SG: What do you think about MP3 players? Do you own one?
WC: I have an iPod. But, the quality gets to me sometimes; I’m a little bit of a stickler for sound, you know. I still have cassettes. I just put a new expensive system in my truck, and I couldn’t find a radio car shop that still sold radio systems that have a cassette player on them.
Everyone has DVDs and iPod players, and I still have these cassettes. I like the sound of tape, you know! I love mini-disks and CD players and that kind of stuff too, but I like to listen to a cassette once in a while of Count Basie or Coltrane or Led Zeppelin or whatever. I think the MP3s don’t give you that much of an option; I think you kind of get what you get.
SG: Are you in the download game? Is your music available on any of the legit download services?
WC: On the legit ones? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s on iTunes. I talked to those guys and we didn’t work out a deal yet.
SG: And, peer-to-peer? Do you know if your music shows up on any of the peer-to-peer services yet?
WC: I don’t know; I’m gonna check that out. [Laughter]
SG: Do you think peer-to-peer is good promotion or theft?
WC: If you’re an artist and you put your stuff out there, in this day and age, you have to deal with the consequences. Once your stuff is out there, it’s out there. We all have cell phones that take photographs and devices that record sound. You saw what happened to the actor who plays Kramer.
SG: Michael Richards.
WC: Right. Now, there are many shows that I attend and I perform and I see phones just coming up in the audience like lighters used to come up during the ballads of rock ‘n’ roll tunes.
And, this stuff can go to YouTube or God knows where else immediately; you don’t have control over it. That’s where the medium is now. So, you have to be happy, or just sort of deal with the industry in the way it is right now.
With these new phones and MP3 players and the Web, when you do a concert, your concert could be up on somebody’s site while you’re packing down your guitar. I remember in the early ‘90s, playing in London at the Astoria or one of these places.
We’d get up in the morning and go to Camden Market; your concert was there! Now, now it’s a different ball game.
I have a friend who’s shopping his vocal record, and he’s afraid to put this stuff up because he’s afraid it’ll get taken. And, I said, “Six in one hand, half-dozen of another; you want your stuff to get heard, you’ve got to get it out there.” He’s a no-name cat, he’s got nice tunes, he wants to get his name known. But, he wants to protect everything he has.