Jeff Black watches while the music industry starts to crumble

By Steve Wildsmith
of The Daily Times Staff

When the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood is abandoned, its executives scattered to the winds ... when the record labels of Nashville’s Music Row are shuttered and darkened ... when major labels have given up the ghost and died from the thousands of splinters of the diversifying music industry ... there will always be a stage.

Singer-songwriter Jeff Black knows this. It’s his saving grace. And in an age when being signed to a major label means pretty much nothing at all, it’s his security blanket.

“Live music will never die,” Black told The Daily Times this week. “You can collapse the copyrights, wrestle with legislation to see which corporate monster is going to get the most money, and there will always be live music. That’s why it seems like I’m always on a perpetual world tour.”

In songwriting circles, Black has something that no major label deal could ever buy — credibility. His debut album, “Birmingham Road,” made a tremendous critical and artistic splash when it was released in 1998. Drawing on influences from Tom Waits to Johnny Cash and obtaining contributions with such artists as Wilco, Iris DeMent and Geggy Tah, Black recorded a collection of country-tinged folk that painted vibrant portraits of vivid characters, from the Biblical Noah (on the soulful “Noah’s Ark”) to the imaginative boy whose playground is a cemetery (“Ghosts in the Graveyard”).

His songs were immediately seized upon by everyone from the aforementioned country group Blackhawk to the legendary Waylon Jennings. He drew comparisons to Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, as well as troubadour poets such as Harry Chapin and Steve Goodman. Unfortunately, his style is too loose, too ethereal, to make him an easy fit into the hit-making factories of Music City’s various publishing countries. After Arista Nashville folded, he struck out on his own, cobbling together whatever distribution and recording deals that he could.

“It seems like I kind of got started at the very end of the ‘good ol’ days,’ or the old way of doing things,” Black said. “I plodded around, played my shows, tried to write songs, got a couple of cuts and then got a major label deal almost 10 years to the day after I moved to Nashville. At the time, I thought, hey man, here we go — it’s all downhill from here. But then the label closed right after the record came out, and all of us were out there twisting in the wind.

“Luckily, I was working on another record, and I started seeing what was out there. For ‘Honey and Salt’ (a European-only release), I came across Blue Rose Records out of Germany. I licensed ‘B Sides’ to Dualtone. And I was always writing and working on songs. So I’ve sort of been prepared for the way things have been going for the music industry. It’s not the easiest, and it does create a lot more work, but at the same time, it gives you this gift of complete and total freedom.”

Since releasing “Birmingham Road,” Black has shared the stage with such contemporaries as Guy Clark and Steve Earle. In addition to “Honey and Salt” and “B Sides and Confessions,” which came out in 2003, he’s put out “Tin Lily,” which came out in 2005. It’s more of the same — songs about life and hope and darkness and the dawning sun that shine more fiercely than any of the country-pop tripe leaching out of Nashville these days.

This year, Black is working on a follow-up to “Tin Lily,” as well as a second volume of “B Sides.” Over the past several years, he’s taken his own publishing company — Lotos Nile — and with the help of his wife, Kissy Black, he’s turned it into a quasi-entity that does a little bit of everything.

“You can’t call us a label, because we’re trying to go down a whole different road with it all, but we are going to sort of have to become a catalyst,” Black said. “We’re going to have to be a springboard to a label, because with smaller distributors all over the country, it’s all about word-of-mouth now. The distribution networks are starting to breakdown, and with iTunes and Amazon and the like, if you’re organized at all you can get your stuff in there.

“It’s kind of like licensing your copyrights to a big publishing company — the more titles you have to sell, the bigger their company gets. And while you go from feeding one corporate monster to another one, the thing is you retain ownership of your masters. That’s one of the biggest changes in the way music is being distributed and discovered.”

Other ways include diversifying the way he books shows. His most recent tour is a prime example — he went from playing a music club in Cleveland to an acoustic music series in Columbus, Ohio, to a private show in Indianapolis. Tonight, he’ll perform at the Time Warp Tea Room in Knoxville. It’s all a matter of strategic planning — further proof that musicians these days have to be almost as savvy at business as they are at making music.

“It’s the fan-sponsored shows, the people who really want to hear your music, who are going to make all the difference in the world,” he said. “When it comes to a big label, I just don’t have the excitement for it anymore. It would have to be a spectacular deal, because I know for a fact that if they want to make you a big, big star, it’s going to cost them a lot of money, and they’re going to put it on your tab.

“When you hear a No. 1 song on the radio, that’s costing somebody a lot of money. It takes a lot of money to rent space on magazine covers. For all artists, all you can do is cross your fingers, roll the dice and hope for fame, but fame was never anything I was really interested in. Not that it would have made me mad, but the way things are going, it shows that music and the arts are alive and not dictated by corporations so much anymore.

“They’re alive and well, and more alive and well than a lot of people think,” he added. “If I can make some sort of artistic contribution to that, I’m happy.”