| SING SONG
“ It’s The Singer Not the Song”, so goes the old
Rolling Stones soul song, which may or may not be true, since we’ve
all seen great vocalists lift mediocre material & mediocre vocalists
lifted by a great song, but what is true is that most often it is
not the person whose name is in capitals on the front cover of the
record but the person in the fine print credited with the songwriting
on the back cover who stands to make the most money from the song.
Every time the song is recorded or re-recorded,
played on the radio, used in movies & commercials, the songwriter
gets paid, not the original performer. Many people have gotten very
rich wielding a pen rather than a musical instrument. In the 1950s
the payola corruption scandal that rocked the music world was as
a result of radio DJ Alan Freed being given writing credits on the
B sides of people like Chuck Berry’s hits, the more airplay,
the bigger the hit & more money for Freed.
In the past history of pop music, the songwriter
wrote the song, the band played it & the singer sang it. Singers
like Sinatra & Elvis drew upon the talents of a team of artisans
who created the original material & finely honed it for them,
“tin pan alley” as it came to be known. The Brill Building
on Broadway housed songwriters like Lieber & Stoller, Goffin
& King, David & Bacharach, Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman,
Boyce & Hart amongst others who clocked in each morning to sit
in offices & churn out the hits for others day after day, even
Lou Reed & John Cale tried their hands at it. Some like Carole
King, Neil Diamond, Billy Joel, Jim Webb & Paul Simon went on
to become performers in their own right. Then there was Motown’s
Holland, Dozier & King hit songwriting team, Willie Dixon had
a modest solo career but it was people like Howlin’ Wolf,
Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley & other blues greats recording
& playing his songs that made his name & no doubt earned
him more money than all of them put together.
Tailor made original songs & cover versions
of other people’s songs made up the repertoire of the popular
singers & bands of the day,
Songwriting was valued as a sophisticated skill & art, not everyone
could do it. Even great originators like John Coltrane & Jimi
Hendrix recorded cover versions like Hey Joe & Green sleeves,
while The Beatles, the Rolling Stones & even Bob Dylan did not
create all original albums until their 3rd or 4th record, they developed
& honed their songwriting skills slowly while playing other
people’s songs to pad out their performances & records
until they were ready to write their own. Bands like Procol Harum
& The Grateful Dead had one non-musician non-performing member
as their lyricist, solely to supply the words for their original
musical material. Singers & musicians did not consider themselves
as automatically becoming songwriters; it took time, practice &
talent to get good at it.
So here we are in an era when everyone’s
a singer/songwriter with no warm up & doing cover versions is
looked down upon as crass commercialism or somehow less than legitimate
(with some notable exceptions). An explosion of self-expression.
Greed? Perhaps, singing the song & owning the song certainly
makes more money than singing someone else’s, but I think
it’s actually something else. Conceit. Because someone has
a good or at least interesting singing voice & may have practiced
the mechanical skills of playing an instrument & mastered it,
does that automatically mean that they have the craft to write a
song or have something worthwhile & original to say in meaningful
way? Of course not.
Everyone’s a poet these days or at least
think that they are. Certainly there is always a percentage of the
population that is multi talented, naturally gifted, geniuses or
musical savants, but how does that account for this current explosion
of self-sown songwriters? The democratisation of the process or
the lowering of standards to the lowest common denominator? Like
most paradoxes probably a little bit of both. Certainly it is easier
for a record company to sign up someone who self sufficiently does
it all, especially if they have a publishing arm that the performer
can also be signed up to, less people & more potential earning
for all. Canny veterans like Van Morrison & Bruce Springsteen
still leaven their career with cover versions, Bob Dylan sat out
the 90s only recording a covers album, they are wise enough to realise
that their muse is not an inexhaustible resource.
Perhaps the new generation could learn from the
masters, that song writing is a life long apprenticeship, that practice
is part of the process, that not everyone is good at it & ask
why settle for the mediocre when there is so much great material
already written & waiting to be played.
back to top
|
