Talking Ticketmaster and Commerce Digression Rant Blues

Over at the Consumerist blog, there's a story about Ticketmaster, and how they're evil.  This is not news, but it did get me thinking, in particular about Pearl Jam's Quixotian attempt to destroy ticketmaster back in the mid-1990s.  It's hard to imagine Pearl Jam succeeding in that attempt, even if other acts that would have been imaginably sympathetic had joined them (say, Springsteen, R.E.M., Neil Young, U2 and Green Day, let alone other acts like Metallica or The Stones or the Eagles, who have generally been more shameless in their interest in filthy lucre).  Ticketmaster was, and is, simply too big to be brought down by anything less than the government.  But that, along with my continued frustration with the entire concept of the third disc of the new Dylan Bootleg Series entry essentially costing an extra hundred bucks, led me to ruminate on music and money and a bunch of other things.  

Let's start with the new Dylan album.  I've long since given up trying to make sense of the things that Bob Dylan decides to do.   Trying to understand the mind of a man who chooses to put "Joey" on an album while leaving "Abandoned Love on the cutting room floor is a mug's game.  But still, one does wonder exactly why he would only include the third disc of outtakes with the 150 dollar "deluxe" set that also includes a book of his artwork, instead of just putting out a three disc version for forty bucks, which would have been a no-brainer purchase for lots of us who try and think up new ways to give this man our money (I bought Live at Budokan for god's sake.  I'm not choosy when it comes to the recorded output of Mr. Zimmerman).  In the Entertainment Weekly review, the critic suggested, perhaps half-jokingly, that this was Dylan's sly way of encouraging fans to bootleg the Bootleg Series.  I don't really think this is true (although, that does involve me trying to decipher Bob's thought process, which I have sworn to myself that I won't do), but it's probably as good of an answer as "Bob just wanted more money" which also seems wrong to me.  (This is not to say that I don't believe that Dylan's in it for the money.  Of course he is.  He just is usually in it for the money in weird ways.  Dylan generally does nothing in the way that anyone else would, and this goes for selling out too- that Victoria's Secret ad for example.  It's almost too weird to be offended by, if you're like me and still get a little offended by hearing a favorite song used to hawk a product.  My point is, the easy way would be to sell "Like A Rolling Stone" to Rolling Rock beer, "Lay Lady Lay" to Viagra and "Mr. Tambourine Man" to Pepsi.)  This isn't the first time that I've been frustrated by the way that Dylan releases his outtakes and rarities- the Dylan collection that sells on iTunes, where for two hundred bucks or so you can download his entire catalog and about forty rare cuts, still drives me mad, mainly for the sheer inanity of it- there is no person alive who wants to hear both versions of the "George Jackson" single who doesn't already own the entire Dylan catalog.  That's just common sense.   (As opposed to how Neil Young maddeningly refuses to release most of his rarities and outtakes at all, but in a lot of ways Neil Young can make Bob Dylan's thought processes look normal). There really isn't a moral to this story.  In the end, I broke my own rule about illegally downloading commercially available music for the third disc.  Every Dylan bootlegger will, at some point, quote "Absolutely Sweet Marie" when defending their actions- "To live outside the law, you must be honest", so I'll just use that too as my defense, to the extent that I feel the need to defend this action, given how much of my money Dylan already has.  (For the record, anyone who takes a stance against Dylan here is morally obliged to also criticize Radiohead.  When they did their "pay what you want" deal with In Rainbows, they also sold a second disc of the album as part of a package that cost quite a bit more than I was prepared to pay for it.  Just saying.)

But I digress.  I was talking about Pearl Jam.  Everyone here read Sandman, right?  For the sake of spoilers and simplicity, I'm just going to assume the answer is yes.  Anyway, remember Lucien's theory about how Morpheus put all of the events of the series into motion deliberately, because he wanted to quit being the anthropomorphic embodiment of the concept of "dream"?  I sometimes feel that Pearl Jam did the same thing.  I mean, when you consider some of the decisions that the band made- fighting Ticketmaster and essentially not touring at the height of their popularity, refusing to make videos, their gradual shifts from grunge into a territory more closely resembling a jam band, initially releasing what would become their biggest single as a fan-club only issue and then, when radio stations began playing it anyway, releasing it as a charitable single giving all of the proceeds to Kosovo refugees- these are not the kinds of decisions that, say, Brian Epstein or Albert Grossman would have made.  It's almost as if they saw how Kurt Cobain got out of being the biggest act in the rock world, and thought "he has the right idea, but let's be a little more subtle".