Jeff Patterson, working at a music store, just like Rob Lord, was equally disgusted. Patterson and co-workers “would sit there and talk about who’s making all the money.” CDs cost $15-$17 at Music Plus, his employer. Elsewhere they were around $12-$13. “And you know, we were thinking like, ‘Where is that extra $4 being pocketed?’ You know, after all the costs were taken out, then their manager would get paid, the record company would get paid, people on the tour would get paid, and then the band would finally get some money after all that, and it was usually a very small check. So the artists that were actually continuing to be artists were the artists that were making money; so it was, like, this level of superstardom that was consistent and the barriers of entry were extremely high.”
That was true in all kinds of creative endeavors, especially in writing. I myself was amused when lobbyists representing industries such as music and publishing would rant on and on about the need for “creative incentives.” If business people at the megaconglomerates really understood incentives, they would cut out their caviar, sell off the executive jets, and spend more than a modicum on garden-variety artists—not just the Mailers and Madonnas. When, even as a teenager, Jeff Patterson started asking where the money was going, he was laying some of the more important underpinnings for IUMA.
An “A” student who would later graduate near the top of his class, Patterson wrote a school paper on another major issue: censorship. Back in the 1980s, Tipper Gore, Al’s wife, had helped start a group called the Parents Music Resource Center, which wanted to rate music and keep the more nefarious offerings out of the hands and CD players of young people. “I was a big fan of Frank Zappa and he was basically taking it upon himself to challenge the PMRC.” The Senate held hearings. And Patterson recalled that PMRC deemed a Zappa recording, “Jazz from Hell,” to be sinful. The album lacked lyrics and the cover just showed Zappa’s face. “It was obvious,” Patterson said of Tipper’s group, “that they weren’t actually listening to the content or caring what it was. They just kind of labeled some artists as being bad, and therefore were trying to prevent stores from selling many albums.” I asked if that made Patterson think later on, “Let’s go on the Net so we don’t have those bozos to worry about.” “Yeah, yeah. That actually had a big part in it.”
From the start, it was clear that Patterson’s own music wouldn’t exactly please the conventional. In high school he played guitar in speed metal bands, which are “usually a lot faster, a lot more angry sounding” than heavy metal. When the Ugly Mugs found each other at William Hart High, Patterson rejoiced in his friends’ weirdness. The style in this case was Dada, a form of random art.
“Who cared if anyone liked listening to it,” Patterson said. “We just wanted to play it. We were using mainly guitar and keyboards and bass. However, we wouldn’t always play them in the normal standard ways. Like, we’d use guitar for percussion or something, and we had also used a vacuum cleaner and things like that. A lot of times we just recorded sounds of things that were just laying around.” Their big gig was at an interpretative dancing class at a community college where teacher and students loved Dada-style mime.
The Ugly Mugs was a life, not just a band. Except for an Egyptian guitarist, whose hair stubbornly kept turning into an Afro when he let it grow, all the Mugs sported long locks. In a dark, ratty, poster-ridden room, they would talk politics and philosophy, standard teenage fashion.
Lord ended up at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Patterson himself went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied computers, his fallback field. He had made music on them in high school, and, in fact, at Berkeley. “I started changing my major to be a combination of music and computers. Two years into it I really got frustrated with the high pressure and decided to transfer to U.C. Santa Cruz. It’s right on the beach, a laid-back community. Everyone drives, like, five miles under the speed limit.” Beyond that, members of the Ugly Mugs had moved there, and in Patterson’s opinion, the school itself was “really great.”
David Huffman taught there. In a certain niche of computerdom, Huffman was famous as the creator of Huffman coding, a compression routine that software products such as Stacker use to double the space available on hard drives. Music isn’t exactly a low-bandwidth use of the Net. Compression routines of one kind or another are de rigueur[rigueur] for the transmission of high-quality sound—not just because of the space that the material requires[requires], but also because big files take longer to transmit.
At the time Patterson moved to Santa Cruz, he wasn’t using Hoffman compression on the Net or posting CD-quality sound from hundreds of musicians through an IUMA-style operation. But like other techies, he was posting files in the synthesized MIDI format. “The stuff I put up there, it sounded like a bad Casio keyboard playing our songs. It really wasn’t very representative at all. I’d just sit there at my computer, compose ’em on the computer, and upload ’em on the Net. I posted them to a couple of news groups, like alt.binaries.sound and things like that and basically got no response at all.”
Jeff Patterson was reading the supermodel newsgroup when he saw a posting from Rob Lord in favor of Kate Moss, the model that so many of the regulars considered too bony. Patterson replied. “We were both huge Kate Moss fans.” Lord sent him some e-mail talking about how Kate Moss should be the “queen of supermodels.” People on the Net have a custom of leaving “signatures” at the bottom of messages—places where they may post their address or phone number, or an I-don’t-speak-for-IBM disclaimer, or quote somebody to support them or deride them—and Patterson took quick notice of Lord’s “.sig.” It alluded to “MPEG Audio Compression, 16 to 1 CD Quality.”