I met Johnny Winter in 1984, shortly after his 40th birthday. It’s hard to believe that almost 28 years have passed since then and that he’ll be 68 on February 23, 2012. When I asked him about turning 40 back then, he viewed his birthday philosophically. “When you’re 40, there’s no getting around it,” he said. You’re not a kid anymore, you’re middle-aged, you’re an adult. It was kinda nice to me to make it this far and still be a successful musician. To me, the greatest thing in the world was to get paid enough so you didn’t have to get a day gig, where you could just be a musician. That’s all I’ve ever done and it’s a good feeling,” he added with a laugh. “I hope I’m still doing this when I’m 75 or 80.”

Mary Lou Sullivan and Johnny Winter during the recording sessions for I'm A Bluesman. (Photo by Dick Shurman)

Almost 20 years later, when I asked him how long he planned on playing during our weekly interviews for Raisin’ Cain, he’d had a change of heart. “I used to say I wanted to be playing the blues when I’m 80,” he said, as we chatted on his living room couch. “But 80′s nothing now; I’d like to go to 100.”

When I embarked on my seven-year journey to capture Johnny’s story, my goal was to preserve his legacy and give him his rightful place in music history. But the results of writing Johnny’s biography have been even more than I had imagined. Accolades for the book have come from far and wide and from some very unexpected places. Dan Aykroyd, a.k.a. Elwood Blues, called Raisin’ Cain “one of the world’s great music biographies,” and invited me to chat with him on two of his House of Blues Radio Hours. Jimmy Page’s manager David Enthoven took the time to send me an email to tell me Raisin’ Cain was “a great read.”

Johnny’s fans contacted me from around the world, praising the book and thanking me for writing it. I received emails and letters from throughout the US, the UK, Canada, Spain, Hungary, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Argentina, and Australia. A copy of Raisin’ Cain made it to the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, where one of Johnny’s old roadies is serving time for too many DUIs. Another copy holds a place of honor in the Library and Archives of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.

There were other honors as well. The Blues Foundation in Memphis presented me with the 2011 Keeping the Blues Alive Award in Literature, and the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) gave its 2011 Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research to both me and Johnny.

Raisin’ Cain not only reached Johnny’s fans and followers; it exposed his story and music to a new generation. A 10-year-old boy interviewed me for a school report about Johnny, and used the latest technology to embed you tube videos into his PowerPoint presentation. Nearly 150 college freshman heard Johnny’s music and story for the first time when I was invited to be a guest lecturer at a music history class at the University of Connecticut.

Johnny’s legacy, like the man himself, continues to thrive. He celebrates his 68thbirthday playing the Sighisoara Blues Festival in Romania on a tour that includes shows in Italy, Croatia, Poland, Greece, Germany, and Switzerland.

Happy Birthday, Johnny. May you still be playing at 110!

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Raisin’ Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Backbeat Books) by Mary Lou Sullivan

Author Mary Lou Sullivan sat with Johnny Winter for hours of exclusive, no-holds-barred interviews, covering the guitar slinger’s entire career. From toughing it out in Texas to his appearance at Woodstock, his affair with Janis Joplin, his stadium-filling tours, and washing out on drugs and the temptations of the road before finally fulfilling his dream of becoming a 100-percent pure bluesman, resurrecting the career of Muddy Waters, and winning a Grammy Award for his effort, this is a raucous roller coaster of story. Raisin Cain is available from Amazon, B&N, independent bookstores, and BackbeatBooks.com.

With the BRONZE medal:
Your FAQs Answered: The Story Behind the FAQ Series by Rob Rodriguez

With the SILVER medal:
Notes on the Lyrics of Spring Awakening, an excerpt of A Purple Summer by Steven Sater

With the GOLD medal: 
Stevie Ray Vaughan: 27 Years Since Carnegie Hall, an excerpt of Stevie Ray Vaughan: Day by Day, Night After Night by Craig Hopkins

Archer: Do you have any advice for those that would like to develop their professional listening skills to hear things more like audio professionals such as yourself?
Parsons: The art of listening is the key to any kind of career in this business. My training at EMI/Abbey Road was thorough in how to listen. I learned how to discern minute differences in pieces of equipment, and it helped me to appreciate what I was hearing. As you become experienced on a pro level you become fussier about how things sound and how certain pieces of equipment behave.

Archer: What do you think about the market evolution that has seen the CD format losing sales while the vinyl and digital download categories increasing their respective sales?
Parsons: I’m not sure vinyl is selling beyond audiophile purists, and I’m not really one of them. I’m reasonably happy with the quality of CDs, but I’d really like to see high-resolution downloads become more widely available. It is encouraging to see people listening to high-resolution audio. Eventually it’s going to be an all-download world…computers dominate our lives these days. We are just going to have to be tolerant of the longer download times. It’s just the way it is.

Keep reading this interview on CEPro!

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Alan Parsons’ The Art & Science of Sound Recording

Nearly three years in the making, Alan Parsons’ monumental ten-hour video series, The Art & Science of Sound Recording, is now available in a three-DVD boxed set! Narrated by actor and musician Billy Bob Thornton, the DVDs are divided into 24 sections, starting with a brief history of recording. Filmed in HD, this the most powerful instructional series ever created for music production.The Art & Science of Sound Recording looks at everything from soundproofing to mixing, and from recording guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and vocals, to recording a choir. Fellow professional engineers & producers join Alan Parsons in this top quality, practical, and cutting-edge guide, including Jack Joseph Puig, John Fields, Elliot Scheiner, Jack Douglas, Tony Brown and Chuck Ainlay. Artists and musicians interviewed include Michael McDonald, Taylor Hawkins, Nathan East, Rami Jaffe, Carol Kaye and Erykah Badu.. This invaluable instructional DVD set applies classic, old school recording experience to the modern recording scene, and is certain to be a standard work on the subject for years to come. Along with its fully interactive website, The Art & Science of Sound Recording is a complete course in modern recording. Available from Hal Leonard.

Guest Blogger: Steve Gordon, author of The Future of the Music Business

This is an excerpt from Steve Gordon’s blog.

Music Licensing Primer
In order to understand music licensing for any project, it is necessary to know that every piece of recorded music contains two copyrights — one is the underlying musical composition or song, and the other is the recording itself. The copyright in the song is usually controlled by the songwriter or the writer’s representative, a music publisher.  The copyright in the recording is usually controlled by the artist if unsigned or and by a record company if the artist is signed.  Songwriters and music publishers have an exclusive right to publicly perform their songs.  If you sing a song in the shower, you don’t need a license. That’s a private performance.  But permission is required to publicly perform music on any radio or TV station, Internet radio and streaming on demand, and in bars, nightclubs, restaurants, arenas, stadiums, bowling alleys, amusement parks, and any other place or venue where music is publicly performed.

However, if songwriters tried to license each venue and place that publicly performed their music they would never have time to write music.  Even large music publishers do not have the resources to do this job.  Instead songwriters and publishers use performing rights organizations or “PROs” to license their music and collect the fees payable from the licensees on their behalf.  The vast majority of countries in the world each have one PRO.  For instance, England has PRS, Japan has JASRAC, Germany has GEMA, Australia has APRA and France has SACEM.  In the United States we have three: ASCAP, BMI and SESAC.  They all have the same function: to license and collect monies on behalf of their members, the songwriters and music publishers, from anyone who publicly performs music.  And each provides a “blanket” license that allow the licensee to play any song in their repertoire. Together ASCAP, BMI and SESAC represent almost every commercially successful song in the U.S., and through their reciprocal relationships with foreign PROs, they represent almost all commercially successful songs in the world.

Owners of “sound recordings” are also protected by copyright law. Only the owner of the copyright in a recording of music has the right to make copies of that record and sell it because the exclusive right to make and distribute copies is one of the rights afforded by the copyright law to copyright owners.  However, in the U.S., unlike owners of copyrights in songs, owners of copyrights in sound recordings do not have exclusive public performance rights.  When the Copyright Act was amended to protect sound recordings in the early 70’s the broadcast community heavily lobbied Congress to carve out this right. They argued that broadcasters, especially radio, promoted record sales and they should not be forced to pay for a service that they were providing for the artists and the labels. They also pointed out that record companies not only encouraged them to play their records, they often paid DJs to play them, a practice known as “payola.” Congress agreed with the broadcasters perhaps because the politicians needed radio’s good particularly during their campaigns for re-election, and they needed the good will the record companies far less.  In any event, because owners of copyrights in sound recordings have no exclusive right of public performance, anyone can publicly play a record without permission. There is one exception — the Copyright Act was amended in the 90’s to provide an exclusive right to perform sound recording via digital transmission.  I will describe the impact of this exception when we discuss transmitting fashion shows on the Web.

Keep reading this article on Steve’s blog…

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The Future of the Music Business provides a legal and business road map for success in today’s music business by setting forth a comprehensive summary of the rules pertaining to the traditional music business, including music licensing, as well as the laws governing online distribution of music and video. Available from Amazon, B&N, independent bookstores, and halleonardbooks.com

You’ve seen internet sensation John Jacobson on YouTube doing Double Dream Hands. You’ve seen Double Dream Feet. You’ve seen him on Sprint commercials. You may have even attended one of his workshops, subscribed to his magazine, followed him on Twitter, or met him at Book Expo America last year. But now John Jacobson comes out with a brand new dance, Whack Attack. Can YOU learn the moves?

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John Jacobson is the author and composer of many musicals and choral works that have been performed by millions of children worldwide, as well as educational videos and tapes that have helped music educators excel in their individual teaching arenas. John has staged hundreds of huge music festival ensembles in his association with Walt Disney Productions and directed productions featuring thousands of young singers including NBC’s national broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, presidential inaugurations and more. He is also recognized internationally as a creative and motivating speaker for teachers and students involved in choral music education. John is the founder and volunteer president of America Sings! Inc., a non-profit organization that encourages young performers to use their time and talents for community service.  He stars in children’s musical and exercise videotapes, most recently the series “jJump! A Fitness Program for Children” and is the Senior Contributing Writer for John Jacobson’s Music Express Magazine.

Visit JohnJacobson.com
Subscribe to John Jacobson’s YouTube channel
Subscribe to Music Express Magazine’s YouTube channel
Follow John Jacobson on Twitter  @DanceWithJohn
Find John Jacobson’s books on Hal Leonard Books’ website

Visit Interlude to read the whole article.

Looking good, feeling good and sounding good are inextricably linked when it comes to playing our instruments. We strive to play with “good technique” but do we have the same commitment to play with good posture? Good posture helps our body function optimally, promoting efficiency of movement and stamina. When posture is “good” bones are properly aligned, and there is minimal strain on joints, muscles, ligaments and tendons.

Musicians sometimes perpetuate what I call the jazz “look”. When we bend and twist, writhe and lean, does that really convey intensity or passion? These postures are risky for our bodies and our playing health. Long-term, they affect how we sound. Undesirable postures are those that load or put stress on joints in an uneven or asymmetrical way, due to awkward, fixed or stiff body positions.

What are Risky Postures?

In necks: tilting, rotating or cocking heads forward or down.

In torsos: bending, twisting or leaning forward or backward and holding arms away from the body at or above shoulder level.

In shoulders: lifting, twisting or rolling shoulders forward, allowing shoulders to droop or hunch, collapsing chests.

In wrists: flexing, cocking or dropping wrists and deviating wrists. (turning your hand sideways toward your pinky finger.)

In hands: pressing with your thumbs and/or fingers. Squeezing your instrument to hold it.

Keep reading on the Interlude website…

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Playing Less Hurt: An Injury Prevention Guide for Musicians by Janet Horvath is available from Amazon, B&N, independent bookstores, and HalLeonardBooks.com. Visit playinglesshurt.com to learn more.

Making music at any level is a powerful gift. While musicians have endless resources for learning the basics of their instruments and the theory of music, few books have explored the other subtleties and complexities that musicians face in their quest to play with ease and skill. The demands of solitary practice, hectic rehearsal schedules, challenging repertoire, performance pressures, awkward postures, and other physical strains have left a trail of injured, hearing-impaired, and frustrated musicians who have had few resources to guide them.

Playing Less Hurt addresses this need with specific tools to avoid and alleviate injury. Impressively researched, the book is invaluable not only to musicians, but also to the coaches and medical professionals who work with them. Everyone from dentists to orthopedists, audiologists to neurologists, massage therapists and trainers will benefit from Janet Horvath’s coherent account of the physiology and psyche of a practicing musician. Writing with knowledge, sympathetic insight, humor, and aplomb, Horvath has created an essential resource for all musicians who want to play better and feel better.

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The following is an excerpt of A Purple Summer: Notes on the Lyrics of Spring Awakening by Steven Sater, available March 13, 2012 from Applause Books.

One winter night in 2007, our first Wendla (Lea Michele) texted me from backstage of our Broadway theater: “Were you thinking about our show when you wrote the lyrics to ‘The Guilty Ones’?” She was referring to how our sweet, unknown show had gone longing for a home for years until we finally got it on.

Something’s started crazy—
Sweet and unknown.
Something you keep
In a box on the street—
Now it’s longing for a home…

Lea (as ever) had a point. But I had actually been thinking about something else when I wrote the lyrics: namely about the guilty longing we all try to keep from ourselves. Wendla and Melchior have found such unfathomable pleasure—love?—in  each other’s arms.

And who can say what dreams are?…

I remember our Austrian lyricist first rendered this as, “Wer weiß schon, was real ist…?” (“Who knows what’s real…?”) I wrote to her, “It isn’t a question for Wendla of what’s real but, “What is this beautiful dream I am going through? Can I trust it? Is it substantive? Will it last?”

And who can say what we are?…

As Prospero states in The Tempest, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.” If we cannot know what dreams are, how can we ever know ourselves?

Sorrow is the shadow of our dreams, for it feeds on the unfulfillment of those dreams.  Yet, sorrow also fuels our desire to fulfill them. Like the lover in Shakespeare’s rueful sonnet, Melchior asks himself — how has he had Wendla “as a dream doth flatter / In sleep a king, but waking no such matter”?

“And now,” Wendla and Melchior have heard the word of their bodies, and it is their bodies that are the guilty ones:

Night won’t breathe
Oh how we
Fall in silence from the sky,
And whisper some silver reply…

The “silver reply” alludes to Shakespeare.  When Juliet calls “Romeo” from her balcony, the giddy young Montague replies, “How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, / Like softest music to attending ears!”

Transported by pleasure from the hayloft where they lie, Melchior and Wendla are like those wonder-wounded lovers in Chagall—falling through the heaven of a wordless love, their bodies whispering, and offering solace, to one another…

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In rich detail, Sater’s notes address the literary sources and allusions of each lyric. He also writes feelingly of what prompted the songs over the course of the show’s eight years of development. In so doing, Sater expands on his partnership with Sheik and his experiences with original cast members, Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff, now also known from Glee.

These notes will prove invaluable for fans of the show, for all those interested in theater, and most especially for all the young performers who will play the roles and sing these songs.

A Purple Summer is available March 13, 2012 from Amazon, B&N, independent bookstores, and ApplauseBooks.com.

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Guest Blogger: Mac Randall, author of Exit Music: The Radiohead Story (Backbeat Books)

Over the two decades since the release of their debut EP, the members of Radiohead have constantly pushed themselves to keep their music evolving. One of the great pleasures of being a Radiohead fan is to follow the path of that evolution. Sometimes you can hear the change within a single song over time. In this and two subsequent blog posts, we’ll look at three outstanding examples; in each case, you’ll hear the way a song sounded both before and after the band brought it into the recording studio.

First is “Nude,” which ranks high on the all-time favorites list of true Radiohead obsessives, not only because of its beauty but also due to its complex performance history. The band first played it live toward the end of the OK Computer tour; the version below is from an April 1998 concert in San Francisco. At this point, it had three verses, the second of which makes it clear—perhaps too clear—that the song is about sexual obsession. Thom Yorke accompanies himself on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, while the dazzlingly versatile Jonny Greenwood tackles a Hammond XB-2 organ with one hand and a glockenspiel with the other. Pay close attention to the melodic line Jonny’s playing in the chorus.

Although fans loved “Nude,” the band wasn’t happy with its arrangement. It didn’t appear on any of the three subsequent Radiohead albums, and it was rarely aired again live until 2006, when it was revived in preparation for the album that became In Rainbows. You can hear just how much they retooled the song in the magnificent 2008 From the Basement performance below. The second verse is gone (no great tragedy). So are the keyboards. This opens up acres of space and brings Colin Greenwood’s bass line—now much more chordal—to the fore. For a few seconds off camera, brother Jonny plays his treasured ondes martenot; his part is then brilliantly echoed by Ed O’Brien’s E-Bowed guitar. Yorke sings the song almost entirely in falsetto, including the final wordless melody, which should sound familiar if you followed my advice in the previous paragraph.

The repetitive-pop fan in me wishes that Yorke would still sing the “Now that you’ve found it” chorus twice, as he did in ’98. But that would lengthen the song and delay its big payoff. Although both takes on “Nude” are more than worthwhile, the sparser nature of the latter-day version gives it an air of spookiness that makes it all the more affecting, at least to these ears.

Mac Randall is author of Exit Music: The Radiohead Story, which will be published in a newly revised and expanded edition by Backbeat Books on March 6, 2012.

In this new, updated, and revised edition, author Mac Randall follows the band from its beginnings in suburban Oxford, UK, through the success of Creep and OK Computer to the traumatic recording sessions that spawned Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, on to the award-winning In Rainbows and beyond. This new edition also includes coverage of the band’s most current release and eighth studio album, The King of Limbs.

Available at Amazon, B&N, independent bookstores, and BackbeatBooks.com.

What is your favorite memory of your dad, Harpo Marx?

I have no real singular “favorite” memory of dad. He always made you feel comfortable with him, even on the occasion when he was angry with my behavior. (Of course, those times were fortunately very rare…heh, heh). So really, all of my memories are all my “favorites” because if you knew him, there were no surprises. Whatever it was, he always came straight from his heart. I suppose my most ingrained image of him was the vision of him after breakfast, practicing his music in front of the living room bay window, his harp resting gently on his shoulder as he transported himself to his other kind of surreal world.

Out of all or your famous uncles, who were you the most close to and why?

Gummo was the easiest to be with. He was soft spoken and pretty mellow. Groucho was the most intriguing of my uncles because he was a very unpredictable character. You had to be on your game at all times with Groucho. Though I toured with Chico and dad when I was but twelve, I believe maybe because of the 50 year generation gap between us, he was more or less indifferent to me, as he was usually in his own world with his peers, and rarely in good health, except when re-energized by any available Gin or Poker game. Zeppo, too, was usually in his own world with his peers and was difficult to get to know. However, my mom did have a wonderful relationship with his first wife, Marion.

How did Son of Harpo Marx Speaks! come together and why did you decide to write it?

I wrote Son of Harpo Speaks! for two reasons. Siblings of Groucho’s and Chico had written books about their father, but no one from Harpo’s family had done so. I thought it was time to complete the trifecta. Yes, there are new stories about the Marx Brothers never before published, and the close father/son and professional relationship dad and I shared together. But the book has another story that I hope people find very compelling; that of the “too Hollywood to believe” way I came to become a part of Harpo’s and Susan’s lives. I chose to write about that only after mom’s passing in 2002, carefully respecting her lifetime role as my mom, the parent. It is a weird story about rejection, abandonment, adoption, and acceptance that I believe many can relate to and understand the accompanying feelings attached to these issues that can affect a lifetime of one’s behavior.

Read the last seven questions and answers on Out of the Past blog…

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Son of Harpo Speaks!, in addition to offering a unique perspective of a very special man and revealing many stories never before in print, is also a book about a “too-Hollywood-to-believe” life-altering quirk of fate that ultimately brought him together with his parents. The background for this remarkable revelation unfolded unassumingly over a glass of wine and some conversation in the famous 1960s nightclub, Dino’s Lodge, on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. It would subsequently lead the author to explore the complex life task of dealing with his emotional scars of rejection and the secure feelings of acceptance, the latter due to his overwhelmingly good fortune of having been adopted by two loving parents.

Available at Amazon, B&N, independent bookstores, and Applausebooks.com.