An Interview with Livingston Taylor – HuffPost 11.18.13
Mike Ragogna: Hi Livingston, how are you?
Livingston Taylor: I’m really good.
MR: Are you a bit exhausted because of all of the stuff you’re doing lately?
LT: What stuff am I doing lately?
MR: Well, you’re a teacher at Berklee, you tour, and you’re probably working on all kinds of new music.
LT: Yes, exactly. I’m certainly doing all those things, but let’s be very clear: Showbusiness is not hard work. The fact is right now, there are people who are cleaning hotel rooms at The Los Angeles Hilton. They’re working hard. Right now, there’s a construction crew putting wire ties on rebar. They’re working hard. I’m sorry, for anybody in my business to speak about hard work is simply laughable.
MR: Okay, let’s reboot. What the heck are you doing lately, Livingston?
LT: What I’m doing is I teach at the Berklee College Of Music. I also have a certain quantity of fundraising activities that I do for Berklee because I am passionate about fundraising programs. I do a series of shows and along with the shows that I’m doing these days, I’m recording a new album. That’s taking me sort of hither and yon. Next Wednesday, I’ll run down to Nashville for a few days and do a series of overdubs down there.
MR: Is the project all Livingston Taylor material?
LT: It’s about half me and half songs that I love. Six and six seems to be how it’s working out. When it comes to songs that I didn’t write, I’m recording a Stephen Bishop song called “On And On,” I’m recording a Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil song called “Here You Come Again” that Dolly Parton had a hit on, a wonderful record. I’m recording a Lennon/McCartney song, “Paperback Writer.” Those are the types of things. I’m doing a Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields song called “Start All Over Again” and a Richard Rodgers song called “I Have Dreamed.” Richard Rodgers is Oscar Hammerstein’s second. So that’s sort of the lay of the land.
MR: Are you looking for other things to try in or outside of music?
LT: The answer is that I do lots of different things all the time, Mike. My brain is active with things that I’m particularly interested in. I’m fascinated in energy policy, I’m fascinated in finance, lots of things interest me and intrigue me. But above all else, performing and writing songs are what brought me to the dance, so I’m always mindful to keep an eye on them. Certainly, musically, a thing that is really important to me, at this point, is to increase the power of my piano playing, increase my capacity to sight read and in doing those two things, increase the size of the spigot that I can dump music into my brain from. Those things expand the pipe into the brain.
MR: What are you teaching at Berklee?
LT: Well, the course that I teach is a course called Stage Performance. I have a book called Stage Performance that sort of gives a general overview of the course I teach, but it’s how to be on stage, how to get an audience to suspend their reality, how to give them your reality and how to make them safe and comfortable that they will want to finance the reality.
MR: And financing could mean anything from fan funding a new album to buying a CD or more?
LT: If you buy a CD or a concert ticket, there’s something that’s intriguing and safe enough that you would be willing to buy a ticket or go see it or download the music or buy the CD.
MR: Even when you were more or less being funded by a record label, it seems you always knew the importance of performing live and connecting with your audience. I imagine that’s why your book is probably an important read.
LT: I’ve had a lot of experience performing and I also have a lot of experience teaching now. I’ve taught for twenty-four years, I totaled up the number of performances I’ve critiqued and it now comes to somewhere over ten-thousand. I’ve seen a lot of people play.
MR: What about you as an artist? How do you feel that you’ve grown over the years?
LT: I think that I’m a far more measured melody and lyric writer. My more recent songs tend to be more disciplined, better crafted. I’m more patient with them, I’m able to wait until a great bridge comes along. I don’t feel under pressure to force a song. If it’s not there, then I just simply can wait. That’s the great advantage of writing with an older perspective. I don’t have to finish things that aren’t ready to be finished.
MR: My normal question is what advice do you have for new artists, but before we get there, I want to ask you, when you look at new artists performing, is there a common problem?
LT: Generally, the most common problem for new performers young and old is that because the performer doesn’t internalize rhythm–said simply, tap their feet–then they keep the rhythm in the instrument. The problem is, when you have the rhythm in the instrument, you can’t stop playing the instrument, so you can’t get the instrument out of the way of the story of your vocal. Then what happens is you start to oversing, and when you overpower your vocals, you tend to slide into the notes because you’re singing them too strong and you can’t hit them cleanly. When you slide into the notes you don’t have time left to enunciate the story of the song clearly. That is universally the biggest problem.
MR: Right. And talk about over-singing, the trend was artists like Justin Timberlake, et cetera, put three thousand notes into one syllable maybe because Michael Jackson did it, though he did it with real soul. It’s interesting because it seems like it might be thinning out a little more lately in favor of the pitch-correction effect, but I guess it’s like one man’s good performance can be interpreted as another person’s torture and vice-versa.
LT: I have to tell you, I really don’t feel that. Good performance is good performance and should be recognized as such and cruddy performance is cruddy performance whatever the genre that it’s in. If you’re reasonably open-minded to the musical or visual genre, then you come to understand good performance, and good performance involves being conscious of your audience and making your audience believe that they are of value to you. That’s good performance.
MR: Has our culture possibly been dumbed down to the point where they may have problems recognizing good performance over bad performance?
LT: That’s a very intersting and perceptive question. The fact is that a Justin Timberlake is only partially a musical experience. Justin Timberlake is predominantly a visual dance medium. The music has become secondary to the video presentation for mega acts. Lady Gaga, although very competent musically, is a visual experiment. Taylor Swift is certainly a visual experience. Justin Timberlake is a visual experience. The music is adequate but it’s not particularly compelling. It certainly isn’t compelling to the level of success that they’re generating. But it’s important to remember that great art is the result of wealth concentrating talent. When you eviscerated the distribution channels that generated wealth so talent could be concentrated, you had to go to the mediums that could still concentrate wealth, and those are visual mediums, not musical mediums.
MR: Very insightful, yeah. And of course, with pop music, you’re no longer just buying into the music, it’s now about lifestyle, image, and as you coin it, visual dance.
LT: These are visual dance artists and this is branding. Taylor Swift is selling Maybelline Cosmetics. I admire and like Taylor Swift, but this is not a musical experience.
MR: Livingston, how do you think the culture ends up having its artists up front and center? It seems so hard to cut through what’s been promoted into those positions.
LT: Yes, but Michael, you can’t do that because there is no way for the income stream to finance the gathering of just musicians or things that are associated with that. Until we get a financial stream for the internet’s transfer of digitizable creativity, we’re not going to concentrate well. With the internet, we put the gatekeepers out of business. We love to hate the gatekeers, and nobody was sorry to see them go, until they actually went. Now we miss them desperately. We miss desperately the record company executives who would tolerate Steely Dan spending one year in the recording studio. Somebody had to pay for that. Somebody had to allow that to happen. That was a recording company executive, and he or she said, “It’s fine. Keep working. We have a distribution channel where we will make the money back.” And they just gave us unbelievable music. These decisions are made by gatekeepers. We love to hate them, but the John Hammonds, the David Geffens, the Clive Davis’, the Ahmet Erteguns, the Jerry Wexlers who gave you Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles and could allow these entities to explore and expand because they knew once they got the product, they would be able to dump it into a distribution channel that would generate millions of dollars.
MR: Right. But then that also goes back into the five-to-ten percent royalty rates.
LT: I’m sorry, but those weren’t horrible contracts. Tell me what venture capitalist would invest in a new project without taking ninety percent of it at a certain point. They’re writing all the checks!
MR: They’re writing all the checks but what’s being forgotten in that mix is that it invents in something that isn’t about the art or the expression of music. In my opinion, yes, music has benefited from the machine, but on the other hand, it seems that we have created ways where many talented artists can’t make a living based on that paradigm.
LT: I’m sorry, the only time artists complain about this arrangement is when the muse has left them and they are no longer creative. The fact is I have made money, I’ve been exploited and I’ve been creative and I can tell you, when you’re in the middle of creative throes, you already know the money is meaningless next to the creation of the art. That’s the miracle. So the only time you complain is when the muse has disappeared, somebody else has the money, and you’re destitute with no muse to drive you. By the way, you look at the artists for whom the muse has continued, The Rolling Stones or James Taylor or Elton John… Paul McCartney is hardly destitute. The muse continued, he then became a fairly guaranteed product and he was able to negotiate fantastic royalties that he was able to hold onto for his creativity.
MR: Okay, that’s true, but on the other hand, he had to get to that point of making a certain amount of money for the company. I know you’re interested in business, how do you keep the artist alive and thriving during the period when they’re trying to “make it”? Seems it’s up to the record company’s discretion as to who they promote.
LT: It is discretionary, but the fact of the matter is I’ve had record companies sign me, spend three hundred thousand dollars on a project of mine advocating for my music, then releasing it, and I can complain that they didn’t promote it hard enough. But guess what? They released it, they put it out and if it didn’t make that money back, did I have to pay that money? No! I’m sorry, this notion of the terrible record company… By the way, don’t we miss those gatekeepers now? Don’t we miss Mo Ostin signing Randy Newman and just standing by him as he loses money record after record after record, going into debt, everybody saying, “Get rid of this clown,” and Mo Ostin going, “Uh-uh. This is great music and I’m going to ride it. I’m going to jam it down your throat until you understand how good this is.” Again, would you ever have gotten Steely Dan or Joni Mitchell without that gatekeeper in that ferocious advocacy? Or David Geffen saying to Neil Young, “This sucks, do it again!” We need gatekeepers desperately and how you’re going to refinance gatekeepers is by figuring out a way to get a revenue stream for the internet’s transfer of digitizable creativity. By the way, we not only need it in music, we need it in art, film, television, newspapers, books… All of them are equally decimated by the reality of the no-income stream of the internet.
MR: I think what happened was, Napster aside, we put music on the internet without figuring out how to fairly monetize it for the artists, songwriters, et cetera, first.
LT: But the fact of the matter is there is a way of monetizing it. My solution to this is to have a broad-based tax on internet use that goes into an escrowed account, and when you write an article and you distribute your article, its transfer through the internet will release a modest payment from this escrowed money for your digitized creativities transfer. It’s basically a broad ASCAP/BMI payment system. What that gives you is the seed money. So all of a sudden, an editor comes up to you, Michael, and says, “You know, I love your work. I will promote your work, but I really want to sign your distribution rights. This is what I can do for you, this is the editing I can give you, this is the value I can add to your creativity. These are the people I can put around you. I can surround you with great editors and great marketers, great publicity people. Are you interested?” And you go, “What percentage of my internet rights am I going to get for all of this?” “This is going to be a big stint for me, so on the first three books I’m going to take ninety percent and you’re going to pay all expenses out of your ten percent,” at which point, you go, “Absolutely, I’m on! Who else do you have?” “Well I handle Stephen King and a few other people.” “I’m in. Sign me up with that.” So this notion that artists need to be paid fairly is laughable. Gatekeepers need to be overpaid and we need to figure out a way to do it. Then once you have an income stream, watch what happens to the quality of music. No longer will you have to depend on the video component. The music itself can be great.
MR: Let me ask you about that. Video has become the married partner of music. Young artists now have to be their own gatekeepers, their own marketers, their own publicists and they’ve got sites like YouTube to assist them. Do you think that’s a good thing or something that’s too challenging for the most part?
LT: Well, the problem is that it forces you to do everything without the guidance of a well-financed gatekeeper. If you look through Youtube, it’s all just a sea of mediocrity. The sparks of genius can’t get the chance to come to the center of an enterprise and surround that spark of genius with the firewood that you need for a conflagration. Great art is wealth concentrating talent, period. You walk into the Sistine chapel, which still exists today, and you look up at the creativity of Michaelangelo–never mind that it was financed by the catholic church, who were also willing to hire a great architect to design it, great builders and great materials so it would last for the centuries necessary for us to view it today. This idea that artists can find their own way is just ludicrous.
MR: But that also begs the question do you feel that there’s any way that the system that’s working now can reveal current and future geniuses?
LT: Yes, but the problem is that once you get the spark, you need to surround it with the tinder that will make the blaze. Do you ever get anybody that’s equaling the output of The Beatles, or Steely Dan or Earth, Wind, & Fire or Motown? Heck no, because there’s no money to put it together.
MR: Plus there’s no education.
LT: But education requires gatekeepers. Education requires a system where somebody says, “We’re going to teach this and we’re not going to teach that and that’s the way it is.” No, what we lost in the internet and what we need to get back is that infrastructure.
MR: I’ll ask you that question now, what advice do you have for new artists?
LT: The advice I have for new artists is keep your head down, learn how to observe, stick your head above the trench, live to fight, the world will find you gatekeepers. Actually, you will probably be some of the new gatekeepers in the newly invented world. Stay tough, stay lean, work on your music and stay alive above all else as we wait for the world to reorder, which it will. But hold on.
MR: Thanks Livingston. Now, to play Devil’s Advocate, you have your nephew, young Ben Taylor, in your family’s mix. I’m very much a fan of his music, but do you think he would have another perspective from the one you just put out there?
LT: He’s certainly an artist that has emerged in the ruins of the old record companies. Ben has benefited from a very good gene pool, number one. Number two, his father is a great, great guitar player and his mother is a great pop songwriter. He’s been in the proximity of real accomplished gatekeepers. That’s been of huge value to him. The fact is that I believe that Ben is a wonderful artist and had he been able to be signed by a responsible record company that had the capacity to exploit him to their profit, his career would’ve been far improved from where it is now. Certainly what his father and mother had.
MR: My feeling is that The Legend of Kung Folk was that opportunity, and I think it was a brilliant album for a young artist. It drives me nuts when something is so obvious and the machine around it doesn’t even know what it’s got.
LT: Yes, and that was the case. It’s wonderful, and he’s a terrific artist, but the problem is when you have a group like The Eagles and they get a spark, once it grows to a conflagration, there’s going to be an income stream. Right now, it’s the exact opposite. Once it gets to a certain level, it’s scattered into the internet and the income is absolutely eviscerated. Where is the motivation for a gatekeeper who would be somebody my age–I’m sixty-two–with experience? I love it when my kids come up to me and say, “Would you help me?” I say, “Yeah, I can help you a bit. You’re really good, you can generate about fifty thousand dollars a year, which is terrific. You make the first fifty thousand, but I don’t want the next ten thousand dollars, I want the next ten million dollars and then you make the money after that. That’s fine with me, but it’s going to cost a million dollars to record you and bring you to the street, and you have a one in twenty chance of being successful. I’m not going to do that if there’s not a payout of at least ten million dollars on it. No chance.” I have wealthy friends who say to me, “Can we sign somebody?” I go, “No, no you can’t. You can’t invest your money here. I won’t let you. Not with me, because I can’t get it back to you.” There is no way to making that money. Do you understand the problem? It’s the same problem for you as a writer. The fact of the matter is it would be very easy indeed for someone to love your writing and say, “I’m going to promote the bejeepers out of it, but you’re going to have to give me all of the profits.” And you would say, “Sure, I’ll do that for a while,” and then as you continue to have wonderful output and creativity, you renegotiate the deal.
MR: Well, to your bigger point, I have found no way to monetize what I do and many of my writer friends can’t either.
LT: Believe me, the internet has totally eviscerated all income-producing distribution streams. The solution of that is important and it is essential because the skill set simply disappears and gets lost, and it is getting lost now.
MR: Liv, what’s in the immediate future for you?
LT: Well I’m making this record and people call me up and hire me to do shows and all sorts of things. It’s a gratifying and a satisfying career, Michael.
MR: I’m happy for you, Livingston, and I love how passionate you are about all this. I think you already know, but some of my greatest joy over the years has been from your family’s–and your extended family, like Carly Simon’s–recordings. I think, in my world and a lot of other people’s worlds, you’ve pretty much been The Kennedys, and I say that with respect, of music. It’s really lovely to listen to what you all have created over the years.
LT: Well I have to tell you, it’s been a wonderful, terrific ride. May the travel gods smile graciously on me.
MR: [laughs] Yes indeed. Thank you so much for the interview, Livingston.
LT: A wonderful, wonderful interview and discussion. Really fun for me.
MR: For me as well. We have to do this again.
LT: I cannot wait. Thanks.
MR: Thanks, all the best with everything.
Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne