Outlaw Blues

"But already in December 1967 the difficulties are becoming apparent. For one thing, there are quite a number of good groups making records, and they all expect a slice of the pie. Can the same audience that--phenomenally--put the Beatles, the Doors, the Stones, and Jefferson Airplane in the top five on the LP charts at the same time, can they purchase enough records now to put Donovan, Love, Country Joe, Judy Collins, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Van Dyke Parks, the Hollies, Paul Butterfield, Jefferson Airplane, the Incredible String Band and Buffalo Springfield in the top five at the same time? All of the above have released new albums in the last month, as I write this, and the Who, the Kinks, Moby Grape, the Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, Randy Newman, the Grateful Dead, the Mothers and the Velvet Underground have stuff scheduled for the immediate future. Elbow room! cried Dan'l Boone. Every one of these groups expects to be able to spend $50,000 or more recording an album, and if this much good stuff is going to be released every two months, who's going to pay for it?
The immediate answer is clear: expand the audience. But since we've already moved in on most of the existing music audience, this means a very heavy undertaking: we have to increase the number of people who are actually listening to and buying any music at all. We have to not only show why rock music is good music, but why Music Itself Is Good For You and so on and on. And maybe even the quantity of really good stuff being released nowadays will help us do it. . . .
But . . . what if good creative art is not always appreciated by huge numbers of people the instant it's available? . . .
But what I'm really talking about . . . [is] the performer who expects to spend as much money on recording time and engineers and instruments and whatever as is needed to do what he wants to do. No matter how you divide up the wealth of the world, there is not at the present time sufficient time-money-energy on Earth to give every person alive an engineer, a set of musicians, all the instruments he or she wants and five weeks of time in a well-equipped studio. So anyone who wants all those privileges had better either be a fascist, or a person who is creating for more than a half dozen people. Because if people will pay for these records that cost of much to make, fine. If you want to spend all that money making the music, and they're willing to spend all that money to listen to it, nothing could be fairer. . . .
But . . . some of the artists who made these [hit] records are beginning to think they have a God-given right to take up as many people's time as they want in order to do they thing. Jabberwocky!
Beware the baldersnatch, my son. Beware the confusion that comes at the top, that comes from thousands of people waiting for your new album, that comes from record companies standing in line for the right to spend money on you, that comes from fourteen-page magazine articles about how great you are. Remember you are only you, remember that your prime concern should be doing what is most important to you, but that you have a responsibility, a very real responsibility, to every person other than yourself who gets involved in the achieving of your personal goals.
That doesn't mean hey sing "White Rabbit" for us, Grace. No, the point is not to think that you have any responsibility to anybody because they've bought your records or whatever they did in the past. The point is to think about the present, think about whether what you're doing is worth whatever is going into it. Because, forgetting the morality of the thing, what happens to our creative artists if nobody buys their new albums and they have to go back to recording in a garage?
Rock music is the first good music in quite a while to achieve a mass acceptance. It is also one of the few really worthy side-effects of the current state of mass media in the Western world. Because many rock musicians, rock producers, rock etcetera do not appreciate the significance of this, we are in serious danger right now of blowing the whole bit. With the best intentions in the world, the ideal of serving pure art and pure individual creative instinct, we may drive ourselves out of the recording studio and the mass media and back into our garages and audiences of half a dozen friends. If we don't try our damnedest to make music that is both of high quality AND accessible to a fairly widespread audience, we may look pretty silly a year from now complaining that no one pays us any attention."
December 1967, Paul Williams, Crawdaddy!