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On a recent search to pick up a copy of a well-known music magazine, I found that no one in the Southern California area had carried it for quite a while. I asked some friends from around the country and they too said they had not seen it at newsstands or other outlets. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Everything relating to music is changing, and at an alarming rate. The switch from traditional print magazines to online distribution is a reality. So is the proliferation of digital downloading of music as opposed to buying CDs—if you can find them at old-fashioned record stores. You know--the ones that are still around. Tower Records is gone and stores such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart are reducing the amount of floor space devoted to CDs. The music industry seems to be surprised by this, but it shouldn’t be: the quality and the sincerity of music has been going downhill since Bach—at least that’s what Professor Tufts told me in college.

The most recent downspiraling is the result of many factors. If you want proof, look no further than your television screen. Have you seen the shows on which bands compete against each other? It seems like the plastic, no-talent groups get all the praise while the talented ones get thrashed by the judges. When you have tin-eared squares judging music (and you can bet that labels employ the same nitwits), the product thrust upon the public goes downhill. Compound that with the fact that everyone wants to be a singer in a band (everybody wants to be Elvis!). Most people are not blessed with a superstar talent for music. If they were, then we’d have nothing but great stuff to listen to.

Background music on TV has also been affected by this downslide, with the situation getting more horrible every year. With everyone now in possession of sequencers and samplers, it’s easy to fake an orchestral recording--this is obvious by the crap you hear on the tube—but most “writers” don’t have a history of writing for the actual instruments they’re “playing” or a knowledge of how it should be done, not to mention the talent.

Speaking of talent, I’ve toured the USA and the world countless times and I can tell you that too many ex-punk rockers think that once they get old they can then just snuggle into certain genres such as rockabilly, surf, garage, pop, etc., and reinvent their careers. Sorry, but ’t ain’t so! The whole thing about punk is that it was supposed to be anti-professional, anti-musically educated stuff. For these ex-punkers to play Buddy Holly, the Ventures, the Beatles, etc., they would have to know their instruments and have advanced musical talent to even begin to pull it off. These punkers thought they would fit right in to the neo-swing in the ’90s, which was pretty funny since swing music is intrinsically advanced.

The world has slipped into a “comfortable mediocrity” and so the crud that permeates the airwaves is accepted rather easily now. The really bad side of this is that people without talent and tangible ability seem to have a need to destroy anyone that threatens them with real talent. They judge without even knowing the music that they are judging. They form cliques. They attack. Basically, however, they suck. Masquerading as “vintage” or “retro” is the perfect hiding place for them. These folks wouldn’t know rock ’n’ roll if it came up and bit them on their teats! They all hate rock ’n ’roll anyway, because they are squares. They like to use genre terms like “rockabilly”, “swing”, “country”, “western swing”, “calypso”, and “pop”, but rarely would any of these call themselves “rock” bands. We (the Sprague Brothers) had a business card in the ‘90s that said the name of the band and then underneath that said “ROCK.” When someone from the poser crowds would ask for a card, they almost always shouted in horror “Rock?!?” when they read it. As Bill Haley said: “Don’t knock the rock”!

These bar crowds that once were posing amongst the members of our audiences are now flocking to festivals which are no more than glorified bars. The majority wouldn’t care if they heard a real band or the usual jokers with an 18-year-old front man imitating Elvis or whoever. But the majority has always been squares since the dawning of beat music in the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, so not too much has changed. The main thing that has changed is the fact that they protect themselves by forming little factions. This one belongs to the “Surf” clique, this one to “Rockabilly,” etc. Buddy Holly played a variety of music as did other bands and artists such as Bobby Fuller. The Bobby Fuller Four would play an original, then a surf instro, then a Beatle song, etc, etc. When the Sprague Brothers were on Hightone, we were met by dumbfounded people in the crowds when we would play a rockabilly song, then our instro “Green Arrow,” then our Merseybeat song “She’s Gonna Leave.” We were once told by a conformant that we would “be more popular if we chose one audience to play to.” Our answer was, “We are playing to one audience—the rock ’n ’roll audience.” This is not to say that we are not involved with country, classical, or whatever; it’s just that the Sprague Brothers have always been and always will be a rock ’n’ roll band.

I’ll bet I’m not the only one to say that most, but not all, of today’s music stinks. I have arrived at this opinion through my personal experiences, during which I stayed at people’s houses on tour and witnessed the latest fake fads on the road through the last 20 years. I’m not afraid to talk about it. I am a witness to the corruption of the music industry, its venues, and its fans.

To most people involved in the music business, music is about money. When you have music in your blood and your motivation for making music is different than theirs, they try to drag you down and eliminate you. I would bet that this has happened more and more and no one ever hears about it. When the making of music is motivated by money, what you get is what populates the airwaves today. This is why many people nowadays complain that there are no new great bands or artists. The truly great artists of today may well get struck down before anyone gets the chance to hear them, thanks to what’s going on with the Internet webcasting royalties situation. By demanding more and more royalties, the music industry has basically stopped airplay from Internet broadcasters who truly love the music they play but don’t want to go bankrupt doing it. The good news, however, is that the Internet is a pretty unstoppable force, so perhaps the passionate webcasters will win and MySpace and tons of other sites will be able to keep putting unknown artists on the air.

The posers and the fakes and the untalented always make a lot of noise, but I’d like to believe that real musicians who are motivated by their love of music will always find a voice and outlast the maladroit charlatans.

Until next time, grab a kazoo and make your own kind of music. And don’t let the fakes/posers get you down.

Go to: Frank Lee Sprague