local economics made it possible to make a living playing.

The music industry was radically different back then, also. The entertainment industry was controlled by a few, large music corporations with deep pockets. Because of the economics of record (this was still pre-CD!) distribution, record companies wanted mega-hits, and tended to drop their lower selling artists quickly. But because the record companies weren’t sure what would be a hit, there was a lot of trial-and-error in terms of developing artists. Record companies and producers would make demos with promising artists, and then somebody would give the project a thumbs-up, or not. In the end, most artists wouldn’t go anywhere, but the backup musicians on the recordings would get paid for rehearsals and recordings. This made a huge difference to musicians’ incomes because a lot of rehearsals and recordings could be scheduled during the day, leaving the evenings free for live performances (when was the last time you went to a club to hear jazz at 11 in the morning?).

I’m not claiming to be one of the hotshot studio musicians who could sight-read any music put in front of them, and still make it sound fresh—those folks are few and far-between. But I was a good ‘feel’ musician—I understood what the music was supposed to feel like, and I wouldn’t play too many notes (important in a bass player). I played a lot of live gigs with local musicians, but also had my share of playing with ‘names’. I backed up blues legends Lightning Hopkins and Big Mama Thornton (she wrote “You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog”, which Elvis stole from her and about which she complained every chance she got). I played at Carnegie Hall in the house band backing up Richie Havens and early rappers Melle Mel and Afrika Bambataa (I still have the Playbill somewhere, in case someone doesn’t believe me). I played on a recording that Richie Havens did for a bad TV movie starring Pam Dawber (of “Mork and Mindy” fame). But basically, I was the equivalent of a day-laborer in the music industry.

Technology Happens
It may be hard for people to remember, but back then, almost all the music on recordings and performed live was performed by individuals on instruments. There were some very costly synthesizers—the Moog and the Mellotron come to mind--that were used to replace strings (and which sounded like they were machines). A few electronic pianos were starting to sound like real pianos, but otherwise, instruments were played by people.

Then the drum machine hit the market.

The first drum machines were simple, and very mechanical sounding—but they had the advantage that you could get a very rhythmic, almost hypnotic groove, that was difficult for many drummers to play—mostly because it was so minimalist. At first drum machines cost thousands of dollars and were mostly analog. Digital versions soon came out and, following the trend of most new technologies, their prices dropped rapidly, to the point that a drum machine cost only a couple of hundred bucks by the early 80s. Soon the joke became:

Question: “How many drummers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
Answer: “None. We have a computer to do it.”

I knew a drummer who worked a lot because he had learned how to play like a drum machine!

Then in 1981, the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard was proposed, and quickly gained a foothold in the musical market. MIDI allowed the user to record a performance in digital format using MIDI-enabled devices, usually a digital keyboard or drum machine. The user could store that performance on disk or tape (remember, this was 1981), and then use a computer or special purpose digital device called a sequencer to replay the performance back into a digital instrument, either live or for a recording. Around the same time, digital samplers—devices that would allow one to record a sound to play back later—made it possible to put various sounds on a digital device. For example, a digital keyboard with a sampler could now sound like a trumpet, a harp, or a violin.

These digital innovations had a tremendous effect in the industry in three ways. First, they freed composers and producers from having to rely on a large group of individual musicians to perform their pieces. A skilled pianist who knew this digital technology could handle most of the instrumental chores, either layering each instrument over another on a recording, or just sequencing the different musical parts to play at the same time with MIDI. I knew composers who, up to then, had never heard their works performed, because they couldn’t afford to hire the musicians to play their pieces (for example, you need around sixty to eighty musicians for the typical symphony). Now they could hear their works performed by a collection of digital synthesizers—not as good as the real thing, but a lot better than not hearing it.

Second, they led to a new exploration of the use of recorded sounds in music—instead of needing musicians to interpret her wishes, a composer could create new sounds not generated by instruments, and then use those sounds in a musical context. This has led to an exploration of aural possibilities—most notably in rap, hip-hop, and pop music, but also in the music we hear in commercials and movies, and in contemporary classical music.

Oh, yeah—and third, these digital innovations put a lot of musicians out of work.

My Strategic Realignment
Coinciding with these technological innovations, in 1982 the United States was enduring the highest unemployment it has seen since World War II. And when people don't have jobs, they don't go out as much. Musicians were caught in the squeeze between technological advances that made musicians less necessary, and economic conditions which made hiring them a luxury.

The independent software market was booming, however. Much of the software back then was written by independent contractors who worked in consultancy pyramids to take advantage of tax laws (the Tax Reform Act of 1986 effectively ended many of these pyramids). A couple of friends, with whom I had played music in high school, had their own software companies. One had done some of the animation on the first full-length digital graphics movie, 'Tron", and the other one wrote software for the niche market of the New York branches of Brazilian commercial banks (and he grew up in New Jersey—figure that out). They both offered me a job if I learned anything about computers. By that time, I was looking at working in the 1982 equivalent of a Kinko's to support my habit as a musician. Also, in the music business, the business people are often as erratic as the artists, and psychic abuse is plentiful. Hence, I was ready for a change, and decided to return to college. New York had recently undergone a transit strike, so I wanted to go to someplace within walking distance. I lived in the East Village back then (before it had become a theme park of its own history), so Baruch was the obvious choice in terms of geographical location, and I entered Baruch in 1982. It was very odd, after slogging in clubs, concerts, and banquet halls, to come back to study accounting, statistics, and economics along with my CIS course. But the feeling I remember most intensely on coming to Baruch was the relief of "Hey, I have a brain! And people appreciate me for it!" And thus started my career at Baruch.

Fast Forward
For a while, it looked like the machines would end the concept of the working musician. It turns out, however, that few things are more boring as entertainment than watching a bunch of guys on stage turning knobs—even the hip-hop bands had to add a bunch of dancers to their shows, because watching even the hippest DJ rotate a turntable gets old fast. And some types of music—particularly guitar-oriented rock, blues, and country—don’t lend themselves well to the totally synthesized performance. So while there are the karaoke-like situations where a singer is singing to a digital soundtrack, live music is back, just heavily augmented by digitized instruments.

Also, the combination of the Internet and the .mp3 file format has broken the hold of the record companies on music, and has made it much more feasible for musicians to bypass the old hierarchy of decision making. While the career horizons of the back-up musician as a craftsperson are much more limited, it is possible for the artist/musician who has a distinctive sound to find an audience without the support of a record company.

I still keep my hand in playing music, mostly under the moniker of Kid Java (it's not a tax dodge—I declare everything I make). People ask me if I do a lot of computer-based music because of my two interests, but I don't. When I perform out now, I mostly play blues harmonica, which has so far been fairly impervious to digitizing. Most of my friends who work with digital music systems don't play their instruments much at all any longer, because the music software is so complicated; I wanted to avoid that pitfall.

Besides, if we have an energy crisis and don't have the electricity to drive all those electronic instruments, I'll have an edge on the market…

Ed note: If you’d like to hear some of Kid Java’s great sounds go to http://www.kid-java.com/