Feedback come first so...
Johnny Boyd of the "Indigo Swing got back to me about playing his songs on the podcast.
It'll take a little while because some of his music is actually owned by Windswept. (I guess he didn't read his contract closely enough.)
I've got some education to do with a couple of people who probably never heard of the Podsafe Music Network.
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I'm trying to get PolarSoftIce to become a sponsor. ( http://polarsoftice.com/ )
It about 100 degrees outside right now. (It's not so hot for Planet Siliconia, as Mark Yashimoto Nemcoff call of the "Pacific coast Hellway" calls Southern California, but its plenty hot for me.)
Man could I use their product now.
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This just in!
I received an email from Keith Line of the MS Foundation asking me to help the Spirit Of Hope MS advocacy group.
He specifically asked me to mention the MS Express.
(http://www.thespiritofhope.org/ms-express/)
Carlo Magno, a wheel-chair bound MSer, his wife Angela, his antique remodeled wheel-chair Blue and his three-legged dog Katie are travelling 4,300 mile from Seattle to New York to see Katie Couric and raise a million bucks for research and awareness of MS along the way.
You go Carlo.
Maybe you'd like to do a podcast interview when you reach your destination?
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http://www.woodyguthrie.org/
Yes, I'm going on again about the **AAs, ASCAP/BMI and the rest of the 'suits' to whom I'd have to shell out my sheckels to play Woody Guthry's music.
Woody would be ashamed of what's happened to his music.
It wasn't enough that he died of Huntington chorea.
He's now silenced as effectively as if he'd never been born.
Well not quite.
Lots of people are playing his music and I've just watched a PBS special on him.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/guthrie_w.html
Woody Guthry voice is still alive in the hearts of people who listened to his music.
But he's not being heard.
(Its like Adam Curry said on his show last Friday. You don't hear a lot of reggae on radio anymore. Actually he was a lot harsher than that. He challenged anybody a find any reggae on the airwaves. I believe that there's still some played, in Jamaica if nowhere else.)
But Woody's music has gone from anthems railing against the very people who now sit on the back catalogs, to an utter silence.
You don't hear Woodie Guthry anymore because he can't be misunderstod.
His lyrics can't be misconstrued. They meant exactly what he said.
He was an angry young man, railing about everybody being screwed during the great depression, railing about everybody being screwed during the second world war, and railing everybody becoming selfish and not caring after the end of the war.
The Ballad of Tom Joad is an incredible work. Powerful.
This Land Is Your Land is another incredible work.
Woody Guthry was an extremly erudite and moving author and song writer.
And the songs grew "sub rosa"; by word of mouth; passed from one voice to another.
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I loved his standing up against segregation during a submarine attack on board a WWII "Victory Ship" making a convoy across the Atlantic.
Upon being hearing somebody else singing, he went back there so listen to them. Upon hearing that he was in the "wrong" part of the ship he retorted: "If people are singing that good, we're right part of the ship."
And he brought them up to the midship holds where he'd been singing to keep up the morale of the troops while the blacks were relegated to a small hold at the back.
Color didn't matter, talent did.
He was popular. He had various radio shows over the years.
Until the money interests got in the way. The money people wanted his radio show to play to certain messages. Woody didn't want to play those messages. Goodbye radio show...
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You don't hear a lot of the genres anymore.
Its all prepackaged crap.
The TV series The One is part of the malaise that's afflicting the entire industry.
- Take some people with dubious talent,
- people who would be the first to admit that they aren't worth the hype being generated,
- mix 'em up in an artificial setting,
- dangle a prize of a value as dubious as they are,*
- for doing something that they would be obsessed to do anyway,
- and use that as a vehicle to drive irrelevant ad revenue.
*The worst one is "A Recording Contract." Some prize.
They have an opportunity to mortgage their lives and futures to pay for getting:
- the opus recorded, (recording studios cost money, their money,)
- pressed, (CDs cost money, their money,)
- distributed, (shipping to a dealer costs money, their money,)
- stored (and the Sam Ash's of tsis world cost money, their money,)
- and promoted, (can you say Payola?, more of their money,)
Yeah, it sounds like real life until you realize that the only products you see are the ones that were 'placed' there.
All that happpens and all that you see, all the stuff that makes to final edit, is approved for its ultimate consumption by a bunch advertisers, who pay for it, and a bunch of suits.
The costs involved are really staggering to me and thee.
But if you're used to running a corporation of 500 or more people, the costs don't really seem that bad.
It can cost 10 million bucks to launch a brand of dog food. Not even to force you into owning a dog and into buying the dog the particular band of dog food. Its 10 million bucks just to get the name out here.
Needless to say, they just want to protect their investment in getting the word out.
Believe me, if they could make you buy their dogfood (or computer operating system) they would.
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We're not discussing comparative economic systems here but inside every capitalist there's a monopolist or oligopolist lurking there, wishing they had a "cash cow" like Microsoft's.
Apart from Apple's offerings, and Sun Micro Systems compaatively very few desktops workstations, Microsoft gets money for every PC made, whether it is running Window's or not...
The Linux people a plenty pissed off about that.
Unix and Linux machines actually own the cluster supercomputing and commodity server system fields. ( http://www.top500.org/ )
Nobody ever trusts their information to anything touched by Microsoft.
Well they don't do it twice anyway.
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http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/bios/ty_pennington.html
The TV series Extreme Makeover, Home Edition is just as blatant with its product placement, its pixelating images of products and people who didn't pay, but not many people are going to come together to put up a house for some people who need it in a week.
We're not talking about hanging a few curtains or changing a color scheme here.
So kudos Extreme Makeover, Home Edition.
And kudos to Sears for getting behind a show that actually does some good.
And kudos to Weyerhaeuser, Tyvek and all the other companies who demolish "un taudis" and then build a house for them what needs it.
( http://www.sears.com
http://www.weyerhaeuser.com/
http://construction.tyvek.com/en/index.shtml )
Okay, its shlocky. It goes for tears (of joy as much as of pain,) and tries to tug at your heart strings, but they're doing some people some good.
To the episode on an upbeat note, I bid you all "Till next time."
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