Online review by The Austin ChroniclePANEL: “IF I KNEW THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW”
Austin Convention Center, Thursday, March 19
Robyn Hitchcock: “I was ripped off, then fucked over, then I pissed a few people off, then I was on MTV and everything was all right.” Billy Bragg: “In the Seventies, they invented cocaine to get our money back from us. In the Eighties it was video.” Indigo Girl Amy Ray: “You could feed a small nation with the money you spend on a video.” Video may have been the leitmotif that, like Dirk Diggler, kept coming back up, but the “If I Knew Then What I Know Now” panel with Robyn Hitchcock, Billy Bragg, Jerry Jeff Walker, Indigo Girl Amy Ray, Kathy Mattea, and Roddy Bottum, was more about how you are inevitably going to get screwed as a musician in this business and how screwed up the business itself is. First, the entire thing is predicated on the improbable and the fallible. Hitchcock: “Let’s face it, McCartney and Lennon being born in Liverpool two years apart was kind of a lucky break… not only for us, but for George and Ringo as well.” Walker: “This whole industry is built on the fact that I have to remember the third verse.” Then, once you start making music, club owners, labels, and publishers are going to want to exploit you any way possible. Ray: “People would want to pay you in drugs or they would miscount the door so they could pay you less.” Bragg: “It’s your rights they want you to sign away.” Hitchcock: “I’ve made too many records.” Then, if you actually “make it,” great, you’re rich. Mattea: “I spent so many years being poor, I knew how to do that. I didn’t know how to be a grown-up with money.” The funniest thing of all – where “funny” means “twisted” – is that little to nothing of what the panelists had learned could help anybody in the audience. No amount of advice can keep you the musician from the sleaze waiting to take advantage of your talents. So, you still want to be a rock & roll star?
– Michael Bertin