Fame

My unstoppable rise to world indifference can be characterised in two phases:

First, between the years of about 1976-1983, I wanted to be a rock star, like Elvis.

Second, from 1983 onwards, I wanted to be a rock star, like Elvis, but only in my head.  I just wanted to be rich.

Suddenly, being famous seemed like too unpleasant and painful a concept to be aiming for.  I’ve never heard a famous person yet talk of the joy they feel as a photographer leaps out of a recycling bin, snaps a photo of you cuddling that rent boy with the words cum shot tattooed between his eyes, and the next morning finding that photo plastered all over the front page of the Sunday Sport.

Once I discovered I could write music, that’s mostly all I wanted to do; write.  But, how to make money out of it?  Of course, just as in my obsession with Hollywood, I was once again born at the wrong time.

The days of the ‘Tin Pan Alley’ song – or, its equivalent, the ‘Brill Building’ song – was long gone.  Publishers employed writers to sit all day in offices with a typewriter or a piano to write songs seemed like the dream job for me.

Even better was the Music Department of every movie studio in Hollywood – every major studio had one until the studio system dissolved for good in 1967, the year after I was born.  Being paid to sit in the California sunshine, with a typewriter or a piano, to write songs for movies seemed like the dream job for me.

In September 1938, at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, an up-and-coming producer by the name of Arthur Freed was making a new version of the classic L. Frank Baum story The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939).  The film was a musical, with a number of new, bespoke songs that, the studio hoped, would be sung across the land: ‘The Jitterbug’ (cut from the final release), ‘Munchkinland,’ ‘If I Only Had a Brain / Heart / the Nerve’, and ‘We’re Off to See the Wizard.’

These songs were all fine, but they had one problem; only one of them, ‘The Jitterbug,’ featured the studio’s fast-rising, extremely-gifted star, Judy Garland, and that was being cut from the film.  At the last minute, they needed a new song for Garland to sing, preferably at the beginning of the film, and they needed it quickly.

The film’s songwriters, Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, were told to go away and work on a new song that was to be ready by the following morning.  No pressure, then.

When they returned the following day and played it for producer Freed, he must have fallen from his chair; in less than 24 hours, they had written a song of such unimaginable beauty that it is, to this day, considered one of the greatest songs of all time.

The song was ‘Over the Rainbow,’ and it may be no surprise to both of you that it is my favourite song ever written.  The song appears in the first twenty minutes of the film, while it is still sepia-tone, and Dorothy (Garland) is walking with her dog, Toto after she has failed to get her aunt and uncle to listen to her as she reports the story of an incident in town.  Aunt Em (Margaret Hamilton) tells Dorothy to “go find a place where you won’t get into any trouble!”  Dorothy begins to muse aloud whether such a place could really exist.  Cue ‘Over the Rainbow.’

The song was almost cut after a preview in 1939, after which studio boss Louis B. Mayer and supervising producer Mervyn LeRoy both felt that appearing as it does less than six minutes into the film, the wistful ballad slowed the action down too much, too early into the picture.

Fortunately, that performance was restored into the film and the world got to hear what I believe to be the most perfectly conceived and written song in the history of the genre.

However, there were other performances of the song, far more emotionally intense ones, which were indeed cut, which goes to show the level of musical appreciation that Mayer certainly had – and LeRoy too, to a certain degree.  These remained unreleased until a complete, two-CD version of the soundtrack was released by Rhino Records in 1995.

Few songs can bring a lump to my throat on repeated listenings.  ‘Over the Rainbow’ is one of them that can.  It is heartfelt without being overly sentimental; its lyrics a perfect lesson in word construct, its music an equally perfect lesson in both melody and harmony.  As sung by Judy Garland, it is a lesson in performance, projection, perfectly controlled emotion, and anything else at all where song performance is concerned.  And she recorded it when she was just sixteen years old.

As you can imagine with a song of such unqualified brilliance, there have been many hundreds of cover versions of this song.  None of them, not a single one, come close to Garland’s performance, in my view.  The closest was the now-famous version by Eva Cassidy, who, while a complete unknown, performed it in a bar, filmed by someone in the audience with an amateur video camera.  In one of life’s devastatingly cruel twists, Cassidy developed skin cancer and died, all before she was ever able to enjoy one red cent of the huge income her records – including this performance – were later to generate.

Maybe it was because Cassidy was already dead by the time the world at large got to hear it that the song became such a huge hit for her.  Her performance was magical; expertly played by herself alone on an acoustic guitar, she allowed the vocal to soar and swoop to match the lyrics, without ever making it obvious or trite.  And, of course, there was that extra nuance of other-worldliness with the realisation that Cassidy had already found her place over the rainbow.

Today we worry and fret over the status of copyright in music; but, trust me, in 1939, it was far worse than it is today.  Neither Arlen nor Harburg, creators of this timeless piece of music, received anything more than their standard MGM salary for this song as it appeared in the movie.  The studio practically stole it from under them; a clause in their contract – indeed, everyone at that and all the other major studios in Hollywood – stated that any song or music written for a film, or related to the studio in any way, instantly became the studio’s property once it was performed on screen.  The song’s publication was a different matter; it took composers many years to fight for the income that was rightfully theirs from the publication of their songs, in the days when publication meant publication.  These days, a publication of a song does not necessarily have to mean that the song exists as a printed hard copy of sheet music that you hold in your hand.  It could mean, e-scores, online versions, or anything that constitutes demonstrating to the performer how the song is written.

I wrote at the beginning of this blog that I always believed myself to have been born at the wrong place at the wrong time; nevertheless, had I lived in Hollywood in the 1930s, and been writing songs at the studio – which, let’s face it, would be the only way a jobbing songwriter could earn a living in those days – I would have been shafted, rodgered, buggered good and proper.  I would write a song, Judy Garland would sing it, and Louis B. Mayer would take the publisher’s royalty from that song.  What a racket.

These days, it is both easy and difficult to get your songs heard if you are a songwriter.  There are many online sources to hear new music, but the major services such as iTunes, Google Music and the like, are dominated by the established acts and songs and, unless your song is exceptional, you will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to break into that market.

There are many sites that devote themselves to unsigned or unheard songs.  Why?  Because there’s money in it, of course!  There are charges to pay: registration fees, promotion fees, playing fees, and other charges that these companies take from you the more that your music gets played.  Then, naturally, there’s the dreaded advertising.  And, as a songwriter, you are faced with a dilemma: either go for it, and compromise your principles because you believe your songs deserve to be heard by the world, or not, and risk the eternal regret of never having gone for your dream while shelving your ten-thousandth book back on the shelves as you work for nothing as a volunteer in your local community library.  (How local authorities are scamming the very people who voted for them is the subject of a whole other blog.)

When I started writing songs, in the mid-1980s, the best way to get your songs heard was to join a band.  Thus, I was in a number of bands, some who performed covers who got gigs more or less every weekend, and some who played exclusively their own material and generally festered in the guitarist’s bedroom, only allowed out two or three times a year to play a set at your mate’s car boot sale.

Like most songwriters, I guess, I genuinely believe that some of my songs that I wrote with my dear brother Julian Butler are as good as anybody else’s out there.  And maybe one or two songs that I wrote on my own.  I know that Julian has also written a number of numbers on his own that are world-class.  Our last album was released online to major world indifference here.  I would be a fool not to take this opportunity to plug my music, even through this blog with just a couple of followers.  I would rather go for quality over quantity when it comes to followers of my blog and that, folks, is the main reason why my music has never got anywhere; fear of the unknown, perhaps, or maybe a fear that I would not be able to control my own destiny once the songs were out of my hands, or finally, a fear that my arrogant self-belief is unfounded (I don’t believe that it is, though).

Let me leave you for today with this thought: if there is somewhere over the rainbow where my music was known and understood, I would still rather have known the people that I know, loved the people that I love, and be loved by the people that do love me. x