Available at all Performances

 

FORWARD FROM GARY POWELL’S BOOK
“Good Boys Do Fine, Always”

“When beginning my career in music, the kind of mentoring insights—like the ones found here—were either absent, mistaken, purposefully misleading, or simply wrong. Beyond my education or even my education of others, I’ve lived outside mainstream thought like a scholar who has never found a quorum for inspiration. I’ve looked outside music to many other disciplines for some thoughtful and measurable relevance to my aspirations. In that search, I found harmony in Benjamin Franklin, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, among other great and ordinary liberators of conscience, including Rosa Parks, and her very powerful free-spoken lesson on rejecting oppression. I even found the disharmony and horror of Joseph Stalin relevant to my understanding of humanity and the arts. All gave me reason for pause and supplied some measure of guidance.

Every word within the colloquial affirmation
of this book’s title is suspect. ~ Gary Powell

My words that follow are an aggregation of existing grand ideas strained through my own experiences and psychology. This manifesto has cooked up a feast of inspiration for me in my overall quest in achieving greater integration of my talent, education, skills, self, and experience within a musical expression. Here, within this music-business discourse, I have slowly been granting myself authorization to move forward with untried and unfettered choices.

So, what did I learn from Joseph Stalin? What can I pass on to you? That Joseph Stalin represents the worst of what human beings are capable of when large institutions, governments, and humanity’s lizard-brain fears become enmeshed. And although history and current events are replete with despots, let’s not keep repeating ourselves by creating a looping déjà-vu-dance of destruction. Despots are easy to identify, but now we fight a corrupt and opaque business structure that consciously and purposefully continues to sequester profits from individuals who create the music. From here forward, we will deliberate together to set free our notions of music and how it can decidedly liberate us as individuals and enrich the soul of our society.” ~ Gary Powell

Home