The Perfesser Goes To Washington

According to Google (the world’s foremost authority on everything!), it was the great German statesman Otto Von Bismarck who first likened the process of legislation to the process of sausage making.  “If you like the law, and you like sausages, you should never watch either one being made,” Bismarck supposedly said.

And now, having spent the better part of two days running around the Exalted Halls of the United States Congress, I think I know exactly what he meant.

The purpose of this week’s guerrilla strike on the Nation’s Capital was to talk with the legislative assistants of numerous Congressmen and women about  recently introduced legislation intended to deal with the the legacy music and film industries’ decade-old preoccupation with the dreaded bogey man known as “online piracy.”

The junket was arranged by Public Knowledge, a “public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant information commons.”  In other words, an advocate for keeping the Internets open and functioning more or less freely. Public Knowledge is among the agencies and organizations that have taken a leading roll in opposing the proposed legislation, and I and some colleagues were invited to come to Washington to help make their case.

The actual invitation to make the trip came from Alex Curtis, a staff attorney for Public Knowledge who has been in Nashville for the past year helping the next generation of “content providers” navigate the shifting currents of the new digital frontier under the aegis of the “Creators Freedom Project.”   For the past several months, Alex has been acting as consultant of sorts re: the social marketing of “The 1861 Project,” so when he asked if I’d make the trip with him, I was more than ready to go.

Along with Alex, I flew to Washington with singer/songwriter and digital music marketing guru Charles Alexander, another songwriter, musician and web developer, Michael Lovett, and Nick Hardy, the manager of a group called Parachute Musical that is another Creators Freedom case study.  Once we arrived in Washington, we were met by Libby Koch, another singer/songwriter from Houston.  As we learned when we were handed the agenda for the following two ways, our hosts had aptly dubbed the expedition the “Musician’s Fly-In.”

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The first thing you need to know about the sausage factory in Washington is that each of the two houses in Congress – that would be the Senate and the House of Representatives – drafts its own version of a bill.  And — as one of the staffers we spoke with said quite matter-of-factly — almost “all legislation is introduced at the behest of some industry or special interest group.” And, often the first draft is actually written by somebody representing that industry or special interest.  I feigned shock at this news.  My attempt at a joke was completely lost on the staffer. Continue reading →

Introduction

From the spring of 2003 until the early 2009, I researched and wrote a biography of a man named Thomas Townsend Brown, a 20th century scientist and inventor whose life is shrouded in all manner of mysteries.  During the course of that research I also encountered the story of a man named Eldridge Reeves Johnson, aboard whose yacht the Caroline Brown served as a radio operator on a deep-sea research expedition in the 1930s.

What I learned in the course of that research is that that Eldridge Reeves Johnson could rightly be regarded as the man who created the modern recording industry.

Last week when somebody asked if I could identify “the grandfather of the recording industry,” I offered the name of Eldridge Reeves Johnson.   The correct answer to this particular quiz was not Johnson, but a contemporary of Johnson’s named Emile Berliner.  That is also a good answer,  as readers will learn presently.  But first, let me introduce you to the man who founded  the Victor Talking Machines Company — and built that venerable firm into what might rightly be regarded as the first  “media conglomerate” of the early 20th century.

The story begins with Townsend Brown arriving at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the winter of 1933 to board the yacht Caroline…

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Except from Chapter 30: The Caroline

Eldridge R. Johnson's yacht The Caroline

The “Caroline” belonged to a man named Eldridge Reeves Johnson.  The yacht was named for Johnson’s mother, who died when he was a child in the 1870s — well before her son would become one of the world’s wealthiest industrialists in the two decades that spanned the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.   Amid the railroad tycoons, steel magnates, and oil barons of the Gilded Age, Eldridge Reeves Johnson became the era’s first great Media Mogul when he started an outfit called “The Victor Talking Machines Company.”

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Eldridge Reeves Johnson was a giant of 20^th century industry whom time seems to have forgotten.  History has recorded that Thomas Edison invented the “tinfoil phonograph” in 1877, but nobody did more to popularize the “talking machine” than Eldridge Johnson.  Edison may have invented the first practical sound recorder, but Eldridge Johnson created the modern recording industry.

Continue reading →