by Peter Berryman
And The Snow Was Deeper, Too
Over three-dollar mugs of cage-free coffee the other day, my musical partner Lou and I reminisced about how much the biz end of folk music has changed for us since we went full time back in the late 70s. We aren't on the cutting edge now, but we weren't then either, maintaining a roughly parallel slope with the cutting edge though maybe ten years behind it. Harder to get cut that way, we hope.
Co-songwriting has changed, for example. Nowadays Lou hangs her melody on an email and flings it to me notated, with chords, in a notation/MIDI program. I download it and play it through my eMac, able to change its tempo or even its key with a click. It used to be that Lou would call me when she had a melody, and I'd wrestle out my $20 Sears tape recorder and mash the phone up to it while she plunked the ditty on her piano. I still have boxes of tapes with bits of lyrics and chunks of melody from those years, all of which are unindexed and useless. Today, if the melodies were named appropriately, even digital snippets from five years ago can be retrieved in seconds.
In the old days, fishing out the words to the Gulf Coast Blues by Bessie Smith from a vinyl LP was a real test of earbones (we thought she was saying "Golf Course Blues"). With computers, you can pause and goof around with the digitized version, goosing the treble and slowing it down... or search for the lyrics on the web, bypassing the whole project.
Booking was a real patchwork disaster in those days. There were no answering machines, no faxes when we started out. No VCRs! Long distance phone rates were outrageous. Mobile phones were just in the movies, so licking stamps was about the only business you could conduct in the car. A few magazines, like good ol' Sing Out!, were in existence, but there was no Folk Alliance, no traveling local in the musicians union, no internet folk venue database. Musicians would pass scribbled giglists back and forth via (gasp!) personal contact or snail mail -- in the days when it was just called "mail" -- to help one another out. When we would travel, we'd buy local papers and comb them for folk clubs. If anybody ever heard a song of ours on the radio, they were truly challenged if they wanted to find out more about our music, with no web sites, no posting of playlists.
Promotion was goofy at best. As far as we knew, there were no good cheap sources of glossy photo reproduction, so I black garbage-bagged the basement windows and cranked out our own 8 X 10s with an old rattletrap enlarger. They still cost almost 50 cents apiece in materials and it took a whole dark dingy smelly day to burn a hundred of them.
Layout of rough posters and mailers was another idiocy. To Xerox them, we'd spend half our time trudging the streets looking for a good machine that had just been inked. When we had them offset, a big problem was halftoning, which you can do now on the computer with one click. Having photos halftoned professionally was too expensive for posters so we invented all sorts of reproducible graphics, such as high contrast photos, or photos copied by hand with pen and ink crosshatching, or our own crude basement photo-halftones. Lettering was a horrible hodgepodge of hand lettering, Leroy lettering, Prestype, rubber stamping, and whatever else we could think of. Our old poster files look like stacks of ransom notes. Rubber cement was the default layout stickum, but once it's dry, it's unrepositionable; plus it turns black after a year. So much for archives.
Fancy layout was a grind, too. For newsletters, album jackets, songbooks, promotional materials and the like, we were forced to have our text professionally (and expensively) typeset. This meant you had to calculate (guess) as closely as possible how much space would be taken up by how much type. Often you were a mile off and had to tweak your layout accordingly, cutting and juggling wee sticky strips of typeset paper. Instead of rubber cement, these typeset "galleys" usually came back with a waxed back so that they were somewhat repositionable. We eventually bought our own hand waxer which was one more horrid stinky contraption but which worked a bit better than rubber cement.
Stamps were lick 'em stick 'em of course. LPs were difficult to wrap for mailing because they were so big; we bought piles of corrugated cardboard squares and miles of gummed tape, the kind you have to wet. Sturdy and cheap, but a damp inconvenience.
Recording, in 1980 when first we plattered, was financially and technically out of reach for all but the most zealous (or loaded) do-it-yourself performers. We had to hire a studio, and even went with a standardized cover layout from the record company to save money, though we did use our own photo. Over the years, recording equipment has come WAY down in price, and the technology has changed totally so that now in the digital age, second graders are making better quality recordings of frogs in shoeboxes than we were able to produce using a professional studio. Come to think of it, for our act, the sound is very much the same.
Road trips were more gruesome because it was difficult to find motel (and airline) deals pre-web; the only way to stay cheaply was in true dives. Finding the gig was trickier because of no Mapquest (not to mention GPS unit or cell phone). Cars got worse mileage and lasted a quarter as long and in fact the ones we could afford weren't air conditioned either. On one summer trip in our '76 Chevy Malibu we bought a huge block of ice and a fan that plugged into the cigarette lighter, blowing the latter across the former toward each other's muggy mugs.
We have no MP3s available on the web yet, and haven't released a video DVD. However we're at least fifteen years ahead of where we were twenty five years ago, I do believe. To catch a true glimpse of the 2003 acoustic music world, please have a look at Whither Zither for July 2013.