Isn't Anybody Or Anything Special Anymore?

A Grim Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was a man named Thomas Alva Edison. He was a brilliant man. He invented lots of amazing things. One of these inventions was the Cylinder Phonograph. It was special. Or was it?

Across the Atlantic Ocean, a man named Emile Berliner had also invented something similar. What a coincidence! It was called the Gramophone. Edison's invention was cylindrical and Berliner's was flat. They were both made of wax and they each put strange sounds on them and said to their friends, "We can save sound if it doesn't get too hot. Just think what we'll be able to do with these things."

They thought about education. They thought about teaching the blind. They thought about information storage of famous events. They thought about the myriad things they could record but what was the first thing supposedly recorded.... beside gibberish that is.... a silly song called "Mary Had A Little Lamb." The first musical reproduction had been made.

Without knowing it of course, these men had invented the Record Business.

How could they have known that down the pike, names like Al Jolson, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Morris Levy, Milt Salstone, Clive Davis, The Beatles and God Lives Underwater would leap onto the front pages of magazines such as Cash Box, Billboard, Rolling Stone and Hits. These were called trade magazines.

These magazines used to play an important part in the promotion and sales of newly recorded sounds. They also made all the people who ran these companies (record companies as they were then called) feel proud and important. They would pay these magazines dearly for tiny little squares that told of the important new sounds they had put on wax ("waxes to watch") which they intended to sell. Of course the big companies bought big squares commensurate with their position and power.

And, for a while, times were good.

Now I forgot about this guy named Marconi. He invented something special too. It was called radio. With a radio transmitter, a station could send to millions of homes with receivers, all kinds of great music. A person could pick and choose from dozens of transmitters playing these various types of sounds. He could then select the type he would like to own and then purchase these discs for his own enjoyment. Oh happy day!

Everybody did well.

It was a great time for "Personality Radio" where insane men and women, with insane names got on the radio and did insane things. One DJ (disc jockey) was called "The Geeter With The Heater." Such merriment! That was until a very smart man from Dallas, Texas came along to put everything in order. His name was Gordon McLendon and he invented something really cool called "Format Programming." Welcome "Tiger Radio."

Now business really started to boom.

Things were so good in fact, that thousands of small record companies grew in every corner of the globe.There was all kinds of special music for every kind of person and culture. For decades things went swimmingly. Small companies became large companies. The large companies then bought up other small companies and became large corporations. Now called the Big Fish concept. (They actually bought up the competition.)

Since one could become very rich if they were successful at making sounds that many people enjoyed and it seemed like a relatively easy thing to do (better than digging ditches or cleaning windows) that soon, more and more people decided to create sounds to store on the (now plastic) discs.

Pretty soon there were more discs than the companies could sell and these discs started piling up all over the place. Soon, the corporations had to build giant storage ares called warehouses in which to keep the discs.

When the retailers and distributors (who were the middle men for the record companies) bought so many discs that they couldn't possibly sell them all, they sent them back to the companies that made them in the first place. Imagine that. The discs came back instead of monetary compensation, much to the companies chagrin, for they depended on that compensation to operate the huge companies they had built. They lost sight of the fact that less is actually more.

Too bad for the moguls, the A&R men, the Veeps, the CEOs, the promoters and all those lawyers.

They were strangling on their lack of foresight and greed and were blinded to the fact that the human spirit is finely woven through with the music of life and, that for some unknown reason, human beings can tell the difference between the real thing and a placebo.

Remember Edison, Berliner and Marconi? They're laughing their butts off and they all agree, that everyone up and down the line should have thought first of "Principles before Personalitie$."

From a 1996 issue of Cash Box Magazine
By: John Rhys

__________________________________________________________________

If you are an aspiring guitarist....please be sure to check out BluePower's Company Store. We have our first basic guitar lesson now available with more lessons being added soon. Help yourself....and help BluePower as well.

Martin Luther King....A Biography!

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955. In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.