Retrograde Motion

 My best story about royalties is from local auto mechanic and musician, Edmond Truman.  Always he was eager to tell me about music in Fayetteville in the 1970's.  Never was I a fan of Beach Music, but we had to learn to play it.  My sophomore year at UNC-Chapel Hill, Holden Thorp and I joined the Kyle Whitford band.  Kyle was a D.J. on local radio at a time when radio was still viable.  We had learned to play jazz standards by this time.  Holden had gone to the summer session at Berkley College of Music in Boston, and I grew up listening to my father play piano in his own combo.  When I showed interest in this music, he showed me how to read chord symbols.  While I had twelve years of classical piano lessons and gave a senior recital, I never had lessons in jazz piano.  I signed up for them at USC, where I was a Graduate Teaching Associate, but Dr. John Emche would just tell me to go home and learn tunes out of the real book.  We never once dealt with any of the plethora of things necessary to improvise in the jazz style.  I learned these on my own with academic study.  It is academic music theory.  George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization was a college thesis before it was published as a book.  It substitutes the lydian augmented scale for the major scale, and the altered scales needed to play jazz are the different modes of this particular scale.  There are other methods and theories as well.  Holden and I had a desire to be good jazz players for whatever reason, so we sufficed.  When we joined Kyle's band we were unprepared for the dance sets that came after cocktails and dinner.  We played these two hours adequately and quietly.  At the Country Club of North Carolina, drummer Jim Fine took us aside and asked us both if we could hear.  The trouble was we had never learned or practiced this repertoire necessary for dancing in the Carolinas.  It is Beach Music where they do the "shag."  As it turned out we ended up taking dictation from Kyle on the breaks to learn these simple tunes.  I wrote the chord changes down on little note cards and continued to use them for several years.  Eventually you learn the songs, and they become second nature.  Kyle was a vocalist and guitarist, and he had effective medleys of these indigenous Carolina songs.  Holden and I didn't know how to shag, because we were not married, weren't rich, and didn't live near O.D. or Ocean Drive.  That was the clientele.  Secretly we loathed this music, because you need a trophy wife, a cold beer, and the prospect of casual sex at the end of the night.  This is the paradox of the G.B. (general business) or society gig.  Back then in the 1980's during Reagan's tenure as supreme leader and purveyor of Trickle Down Economics, the wealthy got a tax break like no other in history.  Before he became President the tax rate on the rich was 70%.  He changed that and suddenly Yuppies including Donald Trump were born.  Young upwardly mobile people were the new rage, and Trump targeted them as his main focus.  So Ed's best story was about when the Carolina band, the Embers, allowed their song "I Love Beach Music" to be used in a Budweiser television commercial.  It became "I Love Budweiser."  The royalty checks started rolling in, thousands of dollars at a time, and like most royalties continued for a long time.  ASCAP and BMI were the associations that canvassed radio, television, and live venues making them pay royalties for playing recorded music.  I was a member of ASCAP then, and still am now.  Like the rest of Americas great businesses they are a shadow of their former selves.  When I received the ASCAP newsletter they would leave the zeros off of the statistics, because the amounts collected were so high.  This is how and why pop and rock stars become wealthy, and it includes Taylor Swift.  I am a writer/publisher member, so I have two differing accounts with ASCAP.  The writer gets 50% and the publisher gets 50% of any music that is played.  That entire system has been annihilated in lieu of a handful of streaming companies that pay fractions of pennies for songs streamed today via digital media.  If the money doesn't flow, Capitalism doesn't work.  People have to have money to spend it, and that means there must be jobs that pay a living wage.  The country used to be based on people and this system.  Today the people no longer matter, and America has turned into an Aristocracy.  While I respect Steve Jobs, because I always was an avid Apple and Macintosh user, the Apple Store alone does not merit his company reaping all of this revenue.  Who are these few that control the music?  We don't know, and they don't deserve it.  It is exploitation of the worst kind.  Popular music has been reduced to soft core pornography and eye candy.  There is no music left.  I did not live through America's Sexual Revolution, but I have studied Bob Fosse's choreography.  Sex does sell and it is a major component of human existence.  The world today has become so hypocritical, deceptive, and expoitative it is no wonder children have no bearings about their own sexuality.  The internet is the worst example with the most depraved and perverted videos imaginable freely available to anyone, including children.  This is no place to grow up.  It is difficult to stomach America has regressed to such a state.  As a musician and composer, I have a hefty catalog of copyrighted musical works.  I have continued to pursue music thinking that at some point America may return to her former self.  One could write a hit song and could make some money from it.  The reality is instead of helping Americans, government now oppresses the common people.  While some may not agree Covid was the worst example.  It was genocide so Big Pharma could rake in the cash.  It disabled the American work force was well as most functioning revenue earning businesses.  Is is hard not to suspect both Russia and China have this ambition, dismantling American from the inside out without a single bullet fired, except for deranged, psychotic, disgruntled shooters mass killing innocent citizens.  There could be no more deplorable Condition of America.