Well, at least if you’re a musician engaged in self-promotion. I’ve come to believe that the philosophy of the “artist as open book” is terribly flawed. If you pollute your mind with the prevalent electronic chatter about the new music business made possible by “direct-to-fan” solutions, social networking and all that rot, you might be led to believe that using technology to get as close to your “fans” (what an awful word) as possible is the goal. Though I use these tools in the promotion of my music and recordings, I’ve been thinking about how it can blow up in your face too.

Two bands I’ve written about here, Led Zeppelin and Kiss, would have ruined their careers by becoming too intimate with their audiences. Yes, perhaps things are different now, but what would these two bands have been if the lives of their members had been documented in a readily accessible resource by the members themselves?

In the mythology of Led Zeppelin, you had deals with the devil, obscure symbols to represent the members of the group, drugs, disasters, groupies, and music that was, according to a documentary I saw about them, “Howlin’ Wolf meets the Loch Ness Monster.” I don’t believe a single one of these particular entrapments was ever addressed directly by the group. I don’t think they ever published an informal piece to “set the record straight.” The audience was left to imagine just about anything. The myth grew and grew. It was anything you wanted it to be, except like you. There were no limits to what you could discover in Led Zeppelin. It could not end because it wasn’t real in the first place. Opening the book would have blown it all to hell.

Even Led Zeppelin album cover art kept the band at a distance. They seemed to live on a planet designed just for them, a mystical place that featured monuments to gods whose names you dared not speak and rolling green Celtic geography that was literally hell and gone from Main Street USA or Times Square. They managed to perpetuate an image of dark magic, without saying a word about it.

If it existed, what could Jimmy Page’s blog have said that wouldn’t have ruined everything?

“Had a costume fitting today. I hope they get the dragon right this time. I like dragons.”

“I took a plane to Los Angeles after the show to meet this 13-year-old model I’m just mad about. I know what it looks like, but she’s just incredible.”

“I want to thank all you guys for coming out to the show tonight. Percy, Bonzo, Jonsey and I had a blast. We can’t wait to come back to Pittsburgh.”

“I’m thinking Peter needs to lose a few pounds. I’m worried about him.”

“I’ve got such a headache today. I must send Coco out for some more aspirin before we leave for soundcheck.”

“Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been soooooo busy with the new album. We can’t think of a good title for it though. I want to use freaky drawings and a tarot card for the cover, but Jonesy thinks it’s a stupid idea. Maybe it could be a contest! Leave your suggestions for the name of our fourth album in the comments. If we use your title, we’ll send you a signed copy a week before it’s released to radio!”

“I can’t stop thinking about burgers! Damn this heroin!”

I’m pretty good with the language, but I can’t think of an appropriate superlative to describe the lameness that would have ensued. Good Christ, Jimmy Page wasn’t human like us! He didn’t eat breakfast or get up for school or go to the dentist. He just made otherworldly sounds with guitars and laser beams went off behind him in all directions when he did it! A blog would have ruined him. A superstar must be a mystery. Maybe that’s why we have so few of them now.

Kiss might have blogged in character, which could have worked, but judging by those fake letters in Kiss Alive, the blogs probably would have been written by someone in the Glickman/Marks office and sucked.

Insert palaver about being rich and famous, hyper-sexual, demonic, from another planet, and something about cats and junk here.

It was so much better to wonder who they were under the makeup. Were they murderers? Was Satan involved? Was the drummer really rescued from death by a panther? Again, the mystery of Kiss made it work. Gene Simmons has stated since the 90s that Kiss were trying be the heavy metal Beatles. They never said it in the 70s though. On planet Kiss, the Beatles did not exist. Get it?

Kiss was best served by others writing about them (provided they could nudge the writers in the right direction). Every time Gene was pressed to explain the meaning of the fire and blood tricks, he could never make sense of it, even when he was in character. A personal blog would have muddied the waters even more. Without the distance, Kiss could never have been superheroes.

So, since I’m at least as interesting as Jimmy Page and Gene Simmons, I have to be careful when I blog. I could ruin everything. It’s a good thing that I do this telepathically. And since I’m getting off of all those pills it’s going so much faster now. Thanks to Satan and his hounds, Myra and Otis, I’m well protected here. I can almost see Earth, though these lasers cast quite a shadow across the great billows of rainbow smoke that surround the palace when I awaken. Regardless, at all times, music flows from me as breath, surrounding you with love.

Peter Guralnick wrote an exhaustive, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. I read Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley when it was first published, but I’ve only gotten to the second one, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, now. Unlike many people, I enjoy the 70s Elvis more than the early one. I know he was troubled and I know now just how troubled, but I just like the music and the show better late in his career.

Since the guy was said to have died by the time I was in first grade, I only know of the Elvis show what I’ve seen in the few concert movies that exist from the 70s era. I love the theatrical aspect of it and I just love the sound of that glorious band, raw in their sophistication, if you can dig that.

However, the more I read of this book, the more I’m struck by how different Elvis had it than I do. Sometimes, I just have to laugh. I know the guy was super huge and everything, but if you put that aside for a minute, as a recording artist, the guy had it so easy.

The book is full of references to recording sessions during which upwards of 24 masters were recorded. 24! How many times did I read stuff like this? “In August, a recording session was scheduled for which RCA hoped sides would be produced for the gospel album, a pop album and the four singles Elvis was contractually obligated to provide.”

All the guy had to do was go to the studio and sing. The band was assembled. He’d pick songs that he liked and they’d run through them if he felt like it. Other times, he would just give karate demonstrations to the musicians and then go back to Graceland. If he cut a tune that they hadn’t planned on, their guy would hustle to arrange the publishing particulars. Or, it would be, “Hey publishing guy, what kind of material do we have available to record?”

Good Christ. That’s gotta be a tough life.

I write songs, play and sing all the parts in the studio, engineer and mix the recording, review the test pressings, oversee the production and then promote and sell the records myself. That’s what a majority of recording artists have to do now. There’s very little money and you have to know how to do pretty much everything if you want to see your vision through. And it takes a little longer than a single recording session.

Sometimes I see singers in bands and I say, “You mean all the guy has to do is sing?” Elvis wouldn’t even do that sometimes. At Elvis Presley’s level, it was all the bread changing hands, but in the rest of the world, in the modern age, I have no idea what breeds that mentality when it exists.

I’ve had to train myself not to do everything. I came up knowing that no one would ever hand me anything and that if I wanted to make records, no one was going to make it happen but me. I’ve never felt that I had the right to claim something was outside of my expertise. Deep down I thought, “Who the hell are you to think anyone else would do it for you just because you can’t?”

It’s a slow process, learning to let go of certain things. It began with me saying that I don’t have to play the drums. I Ebayed my drums some years ago and got a nice new Telecaster, which in the distant past would have been an indulgence I’d have never allowed myself, since I had one Tele already. I’ve regretted not having my drum set a few times, but I still think I did the right thing. The other thing I’ve tried to loosen up about is graphic design. I’m not a designer, but I did my own album covers, because “who the hell else is gonna do it?” I’ve since tried to leave that to some designer friends.

I don’t want to get to a point where all I have to do is show up and sing. Of that, I’m certain. But for all of the legends surrounding Elvis Presley and the way he’s been deified over the years, I can honestly say that I know a ton of people, myself included, that he’ll never have anything on. Pfft… you mean all he has to do is sing?

That’s kinda cool.

I got a letter from Sirius XM saying that they were going to charge my credit card to renew my service for another year. They were continuing the practice of yearly subscription payments instead quarterly ones, which they began last year. I seem to remember something about them freezing the subscription rate for some amount of time if I paid up for a year instead of a quarter. I was actively using the service, so I figured I’d take the deal, which included online access to many channels.

You’ll probably recall my assessment of the merger and the honcho of Sirius XM, old Mel. The letter I received this week was the final straw. They increased the subscription rate with a new fee, which they detailed outside of the subscription rate column so it didn’t look like it was included. It was sort of like what your cable company does to charge you fees. This one however, made me laugh out loud. It was a music royalty fee, per radio.

I have to admit that this had been in the back of my mind for some time. I knew it would come to light, but I was still tickled at the predictability with which the corporation is dealing with the problem, now that its financial situation seems especially dire. (Last I heard, Sirius XM stands to lose its place on the New York Stock Exchange in February if they don’t start building some value. I’d say they’re up against it.)

I’ve written pretty extensively about how music is not free. In the radio business, despite the payola and corruption, you can’t play music without paying royalties. In fact, if you run a business, like a cafe, and you play music to create atmosphere, you also must pay royalties. That’s why organizations like ASCAP and BMI exist, to collect that bread. (I was once asked not to play covers in a Red Bank, NJ coffeehouse, because the guy wasn’t paying the royalty organizations and had gotten burned for it. I was so annoyed that he thought the law didn’t apply to artists like me, that I played a bunch of Todd Rundgren songs, of which I knew he’d be ignorant. Sorry, Todd. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’d probably quit the gig, just on principle.)

I’m a BMI writer. I chose BMI because of the history of the organization. In the early days of radio, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) tried to throw their weight around, trying to claim control over radio broadcasts of their catalog. They put the squeeze on the radio cats big time, because they were the only game in town and figured radio would fail if they had no music of theirs to play on the air. The radio people, in an admirable and as it happens, successful move, formed their own organization: Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI).  “If we can’t play ASCAPs music without submitting to their every demand, we won’t play any of it. We’ll play our own.” Nice. History has proven that these two organizations were in the same boat and now they both collect royalties for the broadcast performances of the work of their members. Some of those funds have even filtered down to me for airplay. This was my first royalty check:

$21 and change is no fortune, but college radio airplay is still college radio airplay. Cough it up. :~)

So, I’ve known for a long time that royalty payments were a rightful expense to be paid by anyone who benefitted from the broadcast of music, especially radio. Therefore (as I return to my point), I laughed out loud that Sirius XM had finally found the perfect medium by which to pass that annoying little expense on to the listeners. I’ve been seeing some accounts that they’ve even inflated the fee. (The agreement with royalty organizations required something like $.50 per radio. Sirius XM charges $1.98 per radio per month. What utter slimebags.)

Between that, the shrinking playlists and limited channel variety, satellite radio has morphed into a paid version of New York FM, which was also decimated by guys like old Mel. Though I love a villain, if only for his boldness, I jumped ship and happily cancelled.

They offered me a reduced rate of $20 per month for six months if I stayed. I said no. Then they offered me three months free if I stayed. I told them through my laughter that it was the exact same deal I just refused. God, did I ever make the right choice. Now I only have to wait until next month to see if they pull an AOL and continue to charge my credit card anyway.

Cancel Sirius XM and buy more independent music. Your subscription will probably buy you 10-12 opportunities per year to have your whole world changed by music. Or, you could just leave it to Mel. Hard to choose…