Artistically Speaking: The Year Is Actually Thirteen Fifty

 

You can understand everything that's recently happened to the music business from reading the great Mack Emerman's obit in the The Los Angeles Times:

Mack Emerman, 89, founder of Criteria Recording Studios, where acts including Eric Clapton, James Brown and the Bee Gees made some of their most famous records, died Tuesday in Miami of complications from pneumonia, said his daughter Bebe Emerman. 

The Criteria studio, which he opened in 1959 in North Miami, has been operated by the Hit Factory since 1999. About 250 gold or platinum singles and albums were recorded at Criteria, which became known as Atlantic Records South when Emerman formed an alliance with label co-chairman Jerry Wexler and producer Tom Dowd. 

The records include "Layla" by Clapton's group Derek and the Dominos, James Brown's "I Feel Good," "Eat a Peach" by the Allman Brothers Band and portions of huge 1970s hits such as "Saturday Night Fever" by the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" and "Hotel California" by the Eagles. 

"I used to see 'recorded at the Hit Factory Miami' written in the back of some of my favorite CDs," singer Nelly Furtado said in 2008. "When I finally cut an album there, I understood why. The whole building has this creative magic." 

Maxwell Louis Emerman was born in 1923 in Erie, Pa., and began playing jazz trumpet while attending Duke University. With his wife and two daughters, he came to South Florida in 1953 to work in his father's candy business in Hialeah. He soon began recording live jazz and set up a studio in his garage, running cables into the family living room, where the musicians performed, his daughter said. 

With a loan from his father, he built Criteria, regarded as Miami's first world-class recording studio. Other musicians who recorded there included Black Sabbath, Bob Dylan, Gloria Estefan, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Lenny Kravitz, Lynyrd Skynyrd and R.E.M.

Jazz people - you gotta love 'em. Anyway, "he set up a studio in his garage,..." and - with computers - here we are again. With the advent of .mp3s, we've even gone all the way back to the age of 45 singles. I'm saying we've been stripped down to a pre-British Invasion version of the industry - and now we're trying to remake whatever's left of that skeleton - utilizing the tools of digital age, which are currently being directed at everyone and no one at the same time. 

O.K., so - if we're got one foot in the '50s - history (music and otherwise) is pretty clear on what happens next:

Elvis re-arrives. 

But only after a few "new" cultural steps are taken,...