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How Jack London's stories, "Before Adam," and "The Relic of the Pliocene,"
helped inspire Paul Dresser to write the song "Tin Pan Alley."
Tin Pan Alley is the wildest time Music has ever had. So how do we express such a wild and free age in music, in a song? A song that will relive the days of Tin Pan Alley, and preserve it's mammoth brownstone-mansions?
At the Field Museum in Chicago, you can witness an epoch called The Pleistocene. Possibly the time of earliest man. There, down the corridors of one of the greatest museums in the world, are the skeleton finds of mammoths, a saber-toothed tiger, and most impressive, a giant ground sloth. All creatures from The Pleistocene. Strange, these are real animals over a million years ago, now all extinct. It took one million, eight-hundred thousand years for Music to reach Tin Pan Alley. Was man alive a million years or so ago? There is a mystery here. If the sloth did howl... then the nature of man no matter how primitive would still have memory traces of this having happened. Therefore, the first audible music on earth heard by a human ear that can appreciate sounds, was probably the howling of a sloth. How wild is that? Could this be The Lost Chord?
In Jack London's story, "The Relic of the Pliocene," in the book "The Faith of Men," a highly rare occurrence of a surviving mammoth into present times is trapped, in the northern reaches of Alaska, in a valley glacier mountain range, by a hunter. The mammoth is far too strong, wise and bold for any one man to kill. So the hunter devises a circular plan for the huge animal to run in. The mammoth is in a valley surrounded by mountain walls that lend no way out. There is no water. And for days and days, the hunter tactically instills fear into the great beast, causing it to run round and around. This is done at great risk to the hunter as well. Finally, the animal is so badly weakened that it falls. The spirit and great stature of the mammoth are completely broken, so that the hunter can now slay it with a hand-axe.
Today the mammoth is The Music Industry that has fallen. This digital-media age of computer piracy has the Music Industry on the run. Round and around they go, and it seems there's no way out. Will we allow technicians to create computer programs to write our music for us? If so, then Music will surely die.
There is proof that computers no matter how advanced, cannot write poetry. They can merely rhyme words. This is because poetry is of the human spirit.
I say, "Let the mammoth live. Find The Lost Chord. And let's begin
a new age of music called the "Eventide."
The Credo
As a gesture of goodwill; The Music Industry, in a combined effort should
really buy and restore Tin Pan Alley. It's good business. At the entrance in
bronze there should be a credo stating: "We The House of Music" - Promise
all of you who love Music these things: "1st. Music always before money.
2nd. We will never allow the airways to dictate to us again what artist you,
The People may listen to. 3rd. We will protect Music and the Artist from this
ever-changing world of electronic science. To insure to all listeners, that their
Music is written by the living human spirit.
What is Eventide ?
"Eventide" is an unfathomable spiraling rush of poetry emblazoned in sound.
It is a Renaissance of words.
If we have to reach as far back as to the Pleistocene to save Music, then let's do it.
Paul Dresser
Visit the Eventide website, click here
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