Tampa is awash with Superbowlites, they’re everywhere and all to see the men with big shoulders running around shouting until eventually throwing an odd shaped ball out of the ground. Everyone jumps up, play stops……. and an entire new team runs on. I don’t understand American football and I don’t think I ever will.
Nevertheless it’s popular. The adds run at $3 million for a 30 second commercial and sadly they were all booked pre recession……$100,000 per second! Rhianna played the other night, The Eagles last night, there’s Fleetwood Mac, Puff Daddy, whoops P.Diddy who turned up in St Pete early this morning for a party. Snoop is snooping around, it’s all going on. Meanwhile I’m checking out Fox Soccer Channel and I think Wigan on the box will do just fine, no problem…..leave ‘em all to paaaaaaaaarty.
…….Oh and then of course there’s The Boss, the man who knows about as much about the game as me, Bruce Springsteen. He’s turned it down a million times but Boss times are hard and like he boldly admits, he has a new album out. There’s no fee but they’ll cover expenses, nice, him and Patti get a hotel room… but then again the audience for his 12 minute half time show is a billion! No need for a sweat drenched 3 hour show. Boss move by Boss man. Nice work if you can get it.
Bruce did a press conference on Thursday and no suprise, it was all over everywhere………it was the first he’d done since 1987 and the media lapped it up. Brucey boy seemed in good spirits and I did like his honesty about not being a football fan and wanting to shamlessly plug his new album. One thing both he and Miami Steve said got me thinking. They said they came out of an era when the music was brilliant and the artists set a very high standard……..and they felt it their job to maintain those standards, they wanted to be great. It’s a wonderful philosophy, admire you’re peers but at the same time try and emulate them.
Springsteen has worked relentlesly for several decades to be where he is. He shunned CBS’s (now Sony) hype campaign and the posters that claimed ‘I have seen the future of rock n roll and it is Bruce Springsteen’ He hated it, he demanded they take them all down. As was the case with his heroes and when he was growing up, he wanted to be judged on merit and not some overhyped record company campaign. He was right, he was more than a commodity, he had a vision and he wasn’t prepared to compromise.The artists that have survived are the ones who had a say in their career, they too had a vision and weren’t prepared to stand back and let the record company turn them in to what they thought they should be, and create something that would make their job easier….make them marketable. They had belief and they had guts and if was going to take time then so be it. It worked then but they won’t let it work now, they all watched as everything came tumbling down. They pushed the self destruct button while blaming everyone apart from themselves.They knew it all.
Filed under: Journey Through The Past, Opportunity, record companies , Bruce Springsteen, CBS, Superbowl
came over from tony’s place, sugar. i like your observations on both american football and music/music industry. it seems that whenever we’ve allowed commerce to supersede talent, everything and everyone has suffered. xox
It all goes back to what we were discussing; the bands/artistes that have survived along with their music, came up the hard way with sheer hard work and determination. In the UK that meant flogging up and down motorways with very few facilities – the Blue Boar being the most famous rest room, especially after the incident with the Stones – no big, comfortable tour buses in those days. More likely to a Bedford Transit van with deck chairs for sitting or the floor or on the equipment. Working men’s clubs were notoriously the hardest place to play but many did and went on to bigger and better venues. Glasgow was one of the hardest, and Manchester could be tough for younger, less experienced people. Today they all want, the tour bus, catering, posh hotels – the ones who went before slept in vans, on mates floors and never forgot it. How many of the new ones would do a tour of the UK taking in places that most people had not heard of and playing to a handful of people, who turn into fans, grateful for the chance to see and hear live music in their backwaters. I was reminded by my best friend, also a Granada colleague of mine of just this when we talked about professionalism and the true saying of the way you treat people is very important, so those who tread on people on the way up, meet them coming down! Music was live LIVE. Remember that. Not someone miming to a backing track on Rock in Rio in Lisbon as if the fans would not realise. My friend bumped into Barbra Streisand on a beach, asked for an autograph and got one with a smile. That’s what professionalism is – always have time for the fans.