Sidran There Was a Fire

Jews, Music and the American Dream (revised and updated)
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-77360-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 426 Seiten

There Was a Fire is the only complete history of how immigrant Jews helped birth America's popular music industry and the terms of the American Dream.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sidran, Ben

Leseproben

As I learned on the first page of this book, Ben Sidran and I share an unforgettable experience: “What boy can forget his bar mitzvah? The excitement of being onstage. The fear of forgetting the magic song. What thirteen-year-old has not asked himself, ‘What am I doing here?’ ” Those of us who have been there are ready to listen to someone who brings back that experience so vividly. And, in fact, we shared a lot more than that. I was the son of American born parents whose own parents migrated from Europe around the turn of the century. Ben’s father was born in Poland but came to America at the age of six. Both our fathers were advertising men, working in one of the big Jewish agencies in Chicago. And, just a reminder, we’re both piano players. I started playing before he did, but that’s only because I’m older than he is. And he plays a lot better than I do. But that’s only because he’s more gifted than I am. We both have Ph.D. degrees and were trained in social science. Ben worked in the more panoramic field of American Studies as it was taught in Great Britain, and brought that training to bear on his many years of experience in the music business. I, on the other hand, learned sociology as part of the large cohort of students who entered graduate school at the end of WWII, though I wasn’t a veteran, having been too young to be in the armed services when the war was still going on. We have both written a number of books, although I‘ve written more of them than he has. But that’s only because writing books was part of my job as a professor for all those years, while he managed to do it in the moments he could find here and there while being an active working piano player and participant in music-making, which he’s been for all his years, and a radio and television commentator on the same music. Though you’d never know that he did all that too from reading There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream. This isn’t a book you’d imagine anyone could write on a day off here and there from a very demanding schedule of professional work. Because it’s a masterfully detailed account of the history and role of American Jews in the music business as players, of course, from Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw to Bob Dylan and Mike Bloomfield and Billy Joel and Kinky Friedman (even the Ramones!), but also as the inventors, entrepreneurs and managers of the organizations that made it possible to earn a living, and even get rich, playing music. Especially the organizations that gave us the present era of electronic music—electronic in both production and distribution—which differs so radically from what I grew up with. That he did that while working full-time on all the other things he worked on (and in) is a wonder. Though not a complete mystery. He did it by using the time-honored sociological method of participant observation. Which gave him the material to show that he could have been an even bigger star than he was if he had taken the opportunities offered him by some of the movers and shakers his account documents. I’ve just reread There Was a Fire to prepare for writing this preface, wondering what I could have to say that would add anything to such a masterful book. It wasn’t easy to find such things. But I’m persistent and eventually found a few areas where my thoughts might be relevant, even helpful, to readers younger than us (which is almost everyone). One relevant area has to do with Ben’s description and analysis of the business part of the popular music business, the way the marketing and financing of musical activity shaped its results, its products, and the experience of the people who produced them. We both spent years as professionals in that world. We both worked in the popular music business for substantial amounts of time, me from the last years of WWII until 1965, perhaps a little more than twenty years. Not a trivial amount of time, though nothing compared to the lifetime Ben has spent, from the beginnings of the ’60s to the present. Comparing our experiences shows what’s distinctive about Ben’s experience and helps us understand the genesis and distinctiveness of the book you’re about to read. What happened in the years that separate my experience from Ben’s is . . . history. Everything eventually changes and the music business is no exception. Musicians of my generation lost some old ways to make a living playing and Ben’s generation took our place and found new ways. New kinds of people came to control players’ access to remunerative work and to professional careers. And one of the consequences of this change was a change in the ethnic composition of the levels of the world of professional (i.e., paying) work. New organizations controlled new ways of reaching a paying public (which, in the end, financed the organization of the professional music world). This is a specific case of a classic sociological phenomenon, what I learned from my sociological mentor Everett C. Hughes to call the “ethnic division of labor.” Every modern society contains multiple groups who think of themselves as differing, in ways they consider important, racially or culturally (the general sociological term is “ethnic groups”). And one of the persistent results of this differentiation is ethnic differentiation in typical ways of making a living, the ethnic division of labor. Through the multiple interacting effects of differing histories of access to training, experience, resources, and organizational opportunities, different ethnic groups end up “specializing” in different ways of making a living. Hughes used to challenge students with this question: “Do you think everyone in China makes a living doing laundry for Caucasians? Or feeding them in restaurants specializing in Cantonese food?” When he put it that way it was obvious that this kind of occupational specialization didn’t come about “naturally.” It needed explanation. By analogy, that the music business Ben entered was so dominated by Jews, in the way Ben documents and explains, is no accident either. He focuses on Jews in the music business as a special case of this phenomenon, the omnipresence of Jews in every part of the music business, as players, and as organizers of the complex activities necessary to produce and distribute the new kinds of music being invented and played. He arrived at just the right time, with the right kind of intellectual equipment, to watch these organizations change very radically, in relatively few years, from the kind of business I had grown up in to the kind he was entering. And he noticed, as anyone of his generation could not help noticing, a phenomenon I hadn’t had available to see, the increasing Jewish presence in that business. Ben got into music professionally at the start of a new era. New ways of making of music were being invented. At the beginning, jazz players and styles were involved, but the role of those elements seems to have become smaller and smaller as the years went by, as the groups changed from, say, the Beatles in England and the Paul Butterfield band in the U.S. to groups like The Ramones. What I learned reading There Was a Fire was that (and Ben may want to dissociate himself from these remarks) the real center of the world of professional music the book describes has no strong community roots in any one place (despite his vivid and memorable descriptions of important business lunches at the Brown Derby in L.A.). Its center is, rather, somewhere in a network of offices—some in New York, some in southern California—connected by telephones and computers and connecting to the centers where music is actually produced and created, which are not in the places where gifted performers meet an appreciative public, but in the studio complexes where musicians and singers—who may never actually meet each other, never actually play in the same room (or in separate rooms, for that matter) at the same time—record the separate tracks which someone else (the recording engineer) will finally combine into the finished “song.” And all of that in the hands of the producer, who now bears at least as much responsibility as any of the “artists” whose names are also connected with the finished product. The ultimate payoff for this work, when it is “successful” in the way that success is recognized in this version of a music world, is to sell a very large number of “units” (records or albums), and thus make a lot of money for the producers, for all the people who owned the rights and collected the royalties, which sometimes (but not necessarily and not necessarily often) included the people who composed and performed the music. And the most assured way to achieve such sales is . . . well, speaking generally, no one seems to actually know this secret, though many people have thought that they had the right answer. No recipe is foolproof. For a while, the magic formula seemed to be payola, “the fifty-dollar handshake,” paying radio disc jockeys in major markets around the country to play the song a lot and thus convince the general public that it is already a hit. If all your friends and acquaintances know about it, you don’t want to be left out. You feel that you better hustle and get your copy. Ben describes the result of such tactics in the actual marketplace, epitomized by the store he...