Two sides, part 2 - Carmine Appice

Part 2 - Carmine Appice

... well, Carmine Appice actually cowrote most of the songs, and the couple covers are instrumental arrangements, so it certainly seems like he's intentionally making a solo album instead of dicking around and getting high like Keith. That's already a much better start. Calling the band "The Rockers" is a little cheesy, but i've got no complaints if they actually do.

I will say this, it's the straight-ahead, apartment rock 80s approximation of Carnivale with a couple tablespoons of slightly less than authentic Noir thrown in. As far as mental images go it's about as menacing as Beverly Hills Cop or Police Academy. I hear how it's supposed to appear menacing and sinister, but my disbelief is not in any way suspended. You didn't actually rush past a dozen mugging victims to get to the studio after a sideways drug deal behind a cargo container at an unbelievably unsecured dockyard. You woke up in your hotel room and put on your best Tuesday headband, had a cup of coffee, taped your knuckles, and four-on-the-floored for a few hours after lunch. I'm not really here to judge, though, except in the sense of whether or not i believe you. Yeah, i believe you, this is what you were going for, it does rock within the confines of its context. I promise this is not an insult, it sounds like a Pat Benatar album.

Unlike Two Sides of the Moon, this is a masterclass in workhorse radio-friendly rock drumming, 4-bar phrases with an infinite variety of drum and guitar fills, about as vanilla rock as it gets for 80/81. Carmine is not the most compelling lyricist or vocalist, but none of this is bad enough to change the station.

We're all so conditioned to think generic and mediocre are bad. Why is that? I have a theory or 12. Mainly what it boils down to is this strange notion of me, i'm the center of the universe, i decide, and only the most amazingly mind-blowing awesomeness is worthy of my attention. I don't like that, and i'll tell you why: it's boring. Absolutely, the 5 best people can just do everything while the rest of us stare at the ceiling and wait to die. 10 more people can compete for top 5, sure, but what are the rest of us supposed to do? Compete for the opportunity to compete for the privilege of buying a lottery ticket?

Even i have that problem. Having to slog through it all to try to impress a couple people isn't fun, and the results become a standard thing that nobody really cares about after 10 minutes. More and more i find myself increasingly frustrated about all the meaningful things i can't do today because they jeopardize all the meaningless crap i have to do for someone else tomorrow while listening to people alternatingly rawr-rawr-rawr about productivity and how inconvenient it is to have to go to a store to buy things and how waiting for it to get delivered is even worse. You know who complains about capitalism the most? Business owners. I don't mean to offend anyone personally by saying that, but us regular people working crap jobs just to buy food have mostly all given up.

And that brings us around to the music business. I'll pick on ASCAP because i know their structure. We have this basic notion that ASCAP collects performance royalties and distributes them to producers. Yes, that's what they do. ASCAP operates as a non-profit, operating on appriximately 10% of revenue, 90% being distributed to its members. The fiddly paperwork part is where it gets tricky because it's not as simple as them writing you a check for 90% of the royalties collected from your actual individual music. Top selling artists get a larger share of revenue inside that payout, obscure artists and publishers get a smaller percentage. They break it down into 5 or 6 weighted calculations to make sure moneys are fairly distributed, for example it wouldn't be particularly fair for the producers of background soundtracks in TV shows to get paid from revenue generated by streaming broadcast of live performances, and vice versa and sideways, but yeah Drake is technically going to earn some amount of money generated by a fluke good week for an obscure singer/songwriter in Idaho. That stuff is a spelled out in the contracts, i have no real care. The part that irks me is the monopolization of royalty distribution by the small oligopoly of major PROs.

Historically, these unions (that's what they really are) grew out of the bad faith exploitation of all those old school labels who simply stole their own artists' rights and royalties. It helped for quite a long time, artists still made their daily money as the house band, touring, etc., with royalties being a nice side income helping them get through the valleys between successful projects. But, as all those independent labels gradually tucked themselves under the umbrella of the big 4, the proportions shrank accordingly. The supply of available licenses is theoretically infinite, the number of buyers accounting for the majority of royalty revenue is countable on fingers and toes. Long gone are the days when an enterprising person can start a studio and negotiate enough to both keep it running and distribute it just because they like the music. 90% of bands simply aren't going to generate enough royalty revenue to fund the next one themselves, or even break even, it still takes about a decade to really connect with a proper fan base. Chucking it in a PRO's database as a self-publisher and hoping it pays off in a decade is really all you can do in terms of long-range financial planning. All a label does is buy the rights to your music and try to reach a large enough audience to make its own royalties profitable. It manages the finances of a whole group of bands who can't effectively or consistently do it all themselves, exactly the same way ASCAP is doing. It's objectively better for as many artists as possible, but it's only worthwhile if you are already fielding offers from people who want to pay to use it for something and need help keeping track of it all and/or making sure you aren't getting ripped off behind your back. It's insurance for already successful artists, not a viable income for most people.

The downside is that blanket licensing system is a zillion times easier and consistently cheaper for license purchasers, so it becomes a standard cost of operation and you aren't even going to get a meeting with a mid-level A&R person unless you'realready on their radar. They will choose something they already have the rights to use: kids and cousins of already established artists, bulk license auctions to ad agencies and subsidiary holdings, let the janitor make an album during downtime, sign a band that doesn't realize they're already about to step up or just to prevent someone else from potentially signing them.

The problem is actually a psychological problem. Once you achieve an apparent level of success/reward, that becomes the new subjective standard, and people equalize their lives based on sustained income, i.e. they naturally live within their means until it becomes obvious that they are no longer being paid an observably fair price. It's not so much greed or envy of your neighbors, it's the equivalence between what you have done, currently do, and want to do in the future. A 70/30 deal can look good on the way up, but terrible if you find yourself scraping by on 3 out of every 10 dollars you generate 20 years later. It looks a lot different when you see your label pocket 70k while you get to keep 30k, doesn't it? 7-mil vs 3-mil stretches the tangible imagination a bit, but the point is you make less than half the profit from your own work and the nature of the business prevents you from renegotiating that relationship unless you made sure you retain full rights to nullification.

Take this album, Appice was already generating revenue for half a dozen labels, he cowrote Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, so someone was gonna publish this whether it made money or not. It's dedicated to John Bonham, and even Led Zeppelin wasn't crazy enough to not list Vanilla Fudge as one of their biggest influences.

Man, i've given this a couple relistens and i take back most of my earlier reservations. This really is a masterclass in great Rock drumming and a completely serviceable album of songs. I'm so accustomed to weird vocals i wasn't fully appreciating his consistency and clarity. I know i don't say this very often, but this album is much better on vinyl than digital.

Critics say they can hear how much fun these sessions must have been, but i can hear the thoroughly enjoyable sounds of actually playing instruments that sound like instruments rather than triggered samples. The stuttering background vocals on Be My Baby are absolutely terrible, but they are definitely doing it on purpose so i can't really fault them for it much.

All in all it's perfectly lovely. This particular listen i thought i might have to take back my statements about mediocrity/excellence and call this boringly exceptional, but i think my original sentiment holds. This is not a top ten best seller kind of album, it really is a thing he had the opportunity to do so he did it kind of album. It's not going to blow anyone's mind, but it's definitely more valuable than a "for die-hard fans only" production. You're always gonna hear it in it's context as Carmine Appice's first solo album, but it definitely proves he had the goods to deserve to make one and it certainly doesn't sound like it was a chore to make. Very nice, i consider myself serviceably rocked and not at all sad i listened to it 3 times to really come to terms with what i was hearing.