Mousalicious Notions

I'm struggling with the notion that I could put all the Prague Spring CDs on CDBaby. That would cost a couple hundred bucks.
Of course, all Prague Spring is up at Bandcamp.
CDBaby has a very thorough FAQ. It's pretty useful for all the details surrounding a record release.
I'm getting a bit chompy at the bit to play my new SG with a band.

Are we allowed to talk about the electric guitar sound at the end of Solsbury Hill? According to Wikipedia both Robert Fripp and Steve Hunter played guitar on that track. Now look. The acoustic guitar sound fantastic, and that electric is just added at the end to lift up the hook.
But that sound is one of the most amazing hard-rock guitar sounds ever made. I mean it's just a Townshend-esque slide down to an open... er.. D?
It's tougher than the darkest Jethro Tull. It's got more testosterone than War Pigs. It does a third, unnamable thing, to your soul. And it's just at the end of this Peter Gabriel song.
+++++
I'm a tad afrighted to put humbucking P90's in my SG though, because the routing might not be deep enough. And there's only a 5mm distance between the bottoms of the screws and the back of the guitar. Apparently. As far as I can tell.

Strangs

Prague Spring now has a complete Bandcamp page with all our material on it.
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Words on strings from Ethan:

I'm a fan of DR strings in general, but have never tried their acoustic sets. For Gibsons, I've always preferred D'Addario 11-52 and for Martins I always used D'Aquisto 11-50. D'Aquisto responded to my affection by going out of business. Now I'm in the market for new strings. Word on the street is that the D'Aquisto employees did a buyout and are only selling wholesale.

My feeling about the DR strings is that they feel, somehow, harder than the Martins I had on my acoustic. Is that because they're at a higher tension? Or maybe a lower tension? Who knows? Feelings. They're vague.
Via.

Retrograde

You'll recall that I am obliged to make Ed McNamee a compilation album of Prague Spring.

The deed is done. I present to you the new Prague Spring "Greatest Hits" album. Buy, download, share, and thank Ed.

I'm Rich!

I'm signed up with Getty Images. More precisely, Prague Spring is.

And now I'm making the big, big bucks. Big. I'm owed almost seventeen raw, unadulterated, United States cold hard cash dollars.

And no, I have no idea who is using Prague Spring songs.

But I do know this. I'm shoppin' for yachts.

I'll just step into the fray...

More responses to Jonathan Newman's post on copyright vs copyleft (or whatever).

I can't help but think that composers are more satisfied with copyrights because the system actually works pretty well for them. Music copyrights are byzantine and complex and confusing and bizarre.

And they work pretty darn good. For everybody.

Firstly, composers don't typically sign away all their rights to their own works. Even film composers and commercial composers see royalties (and they will frequently compose as "works for hire", which is otherwise unusual).

Secondly, a composer has the right to say who will first record the composer's work. But after that, artists can "cover" the work and pay a statutory rate (set by, you guessed it, the State) which is something like 5 cents for the first three minutes per record. That money goes to the composer(s) and publisher(s) of the work. If there is no publisher or if the composer owns their own publisher then all that money comes to them.

So here's the thing -- when the cover artist's version of the song (or piece) is played on the radio, the composer gets paid (through an additionally complicated system of performing rights organizations). The radio stations pay a yearly license and also report which songs they're playing, er, usually.

So like I'm saying, this system is freakin' complicated. But radio stations pay the three performing rights organizations BMI, ASCAP, and the third one which I don't remember the name of (in the United States, there are three of them, elsewhere there is frequently only one organization and they tend to have deals with the three in the US so they trade money back-and-forth). As a composer, you join one of the organizations (which is typically free to do) and you get checks in the mail when radio stations play your music -- even when someone else is performing your work.

I think the most I ever made was $26.87 one year. From my "band" Prague Spring's version of a song I wrote. From a radio station in... Sweden. I don't know what they were doing -- maybe using a piece of my music under weather reports or something. Who knows?

I am of the unusual opinion that I think everyone should be protected by difficult, complicated, and byzantine copyrights and performance rights organizations. I think that directors, producers, actors, screenwriters, authors, the whole kit and kaboodle, should have "performing rights" organizations which pay them whenever their movie is shown on TV or in theaters.

But I'm nuts, so don't listen to me.

Blurry Proof

That 10 years ago today Prague Spring was the first performance at Manhattan Theatre Source.

Sky

I had lunch today with the beautiful and talented Sky Chari of Eats Well With Others fame. Before that she was the flautist of Prague Spring. (Er, 14 years ago. Egads!)

Whole Foods in Princeton NJ where the elite meet to eat. ;-)

Moribund

More about the theater I helped found ten years ago.

In November of 1999 I was looking for a theater for the winter concert that Prague Spring would perform in January of 2000. My high school friend Ed McNamee said "Hey, Andrew Frank is looking at a shoe store where he wants to put a theater, you want to go into New York tomorrow and see it?" I said sure and the next day the three of us were walking around the old Capezio store on MacDougal Street. Andrew turned to me and said "Would you rent this space as a theater?" I said yes, absolutley. And so a week later Andrew signed the lease.

How are things going now? I realized the other day that I am the only one of the founding members who has never "left" or taken a sabbatical from Theatresource. And I'm the only one who's there on a daily basis. So I've been involved in what's been going on for 10 years now and witness to the way it's changed (usually for the good) throughout the years.

But now the place is moribund. It's kind of amazing how in 12 months we could go from being one of the most interesting, artistic, and dynamic off-off-Broadway theaters to one that is completely stagnant.

The Board of Directors essentially meets in secret, there is a complete communications blackout from the Board to any of the volunteers, the bookkeeper dissembles and refuses to write numbers down (she prefers to not have a paper trail regarding the balance sheet (!) and there are actually no mainstage shows scheduled for January.

January? You realize it's the end of November, right? We didn't have that problem in November of 1999 -- the only reason January wasn't completely booked was that the lighting grid wasn't in the air yet.

Now, the communications blackout is likely due in part to the fact that I've been criticizing the malarky infused communications that had been coming. So of course the logical response is not to use less malarky, but to just stop communicating. Great.

Worse than all that, though, is that artistically the place is dead. Somebody thought it was a great idea to do The Crucible at Theatresource. Yeah, that's a great idea. We so desperately need another version of that play. Here's a simple rule you can use in life: When the Wooster Group has done their version of a play, it's time to put it away. Forever.

You're welcome.

*************

Looking south on Cortlandt Alley from Canal Street.

Theatresource

Just about 10 years ago I was trying to get a performance space for Prague Spring to perform. At the time that was basically Sky Grealis, a computer for playback, our friend Kevin, Melissa Riker, and me.

So I was discussing how expensive theaters were with my friend Ed and he said "Hey, I'm going to meet my friend Andrew Frank -- he's thinking about putting a theater in the old Capezio dance clothing store on MacDougal Street. You want to come along and see it?"

Of course I said yes. And when Andrew foolishly asked me if I thought it was a good idea to build a theater in the space I said "yes" once again. I think that was the final bit of convincing he needed.

Now, thousands of theatrical performances later (Prague Spring performed there twice but since Sky moved to San Francisco we have been essentially dormant as a performing group), my studio/edit suite/office is on the ground floor, immediately below the theater itself.

Jon Ecklund produced this video. It features many of our friends from over the years and gives you an idea of the kind of community we made. When I say "we" what I mean is that there are many many people who worked very hard to create it. All I did was say "yes". ;-) Heck, sometimes that's all you need.

"What is TheatreSource?" from Jon Ecklund on Vimeo.

Inadvertent Album

So, it turns out I inadvertently created a new Prague Spring album.

The album is called Come What May. I know, I know, the music is all from Hamlet and Macbeth but the artwork is from The Tempest. Bite me.

Enjoy it while stoned or about to go to sleep.

--

I've been jonesing to record an album of extended late-'60s Danish psychedelic-influenced tracks, performing as the art-rock ensemble, Pleasure for the Empire*. And I figured that would be the next album I'd make. But no, there was another album sitting on my hard drive in the meantime...

What happened was I've found myself responsible for the sound on the new version of Mac Rogers' Universal Robots. Because I don't want to compose an entire score while I'm also working on a couple movies, I figured I'd reuse some of this stuff.

So I dug up the music I did for my movie Hamlet and for the play version of Macbeth I scored (I also scored a comedic movie version of Macbeth, but this isn't that.) So I have an entire album's worth of material, and I figured I may as well put it together as one. The thing is, the music is by and large unlistenable. It's music designed to be talked over, because it's all (or mostly) underscore. The music misses the middle, or melody. There are a couple exceptions, the Coronation for instance. But the point of the music is to affect the emotion of the audience, not really to be listened to on its own.

The entire album is up as mp3's. I'll probably submit it to Pump Audio. In the meantime, it can be perused by directors or whomever for shows and movies. If I could make money with it by someone using it in a score or a commercial, that would of course be awesome.

I found a nice free font source at Abstract Fonts. I know, I know, I should have used Trajan throughout.

*Yes, the last Prague Spring album was named "Pleasure for the Empire". I was thinking about naming the first Pleasure for the Empire album "Prague Spring". What I really want to do is name an album "Disambiguation" so that one day Wikipedia will have a "Disambiguation disambiguation" page.