Nice !!!!!!

all hail the king of the surf guitar

Dick is so right-on here!!! What an awesome interview.

Bob

Bob

what??? hates DD?? gonna get my spider bike and skimboard and go beaching.. too much vile noise here. sorry that the system has another major problem

thanks Neal, very illuminating.

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

Oh yeah, read that years ago, and agreed to every word.
Ran

The Scimitars

WARNING: long and obnoxious post ahead.

I love the DD clip, very good advise, given from the pov of the indivdual musician, at one point he says something like doing stuff from your own strenght. very cool.

as for Albini, I dunno. he makes some good point, esp about the seductive tactics of A&R managers. but on the other hand.... giving it the moral twist and presenting it as a case of morality and fairness, I'll go out on a limb and say: what a whiner. that article, apart form a few good points, is just full of faulty logic and absurd hidden premisses.

the company gets 700 grand, the bandmebers get 4. So? that's supposed to be unfair? you cant compare a company with an individual. how many people work at the company? who gets paid from that 700 grand? it's just BS to present some abstract entity like "the record company" and then call it bad by pretending it's some sort of indivdual. you know what, those mucho dollars in the end ALSO pay the medical bills of the lady who cleans the toilets at the record company. she gets less then the 4 thousand, and she truely has a shitty job.
Of course, the ceo's and share holders in the record company get shitloads of money. undeserved? some think so, others don't. eitherway, it's legal, it's how we designed society and how most people think is the best way, and it is nothing exclusive for the record industry, either.

the producer gets 50 thousand, the bandmebers only 4. think that's unfair? just supply and demand. how many awesome bands with commercial potential and the looks to boot are there out there? You don't need more then 20 minutes on myspace to find yourself a potential millionseller. and how many good producers are out there? supply and demand, as simple as that. Wanna get rich, better start working on becoming a good producer.

Albini also seems to be assuming that without the record company's strategy, publicity and management, the band would at the same point in time be just as succesful, sell as many records, be as popular, and have made more money. that's ridiculous. they'd probably still be doing local gigs and have dayjobs, or maybe maybe maybe just earn a living by playing state-wide. The may have gone the dick dale way, which would have been smart, but also takes a lot of time, and a lot of hard work and discipline. with still slim chances of lasting succes and wealth. so in reality, if the A&R guy hadn 't come along, the band most likely had been even worse off after the same period of time.

Yeah, Dick Dale's advise is good and afaic the way to go if you want to be in a pro-band. But Albini's article is for the most part just completly unconvincing rhetoric.

EDIT: oh wait. one more thing. except for the bitchin' about the lawyer of course. ALL lawyers are crooks. everybody knows that.

WR

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spskins
He didn't mind taking major label money for recording the Pixies and others either. Some moral ground.

Steve Albini takes on major projects like the Pixies and Nirvana, so he can funnel those big dollars into producing good bands that noones ever heard of.

spskins
His bandmates were nice, but he was seething with hatred for us and our "retro novelty act".

Wow....applying the label of "retro novelty act" to Satan's Pilgrims make me very mad... Obviously he has no clue about you guys.

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CaptainSpringfield
I think it's kind of funny he charged the Pixies more to record one of their songs when they were on a major label than he did for their entire first album.

In economics we call that 'price discrimination', and it's a common strategy to maximize profits - charge each person according to their demand, i.e. what they are willing/able to pay. You know, pretty much the same thing that major labels are doing. Darn, can't seem to find that higher moral ground of Albini's....

Ivan

Ivan
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