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T. Townsend Brown
The Incorrigible Iconoclast
Last week I read an article at Huffington Post by Rick Carnes, President of the Songwriters Guild of America, in which Mr. Carnes beats the same dead horse he has been beating for more than a decade, decrying the impact that “piracy” has had on the decline of recorded music revenue.
SGA Prez Rick Carnes, who has apparently not been photographed since 1966
To make his case, Mr. Carnes supposes that if the Beatles were around in today’s shrinking music business, there would be no “Sergeant Pepper” or “Abbey Road” — by recalling the Fab Four’s retreat to the studio after their final, screamed-out tour in 1966:
After their world tour in 1966, The Beatles quit touring as a group…
Album sales allowed The Beatles to retire from touring and devote themselves full time to writing and recording. By focusing on albums as a unified musical statement in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Abbey Road,” The Beatles raised the bar for all the albums that followed and changed recording quality and technique worldwide….
The Beatles, by abandoning touring and focusing instead on writing, recording, and selling albums, invented the “Recording Artist.”
I’m sure that Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and a host of others would take issue with that particular point, but that’s a minor detail compared to the backward looking observations that follow. For example, this bold declaration:
Today there are few, if any, examples of true recording artists left.
Yesterday I posted a link to a video that offered a thumbnail sketch of the issues tangled up in the “net neutrality” rules that the FCC issued yesterday. The new rules have been pretty well reviled from all sides of the political spectrum. On the right, you’ve got whack job Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accusing the Obama administration of trying to “seize the internet” and make a socialist government agency like he did with health care. And and then there are voices like Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Computer, who gets to the real heart of the issue:
"Woz"
We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one of the most important times ever for the FCC, it’s probably the most momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the FCC itself.
So when you hear somebody like Mitch McConnell say that the Obama is trying to seize the Internet, just remember that the government is the only instrument that stands between your keyboard and monolithic corporate interests determining what shows up on your screen.
If there was a competition for “Confusing Buzz Words of 2010,” “Net Neutrality” would probably be at the top of the list. It’s a complex and convoluted issue on numerous levels. Like the FCC getting ready to “regulate” the industry when there is considerable doubt whether the agency actual has sufficient authority. Like the fact that they’re going to propose rules for “wireline” Internet (cable, DSL, dialup) in a trade off that will leave hands-off wireless. Which is sorta like regulating horse and buggies about the time everybody’s switching to the horseless carriage.
Last night “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC (with Chris Hayes substituting) did a pretty decent round up of the issues. Start your primer on the “Net Neutrality” issue here:
It’s pretty clear that — whatever the issues – “Net Neutrality” is an important concept. It just doesn’t look like anybody’s really got a handle on the issues. Nor is is easy to have much confidence that emerging enterprise can prevail over monolithic corporate interests in the unfolding debate. This one is going to take a while to shake out.
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At a retreat this past weekend, I made a brief and furtive, extemporaneous speech about the tendency most humans have to view the future in terms of the past — to view the tide of history through a rear view mirror, or, as McLuhan wrote, to “march rump-bumping into the future.”
I don’t think my little exhortation to try to see the onrushing landscape through the windshield was all that effectively delivered. Maybe I needed a visual aid…
This video has had nearly 12-million views on YouTube, so maybe you’ve seen it before, but I think it rather forcefully makes the point:
As I tried to say, the past is interesting and at times entertaining but not necessarily prologue. As this video clearly demonstrates, what we now learn from the past is that it teaches us very little about the future.
Meet Eldridge Reeves Johnson:
Inventor of the Recording Industry
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 19th and early 20th 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 20th 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.
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