favourite panel

I played SXSW a couple times. The first time with my manager, the under appreciated Don Christensen. His company was called noise management, how great was that. We papered the hotels in Austin, inserting flyers under every door, advertising the two dates I played during the conference. We did a lot of promo, especially Don. He was a great manager. At the time I didn’t acknowledge the value of his partnership, my loss. He had long hair and pirate earrings, the customs officers addressed me as the manager, him as the artist. Two or three years later came the phone call he was quitting. I was on the road in Vancouver, him in Toronto. It surprised me, but how long can anyone go speculating there will be some semblance of income when repeatedly there isn’t. We came close a couple times, but no cigar.

The second time at SXSW, Ani Difranco walked in just as my set started. It was magic and my band (Don Kerr and Hugh Phillips) killed. She hugged me after the encore and told me I blew her away. I felt like what the initiated into the mafia think to themselves, I’m a made man now. She had become very big. Thought for sure this will mean some opening slots on the road. Nothing could help establish one’s career as much as another artist, who has an audience, inviting a lesser known artist to open the shows. To play to a captive audience each night of several hundred. That’s what Natalie Merchant did for Tracy Chapman, what Elvis Costello did for Ron Sexsmith. That made their careers and usurped the managers, agents and record companies who otherwise control those opportunities for their own financial goals, presenting their commercial baby acts that often make no sense to the audience. But as it turned out that never happened between her and I, one more story that ends in no cigar.

Meanwhile back at the conference, I took in a great panel which I wish I had recorded but it was the early 90s, not yet a world of smartphones. The panel was on music and capitalism. There was hardly any audience despite significant speakers – sister Rosetta Tharp, Walt Disney and Noam Chomsky. Couldn’t believe my luck, two of them had even died years earlier yet none of those A&R guys noticed. Guess it wasn’t too different than their track records at discovering talent or maybe too busy hanging in the hotel lobby comparing exotic vacation stories over beers with their peers. I only remember a couple instances from that afternoon.

SRT: this train gonna help its neighbour this train/ this train gonna help its neighbour this train/ this train gonna help its neighbour/ spreading fairness not just favours/ this train gonna help its neighbour this train.

WD: easy for you to say rosetta, but some of us know the ins and outs of business and there’s a little thing call “incentive”. sometimes a favour isn’t just a favour, it’s an incentive.. if you know what i mean?

NC: why shouldn’t extending good will between people be an incentive? you’re merely normalizing a dysfunctional state of affairs. you equate the inclusion of all parties as a threat to capitalist goals based on excessive attainment when in fact people could practice fair play if they were unencumbered with debt which is another aspect of maintaining a dysfunctional state where the goodwill of people easily is immobilized by the pressure of interest rates.

SRT: this train ain’t playing for cheaters, this train/ this train ain’t playing for cheaters, this train/ this train ain’t playing for cheaters/ would rather have a job as a walmart greeter/ this train ain’t playing for cheaters, this train.

WD: well someone’s gotta pay the piper. call it cheating if that makes you happy but someone has to make an investment and then that someone needs fair conditions to recoup their investment.

NC: you didn’t think about fairness when you called the screen actors guild a communist front, i mean they were about fairness much like your own animators who went on strike in 1941.