I am a huge fan of a really well-crafted tune. I am not talking about art or music as a tool for social change. I am talking about pop songs that still sound fresh years after their release. One-hit wonders like "Smoke From a Distant Fire" by the Sanford Townsend Band, or "Brandy" by Looking Glass, and guilty pleasures like "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham! or "Where's the Love" by Hanson. Every one a little pop gem.
A few weeks ago, I happened across a link to an interview in a Canadian newspaper with rocker/Parnelli golf-meister Alice Cooper. It was very, very interesting. In it, Alice bemoaned the current state of songwriting. "If I were to take a young band, I would have them listen to four people: Burt Bacharach, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and Paul Simon, or maybe Laura Nyro."
And I totally agree with Alice. All of the folks he mentioned are absolute masters of the pop song. OK, here's the first turn on the scenic route.
I have, for several years, had a piece of music that I found online that I always thought was a bootleg of some kind. A live medley of three Bacharach tunes sung by Dionne Warwick. For the past few months, I have been using a pretty cool piece of software to organize the almost-30K files in my digital music library. (Just to be clear, better than 95 percent of it is from CDs I own and have ripped to disk in full, uncompressed AIFF format. Not a big LimeWire/BitTorrent guy, unless it is something I can't get through legit channels.) Called TuneUp, it looks at the "sonic imprint" of files without complete info and finds what's missing, including artist name, album and even cover art – with a degree of accuracy that is a bit scary.
So when it came to the Bacharach medley, I was kind of surprised to find it linked to a record I could buy at the iTunes store and a DVD from Amazon (I bought both) called "One Amazing Night." It is a live show at what looks like maybe the Kennedy Center where a string of artists, including Elvis Costello, Chrissie Hynde, Sheryl Crow, Ben Folds, Barenaked Ladies and others, take on some of Burt's best.
The thing that makes it so, so, so cool is that while there are "pure" singers like Warwick and Luther Vandross on the show, the bulk of the artists are also noted songwriters. These people known for their own songwriting prowess are paying homage to a writer who they look up to and who overtly or less obviously influenced their own work.
OK, here is where we come back into our little world. There is an old sound guy joke. "How many sound guys does it take to screw in a light bulb?" The answer is 10 – one to do it and nine to stand around telling each other how much better they could do it. And it is funny, because there is truth in it. We tend to be a smart, passionate and opinionated bunch of folks.
But in the past few weeks I have found that the further up the ladder you go in the elite ranks of audio engineers, the more likely you are to hear overt praise for the work of others. Cubby Colby noted in a recent article some of the people he learned from. And when I got to talk to one of them, Howard Page, he was equally effusive in his praise of Cubby. I recently got back from a trip to Cincinnati where I got to have a long talk with Robert Scovill, who is out with Tom Petty right now. Another guy at the top of the game. And he expressly called out some other engineers – including Marc Carolan with Muse, who is interviewed in this issue on page 20 – noting the high quality of their work.
It is a real pleasure to be around people confident enough of their ability and at the same time humble enough to publicly acknowledge the good work of people they ostensibly compete with. Something I, for one, need to keep in mind a little more often.
