Gary North's REALITY CHECK
Issue 391 October 29, 2004
THREE CAREER ROLE MODELS
Recently, I spoke to a small group of high school students.
In one of my presentations, I provided examples of two people I
knew in high school who were true whiz kids. One was a child
prodigy, and the other was a nationally ranked athlete. Both
attained stupendous achievements, but both eventually faded, the
athlete within a couple of years after graduation and the prodigy
a quarter century later by suicide. Both were examples of the
hare in the story of the tortoise and the hare. That story has
remained popular for about 2,500 years.
Three other role models have proven their case by now. I
began observing all of them in the mid-1960s. None of them
conforms to either the tortoise or the hare. Their careers
illustrate the same career strategy or, if not a strategy, then
at least a pattern.
A DAY AT THE BEACH
It was the summer of 1967. I was off to the beach. I
didn't go to the beach often. I grew up at the beach, and I
didn't much like it or the lifestyle associated with it. But I
had been invited to visit my friend Steve, who had just bought a
home about two blocks from the water. I think it was somewhere
close to Newport Beach, but I forget. It has been a while.
What I have not forgotten was how that day played out. When
I arrived, two others were already there, Steve's partner Tom and
Tom's girlfriend. The girl was a stunner. She had the biggest
eyes I had ever seen. She had a turned-up nose and long black
bangs. For some reason, she looked familiar.
Steve introduced me, first to Tom, whom I had not met
before, and then to Linda.
Linda. . . . Linda. Click! I knew where I had seen her.
I was a part-time disk jockey in those days. I specialized
in folk music, bluegrass music, and a little country-western, the
latter two not being normal fare in California in 1967, at least
not on FM radio.
"You're a Stone Poney, aren't you?" She said she was. "I
don't remember your last name," I said. "Ronstadt," she said.
By then, there were two Stone Poneys' albums, but I had only
seen the first, which had been released early in the year.
In those days, she was officially Linda Marie Ronstadt. She
was the key to the group. Her voice, then as now, was
spectacular. The album covers featured her in the middle,
because she was photogenic, although nowhere near what she was
like in person, close-up.
http://snipurl.com/a4mu
Steve and his wife, Tom, Linda, and I went to the beach that
day. That evening, we went to a local coffee house, as folk
music clubs were called back then: the Cosmos. Steve was the
featured performer that night. He sang mainly songs written by
him, Tom, or both of them as a team.
The Stone Poneys' second album, released a couple of weeks
earlier, featured two of these songs. One of them, "Back on the
Street Again," became a top-40 hit that year for the Sunshine
Company. The album also had the song that launched the next
phase of Linda's career, "Different Drum," written by one of the
Monkees, Mike Nesmith, the son of the inventor of White-Out, back
in the days before self-correcting IBM typewriters. It became a
huge success in 1968, hitting #13 for the year on the Billboard
chart.
Steve's career was a step ahead of Linda's in 1967. He and
Tom in 1965 had written what would become a classic, "Darcy
Farrow." He had opened for Ian and Sylvia in 1965, at the peak
of that Canadian couple's popularity. They put "Darcy Farrow" on
their latest album. His guitar work was as spectacular as
Linda's voice, and he sang well, too.
A few years later, I heard one of the Stone Poneys, Bob
Kimmel, introduce Steve at a performance. He said that someone
had come up to him and told him that the best thing he ever did
as a Stone Poney was his vocal back-up for Linda on "Back on the
Street Again." Kimmel admitted to the crowd that the back-up
singer and guitarist was Steve.
HIT THE GROUND RUNNING
I met Steve in 1960. We were in college together. I was a
year ahead of him. I was a folk music buff, and I introduced him
to the records of Pete Seeger and other folkie types. He began
playing the banjo a little. At the 1962 Spring Sing at UCLA he
and a group sang, although he was not a student at UCLA. He
played the banjo. Earl Scruggs was not threatened.
I mention this because, three years later, he opened for Ian
and Sylvia. Somehow, in about 36 months, he had so completely
mastered the guitar, singing, and songwriting that he could make
a living at it. Three years after that, in 1968, Vanguard
released his album: "Steve Gillette." Vanguard was the dominant
record label in the folk music world at the time.
The first Stone Poneys' album was released in January, 1967.
Exactly a year later, Linda became a star because of "Different
Drum." By the end of 1968, she made her first solo album, "Hand
Sown, Home Grown." That marked a first, or something like a
first: a pop star deliberately crossing over into country music.
I contend that there has never been a country music album
featuring a more versatile pop singer, except for her next album,
"Silk Purse." That's a safe statement, because Linda Ronstadt
became the most versatile pop singer in history over the next two
decades. I'll get to this later.
A problem for anyone who hits stardom or at least profitable
celebrity status early in a career is that public tastes keep
changing. This year's pop-sensation can become a trivia question
fairly fast. What seems like the wave of the future to the
spending public becomes a distant memory when the next fad rolls
in.
This is not a tortoise/hare problem. Whether you're a
tortoise or a hare, Andy Warhol's estimate applies: your 15
minutes of fame run out before you notice. But it didn't for
Linda.
Not many people can stay ahead of the crowd. A few
performers sense the change and do change. Bobby Darrin had this
ability. In Linda's case, she carried her fans with her after
the mid-1970s, when she was unquestionably the queen of rock.
She recorded albums that nobody would have thought could sell,
and nobody else did sell anything like them, yet hers sold.
She made it really big in the mid-1970s: "Heart Like a
Wheel," "Prisoner in Disguise." "Trio," her legendary country
music CD with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, was over a decade
away. She never stopped performing.
WHEN THE CHEERING STOPS
Steve kept performing, too, but the folk music phenomenon
faded in the early 1970s. He wrote some fine songs, but there
were no more hits to match the sales of "Back on the Street
Again." Other artists began recording his songs: Bob Denver,
Anne Murray, Waylon Jennings, Garth Brooks, and a lot of others.
But there were no crowds at his concerts.
I remain partial to his songs and his guitar work. He and
his wife, Cindy Mangsen, perform together. They do mostly
traditional songs and traditional-sounding songs, with the
exception of "Mr. O'Reilly," a clever song about Neil Armstrong's
next door neighbor as a boy. You can't beat these albums.
(http://snipurl.com/a4rf)
Besides, he spoke for all white haired American men of our
generation when he said, "I always wanted to grow up like
Hoppalong Cassidy. I just didn't think I'd look like him."
Their audiences are relatively small. The two are on the
road a lot. As his wife says, "We work by driving all day, and
then get to play music in the evening." Not a bad way to make a
living.
He decided a long time ago to pursue his talents as a
songwriter and performer of traditional sounding songs, but
demand has not been massive. He is faithful to his original
artistic vision, which he established four decades ago, despite
the fact that there has not been a lot of money in it. He has
seen his occupation as a calling, i.e., "doing the most important
work you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace."
Callings rarely pay very much.
In contrast to Steve, Linda has a different calling. Her
calling is her voice. She is not committed to a particular style
or type of song. It is not that she shifts when the market
shifts. She shifts and creates the market.
She has sold more records with more seemingly sealed-off
styles than any female singer ever has. Pop, folk, country,
light opera (Gilbert & Sullivan), 1940s ballads, Mexican: the
money rolls in. (Her father is of Mexican extraction.)
This September, she appeared at the Walton Arts Center in
Fayetteville, Arkansas. Tickets were $100 each. She filled the
place. A month later, Steve and Cindy played three blocks up the
street in a private home that is a part-time folk music
performance center. There were maybe 50 people. Admission was
$15.
Here are two performers whose career paths crossed almost
four decades ago, with both doing what they love doing. Linda
has succeeded in keeping a lot of her original fans and has
picked up hundreds of thousands of new ones. She has that rare
something that cannot be imitated or even predicted that keeps
people coming back for more, ticket money in hand. As they say,
nice work if you can get it.
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-----------------------
AND THEN THERE WAS BOB
I met Bob Warford at a radio station. I had a bluegrass
show on Saturday nights, when most people were watching TV or
were out on the town. He walked in and introduced himself. We
were both students at the University of California, Riverside. I
was a grad student. He was an undergrad. It was 1966, I think.
He brought me some bluegrass records to play. He said he
had a large collection. We got to talking. It turned out that
he was the banjo player for the Kentucky Colonels, which had been
the first bluegrass band in southern California, beginning a
decade earlier as the Country Boys. A couple of years later, I
heard him sit in with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. Monroe
told the audience, "This boy plays like greased lightning." And
so he did.
To pay his way through college, he had switched to electric
guitar. He played in a country music band in a tavern located at
least 100 miles away. It was a hard way to make a living. Then,
in 1970, he became lead guitarist for the Everly Brothers when
they toured.
His old partner in the Kentucky Colonels, Clarence White,
had joined the Byrds in 1968, which had switched from rock to a
new musical form, country rock. White, a master of the acoustic
guitar, was just as creative on electric. He had long been a
studio musician for West Coast country bands. Then, without
warning, in 1973 he was killed by a drunk driver in a parking lot
after a show.
Warford had begun playing electric guitar in a style similar
to White's, yet independently of White. When White was killed,
studios began hiring Warford to do the kind of back-up work White
had done. A search of the Web for Warford produces a lot of
hits.
Warford, unlike everyone else in the bluegrass field and
probably also in country-rock, was a scholar. He kept going to
school. Eventually he earned a Ph.D. in neurophysiology. Not
satisfied with a Ph.D., he went on to earn a law degree. He
still practices law. His email address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Years ago, he told me a great story. He and Steve had taken
a music composition course together at the university. Steve had
just written "Darcy Farrow," which was eventually to sell over
four million copies, performed by many singers. Bob was
supporting himself in school with his music. A decade later,
Steve hired Bob to do back-up guitar work on one of his albums.
Here is the kicker: they both flunked the course.
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't
teach, get tenure."
Why is he one of my career models? Because for him,
performing was not his calling; it was his job. He used the
spotlight as a means to an end. He knew that his greater gifts
had to do with ideas, not music. He was not seduced by the
applause. The money was good, but it was not his calling.
CONCLUSION
When you find your calling, stick with it. If it pays well,
so much the better. If it doesn't pay well, find a way to
support yourself, and self-fund your calling.
Linda was fortunate, career-wise. Her voice was her
greatest gift, and her voice could be converted into money. The
stream of money has not stopped. She has switched styles and
formats to be able to bring her voice to new listeners. Millions
of people started listening in 1967, and they have not stopped.
I don't recall anyone saying that she sold out when she abandoned
rock and filmed "The Pirates of Penzance." She crossed over:
from fame and money to Gilbert & Sullivan. It was hardly selling
out when she teamed up with Nelson Riddle's orchestra to produce
the "What's New" Gershwin/Porter album in the early 1980s. It
sold a million copies. Who would have guessed that there was a
market for three Ronstadt/Riddle albums filled with 1940s-era
ballads?
Steve has not departed from his original vision. His
material is mostly traditional, but there is not a large market
for this kind of music. His talent vastly exceeds his market.
His calling is his job, but his job is not the production of gold
albums. Too bad.
Bob did not find his calling until after he had completed
his Ph.D. Some people take longer to figure this out than others
do. He did not hit his ground running. He just hit the
spotlight running, and young. He got out of the spotlight when
he found his calling. He did play like greased lightening, but
he used this ability to grease his skids through academia and law
school.
I hope you have found your calling. I hope it's your job.
I hope it pays well. The important thing is that you don't
sacrifice your calling for the sake of your job.
Your career is your calling, not your job. Don't get them
confused.
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