Rocky Road

Posted by J (A) on November 29, 2006 at 10:17:23

In Reply to: one thing posted by dave c on November 29, 2006 at 04:13:09:

By that logic...arguably the greatest recording act in pop music history has a contradiction in their own history, given their inability to secure a recording contract for quite some time in spite of the efforts put forth by their manager. 'Groups of guitars are on the way out,' said the man from Decca. The laundry list of record companies that turned them down was pretty long. Parlophone was a faint, last hope after their parent company had already declined.

Then there was the matter of getting a record out in the U.S. Capitol was disinterested enough to pass them off to outfits like Tollie, Swan, Vee-Jay...until they saw that there was an opportunity.

I said she was a self-promoter, which is different than saying one has a flair for marketing themselves. Sometimes people improve over time, other times great artists languish in obscurity (or, like John Kennedy Toole, die prior to their work ever seeing the light of day, in his case the book A Confederacy Of Dunces), in other cases it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Clearly things weren't working out for her here in the States, prompting the move to the U.K. Eventually she struck gold there, and you can debate talent all you want, Jimi Hendrix had to make the exact same trip to cultivate an audience. A little more than a decade later, so did the Stray Cats. Chrissie Hynde, anyone?

So you could make that same contradictory observation towards any of these people, and in fact any act that struggled prior to success. If she was poor at marketing herself, then explain how she got Lennon to buy into what she did, and who she was; maybe she learned from years of mistakes, as many do, and had a plan that finally worked once she was in...the right place at the right time. I don't know. But what seems like a contradiction on the surface isn't always necessarily so. After all, in the summer of 1962, surely the Beatles couldn't have felt confident about their prospects when it came to securing a recording contract...right?