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HOW ONE MAN’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST
MUSICAL IMPOSTORS MIGHT HELP. By
Jerry Adler U.S.
Edition Bauman is better known as “Bowzer,”
the T-shirted lunk from Sha Na Na (the band in “Grease”). Now 59, he
runs his own oldies shows and heads the Truth in Music committee of the
Vocal Group Hall of Fame, crisscrossing the country at his own expense
promoting laws to penalize bands who falsely advertise a connection to
an earlier group. Nine states now have such laws--New Jersey was the
most recent--and bills are awaiting signatures in seven more. Impostors
are “a form of identity theft,” he says, “against artists whose
music changed the world. I look on this as an extension of the
civil-rights movement.” To the dwindling cadre of doo-wop
pioneers who can still snap their fingers without wincing, Bauman is a
hero. “Jon is a dedicated soul,” says Herb Reed of the first group to call
itself the Platters. More than a half-century later Reed
still sings bass as part of a group descended
from the original Platters by a genealogy only slightly less
convoluted than the Plantagenets’. “Those impostor groups are
destroying the market for me,” he says, competing for bookings
by cutting their prices, so that in his late 70s he’s down to a mere
180 dates a year. But supporters of the Truth in Music
bills are also positioning it as a consumer issue, appealing to a quirk
of human nature that prizes authenticity above phenomenology.
“Consumers are being confused,” says Maxine Porter, manager of Bill
Pinkney’s Original Drifters. “There’s a history, a specific
identity with a name, and all that is part of the consumer’s
decision-making process.” Economists struggle to understand this
phenomenon. “Even well-established art experts are at a loss to
explain why a (perfect) copy is considered so much less valuable than
the original,” Bruno S. Frey of the University of Zurich wrote in a
1999 paper. To return to Vermeer for a moment, most people will never
see the original “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” but last week a new
Vermeer museum opened in Delft containing only reproductions. Or
if you’d like a hand-painted copy on stretched canvas to “impress
your friends,” you can buy one online for as little as $155, compared
with $100 million for the original. You could probably tell them apart,
especially if you chose to supersize your copy--the original is just 16
by 18 inches, but you can have copies in sizes up to three feet by four
feet. But would you be confident in your ability to know which
was the Vermeer? And if not, then does it matter? For that matter, how many casual R&B fans could pick out an original member of the Coasters from a distance? (That’s a trick question; the last surviving original member, Carl Gardner, retired from touring recently after a stroke.) Early R&B groups were mostly faceless voices on the radio, in part because record companies weren’t eager to remind audiences that their faces were usually black. And yet, in doo-wop as in painting, an undeniable aura clings to the authentic, the genuine, the original. Which is why if you go to a concert by the faux Drifters or a performance by the Platters manqué, you will always see, says Bauman, one guy in his 70s there so that you, the discerning doo-wop consumer, can nudge your seatmate and say, “That’s the real one!”
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Balboni
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