Follow me, I don't know where I'm going ...

The folks at blogger.com say that I can increase return visits to this blog by putting the Followers widget at the top of the sidebar (to the left), and so I have.

Here's what they say: "Readers often visit a blog and enjoy it but fail to return. With the followers widget you can get all readers to return and become a fan. We highly recommend that you write a post about your followers widget and encourage all readers to become a follower."

So, go ahead and click on the Follow button at the top left of the page just below the title bar. Join me in my rambles. I will do my best to make the return visits enjoyable.

"The present-day blogger refuses to decompose."

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

No. 1 with an asterisk

There are many ways to approach writing about popular music, but the one that's the most concrete is what I'd call the "sports or athletics approach."

What I mean by that is that in sports there are winners and losers, and achievements are documented precisely. The best time in a relay race or a swim competition may be a world record. There may be intangibles in the play of a Michael Jordan, for instance, but the intangibles -- his artistry, you might say -- wouldn't matter if he hadn't won consistently.

So when it comes to pop music, the sports approach documents the top-grossing tour or the best-selling album but never deals with asthetics, which probably makes sense in a culture that rises and falls on the bottom line (mostly falling of late, but that's another topic).

Interestingly, this statistical approach to pop music achievement suffers from the same flaw as sports stats do: It's hard to compare statistics across different eras. When Babe Ruth hit his record numbers of home runs, the competition was different (black players were not in the major leagues, the pitcher's mound was a different height, etc.), the schedule was different (fewer games per season) and the potential substances used by players to cheat (saliva applied to baseballs as opposed to steroids applied to players) were different from what they were in Barry Bonds' day.

When Roger Maris failed to break Ruth's record of 60 homers in 154 games, which is the length of the season in Ruth's day, his record-setting 61st homer hit in the 162nd (and final) game of the 1961 season was given what's been called an "asterisk." In other words, Ruth's record still stood as the best ever hit in the old schedule side by side with Maris' record as the best ever hit in the new schedule.

The prevailing theory about why baseball commissioner Ford Frick decided to acknowledge the different schedules and thus preserve Ruth's record is that he biased in favor of Ruth and against Maris. Even so, it's easy to see that there's some justification for saying that a record set in one era, under a specific set of conditions, is different from a record set in another.

Possibly the best example of the sports approach to pop music writing is Chart Watch, a column ably and succinctly written by Paul Grein. (He has been doing this for a long time. He launched the Chart Beat column in Billboard magazine back in 1981, left that post in 1992 and has been doing Chart Watch ever since, first, as a wire feature for newspapers and now on Yahoo's music site.) Grein always finds an angle that lets him tie together various aspects of his report on that week's top 10 best-selling albums.

In his Chart Watch for the week ending May 3,2009, he talked about the age difference between 67-year-old Bob Dylan, who was at No. 1 with his "Together Through Life" album, and 16-year-old Miley Cyrus, who was at No. 2 with her soundtrack to "Hannah Montana: The Movie." From there, Grein launched into a quick history about how Dylan set and regained the distinction of being the oldest living recording artist ever to land a No. 1 album.

It's fun to read that Dylan set the record in September 2006 when his "Modern Times" album hit No. 1 and Dylan was 65; that he lost it when Neil Diamond, then 67, hit No. 1 with "Home Before Dark" in 2008; and that Dylan regained the record in May because he was older, almost 68, when "Together Through Life" was released. Before that, you had to go back to 1964 to even find an over-60 recording artist with a No. 1 album: Louis Armstrong, who was 62 when "Hello Dolly" hit the top of the chart.

But getting a No. 1 album in 1964 is definitely not the same as getting a No. 1 in 2009.

In 1964, the chart was compiled differently. Although people assumed it was a sales chart -- providing statistics that could not be argued -- the sales reports came not from a tally of actual sales but from a mix of sources that could distort the sales reporting. The dimensions of that distortion became apparent in 1991 when Billboard began basing its charts on sales statistics gathered by Nielsen Soundscan technology.

Using universal product codes (UPCs), Soundscan tracked sales right at the cash register, which seems a fairly reasonable way to do it.

Country and rap records, previously relegated to their own respective ghettos in the charts, suddenly took many positions in the Billboard 200 chart of best-selling albums. They also took many positions in the upper reaches of the chart, that is, the Top 20 and even the Top 10, where very few of these albums had gone before. This meant that either country and rap suddenly became very popular in the week between switching from the old reporting system to Soundscan, or that there was something very wrong in the old reporting.

Nobody has suggested that Soundscan is hugely flawed, and it seems unlikely. Its biggest and most obvious drawback would be that it could not track sales in stores that didn't use UPC technology or sales of records that didn't have a UPC, but by the time the system was instituted, this would have affected a very small number of stores and records.

Pop critics and observers had serious discussions about the whole issue at the time. Could it be that the sales of adult-oriented albums like "Hello Dolly" were overreported in 1964 and that the sales of rock 'n' roll albums were underreported in the year that The Beatles broke big in the United States? Did the sales dominance of Fleetwood Mac in late 1970s reflect reality or the reporting sources' dislike of disco?

I don't know whether anyone ever did a comparison of the Billboard album charts in the pre-Soundscan era to the sales certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to see whether they correlated or were widely divergent.

The RIAA awards Gold and Platinum records. These designations are based on sales, but the RIAA doesn't use Soundscan or Billboard's old methodology to count albums sold. The RIAA tracks sales based on units shipped minus returns, statistics the RIAA gets right from its members (record labels). Certainly, the RIAA is depending on the honesty of record labels(!), for heaven's sake, to make its awards, but they would be less likely to cook the books in favor of an album that label executives liked than the people sampled in Billboard's old formula, where reporting sources in the field clearly favored certain kinds of records.

When you're a label executive, sales are sales and you don't have to like the Spice Girls -- or Bob Dylan, for that matter -- to say that their albums are selling well for your label.

Soundscan is not the only difference in the business either. To hit No. 1, "Together Through Life" racked up sales of 125,000. Compare this with the 4 million in advance orders that propelled Garth Brooks' "Ropin' the Wind" to No. 1 in 1991. Music sales have gone through the floor in recent years, so being No. 1 ain't what it used to be when the Soundscan era began.

It's very likely that "Together Through Life" sold -- and is selling -- at about the pace that most of Bob Dylan's albums have sold throughout his nearly 50-year career. He has a loyal audience of longtime fans and a spate of younger ones added through the years. Longevity is one stat that can't be argued and, in many ways, that means more than being the oldest recording artist to have a No. 1 album -- especially since you can't truly compare stats across eras.

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

When Tisdale was 'ho(t)'

College Hall of Famer and veteran NBA player Wayman Tisdale died today, May 15, 2009.

I heard about Tisdale's death as I listened to a Web-stream broadcast of WBGO, a New Jersey public radio station that plays jazz. The station had former Yankees star Bernie Williams on live. Williams, who plays jazz guitar, was talking about his new album, Moving Forward, and mentioned that one of the players on the album was Tisdale and that he had just learned that the 44-year-old had died of cancer.

Tisdale and Williams played on the album together via overdub. They were never in the studio together and had not met. Williams, who is heading out on a musical tour to promote his album, said he had been looking forward to meeting the former power forward.

I met Tisdale back in 1995. It was a broiling June day in Arizona, and I was invited to check out his band, The Fifth Quarter, which was rehearsing in his home studio in northeast Phoenix.

When one of his band members complained that it was hot, Tisdale smiled and said that it wasn't just "hot" but that it was "ho" (pronounced "ha"). The player asked Tisdale what he meant, and Tisdale said that it was so hot that it took too much effort to pronounce the "t."

Tisdale, then 30, played five-string electric bass guitar and had been signed by Motown Records' smooth-jazz subsidiary, MoJazz. He was excited about the imminent release of his first album, Power Forward.

That was only one of the dreams that had come true for him in the previous year. After years of playing in "purgatory," as he called his 1989-1994 stint with then-perennial losers the Sacramento Kings, he had signed at well below his market value with the Phoenix Suns in September 1994.

The Suns, with Charles Barkley as power forward, had battled to the sixth game of the NBA finals to cap their 1992-1993 season, and had made it to second round of the playoffs in the 1993-1994 season. The team lost that year to the Houston Rockets in a toughly fought seven-game series, in which Barkley, suffering a groin injury, was not able to deliver his clutch heroics.

What the Suns got in Tisdale was someone to spell Barkley -- who contemplated retirement after the Rockets series -- during the 1994-1995 season, so that Barkley would be fresher when crunch time came in the postseason.

What Tisdale got was to hitch his wagon to a star. Although he knew Barkley would be the full-time power forward, he also knew that the team would be playoff-bound.

So he smiled his umbrella smile through the games and went to the playoffs for the first time in 1995.

Adding Tisdale was not a magic potion for the Suns. They suffered the same fate, losing to the Houston Rockets in a tough seven-game series, which came down to a 1-point loss in Game 7.

But for Tisdale that was not a disappointment.

He told me about his days with the Sacramento Kings: "I had so much time! I used to look at the end of the schedule and say, 'Oh, April 23? That's when we'll be finished.'"

With the Suns, he wasn't sure when the season would be over till it was over.

Tisdale, born June 9, 1964, in Fort Worth, Texas, grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he picked up the bass guitar and basketball.

As a junior at Booker T. Washington High School, he led his team, the Hornets, to a 1981 state championship. As an Oklahoma Sooner, his career was similarly full of achievement -- he was a three-time All-American and became the Sooners' career leader in scoring and rebounds.

Then, he played on the gold-winning U.S. basketball team in the 1984 Olympics and went on to play 12 years in the NBA. He retired in 1997 from the NBA, as a member of the Suns. Soon after, he became the first Sooner in any sport to have his number retired. Just this April, Tisdale was named to the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

It was late, about 11 p.m., when Tisdale's band finished practicing that June evening in Phoenix. His wife Regina, cradling their 4-month-old daughter, Gabrielle, sat watching the practice. She confessed that his music schedule in the off-season was making it tougher for the family to see him than the intense NBA season schedule did, because when Tisdale was in town for home games he did not work on his music career, preferring to spend his off hours with the family.

They had three other kids, Danielle, then 11; Tiffany, then 7; and Wayman Jr., then 4.

As the practice wrapped up, there was some talk of a late-night session to tune some things up, but one player said he was bushed.

"You can't hang! You can't hang!" Tisdale taunted through his broad smile.

When he finally sat down to talk, Tisdale said, the band was "something to keep me going during the summer, instead of sitting around."

He sure wasn't sitting around. "Now, I've got a record deal, and I'm traveling just as much" as during the NBA season, he said.

Then, he paused.

"With four kids!"

Tisdale started playing music for his father's church when he was in fifth grade: "I just started picking it up. I never had a lesson. I just play by ear."

Why the bass, which he played more like a lead guitar than a traditional bass?

"I've always loved the bass. I thought the bass always carried the groove and the personality of the band. I didn't want to play the drums, I never wanted to play the guitar; I've always wanted to play bass," he said.

Tisdale wrote songs to get his own feelings out. "Instead of writing it out or writing a book about it, I was able to put it in music."

The inspirations came in spare moments, "like first thing in the morning when I wake up, I hear a tune, I go straight to my studio," he said. "When I'm in my music world, it takes me all the way away from things that are going around."

The music served him well.

After Power Forward, he released seven more albums. Four of them landed in the Top 10 of Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart, and his 2001 album, Face to Face, went to Number 1.

His last album, Rebound, was released last year, and beyond the obvious allusion to his role as a basketball forward, it referred to his hope that he would rebound from the cancer that was discovered in 2007. (It was in his leg, which was amputated below the knee during his treatment.)

The Tulsa World reports that Tisdale started a national tour last month, after a chemotherapy treatment.

The paper also reports that he told a Tulsa crowd gathered to confer the "Legacy Award" on him in April: "In my mind, I've already beaten it."

Even though some would say he lost his battle, I think he really won because it sounds as though he never lost his umbrella smile.

We all die, but how many go out smiling?

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

Jeff Buckley: Son traced father's footsteps to life's edge

I posted this blog July 30, 1997, on Compuserve. I wanted a wider audience to see it, so I posted here. (The review at right was published Monday, Nov. 24, 1994. Click on the image to make it large enough to read. It is copyright © 1994 by The Arizona Republic.)

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A certain yearning, ghostly quality in Chris Isaak's voice reminded me of Tim Buckley, so I asked Isaak if he was a fan. He said, "No." (So much for some of those theories "critics" espouse.)

However, Isaak offered that he'd heard Buckley's son Jeff and that he was a mean guitar player. I filed that info away mentally. Even though I was a big fan, I hadn't realized that Tim Buckley had any kids.

After Jeff Buckley made a little bit of a stir in subterranean New York, he signed a record contract in 1993. He soon put out an ep, Live at Sin-E, and followed up with his full-length album, Grace, in 1994. I was struck by how much he looked and sounded like his dad.

Jeff Buckley's voice had that yearning, ghostly quality in spades. When I interviewed him in advance of his visit to Tempe's Mill Avenue Theater in November 1994, it became clear that he was not a fan of his dad's. Why should he be? Tim abandoned Jeff's mother, Mary, before the boy was born.

His own man

Jeff wasn't exactly resentful. He said he liked his father's music, but that he liked other music much more. He covered Leonard Cohen on his album.

After interviewing Jeff Buckley, all I had were questions. Was his musical talent hard-wired into his genes, a present from his long-dead dad? Even though Jeff was not a fan of his dad's music, there was a similar exotic bent to their vocals and choice of chords. Is destiny a product more of nature than nurture?

Jeff Buckley admitted that he wasn't happy in school, that there was no job track for him, that he lived and breathed being a musician. Just like his dad! Now that he was performing and recording he said, "I'm the luckiest boy in the world."

The news of Jeff Buckley's death at age 30 on May 29 left me breathless, like a blow to the stomach. "Not again! He was so young!"

Not again? Jeff Buckley only died once, drowning in the Mississippi on the edge of Memphis. Yet it did seem like a deja vu. His dad died of a toxic combination of heroin and alcohol at age 28 in June of 1975. Jeff said he had met Tim only once, just a few weeks before the overdose.

Outrunning demons

When I talked to him, the son seemed determined to be stable; to outrun the demons that plagued his dad. Now, there are unresolved questions about why he drowned in the Mississippi. Some say he was a smack user.

I can't imagine his mother's sadness. To lose a child at all is tough, but to lose him in a way that dredges up the long-dead past must be painful beyond belief.

Jeff Buckley's career got off the ground in Greenwich Village, a place that loomed large in Tim Buckley's career development as well. Jeff's first major appearance was at a tribute to his father. He sang Tim's Once I Was, a song that asks, "Sometimes I wonder, just for a while, will you ever remember me?"

Some of us will remember them for a long time and wonder if sons are always doomed to walk in their fathers' footsteps.

Copyright © 1997, Salvatore Caputo