Million Dollar Quartet

July 20, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Broadway musical “Million Dollar Quartet” seems to have been based on a photograph – this photograph.


Memphis, December 4, 1956 – Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash at Sam Phillips’s Sun Record studio .

The set of the show is the studio – an open stage with piano, drums, and microphones, a control room in the rear



The musicians are the stars, but Phillips narrates the play, coming downstage to address the audience, then slipping back into the studio or control room to be part of the scene. So it’s his play, and its message seems to be that this was the end of an era. Elvis had already left Sun for RCA, and Cash and Perkins, as Phillips discovers in the course of the play, were about to sign with Columbia.

But while this date might have marked the end of an era for Phillips and Sun Records, these performers, this studio, and the music they made epitomized the new era in music that had just begun – the era of rock and roll. It was equally a new era for the media that delivered the music, the era of records and radio.

The historical perspective of “Million Dollar Quartet” is disappointingly narrow. A more socio-historical Sam Phillips would have reminded the audience that only a few years earlier, most of the music people heard was not on records, it was live. Even the music on the radio was a live broadcast:

“Coming to you from Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook on Route 23, just off the Pompton Turnpike in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, we present the music of Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra.”

In fact, Sam Phillips had done just this kind of “live remote” in the 1940s from the Peabody Hotel in Nashville.

Nor were the songs so closely identified with particular singers. In Million Dollar Quartet, Carl Perkins voices his resentment at Elvis for stealing “his” song “Blue Suede Shoes” and turning it into an even bigger hit. That was something new. Before records became dominant, when the music business was live shows and sheet music, songs didn’t belong to singers. The Tin Pan Alley tunes, by masters like Gershwin and Kern, or lesser talents, were there to be performed by anyone.

But by the mid-50s, in the era of records, audiences for rock and roll wanted only the singer whose record they knew, and only that performance. On the old-style show “Your Hit Parade” (on radio, then TV), the top tunes of the day were performed each week by the same in-house singers (where have you gone Snooky Lanson?). But on new TV shows like American Bandstand, only Paul Anka could sing “Diana,” only Jerry Lee Lewis “Great Balls of Fire.” And they lip-synched to their own records. Audiences wanted it just the way they’d heard it so many times on the record or the radio.

A more sociological Sam Phillips might also have shown us a 45 r.p.m. record and reminded us that this recent bit of technology made records something teens could afford. You could take dozens of them to a party to play over and over again, something nobody would have dared do with the heavy and brittle 78s. The new 45s were light, cheap, and virtually indestructible.

But “Million Dollar Quartet” is not about that. The show is merely a vehicle for a greatest-hits medley. The other boomers in the audience may have been thinking about that yellow Sun label and remembering the first time they heard “That’s All Right” or “I Walk the Line.” I was also remembering when I was a very new assistant professor, opening the red-and-white issue of ASR and reading Richard Peterson’s article “Cycles in Symbol Production,” to which this post owes a huge hat tip. Ditto for his “Why 1955” (in the British journal Popular Music, 1990) which is more specifically about the coming of rock and roll and which you should read immediately if you can find a free download.

Summertime Blues

July 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why hasn’t Marginal Revolution done a “Markets in Everything” post on summer school?

In the fall and spring semesters, universities are effectively a cartel. Students are in the same position as New York restaurants looking for trash haulers when the Mafia ran that show. If you’re a student at Anywhere U*, and you want to take a biology course, you can’t go to another school to take it. Well maybe you can, but you will have to make some special arrangement. But at least you don’t have to worry that the Provost is going to pull you aside to have a chat about kneecaps and baseball bats. Aside from that, to a great extent, each school is the company store.

Then, in the heat of summer, the cartel melts, and higher ed becomes a free market. Students can shop around, while schools scramble to compete and offer what the market demands. And here is what the market, i.e.students, want:

• online courses (i.e., courses where you don’t have to show
  up)
  
• courses that don’t interfere with summer vacation,
  which means
  
  • courses that last only a short time – three
    weeks or so
    
  • courses that end by mid-June or that don’t
    start until the second week of August
    
• courses that meet a requirement

In my department, we had to cancel four sections that require students to come to campus and actually be in a classroom with a professor. But an online course that fulfills a Gen. Ed. category and was scheduled in the “pre-session” (May 17 - June 3) sold out immediately. The in-person courses couldn’t compete with pajama courses – ours and those offered at other schools.

A market means competition and flexibility not just in scheduling but in pricing as well. A university nearby was offering a tuition deal – take one course at full fare, get a second course at half price.** They’re also charging an additional $120 fee for online courses, not, I suspect, because online courses are more expensive to run, but because it’s what the market will bear.

As technology increasingly loosens the bonds of time and place, and as students are free to move about the Internet, education will more resemble this summertime market. I have seen the future and it is summer school. These changes also mean that I need to revise my idea of what the university is all about. I’ve been clunking along with an outdated model, thinking of our enterprise as education. No doubt that goes on. Sometimes. But the better model is the economic one that sees teacher and students activity as commerce – not teaching and learning but selling and buying. Students aren’t getting an education so much as they are buying credits. And that’s what we’re selling.


*My favorite generic university name is the one coined by David Galef – U of All People.

** At least, this is what colleagues here told me. On the school’s website I could not find any specific offer, but the Website did have a link to “Summer Session, Discounted Tuition.”

Lies My Online Dating Partners Told Me

July 15, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

OK Cupid may not be the largest online dating site, but it has the best data analysis – not surprising since its founders are Harvard math grads. They use the demographic data their subscribers provide, and they can trace the paths of messages – who sends to who, who responds to who. Last week, Christian Rudder, one of the founders, posted some detective work they did to assess the truthfulness of their customers. For example, the height distribution of their male subscribers is about two inches to the right of the national distribution. Either the OK Cupid guys are an unusually tall bunch, or they were standing on tiptoe when they filled out the form. They don’t need Randy Newman to suspect that the shorter a guy is, the less interested women will be. And they’re right (up to about 6' 1") They may be liars, but they’re not fools. It’s not surprising that people stretch the truth and their height. But why would people on a dating site lie about their sexual orientation? Yet the OK Cupid analysts found a difference between reported and observed behavior, at least for those who put their orientation as “bi.” Less than 25% of men who claimed to be bisexual actually sent messages to both men and women.

(Click on the graph for a slightly larger view.)

More likely, they weren’t lying. My guess is that the younger men were using OK Cupid as place to cautiously explore their homosexual tendencies. Maybe they were truly bisexual and didn’t need a dating service to find women. Or maybe they were homosexual but hadn’t yet come to identify themselves as such. Rudder speculates that as gay men age into their thirties, they no longer need to claim that they are bisexual. But that still doesn’t explain why even among the older self-identified bisexual men, only about one in seven is looking for both male and female partners. The data on women do not show so dramatic a change with age. But as with the men, most women who identify themselves as bisexual send all their messages to either women or men, not both.

UPDATE, July 16:

There are lies, and then there are lies.

Hastings-Dobbs Ferry Patch, NY - Ardsley Internet Scammer Pleads Guilty to Grand Larceny via kwout

Prisons Then and Now – Plus Ça Change

le 14 juillet 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Bastille was a prison, and I assume that like most European prisons of the time, it was a miserable place. De Tocqueville’s ostensible purpose in visiting America a generation or so after the fall of the Bastille was to study our progressive prison system.


Some things change, some stay the same. The Bastille was torn down during the Revolution. Now the only prison still standing within the official Paris boundaries is the Prison de la Santé, built in 1867, and it was not much of an improvement.


On Bastille Day in 1944 an inmate uprising was brutally suppressed by the Vichy regime. Recently, a blogger at Invisible Paris, Adam, referred to its squalor as “Zola-esque” (that’s French for Dickensian). He saw it only from the outside, but an American reader who had visited her brother* there then wrote to Adam providing more detail.

Veronique Vasseur, the prison physician, told me that the cells were full of rats and lice. Suicide is rampant, and depression lurks in every crowded cell.

That was in 1994. A few years later, Dr. Vasseur published an exposé of conditions in the prison. According to the story in the Times,

Skin diseases were rampant because showers were only available twice a week, though temperatures sometimes soared to more than 100 degrees in cramped cells holding four prisoners each.

Inmates stuffed their clothes in the cracks in their cells to keep the rats out, and most of the mattresses were full of lice and other insects. Some of the weaker prisoners, Dr. Vasseur came to understand, had been turned into slaves by their cellmates.

But what caught Adam’s attention in the letter from the woman who had visited the prison was this paragraph:

There were many international prisoners there awaiting extradition to their countries. Remarkably they all felt that extradition to the US would be the least desirable outcome, and they were correct. La Sante is unsanitary, and frightful looking - terribly crowded and unhealthy, but somehow civil.

Some things stay the same – French prisons perhaps. Some things change – in 1830, America was the country whose prison system a young idealistic Frenchman might hope to learn from. Today, our prisons have such a bad reputation that even prisoners in a disease-ridden, rat-infested French prison want to avoid extradition here.

No 21st-century de Tocqueville will be coming to the US to pick up pointers about prison reform.

* According to the Website supporting him, the brother, John Knock, was caught in a marijuana sting. He was extradited to the US. He pled not guilty. He was convicted, and sentenced to “2 life terms for conspiracy to import and distribute marijuana, and 20 years for conspiracy to money launder.” He was a first-time offender.