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Rudy Van Gelder interview from 1995


Jim Alfredson

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2 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

I don't. Are you saying it sounds older on an LP than it does on a CD? 

Hmmmm...not primarily....both sound contemporary to their time. The linear-time math that has 1965 being "older" than 2014 is true, but not really the point. The point is that we like to talk about things "sounding dated", well, hell, everything "sounds dated" when things stop sounding dated is when time stops moving. That's true for pretty much everything, fasion, design, smells even (I've noticed a change in elevator smells over the years as different demographics become the ridership, different choices of perfume/cologne, soap/shampoo, food carried, etc.).

"Older" is not the point. "Period" is, and with recorded music it's a question of sonic archaeology, not so much "age" as "time". Of course you have do get the age to place the "time", but "age" is just the beginning, not the end. So, a 1965 record that sounds like 1965, hey, no problem, reverse engineer the sonics through whatever kinds of experiences and received data you have and "experience" the music in its "real time", illusory yes, but not inherently dangerous, and remember, in 50 years, 2016 will not sound like 2066.If you have a big enough experiential/informational backlog, if you know what TV looked like in 1965, you can tell that digitalized Bewitched reruns don't look like they do now when they first aired, or even in syndication (and this is due to both input and output, content and reproduction). But each iteration does carry with it auras of its time, and if you're the kind of person who can derive value from that, hey, it's there for you. And if you're not, carry on, no problem.

But a 2015 record that sounds like 1965? Unless it's a part of the concept, like using retro visual effects in a film for a specific/intentional purpose, then...why would you want to do that? And let's not even open that can of worms as it applies to actually playing like 1965 in 2016.....ggggrrrrrrrrrrrr, Gotta have a damn good reason for doing that, "because it's timeless" ain't it either. Abstractions don't change over time, maybe, but people sure as hell do.

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

 

I call everything "records" these days, have been for the last few years. I play my records, all of them.

.

 

Ah, OK. I actually do, too. But considering the topic at hand, I thought you were referring to LPs. But, I gotcha now. 

 

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

But a 2015 record that sounds like 1965? Unless it's a part of the concept, like using retro visual effects in a film for a specific/intentional purpose, then...why would you want to do that? And let's not even open that can of worms as it applies to actually playing like 1965 in 2016.....ggggrrrrrrrrrrrr, Gotta have a damn good reason for doing that, "because it's timeless" ain't it either. Abstractions don't change over time, maybe, but people sure as hell do.

See, I don't look at it that way. I think the sonics are secondary when it comes to placing a recording in a given "era/age". For example, if I hear Rockabilly, I'm already thinking 1950's. If I hear Psychedelic Rock, I'm thinking 1960's. Now, of course there are contemporary bands playing this music, but I still never associate it with the sonic quality (or lack thereof) of the recording. Is that basically what you're saying? Sure, reverse engineer the sound and make The Soundtrack Of Our Lives sound like they recorded their albums in the 60's. But, you'll still know otherwise, right? Those genres and the artists were a product of their era, not the recording equipment they were able to use. At least in my opinion, anyway. There was a style, a popular modern culture those artist all worked within. I don't know that a modern artist replicate that simply through sonics. Perhaps they could, but I'm not sure if they could fool anyone that was listening intently. There would just be too many other factors, whether it be culture, politics, and/or the many other musical influences that have entered their universe since those styles were popular. 

I think that's one of the reasons why much of Wynton Marsalis' music seems so watered down to many. Try as he might to simulate '50's and '60's Bop/Post Bop/whatever, there are simply too many factors and influences he's absorbed to allow him to fully place himself in that era/pantheon/whatever...

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Today's consumers seed tomorrow's archeologists,  that will be a point I make. That and you can be a consumer and an archeologist both, but as with any multiple identities, it tends to work better when one is aware of which one is being deployed at any given time, lest the correctness of function for one identity wreck havoc on the executional viability of the other (s).

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1 hour ago, Scott Dolan said:

Those genres and the artists were a product of their era, not the recording equipment they were able to use. At least in my opinion, anyway. There was a style, a popular modern culture those artist all worked within. I don't know that a modern artist replicate that simply through sonics. Perhaps they could, but I'm not sure if they could fool anyone that was listening intently. There would just be too many other factors, whether it be culture, politics, and/or the many other musical influences that have entered their universe since those styles were popular. 

I think that's one of the reasons why much of Wynton Marsalis' music seems so watered down to many. Try as he might to simulate '50's and '60's Bop/Post Bop/whatever, there are simply too many factors and influences he's absorbed to allow him to fully place himself in that era/pantheon/whatever...

Sorry, I think you're mistaken about this. The recording industry has CONSISTENTLY throughout its life, presented different opportunities to musicians and singers (and engineers and producers of course) to make changes to their music. For a good read, which deals with this aspect quite clearly - in particular with reference to rock - get a look at this. (This is probably the British cover illustration, but it's an American book, so your local library should be able to get it for you.)

MG

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Mindfulness of function and required skill set for effective execution of same. What used to be called compartmentalization, what "men" were targeted at as being infamously excellent at in matters of intimacy, now less pejorative but perhaps also more simplistically called "multi-tasking'.

Time and a place for everything, including fugue of roles, and certainly no moral obligation to take on all that, it's very much a choice, nothing more. But an archeologist who throws away all their vinyl because CDs "sound better" is no archeologist at all, nor is the one who refuses to hear what modern performances of modern music can really sound like on the grounds that it "lacks warmth". Those are both subjective consumer decisions, not the objective findings of an archeologist, who after all, looks at what is there AND for what is not there. Both, not or.

We like to think that being presented with options is an automatic mandate to choose which one is "better". I mean, if the option is life or death, or marry or desert, or eat or starve, yeah, probably need to make that chpice. But otherwise, enjoy both, travel multiple roads, not a single one. Binary Choices, false paradigm for having a chance of maybe experiencing the cumulativity of life.

But that's just me.That's what I want, for me. Anybody else, hey, not my gig.

 

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So be a pack rat? Even though I own these movies on Blu-ray, I shouldn't throw away my VHS copies? And for what reason, again? Are we truly talking archeology here, or redundancy? 

1 hour ago, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

Sorry, I think you're mistaken about this. The recording industry has CONSISTENTLY throughout its life, presented different opportunities to musicians and singers (and engineers and producers of course) to make changes to their music. For a good read, which deals with this aspect quite clearly - in particular with reference to rock - get a look at this. (This is probably the British cover illustration, but it's an American book, so your local library should be able to get it for you.)

MG

 

I'm fine with being wrong, but I'm not sure where you are coming from? I'm not seeing the connective tissue between my statement and yours. Can you boil it down for me?

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Redundancy entails multiple inventory of identical items. Pack-Ratism is an OCD type thing where volume of inventory trumps breadth of inventory. Practical considerations always bump up against philosophical goals, Art vs Commerece, one of the older games in the book, what do I want vs what can I have and the what do I really need. 

Otoh, shit does get cluttered, so cull as needed, just don't forget.

Or just be a consumer, It's fun, it's legal, and doggone it, it's necessary.

Either way, just don't shit in the closet, that's not what it's there for. 

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Redundancy entails multiple inventory of identical items.

Right, but that's what you mentioned above when you said an archeologist doesn't throw out his old vinyl just because he found a better format. I disagree. 

And as far as the want/have/need dynamic, art isn't a need. So it's not art vs commerce, it's art for commerce. 

I'll continue to be a consumer, but everything will be filtered through my archeologist side. That's involuntary. 

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1 hour ago, Scott Dolan said:

I'm fine with being wrong, but I'm not sure where you are coming from? I'm not seeing the connective tissue between my statement and yours. Can you boil it down for me?

In brief, as recording technologies have developed and new technologies have arisen, those developments have spurred the creation of new styles/kinds of music. He wasn't saying that, for example, rap developed because of recording and playback techniques, but that those techniques enabled what people were doing in the street to be recorded in a creative way, so stimulating the development of the music. And so on.

Back in 1925, the development of electrical recording, and the resulting improvement in the fidelity of quietly sung songs, stimulated the success of singers like Bing Crosby - ie singers no longer had to deliver a song like Al Jolson or John McCormack to get a message through. (Previous instructions to singers from Edison were to sing with as little expression as possible.)

You can never divorce the development of any kind of popular music from any part of the world from the development, and availability of the techniques used to record it. The book relates technological developments to musical ones quite well, though it doesn't reference jazz much.

MG

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Do get hold of the book, Scott. I didn't talk about rock and punk because I know so little about those kinds of music, which I just don't like listening to, but he makes the same arguments about them.

In a jazz context, however, I feel it right to wonder out loud the if impact on Gene Ammons of Bill Putnam's echo chamber effect on his wonderful recording of 'My foolish heart' (R&B #9 in 1950) caused Jug to concentrate more on that side of his playing and, eventually, persuaded Esmond Edwards, Rudy Van Gelder and Bob Weinstock to particularly facilitate that side from 1961.

MG

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Funny you should mention Jug and reverb...that reverb "works" to an entirely different end with Jug & B3 than it does with Jug and piano....With the B3, it's damn near visual, a whole other layer of sound to go through. With piano...not so much, it just sounds like reverb.

Also...Bob Porter & RVG...listening to Gentle Jug 3 in the car most of this week, the reverb on "Didn't We" is yet another thing still, transitioning from the merely visual to the outright hallucinatory, and I mean that as a high compliment.

So again i have to wonder, how much of this was board reverb, and how much was miking to get it from the room. Because as much as "we" all love Albert Lion, it seems that Rudy felt that Creed Taylor us the one who REALLY got all uh dat.

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I think it's worth mentioning that while I very much agree with Jim's fundamental reading of RVG's thesis--i.e., that the notion of an "attribute free" digital is largely a statement about the opportunity for fidelity and not necessarily about the product--I think it's impossible to read digitally recorded music as intrinsically value-less. To put things another way, in much the same manner that the pops, clicks, and hiss of analog media have come to be understood as "desirable" under a certain rubric of fidelity, things like excessive compression and digital artifacts have become a part of the broader cultural landscape. 

This ties a bit into what MG says above, in that genre and studio technology are often developed hand-in-hand. The process is deeply recursive--less so in genres where more value is placed in documentation and more in stuff like EDM or hip-hop, where the music is more receptive to engaging with and disassembling degrees of separation between performance and product.

The near-bleeding edge of hip-hop production for the past decade or so--trap music, certain exponents of IDM, self-consciously avant/industrial stuff like Death Grips, etc.--often edges into a territory where the falseness of the medium sort of becomes the medium. Once you infect the musical mainstream, as much of this music has done--both explicitly through tastemakers like Kanye West and insidiously through, say, a jazz band covering Radiohead (essentially) covering Flying Lotus--it's no longer strictly a macro question of analog v. digital but rather a matter of fidelity v. style. 

Again, this is neither here nor there when it comes to most documentary genres, but then you get into micro stuff like file conversion for itunes and mid-level stuff like remasterings of albums that were already recorded in the digital era. I've had the Axiom issue of Ask the Ages on my ipod for years, and I recently traded up to the Laswell remastering from (I think) last year--to my ears, the compression is significantly more noticeable, and we've entered a realm where both the cold sheen of early CDs and the roughness of analog have been replaced by a weird, dull digital warmth. So again, fidelity v. style.

To put things in another another way, I heard a musician in DC say that Yesterday's New Quintet was Madlib's way of trying to play jazz--now everyone is trying to play jazz like Madlib. We've come full circle away from drum machines to digital sampling to performative sampling (ala Dilla and Madlib) to basically just performing again, but trying to sound like drum machines.

--and on a completely different note, I'd always read the RVG reverb as being the product of some calculated room miking. With what marginal production knowledge I have, I've always read the RVG sound to be a weird convergence of smallness (e.g., the cloistered, mid-rangy piano and clear stereo separation between instruments, drums included) and bigness (e.g., booming reverb). I've always understood this to be one of the reasons why RVG's music still sounds so vivid and performative--it's the illusion of people in a room (rather than a "recording" of people who happen to be playing close to a microphone).

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Dunno about 'Didn't we', which was a different generation of technology (except it just sounds effin' fantastic!) but 'My foolish heart' got it from the room - to be precise, the toilet in the next room. (I seem to remember Atlantic used a toilet, too.) I think it took Patti Page to show what could be done with tape.

But imagine being forbidden to take a leak because Jug is playing :D

You showed the photo of RVG's ceiling earlier, possibly not coincidentally, with the 3 Sounds/Turrentine playing. Stan is another who really benefited from reverb. I can imagine that, if you play tenor sax in certain ways, and maybe even STAND in certain ways so your sound is DIRECTED up there, that ceiling would do things for your sound that other toothbrushes can't reach. Not all technological advances are technical technological advances. But Rudy would have known what to tell both those guys to get it right.

MG

PS Actually, I DON'T love Alfred Lion - I love Ike Quebec, who I'm sure had a lot more to do with what music was played on records than Alfred did.

MG

1 hour ago, ep1str0phy said:

Again, this is neither here nor there when it comes to most documentary genres, but then you get into micro stuff like file conversion for itunes and mid-level stuff like remasterings of albums that were already recorded in the digital era.

Sorry, I don't understand what a documentary genre is. Could you give some examples, as well as an explanation, please?

MG

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Re: Alfred Lion, supposedly he attended "most every" mastering session for his records, and was the only label head to consistently so do. So he knew what he wanted a "Blue Note record" to sound like, and was there to see that it did.

The reason I wonder about the RVG reverb is some of the later Muse sides, especially the Etta Jones records. If that's just all room, it must be an ungodly combination of the mike she was singing into and some stealth mike, like 5 miles up in the ceiling.

Astute observation about the Madlibish paradigm shift, and please, what is "trap music"? Broken Beat was a real game changer for me, but as old folks are wont to do, it had already happened by the time I found it. Oh well, still want to know what the cool kids are up to, uh...last year. :g

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Re: "documentary genres"--sloppy/best fit wording on my part that I thought got the point across, but I guess not. I use it to mean genres where the principal goal is the recording of the performance rather than (for lack of a better phrase) the "performative" creation of a sonic work. There's obviously a lot of slippage and play. Recordings of DIY punk, ESP free jazz, and some early no wave are pretty raw, uninflected recordings, but then lo-fi is an aesthetic that people both recognize and try to emulate. Apropos of the conversation here, the mid-60's RVG stuff is on one hand an attempt to capture live performance but on the other a pretty sophisticated and (apparently) arcane convergence of recording technique and well-rehearsed playing by often great musicians. 

This is now getting into a broader (tangential issue)- it's a major sticking point of mine, though one my knowledge of is incomplete at best, but I've often wondered why there is an (often silent, but present) taboo against the studio inflection of recorded jazz performance. One size definitely does not fit all and I can't imagine how overdubs or excessive panning would benefit 50's Miles or the Jazz Messengers, but when the oft-parroted argument that jazz has lost touch with mainstream audiences rears its head, I imagine a lot of it has to do with the music's broader reluctance to keep pace with trends in production techniques and studio experimentation.

The question then becomes spontaneity and performance v. stylistic breadth and the idea of a "finalized" work of art, and I don't think that there's a better or worse option here--rather, it becomes a matter of whether jazz musicians, patrons, producers and the like wish to have a broader or narrower range of possibilities for the music. Too much premium on spontaneity and you have the very dry and underpowered CIMP aesthetic. Too much importance placed on the sound of innovation rather than the approach and you have DIY bass, Roy Haynes playing an oversized drum kit, and synths appearing on random straight ahead jazz albums. A lot has happened in the world and culture since the 1960's, and fetishizing classic Blue Note records as a model for 21st century music ignores the degree of artifice involved--from the RVG piano sound to the sound of Rudy scrambling to pull down the fader as Tony Williams goes balls out on Out to Lunch

And to further qualify the notion of jazz as a genre that is more interested in documentation than experimentation--there's plenty of classic music that undermines this premise: Teo's production work with Miles and Mingus, Creed Taylor stuff, Ornette's post-Science Fiction career, jazz's long history of solo/overdub albums (from Keith's Restoration Ruin to Hutch's Solo/Quartet and so on), bass overdubs on Jazz at Massey Hall, and so on. There are overdubs on A Love Supreme for heaven's sake. So maybe documentation v. production is an illusion, but in my narrow experience this division does exist--if only in the minds and hearts of people rather than history. 

As for the trap music thing--the long story short is that it's a genre of ultraviolent rap that originated in the 90's but only really flourished in the last decade or so. There's a thematic underpinning to a lot of it--drugs, crime, poverty, violence, etc.--but the notion of "trap music" has also come to serve as a marker for certain now-widespread production techniques: archaic drum machine sounds, swooning strings and synth sounds, and double time hi-hats. It's an interesting case of a series of anachronisms getting remade into something with renewed cultural cache. IIRC, it started in the south and kind of exploded into the mainstream with guys like T.I. and Rick Ross, but it's taken on importance as actual social music in places like Chicago (where the convergence between hip-hop, poverty, and crime are still very real and less the stuff of valorization). 

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Ok, thanks, I have heard trap music, then, but not by that specific name. I'm an interested bystander from afar, not an active participant...obviously.

But as somebody who does, occasionly yet ongoingly, listen to local hip-hop radio, commercial and community access, just because  Black Radio is something that has never not been a part of My Jazz Awareness, I feel very strongly when going from a day or two of K104 to KNTU that I've been taken from the streets, paved with fool's gold that they may often be, and placed in some world that no longer exists except by some type of unnatural intervention, endless iterations of That Same Thing, only "cleaner" in EVERY way, it's just creepy, especially when the occasional REAL That Thing gets played...it's like trotting out animatronic POWs or some shit,  I don't know. But I can handle local hip-hop radio better and for longer than I can handle local jazz radio. Right now, though, between the Desi stations and the 50 Bajillion Spanish stations that each play a seemingly different variety of THAT Same Thing, hey, why stay too long anyplace where the food's not fresh?

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

But as somebody who does, occasionly yet ongoingly, listen to local hip-hop radio, commercial and community access, just because  Black Radio is something that has never not been a part of My Jazz Awareness, I feel very strongly when going from a day or two of K104 to KNTU that I've been taken from the streets, paved with fool's gold that they may often be, and placed in some world that no longer exists except by some type of unnatural intervention, endless iterations of That Same Thing, only "cleaner" in EVERY way, it's just creepy, especially when the occasional REAL That Thing gets played...it's like trotting out animatronic POWs or some shit,  I don't know. But I can handle local hip-hop radio better and for longer than I can handle local jazz radio. Right now, though, between the Desi stations and the 50 Bajillion Spanish stations that each play a seemingly different variety of THAT Same Thing, hey, why stay too long anyplace where the food's not fresh?

It's very possible that the same people who feel threatened by the likes of Chief Keef and Young Chop today are the same folks who will happily listen to N.W.A. without regard to or remembrance of the circumstances of the latter's ascension. The paradox of Straight Outta Compton (the movie) is that it presents an unreal, valorized account of music that was about reality and ugliness. That film was like 50% legacy building and 50% an indication of the fact that N.W.A. had suddenly become either (or both) and institution and/or a cultural artifact--despite the fact that social, political, and racial trends had not and have not kept pace with the ensuing 25+ years of music. The propagation of trap music is in part the world's way of filling a social role that the likes of N.W.A. (and later Tupac, or maybe Nas, or early Jay-Z, or whatever) had vacated, even though said role had never really lost its broader relevance.

If there's anything about the vinyl resurgence that has stuck with me, it's that music has an uncanny ability to invent itself over and over and over again. I say "invent" carefully, rather than "reinvent." It's like the stuff my friend said about Madlib (above)--music isn't innovative until suddenly it is, after the necessary time has passed since the last iteration and the social need has arisen again.

Another friend of mine, drummer Dave Mihaly, uses the phrase "so old it's new." Willis "Gatortail" Jackson v. Albert Ayler--seriously only years apart and context aside (prior to New Grass, anyway). Hendrix and Buddy Guy. Afrika Bambaataa and P-Funk and Sun Ra. Hell, P-Funk and G-Funk. I once had a champion of the "great white canon" preaching to me that jazz was absolutely nothing new or impressive, and that baroque organ was the provenance of improvisation. I'm sure there's a caveman who would argue differently. 

On the other hand--and in a very real sense--I think that by the time a lot of socially relevant music reaches the masses (ala N.W.A. or radio-read hip-hop), it has already lost a lot of its immediate danger. Reality will have warped again in the meantime. 

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About Madlib...the thing that really struck me about the Yesterday's New Quintet stuff was that it had all the noises and shapes of a jazz record without hardly having any of the literal notes, like this what jazz probably sounds like to a lot of people who like it, and even more who don't.  I thought it was brilliant insight to make sounds like that, to take all the music out of the music and still have the music left over. That cuts to the chase a zinkabahillion times more than all the literalist reiterations combined.

Maybe that's not his point, but that's what I got out of it

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

About Madlib...the thing that really struck me about the Yesterday's New Quintet stuff was that it had all the noises and shapes of a jazz record without hardly having any of the literal notes, like this what jazz probably sounds like to a lot of people who like it, and even more who don't.  I thought it was brilliant insight to make sounds like that, to take all the music out of the music and still have the music left over. That cuts to the chase a zinkabahillion times more than all the literalist reiterations combined.

Maybe that's not his point, but that's what I got out of it

YUP. In a crowded field of convergent jazz/hip-hop, I've been a little less impressed by hip-hop inflected jazz than I have been jazz inflected hip-hop. In its best self, self-conscious fusion music (i.e., music that is a fusion of genres--I don't mean 70's jazz-rock in a specific sense) elucidates the things that make its source material so exciting.

Listening to Yesterday's New Quintet is like the closest thing a jazz musician will ever come to hearing what jazz music sounds like to an untrained/unschooled ear--which is not to say that Madlib's music is illiterate or anything (far from it), only that the things that it places value in tend to be grounded in a musical sensibility that emanates from outside of jazz. For example--I love the Reuben Wilson version of "Stormy," but Madlib's version is the one that teases out this mammoth, growling beast, the rhythm foregrounded and the melodic content scurrying around the stereo field like ants. I would never have gotten that out of that, which is why listening to YNQ is a really enriching experience for me.

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Dunno about the concept of documentary genres.

ALL records are commercial ventures into a not quite known/not quite unknown world. That means that EVERY recording manager wants to make records that will turn a profit. And this is true even of musicians making and issuing their own material. And the consequence of that is that no or few efforts will be spared to make that happen.

Even the only avowedly documentary label Folkways STILL tried to get the best out of what was possible in the time and at the place. OK, Moe Asch wasn't Creed Taylor (though he did have several non-documentary labels which made big selling records and might have given CTI a run for his money a generation later) but the impulse to make (lots of) money serving a public need is identical.

There's never been any kind of art or entertainment requiring skilled practitioners, who have to spend long years honing and practicing their work thus missing a great load of social life - playing ball in the park, kissing girls; you all know what it means - and those people want a return on that HUGE investment. Damn right, too. We shouldn't deprecate the commercial side in the slightest.

MG

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