Justin,
I was thinking about you the other day and your questions about what will happen to Texas music. I think in some ways it will stay the same, but there are going to be a lot of changes in the format itself. Music is always about adapting, not changing and as the people who listen to Texas music change, go to venues, etc. that will have to change to respond to the marketplace. There are a lot of challenges Texas artists are going through now that are just beginning to bubble up. Most of you are not seeing it yet but it will. You will have venues close, the chart system change, and more types of music you really never heard before phasing into the music you love. There will be things that change that you HATE, and you will not be able to stop them. And you can yourself adapt or be left behind.
If you want to understand it with a "real time" example, you can take my own career. I grew up playing in bands in the early 70's, learning the craft, learning to perform, etc. About ten years would go by before I got some tangible results. Selling out shows, having a presence in the local and regional scene. When we won that contest in 1984, we expanded what was going on. The music we did was "POWER POP" or what you might know as "ARENA ROCK." If you remember JOURNEY, LOVERBOY, STYXX, REO SPEEDWAGON, BOSTON, FOREGINER,BAD COMPANY, and groups like that. Usually big electric guitars, huge drums, experimental keyboards flavoring everything and a BIG LEAD SINGER. The songs were very poppy, singable, guitar driven with a lot of hooks. That was us.
Then, starting about 1986, things started changing. In our band, we declined after the contest win. The publicity died out, we slowly slunk out of popularity. Even though we kept performing, but to less and less people, our band flamed out. The leader, a tall black guitar player named Jesse Lewis, quit to go into politics. Had he not died in a car crash, we probably would be witnessing the second term of "PRESIDENT JESSE LEWIS" because he was pretty much identical to Barack Obama. Finally, everyone gave up, and I was on my own. I tried for a while to get interest in the band;s music in my solo career and even had management in Los Angeles and thought about moving there.
But one thing I had not quite understood at the time, but do now, is that the music overall was changing. The power pop and arena bands started dissapearing from the radio. The charts became dominated by harder edge bands. People like Motely Crew, Def Leapard, Matallica, came in, with harder edged music, more screaming and shouting than singing, and frankly, more images in their music, videos, hair spray, etc. than I was really comfortable with. It was not as much music as musical pornography, and I never really fit into that.
There are a few documentaries on this, the late 80's-90's run of Hollywood and all the hair bands coming out of LA.
But what I was doing was gone from the charts, gone from the magazines, gone from the big concerts. Those acts became "Nostalgia acts" 20 years later and KISS, The EAGLES, Foreigner, Bruce Springsteen, and others would be back to arenas and drawing the "Geriatric crowd" to pay $75-$200 a ticket.
Heavy Metal went for a while but was in turn replaced by Seattle Grunge, with Nirvana, and angst, angry, bitter lyrics, atonal lyrics and garage bands all getting the attention. Another off shoot was Rap, which became Hip Hop. All of these dominated the popular culture as the audiences for those forms of music came in voque. Younger people pushed the older ones out with their own music, and the older artists were forced out of the marketplace, died off or simply quit.
At the same time, Country music started changing. The old "cry in your beer" whiny twangy stuff, gave way to Alabama, Exile, Lee Greenwood, and more pop influenced artists. Actually almost all the people that came in had more to do with pop and rock a decade earlier. Exile had a big hit in 1977 with "I'M GONNA KISS YOU ALL OVER", They resurfaced with great country stuff and influencing a new generation. It was me seeing them and Lee Greenwood in concert that made me want to move to Nashville.
So I had to adapt. I took the same big hooks and melodies, guitar driven rock, and refocused it for the country industry, found out about how to write for this market, by hiring a mentor, Ron Muir (doing the same thing I do now for others) recorded in Nashville, made trips and finally moved.
I had to reinvent myself because the music changed. I didn't leave rock, it left me.
That is what I think is going to happen to you and your music. Texas has until now been pretty isolated. Artists were able to make a good living and the live scene flourished. But for many years it has been declining, although it is not as apparent as in other formats. Much more gradual. But it is happening. A lot of my tour people over the past fifteen years have been from Texas and coming from those road house and touring lives. They have been phasing out of Texas and coming here because those markets are getting less lucrative. Not everywhere, but in more places than you would think.
One day it will be very different. I don't know when that day will be but I am willing to bet it will be there before you really realize it.
That is what happens. and always does.
MAB
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