"I don't hear a single"

..."The future was wide open" sings Tom Petty, in "Into the Great Wide Open."  It's the line in the title, though - "Their A&R man said I don't hear a single" - that interests me.  It's a common complaint of record executives, that neverending need to bow to the commercial.  Record executives seem to live to find great bands, and then ask them to make music that will sell, rather than whatever music it is they are making.  It's like every Hollywood cliche.

But I wonder if sometimes these guys get a bad rap.  Sure, there are a number of masterpieces that wouldn't exist if the record company got its way, but I have to think that those guys, every day, deal with some young garage band that thinks they're the next Radiohead, when the executives know that they'll be lucky to break even on the album.  "Please guys, just give us something we can sell" and the musicians write an acerbic song about sell-outs.

Because let's face it, it's not good for people to get everything they want.  Artists given unlimited time and resources often produce self-indulgent crap.  Artists want to be left alone, but losing the sense of urgency to create an album is rarely good.  For example, look at Chinese Democracy - it's testament to Axl's talent that the album is listenable at all. But if he'd had someone breathing down his neck, someone with the power to pull the plug, isn't it possible that he would have committed to some decisions earlier, been content with only fifty different takes of the guitar solo, and produced the album in a mere, say, five years?

I think the ultimate example is Boston.  Boston started out as a couple of guys recording songs in their garage, in stolen moments when they weren't working, desperately trying to make a record great enough to get noticed.  Boston is called "arena rock" today and usually dismissed with Styx, Kansas, and so forth, but there are some stunning moments on that first album.  The back and forth between the bass and piano on the bassline to "Foreplay" with the guitars doubling it a minute later - this is music a band poured themselves into.  It was a such a success that they became one of the biggest bands in the world, and when time came to make their third album, they were essentially given a blank check.

Eight years later, they came out with a truly epic lousy album.  Why does this come as any surprise?  We understand that mindless self-indulgence is bad for rock stars when it comes to drugs, alcohol, or groupies - why are we surprised that when they indulge their "artistic" side, it isn't a work of shining brilliance?