The most recent edition of “Podium”, the publication of the Atlanta Federation of Musicians reflects a sobering state of affairs, for musicians at least.

On the front page, local president John Head outlines an attempt at planning a move to a more modern model.

Inside, Michael Moore paints a colorful, powerful and depressing picture of a once grand organization gone to seed, as he describes the national AFM/AFL-CIO convention in Las Vegas. It’s all the more eloquent because of the way it tracks life for many of us who ‘grew up’ with the AFM/AFL-CIO mindset. Some of us have grown from that experience and moved past it on our own terms; and some have stayed rooted in old, failed ideas.

It’s a new day, though – it has been for quite awhile, actually. Walking the picket line in 1975 seems quaint and anachronistic today, even if it was vivifying and a little dangerous back then.

Change happens more quickly in some channels than in others. It’s telling, though, that the photos on the walls of the union local that I saw when I joined in 1973, are still on the same walls as I resigned last week after 37 off-and-on years. Clearly, this is one of the slower moving channels.

But it still has its nobility, and its history. And who knows: Having witnessed Richard Nixon recast as an elder statesman in his later years it’s been apparent that almost anything can happen.

There’s the trumpeting of ‘new leadership’, whatever that means. It looks like there are no new faces, though. And even these newcomers, whoever they are, must be unique individuals to be a non-incumbent and to even think of taking on such a fading idea and crumbling edifice.

But, another, bigger magic continues, and young musicians continue to do as the likes of St. Francis of Assisi, and Voltaire did and, defying their elders and all the compass of ‘common sense’, follow their yearning and their heart – in this case, into music.

The gyres are always in motion. There’s still nothing like performing live music and it’s still one of the coolest skill-sets out there.

And there is also no question that “live” music is more exciting than anything canned (…well, _good_ live music, anyway).

Musicians and artists have always and everywhere been ‘self-promoting’ to a degree. The idea of the union as an umbrella for protection expired forty years ago. The 19th and 20th century models don’t apply anymore.

Maybe there’s a novel, imaginative way to re-think and restart.