Fishhooks and Eyelids

When I was about five or so my family went cane-pole fishing off the bulkhead of the St. John’s River in Jacksonville. We weren’t really the cane-pole fishing kind of family, but for some reason we were all there standing along side North Florida’s finest residents as they dropped chicken coop laying mash in the water to attract schools of mullet (if you ever want to catch a mullet, laying mash is the key. They don’t bite hooks, but if you drop the mash in the water, they will swarm to the spot and you can snag them with your line. Pretty effective, actually.)

I was too young to be trusted with a hook and live bate and I remember standing back a few feet watching as everyone plunked their lines into the brackish water of the then-poisonous waters of the St. John’s.

My brother (who was 11 or 12 at the time) is a bit of a showman and I remember his silhouette on the rough concrete bulkhead and the swooshing sound of the cane pole as he whipped it through the air trying to cast the uncastable length of fishing line. You see, you don’t cast cane poles. They have about 8 feet of line. The whole point is that you hang the pole over the water and let the filament dangle straight down. If you want your bait to go deeper, you have to stick your pole closer to the water. Watching him was like watching a scene in A River Runs Through it, minus the fly fishing rods and fundamental understanding of the fishing.

The reason this is such a pronounced memory for me is because on what quickly became his final backward cast of the day, his line laded on my face. He then jerked the pole as hard as he could driving the hook’s barb, replete with a freshly skewered dirt-worm, through my left eyelid. I can still feel the dull tug as my eyelid fought against the hook, line and pole. The swish of the line and sight of the dark worm wiggling on top of my eyeball is fresh in my mind.

I was little and screamed like a bitch. It took three people to get the hook out, but I was fine.

I can recall every detail of that story in Technicolor. It was as though it was yesterday. I can see my folks, the white caps on the river and the bend of my brother’s rod as he unknowingly attempted to rob me of my ability to blink. But no one in my family seems to recall this story as vividly as I. Perhaps it is because they didn’t have an impaled night crawler ground into their pupils by a rusted piece of metal that was piercing their eyelid, but there recollection is far more vague.

I know that memories have a way of morphing over time. Getting bigger. More colorful. That’s just part of looking backwards at things. It seems to me, however, that as the music business continues to collapse under its own weight and fall into the grave it has spent the last couple of decades digging for itself, we shouldn’t spend too much time looking back at the good old days. It just wasn’t all that great.

(I’m not talking about the music…I’m talking about the music business.)

Radio and record stores were the only means of getting the word out (besides live shows) and access to these golden roads of promotion were granted by a very little few. Long gone are the days when Johnny Cash and Elvis could glad-hand disc jockies into playing their new hit so that they could be showered with new Cadillacs the following morning. Once radio became more corporate, it has been virtually impossible for anyone without the label’s promotional machine to see airplay of any significance. It cost hundreds of thousands to promote a single into the winner’s circle of the Top 40.

What more, the cost of making records was extraordinary and record companies made usurious loans to artists. For every arena rock band with a silver spoon around their neck, there 1,000 other bands optioned to the teeth with no hope of seeing a profit in their professional lifetime.

The Internet is the great equalizer. It allows artists to build social movements. It doesn’t require a song to fit a certain radio format for it to get out to people. Artists can connect with their fans. They can blog, build email lists, run a Facebook campaign to tell people about their music.

Protools has allowed artists to make records in their basements and, in the right hands, those records can sound as good as anything produced in a million dollar NYC studio. This new day and age allows people to have CAREERS! And all without the help of Atlantic Records.

Listen. Don’t get me wrong. Record labels have done great things. I’m just saying that every majorly successful business model in the last 10 years worked because it created new, unheard of freedoms for the users of its product. Google, Yahoo, AOL….Brite Revolution.

Dude. $4.99. Are you kidding? That’s an extra value meal. That’s a latte. You couldn’t get two gallons of gas for that in some places. $4.99 and you get everything. New music from each artist every month. Brand new songs. On Brite. From every artist. First. Can’t get those songs anywhere else and you are getting it from ALL the artists. Plus alternate versions of older songs. That’s like 80 songs available at any given time in a month. iTunes isn’t doing that. E-music isnt’. Pandora isn't. Nobody is.

$4.99.

And we’ll even get 10% to the non-profit of your choice. That’s ridiculous. It’s offensive. And that would never have been possible in “the good old days”.

So, hey people. Let’s put things in perspective. The times they are a changing, but you know what…good! We have an opportunity. A chance to build the new infrastructure that frees the artist, the fan and the people trying to make a difference.

It’s ok to remember the good ole’ days. They gave us wonderful music. But chances are in the wave of nostalgia, you are forgetting that their was a fishhook in your eye.

Join the Revolution!