So last week Steve Miller saided: "This Whole Industry Is F--kin' Gangsters and Crooks" Read more here. Well duh, Steve. This just occurring to you now is it? This from a guy at the top of the food chain. I know nothing about the business of music or the business of anything for that matter. I do however know that music has zero to do with business. Rule numero uno in business is get what you can in any way you can. Those who can wrap their thinking around this merciless grovel and stab concept are usually successful at business. Those who can wrap their heads around the total disconnect between music and business are usually successful at music. Rarely doth the twain meet. Giant corporations have figured out how to milk North America for all the money by feeding on the middle. Once that's gone it'll all fall apart and we'll either learn stuff or just be stupid peasants. Either way we'll eventually get the jobs back. Not much we can do about it at this point. May as well settle back for the ride. So what is the point of this wandery whining you might ask? Well I'd like to be as rich as Steve Miller and the world sux. Wah. That's about it. Ya know... after reading back I notice it's hard to follow the leap from whiny rich musicians to our imminent demise as a species. There may be more sadly segwayed leaps coming so get used to it. There are times when it's fortunate no one reads these rambling flatulations. There's no danger of looking stupid if nobody reads the stupid. The reason for the disjointed flap and flail nature of this round is because much of my brain function has been dragged into digesting another lump of TV slag. I was all involved in Spongebob's hijinks, and forgot to disengage my brain when the ads started up. I found myself immersed in a Mcdonald's ad where some Beiberesque gooberhead with a face you instantly wanted to slap was tossing french fries in his mouth all nonchalant and cool like, while his adoring family looked on with a nauseating wash of role specific hilarity. Stern mom hiding a grin, proud dad impressed at the depth of son's skills at hilarity, sister with giggling pretend irritation. All drooling love and happiness like an old folks home on tapioca day. Ugh. The world is hard enough as it is without that shit prodding our depression. In the world of marketing this is called branding. In the bushes that surround our lives lurk marketing wizards in lab coats armed with song hooks and red hot logo shaped branding irons waiting to pounce. The minute your attention wanders they leap from the bushes into your head and with a steaming sizzle poke their golden arched icons right into your third eye. I still feel a tad nauseated and hurky from the ordeal. My brain is full of ads that have snuck past the attention deficit disorder. I still find myself humming that old Safeway song that hasn't been used since the seventies... Today at safeway, here's what we have for yooooo.... There must be thousands of commercial song hooks embedded in my head after all these years of watching TV. The ad harpoons don't even have to be directed at you. They just fire them off all willy nilly at anybody hoping for an unguarded moment. If I was a girl I'd use Tampax. I've seen Jack In The Box ads my whole life and never seen an actual Jack In The Box. If you think about it branding takes up way a lot of brain space. By now my brain probably looks like a deflated old football full of hooks and logo burns, and a few direct hit harpoons skewering right through. Oh, and one rusty bent old coat hanger left over from Mom's aborted abortion attempt. Bort bort.. Bort bort... Okay that didn't happen, but I'm sure it was discussed at length. Come to think of it, sometimes I forget the point of these endless diatribes, so do me a favor and open your brain. .... wider... widerrr.... okay now picture the toaster with the bass in it at the top of the page while I yell at you. COSMIC PIG STUDIOS! RECORD HERE! DO IT! Sorry. I feel dirty. So enough about our imminent demise as a species via marketeers and studio owners lurking in the bushes. Let's talk about how music is going to save us from all of the above. Music has the power to do that, and it has absolutely no power at all. It can be the spit in the eye of evil, or the justification for evil, or just drivel to sell shit. Music has the power to change the world or just jam stuff into your brain. With great power comes great responsibility. Which somewhat vaguely sorta-ish not really leads us to the point of all this: Yet another round of covers versus originals. Apologies for the wandering segways. Lately my brain is flopping about like a live 3 pound trout trapped in the spandex pants of an eighties bar star. If people don't pay attention to you when playing originals you assume your tunes must suck. If they don't pay attention when playing covers you assume you're doing them wrong or not interesting enough to watch. There lies the value of covers. I recommend doing both as two separate entities. Covers are great for learning how music works and a good way to get used to being on stage and learning how to engage an audience. Using that experience is good for your originals, and you might occasionally make some money playing covers. There are two audiences in music. One group goes to hear the same old crap they grew up listening to, and the second is interested in exploring new music. There's a considerable IQ gap between the two, which is why the first group is so much larger than the second. Most people are stupid. Unfortunately they have no idea they're stupid so any attempts at education are rebuffed enthusiastically with more stupid. When playing originals for that first larger group all you get is experts who used to play sax in grade 7 band giving you sage tips on how to improve your music. Try to keep in mind too, the object of originals is to "sound just like the album", except it's YOUR album. If your good at covers you'll likely be good at your own stuff too. Now here's the point to take home with you: If you suck at covers you'll likely suck at originals. Use the covers, they have value. My use of the term "covers" doesn't mean rediscovering and old gem and playing it. I'm talking about "The List" as dictated by bar owners and agents. The utterly heinous tunage of soulless dweebs who opened their ears for 10 seconds when puberty hit, then quickly shut down their tiny brains forever in fear of that glimpsed universe of unsupervised thought. That's why they came up with "The List". So never again would they need to experience the horror of thinking for themselves. Many times over the years I've heard people say "They sound just like the album" as if sounding exactly like somebody else is a good thing. My first thought when I hear that is omigodfuckoff, but whatever. They wanna hear what they wanna hear and they're quite offended by any new concepts. It's not gonna change, move on. Mind you, a wise and talented drummer I have much respect for did once say it's fun to try to recreate what the original artist was trying to say. Much knowledge is to be gained through fully understanding stuff. So there's that. I personally like to use a cover as a framework for trying new things, which sometimes works out exceedingly well, other times not so much. I caught shit from Cosmic Wifey once for playing Suzi Q underneath Mustang Sally. Screwed her right up. It did however become a good way to morph from one song to the next. The discovery of this great morph wasn't really worth the beating I got for screwing her up, but no pain no gain. Tragically, Mustang Sally was so overplayed by bands it was killed by the dreaded Audible Groan. Many a great song has been unceremoniously scratched from the set list when the Audible Groan is heard. After a song has been Audibly Groaned, it's usually sent to the jams. A fate equivalent to those captured pith helmeted explorers in darkest Africa being given over to the women for the big finish. On any given saturday afternoon jam at the Yale, throughout every third song one could hear poor Sally's death squeals reverberating through the room as amateurs chopped and hacked it to bits. Personally I've always liked Mustang Sally because it has such a wide open palette to screw around in. Sadly I can no longer play it due to Spontaneous Explosive Vomiting whenever I sing the backup refrain, "Ride Sally ride". Spontaneous Explosive Vomiting, or SEV as it's referred to in the psyche ward, is a contagious condition becoming more and more prevalent in classic rock bars. It starts with just an occasional beer burp when playing anything by John Cougar Melloncrap, and if Melloncrap is followed immediately with the intro chords to "Old Time Rock n Roll" it can quickly spread into the band, staff, and customers causing projectile vomiting everywhere. There is no cure. The only way to stop the spread of this horrific disease is to take the band, the club owner, and the agent that booked the gig out back and shoot them. Someone should organize a SEV awareness benefit concert. Maybe Quincy Jones could do a star studded songy video thing. ...uh oh, apparently just typing the words Quincy Jones is enough to get SEV started. At any rate, if you've read this far you're obviously very bored and likely avoiding work. Go do something constructive and stop reading crap on the net. In fact, I'll make you a deal: You stop reading and I'll stop typing.