Three Girls and Their Buddy At The Greek
Patty Griffin did "Chief". Shawn Colvin performed "Twilight" at the appropriate hour. But the star was Buddy Miller.
We’ve heard that you can’t make it after thirty, what about after FIFTY?
Conventional wisdom is you build a star through hits. But what if there are no hits, and no stars? Welcome to the twenty first century!
While the media is plastering the faces of barely pubescent "artists" in front of a non-caring public, true musicians are doing what they always have. PLAYING!
What a concept. Perfecting your craft until you’re so great people will be infected upon one listen.
Your parents will applaud your twelve year old warblings. You can get a professional to back you with hacks and auto-tune your vocals, you can hire a PR maven to spam everyone in the world, but you can’t make people care, you can’t insure a lasting career. Maybe you can springboard to the road company of a Broadway show like an "American Idol" loser (or winner!), but you can’t get people to come hear your music, certainly not once the wrecked trains have been cleared from the rails and rubberneckers have moved on.
I’m not sure what format Buddy Miller’s music belongs on. Then again, does the target audience listen to anything other than PR? He isn’t good-looking enough for a fashion spread in "Vogue", never mind "GQ" or even "Rolling Stone". He’s a heart attack survivor, he’s on the downhill slide in the eyes of the machine, but he’s just starting to fly!
Music is a concoction of sounds that penetrate your brain and body and elate you. We can debate all day long what’s good intellectually. Then someone starts to play and we’ve got a smile on our face, we can’t stop shimmying. That’s what happened to me when Buddy Miller started to play last night. The way he wrung a complete feeling out of his guitar, of being in a bar way past midnight wanting this evening to last because tomorrow is drudgery. Too much of life is drudgery, which is why we’re searching for gems to get us through. And when we find one, we tell everybody we know. We don’t need no stinking machine to spread the word, we are the machine!
Buddy Miller is fifty six years old. He didn’t give up and go to law school, he didn’t quit and go into his daddy’s business, playing music on the side, spending all his cash to get someone to pay attention. Instead he focused on music. Recording it, playing it live.
The album is no longer the focus. It’s not even a profit-driver. It’s just a part of the package. Don’t hunker down and record an hour’s worth of music to be distributed every three years by an evaporating system. Enter the studio when you’re inspired! Or sit there for weeks on end until you get out the kinks and lay down something truly great. Three minutes of genius will get you much further than an hour of mediocrity.
While old men needing to maintain their lifestyles sue customers in the name of rights, musicians who never got rich on royalties are doing what they always have. Playing. This nascent fire will become a conflagration. The old is over, the new is being born. It’s starting to come clear. Music will triumph once again. Because stardom is passe. You just can’t get enough people to pay attention. That platinum paradigm has been canceled like a bad sitcom. Reality has set in. But unlike "The Hills" and other manipulated TV shows, the best musical reality is unscripted. It’s not about getting it right once, but doing it over and over again until the maturity attracts droves of fans, who want to grow with you and the music.
