“Wherever there’s talent, there’s a talent manager.”

That’s a line from the recent New Yorker profile of Scooter Braun—the man who made Justin Bieber a household name. Here’s just one detail to show off Braun’s business savvy:

Braun uses Bieber’s fame as a P.R. platform for his other clients… He makes it worth Bieber’s while: when Braun signed Carly Rae Jepsen, he gave Bieber a fifty-per-cent cut. Braun told him, “We’ll be partners. But you’re going to do your part, being a loudspeaker: put her on your tour, sing a song with her.” And Bieber obeyed. The homemade video of him horsing around to Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” got forty-eight million views and made the song catch fire.

Seems kind of gross, right? Well, back in the early 60s, the same tactics helped an unknown folkie named Bob Dylan get famous, too. From Ian Svenonius’s Psychic Soviet:

[Bob Dylan’s manager Al] Grossman saw that the money in music was in publishing, and he recognized Dylan’s protean songwriting capabilities. He encouraged Dylan’s writing, even setting him up an office at the Brill Building… and ordered his other managed acts (most notably Peter, Paul & Mary) to perform his songs, thereby breaking him to audiences that would have found his voice undesirable. Every night at their sold-out concerts, before signing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Peter, Paul & Mary were induced to announce that it had been written by “the most important songwriter in America today, Bob Dylan.” 

The myth (and marketing) is that music legends arrive on the scene fully-formed and their careers unfold as a natural outgrowth of their artistic genius. But it’s rarely so — behind almost every musical genius who achieved success is a smart manager. (“When Mozart was a child piano prodigy, his father, Leopold, travelled around with him, booking tours and stoking his son’s reputation in the Salzburg court.”)

And when we do acknowledge that managers exist, our ideas about them usually fit one of two models:

One is the underappreciated visionary: “the manager who gives everything to the artist, sacrifices for them, and then, once the artist becomes successful, is cast aside” (Andrew Oldham and the Rolling Stones, for instance). The other is the manager as Svengali: a scheming puppeteer who exploits a star to satisfy his own greed or ambition (Lou Pearlman, the impresario behind the Backstreet Boys and ’NSync, whom Justin Timberlake later accused of “financial rape,” and who went to prison for conspiracy and money laundering).

But for artists who achieve long, prosperous careers, a manager fills a much more nurturing and stable role: they’re often a friend, supporter, and maybe most importantly, the one who keeps the money flowing so the art can get made.

Neil Young’s manager, Elliott Roberts, “handles Young’s business and artistic interests with a great deal of savvy, so Young is good at making money — which helps, because he is also good at making it go away.”

Bruce Springsteen and his manager John Landau have a soul-mate-esque relationship that has guided most of the Boss’s career. After they met (Landau was a critic who wrote a review calling Springsteen “rock and roll future”) Springsteen invited Landau to help out in the studio while he was recording Born To Run. (“He helped Springsteen cut ‘Thunder Road’ from seven minutes to four and advised him to revise the opening of ‘Jungleland.’”

Landau quit his job as a critic and became, in essence, Springsteen’s adjutant: his friend, his adviser in all things, his producer, and, by 1978, his manager… Landau fed Springsteen’s curiosity about the world beyond music. He gave Springsteen books to read—Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor—and movies to see, particularly John Ford and Howard Hawks Westerns. Springsteen started to think in larger terms than cars and highways; he began to look at his own story, his family’s story, in terms of class and American archetypes. The imagery, the storytelling, and the sense of place in those novels and films helped fuel his songs. Landau was also a catalyst in making Springsteen into a big business, pressing him to play bigger halls, overcoming his nightmarish early performances at Madison Square Garden. And he pressed him to think of himself the way Otis Redding did—as both an artist and an entertainer on a large stage.

When Landau had brain surgery, Springsteen was with him “nearly every day.” Indeed, when a good manager is lost, the result can be devastating to the act. John Lennon traced The Beatles’ demise to the death of their manager, Brian Epstein. “After Brian died, we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.”

Dig into almost any big rock and roll story and you’ll find a manager. Whether they were good or bad for the artist might be arguable, but they’re there. Elvis had Colonel Tom Parker. The Sex Pistols were the brainchild of Malcolm McLaren. Tony Defries gave David Bowie the money and the attention that helped him become Ziggy Stardust. The list goes on and on.

And that’s just the music business. Don’t get me started on how valuable a good literary agent is…

On “authenticity”: Bob Dylan vs. Joni Mitchell

In a 2010 LA Times interview, Joni Mitchell said this about Bob Dylan:

Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.

There were a slew of “oh snap!” type articles posted after that (I only found one that questioned whether it was really an insult at all—here’s a bunch of quotes from Joni on Bob) and I quickly forgot about it, as Mitchell’s claim was completely true—Dylan has always been an actor and a thief:

Steal a little, they throw you in jail
steal a lot they make you king

The question, of course, posed by the book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, is: Who cares? He’s also made some of the greatest pop music of all time. ¹

Then I started thinking: maybe Mitchell gave us something else in that quote (“we are like night and day, he and I”)—maybe Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, two friends and peer songwriters, give us two models of the artist, or at least two ends of a spectrum: the artist who gleefully thieves and borrows influence and the artist who tries to avoid thievery at all all costs in the quest for personal authenticity.

Now, I really don’t know that much about Joni Mitchell (I love some of the tracks off Blue, and I’m not all that knowledgeable about her output. (As opposed to Dylan, whose work I’ve studied and listened to endlessly…) But in Mitchell’s 1979 interview w/ Cameron Crowe, I kept noticing how much she talked about her aversion to imitation and copying:

There’s only a certain amount of fine work in any idiom. The rest of it is just copyists. Regurgitation. Obvious rip-offs. Mingus has a song, “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.” Sometimes I find myself sharing this point of view. He figured you don’t settle for anything else but uniqueness. The name of the game to him—and to me is to become a full individual. I remember a time when I was very flattered if somebody told me that I was as good as Peter, Paul and Mary. Or that I sounded like Judy Collins. Then one day I discovered I didn’t want to be a second-rate anything.

She then mentions that the previous work that she doesn’t care for is the work in which she doesn’t feel that she was being herself. (Supposedly, David Crosby once said, “Joni Mitchell is about as modest as Mussolini.”)

The things that I look back on and sort of shrug off, maybe in a weak moment grimace over {smiles}, are the parts when I see myself imitating something else. Affectations as opposed to style. It’s very hard to be true to yourself….I find it now kind of irritating to listen to, in the same way that I find a lot of black affectations irritating. White singers sounding like they come from deep Georgia, you know? It always seems ridiculous to me. It always seemed to me that a great singer—now we’re talking about excellence, not popularity—but a great singer would sing closer to his or her own speaking voice.

And yet, when Crowe asks about her reputation as a “confessional” songwriter (what Ry Cooder slagged off as “this white, middle-class introspective stuff—people elevating their neuroses to mythic heights”) she responded:

I usually use “I” as the narrator in my songs, but not all the “I’s” are me; they’re characters. It’s theater.

I don’t have all that much in way of a conclusion here—I’m just riffing, collecting ideas. I guess I’ll leave off with this quote by Bill Collins, that somehow didn’t make its way into Steal Like An Artist, and yet nicely summarizes the first chapter:

…gradually you come under the right influences, picking and choosing, and being selective, and then maybe your voice is the combination of 6 or 8 other voices that you have managed to blend in such a way that nobody can recognize your sources. You can learn intimacy from Whitman, you can learn the dash from Emily Dickinson…you can pick a little bit from every writer and you combine them. This allows you to be authentic. That’s one of the paradoxes of the writing life: that the way to originality is through imitation.

(Emphasis mine.)

UPDATE: wanted to include a paragraph on authenticity from this piece on Bob Dylan by John Roderick:

the idea of “authenticity” having anything to do with pop music is one of the bloodiest lies in modern history. Authenticity has NOTHING to do with pop music. That’s a belief system propagated by German music writers and humorless teenage assholes. I’ve known a lot of musicians, and after a while you realize they’re all authentic, all equally authentic. It’s hard enough to write enjoyable songs without also trying to put over some scam on people. I guarantee that if you put Katy Perry and Leonard Cohen in the same room, they’d feel like members of the same tribe. It’s only music fans who need to call one thing “real” and another “fake.” What the fans treasure as honest and real is almost always just a question of taste. Either you like it or you don’t—trite, but true.

Filed under: authenticity.