AMG: Sometimes a Great Notion
This story is music from the other end, instead of playing it, documenting it so it would not be lost in the shuffle of time as most things on. This is that story, the story of AMG, the All-Music Guide.
I was into music, big time from back in the late 1950s when I traveled the folk-music circuit and participated in the folk revival from that time… or when I hung around as a high-school kid in Ann Arbor apartments listening to jazz before liquor by the glass made it economically feasible to have bands in bars. I was already paying attention.
And then of course, with our band the Prime Movers Blues Band, I was fanatically studying Black music which led to Black people and using them for the two grandfathers I never had, wise folks with real-life experience.
And the point was sharpened with the two Ann Arbor Blues Festivals that happened in 1969 and 1970, and then the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals from 1972 and beyond. I couldn’t believe it, I was in charge of feeding and providing ‘drinks” for all those players and getting to know them. I personally interviewed most of the players back then, first with audio, and later with video. I couldn’t have been happier.
And after that, in the aftermath of those times, I clung to my vinyl record collection like a drowning man to a masthead. And while outwardly I was becoming a programmer, teaching myself how to hack it, my busy-little fingers never let go of the rosary of Black music that had inspired me. And so, everything went along like that until, well, until vinyl and cassettes began to segue into music CDs. That was when it started, and it started with me getting ticked off, and I will explain why.
As Peewee Herman might put it, I really, really, really liked popular music, and not just blues and jazz, but all of the rock n’ roll that I came up with. Not only that, I had been initiated into classical music, and all the conductors and orchestras, and so knew a great deal about that. I had everything Mozart ever wrote and all of the Bach Cantatas, some 210 of them, to give you an idea of my idea of completeness. And I especially cared, as mentioned, about Black music. And to give you an idea of what happened I want to use Little Richard as an example, a performer I really listened to carefully. And of course, I followed all of the releases of Little Richard as they came across into their CD releases. Minutely.
And to my horror, as I picked up CDs that said on their cover ‘Little Richards Original Hits,” yes these were the original hits, but recorded some 20 years later by Little Richard. Anyone who knows his repertoire knows that Little Richard was red-hot for about three years around 1957. In fact, if you listen to the original hits of Little Richard, he has almost no imitators. By that I mean, people can’t even sing his songs or if they do, it’s a joke. I’ve tried. That’s how intense Little Richards’s voice back then was.
He was so deep in there that other singers could not even get intense enough to measure music time as he did. He killed it. And so when I listened to some of the reissues, they were not reissues, but re-recordings by Little Richard years later. What upset me was if folks new to Little Richard picked up one of these duds and assumed upon hearing it that they had heard Little Richard, that was sad. They never heard him and still they may reject him after hearing that sad attempt to reach deep into the mind where Little Richard originally did. I found it hard to believe that anyone who loved Little Richard would do such a thing, but you know they did just that. It’s all about money.
And so, in my tiny office here in Big Rapids, Michigan, where I still am today as I write this, I rebelled. I just could not let that stand. It was not about me; I had my Little Richard empowerment. It was about you and others, who have never heard him. That’s not going to happen.
And it started small, just my making lists of new CDs that were not what they professed to be. And lists ended up in Microsoft Word, and after that into Nutshell, one of the early PC databases. And it went from there.