Jack Tempchin – HuffPost 7.23.14

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Jack Tempchin: Wow. I noticed you asked Irving Azoff that and he said, “Be born thirty years earlier.”

MR: [laughs] Yes he did!

JT: But actually, for the first time, they’re going to have something called Songwriter Camp in Las Vegas next month–this guy puts on rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camps, so I’m going to go mentor some songwriters and see how that goes. But I’ll tell you this. What I think is everything in the music field is actually better than it ever was. I can go on Spotify and I can follow the trail of any kind of music I want, and I can listen to it right now. We used to have to go down to the store and try to find a record. The Stones spent half their time trying to get a blues record over to England. In a lot of ways the music thing is great. The only way it’s not great is getting paid. I’ll be damned if I can think of any way to get paid. But what I think is the wheel is turning about that. First it was just songwriters and musicians, now movie people, too. The digital wave moves through everything. it’s changing everything. I hope that getting paid wheel moves along and people can get paid. Otherwise, they’ve stolen their own dreams. It used to be one in ten thousand people wanted to be a musician and be a rock star. Now it seems like it’s a career choice. There’s a school. “Oh, you want to be a rock star? Well go to this school and learn how to play.” There are so many people doing it and yet none of them know that there’s no money anymore.

MR: I always felt there’s a bit of a vulture culture going on there. Is it fantasy camp or a predatory school?

JT: Uh-huh. They could’ve achieved some of that dream, but–I’m not against people downloading for free, I don’t blame the people. You opened up the company store at night with nobody there, so people went in and got stuff.

MR: Well, in my opinion, Napster sort of threw a brick through the window. Labels just didn’t have the foresight to lock the front doors in a credible way.

JT: Right. They created this environment, it’s all good but the people who collect the music and present it to you get all the money and none of the creators right now. But then the question is, “What does a guy do?” and I don’t know. A guy can proceed full-on in music but just be aware that it’s going to be really difficult to get any money. I don’t know if Kickstarter is the answer or what.

MR: If your son had decided to go into music instead of computers, would this have been the frank conversation you would’ve had with him?

JT: Yeah, I would have to sit down and say, “How do you think you’re going to go about earning a living from this?” [laughs] Of course, my parents did that, too. There was no answer, but now it’s even like if you have a success and you don’t get paid, then in that sense, how are you going to earn a living? Then you try to get a viral video. I talked to my friend Tom Rush, he had a viral video but it didn’t do him any good.