Stories from the Edge of Music #45: Music in Paradise

MIDEM and weep--with joy for a winter reprieve

This week, tales from MIDEM, once the largest music business gathering of them all. Join 10,000 delegates in the south of France — in January, while the folks at home are shovelling snow.

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Toronto to Paris: welcome to Charles de Gaulle airport. Next stop, Cannes...

TIME TRAVEL: THE SUN IS SHINING WHERE WE’RE GOING

You’re in a time machine time. Close your eyes. Pretend it’s the last week in January. It’s cold and grey and it gets dark early and it’s likely going to snow. Welcome to winter in Canada, the UK and much of Europe.

Keep your eyes closed. You’re at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris; remember the Alan Parsons Project record cover? It’s 1973, and you’re on your way to Nice, and when you arrive in Cannes — a half-hour bus ride away — the skies are blue, palm trees are waving softly in the breeze, the light seems somehow different, and the smell of the sea is in the air.

And you’re about to become just one of more than 10,000 delegates at the world’s biggest music business convention. Here, now, the watchword is “business,” not “music.” A bit of a drag, right? But you’ll get used to it.

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Why I’ll always remember Gordon Lightfoot

How did I get to Cannes, you ask? Well, oddly, I have to thank Gordon Lightfoot. I had a handsomely paid half-time gig editing the house magazine for CAPAC, one of the two performing rights organizations in Canada that were, 20 years later, merged to create SOCAN. In our drinking days, Gord and I — just amiable acquaintances at the time — stumbled across each other in a downtown bar. What are you doing these days, he asked, and I told him I was working with CAPAC.

(Perhaps, here, perhaps I should explain that performing right organizations, simply put, collect licence fees from TV and radio stations, clubs, concert halls and other music users, and distribute the money that’s collected to the composers, songwriters and music publishers whose copyright music is being used.

(Needless to say, with millions of dollars collected and distributed each year, organizations like CAPAC — and now SOCAN — are run by people who collect money: lawyers and accountants and administrators. I was, in ’60s parlance, appointed as the house freak — the person who would spend his life hanging out with composers, songwriters and music business people. It was, in short, a dream job.)

Oh, Gord said, I’m going to their office tomorrow to join the organization. “Cool,” I responded. “Come to my office on the fourth floor and I’ll take you to the ninth floor to introduce you to the folks up there you need to know.”

So I did, taking him upstairs and introducing him to the general manager, the head of repertoire and other senior staff members. My job done, I went back to my office, only to get a phone call from the GM an hour later.

“Do you actually know musicians?” he asked. I said that I did, and I was called upstairs, given a pay raise and an American Express card, and appointed as a roving ambassador to represent the organization to musicians and music publishers. I accepted my new role with alacrity.

Shortly afterwards the question arose: who would attend the biggest music convention of them all? Apparently, nobody in the organization wanted to go — there was work to be done and everyone was busy. Given the alternative of spending the last week of January in the Toronto winter, or going to MIDEM in the sunshine of the south of France, I volunteered — a decision that took me half a second to make.

I continued, for more than 16 years, to escape the cold for a week of warm weather and music industry conviviality. Lots of contacts made, lots of goodwill spread around, lots of really good food, some music (but not as much as you’d think), and some stupid hi-jinks.

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Ah, those cocky Australians and the dumb Canadians

There’s a hotel hierarchy at Cannes. The best and most expensive hotel is the Carlton, and only the top presidents and CEOs of the major record companies (plus a handful of wealthy arrivistes from the larger independent labels) can afford to stay there. The middle tier of delegates, and some of the artists who are showcasing, stay at the Grand Hotel, but most of the rest of us stay at friendly dumps like the Hotel des Postes or in shared apartments. Or, if our expense accounts allow it, we stay at the Martinez Hotel, next door to the Carlton and a tiny night club which is full of overworked ladies of the evening.

And the rock and roll energy was found, every evening, at the Martinez, where a small coterie of ancient waiters tried to keep up with the drink orders placed by hundreds of boozy delegates crammed into the main floor bar.

I can’t remember exactly how it came about, but a bunch of Australian delegates challenged their Canadian friends to a 1 a.m. skinny dip in the sea; a dozen of us ran across the road onto the beach, shedding our clothes as we ran, and jumped into the Mediterranean.

What I will always remember was how frigidly cold it was. It took the rest of the week for my body to recover.

The Australians? Oh they stayed on the sidewalk overlooking the beach, laughing their heads off as the testicles of the shivering Canadians retracted in the icy cold.

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A brutally designed convention centre — known as “the Bunker” — overlooks the sea and dominates downtown Cannes

Heady days in the music industry

During my years at MIDEM, the way that recorded music was consumed went through staggering changes. First came the introduction in 1962 of the cassette tape, slowly replacing the 12-inch vinyl long-playing album; people could record just about everything, from songs on the radio to the latest hits on 45 rpm records to complete LPs.

As cassettes became more and more popular, the music industry responded with a mixture of alarm and hysteria. HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC screamed the record companies — but sales of vinyl singles and albums stayed constant.

And then, first in Japan in 1982, came the compact disc. Within months, the sale of CD players hit 400,000 in the US, and they cost up to US$1,000 each; within two years CD sales were over 22 million.

Along the way came the Discman (a portable player for CDs), the mini-disc (which never captured consumer interest and disappeared within a year), the recordable CD (blank discs on which you could record your own music, or anybody else’s).

But the CD was a godsend mostly for the major record companies. Initially, the price was far higher than equivalent vinyl discs (citing “development costs”); the CD could accommodate 74 minutes of music compared to a total of 40-odd minutes on both sides of a vinyl disc. The back catalogues of everyone from Bowie to Beethoven were reissued on CD with no increase in royalty rates, and manufacturing costs fell dramatically.

On the business side, there were endless discussions about copyright issues and “harmonization.” (The latter was a largely successful effort to get all the performing rights societies to adopt similar standards and procedures, subject to the copyright laws of each country.)

And here we are today, 40 years on, with CD sales now in a near-death downward spiral, and we’re seeing a revival of the vinyl LP format; those records are now costing up to $30 and outselling CDs. Young people are fixed on streaming but there are optimists who think they will eventually want to return to owning physical records — vinyl or CDs. We’ll see — meanwhile, you can’t give CDs away, let alone sell them to used record stores.

MIDEM changed ownership over the years, and the venues along La Croisette — the boulevard that separates the city from the sea — changed. A wonderful old convention centre, dating from Victorian times, was bulldozed and a brutally angular new venue took its place; delegates, universally, called it the Bunker.

COVID dealt MIDEM a near-mortal blow; the ownership of the event changed again and recently the event was held in June, not January. Currently, the city of Cannes — well aware of the financial windfall left by thousands of foreign delegates — owns the event. But MIDEM’s days, alas, seem to be numbered.

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Holger Petersen (left) and Al Mair — Canadian veterans at MIDEM

The Canadians at MIDEM

The late Al Mair was the first Canadian delegate to MIDEM, seeking foreign product to release on his fledgling Attic label. He encouraged my friend Holger Petersen who attended faithfully for more than 35 years, successfully marketing the artists on his Stony Plain record label to distributors from Europe to Australia.

Soon, Canada’s independent record labels, with bucketsful of financial support from various levels of government, created the “Canada stand” on the exhibit floor in the Bunker as a central business and meeting place for a growing number of Canadian delegates. Meanwhile, Quebec’s Francophone industry had its own separate and distinctive stand; as it is back home in Canada, there was minimal contact between the two cultures.

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And you get to meet the most interesting people...

As a delegate, I did what I could to keep my expenses down, but I did treat myself to a single self-indulgent luxury each year — a drink at the ruinously expensive bar in the Carlton hotel. One year, I literally bumped into Keith Richards as he was exiting the hotel’s revolving door (“Sorry ’bout that, mate,” he said). I had breakfast there with a well-known London manager, who thankfully picked up the staggering bill.

And one evening, at the bar with my solitary dark rum and Coke, I realized I was sitting next to Quincy Jones — who I had seen in England in 1955 when he was an 18-year-old playing in the trumpet section of the Lionel Hampton band. We chatted for 20 minutes.

An urbane, sophisticated and gentle man who — until his recent passing — spent many months each year in Europe, he remembered his time with Hampton’s large and powerful swing band with great affection. “It was the first time I ever came to Europe and it captured my affection immediately,” he said.

Quincy Jones’ first major music gig — touring Europe with Lionel Hampton’s showy and powerful big band. You can spot him at 1:35, second from the left in the five-man trumpet section

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FAREWELL, GOODBYE, ADIEU

It had to happen. After 33 long years, my favourite T-shirt is being put in the garbage. Ashes to ashes, and all that. It’s from the Edmonton Folk Festival, August 1993. Who played that year? I muttered, reading the faded names on the back of the shirt.

Ah, yes: Ellen McIlwaine, classic R&B singer Charles Brown, J.J. Cale, Ani diFranco, Steve Forbert, Roy Harper, Moxy Früvous, Laura Smith, Don Ross, June Tabor and many, many more.

Oh, and Randy Newman, who I interviewed on stage and persuaded him to play a Beethoven sonata. I often talk about widening the definition of “folk” — but Beethoven, you must admit, is bit of a stretch.

As always, such a grand festival…and such an over-worn T-shirt.

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A CHRISTMAS QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I’m also a strong proponent of anti-Bubléification wherever possible, which requires the listener to avoid the interpretations of festive classics by Canadian cheese-merchant Michael Bublé, who, whether you’re open to his charms or not, is undeniably a divisive figure in the Christmas music space, and whose entire festive repertoire has been recorded much better by other far less irritating artists.”

— Anonymous writer on Substack

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AND SINCE WE’RE IN A CHRISTMAS MOOD…

…here’s the most batshit crazy Bob Dylan video ever:

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NEXT TIME FROM THE EDGE OF MUSIC

More stories from MIDEM, involving Van Morrison, James Brown and a cruel joke played on your Substack correspondent. And a fond farewell to a dear friend.

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A FINAL WORD

You all have LOTS of Substacks to read, and most of us can only pay for a few of them. I don’t put good stuff behind a paywall to encourage “free” readers to upgrade to paid — I tried that, and it didn’t seem to work.

That said, in a couple of weeks I might put some personal stuff behind a paywall for the good 90-odd folk who have paid subscriptions. Could be stuff I’d share with a shrink (if I had one): childhood, two failed marriages, the friends who have my back, and even (ha!) what’s left of my sex life. Might be fun, and it would certainly be cathartic for me!

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