(Don't) Love You Live: Napster Fears Keep
Bands From Playing New Songs
Thursday March 22 11:47 PM EST
dailynews.yahoo.com
Gil Kaufman, with additional reporting by Joe D'Angelo
A Perfect Circle wanted to do something special for their fans when they
hit the road for a U.S. tour in January.
And what better gift than to play the grinding tribal rock tune "Vacant," a
much-discussed track from the ever-gestating Tapeworm project, which
was started by Nine Inch Nails' Charlie Clouser and features A Perfect
Circle's Maynard James Keenan and Billy Howerdel.
It allowed the band to veer from the dozen songs it had been performing
almost nightly for a year. Plus it lifted the lid on a project that's been
shrouded in mystery for more than two years.
If only that gift had stayed just in the minds of the 2,900 fans at Portland,
Oregon's Keller Auditorium.
"We only wanted to give it to that intimate audience," Howerdel said.
"That [the song showed up on Napster] takes the decision making out of
your hands, and that kinda sucks."
It's another twist to the Napster story. From A Perfect Circle to Neil
Young, Staind to Orgy, R.E.M. to Radiohead, bands are re-thinking their
setlists in this digital age, thinking twice about whether they want to play
unreleased new material that might pop up on the Internet before it's been
properly recorded.
What irks Howerdel about Napster and similar programs, he said, is that
they take the power out of the artists' hands, tampering with what he
considers one of the most crucial aspects of songwriting: timing.
"The sequence of a record, or the way you want to present yourself as an
artist — whether you want to attach visuals with your music, or however
you want to do it — you start to lose ability to do that," he said.
But when A Perfect Circle decided to put some "not-so-great" recordings
of songs from their early gigs, such as "Judith" ( RealAudio excerpt), on
their Web site last year, that was fine, he said, because it was the band's
choice. But when that power is put in the hands of others, Howerdel feels
violated. That's also why the group has held back performing the new A
Perfect Circle songs they've written during their current tour.
The online posting of "Vacant" also drew the ire of Nine Inch Nails singer
Trent Reznor, who wrote the chorus to the song and sings backup on the
Keenan-voiced tune.
"This happened to be the first properly 'demoed' Tapeworm song of a
collection of many," Reznor posted to the NIN forum on the band's
official site in February. "I have to admit I find it mildly irritating for it to
debut in this fashion [APC's live set] before feeling it has been properly
realized."
A spokesperson for Napster declined to comment for this article. The
embattled file-sharing service is blocking thousands of files from its
service as mandated by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel's injunction. (See
"Napster Watch" for complete coverage.)
Young Holds Back The Songs
If you caught Neil Young on his 1999 U.S. tour, you got an advance
glimpse of Silver and Gold, the studio album he put out a year later.
Songs such as "Good to See You" and "Buffalo Springfield Again" got
their sea legs night after night in a tradition the folk rocker has explored
throughout his career.
So you'd better enjoy that old cassette copy of "Hey Hey, My My (Into the
Black)," recorded from some tour long before Young put it on 1979's
Rust Never Sleeps ( RealAudio excerpt of album version), because you
probably won't get that kind of sneak peak again, according to the
rock icon.
In a February interview prior to his set at the massive Rock in Rio
concert, Young told the Argentinean paper La Nacion that Napster
and its offspring are a factor in his decision to hold back the new
material he's been working on with longtime band Crazy Horse.
"With the Internet, there is no more privacy and not even the chance
to express yourself in front of your audience in the intimacy of a
concert that lets songs evolve. You can't do this because they
immediately get circulated," he told the paper.
"My job is to make the music, but I don't want people to be able to
listen to my music if I don't want them to," said Young. The guitar
legend is notoriously exacting about modern audio mediums, lashing
out at everything from CDs to MP3s; he has said the latter sound like
"crap."
"Controlling the Internet is better than being controlled by it," he
concluded.
Love You Live
In the pre-Napster world, hard-touring bands such as Phish and the
Grateful Dead encouraged fans to tape shows, many of which
featured songs that had not yet been recorded for studio albums.
Phish's "Weekapang Groove" ( RealAudio excerpt) and "Mike's Song" (
RealAudio excerpt), for example, were performed live dozens of times
before they made it onto the group's 1997 live album, Slip Stitch and
Pass, while some of their songs never have gotten the studio treatment,
living only as concert staples coveted by tape-trading fans.
That ethic is carried on by a number of today's bands, from fellow
jam-band cohorts the String Cheese Incident and Widespread Panic to
new-wave metalists Orgy.
The makeup-wearing Los Angeles band composed a new live drum'n'bass
song for their recent U.S. tour, and Orgy had planned to try out a number
of unrecorded and unreleased tracks — before the tour was cut short due
to guitarist Amir Derakh's illness. Among them was "Sonic," a song they
performed every night of the aborted tour that was left off last year's
Vapor Transmission album.
"You need to play stuff in front of people to see how it works," guitarist
Ryan Shuck, 27, said. Although he and singer Jay Gordon differ as to the
benefits of playing unreleased material in concert — Gordon prefers songs
to be "exactly how he wants them" before playing them for fans — they
agree that an audience's reaction can sometimes help fine tune a track's
tempo and arrangement.
"Our songs are a work in progress until they hit the shelf," he said. "If the
songs are good enough, I'm sure people will want to buy the record."
Which is exactly what Tool/A Perfect Circle superfan Kabir Akhtar, 26,
was thinking when he downloaded a bootleg recording of "Vacant."
"I think that musicians today have to know that live music will hit Napster
five seconds after it is recorded," said Akhtar, the Los Angeles Webmaster
of an unofficial Tool site, who was unapologetic about downloading the
song. "Musicians decide to treat fans in Portland to a song, and there's kids
in Philly who couldn't make it," he said. "In the old days, they'd wait
months to buy a $30 bootleg of the show. Now they can hear it that same
night." And that, he said, is better for the fans.
If You Can't Beat 'Em
Some artists simply shrug their shoulders at the "see it today, download it
tomorrow" factor.
Although they didn't officially encourage fans to tape their shows,
Radiohead were unfazed that many of the songs from their most recent
album, Kid A, were available in multiple versions on Napster months
before the album's October release.
"It's a non-issue for them," a source close to the band said. "They're not
worried about it. [Singer] Thom [Yorke] even joked about how it would
be on Napster the next day, during a show last summer. What are you
gonna do, stop playing live?"
Savvy fans can find online multiple live versions of at least six of the 11
songs that are slated for the group's next album, Amnesiac (June).
R.E.M. have long made a habit of previewing songs from their upcoming
albums at major live events. "Suspicion" and "Airportman" were among
the four new songs the group debuted at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom
Concert in Washington. Napster, however, had yet to debut at that point.
The group took several factors into account before playing two songs
("She Just Wants To Be" and "The Lifting") from their upcoming album,
Reveal (May), for 190,000 fans at last month's Rock in Rio concert. One
of those factors was their realization that the songs likely would show up
on Napster, a source close to the band said.
"It doesn't help that you're going to have crappy versions of new songs out
there before the album's out," the source said.
"The worst thing that can happen is, fans hear the new stuff in a
[substandard] version and decide they don't like it," according to the
manager of a major rock act. "In this new world, you do something and it's
on the Internet, so there's a certain risk of what will be bad sonic versions
of something that won't be out for months."
Other artists seem unfazed by the trend.
As he has for much of the past year, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy showed off a
number of songs from his band's upcoming album at a March 8 show in
San Francisco. Among them were "Heavy Metal Drummer" and "I Am
Trying To Break Your Heart," both available on Napster under several
different names.
Bruce Springsteen, an artist who has taken bootleggers to court, has taken
no apparent action to stop the online proliferation of several of his
as-yet-unreleased tracks. The gospel-soul "My City of Ruins" was debuted
at a benefit concert in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on December 17; the track
was available on Napster within a week.
Like Orgy, hard rockers Staind initially were reluctant to perform new
material on the road, but their desire to move beyond the songs from their
debut weakened their resistance.
"They're the same questions we've been dealing with for the last few
weeks," guitarist Mike Mushok said. "We knew that as soon as we played
some of our new songs live, they would end up on Napster. Lo and behold,
after the first show, there they were. Napster definitely played a part in
[our] deciding what to do, but in the long run, we felt that we toured on
the same record for a year-and-a-half and it was time to play new
material."
While he was not happy with the sound quality of the Napster versions of
the new songs "It's Been Awhile" and "Open Your Eyes," — both slated
for the band's upcoming album, Break the Cycle (May 8) — Mushok said
he hoped fans would still appreciate even poor-quality bootleg recordings
and look forward to hearing the studio versions when they come out.
"This way, we still give the fans who are coming to see us something
different in the set, and we get to play the new material," he said. "Honestly
though, it is a tough decision." |
