Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised me to receive an email from a Northampton musician fundraising to produce an unrecorded album. Things are tough all over, and there's never been much of a gravy train for artists of any stripe in America. Certainly, in a time of economic difficulties, artists face even more of an uphill battle.
At first I chuckled at the arrival of said email. Did the musician in question think arts journalists sit around in green bowlers beneath rainbows, ready to lead artists to their hoards of inky gold? It's more likely that Sarah Palin will show up in burlap bearing Noam Chomsky's love child.
Then I got a tad queasy, because as a musician myself, I couldn't imagine asking anyone I knew to give me money up front to record an album. Even the most outlandish of distribution models have long involved producing the goods, then hoping people buy them. What if fans paid for the thing, and then it sucked? A fellow could end up facing an unruly mob of funders if they didn't like the dueling sackbut passage that seemed like such a great idea in the studio at 3 a.m. Best to leave some things to nature.
Then I warmed up to the notion a little when I thought of a few new possibilities for employing the artistic fundraising scheme in other ways. I would consider, for instance, paying good money if the Eagles would agree to burn their instruments and move into that stupid hotel in California. I might make monthly contributions if the most abstraction-prone poets agreed to read the complete works of William Carlos Williams and James Tate before getting another microphone rusty with overwrought ejecta. Then again, if the Eagles thing worked, John Turturro might never have done that dance to "Hotel California" in The Big Lebowski, and I'm not willing to give that up.
It's also true that patronage has a long tradition in the arts. Kings have commissioned symphonic works and noblemen funded portraiture. Artists sell their works to well-heeled collectors even now. Who couldn't do with a patron? A quick survey of friends also turned up evidence that such up-front fundraising has occurred even among Valley musicians before, and apparently with some success.
Yet patronage has also changed the nature of artworks in a big way. Do a family portrait for a duke, and you'd probably be well advised to skip the highlights on Great Aunt Gladys' goiter. Look closely at a nativity scene gracing a cathedral wall in Bologna, and chances are that weird guy who's trying to look inconspicuous over near the Magi is the one who paid for the painting. Patrons seem to have figured on catching the heaven express with that kind of pictorial evidence of their piety.
What if an album was funded by folks who likewise wanted in on the action? Suddenly the thing could sink under the weight of flat harmonies, "Chopsticks" piano and the inevitable caterwauled version of "Fly Me to the Moon." Talk about playing with fire.
The whole episode, besides being cause for concern about the wellbeing of musicians Valley-wide, points to the endless difficulty of being an artist. After playing in all sorts of bands for two decades, there's one constant I feel confident in noting: people don't like to pay for musicians to be musicians until they fill arenas, at which time they will gladly fork over absurd piles of shekels. The only exception seems to be paying for musicians to do wedding receptions. At least, that is, if they do a mean "Woolly Bully" or let the father of the bride do, yes, "Fly Me to the Moon."
In some respects this is inexplicable—plenty of virtuosic local musicians can play circles around their more famous cousins, so why shouldn't they get paid well? In other respects, it makes an awful lot of sense: relative worth seems to be determined only by the stampeding of listeners in one direction or another.
In any case, no matter the audacity or wisdom of fundraising, here's hoping that local musicians with a hand out find sufficient numbers of patrons who won't invade their studios. The rest of them, no doubt, will soldier on as they've always done, plying their trade in basements, hoping for a handful of recognition, too. It's a credit to the Valley that somebody seems to be listening: that fundraising email reported that 65 percent of the album cost had been obtained.
